Worrying about things others control, such as how someone else is playing golf serves you no good. It might motivate you, and that would be good but typically we turn this into concern, worry and stress. You don’t control the output of others, nothing you do in a golf game, crossfit competition or pretty much anything else in life will make a material impact on the output of others. So stop worrying about others can do and start putting that energy into what YOU can do.

You can only control what you can control.

When you find yourself trying to convince yourself of something, take a step back and ask yourself if you are being honest and true to yourself. The answer will likely surprise you.

The top people in each division then go on to a CrossFit games regional qualifier and the top from there go onto the CrossFit games at the end of July.  The first WOD was published on the 15th of March and consisted of the following:

• 30 Double Unders (Skipping, 1 jump 2 turns of the rope)
• 15 Power Snatches @ 75lbs for men and 55lbs for women (Bar to overhead, clean and jerk is fine too, etc)

AMRAP (As Many Rounds as Possible): 10 minutes.

On the surface this sounds rather innocent as the weight isn’t that heavy the time isn’t that long.  It only takes doing this workout once to realize how good a measure of fitness this workout is.  This workout isn’t about strength, its about breathing.  After about 2 rounds your heart rate and breathing WILL NOT slow down for the entire workout, and since you’re trying to get as many reps in as possible, you don’t have the luxury of being able to rest to get your heart rate to slow down.

I’ve done the workout 2 times so far, and am considering trying it again on Sunday as a last attempt, I want to be able to do 5 rounds minimum and really am not happy with anything less.  At my first attempt my double unders were awful, 1, 2, trip, 3, 4, trip, 5, trip.  Frustrating since I’m very good and VERY fast at double unders.  I only managed 3 rounds and 24 double unders in my first go all because of my double unders.  In my second attempt my double unders were much better, not perfect, hard to be perfect at double unders when you’re rocking a 175+bpm heart rate, but much better.  However I was getting tired and took too many breaks.  The only way I’ll make my 5 rounds is to push myself where my mind doesn’t want to take me, but in the end that’s the place that will make me stronger.  I managed 4 rounds and 11 double unders in my second attempt.  I believe I need to recover one minute, I need to be one minute faster and take less breaks.  If I decide to do the workout again, I’ll do just that and I’ll get whomever is around me to yell at me if I take more than 5 second breathers.

I didn’t enter the CrossFit Games Open with any dreams of qualifying for the games or regionals.  I did it for one simple reason, it will push me to do better, and work harder.  Without risk there is no reward and without trying there is no gain.

Open Workout #2 is a week delayed because of some technical issues with the Reebok CrossFit Open website.  If I have one big worry for the following WODS it’s got to be Handstand Push-ups.  They are a big weakness of mine and the last thing I still have to scale at my gym. I can do ring dips, muscle ups, and pull-ups until the cows come home but HSPU are my nemesis.  My issue is technique and not strength, I know I can do them, I just don’t do them well which means I burn out quickly and have to result to a “kipping” type of HSPU which means I’m not doing them RX.  I did find a great CrossFit Journal video (membership required) that gave me some pointers that I plan to try at Square One CrossFit tomorrow, starting with wall position, having my toes against the wall rather than heels.  With any luck I can get my HSPU worked out before they show up in one of the Open WODs.

I typically find myself at a loss for words, when asked to explain it.

I can talk about losing ~50-60lbs, gaining muscle, stamina, loosing 5″ from my waist, etc etc but that doesn’t explain how different CrossFit work outs are. How each and every one of us encourage each other to push hard through each work out. Working out at Globo gym is done alone, there is no team, it’s you and the weight, solitary. In CrossFit my peeps at the gym are my teammates, not competitors, they want me to do the best I can possibly do on a WOD as I can.

Like many sports one does not get beat by the competition, you only have one person to blame for losing, yourself. One does not lose a round of golf because Tiger played well that day, you have no control over that, you didn’t play well enough is why you lost. In CrossFit it’s the same thing, if I come second in a WOD or last in a CrossFit Comp, I wasn’t beat, I beat myself.

Doing the best I can is why I keep pushing and why my team mates keep pushing me and THAT IS WHY I DO CROSSFIT.

Granted the results do speak for themselves too:

I don’t think VMWare can continue on their current path, focused very much on the cloud, without a new approach to storage.  Why?  Simple, cost and scale.  By scale I don’t mean 10, 100 or even 500 nodes, but thousands of nodes.  Current solutions involving block storage with VMFS or NAS with NFS rely on costly external systems from the likes of Netapp, HP, EMC and others, this leads to complexity, additional cost and limited scalability potential.  I don’t say this lightly, but as someone who’s actually designed a cloud computing offering on VMWare I’ve seen the limitations first hand.

What I’m proposing is a replacement file system to VMFS, one that’s not tied to the traditional SAN/NAS approach to storage.  What would this look like?  Many of the very systems that run VMWare can have varying amounts of local storage, from 1 drive to massive 32+ drive internal SAS arrays.  The problem with using internal storage is none of the other hosts can see the VMDKs for VMotion etc.   What I’m proposing is leveraging all of those drives and spindles into a large cluster of storage that each VMWare ESX host can access.

To be clear, I’m not talking about simply having a VM run on each VMWare host as a means to this end but rather for VMWare to natively support making use of all this storage in VMWare directly, in much the same way VMFS is layered on top of a LUN, the local storage in a standard server could be clustered together to form a large pool of storage across a 10Gb network.  This addresses cost and scale – Cost, simply adding 4+ 1TB drives to a typical 1U server isn’t very expensive.  Scale because with this approach every time you add a ESX host you’re adding storage , CPU and networking, not just CPU and networking.

What would this file system look like, perhaps like IBM’s GPFS, or Apache Hadoop (Not a fan of the single Namenode, but that’s a different blog post), or something completely new.  I believe something completely new would provide increased flexibility rather than making one of these off the shelf solutions fit, but the general approach would be the same.  I’m not talking pie in the sky, this is how IBM runs their large Super Computers, if it can be done for those, it can be done for this.

Each VMWare host becomes part of the greater storage cluster, not at the VM level but natively within ESX itself.  Think of the VMDKs as objects, replicate the writes across the data center, VMotion would work in much the same way as it does with VMFS today on a traditional LUN.  Or even better have VMWare provide the means for storage companies such as IBM, HP, EMC and others provide their own “File System Plugin” – storage becomes software, in the same way that servers, firewalls and network switches are now software thanks to virtualization.  Virtualize your storage on your virtualization platform, not externally.

Take this one step further and you could have different ESX hosts with different storage types – Some nodes with SAS, some with SATA and yet others still with SSD.  It would even be possible to have non-storage nodes, where they don’t contribute to the overall storage in the cluster, but provide additional CPU to the cluster to run VMs, nodes could even be dedicated storage nodes that don’t run VMs, but that’s not as ideal to me as having every node have some storage.

Another step up in the stack VMs could be assigned to “storage types” so that a “Database VM” could be assigned to storage of the “SAS” type and possibly mixed type of SSD/SAS or SAS/SATA and ILM approach native to VMWare.  VMotion, DRS, etc all become aware of the VMs storage needs, VMWare would be aware of the storage the VMs are provisioned on and become innately aware of the performance that the storage is providing to the VMs themselves.  Allow for multiple blocks to be stored on multiple nodes depending on redundancy requirements.  Have an important database?  Then keep 3+ copies distributed across the cluster, have a simple web servers, perhaps keep 2 or even just the 1.

Extend this to the data center level, replicate data to other data centers and have your “active” file system in your production data center and your “backup” file system in the other data center hundreds of kilometers away.  Your not replicating the entire file system on a schedule, you’re replicating the block writes to the VMDKs in the clustered file system.   Taken to the extreme this would allow you to run the application in any data center at any time with little more than a VMotion to the other data center.  Now it isn’t about having a “production data center” and a “DR data center” but rather running the apps in the data center that is most suited to the given work load, or possibly the data center that is currently less per KW-h.

EMC’s recent announcement of VPLEX achieves some of what I’m after, but it’s yet another box(s) that isn’t directly part of the VM infrastructure.  From what I’ve read it also seems to be an FC solution, so again, not addressing the complexity, cost and scalability issues inherent in an FC deployment.  Scaling FC to thousands of nodes isn’t practical for many reasons; a single clustered network storage option would address that and more.

Perhaps I’m dreaming, but I think this is completely doable, VMWare just has to realize it’s needed.

The 24 hour flank turned out to be a winner though.  I still need to tweak the seasonings a little, but it was tender almost fillet like.

Tomorrow night I’m going to do a chicken breast and this weekend will be salmon. More on the way…

Lamb Sous Vide Pan Seared in unsaled butter and finished with blowtorch

Tonight I sous vide Ontario lamb chops at 134F for 2 hours, they were great!  Mint and garlic marinade penetrated the meat like nothing I’ve ever experienced.  After this I’m excited to try a rack of lamb.

I also picked up hunk of flank steak as well as a flat iron.  I’m very curious on the flat iron since it has a great amount of connective tissue I expect it will sous vide very well, time will tell.

Currently have the chimichurri marinated flank steak in the SousVide Supreme and will be cooking it for about 30 hours.  Not sure how I’ll sear it, might use the pan, but the blowtorch is proving very effective.   Will be making fajitas with it for tomorrow night’s dinner.

I get most of my meat at Medium Rare, they’re at Dundas & Kipling and are my go to butcher.  If you’re looking for very good premium meat, I can’t recommend them enough.

I’m going to give salmon and chicken a go later in the week, a man can only eat so much red meat!

SousVide Supreme

Before I get into the SousVide Supreme I believe a little tutorial on sous vide cooking is in order.  Sous vide is French for “under vacuum” and is a culinary technique where by food is cooking for longer periods of time under precise degree accurate temperature control.  Think of it as effectively like poaching but under much more lab quality temperature control.  Food is placed in vacuum bags and left in a water bath at exact temperatures for prolonged periods of time.   Many foods can be cooked sous vide from beef, chicken and pork to fish, seafood and vegetables, as a result of cooking under a vacuum seal there is little air and flavours are locked into the food.

Another benefit of sous vide cooking is how forgiving the technique is; it’s almost impossible to overcook foods.  Take a 1″ steak, cook it for 1 hour at 130F and you’ll have a medium rare steak, hold it in the water bath for 8 hours and you’ll still have a medium rare steak.  How?  Simple, the water is being held at EXACTLY 130F so the meat can’t cook beyond that temperature.  This is particularly beneficial for seafood which can be tricky to get “just right.”

So you might be asking yourself why you haven’t been cooking sous vide at home for years?  Simple, cost.  The typical equipment required to cook sous vide are lab quality thermal circulators from companies such as PolyScience cost well over $1000, and look like lab equipment.  The SousVide Supreme is the first home appliance designed for cooking sous vide, at $450 it’s not a cheap home appliance but far from the $1000+ that a PolyScience re-circulator costs.

PolyScience Immersion Circulator

Now onto business, unboxing:

The box.

Box opened

Box Removed.

The SousVide Supreme

None of what I’ve read about SousVide Supreme online covers the build quality; after all when you’re paying $450 for a counter top appliance there are certain levels of quality one expects.  I’ve got to admit to being a little disappointed with respect to the build quality of the SousVide Supreme.  It’s not poorly built but it seems like costs were cut.  The lid is quite thin, and doesn’t scream “expensive” – The plastic handles are cheap plastic too.  I don’t think anyone would say it costs $450 if they had to guess.

SousVide Supreme Control Panel

I’m not a fan of membrane keyboard/keys and the unfortunately this is what the SousVide Supreme uses.  They work well enough but expect they’ll wear out, like all membrane keyboards do, eventually.  Granted the buttons on the SousVide Supreme won’t get used very often but is again something that doesn’t scream $450 appliance.  Build materials matter, but in the end I’ll leave it up to the food to decide over all verdict.

First Cooking Experience

Amazing Egg Yolk, whites not so much. Cooked @ 147F for 45 minutes

As I was out of vacuum bags I decided to try a boiled egg, heated the unit up to 147F, placed 4 eggs inside and waited the 45 minutes.  The whites didn’t turn out anything but runny and rather awful, the yolks were nothing short of amazing with a constancy more like Nutella than typical yolk.  Very good, but with runny whites not very appealing, this will obviously become an experiment of heat:time and trying to find the correct combination.  I tried leaving one of the eggs in a little longer and raising the temp to 150F but that simply resulted in harder yolks, but still nice, with a barely more solidified white.

The experiment continues…

Blowtorched Sous Vide Tenderloin

I made sous vide beef tenderloin in butter tonight. Cooked it for 1h15m with some butter, salt, garlic and pepper.  I then used my blow torch to crust over the steak getting a great Maillard effect.  The final product was PERFECTLY cooked; there is no way with a grill one could duplicate the consistency that sous vide brings to the table, pardon the pun.  My only regret is the choice of meat, we just happen to have some tenderlion in the fridge so I wasn’t going to let it waste, but tenderloin isn’t a very flavourful cut, and that was VERY evident cooked in this manner.  It was good, but nothing terribly special.

Medium Rare Sous Vide Tenderloin

Tomorrow, perhaps some flank, tri-tip, rack of lamb or maybe some scallops?