Musings: Triathlons or why you need to find a real sport before I run you over with my car

As the weather warms middle aged, pudgy white men and women in affluent suburbs across America are emerging from their winter slumber. Soon they will be taking to our roads and our beaches with an entirely misplaced notion of their own importance and athletic prowess. Monday morning office conversations everywhere will be dominated by Bob in accounting who wants you to know that he set a personal best in his 10K bike ride this weekend and is really stoked about the fun run he and the neighbors have planned for next Sunday. No one gives a shit Bob, shut up. Seriously. Shut up. Few practices publicly stamp one as an asshole surer than self identification as a tri-athlete. Are baseball games played in public parks? Are basketball games played in mall parking lots? No, of course not, that would be annoying and inconvenient to the public at large. Why then do we tolerate hundreds of out of shape white collar drones trudging and panting along our thoroughfares from Spring to Fall? We shouldn't. We won't. We can't. To this end I've put together a list of proactive steps you can take to rid your town of these menaces.

1) Go to your most local mall and buy every piece of spandex available at you the sporting goods store. God, forbid one of these hippopotami run in a sensible pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Nope, they need to show off the floppy physiques that only a winter full of lethargy and red wine could sculpt.

2) Install a high powered air horn in your car or truck. Then next time you come across a pod of porpoises huffing along in the middle of the street while blatantly ignoring a side walk, you can inch up behind them, lay on the horn and push their cheese clogged hearts into immediate coronary failure.

3) If you're unlucky enough to find that this menace will soon be advancing upon your own neighborhood, set out of the night before the "race" and line the street and fence in front of your house with flyers for your local food co-op/farmer's market. They'll be distracted like a bird by a shiny object. Bring out some white wine and they'll quickly become demotivated and disperse.

This summer when you're driving to the beach and your ride is delayed by 500 panting sloths in visors with grease penned numbers running down their doughy arms you don't have to sit back and take it. Unite and fight America! We are in control of our own destinies and it's time we took our streets back.