In which I am not ready for the Olympics

Today I went riding on the Washington & Old Dominion Trail, and I definitely overdid it a bit. There's a trailhead several block from my house right around mile marker 10, and I made it my goal to get to mile 17. I ended up turning back two miles before that because I was already getting tired. The way back goes gradually uphill, so I was just exhausted by the time I got home. Apparently the fact that I could easily ride 15 miles last summer doesn't mean I can now when I'm all out of shape. Oops.

The trail is really nice though. It's paved and lined, and it's almost 45 miles long. In Arlington the W&OD trail hooks up with some other trails into the city. I'm nowhere near up to it now, but my goal is to get in good enough shaped that I can bike to the city and back. I should try to ride every day and work my way up to it... we'll see how that goes.

I do need to find a good bike shop around here. My brother is a mechanic, but I didn't get a chance to take my bike to him for a tune-up before I left. (My brother actually built my bike entirely out of spare parts. It's nothing too fancy, but it's a vast improvement on my old Huffy.) Of course, just the thought of looking for bike shops brings back bad memories of last years evil Dialog project. At least there won't be any spreadsheets involved.

Olympic Linguistics Pedantry

When did "to medal" become a verb?

It is tempting to say about a week ago - this ear-grating usage, as in "Romero is the only British woman to medal in two different sports", has disfigured the Beijing games - but, annoyingly, some dictionaries do accept "medal" as a verb, meaning "to decorate or honour with a medal" or "to receive a medal, esp. in a sporting event". It is, however, clearly an ugly Americanism - the earliest identified use of the word meaning to win a medal dates from 1966, in California, and the Washington Post was using it by 1979 - which needs to be stamped out. The sooner medal-obsessed Americans stop meddling with the English language the better.

Now while I agree that my countrymen do tend to be a bit medal obsessed, language change is just a fact of life, and should hardly be termed meddling. (Har, har, har. How very clever.) Verbing nouns--that is, creating a verb from an existing noun--is hardly a new phenomenon, and it's not going to stop just because the language pedants get all up in arms and "Wah, they're ruining our language!" about it.

Besides, who really wants to say "Michael Phelps was decorated with a medal eight times"? Sounds snotty and affected to me. But I'm just an ugly American.