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Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, but Mostly Feet
08/02/06
by Shaw
While you were anxiously reloading Deadly Hippos all last week, I was busily traveling the country in search of the meaning of life. The good news: I think I found it. The bad news: the meaning of life is rest. This seemed to be the common theme of the trip.
Having just stayed up all night to move into my new house on a Thursday night, I took a Friday morning train back to my parents' house in upstate New York, as the first stop on my incredibly well-planned vacation. That evening, I had a few beers with Muney, who had just gotten back from Spain. The place we chose to go, the Country Inn, has been described in the annals of Deadly Hippos before, but it is worth mentioning that during our time there, we spent about an hour talking about Spain, and an hour talking to a local named Steve who either stole his voice from Larry the Cable Guy or is Larry the Cable Guy doing background research in a clever disguise. Steve was apparently concerned that we didn't belong in the bar and that we were not "from around here." He playfully approached us as we waited for the bartender to take our order and his first words were, "Hi, I'm Steve, I'm drunk." We introduced ourselves back, and that somehow incited in him a kind of vague and unthreatening hostility that was comical enough to look back on fondly but simultaneously frightening enough for us to hope at the time for escape. Various snippets of things he said include (make sure you hear them in Larry the Cable Guy's voice):
My only hope is that Steve made it home that night. I really hope he's still there when I go home for Thanksgiving this year, because I am going to make Steve shirts and start a Steve fan club. My guess is he's unemployed but the bar serves him for free because he helps keep city folk away. He's the kind of guy who would have used the expression "Git 'er done" when he was 4 because that's how he was raised to talk, as opposed to Larry the Cable Guy, whose real name is Daniel Whitney and went to private school in West Palm Beach.
Steve's possible final resting place
From there, I borrowed my parents' car to drive to Lake Placid, NY where I watched my friend Ness finish an Ironman Triathlon. Did you just read that sentence? Did you have an involuntary muscle spasm? Do you know what an Ironman is? It is a 140.6 mile race: 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike, 26.2 mile run. And my friend Ness finished one. For all my laziness, I got tired just watching.
I have spectated marathons before (even attempted one once) and I am used to the whole scene: people stand out and cheer for everyone, including people they don't know; the runners wear shirts with their names on them so they can be encouraged by strangers. Spectating an Ironman is slightly different though. First of all, you don't really have any hope of actually cheering on your friends in the swim because they are too far away to hear you, and you can't cheer much for the bike race because the course goes 50 miles away and you have almost no hope of actually seeing your friends ride by. Hence, spectating a triathlon comes down to watching the start, where 2500 people start swimming at the same time (I would be surprised to find that no one has ever drowned in an Ironman swim start... it looked like the end of Titanic), watching the swim finish (promise me that if you do go to a triathlon, you will stand near the spot where they are ripping wetsuits off of the athletes... when those wetsuits stretch and then snap toward you, it's like being at a Gallagher show, only it's not watermelon juice, it's mostly sweat and lake water getting slung into your open mouth), and then taking 8 hours off while the contestants ride their bikes.
This is not my friend Ness... the people who you see in the background are about
to get a faceful of nasty though...
After the 8 hour break (we spent ours shopping, eating, napping, and watching Lady in the Water, which if you didn't guess is a bad bad movie), you come back and watch the marathon portion. Letmetellyousomething. After all this time, the spectators were tired. We needed to relax. So we set up chairs all along the road that the runners were on, and we didn't get up for 6 hours. This is where the circus atmosphere of the triathlon really set in. Whereas at a marathon you will get a lot of casual spectators, the town of Lake Placid has a population of about 2500, which is the number of people running the race, so basically everyone in the audience is there for the long haul. This means that they have all made specialty T-shirts with fancy family logos on them. I wish I had taken photos of some of these, but they included one shirt with a logo on the front that looked professionally designed and said, "Just F-ing Cheer". This was worn by everyone in the family, including a 4-year old girl. And of course, we were no exception... Smells and Ness found a bike company in San Francisco with their last name as the company name and Smells ordered 20 shirts for all of Ness's spectators. They, of course, gave him a discount when he explained why he wanted them.
We sat like this for 6 hours. I was really tired.
Somehow I am looking at this column right now and realizing that this is not typical Shaw fare--the second column in a row with no self-loathing diatribe. Goddammit. Well let me just take a pause from the description of this fun family event and mention that I loathe myself. Okay? Satisfied?
Maybe in my next column, I will tell you about my experience almost running a marathon. You know what, maybe I won't! Goddammit, just buy Maniquette. You don't want to hear about my vacation any more than I want to tell you about it. You don't want to hear about how Ness finished the triathlon. You don't want to hear about how I went to Canada afterward to go fishing with Smells, Japes, and Giller, and caught the smallest Northern Pike I ever seen on ultralight tackle fishing for perch. You don't give a shit about me going to a massive indie rock festival in Chicago and nearly going on a murderous nouveaux-hippie-slaying rampage... or the fact that I ran into one of the peripheral characters in my earlier column on my Warring Personalities... or the fact that I spent my entire plane ride playing blackjack and Texas Hold 'em with the 12 year old sitting next to me on the plane. All you damn Hippoheads care about how much Shaw hates himself. Well screw it. I need a rest.
Hmm. Maybe a Part II coming up?
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