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Thursday, June 17, 2010

807

807 is the current odo reading on Ruby after my 15 mile ride yesterday. It was super hot, but I felt like a little ride. I need to pick the pace up to get to 2k this year.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Ready to Rumble

The Bath County Triathlon is this weekend so I wanted to do one last race simulation. I'm definitely not in good shape and the 600+ miles of driving this weekend didn't help. Despite my apprehension, it went a whole lot better than last time.

The only problem was the timing of my trip to the RAC. I couldn't get out at lunch so I had to wait until about 2PM when the usual afternoon thunderstorms were moving in. My swim was curtailed due to thunder. I did manage to get 8 laps in so it wasn't a total waste (about half the race distance). It was a tough call to ride outside but I decided to go for it because riding the exercise bike is painfully boring. After a short swim, I was strong on the bike and the storm cooperated, staying to the north for almost the entire ride. I got rained on at the very end of the 13 miles, but it felt pretty good with less than one mile to go. Next was a 5k on the treadmill. My legs were sturdy and I was able to do a respectable training pace (23 minutes).

A quick stretch and shower afterward and I was home in a little over 2 hours elapsed time. Hopefully, I'll feel as good on June 19th.  

Friday, June 11, 2010

Hit By A Train

The Bath County Triathlon is fast approaching and my carpe sofa lifestyle isn't helping me right now. I went to the RAC today to get a little training in. Since I was a slug yesterday, I figured I would try to do a race simulation today to get a gauge on my fitness. I brought Ruby with me and was planning on a nice outside ride and then running on the treadmill. It wasn't pretty.

In a break from normal routine, the swim was actually the best part for me. I swam 20 laps (1000 yards) and felt pretty darn good getting out of the water. It wasn't fast (24 minutes) but I'll take it. I dried off and hustled outside to get my bike. The ride didn't start off too well as I had to stop a couple of times for lights, traffic and railroad crossings. I went down from the RAC on 615 for a bit which has a number of sharp climbs on it. I knew it wasn't going to be fast due to heat and terrain, but the 13 miles took me 50 minutes and I was pretty tired afterward. From there, I went back inside and ran 5k on the treadmill. My legs were dead and I could only keep an 8 minute pace.

After finishing, I went into stretch and my back was killing me. I did a few things to loosen it up, but nothing was working (trying beer now). Hopefully, that was just a bad day. My stomach has been not feeling great today and I didn't sleep well last night, so I'll chalk it up to that and hope things go better in a week.

Monday, June 7, 2010

Tourney

We had a great time at the NCAA Lacrosse Tournament in Baltimore on Memorial Day weekend. Although all five of the games I saw were entertaining, I thought one of the best was the women's division I final between Maryland and Northwestern. We got there a little bit late (no exit sign for TSU on the Baltimore Beltway?) and Northwestern was up 8-3. After a lot of back and forth with plenty of fast breaks and not too much of the stalling that plagues the women's game, Maryland ended up winning 13-11.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

Train

I got up early yesterday and did a training run for our triathlon coming up in a few weeks. Since I've been sick and traveling, training has been a bit of a problem. Luckily, the Sheraton in Toronto has a really nice 25m outdoor pool (not really luck - I made sure they had a pool before booking). I was able to swim 750m, ride 20k on the exercise bike and run a 5k on the treadmill in about 80 minutes. Not very fast, but considering my doubts about whether or not I could even do it without considerable pain, it went well. Hopefully, I can get some good training in over the next two weeks!

YYZ-DTW-GSO-ROA

I had an interesting trip home from Toronto yesterday. Normally, this is a pretty quick trip but yesterday we had thunderstorms over Roanoke and they had to take us to Greensboro to land and pick up more fuel. We were about 2 hours late which isn't too bad considering.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

Rental

The other week at SFO, Hertz upgraded me from my usual boring midsize to something a bit more interesting - a 2011 Ford Mustang Convertible. Despite not being the higher end model, this car was a blast to drive and I really had to keep my eye on the speedometer, lest I find myself going way too fast. I took it up in the hills after a particularly frustrating day on the project I was doing and drove the heck out of it for 2 hours. The car handled very well and had enough get-up-and-go to keep you very entertained. After a beautiful drive through the redwoods, the day didn't seem so bad after all.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Lesson

I was flying to Toronto this afternoon and got hung up because the flight out of ROA had a mechanical issue (something was wrong with the door). Since I had a tight connection, I knew I would miss the original so I called the Delta service number to check to see if there was a later flight. There was and the rep on the phone said that if I missed my original I'd be re-booked on the later flight automatically. Fine.

We get on the plane and go. We arrive over an hour late and, as expected my original flight had already left. I went over to the kiosk, scanned my boarding pass in the machine that prints out a new one if you have a missed connection and was so confident that I was on the correct flight, I just started towards the gate. Halfway up the escalator, I actually look at the time and I was on the flight tomorrow morning. Idiots. So, I have to go back down the the customer service center and wait on line. While I'm waiting, I call the Delta service number again to see what happened. Turns out, the computer automatically pushed me to the next day and she was able to put me on the later flight today. I reprinted my boarding pass and all was good. 

I learned two valuable lessons: first, always call customer service if you run into a problem while in the airport. Second, you might have to do the first thing twice to get it right.