Month: June 2007

links for 2007-06-07

Overdoing it

So, I’m sitting on the couch in the Q, eating strawberries and drinking beer. There’s a slightly bloody towel in the bathtub, and a bloody sock in my dirty clothes pile. I’m exhausted, and absolutely loving life.

Here’s the deal – A while back there was a Chris Carmichael (Of Lance Armstrong fame) article in Bicycling magazine. Carmichael suggested that breakthrough training could happen by an overload week. Or, at least that’s what I remember someone said sometime.

Plus, I’ve got not a whole lot going on outside of class, so I may as well beat the snot out of myself.

I’ve been swimming at lunch – but I talked about that yesterday.

Evenings – I rented a mountain bike from Sun’n’Spokes here in Sierra Vista. The first night, I rode up a canyon here on base – mostly jeep trail, but I did find some singletrack on the way down the canyon.

Tuesday and tonight, I went down to Brown Canyon. What a sweet ride. It starts with about two miles straight uphill, and then a GREAT downhill for about three miles. It’s similar to east coast trails – babies heads and roots, but different, cause there are FREAKIN’ MOUNTAINS!.

The climb is wicked tough. I cleared it the second time I tried, but barely. I was at 100% pretty much the entire way up.

The downhill – phenomenal. THere’s a sketchy section with lots of loose rock, but other than that, it’s good, do-able stunts, and a lot of good, smooth hardpack where I flew, baby. Flew.

Tuesday was awesome. Legs were fresh, and I knew the bike. The first lap was tricky, ’cause I’d never ridden it before (Go figure). The second lap – exactly why I ride.

This afternoon, I parked in a different spot to let me add a couple miles to the loop. As I was doing the climb up Ramsey Canyon road, I could feel that I didn’t have the ‘pop’ that I had on Tuesday. I didn’t walk as much as i did the first lap Tuesday, but I did walk some of the toughest stuff.

The downhill was good, but it was later in the day, so it was getting dark in the valley. Plus, I was tired. Anyway, on probably the toughest bit of the trail, I hesitated, locked up the front wheel, and did the proverbial endo (as in ‘end over end’) onto some rocks and tore up my knee. Helmet tested sat. Blood everywhere. I felt cool.

No permanent damage, and chicks dig scars, so I finished the ride down the canyon with no further problems. Exhausted, happy, and starving, I headed back to the Q for the aforementioned strawberries and beer.

Oh, and I found some pistachios, too.

Can’t wait to do it again tomorrow.

By the time I get to Arizona

So, I’m down in Sierra Vista, Arizona for a week. And life is good.

All that crap you hear about “a dry heat”? Well, it’s true. 90 degrees up here in the high desert is way different from 90 degrees at the coast. That “evaporation” thing that scientists talk about? It really does carry off a ton of heat.

I’d thought I was adjusting well to the altitude – running and biking haven’t been an issue, but I went to hit the post pool at lunch today. Running and cycling – I dunno, I suppose I’m either slowing down or just breathing faster – but moving about the same rate. Being three orders of magnitude higher than my usual average altitude doesn’t matter much.

Swimming, though – two strokes between breaths is two strokes between breaths regardless of how dense the air I suck into my lungs is. Wow, it killed me. Five laps was a stretch, and I was breathing every stroke near the end of most laps.

The pool was nice – at noon they kept the sliders to the outside open, so there was tons of air moving across the surface of the water. That evaporation was working again, and the top inch or two of the pool were frigid. The rest was great, just absolutely great, other than feeling like i had no air in my lungs.

I’ve rented a mountain bike; will write about that later. The short is that riding out here is like riding on the East Coast, ‘cept instead of series of rollers, there’s one huge climb followed by a roller coaster ride. Excellent.

Camping

Wow, sorry I haven’t gotten this one down yet.

I took the boys camping last weekend. As in actual, honest-to-god put your stuff on your back and hike camping, not the pull up to a graded gravel pad and lock the food in the car camping.

I called the Connecticut DEP the Thursday before Memorial Day to see if any of the “backcountry” camping passes were available for the weekend. “Sure”, the helpful voice on the line said. “Where do you want to go?” I wasn’t sure, so she faxed over the list of places in the eastern half of the state. Scouted a couple on Google Earth, and faxed back my permit request. Easy as that. They emailed it over later that day.

Sunday after church, the boys and I loaded up the VW and drove over to Pachaug State Forest, and started hiking on one of the blue-blazed trails. I was playing it kind of conservative – there weren’t a whole lot of contour lines on the map, and it wasn’t much more than a mile and a half to the campsite.

The kids were great on the hike, despite a decent number of mosquitoes. We used a citronella-based repellent, and it worked decently well. The oldest had a blast on the hike, and the youngest made it about 3/4 of the way before he asked to be carried. Even then, I only had to let him ride on my shoulders for about a quarter mile until he was fine walking again.

The campsite was great, if not quite what I’d describe as “backcountry”. It was immediately adjacent to a boat launch and some state forest dirt roads. Turns out we could have driven there if we wanted to. But the hike was a great part of it.

Other than being a parking lot, the campsite was great. It was right at the deep end of a small impoundment, and we found red-eared sliders laying eggs on the dam. Plenty of good, flat space to run around. We purified a couple of bottles of water to replace what we’d drank on the hike, with both boys making sure they pumped a little bit, ’cause Chris and Martin did that on Zooboomafoo.

We unpacked, and the boys got a kick out of setting up a bear-bag for the evening. They were really, really disappointed the next morning when they hadn’t seen a bear during the night, which, I guess, means I hadn’t completely explained the concept of hanging food to them.

Supper was ramen noodles and GORP. After supper, the boys threw rocks for literally hours, and I had a chance to try out the old fly rod. Tied on a non-descript fuzzy thing with a pink head and butt, and tossed it out, mostly for the joy of being able to throw a long line without worrying about catching the elusive tree-fish.

To my amazement, I actually caught a fish. And not just any fish – at first I thought I’d snagged some lily pads, but then they started swimming to deeper water. Which was odd. Still, I wasn’t convinced it was a fish; maybe a log and some strange hydrodynamics…

Then the water boiled, and my next thought was that the fish was foul hooked (IE, not hooked in the mouth, but snagged) and I was dragging it through the water sideways. It stripped line off the reel, but finally, I dragged it to the shore, and was eye-to-eye with the biggest largemouth bass I’ve seen in my life. I lipped it, and saw the fly neatly stuck in the fish’s tongue. As I was working the fly out, I realized that this was a REALLY BIG fish – I could put my entire fist inside the sucker’s mouth.

The boys got a kick out of it – they’d only seen bluegill to this point, so seeing daddy haul this monster out was a trip. I went to great pains to explain that this fish was extraordinary, but they weren’t buying it. It’s good to be the king.

Somehow we got to sleep. Even though they’re tiny, a two-person backpacking tent is too small for a dad and two young boys. Especially when it’s COOL to sleep in a tent. Eventually we got to sleep, but it was like watching brownian motion in a cup as it cools – gradually less and less until an equilibrium is reached.

The next morning went better than expected. No crying from the big one on the hike back. The little one was exhausted from not getting enough sleep, so I carried him a lot more than on the way in.

All in all, it was phenomenal. Cannot wait to go again.

“End the War in My Rack”

Frickin’ cancer. It keeps popping up close enough to me to make me queasy. But there are amazing stories coming out about survivorship. The latest is a FOAF (Friend of a Friend), a woman I went to college with, who’s battling breast cancer again. From an email from our common friend:

She participated in the Relay for Life, which is an all night relay race to celebrate cancer survivorship and promote cancer funding. Her team decided on a military, combat theme and wore camouflaged t-shirts which read, “End the War in My Rack.”

Amazing. Would that I had 1/10th the intestinal fortitude and courage of folks like that.

I wish there were more I could do than pray and throw some bones the way of folks working for cures.

Y’all be well.

Look at all the people

Wow, so the pool was PACKED Thursday night. What the heck was up with that? Don’t those folks know that’s MY night to swim?

Just kidding, but MAN, was there a difference. Usually when I get to the pool between 8 and 8:30P, after the kids are safely tucked into bed, there’s me, the lifeguard, and maybe one other person. Tonite? The entire place was packed, and all but 3 lanes were completely full.

I picked the older and similarly shaped guy one lane in from the far wall. He said “Sure, I’ll share”. So we did.

It was kind of good swimming in traffic again. Not sure how many laps I did – probably 4×5 and 1×10. But there may have been another 5 lap set in there somewhere. I was tired when I finished.

—–

In other, cooler news, my FatCyclist.com jersey is in. Man, is it cool. In hindsight, I should have ordered a large, but the medium is not uncomfortably tight. I will take it for a spin this afternoon.

links for 2007-06-01