HN user
43 at the time.
Probably relevant too – systematic endurance training since 12, elite-level racing since 18 (world champion at that point). So not a stranger to all kinds of injury and what works and what doesn't. For me that is.
I guess worth mentioning another story..
Some years after my fuck up, Chris Froome, multiple Tour winner, crashed badly. Much worse than me, broke a lot of bones.
One of them was the femur neck. This one (and maybe in combination with other broken bones) took him a long time to recover from. By the time he did, he was finished as the Chris Froome, no more wins.
Not saying he did anything wrong, the fuck do I know, but I wondered for a while if he tried, how shall I say it, a more head on approach to the fractured bones recovery and if that made any difference.
how did you know to disregard the doctor 's instructions
My background (Russian). Don't trust western approach to solve problems with pills etc. End up talking to (usually) Soviet-trained doctors who can't practice here in the west. The advice makes sense so I follow it believing they know what they're talking about. It's always about the cause, not the symptom. This sort of thing.
How did you limit yourself during your riding and other resistance work
By feel. Biking is a second nature to me. Femur neck wasn't the only bone I broke. More plates too.
How long was the recovery period after every session?
First few, felt a bit fucked but I think it was both being out of shape and one leg's muscles sleeping for 4 weeks. So the usual, sit for 5-10 min, back on the crutches, off to the shower and the life goes on.
Another thing – the surgeon told me I'll need a hip replacement in 10 years' time. This was 16 years ago and I don't feel I need a new hip although it's not perfect the way it works sometimes but nothing even remotely serious.
Anecdotal but...
Broke my femur neck on a mountain bike. Surgery, plates and screws. Surgeon said no weight on the broken bone for 8 weeks and no walking on it for 12. And then we'll see he said.
In 4 weeks I was on a trainer (fork fixed to the trainer). Started easy with 30min sessions and then increased time and force applied to the pedals.
After 2 weeks of "riding", started putting weight on the bone with short walks around the house.
8 weeks after the surgery rocked up to a road race, still on crutches because walking was still a bit uncomfy but being on the bike was fine. Raced to a 3rd place (Masters A) with hard breakaways and all.
12 weeks after the surgery go to see the surgeon to check if I can start walking (already walking by this stage as normal). He X-rays me and says your bone is fully healed. Strange but good he said.
I told him the story. Still don't know if he believed me.
In the same boat here: 20+ years of hard core Christianity (Scottish Presbyterianism). Heavy, very heavy indeed studies lasting years and years. Regulative principle of worship, this kind of direction.
Was raised kinda an atheist though and converted in my 30s. A willful, well thought out decision to convert.
All came crashing down on me the moment I stopped ignoring some very obvious questions, e.g. who died on the cross?
Even some casual thinking about this lands you, inescapably, on the only conclusion you have available if you stick to the orthodoxy, and that is: a human nature died on the cross. Not God (cannot die) and, unfortunately for Christianity, not a human either (briefly: if JC is one person / two natures, you have to conclude his (human) nature died on the cross since JC the person, being God, cannot die).
At any rate, this is where it started for me and quickly escalated further. The entire New Testament, I'm convinced now, is a fraud and whoever pulled it off didn't even try to hide it. It's incredible how we can bullshit ourselves into believing what we (for whatever reason) want to believe. And not just religion.
In the end, the NT had to go leaving me with the Hebrew scriptures.
This is odd.
I'm from the area, near Grozny. If Grozny were under fog, there are at least 10 airports nearby (Makhachkala, Vladikavkaz, Nalchik, Minvody, Rostov, Krasnodar etc) in the North Caucasus. Why would you fly east, across the Caspian Sea, toward Kazakhstan?
To OP: please keep it going.
Even better, for a few months the browsers themselves would highlight RSS feeds and allow you subscribe right in the browser. It was too good to last.
Vivaldi browser still does that.
Not true.
Hearing Ukrainian for the first time, if you're Russian, sounds like you're hearing a Russian dialect you never heard before but understand 90% of, bar some words you've never heard. The languages are that close.
Polish, otoh, would baffle a Russian at first, you'd grasp quite a bit but you know you're hearing a foreign language, Slavic but foreign.
Ι wonder what would the effect be if someone got drunk just once before a race.
Not sure, depends on a person I guess. My first time was ok.
Mind you, it's not like we were drinking all the time, more like occasionally, usually between big blocks of training or racing and never before anything important.
The off-season though, that was wild. It had to be for sanity's sake.
Former elite cyclist, Russian.
Can confirm, drinking in cycling circles at elite level is normal. Heavy drinking that is, even before races. Doesn't seem to have any effect on performance the next day.
Then again, we're talking 20-25 yo males with 10-15 years of endurance training.
I work in IT (hence my daily visits here) but blog about something else – cycling.
Been blogging since 2008, on and off, using few different domains. This current one is the so called work in progress, no about me page etc. Mostly write via newsletter these days though.
Sharing for the variety's sake I guess this being HN.
That (the IPA designations) could, and probably is, helpful for breaking down sounds on paper but taking that /t/ from what is a manual of sorts and dropping it into a foreign transliteration is the opposite of helpful.
Everybody expect the French won't have any problem reading out without stumbling Chkalov or Chmil. Supplying the /t/ is a copout to please the French and, as a bonus, to piss of the Russians (especially the Chekalovs ones).
This sound is an ‘affricate’, meaning that it’s pronounced by starting with a /t/ and releasing it with the tongue so that it finishes with a /ɕ/ sound.
I don't agree. I don't start with a /t/ when I'm about to say any Russian word that starts with ч (ch). The tongue is in a different place altogether.
With т, the tongue is closer to teeth than when I start with ч (ch). This should be true for all since we're talking about more or less the same sound – ч and /ch/.
Of course for French and English speakers /ch/ represents two different sounds.
Without the starting t, you might end up with something that could be spelled sheck in English.
That might be true.
The truer thing though is, English speakers at least (unless they're a linguist or read IPA in the morning), go ahead and pronounce (or try to) the t and run into trouble every time because t-ch-kalof is a challenge they're not up to (Russians won't have a problem with it, even when drunk).
Don't know. When I think about it, all Russian ч (ch) pronunciations are consistent unlike some other sounds that vary depending who is talking. Not sure why they'd want to add anything to it. It's an easy sound from get go.
My personal pet hate is how Andrei Tchiml's[1] surname creates unnecessary difficulties for English (and other) speakers. It's a simple ch sound at the beginning and yet everyone stumbles on it trying to speak out a mouthful of consonants while they're not there to start with.
French, I think, are particularly having trouble with it.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrei_Tchmil
Edit: Tchmil that is.
no one, not even high level party members took this bullshit seriously enough
Don't know when you were born (I was in the 1960s). You're wrong. A lot of people, especially Gagarin's generation, took what you call bullshit seriously and believed in it. Hence, were willing to lay down their life for the cause.
You don't need a t there (native Russian speaker), it's a clear ch like in check.
This is a common mistake when transliterating the Russian ч (ch), t doesn't add anything. In fact, t makes it more difficult to pronounce it while it's an easy sound for most people to say.
Have you ever heard of "innocent until proven guilty"?
In the criminal court of law, that's the burden of proof. This is not it.
Paceline has nothing to do with road closures.
Riders form a paceline because of the crosswind which forces everyone to look for draft on the left or the right side of a rider in front of you. Eventually, there's not enough road for everyone to be in the draft and the first paceline is formed (also called an echelon).
More specifically though, paceline refers to the mechanics of the echelon, the way riders rotate, or take turns at the front to stay in the echelon. This rotation is the paceline.
It is being used to refer to pro cycling fraternity. "The rumour going around the peloton..."
Former professional racer here (USSR), former world champion (junior TTT).
The article describes a methodology (high volume, low intensity) commonly practiced by many teams in the USSR, especially my team who took it to the next level supported by a group of scientists and researchers.
Prior to hiring, every candidate (I'm talking about my team) went through intensive testing. A lot of guys (but not all) were sent home based on low VO2Max numbers.
I was 17 when I got a call and tested at low 60 VO2Max on my first test and was offered a ride. I came from a completely different training methodology based around short, high intensity intervals. Within a year, my VO2max moved to high 70 and eventually settled around 80- mid-80 depending on various factors during the season. I've seen this growth in others, sometimes even more dramatic.
To give you an idea, we clocked around 40,000 km per year of mostly low intensity training. A typical training day was made up of 3 rides: 40 km in the morning before breakfast, 3-5 hour ride (depending on the cycle) after breakfast, and another 40 km ride in the late afternoon. We lived on the bikes 11 months a year.
We were often told to pull out of dog fights on the climbs during a race to keep that low intensity in check and just ride tempo far away from threshold (although we used heart rate monitors in training, crude, early version of them, this wasn't possible in a race because the signal was sent to a team car, nothing was displayed on a bike). Not knowing your exact heart rate, we had to go by feel and to this day I can quite accurately tell what my heart rate is at different level of intensity.
For high intensity work, we practiced 20-25 km intervals at race or somewhat higher than race pace intensity, usually 4 or 5 of them per session, pretty much mimicking a 100 km TTT which is what our specialty was at the time (Olympic gold was important for propaganda).
In 8 years of its existence, that team went from an unknown startup to delivering several world champions. When the Soviet Union collapsed, those who survived the crash managed to make it to the west and raced in pro peloton. One guy in particular, my former teammate, did well in the Giro and the Tour. Others, who went through the similar system, went on to win Grand Tours and major Classics.
That is to say - the methodology has merit even though a lot of literature suggests a different kind of training.