:: No Athlete ::

:: i am no athlete... any reader of fluxvapor knows as much after viewing the statistics of my recent return from rakkitbrawl retirement. irish sweater recently dropped me a line accusing me of playing against an imaginary friend because i had scored 3 (!) wins (in about 300 career games, which gives me a 0.01 +- 0.01 batting average). the sweater knows because he was my abuser back in the b-more before i met the dieter. anyways, i've recently been trying to get serious about the upcoming season, organize my goals and the like. the only conclusion i've come to is that i am no athlete. thinking back on my triumphs in the athletic venue only confirms one thing. i have a good shot of being spectacular compared to my competition if no-one shows up... usually anyway. a few examples to ponder: in little league soccer, i was the coaches first pick for goalie until the new kid who's brother was a pro-goalie for the cleveland crunch showed up. in high school i made the varsity lacrosse squad as a freshman. little did i know my position was defensive tackling dummy, and it was the first year of the team so there was no junior varsity for me to bench-warm... and as for cycling, i liked the time trial. used to do this series in maryland and have a few trophies from that: 1st place in the 19-23 age category with no-one winning 2nd or 3rd. cyclo-cross, i won a race when the feller ahead of me though he was done 5 ft from the actual finish and was already off his bike. i blew past like a *blur* and almost ended up in the pond. and in any state champs, if 10 people show up and 5 of them are from nj or md, i might be able to snag one of the 5 medals, on a good day, if i've been training like a dog. it's recently come to my attention that i might be no scientist either. i spent about 2 months developing a numerical simulation that takes a several hours to run. two weeks ago another feller in my group gave me two lines of code that show the same thing based on his analytic solution (thankfully his brother does not also play for the crunch). so in all respects, i'm fairly impressive. so long as there isn't anyone around to impress... ::