Colchester triathlon: Weeks 2-5 Training

Belatedly following up on Week 1. 


Running: Still no better than 5 min/km, I meant to do some running during our travels in PA, but it was too dang hot to be outside, much less running in it.  I suck.

Swimming: Started swimming in the lake and am doing approximately 1/2 mile in 20 minutes at a not-too-tiring rate.

Biking: Got toe clips for the bike and did the 12 mile route that starts and ends at our house in just under 45 minutes (yay!); finally did the official bike route last night and finished in ~45 min as part of a longer hour and a half ride.  The first half is all uphill and took about half an hour; thankfully it's mostly gradual with just a few relatively brutal sections.  It's a good thing the bike leg isn't longer because right now wrist and testicle fatigue kicks in ~50-55 min.  If I'm gonna to regularly do triathlons in the future, gonna need a better bike.

"1945-1998" by Isao Hashimoto (2003)

Isao Hashimoto's "1945-1998" is a visualization of (known) worldwide nuclear detonations from 1945 to 1998. It starts slowly, showing the first three detonations Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki individually and "zoomed in" at the point of detonation.  It then zooms out to show the world map, and counts off a month per second for the next 53 years.  It's a beautiful viz.


I originally saw this on the information aesthetics blog.  There are also some versions on youtube, but they are  less satisfying because they've been trimmed to fit the 10:00 time limit for most youtube videos.

Home heating and pellet boilers

A little history: when our house was built in the early/mid-70's, it had forced air electric heating.  In the mid-90's, when the Burlington Electric Department was busy trying to keep electric usage in Burlington down, they offered incentives to switch away from electric heating and the homeowners switched to baseboard heat with a fuel oil boiler.  In the 9 years since we've bought the house, we've seen #2 fuel oil prices fluctuate from $1.21/gallon to to $4.50/gallon; it's hovering just under $3.00/gallon lately, and I'm betting it'll be higher than that next winter.  Very roughly, we burn 850 gallons per year for home heating and hot water.


Now there are incentives to start moving away from fuel oil, but our neighborhood is not hooked up for natural gas (we'd have to have it delivered to a tank on-site), we have trees on our south side that we're not willing to cut down in order to do solar hot water, and our lot is all ledge so a geothermal heat pump is out.  So... how about wood pellets?


Around here, wood pellet stoves have become fairly popular, but these are not really replacements for your boiler, and some of the early pellet boilers require you to manually feed the boiler hopper ever So far, we've found the following leads:

• Building Energy VT sells the Fröling P4 boiler 
• Blodgett Supply sells the Woodpecker boiler 
• Maine Energy Systems imports and distributes the Oekofen boiler
• Pellergy makes a converter to retrofit the existing boiler
• Stove & Flag Works sells Harman boilers 

There are also lots of options for what the set-up could be like, from installer a pellet boiler alongside the existing oil boiler so that we have a backup (we don't really have room for this in the garage) to removing the oil boiler and oil tank and having pellet storage in a silo just outside the garage (which I actually kinda like because we'd be able to reclaim the space the oil tank takes up in the garage).

Perhaps more as the summer progresses.

Colchester Triathlon: Week 1 training results

Last Friday I decided that I would try to get in enough shape to do the Colchester Triathlon, at least to finish, and ideally under 1:30:00.  The course is a 1/2 mile swim, 12 mile bike ride, and 3 mile run; close to 1/20/5 km.  I like that, but better yet if the bike ride were 15km.  I'm going to try not to dwell on this too much, but looking at the 2009 results, the run and swim times are roughly equal**, but a disproportionate amount of the race time is spent on the cycling.  This is especially unfortunate because it seems to me to be the leg in which the (really expensive) equipment is closest to being as important as the athlete -- the "cheap" Trek triathlon bikes are nearly $2,000.  By contrast, you can easily spend under $200 (combined) for a good racing suit, goggles and running shoes.


At any rate, the good news of the first week of training is that, even when tired at the end of the day, I can maintain a decent jogging rate that does about 3 miles in 25 minutes.  I'll take 12kph on the last leg of the tri, but if I can up that to 15kph, that would be better.


The iffy news is that I did 12 miles in 50 minutes on my Trek 7100 (yes, it's not a racing cycle, that's why I'm grumbling about the bike leg being so long  ;-).  24kph won't cut it on the bike; I have to get that under 45 minutes (26.67kph) and ideally under 40 (30kph).  Toe clips are high on my priority list (no, they didn't come with the bike and I just never bothered to get them before) and frankly I'm hoping that just getting the clips will bring my time under 45 (no, I don't know anything about racing bicycles, so this may be wishful thinking).  Alternatively, I could rent a racing bike, but since this is my first tri, let's do this in baby steps.


A big unknown at the moment is the swim leg.  I jumped in the pool at the Y today and casually swam 1200 yards in 20 minutes (i.e., swimming at a pace I could keep up more or less indefinitely), but I've never swum competitively in open water.


** and bully for the Colchester on that score!  My impression is that the swimmers usually get screwed because the swim leg of most sprint triathlons appears to be 500-600 yards (to be fair, I think this is because the swim leg is in a pool, and the swim leg has to be abbreviated simply to accommodate all the racers, but it still stinks).  Making the swimming and running legs roughly equal is a huge step in the right direction.  Shrink the biking to 15km and it's still the longest leg, but much closer to being fair.

Dead shrub

I don't really like to destroy the vegetation in our yard-- check that.  I *love* getting out the tools and working on removing dead/dying bushes.  But it's sad to see them go.  We had a large bush that used to produce these beautiful white puffball flowers in June, but a few years ago it got some kind of fungus that kills all the leaves every spring (picture below from 3 years ago; sadly, I have no pictures of it in bloom).  The bush would gamely produce more leaves, but these too quickly brown and die.  It's sad, but that bush is in one of the few sunny spots in the yard, so we finally decided it had to go.




After a call to Dig Safe and the requisite waiting period (turns out only the water line runs right under that spot, but the water department claimed the pipes are 5 feet under, so no problem), out came the lopper, 36" bow saw, maul, shovel, and pick, and soon:

Our neighbors have raspberry shoots they're willing to donate to the open spot.  I'm thinking some easily accessible August raspberries will be awesome with two kids.