Iron Pol

NOTE: This post is unrelated to triathlon and is likely to become a rant on society.  My first blog was a fairly successful political blog and that part of my nature is taking over for a bit.

WARNING: This post is likely to contain information we'd rather our kids avoid.  While the language will be reasonable, the subject is difficult.  If you are a younger reader, please go here for an article about the state of youth triathlon, or talk with your parents before reading this post.

A punk rock group called The Bloodhound Gang made onto the "mainstream" radio stations a few years ago with a song called "Animal Planet."  While many people were aghast at the content of the song, it was very tame by Bloodhound Gang standards.  Many of their songs couldn't and shouldn't be played over the airwaves unless the station is willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

And right now, one of their songs is the only thing that seems to fit my mood.  It's called, "I Hope You Die."  An evil thought, I know.  Then again, true evil is the source of my current state of mind.

Today, the body of 12-year old Brooke Bennett was found by authorities in Vermont.  For those unfamiliar with the case, Brooke vanished on June 25th.  While her family believed she had gone to visit a friend's family member in the hospital, it came out that she might have left to meet someone she had met through a social networking site.

As the investigation developed, we learned Brooke's uncle had been arrested on an unrelated sexual assault charge.  He is alleged to have recruited a young girl into a "sex ring."  Shortly after that, Brooke's former step-father was arrested on obstruction of justice charges related to the case.

At this point, evidence supports that Brooke did indeed make arrangements to meet someone from the social networking site.  Unfortunately, evidence also points to the uncle as the creator of the profile Brooke contacted.  Other information further links the uncle to Brooke after she left to meet the On-line contact.

There are a great many things I consider evil in this world.  I believe the people responsible for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center represent evil.  I believe the terrorists waging war on innocent victims around the world are evil.  And I believe anyone who would do what was done to Brooke is pure evil.  There is something wrong with them that goes so far beyond any understanding of the human mind that it can only be described as pure, unadulterated evil.

The rational part of my mind urges caution and seeks justice.  That part of me knows that both the uncle and the ex-stepfather must be tried in court based on the available evidence.  Until that time, they are innocent.

Another part of my mind, the part more tied to my soul, the part that loves all children and wholeheartedly believes that the primary role of all adults is to absolutely protect them from harm, that part of me has an entirely different reaction.

It wants to scream.  It wants me to grab my gun and ensure that these monsters never have another opportunity to even THINK about harming another child.  It wants to ensure that our world is rid of the evil that did this to Brooke.

That part of my brain cannot be allowed to foster more evil, though.  So, it is forced to yield to logic and rational thought.  But the whole time it yells, "Have you no SOUL?"  And quietly at first, then more and more loudly, it does the one thing it CAN do.  It rebels inwardly.  It starts to sing a song.  A song from The Bloodhound Gang.  "I Hope You Die!"  And it focuses on a verse that talks about someone winding up in jail.  And it hopes that the guilty party, whether Brooke's uncle and ex-stepfather or someone else, can become the focus of the song.

I hope your cellmate thinks he's god, but CNN refers to him as Bowling Bag Ball Bob,

Service time for abuse of a corpse, only this time the victim's a clydesdale horse

Edited portion so bad I won't even type it

I hope he grins like Jack Nicholson, and forces you to play a game called Balls on Chin,

And whatever happens next is all a blur, but you remember "fist" can be a verb,

And when you finally regain consciousness, you're bound and gagged in a wedding dress,

And the prison guard looks the other way, cause he's the guy you flipped the bird the other day.

I hope this helps to EMPHASIZE!

I hope this helps to CLARIFY!

I hope you DIE!

Something has gone horribly wrong with the programming of large groups of people in this country.  We have teachers think it's okay to have sex with their students.  We have priests who think it's okay to molest altar servers.  We have grown men who believe it's okay to take sick fantasies and turn them into reality.  They prey upon our daughters and steal their innocence.  And sometimes they steal their lives.

It's evil.  And it has to stop.  Something has to change the direction in which we are headed.  We all have different ideas of what that "something" might be.  Our children are our most valuable treasure.  They should be treated as such.  They should not be treated as sexual objects.  And they certainly shouldn't be treated as so much garbage to be discarded when they no longer please us.

Justice will be served in this case.  The police have too many leads and too much evidence for that not to be the case.  But what about other cases?  What about the children we aren't even aware are being victimized?  What about the children whose very souls are being destroyed by monsters that live in their houses instead of under their beds?  How do we, as a country, find justice for them?  What changes can be made to protect them?

When I made the shift from afternoon training to morning training, I also made the decision that little, if anything, would interfere with those workouts.  The change was made to allow me to train without sacrificing time with my kids.  For the most part, I've achieved that goal.

Last night, we ran into one of those few things that I allow to get in the way of training.  It is, of course, the same thing that made me shift my schedules around in the first place.  Children.

By the time I got home from work, yesterday, I was feeling pretty rough.  I had a bit of a fever, wasn't all that hungry, and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep.  After taking care of a few "have to" items, I did just that.  I was in bed by 6 p.m. and napped until it was time to put the kids to bed.  After helping my wife with that, I went back to sleep.

That turned out to be a good thing.  About midnight, my daughter started squawking in between coughing fits.  She was clearly distressed, and I could hear her breath rattling in her lungs.  To top things off, she was so worked up that she didn't "like" anything.  We offered her honey to try and sooth her throat, which she refused.  We offered her a popsicle to pacify her.  Suddenly, she "no like" popsicles.  She even rejected orange juice.  Perhaps she knew we had put cough syrup in it.

Finally, I just took her into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned the shower on hot.  That helped enough to get her playing and laughing, allowing me to get her to drink the juice.  She even allowed me to suck some of the "buggies" out of her nose.

Unfortunately, it took another couple hours for her to be comfortable enough to sleep.  And if she's not sleeping, daddy's not sleeping.  We sat in the recliner.  We laid back in the recliner.  We made a campsite on the living room floor.

She finally fell asleep around 2:30, and I held out hopes of making my training.  When the alarm went off at 4:30, I decided another 90 minutes of sleep might be in order.  After waking up, showering, and getting dressed, I went into the living room to find my wife had been rousted to assume my role as "co-camper" with my daughter.

Oddly enough, having to care for my daughter put all thoughts of being sick myself on the back burner.  While I may have missed my workout, I feel much better.  Tonight, we will take steps to help her make be comfortable through the night BEFORE she goes to bed.

Because Friday is now my "makeup" day for training...

Anyone of my close friends and family can confirm I'm a bit of a computer geek.  I'm not an uber-geek who sits around trying to figure out how to reprogram Windows or hack into the federal government.  But I do have a networked house complete with a couple of servers and numerous computers.  I'm also the first person called when my church, dad, or any of several friends have computer problems.  I can't solve every issue, but know who to call when that happens.

When it comes to triathlon, I sit on the fence when it comes to technology.  While I have decent equipment, the latest and greatest toys are a good bit beyond what I can afford.  Still, I have a decent stopwatch, a heart rate monitor, and a reasonable cycling computer.  The true "geek" part shows itself when looking at my training logs.  And yes, "logs" truly is plural.

I have one log for my employer's wellness initiative.  I log workouts online at Buckeye Outdoors.  When I have official training plans, I will use Training Peaks to log sessions.  I also have my personal training file in Excel, complete with graphs of current and past years, target and actual distances, and notes about whatever seems important.

To ensure accurate data is entered, I closely track distances and times, along with various other information.  Both my stopwatch and my heart rate monitor were selected based on their lap capacity (150 and 100 respectively).  In addition to allowing me to track very long workouts, this allows me to complete several workouts without having to worry about whether I've logged the last session.

This has been a very successful process.  Until today.

This morning's swim was little different from any other day.  Going into the swim, I had 112 laps available on my watch.  The rest contained my swim and run workouts from the weekend.  I completed a swim including a moderately complicated pyramid from 50 to 200 yards and back.  After a few other intervals, I hit the final wall and clicked "Stop."  As I hopped out of the pool, I glanced at the watch to verify it was actually stopped (sometimes I miss or forget to hit the button).

What I saw was a fairly odd grouping of numbers across the top of the watch, followed by a time of 12:00 AM, Monday 1/01.  Knowing what was coming, I switched to Chrono.  Sure enough, it showed 150 available laps.

I sat there dumfounded, knowing I was going to have to try to reconstruct 4700 yards of swimming and a 10.5 mile run.  Luckily, I can be a bit obsessed with times and distances DURING workouts, and I was able to make a good guess at the numbers.

So, there were two lessons learned.  First, technology is great so long as it is working properly.  It can be a real bummer when it dies.  Second, paying close attention to your workout during the workout can be a good thing.

I think I'll back up my jump drive to the server, this evening...

5:07 a.m. is a good time of the day.  It's just shortly after the YMCA opens, and it's about the time I walk out of the locker room, either onto the pool deck or toward the track.  I'm awake and ready to hit the morning's workout.

Well...  Normally.

At 5:07 THIS morning, I was laying in bed wondering if I should look at the clock and find out how long until my alarm would go off, or just go back to sleep until it actually sounded.  Curiousity won out and I glanced at the clock.

Blink!  Blink!  "Funny, that looks like 5:07.  It must be 4:07."  Looking at the clock again, squinting to ensure I wasn't misreading, it dawned on me that the alarm had been set for 6 a.m.  Apparently, I forgot to reset it before going to bed.

Mind you, all of that took place in about one second as I jumped out of bed berating myself.  Quietly.  After all, regardless of how late I was, everyone else in the house was still sleeping.

As I quickly got dressed and headed out the door, carefully making sure I wasn't leaving anything behind, one question kept popping into my head.

Why hadn't either of my children woke me up at 4 a.m.  I ALWAYS get an early wake-up call.

Go figure.  The one morning my alarm is messed up, my kids sleep through the night without incident.  That should make me happy.  Somehow, instead of feeling I've gained more sleep, I feel as though I've lost a backup alarm clock.

On Friday, I came the closest I've ever come to about beating a child for misbehaving.  However, I managed to control myself.  Good thing, too.  First, I was at the children's play area at a local mall.  Second, it wasn't my child.

In bad need of a haircut, we had ventured to the mall for that and a few other things.  My wife and I decided that one of us would watch the kids in the play area while the other accomplished their errands.  After my haircut, I watched the kids, and my wife warned me that another boy had pushed our son, who responded appropriately by walking away.

With both kids running around, most of my attention was directed toward my daughter, who gets creative when trying to leave the play area to check out the rest of the mall.  My son was playing with a flip board making different creatures.  He was hidden by a play bridge, but I could see if he left.

At one point, my daughter headed toward that bridge, giving me the opportunity to check on my son.  As I neared the corner where he was playing, I was shocked to see my son crying and screaming.  Another boy of about the same age was behind him with two handfuls of my son's hair.  He was pulling back for all he was worth and wouldn't let go.

I stormed over, pulled the boy off, and made sure my son was okay.  After a quick check, I turned my attention to the other boy.  I pointed out that it was my son he was attacking, that my son would get his butt whipped if he attacked another person like that, and that he owed my son an apology.  The boy responded with a "No," and started to walk away.  Seeing red, my only response was that we would then need to find his parents and ensure they removed him from the play area immediately.

Apparently, my input on that issue was unnecessary.  As I sat my son down and tried to calm him down, the boy was getting hauled off by his mother.  He was screaming about wanting to say he was sorry, to which his mother replied it was far too late.  I don't believe she saw what happened, rather another person pointed out what her son had done.  I was disturbed that she found it difficult to keep a close eye on that one child but appreciative of her response to the situation.

We bought my son a cookie as a treat for his handling of the situation.  From discussions with my wife, it seems the same boy was involved in both incidents with my son (the pushing and hair pulling).  Had our son reacted physically, his actions would have been justified, but it's challenging to teach a four-year old the fine line between unacceptable physical responses and reasonable defensive actions.  For now, we are glad he was unwilling to respond physically to the attack.  It will be far easier for us to explain defending oneself when he is older than it will be for this other mother to stop her son's attacks.

It was also a lesson for me.  Even in a small play area with primarily little kids, constant vigilance is vital.  The presence of other adults was insufficient to fully protect my children, and we were lucky this was only the childish attack of another toddler.  There will be minimal lasting damage from my son having his hair pulled.  As dad, my role as protector is to ensure such attacks are the worst my children ever have to endure.

There are people in this world with an amazing ability to patiently allow things to develop.  They start something in motion, then sit and watch as it changes into something bigger, better, or more impressive over time.  Often, that time is years, if not decades.  Then there are people like me.

Not that I'm impatient as a rule.  Come hang out with me at 3 a.m. sometime and you'll get to see patience in action as I give up sleep because of a child that has some "urgent" need of daddy.  But when it comes to plans and personal goals, I'm more of a "right now" kind of person.

That was a key factor behind the path I took to Ironman.  Race a sprint against my better judgment.  Complete an Olympic distance to prove the first wasn't a fluke.  Run a second sprint the week after the Olympic race.  Then sign up for Ironman.  Why take years to do what can be compressed into 18 months?

Luckily, I'm able to suppress that instinct when looking at improving times.  It took nearly seven years to get from that first 5:30 marathon to the four hour mark.  And both options for qualifying for Boston involve a lot more time.  Continue to train and shave another 35 minutes of my marathon time.  Or wait until I age up enough for the qualifying time to be more attainable.  They let 75 year olds run Boston, right?

This instinct is something I strive to keep in check.  As I work to develop a youth tri team, my "now" side wants to see 20 or 30 kids signing up and completing the program.  Each time I schedule a meeting, I want more and more people to attend.  Thirty this year, 50 next year.  Of course, at that rate of increase, the entire Fox Valley will soon run out of kids who haven't completed a triathlon.

Unreasonable as that sounds, I struggle with the notion that most tri clubs start with a few people, take years to attract more than a couple hundred, and much longer than that to reach a point where more than a few dozen members participate in a given event.  Somehow, "average" and "normal" aren't enough for myself.  That's another struggle.  Accepting that the leaders can only do so much motivating.  At some point, the kids have to find the desire inside themselves.

At our first meeting, last night, I had one youth and two parents.  One of the parents was there as his daughter was unable to attend.  Two of the guys from last year already said they will return, and the younger brother of one of them is also participating.  That makes five.

PUt into the proper perspective, one more participant will double the size of the club.  It also represents four youth who will train for and race their first triathlon.  And whether one, ten, or twenty, we'll be there for the team.  I'll overcome any sense of frustration at my own perception that the club is growing "too slowly."

In fact, as I wrote the last paragraph, I thought about gremlins.  Perhaps this is just a gremlin I've never faced, before.  I've faced and overcome many gremlins in the journey from sloth to marathoner to triathlete to Ironman.  They've always been focused on athletic performance.  Open water swims, injuries, pace concerns, etc.  Perhaps this one is just trying to derail the effort to share the love of triathlon with others.

Bring it on, gremlins!  You always provide motivation for improvement.  And you always lose.

It's funny how sometimes the "silver lining" to things is just a matter of perspective.  After six days fighting an upper respiratory infection, I have to consider myself the lucky one.  While training has been curtailed and most of my excercise has come at the business end of a snow shovel, I can at least say I was the "survivor."  Everyone else in the house went down harder.

The timing was at least fortunate.  The past six days have pushed Wisconsin toward one of the harshest winters in recorded history, at least where snowfall is concerned.  We've had 3-4 inches just about every day for a week.  Over the weekend, it was nearly nine inches.  While I've had to forego official training, I have done a lot of strength workouts hefting all the snow.  We now have three foot banks of snow along our sidewalks, and six foot banks along the driveways.  It's getting tough to get snow over the piles at the end of the driveway, both of which have gone over seven feet high.

There is more snowfall in the forecast, so I haven't put the shovels away.

Tomorrow, it's back to the pool, as it seems the worst of the chest cold is clearing up.  While I will train with minor injuries, ear infections, head colds, allergies, or any of a wide variety of other ailments, pulmonary conditions will always get my attention.  In this case, I opted for full (or really close to full) recovery.

If you're in Wisconsin, enjoy the snow.  The farmers need it.  If you're in the south, enjoy the warm.  Because we really miss it.  And if you're in the other hemisphere, enjoy your race season.  I'm sure you've trained for it.

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that were so sure was real?  What if you were unable to wake from that dream?  How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? - Morpheus, The Matrix

That's sort of how I felt, Monday morning.  It was about 3:30 a.m. when my daugther woke me up by pulling on my arm as she tried to climb into our bed.  I climbed out of bed, took her back to her room, and got her to go back to sleep.  I was back in my own bed by 4:00 a.m.

And promptly woke up by my son, who wanted me to hang out with him.  I put him back in bed, only to find my daughter heading back to toward my bed, as she had woke up, again.  This went on for the thirty minutes that remained until my alarm went off.

This is where you would cue the buzzing alarm, with Neo face down on his computer keyboard.  I sat up in my bed, angry at having been kept awake since 3:30, only to realize that at least some of it had to be a dream.  Obviously, I had been sleeping.  I checked on my daughter and found her asleep on her bedroom floor.  So, somewhere between her attempting to scale my arm and my alarm going off, I had been caught up in a very realistic dream.

Now, if I could only figure out how to race a triathlon in the Matrix.  I'm sure my residual body swims much better than my real body.  And, as Morpheus said, "Do you think that's air you're breathing?"

For the first time in what seems like forever (and is actually probably days, at best), our area should see temperatures on the proper side of zero.  They might not hit double digits, but 9F is so much warmer than -5F.  And if we see much more snow, the thermometer outside our window may start to look like the one in the picture.  Minus the beautiful background.  It's tough to find mountains like that in Wisconsin.  Snow covered hills, sure.  Majestic, snow-capped mountains, not so much.

The downside of all the cold is the challenge of training outdoors.  The upside is that I see more of my kids.  I also spend more time in the pool.  And let's face it, while I am far from an elite runner, I can at least finish a half-marathon before any professional finishes a marathon.  My half-IM swim time is well over the best IM swim times out there.

All the snow has given me the opportunity for "alternative strength workouts."  I'm not quite sure of the correction factor, but shoveling certainly counts as a strength session.  At least in my training log, it does.

Dodgeball does not.  In fact, dodgeball should probably be prohibited when trying to improve swim times.  But when there are so many young men (8th graders) just begging to be beaned, I have to answer the call.  The kids in my group were loving it, until I switched to the opposing team.  And my body was dealing with it until this morning's swim.  Still, it's a price I'm willing to play for the opportunity to clobber the kids in my group.

So, a quick recap.  It's cold.  It's snowy, and all my training is indoors.  Shoveling should count as training, and dodgeball is a bad idea.

I guess I'll just have to round the week out with a trip to Red Robin for dinner and a huge training weekend.  It's all about balance, after all.