Author: Dan Brekke

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In the Mail

My medal for finishing the 2003 Paris-Brest-Paris randonee.
My medal for finishing the 2003 Paris-Brest-Paris randonee.
So, just about eight months to the day after I finished PBP, look what came in the mail. In reading the lore of the ride over the years, I’d seen reports of the medal, complete with your own individual
time on it. For some reason, I thought it might show up by the end of  last year. But it never came, and lots of other stuff came up, and I never really thought too much about it. I just figured that maybe I was the one rider who didn’t get one; or that my ride had been declared invalid for some unworthiness that the organizers had detected in me; or that I had managed to ride the one year when no medals were awarded. Just my luck.

Then I started to see accounts on some cycling email lists a month or so ago that none of the American riders had gotten their medals yet. But they were coming. By sea mail, maybe.

Yesterday, a big brown envelope with my self-addressed sticker was in the mailbox. Heavy. The medal was inside, along with my brevet card, with the stamps from all the controls along the way, and the English-language program for the event, with the finish times for all the participants, including No. 4417, Dan Brekke: 85H51.

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Un Pez sin Agua

Sinagua“I feel like a fish without water.” The small type under “sin agua” says “Francisco, 5 años, descridiendo el asma.” It’s a billboard at the corner of 7th and Brannan streets in San Francisco. Kate says she’s seen English versions of it. It struck me just because of my (nearly lifelong) problems with asthma; and also because of the fact the disease seems to have become so prevalent among city kids now; the why of that still seems largely unknown, but one has to think it has got be due to basic environmental causes.

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A Totally Whack New World

Opportunity012504The second Mars rover, Opportunity, plunged and bounced and rolled safely to rest last night/this morning. The NASA scientists running the Martian campout are agog at images of the landing site (“it’s a bizarre, alien landscape,” quoth one).

In other news, engineers think the other rover, Spirit, marooned in a less bizarre, less alien landscape, might not be totally brain dead.

[Image credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell]