World Track Masters

In other events, David Willmott was unable to defend his title in the men’s 55-59 sprint, taking the silver medal after being defeated by Gil Hatton of the United States in the final.
Wilmott had breezed through the afternoon qualifying, posting the second fastest flying 200 time of 11.558 behind Richard Voss of the USA who set an unofficial new world best time of 11.458 seconds. -CA

11.458 seconds for the flying 200 in the 55-59 year old age group at the World Track Masters. Jeebus! I'd better get training...

Spin Harder

I know that for many aeons I've held that spin is nothing to get excited about. And it's not, really, because it's not Real Life. Still, sometimes one needs something on those sunny spring afternoons of the soul...

Not that today's session was without its own share of controversy. And it started mildly enough - doing the same program as 2 days ago, I recorded just 182 in the second HCLR and 137/70.3 in the 106"SS. At this point I was wishing that I'd gone lift heavy things instead.

But I gritted the teeth and slapped the thighs and gave it everything for the 116"SSes. And recorded just 72.2 for the first one. Well, I thought, ain't nothin' to it but to do it and pulled out a 133/74.4. Excellent! But, thinks I, that's so close to 75, surely I can do better? And too right I did - 74.5, in fact. Hmm. Not quite what I had in mind. Curses! So I huffed and I puffed and I blew my way to 135/75.3km/hr. Woooo! First time above 75km/hr on the trainer, so I reckon that's worthy of being happy about. No, it's not a KKRM, but hey, it's what I got, oright?

This got me thinking though ("Oh no!" goes up the collective groan.) Last time I managed to go faster on the rolling starts, no? So... let's see what we can do! So as not to bore everyone to absolute tears, I managed a catching-my-breath 72, solid 74.8 and 75.1, before one final effort... and that's where the controversy begins!

See, Garmin Connect just shows max speed/cadence in a lap, which is handy. Golden Cheetah, on the other hand, gives the actual second-by-second values from the unit. According to Garmin Connect I hit 136/76.2. Woot! But Golden Cheetah gives a top of 123/71.97... and 135/70.00km/hr. Eh? So... well, actually, so what! Maybe we get excited about a photo finish for the gold medal. For a PB on a trainer? Not so much. Any way it adds up - is good.

Then for shits and giggles, 24 seconds of HCLR goodness, hitting a top of 203 (and this one does seem to be accurate!) in the last 12s effort. Noice.

Oh, and after much analysis and reflection I'm of the opinion that the problem with my squat can be traced back to having the bar too low on my back. I've been wondering about it for a bit as the weight gets heavier, and I know that I'm always trying to shove the bar as low as I can manage to, thinking that that's the way to do it. And at lighter weights, that's okay - but as the weight gets heavier, it wants to go further down my back. So I have to lean further forward to keep in balance, and rather than attempt to keep my chest up, I'm allowing my back to round to keep the weight on my back - and occasionally rolling it forward. To a position, in fact, probably closer to where it's meant to be - on the posterior delts. Not underneath them. Which is part of the reason I was hoping to get to the gym today - to test my theory. Watch this space come Friday...

Surprise!

Right when you least expect it, a secret spin session gets snuck in while you're almost looking the other way... the essence of track sprint, really! But I wasn't about to be caught off-guard, oh no!

:05 2 x 6s HCLR:1 (39x23 : 44")
:10 2 x 7s PG+12 (107") SS (R,L):4
:18 4 x 7s BGSS (116") seated L,R,L,R:3
:30 4 x 6s BGRS(20) (116") seated:3
:42 2 x 12s HCLR:2 (44")

Deceptively simple, no? And I do like a good strength workout. But that's not because they're easy - they're just a different kind of hard!

HCLRs: 186. Takes a little while for the neurons to start firing properly, to start spinning rather than stomping really quickly.

107"SSes... a bit ordinary really, 138/71 is a good few percent off my best. Not actually bad, as such, just not particularly good.

116" SSes... well, there's no immediate comparison, but back a few months ago doing these I was getting numbers around 117/61. Today's 4 efforts produced a very consistent 130-132/72.4-73.7 so again, numbers on the trainer clearly improved over the last 6-odd months. I wonder about the interpretation of such results in the current context though - should my BGSSes be faster (and only 6rpm less shpinny) than my PG+14SSes? Am I strong, but not powerful? Or is this exactly what Perko would do, only plus 20% or so? Email time...

Interestingly (perhaps) for once my RSes produced very similar results to my SSes in the same gear, and very marginally higher - a top of 131/74, and still accelerating (if only just) at the end of the 6 seconds - 7 or 8 second efforts would have seen me hit 75, I reckon (at least for the first three. The last one I might have hit 26 and then fallen off the bike, exhausted.)

12s HCLRs to finish off and by then my neurons were properly firing, and weren't so roasted as to have gone on holidays - top of 191, and held for 7 or 8 seconds at that 'suspiciously high cadence' as Golden Cheetah calls it for the duration of the interval.

So there we have it. Brief stats here. Satisfactory, but, well, it's spin, hard to get excited about it at the minute!

Sword Master

I've been thinking about training, and life, and how the two of those fit together. Where I'd like to go, how I might get there, and how to stay focussed along the way.

And then I remembered this comic. I feel a bit like I'm still in panel 1. But maybe I'm actually in panel 4, and the slap's just around the corner... 

Please note: this is not my image, and I've included it here just to illustrate a point and to encourage you to go read Oglaf.

Here's to working on understanding, unlike our poor dimwitted hero, the lessons I'm taught along the way.

Oh, and go read oglaf. From the beginning. You'll be wanting to send me a line to thank me for the tip.

Erm... still Slayer!

Finally I got back in to the gym and did a full workout! Nearly two weeks since I've been in the gym at all, and two and a half since I did a full squat workset. So prudence was the order of the day, as I repeated that workout with the exception of resetting powercleans to 60 kg - a 20% reduction to ensure I get back to a point where I have good form.

Speaking of which, my form was a bit ratty for the squats. I got them all up, but watching the video is a bit wince-inducing. Mind you, doing them in the first place was too, so it's not that surprising. There was one squat in each set that I didn't get correct depth on, so to be picky you could probably call it a miss. More importantly though I was having quite some trouble keeping my back in its appropriate arch, and a good 11 or 12 of the lifts had some amount of rounding, 3 or 4 fairly significantly to the extent that the bar was rolling up to my shoulders. A couple in the first set were largely due to what might be called inattention, as I wasn't quite in the right groove. It's been a while, after all. After that though, it was primarily a matter of muscular fatigue, as my back muscles struggled to keep good tension under the repeated loading.

Bench at 65kgs was fine, which isn't terribly surprising in a way but at the same time, is good. Mind you, my benchpress is in exactly the same spot as it was 2 months ago. Or closer to 9 weeks, actually. That's... kinda disturbing!

Powercleans I was happy with. Only 60kg, it is true, but it gave me the chance to really focus on my form and it felt very smooth. After the first couple of reps I really got in to a great groove, everything felt like it was firing at the right time, and although the weight was noticeable, I could have caught them all on my head without bending my knees if I'd wanted to. Which, erm, I didn't. Odd that.

Wreaking my rewen-ge

Turns out I was supposed to do a repeat of the recovery spin today, but I didn't check my email so instead I popped by BBN for a bit of redress. Maybe it's difficult to actually wreak rewen-ge on a concrete track, but not so difficult to do to oneself!

I was momentarily thrown off plan by happening to bump in to the same chap from back in April - who's bought a new track bike and is looking for some racing! So it was nice to chat, but I really wanted to get out there. I was trialling straps on my pedals for the first time - they felt good when on (though they're only cheapies, so I don't know how long they'll last) but getting in and out of them is going to take some practice!

Anyway, after a bit of a warmup I did a couple of half-lap powerjumps (which at BBN is... well, about 165-odd metres, because I went from pursuit line to finish line) on 86", hitting only 50.9 on the effort from ~30km/hr. Bit low, I thought. I then switched up to 99" and did the same, from ~10km/hr and ~30km/hr. Hit 52 this time from 30, which again, felt a bit low. Not by an order of magnitude or anything, but still. Enough to make me concerned that perhaps I wasn't going to make much headway on looking for an improved F200 time.

But I headed out from the chute, and wound it up over the abridged BBN F200 distance. On Sunday I jumped late from... actually, it's hard to tell! Certainly above 40. But it's a rather gentle 'jump' in the garmin record. I crossed the line at about 49 and eventually hit a max of  54.5km/hr before gracefully curving back down to 51kmh, for a time of 14.185 at an average of 50.76km/hr. I don't have such precise timings, of course, for today and a direct comparison is meaningless because of the different conditions - there was all but no wind today, for example. But I can say that I jumped from just on 35km/hr, crossed the 200 line doing pretty much smack on 50km/hr, hit a max of 55.3km/hr (and held above 55km/hr for 5 seconds or so) which decayed back to ~51 again by the time I crossed the finish line to record an average speed of conservatively 52.99km/hr, generously 53.67km/hr and most likely 53.5km/hr. Which makes for a F200 time of somewhere between 13.587 and 13.415 seconds.

That's still a little slower than I'd be happy with. But I'm much more satisfied with that as a measure of where I am than with what I managed on Sunday, conditions notwithstanding. And there's useful info there, too - accelerating after the line is okay, but by 5km/hr? Probably a bit much. So jump should probably have started earlier - more like the start of the clubrooms, perhaps. The question, of course, is could I hold the speed all the way to the line in that case. Crossing the 200 line at something closer to 52 and holding the same sort of pace as in today's F200 to the line would see me riding something more like a 13.28. Which is closer to where I feel I should be at the moment. Wouldn't necessarily mean I'd win any more races, because there's a whole lot more to it than speed over 200 metres, but it's a start!

SSS Round 1, 2011

Well, that was rather a disappointing day. Short version: Slow F200, last qualifier in B-Grade, lost all three races. But, you know, it's me, so there's a longer version...

Let's approach this in terms of lessons learned.

i) Sunday is race day. Not, races go from 12ish to 4ish, but Sunday, the whole day, is race day.

I arrived late after attending to assorted family matters which left me with little time to warm up, check my bike, or get myself in the right frame of mind. With the wind on Sunday, gusting strongly up the back straight, actually getting out there in a couple of different gearings to check how they felt was important, rather than just guessing. As it was, I guessed 92", and that was probably too small. My tyres were low, too - only about 90psi at most. I hadn't ridden at BBN since last year so I was rusty on the right lines, places to jump, etc. and in my F200, I jumped too late though my line was probably not too bad. Result was a F200 time of 14.185, more than a tenth of a second slower than my time from Round 6 back in April, before I started training! Yes, it was a slow day, but that's an awful time.

ii) I need to be more active in my races.

By this I mean not just in terms of moving around more, or being more aggressive, but thinking more and being adaptable. In my first race against Nic, I was following and wanted him to keep the lead, be dragged up the back straight protected from the wind, then coming in to corner 3 to run up the bank, down in to his slipstream with pace and around, as we've been doing at DISC. But the key point came much earlier than that...

 

At 59 seconds I threw a bit of a fake, just wanting to get him thinking, maybe get him to jump. What happened though was that he went for it, going all the way down the track (and off it!) while I just swerved back up. And sat there. And sat there. And waited for him to get back on the track, get out of the saddle and accelerate while I wasted my height and the advantage that I'd gained from getting him going the wrong way. Eventually, I responded but too late - I wasn't quite able to get on his wheel and couldn't accelerate around. I was closing, but was never going to get there.

iii) I need to kick harder.

I've improved since last year, it is true. But the main point really is that I wasn't kicking as hard as I could. This I think is part experience, part confidence, and part bike handling skills.In my second race against Ed, I decided to take the lead and gradually wind it up so as to try to negate his acceleration a little. I felt that I controlled it fairly well, and brought the pace up. But I always expected him to come alongside. Watching the video though, just as with Nic he's still out of the saddle and accelerating at the point where I'm in the saddle and not confident to get out at that cadence.

I had the legs to accelerate more, but needed to be able to get out of the saddle. He sails past, and I keep plodding along.

iv) I need to be aware that I'm racing against another human being!

In my race against Ian, I decided to try to sit behind him in his blindspot. Fine, but I didn't think it through too much further. I let him get too much space, dictating the pace, and then I neglected to take advantage again.

At 42 seconds, again I threw a fake with nothing to back it up. I rolled down the bank not when Ian was looking forward, but immediately after he'd looked back at me again. After doing that, I just sat back up behind him, lost a bit of ground, and he jumped. Somehow I was caught off guard, he got the gap and won by that margin. As someone commented at the end - I'm a bit of a one-pace sprinter. Or, at least, that's how I raced. Too timidly.

Obviously there's much more to it than just 4 lessons. But I think that those are some of the important aspects to take away from these races. I was clearly off my best, for a number of reasons. What I need to do is work on those aspects and come back stronger next month. And, clearly, losing weight is now the more important aspect than gaining strength, and the ability to apply strength on the track is more important than getting bigger numbers on an ergo.