I love Red Meat comics.

I can't pass this one up, a story that involves cycling and Google Earth.

The Tour of California starts on the 18th and some cool technology is coming into play. A handful of riders will be carrying GPS units on their bikes that will transmit location data which will end up used, among other things, on a Google Maps mashup and a Google Earth feed.

I was involved in the first live Google Earth feed for a sporting event while working on the Sydney to Hobart site, so it's fun to watch other events do similar things (albeit with a much bigger budget). Last year this event had a really nice Google Maps integration to track the current stage, but it was manually entered data. This year they have much cooler toys to send realtime data over the mobile phone network.

More details in this Wired article.

The count of Sydney cyclist bloggers is growing, which is a great thing.  Phil linked to Adrian's blog after meeting him on the Body Art Ride. I met Adrian a few weeks ago when he came along for his first Waterfall ride with DHBC, I didn't know he had a blog though.

Someone else who recently started riding with Dulwich Hill is Michael Glennon who I helped talk into getting a blog of his own. Michael's blog is looking to be a good combination of bike racing and sailing, and is adding to my desire to ride the Alpine Classic next year.  

The next blogger meetup should be lots of fun.

Saturday morning rolled around and I felt pretty good when I woke up, I'd had a good nights sleep, a good brekky and I thought I might give racing at Heffron another go.

After giving the bike a good clean, putting my good wheel (lovingly restored by Dave at Cheeky Transport) back on and making sure everything was in order I headed over to Maroubra. I wasn't feeling great on the way, I put it down to nerves. I kept telling myself I had nothing to worry about, my legs felt good, the bike felt good and I knew I could at least keep up for four laps.

We lined up at the start and I looked around to see a big field, about 25 riders. I guess the nice weather brings people out. After a few announcements we were off. I led for a couple of turns then decided to let a few riders past me and sit in the pack.

I decided this week I'd come up with a strategy, even if it wasn't going to work I figured having some plan was better than just riding around with no plan. I found on one of the two "pimples", small rises that exist on the circuit, that I could make up a bunch of places by heading outside while the bunch slowed down. I figured that if I could be in the front half of the pack at that point in the last lap, I could make up up some positions there, lead into the next few corners and be in a good position for the finish. It was a simple plan, but I decided it would do.

The first fly in the ointment was that the pace of this race seemed to be a fair bit faster than the last one. Just hanging on was going to be tougher. The second mildly annoying thing was one rider who I was following seemed to have been avoiding the shower or the washing machine for some time, wherever I would go he would end up in front of me. Quite a nasty thing to be trying to get in enough air and be breathing in body odour that's covered by the Geneva convention. Thankfully he seemed to disappear after a few laps, as did a quite a few other riders. Not that I noticed, I was having enough of my own problems.

I was trying to experiment with some different lines though corners, in some places you can make up a few positions by cornering tighter than most of the riders. In most though, you either get cut off by people taking a smarter line and having to accelerate to get your position back, or end up in the wind and having to work harder. Discovering this stuff took it's toll on me.

In about the fifth lap, after one of my failed corner optimisation attempts, a couple of riders got a bit of a break on the front. My first instinct was to chase. I quickly realised there was a whole lot of race left, and they were most likely going to wear themselves out so I gave up. My legs took the give up message a bit too seriously at that point and decided they didn't want to be doing this anymore. I slowed down a bit and a number of riders flew past me. No problem, I thought, the pack is about 25 riders, so I must be right in the middle of it. A quick look around was enough to tell me that I was now on the back of the pack as the rest had fallen off already. Not good. I found some strength and pushed to get back up to pace and behind somebody.

The next few laps were hard. I was OK in the back part of the circuit where everyone slowed for the pimples, the corners and the wind. But on the straight it was a real effort to remain on the back of the bunch. I considered just pulling out of the race a few times but managed to talk myself into staying around. I don't know whether the pace slowed a little in the next few laps or if I found some extra strength, but I found my way back into the middle of the pack, tried to ride a bit smarter for a while and conserve some energy and started to feel a bit better.

It's amazing how much about racing is mental. While in the front part of the bunch I'd find myself thinking "hey, I could win this thing", but as soon as I was near the back I had the total opposite types of thoughts going through my head. I was suffering, and ready to call it quits.

So with two laps to go I realised I was in a position to give my plan a try. I used the pimple to move up into the front few riders and stick with them. As we past the line I heard the bell ring for the last lap. The race was now on. As we neared the pimple for the last time I pulled to the outside and made up the places, I was now in front of the group. There was a rider about 50m in front, he was in our grade and moving at a decent pace. I had no idea whether he was a lap behind, or part of the earlier breakaway. After that break was made I was too busy concentrating on my own ride to know what happened so I had to assume the guy was leading the race.

I only had one choice. Attack.

I put some power down and started bridging the gap to the leading rider, and managed to get past him before the final pimple. In doing this I guess I had strung the group out a bit. No matter what now, I was leading the race. Just before the final corner into the straight I saw the 500m to go line on the road. I had a few bike lengths lead, it was time to make another move.

Conventional wisdom says you shouldn't start a sprint too early, but I figured with the element of surprise, the chance that everyone else was hurting, and a tiny head start it was worth a shot. I put my head down, and pedaled as hard as I could. I hit the straight having widened my lead, found some bigger gears and just kept going. I kept waiting for the whole bunch to tear past me, but it didn't happen. Then, with about 50m to go I saw a wheel to my right. I pushed as hard as I could but this guy was going to get past me, I had nothing left to give. I crossed the line just behind him, in SECOND PLACE!

It took me a good 500m before I could breathe properly, I rolled around the course alongside the winning rider. When I could speak again I congratulated him on the win and had a bit of a chat. By the time I got back to the line the reality had set in a bit and you couldn't have wiped the smile off my face. I hadn't won, but I'd survived my first full race, put a tactic into action, and come away with a placing. Good enough for my second attempt I think.

Some stats :

Avg Speed - 33.6 kmh
Max Speed - 49.6 kmh
Avg Heart Rate - 176
Max Heart Rate - 197

A pic of me crossing the line, courtesy of Lindsay

Around the time I started looking at road bikes last year I developed a little fantasy about doing some racing. A decent challenge for myself, but one that was easier to say "I'll do that next year". I started riding with Dulwich Hill Bicycle Club as a step towards this, I figured that when I could keep up with some of the faster guys, I'd be ready. Problem is, some of the faster guys are A grade riders, and if I didn't give it a shot some time, it may  never happen.

So after going along to Heffron Park and having a look at the crits, I decided to just have a go. The general consensus seems to be that you will always get left behind on your first few goes, so I figured I may as well get that out of the way early, then I'd at least know what I'd need to do next time.

Last Saturday, I arrived at Heffron, fresh licence reciept in hand, and signed up for the D Grade race. I got there really early and did a quick lap around to have a look, three quarters of the way around I seriously considered turning around and going home. Heffron park is rough, has lots of corners, and is WINDY. I already knew this, but damn, that lap hurt. My heart rate was rocketing. Figuring it would be a little easier in the bunch I calmed down and waited for people to arrive. I was very thankful to see a couple of club mates arrive to race in the same grade, to hide behind if nothing else. Geoff took me on a warmup lap and gave me some useful tips on the course and how the bunch was likely to act.

We lined up at the start line and the announcement was made there was a newbie in the pack and I was pointed out.... great. We got the go signal and of course I lived up to newbie status by not being able to clip in to my pedals (I seem to have problems when I'm nervous, and no Phil, I'm not going to give up and get Speedplays). After a few metres I got cliped in, found the right gear and got moving. Thankfully these things don't take off straight away.

We took the first few turns and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I could corner as quickly as the other riders up near the front, and even happier to find that I wasn't dropping back. Halfway around the first lap I had settled in to a bit of a rhythm and was keeping up fine. In fact, I was wondering if this is as fast as it got because I wasn't struggling at all. I made the mistake about then of looking at my heart rate monitor, I was sitting on a number that I usually only see on a really hard day. My body was obviously working damn hard, but the adrenaline and excitement was masking the pain.

The race continued, I saw different people sit on the front, copping all the wind, I was up there for a moment myself when I realised I really didn't want to be there, so got out of the way and found someone bigger to hide behind. In my second lap I felt a tap on my shoulder, Lindsay had pulled up alongside and let me know I was doing great.

In my fourth lap I took a corner and my wheels skidded a bit, I managed to recover from the skid, but it was a bit of a concern. A few hundred metres later I knew something was very wrong, I panicked a little and took a quick exit off the track and up a grass bank. I jumped off the bike and checked my tyres, sure enough, I had a flat on the front. I walked the bike back to the start line, my race over. Had I known a few more people I could have swapped wheels and rejoined on the next lap, but I wasn't too worried. As predicted, I hadn't finished my first crit, but it wasn't because I wasn't fast enough.

Can't wait to do it again!

That's me, in the red.

P.S. The next morning's ride to Waterfall and back was pretty painful in the 35 degree heat. I really enjoyed having a swim later in the day.

Have a happy new year everyone!

Sometimes it's the simplest things that make the biggest difference.

On Sunday morning I was living every road cyclists nightmare. The bunch was heading uphill and I'd just been dropped. My legs were screaming out in pain, my heart rate was skyrocketing and I was suffering. I'm not sure why this occurred to me, but I decided to focus on my breathing.

When I first started riding I used to see a small hill and tense up and hold my breath, which is obviously silly, and I had to work on remembering to breath. it's funny how these sorts of fundamentals can be taken for granted and forgotten.

So while watching the group move further and further away from me I started to breathe, deeply, holding each breath for a couple of pedal strokes and an amazing thing happened. My legs stopped hurting, my heart rate dropped and I settled into a rhythm. Within 20 seconds I had recovered a bit and, much to my surprise was starting to gain on the group. 30 seconds later I had caught them. Nobody in the group noticed, but it's the private victories that are the special ones.

For the rest of the ride I concentrated on my breathing, especially when it got fast or steep, and I kept up. For the first time I managed to hang with the group the whole way.

It seems silly to me now that something so obvious and basic was holding me back so much, but I'm sure it happens all the time. I can't help but wondering how many millions of dollars worse off the carbon fiber industry would be if people were breathing properly :)

All good fun, wish we coulda stayed longer.

Thanks guys!

Cheeky Transport have started running some bike maintenance classes in their Newtown shop.

Lela and I went along last night for the class on brake, cables and gear adjustment and it was a great way to get some hands on experience. I do some basic stuff myself, and I knew the theory of a lot of what we covered last night, but it's fantastic to be able to do it in an environment where you know you aren't going to totally break something (which is always my fear). In fact, you are encouraged to get things undone and messed up so you can do it from scratch.

I think this is a great initiative and if you're in Sydney and interested in learning more about how your bike works, you should definitely get in touch and register for some of the workshops.

When I bought my roadie, I was faced with the question of which cycling computer to buy. I had decided that I wanted to take training a bit more seriously and wanted a heart rate monitor, and I wanted something to measure cadence.

After looking around at a bunch of options, the Polar CS200 CAD seemed to fit all my criteria, so I started poking around the place for some online reviews. Here I met a big issue, the quality of review data for cycling stuff online is really poor. If you do a search for "<productname> review", you get hundreds of results for online shops with "be the first to review x". So onto the various forums I went.

In the forums, you'll find a lot of bad stories about this particular gadget, for every thread about it, you'll find a couple of people who seemed to have lots of problems, usually ending with them returning the unit. This was pretty disconcerting, but I got thinking about a couple of points.

It's pretty well accepted that people that are satisfied with a product are less likely to be vocal about it than the people that are dissatisfied. So, people who bought it, and have had it work fine without any issues are likely to be just out using it, not whining on a forum.

Secondly, if you think about the ratio of smart people to total nuffies you meet on any given day, you gotta figure that a bunch of the people whining, no matter how convincing they sound, were just doing something dumb. The louder they scream about doing everything right, the more likely it is that they had the cadence sensor on the rear derailer, and the HR strap around their head.

Lastly, Polar obviously sell a crapload of these, and if there were that many problems, it wouldn't be worth selling.

Anyway, enough of the background info.... I bought it, and have been riding with it for 5 months.

My concerns seem to have been unwarranted, it works great. I suspect a lot of people might be messing up the installation, I got mine installed at the shop when I bought the bike, as I wanted to rule that possible issue out.

The main worry with wireless computers is dropouts and interference. So far I haven't seen any crazy numbers come up, except for the night the chest strap was in my backpack picking who knows what. The figures always seem reasonable at the end of a ride. As for dropouts, I had a very short one while crossing the Harbour Bridge, where I'd been told that nothing will work at all. I also had a minor dropout during the Spring Cycle, while near an apartment block in Rhodes, not sure what that was about. I've ridden with this in heat, cold, rain, mass rides and fast group bunches, so I've covered off most of the riding conditions except actual racing. So far so good.

The unit itself is well made, smaller than it looks in a lot of photos, and a nice shape and design. The screen is easy to read, and has backlighting for nighttime riding (not that I've ever used that).

While riding, you can rotate the display through a number of different modes which display different datapoints on the screen at once. I leave mine on the standard one which shows Speed and Heart Rate on the large areas, cadence in a smaller one, and distance at  the top. Some of the other stats you can show in different modes include average speed, ride time / stopwatch and lap time.

The computer stores up to 7 "sessions", which is good if you log all your data somewhere, but want to get out for another ride before you've found the time to transfer it. While not in riding mode, you can open up any of these files and review all the summary data like ride time, Average and Max speed, Heart Rate and Cadence, time in the preset HR zone and calories burned. The HR zone feature is a little limited, it allows you to set a maximum and minimum heart rate, and shows you time in zone, time above the zone, and time below the zone. This isn't bad, but most modern heart rate training methods work of 5 zones which is a feature included in the higher model Polar units.

Transferring the data is a little tedious, and this is one of my annoyances with Polar. The unit allows you to transfer data via their SonicLink technology, which means that your PC records the beeps and squeaks output by the unit's speaker, and sends this to the polar training website. This website is a Flash based application, and one of the most annoying and counter intuitive applications I've seen. Although it would be simple, Polar haven't included a way to store the raw data on your PC. They have this technology available, as you can do it if you pony up the $800 for their higher models which use the exact same method, so it's just a marketing decision not to include it. Like I said, it's annoying, but I knew about it beforehand, so I can't complain too much. Instead I manually copy the data into the very excellent CycliStats and store it all there.

Another minor gripe is that it can take a few seconds to update it's data display if you make a major change in something, for example going from coasting to pedalling quickly will not show on the cadence display for a few seconds. It makes sense why this is happening, they are doing an average over a couple of seconds to give you a more accurate picture of what you are really doing, so there really isn't a good way around that one. It's not a big deal and I can live with it.

All in all, the CS200 is a great unit with a good set of features. It's well made, looks cool, seems tough, and has been very reliable. The cadence and speed sensors don't get in the way or look ridiculous and the stem mount makes it easy to remove and insert the head unit. As I mentioned, there are a couple of minor annoyances, but nothing I can't live with.

Some other options I looked at were the CatEye range. Their double wireless looked great, but didn't have the heart rate monitor, and their heart rate model didn't have cadence sensor. Similarly, the Vetta range had some models with some great features, but no model I could find had all the options. Lastly was the new Garmin Edge. Bike computer, Heart Rate, Cadence and GPS. Pure geek fun. Unfortunately it seemed like they were having lots of teething problems. In the first 3 months there were a pile of new firmware versions, each one fixing some bugs and re-introducing some old ones. Garmin are going to be the company to watch in this space, once they get the issues sorted out, and can get some better battery life they will have a hell of a product.

Finally, if you're soon to be in the market for something like this, keep an eye out for the new CS 400, which looks a bit cooler and adds an altimeter.