Drama, action and front-row seats

Boy, there’s a great bike race going on in Italy right now. The Giro d’Italia has offered up more drama than Cannes and the Sundance Film Festival put together, and with a killer mountain stage tomorrow and a time trial for the final stage on Sunday – no ceremonial parade into Verona for these gentlemen – it’s not over yet. But it will be over Monday. Where are racing fans going to turn for their excitement next weekend?

Try Lansing, Michigan. Sunday, June 6 is the 4th annual Hawk Island Triathlon. I’ve been involved all four years. Its first year, I just raced. Second year, I joined the organizing committee (my doctor recommended against trying to defend my masters title [like how I slipped that in?] a week and a half after double hernia surgery. Last year, as an out-of-shape, finishing-writing-a-book racer AND committee member AND coach, as my mother and my wife both earned their first triathlon finisher’s medals. And this year, as an again somewhat compromised racer (first weekend after moving day) and committee member. I love this race. Sure, I love it because I’m involved with it. But really, I got involved and stay involved with it because I love it.

Here’s your invitation to get involved and love it. The start list is full, but we still need volunteers to help with everything from setup to handing out water and medals to writing numbers on bodies to marshalling corners to guarding a gazillion dollars worth of racers’ gear to pointing the way and cheering. And believe me, volunteering for this race is no sacrifice. It’s a short race – you don’t need to blow your whole day on it. It’s in and around a beautiful park. The food is great, the appreciation is deep, and you get a front-row seat to some racing that’s a little different from the Giro d’Italia, but no less dramatic.

We get lightning-fast veterans of the sport if you want that kind of drama. And this race is especially beginner-friendly, which is not to say easy. So if you have a taste for watching emotional people accomplish big goals they may once have not thought possible – change their lives, even – we’ve got plenty of that kind of drama, too.

Oh. And now that I’ve teased you with Frazz cycling jerseys that may or may not exist, Frazz and Kiefer swim gear and I are the official swim-cap sponsors, and I ordered a few extra Frazz-themed swim caps -- if you catch my drift and volunteer and ask nice and there are enough left over. And I’m pretty sure there will be.

And yes, I’ll be racing. Look for me Sunday on the official Trizophrenia race bike wearing the orange Team Trout shorts and singlet. Black aero helmet on the bike, bald head off it. And come talk to me Saturday afternoon at early registration (and we need volunteers then, too). I’m there to offer tips to beginners and answers to everyone, and I’ll have a raft of Sharpies if you want to bring a book, or a swim cap, or anything else for me to sign.

And we’ll have so much fun we’ll forget all about the Giro.

To volunteer, e-mail Jerrell Braden, the volunteer coordinator, at jerrell@southlansing.org. Tell him you’re volunteering because you want a Frazz swim cap, and we’ll put your name at the top of the list so we won’t run out of them on you.

Getting high at the Tour of California

Two important tips for writers and bloggers:

When time gets tight, delegate. And when someone offers you material a thousand times more interesting than you could ever make up, run with that instead.

This video is from my friend Jonathan Dietch. We share a current passion, cycling. And he's continued with, and gotten extremely good at, a former passion of mine, hang gliding. He's combined the two in absolutely stunning form over Stage 6 of last week's Tour of California. Don't miss it.

With all due respect to the doping debates, there is a right way to get high at a bike race.

PS: You'll have to take my word for this, but Jonathan is wearing his MMBA Frazz cycling jersey during this flight. As if the video (and Jonathan) weren't cool enough already.

It's tough to kill your mother

One more standard, if brief, blog entry before I line up the book excerpts and take care of other business.

This weekend was the penultimate (why would anyone say second-to-last when they can use a word like penultimate?) pre-moving-day weekend. Yesterday and most of Saturday were gorgeous, and staying inside a house and packing ranked a lot higher on the necessity list than it did on the wish list. Training’s rank on those lists was reversed. There was some internal whining. Probably some external bitching, too.

And a lot of fear. I just wrote a book about triathlon. I’d like to begin my first season after its publication looking like someone who knew what he was writing about, which is complicated when you’re not training much.

Some reassurance was needed, and I found it fermenting in the refrigerator.

Beer? No. I find a lot of things to like about beer, even reassurance sometimes, but what I found was my sourdough starter. Sourdough starter, or levain, if you’d rather, or poolish, biga or mother, is basically home-grown yeast for baking bread. But yeast is a living thing that needs to be fed and cared for. Like any kind of farming, it takes some discipline. Unlike some other kinds of livestock, though, yeast can go dormant in the right environment, so if you’re going to miss a couple days of feeding the culture, you can put it in the refrigerator and get away with it. But there are limits.

I put mine in the refrigerator before I went to the Alcatraz swim a month and a half ago. Life had already gotten a bit full by that point, and I sort of forgot about it until yesterday, when it didn’t look much like starter at all. It looked like putty with a big puddle of alcohol on top. Dead.

But amid all that packing – maybe because of all that packing – I took a few minutes’ time-out to stir it back together, measure out a new portion to combine with fresh flour and water and see what happened.

By this morning, bubbles were happening. Bubbles mean life. Another couple days and replenishings, and it will be full strength, and I’ll take it east with me and soon the new house will smell the best a house can smell. Sourdough is hardy stuff; it’s tougher to kill your mother than you think.

That’s just the sort of thing I needed to apply to my own life. Fine. When I race the Hawk Island Triathlon in a couple of weeks, I might or might not look like someone who had any business writing a book about the sport. Five weeks later is three races in three days at the Musselman, and I’ll probably still be putty and hooch. But by Luray in August and Savageman in September, I might just be showing some bubbles again, and by the Detroit Marathon in October, I might just have the suds to qualify for Boston.

I may not look like it now, but this summer I’m going to race like a mother.