[Andre Jute]

On Nov 17, 3:39 pm, Patrick Turner wrote:
I said....

I used to use boiled potatoes as my secret weapon in bike races over
100km.
They did seem to work better than a Mars bar.

someone replied.....

Moi.

Mars bars are rubbish. The lift doesn't last very long. What works is
carbs. I carry a packet of fig rolls on my bike; highly recommended by
the coach of the British mudbikers. When I was a rugby player, the team
diet was fillet steak and all the potatoes you could eat.

I went on a very hard bike ride 3 weeks ago, 108kms around a very hilly
course,
maybe 1,200metres vertical of climbing, with a lot at 8% gradient.

So now we know where you've been since then: under medical care. I
surely would be if I tried 108km! A good ride for me is 22km.

Try black or dark blue clothes. They make you look slimmer.

Today I lunched at Isaac's in McCurtain St in Cork, on tapas, roast
pheasant with a jus of red wine, spicy pear tart with butterscotch
sauce, washing it down with a bottle of Guignal Cotes de Rhone and
that distillation of sunshine, the Barton reserve Sauternes for a
desert wine.

I was planning on cycling when I got home but it is absolutely ****ing
down.

I doubt I shall ever weigh 75kg but then I never did. Even when I
earned my living as a professional sportsman, I never broke 190lbs to
the downside, which was acceptable for someone my height and bigboned,
so perhaps it is a triumph for the sedentary intellectual in several
decades to have put on only another stone. (That collage of measuring
standards should confuse the French!)

Andre Jute

I took 4.5 hours and although I started 1/2 an hour before the main
field of maybe a 100 riders,
I was third to finish at 15minutes behind 2 guys of about 30, so
although I left 1/2 an hour early, I gave those guys a 30 year start
because I'm 60.
I wondered what kept them from passing me sooner than they did.

I rarely ever eat when I am on a ride these days. As one ages, nearly
everything one does gets more difficult
to do except being wise perhaps. But trying to digest food while on the
move on a bicycle
is not something that improves with age.
So I have never eaten during some of the 100km + training rides I do
around town.

108km is a small ride by TDF standards, but it sure tested me.
Potatoes seemed to be a reasonable fix but although they are natural
complex carbohydrate,
the calories per kg are low, and getting the calories to the muscles in
a long ride
is a being a little too optimistic. Simplistic ppl who think they can
just eat while riding
to make up for an absense of in-depth training are sorely dissapointed.
The body and its workings is far more complex than most ppl think, and
the
glossy sporting magazine articles advertize all this stuff to eat but I
doubt much works.

I didn't quite do enough training for this long ride and found I
was the living dead for the last 15kms, but then the wind was behind me
and the day was overcast
and it wasn't too hard a struggle. When 40 I could easily ride 150km in
such terrain.
But I must have done just enough training to get though.
I passed others who'd begun earlier in the 160km route which was harder,
and wondered
how they'd ever finish. It was obvious to me they had no idea that it
soon becomes MUCH more difficult to
ride up a steep hill of say 8% gradient which is a couple of kilometres
long than it is to ride a slight
steep rise in their local suburb, maybe 100metres long.
They didn't understand that after the first shocker of a really big
hill, there are maybe another
5 more to follow, and each one takes its toll, and after several hours
one's average speed
can drop dramatically, and regardless of how easy one tries to ride up
hill,
and how low the gearing is on the bike. After 100km, I was going
straight down to the lowest
gear I wisely chose, 39 front cog x 27 rear cog. At 40 I rode 42 x 23.
Age takes its toll.

You are right about Mars Bars and Coca Cola. Same goes for all the rest
of the absolute junk being sold
around the shops. Its basically all complete rot gut, and all makers of
this muck
should have their manufacturing licences cancelled and the shops fined
for selling non natural processed food.
Don't get me strarted on food, but most of what is making so many arses
so ****ing big
and health problems so large is the food industry and substance
industries.

I mentioned my slight discomfort at the tail end of a decent ride to a
young dude and he said
eat carbo gel products, presumably tailored to be more slowly be
absorbed
without the body having to work so hard to do that in addition to
prodiving an average of 200 watts
of mechanical power.

I have not tried his advice, but actually let myself get knocked up by
such hard and difficult things
so that the challenge better promotes fat loss and re-definition of
muscle structure.

18mths ago I was 95kg, but now I seem to have settled at 75kg, and its
extremely difficult to
get weight any lower. A skin fold test would reveal I had a HIGH
percentage of body fat of maybe 12%, as opposed to a lean
elite athlete who is typically 8%, and if I was 8% now I'd be slightly
faster up hills on the bike and
might possibly rank amoung the top national cyclists in my age group,
but I have NEVER been to of my heap ever.
Compared to the top riders of my age group who need to have a large
house with a couple of spare rooms for
all the sporting trophies thay have won, I have very few trophies to
show for a total now of about 110,000 kms I have ridden
since 1986. But I don't regret one single kilometre.
Between age 37 and 43 I rode 100,000km in training and weekly club
races.
The longer the race, the better I liked it. At club level, the elites
didn't get all the fame.
The handicapping system evened ppl out.
But the best time trial for 25miles or 40kms I ever did was 1.06, and
there were 3 guys
in the club between 47 and 53 who'd clock very close to the hour.
In a long race these guys didn't like the surging, and like me they
couldn't
sprint to save their lives, but against the clock on they own they were
masters of pain and style.
And they could maintain very unusually high heart rates for their age,
and most
were leaner than myself, to the point of looking emaciated.
There was an abundance of the athletic gene in their make up.
Not everyone has an abundance.
Its not any use for anyone to try to force oneself to be the build that
does not simply result from doing ample exercise and eating wisely.
There are cyclists I have known who'd start each season heavy, and after
a few rides
would lean down to racing weight with ease, and beat everyone else.
By comparision, I had to ride a lot further harder to get anywhere.

3 years ago, I had an operation on my knees and the doctors said I'd
soon need a pair of titanium and plastic
joints to stop the pain I was enduring. I couldn't even mow my own
lawns...
But the little cartlidge operation did improve things and I was able to
get back into best personal form
very close to where I was at age 40. Don't always believe doctors.
They couldn't really say what had caused them to become so sore, I sure
couldn't,
but their fix seemed to work.

Anyway, I thought riding a regular 200km a week would either wreck my
knees, and i would need the joints,
or it would improve my whole body, and stop the fast slide into fatness
and
rotting health that bedevils about 75% of the people I know of my age.

I have had good improvement to health, and ride much faster than most
ppl of 40,
and I have NEVER been passed on the road by anyone my age during the
last 18mths.

Knee pain has reduced to almost nothing, and unlike 3 years ago when I
couldn't
stand up talking to someone for 10 minutes withouty looking for a chair,
I am only slightly discomforted after a 100km ride, and there isn't any
serious pains the next day.

I also swim about 300metres daily which seems to be excellent for my
back.
Old verterbrea tend to slip out of place, and swimming is excellent for
the back,
and to balance the lack of motion of the arms while on the bike.

Steak and potatoes isn't too bad, but some ppl have too much steak and
too few potatoes,
and if they do eat potatoes, its in the form of deep fried chips full of
oil.

The natural human diet is 10% protein, 10% fat, and 80% complex
carbohydrate.
I have always tried to keep to this idea, but aduring 14 years of
doing very little exercize beyond lugging heavy tube amplifiers around,
I was putting on about 1.4kg per year. It could have been 3 kg, but I
know how to say no
to absurd helpings of food and gallons of beer when its offered.

As one toughens up to an exercize regime the body plays tricks because
it becomes far more efficent
and hence it becomes increasingly difficult to get to where the elite
natural athlete
is without having to try very hard.

This morning I was on the road at 6.30am, and did a couple of long big
hills in my course
of 65km. I caught and passed a number of people, and stopped for a chat
at the top of one hill.
It was beautiful early morning at the top with mist hanging on mountain
ranges and
definately had an out of this world feel about it. It elates all the
senses
to get out and do something.

Meanwhile, I think the worst horn sound I heard did use Foster 5"
speakers in tractrix horns
home made buy a guy who tried hard.
No success though. The sounded like the sound was trapped inside a close
wooden box.

There are many examples of horn speakers which are simply expensive
firewood.

Patrick Turner.



Inevitably, I collected the name, Potato Pat, and I didn't mind. I had
the full license to use potatoes winningly as I wanted. Why now, I was
tree quarters Irish, because of me Irish mum, and because of me dad,
two turds English.

Well now, Padraig...

And now, yeah, what is an FE127?

Are they not Foster five inch drivers?

Yeah, I shoulda seen the clue in Mick's "mad box building" but I took
that to mean he was drilling a chassis for these weird FE127es tubes...

Fostex, eh? I heard about them: Japanese-style Lowther type point source
speaks with whizzer cones. Said to be very nice indeed in tapered
quarter wave pipes. Indeed, I once published a design that could be used
interchangeably with 8in Lowthers and the equivalent Fostex drivers,
with someone reporting on the single driver conference that the Fostex
went a bit deeper in my design than the Lowther. Personally, I hated the
design, because with the Lowther it was very sensitive to just how you
stuffed the area behind the driver, otherwise you got a screechy treble
overwhelming everything, which had to be fixed with stupid little tufts
of wool between the whizzer and the main cone; I hate that sort of
kludging, and don't care overly much for those who try to promote it as
"tweaking". In my Fidelio type horns the Lowthers work without that

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