Up, Over, or Down?

WARNING - This post is not triathlon related.  Scary, I know, but I bet you can deal with it.

Living in Tex-ass, I usually tell foreigners people in other places to "come down" when they visit.  This is because they are usually above me on a north-oriented map.  I was just emailing a guy in San Antonio about coming down and realized he actually lives slightly below and to the west of me, lattitudenally.  To be geographically correct, I went back and changed my wording to "come over" instead.  Yes, I'm a geogeek.

Do you take the other person's planetary position in account when asking them to come over, down, or up?  What do you say?

Twitter is the New Google

Did you know Google isn't really a search engine?  It's an advertising agency that uses a search engine to pull you in.  I'm not knocking it - Google works great.  But there's another cool way to get answers: Twitter.

Once you get more than a few dozen followers on Twitter.com, you can get some great answers out of them.  I can post, "How do you run with your iPhone?" and get back a lot of responses from people who actually run with one.

The key is knowing how to phrase the question and also to have a large enough audience.  You can ask a bunch of runners how to upgrade SQL Server while juggling monkeys and you might not get a response.  Lots of runners are into tech stuff, so you never know.

Asking questions is a fun way to start up conversations and make new friends, too.  Enjoy it!

Training by Time Instead of Distance

I wrote the following to a coaching client recently and thought it would make a great blog post.  I also store goodies like this in my "coach's tips" section of my coaching softwares that clients get access to. (Workoutlog.com)

He asked if his workout should be by time or distance.  This is what I told him:

Time vs. distance is one of the most important things to know about in training. Here goes -

You want to almost always workout by time. You do a workout by time and effort level, distance being a result - like a side-effect.

You can nearly kill yourself trying to go X miles in hills or wind one day, then cover the same distance another day or in another location with almost no effort. You cannot reliably compare workouts going by distance.

Pros rarely workout by distance. This is something that separates them from the amateurs. They say "I'm going on a 3 hour run... bye!" However far they run, that's how far they run.

Going by time greatly simplifies and improves your workouts. It also makes them portable. When the workout says "hard for 1 hour", go hard for an hour. What you want is a few hours of hard and a lot of hours of easy by the end of the week. It really doesn't matter how far you went. If you trained for a week in hills, that's going to be a lot shorter distance than if you did it on flats. But the hills were harder! So unless you go by time and effort level, your workouts will get all screwed up because of hills and wind.

Another thing to remember is when a workout says to go easy, go easy no matter what the conditions are. If you're in hills or riding into the wind, just gear down and take it easy. You have to develop the guts and self-confidence to not go hard when some chump is passing you on an easy workout. That is probably the most difficult thing and will wreck your training. You are the better athlete for holding back, saving your hard workout for your hard workout.

The distance in those workouts is mostly for me to get an idea of how much load I'm giving you if all things were equal, which they aren't in the real world.

Pixie Green Tea Mate'

I'm really enjoying a cool green tea / yerba mate mix made by Pixie.  You might want to check it out. 

Caffeine is a little different from source to source.  The stuff in coffee can give you jitters, the stuff in tea not as much, and the yerba mate version hardly at all.  Yerba mate does give you a ton of energy, though.

Pixie makes a blend of the green tea and yerba mate in one tea bag.  Interesting mix and good stuff.

Back in Texas (and Other Blatherings)

I'm back in good old Texas where the men are men and the sheep are scared.  It's a lot hotter than Oregon, but that's OK - I'm ready for some warm weather.

The problem with blogs is Twitter.  Supposedly, blog postings have gone down in count significantly since you can post most of what you want on Twitter.  But, I don't think that people are surfing the web and looking for something interesting to read any less than before.  That makes the blog postings that do get done a heck of a lot more visible, eh? 

Some news:

• I got an email from Mevio saying that GoDaddy.com is offering a sponsorship.  I've bought domains through them and I have to say their customer service rocks.  I forget passwords and crap like that all the time and they've always fixed my screw-ups.  Good customer service is what sets you apart from competition nowdays.
• My right shoulder is a mess.  If I tweak it really good, I can't lift my arm above my head.  My swim coach says I should go get an MRI.  Then he went into detail about how they rip things apart and weld them back somehow.  Thanks?
• Speaking of swimming, I'm rockin' like Dokken in the pool.  I swam 200 yards in 2:19 today, after swimming 2000 yards of other stuff.  The high school kid in the next lane got me by a second or two.  It was a good race.
• Don't use orange juice mixed with water as an energy drink.  I did that at swim practice this AM and nearly puked.  It's the wrong kind of sugar and can go wild like Ricky Martin in your gut.
• During that 200, things went kinda like this:

1. First 25 yds - "Hmm, too fast.  Slow down."
2. Next 75 yds - "Pace it... Pace it..." 
3. Next 50 yds - "Keep up! You're doing it!"
4. Next 25 yds - "Am I about to puke? Stupid orange juice!"
5. Last 25 yds - "IF I DIE RIGHT NOW, WHAT A GLORIOUS WAY TO GO OUT!!! AAARRRHGHGHGHG!!!"

• My nervous system and whatever else absolutely lit up on that last 25 yards.  I hadn't felt like that in a long time.  It was like fire pumping through my entire body.  It was probably supercharged adrenaline and it felt amazing.  Hells yeah.