The School of Medicine has been pretty dead for a while. Hopefully people are still out there, being healthy in secret.
The triathlon my brother and I have been training for the past 9 months is just a couple of weeks away. I'm feeling pretty good about the swim, something I never thought I'd say. I won't be fast, but I won't drown either.
I have been trying to run, but stupid injuries keep hampering my efforts. I sprained my right ankle stepping on a rock one morning in May, and then the past few weeks I can't run more than 3 miles without getting a calf muscle strain in my left left leg. It's always in a slightly different place, and a compression sleeve doesn't seem to be helping. I am resigned to possibly walking part of the running portion, not because of lack of fitness, but due to calf pain.
The one thing I have been struggling with is getting time on my bike. I don't like going out early in the morning when it is dark, and riding at night hasn't been much of an option lately. So I decided to start commuting to work on my bike once or twice a week. It is 19 miles from my house in Centerville to my office west of the airport. Most of the way I am on the Legacy/Jordan River trail, so I feel pretty safe. Our building has showers, and I'll bring my work clothes to work the day before so I don't have to lug them on my back.
I am riding an old mountain bike (seen in the OP of this thread). I decided not to invest in a road bike until after the triathlon to see if it is something I want to continue doing, and see how my knees hold up. I tend to get tendonitis in my left knee especially, but I have been able to keep it under control pretty well by trying to spin smoothly on the pedals, and at a higher cadence than I used to use in my younger days.
I was having problems finding a street tire that worked well on my mountain bike. I tried some WTB slicks from Performance Cycle, but kept getting pinch flats or torn sidewalls. I finally found some Continental GatorSkins that fit a 26" wheel on Amazon. They have been amazing. There is so much less rolling resistance, and they look like a road bike tire (see pics below). The issue was getting them on. I struggled for hours, and couldn't get the last little bit over the rim. I pinched 4 tubes trying to use levers. I finally took them to a bike shop and paid them to put them on. It took 3 bike techs 45 minutes and 4 tubes as well to finally get them on. I felt a little bad paying them just $4 per tire. Luckily, GatorSkins are pretty flat resistant, many users claim they have gone 2,000 miles without a flat. It's a good thing, if I were to get a flat on a ride, there is no way I would be able to patch or change the tube.
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