I've got a tricky shoulder injury I've had for about four months now.  Had a few things done to it by doctors and physios, and on the whole I'm confident that it's on the mend.  Can't say I recommend having a hydrodilation done for fun, but it did seem to work!

Anyway, one of the issues with it at the moment is that it's somewhat unpleasant to ride hard out of the saddle.  Ie: jumping to accelerate is not a good thing to do.  Given that there's something else I need to be concentrating on in my own riding more than I have, this is somewhat of a silver lining to the cloud.  I've restricted myself to tiny gears and am concentrating on spinning like the clappers.  As well as tweaking my position on the bike a bit (up higher, out further at the front) due to a bit of body shape changes (not as much guts in the way!) I can get into a better position which has helped my spin. 

Yesterday evening at DISC Em and I teamed up and did leadout entries.  She'd done some big gear K1 work on Saturday and was dog tired so we just worked together on leg speed in little gears.  I got up to 159rpm doing one of them, at around 58km/h.  That's not super-fast by any stretch of the imagination (the kids go faster!) but I'm pleased with it. I was putting out around 640 watts at that cadence, so also a good sign.  We were only doing entries plus 50 metres, so there was no endurance in the picture, all just a dive off the bank on the flying 200 line and then hold speed for 50 metres, but I don't think I could have done that this time last year. On all but two of my efforts (we did 6 in total, 1 E+100, 3 E+50's and 2 E+150's) I hit over 150rpm, also an improvement from last year.

My best flying 200 time at DISC is a 12.916, which was done on 98.4" or so with a disk wheel and all the fancy aero fruit, that's 119rpm and 55.7km/h, if I can get that tiny gear going at 58km/h, I reckon once I'm recovered from this shoulder problem I should be able to go a bit quicker than that.  My goal for this summer is 12.5s at DISC (57.6km/h) which would be 131rpm on a 92" gear.  That's not outside the possible.  We'll see ... Long term I want to be able to break 60km/h at DISC (12.0s flying 200).  Again, we'll see ...

Some simple maths today.

A 500m ITT, on a 6.5m rollout (J17 gearing) is 77 revolutions, or about 39 pedal presses per leg.  On a 6m rollout (J15), it's 83 revs, 42 per leg.   Not much difference!

If the 500m is ridden in, for example, 39.8 seconds on a J15 gear, the average time per revolution is 0.48s, or 0.24s per each leg stroke. The average cadence is ~118rpm.  These averages are nonsense, the rider accelerates from a standing start which totally blows the average cadence calculation.

So, how about the flying 200, where the rider will mostly maintain speed for the distance (with some losses in the last 50m or so).  Let's take our J15 rider, and a sample time of 13.455 seconds.  200 metres at a 6m rollout is 33.3 revolutions, or about 17 pedal strokes per leg.  In 13.455 seconds that's 0.4s per rev, or 0.2s per pedal stroke.  If you consider that the leg only produces useful power in a short range of the pedal stroke, let's say about a 60 degree arc, that's two thirds of the pedal stroke that contributes useful power, so our J15 has about 0.13s to push as hard as they can per leg, 34 times (not including the windup, of course).  It's even less time if the rider's going faster, of course.  The Australian JW15 record for the F200 is 13.310s (Imogen Jelbart) and for JM15 it's 11.968s (Mitch Docker), Immy was spinning at around 150rpm, Mitch at close to 166rpm.  At those cadences each leg has around 0.1s to produce power and about 0.15s to recover before doing it again.  That's less than the blink of an eye.

I wonder how close the girls can go to the boys as juniors? If the female talent pool was larger would we see JW's keeping up with JM's, at least in the J15 and J17 groups? At these cadences on little gears it's not a strength game, it's how fast you can fire your triple extension and recover to repeat it.

Got to get 'em spinning when they're young ...  The game changes in J19 and above, but we've already discussed that here!

In the Llama blog ... 

I think a lot of us who call ourselves racers can learn a lot from how Shane describes his main rival.  True Class, Shane. I'm impressed but not surprised.

Last winter I'd ballooned out to around 113kg (I was pretty strong, I ground out a 205kg squat, but I was way too heavy ...)

Then I read Taube's Good Calories Bad Calories and Joe Friel's paleo food book.  I'd been eating like an enduro but training sprint, and the animals are different. Enduros need junk carbs because they're (if they're training enough!) burning them off and are chronically glycogen depleted.  Sprinters aren't (quality, not quantity, we have to train fresh), and therefore don't need anything like as much junk carbs as enduros.  The food you eat as a sprinter must be different or you get fat, very fat ... As I found out through personal experience!

So, out goes pasta, potatoes, grains (bread) and rice.  In goes more eggs, meat and green veggies.  I'm aiming for ~2g/kg of protein, so for me that's around 210 or so grams of protein a day (4 chicken forequarters, a load of bacon and eggs, lots of steak, chops etc).

It's worked.  I'm now ~100kg and still reasonably strong.  Due to an ongoing shoulder injury I can't squat but I can deadlift and front squat and my numbers for that aren't down too much and I'm down about 50 watts on the ergo but 13kg lighter.  This should translate into better acceleration, and I'll get that 50 watts back once my shoulder's working properly.

It's the second last Spin for winter of 2010 tonight.  We've had a bumper year with big turnouts and lots of 'fun' (if you can call being flayed on a trainer fun....) through the winter.   Lucie and I have cooked an enormous amount of the aboc bolla over the year. There will end up with a total of 25 sessions this winter, 4.5kg of beef in each session, that's 112.5 kg of beef!

Details of the session are, as always, here

Thank you to Nicole Holt who initially suggested we publish the program online way back in mid 2009, we've done so ever since so you can see what we're doing (there are no secrets at aboc!) and we're always open to questions and suggestions for improvements to the spin program.

We've also had a pretty good winter in at DISC, in the past Spin has subsidised DISC to a significant extent.  This winter that wasn't necessary, again, we're doing something right because you keep coming back.  We can always do better and I always want to hear suggestions for improvements to the sessions at DISC as well as Spin.  We introduced an early warm up for the sprint stream midway through this winter which has worked well and our enduros, under Nathan's guidance, have learned skills and become more confident on the track.

We're running the Summer Sprint Series again this summer at Blackburn, the details are on the series website

That will be a lot of fun and some pretty good competition.  Andrew Steele from Avanti Plus Croydon and Gary Jackson from Riviera Cycles are sponsoring the series again and we'll have some good prizes.  Sue Dundas and the team will be back to make it work seamlessly and efficiently again.

What else is coming up?

We're going to run fortnightly Spin sessions over summer, probably again on Thursday evenings.  Last year these worked well and a small core group of you kept coming to them, maintaining the rage, so to speak.  We'll also run fortnightly DISC sessions or Blackburn track sessions on Sunday afternoons.  I am yet to set a date for our Hotham trip, the calender is so full this summer that it's quite difficult to squeeze anything in.

Personally, I've moved to more specialisation with the sprint squad and Nathan's looking after more of the endurance program that we run so everyone's getting well looked after, but as I mentioned earlier, we can always do better.  We do best when we receive feedback, so please, if there's something we can do better, let us both know!

Thank you

Sunday the 10th of October is round 1.  Gulp.  I am NOT ready!  3 months or so of next to nonexistent training in the gym means I'm down on strength and power, but the racing will still be fun!

The team is pulling together, Sue's back, Pat Dougherty is keen to be involved and our timing wizard, John Lewis, is ready to do the wiring again and Lucie's got her camera ready to take more excellent photos.  I'm hoping that Jodie Dundas will be happy to be our videographer again, she does a great job at it. Also, of course, Anne Apolito looking after the entries and we'll see who we can rope in to commentate (rumour has it Fast Eddie Wilson is keen for that job) and cook the BBQ.

I've got prizes coming from Gary Jackson at Riviera Cycles and Andrew 'Steelie' Steel from Avanti Plus Croydon, we don't know exactly what yet, but they'll be good!

A week or so I wrote about using skateboard deck tape to stop wheel slip on my Kurt Kinetic with the Uberflywheel.

To cut a long story short, the deck tape on the roller is now two bits, with a worn-to-the-roller tyre-wide gap.  Ie, it's worn out the tape, in 2 weeks.

Hrm.

Back to the drawing board ...

Cough up!

We do a lot of high strength work on Kurt Kinetic Road Machine trainers.  I'm a big fan of these, they work, they're (compared to the BT and Wombat etc) affordable while not being cheap and nasty and there's an option to have a very heavy flywheel.  We use the big flywheel for strength work.  It fits on the "pro" version of the KKRM.  With the Uberflywheel, the total flywheel weight is 18.25 pounds, or a bit over 8 kg. This takes some effort to get going.  The Computrainer that all the enduros rave about would blow to bits with the sprint stuff we do, it's limited to about 1500 watts of electro-magnetic braking and I doubt it can cope with high torque applications.  The only other thing that comes close is the WattBike, but that's not a cheap bit of kit and it's got its own flaws, most glaringly the wrong Q factor for starters, and yes, that can be fixed, but a $3000+ bit of gear should be right from the start!

Like everything, the KKRM is not perfect.  For strength work, we load up with a big gear, for example we sometimes use 53x12 (119") for some efforts.  This isn't really what the KKRM is designed for,  but it is the best simulation of a standing start I've been able to find.  With the superflywheel, it's harder than getting out of the starting gate.  Ie: it's good specific strength training.  BUT the rear wheel of a bicycle, no matter how tight we do up the tensioner, slips.

Until now ...

When I was over in Adelaide at the NTID sprint camp a couple of months ago, I had a look at what the AIS guys use, one of them has a KKRM, but he'd modified it, presumably for the same reason I have now modified mine.  Skateboard deck tape around the roller.  This might shred tyres, but it now means next to no wheel slip and a much better initial first three pedal strokes, as the roller starts turning rather than slipping ,which was the big advantage of the BT and the Wombat etc which are directly chain driven.  I ducked up to Ringwood and bought a sheet of glorified sandpaper from Ballistyx (which is all deck tape is, it's a sticker combined with sandpaper), cut a bit to wrap once around the roller, stuck it on and trialed it last Tuesday at Spin.  Wow.  It works really well.  We'll happy cope with more tyre wear for this improvement in resistance.

So now my kilo and 500m ITT riders (and team sprint starters, ie: me!) have a harder session when we do big gear standing starts on the ergos.

Good stuff!

Yas, or your dad, can you give me a call before Saturday?  Sorry for putting this up on my blog but I don't have your contact details and there's some stuff on Saturday you will be interested in.

Everyone else reading, carry on, nothing interesting here!

I just wrote up the program for our 20th spin session for this winter.  It's hard to believe, it seems to have gone so very quickly.  We've been averaging around 22 people per night at these sessions and apart from one night where Dino did the dinner, Lucie and I have cooked 19 monster spag bolls since the end of daylight savings.  Some stats :

We've used some 81 kilograms of mince beef so far.  My local butcher loves me.

All the enduros have done 1,900 seconds of HCLR and on the bike strength work just in the warmups.

My fluid trainers have been brilliant.  The sprinters know they're in for a hard night if they get the uber-flywheel KKRM, it's a very big ask indeed to get it up and going from a standing start.

I'm not going to do any more sums, but it's been a long and successful winter so far.  We haven't had a huge night like we did last winter, where we had one night some 34 riders show up, but we've had a solid block of regulars who keep coming back and my sprint group has grown too, which I'm very pleased about.

I've also been working for Hilton at the NTID sprint squad for about 4 or 5 months or so I think, that's been a fantastic learning and development opportunity and I expect will lead to bigger things in the future.  I'm responsible now for 11 Powertap track hubs which is a significant percentage of Wheelbuilder's production.  Two of them are mine, 3 NTID, 2 VIS, 3 are Hilton's and 1 is one of the riders.

And last night I did another 125km on the motorbike at DISC motorpacing the sprinters.

It sure adds up fast ...

On Sunday at our regular DISC training session, we did K1's for the sprinters.  I had a little help from Rachael Matties who started putting data into sprintTracker for me.

Here's what the data entry form looks like :

 This is only a small part of this application, but it's the one that will get the most use - we will use it to add data into an SQL (sqlite3 at the moment) database for all our sprinters times.  Yes, it doesn't do power (yet).  For now my goal is to have it able to store all our training data from both aboc and NTID Sprint sessions and allow us to analyse rider performances quickly.  Just getting the data into the database is the first step.  Once it's in there we can query to our heart's content.

So I've been busy - the application is written in a programming language called Python, using a GUI toolkit called wxPython and a database/object orientation toolkit called SQLAlchemy.   I'll be using matplotlib to generate charts and graphs, but that's another toolkit I have to learn to use and it'll take some time to get something useful out of it.  I'm very very rusty as a programmer, the last time I did any even vaguely serious programming was way back in 1996 and that was a horrid mismash of code at Westpac to maintain a DNS database written in Perl.  Ugly ... I'm not proud of it!  Anyway, sprintTracker will hopefully scratch an itch I've had for some time re keeping records of sprint performances that a conventional spreadsheet isn't powerful enough (or I don't know enough about!) to do.

Along the way I've had a shoulder injury that's kept me out of the gym, the doctors diagnosed it as a supraspinatus bursitis, which is an inflamation of the bursa (sort of like a bearing) around a tendon in my shoulder. It's sometimes known as a subacromial bursitis.  They (the doctors I saw) insisted I have a cortisone injection in the shoulder.  Cortisone is on the banned list both in and out of competition, and so I need to get a TUE for it, which is a pain in the arse but must be done if I'm to keep my racing licence.  Round 1 isn't that far away ....

What sort of a track sprinter (and track sprint coach!) can't track stand?  Me!  But, we're working on it.  I'm not the only one with this big gap in my skill set.  We're practicing a lot on Sundays at our DISC sessions while the enduros do their warmdown and last night I managed to roll to a stop and hold a track stand for about 10 seconds.  Progress!  Next week we'll be going up onto the boards to do them.  Still wearing shoes rather than clipped in, but it's progress and in a few weeks the whole squad will be bunny hopping up and down the track!  Or at least some will and the rest of us will be standing still watching.

This afternoon I'm off to get my left shoulder scanned with an ultrasound, I damaged it about two months ago, rest hasn't helped, physio made it worse, so it's time to find out what's actually wrong with it.  Wish me luck!  It's at the point now where I can't rotate my shoulder back far enough to do a squat and I'm not enjoying front squats as a substitute, even if I'm reaping the novice gains from a new exercise, I know I'm bleeding raw strength by missing my core exercise in the gym.  C'est la Vie!

Two of the guys who train with the NTID sprint squad are over in Italy at the moment racing at the UCI 2010 Junior Track World Championships.  They're Maddison Hammond and Adele Sylvester.  They're VIS riders, but they train with us and Hilts does their programs. 

Anyway ...

Last night Maddison was in the Australian team that rode the second fastest qualifying time in the team sprint, qualifying them for the gold medal ride-off against the French team.  The French team won the final despite the Aussies going faster than they did in qualifying, so Maddison has a silver medal to bring home.  There's lots more racing for those two riders before they come home, we'll be watching them from here and cheering them on.

You can see the results as they come up on cyclingnews.com, but they're (cyclingnews) being pretty slow about it.  the official website is in Italian and doesn't seem to have any results on it (the 'English' function doesn't seem to work with Firefox).

A big congrats to Will and Bridge Thomas, today at Modella Will won C grade and got for his troubles the big "time to up a grade" message from the commissaires, and Bridgette won the women's division of D grade.  This was at the Modella Hilly course, which is a very tough one to win at.  Will and his dad Mick are regulars at our Tuesday Spin sessions, we'll be sure to give him a big round of applause on Tuesday night!

I posted this to the aboc mailing list, but some of you aren't on it who come to DISC on Sundays, so here it is again.  My apologies if you've now seen this twice :

A heads up for the sprinters who come to our Sunday DISC sessions.  We've made a change to the session's structure.

Sprint now starts at 4:20pm with a 20 minute roller/ergo warmup and the first effort on track is at 5pm SHARP.  Yes, that's DURING the enduro warm up so sprinters will be sharing the track.  The drills are chosen so that's possible (no K1's in the first block!) and the sprinters will have to do these efforts above the blue and safely overtake the enduros while they warm up.  No buzzing the less confident enduros will be tolerated!

Sprint now gets three blocks of efforts instead of two.  I consulted many of you over the last few weeks to see if this was workable and the consensus was yes.  If you can't get there for a 4:20 start the session will still work for you starting at 5, you just do the enduro warm up and miss the first sprint block.

Sunday's program is, as always, here :

Those of you reading this who aren't involved in coaching may still be interested.

As of late last year, CA came out with a policy that all coaches need to have a first aid qualification (and it has to be up to date!).  This is being phased in, any new coach or new qualification sought by a coach as of Jan 2010 has to have a ticket, and as of Jan 2011, we all have to have it.

I think this is a good thing.  I've also had first aid qualifications since I was 13 years old (surf lifesaving as a nipper and then as a senior).  However, my surf bronze hasn't been requalified since some time in the mid 1990s so it's lapsed and my PADI diving first aid qualifiation, while it never expires, is not worth the paper it's printed on.  Seriously, the PADI 'medic first aid' ticket was self assessed(!) and never expires.  They've changed that now but back when I worked as a dive master (late 1990's and early 2000's) that was their course.  How they (PADI) got away with it I don't know .. But there you go .. I've had many opportunities to practice first aid, most memorable was during(!) my first Warny, where myself and the other bloke I was riding (we weren't racing, we just wanted to get to the finish!) with, about 30km from Warnambool, had a car crash happen right in front of us.  Muggins here took over and got the injured people stable and comfortable until the ambulance arrived, handed over to the pros and then we jumped back on our bikes and finished the race!  heh ...

So, I had to get a new first aid ticket.  Ok ... Time consuming (and time is, for those of you that know me, the one thing I don't have a lot of to spare!).  I went a googling and found this : The Red Cross do an online course.  Alarm bells ringing?  First aid online?  How? There's a fair chunk of theory work which works pretty well online with a few multiple choice tests along the way.  Then there's a practical assessment of CPR and I expect a few other bits and pieces that I'll write about when I've done it.  The online theory bit is pretty good - it's quite thorough. A few things have changed since I last did any real first aid training, mainly CPR practice has gone from 60bpm compressions to 100bpm compressions and some snake and spider bite things have changed.  The Red Cross course doesn't teach two-person CPR like we learned in surf lifesaving, but that may be because it's too hard to co-ordinate when you don't necessarily know the skill level of your co-first-aider where we certainly did know it in surf lifesaving.  We did hours and hours of practice as kids.  Some things, like times tables, you just never forget.  15:2, 5:1, 60bpm ... repeat .. Well, now it's 30:2, 5:1 is gone and the cadence is up to 100bpm.  No worries.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I've done the online part of the course and will get the practical part of it done in a week or so. It's pretty good.  Cost $150, you can do the theory component in your 'spare' time from anywhere where you can get access to a web browser and the information is good.

Check it out.

That's a serious game-lifting cycling club website.  Wow.

One of the reasons aboc Spin is successful is that we provide dinner afterwards.  For a tenner you get your legs and lungs smashed to pieces and a solid feed in the company of like-minded fools.  No-one has better value than us!  Enough of the one-eyed advertising... I don't promise you 45.985% improvements or a shower and some mysticism, I promise you a good feed and a solid session over winter when it's cold, wet and disgusting outside.

Lucie and I cook the sauce on Mondays so it has 24 hours in the fridge to let the herbs settle into the sauce before we re-heat it on Tuesday nights. Here's how we do it.

The enduros load up on pasta, the sprinters eat more sauce.