The Dam Half

Ahh, the wonders of nature.

It's one of the reasons that we who run engage in trail runs. You get some nice scenery and some exercise...not a bad deal. This past weekend I ran the Dam Half at a state park. I had run it the year before and decided I would do the same this year. Like the year before, I found myself a little pressed for training time and ended up well-trained for a 7 mile race. The Dam Half is 13.1, not too much more than 7. No biggie.

That and it's all about enjoying the scenery, right?

It was about 40 degrees when we were waiting around (read: freezing our asses off) in our shorts, but once we got started, I knew we would warm up quickly. I started out running with my buddy, Brad. He pushed our pace in the beginning and then we got caught up behind some slow guy. I thought we were running too slow, so I told Brad to pass him once we had a chance on the single track we were on and we did. Then I thought Brad was running too slow, so I told him that I would set the pace and passed him.

The one thing I almost never do in a race is look back. A) It slows you down B) taking your eyes off the rock-strewn course we were on is plain madness and C) it just feels like a sign of weakness...as if you're worried that the person behind you will catch you. Evidently, looking behind you can also be used to see if your partner is still with you. Brad was not.

Whatever. Slow poke.

I was tempted to look around at the scenery...it had turned into a beautiful day. I then remembered that until you got to the short sections of fire road, it wasn't a good idea to look around thanks to the rocks in the trail.

Hmmm, the wonders of nature.

I kept a steady pace and ground up the occasional steep climb. I was running pretty good around mile 10 and hit a technical (read: miserably rocky) flat section. I was a little tired at that point and a rock -- cleverly disguised as a much shorter rock -- tripped me up. I stumbled and realized I was heading rapidly for the 'lose it' stage. I put a hand out and saw a cluster of rocks best quantified as a "face full" coming up at me, so I came up with a better idea and threw myself sideways off the trail. Sadly, my plan also involved a tree which I ran my shoulder into. I stopped abruptly -- as planned, of course -- and since the tree was only about 5 inches in diameter, I got to hear the leaves rattle as well.

Uh-huh, the sights AND sounds of nature.

Anyway, I jumped up and did the most important thing -- looked around to see if anyone noticed. No one was around, so I trotted off down the trail and then thought to check my shoulder to see if it was working.

It was. After a quick -- well, not so quick actually -- 700 foot climb over rocks and a field of largish boulders, it was only another mile and a half until I made it to the finish line.

Despite the lack of proper training for the distance, I did run really well. I made it in 3 hours and one second, which is a half an hour better than last year's time. It was a great race with great organizers and I got a nice medal and a really cool, bark-textured bruise.

Brad clocked in after the 4 hour mark, so it turned out that I had plenty of time to enjoy the park after all.

20 Q

Bernadette smacked me in the shoulder, “I can’t believe it got it right!”

She held out the small, red orb to me. The screen read, “refrigerator.”  It was an electronic game based on the game 20 questions that someone had bought for The Boy. Basically, you would answer “yes,” “no” or “maybe to a series of questions and it would guess (with fairly good accuracy) what you were thinking of. It was sort of fun.

Bern wanted to know how it was so accurate and looked it up on the Internet. After she found out that it used a simple AI algorithm, she said, “It’s sort of like what’s-his-face.”

Ever the geek, I replied, “Do you mean Alan Turing? The mathematician who developed the test to check for true artificial intelligence?”

Ever the mom, she replied, “No, the little guy on SpongeBob…his wife.”

“Karen? Plankton’s wife?”

“That’s it!”

Somewhere in that exchange lay the key to figuring out the difference between men and women, but I’ll figure that out later…

Anyway, I was playing with the 20Q game later and decided to see if it could guess,

“wife.”

20Q: “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

Me: “Animal.” (only because there was no “angel'” category.)

A few more questions were asked and answered until, “Does it have a tail?”

Bernadette: “What are you doing?”

Me: “Checking you for a tail.”

More questions and then, “Does it have claws?”

I answered “no” since there wasn’t a well-sure-if-you-get-her-mad button.

Finally it announced its guess of “a crush.”

I thought, “Hmmm. Yes, but not quite the answer,” so I pressed “no” which gives it a chance to ask five more questions. I answered those questions and waited to see if it would guess “wife.”

The guess scrolled across the screen, “Is it a soul mate?”

I smiled and pressed, “yes.” Very correct, indeed.

 

Technorati Tags: a belated Valentine's Day post

A new addition

She's a cutie. I'm pretty sure she won't stay this size though.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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The Canoe Trip

Thanks to everyone for the warm welcome back. Now for the beginning of the canoe trip...

The canoe trip all-in-all was a great trip, there were a few details that stood out, however. We arrived at the outfitters on time and rented the canoe. We piled into the van, canoe in tow, with a very nice couple that we chatted with. We drove for a while and at some point I hazarded the question, "How long do you think the trip will take with the creek at its current level?"
"About four hours at a leisurely paddle," was the reply.
I figured since we could always paddle a little harder at points, that wouldn't be too bad. It was a little longer than we had planned, but that was okay. I don't recall Bernadette or I choosing an actual drop-off point. I think we went with "upstream" for maximum clarity.
The beginning of the trip was idyllic. We saw mother wood ducks on the water with their ducklings trailing dutifully behind. When we got close they would hurry their little tails as fast as they could away from us.

The Boy caught some frogs with a net and let them go after showing them excitedly to us when we landed. It was peaceful and both the weather and the scenery were fantastic.

I checked my watch and an hour had passed. We snacked a little and paddled on. After another half hour had passed, we passed a familiar bar that was visible from the creek. What was odd was that the bar, by road, wasn't terribly far from where we had been dropped off.
It was about then The Boy asked, "Are we at our destiny yet?"
Since we were nowhere near our destiny nor near our destination, Bernadette and I looked at each other and shrugged it off. I will admit that I did start to paddle a little bit harder at that point.
We found another place to stop for a while. No frogs this time, but we did find something else... mosquitos. Biblical plague types of numbers were involved here people. They loved our canoe. Its arrival must have been foretold in some ancient mosquito prophecy because pretty much all of them came to worship it in a highly mobile cloud. They seemed to be all males since we didn't get bitten at all. Had they actually bitten us, I don't think we would have made it back.
We shoved off and spent the next half hour alternating between paddling and swatting mosquitos until the bottom of the canoe was lined with their tiny, spindly corpses. It did serve to keep The Boy occupied. I know this because as soon as they were gone, we faced the return of "Are we at our destiny yet?"
We took it with aplomb though. Bern did make the observation that when you're in a canoe, with no real place to land — the banks were higher and steeper at this point of the trip — you're basically trapped. It's sort of like the movie Alien without the bother of someone's chest bursting open to release a peppy carnivore. Then again, the crew of the Nostromo didn't have to paddle the ship through space with a six-year old, so we'll call that a wash.
Time passed, we paddled. Not quite enough to qualify as feverishly, so we'll just go with avidly. Regardless of our efforts though, I noted that I could have outwalked our pace by at least a factor of two as I watched the shore slide by.
Luckily we had that aplomb going for us.
We passed the bear which was close to the point where our cabin was located. The watch read four hours into the trip at that point.
The trip by car from the cabin to our landing point takes roughly three minutes. By canoe, the trip takes about an hour. I now suspect there are small spots of curved space along that part of the creek that dilate time. I may go back and look for them later, without a six year old along, but I was too busy avidly paddling to care then.
We landed — finally — and I walked to the outfitters while Bern and The Boy stopped at the local country store for snacks. The outfitters is a 30 second drive mind you, but a 15 minute walk. With oars. And life vests.
Like I said, it was a great trip, but I did manage to take notice of two drop-off points that would have made for a shorter, much less "Are we at our destiny yet?" laden trip for the next time. I'll also evidently need to help the people at the outfitters redefine "leisurely paddle."

Technorati tags: wow, that's a lot of paddling

No Lions or Tigers, just a Bear

We went on a nice canoe trip over the weekend (more on that later) and towards the end of the trip, I looked up and saw what seemed to be a large, black bag in a tree.

I asked, "What's that in the tree?" (I had already been told there was a bear in a tree earlier in the day but the idylls of a weekend at camp must have gently washed that fact from my mind.)

Bernadette said, "That must be the bear." She was kind enough to leave off "idiot" since she knew I had heard about it.

We were sort of excited to see it, but The Boy remained lukewarm on the subject. Sometimes I think if he can't play with it, have it fetch him something, or snack on it, an object's value drops drastically in his book.

We paddled past, stared at fuzzy bear butt for a while, and I suspect we would have hurried back to our landing point so we could get back to camp and look at the bear up close and from the front, but the previous four hours of our trip had disabused us of the notion that there was such a thing as "hurry" when you're in a canoe.

Once we did get back to camp, (it took another hour make the roughly two mile journey) we hopped in the truck and went down to take a look. Here's what we saw (click to embiggen):

 

She's about 30 feet off the ground and doesn't look at all comfortable, but there she is. The bear was asleep as far as we could tell. What you can't really see in this picture are the two cubs that were with her in the tree. This is also probably the reason that she can sleep so well in this position.... kids.

Bernadette called the game commission to make sure the bear would be able to make it down and she was assured that bears can get themselves out of positions like this. She was gone the next morning. We didn't check for ourselves, but the rest of the valley already had and passed the news to us.

 

Technorati tags: nature, bears, canoe trip

The Spider

By request from my 100th post: The day I met the Biggest God-Damned Spider Ever.

I rock climbed a lot during and right after college. It was a good adrenaline buzz and it helped me overcome my fear of heights. There is a challenging route in Huntingdon (in PA) that had an outcropping. The climb up to the outcropping was easy, but then it was all finger and arm strength to get past it.

I was on belay and had climbed just about to the point where it got difficult. I reached up for a nice handhold and had to dig out some moss to get a good grip. I tossed the moss over my shoulder and yelled out, "rock," so my partner didn't get a face full. We always called out "rock;" it made sure that you didn't look up. No one looks up when there's a rock coming. Well, at least the people who don't require reconstructive surgery.

I reached back into the hole I had dug out and felt a tickle. No biggie, there are all kinds of roots and stuff that were coming through the rock. I found a foothold and pulled up to the point where the hole was.

...and there he sat.

...on my hand.

...a big spider. Quite possibly the largest ever recorded in the history of spider kind. The kind of size that would have made Beowulf say, "Shit."

Okay, it was a little over an inch long but as far as I was concerned it may as well have been a Great Dane with six eyes and fangs dripping acid.

I froze. I hate spiders. Not that "run from a room, screaming like a little girl" kinda fear, but too close to that kind of fear for my testosterone to handle comfortably.

I thought briefly of trying to blow it off my hand but visions of it jumping into my mouth (there are perils to having a pretty good imagination) when I opened it to blow filled me with a distinct unease. That and I would have had to have resumed breathing; yet another hurdle.

I wiggled my fingers as much as my death grip on the rock would allow. It raised two front legs in defense.

I considered chewing through my rope and plunging to quadriplegicy but I figured Gargantua (I had named him by now) would have merely clung to my hand to enjoy the ride and then bit me just for kicks.

Because spiders are calculatingly sadistic like that. Just ask Kelley.

The legs went back down.

On an educational note: A funny thing happens when you cling to a rock in the same position for too long no matter how good of shape you are in. Your muscles get tired. First they feel tired...evidently fear and adrenalin let this stage pass without notice. The next stage basically amounts to a slight quiver which moves into a noticeable quiver which heralds something known as 'muscle failure.'

I was at noticeable quiverosity.

I took a breath and blew gently. The dreadlocks that Gargantua was sporting blew lightly back and he again lifted up his front legs.

After a week a few seconds, his legs came back down and he sauntered off my hand. Thankfully this was not in the direction of my face. I would have had to have scrubbed my face vigorously on the rock had this happened.

I told my partner I was coming down. No actual climbing was involved in this process, I was lowered.

When I got to the base, my buddy looked at me and said, "Dude, why'd you stop?"

"Spider," I replied.

"Wuss."

"Bite me."

I haven't been scared of spiders since the incident, so at least I can thank Gargantua for that. If I ever see him again though, I'm smashing him with a hammer.

Technorati Tags: Not a recommended form of therapy.

I Never Knew...

My wife and I were driving around the other day and got caught behind a particularly slow driver. I don't know how we get into conversations like this sometimes, but here it is:

The Wife: "If that idiot wants to park, he should use the lot over there, not the turning lane."

Me: "Yeah; that and I don't like his license plate."

TW: " 'He Gene?' Maybe his name is something like Howard Edward Gene."

Me: "He should have sounded it out before ordering it. It sounds like his boyfriend's name is Gene."

TW: "He can't be gay. Gays don't drive minivans."

I briefly thought about this in an effort to refute it, but I then realized that not a single one of my gay friends has a minivan. Curious.

Me: "So you're saying that gays have too much style to drive a minivan?"

TW: "Exactly... Lesbians, however, do drive minivans. I have experience with that."

We pulled into the lot and she caught site of the guy driving and said, "He's elderly too."

Me: "So there aren't any old, gay dudes?"

I hadn't known that it wore away over the years like a fine patina gently buffed off of a favored copper pot.

TW: "...and look, he's using a handicapped spot."

Me: "Yet another fine reason for him not to be gay."

The Wife countered with, "Just as good as you thinking he was gay due to his license plate."

Touché, mon coeur.

We ended up laughing at how goofy we sounded as we got out, but overall it was quite the educational day for me.

 

Technorati Tags: so why are we dumb enough to drive minivans?