I felt six percent better today. And, because of that, and because I hadn’t been on my bike in 17 days, I decided to go for a little spin.
Two short Zwift routes in Scotland, though I should have stopped at one. Something happened on the second route, which featured a moderate climb near the end. Already my heart rate was elevated, of course, because I was exercising. But there I was, trying to make sure some other person didn’t get around me on the hill, so I’m pushing through some not-insubstantial watts (for me) and I felt my heart rate jump in a noticeable, unusual way.
I was going to do another route, but suddenly I decided to listen to my body, finely tuned athletic mechanism that it is. Mostly because my legs did not want to do any more. I dismounted the bike, cleaned it up a bit, and went to sit on a stepping stool, nursing a sudden headache. Took some Ibuprofen, had a shower, had dinner and started feeling better.
Throwing 700-plus watts while you’re fighting off my first cold since 2019 might have been a bit ambitious, in retrospect. I’ll wait a few more days before trying again.
The good news is I am now taking fewer medicines. And the coughing is progressing nicely, thank you very much.
When I mentioned, last Thursday, that this site recently marked its 5 millionth visitor I coolly said I have no idea why people visit. Only I do know why.
You’re here for the cats.
Phoebe, as ever, is here for the sunshine.
This is my second favorite in-house joke right now. I say to my wife, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed ottoman. On that ottoman, there is a pillow. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”
Perhaps an even better joke is this one. I say to my lovely bride, I say, “On the floor of our house is a medium-grade residential carpet pad. On that carpet pad is stretched a standard 21st century carpet. On that carpet, there is an overstuffed sofa. On that sofa, there is a fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that fuzzy throw blanket, there is another fuzzy throw blanket. On top of that second fuzzy blanket, there is a third fuzzy blanket. And that is where your cat is sleeping.”
Occasionally, Poseidon also looks for the people inside the television.
They’ve gotta be in there somewhere …
This was the Day of Three Presentations. It was a day full of presentations. Many presentations were given, some of them better than others. One was maybe great! That’s the thing about having a lot of things: there will be variance.
I’ll spend all night staring at a wall thinking about every flinch and stumble. Every tone and tenor, time I squinted or had vague eye contact.
But none of that is important. What’s important is what is coming up at the bottom of this post.
Yesterday afternoon’s bike ride featured some dinosaurs. How many giant reptiles do you see in this graphic? I count six.
After that ride, we went outside. This is The Yankee’s first bike ride since her massive crash last September. Look at that smile!
Part of this is physical, sure. The bone is now starting to heal. (Turns out, she busted herself up so badly it has taken this long for the mending to begin.) Part of it is about getting out of your own way. This is perfectly understandable and reasonable. I was in a similar boat in 2012, when it took me five months to even want to ride again.
So we went out for six miles on quiet, empty roads. Whenever a car came along I put myself between the two of them, and we smiled some. It was cheery and emotional. It was a little more normal.
cycling / Friday / journalism / links — Comments Off on A note to self about coasting, and other things 3 Mar 23
I’ve been mulling over creating a syllabus for a trauma interview course. The idea starts with understanding that not all interviews are the same. Some of them require a more delicate care than others. Some would benefit from having some purposeful training.
The idea, for me, started several years ago. I read a profile, which I can’t re-locate, about a reporter in New York renowned as the guy that interviews people immediately after they’ve just found out a loved one has been killed. (What a thing to be noted for, huh?) He talked about his process — the respect involved, the solemn decorum, even the way he dressed for it. It was a thoughtful thing, and it’s worth expanding on.
I remember discussing this in a reporting class during undergrad. I think we did about 20 minutes on the concept. It was essentially, some people want to talk. Some people will not be prepared to talk. Some people will think you a ghoul. Accept whichever response you get, and don’t take it too personally.
It was, I guess, a different time. I think we can do better. Perhaps some people, in some classes, do. But I would argue it needs to be more than a simple unit.
Trauma is a response to anything that’s overwhelming, that happens too much, too fast, too soon, or too long — coupled with a lack of protection or support. It lives in the body, stored as sensation: pain, or tension — or lack of sensation, like numbness.
That’s from a 2020 interview, but I ran across it again the other day, and an entire lecture or conversation — a conver-lecture — sprang to mind fully formed.
The back-of-the-envelope notes suggest there’s a mini-term class here, easy. I am sure, the more I dive into it, there’s a full semester in the idea. Perhaps there is more. You don’t know until you really get into it. And I’ll get into it after Spring Break.
I, of course, think of this in a journalism context, but there are institutional approaches here, as well. And, furthermore, there are other elements to this, most critically, the second-hand trauma that impacts journalists from time-to-time. This was never discussed in any class I took, or any newsroom I worked in. There’s no newsroom I can think of why that shouldn’t be approached. There’s no reason why I can think of that isn’t taught, considered, and re-visited.
So I’m speaking it into existence, as it were.
Rode my bike this evening. It goes like this: following all that climbing last weekend, there were rest days — brought on by necessity and scheduling — on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then a brief ride yesterday. It felt rough. Tonight’s ride was faster, but maybe felt worse.
That avatar in front of me was fun. We paced one another for 10-plus miles. This was my first time ever on this particular route (though some of the roads on this one are on other Zwift routes) and I could tell from the HUD that this was his second lap, at least for the day. He knew the course, which is important.
We took turns pulling, which is the polite thing to do. Everybody gets a little draft and conserves a tiny bit of energy that way. Somewhere along the way he got tired of that and attacked. I let him go, but pulled him back a short time later. Then I started toying with him. For the next two or three times I pulled through I stopped pedaling for just a moment. It’s a question of touch and timing, but you can pass the other person when your avatar’s feet aren’t moving. It’s a funny joke, to me anyway. Look at me! not trying! Now I’ll pedal some more …
So we kept taking turns. Him in front, me drifting by him, then taking a quarter-mile pull or so, then him in front again. I like to think that my little joke aggravated him, and then made him grin with grim determination.
On that route there’s a little climb over the last mile and he was waiting for it. Just after the bottom of the hill that guy exploooooded. He was gone, suddenly 30 seconds ahead of me, and then a minute. I got about half of it back, but he buried me something good.
I learned this: I should coast less — or is it more? And, hey, it’s the weekend …
2023 Zwift route tracker: 78 routes down, 46 to go.
cycling / site / Thursday — Comments Off on ‘It may be a commodity to me, but something else to you’ 2 Mar 23
No one wants to read other people’s dreams. But, here’s the thing, I seldom remember any dreams I have. They may as well not even take place. And when I do remember them, or are aware of them, they only rattle around in my brain for just a minute or two.
Sometimes you try to hang onto them, pull more strands together, tie in details and tidbits to make a more coherent whole. Then the mental quicksand kicks in. The more you pull, the salient points move farther apart. And what was context when your eyes were first trying to focus is just a yellowish blur later in the day.
Or is that just me?
I woke up this morning from a dream where my grandmother was correcting me on the finer points of commodities and commodification. She was using bolts of cloth as her widget. She was explaining the error in something I’d said.
She was a rural homemaker, my grandmother, a textile worker. She quoted a first century Syrian poet in her high school yearbook. That’s one of those things I only learned about her later in her life and, now, I wish I had asked her more about it.
She was attuned to world events, always read the paper, watched the news twice a day. My grandmother watched the A-block on one channel and the B-block on another. I talk to students about broad consumption and critical media analysis, and that’s basically what my grandmother did. She knew which station was best at this and that, and she found a system that worked for her, out there on the gravel road. She knew some stuff.
As for the dream, I don’t know how old or educated (I only have a minor in economics) I was, but I spent a few moments looking through some research this morning to see how accurate our “chat” was.
Turns out — having glanced at some of the sociological anthropological work of Peter Ekeh, Bruce Kapferer and Igor Kopytoff — that, in the dream, my grandmother was perhaps trying to make a point about the commoditization of goods.
The title of this post is basically what she told me in the dream. It’s a pretty incredible paraphrase of Kopytoff who, to my recollection, I haven’t read before.
Also, it appears that she was right, and dream-me was mistaken.
What a real delight some dreams can be.
What a delight!
Regretfully, I forgot to do this yesterday, but here’s the updated cycling chart through February. I know you felt like something was missing here, too. But, after thinking about it most of the evening, did you realize, when you were setting out your things for the next day, that what was missing was an obscenely oversized graphic?
This is what happens when you set up site rules for photographs, so you can deliver nice images in a consistent style, but didn’t think you might one day run a simple Excel chart as filler, too.
Anyway, that purple line is where I am on the year in terms of mileage. It’s humble, to be sure. Nevertheless it’s a high, steady pace for me. And I added to it a little this morning. I woke up early, within that amount of time that going back to sleep and getting anything out of it seemed futile.
Eleven miles doesn’t seem like anything, but I figured I could ride a half hour this morning, or try to ride this evening.
I decided to do both, but one of the cats decided I needed to provide pets, instead. Good thing I got up this morning, then.
Speaking of stats, I haven’t looked at the site data in a bit. Last month I had my 5 millionth visitor.
Five million! That seems like a lot for a humble personal site.
I don’t know why you all come here. I know it isn’t for the occasional dream or the too-frequent talk of my bike rides, but thank you for the visits. (It’s the cats. I know. They know it, too. More from them on Monday.)
Happy Monday. And to make your Monday just a bit more tolerable, we’ll begin with the site’s most popular weekly feature, the weekly check in with the kitties. This weekend they have been quite the cuddle cats. That could be because the heater was, for some reason, turned off on Friday and it was midday Saturday, when it never got warm inside, before I noticed.
They’re also loving and needy little things, that’s a part of it, too. Last night, I wasn’t sure if they would let me go to sleep, for all of their “Pet me. Pet me. PETME,” demands.
In our house, there is a mid-grade residential carpet pad. And on that carpet pad sits a nice, low shag carpet. And on that carpet there’s a throw pillow. And on that pillow there’s a folded pair of jeans.
And that’s where Phoebe is choosing to nap.
What I love about this picture is that it demonstrates Poseidon’s ability to anticipate, and his understanding of the sun’s direction of travel. He’s not half in the shade, he’s waiting for the sun to come around.
That’s a smart cat move.
This was the weekend of going uphill. That’s not a metaphor. I was actually going uphill. Virtually uphill, anyway. It’s a silly thing, but there was a series on Zwift this weekend, a three stage showdown of some of the more demanding climbing routes. And since I am trying to ride all of the routes anyway, I figured, why not?
Friday evening I rode the first of the three stages, climbing 2,500 feet. Knowing what was to come, I was determined to take it easy on Friday. And I was largely successful with that, but I felt too good late and so I pushed a bit on that last climb. I have no idea how to preserve my energy over time. Most people don’t, I think, so that’s OK. I set two Strava PRs on Friday, celebrated by putting on the compression boots and got ready for Saturday.
Saturday, there was the Alpe du Zwift, the game’s (apparently realistic) take on the legendary Alpe d’Huez. This stage was harder, and it has 3,900 feet of climbing. I decided I was going to pace myself up that beyond category climb because Sunday’s route was even more demanding. So on the alpe I set seven Strava PRs, including taking more than seven minutes off my best time up the climb.
I’m no climber. Really, I’m not, but the progress is progressive. But my avatar looks great descending!
At least the switchbacks on the alpe actually provide a little relief on the ascent. No such help on Sunday, on the hardest route of the weekend, punctuated by a slow climb up the vaunted Ventoux.
Ventoux or d’Huez, which is harder? They’re both a big challenge. Ventoux has a bit more of a gradient, and it’s almost continual. Eight percent is the norm, and there’s a lot of 11 and 12 percent, and there’s no accelerating up that. Plus, leg fatigue is, of course, cumulative. The only thing Ventoux has going for it on this particular route was that the finish line came about two miles before the summit. Even abbreviated, the route had 3,953 of ascent, and Strava considers it another beyond category climb. I was pleased with the earlier finish, though. Long before that, I was hoping to just finish well.
It started out great. If you look to the right of this graphic, you can see where I am in the field. For a brief, brilliant, shining moment, I was at the front of the field, pushing on at 30 miles per hour.
When the climbing started, I fell away pretty quickly. I am not a climber.
But I was happy to finish in the top 50.
I was happy to finish 50th.
I was happy to finish.
After finishing all three stages of Rapha Rising, I believe 249th overall, I had another 10,400 feet of elevation gain in my legs over the last three days. (That’s a lot for me!) I earned a day off. My Zwift avatar earned some Rapha kit. The only time I will ever afford Rapha is when it’s free.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 76 routes down, 48 to go.
This is where I stopped reading last night. Willie Morris has spent four pages talking about riding around Texas with W. Lee O’Daniel. He’d been the governor of Texas from 1939 to 1941, running and governing in the all-too-familiar populist demagog style. He went to the U.S. Senate, beating LBJ in a special election, for the rest of the 1940s. Then he returned to private life, running a ranch in Fort Worth, and making money in real estate and insurance in Dallas. In the second half of the 1950s, he ran for governor again.
It’s a poignant, bittersweet thing, Morris’ detailing of three days canvassing Texas in an air conditioned Cadillac. O’Daniel was aging, and he knew it. Morris saw him as an old man “trying to retrieve the past.” His constituency was aging, and he knew that too. Or they were dying off, and he could see it, in the dusty, small towns he visited. Not that he was the same draw as he’d been as a famous radio host back in ’38, but also, the makeup of the state had changed underfoot. Not because of him or in spite of him, just around him, a colorful character with much of the color washed away by time.
I say this every time I return to his work, but I love the way Morris writes.
