I finished my week’s training with a 4.5km run after work yeaterday, followed by a long bike ride this morning. I’d intended riding to La Perouse and back, with a few laps of the park on the way, but when I got to the park it was starting to drizzle, so I figured I’d be more sensible to stay off the roads and just do laps of the park. It also meant I could stay on the aerobars for longer and have the added bonus of not having to worry about avoiding potholes while on them, which might be an issue since I’ve only ridden on them once before.

I decided to do one hot lap on the bars, then one easy lap, then repeat, managing 9.5 laps in total before heading home. The hot laps were pretty good, with my fastest one being 6:16.5 (3.8km), which is an average of 36.5km/h, or about 4km/h faster than my previous best. The great thing about it was that I wasn’t killing myself, so it all augurs well for a faster bike split at the next Kurnell.

S: 5200m – B: 120.3km – R: 17.5km

I usually use PithHelmet, an ad-blocking plug-in for Safari as I hate bloody ads distracting me as I’m reading stuff on the web.

However, evrey time Safari gets updated, as it did yesterday with the 10.4.4 update, PithHelmet gets disabled foe a couple of days until its developer has a chance to release a new version. I’m in the middle of that couple of days at the moment, and it’s a pain in the arse – I’d forgotten just how many bloody ads there are on the net these days, and most of them are flashing at you trying to grab your attention. Piss off! :-(

Yesterday was finally almost a proper bike day, free of interruptions. I had cycled in to work although early rain meant I hadn’t done the laps of Centennial that I had planned to do. I cycled home last night and made up for it, incorporating 4 laps of the park into my commute.

This was the first time I got to use my new Profile Design Carbon Stryke aerobars, which I’d had fitted just before Christmas. The general idea is that you get rest your elbows on them, and get your overall bike position changed around to allow this. You end up with more of your weight over the front wheel, which takes a little bit of time to get used to, and far more aerodynamic, meaning you can go faster for the same amount of effort. In my case, I was 3km/h faster around a lap of the park with no extra effort which is a pretty good investment as far as I’m concerned. Time will tell.

Today’s lunchtime swim was pretty good. Lots of 200s which was a nice change from the usual fare of 100s. Felt pretty good and relaxed. The swim sessions are recovery sessions as far as I’m concerned, and are far less important than run or bike sessions, so I just use them to loosen out and stretch a bit.

800 as: 
    200 FS
    2 * {100 Catch/100 BC}
    200 FS
3 * {
    25K / 175 FS on 3:30 (2:55)
    200 Pull on 3:30 (3:00)}
2 * {
    100IM on 2:00 (1:30)
    100BC on 2:00 (1:40)
    100 8FS/8BC on 2:00 (1:42) }
Total: 2600m

S: 5200m – B: 67.3km – R: 12.5km

Collected my MTB from the bike shop and rode home last night, then headed out for my long run. Normally I do all my running on grass, but this time I decided to hit the roads/streets and see how it went. Wanting to run on grass restricts me to my local park, and doing laps of there gets a bit boring after a while. It’s fine for my short (5km) runs on Monday and Friday, but longer runs there would do my head in.

The aim was to run for around 45mins, so I started from the top of my street, then down to Rose Bay North, one lap of the golf course and then back up towards my road, finishing at the BP garage half-way up the hill to suck down a can of Solo! Felt pretty good throughout the run, though my knees were starting to tighten up towards the end of it. Did a bit of stretching afterwards and they feel fine this morning. Tried to keep the pulse in the low 160s, on the flat bits anyway. Once I got to the gradual hill up to the garage at the end it slowly crept up to a high of 177. Total time was 42:45 with an estimated distance of 7.5km.

I was supposed to go for a bike ride before work this morning, but when I woke up around 6 it was soaking wet outside so I went back to bed for a while. Got up at 7.30 and the roads were almost dry, so I cycled in via Centennial Park, but didn’t do any laps as I was later than I’d intended. Will have to do a few on the way home instead.

S: 2600m – B: 39.5km – R: 12.5km

Bought my MTB in to City Bike Depot last night for one of their ‘learn to service your own bike’ sessions and it was excellent. The basic deal is that you pay for a normal service, and then pay an extra $50 for you to take part in that service, one on one. You get shown how to do everything and you’re made to do stuff to ensure you understood it properly. In my case I learned how to:

- recable front & rear derailleurs, including a couple of tips on cable routing, cable type etc.

- ensure smooth shifting & what all those tiny screw adjustments actually do

- bleed hydro disc brakes & replace calipers

- remove, grease & replace bottom bracket

- remove, grease & replace rear cassette

- regrease & settle wheel hubs

- true wheels

I also got general tips on what needs greasing and what doesn’t, what types of grease to use on what components and things to check on a regular basis, and things which are more ‘set & forget’. They’ll also answer any other bike-related questions you want answers for. I learned shitloads and would be quite happy doing 90% of my own servicing from now on, so it’ll save me that $50 in no time.

Oh yeah, they also do it for road/tri bikes as well, not just MTBs. It just so happened that it was my MTB needing a service.

I was supposed to cycle in and out of work yesterday, with a few bonus laps around the park to total 50-60km but circumstances got in the way again. I was also supposed to go to the Open-Air Cinema with Jacqui, but I had to can that too. I’d forgotten that I’d book my MTB in for a service, and paid the extra to be shown how to service my own bike. Given that I’d been supposed to do this in November, except I’d forgotten about it then too and had never shown up, I figured I’d better go along this time. Just as well I’d set a reminder in my phone!

Anyway, what that meant was that I had to bring the MTB in to work, and since it had no front brake pads, cycling wasn’t a smart option. To compensate for missing out on the road cycle, I jumped on the indoor trainer in the morning for 30min session before going to work.

10mins cycle

5 * 20secs Single Leg Drills

5 mins cycle

Total: ~15km

S: 2600m – B: 15km – R: 5km

A bit of catching up to do here. Last Friday night I went for a 5km run:

Lap, AvHR
4:24.0, 139
4:33.0, 150
4:35.0, 155
4:39.8, 158
4:38.9, 160
4:33.8, 163
1min: 125</pre></blockquote><p/><p/>I skipped my bike ride on Saturday morning as I wasn't feeling it up to it. Hit the pool today at lunchtime and felt pretty good, then went for a run this evening. <p/><p/><blockquote class="session"><pre>400 FS<p/>3 * {<p/>    100 K on 2:00  (1:47)<p/>    200 FS on 3:20 (2:46)<p/>    100 BC on 2:00 (1:40) }<p/>2 * {<p/>    4 * 75H/25E on 1:40<p/>    100 IM on 2:00 }<p/>Total: 2600m</pre></blockquote><p/><p/><blockquote class="session"><pre>Lap, AvHR<p/>4:35.2, 142<p/>4:39.1, 153<p/>4:38.5, 157<p/>4:40.9, 159<p/>4:39.0, 162<p/>4:35.8, 164<p/>1min: 127

S: 2600m – R: 5km

Woke up this morning for my first ride of 2006. Shit weather, recently rained, internal argument ensued:

Get up you lazy bastard, you said you’d train consistently this year…

Weather’s crap, I’ll just stay in bed and ride on Saturday…

You need time on the new aerobars!

But it’s wet…

Nope, the ground’s dry…

Oh, OK then, I’ll go the long way in to work, but I’m skipping the laps around CP…

OK.

Hit the road, get down to Bondi and notice that I’ve got my first puncture since I got my bike over a year ago. Oh well, better change the tube and keep going. Get the wheel off, the tyre off and the tube out. Open up the tool bag only to see that I’ve a 650C tube for some reason, whereas I need a 700C one?? I’ve no pump, only CO2 canisters, so I can’t pump up the old tube and patch the puncture. Oh well, that’s the end of that then.

Ring Jacqui to get her to pick me up on her way in to work, then retire to the Tratt across the road for a coffee and some buttermilk pancakes! Every cloud has a silver lining ;-)

I’ve been doing a bit of reading up on training theories after the Kurnell race, with a view to figuring out what I need to do in preparation for longer distances. The secret is that the most important sessions are one long run and one long ride per week. Up to now I’ve been doing a few shorter sessions and probably not scheduling sessions very well either, so I’ve a new rough outline for a training week:

M: Swim (Lunch), Short Run (Eve)
T: Bike in & out via CP
W: Long Run (Eve)
T: Bike in & out via CP
F: Swim (Lunch), Short Run (Eve)
S: Long Bike (AM)

So, with than in mind, I got back into the swing of things this evening and went out for a 5K run. Felt pretty good and was running a bit quicker than normal, but that was probably due to the fact that it was a bit cooler than usual. Either way it was a good start to the year.

Lap,    AvHR
4:28.6, 136
4:34.5, 149
4:35.0, 153
4:43.9, 156
4:36.8, 158
4:37.4, 161
@1min: 116

Now I’ve just got to stick to the program ;-)

R: 5km

Douglas Adams provides one of the best explanations for the origin of god(s) that I’ve seen:

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge of; he’s begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he’s made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment.

To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a tool maker, doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven’s sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I’ll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better.

Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there’s a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way.

Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

From a speech given in 1998 to the Digital Biota 2 conference.