It's time to make your New Year's resolutions, reader! Don't give me that sourpuss face. You're not a pussycat, you're a human being, and you need goals and structure to survive. Do you know why people always seem to die right after they retire? It's because they no longer have a duty to fulfill. If you don't choose your resolutions for the new year, you will die like a miserable schlep.
My first resolution is to stop calling people "schleps" and predicting their premature deaths.
In all seriousness, with only a few hours left before 2007, it's time to set some goals. Luckily, those forced ambitions don't have to be as difficult as you think. If you're really lazy about it, you can just do what I do and make incredibly easy resolutions like "I will not commit murder gratuitously" or "I will breathe air the majority of the time that I'm awake or asleep".
If you're really crafty, you'll spend a little extra time to think up something incredibly easy that sounds really hard. For instance, this year I'm only making one resolution: To win Grandma's Marathon in Duluth, MN. Sounds pretty difficult, doesn't it? After all, I've never run a marathon before, I haven't worked out in nearly a decade, and my last mile time - during my sophomore year of high school when my gym teacher forced me to run - was around 12 minutes.
However, you don't need speed, endurance, or proper training to win Grandma's Marathon. Just ask the female winner from the last two years, Halina Karnatsevich. She won it using steroids. I can do that!
This story has been around for a few weeks. Karnatsevich tested positive for steroids, changing the image of Duluth's famous race forever. In the past, the marathon's only bad press was when residents along the race route complained about having 6,900 people urinating in their front yard. Now that Karnatsevich has befouled our race in a figurative rather than literal sense, the bad press for Grandma's Marathon is mounting.
What can we, the common people, truly believe in anymore when the big shots start enhancing their natural talent with drugs? The next thing you know, we'll find out I'm using steroids to improve my alcohol tolerance. Wait, would that actually work?
The only upside to this whole fiasco is that lovable underachievers like myself can finally win Grandma's Marathon. Granted, I'll lose my crown after the USA Track and Field group studies my pee for six months, but I'm already hated by most people for this column, so I really don't see the downside. Cheating in that race would be six months of fame and glory that money couldn't buy. I'm sure Svetlana Nekhorosh, the runner-up (and now winner) of last year's race is probably pretty thrilled about getting an $8,000 check in the mail, but Karnatsevich got all the glory.
Next year I'm going to get all the glory. How is anybody going to stop me? By charging me with a crime, having me extradited back to Minnesota for sentencing, and then allowing an angry mob to drag me out of the courtroom and beat me in an alleyway until I learn what happens to cheaters? Or perhaps doing that to Karnatsevich so people in future races won't even think of messing with us again?
Yeah, that might work.
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