simply technique for its own sake is useless. it is only of benefit it it offers improved performance.

Like reduced injuries, and higher speed you mean?

As I said coaching/training etc is not what your "guru" is offering. He seems to have a new USP and his books arent aimed at improving performance (I suspect the market is full of too many good ones from people who are actually making a contribution for him to make any money!)

It's hardly a 'new USP' – call it efficiency, call it performance, essentially, all the people looking at running technique (pose, alexander technique, barefoot running, chi running etc.) are offering ways to get further for the same amount of effort, and/or reduce the injuries you get whilst doing so. Alexander technique is hardly new or unknown for that matter, it's a very common method of looking at repetitive things that people do with their bodies, and breaking learnt patterns of movement that may be inefficient. If it works so well in lots of other areas (there is loads of evidence for it's efficiency in work with musicians that I know about, also in swimming), there is no reason that running should be the odd one out, the only physical activity that we can perfect purely by repeating it, without considering our technique at all.

Joe

But the act of attempting to move faster in the water leads to better technique.

The act of attempting to move faster in the water, whilst following an efficent training plan which takes into account the dynamics of water flow and resistance has been shown to improve technique.

The act of attempting to move faster in the water without taking into account the dynamics of water flow and resistance, leads to people hitting a wall, and repeatedly practicing the same, inefficient stroke.

Which is why top level swimmers without exception employ people to watch and improve their stroke efficiency.

Interestingly, it was the massive improvement in my swimming by following some efficiency based training, rather than just striving to go faster through the water as you suggest, that got me into the running thing, where I also noticed a massive improvement in my running from training based on efficiency, rather than just repeatedly doing something that I'd done a million times before, and denying that bad habits can exist, or that it could be any more complicated than putting one foot after the other.

A small child runs in almost exactly the same way as an adult their is little learning involved

No they don't. A kid running barefoot runs quite differently to most adults in running shoes. Surely that much is obvious to any bugger who has seen a kid and an adult run?

Also, about barefoot running / forefoot running etc. you should read this recent study, by a bunch of good people, reported in a very good peer reviewed journal, showing how it massively reduces the impact on feet.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7280/abs/nature08723.html

Joe

no right or wrong way to run and its no coincidence that the best runners look very graceful. Form and function are part of the adaption process and with increased training the body becomes more efficient.

There is no one right way to run, but there are clearly tons of wrong ways to run, and many people will do them repeatedly for thousands of miles, drilling the bad habits into their muscle memory. Increased training doesn't do it all on it's own, as the many club runners with recurring injuries should surely make it obvious. If you follow this kind of training scheme, the people who come out of it may be efficient, natural runners, but that is only because you've weeded everyone else out through injuries.

On the shoe thing, I have some Saucony ones. They are quite light and not very padded, at least at the important front bit where my feet hit the ground most.

Joe

Not having a pop at you Joe but its pathetic that people feel the need to be instructed in something that comes naturally to young children and some of the poorest nations in the world are its greatest exponents.
I despair at anyone that needs teaching how to put one foot in front of the other!
Instruction in training methods/coaching yes but the basic concept?

I don't know why people bother learning to swim strokes – I mean babies (and even animals) can naturally swim doggy paddle, why don't we just stick with that, rather than learning to swim efficient freestyle or breastroke? I despair at anyone who needs teaching to move forward in water.

Not having a pop at you Joe but its pathetic that people feel the need to be instructed in something that comes naturally to young children and some of the poorest nations in the world are its greatest exponents. I despair at anyone that needs teaching how to put one foot in front of the other!

Supposedly a lot of this has to do with shoes, and the way people in western nations wear heavily cushioned shoes for all their running. Whereas in very poor and hot countries, people tend to run more naturally, either barefoot, or with something much closer to a barefoot running style. Children often run barefoot too. In those countries, people can run hundreds of miles without major injuries. In the western world, we spend a fortune on expensive cushioned shoes, and many people seem to have injuries every fifty miles or so, which it is argued are actually caused by the way that shoes encourage heel strikes / running with your feet landing in front, and also not listening to your body or reading the terrain through your feet.

Have you had running injuries much? Know anyone who has? If so, you probably don't know how to run. Sometimes that may be overtraining, but all too often, it is just because people run in weird unnatural ways, and don't listen to their bodies.

The only problem with learning how to run in a way that is efficient and lets you run without injuries, is that you get annoyingly evangelistic about learning to run.

teaching how to put one foot in front of the other

Ah yeah, but if you'd done the workshop, you'd know that it is more efficient not to think of feet going 'in front of each other', in efficient running, each foot lands directly below the body. If your foot lands in front of you, that slows you down. Even that simple fact makes it feel a load easier to run.

I've found since I did the course, I am a whole lot faster, with no extra effort. I don't run very often (probably once a month maximum), but I've entered some races, and never come outside the top third, despite hardly any training.

Watching people nowadays, I'd say 90% of people you see running suck at running and could make themselves more efficient through improving technique. I suck at running, although slightly less maybe, but at least I am aware of it. Even loads of relatively okay club runners run in weird ways that just cannot be efficient.

If you look at really good runners, they don't run like normal people – they almost all land their feet directly under them, and spend a lot of time working on technique to get faster. Technique is free speed, and reduces injuries, you'd be an idiot not to think about it.

Particularly true offroad too – look at good fell runners – almost all wearing silly unpadded shoes, which it turns out make much more sense than big padded shoes for running over hard off road terrain.

Joe

Is a bad back really likely to be shoe related? I'd guess it is far more likely to be technique.

If you happen to be near one of these workshops
http://www.theartofrunning.com/Master_The_Art_of_Running/Workshops.html
I went on one once, and found it very useful for running technique. There is a book, which is okay too, but it is much easier to understand from the workshop he does.

Joe

The videos on Gizmodo appear to show the signal dropping from a full five bars down to "Searching…"

Yeah, but five bars can cover quite a range of signal strengths (from something like 100 – 50 dbm on my phone shows up as full signal), so if it is already at the high end, like if you're in a city, it'd have to drop massively to get below all five bars.

Joe

3G or N95

Which aren't really comparable either, given there was over a year between them. 2g iPhones go for roughly the same as an n95 and came out at the same time. That is a better comparison. Unfortunately, due to Nokia not bringing out anything that didn't suck since then, there is no real comparison between fancy nokias and iPhone 3g / 3gs.

neither can I or the other two in my office who now have them.

It'd be worth going to a low signal area to check – it's not going to make a difference if you're in somewhere with very strong signal (like in a city centre, or right near a mast), as even an attenuated signal will give you all the bars in a very good signal area.

Joe

I'm aware how tough it is to ride one, but a team of unicyclists have it easier than a solo MTBer!

I think this is right. Even doing mayhem as a solo, I think I probably put in less effort than the top solo guys. It is hard to ride a unicycle in terms of skill, but in terms of effort, you have similar limits to a biker, except that you spin out on the flat, and you don't have a freewheel. So, you put in a bit more effort on the downhills (although with a brake, it is less than you'd think), uphills are roughly the same, but on the flats, you can put in more effort on a bike.

I know I've done tens of thousands of miles of unicycling, and I never got quite as fit as I have from road biking 100 miles a week.

Also, because there's a smaller pool of unicyclists to choose from, the fittest bikers are probably way fitter than the fittest unicyclists, and probably able to put in a lot more effort.

Joe

after you've just proven yourself so slow that you can't even overtake a unicyclist on the uphill only to find the next part of downhill singletrack obstructed by some pony tailed attention whore on a fixed unicycle doing 9mph and meaning you might have to actually learn to overtake, 'tis most irritating.

If you're arguing against unicyclists, you should also argue against the 25%-33% of the field who are slower than us, and who hold us up – even on the downhills some bikers are slower, and on the uphills there are tons of really slow bikes who you have to overtake.

I can see though that a unicycle would be out of place in the NPS races, where at least at the good levels, everyone is relatively fast, but at a mass participation event like mayhem, unicyclists are not the slowest riders. I've entered tons of (mass participation rather than seriously competitive) events on my unicycle, and there have always been people on bikes behind me at the finish.

Joe

It's only 20 miles a day, hardly an epic! Looks like a fun race.

I know Kris, he is pretty fit, and a very efficient rider. I imagine he will beat a few bikes, and probably sell quite a few mountain unicycles in between the racing!

The trans Wales refused unicycle entries because they didn't believe it was possible, humph.

Joe

Then you were paying too much for the N95. I think a lot of people pay a lot more than they need to for their phones.

(BTW i'm not anti-apple/iPhones, just a pet hate is folk that think the iphone is "cheap" by any stretch of the word. It's a £500 or £600 phone, whichever way you cut it, you're paying that for it).

To be fair to Apple, the N95 was a £700 phone when it came out, the HTC Desire is a £400 phone. None of the fancy smartphones are cheap.

Joe

I pay taxes in both the UK and the US. 40% and 50% tax rates plus 20% on top of all that on everything you buy, IMPO, is a joke. Thats before you've looked at the council tax, petrol prices and capital gains tax.

We only tax 40 and 50% on the very highest earners (something like 5% and 1% isn't it?). Which seems fair enough. I mean you'll still have more than half of your 100k or more a year, and there's only so many yachts and sportscars a man needs.

Joe

http://gizmodo.com/5571171/iphone-4-loses-reception-when-you-hold-it-by-the-antenna-band

would worry me a bit about the iPhone4 – looks like you might *need* a case, which would annoy me.

Ouch. Sounds like all their testers had cases (not surprising when you're hanging around in public with the worlds most exciting tech secret in your pocket!).

It perhaps suggests that they have gone too far on the making it super thing / small, so much that they've had to put important electrical bits on the outside of the phone, meaning you need a case, making it as a whole bigger than previous phones. Doh.

as we've repeatedly covered here, if a business is inefficient, it fails if a business does not provide what its customers want or expect it fails – this is not a risk with the public sector, and is why the public sector so often fails to offer value for money.

Not true. Businesses have to be incredibly inefficient to fail. All they have to do not to fail, is scrape by and make a profit, or at least not so much of a loss that their debts get called in, and be not so much worse than their competitors that they actually die. Which in many markets is not exactly a high bar.

In an ideal world, there'd be a million companies able to do everything, there'd be no inertia in markets, no advantage to being a big established company, no barriers to entry, none of the other things that mean that markets don't actually work how you think they do, and it'd all be lovely, customer service would be great, and we'd all be happy with our electricity providers.

If markets were 100% perfect and efficient, we wouldn't have wasted zillions of pounds and years of peoples time during the dot-com boom etc. We had bollocks companies with no sensible business plan being hyped up by market lovers so much that they could even buy and almost ruin major actually profitable, viable businesses (AOL/time warner being the worst one).

We wouldn't have had banks bombing left right and centre over the last couple of years, as they discovered that the supposedly efficient market pricing of assets was actually pricing things worth bugger all as being worth an awful lot.

Joe

a public sector role has a directly comparable private sector role?

Me:
Software developer, few years experience, five years ago, private sector, £35,000 (and offered more when I quit)
Researcher, also doing quite a lot of software development, an extra PhD, 5 more years experience, working much harder, roughly £25,000

In my experience of moving from private to public sector, the private sector was often full of inneficiency, poor management, customers being ripped off left right and centre, golf rather than job skills as the primary driver for advancement, long drunk lunches & pretty slow to get the job done etc. In the public sector, pretty much everyone here is very focused and into what they do, and we get stuff done in easily half the time, and stupid management rarely gets in the way.

Oh yeah, and as for job security, in the private sector, I've spent years working with pretty useless people, because they had no sensible way of sacking people, or because whoever hired them didn't want to admit their mistakes. In the public sector, everyone is forced to justify themselves by getting funding, and almost all people at my level are on short term contracts, renewed based on performance & funding.

The problem with the argument that the public sector is always inneficient and the private sector is efficient, that comes from idiots who have no knowledge, and have just read a few press releases from the more right wing conservative think tanks, is that like most sweeping generalisations, it is bollocks, and just makes you look like a ****. Yes the public sector is inefficient sometimes, yes the private sector is too. There isn't any general trend either way.

As for customer service, that's a laugh – as anyone who has ever called up a utility, phone company etc. because companies are so completely short term profit driven, they basically dump all customer services in order to make themselves more profitable in the short term, without worrying about losing customers in the long term. In part they don't even need to worry about losing customers, because almost all utility companies are as bad as each other. The only exceptions I can think of are Ecotricity, and Smile, who both don't use automated telephone systems, you just get to talk to a useful person pretty much straight away. But that has hardly upped the level of customer service for everyone except for the few who switch to them. Contrast that with the doctors, phone them up, talk to a person, local council, phone em up, guess what, talk to a person, local hospital & midwifes unit, phone them up, talk to a person etc etc.

Joe

I've been on both ends of this – knackered after a long day, getting a 10 mile draft made a big difference, and have also towed some poor old roadie most of the way from Belper to ilkestone.

I'd only draft people with drop bars, and would only want to be drafted by them, as it at least shows enough sense to buy the right bike ( although i've yet to meet the fabled faster than a road bike mountain biker that you hear about so often on here !)

Looks like yet another crappy designer concept bike. One sided forks, stupid wheels, belt drive, wacky frame, all the designer cliches. If you look at the picture, in order for it to have pedals, wheels, seat and bar in the right place, the circle would be ginormous. If the wheels were any decent size, the circle would be ginormous. The drive belt would be longer than that picture too.

You should take a look at brompton and birdy and the like, they have very ingenious folding mechanisms, which actually take into account the fact it should be rideable as a bike, and not weigh a ton, rather than just being some idiot designer's stupid concept, with no idea of how bikes beyond the fact that they have pedals, bars, seat and wheels.

A bit over 16 miles. Fastest I've done it in is 54:13, which made for an 18.1 mph average (proper average including stops, not a stupid cheating average). It does have just over 1000 foot of climbing, which slows things down a little.

I'm confident mine is accurate – distances & height gain off google maps, and I have gps tracks of almost every day too.

Joe

I've got the tuck and roll thing down pat from mountain unicycling. It works great there, as you're free of the unicycle the moment you fall, but unless you're doing big jumps, or you fall down a mountainside, I can't see how it helps in bike falls, as you're tangled up in the bike.

Or at least the sort I have, where I tend to fall to the side, and land still on the bike. I guess if you're over the bars it could help, I don't really do any big enough drops to have to worry too much about that yet.

Joe

I also can't see it going down too well with Tory supporters / UKIP / BNP, those types of people, what with it being a 'put the UK on European time' proposal.

Joe

They'd have to move school forward, or teenagers would start getting stupider. There's evidence that teenagers learn much better if they get up later (a few schools start teenagers later than younger kids already).

Joe

I've worked with TV presenters, and whilst they do get to do exciting stuff as part of their job, if you look at the amount of work they have to do in between the exciting bits to present the programme, personally I'd rather do a normal job and pay for my own holidays. It is bloody hard work – doing tech stuff on a TV shoot is tiring enough, and the poor presenters work ten times as hard as me.

We did a roughly 5 minute piece filming on rollercoasters last year, and the poor presenter had to go on one pretty long rollercoaster* something like 15 times, and also got repeatedly stuck on several of the biggest drop and spin rides in the park too. By the end of the day, he was completely broken – those things are very tiring to ride repeatedly without breaks to queue. On the piece, he just looks happy and professional throughout, and it just looks like he rode one time on each ride. It's a tiring job with 12 hour days and typically a fair bit of travelling to the 12 hour day too, and the ones who aren't super famous don't even get paid spectacularly well.

Joe
*"Saw" at Thorpe Park for any coaster nerds

It is alright to type on at a table, although strangely it doesn't really seem as good as the iphone keyboard to me, as your hands don't have a fixed position. As far as I can tell from the time I've spent playing with ours at work, it sucks typing anywhere else, like on your knee or if you're holding it – phones are much better there. I'd rather have a phone for when I'm not at a table / sitting with a laptop on my knee, and a laptop for the rest of the time.

You also need clean hands to use it, and you need a cloth to clean the screen.

I'd not have one instead of a laptop. I can see it being an okay toy to have in addition, but it is so limited compared to a laptop.

Joe

Oh yeah, one last annoying 'noise coming from the bottom bracket when I pedalled hard' – loose spoke on the back wheel. I tightened every bloody other thing before I worked that one out. From the saddle it always sounded like it was coming from the bb, and annoyingly, it only made a noise when I was standing on the bike pedalling, never when off the bike.

Joe

I had something similar a couple of times – first time it was the bars, put some grease on the bars, stem etc. and that fixed it, second mystery noise, I took out the BB, greased the threads excessively and put it back in and it stopped.

Oh and my pedals go creaky every so often, particularly after wet rides – just bunging some oil/grease on the clippy in bit fixes it (not opening them up and servicing the bearings – just the clipless bit).

Joe

we are not allowed to feed the birds,

Because someone doesn't want to clean up bird poo, or thinks it is a bit unclassy to have loads of birds around, so they use health and safety as an excuse.

not allowed to have door mats,incase somebody trips over them,

Because someone is on a campaign against comedy doormats, because they think it makes the place look less classy, so they use health and safety as an excuse.

must park within all bays and no where else,

Because someone doesn't want the hassle of sorting out a parking free for all, so they use health and safety as an excuse.

Flamingo Land is awesome. You should go on the wild mouse (or is it crazy mouse, can't remember) – scariest rollercoaster in the country, just because it is so shonky and horrible. It is a real laugh. Bit expensive to take a toddler to though maybe, given they can't go on the good bits. If you're looking to go on a rollercoaster yourself, don't bother queueing for mumbo jumbo (the new ride) – it is dull, and not as good as kumali or the one with the motorbikes.

The forbidden corner is awesome, although I don't know if a 2 year old would get any more out of going there than just going to a park?

Lots of great picnic places on the moors. There is a nice ice cream place somewhere near there too, some small village, maybe it had a castle, can't remember exactly.

Joe

I would calculate your maximum heart rate properly, by doing a stress test.

Mine is over 200, and I am roughly the same age as you, whereas this is obviously assuming it is 190ish. If that is wrong, then all your other calculations are wrong too.

I reckon on road, riding quite hard in a hilly area, I use about 600 calories/hour, just judging from the amount of extra food I need on commute days.

Joe

Did you calculate your maximum heart rate too? Or just do the 220-age formula. That could have shot things out.

Although to be honest, manufacturers probably just make the numbers artificially high in these calculations, as it makes people happier with the products.

Joe

I've joined it, although I'm not sure how much off road I'll be doing in the near future, what with the baby just turned up. We should have a commuter / using the bike for practical transport challenge too – I'm still getting 90+ miles a week of commuting logged.

On the privacy thing, I'm not that fussed about people knowing where I keep my bikes. They aren't fancy bikes, they are kept securish & insured, and it'd be an absolute pain to burgle our house due to the way the terrace is laid out. To be honest, a bit of googling would find my address anyway – I've run events based there a few times.

Joe

The version of Skype I have on symbian won't do video.

There is Fring, which does video calls to Skype, but the quality is pretty bad, as you're going via two lots of servers (the Fring ones and a Skype node)

1. Your buddy in the army is wrong, an off the shelf chocolate milk is not as good as an energy supplement becuase almost everything in it is slowly digested. What you want is fast digesting carbs, slats etc and protein if you can get it in there.

Actually, if you read the study, I seem to remember that off the shelf chocolate milk is not 'as good', it was significantly better as a recovery drink than fancy bought sports drink. They are not quite sure why, but it was a real difference.

Some people hypothesise that it is because we have evolved to drink the particular mix of proteins in cows milk over many years or something like that, can't remember what exactly.

I started using chocolate milk as a recovery drink last year, and it does really seem like it works to me, although I was only doing between 100-300 miles a week every week, so I wasn't really a full on long distance type. I've met other people with longish (>150 miles a week) commutes who have switched to the chocolate milk over the fancy recovery drinks with no ill effects too.

Joe

Speeding fines are if anything a tax on stupidity. If you aren't capable of reading numbers on a sign, or if you choose to speed, of seeing a brightly painted camera, or noticing a police van parked up, you probably also are so unobservant a driver that you're doing a bunch of other stupid things in your rush to get from a to b 5 minutes faster.

Whether or not speeding itself is dangerous is pretty irrelevant really, people who get caught speeding are way more likely to be dangerous drivers, due to their lack of observation skills. They all seem to think they're great drivers, but I bet if you look at the statistics, they have way more accidents – if that wasn't the case, insurance companies wouldn't bother to up their premiums. It would be great if we could remove from the road all the types of people who get caught speeding – make the world a lot safer without all those poor drivers.

Joe

I had one like this, after I did the tough guy race (loads of crawling through mud pits) and just stuck it in a 60 degree wash. I figured there was nothing to lose. Seems fine.

Mudguards on the bike to keep it that way (and don't wear it when crawling through mud pits).

Joe

If your partner doesn't work, then you are crazy, but I'm assuming you're wanting to move, but your partner has a job where you currently live.

If you have kids, you'll be basically an absent parent.

Having said that, if it's academia, it obviously depends on the lecturing vs research balance, but I'd find out how much working from home you can do – we have researchers here who work probably 2 days in the office a week, and live 2 hours away – 8 hours total commute per week isn't bad.

Joe

There are clear warnings with the iPhone about temperature range and the risk of condensation. As far as a seven year old phone being less susceptible to water, well yes, of course. It didn't have a fancy touchscreen, large amounts of flash memory storage, wifi, GPS…

It's not really so much to do with the technology in it. It's to do with the obsession with making devices as slim as possible. Which means things like having a very minimal headphone socket which is basically a hole directly to the circuit board (unlike older, larger phones), a gigantic dock connector socket, and generally being very poorly sealed to save space.

If you open up an old fat nokia phone, and a modern phone, it is incredible the difference between how packed up the compenents are compared to the older one.

I don't think there's any conspiracy going on here, it is just that phone companies make the major selling point be that it is 0.5mm thinner than the last one, yet has all the same stuff in side, and something has to give.

The only bad thing in this story is that Apple have always been a bit flaky about warranties or manufacturing problems with their stuff*, but like someone said above, due to the desirability, and the way their fans want the latest version, they do probably have a higher than average level of phones 'breaking' just as a new one comes out.

Joe

*the old Macbooks were pretty dodgy

battery-killing widgets either.

You've just bought into a weird apple publicity thing there. Until Apple implement something, it is 'battery killing', 'inefficient', 'slow' etc etc. Multi tasking was, back in the past intel processors were. I bet you at some point in the future, Apple will implement something similar to widgets, and suddenly widgets will be the best thing since sliced bread.

Widgets are great. If they are setup sensibly, they only update when you go to that home screen and look at them, meaning no major battery hit. At least the widgets I have on my desire do (mail messages, calendar, weather, facebook etc.)

Same as on the iPhone, you can set it to check every bloody thing for messages etc every 20 seconds, and it eats battery life. But that is nothing to do with widgets.

Joe

The only thing putting me off is the physical size of it, but that applies to most of the smartphones.

Yep, it's literally mm of difference between the current good phones (desire, iphone etc.)

There are a few smaller ones, but then you lose the lovelyness of browsing the web on a decent sized screen, and onscreen keyboards suck on smaller screens.

I don't find it that much of a pain to be honest – they're all pocketable – I think the thinner but big smartphones are less of a pain than the old fat but not so big ones.

Joe

cant find viewranger??

From http://www.viewranger.com

also is there a way of locking the screen manually or do you just have to wait till it does it itself?

Press the power button.