Tour of Utah

I went to the Utah Olympic Park this afternoon to watch the Prologue stage of the Tour of Utah bike race. This first stage was a very short time trial, about 1.2 miles up a steep hill. The finish times ranged from 4:05 to 5:22.

The bikes they were riding looked nothing like what I have in my garage. Carbon fiber everywhere. Funky shaped tubing.  These bikes were so light that I have to guess this rack was just keeping them from floating off like balloons.

It was a drop dead gorgeous day, sunny, around 80 degrees and 20% humidity.  This poor rider had his coach riding behind him, screaming something in Spanish similar to "go, go, go, pedal your ass off".  I can't imagine that really helps.

Photographing this kind of event is pretty boring.  One racer at a time, moving fairly slowly up the steep hill.  I apologize for the repetition.

This is the very last turn, up a steep hill, with about 250 yards to go.

There weren't that many of the big stars, but lots of the Tour de France teams were there.  This is George Hincapie, who has completed more Tour de France's than anyone in history.

Right behind him came Christian Vandevelde.  He was looking very comfortable and ended up 7th out of 116 racers.

Also from Garmin-Cervelo was Tom Danielson.  If you watched the 2011 Tour de France, Tom was the highest finishing American.

This guy was really pumping up the hill, but I wonder about having his weight that far forward.

There was a helicopter filming almost constantly.  Throughout the race it was swooping back and forth, popping up from below, and following the more famous racers.  It looked like it would be a blast to ride in but damn it was loud.

I would be quite happy bike shopping on the top of the BMC car.  Quite the selection and probably $15k each.

David Zabriskie is a local Utah favorite. With his time trialing strength, he should have rocked. He even dressed as Captain America.  Unfortunately he wasn't riding in that persona.  By the time he got to the last 500 meters, he was slowing down.  He finished in the middle of the pack.

Levi Leipheimer was the last one to go and finished in 6th. You can tell from the look on his face that he isn't saving much.

I won't catch any of the other five stages, but it should be interesting.  The course is tough, with lots of mountains along the way.  The only disappointment is they won't have a criterium in Park City.  Last year I really enjoyed photographing it.

Now we are off to Hillsboro, OR to visit with Julie's sister and her family.

Another Jupiter Peak runner

I drug my tired butt to CrossFit this morning and ran across another person who had run the Jupiter Peak Steeplechase.  This guy is much younger and stronger than I am, but he finished an hour behind me.  Do I feel better about my time?  No.  He decided that to make it more interesting he would do the whole thing with a 50 pound pack.  Now imagine running down steep hills. No, I was not able to get a good explanation of why he did what he did.

He mentioned having met a woman at the top of Jupiter who was asking whether it was normal to have chest pains.  He said no, and saw she was wearing a heart rate strap that talks to her GPS training watch.  He checked and her heart was beating at about 215-220. It turns out she was on a heart medication.  He ran to the next aid station and apparently they took her off by road to the hospital. 

My run was more boring than I thought.

Race day at Jupiter Peak

I finished the race, came home, showered and had some lunch.  Now I feel fresh as a daisy!  Of course I mean a daisy that was sprayed with Round-Up, left in the sun, and then tilled under.  That was brutal.  You know things are bad when the only four pieces of information on your race bib are your race number, name, emergency contact, and their phone number.

The good news is that I had never fully explored the race.When you have run about 6.5 miles, up 2500 feet, you come out of the trees and see Jupiter Peak..I knew we had to run up there, but had no idea what the path would be.  You basically run straight up the ridge line.  To hell with all the normal mountain path zig-zagging.

And this is what you are running on.  That is until you make a left, and there is no road or path, just scree and steep.  Notice in the upper left corner of the picture where the hill turns abruptly up. You leave the road there.

But you can stop at the top, for a few seconds, and enjoy the nice view. The valley, in the center of the picture, is where we started.

So how did I do? I finished in 3:08 and some odd seconds. That put me in about the middle of the pack and beat my goal of 3:12. I am quite happy with the result.

The bad news is that I was on track for just under 3:00. I was running well and feeling about as good as you could expect. Then at 13 miles, I tripped on a rock or a root. I stumbled fast for a few steps before catching my fall. That sudden harsh movement and strain turned out to be more than my thighs wanted. The right leg cramped hard and the left was a few seconds behind. I hobbled to the water station, sat and slammed Powerade and bananas, and massaged the crap out of the spasming muscles.

The last three miles were slower and much more painful.  I would be good for a half mile or more, and then the thighs would remind me that they were not pleased with this form of exertion.  The steep pounding downhills didn't help.

All is well.  I can check Jupiter Peak off my to-do list. I made my goals and other than the fear of instant charlie horses for the next 24 hours, I am ok. 

They will eventually post the race results to the web, but I saw that the winner did the 16 miles of steep mountain trails in under 1:52.  I thought that was insane, until I noticed that La Sportiva had brought their professional "mountain trail racing team".  Who the hell has a full time job of "mountain trail racing"?  Incredible.

A big thanks to my driver and care giver, Julie, and her assistant Jasper.

Saturday is race time

Finally time to stop whining and go run the Jupiter Peak Steeplechase.  I can't complain.  The weather is supposed to be nice, my training has gone well, and I haven't had any injuries. Sure wish I had started earlier in the year.  In the first five months I ran a total of 46 miles.  In June and July, I ran just under 200.  Another month would have been nice.  Here are my goals, in order of success:

1. Get past the turnaround point before the time limit.  There is a point on the course, that if you get there too late, they make you turn around and go home.  That would be very sad.
2. Finish the race and walk away under my own power.
3. Finish something other than last place.
4. Finish something other than last place for the men.
5. Finish in less than 3 hours and 12 minutes.  This is my fairly realistic goal.
6. Finish in less than 3 hours.  This is my highly unlikely, unrealistic goal, but it is always nice to have one.

The guy who wins will run 7 minute miles and finish in under 2 hours.  For me, this is about as relevant as the guys who run marathons at under a 5 minute per mile pace. Impressive, but I am fairly certain they are not humans.

The big pisser is that everyone expects running and walking up long, steep hills would be slow, but I have discovered that I can actually run a good bit faster on flat ground than I can coming down a steep hill.  I was hoping the downhill would balance out more.  Nope.

I'll post how it all works out.

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".