I can’t imagine how alone all these people felt when they watched us naively suck up the hero image of Lance Armstrong and they knew the truth. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to know the truth and want to help the sport, to help us. Travis Tygart fought the battle the way he knew he needed to while the entirety of the United States trashed him for being a bully and a fraud and fighting an unfair battle. The list of people whose lives were impacted by Lance Armstrong’s lies is uncountable. From honest individuals defending law suits and their families from his wrath to cancer patients lost in the wake of a false idol, he has bruised nearly all of us.
At first I thought this battle was a bad idea. I felt ignorance was bliss.
Rarely am I willing to provide someone else’s words without providing my take. Whether because no one agrees with me entirely (probably for the best) or for simply restating the issue to emphasize its importance, I am unsure. But I will leave this video uncorrupted, at least for now. Continue reading A clergyman’s take on natural disaster→
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→
Yesterday I drifted on the ocean bottom in a field of sea urchins and sand dollars. The day before that I faced spiny lobster. The day before that giant grouper, sharks, snapper, eels, parrot fish, and angel fish. I looked up at the glimmering surface to see that world I came from just a breath before. But now I drift in the world that we escaped from some 300+ million years ago. With twenty feet visibility, the sun shines through and illuminates the bottom. Weights on my hips keep me neutrally buoyant at the surface, but the compression of the pressure on my lungs drops me like a rock on the ocean bottom. Continue reading Free-diving→
For over a third of my life I have competed in short course triathlon. With my first triathlon a Sprint distance race and my third a leap to the Olympic distance, I never considered tackling the challenge of distance racing at such a young age. Ironman and Half-Ironman distance races have never been on the radar for me. In fact, up until three years ago, it was very evident that my performance at the Olympic distance was significantly weaker than at sprints. I was blessed with an abnormally high VO2 max which is simply the volume of oxygen I can absorb in a given time. In fact, it is one of the highest. My lactate threshold on the other hand, was something that needed to be trained. This left me behind in longer races but enabled me to suffer immensely at high speed, something I am still much better at than distance racing. But recently my dreams have teased me toward new goals. Continue reading Sampling long-course racing→
I once believed that religion and violence could be separated. I once believed that people simply used religion to justify their craving for violence. They used it to justify it to themselves and to everyone else, to rouse a riot or to begin a war. I thought religion preached non violence and it was counter intuitive to follow a path of destruction.
I am struggling to see that peaceful coexistence anymore. The reason is not because religion is inherently violent which most often it obviously is apparently not. Instead, I believe it to be a result of the fundamental basis of believing in something that is unprovable, immeasurable, and unseen. Alongside that illogical thinking comes a senselessness that violence fuels off to become justified.
No one has ever been able to tell me what god is. No one ever can put it into words so that I can understand. Everyone just tells me it something you know, something personal that you may feel. Continue reading Senseless violence→
Illogical thinking is the cause of war. So does that mean logic and reason would result in world peace? I believe it would.
Animals follow simple rules of nature. Animals have a desire to reproduce and a desire to survive. They have adapted to environments to best suit their needs and grow to allow them to spread their genetic code. These are traits of every productive animal. That is, it was consistent until education and logic. Humanity is the first and only species on this planet to have overcome these animalistic cravings. That is not to say that everyone has overcome them. The world is littered with people who believe these rebellions to be satanic, preaching birth control and other modern advancements as evil. But I do believe that the overcoming of primitive urges will be the cure to every problem the world faces. I am no hippie. Hear me out. World peace is a product. But the change itself is the real goal. Continue reading Time to graduate→
I have tried many times now to comprehend the Connecticut shooting and understand it well enough to put those thoughts into words. Frustration has prevented me from doing so. I will try my hardest to refrain from metaphors in this post but please excuse me if I slip. We have been trained our entire lives to tie so much emotion to everything that it makes it damn near impossible to actually comprehend the actual event in a logical manner. My frustration following the shooting was mostly due to people’s reactions to the incident. It was yet another thing that I watched tear my country apart. Everyone had an opinion. Everyone thought they knew what was best. And when it came to the actual shooter, words such as “evil” and “crazy” were thrown around without any authority. We dehumanize these killers and therefore make it impossible to see the potential for murder among ourselves. Continue reading Treating the problem→
I wrote a couple posts about lightweight backpacking last week to summarize my preparation for a sweep to finish hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. Having just graduated, I was stoked about my trip. I was waiting for a rain jacket to come in the mail so that I could peace out and get moving. In my restlessness, on the first day of the new year I asked my friend Scott if he wanted to go climb a mountain. Paris mountain sat just across the valley from my home. It stared at me every time I commuted home. Since I moved in I declared my intentions of standing on top of it and with a snowy peak, it was luring me in stronger than ever before. Continue reading Who is better off: the paraplegic or the lottery winner?→
