I've been busy preparing for the upcoming hobodom. Most of the gears, major ones anyway, are purchased and being installed. The biggest, by volume and price, was the mobile fridge and it seems to work fine. It's one of those ubiquitous Chinese-made ones. I've heard stories about Chinese compressors failing within a year, so I opted for a version with LG compressor. Funny thing is, LG has been taking flak for failing compressors for years, on their home refrigerator. So I don't know yet if the extra $40 I paid will pay off.
The next biggest expenditure netted a 2000W inverter. I'm planning to go all electric and no propane, so I needed the biggest inverter the car could handle. It is the most difficult one too as I have to tap the battery and then drill holes in the frunk of my car to route the cables through. The process has turned into an ordeal; I've spent good 3 days and I'm not done yet -- I'm now waiting for the additional parts to arrive before I can finish it all up. I'll write more about it in upcoming days.
So, I finally got a chance to finish up analyzing the skiing of the past season. Here it is, read and weep:
I have made a prediction before the season that the novelty effect won't be as strong as the last season. That was based on the experience with biking: I was able to do 12 miles a few times when I first started biking; in the subsequent years, I couldn't without triggering extended PEM. I reasoned that's because the biking was not new anymore and I figured that the same thing would happen for skiing. And the results pretty much bear that out.
Last year, it was easy to see that I was doing quite well for the first a few weeks and then the struggle gradually worsened. Not so this year. Though it appears that I was doing slightly better at the beginning, there is not much discernable pattern. I didn't do as well at the beginning because of the absence of strong boost from Novelty Effect. Then I reduced skiing in the second half and that contributed to the further flattening of the post-skiing struggle curve over the season.
Still, there are two notable, if not pronounced, patterns. One is the super-performance after #4. This is when I cut the skiing from 3 sessions to 2 per day. (Each session is 8 runs, followed by either 30 minute break or 1 hour lunch). #5 might have had a good performance too if it weren't for the ordeal of tire blowout and the resulting 12 hour day. So, it appears that cutting down on the amount of skiing vastly lessened the post-skiing struggle.
The other is the terrible performance after #3 and #8. #3 is at the end of 3-session skiing in the first half of the season. And #8 is at the end of 2-session skiing. Which seems to indicate that the struggle increased as the season progressed even after the drastic improvement from cutting back. Whatever the remaining novelty effect there was, in other words, was fading as the season progressed.
It is still possible that I'm seeing patterns where there is none and the Novelty Effect is just my imagination. You never know for sure unless you run it through a randomized-controlled trial. But it's been happening over and over again for over a decade, that I'm thoroughly convinced by now that it is real. The fact that I can predict over and over again how my body would respond based on the novelty should be a proof enough.
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