Applying Toilet Water

As I mentioned on Sunday, I had a small collection of boxes arrive last week while I was out.  I generally buy everything online, so me and the FedEx man and the UPS women have a special relationship.  Though, from their point of view, it’s kind of a raw deal – they give me presents almost every day, I and give them nothing.  Perhaps I’ll get them a card at some point.  Hmmm…

At any rate, one of the boxes that game was a rather odd FedEx box that arrived from an unknown address.  Despite living in the DC area where everything getting shipped seems to go through 18 layers of specialized Anthrax screening using the latest in sniffing technology, I used a more simplistic method: Have the Girl open it up.

Though, that resulted in one little problem.  She was now in effect pre-screening my packages.  And in this particular case, she was not only pre-screening my packages but more importantly – reviewing my clothing.  And every guy out there knows that females reviewing clothing can only lead to trouble, especially when she finds something like this inside:

Before I even got the chance to see it with my own eyes it was already on the ‘banned’ list.  That would be the list of clothing articles that I’m not allowed to wear out in public, at least with her nearby.  Though, I’m pretty sure that list covers items anytime I leave the house – mostly for fear that a photo could be taken of me with that article of clothing, and thus potentially traced back to her.

The good news here is that while I appreciate the free sweatshirt, the style doesn’t exactly scream ‘me’.  It screams a lot of other things, just not me.  Instead, it’ll likely get turned into a patch on the giant quilt she makes out of tons of leftover running/race shirts.  She made one last year too, pretty cool.

As for where this shirt originated from, it’s actually the Polar Plunge I did back in February.  They ran out of shirts onsite, so I went ahead and filled out the little card to get it sent to me.  Rob also just received his as well – perhaps we can organize a secret shirt-wearing society.  Just like fight club, only less cool.  Just as a brief reminder, here’s the video from that foray:

Speaking of other things I wouldn’t/couldn’t wear.  On Saturday when I was going to track how blogger Rachael was doing in Ironman California 70.3 (she PR’d big time), I noticed this at the top of the Ironman.com tracking page:

I’m specifically talking about the part of the image with the ad for the Ironman branded “Eau de Toilette Spray”.

First off – I’m pretty sure they’ve got the wrong target audience here.  We’re talking about a group of people that as a whole – generally smell like crap for up to 17 hours.  Even worse, while smelling like crap – we generally don’t even notice it.  In fact, all scientific evidence seems to indicate that we actually enjoy making the situation as bad as possible.

Second – I’m not exactly up on fancy perfumes and what not.  I’m kinda a simple guy when it comes to things like cologne.  But all I can read in this ad is the word Toilet.  So naturally, I’m looking at the situation as if it’s something you put in your bathroom.  You know – you go in, make the situation bad, and this little thing makes it happy.

However, a quick check of Wikipedia seems to indicate that Eau de Toilette is actually just a category of perfumes.  In fact, there’s even a fragrance color wheel you can click on – which actually has the different ‘tones’ that the ad above describes.  I realized while looking at this chart that you really go through several phases of the smell-wheel while in a triathlon as well.

Swim: First you start off with the water fragrance.  Depending on the triathlon, that may include more fragrant Potomac scents, or focus on a saltier option. 

Bike: From there you transition to the citrus smell, mostly due to the absurd amount of Orange Gatorade that somehow ends up everywhere.  Yes, even the back of your helmet.  No, I don’t know how.  It’s just there.  Accept it and move on.

Run: At this point you’re reaching the pinnacle of aromatic fougere (yes, you’ll have to look that up, because no – I can’t really explain it either).   Why did I choose Woody Oriental in that chart at the right?  Well, simple – because it’s much funnier sounding than choosing Mossy Oriental.

Of course, the base of the issue is really that at the end of the day, we’re just talking about toilet water – or at least so says Webster…

…and I’m pretty darn sure that I don’t need an expensive bottle of Ironman branded toilet water.  Especially if they leverage those porta potties at the beginning of the race as the well to ‘harvest from’.  Because such a substance would likely also be on The Girl’s banned list, if not at least WADA’s.

Hope you’re enjoying your week!

Garmin Forerunner 110 – First Look Review

You may have noticed earlier today that Garmin announced via press release their latest GPS watch – the Forerunner 110.  Given I get a lot of questions about their new watches when they come out, I figured I’d get ahead of the curve a bit here.  As I mentioned back in January, I expected to see a new watch in their running lineup - and this mostly fits that mold.

The watch is focused on the mainstream runner – which means it’s target audience isn’t really someone like me, set into hardcore training day in and day out.  Its feature set focuses on things the more casual runner would want: Plenty of storage so you don’t have to worry about uploading data, easy to use interface (no touch bezel), and simple GPS route tracking – uploading to the web based Garmin Connect.  From the new spring chicken runners standpoint, this pretty much looks like an ideal place to get into the GPS watch game.

But, once you get beyond the flashy site with pretty pictures and embedded video of athletic models – what do you actually have?

Well, let’ s break it all down.  I should have one of these in my paws here very shortly for some hands on action, but in the meantime, here’s a teardown of the specs:

A runner’s watch: 
This watch is clearly a runners watch.  It’s not a triathletes watch, or a running watch that also wants to be a cycling watch.  Nor is it a beginners watch that wants to be everything but can’t afford to be anything.  It does the run, and run only. You notice this due to the lack of cycling support in the compatibilities table:

One other area you probably caught on the table above is the lack of Foot Pod, which means no indoor treadmill running, nor any cadence on the run.  Cadence on the run isn’t really a big issue for the target audience of this device – the ‘mainstream runner’ - but the lack of foot pod enablement on a treadmill is in my opinion a gap for folks once winter shows back up again.

That little middle icon above (red one) is also interesting, as they note in the specs that is it indeed using heart rate based algorithms to determine calorie use – something that was introduced last year to some of the other watches.  This is good, as it helps to make the calorie calculations more accurate – something key to the ‘fit in that bikini/speedo’ crowd (and me, let’s be honest, I just want to eat cupcakes all day). 

Though, one strange twist is it doesn’t at this time appear to support the Tanita BC-1000 ANT+ Scale.  Given the target audience is folks looking to get healthy, allowing a pairing between these two devices would make a lot of sense.

Basic GPS support:
The key goal of this watch is to offer a baseline product that does GPS.  As such, it fulfills that requirement.  It records your route track and associated HR (along with pace, etc…), and then uploads them to Garmin Connect.  Garmin Connect is compatible with this new watch, based on previous development efforts.  It’s also compatible with Garmin Training Center, which means is good news for 3rd party developers since it means it likely uses the rather standard .FIT file format, which means other software developers can pull device data without having to recode their apps.

The device will hold 200 hours of activities before you must sync with your computer (or delete data), so clearly they’re aiming towards a group that probably doesn’t rush home and sync it with their computer 18 seconds after entering their homes door.

Back to basics design:
One of the first things I actually noticed is the lack of touch bezel (like the 405).  It appears Garmin is moving away from that with this watch – going for the most simplistic design possible.  The touch bezel was pretty much a love it or hate it type feature.  I personally was not on the love it side of life with it, mostly due to usability.  So I’m happy to see they’ve kept with the KISS design.

From a charging perspective, they are continuing moving forward with the standard contact-charging system used on the Garmin 310XT and 405 watches, which is nice.  They’ve also increased battery life over the Forerunner 405 – up to 3 weeks from 2 weeks.

Form and function:
The biggest complaint most people have about the Forerunner 305 and 310XT’s is their size.  People want a watch that doesn’t look like hamster tied to their wrists.  And while most folks get used to the size after about 2 minutes of running, it’s still a barrier to entry.

The Forerunner 110 takes the same form factor as the FR60 watch (which I love), and simply adds GPS (though removes some additional features).  For people sitting around a running/shoe store looking into the glass case of toys at the counter, having a watch that looks appealing is key.

Price:
One tricky area is always pricing.  Price a watch too high and you won’t get the market pull through you want, and price it too low and you leave something on the table.  The challenge with the pricing on this watch is where it sits above the older-school Forerunner 305.  At $250 for the Forerunner 110 with the HR strap, its comparatively a bit on the expensive side given the reduced feature set.  It’s almost $100 more than the Forerunner 305 is these days, and about $100-$150 more than the non-GPS enabled FR60.  The $200 reduced cost version of the Forerunner 110 is certainly an option though to reduce the costs a bit.

There’s a saying in the software industry that’s often true elsewhere in consumer electronics: Your biggest competitor is your own (older) products.  And that’s certainly true here in many ways.  But when you look at the larger non-Garmin market for GPS running watches, the pricing is pretty competitive with other products out there – especially given the overall competitive landscape for GPS watches is pretty small.

Hope this helps those folks pondering the options, I’ll update this post and post a full review of the watch once I have it in my hands.  I’m looking forward to giving it a run for it’s money…no pun intended.  Thanks for reading!

Update on 4/25/2010: It looks like at least the women’s version is now available for order on Amazon (to the left).  The men’s version still appears to be widely unavailable.  There were some of both available at the Boston Marathon this past year (a week ago Monday), but that and the Chicago Garmin store are pretty much the only places to find them currently.  That situation will likely improve soon as more retailers get the watches into the channel.

Also note that the version currently being offered includes the bundled package as opposed to just the watch itself.

Thanks for dropping by!

Little Washington

The weekend started Friday after a nice flight back from the West Coast.  Upon arriving home I found all sorts of packages had arrived.  While some weren’t terribly exciting (new seat post for an older bike), I did get one from Withings that was much more interesting.  They make a wireless scale that integrates with not only your WiFI, but also with all assortment of online and offline applications – even Sport Tracks.  So I got right to work making a mess of the packaging and tearing it all apart.

So far, it’s very cool.  Quite a bit cheaper than the Tanita scale I reviewed last month, and had some nice integration with other apps (though, it doesn’t have Garmin Connect like the Tanita).  Look for a review a bit down the road, probably in late April or early May – along with little tidbits here and there.  I’ve got about 30-45 days before the demo unit gets shipped back to them.  In the mean time, feel free to ask any questions, I’m always happy to answer.

Saturday morning brought a whole lotta sleeping in.  It was glorious…so glorious!!!

But Saturday afternoon brought the pool and my weekly continuous swim.  This time of year that’s about 3,200 yards, though I’m sure that will change.  At the end of the swim I had a 500y TT with pull buoy to knock out, and was happy to see it down to 6:47 – making progress on getting back to where I was prior to a bad month of February on the swim log.

Speaking of other things that are coming along really nicely…my run.  Saturday was 4 x 7 minutes @ about a 10K race pace, and over the last 2-3 months I’ve dropped my run times from the 6:10ish category down to a 5:40’s category.  I did 3 out of 4 sets at exactly 5:48/mile.  Check out these little sets:

Boo-yeah!

Sunday brought a medium distance bike ride, about 45 miles.  Followed by a rather painful run.

The run was short but to the point in the pain department.  Just simply 5 minutes building to a 10K race pace, and then holding it for 10 additional minutes.  At this point though my legs were well past shot, so things were a bit slow on the turnover.  Not sure why my legs were so slack, but, they were.  That said, I did manage to get it down to a solid pace – but, my HR was still below where it should have been. :-/

After the ride, we set course westward!  Into the rain!

Why westward you ask?

Well, it was time to revisit our favorite place to eat – The Little Inn at Washington.  We last ate here this past summer, and on a list minute whim we decided to come on out for the night.  Tonight we enjoyed another incredible dinner.  My pictures came out kinda ugly, sorry bout that, just wasn’t quite able to pull out the DSLR camera and make pretty stuff happen. 

Though I was using the new Optio W90 camera that I talked about a few weeks ago, it came in the mail.  Once nice thing it does have is little LED lights on the front that illuminate – but don’t flash.  So you can get away with some close up food shots without blinding your nearby pals!  Otherwise though, the camera isn’t much different from the ones in the past (I had the Optio W60 beforehand).

So with that, I’ll be zipping back to DC tomorrow morning – and back to training.  Got a good week’s worth of fun ahead!  Have a good week everyone!

A week of training in Seattle

After a pretty darn successful Sunday race in the Rainman Triathlon, I got back to work – and training on Monday.  That included a relatively straightforward swim of a tad over 3,000 yards.

One interesting thing is there are far fewer full size 50m pools in the Seattle area than in the DC area, not sure why exactly, but just a random observation.

Tuesday brought more sunny skies in the normally rainy city of Seattle (I’m allowed to say that, I was born here and grew up here…I know the truth), and while I had a bike workout on my schedule, it was not out in the great outdoors.  Instead, it was on a trainer.

But, I had meetings going late in the day, followed by dinner meetings later on.  The solution?  Bring the trainer with me in the rental car.

From there I drove the 10-15 minutes around the bottom of Elliott Bay to Alki Beach – where I’ve biked and run to before – and then setup shop.

(In case you’re wondering why I have the HED race wheel on the trainer, I brought it out for the race – and didn’t bring a secondary tire for just a few days of general use.)

You really can’t ask for a better location than the city skyline in the background.  Plus, I got to watch the never ending stream of Ferry’s carry commuters home…right off the front of my aerobars.  The only concern I really had would be if the trainer somehow failed, as I’d be propelled straight over the rocky edge and into the bay.  Which…would probably be humorous for everyone but me.

Wednesday brought even more sun.  And what better way to take advantage of it than a 10 mile run during lunch?  I had just barely enough time to squeak in the run, leaving right from the conference parking garage, and then out along the waterfront.

But…Wednesday workouts were not over.  Nope, upon arriving home (at my parents house north of Seattle), my Dad was just mounting his bike to go for a ride.  Somehow I thought that ride would be about an hour, fairly easy.  It turned out about 3 hours including more stoplights than I could ever keep track of.  We went pretty much everywhere.  We found creation…and we rode all over it.

We also found a giant chicken, with an egg (also giant).  Clearly, that required a picture – though, it’s a bit small due to being cell-taken.

The only problem with our particular plan (aside from not having one), was that we didn’t consider the effect of lighting.  Thus, around 3 hours after we started, the sun went to bed.  And we were still a number of miles from the homeland.  So we called in re-enforcements (Mom), to come and pick us up.  Meanwhile, we wasted time in the parking lot of a local store.  Shopping cart races may have been contemplated…

Moving along to Thursday…

Thursday was simple.  Just a bike.  On a trainer.  Indoors.

All except for the part on the instruction sheet that said ‘Magic’.  It turns out that after I followed the magical magic section, the only magic was how much effort I had to expend…and that wasn’t very magical at all.  It kinda hurt.  I don’t think I like Magic.

So with that, I’ll be catching a flight later this morning back to a land without Mountains and Oceans…Washington DC.  Have a good weekend all!

A night with the Cervelo Technical Folk

Last Friday I got an invited to hang out with some folks from Cervelo for a night at the local tri shop (Bonzai) going through a fairly detailed technical presentation, primarily focused on aerodynamics of bikes.  I happily accepted the invite – despite it the day and time.  You have to really enjoy this stuff in order to sit through a long detailed PowerPoint presentation on aerodynamics on a Friday evening.  But…that’s exactly what I did.

The presentation started off with a bit of an introduction into how Cervelo makes bikes, and some of their general design philosophies.  They also went into a bit of history on the company.  For some reason I thought it was a much older company than they really are.  In the world of bikes, they’re pretty new to the scene actually – I was still in high school when their first bike was born.

They also spent a bit of time talking about the professional Cervelo Test Team group, and how they transformed from sponsoring a team with the Cervelo brand in the past, to having their own cycling team (Cervelo Test Team), where the focus was on getting really good feedback to Cervelo – not just being ‘another ride’.  In other words, they enlisted riders with backgrounds in engineering, to be able to get detailed evaluations, and move away from feedback like “Umm, it rode like a bike” – which is what they got before with the old sponsorship model.

(Side note: I didn’t realize you could actually go spend a bit of time riding with the team.  They offer that sort of thing tied in with larger races (read: The Tour).  One of the guys from the tri shop got to do it last summer, which is pretty damn cool.  How do I get that trip?  And would I get to meet Bob Roll while at the “Tour Day France”?  I’m willing to slap two Cervelo stickers over the Chipotle bike shorts I have.  Though, the bike ‘Hot’ portion over the posterior of the ass would have to remain free and clear.  Just cause.)

From there the presentation dovetailed into a number of areas around materials – walking through the different types of composites used, and how they flexed depending on the load time and load direction.

This was pretty informative, as they talked through why certain portions of the frame are made with materials that are more stiff, whereas other portions use less stiff composites.  Further, why some bikes use entirely different materials than other bikes.  For example – a bike designed to ride the Paris-Roubaix race (which includes off-road sections) would be focused on different materials than a time trial bike.

However, the most interesting part of the session was that focused on aerodynamic properties, and the impact on drag because of the shape of an object.

Drag is a relatively simple formula using a few different parameters, and even though I nearly failed AP Calculus, I can at least complete the function below…most of the time.  Just not before 9AM (and it’s totally not my fault Calculus was at 7:20AM, WTF?).

Starting with the most easiest – the square in the diagram below – you can see that it has 40 times more drag than the airfoil (bottom shape).  In other words, if you put a simple brick wall up in front of your bike, it would be 40 times more sucky than the airfoil.

As you work your way down through the different shapes below, you can see which shapes lend themselves to more aerodynamic postures.  As you do that, you probably start to notice certain shapes are utilized in fields where aerodynamics matter – such as flight and cycling.  For example, that bottom shape – the airfoil, is the same shape as an aircraft wing.

So now that we’ve looked at pretty pictures of circles and squares – where does it matter?  Well, it manifests itself in some places you might not think of.  For example, your aerobottle.  Many new aerobottles themselves are in an overall aero shape (like an airfoil turned sideways), such as this relatively generic one below.

But while the bottle design itself tapers like an aerofoil, one relatively important part does not: The straw.

Now, last fall I had read a painfully long thread on Slowtwitch about this, based on research from MIT.  But deciphering all of the good from the bad in there is sorta tough.  Mostly because there’s a lot of good stuff. But, the Cervelo presentation was able to really put a simple visual on the whole straw thing.

Because your typical straw is probably about a foot long, you need to take that and increase it’s size by a factor of 24 (per the chart above).  So let’s go with 12” long by .33” wide (these straws are not small).  So to get the base area that’s (12*.3= 4sq inches).  Now we take that and multiple it by 24 (24*4).  Thus, 96sq inches.

Now, how big is 96sq inches you say?  Well, it would be a touch bit bigger than an 8x11” sheet of paper.  So, now imagine instead of the aerobottle straw, you just put up a piece of flat steal in front of you the size of a sheet of printer paper.  And then you went out and rode 112 miles…into the wind.  Kinda sucky, ehh?

Of course, the problem here is overlooking the obvious.  The obvious being that while simply not having an aerobottle may work well for your average Tour de France rider, or someone making pit stops along the way – it doesn’t work well for your average Ironman triathlete.  It’s been well proven through many painful bonks that if you don’t have hydration directly in front of you, you’re less likely to drink it.  And cutting the straw length only saves you so much before it just gets fairly annoying.

So what are some options that are aerodynamically friendly then?  Oddly enough, just simply laying a water bottle on the aerobars.  This has a profile that much more closely resembles an aerofoil than that of a brick wall.

And, if you look back at this year’s Kona bike gallery, you’ll notice about half of the top 15 men were using the bottle in the aerobars approach (or no bottle upfront).  Same with the women.

Now, the problem here is really the attachment piece – meaning, what ensures the bottle doesn't go flying when you hit that massive pothole.  The system in the picture above and below sells for a redonkulous $95 once all the parts are included.  Seriously?  Just look at it below.  We’re talking a couple of straps here and a baseboard.  This isn’t rocket science.  Yes it sells for rocket fuel like prices.

Now, bike companies are starting to build in some of these things into the frames themselves.  For example, the relatively new (and expensive) Cervelo P4 includes a much more aerodynamic water bottle:

The problem with that bottle though is refills while underway, and general logistical issues with having basically one bottle (cleaning, etc…).  But, the option is there for the taking.  There are also other options out there now that are a similarly streamlined to the frame, like the below.  Though again, they’re a bit expensive.

So, finally, what about those bottle cages behind you on your rear rack system?  Well, it turns out those actually aren’t that bad at all.  In fact, that’s a rather ideal place to put them.  That’s because your body has already hosed up the airflow in that particular area, so really, it doesn’t get much worse.  The best place to put them is as close as possible to the seat (and thus your ass), and tucked up behind you a bit.  You just don’t want them hanging out there like a aerial refueling boom or anything.  Here’s a post I wrote a while back on what I use, for those interested.

Now, the cool thing is that Cervelo publishes a fair bit of this data that you can go out and read all about the details (starting here).  Also, there’s quite a bit the MIT data available as well via the Slowtwitch link above, even for other areas of the bike as well.

Hope you found this interesting (and just feel lucky I didn’t dump 2.5 hours of engineering slides on ya!), thanks for reading!