Apr 302013
 

When I wrestled in High School, our coaches had t-shirts printed with various inspirational sayings on the back. One of them said “Train Like a MADMAN.” And to be sure, we did. I credit all of my self-motivation when it comes to fitness to coaches Blandino, Aker and Wimsatt, who pushed a very soft, very wimpy little kid to lengths he never would’ve thought possible. It was a formative experience that made boot camp seem like vacation, but with more yelling.

15 years later, I’m back to training like a madman. The calendar from my Endomondo page shows how the month of April went for me, and I’m pretty happy with it. I knocked out my first half marathon of the year with a PR, stretched out my road bike mileage, and got a lot of good weight training and MTB rides in. I’m stronger, fitter and lighter now than I have been at any time in the last 6 years or more. I know I have a long way to go to get where I’m trying to be, but thanks to three insane coaches who believed enough in a soft, scrawny kid, I know how to get there.

Apr 292013
 
When I first had the idea for this post, as I was leaving for work today, I thought it might be the most boring post on this blog yet. But really, the more I thought about it, this picture ends up saying a lot.
This is the bag that comes to work with me just about every day. It’s the bag I take to the trailhead when I go ride my bikes. It’s not a great bag, but the price was right: it was a freebie I got for reenlisting a few years ago. It has a shoe compartment, a few side pockets, and it’s big enough to hold a couple sets of clothes, my shower stuff, and assorted workout gear and gadgets. I also strap my lunch bag to the top of it when I’m going to work, and carry a tub of whey protein, a shaker bottle and a water cup. If you look closely, you’ll see a handful of things that have been the subject of previous blog posts.
So really, this bag, however lowly and unexciting, represents everything that I’m doing or trying to do. It depicts both sides of the fitness equation, with my workout gear and my planned, portioned nutrition. I spend so much time carrying it back and forth, it ought to have a name or something. Come to think of it, there are days I spend more time with it than my wife, because of our sometimes-opposing schedules. It is perhaps a mundane detail, but one I couldn’t do without, either.
Apr 282013
 

This isn’t my strongest deadlift ever, but it’s significant, for two reasons. First, it represents my first set of “heavy” straight bar deadlift instead of trap bar. I decided a few weeks ago that trap bar deadlift is doo similar a movement to squats, and that straight bar would force me to work the posterior chain in a more concentrated and advantageous fashion. Also, trap bars are somewhat difficult to find, so lifting with a normal barbell will make things a bit more convenient.

The other significance is (yet another!) new pair of shoes. I picked up this pair of Inov-8 XF-210s specifically for weightlifting, to replace my old, beat-up pair of Adidas trail shoes. They’re a zero-drop, minimalist shoe with almost no padding whatsoever. The result for lifting is that they provide a stable and solid platform for any vertical movement, allowing your stabilizing muscles to do their job, rather than fighting against the nonlinear flex of a normal running or cross training shoe.

They’ve already made a noticeable difference for my deadlift and standing overhead press workouts. Later this week, I’ll see how they are for squats!

Apr 272013
 
The bar end mirror I picked up to be legal for next weekend’s race. It’s not all that effective, but at least it’s unobtrusive.

Hindsight has a funny way of exposing ambition. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the German counteroffensive in the Ardennes, MacArthur’s push to carry the Korean War into China (complete with nukes)…

Likewise (but on somewhat a lesser scale), my target for an 80 mile road ride today may have been more ambition than good sense, in hindsight. I wanted to get an 80 mile average pace, so I could use it to figure out what race to register for next weekend. I’ve been debating between doing the 100 mile time trial, or the 6 hour endurance race. The idea was to get in a 100 mile road race on relatively flat terrain before the Tour de Cure, which covers some more challenging elevation changes. The downside of the time trial is that you’re released one at a time from the start, which means little, if any, drafting. The 6 hour is a mass start, which means plenty of drafting and pace lines, but it also means I would have to be fast enough to finish 100 miles in six hours.

So today I went out with an 80 mile target, 50 of which would be the big loop of the course for next weekend’s event. My starting conditions were less than ideal, again, in hindsight. Dinner last night consisted of a footlong brat, some pretzel-nacho-cheese-jalapeno thingies, and a couple beers at the ballpark. Today marked the seventh straight day of training, and my legs were still a little sore from deadlift on Thursday, with my chest just getting sore from my bench workout yesterday. In short, I was undernourished, under-hydrated, and under-fresh from the time I got up in the morning.

Still, I thought I could go out, with today’s near-perfect weather, and just set a conservative pace. It wouldn’t be easy, but surely I could just muscle through five hours or so on the bike…

Even saying that now sounds absolutely dumb.

What I had anticipated being a relatively pleasant, if bland, training ride soon became a harsh reality check. Although the wind was nowhere near as intense as my last long road outing, I also had nowhere to hide from it. As the first half of my route wound more or less into the breeze, I found myself vehemently cursing whoever decided to strip thousands of acres of farmland completely bare in order to grow feed corn. As if irresponsible, nonsensical farming of a plant you can’t eat isn’t bad enough, it also removes any and all wind breaks, which means you’re getting beat up by even the most casual breeze. While I started out bopping along at 17-18 mph, soon I was slugging through on the small ring, barely making 14.

And so went the next four hours. I slaved away into the wind along bumpy backcountry roads, trying to conserve water and maintain nutrition as best I could, but suffering with legs that just weren’t rested enough to push harder. At one point, after turning downwind onto a smooth stretch of pavement on State Route 41, I was so relieved by the ease of forward progress that I just put my head down and pedaled for awhile. Unfortunately, my respite also made me miss a turn marker, and I ended up in South Charleston, 4 miles out of my way, and with an additional upwind leg to get back on course.

By the time I finished the loop, I was just about exhausted. I had run out of water, only had 1 gel pack left (strawberry… ew), and had neither the juice nor the motivation to tack on the 15 more miles I needed to make it to my goal for the day.

So now I’m left with no answers to my original questions. I still don’t know if I’m fast enough to do 100 miles in under six hours, but neither do I know if I’m fit enough yet to ride for more than six hours in a time trial, if that’s what it’d take to make it to 100 miles. That said, the solution is obvious, if a little humbling. I need to just go ride the 6 hour, because that will still be the longest I’ve ever been in the saddle continuously, and it’s a logical step forward from the progress I’ve already made. If I get 100 miles out of it, great. If I don’t, well, it’ll just be another data point.

Apr 262013
 

Tonight I had the pleasure of attending my first pro baseball game, courtesy of two good friends of ours. This picture is the view that greeted me immediately at the entrance. For all the eye-rolling I’ve done at baseball through the years, the simple essence of Americana that is this view but a boyish smile on my face. There’s just something entirely right about this scene, and all that it represents.

Odd that I’ve never been to a Dragons game before, since they’re one of the better things going on in Dayton, but it just had never happened before. I don’t know what I was waiting on. Despite the fact that I’m simply not a baseball fan, I had a lot of fun! Turns out there’s a lot more to see than what the soda-straw perspective of the TV camera gives you, and the food, the crowd and the beer don’t hurt. In all, a very enjoyable evening, and one I can see myself replicating many times this summer.

Apr 252013
 

I’ve been through this car so many times I’ve lost track. The brakes, the engine, the exhaust, the stereo, the suspension, the wheels, the intake… I’m running out of parts on the car that I haven’t fixed or upgraded. It kinda drives me crazy. Today, it was replacing an inexplicably broken right rear caliper, and then the obligatory brake bleed. In a couple months, it’ll be some other thing, most likely.

But it’s not all bad. It’s paid for, it runs strong, handles well, and doesn’t look too awful. It’s carried me across the country several times, and for all its rattling, poorly fitted interior parts, its moronic brake system design and nearly catastrophic engineering oversights in the powertrain, it’s also very easy to work on when it does break.

At some point, the level of annoyance with this car will become sufficient to motivate me to replace it. I don’t know when that will be, but it wasn’t today. Barely.

Apr 242013
 

If I didn’t know better, I’d think I have some sort of problem. I’m starting to have an embarrassing number of shoes, for a guy. But really, it’s just a symptom of all the things that I do.

My intent had been, for my new road bike, to just use my mountain bike shoes. I liked that the cleats were recessed, they aren’t terribly heavy, and they vent okay. But the dealbreaker was, I was having to clean the mud off of them every time I wanted to ride my road bike, and that was getting both time consuming and tiresome.

So when I came across a closeout deal on last year’s Shimanos, I decided to jump on it. I haven’t pedaled in them yet, but they seem to fit just as well as my mountain bike shoes, if a tad more snug. And they don’t look half bad, either!

Apr 232013
 

Ever since I noticed that the nutrition choices that have been helping me lose weight are suspiciously similar to what I ate when I was a skinny kid, it seems like it’s become even more frequent. Lunchboxes like this kinda make me chuckle, because I’ve come full circle with my meals, it seems, back to what I was eating when I was nine. But hey, it works! Maybe I should write a book on it and make my millions, eh?

Apr 222013
 

It’s becoming my favorite time of year, again. I don’t really like Christmas, I don’t get excited for a lot of other holidays, but Spring… Proper Spring, with it’s explosion of colors and smells and sunshine and promise, the time of year when all of nature finally casts off the oppressive gloom and soggy misery of winter. Spring makes me excited. And it’s not properly spring until I’m cooking meat with fire, cold beer in hand.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is now Spring.

(As an aside, I got another ride in at MoMBA tonight, with some MVMBA peeps. I feel like I rode even better than I did yesterday! This bodes well for the race on Wednesday, if it happens.)

Apr 212013
 

I went out for a lap at MoMBA this afternoon. It was more wet than I expected, even to the extent that there were a few stretches I walked. But the sections that were drier were grippy, and the bike and my legs were feeling good, so I hammered it where I was able.

I feel like I’m riding better already this year than I did at any time last year, especially on the technical sections. On the hardest trail, Hawk’s Lair, there are a few features that have regularly given me trouble, but today I picked lines and muscled through them with unexpected ease. I can only think that all of the training I’ve been doing, and the resultant increase in leg strength, is finally paying dividends!

The first MTB race of the season is Wednesday, and I’m registered to race in the Sport class. Today was my last reconnaissance ride before the race, so here’s hoping it goes to plan! For today, though, I’m just a happy, dirty kid who had a nice ride on his bicycle.

Apr 202013
 

Today I had the blessing to be able to share in the joy of two separate groups of close friends.

For the first, a labor of love, as Katie and I helped them with a long-awaited move into a new house for their growing family.

For the second, a celebration of love, as two hearts and lives were joined before God in possibly the most beautiful wedding service I have ever had the pleasure of attending.

In a year that has already been filled with more than its share of trials, strife and sorrow, days like today act as the sunburst from behind the storm clouds. I am so happy and blessed to have been counted among the friends of two amazing families.

Apr 192013
 

Got a box of goodies in the mail today. This stuff should help make rides like the one I did yesterday go a little better. I had to stop twice to fill my water bottle, which was actually a little annoying. Thankfully, there were places where I could do so for free, since I managed to leave my house without any money. The little seat bag is pretty sweet! It’s a well designed piece of kit, and holds all the things I was scratching my head over the other day, which will help me worry a little less when I’m out in the sticks.