Bootstrapping Resources

In the Scottish Ruby Conference, Tekin Suleiman gave a great talk about his experiences in bootstrapping a web app. At the end of the talk there was a question about further resources into the subject. I’ve been into this thing for years now (both in the form of building Wildfire, dribbling with personal projects, and now with Bear Metal), so here’s my take on the subject.

First things first: Tekin mentioned Amy Hoy’s 30x500 class and that has been my philosophical home in the field as well. I was fortunate enough to join the class early on, but even after several price hikes it’s worth many times its cost if you’re committed to bootstrapping. But you really, really need to be committed. If not (yet), you should still read her blog Unicornfree from top to bottom to gain lots of insight into all things bootstrapping.

Another commonly mentioned resource is the Lean Startup book by Eric Ries and the lean startup community sparked by it. My issue with the book for a bootstrapper is that in the end of the day, its ideology is still your normal startup mentality, only executed in a more nimble manner. That said, it might be worthwhile to read the book, if only to know what people are talking about when they mention the MVP or validated learning.

If you’re doing anything related to web, Patrick McKenzie’s blog Kalzumeus and the related podcast is an indispensable resource. Another one is Brennan Dunn’s blog and mailing list. Nathan Barry has also written a lot of good stuff on the topic recently.

If you’re a conference kind of person, there are a few that hit the soft spot quite nicely. Hoy organizes one called BaconBizConf in late May. Microconf (unfortunately this year’s conf already was in April) is another one that has received a lot of praise. LessConf was great as well from what I’ve heard but I believe the past one was the last one there was.

Random resource pointers aside, I’ll next delve into some (as random) details and lessons I’ve learned about bootstrapping.

Perils of starting with an idea

An old adage says that ideas are worth nothing, execution is everything. However, most people will only hang on to the latter part of the saying, not taking the first part literally. In her class, Hoy takes this one step further, explaining why starting by looking for an idea to build is actually harmful for you. The reasons for this are manifold.

First of all, it is not very likely that you have a unique, great idea that is also sellable. It is much more likely that someone already had the same idea, tested it, and found out it did not work. Second, thinking that the starting point of a company is an idea found in a flash of deitic brilliance is a very nice path to despair. This effect Hoy calls the idea quicksand. In it you think you find a great idea, sit on it, let it subsume you, and finally give up. It victimizes and paralyzes you.

Lastly, starting a company with an idea is very likely to cause your thinking to suffer from serious confirmation bias. You harvest information that supports your idea and dismerit or ignore cues that would tell you your idea is in reality a stinking, unsellable pile of yak poo. We all are affected by it and it’s really, really hard to avoid it. So do yourself a favor and don’t start bootstrapping with a ready-baked idea.

So what should I start with, then?

To sell anything, you need a market. You need an audience. An audience is a mostly homogenous group of people. Ruby developers. Web designers. Freelancers. Bootstrappers. You don’t necessarily have to be a part of the audience yourself, although that does help you both in finding the pains and later when you’re actually building your product because of your domain knowledge.

Once you have picked an audience, you can start finding out what really bugs that audience. Lurk in their forums, and spy on them for insight. What itches do they have, from which colossal pains do they suffer? This will form the basis for the business you’ll build.

Don’t directly ask whether they’d need this and that. Actually search for patterns and keywords in how they describe issues they’re having. This is what Hoy calls a Sales Safari.

Content marketing

One topic that pops up in almost every discussion about marketing effectively on the web is content marketing. What it basically means is that by providing valuable content to your audience you teach them and simultaneously build trust in yourself. This appoints you as an authority in the field.

An important thing to note is that you do not have to be a super expert in the field in question, just a notch above the knowledge level of your audience. This means you’re actually more likely to remember the pain and issues you encountered when you were in the same situation. For a seasoned expert this might be years in the past and thus something only vaguely in their minds. Thus it is easy for them to take many of the issues as given.

What you do have to be good at, though, is writing. If you have a big budget you can hire people to do it, but for a bootstrapped company at least one of the insiders needs to be a wordsmith. Sorry to break the bad news but there just isn’t a way around it. As said many times over, if you can’t write clearly, you can’t think clearly.

By writing skills I don’t mean writing grammatically perfect English (or whatever language you use to reach your audience). Grammar is important for sure, but much more important is communicating your ideas effectively. The most important thing to learn the ropes here is practice, but here are some resources you might want to have a look at for getting better at writing.

• On Writing Well is a great general guide on writing effective prose.
• Writing for Story by the two-time Pulitzer prize winner Jon Franklin is a succinct introduction to writing gripping narrative in non-fiction. Storytelling is one of the most powerful techniques we have to grip our audience and get our ideas through.
• Breakthrough Advertising is a bible for writing effective ad copy. While you might never become a copywriter, your goals are very much the same. Unfortunately the book is out of print and very hard to get your hands on. You might (I’ve been told) find the full text from the net, though, using your favorite search engine.
• Copyblogger (subscribe to their RSS feed or mailing list) is a blog about pretty much all of the above. The amount of new content there is a bit on the high side but the quality makes up for that.

Once you got the basics covered, you’re ready to get into the nitty-gritty details of teaching your audience. Neil Patel of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics just recently published a free minibook called the Advanced Guide to Content Marketing. Aforementioned Copyblogger also has a series of articles about content marketing. One thing that invariably exists in these primers is building a warm email mailing list.

The Power of Email

As a geek it might be easy to dismiss email as a communication method as old-fashioned and something people mostly ignore. I mean, everyone prefers to get their daily RSS fix or (nowadays) read about your stuff on Twitter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Growing a list of email newsletter subscribers is by far the most effective method of reaching your audience. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, it is way more personal. Most email list software lets you personalize your emails (so do collect at least the first name of your audience members, if only as an optional field), and if you write them in a conversational tone, the reader will react to them in a completely different manner than to a more generic form such as a blog post.

Secondly, in the spirit of permission marketing, everyone subscribed to your list has already given you permission to penetrate their email inbox. This is A Good Thing^TM. You’re given a lot of trust. Just remember not to fail that trust. Always think how what you’ll write will benefit and teach the readers. If your newsletter is literally a collection of news about you, you, you, your readership will disappear faster than you can say MailChimp.

So, here were some random pointers for getting started with bootstrapping. Obviously, it’s a life-long path so taking up everything at once is pretty much a doomed undertaking (I’ve been taking Amy’s course at least three times already). So give yourself time, but get started now. And ferchrissake, don’t try to sell anything to consumers. Why? That’s a topic for another post.

Did I miss something? Anything else you’d like to read about bootstrapping? Drop me a note.

Here’s my deck from the Tampere Web Dev meetup on the 10th of November, 2012.

Thanks to Thomas Fuchs for retinafy.me and Thijs van der Vossen.

If you enjoyed the talk, you might consider signing up for my up-and-coming eBook, Forgotten SVG.

This is a talk I gave in the first Tampere Web Dev meetup in January 2012.

I don’t have a very long history with coffee. To be honest, I really only started drinking it when I was well into my twenties. Even then, I didn’t really like it, but surviving through exam periods took the better of me. It wasn’t until 2010 – when I first heard about Aeropress and then stumbled upon Mathias Meyer – that I found out there is a whole another world of coffee I had never before explored. Thus, with the enthusiasm of a beginner and the confidence of a 20-year-old, I shall tell you about my journey.

I won’t go into too much detail or technicalities. This will just be an introduction with the bare minimum you’ll need to get started. There are limitless opportunities for experimenting in the world of coffee. Now is not the time for that.

This will be a very opinionated piece. Many people – even coffeelovers – would disagree with many points. They would be be wrong, of course, but still have a right to their opinions.

Let’s start by defining what makes good coffee. Actually, let’s flip the question around and talk about what does not mean good coffee.

1. If you think you need milk or sugar in your coffee, you’re not talking about good coffee. Sorry, but you just aren’t. Even with good coffee you might choose to use them – I will frown upon it, but hey, it’s your choice – but you won’t need them.

2. Espresso (necessarily). Many people I know say that they don’t like any of those fancy coffees, by which they mean that they don’t like espresso. To be honest, I don’t care that much for espresso, either. I like good espresso like the next guy, but I actually think that great filter coffee beats the hell out of good espresso any day.

   The difference is a bit like between a vodka shot and an exquisite old Scotch. Sure, you can make great drinks from the vodka, too, but it’ll never be as smooth as a dram of 25-year-old Bowmore.

   The bottom line in my opinion is that while you might want to delve into espresso geekery later on, it’s not the best place to start. Because great coffee shouldn’t be…

3. Prohibitively expensive. Since we don’t start our love affair with coffee with Espresso, we also don’t need equipment that sets us back hundreds or even thousands of Euros and is a hassle to maintain. To me, starting the hobby should be reasonably inexpensive and have a gentle enough learning curve.

With that in mind, let’s find out how to get the most out of your coffee experience. The founder of Has Bean Coffee, Stephen Leighton, says the secret to the very best coffee is “fresh”, “fresh” and “fresh”. Just to make sure, I’ll throw another “fresh” in the mix myself.

1. Fresh Beans Coffee is freshware. I’ll paraphrase a diagram from Tim Wendelboe’s book here:

   
   

   Freshly roasted coffee beans take a couple of days to settle to their best form. After that, they remain optimal for a few weeks. After about four weeks – and sooner if they are in contact with oxygen, i.e. you opened the bag – they start going stale fairly rapidly.

   This brings us to a measurement of roaster honesty. I’ll start with the best example, Square Mile Coffee:

   

   “Brew within one month of roasting”

   As you can see, this pretty much matches with Wendelboe’s graphic.

   The next level is Has Bean. They tell the coffee is best within one month, but you should definitively use it within three.

   Down another notch, we have Kaffiino.

   

   They still mention the roasting date, but pretend the coffee is still good half a year after roasting. It isn’t.

   On the bottom level we have most of the commodity coffees. They tend to give anything up to year before the expiry date. What’s worst, they do not tell the exact roasting date, so you’re left with guessing how much time they give their coffee to go stale and calculating from there when it was roasted. This is pure dishonesty. The roasting date is the most important thing on the label of a coffee bag. Unfortunately, even many reasonably good specialty coffee roasters (like Johan & Nyström and at least sometimes, Mokkamestarit) can be found on this pathetic level.

   The lesson to learn here: buy only from roasters that can guarantee the freshness of the roast.

2. Fresh Grind

   Note that in the previous point, I only talked about fresh beans. That’s because you should never buy your coffee pre-ground. For commodity coffee, it doesn’t really matter whether they give you six or twelve months before the expiry date because the grinds sold to you are already stale when they hit the selves.

   The issues with pre-ground coffee are manifold. First, grinding coffee releases a large part of its aroma, which are lost forever if you don’t use the grinds immediately. Second, coffee really hates oxygen, which should be clear to you by now. When the coffee is ground, there is much more surface that’s exposed to the damned gas than with beans. Lastly, different brewing methods call for different grind levels. Good luck trying to make a good French press with coffee that’s ground to Aeropress level without drowning in sediment.

   So, the lesson #2: Buy your beans whole and buy your own grinder.

3. Fresh Water

   To be honest, I don’t think this is as much of an issue in Finland, where most of the tap water is pretty good. Sure, some conoisseurs want to buy bottled spring water to brew their coffee with, but I haven’t found this to make enough of a difference to justify the price, hassle and unecological choice. If you live on the west side of Tampere, you’re getting ground water from your tap anyway. I’m not, but the water is still ok.

   Still, you probably don’t want to reuse water that’s been sitting in the electric kettle for two days already. But you already knew that.

4. My own addition: Fresh Brew

   Probably the biggest reason people seem to think that espresso-based drink are the “good” coffee, as opposed to filter coffee, is that in most cases filter coffee has been sitting on top of a hot plate for quite some time. Espresso drinks on the other hand are basically always made to order.

   Now, here’s the thing: coffee (the drink) does not stand heating. This includes everything from the hot plate of your coffeemaker to microwave oven to percolator. Quality coffee is good when hot, best when slightly less hot and still great when not that hot anymore. Actually it tastes quite awesome even when cold.

   Lesson 4: Don’t let your coffee stand in the coffee maker after it’s done. If you need it to stay hot for longer, pour it into a vacuum bottle.

With these lessons under our belt, here are a couple of practical tips for your coffee pleasure.

Quality beans in Tampere

Like you learned in lessons 1 and 2 above, you’re going to buy freshly roasted, whole beans. Finding them in Tampere is kind of tricky, but not impossible.

By mail

Your best bet it pretty much always mail order. This is mostly because the best roasters only ship coffee right after roasting. This means that they settle down just the right amount during the days it takes for them to reach your mailbox and are thus ready to use.

My absolute favorite roaster is Square Mile Coffee in London. Pretty much all their coffee is direct trade. While the selection isn’t huge, you also cannot go wrong with any of their coffees. I recommend getting a subscription from them, which means at the beginning of each month they will send you a bag of coffee fitting the season. If you’re not ready for a subscription, just order a bag or two. The shipping costs are pretty much the same as with any Finnish roaster. Note that they only roast twice a week, so your order might take a couple of days to ship.

Another great British roaster is Has Bean Coffee. Their selection is vast compared to Square Mile and includes lots of different types of coffees, including organic varieties. They also offer subscriptions (both monthly and weekly) which are considerably cheaper than Square Mile’s. However, it’s worth noting that their bags (as most other roasters’) are 250 grams, as opposed to Square Mile’s 350 g.

Locally

In my opinion, currently the best coffee roasted in Finland comes from Turun Kahvipaahtimo. Unfortunately, they don’t have an online store, let alone subscriptions. Fortunately, Kahvila Valo on Puutarhakatu sells their coffee. However, they seem to sell such limited amounts of it that it’s best to find out their shipping schedule to know when to go look for new beans.

Kaffa is a fairly new entrant in the Finnish coffee scene. Operating in Rööperi in the heart of Helsinki, Kaffa’s guys seem to put a fair amount of love and effort into their offerings. They have some interesting coffees such as the Indian Monsoon Malabar, but on average they seem to me a bit more hit and miss than Turun Kahvipaahtimo. E.g. even though they say they only send freshly roasted coffee, I’ve often gotten weeks old coffee sent to me from their online store. However, Mama’s Corner sells their coffee in the market hall, and there you can be sure about the roasting date of the coffee. Unfortunately, the same disclaimer as with Valo and Turun Kahvipaahtimo applies: the coffee comes to the store every once in a while, so you can’t rely on it being totally fresh whenever you step into the shop.

The original local roastery in Tampere is called Mokkamestarit. They roast a surprisingly varied selection of coffees, including fair trade, direct trade, organic and Cup of Excellence beans. Kahvila Valo sells a (very) limited selection of Mokkamestarit’s coffee. However, for the full selection you should probably visit their roastery shop in Vermo. My issue with Mokkamestarit is that they don’t tell the exact roasting date at least with the coffees I’ve seen. Moreover, they set the expiry date to something ridiculously long like a year, so it might be difficult to make sure how fresh the coffee is. However, if you can make sure you get truly freshly roasted coffee from them, they are probably a fine option.

Just recently I learned about Fresh Coffee Roastery, which operates in Onkiniemi. Unfortunately, it seems that they neither have a shop at the roastery nor have a reseller in Tampere, so your only option is to rely on their web store. I have yet to taste their coffee, so I can’t really vouch for them.

Grinding your coffee

My advice is to start with a quality and grinder, not a cheap electric blade grinder. The important bit is to get a burr grinder, not a blade grinder. I use a Porlex hand grinder, which is stainless steel throughout, with ceramic burrs. Since the hopper is not plastic, it generates very little static so it’s very easy to get the grinds out of it. Another great thing about Porlex is that it fits perfectly inside an Aeropress, so they make a great travel kit together.

Another hand grinder people seem to recommend is Hario Skerton. I have not used it myself, but you shouldn’t go astray with either of them.

The downside of a hand grinder is that grinding coffee with one is fairly slow and their capacity is limited. Every time we have visitors for coffee (not really that often) I wish I had an electric grinder. Any other time, I don’t.

Another issue with hand grinders is that it is somewhat difficult to control the grind coarseness. It happens with a screw so it’s next to impossible to “store” different settings for different brewing techniques.

The upside of a hand grinder is that it doesn’t wake up the whole house, and grinding coffee with it is a nice morning ritual. If your arms are in bad shape, it probably counts as exercise as well.

I’ve decided not to get an electric grinder before I can justify getting a really good one. At the moment that would mean Mahlkönig Vario.

Brewing the coffee

Everyone who gives a shit about coffee in Finland probably has a Moccamaster. The good news is that there’s no reason to get rid of it. However, (unless you have a model with a vacuum bottle) you should never let the brewed coffee stay on the hot plate after it’s ready. This means that if you want to serve hot coffee during a longer period, you need a good vacuum bottle.

That said, there’s something deeply gratifying in having more control over your brew. For that, there are several inexpensive options. These are what I use myself:

Chemex

The legendary Chemex coffeemaker was invented in 1941 by Dr. Peter Schlumbohm. He’s famously quoted saying that “With this, even a moron can make good coffee.” To add to that, Chemex is on an ongoing display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We have an 8-cup version of the brewer and use it pretty much every morning.

Aeropress

While it lacks the elegant looks of a Chemex, Aeropress is a truly miraculous device. This inexpensive (and somewhat cheap-looking) device can extract some of the best brews from your beans and it does it in a time that really can’t be beaten. Like said above, an Aeropress makes a great travel kit with the Porlex grinder (and some quality beans) which means you can have great coffee wherever you go. Just add water.

Moreover, Aeropress is very easy to clean up. After the brew, you just pluck the filter and grinds into a biodegradable waste container and rinse the device with hot water. This makes Aeropress also a great office coffeemaker. Using it will first get you some amused glances, and then some ridicule. And then, until you realized what happened, everyone will be using you ‘press. At least that’s what I imagine would happen. I don’t really have any officemates so I extrapolated from my wife.

I don’t have time for this, just tell me where to get great coffee in Tampere.

Kahvila Valo. They have a horrible website but are indeed a great, somewhat rustic café. Like said, they sell a decent selection of freshly roasted beans from different roasters. Most importantly, they have recently added several new brewing methods into their arsenal: Aeropress, Chemex and Abid Clever dripper. My favorite cup of coffee there is a strong smooth Kenyan made with Abid.

Unfortunately Valo only opens at 11AM, so it’s not suitable for morning coffee. On the flipside, it is more or less empty until late afternoon, so it’s a great place to hack in if you’re looking for a quiet office outside the office. They also serve light food such as lunch salads, sandwiches and soups.

Jaakko Halmetoja says nice words about Kahvila Taikapapu. I haven’t checked them out myself yet.

Where to go next?

Filter coffee is an affair that is easy to get into, but that has a pretty much limitless depth. On theoretical level, I’d recommend reading Has Bean’s Coffee 101 and Mathias Meyer’s Beginner’s Shopping Guide to Filter Coffee Gear. But most importantly, just get the bare minimum of needed equipment – e.g. an Aeropress with a Porlex grinder –, some quality beans and start experimenting.

And enjoy.

While I missed the tradition of releasing Ruby gems on the Christmas day, I did meet my own tradition of not doing anything with the computer that day. That said, I had something interesting in the works that just needed to be wrapped up as a Ruby gem—namely, a library for parsing the GPS data out of JPEG files produced by QuickRoute. Without further ado, may I present quickroute-ruby.

The task wasn’t exactly trivial, as the data is embedded in binary format in an APP0 segment inside the image. Moreover, the data format was basically undocumented. However, with the help of Mats I managed to reverse-engineer the original C# and PHP libraries to an extent that I seemed to get correct output out of the file.

The library is still very young, and while it seems to work correctly with my test images, I have no doubt there are a bunch of bugs hidden. If you seem to run into one, please file an issue in the tracker, or better yet, send me a pull request with a test-driven fix.

For usage, check out the GitHub page. I’ll work on cleaning up the code and writing some more documentation in the coming days, but the code itself should be fairly self-explanatory.

Happy New Year!

P.S I’m also mirroring the complete (GPL licensed) QuickRoute C# code repository on GitHub. So if you prefer working with Git instead of Subversion + Google Code, you might want to start off there.

The launch of Amazon’s new Kindles has already been analyzed to near death, so I’m not going to dive too deep in that general discussion. What struck me as interesting, though, was John Gruber’s analysis of the new models being US-only:

Production must be tight on the Fire and Touch models, as well, because they’re only being offered in the U.S. for now. The only new Kindle for sale outside the U.S. is the $79 non-touch model.

Now here’s the thing: it’s clear that Amazon is in the razor blade business. At $199, Kindle Fire either has a razor-thin margin or is sold at a loss. According to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster Amazon is taking a hit of $50 for every device it sells. If that’s the case, it must make up for that selling content, which is its bread-and-butter business.

However, selling content such as books, music and movies is also a low-margin business. That means Amazon has to sell a shitload of content to make up for the potential losses it makes with the Fire. Fortunately for Amazon, its customers are people who do spend a lot of money online – maybe second only to Apple. That’s probably the case only in US, though. International clients are likely to spend far less money on Amazon, because of narrower selection of books in their language, and because of movies and TV shows not being available, at all. As Horace Dediu points out:

The problem is that services don’t scale as well as products. Consider that none of the content streams that Amazon will depend on are available outside the US. The Kindle has not been a strong seller internationally. This is because book rights are limited to national boundaries as are movie rights and song rights. Apple has only this week finally completed the rollout of iTunes music to all of Europe! A process that took almost a decade.

So what if the production capacity isn’t the only reason for the new Kindle models being US-only? What if – given Amazon’s current production costs and international licensing deals – they just can’t see themselves selling enough razor blades to make up for the cost of the razor?

Somewhere between updating OS X to Lion and iTunes to version 10.4 iTunes stopped recognizing both my iPhone and my iPad. What’s weirder, even though System information saw both devices, my iPad also showed the disappointing “Not Charging” message in its status bar. The iPhone, which doesn’t demand as high a voltage from the port, did charge, though.

The web is full of different instructions on how to fix this kind of a situation. The gist of them all is basically to restart the device, restart the computer and if these won’t help, reinstall iTunes. There is even a knowledge base article on the Apple support pages with these instructions.

The problem is, Lion doesn’t let you move iTunes to the Trash because it is “needed by the operating system”¹, contrary to what the aforementioned article says².

Fortunately, OS X is built on the shoulders of Unix giants, so here’s how I managed to fix the problem.

1. Open up Terminal.app, e.g. using Spotlight.

2. Move the iTunes.app directory to a temporary place. Note that you need sudo to be able to actually move the folder.

    $ mkdir -p ~/temp; cd /Applications; sudo mv iTunes.app ~/temp
   

3. Download the latest iTunes version from Apple’s website and run through the installation process.
4. There is no step four. iTunes should now recognize your devices again.

Warning. This procedure fixed the issue for me. It should not affect your iTunes library (which is normally located in ~/Music/iTunes) or preferences (which reside in ~/Library/iTunes). However, there is no guarantee that it will work for you. Don’t hold me accountable if you mess up your iTunes library. What’s more important, make sure you have backups of everything before you start.

This the second part of The Road to RubyConf XK, a series of articles about running training. Don’t miss the first part.

For many, it is enough to know that running keeps you fit. But if you’re training with a goal in mind (be it a specific time on marathon or just to get into better shape), it is useful to know a bit about the physiology of physical training.

I’ll start by letting you into a secret. From the outset, you might think that exercise makes you fitter. Actually, exactly the opposite is true. Exercise makes you less fit.

But hey, I hear you say. Why do we then train at all? Let me explain.

In sports science, the training effect can be described with a simple graph:

Figure 1. Supercompensation effect.

In the graph, the red parts are training sessions, during which the fitness level of our persevering hero goes down¹. Then, during the rest phase (marked green) the level goes back up to where it was. However—and this is the interesting part—it doesn’t stop there. Because of evolution, intelligent design or a turn of the wrist of the flying spaghetti monster, the human body is an adaptive organism. It basically thinks, “Gee, I was hit really hard during that last workout, so I’ll be clever and hoard some extra jelly in order to be prepared for the next one”. And thus it steps beyond its initial level of fitness to the land of the unknown. This effect is known as supercompensation.

Supercompensation is a funny thing. It happens in many different training effects, be it strength, aerobic performance, or maximum running speed. As we’ll see later, the effect is also used on many timescales in training programs, from intervals within a single workout to training sessions to days to weeks or even longer training periods.

From the supercompensation graph above we can draw three corollaries:

• You should train at the optimal point of the rest phase.
• You should make the recovery curve as steep as possible.
• You should find an optimal rhythm to your training.

Now, let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Goal 1: train at the optimal moment

In a perfect world, training would always happen at the very top of the supercompensation curve. In reality, that is of course not possible. First of all, the whole graph is a vast oversimplification. There is no single thing called fitness. Rather, there are several aspects to it such as muscle condition, energy level and general fatigue.

Nevertheless, it is important to understand the timing of hard trainings. If you always train too soon after the previous tiring exercise, the curve will never reach the supercompensation state but rather top off before the previous high level. Continuing this for too long can cause what is called overtraining.

Figure 2. Overtraining. Leaving too little time between hard workouts leads to decrease of the fitness level.

Overtraining is a condition with symptoms like general feeling of tiredness, sleep problems, high rest and orthostatic heart rate. Recovering from severe overtraining can easily take months. Many top athletes who have trained themselves too far have never recovered. It is thus important to train on a level that is suitable for your current fitness. You can’t start an olympic-level training program if you have not run a mile in last five years.

On the other hand, if you leave too much time between the workouts (which is frankly far more common among us), the supercompensation effect will fade out and your body will return back to the previous level or even lower.

Figure 3. Workouts too far apart. The training effect fades away between them.

Goal 2: Recuperate as fast as possible

Like said in the beginning, your fitness doesn’t improve while training, it improves while resting. Assuming that you always exercise at the optimal moment, the next thing you can do to optimize the training effect is to make the recovery period as quick as possible. This will allow you do more training-recovery loops within the same amount of time.

Figure 4. Faster recovery allows for more workouts in the same amount of time, thus resulting in faster increase of fitness.

There are a vast amount of ways to shorten your recovery time. The effectiveness of many of them depends on the individual. However, many if not most of them have been scientifically proven to accelerate the process of recuperation. Just remember that doing nothing at all rarely is the fastest way to recover.

• Energy: Try to get energy as fast as possible after the training. A rule of thumb is something quick (such as a recovery drink or bar) within 30 minutes and a warm meal within 2 hours. This helps to start the refill process of glycogen² stores in the muscles and to get them out of a catabolic state. The most important constituent in the recovery process are carbohydrates (the recommended amount for quick recovery is 10g for each 10kg in your body weight), so forget low-carb diets if you plan to go by a real training program³. Proteins are not nearly as important in endurance sports as carbs, but they have been proven to improve the carbohydrate intake and glycogen restoration. The recommended amount of proteins right after a workout is about 3g for each 10kg of your body mass.
• Sleep: Not only do you rest best while asleep, your body also produces more human growth hormone when asleep⁴, which quickens the recovery process in muscles. It is important to note that the physical restitution happens mostly in the deep non-REM sleep⁵, so forget polyphasic sleep and other gimmicks. 9 hours each night and a one-hour nap during the afternoon downswing is not over the top.
• Stretching: Stretching keeps your muscles more elastic by lengthening the individual muscle fibers and helps to get the waste products flowing away from the muscles by increasing blood circulation. On top of that, too tight muscles and tendons often cause injuries in the long run, and make your stride shorter and running posture unnatural.
• Massage: The same as with stretching. Note that you don’t have to get an appointment from a masseuse (although it doesn’t hurt, except sometimes, literally), you can help the recovery process of your muscles by rubbing them yourself.
• Hot: Especially in cold weather, something like sauna helps your muscles to relax. However, make sure you regain the liquids and electrolytes lost when sweating (applies to warm bath as well).

• Cold: A paradox, huh? Not at all. While warmth helps your muscles to relax, cold on one hand mitigates swelling and micro-trauma, and on the other, stimulates muscles which helps them recover faster. Works especially well when alternated with hot.

Photo by Tero Maaniemi.

• More training: More things that sound like a paradox. After tough workouts, very easy training is often way better for recovery than just pure rest, which often causes muscle stiffness and thus makes the next hard exercise less effective. Even within interval workouts it’s proven to be better to slowly run between the heats than to just stand still.
• Electrical muscle stimulation: Ok, this is a gimmick but if you’re serious about exercise and don’t mind shelling out a few hundred bucks, an electrical muscle stimulation machine can be quite a versatile help in both helping the muscles to recuperate and to treat injuries.

On the other side of the equation, there are a few things that will slow down the recovery process and that you should avoid if possible.

• Being sick: If you’re sick your energy goes into fighting the disease instead of recuperating from the training. Unlike you might think, there are things you can do to avoid many common illnesses such as flu.
• Lack of sleep: See sleep above.
• Jet lag: Pretty much the same reasons as with lack of sleep.
• Stress: Stress and overtraining form a vicious cycle and are (quite literally) a killer combo.

Goal 3: Perfect rhythm

Like said above, the supercompensation effect happens on many levels. Within single workouts such as interval trainings, between workout sessions and days, and even between weeks. Therefore, unlike we indicated in goal #1, there might not be a single optimal moment for a training on all those timescales. Sometimes it makes sense to train even while tired, especially on training camps. On the other hand, after harder periods of training you might need to take it easier for a whole week before doing another hard workout.

Figure 5. Supercompensation on both workout and weekly level.

It is thus important to find a good rhythm for your training program. This should happen on one hand both on short (day/workout) long (between weeks) timeframe; on the other hand on both workout intensity, length and type level. Some examples:

• A typical week rhythm for training might be easy, moderate, moderate-hard, hard, weekly hours being something like 6, 10, 14 and 18 hours.
• One rule of thumb rhythm (for an orienteer) for individual days or workouts during the base training season is long, strength, hard, easy, long, strength, easy. This has seven points so it’s either a weekly (if you train once a day) or half-weekly (if you train twice a day) program. The point of this rhythm is that typically fast workouts are not that effective after a long training. On the other hand, the strength-fast pair is typically pretty effective in putting the strength picked up from the gym into practice.

Conclusion

If you read the training schedules of some famous athletes, you can see that there are no two similar programs. While sport science has evolved massively in the last 60 years, there is still no one right way to exercise that would work for everyone or even for the same person in different situations. You thus need to find what works best for you, which is no small feat.

However, understanding the scientific basics of training a human body will help you assess the training programs you find and to choose the program that works best for you. You are thus in way better position than for example Emil Zatopek, who spent years and years shuffling different training programs, from insane mileages to interval training in snow (which both worked well for him) to maximum strength training (which didn’t). So since we’re allowed to, let’s not be shy about running on the shoulders of giants.

Footnotes

¹ The reason for this is that training is a catabolic process, where large molecules are broken into smaller ones, at the same time releasing energy. ?

² Glycogen is the stored carbohydrate in muscles that human body preferably uses as energy in sustained physical exercise.⁶ ?

³ Williams, Raven, Fogt and Ivy: Effects of Recovery Beverages on Glycogen Restoration and Endurance Exercise Performance. ?

⁴ Van Cauter et al: Reciprocal interactions between the GH axis and sleep. ?

⁵ Weissblut: Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. ?

⁶ Gotta love research made by Lenny Kravitz. ?

About The Road to RubyConfXk

This is a series of articles that I’m writing paving the road to RubyConf Xk, the second installment of the running event at the yearly RubyConf. This is the pilot episode of the series. Next parts will explore several diverse topics loosely related to running.

I’ll have to start with a confession. If you’re looking for experiences from someone who knows a lot about how to start to run, I’m not the right person. While I technically did start to run, that happened when I was only a few years old. I don’t remember much from those days. Unlike many others, I never stopped running after that. So maybe the right thing to say is I don’t know much about restarting to run.

Also, I’m not a real runner at all. I’m first and foremost an orienteer and like many other sports as well. Likewise, while I mostly talk about running in this series, many if not most of the lessons can be directly applied to other endurance sports as well.

However.

Running is a natural way to move, and to me, the purest form of all sports. For millions of years, it was the fastest way to move on land known to mankind. It is the way children naturally move when they play, often hours every day¹. At some point, we slip away from this much exercise (often all the way down to nothing).

Why is this bad? That’s what the rest of this article tries to uncover.

Health

This is kind of stating the obvious (and—I hope—preaching to the choir), so I’m going to keep this short. Exercise makes you healthier, it makes you live longer and it makes you feel better here and now. There, I’ve said it. Now for something you might not have considered.

Quiet time

In a recent MacBreak Weekly episode, Andy Ihnatko mentioned Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. In the book, Carr explores what the constant stream of bit-size information and interruptions coming from the internet is doing to our brains. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions², it’s clear that in this age of uninterrupted interruptions, our brain needs some quiet time. Now that we can surf on the ‘net while sitting in the bathroom, there are fewer and fewer places where we can really sit back (either figuratively or literally) and reflect on things.

For me, going for a run (or a bike ride) is often the asylum where I’m really able to gather my thoughts and let ideas fly free. Even if I decide to listen to a podcast or an audiobook while running, I often drift off into deep thoughts on how to apply the ideas presented through the phones to my own current context.

But having quiet time is not the only reason why many prominent figures tell they get most of their ideas while running, walking and biking.

“Exercise boosts brain power”

In his seminal book Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina explains in readable and fascinating way how the most important organ of every knowledge worker—our brain—works³. The title of this section is a direct copy of the name of his first rule. As it turns out, the increased oxygen supply to the brain caused by exercise has been shown to not only cause long-term improvement in cognition, but also immediate results. We are even smarter than normally during the exercise. This caused Medina to go so far as to suggest deploying treadmills in classrooms and cubicles. While that’s an interesting idea (that quite a few people have actually made reality), the most important thing is that you exercise.⁴

Personal addendum: experiences

For many runners, every vacation is equal to a training camp. While some might say this is bringing work to holiday, it has some hidden benefits as well.

To me, holidays are all about experiences. I’m really not interested in lying on the beach or by the pool for very long. And this is where combining running with sightseeing comes in.

You could certainly gain many of the same experiences by driving a car to the spot (when it’s possible). However, I have a theory (based on highly anecdotal evidence) that running accentuates that experience. And it seems there is some research that (loosely) supports my theory.

I got one of the ideas from Dan Ariely’s book The Upside of Irrationality⁵. In it he explains the so-called Ikea effect, which effectively means we’re most attached to things we made ourselves, or had to go through effort to attain. This might explain why the views from a mountaintop feel so much more magnificent if you ran or climbed up rather than took a gondola.

Another possible explanation to the phenomenon is the runner’s high, which would (whether the cause of the high is endorphin, anandamide or whatnot) quite naturally affect the strength of the perceived experience.

A case study of this is our 6-week workcation in New Zealand, which turned into more of a normal vacation when my laptop died while driving down the South Island.

During the trip, we

• Ran to the Cathedral Cove;

  

• Ran hill intervals on Queen Charlotte Track;

• Ran up and down the Kepler Track⁶;

  

• Ran back and forth the riverfront in Arthur’s Pass since the weather forecast was so bad we didn’t dare to go up the mountain;

  

• Kayaked up the Abel Tasman National Park and ran back on the hiking trails;

  

• Ran back and forth the Tongariro Northern Circuit.

  

These are some of the fondest memories of my whole life. I wouldn’t want to have experienced them any other way.

Footnotes

¹ Well, they should. The recommended amount of daily exercise for a child is around 2 hours. ?

² Carr is a known internet critic and sceptic so he might have an axe to grind even in its effects on us. ?

³ Don’t miss the interviews (1, 2, 3) Geoffrey Grosenbach has made with Medina in the Ruby on Rails podcast. ?

⁴ If you’re interested in the effects exercise causes to your brain, you might want to take a look at (besides Medina’s books) John J. Ratey’s Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain ?

⁵ The Upside of Irrationality is the successor of Ariely’s highly successful book on behavioral economics, Predictably Irrational ?

⁶ We did not, however, go as far as our friends who ran around the whole 60 km track (with 1200m height difference between the highest and lowest point) in a day. ?

I really like the clutter-free reading experience the new Reader feature in Safari 5 brings. However, what I don’t like too much is the standard html rendering it uses for typography. The full fix for this would be to write a Safari extension to run the whole text through LaTeX or the very least through the Knuth & Plass algorithm.

However, a quick fix for the horrible justified text is this:

Open the contents of Applications/Safari.app:

Then open Resources/Reader.html in a text editor.

Around line 82 there is a CSS rule for .page. Update it to left-align the paragraphs:

<pre> .page { font: 20px Palatino, Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif; line-height: 160%; text-align: left !important; } </pre>

Use !important as well, just to make sure. Save the file (you might need to type in your password here), and you’re done!

If you dislike Palatino, you can of course edit the CSS to your heart’s content. For me, the biggest beef were the rivers flowing through the text when using the default justified alignment.

The first-ever Ruby/Rails conference in Finland, Frozen Rails, is going to take place May 7th in Helsinki. The speaker lineup is top notch, including three Rails core team members and the inimitable Chris Wanstrath. For an unknown reason, in the midst of these high profile guys, a random guy from Tampere has ended up in the speaker list. Yours truly has the honorable (and somewhat frightening) job to wrap up the conference with an ending talk.

My talk is tentatively titled “Of Perfection, Perfectionism and Perfect Web Apps”. It will be less of a technical talk and more a critical, personal, humorous and hopefully entertaining performance about the previous decade spent writing various kinds of web sites and apps.

If you still haven’t secured your ticket, hurry up! The 99€ early bird price goes out tonight.