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...

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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!)