Time passes, again. And lo, it is getting warmer and lighter. This is a Good Thing.

With some further ado:

I. I got sick after the Chippenham hilly, as did half the people in the office. Although it didn't feel too bad and I didn't end up off the bike for too many days, I ended up with a lingering cough that I've still got the remnants of. Update: I think it's gone.

II. The first Rudy Project didn't quite go according to plan, but it wasn't bad. I finished 3rd with 58'31 behind Matt Bottrill (57'03) and Colin Robertson (58'18).

Although I felt OK, my wattage was well down on the Chippenham hilly, otherwise a sub-58min ride may have been on the cards. I wasn't going to get near Bottrill though, but I knew that. Last year in the national 25 he put nearly 5min into me (he was 4th, I was 43rd), so I have closed the gap a bit.

III. I seem to have recovered most of my fitness since then, so I'm looking forward to next week's Rudy Project 2. The best I can hope for there is 4th, as Hutch and Wouter Sybrandy are doing it, along with Bottrill, Robertson and quite a few of the a3crg team, who are pretty handy. It's 58km so I'll be doing really well if I can keep Hutch at 5min, Sybrandy at 3min and Bottrill at 2min.

IV. Easter didn't involve a large number of miles this year. Even so, I still did my biggest week in terms of TSS (training stress) of the season, without going past 3hrs in a single ride.

V. The power meter tells you quite accurately how many calories you burn. Watts x time (sec)/1000 = ~kcal burned, because the conversion factor between watts and cals roughly cancels the efficiency our body has in converting food energy to power on the bike. Nifty innit.

VI. Last week I burned 10,700 cals on the bike, which when you add that to 2500/day for getting to work and back and generally existing, it means I need to eat 4000 cals/day. Family and close associates can attest to the fact that I do eat this, most of the time. It's about 5kg of potatoes a day, which is why I need chocolate in copious quantities.

VII. Fabian Cancellara supposedly averaged 285W (normalised, I dunno, but it would have been a lot higher) to win the Tour of Flanders. That doesn't sound like much, especially as he's 1.86m tall and 80kg. But that's because a lot of it was spent noodling around in the bunch. But you can be sure that in the last half hour, after dropping Tom Boonen on the Muur, he was at over 400 watts hurtling towards Ninove at 60km/h. Milan San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Tour of Flanders, World and Olympic TT champ, Tour yellow jersey - he's a class bike rider.