Sunday, August 13, 2006

1 Wasp Was Enough

Johan Musseuw ordered up "wasps" all of the time, but this is the third ride in 2 weeks that I have been stung. This time it was personal since it stung me just to the left of the family jewels. I was two and a half minutes into a block of time trial effort when the son of a bitch stung me right through the GTC duds. Since I did not want to stop the interval, I had to deal with the pulsing pain of the stinger lodged in my thigh for another 5 minutes. As you can see from the graph below, the sting resulted in a major loss of power while I cursed its family and then a nice lift in power as I tried my best to translate my discomfort to the pedals. I am not allergic but an epi-pen would have made the intervals better.


At least it was not the same pain as the time when Mike and I were riding somehwere in the GTC Nation and I took off my sunglasses for awhile only to be smacked dead in the eye by a large bumble bee. It would have made a nice physics problem as the impact to my eye was about 100x that of a glaucoma test.

I also was stung by a inch long "bullet ant" in the jungle of Costa Rica. That really hurt and left a bad welt that needed antibiotics.To start it off earlier this week, my daughter was stung by a wasp at daycare, leaving her with a welt and a black eye. Let me state for the record once and for all that I have nothing against the Order Hymenoptera so STOP STINGING ME AND MY PROGENY.

1 comment:

APBIORoswell said...

OK, Mike set me straight. It had to be a bee since the stinger broke off. Duh!