I thought I would reinforce the obvious there because apparently I myself have forgotten it.  On Sunday I tried to go for a bike ride, and I made the colossal mistake of trying to drive to my start point in the early afternoon.  What’s the problem you ask?

Songkran.  Songkran is a Thai festival celebrating the traditional Thai new years.  Which in Pattaya means a week plus of insane tourists and Thai facilitators clogging the streets and shooting or throwing water on everything and everybody in sight.

Needless to say I made it about 500m before I lost my willingness to crawl through gridlock to get out of town to ride.  So I bailed and tried again on Monday.  I left a little earlier (ten-ish) and got out of town before the psycho’s were awake.  And the ride was amazing.  I was trying out a new route (really an extension of a route I’d done before) that I had only done a map reconnaissance of (which is even more ill advised in Thailand than in the States, more on that later) but it worked out well.

Here’s the map overview of the route:

The route was fantastic – good roads, little traffic, great elevation changes, and nice scenery.  Unfortunately for you I forgot to charge my camera battery so I couldn’t take any pictures.  I really wish I had taken some pictures though.  The Eastern Seaboard area of Thailand – outside of the cities – is a place of rolling hilly vistas covered in green jungle and dotted with clusters of coconut palms.  Sprinkled along the roads and in the hollows of the hills are tapioca fields and small pulp wood and rubber plantations.  Add in the roadside shrines, housedold water buffaloes tethered along the roads and small roadside stands and businesses and it’s a fascinating place to explore by bike.

The weather was amazing too.  Very warm and humid but with the wind from moving it was really pleasant and the solid overcast kept the unforgiving hot season sun from baking me alive.  However, I did forget to use any sunscreen so I got a pretty solid “cyclist’s tan” sunburn.  Not that I could download them since I still haven’t found my download cable.

Let’s get to the data.

Three points to finish up:

1. Map reconnaissance.  It is a truism that you should never go anywhere for the first time.  On this ride I was actually trying to follow a course that I created on the computer and downloaded to my Garmin.  I’d ridden about half the route before as part of another ride but I had never been on the other half.  Overall it worked out great.  The “Do Course” function on the Garmin worked pretty well and I had two missed turns and one non existent road.  The latter was a little concerning but only cost me about half to three quarters of a mile to find out the road didn’t exist and ended up with about two extra miles total.  I was able to continue riding and figure out a way to close the loop without too much trouble.  Although I was a little worried for a bit.  Let’s take a look at the planned course:                                       And let’s look at that actual route map again for comparison:
2. Pauses and enjoying the moment.  If you look at my data up there, you’ll see that there’s about 8-minutes of elapsed time that I wasn’t moving.  That was a stop at about the halfway mark to buy a water and a Snickers bar.  I have a bad habit of putting a lot of pressure on myself to always be moving when I go for rides, even long rides (not that this was a particularly long ride) and I have this mental schema that you’re not supposed to stop or unclip or you’re somehow cheapening the event.  Which is ridiculous and unfounded.  It’s a completely internal mental hang-up that is in direct contradiction to my own experience.  Most of my favorite cycling experiences were long rides with friends where we stopped occasionally or organized rides that had support stations.  You feel better, you can ride longer, and the “hangover” the next day is less intense, meaning that you can get moving again sooner.  So it was really nice to stop, refill my Camelbak and relax for a few minutes while I ate a candy bar.  Overall, I did a really good job with hydration and nutrition on this ride (timer on my Garmin and some PB&J and PB& Nutella sandwiches).
3. Regret.  This is the longest ride I’ve taken in 2-years (since my training the the Memorial Herman).  Think I’m exaggerating?  Here’s a shot of my last longer ride:                             It’s also one of less than 10 rides I’ve done outside on the roads in the 18-months I’ve been in Thailand.  I have a ton of great excuses for that but the real reason is just that I’m lazy.  Not too lazy to workout, just too lazy to get up, pack my stuff, get out of the house and go find a place to ride.  But I had such a great time on this ride that I’m kicking myself for all the time and opportunities I’ve wasted since I’ve been here that I could have been out on the road.  Inexcusable.  No more!  (No more avoiding, NOT no more riding.  Definitely more riding.)

I have completely lost the download cable for my spiffy semi-new Panasonic Lumix camera.  I have a bunch of pictures of my Bangkok park runs on there that I want to pull off and share with you folks but I CAN’T.  I’ve searched my apartment twice and today I even went to the electronics store in the Central Festival mall.  They had my exact model of camera . . . but not the download cable.  So now its looking like those pictures are trapped on my camera until The Girlfriend’s next scheduled visit when she can bring me one from the Land of the Big PX.  (That’s America, in case you’re not familiar with Army lingo.)

Anyway, let’s take a look at today’s run data:

Okay, time out.  What the hell is this?

I just went to get my run data for today’s run and apparently Garmin has completely redesigned their Garmin Connect Calendar page, which is the main page that I use at Garmin Connect.  This is off the cuff since I just saw this ten seconds ago and started taking screenshots, but here’s my initial reaction:  I really like the weekly total column and the monthly totals at the bottom.

I DON’T like that they went to pale colored text and tiny icons instead of the multi-colored block system.  I really liked having my calendar full of bright, multi-colored workout blocks.  It gave me great, quick visual reinforcement of my string of workouts (or lack thereof).

Anyway, back to today’s workouts.

This wasn’t as bad as I though it would be.  I got all the way to the last set without using any extra rest.  I gave myself an extra 60-seconds before the final set (which was too much).  I was surprised how easy the last set (which was only supposed to be 60 reps) was.  In fact I probably could have knocked  out another couple reps but I was just not super motivated to tell you the truth.

Which extends to this run data:

Okay, so this is a cool new feature too.  I went to get my run details and this little HUD popped up.  Very convenient summary data in one snapshot.  Moving on to the long promised run data (look!  a squirrel!):

So my lack of motivation clearly carried over into today’s run.  If you can’t figure out what I mean based on the data above . . . let me know and I’ll extrapolate.

Boring swim.

Two points:

1) I did NOT swim an odd number of lengths.  So I have no idea how my Garmin Swim ended up on 25m instead of 50m.  It does worry me a little bit, because up until now I’ve been putting complete faith in the distances and numbers that it has been reporting.  But now that it has lost (or gained) 25m somewhere I will have to test it against some manual data collection.

2) I have no idea how this workout even happened.  I had zero motivation when I got home from work.  Zero.  I really didn’t want to workout at all.  And I was especially unmotivated to do the pushups.  I was so unmotivated that I didn’t even try to motivate or trick myself to go workout.  I actually agreed to skip it and just have dinner and drink some beer.  And yet, somehow instead I got changed and went and swam (I didn’t do the pushups).  Still not sure how that happened.  The only thing that I can think of is that Evil Me who usually tries to convince me not to workout was somehow aware of how terrible/guilty I would  feel if I didn’t do it and so just went ahead and jumped on the bandwagon and sent me to swim.

I got up early (0430) again and knocked out my (5-mile) run before work (and before the sun was up).  It felt terrible.  The first two miles were the worst, after that I warmed up and loosened up.  But I was still a good 25-seconds off my pace from my last 5-miler.  Not a big deal, the easy runs are just about doing them but a little annoying.

I also think that performance-wise I’m really an afternoon/evening athlete, in that I do better workouts in the latter half of the day than I do in the morning.  I’m pretty sure that there is some scientific research to back this up too.  I’m not actually going to go and find it and post anything about it HERE (maybe someday I will) but trust me on that.  I know a lot of things.  And I’m pretty sure that’s one of them.

Regardless, based on my current life situation (long commute, work hours, avaialbe run routes, etc.) it is way more optimal for me to do my workouts in the morning.  So I’m going to keep doing that.  I hope.

Old faithful: 8 x 400m with 200m recovery intervals.  The usual route.

I gotta tell you, I’m pretty happy with those splits.  Obviously I’m nowhere near where I need to be eventually.  But considering I’m only in a low/moderate intensity run training phase, the fact that I was at a 6:45 – 7:30 pace without totally blowing out a lung (including a 7:07 final interval!) is good enough for me.

So Monday was a holiday here in Thailand.  So of course, I wasted my whole day, didn’t go and do any of the local sightseeing that is still on my list and even messed up my workout.

I was supposed to do pushups and a bike ride, which would have fit perfectly with my day off: I could have driven out into the country and gotten a nice ride in with some scenery.  Instead I brain farted, did pushups and tried to swim.  I say tried because even though our pool opens at seven AM the maintenance guy decided to clean the pool at 0830 while I was swimming and after two or three laps of dodging his scrub brush and vacuum hoses I lost my patience and kanked it.

Which put me in a bad mood all day because I was in the middle of good workout.  I was actually doing a programmed workout with a warm up and then 5 x EBEH laps (25m each of Easy-Build-Easy-Hard).  I wasn’t necessarily enjoying it at the time (my upper body was smoke from doing PU first, not a good plan) and that probably contributed to my willingness to be thwarted by the pool man obstacle course.  Nevertheless, it was frustrating and my 100m splits were 15-20 seconds faster than my normal LSD plodding pace so I felt like it was a worthwhile exercise.

As for the pushups.  Ouch.  220 reps with only 60 seconds rest between sets.  For the first time since starting the second run through I added extra rest (+60 seconds before the final set of 55) and still had to take a quick break.  I went to my knees for about 15-seconds somewhere around 35-ish.  Overall though it felt pretty good.

Two more days of workouts before my next max rep test.

This was the best week I’ve had in a long time.  I got back to my daily workout routine and I even got into a MORNING WORKOUT ROUTINE.  Awesome.

I was intending to do a neat little summary chart here that included my mileage and minutes for each discipline for the week and some other neat stuff . . . but I’m getting caught up from a couple days behind so instead I’m just going to post this picture I took of a guy driving down the main street of North Pattaya with fully lit and operational charcoal grill sidecar.

“Jeez Bob how did you get a concussion-broken-arm-second-degree-burn-combo injury?”

“Well, I wrecked my motor-scooter-kabob-stand while weaving in and out of traffic without a helmet.  You know, a regular Tuesday.”

Good 5-mile run.  The best one I’ve had in a while.  Sub-nine minute pace is solid for me these days.

It boggles my mind that I used to be able to do 5-miles in 40-minutes.  Who was that guy?  I’ll ask him when I get back to that level.  Which I will.  Eventually.

BTW, I’m also wickedly impressed with my consistent pacing.  One second difference on the out and back?  Without ever looking at the watch or my pace?  That’s pretty pro.

which means towards using it to improve.

This graph above is from this workout below:

And these definitions:

Are what pop up when you click on those little question marks next to the relevant term in Garmin Connect.  So.  Yeah.  Doesn’t help much right?  I will say that it explains why these numbers are always the same for me (because Avg Efficiency is the Avg SWOLF normalized to a 25m pool . . . and I do all my workouts in a 25m pool).

Good first step.  Now I’ll have to do some research and figure out ways to use these numbers to try and get better.  Or something like that.