Head On A Swivel

While I'm not one of those persons who considers myself a great driver, I would say I'm at, or slightly above, the above average ability. Yes, my wife would probably disagree with my assertion; perhaps my father, too. But I've done more than my share of driving in both large and small cities...and yes, had accidents in both large & small cities over the past three decades I've been entrusted with the controls of automobiles or motorcycles.

However, I've only been at fault in three...with inexperience, foolishness & inebriation being the main root causes...all in accidents which occured in the first ten years of driving. You get past those halcyon days & it's been the stupidity of others to blame.
Two whack-ups in the past two years, however, hasn't helped my sense of paranoia when climbing behind the wheel. Especially in this town.

Why is it I can go on a road trip to a large city, & drive with a fair amount of confidence through their streets that I won't be the target of a T-Bone-To-Be-Determined-At-A-Later-Time, yet when I come back to my fair city I have to drive with my head on a swivel & engage in hyper-defensive driving? I swear, I'm ready to see if DRMO has any warehoused rocket launchers I can mount on the roof of my car.

When driving down the central thoroughfare, near the center of town, I encounter the operator of a large suburban (f)utility vehicle who decides, not only to punch a right-hand turn into the intersection, but to punch it into the left-hand lane...where I am steadily approaching at 30-to-35 miles per hour...

Or, a divided secondary artery which divides two subdivisions becomes a regular dart half way across in between the medians...if we're lucky we'll continue the dart all the way across location. On two separate days in succession I've had this happen at the same exact intersection...I would almost swear with the same driver.

Funniest one had to be the other morning, on a commuter artery which bisects the city from northeast to west. If you approach an intersection with a red light & four vehicles waiting to make a left-hand turn, common sense & logic dictates you would enter the turn lane & wait, correct? Nope, not this knucklehead...this guy turned right into the left hand lane of travel, shot past the other four vehicles & turned left against the opposite oncoming traffic. All I could do when I rolled up to the intersection was shrug my shoulders & look at the car at the front of the left hand turn lane with a look of what the heck can you do about THAT!?

The comforting thought was they were laughing in amazement...or frustration...like I was.

I guess the best thing I can do, barring a change in my employment situation to telework, is to keep my head on a swivel. 'Cause heaven knows there are some folks out there who certainly aren't.

Oh, could someone please tell the lawn care guys who decided to park their big-@$$ truck AND trailer in the access lane of the local sub shop...stop it, for crying out loud?! Okay, not that I was in a rush to get back to work, but neither I nor my insurance provider is ready to pay for more body work on my car. Thanks!

Your Potential - Bring It!

A frustrating day yesterday - no run in the afternoon and a few less yards in the morning swim workout than I would have liked. I started to whine to myself the old 'I s*ck and it's hot and I'll never get back into the shape I was before I broke my arm a year ago and my achilles hurts and so on and so on and on and on...' mantra. Yeah, the kind of stuff I usually hate to hear from the folks I train. I hate it even more when I'm the one doing the whining, because it's more difficult to place a silver lining on your own dark cloud.

However, since the achilles was sore, it was probably a good thing I took the afternoon off. It wasn't like I did absolutely nothing but lay around and drink beer. I did wrestle with a boatload of pharmacy school notes, books, multimedia, entertainment center items, tables, washer/dryer, etc., belonging to Jason and Laura. It was hot. It took three hours to shove it all into a U-Haul. And it definitely s*cked to be Jason; the dude had to drive the stuff back to Tennessee in a day. I definitely felt for him much more than I did for me. I offered him the opportunity to shower and change into some dry clothes before he took off; I was completely soaked and miserable, so I knew he had to be close to that point. Days like yesterday are good every once in a while. It makes you think long and hard about the silliness of moving all your household belongings in the middle of summer. It reminded me just how good it is to have a couple of college degrees and some ostensibly-marketable skills. It reminded me how good it is to have a choice to work in a location where air conditioning works fifty percent of the time (the main office in Norfolk has worse a/c problems than we do). And it reminded me just how good it is to be able to do this as part of my (nearly) everyday routine. Chuckie "V" had this to say this morning:

I propose that if we were all born without worries of survival (financial and emotional stability and such) and all we had to do all day---indeed, wanted to do all day---was train, only then might we start to reach our athletic potential. Potential is impossible to measure, of course. When I lived at the Olympic Training Center, the physiologists tried to measure it through a nonstop series of tests: VO2 max, muscle biopsies, and the like. But yet we know that such tests don't really do the trick. No numbers can. Heart-rate monitors cannot measure heart. Power meters cannot measure will power. Potential is what you make of it. You're close when you believe you are.

Chuckie was inspired by something Kevin wrote, and in turn has inspired me. So I'm going to steal from Chuckie's blog today, in the hope of inspiring you. This isn't plagiarism, even though we shamelessly borrow from each other. It's research...or when you shamelessly borrow from multiple persons rather than just one. At least that's what they used to tell me in college. While we all rejoice and curse the same sun, Solomon reminds me - whether he wrote it or had someone do it for him; the demands of a hundred wives can take away what little time you might have to write profound thoughts - there is nothing new under the sun.

So no number, or means by which we people can measure things will provide the true measure of a person's greatness or of their potential. Maybe that's why all parents think their child will grow up to be president. There's more inside us than viscera, Vicodin, Valium...and in many cases Viagra...that makes us what we are.

See you at the track. Bring your potential with you.