More biking with new bike

I went for a great bike ride last night. Instead of going my "usual" route (can it be a "usual" if I've only done it twice a week for like three weeks?) I sucked it up and went over a bridge to ride 2 loops around Hains Point, aka East Potomac Park.  This is a great loop to practice pedaling consistently instead of frequent braking and coasting to share my usual trail with runners and other bikers.

(And, new this year with the road bike, occasionally accelerating to pass other bikers!)

There's a three mile loop or it's possible to do a five mile loop, but two of the three-milers trying to pedal pedal (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ... counting to myself at some reasonable rate, trying not to say it out loud while riding) was enough for me last night.  I look forward to feeling like the ride over is a nice warmup instead of feeling like it could be an actual part of a workout.

No, I'm not going to share the elevation profile of this route. It's so flat that it's almost downhill both ways. Seriously.

The absolute best part last night was letting two bikers who were around my skill level pass me and then pushing it for a while to catch up with them, and reaching 19mph in the process, which is quite fast for me if there is no coasting down-hill involved.  Actually, that's a little fast for me going downhill too, since I'm sort of a chicken.  One of them was a super athletic looking girl on a hybrid-ish upright bike. I wish I could've gone as fast as she was going when I was on my other bike last year.

I practiced getting my water bottle out without swerving violently as well. It's getting better, but certainly doesn't feel comfortable. Yay summer and exercise!

The vocab word from today at work is Mahalanobis. I should get back to Mahalanobising (not actually a valid way to use this word in a sentence)

Lake swim, et al

I had a great weekend. I wish all weekends for all people could be as good or better than my weekend.

Saturday was the loser day of the great weekend. I learned that Zozo, my black cat, has sadly decayed teeth and will cost me a lot of money. He's not even 3 yet! I'm giving him antibiotics for now to try to cut back the bacterial proliferation in his mouth, but will be scheduling an expensive vet appt with "x hrs of teeth extractions @ $tooMuch/hr" and "y units of pain management @ $whatDoesThisEvenMean/unit" and stuff and then spending the month afterwards thanking my lucky stars that I don't have a car payment that I have to fit into my monthly budget on top of things like this.

Sunday was way better. I woke up unnaturally early -- seriously, what are all those manic birds doing chirping like that at 5am -- and went out to do an open water swimming competition - 1 mile of paddling around in a lake. I could make excuses about my time, but eh, whatever. I made it, I felt good doing it, I swam in straight lines, and didn't freak out about the icky things that live in lakes. And then it was 9am and I'd already swam a mile. I watched the 2mile race start and the very fast 2milers finish, and then went to spend the day with friends.  We went on a field trip to this huge Asian market and I saw loads of things that reminded me of my mochi and nori obsessed-time in Berkeley. yum! I got some mochi and other ingredients were purchased to make some awesome noodle dish that I don't remember the name of, but the noodles were some sort of thin, Korean, potato noodle, I think, that cooked up to be transparent. Yum yum.

Monday was an awesome bonus day where I finished laundry, vacuumed, cleaned, and went for a slow 1hr bike ride. I ended up behind a family on the trail and didn't get up the nerve to pass them because the trail was all swervy and I didn't want to run into an oncoming runner or biker. It was slightly humid, but not in a bad way, and felt like a great intro to summer day.

The giant rain storm even waited until late Monday night to come through so the whole weekend was dry and sunny! Yay.

I don't have any more upcoming races that I've already paid the fees for, so June will mostly be a month of geting in some miles of practice with the HRM and spending time on the bike.

My farm deliveries start next Tuesday and I chose to have them delivered to a group site near work (to save some money) so I need to sort out the logistics of getting my veggies from work to home every Tuesday night and remember to implement the plan next week.

Summer wishing

I feel like it should be summer now. Looking out my window at work, it's been so beautifully sunny that I don't want to believe the weather website that's telling me it's in the low 60's.

I also don't want to believe that it will get into the low 50's by 10pm tonight.  The weather is messing with my plans to have a long bike ride and then go see an outdoor movie -- if I dress in clothes that will feel good for the bike ride, I'll be cold for the movie, but if I carry layers to be happy about sitting for the movie, I'll miss the zippy fun of zooming around on the bike. 

Oh well, there will be plenty of summer nights, so I should enjoy the spring-ness of today.

1 more hour of working and then I'll get to go see how my heart spazzes while biking.

Exercise with heart

I got a new toy last week, a Heart Rate Monitor. The positive spin on exercising with the HRM is that it shows me that I am, in fact, working hard, even if I'm not moving very fast (at all). The terrifying thing that it has shown me is how very little it takes to make my heart speed up. I wore it last Sunday at the Poplar Springs 5K and felt entirely justified walking up hills -- the HRM says I'm trying hard, really it does.

The theory espoused by many exercisey-types of people these days is that running around at a more moderate level of working hard helps build endurance, and eventually, you should be able to do more without your heart spazzing up to super speed. We'll see.

I decided to tabulate my lack of improvement from last year as I'm continue to recover from my winter-of-sloth:

Year	GW Parkway	Poplar Springs
2008	36:41	40:53
2009	38:44 *	41:08

* It was very hot, whine whine whine

I think I could've beaten last year's Poplar Springs time, but my heart told me it was trying pretty hard just to get that 41:08. And I'm certain I couldn't've beaten last years GW Parkway time, partially because this year it was unseasonably hot, and also because I just hadn't spent as much time running around this year.

Lake swim next weekend. Hopefully it will at least be warm on the day of the race. That won't help the water temperature, but it will make it feel nicer to dry off afterwards.

Follow-through, check!

It's been a good week filled with follow-through.

I got my new bike, as mentioned before, and have been balancing the thrill of riding it (4 min 45 second miles on a trail without even trying very hard!) with the pain of getting used to the much less cushy seat.  The seat may need to be swapped, but for now, I'm taking days off between rides and, with the weekend off, was able to love zooming around for 9 miles Monday night, even though it was drizzling and a little chilly.

I've decided to sign up with the triathlon training group. They start groups three times a year, so I'll be starting in mid-June, and the focus race will be at the beginning of October, with lots of other opportunities to go race, support, and cheer teammates at other events.  There are many group workouts scheduled during the week, so I can be as social as my schedule and the constraints of the DC-area transit system will allow, and the running workouts are more about heart-rate than speed, which is good, because I can get my heart rate to go up a lot easier than I can get my speed to go up (sort of joking, it's not actually good that I can make my heart race as easily as it does.  If it didn't calm down so quickly, I'd actually worry about this).  This means that there's yet another opportunity for me to buy myself a new toy; I've been looking at heart-rate-monitor/watch combo things, but will probably delay getting one for a few weeks.  There's been a lot of spending recently.

Some of the spending has been going to committing myself to go be active while someone times it.  For the third year in a row, I'm going to go do the Poplar Springs 5K. The course is full of hills which cause me much wheezing, but some friends are doing it, and then there is vegan yogurt afterwards (ick).  I also signed up for a 1 mile lake swim, which may be a stupid idea, not that I can't swim that far, and not that it's in a lake, but because I decided to not try to rent/wear a wetsuit and may end up blue at the end.  There are other non-wetsuit swimmers signed up though, so it won't be that bad, right?

Two Sundays ago, I went and did a 5K while some friends did the associated 10 miler. Sadly, I was slower than last year, but it was a great deal hotter, so I'll take that as my excuse.  Also, sadly, I was beaten by a 5 year old. There's really no excuse for that. I did beat him last year when he was 4.  If I train hard this year, maybe I'll beat him when he's 6, but shortly after that, there may be no hope of me catching up with him again.

I finished a crafty project last Sunday by going up to Silver Spring to rent a sewing machine for a few hours. It's fun to start projects, but it's also really satisfying to finish them off. 

I'm really looking forward to sitting down to start watching the next House DVD from Netflix tonight after jogging.  DVD watching time is my prime time for working on a never-ending hand quilting project that I've been making for myself. (Now that I said here that I'm going jogging tonight, I'm committed and will have to go, even if it's gray out. Yay sneaky self-motivation)