Watch closely ...

hint, it happens at 14 seconds!

Don't drop your rider, even if they have you seeing stars!

Daryl Perkins and I drove over to Adelaide on Tuesday morning, in the Cycling Victoria bongo van (full of bikes and bits) - we're over here as part of the Victorian team for the Australian Track Titles.  I'm assisting Hilts with the sprint group again. 

Yesterday we got off to a rather surreal beginning - the under 19's who want a place in the team to go to the Junior Worlds had a standing lap (250m) trial to do in the evening.  We had Caitlin, Emerson and Jacob doing it, and oddly, only two other riders, one girl from WA and one boy from SA.   So here we are at the Superdrome, almost completely empty, with three gee'd up sprinters and almost no-one else there except a bunch of CA people and selectors for the national team.  Bizarre ... Anyway, that's done now.

Today the racing starts for real, we start with the girls doing the team sprint, which we have two teams in (J19 and senior), and the mens and J19 time trial (kilo) - our 19's aren't doing the kilo because they also do flying 200's today, and a kilo, followed by a flying 200?  Uhuh .. No ..

I'm pretty excited to be here again as a small part of this team, it's another great opportunity to learn and hopefully contribute towards the success of the guys racing.

Some of you will be suprised, but I brought my roady, and we take the guys for a VERY EASY morning ride to just loosen their legs up a bit, and I've been riding with them.  Road rides!  Ha! Someone has to keep them going slowly, and that's my job.  Good-o - but I am going to come back to Melbourne with a roady tan.  Do not be alarmed!

A picture tells the story better than I can :

1%'ers matter ... practice throws, practice recovery, practice eating right .. Everything matters when it's this close.

I'm trying to sort out a workable, scalable calendaring solution for the millions of things, people etc that I have to keep track of.  Google Calendar seems to be pretty nice, it has the ability to show and hide things, share calendars, delegate permissions etc.  I'm trialing it with some of the guys in Norway and hopefully will find a way to integrate Plone events (this website, the aboc.com.au site) with it somehow.  Adding things in multiple places is error prone and a PITA.  Watch this space ...

This is for those of you that come to aboc Spin over winter, we've made a small change - we're charging more!  Just what you wanted to hear!  But it's not all bad, we kept the fee at $10/head for 5 years, which is pretty good, but everything's more expensive now than it was in 2007, especially food.  We've also decided that a season pass is a good option. 

The fees to attend are now :

$15 per person on a casual basis
A "season pass" is $340, there's 26 sessions over the winter, which would normally cost (at this year's rate) $390, but you can save $50 if you pay up front, so a season pass is $340.  You don't get a refund for missed sessions though (so you'd better show up, eh?!).

Also, we very much understand that for a few of you, this is a family thing, so we're offering a family discount as follows (casual only, but may be applied to family of someone with a season pass).

$15 for the first person
$12 for the second
$10 for the third
$8 for the fourth or any more (you have 3 kids?  they all want to train?!)

(and no rorting this, Nic, Dino is not your defacto!)

so that's only $45 for 4 people, which is only $5 more than it would have been last year. I think that's pretty fair!

We have also done away with the $5 just to train option, just about everyone stays for dinner, and that's how we want it to be.   If you have special dietary requirements let me know and we'll look after you.