Training has been progressing nicely over the last couple of weeks. Above is a graph of my weekly cycling hours since September and I’m pretty happy with the results. I’ve been consistently above about 4.5hrs for the last few weeks and am feeling good on the bike, ready to step things up a notch in December.

I went down to Canberra at the weekend to visit John and brought my bike, intending to do a ride in the hills on Saturday morning. I had a couple of Guinness on Friday evening, but was still home at a reasonable hour, so made it out on the bike at 6:30am. Unfortunately, on the climb out of Coppins Crossing, a short pitch of about 8%, I felt terrible. My HR was through the roof, I felt exhausted and knew instantly that there was no way I was doing the planned 80km hilly ride.

I thought that maybe having beers the night before was the problem and was a bit pissed off that I’d wasted the opportunity for a hilly ride, but it wasn’t until I got back up to Sydney yesterday that I remembered that I’d donated blood on Thursday evening! No wonder I was wrecked, I was missing 10% of my blood, meaning there was 10% less red blood cells to carry oxygen to my muscles. Blood doping in reverse! So, that’s the reason for my paltry 2:41 this week!

My weight has stabilised at a little under 88kg, down from just over 93kg in September. I’m off any diet for the moment, and the plan is to keep my weight at this level until January, then to drop another couple of kilos to get me into the low 80s. I’ve committed to Alpine cycling in June, and the less there is of me, the easier it will be to get up climbs like Alpe d’Huez:

The target is to get to around 80kg or under by June, which shouldn’t be too hard to do if I can stay motivated to keep my cycling hours up for the next six months.

Totals

Nov.29: R 0:20 - C 2:41 - W 0:00
Nov.22: R 0:00 - C 5:05 - W 0:00
Nov.15: R 0:23 - C 4:40 - W 0:00

Well this week ended up being pretty easy. I had great intentions at the start of the week, but never got into it really, and decided pretty quickly to make it a rest week.

I would like to have a 3:1 ratio between training weeks and rest weeks, but I seem to lose motivation heading into the third consecutive training week, so I think I’ll stick to 2:1 for the moment until I learn to absorb the training better.

My long ride was still scheduled for Saturday, but a friend’s birthday on Friday put paid to that so I headed out this morning instead. I had a 90km route planned, heading down to Kurnell and back, and was on the road at about 6:15am. It’s great at that hour as the roads are super quiet.

I’m not going to bother going into the details of the ride, but it went well. I made it to Kurnell quite comfortably, grabbed a coffee and some banana bread, then returned home. I was feeling good towards the end of the ride, so detoured into Centennial Park and did a few extra laps to take my total up to 100km. I’d never ridden 100km before, so I figured that I may as well go for it this morning as the extra 10km was no big deal. The good news was that my arse gave out before my legs did - I’m still getting used to spending four hours sitting on a race bike saddle!

So, total distance ended up as 100.3km, in 4h 11m (incl. coffee stop, stopping at red lights etc.), average speed of 27.7km/h (excl. time stopped) and a total of 2548kcal burnt before breakfast. I had to spend a couple of hours on the couch recovering though!

Totals

R 00:00 - C 4:11:00 - W 00:00

Weight: -0.1kg

Had a decent week this week. Didn’t get everything I had planned done, due to crappy weather on Monday and a hangover on Thursday, but still managed to get some decent cycling in over the weekend. 30-odd km around Centennial Park on Friday was followed by Saturday’s long ride (see map above), then the TT on Sunday.

The long ride is going well, though I thought the route I had planned would be over 70km. Hopefully I can get a 100km+ ride in by the end of the month and can also get some hilly rides in. I might head down to visit John in Canberra later in the month and ride the Canberra HIM bike course which is a hilly 90km.

Totals

R 1:05:55 - C 5:08:18 - W 1:00:00

Weight: -1.2kg

Yesterday morning I headed up to Peats Ridge to try my hand at a 25km cycling time trial. The Australia Time Trial Association (ATTA) holds a 43km and a 25km TT on a public road course on the first Sunday of every month. I had intended going up last month, but got sick so had to pull the pin.

The setup is very informal, but professional at the same time. There are no medals, no fanfare, just a couple of guys who have measured out the courses, put up warning signs so motorists are aware there’s lots of bikes around, and set up electronic timing. Registration starts at 7:30am and you can choose your start time. Riders go at one minute intervals, starting from 8:00am, with men, women, kids, those doing 25km and those doing 43km all interspersed. It’s a great way for people to test themselves every month on a fixed course, and as a result you get a lot of really fancy time-trial bikes, disc wheels and aero helmets on show.

I had no fancy gear, just a plain road bike, normal helmet and wheels, and I was due to start at 8:37am. I didn’t really know what to expect, other than there was a cone in the middle of the road at 12.5km marking my turn around point, and I’d been told not to go all out from the start, but to hod back a bit until the turnaround and then lay it all on the line on the way back. Given that I’d only been back on the bike for four weeks, with a two week break in the middle for a bout of illness, I was nowhere near fit enough to put the hammer down straight out of the gates, and was more interested in riding the course and getting a feel for things. In the back of my mind I wanted to average 30km/h if possible, and to ensure I didn’t finish last (the top guys average about 44km/h!)

I presented to the start a couple of minutes before my alloted time, and was pleased to see that the start was inside a trailer, with a guy to hold your bike steady and a ramp down on to the course, just like an ITT stage of the Tour de France. The guy in front of me headed off and promptly stopped 300m down the road with what looked like a puncture, so I was on the lookout for glass straight away. I got the 5 second countdown and then I was off. Out of the gate, accelerate up to speed, oops, shit forgot to start my stopwatch, shit! is my HR really 160, that’s too fast this early, slow down!

Looking at the elevation map during the week had shown that the course was very slightly uphill to the turnaround, and (obviously) very slightly downhill on the return, but once out on the bike it wasn’t nearly as uniform as that. It’s a fairly undulating course, which makes it hard to get into a rhythm; one minute you’re flying downhill only to then have to shift down through the gears as you hit an uphill bit and your speed starts to drop. Gravity giveth, and gravity taketh away.

The rider who’d left a minute behind me caught me after a couple of km and went flying by, followed a few km later by the guy who’d left two km behind me. I was expecting this, so it wasn’t too much of an issue, but I also knew that Matt, a mate from my triathlon forum, was starting 5 minutes behind me, and although he’d been to a few of these, I was secretly hoping I could stay ahead of him to the finish. A moment of poor mental arithmetic had me wondering if I’d missed the turnaround, until I corrected my error and realised I’d only done 11km, not 12km. Two more riders had passed me well before I hit the turn, so I knew Matt was next.

I made the turn in 28:40 which was a lot slower than expected, and was indicating a total time up around 55 minutes, so I was a bit disappointed. I ramped up the speed on a bit of a downhill and saw Matt about a kilometre behind me. Given he’d started five minutes behind me, my chances of holding him off looked slim. Thankfully, the return journey was slightly downhill and the undulations, while still there, were less severe on the way back, so it was easier to get in a big gear and keep the speed up. All was going well and the few times I checked I couldn’t see Matt behind me, then I hit The Wall (see the green line on the graph at 41:00).

You’re flying along on a slight downhill, topping 60km/h, round a slight bend and then you see it two hundred metres ahead. It seems like an easy uphill, but when you hit it, your speed drops right off, you drop down to your lowest gear and your heart rate goes through the roof. I reached the bottom of the climb doing about 61km/h and 30 seconds later was doing 13.5km/h. It’s bloody annoying, and as the hill goes up and around the corner, I wasn’t sure when it actually ended. I didn’t remember a long, steep hill on the way out??

Thankfully it was reasonably short, and at the top it was a three km run into the finish. Near the top of the hill I’d looked back and seen another rider a few hundred meters behind with Matt just behind him, so I put my head down and went for it. The other guy went past about a kilometre later and though Matt was definitely catching me, I didn’t think he’d get me before the finish. I kept the speed up, HR up around 180bpm, and, as I came around the last bend, I saw the cones marking the finishing line a few hundred metres ahead of me and realised I’d hold him off. One last burst and I crossed the line with the clock reading 1:26:34. I’d started 37 minutes after the gun, so my elapsed time was 49:34 for an average speed of 30.2km/h at an average heart rate of 167bpm. I was happy with that. I’ve got another four weeks of training to see if I can beat that time next month.

After watching a few triathlon mates finish their races, it was off to Pie In The Sky for a well earned coffee, and a pie of course!

It’s been a pretty good week this week. I got back into exercise properly after a couple of useless weeks and managed to do almost all the sessions I wanted to. I missed one weights session and one run, but made the rest. This morning’s ride went well too; to La Perouse, then ‘round the back of the airport (to avoid the airport tunnel), then down to Brighton-le-sands and on to Sans Souci, before turning for home. 64km all up and I felt pretty good at the finish.

I refuelled with danish pastries and biscuits, which Jacqui thought was a waste of all the exercise, but, as I pointed out, if you can’t eat some junk food after having burnt 2100kcal before breakfast, when can you?

Totals

R 40:52 - C 6:05:19 - W 1:00:00

Weight: down 1.2kg

Fake Steve Jobs (really Dan Lyons from Newsweek) has an excellent blog entry detailing why Microsoft is no longer relevant as a player in the IT industry. The piece is in response to a New York Times article (rego required: see Bug Me Not for fake rego details) on Microsoft, which damned with faint praise.

Larry’s like, Look, the Borg has never been out ahead on anything. The difference is, they used to be able to catch up. They’ve always been copiers. That’s been their business model from the start. Let others go out and create a market, then copy what they’ve done, sell it for less, and crush them. They got into the OS business by stealing DOS from someone else. They created Windows by stealing Apple’s ideas. They got into desktop apps by copying Lotus and WordPerfect and then having the bright idea to bundle all the stuff into one cheapo suite. They pulled the trick off again with Internet Explorer versus Netscape, in the late 90s – that was the last time they were able to let someone get out ahead of them and then pivot and copy and give it away free and take them over. By the end of the 90s they had broken through 50% market share in browsers, and that was it for Netscape.

But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn’t just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free – the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.

Another difference was the customer set. In the old days you were talking about selling to corporate America, and consumers just followed suit – remember the marketing shit about how you want the same stuff at home that you have at the office? Selling to corporates was easy. You have lots of levers you can pull to make them do what you want and pay what you tell them to. We all had a playbook – we just studied what IBM had been doing for decades, and we copied them. (Larry stopped and chuckled a little bit when he said this, and for a moment just stared out the window with this glazed, happy expression on his face.) The Borg’s other customer set were hardware OEMs. Again, easy to coerce, and no messy dealing with end users. Perfect.

But on the Web things changed – now you were selling to consumers, and the Borg had no way to coerce or control consumers the way they could coerce corporate accounts.

Well, the cold that I mentioned previously did in fact materialise and knocked me out of action for over a week, just as I was getting back into regular exercise. It also meant that I missed out on doing my first TT at the beginning of October - very annoying!

After two whole weeks without any exercise, I started cycling a little last week, and this week is my first back into it properly. I had a bike ride and a run yesterday, and will head off to the gym at lunchtime today.

Totals:

• Oct-4: R 00:00 - B 00:00 - W 00:00
• Oct-11: R 00:00 - B 00:00 - W 00:00
• Oct-18: R 00:00 - B 1:35:19 - W 30:00

Weight: down 0.6kg

Last Saturday saw us dressed in our finery to witness the marriage of our friends, Stu & Helen. After a week of crappy weather, there was some concern that we’d have to move indoors, but Saturday morning dawned, the rain was absent and clear, blue skies remained. Everything went ahead as planned and a great day was had by all.

Photos are here.

Now that the weather’s improving, the morning’s are warmer and I’ve got all the bits and pieces I wanted for my new bike, I’ve kicked off spring’s exercise program. I started properly two weeks ago, getting out on the bike a lot more and also starting to do a little running.

If we do decide to head over for Sean’s wedding next year, I would like to do some cycling in the Alps. I haven’t decided where, or which of the famous cols I’d like to climb, but at the moment that’s immaterial. If I’m to climb something like the Col du Galibier, for example, which is 18km at an average gradient of 6.9%, then I’d be looking at probably over an hour and a half of constant uphill effort, which I’m nowhere near fit enough for, and at 90kg, nowhere near light enough for.

Therefore, I’ve resolved to get out cycling regularly and make that the main focus of my training programme. An ideal week at this stage is two, one hour weights sessions, three runs of approximately 30mins each, and four bike rides. Three rides of approximately one hour, and one long ride at the weekend. Two weeks in and it’s going OK. I still haven’t managed a perfect week, but I’m getting most sessions done, though the dust storms which hit Sydney this week coincided with two of my bike rides, the first on Wednesday and the second on Saturday, which was a pain in the arse.

Next weekend I plan on heading out to Calga to have a go at the Australian Time Trials Association’s (ATTA) 25km TT which they run every month. I figure if I do the same TT each month it will be a useful guideline as to whether I’m getting any better or not. Should be fun, though hopefully this cold and sniffles that’s materialised this afternoon doesn’t develop any further!

Totals: Sep-20: R 40:46 - B 4:32:00 - W 1:00:00 Sep-27: R 29:43 - B 4:23:08

Having to wear glasses has always been something that’s given me the shits. When contacts became available I started wearing them occasionally, but their shortcomings were evident: having to be very careful not to lose them while going for a swim, and getting dry eyes regularly, especially when spending long hours in front of a computer like I do. The goal had always been to get laser eye surgery and fix the problem once and for all, but when I first looked into it it was still a relatively new procedure, still improving all the time, but not something I was entirely comfortable entrusting my sight to.

I forgot all about it for a long time, but, as I’ve got more active over the last few years, the shortcomings of contacts have become more evident and I resolved to look into laser surgery again. I have a couple of friends who have had the procedure done and been delighted with the results, even after a decade and a bit of research showed that the technology involved has matured significantly and there’s enough of a body of previous patients out there that any long term issues resulting from the procedure would have started to show up.

Since it’s elective surgery, I’d have to wait a few years to have it covered under my health insurance, so I resolved to pay for it myself. As it happened, Perfect Vision, the guys who brought the procedure to Australia, had a two-years interest free offer on, so I decided to take advantage of that and rang them up to start the process. The first stage is a complimentary assessment, where they examine your eyes, testing the thickness of your corneas and other details, in order to determine both your suitability for laser correction and which of the three types of correction is most suitable for you. Thankfully my eyes were in good shape and were suitable for the quickest and easiest procedure.

Stage Two was a meeting with Dr. Con Moshegov, the surgeon who’d be doing my procedure at which he double-checked my earlier assessment, fine-tuned the exact amount of correction I would require and answered all the questions I had surrounding risk factors, side effects and the likelihood of something going wrong. He assured me that the risks were minimal as long as I followed their post-op instructions and the fact that Perfect Vision include a life-time guarantee on their procedures seemed to confirm this. If I end up under or over-corrected, they’ll fix it for free, if I became short-sighted again at a later date, they’ll fix it for free, and if my distance vision goes at a later date, they’ll fix that for free too. The only time they won’t fix my vision in the future was if I needed reading glasses due to the natural ageing process, or if my vision deteriorated due to an eye disease (cataract, glaucoma, etc.) unrelated to my surgery.

So, that done, I was all set for the surgery, which was scheduled for Friday morning. I was told to ensure that someone would be there to bring me home and that I brought sunglasses with me as my eyes would be quite sensitive to light afterwards. I arrived at the surgery and spent some time filling in some paperwork and signing consent forms, then had to wait around for about an hour as other patients got their eyes done before it was my turn. I’d previously been given some Valium and Panadol, both to calm nerves and relax facial musculature, so the final prep saw me outfitted with a hair net, some anaesthetic drops in my eyes and the surrounds swabbed with betadine. It was also at this stage that I took off my glasses for the final time, never to be required again!

After a couple of minutes wait, I was ushered in to the surgery, made to lay down on the table and was shuffled around until my eyes were correctly aligned with the machines. My eyelashes were taped back and a device was inserted to ensure I couldn’t blink, though as my eyes has been anaesthetised, this wasn’t uncomfortable. Stage one was to cut a flap in each eye, which was done by a machine first placing a suction cup on my eyeball to hold it in place, then making the incision. This took about 10 seconds per eye. The surgeon then lifted the flap out of the way, at which point by already blurry vision got even worse. The laser was swung into place and I was instructed to look into the flashing orange light and to remain still. At this stage all I could see was the orange light, surrounded by a ring of white LEDs.

Then the operation started, accompanied by a series of clicks as the laser fired, and the smell of burning hair. I had assumed this was my eyeball being burnt into shape, but technically it’s not. The laser causes a chemical reaction to take place which is not burning, though it sure smells like it. A unique experience nonetheless! At the same time I could see the ring of white light being refined and alternately being sharpened and blurred as the laser did its thing, and then it was all over. Twenty to twenty five seconds - just like that. The surgeon then replaced the flap and as he did so everything came into sharp focus and I realised I could see again. Amazing! The process was repeated with the other eye, then I got up and walked out of the surgery unaided!

After a quick check to make sure I was feeling OK, wasn’t feeling unsteady from the Valium and understood my post-op instructions, I was free to go. Jacqui collected me and we jumped in a cab home. I had to keep my eyes closed the whole time as they were super-sensitive to light, but once indoors again I could open them and see properly. Post-op was fairly straightforward: take the provided sleeping pills, go straight to bed and aim to sleep for four to five hours. Most important was to keep my eyes closed and relax. I woke up a few hours later, took the supplied painkillers although I felt fine, and then just dozed for the rest of the day, keeping my eyes closed as much as possible. I could see perfectly as this stage, and was able to get up and sync some podcasts to my iPhone so I could listen to them in bed.

I woke up the next morning with perfect vision (pardon the pun). Could see clearly, no pain, no problems. A post-op checkup had been arranged for early Saturday morning, and it’s recommended that someone accompany you to this, but I was fine so I put on my sunnies and got the bus into town. A quick eye test confirmed that I had 20/20 in one eye and slightly better than that in the other, then the surfaces of my eyes were checked to ensure the flap had resettled correctly and I was on my way.

I have a regimen of antibiotic and anti-inflammatory drops to follow for the next two weeks and my eyes are prone to dryness and I see slight haloes around lights at night. Both of those are known side-effects which typically wear off over a couple of weeks.

For those of you considering getting it done, do it. The surgery itself is easier and less uncomfortable than a trip to the dentist (and I don’t have a fear of dentists), and the post-op was about as uncomfortable as waking up the morning after a big night out going and realising that you left your contacts in, though obviously there’s no guarantee that that’s exactly how it will be for you.