Windy Wednesday

Today was WINDY! but the good thing about Cedar Falls, is that the bike trails next to the river are pretty much out of the wind. I did the today's interval workout on the roads in George Wyth Park, that was pretty much out of the wind too. Anyway, the workout was a pyramid interval at Maximum intensity 10 seconds on 10 off, increases by 10 seconds up to 1 minute on with a minute of rest and back down. It sure felt like Maximum effort, but my heart rate was not anywhere near max. I am thinking that even with the 1 minute interval my heart did not have time to catch up to the effort:

Wednesday"s Pyramid Intervals

I the frame building front, I am starting to layup the carbon fiber with some 4.7 oz. unidirectional CF cloth. I started with some of the trickier odd shaped places like the bottom bracket area, and the junction of the top tube and down tube. It took me 4 pieces of CF and quite a bit of experimenting with a paper patterns to get the Bottom Bracket area covered. I might have a little too much overlap, but I think a little extra material down near the cranks will be a good thing!

I am getting pretty good at poking holes in electrical tape to let the excess resin out when I wrap the CF to compress it. I am thinking I should order a case of electrical tape because I am going to use a lot of it!

Hills and the End of the Academic Year

Well, classes are over and we are in finals at UNI. That made our favorite hill on Walnut street a little less predictable than usual in terms of traffic. For me it was sort of a physical and mental workout where you had to be watching as you were exerting. We did 5 on Walnut Street and then, actually I only did 4 I had a flat and had to catch up after I got it changed. Then we moved over to Lookout hill and did 12x30 second more. Here is a link to my training data for today: Tuesday's workout

In between meetings and everything else today I finally got the foam core for my bike frame on the jig! Now I have a bunch of fixed attachment points so the places where I need to do some more straightening and fairing are really obvious. So far so Good!

Back to the Intensity

I had planned to do the Ironman century ride yesterday, but the weather was cold, wet, and windy so Kathy and I stayed home.

As of today our training plan has us back into the intervals. Doug joined Kat, John and I today we started with 5x15 second max effort intervals into the wind, then 5x15 on the Walnut street hill, then 2 5x15 sets on Lookout hill. That makes 20. The thing about these short intervals is that it can be hard for me to mentally push myself to max effort when I am a little less than completely motivated (as was the case today), and they are so short a pulse monitor does not really give much of an indication of effort the way it does with a longer interval.

John and Doug

On the frame building front, I am continuing to fair and pull the foam into shape. The other home build CF frames I have seen have straight chain and seat stays. In this design they are bent. I cut them to shape but needed to find a way to make them both symmetrical and bring them to the right curve. To do this I laminated a 3/4" strip of 4 oz S-cloth (lightweight, fiberglass) to the inside of the chain stay, and them used blocks to push them into a wooden form that I cut to the right curve.

After the Resin set, it looks like this worked!! Now I will haveto repeat this with the seat stays.