Phelps and Me

Hey - I have kind of committed to blogging for the new channel swim site iasc-swim.com where I am going to update weekly on Mondays. I am going to X-post here, unless anybody gets there knickers in a twist. Please check out the other site and have a sniff around. It smells professional.

Here is the post:

Tonight I walked into the bedroom with a measuring tape. "Honey, will you measure me?" My long suffering wife has a permanently raised eyebrow and this request gave the other one cause to twitch. Michael Phelps (Olympic athlete and bong-smoker extraordinaire) has a freakishly disproportionate height to reach ratio. He is 6' 4" tall and has a reach of 6' 7". He also has size 14 feet. It is safe to say if he hadn't become a swimmer he would have had a stellar career as a clown. The ability to pick a custard pie of the ground without bending his knees would definitely get him the glad-eye from the bearded lady.

Mrs M, took the tape off me and gave me a good old measuring. I am 6' 0" tall with a reach of 5' 10". I wear size 8 shoes and don't have double jointed ankles. If I joined the circus I would probably be relegated to cleaning out the elephant's cage. My hands are stumpy and shovel-shaped. I don't know what Phelps hands are like, but I imagine they are like perfectly shaped seals paws.

As if you couldn't figure this out for yourself, comparing me to Phelps is a futile exercise. Apart from our ability to eat 8 – 10 thousand calories a day we don't have much in common. He grew up swimming every day, I swam on Wednesdays. He won medals, I learned how not to drown. He qualified for the Olympics at 15, I played a good bit of all-Ireland schools bridge.

As you can see there are quite a few parallels. Truth is, I am not that obsessed by Phelps. As a spectator, I just can't get that involved in individual sports. I don't know why, what Track and field athletes do is undeniably impressive, just a little sterile, a little boring. I realise that this all sounds mealy-mouthed. He has won 16 Olympic medals (age:23), and I am sitting on the couch in my pyjamas (age:33). I prefer team sports, I have clearer view on the whys and wherefores, what makes them tick.

But.

The level of physicality, and psychological nature of my training has caught me a little by surprise and I am beginning to understand and respect individual sports, and thus sportsmen, more. I am spending hours in the pool each week and the amount of boredom is staggering. The amount of mental toughness required to do this 8 hours a day, everyday, is and will remain an alien concept to me. I don't foresee a week that I will be in the pool for 30 hours, unless there is a guy with a gun keeping me there. That these guys can keep their head together is amazing, more amazing than how they train their bodies in my opinion. The level of mental acuity and toughness is beyond my reach. In all fairness, the physical aspect is too. In my defence (because I feel I am giving myself a bit of a hard time) there are days I really don't want to get into the pool and I do anyway. Besides, I am just jumping in the sea of a couple of hours. Perspective, I think, is required.

No wonder Phelps took recreational drugs, I would be a little suspicious if he didn't. I suggest to him that he should fill his pool with bong water. If an Olympic swimming pool is 50m x 20m x 2m, that means he’d need approximately 2,500,000 litres to fill his pool. Luckily that is the same amount that six stoners generate during a game of Risk, so getting the water shouldn’t be an issue.

Overall, I think I will stop comparing myself to Phelps. Yes, Spitz is the man for me. You just have to look at his moustache.

Solving the cocaine problem.

I read an article on the internet today about vaccines being developed for nicotine and cocaine addition. It’s just the sort of fucking about the human body I find simultaneously interesting and really, really scary. Apparently human trials are underway (Hey! It worked on the Monkeys! The Capuchins aren’t wearing sunglasses any more! They seem to pretty angry and depressed too…), so maybe we will see this magic bullet sometime by 2020.

Now, while the scientists think they may be benefiting society with their invention (a stretch, I admit: google exhibit A: Fluorescent Cats), it is easy to predict function creep. Now I can take drugs when I am bored, or when I am not bored, or indeed anytime at all and then take a vaccine to remove all future effects. I’ll still need to overcome the addiction, which is, I suppose, a drawback. However in clinical trials overcoming addiction is apparently going well, with users not switching to other drugs.

The next step is to make cocaine free. I was going to say “widely available” but this is 2007, everyman and his dog can get cocaine if they so desire. Needless to say, the Colombian drug lords won’t be to cooperative about giving their marching powder away free gratis, so it stands to reason that we will need an army of robots to grow it on the moon.

While my Lunar-Automatons are at it, they can start cultivating opium and heroin. The Thai warlords in the Golden Triangle mightn’t like this, but my plot involves making them think the Taliban are to blame. Hopefully this will lead to mutually-assured-destruction. I’ll explain my plan to the Americans and they’ll fund it all. They have a good track record in this area, and will get to bomb Afghanistan again, lucky boys. We’ll set the winners up against the Colombians.

Once my drugs hit the streets, people with weak hearts or other complaints may continue to die due to overdoses, but I’ll have to chalk this up to Darwin at work. If you are not aware of the dangers of cocaine or heroin abuse you are either living in a cave, are irretrievably stupid, or just don’t care. My Mooncoke® will be pure (no cement, petrol, laxative, talcum powder, chalk etc.), so will minimise the risk as much as possible.

Parents may choose to inoculate their children against the effects of drugs. This is a mistake, and will be made illegal. The children need to become addicted, so by overcoming addiction they are made stronger. While society may first baulk at feeding children LunarHorse® for breakfast, hopefully the benefits will soon become clear. By overcoming addiction in the formative years, children will less likely to succumb to addiction as adults. Those children whose addictions cannot be broken, will be boiled down for glue.

Synthetic drugs of any sort will all be banned. My robots will flood the market with lethal-variants, making sure that any dabbling in the area will have an odds-on chance of death. You would do well do remember that I am looking out for your best interests, and yes, I do know best.

Now the governments of the world mightn’t like this, most likely because free things don’t have any tax revenue. Some angry parents may not like swapping their offspring for a tin of evostick. They may try and tax the vaccine, but then they’ll be causing a drug epidemic. It’s a real Smack-22. Perhaps they’ll come after me.

Not a wise move, don’t they know I have an army of robots?