Deck of Cards

On Tuesday I tried out Ross's "Deck of Cards" workout. It looked pretty simple, you take a deck of cards and turn over each card one by one. For a red card, you do burpees, for a black card you do pushups. The goal is to go through the whole deck as fast as possible. Turns out that this was a tough workout. I switched from full burpees to squat thrusts with a jump about a quarter of the way through, and then to just squat thrusts at about the halfway point. I finished in just under half an hour. (I counted afterward, I did 190 pushups and 190 burpees/squat thrusts.) My legs, arms, chest, you name it, have been sore since then. I don't remember the last time a workout has left me so sore. I suppose that's good though...

Last night I rode the mountain bike for about an hour and a half. I didn't have any issues with my saddle sore, and I managed to keep myself from hitting any trees, so it was a nice improvement over my last outing.

As an experiment, I bumped up my tire pressure from 30 to 35 psi yesterday. My impression was that my tires slid a little sooner, but that they were more predictable. I had the same experience when I raced my car. Increasing tire pressure is an interesting exercise in trade-offs. In terms of contact patch, the lower the pressure is, the larger your contact area is, which should translate into more grip. However, at low pressures, the tire carcass is easily deformed which can result in a "squirmy" unpredictable feeling, and therefore worse overall performance. So, what we're looking for is a sweet spot where the tire deforms enough to provide a large contact patch, but is stiff enough to provide predictable behavior. I think I'll stick with this slightly higher pressure for awhile and see how it works.