When I'm forty-four...

So I'm almost forty-four and sometimes I feel blissfully youthful.  However, sometimes these days I feel more like sixty-four.  Today as we drove home from the pool, I was describing the new triathletes of the summer (every year we get an influx of triathletes at the pool, anywhere between January and May). At least one of these athletes, as a rule, is doing "their first ironman!" and they are so cute and excited and nervous.  I may as well be sitting there with a ciggy hanging out of my mouth, "yeah, kid...I know iron...it's a love that'll suck you dry. Ya give it all ya got, then, bam! you wake up a few years later with creaky joints, empty bank account, and an expensive bike in need of repair."  As I, shall we say, mature, I've realized that there is small joy (and decreasing possibility) of me dusting these people in the pool (or anywhere else), so I'm considering further polishing my mentoring/wisecracking/unsolicited advice skills, all of which come in handy if one is attempting to employ expertise with minimal physical output.

Ya wanna talk iron? I'll talk iron, with ya, sweetie.

Yup....I've seen it all...

Let me tell you about the time I won the whole thing...oh...that was somebody else, but I saw someone win the whole thing!

I joked, in the car, that it is just a matter of time before I meet a triathlete at the pool who was born the year that I participated in my first Ironman.  So....here's the deal....a few years from now, at the pool, when I meet somebody who was born on or after 1994 and they say "and I'm training for an ironman!", I'm going to promptly get out of the pool, walk to the nearest bar, and grab a beer.  I don't care if it's six in the morning.