Love you Sean, rest in peace… meet you on the beach.

Dad and Mom and Molly.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

My 23 year old son Brendan has been living with us for the past year as he finishes the Culinary Arts program at South Seattle Community College. He also works in the catering division at the new Seattle Art Museum, so his schedule is congested, to say the least. It worked out that he had Sunday completely free, so he joined us for his first taste of club riding.

Brendan has just gotten his road bike a month or so ago. It seems that just about everyone in the kitchen where he works commutes via bike to save gas and parking fees. Being surrounded by cyclists at work and home, it was only a matter of time before we had another convert.

Locals will remember that Sunday was overcast and cool. It wasn’t the greatest day for a ride, but I had a great time. For most of the ride out to the park, I “swept” the group with Brendan just ahead of me. I watched him ride and gave out a few tips, all whilst “minding my station” with the occasional “Car Back!” call.

I’ve ridden Green Valley many, many times. I know every pothole, gravelly driveway, narrow bridge and turn on this road. The scenery is lovely, and I love watching the young animals this time of year stretching their legs. It is relaxing, but also familiar. On this day, however, it was a little slice of life, a “dad” moment that I will cherish for years to come. I am a lucky man.

Cycling: I’ve had two rides, Tuesday the 2nd I did 25 miles with the Use It or Lose It gang. The weather was crappy before and after the ride, but it was warm and no rain fell on our little out-and-back trip to Sumner. I skipped Thursday as I was in the throes of a headcold, and did not want to exacerbate matters with a ride in 40 degree temps. Saturday I went out solo, and did 19 miles in the valley to shake out the cobwebs a bit.

Rim Failure: I’ve been riding my fair-weather bike, as my new wheels have not been finished by the boys at Ti-Cycles. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to fetch them tomorrow before the night ride. It looks like it’s going to be a wet ride, so I’d much rather be riding my winter bike with the fenders.

Bent Car: My car ended up staying at the auto body place for the weekend, as they had not quite gotten it done on Friday. In the meantime, I drove around in a Ford Focus Hatchback, which was roomy enough to stash my bike in the back, but has seats that were designed by the Bishops during the Spanish Inquisition. I picked the car up this afternoon, and it looks perfect. All the repairs and the car rental were direct-billed to the insurance company of the person that backed into my car. Thank you, Kirmac Auto Body. Nice job!

Gauntlet: Today is Terri’s birthday, but we celebrated on Sunday with dinner at Salty’s. I’m halfway through The Gauntlet with the end in sight.

College Bike: Also on Sunday, I got in touch with my ex-mother-in-law. About 25 years ago, when I was not cycling but owned a bike I had bought in college and ridden up until about 1980. My ex’s younger brother wanted to borrow my bicycle for a while. Rumor has it he never even rode the thing, but it has been hanging in his mom’s garage ever since. I had no recollection about what brand it was or even the color, but Sunday morning we went by and picked it up. It’s a Centurion (predecessor to Diamondback), vintage approx. 1975, 10 speeds. It is pretty well preserved, and not too badly rusted. The tires are shot, as are the brake pads. I may replace those, give it a quick lube, and try it out on the trail. If it is anywhere close to fitting me, I may convert it to a fixed gear bike to do some training and playing on.

Spin Class: I did the spin thing tonight. Class was packed with all the new year’s resolution people, but I got a trainer and class was o.k. Music was so-so tonight, but I tuned it out and got a good workout. He actually played Celine Dion. In Spin class. What is the world coming to?

Advocacy: I had written to King County and the City of Auburn in an attempt to get some sort of fix put in for the Interurban Trail near my house. The trail floods with any moderate rainfall, forcing a detour through truck traffic. The King County Trail folks have inspected this section, and they believe that the flooding may be the result of a clogged culvert. Now the challenge is to see who has jurisdiction over the culvert, the City of Auburn or Union Pacific Railroad. The county folks have promised to track that down, however, so I’m hopeful we can get this problem fixed.

A whopping 44 miles, ytd.