DC Rainmaker

Behind the scenes: The DCRainmaker Gadget Cave

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:14:49 PST

Back a while ago I had shown a photo of the heart rate strap collection I have, where I stash the massive number of heart rate straps that I seem to have obtained (usually just because they came with various products). During that post, some folks asked to see what the full sports gadget collection looks like.

It used to be that the collection all fit into a single Rubbermaid container. Well, mostly. As you saw in my post on ‘Behind the scenes in product reviews’, it was overflowing at the time. So this spring I decided to upgrade it. And by ‘upgrade’, I mean I went to Ikea and bought the cheapest shelving system they had.

Now, I should point out an important item because I’m not sure if everyone realizes it. After I’m done reviewing a product, I almost always end up returning the product to the vendor – no matter if the item costs $2,000 or $200. About the only items I don’t send back are ones that I’ve consumed (i.e…food), which is fairly rare. In some cases, the companies don’t want them back – so I give them away (a hint at what might be coming up soon…).

After the product has gone back though, I end up re-purchasing almost all of them. I do this to be able to answer your questions as companies add new features, or to be able to add them as comparisons in product reviews. Obviously, this costs real hard cold cash, hence why I’m super thankful for all of you who use the Amazon links.

With that – let me introduce the portable side of the sports gadget collection. Note this does not include trainers, or anything else that doesn’t fit in the closet.

Above, the closet. You’ll notice Mr. Shark is hanging out there, guarding the goods. He sits behind the pull-up bar (an artifact as part of the Men’s Health partnership). The pull up bar keeps him in the room, like one of those children's fences.

Once you’re inside and navigated him out of the way, I’ve organized everything into levels. Starting at the very top is basically a place where I can stash boxes that don’t really fit anywhere else – these are mostly just scales and the like.

Then from there we go into swim stuff (you’ll notice the pattern: Swim, Bike, Run…). Because Swim doesn’t really need as much room as the others, I also stash some health and fitness stuff in here – like Zeo.

Moving down a layer we’ve got ‘Bike’. Now in general these are products that I’ve already reviewed, but there are some others in there that I just haven’t gotten around to. In some cases, the product may never be reviewed (simply due to lack of time), and in others, it’s still on my radar. For items that are triathlon and could swing both bike or run, I stash it wherever seems to have the most space that day.

Moving on we’re onto the run! This is without question the biggest category, as it’s the one where I write the most product reviews for. Lots of stuff in here. Sometimes I have two of an item, either because The Girl has one, or because I’ve had multiples for some random reason (i.e. there are two Nike+ GPS watches there, one of them is shattered).

Below the run, we’ve got the ‘To Review’ pile. This serves as a handy reminder of things I’m working on. Some items are higher priority than others, usually determined by your demand. Occasionally determined by public release. Virtually never determined by what a company wants (I recently reminded a company of that, subsequently sending back their products without review after they got pushy). I aim to deliver what I believe you’ll find interesting, not what some PR person wants. Of course, if I find something interesting, then you’ll never know what you’ll get (hence the Shark and blender things).

Finally, there’s that good ole Rubbermaid bin! Yup, he lives on. Currently he’s the miscellaneous parts box, with random stuff that I scrounge from. I’ve got enough zip ties in there to easily take care of any WTO event. And of course, off to the side is my trusty roller wheel for measuring courses, hanging out next to my underwater photography case for underwater review items.

I’ve also got two more little piles out of view (gotta have surprises!). The first being unreleased/unannounced products, and the second being a very good chunk of stuff that I’ll be giving away shortly. It’s a fairly substantial pile – sorta like ‘The mother of all DC Rainmaker giveaways’. And, more fun to keep that a surprise. When have you ever been disappointed by one of my giveaways?

With that – hope you enjoyed the little tour, and hope you have an enjoyable weekend!

Thanks for reading!

Fitting it all in: Work, Run, Fly, Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:01:46 PST

On Sunday evening I realized that Monday was going to be a bit of a whirlwind day – starting on one coast, and ending on the other, so I figured it might be a bit fun to simply put together a journal of my day. Just a bit of an inside look into how I attempt to fit everything into a given day, sometimes successfully, sometimes not as much. On days when I’m flying, everything is all aimed towards successfully being on the airplane before it departs the gate, which in this day’s case was 5:11PM.

Sunday night before heading to bed I checked the weather. My phone at the time showed a strange icon for Sunday evening that I’d never seen before. I’m not clear what exactly the bouncing ping pong balls meant, but I decided that it probably wasn’t going to magically get another 10-20*F warmer by 6-7AM, so I had little desire to run in the cold rain with whatever that little icon meant was leftover.

So instead of running I started the day off with a few conference calls, before eventually ending up commuting to some meetings. It’s during this commute that I found out on the radio that the little icon meant “freezing rain”, as the night before had coated everything in some ice – resulting in most schools being delayed about two hours. Thankfully, by time my conference calls were over it was 9AM and the roads were fine. Packed, slow as usual, but fine.

From 10AM onwards things were a whirlwind of meetings, one after another, with only about 8 minutes to grab and engulf a quick sandwich, all while finalizing a presentation. So basically, just another day.

At 3PM though, my clock started ticketing towards flight time. From one work building I rushed over to another office which happens to have a shared gym in it that I can access. Apparently nobody uses said gym, as it’s always been empty when I’ve been there.

By time I got there, figured out why my keycard wasn’t working, got that fixed, got changed, and re-calibrated my footpod on a new pair of shoes, it was closing in on 3:20PM. Doing quick math that meant if I wanted my 40 minute run it would put me at 4PM, with 5 minutes for shower, then still a 5-7 minute drive to the airport, and a 5 minute walk to security. That was a few minutes beyond where I wanted to be, so I ended up going with a 32 minute run instead.

The goal of the run was just an easy 40 minutes, so I didn’t fret about being 8 minutes shorter – it was certainly better than no run at all.

After a blistering shower, I zipped out on the highway for the short 5-7 minute drive from Reston Town Center to the Washington Dulles parking garages. Thankfully, there wasn’t any traffic to contend with, and I quickly found myself (aimlessly) circling the parking garage trying to find a spot.

From there it’s all about the Dulles Sprint – or the act of getting across the massive airport that is Washington Dulles International using the quickest method possible. Using the quickest method rarely means using the published routes.

Now the trick to Dulles is to use the secret security entrance, which allows you to essentially avoid any and all security lines. It’s amazing.

Years ago this used to be the paid Clear program security lines, but once that went belly-up they converted it into the TSA Diamond security lines (which just means designed for frequent travellers). Nowadays though, anyone can use it – you’ve just gotta know where it is. And being that it’s hidden downstairs in between the baggage claims, very few people know about it.

Thankfully it was empty as usual and I was able to clear security in about 2 minutes, including the fancy machines that just about measure my body composition like a body fat scale.

From there it’s out to one of a few transportation methods to get to the United gates (C & D), which are a few concourses away. If you follow the published signs you’ll likely end up on the underground subway thing. Which while nice for some gates, it’s fairly long for most gates – easily 5-7 minutes at best (very fast) walk time once the subway stops at the other end, especially the higher numbered C gates.

So instead I jump on the moon-buses (I don’t make up the names) to the ‘wrong’ concourse, but it’s just walk 1-2 minute versus the longer walk, saving me critical time.

Along the way I validate that my flight is still for C23, and indeed, my usual UA917 is where it should be. I’ve taken this flight countless times over the past decade – probably between 100 and 200 times, maybe more. I suppose I could look through that massive paper ream of history I got from United…maybe on a rainy day.

By 4:37PM I’ve arrived at my gate – C23, ready to board. And amazingly, I actually managed to get there before they started boarding. Four whole minutes to spare!

Four minutes later, I went ahead and boarded the Boeing 757-200 for the 4hr and 58 minute jaunt across the United States to Seattle.

During this 4hrs and 58 minutes I knocked out a handful of posts (though, this post wasn’t one of them). Many of you wonder where I fit in the time to write posts, and these flights are definitely one of those places. First was the Sunday night post on my weekend’s wanderings (60m), then I wrote Tuesday’s National Harbor post (took about 1hr 20m), and then the majority of the SportyPal post (another 75 minutes).

Spent some time answering about 35 of your e-mails (you don’t want to know how many are still left…sorry!). And then finally, I sifted through unsorted photos from the past month, trying to ensure that my stock pile had everything in the right place. These are mostly all things I’m working on, or recently posted.

Along the way, the sun set outside my little window…

And, just prior to 8PM Pacific Time, or 11PM Eastern Time, I landed in Seattle – ready to tackle…well…another conference call. First though, a ride on the little tram from the North Terminal to the main terminal, and then a sprint over to the rental car place.

By 8:10PM I’m on a 35 minute long conference call with a major national publication talking about sport watches for an upcoming piece they’re doing. I do this sitting in my rental car, in the rental car garage in the same space I found it in, with Avis workers occasionally staring at me.

I keep trying to mentally say to them “I promise, I’ll eventually leave.”

And, eventually I do.

From there, I drive 45 minutes north to my hometown of little Mukilteo, where my parents live. And while I’m out in Seattle for work this week, I simply stay with my family up north, as I get to enjoy spending the time with them.

And with that…the whole process (minus the jet plane) repeats itself again the next day…but, I’d take being busy over bored any day of the week!

Thanks for reading!

A review of the SportyPal Sony Ericsson Xperia Active Bike Mount

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:58:42 PST

It’s not that often that I write reviews for items that actually include no electronics whatsoever. Nor is it that often that I write a review for a single piece of plastic not much bigger than a deck of cards. But this time, I made an exception – and I think you’ll agree it’s a pretty cool little piece of plastic.

See, back in September I reviewed the newly released ANT+ and enabled Sony Ericsson Xperia Active Android phone. Aside from having fully integrated ANT+ support (meaning, it can connect to your Garmin sensors like speed/cadence, power, heart rate, etc…) – it’s all fully waterproofed, and shockproof. Don’t believe me? Well, check out this popular video I put together:

Sony Ericsson Xperia Active meets sports gel

And yes, fully waterproofed:

Sony Ericsson Xperia Active Underwater

So, with that background, the most common question on my original review post was “When is a bike mount coming out for it?”. Unfortunately, there really wasn’t a good answer for that. I spent considerable time checking out phone bike mounts at Interbike the following week – but none of them really fit the bill. In short, all of the options were half-ass, at best. None would be able to withstand an exciting trainer ride, let alone some time on a rough road.

For many, the use-case was clear: A bike computer replacement. Or more specifically, a Garmin Edge 800 bike computer replacement. Being roughly the same size, and just as waterproofed and durable – it starts to become an interesting platform. Especially once you consider that the phone can run any Android app – including ones like Strava or MapMyRide. Further, it’s always connected, allowing you to stream your data in real-time – right from your handlebars.

After Interbike things went quite for a bit on the mount front, but eventually ahead of the holidays I was contacted by the folks from SportyPal, as they were in the final stages of a bike mount that was designed specifically for the Xperia Active. The goal was a super-low profile mount that could happily hold the phone without losing it. So how’d things work out?

Unboxing:

Normally I have an unboxing section in my reviews, but as is often the case with products that I get ahead of release or availability, they don’t usually have full packaging. And that was definitely the case here, no pun intended. So, the full unboxing is quite simply just the single piece of plastic:

The final unit will include a handful of zip ties, which are required for attaching it to your bike.

Getting it all connected:

Now that we’re ready to set everything up, let’s talk about how your phone connects to the mount. You’ll notice that the plastic mount has a small little round bump, this bump corresponds with the Xperia Active’s camera lens. This little notch acts as a way to help secure everything in place – and does a really good job at it.

I asked why they didn’t use the LED flash divot instead of the camera lens divot. They commented that the camera lens was the most vulnerable part on the entire camera – so they wanted to protect it (which this does). Additionally, this would allow you to use the LED flash as a flashlight (turned on permanently) in a pinch on a trail (it’s surprisingly bright).

You’ll notice that the mount is incredibly thin – by far the thinnest overall mount in terms of height that I’ve seen for a phone. Most phone mounts add a fair bit of vertical height so the phone looks fairly awkward on your handlebars. But this one is basically about the same as the Edge 800.

Finally, time to get it mounted on the bike.

This requires two simple zip-ties, which just wrap through the little holes and help to mount it tightly to your handlebar.

As usual, just snip off the the excess:

With that, we’re ready to roll!

Use and durability a bike computer replacement:

It’s funny, by now, I’m pretty used to using a given bike computer on my rides. Sorta habit-like. However, despite having both the Edge 800 and the Xperia Active on my handlebars, I never glanced at the Edge 800 – but instead, kept on checking the Xperia Active for my latest speed, distance and HR updates.

For me, it was just the sheer screen sharpness and brightness of it, and the fact that there weren’t any funky oversized protective case on it. Nor any cover that introduced weird glare.

The one setting I changed that was applicable to riding was to modify the phone’s display timeout to 30 minutes, from the default setting of about 30 seconds I believe. Otherwise, the display would turn off before you finished your first few pedal rotations. Once that was set though, it’s perfect.

Now, as I noted in my previous review, the unit’s touchscreen doesn’t respond to normal glove touches. But folks have noted that you can simply pickup a wide variety of gloves that have little tips in them designed to work with the phone.

Size wise, the phone really didn’t seem out of place, again, about the same size as the Edge 800. Here’s a pic on my handlebars from this weekend – with the GoPro in view for some context. I had taken the Edge off for the picture, though I wish I had kept it on now.

And, here’s a couple more photos for good measure:

One item of note is that if you have a triathlon/time-trial bike, you might have trouble mounting this, since some aerobar pads would block enough real estate to make that tough. You could though pickup one of the various bike computer mounts designed to fit in between your aero bars, and mount it to that though.

From a durability standpoint, it’s really hard to show just how stable, secured and durable this thing is. I think tomorrow I’m going to film a little video outside showing me being able to throw the phone with it mounted to something (deciding what, since I don’t think I’m going to chuck my bike), and not having it fall off. I think you’ll be surprised – it’s remarkably secure and tight.

[Update – 1/26/2012]

Ok, I found something to attach it to that I could throw around – yup, a paddle. From one of those inflatable boats. So, below you’ll find an artful video of my banging the crap out of the paddle (in turn replicating a bumpy ride), and, simply just tossing the whole thing (phone and all) up in the air. Sometimes it landed on the paddle, sometimes directly on the phone. Again, remember that I’m tossing around a CELL PHONE. Just because perhaps that might get lost in your video entertainment moment:

Banging the crap out of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active with SportyPal bike mount.

A few of us were commenting at CES while playing with it then that this would be the last thing on your bike to pop-off in an accident, it’s really well secured. My time on the rougher dirt and mud trails with my road bike (some off-roading as a casualty in a recent ride), didn’t yield any issues. And while I’m not a hardcore mountain biker – I’d feel pretty confident in saying it won’t pop off there.

Upcoming Items of Note:

SportyPal also has an Android app that can connect to ANT+ sensors and record both GPS and ANT+ data. Additionally, they have the usual line of branded ANT+ accessories (HR straps, etc…). One interesting item that their app does is to take advantage of the Xperia Active’s barometric altimeter (yup, pretty cool, ehh?).

Even more interestingly is that they will be amongst the first to support the new Sony Ericsson Smart Watch via an app they’ll be releasing.

But what is the Smart Watch? Well, it connects to the Sony Ericsson phones via ANT+, and will display data in real-time from your cell phone. This could be workout data, location data, or even incoming cell phone calls. Since the Smart Watch is fully Android, apps can also be written for it. This probably isn’t as useful in a cycling scenario, but is much more appealing in a run workout – where the phone probably isn’t strapped to your wrist, but the watch is. And remember, since we’re talking a phone – we’ve got all the connectivity aspects – such as real-time positions and mapping, items your typical Garmin does not have.

The folks at Sony Ericsson are sending me out the Smart Watch to me this week to test out, and with Sporty Pal being the first folks out of the gate to support it – I’ll be digging into their Android app a bit in conjunction with that testing. Stay tuned!

Summary:

For $20, this is probably one of the coolest cheap things I’ve reviewed. The mount will be available in the next few weeks, so you’ll have it in your hands pretty soon. It’ll be available in both black and white initially, though, they also showed off a few more vibrant colors at CES this year.

Finally, I’ve gotten a lot of questions on where exactly you can get the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active. In Europe, that’s fairly easy and straightforward since a number of carriers carry it. But in the states, none of the major carriers have it in their local stores. Instead, you’d simply buy the phone unlocked (meaning, not tied to any given carrier) on Amazon (~$320US – Black/White, Black/Orange), following which your carrier of choice can activate it. And yup, it includes a full warranty and all that jazz.

For example, in my case I can (and do) swap my SIM card on ATT between my iPhone, Windows 7 Phone, and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active – all without any trouble, it just takes a second (really, just a few seconds). The nice part here is that you aren’t stuck in any contract with a given carrier. Note though that it won’t work on Verizon though, but will work with just about everyone else on earth, and all over the globe.

With that, as always, if you’ve got any questions – feel free to drop them below. Thanks for reading!

Ironman 70.3 National Harbor: Run Course Preview…Part I

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:15:07 PST

I had heard the rumors about Ironman 70.3 National Harbor in the fall of last year, as at the time it was expected that the race would be announced prior to Thanksgiving. So while last week’s final announcement was a bit later than most expected, I was happy to finally have the race announced.

Where is National Harbor?

Some of you may be wondering what and where National Harbor is. Well, in short, it’s a couple miles south of Washington DC proper, along the banks of the Potomac river, in Maryland.

Technically, the northern edge of the National Harbor property borders DC. And, it should be noted that National Harbor is indeed a property, and not a city or town. It was built up over the past few years as a convention/conference retreat near Washington, attempting to attract conferences away from the downtown core. In the case of hosting a race – that works both for and against it. While only an Ironman’s distance swim away from Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia, and a solid float from Lincoln or Jefferson – it’s really a world away from DC. And not because of any fancy marketing slogan, but merely because it’s actually relatively isolated – something you’ll see during this post. There’s virtually no public transit there, and is somewhat of a walled compound.

Many of you may also may remember last months fairly well failed Washington DC Hot Chocolate 5K/15K running race that was at National harbor. There’s thus been a lot of questions as to whether this event will repeat that events fate – and I definitely want to touch on that, but will do so later in this post.

But why is this course of interest to me? Well, as I noted yesterday – primarily because it’s in my backyard. Which, doesn’t at all mean that I’m actually going to race it. I might, I might not, I might do the relay, I might volunteer, I might pick a nice warm spot and squirt a water gun at folks on the run course while eating solid chocolate bunnies from an Easter stockpile. We’ll see.

So, the curious person in me decided that I’d go and check out the course. Despite running to National Harbor from my house on an almost weekly basis, I’d never actually run beyond it – which is where the course is. Nor had I cycled beyond it. Thus, this seemed like a perfect opportunity to expand my horizons, while knocking out my regular training workouts.

I should point out that in time I will most definitely check out and cover both the swim and bike courses, but, at the moment neither the weather nor my travel schedule is really cooperating for either. But for those wondering, in one sentence or less my impressions of the two other legs knowing the area/route are:

Swim: Easy and straightforward, potentially wetsuit illegal
T1: A half-mile all uphill fistivus for the rest of us
Bike: 56 miles on an uneventful highway with a scenic loop at the end.
T2: Short.
Run: Well, just read on…

Run Course Attempt #1:

Since my schedule had a 13 mile run on it, I figured this would be a relatively straight forward reconnaissance effort. While I could (and probably should) have created the route on MapMyRun or similar and then downloaded it to my Garmin unit as a course to follow, I decided instead to just print out the course map from the site. After all, that’s how most people would probably do it.

Lacking a good place to store it, I simply just wrapped it around my water bottle – which actually worked surprisingly well.

From there, I did a few loops in my car around National Harbor trying to figure out exactly where the start area would be, and then eventually where I’d be going for at least the first little mile or two on the run. The bike and run start (T1/T2) is just above (hill-wise) the Gaylord Hotel and Parking Garage – which puts it in a giant parking lot, mostly used for employee parking, though open to anyone. The swim is actually half a mile down the hill at the water’s edge. They are connected by newly paved roadway.

A tip on parking at National Harbor. If you park in said lots (where T1/T2 is), you’ll end up paying $12 – regardless of how long you stay. However, if you park on the main stretch in front of all the shops, they have meters (accepts credit cards). That’s your best bet, unless you plan on being there literally the entire day.

With everything all set (including a GoPro on my chest to record everything) – I set off!

The first portion of the run actually has you going back downhill to the water, perhaps a nice reprieve from 56 miles on the bike. You’ll run about half a mile on this service road, eventually cutting through a loading dock area to gain access to the waterfront trail. It’s fine to cut through here any time the main gate is open – which based on my running experience over there for the past two years, is basically all the time.

Once past the gates you’ll work your way a few hundred more yards to the Potomac’s edge. At this point all the swimmers should be long gone, and you’ll likely instead find your spectators. They’ll be there because it’s relatively close to food and things to keep them busy. But, you won’t get to enjoy that quite yet, instead, you need to turn away from it all and run along the waters edge.

The path here is crushed seashells (a very contentious point in local cycling group circles), but you’ll only be on it for a few hundred yards, and for a runner, there’s no problem. And while it was a bit muddy in some sections due to the snow, it’s generally not too bad.

From there, you’ll start heading back up the hill you just came down. About half a mile up the hill you’ll hit Mile Marker 1 – right near the exit/entrance to transition. But, you’re nowhere near the end of this hill.

Nope, it’ll continue to climb for another half a mile, getting steeper towards the end with a reasonably painful burst to the top of the ridge. In general, I’m reasonably certain you’re going to hate life by mile 1.43.

From here, you’ll make a turn to the right and exit the National Harbor property through a backdoor gate.

Now, this is where my entire plan fell apart on Saturday. See, said gate is well locked, and, as I found out – the property on the whole is well gated. In fact, I spent the next 4 miles trying to find a rabbit hole or break in the perimeter of the property to get out.

No such hole seemed to exist. Seriously, they went to a LOT of effort to keep people from either getting out, or getting in. The irony of this being that National Harbor as a real estate development is well known to be struggling a bit. And there are endless neighborhoods of houses which are a very walkable few hundred yards away from shopping and eating. None of which they can get to. If you do attempt to explore the empty property space, you’ll mostly spend just a lot of time running across tundra, which was cleared in expectation for homes that never occurred. I suppose if you needed to practice tundra running – this is where to go:

The nearest reroute would add about 4-5 miles onto the run course. And because the course is a giant loop, merely changing the direction of the course wouldn’t really solve the problem, as you’d still end up short.

So, after more than 13 miles of non-course exploring under my belt on Saturday trying to find an alternate route to use for training, I eventually game up and tweeted a picture of the gate with my findings. A short bit later, I got a tweet back from someone noting that there was actually a bar missing on the gate, just to the left – wondering if I could fit.

And indeed…I could fit! Sweet!

Now, this is totally legal. As long as you’re just EXITING the property through this missing bar, then life is grand, since you’re simply existing onto a public road. If you go the other way, the signs indicate no trespassing. Further, the irony is that as I exited this very spot the next day, a police officer came around the corner. While he hit the brakes when he saw me going through the gate, he kept on going as soon as he realized which way I was going.

So…onto attempt Run Course Attempt #2.

Run Course Attempt #2:

I came back on Sunday, ready to try this again – armed with my newfound fence knowledge. Except, this time I really didn’t have another 13 mile run on my schedule. So, I decided to ride a bike instead. It would allow me to get better (smoother) GoPro footage anyway, and be quicker. Plus, if I got lost, I’d spend less time being lost.

So off I set out, repeating all the same steps as above. This time, I easily escaped through the fence whole – including my bike.

From there, the course scenery immediately changes from corporate designed town center, to rural neighborhoods:

The geography mostly just lightly rolls for the next 1-2 miles. There are some solid dips in there though, a fair bit of downhill, but also some solid little uphill sections of a few hundred yards at a time.

You’ll pass a few schools towards mile 3-4, which are only notable as bathroom/water stops. There was also a small park a few hundred yards off the route, but I didn’t explore it this time. Eventually, the quiet road meets up with the Henson Creek Trail, which is a paved bike/running path that in total runs about five miles – though, the course doesn’t use all of it.

The bike path was rather nice, and will be your best friend during the summer when the heat is blazing, as the trees easily cover the path and should completely shade it. Additionally, once on the trail, it simply follows an active creek, so the terrain is basically flat here. If you’re out there training, note that there was no water or bathrooms along the trail (beyond the trees themselves…).

Eventually, you dip under Route 210 – the busy highway that you’d have just finished biking out and back on. This could be both encouraging or disheartening to see other athletes, depending on whether you’re on the bike or the run at this stage.

While the highway underpass bike path was in semi rough condition (clearly flooded a few times), I don’t expect that to be an issue come race day, as most park authorities in the area tend to clean up these trails in spring. Shortly after departing this underpass, I noticed the sign on the side of the trail:

Not sure what to make of it, I kept on chugging.

Soon though, I came upon what was clearly not a good sign. No pun intended.

The river had completely and totally washed out the bridge. And, despite how it may or may not appear in this picture, the water is/was actually fairly deep in a few places – a couple feet, more than I’d want to hop across in the winter anyway. Hot summer day? Mmm…perhaps refreshing.

Even in summer though, there wasn’t any obvious way to easily make a river crossing on foot without getting wet. Thus, it’s going to take either a new bridge, or some construction. Curious about this, I did a bit of research and found that the bridge has been washed out for at least a year. And while the local park authorities said last May that ‘Construction should be complete by December 2011’- it’s clear it never started, let alone finished.

Curious, I posted a message to the National Harbor 70.3 Facebook page and asked what was up. Here’s the response:

This is concerning in that I would have expected someone to actually have tried running/riding this route at some point in the last year, as clearly they would have been aware of it – since it would have been impossible to complete.

But, at the same time, if anyone can overcome the lack of bridge – it’s Chuck and his team that puts on the Nation’s Triathlon. After all, they built a giant floating pontoon system in the middle of the Potomac River, and put on an event that very few people would argue isn’t world class. Surely they could just grab some of those pontoons they use every year and make a makeshift crossing fairly easily (it’s probably 30-40yds across). It’d be like a Boy Scout Eagle Project. Failing that, as someone else Tweeted to me “Didn't you get the memo, the run is going to have a Steeplechase theme!”.

Now, determined to get a full GPS file and video of this route, I pulled out my phone and looked up detours. It would be another 3-4 miles of riding to get around this and end up at the other side of the bridge. No worries, I had all day. Off I went!

Roughly 2 miles later, about half-way up the mother of all hills that I had found, I noticed a distinct lack of air in my front tire. As in, no air at all.

Well, this officially put a damper on things. Somewhere in the fall season I had removed my saddle bag from this bike (which I don’t often use) and put it with my stuff for travel during bike rental at Interbike and the ANT+ Symposium. As such, I had neither spare tubes nor a patch kit. And, while I did try riding it for a while, it wasn’t really working out very well for further territory exploration with riding on the rims.

Thus, my efforts were thwarted again.

At this point I was some 6+ miles away from my car. And while I contemplated finishing the course, that particular upcoming area was more residential, and also more miles of potentially non-friendly trails. So I ended up backtracking and riding the last few miles on the highway, aka, the bike course. It was flat and straight – which at 8-11MPH and occasional ice, was about all my poor bike would do.

Determined not to leave you completely hanging though – I did go ahead and take the first 5ish miles of video footage and upload it, consider it a bit of a course preview. Here ya go, for your enjoyment!

Ironman 70.3 National Harbor

Looks like fun, ehh?

Hot Chocolate Mess Again?

Obviously, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not another race at National Harbor is a good idea, and whether it’ll end up like the Hot Chocolate mess back in December. In short, I don’t believe so – and here’s why:

1) The National Harbor Ironman 70.3 is expected to have 3,000 racers. The Hot Chocolate 5K/15K had 22,000. That was roughly ten times larger. There are other running events held at National Harbor in the 2,000ish range, without any issue (Woodrow Wilson Half-Marathon).

2) Running and triathlons are fundamentally different. A running race has all people starting at the same time, in a highly clustered scenario. A triathlon however, starts in waves (full Ironman’s excluded). A typical triathlon wave is about 100-125 people, usually in 3-5 minute intervals. The whole swim thing then further separates out the competition. Coming out of the swim there’s a full two-lane road, plenty to handle the normal 1-2 athletes per second you’d see exiting the swim. And that monster of an uphill T1 will continue to disperse the field. Finally, the mere act of 56 miles of cycling does a really good job at separating the field (Ironman Florida excluded).

3) Many Ironman 70.3’s run courses are held on bike paths: An Ironman 70.3 event does not need a full roadway to hold the run portion. A bike path is more than sufficient. Plenty of big 70.3 events today operate this way, even ones with multiple loop run courses. In the case of National Harbor, only a handful of sections are on bike paths (never doubling back nor repeated), the first of which starts at mile 62 of the race. Plenty of separation. I suspect for some extended front portion of the field, you’ll be pretty much running by yourself.

4) National Harbor handles 3,000 person events on a frequent basis. I wouldn’t put myself in the camp of being a huge National Harbor fan – but the reality is, they do handle conventions and conferences every week with 3,000 people in them. The parking lots are PLENTY big to accommodate this type of demand. With 3-5 close-by giant lots, and two even bigger 5-7 story garages, no issues there. As long as they don’t try and pull a Hot Chocolate and have 20,000 cars, they’ll be good.

5) The bike course will be ‘interesting’: The one area I’m a bit unclear on is the traffic management aspect of the bike course. Quite frankly, I’m amazed they got some form of road closures, given how important that highway is to that area. I’d like to understand more clearly what the plan is there – and how that will work. While the highway does generally have a wide break-down lane – the road’s traffic usually flows at between 50MPH and 65MPH. And while there are plenty of races (Ironman to sprint) that operate on fully open roads, I can’t think of any offhand on a road quite like this, with as fast and as much traffic as this. And those that do, tend to have a bit more local history of the event (community support). As we saw with the Hot Chocolate, closing portions of that road was not received well by drivers by any stretch. Below, an image on this stretch coming back with my wounded tire.

But again, if they were to close one half of it, or have at least a lane of buffer – I’d be totally cool there from a cycling safety standpoint. If traffic was not closed on one side, or if it did not have a one lane buffer, I’d be concerned.

Summary:

As the weather, travel and training schedule permits, I’ll definitely be going back out and checking out the rest of the course – if for no other reason that to give me some new training ground. In general though, if you’re looking at doing this race, I’d only note that it’s going to be a monster of a run course (hills), and the heat and humidity will be brutal that time of year. But, if you train in the area, it’s really no different weather wise than any other training day. Also note that you can get just as hot and humid of weather in DC in early May or early October, as you can in August. Had they done it much before May, the river would likely be too cold. But I’ll save the river and bike portions for another day.

Thanks for reading, and feel free to drop your comments below!

(Also, if you find this post in the future, click the category tags below to find the other National Harbor posts. Enjoy!)

Cold Wanderings: A weekend of workouts and exploring in DC

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 22:11:51 PST

With last week’s announcement of the latest addition to the Ironman 70.3 circuit – Ironman 70.3 National Harbor – I was curious to go and check out the course. After all, the start line is only about 5-7 minutes from my house. Now, just to be clear, I haven’t made any decision to race this event – and my interest in the course lies mostly in the novelty that it’s a stones throw away. I did notice they offer a relay option, which sounds fun too.

Given it snowed Friday night, I figured an openwater swim was probably off the table. And as much as I’d love to go out and ride 56 miles (or 59, depending on which map you believe) on icy, cold and occasionally snow covered roads, I decided against it.

Instead – I decided to just run the run course. 13.0 miles was already on my schedule, so I figured I could go the distance and run 13.1 miles instead. Though, I ought not to make a habit of it – don’t want people thinking I’m an overachiever.

So I wandered over to National Harbor and got set. I decided to print off the very-high level map of the course that they had on the website, and just figure it out as I ran.

In retrospect, I should have mapped it out first with MapMyRun or something, but realistically, it probably wouldn’t have mattered much. But more on why later.

Since I’ve now got a pretty substantial backlog of new gadgets to try out, due in part to CES, and simply because spring is coming shortly (a popular time to make new products available), I was testing out the new 4iiii’s heads-up display product.

Now I tried these out back in September at Interbike – but that was largely based on just lots of big loops around the UNLV campus, and a run or two on the strip. As such I didn’t really have a chance to see how it performs in different weather, or simply sunlight. All of my previous runs were at night.

I’ll talk more about it in the coming weeks, but I did find that during my run, I rarely had to look at my watch anymore to keep myself within zone. I just simply ran and listened to the prompts being said near my ear. Of course, the real feature is the light system – which worked well, though I had inadvertently lowered the brightness from a night test the night before. I didn’t account for the fact that during daylight it would be…uhh…bright out. So next time I need to change the brightness setting to be higher.

Now, I don’t want to dive too much into the run course – or my multiple attempts at running it, mostly because I’ve got a whole post planned for that on Tuesday morning. I will point out the following items occurred during my exploration…all of these occurred on the route.

First, I found this:

Then, I found this:

Somewhere along the way, I got this bloody mess. I actually have no idea where, or how, but it doesn’t hurt – so no [pain], no foul. I suppose the mud might be a clue to what’s occurred during the run.

I spent a LOT of time consulting with my dear water bottle shrouded with the course map. You’d think that me – of all people – would have simply spent the time to create the route and download it into my watch. I know, I’ll never learn.

Then, I got this:

Yes, this was the second day. And yes, that means I went out again after my run – this time on a bike. Which likely means I didn’t succeed the first day. Well, I succeeded in running 13+ miles somewhere…god only knows where (well, god and Garmin Connect).

But, the second day did give me a chance to spend more time with SportyPal’s Sony Ericsson Xperia Active phone bike mount.

This little plastic beauty performed like a rock star out there, despite riding a run course that resembled more of a cyclocross bike course.

I’ll be putting together a review shortly, but I’m impressed by it. It’s simple, cheap ($20), and it does what it says it does: Holds the phone very tightly and doesn’t let go. And, remember that the Xperia Active is already completely waterproof/shock-resistant – hence why you don’t need some fancy cover/case.

Finally, I’ve been meaning to post about this little thing below for months, but just keep forgetting. The Girl picked up these belts back leading into the Philly Marathon earlier this fall, and they continue to be awesome for storing not only gels (I can fit about 6, maybe 8 in there) – but also the odd cell phone. I did that during this weekend’s run. Additionally, you can easily use two of them at once for longer runs where you might need to store more (did that for the actual race). Completely unnoticeable from a comfort standpoint, just works.

For the picture I put it on my side, but otherwise I put the cell phone against my back. No wiggling or jiggling. Awesome. I originally had a different picture of it I was going to post, but it just turned out to be a picture of my butt, so I decided against using it. Sorry!

Finally, as I was finishing up Saturday’s run (it was a late afternoon run), the sun started to set. Below is the view from National Harbor, a few hundred yards from where the finish line will be. A pretty impressive sunset, with the photo below not touched up or modified in any way – just straight out of the camera.

Have a great week ahead everyone, and thanks for reading!

Week in Review–January 21st, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:28:07 PST

The Week in Review is a collection of both all the goodness I’ve written during the past week around the internet, as well as a small pile of links I found interesting – generally endurance sports related. I’ve often wondered what to do with all of the coolness that people write, and while I share a lot of it on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus, this is a better forum for sending it on to y’all. Most times these different streams don’t overlap, so be on the lookout at all these places for good stuff!

So with that, let’s get into the action!

DCRainmaker.com posts this past week:
Here’s all the goodness that ended up on the main page of DCRainmaker.com this week:

Sunday: Week in Review–January 15th, 2012
Sunday: Are you a rockstar WordPress template developer?
Monday: New products, cold runs…and homemade cheese balls!
Tuesday: CES 2012 Health and Fitness Gadget Roundup- Part II
Wednesday: Hands on look at the Magellan Switch and Switch Up GPS Multisport watches
Thursday: Sorry about the site outage, was not a day late on SOPA
Friday: CES 2012 Garmin updates for Vector, FR910XT and more

Stuff that I found interesting around the interwebs:
Here’s a not-so-small smattering of all the random things that I stumbled on while doing my civic duty to find the end of the Internet:

1) Cool inside stuff from Team Sky Training Camp: The TrainingPeaks guys apparently found an excuse to go over and hang out with the Team Sky Pro Cycling team (lucky them!). They’ve posted a handful of funny/interesting posts thus far, such as 10 Things You Didn't Know About Pro Cycling.

2) A good breakdown of the new Cervelo P5: While I have absolutely zero plans to pickup the new Cervelo P5 (simply because I don’t need a new triathlon bike), I still found this post a good and easy to comprehend breakdown of the new ride.

3) Remembering Sarah Burke: This week you probably saw a few notes about world class freestyle skier Sarah Burke, and her passing this Wednesday following a skiing accident on January 10th. The above link has some moving photos, though, not nearly as moving as the below video.

A Sarah Burke tribute video. from Downtofilm. on Vimeo.

4) Very interesting and eye-opening article on bike theft: A great article in Outside magazine about bike theft, and the underworld of it all. Good stuff (the article, not the activity).

5) Nike introduced Nike+ Fuel Wrist tracking band: Like just about every other tech company on earth, Nike’s getting deeper into the ‘fitness tracking’ segment by introducing their Nike Fuel wristband. The wristband is similar to the Jawbone Up, or the FitBit, in that it tracks steps and your general daily wanderings. I’ve hit up the Nike PR folks to get a unit for review.

6) Addictingly cool GoPro 2 video: Saw this earlier in the week – some crazy cool snippets of video, all shot from normal users and just compiled into a giant montage. For those curious, I did actually buy a GoPro 2 before Christmas, though, for the most part, for what I use it for – it’s not much different than the original GoPro HD. Easier to use for sure (due to new LCD menu system), but I use both units interchangeably without much notice.

GoPro2 HD Video Montage

7) Boeing employees go assembly-line on a ton of bikes for schools: A cool post from the Boeing folks as they mass-built a massive pile of bikes for 1st and 3rd graders.

8) A good follow-up interview to Chrissie Wellington’s recently announced hiatus: Most of you saw the news earlier this week that Chrissie will be taking a year-long break from racing in the sport to enjoy other things in life. This Slowtwitch interview dives into it a bit more.

9) Comparing the body of a 70 year old triathlete to a 74 year old sedentary person: Some fascinating cross section imagery of the quads of both individuals, and another 40 year old triathlete tossed in there for good measure.

10) Garmin Rebate for Student Athletes: Are you a student athlete (or a school coach?)? If so, Garmin’s giving you a chance to purchase one of their units at a discount…well, a rebate discount. I suppose this is sorta like the educational programs that companies like Adobe offer. Good stuff. Valid on FR210, FR610 and FR70 (FR70 with footpod only), with a valid student or faculty ID.

Random:

Earlier this week Suunto announced their new GPS-integrated Ambit watch. In line with expectations, this watch isn’t focused on triathletes, or really even your casual road runner, but rather hikers, ultrarunners and folks hanging out in the mountains. It’s a fair bit more rugged than most GPS watches, but sports some pretty solid battery life. The unit doesn’t use ANT+, but is compatible with Suunto’s previous ANT (not ANT+) heart rate strap. I’m looking forward to giving it a whirl, and the Suunto folks are aiming to get me a unit to play with here in the near future. Until then, I don’t have much else to base an opinion of the device on – though I think it may be an interesting option for those looking for a barometric altimeter and the awesome battery life (50hrs at 60-second update intervals). Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading all – and have a great weekend!

CES 2012 Garmin updates for Vector, FR910XT and more

noreply@blogger.com (Rainmaker) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:01:00 PST

While Garmin was at CES this year – the vast majority of their focus there from a new products standpoint was automotive and mobile in nature. All of the fitness related products had long since been announced back in the fall (such as the FR910XT in October, and the FR70 just afterwards). Thus, the tidbits of new from the Kansas folks was fairly limited, but certainly worth mentioning since it easily ranks amongst the most requested information I see on a daily basis.

With Garmin Vector (pedal based power meter) less than two months away from the previously announced release date of March 2012, most of the attention was focused there.

Here’s the rundown of updates from the land of Oz:

Garmin Vector Release: The pedal based power meter continues to be on schedule for a March 2012 release/availability date. I reconfirmed this again post-show with Garmin that the product is indeed on target for March. We’ll start to get more clarification on how the ordering and distribution aspects of the product will work as we get into February. As always, for everything else technical (and non-technical) about Vector, you’ll probably want to wander over here (Everything you ever wanted to know about the Garmin Vector pedal based power meter). If it’s not answered there, then definitely let me know.

Edge 500 TSS/NP/IF Firmware Update: The update for the Edge 500 that would bring it the TrainingPeaks metrics (similar to how the Edge 800 already received them), was previously promised back in the fall (2011), then it got pushed into the new year (2012). The new plan has this now occurring no later than the second week of February. From the sounds of the discussion the date has morphed from previously being a soft date to being a rock hard ‘thou shall not go past the second week of February’ type date. It’s unclear on what exactly the reason is for the shift in mentality, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it being driven either by Team Garmin commitments, or by upcoming Vector related items. Either way – it’s good for us that someone has put their foot down. Now hopefully it sticks.

Edge ANT+ Workout Synchronization: I was curious to see if any progress might have been made towards adding ANT+ workout synchronization to the Edge 500/800, allowing you to wirelessly download your activities (completed workouts) via phone and/or computer, similar to what you can do today with the much of the Forerunner series and the Wahoo Fitness dongle. They commented that nothing is currently scheduled, though they’re always looking at new options. Considering that I confirmed with the Magellan Switch folks that their new multisport device will support ANT+ wireless file transfers and the ability to use download mechanisms such as Wahoo Fitness to get it to Training Peaks, etc… I suspect we might see some competitive pressure applied to Garmin here.

Forerunner 910XT Related Items: A couple of items and updates related to the now somewhat available multisport watch.

Shipping: It’s fairly well known now that the units have started shipping last week to folks – so at least that question is now answered. As to when an individual retailer/distributor will get their allotment, that continues to depend on the giant Tetris puzzle that it is fulfillment of thousands of orders. I can say from my own personal order of another unit bought last week from Amazon, that’s now showing a Jan 27th delivery date – so about a three week lead time currently. By the same token, the unit I ordered off of Garmin.com on launch day morning (early October) arrived Wednesday at the house. And then, other units from other retailers are all over the map. Again, it’ll vary by source, and how and when they placed their order. It’s not as much a factor of when you placed your order, but rather when they did theirs – and how many they ordered initially.

Additional FR910XT Manufacturing Capacity: Garmin will be bringing online additional manufacturing lines over the coming weeks to help satisfy demand for the FR910XT and attempt to get through the existing backlog quicker.

TSS/NP/IF (TrainingPeaks Metrics): The current production FR910XT’s ended up not getting the TrainingPeaks TSS/NP/IF metrics. As I noted previously, even my test unit didn’t have it, as it was scheduled to happen just prior to release. I’m trying to get clarification on when exactly this will be available, especially given it was promised. I wish they would have been a bit more forthcoming on this one.

Quick Release Kit: A few folks have asked as to why the FR910XT quick release kit has a 90* different orientation than the Edge series quick release kits (meaning, if you put a FR910XT on a Edge series mount, it’ll be sideways). That’s basically just the resultant of the FR310XT series quick release kits also being sideways. Yet, there doesn’t seem to be a good answer from Garmin as to why it was done that way to begin with – since it seems as though it would have been more logical to have them all orient the same way. Nonetheless, I did ask – but the answer seems a bit muddy.

Swim Workout Creator: Finally, I asked if there were plans to create a swim workout creator, to allow you to download swim workouts to the FR910XT – similar to what you can do for bike and run already. They could not commit to when such a feature might make an appearance, but did confirm they are very well aware of the demand for it, and the competitive nature of other products in the market.

Ensure you update your ANT+ Agent: Just a side note though for those that have the FR910XT already, or will shortly. Be sure to update your ANT+ Agent that’s installed on your computer. If you already have a Garmin, you may not think to update that piece – but in reality, that’s required to be able to correctly export some of the swim workouts from the device to 3rd party file formats. Additionally, it fixes some bugs in synchronization of FR910XT workouts as well. It only takes a second.

Summary

As noted, this is a pretty short update since Garmin doesn’t view CES as their normal stage for launching fitness products. Fitness products are normally launched ahead of the holiday season (October/November), in concert with EuroBike/Interbike for cycling related items (August/September), and in April for running related products (ahead of the Boston Marathon). For Garmin, CES is focused on the other product areas within the company.

As always, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to drop them below and I’ll try and get them answered. Thanks for reading!