28 July 2012

Syringa to White Bird ID 67 miles (TransAm 3,518)

Well I’ll be damned. I am psychic and didn’t know it. And you’d think being psychic, I would have known that I was psychic. So by not knowing I was psychic does that mean I’m not psychic even though I am? (I think if I was a computer programmer I just wrote an infinite loop. Or if I was an alcoholic, I just made perfect sense.)

Regardless, there I was going on and on in yesterday’s blog about the Olympics and my athletic prowess and dream of standing on the podium in the Senior Games and how Gina is already in training as evidenced by her recent forgetfulness and cravings for pie ala mode and how I saw a gold medal in her future when BLAM, I learn that Gina is already an Olympian! Not just any Olympian but a Gold Medal Olympian, having taken this top honor at today’s TransAmerica Olympics. No, not a cycling gold in the road race or time trial or on the indoor track but gold in the much more highly contested map-folding event. Eat your heart out Michael Phelps.

Everyone knows how difficult it is to fold a map properly. This is a skill that should be taught in school but is not, with subjects like calculus somehow taking precedence when, in fact, I can’t recall a single time in my adult life when I needed to solve the derivative of y with respect to x but instead many times when I needed to be able to fold a map. (Mostly to get it back into its proper state but also to avoid an OCD outburst from the driver’s seat.) So take this nearly impossible task and multiply it by three. Yes, three. THREE maps to be properly folded. The degree of difficulty is off the charts.

Gina is slotted in Pool B, up against Judge-Me-Not-Judy and Wrap-That-Map-Wendy. It’s single elimination – win and you head to the Finals, lose and you go home – and our little Gina smokes it, folding those maps like they were sheets in a hospital. So then it’s on to the finals where the competition stiffens, Gina now facing Dice-And-Slice-Simon and Make-Me-Miss-Mike. It’s a tight race, edges creasing, corners bending, paper crinkling … and for the briefest of moments it looks like Simon might surge ahead to the finish … but not today. Nope, today belongs to our girl Gina, who brings home the Gold not just for her country but for everyone who’s ever felt a pang of OCD and wondered how they would succeed in this messy, disorganized world. Know now that there’s hope out there and it comes not just in the satisfaction of a perfectly folded map but in a world full of opportunities for aligning edges and tucking ends and restoring order where once there was little. You just gotta want it bad enough.

And before this Olympic moment? A fantastically scenic ride, with winding roads like Matchbox race car tracks, ice cream at the Grangeville Zip Trip, and spending out on a motel room to escape the day’s heat. I’d say it was a golden day all around.