Category: Bike

Pie is good

want to learn about pie or killing stuff? - Pie is good.

For what it’s worth, I did break down and actually bought a hunting license this year, got both my federal and state duck stamps, and spent exactly NO days waist deep in freezing water. My belly wishes I had; the fact that I haven’t yet had the flu makes me think it’s a smart decision. Didn’t help I was gone most of November.

Training for Mooseman is going well. I spent a little bit of my discretionary income on an Apple TV and Cheap Monitor instead of beer and wings for the basement. Now, I’ve got the whole of the internet on video staring me in the face while I ride. So, it’s not much different from sitting on the couch, other than the sweating and the wondering if I ought to spend more time in the drops.

Running is good – Honestly, I head out and just keep wanting to go. I’ve been running with some fast guys from church on the weekends. They kill me, but go easy for their long runs – I suppose it will make me a better man in the long run.

I also cannot say enough about the swim class at the Y. I’ve got the same instructor, Jen, that my younger kid has for swimming, and she rocks. She’s not a triathlete – came to teach swimming, and it’s absolutely great to get feedback on the actual right way to do things. I am actually beginning to feel somewhat comfortable in the water, which is more than worth the price of admission.

let’s see: We wrote psalms in Sunday school this week – I managed to rhyme “PowerPoint” with “Anoint”, causing David to start spinning in his grave.

So, that’s about it. I suppose next month’s discretionary income will go towards bike parts. But that’ll mean that I might be on the road and not on the stupid trainer.

Before we go, I’d like to leave you with a half hour on the scientific method. Honestly, I think this is exceptionally important – the intellectual discipline that brought us into the Enlightenment and out of the Dark Ages needs to be celebrated. This is why I love my job, and why I relish even a tiny chance to be a research engineer. There’s a tiny bit of profanity, but not so much.

10 miles in the snow

Drill in Newport again, and another storm decides to roll through in the evening. So, rather than spending Saturday evening at the house (or, more to the point Sunday morning digging out and driving on crappy roads), I holed up at the Q in Newport. Work kept me busy until about 5:30, when I strapped on the sneakers, bundled up, and headed out into the first flakes of the evening’s snow.

Really and truly, I didn’t want to go run. Pretty easily I could have justified gaffing off the run, ordering up some wings and breadsticks and watching “Harold and Kumar go to White Castle” on Comedy Central. Man, was it cold, and I was tired, and wah, wah, wah.

I finally talked myself into going three miles. That was going to be it – just a quick out and back to at least put something into the legs. So, I started, and then something just clicked.

Sure, it was cold, and I was tired, but something just felt great. The snow falling was beautiful, the evening was beautiful, and there was just something about the run that felt RIGHT.

So, I kept going – through downtown, across to First Beach, and down the Cliff Walk. Cut across the peninsula, back through downtown, and did another lap until the Forerunner hit 10 miles. Life was good.

Tonite – Jack was back. Spent an hour on the trainer watching 24:Redemption and spinning. I may not love the wind trainer, but it’s what I’ve got, and my legs need the miles.

Tomorrow’s swimming. Cannot wait.

Fitness Plans 2009

Hey, isn’t this a running blog?

Well, no, not necessarily. I mean, yeah, kind of, but remember, we’re trying to branch out.
Regardless, I’m still pretty passionate about the running, the biking, and the swimming. My major race goals for 2009 are:

Other guaranteed races are:

So, how am I going to get there?

For Mooseman, I’m kind of playing it by ear. I’m using ontri.net to track my training – I liked the ability to do batch edits of a training program and upload it as a CSV file. Mapmyrun/tri/bike/whatever is pretty slick, now that I’m using a Forerunner 305. However, there’s no way to use it to plan training, only as a really, really slick tracker and mapping tool. ActiveTrainer was indispensable for me in preparing for San Antonio, but that was largely a result of having a good marathon plan offered for free by the race. The training planner interface is pretty slow. I was tempted to just keep the plan on my laptop, but I like having access to it in cyberspace without having to lug 5 pounds of laptop with me (if anyone wants to buy me a netbook, feel free). And I think I’m ditching nike+ – I’m beginning to enjoy running in silence.

I’m melding the ontri.net 20 week half-ironman plan with the one from TriNewbie. Essentially, my plan is to:

  • run/swim Monday (Swim precedence)
  • bike Tuesday
  • bike/swim Wednesday (Swim precedence)
  • run/swim Thursday (run precedence)
  • Rest Friday (beer precedence)
  • Long Run Saturday
  • Long Ride Sunday

with the culmination being 60 miles on the bike, 15 miles on the run about 3 weeks before the event.

NYC will be pretty much the same marathon plan I used this year, although I may spend June and July examining Run Less, Run Faster given the cross-training base I’ll have after Mooseman.

(Funny thought, marathon training being somewhat anti-climactic the fourth time around)

More thoughts on 2009 elsewhere on this blog.

2009 – Doing

I’d meant to get this out before the New Year, even to the point of getting a draft going days ago. (By getting a draft going, I mean that I came up with a concept in my head, and put a sentence into ecto.) And it kind of died there.

But, I’ll resurrect it here, as 43folders is back with good stuff that sums up a couple of other bits that have really resonated with me lately:

Even (or especially) for people with a notional gift for their chosen field, talent — like luck, rich parents, and unmined gold — is just a raw material. It’s not the one-bit switch that determines artistic success. And, any “talent” one theoretically possesses is likely to stay stuck under a layer of river rock unless and until its claim-holder learns to repeatedly pan, sluice, or dredge it into something that can be refined, polished, and, in most cases, vended. Fancy ladies buy gold jewelry; not drawings of mining equipment.

Even closer to my own state of mind was O’Reilly writer Simon St. Laurent’s resolution to practice:

I don’t expect to become a master at either of these things. Frankly, I think that “mastery” is usually the wrong goal, a strange habit in our culture of setting ourselves up to fail. Mastery happens, but we need to remember – and value – the intermediate steps.

Even closer to home for me has been getting to know a couple of musician friends up here a little bit better. Missy and I went to our first live show together in, well, like forever a couple of nights ago to see Ben and Nancy play, and, man, did it bring together a bunch of thoughts that have been rambling about my head for a while.

Practice and Train

The first is just the unabashed joy of DOING something WELL. What I captured at the San Antonio Marathon, and what I’m beginning to recapture through my coursework at the War College is that half-assing things, while sometimes the right thing to do, is ultimately a method of last resort. Quality comes from repetition/practice/drills. My first two marathons were matters of survival. My MBA was getting a box checked off. San Antonio was the first marathon I did after committing to being a runner, being (relatively) consistent about training, and really doing the groundwork.

My kid brother’s a real inspiration here. He took up the violin last spring, and got to the point where he played Christmas carols for the family this year over the holiday. I want to do that. But I picked up the guitar maybe a dozen times in the whole year, and the piano even fewer. No wonder I can’t play.

Be Realistic

It’s kind of important here to discriminate between doing something WELL and in achieving excellence or being the best. 30,000 people ran the San Antonio Marathon with me; only Meschack Kirwa won the race. I finished in the middle of the pack, but I’m completely satisfied with that result. My point, here, is not to necessarily settle for mediocrity, but to realize that a lot of things are still worth doing. And that the more you do them, the further along the distribution curve of results you’ll get.

We did “A Charlie Brown’s Christmas” as the church’s pageant this year, and filled out the list of kids who wanted to participate beyond what we needed for speaking parts by letting some of the musically talented kids play christmas carols. And, man, was I happy we did. It wasn’t perfect, but it really helped set the mood. There had been a brief motion early on in November when we started practicing to use a CD for the songs, but I put the kaibosh on that. Vince Guaraldi’s album is as close to perfect as a Christmas album can be, but that wasn’t what we were after. We wanted the kids to think about Christmas, and to celebrate Christ’s birth using their own talents. In the end, we had a couple of kids show talent even their parents hadn’t realized. No one’s going to take our show to Broadway, but we didn’t want them to.

What I’m saying here, I guess, is that unless you’re Usain Bolt, or Michael Phelps, there’s always someone better, and it’s always easier not to use a talent. But that’s the wrong answer.

Get Help

I finally understand what people mean when they’ve been telling me to “get help.” It means that I should actually go out and talk to people who know what the heck they’re doing. (My wife’s yelling at me that, no, it means I ought to go see a shrink)

Again, coming back to the church’s Pageant. We hatched the idea, coordination kind of fell to me, since, well, I am the elder for Christian Education. So, I went out and watched the TV show, we bought the screenplay, and I adopted it for the Church. Then, when we started rehearsals, one of the other teachers was helping out tremendously, and had a much better talent for getting the kids to move around the stage than I did. Another teacher took the kids without speaking parts, and did a tremendous job arranging a chorus around the show. I took the kids who didn’t want to be on stage at all, and we built stuff. My initial concept had been that I’d do the directing; but others were stronger at that. Help offered itself, and I had the good sense to say “yes”.

So, I’m going to adopt that attitude elsewhere. I’m going to actually discuss essays with my professors. I’ll get career advice from folks I work with and follow through. I’m going to take “Triathlon Swim Training” classes at the Mystic Y.

Focus

Another thing people have continually told me is that “you can’t do everything”. While I’d like to think I’ve proven them wrong, I’ve realized that what they were really trying to say was “you can’t do everything WELL.”

And it turns out that they were right.

I’ve already kind of started to put this into practice. If something isn’t important to me, it’s gone. I gave a pretty major project for which I’d won a big proposal to another engineer at the office so that I could concentrate on the work I really want to do. I’m paring down my RSS feeds (as useful as he was earlier today, 43folders and almost all the tech rumor sites are gone), and I plan on being quicker to “mark all read” when I haven’t had the chance to read news in a couple of days. And I think I’m pretty much done with television. I’ll watch the conclusion to Battlestar Galactica and this season of 24 on Hulu, and maybe catch Headlines once in a while with the wife.

Cub Scouts? I’ll help out where asked, but am not really moved by the whole scouting thing. If things don’t improve with the pack we’re with, we’ll do Webelos with a different pack in the area that has some super dig-it parents.

I’ve cleaned my spaces in the house – they’re filled with stuff I want to do, and I may cut up the credit card so that i can’t buy new stuff with which to distract myself.

Alright already, enough with the preaching

So, what do I want to do? (Husbanding and fathering are, as always, above everything)

First, while I’m committed to the fleet seminar program at the War College, I really want to go back for a technical masters’ (or PhD groundwork) in Computer Science, specifically state processing or digital signals processing as applied to software defined radio. To support this, I need to:

  1. Brush up on programming and working with hardware; and
  2. Brush up on Math.
  3. Finish one of the projects I’m facilitating at work on time, on budget, and on spec.
  4. Get my ham license

Not necessarily less important is that I want to continue to contribute at church. There’s a bunch of projects cooking, and a bunch of talent newly inspired and some new arrivals. Good times.

I also want to write more, and write better. My plan for this is:

  1. Purge NewsGator/NetNewsWire
  2. Paper journal as first priority
  3. Write first, browse second
  4. Revive the sandbox.

Music’s on my mind. Action items here are:

  1. Resume playing while putting the children to bed every evening. It’s much more interactive with them than my recent routine (following FaceBook on the iPod Touch)
  2. Play the darn guitar rather than looking for new “how-to” books or vieos
  3. Possibly take a few lessons this summer, once I’m done with Swim Class at the Y and on summer vacation from NWC.

Become more accomplished as a geek.

  1. Move my iTunes into a Zen virtual machine on an XP instance inside of Ubuntu on the MacBook. Then, I can still sync the heck out of my Touch, but get some Linux loving.
  2. Finish working through the Python books, and move on to C
  3. Run my own server. So I can get my stuff from anywhere. (I dug this podcast; sad to see it go)

Hey, isn’t this a running blog?

It just hit me that this went way, way longer than I’d planned. I’m putting the fitness stuff in another post.
2009 ought to be good. My predictions:

  • Gen X becomes, as mid-30s types, neo-hippies, fulfilling the promises that the boomers squandered once they realized that love and nature didn’t pay for shag carpet and coke in the ’70s. Gen X, on the other hand, will realize that community doesn’t show up on anyone’s balance sheet, and that productivity improvements mean missed soccer games, missed meals, and midnight oil.
  • Apple releases something cool, sorely tempting my resolution to avoid Tech Rumor sites.
  • The BCS gets even more frustrating.

Thoughts I want to explore in 2009

  • Things that ought to be “Amateur”, or that ought to have lots of non-professional participation (arts and sport spring immediately to mind)
  • Things that ought to be handled at a community level
  • Camping

All right. Enough.

Happy New Year, y’all.

New Haven, 2008

Monday was Labor Day, so I found myself back down in New Haven for the national 20k championships and in the company of the lovely and talented Jon and the witty and interesting Dianna. As usual, the weather was on the hot side of perfect.

Missy and the boys headed down with me this year, and I think they had a good time. New Haven’s got a great setup on the green, and the kids loved running through the bouncy things.

The race started out exceptionally well – legs were good, and I was just over 50 minutes at the 10k (You can check out the results). I’d felt kind of bad – about mile 1, I ran off from Jon and Dianna, feeling good, good, good. Even down the first long, sun-baked, windless stretch, I felt GREAT.

Then, about mile 5, there started being a bunch of hotspots on my feet. I thought that it might just be cause it was, you know, HOT. ‘Cept that was obviously wrong. In hindsight, I should have stopped to re-tie my shoes. ‘Cept I didn’t.

Sometime around mile 7, the pain finally got to me, so I went ahead and pulled the heck out of my laces, and started limping. No way was I going to DNF this year. Dianna must have passed me about then – man, did she have a good race even though she said she was going to take it easy.

Just after mile 8, I saw Jon pass me thanks to the absolutely stellar hat he was wearing. We ran for a while, then I had to walk for a bit and Jon headed on down the course in his own effortless way. I continued to trudge, completely and totally resenting both the uphill in the park, and the downhill back to town.

And the f’n bagpipers were there again just before mile 11. If there’s one thing that just makes the short hairs on my neck stand up and my stomach churn, it’s bagpipe music – sounds like some sadistic evildoer sodomizing a sheep while strangling it at the same time. Which, come to think of it, is probably how they started.

I made it through to the end. I’d walk for about a quarter mile through each water stop, and run easy for the next three quarters. It really, really, really sucked, but I made it. Not a terrible race – finished at about 1:53. So, it wasn’t my slowest finish, but it wasn’t my best, either. (I’m pretty psyched, though, as I’d thought I was even faster in 2005).

We hung around for a while after the race. I was slow, so the beer line was painfully long. The ice cream line was pretty short, so I went through that twice.

The rest of this week’s been great. I started night class at the War College – man, I dig me some Sun Tzu.

Taking it easy on the last half of the race seems to have worked out pretty well – speedwork on Wednesday rocked. Honest to gosh, it just felt great to run.

Today was another day on the bike. Ever since seeing Rudi in DC a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been back in love with riding. Last week rocked – I actually broke a spoke during a bit of out-of-the-saddle time, which was the first time I’d had to replace a piece of gear due to use-induced failure instead of wrecking it while trying to do routine maintenance on the bike.

Last Saturday was a great ride. The highlight was coming over the hill just past Dean’s Mill School. They had one of those radar displays, and it read 18 MPH as soon as I saw it at the top of the hill, and I managed to roll it up to 25 before I passed it. Caught my breath for the next three miles…

Tomorrow’s an easy run, and then somewhere between 7 and 14 on Saturday, depending on how I feel. I’m trying to really treasure these runs, as Missy’s sidelined with ITB troubles, so I can see how precious good legs are.

It’s good to be the dad

Hey, y’all.

I’m still here. Doin’ well, in fact. Running. A lot.

But, I’ve been working. Work is good. Really good, in fact. But, time is short (I’ve been sleeping).

I got to catch up with RandomDuck (aka Rudi, who’s got a great new theme) down in DC. Good food, great conversation, and a neat trip around Dupont (who, interestingly enough was Navy). Man, I need to get on the bike.

I will pass on one tidbit, both bike and running related: Sometimes, being a dad is an amazing thing. A couple of weeks ago, I had 8 miles on the Saturday long run. I was getting ready to go, and said “Hey, Jake (oldest boy) – do you want to try to ride your bike around the river with me?”

“Sure,” said Jake.

I thought “Crap” – my initial fear was that this was going to be disaster – 8 miles for an 8 year old boy on a BMX-ish bike is a long, long frackin’ way. But, I figured there wasn’t much to lose, so we laced ’em up, and went for the run.

Let me be honest for a bit – my goal at San Antonio is to finish, as it’s been nigh unto 3 years since I’ve done 26.2, I’m still above 170 lbs with the hard part of marathon training just kicking off (the bit where you’re ravenously hungry all the darn time and can’t really lose any weight and still focus for more than 30 seconds), and I haven’t been completely on schedule until about 3 weeks ago (and I still missed an easy run last week).

So, part of the loop around the Mystic River (not the one from the eponymous movie, but the one from the Pizza) included a stop at the coffee shop to say howdy and get a drink. About 10 or 15 minutes of break, then back to the bike/sneakers.

Jake’s great to ride with – full of questions, and starting to “get it” as far as riding in traffic goes. We’ve been watching the ospreys that nest on the river all summer, and it’s been fun talking to him about their recovery. Actually, the questions get kind of old about the 7 mile point, but they keep him engaged.

The first trip was great. Jake pooped out on the hill on River Road and had to walk, but there wasn’t any complaints until he realized we were about a half mile from the house. And then, the complaints were about being hungry.

The experiment’s been a success – the next week, he started asking if we were going about Wednesday, and last week was great – he just wanted to be sure we’d had breakfast first. The last two weekends, we’ve actually done the double – Jake and I would do the long run, then Nate (the younger) would beg to go for a bike ride. So, we headed down to go see the Art festival one weekend, and just to look at the river the next.

So, yeah, I’m digging life. It’s cool when you don’t have to work getting the kiddos to like fun stuff.

Real People at le Tour

Hey, Doc – I’m all about a pilgrimage

Walking up the hill, I was aware how quiet everyone was. That is, until I turned a corner and saw hundreds of Flemish folk parked up on the hill. There were a couple of tents higher up, with a great sound-system belting out what are presumably Belgian hits from the past (or maybe it was the current top 10, I’m not sure). In any case, everyone around me knew the words, and were clapping and singing along – a great atmosphere.

The smell of burgers and onions on the barbeques filled my nostrils, and I suddenly realised that I hadn’t eaten anything today – we skipped breakfast at last night’s hotel because the place just didn’t inspire us at all and got on the road as soon as we could. I said to Ed this morning that the hotel reminded me of what a borstal would be like (a “bad boy’s school” as my mum would have called it). [From PezCycling News – What’s Cool In Pro Cycling]

Vermont is a cult

We’ve been summer-vacationing up in Stowe for, oh, let’s call it three years. Absolutely great – few mosquitoes, great hiking, spectacular views, good food, great roads for riding, good paths for running. We dig it. I’m tempted to buy 15 acres and start raising organic goats and sheep, making cheese, and growing my hair long. Go off the grid, and all that sort of stuff.

My brother-in-law says “Vermont is a cult.”

Ah, so be it.

But it’s been good up here so far. The boys are having a blast riding the bike path – Jake made the entire 11 miles on Sunday, and Nate’s cranking on the trail-a-bike, such that I really don’t have to push other than to go up and over hills. Pretty stinking cool.

Running is good. Sunday morning, I did 9 miles, looping through Moscow and back through the village to pick up the toothbrush that I inevitably forget when I go on travel. The upside is that I’ve now got a toothbrush in pretty much every bag I travel with, provided I don’t clean out the bags before I go.

Yesterday, 45 minutes, or 5.1 miles on the path. I didn’t really want to push myself, so I didn’t. Nice how that works. We then drove over to the Cabot Creamery, getting only slightly lost along the way. On the way home, we stopped at the Green Mountain Club headquarters to pick some maps. One of the guys stopped me on the way out, and pointed me towards the Short Trail, a quick 1 mile loop behind the hiker center. The boys had a blast.

Have I mentioned I love my wife? She sent me out fishing last night. Two stocked rainbows on dry flies. Cannot beat it.

Vermont is a cult.

———

Postscript: I’m kind of surprised – “Vermont is a cult” seems to be an original phrase. I could have sworn I’d at least seen it on a t-shirt before my BiL said it.

Towels

Missy keeps giving me grief about why I keep the gnasty old white towels for my gym bag. Finally, I’ve got a good answer:

To look cool, wrap a towel around your waist when you change. Changing skirts are practical, but not very cool. To look Euro-cool, make sure it’s a white, thread bare towel taken from the cheap motel room that you and five teammates crammed into at your last stage race.

(Courtesy of PezCyclingNews)

(Also, it looks like I missed TowelDay this year.)

Small Pieces Loosley Joined

I got to cross another couple of good idea off the list last night.

My neighbor and I have been saying “Hey, we ought to go mountain biking” to each other for about the last year. Which is true – the number of people with whom I ought to go ride is astronomical, and if I could follow through, my belly wouldn’t be nearly so generous as it is.

The other idea was pretty simple – we live up on top of a hill here in Mystic, and there’s a bunch of land and parks, between our house and Fisher’s Island Sound. I’d been meaning to see if I could link together one epic ride out of the whole deal.

Despite yesterday being a day from hell, and despite my getting home about 20 minutes late, and despite a flat going up the driveway, the ride was all that and a bag of chips. We cruised through the land by the new elementary school. Quick pedal on the road past Whittle’s Farm – nice. Wrong turn in Pequot woods that turned into about a mile of tasty swoopy singletrack and ended up being the right turn – good twist of fate. And even the hike around Beebe pond was great.

We finished the ride down in the Daniel Packer Inn with a cold beer.