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I was pretty tired and sore from the swim last night. It was good to get a run in today – the weather was great. Also, I need practice working out back to back days. Usually I take at least one day off in between. Tomorrow morning we go out for our first ride as a group.

Today’s workout: 4.75 mile run.

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I’m exhausted. Swimming is definitely going to be the hardest part of this for me. I’m going to have to take my friend Steve up on his offer of extra swim practice.

Today’s workout: 550 meter swim (with lots of rest every 25m)

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I don’t know if anyone really pays attention to this but the flaming pink brain logo has appeared and disappeared from this site (and my twitter account) a couple of times. I just put it back and thought I’d explain what it is/why I use it.

20 years ago I had a public access TV show that I named “Grey Matter Gravy.” This video is the title sequence that I ran at the beginning and end of the show. The name was chosen for two reasons. First, the concept: my brain was on fire with all kinds of ideas and the show was the best of those or the “gravy” (gravy being made from the drippings of burning flesh). Second, the drippings of burning flesh was gross and thus was a good puck rock name. And I chose the British spelling “grey” because all my favorite bands were from England.

Fast forward to about 2003 I was trying to create a local group of artists to play with video and the web and decided to use the name for the group and the url graymattergravy.org (this time going with the more traditional “gray” to avoid misspellings). The group didn’t really go anywhere but I really liked the logo I created so I reclaimed the name for myself and registered graymattergravy.com in 2005 to host my artwork and experiments though the site isn’t much to see right now.

So here’s the evolution of the logo. I played with being more and less literal, finally deciding on a simplified single image (no puddle of gravy) without text. I keep threatening to get a tattoo of this one day. Maybe 2010 is the year for that.

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This is my entry for the Open Video Alliance’s contest “Open Video in 60 Seconds.” The music is “Delirious” by Human Response.

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It was about 30 degrees this morning for my run out by the Frio (Spanish for cold) river.

Today’s workout: 5.5 mile run.

Week 0 totals: 12.5 miles running, 11 miles biking.

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Today I got on a bike for the first time in forever. I guess I’m going to be pretty sore tomorrow.

Today’s workout: 11 mile ride

[Update: 01-28-10] I’m not very sore at all today after all.

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I’m starting to train for the Capital of Texas Triathlon with Team In Training and I’m documenting it.

I first learned of Team In Training about 2 years ago from my friend Thomas Caleshu. We worked together and he was raising money for Team In Training as part of this triathlon that he was going to do. It turned out that he’d had Hodgkin’s lymphoma when he was 13, but thankfully he’s been in remission for the 18 years since he completed his treatment. After watching Thomas train all the time, I got inspired to start running and I’ve been doing that for about a year and a half.

I really enjoy running and pushing myself to go farther and faster. People often ask me if I’m ever going to do any races. I haven’t up until this point because I’ve never really been interested in competitions. I don’t care about racing against anyone but myself. But what I do really enjoy is a good challenge because everyone has the opportunity to win. A few weeks ago while I was out running it occurred to me that Team In Training was more about the challenge – about challenging yourself, both in endurance and fundraising, than about competition.

That brings us to today where I’m training for this triathlon and trying to raise $3000 for the The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. Both seem like pretty big and exciting challenges to me so I thought I’d start a videoblog to document what happens. So please check it out and see how I do. If you can, it would super awesome if you’d donate a few bucks to help make this happen. There are nearly a million people just in the United States living with or in remission from a blood cancer.

Tomorrow night is the first performance of a show that I’m working on at Jump-Start. It’s a German play that was our (the Jump-Start of 1985 when I was a senior in high school) first show. For our 25th season we’ve reimagined it a bit. It’s a one person show that we’re doing as a site specific piece in the actor’s house. My part has been directing the webcast/closed-circuit video. We have a cameraperson following the actor around, augmenting the visuals for the audience there in the house. We’re also going to webcast it so my aim is to make the webcast work as it’s own piece.

This version of the show runs Friday & Saturday, Jan. 22 & 23 at 8PM CST. You can catch the webcast on the Jump-Start site. Check out the video archive.

We’ll be doing it again in Feb., Mar. and April with a different actor each time.

Here’s a local story about the show.