Too hot and my legs are still way out of it. Somewhat surprised how bad they are right now. Guess the weekend still taking its toll. Glad I didn't run this morning... would have been very frustrating. Got out there this afternoon and it was a little over 90 degrees. Thought I was fine the first few miles, although sore. Then the wheels came off. For no apparent reason. Lots of leg pain. Just total stiffness. Oh well... hobbled in, am blogging it and will forget it.
First CompuTrainer ride in a while. Saw that Paul's back on his so, you know, had to be done. It had been upstairs. Now it's downstairs. Put the tri bike on it today. Nothing major. 187 avg watts, no heart rate. Hoping to run tomorrow morning but my legs aren't feeling fresh at all.
Thanks to Matt Silva of Phidippides who solved my Adidas Supernova Control mystery. He's running the Vermont 100 in a few weeks, has known about my blog for a while and saw the Adidas mystery. Turns out Adidas renamed them to the Adidas Supernova Sequence. The second version of said shoe will be out in early July at Phidippides. I'll be grabbing a pair. Thanks for the sleuthing Matt!
Ava asked me to tell her a story tonight. This is the first such request and I'm fairly certain my story about a blue dinosaur who went to Wal-Mart to buy Bitzel a birthday present wasn't the best premise. But she seemed to enjoy it. And then she told me a story about a little girl who draws pictures and covers a wall with them. She started it with "once upon a time." It was just too cute. I've got some story telling learning to do.
Ah, the Cartersville Century. A yearly ride. That I hate. But always seem to talk myself back into the next year.
Day started with me getting there about an hour too early.
Then I realized I had a flat tire. Have I mentioned that the Cartersville Century never goes well for me?
Hung with the lead pack for the first 50 miles which was what I did a few years ago. Actually, I held on longer this time and felt better but absolutely needed water at the bank rest stop.
Overdid the salt. Accelerade in the bottles. Salt tabs pre-ride. PowerGels with 4x sodium. My stomach shut down at about mile 30 and without water to dilute my innards I knew things wouldn't get better. Mark and I bit the bullet and grabbed some water while Linenberg and a now much smaller posse kept going.
Saw Keith at the bank but Marc and I were quick stopping it. Ended up leaving the stop in about two minutes. But now with only one other dude. About seven miles later my stomach gave up. Actually, that's not right... a second group did form and I rode with them for a bit but just didn't have the stomach. I wasn't processing water and was dehydrating.
So I backed off. And then I got lost. I thought I was following the CC markings but suddenly I found myself at the Bud Plant and the end of the ride! Except... it was the end of the wrong ride... I guess Beautiful Backroads. Suck.
Lots of shifting issues today. Rear was perfect. Front had problems. Could go to small chain ring no problem but going back up was a lot of work. I put my chain over and onto my pedal about twenty times. Saved it every time though. Just dramatic with all of the rollers.
In the end I was pretty close to the numerically pretty but overall irrelevant average speed of 20 mph. I didn't slow to a crawl. But I did have to slow to let my stomach settle. Unfortunately since I was off course I didn't get any more cold water. Suck part deux.
When I overheat I feel like my skin is on fire and like my body is about to explode. It's just that hot. Even though it was only about 88 or 90 out. It was humid and I was dehydrating.
Bonky eyes for the final ten miles. Lots of wrong turns through town but I eventually random walk algorithmed myself back to the car.
Did not feel good. Didn't barf but had the impulse. Bonky eyes. Way overheated. So I turned on the a/c and did what comes naturally.
Sent an inappropriate message to twitter, facebook and about 40 other social networks. Sorry ladies. The phrase "my va***a is broken" isn't appropriate in any context.
Grabbed some sprite and made my way home. Zoned out for a good while. Nice headache now. Unable to sleep... kinda that restless awake/nodding off feeling.
Overall happy with the ride. My training's been crap so far this year and I'm glad that I was able to hang at all with the lead group. Not the century finish with the lead pack I'd have liked but I have much more perspective these days. Plenty of time to add fitness between now and November.
Shouts to Cappy, Suobs, Keith, Linenberg and everybody else out there!
I hate the Cartersville Century. But I'll do it again and so should you. It covers a beautiful part of Georgia, it's well supported and there are always great people out.
Later I heard reports from people that it was "a bloodbath" at the front with people getting pulled, puking and otherwise exploding all over the place. Heat can be dangerous. Heat plus spandex can be deadly. Careful out there peeps!
Quick test ride today. Yesterday I worked the SRAM Red rear derailleur... tonight I worked the front. It's not perfect... my chain's old but I'm not in the mood to get a new one. Saw Dave Stewart right at the beginning and we rode for a while. Warm out today.
Microsoft Outlook is a big fat hairy beast of a program. It does its job well but takes up a lot of memory and cpu. Especially on a solid state disk (SSD).
So a couple weeks ago I started the process of killing Outlook. I moved my email hosting to Google Apps which essentially creates a joereger.com version of Gmail for me. Actually, I guess I began this process last year. I tried this approach in 2008 with pingFit's email and it worked well.
Once all the DNS changes were made and email was flowing to Google's servers (thanks Sr and Carlos) I set up IMAP in Outlook to see how it performed. Not bad. Not great. But not bad. Did I mention not great? I spent a couple weeks just watching it to see how Gmail/IMAP works. Each client has its own idiosyncrasies in how it handles folders, deletes, retrieval of headers, etc.
Earlier this week I started to consider the final push to completely cut the Outlook cord. I had to get my Gmail Calendar, Tasks and Contacts syncing with my phone. Not a big deal once I found GooSync.
ChatterEmail is an unsupported Palm client that supports IMAP + IDLE. This makes email work more like it does on the Blackberry... namely that email is instant. I did a test and sent an email to myself. It hit my phone in 22 seconds. Not bad.
A couple minutes ago in a lunch break from activity I decided to just pull the plug on Outlook. I'll start using the Gmail web interface from now on. I've also got Outlook running without POP3 as a backup if I need it.
What freedom, I can also use Thunderbird and any other IMAP client. The argument for IMAP in a web-connected world is that it keeps the mail on the server so there's less syncing to do. Gmail has an offline version powered by Gears which I can use when I'm on planes, etc.
As much as I wanted out of Outlook it really is a pretty good program. There will definitely be tradeoffs and challenges. ChatterEmail isn't supported and the download I've got says it'll stop working in 30 days. New email workflow to hammer out. I'm sure there'll be syncing issues. Etc, etc.
The hardest thing will be to not automatically turn on Outlook when I think about email. The best thing will be that I won't have any automatic notification about email. I've almost always got incoming email and the notification's always distracting me. Yes, I could have turned that notification off in Outlook. Yes, I can get a Gmail notifier. For now I like the silence!
I may end up going back to big O. Who knows. But after, what, fifteen years on Outlook I'm willing to experiment to see if there's a better way.
I remember the excitement of the "Thriller" video debut. You see kids, back when I was young MTV was an edgy music television station. And "Thriller" was the biggest thing on it. It had captivated the nation. I remember my parents not wanting me to watch it. But we had a baby sitter that night. So we watched it. I can still feel the excitement. Even at a young age I heard all about it for weeks prior. And this was in a time when we weren't bombarded with 5,000 commercial impressions per day. When we hadn't yet learned to tune out the cacophony. When music on television was still captivating. Those first few iconic chords. The beat. The zombies. Red leather n' curls. It was huge. That year I got my first Walkman (an old iPod, kids) and my first tape was MJ Thriller. Can't say I'm terribly sad tonight. But I am nostalgic. His music definitely captures a point in time. If he had gone on to make many albums this effect would have been diluted. And 50's too young, of course.
Wanted to get out onto pavement with the new SRAM Red before the weekend ride. The guys at Smyrna Bicycles really cleaned up the shifting. I thought I was enjoying it on the trainer... I really enjoy it on the road. Crisp shifting. Better fit... in fact I switched to a longer and more stable stem which feels great too. Rode out to mile 15 and turned around. About 19 out and 20.4 back in. Warm but not terribly hot.
Thanks to paige for the organic tip via the facebooks... and to anna for the greek tip... organic greek yogurt has a lot less sugar and hfcs. What's odd is that I didn't buy this yogurt and heather doesn't read my facebooks... just chance that she decided to bring some home for me to take over and use in my smoothies.
Quick ride today. Quick blog post. Made the switch to SRAM Red for $160 via some good deals on eBay. Only swapped shifters and rear derailleur. Like that brake lever doesn't shift. Shifting feels very crisp. Like feel of horns. Can feel how much lighter it is on front end... about 350 grams less... 3/4 lb... wow. Love the hidden cable routing. Don't think I'll have much trouble learning the shift mechanism. After the ride I dropped the bike at Smyrna Bicycles so that the experts could check my work... great group over there... if you're in smyrna check them out!
Heat training in the garage again. Only lost 3 lbs though (much less than lawnmower training) so obviously I wasn't pushing it hard. Worked something like intervals tonight... but free form... hit it hard for a while then relaxed.
May have identified one of the culprits in my knee pain... saddle height. I noticed that the seat had slipped down about 1/3 of an inch. And I had already been riding with it set too low. Set it up an inch, felt better about the form and felt less pressure on the knee.
Now what to do about tomorrow? My normal Wed long run day. But I still have this knee pain. And I'm doing Cartersville this weekend. May opt for something less than the long run.
In 2003 I went to Phidippides and chose the ugly shoes in a self-designed blind shoe test. I got the Adidas Supernova Control. What I really wanted were the cool looking Nikes.
But the Adidas Supernova Control served me well for a few years. Then, like Paul, I got a little crazy with some Saucony's. And then some North Faces. And then... and then...
Always coming back to the Adidas Supernova Control. They change the colors all the time and I usually hate them. Every now and then I like the color and spring for two pair at once. Sometimes they tweak the outsole but generally they're the same shoe. After six years with them I've seen the model number go from somewhere around 6 to 10.
So imagine my confusion when I searched Zappos (the best online shoe store in the known universe) and came up with very little. They do have some models but they're the GCS and the women's. What the?!?
I'm sure they're covering the control issue but I have no idea what the new model's called. I see the AdiStar control. And three or four others that seem to have control.
I like a heavy ass training shoe. That way when I race my feet feel fleet in the racing flats. Some of the new Adidas models advertise control plus low weight. Fail. And the AdiStar are expensive when you burn through these things. So maybe Response Control?
This Running Times article from 2007 mentions the New Balance 767 and Brooks Adrenaline GTS 7 as being similar.
What a pain. With 404 miles on the current pair and a nagging knee problem it's time for a new pair... of Adidas Supernova Controls! A little research and I'm sure I'll figure it out.
Heather's training for the Peachtree so we got up and took the fam to the comet. I wasn't in the mood, battling server issues. But we had a good run. Heather listened to her music and ignored me. I pushed the kiddos while listening to a steady stream of "On Your Left"s. Very humid and muggy even at 8am... we sweat out 82 gallons of water each. After the run I took out my frustrations on a stump with the chainsaw. Knee update? Twingy pain early in the run moving to pounded out numbness later in the run. Nothin' to worry about. P.S. who was it that said "Hi Joe" from the bike, riding with his wife/girlfriend (I assume)? Sorry I didn't recognize you!
Coyote in the Back Yard