Post by chrisoconnor on Jan 22, 2008 15:11:00 GMT -5
Pacifica 50k Report: Craig’s Fake Accent (and Shoe Review)
You’ll want to know about my arrest, I’m sure, but I’ll get to that later. Wendell had told us we’d be starting down in the lower parking lot and so we all got down there when he’d said to. Then he separated us into different groups like those dogs do with livestock. It’s not that I’d ever compare Wendell to a dog, you understand, and I don’t mean to; it’s us, really -- we had a herd-like quality about us right there at the start: lowing and badly in want of direction. He sent the 9k folks off on a trail heading east, the rest of us on a more westerly trail, did that with just some backwards counting and the word, “Go.” (To determine who are the runners in your office, walk up to co-workers while they’re between thoughts and susceptible and say, “Five, four, three, two, one… Go!” and see what happens.) The first climb was about 1,600 feet and 3.5 miles. What Wendell had said was keep going up until you can’t go up anymore and that he’d left a sign for us at that spot where we wouldn’t be able to go any further up, a safeguard for those not likely to notice right off any more steps would be bad. He feared the less attentive among us might make like the late Evel Knievel and that Snake River Canyon stunt he tried back in ’74. Or maybe it was Sarah told him, “Chris is in that bunch -- you should put a sign up.” Their intent was for us to turn our asses around and come back down again. Craig, Steve and I were jawing on the hill, Steve wearing the Montrail Hardrocks.
Of the Hardrock, faithful reviewer, Aloysius Kropp, of Wheeling, WV, writes: “The Hardrock is a sassy trail runner with a message and that message is: ‘Hello, Sailor!’ This is a shoe everybody knows -- you’ll need a shot of penicillin afterwards, and if you’re Catholic, confession. This shoe is worth a couple novenas, guaranteed.”
We came back down, and headed across the parking lot to start on that 9k loop. Steve had backed off some, being cautious before Rocky Raccoon. That, or he wanted some time alone with his Hardrocks. Craig and I plowed on, himself feeling chatty with that fake English accent he got with a $100 contribution during a PBS pledge drive some years back. The instructions said he could use the accent to get things like evil villain roles in B movies, or to pick up hot babes on trail runs. (Trail running women being famously vulnerable to fake English accents.) Craig’s natural patois is from his native Bay Minette, Alabama, with a touch of Biloxi, Mississiippiissisi, where he moved after Bay Minette’s textile industry moved to Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. While Craig was trying to charm a gal, I concentrated on keeping my heart rate under 412. We finished the 9k loop and as Sarah had instructed, went back and did it again in the other direction. Craig had hit a low point in his run: the woman he’d been wooing turned out to be a regular PBS pledge drive donor and thanks to a $150 contribution (12 easy monthly payments of $30 each), was sent both the fake English accent kit and the fake Russian accent kit, employing the latter to pretend she didn’t speak English, accented or otherwise. The fake Russian accent kit included a pair of Sukhoi 38’s, a Soviet-era trail shoe design based on stolen schematics for a Brazilian industrial meat grinder.
No contemporary review is currently available, but Gennady Bershadensky, former Minister of Draperies and Window Dressing, and frequent guest contributor for Pravda’s popular weekly column, ‘Proletariat Footwear Today,’ once closed the column with a brief description of the Sukhoi 38: “Brute shoe for not skipping bourgeois rocks -- For crushing them!! Only do not get wet for stitching come loose. Sukhoi Factory produce 12,000 left foot now, with 8,000 right foot in April, 1987. Lines to purchase starting now for left, two days for right. Left come with loaf of bread.”
Passing back through the aid station on our way to the 11k loop again, a tired Craig accidentally reverted, asking Sarah, “Y’all got inny squirrel meat, steada this here jella beans?” Sarah, a fan of both Masterpiece Theatre and Antiques Roadshow muttered under her breath, “I knew it!”
I left behind me a fast-talking Craig Slagel, feverishly trying to convince Wendell and Sarah it was just a joke, that he only was performing a monologue from Blanche DuBois Goes Hunting, an off-off-Broadway gem he’d studied at Oxford. He even called Wendell, “old boy,” and said, “Bangers and mash! Bangers and mash!” but they weren’t having any of it. The jig was up: Craig’s a transatlantic Pygmalion -- about as English as a box of Moon Pies.
I struggled some on that 11k loop, got up to that sign of Wendell’s still there, avoided again the brief, tragic experiment in human flight characteristics he’d fretted over, made my turn and descended. I was wearing a road shoe, the Brooks Radius.
Grant Bidy, reviewer out of Sioux Lookout, Ontario, says of the Radius that it is “a sandal on steroids with the moodswings to prove it. It’s all sunshine and roses on Monday, a kicking mule on Thursday. I wouldn’t take this on a cinder track, and only a d**ned fool would step onto the trail with it.
The shoe didn’t fair well up on the sharp rocks of the Montara Mountain Trail. If there were 2,000,000 rocks on that trail, I found and stepped on 1,999,987 of them. All pointy. Still, I was better off than if I’d been wearing that abattoir for feet: the Montrail Continental Divide.
Steve Markoe, bronze medalist in Parchesi at the Torino Olympiad, responded poetically when asked if he’d tried the CD: “Seductive, like the Hardrock, but without the payoff. Abandon all hope, ye who set foot in that… that… thing.”
I came down off the hill, tenderly but in one piece, and Sarah sent me off on the final 9k loop with my choice of directions, clockwise or counterclockwise.
I ran quite a bit on that uphill, and barrelled all the downhill in a vain attempt to break 6:30. I came up on a fella from PBS up around the top of the hill, about two miles from the finish and sitting on a cardboard box marked, “Hanes.” As I passed, he offered that for the $50 level, I’d get a complete set of limited edition t-shirts (small, medium, large and extra-large) coincidentally emblazoned with the race logo for the very event I was at that moment trying to complete. What a lucky find! Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It got better: For the $75 level, he’d throw in a fake Wisconsin accent kit and I could have the wheel of cheese for free. I forked over the cash and came crashing down the mountain, missing my 6:30 goal by about two minutes, about three minutes after my wheel of cheese rolled across. What I’d considered pride in my support for the arts and public programming, Wendell and Sarah said the police considered accessories after the fact and I was led away in handcuffs, saying, “Eh?” to the cops. Fortunately, they do allow limited internet access in minimum security lock-up. I’d write more, but Antiques Roadshow is about to start, and they’re in Bay Minette, Alabama this week. Should be lots of old Civil War era stuff, eh?
You’ll want to know about my arrest, I’m sure, but I’ll get to that later. Wendell had told us we’d be starting down in the lower parking lot and so we all got down there when he’d said to. Then he separated us into different groups like those dogs do with livestock. It’s not that I’d ever compare Wendell to a dog, you understand, and I don’t mean to; it’s us, really -- we had a herd-like quality about us right there at the start: lowing and badly in want of direction. He sent the 9k folks off on a trail heading east, the rest of us on a more westerly trail, did that with just some backwards counting and the word, “Go.” (To determine who are the runners in your office, walk up to co-workers while they’re between thoughts and susceptible and say, “Five, four, three, two, one… Go!” and see what happens.) The first climb was about 1,600 feet and 3.5 miles. What Wendell had said was keep going up until you can’t go up anymore and that he’d left a sign for us at that spot where we wouldn’t be able to go any further up, a safeguard for those not likely to notice right off any more steps would be bad. He feared the less attentive among us might make like the late Evel Knievel and that Snake River Canyon stunt he tried back in ’74. Or maybe it was Sarah told him, “Chris is in that bunch -- you should put a sign up.” Their intent was for us to turn our asses around and come back down again. Craig, Steve and I were jawing on the hill, Steve wearing the Montrail Hardrocks.
Of the Hardrock, faithful reviewer, Aloysius Kropp, of Wheeling, WV, writes: “The Hardrock is a sassy trail runner with a message and that message is: ‘Hello, Sailor!’ This is a shoe everybody knows -- you’ll need a shot of penicillin afterwards, and if you’re Catholic, confession. This shoe is worth a couple novenas, guaranteed.”
We came back down, and headed across the parking lot to start on that 9k loop. Steve had backed off some, being cautious before Rocky Raccoon. That, or he wanted some time alone with his Hardrocks. Craig and I plowed on, himself feeling chatty with that fake English accent he got with a $100 contribution during a PBS pledge drive some years back. The instructions said he could use the accent to get things like evil villain roles in B movies, or to pick up hot babes on trail runs. (Trail running women being famously vulnerable to fake English accents.) Craig’s natural patois is from his native Bay Minette, Alabama, with a touch of Biloxi, Mississiippiissisi, where he moved after Bay Minette’s textile industry moved to Mexico in the wake of NAFTA. While Craig was trying to charm a gal, I concentrated on keeping my heart rate under 412. We finished the 9k loop and as Sarah had instructed, went back and did it again in the other direction. Craig had hit a low point in his run: the woman he’d been wooing turned out to be a regular PBS pledge drive donor and thanks to a $150 contribution (12 easy monthly payments of $30 each), was sent both the fake English accent kit and the fake Russian accent kit, employing the latter to pretend she didn’t speak English, accented or otherwise. The fake Russian accent kit included a pair of Sukhoi 38’s, a Soviet-era trail shoe design based on stolen schematics for a Brazilian industrial meat grinder.
No contemporary review is currently available, but Gennady Bershadensky, former Minister of Draperies and Window Dressing, and frequent guest contributor for Pravda’s popular weekly column, ‘Proletariat Footwear Today,’ once closed the column with a brief description of the Sukhoi 38: “Brute shoe for not skipping bourgeois rocks -- For crushing them!! Only do not get wet for stitching come loose. Sukhoi Factory produce 12,000 left foot now, with 8,000 right foot in April, 1987. Lines to purchase starting now for left, two days for right. Left come with loaf of bread.”
Passing back through the aid station on our way to the 11k loop again, a tired Craig accidentally reverted, asking Sarah, “Y’all got inny squirrel meat, steada this here jella beans?” Sarah, a fan of both Masterpiece Theatre and Antiques Roadshow muttered under her breath, “I knew it!”
I left behind me a fast-talking Craig Slagel, feverishly trying to convince Wendell and Sarah it was just a joke, that he only was performing a monologue from Blanche DuBois Goes Hunting, an off-off-Broadway gem he’d studied at Oxford. He even called Wendell, “old boy,” and said, “Bangers and mash! Bangers and mash!” but they weren’t having any of it. The jig was up: Craig’s a transatlantic Pygmalion -- about as English as a box of Moon Pies.
I struggled some on that 11k loop, got up to that sign of Wendell’s still there, avoided again the brief, tragic experiment in human flight characteristics he’d fretted over, made my turn and descended. I was wearing a road shoe, the Brooks Radius.
Grant Bidy, reviewer out of Sioux Lookout, Ontario, says of the Radius that it is “a sandal on steroids with the moodswings to prove it. It’s all sunshine and roses on Monday, a kicking mule on Thursday. I wouldn’t take this on a cinder track, and only a d**ned fool would step onto the trail with it.
The shoe didn’t fair well up on the sharp rocks of the Montara Mountain Trail. If there were 2,000,000 rocks on that trail, I found and stepped on 1,999,987 of them. All pointy. Still, I was better off than if I’d been wearing that abattoir for feet: the Montrail Continental Divide.
Steve Markoe, bronze medalist in Parchesi at the Torino Olympiad, responded poetically when asked if he’d tried the CD: “Seductive, like the Hardrock, but without the payoff. Abandon all hope, ye who set foot in that… that… thing.”
I came down off the hill, tenderly but in one piece, and Sarah sent me off on the final 9k loop with my choice of directions, clockwise or counterclockwise.
I ran quite a bit on that uphill, and barrelled all the downhill in a vain attempt to break 6:30. I came up on a fella from PBS up around the top of the hill, about two miles from the finish and sitting on a cardboard box marked, “Hanes.” As I passed, he offered that for the $50 level, I’d get a complete set of limited edition t-shirts (small, medium, large and extra-large) coincidentally emblazoned with the race logo for the very event I was at that moment trying to complete. What a lucky find! Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It got better: For the $75 level, he’d throw in a fake Wisconsin accent kit and I could have the wheel of cheese for free. I forked over the cash and came crashing down the mountain, missing my 6:30 goal by about two minutes, about three minutes after my wheel of cheese rolled across. What I’d considered pride in my support for the arts and public programming, Wendell and Sarah said the police considered accessories after the fact and I was led away in handcuffs, saying, “Eh?” to the cops. Fortunately, they do allow limited internet access in minimum security lock-up. I’d write more, but Antiques Roadshow is about to start, and they’re in Bay Minette, Alabama this week. Should be lots of old Civil War era stuff, eh?
