Note to Self: Golf = Bad

Meters: 6,147:
Time: 30:07:
500m pace: 2:25>26>27>28>29;
SPM: I forgot to look.
TMR 32,76

Note to self: Remember not to go to the driving range to hit balls in the couple-three days before the C.R.A.S.H.-B.s. My back is KILLING me and my right groin is sore. This should/maybe/kinda explain the 500m pace. Soon as I sat down I knew I didn’t have it, that the only sane thing to do was back it off and be glad with 30 minutes at 500-whatever-pace.

So (leaving all that behind) why am I doing this? I mean, the C.R.A.S.H.-B.s and its necessary six-or-so months of prep required to make it somehow “worthwhile” (whatever THAT will turn out to mean).

Actually, having done even just a couple of these sorts of thing (the Equinox Marathon; that Utah triathlon) I know that the old mountain climber’s bromide — “because it’s there!” — is really answer enough, reason enough. Why am I doing this? Because. Because why? Just because. If you have to ask the question, you won’t understand the answer.

But there ARE reasons. One, of course, is that for me this is a commercial enterprise, or at least an attempt at commerce. I’m trying to give “My Father’s Heart” a momentum boost as it goes into paperback in January 2009. I believe that reason is legit. I write about the Concept2 rowing machine in the book. How it maybe maybe maybe is the exercise machine of choice that actually saved my life, kept me going, in shape. And not like my father, an out-of-shape, three-pack-a-day-smoker dead of a heart attack at 50 years of age. Yes, the rowing machine and me, we have come to know each other over these past 20 years. Friends we are.

But there are other reasons as well. Because I want to and have for years, and with our move to York, Pennsylvania,  leaving my job, suddenly I have time and opportunity. And since I have always had the motive, I can now commit the crime.

And then there is this. I played basketball in college, at Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales in Center Valley, Pennsylvania. The Centaurs — Center Valley/CENTAUR Valley, get it? We were …. not good. We were a brand new program in a school that had graduated only two classes by the time arrived in September 1970. Allentown College is now De Sales University. The basketball program – nay! the entire athletic program — is a wholly legit D-III effort. I am hugely proud of the fact that I was present at the creation. And, yes, how over the years as the team got better, in a way so did I and the teams I played on.

But you know what I miss the most about those years, those games? I miss the sense of purpose, the working to a physical goal — even on that barely there level where we toiled. And what embodied for me that sense of purpose was the long hours after the game was over. How I was too tired to stay awake but too keyed up to go to sleep. I LOVED that feeling. It told me that I had tried. Even when we lost (which was often).

That is what I am asking of these C.R.A.S.H.-B.’s. To give me back that feeling — of working, trying, doing.