Vic masters sprint day on Saturday.  No excuses, I have trained all year, gotten stronger, thought I'd gotten faster.  Even lost a little bit of weight!  To no avail ... Flying 200 was 12.95something, slower than last year (12.91) despite better aero gear.  Didn't qualify for the finals.  I didn't do the kilo (never again after last year, the kilo sucks!) and in the Keirin I didn't want to get involved in the stupidity happening at the front and gambled on doing a Bradbury when they all crashed. 

They crashed in the first run of the race, Turbo got brought down most unfairly and I think no-one was watching it happen, the perpetrators didn't get suspended and from where I was, it was clear that they should have.  Modern Keirin does not include pushing down onto a rider who is in the lane and causing them to crash.  Maybe back in the 1970's, but not in 2010.

In the re-run, almost the same thing happened again, I sat off the back and watched, then when the pace went on I didn't have the legs to go with it. 

So, no better than last year.  I think that means, that after a year or so's dedicated sprint training, that I'm not ever going to be any good as a sprinter.  I can live with that, I'm enjoying the sprint series, I'll never be any sort of elite, but that's ok, I love sprinting and will keep doing it and keep trying to chip away at my PB in the flying 200.  I just won't ever be able to give guys like Lou Pascussi any competition, but that's ok with me.  We're all playing with the hand we're dealt at birth and I figure if I can get the best out myself, that'll be enough for me.

Everyone else had a good day.  Dino and Mick were the best of the Vics at the sprint and keirin respectively, I still don't know why Queenslanders and Tasmanians are allowed to enter, and win, the Vic state titles, I'm sure there's a reason for it but I don't know what it is.  Chris Ray rode his best kilo in competition (after a F200 and a bunch of sprints) and got 3rd in the sprint and I think placed in the Keirin as well?  Craig rode well given his very upset year with a lot of personal stuff to contend with too, and on the Sunday Cam and Mick rode scorchers too. 

As a few of you reading this know, I've been working with Hilton Clarke and John Beasley in at DISC getting hours up for mentored coaching as part of getting the level two cycle coaching qualification.

I've got the hours up now (23 mentored, I needed 20), and by way of trivia, I've logged all the time I've spent coaching since the start of January.  So far, 90.5 hours, in a month.  Phew ... That's a combination of time spent running spin sessions, having meetings with riders, strength coaching in the 'haus, time at DISC with Hilton and John, coaching Em at the Junior Vics and so on.

Along the way I've had to use the stopwatch. The stopwatch all the elite coaches use here is the Seiko S149.  It's not a cheap bit of kit, RRP in Oz is around $700 but you can get it online from the US for around $400 or so, which is what I did.  Why such an overpriced stopwatch?  You can get a basic lap/split stopwatch for around $20.  But, this has a printer (big deal?) and it's also the standard that everyone uses, so if I'm working with Hilton, or John, or any of the others we can all use the same timer and know how it works and how to use it.  The printer is handy for working with pursuiters, being able to print out lap splits and cumulative times is of value.  It's also pretty-much bombproof.  John's S149 is about 10 years old and still works, you can't see the writing on the case anymore because it's been handled so much, but it works as well as the day he got it.  That sort of reliability is worth paying for.

I wrote in my last blog that, amongst other things, it's not about the equipment.

Except sometimes it is ...

It is when the equipment is a limitation.

If you don't trust your equipment, especially in a sprint situation which demands 100% commitment, you cannot perform at your best, and then it is about the gear.  When your equipment is a significant limitation, change your equipment.

I have an FFWD 5 spoke front track wheel.  It is being returned to the local distributor for a refund. I don't trust it.  The first one I got about a month ago, Pete and I glued on a Tufo S3 lite tyre, I took it to DISC and jumped on after some quick photos for Ride magazine.  It immediately launched into a resonating tank-slapper as I got onto the bank.  I took it off, put on the old Bonty front and got back to training and coaching for the day.  Later, Nathan Larkin and I pulled it apart and found that the bearing/axle fit was fractionally loose, and there's no way to adjust it.  Ok, send it back to FRF (local distributor), they send me another one.  This one's still got a little bit of play, but it's better than the last one.  Glue it up, wind it up at Blackburn at round one of the aSSS for my flying 200, I'm 100% committed to this effort and am going absolutely as fast as I can in almost perfect conditions.

At full speed, it does the same thing the last one did, almost putting me over the fence.  I was very lucky not to crash.

We had a look at it afterwards and the bearing/axle interface has play, enough to allow a resonance it seems.  What a seriously brain-damaged design this is.  A ~$3,000 retail wheel which has no way to alter bearing tightness.  The Mavic iO has adjustable bearings, which means manufacturing tolerances (and wear!) can be adjusted out.  Not so this design. It's a POS.  Don't buy one unless and until they redesign the hub such that you can adjust the bearings.

Not that you probably need one anyway, I don't need it, I need something I can trust, which isn't this wheel. If you're thinking about it, think again.

Those of you who are about to start summer criterium racing need to be aware, if you're not already, that many bling wheels are now effectively banned for mass start road racing.  This is the enforcing of a rule made in or about 2003 stating that non standard wheels must be tested with a UCI burst test and shown to be safe.  The test is flawed, because Mavic's infamous r-sys wheels pass it and they're hand grenades, but nevertheless, it's a test that all carbon rim wheels must pass.

Many have not been tested.

If you're shopping for new wheels at the moment, be aware that quite a few people are flogging their fancy wheels cheap in an attempt to get some money for them before everyone twigs that they're not legal for road racing, which is probably why you'd want them.  At Glenvale, Mal Sawford has the unenviable task of random wheel checks and if anyone places or wins on a non-legal wheel they don't get the result.  Any insurance claims are void if there's an illegal wheel involved etc ... Messy.

The list of approved wheels is here.

I'm a little concerned that Carnegie-Caulfield have put a few classified adverts up for wheels on their website that look like they're not on the list of legal wheels without a note saying if they're legal or not for racing.  I think CCCC have an obligation to add that information, especially as a road racing club where the people reading the adverts may be newbie roadies who don't necessarily know about the rule.  I reckon it's something a responsible club should make a note of on products they're involved in advertising.  Anyway, it's their website and they can do what they want with it, of course!

I know I've banged on about this before, and I'm going to bore you again with it.  We debut'ed the new powertab wheel last night at DISC.  I'm no stranger to training with power, I've had a Powertap SL 2.4 in a road wheel for a couple of years now and it's a great tool there, but my emphasis these days is track and once you've trained with power, it's very frustrating to not have it.  

After a bit of show and tell as a few of the Sunday Roast diners had a look at it and asked me a bunch of questions I either didn't know the answer to (How much will it cost? How does it work? "same as all the other PT's!" Is there a Zipp 1080 option? How much is that doggy in the window etc) or wasn't at liberty to discuss (How much did I pay for it?!) or wasn't going to answer yes to ("Can I borrow it next Sunday?" No, but you can hire it!) Nath showed up with the valve extender and we put air in it and I slapped on a 17 tooth sprocket.

As with any new toy, I was a bit mesmerised by it, doing the warm up on a damp track (yes, DISC still leaks .... the irony of an indoor velodrome that gets water on it when it rains!) we had to dodge a wet spot (cue the jokes, now ..) at the end of the finishing straight and I had to pay attention to riding, not looking at the computer all the time. I wasn't going to be the first to test the hub in anger though, that was Emily's job.  After we warmed up she was set to do a 500m ITT and we popped the gate on the track and the wheel in her bike (and the computer up her sleeve!).  A 10 count, and she's away at full torque for 500m (two laps of DISC).  She rides a great time on it which would have won her last summer's JW15 state titles again, but by more (2 tenths faster than her Vics winning time last summer).  No worries. 

My turn.

Our sprint training for the day is low speed jumps.  This'll show if the guys over on FGF's fears about axle slip are real.  I'm matched up with Rob Tidey, on 91.8".  From 6km/h to 50km/h in 10 seconds, peak power 1501 watts, peak crank torque 199.6nm.  No movement.  No worries!

To be sure, we did this 4 times.  Still no movement.  I'm very far from the strongest track sprinter around, in fact I'm a 'never was' and a hack at best,  but that was a pretty good test and it passed with flying colours. Arr, it's nice to have power again!

The rest of the session went well, except we cut short the finish as the track was slippery and damp and we had a tumble during a practice sprint.  Everyone was toast anyway so no-one felt like they wanted more track time.

I took the laptop to Nandos and grabbed the data.  Here's what my 4 low speed jumps looks like

I can't show you Em's data, that's confidential, but I can say that the meter allows us to see where she's really strong and what we need to target to get her faster much more than we've been able to with simulated stuff on the road Powertap on an ergo.

The device isn't perfect though - rare indeed is it to have a version 1 of something that's 100% sorted.  It comes with bolts instead of the more standard axle and nuts and these can be a bit fiddly to do up when setting chain tension.  I spoke with Rich from Wheelbuilder today and he's going to address this with a set of studs and he tells me we'll have the first ones to test out. Also, and this is nothing to do with the track adaptor Rich made, Powertaps do tell you cadence, but in the same sort of 'random number generator' sort of way that Polar and iBike do power - ie: not reliable.  If you're interested in cadence and can't be bothered working it out from speed and gear, get the Cyclops cadence sender as well.

I'm not going to make a fuss about the rest of the wheel, it's an Edge Composites 68 carbon clincher laced with 32 Sapim CX-Ray spokes by Wheelbuilder as per our spec (build it strong, Rich, it's going under heavy sprinters!).  As I'd expect it was stiff and felt fast.  With a Veloflex Record at 140psi it felt just as good if not better than the tubulars I run on my regular indoor track wheels (Bontrager carbon track rims with Tufo S3 Pro's).  It may be faster, it certainly looks fast and feels as stiff as anything else I've ridden except the disk wheel. The White Industries sprockets look solid and feel reassuringly heavy.

So, overall, I'm very happy with this device.  At its first outing it's providing us with very valuable information which will help us all to go faster and that's what we want to do, and it's around half the cost of an SRM crank system here in Australia.  For us, this is a win, thankyou Rich Sawiris!

The wheelbuilder.com Powertap track wheel has arrived.  It's the only one in Australia at this time and one of the very first of this version in the world.  Wheelbuilder did a fixie adaptor for the first generation of Powertaps but they've been unavailable for quite a few years now.

Now we can swap wheels on track bikes and get power readings.  From now on, a laptop comes to every track training session and we're no longer guessing.  I need to work out a hire price structure for it.  It's a very nice wheel, Edge 68 clincher rim (60mm deep carbon clincher), Sapim CXray spokes (32), Powertap SL+ hub with Rich Sawris's fixed gear modification and White Industries sprockets and carrier.  We chose a clincher so that we can quickly and painlessly swap tyres for indoor and outdoor use, it'll have a Veloflex Record for DISC and probably a Bontrager Race-Lite for outdoor use.

Last Saturday (8th August) while training in the 'Haus with the Sprint Squad guys, I managed to grind out 3 x 3 @ 185kg squats at last.  I stuttered on the second set and had to revisit it (repeat it!) because on rep 2 I lost control of the bar and had to regain balance, but I got the lifts. In the end it was 3, 1(stumbled on 2), 3, 3.  So I'm happy with that.  

We had a solid session at DISC last night, it got cold very quickly after it being quite warm at 4:30pm, but by 6 it was an icebox and we all rugged up a lot.  Come 7pm and everyone was pretty-well shattered, so job done for another Sunday.  Our 1/2 lap chase onto the bike, 1 lap paced 1/2 lap sprint drill is starting to get challenging and we'll keep making it harder (the bike goes faster!)

At the moment, according to FedEx the track Powertap wheel is in Australia!

In other news I'm pleased to see that Alan Dorin won CCCC's Lenny Hammond handicap on Saturday down at Modella.  This year it was their hilly course, way back in 2004 I won it, when it was flat!

The aboc PowerHaus now has some new gear.  We've got a set of wooden training plates, a pair of 10 kg calibrated Olympic bumper plates and a flash new barbell from the Australian Barbell Company. (There's differences between barbells? You bet there is .... quite a lot of different types and levels of quality.).  Just in time for two of the DUCCs to come over for their strength session tonight.  Merv's fixed the damaged one too, so now we have two barbells which means when there's four people in the 'Haus we can train more efficiently.

The old bar was damaged on Sunday when I was doing power cleans with it, dropping the bar from shoulder-height stripped the thread of one of the retaining bolts that holds the rotating sleeves on at the ends.  The short story is - Cheap Olympic bars are cheap and nasty, don't use them for Olympic lifts, they will fail!  They're fine for squats, deadlifts etc, but no good for dropping.

There won't be many of these around.  Rich Sawris from wheelbuilder.com has designed and made an updated adapter for the new current generation PowerTap hubs to work with track bikes.  He made one up for the early wired PowerTaps (Liz Randall has one) but the newer designed hubs needed a radically different setup.  We've got one of the new ones on order.  These are not currently available from the Australian PowerTap distributor (Trek Australia) which is unfortunate so we're having to get it from Rich.

It will be laced to an Edge Composites 68 clincher rim.  This is so we can quickly and easily swap the wheel from use at DISC, where we'll have a Veloflex Record on it, and at Blackburn or any other outdoor track where we'll run a more robust and generic road tyre.  The Edge 68 is a really stiff and aero rim, not the lightest around, but not a clunker, so it'll be usable for racing as well as training.  Not a cheap bit of kit, it's going to end up costing around $2,700 I think, all up, but a very useful piece of training equipment.  It's around half the cost of an SRM track setup and a lot faster to switch between bikes.   It will be available for hire when we have it.

My old server was an old Intel Celeron 2.8GHz  box, with a clunky old hard drive and was old, well overdue for replacement. I think it was 4 or 5 years old?  Way underspec to run modern CMS's like Plone (the CMS this site runs on) and such, that's for sure.

Tonight, the server got a big upgrade, it's now a shiny new Intel Core2Duo E7400 with 4GB of RAM, NetBSD 5.0 (amd64), mirrored 320GB hard drives and other nice fruit.

It should be a bit quicker and more stable, the old one was starting to get quite unreliable.  Good-o.  I've got to get up at roady-o-clock (before 9am!) tomorrow morning to help out at the time trial at the 1:20, so I'm glad this upgrade seems to have gone well.

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!

The rumours are true, soon there will be a PowerTap SL hub that works with fixed gear bikes, Rich Sawiris from Wheelbuilder.com is making them.  By hook or by crook, they'll be cheaper and more portable between bikes than the SRM track cranks, and we shall have one, oh, yes we shall!

This morning was a set of standing start 150's at the velodrome for strength, this evening, lifting in the Powerhaus - this is a strength week.

When we were doing spin sessions indoors I used the Powertap to measure power and torque, but now it's nominally summer I'm out on the track bike doing more real stuff.  There's no power meter on the T1 at the moment, and without someone with a stopwatch it's impossible to know how I'm progressing.  WKO+ is useless with no data and I'm a data junkie ... At the moment a set of SRM cranks is out of the question (~$5000).  The only chance at the moment for anything useful and vaguely affordable is the Quarq CinQo. They're not providing a track version yet, but claim to 'soon'.  Hurry up! 

This morning (today, all of it!) I spent at the Blackburn velodrome, assisting (feeding, giving beer to etc!) the guys from CRS who were fixing the two big cracks in the track.

I won't bore you with the details, save to say that it was a privilege to watch a master concreter at work, and the CRS people were very professional and did a great job.

Photos of the job are here.

I'll be back there first thing tomorrow to take the signs etc off the track - I hope no-one nicks the signs or vandalises the concrete overnight ....

A new Kirt Kinetic road machine to add to the aboc equipment list, so my sprinters can have no excuses! I now have 2 KK RM's and one Cyclops Fluid 2 in the inventory.  Watts!  More watts ....

The City of Whitehorse council are paying to have the two big holes in the Blackburn velodrome fixed, so I've been in touch with the concreters and given them the go-ahead.  We're expecting they'll do the work next week, so just in time for round 1.  I'm going to have to do a lot of running around chasing forms, paperwork etc to make sure it happens to keep the various bureaucracies happy,  but it's going ahead.  Good-o.

Speaking with one of the lads today at the Blackburn time trial at the Yarra Boulevard, who'd just come out of a testing session in at the Monash low speed wind tunnel.  He'd done around 90 mins in it testing various configs, and as well as deciding his new super-douper aero helmet wasn't as good as he thought, he found a way to go at the same speed but use 50 watts less power to do so.

His writeup of the experience is here.

It seems Monash might be going to offer as a semi commercial thing, use of their tunnel.

Not something that's been available to 'the rest of us' at all, although a power meter and a velodrome and a good speed computer can be used as a rough wind tunnel, a proper one has been the domain of the AIS etc but not ordinary cyclists.

Stay tuned, if and when more info is available ... I'll let you know!

The saga of the new disk wheel :

Wheel arrives on Friday last week.

I go and get some glue (thanks Steelie at Le Tour!)

I order a tyre from Bob Farleigh - Tufo S3 Pro if anyone's interested.

It arrives on Wednesday this week. Good-o.  We have a wheel to stretch it on, but it's an Ayara deep section and ... we've run out of valve extenders, and we don't have any disk wheel inflators either. Ok... order them from Bikesportz (sic - what's with the z?  Can't they spell?), they arrive on Friday.  Pop tyre on the Ayara and inflate in the morning to get it stretching.  In the evening on Friday, on with the first coats of glue on the wheel and tyre.

This morning (Saturday) - final coat of glue on wheel and tyre, and slap it on.  Scare the kiddies at the shop with 175psi.  Then off for a swim. It's a summery day today, two days in a row we've had hot northerlies blowing and it's only mid September.  Average rainfall in Sept, around 80 or so mm, and so far (almost half way through the month) we've had ... 8mm.  Hmmmm. Everyone still driving their cars when they could walk or ride most times ... smart animals, humans ... anyway ... the swim, 500m warmup, 8 x 25m sprint/25m RR, 30s rest (so roughly 1:3 intervals), 200m warmdown, then ride home again.

Tomorrow, try the new wheel out at DISC!

Not quite off-topic. I'm trying to work out how much energy gets burnt up doing strength training in the Powerhaus and the Mermet etc.

So, today, squats.

I did :

12 x 20kg (empty bar)

8 x 60kg

5 x 100kg

5 x 5 @ 145kg as my work sets. The prior sets were warmups.

Depth is I think ~0.8m, I'll take that as a good enough guess for now.

How much work is that.  in terms of tonnage it's really only worthwhile to look at the work sets, so I lifted 3,625kg as my working load.

That's one measure, but it's not all that useful really. My 1rm for these full squats is probably around 163kg if I use Brzycki's equation to extrapolate from my 5 rep sets, which isn't 100% accurate, but it'll do... So I'm lifting ~88% of 1RM 25 times.  Reasonably intense.  But still not what I'm interested in here.

Work is defined as force x distance

Force is mass x acceleration

Mass is easy! 145kg ... Acceleration is gravity, 9.8m/s^2 - we'll assume the weight is moved upwards slowly, it's too hard otherwise.

Distance is 0.8m

So our force is 145 x 9.8 : 1421 N, which gives work as 1421 x 0.8 : 1136.8 joules - roughly. Let's say 1100 as close enough (conservative estimate).  25 reps all up at that weight : 27,500 joules.  Roughly 27 Kilojoules. Is that much? Nope! The human body is around 25% efficient.  So to get 27 Kj the body will use around 4 times that, so roughly 100Kj. My BMR is around 11,000 kj per day. 100 kj isn't very much!

This lot of sums doesn't take into account the energy used to build muscle after the training session, the effect of extra muscle on RMR and BMR etc, it's purely a rough (very) estimate of how much energy gets used to do these lifts.  Have a look at wikipedia's brief summary of EPOC for more on post exercise energy use.

Power's another interesting measure.  If I assume I'm lifting the weight in ~1.5 seconds (pretty close, but I haven't timed it), let's see how many watts that is.

Power is work / time

So for a 145kg squat, lifting 0.8m in 1.5s, what's that in watts?

We already know work from above, each rep is about 1100 joules, divided by 1.5 seconds, that's about 733 watts.

Compare that to a 50kg clean, where the weight moves from the ground to the shoulders (in me, that's about 1.5 meters), in a second (a clean is very quick).  Work : (50kg x 9.8m/s^2) x 1.5 : ~735 joules - not much compared to the squat at 145kg, but it is a lot less weight (to get the same work, the clean would have to be ~75kg), power is, assuming 1 second for the lift : 735 watts. That's more than the squat at 145kg. It's no wonder that 5 reps at 50kg doing cleans feels as hard as 5 squats at 145kg!

It's so much easier to do these sums on a bike, Powertaps and SRMs make it a doddle ... They just tell you the numbers. For weights work, one of these does, but it's not cheap and it ties you to their website where they store your data - no thanks.

 We had a good night at DISC tonight, everyone did sprints! Fun!