Odd Days: Tandem

First of all, I have this to say to Pope Gregory: Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice....uh, how does that go? What I'm trying to say is that I shall not be fooled twice by a calendar system that occasionally places two odd days right next to each other. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, just fergedaboudit.

So anyway, guess what I got for my birthday!



If you've never been on a tandem, here's what you need to know. The front driver is the "Captain" and the rear rider is the "Stoker." That's not the part you need to know. But remember those exercises you did in psychology 101 where you pair up with someone, put on a blindfold and fall backwards, hopefully into the arms of your partner? Remember? It's a *trust* exercise.

Using that exercise as an analogy, the stoker is the blindfolded person. The only thing she has to do when riding a tandem is trust the captain. That means trusting the captain when he tells her to keep her feet on the pedals even as the bike is listing dangerously to the right. It means trusting the captain even when the bike is weaving all over the road and the captain is muttering, "oh shit, holy crap, uh oh" and other words of the same ilk.

How did we do, you might ask. Well...Pikes Peak Road Race, here we come! Soon. Sometime this decade.

Odd Days: Camp

I think of kid camp as the place you go to discover all the things you can't do. The humiliation you suffer as a result either puts hair on your chest or condemns you to a lifetime of insecurity.

Neither I nor any of my siblings went to camp (as far as I know), so Tanya and I decided to have that missing camp experience last week. Not exactly a bucket list thing, but an adventure nonetheless.

My first humbling experience was kayaking. I had done it before, maybe three times. The third time, I came up on the beach upside down, dangling from the seat with my head in the water wondering why god wanted me to drown in such an ignominious fashion. But I lived to kayak another day, obviously.

We entered the water without incident. But before long Tanya, who had never kayaked before, pointed out to me that every time I put my paddle in the water the boat turned right. Furthermore, I demonstrated no ability to correct my unbalanced stroke. Eventually, Tanya suggested I rest. Ahem. (You know, the gentle version of "Get your damned paddle out of the water and let me steer.")

Meanwhile, Tanya's first challenge was the mattress on the bed in the tent cabin. Its colorful cover told the story of many users and their various accidents. But she had been forewarned and came prepared -- with a futon, a mattress pad, a full set of sheets, AND a sleeping bag. Oh yeah, and four pillows. Score 1 for Tanya.

My second challenge was water aerobics. Lordy lordy. They put a noodle around my waist and I still couldn't stay afloat. My new friend, Camille, whispered to me, "You haven't done this before, have you, Twila?" That got me laughing, whereupon I sank to the bottom of the pool and nearly drowned. When I came up, I was banished to the back of the pool (the shallows).

Tanya, a fish in her previous life, found no challenge in the water aerobics and set her sights on a training session for open water swimming. Score 2 for Tanya.

The coup de grace was jewelry-making on the last day. Oh my god! Tanya and I both approached the table of beads enthusiastically and naturally I ran into the table and knocked three billion beads to the floor. Things did not improve from there. When our teacher looked at our works-in-progress, Tanya and I were both sent off for remediation. But as weird as our finished little leather bracelets look, we totally love them.

In spite of the challenges, I had a good time. Tanya had a good time. (Happy hours helped!) But if I were a 12 year old girl and my parents sent me to camp, I'd be thinking of payback about now. You know, the elderly equivalent of camp, which we call "nursing homes."

Fear and pain - Part 3.

Naturally, I have tried many times to encourage Twila to get rid of her fear. I redoubled my efforts before Pikes Peak, but to no avail. Twila is both very independent and fiercely self-reliant and she likes to do things her own way. Here's an example.

There is only one medically proven cure for hiccups - swallow one teaspoon of granulated sugar. I've done it many times, and it works. Every time Twila gets hiccups, I remind her about the sugar, but no matter how uncomfortable she might be, she won't try it. I don't think that swallowing a teaspoon of sugar is unpalatable to her, she just wants to do things her way, even though she has no other answer for curing hiccups.

Before Pikes Peak, Twila spent a lot of time on the web researching possible exposures that would trigger her acrophobia. Presumably she was looking for assurance that the hike would not be scary, but instead she just intensified her fear. "Twila," I said several times, "get rid of that fear!" That was as anathema to her as a teaspoon of sugar. Her approach was do the hike and try to get through the scary parts. In that way, she is one of the bravest people I know, but her decision-making is curious, in my view.

On to pain.

I heard many years ago that once pain becomes unbearable, it becomes pleasure. I don't recall the source of that statement, but I've always remembered it. I put it to good use for the first time in 1979.

I had just experienced a very unexpected and painful emotional blow. Afterward I sat in a chair in my apartment in Sunnyvale, unable or unwilling to move. I was distraught. That went on for at least an hour, then I had an idea. Since I could see no way to eliminate the pain, I decided to embrace it. Instead of futilely trying to feel better, I would try to see how bad I could feel. I would wallow.

So wallow I did, and almost immediately I felt better. I still knew something horrible had happened to me, but I also knew I was handling it. And if I could handle this, what couldn't I handle? Imagine feeling that you could handle anything that life throws your way. That's a great feeling… and that's how I felt.

When I'd heard the "pain becomes pleasure" statement I'd reflexively thought of physical pain, and I was intrigued and gratified that it also applied to emotional pain. At some point -- maybe when I was scheduled to have some bone marrow sucked out, but it could have been a flu shot or something -- I decided to try the same approach with physical pain.

I'd had some experience with that. About 41 miles into a race, I was running along a trail, my right calf cramped and I fell flat on my face. The only thought that ran through my mind was, "There are only 9 miles to go. I can't stop now." So I immediately got up and resumed running, and I had no further problem with my calf.

There were also a few times when I was doing LSD that I would get a bad cramp. But, being stoned, groaning in agony never entered my mind. Instead, I felt the pain and thought, "Wow."

So I knew that in extreme circumstances it was possible, but what about the more mundane? Could I get rid of pain in those, too?

Not only is the answer yes, but also it was relatively easy. Start imagining now that the next time you have pain, you won't fight it and agonize over it. (If a crazed gopher is biting your leg, you might want to try to pry him loose, though.) Instead, say, "I have pain," focus on it, and accept it. You will still feel the pain, but it won't be pain anymore. It will be a curiosity, an experience.

Will that always work? Theoretically, I think yes, but you'd have to be Gandhi or something. Until we get to that level, there is nothing to lose by trying, and most of the time it works.

[Addendum]
My LSD days are decades in the past, but due to my happy-go-lucky lifestyle I not infrequently get cramps in my toes and feet, and sometimes a calf cramp. They don't bother me anymore. Often I watch a toe bending in an impossible direction and simply remark how interesting it is.

Odd Days: Birthdays

There comes a time in life when you must take control of your own birthday. You've moved out of your parents' house, so you can no longer rely on Mom to fill your special day with cool surprises and endless pampering. Sooner than you might think, you start to notice that time has sped up. You feel a need to mark your birthday with a memorable activity or event. Nowadays they call that "crossing things off your bucket list." In my day, such behavior was called a midlife crisis.

For me, the need to put a unique marker on each birthday began in my late twenties. My first wild ass adventure was getting my ears pierced. I know....yawn. But by the time I hit thirty, I was living on the edge. That year I got a tattoo. Now don't go yawning over a tat. Back then, only Janis Joplin and the entire U.S. Army had tattoos. Back then, you could still find Lyle Tuttle in a tiny shop on 7th Street in San Francsico offering tattoos for $35.

Eventually my birthday events morphed into full-fledged adventures, and this year the adventure was Pikes Peak. (The cherry on top was a multisport camping trip in the mountains on my actual birthday. More about that in a future blog.)

Although the list of adventures-to-come is not growing shorter, I now have a second list -- a list of things I will (probably) never do, or never do again. Before you get all teary, let me just say, I'm not in mourning over any of the items on that list. For example, I'm quite sure I'll never run a six minute mile. I've given up thigh high skirts and 4 inch heels. And I promise never to wear a bikini again.

Hmmmmm. Short list. I guess everything else is still on the table.

We interrupt this regularly scheduled blog...

Today is my favorite day of the year - the anniversary of the birth of the person I love more than anything else in the world, the one who made my life complete. Unfortunately, for the second year in a row, we can't be together on this special day. Last year she had a big party in San Francisco and I had to stay in New York, and this year she is in Oakland on an all-female outing (they rejected my application). So I'll say it here:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TWILA!

Fear and pain - Part 2.

Fear also has different forms, including worry and anxiety. An example, and what inspired this post, is Twila's fear before and during the Pikes Peak climb. As soon as she got the idea to do the hike, she began to worry about her acrophobia. On one hand she was excited, on the other she was terrified. She spent a lot of time in distress about something that might never have happened.

I used to have fears and worry on a regular basis. I went on a motorcycle ride with a friend and was worried that he was too close to the edge of the road. I fretted about being burglarized. And I, too, had acrophobia - to such an extent that once when I was on a business trip and in a room near the top floor of a hotel, I tied myself the bed with a sheet to prevent waking up in the middle of the night and impulsively smashing through the window and to the ground below. (Most likely the window would not have broken and it's my face that would have been smashed, but that is beside the point.) But *all* of my fears went away in about 30 seconds.

It was about 25 years ago. Twila and I had just arrived in Kauai for a vacation. The first night we were walking down to the beach behind our hotel. The lighting was poor, and the roar of the waves was loud. I knew that there was no swimming allowed at the shore because of the undertow and smashing surf. I was afraid. Even though I was still walking along, I became really annoyed that my fear was ruining the experience. I became angry at my fear, and I thought, in essence, "Screw you, fear. I'm sick of you making me miserable, and I do not accept you anymore!"

It worked. I was no longer afraid, and I have not been afraid of anything since then. I am essentially free of fear.

There are, of course, times when fear is useful - it alerts you to imminent danger. To borrow my "anger" adjective, that is flash fear, and it is short-lived and important.

There has been one time since that time in Kauai that I experienced fear that I could not release. Several years ago Twila had medical symptoms that could have been indicative of a life-threatening condition, and we wouldn't know for sure for weeks. That was a very uncomfortable time, and it wasn't relieved until test reports came in and said that nothing truly serious was wrong.

The reason I started this post by talking about anger is that you can harness it and use it to deal with difficult situations. I became angry momentarily with fear and chased it out of my life. It can also be used in other situations that are trying, like being spurned in a relationship or being fired from a job - find a way to become angry just long enough to rid yourself of whatever distress you've been feeling.

Thinking about this blog reminded me of another time I used anger, though I really didn't analyze it at the time. It was about 45 years ago, when I was in college. For a long time I'd had horrible nightmares. Often they would awaken me, but the nightmare kept going on. I'd see terrifying spiders dropping on me, or worse. One night as I was going to sleep I became afraid that I'd have another nightmare, but somehow I decided that I'd had enough. I became angry with my nightmares. I told myself that they were only dreams and that there was no need for me to fear them. It was me versus nightmares, and I said, in effect, "To hell with you nightmares. Bring it on. I'm not afraid anymore!"

I have not had a single nightmare since then. (I have to qualify that. About three times several years ago I dreamed that Twila had suffered a great loss, and I awoke immediately, trembling. They were dreams that only lasted a few seconds - flash dreams, I suppose.)

Fear and pain - Part 1.

Fear and pain are two sensations that most people… well, fear. I did, but I no longer do, so I'll tell you how I accomplished that in the hope that you might be able to do it, too. But first I have to talk about anger.

There are different kinds of anger, including annoyance, irritability, and possibly frustration, among others. One type I call flash anger, which is where you are relatively calm one moment and the next you've flipped out, lost it, and expressed yourself emphatically. Fortunately, that anger is self-relieving, so after you've picked up the shards of glass and repaired the holes in the wall (I threw a paperweight through my wall once), you're pretty much back to normal.

The kind of anger that is most destructive is that which sits deep inside you, festering. I haven't felt that often (unless you count politics), and I haven't had much success controlling it. A few years ago Twila was out of town and something happened that made me *very* angry. (It had nothing to do with Twila). The anger was just burning inside me, and I had no idea at all how to release it. After several hours I hiked around our nearby lake, and that helped a lot. By the end of the day it had become manageable.

Perhaps more insidious is the less apparent anger that, once it starts, lives in you. It might hibernate for a while, but it is easily triggered and then is very hard to dismiss. It takes a lot of work to release that anger, and in the meantime it eats away at you.

That's enough about anger. I wish I could suggest techniques to deal with it, but I haven't discovered them yet.

Odd Days: Kissing Toads

I don't know if it's global warming or our seeping septic system but we've had an influx of toads in our neighborhood over the last few months. I am aware of this primarily because of the quantity of carcasses I see on the road when I'm running or biking. To be honest, if the carcass is fresh I hope fervently that a dog will come and eat the toad before I run by again. Otherwise I have to watch as it gets flatter and flatter until it is nothing more than a stain on the road. And I just know that every time I go by that stain, I will remember it was once a toad.

Why the affection for toads, you might ask. Well, there is a reason and here it is. Some years ago I went to India for a few months and was living (and teaching sporadically) in a women's college in Punjab. A shortage of space landed me in the green room attached to the school auditorium. The bathroom was down the hall. The first morning after my arrival I ventured into the shower. My first surprise was the lack of hot water. It was hot though so I soon settled into the cool stream. All of a sudden I saw a shape jump from the floor of the shower clear up to my nose. I screamed.

I prayed silently to myself that it was just some weird hallucination, but then it happened again. I screamed. Realizing that it probably was not a hallucination, I stepped out of the shower and braved a look-see. Yep, you guessed it. A family of toads had taken up residence in the shower. More interesting perhaps is that they never relocated. So for all the months I lived there I shared a shower with a family of toads.

I can only assume I was a toad in an earlier life or something, but my affection for the little creatures still lingers.

Odd Days: Saddle Sores

I've been the victim of a hoax! I think.

First some history. I've been riding a bike for some 53 (ACK!) years. When I rode Ride the Rockies two years ago, my bike seat was the same one I'd had for several decades. During those decades, I watched Durf purchase a new saddle each time the technology improved. Nowadays, bike seats for guys have a giant hole in the middle so they can still have children after riding their bikes.

For quite a long time, it seemed as though saddle innovators ignored female anatomy. I mean, I could have used one of those giant holes, too. Not so much so that I could have children, but so that I could shower afterward without screaming in pain.

After Ride the Rockies (five long days of mountain climbing on a bike with a 30 year old seat), I decided to do a little research into high tech bike seats for women. And indeed it would appear that changes have been made. I googlized the subject to death, narrowed the search to a couple of seats and finally selected a highly rated one. A self-described superstar female rider gave the seat high praise with these words, "This is the perfect saddle - protection and comfort without being too squishy." And there's the rub, if you will.

I bought the seat. The good news is that I don't scream in the shower anymore. Nope, the pain has shifted back to my sit bones. The seat is so damn hard that I walk like Grandpappy Amos when I first get off the bike. And then it's a good 36 hours before I can sit in a chair. As I was pacing yesterday, waiting for the pain to subside, I was thinking about that reviewer. It was probably some redneck pickup truck driver trying to clear the road of pesky female bike riders. I've been had.

Beer.

When I was a much younger man there was a short period, say 25-30 years, when I routinely drank a 6-pack or more of beer a day. For some reason, maybe because they frequently saw me with one in my hand, people decided that I had a particular attachment to beer. On my birthday and Christmas I could always count in getting some beer-related gift, like a book named "Great Beers of the World". That was long enough ago that I think I can confess now that I never even opened one of those books, nor used my other beer gifts - unless they actually contained beer.

The thing is, I didn't have a special affection for beer, I just liked to drink. I don't mean alcoholic drinks, necessarily, but anything: water, juice, cola, iced tea, beer, wine, whatever. I usually chose beer because it isn't too sweet and it's thirst quenching. Also, you can just drink it, gulp it down. It was very satisfying.

I didn't even know I was drinking a lot until I broke my elbow and the orthopedist asked me how much alcohol I normally consumed. I told him a 6-pack or so plus two or three shots of Wild Turkey 101 a day, and he said, "That's a lot!" I said, "It is?" I mean, I hardly ever got tipsy. I've only been truly drunk, Great White Altar drunk, about a half dozen times in my entire life, and that was usually because I'd skipped eating.

About 10 years ago everything suddenly changed. I stopped liking beer. Not only did it taste less good than it had before, but also I felt full and bloated after drinking even one. My beer consumption dropped faster than the stock market. I didn't drink more than a 6-pack every three or four months. People continued to give me beer gifts, but I kept telling them that I didn't drink beer anymore, and after a year or so they got the idea.

I had to find something to replace beer, of course, because I still liked to drink. Drinking a 6-pack of Wild Turkey 101 every day was out of the question, and I'd actually stopped liking it, too. So mostly I switched to diet cola, even though it's too sweet for my taste. At the end of a day I'd drink wine, mostly, with an occasional shot of vodka or something.

Then an odd thing happened: NuSTAR. I was back in New York State, the very first place I'd ever drunk beer (we loved a place in Manlius that sold 15-cent drafts). It was really hot and really humid and I wanted a beer. It was good. It didn't fill me up. I was home again.

So beer is back in my life, at a more reasonable level. On a really hot day I might drink three. I haven't really settled on which beer I prefer, since Utica Club seems to be out of the picture. Currently I have Old Milwaukee, but I like PBR, maybe better. I'll figure it out.

P.S. No beer gifts, please.