This weekend myself, Rob and Sumeet tried an attempt up Mt. Rainier (14410 ft!). Now Rob is an experienced climber, I’m relatively newb and Sumeet just learnt to do ice axe arrest last week . Anyways, we thought that Kautz route would be do-able since the conditions were awesome!
Pic 1. Geared up to 40+ pounds .
We got there bright and early on Saturday and got a permit for Kautz route!
Pic 2. Permit = good to climb Rainier for a year!
We started from the parking lot at about 9am.
Pic 3. Rob geared up!
Our plan for Kautz was to drop in to Nisqually glacier then go up the Wilson and camp near camp Hazard (11,500 ft). To give an idea there were about 200 people on the standard DC route and 10 on Kautz. Two parties of 5 and 2, just ahead of us. .
Turns out that we over simplified the terrain and got carried away with good weather . As soon as we dropped in to Nisqually glacier from a steep slope we realized that we weren’t prepared for the steepness ahead of us. As I plunged stepped down cautiously, Sumeet behind me took a tumble and got to practice his newly learnt ice axe arrest technique. I’m still amazed how fearless he is and always ready to go new and exciting stuff, while I’m a bit on the timid side .
We regrouped on the glacier and decided that we will do Kautz some other day and may try and scoot over to Camp Muir and see if we can make our way through the standard DC route. It was already about 11am so kind of late to go try Emmons.
We hauled our selves up to Camp Muir and got there around 3pm. Our goal was to try and get to Ingraham flats and camp there so that we can get start ahead of the crowds. Turns out a ranger was meticulously taking a toll, we explained him our story and requested if we can scoot on this route instead of Kautz. He was really helpful and told us that higher camp is difficult but he will try and find a place for us at Camp Muir. Well 15 minutes later he told us that there are simply just too many people on the route and they had to turn some people back from the ranger stations. With over 200 people on the route it was best of us to come and try some other day . We didn’t push too hard, and decided to cook our meals at Camp Muir and head down.
It was perfect T-Shirt weather, I could even take off my shirt! We cooked some pineapple curry, chana Masala and had a party! We even offered some of our awesome food to few colleagues we ran in to at Camp Muir!!
Overall it was awesome weather great time, may be we get to use our climbing passes soon !
Today I spent the an awesome sunny day cycling through Redmond, Duvall, Snohomish as past of the the Flying wheels summer century ride.
I have done this ride in twice before (2006 – 70miles, 2007 – 100 miles). I had a sort of deja vu from 2007 I started getting cramps around mile 70, but the good part of I’m quite happy with how i pushed myself. I learnt two things –
1. Human body is amazing, if you push it can survive a lot of things. I ended up pushing through the last 3 miles hill with cramps, after a few pedals the cramps disappeared.
2. Make sure your condition your muscles for performance not just endurance. I did hard run on Thursday and I was still sore from it. I should use my training time effectively, just like Body by Science.
Anyways, the Asha Team and Emel (a friend from Run, Dinner Social) did awesome! Most riders finished the 65 mile loop, now folks are eyeing the STP. Emel did awesome on her first century beating me by a full hour!
My stats: Ride time 8 hours 20 min. No where good but given the conditions I’m very happy with how i pushed myself.
Now the pictures.
7:30 start ended up being 8:20 start as i forgot my helmet
Gorgeous sunny day! Rest Stops – I did about 1:30 of rest stop time (Slacker )
Alrite summer is just around the corner! Its the time we folks in Northwest look forward to! The entire misery of dark winters and rainy days is worth the gorgeous 3 months of summer we get around here!
I have been meaning to do a few outdoorsy things this summer, and wanted to started chalking my list here so that friends and family can join in, talk me in to and out of few things -
Rock-climbing & Bouldering
A weekend bouldering trip to Squamish!
Climbing as many single-pitch 5.8s as I can. May be pick up Exit-38 Wednesdays!
Goal: Outer space (?) (July 2nd week or Aug 2nd week) – Outer space is a six pitch climb near Leavenworth, and it has been my goal since i started cragging a couple of years ago. Given my space and rock-climbing touch, it might not happen this year but still a worthy goal.
Mountaineering –
Mt. Adams (June 19th?)
Mt. Baker (June 26th)
Mt. Shuskan (?)
Goal: Lead a trip up Mt. Rainier (July 17th), may be two
Goal: One ice-climb, may be Mt. Hood late in the season (Aug 1st week?)
Cycling
Flying Wheels Summer Century! (June 12th)
Goal: Lead a week-long trip along Oregon Coast (week of July 24th), in preparation to India biking adventure.
Motorcycling
Now that i still have my SV650s for this season I would love to do some long riding and track days with it. I have already been eyeing some routes.
Goal: Do at-least one long ride and one track day!
Backpacking
Yosemite (?) (Late summer Aug(?))
Need suggestions and friends to go with!
Hiking & Camping
Granite Mountain
Camp Muir
Goal: At-least do one camping trip with friends
Try a new activity
Rafting down Yakima river! (July 4th –?)
Sea-kayaking or Sailing
Goal: Learn to swim in open water
May be I should make a outdoor activities calendar. Making it public is a little itchy but hey its summer in the northwest!!
Last week when I visited India my friends and family commented on how I looked fitter than the last time they saw me! I attribute some of that improvement to Body Of Science. For past 6 weeks or so I have seen reasonable results from this new workout!
Lowell introduced me to this workout, and has been coaching me through past few weeks. The book – Body Of Science describes the workout in detail. However, in short the idea is to design as efficient a workout as possible. Our muscles are made up of four kinds of fibers (slow twitch, 3 fast twitch – oxidative, glycolytic and oxidative/glycolytic) each of those engage in different activities (strength, endurance etc). Our muscle fibers grow stronger only if we push them hard, to the point that they fail. Once that happens the body reacts by building better muscles over a recovery time!! So an ideal workout is the one which engages all the muscle fibers and gets them to the point of failure as quickly as possible! Well that is what, Body By Science is about!
In the work-out one tries to engage major muscles groups one at a time, by putting them under load (i.e weight) and doing it in a slow consistent way until the muscle group reaches to the point of failure and then we try to go for an extra bit (10 more seconds)! To illustrate the point here is a video of pulldown, starring Lowell :
The goal of each exercise is to increase the weight and time under load (TUL), repetitions are not that important. The idea is to start with a weight which one can do for at-least 45 seconds and each time increment the weight as soon as one can comfortably do it for 80 seconds or so. The ideal time for each rep is about 20 seconds! The Body by Science authors recommend 45-200 seconds for each workout, but from what we have been doing 60-90 second seems like an effective range for most folks.
Following are the results from last few weeks doing the five major muscles groups (note: core muscles are taken care of by all workout but specifically by shoulder press, leg press and pull-down).
(Please note: score is a connived measure of the entire routine which Lowell has been experimenting with, its a function of weight, time & reps)
So today was the official last day of the season! Unexpectedly after a really dead winter I ended up Snowboarding quite a bit in the spring, thanks to $99 season pass at Stevens!
The intent of this post is to summarize my improvements in Snowboarding skills. Overall i went about 5-6 times snowboarding this season, once in winter and rest of the time in spring!
Progress this season?
I definitely improved my skills and speed by trying to connect turns more graciously than forcing my back/gliding leg to get me on toe-side! Leaning forward and then gradually getting on to toe-side helped a lot in my speed and grace! In fact, this was the exact skills the lesson at Tahoe last year focused on. I didn’t go any gracious black this year but I ended up trying the terrain park at Stevens pass, thanks to Jeff. I did a few 1-3 footer jumps, only to see the blue sky.
New gear this season?
Thanks to spring sale i finally bought a Giro helmet for under $40!
What I might try next season?
I’m an average intermediate snowboarder may be I’ll take a couple lessons next season to move up a notch, and possibly a vacation at Whistler to truly enjoy long runs! Meanwhile any tips to improve are welcome!
One of the joys of snowboarding is that you can get in to jumps pretty quickly, I know I’m pass my teens but may be next season I’ll try some jumps and my goal would be to at least do a 3 footer.
One of the things I noticed this season is that eventually i might want to learn skiing, yah I know I give hard time to skiers . No matter how long you snowboard you do fall, not so in skiing , the ability of the skiers to do backcountry and also a lot harder stuff (read moguls) easily is tempting me to try skiing next season, we’ll see.
On Thursday I spent my afternoon listening to Gary Taubes at University Of Washington. Gary is author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, and has had a very successful journalism career exposing bad science. His talk gave background and analysis of research on ‘science of why we get fat’. You can watch this talk online.
I was attracted to Good Calories, Bad Calories sometime last year, primarily owing to my co-workers and friends (Chris, Lowell and Keith). Lowell is a very passionate ambassador of low-carb diet, he infact lost over 90 pounds in a year and a half by just changing his diet! The book is a dense read and I have barely finish first part.
I haven’t really switched to a low-carb diet, but Maris (specially) and myself have been looking in to ways to improve our vegetarian diets. The food in America is no way tuned for a healthy vegetarian diet. Maris researched on the protein aspects of the diet and came up with the idea of putting soy powder in curries. In fact she even bought a whole recipe book for tofu powdered cooking. The next culinary exploration we are going to try is vegetable smoothies.
As you will notice all our exploration has been to add protein to our vegetarian diets and eat more of leafy vegetables. But what i would take away from Gary’s book and talk is to actually try reducing the bad carbohydrates in our diets especially sugar, bread and white rice! I did end up asking a question along these lines to Gary and his frank answer was that he is not a good spokesperson for a vegetarian low-carb diet (given that all his bread substitutes are meaty/fatty), however one of his strongest proponent and friend is a vegan and he has seen improvements in health by reducing carbohydrates.
So what are bad carbohydrates?
Starches (esp. Fructose) and Sugars
Bread
Pasta
What should a vegetarian substitute these with?
Soy products
Green leafy vegetables
Any tips?
Start by reducing rice and bread in diet in lieu of salad!
Introduce the morning vegetable breakfast smoothie !!
The strongest criticism of low-carb diet is that the fat substitutes (esp. meat) are bad for your heart and will increase risk for Heart Attack. For a vegetarian this is not really the case and any reduction is carb is good!! .
Any suggestions for good calories for vegetarian? Feel free to comment away!!
Even before I do my HIMSS post I felt compelled to talk about the shiny things from Mix 2010.
Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Studio – I love the free tools provided to develop for Windows Phone. Love the fact that Silverlight and XNA studio are very thoughtfully working in Visual Studio Express. The developer studio is lean and performant, its great to see the tool tips for Pixel widths right in the design surface. I was able to write a simple Health app in about 10 mins, the Phones are not out yet but the
Open Data Protocol : Very interesting competition to GData . OData – http://www.odata.org/ is a combination of AtomPub with data-typing and querying conventions. OData is supported out of the box by Windows Azure services, and Netflix launch an API powered by OData – http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/. It will be great to learn more about batching and syncing aspects of this protocol (Interestingly Microsoft Sync Platform also launched an asymmetric syncing capability).
Data Relay : MySpace which is the largest .NET site open sourced their middle-tier GU – http://datarelay.codeplex.com/. DataRelay has a framework for message passing, transaction management on top of a performant caching system. Apparently it uses The CCR (Concurrency and Coordination Runtime) from Microsoft Robotic Studio .
A very interesting presentation of building your own MVVM framework – I love the use of Continuations and a programming model where the framework takes care of concurrency and events! The presenter is author of Caliburn – http://www.codeplex.com/caliburn.
A few weeks ago we started a social get fit and have fun event! Every Thursday evening a group of friends get together to do a 3-9 mile run, then cook an awesome meal and follow it with a social dance!! What a triathlon . Here are some pictures and videos of the event.
I’ll add more details about the nature of this Triathlon soon! Meanwhile if you are interested to join us, drop me a line!
By mere fluke I stumbled in to tickets for Feb. 20 Ice Hockey 4:30 PM at Canada Hockey Place. We don’t have accommodation yet was considering a day trip, but that will be crazy! Let me know if any of you guys are up for sharing accommodation in Vancouver around Feb 19, 20.
. Anyways, we thought that Kautz route would be do-able since the conditions were awesome!
. We didn’t push too hard, and decided to cook our meals at Camp Muir and head down.
