Nature has an article pointing out that time is running out for sand - demand is increasing beyond available supply and there’s very little monitoring or oversight into what is the world’s most extracted resource. As you’d expect, extraction is vastly outpacing the natural processes which create sand.

Desert sand grains are too smooth to be useful, and most of the angular sand that is suitable for industry comes from rivers (less than 1% of the world’s land). This extraction of sand and gravel has far-reaching impacts on ecology, infrastructure and the livelihoods of the 3 billion people who live along rivers. For example, sand mining on the Pearl River (Zhujiang) in China has lowered water tables, made it harder to extract drinking water and hastened river-bed scour, damaging bridges and embankments.

This is the earliest warning of a potential problem and the article goes on to recommend a number of steps to deal with the situation, starting with improved monitoring to get an accurate assessment of the sand trade, both legal and illegal.

Pretty interesting website allowing you to enter a country and see its temperature record as blue to red colour stripes since 1901. #globalwarming

Here’s Australia.

Incidentally, the data they are using is from Berkeley Earth, which is the group founded, with funding from the Koch brothers, by a bunch of people who thought the temperature record data was being fudged… until they got together to analyse the raw data themselves and concluded that they were wrong and it wasn’t being fudged at all :)

Pros: Mulhouse to La Planche des Belles Filles, 160.5km, Mountains

Me: 53.5km, 15m @ 75%, 5m, 10m, 15m & 5m @ 80%, 10m & 15m @ 95%, 30s hard finish.

Non stop intervals today. Based on yesterday’s intervals I worked out that just riding to the park, doing the intervals and riding straight home would put me over today’s required distance, so I opted to do them on the indoor trainer instead. At least then I could program in the required intervals on TrainerRoad and watch the stage replay, rather than having to pay constant attention to my Garmin if I was outside.

Unfortunately SBS On Demand have been a bit slow putting the stage replays online and I was stuck with the highlights which finished after an hour, l having me to rewatch the Stage 5 highlights to finish the ride.

A breakaway went early, so the peloton got a reasonably cruisey ride until the last two climbs when things heated up. Same for me, with the early intervals at 80% and the final two at 95%. The last one stung and I pulled the pin with about 3 minutes to go, bringing forward the short sprint to mimic the 24% gradient the pros were finishing on! Could have finished it if I was fresh, but legs are starting to complain at harder efforts.

Saturday tomorrow - no 6am conference calls. Looking forward to a lie-in 😄

Me: 68.2km, 2h 5m, 1253 calories, 114 TSS.

Pro: 178.7km, 5h 9m, 3148 calories, 263 TSS.

Weight: 92.1kg - CTL: 38.7 - TSB: -9.7

Pros: Saint-Dié-des-Vosges to Colmar, 175.5km, Hilly

Me: 56.8km PZ1, 5m @ 225W, 10m @ 225W, 10m @ 250W, 5m @ 250W

The first of a few days with a bunch of efforts thrown in. To guage how hard I should go for the intervals, I opted to check out Mike Woods’ Strava file to see how hard he had to ride the climbs on last night’s stage - 85%, 85%, 93% and 93% as it turned out - and that’s the target I set for myself. This approach might come back to bite me in the arse tomorrow as there’s a mountain-top finish and the GC riders will be going for it! Fingers crossed!

The ride it self was OK. Intervals weren’t too bad, though 250W was a decent effort. Part of the annoying thing about being unfit is comparisons to your fit self. Last March (2018) I knocked out an hour at 280W with the same heart rate as I now get for 10 minutes at 250. Legs felt OK, though I can feel the tiredness starting to accumulate. I’ve ridden a bit over 10 hours in the last 5 days, which in itself isn’t a massive amount. It’s only when you compare it to the 82 hours I’d ridden in the whole of 2019 prior to starting 3DF that you see the problem 😄 One thing I definitely notice is that despite a decent nights’ sleep, my heart rate is elevated all night and my HRV is quite low, both signs of fatigue.

Tomorrow is a brutal stage - non stop intervals for me. Will see what shape I’m in after that!

Me: 53.9km, 2h 9m, 1166 calories, 112 TSS.

Pro: 178.8km, 4h 16m, 3148 calories, 193 TSS.

Weight: 91.7kg - CTL: 36.9 - TSB: -4.2

Pros: Reims to Nancy, 213.5km, Flat

Me: 71.1km PZ1

Another long day today, though no intervals this time. Legs felt OK, though guts didn’t feel great even before I started. Ended up a few km short as a result, opting to skip random riding to make up the shortfall. Still, at 2h45, that’s 50% of the pros 5h25, so I’ll count it.

Me: 68.1km, 2h 45m, 1395 calories, 112 TSS.

Pro: 200km, 5h 25m, 2959 calories, 151 TSS.

Weight: 91.8kg - CTL: 35.1 - TSB: 2.0

Pros: Binche to Épernay, 215km, Hilly

Me: 72km PZ1, 3x5m SST

Nothing exciting. Long hilly day for the pros, long ride for me too. Pace was fine, though the intervals at the end felt harder than they should have. Heart rate was definitely higher, so whether I was doing them too hard, or it was due to a bit of dehydration or fatigue, I’m not sure. I think I’ll do them at the start of the ride in future so I can get a better idea.

One thought that crossed my mind while out on the road was that I’ve been aiming to do one third the distance of the pros, but I figured it would be interesting to compare how that actually translates into work done. I follow Mike Woods on Strava, who rides for EF Education First and finished with the main bunch last night. He publishes his power data unlike a lot of the pros and here’s his ride from yesterday…

The stage took him 4h54, burning 3,400 calories and a training stress score of 206. My ride took me 2h55, burning 1500 calories with a training stress score of 139, so it appears that while I’m only doing one third of the distance I’m getting two thirds of the training stress. This is going to hurt!

Weight: 93.3kg - CTL: 32.8 - TSB: 12.4

Pros: Bruxelles Palais Royal to Brussel Atomium, 27.6km, Team Time Trial

Me: 5 x (2:30 @ 90%, :30 @ 110%)

A Team Time Trial is basically the whole team riding in single file, with the guy on the front doing lots of work and the rest sheltering behind in his draft. The guy on the front rotates off after a set interval and rejoins the line at the back, and so it goes with each team member rotating through to the front position multiple times until the finish line.

Given there’s only me in this lark, to mimic the pros’ efforts I opted for 30 seconds at 110% of threshold to simulate the time on the front, then 90% of threshold to simulate the “rest” portion, repeated five times for a total of 15 minutes. Jumbo-Visma won the stage in 28:57 (avg. 57.2 kmh!) so 15 minutes is reasonable for me.

Woke up feeling a bit sluggish this morning, despite not staying up to watch the stage last night. HRV (Heart Rate Variability) was low too, which can be an indicator of tiredness or oncoming illness, so macro-dosed some Vitamin C just in case (yeah, placebo :-)

Session went OK - no issues, though looking at my heart rate compared to the pros, I probably should have set the efforts a bit harder.

Weight: 92.8kg CTL: 30.3

Pros: Bruxelles to Brussel, 194.5km, Flat

Me: 65km Z1, 5m SST

A bit of a cockup yesterday watching the rain radar! I could see a bunch of rain on the way so kept postponing going out. Turns out the rain was moving much slower that I realised and by the time I figured that out there wasn’t enough time to go out before the rain and also not enough time to go out after the rain and before nightfall. So, onto the indoor trainer 😕

With no distance measured on the trainer I had to adjust the plan. The actual stage took 4:20 for the pros, so a third of that was 1:25 or so, and 65km on flat roads would take me about 2:00 so I opted to split the difference and ride 1:45 while watching a repeat of last night’s stage.

All went well, if still a bit boring. I don’t really ride that much on the trainer, so it still is a harder workout than the equivalent on the road - no traffic lights, no downhills, just constant pedalling - and I was pretty tired later in the evening. Early to bed!

Weight: 93.5kg CTL: 30.1

Third de France is underway, as is the longer term Fat Bastard Project 😆

It’s that time of the year again - Le Tour de France starts tonight!

Rather than my usual winter of sitting on the couch watching the race and getting fat, this year I’ve done all the fat building in advance and will instead do what I first thought of last year - ride my own Third de France, so called because I’ll aim to ride a third of what the pros do.

Very simplified, if you are trying to win Le Tour, it’s essentially a very long ride punctuated with some hard efforts up the mountains and in time trials. Outside of those efforts the aim is to do as little work as possible, so that’s the aim of my stages as well.

The goal each day will be to ride around in Zone 1 (polarised model - mentioned earlier) and to do some harder, sub-threshold efforts when the riders hit the mountains.

The mountains are classified from the easiest 4, to the hardest, HC (Hors Categorie = Beyond Category) and, since a big HC climb could take up to an hour for the pros, I’ll do a 20min SST effort for a HC climb and knock off five minutes for each level below. I’ll ignore Cat 4 climbs as they’re just pimples. I’ll also do all the SST intervals back-to-back, taking five minutes active rest between each, rather than spacing them out as the mountains are. Once all the intervals are done, I’ll continue riding Z1 until I rack up the required distance for the day.

For the team time-trial stage I’ll do OverUnders, and for the individual time-trial stage I’ll do an FTP effort.

I’ll also ride my stage the day after the pros do, giving me the option to watch the stage if I choose to ride on the indoor trainer, so technically I start tomorrow.

Bearing that in mind, how does my Tour look like?

Here’s a quick summary of the plan:

Stages 6 & 8 stand out in the first week, with 18, 19 and 20 going to be a hard finish. Stages 14 & 15 will be problematic for me as I’ll be away that weekend, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Based on my metabolic test learnings, Zone 1 means ‘keep heart rate below 140’. Approximate FTP is 265W at the moment (indoor) so that will suffice for this exercise and I’ll aim for 240W on SST intervals. I haven’t decided yet whether to do them on the trainer or outdoors.

After two weeks’ holidays I’m well rested and well overweight, so I’m under no illusions that this will hurt.

Current fitness: CTL = 29, TSB = 19

Current weight: 92.4kg

Time to shift some lard. Bonne chance!

I’ve just finished almost two week’s holidays with my brother and his family. Although Cormac had visited me briefly when I was in Sydney, his wife Belinda and son Jacob had never been to Oz before, so we made sure to cram as much as possible into the ten days they were here for.

First off was a whirlwind tour around Brisbane, making sure to get a photo at the iconic sign.

Then it was off to Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary to see some Aussie wildlife. They’re a bit more relaxed with Koalas in Queensland, allowing you to hold one while getting a photo, so we took that opportunity to tick off a bucket list item for Belinda. It’s a sanctuary for over 130 koalas, so each animal only has to deal with people for a very short time before going back to munching on eucalyptus leaves and sleeping.

There are plenty of other animals on site and we got to feed some kangaroos and wallabies and also to see wombats, dingoes, Tassie Devils and more. I’d assumed we’d be there for an hour or so, but we ended up spending most of the day there. Well worth a visit.

Next stop was Port Douglas to go diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Cormac and Jacob had been getting their PADI licence specially, and I’d dug up my qualification I’d last used in 2002, so we were good to go. We booked with AquaQuest and I took advantage of their free “Intro” dive to do a quick refresh of the basics before doing a normal second dive with Cormac & Jacob. A great day out on the boat with a fun, professional crew looking after us and no sea-sickness despite the choppy conditions.

We managed to see some nice coral, found Nemo and spotted reef sharks, parrot fish and plenty more, though we missed out on turtles.

After the day on the ocean, it was time to investigate the land, so we opted for a walk through Mossman Gorge followed by a crocodile tour on the Daintree River aboard Solar Whisper which, as its name suggests, is a solar-powered boat. We got up close and personal with five different crocs in all, ranging from a 50cm juvenile to a 4m adult, while getting a running commentary on their personalities and behaviour.

We continued on up to Cape Tribulation, stopping at Daintree Ice Cream Co. to sample their wares. They grow a huge range of exotic fruits which they use to make their ice cream - check out black sapote if you come across it, a fruit with brown flesh which tastes like chocolate and has four times the vitamin C of an orange. Delicious!

We flew back to Brisbane for a day of relaxation before jumping in the car to visit my mother-in-law down near Byron. The weather wasn’t great on the first day, but the Paddies seemed happy enough down on the beach with the rain approaching!

The sun came out for the last day of the holiday, so we ventured in to Byron to check out the most easterly point in Australia, admire the views from the lighthouse and spend an afternoon swimming at The Pass. We even spotted some Humpback whales to round out our Aussie fauna tour!

One final drive back up the M1 to Brisbane, catching some rush-hour traffic, a hectic pack and then it was off to the airport early the following morning to send them on their way to my sister in NZ. From a balmy mid-20s winter in Queensland to single digits in Wanaka!!

As for me, well it’s time to knuckle down and start shifting this ballast I’ve acquired over the last year. With that in mind, I’ve entered the Noosa Classic in mid-August and I’ve got the Third de France starting at the weekend. More on that later.