Rest Days Suck when you're a bike junkie. Even if you do hang out with friends and eat a tasty pizza.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Various Random Crap
- Had a nice sorta shop ride with the Family Bikes crew on Saturday. Jon didn't make it thanks to being involved in various midnight charitable activities, but most of the rest of the crew was there. I joined Gros' weirdly complex workout onto the shop ride for about half of it, with pretty good results. Every so often I shot off the front real hard doing a stomp or spinup, per The Cunning Plan. I think my friends thought it was weird, but they were cool with it; after all, they're my friends, they know me, and weird is par for the course. Mid-ride, we hit the Hard Bean in Annapolis, a good book shop which has a new-to-me barista who agreed to pour me a ristretto or short shot of espresso. Oh happy day! Joy! I've never had a good shot there before, they always push too much water through the beans, but this one was spot on. It fueled me really well for the middle part of the ride when I split off from the organized ride. They headed home with visions of the SM 100 in their minds, but I had to take off for 45 minutes tempo, standing up every couple-three minutes to do 6-8 seconds of mini-sprint. I managed to get it about 90% right, and that pretty much put me 100% in the hurt bucket. The last 45 minutes/hour of the ride was supposed to be a stiff zone 2, but I couldn't keep it steady at that effort level for the life of me, I was profoundly uncomfortable on the bike. Not hurting... just uncomfortable, spin for two minutes, have to stand, shake out ass and feet. I limped home, and was grateful to stop at about 3:20 of riding time. Total damage - 255 TSS points, average wattage of 218, NP of 288, IF of .90. I felt like ass which, looking at the numbers, is roughly what I should have felt like.
- Then today I rolled out for three hours solo. Since I was missing the Devil's Backbone ride this weekend, I told Gros he could beat me into the ground. Ask, and ye shall receive, apparently. After warmups, it was 3x15 minutes of muscle tension drill - that's big ring, small cog, 70 RPM, and around threshold wattage. Up and downhill. It's an insane workout because you're pulling just below, at or above threshold the whole time, trying to keep your RPMs steady. Meanwhile your legs are *screaming*, it feels like you're not going anywhere because your cadence is just loping along... and you've been averaging 25.6 for the last 12 minutes. So that was the first 90 minutes. Then it was rest then 5x3 minute muscle tension drills - same thing, but keeping it at threshold. Which in reality means 110% of threshold. Same thing - pedaling slow, this time heading north with a headwind assist - legs just in agony, back and hammies on the brink of a massive cramp, and grinding it out at speed. My ass was cramping too. It was madness. Then in the third hour... at this point I was limping home, so it was low to middling zone 2, with some work in the middle. Every 5 minutes or so, I did a 1 minute spinup, or I tried to. That's where you take the cadence up as fast as it will go and hold it there, shifting gears from time to time to keep the cadence high. 486, 526, 537, 535... but I couldn't keep that up for a minute. I was so spent I was getting 45-50 seconds and going into a huge hip/ass cramp. Didn't help that I was going uphill most of the time doing these. Painful. I finished off with about 2:40 of riding time, average wattage of 218 (Man, I love me some 218, don't I?) and an NP of 268, lower than yesterday because I wasn't doing for-real sprints. The IF was .85 - a little easier than yesterday but still a really demanding workout.
- I'm throwing all those details about my workout out there because I'm happy. The training is starting to come together again, and I'm on top of the pedals enough and fit enough to be doing some harder, complex workouts. It feels good. My friggin' legs are fried tonight, and I'm grunting as I walk up and down the stairs, but that's okay. I am just grateful for the chance to train and improve myself. It looked in doubt this spring but I'm getting a chance to do it right now. This may hurt but I'll take what I can get.
- What is the alternative? Senescence. Obsolescence. Death. Not that death is necessarily a terrible thing. It's just a part of life, the last part for most of us. But most of us don't like to be reminded that the Eternal Footman is at the door, waiting to hop our bags and see us into the incorporeal stagecoach. Not everybody has the same relationship with death, however. Michael Ledeen - a guy whose politics you may hate but who is admittedly a first rate thinker and Italophile, writes about the Neopolitan relationship with death and spirituality in First Things. The article is a take on Naples' unsanctioned cult of saints and miracles, which seem very unchanged from the high middle ages. Ledeen points out that being aware of death is a part of life for Neopolitans, and that knowing your time is limited and that there are a lot of things that you don't know may be one key to being more creative and energetic. He argues,
- Speaking of life or death questions - Greg Keller takes on Joe Friel's ponderings about whether one should race cyclocross at all. Friel's take: Useful if you're trying to get ready for an "A" event in January but otherwise it takes too much out of you. Greg's take: What? Hells yeah race cross - it ain't training, it's a sport! My take is close to Greg's detailed discussion. You can focus on cross as your main racing activity. Or you can use it as a mental recharge from a long season of training and road or MTB (or track) racing, and just use it to have a shit ton of fun. Your call. The main thing is to have fun with it. Go hard, but keep it light no matter what. That cuts way down on the burnt matches that Joe Friel is so concerned about.
- In keeping with that, I'm trying a whole new approach to cross this year. It involves fixing a couple of my weaknesses - general fitness / fatness, and the need to ride volume to keep myself in balance across all areas of my life. In short, it's quite possible to get fat riding 6.5 hours per week on the regular cross in-season training schedule. It's also impossible to burn off the non-training Training Stress Points that accrue due to daily work and life stress, a pile of angst that builds up into a mountain and wears me out if I don't ride 90 minutes a day. As for the pure training aspect, I'm a big dude. I get plenty of anaerobic work just riding around. *Every* hill is a red zone workout for me, so I'm not going to miss doing 2-3 days of high intensity intervals during the week. One day of intervals, yes. But otherwise it's going to be L2 or L3 (tempo) rides to raise my general fitness throughout the season. Practice will be a once every week or two experience. I'll let you know how it goes.
- Then today I rolled out for three hours solo. Since I was missing the Devil's Backbone ride this weekend, I told Gros he could beat me into the ground. Ask, and ye shall receive, apparently. After warmups, it was 3x15 minutes of muscle tension drill - that's big ring, small cog, 70 RPM, and around threshold wattage. Up and downhill. It's an insane workout because you're pulling just below, at or above threshold the whole time, trying to keep your RPMs steady. Meanwhile your legs are *screaming*, it feels like you're not going anywhere because your cadence is just loping along... and you've been averaging 25.6 for the last 12 minutes. So that was the first 90 minutes. Then it was rest then 5x3 minute muscle tension drills - same thing, but keeping it at threshold. Which in reality means 110% of threshold. Same thing - pedaling slow, this time heading north with a headwind assist - legs just in agony, back and hammies on the brink of a massive cramp, and grinding it out at speed. My ass was cramping too. It was madness. Then in the third hour... at this point I was limping home, so it was low to middling zone 2, with some work in the middle. Every 5 minutes or so, I did a 1 minute spinup, or I tried to. That's where you take the cadence up as fast as it will go and hold it there, shifting gears from time to time to keep the cadence high. 486, 526, 537, 535... but I couldn't keep that up for a minute. I was so spent I was getting 45-50 seconds and going into a huge hip/ass cramp. Didn't help that I was going uphill most of the time doing these. Painful. I finished off with about 2:40 of riding time, average wattage of 218 (Man, I love me some 218, don't I?) and an NP of 268, lower than yesterday because I wasn't doing for-real sprints. The IF was .85 - a little easier than yesterday but still a really demanding workout.
- I'm throwing all those details about my workout out there because I'm happy. The training is starting to come together again, and I'm on top of the pedals enough and fit enough to be doing some harder, complex workouts. It feels good. My friggin' legs are fried tonight, and I'm grunting as I walk up and down the stairs, but that's okay. I am just grateful for the chance to train and improve myself. It looked in doubt this spring but I'm getting a chance to do it right now. This may hurt but I'll take what I can get.
- What is the alternative? Senescence. Obsolescence. Death. Not that death is necessarily a terrible thing. It's just a part of life, the last part for most of us. But most of us don't like to be reminded that the Eternal Footman is at the door, waiting to hop our bags and see us into the incorporeal stagecoach. Not everybody has the same relationship with death, however. Michael Ledeen - a guy whose politics you may hate but who is admittedly a first rate thinker and Italophile, writes about the Neopolitan relationship with death and spirituality in First Things. The article is a take on Naples' unsanctioned cult of saints and miracles, which seem very unchanged from the high middle ages. Ledeen points out that being aware of death is a part of life for Neopolitans, and that knowing your time is limited and that there are a lot of things that you don't know may be one key to being more creative and energetic. He argues,
I think the vagueness of the boundary between the living and the dead has a lot to do with the ongoing creativity of the city. It eases anxiety about death—in the contemporary world, an enormous and largely unspoken fear that stifles the range of thought and art. The Neapolitan ease with the dead reminds the living that they are part of a continuum, and it gives them the faith to believe that their own identity and their own endeavors will continue after they have passed on. It makes it easier for them to maintain their connections with their own history—which so many contemporary Europeans and Americans increasingly ignore or falsify in the interests of current political fashion.Yes, I think I've seen something of that among the Irish. Anyhow, it's an interesting article and it reminded me of reading Chaucer and Boccacio, with those writers' earthy acceptance of natural processes.
- Speaking of life or death questions - Greg Keller takes on Joe Friel's ponderings about whether one should race cyclocross at all. Friel's take: Useful if you're trying to get ready for an "A" event in January but otherwise it takes too much out of you. Greg's take: What? Hells yeah race cross - it ain't training, it's a sport! My take is close to Greg's detailed discussion. You can focus on cross as your main racing activity. Or you can use it as a mental recharge from a long season of training and road or MTB (or track) racing, and just use it to have a shit ton of fun. Your call. The main thing is to have fun with it. Go hard, but keep it light no matter what. That cuts way down on the burnt matches that Joe Friel is so concerned about.
- In keeping with that, I'm trying a whole new approach to cross this year. It involves fixing a couple of my weaknesses - general fitness / fatness, and the need to ride volume to keep myself in balance across all areas of my life. In short, it's quite possible to get fat riding 6.5 hours per week on the regular cross in-season training schedule. It's also impossible to burn off the non-training Training Stress Points that accrue due to daily work and life stress, a pile of angst that builds up into a mountain and wears me out if I don't ride 90 minutes a day. As for the pure training aspect, I'm a big dude. I get plenty of anaerobic work just riding around. *Every* hill is a red zone workout for me, so I'm not going to miss doing 2-3 days of high intensity intervals during the week. One day of intervals, yes. But otherwise it's going to be L2 or L3 (tempo) rides to raise my general fitness throughout the season. Practice will be a once every week or two experience. I'll let you know how it goes.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Public Service Announcement
Just a friendly reminder for them what missed it: Stevil Kinevil is plying his wares at All Hail The Black Market. Check it out. And hit the tip bucket while you're there. I think he's accepting booze, corndogs, and condoms, preferably unused.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Friday Fun Time
Couldn't locate my scheduled workout this AM so I figured out, when the going get's tough... the tough do 3x 8 minute Anaerobic Capacity intervals. Song for the day: Hurt So Good, John Cougar. (Or was it John Mellencamp then? Or John Cougar Mellencamp? I get so confused). It's not embedded here because they think that if they don't allow embeds, we'll be forced to buy it. Well, John Mellon CougarCamp, if that is in fact your real name, screw you! We don't need your stupid song. It ain't good enough to buy. Jerk!
I was talking music with one of the women I work with the other week. She told me she's into "old school hip hop." I asked her what she meant by that - Sugar Hill Gang? Run DMC? "No, who are they? More like late 90's stuff. Or around 2000."
Man I felt old.
Anyhow, here's some real Old School. Some of it holds up okay. The videos were pretty goofy though.
LL Cool J always has great lyrics. "Girlies wanna ride with a brother like me, 'cuz they know I'm gettin' funky fre-quently." Awesome. Hey, did he just say funk? I believe he did. And if there's anything I know, it's that y'all want the funk.
No, I don't have a freakin' clue what the hell all those people are doing on stage. You don't have to be drivin' the Mothership to know it works though. Now look at the Kurtis Blow, and see if you can't spot where he's standing on the bridge between funk, and today's hip-hop.
Yeah man, that's Don Cornelius, your host, on Soul Train. Remember that? I didn't groove on the disco that much but he used to have some sweet jazz acts on the show, and in my weirdo non-conformist musical tastes, I'd watch the show for them. I liked blues and jazz and funk, but only started appreciating hip hop in my mid-20's.
A little further on, around '83 or '84, you have the Sugar Hill Gang. They were the first rappers to hit it big with a crossover audience.
Now that's some old school. Pretty awesome, huh? BTW, "Raper's Delight" is a typo. I'm reasonably certain it's supposed to be "Rapper's Delight."
Unfortunately, that devolved to this:
I know, terrible, isn't it? That we didn't rise up as a people and chase Rob Van Winkle into the sea when he came up with that song, is a terrible mistake that will haunt the American people longer than any of our other tragic mistakes.
Well, perhaps not as long as this:
Um, yeah. I can't stop that feeling either, Dave. But with me, I've been hooked on the feeling of nausea, and yes, I can hardly believe it either.
Have a nice weekend folks.
I was talking music with one of the women I work with the other week. She told me she's into "old school hip hop." I asked her what she meant by that - Sugar Hill Gang? Run DMC? "No, who are they? More like late 90's stuff. Or around 2000."
Man I felt old.
Anyhow, here's some real Old School. Some of it holds up okay. The videos were pretty goofy though.
LL Cool J always has great lyrics. "Girlies wanna ride with a brother like me, 'cuz they know I'm gettin' funky fre-quently." Awesome. Hey, did he just say funk? I believe he did. And if there's anything I know, it's that y'all want the funk.
No, I don't have a freakin' clue what the hell all those people are doing on stage. You don't have to be drivin' the Mothership to know it works though. Now look at the Kurtis Blow, and see if you can't spot where he's standing on the bridge between funk, and today's hip-hop.
Yeah man, that's Don Cornelius, your host, on Soul Train. Remember that? I didn't groove on the disco that much but he used to have some sweet jazz acts on the show, and in my weirdo non-conformist musical tastes, I'd watch the show for them. I liked blues and jazz and funk, but only started appreciating hip hop in my mid-20's.
A little further on, around '83 or '84, you have the Sugar Hill Gang. They were the first rappers to hit it big with a crossover audience.
Now that's some old school. Pretty awesome, huh? BTW, "Raper's Delight" is a typo. I'm reasonably certain it's supposed to be "Rapper's Delight."
Unfortunately, that devolved to this:
I know, terrible, isn't it? That we didn't rise up as a people and chase Rob Van Winkle into the sea when he came up with that song, is a terrible mistake that will haunt the American people longer than any of our other tragic mistakes.
Well, perhaps not as long as this:
Um, yeah. I can't stop that feeling either, Dave. But with me, I've been hooked on the feeling of nausea, and yes, I can hardly believe it either.
Have a nice weekend folks.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Gam Jams Reviews: Headlights!
But first, let me offer a brief salute to the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, pictured above.
I thought Mike May was joking when he said that he wanted us to review headlights. Why do we need to review headlights? We all love headlights. They're wonderful! We love having a big old set of headlights in front of us, all night long. When you see a nice set of headlights, you know *exactly* what to do. Full steam ahead! They're like a pillow protecting you from all the bad stuff that might be out there in the darkness somewhere. Yep, it's a big old bad world, but if you've got a good set of headlights to play with... well, you'll be happy no matter what.
They gotta look good, first and foremost. Some people like big old jugs on the downtube. Not me... I like something sizeable, but sleek. Some people like real small headlights. I find small headlights are okay for some, but for me? You aren't going to see a whole lot with them, and nobody else is going to be looking at you either, when you're out with them. No, I like 'em kinda big, and in pairs, and really nice looking.
I've heard that some folks like one, or three. One or three? I had no idea such things existed. But apparently, they do. Me, I like two great big ones, with big round lenses right in the middle.
Some people like 'em kind of yellow, like an all-over tan. Not me, I'm very into the white ones - tan lines are sexy, so are great big white high beams.
They need to be kind of versatile, if I'm going to keep 'em around. It's not enough that I can flop my headlights on my head; they need to look good slung over the handlebar of my roadbike, my cross bike, the fixie, the mountain bike, and in a pinch, carefully held in my hands by a campfire.
They gotta stand out. No flaccid, floppy headlights for me; they gotta cast a long shadow, and point perkily upwards a little bit - no use spending the whole ride looking straight down at the ground past your front rubber now, is it? Of course not.
So let's review. The headlights gotta look good. They gotta be big, but not sloppy, and they have to pack kinda sleek, no big jugs draped on the downtube and crammed into the water bottle carrier. You gotta have two of them, 'cuz one isn't enough but three is just too much. They look better to my eyes if they are white, not a tanned up yellow. They have to be as good on the top of my head, as they are in my hands and on my bike. And they have to stand out a bit, not just down and straight forward, but up a bit too.
Yep, you'd need to have a magnificent set of headlights to do all that.
Fortunately, I have just such a pair at my disposal, the Cateye Double Shot.
Wait... why are you giggling? What the hell did you people think I was talking about?
Oh, you're perverts. The lot of you.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
Anatomy of a Training Session
There are a lot of things I don't do well in cycling. I don't diet well, I don't time trial well yet, and I don't climb particularly well. What I can do pretty decently, when I put my mind to it and I'm half fit, is sprint, or mash up a short power hill with a lot of speed. I take great joy in riding my single speed mountain bike past guys on geared bikes who are having trouble, just mashing up hills.
For some reason - natural ability and natural inclination to work hard at it I'd guess - I'm blessed with a good deal of neuromuscular power (somewhat to the detriment of my aerobic abilites). You have to have some to begin with, but if you've got a little you can build it up quite a bit. It's not just useful for sprinting; it helps in a lot of other areas in racing and general riding and you should think about adding it to the mix if you haven't already.
The first move is deciding you can actually do this - getting your mind right to sprint. A lot of people don't seem to think they can ride super aggressively, really explode out of a pack or sprint for the win or a money placing. They shouldn't talk themselves out of sprinting or making explosive moves ever - that's like agreeing to fight with one hand tied behind your back before the other guy has ever challenged you to fight. I think it's possible to train yourself to be fairly explosive. A good coach or training book will tell you what workouts to do to build that kind of power. But like most things in cycling, it's not really about the bike, it's more about what's in your head.
You may have a totally different mental makeup from me, but I'd like to clue you in on what I've discovered in terms of mental preparedness, what it takes to do sprint workouts and get real improvements in neuromuscular power. I've found that it's possible to train VO2 or threshold or tempo intervals by spinning up to speed, and then hanging on for dear life. You don't need to be on the top of your game to hit most of those training benchmarks. You don't need to ride those intervals; they are happy to ride you.
Sprinting, stomping, mashing is a whole different way of life. When you want to shoot out the front of the pack with a big jump, or take a prime, blast up a short hill or do a quality sprint workout, you need to attack it with confidence. There's no hanging on or muddling through; you need to kick the hill's, the pack's, your bike's or maybe your own ass with confidence.
To be able to do this in a race or a hot group ride, you need to get after it in training when you have sprint workouts. You need to make yourself hurt, bigtime. You need to get all violent and medieval on the bike's ass, and hope you don't break the bike or yourself. You also need to train your mind to think about the kind of violent jump you need to make, to make your effort really pay off. Nothing convinces other riders to stop sprinting early better than you leaving them in the dust with a violent attack.
The workout Bill gave me for today is a typical neuromuscular power workout and it sounds easy enough. 10-12 x spinups, seated, starting in a big gear at a trackstand or near to it. Do 15-20 turns of the crank going as hard as possible, and repeat every 4 minutes or so. According to Bill, this should be in a gear that just permits you to turn 50-60 RPM at the end of each repetition. We're going to have to discuss this because in 53:13 I'm usually hitting close to 90 RPM after 15 turns of the crank, and if I put it in 53:12 the chainline is just off enough that the chain immediately throws itself off the big ring. Doesn't matter what gear you're in though; it's a stomp. You could do this on a hill in a slightly lower gear if you wanted to, or you could do it so that you were spinning up to 90 or 120 RPM or carrying it out for 30 seconds, depending on whether you wanted to work VO2 power or had some other goal to hit. That low cadence / short duration stuff is strength and neuromuscular power work.
Your mind has to be right because you are going to get all sick and violent and stomp on the bike and yank hard on the bars and wrench up using your back and your ass, riding in a manner that is patently dangerous, and you're going to make the damn bike go fast even if it doesn't want to. Sprinting is an act of will as much as a riding technique, and it will hurt because you can't sprint unless your mind is able to dominate your body and ignore it's repeated requests to just stop and chill out. I know I've done a good sprint workout when the insides of my forearms are bruised from banging on my handlebars as I wrench on the bike, my back hurts a little, and maybe my neck is tight. You need to remember it isn't supposed to be easy, and that it won't be.
Do a good warmup at the outset - 10-15 minutes of zone 2, 5 minutes at FTP, finishing with a minute at 105 or 110% of FTP, just to open the legs. 5 minutes of easy spin, then pull up to the line.Now here 's what the stomp should feel like if you're determined to wring yourself out.
Let other cyclists clear the road. You'll want empty space for a couple hundred yards to your front. Make sure you're in 53:12 or 53:13. Breathe deep. Slowly coast up to the marker at 1-2 MPH - a light pole, bench, or crack in the road where you'll start your sprint. Get your pedals in the 1 o'clock / 7 o'clock position. Get your hands in the hooks or on the drops, wherever you like them and wherever they give the best leverage, but not on the flats or shifters, not for this kind of sprint. Move your ass back on the saddle for more leverage. Notice the slight breeze, the sunshine and a few clouds, some distant joggers. Now put them out of your mind, and start thinking aggressively, picturing yourself stomping a hole in the pedals, flogging the bike. Start feeling mad and letting your inner voice shout and rage; picture how it's going to feel (it will hurt) and how you're going to just about blast off.
As you roll into your start point, tap the brake to come to a complete (or nearly complete stop).
Now Explode! Take out some rage on the pedals. Hate the bike for a second. Take charge of it and dominate it. Pull up with your back leg, so it feels like your feet are swimming, doing a clumsy version of the crawl. Exhale hard. It feels like it takes 5 seconds to get the upper pedal to drop to the bottom of the stroke the first time. Grip the bars tight but evenly, and pull back and up hard, using them for leverage. Let your ass leave the saddle by a half inch and stay there - you can stomp the pedals harder that way. Second pedal stroke, same thing but a little faster. Ignore the pedals and handlebars squeaking in complaint at the abuse. Don't lose concentration here - do not take the easy way out - Stomp! Pull up! After the third or fourth pedal stroke, you're actually picking up quite a bit of speed, and there is a temptation to ease off, sit down and spin. Don't! Keep your ass slightly off the saddle, pick up your leg speed and stomp harder and faster. Go! Go! Faster! I don't know why my eyes roll back in my head here but they do sometimes - but still keep straight. And keep counting - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8... Every second or so remind yourself that you are starting to ease off - and you can't ease off here! Redouble your effort. The front wheel may now be lifting a tiny bit off the ground each time you stomp. Don't worry about it, just keep your body straight and don't cross the bars up. The breeze is stronger now. Keep breathing hard with each pedal stroke. Breathe, stomp! Breathe, stomp stomp. Stomp harder and pull up faster, come on! Keep your head up so you don't crash. Stomp stomp stomp. Start your spin as soon as you can by smoothly but very strongly pulling upward and working every bit of the pedal stroke.
Then you're going plenty fast and you're at 16 pedal strokes. You're doing 30, and showing 80 some-odd RPM for a cadence.
Ease up, and spin for three and a half minutes now. Relax your mind, get ready to attack the pedals again, to let the beast out for 15 seconds, and let him howl.
If you are doing stomps correctly, you should hurt a bit. You will be using your arms, upper back and core muscles. Using the upper body adds a lot of power - in my case at least 200 watts. You need to try very hard to keep good form. You will be pulling all-out, and if you get crooked on the bike you can crash it, or damage yourself physically. That'd be embarassing. And yes, Virginia, if you do 10 or a dozen of these, and do them with the vigorous spirit they are meant to have, you will be sore and stiff. Please stretch afterwards or you won't be flexible enough the next day to pick your nose.
My point in all this is that a lot of riders seem to ignore developing their neuromuscular power because they aren't natural sprinters, to their way of thinking. That is kind of silly. Even if you aren't a 'natural sprinter,' being able to decisively pass a rival in a race drives a stake into his or her heart. Being able to jet out of the pack to take a prime or start your solo attack confuses the pack and gives you a chance to get away. Shedding rivals when you start your bridge effort is mandatory, or else you're going to feel like an ass for killing yourself to bring across three guys who work to shut you out at the end of the race. I've done that, it sucked, believe you me. The other reason to train neuromuscular power is maybe the best reason. I find that my ability to work at threshold and VO2 levels is greatly improved because my legs are simply stronger than they were previously, and it's just not as taxing on them to put out that way. Super double bonus points, yes?
Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this peak into my turbulent mind during a sprint workout. I started writing this to try to figure out what the hell *I* was doing, since it struck me on the third or fourth sprint that I was in this sort of deranged state, and that I always do this training with that mindset. At the same time, I hope you take it in the spirit it's meant - clueing you in on something that has really helped me in training, and that might be useful to you if you aren't already doing it.
Maybe the coaches and, um, distinguished riders who stop on by here from time to time may be able to shed some light on why this kind of training seems to bring a range of benefits with it.
[Update: after sleeping on it overnight... I'm stiff as hell this morning. I also thought about it a little - what's the meaning of this mental routine I do in sprint training? It's weird to talk about cycling this way. It struck me that I'm applying a contact sports mental process to sprint workouts. I recognized my mental routine as the process I used to get amped up and execute during the Oklahoma Drill in rugby practice. That's a physical toughening and tackling drill from football where you line up, mano-a-mano, 5 meters apart, and try to knock down the other guy, to hit him with everything you've got and just flat lay him out. This may be an unusual approach to take in bike-based training - though I expect some trackies have a similar mental approach based on their hockey-on-wheels shenanigans. As in contact sports, the trick is to get yourself into shape, and into position, where you can apply this attitude in a live game environment - in rugby or football it is when you get one-on-one and have a chance to make a huge tackle or break a big run, in cycling it's the finish sprint or making the big attack. I suppose that the real trick for me is getting into good enough shape that I'm finishing a cross race in a position where it's actually worthwhile to sprint.]
For some reason - natural ability and natural inclination to work hard at it I'd guess - I'm blessed with a good deal of neuromuscular power (somewhat to the detriment of my aerobic abilites). You have to have some to begin with, but if you've got a little you can build it up quite a bit. It's not just useful for sprinting; it helps in a lot of other areas in racing and general riding and you should think about adding it to the mix if you haven't already.
The first move is deciding you can actually do this - getting your mind right to sprint. A lot of people don't seem to think they can ride super aggressively, really explode out of a pack or sprint for the win or a money placing. They shouldn't talk themselves out of sprinting or making explosive moves ever - that's like agreeing to fight with one hand tied behind your back before the other guy has ever challenged you to fight. I think it's possible to train yourself to be fairly explosive. A good coach or training book will tell you what workouts to do to build that kind of power. But like most things in cycling, it's not really about the bike, it's more about what's in your head.
You may have a totally different mental makeup from me, but I'd like to clue you in on what I've discovered in terms of mental preparedness, what it takes to do sprint workouts and get real improvements in neuromuscular power. I've found that it's possible to train VO2 or threshold or tempo intervals by spinning up to speed, and then hanging on for dear life. You don't need to be on the top of your game to hit most of those training benchmarks. You don't need to ride those intervals; they are happy to ride you.
Sprinting, stomping, mashing is a whole different way of life. When you want to shoot out the front of the pack with a big jump, or take a prime, blast up a short hill or do a quality sprint workout, you need to attack it with confidence. There's no hanging on or muddling through; you need to kick the hill's, the pack's, your bike's or maybe your own ass with confidence.
To be able to do this in a race or a hot group ride, you need to get after it in training when you have sprint workouts. You need to make yourself hurt, bigtime. You need to get all violent and medieval on the bike's ass, and hope you don't break the bike or yourself. You also need to train your mind to think about the kind of violent jump you need to make, to make your effort really pay off. Nothing convinces other riders to stop sprinting early better than you leaving them in the dust with a violent attack.
The workout Bill gave me for today is a typical neuromuscular power workout and it sounds easy enough. 10-12 x spinups, seated, starting in a big gear at a trackstand or near to it. Do 15-20 turns of the crank going as hard as possible, and repeat every 4 minutes or so. According to Bill, this should be in a gear that just permits you to turn 50-60 RPM at the end of each repetition. We're going to have to discuss this because in 53:13 I'm usually hitting close to 90 RPM after 15 turns of the crank, and if I put it in 53:12 the chainline is just off enough that the chain immediately throws itself off the big ring. Doesn't matter what gear you're in though; it's a stomp. You could do this on a hill in a slightly lower gear if you wanted to, or you could do it so that you were spinning up to 90 or 120 RPM or carrying it out for 30 seconds, depending on whether you wanted to work VO2 power or had some other goal to hit. That low cadence / short duration stuff is strength and neuromuscular power work.
Your mind has to be right because you are going to get all sick and violent and stomp on the bike and yank hard on the bars and wrench up using your back and your ass, riding in a manner that is patently dangerous, and you're going to make the damn bike go fast even if it doesn't want to. Sprinting is an act of will as much as a riding technique, and it will hurt because you can't sprint unless your mind is able to dominate your body and ignore it's repeated requests to just stop and chill out. I know I've done a good sprint workout when the insides of my forearms are bruised from banging on my handlebars as I wrench on the bike, my back hurts a little, and maybe my neck is tight. You need to remember it isn't supposed to be easy, and that it won't be.
Do a good warmup at the outset - 10-15 minutes of zone 2, 5 minutes at FTP, finishing with a minute at 105 or 110% of FTP, just to open the legs. 5 minutes of easy spin, then pull up to the line.Now here 's what the stomp should feel like if you're determined to wring yourself out.
Let other cyclists clear the road. You'll want empty space for a couple hundred yards to your front. Make sure you're in 53:12 or 53:13. Breathe deep. Slowly coast up to the marker at 1-2 MPH - a light pole, bench, or crack in the road where you'll start your sprint. Get your pedals in the 1 o'clock / 7 o'clock position. Get your hands in the hooks or on the drops, wherever you like them and wherever they give the best leverage, but not on the flats or shifters, not for this kind of sprint. Move your ass back on the saddle for more leverage. Notice the slight breeze, the sunshine and a few clouds, some distant joggers. Now put them out of your mind, and start thinking aggressively, picturing yourself stomping a hole in the pedals, flogging the bike. Start feeling mad and letting your inner voice shout and rage; picture how it's going to feel (it will hurt) and how you're going to just about blast off.
As you roll into your start point, tap the brake to come to a complete (or nearly complete stop).
Now Explode! Take out some rage on the pedals. Hate the bike for a second. Take charge of it and dominate it. Pull up with your back leg, so it feels like your feet are swimming, doing a clumsy version of the crawl. Exhale hard. It feels like it takes 5 seconds to get the upper pedal to drop to the bottom of the stroke the first time. Grip the bars tight but evenly, and pull back and up hard, using them for leverage. Let your ass leave the saddle by a half inch and stay there - you can stomp the pedals harder that way. Second pedal stroke, same thing but a little faster. Ignore the pedals and handlebars squeaking in complaint at the abuse. Don't lose concentration here - do not take the easy way out - Stomp! Pull up! After the third or fourth pedal stroke, you're actually picking up quite a bit of speed, and there is a temptation to ease off, sit down and spin. Don't! Keep your ass slightly off the saddle, pick up your leg speed and stomp harder and faster. Go! Go! Faster! I don't know why my eyes roll back in my head here but they do sometimes - but still keep straight. And keep counting - 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8... Every second or so remind yourself that you are starting to ease off - and you can't ease off here! Redouble your effort. The front wheel may now be lifting a tiny bit off the ground each time you stomp. Don't worry about it, just keep your body straight and don't cross the bars up. The breeze is stronger now. Keep breathing hard with each pedal stroke. Breathe, stomp! Breathe, stomp stomp. Stomp harder and pull up faster, come on! Keep your head up so you don't crash. Stomp stomp stomp. Start your spin as soon as you can by smoothly but very strongly pulling upward and working every bit of the pedal stroke.
Then you're going plenty fast and you're at 16 pedal strokes. You're doing 30, and showing 80 some-odd RPM for a cadence.
Ease up, and spin for three and a half minutes now. Relax your mind, get ready to attack the pedals again, to let the beast out for 15 seconds, and let him howl.
If you are doing stomps correctly, you should hurt a bit. You will be using your arms, upper back and core muscles. Using the upper body adds a lot of power - in my case at least 200 watts. You need to try very hard to keep good form. You will be pulling all-out, and if you get crooked on the bike you can crash it, or damage yourself physically. That'd be embarassing. And yes, Virginia, if you do 10 or a dozen of these, and do them with the vigorous spirit they are meant to have, you will be sore and stiff. Please stretch afterwards or you won't be flexible enough the next day to pick your nose.
My point in all this is that a lot of riders seem to ignore developing their neuromuscular power because they aren't natural sprinters, to their way of thinking. That is kind of silly. Even if you aren't a 'natural sprinter,' being able to decisively pass a rival in a race drives a stake into his or her heart. Being able to jet out of the pack to take a prime or start your solo attack confuses the pack and gives you a chance to get away. Shedding rivals when you start your bridge effort is mandatory, or else you're going to feel like an ass for killing yourself to bring across three guys who work to shut you out at the end of the race. I've done that, it sucked, believe you me. The other reason to train neuromuscular power is maybe the best reason. I find that my ability to work at threshold and VO2 levels is greatly improved because my legs are simply stronger than they were previously, and it's just not as taxing on them to put out that way. Super double bonus points, yes?
Anyhow, I hope you enjoy this peak into my turbulent mind during a sprint workout. I started writing this to try to figure out what the hell *I* was doing, since it struck me on the third or fourth sprint that I was in this sort of deranged state, and that I always do this training with that mindset. At the same time, I hope you take it in the spirit it's meant - clueing you in on something that has really helped me in training, and that might be useful to you if you aren't already doing it.
Maybe the coaches and, um, distinguished riders who stop on by here from time to time may be able to shed some light on why this kind of training seems to bring a range of benefits with it.
[Update: after sleeping on it overnight... I'm stiff as hell this morning. I also thought about it a little - what's the meaning of this mental routine I do in sprint training? It's weird to talk about cycling this way. It struck me that I'm applying a contact sports mental process to sprint workouts. I recognized my mental routine as the process I used to get amped up and execute during the Oklahoma Drill in rugby practice. That's a physical toughening and tackling drill from football where you line up, mano-a-mano, 5 meters apart, and try to knock down the other guy, to hit him with everything you've got and just flat lay him out. This may be an unusual approach to take in bike-based training - though I expect some trackies have a similar mental approach based on their hockey-on-wheels shenanigans. As in contact sports, the trick is to get yourself into shape, and into position, where you can apply this attitude in a live game environment - in rugby or football it is when you get one-on-one and have a chance to make a huge tackle or break a big run, in cycling it's the finish sprint or making the big attack. I suppose that the real trick for me is getting into good enough shape that I'm finishing a cross race in a position where it's actually worthwhile to sprint.]
News Flash
You might have wondered where Stevil Kinevil, of How to Avoid The Bummer Life fame, went recently.
Short story is, he no longer works at Swobo. It seems that in times of recession, companies don't feel the need to employ a man with a skillset that includes making disturbing art, drinking disturbing amounts of beer, riding all manner of bicycles, writing funny stuff, and killing hoboes.
Fortunately, even bicyclists who live on skid row are now able to have web access thanks to the New Deal, the Great Society and Defense Appropriations Act of 2009, Stevil is back in business, as he put it, "to put the Cult back in Bike Culture. Yep, it's more of the same old shit we're used to seeing from him. But that's okay, because as you all know, Stevil's same old shit is very, very good and we all like it.
I give you:
All Hail The Black Market.
Short story is, he no longer works at Swobo. It seems that in times of recession, companies don't feel the need to employ a man with a skillset that includes making disturbing art, drinking disturbing amounts of beer, riding all manner of bicycles, writing funny stuff, and killing hoboes.
Fortunately, even bicyclists who live on skid row are now able to have web access thanks to the New Deal, the Great Society and Defense Appropriations Act of 2009, Stevil is back in business, as he put it, "to put the Cult back in Bike Culture. Yep, it's more of the same old shit we're used to seeing from him. But that's okay, because as you all know, Stevil's same old shit is very, very good and we all like it.
I give you:
All Hail The Black Market.
Monday, August 24, 2009
[Your Expletive Here]!!!
Looong day at work today. The big boss left 7 months ago. Boss 1A took over. Boss 1B stepped into 1A's shoes. Boss 1C stepped into 1B's shoes. I ain't a boss, just a worker bee. Turns out Boss 1A is leaving for greener pastures, just announced. Bosses 1B and 1C are on the road right now. The Rouleur had a rough week last week, rougher week this week. Got some %&^*ing litigation spinning up again too with a fairly vexatious opposing party that isn't buying what I'm sellin'. Going to need the riding to keep some sanity in my life.
Sanity, did you say? Got a near-teary call from the Sainted Wife this morning. Seems one of the upstairs bathroom outlets was spewing flame like some demonic lizard from a Harry Potter movie this morning when she plugged in and fired up her 800 horsepower 26,000 watt hair dryer, the one they developed to replace the flawed Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines that powered the original F-14. Anyhow, she shut off all the power and waited for me to get home. I had a semi-manly moment when, in the deepest darkest depths of bathroom murk, I managed to remove the outlet, check the wires, detect a loose ground wire half melted to the ground terminal of the outlet, and reconnect it. Yep, inadvertently welding the ground wire to the ground terminal will cause those arc welding style flames and sparks to shoot out over the sink alright... So that was semi-manly but a real manly maneuver would have been catching it before it put the wife into a near-panic. Hell, I'd panic too. You ever go out of the house without blow drying? It's unthinkable.
Got some stomps to do tomorrow in a little 90 minute workout - big gear low cadence 10-15 second spin-ups. I don't think my legs are up to 2007 standards just yet but I do have some fear of bending the handlebars thanks to recent upper body workouts, or snapping the chain or chainring. We'll see how it goes. I'm a little hesitant because I busted a chain last week and it reminded me of how tenuous a situation that is to blow out the drivetrain, all of a sudden snapping down on the bike, the big wobble, the tank slapper... the odds are pretty good I bite it one of these times and lose a few teeth on the stem or implant the front derailer in my calf again. (Though to be fair the time I did that it wasn't deeply implanted, the shards were just sort of stuck into the first couple layers of epidermis). Oh well, these are really good neuromuscular strength builders, and one of the nice things about them, it's totally counterintuitive, but they help raise the threshold up. It seems that all the muscles (I, IIa, IIb) get stronger when you're doing the equivalent of weightlifting on the bike.
Now your moment of Zen. By way of the excellent Service Course, Johan von Summeren von Gambolputty von Knickern-Knackern von... JvS runs over a cat in the Eneco Tour.
Nope, not a photoshop, though Ryan is running a caption contest. Now I love my cats, and I don't like seeing animals harmed. But on the other hand, sometimes you just have to laugh at the ways that cats manage to get themselves into unlikely positions where they will get killed. Cats are masters at being the coolest, smoothest operators in the animal kingdom, right up until the moment they top it doing something utterly stupid. They are like drunk teenage boys, in that respect.
Sanity, did you say? Got a near-teary call from the Sainted Wife this morning. Seems one of the upstairs bathroom outlets was spewing flame like some demonic lizard from a Harry Potter movie this morning when she plugged in and fired up her 800 horsepower 26,000 watt hair dryer, the one they developed to replace the flawed Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines that powered the original F-14. Anyhow, she shut off all the power and waited for me to get home. I had a semi-manly moment when, in the deepest darkest depths of bathroom murk, I managed to remove the outlet, check the wires, detect a loose ground wire half melted to the ground terminal of the outlet, and reconnect it. Yep, inadvertently welding the ground wire to the ground terminal will cause those arc welding style flames and sparks to shoot out over the sink alright... So that was semi-manly but a real manly maneuver would have been catching it before it put the wife into a near-panic. Hell, I'd panic too. You ever go out of the house without blow drying? It's unthinkable.
Got some stomps to do tomorrow in a little 90 minute workout - big gear low cadence 10-15 second spin-ups. I don't think my legs are up to 2007 standards just yet but I do have some fear of bending the handlebars thanks to recent upper body workouts, or snapping the chain or chainring. We'll see how it goes. I'm a little hesitant because I busted a chain last week and it reminded me of how tenuous a situation that is to blow out the drivetrain, all of a sudden snapping down on the bike, the big wobble, the tank slapper... the odds are pretty good I bite it one of these times and lose a few teeth on the stem or implant the front derailer in my calf again. (Though to be fair the time I did that it wasn't deeply implanted, the shards were just sort of stuck into the first couple layers of epidermis). Oh well, these are really good neuromuscular strength builders, and one of the nice things about them, it's totally counterintuitive, but they help raise the threshold up. It seems that all the muscles (I, IIa, IIb) get stronger when you're doing the equivalent of weightlifting on the bike.
Now your moment of Zen. By way of the excellent Service Course, Johan von Summeren von Gambolputty von Knickern-Knackern von... JvS runs over a cat in the Eneco Tour.
Not-LOL Kitteh
Nope, not a photoshop, though Ryan is running a caption contest. Now I love my cats, and I don't like seeing animals harmed. But on the other hand, sometimes you just have to laugh at the ways that cats manage to get themselves into unlikely positions where they will get killed. Cats are masters at being the coolest, smoothest operators in the animal kingdom, right up until the moment they top it doing something utterly stupid. They are like drunk teenage boys, in that respect.
The Good, The Bad, And The Regrettable
The Good. Since my last round of critical power tests, around August 1, a few good things have happened. I've picked up 30% more power at CP 30 Seconds. I'm still 10% lower than 'in shape' power at that duration, but the VO2 power is coming back quickly. Since I am a fat bastard who relies on that level of power to grind up hills, this is important. The threshold power, or a reasonable approximation of it (CP 20 during a 30 minute all-out effort) has come up 3% since August 1. I haven't been training for improved FTP, so the fact that it's coming up alongside VO2 power as an incidental improvement is heartening.
The Bad. It could have been a bit better. I had a lot of business travel over the last month and missed a good handful of hard workouts, replacing them with elliptical machine workouts or what amounts to an easy spin on a spin bike. The amazing thing about those is you get to level 18 of 20, and it's basically a high zone 2 spin. I'm afraid to try to generate threshold wattage on one of them, for fear I'd be held liable by the Whatever Hotel where I'm staying.
The Regrettable. After riding at Patapsco a bit over a week ago I stuffed my kit to the bottom of the wash basket without letting it dry. I keep a separate wash basket for kit so it doesn't contaminate everything else. All the training clothes worn during the week got piled on top of it. It was a fairly hard ride, combining the nasty sweat from a bunch of hard low cadence efforts on climbs, with the stench of flop sweat from not having ridden a mountain bike to speak of in some months. When I went to wash my kit on Sunday, I could actually see the odors wafting from the bottom of the basket - they were reddish green. The kit I wore to Patapsco was at the bottom, and the smell... it smelled like the place where things that smell like ass go to die.
I tried soaking it in Oxy Clean, I washed it on the long soak cycle, I used extra detergent... nothing worked. It smells hideous.
I totally regret not letting the stuff air dry before putting it in the wash basket.
They'll go in the wash again this week but I think the bibs and jersey may be permanently wrecked. You get within a couple feet of them and the stench is noticeable... not good.
The Bad. It could have been a bit better. I had a lot of business travel over the last month and missed a good handful of hard workouts, replacing them with elliptical machine workouts or what amounts to an easy spin on a spin bike. The amazing thing about those is you get to level 18 of 20, and it's basically a high zone 2 spin. I'm afraid to try to generate threshold wattage on one of them, for fear I'd be held liable by the Whatever Hotel where I'm staying.
The Regrettable. After riding at Patapsco a bit over a week ago I stuffed my kit to the bottom of the wash basket without letting it dry. I keep a separate wash basket for kit so it doesn't contaminate everything else. All the training clothes worn during the week got piled on top of it. It was a fairly hard ride, combining the nasty sweat from a bunch of hard low cadence efforts on climbs, with the stench of flop sweat from not having ridden a mountain bike to speak of in some months. When I went to wash my kit on Sunday, I could actually see the odors wafting from the bottom of the basket - they were reddish green. The kit I wore to Patapsco was at the bottom, and the smell... it smelled like the place where things that smell like ass go to die.
I tried soaking it in Oxy Clean, I washed it on the long soak cycle, I used extra detergent... nothing worked. It smells hideous.
I totally regret not letting the stuff air dry before putting it in the wash basket.
They'll go in the wash again this week but I think the bibs and jersey may be permanently wrecked. You get within a couple feet of them and the stench is noticeable... not good.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Strange Days
It's funny how little things happen in life that make everything turn out differently.
In November of 1988, I was serving as a soldier in West Germany. I wanted to go to the U.S. on leave to visit my family, and a girlfriend who had just moved to Alabama. So I went to the military travel office - SATO - and tried to book a flight out of Frankfurt to New York for December 21st. I figured that would give me time to work out the jet lag, celebrate New Years with the girlfriend, after Christmas with my family in New York. The travel agent got a tentative reservation for the flight, there would be a transfer at Heathrow, and asked for payment. When I whipped out my checkbook, she said she couldn't accept checks from soldiers below a certain grade - I think it was E-7 or something. I was mildly insulted based on my paygrade, and extremely irritated at this petty bureaucratic rule. Nevertheless, I wanted to get home for Christmas, so I went to the military community bank, the American Express Bank, to get cash or a cashier's check, or some other form of tender that SATO would find acceptable coming from such an unworthy person.
There was some delay at the bank, it may have been their lunch hour or something, or maybe I had to meet somebody at lunch on the way to the bank. I don't remember, but it took a little while. When I got the money and came back 45 minutes later, I went to pay for the booking but the last seat had been taken. I asked the travel agent to book me on the same flight, next day. She did that, I paid, and then I forgot about it.
About three or four weeks later, a little after dinnertime on December 21st, a British soldier in the garrison bar confronted me about his unit's big Christmas party having been canceled. He was angry in the extreme, and wanted to pick a fight with me, saying it was "all the Americans' fault." I had no idea what he was talking about, when one of the bartenders clued me in, that a flight full of Americans had been blown up in Scotland, and wreaked havoc as it crashed into a Scottish neighborhood.
I didn't think a whole lot about it until I got to Frankfurt the next day to fly to Heathrow. It was a confusing transfer in Frankfurt because the numbers of my flights had been changed, and the stopover had been changed from Heathrow to Brussels. My itinerary looked totally different from how it had looked when I confirmed it the previous afternoon.
That's when it hit me: Flight 103, blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, might have been the plane I had tried to get a reservation on. I'm not entirely positive it was; Pan Am had a lot of flights going out on the same day and it may have been a different one. Still, it was close enough to the flight I tried to book that I found it chilling. Thank goodness for the stupid little bureaucratic rule that kept me off that flight, eh?
Making matters worse, I found out that two guys in my unit - not close friends but buddies, guys I knew to speak with or hang out with - were on that flight. There was also a bunch of Syracuse University students, with whom a few of my friends in Syracuse had ties.
Christmas was okay that year but it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. A bit of a pall hung over it. Still, I moved past it and I don't think about it often, any more than you'd think about nearly being hit by a bus five years ago. That kind of thing normally doesn't bubble to the surface spontaneously.
This week, Flight 103 and the man convicted of committing the mass murder have been in the news. It seems that he guy is ill, so the Scottish government has decided to release him back to Libya on humanitarian grounds. It has been reported that he has returned to a hero's welcome.
Humanitarian grounds, huh?
I'm wondering the Scottish government will bring my buddies, or any of the other 268 people who were murdered in cold blood, back to life on humanitarian grounds?
I don't like to wax expressly political here but this particular event hits a bit close to home for me. On of the things that bothers me about Oprah Society is that we don't take anything seriously, starting with the value of human life. Letting a guy convicted of killing 270 people out of jail after seven or eight years served basically spits on his victims and their survivors and friends. It says that the great loss unfairly and unjustly inflicted on the victims and those tied to them by bonds of blood and affection just doesn't rate compared to the delicate sensitivities of some Scottish judge or some diplomat. It is unjust in the extreme. I'm not saying we need to be cruel to the mass murderer; but we do need to insure that men like him leave this life from behind bars. Society put a price on the victims' lives when they convicted this man to life imprisonment. When they released him, the price stood at about 10 days served for each victim.
Seems to me that is treating human life awfully cheaply.
I can't help but wonder if a society that cheapens life in that extreme of a manner will not face other major social problems later on. It's easy to disregard crime if it doesn't happen to us, war, terrorism, all that other crap. That stuff is remote, right? But the thing is, society is like a big blanket. It's made out of a lot of threads. You ignore the way it's getting frayed on the edges, and pretty soon, you're looking at great big runs in the fabric, right across the middle of it. You can't let some shitweasel pull away at the threads on one corner, and expect that the rest of the blanket will stay intact. All those little threads, those little strands of life in society, are interwoven. That's the point of discussing my associations with this distant event, that on its surface, has nothing to do with some guy who rides a bike in D.C. Nah, I'm not saying you're either with me or you're with the terrorists. But I am saying that if you don't bat an eye to events like this, you're ignoring societal unraveling, an ignorance that in the long run won't be in your best interest. Broken windows policing, people. Broken windows.
Sorry not to be spreading the joy here like I usually do on Fridays but this little bit of news has given me a serious WTF moment.
In November of 1988, I was serving as a soldier in West Germany. I wanted to go to the U.S. on leave to visit my family, and a girlfriend who had just moved to Alabama. So I went to the military travel office - SATO - and tried to book a flight out of Frankfurt to New York for December 21st. I figured that would give me time to work out the jet lag, celebrate New Years with the girlfriend, after Christmas with my family in New York. The travel agent got a tentative reservation for the flight, there would be a transfer at Heathrow, and asked for payment. When I whipped out my checkbook, she said she couldn't accept checks from soldiers below a certain grade - I think it was E-7 or something. I was mildly insulted based on my paygrade, and extremely irritated at this petty bureaucratic rule. Nevertheless, I wanted to get home for Christmas, so I went to the military community bank, the American Express Bank, to get cash or a cashier's check, or some other form of tender that SATO would find acceptable coming from such an unworthy person.
There was some delay at the bank, it may have been their lunch hour or something, or maybe I had to meet somebody at lunch on the way to the bank. I don't remember, but it took a little while. When I got the money and came back 45 minutes later, I went to pay for the booking but the last seat had been taken. I asked the travel agent to book me on the same flight, next day. She did that, I paid, and then I forgot about it.
About three or four weeks later, a little after dinnertime on December 21st, a British soldier in the garrison bar confronted me about his unit's big Christmas party having been canceled. He was angry in the extreme, and wanted to pick a fight with me, saying it was "all the Americans' fault." I had no idea what he was talking about, when one of the bartenders clued me in, that a flight full of Americans had been blown up in Scotland, and wreaked havoc as it crashed into a Scottish neighborhood.
I didn't think a whole lot about it until I got to Frankfurt the next day to fly to Heathrow. It was a confusing transfer in Frankfurt because the numbers of my flights had been changed, and the stopover had been changed from Heathrow to Brussels. My itinerary looked totally different from how it had looked when I confirmed it the previous afternoon.
That's when it hit me: Flight 103, blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, might have been the plane I had tried to get a reservation on. I'm not entirely positive it was; Pan Am had a lot of flights going out on the same day and it may have been a different one. Still, it was close enough to the flight I tried to book that I found it chilling. Thank goodness for the stupid little bureaucratic rule that kept me off that flight, eh?
Making matters worse, I found out that two guys in my unit - not close friends but buddies, guys I knew to speak with or hang out with - were on that flight. There was also a bunch of Syracuse University students, with whom a few of my friends in Syracuse had ties.
Christmas was okay that year but it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped. A bit of a pall hung over it. Still, I moved past it and I don't think about it often, any more than you'd think about nearly being hit by a bus five years ago. That kind of thing normally doesn't bubble to the surface spontaneously.
This week, Flight 103 and the man convicted of committing the mass murder have been in the news. It seems that he guy is ill, so the Scottish government has decided to release him back to Libya on humanitarian grounds. It has been reported that he has returned to a hero's welcome.
Humanitarian grounds, huh?
I'm wondering the Scottish government will bring my buddies, or any of the other 268 people who were murdered in cold blood, back to life on humanitarian grounds?
I don't like to wax expressly political here but this particular event hits a bit close to home for me. On of the things that bothers me about Oprah Society is that we don't take anything seriously, starting with the value of human life. Letting a guy convicted of killing 270 people out of jail after seven or eight years served basically spits on his victims and their survivors and friends. It says that the great loss unfairly and unjustly inflicted on the victims and those tied to them by bonds of blood and affection just doesn't rate compared to the delicate sensitivities of some Scottish judge or some diplomat. It is unjust in the extreme. I'm not saying we need to be cruel to the mass murderer; but we do need to insure that men like him leave this life from behind bars. Society put a price on the victims' lives when they convicted this man to life imprisonment. When they released him, the price stood at about 10 days served for each victim.
Seems to me that is treating human life awfully cheaply.
I can't help but wonder if a society that cheapens life in that extreme of a manner will not face other major social problems later on. It's easy to disregard crime if it doesn't happen to us, war, terrorism, all that other crap. That stuff is remote, right? But the thing is, society is like a big blanket. It's made out of a lot of threads. You ignore the way it's getting frayed on the edges, and pretty soon, you're looking at great big runs in the fabric, right across the middle of it. You can't let some shitweasel pull away at the threads on one corner, and expect that the rest of the blanket will stay intact. All those little threads, those little strands of life in society, are interwoven. That's the point of discussing my associations with this distant event, that on its surface, has nothing to do with some guy who rides a bike in D.C. Nah, I'm not saying you're either with me or you're with the terrorists. But I am saying that if you don't bat an eye to events like this, you're ignoring societal unraveling, an ignorance that in the long run won't be in your best interest. Broken windows policing, people. Broken windows.
Sorry not to be spreading the joy here like I usually do on Fridays but this little bit of news has given me a serious WTF moment.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Crash Like a Child
Beppo said something really interesting to me riding back from 'cross practice today: "Cross is nice and different because it's about the only thing you can do on a bike where you're riding along and you crash and then you sit there laughing."
That's true. There's something nice and child-like about cross. We take to it in innocence, like a 5 year-old wants to race everywhere. You don't need to have a reason for it, you just do it. It's fun to do it. So you act like a kid and that's just what you do.
I'm thinking about this today because maybe we cyclists are about to dick up cross like we've dicked up mountain biking and dicked up road riding and maybe track and just riding to work.
At times, we take ourselves wayyyy too seriously.
Grant Peterson says bikes will save the world. Really? I thought that's what Jesus was for, saving the world. Or maybe Mahomet or the teachings of Guru Nanak or whomever. Peterson, whom I really respect as a building and bike advocate, is far from alone in taking himself and his riding discipline too seriously.
As roadies, we are such a bunch of purists, such a bunch of true believers, that we act like jerks and try and sometimes try to exclude people for not coming into the faith with their priestly knowledge fully developed. Some of the snobbery makes sense - a guy with a creaking bike, hairy legs, and wobbly handling in the first 5 minutes of a ride probably can't be trusted to be cool in a 35 MPH paceline after he has already hammered it for two hours. But most people need to be shown the light, not the door.
Mountain biking has gone through something like that too. The big money NORBA expansion and TV revenue, along with the Mountain Dewey hipsterization of that discipline for a while turned mountain biking into Teh Biggest Thing Evah, roadracing on the dirt, until the money evaporated and the series died out and it turned somewhat back into a grass roots thing. The single speed movement, near as I can tell, is partially a revolt against $7500 mountain bikes and anal retentive race rules and hipster trendiness. Most of the best single speeders I know ride a frame that retails for $400 or $700. A new drivetrain - rings and chain - will set you back well under a hundred if you're on the economy plan. No $465 cassettes there. Who needs one of them anyhow?
We do the same thing with commuting. A colleague of mine at work got talked into a somewhat expensive, flat bar road bike with disc brakes, because that's what the salesman convinced him he needed to have for commuting, and that's what one of the cycling magazines tried to convince him of. I advised him to put his old 10 speed on the road, we could have him rolling for $100 for new tires, brake pads and a chain, then if he liked riding that he could think about a new bike. He has some regrets now, but he went for the salesman's bling.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because it looks like local cross is having a breakout season, and we may be approaching a turning point where this great discipline turns into cycling snobbery central. The classes are filling up at Charm City, and Ed Sander just opened for registration yesterday. No doubt that will fill up relatively quickly too. Is cross going to turn into another hyper intense sport like low cat roadracing, where you have to register within 5 minutes of the event opening on BikeReg?
So are we taking it too seriously? Are we going to destroy a good scene?
I think we are, if we don't try to preserve the good things about 'cross.
One of the good things that makes cross nice is a laid back attitude. Yeah, you train and race hard. You cheer hard too and maybe you even drink hard after the race. But you shouldn't take yourself too seriously. There's no method of killing the fun quicker than taking yourself real seriously, especially when you're an amateur racer who has no business taking themselves seriously to begin with.
Another good thing about cross is that it's pretty easy to get into races. You maybe pre-register for some races, but you should be able to show up on the day and find a class to race in. Promoters, if we find that two or three of our fields are filling up before the race, we need to consider opening up another field to take overflow. You shouldn't have to sit there at 9:30 on a Tuesday night, clicking "refresh" and hoping to get registered 60 days before an event. That's a key feature of Cat 4/5 roadracing, and it blows.
But maybe the most important part of keeping cross fun will be to dedicate ourselves as racers to having fun. How do we do this? Easy. Select a couple races this year that are going to be misery-free zones.
Huh?
You heard me. I know we all have "A" race goals - a win at a rival club's event, a great finish on a course that particularly suits us, a great showing on the weekend the parents are going to be in town. But most of the other races are B or C races. You should race those hard - but pick a couple of them that will be your designated fun zones. Commit yourself to spending the day and cheering for others, working the pits for teammates, drinking a Chimay or two, taking some pictures, chatting with people from other teams, hanging out with friends, screwing off, being grateful for whatever result you got, win, lose or DNF, and generally maximizing your fun quotient.
Want to know what the most fun race was for me last year? Ed Sander. It was wicked muddy, and the mud section in the lilly ponds wasn't much fun at all. But the rest of the course? Awesome. I hammered it on the flats, moved up nicely through the field... then crashed repeatedly on the back side. Sure, I'd fly past people... then crash. I even crashed twice in front of Joe Jefferson, which earned me some cracks he must have been saving up for a year, since I'd last crashed in front of him. Fortunately, I was able to laugh about the whole thing - thank goodness, because after the seventh or eighth crash, it was pretty laughable and I had lost 20 or 30 hard-earned places that I wasn't going to be able to claw back. I could laugh because I had no expectations for the race. I rode really well, and crashed only because I was working it really hard, and getting blasted in the mud. Despite the misery of crashing, it's the one race I remember from last year as a great, great time. I raced with total abandon, crashed, and laughed, then hung out with friends. When I look back on last year, that is the race that made it all worthwhile. Other super fun races like DCCX were in the same category for me, just a great time.
Having fun at the races doesn't mean you have to slack off. Absolutely not - it wouldn't be cross if we didn't beat our brains out. What it does mean, is that if you are getting caught up in the competitiveness and the grind, you need to remind yourself to have some fun, and to make some fun with other racers. Get yourself an attitude adjustment, and learn to race with a smile on your face. Take joy in the racing and the cameraderie, win, finish, or DFL. Forget about the Monday-Friday hell you face, and appreciate the Saturday Hell for the good-time-in-disguise that it really is.
No, focusing on having fun probably won't save cross from dick-ification, that is a process we may not be able to stave off even if we try. But maybe if we get in the habit of having as much fun as possible, we can spread the fun to the new people coming into the sport, and hang on to this cool scene for a couple more years until the urge to turn it into just one more over-serious anal retentive cycling discipline has passed.
We're going to have to try to remember to have fun with this, until we learn to start acting like a bunch of children again.
That's true. There's something nice and child-like about cross. We take to it in innocence, like a 5 year-old wants to race everywhere. You don't need to have a reason for it, you just do it. It's fun to do it. So you act like a kid and that's just what you do.
I'm thinking about this today because maybe we cyclists are about to dick up cross like we've dicked up mountain biking and dicked up road riding and maybe track and just riding to work.
At times, we take ourselves wayyyy too seriously.
Grant Peterson says bikes will save the world. Really? I thought that's what Jesus was for, saving the world. Or maybe Mahomet or the teachings of Guru Nanak or whomever. Peterson, whom I really respect as a building and bike advocate, is far from alone in taking himself and his riding discipline too seriously.
As roadies, we are such a bunch of purists, such a bunch of true believers, that we act like jerks and try and sometimes try to exclude people for not coming into the faith with their priestly knowledge fully developed. Some of the snobbery makes sense - a guy with a creaking bike, hairy legs, and wobbly handling in the first 5 minutes of a ride probably can't be trusted to be cool in a 35 MPH paceline after he has already hammered it for two hours. But most people need to be shown the light, not the door.
Mountain biking has gone through something like that too. The big money NORBA expansion and TV revenue, along with the Mountain Dewey hipsterization of that discipline for a while turned mountain biking into Teh Biggest Thing Evah, roadracing on the dirt, until the money evaporated and the series died out and it turned somewhat back into a grass roots thing. The single speed movement, near as I can tell, is partially a revolt against $7500 mountain bikes and anal retentive race rules and hipster trendiness. Most of the best single speeders I know ride a frame that retails for $400 or $700. A new drivetrain - rings and chain - will set you back well under a hundred if you're on the economy plan. No $465 cassettes there. Who needs one of them anyhow?
We do the same thing with commuting. A colleague of mine at work got talked into a somewhat expensive, flat bar road bike with disc brakes, because that's what the salesman convinced him he needed to have for commuting, and that's what one of the cycling magazines tried to convince him of. I advised him to put his old 10 speed on the road, we could have him rolling for $100 for new tires, brake pads and a chain, then if he liked riding that he could think about a new bike. He has some regrets now, but he went for the salesman's bling.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because it looks like local cross is having a breakout season, and we may be approaching a turning point where this great discipline turns into cycling snobbery central. The classes are filling up at Charm City, and Ed Sander just opened for registration yesterday. No doubt that will fill up relatively quickly too. Is cross going to turn into another hyper intense sport like low cat roadracing, where you have to register within 5 minutes of the event opening on BikeReg?
So are we taking it too seriously? Are we going to destroy a good scene?
I think we are, if we don't try to preserve the good things about 'cross.
One of the good things that makes cross nice is a laid back attitude. Yeah, you train and race hard. You cheer hard too and maybe you even drink hard after the race. But you shouldn't take yourself too seriously. There's no method of killing the fun quicker than taking yourself real seriously, especially when you're an amateur racer who has no business taking themselves seriously to begin with.
Another good thing about cross is that it's pretty easy to get into races. You maybe pre-register for some races, but you should be able to show up on the day and find a class to race in. Promoters, if we find that two or three of our fields are filling up before the race, we need to consider opening up another field to take overflow. You shouldn't have to sit there at 9:30 on a Tuesday night, clicking "refresh" and hoping to get registered 60 days before an event. That's a key feature of Cat 4/5 roadracing, and it blows.
But maybe the most important part of keeping cross fun will be to dedicate ourselves as racers to having fun. How do we do this? Easy. Select a couple races this year that are going to be misery-free zones.
Huh?
You heard me. I know we all have "A" race goals - a win at a rival club's event, a great finish on a course that particularly suits us, a great showing on the weekend the parents are going to be in town. But most of the other races are B or C races. You should race those hard - but pick a couple of them that will be your designated fun zones. Commit yourself to spending the day and cheering for others, working the pits for teammates, drinking a Chimay or two, taking some pictures, chatting with people from other teams, hanging out with friends, screwing off, being grateful for whatever result you got, win, lose or DNF, and generally maximizing your fun quotient.
Want to know what the most fun race was for me last year? Ed Sander. It was wicked muddy, and the mud section in the lilly ponds wasn't much fun at all. But the rest of the course? Awesome. I hammered it on the flats, moved up nicely through the field... then crashed repeatedly on the back side. Sure, I'd fly past people... then crash. I even crashed twice in front of Joe Jefferson, which earned me some cracks he must have been saving up for a year, since I'd last crashed in front of him. Fortunately, I was able to laugh about the whole thing - thank goodness, because after the seventh or eighth crash, it was pretty laughable and I had lost 20 or 30 hard-earned places that I wasn't going to be able to claw back. I could laugh because I had no expectations for the race. I rode really well, and crashed only because I was working it really hard, and getting blasted in the mud. Despite the misery of crashing, it's the one race I remember from last year as a great, great time. I raced with total abandon, crashed, and laughed, then hung out with friends. When I look back on last year, that is the race that made it all worthwhile. Other super fun races like DCCX were in the same category for me, just a great time.
Having fun at the races doesn't mean you have to slack off. Absolutely not - it wouldn't be cross if we didn't beat our brains out. What it does mean, is that if you are getting caught up in the competitiveness and the grind, you need to remind yourself to have some fun, and to make some fun with other racers. Get yourself an attitude adjustment, and learn to race with a smile on your face. Take joy in the racing and the cameraderie, win, finish, or DFL. Forget about the Monday-Friday hell you face, and appreciate the Saturday Hell for the good-time-in-disguise that it really is.
No, focusing on having fun probably won't save cross from dick-ification, that is a process we may not be able to stave off even if we try. But maybe if we get in the habit of having as much fun as possible, we can spread the fun to the new people coming into the sport, and hang on to this cool scene for a couple more years until the urge to turn it into just one more over-serious anal retentive cycling discipline has passed.
We're going to have to try to remember to have fun with this, until we learn to start acting like a bunch of children again.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
New Commute In
I spent a huge amount of time tonight setting up my cross bike for the upcoming cross season. I swapped out pedals and a front wheel from the fixie, grabbed a rear wheel out of the bin, put on some leftover Ritchey Speedmax tires, adjusted the brakes (mental note to self: there's no pad left whatsoever. The screaming tomorrow will either be The Lambs, or your bare calipers carving a gigantic presidential endorsement into the rims. Better not use brakes just to be on the safe side). And I cleaned up the drivetrain. Total time: 29 minutes.
Yep, nobody prepares more carefully for cross season than I do. Nobody.
-------------------------------------
I commuted downtown to work today, from near Crofton. It was a pretty sweet ride that my friend Sean showed me. An approximation of the route is here. A couple miles of it were pretty sketchy, particularly riding on no-shoulder Paint Branch Parkway. The map also has a weird detour down Kenilworth that doesn't accurately reflect our route - we took a bit of multi-use path from Paint Branch down to Hyattsville, cruising along the Anacostia River on mostly deserted path, right up to where we linked up with Route 1. But otherwise, the map is pretty accurate. The ride was about 21 miles to my office. It's not a terrible ride, particularly if you ride with somebody else; that makes it a bit less sketchy and the cars give you a bit more room. Doesn't hurt if you're moving along at good speed, either. We averaged about 17 MPH though if you take out the stoplights it was probably closer to 19, over a very roll-y course. I wouldn't do this route on a beech cruiser though...
This route may have to go into regular rotation next spring. Do this one a couple times a week and the legs will pick up some serious conditioning.
Yep, nobody prepares more carefully for cross season than I do. Nobody.
-------------------------------------
I commuted downtown to work today, from near Crofton. It was a pretty sweet ride that my friend Sean showed me. An approximation of the route is here. A couple miles of it were pretty sketchy, particularly riding on no-shoulder Paint Branch Parkway. The map also has a weird detour down Kenilworth that doesn't accurately reflect our route - we took a bit of multi-use path from Paint Branch down to Hyattsville, cruising along the Anacostia River on mostly deserted path, right up to where we linked up with Route 1. But otherwise, the map is pretty accurate. The ride was about 21 miles to my office. It's not a terrible ride, particularly if you ride with somebody else; that makes it a bit less sketchy and the cars give you a bit more room. Doesn't hurt if you're moving along at good speed, either. We averaged about 17 MPH though if you take out the stoplights it was probably closer to 19, over a very roll-y course. I wouldn't do this route on a beech cruiser though...
This route may have to go into regular rotation next spring. Do this one a couple times a week and the legs will pick up some serious conditioning.
Monday, August 17, 2009
More of the Usual Random Crap
I had a nice MTB ride saturday with most of the usual shop ride regulars. We hit Patapsco for about 2:15 of riding time. I think it was the longest MTB ride I've done this year - not that I've ridden the MTB much, what with the wet spring and the foot issues. I switched my Sunday workout over to Saturday - it entailed a bunch of 75 second efforts, at low cadence, pedaling up hills seated. What a coincidence! That's exactly how Patapsco rides! Well, except for the 7-10 minute climbs. I tried to ride them hard for 75, then easy, and so forth.
It worked nice except for the fact it was muggy and I haven't ridden MTB much so it was physically a lot harder on me than it usually is. Patapsco is definitely an intermediate level riding area. It's mostly pretty smooth single track, with challenging technical patches that can mess you up as you roll into them thinking it's all smooth and easy. Lotta rocks, that I'm only just learning to ride, lotta logs, and a lot of compound obstacles that are a little tough to clear - drop into water with rocks, a root & mud going out the other side, for example. My Expert friends forget this, but when you haven't ridden the MTB much lately, a 12" log looks more like 12'. Still, it was a total blast and refreshed my mind after a tough week of travel. The only true downer is that it physically wiped me out in a huge way. After the ride I looked in the hydration pack, mentioned that I'd drunk 55 ounces in a little over two hours - a lot, but not a huge amount. When I took the pack out when I got home, I noticed I'd been holding it funny earlier, and realized I'd drunk around 85 ounces of water. Yeah, you try doing that in two hours. I was so punked that I couldn't do my ride the next day, and stayed inside the house painting trim. Sounds like a euphemism for something fun, but it really isn't, I was painting various bits of molding.
------------------------------
The travel was interesting. I was in Phoenix doing some training for part of the week, via Minneapolis (don't ask). While in Phoenix I decided to rent a bike, and got a nice Trek 2.1 from BikeBarn, which a former Coppi recommended to me as a good shop. In addition to having nice bikes for rent at some of the better prices in town, they were really cool. How cool? Well, I was taking a nice relaxed ride on Monday in 107 degree heat when I hit some road debris - the shoulders are nasty down there. The rear tire explosively decompressed, and I had a speed wobble from hell, since I was doing around 30 MPH with traffic closing in at the time. I kept cool, slowed down, and got to the side. Lo and behold, there was a 3/4" slice in the sidewall of the tire, and the tube was shredded like Mu Shu Pork. Since I'm a good Boy Scout, despite never actually having been a Boy Scout, I was carrying my flat wallet and some Gu. I ate the Gu, mainly to feel better because superheated Gu is a real comfort food, and also to have something with which to boot the tire. I checked the tire for razor blades, chainsaw parts, or James Bond Villain Decapitation Saws - the only things that can cause a cut like that - and finding none, used the Gu wrapper to boot the tire. I wobbled back to the hotel. When I returned the bike I volunteered to pay for a new tire - this was a brand new Bontrager tire I had just torn up - but they told me not to sweat it. Very cool of them.
Seattle was nice too, but I was way too gassed from work and too jet lagged to ride. I'm kicking myself because I understand there's some great singletrack within 15 or 20 minutes of downtown. Oh well... next time.
---------------------------------
People ask me if I'm on twitter. I'm not. If I wanted to read: "sitting on couch." "Hangin' out playin' Wi." "Not sure whether to shit or go blind," I'd write it myself and save the wear and tear on my eyes from having to read that sort of dreck. But there is one Twitterer that I check out regularly. This guy. Yep, the click is worth it.
-------------------------------
My Jalapeno plant recently gave up its first dozen or so peppers, so I made jalapeno omelets on Sunday morning. Thinking they'd be about the intensity of storebought jalapenos, I slid a wedge into my mouth and chewed. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! @@@@@@@@@@@@@!!! Daaaaammmmnnn! It caused a minor emergency, which culminated in me rubbing cool, sweet ham on my lips, and alternating the ham chunks with sips of milk and bits of bread. Fair warning people: your own jalapenos may be an order of magnitude stronger than the storebought stuff. My guts are churning today as a result.
Okay, fine, maybe dinner last night didn't help. The excellent liquor store at Staples Corner in Crofton - a great shop that is passionate about quality beer - hosted a beer tasting with Rogue Brewery at Lemongrass last night. The food was wonderfully tasty Thai stuff, and the beer ranged from solid (Hazelnut Brown) to sublime (Chipotle Ale and Chocolate Stout). Oh, that stuff didn't hurt my stomach at all, but putting a bunch of beer and way too much Thai food on top of the whole jalapeno that had been in my omelet? If my guts had eyes, they'd be looking at me right now like a dog that had been kicked, repeatedly. For what it's worth, the Chipotle Ale seemed like it would be a good match for king or snow crab or maybe some grilled rockfish, something mild that a slightly smoky, spicy beer might set off well; and the Chocolate Stout was sublime with vanilla ice cream. They make it by adding Belgian dark chocolate to the wort. Yummy! I had previously thought of Rogue only as the company that made Dead Guy Ale, an okay beer that is well made but not my favorite. After trying their other stuff, I'll definitely be looking for Rogue brand beers in the store. As for Staples Corner Liquors? They may have the best selection of Belgian and craft brews in the D.C. area. They're nice folks, and knowledgeable. I try always to patronize them, even if I'm just getting a box of red table wine to keep in the fridge, just to encourage them and their eclectic tastes.
It worked nice except for the fact it was muggy and I haven't ridden MTB much so it was physically a lot harder on me than it usually is. Patapsco is definitely an intermediate level riding area. It's mostly pretty smooth single track, with challenging technical patches that can mess you up as you roll into them thinking it's all smooth and easy. Lotta rocks, that I'm only just learning to ride, lotta logs, and a lot of compound obstacles that are a little tough to clear - drop into water with rocks, a root & mud going out the other side, for example. My Expert friends forget this, but when you haven't ridden the MTB much lately, a 12" log looks more like 12'. Still, it was a total blast and refreshed my mind after a tough week of travel. The only true downer is that it physically wiped me out in a huge way. After the ride I looked in the hydration pack, mentioned that I'd drunk 55 ounces in a little over two hours - a lot, but not a huge amount. When I took the pack out when I got home, I noticed I'd been holding it funny earlier, and realized I'd drunk around 85 ounces of water. Yeah, you try doing that in two hours. I was so punked that I couldn't do my ride the next day, and stayed inside the house painting trim. Sounds like a euphemism for something fun, but it really isn't, I was painting various bits of molding.
------------------------------
The travel was interesting. I was in Phoenix doing some training for part of the week, via Minneapolis (don't ask). While in Phoenix I decided to rent a bike, and got a nice Trek 2.1 from BikeBarn, which a former Coppi recommended to me as a good shop. In addition to having nice bikes for rent at some of the better prices in town, they were really cool. How cool? Well, I was taking a nice relaxed ride on Monday in 107 degree heat when I hit some road debris - the shoulders are nasty down there. The rear tire explosively decompressed, and I had a speed wobble from hell, since I was doing around 30 MPH with traffic closing in at the time. I kept cool, slowed down, and got to the side. Lo and behold, there was a 3/4" slice in the sidewall of the tire, and the tube was shredded like Mu Shu Pork. Since I'm a good Boy Scout, despite never actually having been a Boy Scout, I was carrying my flat wallet and some Gu. I ate the Gu, mainly to feel better because superheated Gu is a real comfort food, and also to have something with which to boot the tire. I checked the tire for razor blades, chainsaw parts, or James Bond Villain Decapitation Saws - the only things that can cause a cut like that - and finding none, used the Gu wrapper to boot the tire. I wobbled back to the hotel. When I returned the bike I volunteered to pay for a new tire - this was a brand new Bontrager tire I had just torn up - but they told me not to sweat it. Very cool of them.
Seattle was nice too, but I was way too gassed from work and too jet lagged to ride. I'm kicking myself because I understand there's some great singletrack within 15 or 20 minutes of downtown. Oh well... next time.
---------------------------------
People ask me if I'm on twitter. I'm not. If I wanted to read: "sitting on couch." "Hangin' out playin' Wi." "Not sure whether to shit or go blind," I'd write it myself and save the wear and tear on my eyes from having to read that sort of dreck. But there is one Twitterer that I check out regularly. This guy. Yep, the click is worth it.
-------------------------------
My Jalapeno plant recently gave up its first dozen or so peppers, so I made jalapeno omelets on Sunday morning. Thinking they'd be about the intensity of storebought jalapenos, I slid a wedge into my mouth and chewed. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! @@@@@@@@@@@@@!!! Daaaaammmmnnn! It caused a minor emergency, which culminated in me rubbing cool, sweet ham on my lips, and alternating the ham chunks with sips of milk and bits of bread. Fair warning people: your own jalapenos may be an order of magnitude stronger than the storebought stuff. My guts are churning today as a result.
Okay, fine, maybe dinner last night didn't help. The excellent liquor store at Staples Corner in Crofton - a great shop that is passionate about quality beer - hosted a beer tasting with Rogue Brewery at Lemongrass last night. The food was wonderfully tasty Thai stuff, and the beer ranged from solid (Hazelnut Brown) to sublime (Chipotle Ale and Chocolate Stout). Oh, that stuff didn't hurt my stomach at all, but putting a bunch of beer and way too much Thai food on top of the whole jalapeno that had been in my omelet? If my guts had eyes, they'd be looking at me right now like a dog that had been kicked, repeatedly. For what it's worth, the Chipotle Ale seemed like it would be a good match for king or snow crab or maybe some grilled rockfish, something mild that a slightly smoky, spicy beer might set off well; and the Chocolate Stout was sublime with vanilla ice cream. They make it by adding Belgian dark chocolate to the wort. Yummy! I had previously thought of Rogue only as the company that made Dead Guy Ale, an okay beer that is well made but not my favorite. After trying their other stuff, I'll definitely be looking for Rogue brand beers in the store. As for Staples Corner Liquors? They may have the best selection of Belgian and craft brews in the D.C. area. They're nice folks, and knowledgeable. I try always to patronize them, even if I'm just getting a box of red table wine to keep in the fridge, just to encourage them and their eclectic tastes.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
What Won't They Think Of Next?
Just when you think you've seen it all, the Intarwebs throws you a curveball that makes you feel grateful to be alive in an age of wonder:
And if that wasn't enough of a curveball, check out this slider.
That is only the tip of the iceberg, of Bikini Cinema.
And if that wasn't enough of a curveball, check out this slider.
That is only the tip of the iceberg, of Bikini Cinema.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Book Review: Lance: The Making of the World's Greatest Champion
Because John Wilcockson’s Lance: The Making of the World’s Greatest Champion appears to be an attempt at writing the First Draft of History, I will treat it as a work of non-fiction and evaluate it as history. I have to say at the outset of this lengthy discussion of the book, that as history, a work containing facts and analysis to give those facts some meaning, some coherence, Lance fails. Yes , a lot of facts are in there, including some things about Armstrong's personal life I wasn’t aware of. It is also a good chronology of Lance’s career. But in the end it is only useful as a quality mass market biography for dedicated fanboys, as a curiosity-queller for the general reader of ESPN.com coverage of the Tour, and for somebody like the lovely woman I met on the plane this week. She is a cancer survivor who read It’s Not About The Bike and who adores Lance, but who wouldn’t know a Colnago from a coney dog, much less from Joe Parkin's excellent pastiche on racing pro in Belgium, Dog in a Hat.
On the other hand, if you are a close reader (paging my bike riding attorney friends), if you are hostile to Lance Armstrong, or if you are immersed in the world of roadracing and have a keen eye for details, you will find this book less impressive.
I apologize for the length of this review, but I'm leveling serious charges at a serious journalist, and think it's only fair to back up my assertions with details.
Wilcockson’s primary flaw as a biographer is failing to offer a detailed pro and con discussion of Lance’s personality and his history, ignoring or readily dismissing Lance’s bad acts, and most of the time merely alluding to the character flaws that must inform one’s judgment about who Lance Armstrong really is. Instead, Wilcockson offers a variety of viewpoints on Lance, ranging from pro-Lance, to very pro, to unquestionably pro-Lance viewpoints. Contra-Lance viewpoints appear only in strawman form, and only long enough for Wilcockson to set them alight with a dismissive shrug or conclusory argument. Lance is Go[o]d, after all.
For example, Wilcockson sticks to the narrative Lance tells about those who have left his life. Inevitably, it is a story of treachery, betrayal, of poor little old Lance betrayed. The furthest Wilcockson strays from script is to gently disagree (at most) with Lance’s account of things. Lance’s stepfather Terry (a flawed man, but not a terrible father) is savaged for cheating - Lance says something damning, Terry admits it, and Wilcockson moves on. The departures of former teammates like Kevin Livingston, Tyler Hamilton, Bobby Julich and Phil Anderson are not explained. They all left Lance’s team for very good personal and professional reasons, and all tried to stay on good terms with him. Yet Terry Lance insists that “we gotta kill these guys” whe they have the temerity to show up at subsequent races. Only Lance’s view of events is given any credibility, even when he clearly acted like a complete bastard – such as committing various felonies and misdemeanors in a sports car that his first major sponsor, Jim Hoyt, co-signed for.
The problem with Wilcockson’s gloss of Lance’s personal life is that all these formative encounters with others are recounted - a great wealth of basic factual detail that I am grateful for - but when the relationships go bad, the question “why” is never asked. We can infer that Lance deserted his de facto father and mentor J.T. Neil, he screwed over and was long estranged from bike sponsor and early racing mentor Jim Hoyt, and that Armstrong distanced himself for unknown reasons from his beloved mother Linda during the Cheryl Crow years. When Neil dies of cancer post-TdF, we are told that the reason Lance couldn’t be at his bedside was because none of the people at Lance’s house for a post-TdF party managed to give him the phone when his mom called to say J.T. was dying. Yet this wasn’t news to Lance; J.T.’s impending death was a known fact, his leukemia kept him from providing his normal level of support to Lance during the TdF. So what really happened? Why didn’t Lance call when he got home, or take Linda’s call? There are bad explanations and good ones for acting as Lance did, but none are given in the book and the reader is left to wonder. There are similar questions about Lance’s breakup with Cheryl Crow, though Crow suggests that Lance was innocent in her case.
But we shouldn't have to work so hard to develop an inference. A good biography shouldn’t be suggestive; it should provide definitive answers if available, or at least definitive viewpoints from each participant, especially when most of the primary sources are still living. Maybe this stuff is none of our business, but given Lance’s collaboration with Wilcockson on this book, it seems like the questions should have been at least asked.
Wilcockson’s dodging of major questions about Lance’s character is an enormous mistake, because even if he is trying to write a pro-Lance polemic, the failure to take seriously opposing arguments deprives Wilcockson of a chance to shoot them down properly. Wilcockson’s failure to ask the tough question leaves Lance looking like a traitor and hypocrite for engaging in the two behaviors he absolutely won’t tolerate in others, abandonment and dishonesty. This is an unfair rap on Lance, but it’s how Wilcockson makes him look by failing to ask the tough questions.
It’s not that there aren’t interesting facts in the book. There are many, and those facts alone make this book worth purchasing - a good thing because the critical thinking contained herein does not.
We find out that Lance made a deal, a promise to win a race with Davis Phinney’s and Alexi Grewal’s Coors Light squad, to enable Lance and Motorola to take the much-discussed but never-previously-awarded million Thrift Drug Triple Crown. That consisted of three mid-Atlantic area pro races culminating in the 1993 CoreStates USPRO Championship in Philly. Sharing prize money, the buying and selling of results, is something you hear about occurring on the Belgian kermis circuit since it is accepted practice in Europe, but it is surprising to hear that the venerable race up the Manayunk Wall might have been affected by the practice. We also find out that Lance’s closest friends find him a harsh judge of others, but that he is even tougher on himself. These are interesting things to know about Lance’s palmares, and his character.
Yet as strong as the book is for its supply of facts, there are also some disturbing errors or editing mistakes that cause a close reader to question the reliability of the book’s factual assertions. For example, former motorcycle Grand Prix great Kevin Schwantz is referred to as Kevin Schwarntz. Um, Google or Wikipedia, anybody? That’s a minor mistake but it’s evident at page 208 and in the index too, so it was made twice. It’s not like Schwantz wasn’t well-known in Europe, or in Texas, and he is listed as a friend of Lance so it’s not an insignificant error. Who was fact-checking this thing anyhow?
There is some really blatant question-begging going on as well, most significantly on the doping question. Wilcockson frames the doping discussion thusly:
From the time he was diagnosed with Cancer, until he won his first TdF, Lance lost about 9% of his body weight, his power output shot upwards about 9%, so his power:weight ratio improved 18%. Is that even possible without dope? For a Cat 4, yes, I’m sure it’s do-able. We just aren’t that good. But for a young albeit relatively well seasoned and well trained pro, a world champion, to lose a lot of muscle then suddenly get 10% stronger? I suppose that’s possible as well but it pushes the bounds of credibility. World class athletes, particularly pros at the very top of their sport (such as world champions) normally compete at or near the very limits of what the human body is capable of, such gains are extremely rare. I can accept the 9% loss of bodyweight (with it’s corresponding 9% increase in power:weight ratio) but picking up 9% more power at threshold? It strains credibility. But Wilcockson again doesn’t ask the hard questions.
Wilcockson makes one other mistake that grates on me as an attorney. Lance filed a libel suit against the British Sunday Times in a London court, claiming that he was libeled by doping accusations. Lance won, and Wilcockson presents the court win as proof of Lance’s clean riding, or at least proof that there is no evidence to the contrary. But Wilcockson leaves out one fact that is surely known to an international journalist like himself: it is notoriously easy to file and win a libel claim in a British court. It has been said that an American grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. That may be true, but only a British judge could find the kosher pickle on the side complicit in libel. You can claim you were libeled in just about any part of the world, file a lawsuit in Great Britain and win. Such is the low, low threshold for filing and winning a libel claim under British law. The practice of foreigners filing libel claims in British courts even has its own term: libel tourism. There is simply no way this key fact could be unknown to Wilcockson, and when he relies on the lawsuit victory as a key fact ‘proving’ Lance’s innocence, Wilcockson’s omission feels like intentional deception, an impression that badly undercuts his efforts elsewhere in Lance.
There are other points I could raise because Wilcockson very generously left many of them behind for reviewers to pick at, but I won’t raise them here. We do need to discuss the relationship between Wilcockson and Lance, however, and how that affects the book as a whole.
In jocking Lance, Wilcockson isn’t alone. It’s the new normal in relationships between reporters and athletes.
In the old days, jocks and journalists lived the ‘sporting life’ together. They did their jobs separately, but they played together after the whistle blew, chasing women, boozing, gambling, and generally carrying on. Yet there was a professional distance between the two, and for the most part, sports journalism was about the game. There was little human interest fiction, unless the slugger happened to stop by a cancer hospital and promised to hit one for little Jimmy, or if the fans were weeping about the old champ losing a lot of steps. Because the fans were frankly more mature and less nuts than we are today, writers felt less of a need to insert themselves into athletes’ personal lives, and athletes did not feel a need to share their crib, their pimped ride, or their search for Ms. Right with the public. In our Oprah-fied society, fans don’t settle for a focus on the game. They want to know what Lance eats for breakfast, what golfers think about politics, and whether an NBA player’s lodgings are suitable for “Cribs” and whether his ride is pimped. We’ve lost the social distance we used to have from our heroes, maybe to everybody’s loss.
It would be unfair to blame ESPN for the changes, but it bears noting that the “E” stands for “Entertainment.” They merely reflect changes in our society. The great triumph of 60’s radicalism was not free love or an interesting period in music; it was destroying social convention. Thus people no longer have a sense of social propriety. You see people in T-shirts in The Palm, shorts in church, and talking in public, loudly, about things that in the past were quiet sidebar conversations with friends or family, if they were mentioned at all. Consequently, we know (and care) more about whether Tony Romo’s breakup with Jessica was amicable than we know about whether he showed up at Cowboy camp at playing weight, and whether he can hit his wide receivers on timing routes (two much more important questions if you happen to be more of a sports fan, than a celeb fan). We wept at Di’s funeral and ignored her more vacuous ramblings, which frankly lowered her a couple notches from the sad princess image we were all in love with. We wept at JFK Jr.’s funeral, even though he appears to have been, basically, an amicable goofball with famous parents. And when Heath Ledger did himself in with some ill-advised doping of his own…
What I’m getting at, is that sports reflects society, and it is partly our fault that reporters feel compelled to become best friends with jocks, and then write ‘best friend’ books like Lance. None of this stuff is any of our damn business. Athletes have started to play the inside game with the media because we demand it. LeBron sells more sneakers because we want to see him play ball, joke around on an ESPN commercial, see his pimped ride and fly crib, and get his Twitter feed with at least a dozen tweets a day. And the damnedest thing about it, is that the “authenticity” we’ve gotten today, the thing sought by the radicals, is patently inauthentic. Cameras and notebooks bring with them a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that affects humans. When a reporter closely observes a subject, it affects how the subject acts, so that the observer, the reporter, can’t really know the truth about the subject. If the reporter is willing to back off a bit, to look at the big picture more, the intimate personal details of that athlete’s life can’t be known, but maybe a better approximation of who the athlete really is emerges. When Wilcockson falls in love with his subject, refuses to answer hard questions, and then builds an extended press release that passes for history… it’s not entirely his fault, and maybe we’re wrong to expect him to report accurately. Perhaps when you’re that close to a subject, it’s impossible to report on it accurately, and maybe he's just selling us what we have asked for.
It may not be entirely Wilcockson's fault that his book has turned out this way, but it is largely his loss. This was his chance to be the definitive early biographer of Lance, to produce a durable history of cycling’s greatest grand tour rider, the landmark biography that all later writers would have to either genuflect to, or at least openly declare war upon. Either is an enviable position for an author. Wilcockson's book turns out this way after all that hard research and spent effort. Instead of a first draft of history, Wilcockson has given us a fanboy polemic, providing a well written timeline of Lance’s life, and a series of strawman arguments that are more akin to crass political punditry than to sound history and biography.
A lot of this comes back to his relationship with Lance. Wilcockson has put his reputation on the line for Lance, and clearly is great friends with Lance; the racer’s use of Wilcockson as a sounding board to discuss The Great Un-Retirement demonstrates their closeness. Wilcockson seems to live in Lance’s camp, and give Lance loyalty in return for Lance’s confidence in him. Nothing would be wrong with that were Wilcockson not also posing as a disinterested Velo News reporter, supposedly reporting the news.
I suspect there is always a delicate dance that goes on between reporters and athletes, with one side trading access and the other selling favorable coverage. Wilcockson appears to have gained something close to total access, but the price was seemingly a book (and a series of articles this spring) that is unflaggingly supportive of Lance Armstrong, right or wrong. Considering his stature as one of the deans of cycling journalism (Paul Kimmage being the Marquis, I suppose), the cost was probably too high.
It's still a nice book, providing a lot of facts about Lance you probably didn't know, and that makes it a Lance: The Making of the World's Greatest Champion a good book to buy. Just don't buy it expecting to find out exactly what really went into the making of Lance Armstrong.
On the other hand, if you are a close reader (paging my bike riding attorney friends), if you are hostile to Lance Armstrong, or if you are immersed in the world of roadracing and have a keen eye for details, you will find this book less impressive.
I apologize for the length of this review, but I'm leveling serious charges at a serious journalist, and think it's only fair to back up my assertions with details.
Wilcockson’s primary flaw as a biographer is failing to offer a detailed pro and con discussion of Lance’s personality and his history, ignoring or readily dismissing Lance’s bad acts, and most of the time merely alluding to the character flaws that must inform one’s judgment about who Lance Armstrong really is. Instead, Wilcockson offers a variety of viewpoints on Lance, ranging from pro-Lance, to very pro, to unquestionably pro-Lance viewpoints. Contra-Lance viewpoints appear only in strawman form, and only long enough for Wilcockson to set them alight with a dismissive shrug or conclusory argument. Lance is Go[o]d, after all.
For example, Wilcockson sticks to the narrative Lance tells about those who have left his life. Inevitably, it is a story of treachery, betrayal, of poor little old Lance betrayed. The furthest Wilcockson strays from script is to gently disagree (at most) with Lance’s account of things. Lance’s stepfather Terry (a flawed man, but not a terrible father) is savaged for cheating - Lance says something damning, Terry admits it, and Wilcockson moves on. The departures of former teammates like Kevin Livingston, Tyler Hamilton, Bobby Julich and Phil Anderson are not explained. They all left Lance’s team for very good personal and professional reasons, and all tried to stay on good terms with him. Yet Terry Lance insists that “we gotta kill these guys” whe they have the temerity to show up at subsequent races. Only Lance’s view of events is given any credibility, even when he clearly acted like a complete bastard – such as committing various felonies and misdemeanors in a sports car that his first major sponsor, Jim Hoyt, co-signed for.
The problem with Wilcockson’s gloss of Lance’s personal life is that all these formative encounters with others are recounted - a great wealth of basic factual detail that I am grateful for - but when the relationships go bad, the question “why” is never asked. We can infer that Lance deserted his de facto father and mentor J.T. Neil, he screwed over and was long estranged from bike sponsor and early racing mentor Jim Hoyt, and that Armstrong distanced himself for unknown reasons from his beloved mother Linda during the Cheryl Crow years. When Neil dies of cancer post-TdF, we are told that the reason Lance couldn’t be at his bedside was because none of the people at Lance’s house for a post-TdF party managed to give him the phone when his mom called to say J.T. was dying. Yet this wasn’t news to Lance; J.T.’s impending death was a known fact, his leukemia kept him from providing his normal level of support to Lance during the TdF. So what really happened? Why didn’t Lance call when he got home, or take Linda’s call? There are bad explanations and good ones for acting as Lance did, but none are given in the book and the reader is left to wonder. There are similar questions about Lance’s breakup with Cheryl Crow, though Crow suggests that Lance was innocent in her case.
But we shouldn't have to work so hard to develop an inference. A good biography shouldn’t be suggestive; it should provide definitive answers if available, or at least definitive viewpoints from each participant, especially when most of the primary sources are still living. Maybe this stuff is none of our business, but given Lance’s collaboration with Wilcockson on this book, it seems like the questions should have been at least asked.
Wilcockson’s dodging of major questions about Lance’s character is an enormous mistake, because even if he is trying to write a pro-Lance polemic, the failure to take seriously opposing arguments deprives Wilcockson of a chance to shoot them down properly. Wilcockson’s failure to ask the tough question leaves Lance looking like a traitor and hypocrite for engaging in the two behaviors he absolutely won’t tolerate in others, abandonment and dishonesty. This is an unfair rap on Lance, but it’s how Wilcockson makes him look by failing to ask the tough questions.
It’s not that there aren’t interesting facts in the book. There are many, and those facts alone make this book worth purchasing - a good thing because the critical thinking contained herein does not.
We find out that Lance made a deal, a promise to win a race with Davis Phinney’s and Alexi Grewal’s Coors Light squad, to enable Lance and Motorola to take the much-discussed but never-previously-awarded million Thrift Drug Triple Crown. That consisted of three mid-Atlantic area pro races culminating in the 1993 CoreStates USPRO Championship in Philly. Sharing prize money, the buying and selling of results, is something you hear about occurring on the Belgian kermis circuit since it is accepted practice in Europe, but it is surprising to hear that the venerable race up the Manayunk Wall might have been affected by the practice. We also find out that Lance’s closest friends find him a harsh judge of others, but that he is even tougher on himself. These are interesting things to know about Lance’s palmares, and his character.
Yet as strong as the book is for its supply of facts, there are also some disturbing errors or editing mistakes that cause a close reader to question the reliability of the book’s factual assertions. For example, former motorcycle Grand Prix great Kevin Schwantz is referred to as Kevin Schwarntz. Um, Google or Wikipedia, anybody? That’s a minor mistake but it’s evident at page 208 and in the index too, so it was made twice. It’s not like Schwantz wasn’t well-known in Europe, or in Texas, and he is listed as a friend of Lance so it’s not an insignificant error. Who was fact-checking this thing anyhow?
There is some really blatant question-begging going on as well, most significantly on the doping question. Wilcockson frames the doping discussion thusly:
“The sport changed a lot in one year,” Lance told me at the time. “I’m not going to say why it changed or how I think it changed, but I will say that it changed a lot – and a lot of the guys got a lot stronger and a lot faster.”That’s a self-interested statement by Lance, which lays the groundwork nicely if he is ever caught doping. The follow up is, “sure, I doped. But everybody did. There was no way to compete otherwise, even if you were the most naturally gifted rider ever.” Someday, we may hear Lance utter that line, or something very much like it. But Wilcockson never takes on that very suggestive pre-excuse. Instead, in the next dozen or two pages, he discusses how Motorola started getting crushed at races, how its riders started looking around at other teams and hearing about EPO, then about how Lance started to win again all of a sudden. Then cancer hits and Lance comes out the other side training harder than ever, and riding like superman. The problem with this is that the juxtaposition of events and dismissive treatment of doping forces the reader to infer that Lance’s weight loss and new training methods post-cancer caused Lance’s sudden improvement in performance. Or as Lance would put it, even thinking that he is doping is “an attack on the cancer community,” another ridiculous assertion Wilcockson swallows whole.
From the time he was diagnosed with Cancer, until he won his first TdF, Lance lost about 9% of his body weight, his power output shot upwards about 9%, so his power:weight ratio improved 18%. Is that even possible without dope? For a Cat 4, yes, I’m sure it’s do-able. We just aren’t that good. But for a young albeit relatively well seasoned and well trained pro, a world champion, to lose a lot of muscle then suddenly get 10% stronger? I suppose that’s possible as well but it pushes the bounds of credibility. World class athletes, particularly pros at the very top of their sport (such as world champions) normally compete at or near the very limits of what the human body is capable of, such gains are extremely rare. I can accept the 9% loss of bodyweight (with it’s corresponding 9% increase in power:weight ratio) but picking up 9% more power at threshold? It strains credibility. But Wilcockson again doesn’t ask the hard questions.
Wilcockson makes one other mistake that grates on me as an attorney. Lance filed a libel suit against the British Sunday Times in a London court, claiming that he was libeled by doping accusations. Lance won, and Wilcockson presents the court win as proof of Lance’s clean riding, or at least proof that there is no evidence to the contrary. But Wilcockson leaves out one fact that is surely known to an international journalist like himself: it is notoriously easy to file and win a libel claim in a British court. It has been said that an American grand jury will indict a ham sandwich. That may be true, but only a British judge could find the kosher pickle on the side complicit in libel. You can claim you were libeled in just about any part of the world, file a lawsuit in Great Britain and win. Such is the low, low threshold for filing and winning a libel claim under British law. The practice of foreigners filing libel claims in British courts even has its own term: libel tourism. There is simply no way this key fact could be unknown to Wilcockson, and when he relies on the lawsuit victory as a key fact ‘proving’ Lance’s innocence, Wilcockson’s omission feels like intentional deception, an impression that badly undercuts his efforts elsewhere in Lance.
There are other points I could raise because Wilcockson very generously left many of them behind for reviewers to pick at, but I won’t raise them here. We do need to discuss the relationship between Wilcockson and Lance, however, and how that affects the book as a whole.
In jocking Lance, Wilcockson isn’t alone. It’s the new normal in relationships between reporters and athletes.
In the old days, jocks and journalists lived the ‘sporting life’ together. They did their jobs separately, but they played together after the whistle blew, chasing women, boozing, gambling, and generally carrying on. Yet there was a professional distance between the two, and for the most part, sports journalism was about the game. There was little human interest fiction, unless the slugger happened to stop by a cancer hospital and promised to hit one for little Jimmy, or if the fans were weeping about the old champ losing a lot of steps. Because the fans were frankly more mature and less nuts than we are today, writers felt less of a need to insert themselves into athletes’ personal lives, and athletes did not feel a need to share their crib, their pimped ride, or their search for Ms. Right with the public. In our Oprah-fied society, fans don’t settle for a focus on the game. They want to know what Lance eats for breakfast, what golfers think about politics, and whether an NBA player’s lodgings are suitable for “Cribs” and whether his ride is pimped. We’ve lost the social distance we used to have from our heroes, maybe to everybody’s loss.
It would be unfair to blame ESPN for the changes, but it bears noting that the “E” stands for “Entertainment.” They merely reflect changes in our society. The great triumph of 60’s radicalism was not free love or an interesting period in music; it was destroying social convention. Thus people no longer have a sense of social propriety. You see people in T-shirts in The Palm, shorts in church, and talking in public, loudly, about things that in the past were quiet sidebar conversations with friends or family, if they were mentioned at all. Consequently, we know (and care) more about whether Tony Romo’s breakup with Jessica was amicable than we know about whether he showed up at Cowboy camp at playing weight, and whether he can hit his wide receivers on timing routes (two much more important questions if you happen to be more of a sports fan, than a celeb fan). We wept at Di’s funeral and ignored her more vacuous ramblings, which frankly lowered her a couple notches from the sad princess image we were all in love with. We wept at JFK Jr.’s funeral, even though he appears to have been, basically, an amicable goofball with famous parents. And when Heath Ledger did himself in with some ill-advised doping of his own…
What I’m getting at, is that sports reflects society, and it is partly our fault that reporters feel compelled to become best friends with jocks, and then write ‘best friend’ books like Lance. None of this stuff is any of our damn business. Athletes have started to play the inside game with the media because we demand it. LeBron sells more sneakers because we want to see him play ball, joke around on an ESPN commercial, see his pimped ride and fly crib, and get his Twitter feed with at least a dozen tweets a day. And the damnedest thing about it, is that the “authenticity” we’ve gotten today, the thing sought by the radicals, is patently inauthentic. Cameras and notebooks bring with them a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle that affects humans. When a reporter closely observes a subject, it affects how the subject acts, so that the observer, the reporter, can’t really know the truth about the subject. If the reporter is willing to back off a bit, to look at the big picture more, the intimate personal details of that athlete’s life can’t be known, but maybe a better approximation of who the athlete really is emerges. When Wilcockson falls in love with his subject, refuses to answer hard questions, and then builds an extended press release that passes for history… it’s not entirely his fault, and maybe we’re wrong to expect him to report accurately. Perhaps when you’re that close to a subject, it’s impossible to report on it accurately, and maybe he's just selling us what we have asked for.
It may not be entirely Wilcockson's fault that his book has turned out this way, but it is largely his loss. This was his chance to be the definitive early biographer of Lance, to produce a durable history of cycling’s greatest grand tour rider, the landmark biography that all later writers would have to either genuflect to, or at least openly declare war upon. Either is an enviable position for an author. Wilcockson's book turns out this way after all that hard research and spent effort. Instead of a first draft of history, Wilcockson has given us a fanboy polemic, providing a well written timeline of Lance’s life, and a series of strawman arguments that are more akin to crass political punditry than to sound history and biography.
A lot of this comes back to his relationship with Lance. Wilcockson has put his reputation on the line for Lance, and clearly is great friends with Lance; the racer’s use of Wilcockson as a sounding board to discuss The Great Un-Retirement demonstrates their closeness. Wilcockson seems to live in Lance’s camp, and give Lance loyalty in return for Lance’s confidence in him. Nothing would be wrong with that were Wilcockson not also posing as a disinterested Velo News reporter, supposedly reporting the news.
I suspect there is always a delicate dance that goes on between reporters and athletes, with one side trading access and the other selling favorable coverage. Wilcockson appears to have gained something close to total access, but the price was seemingly a book (and a series of articles this spring) that is unflaggingly supportive of Lance Armstrong, right or wrong. Considering his stature as one of the deans of cycling journalism (Paul Kimmage being the Marquis, I suppose), the cost was probably too high.
It's still a nice book, providing a lot of facts about Lance you probably didn't know, and that makes it a Lance: The Making of the World's Greatest Champion a good book to buy. Just don't buy it expecting to find out exactly what really went into the making of Lance Armstrong.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Les Paul: RIP
What did Les Paul do, you ask?
He just invented the electric guitar, built the nicest sounding ones, and fused the jazz string sound of Django Reinhardt and other great blues banjo players, with Black juke-joint music, inventing (along with a couple black musicians, and a few other pioneering Whites, a new form of music called Rock & Roll. He invented multi-track recording, without which all of our movies, tv shows and recorded music would sound like ass, just tinny and thin. He also played with pretty much any major modern musician who is worth a damn, in rock, country, pop and jazz. Basically he lit the fuze that revolutionized music. In fact, he made the fuze before he lit it. He also remained a jamming artist well into his nineties.
But other than that? He didn't do much at all.
You'll an incredible accuracy and economy of notes here. He gets more out of less playing than anybody else.
Not a great recording but it pretty much oozes awesomeness by the Man Who Was The Pivot. What do I mean by that? Check this out:
Hey, you know what that is like? It's like your friends who video the birth of their child. You see rock & roll being birthed in that progression of music, from blues-influenced gypsy jazz, to american swing-jazz being influenced by the gypsy sound; you see the blues being put back in. Then in the final video, you see some really beautiful complex rock guitar.
Les Paul was the man right in the middle of the whole damn thing.
There are a lot of things I don't know, but assuming there's such a thing as "The Celestial Choir," they're gettin' down tonight and makin' a joyful noise unto the Lord. And there's a little bit of smoke wafting past the pearly gates, maybe a whiff of barbecue in the air, you can hear the clank of some ice cold long necks getting dropped into the cooler, and all the cherubim are stomping their feet and clapping along with the music.
RIP, Les. And thanks.
He just invented the electric guitar, built the nicest sounding ones, and fused the jazz string sound of Django Reinhardt and other great blues banjo players, with Black juke-joint music, inventing (along with a couple black musicians, and a few other pioneering Whites, a new form of music called Rock & Roll. He invented multi-track recording, without which all of our movies, tv shows and recorded music would sound like ass, just tinny and thin. He also played with pretty much any major modern musician who is worth a damn, in rock, country, pop and jazz. Basically he lit the fuze that revolutionized music. In fact, he made the fuze before he lit it. He also remained a jamming artist well into his nineties.
But other than that? He didn't do much at all.
You'll an incredible accuracy and economy of notes here. He gets more out of less playing than anybody else.
Not a great recording but it pretty much oozes awesomeness by the Man Who Was The Pivot. What do I mean by that? Check this out:
Hey, you know what that is like? It's like your friends who video the birth of their child. You see rock & roll being birthed in that progression of music, from blues-influenced gypsy jazz, to american swing-jazz being influenced by the gypsy sound; you see the blues being put back in. Then in the final video, you see some really beautiful complex rock guitar.
Les Paul was the man right in the middle of the whole damn thing.
There are a lot of things I don't know, but assuming there's such a thing as "The Celestial Choir," they're gettin' down tonight and makin' a joyful noise unto the Lord. And there's a little bit of smoke wafting past the pearly gates, maybe a whiff of barbecue in the air, you can hear the clank of some ice cold long necks getting dropped into the cooler, and all the cherubim are stomping their feet and clapping along with the music.
RIP, Les. And thanks.
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
GamJams Review: The Aspen Cool Collar
As one of the larger, sweatier riders on the GamJams Ambassador blogroll, I was excited to be offered a free Aspen Cool Collar for testing.
Recovery from rides is a skill. Most of us do a little bit to recover from a hard ride. We try to get down some carbs, maybe rehydrate a bit, and if it's on the weekend we may take a nice shower and a nap. (Mmmmm... nap.) Perhaps we don't put enough emphasis on it though. A good recovery routine can completely change the way you feel the next day, or even on the same day. Proper recovery is an important part of your training and you do yourself a disservice to neglect it.
I know this because in my prior sporting life playing rugby, I used to play Sevens rugby, a much faster moving version of the normal game, played with seven players to a team. It is played in the heat of the summer, and games are short (14 minutes) and filled with extremely hard running and tackling. The matches are played in tournaments, and when you step off the pitch on a 100 degree day in North Carolina following your 12:15 match, you have perhaps an hour to get prepared for your next match. The sweat was profuse, dehydration profound, and the foot pain and headaches staggering - you don't understand what the verb "to swoon" means until you've just done a half dozen hundred yard sprints and been slapped around a bit in near-tropical conditions.
The quickest way to cool down fast and start recovery was to plunge your feet into a cooler of ice water, and to pull a hand towel out of a cooler filled with ice, and wrap the towel around your head and neck. It would also help to strategically place an ice pack on my body, moving it around from knees to thighs to shoulders or neck, wherever the soreness was coming on. Following the quick cooldown, it was possible to hydrate, to eat some salty foods and stretch to get ready for the next match. I used to repeat the routine at the end of the day, and 24 hours later, I might have a few bruises from the hard contact, but there would be little muscle soreness from the running and little fatigue from the heat. Cooling down quickly was key to reducing inflammation the next day.
So you can understand why I looked forward to getting the Cool Collar. When it arrived, I didn't know what to think. It looked like a bandana sewn into a long rectangular shape, with some velcro fasteners on the end and some tiny beads sealed inside of it. Following the directions, I soaked it for about 20 minutes in cool water. The beads swelled into a library paste-like mixture, which I distributed around the length of the collar before putting it on. I then placed it on my neck, fastening it like a collar using the velcro ends.
At first, it felt like a slightly cool washcloth placed around my neck. I thought that the mere presence of water on my neck was causing some cooling, but after the water mostly evaporated turning the Collar into a damp sock, the crystals gently cooled down my neck. The cooling wasn't as radical or as fast as I like it, but it did the job. It also reminded me of my rugby experiences, where a cool influence on the head and neck was very refreshing.
I have been using it after rides for the last couple weeks with good results. It is not a spectacular product, it does not revolutionize my recovery routine, but it provides added and very welcome comfort, and feeling good and ready to go is half the battle when it comes to recovery. I cannot determine whether it helps performance, but it seems to stave off some of the worst effects of hard training.
The best example of how it helps came after a very hot, hard ride a couple days ago. I had performed a threshold test did a number of hard efforts after that when I fell onto the tail end of a group ride. After close to three hours of riding, I was utterly spent. More significantly, I had a heat / exertion headache coming on. I hate these because they are somewhat debilitating, slowing me down for the rest of the day. I slipped on the Cool Collar wondering if it would help, and mirabile dictu, it did. The collar did not feel radically cold, just cool, but it stopped the oncoming heading in its tracks. I wore the Collar for about an hour, made a smoothie, sat still with my feet up, and just recharged for a little after the ride.
Since that ride, I've tried to wear the collar after other rides, and also after I come home following a tough day at work. It provides a pleasant, relaxing sensation of coolness, and it loosens up my neck a bit, leaving me refreshed.
The ultimate effect is that it has caused me to revive my old rugby ritual of an immediate cooldown after heavy exertion, and true to form I seem to recover more quickly. Will it save your life? No. But it might make it a bit more comfortable, particularly if you wilt in the heat.
Of note, I also tried riding with it a couple times. It wasn't quite as effective while riding, since it dried out pretty quickly, rendering the cooling crystals useless. (Don't worry; get them wet again and they will work just fine).
The Cool Collar isn't perfect. It could stand to be about two inches longer. Not all athletes have petite necks; this endurance athlete's neck ranges between 18 and 19 inches, and the collar was a little snug when fastened all the way.
Other than that, I don't have any complaints with the product and will make it a part of my daily recovery routine, at least when riding in hot weather. The $15 you pay for it buys a remarkable amount of comfort.
Recovery from rides is a skill. Most of us do a little bit to recover from a hard ride. We try to get down some carbs, maybe rehydrate a bit, and if it's on the weekend we may take a nice shower and a nap. (Mmmmm... nap.) Perhaps we don't put enough emphasis on it though. A good recovery routine can completely change the way you feel the next day, or even on the same day. Proper recovery is an important part of your training and you do yourself a disservice to neglect it.
I know this because in my prior sporting life playing rugby, I used to play Sevens rugby, a much faster moving version of the normal game, played with seven players to a team. It is played in the heat of the summer, and games are short (14 minutes) and filled with extremely hard running and tackling. The matches are played in tournaments, and when you step off the pitch on a 100 degree day in North Carolina following your 12:15 match, you have perhaps an hour to get prepared for your next match. The sweat was profuse, dehydration profound, and the foot pain and headaches staggering - you don't understand what the verb "to swoon" means until you've just done a half dozen hundred yard sprints and been slapped around a bit in near-tropical conditions.
The quickest way to cool down fast and start recovery was to plunge your feet into a cooler of ice water, and to pull a hand towel out of a cooler filled with ice, and wrap the towel around your head and neck. It would also help to strategically place an ice pack on my body, moving it around from knees to thighs to shoulders or neck, wherever the soreness was coming on. Following the quick cooldown, it was possible to hydrate, to eat some salty foods and stretch to get ready for the next match. I used to repeat the routine at the end of the day, and 24 hours later, I might have a few bruises from the hard contact, but there would be little muscle soreness from the running and little fatigue from the heat. Cooling down quickly was key to reducing inflammation the next day.
So you can understand why I looked forward to getting the Cool Collar. When it arrived, I didn't know what to think. It looked like a bandana sewn into a long rectangular shape, with some velcro fasteners on the end and some tiny beads sealed inside of it. Following the directions, I soaked it for about 20 minutes in cool water. The beads swelled into a library paste-like mixture, which I distributed around the length of the collar before putting it on. I then placed it on my neck, fastening it like a collar using the velcro ends.
At first, it felt like a slightly cool washcloth placed around my neck. I thought that the mere presence of water on my neck was causing some cooling, but after the water mostly evaporated turning the Collar into a damp sock, the crystals gently cooled down my neck. The cooling wasn't as radical or as fast as I like it, but it did the job. It also reminded me of my rugby experiences, where a cool influence on the head and neck was very refreshing.
I have been using it after rides for the last couple weeks with good results. It is not a spectacular product, it does not revolutionize my recovery routine, but it provides added and very welcome comfort, and feeling good and ready to go is half the battle when it comes to recovery. I cannot determine whether it helps performance, but it seems to stave off some of the worst effects of hard training.
The best example of how it helps came after a very hot, hard ride a couple days ago. I had performed a threshold test did a number of hard efforts after that when I fell onto the tail end of a group ride. After close to three hours of riding, I was utterly spent. More significantly, I had a heat / exertion headache coming on. I hate these because they are somewhat debilitating, slowing me down for the rest of the day. I slipped on the Cool Collar wondering if it would help, and mirabile dictu, it did. The collar did not feel radically cold, just cool, but it stopped the oncoming heading in its tracks. I wore the Collar for about an hour, made a smoothie, sat still with my feet up, and just recharged for a little after the ride.
Since that ride, I've tried to wear the collar after other rides, and also after I come home following a tough day at work. It provides a pleasant, relaxing sensation of coolness, and it loosens up my neck a bit, leaving me refreshed.
The ultimate effect is that it has caused me to revive my old rugby ritual of an immediate cooldown after heavy exertion, and true to form I seem to recover more quickly. Will it save your life? No. But it might make it a bit more comfortable, particularly if you wilt in the heat.
Of note, I also tried riding with it a couple times. It wasn't quite as effective while riding, since it dried out pretty quickly, rendering the cooling crystals useless. (Don't worry; get them wet again and they will work just fine).
The Cool Collar isn't perfect. It could stand to be about two inches longer. Not all athletes have petite necks; this endurance athlete's neck ranges between 18 and 19 inches, and the collar was a little snug when fastened all the way.
Other than that, I don't have any complaints with the product and will make it a part of my daily recovery routine, at least when riding in hot weather. The $15 you pay for it buys a remarkable amount of comfort.
Friday, August 07, 2009
I've been asked by loyal reader RideTheWomble to get back to snark. Apparently, authenticity doesn't suit me. I can handle that Womble, I'm on it. You want some snark? Sure. I got a case of the ass though, so pardon me if it's a bit blunter than usual. In the future, if the content here seems a bit fishy, well, I'm sure there's some government agency or another you can report it to.
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Hey, did you hear that Cuba is running out of toilet paper? Now that is some shit. I hear they have free health care, which is probably a good thing in light of the impending dysentery epidemic. But who am I to throw stones? Maybe the Cuban government is right about its economic and politically oppressive policies, and I'm just missing something about the innate superiority to the Wiping Your Ass With Your Bare Hands Lifestyle. I'll have to ask my friends who are members of the Wiping Your Ass With Your Bare Hands Community for their views on it.
----------------------------------------
Least surprising headline of the week: Scientists Find Psychopaths Have Faulty Brain Connections. Really? Psychopaths have faulty brains? Wow. I can only conclude that brain research is underfunded, if this is what we're discovering. What next? "Scientists Determine Smart People Better At Math?"
----------------------------------------
The new G.I. Joe movie, featuring a de-Americanized G.I. Joe who fights for an elite United Nations unit (stop laughing, those of you military readers who've done blue hat gigs...) is apparently a pretty bad movie. Consistent with the United Nations theme of the film, critics's reactions range from with Condemnation, to Strong Condemnation, and in some cases Most Strong Condemnation, none of which has affected merchandise sales or how it is doing at the box office.
----------------------------------------
The NBA suspended Orlando Magic forward Rashard Lewis this week for excessive levels of testosterone detected by a blood test for performance enhancing drugs. Lewis first came under suspicion of doping after winning a tough Stage 20 of this year's Tour de France, even though he was not officially entered. Orlando Magic coach Stan van Gundy attributed Lewis' great performance to constant dousings with cold water, high levels of motivation, "and enough chiba to blow the head clean off of a lesser man, like, say, Stephon Marbury." Lewis, who is not Amish, could not be reached for comment, though Greg LeMond did hold a press conference in which he accused LeBron James of taking EPO.
----------------------------------------
Get your Pedestrian Helmet Laws here, folks. Tell you what, they try to make pedestrians wear helmets in this country - probably just a matter of time - then I'm going to grow my moustache long, get a Live to Walk Walk to Live belt buckle, and walk around town with no helmet on just to stick it to the man.
Snark aside, at some point, don't you just have to ask the question whether life is worth living at all, if you're that panic stricken about everything? It's like this is Oprah's world and we just live in it.
----------------------------------------
Cake - Rock & Roll Lifestyle. I could tell a lot of high end riding friends, "[b]ut rock on completely with some brand new components..."
Along the same lines, John Hiatt, Perfectly Good Guitar.
Enjoy the weekend.
----------------------------------------
Hey, did you hear that Cuba is running out of toilet paper? Now that is some shit. I hear they have free health care, which is probably a good thing in light of the impending dysentery epidemic. But who am I to throw stones? Maybe the Cuban government is right about its economic and politically oppressive policies, and I'm just missing something about the innate superiority to the Wiping Your Ass With Your Bare Hands Lifestyle. I'll have to ask my friends who are members of the Wiping Your Ass With Your Bare Hands Community for their views on it.
----------------------------------------
Least surprising headline of the week: Scientists Find Psychopaths Have Faulty Brain Connections. Really? Psychopaths have faulty brains? Wow. I can only conclude that brain research is underfunded, if this is what we're discovering. What next? "Scientists Determine Smart People Better At Math?"
----------------------------------------
The new G.I. Joe movie, featuring a de-Americanized G.I. Joe who fights for an elite United Nations unit (stop laughing, those of you military readers who've done blue hat gigs...) is apparently a pretty bad movie. Consistent with the United Nations theme of the film, critics's reactions range from with Condemnation, to Strong Condemnation, and in some cases Most Strong Condemnation, none of which has affected merchandise sales or how it is doing at the box office.
----------------------------------------
The NBA suspended Orlando Magic forward Rashard Lewis this week for excessive levels of testosterone detected by a blood test for performance enhancing drugs. Lewis first came under suspicion of doping after winning a tough Stage 20 of this year's Tour de France, even though he was not officially entered. Orlando Magic coach Stan van Gundy attributed Lewis' great performance to constant dousings with cold water, high levels of motivation, "and enough chiba to blow the head clean off of a lesser man, like, say, Stephon Marbury." Lewis, who is not Amish, could not be reached for comment, though Greg LeMond did hold a press conference in which he accused LeBron James of taking EPO.
----------------------------------------
Get your Pedestrian Helmet Laws here, folks. Tell you what, they try to make pedestrians wear helmets in this country - probably just a matter of time - then I'm going to grow my moustache long, get a Live to Walk Walk to Live belt buckle, and walk around town with no helmet on just to stick it to the man.
Snark aside, at some point, don't you just have to ask the question whether life is worth living at all, if you're that panic stricken about everything? It's like this is Oprah's world and we just live in it.
----------------------------------------
Cake - Rock & Roll Lifestyle. I could tell a lot of high end riding friends, "[b]ut rock on completely with some brand new components..."
Along the same lines, John Hiatt, Perfectly Good Guitar.
Enjoy the weekend.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Enjoy Every Sandwich.
This article about a guy who is thinking about writing a book called "The Power of No," should be required reading. For *everybody*. Money shot:
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What does Coppi Cat do in his spare time? Watch bike racing, of course.
That's him, watching Stage 20 of the Tour. For real. Rescued by a bike racer after a bike ride, named for a bike racer. He may not even like the racing, but like all cats, he knows where his bread is buttered.
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What I Did Today
I took the day off and with a friend removed the enormous old crapulent French Doors that had previously made egress from the ManCave onto the ManPatio pretty difficult. The doors weren't properly sized or installed for our townhouse; I suspect they were remnants from a commercial job, producing an enormous doorway of 72 inches width. The sliding door you see is the largest you can get without a special order; it's big enough that we'll have to keep it lubricated because the glass door is *heavy*. Anyhow, demo went pretty easy because my house was built by assclowns, and things like hinges, which should have been secured through the 1"x6" sheathing of the door frame to the 2"x4" underneath with 3" drywall or exterior screws were secured only to the 1"x6" with 3/4" brass finishing screws. Guess that explains why the "frame" (i.e. the sheathing) was warping inward and the heavy doors were sagging. At any rate we got the old doors and storm doors removed, found it easy to rip out the sheathing and 2"x4" frame, and soon had a bare hole. One trip to Home Depot and $200 later, we drilled holes in the concrete, lagged in a solid set of pressure treated 2"x8" studs, and basically slipped the new door right in. We pulled off a bit of a slick job, measuring it close enough that the new door slipped in level, with no shims needed, and snug up against the studs. So there's no complicated framing involved. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. We'll be fabricating up cosmetic facing and installing interior and exterior molding tomorrow, caulking and air sealing it. Nothing major, just a few hours of trim work. It improves the lighting in the ManCave in a big way, to the extent that I'm thinking about re-christening it The Hall of Injustice*, or perhaps Not Carol Gilligan's Island.
* As opposed to the Hall of Justice. The name change is due to the fact that treble damages are available under copyright laws, and while my friends are pretty cool, they are not super friends. Super Hammered Friends, or Super Irritating at Times Friends, maybe. But not plain super.
** Not amused by the amoral combination of vaginal imagery and misogyny embodied in the term, "Man Cave."
---------------------------------------------
Now for some tunes. Warren Zevon. He died of cancer in 2003. At the time, he noted, "I may have made a tactical mistake, in not seeing a doctor for 20 years."
---------------------------------------------
Bob Dylan with probably my favorite song by him. It's like a prayer, almost.
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Chapter 7 should be “Realize What an Idiot You Really Are.” The ancient dictum “Know thyself” is the distilled essence of philosophy. And to know yourself is to know that idiocy has no bottom. It is fathomless and without limit. There is no stupidity that cannot ensnare you, no folly that cannot suck you in. As Dirty Harry famously said, “A man’s gotta know his limitations.” The more clever you seem to yourself, the more likely you are nearing some hard object about to strike you upside the head.Truer words were never spoken. Now go read the whole article. You'll thank me.
--------------------------------------------------
What does Coppi Cat do in his spare time? Watch bike racing, of course.
That's him, watching Stage 20 of the Tour. For real. Rescued by a bike racer after a bike ride, named for a bike racer. He may not even like the racing, but like all cats, he knows where his bread is buttered.
-----------------------------------------------------
What I Did Today
I took the day off and with a friend removed the enormous old crapulent French Doors that had previously made egress from the ManCave onto the ManPatio pretty difficult. The doors weren't properly sized or installed for our townhouse; I suspect they were remnants from a commercial job, producing an enormous doorway of 72 inches width. The sliding door you see is the largest you can get without a special order; it's big enough that we'll have to keep it lubricated because the glass door is *heavy*. Anyhow, demo went pretty easy because my house was built by assclowns, and things like hinges, which should have been secured through the 1"x6" sheathing of the door frame to the 2"x4" underneath with 3" drywall or exterior screws were secured only to the 1"x6" with 3/4" brass finishing screws. Guess that explains why the "frame" (i.e. the sheathing) was warping inward and the heavy doors were sagging. At any rate we got the old doors and storm doors removed, found it easy to rip out the sheathing and 2"x4" frame, and soon had a bare hole. One trip to Home Depot and $200 later, we drilled holes in the concrete, lagged in a solid set of pressure treated 2"x8" studs, and basically slipped the new door right in. We pulled off a bit of a slick job, measuring it close enough that the new door slipped in level, with no shims needed, and snug up against the studs. So there's no complicated framing involved. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am. We'll be fabricating up cosmetic facing and installing interior and exterior molding tomorrow, caulking and air sealing it. Nothing major, just a few hours of trim work. It improves the lighting in the ManCave in a big way, to the extent that I'm thinking about re-christening it The Hall of Injustice*, or perhaps Not Carol Gilligan's Island.
Carol Gilligan**
* As opposed to the Hall of Justice. The name change is due to the fact that treble damages are available under copyright laws, and while my friends are pretty cool, they are not super friends. Super Hammered Friends, or Super Irritating at Times Friends, maybe. But not plain super.
** Not amused by the amoral combination of vaginal imagery and misogyny embodied in the term, "Man Cave."
---------------------------------------------
Now for some tunes. Warren Zevon. He died of cancer in 2003. At the time, he noted, "I may have made a tactical mistake, in not seeing a doctor for 20 years."
---------------------------------------------
Bob Dylan with probably my favorite song by him. It's like a prayer, almost.
---------------------------------------------
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