Six nights of accommodation for the Tour this summer remain unconfirmed. Would you please join in praying that the leads that are currently established would follow through and that the location in upstate New York would be sorted out. It would be a great relief to the organizers if all of these locations could be sewn up in the next weeks.

1. Dinosaur, CO – local campground
2. Fraser, CO – YMCA park
3. Wray, CO – at local park and local pool
4. Fremont, NE – Military Memorial park
5. Woodstock, IL – High School in town
6. Albion, NY or Batavia, NY – still open, no leads

In another line of prayer, there are currently numerous riders who anticipate participating this summer who are dealing with injuries. Some of them are frustrating inconveniences like broken hands that aren’t likely to impact riders’ success this summer but some other riders are dealing with knee trouble and other cycling related problems. The health and strength of all members of this summer’s itinerant community will make a big impact on the extent to which those weeks will be so much more of a blessing than a chore.

Video Log #2

Video Log #3 – 1 minute later..

Video Log #1

It took a few months of contemplation as to whether or not I was actually going to shell out for another bike seat. I have a full season on my current seat which is a Profile Design Tri-Stryke. After looking around online I figured that I have put it through about 30-40% of it’s lifespan because it’s neoprene and foam. I do quite enjoy the deat and it gives me no trouble but I really do prefer to ride aero with that seat rather than sit up tall. With no aero-position riding planned for this summer (see this blog entry about changing handlebars) I figured that I’d save that seat for what it was meant for. I went for a Brooks B-17 which isn’t the easiest seat to get your hands on when you live in Edmonton but I did eventually get on the “notification list” for when the new stock arrived.

I’ve got extra rails mounted behind the seat so that I can attach bottle cages to it. That’ll allow me to carry a total of three water bottles including the one frame cage. I’ve been doing 2 bottles and a third bottle filled with tools for the past 2 seasons. I’ll have a bike bag for my handlebars this summer though so the tools can be moved and I can liberate that extra cage.

The other thing I’ve solved is a tent. The one I’ve got kicking around works great so long as it’s not raining. When you’re planning 64 consecutive tent nights you can’t really expect none of them to be wet. I found a huge 1 man tent on the MEC gear listing that should solve that problem (Columbia Frosty Ridge II). It fits the bill on a number of accounts.

• 8.5 feet long from tip to tail.
• Super ventilated for hot nights
• Vestibule for my shoes
• Enough room alongside myself to keep a bunch of junk.

I guess the photos are pretty self-explanatory. I couldn’t put any of the seventeen stakes (why make a tent that’s only 4.5 pounds yet has 17 stakes?) in the floor so I used duct-tape. It’s not quite filled out all the way when it’s not stretched out with pegs but It’s pretty close in the photos.

A SeatoSea promo video is online. If you’ve come across my website and don’t have a ton of the background regarding what this whole bike ride that I’m talking about is all about here’s a solid 5 minute introduction.

One of the things that I have been very careful about communicating is that all of the money they donate goes towards the cause and none of it is to support us cyclists, who are relying on corporate sponsorship or themselves/ourselves to meet those costs.

Our development manager, Al Vander Hart, passed along a prayer request this evening. Al has been working with contacts at a rather large franchise company for a major corporate sponsorship of our tour. The process, which has been going on for literally months, faces a significant crossroads tomorrow (Friday, March 7) as executives review the proposal with a view to making a decision.

Would you please join me/us in prayer tonight and tomorrow asking that God will open a way for our proposal to find favor with this national,
well-known organization? It means money towards the cause but it also means momentum in that effort.

The weekend rolled by and I did swing through the bike shop to finally finish the conversion project that began back in November. My bike was set up for triathlon racing and wasn’t particularly conducive to the kind of riding I’m anticipating this summer. It started with a handlebars and brakes swap and is now almost complete with my aquisition of a larger cassette for the rear gears. I was looking for a set of gears that was more conducive to climbing hills and initially couldn’t find what I wanted but now have got some. My current racing cassette will be moving over to my new racing wheels which came sans-cassette. This cassette will likely stay on this bike indefinitely once it gets on there (I still need to get my hands on a cassette wrench to finish this project, and at this rate it should happen by mid may)

While at the bike shop I decided to finally get the bike computer I had decided upon but hadn’t yet bought. It’s got wireless capability for both speed and cadence which were the two basic things I wanted. It’s also got the potential to record heart-rate data but my cat-eye transmitter didn’t work the first time I tried it. I may have to try my ciclo-sport transmitter later and read the owners manual again, I’m pretty sure that both of them will theoretically work if I fiddle with them a bit. What is an engineering physics degree worth if I can’t do something like that right?

So I recorded an entire workout of cadence for the first time in my life which was fun, I averaged between 93 and 96 if I randomly looked down to see what I was at. The average for the whole ride was 88 which includes some horsing around we did on the rollers standing and such which drops you cadence way down. I maxed out at 115 without wiping out off the machine which is no small achievement in my mind. I’d like to see if I can actually do 140 on the road, I’ve heard people say it’s possible. I don’t know though. I know for a fact I can do 126 as I’ve measured that with timing myself on the fixie while on the velodrome

Within the Faculty of Physical Education at the University of Alberta there is a group of people studying the effects of hard exercise on inflammation in the lungs (following exercise, not during it, but I’m not doing the study so don’t ask me). Participation in these kinds of studies is of course voluntary and you don’t get paid. You do however need to pass a VO2 test to qualify as “fit enough” to participate in the study. A VO2 test is supposed to be the best indicator of aerobic fitness, unfortunately it’s not easy to do, typical lab testing costs about $120 a pop. That’s not exactly student pocket change. So I signed up, not because I have buckets of time, but because who wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to save $120 that I wouldn’t have spent anyways.

VO2 max is a measure of the maximum capacity to transport and utilize oxygen during incremental exercise. (The derivation is V̇ – volume per time, O2 – oxygen, max – maximum). It is also called maximal oxygen consumption or maximal oxygen uptake. It is also known as aerobic capacity, which reflects the physical fitness of a person. – The Stolen Definition from Wikipedia

If you do a VO2 test on a bike you basically start riding at an easy wattage and the required power for you to generate is incremented slowly until you die. That’s just about it, oh and the fact that you’ve got this huge tube down your throat and some girl yelling at you with instructions.

Above are some photos of the event, and the final one is the most important piece of the result. It shows a line plotting all of the measured points during the test and the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen over a short interval of time. What you see is that early in the test I am processing a low amount of oxygen somewhere around 0.5 L/min and as I increase the amount of oxygen I’m taking in (by cycling harder) the amount of C02 I’m getting rid of maintains the same ratio. That’s the case until I reach my aerobic threshold “wattage” or “effort” or “speed” and then the graph starts to kink. When that kink occurs I’m essentially firing on all pistons but not yet accumulating any oxygen debt or lactic acid in my muscles that I cannot get rid of. That measurement is worth a lot to an athlete if it is calibrated to a heart-rate. That’s why these fitness centers can charge $120 to get your VO2 max tested. Once you know what heart-rate you are at when you reach the threshold you can then measure your “arrival” at threshold without lugging around a computer and shoving a tube down your throat. Training at that threshold is the fastest way to gain aerobic fitness, basically it’s the recipe to get in the best shape in the most efficient way possible. For me the magic number is 170 beats per minute. Typically athletes can measure their maximum heart rate and then estimate this magic spot between 80% and 85% of their max heart rate or 75% to 80% of their reserve heart rate. These two estimates put my magic number in the domain of (163, 174) or (164, 172) correspondingly. Guess what? I follow the pattern, the number is 170.

So, did I qualify for the study? No I missed the mark by 2.8 ml/kg/min. “High calibre” athletes needed to meet the mark of 60 ml/kg/min and I scored only 57.2, not good enough. I still scored about 30% better than the average “non-athlete” (45 ml/kg/min), but it still feels a bit crushing. I have to say that my mass has got to be a disadvantage for something like this, if I were a dozen fewer kilograms like our buddy Lance Armstrong was things would be a different story. Since missing the mark I’ve done a bit of poking around to try and find a bit of solace in some non-standardization of the test. Indeed there is some floating around online, the test is said to be slightly biased towards the smaller athlete (which, at 196 cm I am not) by a fraction proportional to “the difference in masses to the one third power”. That means my inclination to loose weight and score better is right, but I think it also means that it is not really worth it.

Oh, and the other number that’s kinda cool is that I died at 520 watts. That’s pretty good power if I had to say so, and that’s following a 9 minute effort. I kinda doubt (as a matter of fact I know) I would be able to crack a mean grand in a track 1km sprint but the indication is that I’d be respectable, I can confidently say I’d be beyond 750. They say, but I don’t know exactly who “they” is, that to split 40 km per hour in a flat 40 km time trial (on a good bike with aero wheels), you need to stick around 300 watts on the pavement.

Reading week finally arrived. I cruised into it a bit late, sticking in the lab until 8pm on Friday, but decided to take a brain break from the world of engineering and fiddle around on the computer. I brewed a whole pot of coffee and baked a dozen muffins and then sat down to code like I haven’t coded in months.

I wanted to make it possible for people to comment on weBLOG posts as well as on photos using a single universal piece of comment software. I dreamed up a means to do so and have the vast majority of it working. Comments are possible on all weBLOG posts from either the SeatoSea end of the website and from the “krabbe.ca” end of the website. It’s currently set up so that I need to approve all posts before they are publicly displayed. This is mostly to ensure that I get to see all the comments, I don’t want to miss any! It’s also good practice I suppose as far as avoiding spammers is concerned. I don’t know how soon that would ever happen but whatever, it’s a safety measure.

While I was at it I added a search option to my weBLOG because I was having trouble finding old posts in a short period of time. It’s also got a dropdown menu to select any of the “keywords” and access those subdirectories of the weBLOG. That page is linked HERE or from the top of the standard weBLOG page.

I really have a ton of other things to write about but I think I’m going to call it a night, pack up the computer and start getting ready for a little cross country ski vacation. I’ll post pictures and commentary on my VO2 test from this week sometime this weekend… so more on that later.

Please pray:

• For the right route. Ask God to lead Ed Witvoet, our tour logistics manager, to the exact route across the continent that He intends the cyclists to take.
• For accommodations. The tour will need approximately 55 places to stay overnight. Please pray that God will make suitable places available for the size of our group; that these places can be found and booked quickly and inexpensively.
• For support crew members. The tour will need a host of volunteers to travel with the tour to ensure a smooth and safe journey. Please pray for people to apply; specifically, tractor-trailer drivers and a kitchen team leader are needed.
• For increased awareness. Ask God to bless the efforts to communicate and promote the tour and its goals to churches and individuals so far, and to give creativity to organizers to spread the word further.
• For tour sponsors. Pray that those being contacted as possible corporate sponsors will catch the vision and come on board to help underwrite tour expenses.
• For celebration rally planning. Local committees are being formed to organize Sunday celebration rallies along the route. Pray that passionate and gifted people come forward to lend their time and energy to these events.
• For cyclists. Riding across North America is a major challenge and commitment that needs the support of family, friends and co-workers, and the Spirit’s clear discernment. Pray for safety as riders train for the tour.
• For the steering committee. Organizers have a lot to plan with not a lot of time. Pray for wisdom in decision-making and unity within the committee.
• For those living in poverty around the world. May compassion be evident in God’s people and may justice prevail in the hearts of those who govern.