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First day of school.

Kelly first day, Kelly, school

Wow, it’s May. That means I’m now into my more focused race specific training, the so called Build phase. Four weeks to get myself ready. Unfortunately the Base phase now ends a little unsteady, featuring a marathon, dubious swim training, and now two months of twice a week bike training at M2 and what I’ll call “time in the sandal weekend” riding for the past month.

Although last week was a recovery week I still logged over 10 hours.

Swim: 1hr 41 min (4200 yards)

Mondays swim was just an easy 1000 yards in the pool. Almost not worth getting wet for, just did laps and tried to not get run down by the master swimmers. Switching to Mon, Wed, Fri puts me there when the Masters swimming are churning up the middle lanes. This is going to be an ongoing problem. I noticed some of them wore fins. How is that allowed? Anyway, a good recovery swim.

Wednesday’s swim was a 500 yard warmup followed by some drills, followed by 1000 straight yards. The schedule called for 500 yds of the drills so I’ve been rotating between some bi-laterial practice, finger drag, fist swimming, catchup and some sighting practice. I could use more of all of those, especially the bi-laterial breathing, but at least I get some in. Interestingly I swim faster either with bi-laterial breathing, or 4 strokes per breath. However, I don’t last too long like that before I start gasping for air and inhaling water.

The sensation of drowning is never far away even though I’m still amused with actually being able to swim these days.

Fridays swim was a 500 yard warmup and then 8×100 and then a cool down. A pretty short effort, but it was supposed to be a fall back week. For the first time in who knows how long (perhaps ever) I swam three days in a week. Time to get to the pool has to happen at lunch time and it’s easy for it to get bumped for something else, usually work related. The 8x100s went well with all laps under 2:00/100yd pace. My first two were too fast, around 1:50 pace, but that’s too fast to do 8 of them, so they slowed to 1:55-1:58 for the rest of them.

Bike: 5hrs 19min

A fall back on the bike too this week, so other than another two sessions of power training fun, we treated ourselves to a mountain bike ride in Marin at China Camp State Park. This park is pretty cool (for mountain bikers) in that a) the single track is actually open to mountain bikers and b) hikers seem to have given up the trails to the bikers as a result. We can now rip it up as much as we want. Just Kidding.

The trails were really spectacular, and pretty hard in places. The initial climb was up 1000ft to an old Nike Missile Pad that overlooked the bay, Mt Tam and San Rafael. This is where the photo at the top of the page was taken.

Run: 1 hr 50 min (10.7 miles)

Another not great running week. It’s been a month now since my marathon, the arbitrary time I give myself before I do anything crazy in the running department. Unfortunately with all this other training going on I don’t really see much chance of doing anything interesting. The good news is I did run three times (sort of): a 5.5-ish mile run twice around the lake Wednesday evening, and a beautiful four mile run in the heart of the redwoods Friday evening. Also, just for fun, we ran a mile or so off the mountain bike yesterday. Mostly we ran out of trail so we headed back to the car and called it a day. Overall the running feels fine at this point, but I’m going to have to start upping the long run a little now and perhaps do one of my mid-week runs at tempo pace.

Oakland Museum

In other news, the Oakland Museum reopened this weekend with a 31 hour party. We decided to head down there at 7am and check it out. There was a lot of bubble blowing going on on top of the roof, free yoga in the main hall, and a pancake breakfast put on by the Oakland Fire Department. The changes to the museum are awesome, I can’t wait to go back and explore further. One of the best museums around, especially for Californian history.

Marin Farmers Market and Sports Basement

We headed over the the farmers market, which was only about 3 miles from where we biked the previous day. The report: a) strawberries not there yet, and what’s with nobody offering tastings anymore? I guess they know they are no good so far this year, b) Oakdale cheese is still yummy goodness and c) Kelly had her first pony ride there.

After picking up picnic supplies we headed down to San Francisco and ate in the Presidio. The after mouth of the Escape From Alcatraz was going on. Patty took her mountain bike into the nearby Sports Basement to get the gears worked on, which have never worked right, producing the quote of the week:

“Sorry, we’ve got 50 bikes to ship today and triathletes are very high maintenance.”

Biking, Kelly, Running, Triathlon

Another week of training. Seven weeks to go. This week was around 10 hours of volume, a bit less than last week because I missed two runs, a swim, and we’ll do our weekly yoga session tomorrow.I’m trying to relax about that, work and life are always going to get in the way.

Swim: 1hr 30 min

Two pretty good swims this week. I swam 2500yds for the first time on Wednesday, squeezed in before a day of torture in Agile Development training. By the end of that swim I was dragging and couldn’t really muster much more that a struggling survival cruise pace for the last of my 100s. Oh well, first volume then intensity. 2500yds took almost an hour including a set of drills, so that’s the longest swim workout I’ll do for this event. Now to make it stronger.

Bike: 6hrs 33 min

Patty and I headed off this morning for our ‘long’ bike ride, about 40 miles. We rode Pinehurst and Redwood Roads, past the back side of Lake Chabot to Castro Valley and then followed Crow Canyon across to San Ramon. I’m not sure we’d ride that last part again, people use it to get from 580 to 680 and the speed of cars and sketchy shoulder didn’t make for the funnest riding. Plus, we didn’t see a single other cyclist, a sure sign. Beyond that we stuck to the Ironhorse and St Marys Rd to get back to where we started.

We ride painfully slowly as we spin our way over hill after hill. And then once we were beyond the hills, riding on the recreational trails were congested today, lots of people with dogs and kids with training wheels etc. Oh well. Somehow I’m hoping the high intensity power training on Tuesday and Thursday will magically combine with my weekend time-in-the-saddle on race day.

Run: 1hr 41 min

Hopefully my running can still maintain itself while I get the biking and swimming in shape. This week I ran just once, Friday night. It was a beautiful evening run around Lake Chabot on the trails. It was the first time back there since the marathon. Lots of people. Felt strong even though my overall state is a little fatigued. Anyway, perfect way to end the week.

Garden

When you run for fours hours productivity for the weekend is shot. When you bike, other stuff can happen. Saturday we worked on the garden most of the day. The result was at least two green bins worth of weeds and other foliage. We also mulched the flower gardens, mowed and trimmed the lawns, and planted tomatoes and herbs.

Coffee

And of course there was coffee, to fuel it all…

Biking, Kelly, Running, Swimming, Triathlon

Kelly headed to summer camp for the first time this week. She is now an Engineer and a modern artist.

Kelly bridges, camp, engineering, Kelly

Last night Kelly took part in her 8th grade buddy’s graduation ceremony. This mostly involved walking with them up to the front of the stage.

This afternoon Kelly’s class had a small moving up ceremony where they showed a self portrait they’d drawn at the beginning of the year and then at the end. Then the kids walked (or bounced on their knees) up to the teachers to get their certificates.

Kelly graduation, Kelly, school

Kelly dancing, Kelly

Last weekend Kelly had her 6th birthday party, a tea party from which we probably haven’t fully recovered. We already dread coming up with a plan for one next year, only a short 51 weeks away!

We started things off with some cupcake decorating:

Then got down to business with the tea party:

Between the tea party and the cupcakes the girls self-organized their own band out of the deck:

And finally, cupcakes and Happy Birthdays:

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Full photo set here on Smugmug.

Kelly birthday, Kelly, party

Here’s Kelly at her school Chinese New Years presentation. She’s the one speaking with the rabbit ears. Her line was “Rabbits are Gracious, kind and soft-spoken.” There was several hundred kids and parents in the crowd.

Kelly Kelly, st pauls

On the weekend Kelly rode her bike without training wheels for the first time.

Video on YouTube

Kelly Biking, Kelly

This is really a post about something other than running. This past weekend we finally made it to the snow, what little remains, and got in some very late season fun.

We left early and the day was already warm in Oakland. We drove east to the town of Davis in the central valley and stopped and had breakfast, then took in some of the farmers market across the road. Kelly rode the old merry-go-round which is powered my someone pedaling! We also watched some hula dancing. The pickings at the market are still slim but we did buy some cheese, bread rolls and slightly too early strawberries there before heading towards the mountains.

Up into the mountains we drove thinking it was too late. In fact there was so little snow that we ended up at Donner Summit, the highest point as I-80 crosses the Sierras, as it was the only area with snow at highway level. With so little snow up in the mountains people around here are now talking about water restrictions this summer. I remember last year people saying there was so much snow pack that there’d not be restrictions for years to come. Ah, easy come easy go.

It turns out, however, that the little snow we found was perfect for what we wanted: some snow play. Usually we head down back roads until we can find a plowed pullout or jeep road. We get out, climb the bank, and make our own fun away from the crowds. At this time of year, even along I-80, there wasn’t any crowds. We parked in a snow play area just below Donner Summit and headed off to find a sled run.

Patty crossed the river first. I stood back uncertain her idea was sound. She prodded the middle of what was admittedly a small stream with a stick and then with hardly a hesitation leaped into ankle deep water and headed upstream along the middle to a place where she could cross the snow bank on the other side. Kelly and I followed, impressed.

The other side was sledding heaven. Someone had built a long chute which we could use. Here’s Patty making a run…

And there were little hills that Kelly improvised her own ‘butt slide’ on…

We built a snow man, of course…

And later, Kelly also went down the main sled run by herself, a first…

We probably stayed for about an hour. The air was warm, there was nobody else there, the sled run was ideal and our snowman rocked. What could be better? So what if we were on the only snow patch in the Sierras!

Kelly, Travel