Well, not quite, and apologies for the computer science pun. Now I’ve written it down I can’t bring myself to delete it even though it’s not funny and nobody will understand it anyway.

What I’m talking about is my getting away from the rolling road for a while into the real world on a nice, flattish road in calm weather conditions without a yawning chasm for a camber. Conditions almost as one might have in a race.

But more importantly, I got to chase some people! It wasn’t a race…. and the people I was chasing were on foot…. and we were going to the pub… but bear with me.

It was the first time I’ve tried to catch anyone up over a relatively long distance. The people I was chasing were about 500m away and moving at going-to-the-pub speed (that’s fast, this was Glasgow.) Previously, I’ve just tried to go as fast as I can for as long as I can. On Tuesday, I learned something about catching people up – about pacing – that should have been obvious from the start. I learned about how much effort to put into acceleration vs maintaining momentum. I learned why people who do distance races seriously have pacemakers. It’s not just about maintaining a constant speed, it’s also about pacing acceleration. Real roads are different from the rolling one for several reasons, but one is related to the amount of torque the wheels can generate and the diminishing returns from the effort put in. It helped me understand more about how to use different pushing techniques.

I’m not sure that makes sense, but it has certainly inspired me to make some changes to my training regime. I’ll explain the changes later.

In case you’re worried, I did eventually catch the people up. But it turned out that the pub wasn’t wheelchair accessible, so it was all a bit of a waste of time. Other than the valuable lesson learned, of course.