Attack of the San Diego Yeti!

I’m home again after travelling to San Diego for work. With 5 long days of scheduled meetings inside a stuffy hotel, and the weather outside a beautiful 80 degrees and sunny, my emotional status quickly declined into a state of mental constipation. I started to feel like I did as a little kid on Sunday mornings in the summer, when my mother would force me to put on stiff, uncomfortable long pants over my sunburned and scabbed knees and go to church. I had considered renting a bike out there, but knew I would have precious little time to actually use it – so figured it was pointless. Therefore, in the small moments between meeting obligations, I tried to get out and run along the busy road that ran outside the hotel and north toward the beach to get my exercise fix. As I painfully plodded along on the sidewalk watching cyclist upon cyclist zip by me in the bike lane, I felt my frustration grow more and more. It’s not that I don’t like running. I do. But I can only enjoy it when I don’t have to see cyclists. If I’m slogging along and have to be overtaken by a bunch of guys on road bikes, it feels like I’ve been suddenly thrust into a recurrent nightmare where I’m running the 200m sprint in the Olympics but am suddenly struck by some slow-motion force field the instant the starting gun fires, as all my competitors dash away from me. The second part to the nightmare is when I look down, still in slow-mo, and realize I’m not wearing any pants.
Anyway – while running between meetings on Saturday, I began to hear footfalls approaching me from the rear. With every other sound of a foot-slap on the pavement behind me was a simultaneous and increasingly audible exhalation “HEEEEEEE” wheezing sound like one would expect from a suffocating asthmatic. Don't get me wrong - I suffer when I run too.  But making such noises is simply unnecessary. I don’t care if you’re running from a pack of feral hogs, have the dignity to suffer in silence, I say. As this fellow passed me, I was struck by the entire spectacle. He was shirtless, a good head shorter than me, was completely covered in thick body hair and appeared to have scoliosis as his spine listed ominously to the left. His feet slapped the pavement as though he were wearing a pair of flippers and he continued to “HEEEE, HEEEE, HEEEE” as he passed me. Just then a group of 3 guys on Pinarellos whirred by us, heads cocked toward us with quizzical looks on their faces, all clearly trying to ascertain where the wheezing sound was coming from. They all looked to me for whatever reason, and it was as if I had just exited an already pre-fouled bathroom on an airplane to a line of waiting people, all looking at me as if I were the one responsible for the emerging stench. The cyclists passed, the shirtless ape ran on, and I fumed deciding to employ my only course of revenge by snapping a photo of the scoliotic simian and posting his picture here.

Although I was forced to continue to look forward at his hairy and sweaty back for several moments more, hindsight, they say, is 20/20, and as I look at this photo now in retrospect, it smacks of something oddly familiar.

Now I am left wondering if what the Pinarello Princes and I were actually looking at was an elusive San Diego Yeti.

At any rate, once the camera was out, I began photographing cyclists as they passed by, which was actually enjoyable, as though I were on safari on the La Jolla Serengeti. 

My first "kill" was a fixie rider sporting a couple of fashion foibles that I'm not entirely comfortable with.  First is the male shirtless look (as opposed to the female shirtless look).  Now I realize, this is southern California, and it is 80 degrees out, but I still contend that no one wants to see male nipples on a bike.  Secondly - this guy was wearing slippers EXACTLY like my grandpa used to wear to pad about the house.  Initially I was impressed with how he was humping up a fairly steep hill in what appears to be a substantial gear ratio, but then i caught a glimpse of the sag of his feet over those pedals and my own plantar fascia began to weep.

I think the good people of San Diego require some cycling footwear education, because not two minutes later I captured this.  The dreaded Flip-Flop.  Again - please take particular note of the subsequent 'foot-sag' and weeping plantar fascia.  I wonder if I could actually invent a carbon-soled cycling flip-flop - because I think I could make a killing. 

In assessing his foot sag, I notice that he has also been stricken with "canklosis" or the "condition of possessing a cankle" which, if you are unaware, is when no definition exists between the calf and the ankle.  Thus, the two structures unfortunately merge into one entity, called the cankle.

Every good safari must have a "one that got away" story.  Thus, I bring you the next "cyclist" who came from behind a eucalyptus tree and took me by complete surprise.  So much so that I fumbled with the camera and blew my chance to bag a picture of the beast.  I have done some subsequent internet research, however, in the attempt to identify it.   You will just have to take my word that I actually saw this:

This thing is apparently called an ElliptiGO and is a mutant offspring of an eliptical machine and a bicycle.  As though it weren't unsightly enough, the contraption is a good 50% longer and positions the rider a good 50% higher than any other bike around - to maximize the "HEY EVERYONE - look at ME effect".  I feel especially privledged to have seen one of these as they are not even set to be officially released from the San Diego-based company until January 2010.  If you are brave enough to actually ride this one, I think all previous fashion suggestions are null and void and you should go for the full faux-pas monty on this one.  Go shirtless, wear your flip flops, wheeze like a mo-fo, and bask in the glory of being a complete douchebag.