Month: December 2010

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Crazy is seriously frickin’ crazy

Justin and WEDALI are currently in 27th place out of 49, in large part because they’ve survived so long—plenty of teams have had to drop out and/or be retrieved from the desert because they simply couldn’t keep moving. Here’s the description of today’s section according to the race’s website:

The Ruib al Kahli is no picnic on the beach. In fact, on any normal day, you wouldn’t expect to come here and do anything but lie in the shade, if you could find any… So trekking 116 km though the emptiest desert on the planet, after having completed an early morning biking section of 94km over a treacherous and unforgiving track, in daytime temperatures way above the seasonal norm while going “against the grain” of the dunes is no less than Odyssean.

In layman’s terms, the weather and racing conditions would make you sweat your balls off if you could retain any fluids in your body to produce sweat. The description continued through interviews from various racers:

Many of the teams thought so: “That’s the hardest trek we have ever done here,” said TRI-ADVENTURE (GBR). “Last year we at least had the advantage of getting a good night’s sleep before undertaking the desert stage…” they groaned. Jari KIRKLAND of NET COMPETENCE who managed 7th fastest time over the stage and are now in 5th position overall, sat pondering her own sanity: “That stage H was heinous, horrible, horrific, horrendous, hell…” pausing in her exhausted tirade only to gulp down some much needed water. Susanna SKYLV SORENSEN of Salomon Santiveri looked stunned by the measure of her accomplishment in finishing the course: “I died out there – about one kilometre from the end everything stopped…” “We ran out of water at H6+,” confessed team SILVA-GERBER, “and wondered if we would ever make it to the finish.” Salient words considering that many did not…

If anyone out there was wondering why I’ve deemed Justin “crazy” because of what he’s accomplished with his teammates… I can’t imagine myself even trying anything like that, let alone finishing. And finishing well, too. Under the circumstances, it’s approaching -10 degrees with lots of frozen moisture outside and I’m okay where I am.

So good luck and kick ass, WEDALI. Keep surviving out there.

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This weather is no laughing matter!

As it turned out, the voice on the CSC weather line was very calm and collected when I called at 10:00 this morning to let me know that all morning soccer games had been cancelled, but the afternoon games were still on. Then I called around 1:00 and everything was cancelled and all of the games will be played on Dec. 19th instead.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it on here, but I’m aiming to start getting back on the field at the beginning of 2011. Mom asked if I wanted to play in the game today—I answered simply: “Noooooooo.” I’m being realistic, especially since I’ve found out between using the Wii and shoveling snow this morning/afternoon that my right leg is still significantly weaker than my left. I didn’t think about it before, but when my right quad got sore or tired, I’d shift my weight to the left without thinking about it, something I’ve been doing for the past nine months.

And speaking of shoveling, we have an awesome neighbor named Rich Carron who is awesome. And when I write “awesome”, I mean AWESOME. Dad and I let Mother Nature do its dirty work yesterday because we live across the street from a lake. The wind blows across the lake, picking up velocity and throwing snow around wherever the hell it wants. If we shovel some away, the wind will replace it, quite possibly with the snow you just shoveled away. Mother Nature sucks.

It was still windy walking outside today, but we weren’t getting any more snow, so it was time to go to work. Mind you, not all of the house and driveway looked that bad because of the drifting. I looked at the upwind side of the Ford Explorer and thought it looked worse when we got hit with 14″ of snow earlier this winter. (Or is it technically still fall?) It didn’t look that bad until I got to the other side and saw snow snuggled all the way up to the level of the hood. On an SUV.

As I was clearing off the front steps, that’s when awesome Rich Carron showed up. In a Bobcat. He cleared off the front part of the driveway, along the sides, made some extra space in front of the mailbox and moved everything away from the fire hydrant. He got rid of hundreds of pounds of snow. Hundreds and hundreds. There are now five-foot piles of snow stretching at least ten yards down the block on both sides of the road. (Sure, some was already there, but it hadn’t been packed down by dumping more snow on top of it with a Bobcat.)

I have no idea how much time and effort he saved us in those ten minutes of work… heck, maybe it was just five… but however much it was, he is still AWESOME. So thanks, Rich. You’re a back saver.

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Games cancelled due to bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!

I’ve missed most of our Mad Dogs’ soccer games this season because of Mind Over Matt, but the final one is coming up at 3:00 tomorrow afternoon. I’m planning to attend since we play indoors during the winter, but the weather conditions aren’t really conducive to people driving to the field.

Cities Sports Connection, the group that organizes the league, has a “weather line” that you can call to find out if games have been cancelled. It’s probably used most often when there’s rain and lightning during an outdoor season, but Hennepin County (where the field is) shut down their plows earlier because blowing snow was obscuring the roads, 1/3 of city buses got stuck driving their routes and a few hundred accidents were reported during the day.

I wonder if I call the weather line tomorrow, will I hear a message saying games will be played, games will be cancelled or a voice saying, “You seriously think we might be playing today?! Bwa ha ha ha haaaaa!”

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Oh my God, it’s the worst snow ever!!!

I’ll admit it: I’ve accomplished almost nothing today since I crawled into bed last night. The sky has been dumping loads of snow on us the entire day—it started around midnight—and is still going as I write this around 6:30. Up to this point, I think we’ve had 15″; one area in the state is over 20″. With the snowing and the blowing and the drifting and the… rifting… today seemed like a good day to sit inside and accomplish almost nothing.

But there’s a problem. It’s the media. Actually, I think it started with the media and had a snowball effect [ba-dum-bum] that’s spilled out to the general public. It’s taking events like this and giving them names. Names that blow everything out of proportion. We’ve had plenty of snow here in Minnesota before. We’ve had lots of snow come down in a short period of time. We used to call this a “blizzard” or a “snowstorm” since it’s comparable to a “rainstorm”, but way colder and fluffier.

Nowadays, you see it on the news or read it on the Internet: a foot and a half of snow in a day has become “Snowpocalypse!” “Snowmageddon!” “Snowapalooza!” “Snownami!” (Yes, I saw that one on the Internet, too.) Everything is insane and crazy and if the weather gets the tiniest bit worse, you’re gonna buried be up to your nostrils in snow as soon as you walk out the door. Assuming that your house hasn’t collapsed from the weight of the snow, thereby crushing the door frame.

This is all I want to know: What happened to weather forecasts for “Blizzard”?

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Soup for dessert?

I was eating dinner with my dad at Erbert & Gerbert’s yesterday—I had a sandwich and Cheetos while he ate a bowl of chili—and it was kinda late, so there weren’t any other customers in the restaurant. Out of the blue, one of the guys working there (the night manager, perhaps?) asked if we wanted some chicken noodle soup. They can’t keep stuff like that overnight, so he was about to throw it out and he “didn’t want to let all that good food go to waste.”

Thus, to supplement our already tasty dinner, we got some small bowls of chicken noodle soup. (I imagine Dad felt pretty good about ordering chili instead of ending up with a second batch of the same stuff.) So to the dude who didn’t want to dump out all of the soup last night: Thanks for your generosity. It was yummy.

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Crazy hopes it’s a dry heat

WEDALI. My little brother Justin’s adventure racing team. 5th place at Primal Quest last year. USARA National Champions this year. They didn’t do as well in the Checkpoint Tracker National Championship—apparently, there were multiple other teams complaining about how the race was set up and organized as well—but the final result was winning the overall rankings. The championship was worth 200 points, but no matter how the Checkpoint Tracker people played with the numbers, WEDALI was the only team that reached the maximum 500 points.

As a result of those 500 points, they’re currently in Abu Dhabi getting ready for the Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge. Checkpoint Tracker covered the cost of their flight, hotel and race entry fee. Well, not the entire hotel fee, given that they flew out a couple days early so they could tour around a bit. How many times do you think they’ll be heading to Abu Dhabi again?

Up to this point, they’ve sprinted through the Chicago airport because their arriving flight from Minneapolis was late, rode camels, visited a falconer hospital and the Grand Mosque, and stayed in a $3,000,000,000 hotel (sure, I could have written “billion”, but all those zeros look pretty awesome). The race itself is beginning… I can’t find a specific starting time on the website, but it’s about 3:00am in Abu Dhabi right now and the race starts today, so they could be bounding through the sand dunes already.

They’re not expecting to win. Out of 50 teams, they’re one of three from the United States. And given that some team names are “Russia”, “China 1” and “China 2”, my money says some of those are professional racing teams. And then there’s “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. They’re from Germany. I think that team may have been put together for a particular race somewhere in the world, but I can’t figure out which one.

WEDALI is awesome at races that last for a couple days and they’ll sleep maybe three hours, but this race is set up more like the Tour de France—teams push themselves hard during the day and sleep at night. Buncha sissies… So like I said, they’re not expecting to win. They have no idea how they’ll place amongst teams that specialize in races like this. Teams like “Abu Dhabi Triathlon Team”. But it’s an experience of a lifetime and they’re there to compete and have a good time.

All of the teams are carrying a GPS, so feel free to check out the satellite tracking system and join me in cheering them on. Cheering on their little dot as it moves around on the map. They might not be able to hear us, but I’ll go ahead and cheer anyway. Assuming that it’s not 3:00am here, where there’s a much higher potential of waking someone up who doesn’t like being woken up at that hour. If that happens, it won’t matter how many points I had at the beginning of the race—I’ll be the loser.