Over the last couple of days I received an email from some guy from an insurance company asking me to be a part of their sales machine.  In the interests of full disclosure, they offer 20% commission for sales or referrals or something, for their insurance scheme for bikes. 

I'm not the only coach that has been approached. They claim at least 7 coaches are on their scheme.

Be aware, if a coach pressures you into taking out insurance on your bike(s), they may not be being impartial.  Ask them if they're getting a cut.

For what it's worth, I refused to be a part of it.  Our clients should be able to trust us to give them independent, untainted advice.  Once your finger is in the pie, you're no longer impartial.

Everyone's trying to sell you something ....

MMAS2, sprint day (Saturday).

Hot, gusty northerly.

98.4", disk wheel.

Held starts (!%#$CV#$RT@#$!!!!!) not gate starts.  500m ITT, 42.02s (~0.5s faster than last year) - good enough for 3rd, beaten by the Wizard and Jamie Goddard.

Flying 200's - same gear, 13.4 (hand timing, lots of variance, one had me at 13.2 .... results as such of no value as very inconsistent).  Qualify 4th (!) - Wayne Arazny rode a 12.9ish f200!  Wow..... Very gusty northerly making for fast but inconsistent times.  A lot of luck with the gusts, or bad luck, depending on when you got a blast of wind.

I drop down to 91.8" for the sprints.

Race Jamie Goddard in the semi, he wins after leading me out for 2.5 laps.  I didn't come off his wheel with enough power, maybe a chance lost?  Jamie's bloody quick ... I dunno, if I'd come at him harder?  Maybe?

Race Wayne Arazny for 3rd place, I win, Wayne's cooked, he needs more sprint training, he's fast, but he runs out of efforts very quickly, if his 200m time was right, and we think it was close, he's much faster than he raced against me.

So two third places.  Given that The Wizard would win, and Jamie .. they're both a level above me, I'm pleased with the days efforts.  The F200 was my best for the summer, although the time is not to be trusted.

Dino won the 500 and the sprint in MMAS5.

Em won the 500 and the sprint in JW15.

It'll be a busy night at presentation night for the aboc sprint squad.

Em on fire at state team training, reports of a blisteringly quick standing 125 ... Watch out at the Aussies ...

Yesterday I spent at DISC, I was there at 9am working with Liz Randall as she gets ready for her hour record (1st March), then I hung around and waited for John Beasley, to assist him with the Malaysian squad, but I got it wrong!  They weren't in on Wednesday!  Doh!  So I ducked home for a couple of hours, and went back in to get there at 4pm to work with Hilton.

Welcome to the madhouse.

I had been to watch a few Wednesday night sessions over the years as a casual observer, but this time I was in the thick of it.  It starts for the coaching team at about 4, Hilton and Daryl Perkins (from now on, Perko ...) were sorting out stuff in the NTID/VIS/CCCC cage, I helped a bit, carried some stuff, then we had a look at the program for the night.

Many of you reading this have been to our sessions, and will know that we publish the plans ahead of time and have done so for a couple of years now.  So we're no strangers to planned sessions, but this is a whole new scale and intensity ... The session starts at 6:30pm sharp, with warmups for the sprinters and then the enduros (30 mins sprinters, 40 mins enduros), then they had 3 groups - Sprint, NTID/Pursuit and Enduro.  

I did the enduro warmup on the motorbike, Hilton did the sprinters.  The original request was 20 laps at 35, 15 laps at 40, 10 laps at 45, 15 laps ramping up to 58km/h.  When I took it up to around 55km/h with about 7 laps to go, Perko waved me to slow, the bunch was HUGE - there was maybe 35 enduros chasing the motorbike and with the bunch that big it was too fast, so we dropped back to 50km/h for the last 5 laps.

Then the carnival began.  The groups were NTID sprint (mostly, a couple of non-NTID riders were in the squad) doing MACCs, pursuit (NTID) doing pursuit cadence drills, and general enduro training.  For 3 hours it was hectic, a contingent of CCCC guys and Perko helped, with getting the various groups ready to go and misc helping out.  I timed the MACC efforts for the first 2 (of 4) 300m MACCs, and Hilton got me to ride the motorbike for the third set of efforts - I hadn't done it with his guys before and was a bit conservative with the speed I took them to, but that'll be better next time.  Hilton did the last effort for them while I timed again.

I also did the pacing for half of the pursuit training stuff, the first time I walked the line for them I got it wrong and went the wrong way!  Sorry guys!  We fixed it from then on.  Mea Culpa!

Overall, it was a mind-bending experience.  A lot of stress, a lot of people with a jam-packed program of training.  It all mostly worked out and the program was mostly adhered to.  I got home at about 11pm, totally knackered!

It's not 100% confirmed, but tomorrow I'm working with Hilton Clarke from ~5pm, as an assistant with the NTID squad he coaches.  I'm not sure what sort of formal work/pay thing this will involve (I can't do it for free!), but hopefully some of these details will get sorted quickly.

I'm quite looking forward to the new challenges this will bring about, and working with some very talented cyclists.

I get the Peaksware email every week or so (I own copies of WKO+, which is the industry standard power analysis software).  Every week, they're trying to sell me something ... this week it's some protecting protein story.   Apparently there's some 'concentrate' that prevents high intensity training from catabolising muscle.  Or something like that anyway ... The email points to a website full of nonsense and inscrutable jargon, and it doesn't actually tell you anything useful, "sign up here for my program" instead.

Uhuh ... 

At least the study being cited is linked to, so you can work it out for yourself ... The study just says, in a nutshell, that high intensity exercise damages muscles.  OH REALLY?!  The tout is then for a program of 'food concentrates'. Here's a tip, they probably mean protein and carbohydrate supplements, whey isolates and glucose, I'd bet.  If it's not like c4p I'll be amazed .... 

Then there's the RBR newsletter, every week or so, full of pointers to ebooks you can buy, and a couple of useless 'tips' as bait while they try and flog more articles to you.  Got to make a buck, I guess ... It just seems really crass and slimy to me.

At aboc, we publish everything and keep no secrets (outside of client confidentiality concerns).  There's no hook to a sale, if you want to know something, ask us and we'll put up an article if we can find the answer.  

For giggles, see if you can make any sense of this : http://prospro.posterous.com/eating-protein-vs-protecting-proteins-1

I'm waiting on an update to my video editing software (PowerDirector 8.0, in case anyone's interested) to resolve an uploading to YouTube issue, so have a few moments to kill between editing videos for the sprint round last weekend.

I'd like to write a big report for the club teams championships last Saturday and the sprint round on Sunday, but this will be a very brief one.

CTC, a team of three of us, myself, Dino and Russell Poole are the Blackburn 'Open Masters' No.1 team.  I'm the first rider, Dino is No.2 and Pooley is our third after the Wizard couldn't commit.  We did ok, the event was a bit of a mess, no starting gates(!) and no split timing etc, but it was the same for everyone (except we'd spent a lot of time practicing gate starts!).  We ended up qualifying fourth so we just scraped into the final, to race off for 3rd place against Hawthorn's team of The V-Train, Aaron and some other guy who's name I don't know.  They'd qualified about four seconds faster than us, so we were never going to be in it,  but we went a little faster and they went a little slower but it was still three seconds too much, so we had to settle for fourth place.  Better than last year, so that's good ...

Round 4, I did my best flying 200 for the season, but still too slow, on a perfect day, I should, in hindsight, have used a bigger gear than 91.8", I'd felt strong during the week and probably would have done better on 94" or so, but it is what it is and 13.6s would have to do.  B grade was big, 10 of us, and I was one of the slower ones in qualifying. 

A very long story cut short, I beat Craig Towers, Ed Osbourne drilled me a new one, and Stewart Lucy took advantage of a huge tactical blunder on my part to win easily too, so not the best day's racing for me!  Still a lot of fun and the series continues to get good feedback.  There's a crew over in South Africa that want to copy the format and some in NSW as well, so that's very pleasing.  Our dream of a national series is gaining some momentum!  Jodie Dundas did a great job on the video camera, Lucie took ace photos and Sue ran the day like clockwork.  We got help from Will Thomas on the scoring duties as Anne Apolito was unavailable.

In other news, Emily teamed up with Caitlin Ward to roll the JW17 club team sprint by 2 seconds, quick kid, that Emily ... more medals for Dino to find homes for!  Thanks to the Thomas's and Bev for looking after Em on the day.

And if you haven't heard (get out from under the rock!) Mike Goldie from Carnegie-Caulfield was hurt in a low speed tumble at a training session at DISC last week,  from all of us we wish him a speedy and uncomplicated recovery.

Over the last month I've spent quite a lot of time in at DISC working with (assisting) Hilton Clarke with the NTID sprinters and also John Beasley with the Malaysian sprinters.  Some of you reading this know both these blokes, and it's fair to say that they have vastly different styles and they both get great results from their riders, one of the Malaysian lads won the keirin at the Beijing world cup two weeks ago and Hiltons' NTID lads are currently ripping it up at the Aussie titles.

All I'm going to write about in this blog entry is their warmups before a track sprint training session.

Without going into any inner philosophy stuff, here's what they both do :

John/Malaysia : 40 laps behind the motorbike, starting at 35km/h, gradually winding up to 45km/h, the guys then have a bit of a sprint for the last half lap or so and then a couple of activations (short slow-start sprints).  They're usually on 84" or 86".  After this they sit down and rest, they do no more activations etc between efforts.  John has them riding at 100% or sitting on their backsides.

Hilton/NTID : 50 laps behind the motorbike, starting at 30 km/h(10 laps), 35 km/h(10), 38km/h(10), 42km/h(10) then accelerate from 42-60km/h over 10 laps, all on 84".  They then do two activations or entries off the bank depending on what drills they have to do during the session.  Hilton also has them do two activations before every effort.

So Hilton's NTID warmup is a lot bigger than the Malaysian squad's warmup.  

Some trivia, one of the Malaysian lads rode a 9.8s flying 200 on Tuesday, it was lead out by the motorbike with John riding the bike and swinging off at the 200m line, I was timing the effort and had to ask John if I'd made a mistake, nope .. He's that fast ..  Wow!