Why me?

It's ironic that I've been to two meetings this week that involve exercise.

If you know me, the only exercise I get is walking from the parking garage to the office and back.

The first was the Chattahoochee Paddling Club. These people paddle their canoes and kayaks up and down the Chattahoochee River and other rivers in the Southeast.

I've been kayaking once. I did it. Do I want to do it again? No.

Will I do it for a story. Probably. But it just seems to hot right now.

Anyway, the CPC's next trip is Aug. 1-2 and it involves paddling from West Point Lake to Blanton Creek Park on Lake Harding. I don't know how many miles that is, but when Frank Bue kept stressing the dangers of three low-head dams ... Like that made me want to go!

I might go if I could just sit in a boat and someone else did all the work. Yeah, that will work.

I'm meeting with John Woodward, who is the president of the club in the morning. I'll find out more about what they do then. You'll see the story in next week's To Do.

The other meeting was today and it was for the Downtown Duathlon. It's a two-mile run, followed by a 17-mile bicycle ride and ending with another two-mile run.

Will I do this one? No, of course not.

It's in the planning stages and is tentatively scheduled for Oct. 25.

The run begins on the 1000 block of Broadway and will cross Dillingham Street Bridge, go down the Phenix City Riverwalk, go across the 14th Street Bridge and somehow loop around the TSYS campus and ends back on the 1000 block of Broadway. 

The bicycle ride starts on the 1000 block of Broadway, then somewhere cross over to Veterans Parkway to the Columbus Civic Center and down toward the National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus to the Chattahoochee Riverwalk access. The route will take the Riverwalk to Oxbow Environmental Learning Center and return to downtown Columbus.

The committee is still working out the safest route so both the run and the bike ride routes are still tentative ones.

There's a lot to do like setting the entry fees, creating a logo, soliciting money and finding volunteers.

I may volunteer.

Then I remember a race that I watched years ago. I remember Louise Smith, our former food editor, and Guerry Clegg, a former sportswriter/sports columnist, were there. So was a friend of Louise's from Miami.

We were at the end of Front Avenue near Louise's house. We were just there with Bloody Marys in our hands and ready to cheer the runners. The first runner came and yelled which way? 

We said we didn't know. Finally, after a second, Louise's friend, said, "That way!"

The runners went that way.

It turned out that they were supposed to go back up Front Avenue and then cross over to Broadway.

Hey, it wasn't our fault. The race organizers should have had volunteers stationed there. Those volunteers showed up AFTER we sent the runners the wrong way.

I'm sure the Downtown Duathlon folks will not make this mistake.

More on these two events as I get them.