Happy New Year's!!!

It has been an amazing 2007...last year, I never would have imagined the great places I would visit, the experiences, and awesome friends made along the way! I'm ending the year on a happy note- family is together and healthy, I have caring and supportive friends, school is going well, and I'm extremely pleased with how I've developed as a triathlete and am optimistic about my future in the sport.
Today's a day OFF so I'm plannning on staying in bed watching the Myth Busters marathon on Discovery Channel, only to leave for a short trip to the airport to pick up my brother in the afternoon.
Everyone in my family is a 'homebody' so our New Year's, like most holidays are spent modestly at home. Tonight my coach's kids invited my bro over to play so we'll hang there a while and then call it a night- who knows, maybe I'll make it to watch the ball drop on MTV...haha, not likely as my eyes usually shut automatically by 9.

I hope everyone has an awesome 2008!

"Some people dream of success while others wake up and work hard at it."

coaching my brother

Tomorrow afternoon my brother will be coming to stay for a week before he resumes school. I'm really excited because when he comes alone, I treat him like my little training experiment- sort of boot camp for the kid- hehehe (evil laugh)...I made him a training schedule where he'll be doing some things that match my routine and others where I'll be able to watch him and tell him what to do.
So, New Year's day we'll both be running the White Rock 5 mile race, and then I'll be dropping him off at masters. He'll do two weight sessions with me and then this week, ironically ha, I don't have track so it will be awesome to sit on the sidelines with Ahmed and see him and the others hamster-around in the cold. Sunday we'll both do masters in the morning and run drills in the afternoon. He can't bike because the road bike he got like 3 years ago for some "kids- tri" he outgrew dramatically. In fact, he's taller than me and obviously a bigger shoe size so I can't even lend him mine.
Aside from training, we'll definitely be hitting the movie theatre- there are a bunch of movies I want to see and we both have similar tastes so that works. Also our favorite pizza place, Campania is a must and a new gourmet burger joint downtown that I'm dying to try called Twisted Root!

Music-less

I'm an IDIOT!...Yesterday I decided to clean out as much crap from my computer files as possible, thinking that would somewhat solve the problem of it running so slow. Well, inside "my documents" was a folder titled "my music", I deleted that folder thinking it was the music data that comes when you buy the computer and did not relate whatsoever to my actual i-tunes files. WRONG!!
This morning (at 3:30 haha cuz I went to bed at 8) I got up to hop on the trainer and set my computer as always, on the table nearby to crank my playlist from i-tunes. Well, to my lovely surprise I had zero songs :( Immediately I rememberd my genious idea from the day before so I went to the trash can but, as I suspected, it had been emptied.
My solution: YouTube! Every 3-4 minutes for 2 hours i would stretch out my right hand and as best I could, would type titles to play another song haha...all while trying to maintain my cadence and power. This was ok for the first 30-45 min but after it became terrily annoying.
I don't know what I'll do after hundreds of my favorite songs have disappeared. I definitely won't buy them all again so that will probably leave me with asking a friend to burn me a cd or let me download from their files onto my nano.

Lead Legs

By the time Sunday is over, I'll have put in 10 hours of training pace cycling for the week. So what, right? Well, that's two hours for 5 days ALL on the TRAINER. Today was the third day, and after a great massage last night, I actually felt pretty loose. But then came track at 6pm and that's when I felt it- my legs weighing about 200lbs each!! I'm glad I pushed through it though, and more so that I managed the frigid temps quite well :)Now some heavy movie watching and looking forward to a great swim tomorrow morning !

Tatiana the ferocious tiger?!

So, yesterday and today my name fills every news cast...Tatiana the tiger from the San Francisco Zoo attacked and killed a 17-year old boy. I feel horrible for this boy's family. Yet, I couldn't help but laughing as I was riding my trainer this morning and repeatedly saw "how did Tatiana escape?" written accross the bottom of the screen. It's also pretty weird that I've always answered the random question of "if you could be any animal what would you be?" as nothing but a Siberian Tiger :)
Anyway, if tiger and my name do link, I hope I continuously unleash that strength and ferocity into my training and races hehe.

Holidays

Albeit the cold weather, I love this time of year..good food, family & friends, no school, presents, more training, and sleeping. I've slept more in the last week than I probably did in months. It's been relaxing to just lay in bed after a hard workout and watch movies or read.
For Christmas I didn't want any gifts that did not relate to triathlon so I told my parents to save any money they planned on spending for my 2008 season expenditures. I'm happy to be getting a new PowerTap hub for my road bike and enjoying some sweet training camps including Hawaii at the end of January.
My mom's boyfriend actually gave me a cool gift card to Amazon.com and though I could buy some bike components or the like, I have a few books in mind that I really look forward to reading during this down time.
The weather has been quite pleasant for running- mid 50s by the afternoon so thankfully I've stayed away from the treadmill :)
I hope everyone had a merry Christmas!! I can't wait 'till New Year's...that morning I'm doing my first race- 5 mile run at White Rock Lake. It should be fun and it's awesome they scheduled it for 10am.

Winter Break!!!!

Yes!!! This afternoon I walked out of my last exam- actually the last exam on the University's final exam schedule. Most of my friends were done since early this week or even last week, but me, nopes I had a class scheduled for a final Saturday 11:30-2:30. Thankfully, it only took an hour and was fairly easy.
Grades have been posted for my other classes and given all the material I missed in lieu of IM Hawaii and my training trips, I pulled out just fine- 3 Bs and 1A...my onlt Bs in any semester in college!! Oh well, the GPA's still solid :)

My plans to go to San Diego or Austin for winter break have been canceled. I've emptied out my wallet for the year and my coach wants me to stay as well, so I'll just have to deal with the weather Dallas throws. My family should be arriving next week as soon as my brother gets out of school. Right now we're getting through our first freeze...30s for the past couple of days and through early next week!

What's great is that for track thursday evenings, the weather has been pretty good-never below 50. I'm really enjoying our track workouts. Roberto and I stick together the whole time and it's awesome to be able to pace off him and dig deeper than I probably would by myself.


So, yea, training is going really well. I'm taking weights a lot more seriously than last winter and I'm slowly starting to feel the benefits. I also decided to go back to plyometric exercises which we did a lot when I played tennis- they help enormously. Strength and power are key for me to build for next season so bike workouts have mainly been centered around this- doing shorter rides (2hrs or less) with plenty of hill and power-specific work.

I'm out- stay warm!

Yerba Mate

If ya'll haven't tried out this tea...go get some right now!! It's awesome. I've never been one to drink tea, viewing it as gay and old fashioned ha, but a friend barista at my fav coffee shop told me I should try it out. So I did, but before I researched the hell out of this "wonder tea" on google ;) All I found was praise on the health benefits of this Latin American plant and its stimulant effect (as it does contain some caffeine) without the jitters often associated w/ coffee.

Needless to say, it's been 3 days now without coffee and instead a tea bag fills my mug w/ some steamed milk :)I did have coffee withdrawals and won't abstain from it forever but I think staying off it and trying Yeba Mate for a while is good.

Best B-Day Gift Ever!!

Yesterday was my 20th birthday....I'm planning on posting a reflection of my first two decades after I get through finals week.

I just wanted to thank Cervelo for the coolest birthday present- in a couple of days my brand new Soloist road bike will be arriving!!!!!!!!!

Thank you sooooo much to Joe at Richardson Bike Mart, Betsy Hilton and Dave Taylor and everyone else at Cervelo, I can't wait to ride it and claim many great races with it!!!

~Later~

What will you do with your one wild precious life?

Today, our marketing professor posed this question as a topic for discussion on our last day of class. I sat there staring at the screen in front, feeling sure about myself and my future. Some of my classmates quietly whispered their indecisions on interniships, careers, marriage, etc. Ha, I thought, I'm glad I've got it figured out- I'm going to be a triathlete, pouring all my energy after college into training, eating, sleeping, and racing with hopes of a successful career. If it doesn't go as planned, then I'll take my degree and find a job (where, and in what exactly....I'll figure that out then).

Anyway, sufficient to say I left class with an empty, desperate feeling. What the discussion about our future individual lives, and that of our entire generation, led to struck a desire in me to make a difference and find opportunity in areas that in the past I had felt too miniscule to effectively influence.

So what was it that caused this?....

Professor began by showing us slides on the state of America in 1968, with Nixon as President, the Vietnam war, the Hippie movement, racial riots/crime, etc. We had a bad President (some would say the worst), a war in a country that more than half of Americans probably could not point to in a map...sound familiar?

Are we any better off today? Are all of our technological advances really making life better? Next few slides: Take for one the sky rocketing population nearing 7 billion, 70% of which resides outside of the US and developing countries. It was 3 billion in 1960- we've more than doubled in only 4 decades! Our resources clearly cannot and will not support this exponential growth.

We all had our opinions on the key areas of concern, namely hazardous waste and alternative energy sources. If everyone lived at the US prosperity level, our resources could only back up 2 billion people. But if we all lived at N. Africa's level, it could support 40 billion!!!

So what can we do? You're probably thinking "duh, this isn't news". True, no one can claim ignorance to this problem. We are all going to be affected by it, either directly or indirectly. Already many celebrities and politicians like Al Gore have pointed to "going green". But as class went on and we talked about profit maximization and the fact that we are all, as individuals, selfish survivors, the incredible danger we're in became clear.

Before, I had rationalized that, in time, enough people would want to change and cut down that extra use of gas or bag of groceries, begin to recycle, spend only on material things that are necessary...wow, who was I kidding? When would this likely, if ever, happen? We could potentially be dying off as a civilization by the time everyone concurred.

No, this is not meant to be a bottom-up solution, but rather top-down. Capitalism leaves little room for improving our current situation, yet it's not really the system itself that's to blame, but the characteristics of the people who influence our economy the most. It's not in the best interest of CEOs of oil companies to improve on solar energy; nor in the manufacturers of all our modern commodities to tell us to buy less. How about the food industry cutting supply to the US' more than 2/3 obese population? Maybe then we could feed countless villages in third world countries.

If there's going to be change, it has to come from regulations, restrictions, capping the supply- changes that affect everyone because as self-maximizers we're not likely to sacrifice if we think others aren't doing so as well.

Hence, the thought of big powerful names and businesses that are truly the ones that can effectively begin the process toward a better world for us, our children, grandchildren, etc, overwhelmed me. In the past it didn't bother me to feel like my one self would not make a dramatic difference because numerous others were already in the process (bad, I know...reminiscent of the rationale behind those who don't vote). But to realize that even those many "tree-huggers" won't effect sufficient change because bureaucracy rules- that impacted me inmensely.

Lesson of the day: where there's a problem, lies great opportunity. I have yet to figure out by what means I will make a difference and focus on this problem. One thing, however, is for sure: I know micro scale changes like collecting cans will have little to no tangible effect, so whatever I do, or anyone else does, needs to be at a macro scale. My generation has better education and enhanced awareness relative to age (ironically thanks to the information era- its mechanisms and existence supporting the problems addressed), so it is up to the diligent leaders/entrepreneurs to seek business opportunities that better our disposal and usage of hazardous waste, that promote alternative sources of energy and put pressure on oil/gas companies....in other words it takes a small number of us to find our way to the top of capitalism's hand and wave it in another direction.

A long spill, but really, aside from the benefit of "making a living" that hours behind that desk or in my case hours on a bike yield, what will, or do, you do that contributes significantly not only to your life but to future ones? It's leaving a mark vs. leaving a legacy....I'm fueled to find a way, no pun intended ;)