Training and Escaping the Gulag

I have to say I’m a little bored. Every day I get out of bed and head outside to the rowing machines, where I spend an hour by the pool rowing nowhere. My arms pull, but there’s not a ripple on the water. The birds chirp and the dog watches. I row and I row and an hour later I’m right where I started.

I am hoping that like swinging a lead bat, the real thing will feel much lighter when we hit the water.

I have borrowed a piston-action rowing machine and an oak-framed “water rower” that gets its resistance from paddles inside a cylindrical tank of water. It makes a nice sloshing sound. Albert makes fun of me and asks why I need two rowing machines. The answer is simple; one for each arm.

My gear has arrived at Al’s mother’s house at Lake George, the staging and last-feeding ground before we head out to live on the land.

Like Albert, I like to read books when I am either on or contemplating an adventure. I took a copy of Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American” to Baghdad, which I read among the random racket of mortar and machine gun fire.

Lately I have been reading “The Long Walk”, the story of a Polish prisoner who escaped a Soviet gulag in Siberia in March and took a year to walk all the way to India. I’m thinking, “If he can do that ….”