Because it is June, and because I make up the rules around here, I’ve decided that this will be a week of older pictures. Most of these are on my phone. Some of them have been in this space or elsewhere on the site or in some of the regular social media places before. So they might be old to you — and bless you for still visiting — or they might be brand new.
Enjoy.
This is perhaps my favorite little bridge to ride my bicycle over. I’ve been fortunate to pedal over great big overpasses that cross state lines over brackish waterways and across little bumpy things that just get cars over glorified streams. But this one, all ancient and rickety from the looks of things, carries you over a railroad track.
It is surprisingly sturdy, I’ve watched cars and trucks go over it, but the first time I found it, on the backside of town and the backside of everything I normally ride, I went back and forth over it three times, just to listen to the sounds my bike made on it.
The Yankee had another race at at beautiful Blalock Lakes in scenic Newnan, Ga. this morning. Here’s a panorama of the swimming start. Click to embiggen in a new tab:
I think it is evocative of some 1970s sentiment, what with the faded into chemical oblivion effect the early morning sun offered, and this translucent guy who decided to pop up right in the middle of the shot, only to disappear again. I bet if we look really hard we can see what he’s thinking.
Speaking of early morning, Jimi Hendrix’s Watchtower before 7 a.m., there should be a rule one way or the other on that. As in, every morning or in never in a morning. Not sure which.
Anyway, The Yankee is on the right side of this picture, waiting on the start command:
From a different perspective, atop the levee, you can see the last heat, the red caps, waiting to begin their race. Some of the green caps, the second wave, are already returning from their 600-meter swim.
One of these red caps doesn’t know it yet, but he’s about to be hurting. He made it about 570 meters went suddenly hypoxic and they had to fish him out of the water. He scared us all for a while. They put him in an ambulance and had to talk him down like he’d had too many drinks. He wanted to finish the race, but there was just no way. His poor wife was understandably terrified. They took him off to the hospital. The race organizer, at the end of the day, told me he was doing well. They were giving him more tests. It was nice to see, though, how well they took care of that guy.
Hey, what were you doing as a 12-year-old? I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t racing triathlons:
Here comes The Yankee, back from her 14-mile, hilly ride:
One day I’ll get a good picture of her on the bike. But she’ll have to ride more. She’s been off for a week because of, first, a bike repair and, then, an illness. Despite all of that she still won a medal, placing third overall:
Yesterday we pedaled the loop around town. I was riding behind The Yankee and watching her work down into the drops as she got into a hill. I pass her on the climbs, trying my hardest to make it look nonchalant when really my lungs are falling out of my feet. She usually catches me later and all will be grand.
Until, about halfway through, her front derailleur failed. I was caught by a red light and she wasn’t behind me. So I waited through the cycle and still no bicycle. Another turn of the lights and finally she topped the hill. She’d been in her worst gearset for two hills because a rivet popped out and forced her into the wrong chainring. We tinkered with it under a brilliant sky and earnest sun and finally pedaled the rest of the way slowly. As in, this is easy and I have good legs and could take on the world, slowly. I topped one of the larger hills in my biggest gear at this pace and didn’t even feel it. Great legs!
So, today, with her bike in the shop and a cold coming on, she stayed inside and I decided to ride the loop again. If I did it comfortably and easily yesterday, I figured, this will be great to do it at pace.
Only it didn’t work that way. It was warm. My legs weren’t good. I hadn’t eaten enough. I was a bit tired. And my mind was busy making excuses for what was going on. I found some shade at a vacant grocery store:
It is funny, but I’ve noticed that the days that feel the worst — I could complain about the heat and how I feel and all that — allow me to look at the computer and find a new personal best for that route.
Even progress is humbling.
Also, I need to get back into the long rides. The ones I really want to do, the ones in my Map My Ride account are a lot longer than around town. I mapped out a route that would let me hit Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, three states in an afternoon. I just found another one for the Silver Comet and Chief Ladiga trails, which cover Georgia and Alabama and is the longest paved trail in the country. Somewhere out there is the big one, the state tour. Sitting in the shade of a dead Kroger isn’t going to make any of those happen.
So I did a few more miles and marveled at the heat and the various ways I feel on the bicycle right now.
Yesterday we went to James Brothers and Danny asked how my recovery was going. Right after I crashed they were all very concerned, which is nice. The answer, though, depends on when you ask. At that moment I felt great. As I write this … well, I’ve felt better. Nothing a 400-mile week wouldn’t cure, I’m sure.
But these things are what they are. He’s bouncing back from some difficulties that have hampered his training. We talked of triathlons and marathons and various things. I’m hanging out with people who say things like “I can run 10 miles, but I can’t run 12 because … ” and wonder what I’m doing in that conversation.
So naturally tonight we had a healthy dinner and I treated myself to the foam roller. Later I had ice cream.
There’s not a lot to this, because today was today. Tomorrow will be full of errands, however, and so that’ll be something to write about. Just you wait and see.
One of the more knowledgable people in our section — as opposed to the guy last night that called every ground ball a “can of corn” and his date who thought the umpires should reverse their hand signals for out and safe — said this evening that whomever scored a run would win. And he was right.
Game two of the last series of the season was a fine one. Auburn put Mike O’Neal on the mound. Check out this delivery:
Have you ever seen a pitcher get that low to the ground with an overhand delivery? I’ve seen submariners with scrapped up knuckles, but this is a different thing. That’s long been O’Neal’s style, though, and I’m sure that’s what stymied Florida through nine innings last weekend in the most heart-breaking loss of the season.
But O’Neal shook it off, took the ball and delivered again. Seriously, though, the guy is down if he played college football:
O’Neal allowed four hits and one run through seven innings and 100 pitches. The junior has had some hard luck lately, with a record now sitting at 8-4, but he’s got a great command of the mound.
Tonight he just happened to be facing the guy who is perhaps a first-round pitcher:
Seriously, between Arkansas’ Ryne Stanek and two LSU pitchers, we’ve watched a major league pitching corps this year. Stanek scattered six hits and four walks in seven and two-thirds innings and was never not in control of the game. Just a rock steady performance as Arkansas defeated Auburn 1-0. The guy in our section was right.
Here are the highlights, including a 98 mile per hour fastball from Stanek. He was throwing into the mid-90s in the sixth inning:
Auburn did, by virtue of other teams’ play, manage to secure their 10th seed in next week’s SEC baseball tournament. Now they have to go out and beat Arkansas tomorrow to end the season on a high note.
Things to read and watch: This video is described as “A crowd-funded video trailer boosting America’s future in space” which is in the trailer package of the new Star Trek movie. It was shot in Huntsville, which is reason enough to watch it I guess. I share it because it looks pretty awesome, and someone booked Optimus Prime to do the v/o.
In 1910 the USS Birmingham was the first warship to launch an airplane, which would be cool enough to say since the ship was named for Birmingham. Today the navy is launching and landing UAVs via aircraft carrier.
Murder rates? Early data suggests way down. How far down? Century-record lows. There’s an interesting hypothesis:
Analytically speaking, murder is an especially interesting crime because we have pretty good homicide statistics going all the way back to 1900. Most other crimes have only been tracked since about 1960. And if you look at the murder rate in the chart below (the red line), you see that it follows an odd double-hump pattern: rising in the first third of the century, reaching a peak around 1930; then declining until about 1960; then rising again, reaching a second peak around 1990. It’s been dropping ever since then.
This is the exact same pattern we see in lead ingestion among small children, offset by 21 years (the black line). Lead exposure rises in the late 1800s, during the heyday of lead paint, reaching a peak around 1910; then declines through World War II; and then begins rising again during our postwar love affair with big cars that burned high-octane leaded gasoline. Lead finally enters its final decline in the mid-70s when we begin the switch to unleaded gasoline.
This is powerful evidence in favor of the theory that lead exposure in childhood produces higher rates of violent crime in adulthood.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. …
If you’ve been glossing over the IRS hearings, that’s a good place to start.
Meanwhile, also in Washington, D.C. …
My second-favorite part of that Eric Holder press conference, after when he ignored a reporter’s question of about if the attorney general can see how the media “would find this troubling” was that claim about national security. That, with the actual timeline in place, stood up to scrutiny for several full minutes:
(I)t seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn’t add up. If that’s the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were “no longer an issue?”
All of this took about six seconds to become political. There was probably never a time when we seized on things purely in the pursuit of good governance, but I wish that time were now.
Finally, I’ve probably talked about helmets and bicycle crashes enough here in the past year. The farther removed from all of the events of last summer the more convinced I am about how lucky I was, head trauma-wise, and how bad that hospital was, head trauma-wise. (Here’s my helmet after the crash. The sum total of my head exam was telling a triage nurse I was cognitively fine. That’s it. Frightening. I have some generally spotty recollections of things between the trauma and the surgery and the recovery. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to hear about things I don’t remember, or read things I have no recollection of writing after the fact. And my old helmet, by definition, more or less completely did its job.) Anyway, this is one more story worth reading, and probably Bicycling’s best piece in some time:
If you crash and hit your head, there are two types of impacts. One is known as linear acceleration. That’s the impact of skull meeting pavement. Today’s helmets do an excellent job of preventing catastrophic injury and death by attenuating that blow.
The second type is known as rotational acceleration. This is where things get tricky. Even if the skull isn’t damaged, it still stops short. That causes the brain to rotate—the technical term is inertial spin—which creates shear strain. Imagine a plate of fruit gelatin being jarred so hard that little cuts open throughout the jiggly mass. That strain can damage the axons that carry information between neurons.
There are other factors involved, but research has consistently pointed to rotational acceleration as the biggest single factor in a concussion’s severity. The CPSC helmet benchmark is based solely on linear acceleration. There’s never been a standards test, required or voluntary, for rotational acceleration.
[…]
A report last year by the International Olympic Committee World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport summed up the state of the art in a sentence: “Little has changed in helmet-safety design during the past 30 years.”
[…]
There may never be an improved government standard for bicycle helmets. Experts may never come to a consensus on a standard for testing the forces most closely associated with concussions. But one test can be administered now: the market test. After all, new technology costs more. “Adding that upcharge to a $50 helmet,” Scott Sports designer John Thompson told me, “is a harder sell.”
This is the bike-helmet industry’s air-bag moment. The new rotation-dampening systems may not be perfect, but they are the biggest step forward in decades. The choices cyclists make with their money matter. You can pretend to protect your brain, or you can spend more money and get closer to actually doing it.
The science isn’t settled by a longshot, the industry is filled with legal frights and there are all kind of marketing concerns. But there’s also plenty to consider in that full piece, which is worth a cyclist’s time.
Sunny. No shade. And 84 degrees in the prime of the day. Spring has arrived. I went for a ride in it.
And this is the wall I hid behind about three-quarters of the way through my ride. A banana, a bit of water, a deep breath.
My bike is dirty.
It was good to get outside. I spent time today grading and coordinating student-journalists who were covering the second student death in the last two weeks.
You hate that all of this happened — another young person taken far too soon — but at the same time I can’t help but be proud of my particular students. They did a fine job in challenging circumstances. This time our paper is on hiatus for the summer, our new editor is still building his new staff and the students had just started taking finals.
Samford student Caroline Neisler died this morning. The university held a memorial service this evening. Our student-reporters got a couple of quotes, some art and wrote a story, all within a few hours, and under finals pressure.
I didn’t know Caroline, but having read the things her friends are writing about her she seemed like a fine young lady:
