Archive for February, 2007
Week 8 Complete - Whew! I’m finally done with Base 1… This last week was really hard. First of all 16 hours of training. That’s not the most I’ve done in a week, but it felt like a lot with all the other things I’ve got going on. Second, speaking of things going on, this week started out with 3 days “vacation”… which was actually pretty stressful for me, as it meant adapting my training schedule around the vacation, and it put a cramp in getting work done which meant more pressure on the training schedule. I wasn’t sure how I was going to make it Thursday night, but it all worked out in the end. Like last week, I am being particularly aware of trying to keep in a nice low to mid effort base zone, so although there is a lot of volume of hours the work effort in each session has been low. That being said, I was pretty tired last night, and this weeks rest/recovery week couldn’t have come at a better time.
Thursday night, I was doubtful I was going to be able to make my required training for the week, so I had to sit down and make a weekend game plan. I had to complete 9 hours over the weekend. A couple long rides, a couple of runs, some swimming, and a strength session with my buddy Tyler made everything workout. The highlight was clearly the Chilly Hilly.
Here are the details for this week…
Strength Training - 50 min (2 sessions) - Pretty non-week for strength training. I did one 30 min session while on vacation in Victoria. I hit some legs with Squats and Leg Press, as well as a little chest and arms. Yeah, I know it was a random workout. The annoying things is that I could only muster about 60% of the weight that I had previously worked up to on squats, and my legs were really sore the next couple days. Saturday night Tyler came over to do some weights but I had a killer headache, so my session was short and not very productive. I called it 20 minutes of work.
Swimming - 2 hours 20 min (3 sessions) - Better week for swimming. Two of my sessions were in a 25 meter pool, so it was nice to be able to swim further than 10 strokes before having to turn around. I didn’t really focus on speed, just form. I still want to find some better coaching/group swimming opportunities, but in the mean time, I’m keeping with a goal of 3 sessions a week.
Flexibility - 1 hour 47 min (6 sessions) - Mostly stretched every day, except on Wednesday when I only swam. I had one longer session where I really focused on deep stretching, but otherwise this was just basic post-exercise stretching after runs and bike rides. This is still a problem area. I am not sure if I will improve if I lament my poor performance in this area. I probably should also just schedule some time with a massage therapist and get some soft tissue work done. Leave it to the pros!
Running - 2 hours 45 min (19.5 miles) - Two longish road sessions of 8.5 and 8 miles, and one short treadmill session of 3 miles. Two of my runs this week were “intentionally slow”, the treadmill I actually kept things very slow, but last night my intended “slow it down” run on the trail still ended up with an 8:25 average pace. My foot is not 100%. My heel feels fine, which certainly is good, but my left arch, toes, and mid foot feel sore. So next week, I will take it really easy, maybe only do one long run (to move my single run distance up by 10%) and one short run. I’ve heard lots of advice lately that longer slower work is just as important (if not more important) than tempo and speed work, so I am going to try to incorporate that into my routine.
Cycling - 8 hours 32 minutes (123 road miles, 15 spin miles) - This is the first week I’ve done any indoor cycling for the year. This is funny considering this is probably the first week most people did any outdoor cycling for the year. But I was on vacation and didn’t have my bike, so I was “forced” to use the old cardio bike. I will admit I am not a fan of these machines. They just aren’t nearly as fun as riding out in the open. I heard an interesting quote once about how sad it is that people drive their cars to go to the gym to exercise… when they could have/should have just gone for a bike ride or a run.
The highlight of the week was clearly Chilly Hilly, which was an all around good time, and a really really hard workout on my fixed-gear bike. I have to admit it was harder than I expected. It was almost hard enough to make me want to get back on my road bike…. almost.
I am still way ahead of my cycling miles from last year; at 765.33 vs. 642.17. Also at this rate I am almost up to a 100mile per week average, but I am right at the 96 miles per week average required to break 5,000 miles for the year. Over the next couple months I will surely break through that average as the days get longer and my time and speed on the road increases.
Weight - I actually dropped back down into my normal weight zone. Hitting 136lbs on Friday morning. The problem is, I didn’t really do anything to correct my weight or eating habits… which means I’ll probably get the attitude “that my body worked it out” and that “I can go ahead and keep eating without a plan”. These thoughts might work in the short run, but will probably come back to haunt me unless I get serious about thinking about what I eat. Ahh, maybe next week, during my recovery week, I’ll put some time into planning a menu…. hmmmm….. yeah right!
Total Exercise Hours (including Strength and Flexibility): 16.23
Total Swim/Bike/Run: 13.61 hours (note, again a new max for the year)
Charts? We don’t need no stinkin’ charts! Here you go….
February 26th, 2007
Today was the Chilly Hilly, the annual “kick off” to the bicycling season in Seattle, WA and the Pacific Northwest. This was the 34th annual Chilly Hilly put on by Cascade Bicycle Club, and as promised, it is Hilly and Chilly. The weather was rainy about 44F, a beautiful February day in Seattle. 
The course, is a 33 mile tour of one of our local Puget Sound Islands - Bainbridge Island, and includes a reported 2,675 feet of climbing…. So what do I do? I jump on my single speed fixed gear bike and head for the Ferry!
I woke up this morning at 6am, brewed some coffee and made myself some breakfast. My plan was to leave the house about 7am, ride my bike down to the start line, register, and get on the 7:55 Ferry. Because the Chilly Hilly takes place on an Island, there are actually two different official start lines. You can choose to start on the Island, or you can start in downtown Seattle right across the street from the ferry terminal. You ticket to ride the ferry is included in your registration. Since I only live about 5 miles from the ferry terminal, I decided to ride to and from the start line to get an extra 10 miles in for the day.
I always find it amusing when people drive their cars somewhere to get out and ride their bike. I’m not saying I judge these people… I just find it odd. Now I guess I can imagine if you have to travel more than say 30 miles out of your way to start a ride, but I saw a guy from a block away from my house, loading up his car this morning and heading down to the same place I was going to start this ride. Anyway, including my trip to and from the start line, my ride totalled 43.5 miles and 3606ft of ascent…. did I mention this was with only one gear?
As I mentioned this ride is the official “kick off” to the cycling season in Seattle, and so it is a very popular ride. Over 4,000 riders take part every year. The ferries are filled with bikes. It’s really quite a sight to be seen. The other fun thing about the ride is that there’s a very good chance you’ll see someone you know on this ride. This year, I got calls from several old friends asking if I was riding. The problem is with 4,000 riders, it’s actually hard to find your friends once you get on the island. “Just look for me, I’ll be wearing the yellow jacket…” Yeah, right… you and 3,000 other people.
Phil rode Chilly Hilly this year. But I didn’t ever catch up with him. My friend Rob emailed me and called me before the ride… but we never ended up finding each other. I ended up “riding with” Ray and his friends Trevor, Jim, Mike, and Dave.
Now, let me put this into perspective. First of all, there are 4,000 cyclists on a 33 mile course, even if every one of them was spaced out evenly across the entire course, that would mean there was one cyclist every 43.5 feet. But needless to say, they aren’t spaced out evenly across the course, since probably 1,000 of those cyclists were on that 7:55 ferry… so basically for the first say 5 miles of the course it is literally bicycles every 6 inches. It’s an amazing opportunity to practice your bike handling skills. The point is that if you want to stick with a group of riders, you all have to be careful not to get separated, as it is very easy to get stuck behind a group of slow riders who decide to stop and walk up a 2% grade hill. (Foreshadowing of things to come!)
Second of all, and I’m not saying this to draw your pity, I’m simply stating a fact here… I was riding on my fixed gear bike. This means, I have no lower gears to switch down to, and I can’t coast down steep hills at 40mph. So, let’s review my “riding partners”… Ray (former collegiate rower, fellow STPer from last year, first time on a bike this year, just got engaged last night to his girlfriend of five years, congratulations Denny and Ray!… uh… he was “tired”…); Trevor (Ray’s buddy from his rowing days, fellow Ironman, typical 40k time trial pace of say 49min); Jim, Mike, Dave (also wicked in shape cyclists who’ve accomplished all matter of feats like the Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day - RAMROD)… all of whom are riding state of the art road bikes with… hmm… what’s all those GEARS…
So, here’s how my day goes… ride 5 miles from my house to the ferry… about 300ft of ascent… get on the ferry, meet up with Ray, Trevor, and the rest of the gang. We all give Ray a hard time about finally getting engaged. And since our bikes are on completely different parts of the ferry, agree we will meet each other once we’re off the ferry and into a little bit. Picture 1,000 bicycles coming off a ferry in the matter of 10 minutes… they are all greeted by a half mile of 6% grade climb… 800 of these cyclists are in their lowest gear spinning at a ear piercing speed of 4.5mph. Needless to say we are separated.
We meet at the top of the hill. Ray is already exhausted. Trevor and the rest of the gang are already bored, and I’m almost getting tired of people asking me if I am actually riding a fixed gear bicycle. Ok, I admit, I don’t actually get tired of this… I come up with all sorts of responses like “gears are overrated” and “you mean I was allowed to use gears on this ride?” and the crowd pleasing “gears are for wimps!” Somewhere around mile 10 after over eight hills over 1,000 ft of climbing, and more importantly for me over 1,000 feet of descent, Ray is completely shot, and the rest of the guys are complete bored out of their minds at only averaging 15mph.
See, here’s the real dirty little secret of riding a fixed gear bike… you can’t coast down hill. Since you have to pedal, and on my bike 25mph is equivalent to about a 120 rpm cadence, and 30mph is 150 rpm cadence, if you want to go down hill at the pace of an average road bike traveling down hill, you have to pedal at a recklessly unstable speed. The point is, I don’t do it… I’m happy braking hard, pedalling as fast as I can while still being stable, and only going about 25mph down hill. This means that any one riding a road bike with you is going to fly down the hill and get half way up the next hill on momentum alone, while you’re pedalling your guts out going down and back up again.
So, our pack of riders was “pretty well distributed across the course”… I guess we were together in spirit. And every once in a while I would catch up to the lead riders… but honestly I lost Ray around mile 12 and didn’t see him again until the finish line, about 30 minutes after me, Trevor, and the rest of the lead riders finished.
For the most part, I did great on the ride. It turned out to be a lot harder than I expected it to be… but I got enough “oh my god!”’s from other riders to salve any bruises to my ego from being completely beat afterwards. After I caught up with the lead group around mile 25, Trevor and crew took delight in asking me questions that required long detailed answer at the bottom of every hill. I guess Ray hadn’t told them how much I like to hear my own voice, and so they were most surprised at my ability to continue a dialog as I plodded up the 5% grades with my 42/18 gear ratio.
I did have one moment of failure… I hate to admit, I had to stop and push my bike for about 100ft on the worst of the hills. The incident goes something like this… The hill: 17 miles into the ride, .3 mile long, 140ft of ascent, that’s a 10% average grade, but it includes a couple of stretches of 15%-18% grade… and since it’s still relatively early in the ride, the crowds are thick, and a lot of people get off their bikes and push… usually about 3/4 of the way up is when they bail and start walking. On this morning, as I was grunting and groaning, and using all my might to take that 15% grade, someone stopped right in front of me, and that was all it took… there was no way I could keep going, and there certainly was no way I could start up on that grade… so I too had to dismount and walk it. My ego was bruised, but not too badly as I noticed that a guy right next to me, was also pushing his fixed gear up the hill as well.
I actually saw 4 other fixed gear bikes out on the course today. So I’m not the only crazy out there. Back at the ferry on the way home, I chatted with a couple guys, including the guy I say on the really steep hill. He admitted he’s spent more time pushing his bike than riding it… so I definitely didn’t feel bad that I had to push it once.
My total time for the day was 2:56:35 for 43.51 miles or 14.8mph average… But my average heart rate was 133bpm or 66% Max. So it actually was a pretty solid base workout, with some nice spurts of strength training for the legs thrown in. Tonight I ran 8 miles at 8:25/mile pace to cap off my 16 hour week. But after a long day and a long week, I’m tired, and so I’ll have to save my weekly summary for tomorrow… now it’s time to do that other important thing, when you’re training for any long distance endurance sport… SLEEP.
February 25th, 2007
Today I went to the gym for two of my three workouts… oh that sounds like a big deal, but really it was a light day (only 90 minutes, 30 of which were commuting on my bike to the gym)… In the process I was reminded about the delicate balance of gym etiquette. In fact I was a party to two cases of poor gym etiquette, one case where I was an innocent bystander, and another case where I was accused of being a perpetrator of poor etiquette.
I thought I would document these cases, in a sense to acknowledge my faux pas, or maybe to ask the wisdom of the community as to exactly how big of a deal these breaches really are…
So I rode my bike from my home to the gym… about 4 miles… and I arrived right before “rush hour” at the gym. My plan was to run for 30 minutes on the treadmill (more on that later) and then swim for about 30 minutes. Now, I have a little problem with the gym, that I will admit I should have corrected a long time ago, but with my busy schedule I haven’t gotten around to remedying. You see, I have 2 different pad-locks (combination style) that I have forgotten the combination to. I am sure that if I played around with them for a couple hours, I could remember the combination… 37… something something-or-other-7… 13… 18.. 28… I’m sure it’s in the back recesses of my brain.
But here’s the thing… they have spare locks at the gym. And they will give them to you if you ask at the front desk, and if you turn in your keys as collateral. So, for the last couple months, I’ve been using these “free locks” when I come to the gym. Of course they don’t have an infinite supply, and maybe twice in the last couple months, they’ve been “all out” when I arrived and asked to borrow one… Ok, no big deal, I just take the risk of someone rummaging through my stuff. I mean, I guess they could steal my wallet, but usually I just have my ID and a single credit card and a couple bucks in a little plastic baggy in my sweaty bicycle jersey… so I figure it’s pretty low risk.
Anyway, it seems like the last couple weeks, even though I go to the gym at pretty random times during the day; the same young lady has been “working the front desk”… And, well, how do I say this… she doesn’t like me. I don’t know what I did to her, I don’t think I’m lecherous or offensive, but she’s been giving me the skunk eye every chance she gets. And today she decided she’d had enough of me. Here was our exchange…
Me: “Hi” (handing over my ‘id card’ to check in to the gym.)
Here: “uh” (swiping my card)
Me: “Do you have any locks?”
Her: “Yes.” (handing over a lock)
[pause]… (I turn to walk to the locker room.)
Her: “You know, we sell locks.”
(she must be joking right, I’ll try to make some fun of this…)
Me: “Oh really… Why would I buy a lock when you keep giving them to me for free?”
(her co-workers get the joke, they laugh)
Her: “They’re for people who forget their locks!” (She’s obviously not joking at this point.)
Me: “Oh… in that case… I forgot my lock.” (Alright, I admit, that was me being spiteful.)
Now, I felt a little bad… but not that bad. She’s really mad at me, and now I guess I have some sense of why she’s been some cold to me for the last couple weeks. Not that I care, I mean, I try to be friendly to most people… and I appreciate that “retail” work is hard work. I used to work retail, and I business is business, which means you always have to work with customers… so I always make a point of trying to be “the easy customer”. I am the guy that picks up the extra dirty towels in the locker room and brings them to the laundry shoot, I am the guy that always says “hello” and “thank you” coming in and out of the gym. I never complain about the high prices, or the crappy parking… I am a model freakin’ citizen… except, I guess, for my inability to remember my lock combination, and my willingness to ask to borrow a lock.
Alright… I’m done venting about it… I’ll go for my run…
Thirty minutes on the treadmill. I decided to run on the treadmill today, so that I wouldn’t overdo my run. I was reading John’s post about Training Effect earlier today, and I thought about how when I run out of the road, I feel like I am running slow, but actually end up running at near race-effort. The good thing about a treadmill is, you can program your speed… you can’t run too fast, or else you bump into the front of the treadmill.
To be honest my run kinda sucked… my foot was hurting quite unexpectedly… not my heel where my stress fracture was… but the arch and the middle outside edge of my left foot. It made me realize that my left leg has continued to bother me since I got my orthotics… I’ve had a slight “awareness” although not real pain, in the outside of my left hip, and my left hip-flexor is far more tender than my right. I am thinking that my left arch is different enough or that my left orthotic was not made properly. I need to have this checked out again.
But to make matters worse… I couldn’t get this “lock” incident out of my head… I kept thinking about it during my whole run. I have this tendency to hold on to things like this…. I still have memories of embarrassing things I did when I was in 5th grade, more than 25 years ago… jeez! What a dork! So, back to our story…
I finish my run and I head down to the pool. It’s “open swim” which means 2 lanes for laps, and half the pool open to random water fun. When I get down there, both lanes are occupied with one swimmer who started 15 minutes ago, and another who started 8 minutes ago… So, I put my name on the list, and expect to wait at least 15 minutes (there’s a 30 minute limit when someone is waiting). But as soon as I put my name on the list, the first person starts getting out of the pool. Awesome! What great luck!
At this point, the person in lane 2 (swimming for 8 minutes) asks if she can take lane 1, because “I’m waiting for someone to join me.”… hmm, ok, strange request, I guess lane 1 is a little wider so it’s easier for 2 people to swim in it. Maybe she’s an instructor, waiting on a student, sounds reasonable. Lane 2 is a little more choppy, because it’s next to the wave making machine… but I don’t care. “Sure, I don’t mind”. (Notice: This is me being Mr. Easy Going gym member.) So, I go up to the “boards” and put my name up for Lane 2, and I even move the name from Lane 2 to Lane 1 for our 8 minutes swimmer. I jump in and start my laps.
Now, here’s an important detail. I get in around 5:18pm… at 6pm there is an Aqua-Fit class, and so the whole pool is shut down to lap swimmers and kids. I know I’ll get my 30minutes in, and maybe even a little extra time, because after all, who wants to swim for just 12 minutes, which is what someone would get if they waited for me to finish my time slot. About 7 minutes later, 5:25, Lane 1’s “other person” shows up… She instructs him to “put his name on the waiting list” and jump in the lane with her and start swimming. I notice this out of the corner of my eye, and think it seems strange, and potentially a problem, but I figure, no worries it won’t effect me.
Lane 1 proceeds to swim with her friend. It does appear as if she is giving him some sort of instruction, although not formal. They practice flip-turns and some other drills… I’m not exactly sure what is going on… are they friends, sweethearts, coach and student… ah, no matter, just swim. Then, the storm cloud arrives on the horizon.
Another swimmer comes up and places her name on the wait list… 5:35. Now realistically, this new swimmer, isn’t going to get a full session. If she knows the schedule, then she should have known it was a crap-shoot to show up at 5:35pm… The pool effectively closes in 25minutes. But, what she sees is 2 people swimming in lane 1, and the official “time” on the board for the start of lane 1 is 5:10, and so in 5 minutes, that lane should clear up, and hopefully she will get to swim… or at least this person in front of her will swim, and maybe she’ll get to swim next… like dominoes falling in order.
To kill time, Miss 5:35 gets in the “open half” of the pool and does some light warm-up… avoiding the kids and wave making machines, and tries to prepare herself for a quick session in a dedicated lane. Much to her chagrin, 5 minutes pass, and she sees the guy in lane 1 get out of the pool, erase his name from the wait list, erase Miss Lane 1’s name from the lane board, and write his name in to the lane board with a time of 5:40. All hope for her to swim a 20minute session has been dashed. As I make my turn I hear her mumble under her breath… “That’s not cool man!”.
Honestly, that’s what I’m thinking too. As I swim out my last 8 minutes, I think… should I offer to let her join me in my lane? Should I offer to give her my lane and let me finish my laps in the “open section”… eventually my decisions is made for me, as the jilted swimmer decides to pack it in and get out of the pool. And I am left with the thought that it is too bad that she didn’t get to get her workout in.
A small aside to this story speaks to stereotypes and body image… It turns out that the jilted swimmer happened to be a very large woman, and Miss lane 1, was a very fit, very skilled swimmer, wearing a “national champions” swim cap. As I watched this whole situation go down, I couldn’t help but think that stereotypes and self-confidence based on the perception of “worthiness” to be at a gym might have had no small part to play in why the jilted swimmer didn’t stand up for herself. As I swam beside both of these women, I can tell you one of them seemed much more serious about wanting to get a good workout in… the other seemed to want to flirt with “her friend”… I could feel myself as that overweight guy, who was always wondering about whether or not I deserved to be at the gym with all those other “serious exercisers”… and how an incident like this would have certainly scare me away from the gym.
Now I ask you all… who was the more impolite gym member? Me for using the “load a lock” program? Or Miss Lane 1, for bending the rules and getting a 50 minute lap session in instead of her allotted 30 minutes?
February 23rd, 2007
Today I took on my craziest hill effort on my fixie. Now I’m sure that if some serious critical mass style fixie rider ever finds this post, they will laugh at this claim… but for me, this was a serious hill workout. Simonds Road in Kirkland is a notoriously steep hill. I’ve ridden it a couple times on my road bike, but it’s not really a road you’d ever have to go on to get anywhere, so I find you’d really only ride it if you intentionally want to inflict pain on yourself or your riding partners. Today was one of those days… I wanted to hurt!
So, let’s see, it’s not really that long 1.7 miles, and you “only” climb 440 feet… so what’s that? An average grade of 5%… no big deal right? True, but you hit stretches of more than 15% grade, with no switchbacks… this is straight up. So, what do I do? I take my fixed gear single speed bike out and go for it… 42/18 gearing… 6 meter roll-out… this is crazy. Of course I was standing up, and to keep from blowing out my knees I felt like I was standing over my handlebars… I thought I was going to get a hernia! I think I was maybe making 5mph on a few stretches. At the top of the hill there is a short flat stretch a false peak and then a slow 5% grade for another 100 yards or so… when I hit this stretch I felt like I was going down hill… I was actually able to plow into and get back to 18mph.
Simonds Road is at about mile 14.5 of a 37 mile ride. I had already accumulated 640 feet of elevation gain to that point. But for the most part the ride is steady rollers, albeit in traffic so not really compatible with all-out race effort. Another bonus of training with my fixie is that I can still get a serious workout in traffic and roads that would be crazy to ride full out on a road bike in.
At one point along the road, I had a guy riding about 3 inches to my left with only about 2 inches to my right by the curb. I slowed down so he could pass me, and about 10 feet later, he ran up on to the curb with his car… I later realized that he wasn’t paying attention to the road because he was arguing with his wife about being lost… at least I assume that was his excuse as they were handing maps back and forth to each other at the next intersection. I suspect he never even saw me.
Anyway, on to my story of hills. So what did I do after reaching the summit of Simonds Road? Of course I rode down the hill, around to Jaunita, and back up the other side of the “Big Finn Hill” to head back home. Don’t let Big Finn Hill’s name fool you… it’s a Hill, but it’s a piece of cake compared to Simonds Road. It’s about 350′ in 2.75 miles so only a 2.5% average grade.
Total elevation gain for the day was 1700 ft… total mileage 37 miles… good times!
February 22nd, 2007
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Running - 2 hours 45 min (19.5 miles) - Two longish road sessions of 8.5 and 8 miles, and one short treadmill session of 3 miles. Two of my runs this week were “intentionally slow”, the treadmill I actually kept things very slow, but last night my intended “slow it down” run on the trail still ended up with an 8:25 average pace. My foot is not 100%. My heel feels fine, which certainly is good, but my left arch, toes, and mid foot feel sore. So next week, I will take it really easy, maybe only do one long run (to move my single run distance up by 10%) and one short run. I’ve heard lots of advice lately that longer slower work is just as important (if not more important) than tempo and speed work, so I am going to try to incorporate that into my routine.
