Denniston is a former coal mining area situated on an alpine plateau about 30km North of Westport on the West Coast of New Zealand (Wikipedia here). It was actually an active mining area right up until the 1960’s. In recent years it has fallen under the ambit of the Department of Conservation. Along with the Buller Cycling club they have been building out a bunch of Mountain Bike tracks around the area.

You can pull details on the cycling area from the DoC site and from the Buller Cycling club.
http://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-visit/west-coast/buller-area/denniston/activities/mountain-bike-tracks/ 
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=19&Itemid=3 

Dave and I decided we’d try and visit the tracks as part of our summer South Island road trip. We drove in via Murchison as we did some paddling along the way. We had a couple of days in the Murchison region where the water levels were well up. Paddled a few runs that I’ve done before as well as a new run down the mangles that started with about a 2m waterfall- pulled quite a crowd when we ran that one for some reason… didn’t seem that difficult.

We drove into Westport the evening before we planned to ride and found ourselves a nice motel (Buller Bridge Motel) with free WiFi. Got up early and headed up the hill. This place really is quite the plateau. The hill rises steeply off the ocean almost to an altitude of about 650m at the carpark. The views were pretty good for us; on a really fine and still day I can imagine you’d be able to see all the way up to Karamea.

Once we got to the top we had a bit of a potter around looking at some of the old mining ruins. Denniston is famous for the Denniston Incline which is a frighteningly steep, two pitch, coal railway that literally goes straight up the side of the hill. Check out this video from the NZ Archives for an idea of what it was like.

Then we headed up the hill to the Museum Car park which is the designated starting place for the Mountain Biking trails. While getting organized we saw the Google Car driving around- yes, even in the middle of bloody nowhere there is Google!

We started out with the Ropers Hotel Circuit.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Ropers%20Hotel%20Circuit.pdf 
Straight away the riding was quite different to anything we’d ridden before in New Zealand. Lots of slick rock and ledges. Was quite fast riding and reasonably hard on the suspension. A 6” trail bike is ideal- we had a Trance and a Mojo. The last part of this track before it hits the road is walking only- for ecological reasons rather than ride-ability. You definitely want to do this track in the predominant direction indicated on the map as it would be a pain to walk up that hill.

Next we rode out on one of the longer trails. This was nominally on 4WD track but I’d challenge most people to take their 4WD there and get it back in one piece. The track was Sullivans Circuit and it went off the other side of the Plateau back down towards Westport.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Sullivans%20Circuit.pdf 

This track had plenty of challenging riding. Lots of large rocks and ledges. it was all too easy to go far faster than 0.1mm of lycra really should justify.

Finally we rode the Miners and Drill track circuits. Again, lots of hairy riding with a bunch of sketchy single track, some of which we both had to walk.

There was still plenty of sign of the old coal mining stuff and indeed the coal itself.

Despite only doing about 30km (in 3.15hr!) we were in need of a beer once we got back to the car.

Here’s the GPS dump

And the full TCX file of my Garmin 310XT is here:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21786909

Thought it would be interesting to do a blog post of my stats for 2009.

It was a pretty hellish year for travel. It’s the first full year that I’ve used TripIt which has proved to be a really useful tool. TripIt also provides travel stats.

Now not all of this was work travel (I had a couple of overseas holidays) but it was still a pretty full on year.

This is borne out in my exercise stats. Obviously my most exercised location was Wellington, but, I also did a whole heap in Issaquah, Washington and also in Bangalore, India.

I remained pretty steady over the course of the year in terms of the amount of exercise I did. It was still really hard to maintain anything approaching a good training program though.

Once again it was a shitty year for me skiing wise, though these stats do miss out a bit of skiing I had in January. I also did far less mountain biking than I would have liked to.

I did do over 300hr of exercise over the year and travelled 2700km. I also burned 65,000 calories.

Will be interesting to see what I can manage this year.

So… I genuinely object to paying US$20/day to use the hotel gym. But, needs must sometimes and so it was that I found myself at the Mandalay Bay Spa  $20 the poorer this morning. Been working reasonably hard in the build up to the K1 road race in a couple of weeks so needed to get some time in on the stationary trainer.

Well, what an utterly useless experience that was. I got inside the Gym to find that;

1. They had two consumer grade exercycles and that was it as far as bikes went.
2. None of the cardio equipment was available anyway

So even if I had been able to get on the equipment it wouldn’t have been much good for the Interval workout I had planned- I ripped the crank off a consumer grade exercycle in Bangalore this year so it’s just downright dangerous.

In the end I threw my toys out of the cot, got myself a refund of my fees and went for a run up the strip.

Think I’ll try and find someone friendly at the Luxor for the Gym tomorrow and will not be staying at the Mandalay Bay for MIX10 next year that’s for sure.

Got out for hills this morning on the road bike. Turned into a shorter ride, but, I pushed the 2nd interval really hard (100% MHR) and in doing so smashed about 7% off my PB up the short pinch climb I do.

The average power was 450 Watts over the 4min 31 seconds. Pity the hill wasn’t a touch longer as it meant my new PB 5 minute power ended up being only 431 Watts i.e. 30 seconds of my rest break at the top was included.. Goal for the next few weeks is to really work on lifting my power profile. I think I’ll probably look at doing Peak 1’w and 5’w on Happy Valley road as it certainly appears to help going up a hill. At the moment my 1’w isn’t even on the chart and I’d like to work on getting my entire profile into the Cat 4 region over the next few weeks in the lead up to the K1 race. Means I need to be targeting 350 Watts for 60 minutes which I think is going to be the hardest bit.

The other interesting thing is to see just how much temperature variation affects my (supposedly temperature compensating) barometric altimeter on the Polar s625x. All 5 of those intervals should be the same height, but, there is a definite trend downward over the set.

Thoughts I’d start a post of some of the grades of the various hills (Road Cycling) around Wellington.

I’ve pulled these off various rides around the place. Have noted where some are averages. All data recorded on a Polar s625x

Hill	Map	Distance	Height	Grade
Makara Saddle. Karori Side. Cnr Allington Road and Apex of Saddle Average of 3		1.05km	87m	8.5%
Makara Saddle. Makara Side Lamp-post in front of Church to Lamppost at top of Saddle Average of 2	Map	2.61km	186m	7.15%
Takarau Gorge Road Intersection to Top of J’ville Intersection Makara Rd and Takarau Rd to top of Johnsonville on Cortina Road	Map	11.07km	268m	2.2%
Aro Valley Up Raroa Road From Traffic island at bottom of hill to top of hill on Raroa Road	Map	1.96km	107m	5.7%

So I got up early this morning, did some email and proposal writing and then got out for a good hard session of hill repeats.

I have the luxury of having the Makakara saddle just a few minutes ride up the road from my house.

I’ve typically done the shorter Karori side in the past. Today I did three laps up the Karori side and two up the Makara side.

It was dark so I couldn’t see when I had properly pressed my lap button so I have a few more laps that I probably needed. Stats look good though

The short laps got progressively slower: Sub 5 minutes is a good time for me at the moment and only the first was (4:57).
The long laps the 2nd was faster but both were still not super fast. 13:46 and 12:55

Average power for the final long lap was 360 Watts… So shouldn’t be too hard to knock that time down a chunk given I should be coming 400 watts for a CP10 effort.

Other interesting stats. The Karori side is steeper at 8.5% gradient to 7.2%. 86m on the Karori side, 186m on the Makara side.

So all was quiet for me with a big travel load the last couple of weeks. Spent an amazing week in Redmond last week and kinda wish I had my bike with me- Seattle in Summer is rather alluring to be honest!

Got out for a MTB ride with my brother today. Not far, but, we got a couple of hours in. We did a lower loop of Makara Peak then up to the top, down Zacs and Varleys and home along the road.

The Yellow Mojo got really filthy. You can at least still tell it’s yellow.

So my goal this morning was to get some base kilometres in. I was originally hoping to do >100km but in the end my ride on Friday just took a bit too much out of me. It turned out being a slow and grinding 90km. I tried to mix things up by going a route I normally wouldn’t for parts of the ride.

Went from Karori out to Johnsonville via Makara. Then back past Karori, down throug Aro Valley and up and over past Happy Valley. Then around the bays once, over the hill from Mirimar to Worser Bay, back around past the airport and home via Oriental Parade.

The little spike out the side of the map in J’ville was me riding towards Churton Park and then seeing the weather. In the end the weather was fantastic- a touch windy around the South Coast but apart from that lovely.

Average power is understandably a chunk lower than Friday. Climbed 1130 meters which is a nice reflection of my efforts to include a few more hills today.

I listened to a bunch of interesting podcasts on the bike today.

1. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Point of Inquiry talking about the Pluto Files. I listened to the Pluto Files audio book last month while on holiday so was interesting to hear this interview. Unsurprisingly (CFI is a secular lobby org) they got to talking about ‘teach the controversy’- the answer of course… there is no controversy. (Cool shirts here for all of you readers who think the earth is older than 10,000 years… and yes I do have readers who think it’s less than 10,000 years old.)
2. Charles Platt talking about Working at Wal-Mart on Econtalk. I found this very interesting if maybe a little shallow. Platt worked at Wal-Mart for a week which I don’t think really qualifies him to reach some of the conclusions he did. Nevertheless a interesting interview particularly about the aggressive devolution of tactical decision making at Wal-Mart.
3. Professor Doug Richards on TVO Big Ideas as part of their best lecturer series. Richards is a Bio-mechanist and was talking about stretching. An interesting topic given how much my legs were hurting at this point in time. F couple of interesting ideas I drew from this lecture.

1. I think there are some great opportunities to build on the use of Elasticity when I talk about cloud computing to use other metaphors from materials science- viscosity, plasticity…. look out for an interesting blog post on this some time.
2. It confirmed my feelings that whitewater kayakers (of which I am one) should be VERY careful when stretching their shoulders. I’m a big believer that shoulder stretching is actually qhite risky for paddlers as it means we end up with shoulder joints far more prone to dislocation.

I got out for a totally fantastic ride this morning. Just went on my own but half way around realized I really should have got my %&^$%* together and called @RowanSimpson so sorry fella! Sunday maybe?

I went for what I felt was a fairly cruisy ride, but, unless my power meter is telling porkies it was actually a pretty decent ride. I’ll usually do about 280 Watts average for a 2.5hr (60-70km) ride but this morning average was 310 Watts. Hopefully this means that I’m improving both fitness and leg strength.

Was basically a flat ride. Came down from Karori, around the Mirimar peninsula to Happy Valley Road, turned around and came back again to the office. Out @ 0530hr in the office by 0800hr- marvellous!

Got a lovely photo coming back around the peninsula as the sun came up.

So not much blogging went on around my exercise this week. Just too busy with work and running a training course for Windows 7 developers in Singapore.

I did the miles/time though. Well, as much as I generally manage while travelling which is about 5-6hr per week.

Had a good session today though. A 10km hike up the big hills behind Wellington on my favourite tracks. Blistered feet because I haven’t been in my shoes for 3 weeks- groan. Back to Les Mills tommorow for an Upper Body workout and a blast on the Lifecycle. Will be trying to get some Boxing classes in this week before I head out to the US next Wednesday.

So I think that the Intercon Mumbai (The Lalit) has a pretty decent gym. A bunch of late model Technogym cardio and strength equipment. They also have free weights here and decent amounts of weight! Not sure if they have a squat rack though- don’t remember seeing one. Probably the best ‘in hotel’ gym I’ve been to this year. The Venetian and the Holiday Inn Issaquah both have access to great off site gyms: Canyon Ranch and Sammamish Club (checkout the cool Bing search results for it)

Had a hard cardio session today – Training Effect 4.4 on my Suunto t3c. I’m really getting to know how my body responds to exertion now. It’s really interesting working at anaerobic threshold because you can quite literally feel when your body has switched into aerobic mode: less puffing, high heart rate.

Booked in for a massage this afternoon at the hotel spa and then will probably have the day off tomorrow- or a VERY light spin.

49% of my workout today was in my top heart rate zone. So it really was a hard threshold workout!

So my 1hr of solid exercise on the recumbent went a bit pearshaped this morning as I broke it half way through. Note to hotel owners: Kitting your gym out with rubbish equipment is never a good thing.

Ended up doing the rest of my cardio workout on the normal bike. Training Effect of 4.0 on the Suunto. Polar profile below.

So I got a great workout in this morning in Bangalore today. My key focus was to really blitz my upper body.

To achieve this I focussed on using an Isolatio9n exercise followed by a compound exercise for each body part. With the Isolation exercise I focussed really hard on exaggerating the movement of the muscles I was targeting and worked hard on  not using the muscles that tend to kick in if I’m being less concentrated.

So for example- for chest I used a simple Pec Deck followed my machine press. The key here was to really exaggerate squeezing my chest together. I should hurt tomorrow all things going to plan.

Really wishing I was in WLG so I could go running like @Pipssqueaks

So I’ve been horribly slack over the past two weeks. First I was sick. Then I was on holiday.

I managed a measly 36 minutes of exercise week of the 18th and I’ve managed just 2hr this week (week of 25th). But, I am back in action again as of this morning.

I’m back in Bangalore running the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Action Training Tour event. I’d never been tin India before the start of this year- this is now my 4th trip. Gets a little exhausting, SQ502 (the flight SIN-BLR) has to be my least favourite flight in the entire world and last night they put me 4 rows from the back in a middle seat… I was not happy.

But, that was yesterday. Got back to the gym this morning. Staying at the Monarch Luxur hotel, which despite being a ‘Jewel in the crown’ of The Monarch Group is what can only be described as a ‘good value’ establishment. The rooms are not too bad, once you flush the Naphthalene balls they leave everywhere, but the gym is a bit average.

So my workout today was very much a make do sort of workout. So here are a few tips for a make-do workout.

1. Don’t be afraid to try a new piece of cardio gear.
   I used the rather decrepit recumbent bike here to good effect today: in fact I think I’ll try for a full on Cardio session on Tuesday morning using this machine.
2. If there’s not enough weight on a particular machine then go unilateral and explosive.
   Today was leg day and the legpress machine here (part of one of those all in one Gym things) had a very limited weight stack. So it was a case of racking the entire stack and then doing unilateral (one leg at a time), high pace (explosive), high rep (15 per side +) exercises. Makes for a hybrid cardio/strength workout. Wouldn’t want to do it every week as it’s liable to consume a bit of muscle mass but for a first week back it was great.
3. Use body weight exercises
   As above, you can get a good cardio/strength hybrid by using body weight. In my case this was bench step-ups. The bench here was nice and high which made this a good challenge and it was a good balance test as well.

Polar screenshot for the day

So once again, travel is getting in the way of fitness. Was in Sydney over the weekend and while I managed to get an 8km walk (and a 50m swimming race) in with Adam Cogan over the weekend I’ve not done a decent road ride for a week.

Got back from Sydney last night at midnight and on the plane to Dunedin again this morning then Dunedin to Hamilton tomorrow. Oh happy joy!

I did get a morning boxing workout in with Scott @ Les Mills on the Terrace this morning. My 3rd since I got back into it and my fitness is definitely improving.

Did a recovery aerobic session at the gym today. On the RedEye SIN-SYD tonight so will probably try and bang out a decent length session on the spin bike tomorrow. Note to frequent travellers: The Intercontinental in Sydney has proper Spin bikes in their gym.

So I did upper body this morning at the Gym here in Singapore:

10 Min on the Elliptical and then into it.

Tried the old trick of pre-exhaustion through isolation exercises; namely  dumbell chest flys to start. As the heart rate chart shows, not the best. So instead I did a chest pre-exhaustion using isolateral cable flys (those are the BIG peaks in the first bit of my weights routine on the chart). An all together much better idea- the reason, cable machines give you resistance throughout the movement whereas in a standard chest fly the last part of the movement is basically at full extension and the weights just doing nothing.

An easy session on the bike again tonight.

Arrived in Singapore last night. Here for a few days running the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Business Action Training Tour.

I ummed and ahhed about bringing my road bike this time… But in the end I couldn’t be bothered.

Nevertheless I needed to get some miles into the legs this morning so it was onto the Lifecycle for an hour. I did a Training Effect of 4.8 out of 5 on my Suunto T3c which was the highest I’ve had it yet. I decided to leave getting to 5.0 for another day. 34% in my top zone was all good. Obviously the Lifecycle doesn’t give me enough data to feed to WKO+. The stats I worked to were approx 270 Watts at 110-120 RPM.

So my morning bike ride today was an on again off again affair. An early morning tweet from @nathanm kinda leant me towards going to the gym instead. But looking outside (despite the thunderstorm) it didn’t look too bad.

Headed out around the bays but it was a nasty southerly. In the end I just ended up doing some hill repeats on Mt Victoria. Forgot to change my Polar x625x to bike mode so no power/speed/cadence in my chart today which is a bit annoying.

So I had a totally on-again off-again morning today. I was planning to go for a road ride, but, it was raining so I ended up hitting the gym for 50 mins on the lifecycle at about 260-320 Watts doing speed drills. Great hardcore workout. Training effect of 4.6/5 on the Suunto.

Back into working out boxing styles with a PT. My techniques not too bad and power is still really good. Fitness- we’re working on.

Lest you think that boxing is not the most killer workout you can do check out the peaks on the chart below.

So my morning road ride ended prematurely this morning. Got half way around the Miramar Peninsula and blew out a spoke. Stupid cheap Shimano R500 wheels- methinks I might get Oli @ Roadworks to build me some nice training wheels.

I have got my speedo working properly again though.

So just a great morning here in Wellington today. Rode into the office and dropped off my laptop then did 50km around the bays. Rode out around the peninsula to the round-about then back again. About 1hr 45min all up but the last bit from Kilbirnie home was pretty cruisy. Training effect on the Suunto T3c was 4.0. Speed on my Polar is broken due to a spoke that keeps coming loose.

So I’m staying on the Infosys Campus in Bangalore this week and hitting up their gym each morning.

The campus is a fantastic facility and the gym is top notch.

Did a cardio work this morning including a sprint on the Recumbent bike…. never thought I could peak my heart rate like i did on the recumbent! Always thought they were for grandmas! Definitely more of this for me going forward. Check out the chart

Tracking my workout using both my Polar S625x (as above) and my Suunto T3c at the moment.  Set out to achieve a 4.0 Training Effect on the Suunto which I nailed right at the peak of the recumbent interval- I think I was on level 18 (Constant wattage mode) doing about 100 RPM for that interval.

With all this travel I keep forgetting just how lovely Wellington can be on a great day.

Did a fantastic road ride today. Out to Johnsonville (past the murder scene at the Mobil), back into town via Ngaio, around the bays and the Miramar peninsula and the I cut home @ Kilbirnie as I was pretty stuffed by then. Rode a bunch of the peninsula with a guy from Mercer comparing notes on hotels to stay at that actually have proper spin bikes.

Did about 70km all up.

My peak 20min power was up to 300 Watts so I’m defn. seeing some improvement in my Functional Threshold Power (up from 280 Watts last time I did a proper test) . Even more pleasing was I maintained 290 Watts for 20min and 255 Watts for 60 min. Just have to get the body weight down and should be caning it.