april 26, 1986

i remember when chernobyl blew up, and the global panic that followed, and the stories of the fire-fighters and helicopter pilots who died puking and bleeding, their skin blistering, within hours of trying to fight the radioactive fire that burned there.

a couple of years later someone (maybe the discovery channel back when they didn't suck) made a documentary, where they sent a robot with a camera into the sarcophagus, and all the way into the blown-out reactor chamber.

i was incredibly freaked out by that, knowing that the radiation levels there were so high that anything living would be killed, very painfully, in minutes if they were there, but there i was, watching it.

there's a photo essay here about the effects on the people who live/d there. (some of the pictures are pretty hard to take).

about fucking time

http://www.google.com/calendar/

crew

over the weekend i crewed for j. and her team for a 24-hour adventure race. she's been racing for a couple of years and so have her teammates, but this was the first time they'd raced together.

this race had 5 transistions (which is more than normal apparently, the order of legs went like this:

orienteering scramble (get any 2 of 4 possible controls) followed by a kayaking section
run/trek
orienteering, bike or foot, 9 checkpoints
run/trek
bike, 3 checkpoints
trek

teams had anywhere from 1 to 4 members, with most, including j.'s, being 4-person coed (at least one woman).

the race started at 2:30 p.m., and our job (there were 2 of us), was to drive the cars to the various transition areas, have all the gear, clothing, and food for the next leg ready to go, fill water bottles, and do whatever else the team needed, (bike maintainence for example), then clean up and organize everything and drive to the next transition area and do it all over again.

adventure racers are crazy; no sleep, crappy conditions, (it didn't rain, but everything was soaked from the previous weeks of rain), no sleep, weird food (pringles and ensure?), physical abuse, and sadistic race directors (it took most teams over 6 hours to get all 9 controls in the orienteering section, one of them was down a narrow, 30-foot long hole in the ground that opened up into a cave) to name but a few.

it looks insanely fun, and it was surprisingly hard to just be there watching and not doing. i felt like a slacker.

but i had a blast, and j.'s team got 3rd, finishing in just over 19 hours, with 10,000 feet of climbing, and something like 70 miles, which is pretty freakin' impressive considering that it was their first race, and the two teams that beat them were semi-pro.

bleagh!

i know it's lame to write about the weather, but it's rained something like 26 out of the last 34 days, and i'm freakin' SICK of it already. ugh.

in other news, i ran my first race of the year a couple weeks ago, and did ok, but felt like crap. i need to start training properly if i'm going to survive the year.

in completely unrelated news, i got a new camera, it's a little canon sd450 and i'm really happy with it (thanks to manduca for the recomendation!).

if it ever stops raining i'll take some nice pictures of the nature and post them here.

and so ends the dumbest post in a long time.