News of the Obvious

Training proceeds apace. Training for what, I'm not sure yet, since none of you have given me any suggestions of races or events to aim for as goals, and I'm as bankrupt as Greece when it comes to ideas right now. In lieu of interesting stories about training - because I have none right now, here's the News.

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It sucked riding in the cold and rain at Jeff Cup unless you won or damn near won, in which case it was excellent. I didn't ride, so I neither sucked, nor was excellent, though had I ridden I assure you, I would have sucked but not for long.

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Ricky Martin publicly announced he is gay. I, for one, am utterly shocked by this news. Greg, WTF? Did you know? Why didn't you tell me? So who is going to be next to come out of the closet in a shocking revelation? Ellen Degeneres? Elton John? Evidently, the Cold War era gaydar I was issued in the late 60's doesn't work so hot.

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Speaking of coming out of the closet... BikeSnob just did. No, he's not gay. He's Eben Weiss. That's okay Snob... we love you anyhow, even if you aren't gay!

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In other news, French comedy duo Barry & Sarko recently played the White House to Demi-Presidente Biden's obvious pleasure. "They're a f***in' big deal!," he said with glee.

Hottest French Comedy Duo Since Martin & Lewis Does "The Robot"

Hidin' is Ridin'...

The recovery from BackBlowout 2010: The Horrorizationung, is ongoing. I caught the first Family Bikes shop ride of the year (for me), starting the ride with a sharp metallic taste in my mouth. The taste may have come from fear of being dropped, or maybe from the first swig out of my old (and possibly fatally moldy) water bottles. Or maybe it was from the wind chill of 28 degree air hitting this painful temporary crown that is barely topping one of my molars until the permanent goes in this Tuesday afternoon.

It doesn't matter what caused the funny taste in my mouth. The ride was off pretty quick, within 15 minutes of the designated start time. For early season road rides, this means we left a little early, beating expectations of 7:20.

We all participated in the ceremonial early season Pedaling of The Perfect Squares as we clunked around the Parkway and tried to remember how to shift gears and steer and not hook our handlebar ends, and we eventually made our way out to Bell Branch road, and then 450.

I didn't feel great. My legs weren't really opening. I wasn't in agony keeping up with the easy pace - no, I was in steady, mild discomfort. When your legs don't open up, it's like being in the middle of a Very Special Kind of Date, the ones you were on in all relationships with people prior to your current lifelong soulmate, at that precise moment where you realize you just aren't into the person. It's been a long time since I've experienced just that feeling with a person, but "Oh, you're still here?" is what my legs were saying to me yesterday. My cycling mind was saying to my legs, "oh, come on... couldn't you have told me this before we bought this bike together? Oh, f***..."

My legs just weren't that into me riding yesterday. Matter of fact, my legs have been open about as often as the Italian Industrial Efficiency Ministry or the German Institute of Humane Riot Policing Techniques this season. Of a dozen rides since I got back on the bike, only the second half of a ride I did last Wednesday with Beppo felt good. There the legs opened for an hour. Of course when they did, we discovered that the Cupboard of Sustained Power was bare, except for a few #10 cans of ShitI'mWeak. But at least I was able to put in a good, steady long effort. There was none of that yesterday.

Saturday, there was nothing good in my legs. They weren't up for anything, as they reminded me each time the road tilted upward even slightly. So it was time to conserve energy, to be smart, to ride skillfully...

Or as some might view it, to hide.

This isn't as gutless as it sounds, though admittedly it sounds pretty gutless. If you aren't in great shape and need to hide out... well, you actually have to be capable of doing some work. You will probably get tested to your limits, and for longer, than if you ride bravely and try to animate the pack. Despite the fact you are hiding like a whipped dog, it is possible to wring more total effort out of yourself than if you rode hard alone, or burnt all your matches in 30 minutes trying (futilely but nobly) to animate the group. You'll get to work harder for longer, and at ride's end you'll get to pretend you hung in because you're a stud, not because you're craftier than Mike D.'s girlfriend.

Okay, fine, it's gutless to hide. I'll stop trying to defend it as smart. But it's how I manage to stick around on rides until my legs are up to doing some work. Jon and I were talking about this yesterday because I used every trick in the book to not get dropped yesterday, and actually felt good at the end of the ride. Our talk got me to thinking about the tricks I'd used... Forthwith...

The Gutless Rider's Compleat Guide to Hiding Out on Group Rides

The key tactic in hiding out is to never work hard unless you really need to and never put yourself into a situation where you'll have to work hard. This means never giving up speed by tapping the brakes, and never burning off energy unless you have to. You should do this anyhow but when you're in really good shape, you can sometimes get away with being a total moron. When you aren't in great shape, or if you're just outclassed, you can't get away with it, it's a rule of physics. And what's more, everybody will know you are riding like a moron. So if you are hiding, never ride harder than tempo, unless you're about to get dropped in some isolated location where you'll never regain the group. If you have to close a gap, close it up gradually, and ignore the temptation to do a short, sharp effort to close it. If you need to slow, soft pedal or pop out into the wind for a second to scrub a little speed. If people are braking going into a turn in front of you, look for a safe line that lets you pedal through the turn - smoothly. In addition to saving energy, these tactics will make people think you are a "good wheel" - a great person to ride behind because it lets them get the maximum benefit of your draft.

The second tactic is to stick near the front of the group. The handle on a whip moves fast, but the tail of it snaps around exponentially faster. Every tap on the brakes up front translates to a little gap at the rear, that you have to work very, very hard to close. This will happen repeatedly over the course of a ride if you hang back there, until you wonder whether the boys up front simply hate your guts and are punishing you. If you want to work hard, go to the front and work hard where it means something. Don't waste your efforts off the back - unless you need to get in a series of, say, 50 hard 10 second efforts. For that, it's a *great* place.

The third tactic is to slip a little when the going gets hard. Because you are near the front, when the group starts to go harder you can slide back quite a ways before you get spit out. On a hill, you go from 2nd to 3d to 4th to 5th wheel, and so on. You keep working hard, and maybe you even go the tiniest bit into the red. But you never fight to hold your place, and never go all out to hang on the wheel of a guy passing you. Then maybe by the time the group clears the hill, you are last man, or just off the back and able to regain the thread as everybody eases up and regroups. But you can only do this because you didn't blow up, and you didn't blow up because you stayed out of the red on the hill. You worked hard but slipped back, knowing you'd regain the group over the top.

The fourth thing is a strategy - know your group ride and plan so that if you are cracking, you don't split wide open before regroup points. Other than a mid-season month or two where repeated 20 minute hard efforts may break out, the FBS shop ride is one of those group rides that is sensible and group oriented, somewhat predictable in rhythm. Jon doesn't like to shed riders, so where going hard wouldn't gain us anything, we slow and regroup, and chat. I know the roads well enough to know where we'll be regrouping after hills, long hard tempo efforts and so forth. So going up a hill with a regroup at the end, I rode within myself knowing I'd catch up on the regroup, or maybe the traffic light right after that. This saved matches for a 15 minute effort later in the ride.

The fifth thing is to never stop pedaling. If you're working hard just to hang on, your legs will get stiff and you'll have trouble getting them to spin smoothly again. Moreover, you need to take advantage of the regrouping points to catch up. Picture this - the group climbs a hill, you get popped out the back, they clear the top, and work hard up to a stoplight. You clear the top, see them braking for the light that just turned, and want to hurry up to catch them. Don't. Try to time it so that you are doing a light spin and rolling up to them just as they clip in and start to go. And use the momentum to pass, and get into a 2nd or 3d wheel position.

The final thing is to cheat. If you're going around a set of corners, don't take the sweeping line - go straight and clip the apexes if you can do so safely to cut 35 feet off the section of turns. If you're in a paceline and slipping back, don't go all the way to the back if somebody is silly enough to leave a gap. Slide in there and avoid the back-of-the-pack whiplash. When you pull, don't go hard or accelerate. Pull through by keeping it at a steady pace, maybe a little bit of extra effort, then pull off as soon as it's decent to do so, 10 or 20 pedal strokes maybe. Watch the ride's lone rangers - the guys who like to go way off the front and ride alone, or to get to the front of the paceline and then accelerate hard. Make a point of not following them.

Yep, that's how to ride like a coward - but also how to hang onto a group you have no business hanging onto. It's gutless, but it sure is satisfying; you get the training in without the mental beatdown that comes with getting dropped.

One other thing. All those tips? When you are in shape and trying to do well at a race, or on the local group ride, you can use those techniques to keep your legs fresh so you can drop the bombs on everybody around you. Truth is, even when I'm fit I do that stuff so when we do get down to hammering it hard, there's gas in the tank.

And that isn't gutless. It's how you're supposed to ride.

Friday Music

We could use some music.

I was listening to some Medeski Martin & Wood this morning driving into work. It's great stuff, always puts me in a different frame of mind than before I hear it.

One of the tracks I really like is off the Combustication album. It's called "Whatever Happened to Gus?" It names a lot of classic jazz greats.



So who are they talking about?

Well "Max" from Pittsburgh is Max Roach. He invented, or maybe helped invent bebop jazz with his innovative drum playing. Check this out.



Amazing, huh? That's the Max Roach Quintet with Abbey Lincoln, who was married to Max for a while. Clifford Jordan is playing tenor sax there, the cool bass licks are from Eddie Khan and the versatile Coleridge-Taylor Parkinson is on piano. The songs are the Freedom Suite, about segregation, and how it had to end. Damn. That just blows me away.

Okay, so that's Max. Who was Billy Eckstine? Just the greatest jazz and motown musician you never heard of. He had a bebop band, but sang love ballads. He was a early (and middle and late) Motown star. Check out this mashup between a ballad, and a rocking band. Which just happened to be the Billy Eckstine Orchestra.



Of course you guys are all smart, so you know who the Bird was. Charlie "Bird" Parker's Ko Ko is one of the signature bebop pieces. A lot of older musicians didn't groove on this because the rhythm wasn't straight up and easy to count, but the arrythmic forms pioneered in bebop later allowed Miles Davis to push jazz past the avant garde and into a whole new art form.



MM&W also mention Wynton Marsalis. You probably know of some of his siblings, who are pretty damn good musicians. Wynton is a pretty good trumpeter, and a scholar of jazz. He's a young guy who has come in for a lot of criticism because he adheres to older jazz forms and doesn't think much of fusion or any of the experimental stuff that's been done in the last 30 years. His strength is classical music - not classical jazz but straight up classical. Want to know a secret? Most of the jazz musicians going into the age of bebop were classically trained too. You hear Bird, but Bird... he heard Mozart. Just as you need to know the order of the keys on the keyboard to write a book, it helps to know the rigid, plainly theoretical and mathematical forms of classical music before you improvise. So Marsalis, despite his limitations - maybe limitations of his own choosing - he's still pretty solid. Here he knocks out Autumn Leaves with the great Sarah Vaughn, one of the grand dames of the golden age of jazz. In case you're new to jazz, her singing is called "scat." It's the style Cab Calloway used in signing Minnie the Moocher, and takes great verbal dexterity. Scat and bebop go together like farmhouse ale and pommes frites. The thing about Wynton Marsalis is that maybe it is true he isn't an innovator, but he sure gets and likes bebop and classic jazz, and I like him for that. How could I criticize a guy for liking to play what I like?



Lester Young headed the Lester Young Quintet. Here he is with a bunch of friends, playing Blues for Greasy. Lester played saxophone. The guy on the drums is Buddy Rich, who was a reasonably good musician in his own right.



So say, man... who has the key? The key? Gus Johnson. Here he is sitting at the back and playing a cool set of drums with the great Count Basie Orchestra, with Jimmy Lewis on bass.




Now go back and replay that Medeski, Martin and Wood song and see if you don't hear the echos of this piece in that.

And here's another one with Gus Johnson driving the rhythm.



There's only 8 notes, man. Sooner or later, they all get played over again.


Good luck at Jeff Cup y'all.

Chill Out, People

My friend Jeff asks about some of the mildly violent and strongly threatening blowback to the recently passed health care legislation, and wonders why liberals don't do this. Thing is, they don't, but the left does. You just don't always hear about it. The far right and the far left do a lot of violent and stupid things the rest of us ought to reject. The resort to guns (or bricks and cinderblocks, which have been both thrown through Democrat legislators' windows, and dropped on buses of Republican delegates to the national convention) is the beginning of the end of civil society and democratic self rule. You don't hear about it necessarily because the righty press reports nicely on leftwing violence. The mainstream media which, aside from Fox and talk radio is slightly to somewhat center left liberal, reports on leftwing violence. A lot of you guys probably don't listen much to the other side but each reports on the other.

Thing is, rightwing violence isn't conservative violence, it's rightwing, just as leftist violence isn't liberal, it's leftwing. The use by conservatives and liberals of the extremists of either side to discredit the mainstream philosophy of the other makes me laugh at first, then ill later. As a rhetorical tactic, it doesn't win anybody to your side, but I think it does a good job of marginalizing and maybe radicalizing quite a few folks. In the short run it's probably emotionally satisfying (see, e.g. Ann Coulter and Keith Olberman) but in the long run it's going to be disastrous if our national arguments are framed as "you're either with me on the issue of marginal tax rates, or you're evil." Sure, the results of some policies may be evil, but I don't think most people get to their political viewpoints out of mal intent, quite the opposite in fact.

On the larger issues, as a civil liberties attorney I find it highly ironic (in a painful-ironic, not Sarah Silverman 'hah, that's funny-ironic" way) that the same people, generally on the right, who were unworried about the encroachment of the state on general civil liberties two years ago are now wildly upset about this most recent encroachment on economic liberty, while most of the people who were near hysterical about the depredations of the PATRIOT Act two years ago, or at least grimly muttering about Bush's fascism, cheered when Congress handed extensive control over 1/6th of the nation's economic life and a big zone of personal privacy to the government.

I feel lonely as somebody who sees both sides of the coin and sees our foundational principles being chucked out in the interest of dependency on an ever-larger central government power. I am not anti-government at all, you need to have an effectively functioning federal government, but I am realistic about the ability of the government to be a savior of us all. The hope that it will is misguided as prophecy, useless as a guiding principle in the crafting of public policy, and is ultimately going to be truly dismal in execution, in little ways well beyond our imagining today. Statism is *always* shabby and dehumanizing, whether its origin is in rightish or leftish thought.

The Federal Government - not just ours, but every other one in every other country larger than a mid-sized city - is simply not good at the details. It is too big and too distant to know the key details about your situation, too busy to be effective at handling the details, and not interested in looking out for your interests in particular, just some general notion of the common good. The problem with that is that you are not the only stakeholder with an interest in the common good; there are a lot of other stakeholders who have interests that are opposed to yours. In the sausage-making baby-splitting exercise of governance, your needs are not paramount in a nation of 300+ million people, some of whom can afford personal lobbyists or Senate seats.

It appears to me to be a fundamental truth that the bigger an organization gets, the less humane its results will be. I've never experienced the opposite. As a corollary, I think the bigger that a government gets, with its police and economic and social and regulatory and carmaking and medical power, the less likely it is that its touch will be sensitive when it lays its hands on you. I think that's true regardless of whether it is sticking a piece of electronics up your hindquarters for police surveillance, or for detection of an enlarged prostate. I'd much rather that those powers be left in the hands of your state, where your vote matters more, or better yet in your hands. You should be able to say, "pull the damn thing out, I've had enough."

But that's just me. Maybe I should be more trusting of government, at least when people of my own ideology happen to be in power. Seems to work for most people. The only problem with that is that the power I give my guys to mess with you, doesn't leave office when your guys take over.

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And in bicycling news, Delardening II: The Return of My Waistline seems to be working. The first hopeful sign is that my pants did not whimper when I pulled them on this morning. I was also able to get my belt tightened up to the Seriously Fat Notch without cutting off all circulation to my legs. Oh, happy day!

I think I'll celebrate this accomplishment with a rest day.*


*But seriously. My legs are sore and I have a ridiculously bad schedule today. No choice but to have a rest day. I'd ride, were it an option.

March Commute

Moderate to heavy rain.
Winds 21 MPH out of the west, gusting to 32.
48 degrees.

Nope, I can't go to Flanders this year.

But on a night like this, after a horrendous commute like I just had, I can think about what Flanders means and why it's special to us cyclists. When I racked the bike on the roof tonight, shivering and with water running up my sleeves, I thought, "I'm a cyclist, not a guy on a bike." So are the other people out on the trail struggling up the long hill into the wind. It means something to know you can suffer a bit and keep right on pedaling, that wind and rain don't stop you. You're out there, passing people in cars who look up at you through the raindrops on the glass and wonder, "what on Earth possesses them?"

I look back and think, "because I'm not you."

I'm not a pro classics specialist either, and having ridden on cobblestones many times when I lived in Europe, I'm pretty sure I couldn't ever be one. Doesn't mean I can't appreciate the hell out of the racers who are, and what they go through. The training alone - often in conditions similar to what I just rode through - must take more strength out of them than most of us have strength. Still they race. It's because they are cyclists, racers actually; not just guys on bikes.

Victim of Tonight's Commute

A Couple Witnesses to the Conditions

While we're thinking of Flanders, check out Ryan's post on Freire and some of the upcoming cobblestone races.

Picking Up The Pieces

One of the problems with rehab from a serious injury is it throws your plans all out of whack. Doesn't matter how good your intentions were or what you had done to that point, Events simply left a big bag of burning dog poop on your step, rang the doorbell, and ran away. All you have left is a couple wisps of smoke, a disturbing smell, and a sinking feeling that you may have stepped in it.

You can't sit still though. Just because it's not January 1st, doesn't mean you can just go all mushy and aimless. You have to reset, to pick up the pieces.

Of course, the farther you fall, the more tiny little nasty pieces there are to pick up. In my case, I was coming into January in decent shape, with okay legs, relatively thin, and highly motivated.

Now? Well, I can pedal on flat ground sometimes without fear of imminently blowing my lungs out my piehole. My legs have atrophied. Fortunately for me, the muscle has turned into fat, otherwise I'd be accused of having chicken legs. Weight? Um, people are asking me if I'm the Grinch Who Ate Christmas. Motivation? I'm pretty jacked up that... well, it's nice that I can still ride, I suppose, but the slog back into shape kinda sucks. Did I mention I'm really fat?

SO here's what the goals were, pre-blown-disc.

215lbs
13hrs solo @ Bakers
50 more racers for the Tacchino
274 riding days

Okay, we're going to modify that. I've lost two and a half solid training months, plus a bit of riding fitness.

I think 235 is a reasonable goal. That's way south of where I am right now, and about a decent rugby playing weight for me.

Bakers Dozen is gone. I didn't get registered, and even if I had, it's unlikely I'd be fit enough for it. Not sure what the race goal will be.

I'm still shooting for 50 more racers to register for the Tacchino. That's totally do-able.

And riding days... Well, I'm not going to have all that much bounce in my step for a while. But maybe 180 riding days over the course of the year would be a fair goal.

Anything you guys want to add to that? I'll adopt the best most workable suggestion, particularly if it involves a more or less epic ride or interesting race in late summer or early fall. Keep in mind, SSWC of either species is probably out of the question but if somebody gives me a worthwhile race goal and it's more or less in the region, I'll put the thing on the schedule and shoot for it. I could use a goal.

And no, kneecapping Joel Gwadz at Charm City so I can finish ahead of him for once is not "worthy," as goals go. Fun, sure. Interesting, definitely. But not worthy.

What the Moon Really Looks Like

Biathlon: Sisu

Some of you probably thought I was joking a few weeks back during the Winter Olympics when I said it was good seeing the Finns competing, given their history with Biathlon and the Russians.

I wasn't.

Just the other day I happened on an article illustrating my point. It discussed Simo Häyhä, a Finn credited with shooting "at least 700 men in less than 100 days" during the brief Finnish war with the Soviets early in WWII. He was so deadly that the Soviets dubbed him "The White Death," and he humiliated the Red Army despite their "cult of the sniper," or "sniperism." The Finns fought the Soviets to a standstill using light infantry on skis, unconventional warfare, sheer grit, and a willingness to fight in temperatures down to 40 or 50 degrees (fahrenheit) below zero.

I'd have to bone up on my tactical level military history, but if significant changes to Soviet sniper doctrine occurred between 1940 (when Häyhä was wreaking havoc) and 1942 (when Soviet snipers decimated the ranks and morale of the German armies at Stalingrad) then perhaps Häyhä is one of the great, uncredited heroes of Stalingrad. Perhaps he caused the Soviet Army to focus on developing a culture of marksmanship, which involves individualism and rewarding excellence in a way that would have gone very much against the political grain at that time.

Old School Biathletes

Off Topic

Is it such a great achievement? What do you mean by 'free'? The doctors don't work without pay. It's just that the patient doesn't pay them, they're paid out of the public budget. The public budget comes from these same patients. Treatment isn't free, it's just depersonalized. If the cost of it were left with the patient, he'd turn the ten rubles over and over in his hands. But when he really needed help he'd come to the doctor five times over. . . .

Is it better the way it is now? You'd pay anything for careful and sympathetic attention from the doctor, but everywhere there's a schedule, a quota the doctors have to meet; next! . . . And what do patients come for? For a certificate to be absent from work, for sick leave, for certification for invalids' pensions: and the doctor's job is to catch the frauds. Doctor and patient as enemies—is that medicine?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, quoted by Milton Friedman. I added the links just for fun, and partly out of a sense of vengefulness toward the UK's National Health Service, which didn't see fit to let me visit a doctor last time I was in the UK, and suffering from some bronchitis / walking pnuemonia type of thing. They had a shortage of doctors for some reason and I didn't rate...

A common mistake made by many people reading Kafka is that they think he's writing psychological drama, rather than scathing political philosophy. Kafka was a government-employed insurance bureaucrat whose job it was to adjudicate insurance claims, including sorting out fraudulent claims from valid ones. Some have argued that his theme of bureaucratic nightmares may have contained autobiographical elements.

That 70's Guy

Alex Chilton of the Box Tops and Big Star died yesterday. He was a little shy of 70. You maybe didn't know about him but he was a pretty good songwriter. No Zevon, but then, even Zevon wasn't really Zevon sometimes. You probably know some of Big Star's music, whether you know it or not. Here's the song you probably know as the theme from That 70's Show.



Nice song, well written, gets at the teenage angst, the dumbass kind. Pleasant to listen to. Good quality pop music. Here's another song Chilton wrote, "I'm in Love With a Girl." It's pretty simple and straightforward. Lots of people copied it.



So who did that mild songwriter influence? Well, this seminal punk act, for one.



You can hear Chilton's influence in this song by REM:



And in this one:



So who did Alex Chilton draw inspiration from? Guitar great Steve Cropper, who you guys have seen me mention before. What did Cropper do? Well, this song, for one, which has been called the greatest guitar lick of all time by some pretty accomplished gunslingers.



You would also know Cropper from here:



The bassist in the Blues Brothers um... Boys... Band is Donald "Duck" Dunn, who played bass with Cropper on the Fried Green Onions video just up above. And I've told you all before about Matt "Guitar" Murphy, from the Blues Brothers. Matt Murphy's roots stretch back to the Mississippi Delta, and if he didn't play with all the great bluesmen, he came damn close. I've showed this next one before but it bears repeating - it's Matt's Boogie, and he's accompanied by blues greats Memphis Slim, Bill Stepney, and Willie Dixon.



Now this is a long trip around the Horn, but I was thinking about Alex Chilton's passing today. I wasn't a huge fan. I kind of knew about Big Star but didn't really stop to listen to them until today. They've always been just part of life's soundtrack for me; music that is pleasant enough, I guess. But when I stopped and listened, I found that they were pretty good, and Chilton was a really good song writer. Hell, everybody covered his songs, from punk bands to country artists.
So we've come from that 70's show, to some of the foundational blues artists of the 20th Century, the foundational punk group, and the foundational .alt rock group. Alex Chilton may not have been as much of a Big Star as he set out to be at first, but he occupies a privileged place among great musicians. He was very influential, and in his day he played with some good artists, and was inspired by and tried to play just like some great artists. Those of us who like rock, particularly .alt rock, owed the guy a beer. RIP, Alex.

Random Encounters

A cool thing about beginning the bike commute again is you have a dozen or so random encounters each day, just riding into work. Things happen. You bump into friends you haven't seen in months, you see people who aren't friends but who are in that commuter bubble, around you every day, and you see some crazy shit because you're moving slower than you would move in a car and the world is more easily observed in slo mo. My day today? In no particular order...

• I ran into Erik (Erik L?) from NCVC and we had a nice chat about racing cross on the way up the trail. I was mildly suffering, since my legs aren't in the same zip code as the rest of me, but it was really pleasant to speak with a racing friend. You know who racing friends are, right? They're people you race with and do bike stuff with, and you'd give 'em the shirt off your back, but you only ever see them on the bike. It's nearly heart-attack inducing when you run into a racing friend at a "straight" event like work.

• A fixed gear bike has a different feel than a geared bike from the moment you get on it. The most noticeable things are the butt wear, and stiff knees. We take for granted the first 10 minutes of a ride on a geared bike while our knees warm up and we soft pedal. On the fixed gear, there's no warmup, and the knees grumble. As for the hind quarter... well, you pedal constantly and don't move around. Your butt takes a beating. Of course the fixie has it's rewards, which... I'll think of some soon. Oh yeah, it's hard. Wait, that can't be a reward...

• I stopped to help a guy who was staring at his front derailer with a purpose, as if the "Shimano Alivio" lettering held the secret of life. "You okay?" "You need a hand?" Nothing. I stopped to help him and as I'm turning the fixie around nearly got pegged by a guy who saw the dude stopped, stood up, and figured "large guy, bent over, looking at derailer, fixie stalled in trail... MUST MEAN TOWNLINE SPRINT!" Good to see the Pathletes are in mid-season form already.
  

• I saw a triathlete going up the Cap Crescent this morning. She was twisted up sideways like she had severe scoliosis or something, and had both arms wrapped around the right extension on her aerobar. She may not of crashed just then, but if she rides like that much, she crashes lots of other times. Gotta love triathletes' creative interpretations of proper bike position.

• I got passed by a guy on an electric bike this morning. He was hauling ass downhill. I got to an uphill though and blew past him, despite his furious pedaling. How can you have an electric motor assist and still be that slow? I'd have made fun of him but I'm not that heartless and mean.
  

• I was sweaty when I got to work today. And happy. It was nice. Everybody commented on how happy I seemed today.
  

• A kid who reeked, reeeeeeked of marijuana wobbled up to me on his department store mountain bike near George Washington Circle. He was stoned to the bejeezus. "Dude. Do you know where I could get a sandwich around here? You know, a really good six dollar sandwich?" I had smelled him before he even spoke to me. It was like he'd taken a bath in bongwater and then hung out in a house that was on fire only the house was made of marijuana and hippie bones. I told him, "wrong town, pal. But maybe if you try Pizza Paradiso in Georgetown, up there on the left by about 33rd Street, they might have a happy hour special or something." Shit. Guess I forgot about Subway's Five Dollar Foot Long. Kid was so stoned he probably went to Dean & DeLuca, but still.
  

Fingers Crossed...

Keep 'em crossed friends. Today seems to be the first day of spring and summer riding; the day after which you'd be shocked to find snow on the road, shocked to have to break the water in the puddle near your house; shocked to need to wear a base layer under your bibs. It usually falls sometime in March. Generally, I think it's closer to March 1 than March 30, but I'll take it whenever I can get it. Tonight I'll put the neoprene booties, lobster gloves, wool socks and windfront tights away. Sure, I may wind up having to reach into the plastic tub and pull something out for one ride or another. But they can get out of daily rotation from now until some time in late September.

For me it's also the first day where I can work the daily commute into my routine. The commute isn't the be-all, end-all of riding. I have to add a lot to it if I want to have fun every day, or to train seriously. But it's 90 minutes of riding that I wouldn't get otherwise, a daily routine that gets my legs in acceptable shape, kills the flab, and lifts my spirits.

This day is a bit different this year because it isn't clear to me yet whether my back is recovered enough to take the strain of doing this regularly. Yep, I'm still a bit sore from riding a couple hours on Sunday. But you don't get better by doing nothing. So it's stretches, then crunches, then some stretches, and I'll be off.

Most years, this day is an unmitigated lift to my spirits. It isn't this year because of the apprehension. But if I can manage a few consecutive days of commuting and my back holds up or improves, the lift I get will be a lot bigger than I would have received otherwise.

A small lift, when you're starting from a lower position, feels better than a big leap when you're already near the top. Like I said though, I'll take what I can get. It's a happier life when we are able to focus on what we can do, rather than on what we can't.

Here. Have Some Pi.

Happy Π Day. I celebrated by riding, more or less, about 31.4 miles, give or take a couple tenths. I couldn't think of anything more suitable, though the notion of drinking 3.14 margaritas did occur to me.

It took about an hour to get the 'cross bike shifting and operating properly before I went out. I guess riding in all that mud and snow did a number on the thing. I cleaned it after Capital Cross, I really did, but I didn't clean it thoroughly, and a lot of mud was stuck on it in strategic places. So today I rode without fenders, hoping that a constant spray of water from the road would soften up the hardened mud and grit. It definitely helped. When I got home, Son-of-Rouleur and I went for 5 or 6 easy miles, then we washed our bikes (thoroughly) together. That's a nice way to end a ride. It almost made me forget about the burning in my lungs.

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I had to go to the three local supermarkets today to get various things for the Rouleur Celebration of Ersatz Irish Culture, which is going down Wednesday. Corned beef, colcannon, Guinness, and eye-watering/nostril-searing farts until noon the next day. It's just like the old country Irish used to do... except they didn't really eat Corned beef. So who's countin', right boyo?

My ambiguous feelings about St. Padraig's day, and my uneasy relations with pop-Irishness notwithstanding, this was an interesting opportunity to do a taxonomy of the local supermarkets' customers. I know there are some differences in the customer bases, but until today, didn't really notice them formally. Since I had to hit all three to get all the ingredients, I decided to give you a demographic breakdown.

Chain 1: Local discount shopping chain.

Percentage of people with meth face: >10%

Most prevalent type of hot chicks: young, in sweatsuits, and you can see looking at them the particular way they plan to go to seed over the next decade (booze sweat on a Sunday at 5:00 PM, high fat / high carb diet in the cart, boyfriend who looks like he just got out of prison helping her with the shopping).

Typical customer: middle middle class or a little lower; upper middle class in disguise. If they have any money to spare, they aren't showing it in this store.

Typical male customer #1: Blue collar white retiree with a flattop. He don't look happy.

Typical male customer #2: 23, prison tats, or at least prison wannabe tats. Dangerous looking, because stupid is always dangerous. Bonus: he probably just got out of prison, and probably is actually dangerous.

Typical female customer #1: 38, one or two kids in tow, tired out looking. She's workin' hard.

Typical female customer #2: age indeterminate, meth abuser based on skin tone, loss of fat in the face, lack of teeth. Probably 22.

Typical female customer #3: 25, recent immigrant dragging bored recent immigrant husband/boyfriend around. The only hopeful, non-tired looking people in the whole store.

Out of Place Customer: hot chick with big diamond engagement ring, very nice casual clothes.

Cashier: Marge. 40, bored, would rather be reading People than checking out your groceries.

Reason to go to this store: good produce, cheap meat, which is good so long as your eye for picking out the good quality meat is comparable to a practiced butcher, or Pam Anderson. Truly awesome ethnic food section, with multiple kimchis, hard-to-find foreign mustards, a Mexican section that is just like being in Mexico except with less danger of being killed by an out-of-control drug cartel. Good deals on hygiene products and name brands, and the local pipeline for Turkey Hill Ice Cream (BOO YAH!)

Reason not to go to this store: the same reason you buy your jeans from WalMart, but are afraid to admit it to all your friends, you pretentious bastard. It's CHEAP and you're embarassed by the notion that you are watching your spending. Avoid the bakery at all costs unless your S&M club is having a coffee and pastries party and you are looking to hurt a special someone in that special kind of way.

Clothing brand: Ed Hardy. Slogan T-shirts from nearby K-Mart. Generic jeans. West Coast Choppers hats.

Most unusual shopping cart: young heavily (badly) tattooed couple, both with meth face, with probably $500 worth of frozen pizza, pizza pockets, and Doritos and a doomed three year old girl overflowing out of the cart.

$17 gets you: 4 one pound T-bone steaks in the "family pack." They have a short shelf life and are cut somewhat unevenly. One is remarkably tough for a T-bone.


Chain 2: Regional middlebrow chain specializing in HUGE savings if you join their Big Brother We Monitor What You Buy And Send You Creepy Targeted Marketing Mailings Club.

Percentage of people with meth face: <2% style="font-weight: bold;">Type of hot chicks: career women. Suits on weekdays, Levis on weekends, tights if it's post- or pre-workout.

Typical customer: middle to upper middle class, more or less normal shopping cart. Upscale immigrants.

Typical male customer #1: Fireman, military, Federal law enforcement, IT professional or middle manager.

Typical male customer #2: middle class white collar retiree. Well groomed. Owns a boat. Coaches in the local kids' sports leagues. Happy go lucky.

Typical male customer #3: 22 year old white male with wannabe tats. Has a teardrop on his neck, but frankly would have trouble killing a Michelob Ultra, much less a human. Refugee from Towson State. That's a college, not a prison.

Typical female customer #1: 35, professional, left the kids at home with Dad and is hauling ass around the store. She's busy, so don't get in the way of her cart, if your plans for future years include "walking."

Typical female customer #2: 25, just came from working out at Gold's Gym. Clothing - well, that's why they call 'em "tights," ain't it?

Clothing brand: Columbia. Joseph A. Bank. Levis.

Cashiers: Each shift has one dynamic female cashier who knows what she's doing, and then there's 20 high school kids who try hard but are clueless. Doesn't matter; cash-out is the big cost-saver here, with half the registers run by minimum wage kids, the other half "self-checkout," which means you do most of the work until the process stalls, then you wait a couple minutes for the dynamic female cashier to walk over, swipe her card, and bail you out.

Out of Place Customer: Nobody. The clientele runs the gamut.

Reason to go to this store: it's a pretty normal grocery store. They have everything you want, mostly. Good organic section. Good bakery.

Reason not to go to this store: stuff is arranged not by type, but by association. So if you want beans, go to the Mexican section. Or the Cajun food section. Or the Picnic section. Or the Indian food section, between the lentils and the saffron rice. Getting the right can of beans can take a half hour, if you aren't sure what your beans' particular ethnic association is supposed to be.

Most unusual shopping cart: a half dozen beef briskets, a 12 pound pork loin, and a king sized pack of chicken breasts. Backstory: Probably an Irish chick who just started the Atkins diet.

$17 gets you: Two 1 pound T-bone steaks, marked down from $32.99. Bonus: Two weeks from now, you'll receive a flyer in the mail advertising Emeril's T-Bone Steak Flavoring.

Chain 3: Regional Aspirational Highbrow grocery story.

Percentage of people with meth face: 0%. You're in powder coke country here, kiddo. Or maybe X, if you're downscale.

Type of hot chicks: young women living above their means; cougars.

Typical customer: upper middle class. Lower middle class with aspirations.

Typical male customer #1: Clean cut white yuppie. A bit of a foodie. Married to a sorority girl who has a slender build similar to his own. Comparable haircut too, when you think about it. And they dress the same too.

Typical male customer #2: Well dressed middle-aged professional. Doesn't mind paying retail, besides it'd be a pain in the ass to drive to Store 1 or Store 2. It's just food, right?

Typical male customer #3: Disoriented retiree who hoofed it over from the nearby 55+ community. Doesn't remember a loaf of bread costing $5.50 when he was a kid, but chalks it up to bad memory.

Typical female customer #1: 35, professional, nanny has the kids and hubby is still working. Hit LA Fitness first, and is now taking her time working around the store. Ah, they've got king crab this week...

Typical female customer #2: 23, retail clerk at nearby strip mall. Fly-ass clothes. Rents a Baby Merc, pays retail.

Clothing brand: North Face. Patagonia. Rock & Republic. Prada. J. Crew.

Cashiers: Special ed students from the local group home. Eastern European immigrants with PhDs. (No, really. I'm not making this up).

Out of Place Customer: The badly dressed. Non-asian, non-upscale immigrants. People who don't know their brie from their camembert.

Reason to go to this store: The bakery section is to die for, with great pastries. Good cheeses and gourmet stuff. If you are severely caffeine deficient, this store has the tools that will let you get through the day, or at least the produce aisle, without going into withdrawal - there's a Starbucks in the store and a Caribou adjacent to it. You want people to know you don't mind going to a store with cashiers with mental disabilties, you just wish some were minorities working here too, instead of just buying stuff. You are frontin' and want people to know you aren't afraid to pay $6.99 for a pound of green bell peppers. You dig on the good meat and fish counters. There's a bank in the store. You're there for the hot chicks. It's next door to a good wine shop.

Reason not to go to this store: It's overpriced. The bakery's fresh bread sucks, compares unfavorably to hockey pucks. You are more into buying food than meeting attractive new married people. You don't like paying full retail, plus. For the cost of the produce, the quality is frustratingly mixed between superb, and "we picked this up off the streetcorner." The bank's never open. You've dealt with the cashiers, and wouldn't mind strangling a few of them, and probably will if you keep shopping there.

Most unusual cart: $300 of gourmet cheese and quart baskets of assorted berries.

$17 gets you: A one pound T-bone steak, that tastes okay and costs as much as the local butcher's steaks, but doesn't taste like it's taken from the same species of animal.


So that's my Sunday afternoon. Ride, wash, recover, then gawk at fellow shoppers. I feel like the (dorky male) Margaret Mead of local suburban shopping enclaves. Yeah, it's probably over-simplification to talk about my co-shoppers this way, but I'll let my local commenters, who frequent these stores, clarify anything they feel is off the mark.

Alternative Pre-history

Scientists conclude: Asteroid wiped out dinosaurs.

But can you imagine how different life would be, if the Earth hadn't been hit by a dinosaur-destroying asteroid? For one thing, it'd totally screw up all our religious iconography.



It would also add a whole new dimension of excitement to mountain biking.

In other news, a guy was arrested in Michigan for running an illegal circumcision ring. Up until he was busted, I hear business was brisk.

Cops in Greenville Tennesee, upset at a growing profusion of vultures that vomit half eaten carrion all over the place, have taken to killing them, and hanging their carcasses from trees. Apparently, it's working pretty well to get rid of the vultures. One has to wonder if this tactic wouldn't work just as well with drug dealers, murderers, and people who use their phones in movie theaters.

Speaking of which, a man in a movie theater last week asked a woman to stop talking on the phone, so she stabbed him in the neck with a meat thermometer. I have three thoughts about this. First, it's exactly backwards; if anybody should be stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer, it's people who talk on the phone in theaters, not the people who have a problem with that behavior. Second, do you think we should hang the people who talk in theaters on the entrances to theaters, or at least hang their cellphones, as a warning to the others? If it works for vultures... Third: who takes a meat thermometer to a theater anyhow? Am I missing some new trend in self defense? What was the woman going to use the thermometer for if she didn't stab the guy?

If you're interpreting this pile of rambling as "must be raining hard and Jim ain't ridin'," then you're a perceptive sonofagun.

Another Week Down

It's been a good week. I got a couple short rides in, which is probably what I'm supposed to be doing (as opposed to long basebuilding grinds). My six year old kid informed me tonight that babies have gills, because otherwise, they couldn't breathe when they're in mommy's belly. I got a screaming headache fixed courtesy of an emergency root canal this morning, which wasn't fun but did bring relief. A cousin who is close to me, and unfortunately also close with uterine cancer, had an operation and the doc pegs her chances at beating it entirely in the 85-90% range. And like usual, tomorrow presents me with a brand new chance to try to make right what I didn't get right today. What's not to love about that? As I said, it's been a good week.

I will try to get in some longer rides this weekend if the weather is okay. I'm going to get my diet straightened back up, which is now possible because I'm working out regularly again. (Dieting when not working out is damn near impossible for me. Which makes it like dieting most other times...).

It's Friday though, and you're only here for the music. So, as Ray Davies, noted in song, it's time to give the people what they want.

Check out Them Crooked Vultures. Pretty good jam band with some established artists. Who's the old guy? A fellow by the name of John Paul Jones. You may have heard of his earlier band. He's got a pretty solid musical resume. Dave Grohl is no slouch either.



While we're not on the subject... I'm likin' on the Black Keys these days. Nice guitar work, good blues/rock vibe.







Now for something totally different... Hollywood Undead, with an NSFW ditty they call "Everywhere I Go." Juvenile, funny, not very artistic... beasically 2 Live Crew, staffed by a bunch of lowbrow white dudes. I found it amusing though.



Might as well finish with something completely different from that.



Have a good weekend. I hope it's clear for a while and you can get some rides in, despite the approach of this grinder of a rainstorm.

Politics

I've got definite philosophical beliefs about how things oughtta be, but you may have noticed I try pretty hard not to throw my politics in you'ns' faces. There's a reason for that. It's because I think politics generally is poisonous, and best left to the people who traffic in it. Yep, I've got particular ideological beliefs, but nobody likes having the partisan stuff thrown in their face. It's pure bile, whether it's practiced by the right or left. I know a lot of people in politics who are made intensely unhappy by their environment, and if you are capable of reading political blogs with any sort of clinical distance, you see that the folks who take politics seriously are desperately unhappy. One has to wonder if people who do political blogging of the involved, partisan sort are capable of any joy in their lives whatsoever. It's good to have a well-thought out philosophy on how life ought to be lived; but I pity people who care that much about the partisan outrage d'Jour, because there's always something new to be enraged about.

Jonathan Althouse Cohen - son of interesting lawprof blogger Ann Althouse - has an interesting discussion of where politics ought to be placed in the grand scheme of things, citing Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher. According to Magee,

Even on their own terms the politics and business of the world were absurdly evanescent. One week politicians, people who worked in the City, and people whose job it was to report their doings would all be kept out of their beds by a financial crisis which, six months later, would be little talked of. By that time perhaps there would be . . . a corruption scandal in local government, which would then be followed by a flurry of public concern over crimes of violence, which in its turn would be pushed out of people's minds by their fury over some proposed new tax; and so it would go on. Each of these things would seem important for a time, then each would pass away and scarcely matter again except to historians. In fact, the truth is that most of them made little or no difference even to the daily lives of most of the population living through them. People immersed in this stream of ever-changing events were filling their minds with . . . ephemera and trivia, what people in electronics mean by "noise." (254)

Cohen and Magee consider art - good art that strives for beauty and not just political content - to be more permanent and a more superior occupation and hobby than politics. the discussion goes on to cite things that are more vitality-inspiring than politics, and which should be more important in one's life. Love is also discussed as important - the love of family and friends, of the experiences of life itself. That is a damning critique of politics right there - politics is not life, but is a meta-critique of life in some ways. Making your life revolve around politics, is like making your letter writing revolve around the addresses on the envelopes. Sure, the envelopes matter, but they are only an important subsidiary to the communication itself.

The comments are pretty interesting too, and one really caught my eye.

I'd love to be able to let politics slide further down the list of important things that occupy my mind and time, but alas, some of my fellow citizens will not allow me that pleasure. Once the do-gooders decided that every aspect of life is political, and deserved the "wise", guiding hand of politicians, they forced me pay attention... if only for self-preservation.

I think there's truth in that, though there's more than the commenter probably thought. People on the right and left who want to use the state as an instrument to shape how men are, to reshape man, bring this on us.

So you really want to know my politics? I don't owe loyalty to a party, though I believe pretty strongly that the government that governs least, governs best. There are good objective arguments for this, and if you've read Hayek or Nock you know them. The arguments point out the impossibility of achieving utopia and fixing things, particularly from a central government using coersive power. But those men just give me the philosophical underpinnings for what I want intuitively: I want to be left alone to do my own thing, and I want others left alone to do their own thing, with limits imposed only where we would start to injure others. Is this selfish? Yeah, maybe. But I want other people to be equally free to pursue what makes them happy too.

Most of today's politics is about imposing our personal whims on other people, and I don't like that very much. The only way to justify a lot of these intrusions is to keep people whipped up in a frenzy of concern about the flavor of the month, then when 'we' get whatever it is we want, to move on to the next new frenzy over the next big public crisis, and impose a new control on society to fix that one, then move on again. It's such a common pattern of political debate that we usually don't stop to question the big picture, what kind of a society we're creating. Most of the time when I raise a current issue, it's not because I've thrown in my lot with partisans on one side or the other; it's usually because one side is trying to impose another set of controls, and the other side is opposing it with the usual eschatological partisanship. Oh yeah, we're building a legacy alright, but I'm not sure it's the one we're shooting for, with our good intentions and passing but pressing concerns. It is in this way a giant net of laws and regulations is slowly built up to cover all society, constraining it and wrecking the general liberty which is our natural state. Not my concept, but Alexis de Tocqueville's.

So that's my philosophy - do your own thing, man, and let your conscience be your guide. And don't believe the hype.

You gotta check out SuspiciousVans.com. You'll laugh. Then you'll be creeped out. Seriously creeped out. Then you'll laugh again. Then you'll catch yourself, and be really, really creeped out. Then you'll laugh some more.

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Ben Roethlisberger: Role Model

It is total Hoovis Bait to say this, but Ben Roethlisberger may be the dumbest man to play pro football since Nate Newton and his best friend, the Human-Sized Bag of Pot. Like ol' big bong Nate, Big Ben has also brought shame on his football team.

He is still dodging a civil suit for alleged rape in Tahoe last spring, and now stands accused of sexually assaulting a Georgia college student in a bar, "in the early morning hours on Friday." Not satisfied with riding helmetless on his motorcycle and crashing into a car (nearly killing himself and jeopardizing a winning team), Big Ben finds that it's really important to party with the ladies, particularly in bars and in the wee hours of the morning. Not since PacMan Jones was on the loose, has an NFL player's partying led to more consistently disastrous results.

Any halfway intelligent pro athlete would look at the motorcycle accident, and realize that millions of dollars and maybe a the hope of a normal life are at stake, and ease up a bit. Similarly, any halfway intelligent athlete would look at the civil suit for rape and (assuming Ben's claims of innocence are true) realize a young multi-millionaire meeting women late at night in bars is headed for disaster. Say what you will about Tiger Woods, he wasn't accused of rape, and he took a lot of steps to protect himself, even if he eventually blew it. In short, there are better ways for a young, rich, franchise athlete to meet women, ways that are less fraught with risk. A halfway intelligent athlete knows this, and takes steps to protect himself.

Alas, Ben Roethlisberger is not halfway intelligent, not by a longshot.

There should be a sign outside of Heinz Field in Pittsburgh with one of those little stacks of flip numbers on it: "No rape accusations in _ _ _ days."

I'm sure the Rooney family would really like the number to get into the mid-triple digits once in a while. Y'know, just for a change.

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Stevil Kinevil at All Hail The Black Market, has some rad bike kit for sale involving black, skeleton bull's heads, Evil, and his corporate logo. I've been needing some nice jerseys, and I think I may have to pick me up one of these.


Um, I've shown them in my size, which is 2x in a EE width. Check out AHTBM to see them in normal sizes and shapes, and to get ordering details. They look damn good, BTW, and they're made by Voler, so you know the quality will be pretty solid. You can order them here but you've only got about a week to do it, so get after it.

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Maybe I'm jaded, but watching the prologue TT of Paris-Nice yesterday on Versus was... boring as all hell. It was great to see Lars Boom and Jens Vogt ride great efforts, and good to see Levi beat up on Contador... but that was about 5 minutes of fun out of 2 hours of racing on TV. So I quit watching mid-way and left to do more exciting stuff, like blow my nose and watch paint peel in my bathroom near where the tiles leak a bit.

First Dues Check

The human body perceives warmth as pain when the temperature hits around 130 degrees. I was flirting more with pain than warmth as the hot water in the shower drenched my head and upper back. I let the water run off my face and breathed in little water droplets, which soothed my raw lungs. A can of Juengling rested on the soap dish, ready to help me celebrate my first day back in the saddle after a forced 8 week layoff from riding. A small celebration was in order.

A couple preliminary rides last week and this week set the stage for a real training ride. Those rides were short things at Hains Point, which is as flat as a pool table and not difficult, even on days where the wind is a bit tough. Those rides didn't tell me much, except that I could turn the pedals.

But could I work? Could I break a sweat, and not break myself? Would my back hold? I didn't know.

After the usual pre-ride religious observations - balms for the bottom, emoluments for the knees, multiple layers of bright colored vestments - I hit the road on the fixed gear and formulated an easy, 25 mile course. Some short hills meant it would have a few brief efforts in it, tied together with a couple long false flat slogs, but there would be nothing really difficult.

After about 10 minutes of pedaling, it was clear that aliens kidnapped my spin and replaced my legs with a couple worn out, mis-manufactured square gears left over from the failure of the Soviet Union.

In addition to all the other shortcomings it points out, the fixed gear bicycle relentlessly points out poor pedaling technique, giving one's legs two or three reminders per revolution. One could argue that the main purpose of riding these outmoded monowagens is to make the sensations of riding more vivid to the rider. These sensations include the feeling of pedaling squares. Slowly burning rub spots under the sitbones, from pedaling all the time and rarely standing. Another slow burn in the legs on longer uphills because no downshift is available. A training fixie also vivifies this searing pain in the face, which occurs after you punch yourself in the nose as hard as possible for determining that the way to start rehab after a long forced break is to ride a fixie 25 miles in 45 degree temps and high winds.

Life is more vivid on a fixed gear, and more colorful - and not all the color comes from the blood running out of your nose and onto your jersey as a result of that ill-considered self-punch. Because the fixie removes a lot of the thinking and fiddling from the ride, you have time to think.

Pedaling along mindful of my deficiencies in form and fitness, I pondered what it means to be fit, and riding well. The answer isn't as simple as having put in sufficient base miles and more specialized training efforts. In a way, that part is easy. But there is a substantial mental component that is key to riding well. The key mental element is confidence. When you ride with confidence, your legs are stronger because your mind manages them better.

Although it is easily destroyed, confidence doesn't come easily. You can't get a package of it for Christmas, then go out and kick ass. You have to earn confidence, to build it up.

Confidence is undercut by a thousand different things. Bad diet decisions, training layoffs, getting a beating on a group ride where you normally prosper, injuries, simple bad days on the bike... all these things eat away at confidence as surely as rust eats steel. It's more insidious than rust, however, since you can't sand off and repaint a lack of confidence. It's far more stubborn than that, something I'm aware of from last year's foot surgery and this winter's back problems.

The way to regain that confidence is to earn it back. Real confidence has to be earned and built up over time. It's easy to get something that seems like confidence but which has no real benefits to it; that's false self esteem. It's easy to get because we say a lot of nice things to each other because we're all nice people, but nice isn't always what people need to hear, even if it's what they want to hear.

The danger of having a lot of friends who are nice people is that you can start believing their kind utterances and start feasting on their good wishes. Good wishes and support are wonderful, but they are emotional candy. They may pick you up when you're down, and give you an incentive to get out on the road and build yourself up, but the effect is ephemeral, and short lived. So they are important, but once you're on the road and pedaling, they dont' provide lasting help.

Real confidence, the kind that doesn't desert you in a pinch, has to be forged. Like a base metal, you need to get torched and get hammered on, and come through the experience beaten into better shape, with all those surplus impurities knocked out of you. If you want your confidence, your mental attitude, to be a useful tool, it has to be beaten into shape, ground on, and honed. Without the clanging and sparks, you'll never be sure that your confidence in your fitness and your ability to prevail is genuine. There will always be a nagging doubt in your mind that you don't deserve to be in that lead group, or hanging onto your buddy who just attacked on a hill. You can't afford to have nagging doubts if you want to ride well, and this is true no matter what your fitness or ability level.

Confidence was a problem for me yesterday. At three or four points in the ride, I was struggling. My effort level wasn't that high. We're not talking about extended periods with a 180 bpm heartrate. It's just that everything hurt. At one point my knees would be creaking. At another, my lungs were burning. After a hill, my hamstrings were cramping. It was slow, and felt slow. But I hung in there and kept pedaling, telling myself I just needed to keep going, and it would pass.

Sure enough, once I got past the midway point of the ride, my legs started to loosen up. They still didn't have any big efforts in them, but my spin got a little better, and the breathing came a bit easier. The cramps eased off, and soon enough, I was rolling into Crofton, hopping the curb and pedaling into my back yard.

It wasn't a good kind of hurt that I felt at that point; it was a bad, ill-used sort of feeling. The first thing my wife said to me was, "you look really haggard." But I was looking haggard at the end of the ride and I had earned the right to look bad. The nagging fear that my back wouldn't hold up proved irrational, and I proved to myself that I can get through a ride of decent length despite the layoff, and despite the discomfort of the ride itself. It was the first hammer blow on the block of metal I hope to build back up into a decent cyclist.

It's not all sunshine and roses right now, but the track is clear in front of me, and the spots where I'll put my feet are well-trod. I've got a little bit of confidence now, and that will feed my ability and desire to keep working at it.

Importantly, the meditative time I spent let me gain some insight into praise and discipline and work and how they relate to performance, lessons I will apply not only to my riding, but also to how I raise my son. Praise and confidence must be earned, not given freely, because if they are given freely they may not be solid, and because they are not linked to an identifiable cost, they will not be esteemed because they came too cheaply. My praise has to focus on his real accomplishments, where he's worked hard.

At the doctor's this week, getting my pre-flight clearance, the Doc commented on my blood pressure, which has been borderline hypertensive since Christmas. It's back down now to the normal range, which he found unusual. "I know," I said. "I've ridden my bike a few times in the last week." This drew a chuckle but it illustrates my point: tangible effort and tangible achievement are the progenitors of real success. That's something we deserve to be praised for, and something that should be a source of real confidence.

Friday Fun

First, by popular demand, some pictures of the Haole Hauler, my Gentleman's Express.

This bike took me totally by surprise. I was looking for a singlespeed frame to replace the Cross Check that I broke last fall, and Bikeman had a sale on these Kona Major One frames. That's Kona's cross-specific single speed. It's got sliders instead of dropouts, so it's just the ticket for a fixie or single speed. The original plan was to shift the Cross Check's components onto the new frame and be done with it. The Kona had other plans though. When it arrived, it stunned me with its beauty. The frame is this gorgeous rootbeer brown, with fairly subtle white, black and yellow accents.



Once it was built up, I rode it, and found out that the thin scandium tubing delivers a sublime ride. I started falling in love with it - which is what happens with bikes sometimes - and decided I had to upgrade the running gear to stuff that is aesthetically and functionally appropriate to that superb frame.


My old rear wheel was shot, the Surly hub having eaten itself, so I looked around for suitable replacements. Fixed/free hubs don't seem to come in a good mid-grade option. They are either cheap - $50, available from IRO, Surly, Harris Cyclery and others, and seemingly manufactured by the same factory in Taiwan; or expensive - Dura Ace, White Industries, Phil Wood and so forth. I was unsatisfied with the Surly hub's durability, and went for the Phil Wood hub for the build, along with a Mavic MA 33 semi-aero rim, and 36 double butted spokes. (I already had a comparable front wheel built on a 105 hub, so no front build). All I can say about that is the wheel is great, and the hub quality is evident from the tight tolerances coupled with minimal rolling resistance. I'm afraid the cost of my bike builds from now on just went up $250. The result is a superb wheel, with a really understated hub - the epitome of what I look for in bike gear.

At the same time, I needed some fenders. My fixies get used a lot for training and utility rides, particularly in the winter and spring. I *love* me some fenders. But on a bike this nice, clip-ons wouldn't do. So I was looking for rear fenders, and an astute reader tipped me off about a sale that Cody at Woody's Custom Fenders was having. He happened to have a set of natural maple fenders with brass fittings on sale for about the price of a regular set of full coverage plastic fenders so I picked up a set. Although he has a lot of more complex designs available, this simple clearcoated maple matches this bike.



I needed a new saddle, but didn't want the hassles that come with a Brooks. It had to be brown, to match the bike. But I wanted some rivets. That led me to the brown Sella San Marco Regal, in tan suede, with copper rivets and rails.


The brake levers needed upgrading, so I went with the Cane Creeks, which are really solid and which have a nice feel in my hands. I put them on a Race Face 46cm bar with ergo drops - this wide bar is the correct size given my outsize shoulder width, and it is comfortable. Some tan tape from Salsa, and I was ready to roll.



The upgrades aren't quite done. I need to sort out a Thomson seatpost and stem, and there are some cantilever brakes in my future - not sure whether to run with the TRPs, or maybe some Kores or one guy suggested some Pauls. But those are minor upgrades. The Haole hauler is basically complete and I'm really happy with it. As one teammate pointed out, "it looks like a magazine bike, like everything was put together by design." Yeah. That's what I was aiming for.

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Just a quick note. One of my teammates, and favorite writers, and favorite people, is writing regularly again. The sound of ProTour Vittoria Evo Paves (25c, of course) hitting cobblestones in last week's Usetabe Omloop Het Volk apparently awakened Ryan, and The Service Course is once again taking care of all your Bike Racing Insight Needs.

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Time for your weekly shot of good music, right?

It used to be in popular music, that looks could be deceiving. Check out this bunch of dorks - looks like a board meeting of one of the Big Eight accounting firms. (I know that it's now the Big Three - but we use only the finest period-appropriate cultural references here at Rouleur Central).

Sailing Across the Wide Accountant-sea

That is the Dave Brubeck Quartet. You will never see a squarer looking bunch of dudes, not even at the Engineers for Christ breakout prayer breakfast session at the annual IIEE convention. Eugene Wright was a Kansas City jazz/blues style bassist they called "The Senator." Not exactly punk rock material, eh? The innovative (and really square looking) drummer Joe Morello developed all sorts of new beats and really pushed the limits of cool jazz, while the accountant-like Paul Desmond played an extremely distinctive saxophone. Classically-trained pianist Dave Brubeck, a musical iconoclast, led the group in its experiments, and orchestrated a unique sound you will quickly recognize, even if you never knew about the group before today. The Quartet had a lot of different members over the years, but this iteration of it stuck together for about 15 years, and is referred to as the "Classic Quartet." You'll see why, right now.

First, let's take the A train, baby.



That's a pretty easy introduction to the quartet. Pretty standard cool jazz, not too heavy, won't blow your mind. But that was just a warm up. Now check this one out - you may recognize strains of Rimsky-Korsakov and early Miles Davis here, as Gustav Mahler might have mashed them up if he'd had a MacBook and some editing software. It's actually a nod to Mozart's lovely and then-innovative Rondo Alla Turca, and it's called Blue Rondo a la Turk. It features a goofy rhythm that somehow works.



Those guys didn't look cool, but you got 28% more cool just by listening to them play. Want to hear something that will really blow your mind? Check out the Unsquare Dance, which mashes up 7/4 (7/8?) rhythm, old school country and Alvin Ailey-style modern dance into cutting edge music and choreography.



Damn. Just damn. Where'd that square lookin' bunch of dudes come up with the idea for that trippy song and trippy video? BTW, the girl dancing there was a bigtime prima ballerina before she took to TV. There be art street cred in that piece, chirrets. Now here's the Quartet's signature piece, the one you will definitely recognize, even if you didn't know before now where it came from.




Where that music came from, mostly, is the Quartet's groundbreaking 1959 album, "Time Out." As the name suggests, the album is an experiment built around novel rhythm arrangements like 7/8 and 9/8. That bunch of would-be CPA's were breaking ground here, and although Miles Davis gets enormous (and well deserved) credit for his jazz improv work with Bitches Brew, it sucks the air out of the room in that era. The Quartet shouldn't be slighted for its incredible work, taking Davis's (and Coltrane's and Parker's) cool jazz, and raising its art factor by an order of magnitude. Brubeck, of course, was part of the cool jazz movement going back to the late 40's, and a contemporary of those artists, so he shouldn't be slighted as a figure in that movement, pre-Brubeck Quartet, either; it's just that he went so far beyond what Miles and Bird did, taking formal music theory and applying it to jazz even as his contemporaries' attention, and the attention of the critics, was largely turning to more improvisational forms and fusion.

Part of how we judge artists is by their cultural endurance, whether their original works can live on in the culture and be re-used, shaped and formed into new art. Did they contribute something lasting, or was their work a dead end?

The work done by the Dave Brubeck Quartet lives on; you've heard their original work all your life and probably didn't know who they are. It can also be recycled into something wonderful. Check this out.




Sweet, huh? So there you go - a straight line from Mozart, to Dave Brubeck, to Radiohead. Pop culture is mostly filth, but the parts of it we hang onto over the generations are often gold if you can scratch off the dirt and get underneath the corrosion. I like doing this Friday music thing because in researching it, some weeks I'm forced to look for the strands of gold thread.

Now, apropos of nothing - maybe not nothing, maybe this week I'm just missing some people who used to be in my life but who have left this world's cares behind - here's a little Warren Zevon.





Afterword: If you were curious but didn't follow the link to the Mozart, here's Rondo Alla Turca. You deserve this after reading through all that.