July 8th, 2010 Scott
Summer is here. We were lucky this year as we had a longer rainy season than we’ve had the last two years which created cooler temperatures until late June. Then we suddenly had 83 – 88 degree days with 90% relative humidity. Working out now outside is much slower and requires carrying a great deal of water to survive. Coming from spending my entire life in a summer environment where the night time temperatures drop into the low 60′s, I find opening our door at 5:30 AM to a blast of hot, humid air to be very peculiar. Actually though, 82 degrees now feels relatively cool compared to later in the day when the sun comes out.
The marine corps bases here have a system of calculating a head index that takes into account temperature, relative humidity, wind speed, and sun light. From this data, they will post either no flag, a green flag, a yellow flag, a red flag, or a black flag. Most days this week have been black flag by 10:00 AM. That indicates that no physical fitness activities outside are to be undertaken. Even though the air temperature might be around 88, with the sun and humidity factored in, their system has registered a high of 120 for a couple of bases this week. Any number over 90 seems to generate the black flag. You can see what the current conditions are for yourself.
We have about a week left here before we leave for our summer travels. We will be heading to Washington for a couple of weeks, then going to Germany to visit a friend for a short week. After that, Gina travels to Los Angeles to visit with her sister while I go to Ireland for photography workshop. I’m looking forward to all of it.
I’ve settled on my athletic goals for the upcoming school year. I will enter the Izena 88 Triathlon, the Tour of Okinawa 85k Road Race, the Naha Marathon, and the Ishigaki Olympic Distance Triathlon. Izena is close to a 70.3 or half-ironman distance and will be my first long course race. The Tour of Okinawa is a challenging bicycle race that I’ll enter to support a good friend of mine who wants to do well in it. The 85k course is very hilly and consequently very challenging. I will do the Naha Marathon in hopes that I finish strong rather than weak as I did in the Okinawa Marathon early this Spring. And finally, the Ishigaki Triathlon is one I’ve wanted to do for three years but haven’t been able to due to scheduling with work obligations. This Olympic Distance race will be my #1 priority race for the season. がんばって！
Posted in Health and wellness, Travel, Triathlon | 1 Comment »
May 7th, 2010 Scott
We visited three cities in China last month; Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai. In each city we had an English speaking guide meet us at the airport. With a driver and a car, our guide was well equipped to take us on our daily adventures before dropping us off at the airport again for our next stop. Because Gina and I travelled alone, we ended up with a lot of time in the car to discuss various topics with our guides. The following snippets of information come straight from what they told us. It’s up to you to decide for yourself whether you think the information is accurate, exaggerated, or government dictated. I suspect that a little of all three possibilities exist.
One US Dollar equals about 6 Chinese Yuan. This conversion made it challenging to calculate the value of things. We eventually figured out to divide everything in half, then again in thirds to get a rough estimate of US value. All three of our guides told us they average monthly income is 2000 yuan. However, a very small ordinary apartment costs about 1.5 million yuan to purchase in Beijing or Shanghai. That would be the equivalent of an American earning $333 a month trying to find an apartment for $250,000. We saw thousands upon thousands of apartments and easily 50% of the cars on the street were expensive European models (BMW, Mercedes, Porsche, etc). These cars cost about double the cost we would bear. Apparently they have high import tariffs or luxury taxes. Time and time again George would quote prices that were about double what my estimates would be ($50,000 – $150,000 per car). Neither Emily or George (our Beijing guide) could afford to live in their respective cities. Each of them had a 60 – 90 minute train commute each day to get to our hotel. Based on how they dressed and the nature of their jobs (likely a pretty good job and they got good tips) I’d say they were upper middle class.
So who lives in all those apartments? If you have to be rich to afford a 500 square foot studio, where do people who earn less than 2000 yuan a month live? If that’s the average, there must be a lot of street people…but I didn’t see more than a couple of obviously homeless people the whole time. I did see A LOT of people and I was also in places where homeless people might congregate, but just didn’t see them. I did see baggage x ray machines at the subway stations and Tianamen Square. I also saw police and army personnel in most public places. We had to go through security checkpoint to get back into the city of Shanghai after a drive in the country.
All three guides were very quick to always point out or explain why China is the greatest country on earth or why China is quickly becoming a very important country on the worldwide scene. This felt a little like government sponsored patriotism to me since it all seemed very similar from all three of them. Emily explained that she had to go through a one year training program to become a guide. At the end of the year, she had to pass a test that she estimated only 10% of the students who took the course passed. Of those students who passed, she estimated that only 10% actually got jobs as tour guides. Seems extreme, but in a place where there are 1 billion people, the job market is likely fairly competitive. Still, that means that Emily is 1 of a 100 who wanted her job.
Because of the ‘one child’ policy and the cultural preference for boys, there is an imbalance in the population. There are more men than women. In the cities, a man can not hope to get married unless he owns his own apartment. Review my figures above to see why this is especially difficult and why many men still live with family (and consequently have a failure to launch). Married couples who are each ‘one child’ themselves from the policy are now allowed to have two children and couples in rural areas under certain circumstances can have two children (but only if you were born in a rural area…so you can’t move from the city to get a bigger family). It was fairly interesting to realize that we never saw a family bigger than three in a place where we saw more people in one place than anywhere else we’d been.
A foreign teacher recruited to come teach English at a private school might make 5000 yuan a month. Still not much money.
Facebook is blocked in China. Needless to say, I also refrained from checking my DoD email account while there.
All three guides had somewhat disparaging remarks about Japanese people. Basically, they felt that everything Japan has ever done was something that China did first, and did better. These sorts of comments where made about architecture, food, written language, etc. I don’t think they even realized how it sounded….it was just a matter of fact to them:
“Well you know that the Japanese writing system is actually Chinese, right? Well, almost. They could only learn about 3,000 characters”
“Actually the Japanese learned how to make pagodas from us.”
All of it likely true, but it struck me as most likely that they don’t think to highly of Japanese folks.
George explained to us that Tibet has no right, privilege, or need to be freed. It is part of China and China has done a great deal to improve Tibet. End of discussion.
George was baffled as to why American electronics companies will not market their products to him. He likes American products and would buy lots of them if they would just sell them in China. I explained to him that in the news that week I had read a story about how most American companies can’t wait to sell to the world’s biggest market but the Chinese government won’t let it happen. He laughed at me because he found this story to be absurd. It would be impossible for that to be the problem. He was insistent that it was because our companies don’t want to do business in China. It’s all a matter of perspective I suppose. I know Apple wants to sell stuff to him (and they are starting to). Perhaps George is more interested in F-22′s. I could see why Lockheed-Martin might have a problem with selling him military grade equipment.
Chinese people have no socialized health care system. If you have a good job, you can get insurance. However, a great many of China’s people are self employed farmers. If they get seriously ill, there is no recourse for them and they are refused service. Can you imagine not even having the ability to go to an emergency room to get treatment? People argue about health care in the states, but the bottom line is that you can get care if you need it. Ultimately, the hospital may have to ‘write off’ the costs if a patient can’t pay but that cost is transferred to higher bills for the rest of us which means higher insurance premiums (hey…we were all already paying for poor people’s health care…now it’s being handled by the government instead Blue Cross). In China they have none of these issues. If you have no money or insurance, you receive no care.
Bottom line is that China is a powerful old country that is doing very well in modern times. They have different priorities than we do, but they have a different culture than we do. It was most certainly a modern, first world economy that I saw. Unlike Cambodia and Vietnam where you could clearly see that they still live in an old (third) world economy, China looks and feels like a force to behold. Obviously there are freedoms we take for granted that simply aren’t possible in a Communist country, but our guides felt like many of our ‘freedoms’ were simply to dangerous to be allowed and they felt confident and safe with how their government dictated their lives. Our government dictates much of our lives as well, it’s just delivered in a package we are all familiar with seeing. I’m not advocating that their system is inherently good or bad (or evil), I’m just trying to point out that perspective makes a huge impact on perception. George found it insane that I could own a gun. I find it insane that he can’t freely browse the Internet.
George is either happy in his Communist country or he’s been taught to be happy. I’m either happy in my Democratic country or I’ve been taught to be happy. Either way, we’re both happy.
Posted in Travel | No Comments »
April 22nd, 2010 Scott
Okay, I know that’s not quite as Earth shattering as Seven Years in Tibet, but it is an accurate title. Gina and I spent Spring Break on a three city China tour this year. We left Okinawa on Sunday April 11 and returned on Sunday April 19. We spent three days in Beijing, two in Xian, and two in Shanghai. The local on-base travel agencies had group tours organized that followed this general plan and with only one flight a week leaving Okinawa for Shanghai that made for a very crowded plane of Americans on vacation.
There were two other tour groups of Americans and at least one other individual traveling alone doing similar itineraries. We crossed paths with these people from time to time before meeting them all again on the return flight on the closing Sunday. When Gina and I had originally gone into the tour agency to book the trip, we had anticipated going in one of the advertised group packages. Having travelled in a group to Vietnam in 2008, we knew that there would be some issues with traveling in a group we would have to put up with but felt it was worth it to make sure all the details were already planned. However, we ended up booking a trip that was just for the two of us. We also were able to modify certain aspects of the trip to fit our personalities because we were not doing it as part of a large group. So, for the same cost as the group package we received all the same benefits but were able to customize the trip. For example, we had an English speaking guide meet us at each airport. This guide and our driver picked us up each morning and dropped us of each night when were were finished. At the conclusion of that city’s stay, the guide took us all the way to the security screening at the airport. The large tour groups also had a guide, but they had to share this guide with 20 – 30 other people. We had our guide to ourselves and consequently had a lot of time to discuss culture, politics, economics, and history with them. We also were able to move to each tourist spot on our own schedule. Sometimes we’d stay longer if it looked more interesting and sometimes we’d move on quickly if the site didn’t mean much to us. This sort of flexibility was not possible with the large group tours. This proved to be especially useful for the government mandated Jade/Silk/Pearl/Tera Cotta factory stops when we could get back in the van as soon as we were done with the walk through. Some of the other groups spent several precious hours at these tourist traps only to find their time at the Great Wall or the Terra Cotta Warrior Pits significantly curtailed.
I will cover the aspects of this trip from three perspectives: The Tourist, The Traveller, and The Photographer.
The Tourist
The tourist in me had a fantastic trip. We had only two minor poor services issues the entire time. Everything went smoothly and without a hitch from checkins, transfers, meals, purchases, etc. It was a remarkably smooth and professionally organized itinerary. At our first stop in Beijing we saw Tiananmen Square, Forbidden City, Temple of Heaven, and a live Kung Fu based show (a la Broadway or Las Vegas) on the first day. On the next day we visited the Great Wall (using a cable car and a summer bobsled), the Summer Palace, and a Chinese Acrobatics show. On our final day we visted the Lama Temple and a Hutong neighborhood (complete with rickshaw ride). It was a tourist’s dream visit. In Xian, we spent the first day visiting the Terra Cotta Warriors and the Great Mosque (including a cool trip through the Muslim Quarter) with a dinner theater presentation of ethnic singing and dancing. The next day we transferred to Shanghai were we saw Yu Garden and the Bund. We crashed in our room late that afternoon and ordered room service. The activities had finally caught up to us and we needed to take a break. The next morning we traveled to Lake Tongli to visit the ‘Venice of the East’ and then had an evening cruise on the river in front of the Bund and the Pudong skyline. Overall, an exceptional collection of sites to see. However, it was exhausting. For us non-city folk, a visit to New York, Washington D.C., and Chicago in eight days would be equally daunting and exhausting.
The Traveller
This trip was better suited to the tourist than to the traveller. Granted, if you are going to be in Beijing and likely never be there again, you should go see the Great Wall. However, the traveller would’ve spent time finding the spots nobody else knows about and trying to walk as many kilometers of it as possible. The traveller would’ve also stopped in some of the many villages on the way to the wall to meet people and find out more about how they live. Unfortunately that was difficult since our driver sped through these towns in excess of 60 mph. The traveller also would’ve wanted to eat with the locals as most of our meals were set up for tourists and Western tastes. Often we’d go to a restaurant full of locals and interesting looking food only to be lead to another room full of tourists easting very shiny glazed goods stripped of all the nasty stuff Westerners scorn (bones, intestines, etc). One of our guides took my comments to heart and we did eat with the locals one night for Beijing Roast Duck, but he still made sure the other menu choices were easy on Western style stomaches. The traveller got tired of being in the big city…and I really mean BIG city. Beijing is 11 million, Xian is 6 million (a small town by Chinese standards) and Shanghai is 18 million. These place are massive and along with that comes the issues of too many people in too small of a space. Cars and pedestrians alike share no sense of courtesy. To get where you want to go you have to be the most aggressive. Gina was thrown out of the way by an old woman trying to follow her guide as we waited for our tour boat. Our driver in Shanghai sported a secondary horn that sounded like a factory disaster buzzer as well as a PA system he could use to tell people to get out of his way. He wasn’t shy about using either system. The next time I visit China, I will go as the traveller and only use the big cities as a port of entry and exit. I want to see the rural areas and take the time to enjoy them without being shoved out of the way by someone else.
The Photographer
The photographer took a new set up for this trip that worked much better in the dynamic environment of trying to take photos while surrounded by tons of people who don’t care about your photo. I bought a Canon 7D last fall and kept my 20D as a backup. When I went to Kyoto in the Fall, I realized that taking pictures of tourist spots with a tripod is very, very challenging. The tripod takes up too much space and time when there is an ocean of humanity around you. It is especially cumbersome if you are trying to stay in contact with a tour group on a tight schedule like I was. So this winter I purchased a monopod & tilt head and a Blackrapid camera strap. The monopod was my substituion for the tripod but allowed a little more speed and also easier to carry on a sling. The Blackrapid strap allowed me to carry two cameras comfortably on either hip and be able to bring either one up to my eye in an instant to take pictures. I generally kept the 10 – 22 wide angle zoom on the 20D and the 17 – 55 2.8 IS on the 7D. This combination allowed me to quickly and easily take both wide angle and normal range shots. It worked extraordinarily well and I can’t recommend the system enough. The cameras were always quickly within reach and yet comfortably out of the way when not in use. Occasionally I’d swap out the 17 – 55 with my 70 – 200 2.8 when I needed to get in a little tighter or wanted to shoot from a discreet distance. I’m torn on how useful the monopod was because it was only used on the 70 – 200 shots when the shutter speed wasn’t hand holdable. My IS on the mid range zoom negated any advantage for the monopod and the wide angle also never found the need to be stabilized. If only my 70 – 200 were IS then I’d be set.
I took about 3500 shots with approximately 1000 of those as 3 shot bursts for potential HDR use later. As of this first draft of writing, I’ve only gone through the shots once and only a couple really stand out to me so far. This is much different than my Vietnam and Cambodia shots where I found a great deal of interesting possibilities on the first look through. I’ll have to comb through them in more detail to see what else might be sleeping in there, but for now I’m little disappointed. Most of the shots don’t even look good enough for postcard use let alone a large format print, but only time will tell.
Posted in Travel | 1 Comment »
September 6th, 2009 Scott
Gina and I flew to Kumejima, a small island that’s about a 25 minute flight away to the west of Okinawa. Our Japanese language teacher grew up there and we decided to go visit. It takes about 45 minutes to drive all the way around it at 25 mph and only 10,000 people live there. To say this place is laid back is an understatement. Farming and scuba tourism appear to be the primary industries. There is likely some healthy amounts of fishing happening as well. This morning, we hiked to some waterfalls that flow up when the wind blows. There wasn’t enough water to really get the effect today, but there were some really big banana spiders there. This one pictured was about 10 inches from end to end. Each square in his web was about 1/2 an inch to give you some perspective. His web was about 6 – 8 feet in diameter and would move back and forth some 2 – 3 feet in the wind. This made it challenging to get a picture and also made him float uncomfortably near my camera a couple of times. We had to be careful of a few of his brother’s webs on the walk in and out of the observation area from the parking lot. I’ll have many more cool pictures and details later. Enjoy this one for now:
Really big banana spider
Posted in Okinawa, Photography, Travel | 2 Comments »
July 21st, 2009 Scott
I’ve taken a lot of pictures with my iPhone that I thought would be interesting to blog about but have negelected to get them on to the blog. So, I have a collection of several photos dating back to last November that I’ll post here and give you a caption for each one. Enjoy.
Is it a lime (the peel is green) or an orange?
An Okinawan coffee farm
Another shot of the farm
The whole family at the coffee farm
My band marches in the international day parade
Our banner in the parade
Jelly on your root beer float, anyone?
Check out the warning on the bottom
S C plays the saxophone in Vietnam
More Cambodia airport food choices
My mariachi guitarron debut!
A "Gina" sized couch
Seether in concert at Camp Schwab
Fish heads anyone?
Interesting combination of menu items at Tokyo airport
Posted in Okinawa, Photography, Travel | 3 Comments »
June 16th, 2009 Scott
…or “How to mess up your hydration so bad that you can’t run and you lose your balance”.
This is a very detailed, lengthy blog entry about my experience at the Gamagori Triathlon last weekend. Make sure you have some time to read before starting.
Several years ago while taking band students on yet another bus trip I realized that something was always going to go wrong during the trip. It was usually one thing and once that one thing went wrong I could relax because I knew the rest of the trip would be without incident. I developed this theory after many years of teaching and dozens of trips. Sometime the thing that went wrong would be huge (a student disappearing from the hotel in the middle of the night) and sometimes it would be fairly insignificant (forgetting to bring my tuner). To this day on a band trip I still wait nervously to discover what will go wrong so I can get past it.
I now know that this theorem applies to triathlon racing as well. One bit of wise information I received from a very successful triathlete friend of mine was that “Something will go wrong. Deal with it and do what you can with the rest of the race.”
Yesterday was the culmination of five months of training under the direction of my coach with my first JTU (Japan Triathlon Union) Olympic Distance race. I booked a flight and set up hotel reservations in April for the Gamagori Orange Triathlon. This venue has been the site of the ITU World Championships in past years so I figured it would be a classy event. Translation issues notwithstanding, I did manage to make in time for event registration day before yesterday and was comfortably set up in the transition zone well before start of the race.
It wasn’t clear until sometime after the race what went wrong. It’s stunning what a simple single mistake can do to months of preparation. Here’s the mistake:
My time trial bicycle water bottle is smaller than I thought it was.
That seems innocent enough of a mistake, doesn’t it? It’s better than your bike getting broken by the luggage handlers or forgetting your shoes or breaking the strap on your swim goggles (and the backup goggles). All those kind of mistakes are deadly because you know your done before you even start. My mistake still allowed me to race, but was ultimately very costly. Here’s what happened:
As per the advice of my coach and other sources, I wanted to carry a dilute solution of sports drink with me on the bike. Using straight water is good too, but having some calories and some salt replenishment is a good idea. Diluting the solution is critical because too high of a concentration of carbohydrates will cause your stomach to cramp because it can’t digest it properly. I don’t remember the details, but it has something to do with osmosis and strength of a solution dissolving into another solution. It also makes you feel more thirsty and you have to drink even more water than you would normally need in a race in order to dilute the solution in your stomach to a level where it can digest it. I practiced during training (never ever try something new in a race…a basic axiom of endurance racing) with different solutions of sports drink and found a level that worked very well for me. When I packed for this trip, I measured that precise level of sports drink powder into a ziplock baggie and mixed it up right before the race and put it on my bike. I didn’t think anything of it again.
The swim was in nasty brackish (half salt, half normal) water in a lagoon that was literally swamp water. It was nasty green and you couldn’t see more than about two feet around you in the water. Also, it reeked of sulfur. This alone might prevent from ever coming back to this venue. Beyond that though, I had a very good swim. I focused on good long strokes and stayed away from people. I stayed strong throughout and passed several fading folks on the last of the second lap. Unfortunately I breathe to the left and tend to swim toward the left while the race course turned to the right. I kept finding myself outside the mainline of swimmers a bit more than I would’ve liked and probably added 50 meters or so to my swim.
The transition zone was one great big long alley way lined with about 500 bikes on both sides. Just running from the entrance to the exit without stopping to get the bike probably took about two minutes. I didn’t run very fast, but I had a fairly clean transition at the bike and took off for my four laps around the technical 10k course. There wasn’t a race clock so I don’t know how long my swim was (I don’t use a stopwatch in the water, just my Garmin 705 on the bike and the run) and the results weren’t posted yet when I left.
Now I worked hard on relaxing on the bike. I have a habit of going far too hard on the bike and I really wanted to achieve a negative split for the bike leg. A negative split means you go faster on the second half than on the first half. This requires a great degree of patience on the first half because you don’t feel like you are going as hard as you should be. About 1000 meters into the bike ride I took a sip of my sports drink and knew right there I had a problem. I didn’t know how serious of a problem until later, but I knew that the mix was WAY too strong. This meant that with every drink I would get thirstier. That was my only thought about it at the time. I’ve never had issues with stomach cramps so it didn’t occur to me that I would be paying for the mistake with cramps on the run later. I did look for a water station. If they had one at any point on the route, I would’ve stopped and filled my bottle with water. So I was at least looking for a solution. Despite that problem, the bike leg went well. I held 23.3 mph average speed for the entire leg and never deviated lower than 23.2 or higher than 23.4 for any of the four laps. Interestingly, my heart rate descended from 165 to 158 over the course of the four laps as well. I was relaxing more and more (by design because it had started too high) and yet maintaining speed. Toward the end I actually wanted to bring it back up for the negative split effect, but I was unable to do so. This was likely symptom number one of dehydration.
I ran out of sports drink before the end of the leg. So, not only was it too strong and it made me thirsty, but I also ran out. It was warm in the race, but not overly hot. I knew I was sweating though. Other than being thirsty, I actually felt good and was excited to see such good speeds overall with such a relaxed heart rate. The course had 19 right angle turns and 4 hairpin turns per lap. It was highly technical and I could tell that many, many riders weren’t comfortable with the turns. I made up a lot of time in those turns going around other riders as they slowed down more than they needed to.
So, I felt good, had a good swim and now a good bike leg. My goal time of 2:15 seemed within reason as I approached the transition zone for the run. Then something horrible happened: I thought my bike was disintegrating underneath me because suddenly (very suddenly) I had no control of the bike. It was weaving all over the road seemingly independent of my control inputs. I immediately had my feet out of the clips and was looking down to find the source of the issue as the bike meandered out of control to the side of the race course. After coming to a stop, I could see that I had no flat tires and the frame and wheels were intact. I figured that perhaps a weird wind had hit my tri spoke wheels in a peculiar way and that must’ve been the problem. Winds do create some odd effects to the front wheel of this set so it’s not unheard of for this type of issue to occur. Problem was that there wasn’t any wind. I clipped back in and started to pedal off again only to steer my bike straight left into a wall. It was at this point that I recognized the problem was with me and not the bike. I didn’t feel odd at all other than I obviously had lost all sense of balance, and lost it in a very, very sudden way. It was so sudden that once I realized the problem was with me and not the bike I assumed I was having a stroke. I was scared, very scared.
I set the bike down and sat down next to it wondering what was about to happen to me. Two race course officials came toward me and asked me if I was okay (in Japanese). I indicated to them that I was dizzy which wasn’t quite accurate but I don’t think they even understood what it was I tried to say to them. I did start to notice that my arms seemed somewhat disconnected from my brain and I felt a little woozy. At best I figured my race day was done. At worst, I figured that I would start going blind in one eye or lose control over one half my body. Like I said before, I was scared. After a few minutes of rest (I stopped my timer just in case I did race more; I didn’t want the down time to count as part of my high quality bike effort), I started feeling more connected to my body and I tried standing up and succeeded. I wouldn’t have been able to stand when it first happened, I basically fell off my bike when I stopped. I slowly started walking the last 500 meters to the transition and with each step felt better and better. I got back on the bike and carefully peddled in toward the transition and maintained balance throughout. Thank goodness my body and brain started communicating again.
At the transition area, I took my time getting some plain water and getting my race shoes on and started off on the run. It all felt quite normal, just like all my training when I did rides followed by runs. I started easy to get my ‘running legs’ under me and then start stepping the tempo up. My goal was to run the first two laps around 160 – 165 beats per minute (heart rate) and the last two laps around 165 – 170, with the range being dictated by how I felt. However, as soon as I hit 158 my stomach knotted up into a painful ball, cramping that I’ve never experienced before. I had to stop and walk. Throughout the first three laps, my stomach would cramp up painful at anything above 155 or so. That heart rate is a light jog for me and it was incredibly frustrating to not go faster. I felt like I had good strength and good legs, but my stomach pain just wouldn’t allow it. I drank as much water as I could handle at each of the aid stations. Here’s where the problem with sports drink compounds itself. When running, you are limited in the amount of water you can drink because too much will make you uncomfortable from all the sloshing in your stomach. I needed to drink to dilute down the concentration, but not to much or I’d have stomach pains from too much liquid. It was an evil catch 22 that is to be avoided at all cost because the only solution to the problem at this point is slowing down until everything balances out.
For me, it took about seven of the 10 kilometers to get the water/stomach situation resolved and I finally was able to pour on the power for the last 2.5 k of the course. This felt good to finish strong after wrecking the rest of the event because my miscalculation with my bike water bottle.
And then BLAM….down I go onto the street. The same thing that happened to me on the bike hit me again on the run with about 500m to go (just before entering the stadium). Once again, I had no balance and couldn’t stand or really direct my limbs very well. As before though, some rest and slow walking got me out of it and I was able to enter the stadium and finish the race in a light jog.
For the next several hours, I had light nausea. I found someone who spoke good English and he translated my issue to the medical team. They took my pulse and noted that my heart rate was fluctuating up and down but they had no prognosis otherwise. I felt like I likely needed to eat. I had been drinking tons of water on the run, but I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast some six hours and a race earlier. I was worried that I was just bonking while sitting in the chair.
I ate a clif bar and it helped a bit. After going back to the hotel, I improved a bit over the course of the next several hours and finally was able to eat dinner and feel somewhat more normal about 10 hours after the end of the race. After doing some research on line, it appears that I had classic symptoms of dehydration, so I don’t think it was a stroke.
So what happened? Well, it turns out that my time trial bike water bottle is smaller than my regular bottles and I had prepared sports drink mix that would’ve been correct for the larger bottle. Also, even without the drink mix, because the bottle was small I still didn’t have enough to drink and likely would have still had hydration issues separate from the sports drink issues. Kind of a bummer to make one little miscalculation destroy the whole race.
I guess that means I’ll just have to try again to get my 2:15 finish at another race.
Posted in Travel, Triathlon | No Comments »
January 18th, 2009 Scott
Many people have asked me this question or a varient of it (“How was the food?”). It isn’t an easy question to answer. I have no regrets about going and enjoyed the education and look forward to visiting Siam Reap with more time to visit all the temples there, but I don’t think of this event as a vacation. It was an education, and one I’ll never forget.
When I went to Europe six years ago (which started this entire DoDDS experience that has landed me in Okinawa), I came back with a resounding urge to return to Europe on a regular basis. That urge turned into a desire to live and work in Europe. That’s why I applied to teach for the Department of Defense with the idea that I would go to Europe if ever hired. Now that I’m in the system, I can request for a transfer to Europe but living on the beach in a sub tropical paradise has its perks too. I’m taking Japanese lessons and am starting to appreciate more and more of the culture here. It doesn’t resonate with me like Europe did, but I still find it more interesting than American Culture and I think I’ll stick around for a while
Part of our plan while here is to travel in Asia since we figure it won’t likely happen after we leave. This Vietnam & Cambodia trip presented itself and we started there. The Cisco Tech teacher in our high school is from Vietnam. He left the country two days after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He was 13 at the time. His family left because his dad was a Captain in the South Vietnam Navy and as such, he and his entire family would likely have been executed. They went to America where they lived as indentured servants for 18 months before his dad found work as an engineer and the kids all eventually earned degrees various professional studies (doctor, dentist, and software engineer). Ultimately Hoa (pronounced wah) left the engineering sector to teach and he’s been with DoDDS for a number of years. He first went back to Vietnam in the early 90′s when it opened up to tourism for the first time. He has since led small groups of teachers and their spouses through the country, as well as Laos & Cambodia, many times during the Christmas break. Having a tour group leader that knows the country as his own and at the same time has to come back and work with you after the trip is over has many advantages. I can’t imagine doing the trip any other way.
Both of these countries are third world countries. I knew that going in, but it’s still quite a shock to the system to see how people live. What’s fascinating is that all the aspects of modern society we are used to are there, but at the same time there is extreme levels of poverty right along side the gleaming facets of modern technology. I saw dirt floor huts with no water or electricy. I also so dirt floor huts with satelite television sets. I saw a gas station owner who lived behind the pumps. He had a tarp stretched out and a beautiful king size bed, a nightstand, and a big television. This was also just behind the pumps. He had no house. These people were rich by the local standards as business owners and yet they found no need to posess or live in a house. So I don’t think poverty it quite the right term. Many of the people were very, very poor. However, they also were living exactly as they wanted to. If I gave them all the “necessities” of life that I find important, they would likely throw them all away as useless bits of trash.
I really can see now why the carbon footprint of the typical American is so large. Most of the people I saw did everything they needed to from cooking, cleaning, growing food, growing stock, cleaning, purchasing, etc, etc within a mile of their house. Mopeds and bicycles were the standard mode of transportation. It’s amazing what you can carry on a moped if you really have to do so. I’ll share a gallery soon.
I’m currently still working on getting my images sorted and refined. At some point I’ll post another gallery with some details about each image to give you more of an idea of what I saw. One thing this trip did share in common with my experience in Europe: it was a life altering event. (and I haven’t even mentioned the Killing Fields or the S-21 prison, or the Hanoi Hilton…)
Posted in Travel | No Comments »
December 31st, 2008 Scott
Home at last! Our 10 day adventure to Vietnam and Cambodia is over but not forgotten. We saw amazing sights & culture during our visit and I will post a series of blog entries about specific parts of the trip as I find the time and energy. As they say though, a picture is worth a thousand words and I’ve pulled out the first 170 or so pictures that caught my eye of the approximately 4500 that I took on the trip to display on the website here. These are the pictures I’ve chosen for their artistic merit. I’ve got several others marked for inclusion into the blog as documentary photos at a future date. I’ve not done any work to these shots yet, so many of them will improve with some working of the levels, sharpening, cropping, straigtening, etc. For now though, they should give you some insight into the sights of Vietnam and Cambodia.
Please enjoy…(click here to get to the gallery)
Posted in Photography, Travel | 1 Comment »
December 30th, 2008 Scott
Some snapshots (click each one for a larger view)…
The Dead Fish Tower (A funky Phnon Penh restaurant)
"Thuy"; a Vietnamese friend of Gina's has the same name
A Communist statue
Night street scene in Hanoi
The pond outside our hotel in Mai Chau, North Vietnam
Another view of Mai Chau
Posted in Travel | No Comments »
December 23rd, 2008 Scott
Yesterday, we visited a Mong village in the mountains of Northern Vietnam. It is a very, very poor village high in the mountains. We brought an assortment of candy, toothbrushes, pencils, markers, and tee shirts to give out as gifts to the local school children.
I can not begin to convey the utter poverty of the village with words. I will post photos when I can upon my return to Okinawa. Suffice to say that no where in America is there such a low level of poverty, but at the same time contentment with the life.
We entered one of the local’s homes. It was a low thatched roof building with poles and and a dirt floor. The kitchen was in a separate room and consisted of a fire stone in the corner and a large pot on top. She washed and cleaned outside in the mud. The father of the house used to be a high ranking enlisted soldier in the Communist Army. We saw his picture in uniform on the wall, and yet he was living in a dirt floor hut. They had an outhouse and a well.
All the homes were like this. The smallest children there were covered in dirt and mud. At the same time though, there was a ‘shopping’ district of huts where you could buy meat and goods, but also Nokia Cell phones. The hut we visited (dirt floors and no water) had electricity and a satellite dish with one small TV in the main room.
Then we visited the school. Earlier in the day we had visited a school that looked luxurious by comparison. Neither school had any electricity in the classrooms. They did have a chalkboard and a desk for each student. There was nothing else in the space but the natural light coming through the openings in the walls. I don’t call them ‘windows’ because there was no glass, just shutters. The school in the Mong village was a boarding school. The students there were brought from remote (even poorer) villages that had no schools. The students live there and go to school two months at a time and then visit their families for about two weeks. The rooms had concrete floors, but everything outside was mud. The outhouses were worse than the most primitive outhouse you’ve ever seen and this was their daily use facility. No showers of any kind.
The administrators let us give out our gifts to the students, but wanted us to give them to the teachers to distribute later. Hoa, our host and guide, indicated that this would not do because he knew that the teachers would simply keep the gifts for themselves. I was very uncomfortable as I watched Hoa negotiate for us to be able to distribute directly to the students. It was very tense for a time. After distributing the gifts, Hoa then told the students that these were their Christmas gifts from us so that they knew to not let the teachers try to take them away under false pretenses. As you’ll see in the photos, the smiles from each student as they received their gift were amazing. Even more amazing was how each student would continue to study quietly on their work while the gifts were being handed out. They were diligent in not being distracted by our presence until it was appropriate to react. These were very disciplined children working under the most extreme of circumstances to get an education.
Last year, the teacher’s union in my building grieved the administration because they moved the school clock back five minutes to make it ‘on time’. The union felt that this was an unfair change to the working conditions in the building.
Sometimes it’s healthy for us to receive a reality check in our lives to recognize how well off we are in our society. I really doubt that the teachers in that village concern themselves about something like a five minute change in the school’s clocks (if it had any!) when it is more of a concern to know if your students have eaten, have warm clothes, and have pencil & paper to use for learning. Everything else beyond those essentials becomes an optional luxury.
Merry Christmas Eve everyone.
Posted in Travel | 1 Comment »