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Pass me another case of Red Bull!

In the spirit of some one-on-one quality time ans x-mas shopping for the others in the family I took my almost six year old daughter with me to watch the NBC Ironman viewing party in Boulder with the 5430 folks. She thought it was quite comical that we were watching the guy sitting in front of us watch himself on the TV (Norman Stadler). When he moved into the lead of the race I whispered to her, “look, now that man there is now winning the race". 10 minutes or so later the tele showed him having the difficulty he had and get passed. She responded in not quite the same whisper, loud actually, “LOOK, DADDY NOW HE IS LOSING THE RACE!". (sorry)
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Another week of indoors. Monday morning when i left for the pool @5:15am the thermo read neg 14f. So cold that the wall of windows at the pool was covered in white frost and the steam rising off the water made the room like a foggy cave. All in all, I spent 6 consecutive days inside, which may be a new record. 4 days hard swimming, 4 days running the friggin’ treadmill and a few days spinning away in the basement. No fun. Finished Lord of the Rings, now onto some recommended Battlestar…

Wednesday is my 38th birthday. The last several years I have done something big on this day. What should I do? maybe something like this?…

December and all is cold, nasty and dark, all of which has banished me to the confines of indoors. Crap, it just ain't right, all this sweating, fans and endless back and forths.

For cycling, I bought a Kinetic fluid Rock N Roll trainer a couple months back and have been using it quite a bit. It is very quiet so I can watch my Spinervals videos and movies. I am working my way back through the Lord of the Rings flicks. The trainer is nice in that it holds the bike in a way that allows you to lean sideways. I can imagine that this puts much less stress on the frame since when I get up to sprint the bike is moving with me rather than the rear triangle absorbing that force.

Since it is still so dark at 5:30am, I have spent 90" each of the last couple Thursday mornings with my old nemesis friggin' treadmill. It had been about 10 months since we saw each other last, and I really didn't miss it. Fortunately it overlooks the pool so I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what everyone in the water was doing wrong with their swim stroke - looking for some insight into my own aquatic inadequacy. Otherwise, lots of intervals help break up the time and actually make for very good running sessions. Perhaps I'll make peace with the treadmill - at least until I tire of my iPod playlists...

Today is my youngest daughter's 4th Birthday. Hard for me to believe, that the picture at the bottom was that long ago. Despite looking like I aged twice the number of years I am quite a bit fitter than I was than. Although I do wish I had her energy level. She runs around the house from 7am until she finally crashes at about 8:30pm like a gerbil on a wheel. The first words out of her mouth when I return form work are, "Daddy! Lets wrestle!!".

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I have spent a lot of time the last few weeks (well, relatively a lot, anyway) swimming and putting together something resembling proper stroke technique. It seems these efforts the last few weeks are paying dividends. My left arm is actually starting to contribute to my propulsion as evidenced by the amount of scrapes I have on the right side of my body from the cheese-grater lane lines. I need to re-learn how to swim straight.

Spent the morning Saturday waiting for the night's snowfall to melt away and exchanging my techno-clothing closet. Out of storage came the neoprene socks, booties, base-layers, wool jerseys, skull caps and six pair of graduating levels of thickness cycling gloves (Yes, I need to have the just-right one's on). Into storage along side my wetsuit went my collection of sleeveless jerseys. Since I know this winter a lot of weekday mornings will be spent in the basement spinning away on my new trainer while it is still dark outside, I try to get outside on the weekends even if it is damn cold. That is what all the clothes are for, right? I decided to draw the line at the balaclava; it didn't make it's way out of storage. If I need that thing, I'm off to the basement instead.

Saturday turned out to be a slushy mess. Had to stand in the muck while changing my first flat tire in months (knock-knock). And of course, I tuned my bike Friday evening...

more pics here password: my dog's name.