I’m taking a bike ride today. I had grease on me before I’d even filled a water bottle. I took this as a sign of a good day in the saddle.
I rode the bike leg of a super sprint tri course today. The event is coming up in two weeks and a friend is going to ride it. I figured if I turned on the tracking software and forwarded the data to her that she could, after laughing at my outputs, perhaps get something useful from the experience.
I am so very out of shape. So out of shape that it only takes a 16-mile ride and a few small hills to prove it.
She’s an out-of-towner, the person I’m riding for today, but she knows the roads. It could be, I’d figured, that she only knows them in a car though, so I wrote notes like “Watch out for this drainage grate there” and “Even in good form this pretend little hill always kills me there and I don’t know why.”
She pronounced my email the best ever. I think she was just chuckling at my speeds, though.
I caught one cyclist on one stretch and passed another on a climb. I’m also perfectly, embarrassingly out of shape. This was still one of my first rides of the year because of schedules and life and weather.
But, hey, spring!
photo / weekend — Comments Off on Catching up 15 Mar 15
Ignore the cold days, I said. Never mind that you’re still wearing a jacket every other evening, I thought. Pay no attention to dark and gray skies, I wrote. Budding things are life’s optimists.
Can’t get more profound than that. Here, then, are some videos I shot and put on Twitter this evening:
Slipped into a pool lane today just as my sports editor was leaving the pool. He’s coming back from a little injury and is racing in his first track meet in some time this weekend. He’s naturally very excited. So today, of course, he was just knocking out 2,250 yards in the pool.
“Hey,” I said, knowing I was going to run later and that he’s run at the same place before and that he’s a lot faster than me, “I’m going to do a few laps after this if you want to wait around.”
He was planning to run too. Because he’s young and he can do that.
“Where are you going to eat later? I’ll stop by and eat slower than you, too.”
He laughed and disappeared. I swam my 2,000 yards, feeling nauseous for the second half, thinking so that’s what that feels like.
Then I went and ran three miles, feeling better and sprinting through about 15 percent of the thing, pretending I knew about intervals. After I got cleaned up I looked up the sports editor’s best times 5K. He’s very fast. Good thing he turned me down.
Here’s the view from the track. Three black cinder walls and then one side with three of these:
I saw a great pick on the basketball court below, and then I ran my last three laps as the lacrosse team warmed up running laps below. They must have not been trying too hard, I stayed with them. But, hey, that’s two bricks in a week, and that feels great.
Things to read … because reading is always great.
I think this is the first Twitter video I’ve embedded here. This is a great video:
Here’s a newsroom with some spunk. Turns out someone set fire to the building, but the publisher is unimpressed. Fiery journalism:
We know there is a portion of the population that doesn’t like what we do here. A nice quiet chamber of commerce cheerleader that runs press releases, without asking questions, is more to their liking. Those readers don’t want to know how badly the schools are doing, lack of city services, problems in police departments and county job bids that are illegal and padded.
That would be so easy to do. We could operate on half the reporters and they’d require no news writing education, training or experience.
But that’s not what we do. We do what journalists everywhere used to do, before bowing to advertisers, money, pressure and threats and the easy road. When a newspaper informs readers in such a manner, whether they wish to be informed or not, certain risks come with that, including bullet holes in windows, occasional paint-balling and the ever-so-popular rocks.
But to start a fire? Understanding the anger or the arsonist’s lack of ability to cope with a problem is just beyond all of us here at the Rio Grande SUN. Richard Beaudoin states it very well in his letter on page A7: write a letter, come talk to us or start your own cheerleader and print what you want.
Better yet, don’t do the stupid, immature, irresponsible things that lead to your actions or words being reported in your local newspaper. The community would be better for it.
I wonder what they write when the arsonist is caught.
Monasteries, lodges and schools have all been captured and Apa says you might even see some yaks along the way.
“My hope is that when people see this imagery online, they’ll have a deeper understanding of the region and the Sherpa people that live there,” says Apa.
Previously Google has mapped other renowned locations, including the Amazon forest, Greenland’s ice fjords and wedding chapels in Las Vegas.
Don’t you wish they hadn’t grouped Las Vegas with those other places?
