Kettle 'Cross

The cyclocross season started with a different format on Sunday. For the first time in Alberta, an endurance cyclocross race took place; the Kettle Cross Enduro. The course was a 37 km loop in Blackfoot Provincial Recreation Area. While most racers would do the Full Kettle, a two lap, 74 km race, I decided to do the Half Kettle. I did a lap of the course with four ERTC teammates about a month prior to the race and 37 km of bumps seemed like it would be enough for me. There was also a 15 km Tea Cup option.

The race began with all of the about 170 riders starting together with a one kilometre neutral start. I seeded myself towards the back of the starting pack and a few riders moved past me during the neutral start. I had made a tactical error before the race by taking my bathroom break too early before the start. When it came time to stage for the start, it was too late to go again. At about 10.5 km into the race, I was relieved to see, and use, an outhouse.

I knew the race was going to be, for me, about two hours of tough riding. I could tell I wasn’t into the race mentally right from the start as I was content to either sit behind slower riders or not try and push a little to stay with some slightly faster riders. I should have used the beginning to get a little ahead of pace instead of trying to save something for the end.

From my pre-ride, I knew that the bumpiness of the course would take its toll on my body. My triceps and shoulders became sore towards the end of the race but it was my back that was a major problem. Even though the entire course has a variation in elevation of just 45 m, my GPS recorded 200 m of climbing. I wouldn’t say there were any flat sections. I was always climbing or descending. With no flat sections and the constant bumps, I just couldn’t relax my back and was quite sore from about 10 km on. This meant I was constantly trying to stretch and relax on all the downhills so I didn’t carry speed into the next little climb and I also couldn’t attack the climbs too well.

I didn’t have any issues with the course itself. At my slow speed, I wasn’t surprised by any of the few tight corners and I bunny-hopped two of the bigger ruts across the course. I did have one rider crash nearly right in front of me when her front wheel slipped out.

According to my GPS, I covered 36.4 km in 2:01:51 though my official time was 2:09:07. I spent a few minutes in the outhouse and I had four or five minutes at the side of the course lending out my tire levels to someone else who had a flat. I noticed quite a few mechanicals, including a few who had some long walks to either the start or somewhere that they could get a ride to the start. I averaged just 17.9 km/h and had an average heartrate of 167 bpm with a maximum of 181 bpm. I expected my heartrate to be lower as I really felt I could have pushed harder over the last half of the race if my back wasn’t bothering me so much. I also was on my own and, when you don’t have people around to race, it’s easy to lose mental focus and start to coast.

Near Potato Famine

We harvested our barrel potatoes yesterday. As you can see in the photo, it wasn’t quite the bumper crop we were expecting. The stalks and leaves weren’t nearly as brown and dead as I was waiting for but some people were very eager to see how things had turned out. There were lots of smaller potatoes and dozens of little nubs which could have developed into potatoes so the potential for a better harvest was certainly there. I didn’t see where our larger potatoes appeared vertically in the barrel. If the big ones were mostly at the bottom, I would guess that the others would have fattened up if they were harvested a little later. If the big ones were at the top, I’d guess that I added soil too quickly and should have given each level more development time. If it was just random, then our small potatoes could be blamed on either of those reasons or planting too densely, not adding plant food, or a number of other reasons. We still have many other potato plants planted the traditional way in other areas of garden so we’re not about to starve. I also don’t expect Superstore to be sold out of potatoes for the next year.

In the end, it was a fun experiment. Everyone in the house had fun watching the potatoes grow and getting out to water them. I’ll plant another crop next year. I’ll have to check how to preserve my starter potatoes from year to year though. There are other plans for the garden so there won’t be as much room for potatoes next year.

Barrel Potatoes

While driving back from a conference, the conversation turned to urban agriculture. My friend suggested I try growing barrel potatoes. That is, potatoes grown in a barrel. Luckily, soon after moving in to my house a year ago, the City slapped a warning sign on my seldom-used garbage can. It has been sitting inside my fence ever since with nothing to do. So, I decided I would try and grow potatoes in it.

I drilled some holes in the bottom and cleaned it out. Now it was ready for a little soil at the bottom and a little bone meal. I bought some Yukon Gold seedling potatoes and placed some in my barrel. I then covered with soil, watered, and waited.

I’m now twenty days into growing potatoes and I have a number of plants coming up. The only hard part is that I need to keep the soil just under the leaves of the plants but they’re growing at different rates. One is about 25 cm tall while I just noticed a new one coming out today.

It looks hopeful that I’ll have some potatoes in the Autumn as long as I don’t keep the soil too wet and my potatoes get mouldy.

Disaster Averted

Alberta's provincial election occurred on 23 April 2012. The polls had predicted a tight race with the ultra right-wing Wildrose party winning a narrow majority over the right-wing Progressive Conservative (PC) party which had been in power for 41 consecutive years. The polls turned out to be wrong as the PCs captured 61 of 87 seats in the provincial legislature with 44% of the vote. The Wildrose were second with 17 seats and 34% of the vote. The Liberals (five seats, 10% vote) and the New Democratic Party (NDP, 4 seats, 10% vote) took the remaining seats.

It may appear like the PCs won in a near landslide though they only had a minority of the votes but how close were the Wildrose to forming the government? A visit to Elections Alberta to download the results and the electoral districts (ED) shapefile leads to some interesting answers.

As the map above shows, the Wildrose dominated southern Alberta but they had narrow loses to the PCs in a number of other EDs. The red EDs are where the Wildrose lost to the PCs by less than 5%. That means, if one in 40 of all the voters in that ED was a PC voter who decided to vote Wildrose instead, those nine EDs would have gone to the Wildrose. Together, the red and yellow EDs represent where the PCs would have lost if just one in 20 voters selected Wildrose instead of PC. There are 24 red and yellow EDs so if just five percent of the electorate in just those 24 EDs switched their vote, the PCs go down five percent, the Wildrose up five percent and those EDs fall to the Wildrose. That makes the results of the election a Wildrose minority with 41 seats to 37 for the PCs.

Should an election be able to change so much on what appears to be such a small change in voting? Proportional representation in Alberta would have brought a PC minority with 38 seats to 30 for the Wildrose, nine each for the Liberals and NDP and a single seat for the Alberta Party. A 10% swing between PCs and Wildrose in just a third of the EDs would not have changed a near landslide into a minority.

Proportional representation would also have allowed many voters on the left to avoid strategic voting. In the run-up to the election, there was lots of talk about how to block the Wildrose and their regressive policies from becoming reality. It’s impossible to know the true support of the PCs in Alberta due to strategic voting and the apathy in the first-past-the-post system where people don’t vote because the outcome of their ED is nearly guaranteed. I had hoped the final polls before the election would show the intentions of many Liberal and NDP voters who then switched to the strategic vote for the PCs at the ballot box. The last polls don’t show this as Liberal and NDP support is nearly the same as in the election. The polls only indicate that borderline Wildrose supporters had second thoughts about making a deal with the dev… er… Danielle Smith and went back to the PCs.

Speaker Series

On 10 April, I was finally able to see Elizabeth May speak in person. She was in the city for the day and the UofA Greens hosted her for a talk in the afternoon. Her talk focused on the recent budget and all the horrible things it included. I was able to ask a question about whether this budget is the final stages of a "starve the beast" conservative policy. The best part was I was able to get a few minutes of Ms. May's time after the talk. I would have loved to have chatted longer with her but a small crowd was forming so I shuffled off. On 16 April, I attended the book tour lecture by Jarrett Walker, author of humantransit.org and the recently published book, "Human Transit." If you have an interest in how transit works, the book is an excellent read. Jarrett's talk was also excellent. He covered a few things in the book and a few things he said will be in his next book. Some of the questions afterwards were insightful but two "questioners" were just looking for validation on their personal views of transit. One went on and on and on about the proposed LRT line through Chinatown. She was concerned about seniors in the area being hit by the LRT. It was much more of a rant than a question and I don't think Jarrett agreed with her logic. In fact, he believes people around sixty should think about their future mobility as they age and might not be able to drive. The other questioner seemed to wonder about mixed-use around LRT stations but it took him about three minutes to get around to something which was nearly a question and he never used the term, "mixed-use."

Coyote scat on a map

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This is just a little test of what I could be doing with ArcGIS on-line. I've gone into the river valley twice now with Peter as he volunteers his time to help with a coyote research project at the University of Alberta. I walked along with my camera and GPS so I could geotag any interesting photographs I might happen to take along the way. Also, for a bit of fun, I'd take a picture of Peter as he collected a sample. I've used the GPS track and the location of each photo to create this little map of where Peter collected a sample. If there's great demand, I can configure the pop-ups to show the image of Peter bending over taking poop. It's your call.

I did get one interesting picture of a woodpecker.

2011

I set a personal record in 2011! I logged 3240 km on the bike with my GPS. That beats my previous best of 3138 km in 2009. The most striking difference is the amount of climbing I did those two years. Last year I did just ten vertical kilometres of climbing while I did over 25 km in 2009. The main reason for all my riding was commuting. I rode most of the winter months which I didn't do in previous years. In total I commuted for nearly 2800 km. I didn't race very much in 2011 which is why I only logged 277 km of training and 95 km of racing, all of that cyclocross. My highs in training and racing were 290 km and 459 km, both in 2009. The final 68 km I classified as recreation and that mostly consisted of pulling my girls around in the bike trailer. Other than commuting, those are some pretty bad numbers for someone who likes to race bikes.

In 2012, I think I can set another personal best in total distance. I'm just one week into January and I'm already near last January's total will lots of more good cycling weather in the forecast. I'm planning on commuting a lot more for the rest of the Winter and into Spring. I didn't do much in January, February or March last year. It should be easy to beat 277 km of training. Thursday hills are about 35 km for me and a weekend ride is easily over 60 km; 80 km if I start from home. I'll have to see about racing but I would like to at least do cyclocross again in the Autumn.