One of the big problems with religion is that it attracts morons

Pray-in at S.F. gas station asks God to lower prices.

This is just so depressing, on so many levels. Humanity has developed its society to be pretty damn-near dependent on a limited, unrenewable resource. We have known this for decades, at least half as long as we have been using it. Once you take into account all the hundreds of other factors that influence the cost of gasoline (location, refineries operating, weather, whim of whomever is in charge...) it can be pretty well reasoned that it is basically our own fault that gas prices are high, and it is our own fault that we even care that gas prices are high.

This guy is praying to God, the omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient deity that created the entire universe, to lower the price of gasoline. Because He has nothing better to do than save you from trading a few more green pieces of paper for some smelly liquid.

At any given moment, there are genocides being committed, natural habitats being destroyed, and our environment is being polluted beyond recognition. But this guy wants God to let him pay less for gas.

Now, I'm not saying that nobody has ever prayed to God for something that's in their own self-interest. People pray before basketball games, before they put on plays, heck, before most meals my family prays that our personal meals was blessed by the Heavenly Creator himself. This isn't uncommon, and it isn't bad. So clearly, God can sweat the small stuff.

But this guy is having a pray-in. With the news reporting on it. If I prayed for a new bike:

(and Kate would be mad at me if I did), that's one thing. If I start trying to get everybody else to join me in group prayer at the bike shop, that's pretty stupid. A large newspaper writing a story on it is epically retarded. But, a blogger writing about it with righteous indignation is divine.

So, my recommendation to this religious "leader" by the gas station: start praying for a bike. At home.

Weekend of Adventure! And then lazy.

Saturday, I went mountain biking. Super fun. Until this happened. I was going down a trail full of little jumpy-things. I came upon a bigger-jumpy thing, and went slow so I wouldn't launch myself into the stratosphere. Approaching it, it looked like this:

Since it was my first time on the trail, I didn't know that it actually looked like this:

And, because I was going slow, I landed like this:

So, needless to say, I got tossed. Hard. A lot of rolling, sliding, and a little bleeding. But I came up relatively unscathed. Which is saying a lot, because my riding buddy had just broken his foot at the top of this little trail. He got a little bit of shadenfreude in, so at least I helped him out.

Sunday was soooo lazy it was awesome. We watched a couple episodes of "The Universe", a PBS series that came recommended by Kate's dad. We just got finished watching Planet Earth, and I thought it would be kind of like that - super-dry, just footage with a boring narrator.

NO WAY! It had more animations and graphics than I have ever seen. Including some depressingly poor animations of a meteor striking Big Ben. I had a lot of gripes about their misrepresentations of scale (showing the sun as about 4 times the size of the earth and about 5 earth-diameters away), and certain omissions (neglecting to say that photons are massless), but it was pretty interesting nonetheless.

And there was no shortage of unfathomable figures thrown at us: The force of 100 million Hiroshima bombs! The 100-billion times the mass of Mount Everest! How to they quanitify that? Where does the mass of Mount Everest end? At base camp? At 5,000 feet? At the ocean? Everything within a 10-mile radius of the peak? Seriously.

Then I played a lot of this:



For those of you who own a Wii and never had a gamecube, go to your local used-game store, buy a used GC controller, and get a copy of this. I maintain that it is one of the greatest games of all time, and is cute and awesome too. So much fun. It just can't be stopped. Usually Zelda games don't have a lot of replayability, but for some reason Windwaker works.

Also, we filled up Kate's car with gas and it cost a ton of money. I feel really guilty about driving to work again... time to get riding.

Blogging Boston

Okay, I ran the Boston marathon this weekend. I'll try and kind of organize this a little, so day by day, here's what we did:

Saturday - Kate and I drove up to Boston in the morning and got lunch with Jen. Jen told us she wanted to go to some place to get an omelette, and we were up for anything, so we went and ate. She took us to "some place in Central Square" in Cambridge... yeah, it was The Middle East.

I'd only been there before to see American Steel and the Murder City Devils back on '02, so it was kind of weird. Good kebabs, though.

Jen is a fun person to hang out with. Because she is single, she is constantly letting us know whether she thinks random dudes are attractive or not, and letting us know which sketchy dudes are hitting on her when she rides her bike and stuff. It's a side of the world that we married folk are not normally privy to.

After hanging out with Jen for the rest of the afternoon, we took her to Kate's brother's house to meet their new puppy and eat some thai food. It was great, and the puppy was cute and mega-exciteable. Then we went to sleep.

Sunday - Sunday we got up early and Kristen met us at Kate's brother's house to go watch the US Women's Marathon Trials in Cambridge. It was a ton of fun! We got to see some of the fastest women in the country just tear around the course... so fast. And we got very close to some famous people for a very short amount of time! Aside from the great race between Magdalena (gutsy race, ran way out ahead from the beginning from what we could tell) and Deena, we were wicked pumped to see Joan Benoit Samuelson go out there and kill it! She is 50, and she ran a 2:49, setting an age-group record, among her other dozens of notable racing accomplishments. We got some decent photos:



That is Joan with about a mile or two to go to the finish. Incredible! And here is a picture that we took of what really looked like two young boys making out with each other on the grass. It was really weird.



The rest of the day was spent eating, playing with the puppy, and playing video games. I highly recommend video games for day-before-the-race jitters. I may make Windwaker a pre-marathon tradition.

Monday - or - The Best Laid Plans
Ha ha ha, I'm so dramatic it's awesome. Kate and I woke up on time and I crapped as much as I could (if toilet discussion turns your stomach, you'd best switch blogs, because I love to talk about my crappin'). Crapping mid-run plagued my marathon training, and nothing puts a damper on a race more than having to crap in the middle of it. Anywho, I crapped. I ate a bagel, and Kate, with a trooper-like grimace, drove me into the heart of Boston to drop me off. I got in line to ride the buses to Hopkinton.

The way the start was organized was this: There were two waves, one leaving at 10 AM, the other at 10:30 AM. The people in Wave 1 wore bib numbers 1-13,999, and 14,000 and up were in wave 2.

Immediately I noticed that a lot of the people in line had bib numbers WAY higher than 14,000, even though they weren't supposed to get on the buses until 7 AM. Jerks. After a 1 hour bus ride to go 26 miles (booo) I arrived at the athlete's villate. I've never seen more porta-potties. And they were all in use. Mind-boggling.

After an hour or two of waiting around, we went to the start line. More waiting, this time in our individual corrals (1000 people/corral, I was #4056, so I was in corral 4). After a while I finally ditched the sweatshirt that Kate's brother gave me to wear and throw away, and the garbage-bag pants that I was wearing. Both were very necessary, because it was cold in the early morning, around 40 degrees or so.

When the gun went off, there was a lot of stop-and-go, but eventually I crossed the starting line and started to move. My first 8 miles all kind of blended together. I was trying hard to hold back, especially because of the downhills, but I couldn't go slower than 6:45/mile.

After 15 miles, I started to feel the tinge of pain in my left thigh. I knew what that meant, so I started taking water and gatorade at the stops (previously I had just been drinking from my fuel belt). At 18 miles, I was starting to hurt enough to walk the uphills. That sucked. Those hills were not fun. I was already looking for the next mile marker constantly. I pushed through the hills of Newton, and eventually made it down the other side of Heartbreak. I walked a lot of the last few miles, I was going pretty slow. My last few splits were 9:30 or so. But, luckily, I had enough time in the bank that it wasn't too terrible of a finish, and I had enough left in the tank to finish the last mile running nearly the entire way.

At the finish, I waded through the staggering masses and tried to get to my baggage buss. I was really annoyed with all the people who were taking their time, because I just wanted to get out of there. I got my bag quickly (very quickly, actually), and looked around... no Kate. That was our designated meeting point, so I was kind of bummed. I waited around for another 10 minutes, and started to get cold, so I pulled my mylar blanket close. It actually worked! It's the first time I've ever needed one of those things and it came through in the clutch. Way to go mylar.

Anywho, I called up Kate with a volunteer's phone (super-nice lady), and I found out that they were stuck in Newton because the trains were full. So I got on a train to Newton (runners ride free on Monday!) and met them there. Kate was crying, but I was just happy to see her. Then we went to Kate's brothers house and relaxed and I showered and ate super-fast and then Kate drove me to the airport.

Race-wise, I shouldn't have really been surprised, because I went too fast on my long runs. On my 20-mile long run, my legs were hurting and I was beat at the end, so I really shouldn't have been too surprised when that happened during the race. It's probably a combination of not enough base training and going out too fast.

Altogether, I'm not too disappointed because 3:13 isn't a bad time. It's 7 minutes slower than my qualifying time, which is pretty standard because most people qualify on an easier course. But, on the other hand, I kind of feel like a slacker for feeling satisfied, since it's really nowhere near where I wanted to run, and I really should have done better. I think if I had started training seriously earlier it would have helped a lot. I basically took off about 4 months after Cincinnatti and it showed. So, less of a break this time. I was only able to do as well as I did because of the constant encouragement and support of Kate "little coach" Nydam Meberg. She absolutely made sure that I didn't get lazy during my training, so my finisher's medal is at least half hers.

Okay, that's enough sap. Read nydampress for Kate's perspective. It was a fun weekend, but my legs still hurt (seriously ouch).

Traveling without your cellphone: Not recommended

This week I had a business trip to Alpharetta, GA. I hate that town. Seriously. It is a huge strip mall. Shopping center, shopping center, shopping center, subdivision subdivision, subdivision.

I can tell when I hate a town when it has clearly been designed for one reason: to facilitate automobile traffic. Every street that isn't a cul-de-sac in some twisted, meandering subdivision, is a 4-lane highway. The sidewalks are afterthoughts. Don't even think about a bike lane, or any speed limits less than 35 in non-residential areas.

Anywho, the worst part was, I forgot my cell phone at home. For 4 days, I was without it. That sucks, my friends.

Luckily, I was able to get ahold of some of the few people that I know in Atlanta. On Wednesday night I was alone (my co-worker had gone home already), and I drove to the Dick Lane Velodrome to watch the races.

Velodrome racing is fun as hell to watch. I found that my knowledge of track and field helped translate a little bit, because I could judge distance well. But the strategy is totally different because so many of the races are based on who gets the most points, so you are doing math in your head, and if you are in a group you are going to go faster than if you are by yourself, so you see lots of impromptu alliances between racers. The coolest thing I think was during the last race of the evening, a 40-lap points race for experts (that is 10 miles), one guy lapped the ENTIRE FIELD. That, my loyal readers, is tough as hell. I'm pretty sure I would have died trying to race these people. Serious, serious legs.

Anyway, the next day I finished work early and stopped by my friends' shop, No Brakes, and hug out for a bit. Cool little shop, kind of a bicycle boutique. If you've been to trackstar in NYC, it's a lot like that. Probably similar to Yojimbo's in Chicago as well (Ruth you should check that out).

When I got to the airport, I was surrounded by a bunch of surly folks of every race, and I was not surly, so I felt silly. And I started whistling to myself. This was the song I whistled: