The winter Olympics are coming up, so I hope you're ready to compete for national pride!
Well, maybe you're not an Olympic athlete in the traditional sense, but I suggest we look into some new alternative events. After all, anyone who has slipped on a fabric softener sheet and performed a double axle on the kitchen floor knows we've been training our whole lives for these moments.
Slush Shopping Slalom
In this event, our amateur athletes at the grocery store get behind the wheels of a grocery cart and enter not a smooth and icy track like a bobsledder gets, but the slush-filled parking lot of the store.
Large amounts of stamina are required to make it to their car in less than 10 minutes. And while lower body strength is needed to propel the cart through the slush, upper body strength is necessary to try and steer the cart away from the direction the slush wants to go -- most often into another parked car.
The athlete who clocks the quickest time from the automatic door of the store to their car without taking out any pedestrians is declared the wintery winner.
Weather Update Biathlon
While the biathlon usually includes cross country skiing with random stops to shoot things with a rifle, this event requires the athlete to check the weather report by running to the window to see if it's started/stopped snowing yet, checking other sources of information -- Internet, TV, radio -- and then shooting off updates to anyone who will listen.
Competitors who can do this the most number of times in an hour will be annoying, but also declared the winner. Extra points are given for checking more than one source simultaneously.
Digging the Car Out of the Snow Sprint
In this event, the athlete is given a shovel, an ice scraper, a parked car and two feet of snow. The first team to get their car out of the driveway and get to work on time wins.
Using your arms to push the snow off the hood of the car and/or the automatic car starter for the front windshield is legal, as is using various forms of profanity. However, bribing the neighbor kid to help by stealing their sled is grounds for immediate disqualification.
Bonus points are given to the competitor who can open up the driver's side door without any snow falling onto the driver's side seat.
Outdoor Freestyle Photography
Here competitors are given a digital camera and 30 minutes to go outside and take pictures of how much snow has fallen, often using things like rulers stuck in the snow for comparison and captions like, "What happened to global warming?" and "Can you believe how much snow that we got?"
After the time is up, each athlete is required to submit their top images to the judges who will decide a winner based on technical merit, required elements, presentation and number of "likes" on Facebook.
Refuse Relay
Athletes are timed as they put on multiple layers of clothes and run from the warmth of their house to the trash bins stationed outside, deposit the bag of trash, wheel the bin down to the curb, and then sprint back into the house, -- all before a) the trash collector comes, and b) they freeze their ass off.
This event is usually frantically done in the early morning hours on the day of trash collection, and bonus style points are given to the competitor who can take off their winter boots without losing a sock in the process.
So as you can see, this will obviously require massive amounts of carb loading and couchgating on my end. Lucky for me, unlike skiing or luge, this is an activity I've been training for my whole life.
Go for the gold!