Have you been watching the Olympics? Stephan is a self-confessed Olympics freak, so we’re on full media lockdown over here so we don’t get any spoilers, and we’re not providing any commentary lest we spoil for other people. This is proving to be pretty difficult, actually, because of well, social media, and the radio, and email alerts from the New York Times, and even my precious diversion People magazine, because you know what? Everyone wants to tell you who won and how they’re feeling about it, and if you want to have a pure, organic Olympics experience, you pretty much have to cut yourself off from ALL THINGS MEDIA.
So, we’re doing that. And, since I’m also training for a half-marathon at the moment and am considering myself quite an athlete, I have been mentally comparing myself to Olympians in an amusing way. Are you doing this too? I think it’s because these great Olympic athletes make their respective sports look so effortless, my mind then goes “I could totally do that,” and then I laugh at myself and try to imagine how funny it would be if I were actually to get up on that high dive platform or in the starting blocks of that 100 meter race and do those sports next to professional people who do them for a living, and this strikes me as so funny, I now they think they should make this part of Olympic coverage.
Here's how it could work: you know how they now can break the photo-finish down from every angle so it looks like the people in the Matrix? In case you’re wondering, that looks like this: http://www.thebiglead.com/index.php/2012/06/24/photo-finish-leaves-usa-womens-100m-olympic-place-in-question/
I now think they should take an average of all the people in America and make “Out of Shape American Cam” to compare how fast you can run with how fast the Olympic athletes can run. Don’t you think that would be so funny? Because then you could see that you can run approximately 6 miles per hour on a good day, and that the World Record for marathon is 2 hours, 3 minutes, and that this means the world record holder is running approximately 13 miles per hour, and if you tried to run 13 mph even on a treadmill, your heart would explode. I’m just saying that if you put these two things side by side, that would give you some perspective, and that would be funny.
Also, just for the record, that high dive platform is so high, all I would do if I even made it all the way up there is cover my eyes and scream, and that would also be funny when compared to the incredible athletic prowess represented at the Olympics. The Olympics are the opposite of Muppetting and spaziness, and as we've established, I run like this:
So, media blackout. That’s what I’ve been doing. What about you?