I'll write more tomorrow when I'm feeling less nauseus after a smashing at Spin tonight.  The data (after a heavy set of deadlifts yesterday) - Ppeak : 1459w, Torque : 202.9 N-m.  Peak cadence (using the wild guess Powertap, but the graph shows it might be right) 198rpm.

That'll do.  Sleep .. trashed now ..

I appologise for being a bit quiet, after I got back from Adelaide I've had a lot of real-world work to do to keep the debt collectors away and also we had the (fantastic!) SSS round 3,  that sucks a lot of time.  Things will be 'normal' soon.

Thankyou to everyone that was a part of our Spin Sessions this last winter.  In particular I need to thank Bev Vennix for all her help with transport and cleaning up, Karen and Merv for help with setting everything up and also cleaning and Lucie for helping me to make the UberBolla, which kept getting bigger and hotter as we got more and more people coming.

Nathan Larkin did a great job running at first the warmup and as he got more comfortable, more of the sessions themselves which meant I could concentrate on the second sprint group and make sure Em, Jamie and Merv got their dose of hurt.

Along the way Jamie Dann, Em, Dino and Merv also helped dish out the lollies and refill bidons, stir the bolla and generally help out with the roll and collecting the cash. The new DUCCs were noisy and enthusiastic, but guys, get fluid trainers for next winter, those wind trainers are LOUD!  The group's most satisfying thing, to me at least, is having Tom Leaper training with us, riding next to novices and people who will never race a bike.  That says that we have a program that's suited to a very wide range of abilities and desires and a great bunch of people.

I count this winter's Spin as an overwhelming success.  Our record attendance was 31 riders and if we got less than 25 we were surprised.  We were part of some riding successes, many of you who came won races, made state teams and moved up grades and our program contributed to your success.  Without everyone coming along the sessions would have been a flop, thank you to everyone that came along to share the suffering.

We'll be back next year, same format, same price, same place, same time.  For summer, we have our fortnightly 'Summer Spin Sessions" which will be on Thursday evenings from 7:15-8:30pm, shorter and sharper but still ending in a meal.  For dates etc see this website.

Thank you again for being part of it.

From this extract titled "Rower's High"

Physical exercise is known to stimulate the release of endorphins, creating a mild sense of euphoria that has rewarding properties. Using pain tolerance (a conventional non-invasive assay for endorphin release), we show that synchronized training in a college rowing crew creates a heightened endorphin surge compared with a similar training regime carried out alone. This heightened effect from synchronized activity may explain the sense of euphoria experienced during other social activities (such as laughter, music-making and dancing) that are involved in social bonding in humans and possibly other vertebrates.

That might explain why it's much easier to train hard on an ergo (and keep coming back for more!) at our Spin sessions than on your own.

Amongst other things we spoke about on Tuesday, Tom asked "why are Tabatas only 8 reps?".  I had to tell the truth, I don't know.  Maybe quality dies off after 8 and there's no return?  That's the protocol and so that's what we did.  But.... We're always open to suggestions, so now there's a new drill, the Tomabata!  It's 10 reps of a Tabata interval (20s on/10s recovery) where a normal Tabata is 8 reps for 4 minutes in total.  Eh ghads!  5 minutes of torture!  Ok A stream'ers, when you're lying in pools of your own vomit at Spin next week, blame Tom, it was his idea!

I had a good chat with Tom Leaper last night at Spin and was very happy and surprised  when he told me he found the sessions more useful than crits and would like to do some over summer.  This adds to the impetus to do some form of group ergo training over summer, once our regular winter Tuesday night spin sessions finish at the end of September.

Tom liked the idea of once a fortnight on Thursdays, he doesn't race at Sandown on Thursday nights so that would work for him.  Tuesdays will not be viable as many of you will be racing at Sandown with CCCC and the rest of us will be doing track work either at BBN or DISC on Tuesdays.  Thursday does present a problem for me, it's my long-standing 'boys night' with the lads, but it may be possible to do both, and just be late to the pizzafest.

So .... Thursdays once a fortnight at Blackburn from 7pm?  Maybe?  I'll need votes, so please let me know if this interests you.  Blackburn runs a novice track program on Thursdays but I think we could overlap with that with no issues, but I'll confirm at tonight's committee meeting.

Those of you that come along to the Tuesday Spin sessions may or may not notice, but each week we increase the amount of chilli in the sauce.  This is because I like chilli!  It's also because chilli is good for you.

Don't believe me?  Fair enough - wise people don't believe anything they're told by random unqualified bloggers without further investigation.  So here's some supporting material.

http://www.theage.com.au/national/hot-news-chilli-may-be-answer-to-your-ills-20090902-f8fh.html

From the article :

CHILLI could one day replace aspirin for the prevention and treatment of diabetes and cardiovascular disease, according to University of Tasmania scientists who are looking at the way the spicy fruit affects the blood.

A research fellow at the university's school of life sciences, Kiran Ahuja, said the two active ingredients in chilli - capsaicin and dihydrocapsaicin - have the potential to lower blood glucose and insulin levels, reduce the formation of fatty deposits in artery walls and prevent blood clots.

So how about that! It's also reportedly good for ulcers (not causing them .. curing them!) and is full of vitamin C.  Is it like oxy-shots?  No, this stuff is real!

 And on another front, I dropped in at Andrew Steele's Croydon bike shop yesterday to get some glue for the new wheel (which hasn't arrived yet ...) and we spoke about the series - he's keen, his track bike was out in the shop getting some attention. 

While discussing it I was bemoaning the fact that no wholesalers wanted to be involved, not even FRF, who I though would given that they've just started importing FFWD wheels (which are the same wheels as Bouwmeester who have a local reputation) and that they'd have a captive audience of 30 sprinters who will drool over a 5 spoke and a disk wheel and would be very tempted ....  You can lead a horse to water and so on ... Even the big article in Ride didn't sway the position.  So Andrew offered to help out.  The series will now be the aboc Summer Sprint Series (aSSS!) presented by Riviera Cycles and AvantiPlus Croydon.  Andrew is sponsoring the series with a high end pair of Specialized S-Works shoes which will be our runner-up prize, and Gary Jackson from Riviera and I are going 50% on a nice set of carbon track wheels he's (Gary) building.

 So that's boxed up and sorted now, which is a big load off my mind.  Now I have to rally the troops (the volunteers!) to get everyone fired up for a great series this summer.

This week I got unstuck doing squats, I'd been bogged down at 185kg for about 3 weeks, not able to consistently get three sets of three with any sort of form.  This week I bit the bullet and got up to 190kg, and have now done two sessions of 190x3x3's.  That's ok ... Tuesday's turnout at Spin was healthy despite the dreadful weather that kept a number of people home, wisely choosing not to travel.  Tonight at DISC I suspect I'll be pretty slow - Yesterday's squats have significantly disrupted homeostasis and I'm feeling very flat!  Thanks to Hans Seyle ...

I've seen a draft of the full article for October's Ride Cycling Review and it looks pretty snazzy.

We have to plan ahead to summer now.  Our DISC and spin sessions will be winding up at the end of September and two of the DISC sessions in September won't run, the 6th because it'll be father's day and many regulars won't make it and the 20th because that's the practice day for the 2009-2010 SSS.  So what'll we do over summer?  Last summer we did some unstructured sessions at Blackburn on Sundays and also at DISC on occasion, but this summer there seems to be a bit more demand.  We also ran a Tuesday morning session at BBN last summer which worked well, and we may revive that one.

We've built some really good momentum at Spin over winter with, as mentioned, huge numbers (peaked at 31!) and it would be a shame to lose all that, but I'm not sure how we'd fit anything in.  Over summer there's crits on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursdays where most of the racing riders will be, and the trackies will be doing afternoons at Blackburn or evenings at DISC if they're not doing more endurance stuff on the road, but the DUCCs and a few of the non-racing people want to keep going. I'm welcome to your suggestions please.  Remember Blackburn's Summer of Track on Saturday afternoons and of course (how could you forget?!) the Summer Sprint Series for the sprinters.

I'm thinking we might do a race skills (road bikes and/or track bikes) on Saturday mornings again.  Maybe once a fortnight?  It's a trip for some, but for others it might be worth doing and maybe we can sell the idea a bit - I have a basic syllabus that I developed for the DUCC sessions that can be expanded on and fine-tuned and with some marketing may be worth doing more of.  No-one actually teaches race-craft that I'm aware of except us and that's a possible way to not only keep the regulars involved over summer if they're not racers, but also to allow more honing of race skills for those who do race but want to work on tactical development.  Again, if you're interested or have any suggestions, contact me please!

Over the last two days I've lifted :

3,2,3 squats at 185kg (one more rep than last week's best effort) on Tuesday just before Spin.

10 x 150kg squats yesterday and then 5 x 162.5kg deadlifts.

Today, easy spin to CS-M and back on the bike and maybe some ergo time tonight if I get the chance. It's windy, the ride to CS-M will be directly into a big headwind! Lucky it's only 2km!

Got to go, or I'll be late for work!

At last nights (record again, 31 people!) Spin, Vanders (that's Angles to the 9:23-am'ers out there, if any of you read this) came to train.  Not much of a big deal, he's a regular, but the difference, a few days before he'd binned it snowboarding and broken his arm.

I'm certainly not one to say train when you're injured if it'll impede your recovery at all, but that's a pretty HAF effort from Vanders!

We had a huge night, I'd had some bizarre premonition that we'd have a big turnout, despite the A stream having two Tabata intervals to do (they were warned!), so Lucie and I had arranged an extra-big pot for pasta and I'd made the biggest bolla I've ever made on Monday, 3kg of mince beef, 4 big cans of crushed tomatoes, 3 big jars of tomato paste, 2 kg of mushrooms... It was heavy ... anyway ... A few regulars weren't coming, but a few newbies came along and most of the regulars were there too .. so thirty one people.  No need for a heater, we had to open the big sliding door to keep the place cool and make room for them all. Nathan and I were stuffed at the end of the night, even with the megaphone it was hard to communicate.  The noise during the final E3 rampup was ... significant!

I wonder how many we'll have next week?

The DUCC training session this morning went well too, they quickly got the point of blocking and how to spot blocking, when to use it and how to do it such that it's harder to detect than just soft pedaling on the front.  They're a good crew and very keen to learn, working with them is a real pleasure.

Warming in the 'Haus I felt pretty flat, got a headache and generally still snotty and clogged up from this lingering 'flu.  The aim, 3 x 3 @ 185kg.  The result?  1 x 185kg, and only just!  So technically I got the PB, but I didn't get any reps or sets at it.  Will try again tomorrow if I feel ok.  I finished off with some light cleans and snatches so I felt like I'd done something at least ... Now off to Spin to see how that goes.  At this rate, pretty shabby, I bet!

In a winter that keeps breaking records, we've just notched up our biggest Tuesday Spin Session yet.  It seems the harder we make the sessions, the more people come.  We had 28 in total last night, 5 sprinters and the rest doing various enduro streams and it was huge.  The Blackburn clubrooms are proving to be TARDIS-like, we can keep finding room for more spinners.  I'm glad I made a big bolla, it all went!  The A stream had 3/4 Tabatas to do and mostly survived intact, we haven't been able to break Tom Leaper yet, but next week, maybe ... We missed Andrew Jordan, and wish him all the best for a rapid recovery and also wish Bridgette Thomas good luck and good speed for the Vics this weekend.

We didn't have any takers for the Tuesday night Tour watching, but it was a school night.  Sitting at home watching it on the little TV afterwards Lucie and I were amazed and thrilled at the plays up the final climb and the stunning descent.  When Armstrong bridged up to the leaders after getting dropped ... wow!  Class.  Our last Tour night will be Ventoux, the beast.  This Saturday.  It should be brilliant.

This morning the mighty DUCCs trained at Blackburn and we worked on leadouts and started learning how to throw the bike, before finishing with a couple of 2 on 1's to get them thinking race tactics.  The weather was good, cold and a bit windy at first but it soon warmed up once the sun poked over the clouds and a good session was had by all.

Tonight most of the Sprint Squad will be over in the powerHaus for their usual Wednesday strength training session too, so as usual, it's all go at aboc HQ!

I'd like to thank Dino, Ann and Emily Apolito, they brought back some goodies that they gave to me from their trip overseas - including an aboc Sprint Squad t-shirt!.

Thankyou.

I've just put together the 13th spin session program for this winter, the A stream riders get their first full Tabata interval session.  The rest of the A stream for that evening is easier than it would be normally, but the Tabatas are sufficiently brutal that I don't think any will complain.  We'll fine-tune these as we progress and any feedback is much appreciated.

I've still got lingering and unpleasant flu-cold symptoms, so may not be able to train much for the remainder of this week - generally coughing up lumps isn't considered compatible with training.  Still ... these things are temporary and I'll be better soon.  I'm consistently repping out 180kg squats now, and did a set of 160kg deadlifts on Wednesday in the 'Haus, so that's not too bad, and on Tues at Spin I got a 1440 watt effort, which considering I'd just squatted sets of 180kg and was (and am!) crook, I'm happy with.  Last winter that would have been a PB, so being able to grind that out when tired and unwell is a good sign for this coming summer.

The 'Haus has been busy this week too, I've had the Sprint Squad, some of the DUCCs and a few friends over as well.  Teaching them Rip's squat.  I think they'll be moaning today.  DOMS is an old friend we know well!

Last night's Spin session had another big turnout, 23 brave souls attended and we missed a few regulars who couldn't make it.  The sprinters had a strength and power set to do, and the enduros had the usual mixed bag of intervals.  The A stream had their first crack at Tabata intervals.  They only had to do one half-Tabata (2 minutes) but that did enough to result in a few suggesting that they needed a rest afterwards - and they do! 

They'll be doing 3/4 Tabatas next week and the week after, full 4 minute Tabatas, but as we incorporate more of that stratospheric intensity stuff we'll have to reduce the volume, so the A stream will be finishing early when we do that stuff, it's simply too hard to recover from and get any sort of quality out of the remaining time.

As usual Nathan did a great job taking the warmup while I did the sprint stream, banging elbows with Dino, and then we switched over so he got some enduro work in while I took over the megaphone for the rest of the evening.  We finished with the traditional spag boll and Nath's wife had made us a bunch of very yummy chocolate brownies which were rapidly vaporized by the hungry riders. 

Tonight some of the Sprint Squad are heading over to the powerHaus for more strength work and this morning we had the DUCCs at the Blackburn velodrome doing race skills. It's all go at aboc HQ this week!

Adding to the stable of serious spin trainers .. we now have I think 6 Kurt Kinetic Road Machine spin trainers for use at our Spin Sessions. Quite a few of them, and a Cyclops Fluid 2 and a Cyclops ProFluid.  The KKRM is the best of them, so we keep getting them.  They're indestructable and generally the best spin trainer we've ever tried, including the BT ergo, I think the KKRM is a better trainer than that.  They're not cheap, RRP is around $800 these days, but worth every cent.  I know when I pop a KKRM under a rider at a Spin session they will get a solid workout with no reliability issues.

And on another front, Trek/Bontrager have not been able to sponsor the Summer Sprint Series for 2009-2010, so we're in the hunt for a new series sponsor, and rumour has it we may get a write-up in Ride Cycling Review sometime over summer also.

Yesterday one of our Spin attendees called me, asking if we'd sell her copies of the spin program we run on Tuesday because she liked it and couldn't make it after moving to the country.  I'd never thought of selling it, but certainly we can give it out.  So, from now on, every spin session will be documented online so you can see what we did, and do it yourself if you feel like it. We already do that for our DISC sessions, this seems a logical extension to that.  Look here for the sessions for 2009. 

If I get sufficiently organised, we'll have the sessions planned beforehand so you can see what we're going to do.  That might scare people away though ... Heh!

I've spent a bit of time knocking up a website for the Eildon Junior Tour.  It's a basic Plone site, no frills, content is king ... Anyway ... After a relaxing and totally bike-free few days at Bonnie Doon, it's back to the millstone today.  The plan is a set of medium weights in the 'haus at about 4pm, then spin like a loon in the sprinters stream at Spin tonight.  Tomorrow, if my legs are ok from today, lift heavy - I've done a couple of sets of 3 reps at 170kg squats now, it's time to up the volume and go for 5's before I bump the weight up.  The 3's felt reasonably easy last week which is a good sign.

Nathan ran DISC on Sunday for me, it'll be good to hear how that went from him and some of the others who went along.  It'll be back to me running it this Sunday though, so no rest for the keen.

News from the Apolitos is that they've got a nice view in some village in France.  Very nice ... No bikes yet though. 

After about a week of 'flu and general malaise, I'm just about right.  I had a gentle ride on Saturday and didn't feel awful, which was good, and did some light lifting in the 'haus on Sunday morning which also went well.  Lucie and I spent Sunday afternoon at my Dad's place in Baxter using the flame weeder to kill weeds around his pool and start some burnoff fires.  Very much fun!  Tomorrow morning is supposed to be the second DUCC training session at Blackburn but the BoM says :

Forecast for Tuesday

Cloudy. Isolated showers during the morning, becoming more widespread during the day. The chance of thunderstorms with hail from midday. Possible snow about the nearby hills at night. Winds northwesterly averaging up to 30 km/h increasing to 30 to 40 km/h during the morning then tending west to southwesterly around midday.

As I've mentioned before, aboc has been asked to, and is, providing a set of 10 one-hour training sessions at Blackburn for the Deakin Uni Cycling Club.  We're also sponsoring them a little, aboc IT Consulting is hosting their web site.  The forecast is ok ... it might be cold but probably dry.

The BoM says :

Forecast for Tuesday

Cloudy. Dry for much of the day although a lttle patchy rain at times. Light northeast to southeast winds.

On the list of things we need to get (including a track power meter and some bumper plates) was a megaphone.  We used to use the Blackburn one at Spin sessions, but it's missing or broken or both so we needed to get one.  Especially with the Deakin lads with wind trainers, it's very very noisy at spin when the sprint is on.  Nath and I were reduced to a scraping whisper at the end of last week's spin session.  Not any more!

We keep getting more people at our spin sessions.  Last Tuesday we had 24 spinners, a new record for our sessions.  People are overflowing out the door and more want to come.  If everyone shows up we'll need a bigger venue and I'll need a bigger pot to make the dinner in.  We're already up to a 2.5kg mince beef and 2kg of mushrooms feed and that's about the limit of my big cauldron.

Yesterday we had the Sprint Squad in the 'Haus and it was heavy strength day.  Everyone set new PB's in their lifts and I felt good, so went for 3 x 3 @170kg squats, and I got 'em!  Woo hoo!  We also did benchpress and deadlifts to finish off, I got 5 deadlifts at 150kg too, which was a new PB for that lift as well.  The others all PB'd in everything too.  A very solid session.

Afterwards we had a thankyou BBQ for all those that helped out at last summer's Sprint Series.  aboc put on the bangers and bread and some chilli chickenwings and a good time was had by all who made it.  It was particularly good to see the Dundii again and to get a chance to thank Ann Apolito and Sue Dundas for their work last year and of course Lucie for her photography, my Dad came too (he was a photographer at one round) and had a good time.

Today we had the first round of the Blackburn time trial series for 2009.  I was pretty anxious about this, we'd had some 60 pre-entries and were expecting more to roll up and enter on the day.  Blackburns' reputation for running time trials is .. unfortunate .. over the years a number of high profile events have gone awry and with a huge field I was pretty concerned that things would go wrong, but Richard Stringer put together a great team and everything went faultlessly, or at least appeared to, and that's all that matters!  In the end some 110 riders raced the time trial and the results were done within 10 minutes of the last rider finishing.  Fantastic.  They need to be put up on the club's website ASAP too (very important these days!).  Hopefully that will have been taken care of also.

Em and I rode the big aboc Trek T1000 tandem in the time trial and I'm pretty sure we came dead last, but we did win the tandem division.  My alarm didn't go off and I was lucky that I woke up at 6:55, but I didn't have time for breakfast, having to fly out the door.  I rode the tandem solo to the city, along the way hooking up with Bev and Karen who both delighted in dropping me on every hill!  Hungry like the wolf but no food, I rode the ITT with Em and we did a solid E3 effort, then on the ride home (again solo on the tandem) I bonked ... Groveling up Whitehorse Road at 15km/h wasn't fun.  The refueling process was started as soon as I got home, we're training at DISC tonight and I need some matches to burn!