PedalTheOcean.com

The pedal drive is here

2009-06-29T16:58:00.005-06:00

Here is a nifty little animation I whipped up showing the computer model of WiTHiN blending into the actual boat in my shop.

And the big news for the week is the drive leg is here! MitrPak built it and they did an awesome job! The 'T' gear box at the top has a Shimano crank axle which turns a stainless shaft which will run through a tube that connects to the lower 'L' gear box which will turn the prop. The entire drive shaft tube and gear boxes will be filled up with oil and the higher head pressure will keep the corrosive sea water out.

I am happy to say that Ben Eadie is back to help out with construction for a while. The above shot is Ken de-coring the portlight cutout edges. This slot is filled with an epoxy / micro-fiber mix and then covered with carbon.

The image above shows the seat panels now carbon taped into position. The round hatch below the arm rest is for dry storage.

The above illustration is a cut-away view of WiTHiN showing the cockpit, supplies, cabin and a new removable wind generator. My boat equipment guy Glenn Mulhare from Mariner Parts and I are having difficulty finding enough power with flexible solar panels to power all of the electronics, so we have decided to mount a removable wind generator for when the batteries need charging, and wind conditions are right. I can't leave this up all the time because it would cause far too much drag in head-wind conditions. However, if I am stopped for the night, and have a sea anchor out, I should be able to charge the batteries overnight as I sleep.

My back yard

2009-06-23T19:43:00.012-06:00

If you don't live here (Calgary), I am sorry and I don't mean to rub this in your face or anything, but check out the pictures from my Saturday training run with my buddy Bryon.

Bryon Howard and me at the 9100 feet summit of Mount Allen in Kananaskis

It has been a long-time goal of mine to complete an ultramarathon, and I am very happy that I was able to accomplish my goal 2 weeks ago by finishing the Northface endurance challenge 50 miler ultramarathon which was an amazing experience.

After the race, my knees were swollen, achillies tendons very sore, my quads were trashed and my toes are black and blue and I will lose 3 toe nails. A long, restful recovery is required and I am happy and satisfied that I have achieved my goal.

NOT!!!

Instead, I went and signed up for a 90 MILE (146 km) ultramarathon called the Sinister 7 in Crowsnest pass in 9 days from now! YA!!!! Bring it on!

me running (& lost) following an animal trail trail

The Sinister 7 solo race starts at 7:00 am on Saturday morning, July 4. The 146km course will take me through the most rugged, remote and beautiful terrain in Alberta's stunning Rocky Mountains. With over 5,050m (15,150 feet) of elevation gain across the course, this race will punish those who are not prepared.

The Sinister 7 is open to solo runners or teams of up to seven and racers have 27 hours to complete the grueling event. The course is split into seven stages, each featuring a geographic and historic highlight of the area. The race's name is inspired by the treacherous Seven Sisters Mountain that looms over much of the course.

my buddy Bryon sitting at the summit

I actually think I can leverage the Northface race and use it as a training stage for the Sinister - the two races are about 4 weeks apart. I spent the last 2 week in active recovery from Northface, and I felt like I could put in a really tough 2 day training weekend before tapering for the Sinister race. So, last weekend my buddy Bryon and I headed out to Kananaskis to fast hike / climb Mount Allan. Wow! What a hike. It was straight up for 2 hours to the 9000 foot summit. the views were breathtaking!

There was a bit of climbing, but not much, and not very technical

ON the way back down, we got off track and ended up on the other side of the wrong ridge and followed a mountain goat trail to a water fall where a heard of big horn sheep were crossing. That was a really incredible sight. We ended up making our way back over the ridge by following goat trails and eventually made it back to our hiking trail. It was a really cool day.

Then on Sunday I climbed Moose Mountain to the fire lookout station at the top. It took me 4.5 hours for the 30 km round trip and 8000 feet of elevation gain/lost. Now it's rest and recovery time and I feel ready to tackle the Sinister.

I was looking at the solo race results from last years Sinister, and the winner completed the race in a blazing 17 hours! the next finisher was almost 21 hours, then 22 hrs, 23 hrs and the remaining finishers were all over 24 hours. 50% of the starters were able to finish the race within the cut-off time of 27 hours. YIKES! I think my goal will be to just be able to finish this in less than 27 hours. This is going to be TOUGH.

Bryon Howard

------------------------------------------------------------

In other news, we are still making progress on WiTHiN - the expedition boat. The portlight and hatch holes have been cut-out and we have started preparing the edges which is a very time-consuming job! Each of the cut-out holes have to be de-cored, filled with micro, then reinforced with 20 layers of unidirectional carbon running around the perimeter of the hole with a final layer of bidirectional carbon to cap it off.

my x-wing starfighter cockpit

2009-06-17T18:00:00.003-06:00

We got the seat panels inserted into the expedition boat and just as a double check, I placed my recumbent seat onto the carbon seat panel and used the cranks and drive from Critical Power 2 to check where the pedals will be. It all fit perfectly.

We also got the port light (windows) holes cut out of the cabin top, so we placed the top onto the hull while I sat in the seat. For a moment, I was ready launch a plasma bomb to destroy the death star from my X-wing fighter starfighter cockpit seat. Then I confirmed that nothing interfered with the pedal revolution (it's a human power X-wing) and checked the view out the windows (making sure that the horizon from my eye level was mid-window). All worked perfectly according to plan. Whew! Exciting!!!

I joked with Ken that I want to get the hugest bank of flashing lights and switches and gauges filling up both of those arm rests. Of course, they would do nothing, but how cool would that look!

My first ultramarathon - race report

2009-06-11T11:30:00.005-06:00

The Northface Endurance Challenge Gortex 50 mile ultramarathon race report

To say I was having a good day would be the understatement of the year. I was on fire and after 9 hours I was flying through the mountainous course feeling WAY too good. Something bad just HAD to happen...

My first triathlon coach gave me some very wise advice regarding preparing for a race. He told me that the things that we most worry about effecting us on race day NEVER happen. Instead, it's always always something that we don't expect. So far, after 12 Ironman races, about a dozen marathons, four 24 hour world record attempts and my first 80 km ultramarathon, this advice has proven to be very true.

I was quite nervous going into this 50 mile (80 km) ultramarathon because it was my first shot at running farther than the standard 26.2 mile marathon distance. In fact, the distance is almost a double marathon. My right knee had been swollen and sore for about 3 weeks leading up to race day. Most of my training has been on steep hills and the constant downhill pounding really effected my right knee and it wasn't showing much improvement during my taper leading up to the race.

Thankfully, and true to my coaches advice, my knee injury never really bothered me during the race and instead I was inflicted by another injury that I never expected - a BRAIN injury! Basically, I got a bit stupid for a while and it cost me about 1.5 to 2 hours in additional running! Here's the story:

The race started at 5:00 am with the blow of a horn and I kissed Helen goodbye (she was running the half marathon that started at 10:00 am), turned on my headlamp and and joined about 80 fellow 50 miler runners as we launched ourselves through the start line and disappeared into the forest for a very, very long day. A few minutes after we started our first climb I heard a voice calling out from behind me down the trail; "is GREG up there?". It was my buddy Dennis from Boulder, CO who had driven out to Bellingham, WA to run the race with me! It was so great to see Dennis and I had totally forgotten that he was coming out, so it was a really cool surprise to learn that I had someone to run with.

Our paces were very well matched - I worked to keep up with Dennis on the up-hills and he worked to keep up with me on the downs. I think we were pushing each other. The course is a brutal 13,000 feet of elevation and rated 4 out of 5 for technical difficulty, and 5 out of 5 for elevation. You are either running up or down - never flat. We were both feeling pretty good and after a few hours of 'warm-up', so we started to 'pick-off' runners one by one as the day wore on. We would see a runner down the trail and take aim, focus on our pace, eventually pass them and move on to our next 'victim'. Sometimes it would take an hour, but we never got passed and were passing runners one by one as the hours ticked through. It was really a lot of fun and kept us both focused on the race.

Dennis shot this photo with his iPhone while we were running

After 4 or 5 hours my legs started to feel that soreness that creeps in after a marathon, but that just seemed to dissipate with the realization that were weren't even HALF done. There was no choice but to ignore the achy fatigue and push through. I think when you know the end is near, the pain becomes very apparent and real, but your adrenalin allows you to push through to the finish line. When you know that you are only half way there, and realize that you will be living with the pain for another 5 hours or more, I think your body just sort of pushes it to the background and you kind of start just running through it. That worked because I started to feel pretty good and was able to pick up my pace a bit. We started walking less of the ups and running the downs faster.

At 8 hours, we reached a fire road that was a reasonable grade and I was still feeling pretty good at that point, so I decided I would try to put the hammer down a bit and really focus on maintaining an aggressive pace all the way to the finish line. I figured Dennis could keep up and would probably catch me on the next up hill like he typically had been doing all day, so I took off.

I cranked up my music and switched over to tank mode. I was taking no prisoners! I was flying, singing to my music and having a blast - really. Just loving every minute of it.

At 9 hours I figured I had less than 5 miles remaining and I was pumped with the realization that I just might actually make my 10 hour goal. And this is where the 'brain injury' stopped me cold in my tracks. After a blazing 30 minute downhill segment, I reached a highway by the ocean that wasn't supposed to be there. I thought: "Oh, oh... I don't remember seeing this on the map. Wait.. Where are the route markers? In fact, I don't remember seeing ANY of the orange flags that are supposed to mark my trail during the last.. well... quite a while. Oh no! This can't be happening! NOOOOO!!!!"

Realizing that I had missed an important turn, I turned around at the highway and started to back track wondering just how far I had to go to make it back to the course. I ran back up this steep grade for another 40 minutes before I found my orange flags. UGH! I was exhausted from running back up that horrific grade and the whole time I kept thinking - no... hoping, that my course markers were just up around the corner. When I finally made it back onto the course, I looked at my watch to consider the damage, and realized that I had just wasted about 75 minutes including a grueling climb! This was a disaster. Plus, it had been a few hours since the last aid station and I was out of water and out of food.

Of course, the part of the race course that I started back on was the steepest, longest UP HILL section, and my legs were already fried from my little detour. I started to get very discouraged and started to walk quite a bit. I was also getting cold because I was becoming dehydrated and running low carbs. dumb, dumb, dumb. I could be finished by now I kept thinking. There goes my sub-10 hour finish. (I discovered later that a 10 hour finish would have earned me 4th place in my division).

About an hour later I met a Search and Rescue guy and asked him how much farther to the next aid station. He told me it was still 3 miles away and kindly offered me an apple and some water which I devoured. I finally made it to the aid station and chowed down on a plate of potato chips (I was craving SALT), Skittles, Smarties, brownies and drank a gallon of Mountain Dew.

I eventually made it to the finish line just short of 12 hours where Helen was waiting for me. Dennis finished in 11 hours and assumed that I had already finished and headed back to the hotel room, so he didn't stick around. I talked to him after and he told me that just after we separated, his knee locked up on him and he spent 20 minutes sitting at an aid station trying to massage the cramp out. He got it worked out, but he said that last 10 miles was pretty brutal.

In the end, I was totally happy with my day and my primary goal was just to finish in under 13 hours which is the cut-off time. I was expecting it to be difficult, and the last few hours certainly were (mostly due to my stupidity), but for the most part, I THOROUGHLY enjoyed myself and found the general organization of the race, along with the volunteers at the aid stations absolutely AWESOME. One of the best races I have done and I look forward to running it again next year.

In fact, I loved it so much, I'm thinking of signing up for a 90 MILE ultra called "sinister 7" in July. Why do I get myself into these predicaments? Yikes - 90 miles!!! That's probably going to be 24 hours of straight running. What am I thinking?

Helen had a great half marathon. She finished 5th out of 20 in her division with a time of 2:24 (which goes to show you how tough these trail races are!)

Helen and I relaxed for a couple of days in Seattle after the race. We rented a kayak and paddled in West Seattle.

Peace and rainbows

2009-06-02T20:18:00.009-06:00

Peace, rainbows, a mean machine, and a shiny new logo!

Peace and rainbows. man.

We have the lower hull almost totally assembled now, so for fun, we placed the cabin on, and the other top deck panels. It's really starting to come together! Ken is doing a fantastic job and we are progressing nicely - a little slower than I had hoped for, but the quality of Kens workmanship and Stuart's design is second to none. This will be one, mean - state of the art - human powered machine when she is finished.

We started removing some of the jig stations. I can stand on the bow, and it is rock solid.

We prepared the edges of the cut-outs for inspection hatches in two bulkheads and carboned the bulkheads into the hull. 15 layers of uni-directional carbon surrounds each hatch / portlight cut-out!

I am getting tons of help purchasing supplies and equipment from new PedaltheOcean.com sponsor Glenn Mulhare from Mariner Parts. The shipment of hatches and portlights is due to arrive today and we're working on specifying the electronics now (solar panels, radios, GPS, etc). It is going to be pretty state of the art. The AIS will talk to the GPS, and the marine radio will broadcast the GPS coords, and I can get sat weather on the GPS, etc - it's all going to be pretty awesome. My good friend George and PTO sponsor from MitrPak is working on the drive legs right now. They should be here in a week or so and we should be able to start working on the structure to hold it in place.

New sponsors are coming online including a tracking device, a sea anchor, a machinist who is milling the prop, a web developer, a web designer, a copywriter, a new charity, a safety boat, and many others who are kindly volunteering to be a part of this in various ways. Thanks to everyone and welcome to the team! Details and names will all be announced when we roll-out the new web site. If you would like to 'join the PTO team' and feel like you have a bit of time or expertise you can offer, email me - I always appreciate the help.

I'm also making good progress on other PTO project items including securing a safety boat for the expedition, the new charity that I hope to raise $250,000 for, and a splashy new web site. I'll announce my new partners and more details soon! Here is a sneak preview of the new PTO logo:

I am speaking at a grade 9 graduation ceremony tomorrow morning and then Helen and I are off to Bellingham on Friday to run the Northface Endurance Challenge on Saturday. Helen's running the half and I'm running the 80 km. I'm ready, but with a lingering knee injury, so I'm a bit apprehensive about that. Oh well... all part of the adventure I guess. I won't be setting any records that's for sure, but since this is my first ultra, my goal is just to finish within the cut off time. Wait.. what is the cut off time anyhow? Let me check... Oh, it's 13 hours. I should be ok. (famous last words!)

The Hull

2009-05-20T18:54:00.010-06:00

The lower hull jig is finished and we have the first panel in!

First, my training progress for the Northface Endurance Challenge Gortex 50 mile run June 6: My last long run weekend consisted of a 6 hour run on Saturday followed by a 3 hour run on Sunday. Both went very well and my pace was faster on the 6 hour run than the previous weekend, so that is good. No serious injuries so far - my Achilles tendinitis has gone away like I knew it would and now I have a bit of a sore knee developing. The race is still a bit over 2 weeks away, so I have time to recuperate.

Second, Pedaltheocean human powered ocean crossing progress: I've been making some good progress on expedition plans.

I am close to signing on with a new charity which is very exciting. I did some research and found that previous ocean crossing expeditions raised anywhere from $20,000 to $600,000 for their charities, so I'm totally pumped about what I can do - sorry, about what 'WE' can do for this great cause!

I need to announce the new Canada to Hawaii route, so I am working with a great web design company & PTO sponsor / team member on a Pedaltheocean.com re-design. The roll-out of the new site will coincide with the route announcement and the partnership with the charity.

I am also pretty happy that I may have found a safety boat to follow me across the Pacific to Hawaii. Again, I don't want to say anything until it's a 100% sure thing, but if it works out, it will provide me with the responsible safety net I want, plus it will be a great platform to film from. I am looking for someone who might be interested in producing a film, ( or documentary, TV series, TV show, whatever) and who might enjoy a 40 to 60 day Pacific cruise.

Third, speaking: I'm not nearly as busy as I want to be, but this economy is really beating up on the speaking business. I have a booking to speak at a Toastmasters club annual wrap-up luncheon on June 21, a Junior high school year-end function on June 9, and I'm speaking to American Program Bureau in Boston on June 23. APB is one of the largest speaker bureaus in the US and they want to sign an exclusive representation agreement with me which I am considering.

Fourth, other cool projects: My buddy Roz Savage is due to depart Hawaii for Tuvalu, then onto Australia. According to the countdown timer on her web site, her departure window opens in 3 days from now. We all wish her well!

Fifth, boat building progress:

39. The lower hull jig section patterns are printed and cut out

40. The jog sections are traced onto 1" thick MDF

41. The jig sections are cut out with a skill saw and jig saw.

42. The jig sections for the upper cabin are removed from the square box, and the jig sections for the hull are fastened into place.

43. The jig sections are aligned using target holes and a tight string. After we aligned each station, we could peer through a 1/4 inch hole in the end station and look through ALL 15 holes in 15 stations spanning almost 30 feet!

44. A slot was cut down the middle of the floor hull panel to allow it to bend slightly to fit into a shallow 'V' shape in the jig sections. It is held in place temporarily by weights.

45. The carbon panel is secured to the jig stations with screws and blocks, and the cut is filled with a runny mixture of micro & epoxy

46. The seem is reinforced with a strip of carbon tape, then peel ply is placed over it.

47. Sand is poured into the epoxy whetted carbon tape & peel ply to keep the carbon tightly pressed against the panel and the seem.

See the ENTIRE process (all 47 steps) at this blog post.

Cabin top

2009-05-12T07:03:00.014-06:00

Well, we have the cabin top assembled! This is pretty cool because it's the first thing we've made that actually looks like Ocean WiTHiN! We're also pretty psyched to see that Stuart Bloomfields design magic works like a charm. After building the cabin top jig and fitting the 3 cabin top carbon panels into position, they fit PERFECTLY - amazing.

All the construction steps for the cabin top are below, but first a quick training update. As you may recall, I signed up to compete at the Northface Endurance Challenge 50 mile ultramarathon on June 6 in Bellingham, Washington. This will be my first foray into 'ultra' territory which is typically defined as distances greater than 30 miles. I'm really, really enjoying the training which basically consists of 2 long runs per week, back to back. On Saturday I ran up and down Moose Mountain trail in Kananaskis for 4 hours, then I ran it for 5 hours on Sunday.

Running a hilly trail is easier in ways than a flat course. The constant muscle changes from climbing up the steep incline to running down hill seems to 'spread the load' a bit more than the relentless flat and level run. I feel better after 4 hours than a flat run for sure and feel like I can keep going.

The Northface Endurance Challenge Gortex 50 is a TOUGH race with over 13,500 feet of elevation change over 80 km of mountainous trails. The rule of thumb for predicting finishing times for a double marathon is to take your best marathon time, double it and add an hour. This would put me at 8 hours, but that isn't the case with this race. The WINNING time for my division last year was 9 hours! This is one TOUGH race.

My training run on Moose Mountain is a 7.3 km, 2000 foot climb up, then 7.3 km down. I timed myself on my 5.25 hour run on Sunday and calculated that if I could hold the same pace for the entire 80 km race, I could finish in 9 1/2 hours. That's wishful thinking though because I will surely start to slow down after my 5th or 6th or 7th hour! I will be happy if I can break 10 hours.

OK, on to the cabin top building steps:

26. Here is the completed jig station box. It's flat and square and very rigid with coasters so it can be moved in and out of the shop.

27. Ken is tracing the jig station patterns onto some 1" thick MDF wood.

28. The jig stations are cut out and assembled onto the box at pre-specified spacing

29. The jig stations are aligned to each other using alignment targets and a tight string.

30. The carbon sandwich panels are placed into position in the jig. Note that the peel ply and blanket layers are still on the panels. This is to prevent us from rubbing off the peel ply texture which is required for a proper bond and paint.

31. The edges of the peel ply are ripped off showing the carbon. The panels are screwed into the jig sections using a strip of particle board. This will force each panel to curve into it's exact position.

32. The edges of the panels are joined with a radius of micro/epoxy

33. The joins will be reinforced with a strip of carbon tape. To avoid fraying the carbon, a large sheet is whetted out with epoxy resin first, then cut between 2 layers of poly.

34. the carbon tape is placed onto the seam. The epoxy/micro filled radius in the join is semi-curred to a tacky consistency to assure a good bond between the carbon and the micro.

This shows the carbon tape fully whetted out

35. The carbon tape is covered with a strip of peel ply and a strip of absorbent blanket, then covered with plastic.

36. Normally, this carbon tape wet layup should be curred under vacuum, but in this case it would be difficult to obtain a good vacuum due to the seam between the two carbon panels. So, we used about 100 lbs of sand to press down on the wet carbon.

37. After curring, the sand is removed, and the peel and blanket layers are removed. The inside is temporarily reinforced with wood spacers.

38. The cabin top is removed from the cabin top jig.

Cutting panels

2009-05-05T16:02:00.005-06:00

We have completed all but two panels and we realized that we had miscalculated the amount of epoxy resin we were going through. The raw Corecell panels were soaking up way more epoxy that we had originally expected, so I placed an order for more MAS brand epoxy from Noahs in Montreal and we have to wait until Friday for delivery.

It was a chance to switch gears for a bit, so we started work on the next phase - building a jig to hold the panels in place while they are bonded together, and cutting the exact panel shapes out of the rectangular carbon boards. The following steps are a continuation of the step by step "Building WiTHiN" blog post from last week. I'll continue to revise that blog post by adding new steps as we do them.

23. The panel drawing is placed on the cured carbon fiber panel. The photo shows the bulkheads drawing on a section of panel with the peel ply and blanket layers removed. Normally, we do not remove this layer until AFTER the parts have been cut out.

24. The drawing is taped down to the carbon panel by cutting holds in the paper and taping through to the panel.

The two photos above show the paper pattern taped down to the carbon panel ready for cutting.

25. I use a jig saw and follow the cut lines on the paper pattern. Since the paper is taped down to the carbon panel, I can cut right through the paper and panel.

This shows a small panel part cut-out with the paper panel still taped on. Note the nice tight fit between the pattern and the cut carbon panel.

This is the cut-out top deck panel with the peel ply / blanket layer still attached. We won't remove this layer until we are ready to place it into the jig because it protects the surface of the carbon.

26. Ken is building a jig for the top & bottom hull halves. He is starting with a long, straight square box on wheels and the jig stations will be mounted to the top of it and aligned. We will start with the top deck (top hull half) and when it is assembled, we will remove the jig stations and install the jig stations for the bottom hull.

Building WiTHiN

2009-05-01T08:07:00.023-06:00

Building Ocean WiTHiN - a human powered ocean crossing boat

My last blog post called "how it's done" was a step by step attempt to show you how we are building Ocean WiTHiN and it was received with a bit of confusion. I realized that I could do a much better job, so after four more days of panel making, and way more photos taken, here is a much more thorough explanation of what we are doing.

Design:

The illustration above is a computer rendering of Ocean WiTHiN - a pedal powered boat designed for me to human-power across an ocean with. The ocean in question will either be the Pacific ocean via a route that has never been 'human powered' before - from Vancouver Island Canada to Hawaii in June of 2010, or a speed record attempt across the Atlantic ocean in less than 40 days from Canary Islands to the West Indies in December of 2010.

Ocean WiTHiN was inspired by the prototype version of WiTHiN shown in the photo below taken near Tofino off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Sea trials video here.

WiTHiN prototype was designed by myself and human powered boat guru Rick Willoughby and build by myself and my friend Ben Eadie. She is made of fiberglass using a double kayak hull as a base which was kindly donated by PedalTheOcean sponsor and advisor Steve Schleicher from Nimbus Kayaks.

The new boat - Ocean WiTHiN was designed by myself, Rick Willoughby and world record winning naval architect Stuart Bloomfield. Ocean WiTHiN is made from flat carbon fiber panels that are stitched together to form the basic hull.

The above illustration shows some of the hull panels, and interior seat and bulkhead panels

This is a paper model assembled from printing and cutting out the individual panels. This method of construction is called developable panel. An advantage of developable panels is faster and less expensive fabrication process. According to Ricks calculations, the efficiency differences between a smooth contoured moulded hull (like the prototype) and the square flat panel hull is minimal.

How we're building it

The drawing above shows the layout of some of the individual panels that will form the hull. Each panel is made from 1/2" thick Corecell foam board covered with 2 layers of carbon fiber on each side - called a sandwich panel. We are making all of these rectangular sandwich panels in advance, then tracing the outlines of each panel part and cutting that part out with a saw.

Each panel was printed onto paper using a large format plotter. This photo shows two panel drawings on our giant layup table.

1. The first step is to cut and assemble 1/2" thick Corecell boards to make the first panel. The Corecell boards are joined together using an epoxy/micro balloon mix, then sanded flat and smooth.

2. We roll-out a long sheet of poly (Plastic drop sheet) and tape it down to our layup table. The poly is twice as wide as shown in the photo and the second half is folded down over the left hand side of the table. The poly will form a bag that will eventually cover the entire panel. The Corecell panel is placed on top of the poly.

3. The first layer of carbon is 6 oz unidirectional carbon fiber. Unidirectional carbon is a fabric consisting of thousands of thin carbon fiber threads all running longitudinally and held together with a fine thread. Unidirectional carbon is very strong in tension longitudinally and has zero strength width-wise. The carbon is 12" wide and comes on a roll which we roll out to the length of our panel and cut.

4. The unidirectional carbon strips for BOTH sides of the Corecell panel (2 strips on the top side of the foam board and 2 strips on the bottom side) are rolled up and stored at the back of the table.

5. The second layer of carbon to be applied to each side of the core is 6 oz bidirectional weave. This is a weave with threads running both horizontally and vertically. It is cut and applied to the foam board such that the fibers are running at 45 degrees to the length of the core (and direction of the unidirectional). These sections of fabric are cut to size, rolled up, and stored at the back of the table.

6. Absorbent blanket material is cut to fit over the length of the Corecell board. This material will soak up excess epoxy - more about that later.

7. Strips of 'peel ply' fabric are also cut to fit each side of the panel and stored along with the blanket and carbon at the back of the table. I'll explain what the peel ply is for later.

8. This is a picture of Ken weighing each roll of carbon. We will be wetting-out the carbon layers on the Corecell with epoxy resin and we use the weight of each layer of carbon to calculate the exact amount of epoxy to apply.

9. We mix a pre-calculated amount of epoxy resin required to fully cover the Corecell foam board. This epoxy is poured into the foam board and then spread evenly over the board with squeegees. I don't have a photo of this process. After the board is fully saturated with epoxy, we roll on our first layer of unidirectional carbon fabric.

10. A pre-calculated volume of epoxy resin is mixed and then poured in an even line down the middle of the carbon on the Corecell board and then spread evenly over the surface with the yellow squeegees shown above.

11. After the unidirectional layer has been fully whetted out with epoxy, we roll on our bidirectional carbon weave. (There's always a clown - hey?)

12. The epoxy resin is a two part mixture: resin and catalyst which will harden (cure) in about 8 hours.

13. The bidirectional carbon weave is whetted-out with epoxy in the same way that the unidirectional carbon was - by pouring an even line down the middle, then splitting the line with squeegees from each side pulling epoxy from the middle to the edges and then pressing the epoxy into the carbon fabric.

14. You'll be tempted to, but don't eat the epoxy.

15. The process of wetting out the foam core, rolling out the unidirectional carbon, wetting out the unidirectional carbon, rolling out the bidirectional weave, and wetting that out is repeated on BOTH sides of the Corecell panel.

Before the panel is turned over, the wet layup is covered with a layer of peel ply (not shown). This is a fabric that won't stick to the curred epoxy, but will allow wet epoxy to seep out of the layup into an absorbent blanket placed on top of the peel ply. The blanket strip is placed on top of the peel ply layer, then the whole board is carefully flipped over and the entire process is repeated on the other side.

The whole wetting out process takes about 90 minutes for each side with two people working. The preparation which includes cutting the Corecell panel, assembly of the Corecell sections, and cutting of the carbon, peel ply, blanket, poly sheet and mixing epoxy takes an additional 3 to 4 hours. So far, each panel has taken 2 man/days to make.

16. After both sides have been whetted out and the peel ply and blanket have been applied, the other side of the poly sheet is placed over the panel completely covering the layup. The three open sides of the poly are sealed using gummy tape to form an air tight bag.

17. A vacuum pump is connected to the bag and all of the air is sucked out of the bag. The vacuum process creates very high pressure (about 26" mercury) which presses the plastic bag against the wet layup forcing excess epoxy to seep out of the carbon through the peel ply and be absorbed by the blanket.

19. In order for the entire layup to fully cure in 8 hours, it is important for the temperature to stay at or above room temperature. Higher curing temperatures are advantageous because it increases the viscosity of the epoxy allowing more excess epoxy to be absorbed by the blanket. To increase the curring temperature and decrease the curring time, we cover the entire wet layup with electric blankets which keep the panel very warm.

This photo shown the vacuum tube entering the bag and the electric blankets placed on top.

20. The entire layup is left to cure under heat and vacuum for 8 hours and then we turn the vacuum pump off, and leave the heat on until morning (total of about 18 hours curing). Then the bag is cut open and the fully curred, hard carbon panel is removed. We store the panels in a curved stand which is approximates the curve that the panel will take when it is used to form the boat hull.

This is a photo of my 4 car garage which has been turned into a boat making shop.

21. Eventually, the peel ply and blanket is removed from the carbon, but this won't happen until the panel shape has been cut out of the panel. The peel ply and blanket protects the surface of the panel until we are ready to assemble the boat. The photo above shows our first two panels (with the peel ply/blanket layer removed) post curring on a warm, heated floor.

22. The panel drawing is placed on the cured carbon fiber panel. The photo shows the bulkheads drawing on a section of panel with the peel ply and blanket layers removed. Normally, we do not remove this layer until AFTER the parts have been cut out.

23. The drawing is taped down to the carbon panel by cutting holds in the paper and taping through to the panel.

The two photos above show the paper pattern taped down to the carbon panel ready for cutting.

24. I use a jig saw and follow the cut lines on the paper pattern. Since the paper is taped down to the carbon panel, I can cut right through the paper and panel.

This shows a small panel part cut-out with the paper panel still taped on. Note the nice tight fit between the pattern and the cut carbon panel.

25. Ken is building a jig for the top & bottom hull halves. He is starting with a long, straight square box on wheels and the jig stations will be mounted to the top of it and aligned. We will start with the top deck (top hull half) and when it is assembled, we will remove the jig stations and install the jig stations for the bottom hull.

26. Here is the completed jig station box. It's flat and square and very rigid with coasters so it can be moved in and out of the shop.

27. Ken is tracing the jig station patterns onto some 1" thick MDF wood.

28. The jig stations are cut out and assembled onto the box at pre-specified spacing

29. The jig stations are aligned to each other using alignment targets and a tight string.

32. The edges of the panels are joined with a radius of micro/epoxy

33. The joins will be reinforced with a strip of carbon tape. To avoid fraying the carbon, a large sheet is whetted out with epoxy resin first, then cut between 2 layers of poly.

34. the carbon tape is placed onto the seam. The epoxy/micro filled radius in the join is semi-curred to a tacky consistency to assure a good bond between the carbon and the micro.

This shows the carbon tape fully whetted out

35. The carbon tape is covered with a strip of peel ply and a strip of absorbent blanket, then covered with plastic.

37. After curring, the sand is removed, and the peel and blanket layers are removed. The inside is temporarily reinforced with wood spacers.

38. The cabin top is removed from the cabin top jig.

39. The lower hull jig section patterns are printed and cut out

40. The jog sections are traced onto 1" thick MDF

41. The jig sections are cut out with a skill saw and jig saw.

42. The jig sections for the upper cabin are removed from the square box, and the jig sections for the hull are fastened into place.

44. A slot was cut down the middle of the floor hull panel to allow it to bend slightly to fit into a shallow 'V' shape in the jig sections. It is held in place temporarily by weights.

45. The carbon panel is secured to the jig stations with screws and blocks, and the cut is filled with a runny mixture of micro & epoxy

46. The seem is reinforced with a strip of carbon tape, then peel ply is placed over it.

47. Sand is poured into the epoxy whetted carbon tape & peel ply to keep the carbon tightly pressed against the panel and the seem.

I will continue this step by step post as we progress. If you have any question, please feel free to post a comment to this blog post and either I or Ken will respond with an answer.

Here's how it's done:

2009-04-25T15:55:00.003-06:00

Ken and I are now like a well oiled machine. A carbon sandwich panel making machine. Yesterday we finished side B of our first panel containing seat parts, and BOTH sides of the next panel which consists of the bulkheads. We have a pretty good system down, and so far the panels are coming out great - very flat, hard, smooth and strong. The photo above shows the two panels sitting on my warm water heated floor in our TV room. Since winter seems to be hanging in there in Calgary, it isn't warm enough in the garage for these panels to fully cure.

Following is the step by step process for making a carbon fiber sandwich panel:

1. The above photo shows two patterns for our next panel running almost the full length of the table - something like 26 feet long. I believe these are the two main side panels of the hull.

2. The first step is to roll out poly for the vacuum bag. The plastic is folded on the left hand side and will envelope the entire panel after it is fully whetted out to form a sealed vacuum bag.

3. The next step is to place the Corecell foam core down on the table and bond the individual sheets of Corecel together.

I use a pre-mixed epoxy/micro balloons fairing compound, then place flat boards and weights over each join so that it stays flat.

More photos after Monday's work!

Blew through another iPod

2009-04-24T10:13:00.003-06:00

I seem to blast through iPods as fast as I blow through sneakers. Last summer during training for the 24 hour human powered boat record I purchased a totally water proof enclosure for my iPod from OtterBox because my previous iPod got wet and eventually died. I was sick of buying new iPods so I decided to invest my money into a water proof and shock proof case.

Good idea in theory, but because this OtterBox case fits the iPod so tightly, inserting and removing the iPod for updating and charging wore out the headphones plug and now the sound is shorting out. So, Time for a new pair of shoes, and yet another new iPod.

I searched the house for as many old, broken iPods as I could find and shot this photo. Included in the collection is the very first iPod as well as the mini, nano, shuffle, touch, classic and probably some I don't even remember the name of.

--------------------
Ken and I applied the first carbon laminate layer on one of the panels yesterday. We picked a panel that contained seat parts so if we made a mistake we could correct it before we got to the more crucial hull panels.

The layup was 1 layer of unidirectional carbon on the .5" Corecell core, then bidirectional weave at 45 degrees. The layup went smoothly and we ripped off the peel ply this morning to reveal a beautifully flat and strong panel. For the next panel we are going to try to do BOTH sides at the same time.

Above shot is the sandwich panel curring in the vacuum bag. We have about 9 panels to make and I am thinking we could build one panel per day - so in a couple of weeks we should have all of the carbon panels made. Next step is to cut out the panel shapes, build a jig for the top and bottom hull half's, then assemble the panels. Easy. Ya right...

New space

2009-04-21T06:59:00.004-06:00

After only 2 days into my Peru trip, I got a text from Ken with the bad news that we got kicked out of the hanger that my friend Steve so kindly offered to us as to build the new ocean crossing human powered boat - Ocean WiTHiN.

I guess the owner of the Citation jet that was hangered in there didn't like the idea of us lugging long 2x4's under the wings of his baby (understandable I guess), so Ken looked around for another space. The cheapest he could find was a full hanger for $1500 per month - no way.

I knew my garage would be the perfect size for this job, so I sold Helen and Krista on the advantages of parking the cars outside for the entire summer. There weren't many advantages and admittedly it was a tough sell.

So, I spend a couple of days and totally GUTTED the garage and my shop, washed the floor, cleaned it all out and made room for the almost 40 foot long, perfectly flat, most awesome panel layup table that Ken had already assembled at the hanger. Ken installed more lights and we are now totally set to get started on the panels! There is room beside the layup table for a jig that will hold the panels in place to form the top and bottom hulls.

I've been playing with my 3d model of Stuart's design for WiTHiN to get a better understanding of how my drive leg and keel will be incorporated into the hull. Rick Willoughby wants to use the drive leg bay as a torque tube to transfer the rolling moment from the keel into the hull. My good friend and sponsor George from MitrePak is building the drive leg.

Speaking of 'drive legs', here is a before and after shot of my strange swollen foot after we got back from Peru. My Dr. friend Chad thinks it was swelling due to extreme altitude changes and sitting on a plane for 10 hours. It was fine the next day, and I was able to get right back into my ultra marathon training program, so no worries.

The training is going good - no injuries to speak of so far. I'm handling the volume OK. This week I did a 4 hr run on Saturday, 3.5 hr run on Sunday, 1 hr yesterday and I'm off to do a 3 hr run today. I have the Police half marathon to run this Saturday, and I'll probably be running it TWICE - the first time as fast as I can, and the second time in survival mode.

Machupicchu

2009-04-20T07:51:00.003-06:00

Machupicchu

Peru trek

2009-04-19T08:59:00.006-06:00

Backroads Peru Trekking Trip

Helen and I just got back from a 9 day, lodge to lodge trekking trip in Peru from Cusco to Machupicchu ( Machu Picchu ). It was a seriously incredible experience. We stayed in these amazing lodges by Mountain Lodges of Peru - top comfort accommodations in the middle of nowhere at 12,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes. The only way to get to most of these lodges is by mule or hiking. We weren't exactly 'roughing' it!

Trip highlights: Long days spent hiking, 2 amazing runs at elevation, big elevation changes (highest elevation of 15,400 feet between Salkantay and Womantay mountains), glacier capped mountain peaks, visited a family with a small potato farm, legs got eaten alive by mosquitoes, trekked through rain, clouds in the cloud forest, blazing sun, tromped through a mix of mud and mule manure up to my ankles, developed new friendships that will last a lifetime, ate guinea pig, experienced the most beautiful and inspired city on earth - Machupicchu, swam in a river that lead to the amazon and a glacier lake at 14,000 feet, hiked the Inca trail, stayed in this crazy Peru meets the wild-west town called Aguas Contaleros (LOVED IT!), Ate some great food and drank some great wine (and a few Cervesas).

Thumbnails are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/adventuresofgreg/BackroadsPeruGregHelen#

Slide show is here:

Ocean boat progress. FINALLY!

2009-04-01T10:04:00.010-06:00

Finally some real progress on the new ocean crossing boat!

The image above is a model that Ken made using the developed panels designed by Stuart Bloomfield. This is basically how the new boat will be built. The first step is to create the flat panels which are carbon over Corecell closed cell foam core. Then we cut-out each panel shape and form the top and bottom hull halves by placing the panels into a wood jig then joining them together with carbon tape.

My good friend Steve McDonough kindly offered to donate some workshop space in his new hanger at the Springbank airport, so I jumped at the opportunity and Ken and I are going to be building WiTHiN at the new hanger.

The very first step was to test our panel making procedure by running some stress tests on a sample panel. Rick Willoughby suggested two tests - a break test and a flatwise tensile test. He also made a spreadsheet for us to record and quantify the results. Following are the photos and results for each test:

This is a 2" square section of the test sandwich panel. The lamination schedule is 1/2" thick Corecell, then 5 oz unidirectional carbon, then 6 oz bidirectional carbon. (same for both sides of the core). Both sides were fully whetted out with epoxy resin then vacuum bagged.

This shows the break test setup. I used my lat pull-down machine with wood blocks to support the test panel. Weight lifting plates placed on the sliding weight holder pressed down on a 2" wide strip of stainless steel on the test panel.

Our first sample broke at 176 lbs. The 2" x 12" long test panel weighs only 1.75 ounces and I since I weigh only 155 lbs, I could stand on it without it breaking. However, when it broke during the test, the sample sheared apart due to a poor bond between a thin coat of micro on the core and the first layer of carbon - not good.

We made a new panel without the micro and it weighed less at only 1.6 ounces and tested much better. The photo shows how it sheared under compression on the top layer as expected.

I coated another sample panel with an additional coat of epoxy which would simulate a surface finish coating (like micro and paint) and re-tested it. This .3 oz layer of epoxy made it a whopping 60 pounds stronger in the break test and it took 200 lbs to break it!

The most important test is the flatwise tensile test which measures the bond between the laminate layers and the core. What we didn't want to see, is the laminate layers separating from each other, or separating from the core.

To break the 1.25" diameter core sample took almost every weight I had - a total of 276 lbs!

This test resulted in a high 96% of theoretical optimal strength and it broke half-way through the core material which is exactly what we wanted to see.

We had the panel drawings printed out at full-scale. These will be used to trace the panel shape onto the flat carbon panels, then they will be cut out and assembled in a wood jig that will hold the panels in position until they are joined together and bulkheads are inserted.

This is a photo of Ken looking down the pattern. The exact length on the print-out was about 20 mm short of what it is supposed to be, so we are going to ask the printers to re-print them.

------------------------

Helen and I are off on a hiking trip to Peru to visit Machu Pichuu on Saturday. It's an organized hiking trip from lodge to lodge as we make our way from Cusco to the legendary ancient civilization of Machu Pichuu. I am going to take the opportunity to fit in plenty of trail running at altitude in preparation for my 50 mile ultra marathon in June.

Motivation

2009-03-01T08:13:00.003-07:00

I just finished a 100 km running week. I'm not sure if I have ever run that much in one week previously, but I didn't find it that tough. I think the most difficult part was running INSIDE around a track for two, 2-hour runs and one, 3-hour run. The weather here is still cold and icy and I really hate running outside when it's minus 20.

I've been passing the time listening to audio books while making my endless circles around the track. The most recent book that I'm REALLY loving is "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell. I really like it because it really supports what I truly believe, and speak about - that if you want something badly enough, you CAN accomplish almost ANYTHING you set your mind to. And, that innate talent isn't really a very important factor for success.

What do hockey player's birthdays and The Beatles early gigs in German strip clubs teach us about MOTIVATION?

They both serve as really great evidence that innate ability is NOT a very important factor in achieving success. When we realize that and take it to heart, we are encouraged to believe that we can indeed accomplish ANYTHING if we are willing to do the work involved, and that knowledge provides us with the motivation we need to pursue our goals with confidence and enthusiasm.

According to Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers", a very strange coincidence was noticed in a hockey player roster - an unusually large percentage of of the players on the team had birthdays in January. The remainder of the team had birthdays in February or March. He looked into it and discovered this strange birthday effect in other sports in other countries around the world. And he also found this effect is other disciplines as well - not just sports. The reason people born early in the year were better at sports, and music and chess and school and many other challenges in life was simple - every time you have a cut-off date to join a group when you are young, those born earlier in the year have a TIME advantage over those born later in the year.

So - in our 'clever' system designed to filter through millions of young children to select the best of the best of the best in terms of innate talent for our sports teams, dance competitions, debate teams, piano recitals, etc, what we actually end up doing is simply sorting our kids by month of birth, and singling out those born earlier in the calendar year who are up to a full year older and more mature than the other kids in that 12 month age bracket. When you are 8 years old, 10 months worth of age advantage is a full 10% of your life!

Why is Tiger Woods such an amazing golfer? It is no secret that he practiced like a maniac from a VERY early age. Tiger was playing golf on a regular basis when he was 2 years old. Because his father introduced him to golf at an extremely early age of 18 months and encouraged him to practice intensively, Woods had racked up at least 15 years of practice by the time he became the youngest-ever winner of the U.S. Amateur Championship, at age 18. Did you know that the Beatles used to play on stage in Hamburg strip clubs for 8 hours per day? By the time they became "over night sensations" in North America, then had already practiced more hours than most other bands did in their entire careers!

Same goes with Bill Gates and programming computers. He just happened to have access to a university computer lab that had new, very fast time-sharing mainframe computers, and spent thousands of hours leaning programming. By the time he was in late high school, he was probably one of the most talented computer programmers on the planet.

What does this have to do with motivation? Well, it turns out that success in almost anything at all has WAY more to do with the amount of TIME we have to PRACTICE (or WORK at learning how to do it) than innate talent. So, if you really want to be the best drummer in the world, the best speller in your grade, the best chef in your city, the best sales rep in your region, the fastest runner in your age group or simply the best friend you can be, then you need to know that you can do it if you are both willing and able to WORK at it!

Studies have shown that we we BELIEVE we can accomplish something, we are far more likely to invest the time into working toward that goal. Kids in groups who were told they were the top 10%, practiced an average of 30% MORE than the remainder of the group. And this had nothing to do with talent - it's just that those children were slightly older than the other kids in the age-grouping and had the benefit of almost a full year of extra practice time under their belts. Since they were singled out each year as the best in their groups, they eagerly increased their practice time by an additional 30% over the other kids. This has a compounding effect - 30% more time invested each year, year after year, means that when you turn 18, and a hockey scout watches your team play hockey, you are probably going to stand out as some kind of super star.

In my speech Bold!, I say that the first step in accomplishing a goal is to get out there on the edge and make it big. Our boldness toward choosing a goal provides us with the, excitement and passion that we are going to require on our journey. Anything less and we just won't care enough. But the very first step in this process is to boldly BELIEVE that you ARE capable of doing it! Your belief will provide you with the motivation to invest the time and effort into achieving your goal because you will KNOW that you are capable of achieving success!

So what is it that YOU want to accomplish? Is it BOLD enough? And are you willing to go to work? If so, there is no limit to what you can accomplish. Believe in yourself and in the words of Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe: "What you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. For boldness has genius, power and magic in it." BEGIN IT!

Have you become world class at something? If so, I would like to hear from you. Send me an email, or add a comment to this blog post and tell me about your accomplishment AND, tell me approximately how many hours you invested into it. Malcolm has calculated that it takes about 10,000 hours to become world class at almost anything. I'd like to run a little experiment to see if this is true. Send me a note and I will compile the results in a future blog post.

Cheers,

Greg

Marathons, Motivation, Making Boats & Most Extreme

2009-02-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

Surf City Marathon

Helen and I just got back from a GREAT trip down to Huntington Beach, California for the Surf City Marathon - a top rate event which I HIGHLY recommend if you are looking for a scenic marathon to run. We were there with our good friends Kevin and Cindy Casper.

Cindy had a great race and she qualified for the Boston marathon! Way to go Cindy! Kevin ran his first half marathon, and Helen successfully finished her 15th marathon - whew! I had a good day as well with my 2nd best time of 3:17, 11th in my division and a Boston qualification.

Ultra Marathon

As you might recall, I am planning a possible attempt at the indoor velodrome 1 hour unfaired recumbent record for some point next Spring/Summer. However, since my training for the Surf City marathon went so well, I have decided to also plan something that I've been wanting to do for many, many years now - a 50 mile (80.5 km) Ultra Marathon. Yikes! I haven't picked the race yet, but it will be in June which gives me about 4 months to train. My training started on the day after the Surf City Marathon with an attempt to run which was quite laughable. More like a very enthusiastic hobble than a run. Boy was I sore from that marathon!

Training for the ultra will consist of short runs almost every day with two back to back long runs each week consisting of 3 to 4 hours each. I am actually looking forward to the challenge.

New Web Site www.Human-Power.com

My speaking career has been keeping me very busy. I was in DC a couple of weeks ago to speak to Nutricia Corporation and that was a TON OF FUN! They are a GREAT group and I got a super enthusiastic response from them. Future bookings include a potential presentation for a Winter Olympic sponsor event in Vancouver!

A lot of my business is generated by Google search, and my web site www.human-power.com place on organic google search for keywords "motivational speaker" in very important. To improve my position, I need to start to generate links from other web sites to my human-power.com web site.

You would be doing me a huge solid if you could link http://www.human-power.com from your web site - possibly with the linked text "motivational speaker" Many thanks, and I would be happy to link back to yours from this blog in return.

Also, if there is anything at the speaking web site that you care to comment on, please email me your thoughts at greg@human-power.com. Sometimes we are so close to our trees, that it become difficult to see our forests if you know what I mean. I have worked very hard with my mentor - motivational speaker Steve Donahue, on staying relateable in my actual presentation which I think has resulted in a very impactfull but honest presentation. Your comments - both good and bad are appreciated.

PedalTheOcean.com progress

Ken and I have ordered and received all of the carbon and core supplies and we are ready to sart construction of the new ocean crossing boat. We are just waiting for final details on the drawings from naval architect Stuart Bloomfield.

As you may recall, last year I made a 30 mile trip out into the Pacific ocean from Tofino, BC with the prototype version of WiTHiN and encountered some 15 foot swells and I got so sick I thought I was going to die. Link to that blog post here. I really love the wild west coast of Vancouver Island and was so inspired during the two sea trials that I conducted there, that I decided to look more seriously into a new route for PedalTheOcean.

Rather than crossing the Atlantic by human power which dozens (and dozens and dozens) have already done, I could be the first person to travel from Canada to Hawaii under his own power - this has never been attempted before. The distance is about the same as my Canary Island to Barbados route, and the currents, waves and average weather conditions are also similar.

I contracted weather expert Rick Shema at www.WeatherGuy.com to do an analysis and comparison of both routes, and Rick thinks the new route is doable. I have a PDF report if anyone is interested in reading it. A departure window of May/June is required, so I am looking at possibly June of 2010. This gives me this winter and spring to finish construction and this summer, and next winter for sea trials and experience building.

Most EXTREME

OK - check this out. Ollie Hicks has departed from Tasmania on his ultra extreme ocean rowing quest - to be the first person to circumnavigate the planet by rowing. He is circling Antarctica via the Southern ocean. Ollie is rowing 18,000 miles of the most hostile marine environment on earth. He will will encounter freezing temperatures, 50 foot waves - OMG! You can follow his progress here. I will certainly be watching.

Also Mostly EXTREME

Jennifer Figge is attempting to become the first women to swim across the Atlantic Ocean. Figge is a 56-years-old mother, ultra runner, and swimmer. A few weeks ago she dove into the Atlantic ocean with the goal to swim across 2100 miles from the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast to Barbados. According to Jennifer, her epic swim should take about two months, swimming around eight hours a day, but the math doesn't add up. An average endurance swimmer can swim about 3 km / hour (on flat, calm water - not in rough, open ocean!). 8 hours per day * 3 km/hr = 24 km per day. 2100 miles converted to km is 3300 km. 3300 km / 24 km pr day is 137.5 days! that's about 4 1/2 months, not a couple of months. Still, I wish Jennifer the best of luck and I will definitely be following. Here is Jennifer's FaceBook page.

Mens Journal

2008-12-10T11:16:00.004-07:00

Hey everyone.

Not much to report aside from my training is going fairly well - just plugging away at the training program my coach Jason Yanota made up for me. The riding is all inside on the mag trainer which, for shorter-harder workouts, isn't so bad.

I've been in dental hell since getting a pile of work done on November 24th. One of the crowns abscessed and now I need a root canal - scheduled for today, gulp!

I picked up the January issue of Men's Journal and I'm on page 22 which is kind of cool! Check it out:

(click to enlarge)

We ordered the materials for the new ocean crossing boat (carbon, core, etc) and we'll start construction as soon as Stuart Bloomfield finishes the drawings and the materials arrive.

I've hired local composites guy Ken from Stratto Composites, and we're going to start building the new boat in his basement. We will start with laying up flat carbon panels, then trace and cut out the cured panels, then lay them into a jig and seam together to form the hull. This method of boat building is called 'developable panels'.

I have a short demo video and a FREE PDF photo book available for download called "Bold!":

http://www.human-power.com/free

This book is also available in PRINTED form. Let me know if you would like one and I can direct you to a site where you can order it for $6.00

Motivational speaking is a lot of fun for me, it's a great way to spread my message about the benefits of being active.

watts and speaking

2008-11-26T18:39:00.005-07:00

It looks like Jason Yanota's most excellent training program is paying off. I hit 270 watts today for my 20 minute test. That's not all that outstanding compared to the world of what is possible, but considering that I started at a wimpy 250 watts about 6 weeks ago, that's not bad.

As you might recall, I purchased a NoCom a couple of months ago with the intention of using the winter to train for a possible shot at the recumbent indoor velodrome 1 hour record.

Step #1 is to get my power output up to about 300 watts for 20 minutes, and my buddy Jason agreed to coach me. It looks like all of those KILLER intervals are paying off. I'm hoping another couple of months of these will get me close to my 300 watt goal.

---------------------
The Keynote speech at Metafore Corporation on Thursday night went very well! Metafore VP Cyrille Armand introduced me and then flew off to Arizona to compete in his first Ironman triathlon! He finished with an AMAZING 11:35 finishing time. Fantastic job buddy! You are an Ironman!

The keynote was a lot of fun. The audience laughed a lot, which was great to see, and I really get fired up from that kind of feedback.

I got the chance to speak to about 300 to 400 people (200 in the main room with another 200 watching via projector in the second room) about the joys of being active and achieving your goals by being BOLD, and I had a lot of fun.

Bold! Keynote speech by Greg Kolodziejzyk from Greg Kolodziejzyk on Vimeo.
www.human-power.com

Keynote speech

2008-11-22T14:54:00.006-07:00

Yesterdays keynote speech at Metafore Corporation here in Calgary at the Palliser Hotel went very well! I was invited to present at Metafore's customer appreciation night 2 months ago.

My messages about not quiting, the importance of having a strong vision in accomplishing your goals, and why being bold about your challenge will give you an edge went over well.

It's been FAR too long!

2008-11-20T08:01:00.007-07:00

Wow - how time flies hey?

I have been very bad at keeping the blog up to date - sorry. Here is a quick update on some of the various projects I am working on:

PedalTheOcean.com - human powered ocean crossing

You might recall that last winter I decided to push the pause button on PedalTheOcean for a few reasons.

One of the reasons, was to focus on getting the 24 hour human powered boat record right. In June of 2006, I built a pedal powered boat and challenged what I thought to be the world record for the most distance traveled by human power on water of 168 km (according to the International Human powered Vehicle Association). I found out that Carter Johnson had bettered that by a HUGE amount. 242 km to be exact. I wanted to revisit the challenge and do it right this time. I spent the entire Spring, summer and early fall, designing, building and testing a new boat that would be capable of challenging Carters kayak record.

I was successful when I surpassed Carters 242 km mark with 20 minutes left to go and ended up with a total of 245.16 km in 24 hours on Whitefish Lake, September 8th, 2008.

The other reason for pausing was to get a grip on the entire expedition - what I really wanted to gain from it, and how I wanted it organized to facilitate a safe and fulfilling journey for me and everyone involved.

I have decided to change a few things:

1. I am NOT going to stamp a strict time constraint schedule on the project. Frankly, there is no hurry and I don't need the stress.

2. I am not going to stress about finding a corporate sponsor. If one comes along and there is a good fit, then great, if not, then I am prepared to do what I need to do, to make the crossing along with my personal and small business sponsors (that's you guys!) who have been very supportive so far.

3. I will DEFINITELY do the crossing WITH a safety boat. This is a promise that I made to my family and I plan on keeping it.

4. I am thinking about changing oceans. Canada to Hawaii has never been human powered and it would be a first. Other advantages of this new route is not having to find (and PAY$$$) a way to ship my boat to Canary Islands and not having to deal with any of the other logistics such as the Spanish Coast guard, etc. I have already checked in with the Canadian coast guard, and as long as my vessel was safe, they wouldn't object to allowing me to leave. I have hired Rick Shema from Weatherguy.com - a weather expert who did a viability study of the new Pacific route and it is very comparable to the Atlantic Canary Island to West Indies route. May would be the preferable departure month. If all goes as envisioned, then May of 2010 (next May) would be my departure date.

I have started construction of Ocean WiTHiN - the new ocean crossing boat designed by naval architect Stuart Bloomfield. The drawings are being finished now and I am happy to announce that I have hired local composites guy Ken Fortney to start construction.

We would like to have the new boat (for now called Ocean WiTHiN, or OW for short) ready for open water testing in the Spring, then maybe sea trials in the summer. My goal would be to spend as much time on-board gaining experience in the Pacific ocean off of the west coast of Tofino later this summer and next winter in preparation for a journey to Hawaii in May (conditions permitting).

Recumbent indoor velodrome hour record

My training is going pretty good. I have increased my 20 minute power from 250 watts to 260 watts over the last 7 week cycle. That's not super great, and really nothing to brag about, but it is improving and my latest 20 minute test which was yesterday may have been a bit lower than what I was capable of. I'll try another test this weekend. I would really like to see 270 watts. The NoCom is great, but I haven't been outside because the ground is now covered with snow, so most of my training has been inside on the mag trainer (another reason why the 20 average power might be a bit low).

I have some ideas for cleaning up the steering tiller bar which in my opinion is a very large creator of drag. I plan to get onto experimenting with some of my ideas as soon as my schedule eases up, which should be after tomorrow night because....

Motivational Speaker

I am doing a keynote address to a corporation's annual customer event tonight. Professional motivational speaking is something that I have been passionate about since my sister Theresa and I started doing KidPower school presentations over 3 years ago. Each show I do is a big deal in my mind. They say that when you speak, your goal should be to change the world, but my goal is to change lives. I prepare and treat each presentation as seriously as I would for an Ironman race and a world record attempt.

Here is a quick 30 second introduction video to Bold!:
www.human-power.com

And here is a the web site for my motivatinal speaking:
www.human-power.com

Human Powered Flight

I'm not sure exactly what direction I want to pursue with this project. I have a few options. There are a few designs that are being considered and these will need to be built in-house from scratch (a huge job!). Another option is to bring a HPA over from Germany. Velair was built by Peter Frank in 1989 and requires at least 255 watts to maintain flight for at least 3 hours which is way beyond my ability for going after the impossible 115 km MIT Daedalus record.

I have spoken to Executive Vice President Al Krause from the IHPVA and Chris Roper, the IHPVA Vice President for Air records. They have agreed to set up a new record category that would be similar in spirit to the existing 24 hour human powered distance records for both land and water. Since accumulated flight distance in 24 hours is counted, I would be allowed to land and take-off as many times in 24 hours as I wanted - exactly the same rules that allowed for pit stops during my 24 HPV record in Critical Power as I made my way around the 1/4 mile oval race track in Eureka California, and the 24 hour human powered boat record in Whitefish where I circled a 5.79 km loop on Whitefish Lake in Montana.

Of course, the clock would continue to tick during the stops and only miles of actual flight would be counted (wheels off the ground). I'm thinking that a dry lake bed or the salt flats would work for this. Even better would be a frozen lake in the winter near sea level. I could use some sort of light weight skis. The advantage with this approach is density altitude - the air is much thicker at sea level when it is cold and the power required for lift is reduced.

One of the issues is getting the HPV over here from Germany which would require a container ship and cost about $5000. Still, far less expensive than building from scratch.

Well, that's all for now. I'll send out another update and let you know how the big keynote went. I'm getting excited!!

Cheers,
Greg

My new ride!

2008-10-29T19:28:00.003-06:00

Check out the new ride! The Nocom lowracer from Velokraft.
More about the bike at Warren's site.

The Nocom is made by Velokraft out of Krakow, Poland. There are only a hand full of these radical bikes in North America - and probably the world.

My Nocom is pretty extreme because it is unpainted to save some weight. It definitely has that "ratrod" look. It needs a lot of mods to make it really fast. Mostly with the tiller bar - too make wires and that position puts my arms in not the best aero position. I have some radical ideas about how to possibly change that. It will be fun playing around with it.

You can see in the photo above that my arms are not in the most ideal aerodynamic position. I would like to see if I can develop some kind of steering system (maybe remote steering, or maybe a tiller) that stretches my arms all the way forward and down.

The reason I purchased the Nocom is for a couple of reasons:

1. My M5 is on it's last legs. I've put thousands and thousands of miles on that work horse and it is literally falling apart. To get it back into decent shape would require some work, but I am ready for something faster and lighter.

2. My winter training project is to ramp up my hour power (CP60) to something above 250 watts. Right now it's something like 260 to 270 watts for 20 minutes which is probably quite average. I've had my 20 minute power as high as 300 watts, but that was on the Cervelo tri bike. I would like to try to get it back up there on the Nocom and my coach Jason Yanota is helping me.

The reason I am working on my short distance power is I would like to take a shot at the unfaired recumbent hour record. The current record holder is Sean Costin who pedalled his Nocom 47.89 km (29.76 miles) on September 1, 2007 at the Home Depot velodrome in Los Angeles. Here is the YouTube video of Sean's recumbent hour record:

I know that the UCI hour record is way higher at 56.375 km for the 'best human performance category' and 49.7 km for the UCI legal category. And that is with a regular upright time-trial bike, but the recumbent hour distances are slowly moving higher. Old farts like me and Sean need to start pushing those distances up and maybe someday a REAL athlete will take a shot at it and blow the UCI record out of the water.

My goal would be to better the current UCI legal hour record which is 49.7 km (I believe). Is that possible? I'm really not sure. There is no drag coefficient data available for the Nocom and even if there were, my nocom would feature different handle bars, 2 disc wheels with a glued-on tubular on the rear, converted to a single speed with no breaks - basically a very minimal configuration and I would be able to take advantage of the low Crr of a wood velodrome track. So, I really need to get this Nocom into super speedy shape and run some power tests on a smooth velodrome track somewhere to get an idea of exactly where my power needs to be to challenge 50 kph.

Here is a great list of all the hour records through history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_record

And my final little bit of news is that the IHPVA (International Human Powered Vehicle Association) has just ratified my 245.16 km, 24 hour human powered boat distance record from September 8th, 2008 on Whitefish Lake in Montana. It has been ratified by both Guinness and the IHPVA.

LATE BREAKING NEWS:

OOPS! I spoke too soon and hadn't been paying attention (typical). I just posted a new blog update announcing my plans to challenge Sean Costin's 47.89 km hour record and was immediately notified that Seans record was just broken in the Netherlands by Gert-Jan Wijers who went over 50 km!!

It looks like Bram Moens from M5 (makers of my M5 lowracer) had recumbent cyclist Gert-Jan Wijers ride his new M5 HIGH racer to a record 50.389 kilometers for the hour on October 24, 2008 on a velodrome track in the Netherlands.

Oh well, the bar has been raised. This will be TOUGH!!!! Yikes!!!

Here is the YouTube video of Gert-Jan's record ride:

And here are some additional photos of my NoCom:

Critical Power in the 2009 Guinness Book

2008-10-18T12:11:00.006-06:00

Man, it's been a while since I've blogged... I've been busy and I guess there just hasn't been much news of interest to report. Until just now.

It seems that the 24 hour human powered vehicle record from 2006 in Eureka, CA was picked up by the editors of the 2009 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. There is a photo of Critical Power on page 113 directly beside Richard Branson - one of my hero's. That is quite a thrill for me!

I actually met Richard Branson when we were on a family vacation in Maui. We were walking on the beach at night looking up at the Hale-Bopp comet - remember that? And we walked right into Sir Richard Branson who was out for a stroll with his family. I introduced myself and shook his hand.

Ever since then Richard has become quite a nuisance. You know, constantly asking me for favors, advice, etc, etc... Now that we're together on the same page of the Guinness book, I'll never hear the end of it...

Other news is that Guinness has ratified the 245.16 km human powered boat distance record from Whitefish Lake last month. The IHPVA still hasn't ratified it - that could take years (seriously).

I am training rather hard these days trying to increase my short-term power output, which, after so much training this summer, is very impressively average. My coach is Jason Yanota and the goal is to try to get my power output up to somewhere near 280 to 300 watts for an hour. There is an intermediate challenge that I am focusing on that will require at least 250 watts straight for one hour.

I'll say more about the intermediate challenge when my NEW BIKE arrives! Training for this will prepare me for a much bigger goal on my horizon: A Human Powered Flight record. Here are a few ideas I've been playing around with:

Any ideas, suggestions, hints, thoughts, questions about HPA's - let me have'em. I'm not sure exactly what kind of record, or what kind of human powered airplane this would be - or even if I will build it. Just doing some information gathering and learning work before planing the details of a new record attempt.

This is not to suggest that Pedal The Ocean trans Atlantic project is off. One of my goals this early winter is to start construction of the new ocean crossing vessel. Nimbus kayaks is interested in building it for me, or I could build it myself - I'm open to ideas. If anyone knows of a good boat builder, please let me know.

24 hour HPB record report

2008-09-15T17:41:00.007-06:00

Wow... "this is one of those moments that I will never, ever forget" I thought. My senses were being overloaded. It was nothing less than absolutely spectacular. From my three sentence blog that I typed in over my Blackberry from on board Critical Power 2 in the middle of Whitefish lake sometime around midnight: "15.5 hours into this world record attempt and I'm feeling amazing. The lake at night is absolutely spectacular. I know it can change in a minute but I'm really having a great time right now." I wondered if I was on another planet. I was turning my headlight off to get a better feel for this surreal night and I had just seen my 3rd shooting start. There must have been some major meteorite shower happening as these weren't just specs of light streaking across the sky. I'm talking full-on fireballs that leave long, dark smoke trails in their wake. On top of it all, I was feeling amazing. I mean really, really good. My average was slipping, but I was feeling no pain, and very little fatigue to speak of. The water had calmed down substantially since early evening, and I was still really cruising along rocking out to my iPod and singing at the top of my lungs. I was truly on top of the world. To experience this moment, I thought, was really what this adventure was all about. To experience a moment like this, in fact, is what EVERY adventure is really all about. This one single fleeting moment will last forever as a memory and it definitely makes every bit of effort, stress and hardship I had dealt with over the previous 5 months totally worth it.

The song that I chose to start my attempt to break uber kayaker Carter Johnson's unthinkable 242 km world record was fittingly appropriate - as it traditionally is. "Shut up and let me go" by the Ting Tings. It had been a big-time stressful week for me leading up to the attempt and I kept focusing on what I was there to do - to GO. To go as hard as I could for 24 hours without ever stopping. DOING the record was the easy part in many ways. The months of boat designing, building, testing, training and organizing was the hard part, with the stress definitely culminating in the few days leading up to the big event and I was really looking forward to getting on with the real job at hand. So just let me go!

I arrived in Whitefish on Wednesday and met with Skip Schloss who lived right on Whitefish lake and who kindly offered to act as my event organizer. Skip had found some volunteers to act as officials, helped me with some valuable ideas about exactly where to best take advantage of calm water for my course, booked a work boat to set the buoys, booked a surveyor to measure my course, sent out press releases to the local media, and got permission from the State to string some buoys to mark a course, and to use the lake for a 24 hour period. Skip was a gold mine of resources and a tremendous help.

One of the problems we had to overcome was where to station our official observers so that they could see me at all times as I made my way around the course. This took a few days to iron out, as I had to design my course along the protected west shore in Google Earth, download the way point coordinates into my Garmin GPS, then ride the course with Critical Power 2 to make sure that I was able to make the turns with her tiny, but efficient rudder. We also had to confirm that all of the markers would be visible from our observer stations along the course. This required many revisions, as my first course design was too tight and I found myself drifting dangerously close to shore, and some other ideas were hidden from view.

By Sunday, we had designed a 5.79 km out and back course with two turn around loops at each end that was placed along the west shore with the north turn around near a dock at the north end of the lake. This meant that we could station one observer on the dock for 24 hours to watch me clear the buoys in the north turn around loop, and we found that with a small array of telescopes situated in Skips house, on his deck and his neighbors lawn, that a second observer could see all of the buoys in the south turn around.

On Saturday I inflated 12 buoys, assembled and fastened flashing red LED lights to each of them, purchased some cinder blocks and some rope from the local hardware store, picked up some borrowed scopes and binoculars, confirmed with my official observers, and went through the pages of other last minute details before 'riding' my course just one more time. As luck would have it, during my last test on Whitefish Lake with CP2, I slammed the right outrigger float directly into the dock during a miscalculated 'landing' and snapped my outrigger standoffs in two. When I took CP2 out of the water, I found that the shock of the crash caused all of my 3/8" aluminum bolts to gall up (stick together, or seize) and I had to torque them apart with a wrench. I replaced the thick aluminum bolts with some thinner 1/4" stainless bolts which I thought would be fine, but would actually cause me some grief later on during the record attempt. The bolts secure the outrigger floats onto the outrigger struts in a level attitude and stop them from teeter tottering over the waves.

On Sunday, Helen, Ben, Theresa, Pat and their two kids Nick and Andy arrived from Calgary and while Helen and Theresa did some last minute shopping to get all of my support supplies ready (food, water, clothing, etc), Pat and Ben and the guys from the Whitefish Lake Services got to work dropping the buoys down into the lake to mark my course.

By Sunday night everything was ready for a 9:00 am Monday start. It was all up to me now and I wasn't exactly bursting with confidence.

Every calculation I had done - every simulation, every speed test - all confirmed that I would NOT be able to break Carters 241.8 km record. I had three 24 hour events that I had completed previously and I knew exactly how many watts of power I was physically capable of exerting for 24 hours. Knowing that I needed to end up with at least an average of 10.1 km/hr average speed to break Carters record, I also knew to a 10th of a km/hr, how fast Critical Power 2 was at various power inputs, and my average power required to maintain that critical 10.1 km/hr speed was about 10% higher than I was capable of. And this was during ideal, perfect conditions of zero wind and mirror glass calm water, which I don't think really exists for 24 hours anywhere on any lake in the world. Add some wind and waves, a few stops to change clothes and you end up with power output requirements of up to 20% higher than I have ever done before for 24 straight hours.

I had shaved Critical Power 2's weight down to just under 40 pounds, as I had calculated that every pound of additional weight could be worth up to 1 km at the end of 24 hours. I had even lost 6 pounds of body weight to weigh in at 148 pounds on race day in the hope that if I did everything possible to make CP2 faster, that it would result in slightly less pressure on my own physical performance.

I had done everything I could possibly do to make Critical Power 2 competitive with Carter's Surfski kayak record and it was now all up to me. I had to perform like I have never performed before. This was going to be tough. There was a long history of conventionally human powered boat 24 hour distance records I was challenging and there were many skeptical paddlers following my attempt, so the pressure was really on. Here is a quick history of the 24 hour paddle records, as well as the 24 hour 'pedal-boat' records. As you can see, there is obvious reason for the paddler to be skeptical of what I was attempting to do.

Kayak 24 hour records:

Date	Rider	Type	Distance
1986	Randy Fine	surfski	193 km
1991	Marinda Hartzenberg	canoe	220.5 km
2006	Brandon Nelson	kayak	235 km
2006	Carter Johnson	surfski	241.8 km

Pedal powered boat 24 hour records:

Date	Rider	Type	Distance
2000	Kevin & Karin Hughes	Microcat Ultra	90.25 km
2000	John Howard	Pedalos	168.43 km
2005	Team of 3 riders	Trieste Waterbike	176.8 km
2007	Greg Kolodziejzyk	WiTHiN	173.76 km

Controversy

As you can see from the "pedal powered boat" record list, I had attempted this record in June last summer. I did successfully beat John Howard's HPVA ratified 168.4 km record by pedaling my pedal and propeller powered kayak 173.76 km in 24 hours. I was contacted soon after what I thought was a victorious world record to be told that Carter Johnson along with a long list of others using conventional human powered boats like kayaks and canoes, showed a history of distances in 24 hours far beyond my paltry 174 km.

My objective regarding my pursuit of the human powered boat record is the same pure ideal that I believe in and used to guide my human powered vehicle record quest that was successful in 2006 of 1142 km - that is, to go farther than any other human has on water (or land in the case of my 1142 km land record) in 24 hours using my own power. Simple and elegant and pure. A paddled kayak DEFINITELY counts as self-powered, and as far as I am concerned, basically re-labels all of the previous 24 hour HPVA HPB records into a category that should be called "PEDAL POWERED boat records", not "HUMAN POWERED boat records". They are grossly mislabeled. John Howard's 168 km 24 hour human powered boat record from 2000 is NOT a "human powered" boat record. It is a "pedal boat" record because 14 years previous a fellow by the name of Randy Fine paddled his surf ski 193 km around a lake course setting the true "human powered" boat record. In all fairness to the HPVA, none of the previous canoe/kayak record holders were members of the HPVA, followed the HPVA competition rules or had their records ratified by the HPVA. Except for Carter who took the trouble to register with the HPVA, use HPVA officials and submit his record to them. Carters record has not yet been ratified by the HPVA, but I recognize it as the true bench mark for human powered 24 hour distance on water, as I do all of the kayak and canoe records dating back to 1986.

If the true goal of the IHPVA is to encourage technological innovation in the pursuit of human powered efficiency, then we need to know what works best, where to start and what the real targets are. If paddling a boat with oars or paddles is more efficient than propelling it with pedals and propellers, then I think that is what the IHPVA boat designers and record attempters need to be focused on either as honest bench marks that can be challenged using innovation and new technology, or as existing technologies that can possibly be improved on.

My goal was to see if human powered pedal and propeller boats could possibly be more efficient than a paddled boat at long distances. If I could beat Carters record, then it would be the final straw in the old debate as to which method of self propulsion was better, as all of the shorter distance records are currently held by pedal powered boats.

The Attempt

After a huge and delicious spaghetti dinner, followed by a large slice of calorie drenched cheese cake at our traditional "Last Supper" at Mambo Italiano restaurant in Whitefish we all headed back up to our cabin on Big Mountain and I enjoyed a restful nights sleep. I woke up refreshed at 7:00 am on Monday morning, ate a good breakfast, downed a couple cups of java and we all headed down the mountain to Skips house on the lake. When I got to Skip's house, I met with my two IHPVA officials Tom Arnone and Glen Nye and went over some IHPVA rules, their stations, viewing my course through the scopes, recording my lap times in the binder, using the atomic clock to time the start, and the race finishing procedure for Tuesday morning (which really felt strange because it seemed so very far away!).

Then Ben and I climbed into Pat Lor's boat and headed to Senator Weinberg's house where CP2 was waiting for me at his dock. I negotiated through a rather thick patch of weeds on the short trip from the Senators dock to the north observation dock and official starting line. The water was like glass - as per what the weather forecast was predicting. There waiting for me was the rest of the crew on our second support boat - a large pontoon flat deck boat rented from Extreme Motorsports. We cleaned off the mop of weeds from my prop, bow and rudder, then allowed the officials Glen and Tom to inspect CP2. After finding no secret sails or mini nuclear powered motors, we got prepared for the starting countdown. Using the Atomic clock we purchased at Radio Shack the day before, head official Tom Arnone counted the seconds down to exactly 9:30 am, and shouted GO! I crossed the green start buoy and headed out to my first marker.

My plan was to be conservative and to try to maintain an easy pace of 10.5 km/hr from the start to the finish which would put me at 252 km total and about 10 km over Carter's record. But this was far more difficult in reality because 10.5 kph felt far too easy and I was feeling rather ambitious, so decided right then and there that I would try to nail 11 km/hr for as long as I could and allow the overall average to slowly drop down to 10.5 as the 24 hours rolled by.

Once every hour or so, I would radio Helen and Theresa to tell them what I needed as far as my nutrition and hydration requirements go. Helen and I decided that since I have had stomach issues in the past, this time we were going to try to stay away from the typical carbohydrate packed energy bars and try to incorporate more regular food into my diet. I consumed 300 to 400 calories per hour consisting of pretzels, fig newtons, some balanced energy bars with a higher percentage of protein and fat with the carbs, bagels with peanut butter, noodle soup, some natural honey gels and even a cheese sandwich. To hydrate, I was consuming about 1 liters per hour of water mixed with an electrolyte. I got sick of the taste of the electrolyte after 10 hours, so switched to regular water. Over the night I drank 2 cokes, 2 Redbulls, a cup of coffee, and a cup of hot chocolate in the morning. I am happy to say that this plan worked out very well and provided me with a steady energy level without spikes and a very happy stomach.

The support package hand-offs were conducted via an extendable golf ball retriever pole with a soft vinyl lunch basket hung over the end of the rod. The extended pole was typically held by Helen from the edge of the pontoon boat. Without pausing the turn-over of the pedals, I was able to cruise right under the basket, grab it and keep on going. While I pedaled on, I unzipped the basket, removed my goodies, threw in my garbage and empty water bottle, then tossed the whole bag into the lake. They would follow me in the support boat and pick up the basket from the water.

Helen and Theresa had set up a camp at Skip's neighbors dock on the East side of the lake. My course was on the west side. When I needed something, I would call them via the two way radio, and they would hop onto the pontoon boat and cruise out to meet me somewhere along my course at the north end. This system worked out perfectly. While Helen and Theresa were handling my support needs, Pat and Ben were busy in Pat's ski boat ferrying the local press around, taking Jeff the surveyor from F & H Land Surveying around to the buoys for precise GPS location measurement, activating the LED lights on the buoys, and other general running around as issues popped up throughout the day and night. Ben was busy inside Skips with web updates, and on the course taking photos and shooting video. What a team! They were efficient, organized and had everything under control. I was able to do my thing without a concern or worry in the world about the all the crucial stuff that was happening back stage. I am very lucky to have this kind of support and I do not take it for granted.

At about 4 hours into the record attempt, the wind started to pick up from the South and make rougher conditions at the North. There was no shelter from this wind or waves along my West side course, so I had to increase my power output a bit to counter the slowdown caused by the waves. To maintain my current 10.9 kph average, I found that I had to maintain 11.5 kph on the leg going into the wind, and 10.5 to 10 on the downwind leg. This was frustrating, but I knew that it was typically the windiest part of the day and that it should calm down as night approached.

At about 7:00 pm, the water got much better and I had watched my average slip to 10.7 km/hr from 11 during the windy day. I was really going to try to not let it slip further than 10.7 if the night would stay calm. But it didn't. The wind slowly started picking up and not before long it was blowing from the North this time making whitecaps at my south turn around. I was still feeling very good though, so I just sucked it up and tried as hard as I could not to stop pedaling and not to let that average drop any further.

I was really surprised at how warm I was staying. The forecast was predicting evening low temperatures of the low 40's and I could definitely feel the temperature drop as I approached the North turn around and observation dock. But as soon as I got back down over deep water, I warmed up immediately. I think the lake water absorbs some heat during the day which was keeping me in a light sweater for most of the night.

At about 3:00 am I took my first and only quick break to slip on long tights over my legs and a light jacket. I also placed foot warmers into my socks. This pit stop took all of about 3 minutes and I was off. My average had been slipping through the night due to the ever increasing wind and was now at 10.4 kph. I now wasn't totally sure I was going to make it to 242 km before 9:30 am on Tuesday.

The last 5 hours were pretty tough. I was tired, no longer hungry, but kept stuffing food in, and getting pretty fatigued. I was also having problems doing the math. The average on my GPS was still showing an above record pace of 10.3 kph, but I knew that this wasn't my "REAL" average, as we were counting laps that were surveyed and my real average speed was the total time divided by my actual distance covered as per the surveyed course. I radioed the south observer Greg B who had taken over during the night shift from Tom and asked him for my actual average. He gave me the disappointing news that it was much lower than I had hoped for. I had to keep my speed up, I could NOT give into the agony and slow. Greg was kind enough to continually reassure me that I had the record if I could keep my speed going and this was exactly what I needed to hear.

So I pressed on. I passed Carters 241.8 km world record on my 42nd lap at 09:19:40 on Tuesday morning with a total full-lap distance of 243.2 km and I knew I had a bit more than 10 minutes left to tack on as much distance as I could, so I really started to hammer. By then, the lake had calmed remarkably which was good, but I was noticing that one of my outrigger floats was bouncing around quite excessively. My smaller 1/4 stainless bolts that were replacing the thicker aluminum bolts had worked lose and the left hand float was how flopping around on it's strut. The bow of the float was plowing right through waves rather than skimming over them. How long had it been like this? In the calm water of the last 30 minutes, I figured that this torpedo float was costing me a couple of 10ths km/hr. This was not good. I think it was flopping around like that since the peak of the wind during the night. I am lucky that my average didn't slip any further than it did!

The support boat with head official Tom, the rest of the crew, and a TV and newspaper crew from Kalispell and Whitefish. Tom counted down the finish from the Atomic clock and Ben threw in a new buoy from Pat's motor boat at my finish location at exactly 09:30. Head official Tom was watching to ensure that the buoy correctly marked my finish location. Tom took a hand-held GPS reading of the finish buoy and recorded it. After subtracting 33 feet from the GPS reading to allow for the GPS accuracy, we would add the partial lap distance to my full lap distance to come up with a final distance. Since I was near shore, a land mark on the nearby shore was also noted and recorded as a reference to my finishing location.

Here are the UNOFFICIAL Distance calculations:

Course distance by F & H Land Surveying, Inc. = 19,003.88 ft (accuracy less than 1 cm)
Number of full laps completed in 24 hours as counted by official observers = 42
Total full lap distance (42 laps x 19,003.88 ft) = 79,8162.96 feet
Final partial lap distance calculation:

Distance of finishing point (dropped buoy at 09:30) from last surveyed marker (B6) = 3410.12 feet (Garmin GPS accuracy of 33 feet)
Distance of finishing buoy from last surveyed marker corrected less Garmin GPS error (3410.12 ft - 33 ft) = 3377.12 feet
Total distance of last partial lap from start buoy (B9) to finishing point (279.58 + 965.28 + 1559.84 + 3377.12) = 6181.82 feet

Total finishing distance = 804,344.78 feet (245.1642 km, 152.338 miles)

This record is NOT official until the records committee at the International Human Powered Vehicle Association ratify it.

Thanks to my HPVA officials:

Tom Arnone
Glen Nye
Greg Bradley
Bryon Howard
Eddie Monday

Thanks to my loyal and efficient support crew. Most of these amazing people have been with me through thick and thin since the first Alabama HPV record attempt in 2005.

Skip Schloss
Helen Kolodziejzyk
Ben Eadie
Theresa Lor
Pat Lor
Nicholas Lor
Andrew Lor

Special thanks to Whitefish Lake Services for donating their work boat and their time to set my buoy course. Special thanks also to Jeff Bell and F&H Land Surveying for providing me with a survey of my course and a distance calculation. I would also like to thank Skip's friend Sandy for taking some awesome photos, and Senator Dan Weinburg for letting me store Critical Power 3 at his house the night before the attempt. Thanks to Tom LaChance for the use of his dock for our North observation station, Skips neighbor Rick Anderson for the use of his dock and lawn for my support crew and of course Skip Schloss for the use of his house and his generous hospitality.

And finally, there would be no record if not for the help from Aussie engineer Rick Willoughby with the design of Critical Power 2 based on Rick's V11. With Rick, I had unlimited access to one of the true geniuses of the human powered boat world. In my opinion, there is not a more efficient boat design on the planet. Thanks Rick.

What's next

I am asked that quite often these days. I need to get back onto the Pedal the Ocean project. That needs to be completely re-organized and I'm just not exactly sure what that will be yet. But, I have realized one thing since taking a break from the Atlantic crossing, being on the water so much this summer and our kayak trip to Johnstone Straight. It is something that I really WANT to do. I will focus on that and find a way to organize the project in a way that makes my journey across the ocean safe and fulfilling.

Until then, I have another project that is in the incubation oven. With human power, I have conquered land, water, then ......

New world record!

2008-09-11T08:05:00.011-06:00

No person in history has traveled further on flat water under his own power in one day than Greg.

On September 9th, 2008 Greg Kolodziejzyk set an unofficial (pending IHPVA and Guinness ratification) world record by pedaling his human powered boat 245.16 km (151.3 miles) in 24 hours on Whitefish Lake, Montana.

Here is a slide show featuring some great photos. A complete race day report is forthcoming! Enjoy!