63:51 for 4000yds. Compare with my December 18 result two months ago: 68:19 for 4000yds. This is pace for a 67.5 minute Ironman swim. That’s a 6.5% improvement in my TT pace over the course of the last two months, and a whopping 14.3% over the course of the past 3 months which is my first datapoint doing 4000 yard TTs and corresponds to the beginning of when I started the increased focus on swim this winter. I had a quite strong negative split, -1.3% decoupling, but that’s partly due to me making a relatively significant effort increase during the second half. I wanted to make sure that I was going to finish my 4000 feeling absolutely confident that I had swum my fastest TT possible. The variability in this result is more consistent across the hour compared with that previous result and indicates that I didn’t loose focus at any point in the swim.

The keywords I was focusing on were to make the kicking count, and to swim with momentum. The first is to directly combat my tendency to only kick hard enough to maintain an acceptable body position. I’ve started to realize that my body position through the water is actually better when I’m kicking for propulsion rather than just kicking for body position. Like most aspects of triathlon it’s one of those things where when you work harder you go faster, but I’m starting to feel like there’s an efficiency improvement as well, so my return on investment for that effort is something I’m starting to consider worthwhile. The second is based on feedback from Erin, that I have to work pretty hard to get back up to speed every time I loose some of it, and that I’m best off to just keep the bits of speed that I’ve got. Right now that means two things for my swim stroke: 1) ensuring that I am not afraid to keep the arms moving, if I back off the arm-speed and focus more on getting long strokes excessively I am speeding up and slowing down with every stroke, an incredible waste of energy. 2) that after I push off the wall I’m going faster than swim speed, if I coast down to below swim speed before swimming I’m wasting energy, I’m best off to give a double kick and take a stroke before even thinking about breathing. Taking that first breath doesn’t break my body position in the water as much if it’s a mid-stroke breath, and hence I don’t loose that momentum.

The trendline is a per-kilometer average pace.

I was tempted to just post some photos and let them tell the story, but that made me feel like I was shortchanging such a fantastic trip, so I’ll have to tell the stories as well.

The first is the mid-night arrival of part of our skiing crew. My cell phone rang a few minutes before 4 am and I was up out of bed to let in a Lesley and Pat who had spent the night driving Highway 2 in less than ideal conditions to accommodate a late night flight into Edmonton International. I was excited to get out of the house and go right then instead of heading back to bed, but sleep definitely was on the menu for the wearied travelers. Waking up at what would normally be a very lazy hour the next morning we loaded up and set out for the trailhead after a dose of caffeine and a few bites of breakfast. I can’t speak from personal experience but it seemed like enough sleep was had during those short hours by my skiing comrades to recharge adequately for a day in the mountains. Either that, or there was significant horsepower being absorbed by osmosis from the beautiful surroundings that we were skiing through. Considering the number of disclaimers placed that they had few skills and little prior experience they were quick on the uptake. Pat started out as a rather shaky kneed skier but gathered his wits about him quite quickly. Luckily though, I was the one carrying a dozen eggs.

We made good time along the trail, not because we were traveling exceedingly fast but mostly just due to the fact that we weren’t taking very long of breaks. That and a little bit of not wanting to be going “too slow” while leading the group meant that whoever was up front was huffing along and then the others didn’t want to let them get out of our sights. Then whomever else took over felt the need to keep up the pace, the problematic pattern perpetuated itself and subsequently some solid skiing ensued. We’d made a good choice with the waxes and no-one struggled much which was a huge bonus for the morale. Additionally we were left some encouragement in the snowbanks along the way by our friends who were up the trail by a few hours.

Our arrival at the cabin was earlier than anticipated and we had nearly caught the other 7 members of our group who were just taking off their boots when we pulled up. It was about this time that we unloaded food onto the table from our respective bags and realized the magnitude of the task at hand. It was going to be quite a feat to even eat half of the food we’d brought in.

The menu for the trip wasn’t meager pickings for (at least) seven reasons.

1. Carrying good food makes it easier to rationalize why you have a heavy pack. If it’s full of stuff you only marginally want to eat it could lead to complaining. If it’s all gourmet, there is less opportunity to bemoan sore shoulders and an aching back.
2. No-one has ever developed scurvy in two days but we certainly didn’t want to risk it. Better bring some fresh vegetables for our omellettes to ensure we don’t develop anything like that. We were bringing along a med-student but not a real doctor to diagnose and treat big problems like scurvy, better to rather play it safe than sorry!
3. Pat needed to be fed, and everyone knows that he can really pack it away when he decides to.
4. Olives, figs and wine were good enough for all those Roman emperors so they’re good enough for us too. And if Marcus Aurelius would have known to have stuffed his olives with Camembert I’m sure he would have been all over that too.
5. I’d heard concerns about Oatmeal being too boring, so the obvious solution would be to bring it up a notch with cranberries and orange zest.
6. Good chocolate keeps the ladies happy – fact!
7. This was New Years and we were supposed to be celebrating!

Our stay was two nights and our intermediary day was spent on a day-excursion from the hut up towards Assiniboine Pass. The attempt would end at 2:30 when we had to make the prudent choice to turn around instead of pushing onwards to see what we may or may not be able to see from the pass proper. The day ski had us enjoying a fine balance of gently falling snowflakes and sufficient visibility to enjoy the surrounding vistas. If it had been any more clear, the beauty and vastness of the entire valley at once could have been too overwhelming for us; and like I said, we only had a med-student along and not a doctor to perform a potentially necessary resuscitation. There was also a moose spotted along the trail, it had a beard but was definitely still female.

Following our excursion we cooked up some fine tomato lentil curry on rice with a side of garlic butter mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner. After giving our stomachs a lengthy 4 minutes to digest the meal we pulled out the figs, olives, chocolate, crackers & Camembert, cookies and pistachios and got into the port. There was a short debate as to which time zone we planned to celebrate new years in. A long and tiring day of skiing by some parties had them voting to even celebrate on a half hour increment representative of Newfoundland. The suggestion was quickly overruled and Dave set an emergency alarm in case we all somehow managed to fall asleep before midnight, to wake us up at ten to twelve. A few games of speed scrabble ensued, amazingly everyone was able to win a round, some Garden Beans were grown, traded and harvested. There were some stories recounted and then, sooner than anyone would have guessed, there was an alarm going off and the countdown had begun towards the beginning of 2010.

The masses bundled up in multi-coloured down jackets, fleece pants, mitts, toquies and hut booties and then headed outdoors to ring in the New Year from the boundless serenity of the creekbed instead of the cramped quarters of the cabin. Predictably some hilarity ensued, and upon return to the cabin we headed out to kick off the new year with a short ski through the night under a full moon.

The next morning we were treated to a few patches of blue sky, an excellent breakfast of cheese and chive eggs on english muffins with cranberry orange oatmeal, and we were off. Once rolling we were rather quiet as a group. I’m not certain on the reasons why. Perhaps people were exhausted from a few long days in the outdoors without much sleep, maybe they were mad about someone absentmindedly dripping paraffin on the red bean crop, perchance they were concentrating too hard on not falling over to have a conversation, or possibly they were just sick of being with one another. My guess is that is was none of these: we were too captivated by the beams of sunshine coming down through the forest, too busy relishing the glimpses of mountaintops peaking through the gaps amongst the trees, and finding ourselves entranced by the swishing sound of our skis along the tracks pressed into the snow. It was a contented silence. In the week since, that’s one bit of the trip that I’ve been consistently revisting in my mind. The closest thing to contented silence I’ve had since being back in the city was scrubbing the kitchen floor with my head in front of a dishwasher that was loud enough to drown out the rest of the sounds in the house. Obviously it’s almost time to get out of town again!

The ski out was fantastically exciting and we made good time down much of the descent towards the cars. The mile-long-hill was almost as much fun on the way up as it was on the way down two days earlier and soon enough we were standing in the parking lot making comments about not really wanting to be done yet.

By day 3 the shaky kneed Pat was still a rather shaky kneed skier but he was a heck of a lot more confident and quick as evidenced by the following video footage of the weekend. (Lesley’s out front in Pink, Pat’s just in front of me). Clip 1 is from the tail end of Day 2 and Clip 2 is from early on Day 3.

My full gallery of my backcountry trips over the Christmas break is here and Dave’s Flickr set of the trip is here.

10 years isn’t all that long, but it can change a lot of things. The whole world seems to be recounting the last decade, and while this period of time doesn’t delimit any certain and distinctive portion of my life, it’s the period of time that is being discussed right now by a few people. I suppose there’s a lot of ways to recall ten years, but recounting a few things seems appropriate. Best or worst – this list is neither. Perhaps most influential is more appropriate. The last ten years covers a pretty broad range of ages for me, 10 years to be exact, so there’s some maturing that occurred along the way in here. Some of this stuff is “coming-of-age” realizations, but that’s an aspect of life, so they count just like the others.

I started writing this bit earlier last week but had to postpone posting it until I could flesh out a few paragraphs after a fantastic ski trip. So it’s not in time for the 2010 list making that happened last week, but I don’t think that really matters. Readers who were going to read it will likely read it anyways, that’s what readers do – by definition.

1. We’re greedy, selfish, love prejudice and are still somewhat racist – perhaps that’s not the most politically correct means by which to kick off a review of the decade, but the specifics making me note this fall chronologically near the beginning of the 200Xs for myself. Spending a year away from Canada in 2000-2001 highlighted the fact that typically we like ourselves a lot and we don’t like other people all that much. My own experience was probably magnified by being in my early teens at the time, the age that’s arguably got the meanest peers of any age for everyone. My own situation as the foreign kid made that all the trickier. I was the only boy in the grade with long hair I was the only one with an accent. I was one of a few from the village three towns down the road from school. I was too tall. I was damn good at maths. I had the wrong shoes for with the school uniform. I didn’t get the right food packed in my lunch (Mom fixed that one quickly though). I fit no molds and while the prejudices I experienced were rather tame compared with the ethnic cleansing experienced by many people groups around the globe they were certainly noticeable to a wee little GCSE student.
   Oh well, back to Canada in the summer of 2001 I’d escape being the subject of these prejudices, and that should hopefully reduce the amount of tension I felt surrounding this issue. But boom, September 2001 rolls around. Maybe I’m more aware now, or just older, or it’s more extreme than it has been before, but there’s racist commentary all over the place. Everyone Arab is suddenly a terrorist. How did that work? Maybe I needed to have experienced prejudices from the being-dealt end before I had reason to feel uncomfortable finding myself at the dealing-out end. Not a lot has changed by the end of the decade, nearly every media outlet I’m influenced was spewing reports about the climate change summit in Copenhagen. None of it made me happy. There’s an entire global community trying to sit around a pie, and debating how to slice up that pie, and every single nation at the table needs to have an above average slice. All the big polluters want some version of a cap and trade system, yet no system based on cap and trade knows how to distribute the quota. From what I understand, the quota distribution system has basically been proven by economists to not work in the long run. Unfortunately that’s the system the big players are pushing for because they know that if they can weasel their way into an unfair share of the global quota for emissions then while the whole world has to tighten their belts they will have to tighten their belts the least. Alberta will profit from this, I know it, and it makes me sick.
   Intentionally trying to deny developing nations an equal shot at using the planet’s resources is just as self-serving as a game called: “Make a flamethrower out of an aerosol deodorant can and try to light the Canadian kid’s hair of fire in the locker room at school.” Maybe it’s because once we’re grown up we find bigger and more complicated words to use to mean the same thing as ‘bullying’.
2. It was this decade that I made a realization world conflict was current. I distinctly remember watching the BBC news in the living room at our home on School Lane, Staveley Cumbria UK. There was footage from what I only remember was some Serbian conflict in Macedonia sometime in the spring of 2001. There was house to house and street to street armed conflict being shown between people who looked too much like me. I remember being somewhat shocked, sure there were wars going on, but from what I understood, Canada, America and Europe had their shit together we were too intelligent, too highly developed, and too “good” (whatever that means) to rely on anything but diplomacy to set things straight in the world. Canada’s army was for sending on peacekeeping missions with the UN, and that was something that should be highly respected. We were so well advanced in my mind, and we should be proud of it. Our soldiers went to Honduras to help out after hurricanes, or to help dig people out of the rubble after big earthquakes, no soldier that I identified with ever did anything that I didn’t think was good. Wars, genocide and armed conflict happened in places like Rwanda or Chechnya, Israel sometimes bombed what I understood to be “the bad guys” in Lebanon. These weren’t people like me. It’s not like I was out of the loop on the whole Kosovo conflict during the late 90s, but up until this point in life I don’t think I’d realized that this wasn’t too foreign. Perhaps, just because they were fighting, they weren’t at all like me. Perhaps it was the fact that I was now in Europe and the footage was from that afternoon and being shown hours later on the same continent. I remember this distinctly to be a perspective changing occasion, my reality was not as peaceful as I thought it was. People just like me fight, and kill each other. Whoa, what an eye opener for a random weekday afternoon.
   This only happened mere months before September 11, 2001 and mere months after that Canada was off an fighting in a war in Afghanistan. These events weren’t such a hard pill to swallow after the TV broadcast that spring, I seemed to know by then that the world was less at peace than I might have imagined earlier.
3. Pope John Paul II died in April 2005. The world paused for a while it seemed, this man had done so much for humanity during his life that absolutely the entire world took note when he passed on. I didn’t know a whole lot about the man, probably average for the average person outside of the Catholic church, but the way things seemed to pause worldwide when he passed away grabbed my attention. It seemed that the whole world converged on Vatican City to pay their respects to this man who had played such an important role in the history of the world. This fascination by the general public meant that I also started to learn about the Catholic church, and when the media died down I kept on going. This would lead initially to just paying attention, but later beginning to attend weekly mass, reading a few excellent books and taking elective courses through the Catholic college on campus. Pope John Paul II’s death was actually rather immaterial to myself but this set in motion a significant change in perspective and appreciation for differing views and values within the ecumenical church.
4. Perhaps this is the only thing on the list that occurred at a certain time and made the impact right away. Most of the others were events that occurred over months, or catalysts for perspective changes that occurred over the course of years. This happened over the course of maybe 20 minutes one Friday evening in front of the TV in the basement. Bono was giving a speech at the federal Liberal Party convention. It was the night where Paul Martin was taking over leadership from Jean Chretien. Bono took the stage and made a strong case for the power of our nation to do good in the world. He suggested that this period of history would be remembered for three things, the internet, the war on terror, and the lack of the first world’s involvement in the affliction plaguing the continent of Africa. That being a combination economic suppression through debt and exploitation as well as AIDS destroying entire generations of lives. It was a combination of compelling statistics as well as sincere human to human communication. The case was made in my mind for two things; first that there were real things that could be done on a super huge scale to make amends for some of the problems facing different areas on the planet. That if federal governments around the world decided to make it a priority to improve aspects of the global community thing would actually change for the better. Second, he changed how I thought about how I could view my government. If I believed that the potential existed to make positive change in the world, then I should be considering which federal party campaigning to form a government was going to behave most appropriately in that global community, not just for what they could provide me. I was for the first time thinking as a resident of planet earth, rather than as a resident of the overprivileged nation of Canada. I recall the speech relatively frequently when thinking about global issues and definitely every time I’ve been able to cast a ballot since then. If you want to read it, someone graciously typed out the Full Speech and posted it online.
5. It was about mid-decade that Canada changed the legislation governing same sex marriage. This, according to my understanding, was the turning point for gay rights in our country. It seemed that over the course of the previous few years there was an ever increasing frustration with the issue swirling around in the public media, and within different circles of conversation that I participated in. Following approximately 2005, when the same-sex marriage legislation battle came to a close within Canada, there has been a chance for the whole country to calm down and catch it’s breath. I’m certain that this has been for the better. All of the slippery slope arguments that had been made over the course of the previous years failed to hold any water. Religious officials had maintained their right to treat marriage as their traditions saw fit, no-one was trying to marry their pets, and no-one was force-feeding our children messages about their sexual orientation. Society had unambiguously improved, freedom had been granted to a slice of the population without taking anything away from the rest of it. Hallelujah! My own experience relating to the actual issue however, was rather unattached. I didn’t write any letters or join any protests, but I was content to see things change, with me on the sidelines.
   A year later, I was confronted face to face by someone I really respected about almost everything. How could I say I was going to vote for the Liberal party in the 2006 federal election when they had legalized same sex marriage? I was caught totally off guard by that statement. I remember anticipating that the discussion of who we would be voting for in the 2006 election was going to be about something like healthcare, or environmental issues, or the gun registry, or dealing with fallout from the sponsorship scandal, or a fiscal imbalance between the federal and provincial governments… One of those issues that the media kept pushing. Nope, I was mistaken, the question went something like this: If I agreed that biblical teaching was that the God-designed plan for relationships and families was between a man and a woman, how could I support any federal party that would permit otherwise? I distinctly remember having to pause and collect my thoughts for a bit. Well, the fact of the matter was that I wasn’t opposed to that. Actually, I was in support of it. The presence of committed relationships between people of all orientations was undeniable, and it wasn’t going to change because someone else was going to label it as sinful. What good was it going to do in the world to prevent some people from participating in a social structure that was largely run by the government, the insurance guys, and the tax-man?
   The discussion turned into a great one, ideas flowed about our largely undeveloped ability to listen to the needs of other people rather than decide what their needs were. The problem solving strategies that we’d been force fed through school and then university, more often than we’d like to admit were trying to cram round plugs into square holes. If there was a bit more listening and less strategical approaches taken in real life we’d soon realize that our plans for others’ issues had our own fingerprints all over them. Our home-grown solutions unfortunately don’t start out custom designed for other situations. In the subsequent months there was a lot of good that came out of what started as a really tense situation. A ton of trust was developed because, as I recall it, we were actually listening to each other once in a while.
6. Lance Armstrong won his 7th consecutive Tour de France during the summer of 2005. I spent that month of July generally in recovery mode from spending May and June sick in bed. The result was a lot of TV watching, and a new found love for the sport of bike racing. It was a realization for me that I was far more interested in this sport than most others, there seemed to be very little luck in the game, there was skill, effort, fitness, and strategy, and ultimately the best guys seemed to be able to win but they had to try amazingly hard to do it. There was something beautiful about a sport where you could earn fitness by putting in the hard work and quantitatively get better at things. That summer was the catalyst for me heading off to do all sorts of things in the world of endurance sports: learn how to swim, do my first triathlon, bike across an entire continent, run my first marathon, actually win a race. and get myself sufficiently enamored with long distance triathlon to sign up for Ironman. If we’re looking for life-changing and not just mind-changing events this one is it, since that Tour de France I’ve found hundreds of hours each year to put into this endurance sports campaign. As a totally unexpected bonus I’ve made some of the best friends of my life as a result.
7. I changed how I thought about food during this decade. Heading off to University required that I was going to be the person choosing what I would eat every day for breakfast lunch and dinner. I did a decent job right from the start, and got a lot better in the years that followed. Whether that was initiated by seeing the whole world go crazy about the Atkins diet in the few years prior, or due to the hilarity of “Supersize Me”, or just because I didn’t know any better than to eat relatively healthy, I ate better food than 99% of the world living in residence. There was a basic realization that the world chooses to feed itself very poorly sometime in the first half of the decade. During the second half of the decade things changed again, there is a difference between not eating poorly and eating well. Making that change takes some time and some effort but the decision to do so occurred based on conversations with real people who had their heads on straight. My friend Tulani had completely quit eating sugar and I tried that for about two months, before gradually becoming more lax on that front. A family friend, John, was eating strictly according to the direction of a naturopath, nothing processed and huge categories of the supermarket put “on hold” until he developed “better blood”. Neither appeared to be missing out on anything, it was just a decision, and their enjoyment of life and food had improved as a result. A simple realization really: I could choose to eat what I wanted, and I was in complete control of how I was going to decide what I wanted. Rather abruptly I pretty much didn’t want all sorts of things.
8. Friends ended in the spring of 2004. This is, I think, somewhat tied to a realization that occurred when Justin Timberlake tore off part of Janet Jackson’s top in front of all of America at the Superbowl the previous winter. The relationship between society and men and women is far from perfect. Friends wasn’t a show serving up sexist messages, but it wasn’t doing it quite right. If it weren’t for Sarah Jessica Parker being on the TV at the same time and being the go to example of liberated sexuality, perhaps Rachel Green, Monica Geller, or Phoebe Buffay (unlikely) would have been developed into that character. When the second half of the superbowl party turned into a discussion of whether or not the “wardrobe malfunction” was supposed to have happened or not, it wasn’t a marker of emancipation. It was an indication that things weren’t right, despite the fact that people were now suggesting that they were. Sure, women had rights like men but we’re far from having arrived at a solution, or destination. Somehow the end of Friends, made this especially noticeable to me. The fact that the feel good ending to the show is Ross and Rachel back together and Monica and Chandler heading to the suburbs with the twins was kind of a sick joke.
   In theory there’s freedom and equality but in reality in my perception this has just been replaced by almost equally un-beneficial expectations that we just hold in our heads. The issue of women’s rights has migrated from one that existed on paper for one sex to one that exists in the mind of society and afflicts both genders. As of 2004 when Friends came to a close we were far from success. Later in the decade there was an election in America where Hillary Clinton and Tina Fey, err… Sarah Palin, played large roles. Was anything better? Things seemed to be regressing more than they were progressing on this front through the last decade if you ask me.
9. My federal government admits fault with regard to their dealings with the residential schools. This is something that I’d been learning about over the course of a few previous years. Until I had spent a fair amount of time learning and discussing I was almost completely certain that this was not my issue. Despite the severity of the issue or the magnitude of the problem, I was most certainly not involved. Until I started to learn from people instead of books. Suddenly the issue was my issue, but the avenues to do things still seem distant and obscure. I identified with the damage caused and sometimes I think that’s all that anyone hopes from me, to listen, share the pain and to agree that what happened is wrong. When the apology was made in 2008 by the federal government I was lucky to be spending the week with friends, native and white, who also could pause and reflect on the significance of it. Not a lot changed that day, but witnessing the official statement seemed important to me. It was hopefully the beginning of a new renewal and at the time, I remember feeling a sentiment of great hope in so many conversations. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission might have gotten off to a rocky start but I’m certainly rooting for it to be able to overcome those obstacles and make a firm record in history on the second attempt.
10. Quantum mechanics soaked up my life for the better part of two semesters of university. What I at first thought was the pinnacle of my education was nothing more than an ivory tower rather detached from the world. By the time I was part-way through my final year of undergrad I could speak differential equations like the best of them. I had knew the normalization constants for dozens of probability wavefunctions off the top of my head and could basically guess at the forms for most others with an uncanny chance of success. I had started to develop intuition with regards to diagonalizing the matrices necessary to make eigenstates of an interaction matrix orthogonal. I had developed skills that even I myself deemed useless. I didn’t have a huge issue with it at the time, it’s not like I suddenly wanted to un-learn these things. It did cause me to back up however, I wanted to decide which skillsets I was going to develop as a part of my education. Quantum mechanics no longer made the cut. It’s no wonder that Engineering Management and my Christian Theology courses were my most appreciated the next semester. I was basically refusing to become a maven of mathematics, a prima donna of process control feedback or an exemplar of electronic wavefunctions. I was done with learning things to score well on tests. I was only going to train my brain to do things that I knew were useful. Now you could start debating with me the merits of training a brain to focus on putting out the most even wattage on a bicycle over the course of 5, 6, 7 or 8 hours, but that’s besides the point.

Slurp the ‘Nog… and don’t burp on the Jog

Rules:
You must drink 2 liters of full fat egg nog. The calorie count for the carton must exceed 2500 calories. Light egg nog therefore will not be permitted. The full carton must be brought unopened and un-tampered with to the start of the race. It must then be completely consumed, you may pour your egg nog into glasses or cups if you prefer but you must provide your own cups. Drinking from the carton is also permitted. Straws are not permitted.

When you complete your carton of egg nog you must exit the house, put on your shoes (no shoes inside) and run around the entire block that our house is on. The length of the run is approximately 720 meters. Running on the sidewalk or the road is permitted. Running will be completed in a counter-clockwise fashion, this permits maximal visibility during the finishing straightaway. It also provides an empty alleyway only one lot down the road for individuals who wish to remove themselves from formal competition after the first 10 steps of the run.

The winner will be selected as follows:
The first person to consume all egg-nog and run around the block with all of the egg nog in their stomach wins.

In the (extremely unlikely) event that no-one can complete the run with all of the egg-nog in their stomach, there will not be a winner, but the person who leaves the house first may be considered to have beat all of his/her competition.

Lore:

• The first running of the ‘Nog Jog occurred following a mandarin orange swallowing contest. The result of the race proved that Reuben had indeed swallowed multiple segments of the orange without chewing.
• The second running of the ‘Nog Jog resulted in egg-nog being ejected from a nose within the first five seconds.
• Despite failing to complete the ‘Nog Jog in it’s proper format, all competitors of all previous years have continued on to pay their dues by encircling the block with a partial stomach of ‘Nog. If there is any etiquette in this tradition it is to respect the race, and making your way to the finish line is an honorable form of paying respect.

This year’s race occurred on the evening of December 23. 16 individuals arrived with their egg-nog in hand and competed in the race. The kitchen was more than full, as more spectators arrived than competitors. Racing began at 10:37pm. The first complete 2 liters was consumed 63 seconds later and the first egg-nog was ejected from a stomach less than a minute after that. The race was completed by only 4 individuals of the 16 competing.

Results:

1. Josh*
2. Reuben
3. Jacob**

*Fastest chug (1:03) and fastest run (3:03) of the evening.
**Jacob was making his ‘Nog Jog debut, as was 4th place Trenton. Andrew was awarded an honorable mention for fastest unofficial finisher, completing with less than two liters contained in his stomach.

The footage follows:

This is for Dave Roberts:

68:19 for 4000yds. This is pace for a 72 minute Ironman swim. Not a lot else to say, -0.2% decoupling is not bad. Effort certainly did drift up. Started out paying attention to Jan in the next lane, not bad to start out a bit hard, that’s how it goes on race day too so I don’t mind doing it in practice. My watch wasn’t running correct so I needed to fix it after 500m. I felt quite smooth from 750m through about 2000 and then needed to concentrate quite hard. Variability in pace reflects this, dialed in well early on, gets a bit shaky and then control is regained once I switched counting “up” to counting “down” and pace is excellent to finish off.

The trendline is a per-kilometer average pace.

The swimgame concluded this afternoon even though technically I could score two more points if I made it to a pool tomorrow and swam 4000. I’ve got an MRI scheduled though and one of the stipulations is that I’m not allowed to have exercised earlier in the day. So be it, I certainly met my goal of scoring 20 points and am content to leave it at that. Plus I don’t want to make it too tough on myself to break my record if I decide to follow through and actually do do another swim camp sometime later this winter.

The totals were 38.8k and 13hours 27minutes in the pool over the course of two weeks. Those totals occurred over 6 days each week and the second was larger than the first: 18750 & 20050. At the moment I’m ranked 11th in the competition out of 34 people. I think I’ll get passed yet by one or two people. Only two people will have scored all 41 points available. I could actually imagine doing that now, I certainly couldn’t two weeks ago but I’ve definitely brought my swimming to a new level with this camp. Hopefully I’m diligent in keeping the volume up and with one or two more real surges in swimming focus over the winter I can imagine making a few more breakthroughs and might end up placing better in the swim than on the run at a triathlon next summer. That would really be cool.

I tried the twitter thing for the past two weeks and it still seems just about as dumb as before I started. It’s a great way to waste time though. In any case, here are my swimgame tweets outlining progress through the camp…

• @EnduranceCorner – I’ll be playing the #swimgame starting Nov 23. I’m setting the goal today = to score 20 points.
• Finished first swim of the #swimgame 2600 for 1 point. Club swim so no bonus pts: 12×125 as 50drill&75swim with 15sec rest as mainset.
• #swimgame Day 2. 2000TT today, 34:46 & split of 17:32 so -ve split to boot! Count as 2×1000 descend on 0sec rest? Don’t think so. 3 pts tot
• #swimgame D3 2100 as 6×200 on 3:29 3:30 3:23 3:29 3:26: 3:28 then 300 suicide set w/ p-ups and s-ups each 25. tot 4 pts: swim yet tonight.
• Second swim of D3 for #swimgame. 10×200 broken as 4/3/2/1 descending, range 3:35 to 3:23 last sprint in 3:04. 2 pts & 6 tot
• #swimgame is killing me and I love it. I surpassed my biggest weekly distance ever today with 2×1000 on 17:50 & 17:04. 8pts tot.
• Actually 9 pts tot, that was my 5th swim of the week, I’ll do at least two more this week so the #swimgame scoresheet will display correct.
• two more #swimgame points, longest swim ever, 4000! Depending how I feel I might do it again tomorrow. Fastest of 7×300 in 4:19. 11pts tot
• #Swimgame Day6. 4000 conts in 1:13:30. Outside-tops of shoulders ache, never ached there before, I didn’t know I could?! 14 pts total.
• Week 2 of #swimgame kicked off with longest swim of my life. 4200 and 30×100 as main set. On pace for bonus set until last 5. 3 pts:17 tot!
• #swimgame D9, 5×400 on 7:01, 7:00, 6:54, 6:44, 6:16. 2 pts today, 19 tot. Feel for water improving, 4th 400 felt awesome, normally I’d fade.
• #Swimgame Day 10, 1500 drills for 0 points. Moving too slow and ran out of time to score.
• 2600 for #swimgame as 5x(300pull 200swim). Focus on breathing from hip, coach’s orders! 21pts tot
• 2000 band/buoy for #swimgame: 24 pts. First swim with band, found it difficult to swim with much effort- I realize my balance is quite poor.
• 3750 for #swimgame, main set racing Ben 1/2/3/4/5/4/3/1 (00s). Final sprint deeply anaerobic, 7 people cheering on deck, called as a tie.
• #swimgame last bonus: 8x(25flykick 25 sidekick 100swim 100pull) Mrs. Physio said fly-arms are no go. +1000band took all I’ve got. 4000tot.
• #swimgame is over for me: no exercise prior to the MRI is allowed tomorrow. 38800 swum. 31/41 points scored. Certainly made my goal of 20!

So what changed? After 4 days of daily swimming I showed up for tri-club practice on Friday and felt ready to hammer. I was feeling quick in the pool and stuck on the tail end of the train a lane up from where I would normally swim. I really felt like I had developed a feel for what makes a good catch and what doesn’t. I had worked all week on making my long arms work to my advantage by taking a really long reach. Erin even noticed, I was reaching better – focus and dedication was paying off with muscle memory. I took a day off mid-way and the constant ache that I had developed in my shoulders and back had started to wane. Week two was all about developing strength, once I had a better catch I was far from strong enough to pull on it with any speed. To say that I managed to get strong during week two is totally bogus, but I continued to benefit from the volume by putting good muscle memory into my arms. I also identified that I was cheating on good balance by swimming with wide feet. The two band-swims that I’ve done really highlighted that I don’t have very good balance in the water. I need to really work on that to maintain a streamlined position in the water, and part of that is improving core strength. So, 13.5 hours in the pool basically gave me good reason to keep swimming, and concrete tasks to work on. I’m totally pleased with this endeavor, even though it may have turned into a make-work project.

I’ll conclude with a plot of my weekly distance over the period of when I started shoulder rehabilitation last fall up until the present. The past two weeks both doubled my longest distance in any week prior to that. [click it for larger]

Tri club collectively designed training plans for the 2010 season this evening. While mine has generally been designed, it is not complete. I have a good idea regarding foci for the different seasons and for periodization through until the end of April I’m sticking with the triathlon club’s regime. This is completely a matter of convenience, as it allows me to push it when my friends are pushing it and take it easy when they’re taking it easy. I also don’t have to pretend to coach one kind of workout while I do a different one myself, which is just a silly idea. In any case, as I have moved into my first base weeks of the year and am slowly working on continuing to develop the training plan to beat all others. Being that season of the year, the whole world seems to be discussing this stuff, lots of it is crap. It’s hard to sift the free insight from the for-sale products, but I did run across a good suggestion from Joe Friel. It follows.

Stolen Sourced from Joe Friel’s website:

Success in sport is just like success in any other aspect of your life. One of the requirements is careful planning. Deciding where you want to go in the future begins with knowing where you have been in the past. Recognizing trends and evaluating what you’ve been doing are both important steps on the path to racing better next year. This process can be accomplished in several ways. Talking with your coach or a trusted training partner is probably the best way. But lacking such people in your sporting life you can still accomplish the same end by answering some key questions. Here are some I often use. Your answers can lead in many different directions. Ultimately, the reason for such an exercise is to give you more focus when it comes to training and racing. It may even help you to decide why it is you devote so much of your life to training.

Here are five questions to answer at the end of your race season and before starting to prepare for the coming season:

1. What was the high point of your season? Why does this stand out for you? Was it what you thought it would be at the start of the season?

Quite clearly the highseason of the season was the month of June. While it culminated with me winning the Chinook Half triathlon near the end fo the month I trained excellently in the previous weeks and felt like I was very successful at many workouts. I was swimming faster than I thought I was able to be swimming at many workouts. My run pace was quick, despite not having a huge run volume in the previous couple months, and I was logging very impressive bike rides without getting as fatigued as I possibly should have been. I was racing well at the Tuesday night mountain bike races (threshold efforts), won a time-trial and managed a solid 200kms on my bike towing a trailer into a headwind at the end of a solid 4 day training block. I entered what I thought was a test-taper, but tapered well, hitting workout intensity accurately and cutting weight. On race morning I felt like I had eliminated fatigue but hadn’t recouped freshness, indicating I hadn’t over rested. I spent time during race week getting mentally prepared for race day and I then nailed the race, overcame the race day obstacles of a killer headwind, cramps and hot temperatures on the run. Ultimately I surpassed expectations and put together a race to be proud of.

This period of my season was supposed to be my buildup towards race fitness. I hoped to peak at the end of July, having added cycling prowess first and running speed second during the period of coming to maximal fitness for Calgary 70.3. It doesn’t surprise me at all that I was fast on the bike at this point in the season because I had hoped to be reaching my cycling peak earlier in the year but in retrospect I was impressed at how fast I was able to run at Chinook Half. At the time I thought I was primed to be adding some serious run speed to my fitness portfolio in the next six weeks and hoped to cut my half marathon time by ~8 minutes for the next race.

2. What was your greatest disappointment? Why did this happen? Is there anything you could have done to have avoided it?

The disappointing aspect of the season was my inability to get any faster at running during the month of July. I felt like I had designed a program for myself that was aimed at working on my limiters. I completed exactly the workouts I wanted to complete for three consecutive weeks of my run program. In retrospect I had misidentified what was holding me back from running faster. I was convinced that it was durability in my muscles that I needed to improve after suffering cramps at Chinook Half. I felt like what I needed to run fast was the ability to run tough. Knowing that my goal of running ~1:32 for the half marathon at the end of the 70.3 did not actually amount to running fast I was certain that I would be alright without doing much fast running. The issue was that running 1:32 although not fast, was faster than I had run a standalone half-marathon (Maybe I could have, maybe I couldn’t have, I hadn’t tried). In retrospect I was focusing on extending my ability to run longer along my current speed potential curve than I was at improving my speed potential curve.

Quick note -A speed potential curve is the curve you get if you try predict other distance race performances from a single distance race performance (or a couple performances) and plot them on a graph: Depending on your method you’ll likely get a curve – try it. If your curve is a straight line it means your prediction method is bogus, it should curve. If your body listened to what you drew on paper, the best strategy would be to get awful fast at 400 yard sprints you’ll be able to draw a better curve, and you’d in theory be a great marathoner. That theory would be a bad theory. In general though, your ability to run fast at 5kms should translate to run fast at 21.1 kms with the caveat that you run with sufficient weekly volume. Extending the longest distance you can run on your speed potential curve requires doing tougher long runs and long volume. Shifting your speed potential curve towards faster running requires doing those shorter and faster runs. A balanced approach to training sees you do some of each, but at any one point in time it may be most appropriate to focus on one or the other.

Whether or not I could have improved my run speed during July with a different run training focus might not be the only question. I spent July rather tired in comparison to May and June, I felt on occasion that I was trying to stick it out until August and then I’d get a break. That feeling I don’t believe was a symptom of my choice of training focus, it was more likely a symptom of where I was in my season as a whole. I think it’s pretty clear looking back that I had come to a rather sharp peak in my season at this point in time. Cutting weight going into Chinook half was a dumb idea, it likely extended my recovery from the race as well as made July tougher on me than it should have. I was trying to do some of my hardest training when I was already in my best shape. This is something Chris McCormack has talked about on and off, but I haven’t actually read much on the topic from people in exercise physiology. Not because I haven’t tried. I imagine these sorts of things would be terribly difficult to study, there are a million variables and unfortunately (for the researchers) one of the largest is probably motivation. Chris McCormack is also a big guy and his comments went like this, paraphrased of course because I have no idea where to begin looking for a direct quote: I often came into Roth [Late Aug] very light, and then tried to do my kona training while in excellent shape. That didn’t work because I had nothing left to improve as I built towards Kona. I learned that if I went into Roth feeling a bit flabby and out of shape I could still race well, maybe I’d have a hard time running sub 2:50, but it meant that when I started my Kona block I had a little bit extra to give. I’d come into Kona feeling fast and light and that’s what counts. endquote

Cutting 7 lbs during my taper into that race was also not the reason I stagnated in improvement at that point in my season. It’s quite possible that I was just extending my season for too long. Late February and early March had seen some of my biggest weeks ever in terms of dedicated training as I put together a key block of building towards the Yakima River Canyon Marathon. I had taken the shortest break possible after my marathon before getting back to training, everyone’s talk of how much time it takes to recover from a marathon had seemed like a challenge to me: how fast can I recover and get back to putting in big weeks? What that meant was, that I had tied the early season run focus directly into my summer triathlon focus. Taking minimal break probably made me run faster at my mid-season race but cost me the ability to keep building fitness into my end of season race.

3. Looking back, do you think you trained as wisely and as hard as you could have trained?

Without re-hashing the wise-ness of all my decisions relating to my disappointment in ability to continue running improvement through July I’ll comment on training “Hard” through the different months. I felt like I trained extremely hard during March. I was putting together a tough run program while at the same time coaching a tough bike program which I participated in with the triathlon club. March’s goal was to build muscular endurance on the bike and it meant for some hard sessions, combined with running longer than I had ever run before and with more volume than I had ever run before this made for a tough month. My swim frequency suffered as a result. March needed to be a hard month, and thus it was, I wouldn’t say it was too hard though. April was a fun month, I was reaping the benefits of a tough March (fitness wise) and was hitting key workouts hard and reveling the ability to finally get outside in good weather. At the time I didn’t feel like I was close to any limits of my ability to train but I was probably training too hard, not taking as long a break after the marathon as I maybe should have makes this month count as a net “too hard“. I backed off a bit in May from the aggressiveness of training in April knowing that I didn’t need to get too fast too soon. This probably saved me totally crashing in July, probably perfect execution this month. June I hit hard, no questions asked and July I probably tried too hard again! During July especially I was accumulating too much fatigue during the week for me to recover during easy sessions. I was replacing days completely off with easy swims or easy bike rides when I probably should have taken complete rests. Then I raced Calgary 70.3 and the triathlon season came to a close, of the 5 previous months I had netted too hard twice but never too easy, is there any secret I didn’t feel like I could perform my best?

Early August was a complete break and that was great, I didn’t want to train and I hardly did for two weeks. I then followed that up with a super challenging bike trip at the end of the month (Too hard – but that was exactly the idea) and tried to ease into Cyclocross season. I was successful at easing into Cyclocross season as I improved significantly through the course of the season fitness-wise, not just skill wise. It probably took a while for me to reap the benefits of that big bike trip but once I did my TT strength was definitely there. It took until the Blow Street Cross race before I put together my best race of the ‘cross season. Had I not gone down with piggy-flu I might have peaked for provincials, who knows. I’m confident I structured the intensity of training properly following my break in August.

4. What is the one thing you most need to work on for next season in order to perform better?

The race by which 2010 will be measured is Ironman Canada. That’s a fact that I can’t avoid, so while I’d like to take a good run at a few road races, maybe upgrade to Cat3, hammer hard at two half ironman races I have planned, set some PRs at the spring cross country race series and an early season half marathon, stick with the racing-pack at the Tuesday night social mountain bike races, and maybe place top 50 at the national TT championship, it is necessary to make the metrics for 2010 performance relate to Ironman Canada.

Of secondary importance on that day, I need to do quite a bit of work swimming to make that swim reasonably comfortable. To me, that requires technique improvement and swimming endurance. That is only going to be solved by bumping up my swim volume and continuing to accept feedback in the pool. This is currently why my shoulders ache from swimgame, it’s going to be a comfy 2.4 miles on race morning.

Primary importance on race day however, is my ability to run home with a good marathon. It needs to improve significantly from where I’m at right now. Based on my experience this summer I felt that once I was into the triathlon season my speed was capped. I could bump up endurance and my ability to run off the bike, and even my ability to run hills under control improved this summer, but my speed did not. I need to bring myself to a new level of running speed during the off season so that once the triathlon season gets going in full force next spring (when weekends start to be taken up by long bike rides and weekly volume gets stupid large) I don’t find myself trapped at running one pace and stagnate through the season. I need to have the capacity (base fitness, coordination, power, efficiency, pacing skills) for a far faster marathon than I have at the moment if I have hopes of running ~7:3X miles along Skaha. That will come with doing threshold run work in the off season allowing me to build into longer endurance runs when it counts next summer. For those 15-20 milers to wind up being fast, I need to start out with faster short runs in the early season.

5. What would you most like to accomplish next season? Is it a good stretch and yet within your reach if you do things right?

I will run the entire marathon at Ironman Canada August 29, 2010.

I raced Winterstart this evening and it went pretty well considering the lame amount of running I’ve been doing during cyclocross season and then with swine flu and all. The race marks the end of the road racing season for southern Alberta and it seemed like a good chunk of the Calgary running community was out in Banff this evening to run. There weren’t a whole ton of really fast people out if you ask me, and I know that because I was listed on the first page of results out of 1200 runners (give or take). I placed 7th in the 40-49 age group which I have to admit is a personal best for the age group. I would have been 4th amongst the 20-29 crew if I had registered under my own name and age (My Dad acquired a racing bib from an injured colleague/friend on my behalf)

The route leaves the edge of the town of Banff and heads north/east along Banff Avenue towards Minnewanka and is pretty flat for 1.5 miles, it then turns up Tunnel Mountain road for 1 mile which is all climbing, some serious and some not, before turning around and retracing the route back to the start. The hill in the middle makes for an interesting course and an almost guaranteed negative split for everyone (~30 sec for myself). The temperatures were cool but not cold at the start and all was dry but the snow started to fall just as I was ascending the hill which made for a spectacularly beautiful run through the dark fresh mountain air. I ran 33:24 for the 5 miles (4:09 km pace) which my Garmin recorded as 8.2kms. It’s an out-and-back course so I presume they got the turn-around exact and the Garmin is wrong by 150 meters in this case, that’s typical if you ask me, it’s never as long as the Garmin says. The race is followed up by an all-you-can-drink party in the parkade of the host-hotel sponsored by Big Rock. What a deal!

Cyclocross is a sport that has a couple really defining attributes. That’s nothing special, every sport has defining attributes. The thing that makes it different is that it’s mostly the loosely associated attributes or that make it great, the barebones aspects of cyclocross racing aren’t all that exciting. The sport of cyclocross is the result of a set of decisions that independently don’t create something amazing, but together the maybe unexpected ramifications create something really great.

Here are the basics:

• The race surface can be composed of any combination of the following: grass, dirt, asphalt, gravel, mud, sand, puddles… and whatever else the race organizer can find to make you ride over. The changing terrain emphasizes handling ability much more than road racing.
• The course necessarily includes places that require dismounting from the bicycle. This can be in the form of a super steep hill that can only be run up, sand too soft or deep to ride through (beach volleyball courts), or plank barriers typically 18 inches in height. These obstacles add a required skillset to racing, successful competitors must be able to quickly and efficiently dismount and remount their bicycles. They must also carry the bicycle through sections of the course, making the ability to pick up their bike and sometimes shoulder it while running an additional skill to learn. Getting off the bike as close to the barrier and back on it as soon after the barrier is ideal, as running is slower than riding in almost all circumstances (when it is possible at all).

• The race-course is based on time not distance. Racing is done on a lap and based on how fast the race leaders do the first couple laps organizers calculate how many laps to make them to. Typically at the end of the second lap the lap countdown starts so racers won’t see it until the end of their third lap, but they’ll know how long the race is supposed to be before they start: somewhere between 40 and 60 minutes based on category.
• The bike is a modified road bike, running knobby tyres somewhere around 32mm in size with extra frame clearance for mud around the wheels. Cantilever brakes are used and often only a single chainring is run up front with 8-10 gears in the rear. Cable routing on the frame is arranged to minimize catch-ups while picking up and carrying the bike.
• Racing is organized into classes similar to road and mountain biking, in Alberta there are three categories for men and two for women which are always (sadly) merged during competition (because the sport is short on females: what’s new in my world). Provincial and National Championships however are split by age. If you are good in your category you’ll eventually get kicked out and have to move up to some tougher competition. If you’re at the top of the best category, someone will inevitably entice you to go and race in Europe where you will be slaughtered by some really fast guys.
• Speaking of fast guys; the fast guys in this sport are really, really good. As a huge bonus, amateur ‘crossers get to basically participate in the same sport as the pros. It’s not like pro road-racing where the professional version is a completely different kind of competition than the amateur version. Sure, some aspects change a bit, like having a second bike and a mechanic in the pit lane just like a nascar race, but the concept is still ‘ride as fast as you can over this course’. Road-racing at the elite level is all about teamwork, peloton dynamics, leadouts, and whether or not the breakaway is going to be allowed to be successful, hardly about riding your bike as fast as you can over the course. For me this is definitely a pro – getting to race like the pros.

The fast guys are really good – did I say that already? here’s some proof from the World cup races last year:

Why choose to take up the sport? It’s not likely because you think that you really enjoy 1 hour threshold or near-threshold efforts on the bike. It’s not because the idea of jumping onto the seat of your bike at a full run is super appealing to you.

In fact that’s probably the most off putting aspect for many first-timers. The fact that other people are doing it however, and having fun, is a likely reason I think most people start. There is no secret, the sport really looks fun because the people racing are having fun. It’s also time limited, only happening for a couple weeks each year, and there’s an urgency not to miss out. Perhaps a few esoteric reasons too; the handling skills gained in cross are valuable to bring onto the road (and even triathlon) and the top end speed is something that can be added at the end of a season to a solid base developed for other forms of racing. Cyclocross is meant to be hard, and that’s an appealing reason to start too, it’s a heck of a challenge but I’ll get to that later. Ultimately though I think the apparent disorganization and chaos of a race makes for a good time, and as with all sports, it’s about fun times. Here’s someone’s story about what made ‘cross appealing:

We walked around the course with our coffees and I was getting stoked. Then we got the the first run up. There was a plank at the bottom of steep hill. This was something that clearly nobody would be able to ride. Riders would be forced to get off their bike, run over the barrier, and then remount at the base of an impossibly steep run up. People were crowded all around and cheering and yelling and cowbelling. At this point the tail end of the Masters A racers were coming though, and well, they certainly weren’t making it look easy. Everyone was struggling.

Then Barry Wicks came though like a cool breeze, bunny hopped the barrier and rode his bike up the hill. A man on the hill with an enormous cowbell chased him and screamed in his face, over and over again:

I CAN SEE YOU!

I can see you, I can see you, I can see you! That didn’t make any sense to me, but I loved it. I would later realize that shouting the most obvious shit is the best way to heckle your pals.

Turns out it was Bruce from River City Bicycles doing the yelling. It was that scene right there that did it for me, that made me want to try cyclocross: Bruce yelling in Barry’s face, and Barry riding the hill with an ear to ear smile.

Brian NoLastName – 2009

Others have described Cyclocross as “You make a bike race as stupid as possible, but it’s still a race, so people do it. And then you rationalize that, like, it’s so stupid that it must be fun”. I agree that the concept works for some people but I don’t think that’s how you’d sell the idea to a bunch of athletes who are actually looking for a physical challenge, which ‘cross is in spades, but perhaps the sheer stupidity is part of the reason for some folks. For the people who want to go out and race ‘cross, what most of them are really relishing when the whistle blows to start the race is that this is really really hard. The courses are laid out to prevent rhythm, just when your heart-rate is getting out of control there’s a hill to really add some nails to your coffin and bury you if you’re not careful. Just when your legs are tired from a long section in soft grass there will be a corner that really requires you to slow down and re-accelerate out of it to remind you that your legs are really tired. When your hands are starting to ache from all the jittering and shaking after riding over some really uneven terrain you’ll have to hop off your bike and grab the top tube of your bike with a serious grip to pick it up and run over the barriers, yeilding a big ache in the knuckles. When you think you’ll get to run up some speed down a big hill there will be a U-turn at the bottom, or maybe even a double barrier dismount to prevent you from reaping the benefits of the climb you just did. The changing pattern isn’t something that can be practiced as it’s different from week to week, the ability to change pace, position and focus is the underlying key, while at all times keeping the effort level high. Cyclocross happens in the autumn and early winter. For Edmonton that’s September to November; for Belgium and the rest of northern Europe, where this great sport began, it’s more of a November to February sport. The result is the potential of miserable weather. Why is that a good thing? Well, it makes things hard! Cold and wet sap determination. It makes the win go to the toughest competitor out there. If it’s hard, why do I love it? Probably for some of the same reasons that I’m signed up to tackle Ironman in August.

Maybe it’s the mud, or the bruises, maybe the beer, or the loose semblance of camaraderie. I think what it boils down to is that I feel more alive during a cross race than at just about any other time. Cyclocross is the most intense hour of effort, pain and joy I have ever encountered. I’m attracted to cross because I can put everything I’ve got on the line for 60 minutes, come out of it totally exhausted, covered in rain, mud and grime, perhaps with a trickle of blood running down somewhere, craving ibuprofen, blowing mud out of my nostrils, placing top 30 if I’m lucky, and loving every minute of it.

Kelly Hobkirk – 2008

Unlike road-racing where team-tactics play a huge role in competition, cyclocross is more of an individual sport. Co-operation on the course is a definite possibility but more often than not it’s co-operation with riders from another team. The main role of team-members is cheering when they’re not racing and maybe snapping some photos, that’s it. In that sense, everyone is on the same team. The pre-race course inspection and post-race random shenanigans are shared amongst the entirety of those assembled at the race. The event of cyclocross lasts more than the length of the race, it lasts the entire duration of the time spent at the park. Things like this would not at all be considered to be out of the ordinary:

One of the best things about cyclocross is the attitude. Gone is the testosterone-induced yelling and uber-competitiveness. Everyone seems to respect each other, no matter how talented or strong or skilled they are. Everyone cheers for everyone.

Kelly Hobkirk – 2008

The Cyclocross season began last weekend with the kickoff race in Red-Deer and this weekend was the first double-header weekend of the year. I raced on both Saturday and Sunday… and hopefully will be doing so for the rest of the races for the next six weeks until the provincial championship.

I slapped knobby tyres back on my bike the same day I returned from my excursion to Penticton and have been going hard at it for four solid weeks… so much in fact that I haven’t had runners on in 40 days, and counting. I’ll get back at the running at least on an occasional basis before the end of the cross season but taking a break is just fine with me too. I’ve needed to dedicate focus to the cycling though to prepare properly for cyclocross season. All summer I’ve been working on developing a giant 12 cylinder diesel engine for triathlon time trial riding. It also happened to work alright for powering me through a giant and somewhat ridiculous bike trip across BC. Anyhow, that big diesel engine isn’t going to get me anywhere in cyclocross so I needed to try and add on some substantial top end speed. I also felt like my ability to generate some significant power was definitely there, but I didn’t have the ability to do my max power, recover and do it again and again and again. That results in a limited potential for racing well at cyclocross.

- The Training -

The prescription is somewhat obvious, I need to do intensity in my training at a level that I haven’t done in a long time. That means putting together some race effort work, meaning threshold efforts, and intervals that bring me slightly above threshold and then trying to quickly recover below threshold before punching it back up again and recovering again. They’re hard workouts but fortunately they’re short. I’ve been able to structure the triathlon-club workouts that I’m coaching during this period of the training season to serve two purposes, the adaptation and skills sort of work that’s necessary for people who are just starting out as well as allowing me to sit on that stationary bike and go stupid-hard during those intervals at the same time as other people are just getting used to turning the pedals for an entire hour. I’ve also been doing Wednesday night lessons, taught by a previous provincial champion with a pretty good group of riders from Edmonton, we’ve got a full range of beginner through amazing there which gives me the big benefit of riding on some good cyclist’s wheels and allowing me to learn, learn and learn. I’ve also been racing on Tuesday nights at an informal race series with a twoonie entry fee which serves to provide a good long warmup, about half an hour of serious work at race-effort and then a long cool down ride home from the park. Those three sessions each week plus racing or skills based riding on the weekends has the makings of a HUGE bike focus. It’s fun though and I’m getting better. Hopefully the big diesel engine comes back without too much effort after November.

- Cutting my teeth -

The first Tuesday night race I competed in I was absolutely slaughtered by the competition in the B category. I was dropped by the lead pack off the start and I felt like I couldn’t push the pace anywhere to try and regain ground. It was actually pretty humbling, I had no ability to go when I tried to tell my legs to go. The next weekend though we were off to Red-Deer for my first race in the provincial series and after taking an easy day prior I felt pretty good at the start line. I felt like when I wanted to go I could really go, which was a fantastic feeling. I rode reserved for the first 3 of 6 laps, staying with the leading group of 6 but refused to make any effort at the front. I tried to run as easily as I could through the sand but found that my heartrate was absolutely skyrocketing when I hopped back on the bike. I had lost my chain three times already by the time I tried to make an attack on the fifth lap, but had lost it at convenient points where it didn’t take any time to get it back on. I made an attack with the tailwind on my fifth lap and had put in a decent gap until I dropped the chain on a really bumpy descent and wound up having to dismount, re-chain the bike and start from a standstill at the bottom of a hill. Such is life I said to myself, I obvious hadn’t installed my chain-keeper properly when I switched from 2 rings to a single ring up front. I was now back in fourth place and really had to push hard to try and bring back the leader. The course was too short however, and he picked up the pace on the last half lap to stay away for the win. I was about 5 seconds back in second and third was about equally distant behind me.

- The ‘W’ -

The next Tuesday night race was a sweet one indeed. A relatively flat and winding course with one power climb and a fast descent. I started out slow, anticipating that I’d likely wind up about 10th place again and let about 20 people ahead of me off the start, slotted myself in the train and then started to get to work. I found quite quickly that I was alright at maintaining momentum where some others were not and as a result I was pretty quick on the flats, quicker than all the guys in front of me. I slowly picked them off, one or two at a time, until I was chasing people who were quite clearly faster than me. I was OK with that and just sat on their wheels and tried to keep the effort level high I had no idea who was from my race and who was from the race ahead of me, so was content to just ride. Into the finish I descended the hill near one guy and decided I’d try to race him for what I though was probably fifth place. I nabbed the win with a half wheel length on the line. It turns out that was for first place! Now I’m kicked out of the B category and have to race with the fast guys for the rest of the season, that means tough work!

- Wow this is tough -

Weekend #2 of ‘cross racing started on Saturday morning with the ‘School of Cross’ on a very technical course in my opinion. The mountain bike guys didn’t call it technical, just curvy, and that’s probably true. It wasn’t super technical but it did have some tricky bits and the corners were all very sharp. The result of this was that many many short accelerations were required on each lap and they really sapped my energy. Contrary to the previous week where I felt strong and fast, this week’s race I felt miserable and tired after only the first of five laps. My heartrate was above 180 bpm every time I looked at it and I felt like I was riding extremely slow. I wasn’t going all that slow though, I was actually doing very well. I started relatively well and got into the course in 5th position but the first three were getting away and it took me some time and a few tries to finally get around 4th place and try to reel them in. By that time the had formed a gap that I couldn’t cross and it was too long to pace off of them. This was less than ideal and probably contributed to me feeling like I was doing terribly. Second place got rope in his derailleur and had to pull out and by the last lap I could tell that the new Second place was fading and fourth place was gaining. I really pushed to the finish but wasn’t all that close to catching second but did hold off the charging fourth place guy for a podium position. All in all, a very difficult race and after a collapsing under a tree to catch my breath I think I could even decide that it was fun.

- Fun Fun Fun -

Day two of my first ‘cross double header was a course suited to my strengths. We built it the evening before at Goldbar park including what I’d consider three distinct sections. The first was a rather quick but curvy lap of the lower park, including some tricky sections that required very low speeds, but overall it was a matter of running corners as wide as possible and taking the line that allowed you to conserve the most speed. This fed directly into a climb with a mandatory dismount at the top and double barrier. This fed into a section of off camber riding and turns interspersed with short climbs. It went pretty quick but really required that attention was paid. I felt like I addressed this section well considering the technical bits are a weakness of mine. From there on out the course was a matter of pushing a big gear and cruising with your head down through a long gradual climb and a long and fast descent. At the end of the climb was a triple switchback uphill that was very tight. I insisted on building it like this and unfortunately it’s also likely the bit of the course that cost me a position on the podium but that’s getting ahead of myself. I took the race out slow and in 10th place, not wanting to go to hard right off the bat. After a half lap I started to increase my urgency and by the time I was through the first lap I was pushing hard in 5th place. I moved into third with a double pass just as I was passed by another young guy and fell to fourth. First place was off the front and looked to be pulling away and I think everyone had resigned themselves to the fact that the Juventus rider who had won the first two races and should have been upgraded by this point was likely going to win three in a row. The Pedalhead rider in second had faded badly the day before and I was expecting him to fade back as well so I worked hard to stay with third place and did so for the third lap. By lap four it was obvious that we were reeling in second place and made contact before the last climb up to the barriers. I pulled even with them here but ran slow to let the both go ahead. I didn’t need to lead into the wind on the next section, I wasn’t about to offer my huge draft to these guys. Up to the final zig-zag I decided I was going to run, which I had tested prior and experimented with once during the race. I was convinced that it was not any slower and prevented any chance of errors or overlapping of wheels in the tight section. It was probably the wrong choice however because by the time I was back on my bike I they had a tiny gap of maybe 5m. It was enough that I wasn’t poised to pass where I anticipated needed to pass and couldn’t push quite hard enough to get by them on the long fast downhill. It was about this point that I started to wonder why I was breathing at all, it felt really useless to pump air in and out of my lungs because it didn’t seem to be doing anything anyways. I took huge speed into the last climb and rode the descent on the wheel of third place. Unfortunately when we came to the line I was still a bike length back, the run in to the finish wasn’t long enough to permit a high speed acceleration, it was mostly a matter of maintaining as much speed from the downhill as possible. Fourth place. I fertilized the nearby bushes in true ‘hop ‘n hurl‘ fashion but felt alright within about 10 minutes, I was pretty happy with how I raced though and felt strong and worked hard… perhaps I could have stuck with the leader if I’d not have given away those 10 places off the start but I don’t deal well with really hard starts, so I know what I need to learn.

The day saw some fantastic racing in all categories and John Clarke took the win for Hardcore at our own race in the Expert Category as he now moves up to contend with the big guns with the Elites. I suppose the saving grace with a fourth place is that I am still 3 points shy of an upgrade and get to contend in the Dark Knight as well as the Oval Cross with the slower categories. Hopefully this increases the chances that someone from the Hardcore racing team can with a pig on Saturday night as we’ll be represented in all of the races. A win would be nice, but winning the pig I think is potentially more important. (A scavenger hunt on the course that involves beer for the winner… details to follow if the story turns out to be worth telling)

Youtube coverage of the Expert and Elite Mens’ races will follow pending a free lunch-hour at work to do some video editing. I snapped stills for the women as I was supposed to be marshaling in one area and the field spread out too much to make for exciting footage. Not that the race was unexciting.