my weekend's trophy (the michaux mash)

I've written about it elsewhere (and other elsewheres), but in order to archive the (now over-told) story I'm posting it here as well.

If you read all three blogs...well, I guess you're just that awesome.

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A snapshot view of the trophy I took home this weekend:


This picture was taken after I got all cleaned up, obviously. Immediately after the injury it was much more exciting. My eye socket was completely filled with blood, I had sweet blood streaks down my cheek, and I've still dark red splatter spots sprinkled on my top and down tubes. My DNA is everywhere.

The story: Went to play on Saturday in Zach's Michaux Mash--a four-hour mountain bike race on a nine-mile loop of Michaux's worst (that's not true--there is much, much worse). For those that don't know, endurance mountain bike events are often timed. Riders try to run as many laps as possible within the time limit. The rider with the most laps wins. Or the rider that finishes the most laps in the least amount of time wins.

My accident occurred after I went over the bars in a particularly rough section of trail just 30 minutes in. Scraped up helmet, broken sunglasses, slightly dented top tube, and a cut on the forehead. I immediately began bleeding everywhere. I had to take a few minutes to stop the bleeding and assess how bad I was hurt. After five or six minutes the cut stopped bleeding, I felt ok--if maybe just a little deflated--so I figured I'd soldier on. I rode another 3 1/2 hours and finished (I think) 10th in the under 40.

The gash above my eye was cool and all, but through the course of the ride I also rubbed the tip off my left nipple. (Sorry, no photo.) Frankly, that hurt a lot more. Couldn't hardly shower afterward, the pain of water spraying on my chest just a little more than I could bear.

I love bike racing.

what a day...

...in terms of the weather. Wow.

If I were a student, I'd spend the entire day outside playing volleyball, guzzling ice-cold Cokes, and napping under trees. Repeat. Repeat again.

One of the biggest disappointments about growing up is that my peers just don't like to play as much as they used to. When you're ten, the kid who doesn't want to come over for a game of backyard football is the odd ball. When you're 35, the guy who does want to is the odd ball.

Growing old sucks...if only because you have to spend so much time with other old people. Stay young, my friends. There's devilry in maturity.

from an interview with neo-pro Peter Stetina

VN: Everything is ahead of your now – what’s been the biggest surprise so far?

PS: The descents. The other day in training, I was just surfing this descent, leaning into the curves, just cruising along. Christian (Vande Velde) just comes blowing by me like a cannonball. I hopped on his wheel and I was half-chattering my wheel around some corners and was gritting my teeth to get down it.

At the bottom, I said, “dude, you flew down that thing!”

He said, “no man, I am not a good descender. I am one of the bad ones in the Tour.”

I said, whoa, I am screwed! It’s the downhills. I just have to get so good in the climbing that I don’t have to worry about the downhills (laughs). I thought I was pretty good on the descents. I hear stories, that Cancellara is unbelievable. Hopefully, I will get to witness that. You have to put that fear out of your mind, get on their wheel and maybe you will learn something.

From VeloNews. Read the whole interview here.

For me, I let my mind wander to the what-ifs. What if I break a spoke? What if I puncture? What if my tire comes unglued? What if a car, coming up, is passing around a corner?

"You have to put that fear out of your mind..." Yup.

a comment or two on health care (I can't resist)

Perhaps you, like me, have been hearing for the past several weeks (months?) the loudest Republican talking-point--American's don't want Obamacare; how can Democrats pass a law that the majority of Americans don't want--and wondering what data there is to support that claim.

There are a lot of polls--a lot of polls--but I came across some data from certainly one of the most respected polling outlets, and thought I'd share.

Here's the numbers. First, prior to last weekend's vote:

Ok, certainly more would advise their congressman to vote against the bill. However, one notices two things, (1) it's not a majority and (2) amongst those that would advise against there are no doubt a good many that didn't think what was on the table (something like what was signed into law a few days ago) didn't go far enough, they want something more comprehensive, perhaps something more like universal health care, or a system that doesn't rely on the private sector to control the means of providing health insurance to all but those who qualify for Medicare or Medicaid. Those folks would also advise their congressman to vote against the bill. Without that teased out, it's impossible to know how many actually oppose a progressive health care reform bill, but it's safe to say, based on this poll, that it's something below 48 percent of Americans. Probably way below.

So, it would seem, the Republican claim that most Americans don't want Obamacare seems to have been just plain wrong, at least prior to the vote.

But how do Americans feel about change now that a bill has been passed?

Perhaps a more telling story.

Split by party affiliation, for sure, but among the totality of adults, the 49 percent thinking it's a good thing is an awful lot more than the 40 percent thinking its a bad thing.

And then there's this...

...which is, I think, a little more difficult to interpret. Forty percent of adults are "enthusiastic" or "pleased" with the bill. Forty-two percent "disappointed" or "angry."

At first blush it would appear that American's aren't overwhelmingly excited about the bill. And that's a reasonable conclusion. However, it's harder to conclude why they aren't excited.

For instance, I'm pleased that something finally made it through, and I think where we will be once everything shakes out is better than where we are right now, but I can't help but be disappointed too. Disappointed that a large majority of Americans don't think universal health care, or something close to it, a just and obvious good. That's exceptionally disappointing. I'm also disappointed it took so long. And I'm disappointed that it's caused such anger and partisan division. Frankly, I can hardly believe it's such a hot-button issue. I'm also disappointed with the limitations of the bill. As with Dennis Kucinich and others, I don't think the current bill goes near far enough. It may be that the current bill will serve as a stepping stone to more sweeping, more paradigmatic change in the American health care system sometime in the future, but it may also be that the initiative is lost, inertia towards change evaporated. Time will tell, of course, but I fear the later. So, in that sense I'm also disappointed.

...

Broke a chain today. On the mtb. Riding up the steep stuff. Snap! I wasn't even shifting.

It actually broke in two places, which is weird. Oh well...

tomorrow's ride

The ride tomorrow:

Looks like a group of four committed so far. Everyone is welcome.

Around 70 miles. Four significant climbs. Meet at the goat farm at 9:00 am, Saturday. (Email me if you need directions.)

rain

I rode in the rain yesterday. I hadn't done that for a while.

When I woke up, and noticed the soggy weather, I wasn't going to. But later, thinking things had cleared up, I headed out on the TT bike for a quick hour's workout. It started raining. Hard.

But there's a special pleasure to riding in the rain that I'm only reminded of when I'm actually doing it. Like most cyclists, I think, I'll go well out of my way to avoid it. But why? You put on an extra layer, just deal with being wet, and it's really not that big a thing. (So long as it's not too cold...and you're not out too long.)

I think it worthwhile to re-post this passage from The Rider*:


In 1919, Brussels-Amiens was won by a rider who rode the last forty kilometers with a flat tire. Talk about suffering! He arrived at 11:30 at night, with a ninety-minute lead on the only other two riders who finished the race. That day had been like night, trees had whipped back and forth, farmers were blown back into their barns, there were hailstones, bomb craters from the war, crossroads where the gendarmes had run away and riders had to climb onto one another's shoulders to wipe clean the muddied road signs.

Oh, to have been a rider then. Because after the finish all the suffering turns to memories of pleasure, and the greater the suffering, the greater the pleasure. That is Nature's payback to riders for the homage they pay her by suffering. Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride. 'Good for you.' Instead of expressing their gratitude for the rain by getting wet, people walk around with umbrellas. Nature is an old lady with few suitors these days, and those who wish to make use of her charms she rewards passionately.

That's why there are riders.

Suffering you need: literature is baloney.


Woolly mice indeed!

Speaking of suffering, there hasn't been near enough in my riding lately. Probably Iron Cross is the last of something approaching anything worthy of that moniker. I've been considering the six-hour at French Creek, though. Saturday, May 8. If it turns out anything like the last six-hour I did, that should cure me of the want for suffering for a while. Plus Audrey turns 12 the day before. I'll need a good long hard ride to come to terms with that reality. Hopefully it rains.


* I read this a little over a year ago and still think about it all the time. A short book. Brilliantly written. I can't believe it took me so long to discover it. I can't believe no one told me about. Every cyclist should read it. It should come with your first bicycle, or when you buy your first racing license. It's prose should be quoted naturally and without effort on every weekend group ride the world over. It's that important. And besides The Yellow Jersey, the only meaningful cycling-related fiction of which I'm aware.

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I listed two items on eBay last week. I think of myself as a veteran eBayer, but this is the first time I've listed anything for sale. The first auction ended last night. I got more than I hoped (for a lightly used SRAM Force front derailleur). The second ends tomorrow (for a lightly used SRAM Red PowerDome cassette, 11-23). Let's hope I get the same result.

I've lots of other stuff to list:

-- A pair of SRAM Force brake calipers.
-- A set of SRAM TT bar-end shifters.
-- A set of TT brake levers. (Though I can't decide if I want to keep the old, scared, perfectly functional aluminum numbers I'm currently using, or the fancy-pants SRAM carbon numbers I picked up together with a bundle of other stuff I bought a while ago. I clearly don't need both.)
-- A new, completely unused Specialized S-Works crankset, 170mm crankarms, compact gearing (50-34T) with BB30 bearing cups. (I don't even want to explain how I came to own this.)
-- A one year-old, red, 3T Funda fork (this is the fork that comes on all the Cervelos) with its steerer tube cut short--it would fit a 48 or 51 cm Cervelo, or any other smaller frame that takes a 1 1/8" steerer. (This is a nice fork. Strong, light, super aero. They retail for almost $400.)
-- And then I have a really nice frame to sell too. But I don't want to advertise that just yet.

Wow. Written out like that it seems like a lot of shmiz. I've become a regular broker. How did that happen?

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Raced on Saturday. The Philly Phlyer. As I wrote last year, I love that course. Well suited for my strengths. Great weather (70s) and a really large field (maybe 70-80 riders).

This year, at the end of the third lap, there was a small group (2-3?) off the front and a small, three-rider chase group ten seconds or so in front of the pack. On the lap-finishing hill I bridged to the chase group, tried to motivate them, but by the time we made it back to River Drive we were altogether again, except for the two or three riders still off the front.

Fast forward to the end of the fourth and final lap. I dumped out all that I had on the incline prior to the round-a-bout and finishing straight, but four riders pulled around me just before the turn, and another few made it around me in the sprint. I finished ninth.

I knew my chances at a top five finish were dependent on making it to the round-a-bout first. I just didn't have quite enough.

1983

A TV commercial. I can't even remember the product. A phone, maybe? Anyway...there's a TV anchorman sitting at his table, with an open phone. He says something like this...

This just in on Twitter and Facebook. A local bachelor, aged forty-one, has just enrolled in karate.

...or something like that.

So funny. Because, one, Twitter is lame. Two, knowing that Twitter is lame I still have an account. (Don't we all?) Three, the sort of narcissistic self-focused non-messages that dominate Twitter are no different than the narcissistic self-focused non-updates on Facebook and, for that matter, this and a bazillion other personal blogs.

So it's making fun of the thing it's advertising--the means of publishing and reading inane, unimportant, personal goings-on. It's sort of how I feel about professional football. Can't find anything worthy, moral, uplifting, or otherwise praiseworthy in it. At all. Yet I can't stop watching it.

And so in that spirit I offer the following:

I was just at my favorite Shippensburg eatery enjoying a Belgian waffle and homefries. On the radio, an 80s set which included Styx's "Mr. Robato" and Bananarama's "Cruel Summer."

I'll admit, I did a little swaying in my seat to "Cruel Summer."

It was a delightful meal.

nyc

Back from a long conference weekend in NYC. A few thoughts from my fourth trip trekking around the city.

(1) Why are all the advertisements with stock art on the subways of white men and women of northern European descent when only a small percentage of the folks riding the subway are white men and women of northern European descent?

(2) To walk around in south Central Park you need either (a) a baby in a stroller, (b) a dog, on or off a leash, preferably with some cutesy collar or something or other (you can tell the schleps are just waiting for you to stop and complement their canine--dumb), or (c) to be holding someone's hand. To hang out in north Central Park you have to be running. And if you're running around the reservoir, watch out--it's like a stock car track for folks with runners on.

(3) Midtown smells bad and I don't like it there. Times Square is just creepy. The Upper East Side, however, is a place I could live.

(4) Finally, I'm struck by the contrast of the mega-diversity of the city with the utter lack of diversity just an hour west on I-78. Why don't all the folks melting in the pot of Gotham ooze out into the surrounding...wherever?

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Having to spend the weekend in NYC allowed for another shot at the Central Park early morning race. I love it. The city is just barely coming to life and we're throwing punches on the six-mile loop round the park. And the view is just fabulous. I love looking up over the trees and seeing the varied and excellent architecture of all the (I'm sure) high rent residences surrounding the park. Fun, fun.

The last time I raced the park (which was also the first time) was three years ago. On that day I pulled off a lap-long solo-break (chase) to finish fourth, a couple of minutes behind a three-man break and just seconds in front of the closing horde.

This time I wasn't so fortunate. Us non-sprinters have the race-long burden of trying to get something going. It takes a lot of energy. So the day was full of initiating and bridging to ill-fated breakaways. The best shot came with about two miles to go. A lone wolf blasted off the front. I bridged. He gave up. I stayed off the front until about 0.75 miles to go. But then I got swarmed. And then it was over.

But it was a good time.

I love racing bicycles.

ok go

So, am I the last to encounter this bit of awesomeness?



(Facebookers, yer gonna have to visit the blog to see the vid.)

And then there's this too (embedding disabled, for reasons that are not clear).

Wow.

Ok Go is cool.

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This might sound all elitist or hateful, but I promise that's not my intention. It's just that when your belly sags to your top tube, all your bragging about the "hard-core ripping" you do on your mountain bike just doesn't really work. I mean, I love that you love to ride. Nothing makes my heart sing like seeing people who most need a little exercise doing it, but come on, who do you think you're fooling? You're not beating my 11 year-old daughter to the end of the block, much less "ripping" the singletrack around here. Except down. (I'll give the benefit of the doubt when you're traveling the same direction as gravity's pulling.)

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Spring break training camp next week. Shippensburg style. I've four days of 3-5 hour rides planned. Who's in?

dissonance

Quite unexpectedly, I've found I have mixed feelings about the warming weather. On the one hand, warmer weather means a beginning of oh-so-much-goodness. On the other hand, warmer weather means that the sodas I put on my office window sill just don't get quite as cool as I'd like them.

Oh yeah, and we ran out of heating oil yesterday. I suppose that's an on-the-one-hand reason to rejoice in the changing weather.

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As a side note, no heating oil (the truck won't come for a couple of days) means heating the house with solar (unshaded windows), fireplace (that keeps one room warm, at least), and space heater. And I'm wearing a sweater today. I think it's kind of fun, frankly. (For a little while.)

a tangential thought

In response to my last post, Micah asks if intelligence doesn't come at the cost of happiness.

It's probably a worthwhile question, but I think maybe a distracting one.

One way of answering is to say that I believe the most human of activities is to create. That is, when engaging in creative activity I believe we are most living up to our human potential, fulfilling our "transcendent destiny," as Emerson might say. I don't think there's any question that with increased intelligence comes increased capacity for creative thought and, therefore, creative action. So I guess I'm saying that the more intelligent (can, not necessarily do) experience humanity more deeply. (I hope that's not a controversial thought. I don't think it should be.)

With more intelligence also comes more ability to understand the consequences of our choices. And, I think, with greater intelligence comes (though perhaps not naturally) the capacity for a greater understanding of others' lives, and therefore their difficulties, pain, and sorrow. With both comes increased capacity for frustration, disappointment, pain, etc.

So I think it's a bit of a red herring to focus on happiness. Is a dog happy? Maybe. But a dog's ability to create, make choices, and express empathy (though sometimes they are magically wonderful at the latter) is limited.

I guess what I'm saying here (skipping a few steps of the argument for brevity's sake) is that I think with greater intelligence comes the capacity for greater, more fulfilling, and especially more textured happiness, but also greater sorrow. And it's been my experience that you really can't know one without the other.

in defense of youth

Is there anything more tiresome and trite than the old decrying the young? Is there? Nothing presently comes to mind.

Get the Old Folks (I'm painting with a broad brush here, so if you're reading you probably just got wet) a'talking about the Young Folks and it won't be long before the tell tale sign of a sigh, a slight shake of the head, and then something like, "The young people of today, they just don't ____." It's always a negative comment. Things were always better. That previous generation, it was always more moral, mature, hard-working, attentive, courteous, respectful, or whatever other would-be positive trait comes to mind.

Guess what, Old Folks, when you were Young Folks, your Old Folks said the same of you, so damn your hypocritical egocentricism. Even Aristotle (I can't remember the passage, so I won't even try), in his day, decried what he saw as a slow generational decay.

The temptation to engage in generational bitchery is strong. I suffer from it myself. Exhibit One are the neighbor kids. Three of them. High school students. From two different families. The only time I see the one outside is when I hang at the bus stop with my daughter. The only time I've seen the other two, who apparently drive to school, is when they were harangued by their mother to help with the snow shoveling. They don't play outside. No throwing the rock around on the street. No garage/driveway fiddling with...whatever. They don't even *gasp* ride their bikes. (They may not even have bikes!)

In the face of that, the temptation to compare their behavior to mine at their age, and unfavorably, is strong. Very strong. But to do so would be foolish. Asinine. I'm not an old man, but I can already see that the world is theirs, not mine, despite the difference in our values. Hopefully I can remain just relevant enough for them to allow me a productive place.

It's the time I spend with the energetic young that's taught me the irrelevance of age, which is not to say that age is irrelevant, but that one grows irrelevant with age. And then there are the facts. James Flynn has shown, as have others, the increase in average general intelligence (g) over time. In fact, it appears that if we were to denormalize (unnormalize?) the results from decades of IQ testing that the Old Folks in the 1930s would score around 20 points lower than the Young Folks of today on an equivalent IQ test. That means that half our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents (the Young Folks of the 1930s) were borderline mentally retarded by today's standards. Wow.

The Flynn Effect is well documented and, for that matter, not really hot-off-the-presses news either. But it points to the deep absurdity (and, as it turns out, irony) of the Old Folks belittling the Young Folks and their ways. We are growing smarter. Why? Well, there are many possible explanations, but the most convincing to me is that the world is becoming an ever more complex place. There are more demands on our time, our professions are more intellectually demanding, and our senses are subject to farm more sophisticated stimuli through our varied and modern forms of A/V media and what have you. As such, we've had to become more proficient in abstract thought (as opposed to concrete thought), and that is the stuff of which intellegence is made (or at least what we measure when we measure intelligence).

An example from the Wikipedia entry. A kid today, when asked what a dog and a rabbit have in common, might answer that they are both mammals, an abstract representation of their relationship. A kid one hundred years ago might have answered that rabbits are caught with dogs, a concrete representation of their relationship.

So there's nothing biological, per se, or even evolutionary, in the sense of natural selection, to explain the difference. The Old Folks started with more or less the same raw gray matter as did the Young Folks, with a few allowances for advances in nutrition and general medical health. The difference, it would seem, is the world in which we live. Simply put, the Young Folks live in a world that makes smarter human beings than did the Old Folks. And that means it's a world they are uniquely equipped to navigate. Old Folks, you're on the Autobahn with a horse and buggy. Pray you don't get hit.

So eat it, gramps. The damn rascals loitering around the Sheets with the funny colored hair, the low-slung pants, who play video games all day and all night, and seem to have every damn piece of available flesh pierced...they are your superior in ways they aren't even aware. It is their world. They need you only to the extent to which you control resources they desire. Money. Power. Prestige.

And, as it turns out, those have been Old Folks' only weapons against the tide of modernity for millennia. Used, history shows us, with more or less effectiveness from one era to another.

mercy

Behold. A hard man:

the story

I mean, really. Is there a more hard-core sport than cycling? Misery, misery, misery, and then TRIUMPH! Oh... The glory of this sport. But it is not for the pansy-arsed faint of heart.

It's as Jon and I were discussing on our four hours riding through the occasionally snow-covered roads of rural Cumberland County in temperatures that never rose above the 20s, the only two to complete the long-publicized tree and farm race: Cycling requires physical toughness, sure. But it's the mental fortitude, the disposition to sacrifice and suffer that makes a dude (a gender neutral term) on a bike a cyclist.

What a sweet picture. Greipel, you're my new hero. Best of luck to you in the classics.

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And then there's the poor dude who just didn't quite have enough gas:


For Footon - Servetto's David Vitoria, however, the finish came 200m too late. The exhausted Swiss rider was swept up by the peloton at the foot of the steep finishing pitch after spending 195 kilometres off the front.

"It’s a pity, because the stage was extremely hard due to the weather, and I bonked in the last three or four kilometres," said Vitoria. "I knew that the final slope was really steep, but [I] got on it with no energy.

"I did what I could, and that's how cycling works: sometimes it makes you happy with less effort, and today, when I did so much work, I was given no prize.


Yup. I hear ya, dude. I hear ya.

snow day, cont.

To me, the photo in the last post was interesting--artsy and aesthetically poignant--and stood alone on its merits. But y'all apparently didn't like it. (Ok, only two people said something, but both comments were negative--Stephanie said it made her eyes hurt, Eric accused me of deception. Pshaw.) So, for those of you that prefer a crisp and pancake ugly view of reality, I provide the following (first series courtesy of Valerie, the later set courtesy of iPhone):


(Since I know someone will wonder, the girl in the first photo is not one of my kids, but I'd take her, if she were available. Speaking of my kids, however, I love that this sort of thing--packing up skis on back for a bike ride on roads of questionable condition--doesn't phase my girls in the least. Audrey saw me with my bike and asked me if I was going for a ride. I said yes. Marian saw me with skis and asked me if I was going skiing. I said yes. It wasn't until I had it all together that they figured it out. They looked on in polite interest. They found what I was doing unusual, but not in an unexpected way. In their world, this is what men do. If in nothing else, in this I have succeeded as a father.)

I was hopeful that I might locate a slope suitable for making a few turns, but I didn't. Well, I skinned up a few likely suspects, but the woods debris (e.g. stumps, fallen logs, underbrush) was too often just under the surface...I figured it'd be like winning the lottery if I came away without a broken leg, and I didn't want to press my luck. Especially skiing alone. So I didn't really get to make any turns at all.

All the same, it was a delightful afternoon. There is a magic serenity to the snow-covered woods that is unduplicated in all of nature--it gives me such saudades of the West. And when making fresh tracks, there's the undeniable reality that you are all alone. Very, very alone. Which, if you allow it, can be an immensely satisfying spiritual experience.

But then again, I wasn't really alone. There were critters about. I saw deer tracks, bunny tracks, and the furrowed tracks of two other animals that could have been fox (or bobcat) and coyote, but might have been something else about that size. So I wasn't really alone after all.

I look forward to another excursion after this next snowfall. I could live on a pair of skis.

snow day