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…gets the grease. The problem with the squeak, though, was this: it wasn’t a wheel. It actually took me some time to figure out what the infernal squeak was and where it was coming from. I knew that it started every time I walked anywhere. The logical culprit was the shoes. So I tried to figure out how my shoes were squeaking on carpet floors. Couldn’t do it. So I took my shoes off. Step. Squeak. Step. Squeak.

Must be the office floor, right? I stepped into the hallway. Step. Squeak. Step. Squeak. Walked all around my floor barefoot. Still my mousy refrain. It’s one thing to know where an annoying sound is coming from. At least then it can become part of the everyday soung orgy. You don’t hear the wall clock ticking, or the clicking of the keyboard in the next office, or the screams of your boss after another maddening phone call.

The astute reading this (yeah, right) will have already figured out the problem, but, myself never being confused with the astute, had not. Until I got home one evening last August.

I walked inside, kicked my shoes off, and squeaked my way to my closet. I resigned myself to a tall bourbon to drown out the incessant squeaking. This on my mind, I hurriedly undid my belt, undressed and changed into some lounge pants (orange, with Surgery Sam all over — a relic from an operation years past) and a tee and then bounded, such as I could, upstairs to the liquor cabinet.

No squeaks. The pants! Eureka for the squeaka! A bad rivet, surely. I went back downstairs and slid back into the blue jeans. I walked around. No squeak. Ugh. I threw the pants aside and got back into the loungers. Not being particularly agile, I got a foot caught and stumbled, and luckily I stepped right on the buckle of the belt I had hastily discarded earlier. What would normally have been a cursing moment turned out to be that Eureka moment I thought I had experienced earlier. The belt let out a tiny little squeak, metal on metal, and I had my culprit.

I slid the belt on over my lounge pants and hitched it tight. Hitch is not the right word, as I was going only to the first hole on the belt. The tongue of the belt barely extended to the metal guide on the other side. I walked around the closet. Step. Squeak. Step. Squeak. If not my britches, I was at least getting too big for my belt.

I’m just a shade over 6-foot-2. At the time I was carrying about 265 pounds on that frame, most of it in the shape of a beer belly and a Phil Mickelson starter set of man boobs. It was too much, so something had to give. I did briefly consider buying a new belt, preferably something quiet, like nylon, but I knew that wasn’t the answer. There was one other option.

That’s when I committed myself to the Hood to Coast idea. So In the coming weeks leading up to the race (for the unitiated, it’s a 197-mile relay race from Mt. Hood, Oregon to the Pacific Coast) I am going to recount my training, the good, the bad, and the ugly, mostly as an excuse to write, which is one of the few things that I truly enjoy.

I’m bringing you with me, like it or not.

One last thing, I did have that bourbon, but as a victory cocktail instead, my reward for sleuth-dom.