Happy Festivus!

Yeah, just wanted to get that out there. As you all may know, as I can see from the many aluminum poles in the audience, tomorrow/today, December 23, is Festivus. As such, we all need to be prepared for:

• The Airing of the Grievances
• Feats of Strength

Before we come to that, however, I’d like to catch up on a couple of things.

Saturday – Almost a foot of fresh snow, and a great mix of powder and costal New England concrete laid a wonderful base for about 7 miles of XC at Bluff Point. I basically did the epic Bluff Point Trail Race 7~ish mile loop in reverse, and was completely in reverie the whole time. I always love getting out on the local trails on cross-country skis, as it’s a quick and easy way to survey the other post-hippies in the community. No deer, though.

Sunday – Extra sore from the XC – man, does it really, really work the core. Skipped the morning’s Hundred.

Today – Work, supper, kids, and headed to the Y for a swim. I’m in “Base” mode preparing for Mooseman in June. Essentially, what I’m going to try to do is to swim 1K to 1.5K on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, bike 30 minutes to 1 hour on Monday, Wednesday, Sunday, and run 30 minutes to 1 hour on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, with Friday as a rest day. Shoot for about 8 hours a week training, shower included. More on this another day.

Today’s swim was good, at least as good as last week’s trip to the base pool when I realized it was a 35m pool instead of a 25m pool. The only bit of awkwardness was afterwards in the locker room with one of the guys who can’t stand to be naked with other guys. Gives me the creeps.

OK, so, let’s get on with the festivities:

THE AIRING OF THE GRIEVANCES

• Food – Why are you so darn tasty? If you weren’t, I’d eat just what I needed to survive, and would have fabulous abs.
• Fat – Leave. Just leave.
• Weather – All I ask is for one nice hour each day. Is that so hard? Why do you have to squander so many nice hours during the spring, summer, and fall when I’ve got to be at work?
• Shoe Companies – Look, just stop already. Nike – the Air Pegasus 25th anniversary edition is darn near perfect. Asics – I dig me some Gel Cumulus X’s. New Balance – Why did you mess with the 803’s from about 3 years ago? I’ll wear out the pairs I’m using now soon enough, and will happily buy more
• Clothing Companies – Can we get some options for guys besides baggy pants and t-shirts? Oh, and would it kill you to build more shirts with pockets for mp3 players?
• Sunglass Companies – How ’bout something that doesn’t make me look like Bono?
• Other runners – the fuel belts look dorky. Sorry, they just do. Pick up a banana at the gas station. They’ve got water and juice, too.
• Gadgets – Look, here’s what I want: one thing that I can strap on my wrist that logs everything – run, bike, swim; inside and outside; treadmill and stationary bike; and if it could electronically monitor my blood glucose level to estimate how much I was eating, so much the better. Then I want it to automagically sync to my web interface of choice (Mac, PC, Linux, Wii, whatever), show pretty graphs and pretty maps of where I’ve been, and then write 400 witty words about the day. The 400 witty words could be done by a speech to text converter during the workout, ‘cept I’d like to be able to set a filter to edit around the f-bombs and other four-letter words to keep the blog about PG.
• Beer – What happened to all the good Belgian imports?

Yeah, that was fun.

Feats of Strength

• Uh, I plan to get up in the morning, and drag myself into the office and face the year-end tasks I’ve been putting off, so they’re not waiting for me in 2009.
• Oh, and I’m going to the hundred in the morning. I’m building towards doing something like this every time I wake up.

So, Happy Festivus! Get the bile out of your system, and then either continue enjoying your religious holiday of choice. I cannot wait to go sing my lungs out at the Christmas Eve service.