(Because today felt something like a resurgence, because I’m going to England tomorrow and because the lyrics to this post’s music deserve to be read, here they are.)

Today was our last spin session before heading to Worcester. I’d slept slightly better last night and had an achievable amount of must-do tasks today. We’d decided to spin today to take the final opportunity before 5 days of enforced eating and sprout-induced flatulence with very little cycling to take the edge off. (We’ll be staying at my brother’s house, about 5 miles from our parents. The journey involves a quite serious hill.)

The session itself was, as far as I could tell, a repeat of Wednesday’s session but oh, what a difference! Instead of hating it and stopping to swear at my recalcitrant legs, I could keep going – even retaining some reserve for the final push. The jumps and climbs seemed to work, while my bike’s resistance control attenuated well: a quarter-turn increased the resistance by the right amount to move from sitting to running rather than stopping me dead. There were some old spin favourites (such as Underworld’s Always loved a film and Born slippy [of Trainspotting fame]), a snippet of Stairway to heaven* and other staples I can’t yet identify. The rock section (I think the first track is AC:DC’s Thunderstruck) towards the end had me up on the pedals, almost running, and the end section was something to aspire to, rather than Wednesday’s unachievable torture. My knees, thighs and buttocks hardly complained too, while my shoulders didn’t even grumble when running. It wasn’t a classic exercise high, more a coming back up from the depths, but it was noticeable that both Elly and I could joke and laugh on the way home.
*Thank goodness not a cover-version!

So the glitch may be over and I’m looking forward to Hogmanay’s two-hour session.

Oh and Andy, what is the ‘concorde’ music?

The bike-filled studio we know, sweat in and love was transformed yesterday by lots of little people. Some of them were standard-model humans, filled with the usual blood and guts, but others had lots more cotton wool. The latter treated us ‘A Laddie and His Wonderful Lamp’. This puppet show was basically the familiar story of Aladdin and the lamp, but set in Edinburgh! Characters included A Laddie, his younger brother, Abonahzer, Princess Street, Mrs MacRamsbottom, Genie the lamp, and, of course, Stinky the dog.

Just in case you don’t know the story, Abonahzer is a wicked megalomanic with a desire to rule the world. But to do this, he needs the power of a lamp which is safely kept in the dungeons of Edinburgh Castle. We then meet Princes Street and A Laddie, who Abonahzer inveigles to retrieve the lamp.

After Mrs Ramsbottom spends a while lambasting her name, much to the audience’s delight (we never grow up, do we?), A Laddie duly finds the map but refuses to hand it over until Abonahzer helps him climb out of the dungeon. In a fit of pique, Abonahzer slams the door on him. But all is not lost – the lamp has a genie who grants A Laddie some wishes. A Laddie also finds his long-lost younger brother in the dungeons – a search he’d postponed first to chat up Princess Street and then to help Abonahzer.

The genie helps A Laddie and his brother escape from the castle, Abonahzer gets his come-uppance and A Laddie and Princess Street walk off hand in hand.

An uplifting story for Christmas, followed by a parade of characters who hadn’t had staring roles but who needed to be seen. All with an audio-visual accompaniment, songs that demanded audience participation and a whole lot of jokes and fun! I know the audience enjoyed it, especially the wee (human) lad who was bouncing in the wings to the music. You might see (if I can upload the jPhone video) that I was bouncing too. Well done to the puppeteers for staging this show and then putting the Lifescycle studio back to normal for the following morning’s Saturday Surge and Saturday Shake-up.

My spinning history
According to Wikipedia’s article on hybrid storage devices, a significant proportion of wear arises during the spin-up and spin-down processes. The same could be said of hybrid humans such as me. (I’m an Austrian/Australian hybrid.)

Today was my first spinniversary: my first ever spin was on Monday 19th December 2011. I started going to just this session each week. However in April 2012, I moved up to 2 sessions a week (Andy’s Monday and Wednesday evening sessions). Elly joined me for the Wednesday sessions: her first ever spin was on 18th April and she now usually spins on Sunday, Monday and Wednesday evenings. Currently I spin on four contiguous evenings:

• Martin’s ‘Sunday sundowner’
• Andy’s ‘Monday for all – Never give up your dreams’, followed by Fi’s Hatha Yoga session
• Josh and Zara’s ‘Sportif Starter’
• Andy’s ‘Big Wednesday’.

Spinning has become ‘my’ sport, more than swimming ever was*: it’s helped me through the months when my shoulder was in screaming pain, it’s got me fitter, given me enough stamina to take on a 70-mile sportif and has had me enjoying cycling to music in no danger from traffic. It’s even helped me wash more: after an hour in the saddle, sweating out all the nasties, even my history of pongy sulphur-chemistry can’t prevent me from longing for a bath or shower!
*I once represented Worcestershire at breast-stroke but that was way back in my teens. I don’t recall finishing last in that event but I certainly was way behind the winner. Since my left shoulder has become so badly inflexible, front-crawl, backstroke and butterfly are nearly impossible. Even breaststroke is difficult just now.

Pride goes before…
So I hoped that today’s session, which would be Christmas-themed, would be a throbbing climax to the week’s physical exertions and my first year of spinning. However, it didn’t turn out that way. For the past three or four weeks, I’ve not slept a full night: I can’t get to sleep until at least 2 am, then more often than not wake up in the middle of the night, ravenous and drenched with sweat. I do get back to sleep again but am often awake long before 6 am. Also, I’m stressed to high levels by coursework – to be submitted on 11 January, so I’m not looking forward to much of a break – for my current module (I can’t tell you how much I hate Access!) and needing to find time to work on a paper on my research. And to top it all, I’ve been nursing a cold.

… a fall!
So by this evening, I was utterly drained and probably should have stayed at home, relaxing with a good book or some bad sci-fi. But I wanted, oh, how I wanted, tonight to be one of those spin-sessions where it all just flows, where the music and pedalling combine to take me to that higher, excited, exalted place of sober inebriation. This happens about every 6 weeks – when it does, the feeling of joy and achievement just can’t be beaten. Anyway, I guess I had set myself up for disappointment: the session seemed to last forever and the last 20 minutes were just torture. (It didn’t help that I was on a ‘binary bike’ – one where the resistance goes from zero to ‘I can’t even budge the pedals’ in a small fraction of a turn of the control knob. Worse, the resistance wasn’t constant: moving the control to the same place changed the resistance differently each time. Elly was suffering too: she’s working her wotsits off, doing both a practical job (setting up Revenue Scotland) and a policy job (Scotland’s financial strategy) at the same time.

Picking myself back up again
Despite this, I’m going to continue spinning: I’m sure this was just a temporary glitch. The Lifescycle folk, both instructors and spinners, are encouraging and caring and make sport fun. There’s a place for me there, which I’ve never felt before about any sort of sport or exercise, in the same room as triathletes and national-standard cyclists. One of these days I’ll be able to dance on the pedals as fast as the other spinners and spinnerettes. And after all, everyone’s sweat is equally wet and well-earned. Even if I never raise my average road-speed above 15 mph, spinning will help me maintain this level and achieve greater distances with heavier loads, and I’m still intending to mark my retirement by cycling to India. Who’s coming with me?

The marks for this term’s first coursework in my information systems engineering module were released yesterday. The headline is I scored 91%. The ugly details are:

• requirements
• my submission
• my mark breakdown
• lecturer’s overall comments
• my marks so far (86% of available marks).

I’m amused by my mismanagment of expectations. I’d enquired when the marks would be released and was told that release was imminent. The lecturer also said ‘I can say, Bruce, that yours was of exceptionally high quality and was the best in class….(as they say at Crufts).’ So I started fantacising about receiving a D5 (95 to 100%) and was then momentarily disappointed to receive a slightly lower mark.

In truth, I’m not happy with some of my submission and so expected a lower mark: the ‘software development methods’ section, in particular, is thin. (I believe that the ‘history’ paragraphs wouldn’t be in a real proposal but were included in the requirements to test our understanding of agile software development.)

to teach your children!

Spinning tonight
Every now and then, a spinning session is leaves me feeling happy – an exercise high that lasts. It helps when I arrive in plenty of time, so I’m not rushing to set up the bike and can do loosen my legs before the proper warm-up. It also helps to have had a constructive day before the session. This morning I did a load of long-overdue filing, the end-of-week alternative-location TimeMachine backup of our working macs, wrapped and boxed a lot of things to send to Worcester and wrote up some notes from the Centre for Social Informatics get-together on Friday. And much as I hate to admit it, getting a lift to spinning means I’m not panicked from slaloming around the low-lying manhole-covers that litter Ferry Road.

Tonight was another of Martin’s ‘Sunday Sundowners’, with the music changed to include some requests. The class has grown a bit – there were 6 folk the first time we went but it’s grown to 10 tonight.

I appreciate the pattern of 3- to 5- minute workpieces interspersed with 30 to 60 seconds of recovery. (I prefer the Ski Sunday theme for the recovery periods.) The workpieces start with a relatively challenging baseline for 60 seconds or so, before increasing the intensity (by increasing cadence, resistance or getting into a more challenging stance – sometimes all three). Then the intensity might get harder, or go back to baseline, before another increased-intensity minute.

Because I know that in a recovery period is never more than 5 minutes away, I can put more into each workpiece. Also, I enjoyed a lot of tonight’s music – the right tempos to pound the pedals without fearing falling over when running.

The only glitch tonight was due to me misinterpreting Martin’s comment that there were just two tracks to go – I thought both of those would be workpieces rather than being one workpiece followed by a warm-down, so I didn’t quite put everything into the first of these two. Ah well, it meant I was capable of speech not long after we finished!

No prizes for guessing how I know about this:

A Consultation on Tax Management

This is a consultation document seeking views on the structure and powers for Revenue Scotland, ensuring tax compliance, tackling tax avoidance, resolving tax disputes, treatment of taxpayer information and accelerated tax changes.

While Revenue Scotland has only two taxes to collect (Scottish equivalents of UK Stamp Duty Land Tax and Landfill Tax) and won’t start collecting these for a while yet*, it presumably would collect all taxes** in an independent Scotland.

You have probably missed the associated consultation on Land and Buildings Transaction Tax but you still have time to comment on the Scottish Landfill Tax.

You have been warned advised!

*mostly because Revenue Scotland didn’t even exist until after the 2012 Scotland Act
**apart from VAT, of course – that’s collected by all the traders in the chains that get products and services to you. (HMRC is responsible for compliance, enforcement, appeals and so on. I presume that Revenue Scotland would take over these duties in an independent Scotland.)

I’d failed to do anything wheeled since Monday night’s spinning session (I don’t count cycling to and from Cramond or to and from Napier – both journeys are under 5 miles, especially the trip to Napier), I was happy to try the Sunday Sundowner spinning session, led by the one and only Martino. Elly’s exercise quotient for this week had also been severely reduced by work-stress – she’s not been home before 8pm and a couple of times wasn’t home until well after 10pm.

So after a fairly lazy day (lunch at Nando’s – I even wimped out on the extra hot sauce – and a movie*) we were ready to face the challenges Mr R might throw at us. I don’t know whether this evening was typical of Martin’s sessions but I echo Elly’s comment that it was fun, with really clear instruction. Martin’s voice came through very well, with much more than a hint of fun and encouragement. He dealt even very well with an involuntary heckle from my digestive system.

There wasn’t a scenario or theme holding the session together but this absence wasn’t a bad thing. Instead, each track was a self-contained unit of work: a climb, a time-trial, a sprint or similar. All of these were spilt into relatively long sub-units. So a track might be 60 seconds at fast cadence, then 60 to 120 seconds of faster cadence or running (or both!), followed by either an similar interval back at the original work-load or a higher work-load, just to push us that little harder.

The intervals felt longer than I’m used to and I’m not good a sustaining high cadences, so, in retrospect, working on these aspects was very welcome. (At the time, I just gritted my teeth and swore silently at my legs to stop moaning: my right knee and thigh grumbled noticeably during the session, so I wasn’t able to push as hard as I’d have liked.) Ah well, next time! Overall, it was fun – good craic, a very small class (only 8 of us – a great shame for those who missed out) and so lots of personal encouragement. Top marks to Martin for including the Stranglers’ exquisite cover of Walk on by – play it loud!

And so I have to echo Arnie. This might mean spinning 4 evenings in a row each week until I’m ready for the Tour o’ the borders – can my gear and our washing machine take it? And here’s a thought for a post TotB challenge: to do and blog about every spin session Lifescycle offers at least once. Not quite sure about doing them all in the same week: 17·25 hours of sweaty fun!

*Silver Linings Playbook: a romantic comedy(?) set around mental illness – it was reminiscent of things I’d sooner not go into here. Let’s just say that the script and direction felt quite close to the knuckle.

Great to see folks in St Andrews yesterday. I chose to cycle there but stuffed up a few times:

• In Inverkeithing, I saw a sign for Kirkcaldy. It turned out this would have taken me onto the M90.
• I turned too soon in Kirkcaldy.
• Seeing a sign for St Andrews, I took the A915, instead of continuing onto the A92, and hence groaned my way over Largo Law. Ah well, it was good for hill-training. I don’t think I’ll ever be Knave of the Mountains, let alone King.

jPhone ran out of juice at Lathockar, thus missing the final 7·8 miles. Cyclemeter recorded 42·24 miles in 3 hours 31 minutes (average speed 11·97 mph). I started at 10am and arrived just after 2:30. Cyclemeter recorded 28 minutes’ stopped time, so the final 7·8 miles must have taken just over 30 minutes.

Cyclemeter recorded my flit to Leuchars. Thanks to Jane Ann for warning about the bad surface. I don’t like unlit cyclepaths at the best of times, so I used the road.

‘Programming’ coursework for the current module is constructing a ‘prototype application’ in MS Abcess. Unless I start mucking around in VBA, there will be no real programming at all. Disappointed.