Heavy, Wet, Snow

Last week was going well, until Thursday when the sun disappeared and it started raining. The sun wasn't seen again until Sunday. In between, we got a ton of rain, and a ton of snow. 9 News has the official total for Louisville at 8.3" but I know better. I had to shovel my sidewalk and driveway 4 times in < 12 hours. And this wasn't the light and fluffy stuff that skiers go "Woo hoo! Powder day at Vail!" This was the stuff that my neighbor accurately described as like shoveling cement. The shit was heavy.

My in-laws were in town for my Wife's 30th birthday and quite coincidentally, my weekend was free of workouts, or, was supposed to be. With Thursday's rain punting my workout to the evening and that also being my wife's actual birthday made it day off #1. Friday it snowed all day. It never stopped. It got heavy at times, and then lightened up a bit, and then got heavy again. But it never stopped snowing. I could have worked out inside, but didn't.

Preparing For The Worst

It's supposed to snow tonight, big time. Supposedly a foot of snow....yay...after last week's two debacles I can honestly say I'm not really looking forward to it. What I am concerned about is my long brick: 65-mile bike, 13-mile run.

I'm not worried about the trainer ride, after my LOTR marathon last week, trainer rides are a piece of cake, regardless of the workouts. It's the 13 miles I'm concerned with. You see, my tolerance for treadmill running is at an historic low. I hate the damn thing. It's incredibly boring, the speed is constant, and the damn thing is so loud that I can't hear the TV so movie watching is crap. And even if it were enjoyable, the prospect of running 13 miles on a treadmill makes me cringe. Running 13 miles outside is like watching a REALLY good movie, it goes by fairly quickly and is relatively pain free. Running on a treadmill for 13 miles I would have to guess is like watching History of Violence or Last Action Hero, basically, a really, really, REALLY bad movie where each scene just drags on and every time you look at your watch thinking surely 10 minutes have passed, it turns out it's only been 3.

If we get a foot of snow tomorrow, there's no way I can run outside. Snowshoe, sure, but not run. I suppose I could go to the gym and do the elliptical machine - it's at least faster than a treadmill, but I'm still looking at probably 90 minutes (I can go 8-9 mph on an elliptical, not really realistic for real world times, but better than blowing it off all together, no?)

Stay tuned, we'll see what happens.

Two Feet of Snow - The Aftermath

After shoveling our sidewalk and driveway 3 times in 18 hours and nursing a VERY sore shoulder/neck for the last 24 hours, the sun came out today and teased us with typical gorgeous CO weather right after a hellacious snow storm.

The garage door is now fixed so we have the use of our cars back. As the repair guy left, his final words were "That's about as bad of a crashed door as I've seen in a long time."

Ha, nice.

It was bad enough that I totally blew off my workouts for Thursday but we also ordered Pizza Hut for dinner...yikes...but OH so good.

Two Feet of Snow

That's how much snow is surrounding our house. I've shoveled the sidewalk and driveway twice today and the wall of snow lining the driveway would serve any child as a solid snow fort or barricade as protection against snowballs.

But alas, there were no children or snowball fights. Just a solid day of working in front of the computer from the home office and blowing off both scheduled workouts. I can handle several hours on the trainer. I cannot, however, stand more than a few minutes on the treadmill. Even with the TV on.

It really sucks too because overall, this week had been going rather well training-wise. I will do some sort of workout or workouts tomorrow, but I was supposed to do a 100-mile ride on Saturday. There's no way in hell, well, maybe only in hell, all this snow will disappear from the roads by Saturday. I don't care how great the plows are.

On top of all this, our garage door is broken. It is currently at a very odd angle and is mostly no longer on either of its tracks. A repair person is supposed to come by tomorrow but with this weather - I wonder if he'll show up. I hope so because both our cars are trapped inside.

Everybody's Working on the Weekend

Living in Colorado has its advantages.  If you're an athlete, the training at altitude allows you to excel at sea level.  If you're an outdoorsy type person, guaranteed there's something here for you.

However, if you're a cyclist or triathlete (or duathlete) when it snows and you have a ride to do it usually means you're relegated to the trainer.  Just like when training outside, training inside can be great or can really suck.

I've found that as long as I have a good^* movie on TV, then the workout is great.  If there's nothing on, and you can't find a movie to watch, then time can pass excruciatingly slow.  Thankfully, today was not one of those days.  My 2:30 on the trainer went relatively quickly and I even had a break 2 hours in to help clean up the pee our new puppy decided to leave on our new carpet.  (how nice)

The one drawback to the trainer, at least mine anyway, is that I can never make it simulate the resistance of the road, or even the CompuTrainer I use in the lab.  Thus, it's either too lose and my wheel skips, or it's snug and I can't get too far out of my granny gear or it's like climbing up Magnolia.  If there's a happy medium, I haven't found it yet.  And why someone hasn't designed a trainer that doesn't result in you actually destroying your rear tire over time is beyond me.  It doesn't seem like it'd be hard.  Have some type of drum on which you can mount a rear cassette and have that drum connected (either via a chain or a belt) to a resistance unit.  This way, the resistance is constant and one can shift normally.  The rear stay on the bike would simply mount to the drum like it would to a normal rear tire: rear derailleur around the cassette and the dropouts on to some small studs.  A normal quick release skewer could be used to keep the bike from disengaging.

If anyone out there hasn't patented this yet, do it and build it.  I'll gladly be a guinea pig.

^*here, the definition of good will certainly vary greatly amongst everyone I know.