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 :)