I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.

The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.

Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.

The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.

I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.

But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.

I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.

However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.

I went horseback riding today with my camera, the pictures that were not completely blurry are now up on Flickr. Western-style riding is ideal for this, since you only need to keep one hand on the reins at all times, instead of both (as you do when you ride English-style).

However, it is not ideal when your horse randomly decides to break into a trot coming down a hill and you have to try and pull hard enough to stop him with just one hand because the other holds your very expensive camera. That was fun.

By the way, remember how I said I was going out with the Old Fart Bike Brigade 2: Electric Jewgaloo? They’re in way better shape than the Atlanta crowd. I got totally dusted by four guys over the age of seventy biking up a looooong but gentle incline.

They even managed to go up one hell of a steep hill at the end. I took one look at the hill and said, “This is No Country For Young Whippersnappers.” My dad and one other guy agreed with me, and all three of us felt really old.

Noted: 35 miles is kind of a long way to bike.

Also, I need a better seat. Ow.

First, your distance calculator decides that I’m running a thirteen minute mile.

If I could run on a treadmill without incurring extreme pain, I feel like it would be maybe an eight or nine minute mile. Nothing to write home about, but certainly not as horrifyingly slow as a 13 minute mile.

Then, you arbitrarily reset sometime after I’ve gone a mile and a half into the 3.1 miles I need to finish my gym triathlon, and I have no idea how much further I have to go.

I wound up doing another mile and a half after I noticed it had reset and still coming in at 1:59, but I probably could have made it to 1:55 if I had actually known how far I’d gone in the few minutes between when I saw I’d crossed 1.5 miles and when I noticed it had reset.

Bah. I’ll probably do one more of these before I try my Batshit Crazy Plan of doing a full Olympic-length gym triathlon during the Olympics. That’ll be double the distance I’ve been doing, and will therefore probably take about four hours.

At least I was able to verify that I’ve dropped my swim time to just over 15 minutes to do 15 laps from just over 18 minutes to do 15 laps. Yay, progress!

You work a fourteen-and-a-half hour day and as you blearily walk to you car, you think, “Man, that could have been a LOT worse.”

Hours worked this week: 76.6, for a six-day week.

Miles driven for work this week: 841. And I didn’t even drive anywhere Sunday.

Days I still managed to drag myself to the gym: 4, exactly as planned. I now know I can do this and am not allowed to make “But I had to work sooooo much” excuses.

Brain and Sanity: Gone! Hee hee!

Wearing a mouthguard is weird.

I had to order one because I’ve been super-stressed what with the strike and all, and have been grinding my teeth when I sleep, leading to some fairly irritating jaw pain.

I’d done this before when I was unemployed, and my dentist had suggested $1500 worth of contraptions to prevent recurrence, but I got my current job shortly after that suggestion, and the grinding subsided.

Doing some research, I discovered that for most people, the $1500 kit is severe overkill, and the $15 boil-and-bite mouthguards you can pick up for sports tend to do well enough.

I’m trying it tonight for the first time, and the instructions suggested leaving it in my mouth for a while to get used to it.

It’s a really bizarre feeling, but I think the fact that I’m utterly exhausted should help with trying to get to sleep, since I’ve been ready to pass out all damn day.

Anyway, off to give this a shot. I guess if I can’t sleep, I’m covered if I want to go out and participate in a boxing match or tackle football game instead.

I have a story I recently learned about from my mom to share with those of you who are having kids. You are a percentage of my group of friends which is increasing at an alarming rate, so I feel a need to warn you.

This is the story of what happens when a joke goes too far. This is the true story of my grandfather and his three younger brothers.

My grandfather was the firstborn, and his parents named him Tom. His next youngest brother came along, and he was named Richard, and called Dick. Naturally, the third brother was, in due course, named Harry.

And then, my great-grandparents had a surprise. So they wound up with Tom, Dick, Harry…and Bobby.

Bobby, as you might imagine, wound up with something of a complex. It is widely suspected within mom’s family that his family’s naming scheme contributed to his eventual drinking problem.

So please, my friends, name your children well, and avoid silly naming schemes. For the sake of your childrens’ future sanity, do not be like my great-grandparents.

Some days, I think I’m starting to really lose my mind. And then I read a handwritten pro se lawsuit like this festival of batshit craziness and realize I have a long way to go.

Courtesy Fark.

Having spoken to precisely two people in person in the last week and a half, including my neighbor who came up to tell me that anytime I ran water in my apartment her kitchen was flooding, it was nice to have Miss Cleo come by tonight.

However, I’ve been so starved for human contact, I fear I may have become this guy:

Rhetorical Pleasantry Elicits 45-Minute Response

KANSAS CITY, MO-”When he put his hand on my shoulder, I knew it would be a while,” recalled Harding, who could not escape from the monologue.

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I’m strongly considering declaring “for the sake of my sanity” a legitimate reason to leave the house.