Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Monday, April 24, 2006

A while back I picked on the state of Alabama for things being a bit different down there. To be honest, I have to say that the same is true here in Georgia. In my travels about on my bike I see no end of odd things. Perhaps the weirdest road I travel down, however, is Log Town road. Now, I'm not actually sure if there is a place called Log Town anywhere along this road as there doesn't seem to be much in the way of population concentration out past Yatesville on GA-74.

Once I go through this small town that holds an annual Chitlin Hoedown I continue to ride south (As a side note, I make it a point to ride through the Hoedown every year on my bike. I see it as a protest sort of thing. In talking it up around the area with other cyclists I've gotten several others to do the same thing. Spinning through a crowd of truly ample people celebrating fired hog intestines is a sort of consciencious objection for me.). About a mile or so down the road I come to a very odd thing. The tower pictured with this blog.

From the looks of things it is built on a big piece of property that the road sort of runs right through what may have been an old plantation at some point. There's a house with an old water tower that looks like it was built just for the house (that's it in the background) and then you have the pond and the weird tower. No one I've talked to knows why it was built, but it looks like some old observatory or something. Rumor has it that the guy who owns the property wears exactly one set of clothes for any given period. He goes to Wal-Mart, buys his outfit and then wears it continuously until it wears out. I guess he sleeps in it too. I think I tried that for one week back when I was twelve. When the outfit is near tatters, he goes and buys a new one.

Further down the road is the world's loneliest softball field. It's about eight miles down the road from Yatesville and there's basically nothing around it. You sort of have a diamond with something of a backstop but instead of bleachers or dugouts you have picnic benches and what looks like some bench seats out of old trucks and mini-vans. It's out in the middle of nowhere and I can't imagine who would have used it at some point. I wanted to get a picture to add here but there was really no good way to try to show it to you so you'll just have to use your imagination and see this open area next to the road surrounded by pine barrens and kudzu.

Anyways, the road ends down at US 19 which takes me to Americus and Albany if I ever desire to go that way. So far, I've usually just headed back north and west to Thomaston. The road is in good shape, however, and lightly used so it's a great place to ride.

More from the road later.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Given that I got to spend this weekend holding down the fort while the wife headed down to LA to assist with moving duties (I would have gone but the process started on Friday and I had to teach classes), I decided that today would be an excellent opportunity to do a solo century. I had a couple of pictures I wanted to get so I started out in a direction that would let me get the first set early in the ride and then I decided I'd make the rest up as I went along. It was a really interesting way to go because I went out and rode a couple of roads that were new to me and investigated some things I've been meaning to check out for a while.

The difficulty with training rides is that I usually have a limited amount of time due to other weekday obligations and I have some training goals I'd like to meet so I tend to pick routes that I know will fit the bill for the day whether that's a route with lots of flat and some county line signs for sprint intervals or a hill loop (usually Hog or Hagan's Montain) for hill repeats. If I want to do some long climbing drills I'll ride out a ways to a couple of places with two or three mile climds that average 7-8%. Since I was making it up as I went along today and the only goal I had was to get a hundred miles under the wheels in whatever time I felt like, I had a lot freedom and flexibility. So, I went out a road a use for a few different training loops but instead of turning where I usually do, I crossed the highway and ventured into terra incognito for a bit. I knew how everything connected up down the road so the worry of getting lost was non-existant and I could enjoy the ride. I saw some really odd things like what looked to be an abandoned rec park with dilapidated softball fields, a tower built out of stone with a metal dome at the top that looked like a cross between an ancient watchtower and a skinny observatory and an old house and truck that I think I'll go back to and take pics of very soon.

The training goal was to do the ride at an average heart rate between 145 and 150 which is really low for me. Usually when I ride a century I'm usually riding between 160 and 170. The idea was to do long slow distance and have a lot of energy throughout the ride. The wisdom of this became very apparent when 30 miles into the ride the wind picked up to about 15 mph with gusts over 20. I was able to increase my output level as needed and then back off when I was riding with the wind at my back. For the entire ride I averaged 150 with a pace of 20.8 mph which was pretty good, especially considering I had to fight the wind head on for about 35 miles of my ride.

The pic shown is a gas pump that's on a couple of training routes I do. It's at the top of a hill so it makes a great sort of "landmark/goal" when your doing a sprint interval up the hill. Today, the hill was ridden up easily since it came about 89 miles into the fun and my legs were pretty much content to spin along at an easy pace. The really bizarre thing (you might be able to pick it out in the photo) is that the owner has put the carcass of some bass he caught in the lake at the bottom of the hill in the glass part of the old pump. It's sort of nasty but it's also really funny, especially when I take riding buddies on the route and they see it for the first time. Who knows, maybe sometime we can ride out there together and you can see it in person.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Last week I came to the point in my season where I needed to take some time off the bike. I do this a couple of times every year so I avoid overtaxing my body and after teh Macon MTB race I was definitely ready for a break. So I took a week off and tried to relax and do very few things that would tax my body.

So this week I started back. Monday was a nice, solid 40 mile ride followed by a easy spin with a student. I slept great and felt good getting up yesterday morning. Yesterday afternoon I put in a good, hard rolling hills ride down to Macon. I could tell that I had pushed really hard when my legs sort of quit on me at 40 miles with about 10 more to go. I had been riding into a 5-10 mph headwind the whole way and ended up wearing myself out a bit. The problem was I couldn't get to sleep last night. That usually means you've overtrained. Yikes! I've ridden two days and I'm overtrained? I'm hoping it's a case of coming back too hard, too soon after my break and a recovery ride will fix it.

If not, then I have to give some thought to the fact that I might be chronically overtrained and need more time off or time spent riding easy. Lots of time spent riding easy.

We'll see.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, April 07, 2006

I was talking with a student last night and I hit upon a metaphor for my faith life that really appeals to me right now. Be warned that I haven't completely thought this through so please don't expect it to be an airtight theology but rather a loose metaphor through which to examine my relationship with God. Maybe, after I've given it enough thought and prayer, it will become more in time.

I dig jazz. At first I liked jazz because it could swing but now I like it for a lot deeper reason. I like jazz because it is improvisational. It is organic. The musicians agree to live by a couple of rules as they play together. The agree on a time signature (i.e.-how the beat goes), a key in which they are going to play and what chord changes are going to happen. Beyond these "rules" the musicians are allowed to play in any fashion that strikes their fancy. The key to good jazz is that the musicians collaborate to create something organic that flows from the community. Each player, if the music is going to be any good, has to listen to what the other players are expressing and respect that in their playing. Each player is, in their time, given the freedom to express themselves with the support of the other players.

There are a couple of things that make the music a lot better. The first is that each musician understands the basics of music. They know how to play their instrument in a technically competent way. This is achieved through practice which may take hours each day or may take a number of years to reach a point where they can interact within the group. They must understand the history of the musical form. If they want to play Kind of Blue, they have to know how Miles played it and how other musicians played it to understand the structure of the composition and how they can work with it. Finally, they have to know and respect the other musicians that they work with. They have to be able to trust the other musicians. When you have a group of artists that have these things, the music they create in the moment is more beautiful than anything that is carefully scripted and planned out. The beauty in the work is that it forms organically out of the experiences, moods, talents and desires of each of the players both in an individual and a collective sense.

I think our relationship with God is lot like jazz. God gives us some broad rules within which we must live but He leaves a lot of room for interpretation. He wants to come into a relationship with us that allow us to, with Him, improvisationally create our lives. To do this well we have to know the basics of the faith and work to become aware of those rules that God imposes on the music of our lives and how they affect and influence our "playing". We should understand the journeys of those who have gone before us. We are not the first to have come this way, and those who have gone before us offer much about what works and what doesn't; what is in harmony with God and what is painfully dissonant. Finally, we must come into relationship with God to a point where we not only respect Him but that we can trust that when He takes the music in a direction, we can follow His lead and if we decide to explore a path that is within the boundaries of the rules, He willl follow us there.

Once we do this, our life with God can become a wonderful improvisation. I wonder if, when Jesus told those gathered around Him not to worry, this is what He meant. I wonder if He was telling us that together He and they would create through improvisation a beautiful work of art out of the lives they lived. I like the thought of life as jazz; that I can come into relationship with God and He, the creator of all things, will work with me to make something that is truly unique in all the universe. That while He could do it without me, He has asked me to "sit in" and make something unique to my experiences, the talents He has blessed me with, my moods and our desires.

Here's a quote I found that maybe sums some of this up:

"Jazz music suggests an astonishing range of human expression. A jazz quartet can utter things in the presence of God that words cannot express."--BIll Carter

Just some thoughts.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Today was the first MTB race of the season down in Macon on a course known for being a bit of a beast. While not a particularly difficult course in terms of its physical demands it has lots of sand in the corners and it punishes every little mistake by scratching at your skin with thorns, throwing fallen branches into your rear wheel spokes and pushing you into small trees. Add to that the central Georgia heat and humidity along with 4 medium length, moderately steep climbs in the last two miles of each six mile lap and you have a powerfully difficult race made all the more difficult by the largest field of the day full of riders amped to rip off the start line for a new season of racing. When I moved into the 40-49 year old Sport class I thought I'd be hanging with a few laid back guys with cool stories. What we had was more than 40 guys with sinewly looking legs and hungry faces ready to rumble.

I got my usual crappy start and ended up in a lot of traffic which is always annoying because all it takes is one guy to miss a shift on a climb and we're all walking. That happened early in the first lap and then I dropped my chain at the bottom of the hardest climb on the course and got passed by about everyone who had been behind me. Still I hung in there and ended up making up a lot of ground pretty quickly. My first lap time wasn't too good but I made up huge time on my second lap where I was just cruising. The whole first lap my body felt like it was behind the curve but by lap two everything seemed to be dailed in and physically I was clicking on all cylinders. My knowledge of the course was really helpful and I found out that I seem to have figured out how to corner through technical conditions somehow in the last 16 months of almost no real riding. My third lap time was about as bad as my first lap time but the heat was getting to me pretty badly and I was racing a bit more conservatively as the course began to deteriorate under the pounding of hundreds of laps being ridden on a hot, dry day. I was poised for a possible top five even given my mechanical troubles when I dropped my chain again and got passed by three guys. I only caught one of them and ended up finishing eighth. Still though I avoided crashing and made some strong moves when I needed too.

Actually, I was really pleased with the result as I was hoping to finish in the top third of the field and I beat that mark pretty handily. Had it not been for myriad of mechanical issues including the dropped chain issue, crappy shifting and, as I discovered at the end of the race, a badly rubbing rear brake pad I feel like a top five finish was well within my grasp; something I haven't felt like in a mountian bike race in almost two years. I feel like I can compete in the series and today's result seems to comfirm that. I have about eight more races to go and I get stronger as we move into the summer so this is a good start. I still need to improve on some things including losing a little weight and being able to maintain my output for a full ninety minutes but I can do those. I have to sort out the mechnical issues and get them solved with the bike shop to become really competitive but I have every confidence that I can do that.

The next race in the series is May 7th on my home course at Dauset Trails which should give me a lot of time to prepare and to learn every turn, rock and root. I have five weeks to train, improve my fitness level and drop about ten pounds. If they run us over Huff 'n Puff I'll need to make sure I can handle the "ledges" at race pace and can climb in strong form. Another top ten there would put me in a good position coming into the summer and the brutal racing that comes with the heat. In the past it seems like the heat doesn't affect me as much as some of the other racers so those races are generally ones I do well in. Of course, all of this is counting chicken before the eggs are even laid so I'd best focus on what I can do in the next several weeks: watch my diet, train and practice my skillz.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |