Wind. Threat or menace?

Took the chance to get in a workout this afternoon during another opportunistic gap between rainstorms. It was good to get one last effort in before the week long eat and drink fest that lies before me visiting with family.

It was extremely windy out there. On a long steep descent where I can usually hit 47-48mph just coasting if I manage to stay off the brakes, today the gusts were stripping my momentum and I was pedaling hard just to keep it around 35mph.

That power plugin for SportTracks is disappointing. It is all over the place and usually is wrong.

This may be the last of the graphs from it.

Giving the knees a break

Last week was all swimming. Hence no graphs or maps. Snuck in a bike ride last night between rain showers. Timing could not have been better. Roads had cleared of standing water but were damp. It bucketed down about 15 minutes after I got home.

Here's the somewhat dubious power graph using the power plugin for SportTracks. Calculated values are way more volatile than the actual effort was.

Forecast is for 4' of water in the shallow end, 5' in the deep end.

Today was probably the first day this season where a workout had to be changed due to weather. Biking was out. Swimming was substituted. The pool feels like a giant hot bath given how chilly I've been keeping the house. A cold rainy Sunday in mid December doesn't bring the families with kids to the pool. Good times for lap swimmers.

This may happen a lot more this week. The trails may finally get enough water that even when it isn't actively raining at a given moment, they'll be nothing but muck for days.

Runners toe.

This is the end result of damage incurred during the 18-20 mile range portion of the 6 month buildup to the last SF Marathon. Ran the race with it loose and it took about 5 months for it to decide to fall off. Blech.



Shoe problems that only show up in long (>6 miles) training runs are a drag.

Idle net surfing on an off day

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNwmpLPhoHw

Should be able to guesstimate how much this guy (including his gear) weighs with the formula posted earlier. That plus the grade of the hill.

Would love to see the readings from his HR monitor to go with the footage.

Time to invest in some cold weather gear.

So sad for me. I had to wear a jacket on today's ride and could have done with some gloves. All in all though it was another good ride and a great way to burn off the last traces of a hangover.



Having finally upgraded my main SportTracks instance to version 2, I submit to you a new style graph of the ride.

Back on the schedule

Felt good to get out. Got home from work, ate dinner and chilled for a bit and then went at like 8:30. More like a mid-July kind of time to run, but LED headlamps enable a whole new way of life. Better living through technology indeed.

Why is it so hard to remember that working out is good?

Took a break from a few regularly scheduled workout days to spend time with family and eat some turkey and drink perhaps a bit too much.

A mere 7 days from the last run and it takes all of my self discipline to get into my gear and get to the start of the trail. Inevitably, once the run is done I feel 10 times better than when I started. Repeat as necessary. But why is it so necessary? Another of the eternal mysteries.

Residual laziness does prevent me from uploading any kind of image with this post though.