The Magic Mouse

I received my Apple Magic Mouse at work late last week. I'd ordered the mouse the day it came out after reading the description on Apple's website.

I'm a heavy-duty Apple aficionado, but that doesn't mean I jump on every new product Apple introduces. Part of that, of course, is that I can't afford to jump on every product Apple releases, but it's also because as much as enjoy using the Apple products I do use, they all don't speak to some want or need of mine.

I have a MacPro at work and I've been using the Mighty MOuse that came with it the last two years.

Yawn.

The little scroll ball. The fact that the first thing I had to do was disable the right versus left mouse regions and that straight press down. I just never liked that mouse.

But I used it because it was what came with the computer. But one look at the Mighty Mouse and I knew it was just want I wanted. Wireless. Sleek. Capable of accepting finger gestures on its surface. Metal underside- not a bulky mouse, but a thin, well-design pointing device.

It comes in a nice sleek clear plastic shell that I really thought was sleek. Then I read one blogger refer to it as a 'soap dish,' and that kind of stuck with me.

But about the mouse. Great precision. Wonderful feel. The hard work of scrolling that tiny ball has been replaced with mouse top finger gestures. Solidly built with metal and hard plastic components that have that long-term feel. I can really see this mouse lasting a while. The mouse even has a nicely implemented green 'on' light and a great on-off switch.

On the negative side, it doesn't support multi-touch. I'm seriously hoping that the truth is: it doesn't support multi-touch yet.

I recommend this mouse to anyone that has a mac mouse they aren't really happy with, or who wants something more. It's not the Logitech Nano VX, but it's a great mouse and a real step up to go from Mighty Mouse to Magic Mouse.

No Such Thing as an Easy 2.5 Hour Run

I was a little surprised when I saw a two and a half hour run on my schedule for Sunday. I was hoping to be headed back to two hours from two hours and fifteen minutes.

To be honest, I hadn't run this long since IM Florida last year.

The run was complicated by a very late start for a Sunday run- 3:30 PM on the day the clocks went back an hour. By the 90 minute mark I was turning on porch lights on motion sensors as I ran by houses. But I was lucky, as our weather held for one more week, first for the five hour ride the day before, the the run itself.

I took two things away from this run.

The first was during the run itself, when I really felt like 'yeah, I can do this, no problem'. I was able to turn it up in the last hour and run with only a little soreness in a few places.

the second was what hit my when i went to shower (at 6:30 at night). There is no such thing as an easy run that long. I felt good during the run. I stopped at two hours, thirty minutes and fifteen seconds because that is when I got back to my house, not because I had to. But fifteen minutes later, was I just a little tired ?

You bet.

Not exhausted, but tired. Glad I only had a swim the next day.

Running two hours ? I do that all the time. Run two and a half hours ?

Only when my coach tells me to...

Ian Decides to Take Spinervals Virtual Reality 1.0

Crash !

On Sunday morning I got up and couldn't get my MacBook Pro's screen saver to stop. I had a spinning beach ball instead.

Force-quit didn't deliver any relief so I did a hard reset.

When it restarted, it got as far as the Apple logo, then crashed. I tried three more times and the same result. I tried booting from Tech Tools pro DVD I have but it was a few months too old to boot the new MacBook Pro.

Next, I booted from my Snow Leopard DVD. Ran Disk Utilities and repaired the disk. Or tried. The first repair attempt quite halfway through and the second quit right away. The drive name disappeared, replaced my a default machine name.

I had to reformat the hard drive even to install Snow Leopard.

This would have been a disaster, but I'd been using Time Machine to back my laptop up to a 2TB external hard drive. Except for having to drive to work to get the drive, it was amazingly easily.

When the OS X install finished, an option screen came up asking me if I wanted to transfer data from another mac or restore from a time machine backup. I plugged in the USB drive and two and a half hours later, I was up and running and I'd lost a total of one day's work (time machine incrementally backups once an hour when I'm plugged in at work).

That's pretty great- one day of lost work and that's it.

Time Machine rocks.

My Spin Setup

Just a photo of my spinning set-up...

One more last race-again...

I guess I just can't pass up the chance to run a four mile race these days in Branford.

On Sunday I was planning to run 2 hours. Which I did. I ran a 75 minute warm-up with @poycc. In the rain. And the cold. I think it was a little under 50 degrees the whole warm-up, and raining, and then the wind kicked in.

I was wearing light-weight lobster gloves, tights, and jackets for the warm-up but I stripped down to my tri-gear and arm-warmers and headed over to the starting line. The wind kicked up and I couldn't believe it, but I found myself trying to talk myself into the idea that I could actually run the race without resorting to being all bundled up.

And it worked. By the time the race started, as I stood on the line watching the guy with the grey in his hair tying his shoe seconds before the race started (and doing a poor job of it), I thought this would be easy. The countdown came and them we started out, running down past Lenny's and hooking a right.

There were five of us in a pretty tight group, jockeying for for position, the police car just in front of us as we headed past the Owenego and out towards the ocean.

We were running together and no one really seemed to be ready push it. Chris Stonier, who I know is faster than me, was i the group, but no one was giving the sense that they wanted it.

And frankly, I was feeling as good as I could for having already run 70 minutes, for being cold and wet and having ridden 5 hours and run 45 minutes the day before. In other words, I knew what I had- which was nothing frankly.

So I did what crazy old guys that are washed-up runners do when faced with superior talent but running in bad conditions near the front of the pack.

I attacked.

I had a chance to take the lead, to be the guy chasing the police car, and I took it.

What happened the rest of the race really might be immaterial. I mean, I suppose in some ways I was that guy you see lead out at a race with no chance of winning it and you think 'ah, kind of jerky' but then again, not exactly. I wasn't running out of my head or anything. I had a chance to grab the lead, and I took it

Maybe it only lasted 10 seconds, but it was great. I was running hard, not smooth but hard and there I was, out in front. Making the effort. I might not win the race, but I'd taken my best shot it at and it felt great to be there.

And then reality set in, I was passed. We went through a mile at 5:20 and then I quickly fell to fifth.

Other memories- the kid with the track flats that ran me down with a sound like a horse and how I asked him 'what the hell are you wearing ?' as he ran by and he laughed. How my hands went very uncomfortably numb about 1.2 miles into the race. The guy with the shoe tying problem and how he had to stop mid-race to tie his shoe again.

The futile feeling running a course I know so well and knowing I was running out of time and was not going to catch anyone, but just enjoying being on a training course in race situation...

Crossing the line in 23:37, fifteen seconds faster than my last last race before Arizona in much worse conditions.

I was glad I did it. Was it smart training ?

Ah, who cares...

There is No Bonk

How desperate was I to avoid my 5 hour ride outside today ? Or rather, how much would I have preferred just to spin in the comfort of my basement, with an hour earlier start ?

About eight o'clock last night I texted Eric to find out whether it would be better training for Arizona to spin or head out in the cold this morning.

I've been working with Eric eight years now and I have called him for advice maybe a dozen times, mostly around IM time. I have never texted him.

Of course, I knew what his answer would be- it was silly even to ask. Bundle up and get out there, he replied.

I've done plenty of outdoor riding in the cold, and I'm not adverse to the cold. When I get a couple of beers in me and tell you about how in high school I used to run - while it was snowing- in track shorts and a half-shirt, it's not just the beer talking. I really used to do that- and I lived in upstate New York, where below zero was frequent, and it was fahrenheit.

But the truth is, if I had owned a trainer when I was 16, I would have put my three-speed on it and cut my running down to three or four days a week.

In the end, I didn't even bother with a heavy cycling jacket or booties, and I was fine.

In the fifth hour, I did a time trial effort. I'd separated from Steve Surprise, who had suggested at about three hours that I ride ahead and just turn around in an hour. I was on a tighter schedule. I did just that, turning around at four hours- an hour from home, and rode as hard as I could to catch Steve.

Only Steve had stayed on Route 1 when I'd veered off by the Surf Club. On the way home, I was chasing him and he was behind me, which was great because I never stopped working hard. I got home, disappointed I hadn't made the catch, put on my running shoes and headed out.

At first I was running really, really well, jamming along listening to 3 Doors Down.

For the first 4 hours on the bike, I was doing really well- 2 Clif Shots, 2 Clif Shot Blocks and three bottles of Gatorade,. But in the last hour I was going close to race pace and ate nothing and drank only 2/3 of my bottle.

What happened 14 minutes into my run was almost inevitable. I crashed, hard. A real bonk.

And that same biochemical deficiency that saps your strength, that makes your stomach turn over and your legs crash, also affects you mentally. I immediately went into hyper-doubt mode.

This is exactly what happened to me at Firm-Man (twice in the same run).

This is what happened to me last time in Arizona. In fact, this is exactly what I'm trying to build confidence to protect against with a long brick, and instead I'm proving I don't have what it takes to go long.

Too many of my long bikes had too little effort on the run.

I didn't sleep enough last night.

I'm going straight home, go in the house and lie on the floor for a while in a pool of self-loathing.

And then, I decided instead of feeling sorry for myself I'd eat the Clif Shots in the back of my jersey. I wolfed down five blocks (I dropped one).

Two minutes later ? The bonk was over. I ran another 35 minutes. I ran by my house to add on eight more hilly minutes. I remembered that bonks or no bonks, I had a good run and a decent race at Firm-Man.

I ended the run listening to 'Spybreak (Short One)' (the Propeller Heads from the Matrix) and that brought the following thought:

There is no bonk

Getting Serious about Arizona

There's a point in every build-up to an Ironman where you realise that you have a certain number of weeks left, and you have some long workouts in your schedule, and they mean something. That's the point in the cycle when, like any other point in the cycle, no one workout will make or break your training, but the psychological lift of a good5 hour, 100 mile bike or 2 hour run really can carry all the way through to your race, can in fact remind you when you slip into a painful, unhappy place, that what you are trying to accomplish has been done- by you- before.

This is where I've been lately. I ran 2:15 a week ago Saturday (with a 4 mile race in the middle), rode 4.5 hours on Sunday then came back and ran 90 minutes Tuesday.

This weekend I rode 5 hours on Saturday, rode another 2:45 Sunday with a half hour run, ran 70 minutes Monday, then 2 hours on Tuesday. I added Spinervals Mental Toughness tonight- a great 90 tempo effort that delivers a red-zone punchline in the last ten minutes.

i can tell there's an edge here. On one side is the real danger- not that you'll be undertrained, but the opposite. Push too hard and instead of peaking you'll be so spent that you end up flat- Eric, my coach, talks about that in this post about swim training for Kona. I think among athletes who have a serious expectation for an ironman, the ones that don't plan to walk the marathon, overtraining is probably a bigger issue than under-training.

Nevertheless, the other side of the edge is that. That the training will be intense enough but not long enough or long enough, but not intense enough. I tend to think you can replace duration with intensity more easily than intensity with duration. Train long and slow and you will be...

Still, some of the long training needs to be moderated, which is why I've been mixing easy and hard runs.

I've been running 2 hours all year, starting in January. I'm not concerned about whether I've worked the run hard enough. And I've worked the bike hard, and now I'm getting in my long rides (or maybe long spin this Saturday...)

I feel like this could all work out really well. Of course, there are no guarantees...