Duly Noted

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 179.5#

 

Probably a fluke, based on a skipped meal or two and some dehydration in this stinking heat, but I thought I'd make sure the date was marked...

 

A Quiet Fourth: There were some possibilities, but Anne and I opted to kick back and catch up on our sleep -- we woke up early enough according to "California time," but we were in Pennsylvania so breakfast was really brunch. We futzed around the house for a bit, then went over to Lake Nockamixon and did a mellow mountain bike ride, followed by a dip in the lake. Later in the day we caught up with other friends at Greg and Judy's barbecue, then caught the Bethlehem fireworks.

 

A Late Night: Deb and her boyfriend have been vacationing in Kenya, which from all accounts has been the adventure of a lifetime, but then, with the recent terrorist attacks, things got a bit too real and they decided to cut their trip short. We were going to pick them up tonight, but they cut their trip so short we got a text, last night, that they were on the ground at Newark Airport... Cue the comically fast music and off we drove, picking them up not too long after they cleared customs. They regaled us with their adventure stories (or maybe it was venting, with the focus on when/where things went downhill), and we got them home safe by 2:00 AM. So that's a big relief: except for sporadic Facebook posting they've essentially been incommunicado for about a week, and we've all been worried.

 

Anyway, tonight I think I'll be catching up on my sleep again.

 

Like An Angel, Standing In A Shaft Of Light

Back from my California vacation. I flew out to LA with Anne's sister Lorraine, picked up her daughter Vicky and drove to meet Anne in San Diego. Spent a few days there, then an overnight in Thousand Oaks before driving to Pismo Beach for a few days, and finished with a day or two in LA before heading home. I took about 300 pictures, many of which were either multiple shots for stitching into panoramas, or attempts to get a good shot of some nesting birds -- night herons were nesting in the tree outside our hotel window at Pismo Beach, and I have about 40 blurry photos of the (enormous) chicks -- but I should have about 150-200 good photos to post after the final cull. Stay tuned, but don't hold your breath...

 

So-Cal: First Impressions Three things impressed themselves on me right away: The first and biggest was that the traffic was far heavier, everywhere, than I expected. The second was that Southern California, though not particularly hot, is intensely sunny (and my hair is much thinner than it used to be, so I now own a hat like the ones that little-old-lady gardeners wear, bought in San Diego, and I still managed to get a serious full-body-plus-scalp sunburn) and though I knew the region was a mountainous desert, it was more mountainous, and far more desert-like, than I expected. And the third? The people I met and saw were nowhere near as "California" as I'd hoped -- they were pretty much like everybody else, oh well. Uggs seem to still be in style though, and there were one or two common male hairstyles that we don't see back home.

 

I did some mountain biking, not as much as I would have liked but we got two good days in, renting bikes and riding in Topanga Canyon, on mixed singletrack and dirt roads -- including the famous Mulholland Drive, which is unpaved at one end. Not particularly technical except in a few places, but was very hilly, and very scenic.

 

Most of the rest of the trip was nice but uneventful (we had a great meal at Bo Beaux in San Diego, where Vicky knew the chef, and had a nice day sightseeing in San Luis Obispo), but there was one unexpected highlight: The Getty Museum in LA. I'd never heard of it but Lorraine wanted to go, and we did that on our last full day. The artwork inside was almost an afterthought, the architecture and outer gardens were so beautiful.

 

(My laptop battery basically reached the end of its life last week, holding only enough charge for 20 minutes or so off the grid, so I ordered a new and better one on vacation, and it was waiting when we got home -- I went from 20 minutes to over five hours, which I verified yesterday. My car also got worked on while I was away, another burden off my checklist.)

 

We got home after midnight Saturday night, and spent yesterday just hanging out -- reading, browsing the web, and gardening (that last was Anne, even though I do have the hat for it now).  Later in the afternoon we biked out to the swimming hole near Freemansburg, and we ended the day with a visit to Brew Works to see some friends.

 

Anyway, I'm home now, and back at work, listening to the Penn State fans weasel-wording their way around the latest revelations in the Sandusky scandal.

News

Well, I made my decision: I'm not racing the Wilderness 101. So what does this mean? I still want to do it next year, so I have more time to get back in the game, or go further away from being ready for that matter, but there's no longer any training pressure this summer -- I still plan on training, and hopefully I can keep on improving, but I am no longer under the gun for the late-July due date. This also frees me up for a bunch of other things, like maybe that trip to Vermont, and maybe a bike tour with Anne (though she already has planned, and it looks to be a girls-only event). We shall see...

 

They Are Penn State Actual quote from accused pedophile Jerry Sandusky's lawyer, part of his opening statement: "Jerry loves kids so much that he does things most of us wouldn't think of doing." Well, that's kind of why he's in court...  I guess this proves that even his lawyer hates him.

 

(Meanwhile, there are still a lot of JoePat sympathisers here, moaning about how he was dissed -- that saintly man! winningest coach ever! railroaded! --  and how this was what finally broke him and killed him. I think that they're putting the cart before the horse here: he kept the lid on this scandal for years, for as long as he still had all his faculties, and the scandal broke when it did because he, with his health failing, was no longer able to squash it.)

 

One more decision made: I found a lightweight XML library for C, which I think I'll use to write a translation program, from an XML-style data file to the old-school punched card input format used by that FORTRAN program. This way I can either hand-write my own XML input file, or make one (or more!) input programs to create this new-style data file, then just pipe the data file through the translator and into the original program. I'll probably write a second translation program to go the other way, that is a card->XML translator as well as an XML->card translator, for the sake of completeness.

 

Tonight I'll be hitting Sals, maybe chasing after some of the VMB crew, who will be starting earlier on a group ride. Brew Works afterward...? The South Side Film Festival is also happening this week, maybe we'll go see a few movies tomorrow or Friday.

 

Memento Moritori

Whew! Emotionally tough weekend -- I won't get into it now, but I am actually glad to be back at work this Monday morning.

 

FORTRANNING: I got that program up and running for real now, it seems to work for any data set I give it, though the data I give it has all been generated in the past -- I have yet to create my own data set and run it. Data input, especially the fact that was designed around punched cards, and so the input file is very difficult to read/edit, is the Achilles Heel if this program right now; I think my next task will be to either rewrite the program to deal with a better input format (my inclination is to leave it alone), or (more likely) write some filter that takes a more user-friendly input file and translates it into the old format. I was also thinking of building a graphical user interface to create/edit the input files, and started playing with Glade to see how that might happen, but that will probably be a winter project.

 

Riding/Training: I am still on the fence about where I stand in terms of fitness. On the one hand, my monthly miles and hours took a dip in May, and fell off the cliff for June, and on that same hand I find myself off the back and hurting even on fairly easy rides. On the other hand... well there really isn't much on the other hand, except that now and then on a ride I feel good about something I used to have trouble with. I can see that there have been improvements, but I am nowhere near where I was two or three years ago, and more to the point, most of my improvements occurred in the Base training section -- when it came time to take it to the next level, my training regimen fell apart, and now I am nowhere near where I need to be. I worry that I will not be ready for W101, and may need to make the decision, within the next few days, to bag it.

 

Listening: I downloaded Blunderbuss the other day, and though I do like it, it's really just "meh, more Jack White." I downloaded the first Florence + The Machine album at the same time, and find I like it a lot more, though I do still like Ceremonials better. Anne said the other day that she needs new music, which she felt was more like she needed to find some new music to want, and get it, and I think I am in the same boat. Any suggestions out there?

 

By the way, I just posted the photos from Sarah's wedding on Flickr this weekend. Enjoy!

 

 

Newport: There She Sat

We were in Newport this past weekend for a wedding. It was the daughter of some of Anne's friends, to a young man with an apparently wealthy family, since the wedding and reception were at his aunt's summer home, and by "summer home" I mean one of those bazillion-dollar-mansion "cottages" that Newport is famous for -- we were in fact next door to the famous and exclusive Bailey's Beach, and just down the street from The Breakers and The Elms. It was really nice, a very pleasant setting and not as over-the-top as it might have been, and the reception was a total blowout. Photos to follow -- stay tuned.

 

(I'm mostly caught up with photos by the way, just posted a few oven shots on Flickr the other night. I have basically just a few gnome home shots from a recent ride -- don't ask, you'll have to wait and see -- and the wedding shots I took over the weekend, and I'll be up to date.)

 

Away from the wedding, the rest of the town of Newport was not as impressive. They make a big deal of of their history as the center of Gilded Age summer-home society, and they expend a bit of effort keeping the place quaint -- and there are a lot of really fine old Colonial-era houses that are still up to code and in use in town, in addition to the preserved Gilded Age "cottages" -- but the vibe in town was relentlessly tourist-trap commercial, a more upscale version of the Jersey Shore. The tell (and something I first spotted in Florida, likewise in a wharfside setting): lots of nice-looking pubs and bars and restaurants, but no good beer. Luckily, we found one exception...

 

Friday was a travel day, including a lunch visit with Anne's sister in Milford CT, Saturday was some touristy exploration followed by the wedding, and Sunday was more touristy exploring with some friends, a hike along the cliffside trail that runs behind the mansions, before the drive home. Traffic was typical for New England: awful.

 

Computer Fun: I've been trying to get an old FORTRAN program to work on my laptop, and I ran into some difficulties when some subprograms couldn't be found; I decided after some Googling that my best bet was to just rewrite them from scratch. Two of them just looked like old-timey "standard library" routines, and were fairly easy to emulate, but the other two seemed to be custom subroutines, part of the program and probably in some missing file, and it took a little sleuthing to even dope out what they did... (Basically, they were poorly-conceived workarounds, written to ease the transition from punched cards to file I/O. Yeah, it's an old program.) Anyway, I was messing with these over the weekend, planning & researching at the B&B, and the wharfside coffee shop, in between our other activities, and then last night I sat down and wrote the subroutines, and they worked fine -- if not on the first try then at least before I went to bed. The rest of the program is still hanging up, but that might be because of calls to some missing database, a project for another weekend.

 

How's Your Bike Training Going? Don't ask...

 

It All Turns On Affection

Morning weigh-in: 182#

 

"We know enough of our own history by now to be aware that people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love. To defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know." - Wendell Berry

 

So we went down to Washington the weekend before last, to see Wendell Berry give this year's Jefferson Lecture, and we decided to make a long weekend of it, Saturday through Tuesday evening. (I had Friday off, and we were contemplating maybe playing one night in Philly beforehand, but I had a bunch of weekend chores and Anne had some 24-hour bug, so we kept it to four days.)

 

We took the bus to Philly on Saturday morning and hopped the train to Union Station in DC, where we met Emmi. Lunch was at the Native American Museum.

 

Dinner was at the Bier Baron, a rathskeller-type place we found last time we were in town. Our dinner guest was Liz H-D, and she was vivacious as ever, and she seems to have acquired a new poise or confidence -- she seems to be thriving in DC, and we were graced with an hour or so of exciting conversation between the garden party she was coming from, and the "Nineties Party" she was heading to. ("Nineties Party" -- am I really that old?)

 

Sunday was rainy, and we spent the day at the National Gallery of Art -- two big wings, hundreds of famous paintings both modern and classical/historical, lunch in the underground passageway/cafeteria between wings, and they let you take pictures... (BTW I already posted most of those pics over at Flickr, go wild.) It was awesome but in the end exhausting, and I had little energy left when we hit the African Museum afterward -- and not much time either, we got there with only an hour left until closing. It was Earth Day on the Mall, and in our peregrinations we caught bits and pieces of it but the rain put a serious damper on events: even Cheap Trick attracted just a handful of stragglers.

 

That night we had dinner with Emmi's old college friend Amanda and her partner, at another awesome local place called Meridian Pint. This was Amanda's recommendation, but I'd done my homework and knew that it was considered one of the best beer bars in DC, and it didn't disappoint: food and brew choices were both unbelievable, and the service was both casual and top-notch. Amanda, outspoken and vivacious in her own right, also seems to have matured, mellowed even.. It was really nice to catch up with her, she with her newly-minted admittance to the bar and Emmi with her own brand-new PhD.

 

We hit the Smithsonian on Monday, but just the Museum of Natural History. (Another overwhelming experience, stay tuned for pictures.) Anne and Emmi went shopping beforehand, so I found myself in a DuPont Circle institution -- Kramer Books -- bought Bill Bryson's Notes On A Small Island, and kicked back for a while in their coffee shop. The girls joined me for lunch there, and then we were off to do the museum thing. We were there long enough, even just scratching the surface, that were pressed for time getting to the Kennedy Center for the lecture.

 

Tickets were free, but you had to reserve them months ago, and then claim them an hour or so before the lecture or they'd give them away to someone else. We got there in time and retrieved our tickets (walking through literally hundreds of people camped out waiting to grab unclaimed tickets), then we had some time to check out the Kennedy Center -- I mostly sat on the stairs outside the auditorium, where Amanda joined us again. (Anne's friends Lois and Mary Lou were also in town for the lecture; they drove down together that day from the Lehigh Valley, but we didn't see them until afterward.)

 

The lecture was titled "It All Turns On Affection," which was itself a quote from E.M. Forster. (You can find the lecture here.) It really was very moving, and he was quiet and soft-spoken and seemed to become choked up from time to time -- maybe he was rallying his resources, he's not a young man -- and he held us spellbound in our seats for the duration. The lecture ended on an ironic note when the head of the NEH came out and announced that 'the opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the US Government or the NEH." (More on the lecture here.)

 

Afterwards we (Anne and me, Emmi, Amanda, and Mary Lou and Lois) all had dinner at Meridian Pint's sister establishment, the Smoke and Barrel. This was another of Amanda's recommendations, and it was a good one (though I think Meridian Pint was the nicer of the two), and we also got to see some of Anne's old neighborhood from when she lived in DC.

 

Tuesday morning it was finally nice out again, but we were heading home. We said goodbye to Emmi, who was off to a job interview in Maryland, grabbed breakfast in Union Station, and took the train for Philly. We had some time to kill there, so we walked around, hit a few bookshops, and had a long lunch at the White Dog Cafe. One last bus ride, a quick hike across town, and we were home.

 

I have to say, I really liked that train ride.

 

On The Beat Down Beat

I raced yesterday, once more unto the Michaux Maximus... I took it as a training  race, which was good not only because I could use the experience -- it's been two years since I raced, or participated in any large-scale cycling event for that matter -- but also because if I had to take my results seriously I'd be pretty upset: I basically got my ass kicked, if not dead last then close to it, even in my age group.

It was a fun day though even considering the smackdown: the weather turned out to be perfect, and course conditions were as good as I've ever seen them there, dry (for the most part) but still pretty tacky where you needed it. The course itself (you can see my GPS track here) started a little different than the way I remember it, but it still hit many of the familiar trails: the Huckleberry, and the Fuzzy, and Dead Woman Hollow and Three Mile Trail, and it finished with the usual climb up the Log Sled Trail.

I really can't complain too much: my biggest problem right now is fitness (which I knew going into this, and which this is supposed to help address), followed by a general aversion to riding too close to other people -- I stopped a few times to let riders pass, and often paced the guys in front of me rather than muscling my way through -- but I think that this aversion could also be attributed to the fitness thing, since I blew up whenever I put out a truly competitive level of effort, especially in the first section, where there was a rapid succession of short steep climbs, so that ""fighting i n the pack" mentality really wasn't working ofr me.

I was more than a little gratified though -- shocked, even -- at how well I did on the technical stuff, especially in comparison to the people I was riding among. This was a real switcheroo: I used to be pretty bad at technical riding, and made up for it with better climbing ability;  yesterday, I struggled to keep my place climbing Dead Woman Hollow, got passed by a few guys, but then I utterly dropped them, and a few others, on Three Mile Trail.

They all caught me before the end though, either on the long, rolling dirt road stretch that came immediately afterward, or when we were climbing the final mile on Log Sled Trail, or at the point  in between, probably the easiest part of the whole course, when I suddenly needed to pull over and hurl. (Apparently I still have a few kinks to work out. When I got back I skipped the free meal...)

My ride time was about 3:15 and my time on the course was probably around 3:30, no worse than I expected but I do see I have some work to do. About par for the course.

Brown And Green And Pink

Morning weigh-in (Monday): 184.5#

Morning weigh-in (Tuesday): 185#

 

Those were the colors I saw on the way in yesterday morning: off to my left at the bottom of Jugtown Mountain was a plowed field, sort of rolling ground, with just a nap or fuzz of green poking through, looking almost like folds of multicolored velour. The earth was a wet-dirt brown and the green was early-spring green, and just to my right was a tree, maybe a dogwood in bloom, the light flowers almost like cherry blossoms. The sky was blue with white puffy clouds, it was beautiful.

 

So I got in a good ride on Sunday after my trip to Arizona, and Saturday's do-nothing-as-the-rain-falls-fest. (I missed 100 miles for the week and 300 for March, but I was just too tired to go out for a training ride in the cold rain. Oh well.) It was a good tempo ride, 75 minutes in Zone 3 -- I got down past Wy-Hit_Tuk Park and back to the Forks of the Delaware before my time was up -- then did a nice mellow bike path ride before meeting up with the towpath again at the public boat launch. Three hours or a bit more, thirty five miles, pretty nice and the day was very pleasant.

 

 I was pretty happy with this ride's HR zones after my last ride, which was supposed to be the cruise intervals -- the new workout for this period -- but was a disaster: HR not going up after the first interval, and the workout not being properly set up on my Garmin; I ended up doing an easy ride out after the first interval, and a series of standing sprints on the way back. An OK ride for what it was, but not what I had in mind... Tonight is another go at the cruise intervals.

 

More on Arizona in a later post...

 

Back To The Old Nose And Grindstone

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

The second rest week is behind me -- last night was an hour of towpath E2 on the Turner, and tonight will be this new period's first new training ride: M2 or "cruise intervals." I'll be doing three 10-minute intervals in Zones 4 and 5a, two minutes easy spin between each one, and will probably follow it up with another hour of Zone 1/Zone2 spinning. Each new period ups the intensity a little...

 

Luckily for me, this is the first week of the new period, thus a low-volume week, since I will be out of town for work starting tomorrow morning -- the trip is to somewhere in Arizona, north of the Apache National Forest, for a plant inspection. I'll be home Friday night though, and should be able to do a longish tempo/endurance ride on Saturday, and a real MTB ride Sunday, maybe American Standard. If all goes well, I should break 100 miles for the week despite the trip, and break 300 for the month of March.

 

I'm blowing off a few things this week to make room for the trip, and a few others to make room for the rides that I don't want to blow off because of the trip; one thing that must go overboard is the VMB board meeting tonight. I feel a little guilty, but I really don't have time to do everything I need to and still make the meeting, so I have to skip the meeting, ride or no ride, and I might as well get my ride in. However, I was at two officer meetings last week when I should have been doing other things, including trip preparation I'll be doing tonight, and I made one of two trail maintenance days over the weekend, so I don't feel too bad. I played catch-up a bit with my club secretary duties last night too, posting preliminary copies of the minutes for the February general and board meetings.

 

(It was kind of cute, Anne and I typing away on our laptops at the dinner table last night, me on the minutes and she on her latest project, which involved her taking notes from the handwritten transcripts of the Molly Maguire Trials.)

 

Meanwhile, on the computer: Over the weekend I became a bit obsessed with the question of how much a tee (tee as in piping) weighs, based on a weight take-off for work, which I did with a quick and dirty estimation of the weight of two intersecting hollow cylinders. I got to wondering how accurate my estimate was, and what the actual, exact volume of intersecting cylinders would be. I could have found the volume by integrating, but thought that someone must have worked this out before... Googling took me first to a whole lot of nothing, then to pages and pages about Steinmetz solids (close but no cigar), and finally to a general formula for the volume of two intersecting cylinders.

 

The formula is straightforward enough, but unfortunately it involves elliptic integrals, and I could find no elliptic integral functions in any spreadsheet program I owned. This looked like a job for octave, but my version didn't have the functions either -- they were available through a package, one I hadn't installed, that accessed the GNU Scientific Library. OK, install the package, a "learning experience" in its own right, figure out how to use the elliptical functions, and... the actual computation I was trying to do, once I got this far, was a piece of cake. The final result: weights based on my quick-and-dirty estimation method were about 1% off from the exact solution. Which is probably why no one ever bothers to use, or even talk about, the pain-in-the-ass exact solution.

 

See you in a few days.

Hold Steady

Morning weigh-in: 183.5#

 

There may be a bit of suppression of a different kind in that weight: I ran out of steam last night, ate a bowl of cereal and crashed. No ride, but there's not supposed to be a ride, it's a rest week. Tonight is Taco Night at the Brew Works, and I suspect that number may go up a bit by tomorrow's weigh-in.

 

 

Time For Another Rest Week

So last week was the third and final week for Base 2 training, and I think I'm finally getting the volume up where it should be: 105 miles, 9:25 ride time; I was in the saddle six days last week. It was a good end to the period, and now I'm more than ready for a well-deserved rest week.

 

Saturday's tempo ride worked out just fine (as did the beer brewing), then Anne and I stayed in, skipping the St Patrick's Day festivities in favor of some reading and an early bedtime. I'd sent out a text to a bunch of  friends about riding in JT, but got no bites except Greg H, who said he was riding Prompton in the early afternoon with a few people, and I was welcome to join them. I wanted to do American Standard to basically check out the map I'd made, see how accurate it was, but I also didn't want to ride alone, so...

 

Sunday morning was cold and overcast, and it looked like rain, which was completely different from the forecast I saw Saturday night, but the revised forecast said that this would all burn off and the day would be warm and sunny, so I went anyway. I met Greg at his house, then followed him up to the meeting place north of the Poconos -- sure enough, the day changed dramatically as we drove -- and there we hooked up with the rest of our crew: Robin R, Rich B, Jay, and Greg's friend Mark. We parked some cars, consolidated the bikes and riders, and continued on to Prompton, which is sort of northeast of Scranton.

 

It was a beautiful day. Prompton State Park is basically an artificial lake with some of the surrounding land included, and the main trail circumnavigates the lake, with several other trails looping off the main trail. The terrain is rocky, and somewhat hilly, but very rideable -- in some ways it reminds me of Allamuchy. I was worried that I would get stomped by the rest of the riders, and for the first half hour or so I was sucking wind at the back, but after that I was fine. We were all in the same early-season boat anyway, and considering that it was still winter I think we all rode rather well... We were out for about 4.5 hours, of which only 2.5 were spent actually moving, so there was a lot of social time in there as well. We finished at around 6:30, just as the afternoon was starting to wind down. Most of those guys were going out to eat -- they all lived a lot closer, no biggie for them, but I just drove home and met Anne at the Brew Works. (She had been over at Steel Stacks to see "Bicycle Dreams," which unfortunately I'd completely forgotten about.) A chicken cheese steak, a mug of the new Pilsener, and it was time for bed.

 

I'll do a recap of this training period some time in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that things are working out rather well.

 

Fun With Map And Calendar

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 183.5#
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 184#

Happy St. Patrick's Day! -- or, as the bartenders call it, "Amateur Night."

Monday night was a "recovery ride," about an hour of easy spinning on the towpath, then Tuesday I did my 75-minute "muscular endurance ride," 24 miles in just under 1:40 total time (probably close to a personal best for the last year or so), and last night was an hour of E2 ("aerobic endurance") towpath spinning on the singlespeed, which almost drove me nuts with all that hamster-leg spinning, but it was also the first after-work ride of the year where I didn't even bring lights. Unfortunately, Sunday night was a chicken cheese steak at Brew works, Monday night was a regular (ie beef) cheese steak, same place, and Tuesday night was two-brew Tuesday, though I did eat at home. Baby steps, but one of my problems is obvious...

Bottom line though, I was lighter Thursday morning than I've been at any time since last July, and I feel a lot stronger on the bike than I did even a month or so ago.

Thursday night I was exhausted, and the ride was an easy on the towpath, mainly Zone 1 on the Turner, and again without even bringing lights, and I cooked myself tuna and wilted spinach over rice for dinner -- Anne was out with Donna -- before passing out. Yesterday had rain in the forecast, so I made it a rest day: got a haircut and did dry cleaning, the usual usual Saturday-type chores so I can ride today. (Of course the evening turned out fine, but my decision was the right one.)  It's beautiful out now, and sometime today I'll be getting in my last tempo workout (90 minutes in Zone 3) for the second Base period; tomorrow I'll probably so some real off road riding, like maybe American Standard, and then comes my second rest week.

The rest of today is being taken up with brewing; we're actually making two 5-gallon batches, one an Orval clone and the other an Irish red ale.

My quest for good training/analysis tools continues, or rather I should say it got complicated by new information. In a reply to my post about that TCX to HR zone data converter I wrote, someone mentioned a program called Golden Cheetah, so I downloaded it. It's very power-meter centric, but seems to have a lot of really nice analysis tools built in, especially when it comes to graphing ride data, though it doesn't quite do what I want it to do. I did notice though, that my favorite web tools, and my favorite programs in general, seem to involve maps, or calendars, or both. (The training programs all have both, for what should be obvious reasons.) I wonder if there's a market for something like that, a diary/blog program, with geographic data capabilities and a user interface that includes both map and calendar. I'm not sure what a program like that would even be expected to do (other than maybe be used to record rides and analyze training), but I know that I'd love to play with it.

Back From Knoxville

Not giving my morning weigh-in...

 

Four day weekend, and we had an awesome time visiting Emmi in Knoxville: Ben came down from Massachusetts on Tuesday, then I took Thursday off, and we piled in the car and left for Tennessee in the morning. One loooong drive later -- even though we made good time this time, that trip always feels like forever -- and we were there in time to meet Em for dinner. It was a bit awkward, since her dad and his girlfriend were also in town (and at dinner), but it was nice to see her.

 

Friday was the day we came down for: Emmi gave a public presentation of her research on the Tree of Heaven. (Actually, I should say that this was the public presentation of her research; it wasn't quite her doctoral defense, which is coming in April, but something similar and a major milestone on her way to her PhD.) Her housemate and another student also gave presentations that morning, shorter and less formal ones involving temperature response (her housemate) and hearing response to predatory bird calls (the other student) in invasive lizards, and we checked them out too, then after lunch came Emmi's presentation, which was about an hour long plus some time for questions afterward, and was totally amazing.

 

Her fellow grad students took her out for a beer afterward, and we tagged along for what was some very esoteric bar conversation, at least by our standards, then Emmi's advisers took us all out for a celebratory dinner that night: Anne and I, and Ben, Emmi and Matt, and Em's roommate Laura, and her colleague Mark, and her dad and his girlfriend, and of course her advisers Jen and Joe, who were just as proud of her as the rest of us. Strangely enough, dinner conversation was mostly about music.

 

Saturday was a ride day, Anne and I on our mountain bikes with Ben on my 29er. We did some road and some paved bike path then found ourselves at the "Forks of the River WMA," where we played on real singletrack for a bit. Lunch with Emmi and Matt, then I went back to the hotel and took a nap while Anne did some shopping with Ben and Emmi -- I caught up with them later for dinner in Old Town.

 

Sunday we said our goodbyes, drove all day, and were home by about 7:00 -- in other words, before dark. Daylight Savings!

Hump Day

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Lunchtime.  I get through this afternoon and tomorrow, and I'm done for the week -- we are heading down to Knoxville, to see Emmi's presentation on her invasive species (Tree of Heaven) research.

 

Fed Up: I finally had enough. I have an older relative who doesn't email much, but his emails are inevitably of the "FW:FW:FW:FW:LOL!"  and "NEW SCAM ALERT (confirmed by snopes)" variety that have been rattling around the Internet since 1998 or so, always bullshit and usually very annoying. Well, I just put in a filter on my account; from now on, any email from this person that also contains a "FW" anywhere in the subject, gets tossed in a dead-letter file without me ever having to see it. I sure hope he doesn't send anything important...

 

Anyway, last night I did a decent tempo ride on the towpath, 45 minutes nonstop in Zone 3 (plus another hour in Zone 2 on the return). Tonight is an aerobic endurance ride on the Surly followed by a visit to Brew Works, and tomorrow is another tempo ride. Weather and ground conditions are excellent right now.

 

Speaking of feeding, this weekend I had two of the best cuts of beef ever: Saturday was a steak of some kind, and Sunday was some round cut cooked in the pressure cooker. (I had leftover steak sandwiches last night.) This has been going on for several weeks, ever since we split that cow with Donna -- best idea ever, a freezer full of local meat.

 

Walking On Springtime

Walked out the door this morning, and it was a beautiful, springlike day -- a bit cool, but sunny and the air felt like May or June instead of March. Everything is still sort of brown bit it's pretty obvious that we are starting -- starting! -- to leave winter behind.

 

In terms of training, last week was a disappointment: I got in one good "tempo" ride, then had bike club meetings after after work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I was too tired to ride after work, and when I went out Friday night, supposedly for another tempo ride, I couldn't get my heart rate up, and bagged the ride after about a half hour. I rode Saturday but skipped Sunday, and other than a few Saturday errands, drycleaning and oil change and such, it was basically a lost weekend: going out late, sleeping in and being coffee-starved and headachey all day. I've been burning the candle at both ends lately; I think I'll have to let a few things go if riding is what I really want.

 

One thing I did finish was that Perl script to extract heart rate summaries from my ride data. I'll be going back over the past training period and getting my analyzing done soon... Tonight is another tempo ride, tomorrow is aerobic endurance, Wednesday is tempo again, and on Thursday we're off to Knoxville to see Emmi's dissertation defence on Friday. We'll probably get a ride in on Saturday (I hope).

 

So Far So Good, Part Eleventy-Bazillion and One

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

I guess I was pretty used to those towpath SS rides, where my legs would spin out trying to maintain even a moderate pace, since I was really worried about last night's "tempo" ride, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. (I was on the Turner, of course...) Higher gears and I'd move along, just below needing to breathe hard; my speed wasn't too high The plan is to do 30 minutes, then 40 at my next tempo ride -- there are supposed to be two of these rides each week -- then 65 and 75 minutes next week, and both tempo rides for the third week will be 90 minutes. I should be running out of towpath by that point, even if out and back are both in the training zone.

 

Speaking of the Turner... I'd been having progressively worse and worse a time with the rear shifting -- didn't seem to be the cables, or that pain in the ass derailleur I have on there, or anything I could find -- then at Trex a few weekends ago the rear wheel started making amazing rubbing/grinding sounds. Intermittent but loud, it sounded like the rear tire was rubbing on something (a sound I associate with a broken frame), but there was nothing I could see rubbing... Home and on the stand, I gave the cassette a little wiggle and found out my freehub was shot. Luckily, I have a spare rear wheel, so I moved my cassette and tire over, did a little brake adjustments, and now everything seems to be working out fine.

 

Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day, but I did today's ride last night because tonight is the monthly VMB meeting. It should be a real shit-show -- stay tuned...

 

Break Time's Over

Morning weigh-in: 185.5#

 

Yesterday was the only ride I did last week, which was the rest week for my first training period; it was also my opportunity to do that Lactate Threshold test again (I plan to do the LT test monthly, basically as part of each period's rest week), and I found my heart rate at  LT has gone up by 6 beats per minute, from 159 to 165 BPM. I guess that's good news... I haven't really seen, or been able to figure out, anything, one way or the other, about changes to LT heart rate, whether up or down is good or bad or whatever, but hey -- I had a number, I trained, and the number went up. I win!

 

Tonight starts my first night of Base 2 training, and it's the first ride with the new (harder) HR zones based on my new number, and the first training ride outside of Zone 2: I'll be doing a "tempo" ride on the towpath, 30 minutes or so in Zone 3 after my warmup. We shall see.

 

Grabbed My Coat And Grabbed My Hat

No morning weigh-in today: I overslept and was in "run through the house with my hair on fire" mode, trying to get out the door this morning, so there was no time for the niceties like coffee, breakfast or the scale. It was all for naught though, since there was an accident on Jugtown Mountain, the highway was a parking lot, and I was a half hour late to work anyway. Oh well, I'll make up the difference tonight...

No ride last night -- and there will apparently be no ride tonight either, since I forgot to charge my lights -- but I did have some success with the elevation profiles I was playing with. I haven't quite figured out how to use all of Gnuplot from octave, but I output my data to a file, which I used inside Gnuplot to make the exact plot I wanted. I then made a quick plot of my map, and combined the two for a really decent mockup. I'll post it here tonight.

After that it was Miller time, or at least, Brew Works Type A and fastnachts time... I met Anne and the crew (Donna, Erin, Brian, Jen, Nick, and later Matt and a friend of his) down there, pleasant evening.

Not sure what tonight will bring, maybe some laundry and some bike TLC -- the Turner and the Surly both need cleaning and lubing at the very least.

UPDATE Here's that map/profile:
 

Back To The Plotting Table

Morning weigh-in: 187.5#

 

Happy Phat Fastnacht!

 

So how did I spend last night, the first evening of my first rest week? Plotting more elevation profiles, of course! Part of what I want to do is use the more powerful Gnuplot features, and I also wanted to use octave to do any post-GRASS processing -- conveniently enough, octave uses Gnuplot to do its plotting, so that's two birds with one stone. (I also refined my method of getting the data out of GRASS and into a more standard CSV file, basically by piping it through an awk one-liner. In the end I might just use a simple awk script to do all the post-processing on the fly, and just pipe that output to Gnuplot. We'll see.)

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... On Sunday I chose Trex after all, and it was good but in some ways it may have been a mistake: despite the "Trex is never wet" hype, big sections of the place were a muddy mess, the trails were too short, and too steep, for the real "long slow distance" I needed. It was fun though, and I ran into a few other guys riding, as well as a kid on a unicycle, and Andrew, the guy building the trails. Beautiful day too.

 

Tonight is maybe a short recovery ride, or maybe more plotting fun, then it's Taco Night at the Brew Works.

 

February Recap

Morning weigh-in: 187# (not good)

 

Today starts the first rest week in my training program, so I thought I'd do a quick recap of where things stand:

 

Week        Workouts    Hours     Distance   Calories

1/23-1/29         4           5:02         52.0         3413

1/30-2/05         3           4:30         53.1         3412

2/06-2/12         4           8:14         81.6         6645

2/13-2/19         4           7:34         78.0         5531

 

(There are four weeks in there instead of three, because I started my first "week" early to make up for training time lost to a business trip.)

 

Not too shabby, though I notice two things:

 

1. I seem to max out at four rides a week (my plan currently calls for 5-6 rides a week). This may be because it's not the best time of year for riding right now, with weather, daylight and other outside conditions putting a damper on my available ride time, or it be just how my schedule works out -- I have plenty of time on my days off, but not so much during the week. I suspect that both of those come into play, but at bottom it's a motivation issue. We'll see what happens as the weather gets nicer.

 

2. Right now I should be putting in my biggest weekly hours in the saddle, with lots and lots of low-intensity riding to get me ready for the tougher stuff coming (which will be shorter, harder, and need more rest days). My target is about 500 hours for the year, but if these are my "above average" weeks in terms of hours, I'm in serious trouble.

 

Well, things might not be as good as I'd want -- especially considering that this kind of training is less effective, in fact it might even be counterproductive, at lower training volumes -- but here's a look at my February stats going back a few years (to when I first started using the Garmin):

 

Year     Workouts      Hours       Distance    Calories

2009         12             13:37          127.6         8894

2010           5              6:21            88.8         6462

2011           6              6:44            54.4         3075

2012         11             20:26          212.7       15588

 

So in terms of volume, I'm pretty much on target right now to double my best distance/hours/calories from the past few years...