Jibbering Musings

In the many cycle races I’ve done, my commonest result by far is last, even when I’m not actually last, but just right near the back, the results seem to appear with me last. I tell myself I don’t mind, there really is no difference between 11th and last in most of the races I do, and since becoming a 3rd cat, points mean little, so I just want prizes, and there’s generally only money for the top 5.

Actually what I really want is to be pleased with the race, the results really comes second. Of course if I went a season never getting a result, I’d not be happy. But I’m geeky enough that good numbers, no crashes, and a sense that I didn’t do anything stupid makes for a happy race.

Saturdays race was the Hillingdon winter series 3rd cat only race, and us Kingston Wheelers were out in force. After a very fast start led out when the entire bikefood team decided to take us out for the first 5 laps averaging 42.5km/h against the more normal 40km/h for Hillingdon. Everyone was pretty fresh though, and only a couple of people got caught out enough to be dropped, everyone else just enjoyed the speed. I did more than work than necessary, going back and forth through the group to see how Maryka and the other clubmates were doing and just generally drifting back through inattention and then deciding to move up again.

After the bikefood guys had tired themselves out, the average pace slowed to the more normal 40km/h, but it was the normal up and down of attack / chase / lull. We had many people regularly off the front, but the pack was always very alert, even with some blocking work nothing looked likely to escape. Inevitably when the 3 lap to go board came out, everyone slowed down and we had the slowest lap of the race, and it didn’t speed up much more during the next two. My normal poor position, and the slowness left me struggling to move up on the packed circuit. Coming up to the bell I was midpack and desperate to move up, remembering Andy’s request for a fast last lap, and if I was anywhere but the front I wouldn’t be able to help with that.

Just before the chicanes the pack slowed so much I was at my slowest speed all race, but as soon as the chicane apexed I was on the outside and had a clean run to the front, I accellerated hard but instead of finding myself at the front of the bunch, I found myself 10m off the front so I kept going hard through the S bend and was now solo away from a baying bunch. 30seconds into it I thought YES! I’ve 50m already I’m going to win here. A minute into it, hurting like crazy I thought NO! why did I start this stupid idea! 90 seconds into it I looked again behind me, and I still had 60 or 70m on the bunch YES! two more corners and just the matter of a 250m hill. At the last corner I look again, and still they’re not close. 50m up the hill, I stand to eke out the last power I have, and find out it’s none, I collapse, the hill chases any speed I have out of me and shortly after 44 riders sweep past and I inch over the line to last place.

So last place, but the stats tell an interesting story. Almost all the time I made up on the bunch was through the S bend, which I did in 42 seconds, rather than a typical 58seconds for the pack. Through the back straight and the two subsequent corners the bunch only gained back a few seconds on me, it was only once I could no longer deliver the power that I was caught. The 42 seconds cost me 580 watts though, so getting away was tough, and left me only managing to deliver 380watts for the remaining 80 seconds of my ill fated solo effort.

In the middle of a club run on sunday, I did 380 watts for almost 7 minutes up Box Hill, so in looking at the raw stats, I should’ve been able to keep it going for the win comfortably, but the previous hour of hard riding had simply taken too much out of me. So now I’m stuck wondering, if I did the same, but without having wasted so much energy in the race, would I have stayed away?

The picture below, taken at the final corner, not long before I blew up, shows another reason I failed.

I’m simply too un-aerodynamic to be doing anything solo, I waste so much energy fighting the air. It’s a reason to get a new bike, one suited to racing, and not cycling around the hills in great comfort, the RS is awesome, but I shouldn’t be racing crits on it.

The good turnout by many strong Wheelers has really got me looking forward to the road racing season, when I won’t be there mostly for training, wasting energy, and with more strong wheelers like Damien still to race it should be a fun year!

I took most of the year off running, concentrating on cycle racing, with barely a couple of runs a month (generally a 3mile all out race, and a hill session) but I was doing lots of hard cycling miles.

My previous PB for the half marathon was around 1:59 for a standalone half, and 1:43:49 for the half marathon split in a marathon. But I think the goal was a feasible one, as two weeks before the race I did 66:09 for the Cabbage Patch 10mile race.

That race was completely flat though, Barns Green is rolling, and the weather forecast for today, was torrential rain, 30mph winds with gusts up to 45mph. I almost bailed.

It was my running clubs Half Marathon championships, so I had lots of friendly faces, and started off running the first few miles with two of them, and watching the faster club guys come past (not sure why they’d all lined up 200 back, I crossed the start line around 80th or so, which was about right, not held up, not holding anyone else up)

The rain wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, mostly just drizzle, the winds however were strong, and it’s the first running race where I’ve seen real packs form - not just pacing packs, but actual draft packs, it made a big difference!

The rolling course made my splits tough to know just how even they were - 6:32, 6:39, 6:38, 6:17, 7:11, 6:23 for the first 6 miles, and coming through half way in 44:00 - This worried me, because of the weather I’d scaled back my expectations to getting as close as I could to 1:30, on a good day I was thinking 1:28 was the best I could do. (McMillan reckons a 66:09 10mile is equivalent to 1:27:51 Half, and I normally bias towards the short stuff and Barns Green is tougher than the completely flat Cabbage Patch)

I run on perceived exertion though, so I stuck with the pace I was running. At around 8miles two more guys from my club passed me but I kept them in sight and it was at this point that my running partner from the start of the race dropped behind.

The 10mile marker had been blown away by the wind I guess, as I saw the line on the ground but didn’t hit the watch. Mile 12 became a struggle, all up hill and into the wind, and I was disappointed to see the split come in at 7:26 - although the Garmin has it as a long split.

I knew from 12miles it was all down hill until 400m to go, and I still had 9 minutes to cover the last 1.1 miles. I tried to work to catch the team-mate I could still see ahead. It never happened, but 7:20 for the last 1.1 miles, and a sprint to beat some guy in yellow in the last 100m brought me home in 1:28:25.

Job done, very, very, very happy considering the conditions. I guess I should’ve done better in the Cabbage Patch. A positive split, 44:00 vs 44:25, but not too bad, and I think the course was tougher in the second half.

My Nutrition - went to plan, 100 calories in home made strawberry gels with ~400mg caffeine 20minutes before the start, Gel flask with water/gel mix of around 250calories taken over four seperate evenly spaced shots.

I would recommend Barns Green Half as a race to do, extremely well organised despite the torrential rain and conditions, an interesting and whilst hilly not that slow a course, the hills aren’t steep, so as long as you can descend without braking the undulations help break the monotony. Could do without the long hill at 11miles though.

Allan wanted me to blog about websites I find useful, and apparently five is too limiting for him. For me though, the only useful website I find really is the search engine, everything else comes out from that. Mostly I use Google, although it’s not exclusive, and it’s not impossible it will change again. So I’m going to have one site on my list Google.

Everything else is about the service they provide (mail, shopping whatever) or the community they provide (social networks, forums etc.) I’m actually much more of a luddite in terms of moving applications to the web, simply because in general they don’t work. The connections aren’t fast enough, the browsers are too slow or rather single threaded javascript where the UI and calculations share a thread makes it too slow. That’s before you even get to the random ideas of usability that wed developers seem to have.

The one application I cannot currently do without is SportTracks.

To check if your PowerTap is accurate, you can use a “Stomp Test“, applying a known torque to the hub, and seeing if it’s measured correctly. Unfortunately this isn’t possible with alternative head units such as the Garmin 705, 500 or 310xt or other ANT+ units from specialized etc.

On the wattage mailing list Brian Fitzpatrick pointed me at Quarqd a simple daemon that can read ANT+ sport data if you have an ANT+ USB stick such as come with the Garmin 405 or 310xt. Unfortunately it only runs on Mac’s or Linux, but a virtual linux install had it working on my windows XP.

The raw messages out of ANT+ aren’t very useful however. So I knocked up a little Adobe Air application which reads the messages, and assists with the testing.

You need to install quarqd and have it running, then you can start the AIR application, point it at the instance, set up your bike with the weight on the pedal, enter the bike details, and see how accurate your PowerTap is.

Not ideal, as getting quarqd up and running is relatively painful in itself unless you’re pretty geeky, but it’s better than reading raw XML messages.

Download Stomper application

And the result? Our PowerTap’s are pretty much accurate. As accurate as our weights anyway, maybe some accurately measured weights and some speedplay pedals to hang them off to check even more accurately, but I’m not that worried.

It’s common for people to set themselves goals for the year, particularly in sports. I’m not very good at this, but at the beginning of the year I set myself two, to run 40 minutes for a 10km race, and to run 90 minutes for a half marathon. Neither were particularly tough goals, in fact I completed the first without training for it more as an incidental. The second I’ve yet to be motivated to attempt, particularly as it does require me to properly train for it.

I’ve spent the year essentially goalless, but still pretty committed to getting fitter, getting better, and training. It’s tough to know if the lack of directoin has held me back at all, but without goals you only do what you enjoy. Fortunately I enjoy training, so have done a fair bit. Recently though I’ve started to lose my way.

I raced the Pearson Jaunts 5 day stage race at the end of June, it would’ve made a good goal for the year, but I only became elligible to race it a couple of weeks before as I moved up to become a 3rd Cat rider. I had a pleasing race, although finished well down after a bad time trial, and a mechanical which lost me a lot of time on the first road race.

What knocked me back though, was a crash a couple of days later, when I got taken out in the sprint of another road race, when I was perhaps on course for my best finish. Since then I’ve not trained enough, and I’ve slowly been losing fitness, which has resulted in another crash as I was straining too hard to not get dropped when racing well above my level.

As a data geek, aswell as now a fitness geek, I keep records of every workout I do, for this I use SportTracks. A great piece of software, with many plugins available created by the large developer community around it. Training Load provides a visualisation of fitness and fatique.

The output of the training load plugin is something like this:

The red line is my “fatigue”, this is basically the amount of exercise done recently, the blue line is my “fitness”, this is the amount of exercise done over a longer period. (I use 11 days and 45 days for the two values) Each workout or race is given a score based on how stressful it is, this is based on time spent in various heart rate zones. It takes some care to set up your zones to be meaningful, fortunately Maryka on the Sport Tracks forum has posted a how to and although I also tweaked them some more, they end up extremely close to the values WKO+ gives me using Power. Heart Rate is a surprisingly good proxy, well within the general inaccuracies of the method.

You can see my fitness slowly rising from a low start (it wasn’t quite that bad before really, I simply didn’t collect the data) I dropped back a lot in July 2008, as me and Maryka both took a break after her Ironman. December 2008 I had another big dip as I was waylaid with flu, and simply Christmas and the cold weather getting in the way. A big rise at the end of January after a week in Lanzarote hard training. And you can see my poor performance with training since July.

In 2008 I managed to keep increasing fitness through the autumn because of the Nice-Cannes marathon goal in November, and whilst the goalless, just training to train drove my fitness well up until June. I think I had better get a goal again now, otherwise it will just drift down, and as it does that, my happiness will drift down with it, and my weight drift up.

So I’m looking for a goal, something to get me through the winter fit, any ideas?

I signed up for this marathon in the winter after having unfinished business with the last one having failed to get the 3:30 target. It’s pretty flat, very fast, lots of competitors and well supported. Unfortunately my training’s been very poor, I was sick in December, and simply haven’t been motivated enough to do any long runs since, cycling has been more fun. My longest run pre-marathon was around 10miles. So not great preparation.

Annoyingly the organisers had me as a “recreational” runner, which means unlike the club runners (the majority) or the Elites, I wasn’t chip timed. So I needed to get myself near the front of the pens, and with some dodging and weaving past the crowds of club runners, I managed to end up crossing the start line only 12 seconds after the gun went.

Despite the manouvering, I was still passing a lot of very slow people strung across the road. I normally start too fast anyway, but with the added bonus of lots of people to pass and gaps to find, I started very fast. Up and across the Erasmus Bridge, 2km came by in 7:56, but I was still feeling pretty good running along with everyone and decided to keep at the pace, even if it turned out I couldn’t hold it.

The 5km mark was after a complete 180 turnaround coming back on the same road you were running down, so at 4.75km I could see the marker and looked at my garmin and then it hit me, I was going to get a sub 20minute 5km. But my 5km PB was 20:35, what was I doing going so fast? Sure enough the 5km marker was crossed with 19:38 on the clock, almost a minute off the 5km PB, but I still had the entire rest of the race to go, could I keep the pace up?

I couldn’t, the sun had come out more, and I was really beginning to overheat, I’d dressed for 9C and clouds, and it was about 15C and sunny. I pressed on, two more kilometers went by in 4:09 and 4:06. Then we had another bridge to go over, it wasn’t steep, hardly even a hill. Howevre my hip flexors which were hurting from about 30km in the last marathon began to scream at me today after only 7km, and I only managed the next two km in 4:11 and 4:10. I was definately slowing down a lot by now, but seeing the 9km marker and looking at the Garmin saying 35:55. I decided to press on and really work for the rest of the race, the time was still pretty good.

There were very few people around me, but I guy in blue came past and I tried to keep with him, and then just after a kink in the road, I saw the glorious site of the word FINISH over a gantry, and a clock counting down next do it. I sure was glad I’d swapped to the 10km race from the marathon the day before when collecting the numbers. With about 20m to go, the big clock rolled over the 40:00, and I crossed the line just beating the guy in blue to stop my Garmin at 39:51.

So a very pleasing outcome for the 10km - 93 seconds off of my PB. Marred by some disappointments - the leg pains that slowed me down and the lack of official result, that actually says I ran that time. They don’t even give me a gun time, which would’ve been 40:03, it’s as if I never ran the race.

I know I did, and I know it was a PB, I also know that 39minutes is probably doable on a good day on a similarly fast 10km with some actual training, so that should probably be my next goal

One of the problems of exercising more, is that you need to eat more, now that’s just a good thing when you’re at home after a hard work out as I can continue my lifetime love affair with the roast potato without worry. However you also need to eat food whilst exercising, and that’s harder. The foods you can eat whilst exercising need to be easy to carry, easy to eat and easy to digest. A great many products are sold to help you do this, from powders you mix with water and carry on your bike, to solid bars, and sweet like looking things only with even more calories. My favourite though is the energy gel, very concentrated, easy to eat.

Energy gels have a problem though, they cost about a pound a time, and I eat 4 an hour or there abouts. Inspired by the stories of Maryka of making her own sports food, I decided to follow suit. Maryka though likes to eat a paste that I’ve heard described as baby food. I’ve written up my first attempts at creating a home made Energy Gel, but I’ll probably continue to blog as I attempt more things.

I’ll probably try to recreate “Clif shot bloks” - small sweet like things with lots of calories, very easy to carry and eat. A gel that contains protein - Hammer say they don’t create these due to problems with shelf life amoung other things, which won’t be a problem for home made.

I’ve also got more interested in all things gel like after reading the excellent collection of hydrocolloid recipes in researching how to make gels.

Read more about making cheap home made energy gels .

Regular readers will know, I don’t blog much now, but I really should try and change that. Irregular readers, who read random odd pages from the depths of history or people with a very long memory who read my blog a long time ago, will remember I used to blog about running every now and then.

I was pretty pleased with myself with that last one, I ran 20:19 for 3 miles. Shortly after that I pretty much stopped running after a marathon I ran in February the following year (2003).

Eighteen months ago, I was “fat jim” as I was later dubbed, and not surprising I was single. I was over 100kg / 16 stone, but then it changed and I started losing weight, it had a lot to do with being happier. So that’s my first weight loss tip - get happier.

By January 2008, I was down to 87kg, and that’s when I started running again, firstly just as an excuse to get a date with a hot triathlete. After that though it was more to be able to be fit enough to keep up with a hot roadie.

I did okay, when I started back running at the running club in Feb 2008, my handicap time had shot up to 22:41. Of course I had the incentive to train now, simply to keep up. So now a year later I have it down to 18:36, and I only weigh 76kg. So here’s my second weight loss tip get a fit girlfriend.

Last week I was sent a voucher for Expansys, needing a USB hub for recharging Garmins and iPods and the like I thought it was a good opportunity to buy one. Easy, pick a D-Link 7 port powered hub, 20 quid, with the 10 quid off, a great deal, I had the voucher code and all is good. I then remember I want an micro SD card for the Garmin 705, so before checking out, I add one. Returning to the basket though, my voucher disappeared. I add it again, now I get a red error message saying “Voucher code not valid”.

Assuming that the software was really useless and marked the voucher code used as soon as it was added, rather then when the basket was paid for. Expansys support got a call. After explaining the problem they said the voucher code was lost, but no-one could do anything about it until the following monday. They didn’t explain why.

Today I called again - and this time Expansys support said the voucher code was fine, not lost, but because the basket had memory in it, it couldn’t be used. So even though the voucher conditions were met with the USB hub, simply having a micro-SD card in the same basket ruled the voucher no good.

Blessed with this insanity, I left it, Expansys obviously didn’t want my business. There were many problems with them, all focused on poor customer experience. The business decision that memory products aren’t valid for voucher offers is an understandable one - memory is a very competively priced and margins correspondingly low, and people can easily fill up on it. But the website development teams decision to implement that with a simple voucher is invalid rather than explaining that having a basket containing an SD card failed the conditions of the voucher. Or for real service accepting the voucher and applying it only to the parts where it was valid and 10 pounds off a 20 pound spend was fine without the memory.

After the web devs had failed though, the phone support guys started failing. The first guy had wrong information, but even thinking that, what he should have said - Why don’t you give me your order over the phone and I’ll put it through now. Once you’ve got a customer engaged enough to call you, reel them in! It was the week of new years though, so maybe this guy was a temp, and they can’t trust their temps with giving discounts.

However the regular guys were no better, again no offer to just do the order, just an explanation that memory wasn’t applicable and it was impossible to buy anything with the voucher if memory was included. Not even apologising for the poor site, and poor messaging, or offering to help, just stating the fact.

I’m sure Expansys internally talk a lot about customer focus, and putting the customer first, but what happens, as what happens in a lot of badly managed places, is that people start doing things to make their own work easier, rather than the customers life better.

Maintaining a user focus is hard, it’s easy to slack off and go well that will only happen to a few people, it doesn’t matter much if I don’t write the useful error message or skip over some edge cases. The reality is it matters a lot, because those edge cases are the ones that cause problems - they phone your support lines, they blog about the poor quality they moan. In the end you lose far more than just the single sale where it happened.

Of course, if you’re doing phone support or are a junior developer, then you’re going to need strong management to get over this. All too commonly though the management don’t care, because the middle manager sitting over the developer is looking for an easy time, and won’t argue for quality, and isn’t measured on how much the phone support team costs anyway.

User Experience has to be led from the very top, and it has to be one of the very most important things you do, if it’s not, you’re customers will disappear, in bad times like these, that’s enough to fail.

It’s new years - actually it’s a long time after, but that’s just my slowness at writing blogposts - and people are always reflecting on their lives, and wanting to reflect on yours too. I mentioned to a friend of mine that at the end of The Game there was the intro to another book by Neil Strauss The Rules of the Game. This book promised to help you “Get a date in thirty days”, my friend instantly went “what’s your address, I’ll buy it for you!”

So when your friends think that you need that much help, you have to take it seriously. I started thinking about some of the other comments my female friends had said “you’re slightly clammy”, “just dress in an updated way and get a modern hair cut and you’re good”, “you can do alright with girls with a bit of confidence, even you!”. Of course this last advice is what really matters, confidence is key.

So I figured with that much “encouragement” from my friends, maybe I should have a look at the book, with a borders 40 yards from the front door, I bought it, and started looking what I had to do to get a date. Unfortunately it really was even more depressing than the game. Day ones main mission was “operation small talk”, the idea being to make small talk to five people, people suggested were a homeless person or an old lady in the supermarket queue. Day two was do the same, but remember the eye colour to make sure you look people in the eye as you talk.

Day four has the radical idea that showering, shampooing, smelling nice, shaving or grooming your beard, wearing clean well fitting clothes can help you attract someone. Now I realise this is all important advice, but I’m wondering if the sort of people who need this advice really need to get a date more importantly than say some friends or a basic course in social interaction.

On reaching Day 7, you’re given a big, big reminder to not read on ahead, and how important it is to just read one day at a time. Now this is a bog standard psychological trick to get people to buy in and invest in doing it - maybe that’s a good thing if you’re the sort of guy who needs to be told not smelling of 2 week old stale sweat will help you get a date, but I’m just not trusting enough to do that, so I read on.

The build up is all to day 30, where you have to plan a dinner party to invite the “date” you manage to get to come to, in a “I’m having a few friends over for dinner, why don’t you come along too.” It doesn’t have to be at your place, you could just be at a restaurant with a group of friends. My problem with this again is at one point it’s pitched at people who don’t have friends to tell them that they smell, but at another point they have enough friends to get round and impress a date with how interesting and worthy of dating the guy is at a dinner party.

Now I enjoy cooking for people, can manage not to poison them, have a pretty okay flat to host a dinner party in, so it’d be a good end for me - but again this book is pitched at people who 30 days before couldn’t look someone in the eye when paying for stuff in the supermarket, let alone carry off hosting an eight person dinner party, cooking all the food, impressing the date, and if you follow the actual subtext of the book finally getting his end away.

Maybe if I’d've followed the book rather than just read it, I could’ve believed how such a drastic transformation could’ve happened, but at the minute, I just can’t buy it. I don’t doubt that following the exercises would’ve improved the chances of anyone doing it - as my friend said above most important thing is confidence, both to try and that you will succeed, following the exercises will probably help fake that confidence. I can’t really believe it will actually make any fundamental difference to a persons life - of course maybe faking it a few time will give a guy the confidence to not need to next time.

I think better advice for the guy I feel the book is targetted at could be had from Dan Savage who was actually targetting it at 15 year old boys, but I think that’s really who the book is talking to, guys who never made it past their awkward/repulsive phase.

“But don’t despair, TGTW. Your awkward/repulsive stage will pass. In the meantime here’s what you need to do: Worry less about getting your 15-year-old self laid and start thinking about getting your 18- or 20-year-old self laid. Join a gym and get yourself a body that girls will find irresistible; read so that you’ll have something to say to girls (the best way to make girls think you’re interesting is to actually be interesting); and get out of the house and do shit–political shit, sporty shit, arty shit–so that you’ll meet different kinds of girls in different kinds of settings and become comfortable talking with them.”

Substitute however old you are in the above, but if you’re really that inept that you need to be told to shower, work on a few year plan, and not a 30 day one.

So unfortunately my original plan of following the book, maybe even blogging about it as I went has gone out of the window, not simply because I got a date - I got one of those from a girl on the train on the way back from convincing a friend of mine to do the book aswell. The plan really got knocked on the head after a date I had led to something more - it wasn’t a dinner party date though - more of a run - although the next night…