My Great Escape …

Friday, December  5, 2008
Meters rowed: 8,365
Time: 40:00
Pace per 500 meters: 2:25
Strokes per minute:  Don’t care
Total Meters Rowed: 160,050

How do single parents do it? With Noreen out of town all this week I’ve just been playing one on TV, but  … man! Morning, breakfast, school, back before you know it, evening, homework, dinner, homework, bed, night. Geez. I have no idea how a real single parent does it. They need all the help they can get … And then some.

By last night, and this is the truth, all I wanted was to get to this morning and today’s row. To just get on my Concept2 and leave everything behind. Last night between bouts of homework I even once or twice wandered out to the garage just to look at the machine, say hello, I’ll be there.  Forty minutes tomorrow, I told myself.

And so I did. Though the leave-everything-behind part didn’t come easy. But it did. It helped, surely, that when thinking about all the errands I had to run today (even as I was trying NOT to think about all the errands I had to run today) I decided that getting to the bank was just going to have to wait until Monday. Yes, that helped.  And so it was that somewhere around the 26-, 27- minute mark I snapped into the zone. By, conversely, suddenly snapping OUT of the zone – which made me realize I was IN the zone.

Next thing I knew I was humming the theme from “The Great Escape” (seriously), trying to figure out how I could literally spell it out here. What think:

Dent-dent (pause) De, de, de-dent-dent (pause) Dent-dent, dent-dent-dent, de-dent. 

“The Great Escape.” Maybe the greatest guy movie ever made. The book by Paul Brickhill is great too.  Word of the day: Great! A gem of an anecdote from an extra on one of the DVDs (this one, I think ): James Garner says his co-star Steve McQueen wanted to be the “hero” of the movie – he just didn’t want his character to have to do anything, you know,  “heroic.” How fabulously early-Sixties angsty and Steve McQueen-y is that? But that’s exactly what the motorcycle-jumping “Kooler King”  pulls off. Making this all a good excuse to check out the movie again. You need the escape. I sure did.