Return to Racing

 On September 25th, I participated in the Giant Acorn olympic distance triathlon at Lake Anna State Park in Virginia. Lake Anna is about a two hour drive south-west from Baltimore, as shown below.

It was my first time racing in about two years, so expectations were set accordingly and I went in with the following plan:

1. Use the swim as a warm-up.
2. Stay relaxed on the bike until I finished two bottles (one sports drink, one water), then think about pushing it.
3. Stay safe and have fun!

The swim start was delayed due to fog on the lake, so the first racers set out closer to 9am than to the originally scheduled start time of 8am. I think the race directors made a good call since about 45% of the swim was away from shore.

I stuck to the plan, started near the back, and stayed wide (and way clear) of other racers on the swim. The water was warm and visibility was pretty good after the fog burned away. There was a giant inflatable wavy arm man (of the kind one would expect to see at a used car dealership during a Labor Day sale) positioned just to the right of the timing mats for the swim finish. From ~700m away, I had a good target for sighting my return to shore.

The bike ride started with a pretty good climb from beach-level out to the park exit. The race organizers suggested (appropriately) that athletes should start in a low gear. Sure enough, I saw some riders struggling to start going up the first hill. The course was a lolly-pop shape, covering about 25 miles on rolling country roads. A spectator named Joe who was taking pictures (and who met Chelsea) captured a shot of me on the bike at the end of the bike course. You can tell it's the end because:

1. I'm going downhill.
2. The bottles are empty.
   

 The run was a two-lap course within the park, consisting of a loop with an out-and-back side spur. The run course began by climbing the same hill that the bike course started on, which meant that racers had the opportunity to test themselves on that hill three times (once on the bike, twice on the run)!

I wound up with the following splits and overall time:

• Swim       27:28.9
• T1          3:20.2
• Bike     1:17:43.9
• T2          2:07.6
• Run        50:30.3

Total        2:41:11.1

After two years away from racing, it felt good to go out and do an event like this. To make the run extra special, I paced things out such that the last six miles of a September 100-mile running challenge posed by a friend from Fargo took place during the race's 10k.

Thoughts on empathy and nuclear weapons

About 100 years ago, chemists and physicists began developing models of atomic structure that have remained largely unchanged through today.  At that time, the idea that negatively charged electrons orbit around a positively charged and far more massive nucleus was a novel idea.  Some experts greeted it with skepticism.  However, after careful experimentation using new techniques, it became clear that previous models of atomic structure simply did not hold up.

About 300 years ago, Isaac Newton developed calculus while applying mathematical models to the motion of physical objects.  That area of study, now covered in high school and freshmen level college physics courses, is referred to as Newtonian Mechanics.

Newton was a very clever guy, maybe one of the most brilliant scientists of all time.  Why then, did he not discover the structure of the atom?  He certainly had the requisite mental capacities; curiosity, ingenuity, conceptual creativity, logic, and deductive reasoning.  I hypothesize that what he lacked was the technology, the new techniques that were made available in the early 20th century, that enabled other scientists to understand the atom 200 years later.

What does this have to do with sensitivity and safe spaces?

A number of friends and acquaintances have expressed varying degrees of concern about the results of the US elections last month.  It took me some time to understand how it could be there was so much fear and apprehension about the incoming president when I felt so little.

Part of the reason is that I am an able-bodied, straight, white, educated, land-owning, employed, male.  With the exceptions of having a famous family name or overwhelming wealth, I grew up with every advantage.  I've never felt like I was treated differently in any way because of some aspect of who I was.

I am normal.  I am, in some ways, like Isaac Newton.  We both are curious, able-bodied, white, educated, employed men.  He and I also don't come pre-configured with sufficiently sensitive technologies to understand everything going on around us.

While it took 200 years for scientific measurement technology to align with physical reality and concepts that experts in the field could understand, a person today can practice empathy with minimal effort and essentially no cost.

I set out writing this post with a hope of using an analogy to describe a situation in a very non-threatening way.  It's not clear to me if it has translated as well from my brain to the computer as I had hoped.  It certainly turned out longer.  At any rate, I hope it might lead to some useful discussion or prompt a thought or two.

If you made it this far, you deserve a funny picture as a reward.  Here is a photo of the cat telling me to hush.

Muenster says I'm rambling and need to stop.

Thinking about some numbers

Yesterday, I ran across a video in which the NRA accuses the president of being a hypocrite for simultaneously advocating arms control laws while he and his family are protected by armed secret service personnel.

How much of a hypocrite is he for receiving protection?  I am not aware of any units with which to measure or quantify hypocrisy, but I did find some numbers and facts to think about:

Crime rates are often normalized to instances per hundred thousand person years.  In other words, in a year in a place with 100 thousand people, this is a measure of how many times the crime in question might be expected to occur.

New York City in 2010 had 6.4 homicides per 100k people.

Canada in 2006 had 1.9 homicides per 100k people.

Japan in 1989 had 1.1 homicides per 100k people.

The United States has been around since 1776.

This year is 2013.

The United States has existed for 237 years.

The United States has one president at a time.

1 [person] * 237 [years] = 237 [person years].

Four presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) were assassinated while in office.

( 4 [homicide] / 237 [person years] ) * ( 100k / 100k ) =
1687 [homicide] / [100k person years]

Being president is 263 times more dangerous than living in New York City.

As a point of reference, Wikipedia's US Armed Forces page claims there are approximately 1.456 million active duty personnel in the US military.  At the same time, icasualties.org/ reports a total of 6661 US military fatalities (combined) in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

1.456M [personnel] * 12.25 [years] = 17.836 million [ person years ]

( 6661 [fatalities] / 17.836 million [person years] ) * ( 100k / 100k ) =
37.5 [fatalities]/[100k person years]

Being president is about 45 times more dangerous than being on active duty in the US military when the country is conducting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of this analysis, I conclude that the president is not a hypocrite in wanting some protection, or at least in accepting some if he wants it or not.  Based on the numbers, turning down presidential protection would be downright foolish, just like walking unaware through a New York subway, Baghdad, or Kabul.

Holiday challenges

My gym in Boulder had a holiday rowing challenge.  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, athletes put in 100km on the rowing machines.  Being in Fargo, I had no problem with doing a majority of my exercise indoors.  As a result, I became very familiar with the rowing machines at the NDSU student wellness center gym.

I finished the challenge a couple days early.  Two of the toughest sessions were 5km time trials.  While a 5km on the bike might only take about 6 minutes, 5km on the rower takes about 18 minutes and involves quite a bit more suffering.  My final 5km effort involved changing the damper (resistance) setting on the rower every 500m and going to a lighter and lighter damper setting over the course of the effort, while maintaining a consistent pace.

After the rowing challenge ended, I decided to take up a new challenge as I wait for warm weather to return to the frozen tundra of the north.  My next idea was to run 100km between Christmas and Martin Luther King Jr Day.  I was able to knock off a few kilometers in California while visiting my folks for Christmas, and have been continuing to chug along here in Fargo.  Most of the running has been outside in <20F weather, while some has been on the indoor track at the NDSU wellness center.  In a few cases, the "run" has been little more than slogging along in sub-5F temperatures.

Below is a plot of my progress toward completing the running challenge (the blue line), along with a plot of the progress required if I were to run the exact same distance every day from Christmas until the MLK holiday (the red line).  As long as the blue line stays above the red line, I am on pace to finish this challenge too.

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Thoughts based on a recent Fargo Forum opinion piece

In the December 30th edition, in an opinion letter titled "A ‘tired’ defense still valid", the author argues that weaponry is needed to protect freedom from government-imposed tyranny and goes so far as to imply firearm owners might have to rebel against a government that tries to implement arms controls.

Tyranny is defined as: cruel and oppressive government or rule.  There are existing restrictions on gun possession.  For example, Title 18, United States Code, Section 922 (g) & (n) prohibits felons from possessing firearms.  At the same time, the 8th Amendment guarantees Americans will not be subject to cruel or unusual punishments.  It is a short logical leap to conclude a government that implements firearm control is not automatically a tyranny.  Put away your plans for armed revolt; we don't need them!

The Jeff Cooper line of thought made sense in an isolated, post-revolution, frontier community where a small conspiracy of armed perpetrators could use force to inflict their will on a small unarmed population.  That model does not scale well to a country with over 300 million people spread over nearly 4 million square miles of land, with widespread deployment of modern electronic communication systems, law enforcement agencies, and a justice system that works pretty well most of the time.

I am reminded of a conversation with a USMC veteran who told me the most potent person in an infantry platoon is not the rifleman.  It is the radio operator.  Our best defence against tyranny is not a handful (or even a large number) of citizens with rifles.  It is several hundred million well-informed citizens who speak up if they see something wrong and make good choices about who they elect to office.

Subterranean cycling and a bit of word-play

Three weeks ago, I arrived in North Dakota after an uneventful drive from Boulder, CO.  The new job started right away, and I'm finally getting into a somewhat stable weekly routine.  I've even found a coffee shop where I can sip tea and use the complimentary WiFi to check e-mail, read news, and compose new blog posts.

This image of the North Dakota flag was copied from Wikipedia, a fantastic source for information about most everything you can think of.

 Yesterday we had some snow fall in the afternoon with a little accumulation overnight, so when I got up this morning, I became a subterranean cyclist.  I filled up a bottle of water, unfolded the rollers in front of the TV and stereo in the basement, started a DVD from Netflix, and rode tempo until the credits ran.  Oofda!  When spring comes around, I think I'll either be reasonably fast or have hung up the bike and quit.  On the plus side, the probability of being hit by a motor vehicle while riding in the basement is small, probably in the same neighborhood as the probability of being hit by an aircraft.

Towards the end of the week, I managed to make two jokes that were generally well-received.  The first was at work Friday afternoon when a system engineer miss-typed and assigned a project requirement to "menufacturing".  I pointed out that is where one would go before opening a restaurant.  Then on Saturday morning grandma asked where a bus, parked in the mall parking lot, was from.  The side of the bus read Beaver Bus Lines.  I concluded, "It's from some dam place."  Beaver Bus Lines is a charter bus tour service based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The tea in my cup is running low now, and it's about time for lunch, so I'm going to log off and find some food.

New Jersey

Not the state (I drove through there for the first time last June; a story for another time) but what I picked up this past Friday at track cycling nationals in Carson, California.

Last week from Thursday through Sunday, USA Cycling hosted the 2012 elite and paralympic track nationals at the Velo Sports Center at the Home Depot Center.  I raced a pair of individual endurance events from the elite program, and then piloted tandem for Chester Triplett, a visually impaired cyclist based in North Carolina.

In order, my schedule was as follows:
Scratch race qualifier and final on Thursday
Paralympic 4km pursuit on Friday
Points race qualifier and final on Saturday
Paralympic 1km time trial on Sunday

I rode small gears for the scratch races on Thursday, did just enough work in the qualifier to make the final, and then treated the final as a hard opener to make my legs primed and ready for the pursuit on Friday.  The scratch race final wound up being rather fast, with the field splintering inside the last 20 laps (of of 60 laps total for the 15km race).  I finished 12th place out of 24 starters, with the dubious designation of being the last-placed rider who was on even laps with the eventual winner, Ian Moir.

On Friday, Chester and I put a big gear on the tandem, affectionately nicknamed The Battle Tank and warmed up for a 4km pursuit.  We opened up the first kilometer of the ride a little faster than optimal, but were able to throttle back our intensity and settle into a pace we could sustain for the duration of the race.

Mid-way through the race, we caught Kevin (and pilot Robert) which clinched the win.

We ended up posting a 4:37.7 in the pursuit.  We were both quite satisfied with that time for our first pursuit together.

On Saturday, I was back on the single bike for a points race qualifier in the morning and final in the evening.  The qualifier went smoothly.  Like the scratch race, I rode patiently and did just enough work to make sure to qualify for the final.  The final was 160 laps of high intensity suffer-fest.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Also like the scratch race, I intended for the points race to leave my legs primed and ready for the 1km time trial on Sunday.

The kilo was early in the afternoon on Sunday, immediately following the team sprint event for the women.  A picture of our kilo start is shown below.

Kilo starts are hard on tandems.  Chester and his former pilot broke a bike once doing a standing start like this.

Our final time in the kilo was a 1:11.0; not what we had hoped for.  However, there were quite a few easily-identified areas where we could have done better, so there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick for next time.

On Monday I hit the road from LA and drove across southern California, through Las Vegas, cut the corner of Arizona, across Utah, and back into Colorado.  There was a closure on I-70 in Glenwood Springs, so I was forced off the road and took a little down time before completing the drive to the front range.  Now I'm back in Boulder for a short window before taking off to my next adventure with the new job in North Dakota.

Back on June 25th, I drove from Washington DC to Boston in a day, and in doing so traversed New Jersey on the New Jersey Turnpike.  I think I like this new jersey better...

To quote Hannibal from the A Team: I love it when a plan comes together!

Hackfest!

Last night I attended a hackfest at Quick Left in downtown Boulder.  Teams were given SparkFun Inventor's Kits with an Arduino Uno starter board and some sensors and transducers with which to build projects during an evening of hacking fun.

A trio of web developers from New York and I formed a team, but they took off early to have a bite to eat and attend a tequila tasting, so I pressed along on my own.  We set out to build a system that would use a light sensor (eventually two light sensors) and a servo to track the position of a flashlight.

After about two hours of work, it was working!  See the video below.

I spent the last 45 minutes or so tweaking the code to smooth the motion of the servo and light sensors by adding hysteresis and a delay after writing a new position to the servo before re-starting the main loop (and re-reading the analog values from the light sensors).

With more time, there are a handful of straightforward improvements to be made:
- Add gain to track faster when the light is moving quickly.
- Build a more symmetrical light guide (something not pieced together with a slip of paper and scotch tape).
- Perform a more careful calibration of the light sensor circuits.
- Add some signal conditioning to the light sensors to take advantage of the full input range of the ADC (analog to digital converter) on the Arduino board.
- Refine the servo control to improve motion stability and device reliability.

Some of the other teams had a lot more software/application development background than I did, and put together some really neat projects.  I think my favorite was an R/C car that was driven by an Arduino that interprets text messages.  Anybody could send a text message with an 's', 'g', 'l', or 'r' (for stop, go, left, right) and make the car drive around.  I think they tied for 3rd place, but if the judging were based on positive audience reaction, they would have been the clear winners.

All in all, it was a fun evening and a nice introduction to the Arduino platform.  I anticipate some interesting projects in the future; making the Arduino work with other circuitry, sensors, and actuators to do interesting things.

If any of the other hackfest participants find their way to this blog, please do feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a message if you need some awesome hardware added to your next project.

New job

Last week I accepted a new job with a company in North Dakota and will be re-locating in October.  It will be a significant change from living in Boulder, but I'm ready to move on to the next chapter in my life (and career).  After a couple years of splitting my efforts between cycling and trying to be an engineer, I am going to put bike racing on the back burner and turn most of that effort towards engineering.

I'm going to keep this short, in hopes of getting back into the habit of posting regularly.  The idea is to keep posts shorter but more frequent.

Before heading to North Dakota, I will make a trip to California to compete in the 2012 paralympic track cycling national championships as a tandem pilot for a visually impaired cyclist from North Carolina.  We will compete in the 4km pursuit and 1km time trial.

After having a later start to track riding this year compared to previous years, I took a while getting my track legs going, but am feeling pretty good now.

In the tradition of including a picture or two with each post, here are a pair of wildlife pictures I took in the last week or so:

The neighbor's cat is totally relaxed, even in the presence of three deer (there was one standing to my left when I took this picture) and a nerd.

I rescued these raccoons from the dumpster a week ago last night.  They had climbed in looking for food but then couldn't climb out.

April Fools!

I have quit my job as an electrical engineer, given up the bicycle, and joined the circus as a professional cotton candy eater.  Ok, that's not true at all.  Read on for the real story about what I've been up to.

After a couple months of schedule filled to the point of overflowing with non-stop activities, I finally decided to sit down before dinner tonight and compose another blog post.

This is not going to be another picture-less blog post.  However, the picture is very recent (taken 3 days ago), so comes near the end of the post after I describe what has been going on since January.

Since last time, the Navy/Coast Guard had another camp in Ventura, CA for the Wounded Warrior Games team.  I attended the camp, again as a dual-role coach and civilian athlete, piloting tandem for blind riders.  A couple weeks ago, sad news arrived.  Due to a late withdrawal from the competition, there were no longer enough riders signed up for the tandem race, so that portion of the event was canceled for 2012.  I suppose that means Dan Peters (who won last year) gets to hold on to his championship title for another year before having to defend it.

In February, I traveled out to California to watch the paracycling track world championship event at the Home Depot Center velodrome in Carson.  There were some absolutely impressive rides, both from Team USA and foreign visitors.  I was perhaps most impressed by a couple of riders who each had only one arm and one leg, yet still rode remarkably fast.  Also of interest to me were some of the C5 (least disabled category) riders who would have won medals at the US Elite Nationals (able-bodied) if they were US citizens. 

Related to the tandem riding, for the last several weeks I have been making trips to Colorado Springs each weekend to pilot tandem for one of the blind resident athletes at the Olympic Training Center.  In addition to the tandem riding in Colorado Springs, I have also begun piloting for a blind US Marine Corps veteran living in Castle Rock.  Doing two tandem rides in a day is rather tiring, but terrific training for whatever happens on the bike later in the season.

At work we have been plugging away at synthesizer development.  At the moment my workbench is covered with an array of prototype circuit boards and mechanical housings.  The individual boards have been turning on nicely, and we're now into the system integration phase of the project.  The next couple weeks will be exiting as we deliver the first prototypes to a preferred customer.

This week President Barack Obama visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, the first time an acting president has visited the university.  He gave a speech about the upcoming changes to federally backed student loan interest rates, and delivered a message that higher education is not just about an individual's success but is an investment in the future of the community (and country) where that individual lives.  He encouraged all the students to take their degrees, go out, and be hard-working, productive contributors so that the investments pay off.

After the speech, he walked around and shook hands with various people in the audience.  The venue (the Coors Event Center) was filled nearly to capacity, so I didn't have a front row spot.  Having long arms, though, I was able to give/receive a handshake.

The bald Secret Service agent is wondering why my suit matches his.

Normally I'm fairly cynical about politicians, but I liked the message the president delivered on Tuesday.  With elections coming up later this year, the visit was most certainly an attempt to drum up support before the campaign season starts in earnest.  Nevertheless, I'm glad I was there.

End of 2011, Start of 2012, and a Trip to Navy Base Ventura County

That is a warm doggy.

Over the holiday break from school, my sister took care of her boyfriend's dog, pictured above.  During dinner one evening he burrowed under a jacket to find a nice warm place to hang out.

Between Christmas and New Years, I made my way back to Boulder, this time by airplane rather than automobile.  It saved time, but I did miss out on the Motel 7 in Wyoming.

Upon returning to Boulder, I made some last-minute preparations for my "Drink Like the Brits" New Years Eve party.  The event went off as planned, from about 4:00 to 6:00pm (5:00pm Mountain Time is midnight in Britain) with a handful of friends coming over for English tea, ales, ciders, and Scotch.  To give things a Colorado spin, I also had guacamole, hummus, salsa, and various chips and crackers for dipping.

My fridge looked a bit like the front of a Tesco store before the party started.

On New Years day, I embarked on an interesting physical challenge.  I attempted to walk approximately 33 miles from downtown Denver to my apartment in Boulder.  Having inappropriate footwear doomed my effort after about 27 miles.  However, I expect this challenge and I will have a re-match sometime in the not-too-distant future.

The first week of January, it was back to work drawing, building, and testing circuits.  Some prototype RF (radio frequency) filters returned from fabrication, so I tested those, and then assembled a table-top phase noise measurement system to verify performance of some amplifiers that needed to ship to customers.

These filters are all GND from a DC perspective, but to RF, do all kinds of cool things.

Phase noise measurements can sometimes be a real pain in the neck, but this time the system came together nicely and the measurements went as smoothly as I could have hoped.

Last Thursday, I made my way to Denver to catch a plane to LA for the next of (hopefully many more) adventures of 2012.  I was invited by the Navy Safe Harbor program to attend a training camp at Navy Base Ventura County, helping to prepare a group of athletes for the Wounded Warrior Games to be held in Colorado Springs in early May 2012.

In the Wounded Warrior Games, veteran athletes from each branch of the armed forces (Army, Navy/Coast Guard, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Special Operations Command) compete in a variety of individual and team events to lay claim to the Ultimate Champion (individual) and Chairman's Cup (team) awards.  Last year, I joined team Navy/Coast Guard as a tandem pilot for a blind cyclist.  We won the gold medal in the 30km tandem road race event, and now have our work cut out for us to defend that win in 2012.

After waking up to a low of 6F in Boulder on Thursday, I was greeted by temperatures in the 70's in Southern California.  It felt luxurious!

A park at Navy Base Ventura County (NBVC) neighbored the apartment where I stayed.  And there was no snow in sight!

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were all full days characterized by early mornings, long training sessions, short meals, and activities continuing into the evenings.  The athletes were all pushing themselves and each other, which was great to see.  The level of energy and enthusiasm was contagious.

I hope everyone looked in the same direction when the real photographer took his pictures.

The camp participants were a mix of athletes who competed in the Wounded Warrior Games in 2011 and new athletes who are hoping to make their Games debut in 2012.

My workout on Sunday afforded a chance to do battle with a very large truck tire.  There was no clear winner.  We both wound up lying on the grass.  I, however, did eventually walk away.

On Sunday afternoon when the cycling sessions were complete and the bikes were all stowed in the storage facility, I did some training of my own.  Being mid-January, I'm in the middle of doing lots of hard workouts which don't involve the bike at all.  In this case, I rolled a tire, the difficult way, down the length of a football field.  Then I went to a pull-up structure and did 25 pull-ups.  After that, I ran two laps of the track and called that a round.  After five additional rounds, both the tire and I were lying on the grass, neither of us feeling particularly motivated to move.

Monday was another early day, with travel back to Colorado being the primary activity of the day.  While walking through LAX on my way to check my bag, I saw a sign (pictured below) that amused me.

Will a teamate serve a hot beverage if my baggage is lost?

I'd like to meet a teamate some day.  Hypothetical question: if I hand up tea to riders from my club as they pass through the feed zone in a road race, does that make me a good teamate?

Now I'm back in Boulder for a while, until the next adventure.

Holidays in California

On Tuesday afternoon I left Boulder, caught the bus to Denver, and then flew to San Francisco, California.

Here's my gear for a California trip: jacket, waterproof bag, backpack, helmet, glasses, and mittens.  By packing light, I can was able to go to the bus station by bike.

During the last couple weeks in Colorado, I had some more interesting adventures.   At work we built up a circuit board that I designed while I was on my last trip.  It is pictured below.

The green circuit board set a record for fast turn-on: less than 7 hours from the board being delivered by FedEx to having been populated, powered up, and programmed.

Guinness was pleased by progress in the lab.  He sometimes lies on his back in the middle of the floor and takes a nap.

The weekend before I left Colorado, I took a trip to Colorado Springs.  On the way back, I stopped off in Castle Rock and Denver.  While I was away from Boulder, the conditions outside my apartment turned from slightly annoying to outright hazardous.

Here is an ice-covered sidewalk where I lost my footing when leaving for work on Monday morning.  That was an unpleasant surprise.

Yesterday I went for a bike ride in the coastal hills here in the San Francisco bay area.  I climbed up Old La Honda Road from Portola Road to Skyline Blvd, then descended the west side of highway 84, and then climbed the west side of Old La Honda Road back up to Skyline.  Here are a couple pictures from the ride:

Looking west from Old La Honda Road over the coastal hills.

Here is a view looking south from the same point.  The road in this view is where I climbed up.

Here is the view looking east.

With snow falling in Boulder, it is really nice to enjoy some warm, sunny, California weather.

How I almost quit racing on Oct. 7, 2010 and goal setting for 2012

There is a story that I mentioned briefly on this blog back in October 2010, but at the time left out some of the excruciating details.  I felt it might be interesting to fill in a few of the details so that readers can see, for better or for worse, what goes on in the deep dark corners of my brain.

The story, in its original form, is fairly mundane.  The specific story that I am referencing here is detailed in the paragraph beginning with "I think it is safe to say..."  Employing some British understatement, my campaign in Manchester started with a rough first few hours.

At the time, I was rather insulted by being required to take an introductory-level track riding course.  I appreciate the need to follow rules, but rules should be applied with good judgement, not blindly.  After my personal experience and then going to the masters track world championships this fall and seeing riders (who did not go through the accreditation course) slide off the track and cause crashes made me wonder just how well those rules are applied.  Luckily, I have thick skin, and while the accreditation requirement felt like a stinging insult at the time, it's not a big deal anymore.

Further along in the story, I mention being caught up in a crash on the track.  When I composed my blog post on Oct 11th, I still had a large scrape on my hip.  The scrape and associated impact hurt quite a lot, but have both healed.  There is still a 2-inch diameter scar on my right hip, which is an interesting souvenir from that experience.

Where the episode back in 2010 became a real mental test was after I left the track surface.  The person in charge of bike storage space rentals was gone for the day.  I asked the remaining staff if I could leave my bike for the night and sort out the storage rental in the morning.  They said, "No."  I pleaded.  They were adamant.  So, as I went to disassemble my bike and put it back into the travel case, I had tears welling up in my eyes from a combination of pain from the crash and frustration with the bike storage and equipment damage situation.

Finally, after packing up my bike, I began the walk to the bus stop to return to the Manchester City Centre.  It was late in the evening, cold, and raining as I left the veldrome.  As I walked through the parking lot dragging the 70-lb bike case, I thought to myself, "I can leave the case here in the parking lot and come back for it in the morning.  Maybe it will still be here if I come back early.  But if it's not?  Maybe I wouldn't care.  I could forget about being an athlete and just be a tourist for the next two months."

Then, standing there alone in the dark, 7000 miles from home, feeling cold, wet, exhausted, battered physically, and shaken mentally, a smile crept across my face.  I said to myself, "Karl, this will make for an amusing story later.  You need to harden the #@$% up and get moving."

So, I continued.

Jumping back to the present, I am in the midst of formulating goals for the 2012 season.  They're still a work in progress, but at the moment I am planning to turn my focus back to the road and earn my cat-2 upgrade there.

After that, I will turn my attention toward some endurance events.  In the last six years, I've completed several hundred races on the road and track, without the question of whether I was capable of finishing ever crossing my mind.  This season, rather than just seeing how fast I can go, I want to test my physical and mental limits.

I'll write more about my 2012 goals as plans firm up, but I can say right now that the 2012 season will look very different from all my previous seasons.

Back to Colorado and off-season racing

On the way back to Colorado, I stopped in Rawlins, Wyoming for some fuel and a chance to get out of the car and stretch my legs.  Right there on the I-80 business route, I saw something that took my breath away, and had to take a picture.

If Motel 6 doesn't quite do it for you, Rawlins has a Motel 7.

At the end of my first week back on the Colorado front range, I was able to compete in two races.  One was a track racing event at Boulder Indoor Cycling and the other was a run/bike duathlon at Cherry Creek State Park in Denver.

First Friday track racing
Boulder Indoor Cycling, 2-Dec-2011

I jumped in for two races at the December edition of First Friday at Boulder Indoor Cycling.  The first event was a 20-lap tempo race.  He had a field of 6 or 7 riders and the race started off with a moderate pace but quickly became quite brisk and shattered the field.  After bridging over a split in the field, I picked up a few points in the 2nd half of the race, including the 5 points on the finishing lap.

Due to some confusion about which riders would be in which races, I wound up sitting out until the final event of the night, a 70-lap points race.  Colby Pearce and Alex Howes wound up dominating the race, although I felt pretty good about the attack I put in following the first sprint at 60-laps to go.  By the time the field caught me, several riders had dropped out and the field was splintered.  I'm satisfied with how it went for being my first ride back at elevation after two months at sea level.

Only tangentially related to the racing, I walked from my apartment to Boulder Indoor Cycling and then back to my apartment after the event was concluded, 1.8 miles each way, carrying my track bike.

The next First Friday event should be held on 6-Jan-2012.  I'm looking forward to it already!

Chilly Cheeks duathlon series, race #1
Cherry Creek State Park, 3-Dec-2011

There was snow overnight, and the morning was characterized by cold temperatures and more snow falling during the race.  The first race of the Chilly Cheeks duathlon series was a 4-mile run and a 10-mile bike ride.

I started the run at a comfortable pace, intending to increase my tempo at each mile marker.  Many racers started too fast, so I wound up passing people right away and continued to do so throughout the run.  The run course transitioned from road to trail to bike path and back to road at the end, so we had a variety of surfaces to keep things interesting.  Having snow all over the ground required being careful about where I placed my feet.

With the cold temperatures, I had to make a conscious effort to keep my hands from going numb.  In order to stay warm, I wore wool socks, cycling shorts, leg warmers, two base-layer undershirts, a short-sleeve jersey, a long-sleeve jersey, a vest, and a cycling hat. For the run, I wore lightweight windbreaker-style gloves.  They worked well, although midway through the run I pulled my fingers out of the gloves' fingers and wore them more like mittens with my hands clenched into fists.  By the end of the run, my hands were nice and toasty so I could manipulate shoelaces and Velcro to change from running to cycling shoes and operate the buckle on my helmet.  The last step in the transition area was to put on my heavy mittens to keep my hands warm with the windchill on the bike.

Heading out on the bike, my glasses immediately fogged up.  Arg!  I spent a couple minutes fooling around with the glasses trying to clear them of fog while riding slowly (I could barely make out the snow-covered road).  Once my glasses cleared up, I picked up the pace as conditions allowed.  I felt much more comfortable on the climbs than the flat or downhill sections (something about that just seems wrong).  The course wrapped around the lake at the park, with a turn-around on the east side and then headed back to the west side for the race finish.  On the way back, I managed to drop my chain twice. On a fixed gear, a dropped chain means I had no drive and no stopping power.  Needless to say, it was quite exciting as the first chain drop happened on a downhill.

Each time the chain dropped, I coasted to a stop, dismounted the bike, and lifted the chain back onto the chainring and cog by hand (despite being an engineer, I still do some things by hand!).  The first chain drop was on a downhill section.  Riding a fixed gear bike downhill on a snowy ride is an exercise in vaguely-controlled chaos.  In light of the low chain tension I was running, that first chain drop was largely unavoidable as I bounced, slid, and rolled down the hill.  The 2nd drop, however, was due to sloppy pedaling technique.  Following the second drop, I focused on a fluid pedal stroke with steady power for the remainder of the race and kept the chain properly seated through the finish line.  I even managed to catch the two riders who passed me while I was re-setting the chain the 2nd time.  One of them was the winning woman.

The next edition of the race will take place on 21-Jan-2012.  Between now and then I will have some more time to re-acclimate to high elevation exercise (it's been just 1 week since I returned to Boulder after 2 months at sea level) and do a bit of run training (a couple of interval workouts on the track would serve me well for an event like this).  I'll also be able to adjust the chain tension on the fixed gear road bike so it is less susceptible to jumping off when the course is bumpy and figure out a solution for foggy glasses when I am stopped in transition between segments of the race.

That's it for race reports.  I've also been back to the lab, and should have some interesting pictures of circuit boards and measurement systems in the next couple weeks.

Some travel catch-up and a birthday abroad

It's been a while since my last post, so there is some catching up to do.  Yesterday evening, my travels brought me back to Boulder for the first time in about two months, so it feels like a good time to put fingers to keyboard and crank out a new blog entry.

In October, I had my birthday in Edinburgh.  I'm sure some readers will be looking forward to tales of debauchery too scandalous to be uttered (or typed) in polite company.  It turns out, the reality was rather mundane as far as epic adventures go.

In 1776, Adam Smith invented economics.  In 2011, his statue was pooped on by birds.  Only one of the previous statements is true.

I walked around Edinburgh, saw Adam Smith's statue, and eventually wound up going to a pub with some other tourists.

Despite the text on the sign behind me, it turns out the real threat is not terrorists.  It is drinking with Australians.

I met some Australians who bought me one or more shots and promised that since it was my birthday, they would arrange for me to "hit the floor".  Evidently, their plans did not come to fruition, because they left the pub, I hung out with some German friends, and then I returned to the hostel and went to bed.  In the morning, the Aussies were in rough shape.  Perhaps they were planning to give me a terrific hangover for my birthday, but forgot it at the hostel and took it for themselves instead?

A few weeks later, after returning to the USA, I was out on a bike ride in the coastal hills on the San Francisco peninsula.  I saw a scene that reminded me of the cone-on-head art installation in Glasgow.

It's not Glasgow, but I appreciate it.

I noticed this afternoon that at some point in the past few weeks, while fiddling around with my privacy settings on Facebook, I entered a setting that caused a number of status updates to be visible only to me.  Talk about preaching to the choir...  If the above reference to the cone-on-head art installation in Glasgow does not sound familiar, it's probably because the links I shared on Facebook for the last two blog posts were visible only to me.  Feel free to check out the other November blog entries to see what else I've been up to.

At any rate, I think I have the Facebook-link-posting fixed, and will wrap up this post by sharing a couple quotes from a pair of books I read recently.

From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain:
To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

From Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck:
You can look back and say, "I could have been...," polishing your unused endowments like trophies. Or you can look back and say, "I gave my all for the things I valued." Think about what you want to look back and say. Then choose your mindset.

Visited Glasgow, was not stabbed

After my time in Edinburgh and the highlands, I took a train to Glasgow.  On last year's trip I had been told by somebody that most tourists' highlight when they visit Glasgow is not being stabbed.  When I mentioned plans to stay in Glasgow for a few days to some folks at the velodrome in Manchester, they warned me about being beaten up.

My Great Britain travel guide book, however, did not make any such predictions, so I went ahead with my plan to visit.  It turned out to be a fine place.  The city center, like many other cities in the UK, had a tough, gritty feel, but I never felt that I was in any danger of being stabbed or beaten up.

After exiting the train station, I had about a half mile walk to the hostel where I was staying.  The route I mapped out took me by an art gallery with a display of Glasgow humor on the statue in front of the building (pictured below).

I can appreciate performance/street art like this.

The hostel where I stayed was conveniently located, and affordable with respect to cost, and I'll leave it at that.  Not trusting the elevator, I got a little bit of exercise walking up to my room on the 6th floor.

In the city center, there was a large plaza/square in front of the city hall featuring statues of famous Glaswegians or otherwise noteworthy Scots.  As an engineer and a cyclist, it was great to see a statue of James Watt.

In engineering and science, the Watt is the derived SI unit for power.  I make measurements and calculations of power all the time, and the results are always in terms of watts or other units that relate back to watts.  Watt was a mechanical engineer who made important contributions to steam engine technology, helping to kick off the industrial revolution.

James Watt, looking at me like I owe him something.

As a cyclist, I am thankful for the watt as a unit of power measurement.  Throwing down a 450-watt pursuit sounds a whole lot more impressive than averaging 0.603-horsepower. 

The city of Glasgow experienced significant economic decline during the 2nd half of the 20th century.  In the 19th century, it was an important center of manufacturing and trade, and was very wealthy.  The square in the city center with the statues (including Mr. Watt) was constructed to show off the city's wealth.

The Glasgow city hall is a very Scottish-looking building.

The Glasgow city hall and war memorial (pictured above) sit on the east side of George Square (where the statue of James Watt is located).  When I took the above picture, there was an Occupy Glasgow protest, complete with tents and chilly protesters, sitting right behind me.

Near George Square, there was a part of town called Merchant City, essentially the city center shopping district.  For the most part, it was full of stores I was almost entirely uninterested in.  There was one store that caught my eye.  It had an American theme, and a huge display in the front window with a wall of Mug Root Beer and some sort of sugary breakfast cereal.  It made me cringe to contemplate the idea that those are the products Glaswegians think of when they think of America.  Blah!

Scotland: Edinburgh and the Highlands

I've gone a bit off the back in terms of blog updates, so it's time for a little catch-up.  After masters track world championships concluded, I hung around Manchester for a couple days, and then hopped onto the train to Scotland.

It wound up being a two-part journey, with a change of trains in York.  Last year, I visited York and spent a couple days there.  This time, I had about 20 minutes, but was able to make my way to the train station entrance and snap a quick picture.

The York train station felt familiar after my visit last year.  The station exit still welcomes visitors to the city.

The 2nd leg of the train journey took me into Edinburgh, where the station is still under construction.  This year, though, it was mid-afternoon when I arrived, so I was able to navigate to the hostel in the daylight.  Interestingly, the hostel where I was staying had a theme for each room and a theme-related name for each bed.  My assignment was the Riddler bed in the Gotham City room.  I astounded the front desk clerks when I opened my pack and withdrew my Batman logo towel.  I fit right in at that place.

The next day, I headed to the Scottish highlands to check out Loch Ness and hopefully encounter some interesting aquatic wildlife.  On the bus drive north, we saw lots of highland terrain, but only a little bit of weather (which is a good thing, wind and rain are not what I was looking for during my off-season vacation).

This almost looks like it could be in Colorado.

The tour bus stopped a couple times at scenic locations where we could get out, stretch our legs, buy snacks, visit the restrooms, and take pictures of the local terrain.  It's interesting to think that the top of the mountain in the above picture is at considerably lower elevation than where I live in Colorado.  However, they had already had snow in mid-October.  We were treated to some of the nicest weather of the year as Scotland goes.

Green and gold grass with a loch in the background.

The tour guide claimed that back in the Roman times, more than 95% of the land in what is now the Scottish highlands was covered in forest.  Since then, the logging industry has created lots of open range, but there are efforts underway to replant trees in large tracts of land.

This is the smallest lighthouse in the UK.

Around lunch time, we arrived at Loch Ness, home of the UK's most famous aquatic wildlife.  I saw some less-famous wildlife, in the form of a game of swans, being coaxed out of a canal lock by a worker armed with bread crusts.  While I missed out on seeing Nessie, the famous creature allegedly inhabiting the loch, I did not miss out on eating a Scotland delicacy: haggis!  Yummy.

On the way back to Edinburgh, we stopped at the commando memorial.  During World War II, the British commando soldiers trained in the Scottish highlands.  The memorial is dedicated to those original British commandos.  Since then, many tributes have been left at a nearby garden of remembrance for commandos killed in more recent conflicts such as the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The commando statues keep an eye on the Commando Training Depot.

On the way back to Edinburgh, we stopped in a small town for late-afternoon snacks.  I had a Chieftains Choice pie from The Wee Pie Company.  Who would've thought cold meat could be so tasty?

Masters Track Cycling World Championships

Yesterday marked the end of the 17th masters track cycling world championships here in Manchester.  Being several years shy of the minimum age required to compete, I accompanied the Hammer Racing Team to the event as mechanic and general-purpose infield helper.

Over the course of the week, I met many new people and every day heard old stories retold and new ones unfolding.  Here is a brief overview of how the week went.

A week ago Saturday, I linked up with the team and checked into the hotel.  We ate dinner in the hotel bar/restaurant area that evening.

Riding kilometer time trials very rapidly requires lots of energy.  The first night, we made sure to feed the sprinters.  Later in the week, Sky won medals in the kilo and team sprint.  Maybe there is something to be said for eating with two forks?

On Sunday, the riders had some training sessions at the velodrome, but there was nothing for me to do at the track, so I joined several spouses of riders and took the train to Liverpool.

The city still stands as the metal lookout birds on top of the Liver Building have not flown away.  Yet.

On Monday, racing started, so my duties at the track began.  The Hammer team made quite a respectable showing, with four of the five riders contesting sprint distance events in several different age groups and "Count" riding endurance events in his category.  I also looked after wheels for one of the local British riders who contested the mass start endurance events (scratch and points race) in his category.  He came away with a silver medal in the scratch race and making several crafty moves in the closing laps of the race.  It was very exciting to watch, and a very good result too.

The track surface was improved since I raced here last year, and the lobby/reception area was substantially renovated.  If these improvements continue, maybe in another year or two they will have consistently sunny days in Manchester?

After the racing concluded Saturday evening, the group went for dinner at Bella Italia, an Italian restaurant chain here in the UK.  We sat near the door, and in the middle of dinner, saw another group of American riders enter the restaurant.  Members of each group had long-running friendships and rivalries, so it was very interesting to hear some of their stories.

Count messed with Gibby.

After dinner, I parted ways with the Hammer group, but will certainly see them after my ongoing adventures in the UK and Europe.

Turing around Manchester

Yesterday around 8:00am (GMT), my flight from Atlanta touched down in Manchester.  I made my way through customs, picked up my backpack from the baggage claim, and took the train to the city centre.  There, I checked into the hostel, bought a SIM card to activate the quad-band GSM phone I picked up in California, and walked around for part of the afternoon in an attempt to hold off jet-lag.

In the late afternoon, I made my way to Crossfit Central Manchester for a WOD, my first visit to the gym since June.  After doing some toes-to-bar, handstands, and burpee broad-jumps, I'm feeling a little rough around the edges, but glad I went.  Post workout, it was straight back to the hostel for dinner.

In the evening, I joined a group of folks at the hostel for a tour of bars and clubs.  I went to one bar and then pulled the plug on the night, heading back to the hostel for some sleep.  After a long day of travel, I slept like a log.  On an interesting side note, the bar featured mostly British and European beers, but they had Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on tap.  It seems odd I could go 1/3 of the way around the world and find a beer from within 200 miles of where I grew up.

Today, I ventured out into Manchester to walk to a handful of nerdy destinations.  First, I headed to the Alan Turing Memorial in Sackville Park.  Mr. Turing was an engineering hero in World War II, but a tragic figure after the war ended.  A couple years ago, he was granted an official apology from the British government for the way he was treated.

Mr. Turing and his deadly apple sit, permanently, near the university in Manchester.  There is allegedly a computer buried under the memorial.  Today, I sat with them.

On the way back toward the hostel, I spotted the Manchester court house.  It has an impressive clock tower, shown below.

With narrow streets and a limited viewing angle from my camera, it was difficult to take an image that does this building justice.  Hopefully, there is plenty of justice going on inside.

Closer to the hostel, I spotted a pair of street names that tickled me in just the right way.  How could I resist taking and sharing pictures of streets named after famous scientists?

Faraday Street has a Cuban bar/nightclub at one of its corners.

Where does Nicholas Cage go for a haircut?  Con Hair.

In light of yesterday's news, I wonder if Steve Jobs will have any streets named after him.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Season wrap-up

I'm sitting in the San Francisco airport right now, waiting for a flight to Atlanta, GA and then a flight from there to Manchester, England for the 2011 masters track cycling world championships.  Today marks the start of another multinational off-season adventure.

I made the podium in the team sprint at Colorado state championships over Labor Day weekend.

This past weekend I wrapped up my 2011 racing season with some competition at the US elite track nationals in Los Angeles, CA.  All in all, this was a highly successful season, with three events in the past month that I want to go into a little more detail about.

The first weekend in September was the Colorado state championships at the track in Colorado Springs.  I rode every event (individual pursuit, sprints, points race, scratch race, kilo, team pursuit, keirin, Madison, and team sprint) this year, and while I missed out on claiming any state championships, I made the podium in 6 of the 9, an encouraging result for an omnium rider.

The second weekend in September, there was an event that I was not a direct participant in, but that I watched with keen interest.  It was the paralympic road racing world championships in Roskilde, Denmark.  A racer who I have been piloting on training rides this year was competing, took 5th in the time trial, and then went on to win the road race.  Having been part of this rider's training over the course of the year was a huge boost to my morale toward the end of a long season.

Finally, this past weekend was the elite track nationals at the Home Depot Center velodrome in Los Angeles, CA.  I had a fairly full schedule with the international omnium event on Wednesday and Thursday, scratch race on Thursday, team pursuit on Friday, and points race on Saturday.  The omnium was my real focus for the season.  Things went more or less according to plan on Wednesday, but then on Thursday I exceeded expectations by riding a 20-second PR in the 4km pursuit, placing me 3rd among the omnium riders and 4th (had I paid my $60 and signed up) for the stand-alone pursuit.  By the end of the night on Thursday, I was sitting in 8th place in the omnium, a very satisfying improvement from my 17th place finish last year.

Also, I qualified for the final in the scratch race, my first scratch race final at an elite nationals.  That was an exciting improvement over the previous years' efforts at nationals.  Then on Saturday we had the points race, where I qualified for the final fairly comfortably, and then threw down at the end of the 40-km evening ride and captured points at the 10-to-go and finishing lap points sprints.  That was one of the hardest efforts I've made in a track race, but it felt really good to go out there and leave everything I had on the track.

Here is a video showing some of the highlights from the points race.  In the closing laps, I'm the rider at the bottom of the track, being chased by a group of three riders.  Even knowing how that last lap turned out, it was kind of a nail-biter when I saw this video on Monday night.

Stay tuned for more updates from the UK and Europe.  I'm on my way!