Sunday, September 17, 2006

Russ-T and the Josh

First of all, I'd like to welcome everyone to our 150th blog entry from all of us here at Old Coot Productions®. Second of all, I'm tired. Today was the 30th annual Josh Billings Runaground triathlon and I helped power The Pretty Boys to a less-than-climactic finish. I'm not sure where exactly we finished, or how my extraordinarily powerful paddling fell in comparison with my recreational kayak compadres. By recreational, I think they mean large-bicepped, small-boated paddlers.

Now, before I get to the finer details of the Josh, let me tell you about the T-Russ party at Russ-T's house. It was sweet. First, we stood around drinking coffee making smart alec comments, driving Russ-T up the wall. Then we put a couple of T-Russes up. Following another break for lunch, we hoisted the remaining T-Russes into place. Then I went home to clean up for the pre-Josh spaghetti dinner.

The spaghetti dinner was pretty standard. The pasta was heavily overcooked, with 1/4" thick strands and canned sauce/canned meatballs. The salad came out of a bag and the sauce was most likely out of either a can or a big jar, but the price was right. Included in our $100 entry fee was a 100% free dinner, complete with - count 'em - two meatballs. We asked for more, but were told there was only so much to go around and we only get two. The kind woman on the other side of the warming dish reinforced the meatball policy by telling us "Hey, it's only supposed to be a pasta dinner". Oooo-kaaaayyyy, can I have an extra scoop of those delicious styrofoam strands?

But in reality, the dinner was fine and dandy. We ate good and they had a drum circle who played fun, but loud music. It was CPG's last night in town so she met us out there for some spaghetti and conversation. The drum band made the conversation difficult but once the sun went down, they hit the road. Freaking hippies :-) Alright everyone, keep your fingers crossed for the CPG situation.

Sunday morning I headed over to Stockbridge Bowl around 7:30 to get set up for the kayak section. I had the boat dropped off and the car parked at the take-out area and back to the boat launch by 8:00. With the bikes starting at 9:30, it's conceivable that I would have 3 hours to kill before it was my turn with the race bracelet. To make it worse, I quickly ran out of coffee, forgot my breakfast and didn't know a soul at the lake. Long... three... hours.

Once the race started, it was awesome to stand by the radio listening to the play-by-play. There were a few national level ringers in the race who quickly pulled ahead of the rest of the pack. At one point they were ahead of the pace car, that's some fast shit. 1:04 into the race the first pack showed up at the lake. For a 27 mile race, that's just shy of 27 mph in the big hills of Berkshire County. It took me almost 2 hours to ride it when I tried, to put it into perspective. Granted I was not racing and I'm not a national level cyclist, but still those guys are something else.

Anyway, when my cyclist came in I took the bracelet and booked it for my boat. I grabbed it, headed for the water and got to paddling. Feeling strong in my new Nike shirt (ahh, compression shirts), I started off well and just kept going stronger. While the two-man racing canoes were passing me with ease, I had only one kayak pass me in the first lap. WHAT! Plus, she was in a racing kayak and she's one of my running homies, so it was all good. I draughted off of her for a little while until she got too far ahead. At that point I wished her the best of luck and dropped in behind someone else. Ahh, draughting. Not to bore you with the details, I finished in a hair over an hour and passed the bracelet to our runner.

Once the runner had the bracelet, I knew I had about 40-45 minutes to get the boat out of the water, change my clothes and get to the finish line to see him come in. I made it just in time to snap a few pics. Afterwards we GRAZED on wraps, snacks and most importantly Choc-oat-chip cookies. Mmm mmm bitch.

When they finally posted the results, we finished 14th out of 31 in our category. What sucks is that your category is based on the youngest person on your team - in our case that was me - so we were in the 39 and under category. The other two guys are in their 40s and/or 50s and being in the younger category really hurt us. We beat the 40+ teams by about 15 minutes, so my youth definitely affeted our placement. Oh well, it would have been nice to win the mug but it was fun nonetheless. I'm thinking next year I might have to do the Ironman (one-man team)!

Well folks, that's it for me. It's about beddy-bye time for me and I need to get myself ready for sleep. I'll holler at y'all later.

Over and Out,
Old Coot

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice job, Tooter! I don't know if a hair over an hour is good or not, but good going! And I have another one for you:

"I don't care if you all swap spiddle and piss in each others' boots..."

"Something inside of me just said 'Hey, wait a minute, I want to beat him.' and I just took off." -Pre