Going Wireless

After realizing over the last couple of months how little I actually use my home phone line that I pay $45 a month for, I finally called the phone company today and canceled my service. So, starting tomorrow I will no longer have a home phone line.

I'm taking the money that I'm saving on the home phone line and upgrading my cell phone from a pay-as-you-go phone to a monthly rate. I hate the idea of signing a two year contract with a cell phone company but it eases the pain to think of it as replacing a monthly fee that I was already paying to the phone company. Not to mention, I'll actually get a pretty good deal by signing up for a "Family Share Plan" with Rosey. Neither one of us use enough minutes that it's a big deal to share 5 or 600 minutes a month.

I should be keeping my same cell phone number as I switch providers, however the change between the two may mean that my phone is out of service for a couple of days. If you don't already have my cell phone number then email me and I'll give it to you. If you don't have my email address... well, then you have no business having my cell phone number :)

Officially Engaged

I proposed to Rosey this weekend in Bryce Canyon National Park. We were on the Navajo Loop to Queens Garden trail when we ventured off trail to get away from the people. Surrounded by redrock hoodoos, I asked Rosey to be my wife and, fortunately for me, she said Yes :)

Swim Lessons

I have wanted to take swim lessons for a long time now. Growing up in Hawaii I learned to swim in the sense that I wouldn't drown if thrown into the water, but I never really learned how to swim athletically. I would swim with my head above the water and stroke really inefficiently such that I couldn't go more than 20 or 30 yards without stopping to take a breather.

Last weekend I stopped by the pool at the Orem Rec center and went for a swim. On my way out, I noticed that they offerred private swim lessons that were very reasonably priced. So, I signed up. My classes don't begin until August, but I'm already very excited about them.

Last night I went back to the pool with Rosey and she, being a fairly experienced swimmer, gave me some good pointers to get started. She makes an excellent teacher. I almost regret signing up for lessons now as I think that she could teach me everything that I really need to know. But the lessons are already paid for, so I figure that I can get twice the learning: from Rosey and my instructor.

I spent the night practicing swimming with my head below the water and trying to remember to breathe occasionally :) It's amazing how much difference it makes to wear goggles. It's much more comfortable to keep your head below water that way. It also amazes me how much more efficient it is to swim that way. I was able to swim the length of the pool without tiring as opposed the 20 or 30 yards that I could swim above water.

So, why swimming? I guess that there are really two reasons. One, after biking all week and totally stressing out my lower body it will be nice to have another activity that I can do that focuses more on upper body. Two, I have been dreaming for a long time of being able to participate in a Triathlon and the swimming has been my one weak activity. When's the Ironman in Hawaii? :)

Pregnancy Appointment #1

Rosey and I just got back from our first official pregnancy appointment. We are roughly 8 weeks pregnant right now. Everything went great. The doctor was really nice and it looks like Rosey is really healthy and everything is going well with the exception of a slight anemia (which is apparently common among pregnant women). We discovered that her uterus is roughly the size of an orange right now. Mmm, citrus :) Our next appointment is in 4 weeks when we will get to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time. I can't wait!

Rana-Mo-Tad

Rana-Mo-Tad: Ride Around Nebo and Most Of Timp in A Day.

I failed to complete the full RANATAD ride today. I came so close, at 147 of the 160 total miles. That's just 7 more miles of climbing that I would have had to do followed by an easy 6 miles downhill back to Sundance. But my body just wouldn't take anymore.

The funny thing was that it wasn't my legs that gave out. As the day wore on, my stomach gave me more and more trouble. By my last rest stop, the very thought of food was enough to make me nauseous. Even water was beginning to give me trouble. On the last leg of the ride, Rosey came to meet me and brought me some cold water. As soon as I got off the bike, I almost puked and then shortly thereafter almost blacked out. That's when I decided that it was time to throw in the towel for this year.

Nonetheless, I did still ride 147 miles on my bike including going over the Nebo Loop and doing most of the Alpine Loop as well. Not only is that a personal best for me, but I think that it is also a fairly significant accomplishment even without finishing (although I'm still very sad that I didn't finish).

The day started off well. There were somewhere between 40 and 50 people signed up for the ride. We left Sundance at 6:30 in the morning and rode a very fast 25 MPH average to Payson, some 36 miles away. It was kind of nuts. I heard later that some guy wrecked on that first section and busted his head open. Scary!

As we were leaving our rest stop in Payson, I got separated from my group. I turned around and it appeared that everyone was already gone from the park. I didn't worry about it too much since we hadn't really planned on staying together for the climb anyway. Once you hit serious elevation, it's every man for himself until you get to the other side.

Well, it turns out that most of my group missed a detour and got stuck going through some mud in a construction area. It slowed them down just enough for me to get ahead of them. I expected that they would catch up to me shortly, but I never did see them on that section. I must have been riding fast, because I was one of the first 10 people to make it over the loop to Nephi. I was pretty impressed with myself. I think that it helped me to have ridden Nebo so many times already this year.

My original plan had been wait for the rest of the group once I got to the other side. But I waited for 10 or 15 minutes and there was still no sign of them. When a bunch of guys decided to head back out on the road, I figured that I would just jump in and ride with them instead of waiting.

This turned out to not be such a good idea. The problem with being at the head of the pack is that it is populated by the strongest riders. We were 35 miles from our lunch stop and these guys were setting of pace of 25 to 30 MPH. It was crazy. I held on for the first 25 miles but then got dropped going up a small section of uphill. With 90 miles and a huge climb behind me, I just didn't have what it took to keep their pace.

I think that riding at that pace really took a lot out of me. I would have been better off sticking with a group that was moving 20-25 MPH. Fortunately, I was smart enough to not make the same mistake leaving our lunch stop. I actually waited for the second group to come in rather than leave with the fast group.

It turned out that the second group had several mechanical difficulties and was more than an hour behind the first group. I used the time to rest up. My stomach was already giving me trouble at this point. I was at the lunch stop for over 30 minutes before I could even think about eating anything.

The ride between the lunch stop and the 35 miles to our next stop in Pleasant Grove was slow and HOT. The mid-July temperates were in full swing and it was nearly 100 degrees out. It made things worse that we ended up in a smaller groups that quickly dwindled down to nothing. As we left the stop there were only four of us. We rode hard and caught up with another group of four in front of us. But then one dropped off the back and four split off the front, leaving me to ride with just two compatriots.

But then, just as we were approaching Novell, I turned around and the two of them had disappeared. Poof, vanished into thin air. Now, it was just me, riding solo in the sweltering sun with 120 miles behind me and another 20 in front of me to the next rest stop. As I meandered through Provo, trying to stick to the course, I was fortunate enough to bump into half of the group of four that had split off in front of us. I'm still not quite sure how it happened. But I rode with them all the way to the next rest stop.

I probably spent an hour at that rest stop, waiting for something to sound edible. But no matter how long I waited, nothing sounded good. I finally downed a Coke (someone mentioned that they settle your stomach) and then decided to tackle the final 23 miles.

The final 23 miles went like this: 4 miles of rolling hills followed by 13 miles of climbing, followed by 6 miles of downhill back to Sundance. I was convinced that I could suffer through a mere 17 miles and make it to the downhill section. It may take me longer than usual, but I could do it. I was totally convinced of this until I stopped 10 miles into the climb and nearly blacked out.

So, I guess the moral of the story is: There's always next year :)

In the meantime, I need to figure out how to prevent these problems from happening during LOTOJA. I think that riding in cooler weather will be a huge help. Also, LOTOJA, is said to be an easier ride even though it's longer because it doesn't have nearly as much climbing. But, I need to experiment with food that I can eat on a long ride and not feel like I'm going to puke. And it probably wouldn't hurt to be carrying a little less weight with me up those hills.

Sicko

Last weekend Rosey and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, "Sicko". It's a documentary that exposes how broken the American health care system is and poses the question, Why doesn't America have universal health care like much of the rest of the civilized world?

Although he makes some really good points, you can't help but feel like you are being manipulated. The format of the movie is basically this: Tell the story of some poor sap in America that has been screwed by the health care system and then contrast that to the story of some blissfully happy people in another country that has universal health care. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I have no doubt that there are some things that are broken with our health care system. I have no doubt that there are people in other countries that are happy with universal health care. But I guarantee you that the bad isn't as bad as he makes it look and the good isn't as good as he makes it look. I bet that you could just as easily make a movie about the evils of socialized medicine in Canada, England or France and have just as many sad stories to tell of people that felt they were screwed by the system.

I believe this to be a Universal Truth: Anywhere you have a system, any kind of system, there will be people that feel marginalized or victimized by that system, with probably some percentage of those that genuinely are. This means that filmmakers like Michael Moore will always be able to find the right set of people and capture their sad stories as evidence of a broken system.

Despite feeling blatantly manipulated, I did actually leave the film feeling two things:
1) More educated about the issue of Universal Health Care
2) That America would be a better place if it were to implement some sort of Universal Health Care.

I had no idea that much of the civilized world already offers universal health care. That came as a shock to me. Paying for health care is as much ingrained in my American mind as not paying for it was ingrained in the minds of the English or French... judging by their confused reactions when Michael Moore went into various European hospitals and asked where he could pay his bill.

The other argument that I found interesting was that we already have some precedent for socialized services. It's not like medicine would be the first thing to be controlled by the government. Think about education, fire protection, law enforcement, libraries, etc. And in many of these cases, you still have the option to pay for additional services if you feel like your needs aren't be met by the government offered ones. For instance, you can still send your child to private school if you're not happy with the public ones. And, I imagine, you would still be able to pay for private health care if you felt like you weren't getting what you needed out of the public system.

Of course the two things that Michael Moore left out of his documentary was exactly how much these universal health care systems cost the average citizen and any sort of proposal of how to transition America from it's current privatized system into a public one. The transition is what I see as the biggest problem. Even if everyone were to jump on board and agree that universal health care is what we needed, it would be an epic transformation. As I understand it, the health care industry is the second largest industry in the nation (second to the military). How do you pull the rug out from underneath an industry that large?

A friend of mine pointed out that there may be other obstacles to America converting to a socialized system of medicine. He posited that the high prices that we pay for health care and drugs in America actually subsidize the industry for the rest of the world. That's right. According to him, the reason why Universal Health Care works in places like Canada, England and France is that we Americans are paying for it up front. A lot of medical and drug research is funded in America. If that revenue stream were to dry up, would it be worth it for companies to continue research?

Here's an interesting question for you: If you had to choose between universal health care and the progress of medical research, which would you choose? Personally, I think that I would choose universal health care. A lot of research these days is targeting very specialized ailments, whereas a lot of good could be done with the generalized knowledge that we already have. Not to mention, I think that more emphasis should be placed on preventative maintenance rather than spending millions of dollars on developing drugs to fix a problem after the fact.

Down With The Sickness

Endurance athletes (if I may deign to label myself as such) are a pretty twisted bunch of people. This is a group of people that like to punish themselves with exercise. It's almost like we are the modern day ascetics.

A really good endurance event might be referred to as a "suffer-fest". And instead of discouraging people from signing up, the use of this term might actually bolster attendance. You might even find these people talking about going in search of their "Pain Cave".

Quoth "The Everyday Athlete"

It’s that place you go where you are enveloped by a complete and raw brand of pain. You reach it after feeling the seering inside of you and then ignoring it. You reach it when every voice inside of you has screamed for you to stop and you have silenced them all. The quiet of the pain cave is eerie and horrific.

If there really is such a thing as a pain cave, and you knew that you had one, would you really go looking for it?

I would. I am.

It's not good enough to have ridden the Nebo Loop. It's not good enough to have ridden the Alpine Loop. How about I get together with a bunch of other lunatics and take a day off of work to ride them both in the same day. Now that sounds like fun!

The event is called R.A.N.A.T.A.D. - Ride Around Nebo And Timp in A Day. 170 miles, 13,000 feet of elevation gain. The ride starts at Sundance resort on the Alpine Loop. You descend into Utah Valley, ride to Payson, up and over the Nebo Loop to Nephi, come back through the valley to Alpine and then end by climbing up and over the Alpine Loop back to Sundance. I get chills just thinking about it :)

The ride is on Monday, July 9th. If all goes well, I hope to still be alive on July 10th :) Wish me luck!

How to Lower Your Bike Seat

Following on the heels of the ever-so-popular "How to Clean Your iPod" is the next installment in my do-it-yourself series, "How to Lower Your Bike Seat".

Step 1: Affix your bike to the roof rack of your car. Ensure that you perform this step outside of your garage.

Step 2: Forget that bike is affixed to top of car and drive into garage. Note that this procedure only works when your bike seat is slightly taller than the opening of your garage door, but not so tall that the garage door takes the bike clean off the top of your car.

Step 3: Remove bike from roof and enjoy your new properly adjusted seat.

Disclaimer - This procedure may cause peripheral damage to the vehicle used to perform the adjustments, such as (but not limited to) indentations, scraped paint and roof rack removal. This is completely normal.

Yeah, so this is pretty much the worst nightmare of anyone who has ever owned a roof rack :) Fortunately very little damage was done. The only visible damage to the bike was the seat was scuffed up some by the stucco as it squeezed to fit below the garage opening.

My Camry didn't fair as well. The front mounting bracket of the roof rack was ripped free of the door and took a good chunk of paint with it as it came loose. Okay, so it was really a pretty tiny section of paint but it felt bigger than it was :) The rear mounting bracket was pushed into the sheet metal of the roof and made a pretty good indentation. And, again, by "pretty good indentation" I mean a really very small indentation :)

I'm hoping that I can get a body shop to clean up both spots for me. In the meantime, I'm trying to dream up some sort of infrared device that detects that the bike is on top of the car and kills the ignition if I attempt to drive into garage. Fortunately for me, I have a pretty low waiting period before tragedy turns into comedy. After all, it is pretty funny if you think about it :)

iPod Stasis

After several weeks with two busted iPods, we have finally restored iPod stasis this weekend. On Saturday, I bought a new 30 Gig iPod Video to replace the one that went through the wash. I was originally entertaining the idea of getting one of the new iPhone's but I just couldn't talk myself into the $600 price tag or the monthly fee for AT&T cellular service. Although, after seeing one in person on Sunday I'm beginning to have second thoughts :) Maybe next month.

Rosey's iPod has had a dead clickwheel for the last several weeks. It would sync, charge and was probably even capable of playing music if it weren't for the fact that there was no way for you fingers to send signals of the brain of the iPod to do anything. Luckily, the nano was still covered under Apple's one year warranty. I thought it was neat that they have a spot on their website where you can just type in your serial number and they will tell you whether or not it's still covered.

So, we dropped by the Apple Store at the Gateway in Salt Lake City and intended to drop the unit off for service. But, it turns out that they don't service iPods at the store... they just outright replace them. So, we walked out of the Apple Store with a brand spanking new iPod nano to replace the one with the bad clickwheel. I have to say that I'm terribly impressed with how Apple does business. It was so easy to get this thing replaced. Granted, I did have to pay $30 processing fee since it was past the first 6 months of the warranty, but that's nothing compared to the price of a new unit.

Mountain Bike Miles

My fancy new mountain bike has not been sitting idle despite all of the miles that I've been racking up on my road bike lately. Yesterday morning I rode a 30 mile loop from Diamond Fork canyon up and over the mountains into Hobble Creek canyon and then turned around and rode back to Diamond Fork.

The ride was interesting in that it incorporated 3 shorter rides or trails that Rosey and I had attempted previously in the year...

A couple of months ago we rode from Diamond Fork about 7 or 8 miles up the trail to Mollie's Nipple (I swear that's the official name of the geological formation). We speculated that if we continued on that trail that it would continue on into Hobble Creek but neither of us had the energy or water to continue on that day.

The second stretch of trail we happened upon while hiking with Rosey's stepmom Karen in March. We started at Sawmill Hollow in Diamond Fork canyon and ended up hiking to a dirt road in the middle of the mountains. At that time the whole area was still largely covered in snow. I had no idea that the dirt road that we hiked on was actually going to be the same road that mountain bike trail turned into. It was kind of neat to see the same area again without all of the snow 4 months later.

The final stretch of trail was a ride that we did a couple of months back. We had planned on riding from Hobble Creek to Diamond Fork over the dirt road. Unfortunately we were only about to make it a couple of miles before we ran into impassable snow on the road. Ironically, we stopped on the road where there was a 'T' in the road with another trail. We were curious where that trail went but figured that we would have to wait until the snow melted until we found out.

Well it turns out that trail connected to the hike that we had done earlier and then eventually to the same mountain bike trail that we had attempted in Diamond Fork. It was kind of fun to ride all three sections yesterday without even realizing that I was going to be seeing all of these familiar places.

The irony of the ride was that I really hadn't planned on doing it as a 'out and back' ride. I was going to ride from Diamond Fork to Hobble Creek and then come down Hobble Creek canyon and have Rosey pick me up with the car. I was worried that it would be too long of a ride otherwise.

Well, it turns out that the ride from Diamond Fork to Hobble Creek was actually shorter than I had imagined. It was 14.6 miles from where I had parked my car in Diamond Fork to where the pavement begins in Hobble Creek. As I reached the pavement, I thought to myself, "Hmm, I could continue down the pavement and get home early OR I could turn around and just ride back over the mountain to my car. A peak at my elevation profile will tell you which option I took :)

I took a different route on the ride back. I stayed on the main dirt road that connected the two canyons. It was actually a fairly easy ride compared to the ride out. In fact, the last 8 miles of the ride were 'cheating' miles. The dirt road ended in Diamond Fork and I coasted down 8 miles of pavement back to my car.