One Fat Man » fatman

Hands down, best travel accessory

posterous — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 19:50:55 +0000

I travel a fair bit – spent roughly 170 days away from home so far this year. When I leave next week I'll top out at 187 or so. There's lots of great things to make travelling easier, but hands down what I think is the best thing to bring on the road… a power bar. Simple, I know. But these days with all our gadgets and gizmos we need to charge batteries all the time. Hotels often don't have a lot of plugs, so if you share with a roomate you battle for sockets.

In europe you put your adapter on your power bar and voila – you have six plugs for your devices. I can't tell you how many times having this around has been a bonus. I tuck in the the shoe side of my luggage and its pretty easy to pack.

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Off to the shredder with you… Anti-doping forms

posterous — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:59:10 +0000

Here's some other random stuff I found while cleaning up. Anti-doping forms from in-competition tests throughout the season. I piled these on the paper shredder for destruction. In theory, I should hang onto these for 1 more month. But I'm going to gamble and assume its OK to dispose of them now.

I think I witnessed more pee and blood test this year than any other year I've been involved in cycling – almost combined! That's a good thing. If anyone can guess how many Anti-doping tests we had in on the team in 2011, I'll give you a team jersey … but only if no one gets one from my previous post ;)

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If you can figure this out… I’ll give you a team jersey

posterous — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:37:31 +0000

I was cleaning up my office today and I found this. Its the race notes from Tro Bro Leon. That was a good day for the team, Will was 2nd, Bru was 6th and Lucas was in the break almost all day taking the KOM and Sprint classification. We'd pretty much had our heads kicked in all spring and then we had this amazing amazing race – winning almost everything. Biking is funny that way. It was a fantastic day.

Ryan Roth ended up in the team car that day and he took race notes – normally the mechanics job. Ryan did a great at note taking, but looking back I'm not sure I can make any sense of these notes. However, whenever I asked Ryan a question that day, he knew exactly what was going on.

If you can make sense of these notes I'll give you a brand new team jersey. Good luck!

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Dinner Juice

posterous — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:49:18 +0000

Here's what I had for dinner tonight:

1 apple
1 lemon
8 carrots
2 beets
10 pieces of celery
1/4 of a red onion
1 clove of garlic
Kale (a big handful)
Rapini (a big bunch)
1/2 of a cucumber
15 cranberries (roughly)

Wash it, chop it, juice it. Add salt and pepper to taste. It is actually quite thick and tastes kinda creamy. I have no idea how many calories are in this juice. It made about 850ml of juice. I shared it with Sheri, she had 1 glass, I had 2.5 glasses.

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Juice fasting is fun and expensive

posterous — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:38:28 +0000

I started a 2 week juice fast. It seemed like a neat thing to do for a few weeks before I have to travel again … I'll be in Switzerland where the UCI will tell me how to be a better Director from October 31-Nov 5. When I'm there I'm sure I won't be able to just eat, emmm drink, fresh juice. I'll probably be eating rosti, papet vaudois, muesli and fondue. Oh, and beer, I will drink a lot of beer.

Anyhow, I've kind of been easing into this juice fast thing. I haven't eaten much other than juice, smoothies and homemade soup for about 10 days. This week I went all-in, only juice and smoothies, only raw fresh food. Soup is cooked, and has a ton of legumes in it. I feel great, my taste buds are changing, I've haven't been drinking beer, eating junk, etc. I do want to do some juice fast myth busting though.

Juice fasting is not cheap, it is crazy expensive.

I'm mostly using organic fruit and veggies, but we have a coop where that produce really isn't more expensive than normal grocery store produce… but, in Ottawa anyway, produce is expensive. Especially when you use this much.

It is hard to store the amount of produce you need to have on hand. For example, this is how much I needed for my breakfast juice:

4 cups of red grapes
4 green apples
a bit of ginger root
6 carrots
4 oranges
a handful of swiss chard
about 5 handfuls of Kale

For a more savoury lunch or dinner juice I might do this (its kind of like a home made V8 juice):

4-5 carrots
3-4 large tomatoes
Kale
Parsley
clove of garlic
a quarter red onion
1-2 beats
5-6 pieces of celery
1 apple
a quarter red cabbage
some lettuce
Salt and pepper, maybe some tabasco sauce to taste

The whole lot takes up way more space than you would ever have in a normal fridge's crisper drawers. On hand I try to have:

6 cucumbers
24 apples
24 oranges
12 grapefruits
12 lemons
4 big bunches of kale
4-6 other bunches of leafy greans (lettuce, brocoli leaf, parsley, chard etc)
1lb of baby spinach
2 bags of carrots
1 bag of beats
12 tomatoes + 2 mini boxes of cherry tomatoes
2 bags of celery
a few melons of some kind
4-6 Mangos
2 bunches of bananas

It makes an enormous amount of compost. It only seems to last for 3 days – or less for some things you want to use all the timeq2. I'm going to try to make V8 juice from scratch. Other than the hassle of paying for it, and storing it somewhere, it isn't too hard to do. The prep, juicing and clean up time are easy and fun – believe it or not. For clean up if you just do it immediately only rinsing with water is needed. I've lost 7 pounds – about 1lb a day – and I'm not really doing much exercise. Although I wanted to, and I should be running daily – one step at a time.

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My super amazing green smoothy recipe

posterous — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:46:48 +0000

I may have just made the best green smoothy of my life. It tasted fantastic. Here's the recipe (or best I can remember it):

2 lemons
6-8 apples
a bit of fresh ginger root
Swiss chard (about 6 leafs)
baby spinach (about 4 handfuls, maybe more)
two bananas
2-3 cups of water

In a really good juicer, juice up your apples, lemon and ginger. Once you have your juice done, pour it into your blender (use a really good industrial blender), add bananas, spinach and chard. Blend, add water as needed – to make a consistency you like. Enjoy.

The ginger and lemon add a tart and spiciness, the greens provide nutrients galore, the whole thing tastes really fresh. I have no idea how many calories are in this smoothy, nor how many micro nutrients… but I think its not so high in calories, and loaded with nutrients.

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Why we shouldn’t wear bike helmets

posterous — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 06:02:18 +0000

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Absolutely hilarious

posterous — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:33:51 +0000

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The Chelsea life

fatman — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 21:12:50 +0000

This is why I love living where I live. I can walk across the street and do this, all these photos are within 2.5km of the house:

sheri and dot

Beaver pond

Me waiting for Sheri

tracks

skiing across beaver ponds

Sheri and Dot

Dot runs in the snow

Sheri struggles up a hill

Another view of a beaver pond

Sheri skiing

Dot running in the snow

Another beaver pond

Trail run with Mike, Sheri & Dot

posterous — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 22:25:54 +0000

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Had a great little trail run with Mike, Sheri and Dot today. It was actually my best run this fall. I felt good, ran the longest and looking at the geeky data it also looks like I had my best average moving speed. That said, I’m not about to break any world records. It was nice to feel comfortable and fluid again. Its icy out there, and we still have a lot of water from the rain earlier this week. It gets cold when you get a soaker and it is -7C outside.

I don’t think there will be much more running this year… it is snowing right now, and we definitely have more snow at the higher altitudes… as soon as you get over 200m there is much much more snow than back down at 149m. Whodathunkit would be that big a difference? I’ll probably be skiing next weekend.

Here’s the Garmin Connect map & file of today’s run.

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What would you get? iPad or a new MacBook Air

posterous — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:44:43 +0000

It must have been the altitude

posterous — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 02:48:42 +0000

I've been running a lot lately. Thursday I dashed out for a run and suffered. At first I thought it had to be the altitude – I went on a route that takes me much much higher than normal. Then I got home and mapped it using Garming Connect… uhmmm max altitude was only 224m. Darn, wasn't the altitude, must have been that lack of fitness thing instead …

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The crisis of capitalism

posterous — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 20:22:19 +0000

We’re building kitsch stage sets

posterous — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:52:17 +0000

I just watched the movie Objectified. It was really good. At one point in it, Karim Rashid says this:

"We have advanced technologically so far, and yet somehow its almost some sort of paranoia where we're afraid to really say "we live in the 3rd technological revolution". I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop but then somehow I end up going home and sitting on wood spindle whittengail like chairs. So, in a way you could argue that we are building these sort of really kitsch stage sets that have absolutely nothing to do with the age we live in. Its strange, I find it really perverse in some way. "

Me too.

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How many shoes do two people actually need?

posterous — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 23:39:18 +0000

I've recently tidied up some closets and shoe storage at the house. We can now fit 18 pairs of shoes in the front entryway closet and another 56 pairs of shoes downstairs on a shoe shelf. But this made me wonder… do two people really need 74 pairs of shoes – or to be fair footwear? Is that a bit excessive? Even if you consider:

Regular shoes from casual to formal
Running shoes, trail running shoes
Hiking shoes – for dog walking + and of course hiking
Water shoes – for well, water sport stuff like jumping off cliffs
Rubber boots or wellies for mucking about
Winter boots
Snow shoe boots
Steel toe work boots
XC ski boots for classic and skate skiing
Skates – for hockey and speed skating
Alpine ski boots – and maybe alpine touring ski boots
Cycling shoes… oh boy oh boy are their some cycling shoes for road, cross and mtb (and no, apparently MTB and CX are not the same kind of shoes)

Maybe I should build a shoe shed? Anyhow, as much as I'd like to get rid of a bunch of cycling shoes I can only find one pair that we can actually part with. If anyone wants a pair of Time road shoes size 41 – the red and yellow ones from around 2001/2002 let me know. They have speedplay cleats on them right now, you can have those too. They're in good shape – make me an offer.

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I’d love to see a cross over show …

posterous — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:18:31 +0000

from some ecards

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Fixing Velonews for the Tour

posterous — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:41:59 +0000

It is Tour time and I have to get my bike fix all over the internet. Which means I have to go to Velonews on and off. VeloNews used to be my favourite bike site, but they've gone through two redesigns since their acquisition by Competitor. Each one I've felt degraded the site… visually, technically and most importantly from an editorial viewpoint. I've found this all really sad– end sidetrack.

One thing they've done with their site that I've found both innovative and incredibly distracting and annoying (at the same time) is put up large format background images ads. (see the picts). But these ads are too big. They push the page dimensions out too wide for a reasonable display width (1600px) and end up making the site look broken. In an effort to fit it in, they've also made it too close to the margins of the main body content – making it hard to read the site.

I was finding it so difficult to look at the site and read it that I had to do something. I don't know how to 'hack' their webserver, so I had to do something a bit more personal. Enter Greasemonkey and Stylish. I fired up my Firefox browser and clicked on the 'Add ons' area, ' Go get more Ad ons' and did a search for 'stylish'. Stylish is a plugin or add-on for Firefox that lets you write your own custom styles for websites. Normally I just use it to make Government of Canada websites more bearable to look at when I'm working on a project there. This is the first time I've had to use it on a commercial site. But it made all the difference. I just added a simple custom style sheet for Velonews:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document domain("velonews.competitor.com") {

body {background: url(xxx.gif) no-repeat #fff !important;

}}

And voila – no more annoying distracting background ad.

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Exciting sprint shows tactical versatility?

posterous — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:15:41 +0000

Wow, today's Tour de France sprint finish in Montargis was exciting. What a sprint. What made it most interesting to me was watching how the teams played the finish and then wondering … after the outcome, if Columbia-HTC rode the way they did intentionally? Big bike teams these days have become known for developing 'systems' and then following their formula over and over. If it works, why change it?

Columbia-HTC has one of the best finishing 'systems'. They control the front with perfection and deliver their finisher to the line. Mostly we think of that being Cavendish – like today. But it could be Greipel or in the past Ciolek, Henderson and maybe in the near future Howard. They've hardly shown a chink or deviation in this system over the last few years. They are the winningest pro bike team by a big margin over this time.

But today was totally different. It looked like it was all going to plan. Perfect Columbia riding. Then with 2km to go Renshaw and Cav dropped back and Eisel was isolated on the front. Eisel looked confused a bit, but quickly put his head back down and drilled it. Cav actually looked a bit in trouble, he was back in the shit fight and was getting bounced around quite a bit. Then Garmin went over Bernie and looked to be in perfect position, and they were actually – 4 guys, unbroken in firm control with 1km to go. They had it in control until the sprint opened up with about 300m to go. Then out of no where Cav shoots out from 8-10 places back and won the race.

At first look you'd think Cav won by skill and a bit of luck. After all his finishing system looked broke. But on second thought, you might think that Columbia has controlled 2 sprints this tour perfectly and Petachi has taken advantage of their system to win. Maybe they switched up on purpose? If so it would be brilliant, but risky.

I've always thought the best strategies in biking are based on versatility. You need to be able to win with different players in different ways… that way you can keep your opponents off guard. A little bit of confusion can be a powerful thing in biking, and versatility gives you that. By contrast the way Columbia usually rides gives them another key advantage – intimidation. When you can have unbroken control of the front it can be very very intimidating. Sometimes in biking we call 'intimidation' the extra team mate.

But imagine, if Columbia chose to ride the way they did today. Their choice would have been balancing the risks of trading off 'intimidation' versus 'confusion'. They've also seen in this Tour that Petachi is really strong, and can maybe hold his speed a bit more than Cav. If they realized this and intentionally chose to opt for 'confusion' in their finishing system it would be brilliant! If you look more closely at the finish I'd maybe think that might be exactly what they did.

After all, they made sure to keep Renshaw with Cav when they let themselves get broken apart… having Bernie continue to drill it on the front kept Cav and Renshaw reasonably safe 8-10 places back – albeit they were definitely in a shit fight back there. Columbia looking a bit broken would have definitely confused the other teams, but in the split second decision making of a sprint finish there is only one choice to make – "we must move forward and control now" – and that is exactly what Garmin did, and they did it perfectly. What this allowed Cav to do was be in better position to mark Petachi. Petachi is a deisel sprinter and Cav is more punchy – his sprint is faster but a bit shorter (maybe). Renshaw did a great job moving Cav through the shit fight and Cav was able to hit out from the wheels a bit closer to the line – where he knew he was able to go faster than anyone else.

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My notes from US National championship crit in Bend Oregon

posterous — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 01:24:20 +0000

46 laps total Lap/lap to go

1/45 grm solo
2/44 compacto
3/43 3 away grm 5s our guys on frnt 4/42 1 away grm 5/41 compacto 1:42 lap times 6/40 compacto
7 3 away grm ben surging to control tempo

8/38 compacto
9/37 compacto 10/36 compacto
11/35 missed it
12/34 bissell solo 5s (cody)
13/33 bissel 3 guys bunch ben controling
14/32 bissel gavin chasing
15/31 3 away gav in it 5s 16/30 3 in brk bunch splinters 17/29 compacto 18/28 1 away bhatti
19/27 1 bhatti 1 giant bunch 10s
20/26 1 bhatti giant fades 21/25 1 bhatti 20s on bunch 3 chasing 22/24 1 bhati 10s ben controlling
23/23 missed it / halfway in 24/22 bhati solo 5s
25/21 bhati solo 5s
To go 20 3 away ben joins bhati 19 compacto 18 sm brk of 3 we have 1 (charlie) 17 6 away charlie in it
16. Brk ending, perfect-boys setting up counter
15 compacto 14 ben + bissell attacking
13 ben + bissell sm gap
12 coming back together
11 compacto
10 iggy away grm guy 3 total justin countering 9. We’re a bit f*ked 6 and no one
8 we have 2 in 8 justin + iggy
7 bhati solo
6 nate covering move bhati solo 3s front disorganized
5 2 in 8 nate and charlie 5s
4 coming back togethr. crash (poor bhati guy who was super strong)
3 ben + 1 guy 5s. Iggy a bit too back. Justin perfect 2 ben + 1 10s 1 ben + 1 10s. Bike reg chasing. Guys need to control corners Finish: ben gets the win. Looks like justin won bunch. Notes

Gavin got 5th (we think). Justin 3rd. Guys executed well, but race was very hard to control. 1st, 3rd and 5th is a very good day.
Sent from my BlueBerry

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Runaround

posterous — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:07:35 +0000

Yesterday I finished my bench. Today I went for a dog walk with Sheri, Dot and Rigby–then a runaround the house. Beautiful day here. Wish I had a beer, but I drank my last one last night. I might take a nap now.

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