Sorry, but I'm not apologizing

I got stung by a bee on my bike this morning. It's in almost exactly the same spot that I got stung about 6 months ago. I was riding my bike and a bee crashed into my face and got stuck below my glasses on the bridge of my nose. To add insult, in trying to get the bee off, I ripped off my sunglasses and the little rubber nose thingy broke off. Hopefully I can get a replacement part from Oakley.

So now my face is swollen, my right eye swollen almost completely shut. And I have to spend the day in public tomorrow. Yikes. This is miserable. At least the bike ride was nice and the weather cooperated. First time since before summer I wore leg warmers, though.

Today's ride was with the guy I went up Mt. Hamilton with and another friend. Both of these guys used to be my golf buddies, but now it looks like everyone is moving on from golf and getting into cycling. Must be that mid-life crisis thing. All of us starting to worry about our health. Or maybe we decided we couldn't make the senior PGA tour.

School picnic tomorrow all day and long run on Monday.

Here's my new favorite techie device... Squeezebox. It connects to my stereo and plays music stored on my PC and also music from Pandora (my favorite music web site) and Rhapsody. The only negative is that it doesn't play purchased songs from iTunes (except in the new iTunes non-DRM format). I may be going with the whole Rhapsody model anyway and backing away from iTunes. We'll see. Rhapsody, in theory, is awesome, but the software is buggy as hell. If I wasn't such a techno-geek I would have punted on it already.

I'm now in the process of loading all my CD's onto my main PC to use as a music server. I'm loading them in .FLAC format, which means no quality loss, but compressed to about half the size of the file on the CD. Kind of a pain, but I can do it in background cycles when I'm not doing anything else.

Bottom line, I now get tons of cool music playing on my home stereo with good quality. Finally!!

When will I ever learn? I'm just a wimp when it comes to being cold. Yesterday, a friend who's pretty new to cycling took the day off work and asked me to escort him on a ride up to Mt. Hamilton. Sure, no problem, I can take a few hours off on a Friday to ride 2 hours of straight climbing. The morning was a bit more chilly than it has been, so I brought arm warmers and a light underlayer below my cycling jersey. The sun was out and it looked like a beautiful day.

I drove down 280 to get to the base of the mountain. As I'm driving south, I look up to where Mt. Hamilton is. Well, it's completely covered in black clouds. So the moron that I am, I keep driving telling myself it'll be fine. I was so damned cold that ride. I had to stop every 5 minutes on the way down just to try to get some blood back in my hands. I actually got dizzy a couple of times.

Today I woke up with a cold. Related? Shouldn't be, since a cold is a virus, but maybe it weakened my body's defenses. Or maybe it's because I told myself that I actually had nothing to do today, so why not contract a virus while I have time. Yuck!

My parents, being retired and with a bit of extra time on the hands, do volunteer work for the state park system, specifically working 2 gigs - one at Hearst Castle and one at Piedras Blancas as elephant seal docents. Because they've put in enough time, they got access to have 4 people go swim at the outdoor pool at Hearst Castle.

This last weekend, my brother and I brought our kids down to San Simeon so that they (not me) could swim in the pool. They spent a couple of hours pretending to be guests of William Randolph Hearst down on "the ranch." I'm not sure they really cared that much before they got there, but since they were with their cousins, they all had a blast. Even my dad took a dip, even though I don't think he's swam in the last, oh, say, gazillion years.

Some day they'll really appreciate that they got to go in that pool. Not too many folks have that experience.

I work out with a personal trainer. Now that I do, I wonder how I ever did without. It's definitely been a life changing experience, since he's the one that got me into endurance sports in the first place. One interesting thing about this particular trainer is that he's always out on the edge, learning new training techniques, and gathering as much body information as he possibly can.

So when he said, "Hey, let's go out to the track and I'll test your blood oxygen levels, blah, blah, blah," I figured, what the hell, I'll let him use me as a guinea pig. Here was the plan...

Warm up for 20 minutes.
Run 1 mile at 9:00/mile pace, then draw some blood.
Repeat at 8:00/mile pace, 7:30/pace, 7:00/pace, 6:30 pace, and 6:00 pace. I haven't seen the results yet, but I'm supposed to learn how fast I can go before I start to go anaerobic. From his preliminary findings, he mentioned to me that if I run at the same effort as the fastest Kenyan guys (not the same speed), I can do a 3:09 marathon. My goal for the next marathon (unspoken goal, of course), is a 3:10. So now I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be scared that there's no way in hell I can put the same effort in as the pros, or if I'm supposed to be confident that it can actually be done. I'll learn more on Wednesday.

Saturday, after an hour swim, the tri team was to ride to Highway 9, and then time trial up to the top (can "time trial" be a verb?). First, just the trip over to the base of Highway 9 was a hammer fest. Some of these guys are very hard core. I thought I was gonna blow a lung, and that was before it even counted. We started in 15 second increments, just like a real time trial. (And this is supposed to be a recovery week). I made it up in 41:45, which I think is pretty good. Of course, most of the people were saying how sucky they did, and it was they're worst one ever. Whatever. I was pretty happy, since I know I worked my ass off the whole way. The team has a challenge they do every once in awhile where you swim 500y, do the Highway 9 time trial, and then run a mile on the track all in one day. If you can do it in under an hour, you get a t-shirt. If you can do it in under 55 minutes, you get a different color t-shirt. And if you do it in less than 50 minutes, a different color t-shirt. Based on Saturday's result, it looks like I can get close to the 55 minute mark, although I'm not quite there (7:45ish swim, 42 bike, and 6:30ish run).

Anyway, the fun began when we got to the top. It was damn cold, so while we were waiting for the other people to get to the top, we started to cruise along Skyline toward Castle Rock. OMG, I've never been so cold. It started to rain, and I swear there was a little slush in the rain. On the side of the road there was snow. And no one was dressed for the weather. We turned around and descended down Highway 9. I was scared to death, because I literally could not feel my hands on the brakes. I heard the brakes rub against the front wheel every once in a while, so I figured my hands were sort of working, but I sure couldn't feel them. That combined with a little dizziness, I thought I was a goner. We all got down to Saratoga and went into Starbucks. The entire team was in this little Starbucks, most of us completely shaking from the cold. The coach said it was one of his top 5 most cold days ever. Nice.

Today (Sunday), it was double brick day (bike, run, bike, run). We met at Stevens Creek dam, and because of the threat of rain, we ran 40 minutes first. When we came back, it started to rain, and while we were deciding whether to ride or not, it started to absolutely dump. I guess that made the decision easy. I was outta there. I think a few people were going to stay and run, but running steep trails in the rain didn't sound like much fun. I drove home, and as I drove, it cleared up quite a bit. So when I got home, I decided to run for an hour, 20 minutes to get my 2 hours of running it. No cycling, though.

Overall, a very tough week, since I took most of last week off and went skiing. Tomorrow is a much needed off day. At least I didn't go swim at Aquatic Park today like some people I know. Off to SF for a little R&R.

So, here's what I've signed up for this year...

1. SF Kaiser Half Marathon (2/4) - already done (1:27:30)
2. Boston Marathon (4/16)
3. Wildflower long course triathlon (5/5)
4. UVAS triathlon (5/20)
5. IM Coeur d'Alene (6/24)
6. Folsom triathlon (8/12)
7. Big Kahuna?? (9/9)

Check this out... Coeur d'Alene bike route

The elevation profile is below the map, and you need to wait a minute or two for the information to fill in. Since this is for one of two loops, it looks like there's about 5500 feet of total climbing for the IMCDA bike route. Also, check out the map in "hybrid" mode. And, duh, zoom in on the map a bit.

Maybe my new MO will be to just post a zillion times in one day, and then not post again for another month. I guess I'd prefer to avoid that.

I did two hours running today. I noticed when I started that I didn't have my trusty Polar watch at home. I figured I must have left it at my swim club. So my run today consisted of running to the pool the hilly way (1 hour), picking up my watch, socializing with the masters swim group, and then running home the same way (another hour). My legs were quite tired after that. I can't imagine doubling that time to finish a marathon in Boston. I'd better do a few more long runs.

My trainer is trying to brainwash me in his nutty eating ways. I finally gave in and told him I'd at least start to listen to the CD's of his favorite nutritionist (and holistic health doctor). Uh oh! I'd better be careful. I'm feeling the pull. He's got some great advice, but it's way too high maintenance to completely go with. I'm getting the feeling it's basically meat, fruits, and vegetables, all CERTIFIED organic, of course, and all cooked minimally. Today for lunch, I had organic spinach salad, topped with bacon (uncured, blah, blah), buffalo sirloin and asparagus cooked lightly in the bacon fat, plus my usuals - sunflower seeds, cranberries, and walnuts. Afterwards, I felt full, but oh so unsatisfied. Where's my big wad of bread? Couldn't resist the pull of dark chocolate to help me through. Yum!!

I did Old La Honda in 23:30 on Tuesday. That's definitely my best time. Still lots of room for improvement, but since I haven't done the climb in awhile, I'm happy. I changed my seat position a couple of weeks ago and am still trying to get used to it. It'll be better in the long run, but for now, my ass and hamstrings are regularly exhausted due to the higher seat position.

Last Saturday, I was all ready to do a 4 hour ride with my team. About 45 minutes in, I heard a big old snap, only to find out that my rear hub had cracked where the spokes go in, and a couple of the spokes had popped out. I slowly rode my wobbly-wheeled bike back to my car with my tail between my legs, severely bummed out that my ride ended short and paranoid that my bike is falling apart. What if it does something like that during a race? Anyway, I took the wheel to TBO, and they mentioned that those Bontrager wheels have a bit of a history doing that. They said they probably get 15-20 per year. That means that I might get the fix done under "warranty," even though the wheels aren't officially under warranty anymore. The coolest thing is they gave me a loaner wheel, so I can ride my bike while I wait for it to get fixed. That means that I could add 2 more hours of riding on Saturday on top of the previous hour and a half. Almost perfect.