Riding on the SF peninsula. Aww yeah.

Drove to the park & ride at Highways 84 and 280 and had ourselves a 3 man ride. A lot of roads I hadn't ridden (on a motorcycle) in a long time, and never on a bicycle.

Rode here:

[Click picture to see a larger version]
It has a few hills.

[Click picture to see a larger version]

The climb up Old La Honda road is a good place to keep track of PR. Lap 2 sets the benchmark for me. Today was my first try.

I like the elevation profile.

This place was along the way on the return leg. Me likey. Was running short of water due to, shall we say, lack of planning.

Drive less? Ride more.

Rode over to the local bike shop yesterday. Swapped my old Hard Rock for one of these.

Liked it. Maybe not the lightest thing out there but it climbed OK and was very confidence inspiring on downhills and just begged you to go faster on the wide open trail. Brakes and drivetrain felt smooth and predictable and very user friendly. The saddle didn't look very comfort oriented but was actually much nicer than any of my current bikes. The quick adjust collar was so convienient I think I may get one for my roadie.

Resting up today for a scheduled 65 miler tomorrow. Riding volume may be up just a tad until I get myself behind a steering wheel again in a month or two.

Cardiologists have an unfair advantage.

Just because I had one random episode, which I still think was vasovagal, that caused me to pass out for no apparent reason, the cardiologist thinks that 2 weeks is not enough symptom-free time gone by to make it OK to do a sprint tri with an OWS. So sad for me. If actually getting to the event was not a problem as well I may have had a harder time accepting that advice.

Probably the workout for the day will be a 3 mile hike with the dog. Wheee.

1990 Specialized Hard Rock upgrades

Irony isn't the word, but this is the common mis-usage.

Was in the hospital when the event photographer from the last tri finally posted up the pics. Here's the two best ones. Finally, a shot where it looks like I'm actually running. Somewhat.

Managed 20mph in that position on the bike so I could only imagine how fast the pace would be there if I could get my torso flat.

Syncope.

Last Friday I left home in my truck to drive with my dog to the park. Had been up for about an hour. Hadn't eaten since the night before, but that is normal for me. Felt fine. It was shaping up to be a nice clear, sunny day and I was looking forward to the walk, then coming home and having some food, and having the whole day ahead of me. There would probably be a good workout later in the day.

However, we only made it half a block. Driving down the street I felt lightheaded for a second, thought I could shake it off, but the next thing I knew I was waking up from a blackout.

Several days later I now know that the lightheaded feeling was a sign my heart rate had dropped so low my brain was not getting enough oxygen and it shut me down. This unfortunately led to my now driverless car drifting into a neighbors driveway and clobbering their parked car. It was a small Honda and although my full sized Toyota truck can be as good as new with a new $200 bumper, the car may be totaled.

Since I can apparently black out with little warning now, the doctors told me not to drive until we can figure out what is going on.

A weekend of being hooked up to EKG monitoring didn't reveal anything, except that like many athletic people I have a low resting heart rate. An echocardiogram thankfully also showed nothing remarkable. 47,000 blood samples didn't show anything wrong.

When I first was admitted they stuck an IV hookup in me just in case they needed to use it later in a hurry. Maybe it was the insertion, maybe it was me moving my arm too much with it in there for 3 days, but I think it bothered the median nerve that runs along the inner part of your forearm. Like so:



My thumb, forefinger and middle finger are a bit tingly. Have tweaked other nerves before and had similar feeling. Have had worse and it got better, so it doesn't worry me much.

Stress testing later in the week to help try and pinpoint the cause of what may be allowing my heart to beat too slowly sometimes. Too bad it doesn't include VO2 testing because I'd actually like to do that. At least the cardiologist approved of the level of exercise I try and keep up as a healthy thing and not something to avoid.

New life for an old nail.

Not me. (The old nail that is.) A 1990 Specialized Hard Rock. Allegedly a contemporary mountain bike, but one not really equipped to stand up to much hard use. The bottom bracket alone was a serious weak point.

For a long time it was a light-use bike. It would go to the racetrack with my motorcycle. Racetracks are miles long and the pit areas can be vast. A bicycle is a great convenience. When I stopped racing the bike was rarely used. When I decided to start riding for fitness it wasn't hard to decide to get a newer, lighter, better bike -- one that is well built enough that it may be the last road bike I need to buy.

The new bike (Felt Z35) is great and a joy to ride. But recently it became an objective of mine to do more brick workouts. The optimal bike->run session would involve riding up into the Oakland hills from the house to the trails up top, and parking the bike there during the run. Leaving the "last road bike I need to buy" locked to a post just seemed like asking for trouble. Leaving a crusty old mountain bike is another story.

However, riding up an 800' climb on a 20 year old drivetrain (yes, the original chain, chainrings, cassette, derailer, etc.) was frustrating. The cranks wobbled, the chain jumped, the rear derailer walked across the gears on its own. Finally the shifter for the front derailer stopped being able to access the big ring.

A bit of internet shopping and a Deore crankset, new chain, new cassette, new Alivio rear derailer and shifters and some Park tools and it was time for a DIY update to the old bike, making it into a very functional sleeper. [Not to mention it taught me a ton about bicycle maintenance.]

It not only worked and made the thing fun to climb on again, but the parts are robust enough that you can cyclocross it if you dare and it can take it. Good times. This has really opened up my options for a greater variety of workouts.



Some knobbies might be a good idea for the steeper parts of the trail though (15% grade and up). It was a bit exciting with the street tires as seen above.

One last bonus pic just because the slight movement of the camera mid shot gave an impressionist quality to the trees.

[As always, click the picture to see a bigger version]

swimsense

This:

http://www.finisinc.com/equipment/electronics/swimsense.html




Kind of a cool device. At a high level, it relieves you of the burden of having to count laps, which can be kind of a drag after 30, 40 minutes plus. You can look at extra stuff like stroke count per length, and time per length.

First impression is that the hardware works but the software that lets you view your activity is still fairly beta. It confuses yards and meters frequently. If you swim in a 25m pool it will record your activity in meters and then display it in yards. Here is an example. Today I swam 2000m. (Lack of familiarity with the buttons meant I missed the first lap, so it recorded 1975m).



Note how it shows summaries in yards. And then on a goal I defined in meters, it put the number of yards I swam and labelled the unit as meters. Bah.

They seem pretty interested in improving the product. Hopefully this stuff gets sorted out soon.

Even as is, it looks like it will encourage me to swim more often and try more experiments in the pool since I'll be able to evaluate their impact clearly. Plus it will probably make me swim sets at different paces, etc. rather than just one long plod at a steady speed.

Will report later on the H20Friendly modified iPod shuffle I tried in the pool today as well.

Lucky

It's a good thing I've blogged about most of the June workouts, practice for the race, and the race itself. Why? Because all month long I'd been uploading data to my laptop from the Garmin and never clicking "save" on Rubitracks. Most Mac apps autosave when you make changes. This one does not and something crashed the app and 3 weeks of activity disappeared. Bah.

Today's ride was pretty good. Went to compare it to last week's ride on the same course. Nothing to compare it to.

Rage guy is appropriate once again.

Rest day

Was very tired yesterday after a hot bike ride in the hills. The short night of sleep before the race on Saturday was catching up with me.

Even so, it was hard today to not do anything. Maybe I could go to the pool and try out my H2Ofriendly kit. It can wait a day.

So instead there was browsing of new gear on the web and a drive over to Sports Basement to check stuff out. Picked up a race number belt, a few new water bottles for the bike, a few packets of HEED to test out, and a Brooks technical cap. Thought about getting a visor but this hat is very light, and my hair is super short (and or thinning to the point of gone) so a little extra protection seemed like a good idea. Plus those in the know say you can put ice under a cap which you can't do with a visor.