Clearly it's not in the genes

So my family, we don't talk a lot. It's not that we don't get on - in the main, we do - but in the 20 years and more I've lived away from home, in Ireland, London, and Seattle, I reckon I've gotten maybe three phone calls from my parents. So it's hard to keep up with the news.

But I was psyched yesterday when my mother told me that my cousin Paul McNamara was on the Irish men's senior team for the World Cross Country championships! Mind you, I found out about it more than a month after the race itself (March 27), but still - go Paul.

One time I was living with his cousin Kieran in Dublin. He announced he was going back home for the weekend, because his baby sister had won an all-Ireland medal. "It's her first," he explained, as if otherwise it wasn't worth mentioning, "so it's a big deal for her."

They're the athletic branch of the family.