Skip to content

MnTriClub announces My First Tri Clinic

The Minnesota Triathlon Club is sponsoring a “My First Tri” clinic at the Midtown YWCA on Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM. Here are the details from the email announcement:

It’s finally time for the 2008 version of the MN TriClub’s fabulously famous clinic; “Your First Tri”. This clinic is led by fellow TriClub member Duey Carlson, and is an annual favorite. Duey is an experienced age-group triathlete who has completed many tri’s from “mini’s” to Ironman. Although the clinic is held in a lecture format (so no need for workout clothes), the setting is highly informal and greatly benefits from lots and lots of your questions! Duey will bring along all of his tri gear, so when he is explaining something he can show it to you as well. You’ll get to see and touch everything and ask all the questions you want (remember: there are no dumb questions in triathlon – we all had to start somewhere and we all had the same questions in our minds that you have now!). This is one-stop shopping for all of your “First Tri” information. You’ll always remember the experience of your first tri, so be sure and attend this clinic to make that experience the best that it can be. And even if you’ve done triathlons before you might want to attend; I always pick up a new bit of information every time I attend. All are welcome; you do NOT have to be a MN TriClub member to attend.

Here’s just a few of the topics that Duey will cover:

  • Picking a race
  • What gear you’ll need
  • What to do the night before
  • What to do on race morning
  • The swim start and the swim itself
  • T1 (swim to bike transition)
  • The bike portion
  • T2 (bike to run transition)
  • The run portion
  • Post race
  • How do I know I’m ready?
  • Tapering

So, what are the specifics related to the clinic?

  • WHEN: Saturday, April 26th from 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
  • WHERE: Midtown YWCA - Click Here for map & directions
  • WHO: Anyone who wants to prepare for their first triathlon (MN TriClub membership is not required)
  • RSVP: pjohnson [AT] YWCA-Minneapolis [dot] org
  • COST: Zero, Zip, Nada, Free!!!

IMPORTANT: When you get to the Y, there will be a table set up just inside the front doors where you will need to sign in and get a name tag. Due to the times we live in, you’ll also need to show a photo ID at sign in as the Y needs to have an accurate record of who is in the building. After signing in, you’ll be directed to the clinic room. Light refreshments will be provided by the TriClub.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , ,

2008 04 20 Scott Sutherland triathlon Comments (0) Permalink

Swimming and a 10 Count

I’ve been swimming more then usual over the last eight weeks in order to prepare for the 1500m swim leg in the Lifetime Olympic distance triathlon in July. The problem — as always — seems to boil down to some kind of swim endurance and/or comfort level that I need to develop. I wanted to pass along some things I’ve been told which appear to be helping and which may help others.

First, swim endurance has been an personal issue for some time. I can easily swim short distances with comfort and efficiency, but as I attempt extend the distance of any given swim effort I experience a kind of gradually rising panic. I had been attempting to extend distance in swim efforts by doing sets of pyramids. Pyramids are a cyclic interval type exercise; in my case I was swimming 50m, 100m, 150m, 200m, 150m, 100m, 50m for 800m total per effort. A set would typically consist of two or three of these yielding 1600 or 2400 meters of total swimming. While pyramids seemed to be going ok, I really hated them. I swam them with difficultly and was constantly tempted to shorten sets or length. Mentally, it wasn’t resulting in much progress.

Fortunately, an alternate path was suggested to me and it has produced some tangible results. The suggestion was to swim a measured distance with planned breaks, then over time squeezing the length of the breaks down to make the distance more contiguous. In my case I was swimming 1500m as 30×50m with 30 second breaks between efforts. Each 50 is a comfortable distance, and the 30 second breaks allowed me to defer the lap counting to my watch. The watch keeps me honest, and the 50m laps have gotten easier. Executing this plan has provided some structure to the time I’ve been swimming which makes it easier to continue to work on.

Second, I have recently participated in a swim clinic sponsored by the Twin Cities Multisports Club. (TCMC) TCMC is a sister club to the Minnesota Tri Club (MNTC) which I have been part of for a couple of years now. In the clinic we were videotaped swimming from the side and from the front. I saw two obvious things in the one viewing of my swimming at the end of the clinic. First, my legs are still generally to deep. Second, I only get fully on my side when recovering my left arm. I have been focusing on these two things in recent pool efforts and something interesting happened.

I have mentioned before that I know that I was able to execute a 12 count for 25m before, but I had not been able to produce one recently. Most of the winter I was in the 14-15 range with occasional 13 counts, but on Thursday I produced two 10 counts. When the first one happened, I was so shocked that I had to stop at the wall. I was sure that I had miscounted, but then it happened again and was reinforced by some 11 counts as well. I should mention that I do not believe these stroke counts are maintainable over the course of a race, but it’s encouraging to know that it is indeed possible. Additionally, it opens the door to some nice potential swim golf scores.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , , , ,

2008 04 06 Scott Sutherland Swimming
triathlon Comments (3) Permalink

Upgrade pain

If you attempted to read anything here in the last sixteen or so hours and had the connection attempt refused it was caused by my upgrade attempt performed yesterday evening. Almost everything is back to normal at this point. Turns out there was a configuration issue for all the virtual domains, so all the user facing things would not work. Let me know if you find something wierd, and I’ll see what I can figure out.

A little of the detail. We are now running:

  • MySQL 5.0.x
  • PHP 5.1.x
  • Apache 2.0.59
  • Wordpress 2.5

Another new thing is my attempted use of the wp-openid plugin which.. um.. doesn’t work yet.. At least not fully.. If you have an openid that you want to use, register the old way and associated your identity URL with the created user. I believe that the issue is associated with the new wordpress password encoding technique. It is unclear to me at this point, but that is my suspicion.

OpenID is a GoodThing in my opinion, so give it a try. At present, comments are still under the same requires first approval policy we have had since the comment spammers started abusing us.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , ,

2008 03 30 Scott Sutherland Other Comments (0) Permalink

What the Star Tribune could learn from the NY Times

Late last year Nick Carr wrote a piece titled The business case for TimesSelect which discusses the recent change for the archives of the New York Times away from a subscription model toward an advertising model. Carr’s point is that the Times didn’t necessarily error when they made the choice of a subscription based web presence over a more open business model. His point and the resulting comments are interesting, however it made me think of how much I hate the business model of the Star Tribune here in the Twin Cities.

The policy of the Times subscription model was to make the archives available for a fee. After an article has aged some amount, it was archived behind the subscription policy. In the case of the Star Tribune, once an article ages past some point it is removed permanently from the site never to be seen again. Considering the concept of the long tail it seems this policy is the worst of both worlds; not only is the information not available to generate subscription revenue but it also is removed from the long tail benefit of potential advertising revenue. The Tribune, a publication struggling for revenue, seems to have done themselves a disservice.

As a side effect, I can no longer link to Star Tribune articles from this blog. Any link to a Star Tribune article is a broken link waiting to happen; their policy breaks MY site as well. From a traffic standpoint, this blog doesn’t make a substantive difference to their bottom line; however, the concept of the long tail suggests that a significant number of small blogs linking to a variety of articles over time would provide a non-trivial advertising income. As Carr likes to point out, the Star Tribune could share crop the profits from the work of others for the trivial cost of storage.

Putting aside the question of the public benefit associated with archives being available in some form, the business plan they have chosen to implement make me wonder if they have anything to say which is worth keeping around at all.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , ,

2008 03 29 Scott Sutherland Other Comments (0) Permalink

Ode to Cover Art

Once upon a time, I could locate albums in my music collection by the color of the spine. The cover art provided a kind of stylistic fingerprint as unique as the music itself; it was tangible. The process of hearing something new involved the consumption of the cover, jacket, and any enclosed materials in concert with the audio. The music and art were closely associated.

As my music collection has transformed from physical to digital, the album artwork has gradually become disentangled from the audio. Looking at the spines now seems more like gazing at a strangers collection. Sometimes looking at the collection produces moments of pleasant surprise at finding some long forgotten album or artist. The recognized album artwork producing a sudden remembrance of a favorite song, a concert attended, or some more loosely associated memory.

When adding new music to the digital collection, I always attempt to associate an image of the album cover art with the MP3 tracks. It’s not the same as handling a record jacket or reading the lyrics from a CD insert, but it allows some of the visual association with the audio as in the past. It enhances the experience.

Here is an excerpt of a Design Observer article by Adrian Shaughnessy titled “Are JPEGs the New Album Covers?” which looks into the future of album cover art. Check it out.

Over the past few months I’ve been researching a book about current record cover art. Besides hunting down examples of stimulating music graphics, I’ve also been looking for digital alternatives to the traditional album cover. As downloading threatens to become the main distribution method for recorded music, it is widely believed that the album cover will be replaced by some new online format — perhaps animated — that will make CD packaging redundant.

Are JPEGs the New Album Covers? by Adrian Shaughnessy

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , ,

2008 01 23 Scott Sutherland Music Comments (0) Permalink

Netbeans Tutorials associated with extending the IDE

The following is a collection of links which I have pulled (verbatim) from Sun’s website which I intend to return to in the future. They came from the Intro to Struts Tutorial (linked), but I’m more interested in the follow ups.

Adding Your Favorite Struts Features to the IDE

When using Struts, you are not limited to the functionality provided by the IDE. You can enhance the IDE by adding features that the IDE does not support. Here are some examples:

  • You can add Struts-specific HTML snippets to the Component Palette. For example, you can add the HTML code that you used to create the Submit, Reset, and Cancel buttons as snippets to the HTML palette.
    Then, you can drag the snippets from the palette and drop them in the Source Editor. You can create a NetBeans plug-in module that contains the snippets, and then share them with your colleagues. To do so, see the NetBeans Code Snippet Module Tutorial.
  • Instead of adding your Struts snippets to an existing palette, you can create a completely new palette, specifically for the struts-config.xml file. Again, you can share the result with your colleagues, in the form of a plug-in module. To do so, see the NetBeans Component Palette Module Tutorial.
  • You can extend the JSP editor, to provide features specifically for use with the Struts framework. As with the above two suggestions, sharing such features with colleagues is easy, once you provide a plug-in module for them. For details, see the NetBeans Editor Extension Module Tutorial.
  • You can create samples of Struts applications and make them available via plug-in modules. This way, you can share your knowledge with others, who can then access your samples from the New Project wizard, in the same way as any other NetBeans project sample is accessed. For details, see the NetBeans Project Sample Module Tutorial.

These are taken from a similar tutorial on the Spring Framework.

See Also

This concludes the Introduction to the Spring Framework in NetBeans IDE tutorial. This document demonstrated how to install the Spring Framework into NetBeans IDE, and introduced you to the IDE’s interface for developing in the framework.

You are encouraged to continue learning about the Spring Framework by working through other tutorials in NetBeans IDE, such as Thomas Risberg’s
Developing a Spring Framework MVC Application Step-by-Step tutorial.

For related and more advanced tutorials, see the following resources:

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , , , ,

2008 01 03 Scott Sutherland Other Comments (0) Permalink

Running with your ears on, Redux

I recently came across this article relating to the USA Track & Field regulation against wearing headphones in sanctioned events. Here’s the opening paragraph:

At the peak of the marathon season, with one of the year’s biggest races set for Sunday in New York, a worry has emerged among some runners, and it has nothing to do with hitting the wall at Mile 20: Will Beyoncé be there to push them to the finish? Will they be able to call upon Bon Jovi for support when there is no one else to turn to?

New York Times - Rule Jostles Runners Who Race to Their Own Tune

Now I understand — though I don’t agree with — the “boredom” angle which is the typical reason for running with headphones, but “support?” From Bon Jovi? Am I to understand that someone can train for 18 weeks, get to the start line, run the first 20 miles to exhaust their body of glycogen and their fast twitch muscles beyond functioning, then — just at the crucial moment — hear “Living on a prayer” and somehow be inspired enough to render all the rest of it irrelevant? That’s just a little rich.

I have no doubt that some believe they require music to run successfully, but I would think that those who do miss some of the experience associated with the event. For the New York Marathon, it’s just you and 39,085 of your closest friends. You’re going to ignore them all? You’re going to travel through all five boroughs of “the greatest city on Earth” with your eyes on the ground and plugs in your ears? Here’s a quote from the NYC Sports Commission:

An estimated two million spectators will watch the event from the streets of New York City, while a worldwide audience of over 315 million is expected to watch the televised broadcast.

Oh, never mind. “You give love a bad name” is going to start in a moment and requires my full attention.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , , , ,

2007 12 13 Scott Sutherland Music
Running Comments (0) Permalink

Marine Corps Marathon, tidbits

The following images were shamelessly pilfered from the runpix.com website which does visualizations of marathon races. Frankly, being a data wienie — or more specifically a heart rate data wienie, these guys and gals do really cool stuff. Check it!

Finisher Minute

The view above shows the runners who finished in the 30 seconds before and after my finish. On the real website, you can hover over the names to see who those folks are. I suppose that’s a good thing if you want to know who your local rivals are. What this image doesn’t show you is that those two blue dots just in front of me at the finish both collapsed and were taken away on stretchers. For me it’s just kinda neat to see that I could have moved up two division spots by running ten seconds faster. Here’s another view that’s interesting.

Finisher Location

This image shows where I was when various other people were crossing the line. As you can see, I had not made it back to Virginia when the overall race was decided. Down toward the end of Potomac Park where I was when the overall leader crossed the line is where the statue “Awaken” is located. I thought it was neat, but I didn’t stop for a look. ;)

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , , ,

2007 11 05 Scott Sutherland Running
Sports Comments (2) Permalink

See you in the next century…

Time Capsule

Through a series of people and happenings, I was able to meet Kevin Kling just before the release of his first book “The Dog Says How.” In a series of other occurrences, the office building where I work was requesting materials to be included in a time capsule as part of their 100 year celebration. Specifically, they were asking for things which reflected on life here at this time. Synergy!

The image above is the resting place of one copy of “The Dog Says How” never to be seen again this century. I hope that it makes it through those hundred years in reasonable condition, that those who see it next appreciate the stories as much as we do today, and that should Kevin ever run across this post that he understands it as an intended honor. ;)

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , ,

2007 11 04 Scott Sutherland Other Comments (0) Permalink

Marine Corps Marathon Results

Just a quick post on yesterdays run. Results are as follows:

Chip Time: 3:31:29

Clock Time: 3:33:57

Overall place: 1373/20667

Gender place: 1194/12610

Division place: 234/2263

Age Grade: 59.3%

I don’t really understand the age grade number. There’s a blurb on what it means, but the only interesting aspect of it is 60% is the minimum level for a “local level” performance. Whatever that implies.

The goal was 3:30, so I missed that by 90 seconds. However, it is a PR by around 5:30 or so. It’s an interesting course, hilly early, flat in the middle, and a kicker of a hill at the end. I was hoping that I could get the goal time as late as mile 22, but by that point my mile times were sliding and it got away.

I’ll post something more interesting when I have a bit more time.

Possibly related posts:

Tags: , , , , ,

2007 10 29 Scott Sutherland Running
Sports Comments (2) Permalink
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.