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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

For the last two days I've been over here in Adelaide, at the Superdrome and some motel close by, looking after the Victorian NTID sprint squad as part of the NTID sprint camp that's running here for four days.

I've been lucky enough to work with Sean Eadie (who regular readers will know of) and Bryce Mitchell who's one of the WA NTID coaches, running a couple of training sessions on the track and also generally looking after the squad.  I've got 10 riders in my direct care, and while we have support from Josh (NTID co-ordinator) it's a daunting task.   To put it in context, we'll have to do two days of racing (sprinting, which is very coach-intensive) with my squad having just me to look after them, after two days of training sessions and other 'camp stuff'. The state squad, which isn't that much bigger, has three coaches and two mechanics and a host of family people to help out.  And they reckon they're over-worked!  Heh!

This is not a complaint,  I'm loving the opportunity to learn from these kids and also the other coaches, I roomed with Sean last night and we had some really good talks on sprint training philosophy and so on which I hope will end up with Sean and I co-authoring "the" book on sprint training ("the" book because there isn't one at the moment).  I've got Gary West's (national sprint coach) list of sprint drills to add in to our standardisation project that you can see a glimpse of here.  We have to dispel the old ways (no, sprinters do NOT need to do lots of road miles and race road in winter, that SLOWS THEM DOWN! FFS!).  I'm thrilled to be on the same page as Sean on this and we'll be able to work together to drag a lot of the current coaching practices for sprint out of the dark ages.

I'm incredibly fortunate to have been given this opportunity by Hilton and the guys at the NTID.  Today I got to assist (in a very minor way, I was just a start-line holder for a drill) the AIS team training, getting to work with champions like Anna and Kaarle is just brilliant.

We're going to be seriously under the pump tomorrow, the racing starts and there's a full afternoon-evening's sprinting for all my guys and also research to carry out on how the other guys are racing and so on.  The kids have to manage their food for the afternoon/evening on their own, we're taking them on a 'guided shopping trip' tomorrow to help them choose foods that they can race on during a long block of track time, then lunch, then in to the track at ~1pm.  We don't expect to get out of there 'till 10pm or so, then a very late dinner and back at 8am on Sunday for more. 

It's my job to look after them all, get them in the right state of mind, manage any incidents, provide pre-race tactical support and post-race debriefing.  I'm very excited by the opportunity and the pressure and it's going to be a blast. I have a great team of riders to work with and we're all going to work together.  Don't call me, I'll be busy!  Bring it on.

Every time you do a drill that involves crossing a finishing line, throw your bike.

Really.

Every. Single. Time.

Make it automatic, a reflex.

Races get won and lost at the throw.  At the end of a race it has to just happen.  Make a habit of it now.

I had to defer the DUCCs session this morning due to rain.  Given that it's freezing cold outside and windy it's a good day for being indoors.  I've just been to the butcher to get the 4.5kg of mince beef for tonight's spag boll for Spin and it's bloody cold out!  So today's jobs - work on sprintTracker to get it to the point where I can (still with a lot of manual hacking) enter some individual efforts into the database.  I'm also going to keep chipping away at the sprint drills page.

I did get a good chance to speak with Martin Barras last week, his sprint progression is this :

1. strength
2. power
3. acceleration
4. speed
5. speed-endurance

He has his sprinters gym work set to lead the program by around two weeks.  For example :

In a strength block, they're concentrating on strength in the gym and on the bike (squats, deadlifts, legpress (if you must ...) in the gym, K1's on the bike).  They max out on strength in the gym about two weeks before they do on the bike, and start working on power (cleans, snatch, hang clean pulls, clean pulls, ballistic leg press etc) before they switch the emphasis over to power on the bike, and so on.  The rough gym to bike matchup is this :

I'm going to see if I can get more information about the gym work that Craig Colduck used during the speed and speed-endurance blocks.  Craig wrote a famous article that I have a copy of here.  I'd also like to compare this to how Gary West is programming these days and also John Beasley.  There's many ways to skin the cat!

Following the "if you want to rise to the top, start in the mail room" philosophy, I've started at the bottom as a sprint coach, as a lowly assistant coach to the NTID here in Victoria.  It's a great opportunity to learn from Hilton and also as many other sprint coaches as I can.  Along the way I'm documenting sprint drills to a level of detail that should make them useful.

You can see a sample here : The motorbike double-jump.

The plan is to document all the sprint drills I come across, get power data from them, draw diagrams, use animations where necessary and useful etc.  This will take place here mainly, but hopefully will end up being used as guidelines (in some form or other) for sprint coaches in all of Australia to use as drills.  ie: we'll have a reasonably consistent naming and implementation system across the country, so a rider training with us in Melbourne can go over to Perth and know what an MACC or a K1 or a windout is and it'll be basically the same drill.

Remembering , of course, that these drills are not what sprint coaching is all about, in the same way that a spanner is not what being a mechanic is all about.  They're tools to do a job, I want to catalog and describe them to a level of detail that as far as I'm aware, hasn't been done yet.

I'm pretty pleased.  Apart from a positive trend in my peak power output (up, not as much as I'd like, but still consistently going up is good, after a bit of a slump for a few months) I got offered a paid position with the NTID on Tuesday night when I was up at the AIS at the NTID coaching conference.  I didn't want to write about it here until I'd had a chance to talk to a few friends about it.  It's a very part-time position working as an assistant to Hilton Clarke with the Victorian NTID sprint squad.  This is basically what I've been doing for the last few months and it's been recognised by the guys at the NTID and they've committed to paying me to continue to do it.

As you can imagine, I'm very happy about this.  Paid coaching positions are few and far between and this is a great opportunity to develop further as a sprint coach and learn so much more, with a little bit of financial help.  I've done a lot of hours (I guess at roughly 250 hours since February, ~20 weeks, ~13 hours a week, give or take) helping that squad so far for 'free' (really, it's like being at school, I don't expect to get paid when I'm learning and aren't really a lot of use) as well as a bit of paid work while Hilton's been having his knee replaced, which will soon be over. Hilts will be back on deck and I'm sure the guys in the squad will be glad to have him back. 

I've done my best but I'm far from perfect when it comes to running some of the drills, in particular some of the motorpacing stuff is quite tricky to get right and I have a lot of practice and instruction to receive before I'm competent.  Getting the pacing right is critical in drills like motorbike entries, each rider needs a different entry speed, different rate of acceleration and so on, and some need me to go very fast indeed (getting close to 80km/h) which I'm still not comfortable doing.  I hit 80km/h on Saturday pacing one of them, and that's scary-fast on the velodrome on a motorbike.  In some ways it'll be frustrating to have to go back to being the assistant at the training sessions when I've been running the show for about a month, but I'll suck it up and it'll be a good, humbling experience when it happens.

Martin Barras (former Australian Sprint coach) is going to be at DISC on Thursday as part of the level 2 coaching course that's running there at the moment and I'm going to sit in on his session (and not ask any questions, ok!  Yes I will behave, Brendan!) and see what interesting things he has to say.  At the level 2 course I did back in November last year in Adelaide, Craig Colduck was one of the presenters.  Craig was Martin's strength coach and we got the chance to see a lot of the nuts and bolts of his programming style, getting a chance to see how Martin did it directly from him will be great.

We had a good turnout at our DISC session tonight too, I'm pleased to see growth in our little sprint group, I'm gradually handing over the reins to Nathan for the enduro programming and session running, having two of us means I can concentrate on my sprinters while Nath looks after the enduros, so far it's working well and I think everyone who attends is benefitting from having the two of us working together.

We're running an invitational sprint round at DISC on the 9th of July too, which I need a few more riders to attend, if you're interested you can read about it (and the invitational criteria!) here.

And ... I'm going to the AIS/NTID sprint camp in Adelaide in mid July to help out, I'll miss one of our DISC sessions, but Nathan's ok to run it on his own and the sprinters will have plenty of stuff to do without me.

Finally, I've got more track powertaps to play with, I think we've got, between myself, Hilton, the VIS and NTID six of them.  I swapped over the axles in two of the VIS ones today to use studs (conventional track nuts) from the rather fiddly bolts they originally came with.  Darryl Perkins is building the most recent pair of hubs into two more wheels which we should have in a week or two.

It's all go ....

I had to leave the NTID conference early on Wednesday, missing a few interesting talks, hopefully there'll be a DVD or at least a booklet summarising the ones I missed, which looked pretty worthwhile.  I came home in a little (80 seater) turboprop plane chock-full of families with babies (why?!)  but survived the ordeal of daddy encouraging little Johnny kicking the chair in front of him without having to channel Hilton on daddy .. Just ..

We had a solid night in at DISC with the NTID squad, it was bloody cold, started at about 12 or so degrees and warmed up(!) to about 14 by the late afternoon.  This meant that times would be a bit slower, but everyone rode well and it was a good session.

Thank you to Stewart Lucy for running the spin session for me on Tuesday, and to Dino for heating the bolla to feed the troops.

I'll get the next track and spin session programs up soon, and am looking forward to a good flaying on Sunday at DISC with the aboc Sprint Squad!

One of the over-riding themes of the NTID conference so far has been the "X-factor", which isn't physiological (unless you consider brain/personality physical, which you may well do, and I may agree with ... but anyway ..).  I've touched on this myself recently.

I'm still not sure ... The x-factor is best defined as dedication and passion, and much seems to be made of the fact that the most dedicated athletes (and ballet dancers, violinists etc ...) are the ones who reach the elite level.  As a result, there's been a bit of a cultural shift in the talent ID process, they're (we're!) trying to focus on x-factor stuff more.  I agree that it's important and much is made of how much and how well someone trains leading to their elite-level performance.  But is the tail wagging the dog?  I suspect to a certain extent it is.  The kids that naturally do very well (the talented ones!) get positive feedback, so they enjoy their pursuit, they then practice more and smarter, and get better.  But they have to have talent first, I think.  The feedback loop seems to be being forgotten or overlooked in the haste to redefine selection criteria.   Not always is it the most talented physically (sometimes for them it's too easy, which leads itself to complacency or fear of failure), but I suspect that the current emphasis on the X factor may be taking things too far, and most coaches gut feeling would probably reflect this. 

Interesting stuff all the same...

While the NTID isn't paying me, I am getting a few perks.  I'm off to Canberra (sitting at Tulla at the moment in the departure lounge) for a two day conference on talent ID at the AIS.  Some interesting speakers, on I'm looking forward to is a bloke from the air force who's going to talk on the things they look for in fighter pilots.  If it's as interesting as the talk at the NTID Cycling conference in Adelaide in May by the police psychologist it'll be excellent.  I have to leave early (on a little Dash-8!) to get back in time to be Hilton-Virtual at the NTID training session at DISC on Wednesday, but will still get the keynote speakers.

This does mean I miss Spin tonight, but that's ok, I did the ergo session yesterday on my recovery day so my sprinters, I have hurt like you will and it is good!

See you when I get back ....

Over the last few months I've collected quite a bit of data from the NTID and aboc sprint squad sessions with track power meters.  We haven't done anything with the data yet, but just collecting and having a quick look at it.

Now the data isn't perfect, but it's reasonably good and I'm going to use it to try and sort out which of the drills we use at track training are the best at producing overload.

Huh?

In the gym, we manipulate three main variables - intensity (how heavy the weight is), volume (how many times we move it and how far) and recovery (how much time you get between reps and sets).

This is because we want to overload at least one of these variables every time, to disturb homeostatis and drive an improvement.

On the bike, we need to do the same thing.  We need to manipulate intensity, volume and recovery - but we don't have the same easy way of manipulating intensity that we do in the gym.  With, for example a squat or a power-clean, we just add more weight to the bar.  Simple .. We can micro-load with humiliator-plates if we need to (0.5kg plates, everyone loves the humiliators - they're tiny, but they make it so much harder!).  Up goes intensity.  The other two variables are trivially easy to manipulate as well.

On the bike, how do we do that?  Up the gears?  Ok, except that we never really get a 'fail' on the bike, the rider can turn any gear we put under them (on a velodrome anyway).  Up the speed, by chasing a motorcycle or another rider etc, and up the cadence by using small gears at high speeds.  These are all ways to do it, but I don't think we've ever really looked closely at how well they work.  The traditional sprint drills we use are all based on experience (which is not to be discounted!).  Now we're collecting a lot of data, we can start to see which drills get the best overload events out of our athletes - which ones produce the highest peak power, for example, or the highest power at a specific cadence range, the highest torque and so on.

Hopefully with some careful analysis of the data I've collected, with a bit of help from Dr Dan at the VIS, we'll be able to identify which of the drills we use are the best at overloading our athletes so we can train them smarter.  Watch this space!

Many of you by now know that I'm working for the National Talent ID in an ad-hoc sort of way, indirectly anyway, as Hilton Clarke's assistant.  The sprinters, mainly (I'm still doing a little enduro work, but nothing sophisticated).  I've now spent a considerable amount of time with the sprint squad here in Victoria, and without exception they're a very talented group.  Working with them is a pleasure.

But that's not what I want to write about.  I want to write about how we tell who's got "it".  Ie: who's got the drive to get to the very top.  It's a relevant topic to me now, and one worth reading widely on.

This came across on a coaching mailing list called "supertraining".  It's by a famous author called Daniel Coyle, who's pretty well known, it's fair to say.  He wrote a superb book on Lance Armstrong called 'Lance Armstrong's War'.   He makes the observation that being the sort of athlete that rises to the top is a mental thing - it's about dedication and commitment (and all those cliche's!).  He's right, but I think in our area, he's not all right - By that I mean he's only got half the picture and that may be because he's listening to coaches who are dealing with pre-sorted athletes.  Mark Rippetoe makes the point rather bluntly (as is his style) when he says that most elite level coaches have little idea of what they're doing with regards to athlete development because they're working with athletes who are pre-selected.  I think Rip's not right there (and he was talking about American football coaches, so I've taken this way out of context!), but I think understand what he's trying to say.  Armstrong himself got it right, I'll roughly paraphrase from memory : 'if you don't have the legs, no amount of mental strength will help'. The truth is you need both.  You need talent and drive.  Drive without physical talent will lead to frustration or delusion, physical talent without drive, to nothing at all.

So, back to talent ID.  How do you tell who's good before you train them for years?  Part of it is physiological screening (a fancy way of saying tests).  This gets the exercise physiologists all excited.  They get wattbikes out, put kids on scales, they do vertical jump tests, they measure thigh diameters, if they're really lucky they get to do muscle biopsies on their victims and soon enough they'll be able to do genetic tests.  Wow ... What does this achieve?  It gets the ones who are good physically, at least (and this may change if and when gene testing gets sorted) at the time of the test.  They do a lot of correlating.  They get very excited and get paid to do it.  It's interesting, but it's not all there is to it.  Far from it.  These tests are, by necessity, crude and can exclude those who do have real potential but haven't blossomed yet. 

Sometimes, it's the kid that fails the tests who ends up at the top.  I can bring something personal to this, when my Dad was a kid he was a bit of a swimmer, and he got tested by some ex-phys who basically told him he was unfit.  A week later he set the 6th fastest 200m butterfly time in the world.  I spoke recently with Ken Tucker at a conference in Adelaide. Ken was Anna Meares' coach when she was a kid, and he said that Anna wasn't great as a kid.  She certainly wasn't talentless, but she wasn't as naturally quick as her sister Kerrie.  Kerrie was outstanding (and went on to win a few medals of her own!).  But, Anna kept on improving and she had the right combination of talent and drive that took her to the very top and has kept her there for a long time.  Ken saw in Anna the qualities of a genuine champion but it took time to come out.  She was fortunate to have a coach that had the vision to see it in her.

So it's the right combination that matters, not (as Doyle implies) mental drive on its own, unless your game is chess!

We need to test for obsessive (healthy!) desire to be the best that the athlete can be, and that's something that I doubt can be easily done, I suspect it's something that some kids grow into given the right environment.  I think I can see the signs in a very select few that I'm lucky enough to work with.  It's rare, and you can see it in their eyes when they do a hard effort, when they don't shirk a hard session, when they do 'the hard yards' that we ask of them as their coaches, not whinging about them but relishing them.  They have to want to hurt and have to be prepared to make some pretty big sacrifices to get to where they want to be. I'm going to quote one of them.

Cycling doesn’t shape my world, it’s everything I am and everything I hope to be.

drive.  Priceless.

Hilton Clarke had his knee replaced on Thursday last week, and while he's away I'm looking after his NTID and VIS sprint squads (and a couple of CCCC ringins), we had our first completely Hilton-Free-Day on Saturday afternoon.  The session was all K1's which is basically a load of gate starts over short distances, the format being 3 sets of 3 reps of starts, each set has reps going up quarter, half and three quarter lap, and each set goes up a gear.

Generally they all did pretty well, I had to get a little bit cranky at the end, as the drill usually finishes with a small gear quarter lap effort, and some of the lads mucked about during it, it was pretty funny, but at the same time, they're there to train and I had to make sure they did their efforts properly.  Guys, if any of you are reading this, you can horse around between efforts, but you do your efforts at 100%, or you're wasting your time and mine.

In other news, Nathan's taking a bigger role in the DISC sessions now, he's looking after the enduro stream including programming for them, and is also doing more of that at Spin.  I'm happy that this is happening, Nathan's almost finished his level 1 and he's ready to take more responsibility for that side of things.

And we had a time trial on Sunday, run by Blackburn and with CSV looking after part of it. I was the announcer, but didn't have much of a job to do except call riders to the start, which was ok for the CSV Open, but the combine part was a mess, no-one's numbers matched what was on the starting list and the on-the-day entries didn't fit anywhere.  We need to stop the on-the-day entries altogether for TT's.

I'm glad I wasn't riding the CSV Open part of it - not because I don't like TT's (which is true!) but because the CSV guys just packed up and left with no results.  WTF?!  The results are up now, which is good, but at the time they just left.   Not good enough.  I don't know if Blackburn ended up getting the results done and having a presentation for the combine event because I had to get going, but they're not currently on the Blackburn website. It's not good enough these days.  It's embarrasing to be a part of when this happens, and more importantly, keeps happening over and over.

But .. We did run a good session at DISC on Sunday afternoon, Nathan had the enduros doing handicap starts and then some brutal efforts while the sprinters did powerjumps and then chased the motorbike around and around.  We all left well fried.  Today I was at Blackburn again coaching the DUCCs but only three showed up, so instead of doing blocking practice, we did flying 200s and match sprints.  The guys enjoyed that and learned a bit so it wasn't a waste of their time.

I did get a small bit of time to speak with Mal Sawford (CCCC president) about some inter-club stuff and in particular volunteer management, but we didn't get a chance to reach any conclusion, he had to race!  At least the ideas are on the table.  I still think that the northern combine model is worth trialing.  Here's more about how they do it. Mal is skeptical about its effectiveness in our combine because he is of the opinion that the NC races require a lot less manpower to run, but I think it's worth a try.  I guess that's up to the race committee people to sort out, but there is goodwill between the clubs and that's the main thing.