I’ve been testing out salted potatoes for running. They make a nice savoury snack when you are sick of gels.
To cook, I boiled them for 10 minutes, coated them in coarse sea salt, roasted them in the oven at 200 degrees for 30 minutes, coated them in a bit more salt and declared them ready. They were pretty good, but I think their appeal will be much greater towards the end of a long run. They’re not bad cold, but not quite as good as warm.
I tested both Jersey royals and British gems. The skin is a bit looser on the Jersey royals and Elina felt they went a little rubbery, whereas the British gems held up a bit better.
One of the things that totally flummoxed me was trying to change my Canon DSLR from shooting video at 24 fps to 30 fps. It simply was not on the screen: I only had 24, 25 and 50 as options. And nobody on the internet seemed to have had the same problem.
I suspected it might be a legacy problem of PAL vs NTSC but I could not work out how to change it. In the end, I managed to find the menu option and my suspension was correct: once I changed the setting from PAL to NTSC I was then able to access 30 and 60 fps.
If anyone else is struggling with the same issue, or trying to get 24 fps on a NTSC-configured Canon, here is how to change it:
The third workout in my strength and conditioning series is all about balance. Balance is super important in triathlon. If you think about a race, you spend none of it with both feet on the ground. You’re in the swim, pushing down with each leg in turn on the bike, or running, which by definition means having one foot off the ground at all times.
As such, having good balance means you can maintain good technique and therefore avoid injury, and also significantly contributes you your economy: the less energy you can waste swaying side-to-side, the more energy you will have to drive yourself forward.
I’m pleased to announce my new course is now live: Mindfulness for Sleep & Insomnia.
Sleep is a tricky subject because the expectation of our ability to sleep has a big impact on whether we can. That means that sometimes simple tricks can work – but they can also disappear again just as fast. This course takes a different approach. It will change your relationship with sleep so that you stop seeing it as the enemy, and thus avoid activating your body’s stress response.
As you may know, Garmin have had a massive outage. It went down Wednesday night/Thursday morning and started coming back online on Monday, so 4-5 days. It took out their website, call centres, Garmin Connection, production line in Taiwan and even services like flyGarmin and Garmin Pilot.
Garmin’s software is awful at the best of times. Syncs constantly fail with the Garmin Connect mobile app, there are a bunch of bugs in their website that have lastest years (I still can’t see my swim from Wetherby Triathlon) and a lot of stuff crashes and does not work as it should. Hopefully, this will be a kick up their ass to make things better.
As a result, this has put a lot of strain on the things that rely on Garmin.
I managed to record my World Triathlon Leeds virtual event and earn my certificate. I was less lucky with Ironman VR16. Unusually, Ironman was on the ball and extended the deadline but technical problems at Garmin’s end with synced rides going missing and activities not reporting correctly meant I gave up after an hour of messing around. Thanks for that, Garmin. Still, even if I do not have the badge, I know I was a VR16 finisher in my heart.
The cycle was particularly challenging. I did 120 km, but a third of the way through a bolt fell out of my cleat (see above) and I had to do the last 3.5 hours with one foot clipped in and the other riding the flat side of the pedal. Thankfully, there were no major climbs or descents.
A few weeks ago I reviewed the Garmin HRM-Dual and said that it was okay. Since then, I’ve been seeing dropouts in the Bluetooth connection that don’t seem to occur on my other devices, including my Polar H10. Here’s an updated review:
Mountain Fuel is a British endurance nutrition brand making products for runners, cyclists, triathletes and endurance racers at large. In this video, I’ll review their jellies (an alternative to energy gels), Extreme Energy drink, Ultimate Recovery drink and flapjacks to see how they stack up against Science In Sport, Torq, High5 and other brands.
Learn Slim microframework with my new course. You will build your first six projects including a searchable music catalogue, e-commerce project listings and member login and authentication system. Watch the course trailer below or preview the course.
Back in March, I announced Covidman self-supported triathlon to train for while everything else was cancelled. It took a back seat during GVRAT and would have been replaced by Dalesman if it had not been cancelled two weeks after being announced. But now it’s back on.
With one tweak, however. I’m changing the name. Covidman made sense back in March as a symbol that through all of the changes we had to make to keep people safe, we were still going to enjoy life and do what we love.
But the British government hasn’t kept people safe. Excess deaths have now reached over 60,000. It is one of the worst death rates in the world. And, in that light, the name Covidman seems too lighthearted for such a tragic situation. So, I’m renaming it Woolenman in honour of Leeds’s history.
