Doping, my butt

Well, that was an interesting day in the bike-racing world.

Midway through the most exciting Giro d'Italia in years over there, and an exquisitely exciting Tour of California over here, Tour de France champion-not-champion Floyd Landis distracts us all with an announcement that he really did dope, and Lance Armstrong doped, and most of the pro cycling world doped, and that the sky is blue.

I live in Michigan. The sky IS blue. Some of the time. Other times, when the sun is coming up or going down, it's the most stunning magenta you could ever hope to see. Most of the time, it's somewhere amid some indefinable, vast gray area, which brings us back to Floyd Landis' moment in the scud.

Landis may have something important to say, but after several years, millions of dollars and a treasure of his fans' trust spent vigorously claiming exactly the opposite of what he's spilling now, which isn't a lot different from what we've heard before and not, to my knowledge, backed up by any real documentation, I don't see him finding a lasting audience.

Am I part of the problem if I'm already losing interest?

It's too big for me to attack, and too depressing for me to assimilate. I choose to deflect. And today's Frazz turned out to be nicely timed. The world doesn't need to know who makes it to Paris with the lowest aggregate time as much as it just needs to get interested in riding bikes at all. The people who need to get interested in bikes don't care about blood boosters, or hematocrit levels or testosterone patches. They don't look at a 3-week bike race and marvel at the racers' watts-per-kilogram ratio or VO2 max. No.

They ask, "Don't their butts get sore?"

If Landis could answer that, people would listen. And since the answer is yes, whoever finds a drug that fixes that is cycling's first billionaire.

How bad can it be?

There are three notable things I know of where you can follow this theme:

Nothing is as good as good (coffee), but bad (coffee) is right up there.

I used coffee just now because one of my favorite songs – John Hiatt again – is “How Bad’s the Coffee?” I didn’t use pizza because I don’t think there are any songs about pizza, and I didn’t use the third because more songs have been written about that than anything else in the world.

Actually, it’s more than just coffee, pizza and sex, and for starters I have to remember that “busy” fits the equation, too. Like, busy and out of control isn’t as good as busy and under control, but it sure beats idle. You’ve noticed from recent posts that right now I’m busy and out of control. We’ll see if I can walk the fine, fuzzy line between the explanation I owe you and destroying what remains of my privacy. (Note to identity thieves, old-fashioned thieves, vandals and snoops: My writing, whatever you think of it, is vastly more interesting than my private life anyway.)

So. My wife and I are moving. To a new city. Soon. Turns out shopping for houses and finding a house and planning and packing things and signing papers and hemorrhaging money and just plain trying to grasp the idea of it all take up a lot of time, and it’s not as if work and training slow down in the meantime (What am I saying? Training has taken the biggest hit of all.) It takes up a lot of thought, too, like just about all of it, which can’t make for the best blog reading. Sorry.

So with big-time crunch time coming right up, I’m going to see if I can’t cut back on the workload and make the blog more interesting at the same time. I’ll still keep up with the schedule, but I’ll post excerpts from my book, “Trizophrenia: Inside the Minds of a Triathlete,” which, come to think of it, this blog was designed to plug anyway.

So enjoy. I’ll be busy, but like I said, it sure beats idle. And in the background, I’ll be playing “How Bad’s the Coffee?”, just because it rocks. And CAKE’s cover of “I Will Survive,” just in case I need reminding.

P.S. Apologies for not telling my fellow triathletes about this huge speed bump earlier. As in, soon enough to sign up for the Hawk Island Triathlon before it filled. It’s June 6 in Lansing, and it’s full and I’m going to be completely ill-prepared for it and I’m racing in it anyway. Anyone who wanted to race me when I was beatable will have to wait for … okay, any given race.

Reveille

People who don't like waking up on Monday mornings apparently don't wake up the way I did this morning: To John Hiatt's "Crossing Muddy Waters," from his 2000 album of the same name. It's haunting and beautiful, with a jangling mandolin that's somehow soothing and a depressing lyric that is somehow uplifting. It's one of the best songs Hiatt has done, which means it's one of the best songs anybody has ever done, but Hiatt flies below the pop radar and your chances of waking up to "Crossing Muddy Waters" on the clock radio are criminally slim. Waking up that way every morning since Friday would defy all odds, unless of course your clock radio also plays CDs and that's what you put in there.

The song speaks for a man whose life has just reminded him that he's not in control - "Baby's gone and I don't know why," the song begins. Life is like that. It happens to you more than you happen to it. Mine's been happening to me a lot lately, too. Baby certainly hasn't crossed any big wide brown river and disappeared, but this spring has served up a tectonic shift mostly beyond my control. Same jangling, different mandolin. It happens. That, I guess, is why I try to train and race and eat right and read and write and learn something new every day, and why I rack up an old CD alarm clock before I go to bed way too late and way too briefly. You control what you can, and if only three minutes of the day goes right, it might as well be the first three.