7 July 2008

Today is an errand day.

Workout notes Because I am on summer break, I was able to sleep through the electrical storm and go swimming later.

I got in 3000 yards: 500 warm up, 500 of drill/swim 50’s with fins, 10 x 100 on the 2:

1:44, 42, 41, 42, 40, 40, 40, 40, 40, 39 (no flip turns; I don’t like water up my nose!)

500 of odd strokes, then 10 x 50 alternating paddles and free. This is my first 3000 in a while and my first set of 10 x 100 in a while.

Then I did an ugly 4 miles of run/walk indoors: 1 mile walk (14:10 in lane 3), 1 of 200 run, 200 walk, 800 run, 200 walk, 400 run, 200 walk, 10:18 mile “run”. I was just misfiring; I thought “dang, does blood donation affect me for this long?” and then realized that I did have a good 3000 yard swim prior to running.

Observation: when I am swimming, I notice that most slender people get in their pool lanes gracefully whereas the fat people jump right in and make a HUGE splash. I am not sure if this is because the slender ones CAN get in gracefully or that the fat people like to make big splashes.

Yes, I’ve been at both ends of the spectrum in my life time (top weight: 320 pounds).

Racewalking: here is the ESPN story on the men’s 20K Olympic Trials racewalk:

EUGENE, Ore. — My friend bet me dinner that I couldn’t write a column about the 20K Race Walk without a reference to “March of the Penguins.”

I lose.

Race walking doesn’t get much respect.

While the rest of the U.S. Track and Field Trials are being held in historic Hayward Field in front of 20,000 screaming fans each day, the race walk was held at 7 a.m. on Saturday, on a road across from the Autzen Stadium parking lot. There were less than 500 spectators, some of whom were just runners passing by during their morning jaunts and stopping to watch the 14 athletes racing around the course as if they were very late for a sale at Nordstrom’s.

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened with that,” Theron Kissinger said of competing next to a parking lot. “I wish the course was a little flatter. [The slope] doesn’t look like it’s that bad when you look at it, but when you go around several times, you begin to notice it.”

Kissinger is a 37-year-old high school math teacher who competes while sucking on a lollipop — he went through three Saturday — and occasionally performing complex calculations in his head to relieve the tedium of a long race. But before you label race walking a geeky sport, bear in mind that Saturday’s winner, Kevin Eastler, is a captain in the Air Force.

“I have a need for speed,” Eastler said. “But only as much speed as you can get without bending your knee.

“My students ask me, ‘Race walking — is that where you look funny when you walk?’ and I say, ‘Yeah.’ A reporter once asked me how to describe race walking and I said it’s like Mae West, but faster. You have to have that hip swing.”

The basic rule of race walking is you can’t break into a running stride. Your lead leg must be straight — no bent knees — when the foot touches the ground and one foot must be in contact with the ground at all times. Judges watch the racers throughout to make certain they maintain correct form — a competitor is disqualified if judges issue him three violations.

The thing is though, these guys can really motor. Eastler walked the 20K in 1:27.07 — I’m not sure if it was an Autzen Stadium parking lot record — or just about seven minutes a mile. Which is faster than I run when I think I’m really going hard.

“I enter a lot of marathons and I don’t run, I walk, and I beat about a third of the field,” Kissinger said. “I’ll hear people saying, ‘Hey, that guy is walking and he’s passing me.’ “

Still, it’s fair to ask the point of the event. It’s like telling people to race, but not to go as fast as they can.

“It’s good for people like me. I want to be competitive, but running is hard on my knees,” Kissinger said. “It’s less stressful on your body than running and it uses almost every muscle in the body. You build up your triceps without you even noticing. And it tightens up your butt and stomach — that’s why women do it.”

Allen James says he got into race walking when he was in high school in Seattle and the track coach asked him to give it a try so the team could get some points in the event. He says he lost to girls the first time he competed, which motivated him to work hard and get better. “I got the fever and tried to see how far I could go in it and I got to the Olympics,” James said.

And not just one Olympics, but two — he competed in 1992 in Barcelona and 1996 in Atlanta. Which is a hell of a lot more than the rest of us can say.

James is 44, a dozen years removed from his previous Olympics, but he was there on Saturday morning anyway, walking, sweating and swiveling his hips, and fighting through blisters to provide a bookend finish to his career. He crossed the line in an impressive sixth place.

Usually the only people attending a race walk in the United States are family members and a few friends, Kissinger said, but the sport is popular enough in Mexico, Central America and South America to draw thousands. “They never give up cheering,” he said. “They were cheering for the people in last place as much as the people who won, if not more. After a race in Costa Rica, I was signing autographs. It was the coolest thing.”

It looks goofy, but I don’t know. Perhaps race walking isn’t a whole lot different than the various strokes in swimming. Aren’t all those strokes merely a way for Michael Phelps to win more medals. I mean, is there really a point to the breaststroke or the butterfly?

“I think it’s cool,” said Melanie Neilitz, who timed her morning run to see the end of the race. “I really think it’s a unique sport. It looks painful. It’s just good to support them. It’s like the athletes in the throwing sports. It’s important to come out and support them.”

Kissinger finished 13th, walking in pain for much of the race because a calf had locked up on him. To add insult to injury, he was sitting on a massage table with an ice bag on the leg roughly 30 minutes after the race when a meet official came and took away the table.

Perhaps they needed it over at Hayward.

Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com. His Web site is at jimcaple.net.

Bicycling: right now I do a little bit of “fun” cycling with my daughter. I might add some cycling to my routine as my piriformis allows. But cycling and bike shorts reminds me of this funny post: basically this woman talks about getting bike shorts from her husband.

You can get the gist of the article from these two photos:

Hey, this is reality:

At least this is what I remember from the two organized rides that I’ve been on. At least they have looked like this when they passed me; pity I am not good at drafting.

Politics

Seattleforbarackobama has the Republican plan for victory, according to cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

More on Obama: his site actually permits dissent to be posted!

While most Americans settled into a relaxed Independence Day weekend, Barack Obama tried to quiet mounting criticism from supporters over his decision to back a new White House spying bill. In an unprecedented letter released on the afternoon of July 3rd, Obama addressed the thousands of supporters who organized a large spying protest on his social networking portal.

Noting that he expected to take his “lumps” and “be held accountable,” Obama respectfully defended his surveillance reversal. While maintaining that immunizing companies accused of illegal spying undermines deterrence and “accountability for past abuses,” Obama said he now backs legislation granting immunity (and other executive powers) because it provides a “real mechanism for accountability” via future investigations. The explanation ran 852 words – more than double the length of his original statement announcing support for the spying bill on June 20 -
and then campaign policy aides continued the discussion for over an hour with visitors on Obama’s site (pictured at right). The unusual exchange sparked an intense debate over the weekend, as activists and bloggers questioned whether it heralded a more interactive political era, or a reminder that doubletalk can spread on any medium.

Anti-Obama Smears A friend told me that her hairdresser was spreading anti-Obama smears such as “Obama took his oath of office on the Koran” (except that this hairdresser didn’t know enough to call it the Koran). A summary of common smears can be found here, as well as resources to address them:

Fight the Smears

Snopes.com

Now there is part of me that finds this “Muslim” smear to be comical: you have one group of woos attempting to put down someone for believing in another set of superstitions. But part of me is outraged: how stupid can people possibly be?

I swear: requiring someone to pass a basic intelligence exam to be able to use the internet would solve a whole lot of problems.

John McCain: continues to focus on Iraq whereas Afghanistan is the bigger issue on the “war on terror”.

John McCain has called Iraq the “central front” of the war on terror, a crucible of America’s ability to defeat violent Islamic extremists the world over.

But with record US casualties in Afghanistan in June, a resurgent Taliban, and new reports of Al Qaeda regrouping in northwest Pakistan, Senator McCain is likely to face new questions about his judgment on the one issue – national security – where voters consistently give him higher marks than they do his Democratic rival.

McCain has resisted calls for more troops in Afghanistan and has rejected criticism that the Iraq war is detracting from efforts to secure Afghanistan. He labeled Barack Obama “naive” for saying he’d strike terrorist targets in Pakistan with or without the cooperation of President Pervez Musharraf.

And while McCain vowed more than a year ago to follow Osama bin Laden “to the gates of hell,” he has offered few details about how his approach to Al Qaeda might differ from that of the Bush administration.

“I will not describe what I will do in order to get bin Laden, except to say that I’ll get him,” he said in Iowa last September.

Aides to the Arizona senator said Wednesday that he continued to view success in Iraq as the best chance for victory in the global war on terror. [...]

The Obama campaign last week seized on the news reports of a resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda as evidence of McCain’s policy shortcomings.

“Instead of questioning Barack Obama’s consistent call for a new direction in Iraq and Afghanistan, John McCain should explain why he is offering nothing more than four more years of a failed foreign policy that has asked nothing of the Iraqi government, overstretched our military, failed to finish the job in Afghanistan, and failed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice for over six years,” Tommy Vietor, an Obama campaign spokesman, said in a statement.

For McCain, the stakes for drawing contrasts with the Bush administration – in affairs both domestic and foreign – are high. A USA Today/Gallup Poll released last week found that 2 in 3 Americans are concerned that McCain would pursue policies “too similar” to President Bush. [...]

How voters respond to McCain’s continued focus on Iraq may depend on how closely they are following the news, some analysts say.

“If the public is not aware that Al Qaeda is cropping up in North Africa and Afghanistan and other locations, then McCain’s message might be accepted,” says Gordon Smith, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. “For those members of the public who are well informed, to hear him argue as if Al Qaeda exists primarily in Iraq might lead to questions of, ‘What’s he thinking? Where’s he getting his information from?’ ”