Fail tale

For your entertainment, here’s the tale of my epic fail while travelling to the 2012 Alpe d’Huez Triathlon. The plan was simple: on Monday morning get the Eurostar to Paris, then the TGV to Grenoble, pick up a hire car and drive to Alpe d’Huez, spend a day eating baguettes and then the next day doing the race, then back to the UK on the Thursday. Previous experience told me that taking a bike on the Eurostar is difficult because you have to check it in specially and the last time I tried this the staff at the bike check in were so dilatory that I almost missed the train. I therefore borrowed a hard bike case from the club, packed my new Bianchi into it, everything else in a rucksack and headed off.

All went well until I got to King’s Cross, where I noticed that one of the wheels on the bike case had broken. This meant that instead of rolling along it was just scraping on the floor. Since the whole thing weighed almost 25kg there was no way I could carry it, so I just had to drag it through the miles of passages that take you to the Eurostar terminal. There were trolleys at the terminal, though, so when I'd got one of them things were easy and the trip to the Gare du Nord was pleasant and largely incident free. So far so good.

Once there, however, an obstacle presented itself: I had to get to the Gare de Lyon with my giant heavy one-wheeled bike case, and I only had 50 minutes to do it. It’s just a few km and an easy journey on the Metro, but not with a giant heavy box that you have to drag along the floor. No way am I going on the Metro with that, thought I, I’ll just get a taxi. This proved to be an error. To start with, the taxi drivers simply refused to take me because the case was too big. I’m not sure why it was too big, it goes quite easily in the average estate car, but I spent about 10 minutes enjoying a repertoire of shrugs, face-pulling and in some cases downright rudeness. Eventually I found a taxi driver who would take me, loaded up his cab and off we went, straight into complete gridlock. The driver seemed more concerned with changing lanes as often as humanly possible than with getting me to the station. I anxiously watched the time and tried to hurry things along but Monsieur le Taxi was not to be rushed. The taxi rank at the Gare de Lyon was chaos and he spent about 5 minutes trying to find a space, and when he did he got out and started shouting at another driver who’d cut him up, rather than taking the money I needed to give him so that I could get on with things. 7 minutes left.

Dragging the Box of Doom behind me I ran into the station. Found the departure board. There it is: platform 21. Onto the station concourse I ran. I looked for platform 21, but something was wrong... all the platforms had letters, not numbers. I looked back at the departure board: yes, platform 21 for the TGV to Grenoble, but all the other trains had letters, not numbers. I looked around and eventually saw a sign to platforms 5-23, and off I ran, dragging my box and scattering dogs, women and small children in my wake. 5 minutes.

I made my way down the corridor indicated by the sign, heart rate hitting the 180s, and round the corner into… the ticket hall. Which is big, full of people in queues and has no train platforms. Not even any with letters. Sweat dripping into my eyes I looked around and eventually found another sign directing me ne the other side of the ticket hall, so off I ran again, the juggernaut of desolation that was the bike box scraping along the stone floor behind me, crashing through the queues, pushing pregnant women aside and kicking nuns, small children and kittens out of the way. 4 minutes.

Past the sign, and out into another station concourse, with numbers instead of letters this time. There is platform 21 in front of me. I put the hammer down and with 3 minutes to go I was on the platform. The train was there, and the doors were open. I could see the finish line and as I launched my final sprint I could hear a choir launching into the Halleluja Chorus. Confetti cannons were firing, cheerleaders were waving their pompoms and the announcer was going crazy… until SNCF woman, 5’4” in her spike heels and featuring a particularly chic coiffure stepped out between me and the promised land.

“Votre billet monsieur”.

Christ, where’s my ticket? In my rucksack. I shrugged it off, dived into the top pocket, grabbed the ticket and gave it to her. She took a loooong, slow look at it. “Ce n’est pas correct, m’sieur”. Oh *****, I’ve given her the return half. Back into the rucksack to get the other part of the ticket. She slowly took it from me and slowly, unsmilingly, carefully examined it… until the train doors sniiiicked closed. She smiled at last and gave me the ticket back. “Vous êtes trop tard”. I pointed out that there were still 2 minutes, but my pleas fell on deaf ears. It was made quite clear that even if I were Napoleon reincarnated, accompanied by the ghosts of Jeanne d'Arc and Charles de Gaulle there’s no way I’d get on the train now. I slowly sank to the floor by the Giant Bike Box Whose Name Is Calamity. SNCF woman paid me no more regard than any of the other pieces of litter scattered on the floor. Merde.

OK, what now. I went back to the ticket office, ignored the scattered bodies left by my previous passing and, after a while in a queue, determined that a) the next train or Grenoble doesn’t leave for 3 hours, b) No I couldn’t use my ticket on it and c) I couldn't get a new ticket anyway because all the seats were booked (at least I think that’s the reason, my not very good French was breaking down somewhat by this point). OK, what other options are there? I got the phone out, shelled out some money for international data access and found that not only am I not getting the train to Grenoble that day, I’m also not flying unless I wanted to do some very serious damage to my credit card. There was, however, a seat available on an Easyjet flight back to London for an amount of money that is only eye-wateringly painful. Tossing up the relative merits of finding a hotel room (all the while accompanied by the Great Big Box of Desolation) and flying back to London I was suddenly filled with an urge to just go home, and have a beer, and not have to drag this stupid, heavy box around any more Parisian train stations. So I did.

Don't believe the marketing droids

I have long been of the opinion that the majority of claims made about the very expensive nutritional and other products that are pushed at you in a massive variety of ways by the food and drink industry are based on either no evidence or very poor evidence. I'm pleased to say that the British Medical Journal now agrees with me and has published a series of papers where they examine the claims made for a variety of nutritional and other products and find them seriously wanting.

BBC News article here

Blog post from a doctor who works in weight control here

BMJ editorial here (long but absolutely damning)


Remember: these companies are selling products with massive markups, for example maltodextrin from myprotein.com costs £12.99 for 5 kg, PSP22 (which is nothing but maltoextrin and flavour, although SIS claim it's "special" maltodextrin) is £8.50 for half a kilo. They market them in a variety of cunning ways: paying athletes to endorse them (remember that just because someone's a professional athlete it doesn't mean they have any morals or an IQ greater than 25 http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/12/tour-de-france-remy-digregorio), sponsoring races so that you're given their product during the event,  "social" marketing via facebook and twitter (getting people who aren't employed by their company to endorse them) and targetting top age-groupers with free samples in the hope that they'll endorse their product. These things are usually backed up with impressive sounding "sciencey" claims that are usually based on very weak evidence.

Here's an example of the sort of claims they make. Note that they claim very solid scientific support, with links to technical scientific publications. Must work, right? Someone from my club contacted me and asked my opinion as a professional scientist of their evidence. I had a look and this was my reply.

"Briefly, very little of any consequence there. The "publication" is a 1-page published conference proceeding, so nothing approaching a proper research paper. Not clear if it's been peer-reviewed. The sample size is small. The stats are unsuitable for the design (should have used a mixed-effects model). The analysis is not reported properly (no F-statistic or degrees of freedom for the ANOVA, no indication what the error bars on the graphs are). Assuming the stats *are* appropriate, the p-value for the ANOVA for lactate at pmax is 0.049 so it juuuuust scrapes into statistical significance. More importantly, the specific comparison between pmax for placebo and treatment is non-significant on the Tukey test (p=0.062). This means that there is a suggestion that there is an effect on lactate but it's not really possible to draw much of a conclusion - hardly the "off the scale" response the marketing suggests. Even more important than that, ***they don't even report the data for actual performance*** - if they had data indicating (for example) higher wattage at AT or higher endurance for the treatment group you can bet they'd have included it. My conclusion from reading this is that it indicates a possible but very badly supported effect on lactate at exhaustion only (not at the other times they tested) and nothing else. Bear in mind that it's become clear that lactate is only a small part of the biology of fatigue, and is possibly even unrelated to it, so a product which claims to buffer pH changes because of lactate can only have a small effect at best."

That's quite technical in parts, but I think you get the message. This piece of research tells us nothing about whether it works in the manner claimed or not. People might swear blind to you that it makes a difference to them, but bear in mind that we are terrible at making such assessments about our own health and performance - there are also people who will tell you with complete conviction that the zaniest forms of alternative therapy cured their health problems, and just take a look at all those cyclists in the Tour de France making themselves look silly with breath-rite strips on their noses, a product that was shown years ago to have no effect on performance at all.