August 2012 -

28 Aug

My first tri – Lake Sammamish Triathlon

Last Saturday I got up extra bright and early to drive out of Seattle to Lake Sammamish and undertake my first triathlon. Things were pretty quiet on the freeway, but there were plenty of cars at the State Park where the event was. The transition area had opened at 5:30 am, and an hour later it was pretty jam packed. I found a place on a rack to hang my bike and set out my gear on a towel.

At 6:45 they held a meeting to go over a few points about the race with everyone, then the first wave started wading into the water. The sun was just barely up, and the lake was steaming gently in the golden morning light. The beach was cold and gravelly; when I stepped into the water it was warmer than the air and the rocks on the bottom were softened by wave action and algae. I took a place at the edge of my wave, and waited for the start.

The first rush of racing adrenalin pushed me forward and I headed towards the first orange buoy. I remembered to stick my head up and sight every so often, and did a few breaststrokes here and there to keep my bearings and my breath. I had the sense that I was in the middle of the pack. With only a quarter mile to go, the swim was over quickly and then I was gasping and jogging up the beach to the transition area. I heard someone say “seven minutes” so I assumed that was approximately my time, and a minute faster than my goal.

In the first transition I was miserably slow. I wore my bike shorts and sports bra for the swim, with a rash guard over the top. Before I got on the bike I had to take off the rash guard and put on my bike jersery, which was no problem. The problem was that I had thought a pair of spandex capris would be a good thing over the short bike shorts. It’s real tough to put on spandex pants when you’re wet, sitting on the ground, and hopped up on adrenalin. Next time, something baggier for sure!

When I finally got myself together, I jogged my bike out and along the path until there was a sign that said ‘MOUNT BIKE.’ I did so, and set off for the 14.5 mile cycle portion of the triathlon. This was definitely the highlight of the race for me, since I kept a running tally and passed 56 people. The course was out and back along the lake, mostly very flat, with one small hill. I played leapfrog with another woman for a bit, then passed her on the hill and never saw her again. I passed 9 people on the short climb. That’s my reward for crossing the Pyrenees this spring! By the turnaround, one man had irrevocably passed me, and I was playing tag with two other guys. In retrospect, I probably could have pushed harder on the cycle portion, since I was able to be chipper and exchange words with them! As we came back to the transition area, I pulled ahead of one of them, and chased the other into the dismount area.

I changed my shoes relatively quickly and set off for the run jog portion, a 3.2mi/5k course through the park. It was quite flat, and a pleasant route through grassy fields. I’ve never found running particularly enjoyable, but in the last two years I’ve slogged on until I can run 5 miles in a go. I am by no means a fast runner, so I was surprised that only 18 people passed me on the run. I assumed that many of the people I had blown by on the bike would now take their revenge, but I suppose by then the participants were pretty well spread out over the course.

Yes, I have a Sponge Bob bike jersey. It’s a youth large.

Finally I came around back to the transition area and made a short sprint to the finish line. My final time was 1:36 which was pretty good considering I had been hoping to finish in under two hours!

Here’s the breakdown of my time, which earned me 191st place overall, and 10th in my age group.

7:53.8 – swim (119/302 overall, 8/19 F30-34)
3:25.0 – first transition
49:59.4 – bike (150/302 overall, 7/19 F30-34)
1:26.9 – second transiton
33:38.7 – run (230/302 overall, 12/19 F30-34)

For next time, I’ll work speeding up that first transition, I’ll know I can push harder on the bike, and, of course, I’ll keep running. My taller half is talking about learning to swim more competently so he can tri with me next time; in the mean time I think he just signed us up for the Leavenworth Oktoberfest Marathon. Now I definitely can’t put away those sneakers!

24 Aug

Guess what! The internet is NOT public domain!

For reals, people.

Today I saw a Facebook link to an article about how to go about grappling with the opposite gender. Since I spent time doing just that last year, I clicked through. The piece was pretty good, up until when I noticed this in the comments.

…which it totally was.

Well, a bit later the people behind the site came back and pointed out that hey, they’d clearly linked to Chrissy in the first couple paragraphs (before they quoted 95% of her original blog post and then rounded it out with another four sentences of their own). They were just “curating” her article. I added my own comment, giving them some benefit of the doubt before assuming they were content-scraping crack monkeys.

Another commenter linked to The Blogger’s 10 Commandments of Don’t Steal Our Shit, which reminded me of the Cooks Source copyright infringement debacle. The replies from the “curators” showed absolutely no awareness that the internet isn’t public domain, not quite with Judith Griggsian levels of terribleness, but you copied 95% of someone’s blogpost to your site without telling them.

Also, there was that line about “We also quoted in grey the curated content from her site like we always do.” Like we always do. I clicked through two dozen or so of the other posts on that site and all of them were with some blogger’s “help.”

…we’ve tapped into the knowledge base of East West Martial Arts.

We’ve enlisted the help of Jiu Jitsu Mania to show you…

With the help of Gracie Mag, in this post we provide you…

Here are a few tips we gathered through BJJ for Children …

In this post we enlisted the help of Mauricio “Tinguinha” Mariano…

With help from our friends over at BJJ Weekly…

That’s when I started to feel… upset.

I hope they’re actually friends with BJJ Weekly, because I found that they had lifted posts one, two, three, and four from there. The only things on that website that aren’t reposting of others’ written content are posts with several paragraphs of text around an embedded Youtube video, which is kind of the same thing. However, since Youtube vids don’t generally come with much textual analysis, maybe that qualifies as legit content. And by legit, I mean more than 50% created by/paid for by the people who run that website. If that’s not the case, then you need to get some kind of permission from the content creator before you post that content on your site!

Currently the website says

We sourced this article from Chrissy Linzy (check her website out here Clinzy) and it starts with training as a woman first (from a woman’s perspective).

But the rest of their content is still “With the help of Turtle Guard, let’s take a look at..” sort of thing. And that’s not cool. Even if they’ve apologized to Chrissy, the whole website is still chock full of unethical use of other people’s content.

There’s just no way around it. I’m forced to conclude that Steven and the other folks behind bjjtoday.net are content-scraping crack monkeys. You can look if you like, but honestly Monica, if you’re looking for good content on Brazilian Jiujitsu, I think you’d do better to start at BJJ Weekly.

22 Aug

Pinspiration & perspiration: Writing & Triathlon Crossover Part II

Here’s a few more instances of cross-over inspiration.

I have had this one (above) open on my computer for several weeks, as a reminder to keep moving forward. The temperature outside is never going to be perfect for a run – go anyway. It’s always going to be too noisy to write, I’m never going to be in the perfect creative mood. Write anyway.

Add one hour of writing, and you’ve gotten two important things done, and you have 92% of your day left.

Math! It’s amazing.

…just so long as you begin somewhere!

13 Aug

Pinspiration & perspiration – the overlap between novel writing and triathlon training

Like, Lord of the Rings epic.

A few months ago, I joined Pinterest to see what the fuss was about. After unsubscribing from the generica I got for checking too many boxes for my supposed “interests” (i.e. arts, travel, food) I looked for pinboards on my more specific actual interests: snarky pro-women politics, martial arts, pulp novel covers, and so on. At the same time, I registered for my first triathlon, and continued working on my first novel. I started looking at what people post on their boards under ‘triathlon’ and ‘writing inspiration.’

Funny thing — they’re not that different. If you want to write a book, you gotta start writing a little every day, believe that you’ll make progress, and keep going. If you want to get fit and compete athletically, you gotta start working out a little every day, believe that you’ll make progress, and keep going.

So here’s a little quiz! Which of these inspirational quotes was pinned for writing, and which for fitness? The first one is a freebie, since the fitness inspiration ones have a frightening tendency to feature ladies in their sports bras looking prettier than you, but I think some of the others are not so easy. Answer key at the end!

Answer key
#1 Fitness
#2 Fitness
#3 Writing
#4 Fitness & Writing (I’ve seen several versions of this pinned both ways)
#5 Writing
#6 Fitness
#7 Writing

Are you inspired? Another day I’ll post some of the obvious ones which can be switched by changing “writing” to “running” or vice versa. Right now, though, I need to go get epic.

08 Aug

PAWMA Camp: Shihan Fukuda

PAWMA board president Rosanne Boudreau greets Shihan Keiko Fukuda at Friday night’s opening class.

Late this spring, I promised my taller half that I would come with him to Pickathon, a music festival in Oregon. When I realized it was the same weekend as the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists camp, I told him I didn’t mind not going to camp this year.

Then I found out that Shihan Keiko Fukuda was going to be there for the opening class.

When we talk living legends of women’s martial arts, Fukuda should be at the top of anyone’s list. At 99 she is the last living student of Jiguro Kano, the founder of Judo. She is the highest ranking woman in Judo: 10th dan according to the US Judo Federation, and 9th dan with the Kodokan in Japan, where the men who run things aren’t quite prepared to give a woman the highest honors, no matter how overwhelmingly she deserves them.

Fortunately my husband is a bit more sensible and modern than what I assume is a panel of old Japanese men, and I was able to convince him that this was a once in a lifetime sort of thing, worth skipping a music festival for.

Shihan Fukuda still teaches three times a week, despite being wheelchair bound, and is assisted by her black belts. The piece she chose to share with us was ju-no-kata, the “gentle form.” She demonstrated this form at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. The form does not include actual throws, but rather the lead up to throws – tori takes uke to the point when they are just about to fall, and then sets them down gently again. It was a very slow and deliberate form.

I took a lot of rapid fire sequences of photos during camp and made some into gifs, including this one of Shihan Fukuda’s black belts demonstrating one of the almost-but-not-quite throws of ju-no-kata.

I don’t have any pictures of the camp participants practicing the form, since I was in on the class and there was another photographer taking pictures at that point, but we learned a part that involved joint locks, not throws.

After the class session, we got to watch Mrs. Judo, a brand spanking new documentary on Fukuda and her life. Here’s the trailer.

The rest of camp involved a lot more mat artists than usual, which I really liked. Last year while I was living in Alaska, I trained for several months with the Sitka Judo Club, and got my yellow belt. Here’s another giffed set of pictures from one of the classes taught by Sensei Denise Gonzales.

Stay tuned, because I have several hundred decent photos from camp, and dozens of really great ones, and I’ll share some here in the next week or three. If you were at camp, I will be putting all the good photos up online somewhere else and you will get an email from the organization with a link. If you’re a lapsed member, send in your dues so you can be on the email list to get that link! And if you’re a maybe kinda thinking about it prospective member of the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists, I strongly encourage you to sign up, because camp is wonderful for three days, and it is also a door into a beautiful community of strong, inspiring, women.

It doesn’t matter if you started training last week – do you catch the white belt in the above gif? That woman has been training for about a month. You have no excuse. Join PAWMA and come play with us next year!

03 Aug

Martial and photographic arts

I have been training in martial arts – specifically, kajukenbo – for nearly five years now, and for the last several years I’ve been taking photos during belt tests at my school, Seven Star Women’s Kung Fu. It has become a big part of my participation in the school, a reason for me not to skip out on anyone’s test, and a great way to develop my action photography eye. This year I was asked to act as an official photographer during the Pacific Association of Women Martial Artists‘ annual training camp. I accepted, of course! I feel it is a huge honor, and I’m very excited.

Camp is this weekend, so today I have been packing, and adding camera gear to the usual pile of athletic gear I take. I’ve also been looking through test photos. We had a black belt test last week, and I still had 2000 unsorted photos from a green belt test which happened just before my husband and I took off for our European bike tour this spring. Since the number of photos I take during camp will probably approach (or exceed!) 10K, it’s time to set aside my novel in progress and get through some of these pictures!

My process for sorting through the hundreds of photos that come out of a test is pretty simple. I take out all the blurry ones, and most photos were you can’t see a face. I also get rid of stupid faces. Occasionally my husband tags along as a second shooter and takes pictures of me, and then I remember exactly why I have this policy. I’m looking at a picture right now wherein my eyes are half closed and my mouth is hanging open. The knot of my belt has worked its way up under my sweatshirt, giving me an unkempt and possibly cancerous look. It’s not a Kodak moment. No one needs to see this photo of me, and no one needs to see the thousands of equally dopey looks I’ve managed to capture. My kwoon-mates have developed a certain trust that my photos will show their best side, and it’s a trust I value. I do occasionally snicker a little to myself, but I mark two thirds of the pictures as “rejected” for fuzziness, facelessness, or dopiness, and then I delete them.

Now I’ve whittled things down to the photos in which everyone looks sharp and badass, or at least competent. Unfortunately, as I’ve become a better photographer, I end up with more and more competent photos, and I’m not going to share 700 photos, so I look through the remainder again. This time I’m looking for the photos that make me go ‘wow!’ The ones where the subject appears to be holding a pose, except they are in the middle of a form. The street fighting shots where you can see that someone is about to lose an eye. The pretty pretty kicks caught in midair, showcasing the flexibility of the hips. The moment after the fist has hit, when the face deforms a little and the pony tail flies up.

This finally brings the number of photos I’m working with under a hundred, and these ones I spend some time developing. I crop out the fluorescent lights, bring the focus of the frame in on the subject, adjust the temperature and colors so they are consistent across the full set of photos. I add tags so that if Jane Smith ever asks me for all the pictures of her doing street fighting, I can find them. I upload a selection to the school’s Facebook page, and a larger set to the photography website my husband maintains.

I started taking photos at the tests nearly three years ago. Now they’re in the school’s brochures, on the website, and even went into another project I did to redesign the logo. The first pictures I took don’t look so great now, considering what I’ve learned since, but it has been a fun journey, and a good counterpart to my training. It gives me an opportunity to look at my kwoon-mates, and our art, from a different angle, through a different lens. I’m looking forward to seeing PAWMA camp through that lens this year.