Scott Adcox

Doing More With Less Since 1972

Month: March 2012

March 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

You always hear about how hard it is to find time to train when you have small kids. I think it’s true that it presents a challenge, but one that’s pretty easily overcome if you are disciplined with your schedule. Finding time to train isn’t the hardest part of training when you have small kids.

The hardest thing about training when you have small kids is that there seems to always be a cold, ear infection, or sore throat lurking around the house. I don’t notice it so much when the schedule is light, but when volume picks up and the body is more susceptible to the crud, I seem to get it at every turn.

Recommitting by Actually Registering

March 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been training for Ironman 70.3 Florida since mid-January, and so far training has gone great except for a couple of weeks of illness. Even then I didn’t miss any of my long workouts.

But…

I’ve been putting off actually registering for the race. Part of the reason is that I’ve had a string of injuries (real and phantom) for the past couple of years and didn’t know how I’d do when I started amping up the volume in training. I think staying away from rugby and all of its related antics has gone a long way in avoiding injuries. Then there’s the money part of the equation. If you know me at all, you know it’s hard for me to chunk down a few hundred dollars for something and not get immediate value for it.

Today, when I was pretty wiped out from yesterday’s workouts, I went ahead and registered for the event.

So I’m officially in.

That’s a commitment to the commitment. Now it has to be done for sure. And it’s easier to get up and train on the days you aren’t feeling well if you think of it as getting your money’s worth.

Luckily, the race is close to home. So I won’t need to also purchase a plane ticket as a secondary commitment.

Now, about that diet…

The Hardest Part of Lap Swimming

March 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Swimming Bear

Deciding who to ask to share their lane.

Our gym has a four lane, 25 yard pool, and it’s very rare to show up there and find an empty lane. If you do, chances are you won’t finish your workout before someone else comes in and needs to share with you. No big deal…I don’t mind sharing a lane. But I’d rather be the one who does the asking instead of being asked. The reason is simple–if I’m doing the asking, I get to decide what kind of swimmer I’ll be sharing with, and who I’ll be accidentally punching in the face. If I get asked, I’m obligated by the social swimming contract to say “sure”, but whether or not I’m about to get accidentally punched in the face is a crap shoot.

Choosing lanes is a little like choosing urinals. There’s an art to it. Today’s swim put all of my lane choosing skills to use.

  • Lane 1: a pool walker. This lane was automatically ruled out since the first lane is supposed to be reserved for walkers anyway. Plus, I like to avoid swimming next to the wall if possible. It doesn’t have any give to it when you accidentally punch it in the face.
  • Lane 2: a swimmer. Not going fast, but an able swimmer.
  • Lane 3: a swimmer. But not a freestyler, a breast-stroker. She was getting into the pool just as I showed up and seemed to be stroking as wide as she could (and eyeballing me the whole time). Obviously, not the choice.
  • Lane 4: a swimmer. Going about the same speed as the Lane 2 swimmer.

So the dilemma was Lane 2 or Lane 4. Again, I’d rather not swim on the wall, but Lane 4 is extra wide, so that usually isn’t a problem in this lane. So I watched. Even though they were going the same speed, the Lane 4 swimmer was working harder than the Lane 2 swimmer to maintain the pace. And her form (I may not be able to lay an egg, but I can tell a good one from a bad one) wasn’t nearly as clean as the Lane 2 swimmer’s. Finally, the clock is directly in front on Lane 2. I don’t like to wear a watch while I swim and depend on that clock, so I prefer having it right in front of me if possible.

I chose correctly. Not only did I avoid making contact with Lane 2 swimmer during my workout, there was only one time during the session that we were side-by-side. I must have walked in during one of her rest sets because she picked up the pace with some sprints while I was in the pool. In fact, even when a lane became open I opted to keep sharing Lane 2 instead of jumping over to the empty lane and taking the risk that I’d end up sharing again with an unknown entity.

I need to do a post soon about choosing where to line up for the start of an open-water swim. Note: the decision is heavily skewed if you’ve already caught someone moving your stuff in transition set up and would like to kick them in the face.

Accidentally.

Photo Credit

The Post-Cycling Wine-o

March 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of my cycling at night lately, and I’m fortunate to be able to do that. The only problem is that riding the bike really wakes me up. I’m typically very alert and awake for at least an hour after getting out of the saddle. It’s like the anti-swimming. And that’s great for morning rides, but when I finish a workout at 11:30 pm, I just want to go to sleep…but I can’t.

If I had unlimited time and access to a lap pool, I’d handle this solution like Elvis–jump into the pool and swim for a while to induce sleep. Then I’d also need to jump on the bike after swimming to get my energy levels back up. It’s a vicious cycle.

Since I can’t go for a quick swim to make me sleepy, could a list of great post-cycling wines be the solution?

I just have to be careful not to partake when I have a workout the following morning…running with a headache is no fun, and even a glass affects me these days.

March 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

How can you hate the free market on a Wednesday when it is the very existence of the free market that allows you to successfully pressure for-profit entities to remove their advertising dollars from someone who says something you don’t like on Thursday?

This isn’t commentary on what was said, who said it, or whether it was right or wrong.

But doesn’t this prove (yet again) that free markets are a good thing.

What’s Missing From Every Help Desk App

March 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

If I were designing a Help Desk application from the ground up, there’s one feature I’d put front and center: Requester Competency Rating.

Every time help desk personnel handle a call or request, they should be able to rate the technical competency of the person on the other end of the phone. Right now, the default position for every support call is that the person asking for assistance is a pre-schooler, and you build up from there.

Case in point: a month and a half ago I registered a request for help with a vendor. I’d already spent a couple of weeks identifying a problem and eliminating as many possible causes as I could think of, documenting every step with data and including this information in my request. I was finally granted my request for a remote session today, where the person helping me spent over an hour performing the exact steps I’d already performed and included in my request.

The problem is that I have logged several requests with this vendor in the past, and each request has been in regards to an actual problem with their system that I’d identified and isolated. Wouldn’t it make sense to have a system that can flag any new requests I make in the future? Shouldn’t the default position be “incoming request from a guy who it’s safe to assume has already read our manual, read the community support forums, and still has a problem”?

Help desk people who deal with internal users (behind the firewall) probably develop a pretty good idea of who has technical skills and who doesn’t already, but there should be an easy way for them to share this information among themselves and for any new people who join the support team. Every time the phone rings or a ticket is submitted, the person who will be handling the request would have a huge leg up if they already knew what kind of user they are going to be dealing with.

And that’s not meant as an insult to non-technical users either. They need (and deserve) to have their hands held a little more than a tech savvy user, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that. It just doesn’t make sense to waste the time of someone who has already done half of the help desks work by isolating the issue for them. Why not leverage them to help provide better service to everyone?

March 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This is your pain….Don’t deal with this the way those dead people do. Deal with it the way a living person does.

~Tyler Durden

That Rude Smart Phone Thing

March 2, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The topic of discussion on a local radio talk show this morning was “things people do that are unbelievably rude”. The general consensus was that the most rude behavior in our culture is paying attention to your phone when others are trying to engage you in conversation. This behavior is also known as “I-Don’t-Know-Who-This-Text-Is-From-But-It-Has To-Be-More-Interesting-Than-What-You-Are-Saying-Itis”

We’ve all done it. Some more than others. Some are aware we’ve done it and have tried to correct it. I’m proposing a nation-wide movement to address it.

I’m going to be trying out a couple of behavior modification initiatives on people I come into contact with. To be fair, there aren’t that many, but I’m interested to see what happens.

If I’m in a fixed location like a living room and am having a discussion with someone, I’m going to stop what I’m saying mid-sentence until they look back up from their phone, then continue on until they look back down again. I can only assume they are completely bored with whatever I’m talking about, so this is sort of a spiteful way to get back at them for ignoring me by making it drag out even longer.

If I happen to run into someone coming in/out of the grocery store or something and we stop to talk, I’m going to walk away the instant they start paying attention to their device. I’ll just assume the conversation is over and we’re done.

Turnabout is fair play. Do the same thing to me if I’m paying more attention to a device than I am to you. Feel free to add a throat clearing sound in there too.

I won’t think you’re being rude, but I may be embarrassed at my own behavior.

© 2026 Scott Adcox

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑