Another exhausting weekend [s]

Left to right: a bone, a flower, the Union Jack, a smiley, a Wario-style 'stache.

The Camp Pendleton (World Famous) Muuuuuud Ruuuuuun started bright and early at 9:00. We arrived much brighter and earlier at 6:30 because we are abnormally bright. It didn't feel great after the SAIC zoo event the night before, but hey, snakes on a plane.

The course included slimy hills, walls and tires, a sizeable lake crossing, and knee-deep mud pits (some for running, some for crawling). I was fairly certain I'd see Martin Sheen eerily rising from one of the pits, but maybe it just happened on Saturday.

Most teams stayed together. Being jerks, KO and I set our own pace. We got to the finish at 1:01:45 (he beat me).

As a team we we finished in 1:11:38, 13th of 151 (0:57:18), overall 41st of 285 (0:51:15) .

Photos courtesy of Connie.

The new ish [s]

So the Pendleton Mud Run is coming up in five months. CS and KO have enlisted the resources of personal trainers. I prefer the old fashioned pathway to fitness - performance enhancing drugs. But I can't just sit on the couch and play Zelda letting the hormones turn me into the white Lance Armstrong, I have to benchmark myself every so often to gauge the quickness with which I effortlessly approach peak physical performance.

Hopefully this will take the form of a weekly sporting activity in the Mesa; last weekend we had a 4v4 football matchup. The highlight, of course, was Jon catching a football with his eye. A fairly extraordinary event, not because he injured himself, but because it was on the rebound from a tree placed conveniently in their end zone. Not only did the ball achieve the improbable by deflecting off the tree into his eye, but did so having originated fifty yards away where Bret clearly achieved the greatest kickoff in history.

Serious, I YouTubed The Play immediately afterwards. I said, 'After Bret's kickoff, this looks like a bunch of rhinos dooked partially-digested monkeys on a field and the monkeys are writhing toward one end of the field where there are a bunch of shiny dook monkeys.' Then I went to ebaums and found a video of a bunch of partially-digested dook monkeys on a field writhing toward one end of the field where there were a bunch of shiny dook monkeys. Exactly the same.