Weekly Check-In: Internet Rabbit Holes, Bobsled Edition

I often bitch and moan about how much time I spend getting sucked into internet rabbit holes. You know the kind. You start by simply googling “great places to eat in the Catskills,” and the next thing you know you’ve spent 45 minutes on Frank Sinatra’s Wikipedia page. Just me? Liars.

I’d say maybe 1/4 of the time or so I actually find something interesting, or learn something worthwhile on these vague internet journeys that I can actually do more with then simply win pub contests, and by win, I mean, do better at, because I have never come close to winning those contests  despite the amount of useless knowledge stored in my brain (I’m always tanked by the sports questions-I know zero sports trivia).

Anyhow, and I’ve mentioned in my recent post on the Franconia Ridge Traverse, that my brother and I have decided to undertake the Presidential Traverse hike this summer.  In order to train, we’ve been trying to pick out a few shorter, but still very strenuous hikes we’d like to undertake prior. One is going to be the first half of the Devil’s Path in the Catskills over Memorial Day weekend. I’d also like to maybe try another of the Adirondack high peaks, and so was putzing around this morning over which ones would be both good practice, and doable over a short weekend.  I somehow ended up reading about hiking Mt. Van Hoevenberg, which lead to re-reading about their bobsled/skeleton experience, to googling how in fact someone gets into such a niche sport like bobsledding (how people get into niche sports, or super niche careers will always fascinate me).

This lead to reading about Steve Langton, a member of the US bobsledding team, and how he got into bobsledding (it is a really random, roundabout, late in life story), which then lead to reading about his superhuman vertical leap and workout regiment, which lead to reading about just general bobsledding workout regiments, which lead to finding that bobsled workouts are actually really good for training the types of muscles you need to train when gearing up for a big hike, which lead to this workout, which I will be attempting this weekend, and hopefully adding to my  pre-Presidential Traverse repertoire.

The moral of this story is that sometimes wasting time on the internet can be beneficial. It also gives me an excuse to post an ugly of myself in a bobsled.