My VO2 Max was measured today at 66 or 67 ml/kg/min. In February this year I scored 57.2 and then proceeded to ride ten thousand kilometers on my bike, to read about the other VO2 Test click here. I blew that out of the water by about a 13% increase. Oxygen uptake was 5.8 liters per minute and I was processing 240 liters of air per minute around my aerobic threshold. Think about that, I’m breathing a whole 4 liter milk jug of air each second! The seat didn’t go quite high enough on their main bike so I switched over to their non-main bike which limited out at 500 watts of power and the guy was a bit nervous that I would exceed that. I told him that I didn’t think he needed to worry but I did indeed get to the 500 Watt mark during my last minute of the test and rode there for about 20 seconds before collapsing. I rode 2 minutes at 170 watts and then increased power by 30 watts every 2 minutes up to 350 watts and from there I was classified as “past threshold” from there on up it was only 1 minute at each increment. That’s 10 minutes prior and 5 minutes 20 seconds riding past threshold, more ride time by a good margin than my last test.

The test today was my reward for finishing the mid-term crunch of the semester. It’s not really fair to call it mid-terms as I only had one of them and the other stuff was papers and problems that needed to be solved, but anyways, they’re over. I’ll write a bit more about the testing when it finished up next week. I’ve got an MRI of my resting heart on Monday and another fitness type test on Thursday that’s followed up by some heart measurement kind of stuff. One hour of intervals, it should be a good time.

What are they measuring? I don’t have a good grasp on it yet but she told me that in one of her related studies leading up to this one they measured a 7% decrease in fractional emptying of the heart on each beat following a half-ironman triathlon. They were trying to show at that point in their research that the heart itself actually gets tired. This is somehow related as they want further proof that it’s not just the long 5 hour exertion that made the heart tired, that I can tire my heart out in only 1 hour of hardcore stationary bike riding.

I made a tyre swap on my fixed gear commuting bike yesterday in preparation for winter which is due to arrive any day now. Autumn is still cruising along in Edmonton but the leaves are mostly gone and we’ll have to give up on pretending that it’s still fall when things turn white.

I swapped my old chain off for a new one as I had stretched the old one by 3.5% or so. If you’re not familiar the rule of thumb is that you’re supposed to replace it around 1% I think. An eighth of an inch over a foot. 1/(8*12)~1% it was making quite a bt of noise due to being too long and not fitting well on the front chainring. I also slapped on the winter tyres which are 34mm front and 36 mm rear. I’ve a sweet c-cross front tyre that runs between 60 and 90 psi with loads of little knobbies. It’s quite fun and at 80 psi makes a sweet hum as I fly down the pavement. I also swapped gears for winter and am running 48×20 instead of 48×17 which was my summertime gear.

I also caught wind of a funny product out of Denmark to make cyclists appear a bit more fashionable. I would wear one if I had it but I don’t think a third helmet acquisition is necessary in 2008, plus I’m sure they’re not cheap.

Other news is that I’ve been in the pool 3 days in a row totaling up to 5 kms which is pretty amazing progress for the shoulder. It’s nice and tired after about 30-40 minutes in the pool. I skip doing the physio exercises when I’ve swum, I think it can only take one workout a day.

Krabbe.ca was down a bit over the course of the last week. I was fiddling around with a few things regarding how things are hosted on the server that I’ve got. I am currently serving 4ish websites from the same place. One is of course my own, the other is my SeatoSea pages, which if you’ve ever bothered to notice are basically pages from my own site that are linked unidirectionally so that people browsing about Seatosea only end up reading mostly SeatoSea related material. The other two sites are supposed to be a bit more independent, Reuben.Krabbe.ca is my brother Reuben’s blog and photo gallery. He’s at photography school out in Victoria and his subdomain actually garners a decent amount of traffic all by it’s lonesome. The final site is for the Marda Loop Justice film festival and the spinoff festivals that are now happening at other places in the country. It’s got an independent domain justicefilmfestival.ca. The main switch was swapping primary domains on the account so that krabbe.ca points to the root and the film festival points to a folder. This was done because it used to be possible to find your way to mine or Reuben’s sites through the justicefilmfestival domain which can be a bit misleading if you don’t know what exactly was going on. That’s bad practise if you’re trying to inform people about something rather than confuse them. I could care less if people find out about the festival through my domain… in fact that would be a good thing. And I just gave a link to it, it’s happening in the middle of November and if you can you should come!

Other bonuses include the fact that reuben and I now have sweetaction email addresses that are associated with the domain… which I’m not going to post here because then they’d end up getting spammed and that would make them less useful.

The race arrived this morning in the midst of mist and cool temperatures. Check in began at 8:00 am and I was there somewhere around 8:05. Simmon showed up at about 8:20 and no other athletes showed their faces in the park until quarter to nine.

Tuffest 3 is a run-bike-run three person relay that traditionally has been dominated by triathlon club in previous years but unfortunately our showing was a bit limited this year for one reason or another. Tom McGrath, Leanne Haney and myself re-entered our winning team from last year in the race this year, hopefully safely winning the co-rec category and in contention for the overall win. Tom had another idea however, he’s trying to accumulate points in the annual Men’s Intramural competition and wanted us to race as a male team so any points we won would count towards his total. I was aprehensive about the idea as I wanted to win a shirt and didn’t want to have to beat Pat Kong, Corey Dawson and Simmon Hofstetter to get it. Tom agreed that he’d compensate both Leanne and I with champion T-shirts from his amassed collection if this was the case…

As the crew of 29 or so teams lined up for the start I rolled out for about a 10 minute warmup. After the first lap Nathan (tri club) was running in second place behind an unknown dude. Tom and Pat were 50 yards back running neck and neck. By lap two of the run the unknown guy had dropped way back and Tom and Pat had caught Nathan. I got set to ride sporting my time-trial kit: my tightest jersey, favorite bib shorts, and my newly acquired Giro advantage2 helmet that I scooped up for about half-price this past week. Tom came in only meters ahead of Pat and I set out for the first of ten laps with Simmon only seconds behind.

I tried to take it easy for the first three laps, 40 kph on the gradual uphill and letting things run up to 44 or 45 on the downhill, as I’d practiced the previous weekend when gauging how fast the ride needed to be when the corners were accounted to split a full 40 kph on each lap. Lap 4 arrived and I got a bit boxed in having to pass a car and 4 cyclists in the same lap requiring a couple pauses in the ride, Tom told me after I had him a bit scared as I dropped a whole 4 seconds on that round of the park. At about that point I was really going hard and the lungs and legs were firing on all cylinders. With three laps left I thought I heard someone shout Simmon’s name as I rolled through the transition area and thought they were cheering for him to go for the pass. I hadn’t checked behind me yet and opted to keep riding my race, he hadn’t blasted past me yet and if he was going to pass me he wasn’t going to pull away much anyways. A couple more laps, when riding the downhill to the finish and trying to push in for the last bit I really could feel my hips starting to give me a bit of grief, and when one part of the legs starts to groan the rest of them do too. Suddenly my feet and glutes were sore too and I was very content to be riding in to the finish.

I unclipped my left foot and ground the spd cleat along the ground as I pulled in to transition to Leanne. The sparks flew and I got a pretty funny cheer from the crowd. Leanne was off running and I laid down on the ground fully spent having clocked a 40.4 kph for 23.4 kms on my own speedometer.

Simmon rolled in about a minute back and Cory headed out in pursuit of Leanne. She wasn’t to be caught though as she ran well and even though Corey ran a blazing second lap he only managed to gain back about 18 seconds on it.

I suppose I can check off in good conscience “Win a race” from my list of life-goals today. While we won as a relay team last year, I was out split on the bike by one rider, this year however I was fastest on the bike and on the right team. The official stats are based on a lap distance of 23.0 kms so It won’t record my speed as above 40 kph but we were prohibited from riding the “tangent line ” as it’s called through the park. We had to stay wide through a couple sections because the road wasn’t completely closed. I did meet the goal of splitting 40 kph. It would be quite something to do that for a full 40 kms… but on a different course with a bit more focussed training at that intensity I think I might be able to do it next year. Riding huge volume with Sea-to-Sea didn’t exactly set me up for super speed on a 1 hour ride… but neither did Simmon’s training for his ride at Ultraman Canada.

I will no longer be updating my Sea to Sea blog as of the end of September 2008. If you’ve been a regular reader over the course of the past year I suppose I invite you to continue reading what I consider to be my “regular blog” on my “regular website” as I have returned to what we referred to all summer as “regular life”. You can get to there by clicking on www.krabbe.ca

A couple Thursdays in a row we’ve met with real bikes instead of indoor bikes to go for a ride with triathlon club at the UofA. The Wednesday Night XC race was so great with all of the leaves turning yellow in the river valley that I decided to bring along my camera for the ride on Thursday. I ended up returning with not all that many shots of the river valley colours but I did shoot a few tri club members on their bikes instead.

Also while out for the ride I got hit in the neck by a bee which proceeded to sting me as it splattered. I was left with half of it’s arse and stinger lodged in my neck. Bee toxins right to the jugular… great. I’m not allergic to these things but when you get stung in the neck it hurts quite a bit more than the wasp stings I got this summer on my upper arm and my calf while riding. Dave was really nice and encouraging by telling me to just suck it up and quit complaining, so I went off and biked to the zoo hill which was the location of our main set for the workout (climbing it a bunch of times with different focus). After 5 times up the hill I had to call it quits because I was starting to swell in the neck and it was getting a bit constricted with breathing. I opted to cut the workout short and headed home and to the pharmacy. After standing in line and telling the pharmacist that I was getting a bit of a constricted throat due to swelling in my neck he proceeded to tell me that I should put an ice cube on it and gave me some anti-itch cream. If I thought that my neck was swelling I’d need to go see a doctor. Thoroughly frustrated by his lack of concern for my ability to breathe I left and decided I could breathe “just good enough” if I didn’t keep biking up and down hills. After discussing with different nursing students they all thought the guy was full of it and was given some benadryl. I woke up this morning feeling quite alright except it’s pretty tender so I’ll have to grow a Faris-Al-Sultan beard for the Tuffest3 race on Sunday. Maybe I’ll race in a speedo too… but probably not.