Quality of life

The feeling of not knowing how to start is quite familiar to me at this very moment as I'm trying to write about what popped up in my head when I read your article on the quality of life.

I've been smoking dope for more than sixteen years now. It gave me some but it took a damn lot. Apart from some girls who might still be with me without it, I think I blew music school and the chance to be a second Joe Pass doing weed, but that's another story. At the time I thought Kerouac, Burroughs and Ginsberg were about the coolest dudes on the planet and making it all go up in smoke was just part of the deal.

In 1997 I did my first triathlon for the same reason I bought my first guitar -- for the girls. I managed to hook up with one and we were a couple for some 18 months. She was training for Ironman Europe, so in order to not just stay home and wait for her to return from training, I adapted her training regimen and even made it to Mallorca for a bike camp, so when the '98 season was there, I was ready. Ready for what? I had done Ironman mileage and had only completed two sprint distances and an Olympic distance as a member of the state league team of our club. So I went to Almere, in the Netherlands. And did the long distance Holland Triathlon in 11 hours and 13 minutes, never having done a marathon and still smoking. I was amazed.

I split up with my girl and moved out of our apartment. That had to be the point to get back together with the boys and hit it real bad. But even then I stuck to training long miles. And smoking fat joints. The year passed and I went back to Almere. 10:43:46. I started to get a feeling I might even make it to Kona some day. I was writing freelance for TRIATHLET magazine in Germany and got more and more involved in the sport. In the winter I would bike through the snow and cold for more than four hours to get to Holland and back. You could legally buy dope in Holland. It was so schizophrenic, so insane. And it still is.

2000 was the year I planned to do IM Europe to check out the course, so I could go for the qualification next year and in order to see how I would do in a second Ironman later in the year (which was to be Hawaii in 2001) I wanted to go to Florida and try the Great Floridian. It wasn't to be.

The drug pretty much took over that winter and I hadn't covered the mileage I should when season came. Powerman Venray warned me: I was too heavy, my pulse skyrocketed way too soon and there was nothing left of the bikemeister dream I had -- I finally wanted to finish the IM bike leg below five hours. But I went to Roth with about a sixth of what I had trained the year before. And I just fell apart in the cold and the rain. 12 hours and 35 minutes. Just after Roth I had to start for the state league team again and I experienced my first DNF. That pretty much sounds like the end, doesn't it?

Usually it would be. Knowing how I messed up music school (just the same way) I kinda got ready to drop it and retire to just working and killing time. But whether it's the hormonal change that happened during those years of training or something else I do not really know. But I'm still around, I even started education that'll make me a triathlon coach by February. If I'm still around, that is.

But I guess I will, and that, Dan, is why I thought I could write to you and you might even read it all the way to here. 'Cos it's about the nature of the sport, the times, innate abilities and an idea how -- at least -- I will live the rest of my life.

When I read Kerouac I was sorry to find out that he was dead all along and that I wouldn't ever have the chance to talk to him. You know that feeling? I mean I read Thoreau and I thought "Man, I sure wanna sit and talk to that guy for a coupla nights!." It's a sign of the times that the story today reads more like: "I mean I downloaded the Empfield file and I thought 'Man, I sure wanna sit and chat with that guy for a coupla nights!.'" I'm not comparing your writing skills here, it's just about how much I was looking for the dotted line beneath the article. Where do I sign?

I didn't have to be told, I know I think too much. Thinking too much isn't always helpful. It includes questioning facts (this all is true for me, but feel free to adapt any or all of this) and that leaves you with close to nothing to base your life on. Well, actually nothing at all. Which helps you in the process of finding out about reality and the fact that there really is more than one. That we just happened to agree on this one and that people at least give you strange looks if you drag another one out of the shadows and ask, "What about this one?"

Not leaving the house each and every morning kissing your all-American wife goodbye is doing just that. Riding your bicycle longer and taking your dogs out for hours on end is doing just that.

I've just turned 33 and I've had a bunch of jobs, never staying for more than 18 months. I've been travelling a lot as a roadie with funk bands, I worked metal factories and storehouses, I had a company car and headed a PR office. And now I'm about to start a new job working part time in a bike shop for less money I made at the computer company I'm working for now. I want to run more and bike more. I think I found more of my reality in the woods and on the fields than in anything mankind created.

I don't think it would be easy to extract something like guidelines and such from what I said nor do I think this should be done at all. I just know the relief one feels learning that a thought, which weirdness seemed to be almost frightening, was shared by someone else. For this relief I do thank you. I also have to apologize for any irritation caused by choice of words -- after all this not my native tongue.

Yours truly
Holger Mischke (ironman@h-bomb.de)
Krefeld, Germany

EDITOR'S NOTE: You sound like you're on the right track to me (which may or may not be any source of comfort). Reading The Beats will make you think, no doubt about that. I've often thought that Neil Cassidy was perhaps the most influential figure of 20th Century culture: without him there would've been a very different Kerouac; Ginsberg; Kesey; decade of the '60s; rock and roll; and everything that followed from all of that.

But as we all know, Cassidy's zest for life was never tempered by wisdom and sobriety. Kerouac almost got there (he got agonizingly close, and you can read it in Dharma bums), but he couldn't quite get over the hump.

I'm thankful for all of them, and for Bukowski and Fante, and all the others. They helped me to think outside the lines. But theirs is not the only truth.

Kerouac climbed the Matterhorn (the one in the Sierra's) and he was an idiot for not recognizing at that moment the much bigger world than his own small bathtub full of self-loathing, in which he relished taking a good soak. I don't remember if Kerouac ever had a dog. A dog -- and a Colnago -- they might've made all the difference.

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