Ingrid and I raced at the Red 2 Red race over in Echo. There were hundreds of people, two of which were out of shape. I knew it was going to be a hard day as the only thing I've practiced on my mountain bike was crashing on Skyline. It was worse as we got pounded by 20-30 mph winds. We both finished without mechanicals or cramps or losing our water bottles, which was the case for a lot of people. I had a new tricksy backpack that shoots water instead of having to suck on the nozzle. I thought it was crap until about 3 miles from the end when I saw what I was doing wrong. Next time.

Photos

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

We had one sunny day this week, so I played hookey from work and went up the snow on Hamilton Mountain.

Panoramic Photos

Photos

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Removed hot tub with sawzall, chainsaw, boots and an ax. Finally finishing the wall by front door. Dropboxes are your friend, rat crap and worms are not.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Snow shoeing on Mt. Hood.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Turkey weekend at the beach.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Cleaning of the deck with a power washer.

• 
• 

I went up Dog Mountain to work off Thanksgiving food. I think last year Ingrid and I did it in 1:20, today I made it up in 1:00:10, just missing under an hour. My average heart rate was 158, just about my anaerobic threshold, for the whole time. It was nice and snowy and cold up top, sometimes bad weather makes it more exciting.

Photos

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Thanksgiving with Ingrid's mom and brother, no turkeys were harmed but some pumpkins were taken out.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I have been working on various incarnations of a page for listing my books for a few years now. It started off as a way for me to see what books I had so I wouldn't buy double, so it was a .wml page as my first phones were old. It eventually got to be a page that was only usable by me as a result of horrible design. One weekend I even spent both days scanning the covers for each of my books so I could show the covers. (That set of photos is lost in the ether.)
I just revamped the books page to be searchable by author or title. The author page has two views of the books, the traditional list and a coverflow view, with a icon to switch between the two. Hopefully it's intuitive enough.
I used a few web services to cobble together images; books.google.com for book covers, and wikipedia for author photos (which sometimes is the wrong person.)
Plus now the books link is up top next to photos link

Last February I took a EKG stress test to get a baseline of my heart for future. It used the Bruce Protocol as part of the assesment, which extrapolated to a VO2 max number of 48.5.
Yesterday I went and took a proper VO2 max test at Bridgetown PT. The test consisted of running on treadmill with a mask and hose strapped to your face and a heart rate monitor. The test itself took ~15 minutes, starting at 4mph ramping up to 10mph. I ended up with a peak VO2 of 52.6 ml/kg/min.
Besides the VO2 number, I also got my Aerobic and Anaerobic numbers. My Anaerobic Threshold is only 157, so there is more work to be done.

Zone	Low	Moderate	High	Peak
HR	104-146	146-157	157-168	168-172
C/hr	245-943	943-1113	1113-1384	1384-1474