Training Log Archive: barb

Event: West Point A-Meet
 

Around Cambridge. Breakfast at Toscanini's with Mike, Mike, Khing, Ning and Cindy. So nice to see my college friends!

To Arlington and back. Lots of traffic because Harvard Square was closed due to underground explosions. Flames shot up through manholes. Quote of the day: "We weren't trying to extinguish it because we weren't sure what kind of electrical volts were running through there." (There are different kinds?)

I had water instead of alcohol at the bar yesterday afternoon, and no coffee this morning. I feel groggy. Ate a lot at dinner, but not sugar or wheat.

C • volts 2

Brookline, Boston, Cambridge. Afternoon & evening. Suspended my (no) caffeine and sugar diet due to needing to have some brainpower at a Very Important Meeting. One transgression led to another and before long I found myself chatting up a State Department analyst and watching three women lovingly mud-wrestle while slabs of steer studded with butter knives roasted slowly over the coal pit behind me.

C • transgressions 4

Saw a car pull over toward a bike ahead of me - he was OK - but pissed.
Weight is with clothes & shoes on the way out the door this morning.

Today I decided to start eating/drinking more healthfully. Not only am I heavier than I'd like, but my heart arrhythmia is beginning to creep back into my life. And I'm feeling kind of depressed. But maybe that's the fact that I (a) have a job and (b) have too many things hanging over my head that I have to get done.

So today I did not get my usual coffee & muffin at DD. Instead I had eggs, fruit, cottage cheese and OJ. By lunchtime I was really sleepy from the lack of caffeine. I nodded off during a seminar and decided that I needed to bike home and take a quick nap before my next meeting an hour later, or else I would embarrass myself by falling asleep during the statistician's presentation. Unfortunately, my watch alarm no longer seems to wake me up (important to know for rogaines, not that we tend to sleep during rogaines any more). So I was embarrassingly late for the meeting. I still feel groggy. I am proud that I also avoided the free peanut butter cookies. Next task is to decide whether I'm going to avoid having a beer at a little celebration this afternoon with my colleagues.

C • Coffee 3

Do people ever get injured by these traps?

Oft-heard non-grammatical phrase of the day: "Can I help who's next?"

Lots of interaction with traffic in the 4-minute commute, and I wasn't always in the right.

C • Traps 2

Work commute

To the Fells for a CSU sprint. Then to MIT where I caught the very tail end of the science trivia contest, but at least I got to see Ira Flatow. He looks kind of nerdy. The one question (youth division tie-breaker) that I got to see was: name the 20 SI units derived from the 7 basic SI units, many of them named after scientists. (E.g., Volt, Newton, Henry...). The basic SI units are things like mole, meter, second.

Time is approximate.
Lots of trails which is pleasant.

Photos from walking around in Paris on 4/21:

Trampolines in the Tuileries gardens:





From the Eiffel tower staircase:



Looking down to where Grandma & Grandpa are waiting:



Looking across the river to Sacre Coeur:



Grandpa on the Batobus:



Notre Dame:



Feeding the birds:

C • Paris 2

Walked David to school, then biked to work. Lots of interaction with traffic today, including hand signals suggesting that a car give the bike lane more room, and screaming at a van that completely ignored me and pulled over right toward me. All part of a typical day on the streets here, not too stressful; I don't mind conversing with the cars.

Paris has a great bike rental system, though we didn't think we could use it because we were told that American credit cards don't have the chip that other credit cards have. LOTS of rental stations, very cheap. We saw lots of people on the bikes. And bike lanes (some shared with buses) have been established throughout Paris. They worked pretty well.

For the city streets part of our bike trip to Versailles, the leader had us travel in a pack, taking up a whole lane, so cars could not squeeze us against the curb or parked cars.

We couldn't figure out what this sign meant at first: no adults allowed to hold hands with kids? We attempted some civil disobedience:

C • so 4