Category: Revelation

Not the rest day or workout I was expecting

A few minutes after posting that “Current Radar Picture” and declaring that I wasn’t going paddling, the skies brightened up, the sun broke through, and Jim phoned me to see if I was going. He said “Come on, it isn’t golf”. And so I went.

And since there is a race this weekend, I thought we were going to take Dan’s coaching advice and “paddle easy, work on surfing technique”. Instead, I get out to the beach, get launched, paddle out to where Mike, Doug, Bill and Stephen are waiting, and Mike says “Aim for the smoke stacks, go!” and off we went to paddle the same course that we’re probably going to race this weekend.

There was very little wave action. I’m sure the other guys thought it was flat, but there was a strong breeze from about 30 degrees off to the left of where we were going, and it was starting to whip up waves. There was a very subtle swell coming in from behind, small and very long wave length. Sometimes you could feel a bit of a ride from that. And there were a few boat wakes coming from all directions, although not very many because of the recently passed storm. I found it challenging. I’m still very twitchy in the boat, and it seemed like a double effort to paddle strongly and keep upright in the waves.

Because I had been expecting a surfing session, I hadn’t brought my camelbak, and I was very thirsty. I was also afraid to stop paddling for even a second so I couldn’t have asked anybody else for a sip of water, nor even scooped some out of the lake.

After not very long, the group sort of separated out with Mike way off ahead, Doug, Jim and Stephen paddling not very far ahead, and Bill just behind me. And not long after that Doug peeled off from the pack of three he was with and came back to shepherd Bill and I. I was afraid to look around, and so I don’t know if Bill was keeping with me or if he was falling behind, but I think he was falling behind. He’s a lot better boat handler than I am, but he hasn’t been working out all that much in the boat and he doesn’t have the fitness of the rest of us.

As we got closer to the jetty, the wind was getting stronger and stronger, and the hoped for rest in the wind shadow never happened. Instead, the jetty turned the waves from being 30 degrees off my left to coming almost directly down the jetty from my right to left, making it easy to use them to turn around in. Bill and Doug didn’t come in near to the jetty, so I couldn’t ask one of them for water, and by the time I got out to where they were and everybody was paddling the same direction, I was back in a “concentrate and try to stay upright” situation so I didn’t bother to ask.

As expected, the waves being whipped up by the wind, now behind us and angled more in towards shore, were growing. Bill and I paddled the entire distance back side by side, as he used his skill to catch waves and get a ride while I tried to do the same. We were mostly side by side but every now and then one of us would catch a good ride that the other one missed and surge ahead, only to be caught and passed as the other caught a ride. A couple of “linked runs” saw our speeds nudge up into the 7 mph and higher range, although mostly we were around 6.2 to 6.4 mph. For a while, I was really enjoying it. But then the fatigue and dehydration caught up with me and I was starting to struggle again.

Mike was miles ahead and way off to our left, well off shore. Stephen was a not as far ahead, and he was well into shore. If the waves had been any higher, he probably would have been in bad surf and been expending a lot of energy. I think Bill and I had a good line because the last mile or more was straight down wind. I have discovered that sometimes it seems better to be diagonal to the waves so you can surf faster than they are going, but I still think it’s good to have a relatively easy straight downwind surf at the end.

So it was probably too much effort this close to a major race, but on the other hand I really need more wave time and this definitely counted as that.

Rochester Open Water Challenge?

I may have been slightly optimistic to think that a mere 4 weeks after buying a surf ski I’d be ready to paddle the Rochester Open Water Challenge. It’s only 6 days to the race, and today I went out with Doug and Dennis to try to paddle the course. Instead, what I did was fall in. A lot. I must have fallen in and remounted 7 to 10 times, and each remount took 3 or 4 attempts before getting back in. I think I managed to paddle about 2 miles, and I’m more tired than I am after the 8 mile flat water paddle I did yesterday. Balance and remounting both use both different muscles than I’ve been using for all that flat water paddling I’ve been doing, and it doesn’t take much to exhaust me.

I haven’t gotten very good at balancing – the guys with more experience seem to just rock their hips without thought, where for me it’s entirely a conscious effort, which makes it too slow to react – I’m often doing exactly the opposite of what I need to be doing as a wave or boat wake passes. I need more experience. I can feel improvement over the last few weeks, but I’m still not good.

The other guys weren’t finding it particularly easy, and I take some solace from that, but Dennis only dumped a few times and I don’t think Doug dumped at all. But they also decided not to paddle the whole course. So maybe I’m not that far behind them. But if the conditions next week are like this, I’m not going to be able to complete the race.

Upgrades, Updates

I upgraded WordPress to 3.0, and to celebrate I switched to the new theme. I’m going to to want to replace that banner picture at some point, but otherwise I think it went ok.

I “racked” my new colo box at LogicalSolutions.net/RackWire.com. Of course the first thing I did when I got home was discover that I had 15 un-installed security upgrades, including the kernels. Oh oh. I went ahead and upgraded, in spite of the nagging voice telling me that this didn’t go well last time. And the first thing I discovered that when it upgraded the kernels, it didn’t keep all the tweaked settings I had in /boot/grub/menu.lst, not even in menu.lst~. I also discovered that when I backed up the system before I brought it over to the facility, I only backed up the root partition, not /boot. Dammit. I’m currently rsyncing some files from the old box to the new one, but when that’s done, I’m going to reboot the new one, and cross my fingers and hope it will work. If it doesn’t, I guess I’ll see how well LogicalSolutions takes to me visiting my box for a few hours tomorrow.

Update: I rebooted my box with the new kernel and it actually booted! Hurrah!

More colo box setup

On the new box:

  • Boot it up
  • Shut down all three domUs with “xm shutdown”
  • Mount all three domU disks in /mnt/xen[1-3]

On the old box:

  • Set up an authorized key so that root on the new box can ssh into root on the old box
  • Make a snapshot of one of the disks with lvcreate -L 100G -s -n xen1-snapshot /dev/xen-space/xen1-disk
  • Mount it with mount /dev/xen-space/xen1-snapshot /mnt/xen1

On the new box:

  • Copy the changed files using rsync -aSuvrx --numeric-ids --delete -e ssh --exclude /lib/modules root@xen.xcski.com:/mnt/xen1/ /mnt/xen1

On the old box:

  • Unmount the snapshot
  • Remove the snapshot with lvremove /dev/xen-space/xen1-snapshot

What have I been up to recently?

Since the Tupper Lake race, I’ve only paddled the ski. I need to get used to paddling in waves, with the Rochester Open Water Challenge less than two weeks away. Tonight, for instance, Paul D and I did some surfing, but we also spent some time paddling up and down the shore – our theory was that we would experience waves from the side, which is the hardest to handle, but we were in shallow water so if we dumped (and I dumped a few times) it was no trouble to get back in the boat. I haven’t been paddling with my GPS much, so I don’t know what has happened to my training volume other than the feeling that it’s way down. Paddling out in the surf requires different muscles and it’s not particularly fast, so an hour or an hour and a half is about all I can stand, and I probably make less than 3 or 4 miles in that time.

I’ve also settled on a name for the ski. In the past, I named my Skerray “Mary Ellen Carter”, after the song by Stan Rogers, because it enabled me to “rise again”, and the Looksha was “Gideon Brown” after the song by Great Big Sea, because she can “punch ahead in any gale”. I called the Thunderbold “Anne-Marie” after the boat in Stan Rogers’ song “Acadian Saturday Night” because it has “wings on the water”. And so now I’m naming the ski Old Polina because I “fly a long like a song” in it. Or at least I hope to.

I had a great visit with my dad, step mother and kids this weekend. It’s great to see them, especially my daughters. They’re both maturing so well. I still worry about them, but I suppose that’s my job.

In other news, I’m still trying to finish setting up the replacement hardware. I’m experimenting with using LVM snapshots to be able to backup the domU partitions while they’re active – I think what I’ll do is make snapshots, rsync them over to the new server’s partitions, then delete them, and then shut down the domUs and rsync them again while they’re shut down, and then start up the new guys. By rsyncing once with snapshots, that should make the amount of time between shutting down the partitions and bringing up the new ones much faster. I’m also going to look into replacing my current rsync backup scripts to ones that use snapshots as well, because that way I never have to worry about inconsistencies in the file system, especially in the database engines.