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

Photos from this weekend’s ride. I’ll get more details up later.

Headed out here shortly for the Food & Friends ride. I’ll be without ‘net or email, so will catch up with everyone later (will have the phone & text messaging). Have a great weekend, y’all.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who have helped me raise $2,195 (so far) for Food & Friends. I’ve now managed to exceed my fundraising goal thanks to these generous contributors:

Thom
Jerry
Joe
Greg
Richard
Roger
Lea
Kevin
BC
John
Daniel
Doug
Jon
Frank
Mom & Dad
Dave B
Michael

Thank you very much!!!

Practice swim with my newbies this morning and two local coaches. Headed out to Sandy Point early to get in the swim before it got too hot. We swam, off and on, for about an hour, practicing swimming in the swells and going around the buoys set out to mark off the swimming area. It was very helpful to get out there, and I’m glad we do this.

This was the first time I’d hauled out the wet suit since last year. I was a bit worried
about getting into it, since it had been a little over a year since I’d used it. It fit just fine, no worries there. Whew. It was warm out – the wet suit wasn’t strictly necessary (borderline water temps for using it), but I wanted the practice in it. In the water it was fine, it was standing around listening to the coach that was warm.

Got the drink bracket installed on the bike this afternoon. That definitely makes it a lot easier to mount the water bottle on the bike (much, much easier than the rubber bands – well worth the $10). I’m hopeful this’ll encourage me to drink more water while out riding.

Mostly recovered from the work week as ‘acting supervisor.’ It was relatively quiet, and I’m glad nothing big was needed. I think it cemented quite firmly that I’m not quite ready to be a supervisor. I’m a specialist, I do my job relatively well, and I’m not ready to start herding other cats. At least, though, we know I can do it if needed when my team leader needs to go out of town.

Off to a party with BC this afternoon, then another long ride tomorrow to try out the water bottle before next week. I should run at some point, too, but I suspect that’ll be on hold until after the Food & Friends ride.

Stretching, a shower, lots of food, a lie-down (not really a nap), more food, and I’m starting to feel human again. Four hours and about 20 minutes after I started I got home from today’s bike ride out the W&OD trail, about 62 miles. Went out to mile marker 24, which is somewhere in Loudon county near Sterling. Stopped briefly, stretched some, then turned around to head back.

The ride out was great. The trails were well marked, and I had no problems switching from the Mt. Vernon Trail to the Custis Trail to the W&OD. The way back, on the other hand, I never saw a marker to get back on the Custis, so I ended up riding the W&OD all the way down to Shirlington, getting a little lost as there are NO signs worth crap down there, then finally finding my way to the Four Mile Run trail and back to the Mt. Vernon and home.

Wore a sleeveless jersey to try and even out some of the sun on my shoulders. So far, so good.

Overall I liked the W&OD. There were a tad too many stops when you ran though areas like Vienna and Herndon, but there were also some good stretches where I was able to get down onto the aerobars and relieve pressure on my neck. Not too many kids out, though I had one heart-attack inducing moment when I thought one little girl was going to turn out into the trail right as I came up beside her. Thankfully her mother, running behind her, intervened. I suspect that’s where my max heart rate reading came from for the ride.

Have to get the center water bottle set up for this upcoming weekend’s ride – I didn’t have quite enough water with me, which was really annoying when I was lost in Shirlington and couldn’t find my way out. Basically this just involves trimming the straw down to a height where it won’t annoy the hell out of me, but I’ve not needed it to date, so haven’t hooked it up.

Probably do a repeat of this ride, only a bit further out. Pretty much ready for the Food & Friends ride next week, just doing some last minute testing.

Finally cooling off in here now that the thunderstorms are rolling through. I can’t really hear them over the dishwasher, though. It was a ‘clean the apartment and do laundry night’ for me, hence the dishwasher running. The dining table looks nicer without so much crap on it, as does my desk. Amazing what actually filing the stuff in the ‘to file’ pile will do for the place.

Now if I could just make a dent in the ‘to read’ pile.

Good bike ride this morning. I’m hoping the weather will be relatively nice so I can run in the morning. While I’ve been biking a lot more, and finally getting back to swimming, I’ve neglected my running over the past week, which is probably a contributor to the foul mood from yesterday (which was gone after a good night’s sleep and the ride this morning).

Popped by the bike shop to pick up supplies. Sadly their choices of Shot Bloks was very, very limited, so I only picked up a couple. I’ll have to pop back out somewhere else to pick up more. Still haven’t been able to try the margarita flavored ones, but I wasn’t too keen on the pina colada ones. They were okay, nowhere near as gross as vanilla clif shots were, but not a favorite. I prefer the black cherry or cran-razz flavors so far. Oh, and the bike shop was able to take my old bike tubes to recycle them. Yay! Better than dumping them in a landfill, for sure. Glad I remember to take them with me to work this morning in anticipation of the shopping trip.

Swim tomorrow, then maybe dinner in town with BC and some friends. Have to behave as I have a long ride on Saturday, around 4 hours or so.

To date I have avoided doing charity sporting events, but this year I have committed to ride in the 2007 TEAM Food & Friends cycling weekend, July 12-15th. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to do the century (100 mile) ride as part of the weekend; I’ve certainly been riding enough this year for it!

Food & Friends is a nonprofit organization that prepares, packages and delivers more than 3,000 meals a day, free of charge, to clients throughout the DC metropolitan area. One of the main reasons I signed up for this was that while Food & Friends began as a service to deliver meals to people with HIV/AIDS, and that’s still a central part of their mission, over the years they’ve been able to expand that service to include men, women and children who face a variety of illnesses such as breast and prostate cancer, and other life-challenging illnesses. That mission is critical to support providing three meals a day to more than 1,300 people, six days a week.

Please support my efforts to raise $1900 by making a tax-deductible donation today. Every penny raised goes directly to help the clients of Food & Friends.

So far I’ve raised $545 thanks to these generous contributors:

Thom
Jerry
Joe
Greg
Richard

Thank you very much!!!

I hope you will also contribute. If you do donate, please let me know, since I won’t necessarily know the real names of folks who read this.

So, got a call today that the other dresser had arrived at the store. They were able to deliver it this evening, but not to assemble it but could come back to assemble it Saturday. Ha. No, thanks, just deliver it and I’ll assemble it. And you know, it was really easy to assemble, especially if you’ve ever put anything together by Ikea. Basic screws with those little turn-tighteners all over, plus putting on the rails for the drawers. The drawers themselves were fully assembled in their respective boxes, meaning only the frame had to be put together. Even with just one person, it was a snap.

Of course it helps that I have a decent electric screwdriver/drill, too.

So now all my clothes are put away. Huzzah. Still need to figure out the exact arrangement of the stuff in there, but that’s not a big deal. I’m just glad to have both pieces in and my clean clothes put away.

Tomorrow I pop up to my YWCA to (I hope) finalize the arrangements to join the Masters’ Swimming program there. Depends on whether I find the acquatics director or not. Might have to pop up there during the day, perhaps at lunch, in order to catch him in.

Get to see the crush on Saturday. I suppose I can give him initials now, since this seems to be here for the nonce. Still crushing. Still all silly. Still loving it. So we’ll call him BC. Really looking forward to more time with him. We just seem to fit well together. Not finishing one another’s sentences, and enough differences to keep things interesting, but enough commonalities (it so helps that he’s also a runner) to get along really well.

Hazy morning in DC. Got up for my bike ride, headed out. Had a ton of people out this morning, most of whom were in the ‘fast’ pace group. I had volunteered to lead the slower pace group, so off we went. The ride itself was going great until we got around to do a last short loop of the park. As we entered the one-way section we discovered quickly that the parks service had just turned on the sprinkler system. It’s a big pipe thing they’ve only recently set up, which pipes water in from the Potomac and sprays it over the cherry trees and grass. I thought they were done with it, as it was partially disassembled this weekend, but they’ve hooked it all back up. So for a couple minutes we dodged streams (where we could) and did a lot of laughing as we rode through the sprinklers. Thankfully, while they were getting the back side set up they hadn’t started pumping yet, so we got to dry off a little on the way back up.

At least that answered the question as to whether or not to do a 2nd short loop at the end.

Got up, no exercise planned for the morning, so I got down to the dry cleaners, picked up shirts, dropped off two pair of pants to get hemmed (finally hemming the Nasty Pig jeans I got at MAL), came back, made coffee, went down to the office to check some folders for the cult co-op, then up to get ready to head to work.

Work was work. No biggie.

Swam after work. Was trying to concentrate on relaxing in the water, paying attention to form, but not speed. That was going well until about half to two-thirds of the way through the swim when some guy did a cannonball into the lane beside me. Thankfully I was resting at the edge, but that was a bit of a shock. Most folks are polite and just slip into the end of the pool. He then proceeded to see if he could single-handedly recreate water conditions on the Chesapeake Bay. During a wind storm. Not the most graceful swimmer I’ve ever seen. I kept wanting to point out that you’re supposed to slip your hand into the water, not slap the top of the pool on your way in, but instead tried to continue concentrating on the zen feeling. It mostly worked, despite slappy in the next lane. Overall a good swim.

Still nicely burnt from this weekend’s biking and running. Both Saturday and Sunday I got started late, so was out in way more sun than I usually am, with the usual results. It’s cute – I have a classic farmer’s tan half-way down the upper arm from the bike ride, then a separate set of lines on the shoulders where I wore a tank-style shirt to run on Sunday. Not too bad, save for carrying the bike bag to work and the gym today. Ouch.
A brief bit of laundry tonight, and getting stuff ready for the ride tomorrow.

The crush is still, well, just awesome. We’re both still all googly-eyed and silly and all of that and it’s quite fun. We just seem to fit well together. I think I’ve seen more movies in the theater in the past couple months now than I’ve seen that way in years.
Tomorrow it’s off to Dupont for the usual hair cut, then up to Adams Morgan to put bikes together with the club. Some folks are running a kids’ triathlon camp this summer for DC Parks and Rec and we got a bunch of bikes donated for it, so we’re getting together to assemble the bikes for the kids. Should be fun.