More crossness

I got back on the steed this past Sunday to race Southern Cross. I'll let these pics do the talking. They are courtesy of Woodcock Cycle Works, except for the spectacular sand splat (which is not me, though I did have a similar incident during a warm-up lap - fortunately no cameras were prepared for it), which was masterfully shot by Sierra Blake. 

Cross racing is a good time. A good time indeed. I placed 12th in the B-race, just 11 seconds behind Johnny S. One day I'll catch him. One day.

Ride report

in:      -2'C wind 15ks NW

out:   3'C wind 20ks NW

  

A prophet in his own town

Paul thinks he may be Jesus. At least for this day, and at this time, with these things happening on this river, in this boat. He thinks of those stories of Jesus in boats on the water. When he calmed the storm, when he walked on the water, when he told them to fish on the other side of the boat. He rehearses what he might have to do if things go wrong, which he' s sure they will.

It's happened before when he's had this feeling. He and his friends are walking down the Main Street in the small Canadian town they live in after school. They notice the friend of an older brother of a boy whose Dad owns a car dealership in town driving a racing style Japanese motorcycle with nearly one thousand cubic centimetres of piston displacement. The boy whose Dad owns the car dealership says to the others how powerful the motorcycle is, that it's just as fast as the ones they actually race with in Europe. Paul watches the teenager on the bike scream by, engine whining, gears shifting, so that the front wheel lifts and the biker rides the back wheel. After watching the it pass Paul says, "That guy's going to crash," and thus it comes to pass, with all of the boys watching, that the bike's front wheel indeed dips, rises again, then dips and falls to touch the pavement. The rider has turned the wheel off of straight such that it grabs the pavement and wrenches the whole bike over to the left. The back wheel whips out to the right and slides along blacktop until the rubber catches and grips and by force of momentum the bike lifts up again into the air, tumbles once with the rider still on it, before the forces of nature rip him free of it and he rolls, then slides along the grit and fine gravel that accumulates along curbs on the edges of streets. The bike bounces along and at last scrapes to a stop too.

"Whoa!" says the boy whose father owns a car dealership, "did you really just say that that was going to happen?" The other boys generally smile and laugh and congratulate Paul, who squints at the scene unfolding up the street.

"It's going to be okay," he says and smiles. "It's just a lesson the guy needed to learn about how not to ride." With that Paul becomes a celebrity of prediction - a prophet in his own town. The boys spread his story around town and tell of other close calls like it that he's predicted. They tell the stories with such conviction that Paul starts to think before he speaks.

Ride report

in:        4'C wind 25ks NW

out:     6'C wind 35ks WNW

Not even if he was hungry

Out on the river the boy with the striped shirt begins to consider another facet of his Christliness. The boat drifts downstream, the motor idles and occasionally engages, at the behest of the vigilant father in order to steer around corners or avoid sandbars. The boy in the striped shirt is grudging in this observation. It won't be carelessness that causes this disaster. There will be little room for schadenfreude or "I-told-you-sos" here. So he waits and watches and he does not fish.

"C'mon Paul," says his friend, the older brother. "It's not hard. It's fun!" Paul only imagines that time that he watched his older brother catch a fish and he had to try to hold it for him, while he prised the the hook out of its mouth. The slime of the scales and the sharp edges of the gills stay in his memory. He can feel them on his fingers just thinking about it. He can't imagine anything, even hunger, that would cause him to want to put himself in a position where he was the one catching the fish and asking for help to pry the hook out of that gasping maw. For an eleven year old he dwells more on discomfort and trouble than courage and adventure. 

As if on cue the rod the younger brother holds dips and he yells and the father smiles and leans forward, picking up the net in one hand and touching the bending rod with the other. "Take the line in slow," he says. They all watch as the boy listens and slowly reels in the taut line until the jackfish appears at the side of the boat to be netted and lifted into it. Together father and son unhook the fish and set it free again. Paul watches. Though his anxiousness recedes, he cannot see the point in this, much less the fun. What would Jesus do, Paul thinks, if he was a fish?

Ride report

in:        5'C wind 20ks NW

out:   10'C wind 15ks NNW

Occupy the Krahn Barn!

From the Red! 

Please join us on October 21 as we revel in, and listen to, a Mennonite return to music-loving socialist roots, under the guise of a nearby geographical feature. One more time, and with feeling, to keep the show front and centre, here's the poster.

Let us not refrain from repeating the refrain! 


You can follow The Krahn Barn on Facebook (I know I know ... but whatcha gonna do?) 

Ride report

in:       9'C wind 10ks SE (rain)

out:    13'C wind 10ks NW (rain)

Winning

It isn't everything. It isn't the only thing. But it sure makes a difference. Today, after beating Minnedosa 4-1 and winning a wildcard berth at the provincial championships, it felt like a gift. A well-earned gift. The thing is, that you don't always earn a win, and a competitor who understands healthy competition knows this. Hard work, even hard work and superior play, does not always carry the day. (Ah, those juicy cliches - I'm talking sport and they just dribble down my chin! Just wait for more. Get the nappies!)

When you're on your game you know the fickleness of it. You know that you can't blame the equipment, or the field, or the ref. You know that if you do you're weaker because of it and your win, or your loss, is lessened. So it's a gift to win. Well earned or served up with a surprise, you just take it and nod and feel good about your prayers to the sporting gods, and your attitude to life in general. If you can keep it that way, win or lose, you're onto something. 

The reality is that winning just relieves the pressure, for the moment. Until you lose again, or until they score one, or two, or more on you, before you muster a reply. The quality of the competition and the competitive spirit depends on your ability to understand when you've earned your gift, and when you've been graced (mercied?) with it. Today we earned it, so it feels best. To get better we'll have to see what we learned from it too - that after going down by one within the first three minutes we staved off a collapse and found a way to ignore each other's faults and mistakes, and moved forward. 30 minutes later we scored, and then 10 minutes later we scored again, and the rest, as they say ... 

The victory was an earned gift today. We'll take it. We'll take it when we don't earn it too, and we'll smile and nod and say our prayers for the grace we have received.

Ride report

in:         6'C wind 10ks SE

out:    12'C wind 15ks SE

   

Someone else's business

Two things about the brothers' father: He is borrowing the boat; he does not know the river. Knowing that the boat is borrowed, the boy in the striped shirt infers that the father knows less than enough about how to use it, or drive it, or whatever it is you call the operation of a small aluminum fishing boat. Already he'd watched and been asked to help, and tried to do so but only uselessly hung on to the gunwales of the overturned boat as the father heaved it by the stern backboard off of the back of the pickup, righted it, and then dragged it across the gravel and down slick clay bank, the three boys hanging off of it as it slumps down to the water. Then the boy in the striped shirt scrambled back up the bank for safety's sake, turning around expecting to see his friends beside him only to watch them whooping and heaving themselves into it. The father is already back at the truck hoisting the outboard motor up from the truck box, and then lugs it down the bank.

The boy in the striped shirt simply doesn't believe that this exuberance will end well. The Spring run-off has swelled the Pembina such that it is obvious even to this inexperienced skeptic that it is running fast. Too fast for all this nonchalance. But the father and his sons complete their preparations, load their rods and the picnic lunch into the boat and call out, finally, to him to "C'mon, let's go!"

He inches and slips down the bank, gingerly grabbing at and following the gunwales as he gets to it. Once he climbs in, the father pushes them into the water and hops in himself as the current catches the boat and moves them offshore to the centre of the river. The boy watches with concern as the father climbs past him and over benches to reach the stern. He lowers the propeller into the water and pulls the starter cord three, four, five times before it sputters to life. Drifting with the current now the boy says, above the put-put of the motor, "Is this the direction we want to go?"

"Yup," he says, smiling. "We'll drift down with the current, then tool back upstream and drift down again." The boy tries to return the smile. "It'll be fun right boys!" the father says. "We'll follow the river and catch some fish." The boy in the striped shirt wants to be this romantic. That would not be the word he'd use, not at this age, but he'd understand the sentiment that living in the moment would be a less troublesome way of managing this day, or any day, but he'd have no facility to get there. At least not at this time. In fact, not for another 20 years would he have this facility. In fact, the gravity of this unlikely knowledge weighs on him. It's like a mission. It's like he must be about someone else's business.         

Ride report

in:       16'C wind 25ks SE

out:     27'C wind 50ks SE

A tough day

You win some, you lose some. It's true. The soccer team had a bad day today, and so our league season ended after the semi-finals. Still our record for the season was 10-3-3. We hope for a wildcard berth in the provincials. 

They say that breaking up is hard to do. In this case watching a break up is hard to do. This, also, is true, even watching it from a distance. It's hard to watch people hurt, even when you know it's necessary. I think I'd modify the bard's words to "I say, we will have no more 'going steady'." Let's just practice loose affiliations that allow for quick entrances and exits. Only when you find that you're inhabiting the same physical space, and you're really not minding it at all, in fact you can't really see things any other way should you consider declaring some sort of committed association. 

PS. Telephone conversations are terrible, but I can't imagine having the conversation I just had with my daughter via texts. So I say that telephones are terrible, but they're better than the alternatives.


Ride report
in:      14'C wind 20ks SE
out:   24'C wind 25ks SE