Dirty Fun with the CX Bike

I've written about bike cleaning before. It's still something that I fail to do often enough. But since I've put some new tires on my (crappy) CX bike last week, and then went out to hit the Naxian dirt roads along the coast (from town to Agiassos), there really was some cleaning needed.

In difference to the description in that post, I didn't use WD-40 this time. Just water with soap. Maybe a bit more scrubbing was needed, but that was ok. Mostly I had to get all that sand and dust off. It was everywhere and it had gummed up anything that was oily before. Water and soap worked quite well for that. I can't claim that the bike is totally clean right now, but just "good enough for me".

As for the dirt cycling itself: I had a great time. I should write about the new tires (Continental Cyclocross Speed, 35mm) another time when I have a bit more experience with them, but so far they rock. They are perfect for the dry, hard dirt roads that are common here on Naxos.

Kein Wasser im Paradies

Ich bekomme ja öfters zu hören, dass ich im Paradies lebe. Ja, es ist schon schön hier, aber nirgendwo ist es perfekt. Also antworte ich meist, dass es hier auch seine Nachteile hat. Die letzten paar Wochen hatten wir einige Nachteile, denn dieses Jahr gibt es nicht genug Wasser. Den letzten Winter hatte es extrem wenig geregnet. Am 14. August war dann für Stunden kein Wasser in der Leitung. Das ganze verschlimmerte sich von Tag zu Tag. Die Ausfälle waren auch nicht immer zu den gleichen Stunden, so dass man sich nicht gut drauf einrichten konnte. Am 20. August war der Tiefpunkt erreicht, wir hatten einmal früh morgens und einmal spät in der Nacht für je eine halbe Stunde Wasser.

Danach wurde die Situation wieder etwas besser. Da mehr und mehr Touristen und Sommerhäusler abreisten, reichte das Wasser wohl wieder etwas weiter. Einige Tage später hatten wir wenigstens immer Vormittags Wasser. Damit konnten wir uns wenigstens etwas einrichten: Morgens erstmal Flaschen und Eimer füllen, Geschirr spülen, duschen, ab und zu sogar eine Waschmaschine laufen lassen. Mühsam und stressig ist es trotzdem.

Die letzten zwei Tage hatten wir dann wieder durchgehend Wasser. Ich klopfe erstmal auf Holz dass es so bleibt. Vielleicht regnet es irgendwann im September ja auch mal wieder.

Time for a new phone

It was January 2009 when I got a new work phone from my then employer. It was the brand spanking new Nokia e71 smartphone. It did it all and it proved to be a longtime companion. I've used - and loved - that phone ever since. I'm on my 3rd battery. Lately though, more and more things stopped working. The VoIP client and the VPN didn't hold up with the software cycles in their fields. Lately the email-client stopped working too. Those are software problems, there might even be solutions. More and more keys stopped working or fell out. And then the USB connector started to break.

In the end I bit the bullet and decided on a new phone. Given the current selection of phones, this is like "choosing the least sucky of all those sucky phones out there". There's nothing with a physical keyboard. The phone ecosystem seems to think that as a customer, you're just an expendable that never really "owns" the hardware. The security problems are a nightmare. Providers don't bother to update software. Everybody thinks that it's ok if a phone breaks apart and is broken if it ever falls down (typical e71-owners wouldn't even check the phone for damage when it fell down).

So I got myself a "Samsung Galaxy XCover 3 VE" (instead of "VE" it might also be described as "(2016)". It came with Android 6.0.1, which means it will be up-to-date for a little while. I'm trying not to think about all the security holes that are already announced for that platform and duly ignored by providers and handset makers. It's a phone that is slightly waterproof (IP67 IIRC), dustproof, and "should" even survive a little bit of falling down. Only experience can tell on that side.

First impressions: It works. The cameras is better than the one from the e71, but not by a huge margin. Good enough for pics to put on the web when out cycling. Using it is ok. Response time in the UI are really ok. The screen resolution is not great, but good enough for the current state of my eyes (I wouldn't see more on an ultra high resolution screen). Battery time is not in the same league as the e71, but I guess good enough. I'm very stringent about shutting things like bluetooth down and dow't use much (same as on the old phone). The e71 clearly was a phone where "phone things" were much easier accessible.

There is this saying about war, that says it makes difficult things easy, and simple things complicated (or something like that). That's the impression I have about Android. Install a VoIP client? Easy peasy. Open the phone to make a simple phone call to someone in your address book? Takes about 10 steps more than on the Nokia. Put pictures from the camera straight into Strava using the client, childs play. Get your pictures from your phone to the computer that sits 30cm next to it? Ah well, you could do it this way but..., and you could do it that way, but... but in the end it was designed to just hand over your stuff to Google or some other "cloud" thing. Which I obviously don't do.

And there is an app for everything(TM). But that app is quite likely trying to display annoying ads or is crippled in some other way. On the Symbian platform there was none of the ad bullshit really, but there were the crippled apps too. The symbian app selection was smaller, that just meant that you had less "sifting through all the garbage" to do.

Verdict: For now, it will do. It won't last as long as the last one, and it makes some simple stuff complicated. The rest, time will tell.

//INRNG Supporter Jersey

For some time now I'm reading the //INRNG blog about pro cycling. One mark of how well done this blog is, is that from time to time people think it is a comercial cycling press website, and they demand more of this or more of that. Instead it's one man's hobby blog, with a bit of extra income by sponsors and... the sale of supporter jerseys, caps, and socks. So after my usual hesitating and back-and-forth, I decided to finally order a jersey and some caps. So here is what happened and how I like the jersey so far...

Ride Slow to Get Fast?

There is this story in cycling that says that to get faster, you have to do some rides slower. The story goes that the main difference from amateur to pro cyclists training is that amateurs don't ride slow enough on their slow rides, and not hard enough on their hard rides. I'm not a trainer, and I can't give any scientific evidence on this. But I've tried it for a few weeks now. Here is what works for me now...

The Heat is On

The last few days have been excessively hot here. There is a small heatwave passing going over most of Greece right now, the peak was on Saturday and Sunday. Right now things are slowly improving. In our little mountain village on Naxos, it was the first time that we experienced the temperatures not cooling down significantly over night - the wind was stil hot. We're new here, so that might be no surprise, but the oldtimers tell us that it's not something that happens "normally".

The weather report says we had temperatures around 37°C, while in Athens the temperatures would have passed 40°C. I've lived through worse, but that doesn't make it less annoying.

It didn't keep me from riding my bike though. Over the last few weeks I've been working on my acclimatisation. I've been riding more and more in the heat, at the same time improving my hydration. Because when it's hot, you have to get used to it and you have to drink a lot of water. I used to take small sips of water every now and then. Now I switched to drink large gulps at once, as much as I can drink without getting out of breath. The rate of emptying my water bottles has increased a lot like that. On Saturday I drank one bottle (I think they're about 600ml) every 10km / 30min.

Sunday evening I the breeze wasn't that hot any more, yesterday evening it returned to being a cool breeze, even if it wasn't very strong. I hope it stays with us for the rest of the summer.

Two Training Blocks

The last few weeks my cycling-Fu finally took a few steps forwards. I've been going to the gym to fix my left/right leg imbalance, but I don't think that's so much the cause of the improvement (yet). What got me forward was doing two blocks of tough training, with riding much more than I used to do in the last months.

You see, first we had the sprint, where we had (amongst other friends) Borja here cycling with me for 10 days. With Borja I cycled 311km with 5500m of climbing, in 6 rides. One ride was a nice, round 100km Apollona round, always a good endurance builder. When that was done I relaxed a bit... and went back to the gym.

And not long after that, my friend George showed up. Now George, he's in a different category of endurance riding. He has completed his 2nd 400km brevet, and is now training to do the 600km brevet.

Even though he brought the family over, for some days of vacation around Greek Easter, we managed to put in 4 rides. Those 4 rides made me ride 254km in one week, climbing 4500m. That's about 50-60% more than I used to do in a typcial week in the months before this.

As for the results of those two "training blocks"? Of course I have only anecdotal evidence, but I seem to be as comfortable to ride 60km now as I was doing 40km before. Unless I've been to the gym, in that case I'm just a useless pair of sore, tired legs. Ah well.

Flower Power Sprint

The team I'm working with on one of my projects has this tradition of meeting roughly 2x per year and working all together for about a week. We call that a "sprint" (despite that some software process terminologies call something different "a sprint", we're not bothered). The last one was last November in Galicia, Spain. This time we were on Naxos again (for the 3rd time now, April 6-16).

Our program consisted of 3 days of intensive work, then 1 day off, then another 3 days of "sprinting", followed by 2 days for "social stuff". We were quite productive on the work days, which resulted in us enjoying the "social" days together even more. We also had lunch and dinner together mostly, which resultet in way too much food being eaten. In early April, not all naxian restaurants are open, but there is still a good selection.

Borja and me spent much of the "social" time out on a bike. We explored many of the less cycled roads of Naxos together, and the number of climbs was almost dwarfed by the number of sheep and goats we met out on the road. We also met The Pig (which is another story for this weblog, but since The Pig has a no-photo shield around it, maybe better for another time). In the process, Borja managed to pass the magical "100km in one ride" mark, of which he has written a nice ride report. Oscar and Panos went looking for sheep and goats on a couple of motorbikes, but they missed The Pig.

One perfect fit is that we got a new team member from Naxos, joining the team just a few days before the sprint. This fit perfectly, as he could meet all the team members, and also get a working start on the code base.

Oscar has another sprint report online, with tons of picture.

Back from Paris

So, I came back from Paris. I had a very nice and successful week there. Apart from the business stuff, I also did a tiny bit of tourism. Not too much, since walking around currently isn't really my strong point. On the last day I noticed that I had started to limp. Ah, never ending story with that leg, it seems.

After the "vacation", I needed a few days of rest though. The main reason was that I spent an overnight at the Athens airport. My plane from Paris arrived at 23:40, my plane to Naxos left at 7:15. The airport hotel is ridiculously expensive. So I just whiled away the hours. There are some places where you can try to get some sleep, but since I was alone, I didn't fall asleep at all. I re-watched an old movie ("A Sunday in Hell"), then read up a bit on the Intarwebz, since during the days in Paris, I was mostly enjoying offline time. The first 3-4 hours passed quite fast, then somehow the clock seemed to slow down.

The worst was clearly over when I met some friends while waiting for boarding on the little plane to Naxos. The flight passed really quick. I had a nice window seat again, but this time I forgot to take the camera out of my cabin bag, so no propeller pics.

Paris-Brest (the sweet version)

Paris-Brest-Paris is one of the toughest cycling events that a mere mortal can attend. It involves cycling 1200km in 90 hours and is a strictly amateur event. Before it was this "randonneuring" event, many years ago, it used to be a professional race. At some point, someone (I forgot who) created a sweet called "Paris-Brest" in its honor. I knew that much.

This Saturday, while shopping with my host here, I was standing outside the bakery... when I noticed the sweet in real. It's something different to read about this, and then to see it in person. I probably should have gone in and tried one, but at the time the bakery was so full that there was a line outside the door - that's why I was waiting outside.

In any case, I should have gotten one for my friend tralala, who on the same Saturday rode a 400km Brevet (congrats, man!). One the one hand, he could use the calories after that monster of a ride, on the other, in a few years he might be riding PBP itself and then it would be a good preparation.

UPDATE: The sweet things in the pics aren't actually "Paris-Brest", but chocolate Eclairs. Seems that the bakery had misplaced the label. I got a real Paris-Brest a few days later, and saw another one in a restaurant, and they didn't look like this at all. OTOH they were true calorie-bombs.