So I haven't blogged about anything like the triathlons that're supposed to be the focus of this blog, so it's time to talk about 'em a bit. First up,
MY 2009 RACES
March: Solvang Century
May: Wildflower Long Course
June: San Diego International
July: Vineman 70.3
September: Big Kahuna
Maybe something else, if it catches my attention. I've gotta sign up for Kahuna and Solvang pretty soon, just to get them out of the way. For those of you playing along at home, that's 3 half-iron distance tris, all in preparation for the big adventure of 2010. More on that another time.
As for training, I've been doing okay with it, considering that my approach to training is about as scattered as a crack addict in a house of mirrors. I've been doing workouts based on what's gonna hurt most since that's about the only way I can find lately to kill the tension and anxiety of the professional world. Fucking economy, right?
In order of occurrence:
In the pool, I'm up to 3000 yards in 60 minutes. 3250 in 64 minutes. I'm shooting to hit 3500 in 60 minutes. Got some work to do.
I've been biking a lot and doing well. I keep getting stronger and I hope to make a big improvement on my 3:03 bike split at last year's Longhorn 70.3. I'm hoping to go under 3 hours at Vineman.
As for running, I've been in physical therapy to have my foot worked on; part of the continuing quest to clear up last year's plantar fasciitis. It's been going well. Two weeks ago, I started running again for the first time since October. I started at 3 miles and I'm up to 4. I actually ran 4 straight miles pain free last Sunday in 38 minutes. Things look okay, but I'm taking it slow. My goal is to be able to run 10k, or half the run, at Wildflower, and to be back to full speed by Vineman. No risks, no foolish chances with the leg, that's my new motto.
Here's hoping 2009 lets me race as strong as I plan.
Of course, this is all contingent on whether this intense, white hot poker of pain I've developed in the ball of my foot goes away. It's never easy is it?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
For God's Sake, Don't Make Eye Contact!
I was on the road for work today, which is to say that I went to Phoenix for a meeting. As usually happens on days like this, I spent the bulk of the day in airports, Lindbergh Field and Sky Harbor International, to be exact.
Today, I had to fly to Phoenix, got to the client's office, have a meeting and do a walkthrough of their new office to plan an installation. Along the way, we fleshed out the project requirements and roughed in the equipment list. My kit for this little adventure: a notepad, pen and pencil, digital camera, ipod and book for the plane. That's it. No laptop. No portable printers, projectors or any of the other crap I see people carrying around in the security line. What I like about traveling this way is that I can get through security without using the plastic bins, my briefcase is nice and light and, when I get to my gate, I get to be one of the few people who isn't buried in a screen.
I confess, I do carry a Blackberry, and it's a handy little fucker, but most days I'd just as soon hammer a ten penny spike right through its vampiric little silicon heart.
The fact is, as I watch people freaking out that they have to remove their bluetooth headsets to go through the metal detectors, or even better, spend an entire flight with the thing deactivated but still in place; as I watch them sitting in crappy airport gate chairs for hours at a time hammering away on emails and chatting into their little headsets, I wonder what's wrong with me.
I hate being connected. In fact, the harder I am to find, the happier I tend to be. I can go a whole day without my phone. I can go several without checking email. I've set things up at work so that they can run without me checking in constantly. When I do check in, it's usually because I'm bored, and not because they need me to do anything back at the ranch. It's this way because I made it this way. I am replaceable. We should all be replaceable. We should all be able to unplug, to be able to sit down and read a book without a bluetooth headset on, to look around a room or out a window and not at a computer screen.
I get productivity, I do. I get that we all have a thousand little things at one time that require our attention. What I don't get is why we think all of it is so urgent.
Maybe I spent too much time in the wilderness as a kid. Maybe I'm just a bad employee. Maybe I'm missing something and it really is cool to be that connected. I just don't get it. Text me a comment. If I turn my phone back on any time soon, I promise I'll read it.
Today, I had to fly to Phoenix, got to the client's office, have a meeting and do a walkthrough of their new office to plan an installation. Along the way, we fleshed out the project requirements and roughed in the equipment list. My kit for this little adventure: a notepad, pen and pencil, digital camera, ipod and book for the plane. That's it. No laptop. No portable printers, projectors or any of the other crap I see people carrying around in the security line. What I like about traveling this way is that I can get through security without using the plastic bins, my briefcase is nice and light and, when I get to my gate, I get to be one of the few people who isn't buried in a screen.
I confess, I do carry a Blackberry, and it's a handy little fucker, but most days I'd just as soon hammer a ten penny spike right through its vampiric little silicon heart.
The fact is, as I watch people freaking out that they have to remove their bluetooth headsets to go through the metal detectors, or even better, spend an entire flight with the thing deactivated but still in place; as I watch them sitting in crappy airport gate chairs for hours at a time hammering away on emails and chatting into their little headsets, I wonder what's wrong with me.
I hate being connected. In fact, the harder I am to find, the happier I tend to be. I can go a whole day without my phone. I can go several without checking email. I've set things up at work so that they can run without me checking in constantly. When I do check in, it's usually because I'm bored, and not because they need me to do anything back at the ranch. It's this way because I made it this way. I am replaceable. We should all be replaceable. We should all be able to unplug, to be able to sit down and read a book without a bluetooth headset on, to look around a room or out a window and not at a computer screen.
I get productivity, I do. I get that we all have a thousand little things at one time that require our attention. What I don't get is why we think all of it is so urgent.
Maybe I spent too much time in the wilderness as a kid. Maybe I'm just a bad employee. Maybe I'm missing something and it really is cool to be that connected. I just don't get it. Text me a comment. If I turn my phone back on any time soon, I promise I'll read it.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Another Lesson Learned
So last Friday morning the physical therapist watched me jog around his parking lot, and he figured out that I stomp my right leg down and push it off as hard as I can while my left leg runs. Even after he clears me, I have to relearn how to run or I'll end up back on the table. That was 9AM.
At 10AM I find out that a device I installed a month ago has failed in the field, at about the worst possible time for relations with that client. Then I find out that our mail server went down Thursday night and no one noticed. I'm standing there, trying to figure out which fire to put out first, and still bummed about the PT results, when one of the guys walks in with another problem, and that's when this happened:
Yup, I threw a straight right into the anodized aluminum side of our server rack. Let me tell you something that I already knew. Metal is stronger than flesh and bone. I got off light with the skinned knuckles. I've cracked bones doing that in the past. I know just how stupid it is, believe me.
Which brings me to Dieu's annual birthday trip to Big Bear, which began Friday night. I considered bailing, since I was in no mental shape to be social. As it turns out, it's a good thing I didn't. Without going into detail about the weekend (if you're a facebook friend you can piece it together), I spent a day and a half teaching and coaching, which I actually like to do, though I forget how much harder it is than riding like myself. Seriously, if I'm teaching you or just hanging out on the green runs while you practice, it's because I want to. I know full well that I can take off, so don't apologize for holding me back.
Come Sunday I've got a choice: watch the Chargers game in the bar, or go back up the mountain alone and hammer the slopes. I guess I should digress a little here and mention that snowboarding is what I do when I really need to reset my head. It's time I use to take all the damaged and broken and off kilter bits and pieces of my life and put them back in order. This happens without me actually doing anything. The harder I go, the clearer it gets. I ditched everyone in the bar.
I charge a couple of runs and decide to drop onto Olympic, which is the only double diamond run. I stick my first couple of turns and then I hit the ice. BAM! Flat on my face, supermanning down the hill. This has happened before. I kick around a bit and get my board below me, dig in and stop, then lay there laughing my ass off for a couple of minutes before I get up and take this picture:
I took it to prove that yes, I do fall too. So I get up, stick a couple of turns and fall flat on my ass again. In the lift line, the lifty says "Making friends with the snow?" which I find inordinately funny.
I'm riding the chairlift up, pretty much alone, listening to the classic rock they're playing on the PA and right up in front of me, a hawk shoots out of the trees, spraying snow all around it in this cool falling cloud. I watch it flap and gain altitude and then it starts gliding in circles, ever bigger circles, in and out of the patches of sunlight coming through the clouds. Finally, I lose it over the ridge and settle back into my seat. Somehow, there's no more clutter in my head. All the shit, the noise and aggravation and apprehension, everything that scares me and makes me nervous, all of it was gone. Right there, somehow, everything was okay.
I rode through the rest of the game, thanks to a text from my brother letting me know how badly it was going, and met up with everyone after to drive home. So now I'm back in the world, and my calm has already been tested several ways from Sunday, but I still can't shake the feeling that there is in fact a way through it all, that all I have to do is find it. I'm hoping I can hang tough enough to prove myself right.
At 10AM I find out that a device I installed a month ago has failed in the field, at about the worst possible time for relations with that client. Then I find out that our mail server went down Thursday night and no one noticed. I'm standing there, trying to figure out which fire to put out first, and still bummed about the PT results, when one of the guys walks in with another problem, and that's when this happened:
Yup, I threw a straight right into the anodized aluminum side of our server rack. Let me tell you something that I already knew. Metal is stronger than flesh and bone. I got off light with the skinned knuckles. I've cracked bones doing that in the past. I know just how stupid it is, believe me.
Which brings me to Dieu's annual birthday trip to Big Bear, which began Friday night. I considered bailing, since I was in no mental shape to be social. As it turns out, it's a good thing I didn't. Without going into detail about the weekend (if you're a facebook friend you can piece it together), I spent a day and a half teaching and coaching, which I actually like to do, though I forget how much harder it is than riding like myself. Seriously, if I'm teaching you or just hanging out on the green runs while you practice, it's because I want to. I know full well that I can take off, so don't apologize for holding me back.
Come Sunday I've got a choice: watch the Chargers game in the bar, or go back up the mountain alone and hammer the slopes. I guess I should digress a little here and mention that snowboarding is what I do when I really need to reset my head. It's time I use to take all the damaged and broken and off kilter bits and pieces of my life and put them back in order. This happens without me actually doing anything. The harder I go, the clearer it gets. I ditched everyone in the bar.
I charge a couple of runs and decide to drop onto Olympic, which is the only double diamond run. I stick my first couple of turns and then I hit the ice. BAM! Flat on my face, supermanning down the hill. This has happened before. I kick around a bit and get my board below me, dig in and stop, then lay there laughing my ass off for a couple of minutes before I get up and take this picture:
I took it to prove that yes, I do fall too. So I get up, stick a couple of turns and fall flat on my ass again. In the lift line, the lifty says "Making friends with the snow?" which I find inordinately funny.
I'm riding the chairlift up, pretty much alone, listening to the classic rock they're playing on the PA and right up in front of me, a hawk shoots out of the trees, spraying snow all around it in this cool falling cloud. I watch it flap and gain altitude and then it starts gliding in circles, ever bigger circles, in and out of the patches of sunlight coming through the clouds. Finally, I lose it over the ridge and settle back into my seat. Somehow, there's no more clutter in my head. All the shit, the noise and aggravation and apprehension, everything that scares me and makes me nervous, all of it was gone. Right there, somehow, everything was okay.
I rode through the rest of the game, thanks to a text from my brother letting me know how badly it was going, and met up with everyone after to drive home. So now I'm back in the world, and my calm has already been tested several ways from Sunday, but I still can't shake the feeling that there is in fact a way through it all, that all I have to do is find it. I'm hoping I can hang tough enough to prove myself right.
Friday, January 9, 2009
Stress Reliever, Had To Be Done
So I'm having one of the worst days on record in a very long time, despite the fact that in a few short hours I'll be on my way to the slopes. Anyway, this made me laugh a bit, so I thought I'd share:
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Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Blog Division
What a shitty name for a band, huh? Sounds like a bunch of nerds with woodwind instruments. Anyway, in an effort to separate my fictional ramblings from the tri and life stuff that are supposed to be on this blog, I've started another one.
If you're interested, the URL is ryansnotepad.blogspot.com. It's also in the blog roll on the right hand side of the page.
Now, I promise I'll try to keep this one on topic, or at least rooted in stuff that's actually happening.
'Til next time, kids.
If you're interested, the URL is ryansnotepad.blogspot.com. It's also in the blog roll on the right hand side of the page.
Now, I promise I'll try to keep this one on topic, or at least rooted in stuff that's actually happening.
'Til next time, kids.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Sometimes I Scare Myself
I was going through some old files on my hard drive tonight and...no, that isn't code for looking at porn. Anyway, i ran across something that made me laugh, so I decided to post it here. By way of context, a couple of years ago, I took a class in how to write horror fiction. One of the assignments was to write 10 opening lines/paragraphs for short stories. These were mine:
Ryan Mashburn
Horror Writing
Assignment 1: 10 Opening Lines
1. It’s not exactly like flipping a switch, you know, ending the world, but it is pretty easy.
2. “God damn it,” Claire mumbled, kicking the bloody carcass away from her, “Why do they always have to look so human?”
3. Have you ever seen the inside of your own body, without the help of an x-ray?
4. My eyes hurt, the way old scars do when it gets humid.
5. It’s raining outside, the kind of rain that makes you want to put on a straw cowboy hat, steal a Camaro and cross the border at sundown, looking for a beach where you can drink cheap tequila and pretend that nothing’s wrong.
6. The room smells like old blood and rotten leather.
7. You’re feeling it aren’t you? That little pang of excitement, the subtle aftertaste of fear. You think you can handle it. Take the chains off and find out.
8. I can honestly say I never believed him, never thought he was anything but a daffy old coot, until I saw him there, splayed out on the floor like a frontiersman’s bearskin rug.
9. When I was young, I would look up at the stars in wonder, dreaming about flying between them, about weightlessness and light speed; now I just wish the sun would never set.
10. I never would’ve pegged Bobby Smiles for a prophet, but the little fucker was right, he didn’t live through the day.
Ryan Mashburn
Horror Writing
Assignment 1: 10 Opening Lines
1. It’s not exactly like flipping a switch, you know, ending the world, but it is pretty easy.
2. “God damn it,” Claire mumbled, kicking the bloody carcass away from her, “Why do they always have to look so human?”
3. Have you ever seen the inside of your own body, without the help of an x-ray?
4. My eyes hurt, the way old scars do when it gets humid.
5. It’s raining outside, the kind of rain that makes you want to put on a straw cowboy hat, steal a Camaro and cross the border at sundown, looking for a beach where you can drink cheap tequila and pretend that nothing’s wrong.
6. The room smells like old blood and rotten leather.
7. You’re feeling it aren’t you? That little pang of excitement, the subtle aftertaste of fear. You think you can handle it. Take the chains off and find out.
8. I can honestly say I never believed him, never thought he was anything but a daffy old coot, until I saw him there, splayed out on the floor like a frontiersman’s bearskin rug.
9. When I was young, I would look up at the stars in wonder, dreaming about flying between them, about weightlessness and light speed; now I just wish the sun would never set.
10. I never would’ve pegged Bobby Smiles for a prophet, but the little fucker was right, he didn’t live through the day.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
So What Do Insomniacs Dream About?
In Fight Club, the movie, not the book, because I didn't feel like leafing through my copy to find a quote, the narrator says "With insomnia, nothing is real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." This isn't exactly true.
I've had insomnia since I was in high school. As you might imagine, at this point I'm reasonably adept at living with it which, if you look at the time stamp on this entry, is pretty much what I'm doing now. It's 3:39AM and I had planned to get up and go swim at 5:30. Pretty sure that's not happening. Instead, I've decided to write a blog entry rather than get too far into the second book of the evening. I'm rereading West of Jesus, by Steven Kotler. Even if you don't surf, take a look at it. It's a pretty cool story and raises lots of interesting questions.
The reason I'm writing this is that I'm hoping to expend a little mental energy, shut down my brain so that maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll be able to carve out a 90 minute or 2 hour power nap before I go to work. Sadly, the days are gone when I would have these attacks and just power through the day on caffeine until the sun went down and I added whiskey to the cokes to slow down and hopefully get some sleep. And I used to wonder why I would sometimes go three or four days with only an hour or two of sleep. The equation seems pretty simple now.
My record run is 10 days. That's not 10 days with no sleep, mind you. That would have had me in the padded room strapped to a table freebasing NyQuil and asking the nice orderlies to please get the spiders off me. No, it was 10 days with no more than 2 hours a night. I was a freshman in college, which was a bad time all around for me, but this two week span, ugh. I went to the student health center where they advised me to go to bed earlier and to try not to get stressed out before bed. And they wouldn't give me sleep aids because I might get hooked, but was I by chance depressed? If I was, it might be a cause of my insomnia, and they could probably prescribe something for the depression. If you've ever wondered what it would feel like to have Joseph Heller write your life story, that appointment was it for me.
I can't sleep, so I want pills. I can't get pills unless I'm depressed. I'm not depressed, so I can't have pills, but not being able to sleep is depressing...Sorry, that doesn't count. No pills. Come back when you're wearing all black, listening to Morrissey for hours on end and have developed a fascination with razor blades.
Enough of this rambling. I finally ended that run because my body just shut down. I remember I slept for something like 16 hours straight and then got to be kind of functional, but it took a long time to get back to an even keel.
So what do insomniacs dream about? We dream about sleep. Most of the dreams I can remember involve waking up, only to realize at some unconscious level that I just woke up in a dream, which is usually followed by waking up in real life, which can sometimes trigger more insomnia. Like a snake eating its tail, very slowly...because it's fucking exhausted.
I've had insomnia since I was in high school. As you might imagine, at this point I'm reasonably adept at living with it which, if you look at the time stamp on this entry, is pretty much what I'm doing now. It's 3:39AM and I had planned to get up and go swim at 5:30. Pretty sure that's not happening. Instead, I've decided to write a blog entry rather than get too far into the second book of the evening. I'm rereading West of Jesus, by Steven Kotler. Even if you don't surf, take a look at it. It's a pretty cool story and raises lots of interesting questions.
The reason I'm writing this is that I'm hoping to expend a little mental energy, shut down my brain so that maybe, if I'm really lucky, I'll be able to carve out a 90 minute or 2 hour power nap before I go to work. Sadly, the days are gone when I would have these attacks and just power through the day on caffeine until the sun went down and I added whiskey to the cokes to slow down and hopefully get some sleep. And I used to wonder why I would sometimes go three or four days with only an hour or two of sleep. The equation seems pretty simple now.
My record run is 10 days. That's not 10 days with no sleep, mind you. That would have had me in the padded room strapped to a table freebasing NyQuil and asking the nice orderlies to please get the spiders off me. No, it was 10 days with no more than 2 hours a night. I was a freshman in college, which was a bad time all around for me, but this two week span, ugh. I went to the student health center where they advised me to go to bed earlier and to try not to get stressed out before bed. And they wouldn't give me sleep aids because I might get hooked, but was I by chance depressed? If I was, it might be a cause of my insomnia, and they could probably prescribe something for the depression. If you've ever wondered what it would feel like to have Joseph Heller write your life story, that appointment was it for me.
I can't sleep, so I want pills. I can't get pills unless I'm depressed. I'm not depressed, so I can't have pills, but not being able to sleep is depressing...Sorry, that doesn't count. No pills. Come back when you're wearing all black, listening to Morrissey for hours on end and have developed a fascination with razor blades.
Enough of this rambling. I finally ended that run because my body just shut down. I remember I slept for something like 16 hours straight and then got to be kind of functional, but it took a long time to get back to an even keel.
So what do insomniacs dream about? We dream about sleep. Most of the dreams I can remember involve waking up, only to realize at some unconscious level that I just woke up in a dream, which is usually followed by waking up in real life, which can sometimes trigger more insomnia. Like a snake eating its tail, very slowly...because it's fucking exhausted.
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