Five things about me that you don't know...

A Portrait of the Gypsy Scholar as a Young Hominid

The Big Ho's got nothin' on me...

(Image from Wikipedia)

... and probably don't even care to know:

1. I wore 5-pound (2.25-kg) leg weights on each leg and ran up a 500-foot (approximately 150-meter) knob in the Ozarks nearly every day for three years from age 16 through age 18 to stay in shape for basketball.

2. I have Neanderthal brows and was given the nickname "Missing Link" at age 18 when I had long hair, a beard, and came through my freshman judo class's arm-wrestling contest as undefeated champ.

3. I rode my bicycle from Tahlequah, Oklahoma to Waco, Texas in five days at age 19 -- sleeping under tables at rodeside parks and nearly dying of thirst on one long stretch of mountainous dirt road -- just to prove to myself that I could do it without getting myself killed.

4. I could easily slam dunk a basketball two-handed from about age 19 through age 22 or thereabouts even though I stood only a bit over 6 feet (approximately 186 cm).

5. I didn't tumble 1000 feet (approximately 300 meters) down the face of an ice cliff on Mount Whitney at age 28 even though I feared that I was going to.

Bonus fact: Back in our lost youth, all five of my brothers were far better athletes than I was.

Probably, most of you didn't know these relatively uninteresting facts about a younger version of myself, and I've only noted them because Hathor tagged me. You all have my permission to forget all of these trivial facts.

Meanwhile, I'm supposed to tag other bloggers and continue this chain of admissions about our youthful follies. In a previous game of tag, I tagged everybody in the whole world, but I believe that several million individuals have been born since then, so would everybody born since February 18, 2006 please blog on five things about themselves that the rest of us don't know?

Thanks.