Last weekend I had to stay at home, so I did some more virtual training (slowly, in order to not overwork myself again). This time, after all the Zwift, I wanted to test something else: Tacx Trainer Software. Still virtual, but of a different kind.

The difference between Zwift, which does video-game-like worlds, is that TTS, in the configuration that I used, uses a real-life video which scrolls faster or slower, based on your speed. This speed adjustment is so-so, but the appeal was that I could ride roads that I actually know and drove before. Modern technology++!

And this was the interesting part: I chose for the first ride the road up to Cap de Formentor, which is one of my favourite places in Mallorca. The road itself is also nice, through some very pleasant woods and with some very good viewpoints, ending at the lighthouse, from where you have wonderful views of the sea.

Now, I've driven two times on this road, so I kind of remembered it, but driving a road and cycling the same road, especially when it goes up and down and up, are very different things. I remembered well the first uphill (after the flat area around Port de Pollença), but after that my recollection of how much uphill the road goes was slightly off, and I actually didn't remember that there's that much downhill, which was a very pleasant surprise. I did remember the view points (since I took quite a few pictures along the road), but otherwise I was completely off about the height profile of the road. Interesting how the brain works ☺

Overall, this is considered a "short" ride in Tacx's film library; it was 21Km, 835m uphill, and I did it in 1h11m, which for me, after two weeks of no sports, was good enough. Also Tacx has bike selection, and I did this on a simulated mountain bike, with the result that downhill speeds were quite slow (max. 57Km/h, at a -12% grade), so not complaining at all.

Next I'll have to see how the road to Sa Calobra is in the virtual world. And next time I go to Mallorca (when/if), I'll have to actually ride these in the real world.

In the meantime, some pictures from an actual trip there. I definitely recommend visiting this, preferably early in the morning (it's very crowded):

A few more pictures and larger sizes here.

So, I've been sick. Quite sick, as for the past ~2 weeks I wasn't able to bike, run, work or do much beside watch movies, look at photos and play some light games (ARPGs rule in this case, all you need to do is keep the left mouse button pressed).

It was supposed to be only a light viral infection, but it took longer to clear out than I expected, probably due to it happening right after my dental procedure (and possibly me wanting to restart exercise too soon, to fast). Not fun, it felt like the thing that refills your energy/mana bar in games broke. I simply didn't feel restored, despite sleeping a lot; 2-3 naps per day sound good as long as they are restorative, if they're not, sleeping is just a chore.

The funny thing is that recovery happened so slow, that when I finally had energy it took me by surprise. It was like “oh, wait, I can actually stand and walk without feeling dizzy! Wohoo!” As such, yesterday was a glorious Saturday ☺

I was therefore able to walk a bit outside the house this weekend and feel like having a normal cold, not like being under a “cursed: -4 vitality” spell. I expect the final symptoms to clear out soon, and that I can very slowly start doing some light exercise again. Not tomorrow, though…

In the meantime, I'm sharing a picture from earlier this year that I found while looking through my stash. Was walking in the forest in Pontresina on a beatiful sunny day, when a sudden gust of wind caused a lot of the snow on the trees to fly around and make it look a bit magical (photo is unprocessed beside conversion from raw to jpeg, this is how it was straight out of the camera):

Why a winter photo? Because that's exactly how cold I felt the previous weekend: 30°C outside, but I was going to the doctor in jeans and hoodie and cap, shivering…

A (forced) relaxation week

This was an interesting week, much more so than I expected.

The start of the week was the usual: on Monday a run, although at an easier pace after Sunday's longer indoor bike ride, on Tuesday a 30Km outside bike ride (flat, on road, with a mountain bike so not fast at all).

On Wednesday however, I had a planned "intervention" at my dentist—bone reconstruction (or regeneration, not sure what the right term is for the implantation of scaffolding). The dentist told me I won't be allowed to do sports, especially in the first few days after the procedure, so I knew I will have to take it easy; easy bike rides are fine, but not anything more (e.g. especially not running).

The procedure went well and after that I went to work (the dentist looked at me in a funny way when I mentioned I'm not going home but instead back to work). There was a bit of pain a couple of hours after the local anaesthesia went away, but the painkillers did work, so I was able to function somewhat OK. Laughing was the only thing that caused pain, so I tried to be very serious; didn't work well…

On Thursday morning however, I did feel funny and when I looked into the mirror, I got a shock. The affected side of my face was heavily swollen, and I was feeling as bad as I looked. I had a followup checkup at the dentist, so I went there, and they told me “Oh, this is normal. Bone reconstruction is much more difficult on the body as opposed to extraction, since the body actually has to rebuild stuff, instead of just healing the wound. And yes, you should just go back home and take the day off!”. OK, logically that explanation makes sense, but my dental extraction had a very predictable pain/recovery curve (spike right at the extraction, plateau for that day, then slow recovery that went to faster recovery after a few days). This procedure was very different, with the first day easy, and the second day much worse. The dentist continued “Oh, and by the way, expect this to be worse in the morning, as the body can work all night; also, this should go away by itself over the weekend, so let's meet again on Monday.”

At this point I realised than “I'm not allowed to do sports” is not by doctor's orders, but rather “my condition doesn't allow me to do sport”. Sad panda ☹

Friday was even worse; my face was swollen in a different way, such that I looked even more like a monster from the Witcher games. I had to stay at home again, not being able to do much, as the painkillers I got were mostly ineffective. From my usual ~10K steps a day (or more if I run), my Friday was a paltry sub-2K step day. The only thing I was able to do was watch anime. I found Log Horizon to be a pretty interesting anime, much more so than what the synopsis said; the ramification on politics and how to interaction between the two cultures unfolded was much more in-depth than I presumed. Didn't finish it yet, so this is a partial but very strong recommendation for it. Besides watching stuff, I also went to the shop to buy some food, which turned out to be an excuse for "junk food foraging!". The pain took my willpower away and instead of the planned and short grocery list, I found myself with lots of chocolate and ice cream on my hands. Funny how the brain works…

On Saturday I was a bit better; the swelling went partially away, so if you squinted you could pretend I look my normal-ugly, not the monster-ugly from before. I was able to go outside of the house, do some shopping, etc. so I was able to go back to a ~9K steps day. I also stopped taking painkillers since anyway they weren't of much help, and kept myself entertained with movies and other stuff (cough cough Grim Dawn…, since it's a mindless click-kill-loot-repeat ARPG that one can play even when only partially functional).

Today (Sunday) was swelling was slightly worse; however, I was feeling well enough to try to go back on the bike trainer (the first three days of "no sports" were over), and planned to do a slow/relaxing one hour Zwift ride. Right, as all the people who ever tried this, it works as long as only fast people overtake you (since you can't catch them anyway), or as long as you don't get to sprint sections. I did slightly improve my Watopia 300m sprint personal record (29.20s → 28.29s), which was good enough. After the first lap I took it easier—as in had to, since I was not really in shape. I was in any case very glad about ending my 4 days long break from sports!

So, my dentist was right indeed. The swelling did by and large clear up over the weekend (although I'll have to see how tomorrow will be), and was also right about how much more difficult this was. On one hand makes sense (growing bone does sound complex), on the other hand, I couldn't imagine that the body works so hard that it puts you out. The dentist was however slightly wrong with the “you should not do any strenuous activity, especially in the first three days”; they should have said, “ha ha, you'll be flat out for the first days, take it easy and enjoy the painkillers” instead.

Looking forward now to get back into my regular routine; relaxation is good, but only when done by choice—like most things in life ☺

Random things of the week

In no particular order (mostly).

Coming back from the US, it was easier dealing with the jet-lag this time; doing sports in the morning or at noon and eating light on the evening helps a lot.

The big thing of the week, that has everybody talking, is of course brexit. My thoughts, as written before on a facebook comment: Direct democracy doesn't really work if it's done once in a blue moon. Wikipedia says there have been thirteen referendums in UK since 1975, but most of them (10) on devolution issues in individual countries, and only three were UK-wide referendums (quoting from the above page): the first on membership of the European Economic Community in 1975, the second on adopting the Alternative vote system in parliamentary elections in 2011, and the third one is the current one. Which means that a referendum is done every 13 years or so.

At this frequency, people are not a) used to inform themselves on the actual issues, b) believing that your vote actually will change things, and most likely c) not taking the "direct-democracy" aspect seriously (thinking beyond the issue at hand and how will it play together with all the rest of the political decisions). The result is what we've seen, leave politicians already backpedalling on issues, and confusion that yes, leave votes actually counted.

My prognosis for what's going to happen:

• one option, this gets magically undone, and there will be rejoicing at the barely avoided big damage (small damage already done).
• otherwise, UK will lose significantly from the economy point of view, enough that they'll try being out of the EU officially but "in" the EU from the point of view of trade.
• in any case, large external companies will be very wary of investing in production in UK (e.g. Japanese car manufacturers), and some will leave.
• most of the 52% who voted leave will realise that this was a bad outcome, in around 5 years.
• hopefully, politicians (both in the EU and in the UK) will try to pay more attention to inequality (here I'm optimistic).

We'll see what happens though. Reading comments on various websites still make me cringe at how small some people think: "independence" from the EU when the real issue is EU versus the other big blocks—US, China, in the future India; and "versus" not necessarily in a conflict sense, but simply as negotiating power, economic treaties, etc.

Back to more down-to-earth things: this week was quite a good week for me. Including commutes, my calendar turned out quite nice:

The downside was that most of those were short runs or bike sessions. My runs are now usually 6.5K, and I'll try to keep to that for a few weeks, in order to be sure that bone and ligaments have adjusted, and hopefully keep injuries away.

On the bike front, the only significant thing was that I did as well the Zwift Canyon Ultimate Pretzel Mission, on the last day of the contest (today): 73.5Km in total, 3h:27m. I've done 60K rides on Zwift before, so the first 60K were OK, but the last ~5K were really hard. Legs felt like logs of wood, I was only pushing very weak output by the end although I did hydrate and fuel up during the ride. But, I was proud of the fact that on the last sprint (about 2K before the end of the ride), I had ~34s, compared to my all-time best of 29.2s. Was not bad after ~3h20m of riding and 1300 virtual meters of ascent. Strava also tells me I got 31 PRs on various segments, but that's because I rode on some parts of Watopia that I never rode before (mostly the reverse ones).

Overall, stats for this week: ~160Km in total (virtual and real, biking and running), ~9 hours spent doing sports. Still much lower than the amount of time I was playing computer games, so it's a net win ☺

Have a nice start of the week everyone, and keep doing what moves you forward!

After last week's bike ride, I had to pack my bags, and get on Monday morning on a plane to Seattle. The time was so short that I even left the bike mounted on the car.

So 8:15, plane to Frankfurt, and then plane to Seattle. To my big surprise, the Lufthansa "extended leg room" seats were overly generous; I could actually extend my foot completely and put it on the back of the seat in front of me. Very good value when travelling in economy… The only downside was that these were "standard" not "premium" economy, so the seat had leg room but was very narrow. And with normal sized adults on either side of me, it was somewhat… difficult. The leg space allowed me to work on my laptop without fearing the person in front of me will recline their seat and break my screen (almost happened once).

The funniest thing when travelling is that food is always tricky: even familiar food can be not what you expect. Case in point, me at the salad buffet, seeing slices of green vegetables, and asking myself: “Are those jalapeno slices, or bell pepper slices? Hmm, I'm sure they're bell pepper…”, which resulted in my first vegetable salad with jalapeno. Would definitely recommend if you like spicy things!

Otherwise the trip was as usual, but shorter and more densely packed with meetings with a one day exception: had the opportunity to experience for the first time Whirlyball, which was more fun and more difficult than it first looked. Also spent an afternoon on Whidbey Island, which fortunately was also the nicest day, weather-wise, of the week (all phone pictures, not colour corrected, straight-out-of-phone):

A few more pictures here. I keep being amazed by the nature in this area, definitely my preferred place in US from the relatively few I visited.

Had a nice dinner as well at Cafe Langley, which surprisingly had reasonably-authentic Mediterranean food; the “Baba Ganoush” was excellent.

Other than that outing, nothing worth describing, except that I really missed my Zwift or outdoor rides. The experience of using the stationary bikes in the hotel does not compare, so I resorted more to running on the treadmill (hmm, Zwift for running, hmm…); if the foot pod calibration is to be trusted, I continued to slightly improve my 1K, 1mi, and 5K times. Not bad, I might want to join some running races as well this summer, but I need to take it easy though and make sure to not get injured again.

And finally, week over, flew back home, slept a bit mid-day (which will ruin my jet lag recovery program), unloaded my bike from the car (and checked it still works), and and and got on the trainer and did a Zwift ride. Jet lagged, but managed to beat my Watopia sprint record by a tiny bit, and complete a new workout (“The Gorby”), which was interesting. I can stop any time I want, definitely (I just need to take a trip away from home ☺).

Elsa Bike Trophy 2016—my first bike race!

So today, after two months of intermittent training using Zwift and some actual outside rides, I did my first bike race. Not of 2016, not of 2000+, but like ever.

Which is strange, as I learned biking very young, and I did like to bike. But as it turned out, even though I didn't like running as a child, I did participate in a number of running events over the years, but no biking ones.

The event

Elsa Bike Trophy is a mountain bike event—cross-country, not downhill or anything crazy; it takes part in Estavayer-le-Lac, and has two courses - one 60Km with 1'791m altitude gain, and a smaller one of 30Km with 845m altitude gain. I went, of course, for the latter. 845m is more than I ever did in a single ride, so it was good enough for a first try. The web page says that this smaller course “… est nerveux, technique et ne laisse que peu de répit”. I choose to think that's a bit of an exaggeration, and that it will be relatively easy (as I'm not too skilled technically).

The atmosphere there was like for the running races, with the exception of bike stuff being sold, and people on very noisy rollers. I'm glad for my trainer which sounds many decibels quieter…

The long race started at 12:00, and the shorter one at 12:20. While waiting for the start I had to concerns in mind: whether I'm able to do the whole course (endurance), and whether it will be too cold (the weather kept moving towards rain). I had a small concern about the state of the course, as it was not very nice weather recently, but a small one.

And then, after one hour plus of waiting, go!

Racing, with a bit of "swimming"

At first thing went as expected. Starting on paved roads, moving towards the small town exit, a couple of 14% climbs, then more flat roads, then a nice and hard 18% short climb (I'll never again complain about < 10%!), then… entering the woods. It became quickly apparent that the ground in the forest was in much worse state than I feared. Much worse as in a few orders of magnitude.

In about 5 minutes after entering the tree cover, my reasonably clean, reasonably light bike became a muddy, heavy monster. And the pace that until then went quite OK became walking pace, as the first rider that didn't manage to keep going up because the wheel turned out of the track blocked the one behind him, which had to stop, and repeat until we were one line (or two, depending on how wide the trail was) of riders walking their bikes up. While on dry ground walking your bike up is no problem, or hiking through mud with good hiking shoes is also no problem, walking up with biking shoes is a pain. Your foot slides and you waste half of your energy "swimming" in the mud.

Once the climb is over, you get on the bike, and of course the pedals and cleats are full of heavy mud, so it takes a while until you can actually clip in. Here the trail version of SPD was really useful, as I could pedal reasonably well without being clipped-in, just had to be careful and push too hard.

Then maybe you exit the trail and get on paved road, but the wheels are so full of mud that you still are very slow (and accelerate very slowly), until the shed enough of the mud to become somewhat more "normal".

After a bit of this "up through mud, flat and shedding mud", I came upon the first real downhill section. I would have been somewhat confident in dry ground, but I got scared and got off my bike. Better safe than sorry was the thing for now.

And after this is was a repetition of the above: climb, sometimes (rarely) on the bike, most times pushing the bike, fast flat sections through muddy terrain where any mistake of controlling the bike can send the front wheel flying due to the mud being highly viscous, slow flat sections through very liquid mud where it definitely felt like swimming, or any dry sections.

My biggest fear, uphill/endurance, was unfounded. The most gains I made were on the dry uphills, where I had enough stamina to overtake. On flat ground I mostly kept order (i.e. neither being overtaken nor overtaking), but on downhill sections, I lost lots of time, and was overtaken a lot. Still, it was a good run.

And then, after about 20 kilometres out of the 30, I got tired enough of getting off the bike, on the bike, and also tired mentally and not being careful enough, that I stopped getting off the bike on downhills. And the feeling was awesome! It was actually much much easier to flow through the mud and rocks and roots on downhill, even when it was difficult (for me) like 40cm drops (estimated), than doing it on foot, where you slide without control and the bike can come crashing down on you. It was a liberating feel, like finally having overcome the mud. I was soo glad to have done a one-day training course with Swiss Alpine Adventure, as it really helped. Thanks Dave!

Of course, people were still overtaking me, but I also overtook some people (who were on foot; he he, I wasn't the only one it seems). And being easier, I had some more energy so I was able to push a bit harder on the flats and dry uphill sections.

And then the remaining distance started shrinking, and the last downhill was over, I entered through familiar roads the small town, a passer-by cries "one kilometre left", I push hard (I mean, hard as I could after all the effort), and I reach the finish.

Oh, and my other concern, the rain? Yes it did rain somewhat, and I was glad for it (I keep overheating); there was a single moment I felt cold, when exiting a nice cosy forest into a field where the wind was very strong—headwind, of course.

Lessons learned

I did learn a lot in this first event.

• indoor training sessions only help with endurance (but they do good on this); they don't help with technique, and most importantly, they don't teach how to handle the bike in inclement weather; biking to work on paved road also doesn't help.
• nevertheless, indoor training does help with endurance ☺
• mud guards…; before the race, I thought they'll help; during the race, I cursed at the extra weight and their seemingly uselessness; after the race, after I saw how other people looked, I realised that indeed they helped a lot—I was only dirty on my legs, mostly below the knee, but not on my upper body. Unsure whether I will use the again.
• a drop seat is not needed if your seat is set in-between, but sure damn would have been more easy with one
• installing your GPS on your handle-bar with elastic bands in a section of non-constant diameter is a very bad idea, as it lives in an unstable equilibrium: any move towards the thinner section makes the mount very loose, and you have to lose time fixing it.

Results

So, how did I do after all? As soon as I reached the finish and recovered my items, among which the phone, I checked the datasport page: I was rank 59/68 in my category. Damn, I hoped (and thought) I would do better. Similar % in the overall ranking for this distance.

That aside, it was mighty fun. So much fun I'd do it again tomorrow! I forgot the awesome atmosphere of such events, even in the back of the rankings.

And then, after I reach drive home and open on my workstation the datasport page, I get very confused: the overall number of participants was different. And the I realised: not everybody finished the race when I first checked (d'oh)! Final ranking: 59 out of 84 in my category, and 247/364 in the overall 30km rankings. That makes it 70% and 67% respectively, which matches somewhat with my usual running results a few years back (but a bit worse). It is in any case better than what I thought originally, yay!

Also, Strava activity for some more statistics (note that my Garmin says it was not 800+ meters of altitude…):

I'd embed a Veloviewer nice 3D-map but I can't seem to get the embed option, hmm…

TODO: train more endurance, train more technique, train in more various conditions!

Short trip to Opio en Provence

I had a short work-related trip this week to Opio en Provence. It was not a working trip, but rather a team event, which means almost a vacation!

Getting there and back

I dislike taking the plane for very short flights (and Zürich-Nice is indeed only around one hour), as that means you're spending 3× as much going to the airport, at the airport, waiting to take off, waiting to get off the plane, and then going from the airport to the actual destination. So I took the opportunity to drive there, since I've never driven that way, and on the map the route seemed reasonably interesting. Not that it's a shorter trip by any measure, but seemed more interesting.

Leaving Zürich I went over San Bernardino pass, as I never did that before. On the north side, the pass is actually much less suited to traffic than the Gotthard pass (also on the north side), as you basically climb around 300m in a very short distance, with very sharp hairpins. There was still snow on the top, and the small lake had lots of slush/ice floating on it. As to the south side, it looked much more driveable, but I'm not sure as I made the mistake of re-joining the highway, so instead of driving reasonably nice on the empty pass road, I spent half an hour in a slow moving line. Lesson learned…

Entering Italy was the usual Como-Milan route, but as opposed to my other trips, this time it was around Milan on the west (A50) and then south on the A7 until it meets the A26 and then down to the coast. From here, along the E80 (Italian A10, French A8) until somewhere near Nice, and then exiting the highway system to get on the small local roads towards Opio.

What I read in advance on the internet was that the coastal highway is very nice, and has better views of the sea than the actual seaside drive (which goes through towns and is much slower). I should know better than trust the internet ☺, and I should read maps instead, which would have shown me the fact that the Alps are reaching to the sea in this region, so… The road was OK, but it definitely didn't feel like a highway: maximum allowed speed was usually either 90km/h or 110km/h, and half the time you're in a short tunnel, so it's sun, tunnel/dark, sun, dark, and you're eyes get quite tired from this continuous switching. The few glimpses of the sea were nice, but the road required enough concentration (both due to traffic and the amount of curves) that one couldn't look left or right.

So that was that a semi-failure; I expected a nice drive, but instead it was a challenge drive ☺ If I had even more time to spend, going back via the Rhone valley (Grenoble, Geneva, Zürich) would have been a more interesting alternative.

France

Going to France always feels strange for me. I learned (some) French way before German, so the French language feels much more familiar to me, even without never actually having used it on a day-to-day basis; so going to France feels like getting back to somewhere where I never lived. Somewhat similar with Italian due to the language closeness between Romanian and Italian, but not the same feeling as I didn't actually hear or learn Italian in the childhood.

So I go to France, and I start partially understand what I hear, and I can somewhat talk/communicate. Very weird, while I still struggle with German in my daily life in Zürich. For example, I would hesitate before asking for directions in German, but not so in French, unrelated to my actual understanding of either language. The brain is funny…

The hotel

We stayed at Club Med Opio-en-Provence, which was interesting. Much bigger than I thought from quick looks on the internet (this internet seems quite unreliable), but also better than I expected from a family-oriented, all-inclusive hotel.

The biggest problem was the food - French Pâtisserie is one of my weaknesses, and I failed to resist. I mean, it was much better than I expected, and I indulged a bit too much. I'll have to pay that back on the bike or running

The other interesting part of the hotel was the wide range of activities. Again, this being a family hotel, I thought the organised activities would be pretty mild; but at least for our group, they weren't. The mountain bike ride included an easy single-trail section, but while easy it was single-trail and rocky, so complete beginners might have had a small surprise. Overall it was about 50 minutes, 13.5km, with 230m altitude gain, which again for sedentary people might be unusual. I probably spent during the ride one of the deserts I ate later that day The "hike" they organised for another sub-group was also interesting, involving going through old tunnels and something with broken water pipes that caused people to either get their feet wet or monkey-spidering along the walls. Fun!

After the bike ride, on the same afternoon, while walking around the hotel, we found the Ecole de Trapèze volant open, which looked way to exciting not to try it. Try and fail to do things right, but nevertheless it was excellent and unexpected fun. I'll have to do that again some day when I'll be more fit!

Plus that the hotel itself had a very nice location and olive garden, so short runs in the morning were very pleasant. Only one cookie though each…

Back home

… and then it was over; short, but quite good. The Provence area is nice, and I'd like to be back again someday, for a proper vacation—longer and more relaxed. And do the trapèze thing again, properly this time.

Mind versus body: time perception

Since mid-April I'm playing a new game. It's really awesome, and I learned some surprising things.

The game—Zwift—is quite different from the games I'm usually playing. While it does have all or most of the elements of a game, more precisely an MMO, the main point of the game if physical exercise (in the real world). The in-game performance if the result of the (again, real-world) power output.

Playing the game is more or less like many other games: very nice graphics, varied terrain (or not), interaction, or better said competition, with other players, online leader boards, races, gear "upgrade" (only cosmetic AFAIK), etc. The game more or less progresses like usual, but the fact that the main driver is body changes, to my surprise, the time component of the game.

For me, with a normal game—let's say one of Bioware's Dragon Age games, or one of CD Red's Witcher games—a short gaming session is 2-3 hours, a reasonable session 6-8 hours, and longer ones are for "marathon" gaming sessions. Playing a good game for one hour feels like you've been cheated—one barely starts and has to stop.

On Zwift, things are different. A short session is 20-30 minutes, but this already feels good. A good one is more than one hour, and for me, the longest rides I had were three hours. A three hour session, if done at or near Functional Threshold Power (see here for another article about it), leaves me spent. I just had today such a long ride (at around 85% FTP) and it took me an hour afterwards (and eating) to recover.

The interesting part is that, body exertion aside, the brain sees a 3 hour Zwift equivalent to an 8-10 hour gaming session. Both are tiring, and the perception of passed time is the same (long). Same with shorter sessions: if I do a 40 minutes ride, it feels subjectively as rewarding as a 2-3 hour normal gaming session. I wonder what mechanism is that influences this perception. Is it just effort level? But there's no real effort (as in increased heart rate) for computer games. Is it the fact that so much blood is needed for the muscles when cycling that the brain gets comparatively little, so it enters slow-speed mode (hey, who pressed the Turbo button)? In any case, using Zwift results in a much more efficient use of my time when I'm playing just to decompress/relax.

Another interesting difference is how much importance a good night sleep has on body performance. With computer games, it makes a difference, but not a huge one, and it usually goes away a couple of hours in the game, at least subjectively. With cycling, a bad night results in persistent lower performance all around (for me at least), and one that you easily feel (e.g. for max 5-second average power).

And the last thing I learned, although this shouldn't be a surprise: my FTP is way lower than it's supposed to be (according to the internet). I guess the hundreds of hours I put into pure computer games didn't do anything to my fitness, to my "surprise". I'm curious to see, if I can keep this going on, how things will look like in ~6 months or so.

Today I finally ran a bit outside, for the first time in 2016. Actually, for even longer—the first run since May 2015. I have been only biking in the last year, so this was a very pleasant change of pace (hah), even if just a short run (below 4K).

The funny thing is that since I've been biking consistently (and hard) in the last two months, my fitness level is reasonable, so I managed to beat my all-time personal records for 1 Km and 1 mile (I never sprint, so these are just 'best of' segments out of longer runs). It's probably because I only did ~3.8Km, but still, I was very surprised, since I planned and did an easy run. How could I beat my all-time PR, even better than the times back in 2012 when I was doing regular running?

Even the average pace over the entire run was better than my last training runs (~5Km) back in April/May 2015, by 15-45s.

I guess cross-training does work after all, at least when competing against myself ☺

A short public notice: mt-st project new homepage at https://github.com/iustin/mt-st. Feel free to forward your distribution-specific patches for upstream integration!

Context: a while back I bought a tape unit to help me with backups. Yay, tape! All good, except that I later found out that the Debian package was orphaned, so I took over the maintenance.

All good once more, but there were a number of patches in the Debian package that were not Debian-specific, but rather valid for upstream. And there was no actual upstream project homepage, as this was quite an old project, with no (visible) recent activity; the canonical place for the project source code was an ftp site (ibiblio.org). I spoke with Kai Mäkisara, the original author, and he agreed to let me take over the maintenance of the project (and that's what I intend to do: maintenance mostly, merging of patches, etc. but not significant work). So now there's a github project for it.

There was no VCS history for the project, so I did my best to partially recreate the history: I took the debian releases from snapshots.debian.org and used the .orig.tar.gz as bulk import; the versions 0.7, 0.8, 0.9b and 1.1 have separate commits in the tree.

I also took the Debian and Fedora patches and applied them, and with a few other cleanups, I've just published the 1.2 release. I'll update the Debian packaging soon as well.

So, if you somehow read this and are the maintainer of mt-st in another distribution, feel free to send patches my way for integration; I know this might be late, as some distributions have dropped it (e.g. Arch Linux).