Today I'm working in at Cycle Science Mitcham (as I do on most Thursdays).  We often get reps in to try to sell us stuff.  Pete, who owns the shop, has a PhD in biochem and is a very smart man and a real scientist.  

So anyway... We don't stock Skins, or any of those other faux-compression clothes, for example.  No evidence, go away ...

Now, today, a rep shows up, from 'Eken Human Performance Enhancement'.  Yes, alarm bells are ringing ...

They sell those hologram/magnetic/snake-oil placebo bracelets that you may have seen around.  Buddy, you're in the wrong place ... GTFO!

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.

So anyway .. on Monday, Luke Mason from CSV and I took the DISC motorcycle in to Gassit Motorcycles to get fixed up, it had a list of issues that need resolving.  The most critical being the starter motor being flakey.  There was four things in total that needed fixing :

1. Starter motor/battery (make it start reliably)

2. Fix the gearbox/clutch so it will select neutral when hot

3. Fix the cruise control

4. Service & fix oil leak

I picked it up on Wednesday during the NTID sprint training session.  They hadn't fixed the cruise control so I hung around for 30 mins or so while they tried to, then gave up.  (3) not fixed. 

Rode it back to DISC - the trip is about 2.5km, checked the log, 5km since I logged it out on Monday.  Uhuh .. It hasn't been testridden.  And .. IT WON'T GO INTO NEUTRAL!

Right. 

They did change the oil, clean up the engine casing (presumably they fixed the oil leak) and replaced the starter motor.  It cost around $1,100 I think, but it's NOT FIXED!

I've sent Rhys at CSV an email suggesting he tear the guys at Gassit a new one and I'm mightily annoyed, I've spent about half a day of very precious time riding it back and forth from DISC to Gassit etc, and the bloody job is not done.

The current generation of Powertap road power meters (the wireless 2.4GHz ones) mostly come with an aluminium alloy freehub body.  After not very long this happens to them.  Sucks ... It's because making an alloy freehub that works with both 9 and 10 speed Shimano cassettes compromises the design of the freehub.  Of course, the weight weenies want light hubs ... so for the sake of 80 grams (I weighed both the alloy and the steel freehubs today) all but the bottom end Powertap comes with this stupid alloy freehub.

But!  For around $200 or so (in Australia, from a Trek dealer) you can get the PT Elite+ freehub, which is steel (and ... yes ... 80 grams heavier) and swap it into your higher end hub and eliminate the problem!  Win!  It should not cost what it does, but that's not something your LBS can do anything about, wholesale these things are insanely expensive, but they are available and they mean you can swap cassettes with just the one chain whip!  Nice .. when something works like it should.

Enough ranting .. My PT 2.4 is now upgraded to a steel freehub and I'm happy about it.

There's been a stir up amongst dieticians and endocrinologists etc of late, concerning fructose and sugar and the whole food pyramid (see Good Calories,  Bad Calories by Gary Taubes in particular).  In a previous blog entry I've quoted Prof Lustig where he talks about the evils of fructose.  There's a number of rebuttals popping up about his talk, mostly the rebuttals talk about context - which is to say that in appropriate doses fructose is ok, and of benefit.  Sure, it is.  Fructose has a benefit, in the liver (which is the only place it's metabolised) it replenishes liver glycogen stores, which is very handy if you're glycogen depleted, eg after a hard training session.  Once those supplies are replenished, excess fructose is then released into the blood stream or stored in the liver as triglicerides (fat).  I'm going to write more later on the subject of choosing your experts (or, who do you believe?), but that's a topic for another blog entry ....

So, let's look at context for a few minutes and try and clear away a tiny bit of the hand waving.

Let's take a real-world example.  A 250ml glass of orange juice.  I went to the local shop this morning and got a bottle of orange juice.  No added sugar.  Ok, that's the best case scenario.  Let's be conservative and assume that it's drunk by the metric cup, which is 250ml (no-one drinks 250ml cups, but again, being conservative ...).

Orange juice as provided by The Original Juice Co in Melbourne, Australia contains, for every 100ml, 9 grams of carbohydrate which is 8 grams of 'sugar'. I don't know what the other 1 gram is. They don't specify the sugar, but I expect, being orange juice, that that's pretty close to 100% fructose. I don't know for sure, it's not clear on the wikipedia entry for oranges.

Ok, so 250ml of orange juice, no 'added' sugar, what's in it?  20 grams of sugar, that's 4 teaspoons.  If that's just sucrose, that's roughly 10 grams of fructose and 10 grams of glucose, but I think, from this page, that it's 100% fructose.  That's quite a lot.   4 teaspoons of fructose in 250ml of orange juice.  No-one would put that much in a cup of coffee or tea!  It's only 7 grams less sugar than 250ml of Coca Cola. (Coke is 39 grams of sugar per 355ml, ~11% sugar, orange juice is ~8% sugar).  Coca Cola in Australia uses sucrose as a sweetener, which is 50% glucose and 50% fructose.  Coke is 5.5% fructose, OJ is 8% fructose. Interesting, eh?

Let's look at a little more context.  Let's see how many oranges there are in a glass (again, our ficticious 250ml glass) of OJ.  The average orange has about 2 ounces of OJ in it.  According to this site anyway.  An 8 ounce glass is about 240ml (1 US fluid Oz ~ 29.6 ml), so there's 4 and a bit's worth of oranges in a glass of OJ.  so if we've got 20 grams of fructose in 250ml, and  that's about 4 oranges worth, each orange has about 5 grams of fructose in it.  5 grams is one teaspoon.  That's not too bad.  An individual orange has about 70 mg of Vitamin C in it.  That's plenty.  The RDA according to the WHO is 45 mg/day.  So, one orange is fine, it's only 5g of fructose and it's got all the Vit C you need.  A glass of orange juice on the other hand ... In context, is almost as bad as a glass of coke, or possibly worse if you take into account that coke is using sucrose in Australia, which is only 50% fructose. Although OJ does have some good stuff in it (vit c etc) it's got WAY too much sugar in it unless you're doing a lot of heavy exercise.  And this is the best case scenario!  Most of the cups in my house are 300ml or more.  I expect they are in your house too.

We use, in our sports drinks (Staminade) 2-3, maybe 4 at most teaspoons (mostly sugar, a bit of salt) per 750ml bidon, you'd think that was a lot of sugar, until you compare it to OJ, which is 3 times as sugar-full as our sports drink mixture.  And we feed OJ to our kids telling them it's good for them and then wonder why they're all getting fat.

At the Australia Day Madison, way back in January, the Blackburn club's big whiteboard was damaged.  No-one took any responsibility for fixing it, and we use it at ergo sessions.  It's a pretty important tool for us.  So I guess it comes to those of us that are put out by it being damaged, to fix the damn thing.  I'm pretty cranky that the club didn't take responsibility for it despite it being mentioned many times at committee meetings and so on, but there you go.

So, with a thank you to David and Jamie Morgans who helped with rivets and bolts on a day when no shops are open, the whiteboard is now repaired and slightly enhanced, we added permanent holders for the clock to remove the need for the old bent coat hanger and reduce the likelyhood of the clock being damaged.  We had to drill out some old rivets, re-set the alloy frame around the board, replace the displaced retaining bolts, rivet it all back together and then add the mounting bolts for the clock.

Job done ... 

In other less interesting news, I actually did a few road miles today (wow!) - Stew from the DUCC's rolled up with Alesandro (a new DUCC from Columbia, and some climber) with a mechanical, they'd managed to tangle up a chain and bend a link.  We fixed it and I got talked into a ride.  We tootled out to the 1:20 along the Dandenong Creek Trail, saluted the statue of Oppy, I grabbed a couple of dim sims at The Basin fish & chippery while those two did a 1:20 effort then we noodled on home.  That's two road rides in a week.  If this becomes a habit I'll be back racing crits next summer.  Nah .... But a few more miles in my legs might help a bit with high intensity endurance and recovery.

Tomorrow I'm lifting with Stu in the 'Haus, then Dino, Stew and I will do some track work at Blackburn, then I'm in to work for Hilton again with the NTID/VIS squad at DISC in the afternoon. On Sunday, Lucie and I are going kayaking up at the Goulburn!  Good times!

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.