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.

For many years we've wondered, but here's the truth:

At Keirin School in Japan riders are trained to not release the handlebars when crashing.  This is to (in theory) protect their arms and collarbones.  Many keirin riders in Japan wear body armour that includes shoulder padding which protects them when they fall and they're trained to land on the padding not to extend their arms.  This is also why keirin gloves have armoured knuckes.  If you hold the bars when you crash, guess what hits the deck .. yep, your knuckles!

This is according to Josiah Ng who just got back from a racing tour of Japan where he rode some 90-odd keirins and had no crashes!

Way back many months ago at (I think) one of the NTID conferences I've been lucky enough to go to, female sprinters were discussed.  One very common thing is that many of the ones that do very well in JW15 and JW17 often simply never go significantly faster once they get to JW19.

Why is this?

I have one thought about this, bear with my hypothesis, this is gut feeling not science :

When they're riding JW15 and JW17 the game is all about leg speed because they're restricted to tiny gears.  There's a certain amount of strength required (and you see this in the ones that do well out of the starting gate) but it's mainly a game of cadence.  This favours the girls who don't necessarily have a lot of strength but can spin like the clappers.

This is pretty obvious; girls aren't boys.  From a hormonal perspective, girls have roughly 10% of the testosterone that boys have.  Testosterone is the main hormone that drives muscle growth (amongst other things).  As such, it's really hard, without cheating, for girls to pack on significant amounts of muscle.  They can certainly grow stronger and put on some muscle, but unless they resort to training with the aid of the needle, they never get big and thus, strong enough to push bigger gears at high cadences.   The only female sprinters that ever looked like Sean Eadie were cheating (eg Tammy Thomas and Annalisa Cucinotta).  Combine this with old-school training methods that has them out riding lots of road miles, which blunts any muscle growth stimulii that they may get from sprint training and you get a kid that can spin, but will really struggle to push bigger gears and thus, go any faster when they're old enough to be able to push bigger gears.  We see this with some of the girls I work with, they're amazing as JW15's and JW17's but come JW19 the game changes, and it changes a lot.  The stronger girls start to take over and the super-spinners become less dominant.

Why do boys do ok in spite of mixing in lots of road riding?  They're awash with anabolic hormones in their late teens and for them it's not too late to undo the damage done to their fast twitch by endurance training.  But for the girls, their opportunity, I think, comes a lot earlier and is lost if it's burnt up by too much endurance training.

So, if that's true, or at least on the right track, what do we do to get the girls strong without cheating?

The time when they're growing the most is early to mid puberty.  This is when they have the most of the other growth hormone, HGH.  This is when they need to be in the gym getting as seriously strong as you can possibly make them, and doing high power and high torque efforts on the bike and NOT DOING ANYTHING CATABOLIC.  This means STAY AWAY FROM LONG ROAD RIDES!

Conventional wisdom says keep the kids out of the gym, I say nuts to that and I'm not alone.  I'm in favour of getting, in particular, the girls, in the gym as early as possible to get strong so when they're old enough to push big gears, they're strong enough to do it.  Keep them doing short, sharp efforts.  Anna Meares started as a kid racing BMX.  Short and sharp, high power, high cadences and high torque. Shanaze Reade and Willy Kanis are more elite track sprinters who started (and still do) race BMX.   You can add the required endurance work later, and that's endurance for dealing with the needs of a track sprinter, which is not the same thing as the endurance needs of an enduro cyclist and should be trained differently.  You may pay for this in the short term with them being a bit heavier as JW15's and JW17's because to put on muscle they need an anabolic diet (calorific surplus high in protein and low in the foods enduros live on, ie: simple carbs), but getting the girls strong AND able to push high cadences is, I think, the key to getting them fast in the long term.

I have a title :

NTID Victorian Track Sprint Assistant Coach

w00t!

The Australian Sports Commission is now actually going to pay me.  This is great.  Paid coaching gigs are few and far between and this is a fantastic opportunity to get paid a bit whilst learning.

is the girl who beat Anna at Beijing for gold in the sprint.  She's worth listening to.

I'll cut to the chase (I'm pretty busy working on sprintTracker, my little python program to track sprinters times etc), I'm responsible for some 10 wheelbuilder.com track modified Powertap hubs, two are mine, the rest belong to the VIS, the NTID and Hilton Clarke.

There's a small problem with them involving the chainline.  We never noticed it on mine because it's only about 3.5mm out and I'm no great torque machine and both my and Emily's bikes have reasonably long chainstays so the chainline problem doesn't really show up. However, under some of the NTID and VIS boys who have real motors we hear noises at high power outputs, so we investigated the chainline of the hubs.

Best illustrated with a couple of (poor quality!) photos :

	That's what they look like
	That's what it should look like

 As you can see, even with my crappy mobile phone photography and quickly cobbled up bit of cardboard measuring device, the PT hub puts the sprocket about 3.5mm (the width of the lockring) too far towards the middle of the bike.  I think the guys at Wheelbuilder made a mistake reading the width of the hub and assumed that the sprocket was where the lockring is,  which it isn't. Most people would never notice, the 3.5mm deviation is small and under enduro riders would not show up at all, but put them under a big sprinter putting out a lot of torque and it makes noises and runs rough.

The fix is pretty easy, the hubs have a steel axle end cap that you can see in the top picture (with the flat side to allow you to do it up), that needs to be 3.5mm shorter and the other side needs to be 3.5mm longer.  Then, all the wheels need to be re-dished.  Bugger, most of them were put together by Daryl Perkins and he tied and soldered them, which is a PITA to re-do.

Anyway, these things happen and I'm sure the guys at Wheelbuilder will send us corrected end caps ASAP.  They're smart people and proud of the work they do, they'll want to take responsibility for this and fix it.  In the mean time we can machine down the existing drive-side end caps and put washers under the off-side ones.  It's fiddly and shouldn't have to happen but this is prototype and first generation stuff, we expect a few teething issues.  It's the price of being on the bleeding edge.

Read this ...

I love this bit :

I had plenty of time to come up with a fitting book of the day. It’s from the Disk World series by Terry Pratchett. In it, the protagonist is Conan the Barbarian, who is a 70-year-old who has just survived everything. At one point he, and his other old warrior friends capture this village, but then they find that they are surrounded by an army of tens of thousands, and his only reaction is, “Oh man, it’s going to take days to kill all these people!” And that’s the way I was today when I was lying on the ground. I just thought, “Oh no, I’m going to Paris this year, I’m going to Paris. There’s just no way you are going to get me out of this race for the second year in a row!”

Jens, 100% HAF.

On Saturday and Sunday I was "the" coach for the whole NTID group. I have to admit that I loved the situation and while I didn't do everything perfectly, I'm confident that most of the work I did do was good. Some important things got missed though as I was  spread very thin and I can, and will, improve my performance in future. I think that the general idea of the camp was best served by  my work in the infield, and I think that's what Josh (NTID project coordinator) wanted of me, and on the day he was the boss.

Things I need to get better at on trips include, but aren't limited to, include :

Data gathering - I was too occupied in the middle with tactical briefing and debriefing to keep track of what everyone was geared on and their times. In future if I'm in the same situation (30 riders, one coach) I'd get better organised with co-opting parents into doing the data recording. I also need to have my stopwatch with me all the time and my notebook.

I did have help from one parent who got almost all of the F200 times (100m splits) for pretty-much everyone who was there (thank you,  you know who you are), but I didn't get splits from the team sprints, which I should have done. I needed to have a better handle on my helpers. I made the mistake of assuming without checking that we'd be able to get times and splits from the timing team, as I generally can in Melbourne.  This was a flawed assumption and not one I will make again.

We did get some notes on the races, but my hand-written race notes are sketchy at best, video is the best tool for this and in future I'd have a cheapy video camera with a load of storage to record all the races, if possible.  My VX2100 is too big to cart around to camps when traveling light and it's overkill for tactical analysis work.

I need to get a lot better at recognising people I need to keep an eye on, this will come with more experience and it's something I'm very conscious of.

I may have over-coached some of the kids, but that's hard to judge. I left the older and more experienced riders alone mostly, except to ask them if they wanted or needed any guidance and to help them debrief after their races. With the more experienced guys I basically listened to them and gave them a sounding board pre and post-race without any judgement. I'm confident that that's what they wanted and needed. The younger ones and less experienced ones I was more active in talking to, mainly encouraging them to be more assertive and to take risks (to roll the dice) during races rather than being passive. I may have relied too much on intuition with this, but it's hard to tell. As they days wore on I spoke less to them pre-race and listened and debriefed more after their races, as they got better at making their own plans.

It's a judgement call on how much is too much and I'll get better at reading the guys and giving them what they need without over-doing it.

The only feedback I received afterwards was positive, but I guess that's pretty normal, the people I didn't hear from are the ones I'd be worried about if I'd over or under-done them. Not many kids are good at giving constructive criticism to adults, so I don't expect much immediate negative feedback, even if I totally cocked it up! I didn't get any negative feedback from some of the more confident and senior guys, and they're the ones who're most likely to do so, but again, lack of negative feedback from that group is not an indicator of good coaching. With the NTID kids not from our (Vic) squad I didn't know them well enough to be a lot of help.

Things we need to make sure that, as a team, we take next time includes a good, working track pump that everyone knows how to use! They all packed as light as they could, which meant we didn't have a pump and had to scrounge one. Some team rollers would also have been of benefit, we had to borrow time on other teams rollers in the pits.

When I was in the thick of it in the middle, with all the races happening and the kids wanting guidance it was intense and amazing and I loved it. I have much to learn but this is where I want to be.