Up in Ontario

How I Completed My First Triathlon (Part 1)

I've been a little hesitant to post about completing my first triathlon this past weekend, since it seems to reveal a little too much. The solipsistic echo chamber of blogs is inwardly focused enough without my contributions. But I've received a few requests from people I know who are also training for a triathlon for information on my experience. We're all beginners, so this is by no means an exhaustive analysis of triathlon performance. Rather, it's one winded man's story.

I started training about 2 months ago. By training, I mean that I started doing the events I would be doing in the triathlon - swimming, biking, running. I already was in the habit of going to the gym in the morning before work, so a few mornings I swam or ran instead. I did very little biking at first, relying on the old adage that you never forgot how to ride a bike.

Gradually I increased my distances. About a month from Go Time, my runs averaged out at about 8 kms, my swims around 1.6 kms. Both were longer than the distances I would be required to go, but I figured it made sense to be able to go further since I had to do a different event afterward. I strove to increase my overall fitness and endurance levels.

I kept going to the gym though I decreased the requency from 4 times per week to 3 and then 2, and refocused on supersetting (alternating sets of different exercises targetting opposing muscle groups) to achive aerobic and anaerobic activity. The week before the triathlon I went only once.

At the same time I increased my swimming to about twice a week. I swam mostly at Kits Pool, an outdoor saltwater pool 137.5 M long where most of the triathletes train. At first I swam in running shorts. Then I bought triathlon shorts and whoo wee it made a difference. I began to understand all the fuss over speed suits and hairlessness in swimming. Not that I subscribe to any of it yet, but I can understand it. You feel and you are faster.

(Next week, Part 2: Biking, Nutrition, Preparation and Training the Mind)

Cycling Routes on Google Maps

In my ongoing traithlon training odyssey I have started to plot my cycling courses on the superb Google Maps Pedometer from SueandPaul.com to see how far I'm going. One day I'll get myself a bike computer, but until then, this will do.

The Pedometer lets you find a location on a map, plot your course on the map with additional points, and then it tells you the distance of the course you've plotted. As with all Google Maps applications, it works way better in urban areas than rural areas, since the detail of the maps / images is dependant on population density.

The plotting of courses is also a little tricky to get onto at first - choose to start recording a course in the top left corner then double click to plot a point - but once you're comfortable with it things go fairly smoothly. If you make a mistake, don't start from scratch, choose the other top left corner button and undo your last point.

This morning, I rode out around UBC and back. Here you can see the course of my ride on a satelite image. The only thing missing from the equation is elevation, which makes all the difference in the world. The 23 Ks I rode doesn't seem like much as a raw number, but with the hills out at UBC and up Dunbar, it took the stuffing out of me. Do you have any good courses to share?

(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for pointing me in the direction of this great Google Maps extension.)

Concerts Review: Willie Nelson at GM Place

Last night was a big concert night here at Up in Ontario central. First Willie Nelson and His Family, then Patrick Brealey and the Knives. Both: excellent.

I got the call late in the day. There was an extra ticket for the concert, could I make it? Could I ever. We hit the Willie Nelson show at GM Place just as the opening act, Kathleen Edwards, wound down her set to enthusiastic applause. The lights came up and everyone stretched. We walked around to check out the t-shirt stands and managed to not make the mistake of buying one that would surely never be worn again. I saw more cowboy hats in one night than I have seen cumulatively in the prior 7 years I've lived in Vancouver. Perms seemed to have made a comeback.

A buzz started to grow in the building about 20 minutes later. We returned to our seats, the lights went down, a huge Texas flag appear as backdrop to the stage, the crowd cheered and out came Willie and the band. Over the next hour and forty-five minutes they ran through a catalogue of great songs from the past forty years. After opening with Whiskey River there was
Me and Bobby McGee, Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys, On the Road Again, You Were Always On My Mind, To All the Girls I've Loved Before, Funny How Time Slips Away, Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground , Crazy and If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time. All these great, simple songs played one after the other.

Willie threw his black hat into the crowd after three or four songs and fans in the front rows threw their hats onstage. Every now and then Willie picked one up, wore it for three or four songs then tossed it into the crowd. Through the binoculars we could see he had his hair braids tucked into the waist of his jeans. He wore New Balance 999 running shoes. The man looked like he wouldn't know what to do with pretention.

The band, His Family (as in Willie Nelson and His Family) really does consist of his family, some related by blood such as his sister Bobbie on the piano, and others by friendship. My friend cb, who had called Whiskey River as the opening song, had seen Willie with 250 other people in a small bar in New York, had a dollar bill signed from that concert and knew that Willie always played the same guitar, a broken down beauty named Trigger, told me to watch Willie with his bandana. He'd unwrap it from his guitar, wrap it around his head for four songs, then toss it into the crowd. Sure enough, he did.

On a 40-foot square at about the blue line of GM Place, a small bit of American heartland and mythology lived last night and it was a beautiful thing to see. cb told me that Willie Nelson and His Family play around 250 shows a year. 250 shows a year! A seventy-something musical icon, arthritic in the hands and shoulders, worked hard here last night, doing what he does, because it's what he does, and the people of Vancouver loved him for it.

(Wikipedia has a great Willie Nelson resource page, if you're interested.)

Playing Literary Tag

Most of the time I'm not really into following along with online trends. Quizes and fill-in-the-blanks questionaires don't do much for me, either reading or writing them. But this time, I got tagged by Wendy. So here goes, I'll play.

1. How many books do I own?

On my own, I'd guess around 500. Between the Duck and I, probably around 1,200 live in our apartment.

2. Last Book I Bought:

Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. I bought it to see how prophetic it had been - war is peace, Big Brother is watching you. Orwell's totaltarian vision rings truer now than when I last read this book in high school.

3. Last Book I Read:

The Human Factor by Grahan Greene. An incredible book that deceives with its compact slightness yet packs incredibly rich characters and plots.

4. Five Books That Mean A Lot To Me:

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway

50 Stories and a Piece of Advice by David Arnason

Palimpsest by Gore Vidal

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

5. Tag Five More:

Naturally, the Duck, Chris Radcliffe, Darren Barefoot, Kris Krug and Stephen Osborne.

Incidentally, I read last night at a restaurant called Shebeen in Gastown during the Tour de Gastown bicycle race. The evening was themed as a tribute to Hemingway, since today would be his birthday, and the organizer of the event Lorraine read the old man's speech for accepting the Nobel Award for Literature, which was wonderful and made it hard to read afterward.

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Drafting Lance Armstrong in Outside

At the airport last week on my way to Lake of the Woods for the weekend, I picked up a copy of Outside magazine. The cover package on Lance Armstong caught my attention along with the story on how America's top tester believes drug cheats in sports will never be caught. Both articles delivered. I recommend picking up a copy if you're interested at all in the current state of drugs in sports, and if you, like me, are in awe of the lunatics competing in the Tour de France.

The most-revealing part for me was the sidebar on Johan Bruyneel, the one voice Lance Armstrong hears as he rides. Bruyneel becomes Armstrong's internal dialogue for the duration of the race, and this transcript somehow gets into your own head when you read it and you can start to imagine what it must be like to sustain the hyper intensity of the racer during the race.

In only tangentially related news, I finally bought myself a road bike on the weekend to ride on the triathlons I'll be competing in this summer. A shiny new Trek 1200 and I sped through the streets of Vancouver this morning, along Spanish Banks, up the cursed hill to UBC, around the sign for the UBC Farm, which I have been meaning to visit on a Saturday afternoon for their market, and back along 16th Avenue, topping out at an estimated 65 kmph, passing cars on the downhill. Woo wee. If you just happen to be in Abbotsford this Sunday (hey, there's a chance), come out to the Aldergrove Credit Union Triathlon and cheer my winded ass on.

And since there's been a lot of chitty chat about cycling around here lately, the Duck found this wonderful piece of information, also on the Outside magazine website:

Q) When cyclists draft each other, does the drafting cause drag on the leader? -- Ed Reiff, Skokie, Illinois

A) Actually, everybody benefits from drafting—the lead rider just benefits less. It's well known that the leader, by cutting wind resistance, makes life smoother for the rest of the pack—at race speeds, 17 percent easier for the second rider, 38 percent for the next, and 40 percent for the fourth position on back. But the guy fronting the pace line doesn't do more work than he would if cycling by himself; in fact, he uses 3 percent less energy. According to Chester Kyle, a Long Beach, California–based aerodynamicist who's designed ultrasleek clothes for Lance Armstrong, a cyclist riding solo creates several drag-inducing vortices around him, as well as low-pressure cavities that suck him backwards. If there's a rider clinging to his back wheel, those anomalies in the slipstream straighten out. The same goes for freeway driving: Tailgaters, oddly enough, save you gas.

There is no drafting in triathlons. You get yourself disqualified for that kind of shite.

Patrick Brealey & the Knives Concert Announcements

I'm just back from Lake of the Woods, where I spent four days swimming and fishing. The mercury hit 36C in the daytime and dropped to a low of 26C in the evening. As my grandfather says, it was hot as the hubs of Hades.

In my inbox when I returned, a note from Patrick Brealey awaited, announcing upcoming Patrick Brealey & the Knives concerts. Regular Up in Ontario blog readers will be familiar with my laudatory remarks for PB & the Ks, and if you haven't seen them put on a show, well, let's just say you owe it to yourself to do so. Hear a sample song from the Official Patrick Brealey & the Knives website if you're into sampling from the bowl, or come out to the concert if you want to hear the raw, straight goods. From the esteemable P. hisself:

Hey everybody,

Good news! You don't have to hold your breath any longer wondering when Patrick Brealey & the Knives are going to play another show. The future is now. In fact, there are two shows to tell you about. Count 'em. Two. So lean in tight and I'll give you the scoop, ol' fashioned email-style.

The first show is hittin' this week. Friday, July 15th to be exact. So come to the Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir at Seymour) on the 15th and not only get a dose of Patrick Brealey & the Knives but also hear my favourite Vancouver band, The Yoko Casionos, and my favourite Vancouver band I was once a member of, The Salteens. It's going to be awesome. Like, really.

Next up, it's Thursday, July 21st, also at the Railway Club. That's right, two shows in less than a week. Man, you are in luck! Now you have no excuses. The show on the 21st will also be your chance to hear local rhapsodic popsters, Cinderpop, as well as Griffin House, a killer singer-songwriter straight from Nashville. It will also be awesome. Like, really really.

So there you have it. Hope you can make it to a show, if not both. I trust you are making the most of your summer.

Bye for now,
Patrick
www.patrickbrealey.com

The Railway Club (579 Dunsmuir)
Friday, July 15 lineup: Patrick Brealey & the Knives (10pm), The Yoko Casionos, The Salteens - $10
Thursday, July 21 lineup: Griffin House, Cinderpop, Patrick Brealey & the Knives (12pm)

12 Apostles of Australia, Minus One

A few years ago I spent 6 months working, travelling and living in Australia. One of the highlights of the trip was when the Duck arrived and we spent two weeks touring the southeast part of the country, including the cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and the beautiful australian countryside, with a few spectacular days on the Great Ocean Road, a make-work project for returned WWI war veterans, which runs along the south coast through some incredible scenery.

One of the renowed attractions along the Great Ocean Road was the 12 Apostles, free-standing, towering pillars of rocks eroded away from the limestone cliffs that border the shore. A viewing tower sits out on one of the Apostles and from its vantage point tourists can look at Apostles to their left and right as the waves from the open ocean crash below. A few days ago one of the apostles collapsed. The photos below were taken about a minute apart by tourists standing on the aforementioned viewing tower.