I've been a fan of Halloween for a while. A few years ago I decided that it's maybe my favorite major holiday. Which is saying a lot because, well, I don't think much about holidays. Anyway, I've always liked Halloween because it's got a better holiday spirit than the the holidays that focus primarily on people buying stuff all day long. Halloween is purely about having fun. You get to dress up, you get to go to parties, you get to eat candy. I mean, really,...

Schedule-wise, this week was a carbon copy of last week. Same workouts, same durations. I've had a little concern about my intensity levels. I've been reading more out of Going Long, along with this timely post from Gordo on his blog. Gordo has become the philosopher-king of long-course triathlon and is always interesting to read but passages like these got me thinking: "You need to trust this protocol as you will be able to easily exceed. I'm...

My phone's been ringing off the hook for the last week. Wow, have I gotten popular all of a sudden! No, not quite. You pick up the phone and hear: "Hi, I'm Emerson Bigguns and I'm running for State Senate. I think education is important and I love puppies..." Okay, I suppose if I'm going to get phone solicitations, recordings are nice since I don't feel any guilt for hanging up on them. ...

Powerful words from Kevin Tillman.

This was a harder week. My volume was a bit higher (not sure if it it was supposed to be), and work has be ridiculous for for about 2 1/2 weeks. That should be settled down now, which helps. One of the things I've been focusing on has been getting more sleep, which shortens the day. Adding a bunch of extra time in the office makes that even worse. Every day, except for Saturdays, has looked about like this: Wake up: 6:30-7 ...

One more week down. Had a great swim workout today. I had 2000y on the schedule, broken up as 6x300y with every other being a kick set (with fins). The kick sets sucked but I made it through them (300 yards is a long way to kick). What was cool was the swim sets. I did my 3rd 300 in 4:40 which is about 25 seconds better than I've ever clocked before. I didn't really intend it to be that fast, but after my...

The Floyd Landis saga continues. Today they posted all of the case details and documents, as well as a overview of their defense on FloydLandis.com. The opening line reads... "Los Angeles, October 12, 2006 – Floyd Landis, 2006 Tour de France winner, has made public his case documents that use fact-based science to support his innocence in the alleged positive doping test of July 20, 2006. " ...

Alright, one week completed. I got set up with a coach and I think it's going to work out well. Yesterday was my first day working off of his plan. It's really easy to forget how this stuff adds up. I was going to ride over to University Zoka for the team ride (it's a little more than an hour over there). My plan only called for 90 minutes on the bike, so that extra hour was a lot. Plus...

So I've technically officially started my training. I'm going to try to keep a running tally of training hours on here, we'll see how it goes. Still haven't closed on a coach, hopefully later this week. I've also got a TODO to fix this website so that it works with blog readers properly (I think the RSS isn't quite right). Anyway, last year I spent lots of time on the Computrainer. This winter holds as least as much of that time,...

Interesting article about humans, evolution, and running. Bascially the article goes through the evidence that humans are designed to be long distance runners, based on two major pieces of evidence: 1) We've got all these structures that have nothing to do with walking, like big tendons, big knees, and, uh, big booo-tay. 2) We don't have body hair and we do have sweat glands, which makes us efficient at dissipating heat....

Back from Interbike (more later on that...) But yesterday, I did some volunteer time at Starcrossed 2006. Those of us that weren't racing signed up to help put on the event since Zoka Coffee was one of the title sponsors. Anyway, Starcrossed is a big Cyclocross race here in Redmond. Cyclocross (CX) is kind of a mix between road bike racing and mountain bike racing. Basically you have road-like bikes wiht knobby tires and cantelevered brakes. You go around a circuit that has obstacles...