The trash can incident.

One of my garbage cans broke. I found it split down the side. I am blaming it on raccoons since I think they try to knock the cans over and hop on them to get to the feast (at least from a raccoon perspective) inside. The net of this incident was that I needed to buy a new can.

I didn't think that buying a can would be an issue but was more concerned with how to throw out a garbage can. People were recommending to leave a note on it, to put it in the back of the car and find a dumpster to dump it in or to just tip our garbage men to take it away. The problem is that we are the first stop for our garbage men in the morning and that means that they often are at our house before 5am so talking to them (or tipping them) would be a challenge. Our garbage men are good and take almost everything in the almost 20 years we've lived in this house.

While thinking of my approach on broken can disposal, I went to the local Lowe's where they had quite a selection of new cans. I chose a nice wheeled can that had a rather solid cover (to frustrate those pesky critters to the point where they'll go somewhere else for midnight snacks). I got two of the larger cans to minimize the schlepping. I've had an issue in the past where we've "lost" the top of the cans so I got some spray paint and painted our address on the cans.

The other morning I needed to go to work early so was leaving the house about quarter to five and heard the garbage truck. I grabbed the broken can and walked down to the street to give it to them. I said good morning and they said that there was a problem with the new cans. They were too big per the guys. They said that the town passed a law a while back that said the maximum size can be 32 gallons. Our old cans were bigger than that but they said they were grandfathered in so they kept taking the garbage. They said that they wouldn't take the garbage in the new 45 gallon cans. I mentioned that facts like this would have been nice to know BEFORE I brought new cans and asked why would the store sell cans that couldn't be used? They, of course, couldn't answer that. They did take the broken can.

I mentioned before that these guys have been great over the years. I checked the town code and it does say 32 gallons or 50 lbs. max. I can't return the cans because my address is spray painted in them. I can understand the rationale if some people loaded up these cans to the brim they could be extremely heavy and that isn't really fair to the guys who have to lift them.  I'm not blaming the guys. I'm blaming mysef a little but I'm more upset at the store for not simply putting a sign up with the regulations.

Now I have 2 new cans that I can't use, have to buy 2 new ones and do this all again. $80 down the drain. An expensive lesson. I'm sure I won't be the only one learning this lesson though.

Do you throw out new unusable garbage cans?

Not doing and doing stuff.

I took off Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday from work this week. I did not go away. I did not have a race-cation. I did not go looking at colleges for my daughter. I took off simply to help improve my mindset. I tried to avoid work as much as possible and I set some lofty goals to sleep in, do as much or as little as I felt, and to think about my personal goals for this year and beyond related to weight loss plans and racing. I think I met those goals. Of course, every time I put on the TV it appeared that "Office Space" was on and that kept me thinking of work.

The good news about this effort is that I came to some conclusions. Most of the conclusions have to do with desire and focus. I can still have a successful year but I need to prioritize and get to work. I've decided not to cancel on IMAZ. I have a couple of other training events that will act as checkpoints to see if I'm progressing. I remembered that this stuff should be fun. We get to do it - we don't have to.

I've decided to start the C25K as "Couch" is a good description of my running fitness at this time. My fitness level will change. It will improve. I still have the chance to do great stuff or at least damn good.

Stay tuned.

Chris Christie and another fat guy.

News reported last week that Gov. Chris Christie had lap band surgery last February. Dr. George Fielding of the NYU Langone Medical Center did the surgery. Since the operation it was reported that the governor has lost about 40 pounds. He has not said how much he weighed when the surgery was performed but estimates were that he was somewhere between 300 and 350 pounds.

The picture on the left was from when the he was on the Letterman show recently. I haven't seen any post surgery pictures of Gov. Christie but when I look at pictures of him from before his surgery I see someone who I consider fat. I'm sure that everyone has a different gage as to what is fat versus what is not fat but I rationalize it as someone who is much fatter than I am (at least through my eyes).

Objectively, though, I am in the same weight range as Gov. Christie. I don't think I'm as fat as he is but I guess I am. I'm not proud of this but facts are facts.

I haven't been training as much as I did in the past for a whole bunch of reasons. Am I getting fatter since I'm training less or am I training less because I'm gaining weight? I don't know. There will come a point in my life where I will not be able to train the volume that I have in the past. That point may in fact be now.

Before this news came out, I made an appointment and saw Dr. Fielding to talk about weight loss and weight loss surgery options. He is very persuasive and lays out a very well thought out rationale. One of his points is that you rarely see fat old people. Why? Because they all die before they can get old. I also know a lot of people that have successfully lost weight after a heart attack or stroke or something like that. The choice is to lose it now and avoid that potentially life ending event or not. My weight is high enough to qualify for the surgery.

I haven't decided what to do yet.

I did realize some things though. The bariatric folks are into meal replacement drinks and gave me a list of those that they recommend as healthy (you would be amazed how they differ nutritionally). I'm trying them to see if I can tolerate them by starting to have them for breakfast and will continue down the list for taste and other stuff.

Gov. Christie said that he is now working with a personal trainer 4x a week. I looked at what is preventing me from training (I know what to do) and found it is all about priority. I seem to find things (normally not significant things) that I do instead of training. There are ways to solve that problem.

I'll try this and watch what I eat. Maybe then I'll be less of a fat guy. I need to. It will be either one way or another.

Wind and cold or sausages?

I haven't been following a structured training plan in a while. This fact does not bode well for my 2013 race calendar but I need it that now for my sanity and future. The net of this is that I am not training more than I am training but when I train my primary goal is to have fun rather than increase fitness or test or to generally embrace "the suck" or (you get the idea).

This morning I decided to ride with the TNT group out east. They had 3 routes on the docket: a 25 miler, a 42 miler, and a 73 miler. The team is gearing up for a century ride on June 1, just a few weeks away, and I expect to be joining them. My training is not where it needs to be but I believe I can fake it through a century. A better way to say that, though, is that I've faked a century before, survived, and didn't pay too high of a recovery price. At least that's how I remember it.

The weather yesterday was beautiful here. The high temperature was about 70 degrees and it was a perfect day. Unfortunately, the ride was today. I woke up and it was 39 degrees and the wind was whipping. My daughter's track team was volunteering at the local marathon/half marathon so I needed to leave the house anyway to drop her off.  The cool weather was good for the runners but I decided to not mess with the cycling gods. I knew if I wore tights, it would get warm, so I wore shorts. I did wear a windbreaker but didn't bring full finger winter gloves.

When I met the people for the ride it seems like some of them were dressing for Shackelton's Antarctic expedition. People were looking for reasons to bail and I knew if one person bailed, there would be a stampede to the diner. I started whispering the work "sausages" while people were pumping up their tires. The wind seemed it was howling. The sky was getting darker. I decided to do the 42 miler route and see what the weather looked like and how I felt. The groups left.

We pushed the pace a little harder that was comfortable for me. I really can't complain since for a lot of the ride I was setting the pace. I kept asking, dare I say begging, for the group to drop me so I could bail and turn around to head back to the cars. They wouldn't. I said I would pay for the sausages. They still wouldn't. Dayum.

At the end of the ride it was still windy. It was still cold but probably was now high 40s. Nobody got sausages. They chose wind and cold over sausages! I think the world stopped rotating there a moment.

Maybe I am embracing the suck. Just a little.

PS: Maybe I wasn't as focused on sausages as I recall though. Think I can sell sausages for dinner tonight at home?

Training Resurection

I was supposed to be in St. Petersburg, FL this weekend racing St. Anthony's. I did not go because there was no way that I was ready. I haven't really trained in a while and I doubt I could even finish without a personal tragedy happening. I was doubting if I'll ever be racing again for me and if I should just drop the training lifestyle forever. I imagined I could find something else to fill the little free time that I have.

This morning, though, I ran. I could list all the caveats around it how it was only 30 minutes, there was copious amounts of walking, it included a warm up and a cool down, etc., but the net is I had a choice to run or not and I chose to run.

I'm looking forward to choose to ride my bike tomorrow. There is a group going out with about 60 miles on their agenda that I think I'll join. The pace will be slow but I think that on a bike is where I need to be next in this journey.

Game on.

Absentia, Boston, and Mojo

I could give a lot of excuses as to why I haven't blogged recently but the chase is that I haven't. The only thing that I've been doing less of than blogging seems to be training though. I did go for a bike ride last weekend but that ride wound up being sort of a train wreck. The ride was 52 windy miles. I did finish.  I realized during the ride that the last time I was on a bike was the first week in March when I was in California. That ride was sandwiched between looking at colleges with my daughter and some business meetings. After last weekend's ride it took a few days for my muscles to stop aching but that might be because after the ride I hopped in a plan for a 18 hour plane ride to the other side of the world.

I was in the air last weekend and heard the news about the Boston Marathon bombing. I had a bit of a different perspective than I would have had as I only had the international news coverage to give me information. I did get spotty emails that the people I knew were running Boston were all ok. Last night on my way to my hotel the roads were closed since they were running the local version of a corporate challenge. I was happy that they were running this local race with apparently thousands of runners so I didn't mind the inconvenience. I did have a flash through my mind that I should have run this race too but realized that my lack of training would have made that very ugly.

Right now I'm sitting in the Singapore airport watching the Yankees play on TV while I wait for my ride back to New York. I don't know if the game is from today, yesterday or perhaps even tomorrow since my inner time zone clock is all off.  But watching baseball is good. I thought about going to a game soon but decided I want to ride this weekend and perhaps even try a little run. Perhaps.

I'm still in search of my mojo. I miss my mojo. I need my mojo. Often when I travel I eat poorly. This week while I didn't eat great, I did eat better than the "travel" usual. If I can start mixing in more training, maybe my mojo will come back. I decided not to race St Anthony's next week but I am still go ing for the Montauk Century in June. There is still joy to be found on my bike. It is right in front of me and I just need to recognize it.

PS: The best thought I read this week is how while Boston and New York are typically rivals in almost everything but it is more like a sibling relationship than true hatred or dislike. We may argue but they know we've got their back. Always. Even more so now.

Realize, though, the Red Sox are still allowed to suck.

Make it difficult to do the wrong thing.

The other day my kids were watching my wife's cousin give a techie talk on YouTube or some other webcasty type of thing. I wasn't paying much attention to his talk but I overhead him comment that a goal of his "stuff" was to make it difficult for users to do the wrong thing. That short sound bite got me thinking.

Deep down and somewhat in real life I am a techie. My family keeps forgetting that I actually knew (note the tense) some things and I often have to remind the folks that work for me that I used to be smart. Normally this results in an eye roll or even a laugh/snort but I've given talks like his talk in the dark ages before every talk's video was immortalized via digital archiving. It is frightening that I would have to pay to get copies of some of the technical articles I wrote back in the day (assuming I would want them) but at least the patents that I've gotten more recently are still freely searchable. Why do I write all this? Perhaps I think my thinking about sound bites could be profound. Yup, that was an eye roll. I realized that I didn't want to write about this in terms of technology since that could cause me to go down a path of regularly writing about technology. That would have more detriments than benefits so I'll put this into an endurance sports slant.

Back on topic: the statement "make it difficult to do the wrong thing." I thought if the corollary "make it easy to to do the right thing" was valid or perhaps even more impactful of a thought. I realized that idea was valid but wasn't more impactful. Then I thought if it was hard to do the right thing and/or easy to do the wrong thing, what would happen. That, I thought, was the cause of many endurance training failures. The right thing to do seemed too damned hard. Perhaps not physically. Perhaps mentally. Perhaps with life balance. Perhaps with everything else that goes on in ones life. Some times the right thing to do does seem hard. But is it?

Compare it against the wrong thing to do. Is it harder to do or not do a workout? Scheduling the right thing and the wrong thing takes the same effort.  The choices one makes while scheduling (the workout or something else) might be though. If you are doing the workout, you can do it right or you can do it wrong. I often try to make mental excuses as to why I can't do something then all of a sudden, I've done it.

Where am I going with this? The more I think about it the more I realize that if I make it difficult to do the wrong thing I will be more successful at what I'm doing.

Success, my friends, is the right thing.

Defining success is a topic for another day.

Broken new scale

As we were walking through the mall my wife mentioned that she wanted to get a new bathroom scale. We had a Tanita but she recently got these Fitbit things and there is a scale that synchs to the pedometer and such. Since I wasn't emotionally attached to the scale (and wanted to bank some good will for when I want to buy something new), I said go for it.

She was configuring the scale last night (yes it requires configuring) and said it was ready to go. This morning before I got dressed I got on it and then got on the old one. The new scale reads 3.4 lbs heavier than the old.

The new scale must be broken. The old one can't be. I know the old scale was 5 pounds lighter than the official weight watchers scale but I rationalized that as the weight of clothes. I asked my wife and she noticed it too.

At some point I'll have to bite the bullet,use the new scale, and track my weight with it going forward. Why couldn't it have read lighter? Would have made me feel much differently.

First trimester of iron

Nine months from today is Ironman Arizona. I realized that as I was procrastinating rather than doing my scheduled bike workout looking at events that would act as training sessions for the rest of the year. When most people think of things that take nine months they normally do not think of Ironman preparation but of a pregnancy.

How is ironman training like a pregnancy? Full disclosure, I have never personally been pregnant (even though I have had times where I may have looked like it). I first thought that there was no way that ironman training was similar to being pregnant. I need to lose weight, not gain weight. Then I thought a little more. I need to watch what I eat. I need to take care of my body. There will be times where I don't feel so good. There will be other times when I feel great. I need to listen to my doctor (and coach). I'll need my rest. My family will be pulling for me. Some times I'll not be making so much sense but people will humor me. Near the end I'll just want to get it over. November 17 is the date I'll go into my final labor. I'm hoping the labor is less than 17 hours.

Today is the beginning of my first trimester of iron. Time to get on that trainer and do that bike workout.

The WW Weigh in Ritual

•  Make sure no watch is on. 
• Move the phone and wallet to coat. 
• Keys can't be in a pocket.
• Don't want to weigh that belt.
• Make sure that you remembered to go to the bathroom beforehand.
• Shoes off.
• When the formerly fat person working the desk says you may step on the scale, you do. 
• Make sure there is no air in your lungs because Physics told you that air weighs something when you were in 12th grade (perhaps the only thing you remember about AP Physics except shooting the laser at people across the quad).
• Breathe a sigh of relief when they tell you that you lost 5 lbs.
• Now comes the true irony. They say you should consider exercising some or a little more. You scream to yourself "I'M TRAINING FOR AN IRONMAN" then you demurely explain that exercise isn't your problem. They look at you confused.
• Later go home and don't wimp out on your bike trainer workout since you have to do the weigh in ritual again next week.