Thankyou to Swervin' Merv Tracy, Alex 'Too Cool To Sprint' Iwanov, Nathan Dux and Stuart 'Mary Poppins' Lucy for your help yesterday with the working bee in the PowerHaus.  We did a heap of work clearing stuff and moving things around in preparation for the launch of the 'Haus as a top level strength and conditioning facility.  Our new power rack should arrive this week, now we'll have room for it!

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

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

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

My turn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His writeup of the experience is here.

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

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

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

Riding the Powertap wheel on Tuesday before the spin session (yes, I do train!) I noticed a bit of vibration.  Looked down and the wheel was a bit out of true.  No probs ... Nath uses it on Tues night at Spin, I take it to the shop on Wednesday, have a look .. hrm, cracked rim!  It's the second Mavic Open Pro I've cracked now, the last one was about 3 years ago I think.  We had a spare and now the wheel's rebuilt and ready to use again.

I haven't had much time to get out and ride any of my bikes over the last couple of weeks, it's easiest just to say that "life happens".  But ... I have been able to steal 45 mins a couple of times a week to get into the aboc Power House and build leg strength.  After a seminar of sorts with Peter Cayley last week (Thanks Stu Vaughan for organising it) I've discovered snatches (olympic lifts) and they are hurties!  Very intense.  Good for developing power, which I need lots of.

Anyway .. the main leg strength excercise I'm doing is squats.  Not full squats, I've had a knee reconstruction and my right knee doesn't bend that far, but for cycling, that's ok .. I'm not training for olympic lifting, so don't need to go deep with squats.  Started out gradually building weight up, and am now pushing 3 x 12 reps at 135kg with 90s rest between sets.  I only have 137.5kg of total weight.  When it's time to do closer to 1RM stuff, I'm going to need more ballast.  Weights are around $2.50 per kilogram, and I think another two or four 20kg plates will be the go, so another couple of hundred dollars on weights is on the cards in a few weeks.

On other news .. aboc CC and aboc IT Consulting are sponsoring the Hawthown Cycling Club's history website.  You can see it come along here.  It's got no content yet, but should be an interesting thing for Hawthorn to use to record their club's history.  I'm expecting to see some photos of Phil Anderson there soon!

Round 5 of the Trek Summer Sprint Series is this Sunday.  I hope many of you will be there to compete and spectate. The last one was brilliant.  The weather forecast is good and there'll be a free BBQ courtesy of aboc.