Light The Cauldron

It stinks for some of us to think about it, and it's a delight for others. Regardless of which way you feel, winter is coming, and winter Olympic sports are reminding us of that fact this week. While the first day of fall was a mere week ago, winter sports are starting up their long seasons with warm-up competitions and tuneups. Already we've had competitions in figure skating, bobsledding, and curling, and the NHL season starts this week. Because the Winter Olympics were back in February, it seems crazy that the winter sports are already starting up their new seasons. But it just means that this year is flying by, and that these athletes spend a lot of time training and competing. It's not like high school where the season is just three months of the year. Since we are in the beginning of the quadrennial for winter Olympic sports, the competitions are going to be just a bit lackluster. Maia and Alex Shibutani are actually taking the entire year off of competition,

Okay, back to reality. I think it's pretty cool how streaming platforms are allowing us to view documentaries and other shortform films that used to be aired and then subsequently never seen again. A few months ago I reviewed Icarus, found on Netflix. But this week on YouTube, I found Breaking2 , a documentary on three athletes vying to break the 2-hour marathon mark. It originally aired a year ago on National Geographic before the running of the Berlin Marathon, when everyone thought Eliud Kipchoge would break. He didn't actually do it until this year, which made watching this documentary now  even more fun. Here, I'll just post the whole documentary: Kipchoge of Kenya, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, and Zersenay Tadese of Eritrea were all profiled over six months and trained to run in a specially-designed marathon sponsored by Nike. Instead of a road race, the athletes ran on a racecourse. Like a marathon, the athletes had water, gels, and pacesetters strategical

Boy has this been hard. I am a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, but just over the last month has it really started to affect my life. I was   am a miserable wreck and couldn't  can't love the things that I used to love. Like the Olympics, for example. UGH. So my mother came over and stayed with me for a few days while I visited a doctor and got sorted out with medication. I'm seeing a counselor. I'm talking to my pastor. My coworkers know. My family knows. I'm being brutally honest with them because I want to be brutally honest with myself. I've shoved it aside for so long that it reared its ugly head in an ugly way, demanding to be heard. I heard you. Believe me, I heard you. My mother made me food, we talked about a lot of stuff, we watched Jack Ryan  on Amazon, (which was amazing, by the way - get on it) and she was a huge help. But I did realize that she couldn't stay - I had to find ways to figure this out while living and working on my own. B

After many weeks, I finally finished The Games: A Global History of the Olympics  by David Goldblatt. I kept talking about it in podcasts and blogs, but I hadn't actually finished it! You'll find as I do my review the reason why it took so long. The Games tries to cram all of Olympic history into one very large tome. While reading it and thinking about how all-encompassing the book is trying to be, I could only think of Leia Organa talking to Grand Moff Tarkin during Star Wars: A New Hope:  "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  The book starts off modestly. We read about the formation of the ancient Greek games and Pierre de Coubertin's efforts to bring them into the twentieth century. We read all the hurdles that had to be overcome and other people's efforts to present a similar Olympic-style competition in their areas as the Olympics grew.  I found the first half of the book to be very