Spring Break ends with early wake-up calls
During normal life, I get up at 5 or 5:30 pretty much every day to go to work, but over Spring Break I took advantage of the opportunity to be kind of lazy and "slept in" till 7 pretty much every day. Until this weekend, when I had to get up early (on Saturday to get to a 6 a.m. TNT practice, and on Sunday to get to a 7 a.m. race). So what? you may be asking yourself. Well, to be honest, I don't have any idea what the point of this is. It's not particularly amusing, and there's nothing deep or philosophical about it, so why did I bother to write about it. I sense there might be some hint of irony in the whole "getting up early on the weekend" thing, but that seems like a stretch (and a pretty lame one at that). After all, don't farmers get up early every day? And milkmen (or, to be more PC, milkpeople)? And the DJ's or news anchors who have early morning shows (or are those only on the weekdays - in which case, they wouldn't fit here at all)? Anyway, the race was great this morning (nice segue, eh?). Beautiful weather (a little chilly as we waited for the start, but not bad), a good turnout, and I felt pretty good considering I haven't really been able to push it since I hurt myself a couple of months ago. Managed a few miles at a sub-8 minute pace, which was highly encouraging (and reminded me how good it feels to just let it go and run).
Hedgehogs on the wall
On Saturday, at the aforementioned TNT practice, some of us were hanging around at the ramada (because we were racing the next day in the half-marathon, we kind of slacked off on our coaching duties Saturday and spent more time standing around than running) and were not really doing much, just chatting and cheering people on as they passed by and watching folks run/cycle past on the path. Then a couple rode by on their bikes, and they were talking about these little critters that live all along the path, and the woman said something like, "What are those things - packrats?" and the guy said, "I think they might be packrats," and the woman said, "No, I think they're hedgehogs," and then they were gone, and we were all like - packrats? hedgehogs? they're ground squirrels, people. I mean, does a ground squirrel look anything like a packrat? Okay, maybe a little. But a hedgehog? Anyway, this then led to a discussion about hedgehogs and someone who shall not be named (but if he were to be named, his name would be Rick) told us about how when he was a kid, he and a friend would go out with a jeep and a bow and arrows and they would shoot hedgehogs, then they would skin them and tack the pelts up on their bedroom walls. Which created this really weird (and slightly disturbing, in a "isn't this one of the first signals of psychopathic behavior in children?" kind of way) image in my mind of a teenage boy's bedroom with the walls plastered by little tacked up hedgehog skins - which made me think back to my own teenage bedroom which didn't have any hedgehog (or, for that matter, any small/medium/large animal) skins on the walls. But I did have the iconic Farrah Fawcett-Majors poster. Not sure which is worse. Or better.
The master
Moving right along, as some of you are no doubt aware, my lovely wife, Katie, has been struggling with various running injuries over the past few months and hasn't been able to run like she'd like to. This led to a general funk for her, which I completely (okay, sort of) understand. Mainly because when I have injuries that make it so I can't run, I get in a funk, but I also find some other form of exercise so I can continue to exercise. So when she wasn't able to run, I tried on numerous occasions to get her to come to the pool with me to do some swimming. And she did tag along - once or twice - but usually she had some kind of really good and completely justified excuse for not going, like, "I can't go swimming because I'm busy being in a funk about my injury." So I was glad when she decided to sign up for the Master's swimming program that they just started at the Y, because I knew that if she paid for it, and if there was a group that was meeting at a specific time on a specific day, she would go. And she has been - faithfully for a couple of weeks now. The problem, though, is that now that she's a "master swimmer," I've lost my edge over her in the water. Not that I had it for very long. Katie was a swimmer in high school, but when I picked up my efforts in the pool and she slacked off a bit, I got to the point where I was actually a little faster than her (for freestyle only - she could always whip me at butterfly, backstroke, or breast stroke - maybe because my technique in those strokes could only be described as… let's call it floundering). But those days are over, which is okay (really, it is, I'm not being sarcastic at all here, I have no problem with her being a better swimmer than me because she is a better swimmer than me) but I do get a little tired of hearing how hard "masters swimming" is as compared to "ordinary swimming" (which is what I do). So when she does speedwork in the pool with her "master's swimming group," she's "really, really tired," but when I go and do speedwork in the pool on my own, I'm not really, really tired (maybe I'm a little tired, but definitely not really tired) because I'm not a "master's swimmer." And she is. Oh well.
Another annoying commercial
I wasn't going to do this, but this particular commercial is so darned annoying, I just have to go off on it a bit. It's the one with Howie Long and some dorky little red-haired girls, who he says is "Really smart," and then they show the little middle seat of one vehicle, and she says, "That's a little girl seat. I'm a big girl," and then they show the vehicle they're endorsing and she says something like, "That's a big girl car," and Howie says, "See, I told you she was smart," and I just want to smack them both upside the head (although if I ever was actually in the same room with Howie Long, I wouldn't dream of smacking him upside the head because he's a very large, imposing person even though he makes stupid commercials). And now that I think of it, I wouldn't smack the little girl either, because that would just be wrong. Dang. I guess I'm stuck. But I do hate the commercial.
How low can they go?
Remember Willie Ames? Well I do, because I used to watch him on "Eight is Enough" (although I didn't ever watch him on "Charles in Charge - mainly because I thought Scott Baio was really, really annoying). Apparently things haven't gone so well for Willie, which is actually kind of sad, but there was a story today on the internet about him having a garage sale to try to raise money to pay off his debts. There's something about this that just makes me sad - not that he had a garage sale, because I've had several of those, and I don't think there's anything desperately wrong with trying to raise a little money while getting rid of some junk - but that he was so in debt and was suicidal after his wife left him and his house was in foreclosure. I suppose there's also a part of me that feels the urge to gloat a little bit (as in - Ha! This famous actor/teen idol has a rotten life and I don't) but that just seems petty and mean and makes me a little sad that it would even enter my mind.
That's all for now, so until next time may your feet remain fleet, may your fingers remain nimble, and may your nose keep it's eyes on your toes.
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