Lies, damned lies and statistics

I always knew that my Garmin readout from the 24 heures velo was going to be a little strange, tracking the same squiggle for a whole day. My Forerunner only has 10 hours of battery life and I wasn't convinced that charging it during the race would work, but it did. Stupidly I forgot to start it at the beginning of the race but the readout below still offers intresting numbers. My personal favourite is the total of 26,907 calories burned. It makes me feel much better about stuffing my face every time we came back to the pits and trust me, that was often. Second favourite has got to be the climbing, 31,098ft of ascent, astonishing even for someone who cycled it. Good news comes in the form of my average heart rate 103bpm, very low I thought. From the graph below you can see how it varied. The shape is a classic bathtub curve. When I was a student of engineering this kind of graph would be used to demonstrate the life of light bulbs and the like -- MTBF, Mean Time Between Failure. I think this is also true of cyclists, you either blow up early and die or hang on in there but eventually wear out and die. My burn out was self-inflicted as I blasted a lap at the end to celebrate. I should imagine the shape of my fellow riders' heart rate curves would be more of a chaise longue profile, much more civilised.

Elsewhere Andrew has tracked down this great video at 6.45 there is a team of three Transitions riders speeding along in close formation. I think I need to take another look at my riding position.