Do The Right Thing

It’s my birthday.

It’s a biggie.

Looking on the bright side - it’s all downhill from here. And hopefully with a tailwind!

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Possibly the strangest news story ever, via MSN :

A woman driver caused a pile-up after becoming distracted while shaving her bikini line.

Megan Mariah Barnes, 37, crashed into the back of a truck in the Florida Keys after giving her ex-husband the wheel as she shaved her private parts.

Barnes was driving to meet her boyfriend in Key West and told police she wanted to be "ready for the visit," website WJZ.com reported.

I mean, really. Just WTF?

Drivers being inattentive, impaired through drink, tired, distracted by their very important mobile phone conversations, and generally driving in a manner that a sensible person would conclude might lead them to "lose control" of their vehicle, I can almost understand.

But being too busy shaving a landing strip to pay attention to the road ahead?

These aren’t "accidents" - just examples of Darwinism in action!

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Not sure if you’ve seen this postcard - I think it’s from Sustrans:

Anyway, this was confirmed last week with this video that I found on Imagine No Cars :

Eeek! Yes, that is a man, that is a beard, and those are moobs.

Mind you, it might not be cycling that shrinks underwear - it could just be an environmental factor:

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A friend of mine runs a company specialising in building web sites for on-line training. A while ago, they were asked to build a site that was something to do with cognitive behavioural therapy (a form of psychotherapy) , and the customer was absolutely insistent on having the acronym, CBT, in the domain name for the service. Naturally, they complied with the customer’s wishes.

Anyway.

Shortly after the site was launched, there seemed to be some problems - they were getting listed by the sort of ‘adult’ directories that responsible psychotherapists would consider inappropriate. After some research, it was discovered that CBT stands for something else. Something that seems a little . . . um . . . extreme.

I’m not going to tell you what that is (and nor would I recommend that you even Goooooogle it - NOT safe for work, or even at home - you never know who’s watching your internet connection), but let’s just say that thanks to the generosity of my parents and an upcoming birthday, I’ve got a new saddle for my road bike that fits wonderfully, and my days of cycling CBT are now behind me:

Yep - that’s a Specialized Toupé saddle , and it’s very, very comfy. Funny name though - I thought that a Toupé for your nether regions was called a merkin?

(um . . . probably best not to Gooooogle that one either!)

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Nothing much to say - just SO tired.

Actually, I do have something to say - my swimming must be improving, because I was dramatically under-shooting my pace target, and had to work hard to slow down .

That is a very new experience for me.

Workout:

• Type: Swim
• Date: 03/08/2010
• Time: 12:35:01
• Total Time: 00:50:00.00
• Calories: 487
• Distance: 2,300 m
• Average Pace: 2:10.81/100m

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Remember that whole thing that the strong should bow to the weak in transport? So cars give way to bikes, who in turn give way to pedestrians?

Well, as you can see, it was alive and well in Whitley Bay last week:

Oh, hang on a minute, I’ve got that wrong haven’t I? It’s just another example of the sort of thing you can see on a daily basis over at Crap Walking & Cycling in Waltham Forest , isn’t it:

Bah!

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We normally do our caption contest on Fridays, but today is the 8th March - International Woman’s Day.

The bicycle is indeed a true freedom machine. It enables us to go places that are just too far to walk, without the need to be in a silly metal box for transportation. If you were a woman in the late 19th century, this was particularly true - to ride a bike, you needed sensible clothes instead of insane corsets and ankle-length skirts, and once on a bike, you could go where you wanted . . . without a male chaperone (*Gasp* where will it all end?!). As Susan Anthony said,

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

And the same is very much true today - you can see it over at Amsterdamize , or various Cycle Chic web sites around the world. And its to celebrate this that we have today’s caption contest photograph:

So, see what you can come up with as a caption for this photo, and leave your entry as a comment below. Who knows - with the right entry, you could just win this week’s [virtual] prize - the chance to see Fat Rob wearing a corset and ankle-length skirt (n.b. you’ll have to pay for your own psychotherapy after).

Good luck!

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At various times, you might have heard me raving about Wife’s flapjacks. These are without question THE fuel of champions - just perfect for long rides. So perfect that they can no-longer be kept a secret. So I’ve dusted off my Minox A / IIIs camera and broken into the kitchen to steal the recipe for you.

Here goes:

Makes 24 flapjacks

Ingredients:

• 385g butter
• 385g demerara sugar
• 4 tablespoon golden syrup
• 495g porridge oats
• Optional - some chopped dried apricots
• Optional - 1 rounded teaspoon of ground cinnamon or ginger

Large baking tray (ours is ~16" x 11" x 1 1/2"), plus baking parchment. Preheat your oven to 160°C / 325°F

Method:

1. Line the base of the tin with the baking parchment and grease this with a little butter.
2. Put the butter, sugar & syrup into a large saucepan and heat it gently until the butter melts. Stir with a wooden spoon, and don’t allow the mix to boil.
3. Take the pan off the heat and stir in the oats so that they’re completely coated in the syrup mixture.
4. Spoon the mix into the baking tray and spread it with the back of a metal spoon. Make sure you get it into the corners and that the top is nice and smooth.
5. Put this into the centre of the oven, and bake for 35 minutes or until the oats have turned golden brown.
6. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. While the flapjacks are still slightly warm & still in the tin, cut them into squares - we make a 6 x 4 grid to get our 24 flapjacks.
7. Eat.

Nutritional Information Per Flapjack:

• Calories: 287
• Carbohydrates: 34g
• …of which, sugars: 21g
• Fat 13g
• Protein: 2g

Bottom Line:

Great fuel for endurance cycling - the kind of thing that you actually look forward to eating while the hours tick by. On the bike you could probably do one of these flapjacks every 30-40 minutes. Because of their solid nature, I’d stick to gels and the like for running though!

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So after the bike . . . the run. I got home just after midday, and it was warm enough for me to change - my first time in shots this year! I just hope that the sight of my winter legs didn’t scare too many horses / offend public decency too badly.

This was my first run at anything above cool-down distance after a long ride this year, and my aim was to test out a new nutritional strategy to avoid the dreaded bike-run bonk . Basically, I, like many other endurance athletes (not that I’m an athlete - I’m just a bloke who’s done some long rides and runs, and has entered an Ironman race in 112 days’ time), can be prone to stomach cramps. That’s a euphemism of course - what we mean by it is that your digestive system shuts down and throws the "evacuate" switch. T’ain’t funny - you try running with your buttocks clamped together as hard as they’ll go.

Anyway. Apparently this is caused by over-loading your stomach with carbohydrates, starving it of blood (’cos you’re using it all to power your legs, heart & lungs), and generally mucking up the diffusion gradient such that you start to dehydrate from your blood into the stomach. Nice - race over, do not wear the T-shirt for the race, hand back the finisher’s medal, and to find your position when the results are published, look under "DNF".

So I’d had my last food on the bike 20 minutes from home - a gel. Then with ten minutes of faffing around, I’d set off on the run. 8 miles, with a run for ten / walk for one minute plan. At each walk, I took a drink, and held off eating again until the turnaround point. Again, this was just a gel - a High5 Banana Blast (nomnomnomnom!).

Seemed to work just fine - I had a little leg cramp at about 5 miles, but felt this coming on and walked for a minute, taking a big drink, and rubbing my leg hard to smooth it out. But apart from that it was just great!

Workout:

• Type: Run
• Date: 03/07/2010
• Time: 13:07:46
• Total Time: 1:04:00.00
• Calories: 974
• Distance: 8 miles
• Average Pace: 8:00/mile

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This is my last active week in my Base 2 training period - next week (oh joy!) is recovery week, where I shall be lounging around, drinking piña coladas and notching up a mere 6.5 hours of training.

To celebrate, I opted to do a brick session - bike followed immediately by a run.

The bike ride was great - I went up the route of the Great North Bike Ride for 30 or so miles to Alnmouth & back. It was a lovely day for a ride - still a bit chilly, but bright and clear, and I had some of Wife’s flapjacks to keep me going. Actually, I had a little more than that:

• 3 litres of fluids - High5 Zero. Take a drink every ten minutes.
• Banana at 50 minutes
• Flapjack square at 1:40 and 2:30
• Mini Mars Bars at 3:00 & 3:20
• A 90 cal gel at 3:35

*Burp*

There were only two down sides to the ride. Firstly, just like last year’s Great North Bike Ride, the wind was from the South. Not terribly strong, but that five-mile uphill stretch from Amble to Widdrington was just as much of a bitch as it was last August. My average speed on the ride out was 18.3 mph, and for the overall journey, 16.8mph, so I figure that on the return I was averaging just 15.3mph. That’s a big drop.

Secondly, just after Ashington, I rode from sunlight into the shade of a building, and didn’t see a pothole until I was pretty much on top of it. I tried bunny-hopping, but didn’t get the rear wheel over . . . and got myself a snakebite puncture . I could tell that the tube was going to be a right-off when I couldn’t inflate it to find the puncture (the air was leaking out faster than I could put it in!), but thankfully in addition to a puncture repair kit, I had a spare tube with me. Oh, and as far as I can see, there’s no actual damage to the wheel rim.

Workout:

• Type: Cycle
• Date: 03/07/2010
• Time: 12:38:08
• Total Time: 3:57:00.00
• Calories: 3462
• Distance: 66.2 miles
• Average Speed: 16.76 mph

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