Hiatus and Biking Notes

First, an editorial note: I have quite a few items that might be worthy of a post, but I am suffering from a time crunch.  As I explained in this post here, I have an actuarial exam coming up at the end of April.  My free time will be severely limited for all of April as I ramp up my studying even more.  Unfortunately, this blog will not be a priority.  I might make another post or two sometime in the next week, but don't expect much after that.  I'm not losing any enthusiasm for the blog.  I'm just losing the time I need to create the posts.  Please feel free to leave any comments you wish, I receive an email any time you leave one and will read those quickly.

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Today's post is just a collection of biking related topics I'll share with you.

I have been fortunate to get at least one bike ride outside each month this year.  OK, who am I kidding, it has been exactly one each month.  It’s been too cold for every weekend in March so far and definitely too cold to commute to work or do any rides in the evening throughout the week.  Daylight savings will really help with evening rides (not commutes) and so will getting our temperatures back up to the averages.  I moved to Des Moines just over a year ago in mid-March and my parents and I were unloading the moving truck while in t-shirts.

Thankfully, I got a ride in today, Friday, and it should be in the mid 50's for this weekend when I'm in Burlington, and Sunday is looking clear of rain.  For as much benefit as I get from my spin classes at the Y, it is not as good as actually being able to ride outside and feeling the wind in my face.  I took some time Wednesday and mapped out a route.  I am trying to hit as many of the good hills in the area as possible.

Here is the link to the route I want to do at some point this weekend.  I think it is a fairly well designed route.  It hits most of the significant hills around Burlington.  It skips the minor ones on Gear Ave and many of the ones in Burlington that either are surrounded by nothing special or are on too busy of a street.  Angular might be a good one to add, traffic isn't too high on that one.  Division would be great to ride on again, but there is too much traffic.  Thankfully, I got to ride on it during 2009's RAGBRAI, along with Snake Alley.  The one hill I am most unsure about is Locust St.  It's been a while since I have seen that one.  My high school cross country team once thought about trying to run up that one, but I don't think we actually went through with it.  That one might be even more difficult than the southbound route on Irish Ridge.

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I did not have a good spin class on Wednesday.  I slept horribly on Monday or Tuesday night.  Thankfully, I was fine for the swim workout I did Tuesday morning.  After that, I must not have been drinking nearly enough.  For some reason I became quite dehydrated on Tuesday and Wednesday.  I still went to the spin class Wednesday evening.  I was not performing up to my usual standards at all.  I was dogging it.

It's hard for others in the class to tell how well you are doing unless they get close and look at your little monitor.  Usually you have to gauge how others are doing by watching their cadence, body movements, facial expressions, and how they are responding to the instructor's directions.  Outwardly, I was doing just fine.  No one would have been the wiser for my bad performance.  But I knew it.  I knew from the empirical - my "gear" was 3 levels lower than what it typically is when we are asked to go with a tough climbing gear.  I also knew from what my body was telling me.  I knew that day was just not my day.

Oddly enough, despite the warning signs my body was telling me, I didn't really have a bad attitude about it.  At one point I went to a level of thankfulness.  I was thankful that even though I was having a bad day, I still am in a state of mind that allows me to be physically active.  I was thankful that I have been making conscious decisions to improve my health.  I still have a long ways to go, but at least I have been making strides since 2008. Except for two brief periods, I did not make the effort to become / remain physically fit from 2000 to 2008.

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To go along with the previous bit, not everything went badly during Wednesday's spin class.  That class usually has about 55 minutes of biking or so.  Around the 45-minute mark, the song "Uprising" by Muse came on.  There is something about that song that gave me a bunch of energy.  It's certainly not the lyrics, those are neither impressive nor uplifting.  Leaving out the lyrics means some combo of the singing and the instrumental parts did it.

The same thing happened during the previous Wednesday class when “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men came on.  For that song, I like everything about it.  The music video even reminds me of Monty Python.

Youtube videos are available here Muse - Uprising and here Of Monsters and Men - Little Talks.

Fruit and Fridge

When I see something like this, I often think, “why do I even bother”.  I just wanted a bit of fresh fruit this morning from Hy-Vee.  I really wanted some but was out at home.  I would rather they just put up a sign that says these fruits are not in season in most of the world right now than jack up the price to over 3 times the usual.  Sure, I could easily pay that price, but this isn’t a post about money.  Thankfully, there were some apples at a reasonable price.

One of the benefits of being a bachelor is that I do not feel the need to keep my fridge stocked with a huge variety of foods that hardly ever get touched.  I stock my fridge with a relatively few number of items, but usually large quantities of them.  For example, there are currently 80 containers of 6 oz. lite yogurts.  I go through at least 4 per day.

Other items in the fridge, just for fun:

1 gallon white milk

1.5 gallons chocolate milk

Half eaten jar of baby pickles

6-pack composed of the remnants of 6-packs of Mike’s Hard Lime and Mike’s Hard Raspberry from about two months ago

3 50 oz. jars of cinnamon applesauce

Uncooked chicken enchilada bake

Container of chicken tortilla soup especial that looked appealing at Costco

4 apples from this morning

3.5 sticks of butter in case I get the urge to cook something

and 2 bottles of sparkling cider for those times when I want extreme amounts of carbonation – very rarely

That’s it.  Only 11 different types of items in my fridge.  My pantry is the same style, but the highlight there is the 6 29 oz. bags of Quaker Oatmeal Squares.  Now, you might be saying to yourself, “where are all the vegetables?”, but the answer is not in the fridge.  I get my veggies from lunch, which is usually purchased.

So there you have it, a look into my kitchen.

Sweat and Fog

My YMCA recently had a 24-hour cycle-thon to raise money for their in-house charity.  A team of at least 4 people each combined to make sure that their team bike was ridden for every hour.  I didn't participate since I heard about it too late.  However, I did see the after effects of it.  They had a bunch of yard like signs taped up to the cycling room's mirrors.  Unfortunately, my camera didn't have enough juice to capture pictures of all of them.  Only half are shown here.  The third one in the first picture says, "It's just a hill, get over it".  They are a mix of inspirational and funny signs.  I wish I could have gotten pictures of them all.

There is a reason that the signs look a bit warped and curling.  The riders put so much perspiration into the air throughout the day that the water vapor caused the signs to warp.  These are the signs in a recovered mode.  I heard they were warping a lot more than this during the event.  A spin class leader was telling us all about the event during a recovery phase.  I pretty much lost it with laughter when he told us about it.  He also said that you could smell the cycling room from the stairs 30 feet away.

On a cold day outside, and with a full spin class, there are times that just an hour-long class will completely fog over those large angled windows and the mirrors.  There is just so much effort expended that we completely overwhelm the four overhead fans running constantly.  There have been very few instances where I haven't completely covered the back of my t-shirt with sweat by the end of a class.  On good days I will cover a good portion most of my front as well.

I guess the moral of this story is that us cyclists can be a sweaty, nasty bunch when we don't have the wind wicking away our sweat and stink, so we are very grateful for the showers in the Y.

Cool Icicles

Well of course icicles are cool.  They are always cold.

I'm not going to go on a lengthy post today.  I just want to share a few photos that I took and found interesting.  We've had a long period here in Des Moines of freeze and thaw cycles.  That has made for some really long icicles.

This first one is right outside my apartment.  It's right under the roof gutter so it got a lot of drips.  I'm fairly certain this dish isn't working so well.

This next one is in the neighboring apartment complex.  Obviously, I don't let Scooby stand under these icicles when we go for walks.  Those things could really hurt him if and when they fall.

 

This last one is also in the neighboring apartment complex.  It's a set of many icicles that are going through the bush all the way to the ground

 

 Isn't it neat that nature can make such beautiful scenes even in the middle of civilization.

IM Mass Starts

Hello there!  I haven’t written a post in about 12 days.  It’s good to be back at it. 

Today’s topic will involve the minutia of how a triathlon starts.  If this doesn’t interest you, I suggest one of my 32 other interesting posts.  I sometimes worry that my enthusiasm for the sport can have an overpowering dominance during my conversations about it.  But here goes anyway.

There have been rumors circulating in an online forum I frequent that might change how a lot of the Ironman races are held.  I’ll get to the details of all of it, but first we need to go through a bit of background.

Ironman is a brand.  They might run some of their own races, but I believe most of the races are run by other organizations.  The largest organization is the World Triathlon Corporation (WTC).  The WTC is a for-profit company.  They run a lot of races like the Kona IM in Hawaii (the one televised on NBC), the Wisconsin IM I’ll do next year, and many others.

The WTC is reportedly contemplating a change to how their Ironman races start.

There are usually three different ways for competitors to start swimming.

1. Time Trial -- Every so often, usually every three or five seconds, another racer is allowed to begin.

2. Wave start -- Each gender and age group combination is released all at once, then three or five minutes later the next group is allowed to start, all the way until all of the groups have started (The order of the groups depends on the triathlon – some have traditionally faster ones go first, or last, or a random mix).

3. Mass start – This is the one used most often in both the extremely large races like Ironman, and the really small races where there are only like 50 or 100 racing.  You usually start in the water, and when the horn, whistle, cannon, or whatever goes off, the entire field goes.

The WTC is thinking about doing away with mass starts to their races.

I’ve raced in all three types of starts. 

Least favorite – time trial

I believe I’ve done this method twice, maybe three times.  It made the start seem like a nonevent.  There was nothing to really get your adrenaline going.  Everyone just calmly waits in line and you talk to your neighbors until you get right near the starting point.  You are told to go and then you are on your way for the day.  Opportunities for drafting on the swim (legal for swim, not for bike) are very small because the competitors spread out too much.

Middle option – waves

This is the version that occurs in a large majority of my races.  The good news is that you start in the same grouping as the smaller subset of racers you compete against.  Everyone in your age group has to compete in the same weather conditions.  The bad part is that it makes it harder to draw a good comparison for the overall results.  In large races, there can be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 different groups.  At three minutes between groups, that is 72 minutes from when the first group starts to when the last group starts.  Weather conditions can be vastly different by then.  Triathlons usually start not too long after dawn.  The temperature can increase a lot during that time.  In addition, by the time that the last wave starts, there are already racers a good portion of the way through the bike leg.

Favorite – mass starts

Here everyone is on a level playing field.  Everyone starts at once.  Everyone faces the same conditions.  If you come across somebody and pass him or her, you know you just moved up one spot in the overall competition.  It’s not where you passed them but are still ten minutes behind because you started earlier.  Everyone also gets the chance to get off the course before the run gets too hot.

Many people get a real adrenaline rush out of the start.  It is called a washing machine because of all of arms and legs that are churning up the water at once.  Mostly it is a well-behaved crowd that is trying to get off to their best start possible.  You’ll get bumped around a bit if you don’t seed yourself properly, but it’s usually not too bad.  There are no lane lines like in a pool, and some people can’t swim in a straight line to save themselves, but the danger really gets overhyped.  If you are worried about the start, stay away from the middle of the front rows.  That is the area where the speed demons start.  Off to either side at the front or anywhere in the back is usually a very calm place to be.  Another strategy is just to wait ten or fifteen seconds after the start before you start.  This will give the ones in front time to sort themselves out and clear out.  You should then have clear swimming the rest of the way.

I have used this strategy whether I was in a mass start or a wave start.  The first couple of times I raced I started right in the middle regarding front to back and left to right.  That was fine.  I was jostled around a bit, but nothing major.  Those times showed me that I was a back of the middle of the pack swimmer.  Waiting those ten to fifteen seconds really didn’t hurt me at all.  My strength is the bike leg.  I am in the front of the pack for the bike portion.  I will pick off many people that I let battle it out for the swim.  I then go and give away quite a bit of those gains back during the run.

That is just the way triathlon goes, though.  Everyone has his or her limiters and their strengths.  My limiters are my swim and run and my strength is the bike.  Others might have two strength sports and one that is terribly weak.  Triathlon allows you to be a jack-of-all-trades-but-master-of-none.  However, if you want to be near the podium spots, it is best to get all three sports to a decent ability.

Sorry, I’m getting a bit preachy here, back to the Ironman start change.

There is just something magical about the start of an Ironman that thrills so many people.  Look at this video.  It’s the start of the Ironman Wisconsin.  IM Wisconsin video  Notice how it is a calm and orderly procession.  Listen to the announcer’s comments about it.  He says, “One of the most amazing spectacles in sport today – a mass Ironman swim start”.  I have to agree.

The online forum I referenced earlier had a poll up.  By more than a two to one margin, people think that the idea to move away from mass starts in WTC run Ironmans is a bad idea.  I won’t try to recreate all of the arguments that came up for and against the rumored change.  You can go to the site and read them yourself if you wish.  Beginner Triathlete Discussion Forum

Side note: at almost every triathlon, including in the first link above, U2’s Beautiful Day will be played at some point.  It’s kind of a tradition.