Still sick, surprise garage addition, Irene over

My recovery from this ailment has been a very slow climb.  Although I am operational I am still blowing my nose and coughing pretty regularly.  My energy level is still low.  Despite this I had a weekend to do.

On Saturday Ali was scheduled to run a massive 21 miles.  As I mentioned she has had the same general symptoms I have although she seemed to be a little ahead of me on the recovery curve.  Even so I had questioned Ali on her readiness to take on such a task.  She said she would give it a go.

Well it didn’t turn out well.  Ali ran around 9 miles before throwing in the towel.  Her body just doesn’t have the energy to carry her that long yet.  Ali was bummed at her fail when she got home but I told her it isn’t surprising based on my own personal experience with the same symptoms.  She is worried because it throws her marathon training schedule off track.  She will just have to drop the hammer once her strength returns.

Despite the general malaise I was feeling I went full speed ahead into chores.  We had a race to time Sunday morning so that meant I would be doing myself a big favor by knocking out everything possible on Saturday.  I trudged through my chores both as Ali was running and after she got home when she retired to take a nap.

In addition to the weekly chores I tied up a few other loose ends like putting the black canopies on the two additional new shelter frames I bought for the running club.  I actually attached two of the messed up canopies that we received from EZUP, the tops that were printed gold on black instead of gold on dark green.  I actually like the black and gold color combo.

I also got around to replacing the windshield wipers on the truck and the Camry.  I had replacements sitting on my workbench since before the NYC/Ireland trip.

While Ali was sleeping I decided to take care of another loose end, posting my Trek road bike on Craigslist to try to sell it.  The bike is a much higher quality/lighter bike than my Dawes but the frame is too small for my lanky dimensions, making it uncomfortable to ride for extended periods of time.  My plan was to sell it and use the proceeds towards eventually purchasing a newer bike with similar higher end components.

Well as part of the posting process I did a quick search of other people selling Trek’s on Craigslist, to see what my selling competition was like.  One of the ads immediately sparked my interest, someone selling a 2010 Trek 2.1 road bike.  It looked almost brand new from the pics.  It was a large, 62 cm frame which is pretty much perfect for me.  The bike had the equipment I was looking for as well and it was sharp looking.

I noticed that the bike had been on CL for several days as the seller had reposted the ad multiple times.  A big bike like that has a more limited audience. Seeing the reposts made me hopeful that it was still available, so I emailed the seller, no phone number was posted.

Within the hour I heard back that the bike was still available.  I responded back with my phone number so we could meet up.  The seller called me and we made arrangements to meet in a Publix shopping center near his place.  I could tell he was a CL veteran that was exercising the sort of caution that Ali would like me to impose more often.

So I met the guy in the lot and we immediately hit it off.  I could tell he was a good guy.  He told me he was a member of the local Naples cycling group, a pretty hard core bunch.  He got into cycling last year and this was his first bike.  He had just dropped a bundle on an all new carbon road bike and was looking to offset the expenditure.

Knowing he was in the cycling group meant he rode this bike a LOT.  He mentioned that he just had the chain, chain ring and cassette replaced under the Red Shield program he bought with the bike.  Red Shield is basically a bike extended warranty offered by Trek.  The bike has a transferable 4 year plan included which was another sweet bonus.

I hopped on the bike and took it for a quick spin around the parking lot.  The seat adjustment actually felt pretty much perfect, the owner and I had had very similar dimensions except he outweighed me by about 60 pounds.

I told him I liked the bike and would buy it.  Now we had to work out how to pay for it.  I mentioned to him on the phone that if I was to buy it I didn’t have the cash on me and had no way to get it since it was a Saturday.

I asked him in person how he felt about a check.  Again, even though the guy had a good feeling about me, he still indicated he would rather follow CL protocol and do a cash deal.   I asked him if he had any suggestions on how to get the cash.  He said he thought I would be able to get it via ATM, doing three separate transactions to get around the withdrawal limit.

I told him that I haven’t tried to pull out a large amount of money via ATM in years but at least in my experience there was a hard cap on how much you could pull but maybe that has changed.  Regardless I told him I was willing to try.

I walked over to the Publix and pulled out 300 bucks with no problem.  However when I tried to do another similar transaction I was told my limit was reached.  Hmmm.  Ok there were two banks in the same shopping center, the seller said maybe I would be able to get the money out of another one.  Even though I highly doubted his suggestion I was willing to give it a shot.

We walked over to the Bank of America and after a brief delay I received the same DENIED message, oh well.  I told the seller if he wanted I could write him a check for the balance and include my drivers license number on it to set his mind at ease.  The seller saw that it was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to scam him and agreed to take a check for the balance.  I loaded the bike up in the bed of the truck, thanked him and was on my way.  Sweet, I had no idea I would walk out of this weekend with the bike to carry me for the foreseeable future but it was nice to have scored such a deal, paying about 40% less than a year older model would run.

We really need to do some bike clean up at home.  In total, including our old beat up mountain bikes, we will have a total of 8 bikes under our roof, a ridiculous amount.  Despite Ali’s protests we WILL be relieving ourselves of some of these bikes.  Selling my old Trek will be the first step. Some of the other bikes will either be sold, given away or put out by the curb to be readopted.

So we crawled out of bed Sunday to head to the water park, where the race was being held.  This race was a real oddball.  First it was only a mile long which meant I had very little time between the start and finish to get what I need done, done.  Second it was actually three mini-races inside of one.  There was a division for elite men, elite women and everyone else, each with it’s own race start time 20 minutes apart. I also brought the new timing equipment, I wanted to set it up at the start line to test out chip starting a race.

Even though the turnout for this race was very small, I had a hell of a time getting everything ready before the start because we were SEVERELY understaffed with volunteers.  The first race actually started a couple minutes late as I was scrambling to get the start line equipment ready to go.  In the mad dash I actually screwed something up and wound up missing the start times for the first race.

In the second two races I was actually able to capture start times although I didn’t actually incorporate them into the results until I got home.  I didn’t want to risk screwing up the results on site. In the end the event timing worked out, even with the oddball format.  You will notice in the event results, that runners have both a gun and chip time.

When we got home I dug into all of the post race chores.  It turned out I was lucky I got as many chores done on Saturday as I did because my Sunday become much more filled with stuff than I hoped.

A big chunk of that stuff was all running club related.  Not many club members realize just how time consuming our duties outside of timing races can become.  I bet I spent a solid 3-4 hours doing race related items AFTER the race was done.  Not only did I have to do my normal post race web updates I also had to add info for future races, set up registration for these races and handle a handful of additional odds and ends.  It really gets to be hassle.  Unfortunately we are now reentering the core of race season where we will have at least two races per month to time for the next 6 months.

I also tried to lend a hand to Ali with her dog food prep where 32 bowls of various vegetables are cooked/portioned out to be added to the dogs dinner each day.  Currently they are getting peas, green beans, multigrain rice, kidney beans, black beans and blueberries added to each meal.  I have often said the dogs eat better than we do.  It really isn’t an exaggeration.

Of course I was watching the news over the weekend regarding hurricane Irene.  I commented early in the weekend that news outlets seemed almost disappointed that Irene had lost some of it’s punch and was not quite as brutal as expected.  I suppose in a situation like this going overboard in predictions serves the purpose of getting people’s attention so they are motivated to act/follow orders.

The reports I got back from the Reading area were a lot of power outages that seemed to mostly be rectified by last evening, an inconvenience for sure, but nothing near what happened to us during Wilma.   Even with the milder storm, the damage totals will still be massive due to the density of humanity in the region.  Even though the wind and storm surge was not bad, the flooding from massive amounts of rain can bring tons of hurt.