http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7996230.stm

Sir David is onside.

Relevant quotes :

"I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more."

And

the Trust accuses policy makers and environmentalists of conspiring in a "silent lie" that human numbers can grow forever with no ill-effects.

We can't keep breeding forever ...

If not shaving worked for Sean Eadie in the leadup to the 2002 worlds, I figure I'd better do my bit for the third round of the aSSS.  So far I've made two finals (3v4) and lost both, to take the next step doesn't involve training, eating smart, riding smarter, it involves the one thing all great Australian champions have, a dirty great Mo and there's only one real mo, and that's the Big Merv.

If you want to chip in, here's my donation page.  The lucky aggregate winner of round 3 at the aSSS gets to shave it off me. Now there's a prize worth winning!  Mal, you're tempted, you know it ....

While I'm sitting here waiting for Ride to arrive and the new power rack ...

Gutted .. a lot of people say they're 'gutted' by something or other, usually reasonably minor in the overall scheme of things.  To be gutted is to have your intestines removed. It's pretty ... dramatic ... Symptom of our times that it gets used by someone who's lost a footy game, a bike race?  Hardly the same thing as gutting!

In today's Age, the NSW government has banned all departments buying bottled water, and a town has banned it altogether.

Brilliant!  Sanity!  Bottled water is an evil triumph of marketing and waste over sanity.

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.

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.

This last two days have been mainly easy days, I lifted moderately heavy on Wednesday in the 'Haus (5 x 5 @ 150kg squats, 1 set of 10 130kg deadlifts, total tonnage 5,050kg) after Tuesday's spin session and on Wednesday night had a couple of short E1 rides for a total of about an hour and a half's riding.  Thursday was just an easy tootle to the LBS and back, no lifting and today was again around 45 minutes all-up E1 stuff. 

Tomorrow I'll lift heavy when I get back from the Baw Baw if I'm not too knackered from riding the motorbike out there. It's time to bump it up to 162.5kg squats again. I'll be trying for 5 sets of 3 reps, and depending on how that goes will up the deadlifts to 140kg.  130kg was hard, but I think I can manage 140kg for 10.  We'll see about that anyway. If it's not done on Saturday I'll do it on Sunday after Lucie and I go for a kayak paddle ... My arm's slowly getting better after the bursitis incident on Monday, I guess I'm starting to get old though, injuries take a bit longer to heal and mystery injuries crop up without explanation.

Speaking of lifting ... I'm a bit ashamed to say I was a bit bored on Thursday and watched a bit of 'the biggest loser' (the biggest loser is the person watching that rubbish... never again).  They had the punters all lined up in a semi circle with Olympic bars on their shoulders - except they weren't on their shoulders, they were way back off their necks on padding.  A big no-no when squatting heavy - it increases the moment arm around the lower back and increases the risk of lower back injury because to keep the weight over the lifter's feet they have to lean further forward, and they'll slump sooner or later and put a huge dynamic load on the lower back.  To make matters worse, they were doing it to failure and they were loading up the weights while the punters were holding the bars.  This made for asymetrical loads and twisting on the lower back as the 'trainers' (dangerous idiots) pushed the weights around while the punters were holding them up.  You wouldn't dream of doing that to experienced and strong lifters, let alone this bunch of untrained gumbies.

Could they do it in any more of an unsafe manner?  I'm not sure ... That was a pretty comprehensive catalogue of things not to do when holding a bar on your shoulders.  They got away with it ... But it was terrible.  So very irresponsible.  They should have had them progressively deadlift greater weights or something if they wanted to do something like that, at least a failure wouldn't risk blowing a back to pieces so badly. They'd just not be able to pick the bar up.  Shame on you, whoever came up with that stupid and dangerous stunt.  Lifting isn't a dangerous activity if it's done properly with good instruction from people who know what they're doing and with progressive and managed overload.  These idiots, on the other hand, threw essentially untrained people (who were no athletes) into a situation where they had to hold a (relatively) heavy weight in a biomechanically poor and dangerous position (padded out from their traps) while it was loaded up to a failure and twisted and pulled while they were doing it.   If I did that to anyone I was working with I'd expect to go to gaol for gross negligence when they got hurt.

Anyway ... Tomorrow I'm off to take photos of the lads racing the Baw Baw, I'll be at Winch Corner where it's an ~20% gradient.  Good luck to you all doing it. Pay no attention to the chalk writing on the roads! I've also been in touch with the bloke who built one of the AIS's sprint training ergos (the 'Wombat') and arranges wind tunnel testing - watch this space, we may have some slots to get into the tunnel and test sprinters for aerodynamics.

Jobie Dajka was a world champion track sprinter as a junior and senior rider. His palmares etc are listed on his wikipedia page.  A few of us saw him race and raced with him at DISC on Thursdays and at some of the country carnivals.  He wasn't in the best of shape, but had a huge burst of power and was an amazing athlete.

Our condolances to his family and friends.

The last two days have been rainy.  We pulled the pin on Tuesday and today's (Thursday) sessions at the Blackburn track.  No matter, the rain is worth so much more than a few sprint efforts.  It's wonderful to hear rain on the roof again after two months of nothing but dry, hot days and frustrating cooler, but dry days, and fires ...

I'm editing video today for the sprint series.  I hope I'll have most of round 5's video online by the time I have to go out to Lilydale tonight to fix more computer stuff.  Got to pay the bills somehow!  There'll be an ergo session and some light weights work thrown in today somewhere too.  It's a backoff day for weights, so I'll just be squatting light (140kg or so) but will do some cadence efforts on the ergo, it's time to work on more leg speed.

I spent this morning helping out at a working bee at DISC, mostly up a rope on the bank with an orbital sander in a team of two with Nathan from Brunswick as we took turns sanding and taping divots and splinters etc.  I got to use my old mountaineering gear!  Prussic loops and harnesses and my old climbing rope. It was good fun and we got a fair bit done, there's a lot of gouges at the eastern end of the track there.  I think I recognised Dino's dent from when he crashed last year and broke his ribs.  It's a huge job, there was 8 of us there working from about 9am 'til around 12:30 (when I had to go, had to do 2 and a bit fits at the LBS)  and I think we only got about half to two thirds of the track done.  John Beasley's Malaysian tigers were getting ready to train when I left. 

Not much else, club championships tomorrow, match sprints. I'm a bit keyed up for them.  Will be interesting to see if I can get a medal in my age group (MMAS2, 35-40).

So, fires ... the big burn happened, we all saw it on TV or up close (or up closer than we'd like to have).  It's still dry out there, no rain for 6 weeks and what hasn't burned is still primed to go up.  Last night a fire in Belgrave had Lucie's parents evacuating their home in Tecoma, and friends also evacuated.  The fire was controlled by the CFA, I think some pretty desperate controls were done, 16 trucks, the chopper dumping water everywhere etc.  Everyone in Melbourne has a fire-story to tell, we all know people who've been directly affected by it if we haven't been so ourselves.

We raced on Saturday in clearing smoke at Blackburn.  All the funds for the day went to the Red Cross appeal, as you'd expect in a time like this.  Life goes on, of course, and in good news stakes Emily took out a strong third in the wheelrace at the Junior Austral on Saturday.  Dino and Em were around last night training in the Powerhaus with me again, and we're off to Blackburn tonight to train for the club teams championships in a month.  My job is simple, I'm the leadout rider for our masters team sprint, I do one lap .. ONE LAP! of DISC and I'm done.  It's not a big distance, but I have to do it very quickly.  Last year my performance wasn't good, I want to be faster this year (but not drop Dino or Martin, not likely...).

In other news, the Blackburn club championships start this coming Saturday with the sprints (woohoo!).  We're split up into age groups, I'm MMAS2 (35-40) so I'll be racing Martin Lama and Alex Vaughan and I'm not sure who else, as I think Alan Dorin isn't back after his back surgery yet (he beat me last year).  Martin's going to be a challenge to beat, he's been a solid B grader at the BSSS this summer and just made the jump up to A grade with a very good flying 200 at round 4.  I beat him way back in October, but he beat me in round 2 I think it was when we last raced with a brutal second kick at the 200m line after I thought I had him.  It could be interesting, I hope I can have enough speed to challenge him.

Mike Goldie reports on his blog over at Carnegie Caulfield that a masters rider tested positive recently.  Some people will do anything to 'win'.  Winning by cheating is not winning.

And I hope that our clubs in our combine have managed to bang heads together such that the time trial series is recognised by the other clubs in our combine as being a valuable contribution to the combine's racing.  Last year Blackburn got a letter from Mal Sawford on behalf of the combine expressing that the combine was unsatisfied with our contribution, which I think was unfair, as a club we ran 6 ITTs on the Yarra Boulevard that took a lot of resources to run and the combine should see them as a part of the combine's available racing and count them as such.  The time trials are a valuable contribution and I believe that the combine should accept them as such and count them towards Blackburn's contribution.

I've got a pile of programs to write today!  I'd better get to it.

As well as a cash donation from aboc, we've decided to run round 5 of the Bontrager Summer Sprint Series as a fundraiser.  All entry fees from round 5 will go to the Australian Red Cross bushfire relief fund, and aboc will donate prizes in lieu of money to the winners of the grades at the round.  It's not a lot and this isn't an unusual thing (CCCC are doing it with Sandown this week, as are the Southern Vets), but it's clearly the Right Thing To Do.

Totally off-topic.  On Sunday morning I got an SMS from a friend who runs the Lilydale airport who was trapped in Cairns, ironically, by floods.  He wanted photos of the Yarra Valley fires.  Ok, we can do it.  You can see our photos here.  His family live in the Christmas Hills and we were very relieved to see that they were safe, albeit quite shaken up by the experience.

Many of us have ridden around the Yarra Valley for training and racing, as well as Kinglake and Marysville.  It goes without saying that the people who live in these two places that have been essentially wiped off the map have all of our sympathy and support.  aboc is donating to the Salvos, but there's more that we can do.  While these towns rebuild we can make them regular destinations for rides and always stop at the local shops and help them return to normal by being good customers.

The plan was to spend 4 days up at Mt Sterling with the big Fuel EX8 and the lads, and do some relaxing MTB'ing.

It wasn't to be.  On the 30th, at about 2pm my co-location hosting provider shut down my business's main server because of a 'power emergency'.  They didn't call, they sent me an email(!).  At the time I was in a mate's car somewhere between Melbourne and Mt Sterling.  The hard shutdown broke the filesystem and myself and my colleage Sam spent the next 5 days rebuilding the box from backups etc. Not very much sleep, a lot of stress. I'm very grateful to my friends who were with me, they were very patient and the use of the eeePc and wireless Internet meant we got the main part of the system back online reasonably quickly. I was up at King Saddle Hut logged in and working!  Modern tech ... I remember seeing ads years ago for people sitting on beaches with laptops working, this was a little like that, except no smiles on anyone's faces!

Suffice to say I didn't ride the bike at all, and didn't get back into any sort of physical activity until last Sunday, where I rode in to town and back (to replace a stolen monitor!), 50km of ~E1 intensity and then yesterday (Monday) I got my usual swim in.  Today I had to re-introduce myself to the PowerHaus, no weights since the 29th (when we did a DISC session and weights).  So about 8 days off in total from weights.  I racked up for squats, 5 x 140kg, 5 x 150kg, 5 x 155 kg, felt ok.  Strength is one of those things that you lose (and gain ...) slowly, so I expect I'll be able to do 157.5kg next time for a set of 3 x 5's.  With round 4 only 4 weeks away, I have to get on the bike more.  We'll be at Blackburn on Thurs morning, I expect ... Sprinting!

Have a look at this and then this.

Jodie Batchelor has added some spelling mistakes, made some minor changes and reformatted a little, but that's my article.  They said nice things about it, but that doesn't make it theirs.  Cycling-inform is a competitor to aboc, and that's fine, I had a chat with David a few months back after he took offence to my commenting that a claim he made on his site was disingenious, the claim is still there but I'm not going to make an issue of it, it's not that big a deal and overall our conversation was constructive and of mutual benefit.  He seems a nice sort of bloke, he runs his website and email newsletter straight out of the 'Internet marketing for dummies' playbook, but that's ok too, we can all choose to market our services however we want to, and that's just fine.

We all lift content to a certain extent, but I try not to take value from my competitors and wherever possible I have asked to use an article, especially if I know the author and know how to get in touch with them.  Dave has changed my article but not made it clear what they changed and what is the original or provided a live link to the original article so that a reader may make their own minds up.

Dave, I'm waiting for you to at least ask if it's ok to use the article, and to make the reference at the bottom a live link, at a minimum. You know my phone number.

This morning Dino and I hooked up with Uncle Pat D and did some solid work at the track between the showers that fell.  We did a 15l warmup with a sprint finish (Dino won, again!), Pat did a 20 lap motorpaced rampup effort, Dino & I did flying 200's behind the bike, Pat did a 15l mini pointsrace effort (every 5 laps he comes off the back of the bike and sprints a lap), then Dino & I did another F200 effort behind the bike, and we finished off with a rolling start 350m sprint (Dino won, AGAIN!).  A 10 lap rolldown and home ... Then I hit the gym.  Squats - I dropped the cage rails down a notch as my flexibility has improved, and I only worked up to 4 x 5 @ 140kg, and with the extra depth that was plenty hard enough!  A few assistance exercises and that's it for the morning's training.  Tonight's the Mermet and clean pulls and clean & jerks.

I'm hungry!

Sunday's forecast keeps changing :

Cloud increasing. Isolated showers, increasing to areas of rain during the afternoon. Winds northeasterly averaging up to 20 km/h tending south to southeasterly around midday.

Totally off-topic, here's the receipe for the aboc Spag Bol.

I want one of these.

Slap it on the roof of the house, tap it into the grid ... and the DVD player in front of the rollers and ergo trainer is running off wind (and not my wind!)

Today's Age also has an article on population.

About time a polly had the courage to bring it up, we still have too many people, not enough water etc, but at least it's on the table now.

Wikipedia defines hero as

A hero (from Greek ἥρως hērōs^[1]), in Greek mythology and folklore, was originally a demigod, the offspring of a mortal and a deity,^[2] their cult being one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion.

Later, hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters that, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self-sacrifice, that is, heroism, for some greater good, originally of martial courage or excellence but extended to more general moral excellence.

What do we use heros for?  Inspiration I think.  So who, or what, inspires us? Lance Armstrong?  Sure, he fits the classical definition, adversity, certainly he had to overcome cancer, which is one of the biggest hurdles anyone could overcome and that's something many of us have been close to in some form or other. Lance represents hope, survival and the will to sieze the day. I'm still wearing my Livestrong band. I don't expect I'll ever stop doing so.

But anyone 'real'?  I think so.  I'm not inspired by Cadel Evans or Ryan Bailey or Anna Meares, because they're not people I can really relate to. They're born gifted athletes, and I have much respect and admiration for them, and I'm a fan, when Anna set that blistering time at Vodafone on Thursday last week I had a lump in my throat and couldn't stop cheering her on, and watching Ryan Bailey kick so hard it's almost inhuman to win sprints is incredible to watch, Cadel's endurance and courage ... Amazing stuff, but it's far removed from where I am.

The people I work with, those of us not born with genetic advantages that put us miles ahead before we start, but those for whom finishing mid-field in a D grade tour is a major achievement, for those who being promoted to B grade is the highlight of their cycling, for those who started off tootling on hybrids who can now rattle off a 100km ride without drama, or who have had serious injuries but who commit to taking the risk of training and aiming for goals, and putting everything they can into achieving those goals.  You all know who you are, you're my inspiration.  Thankyou.

Today's Age article.

The most worrying things in it :

The size of the challenge also puts into context this week's political scuffle over petrol excise and FuelWatch, notes one analyst as an aside. "You'd expect governments to be having a close look at what our universities are doing and trying to come up with longer-term solutions to the oil problem, instead of pissing about with a couple of cents here and there. But that's probably a big ask for politicians."

It's time I got going, S&C course starts today!