Monday, August 25, 2008

Citius, Altius, Fortius


I LOVE THE OLYMPICS! We have had a marvelous two weeks watching our good friends Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin, Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Dara Torres, Misty May-Traener, Jeremy Wariner, Sanya Richards, Asafa Powell, and so many others. We were amazed at Phelps' feats of glory, shocked as both USA mens and womens 100m medley track teams dropped the baton, and could tell that even to the untrained eye the Chinese divers were a lot better than everybody else put together. Last night we bid farewell to the Bird's Nest, the Water Cube, and Beijing as a whole. I always cry a bit when the flame goes out. But here's one good thing: I will be able to go to bed at night. For two weeks I've watched NBC til all hours not wanting to miss anything. In looking up Miriam's high fever last week on webmd.com, I noticed a new malady called "Olympic Exhaustion." They say that during major sporting events, and especially the olympics, lots and lots of people go with less sleep, contributing to less effectiveness at work and in life. As Bob Costas last night was lamenting about why can't the Olympics last longer, I thought that as much as I would love that, I couldn't survive it. As it is, I'm excited to go to bed on time tonight with no fear that I'm missing a major world event.

2 comments:

Britney said...

I agree completely! It was getting hard to stay up that late. We only get 2 channels pretty good on our TV and NBC is not one of them. It was pretty fuzzy so we were suffering from eye strain as well as exhaustion. Oh well, it's worth it... I love the Olympics!!!
Britney

Anonymous said...

We are so with you! It was especially hard on Perry as he started teaching again during one of the weeks and had to be up by 6 am. Boo-hoo. They were very inspiring though and I am glad that we got hooked up to cable just in time...so we didn't have the eye strain.