Sport, Sport, Sport, Insanity

 The last two Januarys have been tough on Clare.  What she wants to do more than anything is jump out bed, get dressed, run to the gym, pick up a bat and start hitting.  She wants to be the one crushing the ball, not soft-tossing it.  Such are the frustrations of the graduated (female) college athlete.

But she has to do something to keep from going crazy, she has to compete.  Given that she can’t find anyone to play her cutthroat version of Scrabble, my daughter has signed up for a half-marathon at the end of May.  I pity the fool who stands between her and the finish line.

I tried running or jogging or whatever it is but didn’t like it; too much running.  So, instead, I try to go on 50-mile bike rides at least twice a month between May and October.  Yes, I know.  A lot of people would think that’s crazy.  Sport really is in the eyes of the beholder.

Yet, there comes a point where sport veers off into life-threatening insanity.  The half-marathon begets the marathon begets the run across Death Valley in the same way my little bike rides can turn into the Tour de France, or a bike ride across Death Valley.  And then we come across the strange, sad case of Henry Worsley, late of this earth.

Worsley was an ex-English army officer with a taste for exploration, which in my book starts where extreme sports leave off.  Worsley, age 55, got it into his head to try and become the first human being to walk—let me repeat, walk—across Antarctica.  He did it for 900 miles, never mind the temperatures in excess of 40-below and the challenge of, shall we say, going to the bathroom for number one or number two.  But Worsley had to give up 30 miles short of his goal and be evacuated to a hospital in Chile, where he died Sunday of peritonitis.

It’s a good thing Clare hates winter weather, or else I’d worry she might want to pick up where Henry Worsley left off.