You Should Be Dancing

Yesterday was the first two-workout day since the triathlon. At first, I was impatient about waiting for Suzanne to get off work; she wanted to run while I jogged. Since hindsight is not only perfect but magnified it wasn't such a bad idea: I'd have hammered six to eight miles in the mid-80-degree heat and hated myself this morning, rather than jogged four miles at 10-minute-per mile pace...and hated myself this morning. For me, yesterday, the operating word was easy run. Man, the term 'easy' anything is hard to deal with. I've tried to amble, ramble, saunter, shuffle, jog at Suzanne's pace before, with disastrous results. It hurts to run much slower than you're capable of running. But it was fun.

As a form of gratitude, she took me to Beef O' Brady's for a bite and a beer. We ended up chattering about family stuff, both her side and mine, while keeping an eye peeled on the hockey and baseball. She saw Dancing With The Stars briefly on the toob, but then the fine people at Beef's changed the channel. I'll admit I've watched all of one episode of Dancing, while Suzanne was out of town. It was one of those lost-weekend-sit-with-the-dog-make-noises-and-channel-surf moments I get so few of...thank God. Doesn't matter who is on there...I don't want to watch another installment. One more piece of evidence that makes my pet project, The Endurance Channel, seem like a good thing.
Kind of how I felt after the MSNBC thing this weekend. Once again, I loved watching the womens marathon trials, but I had my heart set on the mens triathlon trials. All I could sense was a warm drizzle, and it was a sunny day where I was sitting. Ugh.
If you're into road racing, any track and field event longer than 800 meters, or triathlon of nearly any length, I think you can get behind my complaint. It doesn't matter whether it's college, professional or Olympic sport, the commercial value seems pretty well nonexistent. More often than not, you get commentary from Al Trautwig, telling you 'go out to your neighborhood school track and try to run 12 laps, at 64 seconds for each lap'. Dude, most of the American teevee-viewing public would rather down 12 cans of light beer at 64 seconds a can. I do like Al Trautwig, though. He gets better every year through working the Tour De France with Bob Roll, Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwen. American broadcasters would do well to spend some time working with the European networks in order to learn the finer points of sports commentary, especially vis-a-vis endurance sport. Who knows, we might learn a little something about endurance sport; other nations do this too. Wow. What a concept.

Ah. It's probably good I don't have any of those skills. I do get the occasional coach me for a month before I have to run my physical fitness test so I can drop five minutes off my 1.5-mile run time requests, but no offer of kissing as compensation...thank God.