Don’t have much to say about this one, other than to say that I’ve written two (not very good) (unpublished) novels, and neither one was worse than a thirty-five mile hike through the Montana wilderness. But don’t go by me.
Forty-five miles down, fifty-five miles to go.
The sign is from Kyoto Prefecture, and that’s all I know about it — found it off Wikimedia somewhere.
Didn’t walk on Monday. Probably should have; almost definitely should have, but I was yawning all the way home and was far too sleepy to walk. And you know what? I didn’t miss it, not one bit. I got to come home on time, cook a nice dinner (essentially heating up leftovers, but I did it in a creative way) and enjoy the evening. Miss exercise? Not one bit. I was happy to drive by the gym last night, depressed to drive up to it today.
Knocked out my two miles though, however, without a great degree of difficulty and only a modicum of complaining. If I do one mile tomorrow, that’s:
And that adds up to a hundred miles. Doable? I hope so. We’ll see.
Forty-four miles down, fifty-six miles to go.
Eight weeks in to the NFL season, and there are troubling signs that the Pittsburgh Steelers simply aren’t using Daniel Sepulveda to their best advantage. After a first-quarter punt (thirty-seven yards, inside the 20, fair-caught), the Steelers then went on to score three touchdowns and a field goal, and didn’t require Sepulveda’s services the rest of the afternoon. (Other than the standard excellence in holding for placekicks.) How is a Hero of American Youth expected to get on SportsCenter when he’s only making one punt a game? I ask you.
This isn’t actually a mile marker, it’s a subway sign for the 42nd Street station in New York. Did a quick mile this morning, mostly so I could use the shower at the gym (ours is in the process of being renovated, and we can’t use it until tomorrow). Not much else to say — an easy mile, although my legs were complaining vigorously due to the unaccustomed early-morning exercise.
Forty-two miles down, fifty-eight miles to go.
So it’s come down to this. I walked a whole entire extra mile yesterday, just because I really liked the picture. And it’s a very nice picture, yes it is. I don’t think I could have found one as nice for Mile 40. Bother.
The amazing thing — I think — is that I did the last four miles completely without any sort of reading material whatsoever. It’s easier to watch TV, I think. I’d rather read — I don’t get that much time to read, you know, actual magazines and stuff — but it’s easier watching TV. They had the Game Show Channel on the TV I was watching, and it was showing a rerun of The Weakest Link, and I was actually involved in it, trying to figure out who I would have voted off. (Answer: everybody.)
I think I’ve come to terms with the whole thing; after forty-one miles, you’d expect that you would. It is a misery. But it is not the Bataan Death March. When I was a kid, my dad had a church in North Texas, in this little town that doesn’t exist anymore because it’s been completely overrun and conquered by the developers. There was a guy in the church who’d been at Bataan, and he’d bug the rest of the people in the church because he couldn’t handle normal Texas temperatures after that — he’d always be too warm, and he’d want the AC turned all the way on, and that would cheese everyone else off. That’s real misery. This is just walking on the treadmill a few hours a week.
Okay, so it feels like the Bataan Death March. I’m entitled to a little whinging.
Forty-one miles down, fifty-nine miles to go.
Managed two miles yesterday, feeling like a mule pulling a barge on the old Illinois and Michigan Canal. Just so you know.
Found out something terribly terribly ironic. I can walk a mile without any problem now. It’s old hat. It’s not even a challenge anymore. Piffle. Two miles, now, two miles is hard. I have to push myself, which I don’t want to do or like to do. So how do you get to two miles? You turn off the part of your brain that likes complaining. Oh, the irony.
See, if you listen to yourself complaining about how awful it is to be walking on a treadmill, and then you start thinking, hey, what am I doing here, this is stupid, I’m tired, get me off this crazy contraption, and then you quit, which is bad. But if you turn off the complaining part of your brain, or at least tell it to go and do something else while you finish walking… well then, you can finish easily enough.
It’s still not fun, though.
Thirty-nine miles down, sixty-one miles to go.
This is what I said about Baylor head football coach Guy Morriss at the start of the year:
I want to win as much as anyone. I’d love to see a new coach come in and lead the B to the Cotton Bowl or whatever reasonable facsimile is reasonably possible. But at some point, there needs to be some kind of stability, something other than the endless parade of Reedy-Roberts-Steele types in and out every few years. I’m for keeping GuyMo, win or lose, for at least another year. We owe him that much, just for not being Kevin Steele.
And I said it, and I believed it, right up until I read this:
Morriss said receivers coach Kasey Dunn asked each of his players to write a paper titled “How can I become a better receiver?” Whatever the players suggest in their homework assignment, the coaches will try.
Oh, for pity’s sake. Homework? The wide receivers can’t catch passes, so you give them homework? What is this, Pop Warner football? 2-A junior varsity? Homework? For not catching passes?
Of course, you gotta remember, a lot of these “drops” — at least the ones I saw in the A&M game — were caused by receivers getting the whey beat out of them every time the ball was thrown their direction. But still — you address that by better quarterbacking and route-running. Not with homework.
I don’t want to dump GuyMo. I still don’t. He’s at least kept Baylor marginally competitive in the Big XII. And he’s done a lot to erase the Reedy-Thomas-Steele legacy of awfulness. But pulling this kind of nonsense at the major-college football level is just inexplicable.
It may be just an assistant-coach problem — Lord knows we’ve had those already this year — but responsibility starts at the top. GuyMo must go. I hate saying it, but if we’re at the bottom of the Big XII, it’s time.
Somebody out there really, really, really likes the number thirty-seven.
Probably the less said about this one the better. The experience was almost exactly like yesterday’s. The difference is that I plodded along a little farther (a mile and a third, more or less) and a little faster (2.2 mph) and my sinuses were a little better, but not much.
Maybe a little more digression tomorrow, assuming I have the time to write it all down — something along the lines of “mental toughness”, which is what this is all about, assuming it’s about anything at all.
Thirty-seven miles down, sixty-three miles to go.
Daniel Sepulveda, Hero of American Youth, just missed being a part of football history on Sunday night. If Josh Reed had connected on his sixty-five yard try at the end of the first half, Sepulveda would have held for the longest field goal in the history of the game. But it was not to be; Reed’s try fell short, and the Steelers would lose.
Just two punts for Daniel Sepulveda in this game; a 46-yarder in the first quarter that was fair-caught at the Denver 25, and a thirty-yard pooch punt in the second quarter that was fair-caught at the Denver 13. Too bad he didn’t get the opportunity to really boom one through the thin air. Still, some days of being a Hero of American Youth are better than others.
My sinues are bothering me, really they are, and when it’s hard to breathe, and you’re pretty dehydrated (despite a big bottle of Gatorade) it’s really hard to walk. I managed a mile, at 2mph, but there wasn’t any way I was doing two miles today, which is a shame, because I think I really needed to. But you can only do what you do, and then, when you’ve done it, it’s time to go bowling.
Thirty-six miles down, sixty-four miles to go.