Mellow Yellow

No not the softdrink...these


Mavic Fury

After giving The Rhino sh!t about getting a pair a month ago, I ended up buying a pair.
They are lighter then my Sidi Dragons, and the fitter is definitly better. While I have been happy with my Sidi Ergo II's the Dragon's have just never cut it.
And they are lighter to boot.

First ride tomorrow at the CORC 3hr.

Lust

While surfing last nite I came across a picture for this and now I have some serious bike lust. It's just plain sexy, the helix tubing reminds me of a gun muzzle.



Lynskey Pro 29er with Lefty and BB30


mmmmm Sexy

Lynskey Performance Designs is founded by the Lynskey family who originaly started Litespeed in 1986 and later sold the business in 1999. The production facility at Lynskey Performance is operated by David Lynskey and his crew of fabricators. Lynskey work with U.S. milled aerospace grade 6al-4v and 3al-2.5v titanium pretty much the same as what they were doing back at Litespeed.

The Black Hole

One of the latest discussions over on the Wattage group has been focused around the best method for raising FTP. Are there seems to recognized approaches. The first is the old tried and true method SLD or slow long distance, despite the latest trend to shorter harder efforts this approach does work.
However it is very time intensive the recommended dose is 25hrs+ a week in zones 2-3. I understand this is the approach used by both Craig Gordon & Chris Eatough for their 24hr preparations. However for most people this just can’t work through other commitments, work, family, life. I know if I was even inclined to attempt this my wife would probably kill me after 2 weeks.
The other approach is revolves around SST (sweet spot training) and L4/L5 work. With the development of TSS (training stress score) and PMC it was calculated that SST returns the best buck for your time if you are a time limited person. This coupled with FTP intervals (2x20min) and can only train 10-15hrs a week still provides a very effective way to raise FTP. This approach has been nick named “Training for the time crunched cyclist” by Lance’s Coach Chris Carmichael.
Now there was a lot of backwards as to which approach was theoretically better, but what struck me as a comment about people who can stretch their training out to 19-22hrs a week. Where do they sit? What is the best approach for them? The LSD method won’t work as the time is too limited, but the SST approach is too intensive and can cause burnout.
So this time period falls into the black hole region, I know personally I only ever hit this amount of training on peak weeks and it is not somewhere I regularly visit. But for those that sit in this region it could be time to reassess your approach.

Fat a$$

Now I may not yet be fully back at racing weight as yet but I didn't think my a$$ was fat enough to do this.



The rails on my beloved Fizik Aliante have cracked through I suspect a combination of my saddle position on the rails (slammed right back) using a thomson seatpost, and overtightening of the bolts on the seatpost.

So after discovering the cracks I went on the hunt for a new saddle and managed to snag one of these.






A Prologo Scratch Pro TR. These are produced in limited numbers for sponsered pro riders to their specs. A first glance the saddle isn't overly light but it is under the 250gm mark.

Having fitted it up and ridden it, I can say it is comfortable but the padding is on the firm side.

On tap is a 5hr+ ride tomorrow so that will the real test.

NSW Enduro Series Announced

The dates are up for the NSW Enduro Mtb series for 2010. The race series is being run by chocolate foot Surf over to their web page and have a look. The dates are,


18 April 2010 Sunday
Singletrack Mind Series Round 1

16 May 2010 Sunday
Singletrack Mind Series Round 2

13 June 2010 Sunday
Singletrack Mind Series Round 3

29 August 2010 Sunday
Singletrack Mind Series Round 4

25 September 2010 Saturday
Singletrack Mind Series Final Round

After this lot my program for the year is choca-bloc with races. At rough count there is ~ 25 races over the 3hr mark on tap!

Smack Down

For those that might be following the coverage from the Tour of Oman, it seems the smack down was put on everyone's favourite team....Team Sky on the previous stage.

Now as a bit of a re-cap, Team Sky had the yellow jersey on the shoulders of Edvald Boasson Hagen and basically during the stage riding like a bunch of pr!cks using only half width and putting the peleton in the gutter through the feed zone.

Now there are some un-written rules in cycling, the first is you never attack through a feed zone. Now a feed zone is a dangerous enough place in the first instance, but when you have riders attacking or riding the bunch in the gutter at 65+kph it's just lethal.

The second un-written rule is you don't attack when the yellow jersey takes a nature break, well after Team Sky's previous efforts the other teams returned the favour by turning the screw when Boasson Hagen stopped for a bit of relief.

Road racing in the bigger races is about give and take, if you let someone into the echelon in the x-winds you will have the favour returned some day when you need it by them letting you in or maybe a helping hand on the climb when you're struggling.
The flip side is, if "cut" riders up and don't give an inch when you can and that gets remembered as well and will come back and bite you in the a$$ just like Team Sky

In the Post

Maxxis Medusa's 1.55

In all the pre-Husky race talk about rain, I decided I needed to add some mud tires to the arsenal as I didn't have anything. So 5 days before the event I started ringing around shops trying to find out who had what in stock.

Well from all my ringing around I concluded this was most of the importers idea on the subject, "We don't need mud tires because it doesn't rain enough". No one had anything in stock. BikeCorp don't bring the medusa into the country anymore, the distributor for Michelin don't have any in stock, and pretty much the same from the other importers.

Well given the recent conditions at the the Sydney 24hr, Threadbo national round, and conditions at Nowra on Sunday I think they need to re-think their idea.

So I placed a rush order with CRC and paid extra for UPS express shipping to try to get it here by the Friday. As things would have it.. it all turned to sh!t given time differences and the tires eventually turned up today.

So I am now the owner of a set of mud tires, now I just need a race to try them out in.....

Photo's from the Husky Course Last Sunday

Some Water


Some Mud


And some more water

These were taken from a couple of parts of the course proposed for yesterday.... after the rain.

To the Weather......

The race for tomorrow has been cancelled by the promoter to save the tracks from being decimated by 500+ riders.
I called the promoter at about 11 a.m and got "Still on modified track, all good!"
After retreating to the garage for some erg machine action, then packing the car, I checked Rotorburn and the pin had been pulled.
Now I'm not mad at the promoter... in was a good call if the tracks are fragile due to rain. Just more annoyed at the rain.

Performance Upgrade of the Week

I recently decided to change pedals back to Cranks Bro's eggbeaters due to these guys making a shorter axle to reduce the Q-factor on the pedals.

So I bought a set of SL's off Fleabay and ordered the sortened Ti axles and finally got all the parts yesterday.

So below are some pictures during the upgrade.



Egg Beaters pre-tuning


Ward Industries Ti Axles


The Standard Crank Bro's Axles


Post Upgrade

So total weight savings of 44 grams and a 8mm narrower Q-Factor

On the Menu for Sunday

From looking at the long range forecast there its going to be a wet/ muddy race on Sunday for the Husky 100k. Have to go sort some tires out...thinking Maxxis Ignitors

The New Definition of Epic

Quote for the day.

“Epic” is not training 180km in the rain. “Epic” is training 180km in the rain then waking up the next morning and doing it again, then again, then again….

Chasing Legends Trailer

From the guys that bought us 24Solo is their next masterpiece "Chasing Legends" Out May 2010

Sometimes all's ya can do...is all ya can do!

Sutton Road Course

Yesterday was CORC's XC race at Sutton Road, a course I had previously placed first in Sport B Men late last year when I had some reasonable form.
The day dawned cool and overcast, the outlook was for a chance of showers but nothing arrived during the morning.
All the pre-race activities went smoothly with no dramas, and I got a pre-ride in of the course to ensure that I there were no surprises lurking anywhere. The lap went OK other then getting lost after following a junior off course (yeah I know look at the markings rather than the rider!)

The start was the usual bottom of the fire road deal and off the line I got swamped, falling back as far as 12th before the single track. Having ridden here a couple of times, I knew that it was really easy to go too hard too early so I slowly set about picking riders off one by one.

After about the first 1/2 lap I knew I wasn't on a good day, there felt like not much in the engine and my bike piloting skills had gone out the window.

So I just kept plugging away picking riders off to move up into 6th place with 2 laps gone.

There were a couple of spectacular crashes through the race due to the combination of wet and dry loose conditions. The loose stuff wasn't the normal bull dust more marble sized rocks for a change. My front tire choice (Maxxis Rendez, good for Stromlo, sh!t for here) almost had me on the ground 4-5 times, with one of them having think that a shammy change might be necessary.

So after making 6th spot I could see 5th place just up the trail but wasn't making any in roads. So it was a case of keeping the pressure on and watching the laps count down.

So the overall result was 6th, but this doesn't really tell the true tail of the race.

Analysis
So on the way home I had the normal cyclist things running through my head when you don't get the result you want, "I need to train harder!", "More intervals!", "I need to train longer!", "Loose weight".etc etc

However after calming down and properly reflecting on things, I thought I would wait until I had a proper look at the numbers before passing judgement.


So first up is the raw number from the race, The normalised power is higher than I expected and most of the durations seem to be OK... so the problems not there.


Raw Numbers from WKO

Next up was to perform a MFA on this race and the previous and see where the differences lie.
So as you can see the numbers are almost identical the normalized power is in fact a touch higher this time around but the overall speed for the race is down. So there is nothing conclusive power wise to draw from here. It maybe that I struggled more with the track conditions this time through with the mixture of wet & dry... but I'm not sure.



Multi File Analysis Graph

The final area I had a look at was the quadrant analysis, an it's here that I spotted that there had been a shift in my high end pedalling. The graph showed that there was an ~ 6% shift from quadrant I to quadrant II. So effectively from high force/high cadence to high force/ low cadence. Now whether this can be attributed to the "sluggish" feeling during the race i.e no snap I'm not sure but it is the only measurable difference between the two files.


Quadrant Analysis

So in summary, while I was slower than the previous race on this course my power output was on par with my previous performance. So what does it mean? Well "sometimes all's ya can do...is all ya can do", we as athletes put alot of pressure on ourselves and sometimes forget that there are things outside our control ie other's performances that we have no influence on.
In this instance there were five people who had a better day than me on the day.

Footnote: Looking at the results from the race and the top-3 from Sports B men all out performed the winner of Sports A men and would have placed mid field in the Open Men's category.

The Secret Herbs + Spices

No I'm not going to talk about KFC.... though they do have this back on the menu



As I mentioned here, Dr Cogan is back in the lab re-designed the TSS metric from the ground up.

Today he released another teaser,



Blue points are from structured or unstructured workouts at levels 2-5. Red points are from races and from level 6-7 training sessions. TSS was modeled after Banister's TRIMP, and attempts to express power data in terms of the stress that is applied. The new score, OTOH, was designed from the "ground up" based on first principles as a predictor of training-induced improvements in performance.

What this seems to be showing is that some things (crits, circuit races, L6/L7) are in fact NOT as good training as others given the same amount of training stress. That is, 1 extra point of TSS in L6/L7/Crits only gives a 0.46 extra boost in the new performance index, whereas 1 extra point of TSS in L2-L5 training/TTs/ road races gives a 0.76 boost in the new performance index.


I guess the obvious question becomes: is the new performance index intentionally biased toward adaptations that increase FTP (as opposed to, say, strength or Anaerobic Capacity)? Is it trying to measure more directly how much impact your training/races contribute toward improving FTP.....

2007 Flèche Wallonne

The other night I pulled out one of my older WCP DVD's and threw it on and settled back on the couch. The race was 2007 Flèche Wallonne, a race I had seen a couple of times before so knew the results.
But as the placings list was put up at the finish something grabbed my eye, this is the top ten:

1 Davide Rebellin (Ita) Gerolsteiner 4.48.06 (42.173 km/h)
2 Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Caisse d'Epargne 0.06
3 Danilo Di Luca (Ita) Liquigas
4 Matthias Kessler (Ger) Astana 0.08
5 Riccardo Riccò (Ita) Saunier Duval-Prodir
6 Rinaldo Nocentini (Ita) Ag2r Prévoyance 0.13
7 Fränk Schleck (Lux) Team CSC 0.16
8 John Gadret (Fra) Ag2r Prévoyance 0.19
9 Robert Gesink (Ned) Rabobank
10 Tadej Valjavec (Slo) Lampre-Fondital

Can anyone see it??????


Yes thats right the top 5 have all been done for dope in the following two years,

Rebellin for Cera at the 2008 Olympics
Valverde for involvement in OPeration Puerto
Di Luca for the Oil for Drugs scandle, then for Cera during 2009 Giro
Kessler for testosterone
Ricco for Cera...and being a general douchebag

And the thing was watching these five go up the final climb of the Mur de Huy you could see that they were on something just the way they literally rode away from the others up a 20% climb.

Sad really.....

Cool Pic of the Day

Credit: CXMagazine