I came across intervals.icu a couple of years ago, via an article written about 2021 Olympic road race winner Anna Keisenhofer. In the article she noted the complex and adaptable graphics that intervals.icu delivers, based on data drawn in from a number of sources.

At the end of December, I came across the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die website, based upon the book of the same name. After signing up at the site, you receive a daily album suggestion. There's an app for Logitech Media Server which links to a copy in your local music library, or failing that to your streaming service of choice, making it easy to listen to the album.

So far, I've had 22 albums - several of which I own in some format or other, some were new to me, and some have been added to my collection. As far as I understand it, the albums from the list are presented in a random order. Here's what I've had in order of appearance. Here are the first 20 albums.

If I was a little disappointed at the outcome of my first effort at Zwift time trial racing last week, I did at least pace myself a bit better than I did in event #2. This was held on the same course as event #1, the pan-flat Tempus Fugit course. After a short delay occasioned by an unexpected Zwift update on the Apple TV, I set out to spin through a warm-up ride.

I’ve had a fairly heavy training load over the last week, so maybe I was left a bit jaded. However, the principal failing this evening was a that I didn’t keep a consistent power level through the event. Starting too hard was just the start. I lacked any kind of serious motivation, and repeatedly felt like I just wanted to stop. In fact there’s a surprising number of pauses in the record of the ride (see below).

Flies & Bikes is a website/blog that I started some years ago. Initially I was writing about my interests in Science and my hobbies which include cycling (touring and racing) and tech stuff. At the time I was a University academic, but as my time available to blog waned, the focus shifted towards cycling and tech, then eventually it entered a rather fallow period. 

Along the line, I transitioned the blog from Joomla to Wordpress. I've now reverted it back to Joomla - in doing so, I dropped various comments on blog articles (there weren't very many) as the transition, while automated, leaves quite a lot of manual rearrangement to be done.

I've been using Zwift regularly since April 2020, when I was building back from being an 'early adopter' of Covid-19. In all that time, I've not raced in Zwift, and I've only very occasionally ridden with friends on Zwift.

Until now.

Part 3 of this series is somewhat delayed by Christmas and associated shenanigans such as the traditional Christmas Cold, which really flattened me for a couple of weeks.

In Part 1 I described the hardware I use for cycle training indoors. In Part 2 I’ll describe the principal software package I use for indoor training, TrainerRoad. Part 3 will cover the other software I use, and Part4 the software I use for monitoring my progress (with some hardware comments).

There's a wide variety of apps out there for use with smart trainers. For some of these I'll only give a brief description in Part 3, while others I'll keep my comments very brief as I haven't used them extensively enough to form a valuable opinion.

This is the first in a short series of posts in which I discuss my approach to training for cycle time trials. I find road cycling to be unsuitable for structured training sessions other than extended endurance sessions, due to a combination of climbs and descents (albeit pretty small around here), junctions, traffic lights and of course motor traffic. The exception to that would be the evening 10 mile time trials the club offers through the season, which provided an opportunity for riding at a high sustained pace for 20+ minutes.

In part 1, I’ll give a bit of background to the kit I use.

Support for Joomla version 3 ceased in August this year, and I'd been working on ensuring the three Joomla sites I maintain were upgraded to version 4 in advance of that. What I realised in doing that was the enormous amount of cruft I'd accumulated over the years, especially with the North Bucks Road Club website. One of the issues is always that of finding a sympathetic template, particularly where user access on mobile devices is concerned.

In which I test (and implement) some alternative wiring possibilities for SRAM eTap gear shifters

The SRAM eTap Aero groupset was released in 2015 with a version aimed at road bikes where the gear change controls were switches in the brake levers, and which communicated with the front and rear derailleurs via a proprietary wireless signal. For time trial bikes, the eTap aero was released, where switches mounted on the aero bars were wired to a "blipbox", which wirelessly relayed commands to the gear mechs. Typically, one would set up a pair of switches (the "blips") on the base bar and a second pair of switches (the "clics") on the ends of the aero extensions. The blipbox has four sockets, two for upshift and two for downshift - each clic or blip switch is connected via one socket. The blipbox also has some buttons for shifting. The annoyance there is that the size of the blipbox makes it difficult to tuck it away in the time trial frame.