Friday Bicycle Caption Contest: Engineering Students On The Loose

I was looking for a photo of a bike wheel for tonight’s discussion at the Darlington Cycling Campaign , but instead I came up with this in Flickr’s Creative Commons images:

This is probably why you should never lend your bike to a mechanical engineering student with too much time on his hands.

Anyway, I’m sure you can come up with a witty caption for this - just leave it below as a comment. And who knows, you could win this week’s fabulous prize - something that money just can’t buy*:

A hot date with our favourite mechanical engineer, Fat Rob, who’ll be showing off his latest pair of bib shorts. If you’re lucky, he’ll even let you apply the chamois cream to them . . .

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Ride To The Pool

To fit in my extra swimming session each week, I’m doing it on Thursday mornings. The thing is, Thursday is also a day in my schedule for cycling. So yesterday was a ride into work, a short pool session, a day at the office and then riding home.

It was good fun, apart from finding that I’d got yet another puncture when I came out of the pool. That’s the fourth in four weeks. Bah!

Workout:

  • Type: Cycle
  • Date: 03/18/2010
  • Total Time: 1:50:00.00
  • Calories: 1339
  • Distance: 29 miles
  • Average Speed: 15.82 mph

Short Swim

Strangely enough, I didn’t have time to do a swim with a 4500m main set . . .

Workout:

  • Type: Swim
  • Date: 03/18/2010
  • Time: 09:02:05
  • Total Time: 00:16:00.00
  • Calories: 117
  • Distance: 692.02 m
  • Average Pace: 2:17.24/100m

You’ve Got To Be Kidding Me!

There’s this strange thing with coaches who don’t specialise in working with multi-sport athletes. They assume that we have all the time in the world, and that life isn’t a constant battle against the schedule, and that their particular sport is the one that we think we need to dedicate most every minute of every day time to.

So talking to a running coach a couple of years back when I was training for a half ironman, I was told that I really needed to be getting in at least five good running sessions a week. Cycling coaches will simply refuse to admit that commuting miles could be anything other than junk miles - not even worth counting.

And the swimming coach who had a look at my stroke the other week, reckons I should do this sort of swim workout three times a week:

Warm Up
200m F/C
150m F/C incorporating drills of your choice.
200m F/C as 25m FNT
25m catch/up
50m kick with a board.
150m breast stroke.

3 x 150m F/C Farklek. (No set time. 30 seconds rest between each 150. Target is to get HR up for main set. Hard part of the 150 has to be 100% effort.)
1. 125 steady/ 25 hard.
2. 100 steady/ 50 hard.
3. 75 steady/ 75 hard.

Main set
15×100m on 2.45. F/C
3x 200m 25m F/C 25m Brst. 30 secs rest. (This is a cool/rest period between each set of 100’s)
15×100m on 2.30 F/C
3×200m as above.
15×100m on 2.15 F/C
3×200m as above.

8×25m kick on 1.15. With a board. To develop 6 beat kick.
8×25m sprints on 60secs. F/C. Maintaining 6 beat legkick.

Swim Down.
600m as 50 free 50 breast 50 kick (with board).

That’s roughly 7,850m. I’m sure that if this didn’t kill me, it would eventually make me a very good swimmer. But in the main set, there’s 4,500m just in the 100m reps, and at the average pace suggested (2:30 per 100m), that would take 112 minutes. And that’s just the bulk of the main set!

My problem is two-fold:

  1. I actually think this would kill me waaaay before I got good at swimming.
  2. The longest session in the pool’s public timetable is only two hours long, and all the morning ones are just 90 minutes!

I think this workout plan might need revising.

Workout:

  • Type: Swim
  • Date: 03/17/2010
  • Time: 14:27:37
  • Total Time: 1:00:00.00
  • Calories: 438
  • Distance: 2,377.44 m
  • Average Pace: 2:31.14/100m

LOSING Weight Isn’t My Problem

Two things about Ironman training:

  1. It takes up a lot of time
  2. You burn a LOT of calories

So in the first week of March - the last of my Base 2 training period, I ate like a horse at every meal (to the point of feeling uncomfortably full), and I still dropped 3lbs over the week.

Last week was a rest week (just 7 hours of training), and I did everything I could to make up for the weight loss. I managed to put on just 1lb.

And now we’re into Base 2, with an increased number of workouts during the week. So I’m also changing my eating habits - for the next 100 days or so, I’m basically going to be eating every two hours or so.

No time to write more at the moment - the microwave’s just pinged for first lunch.

I’m Sure I’ve Had This Guy Following Me

So funny it hurts!

(via bikecommuters.com )

Morning Run - Three Beautiful Things

  1. The disk of the sun just above the horizon as I started my run
  2. The skylarks doing their duelling banjos thing above the fields
  3. Wife having a steaming mug of really good coffee waiting for me when I got home. Actually, this last one didn’t happen - she was too busy and sensible, still being beautifully asleep!

Workout:

  • Type: Run
  • Date: 03/16/2010
  • Time: 13:12:16
  • Total Time: 1:05:22.00
  • Calories: 1074
  • Distance: 9 miles
  • Average Pace: 7:15.84/mile

Traffic Pinch Points - A Hazard To Cyclists

Pedestrian refuges / traffic islands - put there for your safety. On the one hand, they mean that pedestrians can cross roads one lane at a time. And drivers, get a greater perception of their speed, which hopefully means that they slow down.

The trouble is, that there isn’t always room for a car AND a bike in these narrows:

In fact, there sometimes isn’t enough room for even a single vehicle:

The real problem for me though is judging the width of the road

Is it wide enough for a bike to ride safely while at the same time a car / bus / lorry / whatever overtakes?

Some of them around here are that wide . . . while others look it until someone does try to overtake you, at which point you find how scarily narrow the road really is.

The official line for cyclists to take on these is to "take the primary position". i.e. pull out into the flow of traffic so that there can be no doubt at all in the driver’s mind: There IS NOT room to get past:

The thing is, I think drivers are getting worse, and you have to be MORE assertive now than ever. Last week, I had a car come past me far too close for comfort, even though I was taking up about 40% of the road on the approach to one of these narrows - roughly the position shown above.

So for the next few weeks, I’m trying a modified technique:

I. Will. Own. That. Road. (Girlfriend).

Never mind this looking over the shoulder and pulling across if it’s safe - my moves will be accompanied by the full arm-out hand signal, and I will be riding through these kill zones at about 50-60% of the distance from the road’s edge. I will be doing this on every single one, and only IF when I get into one, I find that it’s ridiculously wide, will I then pull across to let cars pass safely.

It’s time to reclaim the streets

Monday Lunchtime Swim

Bit of a "Meh!" kind of a swim. Couldn’t seem to find my rhythm, so I got out after a mile.

Workout:

  • Type: Swim
  • Date: 03/15/2010
  • Total Time: 00:35:00.00
  • Calories: 256
  • Distance: 1,463.04 m
  • Average Pace: 2:23.39/100m

Bicycle Fan Fiction - Yehuda Moon

Rick Smith, creator of Yehuda Moon & The Kickstand Cyclery is away for a month or so, re-charging his creative batteries. The trouble is, I’m missing my daily dose of bike shop comic strip - so much so, that I’ve had a go at a strip of my own (click to enlarge):

If you’ve read the Yehuda Moon strip, you’ll recognise Yehuda (back on the Van Sweringan), and the memory of Fred that’s been triggered by what he’s just witnessed. There are just so many blue cars out on Ohio’s roads . . . .

Things I’ve learned from drawing this - the level of detailing in Rick’s drawing’s is astonishing! And producing a daily strip must be pretty much a full-time job - no wonder Rick needs a few weeks off to recover!




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