Bike, swim, no run yet.

Thoughts go out to J & N and the entire Oberlin crew. I hope you are getting through this time as best you can.

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Starting to think of slipping on the run shoes for a test drive. Holding off for now. The last three days:

Sat. 1-19-08 Swim-Bike
Swim 60mins. Free (~300-400), side(200), stroke and glide (250), kick bd (50), free (50), fist (300), free (50), 3x100yds (1:45-48)
Swim was 2-3p after working 9-1. Ride was ~3:40-5:40p after swim.

Bike
QR trainer watching Terps beat #1 UNC at UNC. No aero time. No hard efforts, more time at steady, steady+ efort than recent rides. No knee trouble.
Entire workout (164 watts):
Duration: 1:58:16 (2:00:02)
Work: 1167 kJ
Distance: 39.002 mi

Heart rate: 145 bpm avg
Cadence: 87 rpm avg
Speed: 19.8 mph avg

Sun. 1-20-08
Swim 60mins easy, steady nothing hard
~400free, ~350 side r/l (w/zoomers; trying to find high body position, looking barely fwd, and 45deg angle not 90) ~350 stroke and glide (w/zoomers), 50 kick board, 50 free, ~150 fist, ~400 free. ~1750 total
Core/Lift 35mins
2 x (fonda leg raises r/l, lat pulls downs, cable side bend (obliques) r/l, cable side arm raise r/l, tri pushdown, seated row, side plank)
3 x (bicycle crunches, feet together crunches, plank)

Mon. 1-21-08
Bike QR trainer. No aero time. Gradual warm up to some extended steady time. Watched Bourne Ultimatum.
Entire workout (165 watts):
Duration: 1:51:31 (1:55:44)
Distance: 36.768 mi
Heart rate: 137 bpm avg
Cadence: 86 rpm avg
Speed: 19.8 mph

Tue. 1-22-08 Swim 6-7a

Knee barely stiff out of bed. Taking stairs normally. ART tomorrow. Overall assessment at Sport & Spinal Fri.

Really wanted some more sleep.
Body was screaming sleep! Eventually I managed/decided to tune it out. Did I chose poorly? Ignoring the bod is high on the ingredient list for injury or illness. We'll see.

Solid hr of swimmin’. No one else showed = individual lesson.
Today's flaw fix - Keep my pulling hand at/near/under/traveling past belly button!!! Don't swing it out wide! This is a tough bit of muscle memory to break.

300 warm-up
10x100 alternating left/right breathing every 25 (:30 rest) (fastest 1:48, slowest 1:52)
500 with zoomers, same alternating breathing
5x50 on 1:30 (:48-:50)
100 cool down 2150 total

Hard to get a hold of, feel for grabbing water with the dif hand/arm pull position.
New (?) spots on shoulders, lats feeling the slightly dif use pattern - also carrying some fatigue from recent addition of back/shoulder weight work.

Bilateral = Hypoxic

Humor up front. Bikesnobnyc gem re wooden handlebars. Yep. Wooden handle bars. The prime line:

Together with a brakeless bike, wooden bars will transport you to that next level of sublime uncertainty, and simply arriving at your destination with all your teeth will feel like a Tour de France stage win.

Tue. 1-15-08
Swim-Bike-Core
Right knee better out of bed not too stiff (only 5hrs of broken sleep, less time to stiffen up?), can walk 95% normal ROM out of bed but still funky, full and tuggy feel in spots around knee.
6-7a Swim, solid 60mins wet.
Pretty worked by the time I crawled out of the pool.
Def felt whipped at times mid session, esp for the 2nd half of each bilateral breathing 100. Hello hypoxia. Lats begging for O2. Slight nausea as blood diverted from gut to extremities.

• 200 easy free warm-up
• 6x50 kick bd (25 at 90% effort, 25 at 70%)
• 10x50 w/zoomers (25 hard free, 25 moderate stroke and glide looking for 10 or fewer strokes)
• 7x100 free bilateral/3rd stroke breathing (:30 RI)
• 2x50 hard "bucket" effort (if you aren't wishing for a bucket at the end of the 50 you didn’t go hard enough) (:49 & :52 for the 50s)
• 100 easy free cool down
  

1900yds total

Bike - 40mins easy QR trainer half 39x14, then 53x15, cool in 39x14

Core – 15mins

Weekend of 1-5-08 - Tri Training, Music, Politics

Sat. 1-5 & Sun. 1-6-08
Marathon Blog session

A full weekend. A little work, a dose of outdoor exercise, college basketball (Terps win) presidential campaign heating up with Iowa and NH, the final season of The Wire starting up (link). Augmented by the HD Radio for xmas - I can now revel in not just one NPR station and one Cspan but three of each (ital)

SPORT
Sat. 1-5-08
Bike: Fuji, outdoors, 3hrs, 50mi, 38-40F, no real wind, gray, dry. Heavenly.
Swim 33mins easy-recovery, some drills.

Sun. 1-6-08
Run 50mins, right knee feeling a little funky. Walked some, iced it after.
Core/strength 20mins

The sweet misery of a good hilly ride, that was Saturday. A good ride hurts, you know? Soooo nice to be outside. Tuckerman-Falls-Glen-Seneca-River Rd. Lots of riders out. Chit-chat at intersections but stayed solo, just out to play at my own pace. Jazzed to be out, no desire to engage in any weekend world championship duels. No need to take a caning and damper my day.

Putting on the snow gear (Dec. snowsuit post, below) as a kid has nothing on the prep for a cold weather ride. Getting out in cold temps is time consuming, esp given my penchant for wearing and carrying enough gear to comfortably survive a weekend on the Alaskan Range or lost on the trail of Big Foot. The 45mins of devising and redevising a layering strategy, prepping food and water, actually donning the gear, etc.- all worth it. Got it about right today, no cold bits.

Getting out provided a rude reminder of the cruel rewards of clean living (and clear head pipes). An enhanced sense of smell. No scent is good, it's all overwhelming. Perhaps accentuated by the dry cold atmosphere, everything is a tart smack to my finely tuned olfactory unit.

The worst: auto exhaust, tobacco, car scent trees and heavily perfumed occupants, all of which I do indeed smell via my finely tuned schnoz. Notable was the tag team of a fume spewing school bus and an old dirty-burning diesel Benz slowly accelerating past as I grind up a long, lung busting hill. No place to go, no way not to breath. It's not like the metro where I can avoid the nasal irritation and/or headache by jumping to another passenger car when Mr. Toomuch Cologne or Ms. Canaday de Hairspray boards.

Saturday ride data for the propeller heads.
Meat of the Ride:
Duration: 2:30:47 (2:33:24)
Work: 1584 kJ
TSS: 181.5 (intensity factor 0.851)
Norm Power: 196
VI: 1.12
Distance: 43.917 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 409 175 watts
Heart rate: 105 172 151 bpm
Cadence: 28 106 74 rpm
Speed: 2.7 38.9 17.5 mph

Entire workout (170 watts):
Duration: 2:54:38 (2:59:05)
Work: 1776 kJ
TSS: 202.9 (intensity factor 0.836)
Norm Power: 192
VI: 1.13
Distance: 50 mi
Min Max Avg
Power: 0 409 170 watts
Heart rate: 70 172 149 bpm
Cadence: 28 106 74 rpm
Speed: 2.5 38.9 17.2 mph

2007 Bike Data
Year cumulative:
5500+ miles (4,924 for Jan. - Oct.)
291.9 hrs
179,244cals
Avg Power 172watts
Avg Normative Power 186watts
Avg Heart Rate 139bpm
Avg Cadence 80rpm

Biggest month of 2007: May
686 miles; 36.7hrs; 22,888cals

Biggest Week of 2007: Jan. 8-14 (followed by the 2nd and 4th weeks in May)
198miles; 10.3hrs; 6,830cals

• Only 8 weeks over 160miles
• Only 1 week over 100miles after 8/26
• Longest ride: 82miles 8/11/07
• Only 10 rides 65+ miles
• 30 rides 50+ miles
  

MUSIC
Hopped online in search of "Anyday" performed by Susan Tedeschi (think younger Bonnie Rait) with the Dereks Trucks Band at Eric Clapton's 2007 Crossroads Guitar Festival. Derek is on lead guitar (slide), Mike Mattison is the impressive male voice. The song's been rolling around my head since I caught the PBS broadcast of the show a few weeks ago. That's got to be a sign I'm nearing the geezer tipping point, rocking out to PBS. To Youtube I go. Bam there it is. Beautiful thing that YT. Here it is.



Nodding and bopping to the music on my exercise ball chair (trigeek alert), I multitask over to the bikesnob blog. I'm dangerously behind in my snob reading. The Snob's latest entry (Fri. 1-4-08, he's a M-F guy) is re Clapton as trend setting cyclist, or at least lover of bikes as fine objects d'art.

And, the final stage of this marathon Big Ring digression session...

POLITICS
Sad that Biden is out. Plug for a friend - Here's a video put together as an evening project a few weeks ago by a fellow Biden-ite. Biden on Iraq voiced over images and with some music. Heavy, def not humor. Maybe if we'd seen more coffins the last few years would've been different.



Folks were certainly fawning over Obama's Iowa victory speech. Hard not to swoon. Soaring stuff.


Just when I thought Iowa was the last chance to get any level of policy discussion, the NH debate Sat. actually got into some. Except Bill Richardson. Yeeesh. Take that fork out of your back Bill, have a donut and get some sleep, you're done. Meanwhile you're taking yourself out of VP contention. How much better might that debate have been if Joe Biden, or Dodd, was in the 4th chair? Uh, much, much better.

HiIlary landed a blow equating a vote for the likeable, change, all-for-unity Obama to the error that was a vote for likeable , grab-a-beer, uniter not a divider GW. O wasn't too bad on specifics and defended his hope talk pretty well I thought. Edwards, fiesty and appealing but maybe too much anger coming across, fogging over his agreement re the desire for change/unity/bipartisanship.

Q: Was the Iowa turnout a fluke? Esp new and/or young and/or independent voters?
A: Not a fluke.

Q: Can Hillary dissolve the experience v change dichotomy that seems to have solidified?
A: Maybe blur it some.

Really off on a a horse race tangent...
Q: Will Ron Paul stay in to the end? Go indy? Be a spoiler for a Repub?
A: Yes, yes and yes... I hope.

Send Ron a little $, eh?
Or, maybe the Dems won't need any spoiler help.

Road ID on the bike.
Thanks B.

On to Oh-Eight

The cats are doing just fine, keeping the help in line for another year.

How about that strong family finish to '07: Welcome to Taran! Will Taran get shortened? To "T"? Tary? Plenty of time to sort that out. Well done and good luck to parents P & N.

Thanks to the folks who sent the annual update holiday cards. How can you be so busy and still put together the update letter? Maybe I'll hop on Craigslist, find a future ex and have a couple kids so I have some good material for an oh-8 Christmas update.

Dorothy Z. sounds great, apparently still on top of her game in Vegas, taking down the one-armed bandits and who knows what else. What happens in Vegas....

Word through the grapevine of other items of interest including tai chi mastery out West and thoughts of corn roasting in '08.

There's a new Capo at the helm of the East Coast Soup Mafia, flexing his soup muscle and kitchen control out at the Devereaux cat ranch/high end knitting factory. Giving truly is receiving when the gift is a french cooking lesson. That lead to great soup for the Nov. - Dec. holiday run. But no soup for the NY's eve meal. Instead, Indian - Vindaloo.


For the first time since Thanksgiving my health is coming around. I can swim! Well, I can find water and thrash from one end of the lane to the other without chest/shoulder pain. Looking forward to getting back to coached group swim sessions every Tue & Thur. Five weeks of inactivity has added 10-12lbs to the pale whiteness that is my belly and 10 beats per min to my HR. With the atrophied muscle and rusty parts I feel like raw pizza dough thrown over an old shopping cart, the one with the shaky, dragging wheel.

I think I can not... I think I can not...

I'm working on a weakness, focusing 110% on doing nothing. Going all out to find my inner slug. Six days so far. That's some pretty decent consistency, maybe even a new DN PR. I'm no Jabba the Hutt yet, but why not aim high?

The internet is an excellent slugability enhancer. A beautiful blackhole, with an amen corner for every persuasion. Even within the fitnet, encouragement to slack abounds. The body needs a break, and the mind will relish the change, they instruct. Firm up the foundation. Lay the mental and physical ground work for good health next season command the gurus. Even the NYT echos the chorus suggesting there's an upside to just not doin' it for a bit. Ignore the HTFU crowd.

So, go ahead: Find some new interests. Reintroduce yourself to neglected friends, family and/or pets. Gain some weight - don't burn those great holiday meals, build on them. Shop, on line of course, $3.19 for the cheap gas, ouch. Sleep more, blog at great length(ahem), read more, work more? Enjoy some college B-ball (avoid Dicky V.) Restful down time now for fewer down days over the long term. Sounds rational, right?

Taking it easy doesn't necessarily feel better. It feels worse, at least for awhile. And I've yet to make it past awhile. Rest indeed seems to be rust. Sluggish becomes the norm (Jabba) and does wonders for a dipping cranky curmudgeon factor. Yeah, I'm a strong perfomer on the CC achievement scale as it is. But, I'll buy into all the faffle, file it under doing the right thing and claim the mental victory of successfully doing nothing.

I was nudged in this direction, via an ornery achilles tendon and a high chest strain of some sort (never should've raked those leaves). Not hurtin' enough to prevent exercise. Cold weather and diminished daylight gave that nudge some added oomph, more of a stiff-arm. Seven days worth of oomph? Ten days? Let's not get crazy. All things in moderation.