Wildflower Conspiracy

Friday, May 2, 2008. Lake San Antonio, CA.

We're baaack. I do love this place, the solitude, an absolute quite where one can listen, if one so desires, to the sounds of nature's original podcast in Dolby 5.1, 360 surround sound. I had forgotten about the wild turkeys and their drunken revelry, the soft cooing of the doves, the wind pushing past the dry acacia leaves, and the piliated woodpeckers keeping incredibly precise time hammering out staccato 32nds while searching for dinner as an encore. And now, you can add four thousand triathletes and their audio commentaries of carbon fiber blues and north-country fleece to the cacophony of man in nature. That may be a redundancy, but their sounds, as well as their sights are not. So here we go. The trek south was uneventful, just another long boring cruise at 70 mph down the I-5 corridor. Gas is a joke, maxing at $4.07 in Redding, CA, home of the planets weirdest people. I mean that. And I have twenty years worth of anecdotes to attest. Ya want yesterdays? We pull into town to get gas and decide that since we are there, might as well get a smoothie. We search for a Jamba Juice to no avail and finally settle on a Baskin and Robbins. The only girl working has an attitude, wishing she was watching TV instead of scooping ice cream for tourists. After a ten minute wait in line (!) I order a banana-strawberry. I can already tell from the way she is making it it is going to suck, but I have already paid, so I am stuck. Kurt by this time has already used the head at a restaurant across the street and decided to not wait in the line because it could be midnight before he gets waited on. He bails for the van and I go to use the 31 Flavors head. It is locked. I ask the gal for the key, she shuffles some papers and says it's locked. I know that, can I have the key please? Well. they locked it last night. Well, whaddya say we UNLOCK it so YOUR customers can use it? I don't have the key. You don't have the key? No, they locked it last night. Yes, I understand that, OK, thanks, have a nice day. Weird.

So we press on southward, Kurt at the wheel now after my six hour, 450 mile stint. I try to rest but my lungs are irritated again and I cannot breathe deep, wheezing constantly like a two pack a day chain smoker. I may never be able to run fast again. This blows on the large scale. Maybe I have the bubonic plague and better get around pronto to doing my will and testament, so that some lucky relative can inherit and manage my debt upon completion of the final chapter. Or maybe I should just go see a doctor, pay the $150 and get some antibiotics. Or get health insurance, or knock off a pharmacy. What a freaktard. The holistic method of allowing time to heal all wounds seems to be failing with this one. What good does it do to spend days, weeks, months building up one's immune system only to have it fail at the first meeting of a new strain of a foreign airborne virus, he asked incredulously.

We now move smoothly to the big news of the day. And, boys and girls, this is what blogs are supposed to be, FREAKING BREAKING NEWS. Am I right Donny? OK, let me try to set the stage. Friday morning, I am up COD, pitch dark, a trizzilion stars, turkeys, doves, and woodpeckers doin' three part harmonies (I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now) and I gotta race like a piss-horse. It is four o'clock. Several hours later after my third cup of instant coffee by gas stove, we decide to head down to the expo and check it out even though we can't start to set up till 9 and it opens at noon. We never left, early birds swamped us and it was busy. So we're making it happen, doing the expo thing (it is more fun than usual for me because people, God bless 'em, are actually asking good questions about the RCVs, how did you do this and how did you shoot that. So I'm even more pumped than normal. Then it happened. Guy wearing a Red Sox hat walks in, we exchange greetings and we start the rap exchange, this guy is good, smart, talented, curious so thirty minutes later we're still at it and we segue to the GPS/Google Earth data issue. A little back story is important here. We have been having nightmares getting accurate elevations from google Earth on our international courses. So much so that we have asked some of the race directors at these events to help us out by using an altimeter at their races and send us the data, in some cases a year after the initial shoot. Not real elegant. The classic case is St. Croix where the bike start is at sea level. I know this because I was there and it was sea level. But GE says its 60 feet. This causes obvious problems. The Red Sox guy, Dan, I think, (come to find out he's an engineer) immediately says "sure, there is an oil refinery there". I say, yeah, Hess, so what. And he says, "because wherever there is an important industrial or military site, the government, owners of NASA and all the birds that we get GPS data from, scramble these signals so that you can get close, BUT NOT TOO CLOSE, and usually it's about 60 feet off". As soon as my jaw was re-wired to my face, and I asked Kurt if he had hear that, we both almost simultaneously said, "better call Roger".

So there ya go my friends. Once again we have uncovered yet another conspiracy. The ironic humor in all this should not evade any of you that have been following the trail of RCVman for anything longer than a day. This is just too weird to be true. Did they hatch this one in Redding? Is that Mofo Cheney really this devious and sinister? I know that Star Wars is big, but so big that they consider us competitors?

Stay tuned dear blog faithful. This shit is really happening, and I swear I am not making it up. How could I?

Tomorrow the long course (56 miles), Sunday the short (24.8). We're clearing out Sunday after the last event and pointin 'er North. Maybe by then we will have had the conference call with the Joint Chiefs, where I have but one question, "Gentlemen, WTF?"

Saturday night. The day is done, race over, sun setting. Back at camp. It was a long one. Shoot went OK, I had forgotten how bad these out-back country roads are, so took on a little more asphalt chatter that I had expected, but both cameras, the Canon up top and the new Sony HV5 shooting from the low scooter angle provided some stunning live action. The day was perfect, some cloud cover, not much wind and no rain, should be a "relatively" easy chore to smooth cam out the video and remove those distracting road shakes. If todays long course was the cake then tomorrow's Olympic distance should be the icing. If it wasn't for this gawdawful respiratory irritation (worse today) I would have put a five start pin on today's lapel.

The government intervention GPS conspiracy (this needs a acronym) got a little more intricate today, almost Bond-ish. Guy came by as I was spelling Kurt after the bike leg, and I tell him the tale. He says, yeah, he has a buddy who is in the same biz and they (just can't make myself say us or we) have five countries (all allies) that each share one component on the big machine. Five keys to five locks that open one door. One BIG door. That way nobody has the capability to do the dirty deed without four others having a say in the matter. So now I have to go to the UN before we can get accurate GPS data so our indoor trainers can function properly? Do I just call and make an appointment? Do I need to drop a few names? Hire a lobbyist and line some pockets with cash? I repeat; Gentlemen, WTF? Having a glass of wine, then go watch some more finishers and try to find the sweet sleeping spot tonight that will allow both free breathing, back support and protection from the cold. Did I already say how much I love this place?????

Monday was the long drive back on I-5, with a sleep in Dunnigan.

Tuesday morning. Back in the saddle. Cough is worse. I have been INSTRUCTED to go see a doctor. Successful road trip. Next up: Boise 70.3, June 1. Stay tuned RCV fans, as we have taken on yet another mission of International import. That's right, Operation Chaos Busters!!!!! (OCB to you).