Over the last couple of days I received an email from some guy from an insurance company asking me to be a part of their sales machine.  In the interests of full disclosure, they offer 20% commission for sales or referrals or something, for their insurance scheme for bikes. 

I'm not the only coach that has been approached. They claim at least 7 coaches are on their scheme.

Be aware, if a coach pressures you into taking out insurance on your bike(s), they may not be being impartial.  Ask them if they're getting a cut.

For what it's worth, I refused to be a part of it.  Our clients should be able to trust us to give them independent, untainted advice.  Once your finger is in the pie, you're no longer impartial.

Everyone's trying to sell you something ....

I get the Peaksware email every week or so (I own copies of WKO+, which is the industry standard power analysis software).  Every week, they're trying to sell me something ... this week it's some protecting protein story.   Apparently there's some 'concentrate' that prevents high intensity training from catabolising muscle.  Or something like that anyway ... The email points to a website full of nonsense and inscrutable jargon, and it doesn't actually tell you anything useful, "sign up here for my program" instead.

Uhuh ... 

At least the study being cited is linked to, so you can work it out for yourself ... The study just says, in a nutshell, that high intensity exercise damages muscles.  OH REALLY?!  The tout is then for a program of 'food concentrates'. Here's a tip, they probably mean protein and carbohydrate supplements, whey isolates and glucose, I'd bet.  If it's not like c4p I'll be amazed .... 

Then there's the RBR newsletter, every week or so, full of pointers to ebooks you can buy, and a couple of useless 'tips' as bait while they try and flog more articles to you.  Got to make a buck, I guess ... It just seems really crass and slimy to me.

At aboc, we publish everything and keep no secrets (outside of client confidentiality concerns).  There's no hook to a sale, if you want to know something, ask us and we'll put up an article if we can find the answer.  

For giggles, see if you can make any sense of this : http://prospro.posterous.com/eating-protein-vs-protecting-proteins-1

Alex Simmons up in Sydney is starting up a spin session.    $40 a session, which is $160-$200 a month depending on the number of Mondays in the month or something like that.  Wow ... They are supplying computrainers, and they're expensive ergos, but still .. That's a lot of pony up for for an hour or so on an ergo.  I wonder if they provide dinner?  We do.  The Computrainer increases your cycling power by 20-30% and your speed by 2 to 4 MPH (3.2-6.4km/h) or so the Computrainer website claims anyway. I'm not sure I'd ever make that sort of a claim and I'm a little surprised that Alex, who is by all accounts an ethical sort of a guy, would quote that claim on his site, even if he did add in "it has the potential to" which is one of those wishy-washy weasley phrases used by companies that sell placebos that"have the potential to INCREASE MUSCLE BY 1100108.76%!". I know Alex, not all that well, but I did spend some time with him at the level two course last November and he's a good guy, very devoted and certainly a very good prescriber of power-training drills and a very keen coach. If there's a market for it up there in Sydney, good luck to him with the venture.  It's a tough gig to make money being a full time cycling coach and a bit of hyperbole is to be expected, I guess.

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 ...

From this article.

The good news, exercise, in particular resistance training, is really good for you, even though for basic energy level control it's not that good it's own :

Exactly, in fact exercise is the best treatment. The question is why does exercise work in obesity? Because it burns calories? That's ridiculous. Twenty minutes of jogging is one chocolate chip cookie, I mean you can't do it. One Big Mac requires three hours of vigorous exercise to work that off, that's not the reason that exercise is important, exercise is important for three reasons exclusive of the fact that it burns calories.

The first is it increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, in other words it makes your muscle more insulin sensitive, therefore your pancreas can make less, therefore your levels can drop, therefore there's less insulin in your blood to shunt sugar to fat. That's probably the main reason that exercise is important and I'm totally for it.

The second reason that exercise is important is because it's the single best treatment to get your cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone, it's the hormone that goes up when you are mega-stressed, it's the hormone that basically causes visceral fat deposition which is the bad fat and it has been tied to the metabolic syndrome. So by getting your cortisol down you're actually reducing the amount of fat deposited and it also reduces food intake. People think that somehow exercise increases food intake, it does not, it reduces food intake.

And then the third reason that exercise is important, which is somewhat not well known, but I'm trying to evaluate this at the present time, is that it actually helps detoxify the sugar fructose. Fructose actually is a hepato-toxin; now fructose is fruit sugar but we were never designed to take in so much fructose. Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.

The next thing is our old 'friend' fructose again.  Fructose really is a killer....

high fructose corn syrup came on the market after it was invented in Japan in 1966, and started finding its way into American foods in 1975. In 1980 the soft drink companies started introducing it into soft drinks and you can actually trace the prevalence of childhood obesity, and the rise, to 1980 when this change was made.

Correlation isn't causation, of course ...

the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let's take 120 calories of glucose, that's two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc. directly with no interference. Now let's take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what's in orange juice. So it's going to be all the fructose, that's 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that's another 12 out of 60 -- so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.

That bolus of extra substrate to your liver does some very bad things to it.

Ok, so sucrose, or common table sugar, is 50% fructose and 50% glucose (glucose is ok, by the way, and it's the sugar in Staminade, but not in Powerade or Gatorade ... which is why we use Staminade in aboc C4P!).  Sucrose is just as bad as high fructose corn syrup.

fructose is famous for causing hypertension

And here we go :

Robert Lustig: There's clear scientific evidence on the fructose doing three things that are particularly bad in the liver. The first is this uric acid pathway that I just mentioned, the second is that fructose initiates what's known as de novo lipogenesis.

Norman Swan: Which is fat production.

Robert Lustig: Excess fat production and so VLDL, very low density lipoproteins end up being manufactured when you consume this large bolus of fructose in a way that glucose does not, and so that leads to dyslipidaemia.

Norman Swan: And that's the bad form of cholesterol.

Robert Lustig: That's correct. And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme called Junk one, and Junk one has been shown by investigators at Harvard Medical School basically is the inflammation pathway and when you initiate Junk one what happens is that your insulin receptor in your liver stops working. It's phosphorylated in a way that basically inactivates it, serum phosphorylation it's called and when your insulin receptor doesn't work in your liver that means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise. And when that happens basically you're going to interfere with normal brain metabolism of the insulin signal which is part of this leptin phenomenon I mentioned before. It's also going to increase the amount of insulin at the adipocyte storing more energy. And you put all of this together and basically you've got a feed forward system of increased insulin, increased liver fat, liver deposition of fat, increased inflammation -- you end up with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You end up with your inability to see your leptin and so you consume more fructose and you've now got a viscious cycle out of control.

So who's doing this?  the food industry .. Sell more! Make more profit.  Unregulated capitalism at work ...

We can only eat 1,800 calories per capita per day. In other words the American food industry makes double the amount of food that we can actually use. Who eats the rest? We do, through this mechanism, they actually know that by putting fructose into the foods that we eat, for instance pretzels -- why do you need fructose in pretzels, why do we need fructose in hamburger buns?

Fructose makes you eat more, and makes you fat.  It's perfect for making people buy more food.

How do we avoid this nasty stuff?

Norman Swan: Well given that you're not going to come to harm by reducing the fructose in your diet -- somebody who's listening to this -- what's the ingredient on the packet, or the jar, or the back of the tin that tells you there's fructose in there because it won't always say fructose will it?

Robert Lustig: Well high fructose corn syrup, it should say that, now in Australia for instance the sodas don't have high fructose corn syrup they have sucrose. Well sucrose is half fructose. You know a lot has been made over this high fructose corn syrup being particularly evil. In fact high fructose corn syrup is either 42% or 55% fructose, the rest is glucose. Well sucrose is 50% fructose the rest is glucose. In fact high fructose corn syrup and sucrose are equally problematic.

Norman Swan: Basically table sugar.

Robert Lustig: Table sugar -- that's right. We were not designed to eat all of this sugar, we're supposed to be eating our carbohydrate, particularly our fructose, with high fibre. Well the fact is we have 100 pound bags of sugar that go into the cakes, and the donuts.

So don't drink orange juice, eat oranges :

Juice is part of the problem and there's plenty of data, not just mine. Miles Faith had an article in Pediatrics, December 2006 showing that in toddlers, in inner city Harlem in New York, in toddlers the number of juice servings correlated with the degree of BMI increase.

Toddlers drinking orange juice makes them obese!

And anyone who works for a soft drink company should be thrown in gaol.  Coke, Pepsi, Schweppes ... These evil bastards are loading drinks with salt to make you thirsty, sugar to hide the taste of the salt and spike your insulin levels to make you hungry, and the side effect of this increased sale of their crap is obesity.  Same with my favorite, Big M.  Whole milk is great for you, flavoured milk is chock-full of sucrose, which is 50% fructose, and that's the bugbear.  Damn you to hell, Big M!

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!

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!

This isn't an airing of dirty laundry! Last night we addressed (eventually!) the 300kg gorilla in the room - the Friday night DISC slot.

Nicko's initial suggestion was one that most of us were pleased with; retain Saturday's racing as-is.  Grab the Friday slot at DISC and use it for club training and once a month racing - something special, a niche that people would come to race like the SSS or Hawthorn's Sunday Roast.  Maybe do more Friday night races over winter? Most of us nodded in rigourous agreement with this.

Then Nicko had to go, family stuff, and we got bogged down a little.  To cut a long story short, almost everyone at the meeting was not going to move on Saturday's racing staying as-is.  The Saturday program at Blackburn is what makes the club special, it has broad appeal and is suitable for everyone, if Tom Leaper, Barry Woods, Stu Vaughan and Steve Martin can race on Saturday alongside the F grade novices and keep coming back then we have something very special indeed.   To steal the words of one of the people pushing to change that to Friday at DISC instead of Saturday at Blackburn, consistency IS important and the Saturday races benefit from being consistent.

So, at the end, nothing was really achieved and no firm decision was made (nothing new at  a BBN committee meeting!) except that the Saturday program will continue as planned this summer - The guys pushing for the Friday change have gone away to cook up another plan.  If they're smart (and they are and I mean no disrespect to them.  We're friends and we all want the best for the club) they'll realise the importance of Saturday's racing and NOT TAMPER WITH IT.  When I started the Summer Sprint Series we were very careful to compliment, not compete with, Saturday's racing, which is core to the identity and ideals of the club.

One of the things our racing on Saturday does really well is provide a venue for riders of just about every level to compete in a welcoming family environment.  Sure, some riders will out-grow it and will want and need to move to higher level races but that's a normal thing and I think a sign of the success of the race program and a win for the club if and when it happens - we shouldn't fight that, we should be proud of it.  We're awfully proud of Richard England, who came up through our program and now races professionally, we don't expect to see him very often but he does show up sometimes and race with us and he remembers where he came from, as does Tom and the other elite guys who race with us and have a lot of fun doing it.  That's what club cycling is all about and that's how it should be.

[Mod: The late Dr Siff noted:

Many of us who have worked in several fields including neuropsychology 
and psychoneuroimmunology have witnessed similar changes in response to 
various shamanic, psychological, NLP, placebo and touch therapeutic methods. 
In fact it is very  rare to find ANY therapeutic systems which DO NOT enjoy a 
level  of success at some time or another which is more than sufficient to 
ensure a regular clientele, whether the method is virtually  witchcraft or 
not.  Apparently a success rate of less than 40 percent is quite adequate to 
ensure that a given therapist maintains a successful practice.  By all means 
state that certain methods may work in certain situations, but don't presume 
that they do so for  scientific reasons which have never been proved.]

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.

It's been hard to miss this week, swimming's world record smashfest at the world championships in Rome.  Previous "nobodies" (sic) beating world marks set by famous swimmers.  Why? Swimming suits that reduce drag and increase buoyancy.

They (swimming) started down the slippery slope years ago, but it's finally become obvious that their records are now a farce.

Cycling addressed this issue quite a while ago to howls of derision by some, who still whine about it now.    There's really only one major record in cycling, and that's the Hour.  One hour, fixed gear, velodrome.  If you watched Graham Obree's semi-biographical film or read his book 'The Flying Scotsman' etc you'd remember.  How did Graham break the record? With a special narrow bike, less drag ... How did Chris Boardman break it again? With a bike designed 'On a Computer'.  Eventually the UCI said enough, and now the Hour must be set on a standard bike with standard bits and pieces and there's a separate section of the records that covers the fancy bikes used to set the hour record.  If you want to break the record now you have to do it at sea level on a standard bicycle.  So the Hour is a record that means something.  If you break it, you're actually faster than Merckx was and that's how it should be.

All the other cycling disciplines aren't really based on times, they're all relative (save for some track time trials), so as long as everyone has roughly equal budgets they're on a level-ish playing field.  Our sport coped with the issues swimming has blindly plunged into (who seriously didn't see this coming?!), it'll be interesting to see how swimming copes.  It's a pretty boring sport to watch, the only thrill is the breaking of a world record or seeing someone you're connected to do well, so how they cope with the records issue will be intriguing.

In today's Age, something many of us already know ...

If you think you can drive safely when chatting on your hands-free mobile phone kit, then think again.

Mounting evidence reveals that hands-free mobile phone calls can significantly diminish your driving skills, in spite of claims to the contrary by equipment manufacturers.

It's not news, but it's a timely reminder.

The Griffith study concluded that “a driver’s sensitivity to prospective information about upcoming events and the associated perception and awareness of what the road environment affords may both significantly be degraded when simultaneously using a hands-free mobile phone”.

And of course, the phone companies and gadget floogers spin away ....

“Hands-free car kits allow the convenient and safe use of your mobile phone so you can maximise down time while driving,” Telstra says on its website.

10 points to Telstra, evil bastards.  Money, must make more money ....

Remember when you were a teenager (or if you're younger than that, just put yourself in old-man-shoes for a few moments and bear with me!).  You knew everything.  Certainly.  What you did was perfect.  You were the best car driver in the world.  You knew all the tricks, all the facts, everything was perfectly clear and if anyone spoke to you about what you were doing, or dared to give you some advice or relate their own experience they were WRONG or out of line, you'd get angry, you'd tell them off, you'd rant on your blog/twitter/facebook page after fuming for days etc, what do they know?!

Then, when you grew up a bit, you began to slowly realise that you didn't know it all and that other people are worth listening to, and even seeking out, their experiences and ideas.  That the things you were so sure about maybe weren't cast in stone and a little bit of humility and grace began to be a part of your personality?  It's part of growing up.

Around cycling in particular (although I'm certain it exists in other sports and social groups as well) there's a particular breed who are still stuck in that adolescent (my apologies if you are an adolescent, although I don't think a lot of you read this blog, so I'm pretty safe!) mindset.  Defensive in their certainly that no-one can tell them anything.  Some of them have even coined a name for this unwanted discourse, they call it ADvice and they bandy it around like some sort of a badge of honour.  "Don't give ME ADvice, I know it all".  That's analogous to  "I'm a closed-minded fool who won't listen to anyone else's ideas or experiences, and I'm proud of it".  Yah, smart .. very.  When, for example, a world champion hands out a bit of advice on the discipline in which he's world champion at, that's damn valuable information.  Only a fool would cast it aside and be offended about it being freely given.

Mark Rippetoe wrote of his own experience (we all go through the phase, it seems) where he was training in a gym, and some old guy started to talk to him and make a few technique suggestions.  Mark was training like (and he'd say it himself now) a muppet, doing "silly bullshit".  He was sure what he was doing was the best.  But, he was very very wrong, and after he learned a bit more, came to the stunning (at the time for him) conclusion that he should learn to be more coachable.  Ie: learn to listen to the experience and ideas of others.  Sure, some (lots!) of it will be bogus, but some of it won't and being exposed to other ideas is never a bad thing.  We all need to get better at being coached, we all need to grow up a bit and learn to accept advice and experiences and ideas with grace and humility and to accept it in the spirit in which it is intended - as help and support and interest.  Remember, no-one knows it all and ideas and suggestions are valuable, even if the ideas themselves aren't terribly useful sometimes.

We all think what we're doing is the best way to do something (or we wouldn't be doing it that way, right?) but then, often it isn't, and that's when we get to improve.  Closing our minds to suggestions and ideas from others is stupid and immature and taking offence at the same is the sort of adolescent behaviour that we should all try and grow out of.  Being given advice isn't something to be threatened by, it's an opportunity to learn something new or different and it's given by people who take an interest in the progress of others.  Be one of the people that learns things, not one of the ones that knows it all.

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.

Every now and then I buy a copy of Bicycling Australia, generally against my better judgement.  It's Ride's poor cousin at best, but like a McPlastics thickshake, every now and then I'm drawn to buy it, knowing I'll feel awful afterwards.

The May-June 2009 edition is no surprise.  A few years ago BA published some stupid article glowingly praising a fraudulent snake-oil product called "Oxy Shots" (go ahead, have a look at the website, it's .. breathtaking!) which claimed to improve oxygen saturation in the bloodstream by drinking (yes, drinking!) oxygen.  Absolute bull, but there you go, and the muppets at BA endorsed the thing, gave it a whole page and the reviewer had never heard of placebos (despite apparently having a coaching qualification ...).

So what have they done this time?  "Lact-Away".  Yep, A page's 'review' of a product that claims to buffer the body from something THAT DOESN'T EXIST THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE! Our old friend Lactic Acid!  Really!  Blood lactate is a fuel and is used in the Cori cycle to produce glucose, it's not a performance inhibitor and LACTIC ACID DOES NOT EXIST IN HUMANS!  The reviewer even mentions that she (I assume ... Shannon Johansen sounds female) started feeling like she was lactating more readily than usual.  She breastfeeds while riding?  Ok .... Strangers in the house and all that?  Bizzare ... Anyway .. How would she know her blood lactate levels without a test?  You can't feel it.  Given that the active ingredient in this stuff is vinegar and salt (if you want to buffer the PH of your blood, sodium carbonate is known to work, and there's protocols for it and it's almost free at the supermarket, not that I recommend it), suggesting that the mugs buy a $125 bottle of this stuff to 'see if you're the one that gets a 20% improvement' is a poor joke at best, and downright irresponsible at worst.  Looking for a magic potion to improve performance?  BA, EPO works ... maybe you can promote its use?

If you really want to know what causes muscle pain and performance decreases, read this article.  It's a little dry .... Here's a relevant quote :

In summary, it appears that the intracellular accumulation of lactate per se is not a major factor in muscle fatigue

And even more interestingly :

Experiments in which lactate was infused into whole animals while the muscles were stimulated to fatigue by nerve or direct muscle stimulation, found that the presence of extracellular lactate, which likely decreased pH_i, reduced failure of sarcolemma excitability and restored force production (emphasis mine!)

"Lact-away", no, actually, I'd like MORE blood lactate.

So that's my BA thickshake for this 6 months or so.  Fools and their money, and I was the fool again!  Hopefully I'll resist the urge next time.

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.

It's been a long week.  I've had a headcold for days, on Friday I got stung by a European wasp, Saturday was the club teams championships at DISC, some irony, some of it was delayed by rain just after Rhys was telling us all over the PA about how good it is to have an indoor velodrome!  I was (eventually) teamed up with Dino and Martin Lama as the Blackburn 1 team for the team sprint.  After a false start from Brunswick 1, we got off to a shocker because I got stuck in the gate and must have dropped half a second at the start.  We ended up riding a 56.something 750m, Brunswick 1 rode a 52.something.  The stuck in the gate thing was entirely my fault, I tried to predict the start and must have gone a fraction early and maybe twisted a little?  Anyway ... my fault.  I don't think we would have made the final even if we'd ridden a perfect race, but it was frustrating all the same.

I've not been near the 'haus since yesterday morning's warmup sets before the teams championships, and I still haven't decided if I'll ride the sprint at the Vic Masters next weekend.  I know I'm not fast enough, but it might be worth it to do a flying 200 and see how I'm going.  The main problem is fatigue.  I was chatting with Mick Thomas while we watched the rain leak on the boards at DISC on Saturday and we're all hanging out for the end of the season.  We started racing in October and we're all burnt out.

In the Good News stakes, Emily Apolito and Bridgette Thomas won the JW15 500m team sprint this morning at the junior version of the club teams championships. Em's off to Adelaide with her family next week to ride in the Aussie titles, so Dino will miss the Vic Masters, but if he feels anything like me, that's more a relief than anything! We're all desperate for the end of season and a break from training and racing all the time.

I know what I'll be doing over most of April (break-month) - Kayaking with Lucie and whoever else wants to come along!  We'll be starting spin sessions again in April and also the DISC Sunday evening sessions.  The motorbike at DISC is now an issue, due to some problems with it recently the system's been changed and it's now $1,000 for the first 1,000km.  So our use, which is over about 25 weeks, for about 45 minutes to an hour a week (around 30km at most per session) means I'll have to find $1,000 to use the bike this winter for sprinters leadouts and paced enduro sessions.  Hrm.

I've just about finished the videos from round 5 of the BSSS, I'll have them all done today (just got 2 more finals to do!)

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.

Ghost bike: A white painted bicycle chained near a cycling fatality site.

Dog bites man is never news, man bites dog is. It's a media truism and a cliche'.  We notice the unusual, and ignore the commonplace. 

In 2007, for example, 332 people died on Victorian roads.  How's that break up?

6 cyclists

173 drivers

45 motorcyclists

67 passengers in motor vehicles

41 pedestrians

6 cyclists. On average over the last 5 years, 8 cyclists a year died on Victorian roads. 

That's not very many.  It's hardly even noticeable in the stats, ~2% of road fatalities are cyclists.

So what's the point of the ghost bikes and the ride of silence and other such activities?  If we're to accept the generally held interpretation of some reasearch out of the US, that suggests that the more cyclists ride on the roads, the less (in terms of riding time) get involved in collisions, one aim of most sensible cyclists is to encourage more people to ride, more often (apologies to Bicycle Victoria!).  How does a ghost bike help that?  How does something unusual and thus newsworthy reminding passers-by of a fatality encourage those passers-by to consider riding rather than driving?  I don't think it does any of us any favours.

Cycling is NOT dangerous, cycling is one of the safest and best ways to get around.  It's healthy for riders, it's better for the air we share, it's even better for drivers (reducing congestion etc). That's the message we want to push, and we need to push it because it's the truth.

So get on your bike and ride it, encourage your friends to ride. That's how to make a real difference. The best monument to the fallen, if you must, is for more people to ride their bikes; ride to work, ride to school, ride to the shops, ride to parties and dinners with friends, ride to your holidays, RIDE!