I promise...

I'll be back to blogging soon, I promise. Details of my life are a bit out of control at the moment and finding time to sit and write is hard. I'll see you all soon!

Hey there, Waldo Watchers!

I'm always extremely satisfied and impressed with my workouts, but it's so hard to see results in the short-term and so hard to keep track in the long term. One bad day in a bench mark or a bad race makes the whole season look like crap. Since over the next year or so I'm going to be concentrating on volume I decided I'm going to do a virtual tour of certain parts of the world to keep myself motivated:

I'm going to swim from Barcelona to Rome. I'm going to bike from the northern tip of Newfoundland to the southern tip of Chile. I'm going to run from New York to Los Angeles. Clearly I'm not really going to do this, but I'm going to stretch my high-tech know-how and trace my "progress" on 3 google maps (I have such a geeky obsession with maps!) which I will put a link to on the sidebar of my training log (see link in the top right corner of this page).

This continuing effort, an enormous triathlon if you will, began on April 14,2007 (a day of no real significance, just a day I got disgusted with myself and decided I needed some extra inspiration), and will have a cut-off time of 8:59 am on May 16, 2008: my 25th birthday and 2 days before Lanzarote.

Routs in real space would be impossible. That's why I've devised a superpower for myself: I can bike across all surfaces and I can run over short bodies of water such as streams and small lakes. Also, I will not always be able to measure distances, for example, I'll assume that I go an average of 25 kmph on the indoor trainer in the gym, and will do my best to guess running distances. Since I am also doing this with a combination of the high-tech services offered by google, and the low-tech services of my tape measure against the screen, not all distances will be accurate. Here are the approximate distances I plan to cover:

Swimming To Rome: 844 km
Northern tip of Newfoundland- Southern tip of Argentina = 8,667 mi
New York-Los Angeles = 2,150 mi http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?client=firefox-a&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF-8&channel=s&lr=lang_es&om=1&hl=en&z=2&msid=118209305642889227553.00000111fee9dce11baa0&msa=0

Does anybody know?

Several months ago I walked into the bathroom in a cafe/bar. It was a small onesie kind of deal with very little ventilation. When I turned on the light the air was as clear as... well I don't want to say "crystal clear" to describe a public bathroom, but it was not that murky, fuzzy, air that you find in most bars here where the smoke makes them blurry and yellow like an old photo from the early '80s. But then when I stepped in I was slapped with a facefull of old cigarette smoke smell. It was clear that some time between 10 and 30 minutes ago someone had stood in that bathroom with the door closed smoking a frantic cigarette and ashing into the toilet (anyone who's gone to high school knows how this works), and then flushed and closed the door behind them. Thirty seconds before entering this lavatory I'd been thinking about exactly what little, tiny details in my life I could change to get the edge and become a better athlete. So when I stepped into that clear, stinky bathroom I started thinking about something I'd never thought about before:

We all know that secondhand-smoke (or "passive smoking" which it's sometimes more aptly called) is as bad as (if not in some cases worse than) regular puffing. But is it something in the smoke that makes you cough up brown blobs of lung sludge, or is it something that stays in the air after the smoke is cleared? To clarify: as in the case of my bathroom, the smell of smoke remains even after the smoke is no longer visible (as anyone who has hugged a smoker knows). And the way we perceive smell is that teeny-tiny particles of a substance stick in teeny-tiny little receptors in our nasal passages which allow us to sense, and therefor "smell" an odor/scent. So clearly, even at 9 in the morning in a smoking bar (yes, those still exist), long after all the smokers from the night before have left, since you can still smell that stale, smokey smell, there is still some remenant of the tobacco in the air. Which leads to my question:

Is it something directly in the smoke itself that damages lungs (ergo something that clears when the smoke clears out), or is it something in the presence of burt tobacco which is as lasting as yellowing wallpaper and that musty smell that causes damage from second-hand smoke?



Really, really I'd like to know. I've asked all my friends who are good at useless trivia or know a lot about fitness and no one seems to know the answer to this.