On Pickleball and Video Recording

For those who may not know, I own a completely private and non-commercial building with 3 pickleball courts in it. I love pickleball and love to play and decided I wanted to have a great place to play at home, so I built it. And along the way I decided I wanted to be able to get video from my courts easily. So I started working on ways to do that, starting with an iPhone mount on the wall, then a GoPro, but ultimately I needed better.

First, a description of the video system. I started by simply adding a camera from my Unifi Protect security NVR setup to a pickleball court. Using that, I could go back and get games. But I quickly realized I didn’t really want games, what I wanted was to be able to mark a timestamp easily to find interesting points…Nasty Nelsons, body bags, or just long fun points or amazing shots. You can go back and see some clips on Instagram by hitting up the @picklebarnes account.

I cooked up an idea in conjunction with my son, Kevin. We figured out how to make the “Action Button” on my Apple Watch drop a timestamp in a Notes file on my iPhone. Worked pretty well for a time, but then two things happened: first, Apple broke it. Like as in some OS update literally broke the ability to make the timestamp appear in a Notes file. But on top of that, I also added a camera to *each* of my three pickleball courts, which was another problem altogether because now I had three places I would have needed to search for my clip since my Timestamp didn’t have a way to know which court.

I could have probably done some Siri magic to do something like “Hey Siri, add the current time and Court number 2 to my Notes file for pickleball clips” and maybe most of the time it would have happened. But I didn’t want to be stopping play to do that. And I hate talking to Siri anyway.

So I came up with a new system. I bought six Flic buttons and the Flic Hub. These are pretty small buttons that each have their own coin battery that should last a couple years and can stick to a surface. I then laser cut and engraved a nice little sign to stick them on that basically says you can push this button if something just happened that you would like a video clip of. And I put one of these on each end of each court. But what actually happens when you press the button?

Nothing as cool as you might expect. All the button press does is drop a court number and a date and timestamp in a Google Sheet. Which is a lot better than nothing! Sadly, at first setup there was no way to also get the seconds in the timestamp, just the current hour:minute.

So how to get the video from that? Well, first I’d take a screenshot of the Google Sheet and crop it to JUST the event as a whole (so anywhere from a couple presses to maybe 30 if it was a big group playing) and save that to my Photos. That serves two purposes…one, it’s an obvious marker in my Photos between events, because I am often grabbing the clips from several different days of events at the same time, and since these are video exports, they go into my Photos as new events, NOT as events that happened when they really happened. That is to say if I go get several days in a row, they all just show up the day I get them as one long stream. So the screen shot between each event makes an obvious break in my Photos roll. The other purpose is an easy to follow list. You see, getting the clips from my NVR is easiest using the iPad app. And to ease my workflow, what I’ll usually do is use my iPhone to view the list and my iPad to grab each clip.

So with my iPhone list in hand, I fire up the Protect app on my iPad, then I have to select the court camera I want to grab clips from. Then I have to select the date to go back in time to the right day. Then I have to scroll to the minute BEFORE my timestamp, because often that’s when the point started that I was after. I usually scrub to about 20s before the minute of my stamp and start watching. Sometimes it’s obvious I’m already in the middle of the point I want, so I go back and start further back. Otherwise I keep watching and mentally noting the start time of each point that happens until I DEFINITELY get to the spot I want (it’s usually obvious from the point itself, but if not then you can also see the person on video go for the button, in which case it’s the point just before that). Then I hit the button to “video archive” and then I have to scrub the start marker to the time I mentally noted, then the end marker to the end of the point. Then click “Download.” Wait for that to finish, then hit the back button to move back to the main timeline, then move to the next time slot on the list and repeat. For each camera in the list (there will usually only be one camera for a foursome, because we almost always pick a court and stay on it…but for groups, there could be presses intermixed on all courts).

So as you can imagine, that’s a lot of clicking in and out to get each clip. A typical foursome probably averages six or seven clips and I’d say that takes me about 15 minutes just to get the clips.

Then I made a conscious choice that it would be fun to share them via Instagram instead of just sending them to everyone involved. That created an entirely new workflow. I’ll be less precise here, but just say this: it was about 2.5 times the amount of time just grabbing the clips took to make the posts *good*. And by “good” I mean the algorithm liked them enough to push to random people. Getting the edit cuts just right plus adding some text that made at least light fun of a person or what was going on got the most exposure always. And at the peak I was getting 1.3M hits per month. Yes, MILLION.

But ultimately that just attracted assholes in the comments and didn’t generate any actual value other than, yes, people could see their clips and their friends could also see them. But at a tremendous time cost to me. As it grew it seemed worth it, but at a certain point it finally wasn’t worth it and I just stopped posting.

Ultimately I did decide to start just texting people involved their clips directly, which has gone fine. And while once I started doing that it seemed like I was “winning” because it took a lot LESS time than before, it also still took significant time and started feeling like a bit of a burden. What I needed was more automation. But let’s back up a bit…

A while back a friend pointed me to SwingVision, which can analyze pickleball matches quite well. The one caveat is that it requires 60 frame-per-second (fps) video. The reason is simple…the pickleball can move pretty fast at times and it needs to be able to see exactly where it bounced. At 30fps the ball simply moves too fast and you can often have the bounce happen completely between frames and so far away that even reasonable extrapolation can’t tell you for sure if it hit the line or was outside the line.

iPhones and GoPros can easily do 60fps (or higher), but introduce a LOT of complexity in trying to use them for this. For one, to get them in the right position requires putting them on a mount high enough that they require a stepladder. And you have to make sure you align it properly and hit start and stop and then gather the video from the device and a whole bunch of nonsense that happens around the playing that’s just, frankly, frustrating on its own. The NVR and built-in cameras is just way better since they are always recording. The problem is that the only “security cameras” that can do this are either hard to find or VERY expensive. Fortunately some sleuthing turned up an Axis camera that’s no longer sold, but is very available used on eBay for around $150 each or less.

I bought one of those and then setup an open source NVR called Frigate to do the recording. At first it looked very promising and I was actually able to get a usable game from it, but at some point things went sideways and it took a few hours of troubleshooting to make the cameras pretty solid at shooting 60fps. Once done, now I basically had a higher quality video system that was no better than the original in how much time it took ME to get the video from it.

But along this time I had started experimenting with Home Assistant, an open source home automation package that’s really great at being the glue for automating all sorts of things. It knows how to talk to things like Frigate, Flic buttons, the Protect security cameras, and much more. So I had Claude help me convert the Flic buttons from simple timestamp-dropping to actually have Frigate just export the last 60s or 120s (single or double-tap the button) before each button press into its exports container, which works great. Frigate has a reasonable web interface for downloading those, which by itself would save me a good bit of time grabbing clips that are “very close.” 

But I wanted even better, so I had Claude write me an app for the iPhone/iPad to manage the Frigate exports. So it will load whatever Frigate has into a nice list with thumbnails and I can download those to the app. Once in the app, I can very easily trim them down to the proper size. If I find that the export didn’t quite get enough footage, it’s very easy to hit a button and download it again with 30s added to it. Then once trimmed to the clip I want, if I find that I really want that same clip from one of the Protect cameras (which are on the other side from the Frigate cameras, as well as the center court having an aerial camera), I can click one button and it goes and grabs the exact same time range from those cameras, too, and imports them to the app.

Once I have all the clips in the app that I want, I can share them directly via the normal iOS “share sheet”, which means generating an email or text message is super easy. And I can also save them all directly to my Photos roll. Bang, workflow taken from 15 minutes to more like 2, if that. It’s entirely possible to ship the videos to the participants before they can change shoes and walk out the door!

And there we have it. Video captured on the Axis Q3517 that was pulled via a single button press, then processed using my iPadOS app completely. It's pretty perfect at this point and makes this process so much easier. I may go back to posting some things on Instagram, even!

I'm baaaaaaack....maybe?

 Quick post. Yeah, it's been like 12 years since I was here. Many reasons why that don't matter, but I've found myself recently wishing I had a good place to publish a few things, so here it is. Gonna give this a try again. 

My first from-scratch project with my 3D printer

After much research on 3D printers, I settled on the $750 "CTC" one off eBay.  It's a clone of the original Makerbot Replicator, and I suspect it's made by the same factory that originally made the Replicator for Makerbot.  Makerbot has moved on to fancier and more expensive units, but in my research I just couldn't seem to justify the extra cost for the final product.  In fact, I looked at possibly spending at much as $15,000 on a printer, and yet still settled on this $750 unit.

It really seems like you have to step up to $20,000+ printers to do significantly better things than this CTC printer can do.  You would need to be running it constantly, and I'm merely a hobbyist who was looking to learn a few things and perhaps make a few things that could really be used in the real world.

I started out printing a few things I found on Thingiverse.  I'm kind of surprised more people don't just grab things from there and pay to have them printed at sites like Shapeways.  Before I bought my own printer, I did do 3D model of an enclosure I wanted and had Shapeways print it.  The service takes several days including shipping, but it's not terribly expensive and the quality is quite good.  But all it did was whet my appetite to be able to print my own things NOW.  Enter the research and the purchase of the CTC printer.

The first few prints included some mediocre iPhone cases as well as a cool little GoPro mount, seen here:

Not the most complex thing, but it actually works pretty well.  Here's one used to adapt my mountain bike headlamp to work on the GoPro mount of my bike helmet:

The material is VERY strong and fairly lightweight, too.  If there's a downside it's that the color palette is a bit limited and the time to print is pretty slow.  This little item takes about 25 minutes just to print, but setup and everything included makes it more like an hour for the first one and about 35 minutes for each one after.
 

 A fun thing to do is add a second video camera on the bow of the boat.  Unfortunately there's no good way to do that on these particular boats (and we've tried several different sit-on-top kayaks for surfing, and these seem to work better than most for a 200 pound adult).  So I set out to make something that would work in place of the grab handle in the front.

Here are the parts as I designed them in Sketchup:

 And assembled in place with a GoPro on the boat:

Normally the boat would have a small piece of plastic down where the string connects in this photo attached with a short screw.  I removed that and took the handle off that piece and put it on my GoPro mount.  Then I bolted everything through with a long bolt into the original hole.  It seems every bit as strong as before, except now there's a place to put a camera.  I normally use a chest cam for the best action, but a camera pointed back at the rider is a fun view, too.

There will be more almost-interesting things coming from my evil lab, but not until after the beach.

Dear Garmin, You're Drunk

So today I ran in a place I had never been before, and I was alone.  I was fairly sure I'd have cell service and I figured that if I needed to see a map I'd be a little happier using my phone than a watch, so I started the Strava app to record my run as well as my Garmin Fenix 2.  And I'm glad I did.  First, the Fenix 2 data as seen after uploading to Strava:

The most odd part about this?  I didn't do a loop.  I did an out and back.  Here's the data my phone recorded:

That's much more accurate at 6.7 total miles.  The first one had a bonus .7 miles for a total of 7.4.  Crazy.  The Fenix 2 is currently running the latest firmware from Garmin.  I did get two separate warnings that it lost satellite reception.  But it really shouldn't have as I don't think the phone did.  The phone was being worn on my left bicep and the watch on my left wrist.  Clear day, but I was on the side of a mountain.  No huge cliffs near me, and it was a single lane fire road the entire way, so tree cover wasn't that great.

If anyone from Garmin is reading this and needs the data to examine, you can find it here.

What's Wrong with College Basketball

The Big East used to be known for more a more "bruising" style of basketball.  The officials let more contact go and the league liked being known for being a little more "nasty."  Still, go back and watch tape of top Big East teams during the 80's, 90's, and even into the early 2000's.  They aren't painful to watch at all.  They did have occasional lower scoring affairs, but in general a Big East team in the NCAA tournament, where it was said to be called more traditionally and thus "tighter", could score in the 80's and 90's, too.

Fast forward to today and everyone is screaming about how low scoring the game has become.  The fix, people seem to think now, is to lower the shot clock.  I do believe that will increase scoring some, but it will still make the game more painful to watch than it is now.  You'll have even more hurried possessions resulting in low percentage shots.  But due to a noticeable increase in possessions, the scores will go up.  A little.

No, the answer is not a shorter shot clock.  24 seconds in the NBA is crazy low, but it works at that level.  35 seconds in college is plenty short enough already.  We used to score in the 80's, 90's, and even into triple digits just fine with a 35 second shot clock.

The answer is call the fouls.  Call every foul as is spelled out in the rulebook already.  Call them on the perimeter.  Call them on the blocks.  Call them in between.  Just call them.  You say "oh, but that'll slow the game down for all the free throws we'll be shooting."  Not for long it won't.  Players want to play, and players will adapt and stop fouling.  Currently it's getting to be a free-for-all where players know the refs aren't going to call much of it at all, so they do things with wild abandon now.

Guys with natural ability dribbling the ball can't turn the corner because the defender is allowed to bump them.  Offenses have adapted some, but all they can do is try more moving screens, which has actually had some success, especially if you use a moving screen in the lane to free a screener heading to the top of the key (see: Louisville in 2012-13).  In general, allowing overly physical play helps the defense way more than the offense.  And hence scoring goes down.  Let the offenses work without all the contact, and I believe scoring will go back up.

The other thing is the charge/block call.  It's here where I do feel for the officials.  It's a hard call to get right.  It always has been.  Here I'd like to see a major change that would make it easier, though.  Change the rule so that the defender has to be set (two feet planted, no significant leaning) when the offensive player picks up his dribble.  Currently the rule is when he leaves his feet, but I think that encourages help defenders to try to simply "get to the spot" before a player leaves his feet.

The point of making it when a player leaves his feet is that he's basically "out of control" at that point since he's going airborne.  I say he's all but out of control once he picks up his dribble because he can only take the two steps, almost always toward the basket at that point, and he's got to get rid of it.

Now, is this an easier call to make?  Not really.  So why do it?  Because there won't be as many charge/block calls to make at all.  It'll be too hard to try to draw a charge intentionally as a defender.  It'll only happen when an offensive player is truly out of control, and those will be obvious.  The rest of the time defenders will go back to trying to block the shot.

What will this do?  It'll let guards who are quick enough to turn a corner on their man have a better chance of finishing, rather than constantly getting scared and pulling it back out.  Again, scoring will go up.  That silly circle they put in place changed almost nothing.  I don't think we saw any fewer attempts by defenders to draw charges, and almost never did we see any inside the circle.  So maybe it did change the way players draw them a little, but not enough to matter, I don't think.

But these two changes alone would restore the scoring in the game and make it more fun to watch.  There's simply too much advantage in contact right now, and that's never been what this game was about.

Today's Unexpected Joys

As of a few days ago, today's schedule was supposed to go something like this:

• get up early and run for an hour
• go to Moncure (about 45 minutes away) to coach Zach's game (and picture day)
• bolt straight to Kevin's school to coach Kevin's game, eating lunch in the car (and picture day)
• leave Kevin's game and go to the UNC baseball game (a little late)
• leave the UNC baseball game and go to Burlington to meet friends for supper

Today's first unexpected joy was snow.  All day.  It was mixed with rain and just a tad too warm to really accumulate (it would for a while, then go away), but snow is cool and sometimes those flakes were huge.

Snow led to the second unexpected joy, and that was the cancellation of Zach and Kevin's basketball games.  See, I don't enjoy coaching.  I really don't care for picture day, in particular, because it takes an hour game and makes it an hour-forty-five affair of aggravation.  On top of that, we only had an hour between games and the game sites were 20+ minutes apart, which meant we'd have to eat in the car and likely be a little late.  So it's like a day off work.

The cancellation of those basketball games led to the third unexpected joy, and that was that I got to go to the UNC versus Virginia basketball game.  Due to the fact that Zach and Kevin's games overlapped that game, I had let my parents use all four seats, and they already had invited Dad's cousin Phil who was bringing a friend (from all the way in West Jefferson!).  But me and the boys decided to go anyway and scalp tickets.  Fortunately I have the Sprinter van, too, so we were able to all still ride together and use the good parking pass.

Having to scalp tickets led to the fourth unexpected joy.  I know this seems unlikely, but it's awesome.  While I've always been willing to use scalpers if I have to, the reality is I hate doing it.  It's a dirty, opportunistic business.  Anyway, I passed on a good set of three tickets at $90 each (face value was $50) and kept looking.  Then a guy approached me and said he had two tickets.  I asked where and how much and he replied they were front row of section 210, which is upstairs but the front row.  210 is also side-court.  So they are very good seats.  And he said we could have them as he was just planning to "look for a Dad" and let him have them.  He and his daughter were using his other two seats.  I said we'd take them and if the boys had to sit without me we could make that work.  So I then bought another seat for face value from a scalper in the upper deck and we headed in.

[ As a sidenote here, I was definitely a beneficiary of the pay-it-forward line of thinking.  Dad and I used to buy tickets from scalpers quite a bit back in the 90's for UNC basketball games, but one day a nice man gave us two tickets provided we were "going to use them."  You see, he had given tickets away before only to watch the guy he gave them to sell them.  So we said absolutely, we weren't scalpers and would go in with him.  Since then, I've always done the same thing when I've had spare tickets before games.  And I never charge my friends or family for tickets.  While I could certainly have afforded to buy tickets today, it was nice having a fellow father help me out. ]

I had hoped that some of the people that sat around my normal seats wouldn't show, as is often the case for games in bad weather.  But today was kind of a big game for UNC and the fans really came out in force.  It was a great crowd.  So before the game we headed up to take the boys to their seats and most of that entire area was empty, including the row of four seats behind them.  So I decided to sit there, especially upon hearing those folks didn't show up pretty often.  And they didn't, which was today's unexpected joy number five.  I did pay face value ($50) for the ticket I used to get in, but I ended up able to sit with my boys in much better seats.

This was the first pitch of the season, yesterday, and it was 60F. Huge contrast to the snow today!

The UNC baseball game was cancelled completely due to the weather, which wasn't an unexpected joy at all.  But I had decided last night that I needed the sleep more than I needed to see the baseball game and planned to run after the kid's basketball games.  But that plan still worked as there was plenty of time after the UNC basketball game.  But it was still snowing and right around 32F.  Cold and wet.  The ground was very wet.  But you know what?  It was a great run.  Running in the snow is an unexpected joy all by itself, so that's unexpected joy number six.  I should note that I considered a treadmill run (which I haven't done in nearly two years), but my coach subtly reminded me that it really wouldn't be that bad.  And it wasn't.

I was worried about exactly what to wear during the run.  I ended up with compression shorts, running shorts over those, a long sleeve Smartwool shirt, a dry fit long sleeve running top, a fleece zip up vest, thin running gloves, an ear covering headband, Smartwool socks, and trail shoes.  So I was bare legged.  And I ended up pretty much perfect...I did need to unzip the fleece vest most of the way, and I contemplated removing the gloves a couple times, but I was basically comfortable.  I was pretty much soaked when I got back, but still warm.  Nothing would have stopped me from being soaked by then even if I had a water barrier on as I would have simply been sweating inside it anyway.  So it was great.

And then there was supper.  Originally we were going out, but Ashley realized she had all the fixings for homemade chilibeans.  That was unexpected joy number seven, as that's better to me than anything we would have eaten out.  Combine that with the comfort potatoes that Alisa made for me in exchange for letting her take an extra half day off to extend her weekend a little, and supper was fantastic.  (And another note here...she didn't have to make me those potatoes.  I really just sort of begged my way into them.  They were appreciated, but she would have gotten that half day off just for being the world's most awesome assistant anyway.  Don't tell her, though.  I'm probably not giving anything away, as she doesn't read my blog.  Or by the time she does, it'll be a month later.  Time heals all compliments, or something like that.)

The view from our seats as Tyler Zeller prepares to have his jersey officially honored.

So that's one day with seven unexpected joys and the only cost was missing the UNC baseball game and missing dinner with the Kimels.  So if we play the plus-minus game, we're still at a solid plus-five for the day.  You simply can't beat that.  Oh, UNC did beat Virginia, but in fairness to my Unexpected-Joy-O-Meter, I really did expect to win that game.  Some would say I shouldn't have, but I did.  And I'm still happy and a little bit relieved that they did, but I can't claim it for the UJOM.  Getting to be there for it was important more than just for the game, though, because I also live for moments like today's half time festivities...you see, they officially honored the hanging of Tyler Zeller's jersey in the rafters.  He was also given the Patterson award before the game, and Lennie Rosenbluth and Tyler Hansbrough were also given special recognition today.  Being there for those things is just as important to me as seeing another win.

The Once A Year Punch In the Face

Ever learn your lesson the hard way?  Of course you have.  We all do.  But what lessons do you seem to have to learn the hard way regularly?

Backstory: I learned a couple years ago about the virtue of arm warmers.  In particular, I love SmartWool brand arm warmers.  And it's been "arm warmer season" now for pretty much two months.  So I've put them on quite a few times already.  But like last year and the year before, at some point, the inevitable happens....

You see, if you get in a hurry putting them on, you'll try to pull them up a little too fast.  And you're usually looking at what you're doing, and pulling them up fast once they get near the shoulder means you're likely to let it slip...and BLAM.  You punch yourself right in the nose.  Not hard enough to do damage, but in my case it seems like it's always hard enough to make my eyes water. 

So, arm warmers are awesome.  Just be careful with the installation.  The world is dangerous enough without senseless violence that could be avoided if we all just take our time putting our arm warmers on.  And by all means, if you're going to learn this lesson, try learning it just once, not every year like SOME people I know.

Citizens Arrest!

I had an interesting encounter today.  I was at a stoplight, stopped, and knew the light so I knew it would be little bit before it changed.  I was on my way to grab a drink at a convenience store (if you love frozen Coke/Icee/Slurpees, the machine at the Kangaroo chain of convenience stores really is the best of the breed) and thus wanted to get rid of the mostly watered down tea that I had.  I checked my mirror because there was a left turn lane beside me that was vacant to make sure nothing was coming around me, and opened the door a bit and dumped the tea/water/ice out on the road.  I even took a couple seconds to shake the cup well as I glanced at the light that was still red.

I closed the door, put the cup back in the cupholder, the light changed, and we went.  I do remember well that there was a white F-150 behind me, but couldn't see much else further back.  I crossed the intersection and turned into the Kangaroo, which is out in front of a big strip mall in Carrboro.  Ran in, got my drink, paid, and headed out.  As I was getting in the car I noticed a car moving across behind my car through the parking lot.  The windows were down and I could see an older lady driving.  An older man in the passenger seat yelled "hey" and I looked to see why.  I wasn't sure it was directed at me (seemed possible I just overheard something he was yelling at her), so I continued getting in the car.  But as I did I could see the lady had stopped and the man was getting out with a piece of paper in his hand and heading toward me.

I stopped with the door open, seated in the car, and turned around as he approached.  I figured he needed directions or something.  I said "can I help you?"  He said "I just want you to know you should expect a call from the police about what you did over there" and he sort of pointed toward the intersection where I had dumped my drink.  I said "excuse me?"  I had no clue what he was talking about at the time.  He said "you dumped that tray over there."  And he turned around and started walking back to his car.  I said "for dumping out a DRINK?!?" and started laughing.  He just got in the car and the lady drove away.

I think he said "tray", I'm not completely sure.  The ice was the "half moon" shaped ice from home which is pretty "white" versus clear, so maybe he thought I dumped something out that was solid, I don't know.  I don't even know where he was when he saw me do it unless he was behind that truck or sitting in the parking lot of a different convenience store that would have been to my left.  I do know I dumped out some liquid and ice, and unless I'm missing something big, there's no crime there.  It's been about 30 minutes and no call from the police...my guess is they are out looking for, uh, actual criminals, though. 

Hell, and the freezing and whatnot

So I'm normally the guy that laughs at people who get stuck in the grass after it's been especially wet.  Unfortunately, today I could only laugh at myself.  Ashley had to be at church early, so me and the kids came separately.  I was "on time" for church, which means cutting it kind of close, but still, we were there in time to get inside long before the music stopped.  But it was a big day at church, and the parking lot appeared to be already bulging when I got there.  And I was in the van, which is kind of large.  So when I saw a spot where I could back in on the grass and not be in a tight parking space nor in anyone's way, I decided to jump in it right quick.  Only it was downhill just a touch and it was REALLY soft due to recent rain.  I felt it the moment I backed in, but it was too late.  Just started spinning.

Ugh.  Normally I would have not worried too much about it and just gone to services and waited until most of the parking lot was empty afterward and dealt with it then.  But today we had baseball at 2pm in Pittsboro, so we needed to be gone right when church ended to have any time to grab food at a drive-thru and get there in time for Zach to warm up.  So instead of going to services, I went and found Ashley and had her pull me out with her Pilot after services started.  By some stroke of luck I did have a tow strap in the van, but didn't have anything to attach it with.  But I used some bike rack parts on one end and random piece of metal on the other and made it work.  But it still took a good 15 minutes and my shoes were pretty gross from the mud, so we went ahead and just went and sat down to eat lunch and then went to baseball.

That's a little bad luck, but also something I should have known better to do to begin with.  Just like this past Friday night, when I took Kevin and Zach out to eat at a local Mexican restaurant.  We ordered, ate, and then when the bill came I realized I had NO MONEY.  Somehow I had forgotten my wallet.  Fortunately they were quite understanding and I was able to call them with my credit card number when I got home.  Which was also kind of dumb, since I actually do KNOW my American Express number and could have just given them that on site.  It's been a pretty mediocre weekend.

But that brings us to the hell freezing thing.  For the longest time I've said I had no urge to do a long running race, but I've found I have almost no running motivation these days, even though I really need to do it to help my mountain biking as well as for the cross training benefits.  I used to run both for those reasons and because I thought at some point I'd learn to swim and work on being a triathlete.  But I've mostly given up on the triathlon idea, which has led to less running motivation.  So I figured a good way to get some motivation back might be to run a half marathon.

Yeah, a half marathon.  You know the joke...every time someone says they ran a half marathon I think to myself "now there's someone who knows how to do things half-way."  So soon that will be me, too.  Well, "soon" is a relative term...I don't think I'm going to do a race until late January or early February, but it's time to plan it, anyway.  And thanks to Shelley, I have a time to shoot for...1:57.  That's going to be tough!

The one you've been waiting for!

It's finally here.  Pictures!  I know my blog posts are so long it's like a few pictures worth (1,000 words per picture and all that), but this time I'm just going to let the pictures and some captions do the talking.  Oh, and there's a short video at the end that's pretty boring, but with a fairly cool ending.

The climb up Columbine, near the top

Singletrack in the middle of the course

A little downhill action on the singletrack in the middle

Getting ready to turn down a steep hill

Pushing it up the bad part of Powerline

Powerline descent

The finish with Zach airborne!

And here's the video:

So was it....FUN?

[ How did this blog post get so long?  Cliff Notes version: Thanks to Dad, Jonas, Alisa, Edward, and Reid.  Was it fun?  HELL YEAH.  Now if you need something to put you to sleep, read the long version. ]

First I want to thank a few more people who helped make this possible.  One is my Dad, who loaned me his trailer for the trip.  Made life a LOT better.  Plus, you know, he's my Dad...he almost taught me how to ride a bike in the first place!  (He tried one day, but we weren't seeing eye to eye on it at all, so we, uh, took a break from it.  Then apparently a neighborhood girl passing by on her bike was able to teach me quite easily.  But Dad still gets the credit for buying me that first bike as a used bike and completely restoring it to bad-ass status.  Plus he taught me about everything I know about working on things like bikes and even just about having good tools, though he claims I stole all my tools from him anyway.  That's not true.  I have never stolen one single tool from him. *ahem*) 

Another is Jonas Sahratian, my strength coach.  He doesn't really care much for long endurance sports, but he doesn't let that stop him from making sure my body is as balanced as he can possibly get it.  You see, all this bicycling is particularly efficient at strengthening very specific sets of muscles, often to the detriment of other muscles that your body needs to stay in balance.  By that I mean you can literally strengthen some parts to the point that if you aren't careful they can tear up other body parts that aren't keeping up.  Jonas makes sure that doesn't happen, all the while chewing my ass about how terrible my diet is.  One day I'll listen, too.  Maybe.  He somehow manages to make that weight room fun most of the time, though, without ever letting you take the day off.  But I definitely don't think it's luck that I've stayed so injury-free throughout this process.  Thanks, J.

And still another is my wonderful assistant and good friend, Alisa.  Strangely, thanks to our family beach trip, a vacation of hers, and this trip to Colorado, I've seen her exactly one day in something like seven weeks.  That's just not right!  She makes so much of this kind of stuff possible that it's not even funny.  And she does it all without ever a complaint or a question as to "why?"  Yeah, sometimes I get the "you're nuts", but I already knew that.  But nobody gets their job done better.  But more importantly, nobody else could put up with me and still be my friend while doing that job, too.  She's a special lady.  I miss her, but I'm sure it's a lot more than she misses me!

Last, a big shout out to Edward and Reid.  They pulled off some nice things in those last couple days of packing to make the trailer and RV situation much better for me in terms of traveling and living for a month away from home.  Reid helped out big time with some bike prep I might not have finished before leaving, too.  Thanks, fellas.  The only warning I have for you two is I came up with a LOT more modifications to the RV I want to do while sitting in it bored during rain and such!

So now that I've had a couple days to reflect on Leadville, I realize that in all my story telling about the race itself I never really said it was fun.  I used words like "epic", which is probably getting to be the most over-used word in mountain biking, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was fun.

Alan, Matt, and I...team Leadville!

So was it?  Yes, yes, yes, and uh, no.  Or something like that.  It's really hard to say.  I had some training workouts leading up to this that I dreaded and those certainly ended up having elements that weren't fun, but overall, I'd even describe those workouts as fun.  I learned something in each one, too, and I enjoy learning.  There were parts of the trip itself I was dreading (like the several days I was by myself during the trip), but I found ways to have fun then, too.

I was dreading the time stuck in the corral before the race start.  While I can't say any of that was fun, I will say it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it might be.  We did a really good job of having our stuff prepared the day before, so I knew all I needed to do was get out of bed, eat, dress, and drive to the RV.  There we got bikes out, checked air pressures and put our fuel bottles in, and headed to the start line.  When we got there, it was an hour and a half of waiting, but we carved out enough space to lay the bikes down and sit on the ground, and I had a full coat and thick sweatpants as well as good gloves.  Between that and having my phone to poke at the Intertubez, I killed most of that time fine.  It wasn't nearly as cold as it could have been, which also helped.  Ashley and the kids showed up just before the start and we were able to give them our warm clothes.

I was dreading the race start, too.  Not because of nerves...which I really didn't have.  I think that was simply because we were so well prepared (a more in depth look at the preparation for this race will probably be another blog).  No, I was dreading the start because of the cold.  See, at altitude it does get very cold at night, but it also typically warms up VERY fast this time of year.  And being cold for a little while is better than getting stuck being hot and/or carrying a bunch of gear you don't need any more.  And I'm just not into trying to dispose of gear on the trail...so that meant suffer a bit.  My clothing for this race consisted of biking tights, a bike jersey (provided by Carmichael Training Systems, which was how they spotted us on course before the aid stations to have our supplies ready to restock us during the race), thin Smartwool socks and bicycle shoes, a thin headband, bicycle helmet, clear glasses, thin mountain bike gloves, and Smartwool arm warmers. 

The start of the race is at 6:30am and goes downhill for several miles before going across a pretty flat gravel road for three more miles.  So it's fast.  Which means wind.  Cold wind.  But like I said, it really wasn't as cold as it could have been, and while I wasn't toasty warm, I wasn't shivering for that entire start, either.  So that was another thing that was better than expected, if not exactly fun.  The Smartwool arm warmers are like magic...you can push them down if you get warm and pull them back up when it cools off.  Since we were changing altitude a couple thousand feet at a time, this was nice to be able to do.

The climbs were not fun, but I was prepared for them mentally, and they all lead to fast downhill which is what mountain bikers really love.  So they led to fun.  Now, not all downhill is fun...sometimes you're stuck behind people who are slower than you with no room to pass for various reasons.  That happened a lot more than I expected in the race, to be honest.  Then there was the other part I wasn't quite prepared for...the fact that I had to walk more of the climbs than I wanted because it was easier to walk than to bicycle as slow as the people walking in front of me in places where there was no room to pass.  I wasn't even walking as fast as I wanted to be walking for long stretches!  That part wasn't exactly fun, either.  But on the downhill where there was room to pass, boy did things get fun in a hurry. More than I expected, in fact.  On Powerline alone I heard a lot of "OH MY GOD" as I blew past people.  See, for most of that downhill, there's a reasonably obvious line to take, and most people seemed to think any other line was borderline insane.  Fortunately for me, I am borderline insane.  I'm sure people understood that those lines were possible, they just didn't know they were possible with that much speed.  I am speed.  Okay, so it's not all that...I'm no world cup downhiller, but compared to some of these folks I surely was.  That was fun.

The most disappointing part of the riding in the race had to be the singletrack descent in the middle of the course.  It's by far the most fun section of the course.  It's almost rollercoaster-like when you have the freedom to ride it at your own pace.  But alas, I got stuck right at the beginning of it behind someone who was a very timid rider and by the time that section ended, there were about 15 of us stacked up behind him.  It was paaaaaaainful.  But it was totally a single-lane section and no option but to follow along.

The least fun part had to be that time period of about 45 minutes that started with about an hour and a half to go.  That, I would go so far as to say, was depressing.  It was about that length of time that I was pretty sure I couldn't make it in under twelve hours.   But you know, that's what makes the success so sweet.  If we were sure we could accomplish things, actually pulling it off wouldn't be any big deal, now would it?  No, I was never sure...but I was pretty confident going in.  For 45 minutes, though, I had lost all confidence.  But for that last 45 minutes or so, as the picture began to look much brighter, everything changed.  I was dreading that final climb into town before the race even started, but as I actually approached it I knew it was mine for the taking.  I had Burt Reynolds voice in my head from Smokey and the Bandit...."Hot damn, we're gonna make it!"

And I did.  And it was crazy emotional.  And awesome.  And fulfilling.  And yes, fun.  The whole thing was fun.  Crazy hard.  At times it was "why am I doing this again?" hard.  But I never once didn't have an answer for "why?"  Because it would be fun.  And it truly was.

Doesn't that hurt?!?

When the subject of my cycling comes up  and people find out how long I ride for (six hour training rides, occasional races or mountain riding days much longer), the topic inevitably turns to how much that saddle would hurt them if they tried that. 

Guess what?  It hurts me too. 

Okay, it no longer hurts me as much as it would hurt someone who doesn't bike a lot to go that long, I admit.  But the dirty little secret in the cycling world is that you really don't ever get to the point where it doesn't hurt past a certain point.  Well, maybe there are some people that do, but I really don't think so. 

What I think is that you get your body used to it and it will stop hurting very early in your rides after a few weeks.  Then you'll go a few months where it only starts hurting after a couple hours but you can handle an hour or so of the pain before it gets to you.  Then you kind of come to an understanding...you either love to bicycle enough that you learn to ignore the pain or you don't and you never ride more than that couple hours plus maybe a tad of pain, depending on how much fun you're having with your buddies.

Guess what?  That's fine.  Contrary to what some cyclists might imply, it really is fine to make that choice.  It doesn't make you less tough, it just means you probably don't love to be on that bike quite as much as some people.  And there's nothing wrong with that.

Me?  I've found a love of being on a bicycle that let me push through that pain because I wanted to.  I sure never had to.  I don't feed my family with a bicycle.  Nobody is holding a gun to my head and making me do it.  My riding group is a little nuts, but we all have time constraints that limit riding time for whatever reason and nobody ever complains about it. 

And yes, once you make that decision that you're going to push through it, in a few months you do extend your time before it hurts some more.  To maybe four or even five hours.  And then it starts to ache here and there and you find yourself finding places to stand and pedal for a while, you fidget, you might complain to your riding buddy (which never does much good, because he's in the same boat as you, most likely), and you fight on through.  Why?  Because there's just something a bit magical about riding a bicycle.  To some more than others.

Leadville Trail 100 Race Report

Wow.  Just...WOW.

That was one epic day.  It started with getting up at 4am so we could get to the head of the corral when it opened at 5am.  That went as planned, which was good as our corral was a full half the race and that meant there were probably around 1,000 people in it!  The race started promptly at 6:30am, and it was on!

Alan and I moved through traffic down the paved hill pretty well, but man did things stack up on the first gravel road and then even worse on the first climb.  But I settled in and did my thing and Alan set sail ahead of me and I didn't see him for a long while.  Everything was going quite as planned until I got about 15 miles in and was starting to climb the back side of the famous Powerline descent.  All the sudden my bike just started to lock up...I couldn't pedal!  I jumped off, flipped the bike over (which requires removing my GPS, which I accidentally STOPPED and didn't realize it until 13 minutes later, ugh!), and started diagnosing.  Turns out the nut that holds the cassette (the big cluster of gears on the back tire) had worked loose somehow.  I've ridden THOUSANDS of miles and this has only ever happened to me TWICE.  But still, that's something I should have checked and didn't, and it cost me.

I did not have the special tool you need to tighten that, so I made due and got it as tight as I could and took off after a few minutes, scared it was just going to happen again.  But I made it to the 27 mile aid station (Pipeline outbound), where I had been smart enough to leave a complete wheelset, with the world's most awesome crew, Matt Kimel.  We swapped to my backup rear wheel in a matter of seconds, restocked the fuel, and off I went. 

Things went very well from there through the Twin Lakes outbound aid station and to the start of the Columbine Mine climb.  That's ten miles out and the climb is about 2,800 feet of elevation gain to 12,600 feet above sea level, which is well above tree line.  Let's just say that riding that after riding 40 more miles of the course did NOT go nearly as well as the training rides!  Wow, that was brutal.  I did see Alan coming down as I was still climbing, which was cool.  Somehow I missed my friend Tammy, who is a Pro and did very well today, too.  Kind of bummed about that, but I must have had my head down grinding pretty hard when she went by.  By the time I passed Alan I was up closer to the top and was walking the steep and very loose section, so I spotted him and wished him well.

Made it to the top, grabbed some Coke and a few banana pieces from the aid station, and headed back down.  Man, I must have passed 50 people on that descent!  Generally speaking, I rode the descents within my limits and fairly safely, but I still passed TONS of people on every one.  This race attracts a lot of people that really don't do much intense mountain biking, and my riding with my local group of buddies at crazy places like Pisgah National Forest has prepared me pretty well for going downhill pretty fast.  So that was fun.  It wasn't as fun watching those same people pass me back on the next climb, though.  I need to work on that!

Every climb after Columbine was pretty tough.  The legs just didn't have the power any more.  But they kept going (with some amount of walking here and there) and I slipped my time goals just a little at each station, but not too bad for the first 2/3 of the race.  It was that last third that hosed me!  But to be fair, there was a HUGE wind this afternoon that made a section of the course MUCH slower than it would have otherwise been, and was at a point where it just sapped energy like crazy.  It should have been a soft downhill to flat to soft uphill paved section that in a group would have been easily done at 18MPH or more.  But instead we were reduced to grinding more like 12MPH.  And it hurt.

Then comes the Powerline climb.  Let's just say I had to walk almost every inch of the uphill parts.  I felt like I could have ridden some of the easier parts between the steep climbs, but every time I tried I had the strangest cramps up my inner thighs.  I've never had those before, and it was like FIRE shooting up my legs.  It only happened when I tried to pedal and walking was fine, so I kept walking and hoped something good would happen, with little expectation that it actually would.

And around this time I was doing all this walking, I started running time calculations.  Oh crap, making the 12 hour time for the silver belt buckle award (and being recognized as a "finisher" at all) was looking quite unlikely.  Especially since there was still one long climb left to another descent, and then a three mile climb back into town for the finish.  I was really worried I couldn't pedal with any power due to the cramps, which meant climbing was going to be walking, and there was too much left.

But I took some more salt supplements, kept drinking fluids (water and my nutrition drink that also had electrolytes in it), and kept moving forward.  One thing I had in my favor was I had a fifteen minute descent for my legs to rest and get fluids before that next climb, and apparently that was enough.  I wasn't fast, but I was able to pedal at about twice the same speed I could have walked up that hill.  As I worked through the woods to that last descent, the math still didn't look good.  I was pretty positive for the last hour and a half that I'd never make it.  But thanks to all the support from all my friends and family and coaches and even random people from the Internet that I've never even met, I just knew that as long as my legs would pedal, I was going to keep going.  And I did.

And that descent was fast again, and there was a four mile stretch before that last climb that was probably a soft downhill, because I averaged around 20MPH for that stretch.  As I neared the end of that stretch to start the final climb, I realized I was going to make it with a few minutes to spare.  That was quite a feeling, but then my thoughts turned to my poor family, crew, and all of you following along at home.  I figured it was going to be nerve-wracking since you guys had no idea I was so close.  Sorry about that.  It wasn't much in my control after a certain point!

But I ground out that final climb, often times with power outputs that WERE very respectable (which was quite shocking to me!) and as I approached that red carpet, I couldn't help but start crying.  The amount of climbing in this race just does something to you.  You swear over and over that current climb will be over around the next bend, only to be presented with plenty more to go.  I like to make sure I know a race course ahead of time, and I really did know this course pretty well, but yet once you're racing and doing that to your body, it affects the mind as well.  So you end up back in that same space from time to time, and that kind of thing accumulates inside somehow.  Plus, I had all that time (probably an hour) when I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it.  Then to find I could, pretty much only 20 minutes from the end, meant a huge release when I finally crossed that line.  Here's a picture at the finish...more good pics to come as the various race picture folks have stuff online:

And here's where I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a lot of folks.  I've mentioned my family once, but I'll do it again...they've put up with a lot of me being gone to train for this.  Amazing support.  Then my coach, Sage Rountree, who made this possible.  Without her, there's just no way I could have done this on my own.  And then there's Tammy Sadle, who was my inspiration from the beginning.  She works at Training Peaks, the site my coach and I use for our main method of communication for workout planning.  She did this race for the first time last year, and they blogged about her effort to raise money for Team First Descents and she did great her first time out.  I followed her progress, but also made a small donation to her fund raising effort, which resulted in her being nice enough to reach out to me via social media.  Seeing how well she did made me want to try it, too.  Happy to say she's a friend now, too!

And then there was Alan Bocko.  Been friends with Alan for many years, but I was pretty sure if I signed up that he'd find a way.  And he did.  And then Matt Kimel, who was cool enough to sign on as our crew for the event, including spending several weeks here in Leadville keeping me company.  You've probably read about our motorcycle adventures already.  LOOK AT MY HANDS! And thanks to Matt's family for letting him do this.  That was a big deal for them, too.  Oh, and my Chapel Hill riding crew...riding with those guys is always fun and challenging.  That crew always has multiple people in it that kick my butt on any given day.  And Santa Cruz for making awesome bicycles!

And then there's all of you folks who donated or even just supported me online.  I owe you so many thanks.  I really didn't want to let you down, and I hope I did you proud.  I thought about every one of you at some point on this long day, I promise.  Thank you all so much for all the kind words of support.  It really means a lot to me.   More pictures and further wrap-up to come...I really should go to bed now.