Hey everyone,
I’ve been very busy lately, but here are a few things that I’ve been doing/working on:
MySQL
I started working with data stored in SQL Server, which was tough at first because the only way (that I know of) to extract data directly is to write queries using T-SQL (Transact-SQL, Microsoft’s variant of SQL). There’s been a lot of back-and-forth communication between me and another IT team across the country, and they mainly communicate with me using T-SQL, so I figured that I would have to learn the language – not just to understand it but to also use it independently in my own work. I started reading SQL Server Bible to get a better idea of the language, but that book involved a lot of database and IT administration, which made it very hard for me to understand. Thus, I decided to take a step back and read a more basic book on databases, but I was torn between reading Modern Database Administration and Learning SQL.
It’s been a stagnant 2 months for me and my technical skills haven’t progressed much (actually I take that back – I did improve quite a bit because I had to use MSAcess quite a bit to manipulate data for reports), though I did reinforce them through the use of VBA and CRAN for my existing projects. Last week, I finally decided to read Learning SQL because it’s not so hard that I’m completely lost reading it, but it’s challenging enough for me to learn something. The book covers the MySQL variant of SQL, which is nice because it’s open source, so I don’t have to pay $8,000 to use it (like I would with SQL Server). The author says that all the SQL code should work in SQL Server and other platforms, so I don’t have to worry about incompatibility.
Fitness
It took me a long time to get back in shape, but I’ve finally gotten around to riding somewhat consistently over the last month. I started out with easy miles just to get used to riding again, and then recently I’ve been doing some long intervals right under lactate threshold (or what I think to be my lactate threshold) at 160-170 bpm. I started doing 2×5 minute intervals and I gradually added on five minutes to each interval over the last month, and yesterday I did 2×20 minute intervals at around 165 bpm:
As you can see, I still have a lot of work to do. A few months ago I was able to generate 230-250 watts of power at the same heart rate – but if you look closely you can see that I can maintain a heart rate above 160 bpm for a longer period of time than I could in March, so it looks like I can do some things that I couldn’t do before, but at the same time, I’ve lost some of my power output. I’m not too concerned about that because I’m planning to start racing again at the start of next season, and I can worry about high-intensity efforts later.
I’ve been reading Joe Friel’s The Cyclist’s Training Bible and in that book he stresses the importance of improving your weaknesses during training. I know that I have a lot of weaknesses, and I’ve decided to work on them one at a time throughout the offseason and next year. Building a base – or aerobic endurance is what I believe to be my most important weakness, so I’ve decided to keep increasing my interval times until I can hold 160 bpm for 60 minutes (2×30 minute intervals), and that will take me about two weeks. As soon as I’m done with that I’ll conduct a lactate threshold test, and then take a recovery week and work out a training schedule from there.