Author: Bobbie

T-1 day and counting

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Greetings from the Fairmont Vancouver Downtown (helloooo, Robson street!) where I have discovered the following in the last 18 hours or so:

  • Even mild food poisoning sucks. Not sure how I got it, but I spent a large amount of last night in the beautifully appointed (if not small) WC in my hotel room.
  • My ride packet wasn’t mailed to the friend-of-friend’s house here, which means my butt has to check in (in a line) at 5:30am (even though I did everything they told me to to get the packet early!)
  • Everything I found on Robson street that I liked was either way too pricey or not my size. Except one thing, and I bought that.  Yes, it’s black.
  • No matter how well you list things out to pack, you will always forget something. This trip, it’s hair product…
  • The multiple-Starbucks-on-a-corner phenomena does in fact extend to Vancouver
  • The Hotel Fairmont is the bomb! 4 star hotel, 5-star bathroom products. Yes, it matters
  • I get pissy even when I’m not the one driving in Vancouver traffic
  • Jeff is a very, very patient person (he was the one driving)
  • The route down is mostly flat except for a spectacularly hilly exchange shortly after Bellingham
  • Up until yesterday, the weather predicted for the ride was sunny and 68 degrees. Now it’s rainy and 65, so I went and bought rain gear.
  • Rain gear is not cheap
  • They require you to have a bike bell even if you never, ever use it. I now own a bike bell.
  • Rodgers cell service Canada politely informed me they will be charging me $15/mb while I’m up here, so… yeah no pictures or tweets from yours truly until I get back to the states.

t-3.5 days and counting

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Today I packed.

I have a series of overnight bags, as a result of the odd circumstances of my next week. Attend me:

Wednesday: drive to Mom’s house, drop off dogs. Spend the night, because my Mom feeds me more than anyone on the planet, and it induces instant and immediate food coma. Driving 88 miles back does not seem like a good idea, so… spend the night, yeah.

Thursday: drive back from Mom’s. Go home, retrieve bike, and several overnight bags, and other biking gear. Head to Male Person’s house. Retrieve male person, drive to Vancouver, BC. Check into the Fairmont (have I mentioned how massively awesome it is to work for a travel company?), fawn over everything, enjoy the day.

Friday: drop off bike at appropriate spot, pick up ride packet, hit Lee Valley (if you like hardware, that is the place to go), visit the Lush Store, get to bed EARLY.

Saturday, 5am: wake up

Saturday, 5:30am: HEY, WAKE UP!

Saturday, 6am: arrive at Ride Start. Check in my gear bag, check in my food bag, hopefully I’ve had coffee by now or I’m a mess, and other people are likely going to not be happy around me.

Saturday, 6pm: arrive in Mount Vernon, WA. Observe butt calluses.

Sunday, 7am: leave Mount Vernon, WA. Ignore prescription recommendations on the Advil bottle.

Sunday, 5pm: arrive in Marymoor Park (Redmond), WA. Weep with relief and then sign up for next year.

Sunday, 7pm: male person better have my butt home by now.

Monday: work from home, likely standing because said butt is going to be under protest. Call in to 4 meetings. Thank my bosses profusely for the opportunity to do said work from home.

Tuesday: fly to San Francisco (for work)

Wednesday: fly home from San Francisco (for sanity)

Thursday: breathe. Do laundry, oh, and, work.

Did you catch that? I have to create a series of overnight bags:

  1. for mom’s house, which has nothing to do with my Vancouver requirements
  2. for Vancouver, which has nothing to do with bike trip requirements
  3. for bike trip, which has nothing to do with home requirements
  4. for home, which has nothing to do with bike trip requirements
  5. for SFO, which has nothing to do with home requirements

My dining room table is awash in clean(ish) laundry, small size travel bottles, and a vigorous debate over where the bottle of wine goes: bag 1 or bag 4. The wet wipes have made it into bag 3, as has the Advil; the reading material long overdue for perusal has made it into bag 2.  I am having a fashion debate over bags 1-2, and 4, as well as a debate over which set of bike shorts to wear on day 1 vs day 2. Do I have enough sunscreen packed? Enough disposable bags? Gu/Cliff Bars/shot blocks?

I still haven’t learned how to repair a busted tire. I may have to use the internets for that one.’

Next post: if not from Mom’s, then from the Fairmont in Vancouver.

T-5 days, and Counting

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Eek. 5 days. 5 days to pack, get geared up, buy the food for the ride, get last minute equipment, etc. I’ve spent the last five MONTHS with the attitude of “just survive until the 21st”. Well, the 21st is next week, and I have a triathlon to start training for.

It’s a good thing I got on Hamish (the Schwinn) yesterday as I’ve discovered his front gears are all fu-bar’d. I leave for Vancouver on Thursday, his timing is spectacularly bad. However, Performance Cycle is close and I needed to get a cushier bike seat anyways (I’m sure to be sore, sore, sore…), so this is not awful.

What is awful is getting biker’s burn. Do you know what biker’s burn is? It’s like a farmer tan, except we’re talking about yours truly, and yours truly BURNS before she TANS. Ergo, I have redness of the skin in patches. And not in normal patches.

When I bike, I wear longer bike shorts (let’s prevent chafing, shall we?), a tank top, fingerless gloves, a watch, my helmet, a pair of wraparound sunglasses, short socks and my shoes (natch). Therefore, I have a burn on my arms down to my wrists and then completely white hands, a white strap where my watch usually is, and on my legs from about mid-thigh to my ankle. Oh, and my nose (not anyplace else on my face).

What is most distracting is the “red thigh-high” effect of the burn on my legs — the bike shorts are longer than regular shorts, so it’s a bit distracting seeing shorts, patch o white skin, then red. I feel like I should make some sort of weird garment such that I can get strategically burnt in all of the white bits, but something tells me that won’t really work out as intended.

Tunes

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We are absolutely and completely not allowed to have mp3 players or any other kind of tune-age on the ride. This is fine, because for my actual get-on-the-bike rides I have not had tunes. I have, however, had tunes in the gym.

Tunes are not optional in the gym.

My gym is loud: the music is drowned out by all of the inane chatter. I was getting ready this morning (I had two beers last night, ergo, gym this morning) and outside the ladies’ locker room it sounded like a cocktail party was in full swing. Tunes are a defensive movement.

Fortunately, I have an iPod shuffle, a friend named Kevin, and a thing for old 80’s tunes. The shuffle was purchased with eleventymillion Thank You points (Thank You, Expedia!), Kevin provided enough music from his personal collection to literally require me to procure an external hard drive, and the iTunes store is chock-a-block full of that 1980’s goodness.

You have to be very careful when picking out your 80’s songs, though.

Here are good examples of workout 80’s songs:

  • The GoGo’s, “Our Lips are Sealed”
  • Aha, “Take on Me”
  • Kajagoogoo, “Too Shy Shy”
  • Julian Lennon, “Too Late for Goodbyes”
  • Violent Femmes, “Blister in the Sun”
  • Nails, “88 Lines about 44 Women”
  • Frankie Goes to Hollywood, “Relax”

Here are some bad songs to have in your shuffle, when you’re trying to maintain 115 rpm:

  • Morrissey, “Every Day is Like Sunday”
  • Berlin, “Take my Breath Away”
  • Bad English, “When I See You Smile”
  • Anything by Air Supply
  • Almost anything by Journey
  • Almost anything by Naked Eyes

More often than not, I find myself reaching over and clicking |> madly in an attempt to get to something a little bit zippier. Fortunately, I have quite a lot of 90’s Grunge. Tell me you can’t do 115 rpm to Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.

Taper

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Tapering is described here (don’t you love Wikipedia? I love Wikipedia. I am totally going to marry it.) I am starting a long taper for the long Ride. This week while my mileage remains the same (112 or so this week), the long distance ride is going to be short — a mere 26 miles on Friday and on Saturday.  This is sad, because I got a new bike and it is really, really awesome. It’s a 2010 Schwinn Fastback, all electric-blue and white, and the only thing that hurts when I get done with nearly 60 miles is my back-end (not my back). I’m getting the seat replaced to help with that.

In an unfortunate turn of events, though, it has come to my attention that due to my nut allergy (yes, I get it, I’m a nut and yet I’m allergic to them) I need to provide my own food.

For two days.

Over 168 miles.

I still have to call the Ride to find out exactly what they want me to do: do I show up with a bunch of Amy’s Organics and tell them to have them nuked and ready? I have no idea how hungry I’ll be or what they will or won’t have that I can eat, nor can they seem to tell me. It’s frustrating, but I get that from a liability standpoint they don’t want someone dropping dead on the Ride.

Kinda defeats the purpose.

Ladies of Leisure

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I have to take a moment to digress from the Elephant In The Room — that I just bought a new bike with a completely different set-up 2.5 weeks from the actual 2-day ride — to discuss my gym.

I’ve changed gyms recently — I formerly lurked at the LA Fitness in Bellevue, but then between driving home, then to the school, acquiring my son, and driving back to Bellevue, and then driving home again, I was contributing needlessly to the oil crisis (and my budget) and therefore switched gyms at a $10 premium to the one by my house. That’s fine, I have the excel worksheet to prove I’m actually saving money.

I live in what I would call a “bubble”. This “bubble”, called Sammamish, is a neighborhood of privilege and McMansions, of 5-year-olds with cellphones and 16-year-olds with new cars. I know this because I grew up here in what is now the only 1970’s rambler that exists in Sammamish, when it was not Sammamish but was “Unincorporated King County”. In those days, the joke was that if you had an emergency you called Domino’s Pizza, because they’d get there faster than the King County sheriff. (And it was true.)

I do not fit in the bubble — or at least not from my point of view — but I live here for two reasons: 1. it’s the house I grew up in and I have configured it exactly the way I like it and it’s far enough from my neighbors that I can do what I like how I like when I like without worrying about what they will think; and 2. It is in an excellent school district, which is not something you monkey around with when you have a kiddo.

At any rate, I was at the gym this morning, applying makeup to face (this is a very necessary part of the morning regimen because if I don’t I scare people) and was noting the following:

1. One lady arrived at the gym, put all of her stuff in front of the nicest shower, and then went to work out. That is to say, she blocked the shower from use by anyone else for an hour. As I was applying makeup she came in and proceeded to go about her business as though this was perfectly okay, despite pointed looks from the rest of us. (This is all the more important when we note that there are only TWO showers in the ladies locker room).

2. Another lady was pitching her “Staging/Decorating” business. In the locker room. At full volume. She was very very carefully explaining to another lady that she didn’t do any organization, really, she just rearranged the furniture a client already has in order to optimize the functional space and/or make it ready for sale. She’s very good at it, and she charges $100 an hour. Figure it takes her 4-5 hours to do a standard house (that’s her figuring) but you know she doesn’t go through paperwork and all of that, that’s more of an Organizer (her friend does that) and they’re going to go into business together (but still keep their separate licenses) etc. etc. etc. And she has her card right there. So handy. During the course of the discussion, though, it was very apparent that her conversational partner could neither get a word in edgewise nor convince her that she understood the first time.

3. It is immediately evident which ladies work and which do not. Those of us who work are there to work out, get showered/changed/made up and are OUT the door. And it’s great that some ladies do not work and have that luxury, truly: just please do not block thoroughfares with your conversations. Move to the side. It’s a gym, ladies, Starbucks is a block away.

I wonder if they notice anyone or anything around them, I really do.

Giddyap

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You don’t change horses in midstream…unless the horse dies. Then you can either sit atop a stinky horse or get a new shiny horse to remove you from the stink and hopefully find you a good saloon… I digress…

I was riding the ol’ Cannondale along the Sammamish River trail Friday morning when I stopped about ten miles in. I had been doing awesome, pacing in the rain at 15mph (hey, for me that is good!) and not minding (well, not much) the puddle of water in my clippy shoes (note to self, get shoe covers). I got water, took off, heard a “wsh-chunk!”, and then a “scrape scrape scrape scrape”.

“Scrape scrape scrape scrape” is not what you want to hear on your bike, in the rain, 10 miles from your car, on a relatively deserted path. “Scrape scrape scrape scrape” kinda sucks. An untrained investigation showed that my rear wheel was out of true, it was scraping against the brake. With no prospect of rescue I rode the thing with a scraping brake in 10mph headwinds in the rain (not uphill but you get the idea) back. My pace slowed to 11mph.

At the earliest opportunity I deposited it with much angst at Mr. Crampy’s.

I am awaiting guidance via phone from Kyle “Mr. Crampy” of Mr. Crampy’s Multisport in Redmond. He called and left note that my bike, my lovely fourth-hand Cannondale, has died. It has died of a dead spoke, a need of wheels, messed up shifters, and the only good thing on it is its frame. I am going to need to purchase a new bike, because it is not safe.

When a man who does Ironmans each year for FUN and is ex-special forces is telling you not to do something because it is not safe, you listen.

I’m a bit nervous though: my old bike was a road bike with mountain bike tires (because skinny tires scare fat girls like me) and there’s this whole budget thing. Also, I have only ONE more long ride in training before the Big Day, and that is this Saturday. Ergo, I need to purchase, fit, and ride this bad boy within the next week.

It’s not as though I had a lot of other things on my plate — my brother got married this weekend, bought that new car, shifting jobs, school and PTA is wrapping up, and all of the myriad of normal life-things that waft in and out of my responsibility cloud. I’m actually quite glad I finally took the bike to someone who alerted me to all of this: I went to the local bike shop (we will not print their name, but they are VERY close to my house) and TOLD them I’d be on this thing for 2 days straight and they charged me 20 bucks and said good enough.

I won’t be going back there. I’m going to ride into the very orange sunset with something from Mr. Crampy’s.

Weighty Issues

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Getting a body fat scale may not have been a morale-engendering idea.

I will not publicly post my body fat percentage, but I even ran it by my doctor and my personal trainer and both flatly refuse to believe it. Both of these ladies are no-nonsense, non BS types (hm… now who do they remind me of?) so I’m going to assume that for some reason, it’s not working correctly.

I have lost body fat according to it. But 1% off of a bajillion percent is a small bps change, you know?

I was chatting with a coworker the other day (he finished an Olympic in 2:22, which is pretty damned good) and he teased me about how he wasn’t quite at the level such that he could “charge” for events. Well, technically I’m not charging, I’m raising money for cancer research, and I doubt that I could finish an Olympic in 2:22.  I’m half tempted to see how the Danskin turns out and then sign up for the Black Diamond Olympic, because then I’d have a challenge (only on the swim and run side — somehow, biking 24 miles is just so not really challenging anymore).

I have guilt. I have guilt that I’m somehow projecting athleticism or fitness that is not verified by my scale (or my figure, no matter what you say Jeff). I work out just enough to train for what I’ve signed on for, and to be able to eat whatever/whenever/however. The only reason I don’t weigh 120 pounds and am not rocking a size two is that I enjoy food and am not so good at the pushing the plate away thing. I do not match the visual standard of someone who does the things I have signed on to do (or even have done — If I told you I have run 3 half-marathons, and a triathlon, in the last two years, you would call bullsh!t on me). It is discomforting.

But as Sophia Loren said, everything you see I owe to pasta.  And I loooooooooove to carboload.

PS — by Saturday I will have spent 112 miles on a bike this week. I chafe. That is all.

Home Stretch

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Considering that I’ve only been in training 4 and a half months, I can call the next five weeks the home stretch. I’m following the training guidelines, and am on a first-name basis with my local bike fixer dude, as my derailer isn’t quite sure if it wants to derail my chain appropriately or derail my ride inappropriately. I blame poor nomenclature for its inadequacies and overcompensation.

I have, as of last week, made the minimum amount of money raised ($2,500) and am aiming to get my goal of $3,000 in. At this point, my goal is to stay on the bike for the two days of riding and hope my rear end doesn’t fall off.

Or maybe I hope it will. Since starting training in January I have gained — wait for it, wait for it — seven pounds. SEVEN. POUNDS. This is insane.

Ok, let’s put this into perspective: I weigh X.

At my lowest weight at this height, I weighed X-19.  At my highest weight at this height, unpregnant, I weighed X+40ish. (Yeah, I’m putting the “ish” there. I wasn’t proud of it, and it was a long long time ago). I am on the slighter end of this sliding scale but it doesn’t make me happy.

I have ordered a body fat scale (hello, whole new heights of things to obsess about!) and I’ve downloaded an app for that, and an app for this. I would really like to get back to at least X-7, which is where I was in the New Year and fine with that. I’d like even more to get back to X-19, or even perhaps X-25; but let’s not get too carried away.

That said, I have a new job 🙂 Perhaps that will help burn some excess calories?

Troubleshot

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Ok, so, first, I just have to get this off my chest: something I really really really really really really wanted, I got. I can’t talk about it just yet, but I got it, and I’m really happy about it, and no it’s not a pony.

Wow, I feel so much better. Don’t you? Ok now on to the real post:

You know when you are at the copy machine and you put your little papers in the feeder and you press the little green button and it goes “whrr…whrr..whrr” just fine and then it goes “splllllllltchunk”? You know that’s bad, right? This is when the copier has managed to take originals 2, 5, and 7 and accordion them quite neatly into some recess you didn’t know existed. You spend literally hours, HOURS, looking through all of the nooks and crannies of the machine, patiently following the screen’s unhelpful, generic tips.

“Lift flap A, remove paper”

(There is no paper under flap “A”).

“Lift partition “B”, remove paper”.

(There is no paper under flap “B”).

“Return all documents to the document feeder”

(You do that, but you ain’t buying it”)

“Whrr…whrrr…spltchunk!”

And you’re back to fiddling with flap “A”, again, aren’t you?

This is much like my back. I inherited my back from my father, along with my unibrow, an acerbic sense of humor, and an intolerance for bad italian food. My back does not do well with ordinary things.

Yesterday I threw my back out, for instance, whilst removing items from the clothes dryer. My clothes dryer is actually on a six-inch platform so this was even less strain than the average person has to subject themselves to. And I was only removing a load of sheets, not a load of lead weights. It is never when I am moving 50-pound pots of roses or helping move sofabeds that I throw my back out. No, I throw it out doing laundry.

This morning I woke up twice as stiff and in need of something to make it go away, so naturally I went to the gym and got on the bike. I usually see a chiropractor and a massage therapist for the back, but they are both out of town, and I am left wishing that I had even the crappy guidelines most copy machines give you in order to fix my back.