Milton Sprint Triathlon 🏊♂️🚴♂️🏃♂️
That was fun! Really well organized, friendly racers, and great weather. There were 466 racers, though other than the parking lot, it didn’t seem crowded.
Swim
Mass start by age group for the swim. Temperature was quite nice. Other than an elbow to the nose coming around the last buoy, a pleasant swim 😀.
Bike
The course confronts you almost right away with a steep 320m climb up the escarpment that really tests the legs. After that, some nice rolling hills, until you come back down the escarpment, hanging on for dear life, as you hit about 70 km/hr. Terrifying and exhilarating end to the ride.
Run
Mostly in wooded trails which is nice. Though still has some hills. Since it is only 7K, you can push it, if anything is left in the legs from the bike.
Transitions
These didn’t go very well. I was rather dizzy coming out of the swim and struggled with balance while getting the bike shoes on in T1. This has happened before and is something I should be training for. So, 3:21 on this one.
Then 2:09 at T2 while I fiddled with my shoe laces. I really should have switched these to elastics. Just didn’t get around to it.
Nutrition
I kept is simple: one caffeinated gel at each of the two transitions and a Nuun in the water bottle for my bike.
Apple Watch
This was my first event with the Apple Watch Ultra. Battery life (the main reason I got one) was excellent. I was at about 90% charge the night before, wore it to track sleeping, and then got to the end of race day around 9pm with close to 60% charge.
I also really liked the Triathlon workout in the Multisport category. The automatic transitions worked really well, marking when I started and stopped each component of the race. So, all I had to do was hit the action button at the start of the swim to start the workout tracking and then stop the workout at the end of the run. Everything else worked automatically. Nice to not have to worry about fiddling with the watch at each transition.
☎️ 😱 Living dangerously for seven years with a corporate phone
For seven years now, I’ve been living dangerously by only using my corporate phone for everything. I knew this was wrong, yet couldn’t resist, until this week.
There were only two, day-to-day negative impacts of relying on a corporate phone.
The first, admittedly minor, though surprisingly annoying, one is that any explicit songs in Apple Music were blocked. It isn’t that I feel compelled to listen to explicit lyrics. Rather, there are lots of good songs with a few swear words thrown in, especially for the more high-energy rock I prefer for workouts. Sometimes clean versions are available, though they lack the power of the real versions.
The second, more systematic, one is that iCloud Drive support was blocked. This disabled some important features of many of my favourite apps, like Drafts, Mindnode, Soulver, MusicBox, and Albums. These apps became little islands of inaccessible data that didn’t share with my iPad or Mac, limiting their utility.
Of course the real reason this was a bad idea is exactly what IT says: you shouldn’t mix work with personal. IT has been (appropriately) locking down more and more of the phone, while also adding in VPN and other monitoring apps.
So, why did I do it? Two main reasons: I really don’t like carrying extra stuff and I saved the monthly cost of a personal data plan (given Canada’s rates, this is bigger than you might think).
There was no epiphany that led me to finally get a personal phone. Just a steady realization that meant it was time.
I picked up an iPhone 13 mini. I have no need for the latest phone and really appreciate the smaller size of the mini.
I opted for a Freedom Mobile plan and added in the Apple Watch plan (something I couldn’t do with the corporate phone). My biggest surprise so far is how nice it is to have the Apple Watch Ultra connected via cellular and leave the phone behind. The Apple Watch really is quite functional for my needs without the phone.
Better late than never to this. I’m glad to finally have made the right choice and am enjoying better partitioning of work from the rest of my activities.
Finished reading: The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss is a good second book in the series. The long, imaginative fantasy narrative is exactly what I was looking for in a book 📚
🎵 Simply the Best by Tina Turner was a staple in my childhood home. My Dad had one of her concerts on VHS and watched it frequently. For this song, in particular, he turned up the volume quite loud
Finished reading: An Emergency in Ottawa by Paul Wells is a good, short read on a very consequential period in recent Canadian history 📚
On two occasions I have been asked, “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” … I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
– Charles Babbage
🎵 Don’t Test the Pest by Pest Control will give you the kick in the pants that you might need to get going
🎵 Perhaps In Sides is Orbital’s best album? I could listen to The Box, Pt. 2 on repeat for a while
Finished reading: Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells is another fun, short Murderbot story. I like that these are staying simple and sarcastic📚
Finished reading: Enemy of All Mankind by Steven Johnson is fascinating. The importance of a seemingly small incident is really well explained and shows how such a thing can reverberate through history 📚
Finished reading: The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef includes some good tips for keeping an open mind and incorporating constructive feedback 📚
📺 Star Trek: Picard (Season 3) - ★★★★☆
Definitely the best of the three seasons. Leverages a lot of nostalgia which is okay with me. Nice to clean up after the Nemesis debacle and give these characters a proper ending.
