The Friday Top Five: Top Five Things I Love About Training For Rev3 Cedar Point Full

Do you know why it's Sunday and I am posting the Friday Top Five today?!  Because I am convinced my coach is trying to kill me. Honestly, I am not sure what I did to piss her off....

I think that working with a coach has has made one thing glaringly obvious this year: I had NO idea what the heck I was doing last year when I trained on my own. NOW, that is NOT to say that you can not train your proverbial ass off and race well. I really believe that for people with no time to set up workouts or, more importantly, asses the data from your workouts in any meaningful way, I would highly recommend going this route. The other problem with assessing your own data is that it is much too easy to lie to yourself about why you are not performing at a high level.

Without further adieu....

Top Five Things I Love About Training For Rev3 Cedar Point Full

5) PERSPECTIVE: Training for the Rev3 full provides perspective on what is really important. Training for the full distance is time-consuming. If I do not get my ass out of bed and up at five in the morning for a 6 hour ride, it CAN NOT happen. Why?  Playing catch with my boys, building legos with the bambini, or coloring pictures with my girls pays more dividends down the road than beating my last Iron distance time by an hour. Not to mention that staying gainfully employed means making sure I don't substitute training for say, syllabus design.

4) COACH MARY: Seeing steady progress in my swim and run are exciting. Coach Mary is the ultimate jedi-f-ing-Master. I am not sure how I arrived at this level of fitness after not running for 8 WEEKS, but I am excited that I am not hurting anymore and running fairly solid. I learned a lot this season about training, pacing, nutrition (and Coach Mary learned something about my nutrition plan.... I call it the "Olivieri Small Panini Plan, or just O.S.P.P. for short). Don't worry, I'll explain my "untraditional" nutrition plan in a future post. 

The progress has not been limited to the bike. I have done several hour swims in open water the last few weeks. I am swimming as fast this season sans wetsuit as I was swimming last year WITH my wetsuit. If that is not improvement....

After a few long rides in some rolling hills, I also appreciate how quickly my bike fitness improves. I went out for a ride on a course I have ridden a bunch of times. I was scheduled for an easy hour zone two ride the other day. Something about hitting hills makes going into that westerly New York wind a heck of a lot easier.

3) ELITISM: There is no substitute for that totally elitist, self-rightous feeling that comes after finishing an long run before seven or eight in the morning. I also enjoy casually mentioning the fact that I "just rode six hours today, now I am going to the pool with my family for the rest of the afternoon." Sure, snobbery is not attractive. If you want to truly come off as being an elitist, you have to be (or at least pretend) that you are totally aloof to the fact that you are acting like Thurston Howell. 

No one looks better in spandex than a disproportionate
Barbie. 

2) SPANDEX: Look, if I have to wear it to race, I better have the svelte, rippled physique of a seventeen year old Swedish downhill skier (even I am not sure how I arrived there with that one, but go with it). Sure, my wife makes fun of me because of my 80's aerobic attire, but if I need to wear spandex—and, boy do I ever—I might as well be in my best physical shape of the year. 

1) FOOD: Consuming over 10,000 calories on any given day is both fun and annoys the heck out of many of my friends. It is only during Iron distance training that I can somehow justify eating half of a sheet pizza, drinking a gigantic chocolate milkshake, and having a bowl of ice cream for an evening snack.





RANDOM CRAZINESS:

Building over the past couple of weeks has been both EXciting and EXhausting. I can barely log my workouts for Coach Mary because as soon as I get home from a six hour ride, my kids ask me to go on a bike ride with them. I look at them suspiciously, but then I remember that they are way too young to lay on the sarcasm that thickly.

• Yesterday after my ride, Julian asks me "...when I get older, can I have your  Kestrel so I can beat me you at Ironman.

I said, "Julian, what makes you think you are going to beat me at Ironman?" He replied, "Dad, I am really fast, and you will be older."

• I remember when going out for a 10k, an hour bike, and a 1000 yard swim seemed like crazy long distances to have to traverse. I have an hour bike tomorrow and I am like "thank goodness!"

Okay, that's all for now. Looking forward to seeing all my Trakkers teammates and blogger buddies at REV3 Cedar Point in 20 DAYS!

Train Smart!

The Friday Top Five

The Top Five Things I've Learned After Falling Off My Bike Going Over 20 M.P.H.

5) You're a Long way up! :  You don't really realize that you are atop a small pony on your saddle. Instead of legs that could carry a grown man down the side of the Grand Canyon, you are praying that your 23 cm tires can withstand that small pebble for a few more seconds on your way down a hill going 40 m.p.h. with nothing between you and your chiclets but five feet of air which you catapult through at a speed that can only be calculated by a high-tech NASA computer that has yet to be invented.

4) Road Rash Sucks: Holy Burning Flesh Batman!  I remember getting road rash as a child, but never to quite the degree that I received from my fall this week. Road rash can only be described as feeling like your skin is on fire for several days. Showering was dreadful all week. In fact—as gross as this sounds—I managed to avoid showering for a couple days following the crash. The first time I did, I thought that I would have rather have been subjected to listening to Lady Gaga for 12 straight hours (minus the apparatus to keep my eyes open like that scene in a Clockwork Orange. That was just weird.)
The good news? I was coaching my son's LL team just hours after the crash. The wifey came up to me and said "... you are so macho" and gave me a little wink. I thought... "hell yes... hell yes, I'm macho." I then cranked some Justin Beiber on my stereo when I got home.


3) Get Back Out There Right Away: When I was playing Little League as a kid (I am now coaching my son's Little League team—that is a WHOLE other post!) I got hit by a pitch right in the ribs. I did not think I could breath for what seemed like hours. My father made me get right back out there the next game and stand in the box. I am glad he did. It took a little bit of time before I felt truly comfortable hitting or catching a line drive hit 60 feet away, but I eventually managed to conquer those fears. I got right back on my bike the very next day and rode... slowly.


4) It's Okay To Be Scared: I have been a tad tentative on my rides this past week. You know... when the wind blows I am thinking, "Oh dear Lord, please don't let me fall off and break something." Nothing really hampers your season like breaking something.

There should be signs like this one warning
unassuming cyclists of unmarked potholes!

5) It Will Happen Again: Look, I am no moron. I do not welcome death. No one does, but we all cheat it. Everyday. I am smart enough to realize that it is not a matter of "if" I am going to take another spill, but "when." The best I can do is minimize the amount of damage I do to my body by making sure that my bike gets regular service (it is a good thing to check those brake lines and pads occasionally), and realize that going 45 m.p.h. down a hill when you have five children is just not necessary. Honestly, 35 m.p.h. is fine. Every once in a while I think about how fast 40 m.p.h. is on a bike and think about falling at THAT speed. That scares the hell out of me. I am still a bit tentative after the big fall, but I am sure that I will lose some of those inhibitions soon enough. I have been a lot more careful about looking well ahead of me for debris and unmarked potholes all week. The blood has almost stopped seeping from my knee.

THE KNEE: I may have finally had a bit of a revelation about my knee. The thing about an injury is that you really have to determine how the pain started developing. Post to follow.

Train Smart!

The Friday Top Five and Continued Craziness

The past couple of weeks have been a complete blur, and it is going to continue along this path until the end of April. I am premiering a new work on April 1 to mark the 175th anniversary of a local university. Yes, I am aware that it is on April Fools Day, and if I don't start cranking out some music very quickly in the month of March, the joke will definitely be on them!

I have been trying to desperately to meet all my workouts during the week, but I have missed a couple this week. When it comes down to keeping my job or training, my job seems to wins out for some strange reason. Something about ensuring I can provide for my family seems to be more of a priority. I have been really burning it at both ends—of course, it seems like all my friends are right along there with me. If it were not for wifey, I don't know how we would ever survive. She has been maintaing status quo for the better part of the year as I have been commuting an hour to work each way every day. Ugh.

The good news? I am eating everything in sight just to keep on weight. Ice cream, cake, fudge. Ah, training does have its advantages.


The Friday Top Five: After much consideration, and after speaking with many of my colleagues who are guitar instructors at colleges and universities around the country, I have compiled the definitive list of the top five greatest rock guitarists of all time.

The criteria for this list are: originality, facility, and innovation. These guitarists not only played amazingly, but they completely changed the way in which players approach the instrument. Without further adieu, they are:

#5 Chuck Berry—Berry was unquestionably the first giant of rock and roll guitar. There would be no rock and roll guitar if it were not for Chuck Berry. Some rock and roll scholars say that he and Little Richard single-handedly invented the genre (even though the term rock and roll was coined by New York DJ Alan Freed who use to play black R&B after hours on the radio). Sure, Elvis might have been anointed the "King of Rock and Roll," but if it were not for Chuck, Elvis might not ever have happened. The cool thing about Chuck is that his guitar was always out of tune and he played with a sincerity. He also wrote some of the best anthems to the playing of rock and roll in Johnny B. Goode, Roll Over Beethoven, and Rock and Roll Music. 

#4 Eddie Van Halen—Although he did not invent finger tapping, he certainly helped popularize the technique which culminated in the recording of Eruption. Equally important was Van Halen's use of tuning and volume swells. More, the dude has played with everyone from Dweezil Zappa to Thomas Dolby, oh, not to mention playing the solo on a little tune by Michael Jackson titled Beat It. He was quite possibly the guitar hero for every single young aspiring guitarist from my generation. 1984 came out when I was in seventh grade and I remember thinking, who is this dude playing guitar?

#3 Jeff Beck—This former Yardbirds frontman went on to influence thousands of guitarists with his blending of Indian music with jazz and rock. He lists Ravi Shankar as one of his greatest influences. You probably don't know Beck's solo work unless you are a true rock guitarist aficionado, but you ought to go and discover it if you don't know it yet.

#2 Jimmy Hendrix—Definitely did not have the greatest facility as some of other rock guitarists, but his use of timbre and texture by means of distortion were revolutionary, not to mention, he was one incredible songwriter. I still get goosebumps every time I hear Hey Joe. His performances to me are spiritual. His impromptu performance on the Dick Cavett show was legendary. Besides, who else played so well with his teeth and could burn his guitar and then smash the hell out of it and look cool doing it? Unfortunately, he had to join the 27 club along with Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, much to the disillusionment of a hippie generation searching for some utopian drug induced Nirvana. Speaking of Nirvana, Kurt Cobain was the most recent addition to the 27 club.

#1 Steve Vai—In 1979, Steve Vai mailed Frank Zappa a transcription (taking a melody or rhythm that has been improvised, and writing it out with musical notation) of his tune The Black Page. There are not too many other guitarists in history that have the theoretical chops to be able to do that. Zappa was so impressed that he hired Vai in 1979 to transcribe a bunch of his guitar solos.

Okay, I know what you're thinking—there are some noticeable exceptions here. Where is Jimmy Page? Yeah, well, here's the deal with Jimmy: I think the band Led Zeppelin was incredibly innovative, and Page was an amazing song writer (quite possibly the best guitarist-songwriter in rock and roll history), but he essentially played tasty rhythm and blues licks with a whole lot of distortion. So did Hendrix, but Hendrix use of distortion and sound producing techniques (like playing Little Wing through a Leslie speaker normally used for a Hammond organ), inspired scours of heavy metal bands to experiment with sound in an outside of the studio during the late 1970's and early 1980's. So, my list of honorable mentions include: JimmyPage, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Johnny Ramone, Mark Knopfler, George Harrison and Kirk Hammett.


Training: Like I said at the beginning of my post, I have gotten most  of my workouts in this week. Sorry Coach Mary, but I only managed to get in one swim this week—yikes!  I had one of the worst runs of my training on Thursday.

Have you ever gone out for an easy training run and it just felt like you couldn't find your rhythm? Well, it was not exactly a easy zone two run—I did some zone 3 work at 5x5:00 intervals with 2:00 rest in between. I never quite got into a groove. I had an awesome 1.5 hour bike ride yesterday, followed by a kick-ass 1.5 hour zone 2 run today. I am actually running faster in zone 2. I never thought it would happen! I guess Coach Mary does indeed know what she's talking about. Go figure! The good news was I came home that day to a package from SBR—one of the Trakkers team sponsors this season. Yeah, let me just talk to you a second about this stuff. Do you dislike smelling like chlorine? This is the real deal. I am not embarrassed to admit that I broke out with a tube of the TRISWIM Lotion at the campus gym the other day after my swim and then subsequently offered it to the guys in the locker room. The TRISLIDE is the true bomb-diggity, no lie. I only recently discovered it when a couple of my soon-to-be teammates were accosting us letting us try it out at Rev3 Cedar Point last season. Yeah, there is NOTHING like this. I have used some other stuff to get my wetsuit on and off and to prevent chafing, but I actually refer to this as my "Magic in a Can". I actually had been using Foggle for the past year and can tell you that the rubber on your goggles will snap before you have to buy a new pair because of fogging. Anyway, thanks SBR!

I have to say a big thank you to First Endurance nutrition for coming on board and being part of the Trakkers team. Of course, as you can see, I did not need to be sold on First Endurance. I have been using it since last season when Kelly C. turned me onto it. I have to say, I have been very pleased with the results. I can not do a swim workout without my EFS Grape drink. It's just how I roll. First Endurance will also be the official drink of my Ragnerite team this May as me and eleven other insane people attempt to run a relay race from Woodstock to Manhattan (approximately 184.1 miles), but who's counting?

Yeah, life can be good, right? Here are Julian and Stella saluting with some wine-water. What? We're Italian, we start early in our house.

Train Smart!