Well I got lost twice but I still managed to turn in a 43:59 (if I recall correctly) first lap. I was pushing it pretty hard but I didn’t feel like I killed it. A lot of guys are turning in sub-40 minute times.
Hopefully I can shave some time off my lap next go round. My legs feel good.
Our little team circle of chairs is near enough to the porta potties that I catch a whiff of pee every few minutes.
Attached is a cell phone photo of my super aero super light bell which was mandatory equipment for this race.

I’ve just cleaned and lubed my bike. I’ve eaten. I’m ready to roll.

I’m excited, but I have no idea what to expect. I’ll be posting updates throughout the night from my phone and posting pictures and whatnot tomorrow.

I’ve even grown a mustache myself in order to participate properly.

Wish me luck!

I was considering this when the car bearing these strange markings viciously cut me off. It was a red late 90’s era Jetta. I hit my brakes, thankful to have recently installed front and rear brakes on my fixed gear around-town bike.

“Whoa!” I yelled, not having a horn, then “Asshole!”

The windows were open, thankfully. I like for drivers to hear me yelling at them when they do something fucked up. It makes me feel like I am contributing to their improved road worthiness going forward.

The tint applied to the window with the markings obscured the occupants, but not the finger flipped at me by a passenger in the back seat with longish curly hair. The finger was a dark, defiant shadow in sharp relief against the sunny roadway seen through the car.

And it was a finger that didn’t care if I died.

He comes to us at a time when people are annoyed with the old guard and ready for change. He has the right message, the potential for groundbreaking history as our first black president and he even comes with a pro-muslim America feeling. He’s ridiculously perfect.

It’s too bad he’s still not going to win.

That’s right, I said it. Barack Obama will not win the presidential election in November 2008. I am so sure of this that I am willing to bet $100 USD on McCain. I tried to bet on some overseas betting websites but apparently they can’t accept US credit cards, so I’m hosed on that front.

I hope Obama does win, personally. He seems like a much groovier dude than McCain, for sure, and that counts for something. We can all agree that it counts for something even though we all know it absolutely shouldn’t.

Which reminds me of how we all know we were lied to to get us into a war in Iraq and no one seems to be held accountable in the slightest. No one at all is being held accountable for lying in the face of America and sending our sons and daughters to die in the sand. No one. Even though we all know who did it.

The only thing that’s happening is the guys who were involved enough to know what happened but not involved enough to be legally culpable are churning out book after book after book on the subject. If you watch the Daily Show, as I do, you’ve seen a parade of them.

Here is the climate of our times, folks. Something is horribly broken and I just do not believe that anyone inside the system can fix it.

But if it’s so broken, why not change?

Because change costs money. It hurts the people who are on top and they do not like to be hurt… least of all in their pocketbooks. I’m not saying that there’s a shrouded evil conspiracy at work. I think it’s all completely legal and above board. I just don’t think there’s going to be any change like the kind Obama is selling any time soon and it’s going to be depressing when I’m right.

Which is why I’d like to at least have an extra $100 from winning a bet on the subject.

So… any takers?

I did make it out of the water eventually, though.

On the bike I was bombing down a hill and my front tire started wobbling really fast and threatening to toss me off. I’m not sure if it was the bike or I was just really tired and out of it from the swim. It was drizzly and rainy. I passed a lot of people.

The run wasn’t bad at all. I stayed at a decent race pace and legged it out.

So, that was my first triathlon!

MALE CLYDESDALE : 10 - 99
DIV   OALL                           SWIM  SWIM   TRAN  BIKE  BIKE    BIKE  TRAN RUN   RUN    RUN   PENALTY FINISH  RACE
PLACE PLACE        NAME          AGE RANK  TIME    #1   RANK  TIME     MPH   #2  RANK  TIME   PACE           TIME   NO.
===== ===== ==================== === ==== ======= ===== ==== =======  ====  ==== ==== ======= ===== ======= ======= =====
   40   523 Jim Hodgson          34    52   13:34  2:28   42   43:48  18.1  1:26   38   29:07  9:24         1:30:22  1041

Kudos to Peachtree City Tri for having a sweet goody bag. I got a nice pair of socks and a cool shirt. I’ll be back next year!

If the grub had thought to find himself a stick to poke the finch with, things might be different.

In between bouts of PHP and Perl coding, I am watching a documentary called The Corporation about, you guessed it, corporations. It contains some very disturbing stories about corporate collusion with governments and fascism and sweatshops and all that sort of thing.

Basically the thrust of the film seems to be that corporations do not have an intrinsic morality that they abide by. All they care about is money.

Well, I get that. That sounds really horrible and bad, but folks corporations are collections of people. If those people cared more about their morals than their money, the corps would too, and even more importantly, if the customers cared about morality more than they cared about cheap clothing and cheap gas, the corporations would have to get in line.

The simple fact of the matter is that people do not care, or at least, they don’t care enough to act.

I watch it as I’m going to bed, and I sing the theme song each night as I’m going to sleep. Then I try not to stay up too late laughing.

Sometimes they play a shorter version of the theme song than other times. I guess the shorter theme song means they shoehorned in more actual show on that episode, so when I hear the shortened one I feel I’m getting more bang for my buck.