Wednesday, May 28, 2008

The clothes make the hombre

On Memorial Day, I went up to Harriman State Park and rode my bike around. The whole time I was out there, I was constantly getting honked and yelled at. This was a little surprising because at Harriman there's a 40 mph speed limit, rarely much traffic and cyclists everywhere.

I began to notice I was the only cyclist getting honked or yelled at.

I also realized that everyone honking and yelling was Hispanic, which seemed odd (not odd that there were Hispanic people in the park, but that, of all the people that could be honking at me, only that ethnicity was riled up).

About three-quarters of the way through my ride, one of the cars slowed down enough that I could hear exactly what the passenger was yelling: "Viva los Mexico!"

WTF?

Then I remembered what jersey I was wearing:



Thursday, May 15, 2008

Now I've done it...

For a while now (at least for the last 10 months), I've been operating on the belief that I haven't been fit enough to actually do any damage to myself in training. Sure, I could always be negligent in stretching and let myself get too tight or I could always get a freak injury. But I was confident that in a race or tougher workout, if I was pushing too hard, my body would just shut itself down before I could do anything really bad to myself.

Well, those days are behind me now. I'm officially fit enough to hurt myself. I ran entirely too hard on the track last week for entirely too long and left myself sore for days. That was new.

A further injustice that resulted from my new level of fitness is that all my usual running routes are too short now.

These are both foreign concepts to me. While I suppose they could be considered pretty cool and mean I'm actually getting faster, they result in a terrible inconvenience.

Incidentally, I'm still slow, just not as slow as before. And now it's likely I'll get lost or blow myself up.

Monday, May 05, 2008

A Terrible Idea



One of the better tri shops in the NYC area is currently running this ad. It baffles me in many ways.

Are they saying that the flag graphic is an obscure chart representing the U.S. population? If so, it implies that more people are obese than know how to spell "triathlon." I'd wager there's a lot more people with terrible spelling than those who are overweight. Taking it a step further, while I'm sure there are lots of obese people, I'm also sure that some of them know how to spell triathlon. And what about non-obese people that can spell triathlon? Where are they represented?

I'm also not sure what people who "don't know where Iraq is" has to do with obesity and spelling. And again, I'm willing to bet some of those people who can't spell also can't read a map. There's a lot of potential overlap here.

Lastly, if that flag represents the entire U.S. population, there should be a lot fewer stars.

I really wonder if this is scientifically valid. Where's the margin of error? Who conducted this study? Probably a bunch of triathletes.

Even beyond the graphic, I'm more than a little horrified. Can you imagine more triathletes? Aren't there enough egotistical, selfish jerks running around? We need more people focused on "A" races, lycra, and purchasing things like this?

Ugh. I guess people might be thinner. But we'd sure be a lot less productive as a society.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Theoreticizing

I have a theory. Granted, I'm likely not the first person to come up with this (and I'm sure I cobbled it together from various other sources).

The conventional wisdom in triathlon these days suggests a basic week of three workouts in each sport at a minimum. Also, granted, any of you who actually read this probably don't care. Taking all that into consideration, my theory is that for the average, time-constrained triathlete (that would be me), it's better to do more running. In a nutshell: rather than an even balance, run lots, bike long on weekends and swim a couple times a week.

That's my plan anyway and it seems to be working so far this year. I haven't even been in the pool in nine months. That will change in the coming weeks, but my point remains: if you don't have the time, you're better off running.

Since I know the very few of you who actually read this blog don't come here for my obscure thoughts about training, I'll share a quote from Bike Snob NYC that had me laughing out loud this morning:

There are certain corny, contradictory maxims designed to make you do the right thing that simply aren’t true. A good example is the one about how abstinence is the best form of birth control. That’s complete crap. One has nothing to do with the other. It’s like saying building a garden shed is the best way to avoid hang gliding mishaps.