Chris Lamb: Race report: Cambridge Duathlon 2014
(This is my first race of the 2014 season.)
Run 1 (7.5km)
A few minutes before the start my race number belt the only truly untested equipment that day refused to tighten. However, I decided that once the race began I would either ignore it or even discard it, risking disqualification.
Despite letting everyone go up the road, my first km was still too fast so I dialed down the effort, settling into a "10k" pace and began overtaking other runners. The Fen winds and drag-strip uphill from 3km provided a bit of pacing challenge for someone used to shelter and shorter hills but I kept a metered effort through into transition.
- Time
- 33:01 (4:24/km, T1: 00:47) Last year: 37:47 (5:02/km)
Bike (40km)
Although my 2014 bike setup features a power meter, I had not yet had the chance to perform an FTP test outdoors. I was thus was not able to calculate a definitive target power for the bike leg. However, data from my road bike suggested I set a power ceiling of 250W on the longer hills.
This was extremely effective in avoiding going "into the red" and compromising the second run. This lends yet more weight to the idea that a power meter in multisport events is "almost like cheating".
I was not entirely comfortable with my bike position: not only were my thin sunglasses making me raise my head more than I needed to, I found myself creeping forward onto the nose of my saddle. This is sub-optimal, even if only considering that I am not training in that position.
Overall, the bike was uneventful with the only memorable moment provided by a wasp that got stuck between my head and a helmet vent. Coming into transition I didn't feel like I had really pushed myself that hard probably a good sign but the time difference from last year's bike leg (1:16:11) was a little underwhelming.
- Time
- 1:10:45 (T2: 00:58)
Run 2 (7.5km)
After leaving transition, my legs were extremely uncooperative and I had great difficulty in pacing myself in the first kilometer. Concentrating hard on reducing my cadence as well as using my rehearsed mental cue, I managed to settle down.
The following 4 kilometers were a mental struggle rather than a physical one, modulo having to force a few burps to ease some discomfort, possibly from drinking too much or too fast on the bike.
I had planned to "unload" as soon as I reached 6km but I didn't really have it in me. Whilst I am physiologically faster compared to last year, I suspect the lack of threshold-level running over the winter meant the mental component required for digging deep will require some coaxing to return.
However, it is said that you have successfully paced a duathlon if the second run faster than the first. On this criterion, this was a success, but it would have been a bonus to have really felt completely completely drained at the end of the day, if only from a neo-Calvinist perspective.
- Time
- 32:46 (4:22/km) / Last year: 38:10 (5:05/km)
Overall
- Total time
- 2:18:19
- Perform an outdoors FTP on my time-trial bike outdoors to develop an optimum power plan.
- Do a few more brick runs, at least to re-acclimatise the feeling.
- Schedule another bike fit.
We had a bit of a rough night last night. I noticed Zoe was pretty hot when she
had a nap yesterday after not really eating much lunch. She still had a mild
fever after her nap, so I gave her some paracetamol (aka acetaminophen, that
one weirded me out when I moved to the US) and called for a home doctor to
check her ears out.
Her ears were fine, but her throat was a little red. The doctor said it was
probably a virus. Her temperature wasn't so high at bed time, so I skipped the
paracetamol, and she went to bed fine.
She did wake up at about 1:30am and it took me until 3am to get her back to
bed. I think it was a combination of the fever and trying to phase out her
white noise, but she just didn't want to sleep in her bed or her room. At 3am I
admitted defeat and let her sleep with me.
She had only a slightly elevated temperature this morning, and otherwise seemed
in good spirits. We were supposed to go to a family lunch today, because my
sister and brother are in town with their respective families, but I figured
we'd skip that on account that Zoe may have still had something, and
coupled with the poor night's sleep, I wasn't sure how much socialising she was
going to be up for.
My ear has still been giving me grief, and I had a home doctor check it
yesterday as well, and he said the ear canal was 90% blocked. First thing this
morning I called up to make an appointment with my regular doctor to try and
get it flushed out. The earliest appointment I could get was 10:15am.
So we trundled around the corner to my doctor after a very slow start to the
day. I got my ear cleaned out and felt like a million bucks afterwards. We went
to Woolworths to order an undecorated mud slab cake, so I can try doing a trial
birthday cake. I've given up on trying to do the sitting minion, and
significantly scaled back to just a flat minion slab cake. The should be ready
tomorrow.
The family thing was originally supposed to be tomorrow, and was only moved to
today yesterday. My original plan had been to take Zoe to a free Dora the
Explorer live show that was on in the Queen Street Mall.
I decided to revert back to the original plan, but by this stage, it was too
late to catch the 11am show, so the 1pm show was the only other option. We had
a "quick" lunch at home, which involved Zoe refusing the eat the sandwich I
made for her and me convincing her otherwise.
Then I got a time-sensitive phone call from a friend, and once I'd finished
dealing with that, there wasn't enough time to take any form of public
transport and get there in time, so I decided to just drive in.
We parked in the Myer Centre car park, and quickly made our way up to the mall,
and made it there comfortably with 5 minutes to spare.
The show wasn't anything much to phone home about. It was basically just 20
minutes of someone in a giant Dora suit acting out was was essentially a
typical episode of Dora the Explorer, on stage, with a helper. Zoe started out
wanting to sit on my lap, but made a few brief forays down to the "mosh pit"
down the front with the other kids, dancing around.
After the show finished, we had about 40 minutes to kill before we could get a
photo with Dora, so we wandered around the Myer Centre. I let Zoe choose our
destinations initially, and we browsed a cheap accessories store that was
having a sale, and then we wandered downstairs to one of the underground bus
station platforms.
After that, we made our way up to Lincraft, and browsed. We bought a $5
magnifying glass, and I let Zoe do the whole transaction by herself. After that
it was time to make our way back down for the photo.
Zoe made it first in line, so we were in and out nice and quick. We got our
photos, and they gave her a little activity book as well, which she thought was
cool, and then we headed back down the car park.
In my haste to park and get top side, I hadn't really paid attention to
where we'd parked, and we came down via different elevators than we
went up, so by the time I'd finally located the car, the exit gate was trying
to extract an extra $5 parking out of me. Fortunately I was able to use the
intercom at the gate and tell my sob story of being a nincompoop, and they let
us out without further payment.
We swung by the Valley to clear my PO box, and then headed home. Zoe
spontaneously announced she'd had a fun day, so that was lovely.
We only had about an hour and half to kill before Sarah was going to pick up
Zoe, so we just mucked around. Zoe looked at stuff around the house with her
magnifying glass. She helped me open my mail. We looked at some of the photos
on my phone. 
A new release of the 
Wow. 3G delta. I haven t booted this laptop for a while I think I m finally ready to make the move from gnome2 to gnome3. There are bits that still annoy me, but I think it s off to a good start. Upgrading perl from 5.10 to 5.14.
Between 2001 and 2004, 
Thirty years ago I started to learn programming. To celebrate this,
I'm doing a bit of programming as a sort of performance art. I will
write a new program, from scratch, until it is ready for me to start
using it for real. The program won't be finished, but it will be ready
for my own production use. It'll be something I have wanted to have
for a while, but I'm not saying beforehand what it will be. For me,
the end result is interesting; for you, the interesting part is
watching me be stupid and make funny mistakes.
The performance starts Friday, 18 April 2014, at 09:00 UTC. I
apologise if this is an awkward time for you. No time is good for
everyone, so I picked a time that is good for me.
Run the following command to see what the local time will be for you.
I'm not much of a reader anymore these days (I used to be when I was a
young teenager), but I still do tend to like reading something every
once in a while. When I do, I generally prefer books that can be read
front to cover in one go because that allows me to immerse myself
into the book so much more.
John Scalzi's book is... interesting. It talks about a bunch of junior
officers on a starship of the "Dub U" (short for "Universal Union"),
which flies off into the galaxy to Do Things. This invariably involves
away missions, and on these away missions invariably people die.
The title is pretty much a dead giveaway; but in case you didn't guess,
it's mainly the junior officers who die.
What I particularly liked about this book is that after the story pretty
much wraps up, Scalzi doesn't actually let it end there. First there's a
bit of a tie-in that has the book end up talking about itself; after
that, there are three epilogues in which the author considers what this
story would do to some of its smaller characters.
All in all, a good read, and something I would not hesitate to
recommend.
Today I took down my KVM-host machine, rebooting it and restarting all of my guests. It has been a while since I'd done so and I was a little nerveous, as it turned out this nerveousness was prophetic.
I'd forgotten to hardwire the use of proxy_arp so my guests were all broken when the systems came back online.
If you're curious this is what my incoming graph of email SPAM looks like:
My server, Kite, is finishing its 20th year online.
It started as kite.resnet.cornell.edu, a 486 under the desk in my dorm
room. Early on, it bounced around the DNS -- kite.ithaca.ny.us,
Kite was an early server on the WWW, and
