While researching technical information for an engineering client’s website, I found a series of maps that answer a ton of questions I’ve had over the years. For example, why does it always feel like the wind is against me no matter which direction I bike, run or swim?

Here’s a map of North American wind patterns. I think it explains everything in living color.

Have you ever seen such a confusing shitshow in your life? The wind clearly cannot make up its mind, blowing here and there with all its might. Oh sure, there are “trends” but isn’t that small consolation. Have you ever known the wind to follow orders? Tell me with a straight face that you can honestly count on a tailwind on any given day even after you’ve traveled five miles into a stiff headwind.

More than likely, you’ll turn around and run or ride back into a gale just as strong as the one you just fought for half an hour. That’s because the wind is a capricious bastard, On other days an unforgiving bitch. On other day’s it’s a transition mix of toxic whims.

Perhaps this is because the wind literally sucks. That’s right. It doesn’t blow, it sucks. It’s all about high and low pressure systems, it seems. But even in a local scenario, the wind bends like a cheap hockey stick.

All you have to do to bend the wind is put something in front of it like a hill or a row of corn and it goes whipping around in a furiously compensatory fashion. We can feel this effect whenever a big truck goes blowing past us and the wind is sucked clean out of its path. If you are unlucky enough to be riding or running in a crosswind when one of those big trucks motors past, it is wise to be on your guard. You can get sucked toward the road or wind up clattering down the asphalt.

It’s not much better when you go swimming in open water during high wind conditions. When chop builds up to two or three feet, or the swells come tumbling at you from out of the Big Blue, beware. The wind does not give two shits if you want to go fast in such conditions. It does not even care if you survive or not.

Of course, the wind is radically altered not only by pressure systems, but also regional and local temperatures. The map below of national temps gives you a clue that there is a great big conspiracy afoot in North America. The Southwest is clearly hogging most of the warm air.

Not only is this proof that people in the Southwest are selfish, it also an illustration of what we can call the Dog Turd Phenomenon. Based on the colors clearly show in southernmost New Mexico and Arizona, it is clear that dog turds will stink the worst in those states. Fortunately, these are also the places where “dry heat” supposedly reigns. So the theory here is that the stink of dog poo on hot asphalt will be most profuse those first few minutes, but then dissipate quickly as the dessicated dog poo turns to dried out bits of commercial kibble. The rest of the country is left to deal with sticky piles of slippery dog poo that can cause you to slip or fall. And that is why most of North America is so hard to navigate.

That’s all because there are some people in the population that think being asked to pick up their dog’s shit is an infringement on their liberties. They consider it a breach of their constitutional and even their religious rights to be “forced” to bend over and pick up their dog’s crap off the sidewalk or the lawn. So they leave it there as a sign of protest that their personal “freedom” comes before the needs of all other people in society.

This is a particular problem in Southern States like Tennessee, where people also seem to have no respect for dogs in general.

But when it comes to big piles of poo lying around forever because it never dries out in the heat, the worst part of the country is poor old Alaska! There’s hardly any dark areas in that state at all. That means dog poo or moose poo or caribou dung will hang around for decades and even centuries if left out in the open. If you don’t believe me, consider the problems they have on top of Mt. Everest. , where 8000 lbs of human waste were left on the mountain in 2019 alone. This appears to be proof that many who climb that peak are some of the shittiest people in the world.

And Alaska has been around just as long as Mt. Everest. Which means there are probably even mastodon turds lying around in the muskeg if you care to walk around and look. But be careful, if you notice fresh grizzly bear poo it is best to hope there is a decent sized tree nearby. The bears up there are sensitive about these things, and people who get close to bear poop are know to get mauled because the bears are clearly embarrassed about the stench of their prodigious poo. They also don’t like to admit there are so many berry seeds. The bears have a reputation to protect as giant predators. Eating berries is bad for the Bear Brand, you know.

There are other reasons it is hard to run, ride or swim in Alaska. For one thing, if no one has ever told you, it’s really hard to swim in a frozen lake. That used to be a big problem for Alaskan triathletes. But now that global warming has swept up the continent thanks to the dog turd policymaking of politicians denying climate change in the Lower 48, we’ll all soon be able to swim across Alaska by jumping from lake to river to lake again. And won’t that be swell?

All told, I hope this helps you understand why it’s so hard to run, bike and swim in North America. We live in the midst of a giant conspiracy to make it more difficult to train and race in a country so confused by its own wind and temperature conditions that we’ve been reduced to studying dog turds to make sense of it all.

That also happens to explain why there is a massive dog turd now rotting in the White House. The weather can be blamed for that problem too, because when it comes to elections, it’s all about which way the political winds blow. Or do they suck? Apparently so.