The start of my time trial season is looming ominously on the horizon. In 2024 I plan to ride more open events. Over the last couple of years I've ridden fewer open events (which are usually at weekends) because of various family issues. Mostly those issues have kept me from being able to race at weekends. Our club events are usually mid-week, and therefore have fit better with my lifestyle over the last couple of years.

The first event is an open event, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up '25' on 10th March. In the past this has always offered an opportunity to brush up my 2-up skills with my regular 2-up partner Gerry - the event is in his neck of the woods. In the following three weekends, I hope to ride the road bike TT series aimed at recruiting beginners to the NBRC club events. This series is on successive Saturday mornings on a 5 mile circuit course.

This was the fifth event in the VTTA's Zwift virtual 10 mile time trial series. Over the first four events, I'd seen a gradual improvement from 24:18 to 23:53. As far as I can tell, the improvement is mostly down to improved consistency in maintaining appropriate power levels, and this event saw my most consistent power so far.

My strategy for this was as follows.

Here are albums 21-40 that the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website presented me. See albums 1-20 here.

Having got through 40 albums over 40 weeks, I'm actually enjoyig the experience - I'm listening to stuff that in some cases I've not played before, and I usually play the album three times. There's one exception to that in this posting - the Aerosmith album.

Another Tuesday, another VTTA Zwift time trial.

Aead of this time trial, I decided to splurge some of the 40+ million drops I'd accumulated in Zwift and buy the best frame and wheel combination available. At least as suggested by Zwift Insider. Armed with a (virtually) shiny new (virtual) cadex TT frame with (virtual) DT Swiss wheels, I entered the fourth in the eight event VTTA series.

Recently I'd become interested to see how the power reported by my ageing Tacx Neo smart trainer (first generation) compares with my Assioma pedals (i have the dual set). My initial investigations involved fitting the Assiomas to the bike mounted on the turbo and comparing the reported power by eye. This seemed to have a significant different at least at some power levers, so I felt some further investigations were merited.

I've posted in the past about the Squeezebox network music players, most recently owned by Logitech until discontinued in August 2012. These devices require a network connection to a server - either an instance of Logitech Media Server (LMS), running on the local network, or the Logitech-provides server at mysqueezebox.com (MSB). The two server systems do have functional overlap which does cause confusion in the user base, of which more later. However, on 25th January 2024 the announcement was made via the support forum that the MSB service would be terminated in February 2024.

In this, my third event in the VTTA 10 mile Zwift TT series, I tried to maintain a steady power. I also tried ride this as I normally do road TTs - that is, at a very low cadence. This worked marginally - I seem to have improved by a piffling 4 seconds! At this rate I may have cracked 24 minutes by the end of the 8 events!

Just before embarking on my warmup, I figured out why I couldn't reach top gear - it was a problem with the placement of the outer gear housing. In retrospect, being able to access the two smallest cogs was not helpful!

I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

At the end of December, I came across the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website, based upon the book of the same name. After signing up at the site, you receive a daily album suggestion. There's an app for Logitech Media Server which links to a copy in your local music library, or failing that to your streaming service of choice, making it easy to listen to the album.

So far, I've had 22 albums - several of which I own in some format or other, some were new to me, and some have been added to my collection. As far as I understand it, the albums from the list are presented in a random order. Here's what I've had in order of appearance. Here are the first 20 albums.

If I was a little disappointed at the outcome of my first effort at Zwift time trial racing last week, I did at least pace myself a bit better than I did in event #2. This was held on the same course as event #1, the pan-flat Tempus Fugit course. After a short delay occasioned by an unexpected Zwift update on the Apple TV, I set out to spin through a warm-up ride.

I’ve had a fairly heavy training load over the last week, so maybe I was left a bit jaded. However, the principal failing this evening was a that I didn’t keep a consistent power level through the event. Starting too hard was just the start. I lacked any kind of serious motivation, and repeatedly felt like I just wanted to stop. In fact there’s a surprising number of pauses in the record of the ride (see below).