philly

The Philadelphia century is done.  Finished.  Cooked.  Speaking of which, I nearly flipped a guardrail after overcooking a turn and skidding a very, very long way.  

This past Sunday I rode a century, one hundred miles in the beautiful countryside outside of Philadelphia, ostensibly to raise money for cancer research.  I suppose that is overly cynical, but all I mean is that I, and I am sure there are others that participated who were similar, probably would have biked a fair distance that day anyway and were merely paying for the benefit of marshals, a mapped out course, and some nice little peanut butter and jelly sandwiches placed at various points along the way, waiting for me should I feel like pulling over and having a bite and a stretching of the legs.  Of course that paints an ugly picture, and I am very happy to raise money, and people seem very happy to contribute, and perhaps one (me) should look at it the alternate way, the flipside, and say that as long as I am going to be doing something so selfish as to spend my day pedaling, well then, I damned well better be helping someone other than myself. Competition is always a facet of most things I do, and no matter how many times people emphasized that this was a ride and not a race, I, and again I am very sure that there are others like me, can't help but want to do well, to do better than others, which is what drove me to ask inane questions like "how many minutes ahead is the lead group" to race marshals, and even to the nice Pennsylvanian mothers and daughters handing me my miniscule, square, PBJ's.  Much to their credit, they didn't even blink at the question, or the fact that it was asked while stuffing several of these mini-wiches into my mouth at once, or perhaps that simply kept them from understanding the question.  I believe this was the same stop (I stopped at 3 of the 9) where I kept scooping grapes out of the ice water, my hands like shovels, and giggling each time, asking the women if it was alright if I stuck my head in and bobbed for grapes. (Gamely, they did respond "no", but offered to allow me to accidentally be under it when they dumped it in a few minutes; I declined.)  

Since then, a race at Floyd Bennett and the following:  

What beats a root canal?  Well, pretty much anything.  There's a reason that it is the litmus test of bad, all else, except childbirth, can be waved off relative to this barbaric yanking out of nerves.  

Eric Revis at the Jazz Gallery, and "No Country for Old Men," and now, the US Open