Planning for the 2015 Cycling Season
- December
- 5
I thought I would write a bit about my intentions to perform better during next year's season as a way to remind myself of what my goals are. You see, I'll be racing Masters 55+ next year for the first time. That means I'm at the bottom of the age group again instead of the top. Not that the racing gets any easier, and of course everyone else is also getting older and I can expect to see some familiar faces in the field I'm sure.
I made a good effort back in 2012 and was satisfied with my season overall. A total of about 26 races and ended up about 25th overall for Cat 4 in Pennsylvania for Road Race and slightly lower for Criterium. Not too bad for an old man. The beginning of the 2012 season I raced Cat 5 even though I probably could have gone straight to Cat 4 because of my previous racing experience in my younger days. Moving up to Cat 4 was eventually needed so that I could race Masters races, most of which are restricted to Cat 4 and above.
The last two years I have not raced as much, although I have still enjoyed the sport immensely. I had hernia surgery which affected my 2013 season quite a bit and then ended up breaking my collar bone in July. Although I was back on the bike quickly, there wasn't too much hard racing for me. Last year I did a few road races and a few local crits just to keep myself in touch with the racing community. I had fun but no great results. Still managed to keep my place in the crowd though. Looking at my age group I'm in the middle of the pack.
On club rides during the 2013 season I noticed that I struggled more on climbs than I think I should. Despite riding plenty of miles and training hard my climbing was my weak spot. In my younger days I was a great climber and used that as a strength so it is a bit disappointing to know that I can't do that anymore. But what has really changed since back then? Sure, my VO2 max and recovery are less than they used to be just due to aging. But the main thing is that I'm carrying extra weight up the hills. It's not as much of a problem on the flats or downhills but every extra pound I carry on an incline is painful.
Since my 2012 season I've become a bit lax with my diet. I think the main thing is that I train at dinnertime and then I'm famished when I get home so I eat a lot of food and certainly not the healthiest foods. Then I go to bed. Not a good combination. So the first change I am making is to try to eat a while before training and then be more moderate afterwards. I'm still hungry when I get home but I really watch what I eat. I try to stick to fruit and protein mostly.
As far as my diet goes, I have a strategy that I will lose weight over the holidays which is more of an off-season and then not have to restrict my calories quite as much for training before the season next year. So far that's been going quite well, I've dropped about 24 pounds from October to the beginning of December. I'm probably going to level things out now and keep the caloric deficit more reasonable (maybe 500 kCal per day) and let my body adjust to the new weight.
Meanwhile, I'm putting together a good off-season training program. I've got my Kurt Kinetic trainer with the inRide power module hooked up. I've also signed up for TrainerRoad. I'm hoping that I can spring for a Yahoo KICKR if there ends up being extra money over the holidays. That would be a great way to simulate being outdoors. I still get out and ride but I have to admit that I'm riding less outside this year. I'm not sure I'm getting quite the workout inside since there are no real hills (just simulated) but I still feel the muscle burn after a hard trainer session so I guess I'm getting benefit. I also find it's easier to breathe inside with the warmer air so don't mind doing intervals quite as much. But one thing I've noticed is that I can more easily get my heart rate up outside than working on the trainer. I'm not sure exactly why that is but it just doesn't seem as painful to do it outside. Maybe it's just psychological. I'm certainly motivated by moving faster and you can see your progress when you are riding on the road.
The other tactic that I hope to use is to develop more muscle mass in my quads and thighs. In my youger years I had bigger legs, mostly from doing touring type rides with a heavy bike. I would slog up the hills for many miles a day. It didn't do much for my leg speed but it did get me strong and that strength meant that I could turn bigger gears and go faster overall. So I need a way to simulate that on the trainer or maybe even load up a bike with some weight and ride hills around here. The trainer would certainly be easier but I'm not sure I can completely capture the muscle movements without actually climbing since it involves body posture quite a bit.
So that's about it for now, we'll check in later when I've got my strength training underway. See you on the road.
Walmart online ordering issue
- November
- 1
Seems that Walmart is really screwed up with their online ordering. Look at what happened when I tried to order something to be shipped for local pickup at a FedEx office.
First, I recieved the confirmation of my order via email on 10/22.
Next, I received an email saying the items had been shipped. I checked on the website but there wasn't any tracking information yet of course. So I signed up for a text alert when the package was available for pick up.
Then I received an email on 10/28 stating that my shipment had been delayed and they didn't know when it would be delivered. No big deal as I don't need the items immediately anyway.
After a few days of not receiving anything else I decided to check (today 11/1) to see what was going on with my order. I logged into walmart.com and clicked on the tracking link. According to FedEx the shipment had been sitting at the local FedEx office since 10/24 waiting for me to pick it up and was shipped back on 10/31.
I called into Walmart customer service and was told that my package was on its way and would be delivered around 11/5. I had to argue with the customer service rep stating that the package was actually on it's way back to Walmart, not to me. After some time she put me on hold and after several minutes came back and said that I was right. She then told me that I would have to wait until the shipment was received back at Walmart before I could be credited and that I would have to reorder the items.
Really? I have to reorder something when Walmart never even notified me they were here, not an email or text message?
Now I'm sending the URL for this blog into customer service. Let's see if they are interested in making this right or not.
Funny, but I just got an email asking for my feedback on their customer service!
Abbey Bike Tools H.A.G.
- June
- 12
I put off buying a hangar alignment tool for some time. I guess I was convinced that I could eyeball the straightness of the derailleur without a tool most of the time. But my Opera seemed out of whack and was dropping the chain on the inside once in a while and I figured the time had come to make the investment in a proper tool for the job.
My first thought was to purchase the Park Tool DAG-2 which seemed reasonably priced. I've found most of the Park tools I own to be adequate for the task. But in searching the Internet for reviews I found there were other choices that might be better. You can research on your own if you wish but I finally settled on Abbey Bike Tools H.A.G. (Hangar Alignment Gauge).
The tool was considerably more than the Park tool but I appreciate quality tools and this one is no exception. It came in a plain cardboard box so it assumes you know how to use it. For a bike mechanic it's pretty simple to figure out.
The tool itself is pretty compact. It telescopes out so that you can use it on about any size frame and wheel. Even when the tool is completely extended there is very little play. The inner piece of cold rolled steel, while not honed like a hydraulic cylinder, has been turned to provide a fairly tight fit inside the outer aluminum tube.
On the hangar attachment end there is a piece of tubing with brass bushings to hold things tight. The handle is also cold rolled steel and is tig welded on. A set screw holds the handle piece in place.
The other end of the tool has an aluminum cap which screws on. The feeler gauge stows in the end of the tool nicely and is removed and inserted horizontally through the partially unscrewed end cap while in use. Tightening the end cap holds the feeler in position as you rotate the tool around the circumference of the wheel during the measurement phase.
I liked that the tool was very sturdy. It doesn't take much pressure to make corrections in the alignment, just a little hand pressure did the trick in every case. The whole job took about 20 minutes including removing and reinstalling the derailleur and making sure the shifting was okay afterwards.
I would recommend the Abbey Bike Tools H.A.G. for any serious bike mechanic. The quality of the tool is impressive. I'm sure it will eventually be an Old H.A.G.
Racedots
- June
- 5
I received my long-awaited racedots last week. While I haven't had a chance to try them in a race yet, here are my initial observations.
Mount external flash drive read-only on Mac OS X
- April
- 22
This post came about because of the hard time I had hunting down information on the topic. So I'm sharing what I've learned in the hope that others may be helped by it.
I own several Garmin GPS devices and notoriously I will have one dangling from my laptop and it will become unplugged accidentally without properly closing the filesystem and ejecting. I've had a few issues with file corruption on these devices and I decided to eliminate the possibility that these unintentional unplugging events had something to do with it.
I looked around on the net and there were a few utilities which claimed to be able to force read-only mounting of certain drives but I would rather not depend on a software program that has to watch for events like USB insertion in the kernel. It's just one more driver that needs to be upgraded when a new kernel comes out. So I settled on doing it the old-fashioned way.
The first step is to name your drive so you can identify it properly when it's inserted. If every drive you have comes up as "Untitled" it's not going to be easy to detect when a particular drive is on the system. My Garmin Edge 800 comes up as two drives, one named "GARMIN" and one named "NO NAME" which is the micro flash card. I always store my data on the main device leaving the micro flash card for maps only. I also have an Edge 500 which comes up with a single drive named "GARMIN." Recently I purchased the Garmin Virb Elite camera and put a 64 GB micro flash drive in it. It came up as "Untitled" initially but I simply renamed it to VIRB through the GUI and it is still detected properly by the Garmin software so all is well.
Next, you want to modify /etc/fstab as root. Be careful or you can mess up your boot drive and possible render your machine unbootable if you're not careful. But this is simply a text file that tells OS X what to do when a particular volume is mounted. My /etc/fstab was empty so I just added what I needed. One of the parameters you can specify for a mounted drive is whether it is read/write or read-only. That makes it easy to get the system to mount the drives the way we want.
Here is a copy of my fstab with the entries I had to add in. Note that there are tab characters between fields.
# Identifier, mount point, fs type, options
LABEL=GARMIN none msdos ro
LABEL=NO\040NAME none msdos ro
LABEL=VIRB none exfat ro
One thing to note is that the last entry's fs type is exfat. That's not documented anywhere I could find. I had to guess to find the right entry to put there. My Garmin VIRB Elite camera uses a flash card that is formatted EXFAT (64 bit FAT) so that there are no large file problems. The other two devices use normal 16 bit FAT so you use the 'msdos' file type.
Now when you plug in the device you should be able to see it mounting read-only via tha mount command. You'll see your other disk partitions in the output as well.
$ mount
/dev/disk1 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
localhost:/9A5XAFt6LFmeQe3kcbu0RD on /Volumes/MobileBackups (mtmfs, nosuid, read-only, nobrowse)
/dev/disk2s1 on /Volumes/VIRB (exfat, local, nodev, nosuid, read-only, noowners)
Notice the last line fir the Virb camera includes the read-only parameter.
Now this is all neat but what if you want to erase something on the camera or write a file? I normally purge the old activities and videos off and I upload courses to the Garmin Edge 800. That can be accomplished with a script. I wrote one script to set the devices read-write and one to set them back to read-only. That way I can run the script, write a file or erase something and then run the read-only script. There is one caveat though. The Mac GUI doesn't seem to get informed when you unmount and remount the filesystem read-write. So you can't use it to copy files. I just do it from the command line instead, no big deal.
Here is the garmin-rw script:
#!/bin/sh
# garmin-rw.sh
#
if [ -d /Volumes/GARMIN ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep GARMIN | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -uw -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/GARMIN
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/NO\ NAME ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "NO NAME" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -uw -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/NO\ NAME
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/VIRB ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "VIRB" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -uw -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/VIRB
fi
Here is the garmin-ro script:
#!/bin/sh
# garmin-ro.sh
#
if [ -d /Volumes/GARMIN ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep GARMIN | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -ur -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/GARMIN
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/NO\ NAME ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "NO NAME" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -ur -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/NO\ NAME
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/VIRB ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "VIRB" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo mount -ur -o nodev,nosuid $DISK /Volumes/VIRB
fi
For quicker ejecting I also wrote a shell script to eject the drives. Works much better than right clicking on the icon.
#!/bin/sh
# garmin-eject.sh
#
if [ -d /Volumes/GARMIN ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep GARMIN | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo umount $DISK
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/NO\ NAME ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "NO NAME" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo umount $DISK
fi
DISK=""
if [ -d /Volumes/VIRB ]; then
DISK=`mount | grep "VIRB" | awk '{ print $1 }'`
sudo umount $DISK
fi
For the record I am using Mac OS X 10.9.2. I am not sure of the existence of the exfat file system type in other versions.