March Madness

or “Stop me before I fix again”.

The good news is that the new training program started off gangbusters – 2200 meters in the pool. The first 1700 were great, and I banged out the last 500 without too much whining. It did help that there were chicks swimming this afternoon, so god forbid that the slowly slimming white guy (I’m avoiding the whole “middle aged” which is the surest sign that I’m there) show any signs of weaknenss. No, instead I slowed way down and did the distance swimmer thing of nice big arm circles on the strokes.

Felt really good for not having swum in a couple of weeks. The first three sets of 10 laps were probably the finest 1500 meters I’ve ever swum – every one was big circles with the arms, full extensions through my fingers and toes, and a hard kick off the wall upside down at the end of each 25. The last set of 500, though – can they add Knox Blox mix to the water and change the viscosity? Swear on my sainted mother’s grave (she’s not dead, but bear with), the water just felt thicker.

The other good news is that my beloved iBook is on its way home. I like my Linux machine (Dell Inspiron 3700 PIII 500 MHZ, running Fedora Core 3), but I cannot get the WiFi working on either my D-Link DWL 650+ or Dell 1350 wireless PCMCIA cards, so I’m tethered.

Tonight – did some more work on the T. Rex cutout for the beanbag toss at the Boy’s birthday. Looks good. The big event, though, was the bike clean-a-thon. I degreased the crap out of everythingn that wasn’t welded on to both my Cannnondale and my old Trek. Good stuff. Took the cranks off the Cannondale for the first time since I got it, and remembered the old materials lesson about metals in long-term contact with Aluminium. Oh well – a coat of grease and it’ll be fine for another 4 years.

The Trek is a different story. I’d bought paint at the model shop to patch a couple of scratches. Then I caught Fixedgear referencing a site on home-made headset presses (which work fine, BTW, and don’t cost $100+). Dan Goldenberg (The other site) has got a bit on painting frames. Now that I’ve got the bike apart, the scratching is a little bit more widespread than I though, and I’m seriously thinking about doing it. Be a lot easier to do it now than when it’s back together…

Unless, of course, someone wants to send me a ‘cross frame… (30″ inseam, usually run about a 52-53 cm frame)