Yesterday, I was out on a recovery ride and had an odd experience.
At around ten till five, I was at the top of the high bridge in Saint Paul. I rode down the bridge with a furious wind coming the other way at a speed of around 14 MPH and actually shifted down at about the half way point.
I suppose I should be glad that I could keep the rubber on the road rather then taking a flying leap into the river below.
I am attempting to set some expectations for the race this weekend. I
have not done this recently because it scares the crap out of me. 
My expectations for this race are not really all that high, but
I suppose we have to have something to shoot for.
I have looked at the results from last year and done a little calculating
based on results at Pigman sprint and Minneman sprint. Here are some
pace goals that seem reasonable: roughly 2:15 / 100m in the swim, roughly
19.5 MPH on the bike, and roughly 7:30 minutes/mile run. Here are the
calculated time goals:
| Swim (1.5K) | T1 | Bike (40K) | T2 | Run (10K) | Flub time | Total |
| 33:45 | 2:30 | 1:16:30 | 1:30 | 46:30 | 5:00 | 2:45:45 |
I’m not sure what I’ll do if the event is not wetsuit legal. I’ve been swimming
much more comfortable in open water lately, but I’m not sure that I can handle
my longest open water swim ever without it. More to the point,
I don’t want to have to try 1.5K without it. *sigh* I’ll probably wear
it regardless.
Well, that’s the plan such as it is. I have high comfort expectations for the swim
and low performance expectations for everything else.
Tags: Goals, Lifetime, Olympic Distance, Triathlon
The New York Road Runners sent me the official news the other day:
Dear …,
Thank you for applying to the ING New York City Marathon 2008. We’re sorry to inform you that…
The email goes on to politely say that I should contact various charitable organizations who — for a few thousand dollars — would be glad to get me into the race. *sigh*
Unfortunately, this throws a monkey wrench into the fall marathon plans. Marine Corps is already closed which leaves some other smaller events as options. I believe there are events in Philadelphia and Baltimore in there someplace, and I’ve heard rumors that there may be something in Seattle as well. Looks like there are also events in Monterey and Folsom/Sacramento California in the November/December time frame which may be possibilities.
I’ll have to figure something out soon.
Tags: Lottery, Marathon, New York, Registration
Over here I expressed some intentions. Now for the reality:
At this point, I’m two to the good, with three extra events (there will probably be others), and one missed goal. I suppose that’s not horrible. I would feel a little more confidence if I had better fitness. The Pigman sprint is now only 13 days away. I haven’t been in the pool for over a week; have yet to get into actual lake water; have ridden the bike some but nothing that would resemble riding fast; and my run training is merely decent bordering on below average. All of those items are not a recipe for a PR, but I’m going to give it the old college try.
Tags: Racing, Report Card, Training
The Minnesota Triathlon Club is sponsoring a “My First Tri” clinic at the Midtown YWCA on Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Here are the details from the email announcement:
It’s finally time for the 2008 version of the MN TriClub’s fabulously famous clinic; “Your First Tri”. This clinic is led by fellow TriClub member Duey Carlson, and is an annual favorite. Duey is an experienced age-group triathlete who has completed many tri’s from “mini’s” to Ironman. Although the clinic is held in a lecture format (so no need for workout clothes), the setting is highly informal and greatly benefits from lots and lots of your questions! Duey will bring along all of his tri gear, so when he is explaining something he can show it to you as well. You’ll get to see and touch everything and ask all the questions you want (remember: there are no dumb questions in triathlon – we all had to start somewhere and we all had the same questions in our minds that you have now!). This is one-stop shopping for all of your “First Tri” information. You’ll always remember the experience of your first tri, so be sure and attend this clinic to make that experience the best that it can be. And even if you’ve done triathlons before you might want to attend; I always pick up a new bit of information every time I attend. All are welcome; you do NOT have to be a MN TriClub member to attend.
Here’s just a few of the topics that Duey will cover:
- Picking a race
- What gear you’ll need
- What to do the night before
- What to do on race morning
- The swim start and the swim itself
- T1 (swim to bike transition)
- The bike portion
- T2 (bike to run transition)
- The run portion
- Post race
- How do I know I’m ready?
- Tapering
So, what are the specifics related to the clinic?
- WHEN: Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
- WHERE: Midtown YWCA - Click Here for map & directions
- WHO: Anyone who wants to prepare for their first triathlon (MN TriClub membership is not required)
- RSVP: pjohnson [AT] YWCA-Minneapolis [dot] org
- COST: Zero, Zip, Nada, Free!!!
IMPORTANT: When you get to the Y, there will be a table set up just inside the front doors where you will need to sign in and get a name tag. Due to the times we live in, you’ll also need to show a photo ID at sign in as the Y needs to have an accurate record of who is in the building. After signing in, you’ll be directed to the clinic room. Light refreshments will be provided by the TriClub.
I’ve been swimming more then usual over the last eight weeks in order to prepare for the 1500m swim leg in the Lifetime Olympic distance triathlon in July. The problem — as always — seems to boil down to some kind of swim endurance and/or comfort level that I need to develop. I wanted to pass along some things I’ve been told which appear to be helping and which may help others.
First, swim endurance has been an personal issue for some time. I can easily swim short distances with comfort and efficiency, but as I attempt extend the distance of any given swim effort I experience a kind of gradually rising panic. I had been attempting to extend distance in swim efforts by doing sets of pyramids. Pyramids are a cyclic interval type exercise; in my case I was swimming 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, 150m, 100m, 50m for 800m total per effort. A set would typically consist of two or three of these yielding 1600 or 2400 meters of total swimming. While pyramids seemed to be going ok, I really hated them. I swam them with difficultly and was constantly tempted to shorten sets or length. Mentally, it wasn’t resulting in much progress.
Fortunately, an alternate path was suggested to me and it has produced some tangible results. The suggestion was to swim a measured distance with planned breaks, then over time squeezing the length of the breaks down to make the distance more contiguous. In my case I was swimming 1500m as 30×50m with 30 second breaks between efforts. Each 50 is a comfortable distance, and the 30 second breaks allowed me to defer the lap counting to my watch. The watch keeps me honest, and the 50m laps have gotten easier. Executing this plan has provided some structure to the time I’ve been swimming which makes it easier to continue to work on.
Second, I have recently participated in a swim clinic sponsored by the Twin Cities Multisports Club. (TCMC) TCMC is a sister club to the Minnesota Tri Club (MNTC) which I have been part of for a couple of years now. In the clinic we were videotaped swimming from the side and from the front. I saw two obvious things in the one viewing of my swimming at the end of the clinic. First, my legs are still generally to deep. Second, I only get fully on my side when recovering my left arm. I have been focusing on these two things in recent pool efforts and something interesting happened.
I have mentioned before that I know that I was able to execute a 12 count for 25m before, but I had not been able to produce one recently. Most of the winter I was in the 14-15 range with occasional 13 counts, but on Thursday I produced two 10 counts. When the first one happened, I was so shocked that I had to stop at the wall. I was sure that I had miscounted, but then it happened again and was reinforced by some 11 counts as well. I should mention that I do not believe these stroke counts are maintainable over the course of a race, but it’s encouraging to know that it is indeed possible. Additionally, it opens the door to some nice potential swim golf scores.
If you attempted to read anything here in the last sixteen or so hours and had the connection attempt refused it was caused by my upgrade attempt performed yesterday evening. Almost everything is back to normal at this point. Turns out there was a configuration issue for all the virtual domains, so all the user facing things would not work. Let me know if you find something wierd, and I’ll see what I can figure out.
A little of the detail. We are now running:
Another new thing is my attempted use of the wp-openid plugin which.. um.. doesn’t work yet.. At least not fully.. If you have an openid that you want to use, register the old way and associated your identity URL with the created user. I believe that the issue is associated with the new wordpress password encoding technique. It is unclear to me at this point, but that is my suspicion.
OpenID is a GoodThing in my opinion, so give it a try. At present, comments are still under the same requires first approval policy we have had since the comment spammers started abusing us.
Late last year Nick Carr wrote a piece titled The business case for TimesSelect
which discusses the recent change for the archives of the New York Times away from a subscription model toward an advertising model. Carr’s point is that the Times didn’t necessarily error when they made the choice of a subscription based web presence over a more open business model. His point and the resulting comments are interesting, however it made me think of how much I hate the business model
of the Star Tribune here in the Twin Cities.
The policy of the Times subscription model was to make the archives available for a fee. After an article has aged some amount, it was archived
behind the subscription policy. In the case of the Star Tribune, once an article ages past some point it is removed permanently from the site never to be seen again. Considering the concept of the long tail it seems this policy is the worst of both worlds; not only is the information not available to generate subscription revenue but it also is removed from the long tail benefit of potential advertising revenue. The Tribune, a publication struggling for revenue, seems to have done themselves a disservice.
As a side effect, I can no longer link to Star Tribune articles from this blog. Any link to a Star Tribune article is a broken link waiting to happen; their policy breaks MY site as well. From a traffic standpoint, this blog doesn’t make a substantive difference to their bottom line; however, the concept of the long tail suggests that a significant number of small blogs linking to a variety of articles over time would provide a non-trivial advertising income. As Carr likes to point out, the Star Tribune could share crop
the profits from the work of others for the trivial cost of storage.
Putting aside the question of the public benefit associated with archives being available in some form, the business plan they have chosen to implement make me wonder if they have anything to say which is worth keeping around at all.
Tags: Digital Share Cropping, New York Times, Nick Carr, Star Tribune
Once upon a time, I could locate albums in my music collection by the color of the spine. The cover art provided a kind of stylistic fingerprint as unique as the music itself; it was tangible. The process of hearing something new involved the consumption of the cover, jacket, and any enclosed materials in concert with the audio. The music and art were closely associated.
As my music collection has transformed from physical to digital, the album artwork has gradually become disentangled from the audio. Looking at the spines now seems more like gazing at a strangers collection. Sometimes looking at the collection produces moments of pleasant surprise at finding some long forgotten album or artist. The recognized album artwork producing a sudden remembrance of a favorite song, a concert attended, or some more loosely associated memory.
When adding new music to the digital collection, I always attempt to associate an image of the album cover art with the MP3 tracks. It’s not the same as handling a record jacket or reading the lyrics from a CD insert, but it allows some of the visual association with the audio as in the past. It enhances the experience.
Here is an excerpt of a Design Observer article by Adrian Shaughnessy titled “Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?” which looks into the future of album cover art. Check it out.
Over the past few months I’ve been researching a book about current record cover art. Besides hunting down examples of stimulating music graphics, I’ve also been looking for digital alternatives to the traditional album cover. As downloading threatens to become the main distribution method for recorded music, it is widely believed that the album cover will be replaced by some new online format — perhaps animated — that will make CD packaging redundant.
Tags: Album Cover, Art, Design, MP3
The following is a collection of links which I have pulled (verbatim) from Sun’s website which I intend to return to in the future. They came from the Intro to Struts Tutorial (linked), but I’m more interested in the follow ups.
When using Struts, you are not limited to the functionality provided by the IDE. You can enhance the IDE by adding features that the IDE does not support. Here are some examples:
These are taken from a similar tutorial on the Spring Framework.
This concludes the Introduction to the Spring Framework in NetBeans IDE tutorial. This document demonstrated how to install the Spring Framework into NetBeans IDE, and introduced you to the IDE’s interface for developing in the framework.
You are encouraged to continue learning about the Spring Framework by working through other tutorials in NetBeans IDE, such as Thomas Risberg’s
Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step tutorial.
For related and more advanced tutorials, see the following resources:
