Hey Gang! Well, as you’ve no doubt realized, my blog postings have diminished substantially since my return to chilly Ottawa. even though spring has somewhat arrived here, the weather is still not really good enough to go out and do any long training rides yet, and the race season hasn’t started yet, so I’m sticking to the indoor training, and playing with my computer and getting gear ready. Preparing gear includes looking after my body, but more on that in a moment. The biggest development on my front is actually an improvement in Flickr, which in turn will hopefully further increase the overall web experience you’ll get when visiting ActiveSteve. As you can see to the left, I’m now [hopefully] able to embed short video clips on my website easily. Of course, there were always ways to do this, but to date, I haven’t found a solution that I would truly be happy with… until now. Read on for a little more about this development.
The enabler is Flickr introducing the ability for pro account holders to now upload video. Granted, the maximum length I believe is 90 seconds, and 150Mb per video, but that amount is just about right for small vignettes that people typically take with their digital camera. By chance, I took a little video on my waterproof camera in Fiji a few months ago, and that is the video you see here. I’ve always avoided taking video clips because I had no idea what I’d do with them later. I didn’t feel like posting to YouTube, but now that I can integrate the videos into my sets on Flickr, and even blog them from within Flickr, it opens a whole bunch of opportunities. So, in the future, you can expect me to probably start taking some short clips at races, during training, at parties, etc, and using those to blog about events. An even more enriching and interactive concept, don’t you think? Should be fun.
Now, about the taking care of my gear and body, what did I mean there? Well, on the gear front, it includes taking my bike into the shop to start getting it in race-ready form for the summer. Easy enough. However, on the body front, things might be a little trickier. I went for a quick 30min. 6km run on Monday, and it felt great during the run. My aerobic base is kicking butt. However, the entire rest of the week, including today, I’ve had my bad knee pains. Rather than put it off, I made an appointment with a sports doctor right away this time, since the road to improvement may take a while.
The prognosis? Well, no idea yet. However, I’m scheduled to go for knee X-rays tomorrow morning, and I will also be getting an MRI ASAP, which should be within a month. This is to either identify a root cause, or to rule out problems. From there, I’ll also get a recommendation for a Orthopedic specialist, who will either make a call on whether some sort of surgery will be required, or just a different from of therapy might help. As it stands, running is not currently an option for me, and that has me more than a bit down in the dumps for racing this summer. I need to figure out what’s happening before I commit to doing any of the big races this year. I have a raft of races I planned to do, but for the moment, that’s all up in the air. As always, I’ll let you all know how things develop, and till then, wish me luck.
That’s about it for now from me. Hope you like the short little video clip, and I’ll see you all later.
