Epilogue

Epilogue

9:00am - The Day After

This is when I awoke. I had not slept past 6 or 6:30 am for the previous three months. All my other friends have slept very little and are wide awake by 5 am. Chipp? He got up and drove himself home to be with his wife. At 5am.

We mill about. But one by one my friends and family start peeling away. I have some breakfast with the crew. We trade stories. My wife leaves soon there after. In retrospect I stayed in town too long. The trappings, the celebration of yesterday, are gone. Like the circus -- the well oiled machine that it is -- ironman has come and gone. One more cliche that fits the mold.

By monday night the weekly sprint triathlon is in full swing and I can barely walk. Don’t these people have any respect for what I just did?

I did not deal with the week very well. I stayed with friends Amy and Greg in the house, and realized they probably would have liked a little alone time. I made the long drive back to manhattan, and when I got there no one was ready for a drink with me. The trumpets and ticker tape parade was on hold.

What I had done was pretty neat, but honestly it is far from remarkable. Almost 3,000 people had done the same thing. That very day. Hundreds of thousands will complete the event in a year. Even the let down I went going through was/is unremarkable. It happens to just about everybody who does this distance. But, for seven full months not one day went by when I didn’t think this event. I certainly did not think about our wedding this much, for this long. (For the record our wedding still ranks as a better day.) It was very hard to let go.

In the end I cam away with a few tremendous lessons from the event.

1. Patience and smiles go a really long way.

2. As important as you think you or the event is … it will end. And you are going to have to go to work, be social, clean house, pay bills, breath air down the road.

3. These are choices. We are some of the wealthiest, healthiest, luckiest people in the world. To even be able to make the choice to get across the line you are among the healthiest, safest, spoiled people on this planet. In history.

4. I’ll do it all again.

Run.

Run.

2:30 pm - To this point things have gone as near to perfect as things can go when you set out to workout for twelve plus hours. My memories of the day are clean, clear and picturesque. I am certain that there must have been some shining examples of human misery. But I saw very little of it. As such, my retelling of the day may come out more glossy than what actually took place.

However. I do remember the smell of the transition tent when moving from the bike to run. Mix sweat with urine with earth with farts with poo with suffering and you get the idea. Ironman markets a massive amount of gear and product. I do not intend to purchase the his and/or hers cologne set should it be made available.

If I had any hesitation in wanting to set out for the marathon, the overwhelming stench of the tent set me right.

2:40 pm - The first few steps of the marathon are down hill. I notice I have a slight pain in my right foot as I set out. One-thousand meters into the run it disappeared. Those thousand meters might have been the longest of the race.

2:50 pm – Chipp has come up on me and passed. He looks like he is doing better. That makes me feel good for him, but sad for me. I am already a little bit beyond my pace. I wish I could go with him, but I can ill afford to make such a stupid move so early in the day. I hang back and relax.

Of the core group I trained with I am now bringing up the rear. Yes, I noticed it. And counted it important enough to recount it in essay. So it would be a lie to say it didn’t bother me at all. But I learned enough humility from the people I love and respect to understand that I needed to let my friends go, keep a smile on my face and race with-in my means. It is a much smaller victory, for sure. But a victory. And one of which I still remain proud.

3:30 pm – We are out on the loneliest stretch of the race; for me at least. It is a stretch of country road that is an out and back and comprises most of the marathon. It is different than being on the bike. On a bike when there are spectators you can’t really interact with them. But here we are on foot and we could, if there was anyone with whom to interact, of course.

To me, running is a solitary activity. Often I have sought out small races in small places. But I even feel a sense of solitude in the largest marathons (40,000+) in crowded cities (D.C. and Philadelphia). It’s a lot like living in New York City to me. People all around you. All moving in the same direction. All going to the same place, ultimately. Some are on the sidelines to cheer you on. Others, well, they are sort of in your way and all you want to do is keep moving. Keep moving forward.

Out here on this road there is no one but us marathoners. There is tall grass. Running brooks. Countryside. It is lonely, but in a different way than it was for all my miles in Central Park. And it is every bit as wonderful.

4:15 pm – I am through ten miles. There is a photo that was taken of me in this range. I am smiling and there is surprise and joy on the face of my wife. I am starting to feel the fatigue of the day. But seeing my family and friends in town renews me. I like impressing them with my good humor. The way I am taking this on with joy, and continue to move forward with a grin.

5:00 pm – The turn around in the marathon goes by the house in which we are staying and right on past the finish line. Only fools who think too much of themselves – the sort of fools who would sign up for an iron distance event – would think the idea of passing by obvious points for stopping and being strong enough not to do just that is “neat”. I am one such fool.

5:05pm – There is something that has been going on all day that is, well, pretty awesome. Sure, sure, iron distance triathlon. Great. Whatever! I am currently a perfect 5-for-5 in “trashshots” that I have attempted.

The organization that runs ironman has some strict rules about where you can throw things out. You take on a lot of energy and fluids during the day. This produces a lot of garbage. Athletes are penalized for “abandonment”, or throwing away things in non-designated areas in order to keep the course clean. It’s a good rule.

To encourage folks to throw away their refuse within aid station areas the volunteers on the course have set up clearly designed targets for you to aim your throws – or as I am calling them trashshots.

I hit a card board cut out of a bear and a moose. I scored a goal in a hockey net with a half full bottle of water and on the run scored on regular jumpshot in a trash bin AND! -- the money shot for the day – an around the head, hook shot of a water bottle. Dead center.

Again, things were coming up Chapman.

6:15pm – I have moved through town. I don’t feel the worse I have ever felt, but I don’t feel the best, either. However, this is a day for perspective. For 16 miles into the marathon-leg of an iron distance triathlon … I feel pretty great. I finally let myself think about the finish line. Just not too much.

During training, to keep myself from ever thinking about what crossing the finish line might feel like, I would enforce stiff penalties for going there. I have a few tricks for enforcement. One way would be to sprint for the next two minutes, whether on bike, on foot or in the water. I would do this if I had any visions of the finish line. The other way would be to add up all the hours I had left to do train before I would be to race day – which anything more than a week out was near impossible task for a non math savant.

The danger in signing up, training for, or even watching the event on television is that it boils the day down to just a few moments. Yes. Those are special moments and should be remembered; but thinking about them too much has a funny way of tricking your mind into believing there isn’t still very hard work to do. And even here, with much more behind me than in front of me there is very hard work to do, indeed.

But I think of the line if only to calculate what I need to do to finish before sundown. It is the first time I put a concrete time goal into my head. It works out that if I run sub fourteen minute miles from this point forward I can make it. I am confident I can do this with ease, but again have enough respect to know that things could still go wrong.

I am pulling consistent 10 – 11 minute miles. Every time I go below 14 minutes I take the difference and put it in a bank, ready to be spent if needed.

Through to mile nineteen I have about eight minutes to spare to make my new goal. On another day I might have pushed through it. I have felt worse in marathons and certainly pushed through, but I still don’t know the event and how my body will react well enough to take any chances. For the first time I decide to walk and pull everything together. I have family I want to be smiling for in about three miles. That, more than five or ten minutes saved on the day, is my goal.

7:15pm – The home stretch. I have pulled myself off the back road and am making the final ascent into town. I remain steadfast in my commitment to run all hills. I am gaining on town center and see my wife. She is nearly tearful. “Get into that arena.” I bark at her playfully. My wife is routinely late for things. I have learned to abide it as this is not a fault of her character. It is fault of my character that my lack of patience allows me to get so annoyed so quickly. Yet, if she is late in this instance it would probably be a reasonable time to be disappointed with her. I half kid when I say it again.

I am down around the final turn around and I have one mile to go.

I am aware that I have chosen everything on this path, nothing was forced upon me. And yet it took an enormous amount of self sacrifice to make this moment happen. The sun is still out, and I am proud to have beaten it to the finish line. It looks remarkable over mirror lake.

People in town are going bananas. Still. They have been going bananas for 12 plus hours. They will continue to go bananas until the last sorry soul crosses the finish line. In the ten seconds I am in their life I am happy to absorb all the energy they have to give.

I enter the Olympic park and it is useless to fight back some small tears. A competitor has decided it is his time to sprint. We are not close to breaking one of the important hour marks. At all the hour marks, be it 10, 11, 12, 13 there is a crazy roar from the crowd to encourage competitors to make that arbitrary, but mentally important, goal. This is somewhat poor form on his part. But I let it pass. He’s got the legs to sprint. He’s not going to ruin my moment, and I decide to let him have his.

I focus on the finish. I hear Shaun Chapman, from Brooklyn, NY … and I am so overwhelmed I miss the rest. But that’s ok. I don’t need anyone to tell me what I already know.

I am an ironman.

Everyday is a snow day

He sat underneath the awning in the park rotunda. The opportunity to move had passed him by. So he sat, waiting for the next moment to move along. Snow was coming down pretty fiercely, and coming in a lot of different directions. He wandered out here to to watch the storm come in. To feel the nostalgia of a morning off. Instead of the radio he checked a website. To check and see if things were closed. Things were closed. City wide, in fact.

Its a little bit different now than it was then. Probably a lot different, actually. He gets mornings off when ever he likes. Not by choice. There wasn’t any one moment that said, “Things will be different now.” They just are. He just is.

But there he was, still sitting in the rotunda. He wandered out of an apartment that was both getting smaller and bigger. The burden was bigger. More to clean, more to to do, more to keep-up. More to pay for. Yet, smaller because there were now days on end when he didn’t leave. Funny, he didn’t feel like a hermit or some sort of social recluse. But, technically he had become one. There wasn’t any one moment that said, “You will be a hermit now.”

He started to draw some figures in the snow. Tracing tracks like a bird. He then imagined a fox chasing that bird. It was a hot pursuit of squiggles and lines in an imaginary game of cat and mouse. The bird won this one. But for how much longer?

There was lot of snow. It was coming faster now, and from every direction.

It had been seven months since she out out grew him. This was an instance when -- like on snow days -- the apartment seemed smaller. It would be another five months before she knew she had out grown him. Outgrown their love. It would be another eight months before he realized she was gone. It would be about another three on the eight on top of the five that she would actually get up and leave. There was nothing that said, “Time to leave now.” She just did.

Suddenly, the urge to stand had grown. A moment to move was fast approaching. He didn’t want to miss this one. In this moment he could go anywhere. Do anything. He’d start with a cup of coffee and a joke with a barista. Who knows what would happen after that? A new lead? A big adventure? This was a big city. The big city! Opportunity was in and around every corner. Just look at him. Outside. On a snow day!

Of course, they were all snow days. Now.

Bike

Bike
8:00 am - Transition is long by most standards. But not nearly long enough for me. The crowd, 10 deep at spots, was roaring. You still feel good at this point in the day and the smile won’t fade. I have complained at length to friends and family about the cost of this event. Suffice to say I won’t be demanding a refund. This is as close as you will ever come to being a celebrity athlete.

At the end of transition you grab your swim to bike bag. You dump it out on the ground of the tent and assemble yourself into a cyclist. I asked the guy next to me if this was his first event. He replied, “Coming out of the water is pretty crazy, huh?” It was his third. He knew exactly what I was feeling right then.

We just leave our belongings on our bags and the volunteers take them away wet suits and all. We run to our bikes. They are fetched for us. Valet for bikes, valet for wet suits. Such is the life of a celebrity athlete.

8:10 am - And now I am on a bike. We go through town. People are yelling. For me. For Brooklyn, which is on my jersey. For the sake of yelling, perhaps. Again, it is 8:10 AM! The energy is unreal. These people are well caffeinated or really inspired.

I have a race plan and it is to enjoy myself. Thoroughly. The hard work is behind me, race day was for the sheer enjoyment of being fit and being alive, and not falling apart. Part of executing on that plan is to allow all manner of folks to pass me on the first loop of the bike. This ended up being easier than I thought.

I am a man of incredible ego. I have always believed I could do just about anything, and believed that I would be the best in the room at it. The problem is persistence and follow through. This is how my wife has changed my life. She has taught me an incredible amount about marking a goal and meeting it. She has also tempered my ego -- it is far more likely that she is going to end up as the best in the room.

The bike is a particular week spot for my ego mania. I have been put in my place on hills many times. And I have always signed up for more. Lake Placid is proof positive of this, as it is well known as one of the hilliest ironman courses in the country and the world. I also have a hard time letting anyone pass me on the bike. So, letting people pass me on hills ... tough. But I try and hang back because, as Robert Frost said, “The woods of Placid are dark and deep, and I have a marathon to go before I sleep. A marathon to go before I sleep”. I may be misquoting, though. It was a long day.

9:00 am - I am through the first bit of hill. It has been all spin and all smiles. I have run into my friends Jonathan and Greg. Jonathan sang, “LIGHTNING MAN!” to me as he passed. It is an homage to a ridiculous bike I own. It has been a long and fun training period with these friends. Inside jokes have grown. We tease and support each other.

I am through the last bit of the hills and before the decent I see my sister-in-law and her fiancée. They are on their bikes in the middle of nowhere. It is amazing to see them. They shouldn’t have come this far for this boring race. But they did.

9:15 am - Descending for 10 miles. I would hit 48 mph on the way down. There is a little rain the first loop but it is mostly dry by the time I get there. I try not to let the inner 10 year old who is shouting, “FASTER, FASTER, FASTER” completely take over.

10:00am - This is the golden part of the bike. It is flat and it is fast. But even if you feel like you are getting speed without much effort, it is best to proceed with caution. The way I see it is thus: speed and time, these things can be made up. Effort once expended cannot. Not without a good night’s sleep anyway. And so, even though this is where ego man wants to say, “I could kill all of you right here”. Reality man says, “But I won’t.”

At this point I have seen just about all my training partners and everyone looks really great.

10:45am - I have been taking on food at regular intervals and doing a good job of hydrating. A. Really. Good. Job. No sir. Hydration, not a problem. So ... where to pee? Starting to become a problem. Peeing on the bike is an art I would say I have not yet quite mastered. It is hard to master, frankly. There is a lot of pressure that develops while sitting for 6+ hours in a bike saddle. And that makes relief a tricky thing. Oh. Yeah. And going 20+ mph on a bike with people behind you and having warm urine spray everywhere, that also makes it pretty tricky, too.

I did it. I did not poop on myself, though. And I did not wear diapers. And this officially concludes the poo-poo and pee-pee conversation. I had to get it out of the way. Immediately after: would you do it again? The most asked question is: did you pee on yourself/poop on yourself/wear diapers?

11:00am - The first real test of the day. We are beginning the climb back to town and if my legs have turned to cinder blocks things will not be looking good. I don’t just climb with ease, I ALSO still have the smile. I am spinning free, easy and clear.

And there is reason to smile. There are some very large dogs laying in some hay with a family ... wait, no ... those are billy goats. This is absurd. Thousands of dollars of bikes, ridden by lycra clad biker gangs and there are billy goats. This a David Lynch film. This is weird. But this is also a lot of fun.

We are approaching town and the final big climb, called Papa Bear, is packed. It is very much like the tour de france. Watching the tour I always think, “I would hate to have all those people in my way.” I was wrong. it. is. awesome. They make way for you and are cheering in your ear. They yell for Brooklyn. I fist pump. They yell for Shaun. I smile.

Just up and over the hill and around the bend is my family. Big colorful signs that say Go Uncle Shaun! and Run Chappy! T-Shirts. I want to put on a good show so I floor it through town. For the first time letting myself really work. I bank through town, the crowds still two or three deep. All yelling. My face is still bent in a smile, on a quick decent through town I even hit a few bumps that turn into “jumps”. I decide that this is probably not the best thing to do in the middle of an ironman. But the ten year old, he’s taken over for now.

I am off to the second loop of the bike.

11:30am - I have been doing a back and forth with my buddy Chipp on the bike. It is great to be out here with a friend. Chipp’s wife is extremely pregnant. I have heard people say that pregnancy is binary, not something that can happen in degrees. Whatever, she is due, like ... today. And her husband is 6 hrs by car away and doing an ironman. That makes her more pregnant. There is a very good chance that she is having a baby right ... freaking ... now. (Spoiler: The baby doesn’t arrive for four more days). Chipp tells me that he is starting to have a little bit of IT Band trouble. I tell him to hang in there. I mean it. I want him to hang in there, it is nice having him ride with me.

2:30pm - The rest of the ride goes shockingly well. There was something to all this prep-work. I am having an insane amount of fun. That is a theme for the whole darn day. I manage to negative split the bike. My first loop was faster than my second loop.

But the moment I am really nervous for is coming. I am about to get off the bike for the first time in over 6 hrs. This is when things tend to go wrong. You feel cramps and pinches in places you aren't expecting. What will happen for me?

I slip out of my shoes and a I feel ... nothing. No pinches. No cramps. No nothing. Not true, I feel something. Relief. I hand my very expensive (to me) and prized (to me) bike to a stranger I have never met who I trust will rack it as if it where his own. It's that kind of day.

And now to turn myself into a marathoner.

Swim

6:45 am - Floating in the water having a pee in the wet suit. There is a crowd of 3000 swimmers around me and another 6,000 plus on the beach. This officially makes it the most public act of urination for me by about 9,000 plus.

In spite of the peeing, and the guy with the bullhorn, and the forced adrenaline from the repeat plays of “Ironman” by Sabbath this moment is full of calm. It has been at least a year building til this point and for quite a few of us a great deal longer.

In 2000 I spent my summer working 50 - 60 hours weeks in food service. I smoked a pack a day (Camel Lights) and weighed 235 lbs. I spent my evenings with some fellas who cycled through jobs like this all the time. They killed them selves for middling pay, made car payments and rent (mostly), drank cheap beer. Repeat. This freaked me out. There was no way I was going to drink cheap beer for the next 40 to 60 years. At 20 years old I was having something that looked too much like a midlife crisis, complete with hacking cough, paunchy gut and a can of warm Miller Lite. What the hell was I doing with myself?

I had a conversation with my dad on one of those summers night. My father has never been accused of bending an ear so when he speaks it is to the point. In fact, to make things easier he comes armed with a handful simple choice turns of phrase, reusable for many occasions, “Everything perceived leaves an impression, the question is ‘how much’” or “Any job worth doing, is worth doing right”. At this point I wasn’t sure I was doing a job worth doing. And I certainly wasn’t doing it right. I told him as much.

He said, “The thing I was doing when I was 20, wasn’t what I was doing when I was 25. The thing I was doing when I was 25 wasn’t the thing I was doing when I was 30.” Out of context it doesn’t seem like much. But they were the right words at the right time.

My parents have always given me the freedom to choose my own path. Providing me with just enough opportunity to make things happen, but never so overbearing that I suffocate under the weight of expectation. I took his advice to mean that things could be different, it just had to be my choice. I quit the smokes and rejoined my college swim team. Oh and met met my wife.

The last part. That’s how I ended up in this water at 6:45 am on a Sunday morning in July.

7:00 am - Cannon. Gun. Bazooka. Loud. Not really sure what it was they shot off. It was a bit of a blur. But there was a big bang and then there was white. And fists. And feet.

It would have been easy for me to freak out. But I didn’t. I went with it. I didn’t try to fight anything. It is as close as I will ever come to being David Caradine. I felt like a Tai Chi master. Fist came my way: DODGE! Leg kick to the left: BLOCK! The swim is two loops of what is basically a rectangle. There is a somewhat visible golden line you can follow, but it is difficult with 3,000 other folks looking for the same thing, churning gallons of water as they go. On the way out things were certainly rough, but I never lost control. I held my ground without being so rigid that I bruised and broke in the washing machine that was the once calm Mirror Lake.

7:28 am - Done with a loop and sailing. In the water there is a muffled hum. You know that just beyond the water there is a buzz. You sense that it has rained a bit. You burst free and there is roaring thunder of 6,000+ fans and friends and family. They’ll have to wait another 30 minutes for me. Back to the muddled hum.

On the second loop I hugged the line and just floated as much as one can float in the middle of an extreme athletic event. I was coy about setting any goal times for the day. I knew about where I could be for each leg, and I knew about where I should be. But deep down inside I desperately wanted to break an hour in the swim. Not so much I was going to let it ruin my day. But I wanted to get there. And get there effortlessly.

I popped up at 59:47. 13 seconds to spare. A smile would come across my face. It would pretty much stay there for the next 12 hours.

Prep

Preparation:
The previous year - I started doing marathons in 2005 because I intended to someday do an iron distance triathlon. How I ended up at this iron event, on this day, took a bit of slight of hand.

One friend called another and said, “Everyone one is doing it. We have to. This is our last best chance.” Little did anyone know that the everyone that was doing it was also being told that everyone was doing it. My friend Jonathan said as much to me on the beach at Coney Island. Everyone was on board. It was a done deal.

We would have to go to Lake Placid to sign up. This was to guarantee entry. The week before I had my first and only ‘did not finish’. It was at a half iron distance. My stomach shut down. Two weeks before that my wife and I had had a strained conversation about the demands of training on our social life and marital bliss. For me, this was not quite done deal.

I went to Lake Placid anyway. Ironman weekend in Lake Placid is not a place to go ‘undecided’. There is no chance you make it out of town with your money or your life. By Monday morning it finally was a done deal for me. I would start having anxiety dreams two weeks later.

My official training plan started on December 28th, 2009. At the peak I put about 22 - 25 hrs a week into training. On big days I burned about 9,000 calories. My resting caloric burn rate came to about 2,700 a day. This is how many calories I would burn if I did nothing at all.

There were a few highlights of the preparation period. Strangely, many of the same incidents also sound a bit like lowlights.

There was the iron time trial in New Paltz, New York. This was four loops of a 28 mile course. You had to summit the Mohonk mountians to complete a loop. Twice. After the second loop I crashed my bike twice from fatigue and hunger. The worst of it is you pass by your car, which would gladly take you home or to a cheeseburger. I did not stop.

There was the 1.5+ mile San Francisco Bay swim. The water was 57 degrees. I wore no wet suit. I wore no wet suit. Children may not be in my future. I did not stop.

There was 18.5 miles at race pace (slow) in 95 degrees and 115% humidity (slight, but not unbelievable, exaggeration). This was done the day after I did my longest bike ride of 120 miles. I did not stop.

But mostly, when I think back on the training and the prep, it wasn’t so much a singular big day that proved my mettle. It was linking a lot of smaller events. Being consistent. Getting up, getting the rides in. Watching the food in take. Getting enough sleep so my body didn’t fail. Ignoring the please for social calls, and getting everything done so I didn’t get sick, or injured

By race day I felt fully prepared, even if I still didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t have a single anxiety dream (nightmare) in the final weeks. Done deal, indeed.

Lotto

Most days I get caught up in the hope that I will run into as little calamity as possible, looking to eek out another busy day. Our schedules (though admittedly my wife creates a busier day for herself than I do), mostly out of guilt and poor planning gets packed to the gills. We sometimes get to a warm, cozy spot where all is in balance...

And then your doorbell rings. It is destiny calling. And destiny, it seems, is a really flustered carpenter.

At about noon on a regular old Thursday afternoon, the folks doing renovation upstairs from us hit a water pipe. Now, I don't mean they "hit" a "water pipe" in the way Cheech and Choong would, though it may have been the case.

I mean hit the way Captain Smith would in regards to an iceberg.

The super and the owner of the construction company flew into our apartment at a pace that said: Trouble. Or, a very silly grown up game of hide and seek. Oddly I hoped for the later.

At this point there were no visible signs of apocalypse. So a part of me was kind of like, “Hey. Dude. You mind not knocking my stuff all around. I sort of like some of it”.

His urgency would soon be clear when a single bead of water hit my shoulder.

This lonely bead of water reminds me of the time I was playing the greatest game of racquetball of my life. It was against my much smaller, more nimble Japanese roommate. He was awesome (and may in fact still be awesome). I always played him tough, but failed to come up a winner in any of our matches. This particular day I was playing him hard. I mean real hard. I was ahead late in the game. Something like 19 – 16. I saw victory. I went for the kill. I hit one of those tough slam-the-ball-hard-into-the-back-wall shots. I gave it my all. In giving it my all I somehow I managed to catch my face. In the moment I don’t remember much of the pain. But I remember this: I dropped for me knees and for one second (a second that, like all moments such as these, felt much longer) I watched one deep, dark drop of blood hit the floor. As I looked at that one drop I thought two things:

Oh.

And

Shit.

Just like my face during the racquetball “event” as it would come to be known, our ceiling, on that quite Thursday afternoon, opened up like a really good bible story.

The calamity was complete and total. Our personal items were salvaged. The walls and ceilings of over 75% of the apartment were not.

We had just begun to get settled in this new place. It was almost feeling like “home”. The place now looks like, well, if I came home and say a homeless man crapping in the corner, I would not be all that surprised. Let’s be clear. This was someone else’s fault entirely. We were sitting at home enjoying breakfast one morning and by the same night not able to eat a meal for the stench and dust that covered everything. It really would not be all that different if you were eating a really yummy cupcake and some dude punched you in the face. But then was like, “Oh. I’m sorry that’s not what I meant at all. My mistake.”

But since that day I have been feeling overly positive. The Red Sox and Patriots both blew late leads to lose over the weekend. I got a fever. I missed a long run. A bike ride with the wife was interrupted over a stupid argument.

All of these are annoyances, sure. But they are just that; annoyances, nothing more.

At this stage in the game I have realized something pretty important: When it comes to winning lottery tickets, I am sitting on a big one. I am a straight, white, male, born during the most prosperous time, on the most prosperous continent of all time. Ever. We white males, straight, born in Massachusetts control an obscene amount of that wealth.

When bad things happen to me, like, enough water in my house to put out two Great Chicago Fires, they are merely inconvenient. There was someone fixing my house just minutes after the water stopped. No less than five friends have asked: need a place to stay? This happens when ever I get into even a little bit of trouble.

For most people on this planet this is not even close to the case. I could point you to a million sites that will tell you how bad life is for a lot of people. 80% of the world’s population is living on $10 a day. While 1.6 billion have never had any access to electricity, much less known what it is to be without it in a few rooms. Matt Shepard lost his life just ten years ago, in a real gross way, for liking men.

We could go over all of this ad nausea. I don’t blame myself for these troubles, but I sure am thankful to not count them amongst mine.

I’ll probably get busy again and take things for granted. But every once in a while it is real nice to be reminded why I don’t play the lottery. It’s because I’ve already won in so many ways.