Of Moose And Men
The Best Laid Plans Of Both Often Go Astray

So, I fagged out this morning and bought the super-duper-mega-deluxe-expensive version of Our Lady Of Pop’s latest collection of music I mostly already own. I must say, I’m kinda enjoying having the vids on ye olde AppleTV thingey (since the TV is the best set of speakers in the apartment, this is a good thing).

(oh, and the champagne flutes she uses in the Music video? That’s my crystal pattern)

I’m also suddenly feeling the urge to knit a sweater. I think I must be getting feverish from the head cold. So instead tonight I’m going to work on the long-neglected sock I’m supposed to be knitting. I have to admit, I’m a little afraid of knitting a sweater. I’m not a fan of wearing them, and I’d be trying to make this to be at least partially fitted (as opposed to looking like a big lumpy sack cloth, like many sweaters do), with a really pretty pattern, but man, that’s a lot of yarn to buy and work with. I’m hoping the feeling will pass, but I suspect it won’t. Hmph.

I did get up and run this morning, so am obviously feeling better than I was this weekend. May bike in the morning if I wake up for it. It’s perfect running weather out there now – 50s in the morning. Not so perfect biking weather, but it’ll do. Better than using the trainer, which I’m not ready to do yet.

(okay, watching older Madonna vids, it’s sooooo obvious that she got serious dance training over the years, because the newer ones are so muh more technically competent than her early ones – I mean, watching Lucky Star makes me feel kinda embarrassed for her it’s so amateurish)

Managed to get through the last day of the fiscal year without major drama, mainly because I completely ignored one of our program offices. They can’t manage their own field offices, and I refused to play referee today. Made the day go much better than it might have otherwise. Of course, they’re trying to drag me in tomorrow, but I think I’m going to ask my management to intervene, both with the program people and with the field personnel who are a piecemealing their objections to what we’ve (HQ) told them to do. Tomorrow will be another day, and another year, and another set of messes. Gotta love it.

One more day left in the fiscal year. Thank heavens. With the impending doom coming (not, though it seems like impending doom from their attitudes), our program offices are increasingly nuts. And we’re pushing back just as hard. See, this is where attorney arrogance comes from – dealing with clients who insist on doing things which are, to legal minds, incredibly stupid.

Ugh.

The head cold stuck around through the weekend and my grandparents’ 70th wedding anniversary party. It’s still here, not quite going away yet. I suspect the driving Saturday and Monday and the resultant dehydration didn’t help any. It was great to see lots of family, cousins I haven’t seen in years, but was also good to get back to my routine today. I’ve been trying to look at my eating habits, and I counted it as a net gain that I didn’t gain any weight while eating out with the parents. Because eating this weekend was a mess, including far too much cake.

Still having fun flirting with Mike. This cold better be well done and gone by the time I get up there, as this is not how I would like to spend the limited time I get with him, with a sore throat and a drippy nose. In the meantime, I need to go shopping this weekend for more clothes before I head up (and in general).

And now I’m babbling, so it’s time for me to crash.

Ah, the end of the fiscal year, when otherwise reasonable adults turn into rabid nutcases regarding money.

I got a lot of cursing out of my system on the walk to work. Mainly stuff around the lines of, “I can’t get your fucking work done if you keep fucking well summoning me to useless fucking meetings that waste my fucking time.” It was very therapeutic. And much better than yelling at the clients, if perhaps a bit less satisfying.

Needless to say, I still got dragged to meetings today. Wretches.

Otherwise things skate along. This too shall pass in time. Though I think I’m going to limit our program offices to one impossible legal task at a time. One of them has three going at the moment, and that’s just too damned many. One is actually too many, but three is just out of this world. And leads to more cursing on my part, which I’m sure isn’t good for my blood pressure.

Well, I made it through the triathlon season. I think this is the first time in my five years of doing tris that I’ve done all the races I was signed up for, and didn’t get a major (or minor) injury. No broken wrist, no broken ankle, no sprains, no plantar fasciitis, none of the usual maladies. Not bad.

The last race, the Nation’s Triathlon, which I haven’t written up, was my fastest to date – 3:17:21, or about 15 minutes faster than my previous fastest Olympic distance race. I attribute most of that to the bike. This was a relatively flat course compared to the other races I’ve done, and it showed. However, that said, while the swim went really well at North East (in that I swam the whole thing), I managed to swim, bike, AND run the entire distance with no pauses for rest, which I have to say I’m particularly tickled about. I’ve always had to take walking breaks on the run, and it was soooo nice not having that happen this time. Getting there, albeit slowly.

It does bode well for a good season next year, with a bit more thought going into preparation now. As I mentioned last month, I’m signed up for three races, an Olympic, a Half and a full IM, and I’m starting to do some off-season stuff to help get going for next year, planning out the general tone of workouts, getting in some yoga, etc. I want this next year to work, racing-wise, and to do well at the IM.

In other news™, I find myself smitten. A friend I’ve known very casually online popped down to DC from Boston over Labor Day weekend, and let me know he was coming in. We planned and then met up for bear happy hour at Motley on Friday night, and well, I finally slept in my own bed again Monday night after putting him on a train back to BWI to fly home. To say that we hit it off well would be an understatement. I’ve very much been enjoying chatting with him, flirting via SMS, etc. Mike’s a good guy, and I look forward to getting to know him better. Longer readers will know that I rarely travel on my own (when not for races), so the fact that I have plane tickets to Boston next month should be a sign of how this is going. We know it’ll be a challenge living in two very different cities, but since when have I done anything normally? And I think he’s worth it.

The new gay.com looks like a Smurf threw up on it. And, to top it off, it’s literally headache-inducing due to the bad conflict between the colors. Looks like they reduced the size of the font, too. Dreadful choices all around.

Well, after trying this once before in 2008, and massively failing owing to plantar fasciitis and a spectacular break up, I’ve signed up for another Ironman race, this time in Louisville, Kentucky. On August 29, 2010, at 7:00 am sharp I’ll hit the Ohio river and hopefully sometime before midnight I’ll finish.

Still a little bit freaked out this evening, much as I was when I first signed up for Arizona. I know I can put in the work, and frankly after the injury I think I’m better able to focus on what I need to do to get through this. I’m signed up for one other race next year at the moment, the Eagleman 70.3 (that’s a half-Ironman), and I’m hoping to get into the Columbia triathlon for the third year in a row (registration opens Tuesday). That’ll be it for tris, and I might through in a road race or two as well. I haven’t sketched out the year’s full plan as yet, because I want to get through my last race in two weeks, the Nation’s Triathlon, first. Then I’ll fill in the gaps and set things in motion.

I’ll get through this one.

I should do brick workouts more often, that was good practice.

Biked about 25.5 miles, then ran 6.5, with a dismal eleven and a half minute transition (in my defense I had to catch the elevator upstairs and completely changed clothes, but still). Perfect morning for it, started just before 8, was done right before 11. Garmin estimates I burned about 2,700 calories and I believe it at the moment! Trying to snarf an egg and cheese sandwich (homemade, not fast food). Body’s saying while I may have consumed some sweet stuff on the bike & run, now it needs salt, and lots of it.

Bike seemed to be quite happy that I cleaned the chain yesterday. Only took me how many years of owning the thing? Oy. Better late than never, but boy did it need it. Next, the mountain bike chain. Time to get the bike a full check out after the next race, I think the tires may need to be replaced soon, they’re looking a little cracked.

In the meantime, I think it may be time to get out and do some errands.

As sometimes happens, I reached clutter saturation this week, so have been spending the day throwing stuff out and putting things away. It’s amazing how much junk accumulates.

Decided to just toss all the various back issues of magazines. I’m never going to read them, and I’ve been letting the various subscriptions lapse as it is, so I just need to get rid of this extra paper. I’m also thinking of finally dumping my subscription to the Sunday newspaper. I sometimes do read it, but more frequently than not it just sits until I put it in recycling. I feel kinda bad about it, I grew up with newspapers, delivered them for four years in high school, but it’s just not the way to get news any more.

New sock is going well. It’s a shame there’s not a bar in town where I could order a beer and flop down in a comfy chair to knit. LOL There’s only but so much coffee one can drink, or knitting one can do on Metro.

So, brief notes on the course:

Great swim conditions – flat, no waves. Too warm (85.4) for wetsuits, and no one in recent memory could remember ever being able to use one there. Buoys well placed to measure progress.

Bike was challenging, but not overwhelming – this wasn’t Columbia. Still hilly, but not bad.

Run was hot, hot, hot. Rolling hills, blazing sun with no shade, but plenty of aid stations. A shame they can’t move us across the road to run on the shady side of the street.

Personal notes:

Getting there early was sooooo worth it. Got parked, got set up early, got time to go to the port-a-johns a couple of times. So worth the earlier wake up for the lack of race stress. And in general, I wasn’t as stressed about this race this time. As I started to get some pre-race jitters Saturday, I looked in and said to myself, “You know, you’ve been doing this for 5 years now, you know what you’re doing, you’re going to be fine.”

Best swim ever. Well, aside from major, major chafing. And overdoing it, heart-rate wise. That said, I got my groove relatively early, with very little in the way of stopping to do side or breast stroke, and just powered through. Seeing those buoys slip by at a regular clip was nice. About halfway through I realized I had forgotten to put body glide on my arm and armpit, as I normally do for a pool swim, because the right arm area just got chafed to hell. I did a practice swim beforehand (a first for me), which helped with the comfort level. On the practice I was able to do bilateral breathing. On the real swim I ended up breathing just on my right side to keep my face out of the sun – the reason the right arm is chafed more than the left. I also pushed a bit too hard, because I was feeling pretty good, until I got out of the swim and realized I’d pushed my heart rate too high. Walked rather than ran the distance from the water to transition.

Started the bike with a seized up calf. When I went to mount up my left calf just screamed at me. Came back down (off to the side so I wasn’t in the way) and let it settle down before trying again. Did get back up on, and did ride pretty well, though I used some of the downhills to stretch out both calves, and spent a lot of time worrying if I was going to be able to run at all. Need to work on uphills – I crawl uphill, then fly downhill. Muscular endurance? Will have to check that out. Got tired of flying past people on downhills and flat only to get passed like I was standing still on the uphills. Also, they seemed to like Busch Lite out there because there were a lot of cans of it all over the less populated parts of the bike course (these are the things you notice while trying not to pay attention to how slow you’re going uphill).

Did manage to run – some bouncing up and down in transition after I switched shoes showed that it was going to be okay, so I zipped out on it. The course, as I noted above, was very, very hot. All in the sun (except the immediate start and finish). The aid stations were good (though I’m still glad I carry my own water bottle so I can sip at my own pace), and volunteers were fantastic. I got a cold washcloth early and put that on my neck, recharging it in the ice pools where drinking water was stored as I was able. I think that’s the only reason my neck isn’t as red as my shoulders (which aren’t bad, just a little red – and I did start with sunscreen on, but didn’t reapply in transition). Felt fantastic to have it on there, and to get more cool water on it. Walked most of the course because of the heat, came in running the last bit.

Total time: 3:40:17. Not my fastest (Columbia 2008), nor my slowest (Mooseman 2006). Did learn from the experience, and had a fun time challenging myself, which is why I do these things after all.

I knew that CVS sold marketing data on you, but this is the first time I’ve gotten a freebie without having to do more than walk in the store and buy something using their discount information tracking card:

Weird.