Bamboo

We have a lot of bamboo in our yard. The landscaper was careful to put all of the bamboo in rhizome containers because bamboo is known for spreading like a weed. A few clumps of bamboo are buried in the ground, but most are in black plastic, 10 gallon buckets lined with a plastic mesh. These buckets just sit on the ground around the yard, screening us from the neighbors.

With spring around us, I had noticed some large sprouts in the buried bamboo clumps. They grow really fast! I then noticed some sprouts well outside the buried rhizome containers. In fact, these sprouts were close to one of the black plastic buckets. Then I saw another sprout near another bucket.

I tried to pick up one of the buckets, but it had grown roots. The bamboo had broken through the plastic liner and snuck out the four drainage holes in the bucket. I grabbed my hand clippers and tried to snip the roots. Too thick. I went back into the garage and pulled out the three foot lopper. After loosening it up a bit, I gave a good yank on the bucket and it came free. Here are two of the buckets:

I spent the next few hours digging around for all of the roots. Here is one rhizome trying to make dash under the fence into the neighbor's yard.


It turns out, all of the buckets in the yard had roots growing out of them. Only three were really bad. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. In the short term, I'm going to lift the buckets weekly to break any new roots escaping from the buckets. In the long term, I could buy a container and put the bucket in that, but I'm concerned about the lack of drainage. Any thoughts?

Something in the water...

Today we did another open water swim at Redwood Shores. We did a similar swim about a month ago. The water was just as cold and murky as before: I couldn't see my hand with my arm extended.

We swam to the middle of the lagoon as a warm up. I was almost to the middle when I felt something bump my leg. I pulled my head out of the water and looked around. The closest person to me was about 20 feet away. I figured I had imagined it and kept swimming.

Then something bumped my arm.

It felt like I had swum up against a fish, but it was hard to tell with my full wetsuit on. I kept swimming.

Something bumped my other arm.

I started to get nervous. It isn't like fish to bump into people. Something was wrong, but I couldn't see anything through the water! I started to get scared. I thought, "Maybe it's the tail of a much larger animal. Like a dolphin." Here comes the scary thought, "Or a shark."

Another bump on the leg.

I was freaking out. I pulled my head up and looked around for my teammates. I was not the only one alarmed by the mysterious sea creatures. People all around were shrieking and yelling, "What is that?!" Someone finally caught sight of one: jellyfish.

Great, we're a couple hundred yards from shore and surrounded by jellyfish. I woke up early on a Saturday for this?

We did whatever we could to get back to shore without touching any more jellyfish. One of the best swimmers delicately kicked on his back. The jellyfish seemed not to be right at the surface, so I did my best water strider impression. As we got close to the shore, the coaches tried to reassure us, "The jellyfish aren't dangerous. They won't hurt you."

"Oh yeah? Then why aren't you in the water?"

But it was true, I hadn't been stung and neither had my teammates. It turns out they are Moon Jellyfish which are harmless to humans. Even so, I didn't enjoy bumping into animal life in murky water.

We did the rest of the swim close to the shore where there weren't any jellyfish. I was expecting to bump into more jellyfish the whole time, so it was hard to relax. I will not be swimming there again.

After the swim, we ran around the lagoon a few times. I felt really good the whole time.

With just one week to go before Wildflower, we are going to start tapering our workouts. No hard efforts, no long runs, etc. Our coaches told us that we should expect to feel a little lethargic as our bodies recover. I'll let you know how it goes.

Last Marker Set

At practice yesterday, we biked up Taaffe again. I did the loop three times and climbed up Taaffe a fourth before going right back down. The whole thing took just over an hour.

You may remember that my knee has been hurting me. I went to the physical therapist a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that my quadraceps are really inflexible and my hips muscles aren't as strong as they should be. He gave me some daily stretches and one hip strengthening exercise, and my knee has been feeling much better since then. It isn't perfect, but I haven't had to stop from the pain like I did before.

After the hour of biking, we did our last two mile marker set. I did the first marker set in 15.5 minutes back in February (with only a warmup beforehand). I did this marker set in about 15 minutes. It isn't quite where I want to be, but given that I barely ran during March and I had just biked for an hour, it is pretty good.