CrossFit Games

Once again, the owner of our CrossFit gym made it to the world CrossFit finals. Chris Spealer is an incredible athlete. He's the only person who has competed in all five CrossFit championships held so far.

Most of the people Chris competes with are in incredible shape (beyond incredible actually) and they tend to be a good bit bigger than Chris. Most seem to be 0% body fat, but 180 or 200 pounds. Chris weighs in around 140-145.

In some competitions like running or pull-ups, Chris's smaller size is either nuetral or an advantage. However some of the competitions involve lifting, or in this case, moving huge amounts of weight.

In this particular event, the competitors were doing handstand pushups, then pushing a sled, back to the pushups, keep looping...  The sled weighs about 100 pounds and those red plates are 55 pounds each.  That brings you to something like 470 pounds, for a 140 guy to push.

Most of the big competitors could grab the bars, push like hell, and get the sled moving, although slowly.  Chris tried and tried but was only getting a foot or so at a time.  Finally he got low, put his shoulders on the bars and his head on the weights and got it moving at a good clip.

Chris is always a fan favorite, but when they saw this happen, the crowd simply exploded.  It is truly inspiring to see someone accomplish what seems like it shouldn't be possible.  Out of 50 of the fittest people on the planet, Chris got 6th in this particular event. Unbelievable.

I have to start working out harder at CrossFit!

Oh, if you want to see anything more about the competition, go here.

Quantitative Easing explained

Tim Huntley pointed me to this video. It's great to watch for several reasons:

• Using cartoons for serious subjects is clever.
• You get to understand some of the ubserdity of how we implemented quantitative easing.
• It's just really well done and funny.

Photography in the yard

Julie went to dinner with some girlfriends and I decided to wander around the yard with my camera.  The sun was starting to get low on the horizon, so it was throwing some soft light and some long shadows.  I had my 100 mm macro lens.  They are wonderful for taking close up shots, but they can be tough to shoot because they have such an incredibly narrow focus.

First picture:  without cheating ahead, can you tell what this is?

So we back up a bit more and it starts getting more obvious.

But as you keep backing up, there is still more and more detail.

And finally we have the whole flower (or seed pod?).  It really was gorgeous.  It looks like a dandelion but the seed globe is about 4 inches across.

This was actually what prompted me to head out with the camera.  When I left NC, I dug up a ton of day lilies and planted them here in Park City.  They came up last year but didn't bloom.  This year they are out in full force.

I'm not sure what this is but it is a spectacular little wildflower.

Another wildflower.  This one has been blooming for a week or two.

Which leads me to my next adventure.  Lots of the flowers had bees on them. I decided to try and become a bee paparazzi.

The challenge with the macro lens is that when you open the lens up (like f/4 or f/2.8) so that you can use a faster shutter speed, the focal plane gets so small that you don't even get an entire bee in focus. Notice that the flower he is standing on is completely blurred out.

And of course, they keep zipping around instead of staying in one spot for your photo.  The flowers were a lot more cooperative.

 

But I started to get some technique.  Next time I head out I think will certainly have fewer bad shots and hopefully some really nice ones.

Not perfect focus, but I think this was my favorite.  I like how he is holding on with one leg.

Turned out to bee a lot more interesting than I expected when I walked out the door.

Jasper makes a new friend

Jasper and I stopped on our way to Home Depot so that he could visit with his llama buddies. They were way across the field but took time out of their busy grazing to come visit with him.

Then Jasper got a little intimidated when they approached so quickly.  I wanted to step back from him and film.  He preferred to be right next to me for protection.

But given  enough time, Jasper got a new visitor: the only horse in the field came wandering over.  Even though it was quite a bit bigger, it approached slower and they became good sniffing buddies.

Running Progress - Week 7

Well, this is it.  If the training isn't adequate yet, too damn bad.  I have one week before the race and I plan to make it a very light exercise week.  Light running.  Lots of stretching.

The weight is down to 170.  Not where I had hoped, but about as good as I could expect.  No matter how far I run or what I eat, I always have a spare tire around my waist.  It's just smaller now. That little tire has twice the fat of every other fat cell on my body combined. 

I went to do a hard hill climb on Sunday and it was a disaster.  I wasn't in it physically or mentally.  Very depressing so close to the race. Fortunately I went through the week with a nice 11 mile run up through the mountains (2300 vertical) and a 16 mile run today on flatter ground.  Both were further and a good bit faster than anything I had been doing. 

Now I just have to hope I did enough....

UNC Football is a disaster

The wheels are just coming off. As much as the UNC administration kept swearing that the worst was behind them and that everything would be OK, it has become a growing disaster.They fired coach Butch Davis yesterday, a week before practice and two days after he did the big football media day.  Their timing couldn't have been worse if they had tried.  Today the AD, Dick Baddour, quit.  Any other takers?

Credit for this wonderfully relevant cartoon goes to the web site StateFans Nation. They have done a fantastic job of covering UNC's lying, cheating and cover-ups over the past year.  Now we wait until October to see what penalties the NCAA decides to hand out. 

I feel sorry for the football players who were naive enough to trust UNC's "it will all be just fine".  I guess that's what you get for being gullible.  Welcome to the new and improved "Carolina Way".

Roundup at Red Ledges golf tournament

Friends of Animals Utah held their second annual golf tournament yesterday and it was a spectacular success.  Any time you have so many moving parts to coordinate, something is bound to go wrong.  Food, drink, registrations, scoring, volunteers, the course, weather, the golfers, the auctions, dinner, ... The list just keeps on going. Somehow the group managed to pull it all of without a hitch.  It was a great day and raised a lot ($30,000+) for FOAU.

I got to participate as a golfer (hacker) instead of working the event.  While some foursomes were full of real golfers, ours included handicaps of 18, 20, 22, and 28.  Not exactly a group of ringers.  However, we somehow managed to play completely beyond our skill set. 

The format was Best Ball, which means all four of you hit. You pick the best shot, then all four of you play from there.  On a hard golf course, at the end of 10 holes, we were eight under par and even had an eagle on a par 5.  We mostly played par golf from there, which was much more realistic.  We ended up with a 63.  They adjusted it for our handicap, and we had a net of 40!  In golf, 40 isn't even a real number.  The bad news is we came in second, to a 38.  The golf pros had never even heard of such a score. 

We ended up with a nice little trophy and a dozen golf balls each.  Of course, that barely replaces all the ones I whacked out into the hillside.  Lisa, the only woman on our team, won the longest drive and closest to the hole for the ladies.  She left with a new golf bag, some gift certificates and some other treasure. 

Great event!

The effects of a big snow pack

What happens when a record setting snow pack melts? First it floods everything. Then it fills all the lakes, reservoirs, and ditches. Here is an astounding graph of the Lake Powell water level.

Lake Powell is down in southern Utah and catches a lot of the drainage from west of the Rockies.  Since April, the water level has risen over 50 feet!  They warn you to be careful if you are parking your car near the lake to go on a boat trip.  Come back in a few days and your car may be under water.

How much water does it take to make such a huge change?  So far this year the lake has received over 14 million acre-feet of water.  As you might guess, one acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre, one foot deep.  Duh. 

For my friends in NC, this amount of water would add about 1200 feet of depth to Falls Lake, if you could somehow contain it to its normal footprint.  I think that might be a problem.

Another visit to the dentist

Damn I am sick and tired of dental work.  In the last eighteen months:

• My previously removed wisdom tooth hadn't healed quite right and left a skin pocket where food and bacteria could gather.  The dentist cut it and then sewed it closed in a neater fashion.
• An old metal filling had loosened and a new cavity had formed around it.  They ground it out and made a pretty new filling.
• Then an oral surgeon ripped out my remaining three wisdom teeth.
• My last big metal filling had the same problem. Today they replaced it.

I think, and hope, that my mouth is really healthy now and they have run out of ways to induce pain and take my money.

An evening on the water tower

One greatly underutilized location for relaxing is the water tower down the hill from us. Most of the tank is buried, so you only have to climb about eight feet of ladder to get to the top. The top is concrete and flat, like a giant patio.

Last night we went to watch the sunset with the Benson clan. Bill and Loris's daughter Shannon was visiting from DC. She was accompanied by her fiance' Dave. It was Dave's first visit to Park City, so they had him going everywhere and doing everything.  The young couple is arranging an October wedding in DC.

Notice that the water tower looks down on Main Street in Park City.  It really is a gorgeous view.  We didn't get much of a colorful sunset last night, but that's ok.  It means that the pollution stayed down in the Salt Lake valley.