New LFNS web site#

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The London Friday Night Skate (and Sunday Stroll) web site has at last been redesigned like I said it would be last month. No credit is due to me for the much improved design and usability over the interim site (though I did write some of the text originally) - unless you count the route maps, for which I wrote the map editor. Admittedly, as an ordinary member of the public you can't see the map editor, but if you'd like to and I already know you're extraordinary, send email.

Otherwise, see you on Friday

Circle Line#

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I'm going to blog every time I skate even if you find it boring to read, just so I can remember myself how much I'm doing. Since the ice last Friday, this has been: not much

Saturday: short skate in Victoria Park looking for the smooth bits of road (if there are any, I haven't found them yet)
Monday: the LSST Circle Line skate. Much fun was had by all - I assume, anyway. They might just have been being polite. I do prefer doing that route clockwise: you get the climb up Kensington Church Street (much less work than I remember it having been last time I tried it) and then it's a nice gentle decline all the way down the Marylebone/Euston Road bus lane. With, as luck would have it, green lights from the flyover all the way to Regent's Park.

This evening there was an LFNS route check that I missed, owing to an unfortunately co-scheduled LFNS marshals' committee meeting (the route check shoul have been yesterday, but weather intervened): tomorrow I have a spinning session. As I got significantly further forward today on my other-stuff-I-should-be-doing-this-week, I might sneak out and see if I can get some km logged at lunch tomorrow as well.

Caught on camera!#

Sat, 07 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

(A small section at the front of) this week's LFNS got snapped by a traffic cam as we came back up from Victoria towards Hyde Park. Cute. I was at (or in front of) the front, so should be in that shot somewhere - but unlikely to be recognisable.

It was a good skate: did a route check on Friday afternoon (these days it's much warmer out there while the sun is still up) and then did some proper ordinary marshalling on the night, so I actually got a bit of a workout. Not least because I'm trying to get a lower knee bend - I could feel the lactate in the second half.

Today was supposed to be route check for tomorrow's Sunday Stroll (which I am leading) but as it was snowing when I left the house I'll put that off until tomorrow morning instead. Maybe it'll have dried out in time for the LSS, he says hopefully

Weather or not#

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The Stroll was, unfortunately, cancelled (observe deft use of the passive voice to obscure the fact that it was I - as Lead Marshal - who had to guess whether the BBC rainfall radar predictions were going to be accurate and make the go/cancel decision). But, managed to get some skating in over the weekend anyway

yesterday from Holborn to Hyde Park, LSS in park, and back to Holborn. Since the Stroll route passed through Holborn anyway (a bad habit of my stroll routes which I should squash), I was able to check it on the way across. 20km, I guess, some of it up and down the Serpentine Road
today did the route check again (having established yesterday that it was skateable, the purpose of today's was to make sure at least one other marshal also knows where they're going) and managed to get back just before the rain started. Call it 12km.

So not huge racking-up of distances, but I felt really rather happy about Friday and Saturday (in particular) for no good reason I can think of, and so I rate the weekend as successful. And snatched from the teeth of cold gray biting miserable rain and wind, too. Which reminds me, I found some fleecy tights in decathlon that are not bib longs (I'm not really a fan of having to take all my clothes off just to visit the bathroom), which are going to make future excursions for the next month or so much more pleasant. Still, roll on summer.

London Inline Marathon: date confirmed#

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

From the LIM web site:

The 2006 marathon will be held on Sunday, 6th August at the Lee Valley Cycle Circuit.
This is the last ever time this race can be held at the circuit. In September it is scheduled to be torn up and redeveloped for the London 2012 Olympics. This is therefore, your last chance to test yourself on this challenging course. We hope you can join us and make it a memorable event.

They're right about "challenging course". Last year I managed about 17 laps of the LIM before deciding that the state of my rear right wheel (pictured) - which when I started had an approximately elliptical profile and 80mm diameter - was sufficient excuse to give up with some degree of honour intact. Of course, half an hour later I was regretting it, but ...

This year I have to go back and finish the thing.

Things are looking up#

Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Well, some things. Two skaters I met in the park on Saturday afternoon unfortunately weren't, and having steered left to avoid one of them, he noticed me at the last minute and decided to swerve the same way: could almost be described as a meeting of the minds. Then his friend went into him ...

Damage to me: cut above eyebrow which will some day lead to a fetching Harry Potter-style scar, slight nosebleed (which won't). Damage to him: split lip or gum (not sure which) and probably some concussion. Ouch ouch, mostly on his behalf.

The weekend was otherwise largely uneventful. Good drills session on Sunday morning left me realising that my one-foot balance still isn't all it could be.

Ignore it and it'll go away#

Tue, 17 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

OK, this is nothing to do with skating at all, but I couldn't resist. Douglas Adams fans will understand what this is about

Tag Heureux#

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

You might notice the new section in the sidebar on the right. I've been doing a bit of data mining on old LSST forum threads and articles that I might want to come back to, and thought that del.icio.us tags might be a good way to mark them so that others can find them too. We'll see how it goes.

[ Edit: not any more, you won't. Having seen that (a) it breaks IE, (b) it doesn't seem to show anything from anyone else's machine anyway, I've removed it until I figure out what's happening. In the meantime, technophiles may find my del.icio.us stuff at http://del.icio.us/telent/ - or then again, might find only some of it. Their help pages really are pretty useless ]

Some of the articles referred to may require registration on the said forums; others may even require forking over actual money for team membership. I'd apologise, but really, if you're in London and interested in this stuff, I recommend joining anyway. And no, I don't get a cut.

Slow down to go faster#

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

(Yup, more SF references in article titles)

Posted here to remind myself, really. The virtues of skating slower are:

If I'm not skating on the edge of my ability, I can concentrate better on good technique
If I'm skating slower than that, even, I tend to lose the "flow" - gravity has the same force no matter what my forward velocity. But I suspect that with practice I could flow at these speeds - and would have much lower cadence - and therefore I'd be skating a lot better when I return to normal pace
While I don't have flow, I'm using (and therefore exercising) new and exciting muscles to hold my body position where usually I wouldn't worry about e.g. activating my abs so much.
usual gubbins about heart rate and exercise zones continues to apply, of course.

Skating lower has the obvious aerodynamic advantage and means I can get a longer push without moving vertically. But in this post I am reminding myself to skate lower than I need to, just because that way I'll start building up better quad strength and lactate tolerance, and thus more comfortably able to skate low when I do want to go faster.

[ skating log: route check yesterday (for my LFNS lead next month), then home; to work this morning ]

Anklebiting#

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

I think I have discovered just how much I can wear my Simmons boots before needing a couple of days break to let my feet get back to normal, and the answer is "slightly less than I've been wearing them lately". Or maybe it's the socks. Large tender spot on inside anklebone of right foot makes walking slightly odd and skating slightly painful.

[ skating log: last night - tonight's LFNS route and back to office. This morning I got the noisy slow smelly overcrowded tube to work instead. Ew ]

Twitch and shout#

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

There was a thread on Serpentine Road today about Using a rockered setup to go faster, in which the consensus wisdom seems to be that you don't - or at least, that the usual speedskating technique is about longer and slower strides and getting more push through each, which rockering is not going to help with if it just makes the frame more likely to squirrel around when pushed.

But it got me to thinking about cadence in general, and remembering how surprised I was when I found out that in cycling, higher cadence is better (gross oversimplification, but most untrained cyclists have a tendency to mash the gears because it "feels more powerful" instead of spinning). At a cadence of around 90rpm, the cyclist is not putting as much force into each stroke as he would be for the same speed at 60rpm, so is recruiting fewer muscle fibres, and it's the slow-twitch fibres that get used first. They don't fatigue easily, recover quickly, and can run on fat instead of eating into precious glycogen stores - result, you can go on for ever. So, question to the gallery: how does one determine whether a skating stroke is pushing hard enough to also use the (precious, easily-fatigued) fast-twitch fibres and what can you do about it if so? And, perhaps just as importantly, what am I doing to my knees?

Well, actually, I can answer that last question easily enough. I'm prodding gingerly at the left one and comparing it to the one on the right to see how much it's swollen. While swerving to avoid someone on the Stroll yesterday I clipped the tyre of a parked car with my front wheel, and executed some sort of graceless spinning fall that left me with skin loss from left elbow and knee, plus a developing bruise on my hip. Another day of public transport to work, yippee. But on the bright side, my ankles were fine for yesterday's 26km plus video review session (looking forward to seeing the video now, and whether it's any better than the last one), so it looks like two days off was the right decision for them.

Court in a trap#

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

This evening was the second attempt to test my LFNS lead for next week, and it seemed to be a bit nicer than the route I had in mind last week. It's still in principle the same skate, and still goes past the same places, but I've now managed to find alternatives for some of the worst bits we found on the first pass. It's still a bit on the long side, though: need to find some way to trim it.

It's cold out there. Wow, is it cold out there. On the ay back to the park my hands were so cold I was getting weird nerve twinges up and down my arms. This demands another layer, or perhaps that I find my gloves.

[ Skating log: let's call it 33km for the day, if I do decide to skate home from here instead of getting the night bus. I should do, it's going to take about as long as I'd spend waiting in the cold for said night bus anyway ]

Holborn Stroll#

Fri, 27 Jan 2006 23:21:27 +0000

My Sunday Stroll [[at the start of the year => weather or not ]] was cancelled, so as all the LM slots were booked until March I lent the route to Bren to do tomorrow instead - I won't be leading, but I will be along to see fair play. Read all about it on the LFNS web site

"Off, Broadway"#

Sat, 28 Jan 2006 12:00:00 +0000

That's Hammersmith Broadway, to which we would have been taking the LFNS. But, sadly, we couldn't. We set out at 5pm or so to check the route again (mostly to be sure we remembered it) and by 5:30 Hans (this week's LM) was getting phone calls from other marshals to say it was sleeting in Waterloo, snowing in Marylebone, etc. All this time we hadn't had much more than a couple of raindrops anywhere we were (various places between Hyde Park and Hammersmith) until on the way up Kensington High St I realised I could see snowflakes falling in the light of oncoming car headlights. So, no LFNS. Boo hiss.

Total skating for the day: to work (which I wasn't even intending to do until I got to the tube station this morning and found the Central line was closed), route check (20km?), and back from pub to the office. Caught the last tube back from office to home, because it seemed like a good opportunity to rescue my shoes and a small pile of clothes that need washing.

⟪Dec 2005 Feb 2006⟫