Swimmin' 'n' bikin' 'n' fightin' 'round the world

Well, swimming and biking anyways.

To keep it nice & short, I swam 40 minutes yesterday, including 20 minutes of snorkeling, 10 minutes of alternating breaststroke/freestyle with snorkel mask & tube and 10 minutes of old school swimming with no mask or tube, just ordinary goggles. Awesome.

Today I biked 9.24 miles in 39:51, an average of 13.8 mph. Max speed was 23.5. This was on the Fisher with the Continental Contact tires. So are the Contacts faster than the Bontragers? I'll go ahead and say probably yes. That's a faster average than my fastest previous Somerset ride. I concentrated on taking it easy, shifting to lower gears to maintain cadence and lower heart rate... but I didn't wear my heart rate monitor so I'm only 95% sure I was faster with less effort. So I want to try that and also I'd like to try the Town & Countrys. Both of which will probably have to wait until I get back from NC.

Looks like I may also have to wait until then to ride my Trek. I stopped by the bike shop yesterday to pick up the bent wheel only to find it's not ready yet. They hadn't called and since it was supposed to be ready either Friday (Aug 1) or Monday I was ready to be a little bent out of shape &mdash but they haven't been able to get the cassette off to get to the spokes. It's seized. They applied some serious penetrating lubricant (like a high grade 3 in 1 or whatever) and will hit it again after that does its magic. That bike did spend a lot of time in the sun before I had it, so maybe it's not surprising. So I'm actually embarrassed to have been on the edge of irritated with these guys. They do have an excellent reputation...

That's not as short as I'd envisioned. Anyway to sum up, that's 80 of my 275 minutes for this week.

New Month, New Resolve

July was good. August will be even better. It's easy to see myself becoming more active, becoming fitter, thinner and seemingly younger.

The only firm number I have is the 'new' bike odometer: 106.5. I don't think I mentioned it, but I lost my old Cateye Enduro 2 back in July in NC. Now I have a new Enduro 8, which I like probably even better than the old computer. My only regret is not having odometer data from before, but whatever.... I can say for certain only that the old odo was at least 2269 miles (my best guess would be 3500).

I'll have weight figures tomorrow after going to Bally.

Although I technically didn't work out this weekend, I got plenty of exercise. Friday night, we walked all over NYC for 60 minutes (at least, moderate); Saturday we scrubbed our deck for about 3 hours (moderate to strenuous, aerobic and strength) and Sunday we stained the deck, which took about 90 minutes (easy to moderate).

That makes over 500 minutes of exercise this week, kicking my goal of 275 squarely in the pants.

By the way, my bitching and moaning in the previous post? Kinda stupid. I checked the tire pressure in the Contacts: 10 pounds low. So I put some more air. I re-measured the rotational distance and discovered it was a cm short (which means the speedometer was slower than reality). I took a spin down to the end of the block and easily exceeded 15 mph, much faster than my previous 13.2 with the same bike (and knobby tires). I'll try the Contacts on a ride this week. They ride pretty hard so I'm glad I have Town & Countrys for non-mountain off trail (NMOT??). But pumped up to 60, they're fast on the road.