Some pics up at http://picasaweb.google.com/nic.coyne/Scotland2008. Hopefully I’ll do a bit of a writeup soon.

I’ve been rather quiet - work has been pretty busy, and I’ve been trying to do a lot of riding.

League races have gone relatively well, with Paul grabbing one win, and both Paul and myself with the front group over most of the climbs. We rode Sani2C together and managed 20th overall. We’re pretty chuffed with that, since neither of us are at peak fitness. In fact Paul was giving me a push up some of the climbs on the last day. Sani2C has by far the most spectacular course of any mountain bike race in South Africa. There was soooo much single-track. And mostly nice fast, flowing, non-technical stuff, which was a lot of fun.

Yesterday was funride world champs, and the VA group had a very smooth (and crash-free) ride to come in around 2:47. Not the fastest time, but I’m not complaining. I managed to sneak in with 17th place in the very long sprint.

Cycling will take a bit of a back seat now as I try to prepare for the 7-day hike we’re doing in Scotland in early April. The average day is over 20km, and I’m carrying the tent and everything. Looking forward to it!

Saw a thread on the wattage forum with everyone sharing their annual totals, so I worked mine out too…

Min CTL: 40 (after a week overseas, and being rather busy for the week before that)
Max CTL: 85 (just the other day, and increasing )
Total TSS: 25,954
Total Kj: 266,504
Total Time: 430 hrs
Ave IF: 0.774

Very nice to see my CTL high for the year coming right at the end. I’m putting in a lot of training at the moment to try and lift it to ~100TSS before Sani2C at the end of Feb. I know work is likely to get in the way at some point before then, so I’ll need to take it up to 110TSS if I can, to give me some room to lose CTL to the interruptions. Last time I was up at those levels was before the 2004 Cape Epic, and if I can race Sani2C the way I raced that Epic I’ll be very happy.

We rode another Double Century yesterday, and managed to come in just inside 6 hours. 5:58 I think. My first time under 6 hours, after hitting 6:00 exactly in 2005.

It was a great team effort with 9 of our 10 starters finishing together. The only person to miss out was Frank who had an unfortunate incident involving a musette and his front wheel. Said musette stopped Frank’s front wheel from rotating causing Frank to go flying over the bars. Fortunately Frank wasn’t hurt, but his wheel lost a spoke and our support vehicle was not around to give him a replacement.

Comparing numbers with last year’s race, it seems I went harder despite being less fit. I certainly felt better after last year’s race. This year everybody was completely knackered, apart from Paul who looked like he was ready for another lap.

Still awaiting the results on the PPA site. Hopefully we made the top 10

Another great race today with Garron taking his first win to notch up 4 in a row for Team Vineyard BikeMaxPower.

I’ve been off the bike for 10 days, so I sat in as much as I could to save my legs. We were quite a big bunch going over Hels with Paul setting a very manageable tempo. About 15k’s from the end Team BMP still had 5 riders so we started attacking. First Peter, then Andreas, then Paul. Paul was marked very closely by Shaun and John, so we started again - Peter, Andreas, Paul. Nothing looked like it would stick, but we were tiring out the main sprint contenders while we still had Garron sitting comfortably in the bunch.

About 3k’s out I got away with Alister Arenson on the rise up to Paarl Main Rd. Surprisingly we got a good gap, but my lack of riding in the last few weeks saw me not recovering from the initial attack effort, and Alister did 75% of the work. When it came to crunch time, the final k, my legs were toast, and we were swallowed up with 50m to the line. My disappointment quickly changed though when I saw it was Garron flying past ahead of Shaun, taking a well-deserved win!

And that wraps up a great spring League campaign. 4 wins and 3rd overall for Paul.

I bought a new MacBook Pro a few weeks ago to replace my ageing Dell Precision M60. I’m not missing Windows at all, but there are two apps that don’t have Mac versions, which I use almost daily. Those are Quickbooks and CyclingPeaks.

The solution is to install VMWare Fusion, which lets you run a Windows virtual machine on the Mac. Sounds inefficient in theory, but reality is that both apps run a lot faster than they did on my old Dell.

To get my Powertap downloading to CyclingPeaks I needed to install the USB driver from the Saris website. Once that was done VMWare picked it up on COM3, and CyclingPeaks downloaded first time.

I’ve just come back from a week in Amsterdam, with no riding, and then not much riding the week before due to being so crazy at work leading up to the trip. So fitness plummets again - I’m too nervous to open up Cyclingpeaks to see my CTL.

Last Sunday was the fast and flat West Coast Express. We headed out with a tailwind at a phenomenal pace, probably averaging 60km/h for the first 10k’s as the attacks were coming thick and fast. I ended up in a break with all of the main contenders, being driven primarily by John O’Connor. One by one though, we dropped off as he was setting an infernal pace. He ended up on his own until just after Atlantis.

Just before we got into Melkbos it split again, with most of us on the wrong end of the split, but luckily they slowed down up front and we regrouped. Then Andreas launched a masterful attack along Blouberg beachfront, which no-one followed, and stayed away until the end.

Shaun Le Roux won the bunch kick, with Paul getting 5th. I sat the wrong wheel in the sprint and ended up 12th.

Well done Andreas!