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).
Flies & Bikes is a website/blog that I started some years ago. Initially I was writing about my interests in Science and my hobbies which include cycling (touring and racing) and tech stuff. At the time I was a University academic, but as my time available to blog waned, the focus shifted towards cycling and tech, then eventually it entered a rather fallow period.
Along the line, I transitioned the blog from Joomla to Wordpress. I've now reverted it back to Joomla - in doing so, I dropped various comments on blog articles (there weren't very many) as the transition, while automated, leaves quite a lot of manual rearrangement to be done.
I've been using Zwift regularly since April 2020, when I was building back from being an 'early adopter' of Covid-19. In all that time, I've not raced in Zwift, and I've only very occasionally ridden with friends on Zwift.
Until now.
Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.
In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).
There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.
This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.
In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.
Support for Joomla version 3 ceased in August this year, and I'd been working on ensuring the three Joomla sites I maintain were upgraded to version 4 in advance of that. What I realised in doing that was the enormous amount of cruft I'd accumulated over the years, especially with the North Bucks Road Club website. One of the issues is always that of finding a sympathetic template, particularly where user access on mobile devices is concerned.
In which I test (and implement) some alternative wiring possibilities for SRAM eTap gear shifters
The SRAM eTap Aero groupset was released in 2015 with a version aimed at road bikes where the gear change controls were switches in the brake levers, and which communicated with the front and rear derailleurs via a proprietary wireless signal. For time trial bikes, the eTap aero was released, where switches mounted on the aero bars were wired to a "blipbox", which wirelessly relayed commands to the gear mechs. Typically, one would set up a pair of switches (the "blips") on the base bar and a second pair of switches (the "clics") on the ends of the aero extensions. The blipbox has four sockets, two for upshift and two for downshift - each clic or blip switch is connected via one socket. The blipbox also has some buttons for shifting. The annoyance there is that the size of the blipbox makes it difficult to tuck it away in the time trial frame.
In which I do yet another bout of TT bike fettling, this time to address the front end clutter.
Some months ago, I’d bought a secondhand 3T Aduro base bar (the same as came with the P5-Six). The original intention had been to replace the base bar on the P5. Unfortunately the four bolts holding the low extension/armpad mount to the replacement base bar were themselves seized. This appears to be a bit of a problem with these bars - my P5 has a set of Aduro bars in the low position, and one of the four screws holding the stem top plate was seized and I was never able to extract it.
This book is a nicely presented tome all about the American cycle pioneer Jobst Brandt. I'd long been aware of Brandt not only because I bought a copy of his excellent book on the spoked bicycle wheel (The Bicycle Wheel), which includes guidance on wheelbuilding, but though reading his old USENET posts on matters pertaining to bicycle technology. Many of those old posts have been preserved at Sheldon Brown's website (itself maintained some years after Brown died in 2008). Brandt was strikingly forthright and not shy in making his views known through these early internet posts. However, I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.
Hed H3 wheels are probably Team Grumpy’s go-to wheel - they are pretty close to being indestructable (but not invulnerable) - they aren’t likely to go out of true as there aren’t any spokes to break or lose tension.
In use, I’ve always found them to handle well except in the windiest of conditions (see for example the 2018 edition of the Duo Normand when I ended up using a regular spoked wheel). In comparison to very deep rimmed spoked wheels, they seem to be more of an all-rounder aero wheel for time trialling.
In which I review the power meters I've been using over the last few years. All of these seem to be accurate and consistent in their data. This is a brief review of the four systems I currently use - and to cut to the chase, of these four power meters, which would I recommend as a power meter on a new bike build?
Given that two of these power meters are discontinued, the choice comes down to the SRAM Red chainset or the Assioma Duo pedals, and from the viewpoint of easy transfer between bikes I'd recommend the Assiomas (which can also be bought in a version to be fitted to Shimano pedal bodies). I should add that all four of these power meters have been absolutely faultless in use.
A supremely comfortable saddle for touring use. Possibly my oldest bike component that is still in use (even if only occasionally).
During a recent garage clearout, I unearthed this saddle. It's clearly seen better days - the surface of the leather is a bit cracked and the rivets are a bit green! These photos were taken after I applied some Proofide.
It had been 5 years since we last packed for a Normandy holiday, including both the tandem and a solo bike. Since then we’d changed to a more modern Ford Focus, and I at least had a few concerns that all our stuff wouldn’t have fit inside.
I needn’t have worried.
In which I suffer a series of bike crises before even leaving the house, and have a lacklustre performance.
So as usual I started getting set up about an hour before I needed to set out for Astwood. When I came to pump the tyre up on the P5 TT bike, I found that the front wouldn't get up to my desired pressure, then the rear disk wouldn't stay inflated (I think because the valve core came a little loose). So I switched to the P3.
So it will come as no surprise that 2020 was the weirdest cycling year since I came back to the sport in 1990.
I started in reasonably good form, considering the drop in motivation I had experienced through the autumn of 2019 and into winter. I’d continued a lot of travelling, with monthly trips to Edinburgh - though in training terms these weren’t too disruptive since I’m able to set up a turbo trainer there. I did an OK effort at the New Year’s Day ’10’, and settled down to try and ramp up the training for the opening event of my 2020 season proper, the Port Talbot Wheelers 2-up ’25’ in March.
In which I grab the soldering iron and splice together wires and plugs to place the 'brains' of the eTap system deep in the bowels of my TT frame!
Earlier this year, I travelled to Wales for a Team Grumpy reunion of sorts, in the form of a 2-up team time trial. This was a ‘sporting course’, so I took along my Cervelo P3, currently equipped with 11-speed eTap Red gears. By the time the bike had been in and out of the car a few times, one of the blipbox ports had stopped working (this happened before, with the P5).
Owing to work-related pressures, over the last few years I've had less and less time available to blog and to maintain websites. I've focussed on maintaining two Joomla! based websites:
North Bucks Road Club - my current bike club