Churbuck.com

Date: 06-01-2007
Distance: 7620 meters
Time: 30:00.00
Split: 1:58.11
Comments: Strongest piece in a while. Done in the shade, with new erg music. Pulled a hard 1:44 power-ten on every five minute mark with a full-on 60-second sprint to finish.
Back is still shaky, so I need to watch the power-tens, could mess it all up with one bad catch.
Tags: ergblogging

New Erg Music

Thanks to son Eliot, I’ve been listening to math rock band, Battles. Very good ergometer music, so I downloaded their album — Mirrored — from iTunes and just pulled one of the better erg pieces of the spring. This is a highly demented band — psychedelic Alvin & the Chipmunks.

The saga of Tuberculosis Andy — the guy who flew to Europe to get married but carried along with him a case of untreatable TB then snuck back into the country in a rent-a-car and disclosed that his dad works at the Center for Disease Control (where he works with TB, imagine that) — makes me hark to that unreadable doorstep of an existential novel, The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, where the hero/protagonist, Hans Castorp, wastes away in a Swiss sanitarium from ennui and consumption, going nowhere fast.
Hans was nowhere nearly as mobile, and indeed, was happy to sit around with a thermometer in his mouth. This flurry of news has the makings of a great thriller: border crossings, virulent untreatable diseases, government agencies. Mann wouldn’t know what to do with the plot.