The guy who did it used car power telemetry software, which just reads CSV data. I reckon we can hack something up to do it with our track powermeters and that will be sexy!

Pictures tell a thousand words .. (Thank you Dino for the photos, Emily & James for braving it)

And so we trained tonight at Blackburn, a solid session, the two who are off to the Junior Vics next week did some gate technique practice and some short, sharp but low volume stuff as part of their taper.  I did the same as them.  It was pretty warm, so afterwards it's off to the aboc powerhaus to do some recovery ... The AIS recovery protocol for sprint is 10 mins at 15 degrees in an ice bath standing up.  Cue one big green wheelie bin, two bags of ice, a ladder and three hot sprinters.   

I never put my charges through something I'm not prepared to do myself.  Brrrr!

Dino got photos, I'll put them up when I get them.  Dino .. send photos, the people demand proof!

Just a quick one today, we were thinking of doing training at DISC on Sunday at 8:30pm, but I had insufficient interest to make it worthwhile, so we'll be at Blackburn instead, at 4pm (sprinters, 3:30pm please).  And just to further mangle the English language, James Dann and I spent a considerable chunk of today fixing holes in the track at Blackburn.

We've experimented a bit, we used a urethane filler to fill some big holes, including the dinner-plate sized patch in front of the clubrooms right in the sprinters lane.  The concrete patch that Snake Salsibury put in in September had started to lift so we bashed it out, turned the used concrete into chunky aggregate and then mixed it in with urethane putty.  we covered all our patches in fine sand to try and get some even traction, it'll be interesting to see if it works - the urethane is quite flexible, it may be too much so, but we'll test it out before Sunday to be sure.  If it's too soft we'll have to rip it out and use concrete again.  Time will tell ...

Hello everyone,
Normally we'd run a training session at DISC this Sunday from 5pm (sprinters start at 4:30 on rollers), but there's a development session on that finishes at 8:30pm.

Sooooo

Who's able to train that late?  A couple of you are preparing for major races soon and that session might be acceptable to you.   Please let me know ASAP if that time is ok, we'd be finished by 10:30pm.  I know it's a late one, if I don't get a few of you saying "yep, I want to do it" we won't run the session at DISC, we'll run it at Blackburn instead.

I don't generally like to write about bad stuff, and in the scheme of things, this isn't that bad - I'm not going to die ad I can do most things.  As some of you who read this know, I've had an ongoing shoulder problem for some 6 or so months (maybe longer, I can't remember now).  Anyway, it's pretty-much always painful, it catches, I can't rotate to squat properly etc etc ...

I've run the path through general GP's (NFI ...), misdiagnosis through GP's that should have done a referral straight away, to fixing a symptom; frozen shoulder, had two hydrodilations, that fixed the frozen shoulder, and lots of accompanying physio. 

Finally last week we had an MRI done.  Today I got the results.  I have a labrum tear, a reasonable size one.  May have been caused by any number of crashes, spills and other such rough and tumble stuff in the last year or so.  They won't operate to fix it because it's in a shoulder that's got osteoarthritis.  Ie: it doesn't get better and there's no point - rehab for the surgery is ~6 months and there's less than even odds that it would be any better.  Other things listed include a bunch of placebos and "this might work" stuff and various painkilling drugs, and a shoulder replacement.

Basically I'm paying the price now for playing contact sports for 20 years.  C'est la Vie.  I'll be 40 this year.  Wear and tear is catching up.

From this article :

Says Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health: "If Americans could eliminate sugary beverages, potatoes, white bread, pasta, white rice and sugary snacks, we would wipe out almost all the problems we have with weight and diabetes and other metabolic diseases."

Works for me!

Forgive me for not having written much in the last fortnight.  It's been pretty busy.  We've got our next lot of aboc kit all done, thank you to Dino for making that happen.  The new stuff is made by Giramondo and it's very good.  Locally made (not in some anonymous overseas sweatshop) and top quality.  That's not a sales pitch, I'm not trying to sell you this stuff, I'm just very pleased with it.

I've also done a bit of work on The Book, nothing worth writing about, but more background reading more than anything else.  What else?  Oh, yeah, xmas and new years are all out of the way and they (finally!) put me in the noisy tube to try and see what's going on with my cranky shoulder.  I'm off to see my doctor again on Thursday to discuss the results.  I've been asking them to do this for probably 6 months now, FINALLY they agreed!  Anyway, hopefully we'll have some answers on Thursday.  My power uotput is hovering around 1350 or so watts (peak) from small gear efforts, I haven't pushed anything bigger than 84" for some time, but my cadence is good so I'm moderatly pleased with how that's all going. I still want to try and get a 13.2s flying 200 at Blackburn this summer and 12.5 at DISC at the Vic masters would make me happy, although just a 12.9 would be acceptable, given the injury-disrupted year I had, maintaining the status quo is an OK result.

Summer Sprint Series round 4 is coming up soon (13th Feb) but before that is the Vic junior track championships (29th & 30th of Jan) and the Australian senior track championships (1-6 Feb) in Sydney, which as far as I know, I'm going to as an assistant coach.  More chances to learn from some of the best. 

At DISC, with the weather being warm, I'm finding a lot more confidence on the motorbike.  Over winter I was unhappy at anything much over 75km/h around the bends, now I'm comfortable at about 83km/h which is about as fast as we ever need to go.  The DISC motorbike's speedo reads around 5% over, we think 83km/h indicated is probably about 78-79km/h actual speed, which is faster than anyone can race, so at least in terms of speed, I'm now able to ride the motorbike fast enough for just about anyone.  I still need to get better at a skill that Hilts is a master of, riding at speed around the track while looking over my shoulder. It takes a lot of practice to get good at that and I've not yet gotten to a stage that I think is acceptably good but I'm better at it than I was this time last year!  It (the motorbike) skips around at high speeds especially when you cross the painted lines, but I'm used to it now.  Hilts has been very patient with me learning this skill, it's not as easy as it looks to get good at.

Dino and Pat and I have been doing our Tuesday morning sessions at Blackburn and enjoying a good solid flaying, we've had low (one last time, just me!) turnouts to Summer Spin but it's been holiday season and everyone's off riding outside as they should - it's really only the pure sprinters that need the uber-high intensity work on the ergos over summer, the rest of you, On Yer Bikes!