Prelude

Greetings all… Please allow me to [re]introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste (apologies to Mick Jagger). I have just returned from a top secret fact-finding mission that took me to the four corners of the globe, including Europe, Scandinavia, and the sub-continent. (Well, maybe just the four corners of the Twin Cities.)

Nevertheless, I will once again be your tour guide on the road to the 2008 3-Day, presenting the sights and sounds of all things fascinating and mind-numbing – and everything in between.

The past few months have seen a couple of noteworthy developments. For one thing, in November, I began an involuntary career alteration. After two years as an electrical engineer at Boston Scientific (formerly Guidant Corporation), I was informed, along with a number of my colleagues, that my services were no longer required. So I did what any normal person would do – I slept in every day, listened to the banalities of daytime sports-talk radio, sorted through boxes and drawers and rooms of worthless old junk, and then hopped a flight for Florida to spend a week on the soft powdery white sands of Fort Myers Beach. Yep, it’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

I spent the Christmas holidays visiting with family and friends and partaking in considerable gastronomic indulgence, the details of which can summarily be defined by any physician’s “10 Most Unwanted List.” I therefore declared a Mid-January Resolution (sorry, I’ve always been a procrastinator) to get my lazy butt out of bed in the morning for some exercise and lose those three (or was it four?) superfluous pounds.

During the past two months, while taking advantage of several months worth of well-deserved severance pay and benefits, I’ve awakened at the crack of 8:30 AM almost every day to go through a 30-minute routine of stretching and calisthenics. (Okay, sometimes it’s only fifteen minutes.) Once or twice a week I head over to our local ice arena for about an hour to an hour and a half of ice skating. Considering I hadn’t been on skates in two years, it’s gone quite well. Since I go there at 10:00 in the morning when most people are at work or school, I have plenty of room when I need to turn or stop – and there are few witnesses when I fail to do either.

The only downside of having so much free time on my hands is that, yes, I have been walking – like…almost real training walks, despite the fact that the Twin Cities 3-Day is still 202 days away. But I admit I’ve been enjoying my hour-long jaunts in the crisp twenty-degree air, with the occasional snowflakes wafting down. (The long johns definitely help.) My neighbors no longer look at me with that slightly patronizing gaze, shaking their head, thinking I’m nuts. My insanity is already common knowledge, so they just smile and wave and try not to make any sudden movements.

I guess that’s enough for now. I’ll have more to share with you in the weeks to come – I can’t promise all of it will be interesting, but you get what you pay for, right?


“Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile I caught hell for.” – Earl Warren