SRM, for its clever and entirely unanticipated inclusion of a solar panel on its power meter crankset. They say it significantly extends battery life of the power measuring unit.
I really have no use for a power meter, much less one that costs $3000, but I just love this. As my friend said the other day “this green stuff- it’s happening!”
Wish I had a picture. It looks really cool.Updated with picture. Nice.
WordPress has a plug-in called Snap that shows previews of links when you hover over them. The plug-in also has advertising “related search” links. Noting that I am not a cancer patient, nor have I ever written about cancer, cancer treatments or medical research or treatments of any kind, here’s what Snap thought were relevant links to my blog:
Ok, I don’t know how “Vital Statistics” fits the picture either. The post was about Garmin, so that one makes sense. That still leaves Amgen. There’s definitely no connection except that Amgen makes EPO, much favored among cyclists who swear they are clean until their “B” sample results come back.
Sad. Really it is.
Garmin recently announced the newest version of its bike computers (I love Interbike season!). I like my Edge 305 a lot. It’s a nice device that is 
sophisticated, but reasonably easy to figure out. It also plays well with my Mac, MotionBased and TrainingPeaks.
But . . . the new versions have. color. screens. Sure looks pretty.
And real maps- that beats the arrow at the top of the bread-crumb trail that’s all I’ve managed to get out of my 305. Guess I’ve never figured out how to export courses to the device- or I’ve never seen the point of downloading a course when I might deviate
from the route I rode last time.
The real nifty trick is power data, though. Pretty amazing to get HR, power data, GPS and street maps all in one device. Gadget-geek that I am I’m pretty excited to check this out, though at risk of sounding like a ridiculous fanboy I will say that the battery life on my Edge is slightly better than piss-poor. I’m worried I’ll have to set one of those bottle-dynamo things against my tire to get any kind of battery life out of a version with more features.
I’ve made an experiment this year of trying to get as much of my exercise as possible in early in the mornings. The general idea is to be
up at 5:45AM and on my bike or the yoga mat by 6. I need pretty close to 8 hours of sleep per night, so this means I really need to be asleep by 9:45.
I thought this would be hard, but doable. My kids go to sleep a little after 8PM, so closing down my day and getting into bed by 9:30 is challenging and not possible 100% of the time, but it is doable.
The problem goes deeper, though. I’ve realized that my body just doesn’t want to go to sleep then and I end up lying awake. Sometime between 10-10:30 seems to be my natural “go to sleep” time.
This is inconvenient. I’m well short on hours in the day to accomplish everything I need to, and spend enough time at work, with my family and working out. Fitting in a decent chunk of time for exercise is much harder to do any other time of the day.
Still, I know people who have managed to reconfigure their sleep schedules- people who work “market hours” on the west coast for example, have to be at work before 5AM. Do they manage because they like the job, or are their bodies just more amenable to that sleep routine?
High-zoot carbon fiber wonder racing bikes are a dime a dozen. A beautiful commuter, on the other hand, has a sense of style and profligacy that no racer can match. Between this and the Kona I posted about last week I don’t know which one I’d rather do errands on. The front basket would definitely work better for bringing home take-out sushi, but the rear carrier is obviously much the better choice for heavy bags of kitty litter. And unless both bikes come with armed guards there’s no way you’d see me locking them up anywhere in San Francisco.
I’ve struggled to find time for regular yoga lately, so I was really pleased to make it to class the other day, and more so and how good I felt.
Pigeon is one of my favorite poses. My hips can definitely use opening, and that pose makes it really easy to let gravity do the work. I was feeling great because I got lower into the position than I ever have before. I had my chest resting on my front foot just like in the picture to the left- or so I thought.
Turns out I was cheating. Apparently it only counts if both hips are flat on the ground. Mine wasn’t, and a brief moment of being pleased with myself came to a sudden end. <sigh>
From the Wall Street Journal:
Amgen plans to cut staff by up to 14%, slash capital expenses by $1.9 billion and close some production facilities in an effort to offset sinking sales of anemia drug Aranesp.
Heh.
I’ve seen Xtracycles around town a bunch, though they’ve always looked a little kludgy to me. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for a bike that is going to see hard use, but I still wondered what a custom-built version would look like. I seem to remember Surly demo-ing one at Interbike, and now it looks like Kona is actually going to sell a version.
I like it. A lot. The Xtracycle panniers look nicer, though.
The penalty system for people caught doping focuses on the results: someone takes drugs, tests positive and gets punished. I’m all for paying the price for one’s actions. At the same time, VeloNews has an insightful piece about what drives some people to take drugs in the first place- i.e. when faced with the same competitive pressures why does one person turn to drugs while another doesn’t?
According to the author, a competitive bike racer/psychology major/ER physician/DMV Advisory Board drunk-driver oversight panel member, mental health issues may have a lot to do with it, and in fact there is a correlation between performance-enhancing drug use, recreational drug use and mental health problems.
It’s a fascinating thought, though I wonder where it leads. Should mental health screening be part of the athlete profile that teams like CSC, T-Mobile and Slipstream are using? If so, should any “abnormalities” be considered a predisposition to dope?
Hard questions. Physiological profiling sounds invasive enough; mental health screening seems over-the-top. On the other hand, if it could help level the playing field and possibly even prevent someone like a Frank Vandenbroucke from hurting himself, maybe it would be worth it. I’m not sure I buy it, but maybe.
I read two insightful articles recently on ideas to address the pernicious problem of drugs in cycling.
Joe Lindsey, a writer at Bicycling, penned a response on the Freakonomics blog to the question of “why not just legalize it?” Joe points out that different drugs are approved for different uses (i.e. human/nonhuman) in different countries, so the definition of “legal” isn’t totally clear. Essentially the “legalize it” approach just moves the line in the sand, but doesn’t get rid of it.
If that’s the case, a friend of Fat Cyclist offers another idea, which boils down to a comprehensive physiological “baseline” monitoring system of all cyclists from an early age, combined with reducing the severity of penalties. I think the idea is that in combination, these procedures would give authorities an individualized picture of each athlete. Testing would be sensitive to each individual rather than based on group averages. Better knowledge allows for more accurate positives, and shorter, more frequent(?) suspensions are sufficiently disruptive to discourage doping without turning into drawn-out legal battles.
That’s the theory, anyway. I wonder if the former idea is feasible. Anyone who came in to the sport late- Katie Compton for example- would have no background data and would be something of a maverick- harder to test with the same degree of accuracy. On a larger scale, the plan would require extensive national testing programs. Countries that couldn’t afford that would be at an even greater disadvantage than they currently are.
The latter idea has some appealing aspects. Athlete drug-sanctioning procedures need to be short-fused. The athletes themselves have only a few years to be highly competitive. If they are facing a two year (or more) ban regardless, it may seem worthwhile to spend the time fighting their sanction in the hope of getting it reduced. Regular two week suspensions would merely put them out of action- and out of the sponsor/team’s good graces. Do it enough, and especially with the background data on your physiological profile, and you’ll be out of a job pretty soon.
I note that this still allows athletes to step right to the line (of testing positive) and get dinged only if they step over. This seems to say that the race is to find better masking agents- essentially the same situation as today. I guess that’s what the physiological baselines are for, and without them it seems like the only advantage is to avoid Floyd Landis/Tyler Hamilton-style epic legal battles.
In the end, I guess I’m not convinced that the profiling is feasible, and without it the sanctions seem to nibble at a corner of the problem without taking even a full bite out.
