This is the least humiliating frame from my whole clip.

I’ve recently started a swimming training program so I can competently complete my weakest part of the trifecta: Running, biking, and swimming. Hopefully by next summer I will be ready for my goal, to compete in the New York City Triathlon.

An interesting aspect of this swim class is the use of technology. In our very first meeting, the coach shot underwater videos of each student crossing the pool, capturing all of our flailing arms and gasping breaths. He then wrote up a critique of each student’s swimming technique and gave a CD with all of the videos and critiques to each of us, giving us all a powerful insight into what we are doing right and wrong in the water. It’s astonishing how many things I can instantly see that I need to improve, especially when I watch my own video next to that of, say, Olympian Ian Thorpe.

What’s great about this is how incredibly low-fi and accessible the whole deal was. You would think that underwater cameras as a training tool would be reserved only for competitive swimmers at the top of their game. But there I am! The video camera looked like a regular consumer model attached to a long pole with some kind of jerry-rigged periscope involved, and immersed in the water. The coach shot by simply walking along the edge of the pool and following each of us as we swam across. And because it’s digital, it was easy for him to bring 20 copies of the videos on CD-ROM to the next class a week later.

He’ll be recording us a few more times over the 12-week course, so we can track our improvement. I can’t tell you how much I look forward to the next taping. I swear, I dream about swimming now.

This blog post has been brought to you by “Our Swimmer”, by Wire:

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This weekend I built my first single-speed bicycle. It’s not a fixed-gear or track bike — it has a single gear in the back with a freewheel mechanism, and as you can see it has brakes, too.

For years I’ve wanted a single-speed bike just to see what all the fuss is about, but also I wanted to experiment with what I’ve heard are the benefits of single-speed training. But most importantly I also wanted a basic bike that I would feel comfortable leaving locked up in my lobby or even on the street for hours or days on end. My other two bikes are a just little too attractive to thieves, so I can never leave them anywhere for long. Basically I needed a kick-around set of wheels.

Speaking of thieves, this whole project has a little bit of a shadow over it: Over the years I’ve been collecting enough of my own bike parts for this project, but I was missing just one critical piece: the frame. It finally occurred to me that a pile of abandoned bikes locked up in my building’s lobby might be ripe for the picking. There was one bike, an old Nishiki, that looked my size and had the requisite horizontal dropouts. I knew the bike hadn’t been touched in two years, but still I put up several signs in the building’s lobby seeking the bike’s owner. After a few weeks of hearing nothing, I made my move and, yes, I stole the bike.

I like to think I salvaged it, and I did my deed during a high-traffic part of the day so as many fellow residents as possible would see me doing my work (I merely unbolted the rear wheel, which was the only part locked up). But honestly I am still a little afraid that the bike’s owner will someday return from his three-year ’round-the-world hike, or kick his drug addiction, or whatever has kept him from his wheels, and he will see me on a bike whose dents and angles look a lot like those of his beloved Nishiki. Such worries are the wages of my sin, I guess.

I stripped the bike of nearly every part it had, dramatically reducing the weight by replacing the bike’s original parts with my own slightly-higher-quality parts (the original handlebars were made of steel!) or by just leaving certain parts off the rebuild entirely. The only part I’m (literally) stuck with is the seatpost: it seems the previous owner installed a replacement post that was too big for the frame, so he simply hammered the thing into the seat tube as far as it would go. As a result, the seat is immovably positioned about an inch too low for me. Even if I figure out how to remove the seatpost, I’m not sure a properly-sized seatpost would even work anymore since the seat tube seems permanently expanded.

On my first test ride of about 15 miles, I came to enjoy the single-speed’s simplicity, and it was surprising how often I managed to keep up a steady pace without shifting gears. On the hills I had to stand up and hammer, but even then I managed to keep a good pace.

The best part was that with this beater bike I can stop riding, lock up the bike in the park, and then do a few miles running on foot. The toe clips require me to wear normal sneakers, so I didn’t need to pack an extra pair of shoes. And, as I said, I’m not overly worried about the bike being stolen. Hooray!

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I’m the skinhead in the red shirt.

A year ago I entered my first bike race. It didn’t go well.

Yesterday I entered my second race, and my first multi-sport race. It was a “duathlon” — running and bicycling — around Brooklyn’s lovely Prospect Park in the twilight hours of a perfect summer weekday.

How did I get myself into this situation? It all started so innocently, in a late-night AIM chat with Adam Greenfield in which I mentioned that I heard about an event called the “Brooklyn BricK Duathlon“, and that it looked like something I might be able to handle. Next thing I knew, Adam and I were both registering online at the same time, spontaneously and impulsively. There’s no way either of us would have done this if it wasn’t for the support and encouragement you get from having even just one person to commit with you.

The start was at 7:00pm on a Wednesday night, just as the park was getting dark and the streetlights were coming on. This alone made the race attractive to me: I am not a morning person, and my evenings on Fridays and Saturdays tend to involve fine wines and good spirits into the wee hours. This makes early morning weekend racing a bit of a problem for me. Having a whole day to eat properly and prepare mentally for the race really helped.

The BricK was what they call “sprint distance”, a cynical term for what is still an endurance event for most mortals. It consisted of:

• A 3/4 mile run through wooded trails.
• A 10 mile bike around the park loop.
• A 3.2 mile run through the woods and around the meadow.

So how did I do? I think I did pretty well. Of 133 entrants, and 89 finishers, I came in 35th overall (results here). I did equally well in both the run and bike phases, and felt pretty good at the end, too. Which means I am definitely doing this again.

The event was inspiring, to say the least. Adam and I felt like we were surrounded by superhuman professional athletes, and the carbon-fiber stealth-fighter looking machines most of them had put ours to shame: me on an 18-year-old steel frame, Adam on a single-speed (!). Many of the competitors were tricked out in team gear, ripped with muscles, sleekened hairless, and sharing war stories about the other triathlons they’d triumphed in lately. Nonetheless, the whole event was really low key, very DiY and ad hoc, and completely devoid of the kind of aggression I felt all around me in when I was racing in a cycling pack. In a triathlon/duathlon, drafting behind other cyclists is illegal, which means it’s just you and the wind — which is how I like to roll.

The race was brisk, of course, but the vibe was pure fun. A great first-time experience. The best part was on the last run, where the race leaders would pass the rest of us on their return trip to the finish line. Most of the top five finishers took the time to cheer on the rest of us as they ran by us: “great job, way to go, great pace!”. That meant the world to me.

I want to commend the information design by the kids who chalked the directional arrows on the roads. The running route was fairly complex, the maps they prepared were god-awful messes, and the race director could barely describe it without just confusing people even further. But some young kids were sent on a mission to put directional arrows on the paths using chalk, and they did a great job. The route doubled-back on itself, and there were two runs on the same trail, so the signage needed to indicate which way to turn on the way out and which way to turn on the way back. Here’s what they came up with. Not bad, huh?

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“Simple is Best” is the motto of Jinbei Yamada, founder of Japanese bicycle maker Arrow Bicycles. I love this motto for its elegant phrasing, completely devoid of pretention and utterly consistent with its own meaning. There is no false dichotomy of “form versus function” to drive a pointless wedge between functional and decorative simplicity and pure visual design elegance. Who needs ten complicated laws when one law sums it up so well?

Arrow makes less than 1,000 bikes per year, and most of them are custom-ordered to some degree. As for the bikes themselves, I’ve not had the pleasure of seeing or riding one, but they look lovely. There are no logos to be seen, either, which is something I deeply appreciate.

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The ever-excellent Google Maps mashup Google Pedometer has recently added an “elevation” feature, allowing you not only to see how far you walked, ran, cycled, or drove, but also to see how far up and down you went along the way. You simply click the “elevation” link and it displays a scrolling iframe with your entire route plotted out as a long horizontal graph.

I did a 50-mile ride yesterday, most of which somehow ended up being in 15mph headwinds. Ouch! When I got home, I fired up the computer and plotted my course.

Here’s the best part of my ride: Immediately following the highest point of my entire route, there was a thrilling mile-long descent right down to the lowest point, a riverside pier in Alpine New Jersey. Four miles later, a steep continuous climb brought me (almost) back up again. (click below to see the whole graph).

I’ve been out of practice lately due to my workload and other lame excuses, but it was great to get out and feel the pain on such a beautiful, perfect day for cycling. And there’s something satisfying about seeing the hills displayed this way — not only does it give a real sense of accomplishment (I can pretend these are the French Alps!), but it also gives me some insight into the overall “lay of the land” for the next time I take this route. What a great tool.

UPDATE: I also made a graph of the Prospect Park loop, starting and finishing at the Grand Army Plaza entrance.

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The ads below are both for an innovative new type of bicycle, the high-end “townie”. These are bikes that are designed for everyday use by people wearing normal clothes, but unlike traditional city bikes, these townies use high-quality parts and materials, and are elegantly and stylishly designed.

When I first started seeing ads for these bikes, I thought they were uniquely American. Europe has a long tradition of everyday cycling, but they also have a long tradition of well-crafted (if somewhat dowdy) city bikes. I figured that it must be an American thing to make bikes combining style, performance, and ease. Boy was I wrong.

The ad on the left is from the US magazine Bicycling, and it is for a US company called Electra. Stylish, slick, and targeted at people who like nice bikes but who also dont want to get all geared up just to go to the store or to meet a friend for brunch.

The ad on the right, from the UK Magazine Cycling Plus, is for… BMW? Yes, BMW makes bicycles. Hot. MORE…

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Heading for the starting line.

I did my first bike race today!

Peggy and I showed up at the crack of dawn this morning at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park for a 6-lap, 20 mile road race.

It was thrilling to ride with over a hundred other riders, thirty of them in my racing class (Category-5, the lowest level). Riding in such a big group of cyclists was at first a little nerve-racking — but my excitement overcame my jitters, and pretty soon I got into the groove.

It was fairly easy going at first, but after the first lap the pace picked just up a little — and suddenly I found myself struggling to keep up with the pack. MORE…

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I am going to enter some bicycle races this year.

I’m learning, however, that training to race can require a massive, life-altering level of commitment. Specifically, it requires huge amounts of time, time that a person like me might not realistically ever have. Is it possible for a business owner/entrepreneur to also be a competitive athlete? MORE…

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