It is not at all what you are talking about.

This blog is awesome. (link) The bicycles section is cool. For an extra treat click on the ‘just wierd’ link on the left side.

I went on my long Saturday ride this morning. It was fine and I got the exercise and the miles I needed. I did not meet my objective of riding from my doorstep to the NCR trail. There are more dead end and one way streets between here and the trail than bad plot twists in ‘Snakes on a Plane‘. I did get close, but wasn’t interested in bringing my quest to fruition by that point. Also there were a ton of hills. I kept finding myself flying down some side street thinking to myself “I’m going to pay for this later…” The bikely mapping I stole from someone else had me cutting across between 2 properties at one point on a foot path but danged if I found it so that was a good 20 minutes of backtracking. All of the exploring cut into my pace, but I still came out ahead of my target pace for the century, so no problem. All in all I’ll give it a 6. Disinteresting suburban scenery. Too many stop signs. Good hills. Decent workout, and I was up early enough that I wasn’t too bothered by traffic. By the end of the ride, when I reached the ‘hill o’ death™’ I was too tired to do anything other than throw it in the granny gear and spin at 4.5mi/hr. should have taken my panniers. There were a ton of people having yard sales.

I was feeling a little burnt out when it came time for the ‘briskly paced’ ride which is in my training schedule on Wednesday. Decided to put it off and wake up before work on Thursday, eat an energy bar, ride 12 miles, come home, cool off (usually a 25min process for me), take a shower, and go to work. I won’t bore you with the math, but it was an impossible schedule given that it’s getting light around 5:30am and I need to be at work at 7. I was up at 5 to give it a shot anyway, but failed miserably. After forgetting my helmet, I ended up just cruising around the neighborhood for 2 miles before swinging home and getting ready for work. Good news is that I decided to log all of my training miles above and beyond my commuting miles, so I have a little cushion to fall back on when I screw up my schedule. Thursday was my ‘rest’ day and I put a few miles in there to compensate as well.

The hardest part of upping my schedule has been trying to figure out how to modify my diet to deal with all the extra calories I’m burning now. The easiest thing to do (but not correct) would be to continue eating the way I had on weekdays, and then take the extra calories I exercise and put them towards my weekend ‘deficit’ when we are out on the town living it up. Problem is that it would leave me drained all week long and still not address the transgressions of me eating poorly on the weekend. Alcohol and fried foods are a detriment regardless of how well the calorie equation on my spreadsheet balances out. For the last week I raised my intake slightly during the week, and fairly successfully tried to keep it in check on the weekend.

Now for the sunny part: 2 weeks of non-stop riding coupled with stringent accounting for all my food intake has paid off for the first time in close to 40 weeks. Every Friday morning when I wake up I check my weight. It works better for me than trying to do it every day, which would make me crazy. Today I was greeted by a scale reading 245.2, which is slightly below the range I have been bouncing in for nigh onto a year now. Of course I can’t let myself get too excited because there are anomalies from week to week, both high and low, but I can’t help and wonder if I’ve finally broken out of this demonic range I’ve been in. I’m just going with it and using the momentum to drive my riding schedule for another week. Take what I can get if you will.

There is part of me that wants to eat more protein and try to stave off losing too much muscle. They say you can’t train to get stronger AND lose weight at the same time. If I have to choose between the two, I’ll say I’d rather be a bit weaker and have 10ish less pounds (equivalent to the weight of 1.25 gallons water) of me to push up all those hills this September.

We all gain a little in the winter and take it off a bit in the summer, and if the last 10 years are any indication for me, it only gets harder to take the weight off from here. This is my best chance for the calendar year to break free of this range FOR GOOD. Go team me.

Starting weight when I got back from the Honeymoon — 271
Weight for week 88 (day 613) — 245.2
Gallons of milk you’d have to load into a basket at the supermarket to approximate my progress to this point… — 3.25
Number of pounds I still have to lose before I can really start worrying if my steel framed bicycle is holding me back, and maybe I should get something that has some carbon fiber weaved into it… — 60 (author’s note: a carbon fiber bike is not something I lie awake and dream about - just an illustrative point.)

After taking a week past camp to mull my options and relax, I started into training for my first Century ride ever. September 6 I’m doing the Civil War Century. The website says 105 miles and 7400 feet of climbing, but the routes others have plotted out on Bikely say 54/5500 ft. No matter. Regardless of what it turns out to be I’m going to get my money’s worth. I found a site online that had a sample weekly training regimen for an 8 week program to work up to the distance gradually. Doing the distance is not really a worry for me because I’ve regularly pulled 70 and 80 mile rides out of thin air after doing little preparation without feeling too awful the next week. Bigger concerns for me are the mountains and the open roads with cars. My habits have had me riding nothing but short distances on local roads in the city and Rail Trails. I ride in the city, so the majority of my routes are on roads with lots of traffic lights and stop signs. Even the most testosterone-crazed drivers can’t get going too much faster than me. For the amount of time I spend on a bike, it is truly amazing how few roads I’ve actually traveled on. The training program I’m doing has lots of 20 to 60 mile rides, so I have to break the crutch of looping around small streets downtown. The first week in July I spent a ton of time on Bikely researching other peoples routes and sketching out routes of my own to get me out on the open road more but still on safe roads. I should be good for the first few weeks of training, then I have some ideas about how to use the NCR trail as a connector between the city and some of the roads around farmland and state parks in North Central MD. Can’t wait to share some of the routes I’m drafting, but since I stole the routes of other people as starting points, the notes are all messed up, and don’t correspond to the areas on the map. Some of them are going the wrong way too which leads to some pretty bad ‘one way street’ errors unless you know better. I’ll get around to it eventually, but right now, I’m too busy getting my mileage up. Saturday morning rides are where I’m testing out many of the routes, and it provides the added benefit of less cars (plus the drawback of having to get up at 5 in the morning…). I’m in week 2 of training and it’s going fine.

My camp volunteer work came and went this week. Good weather during the day, but rain in the evening so my tent and all my camping supplies are hanging from the rafters in the basement right now drying out. Love being outdoors - hate all the cleanup:). It was a good time and fun was had by all. I spent so much time building the arch I was discussing in my previous post that I didn’t have too much time to decorate it, but it still turned out pretty good and it was sturdy, which was what I was more worried about than anything else. One additional note. We were treated to a great concert by local Harrisburg blues band Nate Myers and the Aces. This is their second year volunteering their time at camp and they also did a benefit gig this spring for us which I was very disappointed to miss. Everyone who reads this should go check them out because 1. They are awesome and put on a great show, and 2. They’re great guys for volunteering their time like they do.

1. Garden is looking good. The cherry tomato plant has 20+ fruits and a ton of blossoms on it. Will definitely get many useful meals from it. Thinking about getting some more containers or building a raised bed to do some more plants in. The squash looks good too. No fruit yet, but plant is well developed. The rosemary is insanely fragrant and very good in some bean dip. Need to put some with roasted potatoes too, but we forgot. Basil blossomed with huge new stalks and flowers. If I don’t cut it back soon, it will outgrow it’s pot. I think the Pepper was planted too early. It’s coming up, but slowly. Lettuce, Spinach, and Radishes need more light. Parsley looks sickly, but is fragrant. I found a post which said that coffee grounds make for good fertilizer in small doses, so I’ve been mixing some of the really finely ground espresso ‘hockey pucks I have left over into my watering once a month or so. Everything is a guessing game for me at this point. I’ll get some pictures up eventunever.

2. Camp preparations are going well. Years ago I built this arch that spanned 2 doorways and could be painted and decorated with the yearly themes. It was a massive beast made out of 2×4s and 1/4″ plywood. It was made to last 100 years, but unfortunately was cursed up and down every year when the activities director had to lift it into the u-haul for transport. It was so huge that it had to live outside year round too which sped it’s demise. Anyway, my pre-task this year was to rebuild it new and smarter. I’m making it from 5 pieces instead of 3, and using smaller frame timber covered with canvas so that it can be assembled and carried by just about anyone. Basically I’m putting some decade-long-buried skills from art school to use stretching and priming some huuuge 3×5 foot canvases. Sadly, I lost my canvas stretcher years ago so I’m pulling them all by hand. My fingers hurt while typing this. Between Friday and today I’ve put in about 20 hours and I’m ready to be done even though I’m only about 1/4 of the way through. There’s a slight warp to the biggest frame that I’ve stretched so far, so I’m hoping I can come up with a decent brace system, or I am in deep doo-doo when I try and bolt this thing together.

3. Biking is on stall. I got into a good rhythm with my short evening rides, which with my commute was giving me some decent miles even though my long rides have been null. This first week of 10 hour summer schedule, Friday off, has thrown me into disarray. Hopefully after I finish with camp I can get back into riding with fervor. I did some light running 2 weeks ago, which was stupid because it exacerbated an old knee injury. It hasn’t interfered with biking (In fact I think cycling helps it), but I need to watch it when I step on the gas at stoplights. I’ve been looking at 2 rides for the end of summer and haven’t decided which I want to do. The first is the Civil War Century, which I would have plenty of time to work up to since camp is done with at the end of June, and then I could settle into a 2 month training regimen. The second is a fundraising ride along the C&O Canal Towpath for Alzheimer’s Disease. That would be 180+ miles, but it would be spread out over 2 days. I’ve been wanting to ride the towpath for many many years now. I’m not fond of the face to face involved with fundraising, but I think I could pull that part of it off because I feel a special connection to the cause having known someone who recently passed from Alzheimer’s. Need to make a decision soon or I’m going to miss out on registration on both of them.

4. Work is good. I feel like I’m caught in a tornado of intellectual exploration. Last summer I designed a site for our institute using Drupal, which is a canned template system used for creating sites in php with a sql database back much like this blogging system. Building and administering that was half of my fun for last summer. This summer, it’s starting to show it’s age since I built it meet a very quick deadline. At the same time I’ve been reading about AJAX based content systems, Java Server pages, Java Server Faces, and a few other technologies. Now I’m looking at recreating it using a Java base over a SQL database. For what the site will be used for, this would be like using a steamroller to press handkerchiefs. My main reason for exploring it is that the experience I’d get from building it would increase my skillset exponentially, and tie my skills into the same Java systems the Software developers are using. A VERY good thing regardless of how painful it would be. The thought of doing it makes me ill like a 5th grader would feel reciting the declaration of independence in front of an auditorium full of people. Come to think of it, I’d rather recite the Declaration of Independence. At least it doesn’t have thousands of support classes to memorize… I know about as much of these technologies as I knew of database architecture back in April 07, and that worked out just fine so I’m not TOO worried. It’s kind of funny to think that I was entertaining a masters degree 9 months ago. Between all the technology I’ve been cramming in my brain and my second side job of reading about politics, finance, and the economy for 2 hours a day to work on correctly timing a house purchase and future investments, my brain feels like it’s going to explode when it hits the pillow in the evening.

5. That’s ’bout it for right now. I’ve been up since 5a. Gonna sleep now.

After getting away for a day and a half, we came back and I automatically got sick for all of Saturday. By Saturday evening I was better, and I redeemed myself with a nice ride through some of the randomly hilly neighborhoods north of Baltimore Sunday morning. I felt unusually strong compared to the day before. Monday morning we went out for a short ride on the NCR to Monkton and back before the crowds got thick. Nice weather! Before we knew it work was back. Now it’s time to start working on my annual volunteer work. Lots to do since that’s only 3 weeks off. Yikes!

Go 2 days before everyone else does

Our university had off for commencement on Thursday, so we took off on Friday too to get out for a quick getaway. Went to Hershey and camped out for 1 night. Went over to the park in the late afternoon Thurs. and for a few hours on Friday morning. While we were there we were wondering what it would be like to navigate an amusement park with kids intent on staying for the entire 13 hours they were open. Packed up and made it back before rush hour weekend hour traffic started. That’s the way to do it. Forget the crowds. It wasn’t on a bike, but at least it was outdoors. The picture is fairly uneventful because we forgot the frisbee, and we’d already cleaned up dinner.