Tim McGraw, Kip Winger and I, Oh My!

With my 17 mile run today, I joined some pretty prestigious company. While I've always felt a certain kinship with Kip, he of the great hair band Winger and Tim McGraw, he of, well, the sappy, condescending, manipulative machine that is modern American country music, today I officially cemented that connection. 17 is not a number to be taken lightly. It has inspired no fewer than two terrible Billboard hits. That trickster age that has lured so many great men (I can only assume Winger and McGraw are among them) into taking the jail bait. As McGraw, in all of his wisdom, points out, "seventeen only comes once in a lifetime." It's a big number. A special number. And I am proud to have reached it today. 9.2 more to go (miles that is, everyone knows women lose all of their luster upon reaching 18).

Today's run followed the first 8.5 miles of the course of the Cherokee Road Runner's Louisville Marathon. Or, at least the route they link to on their web site 2008 Louisville Marathon Course Map. Strangely, this seems to be the course that the Derby Festival Marathon follows, not riverside course that the CRR Louisville Marathon has traditionally followed. Perhaps some has their wires crossed?

Yesterday's 8-miler was a quick and jaunty one along the Riverwalk. I was nearly knocked into the river by a shirtless man on a motorcycle who was negotiating the 6-7 foot wide trails at 35 miles per hour. A fantasy involving a large rock, the man's helmet-less head and a floating corpse propelled me forward and allowed me to finish with a pace of 7:00. I find that over-the-top anger and (imagined) disproportionate responses always increases my pace. But seriously, the guy was a reckless bastard and really could have killed someone and it almost definitely would not have been him. In all likelihood, it would be some gifted, young, inspiring athlete who had overcome some obscure disease acquired during his or her desperate flight from some war-torn country.

I'll conclude this with a bit from Heather Havrilesky that eloquently skewers Bob Costas's smug, disproportionate response to Usain Bolt's 100m finish

Bolt enjoys joking around with his competitors. One of his shoes was untied when he ran the 100-meter race. His technique is described as sloppy and amateurish. He polished off a bunch of Chicken McNuggets right before the race. He's that kind of a guy. He's 21 years old, for Chrissakes! He became the fastest man on earth by a long shot, breaking his own record, while every other contender huffed and puffed along several feet behind him. How would anyone dare to claim that he owed it to the fans to run even faster, or that he disrespected them by celebrating a little early? What in the world is Costas, space alien from Planet Honky, talking about? Why should Bolt care about class, of all provincial, bourgeois values? What the hell is class, anyway, but some arbitrary code that soulless, high-capitalist professional robots live by?