What is normal anyway?

Last night was the passing of a big deadline - my former employer, Vivitec Pty Ltd, basically went broke in November, and they generously 'gave' me the web hosting part of the business (in lieu of a redundancy payout, in a way).  To cut a very long story short, last night I finished moving all the core stuff off their servers and onto mine.  Websites with mod-perl, PHP, old versions of Zope and Plone, crusty old perl-CGI stuff etc.  Stats, logs, DNS delegations (finding who has the DNS registry keys etc ... ) and email are all working, and if Vivitec turn off their server today, none of my(!) clients will notice.

There's mopping up to be done, and there'll be some fires to put out, but generally it's complete.  The last fortnight has been 12-16 hour days getting it sorted, which has made normal life difficult to say the least.  A big thanks to Bev for doing the dinner bookings etc, I've simply not had the brain space to take care of it. And to everyone I'm coaching for their patience.  I've not been able to give you proper attention for far too long.

So now I'm pretty-much 100% self employed (except for 2 days a week at Cycle Science). If my clients pay their bills I'll be able to pay my rent!

So what else is going on?  We raced on Saturday at Blackburn, there was enough gaps in the weather to get racing done.  Dino and I and young Ed Osbourne got dropped in the combined A&B grade points race at the first sprint (gak, Tom Leaper and Steve Martin .. when they go we blow!), but we worked together and managed to avoid being lapped in the 20 or 25 lap race. It's a bit of a blur, that one ... The bunch did sit up and play cute games which helped (we were sure we'd get caught at lap 7, but the bunch sat up) so although we were dropped, we didn't lose 20 points! 

Before that we had a combined A&B scratch race, and Steve Martin, I owe you a beer, when Steve got onto the front he slowed down(!) and as a result I managed to hang on and recover a bit, and even slipped in a small attack with 5 to go.  It wasn't really an attack, I was caught between Ed's wavering wheel as he tried to avoid running into a rider in front, and Ben Schofield dropping down onto me, the safest place to be was in front of that mess so I jumped and briefly (5 seconds?) was off the front of this bunch!  Suffice to say that was the end of my race and I was quickly ejected from the back of the bunch.  86" - not enough! Legs, not strong enough!  Lungs ... *cough* urgh.

We had a team sprint, big .. 8 riders or so per team, and I was rider 2 in my bunch, and we split our bunch - communication is so important in a team sprint!  I didn't know we'd gone too hard. C'est la Vie ... and then the all in, and I keep getting paired up with strong juniors, I think we got 3rd? Thanks of course to Brian Harwood and Sue Dundas for running the days racing, and I'm sorry I don't know her name, the lady who was inside doing entries etc.

Dino and I have been doing some strength work on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and Nath (aka Foxy Ox) came over last night and we used the now useful shed out the back of aboc HQ to do an ergo session, doing 30 second (10s at each level) sprint rampups.  The basic plan for me is to have a go at more focussed track sprinting.  I figure it'll take me a couple of years to see what I'm capable of.  Maybe masters worlds in 5 years?  Who knows .. I was a pretty decent (running!) sprinter as a kid and the sports I played as a kid were all sprint/power sports, so I figure I've probably got the right genes, or at least, right enough to have a go and see what I can do.  Time will tell ... One thing's for sure, if I don't have a go, I'll never know!

The big BBN Australia Day Madison is next weekend.  I've entered the support races.  Should be fun!

The TSSS round 4 is coming up soon too, if you're thinking of doing it, come and do it.  It's loads of fun and it's graded - you will get plenty of chances to race, learn and try something you've probably not done much (at all). And .. a free BBQ courtesy of aboc Cycle Coaching.  What more can you want?!