Joel Hainley

My bicycling goals for the year have been all but squashed, i’m training now for a couple of solo centuries by the end of the year but I don’t think I’m going to be able to hit my original goals for the year. I let too much other stuff get in the way. I’ve been doing a lot of work on the trainer with a geared bike, then doing my outside riding on the fixed gear. The fixed gear is an ass-kicker. When I’m training I try not to stop pedaling and keep my heart rate up the entire time I’m on the bike. In fact, my standard training approach for 50+ mile training sessions is 5 minutes off the bike every hour, to refuel, stretch, then back on the bike for another hour.

I read an interview last year with a doctor who ran a marathon each month, and had been doing so for quite a few years. His point was that if you did a marathon each month you didn’t have to go through periods of ramping up your training for multiple months to get in shape for a marthon, you are simply always in shape.

I have been thinking of trying this approach in my own training by riding a century each month. I think it’s easily doable and it allows me to add some variety to my training instead of always riding the same 20-30 routes. The only problems I can see with an organized century each month is that there are some gaps in the centuries around the winter. I imagine I’ll just have to do a few solo centuries in the winter to meet this goal.

We’ll have to see how that goes.

Not a lot to report on these days.

I’ve been taking a Film class and a Philosophy class over at DVC. They have been interesting, and somewhat more challenging than last semester as I’ve had to write a bit more than I did last semester.

I was afraid the Philosophy class was going to be very dry, I’ve been pleasantly surprised and find myself looking forward to going to class. I’ve been considering taking some additional philosophy classes, and will probably take the philosophy version of a critical thinking class that’s a requirement for IGETC.

I wrote a paper for the Philosophy class that I might post here when the semester is over, or perhaps just utilize the format to write something similar. I don’t want to post anything I’m writing for classes while I’m taking them though, I think that could get a little difficult. In fact, perhaps the idea of posting papers is a bad idea when I’m done, I donno, I’ll have to think about that some more.

The film class has been good, not what I was expecting, but I’ve been learning things. I have seen quite a few films that I would never have seen otherwise so that’s good. I finally saw the original King-Kong and learned something about myself, I’m not a big monster movie kind of person. I like horror films that have monsters (Alien/s, Feast) but giant (monkey/dinosaur/etc) films don’t do a lot for me (although I thought Lake Placid was hysterical).

Speaking of Feast, I watched that this last weekend, that’s a pretty funny film, the writing is a bit corny, but the director’s abilities saved that film from being a total load of crap. There’s some really, really, spooky parts, some gross parts, some funny parts. It was good film, and the shots were brilliant. The director knows his stuff. It’s not a terribly deep movie, but if you’re looking for something different it’s worth a watch.