TD 4/21

Got up this AM all stoked for a run, but it was raining. Almost went back to bed when I realized that I could actually swim instead of run.

Swim:
500 yd warmup
3x100 yard form intervals with fist gloves
3x100 yard standard swim, working on bilateral breathing
200 yds easy, swimming breastroke when my form went south.

I'm still coming up the curve on the swimming thing, as this is my 3rd swim this year. The bilateral breathing thing is coming along, but I start to thrash when I get tired and it's one vicious cycle from there on in. Also, when I'm going pretty hard, breathing every other stroke doesn't quite cut it.

Pool work is pretty important, and I've got to get my shit together before june 5. However, I'll be happy simply improving my form and comfort level and not worrying about speed until I can swim 500 yards with good, bilateral breathing, easy floating and gliding form.

Meals:
Breakfast: 2 slices toast, 1 coffee, 1 protein drink
Lunch: gnarly chinese food (free lunch Weds), diet coke
Snack: 2 oranges
Dinner: 2 cheese and mushroom quesadillas.
Dessert (!) 1 ice cream bar. My willpower was sapped by the hard day at the office :)

In other news Kiran's test results have come back and he's qualified to take the COGAT one more time. The first time they pulled him in on a day he wasn't supposed to take it and he wasn't prepared at all. This time he'll be ready, and his test taking has gotten better. He's so much like me, spacey, that is, and I worry that it's going to get in his way, like it has for me. But he's got a lot better support than I did, so maybe he'll do OK. I have to keep reminding myself that he's eight, not eighteen, and if I can turn things around, so can he.

TD 4/20

Ah, 4/20, the holiday of choice for the herb friendly crowd!
I drove and parked downtown, then spun on the fixie to the climbing gym, for the first climb in 6 months. Forearms were weak, but it was good to be back. I think that this is a good counter point to triathlon training, since it stresses other muscles and is a great mental break from endurance sports. I'm going to try to get in at least 1x/week! (travel permitting)

Diet today: not bad.

• Breakfast: 2 pcs toast, 1 protein shake
• Snack: 1 protein bar, 1 mojo bar
• Lunch: 1 bowl chili with cornbread
• Snack: 2 oranges
• Dinner: 1 pc fish, lentils, egg rolls
• Post Dinner: I was seriously contemplating an ice cream sandwich, but then forgot about it (really!) and ended up drinking some warm water instead. Wow. Senility trumps willpower, I guess. 

Training diary 4/19

I was thinking of doing a long, slow run, but then I decided to sleep in instead. These days I always choose sleep over a non key workout :) I did ride to and from work, for a total of 10-11 miles of 'easy' riding on the fixie. Easy for the most part except those hills, of course.

Breakfast: 2 pcs toast, 1 protein shake, 2 coffees

Lunch: 1 bowl chili, 1 pc cornbread, 1 diet coke

Snack: 1 mojo bar, 1 orange

1 green tea

Dinner: party: 3 glasses red wine, 1 pc salmon + 1 serving lentils, and 2 pcs of incredible dark chocolate cake. Damn that was good! worth the calories in pleasure!

4/11 - 4/18 log

OK, time to start logging stuff, now that I've committed to Issaquah as the first race.

4/11: 25.17 mi ride. Not feeling super motivated, but got on the bike anyways.
4/12: nothing
4/13: swimming, 45 minutes. Still working on bilateral breathing.
4/14: run 8.6 mi (North end loop). Pretty fast on a couple of the mile splits...still, I think I need more speedwork. Shorter distances?
4/15 - 4/17: out sick with cold. Thanks, kids!
4/18 : standard MI double loop, 28 mi. Was supposed to be an easy ride, but I felt great and just fucking crushed it. broke p.r. by 3 minutes : 1:20 down from 1:23, for an average of 19.5 mph. 21 mph for the first 10 miles. This was _after_ leg resistance exercises in the AM. Apparently those are working.

Nutrition: I went on a freaky cookie binge on Friday, and mentally added 5 lbs.  I think it's time to get serious about not eating whatever the f**k I want. As part of this I'm going to record my dietary intake every couple of days.

Today was decent:

breakfast: 2 coffees, protein shake, 4 pancakes.
ride: 1 powerbar goo, 1 bottle cytomax
lunch: avocado + tomato sandwich on protein bread
snack: apples + 2 cookies
dinner: 4 slices frozen pizza (boo! a sunday tradition, though)
dessert: 1 ice cream bar.

decent, I said. Not stellar.

Garmin back, but motivation not

My get up and go has got up and left. It always happens at this time of year:

1. Daylight savings has just taken away the 6:30 AM sunlight (although, it's back now. But it's been a month)
2. There are no races for me to 'scare myself into shape' with
3. The weather usually goes into a '1 day great, 4 days rain' pattern. After the previous 7 months of darkness and rain, this usually makes me want to curl up into a ball. 

After a very blah March, my motivation has been creeping back as the sun has started to rise earlier and earlier. Running without a headlamp is nice! And not having to layer up for 30-35 degree runs is nicer!

I have been getting out on some long(ish) runs, between 8-9 miles, where I'll warm up for 3 miles, run a couple miles hard, then a couple easy, then finish with a couple hard. My findings from the 'long, hard run' experiment:

1. running fast is hard, painful, uncomfortable.
2. running fast makes running slow much more enjoyable
3. in fact, what once felt fast feels very do-able right now.
4. too bad that my 'fast' (7:15 miles) is a lot of other people's 'slow' :) 

I'm going to keep up with the whole 'run as fast as I can' thing, just to see where it takes me. It's better (and seems more entertaining) than 'run slow for a marathon'. I think I'll start running short and fast and see how I an extend the distance -- at the very least this will be fodder for humorous tweets. The other thing  I was thinking about investigating is the whole plyometrics thing. I'm scared of hurting myself, but from what I've heard the P-90x plyometric program seems relatively safe, and it also looks fairly painful.

I've been trying to spend as much time as possible in the Hurt Locker, but honestly, I'm kind of a wuss about going there. I've been doing a whole lot of reading and I'm convinced that the more I can convince my body that being uncomfortable is not so bad, the faster I can go. Because I notice that on my last hill, I can move a lot faster than I can on the hill in the middle of the run. Mental? Definitely. My head has always been the most suspect part of my body, at least now I'm admitting it.

In other relieving news, my Garmin is back. Turned out the USB cable was crunked, a new one fixed all issues. I've started on my pet project of making a browser enabled run tracker, only to get foiled by a strange firefox issue. One day, when I dont have an assload of real work to get done, I'll figure that bug out.

The first race of the year is looking to be the Issaquah sprint triathlon, on June 5. It's mid April now, so its time to get swimming again. I haven't been swimming in so long that I'm basically starting from scratch. This is good! I get to work on bilateral breathing (again), maybe this time I'll get it down...I've actually been doing OK with the whole bilateral breathing thing since I started focusing on relaxing and gliding along on my weak side...the fistgloves, of course, are really helping me get my balance in the water while saving my shoulders.

Oh Shit my Garmin is on the fritz.

last night I was getting my stuff ready for the AM run, and went to go get my Garmin 305 from the charging cradle, and it was....dead. It was fine on Saturday when I put it in the cradle, but it didn't even power up.

I ordered a new cradle and resigned myself to running without my little computer buddy, but man was it hard to get out of the house. When I finally did,  I kept sneaking glances down at my wrist and seeing my dinky timex in stopwatch mode.

I think I'm addicted to the constant flow of data coming off of the garmin. My pulse, the pace, the time elapsed, and the distance. All there, for insta perusal. Instead I was going by simple perceived effort. Now I know why people use headphones!

I did a 6 mile loop (measured by Garmin, of course), and ran it easy on the way out, hard on the way back. It was definitely a hard run, hilly and I averaged 8 minute miles on in, but for some reason it doesn't feel real unless the Garmin is there recording it.

I really, really hope it isn't borked, that just the charger was on the fritz. Because I don't want to plunk down another $300, and because it's got almost a years worth of data on it.

in the mean time, I'll run on known loops, and gauge my effort as best I can.

Oh Shit It's March. 2010.

Strike that. Its _late_ March. March 21 to be exact. What the fuck happened here? This was supposed to be a veritable cornucopia of pithy insights, devil-may-care winks, and profound wisdom. In fact, my last blog was all about making fire without smoke, so really, where did all of that good juju go?

Well...where to start? Life has been busy. Days are over in an eyeblink, they blur into weeks, which morph into months. And here I am. Late Spring 2010.

Kids and Lopa are doing well. Lopa is teaching as much as she can as a sub in the M.I. school system. I found a 20 times for $20 Bikram Yoga coupon for her and now she's all excited to 'get back into shape', I use quotes here because she's not exactly out of shape, I'm scared to see what she means by 'in shape', I think it means being able to see her six pack or something like that, and since I can only see mine in the morning, this could be bad :) She actually looks the same as she did 10 years ago, which makes me look like her older sugar daddy.

Kiran is eight now, and did you know eight year olds sound a lot like Beavis and Butthead? I love him but he is a little twerp right now, saying things like "wouldn't it be cool if the car exploded and that guys head flew off and he died?". WHAAAT?? What happened to my little boy...oh wait, he's still in there, I can see glimpses of it at the most unexpected times. I guess I'll have to wait until he's 25 before I deem him a complete moron, if I use myself as a relative measure.

Leela is six and she insists on cuddling with me every night she can. Kiran wanted to cuddle with me until he was seven, and I did it as much as I could because I knew that one day he would be over it, and I would be sad. And I kind of am :)  So now when Leela asks, I do my best to cuddle, because after her I won't be holding any more kids until I'm a grandad, and who knows when/if that will happen?

There is nothing better than lying down with your kid's head on your shoulder and listening to them sleep. Of course, I tend to do more sleeping than listening, and that's pretty awesome too. Leela is a very sweet little girl, but can still be a complete hellion when she wants to be. She's going to be a handful. She's as sure in her convictions as her mother, only more fierce. Yikes.

We just adopted a new dog. He's a year old lab and he was a stray in Tacoma who was brought up to the Seattle shelter, where Lopa's friend MJ volunteers. MJ is a dog-whisperer, she knows dogs and can pair them up with people really, really well. So when we met this dog, we knew that he would be great. We struggled a little bit with taking on an additional responsibility right now, but in the end decided it would be 'good for the kids'. Well it's really turned out to be good for everyone.  Shadow is a sweet, sweet boy who loves everyone and thinks he's a lap dog. I'm really glad we made the move to get him, our lives are that much fuller and better for it.

Professionally I'm working hard. Not as hard as I was in November/December/January, but still at a solid pace. I work 8-9 hours during the day, a couple more after the kids go down.

I can't say I'm learning a ton of new things right now, most of what I'm doing is cleaning up some messes. However I am doing a lot of refining on how I write code. Specifically I'm trying to write less, and make it easier to understand. The crew up in Seattle has been really, really great to work with because they all feel the same way about code (Code is the Enemy :) and software architecture (Less is More). So I feel like I'm hitting my stride as far as being able to deliver software in a complete cycle. By that I mean get requirements, estimate, implement, test, and hand off. Lather, Rinse and Repeat, and eventually what looked like an overly complex, untested clusterfuck is starting to hang together much better.  I'm hoping that once we get the fire under control, I can start to focus on big data and get some real world machine learning experience under my belt.  But the guys I work with are great, management is good in that they do a good job of keeping on top of priorities and staying out of the weeds, and business is booming. So I'm happy I made the move from Evri.

My triathlon season hasn't started, I think it will really start in June/July. For now I'm focusing on the bike and the run. I'm doing a lot of running, basically doing the opposite of what I was doing last year when I was full bore training for the marathon. I'm going relatively short distances, but running hard. I'm doing things like hill sprints and stair hops, and I've incorporated a lot more TRX based leg conditioning. So I feel reasonably strong right now. Not super fit or fast, although I did tie my PR for my mercer island 2 lap bike TT the other day. 1:23 in March isn't bad, I'll take it.

I've also been able to get up and skate ski a lot this winter, because Kiran is taking ski lessons. It's been great to finally feel balanced on the skate skis because I've become semi regular at it. I like skating way more than snowboarding in bounds, unless that in bounds is Whistler, Stevens, or Alpental and it's a 20+ inch powder day. I'm thinking of getting a nordic pass for next year, b/c the kids are both going to be taking lessons and I'd like to get up and skate whenever they are up there.

Lopa was encouraging me to take my 40th surf/kite trip this spring, but I decided to punt until next year when Jay can come out and do it with me. These things are way better with friends, and Jay always takes it up a notch :)  We sealed the deal with a handshake and a fist bump. He's going to be a father in August, so come next spring (2011) he'll be primed for a Man-cation!

Hopefully I'll be posting more frequently, but I can't promise anything. I do want to look back on these posts and remember what it was like to be 41 in 2010.