Cursed With Ambition

Martindale Triathlon

Billy and I headed out of Houston Friday evening around 7:30 and pulled into Martindale and Spencer's Campground at 10.  Temperature was in the 50's so the air was crisp, the sky was clear and the moon was bright.  The race officials were still hanging around so we were able to get our race packets and ask a few questions.  We set up camp and checked out some of the other competitors' boats.  Billy had a moon pie as a late-night snack (to go along with his power fuel dinner of Whataburger) and I had some yogurt covered banana chips, half a Clif bar and a cigarette.  No one can accuse us of letting training and competition get in the way of our vices. 

We turned in around 11:30.  Then the Brokeback jokes started.  Some shithead's car alarm started going off.  Then it would stop.  Then it would start again.  This went on for like 20 minutes.  Annoying.  Eventually we nodded off.  We both probably had the same typical tent-camping night of sleep.  I slept really well for about 4 hours.  I woke up a couple of times and it was all over.  The moon was so fucking bright that it was hard to fall back asleep.  Plus, a tent floor isn't nearly as comfortable as the feathertop I'm now used to - citified and soft I now am.  I was excited about the race.  I had to pee.  Dogs were barking like mad.  It was all there preventing me from sleeping.  I worried a little about my lack of sleep for the race.  I dozed a couple of times before my alarm went off at 6:45.  I laid there staring at the ceiling thinking about the race and what all I needed to do for prep beforehand.

We got up for good around 7 and trucked to the convenient store in Martindale for some hot coffee.  We got back to the camp, had some breakfast and got into our race gear.  Billy accused me of farting in my sleep.  I told him that wasn't true.  He said it was; he'd heard.  Then I told him it wasn't true that I fart in my sleep because I had been awake the whole time.  He laughed.

They had a pre-race briefing at 8:15.  They talked about safety and the exchanges and all of that.  It was an open course, meaning there were going to be cars on the roads with us, so safety was going to be an issue.  After the briefing I got the last bit of gear into the boat - paddles, pfd's, water bottles - and started stretching and warming up for the run.  My goal was to run the 7 mile course in under 56 minutes.  I had been able to run 8 minute miles on training runs of 6 miles consistently, so I thought that was a reasonable goal.  Basically, the race started at 9 am with the run first, then the bike, then the paddle.  I was going to have to run into a roped off area where the bikes were and tag Billy before he could take off.  I would wait for him by the boat and we'd carry it down to the river and launch it.  The finish line was at the Staples dam on the San Marcos river.  The night before we had met the official timekeeper, a regular in the paddling circuit named Grady Hicks.  He was carrying around a Nalgene bottle with a mixed drink in it; bourbon from the smell of it.  He asked me if I'd seen "the Hill" on the run course yet.  I told him that I'd only driven the part of the course on FM 1979.  He just laughed.  Hmmmm.  I remembered "the Hill" as we were lining up for the start.  I was a little nervous because I hadn't trained as much as I would have liked and, living in Houston, I certainly hadn't trained for any hills.  I'd been here before though.  I'd been nervous before races plenty of times.  The main thing you have to be careful of is not to let the excitement get to you and start out too fast.  The fastest 10K I've ever run I ran the first mile in 10:00, so I knew from experience to start out easy.  When the horn went off I got in behind some guys who I thought would be about my pace (I had looked at finish times from the previous years and knew some of the guys by name and their times, so I had an idea of who to keep pace with).  We were on what I thought was a reasonable pace.  We came up to the first mile marker and I looked at my stopwatch - 7:10.  "Oh shit," I said to myself.  I tried to slow the pace a little bit, but I really didn't want to give up any positions.  I knew I'd fucked myself already; again.  About 1/3 of the races I've run I have been able to stick by the Slow First Mile Rule.  Today wasn't one of those days.  Even though I'd run the first mile pretty fast, I felt really sluggish.  It was cold and I hate running in the cold.  I just feel slower when it's cold.  Plus, I just didn't feel like I was in a good rythm; no kind of zone at all.  I don't think I ever got any adrenaline going because I felt lethargic the entire time.  The field started spreading out and a couple of dudes who I had figured for a 54:00 pace were going ahead of me.  "Fuck me," I muttered to myself.  After mile 2 it was just a matter of suffering and holding on to some semblance of a reasonable pace until the finish.  At mile 3 we came upon a fairly large hill.  I thought this was "The Hill" that Grady told me about.  "Well, this is going to suck, but it's not too bad" I thought to myself.  I chop-stepped up the hill and I was really suffering at the top, but I recovered within about 30 seconds.  I came around a turn and looked up ahead and was horrified to see a hill that was four times as high as the one I'd just struggled up - "Muh-ther-fuck-er!!" I thought.  I tried to gather myself up before attacking the hill.  I chop-stepped again to try to minimize the damage.  I felt like I was running through wet concrete; barely moving.  I nearly blacked out about 3/4 of the way up and I nearly stopped.  At that point I knew my pace was little better than a walk.  I figured that 56:00 was out the fucking window.  I started thinking of ways to apologize to Billy for sucking so bad.  I finally crested the hill and tried to use the downslope the best I could to pick up time.  I was really suffering at this point.  My legs were gone.  I had no wind.  I was only halfway through.  Still, my stopwatch said 24:00.  I was encouraged by that.  Maybe I'd still be able to make 56:00 after all.  I set my sights on three guys who were about 40 yards ahead of me and resolved to pass them before the finish.  It was really all I could do to keep going.  I cursed myself and questioned why in the hell I put myself through this suffering.  I thought about how I could be sipping a cup of coffee on the couch in my sock feet watching Gameday instead of feeling the incredible burn of lactic acid in my legs and the freezing cold air in my lungs.  I came upon the last water stop and I knew I was 1 mile from the finish.  I hadn't caught any of the 3 guys but I had closed the gap some so I knew I was keeping pace relatively well.  I came around the last turn and there was less than 1/2 mile to go.  I wanted to sprint the last section at least, but I just had nothing left.  I tried to pick it up as best I could, but I'm sure it looked like I was crawling.  I came into the bike corral and tagged Billy.  I've never been so happy to see him.  I looked at my stopwatch and it was a little past 53:00.  I couldn't believe it.  I would find out later that my official time was 52:45, 7:32/mile pace, which far surpassed what I was expecting before and during the run.  I still don't know how I finished that fast considering how poorly I had run strategically and how slow I felt during the entire race.

I walked to the campsite and tried to stay warm.  I put on pants and a sweatshirt and did some stretching.  I knew I'd have about 50 minutes of recovery time and I still had to do some prep for the paddling.  I fixed bottles of Gatorade for the boat and secured all of our gear one final time.  I had everything ready in the boat and I sipped on water and Gatorade while I waited for Billy to come in.  In what seemed like no time he came in, looking strong.  I couldn't calculate his exact time on my stopwatch, but he finished the 16.5 miles in 54:04, 16th male finisher on the bike.  He changed shoes in the corral and ran down to the boat.  We hefted it down to the river and put in; Billy in front and me in the back with the steering pedals.  I told him to do whatever he needed to do as far as recovery - drink, rest, whatever - and I'd paddle.  I actually felt fresh and strong. 

This section of the river holds many fewer rapids and obstacles than the upper section.  Still, there were a lot more rapids than I'd remembered.  I figured we were going to fall out of the boat numerous times, but we managed the rapids really well; never even felt tippy through any of them.  Once, though, we got hung up on a couple of boulders that were too shallow to go over.  I got out of the boat and eased us over it.  It could have been a disaster, but we made it through pretty well without losing much time; maybe 30 seconds.  I knew Billy had to be hurting from the bike ride and it took us a while to get a good pace going.  I was just trying to paddle as hard as I thought I could sustain.  We did find a pretty good rythm.  At the halfway point there was a portage around a downed tree.  It was well-marked and there was a race official there too.  We beached pretty clumsily - I'm still not a very good driver, especially in current.  To make matters worse, my calves were cramping bigtime so every time I'd flex them to use the steering pedals I'd get a massive cramp in my calf.  That sucked.  We had to dump some water out of the boat at the portage and probably burned another unnecessary minute or so.  Right after the portage there was a sharp right turn with a logjam in the middle of the river.  There's a channel to pass on the right and left of the logjam, but the current forces you into the jam.  I fucked it up and didn't steer very well (cramps weren't helping) and we ended up getting tangled in the logjam.  We tried going hand over hand using the protruding branches to ease along beside it, but the current was too much.  We nearly got free when we tumped.  Billy was near the bank so he could stand, I was 20 feet behind him and I was fully submerged.  My legs got all scratched up on submerged branches and shit.  I felt like an idiot because I knew we were making rookie mistakes and losing valuable time.  We finally got the boat up on the bank as four other boats passed us.  We dumped it out, got situated and finally headed off again.  I figure we lost a good four or five minutes there at least.  When were were underway and just paddling in open water with no rapids or obstacles I felt like we were really fast and strong.  The Raptor is a really fast boat.  I can't speak for Billy, but I felt really good the whole time.  With about a mile to go we noticed another men's team in a fast tandem boat creeping up behind us.  They were in our division so we were competing directly with them.  I told Billy that we needed to race them and that I figured we had about a mile to go.  We set to and gave it all we had to keep in front of them.  I tried to pick the shortest lines to steer to gain any advantage.  They were just stronger paddlers, though, and after racing them for about ten minutes they overtook us.  I tried to get in behind them and draft them to maybe make a final mad sprint to catch them.  We couldn't keep pace enough to draft, but I still wanted to make one final push to try to catch them.  We came upon a landmark that I knew was about a half mile from the finish.  I told Billy that we should give it all we had for the final sprint, which we did.  We made up some ground on them, but they still finished 10 seconds ahead of us.  If it hadn't been for our fuckups with the portage and the logjam there's no way they would have beaten us.  But that's all part of the race.  We finished the canoe leg in 57:56; our worst section.  We were fourth in our division - men's team - but since the overall winner gets the Argosy Cup they weren't considered first in the division, so we actually got a trophy for third place men's team.  Final time was 2:44:45.  You can see the final results here. 

We got a ride back to the campground from the finish line.  They had an awards ceremony and a hot meal prepared.  They also gave out door prizes.  The grand prize was a pair of tickets to anywhere in the continental U.S. on Continental Airline.  I got a camp towel.  Billy got rooked.  The MC called us up to get our 3rd place trophies and said our team name, "Todos Ojos," and mistranslated it on the loudspeaker as "All Balls."  That drew a few laughs from some and some weird looks from others.  I had to correct the announcer that "Todos Ojos" meant "All Eyes."  I lied and told him that we weren't dirty enough to use a team name like "All Balls."  Now that I think about it though, I like "Todos Huevos" better for an all-male triathlon team made up of me and Billy much better than "Todos Ojos."

Both Billy and I were really pleased with the results.  Plus, we had a really good time.  We've already committed to doing it again next year.

Eric Cassanova, Markie and Leonard

When I was a very young kid the first few times I ever felt deep pity for somebody really surprised me.  Maybe it's because it's not a natural emotion for me.  I'll be the first to admit that I can be a heartless motherfucker.  I don't really pity cripples and retards. Bums and beggars least of all.  I don't spit on them or try to run them over or anything, but I just don't really feel sorry for them.  Ironically, I do have a certain degree of pity for people in prison, mainly because I think being locked up like that is horrible and most people in prison were doomed the moment sperm made contact with egg. 

Eric Cassanova

Anyway, I distinctly remember the very first time I felt abject pity for another person.  I was in first grade.  I know it was first grade because it was the first year I ate lunch at school.  My kindergarden was only a half day, so I still ate lunch at home that year.  And this happened when I first started eating lunch at school, so I know it wasn't kindergarden.  It was fall, early in the school year, and the whole "lunch at school" thing was still taking some getting used to.  My mom packed my lunch in a metal Star Wars lunchbox every day; I don't know if I could have dealt with eating the cafeteria food.  That stuff didn't look or smell like any food I'd ever seen.  At least I was spared that trauma.  I favored salami sandwiches with mustard and my mom made them for me often.  One day I was at lunch in the school cafeteria and I had opened my lunchbox, laid out my food and had just taken a bite or two out of my sandwich when I looked over and saw this kid who had two small shabby-looking foil balls set in front of him.  Curious, I watched him unwrap the foil and expose his "lunch."  To my horror, there were seven or eight pumpkin-shaped candy corns and that was it.  No drink, no nothin'.  I asked the kid, whose name was Eric Cassanova, if that was his lunch.  He looked over at me and nodded pathetically.  He wasn't particularly sad about the fact that he only had a few candy corns for his lunch, but he was a bit dirty and generally a melancholy kid.  He didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with having candy corn for lunch.  But not me.  When I saw those candy corns come out of the foil and I realized that was all he had for lunch and that his mother didn't pack him a lunch of his favorite kind of sandwich with a thermos full of Kool-Aid, well, I just deflated.  It made me so sad.  Being the take-action sort of person that I was I wasn't about to stand for this travesty of justice.  So I did the only thing I knew to do - I went and told the teacher. 

"Ms. Harris!  Eric's only got candy corns for lunch!"

"What?"

"Eric's only got candy corns for lunch.  The pumpkin kind."

"Where is Eric?"

"He's down at the end of the table."

Mrs. Harris got up and walked down to where we were sitting and saw firsthand that Eric did indeed only have pumpkin-shaped candy corns for lunch.  No drink, no nothin'.  She asked him a couple of questions about it.  She got him up out of his chair and walked over to the cafeteria lady who took the lunch tickets.  They spoke for a moment and then Mrs. Harris walked Eric through the tray line.  He returned to his seat with a tray of whatever the cafeteria was serving that day - fish sticks or whatever.  I vaguely remember that he wasn't too happy with me.  He hadn't wanted that kind of attention from the teacher and he didn't look too happy about the fish sticks either.

(An interesting sidenote - a very similar situation happened to my brother, llogg, a couple of years later.  Same school, same cafeteria, everything.  In stark contrast to me, and as a vivid example of how we differ, he gave the lunchless kid half of his own lunch instead of telling the teacher and drawing attention to it like I did.  When I found out about this I got mad at my brother for giving up his own lunch and told him that he should have just told the teacher and she would have secured a cafeteria lunch for the kid.  I was mad about it because I didn't want my brother to do without half of his lunch, but I also felt sorry for him that he had given up half of his lunch unnecessarily.)

Markie

Fast forward a couple of years.  I was in third grade and playing YMCA league softball.  We had a pretty good team, as I recall.  We were the Expos and we had purple shirts.  Our team was vying for first place in the league with another team, the Pirates.  There was one kid on our team who was terrible.  He was goofy and uncoordinated.  He couldn't hit worth a shit and he certainly couldn't field the ball.  His name was Markie.  Well, we were playing the Pirates for what probably was going to determine the champion of the league.  A bit of a rivalry had developed between our team and theirs.  Emotions were running high.  I remember that I was very excited most of the game.  We were down 3 or 4 runs for our last at bat.  We had a bit of a rally and scored a couple of runs.  We were down only a run with two outs and there were runners on 2nd and 3rd.  Markie was up to bat.  As he walked up to the plate some of the more insensitive and cruel kids lamented out loud that we were basically fucked because Markie was sure to get an out.  Markie had heard and turned around with an ashamed sort of crooked grin on his face.  He told the coach he didn't want to bat; to let some other kid bat instead.  I felt that same pang of pity for Markie that I'd felt for Eric Cassanova.  I looked over and told the other kids to shut up and then I hollered at Markie that he could do it.  Some of the other kids shouted encouragement too.  Whether it was our encouragement or that from the coach, he went up to the plate to bat.  We broke out a "Mar-kie!  Mar-kie!  Mar-kie!" chant.  His first swing he missed and spun around wildly.  It was a disaster, but we kept up the chant.  I felt a twinge of doubt that Markie could come up with the miracle hit.  Second swing whiffed just as badly as before.  The tension was building.  Markie had two strikes.  This was our last hope.  The pitch came and Markie swung again - this time he made contact with the ball!!  It was an infield popup that at any other level would have been an automatic out.  The ball dropped to the ground.  Markie looked over to the bench and he had a surprised look on his face like he couldn't believe it.  The coach was yelling for him to run to first base, which he did.  Markie was the hero and he couldn't stop smiling and I remember being very happy for him.

I don't know what happened after that.  I don't remember.  I think we still ended up losing the game, but I don't know how.  I do remember though that it wasn't Markie's fault that we lost.

Leonard

When I was in fifth or sixth grade our across the street neighbor started babysitting some kids to make a little extra money.  One of the kids that came to her house after school was Leonard.  Leonard was George McFly.  He had a younger brother (conincidentally named Marky) and a sister named Jolene.  They were weird looking kids to begin with and they dressed even weirder.  They wore old polyester clothes from the 70's or something.  They also were always covered in dog hair because they raised St. Bernard dogs and they allowed the dogs inside their home.  I didn't go to the same school as Leonard, but I heard it from the other kids that he was made fun of a lot.  His dad worked at Wal-Mart, so he got digs for that.  He lived in a trailer house and he got digs for that.  He was covered in dog hair all the time and he got digs for that.  Worst of all, he wore weird old clothes and had thick glasses and looked like a total nerd.  George McFly - I'm telling you.  Even the younger kids made fun of him.  He was the most pitiful person I've ever known.  I'm sad right now just thinking about him.  I tried to reach out to Leonard once.  I tried to engage him in conversation and just talk to him.  Get to know him a little bit.  Find out what he liked, what he thought about.  I tried to talk to him just like a normal person.  I thought that alone should make him feel good - to be talked to like an equal and not made fun of.  I think he sensed what I was doing and it made him uncomfortable.  I didn't get very far and gave it up.  It wasn't long after that Leonard, Marky and Jolene stopped going to our neighbors' house and I have no idea what happened to them.

Anderson Cooper?

Am I alone in being confounded by Anderson Cooper?  What is he?  Is he a legitimate professional news anchor whose star is rising?  Is he gay?  Straight?  Asexual?  Does he really have muscular arms?  Is that gray hair or really light blonde?  How old is he anyway?  Is he stylish?  Is he cool?  Is he well-respected by his peers and/or his audience?  And the name Anderson...hmmm.  That follows the wannabe yuppie trend of naming your kids with old world Anglo surnames, but he seems too old for his parents to have been caught up in that.  Could Anderson Cooper possibly be the archetype of the modern American man?

Nothing but questions...

Weekends in Autumn

1. You gotta love weekends during Autumn.
2. The college football player who has most impressed me this season is...Jake Locker, QB, University of Washington.
3. This might be the first season in a long, long time that we have a 2-loss national champion.
4. It's just not fair that a 2-loss team from the Big XII, SEC or Big Ten have to compete for BCS rankings against a no-loss WAC or one-loss Big East team.  I'm sorry, but the fifth best SEC team would win either of those conferences easily.  And those conferences with a championship game are at a distinct disadvantage as well.  The Pac-10 and the Big Ten need to nut up.  Really, the NCAA needs to nut up and install a playoff.  This is ridiculous.
5. My favorite college football uniforms are, in order:  Ole Miss, South Carolina, Ohio State, Washington, Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, Auburn, SMU.  Least favorite:  Oregon, Tennessee, Bowling Green, Syracuse, Florida.
6. Texas' win over Baylor was sloppy and a lot closer than the score indicated.  If this team can ever cure the stupid mistakes, we might make a run.  Eliminating turnovers, missed tackles and penalties alone, without improving in any other area, would have made this year's team a contender for the national title.

Safari Training

Martindale Triathlon is this Saturday.  Allbilly and I spent about an hour in the boat yesterday evening.  It went really well.  I added some more ballast and we moved Billy's seat back some.  Those things combined allowed for much better stability.  I don't think we'll set any records, but we should be able to stay in the boat.  I haven't been running as consistently as I would have liked up to this point, but I should be respectable.  I'm shooting for 7 miles in 56 minutes.

Redeye Update

1. Spontaneous picnics in state parks this time of year are great.  We stopped off at Buescher State Park outside of Bastrop on our way to Austin last weekend.
2. This is the wackiest college football season ever.  I'm sort of a big-program elitist.  I say fuck teams like Boise State and South Florida.  Who invited them to the fucking party?  My world is a little off balance when USF is ranked No. 2 (won't last) and Notre Dame is 1-6.  I sort of like the complicated college football scene, but I need some consistency so I don't feel like I just took a Benadryl.  I will say this - if USF plays for the National Championship I will be lobbying for a boycott of college football until they install a playoff.
3. Franchione, Houston Nutt, Charlie Weis and Bill Callahan will be looking for jobs in December.  I never liked any of 'em.  Fran has turned out to be an even bigger piece of shit than I thought.  Before, he was only guilty of jumping ship off Alabama to the highest bidder and leaving them in a lurch.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt because Bama didn't make full disclosure about all of the trouble they were in when he signed.  (So he says; now I'm not so sure.)  Nutt made the huge mistake of giving too much power to a recruit to land him.  Essentially, he hired Mitch Mustain's high school coach and lied about what type of offense they were going to run in order to get Mustain (and a couple of other recruits who were following Mustain).  Dumb.  Dumb.  Dumb.  No one player is bigger than the program.  That has to be the number one rule.  Nutt is a spazz anyway and his last name is Nutt.  As for Charlie Weis, I could have told the ND administration that nobody with as big of a front-butt as Weis has is ever going to be a good head football coach.  (Good news for RFfat* coaches, though - Mangino may have something at Kansas.)  *RF is an abbreviation for Real Fat.  And finally, Bill Callahan.  I've never like him either so I'm glad he's getting his hat handed to him.  Always seemed like a snob to me.  His tenure with the Oakland Raiders was an abortion and he got the Nebraska job on the strength of that.  Dumbfucks.  Nebraska's got too strong of roots to let it go completely down the toilet though.  I look for Osborne to get the program back on track.
4. I don't know where this so-called parity is coming from in college football.  My only explanation is that the pool of available talent (difficult to assess as it is, especially since some of these dudes are still maturing) gets spread out because dudes want assurances of playing.  Some guy who is looking at redshirting his freshman year, riding the pine for two more years and then competing for a starting job at Florida, Texas, Ohio State, USC, etc. might opt for a surer chance to play at some place like USF or Rutgers or Wake Forest or wherever.
5. Saw Borat last night.  I liked it more than I thought.  I laughed out loud numerous times.  My favorite scene was probably the one where he brings his shit back to the table in a napkin during the dinner party.  The infamous hotel room scene lived up to its billing as "difficult to watch."  All I can say is that Sasha Baron Cohen is waaaaaaayyy more dedicated to his craft than I'll ever be to anything.  If a condition of me succeeding at something is putting a fat hairy dude's ass and scrote near my face, then I'm just not going to be very good at that thing.  For what the movie says about the USA and its citizens I can only say, "I'm scared and embarrassed."
6. Safari training has tapered a bit lately.  Long hours at work and shorter days leaves only weekends to paddle.  I'm still hitting the weights 3 times a week and running 2 or 3 times a week so I still feel pretty good.  Allbilly and I do the Martindale Triathlon on the 27th.  We're currently taking suggestions for a team name.  (Nothing with the word "Brokeback" in it, please.)

It's 8:39am and OU STILL SUX!!

Yeah, yeah. I know.  Scoreboard, right?  28-21, right?  Well, scoreboard indeed.  OU may have beaten Texas this year, but Texas kicks so much permanent ass on OU that comparisons are almost shameful.  I'm too busy and lazy to do any exhaustive research, but here's my scoreboard:

1. Texas leads the all time series 57-40-5.
2. Texas' smoking hot bitches to OU's degenerate sows.
3. Stadium capacity. 85,123 v. 82,112.  (Their stadium is called Gaylord Family - Oklahoma Memorial Stadium.  I can't make this shit up.  Gaylord.)
4. Austin v. Norman, seriously.
5. A Sooner is a cheater.  Seriously, that's what it is.  Sooners were people who entered the shitty lands in Oklahoma that even the Indians didn't want illegally before the president opened them to be claimed.  It's a documented historical fact.
6. Big Bend, Padre Island National Seashore, The Hill Country, Big Thicket, Guadalupe Mountains, Rio Grande Valley versus Lake Texoma, or some shit.  And half of that is in Texas.
7. Texas has the number 3 deer in the Boone and Crockett all time records for whitetail deer and Oklahoma doesn't even have one in the top 100.

* I've got to cut it short because I'm too busy to continue right now.  I'll be updating this list later.  Feel free to comment with your additions to the list of how Texas is better than Oklahoma.

More Texas Water Safari Training and How Time Is the Immortal Enemy

TWS Training Update

Robo and I ran the first 16.5 miles of the San Marcos on Saturday - same course as the Jr. TWS that I ran a few weeks ago.  We were in a plastic SOT kayak instead of risking the Raptor.  We flipped out at the first drop at Rio Vista and literally got swept out of the boat by a sweeper (tree).  Robo suffered a nasty looking cut on his ankle, but other than that and getting wet it was no big deal.  We dallied at the two big dams and lost some time when we fell out so the total time was about 4 hrs.  Next time we run the San Marcos it will be in the Raptor.

Sunday Robo had to opt out of our planned 3-4 hour run on Town Lake to placate the fiance.  Instead, the GF agreed to go with me.  We had a nice 1-1/2 hour or so run, although we bucked a serious headwind and fought through some waves right at the end.  Who knows?  Maybe we'll do a race as a tandem mixed class someday.

Time is the Immortal Enemy

This past weekend was further evidence of a law of the universe that I have long known about:  Tiime is the Immortal Enemy.  We humans are cursed with not enough time to do what we want to do.  I really wish I was one of those people who could function on less than 6 hours of sleep a night.  I'm seriously considering trying to condition my body to do that.  I mean, I'm late to EVERYTHING.  I had a conversation with Robo about this.  I don't like being late.  Makes me feel guilty and undiscliplined.  He put it best with regard to how it affects other people:  "When you're late you're sending the message that your time is more valuable than the other person's time."  While I might actually believe that is true for myself simply because of my ego, rationally I know it's not.  But I can't overcome it.

It's not just scheduling events in our lives that is maddeningly impossible either.  If you think about a lot of challenges in our lives, voluntary or otherwise, they are a race against the clock.  Take the TWS.  Sure we're racing other teams.  But the real enemy is the clock.  I believe that we have an internal mechanism that constantly challenges the two greatest restraints on our existence:  space and time.  Maybe that's why I'm doing the TWS in the first place.  At least, that's the speech I've rehearsed to give to the reporter at the finish line.

Texas Longhorns Football

So the Longhorns lost badly to K-State.  Storyline of the game:  4 interceptions and two special teams touchdowns.  It's really a wonder we didn't lose by more than 20 points.  It's hard to blame Colt for all of the INT's because most of them were on tipped balls.  Normally tipped balls are rare; maybe 1 or 2 a game.  Even rarer are INT's created by tipped balls.  I don't know if Colt's throwing motion is lower, he's throwing shorter passes so the ball is lower, the linemen aren't opening up passing lanes or what, but it seems to me that there is an adjustment to be made that can fix this problem.  No excuse for the special teams TD's.  Especially since one of the guys who scored was a white former walk-on named Jordy.  He doesn't even have a published 40 time!!  In my book, special teams play is the bellweather for the personality of your team.  You want to see guys being aggressive and making spectacular tackles and blocks, but you also want to see guys playing fundamentally sound by staying in their lanes and staying home to cover.  Oh well.  We knew our team wasn't going to win them all anyway.

With the K-State loss and OU's upset loss to CU the Red River Shootout has lost some of its luster.  Not that the game needs national title implications to be exciting.  I'll be there all the same bedecked in burnt orange and trying sort out the Okies from the carnies at the state fair.