Update: it seems both persons in our team got infected by Campylobacter from drinking some water from a local well. Lesson: use the water-purification tablets!
Category: Sport
Energy
Is 3700 kcals enough energy for a 24-hour hiking/orienteering event?
Keimola
Orienteering - Pirttibacka
Iltarastit pirttibacka, 6km course. Walking in the woods and slow jogging on paths/roads - slow enough not to cause problems with reading the map or continuously knowing where you are. As soon as jogging turns into running the brain seems to get too little oxygen, everything moves too fast, and I am lost 🙂
Sunday 100k
Another Sunday and another 100k ride - now in the west to east direction.
I guess one solution to the high-gear-problem is just to ride the bike faster 🙂
Wind from the back/side helped a lot. There's no 10k-segment in the pic at over 30km/h but there were many 4-5k stretches of flat or slight downhills where it was possible to keep a nice 30-32km/h. I rode this one non-stop with about 2L of fluids and one Toblerone chocolate-bar as fuel. Although there are bike-paths in Espoo - where you would think they make every effort to have the traffic flow smoothly - there are also traffic-lights which in fact slow you down significantly - thus the penultimate 10k is the slowest...
The spoke-magnet supplied with the Garmin Edge 800 on the back wheel came loose and broke at around 6km, so speed data is from the GPS only. The speed reading on the screen updates quite a bit slower when working only from GPS-signal without a cadence/speed sensor.
Bike Gears
Update: I had the wrong number of teeth for sprocket nr4, it should be 19T in fact, so the correct graph looks like this:
Turns out it's not exactly easy to find a 46T chainring for SRAM Rival on sale anywhere. The closest I found was a complete 46/38T cyclocross chainset.
I did my second 100k (well 108.2km to be exact) bike ride for the season on Sunday, now with newly bought Tubus Fly rack and a pair of Ortlieb panniers. Much better weather and fitness compared to last time meant that I finished in just over 5 hours.
Ride details: 108.2 km, 5 hours 2 min, avg-speed 21.5km/h, avg-cadence 76, avgHR 118, calories: 1669 kcal.
Riding with panniers full of stuff (heavy stuff!) really changes the feel of ridig quite a lot. Without any bags uphills can be attacked in the big chainring by standing up and pedaling hard. With bags the bike feels much heavier and even small uphills need to be dealt with by shifting down into the small chainring and spinning at 80-90 cadence while sitting down.
My bike came with a 50T/34T compact SRAM Rival chainset and a 12T-27T 10-speed cassette. I wonder if changing the big ring to a more "cylcocross-like" 46T ring would make for better gearing? This graph I made shows the bike-speed at 80-cadence in the different gears. I used 2099 mm as the distance the bike travels when the wheel turns one revolution, taken from the auto-calibration data of my Garmin Edge 800. Changing to a 46T would give four gears in the 25-31 km/h bracket, instead of three currently. It's not like I need the 42 km/h top-speed that the 50T ring gives anyway.
Have updated to WordPress 3.2. The look of the admin-panel has changed slightly, otherwise hope everything is OK (the comment-settings usually get messed up when updating...)
Friday 51k ringroad ride
A better attempt at riding the ring-road, as I didn't get lost as often as two weeks ago! Average speed also up from 20.4 last time to 23.0 km/h (2h 14min total time) this time. With some practice and better negotiation of the big intersections this will become a 50k training ride in two hours flat.
Orienteering - Pornainen
More orienteering, this time in Pornainen. Much less paths, roads, and other signs of urban life compared to central park in Helsinki. Finding our way based more on compass heading, and many times slowing down to a walk through terrain where it is hard or impossible to run. Searched quite a bit for nr 7, and even longer for nr 10 on the side of the wrong rock-face...
Lost in central park
Did a 7km "iltarasti" orienteering course starting from Laakso. 16 controls in total, one and two were easy, then we stumbled on 19 when going for 3, then more or less ok on 4-8, a big miss on nr 9 (just at the top of the map) which features three almost identical 3-road intersections and we mistook the third one for the second one... then again mostly OKish towards the end, with maybe a bit too much walking/searching on 15. The gps shows 9.8km in 1h 45min, so not exactly fast going...
Nokia N900 vs Garmin Edge800 GPS comparison
On Wednesday I had a Garmin Edge 800 (red line in the pics) on my bike while Risto was using a Nokia N900 (blue line). Here are a few comparisons of the GPS-traces. Our bikes were obviously not exactly following the same route, so that accounts for some of the differences. The Edge800 seems to take GPS-samples a more often than the N900.
