Tasmania: today's ride + Talbot vertical

Today's ride

If it's a Sunday it must be Dad's Army - or hill repeats - or Dad's Army. So I rode out at 7.30 am not sure in which direction to go. Anyway, met a Dad's Army trooper on the road and got conscripted, so that was that.

As it turned out, the ride was a whole lot brisker than last Tuesday's laborious DA trundle, with some quick turns on the front. The only downside was the touch of drizzle part-way through that gradually settled into what you would have to describe as a persistent rain, so no one was interested in a coffee after. On the positive side, the new Assos Gotterdammerung / Sturm und Drang / Blitzkrieg jacket (or IJ.haBu.5_S5 as it likes to be called) lived up to its hefty price tag. Despite the light weight it was warm in the 3 degree temperature and dry, with no water penetration or condensation evident. Not bad!

After-ride coffee with DA usually offers some stimulating conversation but, for some reason, DA's pre-ride meeting point conversation consists mainly of a rather forced and jocular bonhomie, liberally sprinked with the "F" word in its adjectival form. It reminds me of the occasion when I took our trainee sales manager on a client visit to 'show him how it was done'. Unwisely I chose a local motor bike retailer which, at the time, was owned by the local Drug Lord.

Drug Lord's conversation also consisted mainly of the "F" word and, in an attempt to blend into character, I reciprocated. After the meeting I asked our trainee how he thought the meeting went. He complimented me on my sensitivity to the client's mien, but pointed out that my carefully enunciated fuckings lacked the inherent menace of Drug Lord's abbreviated, Serbo-Croat inflected "fukkn". But I digress.

65 km, 2hrs 24m  http://www.strava.com/activities/145158999

A Talbot vertical

Last Friday's bi-monthly wine dinner was a triumph for Bordeaux. We chose a vertical of Chateau Talbot, a reasonably priced (as these things go) fourth growth from the Saint-Julien appellation. Between us we managed to come up with seven vintages: 2010, 2006, 2005, 2000 (corked), 1996, 1986 and 1982. Apart from the unfortunately corked 2000 all the wines were excellent with wild hare, even the relatively young ones. The talking point of the evening was the discontinuity between pre and post 2000 vintages. The three older wines displayed the attractive cedary, cigar box aromas typical of aged Bordeaux, but this quality was not evident in the younger wines. Would the younger wines eventually develop these characteristics? Did the wine making change in some way between 1996 and 2000, and if so, how? Is the Chateau trying to impress influential American wine critic Robert Parker by making wines in the style he prefers? We didn't have the answers but enjoyed the debate.

Tasmania: jumping ship

A weird ride yesterday. Set off with no food and minimum fluid, thinking a sedate 45 km with the Coffee Crawlers was the likely ride. Tucked in behind a bunch of them and we overtook the Dad's Army bunch. They had a longer ride in mind so I jumped ship, ditched the coffee boys and became a conscript. Now DA is a strange bunch, depending on who turns up. Sometimes it's a quick and hard ride but today a couple of the more distinguished members were present, so the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would probably have given us a run for our money (and I am well aware that there are plenty of faster riders who would likely give the same description of riding with me :).  

Well, we reached the DA turn around point at Winkleigh, the sun had come out, I was feeling good - so I jumped ship for the second time and kept going. After a while I reached Beaconsfield and refuelled on coffee and an apple slice at the bakery, then set off back to Lonnie along the river. Took this shot of the Batman Bridge en route.

It never looks its best at low tide, but they are oyster beds - even if eating them is not recommended

I had a bit of a tail wind down the river and made good progress, stopping at Gravelly Beach to pick up a choc bar and orange juice (they don't do sports drinks in the Gravelly Beach take away). So I go through the Legana roundabout and I'm rolling down the highway at around 45 kph when - whoosh - some guy with a backside and quads like Cancellara goes past down on the aero bars. I reckon he accelerated to make a point, so I go head down, bum up and try to catch him. No good. But God is apparently giving me his undivided attention, changing the lights to red a few km down the road to hold him up and cannily switching back to green as I approach at max speed so - whoosh - I go past as he's struggling to clip in, and open up a sizeable gap. Sad to say, it did not last. Despite operating at warp speed with all dilithium crystals engaged there is a growing blob in my sneaky bar-end mirror, and  - whoosh - he goes past for a second and final time. Too bad!

Four hours and 101 km.
http://www.strava.com/activities/143310558 

Wine

Photos from a visit earlier this year. The entrance to Craggy Range winery - the skyline forms the logo on the label

Celebrating some good tender results this evening with a 2007 Craggy Range Block 14 Syrah. New Zealand makes a lot more than the ubiquitous Sauvignon Blanc, and some of their Pinots (Martinborough, Central Otago) and Shiraz (Hawkes Bay) combine the fruit of the new world with the subtlety and complexity of the old. The Craggy Range winery is located in Havelock, Hawkes Bay, and makes several top-end, single-vineyard wines from locations throughout NZ. 'Syrah' is a name given to Shiraz that has been combined with 5 - 10% of the (white) Viognier grape in the style of the Northern Rhone. This one does not disappoint - medium weight, nicely balanced and fine tannins.

The winery and restaurant. Well worth a visit if you are in the area.

Tasmania: OpenStreet maps and Clemens Hill pinot

Rain / work. Travel. Work. Work / travel. Rain. That was this week. Today (Saturday) I pulled on the smart new bike gear, opened the door, looked at the squalls blowing down the Tamar, closed the door and headed for the gym and the spin bike. 

Out of - hmm, yes - six bikes this is the least favourite...

Today's objective was leg strength + technique:

• 10 x 30s max resistance @ 90s intervals
• 10 x 30s max rpm / min resistance @ 30s intervals
• 12 step ups x 3 with 20 kg + some core stability exercises 

OpenStreet maps

One of the pluses of the Garmin 810 is that you can add a micro SD card and download your own maps. This article from DC Rainmaker explains how. During last year's visit to Nice I had some trouble finding my way on bike rides, so this year I have downloaded several Maritime Alps routes from Strava and exported them to the Garmin. Next, you need a decent map on the Garmin on which to display the route. I visited OpenStreet maps, selected most of south-east France, downloaded the map file and dropped it into the Garmin. Result? I should be able to select a route with an appropriate distance and climb, then use the map on the Garmin to follow it. I'll let you know how it works out in a couple of weeks.

Clemens Hill pinot

Clemens Hill is a middle-of-the-road Tasmanian pinot from the Coal River area. I 'inherited' a dozen bottles of the 2008 a few years back and have been trying the odd bottle every now and then since. This is probably as good as its going to get. Good colour. Simple red fruit nose. Sweet cherry and raspberry on the front palate, some spice and a bit of a 'peacock's tail' on the finish.

Tasmania: Assos and Domaine De L'Arlot

OK, call me a name dropper but both of the above were better than today's ride. I had hoped for a big weekend of riding, but rain yesterday and Mother's Day today restricted things to 57 km with Dad's Army this morning - no hills, no intervals, just a wet road and a bucket and sponge job on the weapon afterwards. At least the coffee and the chat were enjoyable.

Assos

I've always got by with bike kit and used a mixture of mountain bike gear, bush-walking gloves, beanies and whatever else that came to hand with potential for maintaining warmth and dryness. Assos have a reputation for being the Armani of road bike gear so, when it came to buying a 'proper' bike top, why not get a good one?

They have a great marketing spin with about seven sets of gear, each one for a narrow temperature range. Not content with the four seasons they have Hot Summer, Early Winter, Winter Plus and so on. At one extreme you wouldn't look out of place on the beach at St Tropez and you could probably wear the other extreme for ice climbing. Each set of gear also has a multitude of components but we'll not go there. Anyway, they sucked me right in and I bought an Early Winter jacket and a Spring jacket thinking that, with various T shirts and old orienteering tops underneath, they would do me quite nicely.

Had to laugh. The winter jacket is called an iJ.ha.Bu5. Each letter and digit is coded for something - these boys are even more anal than I am. Glad I bought it online as I couldn't really contemplate going into my local bike shop and asking for an iP...er...QR whatsit 6. Why couldn't they just call it the Eiger? But...wore it for the first time this morning and very comfortable it was, as promised, in exactly the target temperature range of 3 to 12 degrees.

Wine

Took my lady out for lunch after the ride, mindful that a riding buddy had recommended a recent arrival in his restaurant of 2011 Domaine De L'Arlot 'Les Petits Plets'. And what a cracking wine it turned out to be. Red Burgundy is called Pinot Noir here in Tasmania but the only similarities with this one were the colour of the wine and the name of the grape. Don't get me wrong, Tassie makes an excellent New World pinot but this was something else. Despite only being a village wine (three steps down the quality ladder from a grand cru) it was pretty well all you could ask for. Everything about it was subtle. The nose was sweet but with that engaging French funkiness of sexy bed sheets. While not at all similar, those hard to define qualities make me think of Anthony Burgess' description of the durian fruit as being like eating raspberry blancmange in the lavatory. And the texture; one minute is was all velvet glove and the next iron fist. Lovely! And there's still half-a-bottle left to go with dinner this evening.

Tasmania: hill repeats and Everesting

Weather apps

I’m all for objectivity but why is it that my weather app says 1˚ - feels like minus 2.7 ˚? Does it feel  that way if you are naked? Or if you have just got off a boat from Sri Lanka? Why doesn't it just say 1˚ but will freeze your backside off if you cycle down Elizabeth St at 7.30 am? Anyway, I did and it did. I've been wearing a 20-year old mountain bike jersey while I wait for a toasty new Assos jacket to arrive in the post and, believe me, it can’t come soon enough.

Joined the Coffee Crawlers on the Fish Shop ride. After half-an-hour it began to warm up and became the usual lovely ride along the Tamar in the weak winter morning sun: swans, ducks, early morning walkers – great! The ride was uneventful  and we ended up in Gloria Jeans as per usual for a coffee.

Hill repeats

White Hills from the top of the escarpment

So that being the warm up and it being a lovely day and nothing overly pressing happening at work, I continued on to White Hills for a set of hill repeats. The road up to White Hills rises 90 metres in 1.1 km at an average gradient of 8%, with sections up to 12%. I completed five reps at around 5:00 each, seated, 23 x 34, average cadence 69, average heart rate 151 for 450 metres of total ascent; six reps would have equaled the Col d’Eze, ten reps the Col du Vence from the promenade at Cagnes-sur-Mere and 19 reps the Col de la Madeleine. Despite this I felt quite good about the session until I returned home and read about Everesting.

Everesting

Everesting is climbing the equivalent of Everest’s 8,848 metres on your bike in a single ride. A woman has just done it by climbing Mt Buffalo eight times in eighteen hours for a total of 9,031 metres. Believe it or not, some guy did it last month by climbing Anderson Street on the Tan Track in Melbourne – wait for it – 328 times in 24 hours and six minutes. So that would be around 99 ascents of White Hills? – maybe next year.

Days total: 102km, 1,248 m climb and 3:58 riding time.

Wine

A cold evening so back to the Barossa for a 2008 Schild Estate Shiraz. Schild Estate is a family-owned company and make age-worthy wines of excellent value. This one cost me the grand sum of $13 four years ago: sweet blackberry fruit, integrated tannins and long finish. Not in any way over-ripe or flabby. 

Tasmania: goals, equipment, research etc.

Goals and objectives

About three months ago when this project began, a typical week would be around three easy rides for a total of perhaps 100 - 150 km. By the end of the project in mid-July I need to be capable of producing six consecutive daily rides of around 100 - 120 km and 2,500 metres climb. So the focus of the training program is endurance (to cope with the distances), strength (for the steeper parts of the climbs) and strength endurance (for individual climbs of up to 1,650 m + consecutive climbs).

This actually makes it a very simple program. All I have to do is go out and ride hills - lots of them - with the added refinement of staying seated and using a low cadence in a big gear (small cog) to develop the hip extensors, glutes and hamstrings, as well as the quads. This all seems to be going to plan. Later I will start doing two and three consecutive hard days to work on recovery.

I set out to build this into a sequence of two harder weeks (300 - 350 km) followed by an easier recovery week (150 km). This is an age-adjusted version of an elite cyclist's three hard weeks / one recovery week rotation. While this is a fine idea it is often disrupted by weather (if I have to ride in the rain I will, but at the moment I don't have to), work (I run a management training business) and domestic activities (my wife and I are restoring an old cottage in a village about 82.3km from Launceston as the bike rides) - so I do what I can to achieve the targets.

Performance tracking websites

A couple of cycling websites are used to maintain training records and track performance:

• Strava is a useful tool to maintain motivation through their monthly challenges - and the feeling that your mates will all see if you cut a session short.
• TrainingPeaks is an excellent tool for monitoring performance and guarding against over-training.

The Performance Manager chart is what Training Peaks is all about. Simply put, the blue line is your 'fitness' - cumulative training stress score from the last 42 days, pink your acute training load from the last seven days and yellow your recovery.

Both these sites have a free and a paid for option. With Strava the free option is probably fine but with Training Peaks a premium account is required to obtain the performance monitoring benefits. 

Equipment

BMC in Australian green and gold colours

I ride a BMC SLT01 that must be about seven years old - it's the one Floyd Landis rode in that disastrous Tour that he 'won' and then lost. It has a Campag Record groupset with compact 50 x 34 cranks and a 12 - 25 cassette. Right at the moment it won't change into the 25 cog and I'm leaving it that way to force me to ride in the smaller 23 cog. For the tour I'm hiring a Bianchi with 50 x 34 and 12 - 30 :-).

The BMC gained a set of Zipp 404s recently. They are the same weight as the DT Swiss hoops used previously but feel quite a bit faster at what I laughingly call 'speed'. They are also surprisingly good in the wind. 

This neat bar-end mirror is unobtrusive and gives a good view of vehicles approaching from behind that might be passing a little too close.

I don't have a power meter and would really like one. The Stages meter that fits on a crank would be good, but they don't work on carbon cranks, the Garmin Vector pedal-based meters can be easily swapped between bikes but are expensive - so I'm adopting a wait and see approach. If you want to read chapter and verse on this topic then DCRainmaker's summary is excellent.

Research

I'm currently reading Faster: the Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists by Michael Hutchinson. It has added useful detail to some things I was already aware of and filled in some blanks that I wasn't. I might refer back to this book in some future posts.

Tasmania: intro - a rest day

Today is a Rest day so I will take the opportunity to open this blog. You will notice that Rest is spelled with a capital "R". This is to distinguish a "Rest" day from "Training" in comparison with just a "sitting-around-on-one's-backside" day.

Having got the double quotes out of my system I will explain what is going on. A few months ago I signed up with Thompson Bike Tours for a six-day cycling holiday in the French Alps. Thompson advertise that they have a marquee at the top of the climbs, equipped with a beer fridge, smorgasbord and large screen TV to watch the Tour as it approaches. Sounds good to me - all I have to do is get up there.
  
Thompson bill this trip as being for "avid" climbers. I like the word avid. It implies more than being merely keen, enthusiastic or eager; it suggests that one is ardent, zealous or even fanatical. With an average daily distance of around 100+ kms and daily climb in excess of 2,000 metres it looks like being towards the more fervent end of the thesaurus. Thank Christ I didn't sign up for the "extreme" option.

Preparation for the ride is taking place in my hometown of Launceston in northern Tasmania. The typical options are an early-morning bunch ride down the Tamar River with the Coffee Crawlers or Dad's Army, or an after-work solo ride in the more undulating area to the south of Launceston. Once a week I try to do a longer ride; either  an 80+ km trip to Campbell Town, a climb up the 1,000 m escarpment of Poatina, or perhaps a longer mountain bike race or charity ride.

I should explain that I am not a long-term bike rider. I came to the sport more recently after several decades of gymnastics, soccer, rugby, ultra running, and orienteering. Eventually the knees said "no more", but are happy enough to turn the pedals around without undue discomfort. 

In three weeks I leave for an annual trip to Nice on the Cote d'Azur. This promises warmer weather than our frosty Launceston mornings, and a chance to train on the famous cols of Eze, Vence and Madone. Hopefully the local bike shop still has my Giant in the basement. Some oil on the chain, air in the tyres and we will be ready to roll!  

Wine

Yes, I know it's out of sync with training and the rest of the stuff but all work, no play, Jack, dull, boy, make etc. So this evening's drop with dinner was a couple of glasses of 2005 Oratoire St Martin Cairanne - Cuvee Pestige: big tannins the most noticeable feature, soft palate, blackberries, prunes and leather. Still needs a while.