Still Crazy

Hey, here’s a great way to see if it’s time to drop dead:  Take your bike out in 90-degree temperatures and high humidity for a five-hour ride.  You’ll either end up crazy dead or just crazy.  I got option #2, even though I really pushed things by taking the bike on the ‘L’ first to get downtown to the lakefront trail.  People act weird when you bring a Schwinn onboard.

But a ride along the lakefront does have its advantages, namely that breeze coming off the water.  Had I gone a little later, I could’ve met Clare.  She’s working at Northwestern right now at their Near North location.  For lunch, she can walk through a tunnel and eat her sandwich at the Ohio Street Beach.  I like to tease her by asking how many cyclists’ bodies she saw in the water that day.  You never know.

You’d be surprised how many people there were yesterday with that very same death wish I had.  The really strange types were those people on rollerblades.  In this heat?  Then again, that’s probably what they were saying about me when we passed one another.  Once I made it up to the North Shore, the lake receded, but I still got a lot of shade on the trail I took.  So, nothing was too crazy, that is, until the trail ended.  That’s when I had seven miles’ hard time on city streets—bad pavement, bad sidewalks, bad drivers, no shade.  I seem to remember Arte Johnson on Laugh In playing an old man on a bike; he went so slow the bike just fell over, with him on it.  That was me by the time I pulled into the alley behind the house.

Here’s an oddity about me, if biking in hot weather doesn’t qualify as odd enough—fatigue doesn’t make me tired.  No, I was able to sit wide awake on the couch and watch the White Sox bullpen blow not one but two leads in Kansas City before falling to the Royals 3-2 in 14 innings.  David Robertson picked up his sixth blown save of the season in 33 chances.  Of course, he feels bad about it, not enough to fork up some of that four-year $46 million contract he signed last year (when he had seven blown saves in 41 chances), but bad nonetheless.  

Clare had an interesting idea when she heard about the game at breakfast this morning.  “The starters should get together and pay Robertson not to pitch.”  And Robin Ventura not to manage.  No, wait, the team is already doing that.