Frazz by Jef Mallett for November 02, 2019

Is this a clue as to why he’s not a better swimmer?

I’m fighting tendinitis right now….I WISH sore fingers were all I had to deal with.

(Chicken noises.)

I learned something new today: There are two spellings of ‘tendonitis’.

I simply HATE it when stupid people imply that you are weak, because you stop doing something (needless, like a hobby) – because you don’t enjoy it.

Now he has to find another way to get high.

I get vertigo at the top of a stepladder. I break out in a cold sweat seeing pics or a video of rock climbers 3000 feet up the side of a sheer cliff (especially free climbers).

Caulfield’s exercise today was jumping to conclusions without facts to land on.

Got what I’m told is ‘tennis elbow’ (tendonitis) shoveling snow last winter. Still have it. No idea what I’ll do this winter; hope that the afternoon sun will melt the snow on our driveway really fast. Would be nice if the original cause were more exciting.

I don’t think you can accuse somebody of being chicken when they did try it

I enjoyed climbing tall things when young, but the older I get, the longer it takes to heal, and at some point around middle aged, I realized that getting high wasn’t going to be worth the pain of a fall… and that the probability of a fall was increasing with my poorer vision, loss of flexibility and growing tendency to lose 100% focus.

I now get high on the dance floor, which is just as much fun (in a very different and more interactive way) and a lot safer.

PostsFrazz14 hrs ·

I owe a good share of my health and happiness to bicycling and running and, more recently, swimming. A good share because they’re so effectively good for you, and a good share because I’ve spent so much of my life doing them. It’s been and remains a dream.

But those sports weren’t my first dream. Through my teens and transitioning into adulthood — and it occurs to me this is just before young men’s brains fully develop, when we are at Peak Stupid — my head was in the clouds and my heart was in the mountains. This is a problem when you live in Michigan, but dreams survive bigger problems. In the more frank versions of my memory, the initial motive behind running and cycling was to be fit and that much more ready for the mountains when I could finally go vertical.

I did get pretty fit, but I never made it anywhere near the dirtbag life. Before I could move to where the land was a little more wrinkled, the cycling and running got more appealing, and, on the climbing side, I hit a wall. Specifically, one of those newfangled late ‘80s early ‘90s indoor climbing walls. I finally had the chance to climb all I wanted, and I quickly learned that climbing even a modest percentage of all I wanted racked my fingers with tendinitis. As a runner and cyclist, I was no stranger to overuse injuries, but when you aspire to draw little pictures for a living, and at the time draw little pictures for a portion of your living, the ramifications are different from, say, plantar fasciitis. I’d give it up and rest and heal and start again a number of times, but the finger issues always returned. This allowed other admissions to creep in, like the probability I’d never leave Michigan, and the reality that while I had the patience to run as slow as I did, I struggled for the patience to climb at the pace even a good climber did.

Continued:

Brilliant week, opening new dimensions in Halloween costuming.