Trainer Season...Does anyone have some really REALLY warm gloves?...Goodbye Coach Troy Forever.

I kept waking up Tuesday night and into the wee hours of Wednesday thinking I was hearing something downstairs.  A dreadful sound, actually.  Now that I think about it, I’m sure it was dogs fighting.  Dobermans, maybe…or dingos.  Or coyotes.  Whatever the hell it was it was really annoying me and I couldn’t sleep.  I didn’t get up to check on it because I wasn’t sure if it was real or a hallucination brought on by the frostbite I sustained to my frontal cortex during the previous morning’s run.  I don’t mind hallucinations…so long as they are reasonably quiet and respect my sleep patterns.  But these buggers were noisy and mean and for some reason were pissed off and probably Irish.  

So I turned up the fan and double checked my pistol and finally fell asleep around 4AM.  I slept fitfully for two more hours until my wife had to get up at 6 and when she was in the shower I heard them start up again downstairs.  Was it outside?  Something was off about this.  I looked out the window to the back yard and couldn’t see anything in the grey mist that had settled over the common area.  The birch trees and the willow were still and there was no sign of a scuffle in the mulch beds.  Were these things in my house?  The basement maybe?  I looked around the room to make sure the walls were still solid and gave my totem a quick spin on the bedside table for good measure.  It toppled over after a few seconds so I couldn’t have been dreaming.  Winston was snoring and curled up like a furry little butter bean in my wife’s warm spot and didn’t seem to hear a thing.  I heard Beth singing something from the Acousticats in the shower and I could smell the soap so this must be real, right?  But where were the noises coming from and if dogs were fighting in my house, how the hell did they get there in the first place?  

“Screw it” I thought and decided to go have some coffee and check out the basement.  Maybe the furnace was just acting up and it only sounded like canine fight club.  But coffee first.  See…I simply must have two large mugs of Café Richterissimo and one full hour of news before I even open my left eye.  So I sure as hell wasn’t going to venture down to the lower basement (we have two basements) without cranking up my CNS.  The lower basement is where we keep our exercise equipment, Christmas decorations, furnace, water heater, water softener, and wolf-spiders.  The upper basement is where we keep a lot of carpet and air and is Winston’s preferred clandestine toilet which he uses when we are asleep and he really REALLY needs to go.  But the news…the news was boring that morning.  Something about Justin Timberlake in town and a bunch of girls arrested for plotting to capture him and lick him to death.  I switched it to the History Channel and watched Modern Marvels and learned something about bridges for the rest of my wakey-wakey and prepared to go check out the furnace.  

Beth and the Winston came downstairs around this time and I kissed my wife goodbye and tossed Winston into his daytime blanket, where he spends 90% of the day sleeping and occasionally yelling at noises outside which are undetectable by human ears.  After Beth had driven away and I had waved and blown kisses at her like the charming and loveable man that I am, I decided to get down to business and check out that awful noise.  The noise was escalating by now and I’m sure I also heard chains clanking chaotically as if some trapped thing was fighting for its life while having rocks thrown at it.  I was fairly certain it wasn’t the furnace as I descended the stairs to the upper basement because I suddenly became aware of the fact that the sounds of fighting and clanking had stopped and were replaced by the hideous sound of soft, deep laughter.  “Jesus, this is ominous”, I thought as I continued to the bottom of the stairs to the first basement, which we fancy as a rec-room and around the corner to the door which led to the lower flight. I opened it slowly.  Peeking through a small crack in the door, cautiously, I uttered one of those loud whispers to no one in particular…”Hello?…Who’s down there?”  Again…soft, slow laughter in the deepest, most sinister pitch I’ve heard since I went surfing in Ireland and that evil bastard Leviathan-swell up at Bundoran cracked all my ribs and gave me rhabdomyolysis in my shoulders.  Whatever this was I knew it was not something kind.  Perseus was over in the corner playing cards by himself on my Grandma’s table, in the dark (solitaire, I guess), and I motioned for him to toss me his shield so I could use it as a mirror…in case whatever was down there was Medusa or something else that could turn me to stone or maybe something worse with it’s awful gaze.  He gave me the shield and mumbled something about being “so sorry” that he had lost the helmet the week prior in a poker game.  Perseus has a bad gambling problem and a history of holding out for trips with a small pair (huhuh…that’s what she said *wink*).  The helmet would have helped.  Silly bugger…I’ll probably kick him out soon but he is very handsome and his Dad asked me if I would keep an eye on him and “sort of be like a sponsor” while he’s getting back on his feet.  Don’t let it ever be said that I don’t have a charitable heart!  And enough about him…he’s a nice enough guy but I think he likes my wife and I’m not sure I could take him in a fight.  He has half of Olympus on his side, after all…

So I snatch the shield from Perseus and head down the lower flight of stairs and then it happened:  Fucking Coach Troy comes bolting out of the corner from behind the water heater with a stopwatch in his left hand and a DVD in his right.  He has on those patterned, baggy Zubaz-style pants and a polo shirt and I can tell he hasn’t ridden his own bike in months.  He shouts something at me about the eleven-tooth and 95 RPM and I don’t even hesitate when I plaster him in the side of the head with a wicked roundhouse kick.  He falls awkwardly down against the water heater and is out cold and I snicker to myself because I’ve always wanted to sucker-punch that patzer and here he goes ahead and gives me the sleepy broadside of the barn.  But wait…I’ve jumped to a bad conclusion here.  Because just as I finish patting myself on the back with one of Coach Troy’s severed hands (yeah I did it…trophy!), I hear that rotten laughter again.  Smaug?  Hmmmmmm…  It’s to my left and slightly behind me, adjacent to the stairwell.  I can smell the unmistakeable odor of burning tires and molten high-carbon steel.  I nearly left my body and fled to another dimension when I realized what it was.  The sound of the rattling chains confirmed it.  I had chained the filthy thing up almost nine months ago and forgotten about it until just then.  That awful smell of melting tire tread and sour, dried blood…the sort of blood that only comes from burst vessels in the human eye when the pressure is too great.  This happens only at high wattage and low cadence.  It was Kurt.  I stared at him in disbelief and dropped the shield.  It clanged noisily on the concrete floor and slowly came to rest after spinning around slowly a few times, casting a sickly golden light around the room and illuminating the despotic object intermittently like a lighthouse on an evil green Kraken.  I looked desperately out the window…it was locked securely and there was a grate over the well.  A few snowflakes had begun to float down.  Beautiful thing for most people.  But not for me.  I looked up the stairs and saw Perseus standing there with a sad smile on his face.  Judas with curly hair and a tunic.  Swine!  He tossed me a small towel and a half-full bottle of water and said…again…”so sorry”.  Then he shut the door and I heard it lock from the other side.  Rotten traitor.  That’s the last time I give you a few bucks for “lunch”.  And that pretty much did it for me.

The bike was already there with a cheap steel skewer in the rear hub and a sticky orange tire on the rim.  Kurt unfolded his terrible arms and opened his voracious mouth and I knew there was no point in resisting.  I slowly rolled my bike over to him and winced as he closed his awful mouth down and crunched.  It was terrible.  I felt utterly defeated.  I tried one last time to lunge for the door but tripped over Troy’s lifeless body and I knew…I knew I was done for.  I had beaten the gatekeeper but the monster within still ruled this dungeon and Winter was upon us.  There were a pair of bibs hanging near the window and a three year old pair of shoes with brittle nylon cleats…but all I saw were shackles…manicles.  I reluctantly put them on and mounted my bike.  Netflix?  Sufferfest?  Hara-kiri?  I pressed power on the Edge and turned off the GPS.  My cleats engaged and I threw up my arms and screamed in anguish like Elias in Platoon when the helicopters left him behind.  My legs twitched and shuddered and began to turn in slow, rhythmic circles and my arms and hands slowly dropped to the brake hoods and I looked up and saw my wife standing two steps up from the bottom of the lower flight.  Her early wake up call, the kiss goodbye, even the drive-away from the house…these had all been a ruse.  I had been sold out.  She looked at me in tears and said “I love you.”  I feigned a smile, shot a knowing look back at her with a small toss of my head upward and said…”I know.”  And it was finished.