The Three Bears

I had a major moment this past Friday in thinking about preparing for the Wildflower triathlon. Basically, I don't know that I am putting in the time and effort needed to actually complete it comfortably, and started looking into other events around that time that might give me a few more weeks to prepare -- the SF triathlon at Treasure Island is in late June, but it doesn't seem nearly as pretty as the Wildflower which made me think that I need to start busting some ass to get ready in 8 weeks. Still haven't swum in open water, and need to start doing multiple activities in a day to condition my transitions from event to event.

It really is amazing how much dedication and consistency it takes to train for an event outside of your comfort zone, and I am realizing that developing that consistency might take longer than I had thought. I am committed to doing an Olympic triathlon by this summer, and am happy with my progress thus far, but am realizing that I need to kick it into the next gear.

Since cycling is probably the activity I have been most consistent with over the past year, I have been prioritizing swimming and running thus far in my training. As those of you who cycle know, going for long bike rides can be a little bit of an ordeal from prepping your bike, getting your gear together and riding for many many hours to get in an acceptable workout. This Saturday I did my first long ride in a while, about 45 miles with extensive climbing and, as it turned out, a good deal of wind.

There is a very popular bike route in the East Bay called the Three Bears Loop, which entails a hilly loop around the San Pablo Dam Reservoir that has three major climbs (i.e. the Three Bears). I have done it once before with great joy, and so decided on this past Saturday (which turned out to be beautiful), to make that my reintroduction to long bike riding. One of the things I love about the Bay Area are the rolling undulating hills which, this time of year, are an iridiscent fluorescent shade of green and have all kinds of cows and wild turkeys and deer on them. I love talking to cows when I am out on my rides and big groups of them start to stare at me.

Although I am exploring a number of custom bike and run mapping tools (recently MapMyRide, everytrail.com and MapMyRun), I still find many of these tools to be cumbersome and a little unnecessary. Especially when Google Maps allows you to draw routes in maps and get distances (but apparently not elevations yet) without the need to sign up for another one of these services. I also think it is unfortunate that cue sheets in these apps don't seem to be easily exportable (I copied and pasted and emailed to my iPhone), and that I can't get a GPS-enabled cue sheet on my iPhone that would prompt me to turn where I need to.

In addition, embedding the MapMyRide map into a website or blog includes a whole bunch of extraneous marketing collateral outside of just the map, which I find to be visually overwhelming. Google Maps also allows you to view your rides in Google Earth, which is one of my current favorite ways to waste time at my computer. Am using Earth's new "tour recording" feature to do fly throughs of some of my routes, but still working on getting them tight.

And although there is no relation between the Three Bears Loop and the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it is interesting that that story is very much about the Buddhist Middle Way (Madhyama-Pratipad) which emphasizes the importance of finding balance. I wonder if some Buddhist scholar or Western literary critic has written a paper comparing Goldilocks to the Buddha, and the Three Bears to the challenges posed to the Buddha by Mara when he was struggling to attain enlightenment.


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