Weeknotes 25-11/12/13/14

Well, that's it. Tomorrow I'm starting to work again after a little over a year of being on sabbatical. Let's just say that I am more than ready to be retired as soon as possible.

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I haven't kept up with Weeknotes this last month. So here are some of the highlights:

• Spring has sprung ☀️
  
• We bought a few plants at the Königliche Gartenakademie and repotted them, together with what was left of our two coffee plants, which will hopefully survive. This might be the year where we'll have a somewhat green balcony.
  
• In preparation for having a job (ugh), I started going to bed early, getting up at six in the morning, and sitting on the bike at seven for getting the exercise in early in the morning. After work would be too late for the body to recover before going to sleep, and with a training session on almost every day of the week it would be hard to have any social life.
  
• Went to the Museum of European Cultures with V. I wanted to see their exhibition about Sámi heritage. It was wildly underwhelming, a fairly small room with items from their Sámi collection, and a slightly haphazard way of dealing with how these items were acquired without ever using the word colonialism.
  
• This last Friday, on my last weekday on sabbatical, I went out with L for the first proper outdoor ride of the year. We headed to the Döberitzer Heide, just west of Berlin, which is a former military training area, nowadays a nature reserve. The core zone in the middle is fenced off and hosting animals such as bison, wild horses, and deer, intended to live largely unaffected by humans, we didn't see any of the animals though. There's a 22km round trip on a sandy road, sand as deep as 10cm, making it hard work to cycle around it.
  
• This outdoor ride was also the first one after getting power meter pedals fitted on the Surly LHT.
  
• Talking about bikes, the new Surly Karate Monkey is happening! Still a bit unclear when exactly, sometimes in May, it might be tight for the Trans Jura ride in early June.
  
• Talking about the Trans Jura, we have booked a two-week vacation in Switzerland, staying in Biel/Bienne. So far it is one of the top contenders of the cities we might want to move to in Switzerland. Staying there for two weeks, and me cycling along the Jura mountain range, just above Biel, will give us a good idea if that could be a city for us.
  

Exercise

Week 11:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 576 TSS, 11 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (4x15mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with a focus on climb pacing (2051m elevation gain over three climbs)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• 43km utility cycling
  

Week 12:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 346 TSS, 7 hours):
  
  • 3x endurance rides
    
  • 1x FTP ramp test
    
  • 1x long ride with Tempo zone climbs (1485 metres elevation gain)
    
• 16km utility cycling
  

Week 13:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 520 TSS, 11 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (30x30 x 8 x 4 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 86/97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x10mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with focus on climb pacing (1529m elevation gain over two climbs)
    
  • 3x endurance rides
    
• 36km utility cycling
  

Week 14:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 613 TSS, 11.5 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x12mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride, first outdoor ride, blowing well past the planned TSS
    
• 47km utility cycling

Weeknotes 25-10

Week 10! Almost a fifth of this year already gone. The days are getting noticeably longer.

It has been unseasonably warm and sunny, in the latter part of the week between 17 and 18ºC. In the first week of March!

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Nothing like the looming deadline for the end of my sabbatical to finally get me to start looking at the photos from last summer's cycling tour to the Nordkapp. I managed to do a first selection of about half of the trip. But I'll need to considerably whittle that selection down even further to not end up with the size of a book that could put the Encyclopaedia Britannica to shame.

It's been a great feeling to go through those photos again, remembering small anecdotes, marvelling at the majestic Norwegian landscape, and feeling a bit of pride for having cycled all the way to the northern tip of this continent, bit by bit.

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I've tried to rationalise another bike for a while now. The good weather and issues fitting enough bags on my rebuilt Long Haul Trucker (which are solvable, but where's the fun in that) got me to cycle across the city to a shop specialising in custom bike builds, and they are a Surly dealer.
In my imagination I'd have a flat-bar adventure gravel bike with a suspension corrected fork to have the option to transform it into a hardtail mountain bike in a pinch. Lucky for me, Surly has me covered with their Karate Monkey. Or for a few hundred euros more, maybe a Sour Pasta Party, wouldn't it be nice to have a frame made in Dresden.
Anyways, I've talked through the plans with the bike shop owner (1x12, 29er wheels, chunky yet fast-rolling tires), did some gear calculations (that 10-52 cassette paired with either a 34 or 36 tooth chainring), got a ballpark figure (ouch), but am still waiting for the detailed offer.

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I haven't started to plan June's bikepacking event yet, will have to finally get on that next week. I'll probably give Ride with GPS another try to map out sleeping and refuelling opportunities along the route.

Really hoping not to have to plan out where I'm staying each night.

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I've been working on climb pacing in training these last few weeks, and yesterday rode a 73 kilometres route with 2000 metres of climbing across three climbs. I'd slap another 25 kilometres on top of that and then it looks fairly similar to what I'll be facing at the bikepacking event in June. Now I just need to be able to do this four days in a row. That's what the next two months of training will be about.

That route took me four hours on the trainer, and those are not exactly the funnest four hours to ride something like that, but what can you do when you live in a flat area like Berlin where they call a twenty metre bump a hill and a fifty metre bump a Berg.

I used to be a very impulsive climber, burning all my matches and beyond in the first few hundred metres only to barely crest huffing and puffing. I quickly learned that that's not the way to do it when I rode out of Bergen last summer towards Trondheim on that relentless hilly stretch of the EuroVelo 1. I've slowly been chipping away at the proper way of climbing since then thanks to virtual cycling imitating the elevation profile of mountainous areas. I've even come to enjoy the slow grind up a mountain, dialing in the breathing together with just the right gearing to keep the legs from having to put too much torque on the pedals. But it's much more fun in real life, up a deserted old mountain road somewhere in Norway hearing birds chirping, cheering you up the mountain, getting rewarded with grandiose vistas across the fjords.

Exercise

• Cycling training sessions (total of 520 TSS, 10½ hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (30x30 x 8 x 4 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x12mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with a focus on climb pacing (2024m elevation gain with a half-hour, a one-hour, and a bit-more-than-an-hour climb)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• 28km utility cycling

Weeknotes 25-09

I signed the contract with Company B this week!

I didn't feel good about the interview with Company A last week, however, they came through on Monday with news that I made it to the final round, a pairing interview with the lead engineer.
On the same day I received the contract from Company B.

I talked the situation through with V, and along the way discovered that she and another friend of mine have worked with that lead engineer, and only had great things to report. After sleeping on it, I decided to go with Company B, given I prefer their domain and product area. At a different time of my career I would have jumped on Company A to finally have a go at Extreme Programming, maybe one day in the future again.

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The countdown for the last stretch of my sabbatical has started with just over one month to go.

My start date is April 7th, and with that I will have had a full year (plus change) of not working. What a privilege.

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TrainingPeaks Virtual has recently introduced heart rate based structured workouts, I believe as one of the first virtual cycling platforms. I tried it out for an hour-long recovery ride this week. The theory is to stay below aerobic threshold, the point where blood concentration of lactate start to rise above resting levels. Now, I don't have any lab-grade test results, but the training platform I use estimates my lactate threshold (LTHR) to be at 168 beats per minute, that's the level at which lactate levels cannot be cleared anymore at the same level of effort. There's a crude formula that states that the aerobic threshold (AeT) is about 30 beats below LTHR, so 138 beats per minute.

It was interesting to feel how the platform constantly kept adjusting the trainer resistance to keep the heart rate within a range of about five beats above and below the target value.

It'll be interesting to see how the power targets will slowly slowly decline over a longer ride, putting a number on the effect of cardiac drift. That's the phenomenon where the heart rate slowly creeps up over longer periods of time even though the effort stays constant, which is due to increased internal and ambient temperatures and dehydration. The power curve should slowly go down when the heart rate stays constant.

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Next week I will finally have to start planning my gravel bikepacking event. The half year from signing up has now quickly turned into three months until the event starts!

I wanted to not plan too much, ride until I'm too tired to continue, and then find a place to sleep that night. However, I realised that the event is over whit weekend. I'm not sure if that could mean that camp grounds are going to be too busy to just rock up in the evening. I'll also have to buy and carry more food that weekend, as shops will not only be closed on Sunday, but Monday too. Although, I have this vague goal of finishing the event in four days putting my planned finish on the Sunday, let's see if I could really ride 100km each day with elevation gains between 2500-3200m a day.

Exercise

• Cycling training sessions (total of 460 TSS, 9 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 1x Over Under session (3x12mins at 86/97/88% FTP)
    
  • 1x Steady State Push session (3x10mins at 88% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with Tempo zone climbs (1499m elevation gain)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• no utility cycling

Weeknotes 25-07/08

I missed last week, these Weeknotes will cover the last two weeks.

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Right on time, like every year in February, the temperatures drop and the clouds disperse, at least for a few weeks. It's been great peeking at the sun again after what felt like a long wade through the bog that is the grey cloud cover over Berlin.

This year, it came with an almost windless high pressure area. Now, Berlin is getting bad air quality from time to time, and without fail Germany's East loves to pin it on the Polish for burning coal. This time though, it was self-inflicted, traffic and industrial pollution that wasn't moved elsewhere with the missing wind. I've had a constant feeling like a sore throat for close to two weeks because of the pollution. But hey, the incredible politicians in this city don't want to change anything to minimise motorised traffic, it's all fine they say.

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The Bundestagswahl, the German general elections, were today. Looking at the projections, every fifth German has voted for the extreme far right (I applaud the TAZ newspaper, who consistently colours them brown despite their official colour being a light blue), and almost every third German voted for the conservative party which has taken on more and more of the far right's rhetoric. That's at least 50% of the German population who actively voted for xenophobic politics. I say at least because pretty much every other major party has taken on the topic of migration to a certain extent. Migration and integration have always been a proxy discussion for xenophobia and racism.

I'm an immigrant in this country. Sure, I'm one of the good immigrants if you'd ask them. And by that, they mean that I'm white, I speak the language, and I'm not poor. Although at the moment, and for the past eleven month I was unemployed, albeit by choice.

It's not like we asked for another reason to move away from Germany for good, but we got another one anyway. It's not like the country we're planning to move to is any less xenophobic. If we manage to move to a bilingual city in Switzerland, we've got my red passport and V's French language skills going for us. That's at least one more than what we have here.

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And this is the Weeknotes' segment on the current job search.

Company A, who I've applied to before Christmas last year (with an internal referral, mind you), has been ghosting me after the first call. I followed up with them a week after that first call, crickets, then again a few days later with the note that I'm in the final stretches of another interview process, again, crickets. All the while my friend has been escalating this internally, yet again. Another week passed, and I finally got a message with a request to interview straight with a director, but no other information, nothing on what the interview is about, and of course, still no feedback on the initial call. Turns out the interview wasn't only with the director, but also with one of the lead engineers of that division. It wasn't my best interview performance, but I got to know a bit more on what they're working on, and it doesn't sound like it's up my alley. You win some, you loose some. Although, who knows when I'll hear back from them.

With Company B, on the other hand, I had a technical interview with two engineers and an engineering manager. I had to do write a small wiki application beforehand, I decided to go barebones, basic HTML forms with a few progressive enhancements. It was so barebones HTML that it was fully functional in lynx, and of course it worked with screen readers too. The interview itself was good, the typical questions on scaling, team enablement. What initially struck me as odd was when they asked me if and how much I have used AI in working on that web application. I might have gone a tad bit far into my anti-AI rant before checking if they're using AI on a day-to-day basis, oopsie. But on the other hand, how do you assess somebody's technical skills nowadays? I'm assuming if a company cares enough about people's ability to solve problems by themselves, they need to do a pairing session as part of the interview process.

Their recruiter, without fail, called me every Friday afternoon to keep me up to date on the process. I got good feedback from the technical interview and he would be discussing the last details with the hiring manager early the following week.
I got one more call with the hiring manager that week, he wanted to make sure that both our expectations align. And on the following Friday, like clockwork, I got another call from the recruiter with a verbal offer.

I'm assuming I'll bore you another week or two until the ink has dried on a contract, but it looks like we're nearing the end of this job search, phew. And I am beyond glad that I won't have to open LinkedIn again for a long time, pheeeew.

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Exercise was tough. I started learning a lot about heart rate variability, right as mine started dropping in the third consecutive week of overloading. I've mopped up every blog post and interview with Marco Altini that I could find (even though it's hosted on Substack, ugh). I moved workouts around in the week and brought a rest day forward to earlier in the week.

As a result, I started adjusting the weekly training volume down. This was week three in the second base cycle, in other words, the second highest weekly training volume of the whole year. All three weeks in the first build cycle (starting in a month from now) will be that same volume, there's no way I can sustain three weeks of this.
I have to remind myself that this is the first time I'm doing such a structured yearly plan, and without having done this, I don't have any experience which volume is the right amount.

The second week was the long-awaited recovery week. My heart rate variability started to recover, although due to the job search stress, less than I hoped.
Oh, and the obligatory FTP test during the recovery week. I've improved my FTP from 280 to 290 watts during these last four weeks of training. I'm chuffed with that.

Exercise

Week 7:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 521 TSS, 9 hours):
  
  • 1x VO2max session (60x60 x 6 x 3 blocks)
    
  • 2x threshold sessions (7x4mins at 104% FTP, 3x10mins at 99% FTP)
    
  • 1x long ride with Tempo zone climbs (1466 metres elevation gain)
    
  • 2x endurance rides
    
• no utility cycling
  

Week 8:

• Cycling training sessions (total of 344 TSS, 8 hours):
  
  • 4x endurance rides
    
  • 1x FTP ramp test
    
• no utility cycling
  
• 1x long walk