Wordless Wednesday - Goodbye Sochi

Its another Wordless Wednesday because I haven't been working out and I am studying my butt off for a test I have to take. Spring is almost here, the races will be starting again, and I'm in totally crap shape.

On a related note, I'm aware that I'm clearly violating the whole idea of "wordless" Wednesday with all my comments, but I'm doing it anyway because I'm tired and I feel like it.

Sochi 

 - a little weird and awkward at first -

 - And so much warmer than we were expecting -

Goodbye Sochi,

I can hardly wait for the next Olympics. 

I wonder what Spring will bring us in 2 more years?

Wordless Wednesday - Wank and Semen

Andreas Wank has been the most mocked Olympic athlete of these winter games, despite winning team gold in the ski jumping competition, due to his obviously funny name. Adding to his fame, a Twitter artist named 'Loony' Photoshopped his image and changed his name to Cunty Spunkfuckshitpiss. The modified image went viral, leading to a barrage of people posting it and asking "this can't be real, right?"

Followed closely behind Andreas Wank ins terms of being mocked, Russia's Semen Pavlichenko is receiving a share of laughter. And when Wank and Semen's images are combined the laughs never end. Poor guys. Well, one of them has a gold medal, so I can't feel too terribly sorry for him.

Olympic Fever

Every 2 years another showing of Olympic Games comes on the TV. One time it'll be the Summer Games. 2 years later its the Winter Games. Each time I fumble in my mind with the interruption of my regular TV watching schedule. I grumble that my show is not on. I miss several events. Eventually I sit down and watch something.

And then I am hooked.

I find myself watching everything. Right now I'm watching some sort of Nordic Combined event, which involves a lot of Germanic people on skis chasing each other, jumping off buildings, shooting things, and ultimate fighting, all while wearing skis and without dropping their poles. This isn't a perfect description of the event. Granted I have missed a good portion of it. I'm having to fill in the blanks on what came before. But I know that they have to do cross country skiing and they have to do the ski jump off that 40 story ramp. And the only people with any chance of winning are of a Germanic background. I'm including Scandinavians among the Germanic people. I don't know if that's offensive to anyone. But obviously at some point Hitler wanted German soldiers to mate with Norwegian hotties because he thought it would help create a super hot 'race' of Olympic skiers or something like that. Anyway, people thought the idea made sense at the time. And the children that did result mostly went on to be supermodels and flying squirrels, er, ski jumpers and downhill skiing maniacs who never crash.

German fashion models, er, gold medal winning athletes

The point I was trying to make is not about the Germans. It is about sports and the Oympics in particular. From the age of 6 I was an athlete. Immediately upon joining my first basketball team I was a maniac. My best friend and I would practice basketball ALL THE TIME. I had a goal at my house (in an age before 'cheater' goals that parents could lower for little kids) and my best friend had a goal at his house. Our dads had measured and set the rims at exactly 10 feet, as they should, and we spent all our daylight hours when we weren't in school or watching Batman on TV dribbling and shooting on those goals. I remember how hard it was to finally start making baskets. 10 feet is a long way up for a 6-year-old, but we made enough baskets to keep trying. I recall in the games we played with our basketball team the final scores usually were somewhere in the range of 20-30 points. I think if a team scored 30 that wasa considered pretty high.

Basketball led me into track and field. My basketball coach had been tasked with getting together a track team for a summer competition. He recruited me. We had been doing various running exercises in PE at school, but nothing quite as organized as this. The summer track meet included every event a normal track meet could have, minus the pole vault. You can't very well have elementary school kids trying to learn to pole vault at a meet, right? I don't know. Maybe you can. I don't remember there being a pole vault event. But at this track meet every event was open. Anyone could enter any number of events or just the ones you thought you'd perform well at. I entered them all. I sucked at the shotput (softball throw.) I jammed on all the running events. At the end of the meet when they handed out the trophy for best all around competitor my name was called. I won the meet! I entered it again the following year and won again.

I'm old now. I'm not on any teams anymore. I quit soccer after my last trip to the emergency room courtesy of a psychopathic midget who got sexual thrills out of hurting male players for absolutely no reason. I'd been to the ER several times and I was sick of it. More than that, I was sick of people like him. And I was angry that my own teammates didn't have my back at all. They'd done nothing while I was down on the ground. They didn't even say anything to him until he hurt another player on our team. Then they got mad. Yeah, hurt me and that's fine. Hurt the other guy who played my position and that pissed them off. So it was time to say 'goodbye.'

The thrill of victory doesn't always look like ecstasy

Now I'm sitting here watching a man from Norway crumpled on the ground trying to soak in the realization that he's just won the Gold Medal in his event. It's ironic that I said what I did up above because the final results are 1. Norway 2. Norway 3. Germany 4. Germany. Anyway, I had a point to all of this. I'm sitting here watching these dedicated athletes, the best in the world at what they do, and all the agony and the ecstasy depending on how the event goes for them, and I'm remembering what it was like to be so enthusiastic about something in my life. And to train as much a that. And to agonize over every little mistake that cost me a victory. Or to jump for joy that I had won. I remember all of that. And then I think, what the hell happened to my life? I never went to the Olympics. I didn't even compete in college. My freshman year of college I approached the track coach about trying out for the University track and cross country team. He informed me that he had just been told the University was canceling the track and cross country program. The team was eliminated. I had long since given up basketball in favor of soccer and track. I wasn't good enough at soccer to try out for the University soccer team, or so I believed. I ended up trying out for and winning a scholarship to be a male cheerleader.

There's no cheerleading in the Olympics.

I stand corrected. Sochi does have cheerleaders, but not in competition

Watching the Olympics makes me happy. But it also makes me wonder what might have been if I had been more focused and dedicated and determined to do something with my athletics. Several of my track teammates went on to the junior Olympics. I didn't even know about this until many years afterwards. How did I not know about this? What might have happened if I had entered? Could I have gone on to qualify for the US Olympic Team? Probably not, but its the "what if" that bothers me. I say probably not, but the truth is that I don't know. And now I never will.

What might have been?

Stomach Virus

So, my latest excuse for missing workouts right and left is that I have a virus. It's some sort of stomach virus and it has me tired all the time, running to the bathroom a lot and generally weak and shaky. I haven't been on my bike in awhile, haven't run in even longer, haven't lifted weights or even jumped a rope. I have done quite a few push-ups, at least, for whatever that's worth. Gotta give me credit for that much.

I know you are, but what am I?

So, there's a lot of heavy politics going on. I know it's important. I know this election is critical in determining the future of this country. But I'm so sick of it already. I'm not going to say that both sides are equally guilty of mudslinging because they're not, but the one side that seems to have nothing else to offer by mud is stooping to a new low. A certain politician currently in office just today accused the other entire political party of wanting to enslave all the black people. Seriously? This is a professional man who represents our country to foreign lands and he's slinging crap like that around with a straight face? Where do they dig up these people?

OK, though about that.

I've been looking into what all is involved in self-publishing. I have a friend who is writing like mad and in the past 2 years or so has put out over 10 books, all selling very well. Meanwhile, I have had people pushing me to write for a long time. I never knew a good option for how I could write and get published so I didn't take it seriously. I had submitted articles to newspapers in years past only to get rejected every single time, so I'd blown it off. Now I'm thinking maybe I could make this a reality. If I could ever find a minute of free time to write, that is.

Supercar?

I'm currently in a rather unhappy situation. I decided that in order to make this situation more bearable I'd buy myself a car. I started off looking at 2 reasonably priced models. And I quickly moved my attentions to their higher end big brothers, one of which comes from the factory with a supercharger under the hood. I don't know if driving a supercharged musclecar each day can make up for the empty places in my life, but I'm thinking it can't hurt.

I've been looking into road cycles, trying to see what a decent up-to-date model would cost. Looks like what I'm riding was a very ordinary road cycle when it was new and would cost about $1500 today for a brand new model of the same bike. It's an Italian bike, from the oldest bicycle manufacturer in the world. I had another one, a Mercier, that looks to be similar in value. I gave it to a cyclist friend who liked to fix up old racing cycles and ride them before selling them and fixing up another one. Some of the nicer cycles are priced at around $5000. And one bike I read about is $10,000. I can't imagine paying that for a bike. But I guess if I was a very serious cyclist and competitive racer I might. I'm not, though, so I won't.

Anyway, I have neglected my workouts, my blog, my own life even, for quite awhile now. I just wanted to stop in and catch you up on what's been happening. And when I get another chance to catch my breath I plan to stop by your blogs and catch up on what's happening with you, too.


*UPDATE* - Oh my God, I just reread my previous post and it was almost exactly the same as this one! I mean, this is basically an update from the last one, but it's the same topics EXACTLY. The only thing I didn't mention this time was the Olympics, which I did end up watching like an addict. They were really impressive and the track and field was awesome. I turned it on the second I got home from work and watched until it stopped at 11 pm each night, plus the weekend. I was sick all weekend, so it was the perfect time to sit on the couch all weekend long and watch the Olympics. Awesome, awesome, awesome!

Hot Heat and Hotter Humidty

I am aware that I haven't written in nearly a month and I apologize most sincerely to both of you who read my blog. In my defense I was at the beach for a solid week and did not bring a computer with me. I also didn't take many photos, which is somewhat unusual for me. The first time I went to this particular place I had been a photography enthusiast and spent roughly half my time taking photos with my new expensive camera. This time I used my phone and mostly only photographed sunsets.

The other reason that I haven't written much this month is that I haven't done much working out. The heat had been rough, the yard has been out of control, and there have been a few other things popping up that I have had to take care of. There is always some excuse for skipping workouts and I realize I shouldn't be making any, but I did anyway. I have skipped almost an entire month's worth of workouts now.

Oh, one other reason for not blogging here much is that I've been trying to write. I mean, I've been trying to write more seriously, and this has meant that in the few spare moments I've had for getting on the computer (when it wasn't for work) I was trying to write something reasonably coherent and mildly entertaining. I'm not sure if I've been at all successful on that, but if nothing else I can consider it practice.

On the political front, as long as I'm here and writing random things, the Democratic Party and the United Nations have been working together to try to take away the rights of citizens to keep and bare arms. I don't just mean American citizens, but all citizens of any country that signs the treaty the UN has written up. It's odd at first glance, for a political party to be doing this, albeit as stealthily as possible, during a major election year. The subject is extremely unpopular even with their own supporters in the US. But it is very popular with dictatorship nations like Russia and China, and as anyone who has been paying attention has noticed, the governments of Russia and China both have a disturbing level of influence over certain political parties and certain politicians in all of the various Western nations. So, unpopular or not, they're trying to shove it down our throats like they did in the UK. And as the citizens of the UK have tried to warn us, this is a very, very bad thing.

The Olympics have started. I always plan to watch them and then miss most of it until they are almost over. About that time I begin to get hooked and then POOF! They're over and I'm sorry that I missed so much of them. I want to watch track and field. I don't know if I've missed any of that yet. I always like to watch and see how fast everyone is this time. Every Olympics they are faster than the last. And everyone is faster than I was at my peak. But at least I have old personal best times in certain events that I can compare with the times of the runners competing in the Olympics to give me an idea of how much faster they are than I was. It makes it more fun.

For those of you who know who I am, I have been actively looking for a new car. I have been reduced to talking with car salesmen on the phone. Friday I talked to salesmen in Texas, Wisconsin, Connecticut and Massachusetts. I'm looking for something specific and I had no idea when I started just how hard this is to find. I've been looking for months now.

Anyway, I can't think of anything else much to say. I wish I could say that something exciting was going on in my life, a new child, a new mansion, a luxury cruise, Kim Kardashian stalking me, anything at all. But I'm afraid it's just all been work and stress and trying to get back into the groove of regular workouts. Oh, and missing my friends back home. There has been a lot of missing my friends.