Sunday, April 25, 2010

My Own Private Biathelon

I'm finally getting back to mountain biking which has been a passion of mine

I had stopped for a while partially because my bike got stolen out of my locked shed (grrr - new bike lives in the house now), but also because the braking was hurting my hands and wrists.
Well during my time off my wrists healed and the technology of the brakes has improved dramatically with the invention of disc brakes for bikes. So I got a newer version of my bike (a Fischer Hoo Koo E Koo - it's not just the name I like I swear - it's a really cool bike too.) but I haven't done a whole lot with it this year because of the weather.

ANYway back to what I was going to write about. When I'm on a ride I'm frequently on my own and though I'm working to change that, it does have some interesting benefits. The best of which is that I'm not constantly comparing myself to someone else. I can feel good about what I've accomplished without the "what if"s and "if only"s of: what if I could keep up with person X or if only I climb as well as person Y.

My ride was 10 miles at Mt. Diablo in Mitchell Canyon. 1 of those miles I pushed the bike up 800' of elevation. The cool thing was that I wasn't trying to keep up with someone else and I found myself mentally embracing the bike pushing because it's exercising different muscles (hamstrings in particular) that don't usually get as worked out when biking. So in a way I was doing a bike/walk biathelon of sorts if you will and what's intriguing me is that I'm wondering if this is a good workout for climbing training since you are working out more of your leg that you would if you're just biking which is very quad intensive.

May be I should ask Courtenay of Body Results for her opinion about this though I'm not a client right now.

Anyway the best part of all that bike pushing was that I got to go down on the bike. Wheeee! I love this as I hate walking down steep, gravely hills.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

What "There's no there, there" Really Means

When Gertrude Stein alledgedly referred to Oakland at "There's no there, there." It's my understanding that she was actually referring to the fact that her family's home was no longer there. I know exactly how she feels.

I grew up on 2 1/2 acres. A rambling, basic, but large for the time, ranch house, and a large orchard which I've written about how I got to experience being a child slave laborer. Though I was paid well in terms of horse time, so I was properly bought off.

To fund my parents' retirement that place was sold and is now 4 McMansions. This is the closest I'll ever go to it:



It's the one place in the world that I won't go, which is really a strange feeling. Something that played such a large role in my early life just isn't there anymore. Many years ago my father tried to find the place he grew up in Tiger, GA and ran into a similar thing. The house just wasn't there anymore and he seemed kinda thrown by that. Muttering "You really can't go home again." I think I've taken that to heart. I know I shouldn't go there. It would just hurt.

My house would have been on the right of the photo and the rest was horse corral and then the orchard. Mostly of oranges, but a fair number of avocado trees as well. Ironically being a typical picky kid I didn't like avocados until I left home and experienced the heaven of guacamole. But at least I was and remain heavily into fruit so I wasn't a lost cause.




Saturday, April 17, 2010

Pouting about Blogger

Up until now, blogger.com has let you host your blog on your own web site. I love this since I pay for a web site and why not host it there? But apparently those of us who do that are essentially too high maintenance (to very loosely paraphrase them) and so now they are insisting on hosting the blogs. It may look like it's on my site but it's smoke and mirrors actually.

I am bummed about this since I think it really should be on my own site but I haven't taken the time to actually learn enough about WordPress (blogging software that is available through Verio - my host) to make use of it. I do keep an unlisted training blog and maybe I can use that to see if I can figure things out. I made one attempt and really didn't get anywhere.

Though just to rub it in when I published this entry it published immediately and with FTP to my site there was always a delay.

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