MORE QUESTIONS

THINGS THAT GO THROUGH YOUR MIND RIDING YOUR BIKE ON THE PARDEEVILLE TRIATHLON COURSE THROUGH THE WISCONSIN FARMLAND AT DUSK

1. Have I entered the domain of the insane?
2. Should I turn around now?
3. Are those really deer?
4. How many deer-bike accidents kill Wisconsinites every year?
5. If you take an uphill curve marked "15 MPH" at 18 MPH on a bike, can you be arrested?
6. Does being arrested for speeding on your bike during a practice run DQ you from the Pardeeville triathlon?
7. Wouldn't it be nice to go to Dairy Queen without this trouble?
8. Why don't I know how to change a flat?
9. If I get a flat in the middle of nowhere and have to hike back to town, how much damage will I do to the leg I fractured practicing for the run?
10. Oh, is it possible those glasses aren't for fashion but actually prevent these gnats from eating your eyeballs?
11. If there are gnats here now, will there be bees and mosquitoes in July?
12. How much do those glasses cost?
13. Am I there yet?
14. When that guy in the John Deere hat says Highway G is "about a mile up the road," why didn't I really register "up?"
15. Is that beautiful B&B at the corner of G and Twitchell a mirage, or is it an oasis? More importantly, does it serve dinner?
16. What kind of sadist designed this cruel course to pass that B&B at mile 10?
17. Did the race organizers build that B&B?
18. Why are these people having dinner while I'm riding around working off my mid-life crisis?
19. Am I there yet?
20. Am I the only one who finds it funny that every man and woman must be happy to be travelling "Schwantz Road," at the end of the race, given its original meaning?
21. How dark does it get out here in the country?
22. Is it over already?

Pardeeville or no? Pardeeville now or Pardeeville later? These are the questions that distract us from our work.

Six Weeks and Pondering

Six weeks from the 2006 Pardeeville Triathlon, and some of us are still on the virtual bubble...which could continue for another month, since the registration deadline is very close to the July 1 event. How will we decide?

What is Pardeeville, Really?

Pardeeville is a small bucolic town in the hinterlands around Madison, Wisconsin. Pardeeville is a triathlon. Pardeeville is, of course, a state of mind. That Pardeeville is all three of these at once makes it a compelling focal point for a midlife crisis....an athletic challenge great enough to be intimidating to a woman in my condition, in a town small enough to limit the humiliation, with a name that *sounds like* an emotional state of wanton bliss. How could anyone resist, come to think of it?