Bublr Bikes and WildTree in Milwaukee

My wife and I just recently returned from a weekend trip to Milwaukee. She had a weekend conference for her direct sales company WildTree.

In short, the company is about providing healthy meals a to families that are easy to prepare. These generally come in form of mixes and freezer meals without all the yucky preservatives. I’ll admit she describes it a lot better than I do, but what I can tell you about the company is the meals are AMAZING and it has totally revolutionized the way she and I eat. I am a label reader now! I have always been the kind of person to assume that if it was put in our food then it was okay for us to ingest. I have now learned that may not be the case. So since we have starting eating WildTree food, I have felt better and I don’t feel like I’m going to burst every time I eat.

Back to Milwaukee, my wife went to her conference to learn more about the business of WildTree and sales and I was able to tour Milwaukee. We met up in the evenings for dinner and I met some of her friends/co-workers.

Milwaukee is a pseudo-bike-friendly city. I say pseudo because even though there are bike lanes and a lot of people have bikes it didn’t seem as though cars were very conscientious of bikers. I felt like when I was riding in the bike lanes I was dodging cars. It was my first time ever riding with traffic so maybe it was just me.

At any rate, the city does attempt to make bike friendly transport more accessible to everyone. They have a bike share program similar to many cities in both the USA and Europe. It is called Bublr Bikes. You can either pay $3 for 30 minutes of riding or buy a pass for $15. The $15 pass is the best way to go and what I did while we were there. The pass allows you to access any bike (which either way can be returned to any station, not necessarily the one you rented from). You can access any bike for 1 hour and the amount of times you take a bike are unlimited. You can effectively pay for itself in 5 days if you only rented once per day.

When you sign up for a monthly pass they send you a keychain pass in a neat little hand addressed envelope with an actual hand written "Thank You" message on the inside.

This pass makes it so that you don’t have to put in your credit card every time you want to rent a bike. The bikes themselves are fun looking, they look like beach cruisers, but they are VERY heavy. They are 3 speed bikes and this alleviated some of the difficulty of riding up and down hills but still they are not as easy to ride as I had originally thought they would be. They bikes are made by Trek, making me think that they would be good bikes and while they are good, they are not without their kinks. (I found that the shifter tended to get stuck during the downshift process) Still I love the idea of the bike share and if I go back to Milwaukee or any other city that has bike share I will probably buy a pass and use the bike share system. It is a great way for people to see a city and be active. I think that more cities should move toward a bike share system just maybe use lighter bikes.

I will add that it did serve us well. On the last day, we were able to ride the bike share bikes to catch the air show without having to walk the mile or so to where we could see the show. Instead, we biked to see the show.

I also brought my road bike with me . Even though I like the idea of bike share, I also liked the freedom that biking with my own bike meant. I only ran into a few snags when I was trying to bike with my own bike. I decided to bike down by the lake and there happened to be a TON of people down there at the same time as the air and water show and brewfest were going on during the day.

I didn’t get as many miles in as I wanted to but it was still fun. Now I just have to figure out how my left brake lever system on the drop bars is bent in some. Not sure how that happened as I didn’t fall at all. Oh well it’ll get fixed, when I take it to the bike shop. :-)

These are a few other Milwaukee pics I took too. Enjoy.

Thoughts on New Year's Resolutions

Happy End of 2014!

The end of the year always brings bitter-sweet feelings for me. “Did I do everything I wanted this year? What new things can I/should I/do I want to do next year? I should be better at… I need to get in shape and finally stop eating everything in sight. I am going to be a better husband, go to church more, etc.” Or my personal favorite, “I need to work out more so I’m going to join a gym!”

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for doing new things in the new year. Isn’t that the whole point of a new year? To experience new things, set new goals and ultimately have a better year than the one past? I believe that it is, but what I am not a huge fan of is New Year’s Resolutions. The concept of changing one’s self in the new year is a good one and starting on the first of the year only makes sense, but the problem comes around mid January to mid February. We forget about the resolutions to change that we made on Dec. 31 and get stuck in the rut that we’ve been in for the better part of forever. Life happens, I get that and change is hard, but isn’t there a better way to go about it?

Lets take for example those people that make their resolution to get in shape. I did a quick internet search and found a couple of articles on the percentage of gym memberships in January versus the rest of the year and those that keep them. According to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHSA), 12% of the years gym memberships are sold in January as opposed to 8.3% per month throughout the rest of the year. According to an article from Quora.com, 80% of all New Years memberships drop off by the second week of February and the IHSA states that most clubs report that members will only visit the gym an average of 54 times per year. Do that math, that’s just a hair over one time per week. Those of us that regularly go to the gym can attest to those statistics. January and most of February are really crowded gym months and the rest of the year the gym goes back to the way it was save the few that stay. How can you not be a gym statistic in 2015? One word, Consistency.

I mentioned that I’m not a huge fan of New Year’s Resolutions. New Year’s Resolutions imply that I’m not going to stick with the changes I’m making even if I really want to. You don’t agree? Well did you keep all your resolutions from last year? I can’t even remember my resolutions from last year. So this year, I’m not making them. I’m going to continue doing what I’ve been working on during the end of 2014. Instead of partying all night and spending the first day of 2015 with a hangover be it food or alcohol related, I’m going to eat healthy tonight or atleast I’m going to do my best and make certain that I get a workout in on Jan 1.

Instead of starting a new training program on the first of the year, I’m going to continue the one that I’m currently on in pursuit of my 5K/triathlon goals. Speaking of goals, I’m going to be setting some goals for the new year instead of those pesky resolutions that we know no one in their busy life will keep by mid Feb much less Mardi Gras!

Don’t be a gym statistic this year. Don’t set New Year’s Resolutions only to forget about them and give up on them before the ground has thawed for spring. Set some goals and write them down! If you write down your goals, you are much more likely to complete them. You’re even more likely to complete them if you write them down and set a time limit on them. Here are a few articles regarding goal setting that I have found rather helpful: Dave Ramsey's High Performance Achievement and Goal Setting and How to Acheive New Year's Goals.

What are my goals for 2015? I’ve been working on training for a 5K and the Rec-Plex Indoor Triathlon short course. I’m going to continue training for these things. The 5K I will shoot for is the Go! St. Louis Marathon and Family Fitness Weekend 5K. There may be a few more that I will end up squeezing in there but I am going to keep my training consistent. I will also be making a point of writing down atleast one Bible scripture a week that I have been reading. Something to keep me focused on God and my relationship with my wife.

I found a few tweets from a radio station that I like that I thought I would share.

#VOTD #faith pic.twitter.com/KeJATFaN1z
— Air1 Radio (@air1radio) December 29, 2014

#ThankGod ~@Air1Brenda pic.twitter.com/ILn4M0D1MM
— Air1 Radio (@air1radio) December 31, 2014

I sincerely hope that everyone had a great, safe, and happy new year. Don’t eat too much and enjoy the evening!

A Weekend of Basketball, Chruch Volleyball, and Running

1.Basketball in Champaign

I shot my first basketball game this weekend. We travelled up to Champaign to cover the American versus Illini game on Saturday. It was a long day and once I finish the photos, you can read about it on my Off the Street Photography blog. For now, here’s one of the pics that I posted.

2.Church Volleyball

This weekend was our annual church Christmas party and volleyball tournament. It’s a fun time for all of us to get together and fellowship and have some friendly competition. My wife and I are in a home group for newly weds. Sadly most of the group is much younger than we are seeing as we got married a little later in our lives. I made a reference to Zack Morris from Saved by the Bell and one of the guys in the group responded with “who is that?” My jaw hit the floor! He said the show was before his time. I’m not even that old!

We played against several different home groups and got knocked out in the second round. It was still lots of fun and very great to have some competitive fellowship with friends!

3.Running

This week was week 2 in my current training regimen for running. It has been so long since I have run consistently that I have to start off so very slow. In looking for some program to aid me in starting super slow, I stumbled upon Personal Running Trainer.

The program starts off by having you train to run a mile then moves you into running a 5K, then a 10K, then a Half-Marathon, then a Marathon. I like this program so much better than Couch to 5K because it really makes certain that you don’t over do it and injure yourself. I tried Couch to 5K and felt like it was too much too fast. So after finding Personal Running Trainer program I started at the beginning and am moving into week three.

Here is the training schedule:

4 Weeks to 1 Mile Training Program by Personal Running Trainer.com

.	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3
Week 1	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4	45 seconds of running followed by 2 minutes of walking, repeat x4
Week 2	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4	90 seconds of running followed by 90 seconds of walking, repeat x4
Week 3	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4	2 min. 15 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x4
Week 4	4 min. 30 sec. of running followed by 45 seconds of walking, repeat x2	6 minutes of running followed by 45 second walk and finishing with 3 min. run	10 minute run

I’m rather nervous about moving up to week three as all through week two, my legs have been hurting while I run. I asked my sister, who finished her first half-marathon about a month ago, about pain while starting out and she said that she basically ran through the pain. “You hurt for about a month and then you just stop hurting…” or as I interpret it, you get used to it. This is where my problem occurs. I’m so reluctant to push through the pain because when I was in my last year of college (the class part of college) I ran cross country and went from running maybe a mile to running from 3-5 miles a day and increasing speed too! I ended the season with an 8K time of 37:37 and bilateral stress fractures to both my shins which turned into compartment syndrome and required surgery. I’ve been struggling to get back into running ever since then, the surgery was in 2010. So needless to say that whenever I have any pain in the shin area, and I have this week, I am very afraid that I am headed back down that injury road again.

I’ve been reading several blogs about pain and injury prevention and I found several things out. Pain is your body’s way of being uncomfortable and when you are uncomfortable you grow stronger. I’m not talking about the-worst-pain-you’ve-ever-had kinda pain. I’m talking about the I-haven’t-done-this-in-a-while-or-ever-so-my-body-doesn’t-like-to-have-to-move-this-much-or-this-hard-and-it-hurts kinda pain. I also learned that running hurts. It’s hard on the body and starting a running program hurts. Did I mention that running hurts? You just have to get used to pain.

I’ll still admit that even though I know these things and have read the articles, which you can find Here | Running Pain Hurts So Good and Here | Running’s Dirty Little Secret, pushing through the pain and moving forward is hard. It’s really hard, more mentally than it is physically. There are some things that I have a high pain tolerance for and others that I don’t. In this case I can push through the physical pain, but mentally not worrying that I will end up like I did in college is probably the hardest thing to get over and the single thing keeping me from succeeding in running.

This is where I am and I intend to get over this hurdle. I’ll leave you with a couple of pics from my last two runs. Thanks for reading, until next time!

Turkey Trot STL and Thanksgiving

Happy December friends! I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a great weekend after.

Let me start this post with the Turkey Trot. This was the first Turkey Trot that my wife and I have done. She says that it was my idea to do the race, but I remember it being her idea. Either way we did it. We got up for the race around 6:30am and made it there with about 30 min before the race started. We are both not morning people AT ALL, so getting up that early was not fun. But we got there before the race started which is what I really wanted for us to do.

We stayed in the car for about 15 min after we got there because it was SO cold! We were dressed appropriately for the weather, maybe a little over dressed, but it was still cold. The thermometer read 30 degrees F when we got there. COLD!

About 15-20 min before the start of the race we got out of the car and headed to the starting line. I thought I was cold sitting in the car, I was really cold once we got out of the car. The race was held at the St. Charles Family Arena. The starting line was located behind the arena where the parking entrance was. We made our way to the starting area, where we waited for the race to start...in the cold. I tried to position us in between the other racers and the cold breeze. It worked some, not as much as I would have liked.

We migrated to the starting area with the other racers trying to keep warm while waiting for the start. Before we knew it (read: what felt like an eternity in the cold) the race was started and we were off.

This was great, alot of people had turkey hats on!

The course was flat and I'm sure fast as we saw the lead guy reach the 1.5 mile point when we were barely underway. My wife and I were walking and thus not very fast. Once exiting the parking area the course made a loop around the river road and back to the starting area. Pretty straight forward.

Overall the race was good. It was fun to get out the morning of Thanksgiving instead of sleeping all day and then being lazy and eating. I found that it kept me from overeating all day too. I don’t believe that I gained any weight during the holiday.

After the race, I watched some of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and made sure the Turkey Trot imported to my training trackers correctly. For the race I used Wahoo Fitness’s iPhone app. The app is nice because after you finish with the race you are able to export it to any of your favorite tracking sites: Nike Plus, Map My Fitness, Garmin Connect, etc. to name a few. It was my first time using the app and it is very customizable and while that is very good, for the first time user that can be very frustrating. The app was tracking my pace based on GPS and I had enabled auto pause. I noticed that during the race it kept pausing randomly. I found out that I had set a 24 min/mile threshold for pace. Since GPS pace is variable based on reception of GPS, the app kept pausing the workout intermittently. It turned a 3.1 mile workout into a 3 mile workout and thus not giving me credit for the full run.

So while I was watching the Parade, I was editing my data and making sure that it was recorded properly. I have all my run data on Nike Plus (it was the first tracker that I knew about and has all my run/walk data on it from the time I first started using it, around 2008). I have all my workouts on MapMyFitness (I like using MapMyFitness for everything because its very versatile and you can record all different kinds of workouts on MMF). I started using Garmin Connect because you can export the GPS data to Nike Plus if you use something else and I wanted to get a feel for it because I asked for a Garmin FR 15 for Christmas. I went through all those sites to make certain that the data matched. Importing data to different sites can have different interpretations of the same data and sometimes the data will come out skewed.

Nike Plus Data

Garmin Connect Data

Map My Fitness Data

The rest of the day went like many other Thanksgiving Day’s. I helped my wife get ready for the evening meal at my parent’s house. She made homemade stuffing and apple crisp. YUM!!! We were so busy that I forgot to get pics of it. I will say that the meal at my parent’s was very good. The homemade stuffing and apple crisp was probably the best part. It was good to see family and get a workout in.

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend and didn’t eat too much. Thanks for reading!

A Few Adventures from This Week

This past week started off busy in preparation to get caught up before Thanksgiving. I had a few clients to get portraits to and put last minute finishing touches on before I sent them out. I also picked up a few extra shifts at the hospital to earn some extra money for the biggest spending time of the year, AKA Christmas.

So on Tuesday, during my edits, I skipped out of the house to get a few errands done. I ran up to Fleet Feet to get our race packets for the Turkey Trot St. Louis and then I ran next door to Great Harvest Bread Co. to get a sandwich and a yummy loaf of bread.

Turkey Trot St. Louis:

This is our first year doing a Thanksgiving race. I have always wanted to do one, but I was either working or too tired to get myself outta bed to go to the race. I also didn’t plan ahead enough to register for the race. This year was different, this year My Wife and I decided that it would be fun to do a Thanksgiving race. We are going to take it easy and walk the whole thing but I’m still excited to be out there none-the-less.

I’m not sure if the race has ever been in St. Charles, but this year it is and I’m glad because its alot closer to home. Due to all the unrest in Ferguson, the Thanksgiving festivities in downtown St. Louis have been postponed. You can read about it here: St. Louis Thanksgiving Day parade is postponed due to Ferguson unrest : News. The fact that things have gotten this out of hand is ridiculous, but I digress. In years past, I haven’t wanted to drive to downtown for a morning race, but it being in St. Charles makes things alot easier. I’ve read that Thanksgiving is the busiest race day of the year. It makes sense because its a great way to start the day in preparation for all the food you will be consuming that day. This was one of the main reasons that My Wife and I are doing this race. I have to say, I’m rather excited about it.

One of the errands that I made yesterday was to pick up mine and My Wife’s swag for the race. She got a shirt and I got a stocking cap or as they call it a beanie. I’ll write more about the race after we’ve completed it.

After picking up our race packets from Fleet Feet, I walked adjacent to Great Harvest Bread Co. for a sandwich and picked up a loaf of bread. Great Harvest Bread Co. has been around a while but it has grown in popularity over the past few years. When I went in there, it was packed. The space that they have isn’t really large, but it has a few tables to eat at and racks of bread for sale along with locally made chips and soup mixes. They basically have a lot of homemade-type foods and of course breads, as the name suggests. Their sandwiches are made on their homemade breads, I usually get the Farmhand, which is a little bit of everything meat, cheese, etc. They have samples of their breads so you can try before you buy. I picked up a bread called Stuffing Bread. Think Thanksgiving stuffing made into bread loaf. YUM! And they make a bread loaf into a turkey just for fun! I think you take the top of the turkey off and put dip in the center of the feathers and then dip the bread in the dip kinda like rye and dill dip (my mom makes it for parties.)

Thanks for reading and have a happy and safe Thanksgiving!