Sandia Snowshoe Challenge

It’s been pretty hectic around the office these days and I haven’t hand a chance to make any blog entries. We have finally reconfigured our server room, replete with new servers, UPSs, a new Rack and new furniture. This has been my main work focus for the last two months and the first phase is nearing completion. Yeah!! Now, those of you non-computer geeks might be falling asleep (or maybe it’s my writing) but for those computer geeks out there, you know how cool it is to have all new equipment.

On to the race report: I’m a little behind the times, the race was last Saturday (the Sandia Snowshoe Challenge), and I had a great time.

The Outlaws made a strong showing, with the Dread Pirate, Myles, Geek Girl, Flaming Mo, Iron Outlaw and Michi. It seems the gun (or yell) went off and I was still trying to figure out how to walk in those darn snow shoes, much less run. As you may recall my only experience with the snowshoes was two weeks ago for about 20 minutes. During that twenty minutes I had major problems and ended up walking back to the car in my hiking boots sans snowshoes.

Right from the get go I knew I was in trouble, I ran up right behind someone (not a good idea with snowshoes) and got stepped on. I wobbled and flailed my arms wildly but didn’t fall down, it’s amazing how stable snow shoes are. This had me a little gun shy and I fell into a nice easy “run” with a pack of runners. All the other Outlaws were way ahead of me and were disappearing fast. Oh well, I was here for fun. For about the first mile my hip flexors were killing me and I thought there was no way I could finish the race. I think exhaustion made me relax a bit and I when I finally relaxed my hip flexors relaxed too, life was good once more. Now where were those other Outlaws….

After relaxing a bit I got a little confidence and started to pick up speed and even passed a few folks, but got stuck behind Mr. “there is no way I’m going to let you pass no matter how many times you politely ask, and if you do try I’ll stick my ski poles out so you trip”. This guy was frustrating, Run a little, walk some, run a little, walk more. I finally got past him and started making up some time. I saw the Dread Pirate in front of me so I had to catch her and say Hi. Saying anything is more work that you would think. It might have something to do with two snow shoes strapped to my feet and trying to run up a hill at 10600 feet. It took forever to catch her, her easy gait was surprisingly fast. I finally caught her and shuffled past, but just to have the last word she informed me that I had snow on my @ss. So now I’m laughing, trying to run up hill with snowshoes at 10600 feet. Yeah, I got a little out of breath. Luckily the finish was just around the corner and I could relax a bit.

The Iron Outlaw finally beat me at a race. It was one of his goals to beat me this year and he’s finally done it. Congratulations to him! (even though I wasn’t racing!) :)

The race is definitely on for next year and I’m thinking about going up and doing the 10k trail. Anyone else up for some high altitude training?

Not much going on right now, just work, kids, girlfriend, dog and housekeeping. Pretty much in that order. Before everyone gets on me about priorities. Right now work needs to come first, without it the other things become non issues. Well, everything but the dog, she’ll probably still hang around if I’m unemployed, after all dog is mans best friend, right?

I’m finally at my pre-sick weight! Now I just need to take off the rest of my winter weight. At the rate I’m going it should be off sometime around March, just in time for the Bataan Memorial Death March Marathon. I really should start training for the marathon, hopefully this weekend I’ll get in a reasonably long run, a nice 12 miler would be a great way to start the training.

Last year I volunteered at the race. Well I didn’t so much volunteer as go down with my girlfriend who officially volunteered. I just got put to work helping out the people that were officially volunteering. Does that mean I volunteered? I’m thinking it does, and I have a volunteer pin to prove it.

The race has intrigued me since I first heard about it and since I couldn’t run (my toe was in full revolt) I thought it would be fun to check it out from the sidelines, I really had a blast, it was a lot of fun to help out and the opening ceremony was spectacular! Talk about a lot of energy in the air!

So this year I’m either going to do the full marathon or the 15 mile “half mary”, it’s going to be a lot of fun! I love to trail run.

Oh, the best part about volunteering with a massage therapist is that you get to park right next to the medical tent, which is about 50 feet from the starting line.

Eating like a normal person

Eating like a normal person sucks. If you read my blog last week you know that I’m in the process of taking off my winter/sick weight and decided to keep track of what and how much I eat.

The Life Form program is brutally honest, it doesn’t care why you cheat, if you don’t workout or even if you enter bad data. It just reports the facts. The facts are that I’ve been running a pretty good caloric debt, that is, as soon as I figured out how many calories are in a good size handful of almonds. I’ve been steadily losing weight, which good thing. I've had to analyze the content of what I eat, which is also a good thing. But yes, I’ve been hungry, which is a bad thing. Another bad part about this whole process is that I’ve really had to pay attention to what I eat, as opposed to eating pretty much anything I feel like (within reason).

My caloric intake has been about 2100 calories per day. Which is within range of a “normal” person but it’s a lot less than I’m used to eating, which is around 3300 calories per day. So, like I said at the beginning, eating like a normal person really sucks, I enjoy eating and eating a lot. Ahhh the good old days of IM training….

My first time

My first time…

Well, as the Sandia peak snow shoe race draws closer it sounded like a great idea to actually get some snowshoeing in. The Dread Pirate invited a few of us up to the peak for some pre-race practice so we could get a feel for what we were in for. Good thing...

I really don’t do winter sports so this whole fall down get wet, cold, and freeze parts of your body thing is new to me. I think I actually obsessed over what to wear for the training session! I must have learned something over the past x number of years cycling during the winter because I actually got the right layers of clothing on! Yeah for me, I didn’t even freeze or lose any parts of the ‘ol body.

IronOutlaw and I went to REI to pick up some snow shoes the day before our training sessions. And not knowing anything about snowshoes picked a brand shoes that I thought had a good reputation, and the sales guy said were reasonable shoes. Plus, they were on sale, all the better!

We picked up some Redfeather Rainier shoes. These things were the biggest pieces of junk on the market. IronOutlaw’s strap clamp broke in the parking lot. Both of my clamps broke about 10 minutes into our trek. Then, at the turn around point the entire plastic attachment for my shoe broke off and I had to hike back to the car sans snowshoes.

For the brief ten minutes that the shoes worked I had a great time! Although everyone else looked comfortable, I felt like I was struggling just trying to keep up. I'm not sure if was equipment, fitness or altitude but I was definitely having a hard time staying with everyone! Overall it was a wonderful experience, I might even start to like this snow thing!

Pirate, thanks for showing us the ropes!

Okay, so now that I’m doing better I need to lose all the weight that I put on while sick. An amazing 6 pounds! Yeah, I know it doesn’t sound like a lot but that’s in addition to my normal and accepted winter weight gain. I tend to eat about the same amount of food regardless of whether I’m training or not, of course the holidays haven’t helped much either.

I’ve been thinking about my diet a lot lately and have decided to start recording what I eat and get rid of the things that are really bad. The last few times I’ve checked my caloric intake it has been eye opening. I’ve been at 3400+ calories per day and more while training long course. This summer, while training for Ironman Louisville, I tried to cut back my calories to take off a few pounds and ended up bonking several times on my daily bike commute. It really sucks to be stuck on the side of the trail only a mile or two from home but too freaked out to make it home. Gu to the rescue! So this year I’m going to keep track of my diet a little closer than usual. I’ve decided to use a program called Life Form. The program seems pretty intuitive and it has a 30 day free trial, just enough for me to get a handle on things. The interface is pretty outdated, old school Visual Basic, but it works so who am I to complain?

Yesterdays totals were about what I expected, 3,000ish calories and I burned about 3300, guess I shouldn’t have had that slice of pizza before dinner! Anyway, I’m not sure how accurate the calories burned calculation is but it’s on par with my tanita scale.

Did you know 30 almonds have about 885 calories? Wow! Guess what was the first thing I cut down on?

What a great weekend!

I’m on the mend from my cold turned sinus infection, it’s been a long threeish weeks and it’s great to be back to a normal workout schedule. It’s amazing what rest and a round of antibiotics will do!

Yesterday’s long run, a whole 6 miles, was uneventful except for meeting up with my clone. This guy and I were dressed almost identically; white long sleeve shirt, black tights, white hat, ultimate direction bottle carrier, sunglasses. There was one distinction though, I was wearing my ultra cool King Kong running socks. Geek Girl, they aren't sexy toe socks but still very cool

We saw the new National Treasure movie, and it was great. Yeah I know, there are probably 100 different historical facts that were wrong or just plain made up but I don’t care, it was just a movie and a darn good one. Nobody got shot, no guns were fired and there was even a decent car chase scene. However, the plot was somewhat predictable but the dialogue was funny and interesting. Two thumbs up for a good movie with a nice ending.

The Christmas tree got taken down and I finally rebuilt the operating system on my Laptop computer! The poor laptop could hardly open internet explorer without churning away at the hard drive for a good 5 minutes. I’ve needed to rebuild the computer for at least a year, and it was getting to the point where the darn thing was unusable. Why do computer people always have the computer that don’t work?

Bones, The red nosed triathlete

Can’t shake this darn cold!

It’s been more than a week and I’m still feeling under the weather, this darn cold just won’t go away! Maybe it’s all the parties I’ve gone to, or all the working out I’ve been doing, maybe it’s the extra hours I’ve been putting in getting ready for the big server migration, or maybe the extra stress of a new job? NOT!
My schedule for the week: go to bed at 9:30pm, Sleep until 6:00am, go to work, sit all day in front of the computer, go home, eat leftovers, make sure the kids have their chores done. Oh yeah, I did a “long” 8.6 mile run last Sunday, and a fairly fast paced run on the 1st but that’s it, nothing else. I’m talking drugs, emergen-c (raspberry is really good!), eating right (mostly), and I’m still feeing bad. Guess I’m just getting antsy about losing fitness & getting tired of not working out.