MS150 bike ride 2012

This past weekend I rode my bicycle with Multiple Sclerosis fundraiser. This was my second year riding at this event and it was a great experience - just like it was last year. I rode as part of the Vocollect BlueStreak Team. Here is our team photo from the event (taken on the morning of day 2 - I am second from the right):

On the day 1 of the ride (Saturday) we started from Zelienople, PA and rode to Meadville, PA. I took a century option and rode 102 miles in 5 h 47 min. This year route was different from last year and had more hills plus headwind in many parts of the ride. My Garmin GPS showed total elevation gain of 6,327 ft, but training peaks log downloaded from my Garmin only shows 5,650 ft. I am not really sure why there is such significant discrepancy between the two numbers. Perhaps someone can explain why my Garmin Forerunner 305 shows different elevation and even pace from what is calculated by trainingpeaks using the data downloaded from Garmin? Anyway, the average speed on day one was about 18 mph and 17.59 mph according to trainingpeaks. Here is the complete GPS recorded route for day 1 as seen on my trainingpeaks profile. Does anybody know if the drop in heart rate on such a ride is normal? As I had a late start and was passing riders in first three hours I felt motivated to push harder, but towards the end of the ride when I did not see anyone in front of me for long periods of time I think I dropped the pace and effort level went down. I would love to know technique to maintain the effort in this situation (without the use of power meter). Shall I constantly monitor heart rate during the ride to maintain intensity? Overall by the end of the ride I was very tired and did not feel like doing much of anything for the rest of the day (except working for about 1 hour on my presentation for webcast on Monday).

The same thing happened on day 2 - good pace and heart rate in first half and as I passed most of the riders and had nobody visible in front of me the heart rate and intensity dropped. On second day I rode 64 miles in 3 h 8 min with average pace 19.9 mph according to Garmin. Here is complete route with pace and heart rate data for day 2. Again, you can see how the heart rate drifted down after the first half of the ride and then went back up towards the end when I pushed to the finish line. The best part was that after this ride on day 2 I felt very fresh and ready to do it second time (ok, may be not the whole thing).

From nutrition perspective on both days I had nothing, but a bottle of water for the first hour, then I had one bottle of Gatorade per hour, plus one banana per hour, plus one chocolate energy bar or Gu gel per hour. This amounts to about 300 calories per hour starting at second hour of each ride on both days. This seemed to work well, except the process of eating all that food was slowing me down quite a bit. I wonder if this was a little too many calories per hour? Probably it was - especially for the 65 miles. May be next time I do 200 calories per hour - Gatorade + one banana or one gel per hour.

There was, however, one thing that did not work well at all during both days. And that is I forgot body glide (chamois cream). I wont go into much details on what happened, but just a big mental note to myself - never forget body glide for long ride again :-).

Here are some photos from the event I took on my iPhone:

1 week in India - Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad

Last week I was visiting India on business while hosting seminars for IBM partners and customers in Delhi, Bangalore and Hydarabad. I also met few customers while being there. This was a great trip. The primary objectives of my seminars were to educate local community on the new capabilities of the WebSphere Application Server 8.5 and how it is differentiated against Open Source competitors, such as Tomcat, JBoss and others. I think the messages resonated very well.

This was my 3rd visit to India. Last two times I had a little more time to explore the country and posted some photos here: Mumbai - Elephanta Caves and the city. Unfortunately the schedule during this one week visit did not permit for any sightseeing (I flew on 9 different planes and spent about 38 hours in the air from Sunday to Saturday), so the only photos I made were in hotel and the airport. Yet, one could always be creative even with those photos. Here are some of the photos I took:



This one was taken in Chicago Airport - walkway between terminals:

The first human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth

This post is going to be very emotional.  I am completely blown away and struck in awe. No, I did not complete the journey around the earth myself (although I am typing it as I am sitting on the plane from Delhi to Frankfurt and total distance I traveled over the past seven days by plane is enough to circle the Earth as I have taken total of 9 flights and spent about 38 hours in air plus about 15 hours in airports waiting for connections). Being on the modern airplane in a comfort of a seat, eating warm food, relaxed, answering emails on a laptop and dozing off when desired is easy. The reason I am blown away is the “Beyond the Horizon” book I just finished reading few minutes ago. The book is written by Colin Angus (http://www.angusadventures.com) – the Canadian adventurer who completed the journey around Earth in less than two years using his muscle power alone. No motors, no sails – only the power of his arms and legs. He traveled total distance of 43,000 km from Vancouver by bike to Alaska, rowed thru the Bering Sea, biked and trekked all across Siberia via Moscow to Portugal, rowed across Atlantic to Costa Rica and biked back to Vancouver. This was done on a tiny budget with very little sponsorship and support from outside. The book is an amazing documentary of his travel and is utterly captivating. I could not put it down until I finished it (this redeye flight from Delhi to Frankfurt is 10 hours). He also has produced a documentary movie (can’t wait to watch it when I get home!) The experiences in the book are hard to believe – but even if only tenth of it is true, it is still amazing (although I do not doubt any of his writing – it is just hard to imagine these things are even possible). 

 The book is very well written and is a truly one of the best documentaries I have ever read. It reads like a thriller J. For those of you who know me, in the past 10 years or so I almost stopped reading fiction writings. I feel like wasting my time reading fiction (with few exceptions). Fiction can be entertaining, but it is still a fiction. On the other hand scientific books or documentaries fascinate me. They are “real”. Documentaries are especially special as they show what humans are capable of doing when focused and persistent. This book is very inspirational. Here is a short video from this trip around the world - a snippet form the full documentary film.

Next time I am doing something hard, I will remember the struggles Colin had. It has been my dream for the past few years to go on bike from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. Now I am certain that I will do it (hopefully with my kids).  I think it is only about 300 miles, so should take less than a week to complete.

I am typing the end of this post now sitting in Frankfurt airport and looking at the new Airbus A380 – the Dreamliner. Too bad it is not what I will fly back to US. But Boeing 747 is not too bad. Better than rowing across the ocean for 5 months… or not?

Sprint triathlon race today in Boardman, Ohio

This morning I raced in Davis sprint distance triathlon in Boardman Ohio. Complete race results with splits are posted on this site. This was my second triathlon race ever and I loved it! The race was very well organized. While riding and running we did share the road with cars, however I did not have to stop at any intersection as police and volunteers were blocking the traffic when needed. The weather was just perfect - about 65 degrees, almost no wind, overcast, nice water temperature. Most of all - new place to ride and run is always fun.

The distance was very short - 500 yards swim, 14.5 miles bike and 5K run. I finished in 1h 11 min 51 sec and took second place in my age group (35-39 years - there were 10 participants). There is still a lot of space for improvement - especially on the swim part, but also on the bike and run as I did not push to the limit today. Plus, I did not do any short distance specific training in preparation for this race (other people probably did not do it either).

My swim was quite slow - 1 m 55 sec per 100 yards. I should have pushed harder as I can maintain this pace for about an hour and here I swam for only 9 min 30 sec total. In my age group I was 4th in the swim, but out of 98 total participants in all age groups, I was #41 with my swim time (10m 26s including the running part to transition area). The fastest swimmer was 6m 47s - again, including the running part. I was 54% slower (assuming that the run from the pool to transition was the same, the difference is even bigger). Need to work on my swim pacing and speed.

The bike leg felt very good and enjoyable - I averaged 21.9 miles per hour (35.2 km/h - this is 4.6 km/h slower than the average speed of the last year Tour De France winner who had to ride a LOT longer and had a LOT more climbing :-). In my age group I was second on the bike, but out of 98 participants, I posted 8th bike time (overall) and was about 14% slower than the first biker.

My run felt hard at the beginning, but second half got much better and my average pace was 6 min 41 sec per mile. The run course was almost flat with minor rolling hills. I probably wont be able to maintain this pace for 10K, but we will see on June 3rd :-). In my age group I was second on the run, but out of all participants (all age groups) I was #13 on the run - that is 28% slower than the fastest runner.

As far as transitions - this is my best discipline :-). I was 4th fastest on the T1 with 22 seconds and 18th on T2 with 32 seconds - the reason being is that my foot was stuck in a shoe as I ran with no socks. Will probably use socks next time as I got two blisters.

My oldest son Misha went with me to the race today and provided spiritual support. We woke up at 5 am, drove for about 1 hour and were among the first ones to setup the transition area at 6:15 am. Here is what transition looked like at that early hour. It got totally packed one hour later. Because I showed up early, I was able to get a good spot. Usually at larger races they pre-assign spots by the race number.


After transition was ready, we went to register, got the body markings (race number on both arms, swim lane on right leg and age on the left leg), listened to the race director who explained the rules and logistics and watched first few heats start. I started at 8:12am - that is 3 hours after I woke up. For breakfast I ate PB&J sandwich with 1 cup of orange juice, while driving drank another cup of orange juice and ate a banana. While waiting for my heat start I ate two more bananas and sipped total of about 12oz of water. Total from 5 am till wave start at 8am fluid intake was about 4 cups. Felt perfect on the course - no GI issues of any kind. I had very similar pre-race protocol for my marathon race last fall and did not have to go to the bathroom for the entire length of the race (3h 23m). So this seems to work well for me. During this sprint race I did not eat or drink anything at all. I took one sip from the bottle while on the bike - just in case, but it was unnecessary. I think I will leave bottle in transition next time to shave off weight from the bike for the sprint distance.

Since I was in the 4th heat, it was fun to pass people on the bike and on the run. But the hardest part of the entire race to me is always a first 10 minutes of the run off the bike. I did do some bricks in training, but not at the race intensity. Misha was waiting for me at the finish line.


Once the race was complete, Misha and I went to award ceremony and I was surprised with my second place finish :-). Since this was my second triathlon I have never taken "podium" before (too bad they did no have a real podium :-). There were only 10 people in my age group (small race), but still it was nice to receive a medal. My Pittsburgh Triathlon Club also won a "bragging rights" award against the SteelValleyTriClub. There were about 13 folks from the PTC - we took a team picture and that was a nice touch to the day.

2 days in Madrid, Spain

Few weeks ago I went on business for 2 days to Madrid, Spain. IBM held an education session for a few hundred of our IT specialists from all over Europe and I presented several topics for 6 hours all in one day - boy, that's a lot of talking. I do not understand how teachers in schools can handle this much talk every day?

My hotel was located 20 min from Alcala de Henares, the birthplace of Salvatore Cervantes, so I downloaded his "Don Quixote La Mancha" into my Kindle and read it on the plane from Pittsburgh. You should have seen my dreams when I fell asleep after reading that book! It was a mumbo-jumbo of the Don Quixhote phrases mixed with the airplane related stuff - all in the usual surreal "dream" style. In short - I did not sleep too well :-).

The best part of the trip was that I met my schoolmate Saglara. She now lives in Madrid and I have not seen her for 25 years (ouch!). Although she has not changed much :-). We walked around the city center and went to some interesting places that I would have never otherwise found if I was there alone. For example, we went into the 130 years old cafe where they serve soup (not tea!) from the Russian samovar. We also visited the market where they sell "jamon" - thin slices of ham.Saglara graduated from university as a journalist and we had a very interesting discussion. She recently translated a book about transerfing from Russian to Spanish (book link).

It was interesting to talk about different esoteric teachings while walking on the ancient streets of Madrid and I took few pictures along the way:

This was my second time in Madrid. My photos from the first visit in 2007 are posted in this album.

IBM Impact in Las Vegas, Nevada

All this week I was at the IBM Impact conference in Las Vegas. This was quite a trip. Original plan was to arrive on Saturday morning and rent a car to drive to Grand Canyon, but since my presentation was not completely ready, I canceled the car and worked on my session all Saturday. On Sunday I presented a short session to IBM Business Partner pre-conference and then on Thursday had my WebLogic and JBoss competitive session for the general public. The conference itself was excellent. There were a number of cool IBM announcements found on the Impact site.

IBM holds conferences in Vegas every year and between Impact and other conferences, this was my 12th time in Las Vegas. However I love it each time I go there - this is like going into the animated movie. The replicas of the world wonders are sometimes better than the originals. All the fountains, music, people, energy on the strip. I also love running on the strip in the morning before the conference start. This year I ran every other day and biked in the gym and swam laps in the pool on days when not running. Since I missed my long run on Sunday, I moved it to Tuesday and ran 10.5 miles on the strip that morning. Felt great afterwards! First 5 miles were a warm-up and then I ran a bit faster in the second 5 miles with 7:15 min / mile pace.

Having been so many times to Vegas, I have never visited Hoover Dam or the Grand Canyon. Saving this for a family trip some time in the future :-). Last year while on the plane to Las Vegas I took a picture of the Hoover Dam from the airplane:

The conference was in Venetian Hotel. If you have never stayed in Venetian - you should. The rooms are simply amazing. Here is a virtual tour of the room and a floor plan of the room where I stayed - this is one hell of a room for one person to stay !!!

However the highlight of the trip was not the hotel. On Sunday one of my best friends - Victor Pleikis flew in to Vegas from San Jose, CA with his wife and we met for dinner at the Brazilian restaurant and also played roulette for 10 minutes where I quickly lost my $10 and Anna (Victor's wife) won $20.

The other cool thing in Vegas was my trip to the CIRQUE DU SOLEIL show "Ka". I have never been to their shows. What an amazing show it was! It totally blew my socks off. Just imagine a high quality music (on-par with Pirates of the Caribbean), mixed with excellent lighting effects, elements of the movie projected on the semi-transparent screen that drops from the ceiling at different times, mixed with ballet, martial arts, dance, acrobatics in the air, rotating stage where you could see action a-la google-earth at different angles as it rotates (people suspended on ropes so they do not fall of that rotating stage), very cool costumes, nice looking decorations, smoke, folks shooting real arrows, humor and bunch of other things coming out at you for 90 minutes. This was by far the best show I have ever seen anywhere. You can have a look at the short review of the show on their site here.

Three days in Paris and 5 hours in Versailles

Last week from Madrid I flew directly to Paris for 3 and a half days. There I hosted an education session for IBM sales folks and met with several IBM customers. I am surprised how well business people speak English in Paris. Not so with taxi drivers :-). One night with my two team mates we went to the traditional French restaurant. Drum roll... and that is where I tasted snails. Turned out to be quite good, especially considering that there was a ton of garlic and spices. I doubt it would taste like much without all this flavoring, but you could say this about almost any food.

The definite highlight of the trip was my visit to Versailles. I had 5 hours to visit the palace on Saturday. What a beautiful place it is!!! One thing I do not understand - why the king's and queen's bedrooms are separate? Did he (or she) snore? :-) Ok, I know kings in France had mistresses, so they needed separate bedrooms. But as much as this palace is beautiful, it does not seem to be designed for living. Entire design is built around showing off the wealth and power, not private quarters where you can relax. There are several floors in the palace - I wonder what else is there - the stuff off the beaten tourist path? Wouldn't it be nice just to wonder around anywhere you wish?

The garden beautifully complements the palace. I only had 1 hour left to walk around, so there is a good reason to come back in the future. I can only imagine how much work is needed to maintain it all in such perfect shape. At the same time, I figure at the $36 entry fee and about 3 million visitors per year (source), they can afford to keep it look pretty :-). The weather forecast the night before predicted sun in the morning and rain starting at 1pm. I had to leave to the airport at 1pm anyway, but was quite surprised when sun disappeared and rain started at 12:50pm. I think French weather folks do much better job than their colleagues in US :-).

I took quite a few photos - click here for the full album. I also have posted photos from my earlier trips to Paris in this album.

Here are just a handful of shots from this trip:

"Origins of Life"

While running for the past couple of weeks, I have listened to "Origins of Life" by Professor Robert M. Hazen, Harvard University lectures. Great course! To spoil it for you - there is no answer to the question. Professor Robert Hazen does not pretend that modern science knows what the true origin(s) of life is (are), but he presents several theories and ongoing research in this area. I must note that Robert Hazen is a great speaker and is very engaging. This is not a "dry scientific" class. This is fun and easy to understand science.

The first lecture gives a quick history of how humans viewed the subject over years and explains theories from ancient Greeks to our days. Some folks thought that life was always "there", others thought it was born when air water and fire came together, etc. There were some experiments with water in sealed containers vs. open containers where water was contaminated and debates over how "life" came into those containers. Professor Hazen gives several examples of debates over years between different scientists and their early crude experiments.

The third lecture discusses the very difficult question - "What is Life?". Can YOU define Life? What is it? How do you know something is "Life" and something is not? It appears there is no agreement in the scientific community on this subject today. There are dozens of definitions, but none that is universally agreed upon. Isn't it amazing that in 2012 there is not clear scientific definition of what the life actually is? Is computer Artificial Intelligence = Life? Is robot alive? Is organic molecule alive? One of the "Life" features is that it is self-replicating. But crystals, fire and other things are self-replicating too. Another characteristic of "Life" is that is responds to external stimulus. But so does water, air and other things. So what is so unique about "Life"? Even until this day there is no clear answer. It seems that so far one of the more popular definitions of life is this: "Any population of entities, which has the properties of multiplication, heredity, and variation.", which means that Life needs to posses the information that passes information from one generation to the next, yet it must display variation - i.e. evolution by natural selection.


One of the lectures covers the topic of "emergence" and "complexity". How do you measure complexity? How do complex forms appear? There is also a very interesting discussion about the Schrödinger's "paradox". Quoting wikipedia: "In a world governed by the second law of thermodynamics, all closed systems are expected to approach a state of maximum disorder. Since life approaches and maintains a highly ordered state - some argue that this seems to violate the aforementioned Second Law implicating a paradox. However, since life is not a closed system, there is no paradox. The increase of order inside an organism is more than paid for by an increase in disorder outside this organism. By this mechanism, the Second Law is obeyed, and life maintains a highly ordered state, which it sustains by causing a net increase in disorder in the Universe."

Indeed - how is it possible that all this "random" set of  atoms and molecules has organized itself into a highly structured and sophisticated assembly of multi-million collections of molecules that we call life? How do those molecules know "what to do"?

One of the lectures in this course talks about the meteorite from Mars - this is infamous Allan Hills meteorite which cause so much controversy when NASA declared that it found life on Mars based on analysis of this meteorite. Here is a wikipedia article on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001.

Another lecture talks about several ways one can use to detect life when fossils are not available in the rock. There are methods using carbon weight distribution - comparing the proportion of Carbon 12 to Carbon 13. Organically produced materials tend to have much higher percentage of Carbon 12 compared to non-organic materials. There is great deal of explanation how and why this is done in the lab, the type of equipment used, etc.

I also loved the lecture that covered the Miller-Urey Experiment in which organic molecules were produced by combining heat, electric sparks and non-organic materials, including water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen. The experiment was done in 1952 and produced over 20 different organic molecules and it is believed that this was a mechanism by which first life building blocks were created 4 billion years ago. Almost 100 years before this experiment, Darwin also suggested similar theory, but he never published his thoughts on the subject - partially being afraid of trouble from "creationists" (and church).

Lets assume we found out how Life came to be. Even bigger question is - where did all the matter come from in a first place? Big bang or not big bang - all this stuff around and inside of us had to show up from "somewhere". I can't accept the answer that it "always existed" nor do I accept theological theories. I am afraid it may take a long time to find this one out...

I just re-read my post above and it feels very dry and boring. Trust me - the lectures are nothing like it. It is so much fun to listen to this course and learn all this stuff. I am not listening to latest episodes of radiolab.org, endurance planet or any other audio, until I finish this :-). And when I do finish, Professor Hazen has another course called "Joy of science". As luck would have it - my library has this course.

I will post updates to this as I continue thru these lectures. For now I am only 1/3rd of the way thru.

First game of golf

As some of you know, my house is located right next to the golf course. Having lived in it for the past 11 years, I have never played golf. This past weekend kids and I finally did it! It was the first game of golf for my boys and for me! That was a lot of fun. I knew it is not an easy game, and it turned out to be just as hard as I expected. I started counting my strokes on a first holes, but quickly abandoned that idea. It was interesting to watch other golfers play - now I had a different perspective. Amazingly, there are people playing on this golf course starting at 6am in the morning. Next time we play we need to have golf clubs for everyone, not just one set of clubs for the team :-). And we sure will not take a golf car next time - it was fun to drive, but was a drag.

Trip to Raleigh, NC

All of last week I have spent in Research Triangle Park in North Carolina at the IBM lab. This was my 10th time to RTP lab. I love RTP - such a great place to live (almost as good as Pittsburgh :-). Back in 2005 I have spent 6 weeks there writing IBM redbook. At that time I took my mountain bike with me and was able to visit many local mt bike trails.

We had a great group of people who came from all over the world  - USA, Germany, Belgium, India, Italy, Egypt. We had a pleasure of working with IBM Distinguished Engineers and architects on the IBM Expert Integrated Systems - to be announced with a big bang on April 11. I wish I could tell you more about this, but I can't :-). This is very very exciting. While in Raleigh, I was recorded on video - here it is:

One of the best moments of last week was a soccer game between all the "visitors" and "hosts" - where we won 9 to 3 :-). To be fair "hosts" gave us their best guy, who used to play soccer semi-professionally. He did not try too hard, or else the score would have been 100:3. Still after 2 hours of this game I had sore muscles for the next 2 days. I guess soccer makes you use different groups of muscles and in a different way (anaerobic) and my triathlon training made me survive the game well, but did not help with the next two days - I had to use my hands to lift feet in and out of the car :-)).

One thing I did not like was that the Fairfield hotel gym did not have bike trainers, so I went entire week with no bike mileage. Only running in the neighborhood and swimming at the local YMCA (25 min drive). Next time I stay somewhere for a week or more I will call hotel in advance to check if their gym has bikes or not.