La Cebolla

Hello all,

Benn Fraker here with some real news for you. Not to speak less of all the other entries, but something truly noteworthy happened to a few of the team members yesterday.

It began for all those involved as a normal drive to the course. We were running a little late, and it looked as if we would only have four and a half hours to get ready for the workout. Obviously, with such an extremely minute window to prepare, we were all a little tense. We all put our trust in Angela, now known as Mario, to get us to the workout in time to adequately prime ourselves for the workout.

As we safely raced through the streets of Prague to get to the course things began to go awry. What started out as a slightly rushed yet safety conscious trip to the course turned into something none of us could of have ever randomly come up with in front of a computer screen with a cup of coffee.

As the blinker clicked off we merged into traffic on the highway. There was a heated debate in the backseat about the war in Iraq between team members Scott Parsons, Zuzana Vanha, and Scott McClesky. Zuzana’s position, reminiscent of a war-mongering extremist, maintained that the reason we were not yet successful in Iraq was that our troops were out of practice, their combat skills a little rusty. In an unnecessarily loud voice she screeched at Parsons, “You are such a commonplace fool. Why bring our troops home now? They are just getting back into the game. They need this practice! Would you bench Mike Vick right before he broke the all-time NFL rushing record just because he gets sacked 15 to 20 times a game? The two situations are not only analogous, but exactly the same!” Parson’s view, just as extreme, but on the other end of the political spectrum, was that the US should withdraw from Iraq and spend all the war money on food and shelter for the homeless. Between anger induced subconscious fist-shakes Scott managed to stammer out that he felt, “The only right thing to do is to bring home the troops and re-allocate the money we spend wrecking other people’s countries an--an--and destroying lives to create better well-fare and education systems. And while we are at it, socialize healthcare!” Yes, you read right, when Scott gets worked up he has a bit of a stutter, and by a bit I mean that it is so bad that it inspires genuine pity in all who hear it. Then McClesky chimed in, “If you’re not with us, then by God you’re against us! We need to cowboy up and finish what we started. If I ever had me a boy, how would I be able to look him in ‘is eye and ask ‘is respect if I was in favor of forfeiting a war to a bunch of cowards who won’t come out in the open and fight us like they got a pair!!” I will spare you the whole argument, as its participants were all extremist bigots. The argument raged on in this fashion in what seemed to be a merry-go-round of insults and re-iterations. No one said anything new, no one changed their minds, nothing happened, people just got madder, louder, and downright belligerent. Some of their anger may be excused though, because everyone was in the high-stress situation that comes with having less than five hours to prepare for a workout.

As we drew closer to the course, tensions relaxed a little. But not for long, for just as in a cliché story when the characters let their guard down and something pivotal happens, our team quieted and then was smacked in the face by the hand of a new conflict.

Emergency brake up, steering wheel tilted, tires squealing, sliding sideways up an entrance ramp. The car began to fill with smoke from the spinning tires. We had the windows down, because that is the only way o.g.’s know how the kick it. Weaving through traffic like Mike Vick through a Panther’s defense, we flew across the river on a four-lane bridge. Just as we reached the halfway point we saw something that made every jaw in the car simultaneously drop, well, except for mine, because I was eating a royal with cheese and that takes priority over horrific car accidents. I looked up from my European Quarter-Pounder to the most shocking thing I have every seen firsthand. A cross-continental tour bus full of geriatrics was crashing through the railing of the bridge and beginning its rapid, inexorable and terrifying decent into the Vltava River. The never slow to react members of Team USA quickly decided to sacrifice their warm-up time in order to provide a helping hand.

Thanks to the quick minds of Team USA and the fortuitously timed lifejacket delivery at the hotel that morning, we were able to dive from the bridge with 43 lifejackets. This a shockingly perfect number, because their were 41 seniors plus the driver makes 42 and then one left over for Austin who is notoriously weak swimmer. As we fearlessly leapt from the bridge life seemed to play in slow motion. There were cannonballs, graceful dives, front and back flips, jack-knifes, flying squirrels, fairy-twisters, nut-grabbers, lions, tiger, and bears, but all these were upstaged by the jump, or rather screw-up, of Tad. In all the excitement Tad ran from the car, smoked us to the scene, clumsily slipped, and dazzled us all with a belly flop from a height of roughly 31.345 meters. After a quick giggle, we jumped between the bus and mass of oldies; the conglomerate of our splashes kicked up a wave large enough to surf the mangled bus to shore. In one fell leap we cleared the scene of any wreckage to speak of. Next, in the purest form, reminiscent of Michael Phelps, Team USA swam the ancients to shore. Once everyone was on shore we preformed CPR in sync to NSYNC. Literally, we saved lives to NSYNC's "Bye, Bye, Bye." Our High Performance Director, Chris Hipgrave, had his phone along, and "Bye, Bye, Bye" is his ring-tone. During all the life saving someone called him. Obviously, he could not answer with someone's life on the line. Ergo we saved lives one of our time's greatest pop songs. Needless to say we didn't let anyone "Dye, Dye, Dye."

The day was saved, more importantly so were the lives of a herd of tourists. To make a long story short, we will all be awarded The Sergio Vieira de Mello Citizen of the World Award from the UN, and The Nobel Peace Prize in addition to a long list of awards from local and international organizations.

After all the hullabaloo had subsided Team USA piled back into their black Opel Vectra and made their way to the course for a work out. We arrived about 40 minutes before our session was scheduled to start. Everyone promptly got dressed, warmed up, and made it to the top of the racecourse with 20 minutes to spare. Everyone sat around absolutely bored to tears for 20 minutes, like seriously, Jeff, Brett, and Jim started crying. After tears were shed and what seemed like years passed we were finally aloud on the course. Everyone had a positively glorious session on the whitewater. As we piled into the car to go back to the hotel we experienced the days final phenomenon, the largest simultaneous verbalization the modern world has ever seen. Everyone from, the now heroic and life-saving, Team USA looked at one another and in monotonous unison uttered the words, “So, if we arrived to the session 40 minutes early today, got dressed, warmed up, and ready to rock in 20 minutes, and were then painfully bored for the next 20 minutes. Why the hell do we always get here five hours before our workouts? From now on I think we should behave like rational individuals and arrive 30 minutes before every session.”