Race for the cure....and the finish line

A picture for pictures sake

Ron — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:02:43 +0000

This is kind of a test post to see how posts with pics sent from the phone look. I tried one of myself but it’s not easy taking self portraits with an iPhone so you get to see the raritan valley train I’m on heading back home.

Aaaaand im back!

Ron — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:51:56 +0000

Well. Not much explaination needed I guess. Running a blog is not the easiest thing, especially when we can’t post from work and were doing so much every night. Good news is now with my sexy new iPhone and the wordpress app, I can post anywhere so there’s no excuse for me not to keep you guys up to date on the current status of our journey.
We know many people have already contributed and for that we are very grateful. It’s been awesome to see the response from others about the cause and about our training.
There’s only about 7weeks left in the process and it’s gone unbelievably fast. I was pretty embarrassed that I just saw my last post was in may. You have done your part and I need to do mine.
Plan is to give a training update later today and maybe start a congratulatory roll call for those that have donated ( gotta get my list). To start things off, I’d like to thank the two most recent contributors, my good friend Nick Peacock as well as a good family friend and previous employer (to whom I’m grateful) Todd Horowitz and family. Thank you for your support!!!

Is this thing on?

Ron — Mon, 26 May 2008 17:59:08 +0000

Well, it’s been a fun few days. After missing two training sessions because of a wedding (yep, didn’t get up last saturday) and a fundraiser with the Princess of Sweden (weak excuse, i know) I’m back on the horse. Not Big Brown, no, Big Black. I decided to stick with my all-blacked out mountain bike for the race, as I didn’t feel like dropping over 5 bills on a bike I may never use again. Much smarter idea was putting some “slicks” on the bike and locking out the front suspension (that’s Mickey from Sid’s Bikes doing the switch). Even just taking it back from the shop, the difference in speed was awesome. Though the bike shop guys kinda thought it looked funny with a big fat bike and tiny wheels, it’ll do me well over the course of training. More pics of the bike in the flickr roll to the right.

With the new tires, I was excited to get to the first group bike session this Saturday morning (at 8am as usual)…

and I was damn surprised when it was laid on us we’d be doing an “easy” ride of the lower Central Park loop 3 times…15 miles! First time out! I sure as hell never rode that far before, and as expected, my bike seat was KILLING me by the time that third loop came around. At least I had a biking partner named Claire who did a good job keeping our minds off the pain we were enduring. At least the downhills were fun…

After finishing the 15 miles of biking, I rode down Broadway and hopped in the Path to get over to Hoboken for a soccer tourney. The team had already won the first game of the day (that I missed to bike), and even though confidence was high, 3 losses and much dehydration later, we were forced to play one more game as we snuck into the playoffs with a measly 3 points and a goal differential of -7 (bested the next team by 3 goals). After getting smoked one more time, it was a limp back to the apartment do die a slow death the rest of the day.

No exercise on Sunday. The legs hurt wayyyy too much. But today after laying at Hudson Park on the water and watching lots of people work out, I got myself out there, strapped on the Nike+ for the first time, and put in a 30 minute OAB. Since everything on the web is linkable, here’s the results:

Memorial Day 30 minute OAB

The numbers are skewed as the stupid iPod requires 2 button pushes, a scroll, and another button push to officially end the workout. Pretty rediculous to do when trying to stay upright after a greuling run. So if you actually check out the run, discount the final 10 minutes of the workout and the steep drop in pace at the end.

Looking to get in the pool this week. Official team swim sessions start a week from now so I want to get some pool time under my belt. As usual the week’s gonna be crazy busy, so we’ll see what happens. At least I have goggles…

Finally Up and Running…

malbaker — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hey guys, I just wanted to post a quick note to say that I’m finally signed up and ready to roll for the blog so that I can help keep you up to date with our training and other happenings in relation to the triathlon. Look forward to keeping in touch with everyone over the training!!

Post more soon,

Mal

My knees say I just worked out…

Ron — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:20:38 +0000

…so it must be true. Today was actually the second GTS (group training session) of our season and it went well! Except for the painful feeling in my knees after finishing the run (for only about 1.5 minutes, don’t worry Mom, haha) the run was a success. We completed a series of 3 OAB (out and back) runs where your goal is to run as far away on a given path for half the time and complete the second half in the same amount of time. Even through 3 years of running cross-country back in high school, I don’t remember training in this method, but it was great to be able to ramp up intensity. First 10 minute OAB was a warmup to get the legs loose and work on our form, second OAB was an intermediate speed that gave our bodies a good push, while the final trip was split to make the first half out a all-out hustle, while the return was a recovery run to let us cool down. Of course, with the cool New York air at 730pm today, cool down we did, and fast.

There was squats between OABs to train our bodies to feel as if we just got off a bike, and even though we are in the early stages, I can definitly tell that on race day I am going to look like a gimpy Manute Bol (more so than he usually was). At the end was core work, which is always fun to try to challenege yourself to put up with intense pain that the mind has a hard time understanding. What I mean is that just simple positions to put yourself in while sitting/laying on the ground results in an intense struggle to maintain form in just over 15 seconds, and I’m even in pretty good shape already! If I don’t get my six-pack by the end of this training, I think I’ll have to give it up trying to get it back.

As for the first workout, it was kind of weak, as the coaches just wanted to get everyone moving, so it was just a single, easy 10 minute OAB, followed by some running form excersices, and a quick trip to a running store to grab some gear for those who needed it. I’ll go over the running form in the future, but suffice to say, I’m surprised how much I learned about how to run. Seriously. It is going to be a contant fight to keep my strides shorter and quicker, as I’m acclimated to using my 6’6″ frame to get places very fast by opening up the stride.

Also, Domino’s backed out of giving us a few free pies for after our training session, so even though I never buy their crappy pizzas anyway, I’ll still say I’m on an official Domino’s Pizza boycott. C’mon, we’re trying to cure cancer here!

Big challenge for myself this weekend as I’m travelling to Pittsburgh for my good friend Rob Booth’s wedding. Will I have the resolve to get up early on Saturday morning and get a run in before the celebration begins? We’ll see, but I should be able to get a quick post in Saturday morning if I pull it off. If it’s all quiet here, you know I’m going to blame my laziness on the peer pressure of the night before…

Go Pens,

testing…testing…

Ron — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:39:33 +0000

Well, its friday night, and if you can’t tell from the grammatical errors, I’m coming to you live from my blackberry. As we ramp up the site we want to make sure you can follow us not only each step along the way, but also get the most recent updates as soon as we experience them. Thisll also help us stay more on top of things as we won’t have to remember out ideas all day until we get home and turn on the personal computers (unfortunately wordpress is on the wrong side of our firewall here at JBB). So, even though we can’t have the twitter feed hooked up on our site, thres no reason to think we’ve forgotten as the blackberry and iPhone will now be crankin out the stories.

Live from JBB,

One day old!

Ron — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:43:13 +0000

Well, our journey to completing this triathlon, that is. Not this website obviously, this is the first post! (as you can undoubtably can tell by the lack of diction and audience that I’m writing this to.) This site is by myself and a close friend and coworker Mallory Baker, chronicling our path to raising over $3,000 (each!) for blood cancer research and culminating in our completion of the Westchester triathlon on September 21st!

So welcome to the site! I guess this can be a welcome to myself, as my compatriot in this quest hasn’t even seen the site yet and obviously none of you know of these plans either. Luckily, Mallory has been informed of the plan, so she won’t feel like she’s about to get tossed into a “series of tubes” never to make it out again.

Tomorrow on the site should be the big kickoff, with some pics of last night’s big kick off event and some thoughts of ours as we begin 5 months of sacrifice, pain, and FUN. Hope you enjoy our thoughts, feelings, rants, and successes. Our victory will be a victory we can all share.

Tidings,