Author: Dan Brekke

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My Triathlon

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As mentioned in a previous installment, I’ve been up in the Pacific Northwest (broadly defined) to see my friend Pete do the Ironman Coeur d’Alene triathlon. Pete started into this swim-bike-run business about six and a half years ago, the year he turned 40. He went into it as a strong cyclist and runner (though not a distance specialist) and a non-swimmer. After a few months, it became apparent to him that a) he found the sport not only challenging but intriguing and fun and b) that it would take far longer than the half year or so he and another turning-40 friend had allotted themselves to adequately prepare for a race that consists of a 2.4-mile open-water swim, 112-mile bike ride, and full-distance marathon (26.2 miles, if you don’t have that distance tattooed on you somewhere). So he shelved the full Ironman plan for the time being and did “half Iron” events where each event is half the total length of the full version. Somewhere along there, he started running marathons, too (last year he qualified for the Boston Marathon, and this year he ran that event). Since the only thing harder than finishing an Ironman is getting into one–each even admits about 2,200 racers, and each seems to be fully subscribed, at 500 bucks or more a head, within hours or days of opening for registration–he signed up for Coeur d’Alene last June. Yesterday was the day.

Short of a disaster–something possible but unlikely such as a bike crash or something like a debilitating injury during the run–I didn’t have any real question that Pete would finish. The question for me was more about what the full day, and especially the long, long concluding run, would take out of him. The one thing I have noticed from seeing shorter triathlons is that many very strong athletes whom I imagine look imperturbably graceful running under normal conditions are reduced to a painful-looking shuffle in the tri marathon. And it’s a shuffle that goes on and on and on.

I saw some of that yesterday. Pete hit the (60-degree F., wetsuits required) water at 7 a.m. with 2,000 other swimmers. The scene was beautiful mayhem. I saw him in the wild scrum in the swim-to-bike transition area, where volunteers helped peel wetsuits off the athletes, and then as he headed out on the bike. I saw him come in and out of town on the two 56-mile cycling laps, and then early on his run. In the long periods between sightings, I was walking back and forth to a Coeur d’Alene cafe and cheering on every triathlete I saw. When I first saw him on the run, I told Pete that he was looking great. He said he felt pretty good. I saw him coming back in from his first of two running laps. He smiled, but said, “The pace has slowed considerably.” He was out long enough on the second lap that I started to wonder if everything was OK. It was–I was simply stuck in spectator time, while he was slowing but moving forward in competitor time. Finally, I spotted him less than a mile from the finish, ran ahead to snap one last picture, and then watched him run the long, downhill and beautifully sunlit finishing stretch down Sherman Avenue to the lakeshore where the whole thing began.

To repeat what I said yesterday to hundreds of people I didn’t know: great job, Pete. (And yeah, he did well: 12:26:07 total time, 73rd of 209 starters in his age group.)

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(Pictures: Top: The field finishes first of two swimming laps. Bottom: Pete, on the second-to-last turn before the finish. Click for larger versions.)

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Solstice and After

Well, I see I’ve missed our summer solstice by a day. It was too hot here to pay attention. Yesterday, the unofficial Holly Street high was 101–the hottest I’ve seen it since we moved in 20 years ago. The bonus: It stayed lovely and warm out all night, no sweatshirts needed. More of the same today. Just 9:30 in the morning, and it’s already in the 80s. One of the toughest bike rides in all of California, maybe the entire United States, is being held today: the Terrible Two. A series of precipitous climbs and descents through hot interior Sonoma County (mostly). My heart goes out to the 250 or 300 people who are out there; I’ve done daylong rides through heat like that, and for me it’s just something you have to survive.

And now: Running to Oakland airport to get on a plane to Spokane, Washington. My friend Pete is doing the Ironman Coeur d’Alene tomorrow, and I’m there as his official rooting section and post-event driver. Go Pete!

More from up north.

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Valley

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Sunday evening, on the way home from Eugene. We were in the Grand Caravan (174,000 miles); Thom and his friend Elle were driving a U-Haul truck somewhere ahead of us. We got down into the Sacramento Valley just before sunset. On the way north Friday, we had seen a big fire burning in the mountains to the west. A northerly wind had been blowing for several days and carried the smoke well down the valley. By Sunday, the wind had shifted to the southwest, and a long tail of smoke was visible in the northern valley. Just after sunset, a big tower of smoke came up from the fire, and we pulled off to take pictures. This is on Road 7, in Glenn County, just south of the Tehama County line (the “tower” or “puff” or whatever it was is visible in the left center; the clouds in the distance are smoke from the blaze, which I later learned was called the Whiskey fire, near the town of Paskenta, in Mendocino National Forest. It burned about 8,000 acres–a relatively small fire by California wildland standards).

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My Spam Friends

Here’s an “is it just me?” question: Over the last three weeks or so, I’ve seen a blitz of spam to my main email address that I have never seen before. The come-ons are the same, mostly, but with one significant difference: They’re addressed to me by name, and they use my middle name. Some use my home address as well. I find this vaguely disquieting, even though I know that information is public, somewhere or other (but not on Google. There are zero matches for my full name on Google). Associating my full name with my email–not such an easy trick, which leads me to believe that somewhere or other I made this information available (or perhaps some “secure” database somewhere was compromised).

Anyway, back to the question: Anybody else getting personalized spam.

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Graduation Day

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We’re in Eugene, Oregon, for the weekend. The big event is our son Thom’s graduation from the journalism and communications school at the University of Oregon (after three years).

We spent a couple hours this morning at the campus’s famous basketball arena, McArthur Court, and watched the new doctorates, masters, and bachelors (of arts) strut their stuff. The speaker was an alum named Dan Wieden, a 1967 graduate of the journalism/communications school. He went on to cofound Wieden+Kennedy, a PR and marketing firm that started out in Portland with a card table, four chairs, a file cabinet, a green lampshade and the stub end of a pencil. Oh, yes, and one client: Nike. Mr. Wieden has done OK for his clients and himself since then, and the firm is now international. He spoke briefly about barely graduating, about dating the professor in the French class he was failing, and about the accelerating pace of change in our world (citing Moore’s Law and Ray Kurzweil’s singularity).

OK. Then the diplomas were handed out. The ethics in journalism professor mangled Thom’s middle name (Cuchulain came out as KOOSH-a-lin), but that was OK. Then we were leaving campus to come back to Thom’s to pack him up and move him to Berkeley.

Thom had something he wanted to show us on the way back to the house. The tree above. More specifically, two residents of the tree that would be nearly invisible to all but the most attentive passers-by: a pair of nesting western screech owls. They’re little things, well camouflaged; they looked like they were asleep, but their heads pivoted to follow our movements. Below is a cropped version of the top photo in which they show up a little better. (Click pictures for larger versions.)

So that’s it. Packing this afternoon. Dinner tonight. Driving home tomorrow. It wasn’t long ago Kate and I were dropping Thom off up here. The three years have gone very fast.

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Verdi Club

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Just up the street from KQED, where I’m learning how to do radio news. This was tonight, on my way up Mariposa Street after buttoning things up for the night. This Italian-American and a nearby Slovenian-American hall have made me wonder whether you could put together a little display on San Francisco ethnic clubhouses.

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Theme Music

Taxi

Now that we’ve disconnected our 2008 TV, we watch television from past decades. “Taxi” first aired in an era when I didn’t watch much ‘vision (late ’70s, early ’80s), so I became a fan in reruns. Somewhere along the way, someone in the house gave me a season of “Taxi” on DVD. We periodically watch that, as we did tonight.

One thing that hooked me about “Taxi”–beyond the delight in watching the occasionally brilliant ensemble work of Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Andy Kaufman, Marilu Henner, Judd Hirsch, et al.–was the theme. I love what I’ll call it’s winsome (if not melancholy) quality at the opening and what I’ve always heard as the lonely sound of the little reprise at the end. What other sitcom theme has such a sad tug to it?

For the record, the theme was the work of “smooth jazz” master Bob James, who assembled a pretty amazing crew to record the “Taxi” music during the show’s five-year run. The theme itself is called “Angela,” and I’m guessing it refers to a series of episodes involving the Judd Hirsch character, Alex Rieger, and a bitter and unattractive blind date. (The MP3 is for sale at Amazon.)

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A Lincoln Letter: ‘Quarrel Not at All’

Letter from Abraham Lincoln to James Madison Cutts, October 26, 1863.
First page of a letter from Abraham Lincoln to Army Capt. James Madison Cutts, counseling him to refrain from further quarrels with his fellow officers. (Library of Congress)

Today’s edition of The Journal of Interesting Things You Learn While You’re Supposed to Be Doing Something Else (this installment could be called “Abe Lincoln and the Peeping-Tom Hero Guy,” but that would be silly and wrong):

Researching one topic, I stumbled upon another in the form of this letter from President Lincoln to Captain James Madison Cutts, Jr., dated October 26, 1863. The letter is fairly well known , and I encountered it in the Library of America’s “Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859-1865” (pp. 530-31). Here’s the entire letter as published:

“Although what I am now to say is to be, in form, a reprimand, it is not intended to add a pang to what you have already suffered upon the subject to which it relates. You have too much of life yet before you, and have shown too much promise as an officer, for your future to be lightly surrendered. You were convicted of two offences. One of them, not of great enormity, and yet greatly to be avoided, I feel sure you are in no danger of repeating. The other you are not so well assured against. The advice of a father to his son “Beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in, bear it that the opposed may beware of thee,” is good, and yet not the best. Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself, can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper, and the loss of self-control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield less ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.

“In the mood indicated deal henceforth with your fellow men, and especially your brother officers; and even the unpleasant events you are passing from will not have been profitless to you.”

Reading this, one naturally wonders: who was the recipient of this profoundly wise and kind advice, and what became of him?

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Pre- and Post Mortem

The primaries are over. And now it’s time for … the 2008 Electoral Vote Predictor. (Would you like polls with that?)

The Clinton campaign is over. Now it’s time for the post mortems. The New York Times’ “this is how history unfolded” piece published online soon after Clinton gave her farewell address dwells on the backbiting and infighting inside Clinton World (and talks about the obvious ways, such as not recognizing until it was too late that Obama was blitzing Clinton in the caucus states, in which the campaign blew it). A better piece, for my money (editor’s note: US$0.00), is one from NBC’s Chuck Todd that focuses on other points, especially the Clintons’ decline over the past couple of years as forces in the party and the Clinton campaign’s early decision to de-emphasize the candidate’s role as history-making woman. And then there’s the people’s post mortem: readers at Talking Points Memo discussing the speech and the campaign.

Maybe the story has been written and I’ve missed it (send me the links), but it seems to me that there’s something substantial to say about what Obama did right. On one level, people have been talking about that for months—for instance, his success in grass-roots fund-raising. But I don’t think anyone really has a grasp of why this campaign took off the way it did. Going into the race, I think most people around the country knew him for the speech he made at the Democratic convention. Clearly there was something about him that reached a lot of people and that people remembered. During my brief tenure at the UC Berkeley Law School in 2005, I suggested that the dean, Christopher Edley, invite Obama out to do a fundraiser for the school (Edley was one of Obama’s professors at Harvard Law School). The dean responded that Obama was very hard to get; he had been told that Obama was getting 400 or 500 speaking requests a week. How many other freshman senators were getting that kind of attention after five months in office?

The last few decades are seemingly full of charismatic, smart, young Democratic presidential hopefuls who were seen as legitimate contenders and then wound up in the ditch. Some self-destructed: Ted Kennedy and Gary Hart. Some just seemed to evaporate when exposed to the harsh campaign climate (and real opposition): Jerry Brown and Howard Dean. Faced with competition arguably tougher than any of these guys, Obama succeeded. The mechanics of his success so far–the tangibles that go with all the intangibles–that’s what I’d like to hear about.

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A Vote for Newspaper Blogging

Doing a quick check on how soome major papers are handling the breaking news in the Hillary Clinton event (text of her speech, and it’s a damned good one, is here). As of 1:10 p.m. EDT, after the event had been under way for at least a few minutes:

–L.A. Times: Lame and badly edited Associated Press set-up story on the event.

—New York Times: Topping a boilerplate piece on the campaign (which includes the novelistic statement, “Mr. Obama stayed away [from the event] because he understood this was her moment”) with fresh developments.

—Washington Post: Doing on-the-fly rewrites in much the same style as the Times, but feels fresher.

—Chicago Tribune: Main coverage is in the paper’s The Swamp political blog. By far the best of the bunch. I like that they skipped the standard bylined story approach and just went with the blogger. The piece has a much more immediate feel, and you don’t really need the back story.

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