Michaela Sue

OK, in the vein of some things I've been saying:

( Frazz )

While I always say you can't really see anything from inside a car, this isn't literally true. One thing I saw on the way home from OVFF was a man walking along the side of the highway with his can of gasoline, headed back toward his car. It was a Volkswagen, actually. A classic beetle, in his case. Not that this brings back any memories or anything. ("No problem....") He passed me later, driving at high speed.

Last month I was jokingly wondering how much running you can do while still claiming that running is not your sport and you're really not that into it.

Anyway, I've signed up for a formal, organized, official half-marathon, to be held at the end of January in Milwaukee. INDOORS! Because in Milwaukee in January, you probably don't want to schedule that for outdoors. It's held at the running track that surrounds the indoor 400-meter long track speed skating oval at the ice center.

I have actually run 21.1km once now, on my own. It took me 2:05. The thing about doing some sort of sport like this on your own is that it's not obvious how you compare to others. Now, the easiest number of all to look up is the world record. It takes just seconds with google. The record times for full marathons, twice that distance, are just under that time. Well! The record for the half marathon is 58:33. I'm not sure I can run that fast at all, even for 100 meters. It's like the pro cyclists averaging speeds in a time trial that I cannot reach at all without a steep hill to descend.

World records aside, as far as I can tell a two hour half marathon is, if not a great time, basically reasonable for a beginner.

For all that I used to claim to not like running, I have come to like it. Some sort of competitive urge sets in to try to set better times or take on longer distances. For me it's much more of a pure athletic thing than the bicycling. Mostly I'm going somewhere on the bicycle, and want to save some energy for whatever I'm going to do when I get there, and for the trip back. Out in the real world, you go pretty fast on a bicycle and thus quickly encounter intersections, traffic lights, stop signs, and all that. A fast trip home from work is partly a matter of luck at the intersections. Lots of red lights and the trip will be slower. Bicycling involves a lot of thinking about traffic and how to navigate through it safely.

Running is slower, especially for slow runners like me, and it's easy enough to zig-zag around the neighborhood for 21km without ever having to stop anywhere. It's a pure athletic event, no navigation, no traffic safety, no destination at all. Just the Garmin on my wrist with the speed, distance, time, and heart rate data.

The thing about admitting that I like running is that I'll have to stop making fun of those crazy runners and their crazy sport. No more claiming that it's crazy to run twenty kilometers when a sensible person would get on a bicycle and ride one hundred-twenty kilometers, or would ski 20 km at a temperature of -20°C. Anyway, somehow, when written down like that, my old favorite activities don't really sound any less crazy than the running.

What a fun con!

( long... )

OVFF was fantastic, and I'm now safely home. I'll have more to say later, and, yes, there will be photos. Eventually.

Since I specially promised folkmew and Heather Dale concert photos, here are the first two photos:

( photos )

I always wanted one of those vacuum coffee pots. The local Alterra coffee shop had the Bodum Santos on hand, the first time I've seen one in a store. So...couldn't resist.

( description and photos )

Michael Pollan:

I mean, what are we to make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber? (“The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.”) Should we call this progress? Is it even food?

I had not heard of this, but, yes, apparently, there really is "SPLENDA® No Calorie Sweetener with Fiber." Really! It's on the splenda.com web site!

It's boggling. You have to wonder what inspired this weird combination. Never mind what technical challenges it presents, who thought to even try? My guess? Internal corporate rivalry. The research and development people thought the marketing people needed a real challenge! Let's see them market this!

Clear sky this morning, the sun just peeking over the horizon when I set out for work, the moon high overhead. The trees are getting into the fall thing, yellow and red leaves lit by the morning sun. A nice morning to be out on the bicycle.

I drove my car to work yesterday, which I haven't been doing often, and it's a strange way to travel. For one thing, of course, the giant steel box seems just a bit excessive for me, my sandwich, and my tiny laptop computer. Around here, my car is one of the smaller ones. And it just feels so dangerous. You could hit somebody driving one of those giant steel boxes! Everyone is going so fast, and following so close, and changing lanes so carelessly. Crazy people everywhere! Sometimes you feel, as a cyclist, that many of the people in cars seem to hate cyclists. Then you get in your car and realize that, actually, they also hate other people in cars. It's really a free-floating anger at the entire world.

Nice to be back on the bicycle.

Although the weather forecast for last weekend wasn't looking so nice, by the time the weekend came Sunday was looking better. The winds were strong, so Joyce and I avoided kayaking through the outer harbor and instead launched the kayaks directly into the Milwaukee River, from the spot across the street from the Milwaukee Public Market (At Water St. and St. Paul Ave). That's a reasonably nice spot to access the river, though it really helps to have two people to get the kayaks down the narrow ramp with the sharp turns at top and bottom.

You can see the track on the Google Earth view here. The weather started out quite warm, sunny, and very windy. As long as you keep some headway into the wind it isn't so bad, but even a brief time drifting will leave you going backwards on some strange heading and it takes some work to get turned around and moving again. Down between the buildings in the city the wind gets channeled in complicated ways. It seemed that we always had a headwind, no matter which way we were going.

There is a railroad bridge very low over the Menomonee River right where it joins the Milwaukee River which opens by rotating at the south side, which opened for Iroquois tour boat, so we got to see it swing back closed from up close.

Soon after passing that the rain started. The wind died down when the rain got going, though, so in that respect the weather improved. Joyce is quite the enthusiast, so being pretty big nuts we kept at it. The rain was intermittent but the wind stayed calm.

There was some sort of game, possibly soccer, going on at the Marquette athletic fields. Past 25th street the river makes a turn to the south, then passes under a set of railroad tracks. Those tracks funnel into the switching yard there. Last weekend we'd passed under the tracks at the other end of the yard as they pass over the canal. There are a bunch of narrow, low passages under the tracks, most of them mostly blocked with debris, but there is one clear. The water is quite shallow in this area. Layton Boulevard passes high overhead, and we turned around at that point. Someday we'll have to see how far we can get, the water is shallow but the kayaks don't draw much water. The Mitchell Park Domes are visible peaking up behind the riverbank. Sitting in a kayak in the river is about as low a vantage point as you can get, so it's always interesting what things you can see here and there in the semi-distance.

The trip totaled 11.5 km, in 3.5 hours. I'm starting to think that maybe the kayak paddle is a great application for carbon fiber. I have a very heavy, very cheap paddle. If I'm going to be making three hour trips on a regular basis, I ought to upgrade. I have roughly the cheapest kayak you can get, so I'm going to end up with a paddle more expensive than the kayak (possibly several times as expensive, depending on whether I end up going for the full-carbon option).