Illness, lameness

Sick again, how very exciting

Friday a twinge, not bad over the weekend, Monday a bit more and before the port ride definitely on Tuesday.

I stayed home most of the week and maybe I'm getting better?

Either way, it passes the "neck check" - it's 100% in the sinuses etc so I can still ride a bit, but what a pain. This is the winter of inconsistent training for me, for sure.

Hope everyone else out there in cycling-blog-land is doing better.

Tuesday Port Ride stats

Turns out someone (Maury) actually reads this thing, and he admitted to an unsavory desire for updates, specifically those including Wattage information.

Well, who can blame him? I can't get enough wattage information either.

So here's a chart of last night's POO ride, just for you Maury

I highlighted the things that interested me - specifically the largest steady efforts of the night, usually when I was hitting the wind. Many people don't realize the difference in power required to ride in the group or to pull the group - this shows it pretty clearly.

The two yellow lines are placed at where my threshold is right now (260W or so - it's moving up as I get more fit) and where I can hold power for around 4 minutes (320W or so). The blue line is just at 30mph because it's a big round number. You can see average/min/max stats for the whole night in the bottom left (34.1mph max! and there was no sprint...)

You can see that it takes almost twice the energy to pull at POO speed as it does to sit in the pack. So even if it was really fast, if you weren't pulling, telling the people who were that it was easy and you felt good doesn't mean anything to them. Take a pull then pipe up :-)

You can also see that the an attack (or bridging to one) stings a ton. There was one point where a big split opened up, and I pulled for a straight minute at a 30mph average into the headwind to bridge the gap. I don't recall that ever happening in cat 3 crit, but maybe that's just me. Fantastic interval though!

And for Maury, you can see at the very end when he towed me along as he bridged across a huge gap it took a solid minute and a half at 30mph before we closed it. Since I was drafting it only took 260W on my part to sit on his wheel (instead of 300W to pull), but remember my threshold is only 260W? My legs were on simmer just holding on.

That's why the POO is the great workout it is though. In the pack you can recover, but when you hit the wind you get good Anaerobic Threshold and VO2max intervals.

Now if only we could get folks to pedal through all the corners and ride a good corner line (instead of arbitrarily peeling off...) we'd be all set ;-)

One final tidbit - cyclingpeaks.com occasionally posts Pro power charts. They just posted one and I noticed that the Pro (Bert Roesems) who has a threshold of 350W rides around at 160-170W pretty consistently. This is for a 4 hour ride. When they ride slow, they do ride very slow. When he did intervals on that ride he was doing ~500W though. When it's hard, it's very hard. Something to remember, and I'll probably be going slower on average after thinking about it.

Intervals

Morning Intervals
Like hitting legs with a hammer
Getting faster hurts

Eucalyptus

(I know, this picture is pretty pathetic)

So I ride the same route just about every morning. BART to Civic center, out to the panhandle and the Golden Gate Park polo grounds.

One of the roads I use to get there is a service road (it's the start of "Middle Road" I believe), and when I rolled by today it was as if there was a new Eucalyptus God, and he was angry

Apparently, all the storms tore up trees in the park, and I didn't know it but the service road I ride on is where the park service mulches everything.

I guess it's been long enough since the storm that the piles are fully active because they have clouds of steam on them.

The one pictured is 1 of maybe 3 or 4 massive heaps. 20 feet by 50 feet maybe. They all smell very eucalyptus-y which is pretty good actually.

Not sure about you but I like seeing how part of the park ecosystem works. So there's your Nature Moment of the day :-)

Clear your mind, and examine your assumptions

I like how every morning the BART elevator reminds me that questioning
what I'm doing is meaningless.

Should I bother waking up early to ride my bicycle?

Isn't it cold?

What if it rains?

Mu.

new phone, new pics

Piecing everything back together after getting hit by the truck.

Rode to work again Friday with a new phone and snapped the SF skyline sunset shot on the way home. Cliche but still irressistible.

The other one is morning on alcatraz and angel island. Pretty stuff. My bruises only have a couple more days to go before they're healed I think, and I got a new rack and put it on my race bike with the fenders. So I'm pretty sure I have one of the most expensive rain/commuter bikes around. Beats driving to work though and my real commuter bike should be fixed next week I think.

Still traveling and doing other stuff besides racing on the weekend. Lakeport this weekend and two weekends from now. Unsure about next weekend.

Other than that, it's interval time now and I find that after all the illness and travel this winter I'm stomping out around 255W at threshold instead of 270 or higher. Not to mention the 4 extra kilos I'm carrying (but it was winter...and vacation... ;-) )

Should make for plenty of work the next month as I claw my way back into fighting shape. I'll be back though, look out :-)

Oh, and happy birthday to Jay, Merritt, Kelly and Colby (belated) (wow, lots of Feb kids...)

Cheers

Knocked over by a truck

This is a Mack Truck. It looks like one I saw today.

So, I'm at the Port of Oakland.

I'm there every Tuesday.

I get there around 6:20 off the 5:45 ferry from the SF Ferry building.

I'm cruising around and not having a bad time even though the weather is pretty miserable (it's pretty much just pouring).

There's two lanes of traffic each direction, with this dead "lane" in the middle formed by two sets of double-yellow lines about one lanes-width apart, and there's a semi truck parked there near an entrance to one of the berths.

There's also a parking lane, which I'm riding in.

The semi-truck has been there, stationary, since I've been riding, and I'm on my third lap at this point.

As I get near him, with no signal, he all the sudden turns right, right into the berth entrance - crossing both lanes of traffic and headed *right* for me.

He admitted later to the police officer that he saw me but he didn't think I was moving very quickly. No, I'm not flattered by that.

I turn hard to the right when I realize it's really happening but it's too late. The infamous Right Hook got me.

His front-right fender nails me in the left thigh and knocks me forward and over the bike to the right where I skid to a stop in a heap in a puddle right in front of his thank-god-it-was-screeching-to-a-halt semi.

It was ... exciting.

I was not happy, but I managed not to touch him or anything, I just told him that I was very angry at him. Then I called the police who (can you believe it?) showed up in about 5 minutes.

I made sure the truck was where it stopped when the police car got there - with its rear wheels in the double-yellow area and the nose in the turn-in. I can't think of a legal way for a truck to get in that orientation, which should factor for something.

While officer Johnson took a report (08-012887) Brian and Karla saw me and pulled in for a chat. It was freezing and wet and miserable and the Officer offered me a ride so I told 'em to scram before they shivered apart.

I got the ride home, and here I am now (after a warm bath).

My rear wheel looks like it's seen it's last port ride. But my phone appears to have revived (correction: it is, in fact, busted. Sigh), and my laptop still works (despite the rain ride and the crash - I love my Arkel Briefcase bag!). I'm going to have a deep bruise on the left thigh and I've got a little rash on the right hip. All in all, not so bad.

I've tried to think of what I can do differently, but I can't think of anything other than more lights on the front.

Except...he *saw* me! That bastard.

Please, for all your friends and family and loved ones that are out there living and playing near cars, drive safely when you're in one, mmkay? Thanks.