January 25th, 2009 Scott
I decided last week that I need a coach. When I was into bicyle racing, I had a coach for the first season and found it very beneficial. It’s amazing how many people will spend thousands of dollars on high end bicycle equipment when that money would be much, much better spent on hiring a coach. It’s all about the “engine” and without proper training, your “engine” will never power that $10,000 bicyle to it’s potential. The same is true of people who spend absurd amounts of money shaving a few grams off the weight of their bike when they should simply stop drinking beer for a couple of weeks to shave the weight off their gut instead.
After some searching through the Internet, I found a wide variety of on line coaching available from several different certifications. Most of the larger coaching companies give you very little contact for your money, unless you are willing to spend more than $800 a month. I find it difficult to pay that amount for someone I’m going to be interacting with via email exclusively. The least expensive levels start around $100 a month from most companies. However, the service you get varies widely for this fee. Some only give you your plan once a month and allow you to make email contact once a week and one phone call per month. Others offer two emails per week, one call per week, and updates to the plan once every two weeks. Again, this seems to me to be a marginal coaching effort at best. The reason I want a coach is that I find it very difficult to handle all three of the disciplines correctly while allowing for recovery between hard workouts. This was all much easier to deal with when training for only one sport. Complicating the issue is work and family commitments and the occasional injury or illness. I end up spending far too much time with my training books trying to put together my weekly plan and end up with either a poor plan or poor execution. It just wasn’t working. Also, with a good coach, they’ll adjust the plan based on your feedback to make sure you are improving as quickly as possible without over doing it.
The coach I found seems to offer great value for the services rendered and after a lengthy 4:00 AM phone back to the states last week with him, I’ve decided to try his services. He came up with the first 10 days of training the day after we talked and I’m about three days into his plan after going pretty heavily into a daily routine of my own for the last week. So far, I like it. The tasks are laid out clearly, they make sense, and they take the boredom out of the swim. Also, I’m finding myself much better recovered the next day for the new workout. This is something I was not getting when working on my own. I tended to do the run and ride the bicycle harder than I should have been and he’s got my heart rates dialed in to an appropriate level now. He also has the plan laid out cleanly on a web page that’s easy to read and compare from day to day.
My stress fracture in my foot is still an issue, but with some guidance last week from an 15 year Iron man athlete who is also a general practitioner, I am managing the pain while rebuilding my run base. The biggest help is that I no longer run on concrete; only the beach, treadmill, or the track. This makes it slightly less convenient for workouts, but at least I get to run.
So, I registered for the Ishigaki Triathlon on April 12th last week. It’s too soon for me to really peak properly for it, but at least I know I’m going to get to do it (knock on wood…keep that stress fracture under control). I have a couple of other local sprint distance tri’s coming up as well. I’ll be 40 years old for them, so I’m in a new age group. I’d like to win one of these events before I get too old. I placed second in so many time trials when I was bicycle racing that I could always smell the win, but I couldn’t taste it.
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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…)
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January 18th, 2009 Scott
I recognized last weekend for the first time how amazing of a tool Facebook could be. I’ve had an account for years but never did anything with it. However, lately many of my music theatre friends in Wenatchee have been using it and now that I’m in the circle, I see how addictive in can be to sit down, check your wall, and watch 2 hours disappear while reading what everyone else is doing. It always seemed bizarre to me why people would want to constantly post online what they are doing at any given moment. I now realize that it is a great way to stay in contact with people from a distance in a very personal way. It allows you to feel like you are still in touch with them on a daily basis. Gina now has an account and has discovered all kinds of long lost high school and college friends with it. I even found a friend from junior high I used to jam Rush tunes with and he confirmed my friend request but then went on to say he couldn’t remember me (but trusted my story).
Now Facebook will be yet another reason I don’t get the blog updated as often as I otherwise should.
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