Well not exactly alone. He had a heck of a support network. Canada. Canadians of every stripe followed his progress across that beautiful nation and cheered him on.
You see, any kind of endurance sport needs someone somewhere to give you support. To watch over you and to smooth over the bumps. In TV Production they call that a fixer. Someone who spots out where you stay on each step of your trip and makes sure you can get back out of that country if you didn’t pay the appropriate bribe to do so.
Not Canada. I trust Canada more than I trust my own country, the US. Except perhaps Quebec, they tend to do things differently.
Anyway, I do three sports. At least my watch calls them sports, and I do them all at a very long level of time and distance. There’s that endurance thing. I walk a minimum of 4 miles a day, sometimes more than 5. I am an Elite Distance and Endurance Inline Skater where workouts are just a matter of hours and logistics for a minimum of a hyper-half-marathon every time I go out. Finally I am an intermediate distance biker.
Hey, I have to do something half way, right?
Biking is my “Cross Training” workout and something I do when I can’t skate, which is my First Love.
But something happened. I have a small group of people down here who I can call in case of emergency. A group of One. If you watch any honest video of Inline Skating they will tell you that it is a dangerous sport with a possibility of injury as soon as you put your boots on.
Both of my clavicles will tell you that after 22,704 miles I started breaking them.
Since my Wingman, my Support Person comes back home this weekend, it is a short trip and I am just trying to keep my PAI score above 200 as best as I can. Midweek I’m down to 178 and not happy about that.
PAI is a measure of all of your sports and activities over the last week. So that workout that you killed on day 8 falls off the list and you have to get off the couch and kill that distance again. It gamifies the process of measuring your biometrics during a workout and tells you if you were a good athlete or can do better.
You got out of the easy chair and walked a mile? You are a good athlete, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, Coach Ramblingmoose has got your back!
So this Monday I went out on the road bike for an hour. I did pretty well, the bike is not sized for me and I figure 12 miles with a mid workout waterstop is good enough. Seeing a 6’4” 188 pound man (Metric folks think tall 193cm and fit 85kg) use a bike with a 53 cm frame is like watching Dad on a Child's Bike. I whack my knees on the handlebars as I ride occasionally and am on the hunt for a proper XL/61cm framed bike.
Biking in South Florida is tenuous at best. Cars will aim for you and actively push you out of the Bike Lane. They may not even see you although you are in brilliant green spandex. The cities work on the roads. Delivery vans do NOT respect the bike lanes – the rule is that I encroach on traffic lanes to avoid them and not the exception.
Lets just not consider inline skating on a road here. Between dodging ducks, exploding coconut shells, and all that the bikers go through, it is safer to be alone on a bike than my beloved skates. I’ll wait for my Wingman there.
All of this was going through my head on Monday morning. It has to be in the morning because by noon it is too hot to do an intense workout. I am considering getting the lights and so forth on my bike to ride it at 5AM when I wake up but I’m on the fence with that.
But if you get hurt, make sure you get home. Your dog won’t understand why you are missing.
It’s now Wednesday, I’m considering once again whether to roll the dice and go out on the roads. I’m leaning towards passing it up. You can’t keep a good man down, I walked almost 3 miles with the dog already and am planning on extra walks today.
But the Wingman? Please come home. The SuperDog (TM) is tired of all of these walks.
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