Pic Spocket

For the last 17 days, we have kept our friend’s dog named “Trails”. He’s a brittany spaniel and he is adorable. If only he did not pull so much when walking! We worked on that small issue for the last 2 weeks and he is better now, but it’s hard to be effective when walking 2 dogs at the same time.

Other than that, it went really well. Both dogs are behaving nicely together. They are playing a lot. The bed gets crowded in the morning though..

Our friends are about to get back in town and yesterday evening I decided to break out the flashes and umbrellas and try to snap a portrait or 2 with the help of Corinne. We only did a few ones with a single setup because it was quite late already when we got to it.

Trails was cooperating pretty well: that dog would do anything for a piece of food. Not so much luck with the poor Newton. He was simply terrorized by the umbrella I use to diffuse light. Can you tell? hehe!

Album below.

Trails in studio

I am finally done with processing all the pictures taken in France last march. Can you believe how long it took me! I really need to simplify my workflow given the lack of time I have for this. Maybe I’ll have to shoot ‘jpegs’ in the future. We’ll see..

Back on topic, I have updated the Paris online album with the latest pictures. They are miscellaneous pics taken walking in Paris that simply did not fit in the other albums.

I reached the downtown area using the most convenient transport system over there: the subway. I snapped a few shots but I was stopped quickly by a police woman: seems like taking pictures in the subway is not allowed.

Back on the surface, I just walked around randomly taking pictures along my way. Here is a HDR picture (processed from multiple exposures) that I really like even if I pushed the effect a bit too far compared to my usual taste:

Typical French architecture and coffee shops:

The ‘Hotel de ville’ (City Hall) and the ‘Centre Pompidou’ (national art museum):

Lugging around my full size tripod was a chore during the day, but I was really happy to have that night. I could capture some very nice and sharp night views of the city.

Pubs/restaurants:

These 2 are among my favorites of the night shots, I am just not sure which one I prefer. The amount of headlights tracks in the first one maybe a bit too distracting.

 A few more pics:

As usual, more pics and larger version in the album below:

Paris Misc

All pictures from the Paris trip are found in the ‘Paris March 2009′ album of the Travel Section in the photo album.

When I got to the group training sessions over at LPC last Sunday, somebody told me they saw ‘my picture’ the day before in a magazine or something (she did not remember). Few minutes later, another athlete arrives and tells me “You are Thierry right?”.. so I say ‘Yes’ and he replies “I knew because I saw your picture in the newspaper yesterday”. I really had no idea what they were talking about. After more discussion, they mentionned something about a Charity event at the KEG restaurant and then it hit me!

After completing the Detroit Half Marathon last October, I convinced Corinne to go celebrate with a good meal at the KEG (we really like it over there, by the river). It turned out it was a special evening where several ‘local celebrities’ were serving customers for charity. A photograph from the Windsor Star asked if he could take our picture with one of the staff member. This was so long ago, we forgot all about it.

Still funny they waited so long before publishing it. Here is the story in the Windsor Star Newspaper. I included a zoomed version of our picture below the full page.

Zoomed caption:

It’s funny to see how many people in town actually read these pages because all day Monday and Tuesday, people went to see Corinne at work to tell her they saw her in the newspaper of the weekend.

In the previous months, I passed a lot of time reading books and online content about triathlon training for my next season. It’s amazing the amount of information available. Turns out that too much information is not better than a lack of information. You easily get overwhelmed and confused between the different philosophies.

While preparing for my first big race in May 2010 would not be too complicated (I could just follow a published training plan), dealing with business travels and missed workout can easily transform in a headache. Preparing for the last big race of the season (Muskoka in September) while racing smaller races in the summer is also much more complex.

I quickly noticed that I was spending way too much energy on juggling with these topics. Therefore I decided to hire a personal coach. James Loaring at LPC has a lot of experience coaching age group athletes like myself. The reasons for working with a coach are:

• Relieve me from the stress of figuring out how to train and deal with missed workouts. I can then focus of training and other important things of life like passing time with my family.
• benefit from the extensive experience of a knowledgeable coach.
• Get the best return out of the limited training time I have available to invest. That means having a clear purpose for each training session and avoid ‘junk miles’.
• Perform better than I would have by just following a one-size-fit-all training program or by coaching myself (which could easily result in over training at the rate I was going).

I have now been training with Coach James for a couple of weeks and I can say that my training sessions could not be more different than what I was doing before. Everything is much more structured and I am training in several zones. I use to do all my training in tempo/race pace. Hopefully this will all pay off on race day!

 To give you an idea of how structured the training can be, see the article below that James posted on his blog, based on the bike split of the last ‘Loaring Training Days’. I had my Computrainer recording my workout and he used my data to support the discussion. Apparently, I was an good example of ‘proper pacing’. Clicking on the graph below will open my workout on Training Peaks.

>>Techy Tuesday: Dissecting a Indoor Bike Workout

That’s it for the sport bit! Come back soon for more news…

The Sacré-Cœur Basilica (Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) in Paris is located on the highest on the highest summit of the city, at the “Butte Montmartre”. The interior was really nice but picture taking was forbiden - and enforced

Skyline from up there:

The basilica

Some architectureal details:

Local performer trying so get a few $ from the tourist crowd…

More pics and larger versions in the album below.

�

Paris Sacre-Coeur