Jibbering Musings

After continuing to experiment with making my own energy gels, I’ve now finally settled on what the quickest and easiest recipe and settled on the steps.

Ingredients

• 500g Maltodextrin
• 250ml of Water
• 120ml of Innocent Fruit Smoothie (Other pure fruit brands would work too)
• 50ml Pectin
• ~1 teaspoon citric acid
• 8g BCAA
• 1g Beta Alanine
• 2g L-Histidine
• 0.8g Caffeine if you want a caffeine gel

The method

Add 250ml of just boiled water to a measuring jug, and then mix in the Amino acids and caffeine etc. first, stirring well as these are the least soluble. Then mix in the 500g of malto. Do it cautiously with about 50-100g at a time to avoid clumps, but it should dissolve pretty easily in the hot water.

Transfer to a pan, add the Smoothie, then add the pectin and citric acid, the citric acid may not be needed if you’re using a more acidic smoothie (such as a berry based one) and heat it up to ensure it’s above 80C, either using a sugar thermometer, or just guess if it’s bubbling up, it’s more than hot enough

Allow to cool briefly, and then pour into suitable container whilst still nicely liquid. Allow to cool, and then refigerate. Cooling time does seem to impact the texture, if you cool it rapidly (e.g. cold water bath in fridge) it’s more liquid, no idea on why that might be, but it appears to be the case.

The Result

As always the ingredients are all bought from My Proteinand you can use my referal code MP107371 to get 5% off - you also earn me some points.

Pleasingly I’ve had lots of reports of success with the previous gel recipes, and they’ve continued to work extremely well for me, it’s good to hear how other people go with it, and news of any failures or alternative recipes especially welcome!

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.

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?