I am sitting in the ‘tea bar’ in Wegmans, drinking tea. Normally I avoid tea in American restaurants because a tin pot full of water straight from the hot tap and a several year old tea bag sitting beside it is not my idea of a good tea experience. But I figured a place calling itself a tea bar would get it right, and they do. I’m drinking a pot of ‘Silver Needle’, and it tastes like real tea.
I got out of the habit of making a pot of tea in the morning when I stopped working normal hours. I definitely need to start again.
Update: We got it fixed up by deleting my profile off Jim’s laptop, and plugging the GPS back into it. Apparently the reason I can’t figure out how to change the name on the Mac is that there isn’t a way.
Last night after the time trial, Jim hooked a bunch of our GPSes up to his laptop to show us some things about our heart rates. Unfortunately, as a result of that, my GPS has acquired a device name of the first initial and last name of the guy whose GPS he looked at before mine. When I start it up, there’s this guy’s name. When I connect it to my Mac and fire up Garmin Training Center or the Garmin Connect web site, there is his name. Otherwise, it’s still my GPS – it still has my date of birth, weight, and all my training paddles this year on it. But I can’t figure out how to set its name! I even tried the various “reset to factory defaults” options under the setup menus. No luck. I also upgraded the version of Garmin Training Center I use from 2.1.7 to 3.0.0.4 beta (which has much nicer graphs and displays, I must say). Still no luck.
Does anybody know how to change the device name? Will I need to boot into Windows to do it?
Baycreek Team informal raceToday our team work-out was a 5 mile race/time trial. Originally we were going to do individual time trials like we’d done in May, but we decided instead that Dan was going to lead us out at a steady 6.8 mph pace and we’d try to ride his and each other’s wakes as best we could. This would be good training for the two upcoming races, as well as a way to compare ourselves against the 5 mile time trial we’d done in May. This time I had the Thunderbolt underneath me, and a whole summer of hard work behind me.
Unlike last May, when I hadn’t considered myself fit enough to do 2 miles of warm up, this time I did. And then we started off, doing 1.5 miles upstream. I had little trouble keeping up with the team for that 1.5 miles, but I had a hell of a time keeping my boat pointing in a straight line. I was constantly coming in too close to the other boats and banging into them, and then swerving out so far that I wasn’t getting much benefit from their wakes. But I was with them, and that was the important thing. The turn was at a point where the canal narrows down, and I got kind of scraped off when the sides narrowed in and Dan widened out. My boat just does not want to turn, and I had to slow down to a crawl and sweep like hell out the outside. By the time I got around the corner, I was about 200 feet or more behind, and I sprinted like hell to catch up, hitting speeds upwards of 7.7 mph. I caught up, but I couldn’t really find a sweet spot on anybody’s wake and didn’t really get a good recovery. Within a quarter of a mile I was losing them again. I tried to keep near their speed, but in the words of Jim M I just didn’t have any more poker chips. While I was about a hundred feet behind them, I saw Bill F suddenly stop and clean something off his paddle. As I was wondering what he was doing, I got a long piece of fishing line around my paddle and had to do exactly what I’d seen him do to clear it off. Jim M came up from behind where he’d been paddling with some of the slower paddlers and offered to drag me up to the lead pack again, but I just didn’t have any gas left and couldn’t raise my speed even a little. But on the plus side, my “dragging myself home in pain” speed was around 6.1-6.3 mph, whereas early this year 6.1-6.3 mph was my good speed. My time for the 5 miles was 46:29. In May, my time for 5 miles was 50:14. So I’m only 3 and 3/4 minutes faster over 5 miles than I was in spring, which doesn’t seem like much considering all the training and the new boat and everything. But I was only 1 and a half minutes behind the best of the team, so I should be pleased. Plus I’d done a 5 mile paddle yesterday, and I’m in a boat I’ve got almost no time in.
As we were warming down, the Colonial Belle came by and Mike and I went to ride its wake. I got a bit of a good ride for a minute or two, but I was too wiped to keep it up much, so I left Mike to play and went back to Dan’s dock. When I pulled my boat out of the water, I got a bit of a shock. I had about 30 feet of fishing line caught in my rudder. And at the end of that fishing line, a steel wire leader and a large fishing lure of a type I believe is known as a “popper” or “surface lure”. I guess I didn’t do as good a job as Bill of getting that fishing line out of our paddles. Paul D asked me if I had a fishing license. I wonder how much drag that stupid thing added to my boat.
But good paddle or bad, what really makes it all worth while was the chance to hang out with the team. It is a great group of guys, and I’m happy to have the chance to be a member of this great team.
