When I first started making noises about thinking about doing an Ironman, my wife bought me a GPS watch, the Garmin 910XT.

It’s actually a pretty sweet device. It has a ridiculously long battery life, it connects to all sorts of gadgets that are useful and it’s got a familiar albeit unusable user interface. After twenty years you’d think we’d have something other than that annoying beep beep beep sound…

The on real source of irritation is the power-supply.

Garmin wanted something that would be water and sweat proof and ridiculously robust so it could handle bike falls, collisions etc.. so they need some kind of solution that would work in really rough situations.

Their solution was two contacts on the base of the device

and a castanet that you attach to the device. Every time I charge my device, I keep wanting to sing Toreador from Carmen. 

(just in case you’re wondering the garmin gadget is the thing on the right).

The problem with this is system is:

1. Attaching the power-supply is like playing Operation just in reverse. You have to attach the power supply *just* so. 
2. The contacts get covered in sweat and sea water and require periodic cleaning with rubbing alcohol. The first time I discovered this, I only had vodka – which turned out to work just fine.
3. And sometimes even when you get the power supply attached correctly, you place it on the table in just the right way and it stops charging. Usually you discover that 10 to 15 minutes before you need it…

This is the one device that I really wish had a power supply with no cable….

One of the best parts of all of this training is working through the stress of daily life, you know, like a riot in Montreal.

When you go for a run, it’s easy to focus on everything but the training. You move your feet and your brain races with the worries of the day.

When you’re training for a triathlon, every minute you’re out training is done with purpose and requires focus. That focus allows you to find sometime during the day where the reality of the world recedes to the background.

In fact, when you stop focusing on the work at hand, letting the world bleed back in, then your pace slackens, your form degrades and the Garmin monitor starts beeping at you…

The time away from the stress, the planning, the failures, the future, the successes and the pain help make it possible to grind through another day.

Definitely better than eating and alcohol.

my wife is mocking triathlete obsession with good healthy eating. but this is an abomination.

While skiing this past weekend, I discovered that I had this new body to try out.

So I weigh less, but not that much less. And I don’t weigh much more than I weighed in my mid-thirties.

No, what’s really cool is that I have a lot more core strength and a left leg.

Well I always had a left leg, but it was very weak. For example, I could not stand on my left leg for more than 10 seconds at a time. So downhill skiing was about making big turns on my right leg to slow down, and really short turns on my left leg, because it was too weak. As part of my training for my marathon, I had to improve my cadence, and that had the salutary effect of forcing me to run on both legs.

The new core strength, for it’s part, lets me move my hips and do a turn without throwing my body from one side to the other.

The net effect is I can make much faster, tighter turns than I could before.

But a new body is like any new piece of equipment, it takes some time to get adjusted to it.

My wife and I were skiing down The Face at Homewood, when in sheer panic I turned left hard.

On the left you see what I was expecting to do. See marginal left turn setting up a bigger right turn. On the right you see what did happen. I turned so hard that I ended up having my skiis point uphill, and then proceeded to ski backwards. Because my core was so strong, I was actually able to stay up for about 3-5 seconds, before I even figured out what the hell was going on. Finally, when I realized what I was doing I stopped.