What I Could Have Been

It's been a tough day at work today so for my last 30 minutes I am going to reminisce about what it is I would liked to have done with my life other than construction. Usually during these brain storming sessions I think completely irrationally and come up with occupations that don't even really exist and usually involve me doing nothing at all but getting paid for it like Couch Cushion Comfortability Technician or Ergonomic Recliner Engineer. But today I had an occupation dropped in my lap that I had never thought of and that would be to become an evil overlord. I have been thinking of this because of this list that I found of the the 100 things to do in order to be a successful overlord. My favorites out of the list so far are:

8. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three week's time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

31. All naive, busty tavern wenches in my realm will be replaced with surly, world weary waitresses who will provide no unexpected reinforcements and/or romantic sub-plot for the hero or his side-kick.

52. I will hire a team of board certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.

67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full scale emergency.

81. If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will drop flat instead of quizically turning around to find out what he saw.

There are many more good tips on the list for your perusal. But who am I kidding I'm nearly 30 years old, it's too late for me to make a change in occupation like that and now with this list out there for the masses I'm sure that the market will be flooded soon.

Operation: Rob The Jar

Finding Girl Scouts selling cookies is kind of like seeing a celebrity. You know that they're out there, when you see them you get all excited and have to tell everyone you know what you saw. I'm not sure why, but a I have the hardest time finding Girl Scouts selling cookies each spring. It's not as if the cookies are hot and have to be sold on the black market or dark alleyways in neighborhoods that you wouldn't venture into even with a full arsenal. They're cookies that people love! You should see a Girl Scout peddling them on every street corner. I've even noticed, on the rare occasion that I find them, that they have even stopped posting prices. A Girl Scout knows that if she sees someone walking her way that person is making a purchase no matter what the price. That's even power Sam Walton doesn't weld.

This year, luckily, I have the hook up. Kati works with someone that has a daughter in this secret society and apparently all I have to do to get my coveted Samoas is leave a briefcase of unmarked, non-sequential bills on the picnic table at Rockledge Park at midnight and when I return in the morning, there will be my cookies. I was also instructed not involve the police or try any funny business.

But I'm done being their pawn.

The recipes for these scrumptious morsels are kept under lock and key but I have been working with the dregs of society to penetrate their fortress and release to the world what is rightfully ours. We have made many attempts and lost many good men along the way but their loss is your gain for today I give to you the recipes for Samoas, Thin Mints, Do Si Dos, Tagalongs and Shortbreads. Unfortunately our plan was thwarted before we could fully decode the recipe for Dulce de Leche, the only word that we could make out was "milk" and we already knew that one going in.

So take this prize and treat it well. Know that many a men were lost so that you could break the binds of tyranny. And may these "girls" know that their heavy handed ruling is at an end.

The Good The Bad and The...Oh Get On With It

I watched The Good The Bad and The Ugly last night for the first time. It comes in at a lengthy 161 minutes and most of that is wasted reel. I'm not saying that it wasn't a decent movie or that it should be taken out of the "classics" category, just that there's no dialogue for the first ten minutes and there are way too many times where all you get is dramatic music with close ups on eyes, then a gun, then back to someones eyes, then another gun, then a wide shot. It got ridiculous and tedious. I probably skipped over a good 20 minutes of film just of these dramatic moments.

It's probably a movie that everyone should see once just so that you can say you have but keep the remote close at hand because you're going to need it.

Are You Kidding Me?

This is probably some of the coolest stuff that I have ever seen.
Great soundtrack too. That's Band of Horses - The Funeral, if anyone is interested.

What I've Learned

Training will teach you a lot about yourself and the oddities that it will cause to your body.

Here's what I've learned:

1. Get used to the smell of chlorine. Somehow chlorine can penetrate your sweat ducts and if you swim on Wednesday you will smell like it when you run on Thursday
2. 27 degrees is cold enough that on a 1:45 run condensation will freeze on your beard.
   
   
3. Make friends with the wind and cold (you'll give up before they do)
   
4. You can have a good conversation with a dog on a 2 hour run
5. Get comfortable in spandex
6. There is nothing that will keep your feet warm during a 3 hour ride when the temperature is in the 20's. Just deal with it and hope that you don't have a run after wards
   
7. Continuation from above...Frozen toes on a run are very painful as they warm back up
   
8. I can eat a lot and often
9. I lose about a pound an hour of sweat during a moderately warm day
10. Permanent marker makes for an adequate sunblock (note the #30 on the back of the calf)
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11. And the number 1 thing that I learned from training is that the human body is capable of much more than we give it credit for.

The Numbers Are In

During my training for the last 5 months I have kept a log of my total time, mileage and calories burned. Now that we're all done it's time to tally everything up and see what we get.

The totals below do include race day mileage.

Swim
103,403 yards
58.75 miles (That's enough to swim the length of the Straights of Dover in the English Channel almost three times)
35:25:31

Bike
1,441.29 miles (That's almost enough the ride the width of Texas twice)
86:45:12

Run
327.14 miles (I could have run from my house in Lewisville to the race start in Galveston)
48:39:36

Calories Burned
127,962
36.56 pounds (That's a little over the weight of an average 2 year old)

Total Time
171:17:19 (That's working out, non-stop for a little over a week, this number is not as dramatic as I hoped it would be)

Total Mileage
1,827.18

If you want another aspect to the race Kati has posted her race recap here.

Lone Star Half Iron Race Recap

Well, we did it! Sunday was the race that we have been working towards for the last 5 months. You can read the entire race recap below. Keep in mind that this was a 6 hour race so the recap might get a little lengthy.

The maps for each discipline can be found here.

Swim
1.2 miles
38:28

The water temperature was supposedly 67 degrees, at least that's what I overheard while I was waiting to get in. It was chilly but not as chilly as the lakes up in Dallas where we were swimming in 59-61 degree water for practice, that temperature will take your breath away literally.

This swim had a couple of firsts for me, 1. this was the first time that I had swam in salt water, whether for practice or a race and 2. this was the first time that I have started in a group of more then 50 people per wave. The swim is the most frightening thing for me, it's one of the only aspects of race day that you can't practice, although some may try. I'm not afraid of the swim itself, I'm afraid of the start. Imagine 100 people crowding a 30 foot wide swim start chute, by the way this race was a tread water swim start, waiting for the gun to go off. Once that gun goes off everyone is vying for position. You're getting punch, kicked and half drowned by people that you have never met and will never see again, although a few of them you would like to find in a dark alley afterwards. Luckily the melee didn't last as long as normal and I found my line in a couple of minutes. My goal time for the swim was 35:00 minutes but there is a lot to be said for a race day swim in unfamiliar waters. The time seemed to last forever but after the last turn there was only about a quarter mile left to the swim exit which was good motivation.

I recently told Kati that I am almost as happy getting out of the water as I am crossing the finish line. That statement stood true for this swim as well.

Bike
56 miles
2:47:18
20.1 mph average speed

The bike leg had a total of 33 feet of elevation gain over the 56 miles, in other words it was as flat as a board. Leading up to this race that was an exciting aspect, no hills to fight up like we had been doing in training. As I soon learned, flat terrain brings it's own set of problems along with it. Over the past five months I have learned that hills are at least fair for the most part, if you have an ascent, more than likely you are going to have a descent as well but with flat terrain you are constantly having to pedal with no real rests to speak of and soon your hamstrings are starting to talk to you, they aren't using their inside voice and if you could you would wash their mouth out with soap.

We paralleled the coast the entire time, as if you have a choice when you are riding on Galveston Island. The wind stayed down for the most part until the end and even then it was from the north so it was a crosswind instead of a headwind.

The course itself led to fast speeds, partially due to the flatness but also because there were no turns. Once you got out of Moody Gardens you rode for about 24 miles in a straight line, took a U-turn at the end of the island, rode back 4 miles, took another U-turn to head back to the end of the island, when you reached the end you took another U-turn and headed home. Due to the lack of wind and turns I was able to stay in the aero position for about 50 of the 56 miles, which does lead to lower back discomfort, I found.

Stretching was a necessity on this ride. If there were hills then you could have stood up on the pedals occasionally to give your legs and back a little stretch but not on this ride. As much as you hated to coast for a little while to you had to stand up to stretch out your back, legs and neck every once in a while just to give them a break from this stooped over position.

Riding into T2 was fantastic, to know that not only were two legs of the race done but knowing that the longest leg was over was a great feeling. I was one step (OK, a lot of steps) away from the finish line.

If you really have a lot of time to spare you can watch a video of the entire bike course tour here. In video #2 about 5:00 in you will see the only thing that really became daunting on this course and that was the long straight roads where you could see the telephone poles getting smaller as you looked into the horizon and knowing that's where you were going.

Run
13.1 miles
2:09:32
9:53 min/mi

This is when the wind really came into play, luckily there were so many turns that you weren't heading into the wind for long. When I got back to the hotel after the race I checked the wind speeds to find out that they were reporting 27mph winds that afternoon.

The run route was four loops around Moody Gardens, which had it's pros and cons. It broke the half marathon into smaller segments that were easier to mentally handle but it got really old seeing the same sights over and over again. The other benefit was that I got to see Kati twice on the run which is always good for a pick me up.

My intention during training was to run an 8:30 minute mile. I soon realized that this was not going to be possible and became fast friends with 9:30 minute miles. I probably went too fast on the bike but also the flat course had done my hamstrings in. Early on my nutrition plan went right out the window as well. The plan was to have two GU's in a gel flask that would be mixed with a couple ounces of water attached to my race belt. I took sips from the flask at mile one and two but on the second sip I didn't get the nozzle closed all the way resulting in the entire thing emptying onto the ground, unbeknownst to me. So there I was with 11 miles left to run and no nutrition that I had been using during training and as well all know you never try anything new on race day since you don't know how your body is going to handle it. I started running through all my options (get it running through?) and realized that I still had two Clif Blocs in my tri top pocket. These are only worth about 30 calories each and I hadn't eaten them while running since the beginning of training so I wasn't sure if they were going to sit well in my stomach or not. I took the chance and bit them in half and took half about every 15 minutes, they are already small in the first place, a little bigger the a game dice. That worked fairly decently for a while but I was soon felt the nutrition crash coming again and needed more calories and had nothing left on me so I resorted to the race provided nutrition and started having to slam Twizzlers and defizzed Pepsi on the final couple of miles. Surprisingly this didn't cause any problems.

At the end, finally being able to run on the left side of the sign that said "next lap right, finish left" was one of the happiest moments of my life and I can honestly say that finishing this race, I was much happier than any swim leg that I had ever done. A mixture of exhaustion and joy can only lead to tears as I accepted my finishers medal, hugged our coach and headed for the food tent.

Final Time
Swim: 38:28
T1: 5:31
Bike: 2:47:18
T2: 4:13
Run: 2:09:32
Total: 5:45:05