Days 456

Here we go... So, day 4. Simple, no real thrills, 90' R in the pm. Nice water, nice weather, headwind a bit, only saw one dolphin. Lol. only one. Either way a nice row, kayakers were everywhere as usual. This was thursday, 2 days before the 2k, nerves were less than as per usual but I'm not sure why, probably just the joy of being in florida. Probably a good thing. I was introduced to the wonders of the Lord of the Rings, we watched the fellowship of the ring and passed out.

Day 4, friday, got up, ate a light breakfast, then lactate test, then better lunch/breakfast, then chillin. Walked down to the beach again, beautiful, spent a good bit of time talking to Matt McGovern, a good buddy and two year roommate from IC. Good to catch up and just shoot the shit for a bit on life and his pursuit of the ever elusive Amy Bates. Passed out early Friday night, don't even know what we did really, just that I ate some food and passed out, kinda nervous, not really feeling the 2k but knowing that you gotta do what you gotta do.

Day 5, saturday, up, weighed myself, good weight, then ate a bit of breakfast, just toast, banana, pb, honey. got ready for the piece, warmed up, pulled. 6:34.5. Sort of a disappointing result. I'm not 100% sure of what it was that made it a disappointing piece, but it was. I perhaps, as per usual started out a bit too hard, though at the time I didn't think so because of my 6k result. I was feeling pretty good until about 1300 to go, where the burn started to take over and things started to slip. Let's just let you imagine from there how it went. You have a pretty good idea. Post 2k, was alot of fun, despite the poor result. Here's how the day unfolded:

Finish 2k - in pain - wtf. bah, w/e... bring the 2 contraband ergs back to the boathouse, listen to Jon tell me how I shouldn't be self depricating, because I had a bad piece, and I should just get over it. Well yeah, I mean, a bad piece is a bad piece, but in the same vein, THIS IS WHAT I DO. This is all I do. I row currently. Unfortunatley, I don't have all the money in the world and I have to work 2 jobs this summer and I would like to do some other things with my life too, but I cant right now. So fuck, I think I can be a little disappointed by a bad 2k. Or at least one that didn't go as I would have hoped/thought. I mean, It's pretty fucking frustrating when I put in 2x the time as some other people and their results are better than mine. Not Jon obviously but people in college etc. UGH.

Anyway, we return, Brian inquires about acquiring some beer. I say that sounds like a fabulous Idea. We return to the house with a 12 pack of Sam's Noble Pils. Yum. We down one and then head to long doggers, a hotdog/fish place just up the road. I have a mahi sandwich and some fried plantains, along with 2 more noble pils. yum. Fried plantains are fucking awesome. Absolutely delicious. After we return, we head to the beach, 1 beer in cup, one in back pocket. We see Jon drive by w/ Becca and head exactally where we're headed. We arrive at the beach, we're cracking our beers near the steps to the entrance and brian goes: "cop cop cop cop" we quickly walk up the step and see that he was simply pulling someone over for a traffic violation... phew. then since he was feeling lucky, brian takes a piss right there lol.

we turn the opposite direction and continue our man-date toward the south. We shoot the shit about life and rowing etc... and we drink our nobles and we turn around. We see crazy looking seagulls:
The black spots on top of their heads were what made them kinda crazy lookin. We also saw two chick doing intervals down the beach bare foot, looked like fun, we were a little too inebriated to race them, and to be honest, they looked a little scared of us haha. After turning around, I couldn't resist to dip my feet in the water, so nice, thanks for that gene mom. haha. we strolled back down the beach and I had brian take this pic of me:
He must have hit the button right as my jeans were getting soaked haha. Post beach excursion, we stop off at a CVS which is literally right across the street from the beach, kind of an interesting place for a cvs, and we enter the candy motherlode. I grab some twizzlers, a cadbury caramel egg, and two russell stover eggs, one maple cream, the other coconut cream, not sure if they'll be good. haven't tried them yet. I ate the twizzlers on the way back.

Earlier, when we were grabbing the beer, we also picked up the 2nd lord of the rings: the two towers. I made coffee, we drank more beer and watched this long but awesome flick. After that (around 6pm) I was pretty tapped out. My drinking (brian had more staying power) subsided and I began the ritual chugging of water. Today we were supposed to go surfing, not sure that's gonna happen as it's already 9:30 and Jon is just eating breakfast w/ Becca and we've gotta get a row in today. So who knows. Trying to go with the flow. need to get outside though. It's too nice to just hang around all day waiting to row. I'll go insane. Perhaps a run, in 30'ish and then row later, who knows... more to come soon.

flo-rida day 2/3

well. let me just say, that i found a little bit of elation about 5 seconds ago when I decided to take a jog from Jon's house to the beach. It literally took about 11 min from my feet to step out of jon's door and hit the gorgeous sand of satellite beach...

carriage rd.

our humble abode

the end of desoto pkwy

looking north

looking south

africa?

petes feets

see ya later, awesome

Well, that was just this morning! here's some of our previous endeavors:

Yesterday, all that was on the plan was to lift, so we made our way down to "our club" - literally the name of the gym we used; which was about a 10' drive from jon's. This place was nice, and did the job fine, however it was quite possibly the worst part of my trip fiscally. I need to use this place a total of 3 times; yesterday was the first, and each time it costs $10. WTF. I spoke with the front office about his and they said I could get a weekly membership, for 30 dollars, or a month for 45. They didn't really understand how that didn't help me at all. I may just try to gain access with my receipt from yesterday for our next lift.

Anywho. lifted weights we did. after we came home, ate some lunch, chilled, and round 4 headed to the boathouse to help the juniors w/ practice. None of us really wore enough clothes for the launch... The kids forgot to put the plug in the launch... Vanessa (guys varsity coach) got stuck in traffic... yep, this was a junior rowing program. lol. Either way it was fun being in the launch and I told Vanessa a couple of things that I noticed about her kids and she had them do a drill I recommended. After about an hour of drilling, we brought the kids back in and Brian, Jon and I took off; We were COLD. Kind of an odd thing for florida, though apparently not in 2010.

We came home, ate dinner, went to walmart to buy a dvd player, ended up getting mms, and brian rented startrek. We ate mms and watched, and passed out.

This am, got up, made oatmeal w/ banana, and strawberries (which are awesome&cheap here) and then I decided to go for the run, mentioned above. Rowing at 4... catch ya on the flip.

floriday day 1

so, arrive in fla, after leaving bmore@ 7am. Got to the house round 11am, hit up publix for one of their AWESOME subs, yum, then on to the boathouse for a row. I was a little skeptical about this in the beginning, the wind was blowing. BLOWING. It was about a 20 some odd mph wind out of the south with gusts up in the 30's... fucking crazy.

We get to the boathouse, and I'm thinking, there's no way. no fucking way. but, after surviving the 7 or so min. that it takes to get from the boathouse to the inlet off of the banana river, there was totally rowable water. Unbelievable. A 6k stretch about the width of the inlet in ithaca, perhaps a bit less because of the boats parked on both sides, but protected like woah. Even better about this inlet is that its got a designation as a manatee zone, so that means idle speed - no wake. I.e. no pain in the ass motorboaters, going too fast. lol.

This place is also apparently a training spot for international kayak teams, crazy, they move pretty quick, and! there's 4 man kayaks, which i've never seen, kinda nuts. i got caught between two of those, and they throw a wake. lol. probably comparable to the wake of an 8. nuts.

So despite the 40 or so kayaks on the river, there was plenty of water to get the distance in, nice. Though the wind was a challenge, after the first few strokes I was remembering why I row. I also realized that aside from the 2k erg test this saturday and the other tests/bad weather days we may have, I'm for the most part done w/ the ergo for the winter! huzah. Nice. Time to actually do what we love to do...

Also, I saw at least 5 dolphins during my row :). Not sure if it was 5 different dolphins, but it was 5 different sightings, and also, I saw a ton of really cool pelicans with sweet yellow gullets. cool.

ttfn, pics and stuff to come soon hopefully. i do have one from the plane from yesterday am. pretty cool sun, over md/va i'm assuming.

b-more-skis

So, after a couple of days at home, nice... good to be home for sure, headed down to the b-more to see scald. Ended up jetting out earlier than usual which was really nice. I was origionally going to leave thursday afternoon but ended up leaving wednesday night. This is because, with ald and I's luck a jigundo storm was threatening to delay or cancel my bus. So, wednesday ended up becoming a run a round day where I got all the things done that I needed to before leaving home and I was able to catch the bolt bus early. Score.

It was so nice to finally finally finally - after two months see aldi. so nice. She even picked me up from the bus and dealt with the fact that I needed to get up a 5 am to erg, lol. That first morning after I had gotten done ergin was a quintessentially pete morning. My essence if you will. I got to do all the things i love to do. Or. Perhaps it was the thing I love to do. Lol. After scald had to go off to work, which was lame, but what can ya do.... I got in the gret, who i've missed very much, and drove to whole foods :). There I grabbed a coffee, and in what I can most closely relate to strolling an outdoor European market I leisurely wandered the isles of the harbor east whole foods. Love doing this. There's alot of good stuff there, and though it IS a super market, it feels like a shade better than the huge conglomerate evil, lol. I mean organic may not necessarily be better by a ton, but it's better by a little at least. Got some yum stuff, there, oranges, apples, choco milk, bananas, natural pb, etc, yum! also broccolini, and some sweet (though salty in flavour) pecorino romano, and perhaps my fave pasta shape, orrichiette. And, a lb of fresh spinach. Needles to say we made an awesome dinner that night. enough about the food lol.

A couple of highlights:
The walters art museum, a sweet little-ish (by nyc standards) art museum that had some sweet stuff, like a room with armour, an awesome exhibit on japanese enamel. We were seriously hung over after seeing my buddy tom bellu the night before, but we managed to work our way through about 50% of the museum. We'll save the rest for another time.

I'd also say that seeing tom was a highlight, haven't seen him for a number of monthes, he's doing well I'd say, even if he's drinking ALOT.

Bowling... always a good time.

PHO. period. PHO.

Bmore is a seriously interesting city, neat mix of people from all over. See you soon.

long overdue

yo. so this entry is seriously seriously overdue and will encompass a bunch of shit so be ready lol.

the most salient, pertinent, and important news is that this past saturday, (6days ago) I had a long overdue, fulfilling pr on my 6k erg. I had a pr the previous weekend as well but it was not nearly as good of a piece (14s slower) and mentally not all that great either.

I think there were two things in particular that allowed for the jump in speed, both of which were mental. Obviously serious speed gains on the physiological end cannot occur in a week. Both changes sort of went hand in hand but were spurred by another one of the weekend's occurrences: the GMS banquet. At the banquet we did all the typical schmuzin and chatting and eating etc etc etc but when gman gave his little spiel to the junior about what their efforts meant and how he hoped that they could one day be like the hps group, and that this is their effort and their thing, and the erg was like the rowing world's sat score... well. all of that sort of added up. Post banquet we had the "barn party" which was essentially a few good drinks with a few good people in our small erg room in the barn. During an erg the next day at Nyac i made up my mind. Steffan was sitting next to me and i was mulling over in my head the things that had been said the night before and the combination of finishing a piece with the tanks not empty and the words of inspiration by gman I made up my mind. I was going to test again.

The second aspect of the equation was that i didn't feel I had enough mental prep time to properly ready myself for this piece. Basically, we had heard that it that gman would prefer we go on feb 6. not jan 28. but when jan 25th rolled around we found out that we had presumed incorrectly and that we were going to piece that weekend. This sort of threw me off and I got a bit nervous and didn't have my focus together. The result was dealing with the stress by eating improperly the day before and not readying my self mentally to attack the piece. After making my decision, on monday night after the banquet, to test again, I had ample time to wrap my head around this and give it a whole hearted go.

Training the week leading into the next piece was almost trance like. When I got on the erg I used my time there to focus intensely as if I was mid piece. Even while doing steady-state, I focused on hitting the wattages with consistent, long, and efficient strokes, no wasted movements just effective strokes.

On our travel back to New Milford on Friday, we made our usual stop at the P&H truckstop about 1hr outside Craftsbury, here I resisted the oversize chocolate chip cookie and went for the orange cranberry muffin. I had a wonderful cinamon raisin cashew butter & jelly sandwich for lunch with an apple and then later for a pm snack the muffin and an orange. Delicious. Wow. I almost forgot to mention our flat tire. HA.

So...... put this in your mind's eye: we're driving on the dirt roads from cbury toward the highway, snowy, dirty, bumpy roads, which end with a 1/4 mile stretch of paved road before we get to the highway. Jon and I are making the left onto the highway when he asks me what that rythmic bumping noise was... having blocked the background noise out of my head with whatever silly thought I had been thinking, I gulp and think "oh fuck" as I immediately recognize what he's refering to. That unmistakable flap flap flap of a flat tire.

We stop, I open my door and look back, a breeze of burned rubber greats my nose. 'uh, yeah dude. we've got a flat'

Both in unison: "fuck."

To Jon's credit, he quickly fixed the flat and we were back on the road within 15 minutes. The catch was that bmw x3's don't have full size spares; we were rolling, but no faster than 60 mph. We made it home nonetheless. Things actually worked out perfectly (sort of), because we stopped in Hartford CT a the bmw dealership to try and get a tire - they had just sold out of the last one. but we ended up going to whole foods, which allowed me to pick up some goodies for dinner: whole wheat ravioli w/ butternut squash + grana padano and some broccolini. Delish. blanched the broccolini then sauteed them with some garlic and red pepper and olive oil, boiled the ravioli then threw them in the pan as well. yum. This was such a great pre-race meal. Awesome.

Going to bed friday night, I was tired, well fed, and mentally prepared. There was that little voice that pops up every time you voluntarily do another piece that says "hey, you know you don't have to do this" i shut it up and went to bed.

In the morning I woke up, ate my half pb and j and banana and made my way over to the trailer for our pre-training meeting. Gman had caught wind of my plans and was 'surprised' 'but in a good way' . So we warmed up and with a bit of nerves I took my first few strokes; I settled in with focus, and pretty decent rhythm.

This piece had a focus that can only be described through a flow state. The kind where you are just so focused and determined to do what you're doing that the world seems to disappear. This time it wasn't so much like a pair of horse blinder, but more like me, the erg, and gman. Every so often he would walk behind me and I would just think to myself, haha you fucker, eat this.

I knew that in my last 2500, I would need some serious determination and focus, this was the worst point of my piece the week before and possibly the toughest part of any test piece, the last half. This time I wasn't in survival mode like the previous week, I was determined to put this piece away. And, as you know, I did. I was ecstatic. It's amazing how your mental state can be so different after such similar levels of exertion. The difference in split was likely only 1.5 or so seconds, however even after going harder, I was able to feel amazing. The mind is a seriously powerful thing.

The six k pr was celebrated that night with a very nice dark chocolate bar :) This was a great weekend.

Sorry this post took forever and a day, but... better late than never I suppose.

pics from cbury

View from dining hall of grand hosmer lake

Dining hall where awesome meal-age goes down

Cardio in workout room + funky painting

More workout room

Even more workout room

Yes. it is cold here

One Entrance to Cedar lodge - where guests stay and where workout room and sauna is.

Big view of cedar lodge.

Looking left from our house, the way we come in. notice outdoor pizza oven on left

Looking right from our house, you can see the smaller lodge (tamarac)

Dining hall entrance and hosmer

Parking lot, dining hall entrance, hosmer and roof of pizza oven :)

Entrance to our upstairs appt. - Notice slanty window. Pic below from it.

View from our staircase window. Which is on the same pitch as the stairs... wierd vt thing...

Where jon and I lay our heads. lol. cramped

View from our back porch. White building is the dining hall. and behind the trees is lake hosmer, where we can do some steady volume on skis

'ello

new blog. new chapter.
Thought it would be a great time to start up a new blog, one that has some more longevity to it. Something a bit more constant and enduring than "pete @ dev camp" or "blm4x @ u23s" - a blog not necessarily or exclusively about the rigors of training and making weight, but one about my life. This will undoubtedly include many entries on rowing and training and eating and thinking I'm fat etc. etc. however I intend "chasing elation" to encompass my life in whole - the macro, not the micro.

As of right now this feels like sort of a mass email, something of an update for those I love and care about, a way of communicating that can be read by everyone. but maybe an email list is better. though maybe this way is more for me than just you, because if I was writing to you, all of you, I don't think I would be as open to hashing/figuring things out as I can be here.

So there you have it. part blog, part letter, part diary.

Let's recap the day shall we?
Woke, around 7 despite less sleep that I would have liked. Can't seem to override the body's internal alarm sometimes. Read a bit of James Fray's "Bright Shiny Morning" which has been a rather interesting book thus far. It is so far a series of vignettes with a few threads beginning to show themselves more than once. There's a couple in there that basically empties their bank accounts and peaces out for California. Bob, this reminds me of you, always dreaming of doing these things but deciding that we're too well off to just up and leave like these kids. For me I think it's the escapism that I like the most. The ability to live without responsibility is a wonderful impossibility. At the very least you have to be responsible for your health.

When it was finally time for breakfast...845. second sitting. paying customers come first. I gobbled down some delicious home cooked goodies. oatmeal w/ raisins and strawberries and dates, a chocolate chip muffin, and a pumpkin one. too much, hard to resist such awesome things when they're at your fingertips. At 11 I had a massage with Kimberly Howell who is the on staff masseuse here at craftsbury. We had a good chat while she took care of my naked butt. Ha. A bit of pain in the Sit bone area left me bare cheeked at the table, but Kimberly did a great job of making me comfortable, and there wasn't really any awkwardness. Kind soul to give a 22 year old guy a 50min long but massage for nothing. Wouldn't even let me buy her a bottle of wine. Too kind.

This is another reoccuring theme of Cbury. People here are so nice. There has been tremendous hospitality toward us rowers. Some of which I struggle to believe. They put us up in a sweet apartment of our own, above the main office, we're provided 3 awesome meals a day, over 60k of sweet xc ski trails, exercise facilities etc. And we need to put in 15hrs of work per week. Pretty good deal.

So, post massage, 60' ergo, and stretch, nice. Then Lunch. Another delicious meal and a bit of a chat with the dining hall staff. I offered my services if they needed help, I think it would be fun to work in the kitchen. Think it would be a sweet way to meet some other people here, learn how to make some yummy stuff, and see what the inside of a kitchen that cooks for 100 people every day looks like. Perhaps I'll get the chance while I'm still here.

After lunch, Jon and I drove down to Concept 2 to pick up our new hr monitors, which thanks to their generosity and us being on national teams this year, were at a $100 discount. Only 50 bucks each. Too good to pass up. The drive was as most afternoon drives are here: beautiful.

We made good time on this trip, It was starting to look like a 3 hour round trip when we looked at google maps and the time we assumed we would spend in the factory, however we mad it back in time enough to grab a slice of pizza from the green ski team who were firing up some sweet pies from the center's outdoor pizza oven. Fucking awesome.

After that, I helped Larry with his fitness class. This is essentially a circuit training class for 50-70 somethings who live in the craftsbury area. Great group. Full of joy and truely excited about their training. They love using their bodies, and that I think is the primary focus of this class, to encourage a healthful enjoyment of one's body. Larry does a good job of accomplishing this.

After class, another wonderful meal. Surprise surprise. Pete=spoiled. Seriously. Food spoiled. Nature spoiled. It's safe to say I'm enjoying my time here. I also think that writing about it has made this more evident to me. Naeem would be proud scald. Anyway, it's getting late ish, gonna hit the hay soon. Lets do this again soon.