No Cricket

I was all excited to go see my first Cricket match up at the Rose Bowl today, but alas the weather didn't cooperate. It was chucking down all morning and eventually the match was called. I guess I'll just have to wait a while more for my first Cricket experience.

Let the Countdown Begin

Important news for those who haven't heard it, Jill's application has finally posted to the UK home office, so we're now in a 5-14 week hold until her visa comes through. Check Jill's blog for (sporadic) updates.

My First Century (Metric)

I know it's been a while since I posted and many things have happened in that time (a visit from Jill, a product released). I'll get around to posting about those later this week hopefully, but before I do I want to talk about a pretty major milestone for me.

Coming up in June, a number of members of the SpringSource team are going to be entering the Test Valley Tour When I signed up, I noticed that you actually chose the 50km/100km or the 150km versions. I registered for the first which meant that I could chose on the day of how far I really wanted to go. With all of the Sunday rides that I've done, I'd never made it beyond 50km before, so I sort of assumed that would be what I rode.

Rewind to last weekend. Adrian was spending time with his kids, so Rob and I went on our Sunday ride alone and we wanted to head down to Gosport. I was designated as navigator and to put it bluntly, I seriously messed it up. After an hour, we'd gone 13 miles and we're only 5 miles from where we started. Clearly not a good ride. We aborted and slowly made our way home.

Over the last week, Rob and Adrian were in San Francisco (trying to dodge disease). During that time, I tried to redeem myself and do some better cycle route planning. Everyday last week I went on a lunch ride that eventually stretched to a full hour 25km ride including a loop around Hursley Park, IBM's UK research facility.


I felt confident enough that I could now pick the proper road types on a map that I rerouted the previous trip to Gosport and was all ready to try it this weekend. Rob thought he might be able to make the ride today (he got in Saturday afternoon), but when he hadn't called by 11.00 I decided that I was going to go without him. After a bit more putzing around, I finally made it out the door around noon. Now this is important for later, as it means I ate breakfast at 8am and departed without lunch.


I'll say now, that the ride was awesome. It was warm and sunny the whole way and I don't think I really ever broke a full sweat. Hills in the beginning and flat as I approached the coast. Once I got to the coast, I saw hundreds (and not small hundreds, like 500 hundred or more!) sail boats all out on the Solent. This was the first warm weekend this year and you could tell. You could nearly walk from Gosport to the Isle of Wight without getting wet there were so many boats out. At one point traffic stopped because the public boat launch was jammed with 20 trailers of Lasers trying to put in. The beaches were packed and as I rode along the parade (think the boardwalk in Ft. Lauderdale) I even got to flirt with 4 girls wearing bikinis in a car for a while. Needless to say, it was an amazing ride.

My one mistake came as I was nearing the end of my journey. I'd just passed the 60km mark of a 72km planned distance and thought to myself 'What's another 28km, when I've come this far?' I do have to say that I was pretty sure that Rob hadn't done a 100km ride yet and that played into my decision making process. So at my 2nd hour stop I finished the little food that I'd brought with me and downed another swig of water and set out on my way. The final 28km were a nightmare.

I'd finished the one granola bar that I'd brought with me at 60km. I finished my water supply at 75km (hey, I thought I'd only be out for 72km!) but I couldn't quit. As the afternoon wore on, I started getting thirstier and thirstier. Then at about 80km I bonked. But still I kept going. I kept telling myself that I'd hate it if I'd come this far and missed my distance. Clearly though, I wasn't thinking straight through the dehydration and glycogen depletion.

The story does end well though and after a longish detour based on my evening 20km rides from the house and a couple of laps between my house and Sally and Rob's I hit 100km, my first century (metric, as I think it typically means 100 miles). I arrived home at 16.00 having eaten only a granola bar during the preceding 8 hours (I actually had to sit on the stairwell to gather enough coordination to get to my flat).



Now this is pretty important because it shows that even in a bad situation I can do 100km and it means that I'll be doing it at the Test Valley Tour. This was a relatively flat 100km (I think I did 572m of ascent and I'll need about 1000m) but it's a great start for training. All in all this was a great ending to a week that saw me breaking all sorts of personal records. 309.19km total distance, 11:27:55 in the saddle, 2214.9m of ascent, and 12,224 calories burned. Not too shabby I say.



P.S. As I was doing the screenshots and research for this post I noticed that at 12,782.3m of ascent I've climbed the height of Mount Everest (8,848m) nearly one and a half times on my bike! I wonder if I could have actually done the climb on foot ;)

An inauspicious start

After much negotiation (and an agreement to get an automatic Volvo), Jill let me get a road bike! It took me about a week to decide on what I wanted and how to outfit it, but in the end I got a Focus Variado. Much to Rob's chagrin, I actually ordered a bike online without ever having test-ridden it. But from my perspective, my lack of experience wasn't going to tell me anything in a 10 minute test-ride anyway. So late last week it was finally delivered.


It's a beautiful bike, but boy have things changed since I last rode a bike like this. Can someone tell me where the gear leavers are?!


And of course, I had to get my mascots on the bike ASAP to make sure that I was going as fast as I possibly could.


I excitedly bolted on the clipless pedals (you know, the kind you clip into...) and went on a shakedown ride on Friday evening. A nice relaxed 10K and everything seemed to work nicely.

Fast forward to this morning, my first long ride on the road bike and Adrian has a special route all lined up for the christening. We start the ride at Rob's house and I make it about 500 meters before falling over in the middle of the road. As you'd expect I was caught out by the pedals. We pulled up to an intersection and I unclipped my left foot... and promptly fell over to the right. Do'h! I was a little embarrassed but totally unhurt. I bounced back up ready to ride on. As we started back off, I felt a little out of sorts. I was working really really hard to keep up on the flat parts and Rob and Adrian would drop me on the hills in about 30 seconds. My heart rate was racing and I was sweating buckets. They on the other hand weren't even breathing hard. At first I thought my heart was just racing after the adrenaline of the fall, but we went further and further and I just couldn't catch my breath. In the end, I felt like I just wasn't going to make it 70K or 80K and aborted the ride thinking that I was coming down with something. You can see on the telemetry from that my average speed was a paltry 16.9kph which is slower than what I typically ride on the uphill bit to work with my Hybrid bike.


You can also see that even on the flat parts of the trip my heart was redlined just trying to keep up.


Even as hard as I was working it took a full hour to do just 17km. Needless to say, I was exhausted. But as I arrive home and dismounted, I noticed something odd. I tried to roll the bike without me on it and the front wheel wouldn't roll. I did a little examining and noticed that the front brake was heavily out of alignment and holding the wheel. 10 seconds of fiddling and everything rolled perfectly. It hit me then, that my problem was that I'd essentially been riding with the brakes on the whole time.

I still felt pretty bad after the exertion of the ride, so I took it easy for the rest of the day and did some light cleaning and such. But as the weather came and went and the sun got lower in the sky, the fact that I didn't complete my first ride really gnawed at me. I wondered if it'd actually been the brake or if I'd just overestimated how much better the road bike would be. So I did the only thing I could do. I strapped on my shoes and took the bike back out to run the same route I did in the morning. Lo and behold, an average speed of 27.5kph which is 5kph faster than my return home on the hybrid (which has a long stretch over 45kph in it).


Even better was that my heart rate modulated with the speed and gradient and this time I rode 20km in 43 minutes!


So in the end, it wasn't me and it wasn't really the bike either. This thing is just as fast as I dreamed it would be and I can't wait to get out on the road again next Sunday. Here's hoping no more falls.

What Global Warming?

I caught some flack over my last post about the snow in Southampton. Apparently those who get snow didn't think what I had was really anything to talk about. Well how about this for April? This was the view out my balcony this morning and needless to say I didn't go riding.

Some sort of milestone

Since I don't have a car here in the UK yet, I do a lot of cycling simply going to work and back. The route is about 12km to 15km depending on which way I travel. When you ride four or five days a week that really starts to add up both in distance and wear and tear on your body and bike. During the last week in fact, my bike has developed a problem where I can't really stop pedaling while riding. Apparently this is a good thing (or so Adrian tells me) as it teaches you good pedaling discipline. I'm not so sure I buy into this, so I'm taking my bike into the shop to get it fixed and cleaned.

In commemoration of this display of poor maintenance I looked back over my riding so far. Using my Garmin Edge GPS and Ascent, I've determined that this week I passed the 1000km mark. I've also climbed over 8000m on my bike as well. It's amazing how something like that sneaks up on you. And while the weather has been pretty cold and rainy this week, I'm glad that I'm still on my bike. In fact now, I don't even want a car because I know it'll be a matter of time before I become lazy and drive every day.

Since I seem to be starting to exercise in public, I'm joining a number others in the office and entering the Test Valley Tour. The tour (which is just a collection of road and off-road cycling excursions) is set up with a couple of different distances depending on what you're comfortable riding. Most of us will be riding the 50km route, but if Jill lets me get a road bike, I'd love to try the 100km route that Rob and Adrian are riding.

Weather

One of the first things that stuck out at me when I moved here was how cold it was. Now, most Britons will tell you that the weather in Southampton is mild and generally very warm. But compared to Florida, pretty much everywhere is cold. In fact many mornings in February I actually cycled to work while it was below freezing. Here are a couple of pictures of the glass enclosure on my balcony during those days. It's been a long time since I've seen this kind of thing in Florida.


This was in early February and I can deal with that. It's the dead of winter and by the time the sun hit the glass, the ice would be gone. But today was a whole different story. Here it is the end of March and it snowed!. I was sitting in my room doing some work and I noticed a racket in the living room. I walked out and noticed that some sort of precipitation was hitting the windows. Not really understanding what was going on, I walked out on the balcony and noticed that it was snow.




There was no snow predicted for today, but apparently there is for the rest of the weekend.


I wonder if I'm going to be able to take this place next winter.