It’s hard for me to award this dude the Mediocre Athlete of the Week since he was at the top of the pack for a big city marathon and is therefore a pretty bad-ass runner, but he lost the race when he inexplicably took a wrong turn 200 meters from the finish line and headed in the wrong direction.

Two weeks ago I unveiled a new regular feature on Mediocre Athlete, the Mediocre Athlete of the Week…and then last week I didn’t post one because I was busy. I know, I suck. To make up for it, for this week I thought it would make sense to roll last week’s nomination into this week’s post since they’re related to one another. Last week I was going to award the entire NFC West as the Mediocre Athlete of the Week, whereas this week the honor quite obviously goes to the Seattle Seahawks, so what the hell, YOU get crowned and YOU get crowned, Oprah-style.

Last week was the first time I swam since doing Ironman Canada at the end of August. There’s nothing quite like a 3 1/2 month break from doing something to really make you feel like you royally suck at it when you pick it back up again. I maintain that giving swimming the cold shoulder isn’t entirely my fault — when my coach puts “45 minute swim or bike” on my schedule, which option do you think I’m going to go for? The one where I can waltz over to my bike and do a spin while laughing at the poor decisions of the latest 16 and Pregnant girl, or the one where I have to dig out my swimsuit, drive to the pool, jam my crap in a locker, rinse off, hop in the pool, and swim back and forth while fighting off the limbs of Old Guy McLane Hog who’s frog kicking next to me?

I thought I’d introduce a new weekly feature on Mediocre Athlete, partly because there are so many examples of mediocrity in the world that I’d be remiss not to share them with you, and partly to motivate me to get off my lazy off-season ass and update the blog regularly. So without further ado, I present to you the first Mediocre Athlete of the Week, the New York Giants.

The rain gods must have read my post about crappy Seattle weather and decided to troll the entire city by unleashing torrential downpours and strong winds for the past few days. Good thing I live on a hill; otherwise, I could be running into flooding problems that are plaguing many of the city’s residents right now. I’m also finally happy to be on coach’s and doctor’s orders not to run until the Achilles tendinitis heals, because there’s no way in hell I’d want to run in the kraken-summoning tsunamis unfurling outside. No running, unfortunately, means that Teresa has taken this opportunity to remind me that I haven’t swam (swum? Swum looks weird) since Ironman Canada, so that fast little bastard has started adding swim workouts to my training schedule. Boooooo. Just when I was starting to begrudgingly psyche myself up and promise myself that I was going to work hard on my swimming this season by hitting all my pool workouts and not skipping any open water swims, my friend Mr. Oatmeal posted a link to this charming piece of news on my Facebook wall: “More than one million gallons of raw sewage backed up into Lake Washington over the weekend. The sewer system in Medina was unable to handle all the rainfall from the storm, causing raw sewage to back up into peoples’ homes and into the lake.” Oh, great. That should really get me excited to dive into the lake for some long swim workouts this spring. There’s nothing like practicing bilateral breathing while some kid’s pet goldfish rides a turd right past...