andygates

The new LJ terms are unacceptable, so I'm moving this old blog from LiveJournal here to Dreamwidth: https://andygates.dreamwidth.org/ ; nothing much happens but I don't want to lose the old stuff. Ephemera and all that.

I'm angry enough to post that Putin clown pic, but this will be more practical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_Rights

I've been trying to get my head around the numbers involved in the bovine TB drama.  The take-home number from the Government's Randomised Badger Cull Trial (the Krebs trial) is a reduction of up to 16% in bovine TB after nine years of culling.

Let's say you've got a medium-large dairy herd, 200 cattle.  Let's say you have really bad TB, and 10% a year are culled as TB "reactors" (cattle that react to the test).  20 cattle per year.  At the end of a decade of culling badgers across your land by the Krebs method, you have 17 reactors: 16% is really lost in the rounding on such small numbers.  So you spend nine years culling on your land, hiring people to do it, faffing with paperwork, dealing with saboteurs, and after all that you've saved three cows a year? 

That can't be worth the effort. 

It gets worse.  The cull method that DEFRA propose isn't the Krebs method: it's widely agreed to be less effective.  It's not been tested, but instead of trapping it goes for wild shooting with ample chance of perturbing the local badger population.  Perturbing the population - stirring 'em up - spreads disease and makes things worse for cattle and badgers both.

The rational response is to abandon the cull and pour effort into the ongoing badger TB vaccines being trialled at, for example, Killerton in Devon.  That's what the Welsh farming office are doing.  That's what the English should be doing too.

This is going to be a bit of a rant, following on from the building hand-wringing about getting all minced up on the roads.  Apologies for offence caused, but, fuckit.

The sides of lorries are FUCKING DEATH ZONES.  AVOID THEM.

That is all.

Really, that is all I have to offer with umpty years of riding in umpty styles and places: LORRIES WILL FUCKING KILL YOU DEAD IN THE MOST RIDICULOUSLY HORRIBLE WAY IMAGINABLE SO DON'T BE A FUCKING RETARD BY FEEDING YOURSELF INTO THEIR UNCARING MAW.

Does this need a "You wouldn't jump into a woodchipper?  You wouldn't dangle your legs in lava?" public service advert?  ARE PEOPLE REALLY SO FUCKING THICK?

Yes, I know they are, or in a hurry, and yes the road shouldn't be a mindless grinding machine lubricated with the blood of Our Tribe but by FUCK on a HOLY FUCKING FUCKDAY the stories I read are all - to my jaded eye - avoidable.  

I'd bet a fat pot that these are the same people who wear a fluo vest and a helmet on backwards and then jump red lights having ticked the boxes and thinking they're safe but with THE ROAD SENSE OF A BLOODY BADGER.

GAH!

STOP DYING LIKE IDIOTS! You're making me look bad.  

"But how," I hear them ask, "How do we learn this, that you so-smug on your ivory seatpost claim to be Great Wisdom?  Evil Government doesn't train us!  Waily waily!"

You can just fuck off, you spineless whining pussies. I learned the way you bloody should: I acted like a dick and got scared by a near miss.  The difference is I PAID FUCKING ATTENTION.  Get out of your bubble of false safety, get that stupid plastic hat off SO YOU FEEL AS VULNERABLE AS YOU ARE and get a few scares.  That'll teach you. 

And if scares aren't your type, get the fucking bus or grow a pair.  (Ovaries will do fine; it's the weirdly prepubescent indolence of the permanent manchild that irks me here: just take control of your own bastarding safety)  There are some adult training courses and they are good, but this isn't rocket science. 

Victim blaming?  You fucking bet I am.  I'm fed up biting my tongue.

Day two in the Big Ballsup house, and more random Irishmen are dialling in and poking progressively lower-level things with progressively lower-level sticks.  This is all to do the first part of the preamble; the actual work hasn't even come up on the radar yet.  Had the local cell mast not abandoned me, I would be tweeting colourfully right about now. 

At the end of my 12-week SL5x5 routine, I did a strength test, in the form of a mock powerlifting meet. 

( Excruciating Mongo-Smash detail... )

Where next?  Well, I'm still on for the thousand and more: this is working for me, and working nicely.  I'm going to give Madcow 5x5 a go.  I respond well to pushing this 5-rep point -- much better than I respond to training to failure or repping out. 

And perhaps more importantly: those lifts are handy enough that I'll look out for a novice/masters powerlifting meet next year and try my hand in competition.  Yay!

Coming to the end of the 12-week Stronglifts 5x5 program and it's been ace. Challenging and rewarding - and I'll get some test numbers out in a couple of weeks when it's done. For now, I'm looking at the future.

I've got a couple of programs in sight for the next quarter: Madcow 5x5, and Wendler 5/3/1. Madcow's a continuation of the 5x5 exercises with pyramid sets and a heavy-light-medium staging; Wendler has other exercises and heavy singles and a powerlifting-dedicated plan. I enjoy heavy singles. I enjoy 5x5 simplicity. I'm not sure I'm advanced enough for Wendler, but then I wasn't sure I'd survive squats every session with 5x5, either. A dilemma I'm sure will resolve itself by the time I get around to choosing.

Does anyone have any other recommendations? Strength program for an intermediate lifter.

I'm in week 9 of this 12-week Stronglifts 5x5 programme, and things are starting to stall out a bit.  It's taking several goes to make a weight, and the progression is losing its relentless linearity. According to my stats, I'm as strong as I've ever been, and all at once. 

The 5x5 rep/set structure and big compound lifts have, very effectively, taken up all the muscle memory I laid down in the past.  This is awesome for a re-starter, but I think it means SL5x5 isn't a lifetime plan.  Well, it was never meant to be: I'm looking now at cutting the number of sets to 3x5 in the monster lifts, where the volume (weight x reps) gets absurdly huge and hard to recover from.  The warmup weight starts to be considerable, big enough to factor into recovery, so it's not "air squats then 5 x 60kg" (which is how my SL started, cripes!) so much as "60, 100, and then 3x 127.5" (this evening's bar-bending fun).

Itching to do some heavy singles, too, but that's for week 13, which is "Let's Pretend: Powerlifter" week, chasing PRs.  Chasing that thousand.

What comes after that?  I'm considering an actual (gasp) intermediate strength program -- something like 3 full body workouts with Heavy, Light, Medium instead of linear progression, sawtoothing the max up once a week).

I'll call SL5x5 a huge success for what it is: a beginner-to-intermediate strength program that's really hard to screw up, and well suited for restarters who can gorge on muscle-memory newbie gains for a couple of months. 

Just want to get this down before I forget; thinking about LEJOG compared to other adventure holidays, where the natural tendency is to go all-out at the start (Crossfit WOD for breakfast?) and only the hardcore (Nastia!) are still going by the end with the rest subsiding into beer and Wii Bowling.

LEJOG was quantitatively different because it had an un-blaggable endpoint.  Even if, say, a tri-themed camp training camp were to have an actual proper race at the end, it's still blaggable.  A sightseeing tour would be, too; by the end of it, bad weather would tick the tearoom box more than the clifftop one.  But a point-to-point tour can't be blagged: you allow a degree of slack because it's not a route march, but the only way to get where you want to go is to keep on riding, every day, munching up that mandatory itinerary. 

In fact, the itinerary becomes the Prime Directive.  Do what you like to have fun along the way, but you have to make the miles.  Pretty soon I learned that an early start was essential unless I wanted to finish very late; no lie-ins on this holiday!  Shopping, pubs, bike parts, food all change their priority from "best choice" to "first acceptable choice" because there's just no time to mither around all day comparing the titanium to the carbon widget or looking for organic hand-rolled dolmades when there's a can of Sutherland chilli in the Spar.  This sounds grim, but actually, it was kind of okay; in fact it was liberating: buy food, get wheel, find campsite.  The option-paralysis that sometimes hits me ("this pub has better beer" "its a bit crowded" "how about this one" "dingy" "lets go back to the first one" "argh!") isn't allowed: it breaches the Prime Directive: Get the miles in.

I'm wondering whether it is applicable elsewhere, because I rather enjoyed it. 

Mind you, I enjoy the slack adventure stuff too: there the Prime Directive is to have fun; the adventuring is the secondary objective, the vector for the fun to be had, and as such it is changeable (and since hanging out with a beer and a bad movie is fun too, easily changed).

This year's go at Burnham Triathlon in two weeks' time is going to be a spectacular ass-pull.  I haven't run since winter, haven't swum all year, and all my cycling has been of an entirely different character (super low effort, super long duration); my high-effort cardio fitness is somewhere back with the autumn leaves, I think.  The Auld Knee is another factor: it hates torque, and TT riding is torquey spin. 

So, some tests before actually racing:

Swim: Can I actually remember how to swim crawl at all?    If I can, can I get back to the required 20 lengths without puking up a lung?  Get in the pool and JFDI.

Bike: Does riding hard hurt?  And more importantly, does the hurt matter?  Through LEJOG there was plenty of hurt, but ample ibuprofen meant it shut up an went away; also the first ten miles hurt worst, so a warmup may be indicated. Torque hurts more but if it's just a rubbish signal from complaining gristle, I can pill and tune it out to a degree.  Get the road bike fettled and hammer some commutes.  Do Science on it.

Run: Can I actually run?  Apparently yes I can -- if I can do 20 minutes now, I can do the 30-35 that Burhnam's sandy 5k offers, on race-day when the gumption is high.  Cardio effort is extreme though, and my feet and calves are like "wat?".  Test passed, though it's going to be ugly. 

Well, here goes nothing. Lots of lovely bags, loaded with stuff for conditions from St Ives to Cape Wrath.

For the gear nerds, that's sleeping gear (summer-weight bag, thermarest, pack pillow and lantern) in one rear bag and clothes (2 of everything, waterproof, VFF's and bike shoes) in the other. Front bags are roughly kitchen and bathroom, with the handlebar bag serving as bento and dashboard and wallet. Tent is a Terra Nova Explorer, more than I need, but big enough to fit all the bags inside for storm/security reasons and able to take anything that'll be thrown at it.

Bike mods are basic: fat comfy slick Schwalbe Marathon Superbes and a set of bolt-on front lowrider racks.

I have a spork, and I'm not afraid to use it.