persistence

I have decided that it would be great to have a couple of chickens in the back yard so we can have our own eggs.  Especially since chickens seem to do just fine on their own here on Oahu - they are literally all over the place.  Teddy and Emily are pretty inspired, even though they probably won't see eggs until this time next year since they leave at the beginning of August and the whole laying thing doesn't happen for 5 months. 
Of course, they will need a place to live.  That means either buying or building a hen house.  What's the fun in buying a henhouse when you can try to figure out how to build one yourself?  So I am going down to Re-Use Hawaii to get a pile of second-hand wood (what a great place that is - why buy fresh lumber when you can get it from someone's deconstructed house?) www.reusehawaii.org We had a design charette yesterday where we had a community discussion on important things, such as "we should paint it pink".  Fortunately, I used my charette training to keep the meeting on topic, and we did reach a collective decision on dimensions, materials, and other critical decision points.  I'll need to go to Home Depot or Hardware Hawaii for chicken wire and other things.

And where to get chickens?  Initially we had considered going through Waimanalo or some other similar chicken-infested location with a butterfly net.  There are problems with this.  First, it might not be that easy - those chickens are pretty quick and wily.  Second, they won't imprint, so they will be wild forever, and not really fill the definition of pets.  Third, wild chickens may have diseases, and also aren't innoculated against various parasites.  These parasites don't kill, but basically make the chicken sad and tired, and not into egg-laying.

It turns out that, with the demise of virtually all agriculture on Hawaii (or most of the big, industrial money-making-in-more-than-cottage-industry type), all hatcheries on the island closed, with one exception: AND IT'S ONLY 5 MINUTES FROM WORK!  http://www.asagihatchery.com/  Although taking them home with me in my messenger bag on the bus is probably not the way to introduce these critters to the wonderful world of the Nugely Household, it would certainly be authentic.  Nope - cardboard box and an SUV for these guys.

There will be two models.  And we have a plan.

Ironman New Zealand Race Report

 

When you live out in the middle of a very large ocean (in this case, the Pacific Ocean), you find yourself in the awkward situation where takes a long way to get to conventional places such as Massachusetts, where my parents live, and a relatively short time to get to unconventional places, such as other isolated islands in the middle of nowhere.  Take New Zealand, for example.  Hawaii is only 1 time zone (plus one day) removed: when you fly, you fly “down”, a straight shot south over thousands of miles of almost empty ocean and the international date line, and there you are. There’s a direct flight from Honolulu to Auckland twice a week, it takes eight hours, and Air New Zealand flies all sporting equipment, within reasonable dimensions, for free.

 

The advantage of living in Hawaii (yes, there’s more than one, but we’ll discuss just this one for now) is that you can train year-round.  It’s a little surreal: there is no obviously discernible climatic shift where you think “yeah, now I’m in the off season”.  It gets dark earlier, the sun rises a little later, it’s not as hot, and sometimes it rains, but there’s no snow, no ice on the roads, and no 20 minute ordeal getting your winter biking clothes on for the 5 minute ride to the pool.  Races in the southern hemisphere, therefore, do not require dragging out the trainer or huffing over to the gym for a lengthy communion with the Ipod.  Or so I thought. 

 

These three conditions – climate, time zones, and free bike transportation - have “Spring Destination Ironman” written all over them.

 

Ted and I announced to our triathlon friends last fall that we were thinking of doing an Ironman in Australia or New Zealand.  Everyone said they wanted to do one too. Vague statements were made about doing a group thing.  A lengthy email silence ensured. After a few weeks, I signed up for IMNZ, and then Ted followed.  Everyone else signed up for Western Australia. Oh well.

 

I had been in a kind of triathlon furlough since my not-so-hot Ironman Kona (it was hot, I wasn’t) in October 2007.  I had done some sprints, and biked to work, and ran a little, and swam, but no coherent “on the campaign trail” program had been followed.  I had fitness for sure, but I was by no means conditioned, so had a lot of waking up to do.  My coach up to Ironman Kona had been Patrick McCrann/Endurance Nation, but more out of curiosity than anything else I signed up with Mark Allen Online for a trial period just to see what it was about.

 

Ugh, what an unpleasant revelation.  A coach who assigns 2.5 hour bike rides and runs in the first week, and those just the weekday runs, clearly out of touch with reality…hello!?  I have a job?  I hate to sound pompous, but have these people ever worked a normal job and tried to schedule workouts around it (rather than the other way around)? – how about a little empathy?  My round-trip commute on a bad day takes more time than that!  And the workouts seemed to have no pattern or point. After two weeks I abandoned that experiment, went back to Endurance Nation, and signed up for the self-coached 20-week Ironman preparation package, which was a fantastic deal and worth every penny.

Back in the real world, I had changed jobs and was in a better situation financially than I had been, but had credit card debt to work off and now an Ironman to save for.  I opened a savings account and started funneling all my coaching revenues into it, scheduled an automatic transfer of a couple of hundred dollars a month from checking, and put myself on a ferocious spending diet.  Hopefully by March 2009, I would have enough money so that by the time all the bills came in (the post Ironman hangover) I wouldn’t have a credit card balance that looked like the national debt. I recommend this approach to anyone who has a big race coming up but needs to keep a tight rein on finances.

 

Getting back into training was very hard. Getting “re-addicted”, re-establishing the rhythm of wake up, dress, and get out the door for workout #1 before you know what’s happening, day after day, is kind of like tuning an instrument – at first, once you’ve got one string tuned, all the others go out, and you feel like you have to begin all over again.  For the first few weeks I got flat tires, had to get new shoes, slept through my alarm, didn’t have food in the fridge, work got crazy, the local pool closed for weeks on end, and then it started to rain and get cold and windy.  I was battling constantly to establish a routine and it seemed as if everything on the Island was conspiring to keep that from happening.

 

Irony of ironies, the thing that saved me was the bike trainer.  I have never ridden the trainer as much as I did this “winter” in Hawaii.  When I signed up for NZ, I hadn’t counted on how dark it was in the morning.  I also hadn’t counted on it raining every day, and through the weeks up to and following Christmas, that seemed to be all that the weather did. But the trainer was there for me, waiting patiently in the kitchen next to the toaster and the coffee maker.  Ted would wander blearily in and I would be grimly perched on the bike, plugged into my Ipod like it was life support. I must have listened to DJ Rap’s album “Up All Night” about fifty times in a row.

 

Back in the daylight, Ted and I struggled through 20 mph winds on our bikes on three different islands – Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island. We did long runs. I did marathon swims in the ocean.  I lifted weights and did yoga and worried about my back. My fitness improved and suddenly, miracle of miracles, it morphed into conditioning – yes, I was an Ironman-in-training again! I didn’t worry about my swim. The runs were going really well (although I fretted constantly about overstriding and injuring my hamstrings): one day I ran all the way home from work, a 2 ½ hour odyssey over the Ko’olau Range, partially on trails. The bike…I had a bad bike at Kona, and had a feeling that, strong as I was, something wasn’t quite there this time, either. I did all the rides, and in group situations I seemed to be holding my own, but still didn’t feel like it was all that.  And what about the race plan?

 

It’s important to set goals.  I wanted to qualify for Kona at IMNZ. Then again, the specter of Ironman consuming my life and dominating my view of the world has always been a source of worry to me. I didn’t want to want it so badly that if I didn’t qualify, I would go into a big self-accusatory funk and ruin the post-race vacation and the rest of the year – no fun for me, even less fun for Ted.  That being said, I didn’t want to sabotage my race by not caring enough to race to the maximum.  And I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go to Kona that much. I was getting a little tired of having every single weekend devoted to long rides and runs and naps.  I spent a lot of time on the rides and runs wondering what Ironman was really for, and this one in particular.  Would this be my last? Those of you who read my Kona race report may recall that I didn’t really consciously experience the finishing event in 2007.  Suddenly I was there, and I was kind of bundled away before I could understand what was going on. And that really really sucked. By the time the taper began for IMNZ, I had concluded that for this race, I wanted to enjoy myself, race as hard as I could, and appreciate the finish line.  If qualification happened, that would be cool, but I wasn’t going to beat myself up about it if it didn’t.

 

Three days before our departure, the Bike Shop called to tell me they had discovered a crack in my frame.  It’s moments like this when you discover that yes, you really do want to race.  I was enraged.  The frame was titanium, about 4 years old, and had been a replacement for the previous frame, which had also cracked. Quintana Roo has a lifetime warranty on titanium, but at this point “lifetime” was looking more like “half-life of 3 years”. After frenzied calling back and forth, (5 time zones worth), it transpired that the local dealer didn’t have a replacement frame, and QR no longer made my model.  I could switch to carbon, or get an upgrade to a new even-more-badass-Litespeed-frame for $450.  Looking back, I should have driven a harder bargain and made QR give it to me for free (isn’t that what “warranty” means?) – QR even tried to charge me for shipping but took pity on me. I was in a state and took the philosophical view that I was getting a $5,000+ frame + seat post for less than 10% of the price, and was essentially getting sponsored by QR without having to be a pro.  FedEx takes 2 days to get to Hawaii and I was biting my nails the whole time.

 

The new frame was intimidating – I was afraid it would try to bite me. Cannibalizing the components from the old frame, the bike was built the afternoon before our departure. I took it out for a ½ hour to make sure it fit and everything was there, and then took it apart again and packed it in the bike box.  First law of triathlon – don’t do anything new on race day. Hah.

 

Ted and I got to the airport on Friday evening a good two hours before departure to find out that I hadn’t been ticketed. Translation: “we took your money/voucher but we didn’t give you a seat on the plane…didn’t you get our email?” Thank you, United Airlines, for screwing up on an important itinerary and making only the lamest possible attempt to try to let us know.  How about a phone call? Picture two people on cell phones, both on hold with aforementioned airline, both marching wrathfully through the terminal to the United Airlines desk like Moses marching down from Mount Sinai to discover the Israelites worshipping a bull. The problem was resolved, but our planned leisurely trip to the Kona Brewing Company after the security line wasn’t that leisurely. That being said, we didn’t get charged for our bikes or our overweight bag.  We chugged our beers and jumped on the plane.

 

At this point I am going to fast-forward.  The NZ Airlines flight was awesome – great food, lots of wine, fabulous service, great movies, didn’t sleep much.  When you can, go with the national carrier. We arrived in Auckland on Sunday morning, revived ourselves at the hotel (four thumbs up for the Westin, checked us in at 8:00 a.m.), got a nice brunch, did some tourist things.  The next day we went for a really beautiful run along the harbor, drank a lot of cappuccino, and then drove to Taupo where the race is located. We checked into our condo, had a great dinner (NZ has wonderful food, so long as you aren’t Ted), and proceeded to get acquainted with the area. In between swims, runs, bikes, registration, and so forth, we did some sight-seeing.  I put in another 90 minutes or so on my new bike, and managed to develop a case of pre-race Achilles tendonitis (WTF?) which had me spend the better half of the morning before race day scurrying around pharmacies looking for the appropriate pain-killers.  It started to rain and get nippy. I iced my ankle. We packed our transition bags, dropped our bikes off at T1, vacillated about the appropriate clothing for cool, wet weather, got nervous as hell, and generally did what athletes do before the BIG RACE.

 

Before I launch into the description of the actual race, I just want to say how incredibly nice and hospitable New Zealanders are. I also want to say how nice and hospitable Taupo is, and finally now nice and hospitable the exchange rate was – take any US price, divide it in half. That was how far the dollar was going at the time. Our caffeine habits became downright cheap. I violated the first rule of triathlon again by buying a Pearl Izumi racing suit for the equivalent of $35 for use on race day.

 

Race day

I stuffed my face at breakfast but not as much as I wanted to.  I am a firm believer in eating as much real food as possible before the monotony of gel after gel starts to set in.  It was cold and dark and slightly drippy out.  We piled into the car, drove a designated parking area, and got to the transition area in good time.  After last-minute checks of tire pressure and nutrition, we reached the “nervously standing around” stage and headed over to the swim start so we could stand around nervously with hundreds of our fellow travelers all decked out in our rubber suits like some kind of alternative lifestyle convention.

 

Swim

The swim start/finish is about 500 yards from T2 and just that section of the race was worth some reconnaissance, as there’s a bit of a hill at the end of that transition run and it has the potential to be slippery.  Lake Taupo is big and can get rough, but today it was calm – no repeats of 2 years ago when the swim got cancelled and the bike and run got cut in half.  It’s the perfect temperature for wetsuits i.e. cold enough so you don’t overheat, but warm enough that you don’t need them just for swimming. I climbed into my rather tattered 6-year-old wetsuit and warmed up.  Other competitors were starting to pile into the water and Mike Riley, the Voice of Ironman, was getting everyone revved up as the pros took off on their 15 minute head start.

 

The swim is a big rectangle, with the first leg running parallel to the shore and actually providing some decent spectating.  In spite of the cool and damp conditions, thousands of spectators had gathered gamely along the shore with their umbrellas – what else was there to do? – and it was impressive to see the throng lined up on bluff overlooking the swim.  The gun went off.

 

Definitely the most violent swim I have ever done.  My strategy was to find a big, moderately fast guy, and draft the entire way.  What seemed to happen was I would find aforementioned guy, start to overtake, and get hit in the head by his elbow.  Someone actually had the nerve to grab my ankle with both hands and pull me back and try to swim over me. So much for New Zealanders being super nice.  It was a battle all the way to the turnaround where I paused to pop a gel and take a look around, but instead of the crowd thinning, it seemed to get worse on the way back.  I couldn’t see any women (a good sign) and I felt that I was pacing myself well (also a good sign) but I felt I was expending a lot of mental energy working my way around a pile of thrashing arms and legs (not a good sign) and not going fast at all.  Even during the last 1/3 of the swim, I was getting smashed and jostled.  Finally I reached the last turn buoy and the swimmers miraculously thinned out – there’s a current so you have to angle sharply to the shore or you’ll get carried away.  Most people didn’t do that hard enough.  I staggered out of the water and began the slog to T1.  I didn’t see the time but it was 1:00:53.  If you had told me at the time, I wouldn’t have believed you.  It took forever for me.

 

T1

The nice thing about that incredibly long run to T1 was that you did get a chance to stretch your legs, and the crowd was packed against the ropes the entire way reminding you how great you were.  Swim over, now for a very long bike ride.  I peeled clumsily out of my wetsuit, put on a long-sleeved jersey, socks, shoes, etc. got the bike and got out of transition. On to New Zealand’s uniformly rough roads.

 

Bike

I don’t really have much of a memory of the bike. The bike course is 2 unremarkable loops into the countryside and back. There’s a hill out of town, and a couple of rollers once you get into the hinterlands, and some false flats. The roads are rough not because they are poorly maintained (they were in a couple of spots) but more because the surface the NZ highway department chose for the entire country has lots of little rocks in it. I expected it because Carrie Hermstad had told me over and over “those roads are rough!” But it was still brutally slow. I had rented race wheels but had put my most heavy-duty tires on so I wouldn’t have to deal with flats, which I don’t think slowed me down any. The next six hours would be spent trying to figure out how to make my bike go. I liked it very much, but it was like typing at an unfamiliar keyboard.  People kept passing me, and I started to get demoralized.  It never warmed up.  The up-side of that was I never lost interest in eating (a problem for me in hot weather), and there was no question of heat exhaustion. 

 

The one thing that sticks out was the extremely gratifying enforcement of the drafting rules.  The NZ refs were sneaking around on ultra-quiet motorcycles and detaining entire draft packs on the spot for penalties.  It was beautiful.  But it didn’t make me any faster.  I resigned myself to relying on a better second half and plugged on morosely.

 

The second half felt the same as the first half, but I managed to reel in a couple of women in my age group who had overestimated their capacity for exhaustion, and I figured I could catch a few more on the run.  I was thinking vaguely about the qualification slots (4 in my AG) but I didn’t think I had had that great a swim, so in my rather confused calculus a qualifying slot was not in the offing and now it was all about having a good run, nursing the Achilles tendon, living in the moment, and not being a zombie at the finish line. Stick to the plan. Then my right aerobar, in response to the constant vibration of the road, started to come off.  Instead of hammering the last hour, I was nervously clutching my ever-loosening flightdeck, hoping that nothing catastrophic would happen.

 

T2

The weather had dried out a little as I biked into town, and I was happy that it was over and whispering apologies to my bike for the not-so-hot introduction to racing.  T2 was a cinch – shoes, gels, visor, bathroom, out.  For the race they built a bridge over the road for the runners to get from T2 to the run course, which was rather neat.  From up there, got a momentary panoramic view of town, the course, and the crowds.  The first leg of the run you go into town around the finish area and then out for 12 miles.  Then you do a second loop and then out again. The first leg of both loops is along the lake, and there are plenty of spectators.  As you get away from town, the crowds thin a bit, but there were always people there, and the race course was diverted through a couple of neighborhoods for no other apparent reason than to have a captive audience to cheer.  There are some long hills, but not awful ones.

 

Run

I used to hate the run. Over the years, and particularly since I got into the habit of making a brick out of ever ride I do, the runs have actually became enjoyable.  The big breakthrough was Ironman Canada in 2005 and since then the run has not been a problem.  For sure, the first two miles are a little weird feeling. But on that day the air temperature was perfect for running, I was really liking the new racing suit – no chafing, enough support, not too much padding - and the sun was showing feebly through the clouds.  My Achilles tendon felt fine, I wasn’t over-hydrating, the spectators could all pronounce my name (a lot of Welsh emigrated to New Zealand, hence all the sheep) and they never seemed to get tired of saying nice things.  Even when it started to rain again (right after I deemed it prudent to dump a cup of ice down my front – duh!) everyone was out with their umbrellas and their beers and their folding chairs, smiling and clapping and saying how inspiring we were.  It was great.  The loop back into town was a little bit of a drag because I had to listen to Mike Riley announce the winner and other finishers, but it was OK, I had my stride and I could run all day if I had to.  I was out of town again, running through the water stops, and catching lots of people.  It felt so good! I was actually happy – a marked improvement on how I had felt a couple of hours ago.  The drizzle stopped, and I think the sun came out.  I got to the 20 mile mark, gave Ted a sticky hug (on his first loop) and turned around for the last six miles into the wind.

 

Those last miles were wonderful.  My quads were beginning to hurt but it was OK, I had only six miles to go and I could run them as fast as I was able.  I stuck to the track by the side of the path where I could to keep the impact down.  The last two miles I felt like I was really flying, but I also felt that the minute I crossed the finish line the tank would be empty and I would be done – the perfect way to finish. I didn’t care what my time was, or what place I was finishing, I was finishing another Ironman, and it was beautiful.  For the last ½ mile to the line I started to choke up and cry, but by the chute I was grinning from ear to ear and high-fiving people the whole way (while surreptitiously looking over my shoulder to a) make sure nobody passed me and b) nobody messed up my finishers picture). Yes, I am really competitive at some of the most inappropriate times, but I felt as if I was honestly experiencing THE MOMENT that day, instead of sleep-walking it. I crossed the line, waved at what I hoped was the webcam (nobody was watching), and got my finishers towel and my medal (both nice) and immediately was in all kinds of post-adrenaline discomfort.  Ow ow ow. I wondered where Ted was and how I could find him.  But first things first – massage tent.

 

After that I got away from the finish and had some really good take-out middle eastern food.  I then trekked up and down the last couple of miles of the run course (in post-race pain, but not so bad) looking for Ted.  I was so happy to be at a race with him. To quote my friend Rosie “there is nothing as lonely as a finish line without friends.”  I eventually found him and managed to snap a picture as he crossed the line.

 

The aftermath

I got 5^th in my age group.  That surprised me, that I did so well after that milquetoast ride, but there were only 4 slots for Kona. Every other age group but mine and one other women’s age group rolled down. That didn’t surprise me – W35-39 are a bunch of aggressive go-getters who aren’t going to qualify for Ironman Worlds and walk away from the opportunity. It was momentarily frustrating to see M20-24 and M25-29 roll down to something like #14, and I wish there was a way to make it more equitable (3 rolldowns and you’re out?) but honestly I can live with that, and I have the rest of the year to myself, and I can always sign up for another Ironman.

 

I could go on and on about how great New Zealand is. We left our bikes and racing gear with Ken Glah of Endurance Sports Travel to hold for us in Auckland until our flight out. What a relief!  We had a wonderful road trip down to the South Island, and saw as much as we could. Yes, it’s scenic, yes, it’s Middle Earth, yes, their wine country is awesome – and there was more to see than we could have ever had time for.  Just go there and have a look for yourself.  I have photos up on my Facebook page.

 

No race report is complete without thank you’s.  First and foremost: thank you Ted, for signing up with me. I am a happier racer when I know you are out there with me. Second: Thank you bike, for being there on race day, even if I wasn’t quite there for you. Third: Thank you New Zealand, for being a great country and having an Ironman race that’s so totally cool.

 

I would recommend this race to anyone who can train through the winter.  It renewed my enthusiasm for Ironman after my Kona experience. I would do this race again if I was going with a big, noisy group – I miss big noisy groups.  If there are any big noisy groups forming out there to do IMNZ, please let me know.

 

I’ll need to start saving vacation time.

Ach so much to update.

41 days to Ironman New Zealand.  I will be ready.

I met someone a while back who does freelance computer work and one of the things she does is help people manage their on-line personae.  I thought this sounded profoundly obscure and geeky, but honestly,  with a presence in Second Life, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, plus email accounts with work, University of Hawaii, Gmail, two with Yahoo, and a couple of rather somnolent accounts with a couple of other services, it's becoming a big mess.  Second Life is a particular problem because lately my laptop has been super-slow and I haven't been able to get there without profound irritation, and I can't do Science Friday or practice building things any more.

Anyway: updates.

Today I took the LEED AP exam.  LEED stands for "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design" and AP stands for "Accredited Professional".  LEED is a system of points that you can get for both new and existing buildings that rates their energy efficiency, water efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and other stuff.  Look it up.  the AP bit meens that I am assumed to be capable of helping design and construction teams decide what points they'll go for e.g. "do we want a green roof - what are the benefits, and how much will it cost?" and then help with all the documentation to get the point. A lot of it is painfully bureacratic.  

Let's talk about the exam:  I went in there with LEED coming out of my ears, and still felt grossly underprepared.  The test is done on a computer, and the questions are fiendishly tricky.  I froze like a bunny in the headlights on the first question.  I plodded through, feeling more and more depressed and unsure of myself, and by the end was already thinking about when to schedule the next exam, and whether it was worth the cost (work will reimburse me the $400 registration fee only if I PASS).

But I passed.  The thing that makes me really uncomfortable is that I didn't answer many questions with any degree of certainty.  But I'll take a pass.  I can now throw away the reams and reams of notes and scrap paper and printout that fill my messenger bag and spill all over the kitchen table, my desk and work, and other places.

Today I finished yet another 2 hour and 20 mins of running.   Last week I ran home from work, over the Pali lookout, uphill for 1:20 minutes and then a very painful (ow ow my quads ow ow ow) downhill on the Old Pali Road through the jungle.  I'm not doing that again for a while - I could just imagine waking up the next day with achilles tendonitis and all kinds of knee problems and the knowledge that Ironman New Zealand would be two eight hour flights and a whole lot of planning and training down the tubes.  Today it was just a little up-and-down and some stuff on the flats, but not one of the more inspiring runs ever.  My calves are tight.  I should have brough more nutrition.  I need a massage.  But a Kona Big Wave Golden Ale will have to do for now.  I have a 4:30 ride tomorrow.  After a swim to the Mokes.

Our friend Joe Barnes has left to fly airplanes on and off aircraft carriers and his wife Rosie is leaving soon, too.  Who am I going to have to bike with, talk about food, and lend our Battlestar Galactica DVDs?  It sucks loosing good friends when it feels like we just met them, but we are keeping our hopes up that this is only a temporary situation. Joe and Rosie, we'll do our best to still be here when you get back P.S. in the meantime can we have your flat-screen TV?  Just kidding.

Rob Falk (our bestest man) came out from Washington DC to stay with us for a week over the inauguration.  It is always nice to see him, and it is great to have friends who come out to hang out with us, even when we go to work every day and abandon them at the beach.  Rob was so patient about it!  All that sun!  And the beautiful ocean.  He tolerated it all with great forbearance.  We watched the inauguration on TV, Yo Yo Ma looking all serene and amused (of course you would be amused if you were lip-synching classical music, OMG it's come to this, I'm playing my stunt 'cello on the steps - of course that wasn't the good one, never expose your instrument to freezing conditions - of the Capitol in minus something celcius wearing nothing but a suit because otherwise I'd look like a homeless person)  Aretha Franklin was AWFUL!  yuck!  horrible singing.  There's got to have been a better choice.  Why did they have to turn the inauguration into the Olympic opening ceremonies.  Ew.

I watched Barak Obama take the oath (kind of) and all I can think of is The Onion headline the day after the election "Black Man Given America's Worst Job".  And boy, has he been handed a can of worms.  How much of this mess can the government fix?  Really?  How much is just going to be a long slog, to quote Rumsfeld ( I think).  Most of it, I think.  I'm glad I have job, and I took as much heart from the speech as I could.  Time to stop simply hoping.  Time to start doing.  And hopefully what gets done will be the right thing, or at least not the wrong one.

After writing that last piece on my commuter/mountain bike, I mulled things over and realized that it would be criminal to abandon my Gary Fisher and get a cyclocross bike.  So I bought some new brakes and will continue to love commuting on the old thing, bumpy Honolulu roads and all.  The guys at the Kailua Bike Shop said there was really nothing wrong with the bike and urged me to consider once more the moral and spiritual aspects of this decision to abandon a commuter bike that had been nothing but good for me, for all these years.  I felt very guilty.

My poor commuter bike.

It's a Gary Fisher mountain bike.I bought its first incarnation in 2000.  Shortly thereafter, it was stolen out of the stairwell at work, when I was at the Northeast Midwest Institute.  There were workmen doing some remodeling and painting.  Usually the stairwell was locked.  Not that day.

NEMW was incredibly generous - they actually gave me a check to replace the bike.  So I bought the one I have now, exactly the same model.  It cost me $700 in 2000 - the equivalent of $850 today.

I estimate that I have done approximately 2500 miles a year on this bike.  That's a little under seven miles every day.  My commute to Congress was six miles round-trip, but there was also a lot of trips to Whole Foods, the hardware store, up to Jag's for Food of Our Ancestors, down to the boathouse when I was rowing, and occasionally down to Alexandria.  When I moved here, I was putting in about 9 miles every day I biked to work, plus all the errand-running, etc. although I wasn't necessarily doing that every day.  I estimate total mileage at around 18,500.  This is the equivalent of biking from San Francisco to Boston 6.8 times.  I saved about $1,000 a year in public transportation costs, and another $8,000 a year in car ownership costs.

About three years ago I took of the mountainbike tires and put on slicks, so I could go faster and have better control on the corners.  I bought some brand-new mountain tires, which I have never used.

For a few delerious sessions, this bike got to be a mountain bike.  When Ted and I first started dating, we went mountain biking.  I was pretty frightened - it's like skiing through trees, only there's no snow.  But I could tell the bike was happy - like a husky who, brought up in Florida, is suddenly translocated to the Yukon Territory in the middle of winter.  It was in its element, and in the few brief moments where I really relaxed and stopped thinking about the horrible injuries I would sustain if I fell off, I could feel the bike humming along, communing with nature far better than I was at the time, just happy to be a mountain bike at last.

The rest of the time it's been commute, commute, commute.  On and off the bus.  Up and down Connecticut Avenue.  Through Georgetown.  Up the hill to the University of Hawaii.  Up and down Vineyard.  I want to apologize to my mountain bike for not giving it the mountain biking experience it so richly deserved.  Those few times I tuned out on the trails in 2005 and let you do your thing, I know were never enough for you.  Named for a world champion, game-changing mountain biker, you never got your game changed by me.  I should have done an Xterra race on you, just so you could say that you had done one (I could have, too). 

But now, I'm not so sure your frame is up to it.  It's been more than eight years.  You now live outside, and I see weird corrosion on your front fork that really bothers me.  All your components are the original, and honestly it's a miracle they haven't completely seized up, disintegrated, or corroded away.  Testimony to the fantastic metals/materials they make these things out of.  But you, I really worry that some day your frame will crumple on me.  You creak sometimes, although I can't find any cracks.  If I fix one thing, I have to fix everything.  That means new brakes, new shifters, new bottom bracket, new chain, new chainrings, new cassette - maybe even a new seat.

So what to do?  I feel disloyal, but the other day I saw a beautiful entry-level cyclocross bike in Bicycle Magazine.  It was about $850, the same price as my Gary Fisher would have been if I bought it today.  I could ride this the long way to work (30 miles).  I wouldn't be able to race Xterra, but I'm not going to race Xterra on the old one, either.

I have some credit card debt to pay off, but by Christmas (knock on wood) it will be gone.  Should I get a new commuter bike for Christmas, and if so, what should it be?  Or should I stick with this one and give it a total component overhaul, including a new front fork?

If you post an answer, please let me know who you are - Livejournal doesn't ID comments.
 

The week blew by and it's already Saturday afternoon.  This billable hours thing is rough.  I have to appreciate the fact that yes, at this job you do have to account for every hour you spend at work, and this is a major disincentive to messing around the internet, sending useless email and browsing for Christmas presents.  However, it appeals to the worst elements of my protestant work ethic and I have been putting in 9 hours days.  Add this to my 50 minute each way commute, and it's amazing that civic participation gets accomplished.

So here' s a thought.  A lot of people work pretty hard hours and then they get in their cars and drive to the suburbs.  That takes 45 mins to an hour each way.  So that's, say 8.5 hours at work and another 1.5 or so getting to an from work.  So 10 hours a day doing work stuff. And so many of these people have children, and even if they don't, they are too tired from the commute, seething behind the wheel of their car as they crawl along at 10 mph, than the idea of going from home on a regular to a 2 hour neighborhood board meeting to talk about petty crime in the neighborhood is pretty much out.  So much of the civic stuff happens after hours, which is inconvenient, but when else are people going to go?

So this is the question:  are long commutes bad for democracy?

Speaking of Democracy, with a capital D, I could go on and on about the election and how great it was and how interesting it was and all that but I'm not going to. 

Just one thing: let's focus for a brief moment on that subject that suddenly people AREN'T focusing on, even though there was plenty of focus BEFORE the election.  This subject is this: OMG we have a black president.  Oh yes, people were falling over themselves to answer (yes, no, don't know) whether or not it was a factor in their voting choices, whether America was "ready for a black president".  And it was nauseating when people said they weren't voting for Obama because they "didn't think America was ready for a black president."  Yuck.  That's blatant racism clad in the raiment of thoughtfulness.  It's enough to make me want to change my middle name to Hussein. But here's the thing: Now all the post-election discussion seems to be on a) the economy and b) whether or not the Republican melt-down was Sarah Palin's fault.  OK, the first item is very important, but the second was boring before McCain began his concession speech. 

Now that we have a black president, can we have a discussion about the race thing?  I mean, isn't this really interesting?  He won. We have a black President.  It's a good thing. What does it say about the United States?  What doesn't it say about the United States?  Are we "ready"?  Because I guess ready or not, here he comes. I don't think it's going to be some massive revolutionary presidency, and we're going to see some kind of "black" management style. But something is going to be different. Or is it?  A geneticist will tell you that race is a concept generated by people's reactions to skin tone, not something inherent.  Race, from that perspective, is an illusion.  Is the U.S. going through a Judy Garland moment when we realize that all we had to sluff off a big chunk of our nasty legacy of slavery and racism was to click our heels together and elect a black president?  I actually think this is at least slightly true.  We can't say "we never had a black president", just as the NFL can't say "we've never had a black quarterback."  Once someone is there, it stops being a big deal, like the 4 minute mile, the cellular phone, and the sound barrier aren't a big deal any more.

I have to think about this, but I'd be happier if the Economist would write a nice concise digest of the subject.

Not much time so it will have to be bullets

• Ted and I have started training for Ironman New Zealand in earnest. After tremendous vascillation and floundering, I have settled for a Mark Allen Online training program.  The first week has been a mess because I accidentally told them I could do 14 workouts a week, when I mis read and thought it said 14 hours.  oops. So the first week looked like a Ted Nash week when I opened it.  Well these things take ironing out.
• The new job is great.  I was emailing back and forth with my friend Jean, and explaining that I was doing environmental impact statements and enjoying it.  Note to people who don't know about the EIS process: it is notoriously boring, tedious, nit-picky, and all that, and double that if you are actually writing it.  In all honesty, I feel like I am working for the Science Committee.  P.S. - just because it's science doesn't mean it's boring, tediious, and nit-picky.  It just means you are missing something important.
• Does anyone know of some cool places to stay or things to do in New Zealand?  We are going to Taupo, which is in the middle of the North island, and want to end up in the wine country of Malborough, which is on the north end of the south island.  My friend Ed Siebert lives in Wellington, so we'll definitely be going there.  But could use some advice on the in-between.
• We are holding a 1/2 Ironman starting in our back yard on December 13th.  Since we are doing IM NZ, it would be good to get a race under our belts, but where are we going to find a race in the middle of winter?  Answer, organize your own.  We have even signed up some friends to do it with us, and my friend Julie Oplinger from DC is coming out especially for it.  That really demonstrates loyalty to the sport, to steal a quote from Saucony.
• I was talking to a friend of mine who works at the University of Hawaii, who informed me that the Chancellor there has just realized that you can save money by saving energy (which I don't understand - she comes from California, they figured that out years ago) and has rallied the usual suspects to form ....drumroll please....an energy task force to address UH's burgeoning budget crisis by cutting energy costs.  Is it just me, or isn't this what me and my colleagues have been trying to do for the past two years?  I hate to toot my own horn here, but over a year ago I told anyone who would listen that the way the economy was going, state revenues were going to fall and if we wanted to invest in major energy upgrades now, we should invest immediatley before our budgets got cut.  Apparently they have just figured this out, but the only thing they can afford to do at this time is de-lamping, when what they should be doing is some serious heavy-duty HVAC changeouts. Oh, and they want to hire students to do the de-lamping because they don't have to pay them union wages.  A year ago, when students were offering to do this, the admin told them they didn't want students standing on ladders, doing dangerous things with lightbulbs, thanks very much we can save our own skins without a bunch of hippie kids telling us what to do.   I would be more bitter on the students' behalf (we are talking savings of over $1.5 million campus-wide flushed down the toilet because of that attitude), but I don't have the energy.
• I actually have a costume for halloween.  I need to find a fish, though, preferably an alaskan King crab or a halibut.

Newsflash - new job.  I am going to start with www.beltcollins.com on the 15th.

Ted and I are going to Kona to watch the Ironman today (the race is tomorrow).  I LOVE the Big Island.  It's got such exciting geology/geography.

Pics!


Beets from the Kapiolani Community College farmers market

Ainslie's cat who loves to drink from the faucet


If this isn't contentment, I don't know what contentment is.


The bus was so crowded yesterday, I had to stand the whole way home.  But there
was a great rainbow over the Pali, so I took that as a good omen and snapped a
picture.



Here's all the lightbulbs I changed at the University of Hawaii.
I have saved them about $16,000 a year.  When the Music Department
finishes their retrofit, it will be almost $20,000.  My work here is done.

I am taking this sustainable construction course and we have been put into groups to do projects - basically an 8-10 page paper and a 5 min presentation on a subject of our choice.  When I took my energy policy course last year, the people in my class were incredibly smart, motivated, knew how to get information and verify its quality, and moreover were from the social sciences so they knew exactly how to work in a group - division of labor, how often meeting is practical, how to write, why ego should be left at the door, and other important stuff.

The group I have to work with is a bunch of engineers who have no training or experience in group dynamics and it's been a complete nightmare.  One of them wanted to do our project on PV, mostly because it would double as a project he is doing in a another class, I suspect, and got incredibly  petulant when we started talking about maybe doing electric cars or local materials (very important in Hawaii) and whether those would be a fun project to do.  So in the name of group harmony we are doing PV, although not with an abundance of enthusiasm.  Guess who didn't do any of his assigned part of the project this week.  Yeah, that guy.

In the meantime, I have actually had fun with this.  There was a reason I did History of Science as a major in college, and it wasn't just because Dudley Herschbach shouldn't have been allowed to teach Chem 10. History of Science is like geneology, only you are looking at the family tree of sceintific discovery, with ideas transmitted from generation to the generation, instead of DNA.  It's also amazing today to look back at times when there was no internet or telephones and not much in the way of instantaneous communication, and realize that the most important scientific journals today were the also most important scientific journals a century ago or more, and that people in Germany and India and Great Britain and France and the U.S. and other places were all reading each other's stuff even back then.  How long did it take for an edition of Nature to get to the U.S.? How excited were you as a scientist at the turn of the century when you got it?  How often did these guys really get to meet with each other?  And what about all these Indian scientists anyway?  As it turns out, there were a lot of them and they did amazing things - and many of them were Chandras or Boses, not related to each other, but most of them connected to the University in Calcutta in some way.  What was going on there?  Was it a caste thing?  How did they pay for univeristy??  Who got that all started?

So I now have a history of PV which is way too long, but I've learned a lot, and since I'll never be able to use all of this in my presentation next month, here's everything I wrote.  Who knows?  Maybe this would make an interesting book?  I'll have to do some serious fact-checking and I'm still not sure if I have my description of the underlying phenomena completely straight.  I did most of this in high school physics which was a while ago:

 

Sunlight, striking the surface of a metal, delivers its energy to the electrons on the surface of the metal’s crystalline lattice, causing them to be “knocked out” of that lattice and emitted from the metal’s surface. The discovery and observation of this “photovoltaic” or “photoelectric” effect is what led to the development of quantum theory, and is the phenomenon that drives solar energy.  But its observation was first reported more than one hundred years before the development of the first solar cell, by a French scientist by the name of Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel, who was only 19 years old at the time.

 

Becquerel was very much in the family business. His father, Antoine Cesar Becquerel, was a distinguished physicist who studied, among other things, electricity and electrochemistry, and was awarded the Copley medal from the British Royal Society in 1837. Father and son collaborated for much of their professional lives, and Alexandre-Edmond would become the father of a third generation of Becquerel physicists, Alexandre-Henri Becquerel, who in 1903 shared the Nobel Prize with Pierre and Marie Curie for the discovery of radioactivity.

 

Alexandre-Edmond noticed that light, falling on one of two metal plates in a dilute acid, altered the electromotive force (EMF) produced by this cell. He reported his findings in 1839 in a short article entitled “Memoire sur les effets produits sous l’influence de les rayons solaires”[1] Becquerel could not fully explain the phenomenon he had just discovered and, being busy studying a lot of other things (phosphorescence, solar radiation, photochemistry), did not devote the bulk of his effort to carrying his experimentation any further or considering its causes and applications. But others took up his line of inquiry. In 1873 Willoughby Smith, a pioneer of telephony who was looking for a good insulator, noted that the resistance of bars of selenium varied according to the amount of sunlight falling on them, and published his observations in Nature later that year. His discovery was also noted in Scientific American.  In 1876, William Grylls Adams (a British scientist whose brother John discovered Neptune) discovered that illuminating a junction between selenium and platinum had a similar effect, although in this case the effect was the actual generation of an EMF, not the enhancement of an existing one.

 

Accounts vary on when the first solar cell was built. What is known is that in 1883, Charles Fritts, an American inventor, doped a layer of selenium with a thin layer of gold and was the first to describe his device in detail. Selenium was expensive and not a particularly good semiconductor, so the efficiency of the device was less than 1 percent.  Nevertheless, the simple solar cell was useful as a light sensor and gold-selenium sensors were used as measurement devices for decades, but their economies as far as solar power were concerned were insufficient for energy purposes. Because the physical processes underlying the photoelectric effect could not be explained or understood completely, it was impossible to make a directed effort to improve the efficiency of the cells. What was needed to change all this was development of the quantum theory of light.

 

For decades, light was understood to be a wave, and James Clark Maxwell’s theorems on light were the governing principle under which the behavior of visible light, and the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum which was being discovered at the time, were explained. Maxwell’s theorem dictated that light’s intensity should be the driver of electron emission – shine any bright light on metal for long enough, and the electrons should fly off. However, Becquerel’s initial observation that light caused the excitation of electrons, subsequently studied and elaborated upon by other scientists, showed that electrons’ excitation and emission depended on a minimum frequency of light, not a minimum intensity. A very dim light of the correct frequency could still throw off electrons. A brighter light of a different frequency couldn’t.

 

Albert Einstein resolved this problem by re-explaining light energy as being delivered by discrete particles, or quanta, rather than waves. These quanta, later called photons, hit the surface of a metal and, if they encountered an electron, that packet of energy was transferred to the electron, which was either ejected or not, depending on the frequency of the light. Einstein published his ideas on the photoelectric effect and its causes in 1905, but did not get the Nobel Prize for this work until 1921 because the idea was so controversial that it took several years and experimental proof (provided in 1916 by Robert Millikam who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1923) for the scientific community to accept the contradictory description of light as a simultaneous particle and wave.

 

At the same time that the theoretical community was battling over the exact nature of solar energy and its interaction with matter, communications scientists and materials scientists were making progress in two other fields that would be critical to the future development of solar panels. In communications, scientists were working to perfect the use of radio waves for long distance telegraphy and telephony (including Karl Ferdinand Braun in German, who won the Nobel Prize in 1909 with Guglielmo Marconi, and Jagada Chandra Bose in India, Westinghouse Corporation, and AT&T) but needed better semiconducting materials to work over long distances. In materials and manufacturing, a critical step was made in 1914, when Polish metallurgist Jan Czochralski developed a method for extracting large monocrystals from molten silicon – the most common process used today for semiconductor and solar panel manufacture, and still referred to as the “CZ method” in his honor.

 

The first modern solar cell was patented in 1946 by Russell Ohl of Bell Laboratories (US2402662, "Light sensitive device"), who in 1940 accidentally discovered silicon’s game-changing electronic properties when shining a light on a cracked silicon ingot. The adoption of relatively affordable, abundant, and efficient silicon as the platform material made it possible to harness the photoelectric effect to do work, not just sense light. The implications and potential uses of this discovery were immediately recognized by AT&T, Bell Laboratories’ parent company, who began deploying solar cells on telephone poles in rural areas to power equipment.[2]

 

The cost and efficiencies of photovoltaics meant that they were at first used only for the most specialized and unusual of applications where electricity was hard to come by, and paid for by companies or programs that could afford them. It was only natural that one of their first uses for power generation would be on satellites. Vanguard I was the forth satellite launched by the United States and the first to get some of its power from solar cells. Its battery-powered transmitter operated for sixteen days. Its solar-powered transmitter continued to function for eight years after its 1958 launch. Vanguard I is the oldest piece of space junk still in orbit. (It will be visible from Honolulu on November 9^th for about 7 minutes starting at 7:55 p.m. if you want to look at it)

 

I had a FOUR HOUR + job interview today.  Started at 9:00, ended at 1:15.  Felt like a scrambled egg on toast for the rest of the day.  It was pretty intense, a lot of sitting with team members at the table talking about what they do, while they scrutinized (I hope) me.  They seemed friendly. Or maybe they just tuned out and worried about their deadlines.  But I think it went OK.  Now I wait.

It seems like a nice place to work, www.beltcollins.com - it's the environmental consulting wing, they have showers so I'd be able to bike to work.  Sadly, my morning commute would not be significantly shorter, although at least it would not conclude with an annoying climb up University Ave.

But that's getting ahead of myself.  One does not anger the gods by being overconfident.  And besides, it may turn out there's something I don't like about the job, like the pay, which matters a lot at this point, or the actual tasks, which after consideration I may decide I don't really want to do.  I think initially it might be grunt work, but it will be my first private-sector job ever (not counting bike messengering, working at the Fishmongers in Woods Hole, and working at Le Bus in Philadelphia) so I might have some dues to pay first.

Honolulu Century ride this weekend!  It will be my first Century since Ironman last year.  The last few weeks have been stop-start as far as training is concerned, it definitely takes time to get the cobwebs off and the discipline of a regular schedule. But I feel so much better now that I am doing it.  I can even run more than an hour, which is a big confidence booster.  But I think the most important thing is that I'm now doing yoga once a week and all that strength I've been bullying into my back with physical therapy is finally finally becoming flexibility.

But today after the interview and the rest of the day at work, I was too tired to do anything but go home, grab a beer and a plate of hummous and go look at the ocean.  Which was great - no swim, no run, no bike, no yoga, no weights.  But tomorrow I'll be back on the bike to work.  LIfe is good, even if I don't get the job.  I have to remember that.