Nature, red in tooth and crawl

Nature's first green is gold, Robert Frost said. April is the cruelest month, T.S. Eliot said. Give it up. You're not going to get two poets to agree with each other, nor did anybody at all get along particularly well with Frost. And why agree, anyway? In a chaotic world, you're more accurate with less accord. This past Tuesday couldn't have been more disparate, couldn't have been more spring, couldn't have been more cruel.

I was stuck indoors chasing deadlines, but it was easy to see the trees and the sky taunting me. The first buds were unraveling into leaves smoldering with that pale yellow glow that makes it so easy to see the gold Frost saw. So peaceful, so promising. The tornado sirens started blowing just before noon. The hail followed shortly after, and the rain and wind still haven't quit.

Spring promises - defines - birth and regeneration, but it teaches us that renewal is a violent affair. You can only be born if you didn't exist; you can't be reborn without dying a little.

In my efforts to remake myself into a competent swimmer, my right shoulder died on me a little. Rotator cuff issues, it seemed, not at all uncommon with swimmers. Serious rest was the plan. Ride the storm out. This weekend's Alcatraz and Golden Gate swims provided either a time frame or a deadline, however you want to see it. I saw it as something getting closer and closer, and too soon for a complete, spontaneous cure. Michigan State University Sports Medicine - and I cannot say enough good things about this practice - made time to see me. Dr. Norris asked questions, moved parts and felt contours, then sent me off to the MRI lab for high-technology confirmation that his classic training and skills and instincts were dead-on accurate. The picture:

I have some damaged muscles and tendons and a little swelling and a bunch of fluid where it doesn't belong, probably from overreaching on my stroke and crunching tissues together more than I ought. Not a terribly big deal. I have a torn biceps tendon where the tear goes in such a direction that it is of no consequence whatever, other than to be a fun landmark on the MRI image. And I have a torn labrum. That's not so good. The labrum is the layer of cartilage that lines the dish part of the shoulder's rather loose-fitting ball and socket. It's not supposed to tear, and it takes a while to heal when it does. It usually needs some outside help. But my labrum is more ground up than lacerated. And where you can easily abuse a cut into a bigger cut, when you grind up hamburger you just make more hamburger. If I swim Alcatraz Saturday, the worst-case scenario is more likely to affect my short-term dignity than my long-term health. I'm more likely to hurt too much to finish the swim than I am to do anything to change the course of my recovery. Pain don't hurt.

The plan: Rest time was over. I was to go to the pool yesterday afternoon and swim about a thousand at Alcatraz pace and see what happened. If I was headed for a bad outcome, better to have it where I could quietly climb out of the water without jeopardizing anybody else's epic.

The test run was even better than pain-free. I torqued my shoulder doing something that had nothing to do with swimming freestyle and it hurt like hell, and I still swam fine.

I'm going to Alcatraz. It will be golden and it will be cruel. Nature, red in tooth and crawl. I'll be reborn. I'll enter the water an enthusiastic dork with a compromised joint and still more fitness than skill. I will emerge as an enthusiastic dork with all that and a five-dollar bill, in search of a tourist kiosk where I can buy one of those goofy "Alcatraz Swim Team" hats. And if it hurts to reach up and put it on, well, it's not like I left Dr. Norris without scheduling a follow-up.

A bike racer, a basketball team and a cartoonist walk into the media ...

This past weekend was a nice contrast in sporting events. Saturday, Michigan State University lost to Butler in the NCAA semifinals. Sunday, Fabian Cancellara won the Tour of Flanders. The former is a basketball tournament; the latter is probably my favorite bicycle race. The bicycle had to be searched for if you wanted to follow it, and I did. The basketball you had to work to avoid, and I did.

I'm not a sports snob. I'm not above following Michigan State basketball. I enjoy it, in fact. But I don't have what it takes to watch it on television, or, in our non-television household, online in real time. Since I don't follow basketball closely enough to enjoy the nuances, and because I get a little offended by breathless commentators and showboating players telling me what to be impressed by like I'm watching some kind of sit-com laugh track on steroids and Red Bull, the game itself is kind of boring - one basket starts to look like another when there's a hundred or so per game - unless I identify with one of the teams, and when I do that I get way too stressed out. So it's not that I'm above watching basketball. On the contrary, it's more like I'm not up to it.

I didn't follow the Tour of Flanders live, either - I was in Detroit being interviewed on WXYZ TV's Action News, which, apologies for not flagging anyone sooner in my overloaded state, and then I went for a long run around Royal Oak, Huntington Woods and Berkley, simply because I could. But I sure did check it out when I got home and was delighted to see that Fabian Cancellara had won, and in classic Cancellara form, by surviving a punishing pace over the hills and cobbles until everybody - him included - was beaten to a pulp, and then pulling away from the very best and daring them to keep up and now I'm starting to sound like one of those breathless commentators who annoy me.

I don't know Cancellara, but he seems likeable enough, he races with style, he's stronger than hell, and when he wins he wins in a fashion that somehow just seems honest. People choose favorite pro athletes for far sillier reasons, so I buy into the fan ethic enough to follow Cancellara.

I imagine things for a living, but I'm not so sure I can imagine what it's like to be that good. Nobody wins every race, but Cancellara has shown an ability to eventually win the ones he wants to. He's won three world championships, Olympic gold, Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San Remo, the Tour of (his native) Switzerland, a bunch of Tour de France stages and more. He really wanted Flanders, I'm told, and now he's won that. Now, when sports is serious business, it is tortuous and tiered. Every level you rise, it only gets tougher. Being elite doesn't mean you get beat any less, it just means you have to travel farther for the privilege. So when I see someone that good, that successful, so strong that the quest is not to win a race, or even a classic, but to win one of the few classics you haven't won yet, now, that grabs my attention.

And truth be told, when MSU's basketball team has a season like this one, that grabs my attention for the same reasons. All I have to do is avoid it being thrust at me long enough to search it out myself.

A very important side note
While I don't know Fabian Cancellara or anybody on the Spartan basketball team per se, I do know their team doctor, Jeff Kovan. He's my sports doctor, too, and he is the Fabian Cancellara of physicians. That alone makes me identify closely with the team. And probably why, when I do watch them play, I identify with them enough to ponder aneurysm. Since Jeff has been a little busy these past few weeks, one of his colleagues was kind and professional enough to fit me in and look at my shoulder before Saturday's Alcatraz swim weekend. I'm confident I'll get the go-ahead to swim without worry, but now I'm still a little nervous about a whole 'nother MSU outcome of sorts. Go Green.

Loose screws

Technically and astronomically, spring began with the equinox. Here in Michigan, that doesn't mean much in practical terms. Nor do the 80-degree temperatures yesterday and, we're promised, today. That can, and will, relapse overnight. Buds on trees are a better sign, and flowers popping up are an even better one. Our yard is starting to bloom with white things, then purple things, and just this morning yellow things. I can't wait for the tulips to come up, because I know what those are called. But in perhaps the most telling sign, I took the screws out of my running shoes.

We in the ice-storm belt know to keep one pair of running shoes reserved with sheet-metal screws in the soles. Those are the screws with the raised hex heads, and they'll carry you across an icy or unplowed road as well as anything. But I'm feeling cocky that, while we may or may not have seen our last ice- or snowstorm, the aftermath won't last long enough to feel forced to run in it. Besides, swimming is the focus anyway, with Alcatraz coming up.

Speaking of Alcatraz
A week to go! I'm feeling fit and confident, and even ready for the temperatures (meaning my wetsuit fits, and I've dug out the biggest open-water, forehead-covering goggles I own, but I've also swum in those temps before). But I need to take care of two details for you guys in the blogeteria. First, I need to plug the sponsors who are getting me there. Team F.A.S.T. is covering my entry fees, and TriSports.com is helping with my travel expenses. I'm still Midwestern enough to feel a little nervous playing the pitchman, but in the case of TriSports, it's easy because I've been a loyal, vocally happy customer since long before they offered to help out with this trip. I'm a big fan of shopping locally, but I also know that there's sometimes stuff that even the best local shop can't carry, and that a huge amount of localities don't have multi-sports shops. Online shops cover that very nicely, and I've not found a nicer, more professional one than TriSports. Secondly …

Shoulder update
Let the record show I got smart and made an appointment with Michigan State University Sports Medicine. I'll see them Wednesday. Let the record also state that upon further review I don't feel like I was that dumb about it after all. It hasn't even been two weeks since the initial pop, and a wait-and-see-while-you-rest-it approach is, short of severe trauma, generally a good start. I haven't made it worse in the meantime; if I find out that swimming next weekend is going to wreck my season or result in my getting embarrassingly fished out of the bay (and if it's one, it'll probably be the other as well), knowing it a week sooner wouldn't have canceled the cancellation. And if I find out I'm good to go, or good to go with a good Kinesio tape job or something, then the timing is perfect. I'll keep you all posted.

Never pick on NASCAR
Finally, you'd think I'd learn not to use NASCAR jokes or allegories. Jimmy Doom sets me straight in that I couldn't have been more wrong in the whole Last-Supper-portions blog when I claimed most of the "National" Stock Car Auto Racers do not, in fact, come from the same two counties in South Carolina. This wasn't nearly as big a revelation as the news that Jimmy knows about stock car racing. Jimmy's a great friend and I thought I knew him well, but I didn't know that about him. The knockers on the Rumple Minze girls, yes. NASCAR, well, you never know. And for the record, La Professora provided me with the far better analogy I should have used, that the "World" Series of baseball field teams from suspiciously fewer countries than any given other sport's World Cup.