Sailing with Dad.

I call my parents about once a week, which I think is good for a guy. My mom has been out of town (Dallas) for about 3 weeks, so I called my dad and talked to him about how great the Rangers were doing and how excited we were for them. Soon the conversation switched to when mom and dad were planning on coming down to Houston, the trip that we have been planning since August. Finally I just suggested that he come tomorrow, and dad couldn't really think of a good reason not to, so he said he would pack his things and come down for a day so that we could go sailing.

The last time I had been sailing, the whole family went to Galveston. We sailed around the bay in a 30 ft yacht for the day, with a captain and everything. I still remember him with a huge beard and a captain's hat, but no parrot, to my dismay. This trip would be a bit different. Once I started looking at the costs of renting such a boat, I soon decided that a 16' luger with no outboard motor would be plenty for Dad and I to mess around with in Clear Lake and/or Galveston Bay.

Sunday morning we drove down to the dock after sleeping in until 9am (super late for me!). Dad got some sandwiches at Subway while I checked out the boat and payed the charter dude for the sailboat rental.

We chatted with the charter dude for a little bit about Dad’s racing days and how it would be good to get back out on the water. We were loading the boat up and about to shove off, but I suppose Dad “shoved off” a little too hard and lost his balance, falling over backward in to the water! He was unhurt except for his pride and soon got out of the water and on to dry land. The funny part was to see the demeanor of the charter guy get a little bit more nervous about letting these land ‘lubers take his boat out!

It was very difficult to get the boat out due to the strong wind that was coming straight from the direction we wanted to go. This meant that we had no way to get the sails up before the wind would take us straight into another boat in the dock. I paddle as hard as I could while Dad messed with the sails that weren’t put up correctly. Because of the wind, I couldn’t paddle hard enough to keep us from hitting parts of the dock and other boats around us, and my anxiety quickly grew. I kept thinking to myself, “Maybe the old man has forgotten how to do this, and we are screwed!”

After about 15 minutes of knocking around and messing with the sails, we got the sails up and started on a port tack. The wind was pretty gusty and Dad was not used to the boat yet. Because of this, he kept laying the boat over just a little too much, and water would rush over the gunwale and onto our feet. My anxiety at this point started to increase exponential, as described by the chart below, which shows # of expletives coming out of my mouth vs liters of water in the boat. I thought we were about to capsize!!

Soon we had the boat under control and I took a turn at the rudder. I was slow at first, being very cautious with how much list I would allow, so we crawled around the bay, even though the wind was pretty strong. Soon I became comfortable enough to let the boat go and we started to have a lot of fun.

During our cruise we also got to see a neat air show, with 5 jets flying around, looping and twirling in what looked to be an impossibly tight formation. AS the sun was setting, I felt like this was a great day with good father/son bonding. It was good to have him down!

My morning commute to work

I have been biking to work around 3-4 days a week, and have really been loving doing it. I have not ridden my bike on a work day other than going to and from work because of not having enough time. Commuting to work by bike is saving by fitness, and I have much more fun than sitting in traffic. Here is a link to a map of my route! Or just look below.........

The route I take is almost 14 miles, and takes me about 50 minutes. Driving to work usually takes me 30 minutes, if there are no wrecks. The way I see it, I am giving 40 minutes of time to biking on days that I commute, but get a solid 2 hours of cycling workout!! At 8 hours of biking during the workweek, this means that I have the potential to ride 16 hours a week during peak training. The is more than enough to keep myself in racing shape.

Right now I am taking my morning commutes really slow and easy (the offseason!!), but can potentially use this time for interval training and sustained efforts. Because of the complications of time constraints, I am contemplating getting a coach to help design a workout plan that really works well and maximizes the time that I do get on the bike.

I encourage EVERYONE to ride to work if you have the means. If you live in Austin, you have no excuse. Things like showers and lockers help immensely, but a lot of companies don't have these facilities..... yet. I think people should ask for these things! Commuting by bike is great for the environment (very 'green' policy) and help keep employees in shape, reducing medical costs and sick days. The initial investment of a small locker room and a bike rack would more than pay out over time.

Traffic Waves

Dear Aggressive Drivers,

I sit on the 9th floor of my office building. For some reason, I am told I am extremely lucky to be assigned a window office, with a view of I-10 Westward into Katy. The eastbound (toward downtown) lanes of this monolithic highway are just 100 yards away from the office building.

Because I get to work around 7:30am, I get to see people commuting to downtown from 7:30 - about 9:00am each morning. Most of the time the traffic seems to be going around 40-50 mph, but sometime the cars come to a standstill in every lane. Yesterday morning, I glanced over to see a car merge terribly (probably without a blinker), which caused the cars behind to have to swerve and slam on the breaks. This caused a huge traffic jam, even though no accident had occurred.

What was interesting is that the traffic acted as a "wave," propagating backward. What I mean is that on I-10, at some point there was a line of cars that slowed down across all lanes of trafiic. Naturally the cars behind them had to slow down as well, causing the people behind them to slow, etc, etc. The first line of cars then started to speed up again, and then the next line sped up and so on. So from where I looked from above this debacle, it looked as if there was a slow moving, higher density mass of cars moving backwards along the highway. Very interesting.

As I continued to glance every once in a while, it was cool to see these traffic waves propagate down the highway. Almost beautiful, except for the fact that it was a big mass of commuting, polluting cars that caused the phenomena.

It made me realize that a lot of traffic is caused by aggressive driving, you. You want to go where you want to go as fast as possible, and no one is more important than you. If you can merge into a lane and get one or two more cars ahead, even though you are being dangerous and aggressive, you will. Your action creates traffic, which will make commutes for everyone longer. The problem is that you, as an aggressive driver, do not care about this because the traffic that you create will not affect you. What will affect you is the aggressive driver ahead of them that pulls the same stupid move and causes traffic for them (I also find that slow moving traffic makes everyone more aggressive, exacerbating the problem). You, aggressive driver, are too stupid to figure out that IF the whole culture of trying to get to your location as fast as possible, no matter what, was eliminated, then they would actually get to their destination faster.

This seems counterintuitive at first, but trust me it's true. Traffic is caused by fluctuations, which are caused by aggression. If everyone would go a common speed, everyone would get home faster.

I think this is the same reason people get so irate about bicycles riding in the road. It causes their car journey to be 10-30 seconds longer than it would be otherwise, and so they think it is appropriate to put the cyclist's life in danger.

So, drivers of fury, please be kind and considerate to yourself and others, and drive with less aggression. Thanks,

Me

Plyometrics

The "Off Season" of cycling is almost upon me. There is one more race that I will compete in this year, the Texas Road Race Championships, at FT. Hood. After that, I will plunge head long into training for next spring.

Most people in cycling take a true off season, meaning they are off the bike for 2 weeks to a month, and then starting their preparation for the next spring. After reading Chris Carmichael's book on training, I have decided that I will try not taking a dedicated off season, and continue to ride all winter. This works well because most of my riding is to and from work, which I would not want to stop for fear of having to drive five days a week (which I haven't done yet since I started work!). My hope is that instead of having to work from a moth off deficit, I can use the base miles from last year to build to a strong 3's racer. The only problem that I will surely face is burn out, but after assessing my mental state (taking 5 seconds to tell my self to HTFU) I have decided that I will not burn out.

So for the off season I will be running, cycling, and doing routines of plyometrics. I learned of plyometrics from a tweet from Lance about his workouts last fall. I didn't take to them to much last year, as I was trying to work on sustained power and endurance. I was very successful at increasing this (i.e. going from last to podium in TT's), but lost a lot of my top end power for sprinting, which resulted in less than desirable finishes near the end of the year. This year, I hope that weight lifting and plyometrics early in the training season will increase that top end power.

For now, I will not use a coach. It's not really the money that would be spent on a coach, but the need to be self-reliant and have only one person to blame if my plan is unsuccessful: myself. The only problem is that I know that when I have a coach or mentor, I tend to keep on track better and not get lazy or complacent. I think these are the things that could derail my success for next year the most.

I'll plan in time to work on my ever improving golf game as well. Uncle Larry gave me a really nice set for a wedding present and I have been out 4-5 times to Memorial Park to practice already.

The Married Life

There have been significant changes in my life over the last couple of weeks, first of which is marrying..... wait, what was her name? Oh yeah, ally!

The wedding, on Sept 11, was really beautiful and I really enjoyed getting to see so many people from the past. At one point, I was looking over the crowd of people gathered to celebrate with ally and I. I couldn't help but start to think about how all of these people had affected me and made me who I am today at some point: some more than 10 years ago, and some that I had met only months ago. It was neat to see the melding of two random groups of people, brought together by our marriage.

The best thing to see was how well the bridesmaids and groomsmen got along. None of the girls had met the guys, and they all only knew of each other through stories that Ally and I had told. Even though the situation was potentially awkward, they all got along very well and had a good time talk about memories they had with Ally and I.

Many thanks to ally's mom, Bernardita, my mom, my aunt, Sharky (wedding planner), and to Paul Dorsey, just to name a few.

Life has gotten back to normal here in Houston. I hadn't ridden my bike to work in about a week, and I had forgotten how much I love/hate making the commute on two wheels. My bike is slowly starting to show the wear and tear of not being cleaned as often, as it is really hard to clean the bike in an apartment with no garden hose available. Maybe I will have a post on how I manage this feat.

Ally and I also got a dog! Her name is Snookie, named after the infamous MTV star, Nicole "Snookie" Polizzi. Snookie the dog is not exactly like her namesake, but is very energetic and puppy-ish. We got her from the houston pound, and I believe she is some type of German Shepard Dog/[something else] mix.

I am in the process of teaching her more complicated tricks such as stay and roll over, because she mastered sit and shake within the first week. She is also pretty much potty trained. I can't get her to stop barking when we leave the house, b/c I'm not sure how to correct something that I am not there for. Having a dog definitely keeps things interesting and noisy around our moderately spacious apartment.

The next race I have coming up is in late October, and is the Texas State Road Race in Ft Hood. The road race is in a military base, so they can completely close the roads, which should be fun. I am really looking forward to it, but I already have my eye set on next year. I will be racing with Shama Cycles, and will hopefully have a year of winning 3's races.

Houstonian Times

I have been living in Houston for over a month, and my first thought when someone asks me how that is going is always, "We'll it's not as bad as I thought it would be." Ally and I went to the beach a couple weekends back and I found a new love for skim-boarding. Ally is thrilled that I found another hobby!! (NOT.)

At Galveston Beach

Good things about H-Town:

-I like my apartment! It is starting to feel like home and I really like the location.

- I like the people I work with. They are friendly and knowledgeable and very excited to have me around

-I like biking still! I was really worried that there would be no opportunity for me to ride in the hugest, scariest concrete jungle there is, but it has actually been okay. Yes, I get honked at from an irate driver about once a week, but as one of my cycling buddies said, "If they're honking at you, they can see you." My riding mostly consists of riding to and from work, which is about 1.5-2 hrs a day right now.

Flower box in our apartment

Bad things about H-tiz:

-The weather. It rains almost every day. And it is very unpredictable in a calculable sort of way. For instance, it rains every day, but only for maybe and hour or two. This invariably seems to always be when I am riding home from work. It reminds me of Alaska.

-Traffic. The off chance I am in my car, there is traffic around the galleria between 6:00am and 8:00pm. It's not the worst I've every seen (read: Austin) but it's still pretty bad.

I have been racing in the Memorial Park Crit, which happens every Wednesday over the summer. The first week I did it turned into a disaster when I crashed in a break, almost shattering my collarbone. I am now known as "that Texas rider that went down really hard in the break." Already a legend at the MP crit? Well, no not quite....

The Texas part is soon to change because I have found a new team!! Shama cycles. I have been looking for a fun, easy-going 3/4 team to race with until a time where I decide to move to 2's (~2 years). Philip Shama is a great guy with a really neat bike shop near my apartment that I can ride to. I can't wait to start racing with those guys. Here is the website, check it out!

This weekend, Ally and I will be traveling to Dallas to see the Parentals and do wedding stuff. I will be glad when I don't have to go to Dallas every other weekend to do wedding stuff! It gets old being away from home and not cycling every weekend.

Moving Day

Today I move to Houston to start my professional career and married life.

I will be living in the Galleria area of Houston, by the Westpark Tollroad and 610, at a place called Broadstone Uptown Lofts.

I think I will love living with Ally, although there is certainly a lot of changes that come with being married and living with someone. Certainly it is different from a roommate, where if you get tired or cranky you can just shut yourself off in your room. With a 1 bedroom apartment, this is harder. I think that we will do great once we get settled in.

Hopefully when we get moved in, I want to go sailing in the bay with my parents and go to the beach. It has been a long time since I have seen the Gulf.