Saturday 1 December 2007

Discipline

Woeful is the team for whom I choose to root. Part of this is predestination. NY sports fans come in two flavors - Giants/Yankees/Rangers and Mets/Jets/Isles. That's the way it goes, 'twas ever thus and so shall it be until time immemorial. When I was a kid, I was a big Jets fan. A friend of mine was the son of their linebacker coach during the "New York Sack Exchange" - Gastineau, Klecko, Marty Lyons and Abdul Salaam - era. Soon enough, they sucked. My first real exposure to pro sports fandom was the Islanders. We would go to games all the time, and also go to their practice facility. God, how many hours of my life were spent pretending to be those guys on the ponds and cul-de-sacs of Centerport. I still have autographs of all the Islander greats of their dynasty - Clark Gillies, Mike Bossy, the Potvins, net minders Glenn "Chico" Resch and Billie Smith, Lorne Henning, Bob Bourne, Bryan Trottier, Bob Nystrom, Ken Morrow, etc. Man, they were great, but soon enough the Islanders sucked too. The Mets, save for a brief stint as the vessel for another dose of the Curse of the Babe in '86, pretty much always sucked. The final mark of the beast on that one (apart, of course, from this ear's epic meltdown), was the Subway Series where the Yankees swept the Mets. But Tom Seaver was my idol when I was a kid, and my parents took us to their spring training facility when I was young and I have all of their autographs too.

Enter the Hoya. The FPG went to Georgetown, I did not. The best team that Tufts fields is the sailing team, of which I was a member, so there is really no Tufts team to root for as such. The swim team is pretty good, and the female swim team was pretty happy hunting grounds for this guy, but I digress. When we moved to DC, we went to a couple of Hoya basketball games and it was a lot of fun. Before last season, we decided to get season tickets and it was awesome. After the Oregon loss, I figured my curse was intact, but as the season went on it was clear that they were a great team and the whole season was really fun. This year, in a squeaker, we decied not to get tickets. The seats we had last year, while good, weren't great and they were hideously more expensive this year than last. Plus, the home schedule this year kind of blows. This is all a tremendously long winded way of explaining the 'wagon's new paintjob - Hoya blue and grey. They have just finished out an improbably close game against Fairfield with a win to go 5-0 at the start.

So the title of this post is "discipline," and today I tried to have a whole lot of it on our group ride. It worked all right, but I was meant to go between 200 and 250 watts the whole time after a 30 minute warmup. Didn't really happen. In order to stay between 200 and 250 watts, you have to go a zillion and six on the downhills and about 2 on the uphills. This style of riding does not lend itself well to group rides. Tomorrow's ride is supposed to be more like what today's ride wound up being, so perhaps I will break off from tomorrow's team ride when it gets to that point, and roll around in boring yet crazy fashion for the rest of it.

Speaking of curses, I cursed myself yesterday. When I posted, I was enjoying a nice sandwich, digging the progress that we were making. Slightly after I posted, the concrete trucks started taking their sweet time to get to the site. What originally looked like an early day started to look like a very late day. Then it got really fun when the cops showed up. Why did the cops show up? Because one of the dumb ass drivers spilled concrete all over the road, which of course allowed the cops to do their best Hansel and Gretel impersonation and follow the trail straight to my site. So now it's 5:30, I've got a noise ordinance that says I can't work past six, trucks that can't travel on city streets after 6, two trucks lined up to complete the pour, one of which is getting a ticket and trying to get the dispatcher to get a clean up truck on the scene (it's a mess if you don't clean up spills immediately), and of course the pump truck that needs to get off site and out of the city limits by 6. Freaking sweet. Oh and I've been on site for 11 hours, it's Friday, and I really want to be on the way home instead of talking to the po-lice. It got sorted out, but man what a pain in the shorts that was. I got home at 8 and promptly pulled the plug on the weights workout I was scheduled for, cracked a beer and put my feet up.

1 comment:

Jim said...

Dude, I hate you. I'm Syracuse (hometown team), Carolina (my school), Giants/Yankees/Rangers, and since I'm from Upstate and it's within the Different Conferences Exemption, Bills. Used to love the Knicks but I'm trying to get a divorce from them right now.

Next time I see you on the bike, I'm going to stick a CO2 cartridge into your spokes, just on general principle.