Travel Blogging Update
Ok so first of all, sorry for the lack of contributions here but I have been busy tweaking the travel blog on WP and putting more permanent content there. I had some stuff to backfill. Here are some links:
Brooklyn Day 1
Brooklyn Day 2
Brooklyn parent page
The meat is in day 1 & 2. The "parent page" is where I put the recap, links to the pages, a travel map, whatever. I am going to reformat these parent pages a bit, and add some additional navigation to all the pages. Nothing major but a better way to get from A to B to C to A to Main again. Again, nothing major but I'll be tweaking things.
When I did these pages in particular it struck me how much I was half-assing these recaps. I mean, not that you care but I was recapping 8 hours of our day in like 3 sentences and as a historical record for myself, it was pretty poor. Also, as a travel narrative is was pretty poor. So what was I doing? Not sure. I really like this medium even more now as I do not have a character limit like I do here. Of course, WP limits your image storage so I'll need to pay for that eventually. Or stop traveling.
Also recapped Minnesota (
page here then
28 hours post here).
Finally I did the
Broadway: Lion King post from last Thursday. Parent of that one is going to be the
NYC (Various) page, which will grow as the year goes on.
OK again sorry. I realize this is a metric shit-ton of information all at once. If you subscribe to the RSS feed you'll get this 20 minutes after I post. If you are interested, look into the Google extension Feeder, create an account, then add the Feeder app to your phone.
Training
I started training again last week. I had a discussion with
@UtahJoe about my plan which called for 4 hours as my long ride of the week. He reminded me that was stupid, which I admit it was. So I started to rethink this and reminded myself a bit that when you ride bike a long time going slow, you get really good at riding the bike a long time going slow. I think I want to cap my indoor rides at 3 hours, which I know sounds insane to most people but I am ok with it. Anything beyond that right now needs to be outside. As it gets warmer, I need to lower that cap to 2 then hopefully 1.5 once it's warmer all the time.
So that day, I went with a 3 hour ride but decided to bake the training cake by using erg mode on the trainer, setting it at 200 degrees (watts) and baking myself for 180 minutes. Later in the week I did a SST workout which was, honestly, tough. It was 2:10 with 1:40 of that at 220w or 245w. This is that L3/L4 border they power people call SST. Doing both of these in the week definitely hurt.
In all 9:05 on the bike for the 5-day week, which is an hour short of what I am trying to get every week. But I was 2 days short since we were going north this week.
Ski Gore
Friday night we drove up to Chestertown to join
@graveyardman67 and his wife at the cabin for a weekend away. I'll add this to the travel blog at some point so I won't go too into it other than to say it was a solid weekend. We ended up at Gore just 1 day but conditions yesterday were really great, and the sun shining made it a super day out there. Given how slow I have been, hard to say when I'll get to that post.
We watched UFC last night then some Supercross which is exactly like we did the year before. And just like last year, we were there for the Super Bowl weekend.
The Week(s) Ahead
So I am not going to say that I know for sure what is going to happen in any given week anymore but it looks like the next 2 weeks (almost) I will be sleeping in my own bed which is nice. I admit that there may be a 1 day trip to Colorado but I'm not sure how likely that is right now. But for the next 2 weeks, I should be in NJ until we head up to Vermont with Utah and the Mrs. to an Airbnb in Rutland for the weekend. We've already got tickets for Pico for both days. Looking forward to that.
After Vermont I'll be in Austin for 2 days because we are meeting up with the CEO of Microsoft. Wait, did I say Microsoft? I meant some medical parts dealer from Cleveland. Normally I would be happy to be going to Austin over Cleveland in the winter. But this would have been a good chance to check out Ray's. But when I'm in Austin I'm pretty sure I'll be happy I am not in Cleveland.
Team Blog
We now have a team blog, as listed in the navigation above:
http://www.mtbnj.com/news/
The first post shows you how to setup the feed. You can use this as a format for setting up my blog feed as well. There will be an announcement posted shortly there. But since you read this, I'll give you the info first.
Short Track News!
We've secured a food vendor, Mountain Man Chili, who will be coming out to the 3 Short Track races this year. Mike, who is on the board, is a racer and a NICA coach, does many of our races and will be doing his first official event at the March 3rd ST race, weather-dependent of course. He'll be selling a 12oz containers for $6, which is pretty reasonable.
I'll be creating the Bikereg links for Short Track this week. Still need to come up with a name for the series.
January Wrap-up
I'm still doing the tracking of myself but I don't think I am going to recap every month like I did last year. I'll just throw out some random items:
288 total pushups and situps, a new item to track. I do this while I make coffee in the morning, when I remember.
50+ hours of exercise, not bad for January.
202 weight, which is of note as I am 1 pound higher now than my low of 2018 entirely, which is a good start to 2019.
15 movies, which is off the hook.
664 days of no drinking as of today.