Wordless Wednesday: Heinlein on Specialization
Multi-Sport Mind: Biathlon
With the Sochi Winter Olympic Games right around the corner, I thought it might be fun to learn about an often overlooked winter multi-sport event: the Biathlon.
The word biathlon is of Greek origin and means “two tests”. In this case, the two tests are skiing and shooting. The sport has its roots in snow-covered Scandinavia where an important survival skill was the ability to hunt on skis with a rifle slung over the shoulder.
A form of biathlon appeared at the first Olympic Winter Games in 1924 as a team event called the military ski patrol. The military ski patrol would also be a demonstration event at St. Moritz 1928, Garmisch-Partenkirchen 1936 and St. Moritz 1948, the same year the rules for biathlon were standardized. Biathlon would make its official Olympic debut at the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley. Women would compete in Olympic biathlon for the first time at Albertville 1992. There are now five events each for men and women as well as a mixed relay which will make its debut at Sochi 2014.
The sport makes unique demands on biathletes’ bodies. After skiing fast and hard in cross-country free technique, biathletes must calm themselves to take accurate and controlled shots at targets 50 metres away. The target size depends on whether the athlete is in the prone or standing position. In the prone position, the hit area is 45 mm while in the standing position the hit area is 115 mm. (source)
I find that last part interesting, because cross-country skiing is an endurance sport (and a tough one at that), the other half of the sport demands an entirely different skill set. Mental focus, hard-eye coordination and such are really hard to achieve when your heart is pounding its way out of your chest (I used to have a video game in the early PC days called Winter Games; in the biathlon the targeting sight used to bounce up and down faster depending on how hard you had skied). Missing targets incurs time penalties, so you can undo the hard work done by fast skiing.
I’I’ve noticed that there isn’t much cross-country skiing going on in Southern Ontario due to lack of consistent snow, so adding the complication and expenses of firearms and the safety protocols doesn’t make the sport very accessible to local youth, though having seen youth in training at Highlands Nordic in Duntroon makes me hope that things are different in Central and Northern Ontario.
I’m not a youth, but the responsibility of storing a firearm safely still makes my interest in biathlon purely academic (but if I did want to get certified, I’d go to Guide To Game). It got me thinking, what if you substituted a bow (and arrows) for a rifle? I’d feel a little safer about that… I think the potential for accidents with a bow is probably a lot less. Well somebody already came up with Bowathlon it turns out… only they’ve subbed cross-country running for skiing. The other problem is that the site hasn’t been updated in over 10 years, but I still like knowing there are other people pursuing the Multi-sport Mind out there…
Have tried Biathlon? Would you? What about Bowathlon? Any other crazy combinations you could come up with?
Mothers’ Day
There’s two important mothers who have helped make me the man I am today, and if part of who I am is a triathlete, then they’re a big part of that too. Let’s do this in chronological order…
My mother was born in immediate post-war Germany, so she started off tough, as you can imagine. I know one story where her mother took her three daughters (my mother being the youngest) to pick potatoes from a field just so they’d have something to eat. My mother ended up with shoes full of blood – she couldn’t have been more than 3 or 4 years old. She grew up without a father thanks to the war, and my grandmother, my aunts and her had to move around a fair bit. Still, somehow they muddled through.
Athletically her side of the family has been very tennis-centric. It’s amazing to watch my mom play tennis (especially since she wins a lot) – no hard or fancy shots, she just hustles for the ball, and returns it consistently, grinding her opponents down. I haven’t stepped on a court in years, nor seen her play recently, but I bet it’s still the same. Growing up, we didn’t just have tennis though. I can remember being in Scouts (everything from Cubs to Venturers), piano lessons, soccer, judo, diving, softball… the list goes on and on. On weekends we’d bike as a family or cross-country ski or hike at the cottage. We were a multi-disciplinarian, multi-sport family, so now, I’m a multi-disciplinarian, multi-sport man.
When I met my wife, I was immediately impressed by how many pies she had her fingers in (figuratively speaking, you understand). She was working full-time in a marketing executive position, volunteering with a Young Executives of Canada subcommittee of the German-Canadian Chamber of Commerce, teaching special needs kids to ski, all while maintaining an active social life and close ties to her family. She even seemed game to take on training for a half-marathon with me, so that’s what we did.
Getting to know someone as a friend and better through running (or another form of training, I suppose) till the point where you’re starting to fall in love with them is something I’d wish for anyone who tries to lead a physically active lifestyle. Running, exercise and physical challenges have always been part of our relationship, and now they’re part of our family life too. Bringing triathlon into any relationship takes the support of your partner and it can mean outright sacrifice too; so I’m lucky to not only have her in my life to do all those little things that make swimming, biking and running possible, but also that she enjoys similar pursuits and I get the chance to return the favour sometimes. For the second year in a row, I will be taking care of our sons on Mother’s Day while she runs the Sporting Life 10K… and we’ll be all waiting for her at the finish line (this year I even did the race kit pickup!).
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| The Human Totem Pole from last year |
Happy Mother’s Day (or Mothers’ Day… there could be more than 1 mother in your life!) How have the Mothers in your life shape your healthy lifestyle?
Felicitous Friday: Week in Review
Another week has gone by with enough interesting developments to merit a recap post!
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On Tuesday I did a new record for longest swim workout using the ‘Ladder’ workout from Meals And Miles’ Swim Workouts Compilation. That was before breakfast, and I made it to a Gravity Machine class for lunch. If I had one more workout/form of exercise, I could have called it another Trifecta Tuesday, but since I didn’t, we’ll call it a #FAIL 😉
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Those two workouts made me a little sore for Wednesday, but it was some of the nicest weather we’d had all year, so wild horses weren’t going to keep me from doing a Burbathlon! I wasn’t too intense on upper body strength exercises, but I did fit in lunges with a park swing, box jumps on a bench, push-ups, step-ups on a stump, balance beam on a few logs, as well as jumping and (simple-)vaulting some logs and a baseball diamond fence.
It starts with a hill and a path into the woods…. 
The Big Hill to Climb 
Dips in the trail… 
This pic was taken in a colder season… but you can see the lunge with a swing. -
That all left me too sore on Thursday to do my planned workouts, so recovery it was… especially since I neglected to wear compression or foam-roll the night before.
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Friday is a day of excitement. I tried out a bike workout hack that I’ve had rolling around in my head for a while, but you’ll have to wait to see it.. The rest of the weekend is jam-packed with activities and get togethers including initial planning this year’s Levac Attack and a Fitfluential Tweet-Up (or whatever we call get-togethers of online friends) to welcome Pavement Runner to Toronto, where he’ll be doing the Goodlife Toronto Marathon.
How was your week? Is your weekend full of fitness and excitement?
Multi-sport Mind: Rowga
I come from rowing stock, you could say. My mother rowed, my father rowed – in fact, it’s how they met. It was a long time before I would get a chance to try it; my high school didn’t have a team, and my high school life put me off trying out for sports enough that combined with the busy schedule of an undergraduate engineering student, I didn’t look into it at the University of Waterloo either.
It took until Grad School in 1999-2000 for me to get in touch with this part of my athletic heritage; I mean, where better than England to get into that scene? It was unusual for Grad students to take part in athletic clubs, and stranger still to be the eldest on the Novice Men’s Team (I was 26 amongst 19 and 20 year-olds). The Leeds teams didn’t do well that year, but we still had lots of fun and I learned a lot. Sadly, digital cameras weren’t that common (at least I didn’t have one), so I’m having trouble tracking down any photographic evidence of these adventures.
We have a rowing shell at our cottage that I hardly use. The problem with rowing solo (or ‘sculling’) is that it takes an even higher level of skill to keep the boat level and moving in a straight line. If both oars don’t enter and leave the water at the same time and aren’t inserted to the same depth, the boat reels and curves to the left or right, making it somewhat frustrating. I can’t follow the shoreline easily, nor can I simply head out to the middle of the lake, because it tends to be wavier and more choppy out there.
Rowing as part of a crew is different. All rowers are trying to move in sync, taking their cues from the ‘Stroke’ – the rower at the stern of the boat. Yes, there is a cox (a typically smaller person at the stern who faces forward) who can call out real-time tactics and the rhythm, but your natural responses are a little better simply watching the rower in front of you; provided there isn’t too much delay from one rower to the next, everybody should be in lockstep with the Stroke, who’s in the best position to do what the Cox says.
So rowing has a teamwork aspect and a very technical aspect. An oar can get caught awkwardly in the water (either on the way in, or more often in my experience, on the way out) and it’s called ‘catching a crab’. So your technique is something that can always be refined, in addition to simply having plenty of strength and endurance to pull that oar hard, over and over. The element I like the best, though, is the simple rhythmic exchange between the pull and glide (where you recover for the next stroke). It reminds me a lot of cross-country skiing, or maybe even inline skating.
I think I wrote all that out of nostalgia, since rowing doesn’t play a very big role in my current fitness regime with one exception: when I attend a Yoga class (as I have been once a week for the past 3-4 weeks), I don’t like to do it without having warm muscles. So I often hit the ergometer/rowing machine for 5-10 minutes before a class. It works out the whole body, but especially the back muscles, which are not only often neglected by other forms of functional exercise, but they get a nice stretch through so many Yoga poses and sequences. Using the machine (side note: a friend of mine who got himself in good enough shape to pass police entrance exams credits most of his transformation to a rowing machine!) lets me train my muscle memory so I don’t completely forget the gross motor parts of a rowing stroke, puts me in touch with my past a little, and the rhythm of the stroke can be meditative (though I usually have to concentrate to tune out the gym’s distractions like music, TV and other people).
In other words, it can be a great mental and physical complement to a Yoga class, thus: Row-ga. Of course, there’s also this guy, who heads out in a boat in the ocean to have deep, meditative thoughts. That’s also good (though he seems to have retired that blog, most of the links seem to be dead). Plus these guys think like me.
Have you used an ergometer/rowing machine? How about the real deal?
Live Long and Rock On!
Trifecta Tuesdays!
I like Tuesdays. They’re not Monday, so they don’t have that back-to-work sting, and yet you’re not far enough into the week to realize how far behind you might be at work. Due to our circumstances vis-a-vis daycare and babysitting help from visitors, it’s a good chance for me to get out of the house early for some extra exercise…
And thus Trifecta Tuesday was born.
My basic premise for Trifecta Tuesday is to get 3 different forms of exercise done in one day. I’m a triathlete… I like threes… three is a magic number after all!
Some examples so far:
- Dec 4th. I hit the pool in the morning for a workout, then at lunch I had the two-fer workout that I have dubbed ‘Rowga’. Swimming, Rowing Machine, Yoga.
- Dec 11th. Another morning Swim. Then the 3-2-1 workout: 3 cardio sessions, 2 whole-body strength circuits, 1 session of ab/core work; 10 minutes each for a (theoretical 60 minute workout). I ended up short on time and skipping the explicit core work, but since I used the Spartacus circuit and the Matrix circuit for strength, my core was adequately addressed. The cardio sessions were Rowing (again), Spinning, and a combination of skipping rope and the heavy bag. I lost count somewhere in there, but it’s more than 3!
- Dec 18th. Hey! That’s today! I’m swamped with year-end stuff at work, so getting 3 activities in would take not only creativity, but… creativity in the interpretation. I wanted to try a new elliptical trainer that has lateral motion (spoiler alert: upcoming post!) for warm-up, and use the treadmill for a post-workout cardio burn, but others like to use that elliptical/cross-trainer, so I opted for a rowing warm-up. My weight/strength session had the upper body push (chest), legs, upper body pull (back) structure, but I focused more on tradtional moves with heavier weights like a barbell bench press. I ended up snagging the lateral ellipitical/cross-trainer for my post-workout cardio burn.
Stay tuned every tuesday for tweets with the hashtag #TrifectaTuesday. You do follow me on twitter, don’t you? See if you can get your own 3 activities for your own Trifecta Tuesday!
Bunch of Links
Some Good Reads for Your Web-surfing (do we still call it that?) pleasure:
Over at Healthy Tipping Point, Caitlin witnessed a (Modern) Pentathlon and did a nice little write-up of this multi-sport anomaly.
This season has been lousy for snow and skiing, but still I enjoy reading about it from time to time. Here’s an article about the Birkebeiner cross-country ski race in Wisconsin from Outside Magazine. They even go over how you can prepare for the race (training, nutrition and general skiing guidelines).
I now realize I’m sourcing two articles from Outside (from the same author even!). Here they talk about the benefits of triathlon to health and fitness in general, and why this is a great time for the sport.
Burbathlon Lives!
You may remember me talking about Burbathlon before and the unusually mild weather we’ve had this past week let me get out and give it a try again. I decided to do live tweets with photos as I went along (though I wish I had turned on the Add Location feature). I had written up various exercises with links in a Memo on my Blackberry so I could cut and paste the tweets; still it took up time I should have been putting into working out harder. I don’t apologize for the fun I had, though. I’ve marked the exercises I did on the map from Endomondo at their approximate locations. Have a look at the descriptions below.
1.) The trail is gravel till here, but I run up the hill to get into the more forested area. See the tweet.
2.) I did a balance beam routine down this log. See the tweet.
3.) Our company running group uses this for hill training. See the tweet.
4.) This pic didn’t turn out so well (maybe next time I’ll bring a real camera instead of my Blackberry), but it’s Incline Pushups against the fence. Not the most challenging but I had done a 100 Pushups workout (Week 4, Day 1) prior to heading outside so there! See the tweet.
5.) Next I did Single Leg Squats while holding onto the lamppost. This area has benches and tables and little fences that I use for Box Jumps, Squats and other exercises. Maybe next time, more. I realized I was running long with all the tweeting and picture taking, so I started to head back from here. See the tweet.
6.) This tree looks climbable with a good run-up and jump. It is not, at least to me. #FAIL. See the tweet.
7.) The trail seems to be used by mountain bikers/BMXers. That doesn’t stop me from jumping off or over these on foot! See the tweet.
8.) I found a tree I could climb (it was leaning at an angle against another tree. As any cat can tell you, the hard part is getting back down! See the tweet.
So that was a successful (albeit short and sweet) Burbathlon. With the new snow, it’s going to be a little challenging to do these, but I hope to post more of them in the future.
By the way, this was done on the Etobicoke Creek Trail and I had the pleasure of doing a write-up for Loving the Run’s Unpaved Trail Series..
Race Bucket List
Bucket lists seem to be all the rage these days, but I’ve always found the idea daunting – how could I list everything I ever wanted to do? My list would be something like: 1.) Live Forever and do everything. Yet, if I focus on the idea that there are endurance/athletic events I would like to participate in, then maybe I can come up with something.
These races will be in the ‘Bucket List’/Pipe Dream category for one or more of the following reasons (in increasing order of likelihood):
- Conditioning. I’m too far out of the shape I’d need to be in to complete
- Skill/Equipment. One or more of the disciplines involves a skill I don’t know how to do
- Geography/Logistics: Getting there with equipment won’t work while taking care of my family at the same time
All of these are fixable or will change with time, and so will the list as I find out new possibilities and opportunities… so let’s get started!
- Pentathlon Des Neiges. I was going to put the Ottawa Winterlude Triathlon here but I just happened to stumble across this event in IMPACT magazine. Both events include skating, cross-country skiing, and running, but the Pentathlon des Neiges adds snow-shoeing and cycling. The latter discipline can be done with mountain or cyclo-cross bikes and actually takes place first (followed by a run, then ski, then skate, then snow-shoe). There are short (9+4+6+6+4=29km) and long (15+6+9+9+6=45) distance races and it all takes place on the historic Plains of Abraham in Quebec City.
- Men’s Health Urbanathlon What I like about this obstacle course is it seems focused on the fitness aspects needed to complete while leaving out the fear factor/bravado and quite frankly, mud involved in mud runs, Warrior Dashes and Spartan Races and the like. If they bring one to the Toronto area, I’m as good as signed up, but I wouldn’t mind travelling to one of the fine cities that are currently offered when my schedule would allow it.
- Ski 2 Sea what if a race included even more of the Canadian Multi-sport experience, enough to span all seasons? And what if it was a journey with an end destination that was far away from the start? What if you started on top of a mountain, downhill skied 2km, switched to cross-county skis for another 8km, jumped on a mountain bike and rode 28km out of the mountains only to hit the road with your road bike for 36km. Now jump off the bike and run for nearly 15km and get in your canoe/kayak so you don’t get wet because there’s another 8km before the finish line. It’s a lot of distance to cover, and the logistics are quite intimidating so people often do this as a team relay, but it seems like such a dream journey (and it is a net downhill, after all) that I can’t help but be tempted by this one.
- Ironman 70.3 Laguna Phuket Thailand I’m a little wary of iron or half-iron distance racing and it’s not only the daunting training schedule and training volume. Races with the Ironman brand don’t exist in everybody’s back yard, and most people who have done one turn it into a trip with overnight accomodation, meals and maybe a little vacation time… if you’re going to drop that kind of cash and time, why not make it a more once-in-a-lifetime experience? I love Thailand (from having honeymooned there) and I can’t picture a better destination for a ‘destination race’ than the land of smiles. So far, you don’t even have to qualify! This race took place this past Sunday, in fact.
- Berlin Marathon My wife and I both have a lot of friends and family in Germany, and Berlin has become a bit of a home away from home for us. The Berlin marathon is also considered the fastest course there is so there’s my motivation to beat my previous, pitiful marathon time. What really put this marathon into my dream file was a conversation I had with a gentleman who had done more than 50 marathons all over the world, but when I asked him his favourite, he said it was the Berlin Marathon, during the year of German re-unification. He had run through part of the city that were inaccessible to him growing up, and attempting to leave those parts in the East had gotten people shot and killed over the course of the Cold War. By the time he ran through the Brandenburg Gate (below), he was blind with tears in his eyes and needed the guidance of a friend simply to find his way through the pillars. So many Big City Marathons have a lot of historical draw, but none like this, at least not to me.
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| Runners going through the Brandenburg Gate |
- XTERRA Canada (Canadian Open Championship) I already like taking my running “off-road”, and it’s my honest intention to get a mountain-bike for cross-training purposes and to participate in some non-navigational adventure races (like Logs, Rocks and Steel) and off-road triathlons. From the latter category, XTERRA is pretty much the biggest and baddest. This race takes place in beautiful Whistler, BC which only adds to the draw. Until that time, maybe I’ll get to do the Mine Over Matter as my introduction to off-road tris…
This list is long enough for now, but I’m always up for recommendations… dream big!
Multi-sport mind: Cyclo-Cross
“Cyclo-cross (‘cross) mixes the best of road, mountain, cross-country running, steeplechase and endurance cycling.” from the Midweek Cycling Club’s Cyclo-Cross 101 Handbook.
As soon as autumn rolls around, triathlon training in most of Canada gets more difficult. I think this is most felt in cycling, since it is the most time consuming of the three disciplines, and you feel the cold more when your zooming along that fast. Somebody came up with the sport of cyclo-cross as a kind of end of season training for road and mountain bike cyclists.
At first glance, you might have trouble telling the difference between Cyclo-cross and mountain biking (at least, I did). Indeed they both involve getting muddy – in fact, Cyclo-cross can be performed with a mountain bike. While I’m no expert, I don’t think mountain bikers dismount and carry their bikes over obstacles in most circumstances, whereas this is fundamentally part of Cyclo-cross. Overall, it struck me as a little less ‘extreme’ and more friendly to novices since even an old road bike would have been acceptable (though a little tricky). I’m getting ahead of myself by giving my impressions, first I want to tell you the story of how I ended up trying this out.
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| A Cyclo-Crosser jumps a barricade, carrying his bike. I have a bunch of photos like this. I have a lot to learn about settings on my camera – especially those dealing with low-light and action photography. |
In spite of (or perhaps because of) a local climate (both physical and cultural) that isn’t the most bike friendly in the world, there is a strong local community of Cyclo-cross enthusiasts. It wasn’t too hard to track down some riders from the Midweek Cycling Club at Centennial Park one Tuesday to check it out.
What I saw was a course sketched out with police tape and little flags that went up, down and alongside the less steep parts of the ski-hill and some 40cm barriers to be hopped over. I apologize for the poor quality of pictures; photography is not my strong suit, and never will be.
I spoke briefly with Craig, who was directing the cross riders on how many laps they still had before quitting time, and got a feel for whether I would even be able to attempt this thing. It sounded like my old mountain bike would be alright, if less than perfect for gripping and steering under some circumstances. At any rate, I resolved to show up a week later ready to go.
One week later, I pulled into the parking lot wearing my cycling gear, with a helmet, and an old Cateye light that drew a few laughs from more hard-core cyclists I had to purchase a one-day licence from The Ontario Cycling Association and once my admission for the night was paid, they suggested I hook up with one of the more experienced riders for tips on how to navigate the course. The usual format for the evening is to spend time at each station in a kind of ‘lesson-circuit’ before participating in a race to finish a certain number of laps of the mile-long course, but they opted to forgo that since it was near the end of season, I suppose.
I approached a man named Pierre and asked him to show me the ropes. After a few jokes about how this would turn into a new obsession which would threaten my marriage, he gave my bike (an old hybrid that I use for commutes and more recreational riding with my son) the once over.
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| The ‘Before’ shot… even if it is technically an ‘after cleaning’ shot. |
Then we were off on the course. As we rode, Pierre gave me general tips on bike handling that allowed me to get traction going uphill and around the sharper turns, of which there were plenty. Every few hundred meters he’d have us stop so he could point out specifics that I was maybe doing wrong, or specifics of the course to watch out for. In particular, he identified a way of looking where you’re going (not where you are) that helps you balance and set up your turns. There was one hairpin turn I didn’t make all night – it was set up in such a way as to purposely slow riders down so that they wouldn’t accidentally hit a pipe from the ski hill’s snow making equipment.
One of the most unique features of Cyclo-cross is barricades, where you dismount, pick up the bike, and hurdle over a 40cm (a little over a foot) barrier (or two). Apparently I’m not the first beginner to find this aspect the most exciting; good technique however, requires calm grace and not holding your breath as you hop over.
After a couple of laps, Pierre left me to give it a try on my own, which not only amped up the adrenaline factor, but also took a bigger toll on my cardio-vascular endurance; without the pointer sessions to catch my breath, I could really feel each and every lap.
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| The ‘After’ shot. Notice the mud and grass caked everywhere. |
I found Cyclo-cross to be very different than most of my training rides that I do for triathlon. The twists and turns demand a lot more mental attention; no more ‘zoning out’. In fact, bike handing is much more of a priority overall as it becomes a struggle just to stay on the bike. The slippery grass and mud keep you in the lower gears and higher cadences, while the up-and-down of hills (and the bursts of strength you use to pick your bike up and jump the barriers) make it more of an interval workout than I’ve had in a long time.
Here’s a video from my last lap (I had my camera helmet-mounted); it’s a little dark and shaky – rest assured I could see fine.
Describing a cyclo-cross ride in short is easy: it’s the way you used to ride your bike when you were a kid: Without consideration for destination, appropriate terrain, keeping clean or anything but having fun. Despite how much fun I had, and my desire to do it again soon, cyclo-cross isn’t threatening to become an obsession to me. After all, in the multi-sport mind, everything is just cross training for something else!