In 2010, I got into pretty good shape, so this year’s resolutions don’t involve exercise or food really, other than keep on what I’m doing. What I really want to work on is attention and focus (so less internet time), and getting back into creating things.

That said, I need to mention something that has really inspired me. This fall I started taking a spin class with Ed at our gym, taught by Ben. Also known as “Psycho Ben”, or as “The Only Good Spin Instructor in America”. Seriously, while I find all spin classes beneficial, Ben is an actual cyclist, and his classes make you a better/faster cyclist. They’re all different, and never just an aerobics class on a bike. Also, he’s inspiring, and for the last month and a half, he’s been talking during the class about making 2011 a better year fitness-wise than 2010, and about how he has started training with a swim coach to do so himself. During Thursday’s class, he mentioned that he was doing a marathon on New Year’s Eve with two other people, leaving from Oak Cliff, going up to White Rock Lake and back, including Swiss Avenue on the run. I asked him when he was starting and what pace he was trying to make (his goal was to finish at midnight). Anybody else, I’d have thought he was making that up just to get people to pedal harder, but not Ben.

Last night Ed and I did some math to figure out when he would be running back on Swiss, at about 19/20 miles. We grabbed some cocktails, a bottle of water for Ben, and a cowbell and walked the dozen or so steps over to Swiss and waited. Sure enough, within about 10 minutes, a lone running figure arose out of the dark much like Snoopy in the pumpkin patch. It was Ben, all by himself (his friends had wimped out). He was doing okay, but so happy to see us. Hugs all around. Cowbell rung. Hopefully we got him through “the wall”, which was just ahead.

Anybody who has done distance running will understand how difficult it would be to do a marathon, alone, with no support, no water and food stops, and no cheering bystanders. Ben, I salute you.

127 Hours is based on the true story of Aron Ralston, the guy who amputated his own arm after being trapped by a boulder while hiking in Canyonlands National Park. I read his book (Between a Rock and a Hard Place) last year and was curious to see how it could possibly be made into a movie. Guy trapped by himself in an impossibly narrow canyon for 5 days followed by a gruesome self-surgery? Yikes. And yet they pulled it off. It was a great movie. And I am doubly impressed, because they further restricted themselves by not using any narration (but plenty of dialogue), and by including only the timeframe of the hike itself. The book had a lot of biographical build-up that was needed to establish the adventurous (and cocky, careless) nature of the protagonist. And to be fair, that stuff was justified because it was, after all, a memoir. But the movie accomplished all of that character development with just great acting, direction and writing, and with much better results. Not to knock the book, which was very well-written, but watching the movie on the big screen made me cry, and not just at the end.

Which begs the question, is this a movie most people would even enjoy? I wanted to see it because I read a review, and I read the review because I read the book, and I read the book because our friend Brian had seen Ralston speak at a charity event he attended despite reservations due to the subject manner. Brian raved about it. It’s an incredible story, an inspirational movie, and the arm is fake, you know.

That said, Ed and I both had related nightmares that night. But they weren’t about the amputation. They were about the rest of it.

I started to go through and pick out favorites, but I just started clicking back and re-reading them all so I’m not going bother listing them. Although I liked this recent cover letter quite a bit:

Ed’s brother is visiting; he spent a quiet day by the lake. I donated blood again. Ed and I also planned to do the Ride of Silence, a worldwide slow, silent ride in memory of cyclists who have been killed or injured. It seemed an appropriate way to think of Kelly.

In the end, Ed had to stay at work to late to make the ride, so I went alone.

This was a somber ride. Over a thousand riders lined up at 7pm at White Rock Lake. The White Rock ride is the original one, started in response to the death of Larry Schwartz, a local endurance cyclist who was nationally known. The pre-ride speech was sobering, reminding everyone that the person next to you might not be here next year to ride. And then a bagpiper played “Amazing Grace”, which reminded me of Kelly’s funeral, which made me cry (as it always does). I wasn’t the only one tearing up. And then we rolled out.

The slow speed was difficult to maintain with that many people, but appropriate. It took about an hour to get around the lake (as opposed to my usual half hour), and in all that time, no one said a word.

After the ride, the riders lined up on either side of the road, front wheel to center. Someone walked a ghost bike by, and the bagpiper played “Taps”, and we all rode home to live another day.

Here’s the quote I liked:

“You were born on third base and your parents put you there, and you think you hit a triple. It’s not true.”

Thanks Mom and Dad! I sure do appreciate everything you did for us.

• 10. Skiing at Winter Park in Colorado It had been years since Ed and I had been skiing, so this partially work-funded trip was a real treat. It didn’t take long to get the legs back, and we really enjoyed this resort for the sheer size of it, and the fact that many of the slopes were groomed on one side only, leaving the other side to develop excellent mogul fields. This allowed us to ski together more (me on the mogul side, Ed on the smooth). A bonus event was when Ed put a pizza, still in box, in the oven of our condo and started a kitchen fire, then ran outside while I put the fire out.
• 9. Getting my road bike Ed has been riding roadies for years, but I had turned more toward mountain biking. I finally got a good bike, my first since my heavy Schwinn bought in about 1979. We started riding regularly in the countryside near Houston, and had an especially nice ride on rented bikes in the Santa Ynez valley while visiting Steeles. We also did our first race ride, a 55-miler called the Tour de Donut.
• 8. Riding Segways My first time on a Segway made my “Best of” list for 2003, but that was really just a short ride in a mall store. During our summer 2006 trip to Santa Barbara, Ed and I took the Old Santa Barbara Segway tour. I will just say here that riding Segways is really, really fun. We enjoyed it so much that the other day when Linda mentioned that this Segway dealership is for sale, Ed actually read through the details of the offer and was thinking about where he would work while I ran it, and where we would live.
• 7. Ed’s transfer to Dallas While the actual move didn’t take place until 2007, the event was set into motion in 2006 and occupied much of our mental and physical energy for the second half of the year.
• 6. Car chases At Caprock, one of our lunchtime haunts was a Tex-Mex dive which always seemed to be showing car chases on its big screen TV. I think it was Fox News; I don’t usually watch that channel, but they seem to have the car chase thing covered. One Friday afternoon back at the office, my friend John Robert IM’ed me from New York City that he was watching a car chase in Pearland (where our office was) on the screen in Times Square. I found a local news station covering the chase, and before long the entire office (plus John Robert in New York) was watching as a driver in a white pickup pulled stuntman moves past many familiar landmarks (including the aforementioned Tex-Mex dive) with dozens of helicopters and squad cars in tow. He drove through the golf course by the Vietnamese restaurant and headed to the intersection with the tollway that would take him past our building. We all crossed our fingers, but no, he passed through the intersection and headed toward downtown Houston. Somehow sensing his mistake, he drove through the massive median and U-turned back toward Pearland and … would he? would he? YES! he turned east on the tollway right toward Caprock. And the entire workforce ran to the front of the building to watch. Helicopters, motorcycles, cars, all chasing a lone Ford F150. After the show passed, we all went back to our desks and watched as spikes were thrown in the highway and the now tireless truck rode through several more towns, sometimes hopping curbs ON ITS RIMS, near-miss after near-miss, finally plopping into a bayou and sinking. The driver was rescued and miraculously no one was hurt in the whole 2-hour chase. Apparently the reason behind the whole thing was the guy had stopped taking his depression medication and held up a dry cleaner for a pittance. Now, you might think that was the end of the car chase entry for 2006, but no. This car chase ended on our block later in the year.
• 5. Dynamo soccer Houston got a major league soccer team in 2006, and it was wildly successful. Both the fan participation and the team’s performance were stellar. The games were the most fun professional sports games I’ve ever been to, due in part to the insane soccer fans with their drums, streamers, wigs, flags, brass instruments, cowbells and smoke bombs. The team made it to the MLS championship game in Dallas. Ed and I drove up to watch the Houston Dynamo beat the New England Revolution in overtime. And the 2007 update is that this year, the Dynamo beat the Revolution for the championship AGAIN, this time in Washington D.C. Attendance at the games in Houston remains strong and loud. Let’s Go Dynamo!
• 4. Meeting Kyle Chandler I met Ed’s cousin Kyle for the first time when he drove to Houston from Austin, where he was filming a TV show, to join his brothers and cousins for a Buffalo Bills game. What a nice guy! He climbed a grapefruit tree in his brother’s backyard in his socks to make me juice for a cocktail.
• 3. Getting a high-tech crown I did write about this when it happened, but here it is on my top 10 list; it was just that cool. On a sad note, my dentist of seven years who did the crown committed suicide a few months ago.
• 2. Jury Duty Well this is an odd choice for a top 10 list (not that the crown isn’t), and at number 2 no less! But serving on this jury is still one of the most fascinating things I’ve done. The dynamics of deliberations (including watching one woman have a meltdown under the pressure to come to a verdict), the interaction between the jurors (two of whom discovered that they had lived in the same house in different decades) and the case itself were all interesting. Best of all was having the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney visit the jury following the trial to answer questions and discuss evidence and testimony which was not admitted for the trial itself. I hope to get the chance to do this again (but not for traffic court, that is boring).
• 1. Two Gallants show at Walter’s on Washington Being a first-hand witness at the concert in Houston where an HPD officer stormed to the stage and knocked down the guitarist of a band while he was playing tops out my list. First of all, it was national news (well, national music news). I’ve talked to people here in Dallas who know all about it. Second, it definitely changed how I think about law enforcement. I still respect the police, but from the reading I’ve done since and the anecdotal evidence I’ve gathered from friends who are outside of my (somewhat privileged) demographic, I now realize how many problem officers there are. Third, it was a lesson in how the power of the internet. If not for the YouTube videos and the forums and the online coverage, the charges against the band members would not have been dropped. Fourth, I was able to contribute to the effort to see justice done by giving a statement to HPD Internal Affairs and by giving a statement to the bands’ defense lawyers. And finally fifth, because I was interviewed by the local alternative weekly, so I got to show my friends, but they spelled my name wrong, so future employers can’t Google it.

After watching Randy Pausch’s lecture, I rather regret that. The topic of the lecture was “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. If you haven’t seen it, it’s quite touching, especially the ending.