14.9 miles 17.6 Ave. Usual route

Sunday evening ride

After we returned home from the weekend trip to my cousin's wedding, I put in a quick ride:

14.71 miles @ 17.8 mph average. The first 13.3 miles were @ 18.8 mph, then I did the last leg through the highway 101 construction zone which slowed things down considerably.

Only three weeks left until the big race. Time to crank things into high gear.

19.3 miles 17.3 Ave. Usual am road route

The best moments are never on video...

Last night my neighbor Kai Kroll was over, and we were flying the Supercub off the lake. After 3 batteries between the two of us, Anna came down and decided to try a flight. Well, she put the airplane into a dive that I couldn't quite pull out of- and it smacked into the water really hard, with the floats belly-flopping into the water. The float mounts broke, and while the floats stayed on the water the airplane bounced upward. By this time I had control back, and I firewalled the motor to keep the now floatless airplane out of the water. All I could think of was crap, how am I going to land this? I was thinking that I could slow it down and ditch it into the weeds and big rocks on the shore. After regaining a little altitude, I throttled back and banked it back towards the dock. As it neared, I lined it up with the long part of the dock and continued to throttle back. I realized that I had it lined up perfectly to fly parallel with the shore to fly it right down the dock in front of the bench between the dock posts. Kai and Anna dove out of the way, and I chopped the throttle and reached up and grabbed the cub as it flew overhead. Amazingly I actually caught it without chopping my hand to bits or damaging the plane. Kai and Anna (any myself) were shocked- neither one of them even realized that the floats were still in the middle of the lake.

One more reason why there should always be a camera going when flying...

Last component of Backup Strategy

A month or two ago I added a DNS-321 network storage device. I moved all of our photos, documents, music, etc onto this device. Since this box has twin mirrored drives, there is some protection from physical drive failure. However, it doesn't have "previous versions" (which you'd have on a drive on your windows machine), plus if there is a fire, flood, theft etc I'd still lose my data. So, the final component is to add an off-site backup.

The most convenient and fail-safe method seems to be an online backup service. At work we use mozy.com, but mozy seems to be focused on business backup. One of my co-workers uses idrive, and had good things to say. So, today I signed up and started the backup process.

Essentially, for the initial backup it takes a long, long time to copy all of your data onto their secure servers. Once the initial backup is complete, each night it looks for new or changed files and only uploads the new files. Easy and relatively cheap, $4.95 per month for 150 Gb of storage.

Weekend's Rides

Saturday: dirt @Murphy: 30.1 miles 11.1 average.
Fantastic ride. The first lap was a little tough, I didn't feel put together and the singletrack wasn't flowing. After getting warmed up, the second and third laps felt great. By the end of the third I was getting tired. Mostly my arms. I'm planning on adding more core exercises and some basic arms for the gym workout for August. One weird effect of the longer mountain ride- I was craving and literally smelling Ho-Hos by the end of the 3rd lap. Is that normal?

Mmmm, Ho Hos!














Josh reminded me of the BBQ- I was planning on grilling after Thursday's ride at Leb but the possibility of burning some tasty brats after Saturday's ride slipped my mind. It was probably better I didn't bring it with, though, since I needed to help move stuff out of the duplex immediately after I returned home.


Sunday: pavement 24 miles 16.1 ave
Nice tool about town, first cruised over to the new Sport Hut off of Hwy 55 and 24. I initially didn't like their new location, but I'm warming to it. Even though their new digs don't seem as nice to me as their old place, their employees are friendly and seem to know what they are talking about. I had to pick up a couple road tubes before I really started my ride- I was clean out of tubes from all my flats lately. Next I headed over to the Wayzeta High School to check out suitability for flying. Wouldn't you know it, the Plymouth Elm Creek Playfields are hidden behind the school. There must be at least 10 soccer fields- and no light poles. Perfect flying location. I'll have to check it out. Then I looped west on Schmidt Lake Road to Old Rockford Road to Hamel Road. None of these have good shoulders, but there was interrupted sections of bike trail to hop between and traffic was light. Once on Hamel Road I was able to cruise west to 19, south through Baker Park, then back on 24.

Overall my legs felt surprisingly good. After yesterday's effort I thought they'd be dead tired. My average speed was lower than usual, but that may have been from riding around Plymouth and dealing with stop lights.

After the ride I tried a new recovery drink- chocolate malted Ovaltine in skim milk. I don't know if it's effective, but it tastes good and has tons of vitamins. It has to be better for you than my usual Nestle Quik.