40 Goals

Damien Grauser has knocked together an explanation of his extended CP model as a series of diagrams... I am in awe. No doubt there will be more later...

And my 9 yr old made us this to celebrate. Bless his cotton socks!

UPDATE 11 Jun 2013: After 2 months of release candidates and bug fixing we finally released yesterday! Am gonna take a couple of weeks of from all this and play golf. Its been 3 years almost. I forked my own version of GoldenCheetah and added a crap load of stuff before merging that with the main code on January 2nd 2010. Now here we are in March 2013 and finally, finally we're gonna release it. Just need to get release candidates out and then the mammoth task of creating/updating documentation for the hundreds of new features and fixes. And this is it, running on Linux: And on a Mac: And just for completeness, on Windows (In this case Windows 8) :

On and off, on and off This time last year I was giving up smoking. On and off for the previous 10 years I had stopped and started in a fairly regular way. Gave up for 2 years, started again for a year. And on and on. So I'm an ex-smoker of 12 months and this time things are different. The reason I gave up is because my kids caught me smoking. They burst into tears. I haven't ever felt so shitty and guilty. Additionally, I started to get heart palpitations and felt quite dreadful. Giving up smoking and they have gone away. I still cannot bear the thought of ever starting again. I've had cravings recently, but they soon pass. Cycling is the same though But I don't know if it is a personality trait or the two are linked, but my cycling, rowing, running or whatever sport I was 'into' each year has also always been cyclical. A year of determined training followed by a year of slobbery. I rowed for Weybridge in 2003 and was as fit as I have ever been, I r...

Had it coming. Driven. Exceptional. Steely. One in a million. But also, cheat, liar, bully, fraud, doper and dealer. Still have fantastic memories watching him race in the Tour, but they all sour when you find out what kind of a man he is and how much of it all was a lie. Cycling has moved on, bye-bye LA.

So I thought I would wait a few days before posting my reflections. In that time I have returned to eating carbs, but in moderation. No longer drink caffeine and don't take sugar.  I have regained nearly ALL the weight I "lost". I assume this is a mixture of fat fain, but is largely glycogen and water since the weight gain is so unbelievably rapid (literally in 2 days or so). I've had a couple of blowouts for my birthday; afternoon tea at the Savoy and a Haagen Daas ice cream yesterday for my birthday. I have been good otherwise. I won't be doing Atkins again, but here is an attempt to give a balanced review: Postives Negatives Breaking my caffeine and sugar addiction was akin to giving up smoking I supercharged my weight loss losing 4kg in 3 weeks. 88.7 to 84.7kg. More alert, slept better and needed less, more positive outlook and self esteem No hunger pangs, cravings for food largely disappeared Eating...

I am going to spend a month (or perhaps longer, or shorter) on the Atkins diet whilst continuing to ride my bike as an experiment to a) shift some stubborn fat and b) measure the impact of a low carb diet on cycling performance. I will be keeping a diary here of my diet, exercise, performance and of course, my weight and any thoughts or reflections on the experience. A few declarations; - I am not training for anything so my riding is purely for fun, and at an intensity 'I feel like doing' - I will be doing circuits and weights during this period, I am not doing cycling alone - My fitness levels are low compared to my best, so I would expect it to improve over time - I have been getting back into shape for 2 months proper. - I gave up smoking (this time for the rest of my life) in January, so may see performance increases through better lung health over time I no longer own a working HR strap, I gave up on HR, grudgingly, last year and have never missed it. You use p...

Back to earth with a bump Since the beginning of April I have been trying to get back into shape. I started with some unfocused riding, just riding for 40k "easy" tended to hurt. I am terribly out of shape. More importantly being yet another fat middle aged man on a fancy carbon bike with a power meter is frankly embarrassing. I am quietly ashamed at what I have become. I don't want to ride for fear of my old riding partners seeing this big, fat wobbly 93kg 6ft tall man struggling to maintain 190w on the flat. Worse, towards the end of every ride I experience all manner of aches and pains in my upper and lower back, my triceps and even my calves. It is depressing. Back in 2007 I weighed 73kg and could  ride the 110km Tour of the Surrey Hills in under 4.5 hrs. Now I couldn't face the first climb. But I comfort myself with the fact that I am actually doing something about it. Buying new clothes with a larger waistline is not an option. In fact, Andrea Morelli w...

"That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of  Lord Woolton . He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were." Speech on 3 July 1948 at the Bellevue Hotel, on eve of the entry into force of the National Health Service

At last... Oh, I was mashing.. nothing new there then. And yes the x-axis needs to be adjusted -- and prettified obviously! And now this is as pretty as I can be bothered for this, for now, never was a big fan of the rainbow colors in CompCS: And now fully integrated and with 'smooth' transition / animation as the values rise and fall. In reality, the 'smooth' animation is a result of the need to keep rolling averages since the raw data jumps about a fair bit .. which makes me wonder about it's accuracy (but then I am no robot on the bike either).

So its time to dust down the realtime code and get it ready for the Turbo season. Got some time off work and spending it having fun and the odd bit of coding... Just starting back on video and want to add better feedback and aesthetics... its all fun. And now the code is in v3, we have video selection and playback/pause etc alongside a performance plot during the workout. And oh joy, lots of 'video codecs are missing' problems will no doubt arise from our intrepid user community! I'm gonna have to drop a few bucks on some more Sufferfest videos ! The development builds should be up in the next couple of days, we added nicer controls: I just got a copy of the Tacx RLV for Milan San Remo. Looking to add support for their file format (.pgmf) so we can ride all the Tacx content. Tacx themselves have a generic program for riding their RLVs on non-Tacx trainers .. so I'm pretty sure they'll be ok about this :) For the eagle eyed... 

AB DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Rest in peace, sir.

For shits and giggles I thought I'd look at how the code has grown in Golden Cheetah. The chart below plots lines of code by version. Now, some say v3 is all bloat. Some say otherwise... More to the point it helps to explain why haven't I ridden my bike seriously in the last 6 months. Code less, ride more.

After adjusting the map display in GoldenCheetah to support the new v3 google maps API I went a step further and added support for Microsoft Bing maps. I think the Bing maps are better, but better keep quiet since I don't want Google to get all upset with me :) Obligatory screenie:

UPDATE 2: Done and committed to version 3 source. I also cleaned up the look-and-feel, still a way to go but starting to look nice'ish. We will get there... UPDATE: Taking my cue from Microsoft, started making the ride list a little more like the email list in Outlook, or Apple Mail for that matter. Starting to look quite nice, but still a way to go. Outlookesque Ride List from mark liversedge on Vimeo . Got screencasting working on Linux using Kazam. Wicked. Here is a video of v3 on Linux with the Ride List now using a Ride Navigator ... customise the columns, sort, group etc. Kinda cool, but whoa there are a few bugs to fix :) Kazam rocks. Ride Navigator Ride List Demo from mark liversedge on Vimeo .

Spent lots of time at Christmas moving to a more configurable UI and after a few bug fixes have now applied it to the core UI of GoldenCheetah. I think it is starting to get there, but there is still a way to go...

Plot distribution charts (histogram) across a date range is almost the last item on the GC 'wishlist' ... after a few false starts we have got there. Need to work on zoning - want to be able to see contributions broken down when zones change in a period (e.g. plot last 12 months, but your zones changed 3 times during that period). Looking at my recent and historic data tells me I took it soft in 2009 -- not enough high-intensity. Slacker.

Worked up Critical Power (mean-max) plots for data other than Power in Golden Cheetah. So, can now plot critical heartrate, speed, torque, cadence for any given time period. Not sure of the utility of it tho ... it has helped me find lots of bad data in my ride files, but beyond that I'm not sure. Obligatory screen shot.