If you don’t have the legs, this is the worst place you can possibly be.

Jo Planckaert on Paris – Roubaix.

160.934km

100 miles is a long way to ride. It is a particularly long way to ride on a turbo trainer. It is an especially long way to ride on a turbo trainer after being off the bike for four weeks.

On Saturday, I attempted 100 miles for the Fat Cyclist 3rd anual 100 Miles of Nowhere challenge. Where 500 people around the world have donated money for the honour of completely dominating their category (mine chosen division was ’32 year old Brit on a Sydney rooftop’).

After rigging two bikes side-by-side (I was riding with S, who was setting out to dominate the ‘Stylish cycling fashion designer on a Sydney rooftop’ class), we started the SBS highlights of the Tour of Romandie and at 10am with the sun climbing through a blue sky it was time to ride.

Hmmm

Pretty soon it became apparent that this was going be harder than I thought, and that a month without riding had taken of more than an edge. I had hoped to spin up to around 18mph, but it was taking more effort (and a higher heartrate) than I knew was sustainable. My speedo/power gauge was also reporting around 170W average, much less than the 190 – 200W I was hoping for. I settled in for the first 90 minute session,a drink every 10 minutes and gatorade + jelly babies on the half hours working unsettlingly hard to maintain 17mph.

One hour in and things were going ok, the sun was pretty hot and we were waiting for it to pass behind the Horizon building for a respite. Then the shear ridiculousness of the undertaking became aparent, legs started burning and the 10 minute spaces between drinks seemed to take longer and longer.

After the first 90 minutes I had covered just less than my targetted 25 miles so rode another three or so minutes to get there. First block done it was time for a five minute break to refill bidons and jelly baby stocks.

oh dear

The first 45 minutes of the second block passed quite easily, before the now familiar burning legs and the feeling of riding through custard¹. I tried many things to pass the time, riding with my eyes closed, forearms on the bars in the style of David Millar, bribing myself with more jelly babies at the next mile marker. Eventually the second ninety minutes was up, but I was short of the 50 miles so another eight minutes was needed to make amends. 50 miles up in 3 hours 11 minutes and another 50 seemed doable, just. It was lunchtime.

om nom nom

For lunch, S had cunningly (and previously²) prepared tasty cyclists treats as used by the Garmin team (recipies hereand I can thoroughly recommend the rice cake and power potatoes).

At this point I realised that a set of rollers probably has way way lower resistance than my fluid trainer, and thought I would try the zero-resistance method for the next block³.

clunk

Saddling up again the heavy legs and custard feeling was back within a few minutes, it was pretty aparent that another 50 miles would take more than I was capable of that day; even maintaining 16mph was a struggle and I could feel the blood pumping through my skull as my heartrate tried to head north of 170bpm. Grabbing the iPhone a quick check later revealed 100km to be 62.14miles, doable. Freshly fortifed with the knowledge that ’100km of Nowhere’ did not sound like a total failure I cranked out the final few miles before coasting to a halt.

100 miles on a Turbo? Nuts. I salute those who managed it this year. Am I stupid enough to try it again? Certainly.

God created hell because he hadn’t thought up cycling yet.

Netti Advert.

the numbers

100km (62.14miles), time: 3:53:41, ave speed: 16.0mph, ave HR: 157, ave power 165W⁴.

Posted in Active,Cycling | Tags: Cycling, Suffering, training | 0 Comments

So, January is over and had things gone to plan I would have been taking part in a 24 hour MTB race over the weekend¹. Instead, my Ayups are out on loan and I will be secretly relieved as the Saturday forecast is hot and steamy with a helping of thunderstorms.

That change has not however derailed The Plan, and on yesterdays ride I rolled over 300 miles (500km) for the month. Not huge by real riders standards, but still a decent start to the year. I would estimate around 220 of the miles to be ‘good’³ miles so there is a reasonable balance of work and recovery, but with plenty of scope to up the workload.

Since I use a Garmin Edge 305 (which records the gps track as well as heartrate and cadence), I have been recording the data to Ascent for analysis, but since it is currently falling behind in features I have also been using the windows based SportTracks, which supports the training load plugin, allowing me to keep track of my fitness more accurately.

The vertical bars are the activities (taller indicates harder and/ or longer sessions), the blue is fitness (Chronic Training Load or CTL) and red is fatigue (Acute Training Load or ATL). The two gaps in the chart represent three weeks of fieldwork in the Queensland bush (November) and two weeks holiday in the UK (December), where I was without bike. From the graph is seems that my ten days hard work just before the Christmas break payed off in giving me some fitness to lose without going backwards.

Since the beginning of 2010, CTL has risen from around 25 to 40 and I see the change in my lap times at my normal training location (Centennial Park). This is one of few areas of Sydney where you can ride for more than 10 minutes without having to stop for a junction or traffic lights. It’s boring, but handy for short pre-work rides and speed sessions. After an easier week this week, I am hoping to ramp up CTL to around 50 and see how things go from there.

The weights are going ok too, though I am doing maybe three sessions a week whereas I feel four would be more advantageous. Rather than fancy machines at the gym or barbells, I am using kettlebells. I am currently using the ‘beginners’ weight of 16kg (35lbs) which doesn’t sound so much, but which is good enough to give me a good kicking in a session lasting about 20 minutes. I do have a 24kg (53lbs) under the table but I think that will be a while before I can work with it safely and comfortably.

Posted in Active,Cycling | Tags: Cycling, kettlebells, training | 1 Comment

On stage seven of this years Tour De France, just after the summit of the 1249m high climb of the Port del Comte, Fabian Cancellara stopped for a rear wheel pucture. After loosing about a minute¹ the Tour leader set off in pursuit of the peloton being driven by the Astana team. No speeds are shown but I would estimate much of the time to be spent at between 80 and 90km/hr.

A masterclass in descending.

Posted in Cycling | Tags: Cycling, Speed, Tour De France | 0 Comments

I spent a good amount of time of Saturday working on my road bike. After 4,500km the bar tape was getting a bit worn and the tyres and chain were probably past their best.

It was great to witness the transformation back to showroom condition – the dark grey sticky encrusted cassette being stripped back to former polished glory, faded & cut tyre carcasses replaced with clean black and the worn chain removed and a new one fitted that should be good for the next 2,800 miles.

As well as the dramatic aesthetic improvements, the clean also allowed me to look over the Focus checking for damage – the scuffs across the brake units from when I got hit by a car, the little rough patch on the clearcoat at the rear dropout caused by the rough bootliner when transporting my bike to my parents. Fortunately no cracks, chips or anything nasty to be found. It was good to minutely examine the frame and components as I went, reconnecting at a level that makes it more than just a tool for my enjoyment.

It seems there are 1,001 ways to wrap tape, but I went for the clockwise on the left and anti-clockwise on the right. Once it got the method down it was fairly easy to lay tight coils that nicely showed the embossed ‘Zipp’ logos to their full. A lot more padding than I am used to, but since I am thinking about getting new gloves (with thinner padding) it is probably a good thing.

Weather and miscellaneous other things kept me off the bike for the long weekend, but with luck the next 2,800 miles will start tomorrow.

Posted in Active,Cycling | Tags: Cycling | 0 Comments

After my laptop got a (non fatal) soaking due to a burst pipe, I have been looking at additional measures to backup some of my data¹.

Remembering a post by but she’s a girl, I duly downloaded and installed myself a copy of Dropbox. BSAG mentioned creating symlinks for folders rather than copying so that is what I tried since I didn’t really want to be dragging and moving things too much.

After creating a symlink/ alias with crtl+click, I dragged it to the dropbox folder where it was duly synced. The contents of the aliased folder however, were not. A few repeat & fails later a bit more searching brought me to this post that stated that this only works if you symlink out from the Dropbox directory.

So, as far as I can tell there are no GUI methods for this so it was off to Terminal for me:

Last login: Mon Dec 14 22:50:49 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$
Ians-MacBook:~ ian$ cd dropbox
Ians-MacBook:~/dropbox ian$ ln -s ~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups "New Blog Backups"

That creates the symbolic link (ln -s) from the backup folder (~/WordPress/New\ Blog\ Backups) to the Dropbox-synced folder ("New Blog Backups").

Now whenever I backup my site via ftp & drop it into the normal folder, a copy gets pushed up to the remote server as well.

Since I only have one laptop at the moment, between-system syncing is not needed (though I am looking at either the MSI Wind or Lenovo S10 as a ultra-portable²).

Hopefully this system will serve me well & transparently to keep important documents safe from burst pipes.

Posted in MacBook | Tags: backup, OS X | 0 Comments