I found myself, for various reasons, working on a post about goals for the coming year and I got most of the way through the post before realizing that I was looking down the road to where I was going, without first reflecting on where I am and where I’ve been over the past year.
Looking back, it was an interesting year… the first half was almost completely consumed by my thesis. The rest of my time went into training. The work paid off though as I finished graduate school with my masters and got the heck out of Cinci.
When graduation time came around, I was already sitting pretty with a job offer. In February, my employer for my last Co-Op, Boulder Associates, emailed me saying they were looking at their staffing needs for the coming year and would I like a full-time position? Heck yeah!
I moved out to Boulder (aka Heaven!) and managed to even move into the same place I had lived before, that kind of stability is great for someone who had to move almost 10 times in the prior 3 years.
When it came to my training, I took almost 10 minutes off my half-marathon time and almost an hour off my Half-Ironman time (thanks Mark!) and committed myself to doing my first Iron distance race in September 2009. I also got a powertap... huzzah!
Most important of all, I was the best man at my brother’s wedding and my sister asked me to be the godfather for her first child as I am now getting along with my siblings better than I have at almost any other point in my life.
2008 was a very good year, I hope to make 2009 even better.
I’ve been off the blogging wagon lately since my laptop took a major nosedive. Fortunately, I had a hunch it was coming and backed up my files, but it’s still a bummer, that beast saw me through many, many, many hours of graduate school, thesis and a lot of travel.
Now I need to decide what to do next. My current phone meets a lot of my computing needs and my next phone (I’m thinking of getting a Palm Pre) should meet even more. The laptop that died, while great for when I was in school and needed something portable with desktop power, isn’t ideal for my current needs. Now I’m thinking of either getting a good old fashioned desktop computer, or an ultraportable like an Asus Eee PC. Right now I’m leaning towards the Eee since I like having the portability and I don’t really need the power of a desktop.
Any recommendations?
*note: any recommendation referencing Mac or Apple will be lampooned. You’ve been warned.
So I FINALLY got to test out the Powertap now that I’ve got rim tape on the new wheel (need to remember to leave feedback for the seller now too).
I did my first ride on the trainer to try to establish a baseline. The workout [all zn2 + 20x(1:30 zn4 : 30 sec zn1)] called for me to hold 146-165 watts according to my bike computer. I noticed during the ride that the ptap tended to hold a little lower than the bike computer was. The powertap also uses a smaller sampling period than the bike computer did, so it was a little more up and down through the ride.
At the end of the ride, my average watts on the powertap was 155, while the bike comp was 159. Pretty close.
In general, I definitely liked having the powertap on. I set it to show current watts, cadence and time whereas before I’d have had to use two devices to get all three of those showing at once.
The install was pretty simple, even for having the wired version. I had never changed a cassette on my bike before, so that was probably the biggest challenge, just owing to the uncertainty around doing it. There was of course the adventure of the rim tapeless wheel, but that was just me not thinking.
