Lake Phalen Triathlon

Nope. Didn't run one. Didn't even try. As I've said before, I have the perfect excuse. The doctor has told me I have no cartilages in my big toe, which means unless I get an operation, running, basketball and tennis will cause all sorts of pain radiating up from my toe and foot into my ankle and shin. There was a second option, which was to give up tennis, at least the sort involving movement below the waist, to give up basketball, at least the sort where you're not spelling P-I-G, and to give up running unless chased by a bear or chasing some promise of nudity. But that's why I have a bike. No stop and start toe friction in bicycling, and you can still chase nudity, albeit not as efficiently inside the house.

Instead, I woke Eryn up around 6:30 a.m., and she and I trundled off to Lake Phalen to watch Sarah run a marathon with what seemed like about 1000 other people. Here is one batch of contestants preparing to swim. Your swim cap differentiated you from other waves of swimmers, or allowed the safety patrols to get a good look at you if the other swimmers had pressed you underwater, which was possible on the entry, during the swim, and as the international swimmers lapped you. Some of these things happened to Sarah who was, as Pete described it, "beaned in the head." Eryn liked it that we could walk right up to the edge of the water, almost in the middle of the starting swimmers so she could see if boys or girls were taking off. I like the little kids on the edge of the water - I smiled an evil smile as I imagined a hundred green-capped swimmers bounding over and onto them.


This guy looks incredibly tired. The guy that was about a minute ahead of him, who was speeding along right behind a tight-bodied woman in a very revealing bikini, didn't look tired at all. It's just a state of mind.


I thought tear down offered some prettier pictures than the race, and the race was bumming me out because of the twelve year olds doing the whole thing who were in much better shape than I'll ever be again. I compensated by getting some geocaching exercise with Eryn, who insisted that we could find a "mystery cache" by just looking in trees at random. I told her it would take all day, and she replied that we could drive the car and stop at every tree. "No way, I'm not stopping at all those trees," I informed her. To which she replied, "You'll only stop at the ones I tell you to stop at." Ok, Mom.


We dropped by Sarah and Pete's to see how she was doing. She wasn't dead, which really means you're a winner in a triathlon as far as I'm concerned. Eryn found their bowl of candy and a muffin. I asked her why there was fur flying around her face as she ate, and she reached under her butt and pulled out a huge pile of the stuff from the cat cushion she was sitting on. I thought we'd taught her well enough not to sit on piles of unfamiliar cat fur, but then again, that's not in the big book of rules we keep in her room, so maybe we skipped that day.