Training

So, Thursday evening's ride was more fun for Marxo than Sunday's super-hot ride was, but we did it to her again on Saturday morning - we made her ride through her whining, pain, and suffering.  I still say it's character building, though!  ;)

She really had done a great job on Thursday evening's ride.  She was powering up hills that I thought she would stop and walk up and she was generally in a good mood.  But Saturday was different.  We (once again) didn't leave from the house early enough and we were riding in nearly the peak heat of the day (11:30am-1:30pm).  AND, we decided to go to Double Lake Recreation Area (which the kids had voted for the previous night) and it's quite a bit more challenging than the trails at Stephen F. Austin State Park.  But, we figured that we really need to get in some training for both us and the kids before heading to Colorado in only a couple of weeks.

The trail we ride is about 9 miles of total length, but it usually takes us around 3 hours to ride the whole thing.  It's rather technical for a 6-year-old little girl with spindly little bird-legs, so we only average maybe 4 to 5 miles per hour and we stop fairly frequently.  In order to keep the kids happy, we usually stop for a short snack-break at about 2.5 miles and then again for a longer snack break at around the 6-mile mark.  On Saturday, we didn't stop for any snack breaks, so we finished a little faster - in a little over 2 hours -  but it was still unbearably hot.

And to make matters even worse, Marxo fell - right into a bush - and scraped up her arm.  We keep telling her it makes her look like a tough biker-chick, but she doesn't seem to buy it.  ;)

Tonight we're going to go riding up along the bayou again at Buffalo Bayou Park.  It's another two-a-day day for me.  I need about 100 more of these to get in shape before our Colorado trip, but I have less than two weeks to fit that in.  I may have to adjust my goals for this upcoming vacation...

Two-a-days

When I was in high school, volleyball season started a couple of weeks before school started.  I remember the years when the gym floor was refinished during the summer - the finish wasn't nicely worn and dusty and when we would dive for balls, our knee pads would stick to the floor instead of sliding on the floor and we would all end up with knee pad burn on our knees from the insides of our knee pads!

The other thing I remember about that time was that we would have two-a-day practices in the un-airconditioned gym.  I would be so tired at the end of the day from working out and sweating.  And I still remember the taste of the watered-down Gatorade that my mom used to send with me.  I don't think they make that flavor anymore, but I don't remember the name...

But, anyway, the reason I'm traveling down memory-lane here is because I think today is going to turn out to be a two-a-day workout for me.  Which is good, I could definitely use it!  I worked out at lunchtime today and tonight we're planning to load up the bikes and take the kids riding at the Buffalo Bayou Park again.  Gotta get some more miles in all our legs!

And Fellan finished with the dysgraphia testing yesterday, but it will be 3 weeks until we hear back from the woman with the test results.  Wow.

Getting fat

So, I seem to have lost all motivation for continuing to exercise.  What a difference it makes when you lose your favorite lunchtime exercise bicycle!  My project moved to the office closest to my house back in April - which is good, but the exercise facility isn't really as nice.  I didn't think it would be so bad, but after taking a look at my flabby middle, I have to admit that something must be done.  I just don't know how to find the motivation again.  I feel like I've lost a close friend...

But, our yearly summer bicycling vacation in Colorado is quickly approaching and I need to drop some weight to get to my climbing weight for the mountains!  I've sort of been in the Jan Ullrich training mode for the last few weeks.  We even had Bratwurst for lunch on Saturday.  :o  (Ullrich used to take all kinds of flack when he was racing because he would put on weight during the winters and he then had to lose it all before racing season each year.  Ahhh, I miss Ullrich!)

Anyway, the kids also need to get used to doing some trail riding, so on Sunday, we rode up to the Buffalo Bayou Park and rode around the park.  It's a great trail for Fellan.  Marxo's little chicken-legs have a hard time with the climbs, but we're hoping with a few more trips down there in the coming weeks, she'll build up a little strength.

I felt bad for Marxo afterwards on Sunday afternoon, though.  She had told me before the ride that she wanted to take the trailer bike because she was really tired.  I figured she was just being whiney, so I told her that daddy already got her bike and my bike ready and if we were to take the trailer bike, he would have to get two MORE bikes ready, so she should just ride her own bike.

Well, when we got home after stopping along the way for lunch, she laid down on the floor and went to sleep.  She had soldiered through the HOT ride (with only minimal crying!) and made it home and then just cratered.  Poor baby.  But it builds character, right?!  Why, I remember my parents forcing me to do things I didn't want to do all the time when I was growing up and I turned out just fine!  Umm... actually no, I don't think they did.  But that's the story I'll be telling the kids and I'm sticking to it!  :)

In other news, Fellan is doing his dysgraphia testing today.  I'm wondering how it's going...

It's summer! Crap, summer is almost half-way done...

Yikes.  This happened last summer, too.  Summer is almost half-way done and all our plans to develop our childen's minds have most definitely NOT come to fruition.  Luckily, I wasn't planning too much development this year, since we failed so miserably last year.  But still...

We got pretty busy towards the end of the school year because Fellan's teacher suddenly decided to tell us that "public school is not the place for him."

Now, on the one hand, I'm pretty sure she could get fired for telling us that, but on the other hand, why did she wait until the end of the school year when there was NO WAY we would be able to find a different school for him?

Anyway, after checking out alternative schools and having all kinds of testing done, we've come to the conclusion that... well, we've just been blessed with a unique individual.  Which we already knew.  ;)

My mood over this keeps going up and down, but overall I'm having a hard time staying super-worried about it.  Fellan does have trouble staying focused in class and I'm sure he's a pain to his teachers.  However, we're not willing to drug him into a stupor (which one doctor was ready and willing to give us a prescription for!) and I just think there's something wrong with a school system that wants kids to be like that.

We did find one school that is awesome and we think it's really the way all schools should be run.  They spend a lot of time "figuring out" each child - finding their strengths, finding their weaknesses, and then helping the kids to become their own advocate in his/her education.  However, since we were late in the application process, we didn't make the cut this year.  I can't say that I'm too upset about that either, though.  The cost of the school would have just about put us in the poor house!

We're having some additional testing done this summer and we're thinking about trying out some neurofeedback to see if that will help his concentration skills for the upcoming year.  The other thing that has become apparent is that he does have some processing speed and fine motor problems and the additional testing we're having done next week is for dysgraphia - It took him 3 hours to copy two pages-worth of LARGE text for his last assignment of the school year.  Talk about torture!  Poor kid.  Writing papers and journals for every class was definitely not something that was required of me when I was in 2nd grade.

Which brings up the main reason I have a hard time getting super-worked up about this.  Yes, I do want to make sure that there's nothing seriously wrong with him, but if we find out he's just immature and has slow processing speed, so what?  He's still very intelligent.  He remembers everything he's ever heard.  He does fine on his tests and from a macro-perspective, he makes huge progress from year to year.  He loves school and loves learning.  And most of all, he's a healthy, kind, boisterous, sensitive, happy little boy.  Why mess with a good thing?

Race Report: 100MON Houston Picnic Loop Edition

Yes, we did, indeed, survive the 100 Miles of Nowhere ride last Friday!  Although the "official" day of the ride was Saturday, June 4, we did ours on Friday because the Memorial Park Picnic Loop is mostly closed to car traffic that day.  (When I originally talked people into doing it that day, I thought it was closed for the entire morning and afternoon, but it was actually open from 11am to 3pm.  However, it was such an extremely hot day that it turned out not to matter so much.  There weren't many people - or animals for that matter - out in the heat of the day like us...)

Anyway.

The day started off late because HISD decided at the last minute to tack on another day to the school year so what would have been the first day of summer vacation for our kids turned out to be the last day of school and we had to take them to school that day before we could start riding.  (But I'm not bitter about that.)

We gathered in the parking lot, trying to ignore our impending doom.

Everyone looks so happy!

There were nine people who showed up to do the ride with us, including a father-son duo whom you can make out on the tandem bike there to the left of the picture.  (I could add a comment here about the fact that they live out in Katy and the Katy ISD system didn't make the stupid decision to extend the school year by one day, but would that make me sound bitter again?)

After unloading and setting up the food, water, and cold, wet towels (learned that one from my husband who grew up here in this heat!), we rolled out at about 8:40am.

We chose to do the ride at the Memorial Park Picnic Loop because it's a small loop that is twisty enough to not be boring, but still conforms to the rule of " riding an infuriatingly small course for 100 miles".  The course:

Memorial Park Picnic Loop (1.18 mi)

At a lap-length of 1.18 miles, we would have to go around the loop 85 times to get to 100 miles.  The course looks deceptively easy - it's nearly pancake flat - but there's one section of the loop that we lovingly referred to as "The Wall".  It's a slight incline, just enough that you can notice it in your legs, but nearly impossible to capture in a picture.  Luckily, thanks to Fatty's guest post a couple of weeks ago, I was able to take a representative photo of it!

I captured the incline like a true professional

The first 10 miles were a breeze.  We all chatted and loosened up and then the one guy in the group who still avidly rides many times per week sort of took off (I'm pretty sure he gave us "The Look", too), not to be seen again until around the 40-mile mark when he had put an extra 12 miles on us.  The rest of us were content to line up and work together a bit, still not pushing too hard and still being able to light-heartedly joke with each other and pretend to be like that talking dog from the movie "Up" and say "SQUIRREL!" to each other every time we saw and almost ran over a squirrel.

At around mile 40, we broke into the doping products:

Preemptive Ibuprofen - a necessity once you hit 40 years old.

We managed to make it another 20 miles before stopping for lunch.  By this point, though, the people who were only going to do 50 miles were beginning to finish, so I had to start giving out awards.

Winners of the Simultaneous Relay Division (they each rode 50 miles)

Winners of the Father/Son tandem-then-switching-to-individual-bikes Division

The son in this father/son duo really, really wanted to ride 50 miles.  They started off on their tandem and rode about 15 miles and then switched to individual bikes.  I think in the end, they were a couple of miles short of the 35-mile mark on their individual bikes, but we're assuming that there must have been a couple of extra miles on the tandem that they missed in their counting.  Way to go to this awesome 8-year-old!!!

After lunch, I really started feeling it.  When it was 1:30 and the sun was directly overhead - providing only minimal shade to the route - and we had only gone about 65 miles, I was seriously doubting the intelligence of choosing to do this ride.  I actually started getting chills, which I couldn't decide were a result of dehydration or the pain that was shooting from my feet up into my legs.  I ended up assuming that it was dehydration and tried to force even more water into my already-water-logged stomach.  After soldiering through that trough, we managed to make it to 75 miles and another awards ceremony.

Winner of the Spontaneous 100K Division (a co-worker of mine who just decided to show up and ride!)

By this point, it was hot.  So, so hot!

The heat.

My God, the heat!

But, ignoring all remnants of sense we may have had left, we got back on our bikes and started turning the pedals once again.  We told ourselves that we would stop at 88 miles (when the avid-cyclist would be done, since he had 12 extra miles on us) and if we needed to, we could finish the rest of the 12 miles the next morning... in the relative cool of the day!

My Facebook updates throughout the day tell the story succinctly:

• Almost to 40 miles.  Starting to really feel it!  Got all day to finish, though.  We'll make it.  :)
• Up to 60 miles now! Lunchtime.
• 75 miles.  The heat, my God, the heat!  Gonna try to do a little more, but may have to finish this tomorrow in the interest of not passing out...
• 88 miles.  Past the trough.  I think I can, I think I can.
• Finally!  100.31 miles of nowhere!

100.31 Miles of Nowhere!

 When we made it to the 88-mile point and stopped to let Mr. Avid take his leave of us, he decided he just couldn't leave us to wallow in misery without him for the last 12 miles and he ended up riding them with us.  So!  The winner of the 112 Miles of Nowhere Division:

Oops.  Either I forgot to take the picture, or it didn't actually take, so this will just have to do.  Not quite quads the size of Fatty's, but still...

And the rest of us...

Winner of the 100 Miles having "flatted" twice during the ride (he missed a couple of laps, but we treated it like a Crit and didn't make him ride those last two)

Winner of the Most-billable 100 Miles (my husband is a drilling engineer and had to work during every break)

Winner of the Women's-age-40-who-talked-all-her-friends-into-doing-this-with-her Division (Me) (Also? Nice hair!)

We finished at 4:44pm and sat around, recovering while watching people as they showed up after work to put in their workout for the evening.  As we were sitting there, we started noticing that the squirrels had come out from hiding in their cool nests and were running around again.  Until that point, though, we hadn't noticed they were missing!  So, on that realization, we packed up and went home.  We decided that next year, we'll do it in April, instead.

One more before the end of the month...

I felt bad leaving the month of May with only two posts (even though that's twice as many as the month of April saw!), so I thought I'd better just write something on here - just because.

We've had a pretty busy month at our house, but not with anything specific.  We're still trying to clean and organize the house and this past weekend I finally cleaned out all the stuff from "my side" of the bedroom that had been piled there since we had our new closets installed!  It's finally almost looking like a bedroom again when you walk into the room...

We've also been trying to get ready for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere bike ride.  We're going to be riding it on Friday this week - only three days away! - at Memorial Park.  We'll be doing 85 laps around the 1.18-mile picnic loop starting immediately after we drop the kids off for their last day of school.

So, in preparation for this event, we've gone to Memorial Park for the last two Fridays in a row to ride as much as we could in about an hour and a half.  And "as much as we could" turned out to be only 25 miles.  And I was in severe pain.  My butt just isn't used to riding for long periods of time on my road bike saddle.  Yowch!

We're headed to Memorial Park for "date night" again tonight to get in some more riding... not that it's going to make much difference at this point other than to cement in my mind how painful the actual ride is going to be on Friday.

The good thing is that with this 100 Miles of Nowhere event, everyone gets to declare themselves the "winner" of their category.  Which reminds me, I need to come up with my category before the ride on Friday!  Hmmm...

8 years is a long time

So, it turns out that 8 years is a long time to not have ridden your bike for "speed".

The husband and I used to ride our bikes obsessively every weekend at least 40 miles each day (otherwise we didn't think it justified loading the bikes up on the car and driving out to the countryside) and ride three to four nights per week at the Memorial Park Picnic Loop.  And on those nights we would average 20 miles/hour.  People used to draft off of us as long as they could stay with us, but when we got tired of having "wheel-suckers", we would put the hammer down, ramp it up, and just leave them in our dust.  *sigh*  Those were the days...

Last night (date night!), in preparation for Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere, we loaded up the road bikes and headed off to Memorial Park to get a taste for how painful this ride is truly going to be.  And on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say I'm going to be at about a 7.  (Reserving 10 for something like passing a kidney stone or having a ruptured abdominal cyst or something like that - both of which I've heard were excruciating.  I'd say that natural childbirth was about an 8.  So, not quite as bad as that.  But close.)

Anyway...  We attempted to ride fast enough to make forward progress, but not fast enough that we didn't feel we would be able to sustain the effort for 100 miles.  I think we failed at the latter goal.  There's no way I'm going to be able to keep the pace that we were going and we were only going about 17.5 miles per hour.  And that was pushing it.  Oh, the pain that we are in for!!!

In other news, 8 days is also a long time.  I'm trying to see if I lose fat any faster by not drinking alcohol.  It's been about 8 days since I've had any alcohol.  I'm surprised my system hasn't gone into complete shock.  But the jury is still out regarding whether or not my middle is getting any thinner, so I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth it...  ;)

Ding, dong!

The husband was awake at "ding" and I was awake at "dong".  It was a couple of weeks ago on a Saturday morning at 2am and our doorbell was ringing.  What the?...

It would be strange for someone to be ringing our doorbell at 2:00 in the morning, but what made it a little frightening was that our front gate was locked, which meant that whoever was ringing our doorbell actually climbed over our fence to walk up the stairs to our 2nd floor front door to ring the doorbell!

We were completely baffled by what to do in this situation.  We didn't want to go out to the hallway where the person at the front door would be able to see us, but we can't see the front door from our bedroom, so we couldn't see who in the world this was.

We spent a couple of minutes looking around, pacing, and then eventually wondering if we really did hear the doorbell in the first place.  Then...  *Ding, dong!*  They pushed it again!

Finally, when we didn't answer the door, the person went back down the stairs - to where we could see this late-night visitor - stood at the bottom of the stairs for a minute, then climbed over our fence and started pacing around in front of the house.  He looked nice enough - not a homeless person or anything like that - probably a person who just left one of the bars down the street.

But we called the cops, anyway!  The police showed up about 20 minutes later, well after he had finally walked off down the street.  But, we kept vigil at the window for awhile longer, making sure he didn't come back.  And while we were looking out, we saw another police car drive by, shining their spotlight at our front gate.  That made us feel a little better.

It took a little while to get back to sleep, but we've managed to avoid any additional late-night disturbances so far.

And other than that, apparently nothing interesting and blog-worthy has been going on!  ...except that I turned 40 a couple of weeks ago.  But we'll just keep that a secret amongst ourselves, mmmm-kay?  ;)

Six pounds in one week?

Six pounds in one week?!  Nope, not even going to try that.  I've officially given up on my weight goal for my 40th birthday.  Really, I gave up on it about a month ago when I still had 8 pounds to lose in a month...

However!  I'm still considering my fitness and health goal a success.  My clothes are definitely fitting much better and I can feel the muscles in my legs and core.  I feel great.  And I look great, if I do say so myself!  :)

Plus, I went out riding on Saturday morning and after going around all the construction and actually getting to a trail that was rideable, I realized that I don't even notice the little inclines that left me huffing a puffing 6 months ago.  Success.

My next fitness goal is to ride Fatty's 100 Miles of Nowhere!

The back-story: Three years ago, Fatty was talking about a Christmas present he gave himself and was trying to make himself not feel bad about buying them for himself.  It was a set of rollers - basically, a treadmill for bicycles.  He was justifying the purchase by saying that he could probably ride 100 miles on the rollers.  And he dared everyone to bet him that he couldn't do it.  If he did, they would have to donate money to Livestrong, if he didn't, he would have to donate money to Livestrong. Of course, he completed the 100 miles on his rollers and an annual event was born.

The following year, he had people sign up to ride 100 Miles of Nowhere, donate money to Livestrong and then send in a "race" report.  Some of those reports are really funny!  Go to the sidebar and peruse Fatty's blog for 100 Miles of Nowhere.  (I would link to it, but then his comments do that funny ping-back thing and link back to this blog entry and...  well, I still like my relative anonymity.)

The idea of the event is to either ride rollers, your bicycle trainer, or an extremely small route for 100 miles.  And then document the experience.

The "official" date of the ride is Saturday, June 4, but our plan is to ride the Memorial Park Picnic Loop, which is a 1.18 mile loop.  The Picnic Loop is only closed to car traffic on weekdays, however, so we're going to do it on Friday, June 3 instead.  And we have several friends talked into doing it with us!  It's going to be a blast!  Or something like that...  :)

Dogsledding

While we were off in Colorado for Spring Break, we also decided to go dogsledding.  We tried it out last year and the kids loved it so much, we had to make it part of this vacation, too.

The way it works is that you go meet your guide and your team.  The guide introduces you to the dogs and tells you a little about them and how they got to be there.  For instance, one of our lead dogs, Lily, was a little less than a year old and had been trained to run the Iditarod for this year!  Unfortunately, her team's funding fell through, so she "retired" to this place to take tourists dogsledding.  Sort of sad that her "talent" is kind of wasted here, but she's an extremely friendly puppy and she LOVES to run!

After meeting the team, you get to move the dogs one by one, hook them up to the sled, and get ready to go.  The kids got to ride in the dogsled and the husband and I took turns "mushing" the dogs - We each took turns standing on the back of the sled and when the guide said to stop, we put the brake down and jumped on it.  It takes quite a bit to stop a team of 8 dogs!.  The guide rides a snowmobile up ahead of the dogsled and has a sleigh that holds anyone not currently on the dogsled.  About half-way through, you switch people on the dogsled.

This is Buffy.  She's super-nice, we just got a funny picture of her!

Fellan took a liking to Willow.

Marxo was the Dog Whisperer.  Lily loved her and so did Buffy.

Surrounded by friendly dogs!

Dogsledding family