James Pearl Thinks Blogging is Dead

jShort

2018 Fantasy Football Toilet Bowl Lead Technician
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Seriously though...


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Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
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.

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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.

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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.
 

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Travel Blog Post

Day 1 of the Gore Weekend here:
https://mtbnj.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/gore-day-1-the-drive-north/

Nothing especially earth-shattering but again, with the unlimited real estate, fuck it. D asked me what I was doing tonight after the dust of the day had settled and I said I was rearranging some details of the older posts, specifically renaming the Arizona posts to Phoenix posts, which was more accurate. Usually we don't have the kids on Monday but tonight we had the boys. D then explained to them what I was doing, and that maybe someday they would want to read. I said I hoped so. There wasn't much reaction to that. I suppose when they see their own faces on the blog they may change their tune.

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Press Release

Why am I so entertained calling it a press release?

MTBNJ Secures First Ever Food Vendor for Short Track Series

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Travel Clarity

I confirmed today that I'm in New Jersey for the next 2 weeks. Then we'll go skiing up at Pico with the Utah's for the President's Weekend, then I'm off to Austin for 2 days on the 20th/21st. That should be all for February. As much as I like travel, the more I bike the less I want to do these work trips unless they make sense.

March is even more low-key, with our travel looking like a night at Mohunk, maybe a trip to Chicago for 2 days, and a twilight ski day at Camelback. Other than that, I see nothing I am needed for right now. There is a big demo in Atlanta the last week in March but my name was not called on this one.

Training

I hit the Alpe in Watopia pretty hard and I was surprised that I didn't beat my PR on this one. 69:19 previous best, today I hit 69:49. A little disappointed but sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. I continue the take-the-days-you-can-get in terms of when I ride hard. I was off yesterday but then I skied 4 hours on Saturday so maybe my legs were a little sluggish.

I do want to use the Alpe as my training to climb Whiteface. The numbers of the 2 looks surprisingly similar. I have tagged @seanrunnette for this one and he has agreed to give it a go with me. It's too cold to think about that right now.

I reached level 30 in Zwift today.

I was cautiously optimistic that I could get outside tomorrow but hey guess what? Here are my meetings:

10-10:30
11-1
2-3
3-4

That right there is a shit-suck of a day of meetings. I'm not sure what to do with that nonsense. More than likely I will ride after 4:00 inside, for 2-3 hours using Argh mode to get some work in. After today, tomorrow will be hard no matter what.

Short Track

I had every intention of getting the Short Track series setup today but I ran out of rope for the day. Tomorrow, one can hope. Stay, as they say, tuned.

Nielsen Ratings

We were chosen to be a Nielsen Ratings family. We agreed and a woman came tonight to do an interview with us. They'll come in a month to setup the boxes that they use to capture the data. It'll be interesting to see if we can single handedly bring Spongebob Squarepants to the top of the charts. Here she is taking info on the family:

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Patrick

Overthinking the draft from the basement already
Staff member
because one can never have enough data - and if you can get it into strava......

https://gearpatrol.com/2019/02/05/strava-partners-slopes-announcement/

i continue to wonder how neilsen is in business when every click on the set-top-box is recorded,
and all the household demographics are available - must be the softer data (do you remember watching....)
there is also all of the connected info - like twitter mentions..
good example for the kids when they say they will never use 'this math' the rest of their lives.....
 
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Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Travel Post

Gore trip, day 2, when we actually went skiing:
https://mtbnj.wordpress.com/2019/02/06/gore-day-2-skiing-the-mountain/

What an amazing day out.

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Training

Tuesday I did another 3 hours at 200w. Last week it was tough, but doable. This week I had done the Alpe climb at 244w which made this one far harder to get through. I did it, but I wasn't super happy about it. I mean I'm happy I did the work but damn, it was tough. I had gone outside earlier in the day and it was amazing out. It's a bummer I was not able to get out because it looks like that warm front has up & left.

Wednesday/today I did 1:15 easy while watching TV. I am on Maisel which I will talk about when I do a media post.

IDK tomorrow. I did replace my brake pads on Ted today. Maybe I'll go to RV.

Short Track

Dave's Not Here, a new Short Track Series:
https://www.bikereg.com/daves-not-here-short-track-series-1

This isn't live yet because it has not, as yet, been approved. That usually doesn't take long. In fact, by the time you read this it may be live.

I asked Dave and he was ok with the name, so there we are. Once again, kids are racing free this year. And we will have food, which is new for us.

Nielsen Ratings

So there is the official answer to the question of how we were selected, and my personal opinion
  1. Officially, it is random. When someone in the relative area has their time run up as a Nielsen family (usually 24 months), they replace that with someone else in the general area. We just got lucky, as it turns out.
  2. In my opinion, I think it has everything to do with this guy:
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pxs231

Active Member
Travel Blog Post

Day 1 of the Gore Weekend here:
https://mtbnj.wordpress.com/2019/02/05/gore-day-1-the-drive-north/

Nothing especially earth-shattering but again, with the unlimited real estate, fuck it. D asked me what I was doing tonight after the dust of the day had settled and I said I was rearranging some details of the older posts, specifically renaming the Arizona posts to Phoenix posts, which was more accurate. Usually we don't have the kids on Monday but tonight we had the boys. D then explained to them what I was doing, and that maybe someday they would want to read. I said I hoped so. There wasn't much reaction to that. I suppose when they see their own faces on the blog they may change their tune.

d_ava.jpg

Press Release

Why am I so entertained calling it a press release?

MTBNJ Secures First Ever Food Vendor for Short Track Series

chili-1024x810.jpg

Travel Clarity

I confirmed today that I'm in New Jersey for the next 2 weeks. Then we'll go skiing up at Pico with the Utah's for the President's Weekend, then I'm off to Austin for 2 days on the 20th/21st. That should be all for February. As much as I like travel, the more I bike the less I want to do these work trips unless they make sense.

March is even more low-key, with our travel looking like a night at Mohunk, maybe a trip to Chicago for 2 days, and a twilight ski day at Camelback. Other than that, I see nothing I am needed for right now. There is a big demo in Atlanta the last week in March but my name was not called on this one.

Training

I hit the Alpe in Watopia pretty hard and I was surprised that I didn't beat my PR on this one. 69:19 previous best, today I hit 69:49. A little disappointed but sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. I continue the take-the-days-you-can-get in terms of when I ride hard. I was off yesterday but then I skied 4 hours on Saturday so maybe my legs were a little sluggish.

I do want to use the Alpe as my training to climb Whiteface. The numbers of the 2 looks surprisingly similar. I have tagged @seanrunnette for this one and he has agreed to give it a go with me. It's too cold to think about that right now.

I reached level 30 in Zwift today.

I was cautiously optimistic that I could get outside tomorrow but hey guess what? Here are my meetings:

10-10:30
11-1
2-3
3-4

That right there is a shit-suck of a day of meetings. I'm not sure what to do with that nonsense. More than likely I will ride after 4:00 inside, for 2-3 hours using Argh mode to get some work in. After today, tomorrow will be hard no matter what.

Short Track

I had every intention of getting the Short Track series setup today but I ran out of rope for the day. Tomorrow, one can hope. Stay, as they say, tuned.

Nielsen Ratings

We were chosen to be a Nielsen Ratings family. We agreed and a woman came tonight to do an interview with us. They'll come in a month to setup the boxes that they use to capture the data. It'll be interesting to see if we can single handedly bring Spongebob Squarepants to the top of the charts. Here she is taking info on the family:

Stop stalking us! First Tremblant at Christmas and now Pico over presidents weekend!
 

Norm

Mayor McCheese
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Bike Training

This is the 6th straight week of being "on" the gas, which equates to 10+ hours a week for every one of those weeks. Last week was 9 hours, but I also had 4 hours of skiing in there. So to me it counts as a 10+ week. One of the things I noticed right away at Gore was that my legs were tired on the very first run and by the second they were burning. So I had seen some hints of needing a break then. Move on to this week, and I did 3 structured workouts. That culminated yesterday in my pulling the plug at 1:10 and calling it off today entirely, just trying to get a good few nights of rest and see how I feel this week. I'll probably get on the bike the next few days just to spin my legs a bit but I am not going to "work" on anything.

This week, I'm going to play it by ear. We're going to wake up Friday, drop the kids off at school, then drive up to get @UtahJoe and the Mrs. and head to Rutland, Vermont where we will stay in an Airbnb for 2 days. Then we'll be stalking @pxs231 at Pico for 2 days. Anyway, that's getting ahead of myself right now. Between now and then I'm sure I'll get in at least 1-2 days of work on the bike. If I'm a betting man I would guess I'll go easy the next 2 days, which would give me 4 easier days total. Then Wednesday I'll do some actual work for a day. Then just get volume on Thursday. Friday drive, then ski the weekend.

The following week will be 2 days of hard riding, 2 days in Austin, then who knows. I'll sneeze and it will be March before you know it.

Travel Blogging and Such

Nothing new this week as I haven't gone anywhere. After I did these posts, plus another post that may or may not be up on the MTBNJ blog by the time I submit this, I mentioned to Utah that I wish I could do this for a living because I really do enjoy this more focused, more in-depth writing. The post that may or may not be up is a more informational post, which is a slightly different direction, but something I also enjoy writing. Both of these avenues will be something I hope to focus on for 2019.

In any event, when I mentioned this to him he asked, well why can't you do it for a living? As I said to him, I can see the click-throughs. In all, 17 people clicked through over the course of all 3 posts on Gore. If the people who actually know me, and presumably like me, click through on average less than 6 times per post, what chance do I have of random people clicking? As it turns out, the general readership of Wordpress is reading 2-4 times as much as MTBNJ, which is another interesting point in this, but not the conversation.

Utah claims I don't advertise it enough. This may be true. For MTBNJ, I link it here only, which is just a subset of the MTBNJ community. I try to contain my personal nonsense to this thread, since the people who care about what I'm doing click here. And I figure they see it, so why post it elsewhere on the site? I'm not going to do 2 different travel blogs. Though I suppose I can put it in my footer. Ok let me do that. BRB.

Ok done. I suppose I could also feed the posts to Facebook. I'm just hesitant to saturate "the market" with my stuff.

@2Julianas got this for me. And we travel together sometimes. And I have not put this picture in here yet.

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The MTBNJ Blog

So it turns out that Steve got it up tonight. This is my write-up of South Mountain in Phoenix. It's a different feel than the travel blog post and what I do here. My intention is to be more informative with this kind of piece:
MTBNJ blog post on South Mountain, Phoenix.

I was considering doing this for the New Jersey parks, but then @seanrunnette reminded me why this is a terrible idea, so I've scrapped that idea. Having said that I would like to do maybe 12 of these this year, sort of loosely average 1/month, though I'm not sure how I will get February in. It's just going to have to be an average.

The Weekend

The weekend was a mostly domestic series of things. Friday we went out to Readington and watched Zac's team lose a heartbreaker by 1 point with 10 seconds left. I hate to say, this but the refs blew this one as they swallowed their whistles in the last 30 seconds, and our guy drove to the basket in the final seconds and got mugged. We definitely didn't play our best game of the year, and we're a better team than they are. At home, we beat them up pretty well. But on the road our guys were off their game for sure. Win some lose some.

Saturday was morning basketball, then I totally forget, then we went to Scotch Plains High School to play SPF Blue for the last game of the regular season. The first half was a snooze-fest, with the score something like 13-12 at the half, us winning by 1. In this league they can only full court press after the half. Well, in the second half they obliterated and I mean OBLITERATED them. At one point it was 43-17, they had outscored the other team 30-5 in the second half. The other team simply wasn't able to handle the pressure, not at all. Then they called off the dogs and the game wound out to the end.

Random bit, Renaldo Nehemiah went to Scotch Plains Fanwood High School.

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Today D took the boys to a Ninja warehouse place and I took Julia to Penstock Coffee Roasters in Highland Park. This is purported to be the best coffee in the state and after today I am inclined to agree. This was fantastic. As it is only 13-ish miles from the house, I may need to ride my bike there occasionally and grab an espresso or pour over. Or both, like I got today.

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Following this we hit up the Mongolian Hot Pot with the rest of the family, then hit up H Mart for a little shopping before heading home and continuing the remainder of the domestic weekend. I told Zac that I will be shocked if he shows up to our house in 10 days with the same amount of hair. His dad is a close-cropped kinda guy. It's obviously been a while.

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Santapez

Well-Known Member
Team MTBNJ Halter's
I was considering doing this for the New Jersey parks, but then @seanrunnette reminded me why this is a terrible idea, so I've scrapped that idea.

I would like to know why he thought it was a bad idea. Just as if you were someone looking into South Mountain coming from another place, visiting a NJ park can be overwhelming.

As we know with visiting new places not near our local area, trail markings are different, trail features, trail ratings, etc.

It's not easy to look at TrailForks and pick a good loop based on ability or what someone wants to do. Someone visiting NJ may have a hard time deciding between Wawayanda or 6 mile based on TrailForks yet none of us would put them together. Recently me and Dan ran into a couple from Long Island at Lewis Morris and they were asking about the trails. How do we describe them without a comparison to their local trails?
 

rottin'

Well-Known Member
Staff member
Team MTBNJ Halter's
Interesting tidbit about Renaldo Nehemiah...as a high hurdler/sprinter in the mid-80's high school scene in NJ I remember looking at him as an icon, and I totally forgot he was a local!
 
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