Today's my first day back in the powerhouse after a week's R&R and a couple of easy (ok, one very easy and one very hard, but they average out at easy!) rides.  New routine today to concentrate on power.

A ramped up warmup set of deeper (thighs parellel to ground, ish) squats, and then 3 x 10 @ 110kg with 90s recovery.  That's 90kg less than last week's 3 x 5 at 200kg (2 mins recovery), but they were partial squats and done reasonably slowly.  This lot are deeper full squats and the lifting phase is to be done as quickly as I can - I should end up almost jumping at the end of the lift phase.  The bar does get a little airborne at the top so the wise lifter has to be careful not to move much or throw it around.  Not bad, I did the 110kg lifts reasonably well, I certainly felt the deeper lifts.

After that, some deadlifts, again done quickly in the lift, light weight, 3 x 10 at 70kg with 90s recovery.  I haven't done deadlifts for a month or so, when I was concentrating on strength with the squats the deads were dropped out of the program.  They're back in now and I can feel them.   My office is up the stairs at aboc HQ and walking up afterwards is quite special. 

I rounded out the session with bench (10 x 70kg, 5 x 80kg, 12 x 70kg) as a little variety - I'd stagnated on bench but wasn't terribly worried, it's not vital to have a big upper body, just need enough to keep my hips in place, and pulldowns (wide, 15 x some weight I don't care so much to count) and some seated rows.  I should be doing bent over rows but don't have a heavy enough dumbell set up yet.

Tonight's a very easy ride on the roady in to the city (boys night this week is at Chez Grace in Clifton Hill) and back out again tomorrow morning, then I'll do some high cadence stuff on Friday evening, and I've been asked to testride and review an Azzurri roady over the weekend.  It's a cheapy generic carbon frame, but it might ride ok, I won't know 'til I ride it.  Their (Azzurri) carbon track frame looks quite well sorted, their rear axle dropouts are maybe prone to the same problem that the Apollo/Raceline Record has, but the one I looked at was a prototype and had what looked like a glued in stainless steel rear dropout.

Sunday will be another sprint-fest at DISC, I'll have to start doing some races/leadouts with the lads to push us up a notch in the committment department.

I've been reading this :

new rules of lifting

and it's quite good - it doesn't talk about power much, so I've got this one to read next :

Explosive Lifting for Sports

Next weekend is my Level 1 S&C course. Power on!

Have a look at the graphs for today's oil price :

And at the bowser, $1.60 or so a litre.

On yer bike ...

updated: According to The Age, Indonesia is soon to be rationing petrol :

Indonesia's Energy and Mineral Resources Minister recently announced that all petrol consumption by all motorists will be limited from September, with exact figures to be released later this year.

Monday, and the old Volvo is kaput, Rich isn't due to arrive until 10pm-ish or so to tow it home, so we have another day of R&R.  I did have to go for at least one ride on the (now very long) weekend.  Ok, Hurt Hill it is ... I have the big Fuel EX8 with low gearing, so even in my 'endurance? That's 3 laps of the velodrome!' state of mind, I figured I'd better ride the thing to prove I can still do it. HTFU, right?

It's been pretty cold, hovering around 9 or 10 degrees during the day, so I'll use the warm jacket.  The ride to the base rolls a bit and has one sharp, short pinch at the four-way intersection of Maintongoon, Sonn Berg and some other road that goes to the rest of Peppin Point.  Ja .. can still grovel up hills ..

The climb proper starts just around the corner from a CFA watertank, where the road turns to gravel.  Or did ... it's sealed!  We'll need to redefine the start for timekeeping (ok! I have the current record! Vanders, beat 24:30 ... ).  It's sealed up until the point where the nasty bit starts just as you enter the trees and turn right.

Groveling up at between 7 and 5.5km/h I make it to the top in around 24 minutes.  Slow, but I didn't stop and that was the main thing.  The rest of the loop is fairly uneventful, I'm underdressed for the long descent down Maintongoon Rd though and get pretty cold, and the Bontrager tyres are not suitable for the heavy wet clay (veeerrrryyyyy slippery!).  Back to the house for a BBQ dinner (all we have left is bacon and eggs), and wait for Rich to roll up.  He arrives at around 10:30 and decides to stay the night, we'll head back on Tues morning, we're all tired, but also it's cold, dark and we need fuel for the Adventure Truck, but every servo is shut.

Today (Tuesday) we load the Ovlov onto the trailer and truck it home.  It takes about 4 hours all up, and the old Adventure Truck chugs along cheerfully - we're a bit anxious about the descent down Mt Slide on the Melba highway as it's raining heavily when we get there, but Rich handles the old girl like a champ and we're down safely.

Now the spag boll is cooked and ready for tonight's spin session, and I hope I'm not too tired to run it well.  I'll have to do my ride tomorrow, today, no time.

So Lucie & I have been up at Bonnie Doon for the w'end, it's rained the whole time (good!  we need rain) and we've planted more trees, but I've been uber-soft and haven't ridden a bike all weekend.  And, we're trapped here... Lucie's Volvo has decided it's had enough and wants to be towed home.  Right ... So I've called in a big favour from Rich, who's going to come up here tonight with the old Adventure Truck (Series III Land Rover!) and a trailer and tow us back to Melb to get it fixed.

In the mean time I've got 'net access so I can work, but I hate to think what the phone bill will be, Telstra are thieves when it comes to data charges.

The DISC session run by the V-Train went well I hear, but Kym Dundas had another slip, I'm putting my spare veloflex records on her bike for next time.  Note to anyone thinking of riding at DISC - if the tyre says Michellin anywhere on it, do NOT bring it to DISC!

Here ends my current strength phase, and I ended up stronger than I expected, today 4 x 5 reps of 200kg partial squats.

I'm happy with that. Look how much the bar bends!

Last night's Blackburn AGM was very poorly attended (I think all up there was 12 or 13 people?).  This is pretty poor given the membership of the club is something like 150 members.  I had way more food than we needed.  Last year's AGM was reasonably well attended, but last night really was pretty disgraceful.  I think part of this is a failure of the club to communicate well enough with its members that they are part of something, not paying customers of something.  I don't know how to address it though. 

As it is I fear that the club may lose Brian Harwood, who is the current race committee chair, and by the sound of it, he is the race committee.  Anyone reading this who races and is a Blackburn member, you have an obligation to be involved.  Many of the aboc people are, but many other Blackburn members are not, and frankly, excuses are pretty lame.  The club is the sum of its members, it is not a commercial organisation which you pay once a year to run things for you and then events just happen.  That's not how it is.  Showing up on race day and racing is not enough.  If you think you can't take time off from training, or something, or skip the occasional race to help out, you're wrong. We all have an obligation to be involved, or all that training's no use, if there's no races because everyone's taking and no-one's giving anything back.

Anyway .. Nathan Larkin was elected vice president, and Alan Barnes moves on to spend more time with his young family, and the other significant change was Karen Wiggins was elected as the club captain.  The role of the club captain is to be the representative of 'the riders' at the committee, and as Karen is at just about every race riding, she's in a great position to be available to all riders who race from Blackburn and I think she'll be a real asset to the club in that role. Also Rob Monteath is the new club secretary I think, and he'll also be a fantastic part of the club executive.  I'm hoping that we can move the club onwards to do a better job of engaging our membershipo and forging closer relationships with the other clubs in the Eastern Combine.

And we got the club's formal ok to run the Summer Sprint Series on the dates I wanted, and they'll tie in neatly with the regular Saturday race program over summer.

Rant ended!

Stu Vaughan is guest coaching at DISC on Sunday, I'm going to Bonnie Doon to plant trees and ride my mountainbike for a few hours up Hurt Hill etc.

After about 6 weeks of strength (squats, big gear starts etc) it's almost time to switch to a power phase of training.  I'm partial squatting 190kg (today, 4 x 6 @ 190kg) and will have a crack at 200kg on Thursday, then a few days off over the weekend (we're going to Bonnie Doon to plant trees and have fun on the MTB), and then it'll be a power phase for 4 weeks or so -  time to do lighter weights and high speed work.  Then a bit of recovery, and repeat the hypertrophy, strength, power cycle.  I'm doing about 6 weeks hypertrophy, 6 weeks strength and 4 weeks power at the moment, so that's around 18 weeks so about 4 months, which should drop me off at the start of the summer track season quite neatly.

I need to start doing some races at DISC on Thursday nights soon too, in little gears so I have to spin my legs off to keep up, which will help endurance (what's that?!) and also leg speed and poise on the bike.  Just .. no crashes!  DISC's a dangerous place in C and D grade ... I lost last summer because of a crash at the start of the season which pretty-much cost me the whole summer, not again!

I'm interested to see what sort of flying 100 times I can manage once I start showing up at our Sunday DISC sessions fresh, at the moment I'm doing them after a heavy weights session in the morning or mid afternoon and using a reasonably small gear (91.8"), and dead legs don't sprint too well. I'll be happy if I can get a F100 below 6.5 seconds for starters, which works out to a ~13s F200.  I'm doing 6.8's at the moment, 0.3 of a second isn't much, is it?  In the overall scheme of things it's still dead slow, but this is a long term project and I have no idea of how fast I can go yet.  It's a long way before I can put any pressure on Fast Eddie Wilson or Big J, but slow progress is progress.

Offtopic, I had an interesting chat today with David Heatley from Cycling Inform, it's good to have a bit of a chinwag, he's done a lot of good work with his riders and has a similar philosophy to the aboc way of doing things.  His website's very good, with lots of interesting articles and his riders do very well.

Congrats to CCCC for their Phillip Island race.  What a great turnout :

Rider numbers :

147 : teams
15 : A
75 : B
56 : C
47 : D
10 : E/novice
----
350 entries

That's incredible, and shows what a well promoted and interesting race can attract, one that works for all grades.  Many open promoters could learn a lot from CCCC's race program and methods.

Picture this, it's around 9am on a Sunday morning.  I'm a lazy sprinter, and like to sleep in, no more of those 5:30am getups to go ride the North Road loonyride.  No way!  Sunday's plan is sleep in a bit, do some weight training in the morning after visiting mum briefly (it's 'sell a lot of flowers and cards day'), muck about for a bit on some training programs etc, then head in to DISC to train on the bike.

The phone rings.  Neil?  What's he want on a Sunday? Isn't he at some MTB enduro with the aboc MTB team (a bunch of c-nuts)?  Yes ... but he's in need of a jersey, very quickly!  Why is left to the reader to speculate on!

Ok .. I drag the lazy body out of bed, find that I have a jersey his size in stock, crank up the aboc motorpacer and head out to Lysterfield.  I take a wrong turn (it's been a while ..) and end up on the wrong side of the park, ok ... no breaking the speed limit!  I find my way to the part of the park where they are.  Motorbikes are good, I manage to thread through the maze of parked cars, vans, tents, fences etc down to where everyone is, and hand Neil a nice new aboc jersey.  He's very happy, and we'll leave the details at that.  This is the second MTB enduro race I've been to for a look and I have to say I'm very impressed.  It's laid out well, they cater for the needs of teams who are waiting for their riders to swap over very well indeed.  Imagine a huge outdoor velodrome, tents, a portable coffee shop, loads of (at least 2 anyway ...) shop displays, PA, music, it's a real carnival atmosphere.  Road can learn a lot from this.  It's all done in good humour and is very relaxed and everyone's having a ball.  It's almost possible to forget it's a race. 

While there I catch up with some old friends (g'day Simon!) and some virtual friends become real (Euan! good to meet you at last).  Cheer on Byron who's doing it solo, and the aboc team (Cam, Vanders and Neil).  I'm tempted to see if Rich and I can make a team of two to do some at 'participation level' (we're gumbies, but it looks a lot of fun).  Good bit of cross training and base fitness.

After hanging around for way too long I scoot over to Mum's for a very late breakfast, then home and into the PowerHouse (or as Vanders would have it, the PowerHaus, Arnold!).  I'm taking it a bit easy, last Tues I strained a back muscle or two, but I still manage to do 3 good sets at 190kg with partial squats.

Then Lucie and I throw all the kit for the training session into her car and we drive into DISC.  Nath's doing a course there and we're somewhat bemused by seeing a bunch of people in the infield warmup area riding around on a mixture of bikes leaning over picking up water bottles off the ground.  Ok ... I'm sure it has some relevance!  We set up, a healthy crowd comes to my session and it works well.  In particular Karen rides well and Hari Gopu, second time ever on a track bike takes to DISC like a duck to the proverbial.  He's a natural.  I think he'll be sore today, but he rode very well indeed.  Alex Vaughan is improving at a great rate, and Claire's back, no obvious signs of harm from her broken ribs.

I manage some consistant times for my flying 100's, still too slow, but at least consistant.  6.79, 6.81 etc for 100m, which is nowhere near fast enough (around 52-53km/h) but is slowly improving - I should arrange to do a session there where I'm actually trying to see how fast I can go, use a bigger gear and not do a gym session an hour before the bike.  We're concentrating on pedaling and I'm pushing about a 92" gear, so am doing about 130rpm, so that time is still pretty slow. I should be getting around 150rpm I think.  Might have to try some overspeed work with the motorbike, but who's going to drive it?  Maybe if I can get Big J to lead me out?!

Nandos for dinner, home and sleep.

I'm sure many of you will have heard about the crazy in Sydney who harrassed and then caused a multi-bike pileup in Sydney this morning.  If not, you can read about it here.

There's an old argument that pops up every now and then concerning cyclists and the use of the roads, and where it's appropriate, where it isn't, and how dangerous it is.  The above incident needs to be taken in perspective.  Immediate knee-jerk reactions abound, from the car-obsessed 'all cyclists off the road, get outta my way!', with the borderline psychotics writing things like 'I am sorry, but i HATE CYCLISTS ON THE ROAD. pain in the butt. i totally see where that guy was coming from, i just dont have the guts to run them down. good on him.' (sic) courtesy of a certain individual who hides behind the pseudonym 'Laurabot'.  There's some classy people out there, that's for sure.  These reactions, and the lighting up of the responses in various newspapers, from the bogan-news to more considered papers, show that to many, cyclists and road use is a hot topic.

Why is this? And why does it seem to be happening more often?

An obvious answer is that traffic density is higher and our road system can't cope.  There's an element of truth to that, for sure.   The irony being that those that complain about cyclists on 'their' roads are missing the point that they (the car users) are the problem.  There's too many people driving.  Take a look at the Eastern Freeway or the South Eastern, both roads are off-limits to cyclists, but they're clogged all the way.  More freeways just means more people encouraged to drive, and that just makes the problem worse.  The funny thing is that bikes and bikes used as transport are part of the solution to this.  Bikes used as recreation and sport are also part of the solution.  Bikes take less space on the roads, in urban environments bikes are often faster than cars to get from one place to another (so who is holding up who here?).  Bikes are greener (not perfect, but orders of magnitude less environmentally destructive than car use), bikes keep people healthier, and if 20% of the people who drove cars rode bikes to where they're going, the rest of the car-behooven would have an easier time of it, even if the bikes swamped the road system.  Bikes take up way less room on the roads.  The space used by one car is a whole lane, in that space two or three bikes can safely ride side by side, flowing along.  The car has, usually, one person in it.  It's nuts. Where the drivers get 'ragey' is in high density areas where they're not going anywhere fast, and cyclists, who are doing the drivers a favour, sometimes receive abuse for their troubles.

Funny animals, people.

Oil today, $123/barrel.  How much longer will these people be driving their cars anyway?

More fun, if the 50 bikes that were knocked over were ridden by mostly elite level riders, they'll probably be averaging around $5,000 per bike.  If 50% of them are badly damaged, that's going to cost our hero something in the vicinity of $125,000.  I doubt that'll be covered by insurance.  Maybe he'll have to sell his house to pay for the damage?

I'm going to write an article on bike paths and their merits, or rather, why I think they're bad in many cases and can make things more risky for those of us that ride for transport - watch this space.  In the mean time, remember we have a right to use our roads, take the lane and be assertive.

Sunday night's DISC training session ended up a bit of a schmozzle.  We had to start an hour late due to a heap of 'come & try' sessions, which is fine, and wasn't the problem, and it was great to see how well the sessions were attended.  Lots of enthusiasm, that's for sure.

We had a range of abilities at the track, also not a problem, but for my enduro sessions I tried to run a drill we call 'two teams take half a lap' that just didn't work.  You have the enduro riders split in half, a bunch on each side of the track lapping at E1 effort (generally 30km/h, recovery pace), on the whistle, the rider in front has to jump across to the other group (thus 'take half a lap').  It's usually a good interval session for enduro riders, but it just didn't work last night.  The groups ended up split up quite badly and in the end we had to consolidate it down to one group and take a full lap, but that was too far for most riders and the 20 minute block was awful to watch!  I felt quite bad for the riders who while I'm sure they got a good working over in terms of fitness, probably didn't enjoy the block or gain any skills from it.

I might have to use the motorbike next time to control the pace and to be one 'team', and also try and make the drill appropriate for some of the less experienced riders.

Our final enduro block was a 10 minute 'take a lap grandprix' and that worked well, I managed to recover enough from my flying 100's to take a lap or two with Dino, while watching Shane 'teh Llama' and Jonathon blasting their laps at 'scare the v-train' speeds.  I think with a bit more time on the boards Shane could be a very good pursuiter - possibly nationals or world masters level.  He's got a great ability to drive through pain that you need for that discipline.  Jonathon's done a lot of racing at a high level, but we need to coax him into being a bit more generous with space for the less experienced riders!

The sprint blocks went well, in particular it was great to see Emily Apolito riding the track banks like a veteran, showing one of the Dundas girls the ropes for how to ride a flying lap.

Stu 'V-Train' Vaughan has volunteered to run a session soon so I get a weekend off.  Good-o!

Today, 190kg partial squats. The session runs like this :

Warm up with 12 x 60kg

1 set at the previous sessions' max (in this case, 6 x 185kg), 2 mins rest then up to 190kg

4 x 6 @ 190kg with 2 minutes recovery.

Hurtees ... 190kg is heavy. Grunts and roars abound for the last couple of reps.  The neighbours must think I'm up to something very odd in the shed.

This takes about 20 minutes all up.  The warmup, loading the bar, each set takes about 2 and a half minutes (about 30 seconds under the weight).  Sitting down afterwards and trying to stop shaking...

Then I do a set of 3 x 12 benchpress with 90 seconds recovery, and then an upper body quick and dirty set of wide grip pulldowns, arm curls and narrow grip pulldowns.  I should be doing some upright rows etc, but for now that'll do.  All up, about 45-50 minutes.

This arvo we have DISC training, where the emphasis is on pedaling speed and power at the moment - we'll be doing standing 100m start efforts (strength and power) and then after a break, flying 100's in low gears (leg speed).

I hope the Blackburn crits went well down at Casey, I feel a bit bad for not going to race them, but 150km days are not on the menu for me.  It's a 45km ride there, race for an hour and warmup/warmdown, and ride back works out to about 150km, finishing with a grovel up the Boronia Rd hill.  If I was training for the warny again, I'd be doing it... But not this year!

aboc's been reasonably unique for some time (started in 2003) in being aimed primarily at recreational racers and beginning event and racing cyclists at a realistic and affordable price.  There's a few more starting to crop up, a newish one is David Heatley's Cycling-Inform.  I'm guessing he's mainly competing with Simon Quick's Quickcycle (price is about the same anyway), and is charging $97p/m at the moment according to his site.  I think this is a good thing, but am a little disapointed at the marketing spin he's chosen to use on his site, and I quote :

Finally a cycling coaching program that is specifically geared
for a busy cyclist that has to fit their training around family 
and work commitments.

I think that's a little misleading.  aboc has been specifically working with balancing life and cycling for 'the rest of us' for five years or more and making a point of it.  No problems with the competition at all, the more the better, and it's good to see everyone else running camps in the mountains too (what took you so long?!).  I'm all for it, I'm confident that aboc is great value and despite some encouragement to raise our charges, aboc will remain very affordable and will not be focussed on elite riders at the expense of the rest of us.

In the unofficial Hawthorn Cycling Club mailing list 'bicigaga', I read :

It's official

HAWTHORN CHAMPIONSHIP TRACK RACING

2pm Sunday Afternoons at the Darebin International Sports Centre 
("DISC") all winter long (1 June – 28 September 2008)

Format:

2pm: Support/ Masters Grade 20km Scratch/ Points

2:45pm: Open 40km Points/ 50km Madison last weekend of the month.

4:00pm the Floor is open- organise your own racing/ training (Good 
opportunity to do some slings "hint, hint", or for the juniors to 
kick the footy on the ground after the big kids!)

(This is just a guide: YOU decide the racing format on the day, YOU 
decide what races you want to participate in as long as they're 
broadly track endurance in nature. Racing will suit all road/ track 
endurance riders of C grade and above standard, male and female, but 
racing will be of an open/ mass start nature. Capacity for more and 
different races subject to YOUR interest and participation)

Damage: $10 gets you 3 hours of PAIN. 

WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT TO KEEP SUNDAY RACING ALIVE, AND KEEP THE 
HAWTHORN BANNER FLYING HIGH

Rules:
Points: Sprint points awarded every 10 laps, points 5, 3, 2, 1, 
double happiness (points) final sprint)
Madison: Sprints every 20 laps. Points 5, 3, 2, 1, double happiness 
final sprint.
Scratch: Go nuts for 20 km!

More Details 
Tim Watson xxxx xxx xxx
Stuart Vaughan xxxx xxx xxx

I can't stress enough how much we will need the support of club 
members to get this up and running.

This is a good thing, more racing, but it also means that some of the HCC riders who were coming to our DISC sessions may not make it (racing, then training, then training again on the same day?). I don't quite know how they can do 3 hours for $10 per rider at DISC?  So it's good, in as much as it gets more opportunities for racing, although I understand Northcote's Thursday sessions are low on numbers at the moment, so it may be quite a gamble for a small and not terribly track-focussed club like Hawthorn to try and run another race session.  But it might have a negative impact on the aboc DISC sessions if we lose attendees that we need to make the sessions break even.  Wait and see I guess ...

I think they'll be more successful if instead of running 'just another enduro race meeting' they identify a niche and target it.  I'm sure they're in the process of putting together some sort of program, but semi-random unstructured racing is, I think, unlikely to draw much of a crowd.

I spent this morning at Corner 4 at the Lang Lang road race.  It's my usual corner, Lang Lang being a reasonably hilly course and when I was a roady I wasn't much (!) of a climber.  The two times I 'raced' Lang Lang I finished pretty close to DFL, so it's a good race to volunteer to help at.  I've been doing this corner now for I think 3 years?  Maybe 4?  Anyway, I know where to put the signs, which bunches go which way etc.  It's familiar and comfortable.  I took a chair and a book and had a read, waved a flag a bit when the bunches came past and generally had a pleasant Sunday morning.  It didn't rain, but I had a good goretex rain jacket just in case and an ushanka to keep my scone warm.   The racing went well, a small turnout for most grades, probably scared off by the forecast weather (rain, hail etc) but the weather was very benign in the end and if you missed it, it was really pleasant down there.

I went down carpooling with Nick Bird, he's got a snazzy new Golf TDI something, a turbo diesel so it's pretty easy on fuel and quite zippy, getting the hang of the startrek controls was interesting at first (I drove, Nick hates driving and I quite enjoy it), but it was a comfortable and quick trip.  a bit under 75 minutes to get there from aboc HQ.

Some feedback for the organisers : Please make sure that volunteers are looked after - I was fine, I had everything I needed (chair, book, raincoat, food etc) but a few vollies arrived not knowing what their jobs were and unprepared, and they needed to be informed beforehand so they could be prepared, and also the club should feed and water the vollies.  This needs to be a priority.  We do it at the TSSS (Thankyou Bev!)  It's not hard and it makes vollies feel appreciated.  We need vollies to run races.

And, the most important message.  If you race, you MUST help at some races.  No-one is too important to volunteer to help every now and then.   We're not professionals, everyone can afford to spend half a day a couple of times a year helping out at a race.  Blackburn is, I think, way too 'undemanding' of its members.  It needs to do a good job of communicating with club members (this is getting better slowly, but still has a long way to go), but it needs to enforce (carrot and stick) that club members help at some races.  This cannot be optional.  Races take a lot of time to make happen and there's a small team of dedicated people organising them. Personally I want to thank Brian Harwood and his team for Lang Lang today, he did a tower of work, as did Damien Petrie and David de Gama in the past organising Lang Lang, but they cannot do it on their own.  If you haven't helped out at a race, you need to.  Everyone.  I don't care if you're a wannabe professional, a former pro or a world champion, everyone who races has an obligation to assist at a few races a year.  If it's good enough for Stuart 'V-Train' Vaughan to help at time trials (he's a current world champion from HCC), it's good enough for everyone else.

In other news, when I got home this arvo I hit the PowerHouse.  5 x 6 @ 180kg, last set I did 8.  W00t! And aboc may soon have another coach, watch this space.

Roast beef tonight for dinner, with spuds, parsnip and kent cut pumpkin.  Time to cook dinner!

On Tuesday I squatted 5 x 6 @ 175kg, so it was time to go up again, today, 1 x 6 @ 175kg, and attempting 4 x 6 @ 180kg.  I got them all.  In the best drunken darts commentary voice you can do ... 'One Hundred and Eighty!".  Look out Big J, in a few years I might be able to hold your wheel off the bank at DISC!

Heh ..

Off to client sites for the arvo, unfortunatly in a hurry so having to use the motorbike.  Still beats being in a car, it's a beautiful day, and riding past a servo, unleaded ... $1.53/l.  Uhuh ...

This Sunday there's no DISC session, I had to cancel it because it's the ANZAC day long weekend and most people are away anyway, and there's also Blackburns' Lang Lang road race that I'm corner marshaling at.  I'm going down there with Nick Bird, which is good - carpooling is one thing that roadies can do a lot better at to save fuel etc.  The forecast is pretty shabby, rain, hail and cold, so it'll be a day for the hard men and women of road cycling.  I was one, once!  I remember flogging myself stupid at some miserable road race down in Warrigal the week after winning(!) a long flat handicap.  It was raining heavily, freezing cold, hilly ... blown off the back in the first lap of two up a little climb the locals called The Wall ... managed to finish close to DFL, such fun!  The luxury of velodromes ...

An old rule for sprinters, never celebrate until you've crossed the line.  NEVER!

Eric Zabel is a classic case, in the 2004 Milan San Remo, he threw his hands up, only to see Oscar Freire throw to take the win.

And just a few days after his domination of the 2008 Paris-Roubaiux Tom Boonen did the same thing.

A couple of years ago now, Byron Davy and I rode up Mt Baw Baw from Tanjil Bren.  We didn't race it, but he wanted to see what it was all about and I did too.  Let's just say it's bloody steep, and unlike Hotham, which while long is generally climable by anyone fit enough to ride 100km and with low enough gearing, Baw Baw isn't climable unless you're very fit.  I was pretty fit (but still heavy at ~88kg) when I did it then and it took me 55 minutes to do the last 6km.  Byron did it in about 45 with a break to fix a broken rear derailer.

Anyway .. to the story.  I go back every year to take photos of the Baw Baw Classic.  Baden Cooke, the year he won the Tour green jersey, said that it was the hardest hill he'd ever raced up, it was just a survival ride.  Maybe ... but every year Warrigal Cycling Club run the Mt Baw Baw Classic, and it does get raced.

Here's my lot of photos from Winch corner this year. winch corner is ~20% gradient and is about 3km into the main part of the climb.  It's the steepest part of the race and a good spot for photos, riders are going slow enough that you can get several shots of each rider.

In other news, Oil today, $116 per barrel. Almost doubled price in 12 months.  The graph tells the story, on yer bikes ....

In the PowerHouse today I managed to squat  : 6 @ 170kg, 6 @ 175kg x 3, 5 @ 175kg all with 120s seconds recovery.  I probably could have made the last one 6, but let the bar go a touch low and didn't want to blow my back out trying to get it up while out of balance.

Riding the Powertap wheel on Tuesday before the spin session (yes, I do train!) I noticed a bit of vibration.  Looked down and the wheel was a bit out of true.  No probs ... Nath uses it on Tues night at Spin, I take it to the shop on Wednesday, have a look .. hrm, cracked rim!  It's the second Mavic Open Pro I've cracked now, the last one was about 3 years ago I think.  We had a spare and now the wheel's rebuilt and ready to use again.

Googlewhacking for fun (and profit?!)

Totally off-topic ...

Some of you might know that a year or so ago Nick Bird and I were planning on doing a vehicular cycling instructional video.  Somewhere along the line we all ran out of time to do it.

Here's an American version of some of the techniques, very well done, just remember to flip left and right!