Mike's Bike Blog

On Sunday Jack competed in his 2nd Triathlon of 2010 and the 2nd in the 1379 Kid's Tri Series. Jack improved all his times in the swim, bike and run.

Swim: 2:58.7
Bike: 12.7 mph
Run: 5:13.696 (8:42.8 min/mi)
Total Time: 24:38.616 (+5:48.476)

Some fancy wheels and bikes

Jennifer, Zeb & Jack

Ahh the signs of spring in Austin, TX with it's high pollen and other allergen count. The days are starting to hit the 80 degree mark can only mean one thing, the start of the RunFar Time Trial bimonthly series. The RunFar TT is held every other Tuesday from April to September on an 8 mile course on the South end of MoPac.

I made it out a handful of times last year and my best time was the very last one with a time of 19:47 and averaging 24.3mph. My goal for 2010 is to average 25 mph on the course.

Sunday I played hockey, the first time in a couple months, because of my sporadic hockey schedule my legs never really have time to adapt. This leaves me sore afterwards, the funny thing is on Monday my legs usually feel fine, it's Tuesday when they start to stiffen up. To make matters worse I was bitten by something last week while riding and my leg has swollen up, I even did a little time in the ER it got so bad. It's still swollen and aches but they have me on antibiotics, still don't know what got me. Tuesday during lunch I went out for a little spin to see how the legs would handle the pedals and it wasn't as bad as I suspected. My plan was to go out there and get a couple 20 minute SST workouts in.

When I got to the veloway at 5pm the parking lot was almost full and there were cars already lining the street. Everybody was as excited as me for the first TT of the year! I hadn't seen so many people there this early before. I warmed up with Enrique (NWCC), Andrew (AC2) and his buddy. We did a couple laps around the veloway.

The entire time I felt really good, even the hill before Escarpment was good, with the wind at my back I was able to stay in the aero position up the hill. On the way back I still felt good despite a headwind where usually we have a nice tailwind. I lost focus a little and let my speed drop as I was averaging 26 mph. The official results have my time at 18:56:40 with an average speed of 25.3 mph.

After the race the BikeNoob asked me if the jump in my average speed was due to the new bike or legs. I of course replied that it was all legs, but in truth it might be a little of both. My power from last years fastest time and this one are fairly close, with this years average power about 10 watts less. The faster time with fewer watts can be attributed to bike as the TT bike is more aerodynamic plus I was wearing a skin suit, shoe covers and an aero helmet. Another contributing factor is I've lost a few pounds since last year and I've been playing with my nutrition as well. One other item to take into consideration is a slight change in the course. At the end of MoPac when you U-Turn onto the opposite direction it use to be a sharp turn onto the shoulder of oncoming traffic. They have reworked this section and there is now a dedicated U-Turn lane and the corner seemed a little easier to maintain speed. As I recall last year in my best effort I was slowed by other riders in this section which didn't occur this time.

Now that I've met my 2010 goal in the first race I need to up it, 27 mph sounds pretty good.

Left: Jack Middle:Ethan Right: Zeb

This was the first time all 3 of my boys were at the Driveway Race Series and giving the Kids Fun Lap a go. Both Jack (9) and Ethan (8) have done the Kids Lap before, but Zeb (5) was making his first appearance in the competition. The Kids Lap is run right after the Mens 4/5 race which I was competing in. As soon as the last 4/5 rider crosses the line the kids are let loose for 1 lap.

Since this was Zeb's first time the plan was for me to ride with him, but because of where the finish line for the 4/5 race was I had to take 1/2 a lap to get back to the kids race start and they had already started. I couldn't see him when I rolled around but Jennifer said he was out there so I started to go around to find him. Jack was at the front and almost done when I found Zeb humming along, I suspected Ethan was somewhere up front with Jack. To my amazement Ethan had stayed with his little brother and was shepherding him to the line. I could hear him encouraging Zeb to go faster "You don't want that girl to beat you do you?". I really wasn't needed Ethan was doing a fine job looking out for his brother.

All I can say is the P12's better watch out for Zeb. Literally, he came around the final corner just a flying and he's not so good with the stopping part yet, something about "slowing down is for sissies". He came to the end at about 9 mph and the P12's were lined up for their race, Zeb dragged his feet in an attempt to perform a Flintstone stop and when that wasn't working he then took the bike into the grass and into the Holland Racing sign. After a few tears about forgetting how to use his breaks he proceeded to the medal area to receive his medal with a grin on his face from end to end.

Of course I'm really proud of my 3 boys, Zeb was super excited about his first "bike race" and happy he beat the bigger girl on a pink bike. I was super proud of Ethan for acting like a cycling domestique to make sure Zeb got to the finish line.

Whenever there's a call out for a ride on Twitter I'm all over it and if it's local even better. Doesn't matter who's making the call from a Hump Day Nooner, a Friday Hookie Ride to riding with a professional bike racer. If I could I'd make them all, let's be honest if I could ride my bike all day I would, I just need to figure out how to make that happen and live above the poverty line.

When local professional bike racer Pat McCarty  sent out a tweet to come ride with him I was all over it.  Everything seemed to be aligned for me to make it, with my Mom in town for the month I had someone to watch the kids while Jennifer took Jack to his swim practice thus I could be out and about on the Austin streets with Pat.

The ride was slated to be an easy pace ride, I had ridden earlier in the day doing my typical Monday workout of a 40 minute SST (90% of FTP) up Courtyard and City Park Road down to the Emma Long Park entrance and back. About 3/4 of the way I remembered that I had a ride that evening and this ride along with my hill repeats on Easter up the 3 Sisters on Limecreek Road had me kinda wishing I might have been better off laying off the gas and not going so hard. I mean when a professional rider talks about an easy recovery pace that could be my  Steady State or Threshold level.

Luckily I didn't need to taper for the ride with Pat, for 1 1/2 hours my average power was only 155 watts right at my recovery level. The whole time we kept it at a pace so we could talk, even up the hills. I was able to pick his brain on every topic that came to mind from training, race tactics, his racing career, his favorite Austin area routes, the pro tour and on and on. Anything and everything I could think of and he asked me questions making it a two way dialog.

Pat's a great guy and I suggest the next time he does one of these that if you can that you make it.

Exhibit #1
I like a good April Fools joke, ok I'll be honest I like a good prank anytime. This one I'm about to relay took place back in the late 90's, probably around 1998. I was working as a software developer for a small company specializing in CD-ROM and Web based delivery, at the time it was called multimedia. One of my fellow developers, we'll call her Patty, because that's the name her mother gave her, had a big thing for Tom Cruise.

Nick, also his real name, who did video for the company and myself would like to tease Patty that Tom Cruise was gay. Not that there's a problem if he is or anybody who is, but it seemed to really get under her skin and she would argue viciously almost to a point where blood vessels behind her eyes would pop. Great fun.

Nick was leaving the company, or so we thought, to go to LA or Phoenix to pursue a film career so we wanted a grand finale, a prank of all pranks. This next part might be a little technical but follow along as best you can. I came in early, real early one morning. I set up a DNS server (DNS is what resolves domain names like CNN.com to the actual computer that the files live on, it tells the web browser where to go) on Nick's computer and set up an entry for msnbc.com and pointed it to my computer. At the time and in our office at least MSNBC.com was the place most people went to get their daily news.

On my computer I ran a web server, for local development and I downloaded the front page to msnbc.com and a few of the main articles. Nick and me wrote an article worthy of publication on the coming out of Tom Cruise. As fake news goes this was premo! Now we had a web site that looked like MSNBC.com with our fake news on the front page and when clicked it would take you to the fake story. Nick went around to a few of the computers in the office and set them up to use the DNS server we had set up. Now when these people typed in www.msnbc.com in their browser it would take them to our version.

While Nick was doing this we needed something else to really pull this off. Patty had a little desktop application she had downloaded from MSNBC.com, it would pull the latest news headlines from their site and display it in a small box in the system tray. I quickly replicated this application. I built my own knock off desktop app, and programmed it to pop up with our news story around 10:30, about the time Patty usually got in to work.

The trap had been set and all we had to do was wait and try to keep a straight face. At 10:30 right on cue the application I wrote fires off the notice with the fake headline and with it sends Patty into a screaming fit. At first it was "No, No! I don't believe it!" She instantly started blaming me and Nick like we had some hand in this. She clicked the headline to go to MSNBC.com for the full story and voila the full fake article was displayed. Her acquisitions against us stopped. Coworkers came running into our office area to see what the commotion was. There were skeptics in the crowd, telling Patty that it must have been Nick and me somehow. A group of nonbelievers ran back to the reception area and went to MSNBC.com. That computer was one that we strategically changed the DNS settings on so it to brought them to our fake news server. A silence fell over the crowd of woman. We had crushed many a fantasies that day.

We really had no plan for the second part, the first part really wasn't through through either. So after lunch we changed out the MSNBC.com site with another fake story, this one was 2 men were wanted in questioning for hacking the MSNBC.com website with our pictures.

That was one of my better office pranks. Is it one of my best one? I'll let you be the judge.

Exhibit #2
When I worked at Keller Williams Realty International in their corporate IT department there was a running joke. If you walked away from your computer and left it unlocked somebody would walk by and mess with it. That somebody was usually Kurt. In all my past work environments I wasn't exposed to these types of shenanigans so I would get up and forget to lock my computer. There was the time I walked down the hall to get a VP level executive and other high ranking stakeholders to demo an application I had been working on. You can imagine my dismay when I returned to have my desktop background and everything else set to a teletubby theme. The execs got a good laugh as well as everyone else in IT. At that point I started plotting my revenge. It wasn't going to be simple, Kurt ran Linux so even the times he walked away and left his computer vulnerable all I could do is sit there not knowing how to use Pine to send an email on his behalf, or change any of his desktop. Plus I needed to take it to the next level in hopes to prevent any further pranks.

One night I wrote a little surveillance application, all it did was detect motion on my web cam and record it. Then whenever the mouse or a key was pressed it would mimic the blue screen of death and prompt that it was reformatting the hard drive. I built this as a screen saver with the background that looked like my desktop, so to the unsuspecting fool walking by it looked like my computer was unlocked when it fact it was not only locked but had a booby trap waiting.

For the next week I would leave my computer "vulnerable" waiting for Kurt to jump at the chance to get to his hijinks. For 4 days he didn't take the bait, in fact on the 3rd day he told me how I left my computer unlocked and he could have gotten me big time if he had wanted to. I kind of egged him on in hopes to spur him to. On the 5th day, April Fools day of all days. I caught him in my trap.

When I came back to my cube he and Charles had a worried look and were apologetic. They were worried that they had really messed up my computer. I quickly sat down and reviewed the video. It was quite funny you see Charles in the background acting as a lookout while Kurt is sitting at my computer. You don't see much except the top of his head, but then when the blue screen of death is displayed he backs away from the computer and he has a look of fear and Oh Crap on his face.

I sent out an email, with a link to the video, to all of the IT department to be on the look out for the suspects in the video. I was never pranked again while at Keller Williams. A month or so later, unable to top me Kurt left the company and moved to Switzerland. Charles also departed the company as well. I did have a couple other ideas I could have pulled in case we got into a prank war, I'll keep those in case an occasion ever arises.

So you be the judge, which one is better? Or do you have one that can top these?