We Walk the Same Line

By request, and because I've had a Hell of a long day.

A Quick Rant About Statistics and Reality

Slate carried a real gem today: You Can't Measure America's Grit: Hatred of sabermetrics comes to business and politics.  There were several great quotes, but my favorite is reprinted below.

KFC president Roger Eaton is lashing out at New York City regulations that require restaurants to post calorie counts on their menus. "KFC's Famous Bowls and Big Box Meals are so much more than the sum of their ample calories and saturated fats," Eaton explained in an impromptu speech at one of the chain's Manhattan locations. New York's disclosure laws, the fast-food executive continued, ignore more subtle health factors, such as the impact of saying grace before you dig in and the salutary effect of eating in a booth.

—New York Post, July 6, 2011, as quoted by Slate.com.

I’m not usually much of a stats-guy when it comes to sports, but these guys have pretty much proved to me that you can tell almost everything you need to know about anything from statistics.  You might hate it, but the truth is that the numbers don’t lie.

When did America become so anti-intellectual, anyway?  I swear, ever since George W. Bush refused to stop saying “nuke-u-ler” instead of nuclear, it’s like I don’t have a country anymore.  Have I changed that much, or have people just stopped caring about facts and instead started buying wholesale into their own personal delusions?  Even my church has been off on a rant lately about “new Earth creationism” and how there couldn’t ever have been any real dinosaurs because there aren’t any dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible.  Ugh.  Try explaining that one to a six-year-old would-be paleontologist. 

Honestly, it’s crap like that that’s been destroying my faith these last few months.  And I don’t mean my faith in America; I mean my actual, spiritual faith.  I want to believe, but it’s just so damned hard when you have these guys who refuse to believe in something as simple, mundane, and obviously factual as the existence of dinosaurs.  We found the bones!  How is this even a question anymore? 

Enough. 

Today’s gonna be one of those days when I’m glad my neighbors don’t read this blog.  It’s Wednesday afternoon, and here I am wrestling with my faith.  What’s the world coming to?

Tuesday Stray Voltage

·         My favorite commentator over at the Podium Café has a story out about five riders she wants to watch in this year’s Tour de France.  It’s a pretty good list and a decent primer for folks looking to get a handle on who some of the players are in this year’s race.

·         I ran some intervals last night.  I ended up going about 3.5-miles with a set of 5 x 2-minute Fartlek intervals as the centerpiece.  Despite being sleepy all afternoon yesterday, I felt great when I was running.  Ended up averaging just under 7:45/mile—pretty good for me.  I’ve been doing a lot of aerobic work lately, so last night was mostly about working the upper range of my heart rate reserve as well as sharpening my running form a bit.  I think I accomplished that.

·         Transformers: Dark of the Moon is off to mixed reviews.  The Republic liked it.  Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News not so much.  Eh.  As I type this, the movie is at about 35% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.  That ain’t too good.

·         Though I cringe as I type this, I find myself agreeing with Justice Clarence Thomas over Antonin Scalia in the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned a California law banning the sale of extremely violent video games to minors due to concerns over Freedom of Speech.  The majority of the court unfortunately ruled with Scalia in saying that video games are a form of speech, and that their sale cannot therefore be banned by the State of California.  Which is fine.  Except—as Justice Thomas points out—that the rights of minors are not the same as the rights of adults.  Thomas then goes off on a rant about 17^th and 18^th century parental morality that I think we can safely ignore, but his base point—that banning the sale of games to minors does not ban their access by minors because parents can still purchase said games for their kids so long as they consent to having their kids view them—is valid.  Bottom line, parents make choices for their kids every day.  That’s just part of the deal.  And just the same as I wouldn’t want some asshole to try to sell my kids pornography without my being aware of the attempt, so too I think I’d like to know about the attempted sale of violent video games as well.  Honestly, so long as parents are legally responsible for the actions of their children, I don’t know how you can reasonably restrict their ability to control their children’s access to media.  Either parents are responsible or they aren’t.  The distinction is not that hard to make.

·         I mapped the bike course for the Litchfield Hills Triathlon on MapMyRide.Com today.  If the site is to be believed, there are two Cat 5 climbs on the route.  The first is at the 14.5-mile mark and lasts just over a mile with an average 2.9% grade.  I cannot personally remember that one.  The second climb is at the 21-mile marker, and it lasts for basically the last two miles of the ride with an average grade of 3.4%.  I will tell you that the beginning of that climb is by far the easier part while the ending is much steeper.  It’s probably close to 6% at its worst.  Anyway, I saved the course map if you’re interested.  Lots and lots of people read my race report for that race, so I assume that those same folks would probably like to see what they’re in for when they get out there on the course this year.

·         By comparison, 6% is a relatively benign climb for the Tour de France.  At the Tour, they’ll average 9% or more for miles.  Which is just unbelievable if you ask me.  I can’t even imagine climbing something like that.

·         Last thing: we had a dip in readership last week, but it seems like things have picked back up since Sunday night.  Still, the comments have fallen off a cliff.  So.  If you see something you like around here, by all means, please feel free to leave a comment—even on an older post.  That helps me know what’s working here, and honestly, I think it makes it more fun for everybody. 

Monday Sleepy-Time Blues

It was a great weekend, but between Six Flags on Saturday, a full day of house-chores on Sunday, and swimming Sunday afternoon, I can’t stop yawning today.  Sally says she going out with her friends tonight to see Bridesmaids, so I suppose that means that I’m going to go to bed super-early.  Whoopee!

Actually, I really am looking forward to getting some good sleep tonight.  *sigh*  It’s like one of those, “You know you’re a grown-up when…” moments.

One of the things I did this weekend was to sit down with Hannah and Emma and start teaching them the differences between Wrath of Ashardalon and the full 4^th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons.  I only mention it because they made first characters who are basically exactly like they are.  Hannah made herself a dragonborn paladin, a holy warrior of virtue and renown, dedicated to the fight for truth and justice.  And yes, that describes Hannah to a “T”.  I often think she’s going to wind up in seminary.  Emma, meanwhile, made herself a changeling vampire—a dark and deadly little creature who looks cute and cuddly but who’ll rip off your face if you let her get too close.  This from the same girl who, at the age of six, insists that she will never have children because she doesn’t want them to interfere with the important work she plans to do as a paleontologist.

What can I say?  Sometimes life is wacky.

 If you’re wondering, Sally and I still presumably need to make characters if this idea of a family campaign is ever actually going to get underway.  Sally says she’s going to play a wizard.  That leaves me with the Leader role in our little family group, but I’ve not decided exactly what flavor of leader to make yet.  I was leaning towards playing a bard, but now I’m starting to think maybe we could use a warlord instead.  It seems like this group might be a little light without another strong melee character.

***

Six Flags was fun.  We rode roller coasters, and my kids loved them.  We took some pictures, too, which you can see below.  We even ended up buying Season Passes.  So, bottom line, I don’t know exactly when we’re going back, but we ARE going back, hopefully sooner rather than later.

That said, after we got home Saturday night, I was so tired I felt like I’d been poleaxed.  I went to bed at eight!  And I still woke up feeling exhausted on Sunday!

Eh.  I gotta start pulling myself together.  My Rest Week is over.  It’s time to get back on the horse.  I’ve got less than two weeks until the Greenwich Point One Mile Swim and four weeks until the Amica 19.7 Triathlon at Ocean Beach.  It’s time to get hot!

*yawn*

Have I mentioned how sleepy I am?

A Few Family Pictures

Hannah & Emma at the Hall of Justice

The Whole Super-Family!

Sally, Hannah, & Emma at Easter

The Girl Scouts parade on Memorial Day

Friday Mad Science: Rest Week Edition

Now that it’s Friday of Rest Week, I can begin to see just how necessary that rest really was. 

I typically train on a four week schedule: three weeks hard, one week easy.  It’s a little different than the way I trained as a swimmer—when we used to train eight or ten weeks hard and then three or four weeks easy—but at age 38, I find the four week schedule to be much more sustainable over time than a more hardcore approach would be.  It’s a lot easier on my body and a lot more conducive to the demands of real life.  Among other things, overtraining the way that young competitive swimmers do tends to make me grouchy, and nobody like a grouchy daddy.  Last week was actually Week 4 for me without a Rest Week, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that I started to notice decided grouchy tendencies in myself late in the week.

Still, it can be tough to diagnose overtraining by degrees of grouchiness especially because I think most athletes will want to treat emotional issues and general irritability with more training rather than less.  I dealt with my father’s death by taking up triathlon, I’ve been dealing with my mother’s death by riding my bike more and basically doubling down on the triathlon lifestyle, and along with all of that, my usual self-prescription for any issue of stress or emotional difficulty is pretty much always the same thing— swim, bike, or run.  Exercise gives a mental and emotional break from stress, and it gives an endorphin rush that helps, too.  And over time, you feel better when you exercise, which in turns makes you more resilient to stress.  So exercise is all good.  It’s even a little addicting, and it can therefore be quite difficult to realize when you need to back down.  The dedicated athlete does not typically respond to a sub-par workout by saying, “Obviously I need to start taking it easy.”  No, a more typical response by far is, “Man, what is wrong with me?  I need to start kicking it in the ass!  Come on, let’s go!”

This is why it’s good to have a plan.  This is why it’s important to stick to that plan. 

I wasn’t feeling particularly tired last week.  I had maybe two sub-par workouts.  Truth be told, had I simply gotten some sleep, eaten right, and planned my next set of workouts a little more carefully, I might’ve worked through it.  Probably would have.  But I would have kept getting grouchier and grouchier, and eventually, I’d have put myself at risk for an overuse injury.  This is part of the challenge of training for an endurance sport. 

Was I overtrained?  Probably not, at least from a technical standpoint.  For example, my resting heart rate wasn’t elevated.  But I was getting tired, I was getting grouchy, and as I’ve said before, it’s not like I’m on scholarship here.  And I was tired.  We can see that just by the fact that here it is Friday, and I’m only now starting to feel better.  I’ve got to be Daddy, Engineer, and Triathlete.  Bottom line, that takes balance.

Anyway, I’m feeling better now.  I’m gonna swim a little tonight, and then Sally, the kids, and I are all heading up to Six Flags: New England tomorrow for a day of rollercoasters, Batman, and Johnny Rockets.  Frankly, I can’t wait.

***

Alright, so you might’ve noticed that I’ve been putting up a bunch of YouTube videos recently.  I’ve been doing that basically because I’ve been trying really hard to have some kind of new content on the site every day, but I don’t necessarily have time to write a full blog post every single day.  So on the days when I’m basically swamped, I tend to just go to YouTube, grab something cool, and throw it up there.  You can feel free to watch or not, I don’t care, but I want you to have a reason to check the site every day, and if the possibility of an interesting YouTube video is enough to make that happen, then, well, I’m not too proud to use the tools that are available to me.

With that in mind, I’ll also mention that our new Honda Pilot came with satellite radio installed, and as you might imagine, I’ve been listening to nothing by Hair Nation ever since.

So.  Like “two great things that taste great together,” I’ve decided that what we really need around here is a new feature called Hair Metal Friday. 

Today’s installment is Great White’s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy.”

Just Passing on a Little Congratulations...

Now... tell me that movie isn't gonna be awesome.

Wait. This Is a Gaming Blog?

I asked for article requests the other day, and one of the responders said that he’d never been into D&D, but that he liked Axis and Allies and a few other strategy games, and did I think he’d like D&D? 

Short Answer: I don’t know.  Dungeons & Dragons isn’t so much a strategy game as it is a storytelling game with elements of strategy and statistics mixed in.  It is therefore a game that tends to attract engineers and math geeks, a population that is often male, detail-oriented, and interested in science fiction, comic books, and all kinds of other “nerdy” stuff.  There are lots of other role-playing games besides D&D, of course, but D&D is the most popular, probably because the folks who tend to enjoy the math and strategy embedded in the game also tend to imprint on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien orRobert E. Howard.  But it could also be because D&D was the first mover in the Role Playing Game (RPG) market way back in the day.  In any event, if basic math and cooperative storytelling sound like interesting game elements to you, then you’ll probably like D&D.  On the other hand, if you hate math, never cared whether Batman could beat up Spider-Man, or wouldn’t want your friends to hear your were playing Dungeons and Dragons under any circumstances, then chances are that D&D won’t be your thing.  There’s nothing wrong with that. 

Still, as Huey Lewis said, “It’s hip to be square.”  And that must be true because the fucking Green Lantern led at the box office this weekend with $54 million, and there is nothing cool at all about Green Lantern.  GL is as square as it comes.  So if Green Lantern can go mainstream—and the fucking Return of the King can win Best Picture!—then it is for damned sure that Dungeons and Dragons can at least gain market share.  The only thing that really works against that, I think as far as the major populace goes, is the game’s basic complexity.  Played over a table top, D&D takes quite a bit of skull sweat.

Back in the 1970s, insurance adjuster Gary Gygax used insurance actuarial tables to come up with a simple but revolutionary concept for gaming: if I attack you with a weapon, then there’s a certain probability that I’ll hit you with it, and if I hit you, I’ll do some amount of damage based on how hard I hit and what kind of weapon I used.  I can model the probability of hitting with the weapon and the amount of damage dealt with dice rolls, and I can improve the accuracy of my results if I use numeric modifiers.  So, for example, if I’m a barbarian chief with a magic sword, I might need modifiers for my basic strength and skill with weapons, my proficiency with a sword (as opposed to an axe or a magic wand), the level of enchantment that my magic sword is carrying, and anything else that might apply like advantageous position on the battlefield or the fact that an evil wizard just cast a Blindness spell on me.  All of that’s going to give me a basic calculation:

                d20 roll + Strength + Level modifier + Enchantment + Proficiency + etc… = Attack Roll

So I roll a 20-sided die, add in all the modifiers, and if the result is higher than the Armor Class of the thing that I’m attacking, I hit it.  After that, I roll to see how much damage I did.

That same basic mechanic underlies all of D&D.  I have some basic skill at something—hiding in shadows, picking pockets, reading an ancient magical text, bonking people over the head, whatever—and that skill is represented by a set of mathematical modifiers.  The influence of random chance is represented by the rolling of dice.  Add those two things up, and if I beat whatever score I needed to beat, then I succeed with whatever it was that I was trying to do.  If I fail, then I don’t.  Either way, as a Player I have to then decide how my Character will react and deal with the resulting situation.  When the game is running well, it turns on the actions and reactions of the Player-Characters rather than on the repeated rolling of dice, but the dice are still a decided part of the game. 

Which is kind of the point.  Gygax used probability and insurance theory as a way to model combat for gaming.  But what you do with the ruleset he created is a thing he left more or less entirely up to the folks who bought his game.  In D&D, you have a referee, called a Dungeon Master (DM), who sets up situations for the Players and who controls the monsters and the environment.  Against this, the Players build Characters (called Player-Characters or PCs) that they then walk through the adventure that the DM has created.  The situations are sometimes represented using a map, but the action really takes place in the players’ minds, and it’s important to understand that and buy into it if you’re going to play the game.  You have to imagine yourself in the game and act it out.  When everybody at the table does it, that’s when it works.  If you think this whole conversation sounds ridiculous, then D&D probably isn’t your game.  It’s not for everybody.

To me, playing D&D is a lot like writing a comic book.  As a DM, I’m basically scripting the adventure.  But the writer of a comic is NOT the guy who makes that comic come to life.  Just as a comic writer needs lots of help to make a comic, so too a DM needs lots of help to make an adventure.  I might have an idea for my Players, but it’s their Characters who star in the story.

Still not sure?  I recommend the Critical Hit podcast from MajorSpoilers.com.  Listen to a few episodes, and if you like what you hear, give D&D a try.  Otherwise, well, there’s lots of other stuff you can do with your time besides playing D&D.

A Few Words about Supplements

I don’t want to do a whole thing about this, but Niki asked me what supplements I take, and I don’t want to dodge the implied questions, either.  On its face, the answer’s easy: I take a daily multi-vitamin, and I take an Omega-3 supplement—flaxseed oil or fish oil—to promote joint lubrication.  I’m not sure that science supports the need for either, but I still take them because I see no reason to risk lower performance based on some slight but real vitamin deficiency.  Plus, I’ve had enough little nagging knee injuries that I’m almost willing to try anything to keep my knees working right and therefore keep training.  For what it’s worth, anecdotally, it does seem like my knees and whatnot have been working a little better since I started with the Omega-3s.  Certainly, there’s no reason to stop take them.

With all of that said, the Hell of being a triathlete is that it tends to be an older person’s sport, and getting older sucks.  Your typical triathlete is a former standout athlete of some kind—swimmer, biker, runner, whatever—who just wants to keep doing what he or she has always done. 

I think my story is fairly typical.  I swam competitively for eleven years, but when I graduated from college, I stopped competing, stopped training in any kind of organized way, and basically let myself drift.  Fifteen years passed.  By the time I met Sally, I was back in the gym regularly and trying to get back into running, but I was also still out a lot at nights, and I wasn’t racing or really training for anything, and I knew that something was missing from my life.  Fortunately, Sally encouraged me to train a little more seriously and to enter some road races with her, and that made both of us better, happier people.  Eventually we got a pair of bikes, and it was a natural evolution to give triathlon a try.

The rest is history.

The thing about triathlon is that I’ve always been an athlete, and so in dedicating myself to the sport, I’m basically just re-dedicating myself to being who I really am.  With that said, I like triathlon because it’s different every day.  I’ll never be the swimmer I once was for a variety of reasons.  But triathlon is a new sport, and I can be the best triathlete that I’ve ever been, even now in my late 30s.

So that’s why triathlon is good.  What sucks, though, is that most masters-type athletes only rediscover their passion for training and competition once they’re into their 30s.  For my money, you have to get to a place where the bars aren’t fun anymore to be a truly dedicated adult athlete.  You have to know that you’d rather spend three hours on your bike than three hours at the local pub.  Otherwise, why are you even out there?  Nobody’s on scholarship anymore.  Nobody cares if you miss a workout.

I bring all of this up because it touches on supplements.  As an adult athlete, I can remember what it felt like to go FAST.  Sometimes, I can even still go fast.  What I can’t do, though, is go fast consistently and then recover quickly.  Not anymore.  These days, the threat of injury is ever-present.  If I over-work, I get hurt.  Thus, if I want to train consistently, I have to train smart.  Which is kind of how I’ve come to know something about the sport. 

But there are other ways to do it.  I can certainly understand the impulse to go looking for some more powerful supplements, ones that will help you go faster, recover quicker, be better.  After all, most guys are just trying to be the same person they’ve always been.  Something that helps with that, say HGH or synthetic testosterone… I can understand the temptation there.  I don’t condone it.  But I can understand it.  Personally, I would never risk my health for the sake of sport because, bottom line, I have a family to feed, and for as much as triathlon is a great hobby and lifestyle, it’s still just a sport.  Meanwhile, my kids actually need me.  I hope most other amateur triathletes will make that same calculation.  But who knows?  I can only know what’s right for me.

So.  We all want to take whatever supplements are necessary and helpful, but at the same time, there aren’t any magic bullets—no legal and safe magic bullets, at any rate.  The only good, safe way to train is with proper diet, adequate sleep, and a healthy dose of education and planning.  What that means as we age is that we have to take more time off, work at a slower pace, and go longer instead of harder.  It is what it is.  That’s why I try to think of triathlon as a journey rather than as a destination.  So yeah, I try to make the most of each stage of the journey, but it’s also important to remember that we’re not actually trying to get to the end of the race.  We don’t sort of finish with triathlon, and then we’re done.  With that in mind, we can realize that we we’re not really in a hurry to get where we’re going.

***

On a slightly related note, as I’ve mentioned here before, it’s almost time for the Tour de France.  And now more than ever, there’s no reason not to watch.  Football is locked out, basketball and hockey are finished, and baseball has yet to heat up.  Practically the only sport on TV is pro-cycling, and the Tour is cycling at its best.

If this is your first Tour, let me recommend the coverage over at the Podium Café, SB*Nation’s cycling blog.  I mention this because I noticed today that they’ve already got a couple of previews up.  The best is probably their Yellow Jersey Preview.  Enjoy!

Weekend Round Up: Father's Day Edition

I didn’t get quite as much done this weekend as I’d hoped. 

In setting up this part of the season—leading up to the Amica Ocean Beach 19.7 (Sprint) Triathlon on July 24^th and the Litchfield Hills Olympic Triathlon on August 21^st—I’d been planning to focus these last two weeks on swimming and running.  Why?  A couple of reasons.  First, I feel like I’m riding reasonably well.  Because of my commute, I’m on my bike at least a little almost every day.  And then, too, I finished a metric century just two weeks ago, and I felt great for at least the first fifty or so miles of the ride.  My longest race of the season only has a 24-mile bike leg, so I think I’m in pretty good shape there.  And in any event, you can’t focus on everything every week.  Meanwhile, both my running and my swimming need the work.  Running is a perennial weak spot for me, and that same race with the 24-mile bike leg has a 6-mile run right afterwards, a run which I happen to know is gonna hurt me a lot more than the bike leg will.  As for swimming, well, one of the things I promised myself this season was that I was gonna make a real effort to do well at the Greenwich Point One-Mile Swim.  That race is Saturday, July 9^th, two weeks before Ocean Beach and a full six weeks before Litchfield Hills.  Translation: I’ve got some time now to put some emphasis into swimming, but after July 9^th, I’ll need to switch my focus back to riding and running, and I’ll need to keep it there.

That said, the Greenwich Point One-Mile Swim is not the only reason it’s a good idea for me to spend time swimming now.  The other reason that I’ve been swimming more this season—besides the fact that I just like to swim—is that swimming is a safe way for me to put in extra training volume.  Because look, training for an Olympic triathlon is decidedly not training for three separate races run in sequence.  It’s training for one long race with three separate disciplines.  For me, an Oly is a two-and-a-half to three-hour effort.  And if I’m going to be racing for that long, then I need to be ready for it.  I need to put in enough aerobic volume ahead of time to be able to handle that length of continuous effort on race day.  And like it or not, I CANNOT run for three hours straight.  My knees won’t survive that kind of training.  So the best ways for me to go long are on the bike or in the pool.  With these last two weeks being Run/Swim Focus weeks, that means that the majority of my volume needed to come in the water.

Unfortunately, this past week was kind of a wasted training week.  I rode my commute four times for a total of about 44-miles, and on Thursday I ran a 4-mile tempo run, but that was all.  I never managed to get in the water during the week, and I certainly didn’t get that second mid-week run I’d been hoping for when I set up the idea of a two-week Run/Swim focus.  So that left me needing to swim twice on the weekend and hoping to get at least one long run sometime during the weekend as well.  Considering that it was also Father’s Day weekend, I didn’t like my chances for getting through all of that.

Before we go on, let’s define a couple of terms:

·         Tempo – Tempo pace is fast.  When you work at Tempo, you’re pushing but not killing yourself.  Certainly you’re not going hard enough to be doing Speed Work.  For me, Tempo pace is probably 80% to 85% effort.  In heart rate terms, that’s gonna be somewhere north of 160 beats per minute (bpm) but below 170 bpm.  You do tempo work in order to train your body to go fast over time.  For example, if you do a 5k road race, and you feel like you want to die afterwards, you probably need to do more tempo work.

·         Aerobic – Aerobic pace is the pace that you can maintain over an extended length of time.  It’s aerobic as opposed to anaerobic exercise, meaning that you’re using oxygen for your metabolic processes no faster than you’re taking it in via respiration.  You’re therefore not creating lactic acid in your muscles, which is why you can maintain that steady pace over time.  Moreover, when you’re working at an aerobic pace and doing it correctly, you ought to be burning more fat for fuel than glucose, which is why you’ll sometimes see a sticker on the side of the treadmill in the gym that talks about your “ideal fat burning zone” being between around 60% and 80% of your max heart rate.  That “ideal fat burning zone” thing is the purest bullshit, but it is true that those long aerobic efforts tend to rely more on fat for fuel than they do simple blood sugar.  For the triathlete, aerobic work is base training.  You want to go at between 70% and 80% effort.  For me, that means a heart rate of between 145 and 160 bpm.

·         Speed Work – Doing speed work is practicing to go as fast as you can.  You do not take heart rates or measure effort level during speed work.  You just go as hard as you can go.  That said, triathletes typically do very little speed work.  Still, speed work has a decided if limited role in endurance training, especially when you’re trying to come around to your peak form of the season.

·         Active Recover – You don’t have to necessarily kill yourself every single time you go out.  Sometimes it’s good just to get out there and stretch, work the kinks out, and maybe sweat a little.  That’s Active Recovery, and it should be done at around 50% of max effort.  For me, that’s done at maybe 120 to 140 bpm.  When I do active recovery, I tend to just warm up and then stop and stretch.

·         Glucose – Glucose is sugar.  Usually when we talk about glucose, we’re talking about blood glucose, meaning the level of sugar that’s dissolved in your blood.  Your body always burns a mix of glucose and fat for fuel, but when you’re going fast, you tend to burn more glucose.  Glucose is also the only fuel that your brain can burn.  Moreover, glucose is a finite fuel whereas every human has an almost inexhaustible supply of fat, even super-skinny marathon dudes.  Therefore, one of the main tricks of being an effective triathlete is learning to maintain adequate blood glucose over time during extended efforts.  This is especially tricky when you’re racing.  It is for this reason that we say “Nutrition is the fourth discipline of triathlon”.  There’s a whole science to eating during a race in order to maintain your blood glucose for best possible performance.

·         Bonk – You “bonk” when your body runs out of blood glucose.  It is not at all fun to bonk. 

I mention all of this to show what some of my concerns are when setting up a typical training weekend.  Not only is it hard to find the time to train on the weekends, it’s also hard to balance those training times with the need to eat regularly.  On the other hand, if you don’t eat, you’ll have no shot at all of training well.  For me, keeping my blood sugar up during a long mid-morning or late afternoon workout is the most consistent pain-in-the-ass thing that I deal with in my training.

So.  I was planning to swim Friday, do a long Swim/Run brick Saturday morning, and then do another, much shorter Swim/Run brick on Sunday.  Ideally, I wanted to put in about 2000 yards of short tempo work on Friday, about 3000 or so yards and 5.5-miles on the road on Saturday (fast aerobic pace), and maybe 1500 yards and 2-miles or so on Sunday (easy, almost active recovery pace).  But Sally called while I was on my way home on Friday and asked me to stay home.  She was tired from a long week, and honestly, by the time I got home Friday night I was more than ready to give her what she wanted and take the night off.

Unfortunately, that upped the ante for Saturday morning.  So now, instead of doing maybe 2500 or 3000 yards, I wrote out a full 3500-yard workout and then packed a Power Bar and a bottle of Gatorade to try to maintain my blood sugar for a long run after that long swim.  Which was a fine plan.  I mean, training to run when you’re tired is a necessary evil, and so is training with nutrition over an extended period of time.  So we headed to the pool, Emma got in the water for her lesson, I got in the water for my workout, and Sally and Hannah started doing yoga.  My workout was:

5 x 100 free @ 1:40 – warm up

5 x 300 free @ 4:15 – main set

8 x 50 kick @ 1:05

500 pull

100 easy

8 x 50 @ :50 – alternating fly/free

100 warm down

That took not quite an hour and a half.  I’d planned to do mostly tempo-type pace work on the main set and speed work on the fly/free 50s at the end of the workout, but I fell off my pace on the last of the 300s and then ended up doing the rest as a kind of fast aerobic workout.  That said, the last set of 50s was tough, and when I finished it, I was rocking a heart rate of probably 175 bpm.  It took that much effort just to hold my stroke together, maintain my pace, and make the interval.

Got out of the water, took a shower, and waited for the girls to get out.  Since they also had to shower, this ended up taking a while, and by the time we got home, I was STARVING despite the Power Bar and the Gatorade.  Moreover, the sun was high in the sky, and Sally suddenly started talking about the auction at my mother’s house, which it turns out was actually scheduled for Saturday rather than Sunday. 

So the moral of the story is this: if you want to do a swim/run brick, take your shoes with you to the pool. 

As it was, my weekend workout plan came apart on the spot.  I ended up spending the next few hours trying to get our new fax/printer/scanner set up, only to discover that the print head was defective.  Several maddening hours ensued during which my mother’s house and all of her remaining effects were auctioned, and after much wailing and gnashing of teeth, we eventually got all of the forms we needed to sign sent over via email, printed out, signed, and then ready for faxing back to Tennessee. By mid-afternoon, Sally and Hannah went to go take care of that stuff, Emma went to a birthday party, and I finally got out for my run, but by then it was HOT.  I’d wanted to go five miles, but by the time I actually got out of the house, the sun was blazing, and I ended up cutting it short.  So I ran four miles in thirty-four minutes—almost exactly an 8:30/mile pace, all aerobic work.  And no real complaints.  I mean, sometimes you just have to take what you can get.  Plus, I felt better running on Saturday than I’d felt earlier in the week, and that by itself was worth something right there.

Sunday was Father’s Day, and I’ll spare you the recap save to say that I did eventually make it to the pool, but I never made it out to run.  Still, after my little swim workout, the girls and I played MONSTER, and that’s always fun. 

Bottom line, being a successful triathlete is often about balance.  Balance you need to go fast with your need for endurance.  Balance your nutrition, hydration, and pace.  Balance your training across three separate disciplines.  And balance your triathlon obsession with the rest of your life and your family.  I came down on a different side this weekend, but looking back, that’s probably exactly what I needed.

GI Joe Renegades

On the heels of having watched GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, the girls and I sat down to watch the GI Joe marathon on Hub.  They were alternating GI Joe: A Real American Hero and a new show that I'd never heard of before, GI Joe: Renegades.  Kind of GI Joe-meets-the-A-Team.  Nice concept.



Needless to say, a good time was had by all.

Comics for Girls: Spider-Girl

I have two kids--both girls--and all three of us like comics.  Moreover, my oldest, Hannah, seems like a natural-born comic geek.  She draws and writes constantly, and at age 7, she's already producing an average of two illustrated short stories every week.  She even has her own super-team, The Faith League, a Christian team comprised of Horse-Girl, Snake-Girl, Cape-Camp, and Cape-Camp's dog Camper, along with their arch-nemesis Fireball, and for her next project, she wants to collaborate with me on a graphic novel called Night Wars, the script for which is already about a month late.  In my defense, I'll just say this: if you've never tried to write a comic script for your seven-year-old, it's a lot harder than it looks.

The cover for Batgirl #21

In any event, my girls and I like comics, but finding comics that you can read to your six- and seven-year-old is hard, and if they're girls, it's even harder.  They're carrying Batgirl and Batman: the Brave and the Bold on their Pull List at the Local Comic Shop (LCS), but both of those titles are a little frustrating for them.  Batgirl's frustrating firstly because it's written for a much older audience and secondly because it's just not that good.  The art is mediocre at best, and the storytelling jumps around so much that it's often hard to follow.  Batman: the Brave and the Bold is better, but it's not great by any means, and it's definitely not a comic for girls.  Which leaves us looking constantly for something we can all read together and actually enjoy.

We picked up the new Spider-Girl, numbers 1-3, with some trepidation.  Every once in a while, either Marvel or DC will do some kind of ridiculous pandering stunt to try to pull in new readers from a new demographic, with Spider-Girl being a recent example of the ways in which that can go hideously, horribly wrong.  There have been several Spider-Girls, of course, but the most recent version of the character was a Brooklyn-based Latina named Anya Corazon.  Now there's nothing wrong with making a Latino character based out of Brooklyn, but my experience with Latinos from any borough is that unless they're actual immigrants, they're English is generally pretty standard American English.  They don't, for example, talk like Handy Manny or Dora the Explorer.  You look at Jennifer Lopez: she doesn't exactly struggle with the language.  Yes, she can speak Spanish, but that doesn't actually degrade her English.  Which is why I have to call it pandering when they make a Latino Spider-Girl and then have her run around speaking some kind of ludicrous Spanglish.  And clearly somebody agreed with me because the original Anya Corazon Spider-Girl was cancelled after a mercifully short run.  This new Spider-Girl is a therefore a re-boot, albeit one that's still in continuity with the original even though it's executed with a far different design sense.

Spider-Girl #1

The good news is that the new Spider-Girl is really good.  Anya comes across as a typical high schooler--albeit one from a Latino family--this time living in downtown Manhattan.  And her adventures are refreshingly down to earth.  For example, the first issue has her dealing with street crime and chaos while the Fantastic Four fights a monster nearby.  That juxtaposition gives us as readers a nice frame of reference for how the new Spider-Girl sees herself and her mission.  She's not trying to save the world; she's just trying to help a little in her neighborhood--because she can.  Beyond that, the story is intensely personal and heavy on internal monologue.  Which is fine.  I mean, comics are also a literary medium, and there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of that fact, so long as the writing is good.  In the three issues we've read so far, I think writer Paul Tobin is right on point.  Anya is a interesting and largely introspective girl.  Her struggles are personal struggles, and she deals with them in a way that I think most readers can understand.

More than the story, though, the thing that I really like about the new Spider-Girl series is the art.  Most comics are written--and drawn--for overage horn-dog fanboys in their mid-30's, and that tends to turn girl heroes into a vapid, half-naked booby-girls.  I can't and won't read that to my daughters, and it frustrates me to no end.  Which is why I was super-happy to see that Anya's new costume is actually a whole-body affair, and that she's drawn with a realistic, athletic figure.  Moreover, the actual sequential art is both well-drawn and plenty clear.  Even six-year-old Emma had no trouble at all following the story.  That in itself was awesome.

So.  We're gonna pick up the rest of the back issues of Spider-Girl next time we go to the LCS, and we're adding the ongoing series to our Pull List.  I genuinely enjoyed reading Spider-Girl, and I felt comfortable reading it to my daughters.  That's such a vanishingly rare combination in a comic that I'm actually super-excited to see what's gonna happen next.

Requests for... Requests

Okay, so I've noticed that traffic has picked up a bit.  Over on Facebook, my friend Niki asked me if I could maybe film myself swimming and post a swimming workout or something, and she asked what supplements I'm taking.  That's good because it gives me something to write about, although to be honest, I'm not sure I'm gonna film myself.  Still, it's good to have something to write about that folks'll actually want to read.


So.  Requests?  Anybody got another topic you want me to cover here?  Movie reviews?  Comics?  I'm easy, but it'd be nice to get some more comments and more discussion around here.

Post-Run Postmortem

If you’re wondering, last night’s run wasn’t all that great after all.  I felt good yesterday afternoon, and I felt like I rode reasonably well during the ride back to the Harlem train station after work, but then I spent an hour on the train heading back to Stratford before riding the last mile to my house, so that by the time I got home, it was after 6:00.  Honestly, at that point the last thing in the world that I wanted to do was to go run.  But that was the only time I had, and I knew that I needed to put in at least some miles during the week, like it or not. 

I made myself some Gatorade and then popped a handful of jellybeans in an attempt to raise my blood glucose long enough to get some temporary motivation, and then I went out to stretch.  That worked well enough, and fortunately, that last mile on the bike had at least warmed my legs a little.  I eventually headed out around 6:20, iPod set to a mix of Tool, Tears for Fears, Van Halen, Daughtry, and a selection of cuts off of Slash’s recent solo album.  I started out trying to keep my cadence high while holding my effort at or below an aerobic threshold—roughly 80% effort or less.  Or, to put it another way, I started out trying to take it easy while simultaneously holding decent form.  But that’s a tough balance for me personally because my cadence has a tendency to fall when I’m either tired or just running easy.  Which is another way of saying that I’m a natural over-strider, but over-striding can lead to injuries.  To keep my cadence up, I have a choice of either shuffling along with teeny-tiny steps or just pushing a little harder to maintain better turnover—and better form—naturally.  So, bottom line, yesterday’s run was about finding some balance between relaxed pacing and proper running form.

In any event, the jellybeans Tool’s Ticks and Leaches carried me through about the first mile or mile and a half, and after that, I had to start gutting it out.  It wasn’t as bad as all that, but that third mile took some real effort, and if not for a couple of timely up-tempo songs off of Slash’s album, I suspect that last mile would’ve sucked a lot.  Regardless, I got back home just before seven o’clock—total run: four miles exactly in 33:09.  That’s right at 8:15/mile.  That’s not quite a tempo run for me, but it’s a touch faster than I’d meant to go, and it took considerably more effort.  I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not.

I got home to find Sally sitting on the front porch with a glass of wine and the phone, talking to her sister.  She’d worked the morning at her job with Birth-to-Three and then taught art to kiddos for the City of Stratford in the afternoon.  She’d therefore ordered pizza for dinner, and after I got home, I had maybe ten minutes to stretch before that pizza arrived.  I did some ab work while my kids set the table, paid the pizza dude, and then took a quick shower while Sally and the girls started eating.  After that, I read Super Dinosaur #2 to the girls and then put them to bed, and then Sally and I sat down and watched Covert Affairs on Hulu.  I was in bed at 9:30.

And I was up this morning at 5:00.  I felt tired and a little hung-over, which tells me that I probably didn’t drink enough water when I got home last night.  Also, my legs were a little more sore than usual, and my right knee is aching where I had the plica earlier this year.  Again, that’s probably caused by a mix of dehydration and inadequate stretching, especially post-run.  I’m sure the rain outside didn’t help.  But truth be told, I was just as happy to see the rain because I think my legs can probably use a day off from the folding bike.  In any event, when I go for my long run this weekend, I’ll have to make sure to wear my knee brace, or I’ll be risking injury—a concrete example of why stretching is important and what the consequences are when you fail to train properly.

Tonight’s a swim night, and I’ll do my long swim of the week Saturday morning.  I’ve got to give some thought to balancing those workouts—and the necessarily short recovery time between them—but that’s at least a surmountable problem.  In the meantime, there’s a whole day to get through, along with all of its inherent challenges.

Yo Joe!

The good news is that the movie was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.  In fact, there were parts that I enjoyed quite a bit.  If you haven’t seen it, Rise of Cobra tells exactly the story that the title implies; it’s an origin story for Cobra, especially Cobra Commander, and for the old cartoon series’ perpetual male lead, Duke.  There’s some other crap in there about high-tech weapons and something that someone in another, dumber universe might possibly conceive as a critique of the military-industrial complex and the ongoing privatization of the Pentagon weapons procurement process, but mostly the movie’s plot is a vehicle for far-fetched car chases and other often extremely wacky action set pieces.  And perhaps not surprisingly, those are the parts of the movie that I liked the most.  For example, there’s a car chase set in Paris that I thought was absolutely brilliant.  The chase itself is cleverly constructed with action shots that built through a series of hits and near-misses to a crescendo of wackiness that’s at once exhilarating, wildly implausible, and fully committed to delivering on the implied threat that the sequence’s antagonists represent.  On top of that comes the fact that the sequence itself is nearly all CGI, but the CGI is so well done that it actually looks real.  That’s a help with both suspension of disbelief and the sense of danger surrounding the characters.  Which is to say that you’re not worried about Scarlett when it’s obvious that “Scarlett” is really just a CGI construct drawn onto a blue-screened cartoon backdrop, but when you can’t tell which shots are real—when a real, live actress might actually get crushed by a truck—and which are CGI, it’s a lot easier to just let go and just believe.

All of that is not to say that there aren’t a host of valid critiques of the movie.  Even for a dumbass summer action flick, this movie had moments that were either so idiotic or so poorly constructed that they yanked me completely out of the story.  For example, GI Joe is supposed to be this team of international super-commandos comprised of the very best soldiers that NATO and the Western powers have to offer.  And yet, when Scarlett gets on a treadmill, the actress that plays her, Rachel Nichols, runs so badly that it looks like she’s never actually been on a treadmill in her life.  I don’t get that at all.  And then, too, GI Joe is supposed to be “A Real American Hero”—and not an international super-team—but for whatever reason, the script has these guys based in the middle of the Sahara, and half the characters seem to be recruits out of the French Foreign Legion.  Which is annoying on a couple of levels, not the least of which is that no one in NATO actually wants to fight anymore, even when the fight itself is their idea.  I mean, come on.  The French Foreign Legion?  When was the last time those guys did anything?  Everyone on Earth knows that if NATO were to put together a team of super-commandoes, it would be fitted out entirely with American soldiers and American gear along with a tiny smattering of British SAS troopers and a single, rock hard Canadian with adamatium claws.

So, bottom line, I liked GI Joe okay, both because of and in spite of its ridiculousness, and against all odds I find myself hoping that they make a sequel.  I particularly liked the action sequences through the movie’s second act as well as the way that they made Rachel Nichols’s boobs into almost their own separate character.  Inch thick Kevlar vest?  No problem—as long as it’s covered with skintight rubber that shows off Rachel’s rather substantial rack.  Additionally, I thought they did a nice job on the Baroness and Stormshadow and a couple of the other major supporting characters despite the nigh-unforgivable absence of Leatherneck.  In summary, GI Joe is a fine way to spend your TV watching evenings until Burn Notice and Royal Pains start back up.

***

By the way, while we’re discussing Rachel Nichols’s rack, let me go ahead and point out that Ms. Nichols is playing the female lead in this summer’s Conan re-boot, which is yet another reason to be excited about the new Conan movie.  God willing, they’ll be true to the original Robert E. Howard short stories, and she’ll be naked for at least three-quarters of the movie’s total running time.

***

Last note: I’ve been sitting at this fucking computer screen for so long today that I feel like my head is about to explode.  After my long run on Sunday, I took Monday off, and then it rained Tuesday, and then last night the Life Insurance Salesman came by, so that instead of swimming, biking, or running, I got to talk about death and saving for my kids’ college funds (yippee!).  Never mind that Sally and I both put ourselves through both our undergrad and graduate degrees, apparently folks actually pay tuition for their kids, and we’re probably gonna have to do it, too.  Ugh.  I personally do not believe in paying tuition—at all—but against the possibility that I cannot convince our daughters to fly helicopters for the Coast Guard for a few years, we’ve started talking about how we might pay in the hopefully unlikely event that we actually do wind up having to foot at least some part of some bill for some education.  In any event, all that talking was a lot less fun than it probably sounds, and I’m getting antsy anyway since all I’ve done workout-wise this week is my regular commute riding.  So.  I’m very much looking forward to my short run tonight, but even with that, if tomorrow weren’t Friday, I’m not sure I’d be able to face it.