Logistical Issues

I think I might have another one of my crazy plans in my head.  I might be going a little bit stir crazy because I have to do most of my workouts indoors right now.  I am excited for the upcoming triathlon season and all things related to exercising outside.  I'm so excited about this I spent a majority of my lunch time typing this up.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about the overnight towns on RAGBRAI this year.  Click here  I looked up the Omaha Triathlon this morning.  This race was just starting the last year I was living there.  It is always near or on one of the RAGBRAI weekends, so I was never much interested in it.  It goes right by my house (by the way everything is still on track for the house sale 6 days from now).

This year might be the year that I do it.  It depends on the logistics and if I'll have the training and stamina to do a bunch of activity that day.

The race is on Sunday, July 21st.  That is also the first biking day of RAGBRAI.

How I envision the complicated logistics:

1. I'll get into Council Bluffs on Saturday, the 20th.  My charter group will have an area reserved for tent camping that night.  I don't know how close I'll be allowed to get the car in order to drop off my camping gear.
2. I'll leave all of my triathlon specific gear in the car.  The bike will stay in my car for this part.
3. Then I'll go and drop off the car at the shopping mall where my charter group always parks our cars for the week.
4. The bike will then come out of the car and will serve as my transportation back to the campsite.  The triathlon specific stuff remains in the car for the night.
5. This will be followed by regular RAGBRAI activities for the rest of the day on Saturday.  Getting to know the new people in the group this year, reconnecting with the regulars, going to the bike expo, etc.
6. Really early on Sunday morning I'll have to get up and pack up my tent and sleeping gear.  This stuff will get loaded onto the team truck.
7. Next I will have to bike out to my car.  It will serve as a warm-up that I never do before a triathlon, but oh well.  It looks like the ride would be about 5 miles, no problem.
8. Once I get to my car, the bike gets loaded up and I drive out the triathlon site.  Thankfully it is not too far, 18 miles or so on the interstates.
9. Unload my triathlon stuff and bike at the event.
10. Participate in the triathlon.  It should take about 3 hours of racing time, plus another 1.5 hours of post-race activities, recovery, load up time etc.
11. Stop at a full service restaurant and eat a good meal since I'll need it that day.
12. Drive back to the shopping mall to drop off the car.
13. Unload the bike and any items that I will have on the bike at all times for me for RAGBRAI.  Triathlon specific stuff gets stashed in the trunk.
14. Hopefully by this time it is no later than 12:30 or 1:00.
15. From here, take off on the first biking day of RAGBRAI.
16. The Sunday route looks to be about 60 miles or so.  The crowds should be really thin at this point.  Most days I enjoy riding in the large crowds, but this one will be different.  I probably won't be going very fast since I'll be very tired.  RAGBRAI isn't a race, so no issue.
17. I should arrive in Harlan somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 to 8 PM.
18. Set up camp, find some dinner, hang out with people, etc. until I crash.
19. Get up on Monday the 22nd and get ready for the century day.

So, on that Sunday, I'll have swum 0.93 miles, ran 6.2 miles, and biked about 90 miles.
The very next day I'll have biked another 100 miles because I always do the optional century loop.

There are a few potentially complicating issues:
1. Triathlons sometimes insist that you check in the day before.  Sometimes at the bigger ones you have to attend a safety meeting or some other thing.  A lot will allow you to do the check in the day of the event.  If they require the day before and I can't get an exception, I'll likely do this before step 1 or during step 3 if the timing works out.

2. Some triathlons insist that you leave the bike in the transition area the night before the event.  The Hy-Vee Triathlon in Des Moines is notorious for this as well as many of the larger ones.  The smaller triathlons aren't as picky and people appreciate that more.  I absolutely must get an exception to this rule.  The logistical issues I face absolutely dictate that I NEED my bike for transportation and not just fun on Saturday and Sunday morning.


So what do you think?  Am I going nuts?

Worn Out

These are my old bike shoes.

Can you tell which foot I use to push off with?  It is time to finally retire this pair.  I was getting a bit more wind on my toes than was designed.

When I bought my bike in 2008 I went with an upper middle level quality bike.  I knew that I would use it enough to justify the quality.  I didn’t go with very high quality shoes.  They were just barely above entry level.  They fit perfectly though, and at that point I wouldn’t have been able to tell the performance difference.

Now, as the components to my bike break down, I have been slowly upgrading the quality.  It’s one of the few spending areas that I am regularly willing to go above and beyond that which would suffice.

Each year my parents struggle to find me gifts for Christmas that I need or want.  This year I made it fairly easy on them and just made a list.  On this list was a new pair of bike shoes.  Obviously, you can’t get something that has to fit as well as bike shoes without the actual recipient present.  So, they just gave me the means to do so.

I turned that into these

They are so awesome!  Sorry, I’ll stop acting like I’m 12.

They are light, have a perfectly stiff sole – desired to transfer power to the pedals more efficiently, the soles are carbon – carbon is the gold standard for many things in the bike world, have replaceable heel cups, and have clasps that allow me to adjust the fit while rolling on the bike.  

I’ll show you a special surprise handmade gift related to biking in another post.

Gotta Catch ‘em All

I apologize for using the tagline from Pokemon.  I have only seen a minute of the show and don’t wish to see any more.

It’s just that that line applies so well to one of my lifelong goals.

On my family’s vacations each summer we went to a lot of different locations across the country.  For each one my parents made up a rough itinerary long before we even left.  We did a lot of fun things like visiting a lot of major league baseball stadiums.  But we also had a requirement that there must be at least one thing educational during each vacation.  It usually ended up that we would do lots of things with educational value.

Maybe the most inspirational thing we did was going to a lot of national parks.  I have one of those "passports" from the park system in which you collect ink stamps.  For every national park, you go in to the visitor center, and usually in the gift shop they have a place where you can get your passport stamped.  My parents got it for me when I was really young.  I don't even remember going to a lot of the places I have stamps for.  It is a lifelong goal of mine to eventually get a stamp from every national park.  After that’s done I’ll work on finishing off the lesser national "parks" like monuments, preserves, etc.

I regret that I didn’t have my passport with me when I was in Yosemite about two years ago.  That’s no big deal though.  That was such a beautiful park that I'm sure I’ll make sure to stop by again sometime.

Speaking of national park gift shops, this reminds me of a parable from Colorado.  For some reason that year I was obsessed with buying quite a few glossy coffee table type books with my vacation money.  My brother didn't.  He wasted his on candy, usually rock candy from the gift shops.  He didn't get the reward I got for being responsible with my money.  It was near the end of our Colorado vacation and we had been to a lot of national parks because the state is full of them.  I was going to buy the book about Arches National Park.  Mom and Dad had to do some conniving to convince me that I really didn't want to do that.  There's nothing there but rocks.  It's not very interesting, etc.  Of course, little did I know that Mom and Dad had already bought that one for me as my reward for doing something responsible.

How many 2's?

Here's a 1 question quiz for you:
As a fraction, what portion of the whole numbers 1 through 100, inclusive, contain the number 2?

The answer is later in this post.

This math question has stuck with me ever since 8th grade.  I missed that question in a math skills competition called MATHCOUNTS.

The reason I mention MATHCOUNTS is that my team at the office will be volunteering as graders at the local competition here in Des Moines next week.

That's right, it's my time to come full circle and give back to the competition that I competed in when I was younger.  It's basically a few math nerds from each middle school gathering together to see who is the nerdiest.  I guess it is time to admit to my nerdism.  I won my local competition and earned the right to compete in the state competition.  I point this out not to brag - I mean who really brags about a competition in 8th grade when they are 31? - but as a means to point out a dichotomy later.

The state competition was at Drake University in Des Moines, so we had to travel for three hours just to compete.   The way it works is that you get a certain number of rounds of individual and group rounds where you are just sitting at your individual desks.  It looks similar to a college classroom where 200 people are all taking their final exams at once.  The only thing you had to worry about was getting the answers correct for the current round.

Then there is a break for all of the graders to get done scoring each of the rounds.  Once the scores are tallied they announce the top ten competitors.  I was announced as the one in 6th place.  I remember thinking to myself, “This is awesome!”  I wasn’t expecting to do as well as I did.

This is not our final placing.  We then start a challenge round for final placement.  The challenge is a best of 3 questions (or 5? I can’t remember) going head to head with a competitor.  First, the 10th and 9th place competitors square off.  The loser of the challenge gets 10th place, the winner gets to challenge 8th place.  So they then battle and the loser gets 9th place, etc.

The first couple of rounds occur and the 10th place initial finisher won his or her first couple rounds but gets beaten by the person initially in 7th.  It is then my turn.  I take my seat at the competition table for my battle.  The first person to buzz in with the correct answer wins each point.  If you answer and are wrong you are not allowed to buzz in again for that question.  Your opponent can then take the rest of the time allotted for each question.

I don’t remember what the questions were other than the one above.  I do remember that my opponent was in a hurry for the first question and got it wrong, giving me time to methodically get the correct answer.

Answer to the quiz from above: 19 / 100 [2, 12, 22, ... 92, and 20 - 29, each sets of 10, but remember to subtract one to account for the double counted 22]

The second question was the quiz question.  I remember arriving at the number 19 quickly.  I went to buzz in, and was acknowledged without much hesitation.  Somewhere between when I sounded my loud buzzer and when the words began coming out of my mouth the nerves got to me.  Somehow 19 got placed in the denominator and what ended up coming out of my mouth was “one-nineteenth”.

I don’t remember the exact proceedings after that, but I do know that the final score was either 3-2 or 2-1.  I lost my battle because of that one question.  That meant that I ended up in 7th place.

The boy who beat me ended up making it all of the way to 4th or something.  After my loss I was doing the problems at the same time as the competitors just to see how I could have done.  I had the possibility of getting as high as third.

But I didn’t place that high.  My nerdy math smarts didn’t do me a bit of good since I couldn’t transform my hasty chicken scratches into a reasonable short oral answer.  I did learn a thing or two about myself that day.  I learned that I have times when I do not perform well while under pressure.  That lesson has been reinforced numerous times throughout the years.  Apparently I am not a lump of coal that can be pressured into a fine diamond.  This is probably similar to why I would be a terrible car salesman or some other high pressure sales job.  Yucchhh.

Singles Awareness Day

Happy Singles Awareness Day everyone!

I know I’m a bit early, but there is a good possibility many of you will be busy doing stuff with your significant others tomorrow.  No, I do not want to know whatever it is you have planned.  Especially if you are related to me.  Feel free to spare me the details.

I sure I’ll find a woman who understands me eventually.  I’ve got a couple irons in the fire, but it is too early to tell if they will come to fruition.  I’d be pleased with just continuing to build up my network of local Des Moines friends right now.