Road of Iron

Do your workouts!

2011-08-23T12:20:00.002-04:00

Or else!

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Post-ultra-marathon blues

2009-05-02T15:28:00.003-04:00

Bill Meisner talks about the long recovery from ultra-marathon muscular effort in "The Awful Afters."

My (triathlon) goals for 2009

2009-01-03T15:25:00.005-05:00

We were watching some TV programme and they were going on and on about making, keeping, and breaking New Year’s resolutions. And I realized—not that I was ever much of a New Year’s resolver—that I hadn’t given resolutions a single thought. Because I’d already established some big goals for 2009:

• Ironman 70.3 New Orleans, April 5—this is a B or B+ race—the current plan is to combine it with one of our 2½- or 3-week driving vacations
• Ironman Canada, August 30—my A race
• Ironman Florida, November 7—my B or back-up race

I have no C races planned, though they may arise as the year progresses. I know I’d benefit from some race, and particularly transition, experience.

To get there I have some other goals:

First and foremost is to get my work life under some control. I’m in one of those weird situations where I’m so busy I can’t spend time on getting help. But also, as a certain Tri-Dead told me off list, I need to be tougher-minded about work. It’s hard for me—a kind of weakness—that I don’t like saying No to people. And that doesn’t help when you have to clear aside twenty hours or more a week for training and training-related activities.

Some other contributory goals—or perhaps they're more like working principles:

• (Continue to) learn to suffer.
• Stay focused! (Always!)
• Get to the weight room twice a week at least.
• Improve my technique, in all three disciplines, but especially swimming.
• Lose some weight; it'd be nice to get under 180 lb—but I don't lose too much sleep about it.
• Maintain a positive mental attitude.

And I’d like to focus on the things I posted about on Monday.

Did my two-work-out New Year's Day—both work-outs precisely as Coach Steve listed. But yesterday I worked at home, and somehow being in my home office just made it easy to avoid going to the gym and to the pool, just to work instead. I’m wondering if that’s why when I headed out on my run this morning I crapped out so badly. Oh, well. I don't think the weather is (or more precisely the road surfaces are) going to favour a bike ride outside—not looking forward to 2½ hours at base pace on the trainer, even watching the NFL play-offs. Ah, a test of mental toughness!

What is Canada’s worse problem? Ignorance or apathy?

2008-12-30T20:15:00.003-05:00

“I don’t know and I don’t care!”

One of my favourite jokes.

I’ve felt apathetic for a couple of days—especially yesterday. Today was almost as bad.

But today I know I’m sick. So nothing to report. Barely worked. Three naps during the day. Read all of the current Sports Illustrated, another chapter of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I began Frederick Forsyth’s The Fist of God. I’m even too apathetic to watch the Holiday Bowl on HDTV; that’s a very bad sign. Instead, Mona and I are watching a Discovery Channel documentary on MV Paul R. Tregurtha, the longest ship on the Great Lakes.

Tomorrow? I don’t know. I’m thinking of deleting my swim work-out but still getting to the gym. Oh, and once again I have to reschedule my blood donation. And I do plan to go to work, probably by transit.

Box-Box- Boxing Day

2008-12-29T11:15:00.002-05:00

Today is December 29, but it feels like Boxing Day (Dec. 26; a term Americans don’t use, but a statutory holiday in Canada and Ontario).

So I’ve had two public holidays (Dec. 25 & 26), two weekend days (Dec. 27 & 28), and today (Dec. 29) a vacation.

Christmas was a very quiet day for us. Liz called a couple of times. Monado and I didn’t exchange gifts.

After sleeping in a bit, I ended up going for a run at midday. Because I anticipated that residential sidewalks would be very icy and the ravine bikepaths impassable, I ran along Danforth Avenue, a major arterial road (and, until 1998, a provincial highway). This was my “long” run, about 90 minutes, so 45 minutes out and back. I basically ran from my house south on Pape Avenue to Danforth, and then east on Danforth to Danforth Road.

I’ve noticed this before: east of Victoria Park Avenue, the ancient townline between York and Scarborough townships, the property owners of Danforth Avenue are careless of clearing their sidewalks. West of Victoria Park, the sidewalks were generally clear (though the windrows occasionally encroached, and the intersections could be bad); east of V.P., the opposite. Particularly egregious, I thought, was an Anglican church whose sidewalks were a mass of irregular ice.

My other odd sighting was a streetwalker at Danforth and Pharmacy avenues. First, I don’t think of that area as a “stroll”; second, it was the middle of a sunny Christmas day. The only word is: sad.

On the real Boxing Day, Monado picked up Andie and I did a trainer work-out. Boy, I’m out of shape! A fairly straightforward work-out (15 min warm-up, then 3 x [10 min at tempo, 10 min easy]) was hard to do. I had to cut short the 3rd tempo section. During the tempo sections I was just able to touch HR=140, and my power output was just over 170 W. My legs were toasted from Christmas Day’s run.

Dec. 27 I actually made it to the pool at the East York Community Centre, and shared the medium lane for an hour. I did the whole listed work-out, which was only 1500 yards but left me exhausted and ravenous. The McDonald’s I pass on my way home was very tempting!

This was also an exciting day because I got my January work-outs from Coach Steve. There’s something exciting about the fresh set of work-outs, and laying them into my calendar; it makes it seem possible and exciting.

Yesterday, I’d planned on getting a two-hour ride outdoors. The temperature was in the high single digits (Celsius scale, so well into the forties Fahrenheit), but at sunrise Toronto began to suffer high winds that had been forecast for the afternoon. My concern was not a strong steady wind—it was the forecast 30- and even 50-knot gusts; even the arterials were still a bit narrowed by windrows, so I didn’t want to be blown into a traffic lane. I made this decision and fell back asleep. Sigh.

By the time I got up again, it was time to get ready for our annual Christmas potluck. It was a little different this year—my brother had gone out and gone beyond his siblings and their offspring, and included our uncle, his kids (my cousins), and their kids. Andie was good-tempered but bored until my 14-year-old niece Lexi arrived late.

This year we finally gave up on gifts. All my nephews and nieces got were “Mackenzie Kings”—fifty-dollar notes with a dour portrait of our longtime Prime Minister. They seemed to appreciate. For my step–first cousins once removed, I gave their parents three Mackenzie Kings to spend as they saw fit.

It’s a long drive to and from my brother’s house in Snelgrove and I had some time to think because everyone was being quiet.

I’ve set myself a Project in David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology to improve my consistency and to rehabituate myself to good habits for an Ironman year. This is what I came up with last night as I lay in bed:

Body work: At my age I really, really, really need to do my body work every single day—flexibility, core strength, resistance to injury. I read Peter King’s Monday Morning QB blog this morning about how Peyton Manning rehabbed himself to recover from a serious knee injury to lead his team to a 9-0 record their last nine games, and make himself a leading candidate for league MVP. I neither need, nor am I paid, to spend two hours a day (as Manning did) getting therapy; but Manning’s mindset, his dedication, is a good example.

Early-morning work-outs: I know that getting out at 6:30 a.m. would help me a lot; I would always have one work-out marked done by the time I showed up at work. The days I’ve done this I don’t beat myself up mentally all day about skipping work-outs.

Consistent sleep, meal patterns: This serves the previous sub-project by making it easy to slot things in. Although I’m not as bad as many folks, I have cluttered, demanding days, and it’s important to maintain consistent sleeping and eating; if I do, I can work out when a window opens.

Favourite sporting nicknames

2008-12-24T11:23:00.003-05:00

Monado & I were just chatting about sporting nicknames. Her favourite is the Bossier-Shreveport Mudbugs of the Century Hockey League (ice hockey in Louisiana!).

Here are some of mine:

- Anteaters (University of California, Irvine)
- Banana Slugs (University of California, Santa Cruz)
- Horned Frogs (Texas Christian University)
- Salukis (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)
- Columbus Blue Jackets (National Hockey League)
- Atlanta Thrashers (National Hockey League)

What these all have in common is that they’re far from the Bearcat, Wildcat, Fighting this or that, Warrior names; they don’t take themselves too seriously. But the Horned Frogs and Salukis are Division I programmes with particularly good football and basketball teams; so they can take themselves seriously if they wish.

Worst name? Most names are just mediocre (I know that’s illogical!), but the most inappropriate is probably the Black Knights of the United States Military Academy (i.e., West Point). A black knight is a knight who’s painted over his arms, who owes loyalty to no one, who looks after his own interests; surely very far from the ethos of the U.S. Army’s officer corps. (Nice, brief discussion, as so often, in Wikipedia.)

An odd day

2008-12-24T10:13:00.002-05:00

Yesterday (Tues., Dec. 23) was an odd day. This mantle of fatigue that I’m carrying really slowed me down. We barely got out to my blood donation at 11:30 a.m. The work-outs went by the board.

Canadian Blood Services’ Toronto Centre seemed a bit more chaotic than usual, but eventually I saw the nurse. BP and pulse were excellent (124/68 and 55); but then the nurse got to the questionnaire. I had admitted that, yes, I’d had cancer: a basal-cell carcinoma that was removed in 2001; I mentioned casually that I was seeing a dermatologist that very afternoon to have a spot looked at—and the nurse immediately rejected me.

I believe I’ve been giving blood for 35 years, and this was the first time I’d been rejected; I understood it (in the context of Canadian Blood Services’ extremely rigid criteria), but it still was a bit depressing.

Mona was rejected, too, but because her pulse was too high for their taste.

We had lunch at Pogue Mahone, and tramped in the snow up Yonge Street, remarking on how little that street had changed since the ’70s. A fairly quick stop at the Watch Service Centre of Canada (whose very poor Web site you can find here) and my Polar watch and transmitters were rebatteried; the technician said to me, “Now you have no excuses.”

Then we tramped to The Runners Shop where we wished Sava goodbye, and bought Andie a Christmas present. Thence to Specs on Bloor, where we picked out a new frame for me; I never grew to like my wireframes, so a new prescription gives me an excuse for new glasses.

Finally we got to the Dermatology Centre, and saw Anne Curtis, the dermatologist who treated my cancer. The spot on my face? yet another example of seborrheic keratosis (SK), which is all over my ageing skin; i.e., not cancer. Phew! (When I got home I rescheduled my blood donation to next Tuesday.) At my request, she used a can of liquid nitrogen to blast off a particularly annoying SK from my back.

After that, we spent some time at the Atelier Grigorian, where Mona picked up some CDs (how 20th-century!), and at Lululemon where we had no luck with my plan.*

We got home, and I “lay down for a minute”. Of course, I fell asleep. What’s happening to me? This is really weird.

Today (Christmas Eve, Wed., Dec. 24) I’m hoping to get out to the East York Community Centre for a thousand-yard swim (i.e., nothing very hard), and do a home-based strength work-out, trying out some things.

Other than that, it’s just work! And maybe some football on HDTV: but the only game today is the Hawai’i Bowl, featuring two unranked teams, the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish (6-6; why are they in a bowl at all?) v. the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa Warriors (7-6, 5-3). Not at all promising.

* Ah, my plan. I’d like to do my stretches several times a day, but in the PRESTO System Project office I work in a vast bullpen, so lying down on the floor would only add to my unfortunate reputation for eccentricity. My thought was to get a Lululemon-branded mat and bag for said mat, and use them in unused meeting rooms. The mat, the bag, and the branding would somehow signal that this was all “official”, and thus betokened dedication rather than late-middle-aged eccentricity. We’ll see.

Target races

2008-12-23T09:24:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I created “countdown” Outlook events for my three 2009 target races. Thus, every day’s calendar shows how many days and weeks I have till each race. This is reassuring for the Ironmans—lots of time to get back on track; but not so much for the 70.3. Here are my target races:

- Ochsner Ironman 70.3 New Orleans, Sunday, April 5, 2009—103 days, 14½ weeks (eek!)
- Subaru Ironman Canada, Penticton, B.C., Sunday, August 30, 2009—250 days, 35½ weeks
- Ford Ironman Florida, Panama City Beach, Saturday, November 7, 2009—319 days, 45½ weeks

Movies to watch

2008-12-23T09:08:00.003-05:00

Probably not going to work out today. Still going to give blood (which means I can’t work out this afternoon), see my dermatologist, and buy Andie a Christmas present at the Runners Shop.

Over the weekend, I saw Iron Man and The Dark Knight. Iron Man was surprisingly structured for an action movie—a long set-up, a key character killed midway through the move—before the action, and a short pay-off action sequence.

The Dark Knight was one of the fastest 2½-hour movies I’ve seen. It had some nice touches, and was much more optimistic than we’ve come to expect from Batman movies. For one thing I can’t imagine how the sequel (if any) would derive from the end of The Dark Knight. Getting a great actor, Gary Oldman, to play James Gordon brings much core strength to a long underdeveloped character in the Batman universe.

Here are the movies in my viewing queue, all from Zip.ca:

- Der Ring des Niebelungen
- The Wild Bunch
- The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
- Seven Samurai
- The Bicycle Thief
- Dances with Wolves

Starting again …

2008-12-23T06:11:00.002-05:00

Yesterday (Monday, Dec. 22)

Swam a bit more than 2 km under Coach Kelvin’s direction at the new (to me) St Lawrence Community Recreation Centre (this was only the 4th time I’ve swum there, even though Liz spent her childhood across the street):

- 4 x 200 warm-up (plus an extra 25 because I always jump into the deep end)
- 6 x 3 x 25 working on stroke count; it varied wildly, from 32 (very inefficient) down to 23 or 22 (quite good); weirdly the eastbound lengths were consistently more efficient, often much more so, than the westbound
- 8 x 100 with good effort

No cool-down: they were taking in the lane ropes and I was beat.

So beat that by midafternoon I couldn’t concentrate on work, so I took a taxi home(!), had a p.b.&j. & a bowl of cereal, and started a “lie-down” at 6 p.m. that lasted until 5:44 a.m. this morning.

Today (Tuesday, Dec. 23)

- easy trainer work-out before work—“Cycle 60" easy spin”; I wonder what I’ll watch?
- my first strength work-out in ages
- blood donation (O-negative always appreciated) at Canadian Blood Services’ Toronto centre, which is in the original building of the Hospital for Sick Children at College & Elizabeth streets
- finally a get-together with my dermatologist about the dark spot near where I had cancer seven years ago

Will try to fit in some errands, some self-centered—getting my Polar stuff re-batteried—some not so much—getting Christmas presents?

Woman runs a mile with rabid fox on arm

2008-11-08T11:47:00.002-05:00

from Associated Press:

PRESCOTT, Ariz. (AP) -- Authorities in Arizona say a jogger attacked by a rabid fox ran a mile with the animal's jaws clamped on her arm and then drove herself to a hospital. The Yavapai County sheriff's office said the woman told deputies she was on a trail near Prescott on Monday when the fox attacked and bit her foot.

She said she grabbed the fox by the neck when it went for her leg but it bit her arm.

The woman wanted the animal tested for rabies so she ran a mile to her car with the fox still biting her arm, then pried it off and tossed it in[to] her trunk and drove to the Prescott hospital.

The sheriff's office says the fox later bit an animal control officer. He and the woman are both receiving rabies vaccinations.

Wetsuit trials

2008-09-13T18:57:00.005-04:00

Richard, Mona, and Andie all tried on their wetsuits at the pool with the assistance of Coach Kelvin. These are chlorine-resistant suits. We all enjoyed the extra flotation and practised swimming in them. Andie's should perhaps have more room to grow and Monado's is still too tight in the bottom.

Picked up last piece of wetsuit

2008-08-19T22:08:00.002-04:00

The bottom, or bib-john, of Richard's wetsuit was not included in the original shipment. It arrived the yesterday and I picked it up at the post office substation this morning.

Wetsuits are on their way

2008-08-09T23:25:00.001-04:00

We've ordered our wetsuits and they should arrive next week.

The decision!

2008-08-07T19:07:00.003-04:00

After a lot of thinking and incessant talking, I’ve decided to aim for Ironman Canada in late August 2009 as my target race.

To sign up for most Ironman races in North America you basically have to line up the day after the race at the race site. This has been the “tradition” at IM Canada for at least a decade.

The race is held in and around Penticton, British Columbia. It so happens I’ll be in Vancouver on business the week before the race, so I’ve rented a car and found a place to stay, so I’ll drive thither on the Friday before the race, hang out on Saturday, spectate the race on Sunday, and sign up on Monday, before returning either home or to Vancouver to work. (Because of the immense drop fee Hertz was going to charge me for leaving the car in Kelowna, I’m going to drive back to YVR anyway.)

I had been torn between Canada and Ironman Wisconsin, the race I sort of did last and was supposed to do this year. As a registrant this year I get the secret decoder ring that enables me to sign up on Saturday for next year. But to make that happen I’d have to fly over night from Vancouver Sept. 4/5; and Coach Steve wisely pointed out that with my work history I might well be prevented from making it to Wisconsin at all that weekend. A sign-up at Penticton would be the proverbial bird in hand.

So that’s the plan!

No Ironman for me this year

2008-07-31T21:17:00.002-04:00

I’ve been pretty quiet since early June. This is for two reasons: I’ve been busy as [insert bucolic simile here]. In fact, I’ve never been busier—not so much in terms of hours worked, but in terms of Things to Do. I could talk about all the travel and the conference calls and the deliverables, but, let’s face it, the work is generally interesting and satisfying, and I’m fairly well compensated, and it should pay off in the medium and long term.

The other reason is that my training for Ironman Wisconsin has been in a death spiral. I’ve never achieved consistency (work and travel; see above), and I’ve become progressively more tired. Talking today, my coach said this “shone through” in my reports lately. I’m beat. Yesterday I swam less than a mile and did an easy three-mile walk with my daughter, granddaughter, and daughter’s dog—and was wiped—I had to sleep ten hours to recover! None of my work-outs has been good, and some gawdawful—2- and 2½-hour death marches. I meet all the symptoms for overtraining even though my volume numbers, looked at in isolation, don’t justify it. Between work and everything else, I’m not recovering (that’s my coach’s view).

This week it all came together. I’m on “vacation”, spending time with my 12-year-old granddaughter. We’re going away for a three-day cycling weekend on Friday, but I’m barely prepared, which means I’ve been spending time making lists and checking drawers and boxes. In addition, I’ve been working. My various projects are in such high-maintenance phases right now that I’ve basically been working full time, especially on conference calls. And I’m still delinquent enough on two of them that it’s reached Director level (never a good thing). For most of the last three days I’ve left Andie to sit in the living room, IM-ing with her friends and watching TV. When we went out for a walk with my daughter (no relation to Andie, who’s technically a stepgranddaughter) and my daughter’s eight-month-old golden retriever, it was obvious Andie needed some activity. She was chatty, skippy, elated.

So, combined with all my tiredness, and realizing I was only 38 days to IM Wisconsin, I decided to call it quits. I discussed it with Monado briefly this morning and then wrote what I call a “novel” for my coach, and he called me later and we discussed. He’s on side—no trying to talk me into doing it.

The general plan is that I’ll “unload” now, we’ll aim for some of the fall running races, and then start building again over the winter. I’m very happy with this decision.

Mortality

2008-07-24T09:54:00.002-04:00

No picture for this post.

My mother died on December 13, 1987, aged 54 years, 9 months, & 27 days - 20,023 days from her birth in February 1933.

I knew I was approaching the age she was when she died. I do wonder why this floated to the top of my mind—I hadn’t been counting or anything.

But yesterday I did the calculation: I was 20,024 days old, one day older than my mother was when she died. And today I am two days older.

Monado’s immediate comment when I told her was, “You’re free! You can do whatever you want!”

I’m not sure what I think or feel about this, but it feels important to me.

Victoria's Duathlon

2008-07-15T22:51:00.003-04:00

I've posted my pictures from Victoria's Duathlon, which occurred on Victoria Day weekend, May 19th.

A Dominion Day + 1 surprise from WestJet

2008-07-02T08:58:00.004-04:00

At 5:24 p.m. Eastern Time (Z-4), WestJet sent me this e-mail:

Starting Thursday, July 3, 2008, WestJet will be implementing changes to our checked baggage weight allowance. The baggage weight allowance will be reduced from 60 lb (27 kg) to 50 lb (23 kg). This change to our baggage allowance will apply to all flights taken after July 3, 2008.

What’s odd about this is that I’m in the middle of a round trip. In other words, I packed and flew yesterday (July 1), and am scheduled to return, via WestJet, on Saturday, July 5. If I’d packed according to the old 60-lb limit, what would I do?

The American airlines that have adopted stricter baggage rules are only applying to them flights booked from a certain date. It’s seems a little unfair of WestJet to apply a new rule in effect retroactively.

Fortunately, my one bag, which I checked only because I’d forgotten not to take my Swiss Army knife with me, is well under 50 lb. But still …

On the athletic front, had a Coach-is-trying-to-kill-me run when I got to my hotel yesterday—a 45-minute run with no fewer than 4 x 3 minutes at 5-km pace, in my case with my HR touching 170! Phew!

Boy, am I glad I’m out of town this week!

2008-06-14T14:40:00.003-04:00

The Toronto Police Service celebrates Bike Month in their usual fashion: by cracking down on Highway Traffic Act (HTA) and Municipal Code offences by cyclists.

The Police Service’s news release is unobjectionable, but Cyclometer (the City Corporation’s cycling newsletter) is a bit scarier:

The annual police enforcement campaign for Toronto cyclists begins officially on Monday, June 16.

Police will be enforcing Highway Traffic Act violations such as no bell ($110), failure to stop/stop sign ($110), red light ($180), no front light/rear light beginning a half hour before sunset, sidewalk riding, unsafe lane change, failure to signal, and others, and encouraging proper safety equipment for all wheeled road users. Conviction can result in points on a driver's licence in addition to the fines. The campaign, also known as 'Bike and Wheel Sport Safety', lasts for one week.

Cyclists are advised to consider carefully the rules of the road and the Highway Traffic Act as it applies to them before setting off.

My personal skin in this is minimal: the only offence I commit on a regular basis—or, indeed, ever—is not having a bell.

What bothers me much more are two things: First, the notion that a blitz on cyclists is really a worthwhile use of police time. Second, is the inherent unfairness of enforcing the cycling provisions of the HTA only one or two weeks of the year. Let me explain: if I drive through a stop sign without slowing down, in plain sight of a P.C. in his or her cruiser, they’re very likely to pull me over, even if they’re not assigned to watch that stop sign. On the other hand, if I blow through that same stop sign on my bike, again in plain sight of a P.C. in their cruiser, I am very unlikely to be ticketed–unless it’s blitz week. This sets up a sense of gross unfairness in the ticketed cyclist’s mind.

And the way the blitz is organized almost guarantees that relatively unimportant offences are focused on. During the blitz, each of the Police Service’s 17 divisions is required to report how many cycling-related offences they ticketed, and the division’s traffic sergeant reminds the patrol officers of their responsibility to (literally) fill out a form counting up the number of offences ticketed in the division. That means that the much vaunted “officer discretion” that police officers enjoy under common law is thrown out the window, and inconsequential but highly provable offences like the lack of a bell are ticketed heavily.

Regardless, I’m safe. I won’t be riding a bike in the City of Toronto until June 22. This week, like last, I’ll be in Burnaby, British Columbia, specifically its Metrotown district. (You can see a nice, schematized map of my temporary neighbourhood here; I’m staying in the Holiday Inn Express in Station Square.) I’m doing some work for the transit agency that serves Metro Vancouver and its environs, and, as I remarked to a friend, “TransLink is paying me to work this week, and they’re getting their money’s worth!” In the nearly four days I’ve been here, I’ve managed only two, or more precisely 1½, of my scheduled six work-outs: I swam nine hundred metres in the Bonsor Recreation Complex’s chaotically crowded pool, and ran 44 minutes to Central Park and back, getting tangled up in the Vancouver Easter Seals 24 Hour Relay for the Kids. Coach Steve responded to a report of my poor results by revising my training plan, and remarking, “It looks like you can get some good training in the rest of the time you’re there. Carve it out of your schedule and try to get it in.” (Emphasis added.) For the mild-mannered Steve, that’s his equivalent of yelling in my face. With my Ironman less than three months away, perhaps I need some yelling at.

Tomorrow will be a four-hour(!) ride on my bike. I have no idea where I’ll ride, but I have a hard copy of the official Greater Vancouver Cycling Guide & Map to pore over this evening–after I assemble my bike! Steve has set me with some more swims and a 1:45 run on Tuesday, which I’ll probably do along the B.C. Parkway, which mostly follows the right of way of the British Columbia Electric Railway, which last carried passengers in 1954, but traces of which you can still see, e.g., at Patterson Avenue; the r.o.w. is now mostly occupied by the elevated SkyTrain.

UPDATE: The City of Toronto’s cycling office sent this correction on June 17:

The June issue of Cyclometer contains incorrect information about the Highway Traffic Act as it applies to bicycles. We apologize for the error. Please note of the following correction:

The HTA defines bicycles are defined as vehicles. As vehicle operators, cyclists are subject to most of the same HTA requirements as drivers of motor vehicles. However, there are some important differences. The application of demerit points is an important difference.

According the the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, "the demerit point system only applies to certain offenses committed in a motor vehicle. However, I understand that on rare occasions demerit points are in error assigned to the driving record of an individual for an offense committed on a bicycle. When the Ministry of Transportation is notified of such occurrences, the error is immediately corrected." (1993 letter from Ontario Minister of Transportation to the Chair of the Toronto Cycling Committee)

We continue to hear that cyclists are being charged with demerit points in error. If you are being given a summons by a police officer ask them to clearly indicate that the "vehicle type" is "bicycle" on the Provincial Offenses Notice. If the notice is submitted to the Ministry of Transportation without a bicycle being indicated then it could be mistakenly coded as a motor vehicle offense.

Note: Some of the fines listed in Cyclometer were also incorrect. The fine for running a red light on a bike or motor vehicle is $190. Bikes are required to have a front light and a rear reflector beginning a half hour before sunset until a half hour after sunrise.

In Chicago

2008-06-03T18:24:00.004-04:00

Mona & I are staying at the W hotel in downtown Chicago (pictured), a hotel so hip you need a flashlight to find your way around. Arriving about 8 p.m. Eastern Time last night we slipped into the lobby bar for a sandwich & a beer, but they had only 4 kinds of beer, all in bottles, and three of them light(!), so we took our business to the nearby Elephant & Castle, where we had delicious (really) pub food and a pint of beer.

This morning about 5:30 local time I did a 50-minute run that (partly because I got lost!) took me through Grant Park before I got to Lake Shore Drive. I ran north along the lake, and then up the Chicago River to Michigan Avenue, then through the grid to a Starbucks a block from the W.

We spent all day in the RoadMap seminar. It was an interesting and (I hope) useful recharging of our GTD habits. David Allen himself is an energetic 63-year-old, who seems very oddly reserved when he’s not “on”. I do think that getting re-engaged in the GTD process will be good for my Ironman training. One decision I’ve made is to delete my IM Wisconsin countdowns. They make the day-to-day countdown too quotidian.

Before I close, check out this piece about a Spinning-class smackdown; as so often, tip of the hat to the Nancinator.

Ride for Heart 2008

2008-06-02T06:55:00.004-04:00

Yesterday was Toronto’s Ride for Heart, which Monado has already written up for us. There are three distance options for cyclists: 25, 50, and 75 km, and I (of course) had chosen the last. At the end of an easy week, Coach Steve had set me to ride three hours at base pace, so it worked out nicely.

The Ride for Heart is famous for closing two of Toronto’s three metropolitan expressways to motor vehicles. Because these are 90-km/h (55-mph) roads, the surface is kept in excellent condition, much better than our potholed streets. And the 75-km riders get to start very early (6:45 a.m., compared to 8:15 for the masses), so for the first hour or two, you can ride quickly and smoothly, very much like you’re in a long-distance triathlon’s bike leg.

Unfortunately, an unscheduled half-hour pit stop meant I wasn’t going to make the 6:45 start, so I rode to the nearest on-ramp to the expressway, about 1½ miles from our house, and waited. I needn’t’ve, but in due course a Traffic Services car lead the 40-km/h-plus peleton of aggressive riders. My friend John waved at me from the mass. I did not tuck in behind(!), but I took that as my signal to follow, and I was alone for at least 15 minutes before the next riders came along (and, of course, passed me).

After my turnaround, near Don Mills Road, I passed a group of riders down on the curb, being attended by a pair of bike-borne paramedics. John popped out and waved me down. He’d been in the crash, been bruised and scraped and had his aluminium bike frame damaged beyond rideability and (he thought) repair. He decline my offer to call Monado to have him picked up, and walked toward Don Mills Road to hail a cab. (I called him later and he’d made it home without incident.)

After 30 miles of the Don Valley Parkway, I waited at the 25-km turnaround to pick up Monado and Andie. (Side note: the turnaround is at the so-called Bloor-Bayview Ramp, an elaborate structure that connects the D.V.P. with Bloor Street and the Bayview Avenue extension—but which is, in reality, the only section of the Crosstown Expressway ever built, during Toronto’s orgy of expressway-building fifty years ago.)

I kibitzed with a few of the hundreds of riders stopping at the rest station there. It’s funny how people’s fitness levels can vary; many of the 25-km riders professed themselves exhausted at the halfway point!

Eventually Monado and Andie showed up. Monado stopped for a drink, but Andie skittered along, so I had to take off after her. She was very fast, but I was able to find her because of her distinctive Tough Girls jersey and bright yellow Aquila Tri Kids bike, but it still took a couple of minutes fast cycling to get to her.

We finished the ride at Exhibition Park, and waited just west of the Dominion Gates for Monado, who showed up with her tale of mobile-phone woe. We rode back to the van, which Monado had parked in Riverdale. Andie is a very competent street cyclist—and clearly like me telling her so.

For a total 47 mi of riding, most of it pretty easy, I was very tired and quite beat-up feeling.

“In the basement of the Ivory Tower”

2008-05-27T20:41:00.003-04:00

A good title for an interesting article in the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. The tease asserts that “The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a ‘college of last resort’ explains why.” This rather overstates the breadth and cogency of the article, but it is a good reminder that not everyone is suited for education that (to me, anyway) seems easy.

One of the scary and little reported trends of post-industrial society is the widening income gap (and even health-measures gap!) between the educated and the not educated, with educated now meaning some post-secondary schooling. The usual solution is to make secondary and post-secondary education more accessible and more necessary (as Professor X writes about). I’ve often wondered, though, if (at some point) post-secondary education is pointless, if what we’re seeing is, at least in part, a gap between the educable and the not.

Even to wonder that feels, to me, uncomfortably elitist. I often say that everything good that ever happened to me happened because I went to university, and I went to university precisely as the beneficiary of a huge and expensive programme of making post-secondary education broadly available to Ontario school-leavers. My parents were high-school drop-outs, but I have a graduate degree and the income to match; shouldn’t these same benefits be available to other unfortunate folks?

Of course. But being available to someone doesn’t mean they should avail themselves of it. The most poignant part of the article Professor X’s description about one of his students:

“I can’t believe it,” she said when she received her F. “I was so proud of myself for having written a college paper.”

She most certainly hadn’t written a college paper, and she was a long way from doing so. Yet there she was in college, paying lots of tuition for the privilege of pursuing a degree, which she very likely needed to advance at work. Her deficits don’t make her a bad person or even unintelligent or unusual. Many people cannot write a research paper, and few have to do so in their workaday life. But let’s be frank: she wasn’t working at anything resembling a college level.

…

In her own mind, Ms. L. had triumphed over adversity. In her own mind, she was a feel-good segment on Oprah. Everyone wants to triumph. But not everyone can—in fact, most can’t. If they could, it wouldn’t be any kind of a triumph at all. Never would I want to cheapen the accomplishments of those who really have conquered college, who were able to get past their deficits and earn a diploma, maybe even climbing onto the college honor roll. That is truly something.

The lies of wide-angle photography

2008-05-27T12:24:00.004-04:00

Doesn’t that look nice? That’s the rooftoop pool at my hotel—as shown on its Web site.

I should’ve known better, of course. That gorgeous-looking pool is just over 9 paces long, call it a generous 9 yards. And the adjacent “Fitness center with treadmill, exercycle and free weights” actually lacks an exercycle; it has, instead, two treadmills and an elliptical trainer.

The fitness facilities in his hotel are awful sad for a “four-diamond luxury boutique hotel”. Maybe guests here are content tubboids.

So no swim and no bike today. I’m wondering if my wonky knee could take doing yesterday’s work-out: “Run 60" relatively easy and light, with 3 x 4" at goal race pace (2" RI)” on the streets of downtown Los Angeles after my meeting with the high-up lawyers.

In Los Angeles

2008-05-27T10:04:00.002-04:00

I’m in Los Angeles to give a three-hour briefing to my client’s lawyers in their 55th-floor ærie downtown.

This is my second stay in downtown L.A. in a month, and I’ll admit I rather like the mix of old and new skyscrapers. I’m staying in the Checkers Hotel (pictured), which is now operated under the Hilton label. It’s listed as a “four-diamond boutique hotel”, which bodes well for a luxury stay, but it’s under $200 a night, and the room is nice but not spectacular. It doesn’t seem a lot different than the Hilton I regularly stay at in unglamourous Burnaby, British Columbia.

As always, work-outs suffer. Yesterday I didn’t get a chance to get out at all before I headed to YYZ. Part of the problem was that I set aside an hour or so to get my TN visa renewed at the U.S. Bureau of Customs & Border Protection’s office at the airport. I guess I should’ve read the Wikipedia article I link to; for the first time in almost ten years, my routine, well documented petition (sic) was the subject of a somewhat aggressive interrogation. It wasn’t that the officer was probing my petition that bothered me—that’s happened before—it was that he was needlessly aggressive, cut me off as I tried to answered and told me what I was trying to tell me, and accused me of trying to pull a fast one on him. It was all rather sad and irritating because, for strong personal and professional reasons, I want to keep my U.S. entry status totally clean. My petition is almost three pages long, full of detail, and I seem to have gotten into trouble by giving him so much information he took a hook and told me I didn’t understand my own business.

It was clear, however, that he’d painted himself into a corner: if his interpretation was correct, I qualified for a visa-free entry! He decided to grant the visa because his colleagues had already granted me one for the same work; but to do so with “notes on my file”. He reminded me of the incompetent cops you can see on Cops or sometimes run into, who jump to conclusions, are aggressive whatever the situation, and assume everyone has a secret agenda. (Let me hasten to add that I’ve often enough run into cops—and CBP officers!—who do listen, don’t jump to conclusions, and do their duty in a helpful manner.)

So now I’m in my hotel room, my daily review done. I have two conference calls, my client is coming over to preview the presentation, and of course I have my big briefing this afternoon. Will I get to work out? Let’s hope so!

“Poser!”

2008-05-26T04:58:00.002-04:00

That’s me in my new—and how appropriate?—Poseur jersey, after a ride Sunday afternoon to the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station (& back). This was the first time the weather’s been mild enough to wear a short-sleeved jersey on a ride.

You can read a highly amusing account of the Poseur team here.

Quest for bike helmet

2008-05-25T07:00:00.000-04:00

Over on my personal blog there's an article and some pictures about the quest for a new bike helmet.

“I am Doobie Kajoobie, Super Space Traveler”

2008-05-24T15:40:00.003-04:00

Like Pig, I too bought a new helmet recently, a Giro Atmos (where do they get these names?) in white & silver. I’ll confess I feel more like Pig than I do like Alberto Contador (seen here wearing an Atmos at last year’s Tour de France):

Davis Phinney v. Parkinson’s disease

2008-05-23T10:35:00.002-04:00

I’ve always been a fan of Davis Phinney, and one of my long-range fantasy, perhaps for when I’m done pursuing an Ironman finish, is to ride one of the Phinney-Carpenter tours of Tuscany.

Leslie Holton of the Tri-Deads forwarded this link, which I (uncharacteristically) watched all the way through. (Leslie is on Phinney’s right in the Medtronic jersey; Medtronic developed the technology that’s helped Phinney.)

The saga of Angelica-Leslie continues, with a dark turn

2008-05-23T10:23:00.002-04:00

This is one of those cases where an ongoing mystery might be best, but that mystery is close to being dispelled. The Toronto Star reports today that a married couple of thirty-year-olds have been charged with abandoning and abusing her. The whole story is here.

This is one of those stories that always attracts my attention. (And others’, too—the Star listed it among the top 5 read stories of the day.) I think it’s because I love being a dad so much I can’t imagine abandoning my child: it seems perverse.

How a track meet can be dangerous

2008-05-23T06:31:00.003-04:00

From Yahoo News:

Ryan McGeeney of the Standard-Examiner was spared serious injury in Saturday’s mishap, and even managed to snap a photo of his speared leg while others worked to help him.

“If I didn’t, it would probably be my editor’s first question when I got back,” McGeeney said later.

The 33-year-old McGeeney, an ex-Marine who spent six months in Afghanistan, was taking pictures of the discus event and apparently wandered into off-limits area set aside for the javelin throw.

Striking just below the knee, the javelin tip went through the skin and emerged on the other side of his leg.

“It wasn’t real painful. ... I was very lucky in that it didn’t hit any blood vessels, nerves, ligaments or tendons,” McGeeney said.

Much of the javelin was cut off at the scene. The piece in McGeeney’s leg was removed at a hospital, and he received 13 stitches.

The javelin was thrown by Anthony Miles, a Provo High School student who said when he saw what had happened, “my heart just stopped.”

“One of the first things that came to my mind was, ‘Good thing we brought a second javelin,’“ Miles’ coach, Richard Vance, said Monday. He said Miles was “in a little bit of shock,” but he assured the athlete that it was not his fault.

With a subsequent throw, Miles went on to win the state title in javelin for teams in Provo High’s size classification, 4-A.

Tip of the hat to Becky Ryder of the Dead Runners Society.

Victoria’s Duathlon

2008-05-20T11:29:00.002-04:00

Monday was a holiday in Canada, and the acknowledged opener of southern Ontario’s multisport season is held that day: Victoria’s Duathlon (run 4 km, bike 24 km, run 4 km), in the hilly country northwest of Waterloo, Ontario, about a 90-minute drive from my home in Toronto.

It was a challenging day: 20-knot winds from the west (so we faced into them for the first half of the bike), in the single digits Celsius (so in the 40s for our American neighbours), with scattered rain, even a touch of hail and snow.

Tri-Dead John Green was there & did well, 17th out of 70 in his AG. Other non-Dead friends of mine were there; my friend Paula even won her AG.

I raced according to plan: hard & steady from the start. The wind was dispiriting, and my legs got trashed, but I kept at it, and with the wind to my back I was able to bring my HR back up. On the last run I went as hard as I could, and the HR profile supports this feeling.* The finish-line photos (one shown above) show me suffering, which is good. :-) At the end of the race I had some dry heaves, and then sat in our car with the heater on full, shivering. All signs of a race worked hard.

I looked at the results when I got home. I was DFL in my age group!!! On the bike I made up more than 30 spots—I was passing people constantly—yet I was last in my AG even on that leg!

Yes, I’m not a “fast” guy, and a sub-2-hour event is never likely to be one where I do well, but I’ll admit I’m very disappointed. I feel fit, I fell I “suffered” in the race, but I didn’t do well in any comparative sense.

* My coach asked me to run my HRM so he could review it. I didn’t race “to” it—my effort was to feel.

Swim, May 10

2008-05-10T21:00:00.001-04:00

We both went to the pool at Settlement House for a workout. My description and pictures are here.

Loved today’s “Frazz”

2008-04-30T10:07:00.001-04:00

Happy anniversary to the Dead Runners!

2008-03-15T13:54:00.003-04:00

The Dead Runners Society was founded 17 years ago today! Congratulations!

I’ve been a member, off an on, for almost 14 years now; but there are some charter members still active. If you’re a runner, you should check it out; it’s not to everybody’s taste, but it can be very fun, and I’ve made genuine friends through it.

For triathletes, there’s the even busier Triathletes of the Dead Runners Society, which I’ve been a member of, off and on, for about 8 years.

Omloop Het Volk 2008

2008-03-02T10:57:00.004-05:00

The 2008 Omloop Het Volk, a famous Belgian bike race, was yesterday. We were watching the video feed over the Web. But as the exciting conclusion drew near, the news server was overloaded and dropped our feed. It returned just after the finish. I suppose enough people logged out so that we could see the awards ceremony. The winners were Philippe Gilbert, Nick Nuyens, and Thor Hushovd.

Swim practice

2008-02-01T09:00:00.000-05:00

In Wilmington, North Carolina, we bought a day pass to the YMCA and had a long swim. LotStreetWiz did 2,000 yards with a different focus on each lap.

Swim course in Florida

2008-01-26T14:58:00.000-05:00

Today, LotStreetWiz started a two-day course on efficient swimming with the Total Immersion folks. It's being held at the Coral Springs Aquatic Complex.

Stretchies!

2008-01-08T22:00:00.001-05:00

There are some nice stretches on the [bike] Ride to Conquer Cancer Web site.

When should we celebrate the New Year?

2008-01-02T11:59:00.000-05:00

I do feel a bit like Dilbert: why should I celebrate an arbitrary point on the calendar?

I could see celebrating on Dec. 21 or 22 (the winter solstice),* just like pagans.

On New Year’s Eve I was so beat I went to bed at 7:30 p.m. Toronto time. I rationalized it that “real” midnight was at 0:00 Universal Time, which happens to be 7 p.m. in Toronto. Now, wouldn’t that be easier on those of us who are late-middle-aged or older?

* The 2007 winter solstice was at 20:08 Universal Time on Dec. 21, so after midnight Dec. 22 between Halifax and the International Date Line.

No whining about the weather!

2007-12-30T14:53:00.000-05:00

Had my first ride outside in what seems like months. We’ve had a fair amount of snow and a couple of freeze/thaw cycles that have left a lot of ice here and there, and turned the windrows (i.e., piled up snow) into something akin to rock. (Managed to damage one of my car's integral mudflaps on one of them yesterday). But, in general, the road surfaces are clear, no precip. in the forecast, and the temperature around freezing. For the whole ride the temp. stayed steady at 1°C (about 34°F), with no wind, so pretty good. I underdressed my feet and perhaps my torso, but the rest of me felt fine—oh, and I wore my glasses, which acted as a heat sink and gave me an ice-cream headache without the benefit of the ice cream! I'm so glad I got out today instead of doing a two-hour trainer ride watching meaningless pro. football games.

Marathons save lives!

2007-12-22T13:01:00.000-05:00

The current British Medical Journal has an amusing, maybe even fascinating paper asserting that fewer folks die in marathons from heart attacks than would have died if roads hadn’t been closed for the marathon. BMJ is letting you read the whole paper for free here.

Rethought objectives for the year

2007-12-22T11:50:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking about the objectives I drew up for 2007/08, and have come up with a slightly reordered and extended list:

1. Learn to suffer.

2. Improve my time management, with respect to working out.

2½. Be more consistent. This is a new objective, but I think it may well fall out of No. 2.

3. Get to the weight room twice a week at least. This was No. 4 in my Oct. 28 list; I moved it up because I need to increase my focus on it—I haven’t reached this objective in any seven consecutive days.

4. Improve my technique, in all three disciplines, but especially swimming.

4½. Improve the weaknesses Scott identified. This was in the biomechanical assessment I wrote about here. Especially after I worked with the trainer at my gym, I think that upper-body strength is important—because it’s so lacking!

5. Lose some weight: <170 lb.

6. Maintain a positive mental attitude. This is new, and is derived from an article by Jason R. Karp, “7 Habits of Highly Effective Triathletes”, in Triathlete No. 284 (Dec./07). The “7 Habits” are:

1. Effective training.
2. Consistent training.
3. Adequate recovery.
4. Setting goals.
5. Coaching.
6. Nutrition.
7. Positive mental attitude.

Nos. 1-6 are covered in my objectives. No. 7 intrigues me. All my life I’ve alternated between cheeriness and gloominess. For a variety of reasons, my gloominess has dissipated as I’ve careened into my fifties, and I find that having a “positive mental attitude”, insofar as one can cultivate such a thing, helps a great deal. One example: in the gloomy days, if I lost a work-out, especially through some poor planning or lack of focus or commitment on my part, I was inclined to see it as proof of my unworthiness to aspire to an Ironman, and I would then bag my work-outs for a couple of days. Nowadays I’m much more inclined to shrug, make note of what I could, maybe, have done differently, and move on with my training plan. We’ll see how this goes, but I’m pretty, yes, positive about it.

I’ve also settled on the races I’d like to do:

Feb. 24: YMCA Half Marathon, Peterborough, Ontario

Mar. 30: Around the Bay Road Race (30 km), in the town of my birth, Hamilton, Ontario

May 19: Victoria’s Duathlon, in Waterloo County, Ontario

June 15: Muskoka long-course triathlon (swim 2 km + bike 55 km + run 15 km), in and around the resort town of Huntsville, Ontario

July 6: Peterborough Half Iron Distance Triathlon (swim 2 km + bike 90 km + run 21 km)

Sept. 7: Ford Ironman Wisconsin Triathlon, in Madison and Dane County, Wisconsin

Only Ironman Wisconsin is an “A” race. The rest are really “C's”: I’m doing them for fun, for practice.

“6½ Questions for 2007”

2007-12-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

One of the senior Triathletes of the Dead Runners’ Society sent “6½ Questions for 2007”. Her questions are in bold italics; my answers are not:

1. What one word describes your 2007 season? Does it match what you said last December in anticipation of this year?

Bittersweet. No.

2. What one word comes to mind when you think about your 2008 season?

Resolution.

3. Did you race any new distance this year or try any new type of racing or sport?

Yes: Ironman.

4. What was your greatest thrill or joy this year from training or racing?

Learning to swim in open water; being able to do the Ironman-distance swim in training and in the race (albeit slower than I wanted).

5. What was your biggest disappointment this year from training or racing?

DNF at IM Wisconsin.

6. What was your favorite race in 2007?

Only did one: IM Wisconsin, which I enjoyed despite DNF.

Oxymoron of the day

2007-11-18T06:06:00.000-05:00

The National Geographic Society has Explorers-in-Residence.

Along the same lines, I was driving to LAX Friday through Gardena, and saw a sign on an industrial building:

LIFE UNIVERSITY
M.B.A. - Chinese Medicine - Theology

That got a smile for the odd combination. It will perhaps not surprise you that Life University is not accredited. (It’s worth clicking the link to see the weird and ungrammatical mission statement.)

Canadian capitals

2007-11-15T16:52:00.000-05:00

It’s rather sad, but posting the entry below made me realize how little travelled I am in the country of which I’m a proud citizen. Of Canada’s fourteen capitals, I’ve had contact with only half!

Run in:

Canada: Ottawa
Alberta: Edmonton
Ontario: Toronto
Prince Edward Island: Charlottetown

Slept, but not run, in:

New Brunswick: Fredericton

Visited:

Manitoba: Winnipeg (very fleetingly)
Nova Scotia: Halifax

No contact:

British Columbia: Victoria
Newfoundland & Labrador: St John’s
Northwest Territories: Yellowknife
Nunavut: Iqaluit
Québec: Québec
Saskatchewan: Regina
Yukon: Whitehorse

Running in Sacramento: almonds, deer, cyclists, and thugs; state capitals

2007-11-15T16:21:00.000-05:00

I was in Sacramento, California (pictured), for about 15 hours, but managed to get in a 1¾-hour run. Because of a conference call whose time made sense to people in the Eastern Time Zone, I got out just at civil twilight Tuesday morning—about 6:15 a.m. local time.

I had asked members of the Dead Runners Society about running in Sacramento. Although the listmembers had suggested I run to the Capitol and then to the American River, a map one of them pointed me to showed a direct route from my hotel at G and 16th streets to a bridge across the American to the American River Parkway (below).

This route took me past Blue Diamond® Growers’ plant (warehouse? packing plant?). The point is that monado loves Blue Diamond almonds, so I got to see whence they come. Rather disappointingly, there was no scent of nuts in the air.

Just across the bridge I saw ahead of me what I thought was a Very Big Dog. Watch out, I told myself—then I realized it was a deer! An urban runner like me doesn’t see a lot of deer, so that was kind of cool.

Otherwise the only wild life I saw on the trail was some noisy birds I couldn’t recognize (magpies?), some mallards, and lots and lots of cyclists. I only saw four other runners (three in one pack) in nearly two hours, but lots of two-wheelers, including lots twice. Most responded to my good-mornings.

On the way back along 16th Street, now in daylight, I passed under some railroad tracks through a narrow foot tunnel that stank of urine. When I’d run out I’d thought it might be a bit scary, and I got the proof when I came back. Three tough-looking guys were hanging around at the entrance. Following the Manly (but Perhaps Stupid) Code, I didn’t show fear but kept jogging. At first they were friendly—“Hey, make way for the runner!”—but then they started demanding what was in my FuelBelt bottles, and wanting some water. They actually ran after me. I kept jogging as if I didn’t care, and nothing happened—I suspect even my slow pace is more than they can maintain for a hundred yards. But I saw my heart rate had jumped up 30 beats!

My meeting later that morning was across the street from the Capitol, and I realized I’d added another U.S. capital to my list. Well, I hadn’t been keeping a list, so I’ve now compiled one, and here it is:

Run in:

Washington, D.C.
Sacramento, California
Boston, Massachusetts
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Madison, Wisconsin

Slept, but not run, in:

Denver, Colorado
Atlanta, Georgia
Topeka, Kansas

Driven through, or stopped at:

Boise, Idaho
Annapolis, Maryland
Lincoln, Nebraska
Albany, New York
Raleigh, North Carolina*
Montpelier, Vermont

* We did run, and sleep, in Chapel Hill, which could be counted as a suburb of Raleigh.

The new era dawns

2007-11-04T18:35:00.000-05:00

On Friday I “[r]ather grandly … set Saturday, November 3, as the beginning of a new … era.”

So how have I done?

Saturday, Coach Steve set me a simple work-out: “Run 90" base pace with 3 x 15" tempo HR 155 (5" easy base pace jog RI)”. My plan was to have breakfast and coffee, and get out around 7 a.m., running up the Don River and Massey Creek, probably to the Woodbine Bridge, and back. That would have me back at the house about 8:30, well before M. and our visiting granddaughter would rise.

Well, big surprise, it didn’t happen. Once again, I was tempted to cuddle, and that’s what I did–for two hours! It’s fair to say that this restful, quiet cuddling is among the great pleasures of my life—but it’s unlikely to get me under the finishing banner at Monona Terrace before midnight on Sunday, September 7, 2008.

By the time I roused myself I wasn’t going to be able to get out and back by 10:30 a.m., our projected departure time for the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, so I decided to run after we got home—or perhaps even from the fair.

Of course, things didn’t work out. Rather than showing up at the fair at 11 a.m., we were there after 1 p.m. Then we walked around for almost four hours. In due course, I got back to our van, changed, and, indeed ran home via the Goodman and Don trails; it was a nice run. Actually the only thing I did wrong was running after I’d spent more than four hours on my feet. Why hadn’t I run to the fair?

This morning went better: I got a little mixed up about the switch from Daylight to Standard time. I knew about it, but didn’t do the time arithmetic properly. I slept in, but I did get out a bit after 8 a.m. for a three-hour ride.

I also picked the wrong route. About 1 h 20 min in I ran myself up against the Rouge River. I could’ve humped my bike up the slippery stairs on the left bank, but decided against it. Instead, I biked home against the westerly breeze.

I only suffered for about 15 seconds, maybe 30, as I ascended Bethune Boulevard. (This is the same route as I blogged last year; and I always wonder about the name of the street!) The hill doesn’t seem that steep, but I briefly considered clicking out! But I persevered.

At home I had just enough time to inhale a p.b.&j. and a mug of coffee before we drove to swimming, where Coach Kelvin worked on my technique. And I think we had a breakthrough! More on that perhaps later.

All in all, the new era dawned messily, but so far so good. The key point: I did the work-outs, and they were good work-outs.

Tomorrow: some routine blood tests, but I can’t eat for 12 hours beforehand. I’ll swim at lunchtime, and then run home.

The dawn of a new era (well, let’s hope)

2007-11-02T11:41:00.000-04:00

Rather grandly, let’s set Saturday, November 3, as the beginning of a new Ironman era.

I have not worked out since the previous Saturday. Tiredness permeates me like mist. I had almost eight hours dreamless sleep last night—and still fell back asleep when I (big mistake!) snuggled up with M. after I’d brought her breakfast.

Is it a matter of working harder or of working smarter? And if the latter, what am I, Mr IQ Supposedly 169, doing wrong?

It makes me think (despite my disappointment with sport psychology books) that maybe I should dust off my Toughness Training books. Or look hard at what slows me down in the morning—I rather suspect that’s the key.

This all reminds me of an article I read years ago about a fellow who kept losing jobs because he was always late. He’d spent years in various therapies trying to establish the whys of this behaviour; in the end, he found a therapist who instead focused on the hows. They worked on how he could get up and get to work on time; and the problem, in due course, disappeared.

What are my hows?

I made an executive decision not to execute

2007-11-01T16:49:00.000-04:00

The last ten days or so have been tough. I’ve felt, well, crappy. I clearly had a cold that was floating around; but the cold seemed to dissipate, I worked out happily, and then I was just, well, crappy again. Since Sunday it seems that all I do is sleep. I, er, “worked from home” yesterday. I did, against the odds, get an important deliverable out the metaphorical door, but I also slept more than three hours, in three separate pieces, during the day. Just coming up stairs seemed to tire me out.

So before dawn Wednesday (yesterday) I made an executive decision: I would not work out the rest of the week. I’d recover, and then work out. Today I was even thinking of skipping the weekend.

But I had two conversations that have changed my mind. The first was with a doctor. He suggested that maybe I hadn’t had enough sleep, and he was right: I don’t sleep well when Mona’s out of town, and perhaps having a beer every night was not a good idea.

The second was with my coach. He said that, ahem, “older” athletes need a lot of sleep. And I generally find talking to Steve is kind of enlivening.

So I’ll still take today off; get a good night’s sleep tonight; and be out there at 7 a.m. for my swim class.

I find I’m looking forward to it. Let’s see how I feel at 5 a.m.!

Are you a cyclist?

2007-10-28T15:40:00.000-04:00

You bike to work every day, rain or shine, snow or sleet. Are you a cyclist?

In your backyard shed you have a mountain bike you bought years ago from Canadian Tire. On really fine days you and your significant other ride to a nearby park and toodle along the bikepath there. Are you a cyclist?

You belong to a cycling club and have several beautiful (and expensive) road bikes, none of them weighing more than 20 pounds. You don’t bike to go anywhere, but you put in a hundred-plus miles a week training, and you do duathlons or triathlons in the season. Are you a cyclist?

You ride a well-put-together hybrid bike with large panniers. You ride it to work most days. Though you won’t bike when there’s a lot of snow on the ground—you don’t like falling—you’re a twelve-month rider. You don’t bike anywhere else; indeed, you own a nice minivan you use to take your kids to hockey and to get groceries. Are you a cyclist?

Every summer you and your significant other bike hundreds of miles while on vacation. Your bike sports front and back panniers, a triple chainring, a well-broken-in leather saddle, and maybe a trailer with your camping gear. You can’t go fast, but you can go far. Are you a cyclist?

You ride a bike everywhere. It’s a matter of principle. Your bike is not beautiful nor expensive, but it’s serviceable and gets you places. Perhaps it has plastic flowers wired to the stem. You loathe our mechanized society and its consumption of irreplaceable oil. You loathe the BMWs and SUVs that clog our roads, that kill cyclists. You go to cyclist memorials. You demand bikelanes on every road. You bang on the sides of motor vehicles that (you think) threaten you. Are you a cyclist?

You and your spouse ride a tandem every weekend, and hang around with other tandem riders. Are you a cyclist?

You ride a recumbent bicycle, which you call a ’bent, or sometimes a human-powered vehicle. Your “upright” friends make fun of you climbing hills, but your back feels great. Are you a cyclist?

You’re a randonneur. Your season starts with a 200-kilometre ride. You think nothing of battling sleep while cycling the 1000 kilometres around Lake Ontario. Your training, indeed much of your life, is oriented toward qualifying for Paris-Brest-Paris four years from now. Are you a cyclist?

Perhaps more important: do you consider all of these folks cyclists? If not, which ones?

Ours is a huge community, yet a weirdly hidden one—we hide from each other with labels and badges and qualifications that include us and exclude those who aren’t (we think) “real” cyclists. Hang around with performance cyclists, and they’re mildly contemptuous of the scruffy do-gooders on heavy steel mountain bikes with squeaking mechanicals or of “gutter bunny” commuters. In the world of cycling advocacy, the performance cyclists—Lycra-clad whippets travelling in packs they give a fancy French name to—barely register. And, of course, to most utilitarian cyclists, biking to work or school on their mountain bikes or hybrids, and to most of the folks on the bikepaths on pleasant weekend days, neither the performance cyclists nor the advocates matter.

Nor should they. We’re all cyclists. Practically every adult and near-adult in Toronto is a cyclist—sometime, somewhere, somehow. Some of us bike a lot, some of us less, but we’re still cyclists.

Objectives for this year

2007-10-28T15:16:00.001-04:00

It’s a bit like being in school: I think of my year as being the period between runnings of the Ironman Wisconsin triathlon!

I DNF’d on September 9, 2007, and I will be in Lake Monona at the start on September 7, 2008.

In the seven weeks since my DNF, I’ve decided on five objectives for this year, in more or less this order.

First, I must learn to suffer. I’ve never been big on suffering. If a work-out is difficult I’m inclined to step out of it, rationalizing that I don’t want to be injured. But I’m learning that pushing the envelope of my performance means that I must suffer—especially on the bike. (On the other hand, I have to be careful: this last week I’ve been suffering from a cold; after it abated I worked out a few times, and now I’m laid up again.)

Second, I need to improve my time management, with respect to working out. That is, there’s still much “training to train” I can do. The off season (i.e., now) is a good time to try out some of my ideas. One of them, for instance, is to do my work-outs as soon as I get up, at 5 a.m. Eastern Time—and then reward myself with my much-loved cup of coffee.

Third, I need to improve my technique, in all three disciplines, but especially swimming. Coach Steve and I met on September 29 and he had some useful critiques of my technique, but barely improving my swim stroke will take twenty minutes off my Ironman swim time, with no other changes. Coach Kelvin said he agreed with all of Steve’s comments.

Fourth, I need to get to the weight room twice a week at least. I blew off weight training last year, and I don’t think that helped in Wisconsin.

Fifth, I need to lose some weight. Getting under 170 pounds (on my 5'10½" mesomorphic frame) seems pretty reasonable.

“Biomechanical assessment”

2007-10-13T22:38:00.001-04:00

Coach Steve has several time recommended Scott Howitt at the Sports Performance Centre in Thornhill. I met Scott at the Team Bentley party early in the summer, and we agreed by e mail that I’d see him for a “biomechanical assessment” after I’d done Ironman Wisconsin.

Letting my cracked rib heal, and working with his schedule, I saw Scott on Saturday, October 13. He spent about an hour and a half with me: he watched me run, stretch, walk over bars, lunge, etc. One of his tests, the Thomas test, looks a lot like the picture I’ve inserted. (And I’m not sure, but I think that’s Scott in the pic.)

In our valedictory discussion, after I’d dressed, Scott had a few particularly interesting things to say. Most important, he said he found nothing that was worth his working on. I.e., no therapy was indicated. All the problems or issues were for me to work on, not a therapist. Indeed, he said, I was in better shape, biomechanically, than half the Maple Leafs they’d examined during training camp.

He wrote a two-page report I got just a few hours later—great service. I will share part of what he wrote in the summary:

“Richard has no current injuries and no limitations to his training. Some minor tweaking of muscle strength and flexibility to his improve his overall muscle balance is recommended. … Train harder and kick butt in IM Wisconsin.”

How did I feel? I was disappointed! I know that doesn’t make much sense unless, like Jeeves, you “consider the psychology of the individual” (I am working my way systematically through Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books): there is no magic bullet, nothing that I can delegate. My aches and pains, my “limitations”, are all in my control, as much as they can be controlled.

As Scott says, the key message is: “train harder”!

Smooth bike drills

2007-10-09T21:00:00.000-04:00

Tonight was a short but hard workout, 45 minutes or so of very smooth cycling drills with speed intervals thrown in. The new plan is to put as much power into the up stroke as the down stroke, producing an even hum. The new technique works certain muscles harder than before.

Sloth!

2007-09-25T19:49:00.000-04:00

Besides being the name for a rather odd animal, sloth is the old English word for being, well, slow.

And I am slow. I finally analysed my training logs from what I now call “last” year, by which I mean the year leading up Ironman Wisconsin on September 9. To do the bike leg in 7:30 requires an average speed of 14.9 mi/h. In not one of my on-the-road-rides last year did I achieve that as an average. An under-the-cutoff ride was probably never possible. And after this morning’s painful trainer work-out I can see that speed, the antonym to sloth, must be my goal.

Committed—or is it commitable?

2007-09-25T19:44:00.000-04:00

This afternoon active.com finally got its act together, and I was able to exercise my privilege to register for next year’s Ironman Wisconsin, on September 7, 2008. I managed to get much of my client billing done, but otherwise I just couldn’t focus. All I could think about was a race almost fifty weeks away!

The predictable let-down

2007-09-23T09:54:00.000-04:00

The week after my incomplete Ironman I was excited, urging Coach Steve to load me up, eager to get out and work out.

But then I kept blowing off my work-outs. Perhaps it was my blood donation, but I just didn’t feel like working out. On Friday, the triathlon e-mail list I belong to had a thread on Genevieve Jeanson. At the end of a post I tacked a note, “Still in a kind of let-down or something post-Ironman.” In response, an experienced Ironman wrote:

Hey Richard - welcome to the world of post-Ironman blues. Whether you won, never start, finish or PR, we all have the same feelings afterwards. Give it a few more weeks - you'll come around. You worked non-stop for the last 6, 9, 12 months toward one goal and now that goal is no longer there... I pretty much define myself by my goals & associated workouts. Needless to say, I've been defining myself as Huge Slug for the last few weeks, but am starting to get the itch to get back in the saddle (literally).

Did you sign up for IM WI again next year? What about a more short-term goal (not necessarily a triathlon) - have you got some of those that you can focus on??

Since Friday, I’ve embraced let-down-ness. I just ran some errands yesterday, lay in bed, and caught up on my reading. Today has started similarly.

Tomorrow is an important day. Tomorrow I sign up for Ironman Wisconsin 2008. I’m getting a bit excited just typing this! That will be the end of my off season, I expect.

Photo “Melancholy” copied from www.georgiabyte.com.

Finally, the loss

2007-09-19T19:31:00.000-04:00

My most poignant loss are the Specialized Arc glasses I’m wearing in the picture below. I’ve had them for about a year and a half and really liked them. I think I put them down on the table at State Street Brats, but the bartender told me the day after the race no one had turned them in. I’m not surprised. By contrast, I was astonished that someone turned them in when I left them on a table at the Steelhead Brewery in Irvine.

These two incidents point out that these very-lightweight glasses are not good casual glasses: too darn easy to forget about.

I’m not certain yet if I’ll replace them. They’re expensive (a suggested retail price of 230 USD), and I do have an old pair of Oakley M Frame Pro’s, albeit without the photochromatic lenses I liked so much.

Analysis and looking forward

2007-09-19T18:40:00.000-04:00

I’ve done some thinking about the Ironman and moving forward:

This year:

1. My cracked rib limited my ærobic work.

2. That meant I was doing the bike course’s many hills with my muscles.

For next year:

3. I need to bring my time budget down. My budget for into T2 was 9:45; if the race official had let me continue, I would’ve been more than an hour past that. If my budget had been, say, 9:00 (swim 1:45 + T1 0:15 + bike 7:00) I might have made it even with the cracked rib.

4. I need to get stronger for that course. Even with my 9:45 time budget and a cracked rib, I might have made it if the hills hadn’t trashed my legs so badly. On two hills of the 2nd loop (Old Sauk Pass and Midtown) I had to walk for a few minutes because my quads were cramping.

That means:

5. I need to improved my swim technique. Just that should take a lot of time off the top of my swim.

6. I need more bike training, especially in the Oak Ridges Moraine (which is very like the IM Wisconsin bike course).

7. I think I need more strength training.

At least, that's what I think.

Lessons learned from Ironman Wisconsin 2007

2007-09-19T18:10:00.000-04:00

In the ten days since the Ironman, I’ve been thinking about what lessons I’ve learned. This is a little different from looking forward, another post I’ll do soon. This is about things I did, or didn’t, do that turned out good or ill. So here’s a cut at what these lessons were.

First, what did we do that turned out right?

1. We stayed in a good hotel. We didn’t “find” it; I reserved late, ’way too late, and the Ironman Wisconsin Web site found us the Staybridge Suites Hotel Madison East, which is a Six Continents/Holiday Inn brand I wasn’t familiar with. The property is an undistinguished box at the corner of City View Drive and High Crossing Boulevard. On paper, it looked ’way too far out of town, but it was a great hotel, really. We were so delighted, we happily booked there again for next year.

2. Do the one-day drive, i.e., through Chicago. On our last trip, we took two days and drove via Sault Ste Marie. Although the one-day drive is long—thirteen hours, even with minimal stops—there’s none of the hassle of checking into a hotel or a bed-and-breakfast, and it is quite doable with two drivers—and it makes us feel better about the time we take from work and our cats for the Ironman.

3. Stay five days and six nights. We drove to Madison on the Wednesday after Labour Day, and drove home the Tuesday after the race. It worked out very nicely, as follows.

4. Pick up my packet about an hour after pick-up opens on Thursday. When I went, 11 a.m. local time on Thursday, the line-up was short. The volunteer told me it was quite busy just an hour earlier. Going at 11 on Thursday meant that I got my kit early, but it didn’t take very long.

5. Spend the Friday before the race obsessing about my bags, and getting things I’m missing. You drop off your bike and the two transition bags the day before the race. Feeling I have a full day to lay out the contents of all my bags, and then to run around getting the handful of things I was missing, worked out really well.

6. Bring our own coffee for the in-room coffeemaker. I’m an early riser, especially when I’m in the Central Time Zone, and it was nice having a decent cup of coffee at 4 a.m. on race morning.

Second, what did we not do that I now wish we had?

7. On Saturday, don’t check in my bike and transition bags until I’ve done my “race prep” work-outs. I don’t think I was as sharp as I could’ve been. (Alternately, I could bring my road bike as well as my tri bike, but that seems like a lot of trouble.)

8. Do all work-outs Coach Steve sets, including the swims.

9. Bring our own food for lunch and dinner. The hotel’s complementary breakfast was perfectly adequate, and it was nice to discover Panera Bread, but my comfortable food would’ve helped me out in the pre-race days.

10. Use a big backpack for my morning stuff. It would’ve made hauling all that stuff around (wetsuit etc.) a lot easier!

11. Look at the picture accompanying this post. The lesson here is that when I see the race photographer, look like an Ironman participant! Don’t give the oh-I’m-about-to-have-my-picture-taken grin!

Down a pint

2007-09-19T14:25:00.000-04:00

I gave blood yesterday, for the first time since I started out on the Road of Iron. I thought, with this being the interval between Ironman Wisconsin ’07 and the road to IM Wisconsin ’08, that it’d be a good time to give. I’ve given maybe fifty times in the last thirty years, I have O-negative blood (which makes me a universal donor), and, well, I feel guilty if I don’t give.

I walked up to Canadian Blood Services’ Toronto headquarters (pictured) at College and Elizabeth streets, about a mile from my office. (Interestingly—or maybe not—this handsome building was the site of the Hospital for Sick Children for sixty years.) Even before I saw the phlebotomist, I was asked to make my next appointment. I went through the usual embarrassing questions (“Have you ever had sex with a man? Have you ever paid for sex with money or drugs?”) and was soon in the donation chair. It took only four minutes to give my 500 cm³—very close to a U.S. pint.

They insist that you not just march out, which is what I always want to do. Instead, some ancient volunteer plies you with juice and cookies. I took the minimum: a Tetra Pak of apple juice. As I walked down Elizabeth Street I felt the usual light-headedness I get from sweet juices, and promised myself I’d bring a protein bar next time. Thus, I could be seen to eat, but it’d be something tolerable.

But will there be a next time? I walked the mile to work without incident, even picking up granddaughter Andrea’s bike (an Aquila Tri Kids, very sweet) from the Urbane Cyclist. (There’s a bit of irony here as the folks at “Urbane” are the sworn enemies of Aquila Cycles’ owners, the guys at Racer Sportif, which claims to be “the leading racing bike store in Toronto”.)

Later that afternoon I walked the mile from my office to pick up my Odyssey from the garage, again with nothing negative, except, maybe, I felt a bit tired. After we declared a supper emergency and had our “emergency food” and the inevitable cereal-as-dessert, I had the energy to clean the catboxes and the frig and gather the dry garbage from around the house. (Today is garbage day on our street.)

But this morning, well: up, as usual, at 4:30, a refreshing mug of coffee, breakfast (more cereal!), into my bike clothes, my bike loaded up for my 7:00 swim group—I bounded upstairs with M.’s wake-up waffles and coffee—and found myself breathless and even just a tad sick-dizzy. At 6:40 I decided I wasn’t going anywhere, and so changed into my Lululemon warm-ups and sent a working-from-home e-mail. It’s taken to mid-afternoon to feel normal.

I checked my journal and training log from the time of my last donation, and don’t have anything negative recorded there. I do wonder if I should keep my Nov. 13 appointment to give another pint.

In other news, Coach Steve and I had a lengthy and productive chat yesterday. We discussed my goals and our approaches to it, especially in the near and medium term. I think I can cut 15 minutes off my swim time—he seems to think I can cut 30 to 40 off! He’s also hopeful, aggressive, or deluded about how much time I can cut off my bike; when I said 7:30 was a plausible target, he said closer to 7:00. So my goal seems to be something like a 15:30 at Ironman Wisconsin, which would be awesome—really.

We agreed to get together for what I’m calling a technical review, that is, a review of my technique, on Sept. 29. We’ll go over my cycling technique on his trainer, do some running, and then go to the Mississauga Y to swim and do some weights. Should be—interesting!

My Ironman Wisconsin

2007-09-10T07:49:00.000-04:00

To put it shortly, I was pulled from the bike course 9½ miles from the finish at 5:15 p.m. local time. There was nothing grossly wrong—the cracked rib I suffered four weeks ago just prevented me from being highly ærobic—that slowed me down on the flats, and meant I had to power up the hills (of which, for those not familiar with the course, there are many), so my legs were trashed by the second loop.

The swim went according to plan. I know the triathletes who read this will find a 2:05 swim risible (there were only 29 swimmers behind me, I think), but I couldn’t swim in November ’05, and had not swum in open water until June of this year, so I’m very pleased to have had a pleasant easy swim. My technique, of course, is terrible, but that just gives me something (of many!) to work on for next year.

I left the water in great shape, shook Rob Beuthling’s hand, and had a good transition—no dawdling, and no hurry, just kept moving—though somehow it took 16 minutes.

I cycled down the helix and got out on the course. It was pretty clear early on that something was wrong. I hadn’t done any hilly cycling since I’d cracked my rib, and the constraint it puts on deep breathing was a real problem—hills became weight-lifting exercises, and I’m a pretty heavy weight. :-)

Anyway, it was a long day on the bike; by the halfway point I knew I’d miss the cut-off, but I wanted to finish the bike even if I was going to be marked a DNF. The official who took me off disagreed; I knew I could’ve just taken off my chip and bib and continued as a civilian, but I was, basically, in a good mood and didn’t feel like arguing. The other 4 competitors and I in the van had a good chat, and shared a couple of beers(!) on the drive back to Monona Terrace.

UPDATE: Here's a screen shot of my official results:

After rendezvousing with my family (the only real frustration of the day!), we walked to State Street Brats for (what else?) brats and beer, and watched the run competitors come in. I was more than a little envious, of course, but content with my fate. I’d known that my rib was going to be a problem, and it really points to what I need to do.

I trained for this race from pretty much a standing start in late June ’06. Now I have another 12 months, and what I expect will be a bunch of shorter triathlons, in which to chop chunks of time off the swimming and cycling, and to get even stronger and fitter. I had trouble fitting in all the work-outs Coach Steve wanted me to, but I was getting better and better at it. Another year to “learn to train”. I am very much looking forward to getting back to training!

Thanks to everyone—the Tri-Deads, my family with their e-mails and phone calls of support, and my friends and other supporters.

Liz, my daughter, gave me bottomless emotional support, even from her three-month exile in Canada’s Yukon Territory—and spent only two days in Toronto before driving to Madison to be with me!

Mona, my SO, put up with my ceasing to be a full member of our household as I trained—and is supportive of my doing more next year!

Coach Kelvin Landolt taught me to swim, an accomplishment of which I am proudest at age 53.

Coach Steve Bentley brought me to the start line of an Ironman with confidence.

And my friend and colleague John Boguslawski talked me into the whole thing in the first place!

Wisconsin Ironman bike route

2007-09-09T19:21:00.000-04:00

The loop is done twice.

What is the Wisconsin Ironman?

2007-09-01T21:00:00.000-04:00

I'm stealing the description from the Ironman Web site. It says that the University of Wisconsin is a party university:

That's funny, I thought of them rather as the Cement Canoe champions of North America. First you swim in Lake Monona, which is too small to be more than slightly choppy...

Go on a large, two-loop bike race through the green fields of Wisconsin...

Finally, there's the run...

If you survive that, there's Beer at the Finish! Or we'll go to State Street Brats.

Lessons learned

2007-05-12T13:22:00.000-04:00

One of the things I’ve been doing lately is writing up my “lessons learned”. Most of them are obvious duhs, but even so I find it useful to have them articulated. Here are this week’s, with a note on how I learned each lesson.

Mon., May 7/07: If I’m going to be “on site”, I should bring healthy food. (Did not learn this lesson for Tues., May 8.)

I spent several hours at one of Toronto’s busiest subway stations supervising installation of farecard equipment, and neglected to bring anything to eat; this left me wandering into the adjacent food court and getting something from, er, McDonald’s. Despite doing this two days in a row, I neglected to do anything about it on the second day.

Tues., May 8/07: It may be trying too much to swim Mon. night & do bike work-out early Tues. morning. Alternately, I may not have been well.

After a good swim work-out Monday night I had no energy Tuesday morning for my trainer work-out—but I’m now pretty sure that I was—and to a degree remain—a bit sick.

It’s not worth the dubious “convenience” of wearing business-casual clothes on the bike. I soiled and tore the drive-side cuff of my khakis.

On a beautiful spring day I was trying to save the time of changing from bike clothes to street clothes (& back in the evening) for a mere 4.3-mi, 7.0-km commute. As I note, I just don’t find it so convenient.

Wed., May 9/07: Rest between work-outs is valuable to Ironman training. Standing for 5½ hours without a single break was not wise.

My Ironman buddy is in awesome shape, but takes the elevator & sits when he can. In the presence, I’ll guess, of all those hard workers from the Transit Commission and our contractor, I didn’t want to be sitting down. But I should’ve; between that lack of rest and a virus, I could do nothing: I skipped both swimming and even Pilates.

Fri., May 11/07: No matter how “out of sorts” I feel, a work-out can often be surprisingly good, and feel surprisingly good.

Well before dawn on Friday morning I sure did not feel like a 90-minute swim work-out, but I went with the expectation that I’d quit pretty quickly. Yet the moment I dove into the water I felt good, and in the end had a great work-out—and felt great the rest of the day.

Sat., May 12/07: 40 oz (1200 ml) of beer is not good preparation for an early-morning long run.

monado and I had a nice dinner at Gabby’s on the Danforth that involved sharing a pitcher of beer. Despite my low tolerance of alcohol, I was nowhere near drunk or even tipsy when we got home, and I went to bed pretty quickly, but I’ve been barely motile since—13 hours in bed, and I still feel like having another nap, not doing the 90-minute easy run I’m scheduled to do.

“State of the union”

2007-04-27T09:30:00.000-04:00

This is what I wrote Coach Steve in my report to him on April 22:

With 20 weeks to go, I felt like giving you a kind of “State of the Union” about where I think I am in my training …

Cycling

After a weekend like this, naturally I’m looking forward to being outside again, and I’m looking forward to doing some serious miles on the roads—such as next weekend’s 3 h 45 min, and the 5 h 30 min between the two rides the following weekend. I think I’ve been pretty good at executing the interval work-outs on the trainer, and not so good at the “long rides”—thus I am very happy to be outside, where such are “easy” (i.e., easily doable).

Today’s two hours showed I need some bum time. It was nothing even close to a struggle, but I could tell I wasn’t used to being on my bike without a break for so long.

I know this is the crucial discipline, and that getting to do 180 km easy is the key. Bring it on!

My current vision, looking forward, is that most mid-week bikes I’ll still do on the trainer—one-leg drills, for instance, are scary on the road—but I’ll usually do the weekend rides on the road, mostly in the Oak Ridges Moraine north and east of Toronto, which is much the same as the IM Wisconsin course.

Running

Yesterday’s run may have been an aberration, but there's no doubt I need some quick catching up to do. I have zero—I repeat, zero—issues with my knee. I’m definitely an advertisment for arthroscopic surgery. However, it’s also clear that my legs remain my limiting factor. They’re just not used to the running.

…

I’m expecting you to give me two or three runs a week in May, with the distance increasing pretty steadily.

Swimming

As you may have guessed by now, I pretty much ignore the swim work-outs you set for me (unlike running and especially cycling). I work three times a week under a coach, a very good coach I think, and I’m making progress, albeit slow. As “unimportant” as folks usually consider the swimming leg, for me it remains the weakest link. A year ago I couldn’t swim—today I can do continuous 75s. With only three swims a week possible, that means I have only fifty or so work-outs to get myself to be able to do 2000 or 3000 yd a work-out in continuous 500s and 1000s. It’s doable, I think, but it means staying focused and not missing work-outs.

The problem is that I remain a very inefficient swimmer: my aerobic fitness can’t overcome my inefficiency, and I get winded. Still I swam just shy of a mile on Monday (if I'd known how close I was to that milestone, I would’ve got in and swum the 60 yards!), and I can see it coming.

Overall fitness

I actually think I may be fitter than I’ve been in my whole life, even seven years ago when I was doing a couple of marathons a year. One thing I am is tired, and my muscles are tired. Being so tired only really hurt my swimming, so I worked on technique. I am concerned, though, that I may need a bit of rest as I drag my 53-year-old body up to the start line on September 9.

Fear of puss!

2007-03-22T19:54:00.000-04:00

(Google Images is interesting. When I googled puss, I mostly got pictures like these. When I realized I wanted pus, I got pictures so gross I didn’t want to look at them, much less post them. Which I guess is rather the point here.)

When I had my knee “done” (Mar. 6), the orthopædic surgeon said that I could swim all I liked until the stitches came out, and then I shouldn’t swim until the incisions fully healed. When my family doc pulled the stitches out (Mar. 16), she said I shouldn’t swim at all for two weeks. As I’ve posted below (here, here, and here), I’ve swum twice this week, and without benefit of bandages.

After I posted about it, monado called me, and pointed out that while an infection was very unlikely, its consequences would be terrible—so perhaps I should not swim for a few more days.

I took her advice. But at least I got out again for my one-mile walk-and-run loop, as I did two days ago. I had hoped that I might do a two-and-two, but as soon as I started running I knew that would be wrong. There wasn’t any pain, but my injured knee felt injured, so I limited it to the two-and-one thing, and I was, I think, fine. (As I type this, I’m in my hotel room, icing the knee prophylactically.)

Tomorrow is an off day as I fly home. I haven’t been upgraded, which I always find a disappointment. As I once read in the American Airlines in-flight magazine, frequent flyers live for their upgrades.

I forgot to stretch!

2007-03-22T13:32:00.000-04:00

I wondered why I felt a little uncomfortable this morning—I forgot to stretch!

Based on one of the best articles I’d ever read about being a better cyclist, I’ve taken to stretching every morning after my coffee and before breakfast. Nothing elaborate, just some eight or so basic stretches that really seem to help.

But today I forgot. Sigh.

By the way, in looking for a good image for this post, I found a French Web page devoted to stretching for the obese.

Not so waterproof on hairy legs

2007-03-22T09:22:00.000-04:00

When I had my stitches removed, the doc reiterated that now I shouldn’t go swimming—for two weeks, i.e., until it was certain my sutures had healed. (Mind you, they looked healed to me!)

So before I went on this trip I bought a box of waterproof bandages (illustrated). I, er, forgot to put any on for my first swim, Tuesday. Yesterday, though, I put one over each suture—and they lasted, maybe, one length before they started flapping, and then two or three lengths before they just plain came off.

The problem is not the bandages themselves but the hairiness of my knee. The bandages don’t have enough purchase on my skin to stay on. It’s been a problem since my teens.

Not sure what I’m going to do today.

Splash! (IV)

2007-03-21T20:48:00.000-04:00

(Found a new picture of the Doubletree’s pool, showing the furniture as it now is. Beyond the hedge to the left and in the background is Carson Street, a busy arterial that could also be called 217th Street. Beyond the hedge to the right is the hotel’s parking lot. To the right of the canopy is the hotel bar.)

Did as Coach Kelvin recommended, doing lengths of freestyle without breathing in the 12- or 13-yard pool, alternating with body rolls, usually doubles, sometimes single or triple.

The six or seven strokes of swimming without breathing were kind of interesting. It was fun how easy it was!

Oddly, I “felt” my knee more during the body rolls than during the freestyle.

As usual, I was alone in the water, but not as usual two women were lounging in the sunny end (near the canopy) carrying on a low conversation. It was sufficiently sunny that midway through the work-out (such as it was) I switched from my clear-lensed Aqua Sphere Kaimans to the mirrored pair.

Splash! (III)

2007-03-21T17:13:00.000-04:00

I forgot to mention … so I went “swimming” before I did my “run”. The swimming wasn’t really quote-mark-worthy, except that—unlike last April—that tiny pool is a real problem. In six short strokes I was at the end of the pool; I could never get my rhythm. I put this problem to Coach Kelvin, and this was his reply:

Short pool?

Try doing length totally under water in one breath. Rest to recovery at each end. Don't loose control when needing a breath. Be sure, if you decide to surface and breathe that you are (for sure) going to catch a breath.

Body core rolling is good. Single, double and 3x.

Work on the pull stroke for breaststroke (knees might not be ready for the breast stroke kick), us a dolphin kick.

Find another pool.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the nearby 24 Hour Ftiness centre does not have a pool; the nearest is in Long Beach; I’ll stick with the hotel pool, whatever its limitations.

Shmegege!

2007-03-21T16:49:00.000-04:00

It’s been two weeks (15 days precisely) since my knee surgery. I’ve been taking it pretty easily—too easily, I think.

I think I should’ve been doing more upper-body exercises, and my core strength work-outs—but I was so afraid of hurting my knee—and maybe I just liked the idea of time off!—that I did almost nothing.

I’m going to pay for it over the next few weeks, I think. I’m chunkier, and of course less fit.

But no time like the Now to start catching up!

Five a day!

2007-03-21T16:39:00.000-04:00

One of the problems of business travel is that it’s easy to fall into bad, bad eating habits. This is particularly true at the Doubletree Hotel Carson Civic Plaza (sic) where I think they mean well, but where there’s not a lot of variety on the menu.

So I’ve been having rather a lot of bar-type sandwiches with fries and beer, high in fat but also low-ish in fibre, and without any freshness to it. This morning I resolved to address the breakfast buffet in a better manner: I had a small bowl of oatmeal, a bagel with cream cheese and jam—and a plate full of fruit and a whole banana. Not that felt better!

At lunch my colleague took me to an Italian restaurant in Torrance, and I had the pasta primavera, which was a nice choice. I executed my “food rules”, and it worked.

I am a runner!

2007-03-21T14:01:00.000-04:00

Well, okay: I’m not as good-looking (or young!) as this guy; I’m not running in the fall somewhere (it’s March in the northern hemisphere); nor am I running so athletically.

But last night, about 5:45 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, in the City of Carson, County of Los Angeles, State of California, I “ran” pretty much exactly one mile on my reconstructed knee.

“Run” is a bit of an exaggeration: I’d walk two minutes, then run one. My knee never hurt, and afterwards I spent almost ninety minutes alternately heating and icing my knee. There was no swelling, then or now, 18 hours later.

I’m still pretty fit: but running-fit? Nah.

I wore my heart rate monitor, and during my little jogs my rate got up to 149 bpm!

During the run I could feel tightness in my leg above and below the knee. I wondered if this was from a year of having problems, and not running, because it wasn’t bad. And today I can “feel” my knee, but it’s nowhere near painful. If it’s okay this time tomorrow I may go out for a repeat.

Setback

2007-03-17T18:52:00.000-04:00

Tuesday evening (March 13; I won’t remark on the number!) I had my first swimming lesson since my knee surgery.

I felt great. It wasn’t just the joy of working out; it was that my kicking felt so much better. My vertical kick, never that bad, was suddenly better. With better kicking (as any fan of Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion technique knows) comes better body positioning which means better (or at least easier) swimming. (See the Wikipedia article on TI for a good summary of the criticisms of TI.)

About midway through our hour my knee began to hurt, and we switched to drills using a pullbuoy. But it was too late; after a week of wonderful recovery, my knee has been sore since. I took a couple of days off, and since then I’ve resumed light cycling. Yesterday I did another session of Coach Kelvin’s Triathlete Swim Training but only for half an hour. For one thing, trying to do stroke drills with a pullbuoy is (for me) nothing less than comical. I’ve also been babying the knee, spending hours each day alternating heat and cold.

I biked easily 40 minutes today (watching the last two stages of the 2004 Giro d’Italia on DVD). I think I’ll do an hour tomorrow, and then I fly to Los Angeles for a week of meetings with my client.

The week in Los Angeles I’ll be staying at the Doubletree Hotel Carson Civic Plaza (sic), whose pool I’ve described before. But an alternative to the Doubletree’s modest facilities is a brand-new 24 Hour Fitness facility about a mile from the hotel. The building looked great from the outside in January, but its home page doesn’t mention the pool I thought it had. Anyway, my plan is to swim a bit, pool-run a bit, walk a bit, and maybe even *gasp* run a bit. As with so much: We’ll see.

Back in the saddle …

2007-03-12T16:03:00.000-04:00

First, an apology for using a cliché as my title; I couldn’t think of anything else.

Second, the pic is also just the best I could find. I’m not female, I don’t have long hair, and I was riding my old Trek 2200 (a diamond-frame road bike) on a Tacx Flow ergotrainer, but …

for the first time in six days, I worked out. And, to my pleasant surprise, my refurbished knee didn’t complain; indeed, it liked it!

Spring forward!

2007-03-11T12:18:00.000-04:00

This morning I struggled awake, with many hypnopompic dreamlets. I glanced at my watch: 6:00. The local Starbucks opens at 6:30, so I thought there was no point in stirring now. (Our coffeemaker is in the shop, so the 800-m-distant Starbucks is our source of coffee now.) At 6:30 I suddenly realized: it’s 7:30!

I hadn’t forgotten about the earlier shift to Daylight Saving Time—I’d made sure my PDA and computer were properly patched. I’d just forgotten to reset my wristwatch!

The Starbucks staff were all clued in—no problems that morning.

Some folks (myself among them) wonder why Daylight Saving Time. My objection has always been the confusion of name and thing, and the multiplication of entities.

Some people have better arguments: Michael Downing wrote a reasonably well received book, Spring Forward, whose subtitle, The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, pretty much summarizes his point.

For this post I even discovered there’s an “organization” (not sure how organized) opposing Daylight Saving Time.

A funny thing happened to me on the way home …

2007-03-11T11:50:00.000-04:00

No pic here. One problem with my Treo 700p is that it takes so many keypresses to bring up the camera; as you’ll see from this story, I just didn’t have time to capture it …

I was driving home from “La Bicicletta” with my newly overhauled Trek 2200 in the back, heading home in the Odyssey. I was eastbound on Davenport Road somewhere near Ossington Avenue as I approached a pedestrian cross-over (PXO).

As I approached the PXO, a large orange cat entered it. It looked either way and started to cross the street in front of me. Of course, I stopped. The westbound traffic also stopped, and the cat, always stying inside the double white lines of the PXO, crossed to the other side sedately, always looking—and then ran off!

As I drove east, the driver of a Wheel-Trans van rolled down her window and gave me the thumbs-up.

It certainly looked like the cat was using the PXO in the canonical fashion. Very odd.

Ah, that feels better!

2007-03-11T11:40:00.000-04:00

On Tuesday, March 6, I had my torn meniscus snipped. (The photo to the left is actually of a dog’s torn meniscus, but it looks an awful lot like mine!

It’s been almost twenty years since my last surgery, but I had same experience with the anæsthetic: one minute I’m awake, blinking at the bright lights, chatting with the staff, and the next thing I know I’m in a different room.

I had a prescription for codeine-based painkiller, but I haven’t used any yet, which is I guess a good sign, a very good sign. I kept the hospital dressing—chiefly a tightly wound tensor bandage—on for most of two days, and Thursday revealed the almost invisible “stab wound” at the top of the knee and the two stitched wounds on either side at the bottom. My knee is a bit stiff, doesn’t like being kept bent, but tolerates walking and even climbing stairs two at a time.

My take is that the surgeon did a very good job.

The next phase, though, is coming back to athletic life. I’ll ride lightly on my trainer today, watching the end of the 2004 Giro d’Italia on DVD. Tomorrow I’ll swim a bit and run in the pool a bit.

A day, perhaps a weekend, off

2007-03-04T10:19:00.000-05:00

As planned, monado & I took Andrea (pictured) to swim at the East York Community Centre, together with her father (my stepson).

As always, Andrea was incandescent; she loves being in the pool; and she’s very fit.

I just puddled around, did some widths, chatted very briefly with an injured runner doing pool-running, and hung with monado mostly. Still it can be a bit tiring.

And so I decided not to do lengths when the pool threw out the kids, and further decided that what my body was trying to tell me was that I needed a day, maybe two off—even though I’ll get very little work done after my surgery on Tuesday.

Last night I was in bed about 12 hours, sleeping most of that, so I’ve missed my morning window to do my long bike ride; might do something tonight.

Andrea wants to go the bike show this afternoon, and we have to take her back to other grandparents’ this afternoon.

After no fewer than twenty-three consecutive days working out—by far a lifetime record—this fifty-three-year-old body needs some time off.

Turn, turn, turn

2007-03-03T12:28:00.000-05:00

Watched the Omloop Het Volk today on cycling.tv. (According to Babel Fish, omloop means ‘turn’ in English; Het Volk is the name of the sponsoring newspaper, in English ‘The People’.)

It was a very exciting race, especially as Filippo Pozzato of Liquigas zoomed from the chase group to the leaders, overtook them, and rode away with the race, all in the last few hundred metres. (His official Web site is very Flash, literally, and seems to me very Italian.)

It’s also a tough race, with long and frequent sections of wet paving stones, and very steep grades (at one point, 16%). It would be hard to imagine covering it on my road bike with skinny tires, but the pros manage.

The most interesting thing, though, is how the Web will change people’s viewing habits. Cycling.tv can offer live professional cyling at high data rates world wide for a small sum of money (and at low rates for free). I can watch near-TV-quality images on my computer anywhere I have a broadband connection, so I can follow the sport more than I ever could before.

Zap!

2007-03-02T14:18:00.001-05:00

The pic is of a rather severe instance of last night’s storm, a couple of miles from where monado and I live. (I’ll confess I, er, borrowed this pic from The Toronto Star’s Web site, which I heartily recommend.) I woke at 3 a.m. today to discover that the power was off; monado reports it was still off at 9 a.m., and, according to the Star, our utility is not promising to have everyone back on line before Sunday.

But this was a swim-club morning. Should I go or not? At monado’s suggestion, I called my office, and the auto-attendant answered promptly; thus I knew that the power outage wasn’t city-wide. From our bathroom window you can see the upper floors of Nisbet Lodge, and its lights were on. So I decided that the Innes Centre was probably powered up, and I could, and should, go swimming.

It was pretty wicked. The car, and especially its windshield, was covered with ice, and I got stuck reversing out of our parking spot; fortunately I was able to rock the car out without having to rouse monado to help push. :-) The streets were quiet; yes, it was 6:45 a.m., but it felt like 2 a.m., not the beginning of rush hour.

Only three of the registered seven made it to class. (And, yes, the facility had power.) Thus we had even more of Coach Kelvin’s attention than we usually have. (He’s actually quite good at giving individual attention to seven or eight swimmers at one time.) One poor guy—the fittest of us, of course—was to do 14x100 on 2:00. I was only supposed to do nearly endless 50s on 15-second rest, alternating underswitching, overswitching, and freestyle.

Once again, I have to say that swimming three to five times a week has done wonders. I now, honest to G-d, have a freestyle. (I do not, however, have an “alternate” stroke. Kelvin had us do a few lengths of our “alternate”, and my breststroke was pathetic; that 85-year-old guy at Settlement House who does 20 minutes of breaststroke every day at glacial speed would rule me.)

Back to my freestyle, there’s still tons to work on: my breathing stroke, for instance; my catch; and, of course, my endurance—I can’t realistically do more than 50 yd consecutively. But I can work on these; I feel I now have a base to work on.

The weekend: Lots to do: two lengthy bike work-outs, a core strength work-out, and I hope and expect we’ll be swimming with Andrea (our granddaughter) tomorrow afternoon, after which I’ll do 1200 yd or so of drills. Should be fun.

Rover!

2007-03-01T16:39:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago I bought an exercise ball so I could do my core strength work-outs at home. Today, seeing its sleek, Jupiter-sized blueness lurking in my living room, it reminded me of Rover, the creepy security device of The Prisoner’s Village. In the pic, Rover is shown about to catch a miscreant.

Forza, Emanuele!

2007-03-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

Did my bike work-out on the trainer, continuing to watch the DVD of the 2004 Giro d’Italia. I’ve not enjoyed the abridged Giro coverage as much as the four-hour-per-stage live coverage (as I noted a couple of days ago), but today I watched Emanuele Sella take his first win as a pro on the 11th stage (in Pantani’s hometown of Cesena), and it was exciting and inspiring. I couldn’t find any English-language sites on him, but you can visit his fan club here.

One amusing thing about watching a bike race while I work out on a trainer is that when the cyclists are doing tight corners I lean with them! Could be a bit scary, if I leaned too much!

The work-out was ok. Coach Steve asked me to “Cycle speed - 60" total with 2 x 10" tempo (4"R I)”. I did a very, very easy 15-min warm-up, then worked hard for 10 min, then did a 5-min rest interval (just so the times were even), did another 10 min hard, and a final 20 min easy.

The first interval was awful. My legs, particularly my thighs, were screaming. I wondered what Alison had done to me. And I couldn’t get my HR into the tempo territory of high 130s and low 140s. Indeed, I don’t think it ever went over 125. But the second interval was completely different—power over 200 W, HR well into the 140s, and my legs didn’t hurt.

I wondered if my warm-up was too easy.

The Department of Redundancy Department (Time Machine Section)

2007-03-01T16:14:00.000-05:00

Another post not about triathlon. What am I thinking?

I was reading Maclean’s (which used to call itself “Canada’s National Newsmagazine”) when I came across this sentence about Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States Attorney for Northern Illinois:

Nor has success diverted him from a vocation that he seems to treat as a calling.

This is careless (perhaps ignorant) wordsmithy: vocation is just a nice Latin word for calling.

(The article is not on line yet, though I expect it will be at some point, at Maclean’s site.)

A further irrelevancy, but Maclean’s is a weekly, and the issue in which I read the above is dated Mar. 12. I got it in my mailbox Feb. 28! That seems weird to me.

Cheap music, cheap!

2007-02-28T12:50:00.000-05:00

This post is not about triathlon.

I often read Arts & Letters Daily, which is itself a true blog (Web log) of interesting articles around the Web. It sent me to this online article from Gramophone about the Joyce Hatto scandal. The online article had an ad beside it, for Naxos Web Radio. Basically, for 9.95 USD or 9.95 EUR a year—essentially free—you can get a feed of any of seventy-three different channels from Naxos’ huge catalogue of definitive recordings.

It has some funny quirks: with 73 channels, the categorization if quite atomic, so you don’t get what you’d expect from a classical-music radio station, i.e., a Romantic piano concerto followed by an opera selection followed by some baroque music. Each of these has its own channel! But you can jump around as much as you like.

The other quirk is that each channel plays through an entire CD in sequence, so, for instance, you’ll get a bunch of Mozart followed by a bunch of Beethoven, etc.

Anyway, if you like “serious” music, I highly recommend it!

Splash! (II)

2007-02-28T12:12:00.000-05:00

No more drowning for me. A good, solid session of Coach Kelvin’s Triathlete Swim Training this morning in the 50-yd pool at the John Innes Community Recreation Centre in Toronto’s Moss Park neighbourhood. I’m still (by far) the worst of the five triathletes that Coach Kelvin is working with, but my swim technique is really coming along. Oh, 75 or 100 yd of freestyle tires me out, but now I have a freestyle to work on. I can breathe, my breathing-side arm has a nice high elbow, I need to work on my catch, but I know I can … altogether a positive feeling, especially after feeling I’d “lost” my swim a few weeks ago.

During Monday’s private, Kelvin had had me try to use a pullbuoy, the thought being this would be good practice for after my knee surgery. It was comic: I kept rolling over as I fought the pullbuoy. But today, with paddles on my hands, it worked; it was hard, but it worked.

Afterwards, Alison had a lot to work on during my weekly shiatsu treatment: my shoulders, my mid-back, my concrete-like legs.

I’ll tell you a really nice feeling, though: that I have no serious work-outs until tomorrow afternoon! Being a work-out machine is tough!

An inspirational video?

2007-02-28T04:20:00.000-05:00

Not sure if I find this “inspirational” or not.

“Working” at home

2007-02-27T19:54:00.000-05:00

Last night’s swimming lesson with Coach Kelvin lasted until nearly 22:30, and it was almost 23:00 by the time I got home. So I let myself “sleep in” this morning—it was 6:45 when I glanced out the bedroom window. Today was garbage day, and we’re supposed to have our stuff at the curb by 7:00 but I decided it just wasn’t very important today, and snuggled back under the covers.

In due course, I had my mandatory mug of coffee; I actually did put the garbage out before the truck came by; Monado went to work; and I did a bit of work in my home office. And then I realized it was 11:00, I was still in my warm-ups, and I hadn’t showered or shaved. I had no meetings today, so I just e-mailed my secretary and my team that I was, ahem, “working at home”.

Not sure how much work I got done—but at least my training for Ironman Wisconsin is on track!

After a post-lunch nap, I got on my bike and did my “A” work-out for the day. According to Coach Steve: “Cycle 90" total with 2 x 20" tempo low cadence cycling (70-75rpm max, stay seated)” (for some reason, Steve uses a double-tick for minutes). Pretty straightforward: the old Trek went into the ergotrainer, and off I went, with the 2004 Giro d’Italia for entertainment (hence the picture of Damiano Cunego).

Two digressions here. First, I had the Giro d’Italia (or rather the first DVD of it) through zip.ca, which I’ve been very happy with.

Secondly, seeing Cunego and his teammates in their bright-red Sæco kit reminds me that my Sæeco Superautomatica coffeemaker needs to find its way to the local Sæeco office at the edge of the universe (Steeles Avenue!!!) sometime soon. It is not a happy coffeemaker, which makes me not a happy coffeedrinker.

I’ve been drinking Gatorade Endurance the last few trainer rides, the official drink of the U.S. Ironman races. I had to order it from Performance Bicycle (because it’s not available in Canada), but I actually think I like it better than the usual Gatorade.

Anyway, about halfway through the bottle I wondered what was wrong with it, and I realized it was soapy—I’d decanted it into a bike bottle not entirely rinsed of soap. Sigh. Just cold water from the cooler, I guess.

So a pretty easy ride as I watched a highly abridged three-year-old bike race unfold. It reminded me how much I enjoyed the much longer live or pseudo-live coverage of the Tour de France on the Outdoor Life Network. Somehow the hours spent watching very little happen seemed, well, more interesting than the twenty minutes, or sometimes less, I got per stage on the DVD.

I capped a reasonably easy day with my core strength work-out. Coach Steve has set one for his athletes, but I kind of liked the one in the March 2007 issue of Bicycling, so I’ve been doing it the last couple of weeks. As the article hinted, it’s hard, and I’m reminded how much better my core was when I was doing Pilates once or twice a week.

Anyway, the end of the day had me packing my swim kit for my 7:00 swim group (yawn!). It’s coming up on 21:00, so time to get to bed, and read the April issue of Bicycling, their annual buyer’s guide. Thus I will dream of carbon and aluminium and cool wheels.

“Pre-op”

2007-02-23T15:09:00.000-05:00

That’s the Holland Orthopædic & Arthritic Centre of the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre on Toronto’s Wellesley Street. It’s where I spent two hours Friday morning in the mandatory “pre-op” for March 6’s arthroscopic partial meniscectomy. A clerk asked me questions and filled out a form, I had an ECG done, and then I saw the anæsthesiologist who confirmed that, yes, I was healthy. The heartrate on the ECG was slow, my b.p. was 124/73 (that’s good, right?), and there is, basically, nothing wrong with me. :-)

The news buried in this post, of course, is that I’m having surgery.

I haven’t run, really, since mid-January ’06. I’ve done various work-outs, “probe runs” (as Coach Pimm called them) of one or two miles, and just accepted the pain. By late fall ’06 I accepted that the problem wasn’t going to go away with non-invasive physical, chiropractic, or shiatsu therapy (though each has its virtues). My family doc requisitioned an MRI, which I got in early December. The result: a “small radial tear of the medial meniscus body”. (Also “severe chondromalacia patella”, but that’s the subject for another post.) So my family doc referred me to a specialist, an orthopædic surgeon. That was December 4.

In mid-January I called my doc. Any progress? Well, no; it would be months, perhaps eight months, before I saw the orthopædist. Eight months! What about my Ironman?

I spoke to my doc, and she said she’d “grovel” (her word), and the next day or the day after I got a call from the ortho’s office: I had an appointment for the next week. It was the day I was booked to return from Los Angeles, but I resched’d my flight to return over night (I ended up flying on a late and nearly empty flight from Los Angeles to Boston and then taking a little EMBRAER jet to Toronto.) Dozy, I saw the ortho. He recommended no surgery—unless I wanted to run. Yes, I did.

So they put me on the cancellation list—and less than two weeks later, I had my date.

I know it’s odd, but I’m excited at the prospect of surgery!

The one negative, if it is a negative, is that my schedulaholism cannot be satisfied. I have my March work-out schedule, but it’s not much more than Coach Steve’s wild guess as to what I’ll be able to do. The ortho will talk to me after the op, and we’ll take it from there. I’m kind of hoping I can go to the triathlete swim training class three days later and do some work-outs with a pull-buoy between my thighs, but, sigh, we’ll see!

I’m dreaming of a magnetic Christmas!

2006-12-26T09:10:00.000-05:00

What did I want for Christmas? What else but a better instrument of torture? Thus it was that on Saturday, Monado & I went to the Bicicletta (“the bike store of hopes and dreams”!) in Toronto’s North Fairbanks neighbourhood, and bought me a Tacx Flow trainer.

I’ve ridden about 40 or 50 “miles” on it over the last few days. It’s more stable, has a better display, and is more, well, usable, than my previous trainer. I put the old trainer on the boulevard (i.e., strip of grass between sidewalk and curb) in front of our house, and it was gone in about 24 hours.

Candidly, I was at least partly upsold by Henry at the Bicicletta. I’d been sent there by Coach Steve, because his “athletes” allegedly enjoy a discount. Henry pointed out that the Flow can be upgraded with various data-collection and VR add-ons; in aid of this upselling, I mounted a bike on an uprated Tacx and “biked” along some road in Europe, with (and this is really the best part) the resistance on the trainer changing as the “grade” of the road changed. I’ll admit it was cool. Now if only I could have a DVD of the Ironman Wisconsin course!

There’s a video game–like version that you use to steer a CGI cyclist along a CGI road; with the appropriate attachments, you “steer”; for fun, I “steered” my avatar into a wall. :-) It didn’t hurt a bit—unlike my last fall.

Does it pay to complain sometimes?

2006-11-04T18:11:00.000-05:00

Personally, I think crashing is part of cycling. I think one of the cyclist’s jobs is dealing with imperfect road surfaces. So when I crashed two weeks ago, I e-mailed to the City's Pedestrian & Cycling Infrastructure Unit just so the hazard would be eliminated. As a consequence, I was more than a little surprised four days later when a supervisor from the Transportation Services Division called me, to assure me that the utility that ordered up the cut, the contractor that did the work, and the City itself would ensure that the road would be fully restored. Then, two days later, someone from the contractor called me, and wanted to know what my damages were. I could’ve expanded the list, I guess: my bib shorts and favourite cold-weather jersey were ripped, I’ll probably have to replace my helmet. But I forebore; instead I just reported the cost of truing my wheels and replacing my shifters—still over 300 CAD—all of which I’d ordered up before I had any inkling someone would pay for it.

And yesterday in the mail was a cheque. What a pleasant surprise!

My coach finished!

2006-11-04T17:59:00.000-05:00

I watched Coach Steve cross the finishing line at Ironman Florida at 9:50:40. He didn’t look perky, and I know he didn’t beat his time from last year. The catchers asked him something and he shook his head No. We’re not sure if he was asked, “Do you need help?” or “Are you ok?”

Torture?

2006-10-28T13:37:00.000-04:00

Friday I was finally back on the Road of Iron. Not sure what exactly is wrong. Coach Steve posited that I’d use a lot of energy recovering from my wounds (to recap: a lot of skin rubbed off, still under Compeed bandages; bruises up and down my left side, metastasized to my right!). Considering that I’m not working out, it seems odd that I’m so tired all the time.

Anyway.

Friday evening, watching SportsCentre and That’s Hockey on the Sports Network, I mounted my bike on the trainer, and did what Coach Steve actually prescribed for Thursday. (Friday was to be a swim day, but still missing a few square inches of skin, I don’t want to expose myself to highly chlorinated water!) That is, I did an hour—yes, a full, honest hour—on the trainer, and did the six 30-s one-leg drills (that is, twelve drills altogether).

One of my favourite magazines, Cycling Plus asked if what they call turbo trainers were “instruments of turture”. They decided no, of course; but there’s something weirdly enervating about riding on a trainer.

Do I have a good trainer? I have the cheapest trainer I could buy from Performance Bicycle. It seems to work fine, though the controller is pretty basic.

Do I have the right technique? I had the trainer at its lowest level, which I still find harder than riding on a windless flat road, and I was in the big ring. I think I may not have been spinning enough; after the hour, my legs were sore, but I rarely got my heart rate above 100.

Of course, I’m delaying now. We have wind warnings (gusts up to 100 km/h!), the roads are wet and covered with leaves, and it’s chilly (about 6°C). A good day to use the trainer. And if I°m not on the trainer really, really soon, I won°t get the two hours of base pace done before I can get to the gym before it closes at 18:00. Sigh.

Update: Well, I didn’t make it. I managed 40 min on the trainer, and that was all. No energy, no mental toughness—I admit it. Did some errands, and I’m irritable, my throat is tight—oh, oh, that damned virus again.

And the weather is nowhere near as awful as Environment Canada forecast. The wind’s not bad at all. The Weather Channel is forecasting a strong breeze from the west tomorrow morning—but nowhere near the storm EC was warning us of.

Crash!

2006-10-22T12:49:00.000-04:00

Yes, the inevitable happened yesterday (Saturday). I was tooling along, at 15 or so miles an hour, when the handlebar just left my hands. I was on the ground in a split second. My bike and I were spread across two travel lanes; I was lucky the heavy traffic hadn’t been right around me at that moment.

What happened was that there’d been some utility work, and the asphalt patch had sunk, leaving a nice vertical 1-inch bump in the road; I hadn’t seen it, and it had knocked the front wheel out of my command.

I rode another 15 minutes or so, but I decided it was not my day. There was something wrong with the bike, and the pain was getting pretty bad.

My biggest concern is my head. I had hit my head (though my helmet doesn’t show it); and 11 years ago I had a Level III concussion I’d treated very poorly, resulting in persistent, though not serious, post-concussion syndrome. I decided, among the pain, the concern about concussion, and the heavy, heavy traffic on my routes, that I’d go home.

At home I found I’d ripped my favourite cool-weather jersey and my Assos bib shorts, and I had skin ripped off my left knee, left elbow, and, oddly, my right elbow. (I don’t remember hitting it.) I scrubbed the wounds with paper towels until no dirt showed up. You think that hurt? Try putting tincture of iodine on the nicely scrubbed-up wounds. Youch! I ended up spilling iodine on the kitchen floor! :-)

I called Monado and asked her to come home from visiting her dad; it was a good thing - this morning, at 2:30, my dressings had slipped off, and it was just too darned hard trying to dress my elbow with one hand!

Today, I don’t know. I think I’ll check out my bike, and try to do some spinning on the trainer. Pool work-outs, scheduled for the next two days, don’t seem a good idea, with my open sores - so it’s off to Coach Steve for some advice.

Good news and bad news!

2006-10-15T19:17:00.000-04:00

Yes, I’m sick. The weekend off. Sigh. Only 47 weeks to go!

The good news I got Friday: I’ll be working on an exciting new project, which for the first time in years will be local, although it’ll involve visiting a lot of offices in nearby cities and towns, which means a lot of driving.

The bad news is that it’s likely to threaten my training. Indeed, it begins with the kick-off meeting tomorrow—I’m not sure how I’ll get my two pool work-outs done!

(I guess this assumes I’ll feel like doing them.)

Road trip!

2006-10-10T20:27:00.000-04:00

Coach Bogie & I travelled to Dane County, Wisconsin, over the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend to ride the Ironman Wisconsin bike course.

I’d instigated this journey, and I’d had a couple of objectives. First, I wanted to see how tough the course actually was. Everyone (and you know who “everyone” is, right?) said it was tough, perhaps the toughest of any Ironman North America event—which says quite a lot.

It didn’t matter if it was so tough I couldn’t finish; or if, as I’d predicted, it was “just ”112 miles of the Oak Ridges Moraine, which I happily & even eagerly bike most weekends I can get out of town.

Second, I wanted to get a feel for the course. I sure didn’t want Sept. 9/07 to be my first look at it!

In the event, Coach Bogie & I started a little ways from the course’s start at the Monona Terrace. We parked his Blazer at Olin-Turville park, and we rode our bikes on the sidepath along John Nolen Drive, and turned south on Rimrock Road. Where we met Rusk Road we were now on the official IM route.

Bogie & I took different approaches to the weather. He was in his long-sleeved CSC jersey under a windvest, and wore tights over his bib shorts. I had arm warmers and light long-fingered gloves under my cycling mitts, and no tights. I was pretty comfortable when we began.

We turned briefly onto Oregon Road, then west on McCoy Road, and made the wrong turn, north, on Syene Road. Around Watson Avenue we realized our mistake, and headed south, taking Syene southward. We passed our last subdivision for a while; we were now in country. We turned west on Irish Lane, south on Caine Road, and west, for several miles, on Whalen Road. Here the hills began. Bogie’s observation was that it was like Guelph, by which I suspect he meant that it was like Ontario’s Wellington County. That is, the hills were rolling and steady.

I haven’t mentioned the wind. Most of this time we were subjected to a steady wind of about 20 km/h, with occasional gusts much harder. It made for hard going along Whalen, making the rolling hills seem worse.

At Old Highway PB (really, that’s its name!) the loop began. In the race itself, you do this loop twice; we managed to mess up the beginning a bit. Through a new subdivision, we were diverted from Whalen Road, taking a rocky hill up and around Harvest Lane. Around here I saw a house with a giant Packers banner; in the driveway was a van whose licence plate read QB4GB4, a reference to the Packers’ longtime starting quarterback, Brett Favre.

At County Road M we were supposed to turn right, but for some reason we turned left, crossed U.S. 18/151, and realized at Range Trail we were lost. We turned around, and just guessed to turn at Prairie Heights Road. At Locust Drive we turned the wrong way again, crossed 18/151 again, found ourselves on a very pretty road that was much too gravelly to be an Ironman course. We guessed that north was the right direction, rocketed down Locust Lane’s sharp hill, and turned west on Bruce Street. We were now back on course. We turned southwest on Paoli Street (Wisc. Route 69), crossed 18/151 yet again—but this time we were supposed to! At this point Paoli Street was a divided near-expressway, so I was happy turn west on Valley Road, which despite its name was a sharp ascent, before we fell into the ravine of the Sugar River.

Valley Road ended at Sugar River Road, where we turned north. Somewhere around here, I stopped to take a picture on my camera phone of some grazing horses. They were such odd colours, I rather thought Monado would like to see them. In the sunlight, even with my reading glasses on, I had to shoot blind; the picture isn’t bad.

While I was standing there, I saw a used 700C tubular in the swale, so I stuffed it in a jersey pocket, and headed off to find Bogie, who was waiting patiently for me at the top of a hill. (He later said he was riding about 2½ miles per hour slower than his usual easy pace; but then his target Ironman time is 4½ hours shorter than mine!)

We turned west on Marsh View Road, then southwest on the wonderfully named County Track G. More rolling hills, but sharing a road without a shoulder with a lot of fast-moving motor vehicles.

Track G ends at Washington Street (State Route 92), where we turned northwest. This was even worse—hilly, narrow, with a crumbling road edge, and a lot of motorized traffic. But the drivers were astoundingly courteous. I had several drivers wait behind me until the opposite lane was clear so they didn’t have to pass me too close.

Just as we’d turned north on Washington Street, we’d been passed by a faster cyclist, and Bogie, as is his wont, took off to “take” him. I was on my own for a long ride!

We entered Mount Horeb, and Washington Street turned north, became 8th Street, still State Route 92 but now also County Road JG (they all had these funny lettered names; typical of Wisconsin I’ve since found out—but we never figured out the system).

Bogie was waiting for me at a gas station at the traffic circle. I was out of fluids, so took the rest of his Gatorade, and we headed off. (By this time I’d taken off my arm warmers and gloves. Bogie was still in his fall outfit.) Up to this point, we agreed, the route was tought but doable; but Bogie told me that the other cyclist had told him that it got much worse. Hm.

We headed through the traffic circle, still on 8th Street (now State Route 78), and turned east on County Road S. We were in the country, and headed back to Madison—but, as promised, we had a lot of punishment yet to take.

It was wonderful on a high highway, with a beautiful view, with that stiff wind to our back, and we rocketed past our turn, north on Witte Road. I noticed the steeeeep downhill followed by an equally steep up, and remarked to Bogie that I was glad it wasn’t on our route! But we checked our cue sheets, and realized it was! This was the best downhill of the course—I hit 40 m.p.h., but I was still in my bottom gear when I ascended the other side. We also got a stark reminder of why people don’t like living near pig farms!

East on County Road J—still heading home!—and then north on Garfood Road. We almost got turned around where Garfoot jogs at Mineral Point Road; the written directions make no mention of this jog, but fortunately the map suggested it. From here, came my favourite part of the course. A long, sinuous descent, at high speeds, until the road ended and we had to turn east—still homeward!—on County Road KP, and then east on Bourbon Road (sic) into Cross Plains. It was here that we had what I would characterize as an un-Wisconsin moment. A young guy with thumping hip-hop coming out of the windows of his Ford Escort pulled in front of a wind-aided Bogie so that Bogie had to jam on his brakes to avoid hitting the car. Bogie gave him a killing look, but I doubt it had any effect.

Where Bourbon Road ends, we turned south on County Road P, another busy highway, but we passed over something I’d never seen before: a tunnel under the road for cattle! Not tall enough for a man, I don’t think, but squarish for cattle. Kind of neat.

The triathletes that post on bulletin boards refere to Ironman Wisconsin as “IM Moo”, but I saw very few cattle. I would think “IM Corn” would be a better nickname!

In due course we turned east onto Stagecoach Road, which was uncharacteristically flat! We passed more farms and estate homes, and a lake marked with private-property signs. I noted that we were passing between two glacial-dome-type hills and thanked the route-designers for omitting them.

I thanked them too soon!

We turned south on Birch Trail, and the road started to climb. Then we turned east onto Old Sauk Pass Road. Note that word: Pass. This was the prettiest road, and definitely the worst hill, on the route. I was soon out of the saddle, pushing each pedal down, wondering if I was going to topple—or if I should save that indignity by walking up the hill!

Bogie must have read my mind, because he came back, and yelled, “No quitting, Nelson!” I made it, and then we had the joy of the twisting descent. We turned south on Timber Lane, more largeish exurban homes, but we were now straight into the wind, and even some modest hills left me hating life. But I was also out of fluids again.

At the crest of one of these hills we passed Serene Court, and I announced to no one in particular that I, for one, was not feeling serene.

We turned east on Midtown Road—which was not in the middle of any town—then south on Shady Oak Lane, east on County Road PD, south on Nine Mound Road—which, despite its name, was not particularly hilly; after Old Sauk Pass Road, I was suspicious of any road that actually mentioned hills!

We were now on the outskirts of Verona, and Cross Country Road took us right into town, descending another steep hill before we stayed relatively level in the city itself. South on Main Street, decorated with welcome banners for cyclists! We stopped at a gas station at Verona Avenue, and bought some fluids, which I badly needed. We continued east on Verona Avenue, south on Old County Road PB, and back to Whalen Road. We’d done the loop!

The last hills on Whalen Road didn’t seem so bad after the horrors we’d been through, and having the wind at our back meant that even though I was leading we were keeping a steady 20 m.p.h. or better.

All told, 68.8 miles in 5 h 7 min. That sounds horrid, but it’s the pace for an 8:20 bike split, which is “only” an hour off my best possible time—and I have 11 months left to train!

Some observations: I’m really, really glad I made the trip. I think I’d’ve been thoroughly demoralized by the hills past Mount Horeb if I didn’t know what to expect. Also it gives me the glimmering of a strategy for the course: steady all the way to Mount Horeb; make up lots and lots of time into Cross Plains; then grind it out to Verona. Bogie did suggest that I get a couple more teeth on my sprocket; that would allow we to spin 80 r.p.m. up even the terrible hills, and thus save my legs. Bogie also feels that it’s a great course for a tri bike, despite all the hills. I’m still not sure about that.

I do plan to come back, probably late in the spring. As of Tuesday morning, that trip may include Bogie and Our Hero Rob as well.

The trip itself

Bogie picked me up at 7 a.m. on Saturday morning, and we drove pretty much without stopping the 13 hours and 1100 km to Madison. The route was an unaccustomed one for Bogie, who does have relations in Chicago: Ontario Highways 401 and 402 to Point Edward; across the Blue Water Bridge to Port Huron; and Interstate Highways 96, 69, 94, and 90 all the way to Madison.

The westward crossing seemed laborious, with a 20-minute wait. The CBP agent was bored and obviously tired. He asked us the purpose of our visit, and Bogie said we were driving to Wisconsin to go cycling. At this point the agent asked an acute question: “You’re driving all the way to Wisconsin to go cycling?” Bogie answered with the truth, that we were doing an Ironman.

Then, perhaps as punishment for our pretensions, we missed the exit to I-69, and got lost in Port Huron. We stopped at a Krogers for fuel, and, according to Bogie, I lost my manliness by asking for directions. It turned out the directions were accurate, though, and we were on I-69 again in no time.

On I-90/94 across Chicago we lost a ton of time with the “Open Tollway” construction.

Anyway, after 13 hours of driving, all done by Bogie, we arrived at the Quinta Inn & Suites in the American Center business park north of Madison. It amuses me how a Quinta tries to be up market. The clerk offered me an upgrade to a 2-room suite for $20. Of course, two straight guys travelling together would prefer separate rooms, so I went for it, but I asked the obvious (to me) question: wasn’t I already in a suite? Oh, yes, I was told; but it was a one-room suite. I didn’t get an answer to my question about how one room could be a suite. So because the hotel wasn’t busy I ended up with a “Jacuzzi suite”, probably not something we want to share with Bogie’s manly friends!

One curious fact: on the entire 1100-km trip I saw only three working police cars: two OPP cruisers forming a speed trap near the Blue Water Bridge, and a Wisconsin State Patrol car not long before Madison. I never saw a police car in Madison.

Another interesting thing (to me): except for Port Huron, it was hard to believe we were passing through large cities in Michigan (Flint, Lansing, and Battle Creek). All we ever saw was trees. Well, not exactly true: one very large GM plant as we entered Flint.

Sunday night, after our big ride, we headed to downtown Madison for something to eat. We walked the entire length of State Street, from Capitol to University, and around some of the local streets, before we settled on Frida Mexican Grill, which had large murals (of course) of a beetle-browed Frida Kahlo facing me. As Bogie noted, it would be tough to spend more than $20 on State Street; our extravagant, high-calorie, post-epic-ride meal cost me $48 for both of us.

Monday—our Thanksgiving—we headed home. Once again, Coach Bogie never wanted to stop, but refuelled the car at the Belvidere Oasis (great name), where I got us some Starbucks and Krispy Kremes.

The only interesting thing about this 13-hour drive was our 1½-hour(!) crossing of the Blue Water Bridge. I have a word of advice for anyone Canada-bound on this bridge: stay to the left!

Anyway, as we edged our way across, we joked about peeing off the bridge. “What a great story that would be!” Bogie remarked more than once—but we kept ourselves in the car.

The guy in front of us—a later-middle-aged fellow in a Mazda Millenia—couldn’t wait. Only six cars from the Customs booth, he opened his car door, and stood up facing to the booth. It was Bogie who identified what he was doing, and when we saw the puddle he left, Bogie’s hypothesis was confirmed. “But his wife was in the car!” I noted. “Ah, she’s seen it before,” Bogie said.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2006-10-06T15:59:00.000-04:00

Monado’s present for my birthday arrived the other night: a DVD of the 1952 British film The Importance of Being Earnest, what is surely the funniest play every made. Sadly, I don’t think Monado quite found it as funny as I did.

Why is this on the Road of Iron? I’d come home from my late swimming lesson Wednesday night, and there it was, so I stayed up watching it. Only six hours sleep that night; then only six last night. The result? A day of doziness and laziness today.

But as I type this, I’m watching it again, and enjoying it as thoroughly as always.

Catching up!

2006-10-05T11:10:00.000-04:00

Yeah, it’s been a while, and the funny thing is that my training is going great.

Let’s hit the key points, though:

At 11:16 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Monday, September 11, I successfully registered for Ironman Wisconsin 2007. This is very scary, but very exciting, too. The following Sunday I went to an end-of-triathlon-season party, which included a couple who themselves had just done IM Wisconsin 2006. It came out, of course, that I’d signed up for IM Wisconsin, even though I’ve never done a triathlon. There were a lot of arched eyebrows, I can tell you—until our host said I’d engaged Steve Bentley as my coach.

I’m now “panicing early”: every missed work-out seems to take me away from goal of finishing IM Wisconsin—so I’ve gotten better at finding the time. On Sunday, Coach Steve said, “Congratulations on a good week.”

I’ve learned that business travel is not good for Ironman training. A short trip to Ottawa in aid of some work for that city’s transit property left me with no time to train.

Two weeks ago, walking out of my house to do a bike work-out, my plastic Look cleats slipped on the wet painted wood of the steps. As I fell, I prayed, “Please, let me fall on my ass”; but my prayers weren’t answered, and I fell to my right, digging a nice deep gash in my right arm, a gash that got mildly infected; and straining my right wrist.

The wrist I took care of: didn’t use it for a few days, iced it several times a day; and it repaid me by healing nicely. But pain below the wrist, in my upper hand, persisted; and indeed, has gotten worse. Yesterday, my doc poked around, raising even more pain, and gave me the preliminary diagnosis of a non-displaced fractured metacarpal. Not serious; but it means weight work-outs, which I have a problem doing in the first place, will be tough.

One thing that's kind of exciting—heck, very exciting is that “Coach Bogie” and I are driving to Madison, Wisconsin, this weekend (October 7-10) to do the bike course. We keep hearing such fearsome descriptions of it that we decided to see for ourselves. If it really is hell, we’ll know, and will train accordingly; if it’s just like the Oak Ridges Moraine, then I’ll know just where to train! Indeed, I found that Dane County (of which Madison is the seat) is “glaciated and has a landscape of low rolling hills with intermittent moraines”—so my hope is not bootless!

Sunday’s work-outs, July 16/06

2006-07-17T19:10:00.000-04:00

Coach Steve wrote: “Cycle 3.5 hours easy to base pace (aerobic)”.

Another very slow morning, as we had breakfast at the b.&b., got out and on the road. The idea was to start on Wasaga Beach’s River Road. A couple of troubles ensued: I lost the way to Wasaga Beach; then we stopped on the wrong River Road. Wasaga Beach, bizarrely, has two, and we chose the wrong one! In any event, about 11:30 a.m. I swalled a Promax bar in the parking lot of Birchview Dunes Elementary School, and headed, er, east. When I reached the police detachment, I knew I had to turn soon. I got lost and ended up far east of my intended road (Tiny Beaches Road), but found my way to water finally, and for the most part did what Coach Bogie strongly recommended. At Balm Beach I missed the turn again, but I knew it quickly, and asked some folks drinking beer whither to go. When they asked where I was headed, I said Cedar Point. One of them remarked, “But that’s ten miles!”

Bogie had forgotten to tell me to turn at Concession 12. Instead I kept following Tiny Beaches Road, even riding a sandy kilometre, argh! Just north of that I bought a bottle of water from two little girls with a roadside stand. It was a dollar, but breaking my five proved a major project!

On and on I rode. I eventually decided that it couldn’t be far to Cedar Point really, and I’d ride there. I crested my only significant hill, which was quite steep, and rode the boring road into Cedar Point, to find that the convenience store was closed and for sale.

(One of the interesting things about the ride was that while Wasaga Beach and the Tiny Beaches have been fixtures in local culture since I was a child—my friends in high school routinely went to Wasaga on weekends to carouse—this was to my knowledge the first time I’d been in any of these places! But I must have been in Cedar Point once, forty years ago, because it’s the launching point of the ferry to Christian Island, and we once visited the cottage of a co-worker of my father there.)

I’d hit Cedar Point half an hour after my ostensible turn-around, not good. I had no mobile coverage either! I picked a fairly direct route, and ended up at a convenience store slamming water and Powerade (does no one sell Gatorade any more?). I asked a passerby where I was, and found out it was Lafontaine, in the heart of Franco-Ontario. Many of the signs were unilingual French, which made it seem like rural Québec.

I finally connected with Mona, and we agreed to meet near the Tiny Marsh Provincial Wildlife Area.

At this point I’ll admit I was hating life. Simcoe Road 6 was no joy. And every contact point hurt, especially the palms of my hands. I made it, finally, to Concession 2, and Mona showed up minutes later. I actually fell asleep in the car—after we’d stopped at a McDonald’s in Elmvale for a coffee and a Triple Thick Milkshake.

The ride: 51.6 miles in 3 h 34 min.

The week ended July 16 is my heaviest bike week ever: 154 miles. And in the four days from Thursday through Sunday, I rode 138 miles.

This morning (Monday) I had a reaction to yesterday’s fluid intake, extra salt, and perhaps evening pizza that reminded me of a colonoscopy prep. For a couple of hours I couldn’t leave the area of the bathroom. (Even now, 12 hours later, I don’t feel great.) But even so I look back after the last few weeks and think maybe this Ironman thing is doable!