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I completed my second Tinman, half an Ironman distance, triathlon yesterday.  The race took place in Tupper Lake, nestled up in the Adirondacks.  The events for this triathlon include a 1.2 mile swim in Raquette Lake (odd that it’s not Tupper Lake), 56 mile road ride and you finish with a 13 mile run.  I completed the race in 6 hours and 5 minutes.  This is slightly slower than my time two years ago and slower than I wanted to finish in, but I ran into a few issues on the bike (more about that below).

My goal for this race was to complete the race with roughly the same time from two year’s ago.  I didn’t know how realistic this was as I did not train as long or intense as I did the first time around.  Work and other stuff seemed to get in the way this Spring.  One major bummer was that the East Greenbush YMCA had their pool closed from February until June 22nd for repairs.  That meant I would have to go to a nearby pool to do workouts, which honestly didn’t happen.  I actually only did 4 pool workouts for my entire training.  Two in February and two the week of the race.

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It has been about a month since I posted a cipher puzzle after reading an article about the Kryptos exhibit at the CIA headquarters.  The solution is posted below, looking back at the answer the puzzle was actually quite difficult to anyone except people who study cryptology.  The major hints in the post was the reference to the Kryptos exhibit and the accompanying Wikipedia page.  This page talked about the basic ciphers and translations used on the panels which have been solved already.  I used two of the basic ciphers. (more…)

This past Sunday I participated in a race I have not done before, a six hour mountain bike race.  Basically the race consists of you hoping on your bike and riding as many laps as you can in six hours. The race was hosted by Heather Rizzi, a pro rider now riding for GT Bicycles.

The race was at the trails in Schenectady’s Central Park. If you have not ridden these trails recently you really should get out there and give them a spin.  A full loop is about 5.5 miles.  At a race pace, the really fast riders can do it just under 30 minutes, I was able to ride a loop around 35 minutes.

There are lots of fun technical features on these trails, you get to experience bridges, logs, skinnies, and a small jump you can take which gives you a nice advantage over the easier but longer ride-around.

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