If you remember, I did a Sprint Triathlon last year, and I loved it. Since I won’t be able to make it to this year’s edition of the Pyramid Lake triathlon (I’ll be honeymooning in Australia and Fiji), I’ve decided to instead take part of another tri… and because I think being exhausted is fun, I’m doing a longer distance one, an Olympic distance one!
The event of choice is the Silicon Valley International Triathlon, which will be just south of San Jose in Californi on June 13th (just a month and a half from now!). Kelly and I will make a weekend-trip out of the thing, but Sunday morning I’ll be sweating amongst hundreds of other people.
The event consists of:
1500 meter swim. This is almost a mile!
24.9 miles (40 Kilometers) on the bike.
6.2 miles running – a full 10k.
Now, I’ve got a goal time to finish in. Considering that I finished the sprint Tri of last year in 1 hour and 41 minutes and all of the following things…
The Olympic/International distance is double the distance of a Sprint.
I’ve been swimming at least once a week, and will continue to do so to be ready for this race.
I’ll have a wetsuit, either borrowed or rented, but some buoyancy help for sure!
The race is at sea level, which should give me a small oxygen advantage.
The longer distance means that I’ll be going slower, so as to not burn out.
I haven’t been running as much as last year.
My realistic goal time is then exactly the double of the sprint: 3 hours and 20 minutes. But I’ll be pushing myself to finish in under 3 hours. I think it’s doable, and I’m going to be training hard to try to make it happen.
If anything, all the training I’m doing will help me accomplish my goals of being in shape and looking good for the summer!
I received a letter from the USCIS the other day. My citizenship ceremony is scheduled for April 30th!
So, on May 2010 I will be considered an official citizen of the United States of America; I’ll be applying for a US passport the very first week of May, so that I can fly to my honeymoon as such. Exciting times!
Even though my DEXA scan was a couple of weeks ago, today was the official start of the weight-loss competition at work. I’m really hoping that while I started being extremely careful about my eating, other competitors waited until today to start… which should mean that I’ve had an extra 2 weeks to work towards my goal; a head-start if you will.
At any rate, I met with the trainer: Shelly Wilkin from Sierra Body Works. The 20 minute talk was pretty reassuring that I’ve been doing the right thing, since she said that it’ll be a great way to get my to my goal of 18% body fat.
Right now, at 22% BF, my body is composed of 39lbs of fat and 131lbs of lean tissue. If when I get to 18% BF, my body’s composition would will be 140lbs of leanness and 30 lbs of fat. So, the plan is to lose fat and replace it with muscle. Ahoy, here we go!
I had an appointment with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services today. On the letter they sent me about it, they told me to be prepared to be there for approximately 2 hours, and they included a study guide for me to prepare. It didn’t say exactly what I was going there for, but the hints were pretty heavy, and it sure sounded like I was about to have my citizenship test.
The occasion was set for 10:30am, so I showed up a good 15 minutes early because that’s how I roll.
At 11:10, I was finally called in for my interview. The lady that helped me was very friendly, and had me come into her office. That was nice, because I’d been trying to get mentally ready for an interview room with a chair and a lamp. However, there was a bit of an “official” moment when she had me hold my right hand up and swear to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
After verifying paperwork, the questions came. If I recall correctly, they were:
Who wrote the U.S. Constitution?
Name a state that borders Mexico.
Who is the commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces?
What is the political party of the President?
Name the two main political parties of the United States.
Name three of the 13 original colonies.
My answers were:
Jefferson.
Texas.
The President, Barack Obama.
Democratic Party.
Democratic Party and Republican Party.
Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina.
Of course, they were the right ones. In the last weeks, Kelly helped me study, and thanks to her teaching skillz, I had no trouble remembering all this valuable information.
After the interview, I was told about the next stages. I have to wait to receive a letter about my naturalization, but I’m pretty much already on the path and they just have to finish processing the last part. After that, I’ll surrender all my Argentine documents (like my passport) and then I’ll quickly rush to get myself a US Passport.
This is all to happen before July, so that I can travel abroad using my shiny new passport. And when I come back into the US, I can take the short line into the country that I will soon be calling my official home. Yay!
Well, I had my DEXA exam yesterday, and the results are in:
I weigh exactly 80kg, which is more or less 176 lbs. I guess I need a better scale to weigh myself, because I thought I was at 170.
22% of my body is fat. Now, for males the normal range is 4% to 25%, so I’m not technically in a bad spot… but I’m at the upper end of that range, and I would have never known.
The study is pretty cool, you get to lay down on a cushioned bed (very much like this video, except for the knee rest) and hold still while a robotic arm hovering above you zooms around. There is no pain involved, and the best part is that now I know of a bed-like surface to go take naps on if I ever have the need.
Anyway, the report gives some interesting details, broken by body parts. For example, my trunk tissue is 26.7% fat, my legs are 22.6% and my arms 14.6%. Talk about storing the fat in the middle of my body, eh? There are also some more obscure measurements, like “Gynoid: 30%” and “Android: 28.6%”, and I’ll have to wait until I meet with the trainer to find out what those are.
So with that knowledge, I have a better idea of what the goal will be: BF% to somewhere between 12% and 15% range, which will probably take way more than 6 weeks, but that’s ok with me!
Today is the first day of a “The Biggest Loser” kind of competition at work.
I have 6 weeks to meet my goal, which is set after an assessment with a personal trainer. I like that, because it wouldn’t be fair if it was a weight loss competition, since I’m not overweight. It’s a lot easier for someone 50 lbs. overweight to lose 20 lbs, than for someone at their “ideal” weight to lose 20 (specially since they have no reason to do so!). Additionally, even if it was a body fat percentage loss competition only, it still wouldn’t be fair: It’s easier to go from 30% to 25%, than from 25% to 20%. So the trainer’s assessment will establish goals, and for those of us who are already at a decent level of fitness, the goal will be something else.
The way it works is:
Day 1 (today): DEXA Body Fat scan. We do those here at work, so that’s convenient.
Day 1+n (undetermined yet): The trainer appointment happens, and she’ll come up with the goal to meet.
Day 42: Another DEXA Body Fat scan. After this, the trainer will re-asses everyone, and determine the winner.
The big prize is quite nicel: $250 in cash, a year membership at the gym of the winner’s choice, and 4 tickets to a Reno Aces game.
Today I weighed myself, and I came in at 170lbs. Standing at 5′ 10″, this is the top of my ideal weight (according to the BMI magical formula), and I really don’t want to get any thinner or lighter. My goal however is to get more “ripped“. That is something I’ve been planning on doing to get ready to look good on our honeymoon pictures in July, so this just helps me stay on track, and perhaps speed things up. In other words, my goal is to reduce my body fat percentage. It all sounds pretty vane, and that’s probably because it is.
I’ll be “working on my fitness” by being more mindful about what I eat, and stepping up my work-outs. I’ve doing Starting Strength at the gym for about 2 months now, and I’ve enjoyed getting back into lifting weights regularly. Along with that, I hope to be able to ride my bike to work at least twice a week, now that the weather is much nicer and there is plenty of daylight for the ride home at 5pm. Lastly, there’s always volleyball (the season starts this Sunday, and I’m on two teams!), running and swimming (to be prepared for a triathlon, perhaps) and any other kind of activity that I end up getting involved in one way or another.
My DEXA scan is in 4 hours, and that means that I can’t have any food or water until I’m scanned and given the green light. The suffering begins, NOW!
I’ve wanted to be able to breathe better for years. When I ran* hard and I had to push my nose upwards in order to be able to take in all the air I needed, I wished my nose worked like that in a fingerless modus operandi, at all times. *Read “ran” as: ran, biked, skied, swam, or anything that got my cardiovascular and pulmonary systems at a level above 80% of their maximum capacity.
As of the last year, I found yet another reason why I wanted my nose to work in a different way. My inability to inhale through my nose left my body only one option, one that I couldn’t control once I fell asleep: breathing through my nose. Unfortunately, silent mouth-breathing was apparently impossible for me, so I snored as loud as a hog.
Sure, that’d happened for my whole life, but I’ve been sharing my life with Kelly… and I have intentions of living the rest of my life with her, so this was something that jumped to the top of my “things to do to make Kelly happier” list. Specially after keeping her from sleeping to the point that she recorded me so I could hear how loudly I snored: Click here to listen!
So that’s how I ended up in the Saint Mary’s operation room on Monday 18th of January of 2010. Doctor Anthony Zamboni took care of me, but it’s not like I remember anything. All I remember is going in the OR with a robe on, breathing through the Oxygen mask, and waking up feeling like I was in Jupiter.
The original procedure I went under was a Septoplasty. This was a pretty straight-forward concept to understand: my Septum was deviated, so the doctor was going to go in and straighten it out. Since I work at a fancy radiology center, I have access to my very own Computed Tomography of my sinuses, so check it out here:
However, when I talked to Dr. Zamboni about how much I wanted him to knock me out and use tiny little knives on and in my face, I explained to him that one of the results I was hoping for was the lack of snoring. He suggested putting me through a small Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty, where he would “just take out a bit of the soft palate”. This was only going to add 10 minutes to the surgery, and would greatly increase my air tunnel in the back of my throat. Since I figured that we might as well do all we can to take care of business, I agreed to it.
The recovery process from the surgery wasn’t too bad. This is mostly thanks to the excellent care that my loving fiancee Kelly provided. Lortab made me feel very little pain, and a lot of fun muscle relaxation moments. I’d have to say that the hardest part of the recovery was resisting the urge to pick my nose, which was 100% stuffed with a magically grotesque combination of mucus and blood.
10 days after the surgery, Dr. Zamboni removed the splints that were holding my nose together, and I took my first breath with my “new” nose. What a moment! I had never felt so much airflow through my nostrils, and in that moment I knew that the surgery had been worth the suffering and the $2.5k that I’d saved up to pay for it.
Since then, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying being able to exercise without having to put a finger to the tip of my nose. Additionally, Kelly claims to have been enjoying the more silent lack of saw-logging that used to come from me. Yay!
My resolution for this year is to become a US Citizen.
I looked into dual-citizenship, but apparently that kind of thing doesn’t fly anymore, so I’ll have to swear to forget all about how much Argentine government sucks, and promise to treat the flag of the United States of America as my own.
After thinking about it, it doesn’t seem like something impossible or impractical for me to do. In fact, it makes sense.
I’ve lived in the US for a while now, and I have a bigger sense of citizenship towards the USA than Argentina. I’ve never even voted in Argentina, and I probably never will because I’m not familiar nor personally involved in the politics that are going on there. However, I would like to be able to vote in the country that I live in, and that I will continue to live in.
The process is pretty simple:
Fill out a long form with lots of uncomfortable questions (Do you have the Taliban in your backyard?).
I’m freshening up on some civics knowledge, but lucky me, my fiancee is a US History teacher, so I have a good resource to study.
Forms are filled up, and the process will be officially started when I stuff them in an envelope and send them away, probably by the end of this week.
Oh yeah, I also have “secondary” resolutions, which are much more along the lines of the typical promise: Do a Century ride on my bike (like the Chico Century Ride), have a six pack by summer our honeymoon, maintain a positive attitude and continue to be a key member of the day to day operations at work.
Last Saturday was the one year anniversary of the first date that Kelly and I had.
Plans to make it a memorable event had been in the making for many days, and the payoff was grand.
We woke up early, and drove to South Lake Tahoe. Reservations for Montbleu and dinner were taken care of, and Kelly even scheduled us for a fancy couple’s massage at the spa in the hotel.
When we checked into the hotel, I was a bit disappointed about our view. Our window showed us the roof of some buildings, and a mountain that wasn’t even covered in snow. Yuck!
I called the front desk and asked if we could upgrade. They told me that they’d have a nicer room available in an hour or so (for a small fee, of course), so we decided to take the offer. The new room would be facing Lake Tahoe, a sight well worth a small upgrade fee.
We had a couple of hours to kill before our massage appointment, and I had just the plan for that time. We walked over to the Heavenly village to catch a gondola ride to the top of the mountain. It was cold and windy out, but my hands were sweating.
Luckily for us, we managed to get in a gondola by ourselves. The sky was cloudy, but the lake was a very deep blue, so the views we were about to take in got us excited. Kelly sat with her back to the lake, as I took a few pictures of her with Lake Tahoe in the background.
I sat next to her, and whispered some sweet things in her ear. We kissed a couple of times, celebrating our anniversary with a very romantic and private ride. Seizing the perfect moment, I told kelly to “Look at the lake, it’s so pretty!”.
When she turned around to look back at me, she found me on one knee, with a ring on my hand and a huge smile on my face. I simply asked her: “Will you marry me?”, and she said yes. The ring went on her finger, and we spent the rest of the ride looking deep into each other’s eyes.
When we arrived to the top, we walked around in bliss, enjoying the landscape, the view, and our love for each other. Kelly had been questioning me about when I was going to ask for her hand, and little did she know that I’d been planning it all along.
When we first talked about such things, many months ago, she told me that she wanted three things: A ring (she showed me a picture of “a ring”), a private circumstance, and a surprise.
I took these things to heart, and made sure that they were true at the moment that I went down on my knee. Her face told me I’d surprised her. Being on a little cart dangling from a wire above pine trees and snow on the side of a mountain… that’s rather private, I’d say. Happily, the ring requirement was also met, and I did actually hear her say “wow” a couple of times. Success!
When we went back to the hotel, we headed to the front desk to check in into our new and upgraded room. Kelly totally pulled a move from Friends (the TV show) and announced to the concierge that we had just gotten engaged. Luckily for us, it worked! The manager was there by coincidence, and we got a free upgrade to a mini-suite.
We had our couple’s massage at the spa in the hotel, and it was wonderfully relaxing. It was a royal treat to our bodies. The therapists were super nice, and we both felt at the end as if they had transmitted a lot of positive energy our way. If they hadn’t disappeared after leaving the room for us to get dressed, I probably would have given them a hug.
The last item on our anniversary plans involved a fancy dinner at Evan’s, the fanciest restaurant I could find. It had great reviews on Yelp and Zagat, so we had to check it out.
Dinner was very tasty , and the things we ate were straight out of Top Chef. However, the highlight of the experience wasn’t the incredible food. There was a small wedding party dining there, with the bride wearing her white dress and the groom in a tuxedo and all. I took it to be a very good sign of the day’s events.
In the end, the weekend turned out to be out of a movie. We celebrated our year of falling in love with each other, and we also celebrated our promise to continue to love each other forevermore.
Our City of ReMO team kicked ass. When Don and I talked about Movember at the end of last year, we had a few things in mind:
Better planning and organization: Plan things in advance, spread the word, and try to make things run smoothly.
Bigger focus on the actual goal of Movember, and put the fun and good-looks on the second plane.
Raise a lot of money.
Reach out to more people in Reno.
Get local businesses involved.
It’s a big source of pride and accomplishment to be able to say that we can check all of those.
At the end of September, we laid out a list of things that we’d like to do, and we set our minds to make them happen. Before Movember officially started, we had a pretty well outlined calendar of what was going to happen, when and where. This helped us spread the word. This was a much better approach than planning things on the go, since most people make plans far in advance… So this year, we gave them notice, and the plans they made were to attend our events. Fantastic!
Talking about Men’s Health issues was easier than imagined, and it came naturally. When people asked us about Movember, it was the first thing we talked about. (The second thing was about how sexy we looked). I think this was in part because of our “experience” in the subject, and the conscious decision to focus on getting the word out.
Certainly, humor had its part and no talk about the actual reason behind Movember went without crude mentions of balls and assholes.
Our goal for this year was to raise $5000. At first, that seemed like a huge number, considering that last year we’d raised right about $1600. We figured that it was a good goal, a nice round number, and something that would definitely identify us as a “serious” group committed to the cause.
To our surprise and joy, the $5k mark was met before half of the month even passed, and this was before most of us even had decent moustaches to be asking for donations!
The first thought was to call it good and declare “Mission Accomplished!”, but we were just starting to gather steam and MOmentum, so we decided to step it up, and declare a new goal: $10,000. Ballsy move, one could say, but this was after all very much about the balls.
On the day 30, the $10k mark was met with much rejoice. The final number is yet to be computed, because of cash and check donations, but the accomplishment is there, and it’s a wonderful feeling to know that we made it. If $5000 was a lot of money, we raised two lots of money.
Last year, we felt that our efforts in reaching out were successful when Anthony joined our team. We didn’t know him, and he joined because he thought it was a good cause. Our “campaign” had transcended the circle of people that we knew, and I took that to be a very good thing.
This year, that effect snow balled. The members of our team kept growing and growing. I received an email when someone joined the team, and I remember being excited when it showed that we had 25 members in our team. Quickly after that, our total was up to 40 people. And fifty… and a hundred.
Who were these people? Some of the names sounded familiar, but there were many Anthonies. We even got David Bobzien to join. Way cool!
Eclipse Pizza joined us last year in our official team, and we knew we could count on them again for this year. But what we didn’t know was how well other businesses were going to receive the idea of teaming up, and the response was a very positive experience. KRZQ (100.9 FM) gave us a lot of airtime with ads, and even put us on a show in the middle of the day! One of the owners of The Sierra Tap House, Zach, became very involved and helped us put together some very successful events. Shannon from SOAK Lounge invited us to her business which caters mainly to women, and organized a very creative and fun occasion. The Biggest Little City Club hosted us on a couple of different nights, and made us feel really good. We went to Butcher Boy for lunch, got Rockstar haircuts and had tons of fun bowling with a lot of the ReMO team at Starlite Lanes. The local restaurant Amendment 21 organized the Reno Beer Crawl with proceeds benefiting our cause, and promised to be a big helper next year.
Long story short: local businesses rocked our world. I’ll be making a longer write up about it all on the City of Remo website soon, so I’ll spare the details for that post.
On a personal note, none of this could have happened without Kelly’s support. Despite almost crying after seeing my clean shaven face after many months of sporting a goatee, she encouraged my efforts to make our team a successful one. As if putting up with a prickly upper lip wasn’t enough, she had to tolerate my distracted attention and need to be involved in a lot of things.
That is the job of a “Mo-Sista”, and she did it well without much reward. Rest assured, I’ll be making sure she knows how much I appreciate her.
Even more personal, and somewhat geeky: I was more or less “the” photographer of the things we did. I won’t be asking for money to take pictures anytime soon, but I’m pretty happy with the moments I captured in still images. Most of the pictures ended up on Facebook, if you’d like to see for yourself.
For the Stache-Bash (aka end of Movember party), I got to play with some fancy photo gear I borrowed from Mo-Bro Kyle Walker. The pictures from this event look specially good thanks to the lighting equipment and the improvised photo booth that I put together. It kind of made me want to have a flash and fancy umbrella to be able to do it more.
At any rate, I took pictures of my moustache growth on a semi-frequent basis, so if you’re ready to see how it all went, check it out right here:
Finally, I’d like to say thank you on a personal level to those who donated to Movember and “sponsored” my moustache. Thank you Kelly, Joan, Elinor, Kathy, Zach, Willie and Roger. My prostate and testicles appreciate it!
Went and saw the faculty play at Reno High. Good laughs! It's also always good to see the very hot @stellarkelly on stage. Hey, babe, sup? 19 hours ago
Learning Ruby/Rails/MySQL... somehow messed up the database.yml that was using sqlite instead of mysql. Blah, thinking is hard work! 1 day ago
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