One-mile run.
One-mile paddle.
Pound six beers without throwing up.
From Iron Boy to Iron Man
For whatever reason... I decided to do the Iron Man with Mr. Ziskin this year. At 10:00 I'm at his parents' place with an entire house full of space filler... folks from Boston, from MIT, wherever. Only four of us are doing it this year... me, Ziskin, Harris, and a buddy of Matt's. We bring our six beers down for checkin... a girl with enormous tits and a shirt reading "Lifeguard" takes our $10 and gives us numbered bags... we head back and grab boards....
The big event: we put our boards down, and we're near the last to get there so our boards are around Longfellow (the race starts at the 28th street lifeguard tower). Everybody is a skinny, whippy surfer type... the amount of bare flesh on display would drive Buffalo Bill wild... we deposit our bags of beer (I'm #239) near our judge, who has passed out once today already, judge 16, a squat man covered in tattoos, deeply tan, wearing a leopard hat... the only one taking this seriously is Harris, who got 5th place one year and was totally psyched....
At some point the race begins... announced by a former mayor of Hermosa... we all take off running. My compatriots leave me in the sand (not surprising). I run by several highschoolers... at 4th street in MB (the street MZ lives on) we turn around, appoximately, and turn back... I'm near last in the run but my board is parked closer than most so I get in the water ahead of a good 1/3 of the others.
Paddling... I haven't been out on a board in years... 30 minutes of sheer agony. I turn around 10 yards in front of the 4th street tower... my triceps haven't hurt this bad since, ever.
After an eternity I park my board on the beach... I'm among the last 20 for sure... takes me forever to find my friends and I start pounding Coors lite... it's not even fun... it gets fun when I dump half of number five, drink the rest, give #6 to Ziskin, then chug half of his friend's #6 and throw up copious amounts of still-carbonated beverage plus yellow-and-red bits of melon I ate this morning....
The post-party... awards are given for Best Puke... Casey Glen, who threw up then rolled around in it, gets robbed... a punk band starts up with Bro Hymn, then Search & Destroy, then countless more generic tunes, many of which have "South Bay" worked into the lyrics... high school blondes in patriotic bikinis are everywhere...around this point I'm hammered... a mosh pit begins, somebody throws a Budweiser can into the air which spirals around spitting droplets of beer, each drop perfectly framed against the hazy blue sky... the guy in front of me has "fuck you" tattooed on his back, the guy next to him has "South Bay" running down his spine... flags everywhere... I'm numb....
I now own a shirt! On the front is a woman with four eyes. On the back it says "run smart! paddle smart! drink smart! puke smart!"