Back To The Old Nose And Grindstone

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

The second rest week is behind me -- last night was an hour of towpath E2 on the Turner, and tonight will be this new period's first new training ride: M2 or "cruise intervals." I'll be doing three 10-minute intervals in Zones 4 and 5a, two minutes easy spin between each one, and will probably follow it up with another hour of Zone 1/Zone2 spinning. Each new period ups the intensity a little...

 

Luckily for me, this is the first week of the new period, thus a low-volume week, since I will be out of town for work starting tomorrow morning -- the trip is to somewhere in Arizona, north of the Apache National Forest, for a plant inspection. I'll be home Friday night though, and should be able to do a longish tempo/endurance ride on Saturday, and a real MTB ride Sunday, maybe American Standard. If all goes well, I should break 100 miles for the week despite the trip, and break 300 for the month of March.

 

I'm blowing off a few things this week to make room for the trip, and a few others to make room for the rides that I don't want to blow off because of the trip; one thing that must go overboard is the VMB board meeting tonight. I feel a little guilty, but I really don't have time to do everything I need to and still make the meeting, so I have to skip the meeting, ride or no ride, and I might as well get my ride in. However, I was at two officer meetings last week when I should have been doing other things, including trip preparation I'll be doing tonight, and I made one of two trail maintenance days over the weekend, so I don't feel too bad. I played catch-up a bit with my club secretary duties last night too, posting preliminary copies of the minutes for the February general and board meetings.

 

(It was kind of cute, Anne and I typing away on our laptops at the dinner table last night, me on the minutes and she on her latest project, which involved her taking notes from the handwritten transcripts of the Molly Maguire Trials.)

 

Meanwhile, on the computer: Over the weekend I became a bit obsessed with the question of how much a tee (tee as in piping) weighs, based on a weight take-off for work, which I did with a quick and dirty estimation of the weight of two intersecting hollow cylinders. I got to wondering how accurate my estimate was, and what the actual, exact volume of intersecting cylinders would be. I could have found the volume by integrating, but thought that someone must have worked this out before... Googling took me first to a whole lot of nothing, then to pages and pages about Steinmetz solids (close but no cigar), and finally to a general formula for the volume of two intersecting cylinders.

 

The formula is straightforward enough, but unfortunately it involves elliptic integrals, and I could find no elliptic integral functions in any spreadsheet program I owned. This looked like a job for octave, but my version didn't have the functions either -- they were available through a package, one I hadn't installed, that accessed the GNU Scientific Library. OK, install the package, a "learning experience" in its own right, figure out how to use the elliptical functions, and... the actual computation I was trying to do, once I got this far, was a piece of cake. The final result: weights based on my quick-and-dirty estimation method were about 1% off from the exact solution. Which is probably why no one ever bothers to use, or even talk about, the pain-in-the-ass exact solution.

 

See you in a few days.

Hold Steady

Morning weigh-in: 183.5#

 

There may be a bit of suppression of a different kind in that weight: I ran out of steam last night, ate a bowl of cereal and crashed. No ride, but there's not supposed to be a ride, it's a rest week. Tonight is Taco Night at the Brew Works, and I suspect that number may go up a bit by tomorrow's weigh-in.

 

 

Time For Another Rest Week

So last week was the third and final week for Base 2 training, and I think I'm finally getting the volume up where it should be: 105 miles, 9:25 ride time; I was in the saddle six days last week. It was a good end to the period, and now I'm more than ready for a well-deserved rest week.

 

Saturday's tempo ride worked out just fine (as did the beer brewing), then Anne and I stayed in, skipping the St Patrick's Day festivities in favor of some reading and an early bedtime. I'd sent out a text to a bunch of  friends about riding in JT, but got no bites except Greg H, who said he was riding Prompton in the early afternoon with a few people, and I was welcome to join them. I wanted to do American Standard to basically check out the map I'd made, see how accurate it was, but I also didn't want to ride alone, so...

 

Sunday morning was cold and overcast, and it looked like rain, which was completely different from the forecast I saw Saturday night, but the revised forecast said that this would all burn off and the day would be warm and sunny, so I went anyway. I met Greg at his house, then followed him up to the meeting place north of the Poconos -- sure enough, the day changed dramatically as we drove -- and there we hooked up with the rest of our crew: Robin R, Rich B, Jay, and Greg's friend Mark. We parked some cars, consolidated the bikes and riders, and continued on to Prompton, which is sort of northeast of Scranton.

 

It was a beautiful day. Prompton State Park is basically an artificial lake with some of the surrounding land included, and the main trail circumnavigates the lake, with several other trails looping off the main trail. The terrain is rocky, and somewhat hilly, but very rideable -- in some ways it reminds me of Allamuchy. I was worried that I would get stomped by the rest of the riders, and for the first half hour or so I was sucking wind at the back, but after that I was fine. We were all in the same early-season boat anyway, and considering that it was still winter I think we all rode rather well... We were out for about 4.5 hours, of which only 2.5 were spent actually moving, so there was a lot of social time in there as well. We finished at around 6:30, just as the afternoon was starting to wind down. Most of those guys were going out to eat -- they all lived a lot closer, no biggie for them, but I just drove home and met Anne at the Brew Works. (She had been over at Steel Stacks to see "Bicycle Dreams," which unfortunately I'd completely forgotten about.) A chicken cheese steak, a mug of the new Pilsener, and it was time for bed.

 

I'll do a recap of this training period some time in the next few days, but suffice to say for now that things are working out rather well.

 

Fun With Map And Calendar

Morning weigh-in (Thursday): 183.5#
Morning weigh-in (Friday): 184#

Happy St. Patrick's Day! -- or, as the bartenders call it, "Amateur Night."

Monday night was a "recovery ride," about an hour of easy spinning on the towpath, then Tuesday I did my 75-minute "muscular endurance ride," 24 miles in just under 1:40 total time (probably close to a personal best for the last year or so), and last night was an hour of E2 ("aerobic endurance") towpath spinning on the singlespeed, which almost drove me nuts with all that hamster-leg spinning, but it was also the first after-work ride of the year where I didn't even bring lights. Unfortunately, Sunday night was a chicken cheese steak at Brew works, Monday night was a regular (ie beef) cheese steak, same place, and Tuesday night was two-brew Tuesday, though I did eat at home. Baby steps, but one of my problems is obvious...

Bottom line though, I was lighter Thursday morning than I've been at any time since last July, and I feel a lot stronger on the bike than I did even a month or so ago.

Thursday night I was exhausted, and the ride was an easy on the towpath, mainly Zone 1 on the Turner, and again without even bringing lights, and I cooked myself tuna and wilted spinach over rice for dinner -- Anne was out with Donna -- before passing out. Yesterday had rain in the forecast, so I made it a rest day: got a haircut and did dry cleaning, the usual usual Saturday-type chores so I can ride today. (Of course the evening turned out fine, but my decision was the right one.)  It's beautiful out now, and sometime today I'll be getting in my last tempo workout (90 minutes in Zone 3) for the second Base period; tomorrow I'll probably so some real off road riding, like maybe American Standard, and then comes my second rest week.

The rest of today is being taken up with brewing; we're actually making two 5-gallon batches, one an Orval clone and the other an Irish red ale.

My quest for good training/analysis tools continues, or rather I should say it got complicated by new information. In a reply to my post about that TCX to HR zone data converter I wrote, someone mentioned a program called Golden Cheetah, so I downloaded it. It's very power-meter centric, but seems to have a lot of really nice analysis tools built in, especially when it comes to graphing ride data, though it doesn't quite do what I want it to do. I did notice though, that my favorite web tools, and my favorite programs in general, seem to involve maps, or calendars, or both. (The training programs all have both, for what should be obvious reasons.) I wonder if there's a market for something like that, a diary/blog program, with geographic data capabilities and a user interface that includes both map and calendar. I'm not sure what a program like that would even be expected to do (other than maybe be used to record rides and analyze training), but I know that I'd love to play with it.

Back From Knoxville

Not giving my morning weigh-in...

 

Four day weekend, and we had an awesome time visiting Emmi in Knoxville: Ben came down from Massachusetts on Tuesday, then I took Thursday off, and we piled in the car and left for Tennessee in the morning. One loooong drive later -- even though we made good time this time, that trip always feels like forever -- and we were there in time to meet Em for dinner. It was a bit awkward, since her dad and his girlfriend were also in town (and at dinner), but it was nice to see her.

 

Friday was the day we came down for: Emmi gave a public presentation of her research on the Tree of Heaven. (Actually, I should say that this was the public presentation of her research; it wasn't quite her doctoral defense, which is coming in April, but something similar and a major milestone on her way to her PhD.) Her housemate and another student also gave presentations that morning, shorter and less formal ones involving temperature response (her housemate) and hearing response to predatory bird calls (the other student) in invasive lizards, and we checked them out too, then after lunch came Emmi's presentation, which was about an hour long plus some time for questions afterward, and was totally amazing.

 

Her fellow grad students took her out for a beer afterward, and we tagged along for what was some very esoteric bar conversation, at least by our standards, then Emmi's advisers took us all out for a celebratory dinner that night: Anne and I, and Ben, Emmi and Matt, and Em's roommate Laura, and her colleague Mark, and her dad and his girlfriend, and of course her advisers Jen and Joe, who were just as proud of her as the rest of us. Strangely enough, dinner conversation was mostly about music.

 

Saturday was a ride day, Anne and I on our mountain bikes with Ben on my 29er. We did some road and some paved bike path then found ourselves at the "Forks of the River WMA," where we played on real singletrack for a bit. Lunch with Emmi and Matt, then I went back to the hotel and took a nap while Anne did some shopping with Ben and Emmi -- I caught up with them later for dinner in Old Town.

 

Sunday we said our goodbyes, drove all day, and were home by about 7:00 -- in other words, before dark. Daylight Savings!

Hump Day

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Lunchtime.  I get through this afternoon and tomorrow, and I'm done for the week -- we are heading down to Knoxville, to see Emmi's presentation on her invasive species (Tree of Heaven) research.

 

Fed Up: I finally had enough. I have an older relative who doesn't email much, but his emails are inevitably of the "FW:FW:FW:FW:LOL!"  and "NEW SCAM ALERT (confirmed by snopes)" variety that have been rattling around the Internet since 1998 or so, always bullshit and usually very annoying. Well, I just put in a filter on my account; from now on, any email from this person that also contains a "FW" anywhere in the subject, gets tossed in a dead-letter file without me ever having to see it. I sure hope he doesn't send anything important...

 

Anyway, last night I did a decent tempo ride on the towpath, 45 minutes nonstop in Zone 3 (plus another hour in Zone 2 on the return). Tonight is an aerobic endurance ride on the Surly followed by a visit to Brew Works, and tomorrow is another tempo ride. Weather and ground conditions are excellent right now.

 

Speaking of feeding, this weekend I had two of the best cuts of beef ever: Saturday was a steak of some kind, and Sunday was some round cut cooked in the pressure cooker. (I had leftover steak sandwiches last night.) This has been going on for several weeks, ever since we split that cow with Donna -- best idea ever, a freezer full of local meat.

 

Walking On Springtime

Walked out the door this morning, and it was a beautiful, springlike day -- a bit cool, but sunny and the air felt like May or June instead of March. Everything is still sort of brown bit it's pretty obvious that we are starting -- starting! -- to leave winter behind.

 

In terms of training, last week was a disappointment: I got in one good "tempo" ride, then had bike club meetings after after work Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I was too tired to ride after work, and when I went out Friday night, supposedly for another tempo ride, I couldn't get my heart rate up, and bagged the ride after about a half hour. I rode Saturday but skipped Sunday, and other than a few Saturday errands, drycleaning and oil change and such, it was basically a lost weekend: going out late, sleeping in and being coffee-starved and headachey all day. I've been burning the candle at both ends lately; I think I'll have to let a few things go if riding is what I really want.

 

One thing I did finish was that Perl script to extract heart rate summaries from my ride data. I'll be going back over the past training period and getting my analyzing done soon... Tonight is another tempo ride, tomorrow is aerobic endurance, Wednesday is tempo again, and on Thursday we're off to Knoxville to see Emmi's dissertation defence on Friday. We'll probably get a ride in on Saturday (I hope).

 

So Far So Good, Part Eleventy-Bazillion and One

Morning weigh-in: 184#

 

I guess I was pretty used to those towpath SS rides, where my legs would spin out trying to maintain even a moderate pace, since I was really worried about last night's "tempo" ride, but it turned out to be surprisingly easy. (I was on the Turner, of course...) Higher gears and I'd move along, just below needing to breathe hard; my speed wasn't too high The plan is to do 30 minutes, then 40 at my next tempo ride -- there are supposed to be two of these rides each week -- then 65 and 75 minutes next week, and both tempo rides for the third week will be 90 minutes. I should be running out of towpath by that point, even if out and back are both in the training zone.

 

Speaking of the Turner... I'd been having progressively worse and worse a time with the rear shifting -- didn't seem to be the cables, or that pain in the ass derailleur I have on there, or anything I could find -- then at Trex a few weekends ago the rear wheel started making amazing rubbing/grinding sounds. Intermittent but loud, it sounded like the rear tire was rubbing on something (a sound I associate with a broken frame), but there was nothing I could see rubbing... Home and on the stand, I gave the cassette a little wiggle and found out my freehub was shot. Luckily, I have a spare rear wheel, so I moved my cassette and tire over, did a little brake adjustments, and now everything seems to be working out fine.

 

Yesterday was supposed to be a rest day, but I did today's ride last night because tonight is the monthly VMB meeting. It should be a real shit-show -- stay tuned...

 

Break Time's Over

Morning weigh-in: 185.5#

 

Yesterday was the only ride I did last week, which was the rest week for my first training period; it was also my opportunity to do that Lactate Threshold test again (I plan to do the LT test monthly, basically as part of each period's rest week), and I found my heart rate at  LT has gone up by 6 beats per minute, from 159 to 165 BPM. I guess that's good news... I haven't really seen, or been able to figure out, anything, one way or the other, about changes to LT heart rate, whether up or down is good or bad or whatever, but hey -- I had a number, I trained, and the number went up. I win!

 

Tonight starts my first night of Base 2 training, and it's the first ride with the new (harder) HR zones based on my new number, and the first training ride outside of Zone 2: I'll be doing a "tempo" ride on the towpath, 30 minutes or so in Zone 3 after my warmup. We shall see.

 

Grabbed My Coat And Grabbed My Hat

No morning weigh-in today: I overslept and was in "run through the house with my hair on fire" mode, trying to get out the door this morning, so there was no time for the niceties like coffee, breakfast or the scale. It was all for naught though, since there was an accident on Jugtown Mountain, the highway was a parking lot, and I was a half hour late to work anyway. Oh well, I'll make up the difference tonight...

No ride last night -- and there will apparently be no ride tonight either, since I forgot to charge my lights -- but I did have some success with the elevation profiles I was playing with. I haven't quite figured out how to use all of Gnuplot from octave, but I output my data to a file, which I used inside Gnuplot to make the exact plot I wanted. I then made a quick plot of my map, and combined the two for a really decent mockup. I'll post it here tonight.

After that it was Miller time, or at least, Brew Works Type A and fastnachts time... I met Anne and the crew (Donna, Erin, Brian, Jen, Nick, and later Matt and a friend of his) down there, pleasant evening.

Not sure what tonight will bring, maybe some laundry and some bike TLC -- the Turner and the Surly both need cleaning and lubing at the very least.

UPDATE Here's that map/profile:
 

Back To The Plotting Table

Morning weigh-in: 187.5#

 

Happy Phat Fastnacht!

 

So how did I spend last night, the first evening of my first rest week? Plotting more elevation profiles, of course! Part of what I want to do is use the more powerful Gnuplot features, and I also wanted to use octave to do any post-GRASS processing -- conveniently enough, octave uses Gnuplot to do its plotting, so that's two birds with one stone. (I also refined my method of getting the data out of GRASS and into a more standard CSV file, basically by piping it through an awk one-liner. In the end I might just use a simple awk script to do all the post-processing on the fly, and just pipe that output to Gnuplot. We'll see.)

 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch... On Sunday I chose Trex after all, and it was good but in some ways it may have been a mistake: despite the "Trex is never wet" hype, big sections of the place were a muddy mess, the trails were too short, and too steep, for the real "long slow distance" I needed. It was fun though, and I ran into a few other guys riding, as well as a kid on a unicycle, and Andrew, the guy building the trails. Beautiful day too.

 

Tonight is maybe a short recovery ride, or maybe more plotting fun, then it's Taco Night at the Brew Works.

 

February Recap

Morning weigh-in: 187# (not good)

 

Today starts the first rest week in my training program, so I thought I'd do a quick recap of where things stand:

 

Week        Workouts    Hours     Distance   Calories

1/23-1/29         4           5:02         52.0         3413

1/30-2/05         3           4:30         53.1         3412

2/06-2/12         4           8:14         81.6         6645

2/13-2/19         4           7:34         78.0         5531

 

(There are four weeks in there instead of three, because I started my first "week" early to make up for training time lost to a business trip.)

 

Not too shabby, though I notice two things:

 

1. I seem to max out at four rides a week (my plan currently calls for 5-6 rides a week). This may be because it's not the best time of year for riding right now, with weather, daylight and other outside conditions putting a damper on my available ride time, or it be just how my schedule works out -- I have plenty of time on my days off, but not so much during the week. I suspect that both of those come into play, but at bottom it's a motivation issue. We'll see what happens as the weather gets nicer.

 

2. Right now I should be putting in my biggest weekly hours in the saddle, with lots and lots of low-intensity riding to get me ready for the tougher stuff coming (which will be shorter, harder, and need more rest days). My target is about 500 hours for the year, but if these are my "above average" weeks in terms of hours, I'm in serious trouble.

 

Well, things might not be as good as I'd want -- especially considering that this kind of training is less effective, in fact it might even be counterproductive, at lower training volumes -- but here's a look at my February stats going back a few years (to when I first started using the Garmin):

 

Year     Workouts      Hours       Distance    Calories

2009         12             13:37          127.6         8894

2010           5              6:21            88.8         6462

2011           6              6:44            54.4         3075

2012         11             20:26          212.7       15588

 

So in terms of volume, I'm pretty much on target right now to double my best distance/hours/calories from the past few years...

Funny How Things Work Out

Morning weigh-in (Friday): 186.5# (oops!)
Morning weigh-in (Sunday): 186#

So Thursday night I had an itch to scratch, and ended up playing with the computer instead of riding. Oh well, but at least I managed to get some results, as well as managing to break Topofusion...

Our Story So Far: What I want to do is take a GPS track and create an elevation profile of it, sort of what you see here or here or here. For the geekier cyclist, it's now normal to ride with GPS and upload the ride's data to some website, where you can see the data analyzed (ie graphs of elevation, heart rate, speed, etc), maybe even compare it -- read: compete -- against the rides of others. That's all good in its way, but what if you want to create your own standalone graph, maybe for use in some other project, and screen captures just won't do?

There are a few options. One of the best programs around, for playing with maps and cycling data, is a thing called TopoFusion. It can read ride data from a variety of formats, draw routes, and analyze either one in terms of elevation, distance etc. Unfortunately, it's a Windows program, and though I got it to work on my Linux laptop, recent upgrades caused it to become pretty flaky -- and then my attempts to fix the problem caused TopoFusion to stop working altogether.

(There is another problem with TopoFusion: GPS tracks consist of a bunch of individual points, and TF finds the elevation for each of those points and then makes a "staircase" graph of those individual data samples. When there are enough data points, like the GPS track of an actual ride, it's not noticeable, but with only a few data points the profile looks like a staircase. Worse, if you define a track by two points, say miles apart, with a mountain and valley between them, you will not get any of that profile, just the elevation at the first and second points.)

My next plan was to use an open-source program called Quantum GIS, which is supposed to be pretty good, with all sorts of functionality that can be added via plug-in modules. Unfortunately, it had no direct way to generate a profile, and the plug-ins I could find to make profiles refused to run without more added software, usually versions of stuff not easily available to my Ubuntu distribution -- for a variety of reasons I am deliberately behind the times with my upgrades, and this is one of the few times it worked against me.

Anyway, I finally punted, and went with the thing I initially had a lot of resistance to: GRASS. It took me a long time to get the hang of GRASS, and I still think that the interface is a pain, but it's big, and flexible, and programmable, and though it never "just works," when you do things right it can be very powerful.

I did some Googling and found some people dealing with similar problems, and I eventually found a way to do what I needed. It involved some indirect steps (convert the track into a series of points, adding extra points to fill in the spacing as needed when my original points were too far apart, then interpolate Shuttle Radar elevation data to convert the 2d points to 3d points), then I had to dump the results of that into something else for the actual graphing -- the example I followed used the statistical program R, which worked fine but wasn't very pretty, so I eventually switched to a spreadsheet. It was exactly, or almost exactly, what I need, though I may use GNU Plot to do any final graphing. It was strange to me that the clunky workhorse that I'd tried to avoid was just the thing that got my job done. Another life lesson I suppose...

Anyway, that took up a chunk of Thursday night, and the other half was taken up with a trip to Brew Works. Anne had gone up there to see Deb and Donna, first time in while that the old crew was together, and it was raining out, and I hadn't seen Deb in a while either... and there you have Friday morning's weight.

Friday night I hopped on the bike as soon as I got home, and did a moderately long towpath ride, then we went down to Black & Blue for dinner with Donna again, plus a few friends from out of town. Turns out it was Kelly-Jo's birthday, and they had cake and cupcakes, and we sang, and it was good. Yesterday I got up early, did some chores and hit the towpath again, this time doing about 34 miles of mixed towpath (Lehigh and some Delaware, though it was in bad shape) and bike path.

Right now I'm tending the bread oven's fire ( I just put some more wood on, and I can see the fire from the living room window), and debating what ride to do today. My choices revolve around doing more towpath (blech, but probably the smartest and best choice), a road ride (meh) or a real MTB ride, maybe at the relatively bomb-prof Trex. Tomorrow starts my first rest week, and I'm stuck between going out with a bang, or going out with more of what I'm supposed to be doing.

These Things Go In Cycles

Morning weigh-in: 184.5#

 

Played around with the computer last night, more frustrations but I think I'm at least eliminating possible problems from my checklist... I was fooling around until about 8:00, didn't get riding until a half hour later, but still managed to get in a halfway decent towpath ride, another "singlespeed E2 on the towpath" ride as I label it: "singlespeed" for the bike, "E2" because it sort of follows "endurance workout #2," and "towpath" because... 14.08 miles in 1:18, more than an hour in my "aerobic endurance" zone. I need more, like a lot more ride volume, but I was glad I could get myself out. Tonight is more towpath, same ride only longer.

 

Next Steps

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Skipped the ride last night, did some computer stuff -- I tried some new things to get TopoFusion to work right, which didn't work -- then worked on the bikes, Turner & Surly, mostly just cleaning and lubing. We ate at home, went out for drinks a bit on the late side, and ran into a few friends at Brew Works, but still managed to make an early night of it. Tonight I'll be hitting the towpath; I've already missed one day on my highest-volume week in my first base month so I might make this a longish ride.

 

Meantime,what else? Uhhhh...

 

Word Salad Surgery

Morning weigh-in: 185#

 

Happy day, all you lovers!

 

I looked at my "Garmin to spreadsheet" perl script last night, and I think I spotted the problem: if I'm not riding according to a specific workout, the Garmin will temporarily stop recording whenever it thinks my motion has stopped for more than a few moments, and when that happens, each lap in the TCX output file contains multiple sets of tracks within each lap, one for each separate period when it thought I was moving. My program assumes that each lap has only one set of tracks, which is true for most of my training rides, since "stop recording when not in motion" is almost always disabled -- everything worked fine until I did those "Stop And Smell The Roses, Or At Least Catch My Breath" rides this weekend.

 

So I now know what the issue is, I just have to think of a good way to fix it. Maybe this weekend.

 

Last night was also pick-up-my-pants night -- I'd gone to the local Men's Warehouse last week, and the new dress slacks I'd bought were ready to be picked up last night. I spent so much time playing with the computer that I almost missed closing time, but managed to get in under the wire, and now I have increased my work pants inventory by 50%, not counting the bottom halves of my suits, or the corderoys I also wear to work but plan on phasing out. I'm not really upgrading my image, but I did need to upgrade the quality of my work pants, and those cords were no longer cutting it.

 

Dinner last night, brisket sandwich, on rye bread from Anne's Sunday baking. Tonight is usually knitting for Anne followed by Tuesday Taco Night at Brew Works, but since it's valentine's Day, and knitting is cancelled, we might just stay in tonight.

 

Oh, The Woes

Morning weigh-in: 186.5#

 

I've been looking for better cycling training software for a while now, but I've been finding that most of what's out there is either a bit "meh," or unavailable on Linux, or both (usually both), and the web-based stuff seems just as lame -- I've tried a few of the free-on-a-trial-basis ones, and none have impressed me enough to want to upgrade to the paid version.

 

All I really want is one more feature than what's already present in Garmin Connect, PyTrainer or SportsTracker: I want to be able to see a breakdown of my heart rate data by heart rate zone, basically how many minutes in each zone, on a lap by lap basis. I was fooling with a Perl script I found online that converts Garmin data to Excel file format, trying to get it to work -- of course it didn't at first, it was poorly written -- and while I was on my new voyage of discovery I realized that a rewrite of this script would be the best way to extract the data I wanted.

 

It took me about two days, mostly because I didn't really have a big enough block of time to just sit down and do it, but I finally had something that seemed to work well with my sample data, and gave me the results I expected. Then yesterday I tried it on my actual training data, and got incomprehensibly wrong results. Oh well, back to the drawing board tonight, good thing today's a rest day.

 

Meantime, my new computer upgrade did wonders for TopoFusion, which as a Windows program needs to run in an emulator (and I guess the new emulator works a lot better), but then I did something and -- TopoFusion is all out of whack, and now maps and GPS tracks don't line up. I tried removing and re-installing wine (the emulator), and upgraded to the latest version of TopoFusion, but got very little relief. This is all happening now that I've committed to help Bob and Doug with mapping duties for an upcoming race, and I'd planned to use TopoFusion to do that work.

 

There's still always GRASS, or maybe QGIS.

 

The Comeback Kid Goes Lactic

So it's been about two weeks of training, two weeks of about twenty eight. I am already seeing results -- and of course I am already deviating from what I should be doing...

I'm mostly following Joe Friel's The Cyclist's Training Bible, and that means that right now I am doing a whole lot of "base riding:" lots and lots of easy rides (difficulty measured in terms of heart rate), and one day a week of spinning drills. I'm finding that, here in hilly Bethlehem, I can't go easy enough on the road to stay in the lower heart rate zones, so I've been doing a lot of cruising up and down the towpath; I kill two birds with one stone by riding my singlespeed, getting in a good, moderately-high-RPM spin workout while I'm out. Back and forth, night after night, by myself after work, up and down the towpath with the  hamster legs going and the heart rate monitor beeping at me to take it easier -- I'm already sick of it, and there's three months total of base work...

So this week I mixed it up a bit. I had Friday off, and took the Turner down the towpath to Easton, where I met Larry and we did a bike path loop. Social pace, maybe a bit faster than the training would have allowed, given the occasional hill and Larry's running slick tires on his bike, but really a nice break in the routine. I took the towpath home again, and followed the rules.

I skipped riding yesterday, and today I was going to meet Arnie and some others for another towpath ride -- and probably another violation, since those guys are usually on 'cross bikes and like to push the pace -- but instead I slept in, and later took advantage of the cold temperature and frozen ground to go ride Sals.

Technically, this ride was another violation, though I took things easy, and stopped whenever my heart rate went above my lactic threshold -- which means I stopped a lot, but it was a beautiful day, stopping to enjoy the view wasn't the worst thing that could have happened. The ride felt awesome, conditions couldn't have been better and I had a blast, and when I completed my usual loop I decided I wasn't done, so I hopped on the towpath and got in an hour or so of the training ride I originally should have done. Bonus! -- Though I suppose that was really more like eating diet food along with your nachos.

But: A month ago, a towpath ride like Fridays (but shorter) beat the tar out of me, and I actually had to bail on a Sals group ride about the same time. Some observations:

1. There really was a pulmonary issue going on, and a few weeks of that new maintenance inhaler has made a big difference. Today I was out in all my trigger conditions: cold, windy, and I was breathing hard, but I had no "incidents."

2. It wasn't all lungs: I'd been getting further out of shape the longer the asthma issue continued, and we're talking almost a full year here, so this new inhaler hasn't enabled me to pick up where I left off; I still have to start over at the bottom, only now I'm healthy.

3. Concentrating on "aerobic endurance" early in the season, lots of easy rides designed to encourage the cardiovascular system to prepare now for the harder workouts later, is already paying off. Maybe I'll mix a little fun in now and then but, despite the boredom involved with this phase, I am on the right track.

The Whistler Past The Boneyard

Morning weigh-in: 186#

 

Wassap...

 

Reading: I'm working through a shit-ton of books right now, mostly Christmas presents. Ta-Nehisi Coates's The Beautiful Struggle and James Wolcott's Lucking Out, two memoirs from Baltimore ex-pats -- Wolcott looking back at his twentysomething years in late-Seventies NYC, when was writing about movies, punk, porn and ballet for the Village Voice, while Coates writes about coming of age in Baltimore, at the height of the Crack Years in the Eighties -- are the two main reads right now, the bedroom and bathroom books, but I'm also working through an economic-travel-detective-journalism story by Michael Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World), and a lit-crit look at Thomas Pynchon as a writer of historical fiction. There's also a primer on open-source GIS in there, and a couple of novels are on the back burner. So of course I picked up Gravity's Rainbow again, and began re-re-rereading...

 

Actually, what I'm really reading is The Flame Alphabet, by Ben Marcus, a novel in which children's speech becomes toxic to adults. I just started it, at Anne's insistence, after she wolfed it down in about three days -- she found it compelling, beautiful and disturbing, and it was interesting to watch her be totally absorbed  (and freaked out) by the book. I think it's interesting too so far, but I'm definitely not as freaked out (so far) as she was. Then again, I never had kids, and I am not the word person she is. We shall see.

 

Listening: More Christmas presents here too, mostly Anne's presents from me, at least for the new stuff -- I've been getting myself a whole lot of 70's AOR, Bowie and things like that, from E-Music lately. Of Anne's new music, most of it was stuff Emmi played for us, back at Thanksgiving when we all visited Ben: the latest from The Builders and the Butchers, The Tallest Man in the World, and a "folk opera" by Anaïs Mitchell called Hadestown -- my own personal favorite.

 

On the way in this morning, Jethro Tull's "The Whistler" came up on random play, and I cranked it.

 

On-The-Bike: Yes, listening to "The Whistler" means that I am back to training, or "training," as the case may turn out. I've been reading and studying up, mostly Joe Friel's stuff, The Cyclist's Training Bible and things I find online. My goal, as in past years is to do well, or "well," at the Wilderness 101. (Long time readers may remember that last year, and the year before, I didn't even register, while in 2009 I had my only DNF ever at mile 89.) I'd like to break 10 hours, my target the last time I did it, but I think it's more realistic to say "my goal is to finish, and breaking 12 hours would be a bonus."

 

I think my biggest problem these past few years has been lack of time in the saddle: I should be putting in 400-500 hours a year, meaning I should be riding 5000-7500 miles a year. I've been doing about half that since 2009, and I think that things like that "time-crunched cyclist" plan were no substitute for chamois time. Unfortunately, finding time to train might be my biggest challenge -- I was thinking of starting my regimen next week, and so of course I am now scheduled to go on an emergency business trip next week...

 

Last night was the first step though: I did a towpath ride, one in which I did a simple test to find my lactate threshold -- 10 minutes warmup, followed by a 30 minute time trial. According to the Internet, my lactate threshold should be close to my average heart rate over the final 20 minutes of the time trial. The towpath was a muddy mess, there was creepy barking in the woods where I recently saw dogs kill a deer, and I took the road home, but I came home with a number: 159 beats per minute, close to my guess of "about 160."

 

Computing: So if we're talking training we're talking heart rate, and that means Garmin, maps and plenty of data crunching. I've found some Excel templates online, plus a few programs to extract HR data in spreadsheet-usable form from my Garmin's TCX file format, and I've broken out both PyTrainer and SportsTracker -- both of which work much better after that system upgrade -- but I have found no real, comprehensive, training analysis software for Linux (yet). Maybe Training Peaks? Strava?

 

I have, however, downloaded more mapping software.

Breathing Easy

Morning weigh-in: 188#

 

(Ha! You probably weren't expecting that! Too bad the scale is out of whack, or needs batteries or whatever, or I'd have a percent body fat for you too. I'm on it...)

 

My breathing has been OK-but-not-great for about a year now (starting about when I got the other allergy problem -- eczema -- under control, how convenient), with breathing problems worsening with the onset of the colder weather and mostly abating by spring. It got bad enough for me to complain to my allergist about it this past November, at my semi-annual skin checkup (skin being really the the only reason I go to her), and she gave me a "spirometry" test: breathe into a tube and the device figures airflow vs time, lung capacity, things like that -- it connected directly to her laptop, and pumped out a bunch of results and graphs.

 

The graphs meant nothing to me of course, but my allergist took one look at the results and said "Huh. That's not asthma!"

 

Next thing you know, she has me signed up for a chest X-ray and a more sophisticated version of the spirometer test (and others) at the hospital, and has referred me to a pulmonologist. Gulp! She tried to be reassuring, but I went home and Googled what I remembered of the test results, and came down with a bad case of hypochondria on top of everything else...

 

Fast forward to this Tuesday, when I saw the pulmonologist. (Anne came with me, so she could hold my hand while they told me I had emphysema or whatever -- it didn't help that the other patients were all overweight elderly with oxygen tanks.) Nurse takes my height/weight/pulse/blood pressure, then comes a long interview with a PA, all my asthma/allergy/medical history, review of those test results, listening to the lungs etc. He disappears for a while, presumably conferring with the pulmonologist, then the both of them come in to announce that I do, in fact, have asthma (and nothing else), my allergist was right to refer me, but the test results were close enough what they'd expect that they don't think anything else is going on.

 

They put me on a new, twice-daily maintenance inhaler, and gave me a new type of rescue inhaler -- one of my complaints was that my regular rescue inhaler didn't seem to do much -- and I go to see them again in six weeks to check on my progress. In a year or so, I'll probably be repeating those breath tests.

 

There was a definite feeling of letdown after all that drama, and I am not happy with the new inhaler regimen -- and it's hard to see "you do have asthma" as the good news -- but I'm slowly starting to feel like a weight is off my shoulders. I plan on giving these medications a few days to kick in, then I'm giving them an on-the-bike stress test over the weekend. Last year was terrible for me in terms of cycling and mileage, maybe this year will be a bit better.