Pic Spocket

I’ve had trouble with toothache for the last month. After a few visits at the dentist and a couple of filling redone, I still have the issues. It’s even worse now with some swelling in the neck area on my right side. For troubleshooting, they sent me to the Oral Surgeon where I had a 3D-Xray done for the first time. You are standing with your head in a fixture of a weird machine and then the X-Ray scanner revolves around your head. I got a copy of the X-Ray, which I photographed by placing the negative on a white diffuser behind which I triggered an off-camera flash unit (sorry for the details, but I was excited about using that backlighting technique for the first time!). Here is the 3D-XRay of my teeth:

According to the Oral Surgeon, either I have a problem with the pulp of tooth #31 (marqued with an ‘X’), or one of my wisdom tooth (marqued with ‘y’) must come out. I hope it’s not the latter because that would mean 2 days off work and one week off training without mention of the pain associated with a tooth extraction procedure… In the former case, a simple root canal would solve the issue.

What is scary is the orientation of the wisdom teeth on the other side of the mouth. If they ever start growing, they could cause some serious problems due to their orientation!

 Talk about random pieces of life

Well.. one thing for sure: It’s not me anymore! See below for the setup of a typical night in the home theater. Now.. See the tiny little space left on the left side: that’s for me!

Hard the life life of a dog like ours… The right picture shows how he looks at you when you dare wake him up when it’s time to go back up the stairs for the night…

You can’t say he is not adorable though :).

The “About us” page was updated for 2010 with a lot of pictures. The previous version dated from 2007 when I started te blog. Have a quick look! The before/after diet comparison is shocking

At home, I am known to forget about wish cards, or simply not putting enough effort into cards. I think that for this Valentine’s Day, I redeemed myself for all the previous times. I passed hours coming up with a card I made myself, based on a collage of photos of happy moments passed together. The card is also huge, printed on 13″x19″ photo paper folded in 2. Here is the front of the card:

I also put a lot of details on the back of the card:

One may find the numbers from the barcode pretty spooky… Bigger versions (up to 1000 pixels) of these are available here.

For the front of the card, I used a small program called “Shape Collage“. With this program, you can make very interesting collages of any shapes with only a few mouse clicks. Here is a video tutorial which is also a great way to see what can be done with it:

Things are taking shape for my first season of Half Ironman (HIM) long course triathlon races this year: I have registered and paid for hotels for Florida in May and Muskoka (Ontario) in September. My bike transport is also arranged for Florida. Traveling by plane with a bike is no fun at all. Rather than checking it in I will use Tri Bike Transport, a company that has trucks stopping in many bike stores across the country and delivers your bike right at the Ironman race venue without the need to take it apart. That makes things much simpler.

My training volume is currently at about 10 hours per week at this time. That may not seem like a whole lot, but that’s 10 hours of actually “doing” workouts. Considering most of my training sessions are at 45 to 60 minutes in duration each, that’s a lot of training sessions. There are many days with 2 sessions. Time adds up quickly when you include the preparation related to each session (drive to the location (pool, gym), setup the hardware, print/read the workout instructions, change, shower afterwards, etc). Right now, a typical week looks like this:

Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 45 min swim at lunch; bike in the evening
Wednesday: Run + 30 min core strength
Thursday: 45 min swim at lunch; bike in the evening
Friday: Run + 30 min  core strength
Saturday: Long swim ; Long Bike
Sunday: Long Run + 30 min core strength

The weeks are going by quickly, I’ll tell you that! 

Bike Configuration 

I have finalized by bike configuration for the HIM races. I have made a few upgrades to my Time Trial Bike since posting about it. Here it is, in full race configuration:

It’s a Kuota K-Factor 2009 Time Trial Bike. In december, I went to a specialized shop in Saline, MI to get properly fitted on it. They raised my seat by 3/4″ and lowered my cockpit quite a bit (1.5″ IIRC). This will ride quite differently next spring.

The biggest upgrade on it is the set of ZIPP wheels. These are aerodynamic deep profile carbon rims. I am running a Zipp 808 rear (80 mm section) and a Zipp 404 front (60 mm section). I went for the ‘clincher’ version of the wheels rather than the ‘tubular’ (lighter) version because I would rather deal with a clincher tire if a flat would occur during a race. They are only slightly heavier than my original wheels, but that is mostly because the rear wheel hub is a Cycle Ops Powertap power meter (more below). Only downside is that the bike is more difficult to handle when there are a lot of crosswind (especially wind gusts), as I have experienced last fall. On the other side, the carbon rims absorb all the road defects really well and the ride becomes much more enjoyable with these wheels.

The rear wheel hub (Powertap unit) transmits wirelessly to both the bike computer and my Garmin GPS watch not only speed, distance and cadence but also the amount of power (in watts) that I am transmitting to the rear wheel. That information can be an invaluable tool for racing and training. It can help to pace yourself properly during a race. Here is a close-up of the Powertap unit. 

The funny thing is that the wheelset is worth more than the rest of the bike itself. I would normally never put that kind of money just on something like wheels, but I found an awesome deal on Ebay last fall for this barely used set that included the powertap already.

The saddle was replaced for a “Fizik Arione Tri 2” which is more comfortable and lighter than the original one. The red and white saddle also looks good with the bike’s color scheme.

Other than that, most of the additions are related to hydration, which is a key factor in endurance racing:

• Profile Design AeroDrink: the bottle in the cockpit that lets me take sips without getting out of the aero position;
• Profile Design Razor bottle system: the narrow profile bottle on the frame
• Beaker Concepts rear seat bottle holder bracket: holding 2 more bottles
• In the rear seat bracket is a small bag with everything I need to fix a flat including compressed air cans.

I added a nice personalization touch last week, thanks to Victory Circle Graphix : my bike is now sporting my name and country flag. How cool is that!

I have been putting a lot of time riding it indoors on the Computrainer (I have over 1000 km on the trainer since fall) but I can’t wait for the temperature to rise again so that I can ride outside. Bigger image versions here in the photo album.