Middle Aged Spread....winning the battle

Just an update and it is good news.

My seemingly unambitious plan of a kilo per month is on track, down to 114kg which was a surpise since we have been on holiday, more on that later in another blogg.

My aim is slow weight loss reflecting an undramatic change in diet and lifestyle, just concentrating on removing high calorie "luxury extras" and prelonging training sessions to over 2hours duration. Here are more tips for the active still sporty yet lardy 40 something:

1) count your extra calories per week and mulitply by four. Include in this tally, any more than two glasses of sugary drinks per day, and all beer ,snacks, sweets, cakes, desserts and extra/double helpings of dinner. Wow. You will find you are a fat bugger over 16 or 18 stone because each month you are consuming 7000 to 14000 kcal in "extras". Each hour of training down the gymn or whatever is only maybe effectively 600kcal and all of that is glucose and glycogen.

2) now limit yourself to a level of life's little extras which add up to 3500 kcal max per month. That is twelve beers or ten slices of cake if you like, but think per week with a max of two beers per week, one cake, one extra portion dinner, one post training extra portion dinner/lunch, 50g crisps or nuts per week and one single orange juice (250ml)  per day and one single diluted squash per day.

3) now change your training style and duration. A minimum of five hours quite vigourous exercise per week in three or four longer sessions. My target has been seven hours per week, base five hours from two long sessions.

Aim then to have 2 hour sessions three times a week as a target. These have to be aerobic, sustained with heartbeat over 120 bpm which means good breathing and a fair degree of sweating! One of the three sessions can be easier going, such as brisk walking, gentler cycling, walking in the hills, badminton, kayaking.

If you only manage to fit in two sessions per week then try to stretch them out to two and a half hours each such that you switch on fat burning and burn more. Every half hour over 'one and a half hours' at medium intense will burn a lot of fat and your body will go on burning fat for some time after you stop exercising ( that being if you avoid sugary drinks and snacks. )

Consider stretching your duration out to four hours for one session a week,  with only light eating and take a rest day after being careful not to over compensate with food: when out on a longer session,  if you near 3 hours and feel empty, eat no more than a bannana and some nuts or a slice of bread with margarine.

Sports drinks can be packed with calories, watch out. No matter a promise of slow release, the complex carbo ones  are really for endurance atheletes or as meal substitutes. Choose instead lighter calorie isotonic drinks to take around three hours and drink only water until that point.

If you are pushed for available time to make up five hours total say from a single four or two twos, then do an hour or two half hour session which include hard conditioning training after a warm up. This will help your body become more muscular and fitter so you burn more calories per hour total next time you train at low intensity.  Aim though to do three longer, two hour or longer sessions though as your outset if you want to loose more than say 8 kg.

Also try to use more "grey" calories by walking around more at work or to the shops, school run etc . There are seven days in a week ! Throw in extra small sessions of jogging or cycling or play a quick bit of football with colleagues or your kids for half an hour or more. Weight training is purely additional as desired, it should not be part of the core long sessions.

4) split your "eating week" up as monday to sunday so you avoid friday-saturday being split and tempting more mini binge eating in two days. Also having the whole weekend means that you can achieve your five hours training per week if you have been too busy during the week.

5) two hour sessions can make you hungry to begin with: plan around meals with this in mind- take a healthy packed lunch or fruit / nuts with you to have after exercise as a meal. In the evening eat a lighter dinner before training, with no dessert and then have a bannana or other slow fruit like pears right after training. Avoid snacking or extra "make up" portions, you can only have one of those a week. 

6)  Wine, pure spirits and fruit are  "free":  except for avoiding more than two bannas and more than a handful of grapes a day, or downing a whole bottle of wine yourself on friday night.

7) try and break the "beer and nuts" pavlovian cycle. Drink your two beers without access to snacks! Have your 50g crisps another time as a treat, especially when you have sweated a lot one day when training.

8) Avoid eating dinner after 19:30. Aim to do at least one of your two hour sessions on an evening in your first week after an early dinner to break old habits of either sitting by the TV or eating at 9pm after the gymn.

9) set a total goal of weight loss and then realise how long this is going to take at a kilo per month  (an achievable loss rate: this will be your minimum loss if on this regime strictly, beleive me !) : for me it is a sixteen kilo weight loss and i expect to be half way after six months, a kilo a month and then a little burst of long sessions before winter comes and i have to move indoors or to xc skis.

10) Remember this may be your best chance to enjoy being on the young side of middle aged, slim and trained:  and as in anything worth achieving, it will take effort and moving outside your comfort zone.

The hardest is to maintain three long exercise sessions a week: think then that these are indeed, probably an hour more than your current sessions and you need to work this hour in by changing job and family logistics more than any grim determination. 120 bpm is quite light and easy to maintain for two hours if you have an underlying fitness from shorter sessions. Also you can take short breaks of upto 5.minutes or freewheel downhills if cycling in that two hours as long as your heart rate does not fall below 120.

Set then a target : for me it is  now 14kg, ( from 18kg , I lost two already some more slowly in the winter before i counted up my wee treats to 7000kcal per month, and then have lost two more per month now on this regime and with a holiday which messed it up a bit but not completely ,see later blogg to follow !),  and I therefore am prepared to work 14 more months at it. Period. If my VO2 max goes up enough to burn more fat quicker then great,  so be it, but I am in for the long haul from this point forward as much I have been the last months. Patience ,self discipline and hard work, no quick fix.

11) from the last point - I found it really quite easy to break the two hour barrier, and did it in my first session on xc skis of the season having previously shot out for an hour to one and a half hour session in all my time on skis. Summer cycling sessions were often over two hours to begin with, but i just got fitter and did the same routes faster and lost only a bit of weight !  Back off and enjoy the view. Concentrate on technique in your sport for endurance, this can help make time go quicker or encourage some tips from people you train with underway to pass time. But to the core of it: You get sweaty. Your heart pounds.  You breath hard ......You do this for two hours! 

12) Work in some ways of "cheating" your time allowance in getting that level of intensity going and up to two hours or more. One session at least can be brisk walking, but that is best done with a back pack to keep up the intensity and burn 600kcal per hour instead of the 400kcal brisk walking can burn. You get sweaty. Your heart pounds. You do this for two hours!  Building up the weight you carry to 10kg for ladies, 15 to 20kg for men depending on build and your joints! Cheating a hard walk into your week to make a session or two, can mean bus or lift to the shops, walk home via a park, or a commuting walk home with a pack on a long detour. This may replace your direct half hour jog or cycle home from work twice a week, which will not have been burning fat and may have been counter productive in giving you a bigger appetite when you get home for dinner. On that point-  Alternatively Take a packed dinner to work, eat it after 4pm while you work, and then go a longer bike run into the evening straight from work, including the commuting time, or play a double round of soccer, or three sessions in the aerobics studio: think like this instead of that one quick, intense burst followed by dinner and TV. You will find that the two hours can go surprisingly quickly. If it bores you, then take a sports mP3 player with something good or even a talking. book downloaded onto it, or listen to radio discussion and new programmes (not good for cyclists in traffic though!!) Vary your sessions: as mentioned a heavy ruck sack transforms a slow paced walk into a challenge- take one on a family tour. Or arrange to be social with someone for the first part of your session, maybe make that a jog from.work followed by an extra hour of jog-walk on your own. Try throwing in new sports like kayaking, xc skiing, roller blading/skiing or mountain biking.  Martial arts often have two to three hour sessions where initially at least you may find your heart rate is kept above 120 for most of the session, even when meditating or under technique supervision.

Combining mulitple aerobic studio sessions is a good mid winter or get into shape means of covering two hours with variation, an element of keeping up with the gang, and some fun- often they run back to back and you may find they cater for several members like yourself or fitness fanantics, in having a series which lends itself to warm up and warm down, with an intense sweat sess' / dance/thai bo in the middle. Or choose a session you can take at medium intensity and warm up for it on the tread mills and down from it by rowing and cycling. Keep track of time and keep your heart rate above 120.

Last point from this : you only "need" to do the long sessions for the duration of the weight loss period. Thereafter you can tone it down. See other comment about this above. However 6kg means aiming to keep it up for six months. That is about 15llbs.

My philosophy is that :

A) you change your bad ways of extra little luxuries for good!  You learn to count extra, uneccesary spoiling-yourself calories which is really why we are fat, not because our core diet and exercise is lacking in something.

B) we only burn fat when we are emptied for blood glucose, and the glycogen stores in muscles and the liver are depleted. Studies have shown that the fat burning heart beat zone of 65-75% max heart beat will promote fat burning with exercising earlier than this, but really the combination of sustainable moderate intensity and duration past the glycogen bottom out point around an hour or so,  is what kick starts and maintains fat burning.

C) Once your body remembers how to burn fat and you get fitter and more active, your body will burn more fat in general even at the point when blood glucose is supplemented by liver glycogen. It has learned to open the burning pathways up and employ them quickly from all your long sessions.

D) An alternative to longer duration exercise to kick start fat metabolism is the low carbo diet. The famous Atkins diet actually creeps carbo intake back in until you reach a level where you stop loosing weight or start putting it back on. Low carbo should NOT be combined with my diet and exercise regime, but you can moderate starch and sugar intake greatly when you cannot train due to injury or weather or busy weeks.

Basically Atkins was able to clarify that a high fat diet does not lead to obesity. We already knew that a high sugar diet does and Atkins proposed that all carbos are to blame, from our carbo maxed 1980s diet cycle. In fact starchy carbos are only problematic in larger amounts or when taken with too much sugar. It is when the body is overloaded with sugar in a meal or even a single super sized fizzy drink , that the system compensates for potential hyperglycaemia by re-engineering sugars to fat for storage. Fitter people have higher capacity in the other store, glycogen, which is not related to significant weight gain at all.

E) In a sporty 30 something we begin to forget that our peak as amateur sportsperson was earlier and we now train less,  though, but at least think that this is maybe more intensely. Also we eat as we did when we trained and peaked, plus some we forget.  And we have higher income and more opportunities for socialising and beer drinking. By 40 we have kids and hop out for shorter sessions, often leaving competitive sport behind. We dont adjust our eating habits and exercise makes us more hungry and we snack, like we did 20 years earlier, but without the same calorie deficit we had back then. We wear our surplus round our middles and on our lower chin.

F) With this diet and exercise regime, we should also find that we have a peak weight loss after some months of strict adherence to it. This is partly because the body achieves a higher VO2 max, and we can achieve a higher max than with shorter, intense sessions five times a week  - long steady but sweaty sessions are excellent for we ageing "atheletes" because they are less wear and tear on the body than the "gynm bursts" most of us got used to.  In reality we only achieve 20- 40 minutes good effect on VO2 max by a typical gymn work out of mixed aerobic and weights. The super burst nano training is better for VO2 max and Insulin response as demonstrated bgy researchers at Nottingham and Glasgow universities. However the 30 second times six max outs will not really help you burn much fat. You can of course include them in a long two hour session anyway!

E) That the body learns to use fat again seems also to be important in long term weight loss and maintenance, but more important is to change lifestyle : when finished with the regime, you cannot turn back from the new eating and drinking lifestyle you now have learned if you want to hold your new figure you have worked so hard for.

F) Awareness to life's wee extras is the key to this diet for sporty fatties, as much as doing the longer training sessions. The key to staying slimmer post diet phase is to keep up this awareness of extras and you can calorie count in times when you lack time or health to train normally in future.

Basically here for the once very sporty, now a bit rotund over 30, I have counted the calories for you, and worked out that they lie in luxuries and that we no longer burn off as much as we used to,  and that therefore our mid rift spare tyre needs to be burnt off slowly but surely with longer duration exercise and cutting way down on luxuries to a point when they are just that, and we can even live a week or two without them.

F) IMPORTANT : This diet is for people who have been well trained in earlier life and have maintained some degree of training through their lives, just that they have put on weight overtime in fat deposits.  If you have never been fit or are now quite obese then you will find it hard to follow this regime, but not impossible. Consult a doctor if you are obese, totally unfit, or have health issues such as  a heart condition or anything unusual happens when you train.

G) once at your desired weight , then you can ease down the duration of sessions of exercise and change over to shorter, more intensive sessions which will help you maintain your VO2 max and general fitness and muscle mass. As long as you follow point E. Alternatively you can take up bigger nights out on the town say , but then walk home to burn beer sugars down, and then throw in a gentle two hour session the next day to help shift glycogen from your liver such that that reserve is what is being filled up by your normal diet opver the weekend, and you are not overloading into fat gain.

Democracy as Mass Dictatorship

An interesting way of expressing how it feels to be governed by "the other half"- the opposite political colour. The majority religious parish. Health and Saftey. Brussels and Strasbourg. The intellectual or the brute.

This concept of democracy actually as a means of mass dictatorship, oligarchy of the lowest common denominator, tyranny by the lower classes is brought to me by the danish author Kierkegaard. He writes in the context of the French revolution and post napoleonic denmark, a monarchial ally of napoleon until his descent from power after 1812.

His view is a prevailing christian neo conservative one: that the church and monarch allow more freedom and justice for the righteous, pious individual than the movement to democracy. This is of course from the point of view of old  Trinity:  the capatilist, monarchist  and ecumenical establishment. Worse, Keirkegaard was that most ill type of proponent of all things fascist and conservative- he was from a nouveau riche family. Having climbed out from the great unwashed, there is no worse a snob and nazi than the newly baptised of the bourgiouse.

How is this relevant today?

Firstly we can take the bourgious social climbers as the first part of an important schism in the UK:   England has become ruled by a large and influential minority, with an americanised philosophy that the provision by the state in family life should be minimalised, or rather that you should not look to the state with any sense of trust in running what little states do now: health and education, with "welfare" being a metademocratic issue for those on subsistance while there is in effect no safety net for injury or unemployment over age 50. 

The current unholy coalition is hell bent on a strategy of "divide and conquer" when it concerns these two last bastions health and education, on the basis that we cannot afford the nhs as it is run today ,it needs to be managed locally and as a markey in order to function and that education can be an instrument of tory politics by schools becoming increasingly independent of the state.

As with most conservatives with large or small 'C' they do not want to understand a different view point and life experience than their own over priviledged upbringing and pampered career path. Also they are coming with that solution proposal and then looking for problems to fix, and that has been the case since 1979 and the subsequent over beaurocratisation of both health and education.  The NHS after thatcher years left with more managers than beds. Teachers left with more hours unpaid administration than paid teaching infront of classes.

The schism has lead to a major division in that Scotland now votes on independence, having already diverged on a different route. There in is of course a great divide with just under half the population going to be against independence.

Back to the concept: democracy has two or three possibilities for being experienced or percieved as mass-dicatatorship. Firstly as above in the UK , a large minority or even the majority get a government they dont want (in part due to the seat based electoral system ) or a new country border they dont want ,or the exit from the EU in 2015 voting they dont want.   The other area is that democracy becomes highjacked by the rich, who realised long ago that it is dictatorshiip by the masses from their perspective. This has happened totally of course in the usa, where they just want to forget that the masses actually can vote for change they dont want.

Secondly as in the USA, there is a federal meta-democracy driven in the uk by the judiciary, the unions and the EU.  This centres on human rights and health and safety and fair-trade/movement of goods, capital and people. This can be of course interpreted as the march of the beaurocrat from the social democratic seeds post war on both sides of the atlantic. Incessant and dangerous to many, the courts over turn state rulings and enforce a highest common demonimator on issues which national politicians would like to be seen to have actual power over, even if infact they would bow to juris prudence, given constitutions and the declaration of human rights.

Truly the UK is also en route if not in full swing with  the same oligarchical and faceless judicial oriented post democratic status we see in the USA. Scotland is a sore thumb for the rich as is Norway because as an independent state they may well just do better for the average punter and the unwashed silent minority under left wing governance with a more transparent and immediate democracy.

Can't Believe She Hasnt Got a New Man

I was onto a different type of blogg, self centred crap ,when my thoughts fell onto a few very attractive women, separated, and back in the market. Same goes for men I would guess.

What they do wrong? First and foremost they have a really bad wing-girl to go out with and secondly they dont trust the dating web sites. Think that is all cross gender

Also women in their thirties tend to over compensate with make up and jewlry and clothes when going on the odd big night out as a separated parent. This scares off the easy going bachelors and the once bitten twice shy divorcees and leaves them with the chancers and the trophy hunters.

This last issue is not cross gender. Men can make themselves look foolish in fashion clothes and fake tan, but generally attract a different type of inappropriateness altogether.

There is an age perception thing here too: some men see themselves as shadows of them former selves and have some body confidence issues. Women have the same issue, but are perhaps more comfortable with going with older men, who are now suddenly a much older age than last time they were single. Men have a bigger issue with women and their sensible haircuts, small glasses and spare tyres when they are divorced and forty five.

Suddenly I know i felt surrounded by "ladies" some mumsie, some spinster, and no longer in with a mix of attractive young , girlish women. Separation now begs me to ask myself why I tried for five years to make it work when i should have been on the market. That would have been the wrong choice , ah, wouldnt it?

I guess the same is true of the "gorgeous pal, cant believe she's not got a new man". Bachelors are usually alone with good reason, divorced pappas are usually on the thick end of the middle age spread. Shark exes are out there of course with masculine bodies and a daring eye:  the training fanatic , the body builder, the womaniser.

Back to the two big mistakes: a bad wing-'person'. Usually the attractive girl has one single still clubbing pal, who is an albatross round their neck for finding new men. Firstly they are usually over made up and basically not very attractive. Also even if they are pretty, they can give out the wrong signals , usually extremes of 'stay away from us',  or 'I am desperate'. Also they may well be consumate at pulling men and one nightersx ,or whipping the prospect from under the feet of the lone, white or brown female they were wing pilot to. That is worse in men, especially with an attractivde married man on your starboard wing.

The issue is to stop going out with your millstone in hand, and all the randomness and low productivity of pub-club meets, and instead move over to the internet dating scene and all its randomness dressed up as matching and its counterproductivity. Seriously though, you can at least trawl in safety through avatars and profiles, while also being contacted by would be suitors in their droves if you live in a city. Easier to ignore and brush off than even a pub, and you can report them to the doorman on the web site too.

Personally girls, ladies rather, I dread the thought as much as going for a prostrate examination or to an aunty's funeral. However I know that it is the only reasonably effective way of getting to potential partners and also of learning to be single and sociable again.

The Next Generation Browsers.....That Havent Quite Happened

Way back when in the early days of the www open internet, i started getting ideas about a super-browser which would be a personal oracle for content on the internet (in the original greek sense). By 2009 these had crystalised into a more specific concept of a personalised web-bot which would work in the background from your pc and deliver you the holy grail of relevant, salient and up to date information in a standard GUI platform.

This was no stroke of genius, all search engines have been striving for relevancy and anti spam since their inception, and personalised feed has been available since the pre www news groups and into the era of RSS feed (did anyone really use rss for more than a week?).  The ground was trodden but the trail had been blazed by the errant and often unstable marching elephant that is the do it all web browser.

Next generation to me in 2009 meant a super-info-deck outside of the social media circus, to which i was yet to become such an addict as I am today. All your favourite web sites would be scoured for new content, rss news would be screened for relevancy, meta engine searches would be compiled and pages automatically visited and spam screened, and the bot would crawl inexorably looking for highly similar sites and content to your favourites or those of current interest. Essentially a drag and drop lazy gui, which then did most of the leg work in sifting through the shit to get to the news and the stuff you are really interested in, at the same time you worked or even when the pc was on screen saver. More over server side or cloud systems could be employed to deljiver really well plucked content for you and present it in a deck which you could define as you will.

Today we are no where in particular nearer in terms of PC or standard tablet platform browsers: they are generic and have to cover the bases of all html and javascript while also being a cornerstone of consumer commerce and on line banking via secure https. All this and Bill Gates and competitors can't charge a dime, euro or rubel for the consumer software.

There were however many seeds and some still exist, of a more personalisable web browser interface with automatic content supply. For example rss as stated, but then google update alerts on searches and the loknger standing meta crawler pages.

What interceded in the potential for wonderful browser was of course the explosion of mobile devices and the two system tablet war. The outcome has indeed been personalised browers -plural- with uncountable apps which utilise html5 programming as a browser for specific source content, such as facebook or twitter. More open and nearer my concepts are the  newspaper crawlers and the multi social media decks.

In effect then the mobile device has become the interface by means of apps and some with their incessant alerts. I feel we are steered by them and use much of our time looking at paint drying in order to get juicy content and the whole process becomes distracting recreation like patience on windows 3.1.1.

Facebook in particular has its up-sides with news channels and feed filtering but it is irrritating to control the feed now and frankly i don.t want an algorythm deciding what is important for me. I have systematically dropped all meme addicts (bar one very sexy blonde) but then i miss all their good stuff and they get used to me being no likey them and no parles avec moi.

Mozilla firefox and app community has come nearer than many to providing a true post 2010 next generation browser, but they falter now and what was a fast, slim line browser seems to be baggier than IE v5. Opera has some plus points too, but the great white hope of Google Chrome has to be taken with the backdrop of consumer profiling and potential abuse by the US government.

Tablet browsers scare me a little too, especially the standard android one (which is wierdly not yet deleted in favour of Chrome presumably because they are device optimised) it allows for pop outs, split tabs and automatic downloads as soon as you stray down tin pan alley on the electric lady net.

The stage is hardly set and i bait no breath here : yes there could be a super deck, a non social media info oracle. Yes there could be a nice https only browser which is locked from all other browsing and client side app's. However no, it is in no-ones interest to fight against the major browsers and search engines and of course with a robot crawling basis you will get flicked off many sites or entire server banks or served spam from ghost sites.

Apps on mobiles are all the rage and they need to score fast on a pretty narrow benefit proposition, a USP or a brand halo effect, in order to gain critical mass and make money. When we start to think a big app, a  major cross genre of content personalisable browser which uses bot technology and perhaps some server side or cloud computing, then we are some time away. Not because of technology, which is all there, but because of the crazieness of consumer economics.

Shimano History Proving the Unreliability of the Internet

...in particular of Wikipedia, not because of the concept of Wikipedia is so very flawed, it is just a little inherently flawed by it being really first to post. In corporate terms this is likely to be a professional web PR firm these days, but a few years ago it was out to the nerds run by the webmaster and some pretty amateur entries were punted for some corporations.

Shimano, case in point: in terms of bicycle components that is: The article is factually incorrect due to the "stub" nature of historical information on the internet. In fact the tradition of shimano is probably only held in dusty vaults under the sushi cafe at their HQ, and in some anorak's bedroom cupboard in form of old catalogues, pictures, boxes, reciepts etc.

On Wiki, both Shimano 105 and Deore are given a far later date for their arrival on the market. This is probably because shimano was not a major supplier even by 1980 after nearly a decade of producing good quality kit. So the aural or folk tradition that has transferred to the internet is tainted by what people actually remember, and that is tainted by asking Mr Average cycle enthusiast who is probably in their 30s.

Here though is one guy , Sheldon Brown,  seems to have a fairly honest collection of actual facts, pitted with some holes like the "W" notch ring machining which was a predecessor to hyperglide, where one tooth was sunken a little which generally promoted smoother downwards "derailing" , whereas hyperglide improves both due to the thinner, wedging machining to the lateral profile as well as the verticle height

The internet, and Wikipedia in particular, suffer from a terrible recency effect in what they present as fact. Disclaimer aside, it is just irritating. It is caused then by

1) Lack of Digital legacy history in  ASCII / HTML / XML / JPEG for most everything pre 1989 or even 1995 you could say.

2) "Experts" being contemporary, not knowing the full history,  or from say the USA, where as a product / Science / you-name-it may have developed for many years outside the US.

3) The search engine effect : recency, search word relevancy and links are pretty high at getting you on the first few pages of results, there after you are down in spam alley and fishing for other, correct key words. A search engine which snow-balled special key words to suggest new key words would be ideal, but probably reach diminishing returns in both quantity and how far back in time it finds results anyway.

4) Amateurs being the only ones who have time. WIki entries for "minority reports" and real corporate histories (which are often fascinating, especially for American technology start up successes) are in the hands of amateurs who are inaccurate and uninformed, or sometimes avoid the risk of revealing insider knowledge.

For Shimano, my three irritations are

a) That Deore has always been a mountain bike group set:

b) SIS was missing from its actual inception in the early eighties, or even late seventies

c) Shimano 105 was a far earlier group set than they claim

Taking a:

a) Deore was a rather pricey touring group set, with a finish in semi polished aluminium, probably available from the late 1970s. It was essentially a copy of european manufacturer's touring group sets, but priced below Campagnolo while above Sachs Huret in terms of quality too. Apart from the long cage arm derailleur front and triple chain set, the other innovation was ergonomic thumb shifters (which may have been an option on campag' touring sets earlier, but I admint to not being an expert)

The thumb shifters allowed for bar top shifting and were located on the inboard ends of the touring bike's bar-tape (or foam as had become popular in the 1980s) on the ram horn / drop handle bars. There may have been a deore bar end shifter too, which was popular in cyclocross, a kind of tab shifter which was mounted into the end of the drop handle bars on each side. Anyway, the rear thumb shifter received indexing before STI style integrated shifters came in, and the rear shifter retained the feature from the "down tube" old fashioned road shifter position, in having a ring to switch from indexing to friction mode. This actually was the preferred option for serious mountain bikers in the late eighties right through to 1992 or even later, well after STI and in particular, Grip shift had established themselves. I think it was the latter which killed off the market for them, as much as shimano doing a dirty, as with those indicator numbers we all though were so girly, but actually we quite like!  The front shifter was friction only.

In those days MTBs by in large did not sprout suspension forks for amateur racing because the forks were too soft and not reliable enough , so the bikes and riders took a beating. Also cables were probably not as well pre-stretched and not PTFE coated as they are now, so in the course of a hard race you could find your indexing had gone, or your rear "mech" was so clogged you had to switch to friction and more over, use your whole hand to shift the thumb shifter.

Some riders mounted the shifter below the bar, which has obvious ergonomic advantages, and this is where probably SCOTT got their idea for their odd bat wing under-bar shifters, which worked pretty well but it was easy to get your knee onto them when ejecting from the bike involuntarily.   Perhaps too Shimano got their idea for their under bar shifter from that too, but in any case it is fairly obvious to do it firstly as they did with the two levers, rather clumsy and always falling to bits, and then over to the ideal solution.

Grip- Shift (the birth-right of SRAM) was then the nerdy alternative, and I seem to remember it also having a friction only mode in the models from the early nineties.

One issue with the early Deore I remember seeing in the bike Shop where I worked then, Dales of Dobies Loan, Glasgow, was that the original front gearing had followed the european convention for 52/50 as the big ring, followed by a 44/46 and then a "granny ring" between 32 and 36 teeth. I can see the wisdom in this now, because of the principles of leverage - a smaller ring on the front gives you more torque, and also momentum, in that the amount of chain you turn and throw off is larger on a mid ring for the same actual "inches" of effected gear. So you reserve lower gears and higher torque per llb pressure on the pedal for the alpine ascents or the belgian "bumps" , and you have your 46/48 for rapid progress on the meandering, roller coaster back roads onto a wide back set where your effective 3rd gear sprocket is a 21 ( 28 / 24 / 21 / xx xx xx being usual low gears, with the xx higher gears depending if you were on the old 5 speed or onto 6 by the mid 1980s)

So successful was Deore in being a cross over set into MTBs that both Sun Tour and Campagnolo came out with copies, suntour if I remember correctly going for a cheaper and a better version, kind of LX and XT on each side of the standard, while campag had a pretty dear set, with their clunky non Hyperglide indexing onto 7 speed. I think it was the first campag group set of modern times which was brushed rather than highly polished. It was either lighter or rather heavier than Deore, I cannot remember but I know it differed.

b) Now to SIS. Shimano had a system called Positron ( not the rear differential trade mark) for indexed shifting which was catastrophically launched in cheap OEM bikes for the USA; with plastic levers and so on. In fact an american kid I knew must have had this in 1981 with the horrid plastic shifters mounted up on the bar stem. He had "clicky gears".

Anyway, it is claimed in Wiki and by Herr Sheldon that SIS came to light in the 1984 Dura Ace group set, which did so much to establish Shimano as a major player by being light and innovative. In fact I had seen a shimano 600 shifter from the early eighties with the SIS logo on it, and been told that it had been a fiasco by an experienced mechanic and road racer who worked at said Dales Cycles. 600 had been in fact offered to lower level pro's ( on the continent there are thousands who never make it to the "grand tours" ) with the SIS. Whether they had not perfected it, or more likely that those riders got little time from mechanics if the team actually had one, is for debate, but the mechanic did dig out an article on the system which looked dog eared and circa 1980.

The pre 600 EX group set was a rather scruffy looking affair, with a gun metal finish with speckled logo back ground, and I remember both my mate's Elswich Stag tourer having a mid to long cage version (probably a 26 mid length) and then seeing the SIS logo on a short cage version which came in on a bike.

According to the mechanic, shimano did not take into account stretch in cables, and the resulting difficulty in getting a correct indexing as the cable tightens when you go to the lower gears with more teeth on the rear block. This was solved by better quality "pre-stretched" cables and a longer adjustment barrell on the rear derailleur with it's own quarter turn cam adjuster widget inboard to facilitate quick road side adjustments (it may have been better to incorporate a fine adjust barrell or mechanism of some sort,  to the lever as they later did with STI and maybe Deore Thumbshifters)

I would not say that index gear shifting was "driven" by the mountain bike boom, where as STI was clearly a related development in terms of supply and demand. The earliest STI shifters I saw were dura ace and 105 , and both sets which came into Dales had an apparent "hand made" appearance to them, with some uneven metal working and polishing, and a milky finish to the aluminium incidentally.

Back to Shimano 600 being a rather cheap looking affair in the early 80s prior to the lovely much missed polished chrome like finish prior to the bastardisation to mediocre Ultegra-ness. 600EX was a beautiful group set, especially with dual caliper brakes, and when it was properly indexed around 1987 it was a better group set than Campag' Chorus for club riders, or the then fancy Athena which was lovely but still clunky in comparison to even the 105 SIS gear shift.  Prior to 600 EX the 600 rear and front mechs suffered from failures in the bushings around the riveted little pivot axles, however these could be re-engineered by any machinist worth their salt.

105 though..-


c) One-oh-Five. Shimano 105 is widely quoted on the internet as beginning with the rather innovative, and super light 1986/87 model, when Shimano produced an SIS group set that was lighter than the last Dura Ace. It featured SIS six speed, biopace chain rings (which I dumped) and soon into its life it had double pivot calipers, before 600EX got them. Also this had SLR, springy brake hoods, which did help the set up a bit - i had them onto nice 600EX single pivot calipers though because the 105 were frankly ugly and luckily out of stock when they built my 531 C machine. 105 had some other innovations to save weight in the bottom bracket and head set, and the hubs were super light. The finish was dull, brushed aluminium, but the next dura ace followed suit, dropping the fine polished finishe for a super light set for serious cyclists who didn't care about bling.

However, 105 has a longer history than that. I bought an old stock 105 derailleur , non indexed, from about the same production period as the gun metal 600 and it was a superior looking bit of kit, maybe a tad heavier, but nice and apart from not being a high chrome finish, the item was pretty much in line with Campag. The date must have been 1984 import latest, so maybe 1982 model, and I bought it in 1986 / 87 on an upgrade impulse.

The packaging box was chrome yellow with shimano's then blue, white, green stripe probably in the wrong pan tones.

I also saw a set of shifters (for some reason I bought campag, just to own some shiny campag) which also were better qaulity look and feel than the old 600.

There ends my rant about innaccuracy's, but I only pose my own half memories and half-truths to you.  

I would be pleased to get any comments which support this kind of chronology and so on of Shimano, while any criticism should come with non internet generation fact!



Post script It seems campagnolo suffer the same fate : i remember the athena groupset was introduced in either 86 in the UK or maybe a year earlier on the continent. It was non indexed and the last launched then without it. The lovely dual pivot brake calipers of chorus were in the set iirc, and these were nice - many say as good in chorus as the vastly expensive delta brake. Also the set had at least one other innovation which was at that time unique to athena: a special derraileur to rival perhaps Shimano's w-cut, or hyperglide introduced about that time and certainly to compete against indexed gearing which became standard on Shimano group sets in 1986. The first Athena derailleur had a geometry and mechanism which pivoted the jockey wheel cage backwards as the cable was engaged for an up shift to a lower (more teeth) gear. This meant that there was less chain on fewer teeth to disengage and made for a very elegant shift. I was told this was not new, but rather a more relevant introduction to what would have been a 7 or maybe only six speed cassette/freewheel over the five speed from history. I saw the athena group set on a bike at Dales Cycles of dobies loan, glesga, and tried the shift on a lifted back wheel and it was very nice if a little clunky sounding for some reason. At that time a machining company in Northenglandshire somewhere offered to machine cut any cassette or set of rear sprockets to "hyperglide" and I heard a few serious cyclists talking of getting this done to campag or older dura ace sets. Despite being poorer at indexed shifting for many years than the japanese, if you exclude the Armstrong fiasco years, campag have dominated the tour de france and many other competitions for the last six decades. They survived by making things of beauty and also eventually catching up in the innovation for top end group sets.

Cyclocross Bikes Take Off

Cyclocross bikes used to be the reserve of a small band of devotees and "serious" cyclists looking to train and race while there was salt on the roads. In Europe they predated mountain bikes of course as a form of racing, but were usually regarded as a quirky investment.

Now the wheel so to speak, has come full circle again after the long love affair with the 26" wheel, 1.95 inch tyre and straight handle bars wanes. Where once riding a muddy fox courier was cool and a sign of "hipster" rebellion, now mountain bikes are standard consumer items for the masses. Teenagers bikes today would have been exotic items to drool over in the 1990s. Cyclist "nerds" were looking for something more exclusive and esoteric, and therefore the explosive rebirth of cyclocross as a sport began.

Just to focus on the bikes: there is a happy sweet point now with technology and price point. Now you can have disc brakes which give extra stopping power and much longer life to rims. Frames are quite light at the entry level (which is about mid level compared to mountain or road bikes) but importantly they are stiff with good clearances. And then most of all there are the shifters: gone are the drop bar end ungainly shift of old cyclocross, in are hood shift-brake units from road bikes.

The next move will be to use the mid sized 584mm wheels which are half way between mountain bike and 700c road clincher wheels. This will make the bikes more sturdy, and offer the average user spoke key free seasons on a wide set of terrain.

What i liked about hybrids was their lack of pretention: they were city street bikes as much as they were "trail" bikes. I worked in bikeshops when there was a steady stream of people wanting to ahem, drop the drops so they could commute with better access to brakes and gears in the morning rush hour traffic.  Mountain bikes, like range rovers, offer a tough off road pretence while most users will spend most of their lives on tarmac.

In my days of youth though, i loved mountain bikes because you could just go mad down a rooted, bolder topped path and then ride back to town. You could power slide corners and sprint downhill. However the older me wants to do longer sessions now and explore the countryside more, joining up forrestry roads, tarmac and the odd dry good footpath to make for a 2-4 hour ride.

Drop handle bars have such a big windage and comfort variation factor that they are a must for faster and longer runs. The " African" tour bikes of the 1990s were very often either hand made hybrid on 26" wheels with drops, or just bastardised MTBs with bar end or the legendery Deore top bar thumb shifters so loved by serious mountain bikers in the early nineties over the plasticy double lever under bar cousins of the time.

That is another thing these days of getting three bikes in one wijth a cyclocross: trail and cross bike for smoother off roading, touring bike for paniers and road racer with 23C tyres at 120psi.

Most of my riding now then would be better on a cyclocross bike. However i do enjoy unlocking my forks for a comfortable blast down hill or a trip off the beaten track.

There is my tuppence on the whole MTB vs Cyclocross debate.

Middle Aged Spread - The battle Continues

I will be moving this to a new custom made, slim and nimble little blog of its own soon btw.

What struck me with the Atkins diet (all info to adhere to the diet is freely available btw on their web site) was that you remove of course all the goodies in life, our little self allowed luxuries, completely during the diet period and then only creep them back in later. Luxuries are high sugar basically: beer, chocolate, sweets and then high carbo-fat combinations like crisps or chips and then finally high sugar-fat combos namely cakes and buns and the like.

What I pondered, if you cut out all these extras , beer and crisps and sweets, and then ate a healthier, fairly high carbonhydrate diet? The old F-plan fibre diet?  Then if you did a lot more exercise in the fat burning zone you would not need to cut out all the luxuries?

If like me you eat healthy meals but have middle aged spread and it goes up and down a few kilos but is really about 20-30% over your ideal and stable, then you are actually balancing your luxuries and binges against either dieting or the amount of exercise you do. The beefy rugger player, the chubby but fit cyclist, the jogging mummy with the un-shiftable spare tyre round her middle.

As I said in my last blog, my luxuries account for 9000kcal a month, so on top of a normal diet with no exercise, I would gain a kilo a month, and around Christmans I do! However my exercise in training this year has been about 12500 Kcal / month on top of normal activity (@ 500kcal av.per hour, 5 -7 hours per week) So given for miscalculation, forgotten snacking,  injury down time and larger dinners which I thought weren't luxury, I am about in balance and that was reflected by a meagre loss of maybe 4 kg in the last six months, away from my super heavy 118-120 kg.

Back to the cutting out of all things bad. Well if you do a lot of exercise you can have luxuries if you know the rest of your diet is healthy and around the recommended daily intake for man or woman. Only you have to be strict on what amount you have, and be open to include all sorts of extra hand-to-mouth-repeat opportunities.

Then it does come to counting calories: In an Out. This has been weight watchers mantra for years. I decided to up my training duration to improve my cardio vascular and put my body in the fat burning zone longer. My sessions went up from 45 mins-60 mins to 90-160 minutes with a total of five to seven hours per week since second week in january. Plus then some other walking to the shops, school "run" and so on. However four kilos loss on a target of 20 was poor, and I did not weigh myself often enough to know if I had hit a lower figure and bounced up since I was afraid to do so.

I found it to be my luxuries and I include extra whole portions of dinner in that. Sometimes I just need to bowls of pasta to be satisfied after training days or cold days. However that was being used as an excuse along with the now well trodden lie of "carbo loading" for the next day's training.  From a standing start, anyone who is middle aged and healthy has enough energy in glycogen for at least one hours intense 600-800 kcal training. There is no need to carbo load.

Snacking and training are also bad. You should look to not snack at all during anything under three hours exercise unless it is -7 or below when after an hour you may need a small snack to keep going another hour comfortably. Then when you finish exercise, midt in the danger zone for the munchies, have your lunch in the car or a single piece of fruit to hand, and do not what ever you do go into the shops. Alternatively have half your lunch or dinner with you, and control the other half at home.

Being strict means setting the number and then counting the beers, the squares of chocolate and the grams of crisps you are allowed by virtue of training or a raised level of physical activity, walking being not bad at 300Kcal / hour. You then need to keep a tally somewhere and use a weekly basis, beginning each Friday morning with a new week such that you do not split your goodies friday-saturday between two weeks. You may use up all your goodies on Friday, in which case you may put on wieght that night, but you will then be exposed to how much you used to eat, if for example you like me come on halving luxuries as creating a calorie deficit. That is it, your allowance is used up until next friday by which time you will have had almost a week's training in abstinence!

I included those extra meal portions as a big culprit, and have only allowed myself two per week. A fly on my wall from the last six month's training period, may argue that I was up at six or seven doubled dinners! Saying I have two, and now this week I have by the way used them up, means that I do not allow myself more on the basis of carbo loading or being empty from the day.

The next real culprit was beer and crisps, so they are cut way back, with a miserly 100g crisps and no nuts , or 50 -50 per week. The other thing about crisps and nuts was that I was using them to bridge the gap to dinner after training or when the school run home was running late due to sports etc.  100g is not very much, a couple of small bowls full, and it is still about 200Kcal at least but there I have the discipline of a red light through the week, and a little green one for a single bowl each night of the weekend.

If you have more limited time for exercise then you can make it count more by doing it before breakfast and after dinner, with no eating there. A good alternative is to have a light breakfast, walk 45 mins to an hour to work or to transport to work, or with the dog locally. Some people respond well to this in stimulating their metabolism for the whole day, I happen not to really burn any fat this way as I have tried.  I need the two hour sessions plus a higher general level of activity and less snacks to attack the issue personally. Otherwise for me it would be no luxuries and also calorie counting on ordinary meals during and after the diet weight loss period, which I think is tedious and unsustainable for me.

Two hour sessions can burn a whole hours worth of fat for most people which means that over a month of eight two hour sessions you can burn about a kilo of fat. So think again of those saturday mornings with the paper, twitter and FB and get out. Or think of those one hour sweat sessions followed by a bar of chocolate which are quite possibly putting fat on you! Extending sessions take will power and planning around jobs, family and as said above, meals. The trick is then not to snack.

The only snacking I allow myself is fruit, and I have take fruit as a "free" but I have also taken that two or three pieces of fruit after exercise can be a convenient lunch. Bananas and grapes should not be combined: they deliver a lot of sugar over a long time from first injestion. Pears are quite low in sugar as are fresh strawberries. Apples are about mid way.

Because fruit is more satisfying to your appetite than salty or refined sugar based snacks, you will quite likely find that snacking urges begin to disappear as you loose a bit of that Pavlovian-dog response. That is to say the mind has associated  a reward, which is transiently satisfying, with finishing exercise and learns to expect it, more over it demands it!  ( I have it terribly for beer and snacks in either way at the weekend, having never ever got the munchies from beer as a young adult!)    Furthermore,  those type of foods actually lead to cyclic cravings for more of the same, because they were high value foods in our species' evolution and we were  subconsciously encouraged by the evolved feedback mechanism to gorge ourselves on them so as to take advantage of the rare sweet or salty find. Like Honey for example, or a salt deposit on the inland plains.

I think that saying no to all luxuries in life is counter productive when you are doing a lot of exercise which is in the fat burning zone, mid intensity, high duration or before breakfast for example. I remember 14 years ago I was actually unemployed a while and very poor,  I  had only £10 pounds spending money per week after bills and basic food, while I had access to a virtually free public gymn and pool. I also walked about 8 km home, sometimes both ways too. I lost about 10 kg, yeah,  but I was miserable. I felt good with the weight loss though, but when I started in a new job I became weekend snack central! It all went back on without me noticing and I was very chubby once again within a year. So I did not learn to manage my luxuries because I was so pleased to be able to afford them without really needing to think about budgeting for them again. I think that is an unreasonable way to go about things if you are willing to do some serious hours of exercise per week, with 2 hour sessions being at least two of the times you do it.

Once the "diet" is over then you have to be able to avoid the things which will rebound you out, and the only way to do that is to go back to tallying up. However once at a desired lower weight, you can probably do less exercise, concentrating on one hour or less conditioning and strength exercises which will keep your body in trim and strong. Keep an eye on your weight, and as with Atkin's maintainance period, you may find that you need to reduce luxuries more, and be aware of weeks you do not achieve much exercise or when there are many temptations.