Supposedly the Chinese training method for swimming works like this:

1)have a huge population
2)Find the kids in that population who are most genetically advantaged in ways that make them likely to be good swimmers (both they and their parents have big hands, big feet, are taller than average etc.).
3)Train that small number of genetically advantaged athletes to swim really well, in an extremely focused manner.

Whereas most training systems work from a much smaller population of people who are interested enough in swimming, and then take those who demonstrate ability through clubs, racing etc. and promote those. Meaning that we may miss out on many people with the genetic ability to be jolly good, but who don’t show early commitment to swimming, and that the people who do get good, may not be as perfectly matched to swimming as people who are selected for exactly that aim and trained up.

Something about it in here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/london-2012-olympics-blog/2012/jul/29/london-2012-china-ye-shiwen?INTCMP=SRCH

If you assume that tommorow’s weather will be the same as today’s. you’ll be right about 2 times out of 3.

Called persistence. Like you say, you’ll be wrong 1 day in 3. Which isn’t that good. It certainly makes you less right than the met office -according to a friend who worked there, they get their bonuses based on how much better their forecasts are than persistence.

The reason the very short term weather sometimes isn’t correct is because they appear to only do forecasts twice a day or something, and also because their weather stations are quite widely spaced – for example I think our nearest is 20 miles away near Nottingham, the other side of a load of hills, which means they probably don’t have much of an idea about the exact weather happening here at any given time. The BBC tells you on their site when they are updated, and where the weather stations are. I don’t understand why things aren’t updated regularly, but I suspect that running a forecast takes a lot of computer power; it’d be great if they ran a real-time forecasting model of some kind to fix that, but I don’t know if they exist or how accurate they’d be.

When I’m working from home, I sometimes do 1 mile swim (down the river), 1.5 mile run (to the river, then coming back up the river, barefoot in swimming shorts), 45 minutes door to door (or less if the river is high and the current is fast).

Best kind of exercise on a hot day, the swimming lowers your body temperature a little, I find I don’t sweat for the run, even when it is toasty warm.

Or another one is a 3 mile bike (10 mins on road bike) to a spot further down the river where there are some rapids and a big slow corner round the cricket pitch / sports fields, three or four times swimming down the rapids there, round the length of the meadow and run barefoot back to the start (30 mins or so) and then 3 miles bike back. 50 minutes to an hour total. Again, you get rid of the sweat in the river from the first ride, and the 10 minutes riding back is short enough that I don’t sweat much.

Oh looked it up – he (and you) would be committing mortgage fraud – see the bold bits below:

http://www.lawsociety.org.uk/productsandservices/practicenotes/mortgagefraud/5041.article#mf2

Individual purchasers can commit mortgage fraud by obtaining a higher mortgage than they are entitled to by providing untrue or misleading information or failing to disclose required information. This may include providing incorrect information about:

identity
income
employment
other debt obligations
the sources of funds other than the mortgage for the purchase
the value of the property
the price to be paid and whether any payments have been, or will be made, directly between the seller and the purchaser

It sounds a lot like the classic scams that people do, where you are in some way led to believe that you have his money, then you give him 13k, and it suddenly turns out that you have given away 13k for nothing.

Unless he suggests at some point that you use ‘his’ solicitors though, or ‘needs the deposit’ before completion, I can’t see how he might work it.

If that isn’t the case, then he is surely committing some kind of fraud, and you are obviously going to be party to it if you take part in the transaction, so I’d be a bit worried.

I would suspect that any normal solicitors will not be happy about doing the agreement to pay him back the 13k, because they tend not to like taking part in fraud. In which case he might suggest using a solicitor he knows who will sort it all out, in which case it’s a scam, you lose 13k.

1075 cal for 100 minutes cycling 10 to12 mph

That’s gotta be one seriously hilly ride surely? Or you weigh quite a lot. According to here[/url] you’d have to be riding ’12-13.9mph’ and weigh about 12 stone to do that.

And don’t forget that you use calories just sitting around, so the number of ‘extra’ calories you burn through exercise is going to be less than the number of calories quoted by this kind of app.

Knackered meaning all sweaty and disheveled

From 10 minutes exercise? Nothing that a 2 minute sit down won’t fix. As long as I remember to shower daily (which I kind of do), I don’t see that being a massive problem.

Bearing in mind that work uniform = shorts and a t-shirt – I don’t exactly have to be immaculate anyway.

But that’ll put you knackered when you get to where you are going!

Not a massive problem really – it isn’t like I need to hurry anywhere once I’ve got there after all.

Hmm. Waiting for an SDK to download estimated time 45 minutes, off for a quick lunchtime swim it is then!

I work 80% time, with a 2 year old to look after the other 20%. I find I get up to a lot of exercise on that day – I have a bike trailer, which we use for general getting around, shopping, going swimming, and also for adventures like trips to the woods, picnics, going paddling in the lake etc. Oh and she has a teeny weeny balance bike, which is probably also improving my fitness – she rides home from the child minders down a hill, and I run behind with running shoes on. Not to mention all the chucking her in the air / ‘daddy carry now’ moments when you’re out, which I reckon have improved my arm strength no end! Oh and the swimming is pretty hard work too.

I also do evening exercise things (triathlon club), bike to work when I’m working in the office, swim in the river at lunchtime, and various other bits and pieces, but I do find it is surprising how much exercise it is possible to get in a day when you are looking after a small kid full time. Thanks to all that, she loves being outside and doing stuff too, even in rubbish weather, which is great.

If the weather is nice, we went to the temporary Wahaca place on the South Bank by Waterloo Bridge. It’s Mexican street food, but done very well. Food v. good and lovely and fresh – although when they say spicy, they mean it – the chilli tacos are one of the hottest things I’ve had in a restaurant ever. Lovely place to sit and watch the river too.

http://blog.wahaca.co.uk/2012/07/going-experimental-down-on-the-southbank/

They also have various normal restaurants, which are jolly nice too.

Joe

For kids or luggage?

If for kids, then I can recommend a Croozer.

It is jolly well built, rolls nicely, not too ridiculously heavy, tons of space for luggage (I’ve camped with a baby and all our camping gear in the back of it), and only quite expensive, as opposed to the ridiculously expensive Chariot ones. Oh and it can be a running buggy or a normal (if large) round the shops buggy, it comes with the different wheels etc.

All the hire places round us have Burley ones. Personally I don’t think they’re as cozy as the Croozer, but I presume they are also quite robust.

Cheaper trailers I’ve seen are silly heavy, and have much less nice seats and less good straps etc. for holding the kids in, which I think probably makes a difference.

I have a double, which is okay, but a bit wide sometimes, particularly off road – a single trailer would be much better for when things get tight.

The seats on the Croozer are kind of hammocky – they hang off the frame, which gives the whole thing a bit of suspension – I’ve certainly never worried about not having the full on suspension of a Chariot trailer. Especially now Rose is two and she’s always egging me on to ride faster at speed bumps or little jumps on the track so she bounces in the air!

I’m pretty sure there got to be a good campsite somewhere near Keswick, and you have the old railway there for a flat bike ride and loads of scrambling and easy rocky paths in the hills that five year olds could go some way up. Plus the lake which is obviously a bonus.

Or somewhere near the High Peak trail or Tissington Trail in Derbyshire. Not sure which campsites are nice round here though as it’s riding distance from home.

I’d go and look at the science behind hydration, and see why the latest recommendations are to drink to thirst rather than a prescriptive drink x mls in x minutes.
Is the research about survival or atheltic performance?

The point that the research makes is that being a bit dehydrated doesn’t harm performance, whereas overhydrating by drinking before you feel thirsty appears to have a big negative effect on performance.

Something along those lines anyway. I suspect it is slightly more complicated, given they’ve written a whole book about it, but the general advice is that your body knows what it is doing, being thirsty is it’s way of telling you that you should drink something, and if it isn’t telling you, you probably don’t need to drink.

squirting that white ant powder all over the place is not an option

It works though. Yes it leaves the place messy for a day or two but you have no ants.

If you can see where they’re coming in, then put it there, but otherwise, put it at entrances and gaps in the wall where they might be coming from.

Oh yeah, and whatever you do now, ignore the people who say “you’re building a rod for your own backs” if you ‘give in to the baby’ all the time (or similar things people say if you do controlled crying) – there are arguments either way about what effect it’ll have in the long term*, but probably it makes next to no difference long term and you might as well just ride it out whichever way is easiest for you to get through. We did the cuddling with the sling thing, and now Rose rarely wakes up before 7am, and goes to bed at a sensible time usually (between 7 and 8), and is very good about daytime naps.

Joe

* some people say that babies who are held too much get too clingy, whereas others say that babies who do controlled crying are emotionally troubled and don’t sleep well later on – my guess is that both are wrong, as I know various people who’ve done both methods and there seems no logic about who ends up with a good sleeping toddler.

You might just have a kid who can’t be put down. Some kids are like that. Sorry. No idea why, but they just seem to need that reassurance more than other kids.

Rose was like it until about 8 months or so. Even daytime naps she wouldn’t take except if moving in the pushchair, or on the sling on someone. I took her for 5am runs in her pram, big long walks in the sling etc. I remember the first time she went down for a nap in the cot really clearly, it was just after 8 months old, I didn’t really know what to do with myself!

It was a pain in some ways, but if you use a sling, it makes life a million times easier. We used a wrap sling (Moby Wrap) when she was little, and got something more structured (a ‘connecta integra’) once she got too wriggly at about 6 months I think. Once you get used to the sling, you can do everything with the kid in it. I’ve washed up with her in it, gone to the loo, cooked dinner etc. It is also very snuggly, lots of time being really close, building up a bond with your kid, which is not to be sniffed at (although I’d have preferred if less of it was at 5am in the morning!).

The good news is, that it means nothing about how they’ll be later on in life – from when Rose learnt to crawl, she’s always been really independent, if anything more so than other kids her age. It kind of feels like she was just waiting to be able to go places on her own, and until then, she was continually annoyed by the fact that she was unable to take herself to look at the shiny things.

Joe

as I understand it. what the excess hydration people are arguing against is the idea that you should drink before you are thirsty – they argue that the bo.y is very good at telling you when it needs water, and that you should just follow its signals. They’ve done studies showing that drinking before you’re thirsty actually decreases athletic performance compared to either drinking when you feel thirsty, or even compared to not drinking at allfor some lengths of races.

It’s obvious that many people hydrate massively more than they need to by the huge difference between the amounts of water you see people drinking on mountainbike rides – people who ride for three hours and want a three litre camelbak, and you compare it with a three hour road ride, where most people might ge some way through a 750ml bottle (and probably at a much higher intensity than your average mountain bike ride).

or look at runners – many club runners I’ve met just don’t carry water for normal hour to hour and a half runs. It certainly doesn’t seem like it slows them down.

Better management of the current budgets would, of course, be too radical an idea. This assumes we are not so arrogant to presume that current management of budgets cannot be improved upon.

‘Efficiency savings’ are always touted when people want to do more but don’t want to spend any more money doing it.

The problem with it is that it assumes both that current budget management is not 100% efficient (which is likely to be true), but also that the person proposing the efficiency savings is able to propose a new budget which is more efficient (which may or may not be true), and also typically ignores the inevitable cost and inefficiency that is imposed by the major reorganisation required.

I bought a second hand bike over there – for the several hundred quid it’d cost to send a bike there and back, second hand made more sense. Sold it on trademe (new zealand ebay thing) for 50nzd less than I bought it for too, which wasn’t bad for a few months bike hire.

I’d always prefer clubs to classes, particularly ludicrously expensive thing like bmf – things like swimming club, triathlon club, running club, usually way cheaper and with a good club you should get just as good training.

bmf always seemed essentially gym prices, but for a pretty basic potter round the park workout with no overheads for them

Difficuly to continue justifying research grants etc if you admit it though.

These ‘scientists’ have probably got families to feed and mortgages to pay, so as long as they’ve got a seat on the climate change bandwagon the larder will be full.

I’m loving this – the idea that researchers do research because they want the vast amounts of money, fame & fortune (and overwhelming quantities of anonymous sexual encounters, hard drugs and free champagne?) that are of course part of being an academic, particularly if you are part of the ‘climate change bandwagon’.

Given climate scientists are mostly going to be people with a pretty strong grasp of maths, stats, computer modelling etc. – if they wanted a safe job with lots of money and all that they’d have become accountants or something – people become academics because they are interested in something, not for the safe easy vast quantities of money. eg. My pay now, after 6 years of postgrad/post doc stuff (and being quite successful at it so far, in a pretty well funded department) is something like 75% of my pay before my PhD, even ignoring the significant amount of inflation that has gone on since then meaning that the money is worth less than it was.

Joe

I met a Canadian guy who has one, complete with refrigerated coffin in the back for putting beer in. I think he was a bit eccentric to say the least!

I found total immersion brilliant for getting from not being able to swim crawl (I think I could do about 100 metres continuously) to being able to swim for a decent distance.

I do think the swim smooth point about overgliding, and gaps in strokes is a good one though – I think the Total Immersion book does mention it a teeny bit, and it is pretty clear that you have to balance stroke rate and stroke length to get optimimum speed but the focus of the drills and things is very much on stroke length.

Right now I’m swimming with a triathlon club where both the coaches are swim smooth fans; much of the stuff is the same, but I’m finding with a bit of focus on consistent stroke rhythm and slightly upping my stroke rate I am speeding up a fair bit (although I’m only at 7:04 for 400 metres right now, so I am by no means a fast swimmer).

Also, if you’re not made of money, you could try some club coached sessions – obviously you don’t get the one to one tuition of a fancy coached session, but at 4 quid or so a go, you can’t really lose out; you may also get access to individual coaching cheaper through clubs – for example a very experienced coach who works with our club also does video stroke analysis clinics which are about £40 or so for club members which is a bit of a bargain, and the other coach runs ‘learn to swim crawl’ sessions for people who are really beginning crawl.

I’m in a triathlon club, not really because I’m desperate to do a triathlon, but the swim sessions are a bit less full on (and assume you have less free time) than joining a swimming club; also because triathletes are often poor swimmers to begin with, they don’t make many assumptions about how good a level you’ll be starting at – we have people who take pretty close to 10 minutes for 400m, and people who are well under 5 minutes on a good day.

Things li_e canging pads, I usually find a quick google for the instructions that come with the brake is the best thing to do. they’re usually pretty easy to follow, and free. For basic stuff (eg taking tyre off without levers) I watch one of the zillions of youtube videos.

No, but I saw a 36er Unicycle been riding fast out of Warrington towards Liverpool on the main road a couple of months ago.

If you the rider of this awesome machine and are reading this, please can I have a shot on it?

Would quite likely have been Steve Colligan – he’s a very fast rider and lives somewhere round there. He is quite an energetic guy, check out this ride he did a few years back: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steve.colligan/about_steve_colligan.html

Joe

31, she’s 2 now, and absolutely loves riding her bike down to the park whilst I run behind to keep up, and going in the bike trailer, so I’m enjoying pretty much daily bike rides at the moment.

Joe

We just have small rucksacks, rather than anything that attaches to the pram. once you have a lightweight ppshchair rather than the massive newborn pram (3-6 months or so), something that you can carry gubbins in without tipping the pushchair over is dead useful.

3-6 months in a fancy bike trailer with a special baby sling attachment (croozer or chariot). Most seats are from one I think.

Rose went in the Croozer trailer from six months and still loves it now she is two. I’ve taken her in a bike seat (hire bike in Berlin), when she was just one, was fine, although I massively prefer the trailer.

McGregor’s studies indicate that there is no such thing as good running form. Rather, skillful running is the result of an unconscious, evolutionary process wherein each runner’s unique body finds its own best way to run economically, resulting in a form that is slightly different from that of any other runner.

would that also be an argument against using padded built up ‘corrective’ shoes to run in? because they would surely make it harder to feel your ‘natural’ running style?

depends on the trailer and seat – our croozer is recommended from 3 months with the special baby bit, and rose was fine in it at six months.

Do you have a sleeveless wetsuit? Wetsuits with arms are more of a pain to swim in as they constrict your shoulders in an annoying way (unless you already have a fancy pants swimming wetsuit, in which case you’ll be fine and dandy whatever). I have a sleeveless one, and it is alright to swim in; not as nice as a swimming wetsuit, but I don’t have two hundred quid spare to buy one of those.

Sighting is good – learn to get your head up and have a look without slowing down too too much. Bear in mind that in the sea, waves may mean you need to sight a bit higher. Worth practicing seeing things to sight off too – for example if you know you need to get to a buoy, look for the buoy, then look for something directly behind it but higher up, and aim for that, it’s easier to sight off high up things when there are waves.

I did yesterday lunchtime. Ran a mile down river, left my top and shoes there, then ran a mile back barefoot in swimming shorts, swum back down, and then ran home (via Morrisons for doughnuts obviously). None of the dog walkers I met seemed to care.

I draw the limit at running wearing just speedos (except on the beach obviously), but I don’t see anything wrong with running along a country path with no top on (or biking with no top on for that matter).

I worked Saturday, so I have a day to take off at some point. Darn!

Today I’m working this morning, then take a couple of hours for a lunchtime swim, then see how I’m doing after that.

I had one on Friday, where I was actually being held up by a car in front, on a single lane road, the car was right in front of me, and the idiot behind me started beeping at me telling me to get out of the f***ing road.

In the end I slowed down for where I turn off, and asked him how exactly he was going to teleport past the car in front once I’d stopped slowing him down, to which he didn’t have an answer, idiot.

London has approximately 190,000 French expatriates, with approx 300,000 people who claim French citizenship

FACT

Not for nothing is it known as the 21st arrondissement… I suppose they’re all here for the weather, eh TJ?

Although France (apparently) has at least half a million English expats, who are also most likely concentrated in the big cities like Paris. Who presumably don’t go there to escape the high taxes of the UK?

Not a bike cafe, but the kiosk café at Kedleston Hall is the only place I’ve ever sent back food – ordered a ‘cream tea’ and it turned out that what they meant was half a tiny scone, which had obviously had a blob of clotted cream and a strawberry put on it at 9 in the morning and had then been left out on the plate in the sun till the afternoon. And only serving half a scone, and the tiniest scone I’ve ever seen, what a load of rubbish. The lady serving it seemed pretty embarrassed too – she’d obviously had a few of them returned, and just said “that’s how we’ve been told to serve them” when I questioned where the other half of the scone was.

On a positive note, the lovely and ludicrously cheap Tor Cafe in Cromford is a good stop on a ride. Not much over 2 quid for a double egg cob and a big mug of tea. And service so quick that I’d only just got sat down and comfortable when it turned up.

Rose is two tomorrow. This week I’ve ridden 100 miles on commutes and doing work trips to buy stuff, 30 miles with the bike trailer, and managed 2 swim sessions, one late night sunday, and one early morning before work.

I can really recommend the bike trailer – it’s a fun thrng to do together, and jolly good exercise too particularly here in Derbyshire. Rose loves it, and also naps well in it, which is jolly useful. we can easily do 40 miles in a (summer) day, and have also been bike camping using it. It’s also good for the weekly shop too (massive boot), which is fun.

I pretty much always ride from the door, and mostly commutes or night rides, but I find the main limiting factor for distance is my energy which means I work from home some days to avoid the commute, rather than time.

We’ve used ours since about then. At first, I always put her in it at points when she was about to fall asleep for a daytime nap, or when she was obviously desperate for a nap but not going to sleep.

She did grump a little bit sometimes when going down for her sleep, but not for long, and probably less than if i’d been trying to get her to sleep in the pushchair or sling. To be honest though, we may have lucked out – it always seemed a bit like a baby version of ‘speed’, she needed constant movement in order to sleep. I found she slept really well in it, but woke up the moment I stopped at home.

I did always come home when she woke up, but with two naps and planning that allowed some pretty long rides, I used it as my main transport for things like going swimming 8 miles away over the hills, or the 10 miles into Derby for clothes shopping.

By about 10 months she worked out that the magic sleep machine was also quite fun when awake, probably because she’d had such comfortable naps in it, but until then I never put her in it unless she was going to sleep.

I know one who learnt pedals at two and eleven months, that’s the youngest, and the others were three when they switched.

I also have met loads of 4 and 5 year olds who can’t, who have never got into balance biking.

I bought my Son a balance bike for his 3rd b’day. It was too big for him at first, but even when it did fit he never used it.

There are some real rubbish balance bikes around – big, heavy, hard to manouvre – if your 3 year old couldn’t get on it, it was probably a massive piece of junk. They aren’t nice to ride, and kids notice that, they really
feel the weight. friends kid with a big heavy balance bike just wanted to steal Rose’s obviously lighter and nicer one.

I’ve got an 18m/old wandering around the house on a Toddle bike, he doesn’t really ride it, just straddles it and literally walks it about the house.

yeah, Rose at 18 months played with it, put it back in the corner, then got it out at 20 months or so, and did the walking thing, then we showed her it could go outside, and before we knew it she was running it down to the park. Then she decided to ask for it every evening after tea for a quick spin round the block, and now she has got the hang of it, she wants to go everywhere on it (except the 20% hill to childminders, which she’ll only ride down, and even then only with daddy holding herfor the steepest bit!)