With Mette Marie and the kids now living in Trige and me in Copenhagen I get to travel a lot back and forth on the week-ends by train, 2-4 week-ends per month.
I like travelling by train, I always enjoy the view. The railroads are always passing through the prettiest parts of the country. Then I sit and let my thoughts drift out into the landscape, picturing myself running and cycling through it on all the cool roads and paths that I see.
As the train travels along the south coast of Vejle fiord I inevitably think back to the, in my mind, legendary Vejle Triathlon. It was the first ¼ Ironman race I did on June 6th 1993, and the first open water race on the Danish triathlon calendar back then. The water was cold, and smelled/tasted of the exhaust from the boats that had been sailing through just before the gun went off. Then on to a completely flat first 10 km of the bike, and then, Bam!, you hit Munkebjerg, one of the nastiest hills in the kingdom. Loved it.
Last I looked, Vejle Triathlon was just a shadow of its former self with a pool swim, shorter distance, and no more munkebjerg.
Back on track, litterally… I especially love that DSB has been running a campaign with free internet on the Copenhagen—Århus route where I travel, but it’s ending in a few days. Sadly.
And today I’m travelling to Holstebro instead, currently between Vejle and Herning, where there’s no internet coverage for the train. I manage. Barely. Just don’t know when I can upload this.
I’ll just enjoy the less familiar views and look forward to spending 29 hours and 45 minutes with my kids. And my mother, sister, nephews and aunt. Will be great.
And just now the train stops at my childhood town of Brande.
Update: Minutes before scheduled arrival in Herning the train stopped and it was announced that there were problems in Herning and the train would return to Brande where a bus woud pick us up. That bus never arrived, instead we got on the next train and arrived about an hour late in Herning, all in all I’ll be just over an hour late in Struer. (Just now passing a part of the Herning Triathlon course…)
I don’t know the artists name, he just drew it, unbeknown to me, while I sat in deep thought looking out the window and listening to The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, their message still depressingly current across 18 years since their first and only album.
I had just had a wonderful week-end with the kids and my family, and when I left and waved good-bye and had walked about 30 meter, my 3½-year old son ran after me shouting “Dad! Wait dad!”, and I had to turn around and bring him back, before I had to leave for the bus I had to catch.
It breaks my heart every time I have to leave, even more this time.
I very much appreciated the gesture of the drawing, the physicality of it, much more than the meager “Thanks!” I gave suggested. I was a little surprised of course. And it made me think about how digital my life has become, and how little I create physical artifacts with my hands. I kind of miss that. I used to draw a lot as a kid, but I stopped in my teens.
Pro cycling is dead to me, morally and ethically bankrupt. What they do is no longer fantastic, that stopped definitively for me when Ivan Basso was busted for doping. Yes, I know he never tested positive or admitted to doing anything wrong, only intent, but I must say I don’t care. He was not the hero I once thought.
I believe you can’t reliably place in the top 10 in the general classification in a grand tour without being a doper.
Pro cycling have a long tradition for doping, and I think you could replace “Floyd Landis” in the title of this post with any other grand tour winner since forever. Only there wasn’t any rules against doping before some time in the early 60’ies of course.
The reason it has become like this is that to get to the top you must live and breathe your sport from a relatively young age, and then after many years you get a lucky break and go pro, and, at least if you’re good, start earning enough money that you can afford the $10k/year + logistics you need for a doping programme like what Floyd Landis was on. Can you say no to living the dream? Because that’s the question you think you’re answering when you are introduced to doping.
I believe some people are smart enough to answer the right question, to say “no” to cheating, because that is what it is about. And that is absolutely wonderful, and I wish to support those people as much as I can, but how do I distinguish them from the dopers?
I can’t, because the doping control is not good enough, and they all say they’re clean, or at least that they “… never tested positive.” And that’s the tragedy.
Addendum: This is not to say that the doping controls should be stricter, I think the whereabouts system is draconian enough as it is. The incentive to cheat should just be removed, and I have absolutely no clue about how to do that.
The last month I’ve been runnning “barefoot” in FiveFingers, both KSO and Classic depending on temperature, that I bought from Alun.
I first tried a barefoot approach to running in the form of Pose Running a few years ago because I got injured by my Saucony stability shoes. I later found out it was compartment syndrome in my anterior shin compartment I suffered from. There is “… only one form of effective treatment for this injury, and that is a surgical procedure in which the lining of the tight compartment is split, allowing the mucle to expand freely” according to Noakes pp. 833-834. Good thing I didn’t know that at the time, and set about correcting the underlying biomechanical issues instead.
At first I tried going to 100% Pose Running, cold turkey style, in a pair of Puma H-streets, which of course gave me sore calves like never before. In the beginning it took 5-6 days for the pain to subside, after around 6 weeks it was down to 3 days, and then it didn’t get better. Which was very discouraging. I was saved by the Nike Free 4.0 shoes that had just come out, they proved to be a good compromise.
Later I’ve fallen completely in love with Newton shoes.
In retrospect all my problems came from the misunderstanding that for Pose Running the heel is not supposed to touch the ground at all. This seems to be a common misconception when learning, so let me just say here that my experience is that everything gets better when you start to support your weight on a flat foot in the middle phase of the step. If you’re a fast runner with a very fast turnover—unlike me—you might be able to run more on your forefoot, at least that’s what I think I tend to do when running strides at around 3’30"/km and a cadence of 95 or faster, and also the reason incorporating strides is a great idea in general, year round.
All is not perfect though; this morning when I got out of bed and put weight on my right foot my right calf was very stiff and sore, so much that I had a limp the first 5 minutes. It probably started on April 18th (Ahh, the value of a training log. Intensity kills—or at least injures—in case you were wondering). So I’m back to my current Newtons and had a completely unproblematic run in them this morning.
So I guess I should reintroduce the FiveFingers in a weeks time or so, and then only run half of my runs in them, and none of the longer runs, where longer is defined as anything above 60 minutes or so. And nothing fast, not even strides, for a while.
I started running in the winter 1991-1992. I had worked for two years as a forest worker but got laid off, and being 20 years old and having to move back home with my mother, waiting for my 6 months of civil service, I gained a lot of weight. I had been used to eat a lot with my previous years of hard physical labour, and all of a sudden I sat around reading or watching TV, with an undimished appetite. I got fat quickly.
Something had to be done. The completely natural choice was of course to become a triatlete. I’ve always loved riding my bike, and I’ve always loved bikes as technology, and to me triathlon bikes are the ultimate in aerodynamics and comfort, all at once. So I wanted one of those bikes, and it would look silly without also doing some swimming and running. And really; how hard could it be?
I already knew very well that running would be my weak link, and to this day it still is. I knew how to swim breaststroke, and I was confident I could do the distance that way, and cycling was no problem whatsoever, I only had to get that cool bike. I only had a very worn down yellow 1989 Nishiki Ariel mountain bike.
So in the autumn of 1991 I started running. I looked at a map and carefully measured the distance with a piece of string to a good point that would be approximately 2 km from home. Then I ran out there, turned around and ran home. Lather, rinse, repeat. I tried to run 6 days per week, but most weeks I’d have one or two days where I was too tired. I didn’t just run easy of course, I tried to set a new personal best almost every time, timing my runs by taking note of the exact time on my watch when I started and stopped. I was the quintessential boneheaded beginner.
I think I made it down to about 22-23 minutes on that approximately 4 km course, going as fast as I could.
Over that winter I trained reasonably well, although I was frequently plagued by shin splints. I came into contact with a local bike shop (HeMeBa in Thisted, I later worked there a little) where I gradually bought the parts for my bike. The wheels, gears, brakes and crankset I got from a Specialized Transition, the severely pink model they made that year. It was Shimano 105 with Wolber Aero something-22 rims (remember Wolber?). Late in the winter I got a 54 cm Principia 700 frame, a red aluminium frame with standard road geometry. I think they also made a model named 650 after the wheel size, 650C, with a more appropriate geometry for triathlon, but I guess I thought that since I had a perfectly fine 700C set of wheels I’d just buy a standard road frame and set it up with a forward pointing seatpost, that’d be the same, right? (Wrong, of course, but I didn’t know better back then).
I don’t think I had rounded 100 km on my awesome neon yellow Avocet 40 computer, with cadence, before I did my first multisport event. It was the national championship in duathlon 1992 in Silkeborg on the old 5-30-5 distance.
That is still the most windy race I’ve ever done, noone were on race wheels, rims deeper than 30-40 mm were dangerously hard to control on that day. When you rode along and looked to the horizon it was just a brown haze from all the soil being blown up from the still bare fields, and it got in everywhere, you could see and taste it in the cups in the water handed out. The runs were evil too, about 2 km slightly downhill, 1 km flat, then 2 km slightly uphill. A nasty one the second time around. But I made it through, and I was very proud of that. Can’t remember the time anymore, but think I still have the diploma somewhere.
I think I have only once since tried riding my bike in stronger wind, years later, on a day where I had a 45 minute time trial scheduled, so I did that going flat out against the wind — struggling to do 20 km/h. Then I turned around and was home in 20 minutes doing 50 km/h with absolutely no effort…
I did 3 other races that year, all of them the then popular ⅙ ironman distance, 650 m swim, 30 km bike and 7 km run. I still think that’s a perfect distance, although the swim could be longer. The second of those races were in Aalborg with a open fresh-water swim, and I was a very weak breaststroker at about 17 minutes for 650 m, and suddenly in deep water with less bouyancy than I was used to I almost paniced and swam to a boat and quit the race. I claimed I’d been accidentally kicked in the stomach by another swimmer, just to save face. There was another swimmer with a similar story in that boat, although he was probably not lying. It turned out to be Bent Nielsen, the race organizer of the ironman distance race in Rødekro that I would end up doing 2 years later.
I was nonetheless completely hooked on triathlon by then, I really liked it, except for the humiliation of spending the last third of the swim alone in the pool; something had to be done.
I lived and studied in Thisted by then, and they had a really good swim team with some world cup swimmers among them, so I went and looked at their practice and after having done that a few times I pulled myself together and went and talked to the coach, Bjarne Kragh. I told him I was a triathlete swimming breaststroke, and wanted to learn freestyle. What I didn’t know was that Bjarne was himself interested in triathlon and wanted to try it, and that was probably a huge reason he agreed to take me on and teach me.
So that autumn I started swimming 4 times per week, sometimes even 5, with all the 11-14 year old kids. All of them of course real swimmers doing freestyle like they’d been swimming for many years. And they probably had.
Swimming became my focus, almost never missing practice. I didn’t really do much other training that winter except for the occasional run and even more occasional ride on the rare days with exceptional weather.
Bjarne had me swimming alone in a lane while I learned freestyle; he’d give me something to work on and then occasionally check up on me and help me when he could while doing his real job with the rest of the squad. In that environment I learned quickly, and I loved it. The kids would always be faster than me in the just over two years I trained with their squad, but especially in the beginning I closed the gap quickly, and that was tremendously satisfying. Especially when I started to do the same sets they did.
I am still incredibly thankful for the help Bjarne gave me, I’d never become a reasonable freestyler without him. I later trained with Bjarne, and one time when the pool was closed for a few days for a holiday Bjarne, Thomas (another local triathlete who also helped me with training programs) and I exploited the fact that Bjarne had the keys and went swimming. I jumped in first in a completely quiet pool without lane ropes or anything. As I streamlined off the wall, just ahead of the waves I’d made, I looked forward seeing a perfectly symmetric underwater world, the bottom of the pool perfectly mirrored in the still surface of the water. A completely unexpected beautiful sight. That memory is still vivid in my mind. It only lasted for a few seconds until Bjarne and Thomas jumped in.
I started the 1993 season with the ⅙ ironman distance race in Billund that I’d done the year before as my first triathlon, and I almost halved my swim time from around 17 minutes the year before, to something like 9’35" or so, I also went way too hard, but I was learning. I was so happy, from one of the slowest to one of the faster swimmers in a year. My bike form was about the same as the year before, but my run was improving too.
That race set the tone for the rest of my triathlon “career”, I swam well, biked very well without having to train much for it, and then everybody would ran past me on the run no matter what I did.
I still haven’t really figured out how to run as relatively fast as my swim & bike used to be, but I have figured out how to run almost daily now, without injuries, and that will no doubt prove extremely valuable as I get back into it.
I hadn’t seen the OLPC interface in action before. Looks terrible, especially in comparison to an iPad. Of course there’s a huge difference in price, scope etc., but still…
I have my laptop set up to request a specific URL on my server every 15 minutes, so I can follow it’s whereabouts if it happens to get stolen. Or just for statistics.
To do this you need a laptop running some sort of Unix based operating system with cron running, and a webserver somewhere else. Preferably one that you control completely like a Linode VPS.
Set up a cronjob on your laptop that periodically fetch a URL (lines wrapped, should be one long line):
Adjust the exact URL as per what you have available, and substitute the computer’s hostname with the <host> string. The above is specific for Mac OS X, but most Linux distributions will have curl available as a package if it’s not installed by default; I know all the BSD's have it in ports/pkgsrc.
Use ‘crontab -e’ to edit your crontab, except on Mac OS X, where you must create a file, eg. ~/.crontab, with the line above, and then run crontab < ~/.crontab. Annoying, but it’s been like this forever, so I suppose Apple think it’s a feature. (Yes, I have submitted a bug report).
I’ve set up a virtual host on my server specifically for tracking like this:
