nickcoyne.com

Don’t know the original source of this, but anyway…

There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world, however since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the population reference bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say, that for every Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000 of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purpose of our calculations). We are talking about 1.25 km per household, a total of 120.8 million km, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 1040 km per second……..3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 43.8 km per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 25 km per hour.

The pay load of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium Lego set (1 kg), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 140 kg, even granting that the “flying” reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them……Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth 2 (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons travelling at 1040 km per second creates enormous air resistance….this would heat up the lead reindeer in the same fashion as a space shuttle re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 1040 km/s in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 G’s. A 115 kg Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 2,012,500 kg of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

Its now been just over 3 months since I started training again, and my fitness has made a steady improvement since I decided to enter Cape Epic. Starting with a CTL of only 14 on 4 July, it has now climbed all the way to 83. I haven’t raced the Spring League season this year, and its helped a lot with planning a steady progression in my training load.

This chart shows my steady increase in TSS load per week. My last week hit a new high of 780TSS. This coming week will slack off a bit, then I’ll pick it up again, aiming to level out at around 700-800TSS per week until I have the time to give it a bit of a kick. That’ll probably start around the middle/end of December.

The result of the steady increase in load is this. A nice progression in CTL…

The blue line is CTL. Yellow line is TSB (training-stress balance). TSB is at a new low, so I’ll take today off, and either a short ride or another day off tomorrow.

My training rides have focussed on L3/L4 work, and while my threshold power is still down from where it was last year, I’m finding I can ride at high L3 for long periods. On yesterday’s 140km Double Century training ride, I managed a 20min L4 interval three and a half hours into our ride. Comparing my numbers to my bests, for the range around 30min duration, I’m only about 10w down. The gap widens on shorter durations, probably because of the lack of racing, and the gap is wider, but not too bad, for longer durations. For now I’ll continue to focus on L3/L4 work and in December I’ll start with L5 work in preparation for summer racing.

I’m very happy with how smoothly things have gone so far. Hopefully illness and work interruptions stay clear so that the trend can continue.

Finished my new bike build up (for now). New parts are
* Thomson Masterpiece seatpost to replace the USE Carbon. A little lighter, but more importantly a lot stronger.
* XTR cranks to replace the well worn XT cranks. A bit of a weight-saving, as well as making he bike look a lot nicer. Those XT cranks clashed a bit. They’ll move on to my Kona commuter bike project which I’ll hopefully build up this weekend.
* Eggbeater pedals are back on. I’ve installed the short-length Ti spindles. The main problem I’ve had with Eggbeaters is that the spindles are too long. These new spindles solve that problem, as well as losing some weight with the Ti versions

Total bike weight as you see it in the pic, is now 10.6kg. Future upgrade possibilities are:
* Hope blue seatpost collar
* Hope blue quick-releases
* KCNC blue pulley wheels
* KCNC SC Bone handlebars
* maybe a new saddle

More pics at http://picasaweb.google.com/nic.coyne/GiantAnthemX

See how you align with the candidates on the issues that matter to you, and choose the right candidate.

http://glassbooth.org/

http://www.superhumanmag.com/content/view/954/92/

My new Giant Anthem X1 arrived last week, so we got all the bits transferred from the Zen across to the new bike. With my American Classic wheels on she weighs in at 10.7kg, which is almost 400g lighter than the Zen.

All the Giant’s bits got moved to the Zen, which is now Nicole’s bike.

Nope, I’m not dead. Nor have I moved, been kidnapped by aliens or fallen into a long, deep sleep. No excuses, this blog has just been neglected and forgotten.

In the next few weeks I’ll be upgrading WordPress, creating a new design, and starting to post again.

Most posts will likely focus around my training for next year’s Cape Epic.