Yesterday I raced up a grade, being put into C grade. As a time trialler and so able to stand long periods of a high wattage, but not so good at multiple mega surges, Criteriums are a challenge to my body and in the latter stages, my mind.
I'd been fairly comfortable last week in D grade where the average kph had been ~35kph but C grade? meh...try to hang in for 40 of the 65 minutes was my goal... the graph below shows how I fared...35 minutes with the bunch and then a prolonged surge up hill and into the wind plus a bit more and I was cooked.
Silly me.... the previous lap knowing that I was starting to struggle, I'd got closer to the front during the tail wind downhill hoon to allow my drop off to take me to the back but this time I was hovering near the back to begin with and so the elastic broke.....
The final bit of the graph is me riding solo, initially trying to get back on, then just TT'ing for the sake of it
Language Learning
Learning a language is always a challenge with many, many pitfalls for the unwary, mostly to do with unwittingly saying something extremely rude. I recall with fondness and a wide grin a German lady whose English was fluent (but who's pronunciation was.... hmmm...Germanic) bringing us all to tears of laughter when she told us that on this holiday (riding a tandem bike with her husband) it was her job to look after the sex. Of course she meant sacks.ie panniers. Poor girl she just could NOT understand why we were all ROTFL.
Italian is a phonetic language and with pronunciation what you see is what you get, unlike English which is definitely not and so I was a bit gob smacked the other day when one of my fellow Italian pupils said that English was an easy language to learn...was the fact that she was of Russian origin a factor in this comment??? Anyhow check out this web link for proof of my contention that English is so full of pronunciation traps that it cannot possibly be "an easy language to learn".
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