Sometimes

Sometimes nothing happens and all of a sudden everything is entirely different, even if still completely the same. And sometimes it's just the opposite. "Quando urubu está com azar, atola até em laje". Living to fight another day.

And kudos to whoever can decipher the above :)

There's blood...

...but there are also endorphines!

I crashed again, this time at yesterday's Bento Goncalves race. As I plunged too fast in a sharp curve, my rear wheel skidded and I flew over, hitting both knees and elbow on my way down. The right kneecap took the worst damage, enough to discourage me from continuing the race. All bandaged up, I drove back immediately after.

Still, it wasn't enough to shatter the good feelings I had developed over the past few days. Sports-wise, of course, but also academically - I learned of my acceptance to MAQC'08 in Montreal, and finally managed to obtain a 100%-exact trace formula for the graph system I was studying since last year - which even got me a congratulatory phone call from my advisor in Spain :) . And to top the endorphines stock, I went out for some dancing on Friday night and had as much fun as I hadn't had in a long time.

Finally, mostly silently, yesterday I began a countdown. Some 179 days left if everything goes as planned. Here's to that!

Sunday in Hell, Monday on Campus

O segundo domingo de abril é reservado, tradicionalmente, à clássica Paris-Roubaix, prova no norte da França tida como a mais dura do circuito de corridas de um dia. Nos seus mais de 260km, os corredores enfrentam quase 50 km de estradas de paralelepípedos medievais, além das baixas temperaturas, vento e chuva associados à primavera no norte do continente europeu - daí seu apelido, "Inferno do Norte"

Nos pagos do Sul, neste domingo foi disputado o Troféu 122 anos de Taquara, válido como a 7a etapa da Copa União de Ciclismo. Passei o sábado de molho devido à uma gripe que me atacava desde sexta-feira e apropriadamente, fazendo jus ao evento europeu, a noite anterior à corrida trouxe uma frente fria e chuva recorde em todo o estado; as temperaturas cairam, e com o raiar do dia, quando nos dirigíamos para Taquara, muitas ruas encontravam-se embaixo d'água. Poucas horas antes da largada, dois colegas da minha equipe me telefonaram para avisar que não iriam correr, ambos acanhados pela intempérie. O prognóstico - corrida na chuva, gripado, e com a equipe desfalcada - me deixava muito entusiasmado: adversidades são poderosos fatores motivacionais.

Fiquei surpreso com o número de presentes na largada, incluindo equipes de Caxias, Vacaria, Novo Hamburgo, Porto Alegre, estimo quase 20 ciclistas na largada principal (naturalmente muito menos que os 80-100 de uma prova grande, mas dentro da média das últimas edições da Copa União, que foram realizadas com condições climáticas muito melhores). O circuito, o mesmo onde eu havia conquistado a vitória na Copa União do ano passado, estava novamente encharcado e escorregadio. Largamos, e em menos de 5 voltas ditando um ritmo forte, já havia me distanciado do pelotão junto com Roberto "Betão" Rodrigues (Acivas/Beto's Bike) e Rui Barbosa (Startec/DTools). Trabalhamos em conjunto para ampliar a nossa vantagem, e inclusive colocamos uma volta de vantagem sobre os demais adversários. Tentei atacar na penúltima volta, mas entrando em alta velocidade numa curva, perdi a traseira ao passar por cima de uma faixa de segurança e quase fui ao chão, tendo de reduzir bastante a velocidade para não cair - o que possibilitou que os outros dois me alcançassem. Abri mão da disputa do sprint depois que julguei muito perigoso arriscar tudo na última curva (onde o Betão quase derrubou o Rui ao ultrapassá-lo por dentro), e fiquei com o 3o lugar, ainda assim muito satisfeito com o meu desempenho. Terminei a prova ensopado, coberto de sujeira, numa imagem que não deixava nada à dever para a famosa fotografia de Paris-Roubaix. Um verdadeiro domingo no inferno :) .

Me sequei como pude para a viagem de volta, comemos um sanduíche e tomamos um chocolate quente num posto de gasolina, e partimos de volta para casa, onde cheguei quase no meio da tarde, encarangado de frio. Deliciei-me com um banho quente e um enorme prato de feijoada, já com roupas secas. Depois de uma boa ciesta, encontrei-me com alguns amigos para comemorarmos a premiação (o 3o lugar, além do bonito troféu, ainda rendeu algum dinheiro...) com uma tradicional torre de Pale Ale do Mulligan.

E hoje, de volta à rotina acadêmica, com novas bibliotecas e um novo compilador, consegui implementar a simulação do meu grafo com precisão quádrupla, permitindo esclarecer a dúvida sobre a qualidade dos dados anteriores. Infelizmente, os novos gráficos não mostram a diferença de órbitas que haviamos detectado antes; terei de procurá-las em algum novo sistema para não perder o "resultado inédito" que pretendia apresentar. Mais diversão pela frente...

Builds

The training phase following base, where the development of endurance forms the core of the training sessions, is usually called "the build period". In this stage, one incorporates strength and speed workouts and increases the intensity of the efforts, building fitness to a peak. It is, by far, the part of the season I enjoy the most. Following my wins in the 500 Miles and Parobe, I'm quite motivated to the next round of fall races: Taquara - a race I won last year - tomorrow, Bento Gonçalves the following week, and "Volta de Gravatai", a national calendar race, at the end of the month.

A build period could also be defined for my master's work. Following one year of base - which one could define, academically, as the period when I took most of the courses and readings - I'm working actively on my master thesis, building up to what I expect will reach a peak come winter (for us, that'd be somewhere in June or July). That is, if I can overcome the current crop of uncertainties which surround my graphs: while building data for my thesis, I decided to run some consistency checks on my previous data, and some of it failed. So I went back to Maple and recreated all the equations from scratch - a good opportunity to review the basics - and got a new result, on which I later applied a Fourier transform. All is well, and the resulting dataset was pretty much identical to what I had obtained half a year ago - minor differences of around 10^-20 - less than a billionth of a billionth. Seems irrelevant, except the outcome of the new transform was entirely different from what I had found earlier. Chaos is defined as the hypersensitivity to initial conditions - and from this definition, my system's classification as chaotic is quite appropriate. I am now fighting Fortran's numerical methods to obtain a higher precision dataset, on which I can guarantee which result is indeed 'correct' - and then write it up.

In other news: submitted a paper to a conference in Montreal, Canada; pending approval, I'll be off for a week in early June. Applied to a Ph.D. position in München, and am now waiting for my references to write them good recommendation letters and, hopefully, I can start somewhere in November. And before that, together with Kàzic and perhaps my other cycling buddies, I intend to ride from the Atlantic to the Pacific - right now we're still researching the best routes, equipment necessary, and all that goes along with such an endeavour. Putting it all together means that there will be no place for boredom in the last few months on this side of the pond :)

Of music, cycling and physics

Following my trip to Uruguay, I took an easy training week to allow the body to heal from the race efforts - and wounds :(. With the extra time, I worked a little more on my dissertation, and prepared an abstract for the "Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Chaos" conference. This will take place in Montreal in early June, and I hope to be there for a chance of presenting my work and getting some feedback before my defense. I also made first contact with a group in München which has an open Ph.D. position I intend to apply. The position is still open and at least on paper I fulfill the requirements. Now I have to wait for recommendation letters, possible interviews, and hope for the best :) .

This week, I started working on some new calculations for some old graphs - some consistency tests detected minor flaws, which I intend to correct before putting them down on paper for my diss. Also got back to the regular training regimen, with the first Build week of the season. Some intervals and speed work - a nice change from the endurace-focused base weeks of the previous months. Can't wait to get some more racing :)
Edit: I forgot to add (how modest!): last weekend I won another race, a stage from "Circuito Vale dos Sinos de Ciclismo", which took place in Parobe. The team performed flawlessly, and besides my victory, we also managed a 3rd and a 5th spot - filling the podium with our orange jerseys :)

To top it off, I also went to two concerts this week. On Tuesday, OSPA played the Polovetsian Dances, from Borodin, and Tchaikovsky's 5th Symphony, to a full house. Yesterday, courtesy of the German Consulate, we heard the Tübinger Kammerorchester - with their wonderful solist, Julia Galic. Really, really good. Music has been an integral part of my activities - be it listening to loud rock (or piano concerts!) on the car while driving, or some Bossa Nova on my headphones while reading articles or working on my diss - it keeps the brain cells happy, it seems - couple that with chocolate and caffeine, and voilà!