Today I pulled a personal best time on the erg (rowing machine): 4:25 for 1000 meters. To give you some perspective, this means that, out of the not-too-many people worldwide who have entered times on Concept II’s online rankings, I am 9th out of 15 lightweight women, and, oddly, 28 out of 56 women overall. ("Oddly", because heavyweights are usually considerably taller and stronger and thus, faster.) I feel good about those numbers; height is an important factor in stroke length, translating to more speed, and not too many rowers are 155 cm tall.
I hope my parents aren’t reading Phelps’s journal, and picking up her family’s dynamics. Last night in a phone conversation, they asked me to pass on a message to my brother, about his spending time with them on Father’s Day weekend, which is also the weekend of Dad’s 65th birthday. I do hope this isn’t the beginning of a trend, because I don’t want to become their intermediary. I should also mention that my brother lives roughly 3 miles from them, whereas I am near the opposite coast, very nearly as far away as you can get and still live in the same country.
On the other hand, one part of Phelps’s family dynamics I wouldn’t mind emulating is her closeness to her brothers. My Brother the Writer is finally growing up, is now in a serious relationship with a woman who both respects him and provides a good influence, and in a series of recent email exchanges, is being pretty damn funny these days. He has a lot of respect for me too, but I ascribe that mostly to my moving out of the house before he hit puberty and grew bigger than I am.
I may need to emulate the BroTW too; in chat the other evening, some listsibs got a fair way toward convincing me I should actually move ahead on a book idea I had. It would require more editing than writing, on my part, so I’m confident I could produce the material itself; getting the go-ahead from a publisher and maybe an advance for some required travel would be the hard part. Just what I need, another project....because you know I haven’t had enough to fill my time lately.
Posted by dichroic at June 12, 2001 08:31 AM