Nay, we are but men. Rock!

You all know that I love bacon. It is the king of breakfast meats–it laughs in the face of Queen Italian Sausage (and her wicked stepsister Maple), while Jester Jimmy Dean whimpers in the corner, and Servant Ham shovels the latrine.

If I could, I would carry some in my pocket everywhere I go. Who am I kidding? I would take a bacon shower (only if it’s cooked first).

That said, here is a great way to start the perfect day! And by perfect day, I mean any that starts with bacon!

And I will never have to worry about burning my foot on the George Foreman again.

(Honey! Can you come rub Vaseline on my foot?!?)

Every year as part of my job I lead a team of 10 college student leaders on a 7 day backpacking trip in the Sisters Wilderness in Oregon.  It is one of the best parts of my job description.  I really love the day to day work that I do with these leaders but to actually get to go into the back country for a week and get paid for it is pretty cool.  Our program has built into it 4 main elements used in the learning/development process: Solo, where they are on their own for about 24 hours, Leader of the Day, where two of the leaders are responsible for all of the decisions made for the day from traveling to setting up camp to meal schedule, Final Expedition, where the guide and I leave during the night and they are responsible for getting safely to the trailhead, and Summit, where, you guessed it, we give summating one of the Sisters a whirl.

All in all it is a pretty sweet deal.  I get to be part of breaking in some students who have never been in the wilderness before and be part of furthering their leadership skills on the whole.  What I don’t like about it is the masochistic training schedule our university’s strength and conditioning coach put together for us.  I swear this cat must be endorsed by the National Association for Lunging Lungers.  Every day has you doing 764 more lunges than the previous day.  I don’t know what’s worse, doing the lunges now or summating a 10,000ft mountain without doing them.  Personally I am leaning toward not doing them since it is only one day of the trip instead of every day leading up to it.  On the bright side though my tush now deserves to be cast in bronze and put in the Louvre. 

I tried to muster up the energy to write this yesterday but as it turns out the only thing I had energy enough to do after about 10:00am was to eat, and I mean eat.  Whatever I could get close to that wouldn’t run away was mercilessly devoured.  I ran my half-marathon yesterday morning and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done.  Let me take you through the timeline of the day:

4:30am       Wake up

5:00am       Leave with a friend for the race

7:00am       Start running at a pace that I’m sure made some turtles snigger

7:05am       Start wondering why I was doing this

8:30am       Become convinced that I was doing something completely stupid

9:15am       Wonder why the organizers of the race chose a course that continually lengthened itself

9:59.47am  Find my Holy Grail known as the Finish Line

A friend and I ran/walked 13.1 miles yesterday and I have no idea how it happened.  First off I was working myself through a 12 week training schedule to prepare for the race.  Due to some circumstances with family that far outweighed my running schedule I lost weeks 6-10; so basically I trained for 6 weeks, took a month off, trained for 2 weeks, and ran a half-marathon.  Oh, and did I mention that I weigh roughly the same as a baby bull elephant?

The first hour and a half of running wasn’t that bad, if you can believe that.  After about mile 9.5, however, I felt like I moved from the speed of an excited slug to that of a three-toed sloth on morphine.  There were a couple of reasons why I was able to finish.  The first reason was Christ.  I know that that might sound like any number of professional athletes on TV that give glory to God before going on to tell everyone how great they are but it is absolutely true.  My wife and I use prayer beads to help with the discipline and consistency of our prayer lives.  Prayer beads are basically a Protestant version of the Holy Rosary, but since Protestants apparently can’t be associated in any way with the wonderfully rich Catholic faith we get the term prayer beads, beautiful huh?  But anyway, I would run through the prayers in my head and it would take about 20 minutes at a time.  While I was going through the prayers I was fine but the moment I stopped I would hit a wall.  You could say that the only reason the prayers made running easier because it distracted my mind and let me focus on something else for a while, I just wouldn’t believe you.

The second reason I was able to finish was because of other runners.  I began the race with a good friend of mine.  We had decided to run together a while back.  He is in better shape than me and a fair amount smaller, though he himself is a big guy, so he was faster than me.  Despite this fact he chose to stay with me and put up with all of the times I needed to walk when he would have, I’m sure, preferred to be running.  But because we are friends we ran together.  It wasn’t until somewhere between miles 9 and 10 that I was able to convince him that it was alright if he went ahead.  He is a good friend.

After the race I was hungry like I have never been hungry before.  I ate everything.  If it was someone else eating it would have been impressive how much was actually consumed but since it was me it was a little embarrassing.  I just couldn’t get un-hungry, if that’s a word, let alone full.  Today I am pretty sore but doing relatively well.  I don’t know if running races is addictive or if I am still a little delusional from yesterday but my wife and I have signed up for a 10K in September called Pints to Pasta.  I don’t think it will be fun but there will be beer at the end of that one so that should make things a bit more bearable.

I just got home from one of the most incredible sights of my life.  My wife just finished her first half-marathon and it was awesome.  First you have to take in the whole scene.  This race is called the Hippie Chick Half Marathon and encompasses women, and yes it is an all-female race, from every and I mean every walk of life.  There are you twenty-somethings that are obviously at the top of their game.  The winning time was something like 1:31.31, which is pretty impressive.  There is the sixty and over crowd, which is inspiring enough as it is.  There are the baby-boomers that run the whole race arm in arm. And there is everyone in between.  One of the most amazing aspects of this race is not necessarily that all of these women, totaling somewhere around 900, from all of these walk of life are here together but that they all want to see each other do well.  As they are passing each other those being passed are cheering.  I saw multiple women stop and get out of the way of other women in their sprint to the finish line.  It was a competitive atmosphere that I have never experienced before.

Then there is my wife.  She is the mother of my two children and probably the most amazing woman I have ever known, and I know so great ones.  She didn’t run the race fast but she finished.  She ran 13.1 miles and was able to smile at the end.  She uses the same tenacity in loving and raising our children and in being married to me, neither of which is easy.  She is the best woman I know and this race is merely the latest piece of evidence that proves what I have known all along.  She is awesome!!!

There is only one down side to today.  I have to run my half-marathon in July and I do not think I will beat her time.  Frankly put she is in better shape than me, which makes me love her more and go get on a treadmill.  Although 900 women can run a race and only wish the best for all of those involved I do not believe that is something men can do. We can cheer for people to do well as long as they finish behind us.

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am -a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

- Edward Abbey

I’m an American, so that means I’m overweight and out of shape, right?  Isn’t that what the statistics say?  Men’s Health is trying to help us be un-American by offering four freely downloadable videos (with free registration of course) that you can load onto your iPod.

(HT MacUser)