Posts Tagged biking
50 miles!
As of today’s swim, I have now swum 50 miles (50.77, actually) since I started with the Master Swim program at the beginning of August.
I really need to enter some triathlons next year. I did a few mini-triathlons a few years ago, but have only really done biking events for the last few years. Of course, I’ll need to get more serious about my running if I plan to do more triathlons.
Speaking of biking, Marci and I did the Wurst Ride this past weekend:
For this ride, we usually have my parents bring our kids down to Wurst Fest after the ride and get a ride back to the start with them. This year, however, we had other plans for the evening so we needed an alternate way back to the truck. I eventually realized that the short portion of the ride that we were doing was short enough that riding back to the truck was only a small stretch for me and I decided to do it. Marci rode back part of the way and I picked her up at the last/first rest stop. It worked out well.
I did another ride back at the beginning of October with Travis and his son:
Now it’s becoming winter, so nothing more ’til spring, probably.
Biking: LBJ 100 + Solo
Last Saturday my wife, a friend and I participated in our first organized ride of the year, the LBJ 100. We did the 30 mile route as we haven’t trained yet this year but felt we could manage that distance. It was a very leisurely ride — my average speed was 12.3 mph, but I took some long breaks as well pushing the total time over three hours.
Yesterday, I had some spare time after work before picking up the girls from gymnastics so I decided I could squeeze in a quick 90-minute ride. I pushed much harder than on the organized ride and got my average speed up to 14.6 mph with only a few minutes of waiting at lights. There was a pretty strong wind which I first rode into and then had at my back (getting my top speed up to 34.3 mph on a slight downhill).
I’m hoping to do another practice ride tomorrow morning, but it looks like the weather may have other plans.
Wurst Ride and Wurstfest
Last Saturday Marci, Travis and I participated in the Wurst Ride, a 100K ride from south Austin to New Braunfels. New Braunfels is the location of the annual Oktoberfest celebration, Wurstfest. For Marci and me, this was the third consecutive year to participate in this ride and it is one of my favorites.
Last year there was a bit of a headwind, but this year the weather was great, including some nice cloud cover for the first couple of hours. We are currently experiencing an extended period of perfect weather in Austin. It happens most years in both spring and fall, but varies greatly in length. This fall’s nice weather has been wonderful and I hope it continues for a few weeks, at least.
The cost of the Wurst Ride includes tickets to Wurstfest, so we headed there after enjoying the post ride amenities (beer and brauts). Additionally, my parents had driven down, with my kids and grandmother, to join us at Wurstfest and to provide transportation home. We didn’t stay as late as we have some years, but the kids still got in plenty of carnival rides.
Now, for the first time in months, I don’t have an organized bike ride to anticipate. I guess I should see about finding one….
Flashback Friday: Action, No Action
Posted by Ren in Flashback Friday on November 6, 2009
Because I’m having trouble coming up with a topic, and in honor of the fact that we’re doing the Wurst Ride again tomorrow (third year in a row!), here’s my post from after the ride last year. Again this year we’ve been pretty bad about training for it, though at least we managed a ride last weekend. Marci in particular hasn’t been riding much, so she’s going to do the 42K route again this year, though she’s not accompanying anyone and so is likely going to wait for us to get to her starting point.
As I mentioned previously, this weekend I participated in the Wurst Ride, a 100 kilometer bike ride from Austin to Wurst Fest in New Braunfels. I did this ride last year as well, and I must say that it was more difficult this year. I attribute this primarily to the fact that I hadn’t ridden at all since the Outlaw Trail three weeks prior, though I think the wind may have been less favorable this year as well.
Marci was originally going to do the full 100K with us (as she did last year, which may be her longest ride), but a friend of ours decided to join us for her first bike ride so Marci did the 42K route with her instead. After the ride, my mother brought our kids down and we hung out at Wurst Fest for several hours, including spending some time with some friends that we hadn’t seen in quite some time. Lots of food, lots of people, lots of fun.
Not surprisingly, our Sunday was spent sleeping and veg’ing in front of the TV. I really need to make a better effort of at least kicking my kids outside for a while even if I’m not joining them. The weather was so nice this weekend that I’m now feeling guilty that we didn’t take advantage of it better on Sunday.
Biking to Fredericksburg – Video
I finally got around to putting together the video I took during last month’s bike ride to Fredericksburg. Editing it finally pushed me past what I could do with iMovie ’08. ’09 might have done the trick, but I already had iMovie HD ’06 and knew from others’ comments that it might do the trick. It did.
3rd Annual Friends Bed-n-Brew Bike Ride
This past weekend was our annual bike ride from Austin to Fredericksburg. You can read last year’s post for a (very) little background. This year, I knew going in that I was unlikely to ride the entire distance. We’ve been pretty lax in our training and I’ve only done a max of about 20 miles on any given day leading up to this event. After about 35 miles of cycling, I was ready to stop, but it took a another mile to meet up with our truck.
After riding in the truck for a bit more than 21 miles, I decided to get back on my bike and ride the last 12 miles or so into Fredericksburg. In retrospect, I think I took a bit too long of a break as I wasn’t as tired as I really should’ve been at the end. Also, as can be seen from the sudden jump in the elevation chart below, I picked a good time to ride in the truck, saving me 405 feet of net uphill riding.
Austin-to-Fredericksburg, first 32 and last 12 miles
Overall, I think we finished in about 6.5 hours, a half hour quicker than last year.
After we arrived, we spent a nice, relaxing afternoon and evening resting and eating, went to bed fairly early and then met for breakfast at 8am before packing up and driving home. A good time all around, though we certainly missed the one couple from last year that couldn’t make it this year.
Garmin 405: Running Again
I bought a Garmin Forerunner 405 today, pretty much on a whim. Well, not completely on a whim as I had commented about it over at ilaxSTUDIO.com a whole four days ago. I had originally intended to get the 405CX, but the 405, with heart rate monitor, was on sale such that instead of the CX only costing an extra $20, it was an extra $100. I couldn’t pass up the sale price, particularly since there’s so little difference between the two models.
One of the main features that led me to purchasing this despite the fact that the Forerunner 201 I already have still works fine is the integration with Garmin Connect (plus the fact that my 201 doesn’t work with my Mac). I’ve added a widget to my blog that shows my last five activities and provides a link to the Garmin Connect page for the activity. On this page you can see graphs and other data from the activity.
Naturally, I had to take the new device out for a spin, so I want for a rare evening run. You can see the details of it here.
Now that I have a new toy, I’m sure I’ll be running a lot more. In addition, we’ve planned this year’s Fredericksburg bike ride for early next month, so we’re going to ramp up our bike riding over the next several weeks. These things should help me with the second half of my weight loss goal (a ticker of my progress is another recently added widget on my blog).
Practicing Practice
I’ve never been good at practicing. Anything. Not only do I hate practicing, it never seems to help me. Now, I admit that I’ve probably always expected immediate results, which I know is unrealistic. But that’s too bad.
There is one exception to this, and that is if I can practice by actually participating in the activity. I have no issue with this at all. In fact, I can sometimes even manage to practice alone by competing against myself, if possible. But I know that this is simply not the same as routine practice, such as specific skill drills.
Pool
As I’ve apparently only rarely mentioned, I participate in a pool league once a week. We play both 8-ball and 9-ball and I’m a fairly decent player. Even though I have a pool table at my house, I never practice. It used to be that I would at least play some 9-ball by myself, but that was mostly a waste of time as I wouldn’t really focus. I certainly would never do any of the drills that are often suggested.
Golf
I hate the driving range. Hate. Hate. Hate. Practicing chips and putts is not quite so bad, but I’d rather just play a few holes. Or 18. Though the obvious decline in my game over the last several years argues that this “improve through play” system is no longer working for me.
Photography
OK, I guess I technically practice photography in as much as I often just take pictures of random things to experiment with techniques and settings. However, even then I’m always looking for interesting subjects for my photo blog. Certainly if I’m going to be taken some portraits I try to take some test shots before hand. I suppose this comes as close to practice as anything I do. Perhaps this is just an indication that I take photography more seriously than my other endeavors?
Running/Biking
While I do make sure to log a reasonable amount of time in these activities before a scheduled event, it’s more about simply participating in the activity than about training for the event.
Racquetball
I’m not even sure how I would go about practicing racquetball. I would like to play twice a week instead of my current once a week, though.
Bridge
I haven’t really played bridge since we moved back to Austin over ten years ago. I miss it. This is something I actually did practice, though practicing was usually in the form of casual play. But sometimes I would create contrived hands to practice bidding, with my more experienced partner critiquing my choices.
Of course, this is last example is mental practice rather than physical practice, which makes it distinctly different from the other examples (except photography, perhaps). That naturally brings up the parallel of studying in school as a form of practice. And that was another thing I generally avoided. It worked out fine, and I don’t certainly have no regrets with my current status in life, but I do occasionally wonder what might have happened had I had the wherewithal to really apply myself. Perhaps that’s a topic for another time.
Diet Progress
It’s been about four weeks since I blogged about my Fast Food Diet, and while I’ve done a pretty good job following it most of the time, I certainly didn’t during the cruise.
In the week from the day of that post (which was not actually the beginning of the diet, but that’s OK) to my last weigh-in before the cruise I lost a couple of pounds. But, of course, I was up about five pounds over the week of the cruise. Since then, I’ve managed to lose about six-and-a-half pounds. So I’m only down four pounds in four weeks.
Given that I haven’t used the Wii Fit since before the cruise, haven’t run at all in months, and have hardly biked this year, I feel like I’m doing pretty well. Plus, I’m actually down about ten pounds since Mardi Gras, which was pretty much my high point.
I really need to get back into the groove of exercising. Maybe tomorrow. Or Monday. Or….
Fast Food Diet
OK, two ostensibly weight-loss related posts in a row. But the previous one was just humor whereas this one is at least a bit serious. About five years ago, a friend and I lost a good amount of weight by, for the most part, simply tracking the calories that we ate. Obviously, we had to actually reduce the calories as well, but tracking them made that very easy. Notably, I also switched from regular to diet soda at that time. I went from a high of maybe as high as 240 down to about 170.
The thing about tracking calories is that it makes you want to eat meals where you know what the calories are. Conveniently, almost all fast food chains publish the caloric content of their foods. Therefore, I found that I would actually eat more fast food rather than less while on this diet. Of course, in many cases this was in lieu of equally unhealthy comfort food from other, non-fast-food chains like Chili’s (I love Chili’s).
Well, in the intervening five years I had slowly gained about 25 pounds back (which isn’t too bad, I think), and I’ve decided it’s time to get serious again. I used to track calories with a couple of different programs for Palm, but not that I’ve moved to the iPhone I needed a new program. I’ve settled on the free app, Lose It!.
The database doesn’t seem quite as extensive as I’d like, but the interface is pretty nice. I’ve created custom foods and recipes (collections of foods) and you can reuse previous meals. One feature I’d like would be to create hierarchies of custom foods — this was something that I wanted in the Palm apps as well.
One big difference between now and then is that now I am addicted to breakfast tacos. Thus, instead of a breakfast of < 200 calories, I end up with a breakfast of 300-500 calories. I’ve considered giving this up, but it’s one of the highlights of my day so I’ve decided to make sacrifices elsewhere. Sometimes, like yesterday, that ends up being that I skip dinner and go to bed hungry. Actually, going to bed a bit hungry was a hallmark of my diet the previous time and is usually a good indicator that I’m going to weigh less the next day.
One thing that using calorie tracking as a diet definitely drives home is that the reason to exercise is less directly about losing weight and much more about allowing you to eat more. 
Which reminds me, I really need to start riding my bike to work again. Tomorrow should be a good day for that, I think. Oops, I have an 8am meeting, so perhaps not….
I wonder what’s for lunch today. Whataburger? Jack-in-the-Box? Or maybe it’s a Chili’s day after all. Breakfast was 428 calories out of my 1554 budget for today, so I need to try to keep lunch fairly small.
My GPS Logs- Couch to 10K, Week 2, Day 1 October 11, 2011
- Couch to 10K, Week 1, Day 2 October 6, 2011
- Couch to 10K, Week 1, Day 1 October 4, 2011
- Couch to 10K, Week 3, Day 2 September 29, 2011
- Couch to 10K, Week 3, Day 1 September 27, 2011
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