John’s Ramblings

There will be no huge celebration, perhaps a small gathering of the clan later. We’re marking the occasion with a “chill” day… as chill as a day can be in 95 degree temperatures! I’ll rally myself for a workout here in a little bit, then we’ll go have lunch with the gang at the Ram. Much of the afternoon will likely be spent soaking in the hot tub (turned to slightly less than hot for the summer). Dinner out, something in the salmon or steak realm would be splendid. No cake, although I’m entitled to a free “mile high mud pie” at lunch. I’ll have a couple of bites, then try to give the rest away. Show up around noon a grab a spoon.

I hit the birthday-fairy up for a new iPod. I’m facinated with the Touch but I’m not sure how practical it would be to carry around both the Touch and my Instinct phone. If I love the Touch, waddaya bet I’m going to want the iPhone next year when my current service contract expires. I won’t need both an iPhone and a Touch… that seems a bit much even for a gadget junkie like me. So perhaps I’ll get a new Nano instead for use as my workout/traveling model in the meantime. Decisions, decisions.

My best-est present comes in the next two weeks, when me boy-o Brendan comes to Washington for a visit.

I think I should also be wishing for a few extra hours to ride my bike. I received some earnest arm-twisting yesterday to do the Rapsody bike ride August 22-23. I’m going to need some saddle-time to get ready for 175 miles in two days.

I’ve been struggling to get in my home workouts for the past couple of weeks.  Emphasis on cycling, lots of work to do around the house, school, and to be perfectly frank, a bit of a lack of motivation has kept me from doing anything but the bare minimum to assuage my guilt.  Well, it wasn’t working as either a quality workout routine nor a guilt-assuager.

Part of my problem has been that I never quite got my head around the Wednesday night training vs. Saturday morning sessions that I had been doing at Hocevar Performance Gym.  Wednesday nights actually work better for me in a lot of ways, I just never quite got into the rhythm of what I was going to be doing workout-wise for the rest of the week.

Given that my spare time is a pretty precious commodity right now (and for the foreseeable future) I am going to concentrate my hard training time on the kettlebell/bodyweight training, and taper back on the road cycling.  Practically speaking I can accomplish a helluvalot of conditioning in 4 hours a week with the kb’s, but I’d need 2 to 3 times that amount of bike time to just maintain.  I asked Luka to provide me with some workouts that I can schedule during the week, and he obliged with a series of 4 workouts that utilize my inventory of kettlebells, exercise equipment, and (gulp) the hill that my house sits at the bottom of.

Much of the training I’m doing with Luka is Escalating Density Training, or EDT.  The principal of EDT is to do a set of alternating exercises that use opposing (or different) muscle groups, and do as many sets as you can in a given period of time (known as PR, or Personal Record).  Monday was Luka’s “Workout A”:

4 sets of:

• Kettlebell front squats, (2 x 20kg), 8 reps
• Negative Chin Ups (3 second descent from chin-over-bar), 5 reps

EDT-PR Zone 1: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 9)

• 10 x 24kg kettlebell swings
• 10 pushups

EDT-PR Zone 2: 10 minutes, as many rounds as possible (I did 5)

• Kettlebell reverse lunges, 6 reps R & L, 16 kg kettlebell
• Kettlebell 1 arm rows, 24 kg, 8 reps R & L

3 sets of:

• 10 x v-ups
• 30 second plank

The principal here is that I will be able to do more work with less rest as I progress… so future sessions of “Workout A” should mean more rounds completed (by virtue of having to rest less), and eventually more weight being used.  I’ll try to keep up with my posting here, so you can keep score at home.

Oh, and then I went for a bike ride.  Recovery pace, about 13 miles, lovely weather for it.

Here’s why breeders of Golden Retrievers don’t need big advertising budgets:

(pictures credited to big sister, copyright 2009, all rights reserved, blah blah blah)

My sister’s new little boy, as yet unnamed.

No big events, no epic attempts at solo centuries. Just a casual, bicycle-centric weekend.

Sunday, I took Terri out for a little bit of an extended valley spin, with your’s truly deviating a couple of times to do some climbing at Cemetery Hill off Orillia Road, and the extended Macadam Loop in Tukwila. Terri is lovin’ the new bike.

Sunday I took Terri out to breakfast, then went for a short spin with “the guys”. Insert adolescent humor here:

Sunday night, we went to the Cirque du Soleil show Corteo. The show was great, as it has been the other three times we’ve been to Cirque. The “plot-line” of the show is the celebration of the life of a clown who has passed away. Not necessarily the happiest of topics, but his spirit rides into the afterlife on a bicycle. I should hope so.

Just over a week until the Ride of Silence.  I hope you all can find a local version of this ride to attend and help honor those injured or killed by collisions with automobiles.

In two weeks, I’ll be riding day three of the Century Ride of the Centuries in Pendleton.  I’m very much looking forward to this ride in Eastern Oregon, as it is always fun and very well supported.  They still have some availability for this ride, but registration will close at the end of this week, and no on-site registrations will be taken this year.  Get ‘em while they’re hot.

We hosted Thanksgiving again this year, but it ended up being a far different affair than in recent history. Usually we have various branches of the family come from the area, resulting in 16-20 folks.

This year it turned out that the other branches of the family had other dinners to go to or host. So as we sat down to dinner, we had 5… Terri and our three collective kids (now grown). Soon we were joined by the youngest member of the family, our 6 year old granddaughter.

So there wasn’t the hustle and bustle of years past, but it was a lovely Thanksgiving nonetheless. We reflected on our first Thanksgiving for our assembled family unit, 21 years ago to the day. Lots of smiles, warm thoughts, and a couple of tears shed as we reflected on how we were thankful to have each other.

Thanksgiving, indeed.

Regular readers know of the truck in the yard, a couple of weeks ago.

Our family had another close call with a truck last night. Son Brendan was driving home from work last night when a truck lost one of its wheels somewhere in front of him on Hwy 99. The car just in front of him saw the tire and swerved at the last second, but Brendan went over the top of the damn thing. He’s fine, but the undercarriage of his Focus is much the worse for wear. The car was not drivable, and it was leaking its little life-force away on the pave.

A quick search of a local news outlet confirms what my feeble memory recalls from this past summer: This story recounts 5 incidents of tires coming off trucks in the area, and one resulted in a fatality. Despite the likely loss of Kegel (Brendan named his car), we are feeling very lucky this morning.

My birthday was last Friday. The family indulged me with many cycling-related gifts and my perennial fave, german chocolate cake. Because my son is connected to the culinary arts program at South Seattle Community College, he thought to commission a cake through the college. The result, which bears the likeness of cartoon characters Wallace and Gromit, is shown here:

I was absolutely blown away by this cake. The little wedges of “cheese” on the border are marzipan. If anyone is looking to hire the pastry chef that did this work (full-time), email me and I’ll hook you up.

For those unaware of who the characters are, I’d recommend renting “Wallace and Gromit and the Curse of the Were-Rabbit“. I discovered Wallace and Gromit (and their creators, Aardman Studios) via two shorter features for these two characters, “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave”.

Although I’m old, need few knick-nacks, and am generally a pain in the ass to shop for because I’ve already gotten what I want anyway, everyone did great. I received a couple of cool cycling books that will give me some good reading material on while I’m camped during RAW, and an uber-duffel bag that will easily accommodate my gear. When I return from 6 consecutive days of riding, I’ll recuperate by watching my 3 dvd set of the original 3 seasons of Ren and Stimpy.