Porcelainia

Quite a few of my recent posts have been about fairly high brow 'Art'. Time to bring it down a peg or 2, with these very, 'artistic' porcelain water bottles. Such are the delights of racing the Tour of Friendship in Thailand, where the trophies are custom made for each year's event, with a bike part as the theme. Previous years have seen porcelain cranksets and, another one in my kitsch cabinet of fame- a candy blue Selle Italia SLR complete with gold swirly '09 Thai trim. It certainly beats generic golden plastic cups, though the frightening thing is that these are probably hand made...

I rode the 30s this year, and while the race wasn't super successful for me, I did manage one podium with a 5th place on one of the sprint stages behind 'Vincent' Tam (ex Thai champion), earning me one Thai porcelain water bottle. The full race report is up on colossi.cc, but one thing to expand on a little, is the fact that in earning this trophy I reached a new max heart rate of 196bpm. This is 3 beats above my previous maximum- reached about 5/6 years ago. And it's not like I haven't been trying hard inbetween... Evidently conditions played a bit part in reaching this- sprinting in 40 degrees heat certainly makes you work pretty hard, but it really makes a mockery of the 220 minus your age nonsense you read in the gym. Maybe I'll hit 200 when I get to 40???