KRAC Blog

I like King Kaufman's take on the Yankees: "The Yankees will have plenty of offense again. So they lost Gary Sheffield. Big deal. They lost him for most of last year and didn't even blink. They still have one of the best hitters of the last quarter century -- this will be news to fans in the Bronx -- in Alex Rodriguez, plus Derek Jeter, Bobby Abreu, Jason Giambi, Hideki Matsui, Johnny Damon. This is a team so powerful that Robinson Cano, a legitimate slugger, hits eighth, and legitimately so."

Usual stakes, gentlemen?

The Best Exercise You're Not Doing. Goddamn right I'm not doing them. What else you got? Screw this, I'm getting a beer.

We were told that the course was controversial. In previous years it had been a loop, this year it was point-to-point, and the story was that this was to accommodate the various ethnic neighborhoods in East L.A., who wanted the race to run through their part of town. (Jim's friend Scott also told us that his GPS had the course long, at 26.4. I'd be interested in finding out more about that.) The course was supposedly mostly flat, with a long descent at the start, but it didn't feel particularly flat, and the hills at the end were brutal-- a long bridge over railroad tracks and the Los Angeles River. I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest. There were other problems, too. The water stops were at every mile, but sometimes they were before the mile banners, sometimes after, and they were not well marked. I hit 'em all, but it was a nuisance having to find them. Probably a third of the race ran through interesting, attractive neighborhoods. The rest were, there's no other word for it, ugly. And a lot of those were warehouses or industrial. Crowd support was spotty, as you might expect. There was no shade. LA is the entertainment capital of the world-- you'd think there'd be better celebrities than the guy who played the producer in "Borat" and a competitor from "American Idol".

On the other hand, it was great.

The hand written note on Jim's bib says, "Help Me, Deerfoot." It must have worked: he made his time.

I went out with finishing as my goal, so I suppose I can say the same. Two things happened to me out there: I took the training too lightly, and it was 80°. I suppose I could have done something about the former, but the latter was out of my hands, and was probably the bigger factor.