Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Early Morning Running: How to Get Out of Bed

Let me start off with this: Getting out of bed for early morning runs is tough.

Thanks, Captain Obvious.

I have not perfected the art of springing out of bed, landing in my running clothing and shoes, and sprinting out the door - all with a smile on my face.  The only way I'm getting out of a warm bed in pre-dawn hours to get in my long run is with a plan and hard work, and it's still not easy.  The steps I describe below just make things a bit easier and more efficient.  Here we go...

1. Have a plan.
Speaking personally, I can't do anything without a plan.  Before I go to bed the night before, I need to know exactly what I am going to be doing in the morning.  I figure out when I need to be back for the first activities of the day, calculate when I need to leave and then calculate when I need to wake up. Usually, that is 30 minutes before I need to leave.  If I wake up without something concrete, I am completely adrift.  Before I go to bed the night before, I check the weather forecast, and I make a plan for how long I am going, what route I will take and what I am going to need.  I will program the workout into my Forerunner.  If I'm taking my iPod, I plan the podcasts or music I am going to listen to and made sure that they are loaded. This may sound like over-thinking, but you want to eliminate, or at least minimize the number of, details that need to be sorted out to the morning.

2. Get everything ready the night before, and I mean everything.
From the forecast (see #1), I select and lay out all of the clothing I think I will need. I make sure that any electronics I need are loaded, charged and ready.  I chose what I am going to eat and set it out on the table (with dishes).  I have even soaked oatmeal and left bread in the toaster to save time in the morning.  Depending on how long I am running, I have filled the bottles for my hydration belt and put them in the fridge, and filled my pockets with bars and/or gels.  There is a particular shame I have experienced in having to put away everything that I prepared when I have overslept.  This is something I try to avoid.

3. Brush your teeth immediately after getting up.
This is my secret weapon to staying awake.  For some reason, I feel more awake after doing this more than anything else I do.  If you have any theory or explanation as to why this is so effective, please leave it in the comments.

4. Keep moving.
I cannot explain the physics behind this phenomenon, but time passes at an accelerated rate before 7:00AM.  When I am up at 4:30AM or 5:00AM to get a long run in before the pace of life removes the opportunity, 30 minutes can pass in what seems like 10.  In addition, activities that take 10 minutes in the evening, somehow take 20 minutes or more to do in the pre-dawn hours.  Do not sit on the couch to check out the news on TV, or start reading e-mail or news articles on the web.  Inevitably I will find something distracting, such as the end of a late night movie, and 30 minutes (or more) have disappeared.  Having a plan really helps me focus.

5. Change into as much running clothing as needed to make yourself feel ready to go.
Getting out of the pajamas and into your running clothes is a key step in making me feel like I am ready to go.  If the forecast is warm weather, you will probably end up fully dressed; if the weather is nasty, maybe you only have your base layers on.  In any case, put on as much running gear as you need to tell your brain and body that running is inevitable.  Again, there is a particular shame in having to change from unused running clothes back into street clothes without having run in them.

6. Eat as soon as possible after getting up.
Even if it is difficult, start shoveling in food as soon as you are dressed.  I believe it gets the body working on something.  The other thing is that, regardless of what time of year it is, I feel chilled when I wake up.  A nurse I know explained to me that the reason for this is that one hasn't eaten in many hours.  Eating, I guess, stimulates blood flow to your core for digestion and brings the core temperature up.  Once you have eaten, put on the rest of your running stuff, lace the shoes and head out the door.

Another tip: While you are eating, turn on your Forerunner or whatever you use and set it in a window to lock on to satellites.  You do not want to be standing in your street with your arm in the air for what seems like an eternity (because it always seems to take longer when it is dark.  See step #4.), especially when it is cold or raining or both, waiting for your device to "Garminize" with orbiting satellites.

I can get through steps 3 through 6 in 30 minutes if I have thoroughly done steps 1 and 2 the night before.  Anything I forgot or neglected to do delays my departure and potentially shortens my run or slams the window of opportunity shut.    After 5 minutes of running, you will be happy that you are out there getting in your run long before everyone is up while your window of opportunity is still wide open.

If you have a routine that really works for you, please share it in the comments below.

Friday, February 20, 2015

Week 3, Day 6 - Intervals

Unlike Wednesday, I actually managed to select the correct workout on my Forerunner 310XT today, but it was super cold (-30C with WC) and the HRM wouldn't start.  In reality, it was really nice to run without the Garmin chirping at me and the footing was much better than it has been lately.  I was dressed as well as I could be, but I never warmed up outside and I didn't really start feeling warm until I was back inside. The run itself was good, and I'm glad I got out there, but I'm really feeling unfit and heavy - for good reason. I will keep on plugging away; breakthrough must be just around the corner.  Here is today's run.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

The Straight Goods on Removing a Stuck Seatpost

I know this is a running blog, but I have a non-running confession to make: I have a bike problem.  I really like all kinds of bicycles, but there are a few that stick in my head.  I also like building bikes, perhaps even more than riding them - and I really like riding them.  I know that I already have too many for one person to ride, but I am a sucker for a good deal, especially when one of the models that have been sticking in my head shows up on Kijiji or Craigslist or on the curb on garbage day.  In the summer of 2013, I found a 1995 17" Kona Lava Dome - one of "those" frames.  I really like steel and have always admired the Lava Dome's geometry and skinny little tubes.  Because I already have too many bikes in various states of (dis)assembly, it was a complete impulse buy, but for $20 I felt I couldn't go wrong.  That is, until I went to pick it up...



I had already committed to the fellow that I was going to buy it, and he was a nice guy who was running a neighbourhood bike repair shop out of his garage.  It had been well used and the paint and decals have had it, but the steel is in good shape.  It's nothing that some paint stripper and a wire brush can't clean up.  When I looked the frame over, however, he told me that a previous owner had inserted a "shim" in the seat tube and that I would need to get a really skinny seatpost to fit.  I immediately identified the "shim" as an old seatpost.  The nasty thing is that the seatpost was inserted deep into the seat tube and the previous owner had cut off the seatpost flush with the top of the tube.


 Upon further inspection (and repeated measurements), I discovered that there wasn't just a small portion of seatpost in there.  The section of seatpost in the frame was 28cm (approximately 11.5"), and there was nothing protruding from the tube to grab onto.  Furthermore, it became clear very quickly that the seatpost was heavily oxidized and fused to the inside of the seat tube.

I checked with Mr. Google (OK, I researched this to death) and found many different methods that many different folks have tried with varying degrees of success.  Many of these methods depended on a portion of seatpost extending beyond the frame to give the extractor something to grab or clamp with a pipe wrench or clamp in a vice, which for me was a non-starter.  Being in Canada, I made the best use of Winter to try to leverage thermal coefficients by putting the frame outside when it was -30C and then bringing it inside where I went at it with a heat gun.  Perhaps I could never get the timing right or I could not focus the heat well enough.  Research informed me that aluminum expands and contracts 2.5 times faster than chro-moly steel. So that didn't work either.

My longest experiment was with chemicals.   I looked into using chemicals to dissolve the aluminum, such as sodium hydroxide (commonly used in drain clog removers).  I saw folks who had great success with caustic soda/lye: here and here.  I read that others had success with pure ammonia, but that was hit and miss.  When I tried drain cleaner, I had trouble sealing the seat tube well enough to contain it, and when I managed to keep it in, it did nothing.  Be warned if you go this route: if it leaks on to anything metal, it will cause rust to form instantly.  I lost a really good pair of cable cutters in the process.

Sheldon Brown has a great article on removing a stuck seatpost.  (Surprise, surprise.  He has great articles on all things two-wheeled.)  The more research I did and the more things I tried, the more options I eliminated for my situation and the more I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to have to pursue the route of #12 in Mr. Brown's article: hacksawing the post out.  My problem is that there isn't just a couple of inches of seatpost in the tube, which means that I just can't use a portion of a 10" (standard ) or 12" hacksaw blade, like his article suggests.  I need something that will make these cuts down the entire length of the frozen seatpost.

The saw I needed was not available in stores.  I didn't even bother to check; I just knew.  To make my own, I started by cutting a wooden dowel (two, actually, but I will get into that later) lengthwise and epoxied a hacksaw blade in the kerf, ensuring that an even amount of blade was exposed from end to end and that enough blade protruded from the dowel to cut all the way through the thickness of the wall of the seatpost.  I also had to shave down the dowel to fit inside the seatpost.  I did this with a spokeshave plane, rasps and finally sandpaper.  If you look at the photo below, you will see a blue mark I made with a Sharpie on the handle of the saw (Mk II) just above the end of the blade.  This was a depth gauge to let me know that I was sawing deep enough into the seat tube.

Blade direction is important.  I built my first saw (Mk I) with the teeth pointing toward the handle.  In order to start the cuts in such a confined space, I wanted to be able to jam the saw into the seatpost and then cut on the pull stroke.  After the cuts were started and there was a noticeable groove in the inside of the seatpost, I used my other saw (Mk II) with the teeth pointing away from the handle, like any other conventional saw.  Cutting on the down (or push) stroke removes much more material that cutting on the pull stroke.  After many hours, here is the outcome...




Please learn from a mistake I made.  I tried to cut the seatpost into four pieces, making cuts at 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock.  The photo above does not show it well, but the big piece on the left is almost completely cut in half.  In retrospect, I should have made three cuts at 2, 6 and 10 o'clock.  I would have accomplished the same thing, but with a lot less effort. You may think that this is not a big deal. Read on. I am not exaggerating when I say that cutting is a long process.  It took me probably two to three hours per cut, maybe more.  The hacksaw blades were new and, therefore, sharp.  The problem is applying enough downward pressure at the very end of the saw to cut the metal.  I pulled out the frame and the saw (with newsprint on the floor to catch the shavings) whenever I watched something on television. Here is the same photo showing the outside of the seatpost.



With the seatpost finally out, you can see how much oxidization there was.  I don't think I would have ever been able to get anything to penetrate the "space" between the inside of the seat tube and the outside of the seatpost.  I also discovered that the previous owner who installed the seatpost (not the guy from whom I bought the frame) had installed a standard (or at least a prevailing standard) 27.2mm diameter seatpost.  I'm sure he had a difficult time and I don't know to what he resorted to insert it.  A very quick bit of research on the frame turned up the fact that the 1995 Kona Lava Dome takes a 27.0mm seatpost.  It is not exactly a square peg in a round hole, but 0.2mm turned out to be a big difference in this project.  Removing the seatpost took much longer than it should have.  I hope that it goes more quickly for you.

So, you ask, where am I going from here?  I have been amassing parts for the build over the past 18 months.  I'm not the kind of guy who builds a bike and hangs it on the wall to admire as art.  I build bikes to ride them.  With all of the trails around our place, I decided a build up the Lave Dome into gravel grinder.  I already have a set of Gary Fisher forks, a headset, Masi stem and drop handlebars, Shimano STX LE crankset, and 26"wheelset.  My next task is to strip the frame and have a cable stop brazed on so that I can use v-brakes on the rear wheel.  If you have any questions or comments or even a similar experience, I would love to hear them in the comments section below.  I hope that this helps someone.