Week of Woes

Some yahoo who thinks that he looks good in Oakleys and DeSoto tri-shorts.

One of my great passions in life is triathlon. I spend an obscene amount of time and effort at it. If you ask my wife, she’ll lump “money” into that last statement as well. Nevertheless, it’s been a week of training woes. The following is an except from an email I wrote a friend of mine in Miami.

Went for my weekly long run; 10 miles up the parkway against morning commuting traffic. Some fat guy gave me the finger from his speeding mini-van because I guess he thought that running five feet off the side of the road was impinging on his right to the road.

I was sporting a new pair of DeSoto running shorts that started to chafe at about mile 3. By the time I got back home my new Asics were bright pink from sweat and blood, and I had streams of blood running down both of my legs. Michelle looked at me like I was a blooming idiot. Can you blame her?

Now I'm limping around with what is effectively road-rash between my legs. There is NOTHING more painful than road-rash in the shower.

I've decided to stick with the DeSoto compression tri-shorts for long runs. These have been stand-bys for years.

I went for a long bike ride through the hills of southern Atlanta the other day. I got hopelessly lost, and kept passing the same dead dog lying on the side of the road. I took that as a bad omen and called Michelle for directions. Ended up doing an ass-load of “bonus miles”.

Also went to the tri-store yesterday to stock up on Accelerade (“Biker Crack”). The guy looked at me like I was crazy. I'm getting a lot of that lately. He told me the stuff was junk and the latest version of "go-faster" drink was something called Perpetium (orange-vanilla). I tried it yesterday. I'm not sure if it helped at all, but it tasted great.

The Speedo polyester swimsuits are great. Good advice there. They don't come in leopard pattern though.

I was in the pool the other day swimming an unbroken 1600 and the guy next to me was floating 25 yd intervals on his back. He saw me in the shower and commented, "you're a beast in the water". I'm thinking, "Yea, you should see me bench press 80 lbs!!"

All from my tales of woe. How's it with you?