Lost in the crowd?

Deuce's entry #1

When Laura told me she thought we should start a blog about our training, I was not enthused. Who would want to read our blog? We aren't exceptional, we aren't unique, we haven't overcome a horrible disease against terrible odds (although I did recently have a mild cold, and recovered!). To have a blog suggests you believe something about you is worth reading about, which just seemed like arrogance to me. Well, Laura had made up her mind. This blog was happening, with or without me.

These Crawdads, while delicious when sauteed in garlic, are not unique. In fact, they are all nearly identical. While I enjoyed eating them, if one of them were to start a blog, I doubt the other crawdads would want to read it. They are just another another poor-man's lobster, lost in the crowd.

Then after much nagging gentle persuasion, Laura convinced me to write a blog post. Then my introspection began. What would I write about? Was there a minimum word limit? Laura's posts were quite long and I felt like I couldn't compete with that, so could I simply fill space with pictures to make it look like my blog post was longer than it actually was?

Women hate it when you post awkward photos of them. Here Laura is getting tired of me taking forever to walk 800 meters from the parking lot to the Pt Arena lighthouse (The 800 is one of the events in the Heptathlon, that is a tie-in!!) because there were lots of flowers, and I insisted on taking a picture of every single one of them.

In high school, I was on a huge team. If you go to any given league track meet, you might see boys run anything from  4 minutes to 6 minutes for the mile. Then when you go to college, the bottom end drops off, leaving only the faster maybe 10% of guys left competing. Then you graduate from college and again you have a large number departing the sport, leaving only maybe the top 5% of college athletes to continue competing after college.

This guy won NCAAs in 2010. For the last 4 years he has continued to compete post collegiately in an attempt to "take it to the next level." It makes sense why somebody like that might decide to continue to compete and make his training a priority. People seem confused when Laura and I, who are not elite athletes, choose to devote so much time and energy in this pursuit.

Laura doesn't quite fit into that top group, and I am far behind that top group. Not surprisingly, we also hung up the spikes. Laura painfully ran a half marathon and vowed never to do that again, I ran a few road races and gained 20 pounds, life was good. But after 4 or 5 years of not competing, we missed it.

After years of running and trying to push my self athletically, I found myself continuing to challenge myself in random ways. I took this picture in the red sea (but it's blue?) just to see if I really could free dive to 90 feet and take a picture. This was a pointless challenge, but sitting on the surface above this ship wreck, I just had to do it. Despite the fact that 90 feet is nowhere near the depths the top freedivers can go, I was still compelled to try, for my own satisfaction.

 So what makes us interesting? People read It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life because he had cancer, he almost freakin' died, and then doped his way to a record seven zero Tour de France victories! People visit the personal website of Renaud Lavillienie because he is the current best hope to break the world record in the Pole Vault, despite being a smelly Frenchman. People read Lolo Jones' twitter feed because of all those olympic medals she has won    because she won't shut up about being a virgin   because NBC tells us to   because she is hot   because she once stumbled her way out of medaling in the Olympics. 

How can I compete with the likes of Lolo, Renaud, and Lance? Pretty much the only thing I do better than any of them, is that I'm typically worse smelling than the frenchman. Also, I have a picture of me with a cattle-dog puppy, which is totally cheating.

Then I realized what was our "hook". In fact, we already had the uniforms! Our very mediocrity, our shambleness, was what made us unique. Nobody else is dumb enough to try to pick up the decathlon at 27 after having been a mediocre distance-runner-turned-400-runner in college. I was going to have to learn 8 of the events! Laura had only ever done the 200 and long jump. Maybe we were naive, maybe we were arrogant, maybe we just didn't care, maybe we were the last of the horsecows, a dying breed known for their brash nature, their heavy drinking high waisted pants joie de vivre, their... Well that is pretty much all they are known for.

Green eggs and ham? More like Green Hamms and egg!

Anyway, we had a long road to go, but it's been a bit over a year since we decided to stop talking about how we had always dreamed of doing the multis and just do it, and we've made some excellent progress in some events, and a complete lack of progress in others. I don't regret our journey, because.... well... because Nay-Moo MotherFucker!

NAY-MOO!!

Signed,
Deuce