Cultural Learnings…

You can buy all kinds of awesome products in Japan. I am sort of fascinated by the posters and product packages over here.

My first night in town, I saw a rather large Pocky and Pocky-knock-off section at the 24-hour convenience store. My favorite item was the Toppo “for men!”

Outside of my hotel in Okinawa, there were a few garden beds with this posted warning sign:

I am unsure about whether they dislike the meat, the bun, the condiments or the whole package … but keep your cheeseburgers out of the No Cheeseburger Zone!

Next up: the pants press. My very small hotel room in Okinawa had very little floor space that wasn’t covered by the bed, but they found enough room for a pants press. The hotel rooms in Ishigaki were a bit bigger, but the entire hall had to share a pants press… luckily triathletes don’t wear a lot of pants?

If you are a crab and you like to ride the monorail, be careful around the doors or you might damage your claw. The vast majority of warning signs and advertisements in Japan seem to feature cartoon animals.

 

There was also an ad on the monorail for a show called “The Opening of a New School.” I thought that maybe it was a play being performed in Naha/Okinawa, but we later saw these characters on TV in Ishigaki. So our best guess is that it is a Japanese knock-off of High School Musical. I found something about each of these characters’ style and posing to be really intriguing…

  

Upon arriving in Ishigaki, I was ready to grab some lunch but I had a hard time finding a place with an English menu. So I just went with the “point at something that looks tasty” method.

The upper-right beef/soup/noodles was a good choice. Unfortunately it looks like somebody didn’t avoid those automatic doors on the monorail and their claw ended up in my miso soup!

Ben and I managed to find a restaurant with an English menu for dinner that night. It was called the Garlic House, or something like that. We had many creative and tasty garlic dishes, but the most memorable had to be the deep-fried roasted garlic. Check out Ben’s faux-hawk that he decided to rock for Monterrey and Ishigaki.

 

The English-speaking menu must have attracted another popular trend that we saw in Japan: t-shirts with collections of English words that didn’t really make grammatical sense to us. You can’t quite see this girl’s entire shirt, but it says something not-quite-sensical about winter fading into spling. Not “spring,” but “spling.”

On Thursday three of us went for an ocean swim near the Intercontinental Hotel. Their bike parking area was a bit far from the beach and close to the main road, so we asked if we could leave our bikes closer to the office. They let us leave them on this rubbish pile. There are at least $15000 worth of bikes in this picture:

Our hotel in Ishigaki had room service, and they also sold a few a la carte items at the front desk. The Ishigaki Beef Chips sounded very tasty, but I was especially curious about the “TBCL NUTS & CRACK.”

 

Next to the Max-Valu grocery store in Ishigaki, we found a little slice of home: KFC! Complete with a life-size statue of the Colonel himself, standing outside to greet visitors:

 

Inside the grocery store, there were too many wondrous products to ever possibly document here. But we did find this intense display for xylitol mints. Dave Messenheimer used to love picking up these mints or gum in Asia since you can’t get it in the US.

The best section had to be the beer section. There we found such popular brands as “Zero Life” and “Relax.”

   

But our favorite type of beer had to be Okinawa Prefecture’s own, Orion. Not just any Orion, but the Orion in the special commemorative Ishigaki Triathlon can:

We also snagged a delicious red pineapple to snack on back at the hotel.

 

At the welcome party on Friday night we got to watch traditional dancing and music performed by local high school students.

We also got to taste sweet potato ice cream for the first time.

I could go on for days, but I should probably wrap this up before I start posting pictures from the afterparty … well, okay, one picture from after the race: a tasty treat called “Crunky!” You must do your best to look crunky while eating Crunky!

The night only got more Crunky from there on out! International Karaoke Madness!!!

Fajitas!

Last night we did another Austin Endurance Ranch prep dinner.  This week’s main course was fajitas, including meats from Bill the Butcher and tortillas that we made ourselves, from scratch.  We also had a bit more Tremonte & Son’s Fine Ale, a giant salad, chips and salsa, margaritas and a few desserts.  Good times.

Ashwin handled the cooking of the flank steak:

I got to demonstrate the proper technique for dividing dough and rolling tortillas.  At the height of our tortilla-rolling frenzy our little sweatshop had five forced laborers working for their dinner:

 

We need to work on using that “red eye reduction” setting on the camera… Myk looks like he is about to come for your soul.

Courtenay and Loren worked on the salad:

Two of us are hard at work.  One of us is hard at work opening his beer:

No Pomerians were harmed in the cooking of this dinner.  “No, I didn’t bring the Pomeranian bowling.  I didn’t rent it shoes.  I didn’t buy it a beer.  It’s not gonna take your turn!”

  

All of the rolling and cooking took a bit longer than expected, so by the time the food was ready everybody was very eager to eat:

We finished off with a variety of desserts.  Ritz made these oat-berry bars and Ashwin brought some fresh berries and a chocolate cake.

Sadly we didn’t get a photo of the awesome salsa that Nat made for us.  We put it out with the chips as an appetizer and it disappeared quickly, despite the generous portion.  It was a green salsa with a delayed but powerful kick.  Tasty!

Loren wears his sponsor gear everywhere he goes, just in case.  Sort of reminds me of Barrett and Andrew and their PowerBar Team Elite gear that they wear *everywhere.*  The first day that I met Andrew he was ironing PowerBar patches onto everything that he owned.

Ben discovered the “creepily lit self portrait” settingon my new camera:

He also discovered the “two goofy guys gazing off into space” setting:

Of course, nobody could be as goofy as that goober in the pink hat.  But check out his awesome t-shirt!  It is made of bamboo!

If you haven’t booked your Austin Endurance Ranch trip yet, you are missing out on some mighty fine grubbin’.

What’s Cookin’, Good Lookin’

As we prepare for this winter’s edition of the Austin Endurance Ranch I wanted to run through all of the planned recipes, so I’m inviting friends over every Thursday night to be my guinea pigs.

For our first effort two weeks ago, Courtenay and I made enchiladas and a salad while Ben “worked” on his laptop.  Here are the results:

Cooking the enchilada filling:

Filling the pan:

 

Salad in a pot, salad on a plate:

 

The finished product:

Ben helped eat:

 

This week I’ll be following the old Tremonte family recipe for pasta sauce.  This will be served over a choice of Zone or Cucina Fresca pasta, along with some fresh bread, salad, dessert… good times! 

I may try to throw in some Chicken Parmesan, too, if Bill the Butcher has some scavenger chicken in-stock tomorrow night.

This is the Endurance Ranch

Today we are happy to release our first two "This is the Endurance Ranch” video ads.  We hope you like ‘em.  Tell all your friends!

 

More are on the way.  Next weekend we’ll shoot a few on location in Austin, TX and at Longhorn 70.3.

A Busy Weekend

My friend Dave “The Man with the Moustache” Messenheimer visited Seattle this weekend to visit some friends and to race Starcrossed.  We packed in a lot of activities.  Here’s a quick summary.

Wed: AM long swim, PM track workout with Tony, Andrew and Paul, late-night airport pickup

Thu: sleep in, cyclocross practice at Marymoor, dinner at Gordito’s

Fri: AM swim, PM cyclocross practice at Marymoor, dinner at Ivar’s, Girl Talk show at the Showbox SoDo

Sat: packet pickup for Kirkland Triathlon, race at Starcrossed, prep our TT bikes for Sunday.

Sun: Kirkland Triathlon, volunteer at the Brooks Outlet semi-annual sidewalk sale, afternoon snack at Dick’s Drive-In, check out the Colonnade, dinner at Sushi Land

Mon: easy ride on CX bikes, Pearl Jam show in the evening

Tue: awake at 4:30am for the airport drop-off, then a quick nap in the car before a 7am swim with Ben and Courtenay

The cyclocross race went pretty well for me.  It was my second time racing CX on a CX bike and my first time not double-flatting, and I managed to finish in the top ten!  I didn’t get off the line very quickly and had to work my way up from 30th or 40th, but it was very encouraging to be able to do so.  My weak-but-improving handling skills didn’t hold me back all that much and my TT power helped me move up on the straightaways. It was cool to watch the elite races later in the day, especially once the rain started falling.

    

The triathlon on Sunday brought out an impressive field for a local sprint race – Ben Collins, Rusty Pruden, Dave Messenheimer and I were the top for finishers, in that order.  My splits were a bit slower than the last time that I did this race, back in 2007, so I was a bit disappointed about that.  But it was fun to get to race against such a solid field without having to travel.  I was second out of the water behind Ben but I was surprised at what a large time gap he was able to open up during the swim.  I picked up some time in transition but he just buried us all on the bike.  Dave and Rusty caught me about halfway through the bike.  I stayed with them for a bit, gained some ground on the big hill but then they slipped away on the flats.  Lame.  I started the run feeling strong but faded a bit after the first mile.  My form didn’t look terribly smooth, either.  I think that I need to pick up my run volume a bit once my PG blisters fade away.

But my biggest offseason training focus is going to be my swim, at least until January.  While I need plenty of work in all three disciplines, I can’t really “race” draft-legal without swimming my way into that first pack.  I’m going up to six workouts a week for awhile to see what kind of impact that has.