One step forward, two steps back

The foot problem has cleared up, whatever it was, so I should be back in action... Except there is no longer snow to ski on.  I am not super motivated to get back to training with rollersking and running being the only options, or a drive to man made snow, not much more appealing.  Instead I've been putting some big time into the minecrafting trying to get my nether globe done in time for the holidays.  I think I will finish the globe, but don't have a good idea for getting a Christmas tree in there.  Not much else new at this juncture, just need to figure out what I'm going to do with a week off over the holidays if there is still no snow to ski on.

When did this happen

Yikes, a lot to post about all of a sudden.
The most exciting news first, Kikkan Randall gets another sprint win in Davos!  Not just a win, she qualified first and proceeded to dominate every heat she was in after that, including the finals.  The showdown that everyone has been waiting for Randall vs Bjorgen has yet to happen as Marit did not make it to the finals.  Randall is now very much in control of the sprint standings, and if she can continue to make the finals when sprinting goes back to the classic technique I don't think anyone will be able to unseat her.
Elsewhere in women's sprinting, I'm quickly becoming a huge fan of Laurien Van Der Graaff, the young Swiss sprinter.  She has had two great sprint weekends now and her enthusiasm for the sport is pretty apparent.  I'm not sure what to make of Natalia Matveeva.  She was a standout Russian sprinter until 2009 where she tested positive for EPO and received a two year ban.  Now she's back and jumping right back to the top of the podium.  I hope she's cleaned up her act, but the Russian system is not exactly known for having the toughest of internal doping controls, so I'm kind of doubting she has gotten much pressure from her own ski federation to clean up her act.  That being said I hope she is clean, since she has a lot of her career still ahead of her and a repeat offender would not speak well for the efficacy of the doping ban (although it might speak well for the effectiveness of the testing.)  On the distance side Holly Brooks keeps getting better and better, and she also qualified for the heats in Sunday's sprint.  I hope she finds a way to stay over for the tour this year, she could have a good impact.
I had my first race this weekend.  Dave and I partnered up for the Breadsmith relays.  Not one of my favorite races on the circuit, since it seems like it is always cold and slow.  Maybe starting the race at 6:45 on artificial snow has something to do with that.  This year went far better than years past however.  I used my brother's new skis, and they felt fast and stable the whole time.  I actually took the lead partway through my first go and tagged off to Dave in first.  Of course Bjorn is a force to be reckoned with and the reason team Boom beat our team, named "without Bjorn".  He had a large gap on Dave by the next tag-off, and I couldn't bring back much if any time on Travis the second loop.  We did manage to bury the teams behind us though, and came in second.  Not good enough to win anything, but we still get the respect; to some people that's more important.
I have a minecraft server up and running now, so my efforts are a bit split between exploring the wonderful world of 1.0 and working on my snow globe on Iskidar's server, which I have the feeling won't complete before the Christmas goal.  It is a fun project to be server host, but also a frustrating one.  I have random login errors often, and am not sure why because they come and go.
On the least good news side of things I was awoken this morning with a sharp pain in my right foot.  It has dulled a bit as the day goes on today, but not enough that I would risk working out on it.  Maybe good timing, since it was raining out this morning and I feel the snow we have left is not long for this world.  I'll try to post again later in the week if the weather and my treacherous body sort themselves out.

It's ski season

The world cup is in full swing, and there is natural snow for skiing here in Northfield, ski season has arrived.  While West Yellowstone was mostly a chance to just get used to the skis again and put in plenty of km at elevation on amazing snow, it is the day to day training back here at home that makes a season.  I'm planning to race the Breadsmith Relays this weekend with Dave, so I've started to mix a bit of speed work into my training already.  I did 2x2km today, pretty much the same as I'll be facing this weekend.  As long as I don't go out too hard I think I'll handle it ok, although the cold, artificial snow always makes Breadsmith a tough race.
As exciting as the snow here is, the real news from the weekend was Kikkan's win in the sprint at Dusseldorf, followed up by a her and Sadie taking 2nd in the team sprint the next day.  Kikkan is the real deal this year, and if Sadie and Liz keep going the way they have been it will shape up to be a great year for the American women.  Seeing Crawford qualify for the final and just miss out on a podium was exciting too, a much needed result and confidence boost for her.  With more North Americans committing to a full season in Europe this year it should be exciting to see what they can do.  The men have been a bit slower to get rolling, and face a very deep and competitive field, but the Canadians especially have shown that they are capable of getting in the mix when things come together, so hopefully they turn things around.
In other news my network card went out last week, and my new card just arrived.  This allows me to host a minecraft server now, which I got up and running (albeit not in the form that I hope to have it running in, but at least it works).  As I have time I plan to add some mods, such as a wrapper, minimap tool, and bukkit.  I might also create a new server using the industrial mods I have been playing with on Iskidar's server, but since I already have access to those things on his server there isn't a lot of motivation for that.
I'm going to try to push the posting schedule up to Monday from now on, since by Thursday last weekends news really is old news.  We'll see if it happens, but at least that is the goal.

Gone West

Yikes Wednesday already.  I was in West Yellowstone skiing last week and have been playing catch up since. The skiing was great, plenty of amazing snow and really nice weather.  There were a lot of familiar faces out there this year, and my brother and sister both came out, so I did a bit less skiing than years past on account of hanging out with them, which was really great.  I still ended up with about 200 miles total skiing for the week.  Not to shabby.  The drive out and back was slightly less exciting, but still pretty good.  It is nice to have a car full of people to talk to on that long of a trip.
Coming back to a lack of snow is a bit depressing.  The road tips go back on the ski poles today for a bit more rollerskiing, hopefully not for long though.
I did a lot of my skiing with Bjorn last week, and he gave me some pretty good technique pointers that I'm anxious to work on, but have a bit of trouble with that on rollerskis.  It is too easy to let technique slip when you don't have a real edge to ski on, or classic skis period.  Over the course of the week I could tell I was getting the snow feel back, so I'm sad to leave it behind and get back on the rollerskis.
Before I left I did buy some new running shoes, and have been putting them to decent use so far since returning.  Trying to get some hill bounding in and ingrain a bit of that technique work.  My endurance seemed alright during the trip, not great, but enough that I'm not all that worried about putting in big hours.
I updated my workout spreadsheet and am at nearly 340 hours so far this year, so I should easily clear 350 by the end of next month, although I won't make it to the nearly 400 I was at last year.  I think that is ok, I'm enjoying doing a lot of other stuff (and way too much minecraft).
The first world cup races went on as well, and it looks like Bjorgen is going to continue to be an unstoppable machine.  Several of the other Norwegian women also looked on very good form.  Northug, Roenning, and the Russians also have had a good start to the season so far.  The racing has been on low snow courses so far, so it will be interesting to see if things shift around a bit when they get into the meat of the season and start racing on natural snow.  Things have looked very promising for Kikkan so far, and Liz Stephen is showing the kind of form that got her on to the USST, which is a good sign.  Now they just need to get Jessie over to Europe and they will have a pretty solid relay team.  Not that Holly or Sadie are slouches by any means, but the way Jessie tore up the West Yellowstone races makes me excited to see how she does against much stronger competition in some head to head racing.
Sorry this post has been a bit disjointed, I'm still not settled back into any kind of routine, so my thoughts are a bit scattered right now.  By next week things should settle back down and I'll give a bit more comprehensive update, unless it snows and I'll just be thinking about skiing all the time.

A quiet week

It has been a busy week, mostly work, but not too much of note has been going on.  Mostly trying to get all of my ducks in a row before leaving for a week for West Yellowstone.  Here are a few odds and ends.

• Minecraft: Detrepid is working on a nuclear reactor (rebuilding after the first one blew up under our cabin) and I have been making a large structure in the Nether.  I have it all laid out in cobble, but the plan is to have the entire structure be reinforced glass eventually.  Also had a working oil harvesting/refining platform going offshore for a while.  Something about this sat well with the chemical engineer in me.
• World Cup:  I might be doing a bit of FIS Nordic world cup analysis this year, just for funsies.  I'll start by posting my Skitrax fantasy world cup team.

Team: Siggy's Speedsters

Female Skier #1; Marit Bjoergen (Nor) 

Female Skier #2; Justyna Kowalczyk (Pol) 

Female Skier #3; Therese Johaug (Nor) 

Female Skier #4; Kikkan Randall (Usa) 

Female Outlaw Skier; Vibeke Skofterud (Nor) 

Male Skier #1; Dario Cologna (Sui) 

Male Skier #2; Petter Northug (Nor) 

Male Skier #3; Emil Joensson (Swe) 

Male Skier #4; Alex Harvey (Can) 

Male Outlaw Skier; Jesper Modin (Swe)

• The winning technique is to get the skiers that have the best chance to hold one of the leaders bibs (sprint, distance, or overall) since they accumulate points every week.  It is also better to get occasional great results compared to consistent good results.  This is the reason Charlotte Kalla, Lukas Bauer, and other very good athletes are left off the list.  I see Marit and Justyna as no brainers, Therese and Kikkan are both solid options to lead the distance and sprint standings respectively if one of the top two doesn't, and the outlaw skier is usually a bit of a crap shoot (except last year where Therese and Ola V were pretty easy picks).  Racing starts this weekend in Sjusjoen, Nor.  Hopefully I'll still be able to find Eurosport coverage to watch all of the races this year.
• I won't be posting next week because I'll be in West Yellowstone skiing, but will post about the week when I get back.  Snow conditions sound great, so I'm looking forward to being mostly cut off from internet and such for a week with nothing better to do than ski all the time and hang out with family and friends.

      

Bright White Morning

A somewhat slow seeming week where I still have had no downtime.  Here are a few details.  Note: I am sadly no longer able to deny that I'm an adult when my first several bullet points are all work related (or maybe the fact that I'm using bullet points is enough evidence anyway).

• The process engineer who recently left from my group was in charge of all of our database systems here.  I have been taking an intro to databases class and combine that with my tiny bit of programming knowledge and I have just enough skill to keep the database system running and do some troubleshooting.  Now I'm getting to the point where I might need to start designing pages and queries though, so that will be a step up.  Learning my way around that system is occupying any down time I have at work.
• The copper plater I'm working on has been running quite well lately, but chose one day this week to hiccup.  Not a big problem, and fairly quickly solved, but it had to happen while running the most expensive product we run on that line, causing some amount of scrap, and it had to happen at 3:00 in the morning, so my sleep schedule is still readjusting from that.  Had the same problem happened on day shift on our normal product nobody would have batted an eye, but instead I get a phone call in the middle of the night that we are scrapping out expensive material.
• It Snowed in Northfield last night!!  By the time I woke  up it was all gone, from the ground, but evidence remained on my deck, so I took a quick snap shot.

• The West Yellowstone trip is coming together.  Still not sure about vehicles, but there might be 10 of us U of M skiers/alumni out there this year, so it will be a good crew.  They have been getting snow it sounds like, so things should be in good shape by the time we get out there.
• Several of the bloggers I read are fans of reducing the amount of stuff you have to simplify your life.  I seem to be moving in the opposite direction, since I am a bit of a hoarder.  I just bought a new SSD since I have a hard drive failing, and this picture shows how ridiculous my boat situation has become.  In fairness only one of them is mine, but even so...

• I have started playing Minecraft again.  It is a great game, and a great reminder of how fun legos were, but legos wouldn't let you build nuclear reactors or play with people 1000 miles away, so here we are.  Garrison and I joined a MP server running a couple cool mods, and I am now spending way too much time building solar panels, quantum armor, chainsaws, and macerators, and of course mining all the resources it takes to build those things.  I got a teleporter working yesterday, so hopefully the server creator, who has a Lets Play Youtube channel, will highlight our progress in his video in the next week or so.  Not that there is a ton of progress so far.  We've built a cabin, some solar flowers, a wind farm, and some industrial equipment.  So far just laying the groundwork so that when we decide on a large project all the infrastructure is in place to get it going.
• Finally, I got a chance to chat with my friend Annie, who is in Tanzania right now.  It was good to catch up to her.

Lining 'em up

My blog posts tend to ramble, as I realized when I looked back to try to find some info from a few races earlier in the year, so I'm going to try to do this post in bullet points and see how it goes, because bullet points are fun, unless they are piercing your flesh.  Then they are less fun.

• New canoe maiden voyage - My boat repairs were finally finished last Tuesday, so Thursday Emily and I hit the mighty Mississippi (and Minnesota) river to give it a test run.  It was 18.5' of quiet fast magic.  Now I need to start saving up for a paddle.

Paddling off into the sunset

Emily keeping us on track

• Jallie's Meeting - Allie works for the City of Lakes Nordic Ski Foundation, and I got to go to a meeting she was putting on about growing participation for the Hoigaards Challenge series.  It was all very adult like discussing things like advertising tactics, entry fees, and demographics.
• Write up for Hoigaard's Challenge - On another note related to the Hoigaards Challenge, I was asked to do a short writeup on the event since I won it.  It was really hard to describe three events in under 300 words, my writeups here are probably 400 words for each of the events, and that is without trying to ramble too much (and not always succeeding at such).
• Rollerski With Bjorn - Got out for a long rollerski with Bjorn on Saturday.  I handled the distance fairly well considering my lack of rollerskiing, but any time the speed amped up I was dropped pretty quickly. Great day to be out though, and Bjorn's rollerski route is really great.
• West Yellowstone - Rooms are booked for West Yellowstone over Thanksgiving week.  Staying in the Holiday Inn this year, which is kind of the epicenter for the Festival events.  That will be a change from the peaceful, homey feel of the Brandin' Iron, but it will be fun to try out something different.  There is a good crew this year.  My brother and sister are both coming, as are Emily, Bjorn, and Jallie.  Now all that is missing is the snow.

Well, I don't know if it is shorter or sweeter, but it does seem a bit more organised than previous posts, and it is easy to drop bullet points in over the week so I don't forget anything.

So maybe Wednesday should become the new post day, that seems to work out a bit better the way work and everything has been going as of late.  I have morning meetings three out of five mornings anymore, so I'm going to try to get one of those cancelled, the Wednesday one actually, which would give me even more time that day.  Did I post at all last week, I suddenly can't remember.  Things are finally settling down at work so I have time to breathe a bit, and things at home are settling down a bit too.
  I have had a mess of a time trying to get a legal copy of Windows 7 installed on my computer.  My friend David gave me an extra copy he had around, and who can say no to cool free stuff.  Well, after a week of installing and reinstalling trying to get this copy to work I finally gave up and pirated it.  The sad part is that took all of 3 minutes to figure out, get the software for, and complete the installation.  The bad part now is that the HDD I installed it on is failing, so I have to get a new HDD and install it yet again.  I now have another few things to try to get the legal copy working, so I may yet have a legal copy of Windows running soon, the first time in about 10 years I can say that.  As many copies of Windows XP as I have purchased for system builds over it's illustrious life span, I've never owned a copy myself.  That was my revenge against Microsoft for selling me Windows ME, but now with Windows 7 that grudge is settled, and I have a job that pays me money, so it's time to pay up.  As frustrated as I am about having to install windows yet again, I am pretty excited to be going to a SSD.  Good and bad of that is my Mobo only supports SATA II, so I get a slower drive than is available, but that also makes it a much cheaper drive, so good for my budget, which has been stretched right to the point of breaking the last few months, and with West Yellowstone and Christmas coming up probably will continue to get worse before it gets better.
  I also finished up all the major work on my boat project finally, just a few small details left to finish, and none of those actually prevent me from putting the boat in the water, so hopefully I can try it out yet this year before things start to ice up.

  Even if there is no ice about, there has been frost, so I finally totaled out my garden for the year.  I have probably 10 pounds or more of potatoes, and over 5 pounds of tomatoes, so I need to figure out some recipies to use these babies up.  I tried my first one Monday night, fried green tomatoes!  They turned out to be far more tasty than I expected actually, and I used the leftover egg/milk and flour to make a few pancakes when I had all the tomatoes fried, so no ingredients were wasted in the making of this meal.

I've gotten to exercise 3 days in a row now, so that is a big win too.  Running a mere 10k left me pretty sore the next day, so I need to get my act together quick, Yellowstone is not that far away.
  One last fun fact, I am going through my song of the day collection sorting out songs that I like, and I came across a Daredevil Christoper Wright song, the band my friend John Sunde is the lead singer for, so I was super pumped about that.

Heads up 7 up

Yikes, another week has snuck by with almost no blog post, so being a fan of the better late than never mentality, here is a quick rundown.  Last week was pretty crazy, and this week did not disappoint either.  The end of last week slid by somewhat quietly I would assume, since not much of it sticks out in my mind.  It might be that I've just kind of been in a sick/tired coma that is inhibiting the formation of new memories also.

The weekend was not very eventful.  I made some decent progress on my canoe, but now I fear the weather will turn before I get it in the water.  The first gunwale is about 40% installed, but there are some stress lines appearing that I want to work out before I put in any more rivets.  I also got about 1/2 of my yard raked, and can at least see my driveway and front walk again.  I also got dishes and vacuuming done finally, both long overdue projects.

I got a half decent rollerski in Saturday, but wasn't feeling great, so I cut off early of my full weekend route.  I haven't really gotten to work out since, so I'm now starting to get a bit worried about my conditioning, and I'm having trouble shaking this cough so I don't feel motivated to hop right back in to a workout routine just yet either.

Monday I decided to make the switch to Windows 7 and it has been pretty disasteriffic so far.  First I have an upgrade version of W7, so I had to re-install XP with a valid key to start out.  This didn't go bad, just took a while, but then the next step is where trouble started.  Windows 7 refused to boot off the HDD installed it on midway through the installation process, and after several times formatting the HDD and reinstalling XP and 7 I decided it was a master boot record (MBR) issue.  I could boot to a bootable cd and then start my HDD with windows on it fine, but could not boot directly to that HDD.  I finally decided to let that issue be for a while and  just get Windows running the way I wanted, only to find that my key was supposedly not valid.  Additionally the text file where I had all my keys stored was on a HDD that windows recognized but would not connect to.  I finally found drive settings and assigned a drive letter to the drive so I could access it.  After several checks to make sure I didn't have a typo, reinstalles to make sure there wasn't a software problem or some other oddity that was due to it being an upgrade copy I just gave up and cracked the activation.  I now have an activated "genuine" copy of Windows, though not with the valid key that I have for it, and I'm sure not without my fare share of problems in the future.

In addition to the stress of not having a working PC (which is hard to troubleshoot when you can't look up solutions on the internet because your computer doesn't work) things at work have still not been peachy.  We had another major maintenance project on the copper plater and the adjustment to work with 3/4 of our normal staff in my group.  We are running some new cell phone antennas here that have all kinds of issues at gold plate, we have ongoing staining issues on our silver plating, and trouble with some of our new lab equipment.  I also have a couple minor projects that I've neglected too long that I'm getting pressure to get done.  Then yesterday the machine that I have just been put in charge of decided it wanted to start chewing up material, so I have to dig around and try to figure out how to fix it without hardly knowing how it works, or where the spare parts for it are located, or how it typically runs when it isn't broken, so fun times there.

On the plus side my friend Allie sent me an email from her new @cityoflakesloppet.com email address, so that brightened my day.  I'm excited that she got a great job helping make nordic skiing in the twin cites better, and that I now have an in at the city of lakes loppet foundation.

Time ain't on my side

It seems I'm kinda forgetting what my house looks like I'm home so seldom lately.  I did get a good bit of work done on the canoe early last week, but haven't touched it in a week now.  The patches all took and look pretty good, but the gunwales still need to be shaped and riveted on.  I headed down to Chicago to watch my friend Erik run in the Chicago marathon this past weekend.  I took off right from work Friday for the cities to meet with my carpool crew down to Waukesha.  We stayed with Kyle and Kelli, a couple of high school friends.

Saturday was a nice relaxed day, just hanging out, fielding a couple calls from work, and getting in a short run with Erik.  Saturday night a few of us headed into Chicago so we could more easily get to the race the next morning without needing to hop on a train at 2:00 AM.  Elena and I stayed at one of her friends and got to sleep in until 5:30, not bad considering.  We biked the 7 miles to the race start, a really great ride along Lake shore drive.  There was a heavy fog over the lake, and a great view of the skyline.  I tried to take a couple pictures, but they came back very grainy.

Erik was hoping to run in the low 2:20's for the race, which is around 5:20 mile pace.  He started at 5:17's to keep with the women's pacer who was running a 2:18 pace.  This would have gotten him an Olympic trials qualification.  

Biking was a spectacular way to cheer, but Elena and I really had to book it to get back ahead of him, since he was on a closed course and we had to deal with traffic, stop lights, ect.  It was a lot of fun flying around on roads closed to cars and weaving around through roads with slow traffic.  I would not have wanted to be driving a car near the marathon course, but biking afforded a lot of latitude in where we were able to get to.  It was a bit worrisome running red lights and weaving through traffic with police all over the place, but they were too busy controlling traffic around the race course to bother with a couple bikers.  We caught Erik every couple miles or so for the first 8 miles, then headed to the halfway point to catch him there.  He was a bit off the pace by that point, and looked like he had backed way off.  Next we hopped ahead to the 17 mile mark.  We waited there and didn't see him, and didn't see him.  We met a few of the other people who were down there cheering and all kept an eye out for him long past when he should have finished.  We finally got a call that he had gotten bad cramps and ended up dropping out.  Very disappointing news considering all the training he has put in and how great his race start was.  We headed back to the finish area to watch the race leaders come in.  For much of the early race there was a pack of about 10 at the front.  Ryan Hall was dropped by the half and at mile 17 the pack was about 6.  At the finish Moses Mosop had easily left everyone behind and cruised in to take the win in about 2:05.

We grabbed some great Chicago deep dish pizza then split up so the train goers could get back and Elena and I stopped by Millennium park on our way back to her car.  I got some great pictures by the bean.

 We headed Picked up Erik and headed back to Waukesha to celebrate a bit.  It was Elena's birthday so we had something exciting to celebrate, even if Erik's day didn't go as well as he hoped.  We didn't start back for Minnesota until 11:00, so by the time we got back to the cities, got unloaded, and I drove back to Northfield it got pretty late.  I got home at 5:30 and crashed for about an hour before getting up and going in to work.  Normally I would have slept in a bit but there was a major maintenance project going on at work that I had to be there for.
 The rebuild project moved along pretty well actually.  I was awake and mostly cognizant even, until I sat down for a meeting for a bit.  I bet I didn't make it 5 minutes before I was nodding off.  I ducked out early to "go check my machine" so I didn't flat out fall asleep.  I finally got home a little after 6:00 pm, had some supper, and got about 2 hours of sleep before work called me back in.  We replaced a conveyor frequency inverter, and it was not commissioned correctly, so the speeds of the two conveyors did not match.  This leads to very bad material very fast.  I recommissioned the inverter, and it started going in the opposite direction, how does that even happen?  I changed a couple of the wires around and got it going the right way at the right speed, then spent some time searching for a leak from a bad seal.  I finally went home about 5:00, making it 3 days in a row where I was awake at 5:30 AM, and two of them coming from the wrong direction.  I slept until 7:00 and then back in to work.  Things were going well, but I had a lot to catch up on after a couple days of not spending any time at my desk, then had to go to the cities to run a couple errands.  It was 10:30 by the time I got home, just enough time to put away groceries and eat before going to bed.  Finally a full nights sleep.  Still pretty tired today.  Headed up to the cities again today for Erik's going away party.  He leaves for Ethiopia on Saturday for a few months.
 Just to make this busy week more fun I found out yesterday that one of the four engineers in my group is leaving for a different job.  This means 30% more work for those of us who are left, if my math is correct.  This should keep things from getting boring at work, that's for sure.  They should get even more fun yet when our new process equipment starts coming in next year...

Boats, Budgets, and Blacktop

I'm actually starting this a day early, but by the time it makes it out to internet land it will be right on time.  Ok make that late, since I waited to put up some pictures.  Last week was a rough work week, the copper plater was having some teething issues, either not biting material at all or eating it up.  Add that to the fact that we went from having Friday off a week ago and this last Friday scheduled as off to cancelling the Friday vacation, then by Tuesday to adding overtime on the weekend.  This puts a lot more pressure on keeping the machine up and running.  Some random fiddling with settings and careful measurements involving drawing lines on spinning gears got things at least mostly back on track, but maintenance down time on the machine is still crippling right now, so next Monday a major overhaul is on tap, changing anodes, checking cathodes, checking moving parts, and all as quickly as we can to get back to running material.  I did get a field trip in for work last week, going to another shop over in Wisconsin to take a look at some process equipment that is similar to the new equipment we are buying here.
Some pretty interesting stuff this last weekend (if these posts seem to focus mostly on weekends, its because my weeks can be fairly boring and too frequently lately free of training as well).  Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed early and headed up to Battle Creek to check out a Sisu workout.  We did some pole hiking and a fair amount of bounding.  It was a fun group, and Rob (one of Allie's friends who I met last weekend at the trail run) was close to my speed, so we got a good workout pushing each other a bit.  Then I went to Northwest Canoe in St. Paul (what a mess to get to between road construction and farmers markets) and picked up gunwales and patch equipment for my canoe.  It was a bit more spendy than I expected, so now I'm going to have to watch the budget very closely for a while so I have funds available for West Yellowstone and Christmas.  I did start tearing off the old gunwales when I got home on Saturday, that is a much bigger project than I expected as well, since they are glued on.  I put a couple small tears in the Kevlar tearing them off, but I can just put small patches over them, and the new gunwales should reinforce the area adequately think.  After buying boat parts I headed over to Jeff's to help strip off shingles from his garage.  That project was done by the time I got there, so I caught up with everyone there, ate lunch, and helped put up tar paper in anticipation of the arrival of his roofing (which showed up Sunday just a bit too late).  Then David, Jeff, and I headed out for some biking.  We were going to go do Ohio St. but hit a rough section where there was gravel and sand on the road where they were doing some construction work.  I'm happy we all made it through without incident, since it was a screaming downhill, but David picked up a bit of wire or something and ended up with a flat.  None of us thought to bring a spare or pump, so it was a hike back to Jeff's house to end the ride.  At least it was a short walk.  David is becoming a stronger rider for sure.  Next time Garrison is up I'm going to have to get those two down to Northfield and beat up on them a bit.  I know just the route...
Sunday morning I headed out to try the rollerskis on the new pavement on Hwy 246.  It was a nice warm day out, and since it is now October already I figured I better get on my horse with respect to ski training.  With bible study on Tuesdays I'll have to pick a new interval day soon and get going on those as well.  Since the downhill on 246 would now be manageable on the rollerskis I headed out towards Cannon City first.  There was a decent amount of traffic, but that is just part of rollersking.  The uphills were pretty good, and the downhills all manageable.  The 6 mile stretch from Cannon City to Nerstrand was as boring as usual.  The new pavement made it all the way to Nerstrand, so the run from there to the Valley grove section was rather good.  I took a few pictures along the way.

 





Climbing the hill on Ibson was great; I think in general going this direction gives access to the best climbs.  I'll maybe try it the other way around next time to see how the climbing on the new pavement is for comparison.
I went in for a couple fillings today.  Only three, but all in different places around my mouth, so my whole face is a bit numb right now.  I also found out that silver fillings are actually half mercury.  So I'm not sure what to make of that, but it's a bit creepy considering the stigma against playing with mercury, and for good reason from what medical data I've seen on the topic.  Even so, apparently the release rate is really low, and it's got to be better for me than uranium right?  On that happy note I'm off to study the bible, have a good week.

Adventures in Birkieland

Hopefully starting soon Tuesday will be bible study day, but this Tuesday that plan was derailed by some illness.  I think going forward I'm also going to try to make Tuesday blog day.  That gives me time to rehash the weekend, upload photos, and catch up with other things enough to have time to put a post together.  If Tuesday bible study yields good blogging fodder I might change my post date or add a second post, but I want to start sticking to a weekly schedule of some sort, just so stuff doesn't get lost in the wash.  Speaking of wash mine has been hanging in the basement since Wednesday, so it's probably dry and ready to be put away by now, or maybe I'll wait another day and it can have a solid week to dry.
This past week was an eventful one to say the least, but included a good amount of down time, which was nice.  Tuesday I went up to the cities for a going away party for my friend Annie.  She is leaving today for Tanzania, where she will be teaching English and other things at a rural bible college.  It was a fun group, with people from Amery and people from the U of M ski club.
Work has been slow for a few weeks, so last Friday was a forced vacation day.  I took of for my parents Thursday night, with a stop in Anoka to visit with Annie for a bit.  Friday I got a good rollerski in and had a chance to catch up to my parents and grandparents a bit, which was really nice.
Saturday I made the trek with my Trek up to Seeley to get some mountain biking in and cheer for my friend Allie who was running her first marathon.  I ran the Birkie marathon last year and it was a blast, but I've had enough of the racing for a bit and decided my mountain bike was underused.  The CAMBA (Cable area mountain bike association) trails were pretty baller, the singletrack defiantly pushed my technical biking skills to the limit.

I took off with a rough plan but forgot to grab a map, and started down the wrong trail immediately, so working off my rough memory of the trail system and my general knowledge of the Birkie trail I headed south to try to find a race.  I explored a few different trails, and managed to work my way to the Gravel Pit trail head, where I figured I could pick up a map.  Right when I pulled up I saw a few runners going  by who I guessed were about Jallie's speed, and then Jallie ran by, what great timing!  It caught me by surprise actually, so I cheered extra loud because I was happy to have found her, and that my timing was spot on despite a complete lack of plan following.  I grabbed a map and took off after her.

The singletrack trail I followed back towards OO where I parked weaves around a lot and crosses the Birkie trail at many locations, so cheering worked out really well.  If I got behind I would have to take some risks on some of the downhills and corners to catch up, and if I got ahead I had time to check the map or snap a couple photos.  Jallie's pace was good the whole way, and I got a great workout trying to keep up.
After OO my nice parallel trail disappeared, so I took some more adventures off on other trails and lost track of Jallie for a bit.  Then when I was ready for a break I cruised up to high point and waited there for her to show up.  After that I leapfrogged ahead a bit on the Birkie trail, and eventually found some more single track that ran along the trail in towards Telemark lodge.  Jallie finished well and was still walking around afterwards, which is always a good sign after a marathon.  I also ran into the Stone family and chatted with them for a bit. Michelle was doing the 1/2 marathon hike, and Mandy was doing the 5k so she could get a bit of mountain biking in afterwards as well.  I also ran into Joy Keller who was on a relay team.  After a bit of socializing I hit the trails back to OO and really pushed myself.  I got some good gravel road riding in, and got back on the Birkie trail in time to do the climbs at 16, 18, 20, and 22km.  By the time I got back to my car I was worn out.
Then I cruised back to the cities to meet Annie and some friends for her birthday meal at Old Spaghetti Factory.  A great way to fill the tanks back up after all that biking, and a really fun crew to hang out with.  After that we went out to the bars for a bit.
Then I headed home to get some sleeping in.  I actually slept a good chunk of the day Sunday as well, knowing I had to go in to work at 10:30.  Not the most exciting birthday, but I'm ok with that I guess.  There were machine troubles at work, and they only got worse over the next few days.  Things look like they are getting back on track finally today, although it's too soon to tell for sure yet.

Urban Warfare Eastern Front

Saturday was the EMVC's Urban Warfare Eastern Front ride.  We started in Mendota and got in some really good climbing and explored some great trails along the mighty Mississip'.  We found several closed roads to traverse, traffic to weave through, and one ways to take backwards to give the ride a bit of that warfare feel.

There were some great climbs including Davern Street where I managed to pull a foot out of the pedals, Highwood avenue, Grand Avenue over in South St Paul, and of course Ohio Street.  Jeff and Galen both climbed well, but I managed to wear them down over the course of the ride and made a big break on Ohio street.

We also got to try out a wide variety of different surfaces.  Everything from your standard pavement to wooden walkways, real cobblestones, brick, cement, grass, dirt, and gravel.  About the only thing we missed out on was a metal bridge or something.

Jeff edged me out on sprint points.  I got both of the Newport sprints, but he took a county sign to even the score, then got the double sign at Mendota Heights and the Mendota sign at the finish by a couple inches.

I broke another spoke on the Shogun, so I decided it is probably time to finally replace the back wheel.  I've also been looking at carbon forks, but that project may need to wait a year so I can build up some savings.

Lets Finish This

The time off running along with my consistent and enjoyable legs at Ragnar put me in much better spirits heading into the Trail Loppet, the final leg of the Hoigaards challenge.  I had a horrible set of intervals the Tuesday before the race (6:40 mile repeats which I felt sluggish for and no energy in the legs with 4 days until a big race, yuck) but didn't let that worry me too much.  I had some great intervals before Battle Creek after all and raced like crap.  I went to play some Frisbee the day before the race and tried my best to take it pretty easy, which is hard when playing Frisbee.  My black Frisbee of several years also developed a crack, which was sad, especially considering it was the only Frisbee we had to play with.  Also, the wall of talkers, a ski team ultimate Frisbee fixture from my early days on the team, was back in full force.  After Frisbee it was off to Annie's malt shop for some "carbo" loading.  I'm pretty sure a bacon cheeseburger and peanut butter cup malt with bananas is about the best possible pre race food, right?  Then it was off to drop Jeff and head to Elena's to sleep.  The next morning Jeff met Annie, Elena and I and we biked to the race start, a good 10 mile warm up before the race.  The legs still felt a bit sluggish on the warm up but not tired at all.
As I was going to check in Micheal Moulsoff stopped me to let me know that Matt Liebsch was not racing, so I was the favorite going into the race.  I knew Erik Solberg was there though, and after the beat down I was served at Battle Creek I was not giving myself great odds on winning.  My track record of winning close races hasn't been great in the last year.  It was a good boost to get a vote of confidence however, and got me in the right frame of mind to go after it.  I knew even with Matt out Evan Pengelly was a tough runner and probably a shoe in for the Hoigaards challenge win with a six minute lead on me going into this event.
At the race start Jeff took off fast so he could say he had his moment of glory leading the race.  Things at the front were pretty chatty for the first quarter mile as things sorted out.  Julien Sein created a small gap almost immediately, and I was content to let him get a bit of a gap, assuming someone would do the work to pull him back, and after a fast start led to a bad end a couple weeks ago I wasn't going to go too fast too early.  It soon became apparent however that nobody was in a hurry to go after him, so I ended up at the front of a trio of runners, with Erik and Eugene right off my shoulders.  Eugene took the lead for a bit, and I decided I would rather be in front, with the unpredictability of the trail I could get the best line of sight and the best speed control being in front.  I worked the flats hard and held steady on the climbs so the guys following me didn't get much rest.  I kept counting the gap up to the leader as about 10-15 seconds and at about mile 6 I finally decided I should go after him while there was still time, and maybe we could work together to make an escape from the two guys following me.  I pushed hard on a flat paved stretch of bike trail along Hwy 55, and it took me about a mile and a half to finally reel him in.  By then Eugene had lost contact, and Erik was a little ways back as well, so I pushed on by, hoping to leave them all chasing together.  After how long it took to reel in Julien I thought a good gap might just carry me through.  That didn't prove to be the case however.  Erik ran with Julien for a bit, but then I could see him bridging the gap up to me, and he caught me a bit before the big climb behind the Par 3 at mile 9.  We ran the next couple miles together, with me usually leading, but not making much of a gap.  Then at around mile 11 we hit some windy single track, and I amped up the pace a couple times and finally got a bit of a gap to put Erik out of sight for a bit.  This late in a race having a visual on someone can be a great motivator, and seeing someone get away and out of sight can make it hard to keep up the tempo.  Being in front and out of sight I was running scared.  I didn't want to turn around for fear of seeing Erik effortlessly shadowing me, but by the time I hit the last big climb I was close to shot.  I kind of walk/ran up it and took a glance at the top and didn't see Erik behind me.  I knew from there in as long as I kept the pace high I would get away, and I did pretty safely.  I came across the line about 30 seconds or so ahead of Erik, making this our 3rd or 4th Trail loppetHoigaards challenge outright.  The prize is a weeks trip to the Bearskin lodge up on the Gunflint trail, and I'm really excited to get up there this winter and get some skiing in.  Not sure when I'll be able to make the trip with some new process equipment due to come in about then at work, but I'll figure something out.
Then it was a nice easy ride back to Elena's, with a stop at the Birchwood Cafe for lunch on the way.  Over the course of the weekend there were a couple reminders of a happy evening from last fall that were pleasant to remember now that they are far enough away to have perspective, at least some perspective I guess. 
The next day I decided to skip the Jesse James day run, which I could have won, but probably wouldn't have enjoyed.  Instead I ate Indian Tacos and got beat by my brother at Frisbee golf and Jeff at Mario party in one of the biggest comeback games I have ever seen.  With 5 turns left I had 12 stars and was dominating, by the end I was down to 5 and Jeff had 7.  That is the crazieness that is Koopa's Tycoon Town.
Well with this long post done I am wrapping up the running race season.  There is still a chance I might give the big woods run a try, but if I do it will be a game day call.  On tap for this weekend is Urban Warfare Eastern Front, then after that the gravel season arrives.  Looking forward to some good bike rides, and plenty of rollerskiing now that fall is creeping in and snow doesn't feel so far away.  Jim has been stopping over to rollerski a few times now, and Nate Porath just started a facebook group for Northfield skiiers, so hopefully that gets some training partners together as well.

Not racing

I started this as a single post, but it is getting huge-ish, so I am splitting it up a bit.  My posting schedule is not what anyone would call consistent, or timely for that matter.  If I ever get readers I'll do my best to remedy that, but since all of these posts will be in the archives before I get around to reading them it doesn't matter how much time passes between posts.  The reason for the gap this time is that I actually didn't race for a couple weeks.  I did get some pretty good bike riding in over the course of the two weekends, something I have been missing this summer it feels like.  I went from not riding Sogn the whole season to doing it twice in 3 days, and I got in a ride to the cities and back, also a first for this year I believe.  I also got in a good day at the state fair where I rocked my blood pressure test, and perhaps most exciting of all I got a boat! 
I don't have pictures of the boat just yet, they will be forthcoming at some future time now that I have a camera, but it is a 36 lb 18' beauty of a canoe.  It is a Wenona Jensen 18' ultralight Kevlar canoe with bucket seats.  It currently has wooden gunwales that have quite a bit of dry rot, so I'm planning to replace them with aluminum gunwales, if I can manage to get some ordered.  Hoigaards has so far not been all that responsive to my requests for pricing and delivery.  There is also a 6" crack in the Kevlar that I need to get some parts for and patch up, a project I'm actually kind of excited to take on.  The boat is as old as I am, and considering the damage my body, which can heal itself, has sustained it is no surprised that a boat will pick up a few bruises along the way.  The price was right however, and the advantage of buying a boat with a few dings is that I won't be super protective of it and will get better use of it because of it.  It is a bit short to be a competitive racing boat, but should help give me a good boost for Chippewa and the Tri loppet compared to the fiberglass 18' Jensen I have been using (for sure it will help for the Chippewa portages) and it should make a good BWCA boat as well.  I don't know if I'll get it in the water before the cold sets in this year, it was 28F last night, but for sure by next spring it will be ready to hit the lakes.  Emily also got a boat on the same day, so I will now have 3 boats to store in the garage for this winter.  So that was the weekends off, back to a bit more racing.

Step Up

Many exciting things have happened since my last post, but I'll start with perhaps the most boring of them.  We are starting a fitness challenge at work next week.  The contest runs for a month, and everyone wears a pedometer and logs the number of steps they take.  Here is a picture of the beauty.

I signed up for something like 300k steps, or about 10k a day for the month the challenge runs.  On a normal day at work I get around 3k, but if I walk (or run most likely) to work I can get that number way up without any trouble.  If I am willing to leave a bit earlier to account for the longer commute I should crush the 300k mark.  So there is a tidbit for you, much more exciting stuff to come.  One more note, I got a new camera, so the photo included here is hopefully the start of a more visually entertaining blog going forward, which should be a joy for the zero people who read this blog.

Ragnarrrrrr

Continuing the trend of firsts this year I tried my first super relay.  The event is called the Ragnar Relay: Great River.  It is 12 runners (or 6 if you are that hard core) doing 194 miles from Winona to Minneapolis through some great Wisconsin bluff country along the way.  I was the 7th runner on the team, the first from the van I was with (2 vans with 6 runners each).  I had great teammates in my van.  Erik is an amazing runner with a shot at making the Olympic trials in the marathon, Gehrig is a great leader, Tony I haven't seen since high school, so it was great to catch up with him a bit, and Rebekah and Libby got along with the rest of us well.  Everyone really tried hard and had some great runs.  I didn't see much of the other van after the start other than nearly being run over by Alicia at the handoffs.  My first leg was 6 miles and featured a 2 mile climb with about 500 feet of vertical climb.  It was good to plug away at it and run the whole hill.  It felt much better than those battle creek hills last weekend.  My next leg was 9.5 miles from River Falls to just south of Hudson, starting at 2:45 am.  The cool air and drizzle actually felt pretty good, and the road was nice and smooth, plenty easy to see with my headlight.  My final leg was 6.5 miles from Lake Elmo into St. Paul.  By this time I was feeling the previous runs and really had to push myself to keep the pace up.  It helped that I was around faster runners and had them to motivate me to push on, including a guy with an amazing beard who I had seen at the Afton trail run who our team nicknamed Ragnar for this race.  I kept my pace under 4:00/km for all 3 legs, so I was pretty happy with that, the legs do have a bit of speed in them still.  I tried running a 400 on Tuesday though, and the best I could manage was a 63.  Had I warmed up and really went at it I maybe could have made it under 60, but that would be the best I could do right now.  Maybe time to bring a bit more speed work back into the routine next year, I've been missing it now that I don't play much Frisbee anymore.  A couple more weeks to the Trail Loppet, then my season is pretty well over at long last.  I'm not sure yet if I'll do Nerstrand, or even Jesse James days yet.  Depends how the Trail Loppet goes I guess.  I could even sign up for Birkie still, but am pretty sure I won't do that.  I think going up to do some mountain biking and cheer for Jallie would be much more fun if she decides to race it, or I could even go on my churches hiking trip again, which I have missed for the last couple years.  Nice to have a few free weekends to contemplate some of these activities.

Too much racing?

A couple more races to put in the books this last weekend.  Saturday was a wet day for the first ever Battle Creek 1/2 marathon.  The field was pretty small, about 30 runners, and the course was 3 laps of the hilly battle creek ski trails.  I started out fast and created an early gap, but at the end of the first 7k lap I was caught by Eric Solberg.  As the rain of the morning went from a light drizzle to a steady rain I was extra glad I had decided to skip the shirt, even though I was a bit chilly at least I wasn't putting on water weight.  I held with Erik for about half of the second lap until he pulled away from me on a steeper downhill.  I kept losing ground on him after that, and my 3rd lap I kind of cashed it in, content to hold on to my second place.  Jeff came in only about a minute or so behind me, closer than I would like, but he has been training far more consistently than I have, so a good result for him.  I hardly felt like I was breathing hard, but my legs were unresponsive, so I think I need to start ramping up the hill work and a few longer runs to beat the legs back into shape before trail loppet in a few weeks, or that could be an ugly race.
After the racing I was a vegetable for the rest of the day.  I wandered around a book store for a while, then watched three movies in a row, making the most of one of my free movie tickets I clipped from some cereal boxes.  I saw the final Harry Potter movie, a romanic comedy called Friends with Benefits or something like that, and Cowboys vs. Aliens.  It was a nice recovery to just sit and stare at a screen for a bit.
Then Sunday I tried my first real triathlon.  Less than 1/4 mile swim, so I figured I could work my way through that and then see what happened after.  The swim was even worse than I anticipated, I need lessons for sure if I am going to get serious about this, since I came out of the water in dead last.  I have my transitions down fairly well by this point though, and the bike and run went well so I ended up winning overall, so not too bad for my first go around.

I may not be cool, but at least my food is

A couple of weeks of down time after a long racing season have been a welcome change, and a chance to get a few things taken care of on the home front and get a bit of adventuring in.  I went with my brother down to a family reunion near Waldorf this last weekend and got to try my new $15 tent out for the first time.  Cary and I teamed up for the lawn golf and "win it in a minute" challenges and won both.  The golf games were very close, as we changed what implements we used each time.  Over the course of the weekend I used a Frisbee, a lawn dart (both the new weighted and old sharp variety) an actual golf club and ball, a horseshoe, an apple, and a block of wood.  The block of wood won us our very close victory game, it went into 3 extra holes to break the tie at the end of the regulation round.  Cary dominated most of the minute challenges, but I pulled out ahead in blowing a ping pong ball into a horseshoe and stacking erasers and dice on a Popsicle stick I was holding in my mouth.
I don't do a lot in the way of home maintenance, but I do what I need to.  My basement is finally finished, and is actually looking pretty good.  A nice thorough cleaning and things should be in ship shape down there. 
I am also working on fixing my refrigerator.  I had to de-ice it this spring and then a few weeks ago it started not keeping food cold.  I did some sleuth work and found out that the evaporator fan was bad, so the cold air was there but was not being circulated.  I replaced that, but still suspect that my defrost timing switch is bad, since I never notice the fridge going into defrost mode on it's own, and that was stated as one reason that an evaporator fan might fail, if it gets plugged up with frost.  The new fan is working great, and I can at least manually switch the defrost on and off, so I'm going to watch it a few days and replace the switch if needed.
A bad storm this last weekend knocked a lot of branches down, so that was a good catalyst to get some lawn work done as well.  I cleaned up all the dead fall and pruned a bunch of my trees and bushes back, so I had a good sized load to bring to the compost this week.  It is always fun packing the Focus full of branches and ratchet strapping the big ones on top, then cruising right through downtown with the whole ensemble to get to the compost site.  I also got my strawberry garden weeded out, a huge project, but it looks pretty good now, except the fruit season is long done already.
Got my first real rollerski workout in last weekend too, 15km in 1 hr, a pretty sedate pace, but it felt good to start getting the ski legs back under me.  I've had a couple really fast near TT bike sessions the last couple weeks on the lunch rides.  I would attack right after the intermediate sprint and open up a gap that I would try to hold as long as possible.  Add that to a 10 mile run on Tuesday, and even though I haven't been doing many extra workouts I feel like I'm getting some solid training in.  Racing starts back up for another block in a couple weeks, so I need to hone the fitness back in a bit before then.

A flood of panic

Gary and Maddie came down a couple weeks ago for some canoeing on the cannon river.  The river has been high all summer, and was finally settling down, so I figured it would be a good time to get some boats out.  It rained about 7" in a couple hours the night before we went however, so the river was very high and fast when we put in Saturday morning.  The trip started alright, and we made really good time, hardly needing to paddle.  There were a lot of trees down and debris requiring some navigation skills, which it turns out we don't really have.  We overturned the boat going under a tree and only then realized the predicament we had gotten ourselves into.  It was warm out, but the water was surprisingly cool.  More noticeably it was very fast, and high enough that it went well back into the trees near the typical shoreline, so there was no safe way to get the boat out of the current.  Maddie was in a kayak and her quick reaction saved our paddles and a couple other random objects.  We floated downriver with the boat for a while and finally managed to manhandle it over to a downed tree where we could anchor ourselves and get the boat righted, although it was a tough fight with the current to get it out of the water and upright.  Our poles and tackle were sadly lost, and I had to untangle my legs from the fishing line, but we got back underway.  We didn't make it near as far before tipping a second time, and needed to work over into some shallows and right the boat.  Then We decided to try me in the stern and Gary paddling bow, but barely got underway before tipping again.  This time we got caught on a pile of flotsam, but Gary had to drift away.  I managed to hang and get the boat flipped and emptied on my own while bracing on a log that seemed mostly stable, then sat in the bottom of the boat and turned it by leaning and paddling with my hands until Gary could grab hold and pull himself into the boat, while going downriver.  Maddie saved our paddles each time, and handled her kayak very well, without her there things would have been much the worse.  We ended up stopping when we reached a good place to beach along Hwy 3 and had Gary's dad come rescue us.  I think all of us had as much adventure as we cared to that day, and it was a good reminder how much the speed and power of a river differs from the lakes where I have been doing most of my paddling as of late.

Ngede it done

The final race in this block was another unique one.  My friend Erik has been dreaming up this race for a few years now, and to finally see it come to fruition was exciting.  It is called the Ngede challenge and is a pretty exciting series of events to make up one spectacular 65km race.  Since it is in it's inaugural year the field was pretty small, and this is probably a good thing since there were still a few bugs to work out in terms of course design and marking.  I showed up Friday night to have supper with some of the racers and volunteers and ended up helping finish up some course marking before heading to my folks to catch a bit of sleep.  The next morning was perfect temps, if a bit muggy.  There were 5 of us doing the whole event solo, and maybe 7-8 relay teams entered as well.  Erik I expected to get away on the 10k run that started the race, but thought I could pull him back on the road bike depending on his mountain bike skills.  There were some very fast looking Orbea TT bikes there with their accompanying triathletes.  These guys would be the unknowns, how much would the bikes and multi sport experience chip into the gaps I could put on them in the runs?  The 10k played out pretty much as expected.  One of the relay runners got a huge gap, Erik slowly edged away and probably had 1:30 on me by the exchange.  I was 3rd in with Than right there with me.  I took the time to throw on my EMVC jersey and shoes and hit the bike trails.  I kept it relaxed for the first couple km then started to work the big hills on the black ski loop.  I caught Erik after turning onto the blue loop and overtook him pretty quickly.  The long green climb I was starting to feel it a bit, and after pushing over the black climb I geared up and tried to relax on the long descent to the exchange zone.  The road bike transition went very quickly, just change bikes, no clothing changes at all, and took off, still with no triathletes in sight.  I hadn't seen the relay team in the lead either though, so I wondered if they were away.  I saw a flash of yellow ahead when I was about 3 miles into the bike though, and just kept my head down and pushed as hard as I could maintain knowing what was yet to come.  I caught the relay team rider about 3 miles later and quickly left him behind.  I knew this was going to be my chance to make a gap, and I kept right on the edge of what my legs could handle.  There was a long stretch on a crushed rock bike path, and I could feel the speed slow down compared to the road, and the effort increase.  It was a rail trail, so there was no break to climb or descend, just effort and the slow feeling of the legs creeping towards fatigue.  I tried to keep my focus on staying low and lean and keeping consistent force on the pedals through the entire rotation.  I took a couple glances back, but didn't see anyone closing on me.  Getting back on the road was a welcome change, and I picked up the tempo for the last 7 or so miles in to the last exchange.  I changed shoes, lost the jersey, and hit the trails.  The legs and abs were angry, they didn't like the change of motion.  I hadn't seen anyone else arrive by the time I left the exchange zone though, so I figured I was at least 1:00 clear and was willing to take my time for the first mile to let the legs adjust.  Then I picked up the pace a bit but kept things in control, just in case.  Much of the run was an out and back, so when I passed mile 2 on the way back I knew I had over a mile lead and was able to relax and just work at a comfortable pace the rest of the way in.  I ended up with a rather large win, at least 15:00 I think, since the fastest of the triathletes got lost on the road bike, and Erik stopped to redo some course markings along the way.  There was a Tanzanian feast afterwards that was simply amazing.  It was great to just eat and hang out with a bunch of friends new and old.  With that race done it was nice to go home and relax before heading to the cities the next morning for the EMVC urban warfare ride.

I got sole, they're super bad

So when I was looking at the race calendar this spring I though, you know what would be fun to do the day after a 50k, drive to the center of the state of Wisconsin and run a 5 miler.  The Pitsville Heart and Sole is a flat, fast, road race held on July 3 every year.  I have been going for a few years now and didn't want to miss the 25th annual race for something as dumb as running a 50k the day before.  The legs were barely working when I hopped in the car that morning, and walking down stairs was not happening without a hand rail.  This would make for exciting racing.  I did a couple strides before the race just to see how the legs would handle speed, and it wasn't a pretty sight.  I decided I would not push it, just tuck in and see how the race progresses.  My brother, friends Jeff, Chris, Rob, and Heather, were all racing too, so if I decided to just jog it out there would be plenty of people to run with.  Well when the gun went off that nice flow of adrenaline quickly calmed the aching muscles and I tucked in with the second group of runners.  Nearly everyone in the first group turned off at the two mile race cutoff, and I found myself in 4th.  This would have frustrated me in other years, but was better than I expected this year.  I was caught by a couple other runners and ended up settling in with a group of 4 behind 4 more leaders who we weren't going to catch.  I worked on keeping the turnover high and the effort relaxed, and in the last mile poked ahead just a bit to keep the other guys honest.  One of them got away, I tucked in with a second, and we dropped the third.  That second runner got away with a quarter mile left, so I settled in and took 7th, good enough for a second in my age group.  This kind of marks a turning point in my athletic career.  I used to always have the goal of not being beat by anyone younger than me.  I was training hard enough that my additional years of maturity and experience should keep me moving up.  Now my goal had become not to be beat by anyone older than me.  My youth, training, and enthusiasm would have to hold against the additional experience of my competitors.  I've been trying to train less this year, not always effectively, just to see what impact it has on my racing, and so far I've been pretty pleased with my ability to stay in the mix in most races, even though I feel like I'm riding right on the edge of crashing out more now than in the past where I just couldn't maintain the pace needed to move ahead, period.  One more race entry coming up, then a couple weeks away from the race scene, probably.

An Ultra good time

The next race on the docket was the Afton Trail Run 50k.  I really enjoyed the Birkie marathon last year, and so decided that if I could run a trail marathon and still walk the next day an ultra couldn't be that much harder.  I was wrong, at least in this case.  The race was supposed to be held at Afton state park, and is known for being hilly and tough.  It would be 2x25km with about 6 significant climbs each loop.  When the Minnesota government completely failed at it's job of coming up with a budget (a problem still not solved 2 weeks later) the state park closed and I hoped briefly that a cancellation would ensue and save me from this race.  Instead the resourceful race organizers moved the race right next door to the Afton Alps ski and mountain bike area and made good use of some single track and ski slopes to create a 12km loop that we would traverse 4 times, still with about 5 major climbs each time around.  The total elevation gain ended up being somewhere around 1600m. 
The long runs started out rough a couple months back with some digestion problems making me wonder if I still had it in me to do these long races.  As I built up my mileage and started to play around with my diet though things worked themselves out alright.  I put in a 25 mile run the week before Chippewa and then counted on my racing to hold my fitness until the race.  With only 2 days of just "running" logged in June I was a bit apprehensive going into the race, but when the gun went off at 6:30 am I was ready to go.  I quickly settled in as the trail immediately narrowed and most of the race was walking.  I watched a group of 4 go off the front pretty much right away, but I didn't worry about them.  I was here to finish, not to win any prizes.  I did want to finish in a timely manner however, so I passed a number of people when the trail opened up to a service road.  Jeff stuck right with me and I pulled us around on an uncertain first lap.  There were plenty of people even near the front walking some of the more steep uphills, and I took a cue from them and walked as well.  It made for a pretty pleasant race experience actually, it is a unique atmosphere where everyone I was around was racing, but not at the expense of the racers around them.  I could walk up the hills and chat with the racers around me (when I could catch my breath.  Even walking these hills were no joke) and when things flatten out go right back to a race pace.  There were "fun" hills with cool names like "pirates point" and "easier loop" (it wasn't).
The first water station was about 4 miles into the 7.5 mile loop, and it was a welcome sight.  I didn't carry water with me so I had 2 or 3 cups of water or heed (another huge plus of this race, they used the same drink I train with year round) and a banana, part of a peanut butter sandwich and some M&M's.  The aid stations were veritable buffet tables, and I made the most of it.  The race director was out acting as a course Marshall, so I gave him a thumbs up for the course selection, fun and challenging single track.  It was shortly after that I saw the sign indicating I was headed "to the Manhandler".  After a bit of winding around sure enough, there was a monster climb up to the back side of one of the ski slopes.  I was walking it so I was not man handled, but the prospect of making the climb 3 more times didn't seem super appealing.  From there things went downhill fast, right to the base of the ski slope in fact.  Then in a cruel twist we were right near the lap/finish line, but instead of finishing the lap there the course turned and went straight back up the steepest ski slope it could find.  If the race directors were worried about the course being hard enough up to this point (I'm sure they weren't) this climb surely settled any lingering doubt that this course would be an equal in challenge to the course at the state park.  Shortly into the second lap I began to catch 25k racers who's race had started an hour after mine.  This fueled me to push the pace a bit more than I may have otherwise done and Jeff's labored breathing reminded me to reign myself in from time to time.  There is something quite satisfying about flying by people who know you've already been on course for an hour, and probably will be for another hour after they finish.
Jeff decided to dial the pace back at the start of the third lap, and I continued to weave my way through 25k racers, albeit at a slower rate than the lap previous.  When I reached the easier route climb I found myself walking behind a rather attractive lady doing the 25k race.  I passed her on the short running section at the top of the hill and she tucked in behind me and easily kept my pace for the ensuing descent.  I paced her for a bit, then got a bit of a gap before the food station.  While I took my time feasting she cruised by, and I caught back up to her a hill or so later and ran with her for the rest of the lap.  It was nice having someone at close to my pace to make me keep up the effort, and to talk to while walking up the hills.  I didn't think to ask her name, so I don't know who she was, but she made a great pacer.  My friend Dean was out taking pictures of the race, so he popped up at various locations to give encouragement,  Dave and Caitlin came to cheer and hung out near the big hills at the lap/finish area, and the winding nature of the trail means I saw Jeff at several points too and we cheered each other on.  Once my pacing lady had finished her race I was on my own a bit behind a group of 3 runners.  I caught up to them and one turned out to be Kyle Donovon, one of my brothers friends from RF.  I ran with him for a while until the hills began in earnest when much to my dismay I found I was no longer able to run downhill without my legs starting to give out on me.  I kept the pace up on the flats and climbs to try to compensate, but as they say what goes up must come down.  I walked, even walked backwards when possible to try to keep the downhills manageable but still lost major time on the group I had caught.  The last time up and down the final slope near the end of the race was pure torture, but being able to see the finish line the whole time was a good reminder that it would all be over soon.  I finished and immediately started eating and drinking anything I thought my stomach would hold down.  It was an exciting time.  When I recovered enough to move around I went to wait and cheer for Jeff, who came in about 1/2 hour behind me.  My goal was to not take as long to finish this race as I did Chippewa, and I made it, by only about 10 min.  My time was 5:26:00 or somewhere thereabouts.  Not a bad day's work.

Give it a Tri

Work intruded on life for a couple of rough weeks in mid June, and I'm still dealing with some of those issues now.  The copper plater I'm in charge of has been getting worse, until finally a major overhaul was required.  This involved a couple long days of changing out parts, and in the process finding more parts that need changing out.  All this was accomplished, and then the machine worked worse than ever.  So the end result was that I ended up working a 65 hour week leading up to the Tri-loppet, with 50 of those hours being in 3 days.  This somewhat decreased my motivation for the race, but it is such a fun race I was still excited by Friday evening when Mike Kosloski and I hit up lake Calhoun for our one and only canoe training day (and Mike's first time in a boat in who knows how long) in the Jensen named Lilly that we borrowed from Paul.  I did my best to impart my incomplete knowlege of race paddling on him, and try to learn how to steer a boat at the same time.  The practice round didn't go too bad, and we had a plan ready for the next morning. 
Race day was bright and beautiful.  Jeff came with to be cheering squad, and the paddle over to the beach where the race was starting went off without a hitch.  There was a bit of down time to relax before the race start, then it was get in the boats, get in position, and get going. 
We started in the second row and drafted a rather fast boat right out of the gate.  We were probably about the 20th boat around the first booey, and were out of most of the traffic.  My steering wasn't the best, so we ended up bumping boats we were trying to draft a couple times, but never really interupted their paddling or ours.  We picked off a few boats along the course, including Fixie Paul in his solo kayak and Carl Schaffer, who had taught me my dubious paddling skills.  I was rather pleased with this, and even more pleased when looking at the results to see we finished 25th and 26th in the paddle leg, my best tri-loppet paddle yet.
Then it was off to the hilly quaking bog for the run leg.  I have had the fastest time for the run every year I've done the Tri-loppet, so I had a record at stake for this section.  I was feeling fast, but not winning fast, and taking a digger around a sharp corner didn't help.  I was back up in a jiffy, no worse for the wear, but it broke my rhythym a bit for sure.  Jeff was all over cheering, and when he ran along side me for a stretch not even breathing hard I figured I was in trouble.  My abs hurt far more than other years, since I actually used them to paddle this year, and the lack of sleep over the last week was beginning to catch up to me.  I powered through though, and was happy to hop on the bike.  Not that the bike leg hurt much less, but it did give my abs a rest, and the speed and wind always help a bit.  When I was at about the 3 mile mark in the bike I saw one of the leaders passing the 6 mile mark going the other way, so I knew there was no winning for me this year.  I got passed by a rider who I had caught in the running leg, the first time I've ever been passed in this race after leaving the boat behind, so that was a bit demoralizing too.
After an exhausting race I wasn't expecting much, so I was quite pleased to see I ended up 8th overall, and managed to snag a 2nd in my age group behind Matt.  I did have the fastest running leg, and was 5th in the bike, so if I ever get a fast boat I could be in the mix for a win.

Off to the Races

Since I last posted in May I have been doing a whole lot of racing, working, and unfortunately driving.  Racing season kicked off with a new one for me, the Chippewa triathlon in Cass Lake.  Emily and I were a canoe duo, and the Buessler family was nice enough to give us a place to stay before and after the race.  To get ready for the race I went up and paddled with the Minneapolis Canoe club a couple of times, and boy what a difference it made.  I feel like my stroke is way worse now than I ever thought it was, but at least I'm on the path to doing things right, getting the paddle in a powerful position and applying force with the correct muscles.  It was hard to tell at Chippewa if it paid off, since Emily and I are a bit unbalanced in terms of paddling strength and weight in the boat, so we had to make some mid race adjustments that included me hopping into the stern with really no idea how to steer a boat.  The portages were also costly since my height meant most of the weight of the boat ended up on Emily's shoulders when we tried to do the racing portage.  So by the time we hopped out of the water the race leaders were a good hour down the road.  The bike was a bit more suited to my abilities with paved bike trail, gravel roads, and bumpy, windy forest paths on offer.  I think I ended up with the second or third fastest bike leg on the day, not too shabby.  I had heard from reading about tri's that the bike to run transition can be a bit tricky, and boy was it ever.  I was running on fumes by the end of the bike leg, and then to hit the trails on foot the muscles didn't seem especially willing to get moving.  After a few miles this settled out and I could finally get into a good, if still not comfortable, groove and began passing people even.  A small detour to check out some neat trails not on the course had me backtracking and proceeding to pass most of the people I had caught earlier again.  I did pass them all a second time before the finish.  I finished the race in 5:32:12, my longest ever race in terms of time and distance (71 km).  It was a great adventure, and I was pretty spent afterwards.  Luckily the next weekend was Grandma's marathon, which I did not race, so I got a chance to recover, finally meet up with Matt and give him his prize and medal from trail mix, and get in a good bike ride on a very rainy day with Bjorn.  There will be plenty more racing news in the next few posts.