Hale'iwa Metric Century Ride Recap

Wow - I am actually going to have time to write about an event the day it happened! This is how it should be, actually, while my thoughts on it are fresh. Normally, however, I do not have the luxury of the time to do it, but today I do! Read on...

For review, today I did a "metric century" bike ride. That means a 100 kilometer ride (about 62 miles), although my GPS told me when I was done that I had only gone about 60 miles, even though I rode the entire event course - honest! At any rate, it went much better than I could have hoped! No, I wasn't anywhere near the "peloton" that lead the way, I took it easy, particularly on the first half. What made it a successful ride for me was the strategy I used, one I need to get used to using, for it is the only way I will be able to complete the Half Ironman next month - going easy on the first half and then pushing a little bit on the second half. I ended up with a very desirable "negative split" - that is, riding the second half of the event faster than the first. When a rider is able to do that, it indicates a sound pacing strategy was used. My goal for the ride overall was to finish in 4 hours of riding or less (not counting stops at aid stations - I turn off the watch during those times), and I handily did that. I finished in 3 hours 34 minutes. Here's how it broke out:

I made three "pit stops" total, one approximately each 1/4 of the way through.

Lap 1 17.19 miles 1:07:00 15.4 mph avg
Lap 2 11.83 miles 0:44:27 16.0 mph avg
Lap 3 12.09 miles 0:42:22 17.1 mph avg
Lap 4 17.81 miles 1:00:13 17.7 mph avg

Laps 1 and 4 and laps 2 and 3 are roughly equivalent (covered the same pieces of road), so that's how you can compare each segment.

Some overall totals:

Average speed: 16.5 mph
Total calories : 3445 (not sure if I buy this - seems pretty high to me)
Average heart rate: 121 bpm
Max heart rate: 175 bpm
Total ascent: 1295 feet (includes all climbs over the entire course - it's a pretty flat course overall)

Just for fun, I looked up my stats for this ride in 2006. I shouldn't have - I finished in 3 hours flat and averaged 18.8 mph over the entire course. Ah well, today's event was for completion only, but it does let me know where I am at in comparison. I went on to run the same Half Ironman race in 2006 after doing this metric century ride, too.

All is not lost, though - I think today's ride was much more enjoyable than the 2006 version! There are several reasons for this. First, I had no flat tires today (lucky, really; there were lots of other folks with blowouts along the way). I had 2 flats on this course in 2006 - not a good day. Also, there was nothing but bright Hawaiian sunshine out there today, and fairly calm winds (normal tradewinds notwithstanding). In 2006, it rained off and on over the entire duration of the event. I wrote in my notes that it was a "dirty, wet ride." Today was neither. And since I wasn't "dodging raindrops" today, there was more opportunity to take in the beautiful scenery. If you like beaches, azure blue sea, surf, mountains, and blue sky, this is one event that has all that! All in all, I am glad I did the event today.

GJS

The Next Event

Tomorrow morning is the Haleiwa Metric Century Ride.  To tell the truth, I am not feeling the best about the event.  Normally, I could scoff at a 62-mile ride, but this spring, the longest ride I have been able to get in has been barely 30 miles.  I will be "doubling that ride up" tomorrow morning.  Ugh...and that bodes not so well for the Half Ironman in just over a month.  Prep simply has not been there.  Tomorrow may be a long day for me, foreshadowing to the Big Island next month.  I will be able to complete both events, that I am confident of, but the times are going to be way off.  This just in the way of expectation management...

 

This has not been a good month for me, training-wise.  I have not been traveling for work, but neither have I been able to get any workouts in during the workday in probably 4 weeks.  Grumpiness is the result.  Add to this a nasty chest cold over the past ~2 weeks that has allowed zero training at all (even on weekends) and you can probably get a feel for the "funk" I need to break out of - give me some exercise-induced endorphins!

 

Even if the time is crappy for tomorrow, I will post the results here.  Same for the Half Ironman next month.

 

GJS

No Marines slated for de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan

Associated Press April 22, 2008

No Marines slated for de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The United States has no immediate plans to send Marine guards to its de facto embassy in Taiwan, a U.S. official said.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey said the United States does not "intend to place Marines, at this point" at the American Institute in Taiwan.

Casey's comment in Washington on Monday followed the weekend publication in two Taiwanese newspapers of a State Department advertisement calling for contractors to build a facility to house Marines at the new AIT compound in Taipei. It is customary for the United States to put Marine guards in its embassies and consulates worldwide. Casey said the ad in the Taiwanese newspapers may have been confusing. "What is happening is there are discussions about having a new compound or new complex built to replace the existing AIT structure in Taipei," he said. "The notices that have gone out have included the broadest possible kinds of elements that might be included in there."

Since the United States switched its recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, there have been no Marine guards at its Taipei facility in keeping with the deliberately low American profile on Taiwan. Almost 60 years after Taiwan and China split amid civil war, the United States does not treat the island as an independent country. Instead, it acknowledges China's claim that Taiwan is part of Chinese territory, and calls on the two sides to reach a final agreement on Taiwan's status through peaceful means. The new U.S. compound in Taipei is a part of a large-scale State Department overseas construction program. The facility, to be built in the city's Neihu district, will replace an aging downtown compound.

***

Nothing follows.

GJS

Trading

Last night I took the final exam for my non-resident professional military education (PME) seminar course. That was the last piece of the first year (basically the first "half") or phase of the program. Interestingly, I also was able to score the Mandarin Chinese Rosetta Stone set of materials from my local library on the same day. So I finished my PME requirements, and now am able to start right in on learning Chinese!



I *should* be able to complete the second year of the PME program at Monterey or wherever we end up going for language training. It is in my best interest to finish it prior to entering the Olmsted program because, well, it's a required course for captains (someday soon I will be one), and in order to be promoted beyond the rank of captain, you must have completed it. With no inkling of where my follow-on assignment after Taiwan will be and whether or not they will offer the Expeditionary Warfare School non-resident seminar, plus not knowing what types of commitments away from home (i.e. deployments) will come with that posting, it is just best to knock it out in as short order as possible. Sure, adding that to learning Mandarin full-time will not make either one easier, but in my mind (not having begun learning Mandarin yet), both things involve being a student and learning, so to me they seem to be somewhat complimentary activities, not mutually exclusive ones.



Off to run - first run since last weekend's triathlon. Been trying to rest up and recover from the race (plus I was devoting all my spare time to preparing for last night's EWS exam). Now that those things have been accomplished, it's time to run again!



GJS

USS Sampson featured in All Hands magazine

A while back one of my brothers sent me a message indicating that, when completed, the new destroyer USS Sampson would be "...capable of fighting air, surface, and subsurface battles simultaneously." He went on to deadpan, "We should all be so lucky." Not to be outdone, witty brother #2 added "We would each need a couple more arms to be able to do all that at once." Indeed.

Last month the US Navy's All Hands magazine did a feature article on the newly-in-service Sampson. Check it out here (extract from the full magazine):

Read this doc on Scribd: USS Sampson 4.0

She is homeported in San Diego. Perhaps this Sampson will have a chance to visit that Sampson sometime in the future.

GJS

Lanikai Triathlon

The race went very well.  You can see the results here:

http://www.bocahawaii.com/LANIKAI08Overall.TXT

You will have to scroll down a bit to see my results; I came in 104th.  I was surprised with how well the swim went - I was out of the water in about 9 minutes (my posted swim time includes part of the transition from swim to run).  Part of this was a result of what I think was the inadvertent shortening of the course.  One of the buoys snapped off from its mooring while the athletes were in the water and it was pushed to shore by the current.  We just swam after it, resulting in what seemed to be a distinct "rounding off" of the final corner as we turned to head to shore. 

This event did not employ chip timing.  Certainly, this is a bit odd; it seems that just about every event nowadays does use that technology to give the most accurate timing and splits for each individual.  Even the small 5k I ran on base a couple weeks ago, with barely 100 competitors, had chip timing. 

I was not surprised that I had trouble maintaining a good speed / power output on the bike.  I simply haven't been doing enough cycling to have developed my cycling skills enough to maintain a high rate of speed over even a short course triathlon such as this one, with a bike portion barely 10 miles in length.  There was one monster of a hill at the halfway point, though!  That one hurt - but I passed probably 10 people on the way up it!

And then on the run, I was pleased to average a sub-8:00 per mile pace in a fatigued state, although I know that if I had a better running base built up at this point, I could have hammered this course.  It had a few rolling hills and ended with about a half-mile segment on the soft white sand of Kailua Beach.

All in all, not a bad day for a guy who hasn't "tri'd" since summer 2006!  This certainly bodes well for the Half Ironman race that I will run on the Big Island next month (that is, as long as I can keep some semblance of a training program going between now and then - we'll see what my work travel schedule ends up looking like).

GJS

Trying a Tri

This morning I will be running my first triathlon since mid-summer 2006. Wish me luck! It is a sprint distance race consisting of a 500m open water (ocean) swim, a 20k bike ride (approx. 12 mi), and topped off with a 5k (3.1 mi) run. I will post results and such once they are available.

GJS

Nagl to leave US Army

Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, noted counterinsurgency author and up-and-coming thinker, is set to retire from the service.  Looks like this has been on the street for a while (Washington Post article linked below is from January 2008); not sure why I only came across it now.  (I usually keep up with developments such as this fairly well between all the various publications and forums I try to keep current on.)  I don't know him personally but I am familiar with his work.  This is a tremendous loss; we (the US military) need more people like him, not less.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011503359.html

His latest op-ed in The New York Times (from last week) is here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/opinion/02nagl.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion

At least he is still planning to continue focusing on the same strategic security and counterinsurgency themes in his new think-tank job as he has in the past.

GJS

Haircut: Before, During and After

I recently received some reader comments to the effect of, "Your son is a hippy, get his hair cut." I guess the cute blonde-haired surfer boy look is not high on this individual's scale of acceptable hair styles! :-) Seriously, though, it was time for a haircut, so here are the photos you have been waiting for!

Some "before" pictures:

What a great "mane" of hair! Now, during...

And the final result...

GJS

Update on "The Charmed Life"

The title of this post in no way refers to any silly reality television show or half-baked Hollywood celebrity of the moment. Rather, it is a paraphrase of Barb's opinion on what type of life we (or perhaps more particularly, I) lead. When things like Olmsted happen, she says to me, "You live a charmed life, dear." More often than not, I have to agree! Things are going very well...

First, lets do an "Olmsted Update" - what is the latest news? I have been negotiating with my service as to where and when I will start / conduct Mandarin language training. It looks to me, at this point, like we're going to Monterey, California. Realistically, this location was the most likely one all along, but I was pushing to go to the Washington, D.C. area for language training, instead. The struggle is not over, but I am coming to terms with the likelihood that Monterey will be the place I learn Mandarin. It's not all that bad; I have heard nothing but great things about the location itself, about 2 hours south of San Francisco and adjacent to the famous Pebble Beach Golf Links (I'm not a golfer, but if you know the virtues of that famous course, that should tell you a little bit about the picturesque beauty of the area). I have already begun to look at what triathlons, marathons, and other races will be held in the area while we are there, and while it is too soon to sign up for any, it is never too soon to plan!

The course I am looking at in Monterey begins in early July 2008 and ends in late July 2009. That will be just in time for moving to Taiwan, getting set up, and starting graduate school in September 2009. So that's the big-picture timeline as of now. Standby for changes...

Let's talk 5k race results from last weekend: it's been a week, and I have still to see any results posted online (and believe me, I have been looking!), so if you checked out the link I said would take you to the results and found out it didn't take you to any, don't be alarmed - as far as I can tell, they haven't been posted yet. I'll just have to give you the "unofficial" results based on the time from my watch, and - oh yeah - the medal I brought home with me...the race went better than I ever could have hoped! I placed third in my age group and took home the corresponding "hardware" mentioned above. Granted, it's a fairly small race (maybe 100 - 150 participants), and my overall time, while not impressive to look at in and of itself (25:39 for a 5k - pretty slow! That's an 8:14 per mile pace), that doesn't take into account that the course was very "windy", snaking across several parts of the Kaneohe golf course on its way to and from the part that really slows down the overall pace and time, the almost 1/3 of the race that was on the soft sand of the beach! If you take out that part of the race, where I could only manage a pace ~8:30 per mile, for the rest of it I was well under 7:30 per mile! For a guy who hasn't raced at any distance since fall 2006 before deploying to the Philippines, I was overjoyed - all this, and no pain from my Achilles, before, during or after! It would seem, my friends, that I am back in business! Yes!

And now I've got my sights set on a couple multisport events: first, the Lanikai sprint distance triathlon next weekend, and a little bit further down the road, the Ironman 70.3 Hawaii on 31 May. The latter event will allow us to, as the saying goes, kill two birds with one stone - I wanted to run one last big race before we leave Hawaii, which looks like it will happen not long after the event, and also to get Barb and John over to the Big Island, where they have not been yet (I went for the same triathlon in 2006, just weeks after John was born. He was too young to travel at the time and Barb had no interest in traveling so soon after giving birth, thus my solo effort that time.). Once we make that trip, Barb and I will have been to four of the six principal Hawaiian islands, excluding only Lanai and Molokai. Maybe on our next rotation here we can hit both of those...coming back again for a third tour in Hawaii is not out of the question, and in fact, the more I think about it, I think it is quite possible due to the unique expertise and skills that I will acquire during my time as an Olmsted Scholar. But only time will tell...

********

OK, time to wrap this up - I wrote the preceding portion before my 2 hour bike ride this morning. I have been doing only the bare minimum for biking in preparation for my upcoming events (seems like finding time to fit in this most time-intensive of the three disciplines of triathlon is one of the hardest riddles to solve for me now - I usually can only get out for a single training ride each week, so I try to make it count), and today's ride is the longest one I have done since the layoff from training, etc. in late 2006 until recent days. I went just over 30 miles. Legs are definitely fatigued, as that I included a few pretty good climbs and tried to stay in the saddle for as much of them as I could. You see, in the 2006 Honu Half Ironman race, I discovered a couple things about my cycling. First, I was not prepared then for the volume of aero position riding that one needs to be able to do to find success at longer triathlon distances, such as the Half Ironman distance. Granted, I had only received my first set of aero bars something like a month before the race, a birthday present (thanks Barb!), so I didn't have much time to get used to them, and clearly I wasn't. I couldn't maintain power in the aero position for very long before having to move to another grip / position. Building further on that, I also discovered that I needed to be able to climb AND climb into a continuous headwind in the aero bars. I certainly wasn't good at that in 2006. But these are the things I am working on when I ride now so that when I am on the bike on the Big Island next month and I am going up the hill to Hawi on the North Shore (the location of the turn-around on the bike leg for the Half Ironman, and for the Hawaii Ironman World Championship race, too! The bike course shares many similarities between the two events.) and the wind is blowing in my face the whole way, like it was in 2006, I want to be able to climb in the aero position so I don't fatigue myself fighting the drag of the wind so much. That's all. I hope the strategy works.

I'll write more later if I have time - I hope that I have time! I still owe you pictures and video of John! (I know that's the real reason you check this page, and we aim to please!)

Interesting Reading

Here are a couple interesting links (for runners) I came across this morning.

http://www.kevinandnan.com/kevin/running/2008run2sun.html
http://www.kevinandnan.com/kevin/running/2008gar.html

This gentleman posted his training logs and race notes for a couple recent events here in Hawaii.