Monday 4 May 2009

The Future's So Bright...

HP Photo Edit Stitch helped me make this cool panorama of what we saw from Sugarloaf on Saturday. Nice, huh? If only I could format it right so it didn't look completely wanked.

In April, the Dow had its best 1 month performance in 8 or 9 years, I can't remember which. Is this a statement of our economic prospects or something else? Something else. A lot of the big banks announced huge results based on repricing a bunch of assets based on new rules, which provided a lot of the bump. A lot of the rest is probably speculative activity. I don't see a ton of reasons for prospects to be so bright. Warren Buffett told shareholders at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting not to expect any rebound in retailing or manufacturing any time soon.

The Senate is debating a credit card consumer bill of rights which would prevent the card issuers from a lot of the stuff they do, like changing interest rates at any time for any reason in any amount. The new bill passed with flying colors in the House, but it failed last time it went to the Senate. Maybe it's a crap piece of legislation, I don't know. Wouldn't surprise me. It's pretty amazing that you can't get a common sense rule on this that protects both consumers and the ability of the card issuers to do legitimate business. What kind of hope does this give you for our collective legislative ability to regulate the financial markets? Take one part ignorance, two parts special interests and one part blind partisanship and blend them together until they're totally fouled up. Sweet.

Pretty happy I didn't race this weekend. The time I spent riding gently, adapting my position was well spent. I got another hour and twenty minutes on the rollers yesterday, working on getting up to 120 rpm without breaking form and gently increasing the workload. There is a strange disparity between leg effort and heart rate. I've got enough time looking at these things to know when things are out of skew, and things are out of skew. Usually, I get to about 80% of LT effort, at which point my heart rate is normally about 15 beats below LTHR and my legs feel very little effort. Now, I get to the same situation, and my legs start to get quite a bit of discomfort but my heart rate is low, and breathing is regular. Getting to LT power causes considerable muscular strain, but pulse stays slightly below what it "should" be and breathing stays regular. Hip flexors and whatever the muscle is that's on the inside of your thighs, toward the top of your legs - they are getting quite a workout these days. Also, the muscles that are on the top of your knees to the inside are getting pretty beat up. Again, the supposition here is that there is more muscular potential available in the new position versus what I had been doing, and that once these muscles are trained, they will provide improvement that had plateau'd previously. Also, the aerodynamic benefits of being lower and having a much lower profile should help me go faster for the same work load. We'll see, right?

Looking forward to Ft Richie this weekend for some good pack riding practice and hopefully a pretty good performance, and then a TT in NJ the weekend after. Gotta keep working on that TT stuff, it's going to be important this year.

1 comment:

Boz said...

Funny you should mention the credit card mess. About a year ago, we started getting these rate raise/limit lowered notices. I said to the wife"hang on, the economy is about to tank". She said I was nuts.