2009 Eighth Annual Forks of Cheat Forest Triathlon

Selfishly, needing a motivator for exercise in summer several years ago, I decided to host a triathlon in our neighborhood. At the time, it was, "raise up the flag, and see if anybody salutes!". Well, some athletic neighbors joined in. The next year, some students joined in. This year, some faculty joined in. I added 'teams' this year to encourage participation. It worked!

Now, it's no longer a selfish thing I do (although, it still serves the function); it's something I look forward to doing as a way of contributing to our community's emphasis on healthy living in harmony with the environment. Hey, that's a pretty good slogan...hmmm. Maybe I'll bring it up at our neighborhood visioning meeting next week.

This year's event was greeted by a cool morning (low 60's) and cloudy skies. It was chilly before and after the event, but the weather was perfect for swimming, running, and biking. I had probably prepared for this triathlon less than any in recent years. I had done some running, but virtually no biking (and no bike tuneup) and only one swim. I was surprised that the swim went as well as it did; I managed to do the crawl all the way across, which is a sign that I'm not in too bad shape. During the run I felt a bit sluggish...never did put on my earphones in the interest of time, but I might have run faster with the inspiration of Porcupine Tree. On the bike ride, I don't think I was quite as fast as last year, but I didn't feel too bad. Until, Dick and Jane Lambie came flying by me on a steep uphill with their tandem bike. Impressive.

My only personal achievement I guess was coming in 2 minutes ahead of Lynne Ryan, a bona fide triathlete, who has participated in 7 events this summer and won a number of them in her age class. She was fast! But I was slower than last year by a bit. I need to work on my transition both coming out of the water and getting on the bike - they were painfully slow this year.

Special thanks to Charlie Kramer for driving bikes over to the dam in his truck and to Caitlin McGraw for managing the swim portion, as well as timing the whole event. You guys were indispenable!

Now, my motivator for staying in shape will be....SKI SEASON!!!!

Brothers and Sisters - Sept. 6 and 7

On our traditional trip to the U. S. Open over Labor Day this weekend. Ann, Kate and I drove up in the new Prius (averaging 53 and 55 mpg on the 2 complete tanks of gas! woohoo!). Trev took the bus up from DC for $19. Ian and Ming are still honeymooning somewhere in the world, if they haven't been eaten by a hippo.

I'll make this a short entry so I can get back to work. The weather was gorgeous this weekend - not too hot, though the sec. 127 seats Ann acquired for us were facing the sun and we sweltered a bit anyway. I guess I'm in charge of seat selection next yr. Trevor's unbelievable seats on Labor Day were great fun - staring right at the server from courtside. At that angle and distance you REALLY get a feel for the speed and power of the pros.

Two fun matches were watching one set of the Bryan brothers playing doubles and later, the Williams' sisters playing doubles in the evening. Both won their matches. Both looked like they were having a lot of fun out there. Here are a couple of pictures from those matches that captured nice moments I thought.

ADDENDUM: THE WILLIAMS SISTERS PHOTO HAS BEEN REMOVED. I CANNOT ABIDE HAVING SERENA WILLIAMS' IMAGE ON THIS BLOG. SHE IS A BLIGHT ON THE SPORT, AN EMBARRASSMENT TO VENUS, AND SHOULD BE BANNED FOR LIFE. SHE ALSO NEEDS SERIOUS PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNSELING.

Aug. 21 etc. - mopping up

A few last thoughts on the Australia portion of this trip.

1. If you go to Australia, you must go for more than 4 days; OK I was there for 8 days, but half of that was conference. Nevertheless, even with only four days to explore and educate myself about Australia, it was worth it, despite the 35 hr trip back, one leg of which I was seated next to a crazy person (no, not Sara). Try going for at least a month. Maybe 2 if you want to check out Tasmania and New Zealand!

2. I always tell people "You must go to Alaska sometime in your lifetime". Well, I might have to add another A list destination to that with an "...and Australia" on that. It's a super-cool country. I'd recommend reading Bill Bryson's "In a sunburned country" before you go - it's spot on in its descriptions, and hilarious to boot.

The pictures above show another Wendy recommendation: going down to the wharf district for sunset-watching and a drink by the piers. She implied we would see something special. Little did we know it would be a ca. 10 foot fish eating scraps under our noses by the shore. It was 'George the Grouper'. Now, Australians call them Gropers...I think on purpose. I told one of our reef guides the next day that that name might have other connotations in North America and he just smiled. Anyway, both George and the sunset were amazing, and all the tourists seemed quite happy despite the outrageous price of the wine.

Aug. 21 - Rainforest Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary

Saltwater crocodile - this thing could eat you, easily...

Sara enjoyed the feeling of this wallabee's paw on her paw

Sara got a kick out of feeding the kangaroo too...well, fortunately she did not get a real kick out of it.

Jim feeds a 'roo'

A nail tail kangaroo

This was the only black stork that had ever nested in captivity!

These ducks just looked happy

I thought these lorikeets were gorgeous

Lorikeet

OK, the chronology is reversed here. Sorry. But when I downloaded these pics, I thought I'd like to share a few. We stayed in a 2 BR apartment in Port Douglas (apartment renting is de rigueur here in Oz) called 'By the Sea' apartments with some new owners who are really trying hard to do a nice job. The head greeter/owner was Wendy, and she made one after another excellent recommendation for our stay in Port Douglas. So, if you're ever going to Port Douglas, I highly recommend By the Sea apartments - 50 yds from a 4 mile beach and a short stroll from the main drag of Macrossan St. where all the restaurant/shop/galleries action is. In other words, perfect location for your stay in Port Douglas. You might even wake up to a kookaburra singing outside, as I did one morning. But I digress.

Wendy's first recommendation when we arrived on Friday was that we zip on down to the Rainforest Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary. Now that sounded like a bunch of caged animals in a zoo to me, but it was a bit better than that, and it provided an opportunity to get a closeup look at some Australia birds and marsupials and reptiles. So here are a few pictures of what we saw there - and despite my reservations about zoos generally, I would have to recommend a stop at this place as a good starting point for learning about Australian zoology.

The Daintree Rainforest

How about the size of this fern? We thought Cinnamon ferns in Appalachia were impressive!

Palm

Strangler fig doing its thing to another tree.

Like big ferns and palms? This is the place for you.

Looking up at the canopy

And this is what you see!

Leafy vine

Birding is really hard here, but bird diversity is supposed to be incredible.

I thought these palms were the coolest

Buttress roots were common.

Two world heritage sites (I believe there are only 34 in the entire world) sit nearly on top of each other in this little corner of Australia - the Great Barrier Reef (which, truth be told, goes way beyond this little corner of Australia!) and the Daintree rainforest. Why is the Daintree special? Two words: Relictual biodiversity. Huh? OK, most tropical rainforests are diverse, but this one has been around a LONG time, and thus contains relicts of evolution that other places on earth lack. One example, now quite well known, is Idiospermum australiense (idiot fruit!). This endemic tree has been around for 120 million years! That's a long time. The seedlings have 3 or 4 cotyledons (most plants have one or 2, an evolutionary path chosen long ago by most flowering plants). Crazy huh?

The Daintree looks like a scene from Jurassic Park - huge tree ferns, vines, etc. are everywhere. All of this is wonderfully described at the Daintree Discovery Centre, where you can walk right up in the canopy with an elevated walkway and a tower at the end. The audio guide and written guides are both excellent for introducing the animal and plant life unique to the area.

Great Barrier Reef - Return to Shore: The personal music video

OK, as many of you know, I have indulged in making music videos, mostly of skiing expeditions set to progressive rock, over the past several years. It's a blast to do this and to share the 'art form'.

But in the past year or 2, I've discovered...invented?...not yet perfected, but I'm getting there...a new very personal art form I'm calling the personal music video - a one time performance that nevertheless lingers in the mind way beyond the time it occurs. To be really effective, it has to be planned in advance, kind of like a more formal music video, except you are the only one that experiences it, AND, it is a live interactive performance. So, what do I mean?

Both examples I'll give emerged from my repeated listening to the latest Pendragon album - Pure. Last spring break, one of the songs "The Freak Show' struck a cord with me in two ways. First, I thought about how at times we all step back from our brains and think what a 'freak show' we have going on in there, and how we really don't want people to know about it. That song captures this sentiment perfectly. Second, the rhythm of it struck me as perfect for huge swooping high speed GS turns. Where could I listen to that song and ski a really long, fast set of arcing curves? No better place than Elk Park Ridge at Big Sky Montana. Now, for the personal music video: Cue up the song at the top of the slope, press play, and take off! What happens next depends on how well you've chosen your music and your activity...in this case the conditions of the slope (perfect), the weather (bluebird day), and the state of your mind (freaky). By the middle of the song I had this ear-to-ear grin that I could not wipe off when I reached the bottom! There may have been tears of joy too, I don't recall. And I was skiing by myself. Now, every time I hear that song, my mind veers back to that experience.

So why am I harping on personal music videos? Well, living here in 'almost heaven' I've been thinking about the heaven on earth concept, and realized that perhaps these personal music videos are capturing a piece of that. I'm also mentioning it here because I had planned in my mind a personal music video moment for the boat trip return from the reef! Thus I pulled out my personal assistant (read iphone) and my noise cancelling headphones, sat on the front deck of the boat, and turned up 'Indigo', the first song on Pure, to relatively high volume. Now the first half of the song is about a rather sad boy growing up in a decrepit town where misfortune and misfitting were the main themes...but in the middle of this song it transitions into soaring major chords with visions of the boy escaping his prison and diving into a deep blue lagoon...to swim away from here...it becomes a song of liberation. And I thought the moment of returning from diving in the deep blue lagoon would be a perfect time to play this song due to the vision it conjured. Now of course it would have been better to play it underwater, but I haven't purchased the underwater ipod case yet, so this may have been second best. At any rate, once again, I probably looked like a freak as I swayed to the music, watched the ocean spray up from the bow, and contemplated the numerous dives into the deep blue sea we had just experienced. Personal music videos are very personal. I was curious whether it was transferable, so I plopped the earphones on Sara's head, but I don't think it had the same effect. She didn't know the song, why it was being played, hadn't anticipated the experience as I had. Ah well. That's why your perfect personal music video will be personal

Great Barrier Reef - Going Under

Some of the corals really glowed; most were not so colorful as this, though they came in fantastic shapes and sizes.

Big schools of these guys; species?

Butteflyfish pair

These are beginning divers hanging onto a line while they get used to breathing naturally underwater I guess.

Lots of small fishes on the reef.

The giant clams were truly phenomenal, and they had glowing green fluorescent dots on their lips!

A wrasse of some kind?

Like birds, many of these reef fish pair up; they really seem to have personalities too.

This is a small parrotfish

These small blue fish were everywhere in darting schools. I saw one get eaten by a very fast triggerfish.

Here I am exploring the reef.

These small stripy fish were everywhere too (Sergeant majors?)

Here's a large fish I saw frequently...

The first site we stopped at had a swift current going by the reef, so there would have been problems with beginning divers (or so we were told) so we moved to a calmer spot on Opal Reef one of the thousands of reeflets that are part of the GBR preserve. I was eager to plunge in but we had to wait for the divers to get their acts together - for those reading this, you may want to consider a snorkel only boat if you want a little more time in the water. We had originally signed up for one, called Wavelength, but they had to re-fit their propeller so we moved to this outfit, which sounded good on the web (and by and large, they were).

Anyway, plunging underwater, we were not disappointed by the wonderful displays of coral and fish. Now, when you've snorkeled before in places like Hawaii, Egypt, the Caribbean, etc. I think you get distorted memories over time...at least I think I do. I remember a place we call 'the aquarium' in Maui is just off the charts spectabulous in every way. But truth be told, I suspect the fish diversity was higher here on the GBR and the corals were most certainly more spectacular. But even after snorkeling here on the GBR, I have a tremendous fondness for the aquarium on Maui and would go back there in an instant.

So technology is amazing isn't it? Here are pictures taken with an $87, 8 Megapixel waterproof camera (Vivitar 8400). I'll let you be the judge about how they came out. I took about 150 pictures in the course of 2 snorkeling bouts, and these are definitely a culling from that, but some of them I hope give you the flavor of the day. Suffice it to say, I was wishing for more days on the reef...enough time to start learning the new fish, etc. So I felt like I just got a taste.

Aug. 22 - Great Barrier Reef; journey to the reef

Again, there are places in the world that kind of speak for themselves, or pictures speak more clearly than words. Perhaps the Great Barrier Reef is one of those. We met the bus for Haba (our snorkel tour company) in front of By the Sea apartments (more about them later) and were whisked across town (we could have walked) to the wharf where Haba's boat was docked. The boat was not the prettiest in the snorkeling/dive fleet, but it certainly beat QuickSilver for looks, whose boats looked like giant steel grey greyhound buses on the water. Our boat was modest in size with a simple foredeck, a main cabin area with seating for about 70 or 80, then an upper rear deck with seating for perhaps 30. Our group was supposed to only have about 60 people (as opposed to ca. 300 for Quicksilver). It was still a bit crowded on the boat, so we moved to the foredeck where we could watch where we were going and get a little freedom to move. It was nice up there, and here are a couple of shots I took so you get a flavor.

Aug. 21 - To Port Douglas via Cairns

Today began the vacation...er...um...I mean research on the northeast Queensland World Heritage Ecosystems known as The Great Barrier Reef and Daintree rainforest. Flight from Brisbane to Cairns was ca. 2 hrs. I rented a car from Alamo (read Europacar). Now, I had specifically requested an automatic since I didn't need the extra hassle of shifting left-handed while trying to remember how to drive on the 'wrong' side of the road all the time. But I shouldn't have been surprised when I got the vehicle for a lower price that it was in fact a manual shift Hyundai Getz (a very small econobox). I swallowed deep and took off into Cairns traffic, heading north toward Port Douglas along the coast. First impression - OK driving on the left is not all that bad - you just have to keep reminding yourself. Second - whoa, this coast is beautiful! Reminds me of Hawaii. Not quite as wild and woolly as the drive to Hana on Maui, but really very nice. Third, the coastal tropical scrub forest was burning in a number of places, sometimes right up to the road. Wow. Here are a couple of pics for ya.

Aug. 20: Brisbane Botanical Garden

I didn't feel like I was really in Australia until I skipped out on the meeting one afternoon and ventured out to the Brisbane Botanical Garden at Mt. Coot-tha, a few km outside of the city center. The garden was divided into different Australian habitats and showcased the tremendous diversity of plants comprising the flora there. There were also plants from around the world. We liked the 'natural' Australian dry tropical forest (where we saw a monitor lizard climb a tall tree, probably looking for bird eggs to munch (see pic). There were also many beautiful birds scattered about, including a mysterious large white loud bird that we later identified as a cockatoo. In this case, pictures really are worth a thousand words apiece, so to give you a flavor of this place, i've included several shots here.