Gardening Club, Sustainability Discussion Group, Recipe Sharing, and Oh Yeah, Triathlon Training

As our little group of aspiring triathletes is warming up for a training run, the conversation inevitably turns to topics like.....

... whether or not to mulch the tomatoes against a potential frost, best designs for backyard chicken coops, books like Food Not Lawns, or  In Defense of Food, recipes for flour-free muffins, seed saving, or what we want to can, freeze, and store food-wise this summer.

I bet you thought I was going to say heart rate zones, tempo vs. long runs, brick training, and nutritional periodization! For many athletes, sports are a distinct thing that they do, separate from their regular life. And perhaps they eat a little more nutritiously to fuel their workouts, or perhaps they just buy more power bars and binge on pizza. For many of us (and I have definitely been in this camp before) we work out so we can pig out. I used to love the fact that I could eat a pint of Ben & Jerry's because I'd done a 15 mile run that day. Don't get me wrong, it's a definite advantage of the multi-sport lifestyle that we can afford a few more nutritional indulgences since we burn so many more calories. And there's definitely nothing wrong with a pint of B&J's. Especially if it's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch......yummmmmmm

But these days I'm seeing a synergy starting to develop between my athletic pursuits, my passion for sustainability, and my interest in good nutrition starting at the ground level with my garden. When I started blogging several years ago, I created three blogs: one for triathlon training, one for sustainability/gardening, and one for our homeschooling and parenting. As the years have gone by, I've found it harder and harder to figure out where to put many of my blog posts. Is eating directly from my garden an offshoot of the Paleo eating that I'm doing to fuel my body for sports and thus should be posted here? Or is it related to my Urban Farm blog because of its environmental sustainability and ties to local eating, or is it something I do to bring better nutrition to my family and to raise healthier kids and thus should be covered on my Blue Skies blog?  I've toyed with the idea of combining blogs, but I think most of the time it works better to keep them separate because people interested in backyard chickens probably don't want to read my swim workouts and vice versa.

Yet an increasing number of my triathlete friends, both online and in person are planting gardens, getting chickens, buying local meats and produce, and moving toward a position of food sustainability and locavore eating. It makes sense that if you're going to work your body to the maximum, you should fuel it with the best possible sources. So we'll probably be having BRiCk workouts this summer. That's Bike, Run, and Canning green beans!

How Many Cyclists Does It Take To Run a Hairdryer?

I posted a link to this article on my sustainability blog, but I thought it was also really interesting to read from the standpoint of a cyclist. Think about how much energy we generate and how that translates to the real world. Also, wouldn't it be really cool to be part of an experiment like this??? What a workout, sign me up!

How many cyclists does it take to power a hairdryer? The answer's 18, as one family discovered in a unique TV experiment

As a side-note, here's the best instructions I've found online for building your own power-generating bike trainer.

Welcome To My Three-Ring Circus

In ring #1, we have Robin the triathlete. She did a time trial last night with some of her teammates and they did a brick run afterwards (while cyclists going home looked at them like they were nuts), and then she gave them a ride home. The back of her minivan looks like a bomb went off in a bike store: wheels, trainers, shoes, helmets (some of which are not hers). Although she brought her bike in when she got home last night at 9:00 pm, it's now 9:30 in the morning and she's just realized that she has to put up the backseat in order to carpool everyone to Karate class by 10:00 am. She is frantically carrying biking gear into the garage and dumping it willy nilly.

In ring #2, we have Robin the homeschooling mom. Note: this is the same Robin that's in ring #1. She's busy making sure the kids are fed, they have their karate gis on, belts tied correctly, waterbottles in hand, and a bag with clothes to change into after karate. She also needs to bring along cloth grocery bags for shopping at Trader Joe's afterwards, and make sure she has playdate arrangements for the kids' afternoon, as well as time to shlep kid#2 to her horseback riding lesson shortly after lunch.

In ring#3, we have Robin yet again. This time it's Robin the urban homesteader and environmentalist. This is why she's carpooling to karate (when the weather is not so rainy, she'll be busy loading kids onto bicycles and making sure they have helmets, sunglasses, gloves, etc.). She's busy letting the adult chickens out of their coop for the morning, making sure the baby chickens have food and water. Oops, carrying all the biking gear into the garage has caused all the baby chickens (which currently live in a cage in the garage until it's warm enough for them to go outside for the day) to go nuts, so now that she's filling their feeder, they're busy popping up out of the cage and flapping around. She grabs a chicken with one hand and stuffs it back into the cage, then another, making mental note that they are now able to fly quite well, and moving cycling gear out of the way with her toes at the same time.

Usually, the three rings of my life run more or less seamlessly. I'm doing one thing or another, taking the kids someplace and then running or biking, or I'm home with the kids doing their stuff, or we're taking care of the animals together, or my hubby's home and that's when I exercise or whatever. But some days every ring has to be going at the same time, and there's just not enough of Robin to go around. This morning was just one of those times! And don't even get me going on what it felt like to have to complete dozens of punches in a torturous position known as Shiko Dachi while the sensei walked around with a bopper hitting you in the stomach and arms and shoulders to make sure everything is solid (it wasn't, my legs were quivering like jelly on a plate.)

Luckily, tomorrow is our day off from everything: all activities, places to be, things to do will cease. I will stay home, try to get the house straightened out, and dye easter eggs with the kids. Oh yeah, and bike. And run. And do it all again.

Proud To Be Wearing This Shirt

Twenty-one years ago, in 1986, I walked into a local bike shop named Collins to buy my first road bike. My college swim coach had dictated that everyone on the team would do a triathlon for cross-training, and the only bike I had was a one-speed Schwinn cruiser that weighed about forty pounds and you braked by pedaling backwards. I had an extremely limited living-on-Top-Ramen student's budget, and I dropped almost 10% of my entire year's income on a maroon Peugot 12-speed. That bike saw me complete my first triathlon, and many others over the years (this photo is from 1989 in The Dalles, Oregon), it saw my love of the sport of triathlon take hold and grow. It took me on my first bike tour down the Oregon coast and through the Redwoods of California. Those of you who wholeheartedly love bicycling will understand the fondness I still have in my memory for that first bike. It took me almost twenty years to get rid of it, even though I'd moved on to a carbon fiber triathlon ride. But eventually I found a worthy place for it to travel on: first a friend who used it in her first triathlon, and then to a teenager who was doing a bike tour with the Superheroes, folks who do long-distance cycling tours in order to do good deeds along the way.

Fast-forward to the year 2000 and I have moved back to Eugene after over a decade of living in the Seattle area. We now have two kids and a primary focus of returning to this area was to ditch all the car-commuting and get back on two wheels again for basic transportation. We all troop down to Collins and they set us up with a Burley trailer for kid-hauling. The next year, we're back to pick up a Burley Piccolo tag-a-long bike for our now four-year-old son to ride on. A couple more years and he has mastered a two-wheeler. We return to pick out his first bicycle, an outstanding moment in any kids' life.

One of the things I like best about supporting your local bike shop, especially if it's a good one like Collins, is that you get more than a bicycle. You get the service and the helpfulness that people who are passionate about bikes can provide. When we took our son there to pick out his birthday bike, they treated him like Lance Armstrong himself had strolled through the door. They made sure he had just the right bike, it was fitted well, and he was looking sharp in his new helmet. He had a grin from ear to ear when he left with his shiny new blue bicycle. My husband got the same treatment when he picked out his Bianchi road bike, and again we were happy to support our local bike shop, knowing the excellent treatment we'd gotten there over the years.













Since then, they've maintained our town and road bikes, and shipped my tri bike off to Florida for me. They've consulted on gear, and didn't even ban us from the shop when our young daughter once accidentally tipped over an entire row of bikes (one of those freeze-frame parenting moments you'd love to forget). So all of this adds up to why I'm proud to be wearing their team jersey in the group photo above. They're not only a nice bunch of folks to ride with, but a place I'm happy to have available to me in our town. With the advent of internet shopping and the big box stores where a "bike" can be had for $100, it's sometimes easy to forget that there's more to buying a bike than just pointing and clicking, or going and picking one out of a rack of hundreds. A bike is a long-term purchase, an important conveyance and even an affair of the heart. It's good to have someone around to help you make a wise choice, and to keep you in good running form. I have a 20+ year relationship with my local bike store, and I'm happy to be sporting their logo.