river ragamuffin

 Here we are, embarking upon another North Platte trip. Although this looks like the aftermath of a bad night in the sleeping bag, it is in fact C's usual appearance (Me: "your hair is a ferocious mess. You look like a wild animal !" C: "Thank you").

We've done this trip in many configurations: me alone, me and H together but in solo boats, H in tandem boat with a girlfriend, all four of us in the mighty Penobscot 186, me and one boy or another. This time Ian was at church camp in northern New Mexico, so it was C's turn to see the water from the front of the tandem canoe.

C nearly died of boredom while waiting for the shuttle, which takes about two hours. I fished quietly within view of the grumpy child, breaking off from time to time to feed him or otherwise ameliorate the tedium. The river was as always generous with its fish, first a plump but startled-looking cuttbow then a pretty red-spotted brown. The brown is a lot smaller than I remember it being.

Is this a Dagger I see before me, its handle toward my hand ? Indeed it is and we caper merrily into the eddy, dragging the Clorox baler for extra turning power.

Lunch in the canyon, below the biggest wave on the river, hidden behind the rocks from this angle. The water was relatively low and warm as we were a bit later than usual this year. On the planned weekend, there were storms, snow, and 5600 cfs: two feet of water running strong through the campgrounds. Wyoming Fish & Game actually closed the river. Ken postponed the trip to the beginning of July when the torrents of spring and the snowbanks had receded.

A blessedly uneventful paddle down to Deadwater South camp. The pumpkin-orange tent is my latest new tent, a Marmot Titan 3-man, rather more colourful than I'd prefer but the price was irresistible. It took me a while to figure it out, but the reason the two-man tents these days are so light is because they're not really big enough for two. While the MSR Zoid 2 is a fine weatherly tent, it's rather like sleeping in a coffin. I confess to a bit of a tent fetish, but buying all these tents does allow me a rich fantasy life where I get to use them all.

Water so warm in fact, that swimming and beach play were possible. Peter's canoe serves as an impromptu drying rack after a regrettable incident with a broadsided rock lurking in the flow. It took us ten minutes to pump the boat dry, and some of the dry bags weren't.

I investigated the river attentively, with a trout fly as a sort of virtual periscope into the brown waters. In past years the micro-eddies along this stretch in front of camp held numbers of trout, this time only a smattering of smaller fish. Small is of course a relative term (once wandering down a rivulet high in the Smoky Mountains, I caught a 9" brook trout that was an absolute monster) and comparisons are invidious, I was quite happy to see their bright sides anyway.

Having failed to solve the fish/river daily conundrum, back to camp where C was reading and snacking. There was a large stonefly pattern lost in the weeds by my chair, a huge black fly with an orange wedge of foam as an eyecatcher. I took the hint, lashed it to a strong leader, and went upstream to the black deep water curling and folding around itself in the hole below the rapids. It looked quite implausible, this monster fly floating about, but a splashy little rise turned into a long run deep into the rocks where the leader parted. No more stonefly patterns in my box, a Chernobyl Ant did not produce. C hiked up the riverside trail in the dusk to tell me it was time to start cooking dinner, which it was of course. With a guilty start I complied.

Here we are beneath the cathedral of trees. Canoe tripping tends to gather congeries of mild-mannered eccentrics. The upside is they all have good stories to tell.

C headed off into the woods with the potty shovel, quoting from Up: "I've always wanted to do this ! .... ... so do you dig the hole before or after ?"

Next day time for the Douglas Creek rapid, not particularly formidable at this water level though. Here's everyone lined up for the run, then Roger and Peter coming through.

Ken and I ran heedlessly down ahead of everyone else, to stop and set up rescue ropes just in case. C enjoyed the rapid too - they are his favorite part, probably because he's never yet had to swim one. I'm trying to hold off on giving him that experience. As you can see, it was all a happy blur as we crashed through the waves.

The rescue setup gave me time for a bit of nature-boy contemplation in the undergrowth among small wild roses.

We all agreed the forecast had been for calm sunny weather all three days, but it clouded up quickly and stayed grey all day. Once out of the wilderness area, there was a near-crowd of rafts and driftboats going down in pursuit of trout. After lunch C started to fish and quickly hooked and landed a nice 15" brown in front of several fishless driftboats. A thunderstorm gathered above us, clear blue skies at the horizons but grim lowering cloud above. It rained, thundered, and then hailed for a while. The hail was quite impressive, flattening the riffles while also raising white gouts of water. Once in camp it was wet cold and nasty, so the bonfire was required again. Once C had dried out and warmed up a bit, he told me "Dad you know I didn't enjoy that part".

Luckily there were some good climbing rocks available for entertainment.

I left C carefully drying his feet in the tent, bolted for the water to get in a cast or so. There was a small storm of pale yellow mayfly and caddis blowing down river, so tried a dry fly and was quickly rewarded with a handsome 15" brown, the match of C's fish from earlier in the day. I took that as my prompt to not neglect my fatherly duties again. Ken went on and caught some excellent fat fish on dry flies from around the island.

We clambered up and among the rocks. It rained off and on all evening. Usually things will dry out overnight in the desiccated Wyoming air, this time it was still sopping wet in the morning, tents, clothes, shoes and all. There's nothing like packing a dry bag full of damp matériel which you know is going to fester in there for another day and night.

The water had grown colder as we went downriver, oddly enough. French Creek came in roaring high with icy green waves breaking into the tiger's eye brown of the main stem. Paddling over near it was like going into air conditioning. A bald eagle watched us go from his dead-tree perch. The high water rushed us down to the takeout.

The Saratoga Hobo Hot Springs were too hot for comfort. C couldn't even get in, and it took me several tries. Usually there's a pool in the river at the outflow where the water mingles with cold river water, but it had been washed away. At Stumpy's Cafe the waitress was a young Goth, didn't expect that in farming country.

Back over the Snowy Mountains still plentifully supplied with snow, even a cornice or two in the highest country. There was a small moose-jam on the road, a big bull up to his knees in a flooded meadow, munching happily while surrounded by cameras. C had fallen asleep ten minutes after leaving Saratoga so we didn't stop.

Some of the pictures are courtesy of Roger. Thank you Roger.

Thanks too to Ken for putting the whole thing together, as every year.

Budapest 2010

As Don Marquis once observed, "I've finally conquered that G-D willpower of mine. Gimme a double Scotch". In my case it was a tax rebate that overcame real and deserved scruples about indulging in a vanity project, to go and race in Budapest. The swim is in a rowing basin next to the Danube, since the river is sick with wastewater at that point. The bike looks to be flat and drafty. The run goes along the river past the castle, then two loops through the old town - should be a fine route. Originally I'd hoped to be somewhat competitive, but at this point it's looking like it will be more a gesture towards the memory of racing than a race in fact. Usually it's a good party though: it will suffice to bring a period to the end of these endeavors.

peach blossom time

Friday: worked nine hours straight, packed for two, then drove for five: hopefully grinding our way across the Continental Divide to a weekend of peace and quiet at the yurt. The drive was a bit grim from my perspective, enlivened by a CD of Hank the Cowdog's adventure with the abandoned Mary D. Cat
"A crust of bread, baloney, cheese
Spare a morsel, if you please!
Marooned I am, oh hateful place
At last I've found a friendly face."
Hank bids goodbye by saying "hors d'oeuvre, cat" and responds to the puzzlement by claiming "I speak lots of languages - French, Italian, Thousand Island, and Ranch.."

After an exhausted remnant of the night, morning on the Buzzard's Roost,

with the usual farm detritus washed up on and around the fences and erratic boulders, themselves gradually returning to the earth. As Elizabeth Bishop observed, "Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it." In this case a closer examination finds black widow spiders in the old shed, so perhaps not.

Breakfasted slowly and coldly waiting for the sun to come over the ridge. There are petroglyphs in the neighbourhood. We hiked up to take a look. Usually they are found in caves or overhangs, it's surprising these have survived on the bare face of the rock.











Presumably a herd of deer, though there were others with
elaborate antlers, one with sweeping horns like a sable. There was elk poo on the trail around the outcrop with the petroglyphs. The dog was completely happy, if a bit hot. Back in Palisade he behaved remarkably well at the farmer's market, doubtless because he'd finally run his yayas out. The brewery has changed hands and no longer has a liquor license to sell beer, except for consumption on the premises: instead of a growler of delicious Orchard Amber Ale, had to settle for 3.2 Corona from the grocery store, eww.



Home again for bacon cheeseburgers on the grill. The carunculated old logs of peach wood did not burn as long as I'd expected but made beautiful coals.

At bedtime I doused the fire with toothbrushing water which was quite inadequate. At two in a windy morning the coals still glowed. Although Grand Junction is just over the horizon, the dark hour stars were still impressive, Milky Way blazing overhead.






Monday the work of the farm got back underway. The beauty is merely incidental, or is it ?

We sold a conservation easement on the farm last year, to ensure it can never be used for anything but agricultural land. This made tax time absolute hell, three midnight watches to get it all posted.

As rentiers we get to watch the tractoring and other actual work. The drill uses shear pins which reminded me of several times Charles and I stranded ourselves on fishing trips, with outboard motors and sheared pins between the prop and the pony. I don't remember how we got home on those occasions - possibly repurposed a different bolt and drove very carefully around the rocks and sandbanks.










A tractor framed by the cash crop. As the fire burned both nights I thought of the time that was burning: when was the tree planted, how many salaries did its fruit help to pay, how many families ate the harvest ?

We hiked up in the Colorado National Monument, where Christopher added to his collection of Junior Ranger badges. It's a gorgeous piece of ground with one of the classic Colorado bike rides traversing it on the Rim Rock drive. One day.

Sunset over the Roost.


The Roost gets all the pixels, so here for a change is a view in the other direction, from the shaky corner of the deck. This point is some eight feet off the ground: walking on the deck here gets some sympathetic vibrations going and the whole edifice shudders.

Next morning before leaving, we caught the last of the morning breezes to put a couple of kites up. I'd been frustrated before by these kites' erratic diving. Today we had a twenty-five foot tail for the dragon kite, and a three-way six footer for the triangular box kite, which worked far better until the wind finally faded.

Here the dragon gets off the ground.



























Then it's time to go again, back to cubicle prison to earn my daily crust.

nearly made it

almost spring I think, nearly survived another winter. Yesterday it was warm for Colorado values of warm, and sunny, though today a foot of snow is in the forecast. Running from the office out to the Highline Canal trail, it occurred to me that I could take that trail over to Waterton Canyon, the canyon trail up to the Colorado Trail, and thence to Durango 500 miles later. A camelbak, some energy bars, bivy sack and a credit card is all I'd need. That, and a couple of weeks off work; oh well maybe in my next lifetime. 

Started the run in a long-sleeve shirt which quickly became too hot in 50 some degrees. Highlands Ranch is one of the breeding grounds of America, so I usually encounter moms and children on lunchtime runs. It's also a Republican stronghold, with the accompanying broad but narrowminded Puritan streak running through it. Many of the children are astonished to see a shirtless man. The best comment was from some little mite barely as high as my knee, "mommy why is that man naked ?" I'm not naked, I have running shoes on. And a perfectly decent pair of shorts.. Today it was "mommy where's his shirt ?". Most of the moms smile pleasantly, others give that PTA-GT-Mom rictus which means they're inwardly planning your ritual disembowelment. 

Now that we have the Romneycare health care bill on its way, perhaps the country can be dragged kicking and screaming into the century of the fruitbat. As Kieran Healy tweeted, "Hello America! Germany says, Welcome to 1883! The UK says, Welcome to 1911! France says, Welcome to 1930!"

It's also a good time for a redefinition of hope, 

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and

powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or

willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for

success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is

good. 

Vaclav Havel 

which echoes President Obama in his extempore speech to the Democratic caucus, quoting Lincoln: "I’m not bound to succeed, but I’m bound to live up to what light I have.”

May it continue. 

moving house

Given the ratio of time spent (conscious) in each room and place of the house, clearly my first priority was to preserve the mountain view from the kitchen sink. 

In the old house, the view as it actually is, 

and the view as I see it with none of the usual distressing kitchen filth in the foreground, 

In the new house, the view isn't nearly as good, but the house is bigger. 

By squinting carefully through my new bifocal glasses (well, progressive lenses really, but still I feel as if I've tottered over some new threshold) the mountains can yet be seen. 

In a Platonic sort of way it should be enough to know the mountains are out there, the shadows on the cave wall are all we have anyway: but I was confirmed in the church of St Thomas, and I need to see. 

Over Thanksgiving it was fourteen-hour days shuttling boxes down the road. Some of the boxes hadn’t been opened in 15 years..  some of those contained letters and photos from our childhoods, couldn’t quite throw them away yet. I’ll let my kids do it. 

Here’s the short list of major fun incidents :

-        washing machine tap snapped on Wednesday evening as I tried to replace it. Memo to self: don't undertake plumbing projects on Thanksgiving eve. The water was off until Friday when I could get to a hardware store for the special extraction tool. The first cheap Chinese tool was made of a metal softer than copper, so it just rounded off – back to the store for a quality US-made implement. That still took a 3-foot lever and all my strength to get the tap remnant out of the pipe threads. 

-        Used the camping water jugs and fetched water to flush loos, etc. I was so fully into camping mode I went to the basement on Friday morning to get a camping pot to boil water for coffee. H asked why I didn’t just use the kettle, I had no answer. Ahem. 

-        Sienna hatch door handle broke on Wednesday evening, so I had to remove the rear cover and open the trunk from the inside, all weekend long, while moving loads of junk. Ebay had a new metal handle to replace the original plastic part, but it's wending its way from Florida. I should have it in good time to not need it for the move. 

-        Dishwasher in new house runs but doesn’t heat water or dry. Handwashing all dishes is just what I needed to do with my free time. While searching the interwebs for a dishwasher manual, I found many references to this Bosch model overheating the circuit board so the solder melts. Tore it open, grunting: by golly one pin on the board was completely dry and surrounded with blackened spatter. Re-soldered it with an added piece of copper wire to act as a heat sink and re-assembled. Now it gets hot but the soap release is sporadic and random. Oh well close enough. You have to wonder about a design that gets the circuit board up to 600 F, hot enough to melt solder. As soon as the cash-for-clunker appliances kicks in for Colorado, we'll get a new washer. The stimulus program has been good to us: $4500 for the old Subaru, $6500 for the home-buyers' tax credit, and now even more money for a new dishwasher. I feel a little guilty but not enough to refuse the moola. 

-        Went to all the outlet stores looking for a new stove for the old house. This is part of staging the old house, the 20+ year-old coil stove is rather repulsive. We moved it with us, thereby providing another opportunity for the taxpayer to subsidize our new appliances. After 3 hours of fruitless driving around, resorted back to the internet in desperation: Home Depot, Lowes and The Great Indoors were all $50-$150 cheaper than the outlets. Bah. Did you know you can still buy a stove with an oven that isn’t self-cleaning ? I had no idea.

-        Realtor said we should re-hang the closet doors in the one bedroom. The previous owner took them off, installed shelves and painted them in bright primary colors for the kid’s room, we liked it and left it. I thought it would be straightforward. Instead started at 7pm Sunday then off to Home Depot at 7:30pm with the project list. It went well until I found my guess that it took ¼” runners was wrong, should have had 3/8”. So then it was only another load to move and unload, got to bed nearly before midnight at least. 

This coming weekend is for the crawlspace and garage. The old house had a two-car garage and 1400 sq. ft, new three-car and 2500 squares: yet the new is quite full and there's still all that other stuff to move. Two canoes and six bicycles out of the garage alone, two more canoes and kayaks from the outside, and on and on. 

The old house looks quite beautiful now. Empty clean rooms full of sunlight, I think we'll buy it. We were happy there. I'm sure I moved the Lares and Penates in one of those boxes, so hopefully they made it intact. 

Opening Day

November 7th was opening day for Wyoming's pheasant season - not exactly the Glorious Twelfth, but quite good enough for who it's for. The dawn comes up with a distant cackle, "kek-kek-kek" from the cornfields as the roosters feel their oats, so to speak. In this wet year, the corn is still standing, which gives the birds plenty of food and place to hide from dogs and hunters. We were listening to Prairie Home Companion that evening, broadcasting from Des Moines, where they have the same problem: "We're in Iowa, where the major industry is gambling. Some call it farming. The corn harvest is a couple weeks behind, the corn is still wet — do you harvest it now and have to pay to dry it out or do you leave it in the field to dry and maybe lose it to a hard freeze ?" 

The road that's dimly visible on the L of that photo runs up past the pea field and sorghum patch, to the neighbour's corn. Often at lunchtime while sitting in front of the barn recuperating, we'll see birds come out of the field, look left and right then scuttle quickly over into the scrub on the other side. For some reason we can never find these birds even with the dogs Spot and Artie. I did notice today that a wing-shot bird can outrun the dogs, so it's possible they just run very fast and far. 

The sunflower picture is from earlier this year, now they are brown stubble. My excuse for posting is that it's pheasant food, also I like the picture. Even after harvest there are seeds scattered around, good for giving the feathers that final gloss to just bowl over the hens. 

In the field everything is grey and brown except for the hunters in blaze orange. I used to be quite snotty about US hunters and their brilliant garments (the hunters I knew in SA didn't often kill each other by mistake), especially after a deer hunter shot our grey backpacking tent in the Three Sisters wilderness. That was twenty years ago. I still have the two orange ball caps we bought at the first gas station we saw on the way out of Three Sisters. Now I find with any more than two people in the field, the orange is downright necessary. A shotgun blast is dangerous up to at least a quarter of a mile; in the tall grasses it's easy to lose track of where everyone is, especially when tracking a bird moving high and fast on a curve to the next county. 

We trudged around for some time, scaring up a number of hens but nothing shootable. Artie got away to do some independent hunting and flushed a handsome rooster at sixty yards, which made me think of getting him back in the shock collar. It has a vibrate mode, a shock mode, then a "bowl 'em over yelping" mode for when they're in full overexcited pursuit. 

Further down in the beautiful blonde wheatgrass, a rooster broke out near my feet and hurried down the wind past Ian. He shot it dead center. I shot a second after him, but the bird was already dropping when I pulled. Artie dashed off but did not find it. We found a wing feather so we knew he was down somewhere, but quartering with two dogs did not reveal anything. Apparently the problem is after the flight, the bird is air-flushed so there's not much scent, and it's difficult for the dogs to track it across the dry windy Wyoming plain. A couple of hours later we came back and Spot proudly trotted out of the grass with a mouthful of pheasant. 

That's not in fact the gun which did the damage - it's a Remington 1100 automatic, rather looked down upon as inferior to the break-action shotguns. Ian was shooting a borrowed Beretta Silver Pigeon with a cut-down stock when he got the bird. For my sins in not buying myself a shotgun over the off season, Ken made me carry the 12 ga Browning Citori, about eight or nine pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but after keeping it at the ready for five or six hours and ten to fifteen miles, it's a bit of a lump. 

Ken was shooting a new-to-him vintage gun, a ninety-five year old side-by-side, with double triggers and an unusual safety. A bird got up out of the cattails while we were searching for Ian's, presenting an easy shot. First the safety was on, then the wrong trigger, so the shot came late and far. Spot was on the case though and pinned the bird as soon as it came down. 

By lunchtime my other urchin had arrived. For a cruel and unusual punishment of Artie's independent hunting, we put him in his crate with the urchin. 

The sentence for a shot pheasant is to hang by the neck while dead. These are all Ken's birds, though Ian had a beautiful shot at one of them. Artie dug it out of the cattails in a ditch and it hung there in the Wyoming breezes, glaring at us while trying to pick up speed into the wind: but there was a regrettable misunderstanding about the safety on the Remington, so Ken had to shoot it. I'd told Ian the red band on the safety button meant the gun was on and ready to shoot, but he'd understood me to say the red band meant the safety was on. Dagnabbit. By late evening the score was three for Ken, one for the whole Kretzmann tribe, a disgraceful exhibition. Do the birds your sons shoot count for you as well ? I'm demanding credit for taking him hunting anyway. 

Early evening, and there's a rooster in that tangle somewhere. Artie knows about it as evidenced by his alert stance, but I wasn't paying enough attention. The bird flushed out from behind my right shoulder as we passed the puddle and headed for the corn. I was slow to respond then didn't lead him by enough and missed clean. No beer for me tonight. 

John Buchan wrote, "The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope." This of course doesn't apply to fishing a popular hatch on one of our Western tailwaters, which is rather a series of opportunities for public humiliation and to be comprehensively ignored by the fish. Still the point holds good for most fishing, and indeed applies to pheasant hunting as well. There's an awful lot of walking through empty fields: but at any moment anything may happen: and at worst there's been a fine long walk in the sun and wind, which is very nearly enough. 

A well-hunted dog. That's either bliss or extreme fatigue. 

What with all the hurry and scurry of preparing the old house for sale, packing up the old (Helen) and panicking about the cost and debt of the new house (me), somehow two sleeping bags got left behind. Since we're doting parents the boys got the bags and we slept fully-dressed under coats. Luckily it wasn't particularly cold, unluckily my sleeping mat had a slow leak so I'd descend gradually onto a concrete heat sink and wake up shivering. Then it would be time to shove another big chunk of cottonwood into the wood stove and wait for the warmth to permeate my old cold bones. With the air flow turned down in the stove, the flames come up and fold around the new wood slowly and waveringly. This makes for phantasmagorical images in the fire, good for poetical midnight musings but not so grand for a steady eye and hand in the morning. 

Next day the mighty mighty hunters went off early to check neighbour Casey's cornfields. Tea and toast for breakfast, made with spray-on olive oil in an electric frypan, an abomination to my Greek-by-marriage sensibilities. We couldn't wake Ian up to go with us, another well-hunted creature. The birds were mostly all very happy where they were, deep in the corn, thank you very much. We did kick up a pair of roosters in a small field that had been left to go to weed for the year. A good shot would have bagged the double here but I'm not a good shot - missed with the first barrel, regrouped myself and re-acquired the target as it built up speed, then brought him down. Artie plunged swiftly into the ditch and brought it back to me grinning through the feathers. We were both very happy. 

After brunch we went out on Ken's fields again. Ian preferred to loaf in the sun with a book, fair enough after walking his feet to nubbins the previous day. In the sorghum field, Artie ran his usual enthusiastic circles, wagging like an animal possessed. The rooster was trapped between me and him, panicked and blew up practically in my face. This is hard on the heart, but at such close range even I couldn't miss. 

Last weekend we'd taken the dog to Cherry Creek for a walk in the mud snow and slush. Afterwards to Petco, to wash the dog ($11) in their self-dog-wash facility (the new house has a utility sink in the mud room, so we'll save $11 there). A Russian guy working at Petco told me Artie looked just like his Russian spaniel in the old country. He also used to own borzoi for coursing. I asked him what they hunted on the steppes, he didn't have the English names but said "the small wild chicken, and the big wild chickens".  We'll eat our wild chickens in a leek soup with wild rice, I think. 

In the late afternoon Ian had another shot at it. C got into an orange vest and walked with us. Only hens, and one indeterminate bird which Artie rooted out on an independent foray, far off into the setting sun. 

The first time I saw a marsh hawk was near San Francisco, in Tomales Bay. Here again over the wetlands marsh hawks flew low and quartering, snipe gave their alarm calls, and a great blue heron flapped slowly up.  That's all, he wrote. 

a qualified success

USA Triathlon National Championships, Tuscaloosa AL 08/22/2009
1.5k mostly upstream swim, 39k bike, 9.8k run




"The tumult and the shouting dies --
the Captains and the Kings depart --"
leaving us with the flags flying over a quiet Black Warrior river flowing swiftly to the Gulf.

This is aftermath of course. In flashback, my story is a below-par performance at the world age-group (AG) race in 2006, see here. The idea this year was to attempt to qualify for 2010 Worlds for one last race, to satisfy my vanity. This was all predicated on job life and health remaining unchanged: Ha, the gods who live past all imploring laugh merrily and long. So as prospects narrow, the goal remained to qualify, but the actual trip to Worlds in Budapest became unlikely. It's just too much money, given the GFC's effects on our college and retirement funds. I’d feel bad leaving the family to spend thousands of dollars on a vanity project. Lausanne actually cost less than Tuscaloosa, go figure.

A cheap flight to Huntsville left me with 100 miles to drive to Tuscaloosa. Walking out of the airport was like stepping into a pressure cooker - the heat and humidity combine to a sensation of physical oppression. Torrential rains and heavy traffic for all those miles wasn't quite as expected, but survived to reach the U of Alabama's campus and the Official USAT Hotel Capstone. Every third radio station in Alabam’ is faux Christian. Luckily one of them was bluegrass gospel, some good old-time music. The mayor was running ads on the radio thanking all the triathletes for coming to spend money in Tuscaloosa.

Dined quietly in the deserted hotel restaurant, as I couldn't face any more driving. There was one other couple, he was another racer in my AG, from Montana which is a long long haul. Nationals draws a crowd wherever it's held.

Next day was all administrivia, fetching the bike from the transport company, checking in, etcetera etcetera. On the walk back from bike check-in, talked to a Pennsylvania couple: we were in violent agreement on the need to avoid unnecessary exertion before the race. Amazingly the bike course was cluttered with clots of bikers, apparently riding the whole way. I drove the course, bike then run. Both were hillier than expected. The run in particular had some startling hills climbing out of the floodplain.

I'd finished the entire 500 pages of David Copperfield by dinnertime. A book is a good shield when dining solitarily but having read greedily, at the restaurant I had to sit in my usual eccentric-loner pose. The guitar player showed up with an old Fender amp and a couple of acoustic instruments, promising to make our ears bleed, but in the event was gently melodic. My usual pre-race meal is a PB&H (peanut butter and honey), so ordered a PB&J to-go from the kid's menu, for breakfast.

By morning all those rains I drove through had worked their way into the watershed and the Holt Lock opened. This turned the river from a sluggish scarcely-detectable flow to a brisk 1 mph current. I swam a short warmup upstream, turned over and floated down at a good clip. We faced the swim with trepidation. One poor old gal (age 77) never even finished the swim, just stayed in one spot for two hours fighting on, then called for a kayaker and quits. Bravo, is all I can say in admiration.

I usually swim about 23-24 minutes but took a hard-working 33 today: once tried to get closer to shore for quieter water but nearly impaled myself on a snag. The stronger swimmers lost 5min or so, the weaker went to the wall and lost 10 to 50. One of my AG competitors swam 44 so I beat him for the only time I ever will.

On to the bike, a two-loop course, and immediately plunged into a bunch of squirrelly 20-somethings on their second loop. For most of the first loop all my effort went into not-crashing and avoiding a drafting violation. I did clip a traffic cone at one point, but managed to keep it upright. The second loop was much pleasanter, in exactly the same time as the first.

By the run it was 80 degrees and 70% humidity, really not as bad as it might have been but quite bad enough. After ten minutes I decided to take my top off and damn the spectators' eyes, it was just too hot to be wearing anything more than necessary. The hills were staggering. Held on grimly to finish in 2:23, as 33 swim, 1:04 bike, 43 run.

At the finish I was quite satisfied with my effort, as I could scarcely walk. The run time seemed slowish though that could be put down to the uphills. Looking at the results, everyone else ran their usual times or faster: that plus the anecdotal reports of GPS showing a short course leads to the belief that it was short and I was slow. Oh dear.

Later that day, delivering the bike back to Luke at the bike transport, I got talking to Kirk Framke (your M35-39 National Champioeen !) about running and getting old. The postrace exhaustion supplied a form of 'in vino veritas' which let me blurt out a truth I'd not articulated before: the worst thing about aging is that running now hurts. It never used to hurt - the pain appeared as information rather than suffering - but now every blessed step of a race takes effort to oppose the weakness. If I take my watch off it's possible to imagine myself to be running fast, still that's only a comfortable delusion. Kirk was an architect: after 9/11 he took to teaching middle-school math in the poorer quarters.

All this plus my need for a little lie-down at the hotel meant I missed the women's elite race.


Here are their bikes at least. The greensward in the background is where the AG rabble racked their bikes. I was by the first flag on the left at the back. A California girl in the 45-9 AG, coached by Michellie Jones, was racked opposite. She assured me her Tyr speedsuit was worth several minutes in the swim. I took an informal survey of all the athletes I saw wearing speedsuits, asking if it helped: 6 "I don't know, this is the first time I've tried it" and 2 definites. The definites came from ex-college swimmers with deep backgrounds, so I'm inclined to think I should have spent the $250.

At the end of the day, 14th in the 2010 50-54 rankings, so a clean qualifier at least - top 18 qualify, this year. 21st in 45-9, a bit weak but as the oldest in the AG I'm not too concerned. The bike was 1:04 for 24 miles which is about 1:06 for 40k, a small PR. The major disappointment was that I'd trained very carefully all year long in an attempt to recover my run, but all the training and tapering did not make any difference at all. In fact the neglected swim was the best performance, bike OK, run mediocre.

From one of President Obama’s books,
“I began feeling the way I imagine an actor or an athlete must feel, when, after years of commitment to a particular dream, after years of waiting tables between auditions or scratching out hits in the minor leagues, he realizes that he's gone just about as far as talent or fortune will take him. The dream will not happen, and he now faces the choice of accepting this fact like a grown-up and moving on to more sensible pursuits, or refusing the truth and ending up bitter, quarrelsome, and slightly pathetic.”

"If you can't let up on the competitive part of it, if you have to go as fast at 50 as you did at 20, you will grind yourself into the ground and become stressed out, bitter and unhealthy." Mark Allen

I'm not bitter, really. It was swell while it lasted.

Brightroom took a picture of me in the race that is the nearest to flattering I've seen in thirty years of race pictures.

On the other hand, my nieces and nephews think I look like a velociraptor, strange bug eyes and muscles in implausible places. So much for flattering. After all those pictures I'm forced to acknowledge that maybe I really do look as goofy as they seem.

Letters (well emails in point of sober fact) to and from Tuscaloosa:
here in tuscaloosa
Aug 21
there are no telephones.. the hotel phone is incapable of outside
calls, and there are no public phones. Extraordinary.

Anyway, arrived safely last night about 7pm, after 130 miles of
driving in heavy traffic and torrential rain. The air is thick enough
to chew. Bike also arrived safely so we're all in place. In Kansas
there were 36 in my AG, here there are 61. Yikes. I guess that's the
east coast phenomenon, more people everywhere you go.

The conference center has free computers so here I am.

I plan to have dinner at FIG (food is good)
http://www.figintuscaloosa.com/
and order the kid's pb&j to go, for breakfast tomorrow.

Haven't seen anyone I know yet, talked to a guy from Montana
yesterday, the only one from the state. The hotel has the same feel as
in Kansas - individual triathletes are in general pleasant to know,
the herd emits a narcissistic vibration.
How do you know there's a triathlete in the room ? He'll tell you..

The hotel bed is very comfy. Two queen beds, I need my family with me.

> See. You need a cellphone.
>
> I was wondering why you hadn't called last night. Boys came up with all
> kinds of excuses for you. Maybe your plane was late, maybe you were too
> tired, maybe YOU WERE ON THE PHONE,MOM, AND HE COULDN'T GET THROUGH
> (see, we need call waiting).
>
> Dougie needs to catch a fish and release it to complete his
> fishing merit badge. We might all go down to the gravel ponds on Sunday
> to find a fish to release. Any suggestions on what lure to use ? Can
> you use bait there?

bait is allowed, a nice worm is the best bet - the ponds have mostly
warm-water fish, bass etcetera, so woims is what you need. Otherwise a small minnow lure.

Yes, now everyone has a cellphone, no-one is allowed to not have one:
since the public phone infrastructure has withered away.

The goodie bag includes a fine big towel from Ekanuba (dogfood company), with a pawprint on it. Odd sort of triathlon sponsorship.

It's raining and hot. The bike course is a lot slower than I thought
it would be, hilly and two long climbs. The most part of the swim is
against the current, which is bringing down quite a bit of detritus,
leaves twigs branches and probably the odd dead dog. Not much chance of a PR I think, but I do not repine.
Aug 22
the current in the river picked up overnight. One 70-year-old woman
spent 2 hours swimming upstream before giving up..
I was 10min slower than usual, but the weaker swimmers were 15-20
minutes off their usual swims. This was an advantage for me.
14th in the age group for Worlds qualifier (top 18 qualify), 21st in
45-9 AG. So an OK race, not as fast as I'd hoped, but the course was
very hard. I put my name down for Budapest, have 4 weeks to make a
decision before they want a race fee, but I'm thinking probably not.

off to chipotle for dinner because it's getting late and I'm tired
now. Drive at 7:30am tomorrow and away we go again.

the end