Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

Do you want to know why Kenya runners dominate the Boston Marathon as well as every other marathon?  I can tell you in one word: “Lions.”  That’s right, you heard me: “Lions.”  Okay, I can see that you are a little skeptical, so stay with me on this, and follow my logic closely.

When an American runner goes out for a practice run, the worst thing they might come across is the occasional pesky poodle named “Pepper.”  And it’s a well-known fact that with one well-placed kick you can punt a pesky poodle permanently into a petunias patch and be on your way.  No harm, no foul unless, of course, you are the pesky poodle, and then you’ll be busy pushing up petunias for perpetuity.

But when an African runner goes out for a practice run, they are probably going to stumble over a lion or two.  And though I don’t know this from personal experience, but I’m guessing that if you attempted to drop-kick a lion, chances are you will shortly thereafter be nicknamed “stumpy.”  And your marathon career, along with your leg and life, will be quickly terminated.

So, if every time you step out of your house, even to pay the pizza delivery guy, you run the risk of being eaten alive by an oversized housecat, you too will become slightly jittery and quickly learn to run real fast, or at least faster than the pizza delivery guy.  And by comparison, jogging up and over Newton Massachusetts’s Heartbreak Hill, versus trying to keep ahead of a toothy lion who’s determined to turn you into that evening’s entrée, will be a breeze.

But seriously, can you imagine running for 26 miles, 385 yards without stopping?  Ha!  I couldn’t imagine driving for 26 miles, 385 yards without stopping especially if my wife is in the car with me because the woman has to pee every ¼ mile, and we’d have to use a calendar to time our arrival over the finish line.

Anyway, one of the other main factors why I can’t run a marathon is that I’m really good a sitting and am a huge fan and a big supporter of laziness.  Well, not laziness in the sense of being lazy.  I just don’t like to get off of the sofa much to the point that you’ll need the help from a qualified medical examiner to tell were my butt ends and were the couch cushion begins.  And anything that I can do to help prevent me having to get off of the sofa I will do.

In fact, as the old saying goes “laziness is the mother of invention,” I’m currently designing a launching mechanism that can catapult cans of ice cold beer from the refrigerator to my hand at the flick of a lazy switch.

Unfortunately, and I’m using the word “unfortunately” in the sense of being very fortunate, my mother-in-law keeps stepping in the way of oncoming cans and has been pelted in the back of the head on more than one hilarious occasions.  This has become a huge source of entertainment to me, right up there with watching Discovery Channel’s “The Deadliest Catch.”

And when I stop snickering, I tell her that “this is all part of prototyping a new invention.  And civilian casualties are to be expected because beer-can catapulting is not an exact science, and that’s what experimentation is all about.”

WHACK!

But anyway, I just had a great idea: perhaps I can modify my can-catapulter and sling myself the entire 26 miles, 385 yards, all the way along the Boston Marathon route.  This way I don’t have to move around a whole lot, I can fly over the heads of the Kenyan runners, and score a win for the Americans, which, thanks to pure laziness on my part, is the only way we’re going to beat these guys.