I got this book at LibraryCon in 2019. It’s the first of a series of graphic novels retelling the story of the Trojan War. It takes 200 pages to get to the launching of the 1000 ships–almost; we have not gotten to Iphegenia yet.
The 200 pages tell about the run-up. We get the story of the young Paris, raised as a cowherd away from the palace because of the prophesy that he would bring doom to Troy. We get the story of Odysseus feigning madness because of the prophect that he will wander for twenty years after the war ends. We get Achilles hidden amongst an obscure king’s daughters until Odysseus tricks him into revealing himself as a boy. We get machinations on both side and a pretty good fleshing out of the characters.
The book takes a human-centric approach, consciously as the afterword says, because the author wanted to make it more realistic. The afterword also goes into detail about the sources the author/artist drew upon (buh-DUM-sh) for both the story and the drawings of the period, including the clothing, weapons, palaces, galleys, and so on.
The books is well-illustrated, but not with a look-at-the-comic-art way you get in a lot of comics and graphic novels these days (like this). It tells the stories, not just shows you widely disparate images from the story.
So I will look for the others in the series should we ever have a thing like a con again.
My beautiful wife participated in a virtual bike ride Saturday in part by riding around the annual Republic Pregnancy Resource Center Happy Feet 5k run course to look after participants whilst we ran it. To pick up her t-shirt for the bike ride, she had to go to an event space way up north, which is to say, right by ABC Books.
So we made a family outing of it.
I found a little something that I didn’t order during the lock-in:
I got:
Superstar, a novel by Christopher Long, about a singer on top of the world who is not happy. The author has been to ABC Books numerous times, mostly on weeknights. And Ms. E., the proprietrix, bought some marketing t-shirts to give away with each purchase of the book. I declined as my t-shirt drawer is already bulging from athletic event t-shirts, not yet including the shirt from today’s run with my company’s logo on the sleeve.
Ain’t No Such Animal by Larry Dablemont. I actually ordered another of his books from ABC Books in March. I was very pleased to learn as I prepared this post that it was not the same book.
My Name Is Rock by Jeff Patrick, a thriller in a series about a special agent. The author has a whole stand-up display at ABC Books, so he’s invested in his book. And if I like it, there are others in the series.
The Violet Hour by Richard Greenberg, a play about a publisher starting out who has to choose between his lover’s book and his best friend’s book, and something zany and magical happens.
Loveroot by Erica Jong. I read her How To Save Your Own Life before I started this blog and wasn’t impressed. I can only hope I like this collection of poems as much as Danielle Steele’s Love.
Two monographs: Charles Russell, a western (cowboys and indians) artist, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Both look to be mostly images and some text, the kind of thing I would flip through whilst watching football, although I’m not sure whether there will be football this year or whether I will watch it. Basically, I am coming to enjoy flipping through these on their own with no sporting event at all. And they count as a full book no matter how little text they have.
As she was ringing me out, I asked Ms. E. to drop the hundreds place when she announced the total out loud. And she did.. Well, the total, including a couple books for the boys (not depicted) was just a shade under $100 (the local author books were dull price and the monographs were $10 each). But a bibliophile has to do what he can when the spring book sales were cancelled and the fall ones are in jeopardy.
The state of Alaska moved a notorious tourist attraction — often known just as “the bus” — from the Stampede Trail on the west side of the Teklanika River on Thursday.
The bus has long been a destination for pilgrims enamored with the book and subsequent movie “Into The Wild.” Some people have died making that journey to the bus. The Alaska Department of Natural Resources called it a “deadly attraction.”
“After studying the issue closely, prioritizing public safety and considering a variety of alternatives, we decided it was best to remove the bus from its location on the Stampede Trail,” Commissioner Corri A. Feige said in a press release. “We’re fortunate the Alaska Army National Guard could do the job as a training mission to practice airlifting vehicles, at no cost to the public or additional cost to the state.”
As you might know, gentle reader, I hated that book when I read it last year.
Weird, huh, with all the statues toppled that anger me, and I see this symbol removed and think, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”
This is cute and clever. Kevin Parry made a stop-motion video with just a water hose sprayed at a wall -with him between them. Here’s a look at the process.
In the 1980s, we were always on the verge of a total nuclear war annihilation because we had a Republican president (the fear and promotion thereof died down when we got the second Republican president of the decade).
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down. The five spots of paint- the man, the woman, the children, the ball – remained. The rest was a thin charcoaled layer. The gentle sprinkler rain filled the garden with falling light.
Hey, the way 2020 is going, a nuclear exchange almost seems likely. Although I’d bet on India/China rather than anyone involving the U.S. But these are strange days indeed.
I had an idea for a similar story about the same sort of thing called “The Last Span Falls” about the last bit of a bridge falling sometime in the far future. I never got around to anything but the title and conceit, though, the bad habit of which leaves me with only three books in print-on-demand in 2020.
I am on a streak of sorts: This is the second book of poetry in a row that I’ve read and enjoyed (the other was 100 Love Sonnets by Pablo Neruda).
Mrs. Adelman didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature (and she wasn’t a communist, either, which probably helped Neruda with his). Instead, she fits into the World War II generation of grandmother-poets who kept several magazines afloat with their literary reading and writing even though many of them didn’t have much formal education.
The poems in the book are a cut above a lot of the grandmother poetry I’ve read. The book called them ballads, and they are longer, lyrical lines with end rhymes–and some internal rhymes–with a good sense of rhythm that is not regularly iambic. The topics are concerns of mid-20th-century housewives: Family, home, church, and patriotism. Although she writes about church, the poems themselves are not religious- or Christian-themed like you find in some similar works. Well, you would find them there if you read similar works. Sometimes I think I’m the only one reading these books decades later.
This is not a chapbook, by the way. Mrs. Adelman published this through Vantage Press, which was the bigest vanity press “publisher” of the latter half of the 20th century. Basically, you paid them a bundle (thousands of dollars) up front and provided them with a manuscript. They laid it out for you, designed the book cover, and printed a couple hundred or a thousand copies for you to distribute. So when she published her collection, Mrs. Adelman invested in it.
I’ve always looked a bit at the life of Lileks and thought, Man, that’s what I wanted my life to be, especially when I was at the university (which was before the Internet, so before I knew of Lileks). I mean, family, writing newspaper columns, a vast audience across the country….
Welp, I am finally aligned with his lifestyle, at least the bit he describes this morning:
Can’t say I was the most productive person this week. Can’t say I did much of consequence, besides the usual work. Some weeks I feel as if I did my part, but some weeks I think, well, my part in what, exactly?
So Facebook, which thinks I like two things in the world (virtual athletic events and t-shirts), pushed this into my feed yesterday:
And I wouldn’t have known who that was except that I watched the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes in which the Donald Sutherland character Oddball (depicted on the shirt) appears. And I watched it, on DVD or videocassette in a device not connected to the Internet.
But I probably had my phone nearby….
At any rate, I did not buy this shirt. To be honest, although I bought the Scipio t-shirt, I am generally not in the market for them as athletic events keep my drawer bursting with them, and I have been relying upon them a lot for birthday and Christmas presents lately, so I probably won’t buy more than a couple a year.
Meanwhile, I get the ads. Also, Facebook seems to think I have a thing for otters, but really, I was just talking about Pauly Shore (the Weasel) movies recently. Well, okay, Encino Man, because it also stars Brendan Fraser. So who knows what the Facebook AI thinks?
All it knows is that it can extend advertising reach if I make fun of it.
As you might know, gentle reader, I used to sit and read poems to my child and then children while they played. This book, along with Ogden Nash’s I’m A Stranger Here Myself, represent probably the last two I started to read with them before they were resigned to the nightstand book accumulation point. So this, aside from the unfinished legendary collection of Emily Dickinson that I started in 1994, might be the longest I’ll ever go between starting and finishing a book of poetry.
To be honest, in the middle 1990s, a girl I was dating got into Neruda probably because her film class studied Il Postino (the other The Postman). She borrowed a translation from the library, and as I was examining it, I showed off my Spanish-language chops by comparing the original Spanish on the left with the English on the right. One of the first poems I saw if not thefirst translated something along the lines of “no me hace nada con muerte” to “I ain’t got no truck with death.” I laughed out loud and guessed the year of the translation–I was correct: 1974. But the particular flavor of translation clung to Neruda.
Which is unfortunate. This book also presents the Spanish on the left, so I was able to track the translations a bit, and this one was pretty straightforward. I only found a couple of variations, where the syntax of lines was rearranged. It was made easier, no doubt, that these were not actually sonnets in the original Spanish with rhymes and all. Instead, they’re earthy fourteen line love poems written for Matilde Urrutia Cerda. The book includes a picture of a portly, older Neruda kissing the head of an older woman, and you think, Aw, that’s pretty sweet, until you learn that he wrote these poems for a woman who was his side piece for like a decade until she became his third wife, which definitely dulls the luster.
However, I wish I had written these poems for my beautiful wife. They’re earthy, concrete, and they flow pretty seamlessly from metaphor to metaphor but still hold together. The poems are chock full of carnations, wheat, and bread, and they contain some maturity in their tone and conceits. A nice change from most of the poems I generally read, and even from the classical poems I’ve been reviewing with my children.
Although I’m not sure how much I want to delve into Neruda’s other poems as he was a committed communist. These poems only lightly touch on that as he talks about those who oppose him in contrast with the lover, and certainly in contrast with the film which revels in his communism.
Still, worth a read. And, perhaps, in time, a re-read.
I mean, the picture is of an attractive young woman, and the ad is something something reverse mortgage, which is a (foolish) divestment strategy for people who own their own home:
I mean, look at her; she’s too young to own her own home, and if she inherits her parent’s (single person possessive because this is the 21st century, you know; intact families are so 19th century) home and does a reverse mortgage on it, she’ll get an annuity for fifty years spinning off a hundred dollars a month in income. So, yeah, this is not addressed to young people who own their own home.
I mean, I suppose the message if you click through (not me, brah; I’m already getting enough senior-themed advertising as it is) might be your kids won’t inherit the house, but, come on, your kids don’t look like models. I mean, mine are strikingly handsome and do, but we’re talking about your kids, gentle reader, and they probably look like you (mine do not; they take after their beautiful mother).
So, yeah, this is all about the sugar babies. Or just another instance of ads putting an image of an attractive woman in them to catch your eye. Alright, my eye. I plead guilty. Because I look for pictures of ads with attractive women who really have little to do with the product/service being teased. Also, I like to look at pictures of pretty women.
I’ve never been a fan of “Cloud”-based entertainment, whether literature or movies, because it’s always seemed too easy for the “Cloud” to remove stuff that you’ve paid for — Kindle books, Amazon movies, etc. — at their own discretion / whim. I don’t care that my well-filled bookcases take up a great deal of space in my apartment, or that they’d be a pain in the ass to move should I decide to live elsewhere; I bought them, they’re my property forever, and nobody can take them from me. Ditto movies. I have a large number of DVDs of the movies I love and can watch over and over again — not too many modern ones, because today’s movies largely suck — and like my bookcases, my DVDs are eternal. (I have a brand-new-in-the-box multi-format DVD player sitting in a closet in case the existing Philips gives up the ghost at some time in the future, and ALL my computers come with DVD players, just to be on the safe side.)
As you know, gentle reader, I still have videocassettes to watch, so I even have backup videocassette players.
Well, Brian J., did you do something radical in the fitness department this weekend? I mean, last weekend, you did a duathlon that kicked your butt.
Gentle reader, this week and weekend, I took it easy. It’s the first weekend in a month not dictated by a duathlon of any sort, so I took it easy. Next weekend, I have a 5K (that takes me past the Monte Crist subdivision). So perhaps I will take a run some morning or afternoon this week to remember I can do this sort of thing.
To race well, Laughlin tells me, it hurts. The body feels discomfort when demands are made on it mile after mile.
“I have a lot of determination,” she says. “I love competition. My goal every race is to see how much suffering I can endure and still maintain joy. Because if there isn’t any joy in it, I don’t want to do it.
“I think there is a lot of suffering in life — a lot of tough times. Can we find a way to maintain joy in the same space as suffering? If we can do that, life rocks.”
Yeah, I kind of think that’s why I run even though I hate it. At the end of last week’s duathlon, I was not that keen on riding a bike, either.
So what did you do this weekend, Brian J.? you might ask.
Well, I slept poorly, again, both nights. Which means I slept later than I would prefer on Saturday, and I got on the lawn mower at about ten o’clock, and….
Let’s face it, if I don’t have a new certificate or t-shirt at the end of the weekend, I feel as though I’ve wasted my time. So I mowed the lawn for four hours and I went to the grocery and gas station, and then it was dinner time.
Sunday, we went to church for the first time in months, but instead of an 8:00 service, we went at 10:45. So before, I puttered and did light chores, and when we got home a little after 12, I ate, snoozed a bit, did a bit of yard work, wrote some blog posts, and then it was time for dinner and bed time again.
Perhaps I need to treat or think of every day as I do a vacation day: We have one great adventure or destination for the day, and the rest of it I have permission to relax, read, and whatnot. If that’s the case, I’m marking down two days of yard work as the pinnacle of the achievement and activity.
Meh, that probably won’t work long term unless I go about accomplishing actual things.
Which links to a recent bit in the New York Times entitled The Swinging, Jamming Musical Charms of 1940s Soundies that describes Soundies, which were little 16mm reels of music video that played in vending machines. You pay a dime, you see a song.
It was funny to see this on Sunday, as my beautiful wife put a Soundies reel on my desk on Saturday.
As I mentioned, I became the world’s biggest collector of Tommy Reynolds records because my cousin (once removed, by marriage) sang for them in the Soundies era.
I bought this reel and took it to the local transfer shop in December or early January; they told me it would be a couple weeks, but stuff happened. Last week, they called because it was still lying around their shop, although they hadn’t called me to come get it before. So when my wife was out in that part of Springfield on Friday, she picked it up and put the DVD and source reel on my desk on Saturday.
I haven’t looked at my DVD yet, as the computer doesn’t have a native DVD player app in it (what? Is this 1998?). But you don’t have to borrow my DVD; you can find this song on YouTube:
But watching it on YouTube and owning the almost eighty-year-old movie reel yourself are two different things. I, unlike most of Internet-connected humanity in the twenty-first century, am of the latter sort.
Now, to find a Mills Panoram machine to play it on….
On Friday night, the oldest boy stayed at a friend’s house, so the younger, my movie-watching buddy, and I watched a film. He’s always more patient with films; the older boy fidgets, wanders in and out of the room, and offers his commentary track atop what’s happening–but often needing to ask what’s going on because he’s been in and out. The youngest, though, will watch the movie, so it’s a treat to watch a movie with him.
I selected George of the Jungle.
I don’t know when I picked this up at a garage sale; likely almost a decade ago when I was planning on watching movies with my children. Frequent movie nights have not materialized at Nogglestead; instead (no pun intended), we watch a movie every month or so. The last was Tron the end of last month. So I guess they’re picking up as we’ve also watched Ben-Hur and Clash of the Titans since the spring.
At any rate, I have a passel of kids’ movies that we never watched, and the boys are aging out of them. The youngest rankled at the trailers ahead of this film because they’re for Disney cartoons.
And not just any cartoons; this film was on a videocassette released in late 1997, so they’re trailers for Disney cartoons that Disney was only making available on video for a limited time. Do you remember that they did that in the late 90s? You could only get Peter Pan in stores during a 45-day window? They did that to really goose the sales. I’m not sure if it worked, but 23 years ago was a very long time.
When this movie came to video, I had been dating the woman who would become my wife for a matter of months. I surely wasn’t thinking about watching children’s movies from the era with my children in the world that is 2020.
As far as the movie itself goes, it has Brendan Fraser doing the Brendan Fraser thing. You know, like he did in Bio-Dome and Bedazzledwhich I just mentioned seeing in the theatres. I have a certain appreciation if not affection to the types of characters he played in those days. I don’t know how much I actually identify with them, but I had fun watching them. Although it looks as though he has been making movies this whole time, but nothing I’ve seen since, oh, The Mummy Returns.
George of the Jungle was originally a short-lived cartoon from 1967 that made mock of Tarzan (which had a network television series running concurrently with the George of the Jungle cartoon). I knew of the Tarzan television series because it was in syndication in St. Louis in the 1980s. But the George of the Jungle property has punched above its weight, as the theme song was covered by “Weird Al” Yankovic in the 1980s:
George of the Jungle also had a direct-to-video sequel and was rebooted as a Canadian cartoon in 2006 with a second season in 2016. So it’s due for a reboot soon especially if Disney owns its rights or can get a hold of them.
I piped the video directly to my television from the VCR instead of going through out twenty-year-old receiver, and the video was very clear indeed. The receiver has been having some trouble handling sound from the video sources, so I’ve taken to routing them to the television directly. It will be a shame to replace this receiver, as it has old timey connections that can handle our VCRs and old computers. I fear replacing it as I don’t want to lose that connectivity. But I fear I shall have too, soon. But that’s unrelated to what I was talking about. Watching what my boys would call an “old” movie on an “old” media format, and musing on things other than the content of that movie.
It took me a long time to go through this book. A couple of years, actually. I had it as my carry book for a while, which meant I’d put it on my dresser (a book accumulation point) and would throw it in my gym bag when going to the martial arts school or carry it along to church to read during the Sunday school hour, after which I throw it into my beautiful wife’s tote bag as I carry it to the car.
At some point, the book disappeared, and I thought I had put it into the tote bag, and it had disappeared into my wife’s sometimes untidy office, and I kind of found something else to read.
Well, I was recently cleaning out my gym bag, and I found that it had fallen to the bottom, beneath eight year old magazines that I’ll read one of these days at the martial arts school. No, scratch that: as our boys are in class with us for the nonce and are rapidly reaching the age of the adult classes, the nights where I’d show up at the school at 4:15 and have two hours until my class started are over, so I won’t be reading much at the dojo at all. So I can probably remove those old magazines unless I’m keeping them in the gym bag for the rare occasions when I go to the YMCA and finish my workout before my family does. But that does not happen often. So the glory days of the carry book are over.
But I digress. This book collects talks that Zen master Joko gave during sesshin weekend retreats like what you find in Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.
I’ve mentioned before, I think, that the Buddhist ontology really doesn’t work for me. I’m one of those grazers who reads this sort of thing for the mindfulness and detachment lessons, but this book really does emphasize elements of the ontology that make me recoil a bit. I mean, the passivity in accepting each moment as it unfolds and not wanting anything out of it conflicts with, you know, getting anything done. Whether it’s picking up the house or changing the world, the book and its talks glides around what exactly it is that makes you decide what to do to do it instead of just chilling and enjoying the moment at a near-id level.
I think I’ll stick with stoicism which at least gives a little bit of a spark to get you moving. And the mindfulness training that you find in both.
The other evening driving out of Nogglestead, we frightened a couple of turkey vultures from their bounty at the end of the driveway. I assumed the hawks had gotten and dropped another bird, but when I went to the mailbox on foot, I saw what they had been picking at.
I wondered if it might be the remains of the famous Ozarkian giant carnivorous, venomous centipedes, but it’s actually a snake skeleton. Given that it’s picked pretty clean, they probably dragged an old skeleton out of the ditch to pick at.
But when presented with a snake skeleton, of course I had to take a picture and put a wry comment on Facebook. But a snake skeleton yields more quips than a single Facebook post could provide.
Think of this as a multiple choice quiz. Try to guess the quip I actually went with on Facebook and post your own in the comments.
Can anyone identify this kind of snake? It kind of looks like a diamond-backed water snake, but I’m not sure.
Does anyone need a snake skeleton? I have an extra.
When snake is served at Nogglestead, not a scrap goes to waste!
For proper snake broth, remember to simmer the snake carcass for two hours or more.
Strangely enough, there’s enough boy in me yet that I have the urge to do something with the skeleton other than toss it in the ditch on the other side of the road. Instead, I will probably ignore it until it gets crushed by passing cars or disappears–possibly due to the intervention of actual boys present in the household. I’ll let you know if I find it in their rooms in a couple years when cleaning them after they move out.
I read Gahr’s Random Realities last October after having bought these (and one or two others) at LibraryCon last year. I said then:
Well, I liked the book.
It’s a collection of science fiction short stories. Some of them are very short indeed–a couple of pages, which means they’re coming it at under 1000 words. So flash fiction. The plots are imaginative, but the execution is a little unsophisticated at times. The prose lacks any flourish, even the flourish of austerity. But, you know what? Who cares? Did I mention the plots are imaginative? And the stories are not woke parables, which I understand is a problem in some modern sci fi.
Well, basically, you could search and replace science fiction and sci fi with fantasy to describe how I feel about this book, although the stories tend to be longer (the last is novella-length). Still, interesting stories, simply told.
The book rather highlighted some difficulties I’ve had in completing fiction in recent years decades–trying, perhaps, for too much sophistication and perfection instead of just telling a story. Also, perhaps I am too focused on the concept or the gimmick and less on the people in the story. I’ve also got a pile of short stories from the olden days; I wonder if I could mind the peaks of my output and produce a collection of short stories for publication. Although since Charles Hill has passed away, I’m not sure anyone would buy it.
But I digress. I rather like Gahr’s work. Other books I have of his are novel-length, one in fantasy and one in science fiction. I will have to delve into them when I get my stack of in-process books down a bit.
(Not that cousin but rather her sister, who often posts enlightened Buddhist- and Hindu-flavored posts but lately has given over to celebration of the current troubles and their themes.)
At any rate, I am no biblical scholar, but, come on. Let’s look at some whities in the Bible:
I would say Timothy, but he was of a Greek father but Jewish mother, but in the new old one-drop accounting, this means he was not white. Also note that in this ethnography, people of Jewish origin are no longer white, but I think in some accountings, they are still white or not POC. I get so very confused.
Various and sundry Romans and roman soldiers.
I am not a Biblical historian, but I can certainly think of a number of instances I can come up with off the top of my head where the Bible might have included a white people put this twee claim (from a church no less!) into doubt.
I don’t know why this rankled me so much. Perhaps because this kind of “truth” is passed around by people who probably don’t believe in the Christian faith to rebuke those who do and disagree with the meme-passers on current thought.
You could argue that most of the “white” people in the Bible are bad guys, I suppose, but it’s pointedly from the time of Paul onward designed to be a religion for Gentiles who are sinners, so perhaps if you went down that road of argument, you wouldn’t really have a point.
Why do I argue with memes? Don’t I have anything better to do than get outraged on the Internet? To be honest, it’s hard to be on the Internet now and not get incensed. Even on Facebook. Even on LinkedIn, which used to be a professional Web site but which is also currently filled with political content. Eesh, pardon me whilst I close my browser again.
On weekends in May, I did a number of virtual duathlons through the local multisport club that I belong to.
I’ve also posted some glib things on social media in an attempt to win some Ozark Multisport Club swag.
That day, I did a 1 mile run, a 11.64 mile bike ride, and a 3.1 mile run (a 5k).
I mentioned that the four routes out of Nogglestead are:
Hilly.
Very hilly.
Alpine.
Autobahn. Also, hilly.
Which is true: If you leave Nogglestead to the south, you can cut over to the smaller state highway on a farm road, and it’s only hilly. If you continue south to where the farm road intersects with the state highway, it’s very hilly. And kind of like an M.C. Escher drawing. You go up a hill and around a corner and up another hill and up another hill. To be honest, I’m not sure where you actually go downhill in that route. The third route is north out of Nogglestead; in addition to starting out with a couple of rolling hills, they’re followed by a couple of really large hills with a small valley in between them. The valley is more like a gulch. And if you go west out of Nogglestead, you get the farm road leading to Republic, which is narrow, curvy, high-speed, and hilly.
I have mapped out a number of routes, landmarks, and distances for runs. If I run to the farm road to the south and back, it’s a mile; if I run south to the church and back, it’s a very hilly two miles; if I run to the pipeline pumping station in Battlefield and back, it’s two miles and less hilly; if I run to pizza joint in Battlefields and back and once around the yard, it’s a 5k (3.1 miles); if I run north but turn at the road in the bottom of the gulch and around, it’s an alpine 3.1 miles and a very bad idea; once around the block across the street is 4.2 miles; if I run south to the state highway and take it through Battlefield to the gas station and come back around and down the private lane just south of here and out to my driveway, it’s 6.2 miles (a 10k).
The bike routes are a little dicier. I can use any of these loops to add mileage, but I really don’t have any good routes to the farm roads and state highways out west. The alpine route plus a high-speed, little shoulder state highway or the aforementioned hilly autobahn route. So I’ve ridden into town for my routes. Which includes some torturous hills you don’t notice in a car.
At any rate, I did the last of the OMC duathlons the last weekend in May:
I don’t think I take multisport competitions as seriously as some people do, but apparently, I take them too seriously.
So that last weekend of May, I did a 5k on the hilly route, a ride into town and back, and the alpine 5k route listed above (a run/walk situation instead of a true run).
Both of those efforts were about the length of a sprint triathlon’s bike and run component, and the last was the run equivalent of a 10k. So I felt prepared for this past weekend’s activity: An Olympic-length duathlon.
Some of the people I work with put a new discussion group on the in-house collaboration software about running and biking and multisports. Apparently, a number of my co-workers are into it, too. A couple weeks back, a number of them did a 17 mile virtual duathlon. This time, though, it was a “Double Down” with about double the distance. A 6.2 mile run and a 24.8 mile bike ride. No sweat. I was ready, ainna?
Yeah, maybe not.
I didn’t sleep well on Friday night, partially concerned about the event. I didn’t eat well before hand, probably. I did hydrate pretty well, which is often a mistake I make, going a little dry because I don’t want to have to urinate during the race, and I cannot drink while running or biking–if I am breathing hard and swallow air while drinking, it’s a bad, bad thing.
My route out was the very hilly route, and it killed my mindset very early. I got right past the church, about a mile into the run, and I was already walking. And I walked a lot of it. Still, I ended up with a run/walk of about 1:15, which isn’t bad. Then I got on the bike, and I did the same route. It was less bad on the bike, but my route took me well into town, and then through a subdivision to add mileage, and then back. To make up the mileage, I went back down and around the very hilly route again to make my mileage. And I had to walk my bike up a hill.
I almost finished; it turns out, I did 24.73 miles instead of 24.8. I thought I had to do 24.2–I confused the tenths place with the 6.2.
I was one of the first three finishers of the event, and I was in last place for a long time. Watching the results come in on social media, I was an hour or more behind everyone on the bike. Because I went through town, because I’m on a crossover bike instead of a racing/road bike (and this gap will be exposed more with longer distances).
So I did not enjoy the event, and I did not do well. It took almost four hours out of Saturday–but I got an early start, so when I passed the pizza place, I could not stop in to place an order for delivery because it wasn’t even open yet.
Often, a triathlon will knock me out for the day, but this event really killed my energy and mindset for the whole weekend. I didn’t get anything else done but a bunch of reading.
So perhaps I should look back on the weekend and reflect fondly on all the reading I got to do. But reading does not feel like an accomplishment; reading is more akin to recreation and reward.
Ain’t that a pip? I completed an event that a lot of people cannot, but I’m not proud of it. As I’ve said before, I suffer from a mindset that says If I can do it/have done it, it’s easy; if I haven’t done it, it’s impossible.
At any rate with the completion of this event, I might be done with the road running for a while. Except I have a 5k coming up in a couple of weeks, so perhaps I and the boys should run a little before then. And my April triathlon is going to be rescheduled to some point in the near future along with four weeks of the training class ahead of it. And the Tiger Tri is coming up in August, and the boys and I don’t want to miss it.
As Shaman’s Harvest says, “I’m a glutton for punishment; yeah, it makes me feel alive.”
Although they probably didn’t include a semicolon in the actual lyrics.
I got this book at LibraryCon in 2019. It’s the first of a series of graphic novels retelling the story of the Trojan War. It takes 200 pages to get to the launching of the 1000 ships–almost; we have not gotten to Iphegenia yet.
I am on a streak of sorts: This is the second book of poetry in a row that I’ve read and enjoyed (the other was 
As you might know, gentle reader, I used to sit and read poems to my child and then children while they played. This book, along with Ogden Nash’s 
It took me a long time to go through this book. A couple of years, actually. I had it as my carry book for a while, which meant I’d put it on my dresser (a 
I read Gahr’s 
