Last week I volunteered to help out the gym at work and take some headshots for the intranet. They wanted something a bit better than you’d get with a point-and-shoot, and I wanted some practice taking pictures of people other than myself and Tessa.

Since the shots may need to be used in a variety of situations, including small thumbnails on the website, I opted for low-contrast lighting, using a ring flash to kill the shadows and side-lights to add highlights. I had the ABR800 ring-flash on camera without a tripod, so after the hour-and-a-half session my right-arm was pretty tired.

In the end 22 people flowed through, which only gave me a few minutes per person. Some of them were only on a quick break in between training sessions, others uncomfortable and not wanting to be there.

Overall, I think the results came out pretty well, considering. Hopefully they like them.

Man, I thought I was going to die on the run…

Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, but I did feel really tired, got the chills (again), and was having a hard time keeping my legs moving.  Time slowed and I felt like each mile took an age. But in actual fact they were only taking about 7 minutes 12 seconds (average… which is a pretty fast time for me).  The bike went as hoped, where I averaged 20.25 mph.  For the swim, I was just hoping to match my Wildflower time, but managed to knock off 4-minutes.

Swim – 0.93 miles in 26:40
T1 – 2:01
Bike – 24.9 miles in 1:13:46
T2 – 1:09
Run – 6.2 miles in 44:34
Which gives me a finishing time of 2:28:11.   Over 10 minutes faster than my time on the–admittedly much hillier–Wildflower course.

The only slight hiccups were the elbow I took to the jaw during the swim and the subsequent mouthful of lake water I swallowed, and then on the bike the aid station was unmanned so I ran out of water at about the 20-mile marker.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the result.   I don’t think I could have done much better.  Position wise, I came 15th in my age-group of 64, and 106th of the 429 finishing men.  But as I said in my other post, at my level that’s not a very meaningful metric.

So now the question for next year is: do I try for a half-Ironman or do I stick at the Olympic distance and try to improve my times?  Or maybe both…

Prep
At 4am the alarm will go off; It’s Your World will be playing on NPR.  Get up.  Have a cold shower.  Get dressed (race shorts under civvies).  Head down to breakfast: blue-bottle coffee, 2-pints of water with electrolyte mix, toast and honey.

I’ll have packed my bag the night before, but just do a last check through.  Pump tires on bike to 120psi.  Get Tessa and Ada ready, head to car by 4:45am.

The drive to Almaden Lake is 55-miles and should take less than an hour.  Tessa will drop me off and go find parking.  I’ll have registered the day before, so head straight to the transition area and set up my spot.  I should have an hour before the race starts, so I’ll familiarize myself with the transition area, the entrances and exists, and the swim course.  If allowed, I’ll do a warm-up swim, nothing hard, just enough to get the blood flowing.  Stretches.  And the requisite trips to the porta-potties.

Swim
I’m in the third wave, starting at 7:08.  I’ll stand one row back from the front, on the inside.  I’ll take the first 100m easy, trying to avoid feet, and picking a path through the carnage.  After that I’ll settle into a comfortable rhythm, avoiding the temptation to race.  A mistake I made last time was going too wide, so try to keep an optimal course.

Transition to bike
My wet suit’s a two piece, so I’ll have the top off by the time I get to my spot.  Take off the bottoms.  Socks on.  Shoes on.  T-shirt on.  Helmet on.  Put 3 gel packs in back pocket.  Grab bike.  Run for the exit.

Bike
The bike course is wide, smooth, and relatively flat.  I’ll be pushing hard.  I’ll have a gel pack at the start, one half way, and one at the end.  I’ll alternate between water and energy drink, sipping regularly.

There’s a 7% climb for 200-vertical-feet between miles 15 and 16.  After riding in Marin, this should be easy.

I want to average above 20 mph.

Transition to run
Simply drop bike off, take off helmet, switch shoes, and grab race belt with my number.

Run
Like the bike it’s a flattish course.  I’ll take the first mile to ease my legs in, then settle into a race pace.  I want to push close to my limit.  I won’t have my heart rate monitor so I’ll pay attention to my breathing and if it gets laboured will ease off.  I’ll take water every mile at each aid station.

Finish
At the end of the day I know I’m not going to place very highly.  I could say I’d like to finish in the top 10%, which would be very cool, but is meaningless; it is a measure of other entrants not myself.  My goal is for everything to go smoothly and to feel like I couldn’t have finished in a quicker time.  But, shit happens and if something does go wrong I’ll just do my best to get to the end.

Today is Bike To Work Day in the SF Bay Area. A few hundred people turned out at the 24th and Mission BART station at 6:30am this morning to make their way to the South Bay for work. There were three different routes heading to Google, I joined a group of about a dozen people taking the 46-mile, very picturesque route down Skyline.

A few more photos and a couple of videos here.

So… if you read the last post you’ll know I was heading to Wildflower to do the Olympic triathlon this weekend. Now, this is no Iron Man. The Long Course is on Saturday and is a half-Iron Man; the Olympic is an “Intermediate Distance” event and is a mere 1-mile swim, 25-mile bike, and 6-mile run. However, each of the Wildflower courses is known for being particularly grueling.

Tessa, Sani (my fellow racer), his brother, and I drove the 300-miles to Lake San Antonio on Friday afternoon, and set up camp.

On Saturday, we did some swim training, a light bike ride, and watched the Long Course competitors. These guys are seriously hardcore. The winner will finish the 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, and half-marathon in 3-hours 55-minutes. The last person will take nearly 10-hours, biking and running in the scorching California sun. Seeing the people of all shapes and sizes do this race made me feel really quite lame. The Team-in-Training people were particularly impressive; many of whom certainly don’t look like athletes, but they all support each other and with serious mental willpower finish the course to support the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Today, after two cold and uncomfortable nights in a tent, was our race. The start is split into waves, with the collegiate men going first at 9am. Then the male age groups, then female. My wave started at 9:25.

The swim started with the usual carnage; legs and arms flailing everywhere, people almost swimming over you, kicks to the face. By the first buoy it had thinned out only a little, so I decided to go wide to avoid the masses. By the half way point I was now overtaking stragglers from the waves in front; some swimming breaststroke, some lying on their backs staring at the sky. By the final buoy and the last-leg back to the dock I got overtaken by the front guy of the wave behind me. Appropriately wearing a ninja-black swim cap. The swim felt long, when training I think I go into a kind of meditative state, but in the excitement of race day it took forever.

After the first hill, the bike was relatively straight forward. I pushed it quite hard, taking satisfaction from over taking guys on $5000+ tri-bikes, and feeling awe at other guys on $5000+ tri-bikes flying past me. The course was a there-and-back, with 2 biggish hills either way. My “nutrition strategy” was to have an expresso-gel at the start and end of the ride, a honey gel in the middle, and then alternate water/electrolyte drinks throughout. This worked pretty well.

The run was killer. As always it hurt like hell trying to run after biking for over an hour. And the course was tough. There were aid stations at each mile giving out much needed gatorade and water, but even with these I started getting chills about half-way round. At this point the sun was high in the sky and it was getting hot; I feel so bad for the women who didn’t get to start till 11am. The run course was nearly all up hill for the first 5-miles, on road and dirt trails. Then a 1-mile knee crunching decent to the finish line.

I felt pretty rough by the time I crested the final hill, but I kept going and made it to the finish with a time I’m pretty happy with.

My total time was 2-hours 39-minutes, which put me 24th in my age group of 224 guys, 142nd out of all 1200 men, and 166th overall out of over 2000 competitors. For context, the winner came in at 2-hours 2-minutes, median time is 3-hours 19-minutes, and the 90th percentile take longer than 4-hours.

Swim: 00:29:49
Transition 1: 00:03:04
Bike: 01:19:31 (18 mph avg.)
Transition 2: 00:01:09
Run: 00:46:10 (7:43 min/mile avg.)
Total: 02:39:43

Not too shabby, but plenty of room for improvement.

Now, off to finish this 2002 Moon Mountain Syrah and eat some honey sandwiches, oh, and I should probably shower at some stage.

Tomorrow we’ll be heading down to Lake San Antonio for my 2nd Wildflower Triathlon. Last year I entered the Mountain Bike course. This year I decided to up the ante and try for the Olympic distance.

The course is a 1.5km swim, a 40km bike, and then a 10km run (that’s 1-mile/25-miles/6-miles for the imperially inclined). While it’s no Iron Man, they say the bike “should be considered relatively difficult” and the run is a “combination of road and trails, through campgrounds and challenging hills”.

The training has been pretty tough. I injured my back last October, which meant I started the running training later than I would have liked. I’ve also found it stressful finding the time to train (doing an IronMan must be almost a fulltime job).

For the last couple of months I’ve been working out 5 or 6 days a week; with weights, runs, and swims in the infinity pool, during the week; then long bike rides, runs on the embarcadero, and swims in the bay, on the weekend. Running after cycling is hard on the legs, my knees and ankles are pretty sore this week.

Anyway, I do it because I enjoy the challenge. Hopefully I’ll finish with a reasonable time and legs that still work. I’ve already signed up for the 12km Bay-to-Breakers run in 2-weeks and the Silicon Valley International Triathlon in 6-weeks.

Wish me luck!

On its own, the Closure Library isn’t very compelling for the average web developer. The dynamic loading is intended for unit tests and development, and using it in production would cause users to download masses of unused code.

Luckily for us, the Closure Compiler was open sourced at the same time. The compiler knows about a lot of the idioms used in the Closure Library and does a really good job of removing dead code and optimizing what remains. The team also launched a web service with a RESTful API so you don’t even have to run the compiler yourself.

Even with the web service, the development-debug cycle isn’t ideal. So when I found myself wanting to use some of the Closure Library for my new photo site I hacked together a PHP class that provides a convenient interface to the compiler web service, caches the optimized code, and recompiles when the sources have changed. Pretty basic, but quite useful I think.

I know PHP is looked down upon by many programmers, but it is easy, convenient, and widely available. If you have a PHP based site and want to use the Closure Library and/or the Compiler, it might be worth heading over to the project page and seeing if it might be useful.

[php-closure]

Coming relatively late to the party, I joined Flickr at the start of 2008 and haven’t looked back since. The thing that is most compelling for me is the social aspect, something that a personal photo site could never achieve. It pushes me to take more photos and to try to be more creative.

With this in mind I felt the photos left on this site were getting dated and unrepresentative; photos from university ski trips and my early travelings in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Instead I’ve put together a portfolio of sorts.

So Flickr is my photostream, Picasa gets random albums for sharing with family and friends, and while I don’t feel I’ve found a particular style yet, this site gets my best attempt at a photographic portfolio.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZkEde-9QAk

Click the resolution menu and maximize or head on over to YouTube to watch it in full 1080p.

And yes, that is me crashing into a tree at 0:29. And yes, it did hurt. I ended off with rather bruised ribs.

I think what I like most about road biking is how much distance you can cover in a relatively short period of time.  For example, this afternoon I took a 2-hour ride round the tip of the SF peninsula and was able to take in views of Crissy Field, the Golden Gate, Ocean Beach, Lake Merced, and Golden Gate Park.

Here’s the route, logged on My Tracks. You can click the start/end point for details.

View SF Ocean Beach Loop in a larger map

A group of us went house boating on Lake Shasta last weekend.  We took a tonne of polaroids which Tessa was kind enough to scan.

The camera rocks.  It’s big and chunky, and takes a good 20s to charge up the flash, but the noise it makes when you take a photo, and the retro-quality of the prints are awesome.

I’m not a big chess player by any means, but I wanted an authentic scene for this shot, so I looked-up some famous matches on Google. I found The Game of the Century, where 13-year old Bobby Fischer beat a renowned chess master.  This photo replicates the last move in that match.

Tessa turned out to be a great hand model :)

Then in December I saw an ex-colleague tweet that he’d signed up for the Wildflower long course. I checked out the website and noticed the Mountain Bike Course: a much more manageable 1/4-mile swim, 9.7-mile bike, 2-mile run.

I told my personal trainer about it and in February we both signed up. We trained in the pools and the gym at work, then at China Camp Beach on the weekends. The distances aren’t very long, so I was mainly focussed on getting a reasonable time.

Last weekend was the actual event. We drove down Friday and camped on the hill above Lake San Antonio.

On race morning we got up at 6, ate a solid breakfast of granola and expresso beans, and then headed down to set up the transition area before the long course got underway. I got pretty nervous while we watched the long course participants leave, but by the time it was my wave’s turn I was calm and ready to go.

There seemed to be a lot of people unprepared for the swim, and I caught up to the tail end of the first wave by the mid-way point.

My transition to bike was pretty terrible; I spent way to much time putting my shoes and gloves on.  But the bike course itself wasn’t too bad at all, with only a couple of hills of note. Everyone is marked with their “race age” on their left leg, so I could tell I was overtaking people from the first wave, which was very motivating.

My transition to run was nearly as bad as the one to bike; I managed to misplace the t-shirt that had my bib number and spent valuable time digging through my bag. The run is definitely my weakest leg and having pushed hard on the bike I found it pretty tough. I made it back to the stadium though, with enough energy to do a sprint finish :)

My end time was 1:04:43, placing 17th 16th of 131 in my age group, 59th 1012 overall. Some of the times are messed up so I’m not 100% sure of my overall ranking. My bike time didn’t record correctly so I don’t know how long I spent in the second transition, but if my first was anything to go by I think I should be able to shave 2 or 3 minutes off my time just at the transitions.

What next? I definitely want to do longer tri’s in the future but I think for now I’d like to focus on improving my time on sprint courses while working on my running.

Update: looks like they fixed the timing data.

Tessa came out for a bike ride while Sani and I did a trial run at China Camp. I’m getting more used to swimming in the cold, salty water, but it’s still not the most pleasant experience.

This week we’ll be winding down and doing some relatively light training. Don’t want to start the race with sore legs!

I felt a little jealous just watching from the sidelines, but at least I managed to get a few photos.  Maybe next year :)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHVRzURcjo4

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nutFBeS3viY

This site has some good information on how to go about cancelling. I didn’t have too many problems, but they did try pretty hard to keep me on, and when that didn’t work they offered me a free a month in the hope I’d forget to cancel again.

If you ever used this site, I’d recommend checking you’re not still paying for it unbeknownst to you.

So, its cool that I got my first patent, even if it is a moderately embarrassing one :)