I spent the weekend up in Tahoe. Friends of mine entered this 24-hour race thingy and I went up to help them out. Well, actually more like spend a lot of time reading by the pool while they did a lot of biking, but I did do a few things.

The gist of the race is that there's a bike race for 24 hours and teams of biker's race it. One team member goes and does a lap and when he/she is done, they hand off some card to the next team member and they go do a lap. This goes on for 24 hours which means that those who are doing it are quite liable to have to get out of their beds at 3 in the morning to go do a serious bike trek up and down a mountain. Crazier than that, there's a few people who do it solo. Instead of doing it as a team and getting the chance to take a few breaks, these people do the entire thing themselves. That's 24 hours on a bike. That's finishing your fifth lap at the end of the sixth hour of the race and knowing that you still have another eighteen hours to go.

This is supposed to be fun.

As I watch, I couldn't help but see a certain appeal to it. It is, after all, the whole pushing yourself to the limit thing. It's taking everything as far as possible, seeing how far you can go, and then pushing it a bit farther. Sometimes I watch and think to myself that maybe I should test myself like that. Get off my fat ass and physically challenge myself. Get in shape, get in gear and let's get physical.

And then I think to myself, "hey, you know, I still haven't seen 'I Love 1978' or 'I Love 1979' on VH-1 yet and I could miss the Bionic Man meets Bigfoot episode retrospective" and the next thing you know, I'm couch-bound.

Hell, my life is an extreme sport. Why would I want to go volunteer to do one?