Obligatory Triathlon Experience Write Up

I took part in my second triathlon today, the Santa Cruz Sprint Triathlon. It consisted of a 750 meter swim in the Monterey Bay (kelp and all), a 12.4 mile bike ride and a 3.2 mile run. Nope, not even sniffing at the kind of distances the Ironmen do but its a start. Plus, its alot more feasible for me to train for and enjoy a sprint tri than much of anything else at this point.

Family Milestones

Just wanted to make a quick blog post to note that, as of yesterday, Grady is no longer in need of using training wheels at all. When we bumped him up to the bike with the 16 inch wheels, he decided he really needed the wheels to keep him upright. After a couple of outings with the wheels I could see he was being slowed down and his bicycling skills progress was being hampered by the wheels. So when he hopped off to get a drink of water, I grabbed my ratchet wrench and removed the wheels.

At first he was rather unhappy about it but when he climbed back on board and took a mere two pedal strokes, that big awesome Grady grin broke out on his face and he blazed across the parking lot at a new higher speed than ever before.

Oh yeah, training wheels are gone for good now!

And Sullivan has moved up from his low-slung tricycle. He's now riding the 12 inch wheeled bicycle with the training wheels firmly attached still. But he's doing really well on it and is farther along than Grady was when he'd started using the bigger kid bike.

To celebrate we rode all the way from West Marine to the bridge and back (maybe close to a mile) on the slough path which is gravel-ly and a little daunting to new cyclists. But both boys kicked some butt, took some names and rocked it out like the little stars they are.

We had a great time even though the wind was howling across the lot!

The Weekend Wrap

So here it is, Monday morning again and I'm plugging away at computers on one of my school campuses. We had a pretty good weekend even if the weather never did live up to the hype. And I got two distinctly different and good workouts in which have shown me just how far I've got to go before my body is ready for the triathlon.

I also signed up for another race in about three weeks at the 2010 Sea Otter Classic in Monterey. I'm going to do the Cat 3 Cross Country starting at a bleary and cold 8 am on Sunday morning. I sort of pushed myself into it because I've always wanted to race at the Sea Otter and, because I'm a cheapie, I could get $10 off my entry (the offer for which expired at midnight last night). I've never raced mountain bikes before so this should be fun and it is the Sea Otter's 20th year so there's that too. I'm not quite sure how that weekend will work since I will likely have to camp out there or hit the road butt ass early on Sunday to make the start. But there is time to sort out the details now that the race is on.

I also did some additional tweaking on NorCal Bikers, added some Amazon affiliate links because I need to get some stuff at Amazon anyway and might as well generate a little side income from the process.

And for the workouts, I converted an 8 week training schedule into an Excel spreadsheet, then uploaded it to Dropbox so I could check it anywhere and then went a step further and uploaded it to my Google Docs so I can access it AND update it with workout data on the fly. Jay suggested going even further and importing into my Google calendar but I have a tendency to flip my workouts a day forward or backward so not sure if that'd work.

But I did get a good run and swim in on Saturday and then a good mountain bike ride in on Sunday. My legs were pretty worked after the run and swim but those sored-up muscles didn't infringe on my cycling at all. I'm well ahead of my training schedule at this point but still need to bring my running up by quite a bit.

Today is a scheduled rest day which is good since its also my big work day with a nearly full day at one school and then heading out to another school for a shorter day there.

My swimming is coming along pretty well overall. I need to work on my ability to keep going without needing to stop. But its good for now and I'm improving my technique and stamina each time I'm going out. I'm in the market for some better swim trunks since the board short style is like wearing a big ol' drag suit. No, I am not going for the banana hammock Speedo style. At least not yet. For now I'm going to get some square brief style trunks.

The one downside to swimming on Saturday is the little heated pool area got very crowded with people who seemed to screech almost constantly. It got kind of annoying.

The run was pretty good too considering I haven't really done much running since back in high school when I ran cross country for a couple of years. Then I discovered mountain bikes and was like, running is for suckers, biking is for me! Only now I'm having to learn how to run all over again. I'm working on my stamina, working on my stride and trying not to pound my shins and calves into cramped up jelly. Seriously, I've never had to deal with cramping in my shins like this and its rather painful. But it is coming along.

I fully expect to be on the starting line for the triathlon fully confident in my preparations for the race. Over the next few weeks I will start to work on my transition work and actually changing over from swimming to biking and then from biking to running.

On Sunday I got out and hit Nisene Marks for my standard (though awesome) ride. The trails had really dried out alot more in the last week since I was there. Still some sloppy spots but overall the system is in great shape and I did not crash into a pricker bush this time which always helps. On Sunday afternoon I took the kids out to the huge parking lot behind West Marine and they rode their bikes around the lot for a bit before Grady decided he wanted to try riding the hill that leads down to the slough path. And he rode up and down the gravel hill 20 or more times. He has really taken to riding without his training wheels and is fast as heck now.

The next step will be bumping him up to a bike with 16 inch wheels and getting Sully going on the little bike with the training wheels re-attached. And then the whole family will be almost ready to go bike touring together. I can't wait!

And last night everyone had a pretty low key evening. Sully passed out on the couch at about 7:30 and Grady put up virtually no fight when it was time to take him up to bed.

Another good weekend with lots of good exercise!

Today Was a Good Day

Because today was an unusually good and fun family style day, I thought I'd briefly try to capture how it went because I know, maybe years from now, I will want to look back on days like today and remember them.

My wife and I are training for a sprint triathlon at the end of April, a little more than six weeks away. A sprint triathlon, for those that aren't knowing, is a short distance triathlon consisting of a quarter mile swim (in a suck the breath right out of you cold lake), a 9.7 mile bike portion and then a two mile run. It doesn't sound overall challenging on the face of it. I'm already routinely riding 12 - 16 mile mountain bike rides now though the recent non-stop rains have definitely cut into my cardio. Anyway, it is a race, it does have swimming and running as key features of it, two activities of which I've done damned little of in the last ten years or so. I did used to run cross country in high school but gave it up when I realized how much faster and further and less impactful mountain biking was.

But we are now training for all three aspects of the race. Which means getting some pool time when possible. The first possible came earlier this week and I came up against the hard reality that bike fitness and pool fitness ain't got shit to do with one another. I grunted my way through 30 or 35 laps, I stopped counting and then stopped swimming when my calves decided they'd had enough and locked up on me. Let it be known that I've always had a rather large set of calves, probably from so much mountain biking throughout my life. They are a great source of power but they also have a tendency to cramp up and stop working if I go too far too soon.

Anyway, let's fast forward on to today, which was kind of the original point of the post in the first place and I've already rambled my way halfway down the page without even getting to the good stuff.

The good stuff for today included a trip to the health club/gym whatever you want to call it. This is unusual for me because I stopped going to health clubs a number of years ago after getting pretty well burnt out on them. But my wife has been going to one in Live Oak for a while now and really likes it, my kids also like it because they've got a cool day care space on the premises and everyone can have fun while mom gets a work out in. They even have a climbing wall outside with three auto-belay rope systems built-in for the kids and, as my wife found out today, adults to try out.

So we dropped the two boys off at the day care next to the club, they happily jumped in with their snack bag, they grabbed a table in the marked off area and had a snack. Around the room there were good fun things to play on or in, a small obstacle course crawly thing, a bouncy trampoline and more. It was pretty cool and there were a bunch of kids to play with and three staffers keeping an eye on things inside and another staffer outside helping kids try the climbing wall.

In the club one of the first things I noticed was the lack of blasting music. It was actually kind of peaceful, it wasn't empty, there were a couple of dozen people working out, on the cardio machines and in between. We talked with the desk staff, talked about a day pass for me, talked about possibly signing up, met the co-owner and then met the owner. I'd already met him a number of years ago when I was working at another gym in the area and he was opening the first of the local gyms. I even interviewed with him for a job once upon a time.

The owner took the time to talk with us, get to know me (again) and learn a little bit about us which bodes quite well. He gives a damn, has a great demeanor and personality and obviously loves what he does. He found out I'm a cyclist and a computer geek and took us over to three rather cool bikes near the stretching area. The bikes let you create an account, choose a ride (countryside, coastal, big hills, whatever) with distances, set your pace rider (who can be sped up or slowed down), you steer with the handlebars, you have a shifter to move up or down depending on the incline or decline, you have a heartrate monitor built into the bars, you have real-time data streaming across the screen, you have scenery, you have other cyclists out on the ride. It was, suffice to say, pretty damned cool. I did a 7 mile ride in around 25 minutes, worked up a very good sweat and enjoyed it. It helped that I could see exactly how hard I was working and dial it back a bit if I needed to.

After the bike ride, I did some calf stretching on the crazy stretching cage nearby. It was set up to allow a person to effectively stretch every part of their body. There was a chart of how to use it on the wall and it was pretty easy to get a pretty good stretch in quickly.

I didn't want to get too crazy on weight training since I haven't been lifting regularly for quite some time now but I wanted to do a quick circuit to wake my body up to the fact that slug time was over. I started with some shoulder presses, then to a butterfly machine, went to a bench press machine (with independent grips which was interesting), then some rows, pulldowns, tri-presses and standing barbell curls. Not anything super heavy, pretty minimal weights to get my machine started back up. Plus I knew that there was pooltime coming up and I didn't want to fry myself beforehand.

My wife finished her ride and did her circuit and headed off to the sauna or steam room to sweat some more. I gave a try to the climbing wall, scrambled up most of the way to the top before my hands starting to give out and, truth be told, the height I was off the ground kind of freaked me out a bit. I'd never used an auto-belay system so its hard to just instantly trust it. I climbed down and vowed to return when I hadn't already burned most of my energy up. And I will.

After some more good chatting with the owner including war stories from my old gym and how he'd come to take over the operations, I signed up to join the gym, adding myself to my family's membership. The price is good, the facilities are excellent, the day care is great and its a nice place to get exercise in. Not much like my last gym that wasn't taken care of as well as it should have, was over run with poser gang banger types and almost always had crazy loud crappy music playing.

From there we headed down to the swim center nearby. The gym and the swim center have a deal where we can get swim passes at a discount and they have a shallow warm pool for kids and parents to enjoy together as well as a large lap pool for more working out. We all started in the smaller shallow heated pool, the boys haven't been swimming in a while and had a total blast. There were other kids to play with some but they mostly wanted to swim and play with us, their parents. Which was fine and fun.

After everyone had had some fun, I went to the big pool to get some more work in. I'd planned on just a ten lap short session but stretched it out to 20, a quarter mile, before my legs sent up a white flag and requested some other activity. I headed back to the shallow pool to play with the family more. We did submarine rides, I pulled Sully through the water, we splashed, we laughed and we all had lots of fun. It was a good time and it was a really good family time together.

When we did end up heading in, my wife took Grady in to get him ready and Sully and I headed in to get showered up and dressed together. He had fun in the big shower room because all the showers were push button activated and he laughed as the warm water got him.

Once we were all cleaned up and dressed, we loaded into the Escape and headed out to get some food as I was approaching starving from not having eaten in too many hours. We ended up going to Pink Godzilla in Capitola and took over one of comfy eating rooms where you have to take your shoes off and there is a pit under the table and its cozy and fun. And the food was especially great today, the sushi we got was delicious, the salads with the miso dressing were good though I had to ask for more dressing. Grady expanded his normal order from the inari to trying everything on his plate and finding that he really like almost all of it. We were quite proud of his being open to trying the new foods and thrilled that he liked them. He's usually a picky eater but I've been using the Green Eggs & Ham story as a way to remind the boys that sometimes food may not look like something you'd like to eat but you will never know until you try it. And it works!

Oh yeah, before heading into Pink Godzilla, we ran into some friends and their kids who were all out on a bike ride together which made Grady want to get his bike out of the truck so he could show off his non-training wheel riding skills!

We had a great late lunch and headed home to a couple of napping boys, Grady kept napping after we got home, Sully did not but played pretty quietly. My wife went up to Target to do some shopping since she's been dropping weight and losing inches she needed some new bras. When she got back, they put in a kid's movie called Planet 51 which was cute and funny and entertaining. I went up to Target myself and got a pair of training tights that I've been needing for cold rides and some other goodies.

It was, all in all, a wonderful day. The kind I wish we could have everyday. With some luck I'll get some trail time tomorrow and we'll go into next week with more swimming, more gym time, an increasing fitness level and the upcoming triathlon weekend will be a great fun time for all of us. We're going to be camping on site with lots of other racers and I'm really starting to look forward to it.

In the meantime, I need to figure out if I want to try and race at the Sea Otter Classic a couple of weeks before. I'm starting to lean more and more towards a yes on it. Its a longer ride but its a great place to race and the whole Sea Otter experience is really fantastic. I hope to share it with my family this year and next and the next after that.

But, for now, I've got to get to bed. This has turned into a long, long post and I'm not sure I expect too many readers to read it all the way to here. And that's alright really. Sometimes blogging isn't so much about writing it for others but writing it for yourself (and your kids and wife) and if others enjoy it then so much the better!

Things I'm Thinking About

Like most other people with ADHD, I've usually got five or six (or more) things juggling around in the front of my thinking. There's work stuff, geeky tech stuff, Kyani stuff, exercise stuff and lots more. I thought I'd share some of the cooler things that have passed my plate recently.

YouTube hack - found a video on YouTube that you love, love, love and you want to have a local copy on your computer or one that you can put on your iPhone or other portable device? There's a very cool way to do that. Replace the "Y" in YouTube with a "3" and you will be presented with an option to download the file in two different formats. It doesn't work perfectly all the time so be patient but it definitely does work and is very cool!

There was a cyclist killed on Monday morning in Los Gatos. His name was Joshua West, he was a single father of a seven year old girl. He was killed by an SUV that had drifted onto the sidewalk (note, he was on the sidewalk at an intersection, stopped) and annihilated him from behind. There were no skidmarks from the SUV indicating he didn't even see Joshua until after he had killed him. I spent a major portion of yesterday thinking about his daughter and the fact that her life has been completely ruined by a jackass named Kevin Derr who, according to eyewitnesses, was traveling at around 50 mph in a 30 mph zone when he killed Joshua. The link above includes information on how to donate to a memorial fund for his daughter. I am planning on donating to it and hope others will as well.

And, as I was writing the above, Jay posted more crappy news about another cyclist getting killed by an inattentive or distracted driver. And another kid who's lost his father needlessly because people can't seem to put down their damned phones while they are driving. Very sad!

On to lighter things, I've been geeking out on Logitech's very cool and fun to play with TouchMouse app and software. It allows you to control your Mac using your iPhone or iPod Touch. It is, for all intents and purposes, magic.

For some gorgeous and insane photographs of the 2010 Toughman Challenge, check out The Boston Globe's Big Picture series. Not only is the race crazy, the photographs from it are astounding.

I have truly started to doubt the competency of the San Francisco Giants leadership group. They fell all over themselves to pay Barry Zito a ridiculous sum to be a bottom half of the rotation pitcher and they are trying to lowball the best pitched in baseball, Tim Lincecum. Seriously? The guy's won the Cy Young in his first two years in the league and they don't want to pay him what he's worth? Stupid, stupid, stupid. I say they go back to him and add 10% to his last salary request. Do not piss off The Francise because he is the future of the club.

Plus, I need to talk with my doctor about possibly trying a differnt ADHD medication to see if something else might work a little better for me. Which presumes, of course, that I remember to take it every day which I've forgotten today and will take it right now.

And, oh yeah, our pending move, the upheaval, stress, painting and prepping and everything else that goes with relocating a family of four with a dog, cat and two fishtanks. When do we get to the easy part?

Cycling outside the bike lane

When is it OK for bicyclists to leave the bike lane?

The following rule of the road for cyclists comes from California Vehicle Code section 21208 (a).

According to the code, whenever a bike lane is present, cyclists traveling slower than the normal speed of traffic should remain in the bike lane except when:

* Overtaking and passing another bicycle, vehicle, or pedestrian within the lane or about to enter the lane if the overtaking and passing cannot be done safely within the lane.
* Preparing for a left turn at an intersection or into a private road or driveway.
* It?s necessary to leave the bicycle lane to avoid debris or other hazardous conditions.
* Approaching a place where a right turn is authorized.

The law also provides that no cyclist shall leave a bicycle lane until the movement can be made with reasonable safety.

Read the full law online at www.dmv.ca.gov.

Random

I feel inordinately proud that I filled five big trash bags with yanked weeds from the steetside of my fence.

Sully and Grady are wearing matching green and yellow tie-dyes today that we made at a St. Patty's party a couple of weeks ago. Sully told his daycare provider this morning that I made them at a party, the way he enunciates is just too funny and sweet.

My district has seen fit to close down one of the means I was using to get access to my home computer and no firewall. My annoyance is powerful.

The seemingly capricious nature of the filtering is just stupid. Garbage sites like Millsberry, Cartoon Network and Family Guy (note, garbage in the sense that they have zero educational content) are allowed but sites like TinyURL are blocked. Stupid and annoying. Made more because I used to be able to bypass the blockages by entering my tech account information but they aren't allowing that anymore. What I need is a 3G card for my laptop so I can connect without concern for firewalls and blockages.

I'm looking forward to checking in with some of my teachers I've gotten Kyani samples to. One has been having some pretty serious stomach issues that should be starting to improve. Another has a son who's wrestling and will totally dig the extra energy. And yet another had surgery recently and will make a quicker recovery with his free radicals being actively chased down and flushed out.

It will be interesting to see if the after school jerky says anything. Last week, I got rid of his yard sticks because he used them to hit the backs of the kid's chairs when they weren't working hard enough. Not cool and bordering on abusive. I also made it so that he couldn't use the admin sign-in on my lab computer. No reason why he should be logged in as an admin, ever. He's not a tech and he had his email account removed for abuse. I doubt he'll say anything since he's got no grounds to complain.

I think I processed six or seven loads of laundry yesterday.

There are nine full days of work before Spring Break. Spring Break activities include: a day trip down to the Sea Otter Classic for photos and biking fun, a camping trip, several good long ripper mountain bike rides, a yard sale/garage excavation.

Looking forward to a UFC event tomorrow night, Ultimate Fight Night Condit vs. Kampman (predictions coming soon) followed by the first episode of the new season of The Ultimate Fighter US vs. UK. The coaches are Dan Henderson for the US and Michael Bisping for the UK. Two fighters I have alot of respect for and it should be a good season.

Finally, after two weeks of Survivor on virtual hiatus, there's a new episode this week. March Madness killed one show one week and they aired an annoying behind-the-scenes show the next. I wonder how many people just stopped watching altogether?

I'm still thinking about that outstanding sushi we had the other night. The two new rolls we tried were really superb, the Roll Forest (mango, avo, macadamia nuts and topped with a tiger prawn) was good but the Grinch Roll (deep fried soft shell crab, spicy tuna topped with avo, tuna, wasabi tobiko and spicy mayo) was really top notch especially with the wasabi tobiko on top.

That's about it for now.

Two Wheeled Therapy

One of the best aspects of riding bikes for me is the peace and quiet, the chance to be out in nature with your thoughts, your bike and maybe a pal or two and some dogs. The other day I got a chance to go for a good ride in Nisene Marks State Park. It is a gorgeous park with excellent trails through the redwoods. The air is clean and pure and feels like magic.

There are also many miles of top notch riding trails. Some of which are singletrack paths along the sides of steep hills with dropoffs of a hundred feet or more. I'd call the place breathtaking but with all that fresh new oxygen around it seems almost hard to lose one's breath.

Unless it has been a couple of weeks since I've gotten some saddle time and my legs burn up early on and my lungs weren't used to having to work so hard. But even so, it always feels like I recover more quickly and can get back on the trail faster than if I were riding somewhere else without such heavy tree cover.

Mountain biking is a great combination of things for me. Its a chance to get out in nature, a chance to get some exercise and burn off some frustration and its a chance to think in ways that aren't really possible without the effort. Does that make sense? You know how sometimes you're able to figure something out even when you're not really thinking about it? A light goes on, the answer is clear. Biking is like that for me. The world becomes a simpler place, there is your front wheel, there are the pedals, there are your feet and away you go.

Reducing the distractions can quiet down the competing voices and thoughts in my head so that a certain level of clarity bubbles up from below. What might have been vexing before is clear and simple and it can become much easier to work through a charged issue (yes, I recognize that this is a vague term but I don't really care to elaborate).

Everyone needs a way to blow off steam, the important thing is finding that thing that works for you. Biking is one of valves and it helps that I love it! What do you do to keep your grip on your sanity?

Take Two on Mountain Biking Video

Wish me luck, we're heading out to the trail again this morning. I tried to mount up my DV cam but it bounces around waaaay too much, even on smooth concrete in the driveway. I don't think that will work unless I want to make people motion sick.

Anyway, I've changed some camera settings and should hopefully capture some better video this time around. I've also doubled my actors so we'll have two dogs and two bikes this time. That should help too. The only downside is that I've got a mere eight and a half minutes of video memory to fill and that goes quickly.

See you in a few hours.

Presenting My First MTB Video

I came away with some good lessons from my first ever mountain bike mounted video recording yesterday afternoon with Nande. The most important is to set the camera for faster recording. And some decent footage that I've put to music and am uploading to YouTube as we speak.

The best part, in my estimation, is Nande playing "rabbit" and running out in front of me for a good portion of the ride.

Anyway, here's the video for your enjoyment. Let me know what you think. As usual, YouTube's compression algorithms have made the video alot smaller and alot less viewable. I think I'll upload my own local copy and replace the one below. YouTube makes it easy to get online but I am never very happy with the product they produce, too grainy, blotchy and hard(er) to watch. I uploaded the larger version over on NorCal Bikers, don't know why the title page is posted beneath the vid though.