Sock Snob

Contre le dopage

2012-02-11T12:26:00.000-04:00

What a week for doping. What can one say that has already been said, and surely more eloquently than I ever could?

The big surprise, perhaps was Benjamin Martel, a Quebec amateur, popped for testosterone last year. La belle says the francophone blogs have been abuzz with this news and whilst most are condemning him, he has his share of supporters, many trotting out the "his bidon was spiked" defence.

Really? Spiked bidons? Really? What is this? 1975? Speaking of 1975, testosterone is so 70s! I thought the use of the big T as a doping agent went out with flares and disco! Testosterone and spiked bidons, haven't we come any further than this in 35 years? What's next? The Jack Daniels and dehydration defence? The phantom twin defence? Or maybe the spiked steak defence?

What? Too soon?

I never thought that they'd ding Contador. Personally, my view was that it should have been a slam-dunk but given the stakes I was sure that it wouldn't happen, to the extent when I read the news it was an almost visceral shock! Armstrong? Well, if I have to tell another fanboy all it means is federal laws regarding the use of federal money for the purchase of illegal substances were not broken, well you get my drift. It's SCA all over again. As for Ullrich, well hey, he has as much as admitted playing with the heavy water. I always said he had class and once more, it shows. Armstrong and Contador have tied themselvs in linguistic and legal knots, straining credulity to prove their innocence whereas der Kaiser has 'fessed up, faced his fate and taken his punishment like a true campione. Class. The two year ban may seem strange, but it if he were still involved in cycling it would stop him from being in team management, a DS or the like. There are way too many former dopers running teams. Riis, for one. I sense a certain poetic justice if Saxo were to be demoted to Pro Conti after this. Oh, and a certain Erik Lyman. Who? Benjamin Martel's manager, who himself served one, if not two, doping suspensions. See what I mean?

How's this for unintended consequences following Contador's ban? He is stricken from the Tour de San Luis top-three, promoting a certain Stephan Schumacher to the podium. F#%k!

That notwithstanding, this may have been a bad week for cycling on the surface, but maybe not for the future. Maybe the good news is that the "authorities" have finally grown themselves a collective pair and are not afraid to bust riders for doping, regardless of who they are. No longer, perhaps, are the days when a Grand Tour gave immunity from prosecution.

Le cyclisme est mort, vive le cyclisme!

Pumped Up Kicks

2012-02-01T09:09:00.000-04:00

Apologies for the obligatory Foster The People reference, but you understand it had to be done! I picked up my new kicks yesterday at work, Pearl Izumi's Isotransition. As a triathlon shoe it's definitely not a pumped up kick per se, more like a racing flat. So light, so slim in fact, you can see right through the sole without taking the insole out! As for the Sock Snob bit, well they have a sock-liner meaning no socks, but hey, if you stop to put socks on in T2 you might as well take the extra five minutes to do your hair and face so you look good for the finishers' photo!

It fits a bit small, I usually rock a 43 but I'm in a 44 here. It was comfy doing drills around the shop yesterday and I'll put them through their paces at the Halifax Running Club track-meet on Saturday afternoon. Look out for a longer review on Cyclesmith's new blog Chain 'n Gears in a few weeks.

Looks like a Creamsicle though. Hmmmm, ice-cream.....

Vive la difference

2012-01-28T17:03:00.000-04:00

I just got back from renting a movie at Video Difference (hereafter Vid Diff). Have no fear though, this isn't going to be a boring "what I did today" blogpost, or even worse, a triathletes' "what I trained today" blogpost.

I was looking for the Star Trek reboot movie, the 2009 one, for Son#1 to watch tonight, as requested. It took a while to find, eventually tracking it down under "Action" on the ground floor whereas all the other Star Trek movies, from whatever generation, were under "SciFi" on the upper floor. The last time I was there I was looking for Die Hard for my Christmas movie marathon and eventually found it not in "Action" (ground floor), "Archive" (lower floor) with Die-Hards 2-4 but "Greatest Villans" on the top floor. Needless to say, Villans was the last place I looked.

So here's a plea to Vid Diff. I love you guys, I really do. Awesome selection, some really esoteric stuff, always open, plenty of copies and plenty of places to return a movie even though you only have one location. But despite my love for you please, please, re-order the collection.

I think the time has come to just alphabetise the whole store. Start with A, say in the top corner of the upper floor, and wend your way through to Z in the basement. Enough with this division and sub-division and sub-division of the subdivision ("Action/70s", "Action/80s", "Action/90s".......).

When I finally found Die Hard it was, as discussed, under "Greatest Villians". On the other side of the Villians' rack, "Seen At The Oxford". This rack was free-standing on the floor just down from the AFI Greatest 100 rack, the whole lot sandwiched between walls-full of "English Language Drama", "Canadian Drama" (I think), "Independent Drama" (mostly indie Brit-Flicks) and "Foreign Language Drama". As a side-note I find it somewhat interesting that Made In Dagenham was under Eng Lang Drama and not "Indie Drama", even though the latter would be the first place I would think to look.

I like to think I'm a bit of a cinephile, not scared by cataloging and able to think on my feet but dammit I get lost in there now every time. Sometimes this is great and leads you to see movies you may not have considered seeing. Sometimes, like today, if you want to pop in-and-out, well this is getting ridiculous, What next? "Tarantino/with Uma Thurman" and "Tarantino/without Uma Thurman"? Perhaps "Liam Neeson/swords" and "Liam Neeson/no swords". Star Wars could be a sub-genre in the first genre, maybe cross-referenced to SciFi, Family, Staff Picks and AFI Top 100.

So, please consider re-ordering your catalogue in an easy-to-understand format. You're getting a bit too Rob from High Fidelity ("VD Suggests", not "Comedy" or "Independent Comedy" as you might think) and whilst Rob's OCD-driven, great record recategorisation from High Fidelity ("in the order in which I purchased them"!) is funny in a novel or film, it kinda sucks in the real world!

Danger: Thin Ice.

2012-01-14T11:33:00.000-04:00

As Michelle from 'Allo 'Allo said "leesten fairy carefully, I wiil zay zis only wance".

I think it's great there's a speed-skating oval here in Halifax. It will allow us as a city and a province to promote winter sports and, who knows, maybe even position us to get another high-profile winter event here one day after last winter's Canada Games. The "if you build it, they will come" attitude.

Furthermore, the oval has really exercised (pardon the pun) something in the people of Halifax and during public-skates there isn't breathing-room on the ice. Not only on the ice either, Greg Wiezorak has said he finds it difficult to do mile-repeats around the Common now there is so much foot-traffic to-and-from the south-east corner! Either way, there are way more people now than just Greg getting aerobic exercise around the Common now, and that is a good thing, especially with Nova Scotia's body-image problem.

Just don't expect me to do it.

Now, now. I know what you're saying and trust me, I've heard it all before. The attitudes range from sheer disbelief to that gentle, kindly "there, there" look you'd give a senile relative or a sick puppy. I almost expect to get petted on the head.

Yes, I'm sure I already have the mindset for it and yes, I already do the summer equivalent (Clara Hughes anyone?) and yes I know many cyclists do it for winter cross-training and yes I'm sure I'd be good at it, and yes, when I'm wearing that winter running top with the thumb-holes and hood I even look like a speed-skater

Here's the thing, I don't skate, can't skate, won't skate. The first two reasons are simple: I'm a Brit, we really don't have ice, or a culture of ice. Unless it's in a G&T or maybe a Pimms.

The last, more personal, reason is I honestly don't think my knees could take it. Yes, I can run a marathon, but as long as my knees are going up-and-down in a sagittal plane, I'm golden.

Any twisting, any movements away from this plane, or any deep squats for that matter, makes something in my knee pop out of line quite painfully. There seem to be some of these movements in skating. As a runner, cyclist and triathlete I am already part masochist, but painfully displacing my patella just so I can say "yey, I'm using the new infrastructure" seems to be a masochistic byte too far.

These are my own reasons and to be honest, I'd rather not have to get into these personal reasons with every Tom, Dick or Harriet who asks. So let me put it another way.

I do triathlon. Do you? Now I know some of you do too, but perhaps not all of you. To the latter group I ask, why? Oftentimes it's the swim: "I'd love to do a triathlon but I can't swim, don't swim, won't swim" (that last usually qualified by "open water"). If I had a pound for every time I'd heard that, I could probably take early retirement somewhere warm. I don't question your desire not to learn to swim just so you can do a triathlon, nor do I regard you like that harmless, drooling, slightly slow relative with the buck teeth we all keep in the attic somewhere and only bring out for Halloween and Christmas for not wanting to. Do I think you're missing out on something? Yes, I really do, but I respect your choice not to swim, not to do triathlon.

So please respect my choice not to skate.

Whatever next?

2012-01-11T22:04:00.003-04:00

I often say "I really need to write a blog about that". Once upon a time I did. Nowadays I get as far as writing the blog in my head but regrettably (or not, depending on your point of view) oftentimes I don't. Something came across my path just now that exercised me to the point of writing without even thinking about it first on a run, and I've not even been drinking.

I follow UCI_Overlord on Twitter. As I'm sure you know this isn't really Pat McQuack, but a fake Pat McQuaid account which is written, believe it or not, by a bloke from Bridgewater, NS who also writes (or at least edits and contributes to) to cyclimas.com which bills itself as Cycling Snark and Commentary. I enjoy the snark but they also have some well-thought-out and written articles on the history of cycling. I had the great fortune to run into UCI_Overlord's mum in the shop before Christmas and we had a great chat. Nice lady, I hope she found Not Pat McQuaid something nice in the cycling line for Christmas.

Anyway, I was just checking out my Twitter and I see this from UCI_Overlord

Huh? FIA as in Federation Internationale d'Automobile or whatever? Yup, following the link gives you this....

IOC recognition of motorsport? Citius in extremis, autem altius et fortius? I think not. Shome mishtake shurely. It's not April Fool's but UCI_Overlord isn't above a little sarcastic silly buggers so there was a good chance I was being taken for the proverbial ride. So I Googled FIA and when there searched for IOC and got to the same link. Then I went the other way and Googled IOC, and then searched them for FIA and got this. Getting the same story both coming and going leaves one with the distinct, and horrid, suspicion that unless UCI_Overlord has got really good at hacking, it's true.

What are the Olympics coming to? Archery and shooting were always a bit of a stretch, but seeing as the original Olympic sports were all military disciplines, to a greater or lesser degree, then Archery was pretty much grandfathered in. Synchronized Swimming? I once tried to hold my breath that long and nearly passed out and so whilst it would normally fail on the subjectivity score (giving out medals based on "artistic merit" is surely somewhat flawed) I'm willing to cut them some slack. Golf was the nail in the coffin; a good walk spoiled now has Olympic status. Of course between the two there was letting professionals into the Olympics which might have increased the spectacle but at the expense of a little bit of the Olympics' soul.

So now motorsport, Lewis Hamilton as the Olympic Gold Medal Winner in F1, but will there be a ladies; division? The only possible explanation is that the Olympics goes where the money is (and where the TV is right; this we know from experience). Golf, motorsport. What next? La belle said poker. You saw it here first.

Sigh

Cowadonga

2011-12-27T07:00:00.000-04:00

One of the nice things about a holiday, for me at least, is to lie in bed in the morning, drink a cup of coffee and read a newspaper or a book. As the Grauniad told us this morning, iProducts and Kindles are eroding the actual print copies of newspapers and oh irony of ironies I read that this morning from the warmth and comfort of my bed, a cup of coffee on the go, on an iProduct.

Further perusing the Grauniad (so-called because of their penchant for spelling errors) led me to cyclingnews because the Grauniad has a particularly good cycling section for a British paper (which predates the Manx Missile and then some) which led me to the "steepest street in the world" link.

35% eh? Seems steep.

Call it web-based research (remember, wikipedia is not a reference), cyberslacking or mere random link-clicking, it got me to where I wanted to go. You see, I was in Spain earlier this year and since I lost the blogging urge for a while mid-year I never got the opportunity to write about some of those experiences. One of those experiences was ticking one thing off my cycling bucket-list. Something I'd never done which always made me feel a little less of a cyclist.

Never mind that in over a quarter-century on the roads I've road-raced, time-trialed, psycho-crossed, triathloned (is that a verb?), bike-couriered, commuted, toured, ridden in stupid baking sun humidity (Virginia) and oh-my-God freezing cold (Canada) and everything in-between, crashed and got stitches and screws, worked in a bike-shop and even been in a beer-club with a cycling problem (Crest CC, I'm talking to you) but I've never climbed a mountain col.

Besides, for a guy of my size (north of 160lb/72 kg, not by much but still north) I like to think I'm not a bad climber. It's one thing to punch it up and over the hills of the Shubie Doobie Tri or drag a loaded touring bike over North Mountain, but how would I measure up on a proper hill? It was time to find out.

World Du's had been on the Sunday and la belle and I were now planning what to do for the next week. We had no plans other than to relax, see a bit of the locale and ride our bikes some. For me, I wanted to check out a climb from the Vuelta d'Espana; Gijon often hosts a stage of the Vuelta and it's almost always a mountain stage, so that shouldn't be a problem.

We were very lucky in that one of the World Du's LOC, Raul Martin, took us under his wing for most of the week. It started in the officials'/LOC meeting when it turned out we were the only three there working and racing the event, and then when he bartered me two Federacion d'Espanola de Triatlon running jerseys for my Team Canada fleece cycling jacket. Before we knew it he was showing us around the Asturias. We were los Canadiens for the week and we loved it.

After a day to decompress he showed us around Aviles and Oviedo, where we also met Jorge Garcia, World Du's Race Organizer (who we'd met the previous year in Edinburgh) and recently minted ITU level 3 official.

We then headed west out of Gijon to Ballotta, via one of the best beaches in the area, according to Raul, near La Magdalena. I don't have any reason to dispute this.

In Ballotta we stayed at the Casa Fernandez, run by the family of Beatriz Tenreiro, one of the best female triathletes in the area and a top-ten finisher at Spanish Nationals this year. Together with Beatriz's husband and coach, Miguel Angel, they all took us on a lovely ride along the coast road to Luarca. It was a great road-ride, twisty and climb-y. These were their training roads and they descended like bats out of hell! I did't even try to keep up!

I felt at home and at ease with these cyclists, who I'd never met before. It's funny how some people scare you on a bike and some people don't. What made it more remarkable was we couldn't really talk with one another, so we did our talking with the bike and we got on just fine. They didn't scare us and we didn't scare them. I felt like a real cyclist again, They complemented us on our road-handling skills, perhaps they were worried about being on the roads with triathletes, fortunately we were cyclists first! Talk about keeping Canada's end up!

Nice little story; I asked what was the Spanish for "car behind" seeing as we were 5-up on a twisty road. Oh, "don't worry" was the answer, "the cars will look after us". By goodness they were right. A 60km ride on a twisty coast road, sometimes three abreast or bombing down hills at > 60 kph (Miguel and Raul at least, I descended with the ladies) and not once did we get honked up. I want to move there.

Oh, they also asked me if I was la belle's coach! As if!

The next day we had a rendezvous with the climb. Raul told me we had two choices; Lagos de Covadonga or the Alto d'Angliru. Now, I've heard of the Angliru; 10% average but supposedly 25% in places and so hard the team-cars can't get up there. Pros put on compacts and (if appropriately sponsored) SRAM WiFli. Velonews named Team Sky's choice of gears on the Alto d'Angliru in this year's Vuelta as their "Technical Blunder of 2011". I did not know of this Covadonga climb of which he spoke, but how could it be worse than the Angliru?

We met up with Raul in his home town just outside of Ovieda and drove the 50kms or so to the foothills of the Picos d'Europa.

To perk ourselves up for the climb we stopped for coffee at Cangas d'Onis, which my pet cow really enjoyed (more about her later).

We parked up just outside Soto de Cangas, unloaded, chucked our legs over the top-tube and headed off. A very low-key start. Unlike the pros, we hadn't raced 100kms to get here, so what could possibly go wrong?

It wasn't good road, very harsh chip-seal. It was a bit of a false flat; combined with the road-surface, I was already in the 23, doing about 20 kph and the climb hadn't started yet. I had time to reflect on the statement "what could possibly go wrong".

We hit a couple of roundabouts and then we came to the basilica of Covadonga: little did we know it but this was in some ways the birthplace of modern Spain, where Pelayo had turned back the Moorish invasion.

The climb started and within 500m of the cathedral, I was in the 27 already. Ah. Never mind. I didn't have anything left below this and this wasn't the place to start berating myself for not fitting a compact or a big cassette and an XT derailleur before we left. So I gritted my teeth and got to grips with what I had; 39 x 27. We were to be together for most of the climb.

La belle says I rocketed up the first section. I didn't think I was pounding it, but riding within myself. She was riding comfortably with Raul: after all, I was the col virgin. Raul had been up Covadonga several times, including at the end of a longish brevet (is there any such thing as a short brevet?) and la belle had done the Ventoux. I was the only one who didn't know what was coming!

I climbed well for about 5 kms, or about 350 vertical metres, when I passed the tree-line. The longest climbs I'd done had been in the 5 km range, in the Grampians or the longer climbs in the Annapolis Valley, and none of them had ever gone above the tree-line. The climb at Worlds three days earlier, which had many Nova Scotian's worried, was just under 200 vertical metres in just under 5 kms. We weren't even half-way up and I was already into uncharted territory. Here be dragons!

Then disaster. The average gradient of the climb is given as 7.5% with some 10% pitches and one 15% pitch, about 800m long at about 6 kms. They call this pitch la huesera; the bone woman. She had me.

I'd noticed the day before than even strong riders such as Beatriz and Miguel were rocking triples, Raul was. La belle had argued with me long and hard about my choice of a compact double for her bike, but I didn't hear her complaining about the 36 inner ring (34" gear with 28T). On the other hand, I was rocking out on 39 x 27 (38"); yup I'd brought a gun to a knife fight.

My heart was coming out of my chest and my legs were blocked. I was fixated on the remainng section of la huesera, I could see it turn right by 90 degrees, maintaining an even 15% gradient as far as I could see. Fuck. I stopped for the first time on a climb since I can remember. They say walking a bicycle up hill is the cyclists walk of shame, and that's how I felt. La huesera had found me wanting. Bitch. I rolled to a halt next to a cow, who just looked at me.

Le belle and Raul caught me. They stopped and we all took the time for a photo, a drink and a little gee-up session for me. Everyone stops the first time, Raul told me. He then let me know what was to come; the gradient evened out but there were short ramps at 10 to 15%. Nothing like this. Bueno.

We set off again. There was a look-out, or mirador in Spanish, on the corner and I really wanted to stop again but la belle overtook me and, I think, called me some names. Chalice. That got me going again.

I knuckled down and rode the ramps. As Raul said, the gradient was pretty even with lumps and bumps. For los canadiens reading this, at the shallowest it was like the steepest part of the BLT trail as it climbs to Bayers Lake, but the ramps were like any of the harder climbs around here.

At the top there is the Lagos Enol (an alternative name for the climb). The Vuelta's finish is flatter and to the left.

Naturally, we went to the right for another few hundred metres of climbing, but unlike the Vuelta's finish, this road dead-ended at a bar.

Muy Bueno.

About 1100 vertical metres climbed in 12 kms (there was a small descent before the finish, so if we were 1036 above sea level, we had a tad more climbing on the clock). My Garmin has more, but it's not an accurate altimeter. Put it this way, it's clocked me at 10 metres below sea-level when I've been on the ocean! To put Covadonga in perspective, Cape Smokey on the Cabot Trail climbs 200 vertical metres in just under 2 kms.

How about those Bontrager Node 2 computers?

A word about cows. It had started as a little joke. Readers of this blog know I have a little pet cow called Moo (imaginative huh?) who goes on my travels with me. It seemed right and proper she climb Covadonga on my jersey pocket.

However, Covadonga was covered with Moos of the original variety: big, one-ton, slab-sided, mobile hunks of beef-on-the-hoof. They just littered the road and didn't give a shit. Or maybe they did, plenty of manure on the road too: wouldn't like to hit that at speed, in the wet on the way down! On the way up it wasn't so bad; the closing speed was 10 kph, or less, and you had plenty of time to work out which way to overtake a stationary cow, especially if a car was coming the other way. On the way down, it's a different matter.

I read earlier this year that if Thomas Voeckler regretted anything about this years Tour de France it was chasing too much on Alpe d'Huez and not checking out the descents. I feel that. It took us 75 minutes or so to climb to the top, and 30 to get back down: and I was descending like a girl. I mean that too, having ridden with some of the Youth triathletes. I didn't even break 50 kph. I wasn't the only one, la belle literally burnt trough a set of cork pads! Partly it was just not knowing the corners, partly it was the sheer exposed nature of it: you could see that of you flipped over the barrier (which wasn't really a barrier, just a concrete post like the one which killed Fabio Casartelli) then it was a long way down. Partly it was not wanting to broad-side a cow at full tilt (one suspects the cow wouldn't notice) and part of it was having to full-on concentrate for 30 minutes. Even at speed on a straight road in a pace-line you can switch off a little bit, it seemed like that would be suicidal here. Still, going slowly we got some nice views.

Now here's the thing: it was really hard going up and really easy going down. Yet we stopped repeatedly on the way down to take pictures, not on the way up, when repeated stops wold have been welcomed. Yup, we're cyclists!

At the bottom we hit the bar with a huge stack of sandwiches, taller than Moo, made from the local Jamon Serrano, even more appropriate today as Jamon Serrano literally means "mountain ham"

And that was the climb of Cowadonga. Moo!

Christmas

2011-12-25T15:24:00.000-04:00

Sunny, -10C, no wind, snow on the ground and the occasional patch of black ice this morning. All-in-all, meterological conditions that send the Guardian or Daily Mail into paroxsyms of weather-laden gloom and, for all I know, boosting climate-change deniers the length and breadth of the country. Apologies to my UK friends but from over here, that's how on-line media appears. One snow-flake and it's snowmageddon. Start hoarding the canned goods Mabel, that snow-drift is an inch deep, we'll be cut off for days!

Not that I'm becoming a smug pseudo-Quebecer with the whole mon pays ce n'est pas un pays c'est hiver thing but the conditions today were perfect for a winter run. As always the first mile was a bit cold, but I warmed up soon enough and the remaininig distance was a joy. The ice made me slow down enough to enjoy the scenary. As you might expect it was pretty quiet, so quiet in fact I had to remind myself to check both ways when crossing the street! I got honked up once, by some old boy on Barrington Street who I think took exception to me running in the bike lane.

I listened to Handel's Messiah on French CBC Radio while I was running, and it made me wonder. Sure, it's a traditional Christmas piece, or at least the first part is (it's 60% Easter), but at heart it's an English oratorio, written by a transplanted German for a German king and sung (this is the crucial thing) in English! I enjoyed it. but I can imagine there are retired colonels all over la belle province writing to Le Journal complaining about the steady erosion of French on SRC!

I also realised that the Messiah was a great piece of music to run to. With so many short movements from adagio to allegro, you could do a great fartlek run. Never mind "let's do 4:00 pace to the lights" or "race you to the tree" you can say "let's go hard to the end of 'the glory of the Lord'". Sounds geeky I know.

I kid you not, but I finished my run to the Hallelujah chorus, Seriously. Honestly. I couldn't have timed it better. In fact, if I'd tried to do that, I doubt I would have nailed it as precisely as I did, with the opening bars as I hit the final kilometer and finishing as I turned down Summit St. OK, I might have blown through a couple of traffic lights and I certainly finished with tears in my eyes. Must have been the cold.

Also, as I was runnimg, I was already standing too (take that Kevin Mallon); double-plus bonus

My one dilemma for the holiday was, perhaps a surprising one. With la belle being away I can watch a ton of movies. She's not really a movie person. Unfortunately I am. Probably got it from the old man, who was not only a big fan of the movies, but a big fan of seeing movies in a cinema (that's theatre, or theater, to you). She's not as bad as some people I have known, mind you, who took a perverse delight in being counter-culture and not watching movies. All it meant was, instead of appearing above such quotidian proletarian pleasures and eschewing the new opiates of the masses they just didn't "get" the zeitgeist and made it increasingly difficult to have any kind of conversation!

Anyway, back to my dilemma and what movies to watch now I have my druthers. I had considered, and rejected a marathon; all six Star Wars movies, the Bourne or Oceans 11/12/13 trilogies for instance, mainly because of the time. Hell, if I'd done Star Wars I could have started this morning at eight and still be going strong close to midnight. A friend suggested Lord Of The Rings. It makes sense to watch all of them in a row, after all I've tried watching them separately and all I do is get confused and what, they've already killed Richard Sharpe? Time constraints again came to mind: it would be nice to do something this Christmas besides watch LOTR, besides I've got to be back at work on Tuesday!

My criteria were that they had to be Christmas movies, but nothing with red-and-green and sprogs of holly on the cover, nor those black-and-white tear-jerkers either. You know I hate Christmas, and while I was prepared to indulge in the schmaltz at the shop by playing cheesy Christmas music, don't expect me to do it in my spare time!

From my own (surprisingly high) stack of DVDs, it's got to be Love Actually and When Harry Met Sally. WHMS I can watch any time, but Love Actually makes me feel homesick if I'm not careful, even though it has been said that Richard Curtis presents an unrealistic view of England! So long as I watch it early in the rotation before the port kicks in. What else? The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe came to mind, it's kinda Christmas in the middle. If I was going to do that then I got Prince Caspian as well, basically because I haven't seen it yet. I wanted to get Die Hard, after all, it happens at Christmas, yippe kay yay, but Vid Dif were all out.

Instead I went for Ben Hur, now there's a solid three hours of my life committed. Kinda biblical in it's own way, but more slave-galleys than the original. The film is so long you have to flip the DVD over mid-movie, like an old LP. Maybe I'll have ice-cream in the intermission, just like we used to do in the movies so many years ago.

Finally, for now, Moonraker, because what's Christmas without a Bond movie? Every Brit worth their NaCl knows this. All this from Vid Diff, and it didn't really cost me anything because every time we have a draw at work I seem to loose the big prize (apart from the Flak Jackets. thanks Terry) but win a Vid Diff coupon. Between that and the Running Club, I don't think I've spent any of your actual money at Vid Diff for a while. Funny that it's Blockbuster that went out of business. Any other ideas, let me know, I've still got a Vid Diff coupon to burn before New Years.

Well, time to Irish up some coffee and get comfy on the couch, I've got a stack of DVDs to burn through....

AD

From When Harry Met Sally to Karl Popper.

2011-12-24T19:38:00.000-04:00

A quiet evening in for now; the boys have gone back home, la belle is in Florida, so it' me and Elvis (the King, thanguvurrymush) and before I hit Portugal's finest and get too maudlin, maybe a line or two of blog.

Up way too early this morning to take la belle to the airport, early as in 04:00, doesn't even qualify as oh dark thirty. Ugh. Reminds you of the airport scene in When Harry Met Sally doesn't it? "I never take anyone to the airport in the first three months of a relationship becasue eventually you stop taking the to the airport and I never want someone to ask me why I don't take them to the airport any more". More-or-less. To be honest, you could live the whole holiday season through Nora Ephron quotes without trying too hard. I usually default to "every year I just try to get from the day before Thanksgiving to the day after New Years".

Anyway, I took la belle to the airport and maintained my record in the "how come you don't take me to the airport any more" stakes. She wanted to take a bike to FLA so I did a little work on her Trek 520 (ten years old and still ticking) and packed it in box for her. Never underestimate the power of a new chain and cassette as stocking-stuffers! Useful and shiny and, if you get Shimano, possibly in a grey and blue box. Did I say shiny and blue box? Nothing says "I love you" like a 32T sprocket.

Now, we're no strangers to travelling with bikes on planes but even my eyebrows rose a fraction too high when the airline clerk said "Bike? That'll be $200". Crickey, that's a bit steep; makes Air Canada seem bike-friendly. I can't help believing (oops, too much Elvis) that airline clerks just quote you the first number that comes into their head when they see a bike, say between 75 and 250, and see if it'll stick. I also can't help believing (thanguvurrymush) that a set of golf-clubs wouldn't get dinged quite so much, and one suspects it's just because golf is the game of the 1%. #occupycheckin I say!

Another observation this morning was the inverse correlation between how happy and customer-friendly the airport staff where vs. the presence and/or size of the Santa hat. The security-screeners were hatless to a man and woman and the picture of helpfulness and smiles. They even commented on how we'd come equipped with packing tape so we could seal the box after it had been X-rayed and potentially opened. Compare and contrast to the check-in clerk, Santa hat with a bobble practically in her eyes, who condescended and patronised each passenger I saw her interact with, short of being down-right rude. One suspects she only plays that card when people spark off her lack-of-customer relation skills.

So, in the spirit of Karl Popper let me say airline check-in sucks. There was an apparent correlation between suckiness and Santa hats which leads me to propose the hypothesis "that there exists an inverse relationship between friendliness and the presence and/or size of a Santa hat". Of course, many a beautiful theory has been slain by ugly fact, but in this case I think one suspects we may be onto something, For one week a year could airline service be improved by the simple expedient of banning Santa hats? What would the knock-on effects further down the economy on the makers of Santa hats be? Could this loss be off-set by making flying a pleasurable experience again, putting bums on seats should the hats be banned? And what of Easter? Whitsun? Some random day in August? Do your own observations, my fellow scientists and try and falsify (not prove) the original hypothesis. If you can't, p < 0.05, then we have a new law of nature.

Discuss.

Funny old day

2011-12-17T21:02:00.001-04:00

Forty-two is supposedly the answer to the ultimate question; the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Certainly when I went to bed last night, at the tender young age of forty-one I didn't have any of the answers, and when I woke up this morning at the ripe old age of forty-two I still didn't have any of the answers. When my programme at NRC was somewhat summarily and peremptorily closed, another Douglas Adams line floated through my head; "so long and thanks for all the fish". Unfortunately, five years later and I'm still no closer to providing you with a more coherent answer to the ultimate question than that.

I guess that means my brain is safe from the mice.

I've long maintained that my birthday should be more a time for introspection than celebration. Partly because as we get older we need to take some time to take stock of who we are, what we have done, what we are doing and where we are going; a bit like a performance-and-planning review for the soul. The older we get, the longer that list gets. At this rate I'll need to book a week's leave-of-absence for my 50th! Also, partly, because I'd die of embarrassment if anyone made a fuss of me in public, and by public I mean any place where there are three or four people other than myself.

The day went was planned, nice and low-key. A little run with the club this morning (5km easy, 6 km not-so-easy, but just to see if these old legs still had it in them you understand), hung out at Chapters this afternoon, spent a little quality time with la belle. This evening we were scheduled to go to a friend of ours from running who was having a pot-luck Christmas party for friends from the local running community. There were going to be two of us there with birthdays this weekend, so at our hostesses' suggestion we bought birthday cakes as our contribution to the evening, Should have been a nice evening. Not a birthday party, but a party with friends and cake. Bam!

Unfortunately I didn't get to stay beyond a plate of finger-food. In fact, our visit was so swift, la belle's allergies to the hostesses' cats didn't even have time to kick in; shit, we beat a degranulating mast-cell. Receptor/ligand reactions take milliseconds. A T-cell can read millions of immunological synapses in a second or two and yet we got out before a positive match. Not often you can say you beat out 380 million years of vertebrate evolution, but we managed it. I mean, who parsed that fucking invite list? How are we defining runner? It's not fucking rocket-surgery you know.

Still, the less you expect, the less upset you are when you don't get it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I'm going to miss my cake though. It was a carrot cake too! Oh well, I refer you to my previous statement about expectations!

Master Baker

2011-12-16T09:41:00.002-04:00

Sometimes there's an advantage in having such a wide range of life experiences at work. Sure, no-one is ever going to call on me to exsanguinate a fish or do a quick spot of PCR or manual sequencing, but I still get to use my mind and it seems nowadays whenever anything needs writing or proof-reading I get the call. There'll be no more split infinitives on Cyclesmith's website on my watch! Stephane, our floor manager is a trained chef and when I got to work yesterday I found these on the kitchen table

It was all I could do not to scarf the lot down immediately. however, I did consider placing a "Not for consumption; display purposes only" sign on them. The cupcakes were delicious, either gingerbread or carrot-cake.

Whilst eating my cupcake I had a look on cyclingnews.com, under the pretense that if I was going to cyberslack in a bike-shop, I should be doing so on something that could be construed as work-related. Actually, velonews.com has a very good tech section, which has to be work-related, but I digress. Whilst on cn I nearly choked on my cupcake, but in a good way, when I saw the pictures from the Liquigas end-of-season party. The riders, naturally, were dressed as pure Eurotrash; exhibit A; Vincent Nibali's trousers;

...but then the North Americans were no better. Who can remember (I'm trying to forget) Garmin-Cervelo's team intro this season and Christian Vande Velde's Norwegian curling trews? Why?

The Liquigas boys didn't eschew trousers but their guests did;

those are the Miss Ciclismo ladies in the back cavorting in the nearly altogether. Here's Miss Ciclismo 2011 Nancy Bernacchia there, doing her best to remember the Little Prince has sucked on a bike for nearly a decade now and the Piccolo name-tage is surely wearing thin....

And there is so much a double entendre there. Maybe thats why Nancy's smiling. So much for taking women in cycling seriously. Maybe Bronzini was right.

Still. when you consider the family-safe North American version was David Zabriske doing karaoke, maybe a bit of southern European elan is the lesser of two evils.

AD

Uncontrolled control.

2011-12-14T21:00:00.000-04:00

Maybe it's just human hubris, but we haven't really tamed nature. We think we have. Maybe we have it under some sort of control, most of the time, but tamed? Not really. It doesn't take long for the checks and balances to become unchecked and unbalanced. Just ask New Orleans.

So I was running tonight and a dog came at me; one of those low-slung, muscly ones with the big head (I'm not good with breeds). Ears back, head down, wide-eyed, tail out, fur up, teeth bared, snarling and making that back-of-the-throat growl that makes you look around for the nearest pointy implement or tall tree. I guess it's an evolutionary thing: five million years ago when an Australopithicine heard that growl it was climb or become dinner (or a very elegant fossil) and as we are, by definition, descended from the survivors, those who climbed and were not dinner, we have retained that instinct.

As any runner knows, the owner was right behind, not quite behind enough to have any of your actual control over the beast but behind enough to utter the familiar refrain, you know the one

"Don't worry, he's quite friendly".

I had the presence of mind to reply

"Of course; it was the snarl and teeth that gave it away"

and she looked at me like I'd grown an extra head. The dog, on whose leash she was now standing, looked at me like I was dinner. I looked at the dog like our Australopithicine ancestors may have done, disguised fear mainly, I held my keys out in front of me (I'd found a pointy implement if not a tall tree) and said

"if he comes for me again, I'll protect myself"

and, of course, she gave me that extra head look again. Protect himself? For why? Everyone knows that Muffy is a quiet and gentle dog, really very friendly, loves to be scratched and (as the old joke goes) loves children.

As I continued my run, with great trepidation as I was now turning my back to, and behaving like prey towards, a highly mutated top carnivore which had already marked me down as a light snack, I suddenly thought of the reply I should have given.

"Madam" I should have said. "if you do not have the common sense to understand, or find out about, the basic dog psychology or animal behaviour patterns of your dog, you should not be allowed to have a dog".

"Dogs are pack animals. Your dog loves you because you are the alpha-male in his pack. He looks up to you as the leader. He fawns at you because he is essentially sacred of you, and when you scold him he puts his tail between his legs and whimpers because deep down, some animal part of his brain thinks you might quite literally rip out his throat."

"To your dog anyone not in his pack, viz, you and him, is an outsider and either trying to steal his food, his territory or somehow threaten his pack. Like any good pack animal, he'll respond violently to such threats. Either that or you're food, and lets face it, you respond the same way. No prey animal ever lay down willingly to be eaten, you have to chase the buggers down and bite them repeatedly until they get the message."

"Of course, not all dogs behave like this all of the time. Most of the dogs I encounter as a runner or in real life either don't give a shit that I'm there or regard me with a certain contempt once they realise I do not have any food on me. But deep down in their DNA there's a wolf and sometimes other dogs, runners, children, sheep, whatever can turn into a threat or food. So your well behaved, cute house-pet can quite literally turn into a monster given the right cues. We don't always get those cues and can't always predict when Muffy's going to go all postal. If you don't understand that, you probably shouldn't have a dog. and you certainly shouldn't let it off it's leash on the Halifax Commons (local bylaws notwithstanding)."

"I know the theory of what do do in these situations. Don't run: you look like prey. Puff yourself up: you'll look bigger and more threatening. Don't smile: it bares your teeth and looks like a threat-display. Oh, and look for a pointy implement or a tall tree. If it's (apparently) incumbent on me to know enough of the psychology of your dog so I don't get attacked, the least you can do is understand the psychology of your dog so when it tries to attack me you realize that "don't worry, he's quite friendly" isn't really going to cut it!"

That's what I should have said.

Ah, hindsight. Still, maybe I'll print it out, laminate it and hand it out to dog-owners the next time I'm running from their little darlings. Who knows, maybe it'll give us something to talk about while I wait for someone to put the sutures in my calf and they're shaking their heads in disbelief saying "but he's such a good dog at home"

Musical Chairs

2011-12-08T21:56:00.001-04:00

So I just returned from Son#1's Christmas, I mean Holiday, concert. Something I approached with not a little trepidation. Let me say that no matter how much you love and cherish the little darlings, there is nothing quite like an school Christmas, I mean Holiday, concert.

Let me too be the first to say, with some surprise, that I actually quite enjoyed it. No-one is more surprised at this turn of events as I.

I think it's because he's finally at Junior High and whereas the raw talent may still be lacking, there's a ton more practice, which is starting to make some semblance of perfect,

Also, there was the subject matter in the concert. Your average Elementary School Christmas, I mean Holiday, concert is primarily composed of neutered, culturally defanged (yet curiously culturally appropriate), politically correct Holiday songs, the subject matter of which seems to be the one thing your average Westerner (or Western-dwelling ex-plant) can agree on: presents. There may be the occasional "Silent Night" but the play-list reinforces the general idea that this is a great gift-receiving time of the year, the occasional TV John Lewis TV advert notwithstanding.

If the Guardian is to be believed, that advert pretty much has grown men weeping into their tea the length and breadth of the country. And kudos to Slow Moving Millie for taking a Smiths track and bringing it down an emotional notch or two. Because let's face it, ITTET what the world needs now is not love but a more depressing version of an already depressing classic.

Where were we? Oh yes, another SockSnob aside. So, the subject matter. A couple of unapologetic carols and Jingle Bells, which apparently was originally an American Thanksgiving song. Who knew? The rest of it was surprisingly adult. Maybe given the average age of your average parent with a kid in Junior High there is an understanding that maybe stuff the parents might actually like would be a winner. So we had some pretty passable versions of Let It Be, Stand By Me and Lean On Me, Of course, I would have preferred Ain't No Sunshine instead but that's just me. Son#1 told me they were going to do Sweet Caroline as well (which I love, reminds me of being 8 all over again and listening to Neil Diamond with my parents) but their teacher didn't think they were up to it. Quelle dommage. I was excited to see Hallelujah on the program thinking we'd get a blast of Handel but it turned out to be Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah instead, which was fine by me.

The Grade 8 guitars did Ode To Joy (awakening the sleeping soccer fan in me)....

We lost on Penalties. Kuntz!

Anyway, after that they switched track completely and played Romanza. Not only is that my favourite piece of classical guitar after Rodrigos Concierto d'Aranjuez (or Concierto d'Orange Juice if you like) but a piece I remember playing at a school concert at about the same age as these kids!

Even though I've had "All I want For Christmas" as an earworm all week, I found the whole school concert thing tonight more About A Boy

rather than Love Actually.

Maybe I've been reading too much Nic Hornby recently.

Unfortunately, the evening did not end up with Rachel Weisz at my door offering to go to bed with me. Oh well, you can't have everything!

Ten percent per week my arse!

2011-12-03T20:16:00.001-04:00

This one straight from the "do as I say, don't do as I do" file. Crikey, my knees ache. Why? Age-related perhaps but all self-inflicted!

I went straight from my Marathon-Maniacs qualifying streak to the cyclocross season. Of course, racing on Sunday meant no long runs, which I suppose was a good way of recovering from the long runs and ensuring no inadvertent 30 km Sunday runs with Rami. Before you start saying I have no discipline and willingly head out on 30 km Sunday runs the week after a marathon, you've clearly never run with Rami. A "short ten miles" can all too easily turn into a water-less, gel-less epic as you end up by the Rotary and Rami quietly suggests "yacht-squadron anyone?" and all of a sudden you're at Herring Cove without a paddle. Or a bus-ticket.

Still, I managed to head out nearly every day a pied and still racked in 50 to 60 km weeks, a nice relaxed weekly distance. Just what I'd expect to do in the off-season without any races in the near future.

Anyway, since the Cyclesmith cyclocross finished last week I just started running this week as per what I considered to be my usual schedule; nice easy long-run with the club last Sunday (we ended up at the Rotary but luckily Rami wasn't with us so we didn't do the Yacht Squadron) and what with thus and that without really trying to do it, had a 90km week (last bar in the graph below). Oops. Not just a >30% increase on the previous week (for four previous weeks!) but one of the highest weeks of the year, and I'm supposed to be in easy mode. Double oops.

As you can see from the graph (sorry for the crappy graph, I really miss Graphpad! Wow, how geeky does that sound?) I did hit another running milestone this week and passed 3000km running for this year; a target I usually hit. Since I started keeping a training log again in 2004, this makes it a shade over 24000 km (or 18000 miles).

No wonder my knees ache!

Fabada!

2011-11-20T20:24:00.001-04:00

Cold and blustery. Sure, it's going to get colder yet, but still this week was the week that we were reminded that winter had not forgotten us; there's been frost more mornings than not and we had that short but vicious flurry on Thursday. As a runner and a cyclist, this has been the week that the longs all came out; long-sleeved tops, long tights, long-fingered gloves all topped off with a toque.

Just the day for a warming recipe, so I tried making a fabada or Asturian Bean Stew; something I had when in Spain a couple of months back. Nothing too complicated, just white haricot beans and sofrito. If you're watching your cholesterol then the original, served with chorizo, blood-pudding and pork belly can be a bit much (although they are all food-stuffs I love dearly) so I added a lean pork chop instead.

I'm sure it would have been nicer at Casa Fernando, but a couple of bowls of that, fresh bread and a little too much Rioja than was strictly necessary and I perked right up.

This was a needed meal after quite a full weekend. Headed for the usual club run yesterday and ended up running ridiculously fast for an easy Saturday. However it felt good, it was nice to know the legs were still (kinda) there and it was a great excuse for a breakfast sandwich.

After we got home la belle said let's go for a ride on the BLT trail to the Bike And Bean cafe. I didn't really feel up to it, the morning's run had left me feeling a little empty and my knees were aching but hey, it was warm (or at least not cold) and the wind wasn't too bad so why not? I'm sure there were coffee shops closer (it's a 60km round trip) but it was pleasant enough.

This morning was the cross. Again, it was warm and like last week warm enough to essentially race in summer kit

....although I did my practice-laps in my Team Canada jacket (I managed to get another one after swapping my original with Raul for an FETri running top).

The course had dried out quite a lot and it was quite fast. I managed to have my 'cross head on again and had a good race, for me. Like last week I was in a sprint for 37th place (or something) but unlike last week I won it! The wind was insane, 50kph gusts according to Environment Canada. On the back part of the course we were blown along, you were pedalling but it was like the chain wasn't there. On the grass the wind was mostly in our faces and coming around the last 180 before the barriers/finish I was quite literally stopped dead in my tracks as I turned beam-on into the wind!

The wind notwithstanding, it was a tough race for me. Despite doing the same number of laps as last week in almost exact;y the same time, after a couple of laps I started to feel the effects of the previous day's run. It's one thing to do a >160bpm run for 45 minutes, but at my age I'm starting to find that it's quite another to ask your body to do another 45 minute >160bpm effort 24 hours later.

Tomorrow's a rest day for sure!

Stadium of Shite

2011-11-19T10:58:00.001-04:00

Shit, from the Old English scitan. Sometimes in parts of northern England is Shite (pronounced to rhyme with "light") and one wonders if that pronunciation is perhaps a language fossil from a much earlier time. It is one of the earthier Anglo-Saxon words in our current lexicon, and perhaps the most socially acceptable. In fact you could probably get away with it before the nine o'clock BBC watershed, unlike fuck and definitely unlike cunt, which is apparently the last taboo word.

I mention it because today, November 19th is the Halifax Parade of Lights, the de facto Christmas season opener. Whenever I hear the expression Parade of Light my brain often transforms it into Parade of Shite, perhaps because of Sunderland FCs home-ground the Stadium of Light which rival Newcastle fans (think Montreal Canadiens - Toronto Maple Leafs for the level of intensity) immediately christened the Stadium of Shite. Rather like Atlantic Tit-Chiming it's an expression which rather rolls off the tongue and for better or worse almost always comes unbidden to mind.

Unbidden but perhaps an appropriate mental Spoonerism. It's November 19th! Barely mid-November and we're doing Christmas already? What gives? At least in the States the Christmas season cannot start until after Thanksgiving (which is next Thursday) and this puts a natural check into the start of proceedings. Here, with Canadian Thanksgiving so early, there is no such hurdle. Rememberance Day perhaps; no evergreen before poppies seems reasonable and whilst some stores didn't respect this unwritten rule (or guideline); our local Sobeys has been the full Christmas nightmare for a fortnight now, private houses did. Now the wreaths have been laid? Well on the Sunday afterwards (November 13th for the record) I saw at least two houses decked out to the nines, including one with the full-on candy-canes-in-the-front-card-lit-up-bushes-and-trees.

Yup, I don't like Christmas. OK, to clarify; it's not the holiday as such as the falsity, the anti-genuine, the supposititiousness behind it. For one day a year, or so it seems, we are told, instructed, expected to, have a good time. If your family is even slightly dysfunctional (I'm not talking Simpsons here, I'm talking your regular run-of-the-mill dysfunctional family) then you are expected, forced, told (whatever) to do this with people you may not even talk to for the other 364 days of the year. Yet for one day you have to be all hale-fellow-well-met and transform the usual family bickering into a picture-perfect Normal Rockwell Time cover. The irony of course being such an image likely never existed anyway, yet here we are trying desperately to recreate something that wasn't there in the first place!

Of course, to get over some of the guilt you may feel over such heretical anti-Christmas feelings, well you can spend your way out of guilt. An idea so old that even the Catholic church doesn't ask you to do that any more; just you try asking Father Ignatius after midnight mass for an indulgence. I'm sorry my child, we haven't done that since Martin Luther! Here was a guy who the Roman Catholic church loved so much they excommunicated him on the basis of his writings but they still said hey, putting a stop to the whole buying your way out of purgatory, not a bad idea that!

It reminds me a bit of being told to go out and enjoy myself in the snow. The logic being it's snowing, snow is nice, nice is fun, so if you go out in the snow then you will automatically have fun. Of course the truth of the matter is you climb into umpteen layers of fleece and go outside and hey presto, I'm cold and wet. Now what? Are we having fun yet? Like Christmas, well I'm here, I've spent tons of money but I'm still not happy. What did I do wrong? Nothing. You can't force anyone to have fun, whether it's snowing or Christmas. I'll have fun when I'm doing things I enjoy with people I like. So guess what? By that definition I can have Christmas nearly every day! I might not get any free stuff, but I'm smiling and laughing (odd behaviour for a misanthrope I know, but it does happen) with people I genuinely care about. You can't force such a thing.

So please don't try. I'll respect your enthusiasm for this holiday, if you'll respect my lack of enthusiasm for same.

Ponzoña

2011-11-07T20:16:00.007-04:00

So, it's what, November already? Oops, I guess I haven't been blogging for a while. Truth be told. I've written some pretty damn fine pieces, albeit in my head. I just don't seem to have to have the time to get it down on paper, well the screen, you know what I mean. Somehow, tonight, the stars have aligned: the will to write, the want to write and, perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to write. I've been told that writing is good for me, and that might be true. so perhaps blogging will be part catharsis, part therapy, part stopping-me-from-wasting-all-night-on-youtube.

As I've said before, I don't really get any "free" computer time nowadays and it's worth reiterating that I never realized how much government time, both federal and provincial, I wasted blogging, either for myself or for TNS. I apolgise to Laura and Stewart and Tarjei and Hussain. Well, the former three anyway; the latter needs to, well, never mind.

I think I'll try and get back on track, and even though it's been a couple of months since last putting pen to paper, they haven't been quiet months, quite the opposite in fact. The blog may end up jumping around in time as we travel between events that may, or may not, be causally connected but as the joke goes: " 'I'm sorry Sir, we don't serve particles faster than light'. A neutrino walks into a bar".

As with all years, my racing season seems to have started late: only three races until August 31: two marathons (one as a pace-bunny) and a team duathlon. I seemed to be living that Clash song,

If you liked that, try the acoustic-Mick-Jones-in-a-public-library version. Fricking awesome!

Anyway, after that, I seemed to get racing with Shubie (as per the belated post below), Worlds, a couple of marathons and then the customary cyclocross, or "humiliation on a bike by pros and 14 year-old girls" as I like to call it. I might yet get ten races in this year (as opposed to the 20 + last year) but with over half shoe-horned into the last three months of the year after every self-respecting triathlete has already bolted their bike into a CycleOps. Of course, I'm not a self-respecting triathlete, so 'cross, here we come.

The first 'cross race I did this season, the second of the series (I missed the first because of a marathon: there's the first cause-and-effect or effect-and-cause of my next few posts'), was a true, Belgian 'cross day. Windy and rainy. Horizontal rain actually, interspersed with hail and sleet! The course was slick and the mud-pit was well over our rims.

The Cyclesmith 'cross has really ballooned in size. Five years ago it was twenty, thirty guys max, now a bad day is sixty. The joke is that BNS should rename all their races "cyclocross" and they'd see some decent size packs again! La belle did it one year, but now says she's a little intimidated by the size of the event. I can see that: your only mass-start race of the year and it's off-road single track. Plus the front row is 50% local pros. It's a bit different at the back: it's not quite the proverbial laughing group, we're serious too, but we know where we stand in the pecking order, fight it out amongst ourselves and get the hell out of the way when the big guys come steaming through to lap us! There's no need to get intimidated out of the race: just readjust your goals (finishing without hospitalization is a reasonably achievable aim) and have fun!

I didn't think the 'cross Gods were smiling on me as I crashed on the course riding to get to the start, a silly little 10kph prat-fall on an off-camber descent that gets me every time. I started at the back and the first lap was little more of a warm-up riding behind people slower than me and, thankfully, the same kind of bike-handler. This allowed me to get my eye in for the terrain and the obstacles and I slowly picked it up as the race went along. I missed the bell-lap as I was in the funny no-mans-land between the leader and the flag. I know I could have made the bell-lap but there was strangely something missing. It took me a day or two to realize what it was. After a month or two of concentrating on long races, where tempering your tempo was the name of the game, my head just wasn't into the 40-minutes-or-bust attitude that was 'cross. I was coasting over the top of the hills and taking too much rest on the straights.

Still, it made for some epic racing and one of the advantages of taking the first race piano was that I didn't crash in anger!

It's not blurry, its' the rain!

However epic it felt, it doesn't top the epic-ness of last years epic 'cross shot...

Terry Tomlin said it was the full Mount Surabachi and whilst such comparisons are meaningless and trivial at this time of year (I am assiduously avoiding any use of a Paschendale metaphor with regards to certain sections of the course), I think secretly, we all agree with that.

This week I went with my 'cross head squarely screwed on, and even listened to a bit of JLo to get my heart-rate pumping before we started. Not that I've turned into a JLo fan in the last six weeks, but events have conspired to make On The Floor this season's warm-up track!

The weather was much better than last week, sunny and warm. Unfortunately, the mud had dried out to a much slicker consistency. It was like cornering on ice. Except for the mud-pit which was still over your rims, but sticky. Imagine cycling through a 30 metre semi-cooked waffle, already coated with maple syrup. If the Inuit supposedly have 57 words for snow, we need 57 words for mud, as this was clearly a different mud to last week! Raul Martin commented it might be called ponzoña or poison in Spanish. Poison to your race perhaps, trying to get a bike through that, but it smelt pretty toxic too. The passage of so many tyres has churned the mud up and reanimated some previously dormant sulphrogenic bacteria. My bike positively reeked when I washed it. I've no idea what latent anaerobe we've awoken from the deep but if it escapes, it's going to be armageddon!

By my own standards I had a good race. Again I started at the back and picked my way through the field. Instead of coasting and floating through some sections, I pedaled through them. One person I caught on the last lap said I "really picked it up at the end". I don't think so, I think it more likely that the three-hour engine I've been cultivating all summer helped me keep an even pace. Plus, I know my bike-handling limits and whilst I may not have been chucking it through the corners, riding reasonably conservatively through the technical sections meant staying upright and not losing time remounting, re-hitching dropped chains and cleaning small shrubs out of the drive-train. The closest I got to crashing was spinning the bike around nearly 180 coming around a U-turn and ending up pointing back the way I came! I got an extra lap in compared to the previous week and I was pleasantly happy with the event. Plus, I'd trued my own front wheel the day before, not something I do often, and I wasn't sure that doing that and then heading to 'cross was a good idea! Well, the wheel held up; there was a slight squooshing coming from the front end by the end of the race, but it was only mud build-up under the fork-crown!

The tale of the tape tells it better than any words. For the first race my Garmin gave me a 163 average, 172 max over 44 minutes. This week, I got in an extra lap for 51 minutes, but a 170 average and 180 max! The SD this week was lower too, so I was riding more consistently throughout. That max, 180? How do you like them apples? So much for 220 minus your age.

Plus, for the rest of the day I had that funny hacking cough I only get after red-lining it in the cold! Sweet times.

Well, that's all for now, I'll try and make a start on getting some of that other stuff down.

Later

World Duathlon Championships: pre-game

2011-09-23T20:12:00.002-03:00

Yes I know, I've not been updating much recently. To be honest, it's been difficult. I don't have a lot of free computer time, and hence blogging suffers. i never realised how much work time blogging and triathlon took until I had a job where I was unable to get to a computer to anything other than check pricing and availability!

So, in Gijon, 48hrs from what is arguably the A race of A races in my racing "career", and I pinned on my first dossard in 1989! How am I feeling?

Well, kinda prepared. I did the Shubie Sprint two weeks ago, just to test the legs. The swim sucked, but it was my fifth swim in four years, and that included the Optimyz photo-shoot! I had a great bike-leg; it was hilly and I just rocketed through the field, from 44 to something like 7th. What gives, I thought I'd lost any kind of cycling legs years ago? I had a good run too, a 20 minute 5K , but that did include the world's worst T2 ever, but then that was part of the plan to doing Shubie in the first place; to do a real T2 in anger. I'd never raced in the Ronins before, and what's the good of a fast shoe if it takes you over a minute in T2 wrestling with the damn things? Might as well have slow shoes and enjoy the run! Still, I know what I screwed up and it won't happen in Gujon, I promise.

Last weekend I did my final 20 miler before the autumn's madness. I headed out with Ray Morehead and Denise Robson and we rattled off a repsectable 35 kms. Knowing Worlds would be a 2.5 hr race with a 5K at the end, when we hit 30kms I tried, and suceeded, in upping the pace for the final few kilometres. It felt pretty good, so I think I can head into the race on Sunday with some confidence in my own abilities to challenge the distance, if not with any pretensions of any kind of placing!

R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

2011-08-29T15:49:00.003-03:00

I'm not going to get all biblical, but I really would like to be treated by others as others would wish to be treated. With a little g'dam respect perhaps.

I'm not going a bundle on the dress, but the sentiment is sound.

Now respect has to be earned, not demanded by right. I understand this. I once met a triathlon official who confided to me that he (but it could have been a she) was feeling a degree of disrespect from the athletes and proceeded to be an absolute jerk at someone-else's station; presumably in an attempt to reassert him(her)self on the athletes. I hope I'm not the same. I admit, I'm not perfect. When it comes to fallibility I'm low on the papal scale. But I do try to be nice, to be polite, to say my please-and-thank-yous, hold the door open, to be diplomatic, I don't say the first thing that comes into my head (although God knows I want to) and try to be reasonably empathetic.

What does it get me? Reciprocity? Fuck no, you bastards can't even spell it.

Maybe I'm just in a nihilistic mood today, but despite this, it seems all I get is walked upon and over; do I have a sign on my head that I cannot see that says "delicate sensibilities contained with: please trample upon at will"?. What makes me such a good target to all and sundry? People who are neither perfect themselves or indeed good at their jobs find it acceptable to find in me the smallest fault, while (again trying not to go all biblical) overlooking the note in their own eye.

Really? Am I that bad? So perhaps I should just FOAD. Oh, what's that? You don't want to to go? Well, you just told me I was a complete fuck-muppet and so if you want me to stay, you must be a fuck-muppet too. Only a fuck-muppet wants a fellow fuck-muppet in control. But of course I can't call you a fuck-muppet, even though you told me I was one, because then you'll get all upset and say I'm not treating you with respect. Hence the problem, quod erat demonstrandum and all that.

Let me give you an example, which illustrates the problem I'm having perfectly and with exception to the two people concerned, you, my fearless reader, will be unable to work out who they are.

So I was standing in a car-park recently waiting for my Garmin to synch so I could go for a run. A friend of mine just happened to be in their car, so we started chatting. Someone else my friend knows, but not someone I know, walked by, saw my friend and (presumably) saw me chatting to him, walked up to said friend and engaged friend in another, totally unrelated conversation to the one we were having. I mean, buddy just cut right through me: physically and conversationally. After 30 seconds he turned around and asked me if it was OK to butt in.

Right, sure. Go right ahead. Don't mind me, I'm not here. Unless you want to walk all over me, in which case, I'm all yours.

Grrrr

Travelin' light

2011-08-23T14:48:00.011-03:00

At least the Youth athletes turned up this morning! I spent a pleasant hour pack-riding with them, saw the early morning sun over Purcells Cove then headed off for a couple of hours on my own. It was sunny, slightly cool in the shade, no wind. a true float day. Legs felt OK, there was even some leg-speed in there somewhere (surely not, and don't call me Shirley) and my knees had the good sense to know I was on a good thing and quit whinging. I hit TIBS after 50 miles and pretty much inhaled an almond croissant, which is why the Americano is standing on an empty plate!

Last week Dan stayed for a week and we had the opportunity to get some rides in together. It was time for clipless pedals so I took a pair of Shimano M520s off one of my fixies and put them on his mountain bike. Of course, he had the typical first-time users' crash: he rode up to me, stopped dead, couldn't get his feet out and fell over in slo-mo, like Wile E. Coyote. All I could do was watch!

Hey, who hasn't?

After we got that crash out of the way, we had a good ride on the BLT trail, and followed it up the next day with a evening traipse through Shubie Park. He's definitely getting the hang of clipless and it's improving his riding: in Shubie was actually making me work a bit to stay on his wheel. So much for stealing candy from babies and beating up 11 year-olds on the bike.

But travellin' light? Apropos of what, other than being my favourite Billie Holiday song?

Well, one day I had to work all day, despite having Dan at home so I did what a whole generation of parents has done and left him under the care of the electronic babysitter; the TV. What he did with his time was undertake a Star Wars marathon; while I was at work he got through Episodes I - V and we finished off Episode VI after dinner.

Like father like son? I've got a bad feeling about this.

I was quite envious really; who wouldn't want to have a free day and spend it watching an entire canon of movies? And which ones would you pick? Star Wars, a la Dan, is an obvious choice. I suspect Son #1 would go for a Star Trek marathon. I would go for maybe the Bourne trilogy, or maybe the Ocean's 11/12/13 trilogy, but only if you were in a Matt Damon mood! Perhaps Bond? A Kill Bill double feature? Austin Powers? Bee-have. A colleague said he'd watch Lord of the Rings. Perhaps. Maybe the only way LOTR will ever make sense to me would be if I were to settle down on the couch with a metric ton of popcorn and an adult diaper and just watching the whole damn thing.

Anyway, Dan pointed out that in the Cloud City scene in The Empire Strikes Back there is a fleeting glimpse of a guy running down the corridor carrying a canister and, somehow, this guy has been immortalized as an action figure. I tried to find a pic of this one on-line but typed in "Star Wars Leia's Metal Bikini" by force-of-habit and was momentarily side-tracked (if by momentarily you mean a good chunk of the afternoon).

See what I mean? Schwing!

I got to wondering about what would you carry in your canister if the Empire suddenly too control of your gas-mining station in the clouds, or perhaps more realistically if you had to lave for any reason. What would you take?

This wasn't quite as academic an exercise for me as I've done this quite recently. What I ended up taking was whatever would fit in and on my car. It looked something like this;

If you ever wondered what the internal volume of a 2000 Hyundai Elentra is, that was it,

plus three bikes on the car rack.

Not quite up to Paul Simon's standards ("hop on the bus Gus, you don't need to discuss much") I'll grant you, but life has a poor record at imitating art.

Of course, now I have the Ninja, I'd have to pare even this down a little more (well, a lot more).

Bikes? I know I can get a two-bike rack on the Smart; either a 1 1/4" hitch for a Thelma or maybe a Yakima roof system. I'd have to say the Carrot and Old Bess, but I'd take a couple of spare wheels, including the eccentric White Industry's ENO fixie, 'cos Old Bess can take it (Old Bess can take anything!).

In the car; clothes; some nice shirts, trousers, couple of jackets. I'd have ti get rid of all those race t-shirts, but we all have way too many of those. Basic running kit (one of everything for all weathers), ditto cycling kit. I'd junk most of the jerseys, just keep a few. My volunteer jacket from World Du's, it'll pretty much do every weather I'm likely to see, even if I'm fleeing an apocalypse in the Ninja.

The only thing missing from the Hyundai/interval volume picture is my Japanese Peace Lily, otherwise known as the Drama Queen for her habit of wilting at the slightest provocation. She's my bastard red-headed step-child with whom I have a love-hate relationship. I'm not as attached to the Drama Queen as Nicholas Angel is to his in Hot Fuzz, but I'd be loathe to see her go, so she comes with me. She'd take up most of the front seat of the Ninja though, but I suppose one has to make sacrifices; after all this is what the exercise is all about.

Should I have advance warning of the coming apocalypse, then in prep I'd get a lap-top so I can play my DVDs. Of course, perforce I'd have to a junk a bunch - maybe only keeps those suitable for a movie-marathon on a rainy afternoon? Or I could rip them all to an external hard-drive. I've done that to my music already but I bet buddy from Bespin didn't have time to rip >100 movies to disc before a vengeful wave of stormtroopers ransacked his quarters. Books, kinda hard to rip those to the E-drive, but they take up so much space. Natch. I'd have to hope the public library survived or spend a lot of pre-apocalypse time (and money) getting them all on a Kindle.

This illustrates on of the problems in my life in general. I seem to spend way too much time and money re-acquiring what I lost or left behind in the many moves I've made. Goodness knows how many times I've bought From Russia With Love from second-hand book-shops (Leeds, London, Aberdeen, Virginia, Halifax), or maybe how many different versions of Mission impossible or Star Wars (NTSC VHS, PAL VHS, DVD, don't make me go Blue-Ray, please).

As well as losing a lot of media in the last 23 years, I've also lost pretty much everything else. Some I willingly (or near as dammit willingly) gave up. Some, my Mother likely trashed. As much as I lightly refer to the Drama Queen as my red-headed step-child, at home I was quite literally the bastard black-headed step-child. I suspect, though I dare not ask, whatever didn't make the first cut when I left for Poly was unceremoniously flung in a skip. I do wonder, however, how much of my step-brother and step-sister's stuff remained at the family seat during our respective Uni years. More than mine, I'll warrant. Why? I'm at a loss, but as much as mater refuses to countenance it, some step-children were more equal than others chez Pickering. From my perspective the unifying quality amongst the Favoured Ones was a certain, how shall we say, Caucasian-ness. Hey, just simple cladistics: grouping things by outward characteristics!

So, I'm already travellin' light. All have have from high-school is this CD, The Cure's Kiss Me, Kiss Me Kiss Me. I'm serious. I may appear to be a hoarder, but all I have from 1982-1988 is this single CD. I did have my scientific calculator for a while too, but it eventually got dropped in one too many beakers of buffer!

From before this time, I have Sooty, a rather threadbare hand-puppet from when I was a small child. Don't ask me how Sooty survived the culls and moves, but he did.

Third on the list of old stuff is my Crest CC jersey, which (incidentally) still fits.

Add some bike-tools (really, I don't have a photo of my high-school girl-friend but I have a pair of 20 year-old 15mm cone-wrenches and a pin-spanner!) and that's it. I suppose my GSCE certificates must be here somewhere, not that there'll be a pressing and urgent need for me to prove a B in O-level Religious Studies in 1986! Not much to show for a life. I've always prided myself by thinking I'm not too much of a materialist and I think this pretty much proves it. However attached I get to stuff, no mater how much stuff I acquire, life has a habit of periodically paring my shit all the way down again. Stuff this lot in the Smart Car, which cynics would say has the same internal volume as the Bespin dude's canister, and I'm good to go.

Soul Food

2011-08-17T08:20:00.005-03:00

No TIBS thins morning, but TIBs is becoming more of a treat than a regular occurrence nowadays anyway. Still, one supposes one appreciates it all the more when finding oneself on the dark-side with time to spare. The picture does illustrate, perhaps, the reason I've been posting less and less recently; not so much the aimless loafing in coffee shops (I just said I was doing less of that, didn't I?) as the attendant introspection that accompanies a cappucino and pastry. I've been doing a lot of that recently.

Anyway, unrelated or not, I finally made it to a new restaurant in town yesterday, well at least new to me: Mabuhay on Blowers Street, more commonly known as Rockys. Mabuhay, which is Tagalog for "long life" in the "cheers" sense of the word has strange hours, catering either a lunch buffet to the downtown City crowd (I use the term City advisedly, this is Halifax after all) or late night kebabs to the clubbing crowd. As such, it was always difficult to get to, being a full time employee somewhere other than downtown and not having been to a nightclub since 1989.

If I was going to check out a Filipino restaurant without looking like a sad lonely bastard I was going to have to choose my company with care. Son#1, well this is the guy who went to the recent Indian Cultural Festival (Curry is our middle name) and got a hot-dog. I think he finds onion spicy. Wimp. All the European genes went into that one! As for la belle, well her idea of food involves a fat-stripping process to the point of performing phenol-chloroform extractions to remove cell-membranes from the most basic of food-stuffs. Not so much cuisine as chemistry. Whilst undoubtedly healthy (although of dubious utility given what appears to be a genetic basis to my own hyperlipidaemia), remembering that when Filipino recipes are not calling for large amounts of belly pork (a fattier version of bacon or ribs) they require liver (ugh, offal, how can you eat that? You do know what those organs do, right?) it was clear she would not be a tranquil dinner guest.

So yesterday, when I finally made it to Mabuhay, it was with Son#2 , Daniel, in tow. Dan likes spicy food, is somewhat adventurous with with gastronomic tastes and, as yet, is not lipidaphobic (but if his biochemicial traits are like mine, then he will have to become so).

Oh boy. I have quite literally not eaten that food for thirty years, not since my parents divorced and my mother cut any ties we had to Filipino culture, including my name. Yesterday Dan and I pigged out (and I use the word advisedly) on pancit, steamed dumplings, asado and a few other things I have forgotten the names for. No adobo or dinuguon though, those were my favorites.

It was tasty, but not curry-hot spicy, although I did hear a white lady at the table next to us comment on the spiciness of something. I don't know exactly which dish she thought was "hot", but it can't have been anything I ate, and I ate everything! Funnily, most of the diners were, asides us, either from Sport Nova Scotia or Catholic priests.

It was only $10 a plate (or actually about $3.30 a plate by the time were were done) but the biggest surprise came when I went to pay.

"$15 please".

I protested that both of us had eaten.

"Ah yes, but your son? Only $5".

I mean, here is Dan, building a milk-and-jelly tower in Coras (who hasn't?) last Sunday, shortly before killing a huge breakfast.

Sure he's only 11 but he's an eating machine. He's nearly outgrown a 16" framed 26" wheeled mountain bike; the next size up is one I'd ride. He's adult sized, with an appetite to match! I told them as such, he'd had a couple of big plates and I was more than happy to pay them for what he had eaten. But they stood firm, and charged me only $15.o0 for two. They didn't make any money off us yesterday, so I feel somewhat obliged to go back and make good the deficit. Maybe I'll take la belle; after all how much can a couple of steamed dumplings with a plate of rice and water-chestnuts cost?

I ran the usual "you're not from around here" gamut on the way out, but for once I wasn't pegged as an Australian. They pretty much dinged it, which wasn't a problem. It was strange, the old guy who was cooking gave this funny little laugh when someone said something: it was exactly the same kind of laugh my Dad makes. Bearing in mind I wasn't looking at him when he did this, I was momentarily confused because I thought Dad was in the restaurant,. Wow, I never realised that was a Filipino laugh, it has to be because I haven't heard it anywhere else, and I've lived around a bit. It must be as culturognomic as the Canadian "eh" or the French Canadian "Waoui".

Anyway, I'll give my LDL a few weeks to calm down and I'll be back for sure: now Tuesdays are my day off and a lunch-buffet is only a 30 minute walk from home!

Pass the dinuguon, adobo and make mine a double helping of statins: Mabuhay!

To the winds

2011-07-26T23:17:00.004-03:00

A farewell dinner tonight for an old colleague of mine, Jessica Boyd. Some old, some current, NRC colleagues met at the Economy Shoe Shop for a final goodbye before she takes a new post on the faculty of the American University in Yola, Nigeria.

It was a little bit strange seeing so many old, familiar faces again. Of course, as might have been predicted, as the night progressed the crowd around the table dwindled to just Roger Ebanks, Mike Reith, Jess and myself; in many ways just like old times. The juke-box played old folk-punk tunes such as the Pogues' Fairy Tale of New York and we talked about science, life, Jess's new position and the current state of NRC; Roger and Mike still working in the old Mother Ship whilst Jess and I had been cast aside in favour of the new reality four years ago now. To be honest, from what we heard, we might be better off out of it than in!

We all stayed for a pint longer than usual, on account of the rain you understand, and eventually staggered out into the drizzle (drizzle being something Jess is probably going to miss in Nigeria). As we did, I pointed out that in 2000, NRC hired five young RAs on the GHI Aeromonas project; Roger, Jess, Victor Nesatyy and Stephen Tsoi. Victor and Stephen moved on after three or four years, but Roger, Jess and I stayed until the bitter end, and if I may say so, did some damn fine work. Roger survived the great WR (work-force reduction; great euphemism!) of 2007 whilst Jess and I were let go, but we both managed to stay in Halifax. We might all have been pink-slipped nearly four years ago now, but with Jess's farewell dinner and her imminent relocation to Nigeria, tonight felt like the end of GHI, with only Roger remaining on Oxford Street and his erstwhile colleagues, the three Amigos if you will, relocated hither and yon.

We didn't have the silly hats or that intro dance, but we published our fair share of papers and abstracts together.

Plus, after three pints, like the lightweight I am, I fairly staggered home. I don't think I've done that since I went to the Prince of Wales in Aberdeen with Andy one Friday night after work in 1994, had way too much and spent the rest of the night face-down in a bucket moaning "don't move my head". In hindsight, tonight I probably shouldn't have gone for a run then headed straight down the pub to rehydrate with three pints of Rickards White. Just sayin'

Descent of man: Johnny Miles

2011-07-12T17:21:00.000-03:00

A latte and an almond croissant at TIBS this morning, just the thing to warm up after 60kms in the rain. Of course, putting a wet helmet and track-mitts back on after the coffee felt pretty icky, but having one of the best java-shots in town and a croissant still slightly warm from the oven? Priceless.

Of course, in the "icky" damp cycling clothing category nothing comes close to damp cycling shorts with an actual chamois leather chamois. I'm old enough to remember those, and had a pair back when I started riding. Now putting those on while they were still slightly damp is an experience I'm glad none of you have to endure.

Taint necessarily so: synthetic chamois - we're spoiled beyond belief!

It's been a funny couple of weeks, what with Johnny Miles, Coteau du Lacs, having the boys full-time for a while and then generally trying to maintain a rhythm of life (the universe and everything). La belle and I had a chat last night and we pointed out that me starting full-time at Cyclesmith co-incided with a significant uptick in her call schedule. All of which means we're not entirely sure what even represents a "regular" life rhythm nowadays anyway.

In many ways, this morning's soggy sixty represented one of the first times I was able to have some time for myself in quite a while. Sure, the >14hr drive to Montreal and back was also "me" time, which was ably filled with audiobooks, podcasts and the CBC, but there was also the slight matter of piloting the Ninja at 120 kph. This morning was a little more sedate.

I thought a little about Johnny Miles. On the whole, I was disappointed with my time; 3:13 and change. Now yes, I know, whinging about yet another BQ may not be seen as something worth whinging about, especially when the mean marathon time in North American is nearly 50% longer, but at least one person has looked me in the eyes and said "well compared to what you can run, and have run, you have a right to be disappointed with that". Thank-you. You know who you are.

I thought I was doing OK around the first two laps, hell, I was doing OK around the first two laps. A nice easy lope with Dave Nevitt, Kevin Tulloch (until he DNF'd) and Matt Callaghan. Pace felt good, legs felt good.

On the third loop I tried to pick it up a little. That did for Matt, Kevin had already DNF'd, and I still felt good. Everything was under control and it even felt like I was gapping Dave Nevitt. Sweet! Only 10 kms to go.

Then the wheels came off. Dave blew by at the start of loop 4. This was quite demoralising really. It felt like I'd been working to gap the guy, yet all I had to show for it was a 15 second gap in 10 kms, which Dave handily disposed of in a jiffy. Fuck.

Oh well, still in 6th place on the road.

The first five kms of the last loop, which were on road, felt OK. Well, my legs were heavy and my mind was starting to get that slightly hysterical, wild-eyed look, but the monster was under control. Plus I was now moving through the back-markers and if I was feeling a bit lunatic with only four miles to go, these guys had ten miles to go and they were walking already, whereas I was still maintaining a semblance of a run. Nothing like feeding off other peoples' misery.

Then the left turn, down a small hill, narrowly avoiding a Sobey's 18 wheeler K-turning across the course and onto the track paralleling the river; three miles home, nearly all on trail. It's called Albion Way.

Oh, perfidious Albion!

Every step took more and more out of me. The more I tried, the worse it became. The Garmin taunted me; "ha only 200m since you last looked at me". The only saving grace was that Matt was in worse state than me! Our paths crossed just after the last turn, with 2 kms to go (for me), well he was really suffering! If I was going through some kind of purgatory, he was already plumbing the lower levels of running hell.

I was only 25 minutes or so behind the winner; Dave McLennan did a 2:48 or something. This isn't too bad, I'm usually 25 to 30 minutes behind him, so perhaps I really did have something faster than a 3:13 in the legs, it was just the day (which was kinda warm), or maybe the course (which is nearly 50% trail) or some other intangible on the day, which affected all of us, to differing degrees of course.

We can be geeky and look at the Garmin tracks for the race; The clear upward trend in pace can be seen. Good and controlled through the first twenty kilometres. A slight swing upwards between twenty and thirty and all hell breaking loose after thirty.

Or we can review the photographic evidence. Here's the start. Hey, I look pretty good.

Coming up to the half. I still feel pretty good. Dave Nevitt is just behind the halfer in red, sitting there, taunting me with his presence. Matt (in black, to my left), well his wheels have already become unscrewed and are on the verge of falling off and rolling away in opposite directions. Still, a good action running shot for me I think. Not looking as fresh as the start, but allowances have to be made for having a half in the legs already.

This is my third passage along the trail. Still look OK, I know I felt OK and I thought I'd dropped Dave. Of course, he was probably lurking just around the bend behind me. I know this because a mile or so later he came steaming past me like I was standing still.

Oh dear, oh dear oh dear. 38 kms or something. That calm visage has gone, replaced by a mix of pain and hysteria, my arms have dropped and if this was a video, yo'd see the rest of my running form had gone too. The shades still look good (nice bit of bling from work) and they did do the job of hiding that wild-eyed, staring look of desperation quite nicely.

This series of pictures reminds me of those ascent of man posters, but in reverse. To be honest, I'd have preferred riding a bike!

Next up, I have no idea. A couple of TD gigs I think. Certainly, I haven't really run since Johnny, now three weeks ago, and to be quite honest, I haven't really missed it. Shawn Beaton beat me up on a 20km club-run on Sunday, but I managed to keep my pace. You know, I think I'm starting to feel the urge to run again. Maybe.

Signs of summer

2011-06-23T22:47:00.004-03:00

For some, signs of summer may be the swallows returning, the solstice,modern-day druids performing made-up rites on said solstice, or perhaps having to mow the lawn.

For me, it's Irving gas-station coffee.

Whether perking up at the mid-point of a ride or perking me up at regular intervals on the highway, this is a beverage that never passes my lips in the off-season. As belated as summer has been coming to Nova Scotia, I've drunk a boat-load of Irving coffee in the last few weeks and, therefore, it is undubitably summer.

The latest batches of Irving's witches brew have been downed keeping me awake on the 1400km drive to the south shore of Montreal, Salaberry-Valleyfield to be precise, for the Soulanges Continental Cup triathlon. No, I'm not racing, I'm one of the officials. I've only been in town long enough to find the hotel and find the nearest St Hubert BBQ chicken resto; triathlon work starts tomorrow.

The drive was uneventful; as much as I usually don't like driving, it was nice to have the better part of 14 hrs to myself. I filled the first two-thirds of the trip with the CBC or a couple of audio-books, but then defaulted to louder and louder music as Montreal got closer and closer. Traffic was pretty bad around Montreal, and it took me over two hours to do the final 90k s from the junction of the 20 and 30 to the hotel. This was ignoring the advice of a suicidal GPS who wanted me to drive onto, and off, the island instead. Sure, it would have been a bit shorter, but with the current state of Montreal's bridges, I'd probably be out there.

There was no compelling reason to do so, but I did use a Garmin Nuvi on the drive, even though I knew exactly where I was going. Was this so I had accurate kilometres so I could submit my travel-expenses to TriCan? This is what I'm telling myself, but we all know the real reason; if it isn't on your Garmin, you never did it. Oh, how it creeps. Firstly, it was bike-rides that never happened, then rubs, but now long road-trips? If you remember doing it but you can't download it (or have a downloaded record of it) does that mean the workout still happened? When my computer crashed and I lost three years of saved Garmin tracks on Training Centre, did that mean I hadn't run all those miles? Which is more reliable; the BAA website shows I ran Boston twice, but I can only show you one downloaded track to "prove" it, and I was never actually "at" MDI! I think I need to get a life. Or a least one whose' worth cannot be so qualitatively determined, and if necessary, dismissed!

The Ninja was very good on the highway, I seem to be getting ca 500 kms out of a tank or ca. 6.6 L/100 kms, which were the figures the Smart was sold to me in the first place. La belle was very skeptical and didn't think I'd see those numbers, based on her experience with the diesel, so I'm pleasantly surprised to see the Ninja doing exactly what it said on the tin. As it uses Supreme, not regular, it costs about $40 to fill 'er up and so I go for about the same distance for the same money as the Deer Killer, but I am using less fuel, hence reducing my overall footprint.

And yes, I am aware of the irony of using the phrase "reduce one's footprint" whilst discussing a drive to Montreal. It's like discussing the ethics of food-production methods whilst eating a foie gras-stuffed veal sandwich (possibly the worlds most indefensible meal).

Well, bed-time for me; early start tomorrow. Should be an interesting linguistic weekend; most of the officials are Francophone, I'm a Brit and the TD is a Newfie! We'll have the arse out of 'er in no-time!

Breaker breaker

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Bikes and free coffee

2011-06-16T07:35:00.004-03:00

Part Deux in the bringing you up to date on life and me up-to-date on the blog. Perhaps after I write this, the blog can get back to some semblance of contemporaneity and, who knows, socks.

Mad Science, "blowing shit up for Grade 2", was, and is, great fun. Being there for the lightbulb moment in some child's life was, and remains to be, an honour and there is possibly no greater thrill than doing an experiment, no matter how small, and hearing twenty kids go "woooooowwwwwwwwwwww, that's so cool" in unison.

Unfortunately, "ohs", "wows" and "thats-so-cools" don't pay the bills and whilst there was a possibility of parleying Mad Science into something closer to full-time, it seemed a little too sketchy. I don't mean the work or the people are sketchy, they are actually great people and a great program, but probability of a pay-cheque, and the amount of that cheque, was a little too probabilistic too me.

There was nothing in this town in my chosen field (fish + immunology; can you get any more esoteric?), leaving town was not an option and EI only lasts for 40 weeks. Time for Plan B: rethink one's career trajectory.

Fortunately, I had already thought out an alternative career trajectory. You know how some people say they'd like to retire early and open a B&B or become a painter or (in Alexandra Morton's case, become a "biologist")? I'd always said that if science didn't pan out, well I'd love to work with bicycles and in triathlon. Was there any way of making this pan out?

I'd been applying to sport-related management positions, but my CV just didn't want to stick with anyone. I think it was the PhD that did it. I was just overqualified. I remember getting CVs from post-docs wanting technicians' positions and I suspect my CV was ringing the same kind of bells with the people on whoms desks it was landing. Then just as HRDC was thinking "Dacanay, Andrew, we've been supporting you for a year, time for you to get off your arse", some opening on the sales-floor at Cyclesmith appeared. Within the space of two days, I applied, was interviewed and was offered a position. Within five days, I was on the sales floor in a staff t-shirt getting to grips with Career 2.0.

So, three months in, how goes it? I'm not so naive to think everything will be sunny and smelling of roses. I used to set my own schedule and agenda, I was the boss. Now my agenda and schedule are set by others, and I am most decidedly not the boss. Occasionally someone more senior will ask me what am I doing, if it appears I am standing around, customer-less and temporarily underemployed. Coming from a background where I was the one asking the questions, not answering to them, it feels weird.

However, I'm not making mistakes any more, at least I haven't had a mechanic come up to me with a work-order recently and say "did you book this in?". I'm getting a better handle on our inventory, but given the shop is 25 years old and has vintage esoterica on dusty top-shelves all over the basement, I don't think anyone really knows what we really have, and I'm getting to grips with the rhythm on the shop and shop-life.

But bikes! Do you have any idea of the amount of sweet, carbon-y, Ultegra/Rival/Dura-Ace/Forced-up goodness that pass under my hands on a regular day? So how bad can that be? I get paid to deal with these things! I mean, really, a job where I can fondle the Trek Speed Concept 9.5 on the floor without people saying "sir, please step away from the bicycle".

I already knew many Cyclesmith staff, after all, I've been a customer there for 11 years, so there was no awkward getting-to-know-you phase. This did mean my training wasn't quite as thorough as it could have been as I think was regarded as one of the family (almost)! There is a sense of community and team-work, more than the NSAC ever did (Houssain Farid, are you listening?), which makes it a great place to work.

The hybrid and moutain-bike learning curves were particularly steep for me. However, if you're enthusiastic about bikes, as I am, then it makes it easier to engage people regardless of your product knowledge; availability, affability and ability is the sales-floor triad (I believe). There is a great cross-range of people at C'smith and if I don't know the intricacies of a dual suspension MTB, I can always call on a colleague who does. And already I feel that I am called on to help out with with customers who's needs others feel I can better serve than they. Sometimes when your self-worth is feeling a little low, someone asking you to help a customer chose tri-bars is all the validation your life needs.

For those of you who know me, you know that coffee is kinda a big deal. I once worked out that I spent ca. $8500 at the Tim Hortons in the Life Science Building opposite the NRC in the 8 years I was there. With a Timmies on the same block as C'smith, was it possible this could happen again; coffee, bagels and breakfast sandwiches? No; there's always a pot of coffee on downstairs; it's provided by management and comes from Java Blend on North. Once a week a particularly sweet-smelling box is delivered containing a week's worth of coffee-grounds.

So, in the final analysis, I get to drink free coffee and talk bikes and triathlon all day. I mean, where's the problem? I'm supposedly an intelligent individual, I should have thought about this earlier.

Bluenose #5

2011-05-24T15:57:00.011-03:00

A croissant and a latte at TIBS on the way back from my ride today. What with the cafe-stop and some quiet roads, it was a time to reflect on my marathon.

I felt very disconnected from the race this year. I didn't go to the Expo (la belle picked up my dossard and chip), I didn't go to the kids' run, I didn't make the pace-bunny meeting on Friday. I just rocked up to the Metro Centre on Sunday wearing my ears.

As you know, I was my usual basket-case beforehand. Perhaps more-so because of the lack of racing this year. I think it showed in the run-up to the start. I was able to relax a little with my fellow pace-bunnies, but that was it. I felt as focussed bfore this as I had for any race I was running solely for myself!

We (the pace-bunnies) were all sitting on the floor in a corner of the Metro Centre and everyone was laughing at me because of my pre-race drugs plan

Imodium, Advil, gels and water. Embrocation to kick-start my muscles. What's wrong with that?

As we did this, we had one guy come up to us and get all aggravated there wasn't a 3:30 marathon bunny. He started to complain there should be, the last race he had done had one blah blah. It was hard to be level and calm and diplomatic (but I was, I think). With the minor shit-storm swirling around BN, it seemed the perfect start to the day; a bunch of volunteer pace-bunnies getting aggravation for something totally out of their control!

I started a tad too fast, but we always do, but took some corners wide and slow and tried to slow to to pace, about 4:15/km. I hit 1 km on the money, but after that, we always seemed to be on the back foot, always five to en seconds per km slow. Each and every time. We hit the park late, whereas I always like to get there early. We always lose time in there. I think it's easier to run 4:10 to the park, get there a minute early, slow down to 4:30 in the park (uphill, draggy, off-road) and leave the park on-schedule rather than run 4:15 to the park and try to keep 4:15 through it!

Somehow we left the park on-schedule and stayed there to the end. As usual, I picked up a lot of guys who'd gone storming off the front in the first couple of miles to the usual refrain

"You're fast"

"No I'm not"

"F#*k".

Not as usual, I didn't have a group with me; just two guys who stuck with me all the way; one guy sped up after the park to get his time (which I always tell them they can do) and one guy ran in with me for a 15 minute PB! I feel bad that I didn't have a big group, or that I dropped the group I did have, but I ran my set pace and if no-one could stay, well? Surely I was there to run 1:30, and that was my prime motivator.

As I ran through the start/finish area, la belle ran next to me for a bit, having just been part of a team that pushed a 17 y.o. boy with cerebral palsy in a chair in the 10K. Now that's hard! To be honest, I wanted to know how fast they could get going down Nantucket! The child really enjoyed the run, he likes the sensation of "fast" and laughed his head off all the way around.

At the CBC on Sackville and South Park, Denise met me as planned to run the second half with me. She filled me in on the marathon; who was leading who and the inevitable course fuck-ups that this race seems plagued with.

Back in the day, when the Halifax loop was just one big loop of Halifax; Citadel, North End, Waterfront, Park, Oxford St, West End, Citadel, no-one got lost. This one and one-half loops of the North/South End, someone always takes the wrong direction somewhere. Invariably it's a front runner taking an under-trained volunteer by surprise and being sent left instead of right. By the time the fuck-up has been remedied, the bulk of the runners are there, playing follow-my-leader and have no idea of the ruckus they just missed. Tough shit they think, fricking "elite" runner, serves 'em right (the logic escapes me). Except this ain't no wiry Kenyan out for a payday, it's an age-grouper just like you and me, who's been training since Christmas with this one goal in mind, and all those interminable miles in snow and freezing temperatures have just been pissed down the road by a race-organisation that seemingly values a runner only until they've paid, and a front-runner even more-so.

Anyway, Denise and I dug into the second half; any attempt at conversation on my part was cut off with "if you have enough breath to talk, you have the energy to run faster, so run you bitch".

The lack of quality racing miles was starting to show even three miles into the second half, with my quads feeling heavy. Heading over the bridge, even my hamstring started to give out that warning twinge, the one that says "try that again and I'll cramp, you bastard".

Nonetheless, the endless hills in the second half came and went; Bridge, Nantucket, Woodlawn, and no cramp. I felt pretty good heading into Shubie at 30km all things considered. Denise was being a hard task-master.

The wheels started to fall off in Shubie coming up to the 20 mile mark. We met Shawn Beaton in there and he started to run with us, but he pretty much had a nice chat with Denise while I wallowed in their wake. Sorry Shawn, I wasn't much of a conversationalist.

As you can see, Shawn and Denise had the energy to dynamically pose for the camera whereas I think I just ran into a trash-can!

Out of Shubie, 33kms done. The works starts now. I told the guys I just needed to hold it together until Maple, at 38km, because by then the work was done. Sounds counterintuitive, with three major hills in four kms, but by 38 you know it's in the bag, plus I like hills. I'm too lazy to really give it all when it's flat, I need a hill to bring the best out in me! The five kilometres between Shubie and Maple are sterile death. Yes, flat, but no diversion, no crowds. Just a lake on one side and a busy road on the other. This year, those kilometres just flowed by with Shawn and Denise talking a storm in front and me tagging along behind like an idiot child; the illusion complete when at each water station Denise would take a cup of water and give it to me!

Maple then hove into view; 38 kms, three hills. Then a surprise. At the bottom on Maple, club-mates and friends; Louis Brill, John McQuaid and Nick McBride. Together with Shawn and Denise they ran me all the way up Maple, shouting encouragement and coaching advice; dig in, back straight, knees up, breath. I may not have looked it guys, but I was so grateful.

Over the top and Shawn peeled off, leaving me with Denise and Nick, who coached and cajoled me all the way home. The nice thing about runners is they don't give you that sugar-coated "it's all downhill from here" crap (it's Bluenose fer' goodness sake. There is no downhill!). They tell you like it is, but also tell you how to get it done and that you can get it done. In very explicit terms too. Honest advice, in other words. The stuff you appreciate.

The cramp finally came on the bridge, but I was lucky and didn't have to stop, but ran it out.

Nick and Denise peeled off on the hill on Brunswick with the finish-line in sight. Big thanks to both of you for dragging me around. I quite literally couldn't have done it without either of you, and having seen the pain and suffering up-close and personal Nick seems more determined than ever not to do a marathon!

I saw la belle just before the line and she gave me Cookie Monster! I took Cookie and ran over the line with him; it seemed like the thing to do to celebrate getting marathon #14 in the bag, and my 5th Bluenose full.

I posted a 3:05:57, my best marathon outing since BN in 2009, which was also a 3:05. I was 10th overall, after Mark from Sportstat transferred my time from an embarrassing 3:05 half to a respectable 3:05 full!

Obviously, I"m pleased with the time; one of the best I've posted for a while. Does this mean the legs are coming back at last, or was this a statistical blip; the low time to average out last years PW at Boston? Time, and perhaps Johnny Miles, will tell.

Basket-Nose

2011-05-21T19:29:00.006-03:00

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose. I know that's not how it's said in QC, but it's what I learned at school and 65 million French can't be that wrong, can they? The reason I say that is because I remember this very night seven years ago, before Bluenose 1. I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by all my running kit, contemplating my second marathon (my first in seven years) and totally freaking out.

Fast forward seven years, it's now BN 8 and I have 11 more marathons under my number-belt but I'm still sitting on the floor, freaking out slightly. Some things have changed. The pile of clothes is smaller. I know I have to wear the Running Room Pace-Bunny T-shirt and hat with bunny ears. Arm-warmers probably, but with a T-Shirt not a singlet, so I'm safe from my snob self! I'm still debating between three pairs of shorts; two of which have seen marathons before, but one of which should probably not see another! I have new Balega socks (thanks Luke MacDonald and A1) and I think I'll use the Precision 10s rather than the new Precision 11s (which I haven't quite dialled in yet). The Ronins can stay on the shoe-rack tomorrow; weighing more than 70 kgs I don't think this Clydesdale wannabe should do a full in a 7 oz racing flat.

If it's a nice day, I'll break out my new bling from the bike-shop, a sweet pair of Oakley Flak-Jackets. Thanks Terry. Yeah baby, yeah!

I have a love-hate relationship with this race. I'm still waiting for my 2nd place medal from 2005. From the small tempest swirling around BN in the Chronic and on-line, Gerry Walsh's recent comments, how the race is for everyone, not for Elites, I guess I'm waiting in vain. It's flattering to be classed as "Elite", but still, I'm your average age-group runner who trains hard, was blessed with a reasonable gait and good mitochondria and occasionally gets lucky. I occasionally win a race (or at least place) too! So it would be nice to get rewarded for that. But that's another story.

I do think, however, its unfortunate how some people have jumped on the "the race is too hard" bandwagon as to why BN is unpopular with local runners. Sure, it's hard. So is Boston. I think if the race was better organised, and that means the City coming on board and coming on board big-time, then the race would be better, and more people would run. Have the 5K and 10K on Saturday like Ottawa; that'd free up the roads and avoid a cross, yes a cross, of runners tomorrow. Let runners, not bureaucrats, devise a clear route, not this one and a half loops of Halifax that gets people confused and led to the mass DSQ three years ago. It can be hilly, sure bring 'em on, but make it easy to follow, and not rerouted to make it easier for some-ones Sunday Timmies run. Close some more roads. We have what, three or four miles of closed road in 26 (Brunswick and Ilseview)? Does Boston just close Boylston? Does London just close The Mall and Tower Bridge, but open the bridge after two hours and make everyone run on the sidewalk? Do all of that, and more, and make BN a real destination race, not something we have to apologise for.

Oops, rant over. Sorry!

It turns out I've done five BNs, four fulls and a half, in the seven editions. The fact I keep on coming back must mean I like it, right? This will be my third time pace-bunnying. The Running Room let me bunny the half and then carry on for the full as a semi-official, quasi-endorsed bandit. I spend five minutes after the race in the timing van with Mark from Sportstats, who I sometimes work with as an official in Quebec, and they reconcile my time from a >3hr half into a >3hr full! I do find bunnying rewarding, to help people do that pace. Last year, there were so many PBs in my group, for both 10K and the half. Regardless of what happens in the second half, that's always a good feeling. To be honest, nowadays I think I get more out of that, than I do out of my own achievements!

I missed one BN to do Ottawa and missed one due to illness. I think Mark "Cookie Monster" Campbell has done all seven. Given that I've done so many, and these are the roads I train on all the time, gives some advantages. I can visualize nearly every step of the way. This is pretty useful when you come out of Shubie and are faced with the spectator wasteland that is Waverly Road and Braemar. I know exactly how bad Maple and all the other hills are.

Conversely, I know how bad Maple and all the other hills are. I have, statistically speaking, suffered badly on nearly every portion of the route at some point over the last ten years, which means I can tell a bad race or training-run story about every sector on the course; Oh yeah, I blew up here, bonked there, threw-up in that corner. Those negative thoughts can dwell on your mind at some point in the race.

This will be my first race this year; my last was the Fort Lauderdale Resolution Run 5K on Boxing day. I've logged a moderate number of miles this year, just over 1400 kms, not the most ever but not the least either. I'm also going to be unapologetic about mixing my units, deal with it. I'm not sure how my legs are going to behave. I have no Moose, for example, to measure myself by, nor do I have any shorter races to sharpen my legs and top off my lactate pathways.

My running buddies tell me I'm running strong, but the marathon is a different beast. I don't think it matters how many times you've done one, each time on that start-line is a new roll of the dice. Like die, the marathon has no memory and weird shit happens after 20 miles. You can train all you want and perhaps ameliorate how bad the shit's gonna be or when it's gonna strike, but strike it will and the marathon will have no mercy as to whether it happened last time or not. It's not about avoiding the man with the hammer (as the French say), it's how you deal with him when he comes. Essentially, just remember you're not due, by right, a good marathon after three bad ones, or visa versa.

Well, I think I've successfully transferred some of my angst onto the screen. Time to go and try to make a decision on those shorts, charge the Garmin and get an early night.

All revved up with no place to go.....

2011-05-10T06:42:00.001-03:00

Ahh, makes you feel 16 again doesn't it? I know, not the best quality video out there. Try this one; cavorting, scantily-clad women in leather and fishnet. I think the 16 year-old in me just had a cerebral vascular accident (or something). I know it's cheesy, over-the-top, objectifying, demeaning and promulgates sexist stereotypes of women, but it's also rock-n-roll. This is before we talk about Carmen Electra, ahem, fronting ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man and Legs. Is it warranted? Perhaps not, but I like to think we can all let our PC instincts lie down for a while in the interests of a thumping back-beat.

Lest us not forget the late Robert Palmer, the godfather of such scantily-clad rock foolery.

Is it me, or are those knee-length dresses on the guitarists looking dangerously modest? Probably because of this. I've heard that Richard Curtis films, such as the one that last video came from, portray an inaccurate picture of England as a romantic wonderland; snow at Christmas (a la Bridget Jones's Diary)? Please! And it, should it actually snow at Christmas, we all know the place would grind to a shuddering halt that would last until Epiphany. Still, I have to be careful of them. Too many can put me in a state of nostalgic melancholy.

Not that I've ever pursued Rene Zellweger through snow-covered streets or publicly dumped Anna Chancellor (that Gladys Althorpe; never buys 'er own) for Andie MacDowell of course. It's just the, well, Britishness of it all. Oh well, it isn't good to dwell too extensively in the past, in detracts from the now dhaling.

Which rather long-windedly brings me to the original subject of this post, feeling decidedly all revved up with no place to go. Randal asked me this morning when I was going to use some of my form on a race-course. I have no idea.

Let's look at it. I spent the winter sitting, by choice, on the sidelines while y'all skated and skied around me. I have neither the skill or the knees for such activities and gladly awaited the return of sports dependent upon a decidedly higher coefficient of friction. None-the-less, I slithered and slid my way through many, many training runs, putting miles in the bank against such a day.

I missed Moose due to both family and triathlon commitments. Goffs, I was on the course at the turn due to RNS commitments. I missed the Pig being unable to secure the time off work. I skipped the 8 miler today through (to be honest) blatant apathy yet paradoxically buried myself on the training run. I'll miss the Bulldog 5K for the same reason as the Pig and the following duathlon for the first reason stated, but I'm still working through last year's gin so that's not so bad.

I am, on-track however to make a 2011 racing debut at the Bluenose, reprising my role as the 1:30 pace-bunny and, once more, I hope to reprise my role as full-marathon quasi-sanctioned/quasi-bandit running half-an-hour behind the main group.

This isn't because of the Tally. I have neither the time, money, inclination or knees for such foolery. It's because of what racing does for me. One, I really enjoy it. I can't explain it either. I'm a basket-case beforehand, sometimes for days, totally wound up, I push myself like crazy during it, and invariably spend a few minutes on the floor retching afterwards. Not the way intelligent people behave on their days off. But I enjoy the cut-and-thrust of racing, the tactics on the fly, finding out exactly what my body can do.

Which leads me to the second point. I'm too lazy to be a real athlete. I'd much rather go for a scenic ride, see the proverbial roses and smell the proverbial coffee than do intervals. Ditto running. It's only by racing that I train for racing. It's only by racing that I push myself harder and further than I would sanely do so on a random Wednesday night training run. You can train as hard as you want, but only racing makes you better at racing. I thought I'd read a similar sentiment from Steve Tilford recently. I can't find it now but go ahead and read his blog anyway, it's really, really interesting.

Sure, you can train quite adequately for a time-trial on your own, on the rollers or on a treadmill. Just settle down, ramp up the pace until you hit your numbers and hold until done. Easy. But the bike-portion of a triathlon/duathlon aside, we're not solo, we're mano a mano. We're reacting to other people.

There's no such thing as a game-plan in a race, it all goes to shit once Mike blows the whistle. Someone goes off the front from the gun? Well if it isn't Matt Callaghan then you probably have to chase him down right now; so much for easing into the race. Then if buddy goes in the last 5 K, is it a real threat? Is he going for a flier? Should I chase him down? The answer is undoubtedly "yes" in all cases. The next thing to do is go catch him, go deep to do so, and then either sit on and make sure he doesn't do it again, or put in another dig of your own just to piss him off and show him who's boss. Can you train for this? Only to a point. Every race is unique and you can't map every possible scenario out. You can't ask him to wait, you hadn't planned your attack for another kilometre and then you can both go and make a race of it and besides, you've only trained at pace x on the dread-mill and would he mind dreadfully if he slowed down because you're not ready for it!

Nope. Just go already, and never mind the Garmin.

I miss racing.

WWJD

2011-05-06T21:27:00.008-03:00

No, no, don't worry. This isn't an evangelising post. Well it is, but the J is not Jesus, but Jason, as in Jason Murphy, our favorite race official.

As you may be aware, la belle just came back from the Flying Pig marathon in Cincinnati. It was a warm(ish) but wet day, maybe between 17 and 21 Celsius. Great running weather we suppose and she put it to good use, running a 3:23:53 (or thereabouts). First time sub 3:24 and a personal best. Yey.

Pretty good splits, very consistent and near-as-dammit even splitted the whole thing. Fourth AG too. All-in-all a good day out. Training was not perfect and this result clearly shows that long runs are over-rated; the fewer she does, the better she does. Any fewer and she'll be taking to the start-line smoking a Gauloise and eating poutine and still get a PB!

As you may also be aware, it was a trip fraught with difficulties; a cancelled flight on the way out, a missing suitcase that turned up just in time for the trip home, hotel problems and most of the museums and art galleries in Cincinnati were closed on Monday, the only day she had left to take in the sights of Jerry Springer's former stomping-grounds.

There was one last thing. The Flying Pig has a no-double-dipping policy for it's awards. Nice. So as at least one of the big-time place-getters was 35, la belle reckoned that, according to the preliminary results, she should have been in line for a nice little gong, no?

However, the preliminary results were just that, preliminary, and before she'd eaten her way through the recovery tent, she'd been dropped by one place. Which on the face of it was odd as whilst PBs and BQs are always by chip-time, gongs are by gun-time.

A little digging (what's a gal to do when Cincinnati is all but closed?) showed something odd. The lady who was 3rd AG did not ping all the mats!

Huh?

That's right. Runner #5307 (I have no problem naming and shaming at this point) had 6.8 mile split, missed the half and 20 mile mats and pinged the 25.2 mile and finish mats. As she had some split times and a chip-time, she also must have pinged the start-mat.

#5307's first 6.8 miles were at nearly 10 minute per mile (or there-abouts), so after an hour, she was something like 14 minutes in arrears to la belle, who as previously noted was stoically knocking out 7:45s (per mile). Her final mile was 7:20 or so. Her final time was a scorching 3:21. So, she covered the remaining 18.2 in 2 hrs 06 minutes. This isn't a bad pace, 7:00 per mile or so, coincidently the same pace Denise Robson and I were knocking out on our Tour de Dartmouth at the same time.

I can't work out where she must have passed la belle, as running at least 40 seconds per mile quicker and being fourteen minutes down after 7 miles, it should have taken her over 21 miles to catch her (14 mins = 840 seconds/40 seconds = 21) ! This assumes they started together, which they likely didn't. If you say the speed differential was 45 seconds, #5307 could have caught her in 18 miles (18 + 7 = 25 miles), but you tend to remember being passed in the finishing straight and sprinting it out for the place, and she doesn't. These pace times are necessarily extrapolated as she didn't have those splits.

When contacted by the timers, who'd noticed this anomaly, she said she ran the whole course but her chip fell off and she was carrying it on her watch-strap, hence it didn't register on the mats. The timers were temporarily placated, but then they then found a finish-line picture from their own cameras that showed #5307's chip clearly on her shoe.

The map is above (larger version here). There is no evidence from the mats, that #5307 was ever any further east than than the apex of that big bend in the Ohio River.

For a while, the timers didn't think they had grounds for DSQ, but we argued (in a couple of emails) that if she couldn't be placed on the course, then there were no grounds to assume she had run the distance.

The last we heard, however, #5307 has been DSQ from the results.

This is as it should be.

Those mats, you see, aren't split-time mats per se. Sure, that's how we think of them and your average runner thinks they are there so their times can be texted to friends, family and colleagues and simulcast to people following them on Athlete Tracker (who hasn't spent the last Sunday in August, or the Patriots Day morning glued to their computer?). As nice as that is, that's not why they are there. They've been there since before when SMS was only a brand of cycling clothing!

They are lap audit mats and there because Rosie Ruiz cut the course (and spectacularly so) at Boston in 1980! She denies it, but the fact remans the only person who vouched for her being on the course was a dude running in a Superman suit. In 1980 BAA didn't have hard-and-fast eveidence that Rosie was, or was not, in Framingham or Wellesley or on the Newton Hills or on the subway. So lap-audt mats were introduced. They confirm you did, in-fact, run the entire course.If you didn't ping all the mats, it's pretty good evidence you didn't do the course, and if you didn't do the course then you should not appear in the results. And if you ignore the evidence of the lap-audit mats, as the Cinci timers were thinking of doing, then why go to the expense of having them? Speaking of Boston, this was a BQ time, and not any old time, this was a first-day sign-up time.

You can miss a mat, but when this happens we ask, did your splits make sense? If you missed a lap and clocked a 2:55 per k average, it's clear something is wrong. In this case the times were believable, but fast. Running a 7 minute mile, #5307 should have been fighting for the win and would have been third. So, was it believable? Perhaps, but one's incredulity was being strained by this point; missing mats, chip not where she said it was, blazing fast times. Occam's razor and all that.

So justice, in this case has been served. It's not about the gong, which la belle may, or may not receive, it's about the principle.

Now all we need to do is write to the Columbus half. She won there last year but, curiously, she has no 10K split-time.......

Il buono, il brutto, el cattivo

2011-04-22T11:02:00.010-03:00

Oh well, been out of it for a while, in more ways than one. Instead of one monster blog-post that rambles on for days, I'll try and get back up to speed in bits and pieces.

Before we begin, some mellow tunes to listen to and hopefully become today's earworm. Firstly, I Am The Photographer by Memphis. Their sound has been described as having a "lush, easygoing and melodic sensibility" and whose music "jangles and shimmers" with the Smiths as a reference point.

That's better, isn't it?

To continue mellowing out, try a little of Alexander's Truth.

I'm not sure where this one is coming from. More than a bit of an Enrico Morricone vibe, that's for sure.

Il buono, il brutto, el cattivo pretty much sums up where I've been coming from recently.

Some twat hit my nice, brand new Smart car three weeks (or maybe two) after getting it. I know, I know; I'm starting to sound awfully possessive over an inert (in a conscious rather than a kinetic sense) assemblage of metals and plastics, but for the one time in my life I get something "nice" and this is what happens. This is why you don't get the good stuff; you'll only get crapped on from a great height by Lady Luck masquerading as a diarrhetic Larus argentatus.

Anyway, I was behind him, we were both turning right out of the IWK car-park onto Robie Street when he reversed into me. Nope, doesn't make any sense does it? I remember sitting there watching his reverse lights come on and thinking he must be going through the gears trying to find Park because there's no sane reason to reverse, before he came back at me! Anyway, he 'fessed up good and proper. The damage isn't bad, just a Deerkiller-esque dent on the bumper and I'm in the process of getting the repairs done on his insurance.

As rakish-looking (and performance un-limiting) as the dent may be, I don't want it on the car!

A week later, I took Joshua to Science Fair regionals at SMU, on the back of his performance at the school science fair. It was a bit daunting when we arived to set up. Here's Joshua with his store-kit solar rover and a clock from my bathroom that runs on water and lemon-juice and next to him, again in the sustainable-fuels section is a kid who's Dad had built him a water-wheel and a windmill.

Oh dear, so this was the competition. Note to self; next time a little more on the creativity, a little less time in the science-section of Scholastics! We set up, ran his presentation through the safety and ethical checks; no radiation, no poisons, no gigawatts of power and no animals were harmed in the making of this poster (something I have never, ever, been able to say before), and firmly decided this would be a learning experience instead.

Instead, he won the Junior Sustainability prize! This was a shock to all concerned, not least Joshua who didn't even go up to accept his prize at first. He was so convinced that he wasn't third or second, and neither was the kid next to him with the home-made water-wheel, then were was no way he'd be first. The way he tells it is he tuned out after they awarded the silver and didn't even go up at first to get his prize when he was named. They had to call him three times!

Funny aside, there was a real NRC-IMB vibe to the fair. Out of fifty or sixty entrants there were four or five ex- or current IMBers.

Anyway, Joshua walking off with cold, hard cash was one in the eye to a somewhat cruel comment that he only won at school because the competition was weak and/or they were marking low! Instead, all the judges praised him for his enthusiasm and overall presentation skills. All goes to show, sometimes the high-falutin' science means naught if you can't present it well.

So bravo Joshua, but no you're not spending the $150 first-prize money on Lego (it's going in your RESP). We're (well, I am) = already planning next year's project. This time, with actual data! And no Joshua, not the funny-looking chap from TNG, I mean numbers!

Ninja!!

2011-03-07T20:18:00.009-04:00

So, I had to replace the Deerkiller with something. Perhaps we can define the term "had to". As much as I am not a car person, with work and home and triathlon, a car is definitely useful. So "had to" it is.

But what? I decided on a Smart ForTwo. I knew the car fairly well as La Belle has one. Good on fuel, nice-looking, mostly recyclable, low emissions. Works for me.

It's a gas model, because they don't import the diesel into the US market any more. The US has very stringent emissions regulations which essentially bars the Smart ForTwo diesel from the North America market. The whole thing smacks more of politics rather than concern for the environment, as the emissions standards for gasoline engines are far more lenient and don't even come close to the diesel ones. But hey, you can't argue against the EPA so lets just go with what's on offer.

Black throughout. What else? White was available, but can you see me in a white car? The name came naturally; The Ninja; black, sleek, stealthy and fast! Yup, fast. Way better acceleration than the diesel, and with the semi-automatic gear-box (you change gear, the car does the clutch by itself, so no nasty clutch-control to trip stall you out) it's really easy to speed in this puppy; gotta be careful with this one!

When I picked it up, it only had 20 kms on the clock, it didn't occur to me to take a pic until I'd done a couple of miles

Still, my long run on Sunday was 30 kms!

I could have got a "previously enjoyed" diesel, but getting the absolute best fuel economy wasn't a priority for me. This change in car was more about reducing my own personal carbon foot-print and reducing my fuel costs. The numbers the car was sold to me on are not real-world according to the Smart forums (fora? What is the correct plural?) but the car will likely burn ca. 1L fuel more per 100 kms than the equivalent diesel model, but even this 20% relative increase in fuel consumption still means The Ninja will burn 40% less fuel than the Deerkiller! Reducing emissions and costs. And, to be honest, the hypermilers are kinda kooks anyway. They mean well, but they always come across as being a bit, well, off.

Parking is a hoot. It's 7" longer than La Belle's diesel, most of which is extra trunk space (and when the trunk is that small, any increase is significant) but it's still about as long as a Hummer is wide. Unfortunately, the word is parking nose-in to the kerb is illegal, which is a shame. Still, at the condo we squeezed two Smart Cars into one parking space.

Together, we're not much longer than the Mercedes C class in the adjacent bay! Speaking of Mercs, The Ninja looks boxy but it's drag coefficient is the same as an S-class.

Or indeed, squeeze two cars into the place of one outside one's favourite coffee shop

You can see the differences in styling between the '06 and '10 ForTwos. I've seen it written that the first generation '06s were styled more like concept cars; quite futuristic. The '10s are a little more down-to-earth and with two cup-holders dare-one-say, a bit more North American? You can see this mostly in the interior, but you can see here how the '06s rocket-ship silhouette has become a bit bulkier!

Funny how life comes around. Back in the UK I nearly bought a yellow Fiat Cinqeucento, very similar in lots of way; small, 700cc engine. It was nominally a 4 seater but very nominally, and optimistically.

Finally got a Fiat Uno, same kind of deal, but a larger engine (999cc) and a legitimate 4 seater. Not this one, but very similar.

Anyway, here I am, 20 years down the line, with a very similar vehicle to the one I was looking at 20 years ago. Given the way The Ninja drives (very well thank-you), and the Uno drove, it makes me wonder how the substantially larger bodied Cinquecento would have managed the highway with the same sized engine as The Ninja!

Of course, the problem is the boys. Well, they're never a problem, but a two-seater does pose a challenge. The answer is either we go in two Smart cars, or join Halifax Car Share (or rent) for the rare times I'll need to car both of them independently. Using two Smarts uses about the same amount of fuel as the Deerkiller alone. Not to mention travelling in style! Or, of course, get the bus, ride or walk!

Vroom, vroom

Farewell, adieu, hello.

2011-03-01T22:12:00.020-04:00

It was about time to say goodbye to the Deerkiller. Here we are with 6 months left to go on it's MVI and you could pretty much see daylight through the rocker panels. Which was funny, seeing as I'd just (well 18 months ago) paid $600 to get them fixed seeing as it'd failed the MVI on the basis of them alone. Not to mention a marginal emissions test. Oh, and the brakes. In short, a car that usually cost about a $1000 in repairs a year to keep it on the road. The only reason the last bill at Midas didn't quite reach these giddy heights was seeing as how I "forgot" to go back and listen to what they'd really found. To me the real story was how a $45 summer special oil-change turned into $400 dollars worth of ball-joints.

If she was a human being, the surgeon would have come to the doors in blood-stained scrubs, wearily taken off their surgical mask and said "we tried everything, but the rust had spread too far, I'm afraid.... she's gone" Da da daaah! She'd cost me nearly her blue-book value in repairs to this point and it was clearly only going to get worse. It was, in other words, clearly time to let her go to that farm in the country where she could frolic, care-free in green fields with other clapped-out Hyundais.

As much as I ranted and wailed about her, let us not forget not only was this a car I didn't want in the first place but had been foist upon me not once but twice, she performed sterling work. That trip to Montreal was clearly a huge risk, but she passed with flying colours, getting us there and back without once calling CAA. She never once, except that one time two years ago, refused to start in the cold and ice and snow. To my British friends, I do mean COLD. Not quite plug-your-car-in-cold (as my friends in QC and all points west will attest to), but cold enough should these temperatures occur in Britain, questions are usually asked in parliament.

Then there was that time I had to move and she quite literally held all my possessions (or at least those I wanted to keep).

Yup, if you ever wanted to eyeball the exact internal volume of a 2000 Hyundai Elentra, there it is. Once I'd strapped three bikes to the bike-rack, I was good to go, and was gone. Get a new plan Stan....

Let us not forget, the three bikes; The Carrot, Old Bess and the Kona Fixie, combined, were worth more than the car.

She's been to all the races, here was the sight in my erstwhile rear-view mirror as we left Guysborough last year. FYI, Guysbrough is now in July this year, just so you know.

and she was also the backdrop to one of the best "atmosphere" pictures I ever took at a race.

Admit it, it kinda sums up your life doesn't it?

My pet cow also liked her, but Moo is a sucker for a road-trip!

Speaking of races, there was that deer on the way to TD Riverport in 2008, getting up-close and personal with the genus Odocoileus and putting the arse in virginanus! The deer, of course, was shrugged off with nary a worry, leaving her with a rather raffish dent....

which allowed for easy identification in a line-up!

Spot the difference?

That head-light cluster was always on shaky ground after that, and gradually worked itself loose. However, it only fell out three years later, about a month ago actually, after I got a bit too aggressive clearing a foot or so of snow off the bonnet. I kinda got fed up with the brush and used my snow-shovel, which although plastic was enough to take the cluster straight out!

The fix? Duct-tape of course.

Not any old duct-tape either; the original repair was with a length of duct-tape I found wrapped around an old puncture-repair kit in the glove-box! Ha! The resourceful cyclist strikes again.

I got $300 for her, a mere 5% of what was paid for her three-and-a-half years ago. This was as a trade-in on a significantly different car. Sure I could have got more, say $500, by selling it through Kijiji or similar but this way I was spared hordes of large gentlemen in oily t-shirts and boiler-suits traipsing around and telling me in excruciating detail exactly how crap it was and why they should only give me $300 for it, and why I should feel lucky to get that. Oh, and have them know where I live when something vital dropped off.

A trade-in wasn't exactly a Viking funeral. Come to think of it, it wasn't really the viking funeral of legend either. I've been to one of those, or at least the archaeological remains thereof

I wasn't born that far away you see.

Anyway, I felt the Deerkiller deserved the apocraphyal viking funeral of lore; cast out to sea on a flaming raft whilst hoards of large men in furs and horned helmets sang mournful dirges in minor keys before toasting her soul with strong ale quaffed from the skulls of their vanquished enemies before retiring for the BBQ of all BBQs, but it was easier to arrange the trade-in and as for the whole thing of setting a flaming car adrift - more easily condoned by DFO and Environment Canada, both of whom I believe take a dim view of sending automobile flambés adrift asea without a permit.

Not much of an eulogy, or indeed a send-off, but she deserved something.

The one in which I strike a blow for dope-free age-group sport in Nova Scotia

2011-02-20T16:29:00.014-04:00

So, I got some of those blood-results back and whilst I'd like to keep the clinical chemistry and endocrinology data to myself for now (the amount of bacon I eat and my method of birth control are my business alone), I don't mind putting up my blood values.

Yup, following such luminaries as Brad Wiggins and Ivan Basso, I'm putting my haematology on-line for all to see. This way you can all be satisfied that my coveted 2nd place overall in the 2010 Run Nova Scotia 40-44 age-group was on the basis of hard work, natural ability and talent. Or large amounts of bacon, beer and luck. Let us not also forget, of course, the ability to suffer, or as Phil n' Paul would have us say, dipping into the suitcase of courage. Of course, I have less of a suitcase of courage as a purse of wussiness. It's a particularly small purse of course, more a clutch really, and very tastefully decorated with sequins. Your choice. I know Anne Gripper just said that putting your blood-work on-line wasn't worth the hassles of armchair haematologists pouring over it and coming up with elaborate conspiracy theories, but I'm an armchair haematologist who loves conspiracy theories, so here goes!

The print-out looks like this;

Yes, it's pretty small and blurry, so the pertinent numbers are

WBC (x10^9/L). 5.1
RBC (x10^12/L) 5.01
Hgb 158 g/L
Hct 46.9%

My haematocrit (Hct) is tad high, 47%, a mere three points off a two-week holiday courtesy of the UCI for the benefit of my health. Still, it's better than that time I did a DIY Hct in the fish physiology lab at the AC and came up with 51%. Twice! From two different fingers!

Lest you think I'm microdosing CERA to stay under the testers' radar, the haemoglobin concentration (Hgb) is right in the middle of the accepted range. White blood cells (WBC) at 5.1x10^9 cells per millilitre are 0.1% of the red blood cells (RBC) at 5.01 x10^12 cells/mL. They didn't do reticulocytes, since they were doing health check on a sad, fat 41 year-old referred because of his age and not a ProTour (sorry, World Tour) cyclist referred for the suspicion of nefarious, performance-enhancing short-cuts, so we can't do an off-score. Nevertheless, the Hgb and the RBC:WBC are pretty good indicators I'm not doing EPO (no extra haemoglobin) or transfusing red cells (no extra red cells) but I can't conclusively rule out an autologous transfusion of whole blood without the off-score. However, I invite you to come around and check my 'fridge. Plus, my hatred of 18G needles is greater than my hatred of running a 10k at full tilt.

We still have to explain the somewhat elevated Hct. The conspiracy theory is I'm using my erstwhile contacts in the research world to keep me supplied with rEPO and have done so since before the DIY Hct test in 2008. There have been no anomalous changes in Hct over the years, so the BioPassport folks are just peachy. Either that or I just have a high-ish Hct; perhaps I'll need TUE from the RNS competition committee before I can do Cabot Trail again! Or maybe we can invoke Occam's Razor and say it's maybe just due to dehydration. It didn't work as an excuse for Pantani or Landis, but it's worth a shot. Speaking of shots; JD? Just kidding. Or perhaps the twin I swallowed in utero is making a come-back. Just remember, as silly as it sounds, those last two have been legitimately offered as a defence for an adverse analytical finding! Or maybe we just need to invoke the silly; living at altitude! The condo is, after all, on the 12th floor; live high, train low and all that.

Anyway, there's my haematology in it's raw, naked and bloody glory and I hope I've demonstrated that however slowly I may run, I'm not using PEDs to do it.

Rami? Over to you?

Maître Jacques

2011-02-18T09:48:00.005-04:00

You'll remember a few months ago I revisited the old myth that you "shouldn't buy a cycling magazine with Lance Armstrong on the cover" and how this was linked, in a small way, to me stopping buying CycleSport magazine. It was a multifactorial discussion and the Lance-factor was minimal compared to the magazine's cost, the internet ( and cyclingnews.com in particular - free, so very free) and the fact you couldn't beleive anything you were reading any more.

It's depressing to watch those old cycling videos from the late 90s, the height of the EPO era, and hear Phil and Paul's commentary and realise how in ten years they haven't changed! They still steadfastly ignore doping and still prefer to believe that great changes in "form" are always, but always, down to hard work and natural talent. I mean, listen to them commentate on the 1999 LBL and talk about Festina barely mentioning the mere trifle of a fact that ten months previously they'd been kicked out the TdF before it started because Willy Voet was caught with a car-full of drugs. They tried though and their commentary might lead the uninformed to believe that Willy was a rogue pedlar of PEDS operating outside of the system. And these people are the English languages voices of the sport?

It feels like the chain has turned full circle. Yet now it's hard to even open a website (sorry, Cyclingnews) for the same reasons I couldn't part with my hard-earned $12 CAD a decade ago. The European racing season has started, and we're on a countdown to the Spring Classics. No offence to the Grand Tours, but the Classics arguably offer the best month of racing. No sitting in during these races, they're all raced to be won and let the devil take the hindmost.

Yet everyone is leading with Contadoper's acquittal and then return to racing; on subsequent days no less. This story managed to relegate Retirement 2.0 down a couple of lines, but it's still all there. I steeled myself an opened a "reactions to Armstrong's retirement" story. Cedric Vasseur was quoted as saying the haters are motivated by jealousy and that "it's easier to support the second-placed rider - just think of Poulidor".

What, Armstrong is our generation's Anquetil? Puh-leeze! Any more of this drivel and I'll just have to get my cycling news from Cozy Beehive!

Run that body down

2011-02-15T11:42:00.018-04:00

Decrepitude, senescence, degeneration. Call it what you will, it all seems to be happening to me right now; the events of the past few weeks have left me feeling that I'm living Paul Simon's Run That Body Down!

On a macro scale, this weekend was three years since that slightly alarming vertigo/collapse/vomiting episode at the running club that Sunday morning. Or to use the succinct analysis of a running buddy, on that day "you scared the living crap out of us" . It took me a while to come back from this; not so much physically as mentally. The labyrinthitis (for that is what it was) cleared in about a week, but then there was the matter of the pericardial effusion and falling through the health-care system cracks and I was essentially scared off running for all of 2008.

When I finally came back, a couple of things happened. In the very first race I did, the first 'cross race of 2008, I decked out hard on a gravelly corner and got those stitches. Yey!

Also, I found that the ca. 9 months I taken off had taken a toll on my recovery time; it just took a little longer to recover from a hard work-out or a race. When I was 20, sleep was an Etchasketch. Tough race on Sunday? Go to bed tired, and one quick shucka shucka shucka and on Monday morning everything was back to normal. Race? What race? I know the physiological basis for this but it always seems to be that a prolonged time off exercise (in the order of months off, rather than a day off) accelerates the deceleration of recovery times!

Finally, it seemed in 2008 my running buddies all took huge leaps forward in their training and started to hit some truly amazing times. I was always barely hanging off the back of this group during my "good days" and when I came back, the elastic was so much longer and was snapping far more often. The French expression for dangling off the back is jouer le accordeon. In English we call it yo-yoing because it's easier to say yo-yo when you're dangling off the back then finding the extra puff to squeeze out the addition syllables in accordion!

As a consequence, poorer recovery and getting shelled out the back a whole bunch more, I'm running a tad slower that I used to. This is most evident in the marathon where, although I'm still running open-men BQs (usually), I haven't broken 3hrs since I came back; 3:05 is the best I've managed I think, a good seven minutes off what I was running and a shocking 13 minutes off my PB. I think the half suits me more now, but even there I'm a minute or so off.

So this was where I was living until this past fortnight, with the 25km+ Sunday runs beating me up more than they ever used to. Then I took a blow to the head last weekend (eight days ago) in a silly prat-fall at home and I took myself off to ER to get checked. It looks like early February is my ER time! They saw what was originally called an anomaly on my lateral c-spine; a small broken-off bone-spur around C5. The radiologist however said this wasn't anything to due to the fall; it was just a "degenerative change", a normal part of the aging process and within the normal range of someone my age.

My age! MY AGE? I don't feel my calendar age, I don't look my calendar age and I sure as hell don't act it! X-rays are, apparently, no respecter of age and told the (ahem) naked, unvarnished truth. Bastard electromagnetic radiation. I hope the inverse square law makes you feel inadequate. I was free to leave ER, with a clean bill of physical health but with my ego, unlike my vertebral discs, ever so slightly crushed.

Good things come in threes, naturally. So in hindsight, that appointment with my GP for a flu-shot wasn't a good idea. He looked at me, looked at my file, did the needle-in-deltoid thing, looked back at my file again, did the math and said "so, 41 eh?". Before I knew it, I was leaving the office armed with a requisition-form for blood-work, essentially cholesterol, HDL/LDL and PSA, all based on no pathological indicator other than my age. See comment above about the radiologist.

Sigh. So it begins, the indignity of male middle age. Routine blood-work is so, well, routine, but how long before statins, ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers become part of my repertoire?

Here's the thing. As with the degenerative bone-spur on C5, the harder you look, the more things you'll find. I believe studies have been done on this. Good job they didn't image my knees last Sunday, or they would have booked me into ortho stat! For example, I altruistically had a routine cardiac echo for a study on bike-riding and cardiac function, they found a PFO. Nothing life-threatening, 30% of the population has one, but most of them don't know it and it never bothers them as it's a post-mortem finding. Anyway, just another finding, albeit thirty years early and it was a cardiologist, not a pathologist, who made the note in my file.

The human body is an amazing thing. However, it's fanatasitcally complex, in part because if you stop to think about it, it's almost haphazardly put together. If it had been intelligently designed our chests or abdomens would look more like a car engine, with laid-out straight lines and tubes that clearly go where they should with a minimum of deviation or wastage. We'd all look exactly the same, with I suppose, some allowance for scale. Oh, and if we were designed our retinas would have the photoreceptors on the outside and the nerves on the inside rather than having to reverse engineer in a punctum caecum and have to do some fancy processing in the visual cortex so we don't see the hole. While we're at it, the recurrent laryngeal nerve wouldn't loop itself around the aorta as it goes back to whence it came either, but like the recurrent laryngeal nerve, I digress.

So, instead of being ideal physical specimens, we merely approach the Euclidean ideal of an ideal body. We exist, as a species, on an anatomic and metabolic continuum. Given my recent history of outlying radiological findings (the echo could technically be considered a radiographic finding, even if no tungsten nuclei were harmed during the production of the image) my worry, quite naturally is how does my approximation of the human body match up with the Gaussian standard metrics of the human body? Which lets face it, were probably drawn 50 years ago using white male farmers from the American mid-we (who needless to say, have contributed little to my genotype. At least I'm a guy!). Will my cholesterol, HDL:LDL and PSA fall within 2SDs of the norm? And what does that norm mean anyway?

Here's hoping I can put a stop to the rot, for now. If not, the next stop on the senescence train is bifocals!

Elgar, Parry and Michele Bartoli

2011-02-09T16:13:00.007-04:00

Someone from Montreal asked me recently if I saw much live music in Halifax, he'd heard the live-music scene here was amazing. The Symphony I said. Well, it's live, our other running buddy said! I've seen three live acts in the past five days. Last Thursday la Belle and I saw Heart at the Metro Centre, which for a night was liberally drenched in estrogens! Not quite the Symphony, but they did all their classics and knocked a couple more years off my hearing. Job done in other words. The next night, after the tinnitus had subsided, we saw Dutch Robinson play with the Symphony at the Cohen. A much mellower night. It was an experience to hear a full orchestra get funky with Lets Get It On. Last night I heard Nova Sinfonia's recital of the Enigma Variations. This always puts you in a bit of a patriotic mood as you nearly always go from Nimrod...

...to Jupiter...

...to Jerusalem.

Rule Britannia indeed.

Anyway, there was some very unBritish weather this morning. For the benefit of our British reader, the thermometer looked a little like this this morning.

Yup, -13.3C. Now this was taken last week, and -13C was the air temp, but it wasn't windy. It was about -8C this morning, but a brisk north wind dropped that to about -20C. Even die-hard bike commuters were likely looking at their options this morning. Apart from Ian Loughead, who I'm sure rode over the bridge.

It should be pretty obvious that I'm not riding outside when it's like this! Hell, walking outside to get the car sometimes makes me feel like Capt. Oates. So I've been hitting the turbo instead. Can't say it's "fun" as a nice ride in the country would be, but I do have some bike-related goals this year and I suppose I need to keep my legs in the habit of turning circles. As with many, I try and dull the mental Turbo pain watching movies or some-such. The past couple of daysI've knocked off a Liege-Bastonge-Leige and a Fleche Walloon. Unfortunately, my only videos (as in your actual VHS) are from the late 90's, both of these races were the 1999 editions, the height of the EPO era. This makes watching them an exercise of the upmost cynicism. Having said that, I watched the '99 Fleche for a reason; the weather was miserable in that race, rain and snow. Watching the pros slog through that made me think an hour on the trainer was actually the cushy option!

You can't help but feel the only guy not on drugs was that fat Belgian bloke half way up the Mur de Huy, you know the one with a Duvel and a paper cone of double-fried frites and mayonnaise. The jury is surely out on everyone else. You can watch Bartoli and Vandenbrooke's duel on La Redoubt but over-dub Phil n' Paul's amazement at Bartoli's ability to attack twice and Vandenbrooke's ability to still drop him with your own, more cynical version.

We know Vandenbrooke was on the heavy water, after this it seemed he spent as much time suspended or under investigation as he did riding. To the best of my knowledge, Bartoli has never been accused of doping, but his name did allegedly crop up in the Operacion Puerto lists. To me Bartoli always looked perfect on his bike; that nightmare of a Mapei kit notwithstanding!

I had a mate who looked a bit like that; lean and smooth. Effortlessly aerodynamic. Perfectly positioned on his bike. He had a lower position on his road bike than I had on my aerobars, or it felt. Always made me feel overweight, lumpy and upright! Git. Before you think Dazza was some kind of bike-God, I had to pull him out of a couple of ditches in our time and I pushed him home once (on our bikes; it was a like a 20 mile hand-sling). Of course it was a two-way street and he pushed me home once too! Cheers Dazza.

Scrambled glia

2011-02-07T10:17:00.005-04:00

Hmm, had another one of those weird anxiety dream-type events. I dreamt I was at a triathlon with an out-and-back swim. Which is odd since I don't swim any more. Anyway, I did the swim in the race, which was odd since I was the TD. Afterwards the RD, someone in the TNS community (who shall remain nameless) told me I'd cheated and cut the turn. "We're not having Andrew doing any more of his shit" was the phrase I heard in my dream. Which was odd becasue the RD was also racing. Plus, I'm pretty sure that even though the red-mist descends when I race, I'm fairly scrupulous about keeping not only to the rules, but to the spirit of the rules.

So all-in-all, none of it made sense. Maybe the blow to the head I received yesterday scrambled a couple of circuits (well, OK, scrambled a couple of circuits even further).

In better news, Joshua (my eldest) did his longest run ever on Saturday at Leah Jabour's "Ugly Sweater Run" on Saturday, at the grand age of 12. Just under an hour. Poor lad, on Sunday his legs hurt! First time ever too! I won't be entering him in any more 10Ks any time soon. This was a one-off given it was billed as a long, slow social run in an ugly sweater. He's 12, fer goodness sakes, surely the Athletics Canada LTAD restricts kids like him to 5Ks!

This was the view at the start of the run, and that's quite some display of ugly sweatery. Interestingly there were two hockey jerseys, with one person thinking an Oilers' jersey was the epitome of "Ugly" whilst the other went with a Leaf's jersey. Such hockey sectarianism aside, some of the sweaters looked like ones I would have worn quite unironically in my youth.

Thank goodness for changing times!

Going off half-cocked

2011-01-27T10:20:00.014-04:00

Take a good look; maybe your only chance to see Alberto Contador Velasco in Saxo kit! Pistolero is going down. Well for now. One year and losing the '10 Tour title say the reports. This could be a bad day for cycling. No, not in the way you'd think. Is it bad that the guy who won the "world's biggest bike-race " is taking a doping sanction? Does it paint the sport in a negative light? I would say "No". On the contrary, it would be far worse if he finessed out of it just because he won "the world's biggest bike-race".

Unfortunately, there seems to be finessing going on. There have been machinations, or the appearance of machinations from the beginning; from the long delay in notification to the current wrangling over the nature and duration (if any) of the sanction. Also, the role of the Union Cycliste Internatinale (UCI), the International Federation (IF) that governs cycling, in this has been questioned. What role have they played in this case? Does it even have a say in doping cases?

To the best of my knowledge, the sanction is supposed to be two years. Vinokourov was given a year in '07 by the Kazakh Cycling Federation, a term that was seen as nationalistic in nature i.e. to get Vino back on the national team as soon as possible, and the UCI appealed successfully to get him the mandated two years.

One year bans are handed out, but this is usually when the accused charger has "cooperated". This time-off-for-good-behaviour approach sticks in the craw. Danilo di Luca just got a year ban for a second doping offence (well kinda second offence, the first one was only an implication in Oil For Drugs but he still served a ban). The nature of his "cooperation" the second time around wasn't clear. He confessed to his own doping but didn't implicate anyone else. So how does this merit a reduction? More-so a reduction that allowed him to start racing almost straight away, we must add!

It's been said that it is unfair that the cyclists are taking the rap and having their reputations tarnished and careers destroyed but the team doctors and in some scary cases the team veterinarians (Dr Mabuse anyone?) are in the the main, getting away with it. Which is why it was so so gratifying to see Stefan Matschiner get prison time recently for helping Bernhard Kohl, among others, to blood dope. Of course, "among others" hides a multitude of sins including the fact that cyclists were not the only ones supposedly re-transfusing their own blood. Remember, in Operation Puerto, track & field athletes, soccer and tennis players were all allegedly in the net yet it was only cyclists, including Ulrich and Basso, who were named. Don't get me started.

So Bertie (not the Colin Firth Oscar nomiated Bertie, the other one) is getting a year, and that smacks of preferential treatment. Listen to the arguments. It was only 50 pg/mL, clearly accidental, let's get the guy back racing as soon as possible. After all, he did threaten to retire if banned. If Contador is seen as the future of cycling by the powers that be, then that's no good. Here we have a champion everyone likes, we must do what we can to keep him.

Implicit in those statements is Contador's post-sanction return, none-the-less. There has been a remarkable discontinuity in the treatment of post-santioned dopers. OK, so Basso could come straight back in to the highest levels but that was a couple of years ago and times have changed. Have they? Vino, straight into the Astana A-squad and won the '10 la Doyenne. Not all's bad; he was booed in the finishing straight! Petacchi, who still doesn't know how to use an inhaler properly, welcomed with open arms, back in the ProTour (or whatever we're calling it now, World Tour I think) and working to get his tally of wins back up after being stripped of a years-worth of results. Di Luca gets a Katusha contract right out of the ban. Rasmussen on the other hand, guilty only of not being where he said he would be (I'm not standing up for him in any way but compare to Di Luca who was caught red-handed with CERA in his system) can't even get the UCI to return his calls. His assertion that there was a UCI "black-list" of formerly-banned riders seemed like sour grapes once upon a time, but is unfortunately soundng more like UCI policy! Landis, even when flying the Floyd Fairness Fund flag high and proud, was lucky to get a gig with Rock Racing, alongside Oscar Sevilla and Fransisco Mancebo; let's just say Rock Racing's bad-boy image wasn't all down to their "rad" Primal jerseys. It was the French Foreign Legion of cycling, with Sevilla and Mancebo not so much exercising their right to ride for a foreign team as it was trying to stay one step ahead of the UCI and Puerto! Landis' case is probably the closest to Berties; current TdF winner with drugs in his system. No ifs, ands or buts over what and how much. Was there testosterone? Yes. Was there clenbuterol? Yes. Landis is ridiculed and summarily drummed out of the business whilst the UCI appears to be trying to cushion Berties' blows.

And what about Fuyu Li? Who? The Chinese cycling champion (as in ITT national champion). He was also caught with clenbuterol last year. Also, in the minuscule 50-100 pg range. You could be a cynic, but perhaps Fuyu Li's problem wasn't the Clen as much as it was not having won a couple of Tours yet. Do we ever hear any moral-wringing ( and wrangling) arguments from the UCI on Li's behalf? Any splitting hairs over the performance-enhacing meaning of 50 pg of clenbuterol? Do we ever hear the UCI equate the Li and Contador cases? Hey, both vanishingly small amounts of a drug of questionable efficacy? Nope. Contador gets his blows cushioned by both his national and international federations whilst Li gets tossed under the bus; just another bad boy with PEDs in his system. Fu Yu indeed.

No, the rules are the rules. It shouldn't matter how many Grand Tours he's won. He did the crime, let him serve the time; and by time, we mean two years. If we don't, then cycling's whole crusade against PEDs, already on shaky ground, will be exposed as gutless. Open to abuse, depending on who you are, not what you've done. This isn't pour encourager les autres; Contador shouldn't have coming more than someone in the same situation, he should be getting the same. And if cycling's latest great white hope retires in a fit of pique because of it, then so be it. We picked the wrong great white hope. At least we won't be seeing that stupid victory "gesture" for a while.

Oh, I copy-and-pasted those images off cyclingnews,com; they're their IP, not mine.

Quantum Effects and Vehicle Ownership

2011-01-20T14:20:00.012-04:00

Got dinged big time with the winter parking ban. I left the Deer Killer (sensu stricto the Deer-Strike-It-In-The-Haunch-And-Let-It-Bleed-To-Death-In-The-Woods but that doesn't trip off the tongue so easily, or indeed sound quite so macho) in a local supermarket carpark given that we're not allowed to park on the street. The problem was not so much leaving it there as leaving it there for about a week without moving it, to the extent it got plowed in and then set in a small ice-drift as the snow metamorphosed over a couple of quick freeze/thaw cycles into the Windsor Street Glacier. If your car becomes a small geological feature it's obviously illegally parked, so they towed it.

I'm telling you; this car is becoming more trouble than it's worth, and it's not worth much. A vehicle I didn't want in the first place, which nevertheless has survived a couple of serious threats to sell it and a failed MVI which pretty much cost the Blue-Book price to get a sticker and still comes back to me like a faithful dog. Woof! Perhaps there's a moral here and I should treat her with a modicum of respect. Let's face it; she did make that heroic trip to Montreal last summer (which I could have sworn was well beyond her mechanical capabilities) and shrug off that deer without so much as a twitch; "get out of my way 150 lb deer","No", Thwack! "Told-you-so".

To be honest, the whole process of getting the Deer Killer back wasn't so hard, a couple of phone-calls, a trip to police HQ and a ride out to Exhibition Park to pick it up. Fortunately HRP displayed an amazing amount of common sense, seeing as to prove the missing car was mine I technically needed the missing car's registration and proof-of-insurance, which of course, are in the glove compartment of the missing car which I was trying to ransom out of the missing-car-lot in the first place. Think about it; your car goes AWOL so you schlep off down to the police station where they ask you for what you don't have because it's in the car you're reporting AWOL and trying to recover. They might as well ask for the license plate; no I don't have that either because it's with the car, and the car is AWOL.

"I'd like to report my car missing, I suspect it's been towed"

"Certainly Sir, licence and registration please"

"I don't have the registration, it's in the car"

"But without the registration documents Sir, you can't prove the missing car is yours"

"But I don't have the registration for the missing car because it's in the missing car"

"The alleged car Sir".

I think "Alleged Car" gives the Deer Killer an even more rakish air than the deer-dent. Anyway, so as you can see, the car is simultaneously there (you know you have it) and not there (you don't have the registration and insurance to prove it to the police). It's Schroedinger's car, which probably explains why the police don't think it's yours in the first place.

Maybe this is what they mean by 21st Century policing; not so much CSI as invoking quantum physics to logically deduce where stolen proerty is. Now I think about it, it's kinda Dirk Gently.

As I was saying, I was lucky and didn't have to argue from quantum principles that the car was mine, although I often feel the need to invoke the Uncertainty Principle around my car (not necessarily Heisenberg's Principle, it just has a general air of uncertainty about it) and I was issued in short order with the magic blue slip with which to ransom it out of captivity.

Maybe "ransom" is too strong a word, given that the cost of getting her back was only about 0.001% of the ransom asked for Richard Lionheart (assuming silver costs ca. $20 a Troy Ounce and the dollar is at par). However, the only thing that stuck in my throat about the whole thing was to do with paying to get the car back. No, not the rate, I can live with that. There's the truck to do it, guys to do it, the six miles towing, digging the damn thing out of it's own private glacier, the overnight parking and I suppose there's also a hefty deterrent factor in there too to prevent you from parking illegally in the first place. Mea culpa. No, it's that the towing company only accept cash.

Yup. Cash only. One company has the contract to tow illegally parked cars for the City, and they only take cold, hard, untraceable cash. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical, you wouldn't be the first person to suggest it, but doesn't that sound odd? I can see the business case in that yes that it does cost businesses to accept credit cards. It's why TNS for example only accepts cash at the Bluenose Sport's Expo, but last year at the Expo we sold less than $100 of TNS-branded merchandise and the fees (to us) for you to buy your $5 TNS mug would have likely outweighed the cost of the mug. However, it's a matter of scale and it certainly cost more than $100 to ransom out the Deer Killer and one suspects I wasn't the only one today. If you're charging half a monkey to redeem a car the City had you tow in the first place, then remember that cash-only has a reputation. Perhaps if you're working law enforcement, even if it's only extreme parking-ticket enforcement, you should at least have the appearance of legitimacy. Caesar's wife and all.

Just sayin'

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Flying the friendly skies

2010-12-31T09:09:00.004-04:00

Here we go again; this time sitting at the gate in the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood Airport and wondering if New Year will be celebrated, as planned, in Halifax or if we'll ring in 2011 in a departures lounge somewhere on the east coast. Looking out of the window, the first thing that strikes you is the question "Who designed the Southwestern paint-job?". Red, purple *and*orange? Neither two of these colours go together, mcuh less all three. Yikes! It must have been the same people who did the Kona Jake The Snake paintjobs a few years back.

As a last guilty pleasure of the vacation, I just indulged at Dunkin' Donuts. I swear this is the first time I've Dunkin'd since post-docing for Steve Kaattari over a decade ago. Steve would always bring a box or two of Dunkin Donuts to lab meetings. Then again, lab meetings would start at 07:00 so as not to interfere with lab work so donuts were the least he could offer. In his defense, I understand Steve has calmed down *a lot* since those days.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, the cabs down here all have roof-mounted adverts that seem to sell, solely, strip-clubs or lawyers (imagine that in Halifax!). "Always cheap, always tacky" (or something similar) I read on one sign, but I forget if it was for a strip-club or a lawyer.

Now the donut is gone, I suppose the vacation is finished. Back to the quotidien grind of daily life. That I can deal with. However, I think the <30 degree (Celcius) temperature change between here and there might be harder to cope with! I hope I don't crack when I get off the plane.

See you at a run in Halifax this weekend; I'll be the one bundled up like Shackleton in the Antarctic for a mere 0C with flurries.

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Woof woof, bacon, maple syrup and manatees

2010-12-26T20:45:00.013-04:00

Well, I have never spent a Christmas quite like this one. Am currently down in Fort Lauderdale, FLA with la belle et ses parents. So that's a fully fracophone Christmas. This has had the effect (an advantage to some I'm sure) of shutting me up almost completely; my French isn't good enough yet to think and speak on my feet! I can keep up with simple conversations but by the time I've translated a sentence, come up with a suitable reply and translated that, the conversation is somewhere else completely. So my verbal contributions are effectively limited to "Oui", "Non", "Pamplemousse", "Toaster", "c'était écoeurant" (probably misspelled but my accent is atrocious anyway) and the ever popular "Oui, je vais prend une autre bière". After a couple of bières it gets better, especially if the Canadiens are playing. You'd be surprised how far you can get with "Carey Price, eh?"

This morning, Boxing Day, we were up at 5. Yup, five, 5, cinq. WTF? La Belle had entered us all in the Greater Fort Lauderdale Road Runners Resolution Run, an essentially pan-flat 5K in a State Park somewhere near the ocean. So, that was up as early as I do for the Bridgetown LC, in the car for 6 and registering for the race at 05:40. Except they got my registration wrong and couldn't find my dossard because they'd written my name as "Nacanay". That was a new one for me.

You know this guy? I don't.

La belle had been cautioning me all week that it was an untimed fun-run and "don't do a Matt Callaghan" viz; bomb around a Running Room 5K Santa Run, winning the thing by five minutes, for naught, and getting injured in the process. As you know, running any race intentionally slow is an anathama; why give me a bib-number if you don't expect me to use it, but I resolved myself to run at a reasonable pace, with the leaders if possible, and not to do a Rami, go cracking off the front and pissing off everyone else who's just out for a good time.

View from the start. There was a signing asking boaters to reduce their speed and watch for manatees; no wonder I felt at ease, being in the presence of other fat marine mammals.

This lasted until the start. A group of four, including a handy-looking Junior, slid off the front in the first few hundred metres and were tantalisingly within sight, only a few strides. So instead of talking it easy and falling back into the laughing group, I closed the gap. There's something of the dog-mentality in me, and many of us I suspect, in that we carry a compulsion to chase down runners (and cyclists and even swimmers). Woof woof!

A car-ornament spotted in the race car-park. Neat.

The guys in the front group were savvy to the idea of "work" and we started taking turns;, going to the front to keep the pace high, but not to intentionally drop people. Yet. It was unasked but expected. Soon, people were sliding of the back and by half-way it was down to myself and one other guy, an ex-pat Jamican called Courtney. We did for the age-groupers by one mile and the Junior a little after. Courtney said the Junior kid been good when he was 14, but had recently discovered girls and his form had subsequently suffered. Good for us.

So, sorry La Belle, I was off the front doing 3:30s (kms), or a 5:30 mile for the first one, but I was doing it in company and to be honest he started it.

I had a crack at the win with what I thought was 200m to go, but what I thought was the 3 mile clock was actually the 1 mile clock (the race was 1 and a half loops) and even though I dropped Courtney I'd gone too early and he was coming back. I let him come back thinking I might, might mind you, recover enough to be able to cover his kick but who am I kidding? I'm a slightly overweight age-grouper on the wrong side of 40 and when Courtney went, all I could do was wave goodbye, bonne chance et bon voyage. I still got second, 17:30 something and it might have been a tad over 5K too.

My warm-down was longer than the race!

There were no prizes, but the GFLRRR set up a table with all the unclaimed prizes from their races, first come first served. I have to say, they have way cool prizes. I was there pretty early and secured 3rd Senior Masters Lady from the 2009 Spookactular 5K. Score!

After that we debouched to brunch. On first sight, the Club Tropical seems pretty run down, kinda closed off and possibly a mafia front (I've read Donnie Brasco). But all the cars outside had "Je me souviens" on the license plates; it's run by expat Quebecois and on Sunday they offer a Canadian brunch, which is essentially plus du bacon avec sirop d'érable et cretons. Done. I'm sold. So two plates full of cured pork-products and home-fries later (there was fruit, but why? There was bacon!), I'd recovered from a ca. 600 calorie run with a 1000 calorie breakfast. Double-score!

As well as offering two chronic diseases in one (atherosclerosis and diabetes) they also have shows with Quebec artists who are playing the snowbird circuit. I wonder if it's the unofficial social centre of the francophone community in the Greater Fort Lauderdale area?

Seeing as we'd dispensed with a race, a run and a slap-up breakfast by noon, we killed time in the afternoon by going for a walk on Hollywood Beach. It was cold by Florida standards, 15C, and people were, I kid you not, wearing coats, tuques and scarves. At the race I saw one guy in tights, long-sleeved technical mid-layer and gloves! It was 18C! Anyway, seeing as it was "freezing" the beach was deserted, and it had a bit of a tropical island feel; white sand, blue, blue ocean and palm trees

.

I have to say, Christmas decorations look a bit silly in such an environment!

Oh well, compared to what's meterologically on offer in Nova Scotia or the UK, it's a breeze. I feel kinda guilty I'm not sharing in the collective misery, but I'm sure Mother Nature will have saved some for me when I get back!

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Signing off

2010-12-24T12:43:00.002-04:00

Here we go, sitting in the departures lounge at YHZ. So far, so good; everything seems on-time, reducing the probability of spending Christmas in a terminal lounge, but there are many miles to go yet.

Heading off into, among other things, a bit of a communications blackspot. Probably a good thing, to go off-line a little. I mean, how important can those Nigerian 404 emails really be? They can wait until I get back. Looks like I'll get a chance to read words printed on real paper, and maybe catch up with my podcasts. Should that sound Luddite-ish, just remember, constant information bombardment isn't communication. Less quantity, more quality.

See you in the new year

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The law of unintended consequences

2010-12-22T14:13:00.002-04:00

Double capp from Java Blend on North. The barrista apologised for her latte art but I told her not to worry as a) who amongst us could do better (Zane, you're forbidden from answering that one) b) it still looked cute, like a little Christmas tree escaping from a coffee-cup (or maybe a pac-man)! c) the coffee was warm and d) I was cold. You see, I headed out for a short ride in the rain and whilst my kit held up well, by the end there was that feeling of the cold dampness starting to finally soak it's way through all the seams. However, I do find that riding the rain is really quite nice, if you've got the kit for it; it's the cycling equivalent of lying in bed and listening to the rain against the windows.

I took the time to squeeze in the ride knowing it would be likely the last peace and quiet I would have on my terms for the next week or so. Beyond having to give it to the man viz a viz the NS Traffic Act, for an all too short time I didn't have to do as I was told (or tell people to do what they're told), I wasn't beholden to anyone, I could be lost in my thoughts.

My thoughts were contemplative. Partly it's the time of year for it, especially if you're not an extroverted, optimistic, social butterfly. Partly it's riding in the rain. Partly, it was the law of unintended consequences.

We are all familiar with this one. For example, in my sporting life, I have been called upon recently to uphold the new ban on compression socks and arm-warmers in triathlon. As a fashion maven I'm all for this, even if I've sinned with respect to the latter prohibition

In my defense it was a running singlet not a form-fitting triathlon crop-top, it was for racing only (I don't train like this; if it's cold enough for singlet and arm-warmers, it cold enough for a long-sleeved t-shirt) and being in Boston I thought I was far enough away from anyone I knew.

Clearly not.

Being hoist by one's own petard aside, simply saying "because I don't think it looks nice" is not a reasonable answer to an elite athlete when you strip them of their arm-warmers in the start-corral. The actual reason is the recent rule that bans clothing below the elbows and the knees. Meant (I believe) to ensure speedsuits are now illegal (along with "in a wet-suit illegal swim you should finish the run in what you swam in") it has had the unintended effect of banning these other two items. My question is, if compression socks are banned, how about ankle-high socks? They still are clearly located sous-genou.

Today the law of unintended consequences was in full effect; an unintended consequence of learning French is that the first verse of Ne me quitte pas by Jacques Brel became understandable. It sounds like a sad song, so to actually listen to it and find out he's trying to find out how to forget, well that's standard jilted-lover fare. A lifetime of The Smiths, Morrissey, The The and assorted other depressing indy British bands has inured me to such lyrics. So far so good, an intended consequence, surely.

What it hadn't prepared me for was the rest of the song. It ran away from me so I looked up the lyrics and was exposed to the full melancholic desolation of the piece as it descended through despondency, suffering and desperation to abject suffering. You know that bit in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy when Arthur is hooked up to "imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and similie dumpers all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure not a single nuance ... was lost"? It was like that, but minus the Vogons. By the time it got to "I will not leave, I will not cry, I will not speak, I will just hide here and watch you dance and smile, and listen to you sing and laugh" I was eyeing the cutlery draw for the easy way out. The English versions just don't do it justice. And this is a good thing.

I felt as though the emotional centre in me had been severly bludgeoned with a heavy, blunt object and was left reeling and concussed.

Talk about unintended!

Dan's Story

2010-12-20T10:39:00.004-04:00

Big props to Daniel. who had his entry in CBC Mainstreet's "Young Canada Writes" contest read out on the radio last week. Each week, the writers (all U15) are given a list of words to use in an original composition of 250 words or less. Last week they were; anticipation, earmuffs, lurching, slivery and jiggled. He got 'em all in! Here is his entry in full;

It was the post-apocalyptic scenario all people fear: giant alien earmuffs with prehensile tongues! That is not all. They have domesticated krakens and used their awesome strength to destroy all prosperous societies they find. They were completely jiggling with anticipation when they found earth. It was perfect - what with there being only one sentient species. Better yet, having technology that was crude and senseless compared to theirs. They came to earth subtly but then exactly after 79 hours they attacked.

Humans, once thinking they were all powerful against all possible waves of deaths and eradication, were now being overthrown by the lurching mass of cyborg krakens. Their tentacles showing no mercy to the humans. Suddenly ninjas rained from the sky exploding upon impact with the ground. Then, from the ground silvery armoured knights jumped into the air, only to sprout wings and turn into flaming beasts of depression and sorrow. Just when the humans best efforts were fading away, an asphalt parking lot exploded and a green scaley beast with firey breath and laser vision came from the rubble. Its laser eyes burned through the human's strongholds. The sky turned red and giant lava geysers burst from the ground. The killer earmuffs were now more engaged in a great brawl between the monsters they created. Then, giant explosions of blue flames erupted everywhere. AAARRRGGGHHH!Run for your life Jimmy!!! JIMMY! JIMMMMYYYY!!!!!"

Huh?! What?! " I muttered. Oh - yes - it was just a dream. And now it is time to get ready for school.

Daniel Dacanay 10years old

Grade 5 (Ms Ryan) Southdale North Woodside Elementary

Kudos Dan.

Psychiatric assessments may be posted below or emailed to the usual address!

Snow and candles

2010-12-17T15:40:00.008-04:00

Not a birthday 'spro, but a birthday capp. All the better to keep the cold at bay.

You see, after confidently telling a colleague in BC yesterday that "no, we have no snow, nor does there seem to any sign of same", it snowed. I had my mind set on a little ride, and I wasn't going to let 5 cm of snow get in the way, but neither did I have any wish to accidentally slide under a bus on fixed. Plan B it was; I chucked Old Bess on the back of Smarty and headed out to Shubie instead.

Ever noticed how your mountain-bike shoes leave monstrous tracks in the snow, and by monstrous I mean "like a large, clawed, hungry and undoubtedly carnivorous monster" monstrous. Talk about cryptozoology! Speaking of cryptozoology, I watched the beginning of a creation-science (now there's an oxymoron if there ever was one) video on Youtube recently about the co-existance of dinosaurs and humans. Crikey. Anyway, enough said about that the better.

So, ignoring the evidence before my eyes that I was being closely stalked by a bipedal, clawed creature, I set off into the woods down the Lake Charles trail.

I felt a bit unsteady for the first five or ten minutes because that tabernack of a front brake still isn't working quite right, but what the hell, brakes only slow you down anyway. The trail isn't technical anyway, so no dramas, I just sat back enjoyed the peace and quiet and the crunch of the tyres in the snow. Very Zen, very relaxing. Apart from nearly T-boning a dog that is!

As usual, Old Bess held up her end of the bargain and seemed pretty bombproof, front brake notwithstanding, after I settled down.

I noticed how the snow packed onto the rear wheel, giving my venerable MA2 a bit of a Deep-V vibe....

....and when the brakes on the car were applied, it had a bit of a pink Deep-V vibe to it!

Check out the snow-marks left by the helmet! Makes a change from getting tiger-stripe tan-lines across the top of my head!

After I finished I headed off the TIBS for the aforementioned capp and a bagel (the ride wasn't hard enough to justify a croissant)

However, I got one anyway, courtesy of Zane, complete with a candle

Thanks man, made my day

Bicycles, trainers, beans-on-toast, earworms and Scarlett Johanssen

2010-12-14T10:36:00.001-04:00

If it gets any worse than this, then I'll have to get the trainer out early. Given that bike-riding is a pleasure and not a chore - something only to be endured between T1 and T2, I generally eschew the trainer for as long as possible. Nothing about it can possibly be any fun. I will admit that there's always a masochistic pleasure to be found in intervals, but a ride on the trainer lasting hours? Sure, you can sling on a DVD, several in fact, perhaps work through the season on Lost you missed this summer as you were always out training, but it can't, won't, recapture the sheer joy that is getting out on the roads.

Spotted in Cyclesmith last year; an over-the-handlebar remote control holder. Actually, I wonder if it's supposed to be a modern take on the handlebar mounted bottle-holder of yore?

Anyway, it works for remotes. This is when you know you've gone too far! But surely makes a handy seasonal gift for that special someone who spends all Saturday afternoon pedalling to nowhere like a demented hamster.

Music sometimes does the job better than film, so, what songs go through your head when you're slaving over a hot fly-wheel? Training rides are often referred to as chain gangs, so it has to be Back On the Chain Gang of course!

I guess the London skyline looks pretty much the same today. Nothing's missing as such; the Gherkin has been added, but really it's the South Bank that's undergone the Renaissance. Speaking of London, and the Pretenders, there are a whole bunch of Pretenders songs I associate with my short time riding with the Crest CC. I don't know why, but Don't Get Me Wrong gives me a memory flash of the Log Cabin cafe in Abridge where the Crest used to start some of their Sunday club runs; the others used to start at the Hobbs Cross Farm, but the Log Cabin had better beans-on-toast (and was fractionally closer to home!).

Speaking of beans-on-toast, cafes, milky tea and the Pretenders there is, of course, Brass In Pocket

Which was covered by Scarlett Johanssen in the Karaoke scene in Lost In Translation....

There is a catchy little number in Lost In Translation from Phoenix. I've been exposed to beaucoup de musique francais recently, but not Phoenix, who even though are French sing (thank goodness) in English. Anyway, Too Young is the Phoenix number in the background of Lost..... The video, inexplicably, takes place in a fish-packing plant!

....so today's mental jukebox finishes off with Phoenix's Lisztomania cut to a montage of John Hughes films

ahhhh....

John Lennon

2010-12-08T10:17:00.007-04:00

I wonder if John Lennon is my generation's JFK. Too young or too non-existant to remember where we were when the President was shot, perhaps we all remember where we were when John Lennon was.

I was at home, in Ilford. What I do remember is that we were doing the Christmas play the following evening at school and I would miss the BBC screening a Beatles' film in memorium. I forget which one, not Yellow Submarine (which I never really liked, even being a cartoon), so I'm thinking Hard Days Night or Help. Funny. Hey, I was only ten. It's only with time that I realised that what had been lost was more than an opportunity to see a movie on TV!

It probably affected my Dad more. Growing up our music was the Beatles, Elvis (I remember his death too), Simon and Garfunkel, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel in their solo incarnations, and The Association. I'm going to guess he was more a Lennon fan than a McCartney fan; he would always say he was "born in 1941, the year after John Lennon" and tellingly not "the year before Paul McCartney".

Later, when I "inherited" my father's record collection (he's still with us) I found copies from all of these artists, including some old mono albums made of thick, thick, vinyl, from Elvis and the Beach Boys. It pains me I have lost track of those during the intervening years. One of the albums I found was 1975's Shaved Fish, a compilation of Lennon's solo work. I listened to this a lot as a teenager. I preferred Side#2, Imagine, Mind Games, Whatever Gets Your Through The Night, #9 Dream to Side#1; Give Peace A Chance, Cold Turkey, Instant Karma. What does that say about me? Or my dad? Or both of us?

I remember driving somewhere with my Dad when I was an undergrad; four-hours on the road, and listening to Abbey Road on 8-track! Yeah, he still had one in his car in 1990! The cassettes were Beatles, Association and the like! Man, what a trip!

As we have grown older, it is my brother who has had generated his own Beatles stories, contributing directly to the Beatles story as a graphic designer on the aughties re-releases'. Which is pretty damn cool.

Actually, I've been watching Across The Universe recently too, a musical set to Beatles songs. I know it sounds corny, but maybe listening to the Beatles on-and-0ff for my whole life makes it somewhat less so.

Gotta go now, need to get down to some serious listening...