Last night the team went out on the lake to do a light interval workout. Dan called it his “pre-race” workout. Last week, Jason Quagliata told me that he didn’t think I was getting my paddle in enough at the catch, so I brought my video camera along. I also wanted to try out my new bright green paddle tape job, and my new little doo-dad for the camelbak hose to keep it where I can reach it without pausing in my paddling.
As you can see from this video, the bright green looks good (and it feels good too), my doo-dad was pretty much a failure, and I aimed the camera too high for me to really see my catch. Oh well.
[youtube YbzNN5G3mTM Training on Lake Ontario]
Oh, and I’m still not opening my left hand very well on the forward push. And is it just my imagination, or am I paddling at a lower angle during the fast parts?
Kind of late posting this. Oh well. The air felt like soup. A thunderstorm had swept through a few hours earlier, but it must have been an air-mass thunderstorm rather than a frontal storm because we had neither cool air nor winds afterwards. The rain kept the number of participants down, but on the plus side the bay was flat and the creek was high. Still, I wasn’t expecting a personal best because of the humidity.
I started out pretty fast, maintaining a speed better than 6.5 mph for the first two minutes. My split time was 9.33 minutes, which is my fastest yet. I was worried that a fast split would mean a big fade for the second half, but it wasn’t bad. I kept my speed up well to the turn, but had a lousy turn – I’m not sure what I did wrong, but the flat spot on the speed graph is longer and lower than usual. Downstream was really fast. I even managed to put in a bit of a sprint at the finish. My second half was 9.57, which isn’t my slowest or my fastest, leading to a total time of 18.90, a new personal record by 0.05 minutes. Nothing too mind blowing, but unexpected and satisfying. Paul D, who claims that he doesn’t care about our “rivalry” but always seems to be checking up on my time, had a bad night and finished behind me for the first time in a number of weeks, at 18.93. However he has the perfect excuse because he participated in a killer race the weekend before.
There is a business here in Rochester that needs a lesson how to do business. I’m not going to give them the exposure (or Google rank) of putting their name here, but their name sounds a little like “Cock fire”. The business they are in is something that is actually of interest to me, something I currently use, and something that I recently solicited quotes from numerous companies in the business by going to a site that collects your requirements and sends them to registered providers. It’s also a business that members of a Linux Users Group, such as our own Linux Users Group of Rochester (LUGOR) might be more likely than the general public to want to do business with.
But “Cock fire”, instead of waiting for requests for quotes, or introducing themselves to the LUGOR group as a peer or contributor, instead decided to somehow mine our mailing list for email addresses, and then individually spammed the members of the list. When I got mine, I actually thought it was somehow related to my earlier request for quotes, until I realized that they’d sent it to both of the email addresses I’ve subscribed to the mailing list, not just the one I’d used in the RFQ. And then somebody else on the list mentioned that they’d gotten this spam to an address that they *only* use for the LUGOR list, and several other members piped up that they’d also gotten spammed, so we figured out what they’d done.
So well done, “Cock fire”. In spite of the fact that your product is actually $10 a month cheaper than what I currently pay your competitor, I’m not going to switch my existing use over, and neither am I going to recommend you to my current employer. Reap what you sow, assholes.
Update: I got a response from the email I sent them.
On behalf of [Cock fire] I would like to formally apologize for the e-mail marketing to your group. I was given 2 lists of e-mails from a Rochester Linux guru that said their group would be interested in Rochester based services. From the number of negative responses I have gotten back this was a mistake.
We have deleted all LUGOR e-mails and will not be in future communication. Please convey our apology to the group.
So it wasn’t his fault that they decided to spam, it was the fault of somebody who tempted him into it by giving him a list of email addresses. Oh, then that makes it all ok then? I don’t think so.
14 Miles on the Genesee RiverToday Mike and I met early at the Genesee Waterway Center. I didn’t have a firm plan in mind, other than to go long and slow. Well, Mike’s plan was similar, except for the slow part. Last time I did a long paddle here (30 May 2009), I went upstream at about 4.5 mph and downstream at about 6.7 mph. Mike is a much faster paddler than me, so he started off at about 6.3 mph and invited me to grab his wake and ride it. I grabbed it and held on as best I could, although I had to ask him to slow down a touch. My heart rate was pretty constant at around 140-145, as opposed to the 126 from that time. Mike asked me to pull for 5 minutes at the 20 minute point, the 40 minute point, the 50 minute point and again at the 60 minute point. That let the speed drop and my heart rate rise, but the good part was that when Mike said he was ready to come to the front again, I could stop paddling and grab my water tube and suck down a couple of gulps.
I was expecting another 10 mile paddle, since that’s how far we go when we go around the bay. So when we went through the 5 mile point on the way up, I figured “ok, I’m good for 12 miles”. Then he went through 6 miles. That’s when I spoke up, and he said he was planning on turning around at the 7 mile point. “Oh oh”, I thought. On that previous paddle, I’d only gone up 4.5 miles, so I got to see some of the river I’d never seen before. But I could feel the fatigue creeping in, and it was getting hard to keep right on his stern.
On the way down, I tried to paddle beside Mike, but once again his speed was too much for me. He was going around 7.0 mph, and I had to grab his wake once again. I noticed that we hit the 9.77 mile mark in 1:36, which is the time it had taken me at the Armond Bassett race to do 9.83 miles. Since my average pulse at the race was much higher, I have to assume that if I’d paced myself better in the race I could have done much better. Nearing the 11 mile point, which is about where the Armond Bassett race turned around (because the race started out by going 2 miles downstream, then 5 miles upstream, then 3 down) I could see two paddlers approaching. I realized pretty soon it was Jim Mallory and Jason Quagliata, two of the best paddlers in the area, if not the country. They turned while we were still a few hundred metres away, and started heading downstream much faster than us. They weren’t working hard, and you could see them pausing frequently to talk to each other, but they were still leaving us in the dust.
The last three miles saw me making a series of deals with myself. “Come on, just keep this pace for another mile, and if I have to, I’ll take a short rest”. “I’ve already gone further than I’ve ever gone before. so there would be no shame if I blew up now, but I’ll just keep going as long as I can”. Actually, some of the deals were pretty similar to the ones I made myself on these same three miles when I came here last August and I’d done 6 miles in 1:27. (Wow, 6 miles in 1:27 versus 14 miles in 2:13 – what a difference a year makes.) My heart rate monitor shows that my heart rate was going steadily up in that last three miles, which is partly due to the heat, but also fatigue. But at the end, I even managed a bit of a sprint – just call me Mark Cavendish.
Afterwards, Mike and I came back to my house and watched the excellent Mt Ventoux stage of the Tour de France. My lovely, talented and far too giving wife Vicki brought us bagels, cream cheese, lox and strawberries just to make it perfect. Man, Lance Armstrong still has it, doesn’t he?
