The photo at left is me, in flagrante delicto. More about that later.

I was riding with one of my usual ride-mates—I’ve got unusual ride-mates as well—and we were talking about one of our fellow riders who'd not been around for a couple of months. My friend described a sad scene in which our poor buddy had been sick, and his malady was hanging on, and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and they told him he might have Epstein-Barr—the default diagnosis by exclusion for stuff like our friend has—and, well, you've probably heard this story before (and perhaps know it all too well).

I was thinking during that ride about how I’d kicked my health problems of a year or two ago—which I bragged about to my riding buddy—and about how all things considered I had things in hand. I mean, as measuring sticks go, societally speaking, I was in pretty good shape. I was healthy, losing weight, getting fitter, I had A-1 credit, no moving violations in the last 10 years. I was, in short, pretty bitchin’.

I am to the left—ex post facto—along with the wife (my accomplice). More on that later.

Anyway, I even entered the Wildflower long course. I hadn’t raced since 1989, but, hey, as we all know, I’m pretty bitchin’.

So, of course, I woke up the next morning sick. No mistaking this. Nothing I could pass off as allergies, or the unusually dry Santa Ana wind, or the ill effects of "last night." Nope, I was legitimately, authentically sick. That was my last ride for more than three weeks.

Furthermore, I almost immediately thereafter got a love letter in my (snail) mail box from the San Diego Superior Court. I’d been caught running a red light leaving the airport. I could fight this, I was told. But I’d have to successfully cross-examine an automatic picture-taking-lying-in-wait camera. The evidence was fairly conclusive. This camera shot me like a $5,000-a-day swimwear model—from every angle, and often.

I am sharing the best shot, at right. It captured the real me, I think, and my best side. I want Triathlete magazine to know its editors can use this photo for their next cover, and they probably won’t have to pay a photographer for its publication since, after all, it was a machine that caught my likeness.

As it says in the good Good Book—perhaps in Philemon, or somewhere in Numbers—pride goeth before the fall. I shoulda seen it coming. Here it is January late, I’m supposed to be racing a half in May, and I haven’t even gotten in the damn pool yet. If you see me paddling my wetsuit through the Wildflower swim like it’s a damn kayak, you’ll know I’ve had to resort to my own private technologies to get me through this thing.

Just as, like Job, the world was flushing a toilet on my head, things started to turn. I was offered traffic school. Though I'd earned my master's degree in this during my teen-age years, I'd kept my nose clean for lo these many decades and was therefore eligible to start my education all over again. While I was looking forward to "Red Asphalt," "Mr. Walker and Mr. Wheeler," and other Oscar-worthy traffic school classics, I didn't think my classmates would be the sort of people with whom, under normal circumstances, I'd be inclined to hang out. While I'm sure there would be some fun people there—perhaps some guy who'd bring in his back issues of Highway Patrol magazine, and no shortage of people I could bum a smoke off of—I thought I'd probably outgrown most useful applications of traffic school.

But that's better than a point on my driving record, so I went online and started surfing Yahoo! for the traffic school of my choice. Lo and behold, I found an online one—meaning one in which you can go to school online. No "Red Asphalt," mind you, but I could sit with my feet up and drink Diet Coke and eat the neighbor's chocolate-chip cookies and read the material and take the test. Right there on my computer. Cool.

Which is exactly what I did. Ticketerasers.com is the school from which I graduated for any of you who find yourself in a similar situation. But don't even think of asking me to help you with the test. Do your own damn work.

I typed in my credit card number right there online and took the course, and I passed the test and got my certificate and mailed it with my check for $298 to the court. (For you Canadian readers, that's $298 in U.S. funds, which is about ten thousand of your dollars.) Of course, I might have a marshal knock on my door in six months with a warrant for my arrest for a failure to appear when it turns out Ticketerasers.com is really Your-available-credit-erasers.com. But I'm willing to take that chance—anything to keep me away from those awful people who break our traffic laws.

Right when you think you’re on the straight and narrow—when you’re going, as the Mexicans say, "derecho, directo, y adelante"—life takes you sideways. So for all of you who’re successfully piling in the miles and are otherwise heading straight up the road in the fast lane at 75mph right now, my advice is: Don't get caught in flagrante delicto. Keep your damn mouth shut about it.