Mountain Biking in Monterey

I went mountain biking with my coach, Sharon Osgood. She watched me wobble, and struggle, and within about two hours had smoothed out my riding style noticeably.

things to remember, posted here not because I think you all desperately want mountain bike coaching, (Except possibly for Steve-- hi, Steve!) but so I can keep track of what I just learned:

1) Everyone's legs burn going up hills. It's not just me, and it doesn't mean I'm not in good shape. It means that mountain biking is anaerobic by nature, and the leg burn is just part of the fun.

2) When climbing, slide your butt forward so you're perched on the nose of the saddle and your weight is on the bottom bracket. Stick your chest out, a little, to weight the front wheel so it doesn't come up. (It's amazing how much easier it is to climb when you do this.)

3) When descending, slide your butt back a little and grip the seat with your thighs. 2/3 of your weight should be on the back half of the bike. (I discovered that I have a very bad habit: I come up off the saddle when I descend. No, no. I need to _sit down_ and get a grip. In general, this seems like good life advice. ;-)

4) As with road riding, steer with your belly button. (It's like hula hooping!)

5) When you're in the lowest front chainring, and the hardest gear in back, shift UP a few gears harder, tehn shift to the middle chain ring, then readjust. This keeps you from dropping your chain.

6) When going over a jump, it's possible to get some air and survive the jump by sitting down and leaning back as you go over. Your arms and hands are connected to the handlebars, so your front wheel automatically comes up a bit and your back wheel comes down. That's exactly what you want.

S and purposefulness

I stayed with S. in Monterey. He's about a decade older than me, has a girlfriend and a successful technical consulting business and a dog.

He does two ironman races a year.

He refs triathlons.

He rents a mobile home that he keeps very neat. It has no television, but does have cable radio.

He eats more or less the same way I do: Boring, reasonably healthy, athlete food. His house is full of clif bars, gatorade, bottled water, canned tuna, protein bars, frozen chicken and vegetables. He doesn't own a lot of extraneous stuff.

I get the sense, staying with him, that he lives a bachelor existence in which the details are well thought out and not influenced by social pressure (to own a house, to keep up with the Joneses, to marry). In short, this is the way I would live if I paid less attention to the social zeitgeist and worried less about what other people thought.

Lesson noted: It's possible to live that way and be happy.

Holy rising grades, Batman!

I checked my grades. As regular readers of my LJ are no doubt painfully aware, I thought my grades were as follows:

Anatomy B
Physiology B-
PT Skills B+
Human Life Sequence A-
Orthopedics B+

So I checked my grades online, secretly (or perhaps, now, not so secretly ;-) worrying that there'd been a mistake and my grades were worse than I calculated and I was going to be thrown out of school for failing physiology. (A B- is close to failing in my program. I cut that one a little too close for comfort!)

Well, no. Careful inspection of my online report card reveals the following:

Anatomy B
Physiology B+
PT Skills A-
Human Life Sequence A-
Orthopedics A-

Well, I'll be damned. How'd that happen?

Possibility 1: I miscalculated (not likely-- I looked at those numbers a lot)

Possibility 2: Much of the class missed the same exam questions I did, and those questions were thrown out, thus raising my final exam score and my resulting final grade.