Ski Vail

Hit up a ski day at Vail today. Jammed to the standard on the way up - Girl Talk's Feed the Animals album. It snowed a few inches to keep it fun and Blue Sky Basin was the stash, less crustiness unerneath than the other bowls. Above is a shot from the lift, a pic of Matt and Ofer, me jumping a little rock on Scree trail, and one of Amy and I. Unfortunately Amy fell, hit her head, and had to DNF on the day so I couldn't get any glamour shots of her hitting her normal 20 footers.
I'm restless to get in one more ski day this year with a 2 foot dump to hit some good kickers and what not.
Afterwards to the pool. We're swimming CO Senior State meet at DU this weekend and yours truly qualified in the mile. With that in store the training is down for the week and I felt great swimming team goals today even though we only swam two, hit 1:00 for 100y on the first and ditto on the second.
Time to bust out a good one this weekend. 19:48 PB is going into the trash.

Golden is golden

mmm mix1

Riptide is now sponsored by mix1 which I'm very pumped about. I've liked them since they hit the scene and started appearing in King Soopers and City Market (where I always end up going while skiing). It's a protein juice drink but best of all it doesn't have to be refrigerated. So you can pop it in the bag when you go to work in the morning and have it on the way home from the evening workout. Very convenient. No need to worry about the entire bottle exploding when it goes bad. Most flavors have 15 grams of protein to keep you going strong and best of all they have a lime flavor. Props to them for the great drink.
Yesterday was incrdibly warm, high 60's so I got out on the bike at 8am as soon as it was temperate out. I thought I'd mix it up and try out Golden Gate Canyon which I've never been up. It only took 10 minutes to get to the start and then I was climbing up into the canyon and it felt like Golden was hundreds of miles away. I hadn't heard people talk about this climb so figured it wasn't very good but it's a gem.

Golden Gate is an easy grade so it's a nice change from Lookout which always turns out to be an intense ride. You can ride it hard or just spin it in an easy gear. Now I've got it in my head that I want to ride way up Golden Gate, meet up with Coal Creek Canyon and ride that back down to Rt. 93. Next time, next time.
And the random quote of the day, this one from today's Wall Street Journal. "Today, the college is facing a $5.5 million loss in the alleged Madoff fraud...a Stony Brook University spokeswoman says the collapse of Mr. Madoff's firm in an alledged Ponzi scheme will have only a 'slight' impact on scholarships, research, and academic support."
So does this mean that the university tells potential $5.5 million donors that their donation will have a "slight" impact on scholarships, research, and academic support?

Weekend o' Fun

A normal weekend of training in Golden. Yesterday I ran at Highline with the usual Saturday morning crew. We were going to do a hard run but it snowed a bit the night before so we decided to just do a long run so ran 13 miles instead. I don't know how it snowed. It was over 50 both days but still managed to snow a couple inches at night, at least it all melted by the time we finished the run. Topped it off with a long stay at Einsteins with Matt, Alexis, and Ofer afterwards. We thought we set a record for longest Einsteins visit ever but then noticed the guy next to us was still there when we left.
Today hit up a 2.5 hour ride. Got way lucky since it was over 60 degrees today. Rode hard from the get go, then finished it off with a 22:59 effort up Lookout Mtn. Not very smokin' but I wanted to test the bike fitness so rode hard beforehand.
Amy and I decided to sign up for the Miami Intl Triathlon on March 15th. Now that I got that going I feel like I can put in some good efforts and start thinking about racing again. Everything feels good. The only question mark is the bike since I've been riding inside for nearly all my rides. It takes some road efforts I think to get ready to ride hard so hence my harder riding today.

Best Swim Ever

With the season now coming up I'm trying to shave some last seconds off the swim so I'm ready to go. Monday I had a good one, swam 7x300y on the 3:45. The first one I came in at 3:44 so only had a 1 second break. For some reason on these sets the first ones are usually the hardest for me. Once I got in a rythme I was coming in on the 3:35 so had plenty of rest.
The only downer was that the effort seemed to crush me in the pool the rest of the week. Tuesday was hurtin' for certain and Wednesday we had a hard 20x100y set. I was able to swim 1:09's but was still a couple ticks off where I could have been if I was feeling better.
We've been rolling out some good tempo runs on Highline. 35:05 for 6 miles last week. I'm just about to head down there in a few minutes to meet the usual crew.
We've decided to create a Riptide store to sell some logo and casual clothing so I just started work on that this week. I was going to use the MileHighAthletic.com code but then figured I'd try something new so downloaded the OSCommerce package. OSCommerce stands for open source commerce so is free code that you can use to create a commercial website. The code looks great. Installing it was a bit tricky, it definitely takes some know how to get it started. Now it's running but I haven't made any adjustments to it which will be the big job. There's plenty of functionality but it looks a bit plain:

so the work will be in getting it to look sharp.
The inspiration for this is come from the Rock & Republic cycling team. The team was started by Rock & Republic jeans founder Michael Ball. Many out there don't appreciate the team because many of it's riders have served banned for performance enhanhers. I'm all for the team though because of their business model. Ball is trying to make the team a profitable enterprise through Rock Racing branded clothing sales and not rely entirely on sponsors to support the team. Check the site: Rock Racing.
The gear looks awesome, loads of style. I like that he's got casual wear as well so you can flaunt he cyclist in you when you're hanging at the coffee shop. Cyrus made me realize a bit ago how there could be a market out there for this kind of clothing. Everyone likes to show off what they do and there aren't many good ways to do that with tris without wearing your race shirt and looking like a dork (unless it's an Xterra shirt, those things are sweet).
So we'll see if we can get the site up and rolling, hopefully it won't be too hard.

Riptide Multisports Website

Yesterday the team met at Highline Canal for a long run with a tempo mixed in. Dan and I are on the same page in what we want to do for run training now and last week we agreed that a 12 miler with 6 at easy tempo pace would be good for us. We started the tempo and Josh and Pete took off but I stuck to the 5:55 pace I had planned with Dan. We hit it spot on- 5:54, 5:54 then ran a bit farther than 3 miles before turning around. Held it on the way back, 11:50 for the last 2 miles. Felt good and controlled. I can tell that I should do some more of these to work on my endurance. Right now I prefer to do these longer tempos and then as race season comes I'll move them down to 4 miles at about 20 seconds per mile faster.
I used to do a long run and then a separate tempo run every week but since I'm not running as much now it makes sense to merge them. I like keeping the tempo pace relatively comfortable since I won't actually be running that fast (5:30 pace at altitude) in races. Instead of doing training at faster than race pace I prefer to get my body as comfortable and efficient as possible at 5:30 pace so that it will come as second nature when I hit the run leg in a race.
I relate this to police training. As a cop I'd practice drawing my weapon and firing over and over and over. After hundreds of repetions the movements become second nature, just what is needed so that you can react in a real life or death situation.
If you haven't checked the RiptideMultisports website lately then check it out. Amy and I revamped it and I'm happy with the outcome. Amy did all the design and I wrote a program similar to Facebook that allows team athletes to maintain profiles and race schedules.
We were going to have a static site but with around 15 athletes and ever changing schedules I decided that a dynamic PHP based program was needed. Amy maintains the site and it would have been a full time job to always have athletes emailing what races they were doing.
The first phase was to make a login page where athletes could sign in with a username and password. From there they can fill in a form to enter their profile. Next a form to upload a picture. The results of this can be seen here. As you can see in the web address it's a PHP page with the athlete name sent with the GET method. Type in a different athletes name in the web address (try "AmyDannwolf") and the page will display based on searching the database for that athlete. This way I only had to make 1 page for all the athletes and it would dynamically display a profile based who's name is in the web address.
From there, allowing athletes to enter race results and schedules.

I initially had a simple form when athletes would enter the race name, location, etc. This proved problematic because athletes came up with 5 names for the same race (USAT Elite Champs, USAT PRO Championships, USAT... you get the picture). This looked OK on an individual athletes results but when you looked at the team results it looked like a mess.
To solve this I changed the program so that when an athlete wants to enter a race on their schedule, a drop down menu appeared with all the races that had ever been entered by team members. If the race is on that list then just click on it, it's added to the athletes schedule, and all the info from the initial entry is there such as venue, date, etc.

If the race is not on the drop down (because no athlete has previously added it to their schedule) then the athlete enteres the details of the race.
Once an athlete selects a race, then it is added to the database of races and can be displayed in a vaiety of ways. It is shown on the athletes profile page under their races and results. It can also be displayed in the entire team's race schedule. You can see this here in Riptide's 2009 race schedule. The schedule can be shown in a number of arrangements, whether by date, athlete, or finishing place. About the finishing places. When no place is entered then it is displayed as TBD. Once an athlete finishes a race they can sign in, click on the race in their profile and enter what place they finished.
All of this is an incredibly efficient way for teams to maintain up to date schedules and results with minimal webmaster maintenance. Athletes can constantly delete races, add races, and enter finishing places as the season progresses.
It could also be an incredible website feature for triathlon coaching companies. It's a great advertisement for coaches to show the variety of races their athletes are competing in and how they finished. Athletes also feel more linked to the group if they are featured on the website and can control some of the content. To top it off, athletes can figure out who else is going to their races so they can make travel plans together.
Check out the comfort I enjoy while blogging. Got my mutt Gulliver and my mom's Border Terrier Primo:

mmm shipping

It was a hot one today so got our for a 2 hour ride in the afternoon. Rode some roads around Golden for a bit then up Lookout Mtn. Took it fairly easy and didn't time it this time around. I've had a bit of a cold lately and now I can feel it in my chest.
Last weekend the Riptide team swam at a meet in Englewood. The pool was friggin' 4 ft deep so I wasn't about to down off the blocks since I've only practiced that about 10 times and I always seem to dive 10ft down. It was a hard effort and I swam a 19:50. Still felt a bit off from my cold but it probably didn't make much of a difference. Everyone on the team swam well so we celebrated with some beers in Cherry Creek after as proper athletes should.
I've been working away lately on writing PHP code to solve our shipping situation at MileHighAthletic.com. We've been using Paypal to get the order information to copy and paste into UPS Worldship. It's not a terrible way to do the shipping but there's wasted time involved in clicking around the Paypal site (Paypal has some slow a$$ servers) and copying and pasting the info for each order. When there's 25 skis to ship all this makes it a huge hassle.
As usual the PHP code is turning out to be more involved that initially expected and I'm up to about 600 lines of code at this point. Most of the difficulty is that Paypal's API doesn't give you basic info such as what type of order a transaction is (eBay, Website Order, Telephone Order) so I had to come up with some creative ways of determining this. This is important because what a customer actually ordered is sent in a variety of fields depending upon the type of order. Once I get all the info I can populate a database with the info. From there the shipper can pull up what needs to be shipped and everything needed is displayed - essentially what items were ordered. Fill in the height, weight, etc on that page and do this for every order. At the end just hit submit and that info goes into the database and an XML file is saved on the computer which UPS Worldship will read to process all the orders.
It's turning out to be pretty sweet and it's going to speed up our shipping big time. There's a bunch of other problems that can be solved with this. If a customer wants an item shipped on a certain date then that can be entered and the item won't appear in the "To Ship" list until that date. Right now I just have to finish things off and write the code that will create the UPS file.