From the cot

Thursday, August 30, 2007

The gypsy cyclist turned beneath the blanket on the cot the girl and her father had brought him to.  The girl watched as his closed eyes twitched and his arms began to shift.  Morning sun too was stirring, sighing gently as it slipped through an open window that framed open oat fields and cattle, most of which were still sleeping, scattered in locations near the farmhouse all the way up to the horizon.  "Pater, come quickly!" She shouted through an open door to the next room. "He is awakening!" 

The tall blond man ducked as he entered through the doorway.  "Well, so he is," he said.

The gypsy cyclist turned one more time onto his back, threw an arm so that it hung off the cot, and opened his eyes.  He looked upward at the high wooden ceiling, unpainted, his eyes focusing on fine planks that revealed swirling timber grains. Disoriented, momentarily he wondered what type of wood it was.  He blinked, then from his peripheral vision could see the two figures standing near him. He turned to face them.

"Hello," he said. 

"Hello!" said the girl and the man in unison, smiling.

"Let me guess, I passed out."

"Yes," said the girl. "Something like that.  You weren't conscious when I came back with Pater.  You had a great fever and we brought you in here.  You have just slept for nearly thirty hours!  We thought you were in a coma!"

"Oh," said the man. "You must be very thirsty.  Let me get you some water!" He rushed off.

"Yes, thank you," said the gypsy cyclist. "Wow, thirty hours?  Look you've given me pyjamas!" He lifted the blankets weakly to study his outfit.

"Not easy to get you into!" said the girl.  "But, can you guess what Mr. Sir?"

"Mmm, no, what?"

"Pater and uncle Hansed have retrieved your bicycle from the river!"

Lumpy lymphs

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Despite a few untoward aches in my body and a couple of swollen lymph nodes, I elected, against my better judgment to ride this evening and toss into the mix a few Mt. Tolmie intervals.  The last couple of days I've noticed that I'm fighting some sort of infection, although it isn't entirely clear what it is.  The lungs are clear and I've got no head congestion - just swollen lymph nodes and some general muscle achiness.  I was sporting a mite of a fever yesterday too, but this morning a couple of Tylenol with caffeine seemed to quash all symptoms and I was feeling more or less on top of the world.  The effects of the drugs continued to linger after work and, when I eventually made it onto my bike, the legs exhibited some strength and I thought to stick with my original plan of some intervals. 

So, it was up the waterfront for a brisk warm-up, then a swing left over through Uvic and to Mt Tolmie, where I subjected myself to six of the best lashings up the Beast.  I considered a couple more, but decided that was sufficient to open my system up without overdoing it, given my somewhat tenuous condition.  I didn't have a watch with me, so I can't report times, but the first was fastest and the rest all about the same, but a tiny bit slower.  Of course when I returned home and finally dismounted my bike, I felt a bit like I'd be hit by a Mack semi as I was promptly reminded in no uncertain terms that indeed I am fighting some sort of invasion by the little guys. 

Today's effort followed a couple of hours easy yesterday, when I felt particularly weak, but I wanted to make sure I got the time on the bike.  This followed on a hard weight session on Tuesday, where I found myself hoisting weights that in the past I could only have imagined.  There is definitely some good strength, and hopefully it will result in some extra jump and ability to go anaerobic when the going gets tough in Bastion Square, coming up in a couple of weeks or so.  I'm hoping I will have a little extra juice in the pedal stroke for the Bear Mountain Hill Climb, as well as the Oak Bay criterium, all three of which are on the same weekend.  That will be my last hurrah for the year, unless I can squeeze myself into the Tour of Costa Rica in December, which at this point I have done little to investigate.

I'll take tomorrow off in hopes my body will kick this bug in the behind and leave me reasonably able to train on the weekend.  There is a Masters 48km TT on Sunday, but if I'm feeling at all pekid, I'll be canning it.  It would be good to do, just to ensure maintenance of the aerobic threshold, but I don't need to thrash my body into submission quite that badly.   Hokay, to bed now.

Wayward waters

Tuesday, August 21, 2007


"Mr. Sir, won't you tell me where you have been?" asked the girl, perhaps seven years of age. "You look tired and muddy and wet, and I can see that you are shivering.  But it is warm here.  See? The skies are blue; there are no clouds.  Where have you been?  Where ever you have been, you should become warm beneath the sun, and I think your shivering will stop.  Your clothes are so strange!"

"You are right," replied the gypsy cyclist. "I fell into the river, not far from here.  The water was cold and muddy.  I have lost my bicycle. "

"You had a bicycle? Oh dear!  How did you lose it?"

"It flipped away from me into the water where it was very deep, and it sank to the bottom.  I tried to retrieve it, but the water was too fast and deep in that place with sharp boulders, and it wasn't safe enough to swim."

"Well, then," replied the girl.  "You are lucky that it was the bike that landed there, and not you!"

"Hmm - I'm not so sure about that..."

"Oh you poor man!" said the girl. "I will ask my father to see if he can get your bicycle back..."

"No, no. It isn't safe. It's ok.  I'll be fine without it.   I can walk back to the village and catch a train to Brussels.  I will fly home from there.  I have lost my money as well, but I have a friend in Austria who can wire me some money.  It is ok.  I've been fighting a cold and I've been weak, and it is time for me to go home."

"But it is twenty kilometers to town!" said the girl, her blonde hair flicking to the motion of her head as she spoke.  "I will ask my father if he can drive you.  Will you wait here, while I fetch him?"

The girl ran off to the farmhouse in the distance.  The gypsy cyclist relieved the aches in his body by sitting at the grassy edge of the gravel road.  He removed his cycling shoes, his wet socks and jersey.  What a long and beautiful journey, he thought.  But perhaps I have lost my bicycle for a reason.  Yes, I think that is it: this is the right time to return home. 

He closed his eyes and, in a moment, all the purples and blues that danced behind his weary eyelids transformed into a thousand faces and voices.  Images and sounds of all those he had encountered during his journey coalasced into a single voice and a single face, at first unrecognizable.  He lay back on the grass, felt a thousand blades gently strafe his back while the heat of the sun pressed upon his own face; the single image persisted before him.  

Then at last he knew who it was.  Beneath the warmth of the sun and the weight of his fatigue, he turned to one side, and held his face in his hands.  Tears streamed, clearing in little salty rivulets the dirt from his face, seeming to forage pathways along his cheeks where new tears, and new tears, and new tears followed.

Update

Monday, August 20, 2007

There seems to be some amensia as to exactly what sort of training I did last week, although generally it was not a difficult training week.  I think Tuesday was a reasonably hard couple of hours on the bike, and I think perhaps I ran on Wednesday and took Thursday off entirely.  On Friday I recall a session in the weight room and some easy riding thereafter. 

Ah yes, it's all coming back to me in a cascade of synapses.  Following on some weight training advice from Rob B, I am looking at shifting from my past approach of low weights/high repetitions, to high weights/low reps to stimulate some fast-twitch muscle growth.  My weight training session Friday was likely harder than any I've done in recent memory, and I found it interesting the sort of strength I had in my hamstrings and gluteals compared to when I was doing weights while running - generally when running, my max strength was significantly lower.  Max power gained while cycling for most leg muscles is substantially higher for me, it seems - and which makes sense: cycling is all about high power output capacity.  So is running, obviously, but it seems to me the ability to put the same kind of maximum power output is reduced when running - something worth researching a bit more. 

In any event, my legs felt somewhat weakened for Saturday.  Still, when Brett and Jon W and I met up for two jaunts up Bear Mountain before joining the regular Burnside ride, I was reasonably strong.  I didn't have a watch, but I was about 30 seconds ahead of Brett on both efforts to the top (a bit more on the first one I think), who was another 30 seconds or so ahead of Jon.  We estimated I was up in 8 minutes and something, while Brett was up in 9something (based on Bretty's watch time).  The balance of the ride consisted of mostly sub-tempo type riding punctuated by a few harder efforts, and some solid paceline work by a few guys including Matt, Roland, myself, Jon around Lands End.  The total ride for me on the day was about 145-150km - a good solid day after a couple of easier weeks since the Kelowna races. 

Sunday was an easier ride of about 55km to flush the legs out - enjoyed taking a jaunt into Genoa Bay near Duncan, the road to which takes my vote as perhaps the most scenic 8km stretch of road on the entire Island.

Saluddin's Lamp

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Saluddin was a heavy set boy of twelve whose father and mother together toiled in the hayfields and gathered water from the stream that divided all the rocks, the red clay and dark topsoil into a crevice a hundred feet down and barely three hundred feet across.  For two years, though, the stream was nearly dry, yielding only a trickle, but still just enough for Saluddin and his parents to meet their needs. 

Although Saluddin was portly and his parents kept him so, he was asthmatic and sickly and was frequently prone to fits of painful coughing.  Due to his allergies, he could spend no time in the hayfields, so, while his parents worked, he was left alone to spend much of his time exploring the bottom of the gorge, wheezing often and moving gingerly, rather like a groggy slovenly bear over the rocky stream bed.   Sometimes during times of more extreme asthmatic discomfort he would sit on a boulder or a fallen tree, hold his head and clutch his soft dark hair in his hands, and wait for his lungs to relax just enough so that he could resume enjoying, on his naked shoulders, the warmth of the sun as it shone at the best angles in the middle of the day, and continue inspecting the rocky outcroppings and their amorphous geology in hopes of discovering the singular, as yet unknown, motherlode of fossils that would make him famous.

But one day, as the sun lowered and spread itself against the horizon, Saluddin's last moments of the day before departing were interrupted by a strange man who stood atop the highest bank of the gulley with a bicycle beside him, shouting down into the ravine, echoing.  "Excuse me," implored the man, "is there a bridge across this gulley?  The road ended back there," he said, pointing, "but I can see where it begins again on the other side of the ravine, but there is no bridge to cross."

At the moment of answering Saluddin was having great difficulty breathing, but between shallow breaths, he said, "No my mother... and father... removed the bridge to keep the chickens...and the goats on that side of the ravine...  If you want to cross, you... you must go that way for a few hundred meters and there... there is a path that comes down on your side.  At the bottom... you must walk along the stream... back toward me... and there is a path on the other side... just over that way.  Be careful, though, there... there...are many sharp rocks down here." 

"Thank you," replied the gypsy cyclist. "I will look for the path up thataway and come down.  Are you ok?  You don't sound well."

"I'm ok," said Saluddin.  "I've got... just got... the wheezies a bit.  So I cannot move... much to help you, but you... you can call out to me if you want.  It is getting dark... you should not waste any time. You be careful... on your step down.  My mother... broke her ankle once... once coming down that slope."

The gypsy cyclist had miscalculated the rate at which the sun was setting and, being in an equatorial region, it did not linger on the horizon.  When it pressed the earth in a ball of flame, the horizon became like quicksand and the sun was rapidly swallowed up.  The gypsy cyclist moved quickly to find the path into the ravine.  "I am not sure where it is!" He shouted back to Saluddin, hesitating "and my bicycle light is beginning to brown out.  Maybe I will wait until morning now to cross."

"That is fine!  You can... wait until morning if you choose," replied Saluddin.  "But I will...I will guide you if you want!  I have spent... all my days in this ravine, and I know... every inch of it.  I know every rock... for I have touched... and examined them all; every piece... of driftwood, every layer... of earth along the banks, every... sandy outcropping and... every branch.  I have measured them all... and know all the distances and the number of steps... between everything down here.  This is not my home... but it is where I have studied...studied the nature of the earth... and learned of its ancient history.

"From the bottom of the path... when you find it... I will guide you... step by step until you are here, and then I will guide... you to the path that goes up the other side.  Do not fear...old man!" 

In an instant the gypsy cyclist's hesitation vanished.  "Thank you.  I am relieved.  Please guide me, my boy," he said.  Then, in the darkness, he listened intently for Saluddin's every word.

A couple of runs

Tuesday August 14, 2007

With the close of the Kelowna Stage Race, now two weekends ago and rapidly fading into the past, I haven't quite decided what the plans are now, racing-wise.  Do I maintain bike-racing fitness for the Bastion Square weekend in early September, or do I begin running now at the risk of taking the edge off my bike racing capacity, but building for a fall marathon (perhaps)?

Given that I've actually reached a decent level of bike fitness, by my standards, it makes some sense to maintain it, or at the very least maintain some semblence of race fitness for a while.  At the same time, if I want to get in shape for a marathon, I will certainly lose my bike racing fitness. 

I've been eyeing a UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) 12-stage race in December in Costa Rica.  My plan is to take December off work, and if there was some way to get on a team for that race, it may be doable.  Although the race is ranked as a UCI 2.2 race (the first digit 2 means it is a multi-stage race, decimal 2 means it is ranked for UCI points and allows division I and II pro teams) -- I've checked past results, and it is usually not contested by European or North American teams, and is primarily a South American specific race.  That doesn't mean it will be any easier to do as a race, but it may be easier to get into, and there are ways to get on teams for races like this for a Category 1 or 2 rider like myself, and I will investigate.  Two stages are 194km and 190km respectivly, but the rest are quite a lot shorter.  With my current level of fitness (plus some higher mileage) it's the sort of race I can probably hang in and finish.

That said, if I want to do that, I would need to be in very good shape for it and would need to do some serious training and some racing somehow in the months before it.  Not an easy task in these climes.  And perhaps not realistic with two additional courses I'll be taking starting in September too.  But no more about that until I investigate some more about it -- it's just an idea at the moment.

In the mean time I did a couple or runs last week.  One last Wednesday, about 35minutes, for which I felt a bit tight, but surprisingly limber given I haven't run for six weeks; the second was on Saturday when I ended up getting lost in the roads of Cobble Hill and ran for at least 15km for an hour and a half.   I had planned on only 10k, but from Hayley's place in Cobble Hill there are myriad twisting subdivision roads, and I managed to get myself a bit backwards, making for an extra long run.  Surprisingly, while I felt a bit tight, I loosened up as I went, and by Sunday when I went for a couple of hours on the bike, I actually felt loose and limber.

So, we'll see how the running progresses in combination with the cycling at the moment, and see where it takes me.

Grabel's Law

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

        "Two is not equal to three -
        not even for very large values of two."
                - Grabel's Law.

The gypsy cyclist once met a man, perhaps from an antique land -- but of this there was no certainty, for the features of the man, neither his face nor his clothing, betrayed anything other than a man of northern European descent.  But about this man, who was neither old nor young, was the general characteristic of one whose knowledge of history, archaeology, and perhaps ancient sanskrit literature permeated through his pores.  Indeed, in the oddest of fashions, the man simply exuded the odor of one from an ancient land, and all the words that he spoke served as ample confirmation of anyone's suspicion in that respect. 

    "Like the application of the Rosetta stone," he once explained to the gypsy cyclist, "One day I sat down with pen in hand, and sought to prove the equivalencies between the content of two ancient texts: one found in the Tigris valley and one from the rainforest of Peru. 
 
   "They were not contemporaneous," he explained, "but were separated in the times of their creation by at least two centuries.  And I had nothing to do with their translation - believe me, I am not a linguist.  Too, not even the contents were related - one was an epic tale of war, not unlike Homer's Illiad, while another was a collection of mystical teachings, not unlike the Upanishads. 

    "But," he continued, "I sought to quantify the images presented in each text, developed a system of assigning values to these images and equations for equivalencies in the content of their information.  I began with a simple hypothesis:  these two texts contained nearly identical underlying quantities of information.  This was not planned by the writers, but nor was it coincidence. There is a hidden order, I believe, to the creation of literature that reveals itself only on the rarest occasions and only when circumstances are just right for one to see the order there. To realize this I discovered key markers at identical junctures within the texts that suggested that these texts, informationally, were identical. 

    "I know, some thought it was crazy -- in fact I doubted it myself for a very long time, and wondered how I could even intuitively sense that these equivalencies existed.  But when I read them -- and I have read thousands of pieces of ancient literature -- there was a similarity between these two texts in a way I did not at first understand; that is until I read them both twelve times and came to realize they were one and the same.   This was despite the fact that Tigris text contained nearly twice as many words as the one from Peru - for it was the images that matched at a precise scale, revealing a hidden shared structure to their creation.  This was the key feature by which I deduced the equation for their equivalencies. 

    "What does this mean, you ask?  I have yet to understand it.  But of all the thousands of texts I have read, these are the only two that share this deep structure.  And what this suggests to me is that there is a kind of order that develops among the writing of billions of words contained in collections we call books - much like fractals in nature. It was not planned, but it is not a coincidence - rather it is part of the nature of the universe.  It is very hard to find, but it is there nonetheless.  And what is interesting to me, is that it allows me to see all literature as a deeply connected tapestry."
   
    "That," said the gypsy cyclist, revealing his ignorance, "is hard to believe.  Doesn't it violate Newton's second law or something like that?"

Kelowna results

Results of BC Cup #7 are now up.

I see that I ended up 15th overall in the final General Classification.  Being only a few seconds out of the next few places, it goes to show it's worth fighting for every second you can get.  Brett ended up 33rd on the day.

Also of note is that it looks like they sorted out the alleged fastest times in the TT - it looks like the fastest time was 9:13, not 8 minutes flat as was rumoured, a bit more than a minute faster than my time. 9:13 was posted by Rob Britten of Lazy-Boy Furniture.  

BC Cup #7 Kelowna

Monday, August 6, 2007

There were four stages to the "Fantastic Four" BC Cup stage race this weekend in Kelowna.  For the Category 1/2 race, the stages were:

1.  Hill Climb - 3.4km up Knox Mountain on Friday evening
2.  Road Race. 108km Saturday morning, 9 X 12km hilly circuit, technical winding course (shortened from the originally advertised distance of 132km)
3.  Time Trial - 8.2km Saturday afternoon/evening - point to point, rolling, but with a strong tailwind
4.  Criterium - 48km - Sunday mid-day - 28 X 1.7 km circuit, short hill, but fast wide-open course.

55 cat 1/2 riders were on the start list.

Brett and I made the trek out Friday morning, after Demian was kind enough to pick up our race packages the day before.  Demian was up for the Category 3 race, for whom the RR was shorter (60km) and the Criterium shorter, but the HC and TT were the same.

1. Hill Climb

My legs were a bit sore and tender during the warm up for the HC, and my plan was to not completely kill myself for the climb, in order to ensure I was adequately fresh for the RR in the morning.  So, I went relatively comfortably for the first 400m of the climb, before gradually winding it up.  The evening was quite warm, mid-20s, but not scorching hot, and pleasant to be able to warm up along the waterfront on the back side of Knox Mt, where Brett and I did a few efforts up one of the climbs there.  Oddly at the moment I have amnesia as to what my exact time was, but it was about 10mins and change, putting me in 27th overall, with the winner up in the low 9s.  Brett deliberately took the climb easier, with much the same plan as me - to ensure freshness for the road race in the morning. 

2. Road Race

We managed to find someone to help us in the feed zone, which, on a warm day is necessary, even for a relative short race of 108km.  I was a little worried, given my legs still felt a bit tender.  Still, I felt adequately recovered from the Hill Climb and well carbo-loaded from the meal the day before. My heart rate in the few days leading up to the weekend was good and so I was reasonably confident in my preparation, although one is always uncertain. 

The course being hilly and technical, the race went out hard. It felt like it was going to be a long course criterium - fast and brutally hard.  Right away guys were being shelled as Christian Meyer of Symmetrics and a Red Truck Ale guy (I think, and who's name I've just forgotten) blasted away early, and ultimately stayed out for the top two places.  For me I knew it was essential to be continuously aiming for the front of the peloton as the back of the pack was shattering on the one longer climb, and on the technical twisty sections.  I'm generally not a great technical rider, but once I got comfortable in the group and with the course, I was picking my way to the front at every opportunity, and headed the steepest climb at the front as much as possible. 

Small groups got away to chase at various times, but were always brought back.  At one point, I made an effort to bridge to a two-person chase, but being caught in no-man's land, gave up the chase.  Those two were brought back. At about lap five, an H&R Block guy from Calgary initiated a chase group shortly after the feedzone on the descent, and I took up the chase.  Dan Macdonald of Masi-Adobe came across along with one other, forming a four man chase.  Within about 5km, Rob Britten (current leader of the BC Cup series) and a couple of other Lazy-Boy's got across to us, and we had an 8 man chase.  I thought this might stick, but eventually what was left of the peloton made it across. 

On each lap, the group dwindled, and by the finish there were about 15 guys left in the peloton as the rest were lapped out, with two guys off the front, and two who got ahead of us by a few seconds.  I came through in the group sprint in 16th overall, with all of us in our group receiving the same finishing time, 2hrs 45 mins and change, I believe.  Brett had two flats that sidelined his day, much to his disappointment and ended up being lapped out. Lapped riders were given calculated times and were allowed to start the next stage, however.

At the end of a hard race I was elated with my result in the road race, bumping me up in the General Classification to 16th place. 

3. Time Trial

The course was a point to point 8.2 course, with rolling hills, and very fast with a tail wind.  This was an effort I simply wanted to get through.  Unless my time was disastrous I wasn't going to lose my spot in the general classification. I also knew that, without great TT equipment -- I even loaned my front Zipp wheel to Brett, who was hoping to redeem his misfortune in the RR with a fast TT time -- and not having done many TTs this year and none particularly fast, I was unlikely to move up much either.  

On the day my time was 10:18, and I'm not certain of the placing, although many guys posted times in the 9s. Two highly questionable times were at about 8mins flat (!) These time were questionable as they would have had 60km/hr average speeds, which, when most of the fast guys were going in nine-something, there was a lot of speculation that these guys had the benefit of some drafting or that the times were messed up, and one of the guys apparently admitted his time was erroneous. 

Brett posted a time about 15 seconds faster than me, which he was a bit disappointed with.

In any event, I was glad to get the race overwith.

4. Criterium

The course being wide open, a short hill over some railway tracks covered with rubber matting, the day being warm, guys being tired, the group was destined to stick together.  While a breakaway of four guys slipped away, I was mostly content to stick in the pack.  I did make a couple of hard attempts to get across to small chase groups and found myself a couple of times in solid six or eight man chase groups.  Still I for one didn't have a lot of extra will to pull much at the front, and I think the will generally was lacking among many others as well, resulting in the main pack ultimately together.  I preserved my 16th spot on the GC (although I haven't seen the official results yet), which I was more than happy to do. 

Overall I was happy with my race.  There has been continuous improvement since I started training in earnest specifically for bike racing at the end of June, and I'm finally where I would like to be with my fitness.

After departing immediately after the race, Brett and I caught the 7:00 pm ferry home, and today my legs felt incredibly good - I was wishing for a fifth stage, perhaps a long road race.  Nonetheless, I am elated with how things went for me. 

Demian, I have learned, missed the start time for his TT, and so missed the opportunity for some upgrading points.

A fellow duathlon/runner turned cyclist, Frank Woolstencroft from Calgary, had a good race in the Cat 3 race, and had the fastest HC time for the Cat 3s.  So, we should see him in Cat 2, soon, I think.