You want to know how awesome my childhood was? When I was a kid, nearly every year my family would vacation on the Gulf of Mexico in Fort Myers Beach, Florida to a resort called The Pink Shell. While, like normal families, we did enjoy playing in the sand and the waves, much of the time spent on vacation was actually causing mischief. Nearly every year, my dad, my sister, my brother and I would take a walk down to a store chock full of rude toys and buy the worst of the worst. With stink bombs and fart machines in hand, we ran back to the hotel ready for pranking. After realizing that the stink bombs faded too quickly in the ocean breeze and the fart machine could rarely be heard over the waves and traffic, we migrated to the quiet confines of the hotel elevator where we unleashed hell on unsuspecting victims. Continue reading Farting in elevators
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Zen and the Art of Freediving
Today I stood between mountains of coral that towered next to me. Beneath thirty feet of crushing water, I sunk like a rock to the bottom and firmly stood with my feet planted on the sandy ridged bottom. Beneath the turbulent waves, I felt only gentle swaying with little current. Fan corals rocked back and forth alongside me. I could walk on the sandy bottom, pressing off each tiny dune in the sand for traction. With my arms spread wide, the walls of the reef were nearly within reach of my fingertips. Several large barracuda rested just above the sand, watching my every move with their teeth spilling from their jaws. Continue reading Zen and the Art of Freediving
Live red
I was nearly done with my long run when I heard the lyrics, “How will you know….if you don’t try?” whispering in my ears. It was the remix of Jetstream by Jacques Lu Cont. “How will you know if you don’t try. How will you know if you don’t try.”
I had promised myself I was going to take this one easy, stay in zone 1-2 like the plan says, not pop it up to zone 4/ threshold. But my legs were rolling underneath me and I never take these long runs easy. Every time I make that promise to myself, stay around 7′s per mile. Don’t push it. Just ease into it and cruise. I hit the halfway point at the absolute lowest point in Blacksburg and took a left turn into some agonizing cramps and uphill. The pace slowed but the effort rose. Before I knew it I was hammering it up the hill, trying to salvage the pace I had kept on the downhill.