On the Tue/Thurs group ride this morning there were not one but two guys with new bikes.
Mike, who with his brother owns a local two-shop chain of Trek stores, had a spiffy new Madone 6.9. I think that’s the top end Trek frame. He had it outfitted with the new electronic Dura-Ace. Electronic DA has been in the works for years and has also been quite controversial on the various cycling forums. Besides the usual Luddite frothing about any new technology (“Eddie didn’t need that crap to win!”), many posters claimed that it will short out or stop working at an inconveinent time, like in the middle of a sprint or on a steep hill. I did not personally witness either an explosion or a shifting malfunction, but I was safely off the back most of the ride.
The group ride “new bike” protocol goes something like this. You roll up to the ride’s meeting point on your new steed. The guys (and girls if you’re lucky enough to have any on your ride) notice your bike. “Hey, is that a new XYZ?” Then they engage you in bike technobabble, like “is it as laterally stiff and vertically compliant as they say?” Or in the case of electric DA, the talk’s about the shifting precision. It’s good form for the new bike owner to downplay it a bit by finding at least one thing to complain about, no matter how small. It’s most definitely good form for everyone else to be admiring.
Karl blew that however. I was chatting with someone else when I heard a loud “ELECTRONIC SHIFTING? YOU MIGHT AS WELL PUT A MOTOR ON IT!” Mike took it in good humor though.
The reason I was chatting with someone else was that I’d noticed the other Mike, who is a realtor, was also on a new bike. No one else had noticed in the fuss over Mike the shop owner’s bike, so I felt like I owed Mike the realtor some bike admiration.
The ride itself was eh. I was doing ok until we started up the big climb, all of ten minutes into the ride. After that I saved Mike the shop owner from the embarassment of being last up the big climb despite his spiffy laterally stiff yet vertcially compliant crisp shifting new ride. I was “in base training” which is what us serious cyclists call it when we have been riding 8 hours a week for the last month and have been eating like we still were riding 18 hours a week. I’ve gained five pounds since Everest. I’m not yet in the “clyde” camp but I have reached my “oh no, I’m fat!” winter weight. That didn’t take long.
ericm Uncategorized
I’ve been busy adding to GoldenCheetah, which is open source power meter software. I used to use WKO+. Since that only runs on Windows and I prefer Linux, I ran Windows in a VMware virtual machine and ran WKO+ in that. It was cumbersome but worked (and WKO+ is awesome) but then I upgraded to a newer version of Linux. VMware wanted $50 more in additon to what I’d already paid to purchase the software to get get version that would run on current Linux, and I didn’t think that a port was worth another $50 over what I’d already paid.
In the mean time the open source GoldenCheetah project had improved greatly. So I switched. It’s missing some features that I used in WKO+ so I took the opportunity to add them. First was manual file entry. I sometimes ride without my power meter (often because the wheel its in is broken) but I want to be able to track the training load, even if it’s with estimates. That got into the 1.2 release and was a good way for me to figure out a bit of how QT works. Second was a performance monitor to track training load. It’s in the dev builds now but I don’t know when the next official release is. There are still a few bugs to iron out but it’s working pretty well. It would have been cool if I’d done this well in advance of the Everest Challenge so I could have used it but I was busy training and didn’t have time.
The blue line is the short term stress (STS, or ATL in WKO). By default it’s an exponentially weighted average of the last 7 days’ training stress. In GC training stress is calculated using BikeScore instead of TSS, since “TSS” is copyright. BS is calculate differently but the numbers are close enough that they can be considered the same. The green line is the long term stress (LTS, or CTL in WKO). It’s calculated the same was as STS but over the last 42 days so it shows a longer term perspective. And the black line is the stress balance, or LTS-STS. When it’s negative you’re tired and getting more tired; when it is positive you’re fit and rested. LTS is really the thing to watch. You can see that in early September I had it up to about 120, then tapered just enough for my SB to go positive for the Everest Challenge Sept 12/13. (that’s the big spike in STS). I know from past experience that a CTL of over 120 for long is too much for me, so just hitting it is about right.
A lot of the fun/challenge in the PM was figureing out how I wanted the UI to work. I have not done a lot of UI programming and what I have done was a while ago so it was new and interesting. The screen shot doesn’t show it but you can drag the mouse across the graph. When you do there’s a faint vertical line, and the bottom row of boxes are filled in with date and STS/LTS/SB values. That lets you look up the value on a specific date. The sliders let you change the range of dates that are displayed.
ericm Uncategorized
At about 4:30 this morning I was woken up by a bright light across the valley. (the bedroom has a big picture window facing the view). It was a wildfire. In the dark I couldn’t tell which ridge it was on- the near one or one farther away. I watched the flames for a bit then woke Laura up so she could see. We got up, turned on the scanner to hear the radio traffic and checked the various fire sites on the internets. It turns out that it’s on a ridge farther away, so it’s not an immediate worry unless it gets really bad.
I’m suprised though- I thought that after the big rainstorm we had a couple weeks ago, where we got 10 inches of rain in less than a day (and lost power for 3.5 days), the fire season would be over. But today it’s warm and the air is dry (humidity 20%) and the winds are strong (the fire fighters keep having to ground their aircraft because of them). That makes for good fire conditions….good for the fire that is.
First call was at 2:38am, now at noon on the radio (CDF) they’re estimating 500 acres. So far a couple outbuildings and a trailer have been burnt. Hopefully everyone stays safe.
Fire pics from someone who lives much closer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dandawson/sets/72157622659477116/
ericm Not cycling