Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Something New

Check out the new blog listed to the left: Velorution. Very Groovy!

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Missed by Just That Much

You may recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about being a weather junkie. Always on the lookout for the big storm, tracking the weather service reports of temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction and all the rest like a heroin junkie trying to track down a fix. The big winter storm came this last weekend and I almost missed it and it just missed me.

I almost missed it because, like is often the case with these things, the storm was a little tricky. The meteorologists first said we'd get some rain and the like and all the cold stuff would stay to our north. Interesting but not personally affecting to me. I had a couple of cycling sponsorship events to do and a little rain, especially since it looked to be coming in Sunday evening, didn't really change things much. Two things should have clued me in. The first was a little "hedging our bets" line in the Friday evening forecast about how this storm might develop a bit differently that the official forecast said. What that meant was that a couple of the computer models weren't quite giving the same answers as all the others and that the local meteorologist's intution was telling him that maybe those models were more correct than the national office was giving them credit for. The second thing was the glorious day we had on Saturday for the first L5Flyers/New Zealand Foods team ride. I mean, for there to be a day like that in January should have been a dead giveaway of serious atmospheric instability.

So Sunday, we head up to Gainesville for the GAP awards banquet with the rest of the "On Your Left" gang. It rains cats and dogs all the way up, all during the banquet, all during the post-banquet festivities at the Park's and all the way home. On the way up the temperature started to slide and I started to have a feeling that the bet had been hedged forecast-wise. So as we're hightailing it home, things are starting to deteriorate. We see a few cars inthe ditches and a lot of accident patrols out. When we get home, I check the forecast and the county-by-county map for north Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina has more colors than the terrorism threat chart. The big fear is becoming freezing rain which is ten times worse here in the south than snow. The big question is how far south will it go. Already all of Atlanta was in the warning area and there were rumblings that it might extend further south than that. I went to bed wondering about it all after a two hour recovery spin on the rollers.

I got up the next morning wondering. I looked out the window and things didn't look bad at all. When I got into the car though there was a thin layer of ice on the windshield. Easy enough to clear but worrisome as the storm wasn't done. I got to work and saw the line of thunderstorms moving our way on the NOAA radar. Yikes! Other faculty from further north started coming in saying that there was ice as far south as 15 miles to our north and it was bad up in Atlanta. Then the weather service issued the first of the tornado watches for a few counties south of us. Ice to the north and severe thunderstorms to the south, what a combo! So I watched over the next couple of hours as thunderstorms trained over us with deluge after downpour. Once that cleared , in came the wind and the temps dropped even more from the mid-30's to the low-30's. If we got another shot of moisture while the temperature was that low we'd get the freezing precip in the trees and on the power lines. We hovered on the line all through the day and into the evening until at about 8:30 pm the temperature edged up a bit to about 34 F and I knew we were out of the woods.

Fortunately, all of the ugly stuff stayed either north or south and we have remained just a bit soggy. The power's been up and down a bit but nothing bad. Our downstairs furnace has gone on the friz but hopefully we'll get that fixed today before the really cold air moves in behind the storm with all the wind. Still though, further north things are bad. About 40 people have died due to the storm and for the mid-Atlantic and New England states there's more stuff on the way.

That's the amazing thing about the weather that some people never seem to get...it doesn't care. It's a big, impersonal force of nature that has more energy than we humans can ever comprehend. Why people don't hunker down is beyond me but they don't. They think they can go with their lives as if the weather won't hurt them. The very thing that makes the weather so fascinating, it's enormous power, is also what makes it so deadly. All that energy can create forces at the mere twitch of a variable differential; a slight change in pressure, an anomally of temperature, small eddies borne out of slight wind shear can all blossom into frighteningly destructive phenomena that can affect hundreds or thousands or even millions.

Just missed.

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Thursday, January 22, 2004

Counting the Cost

In an article today on CNN, I found out the CDC has had part of the cost of obesity calculated up. Right now it costs every American taxpayer about $175 per annum to treat obesity related conditions through the Medicare and Medicaid programs. It costs me $175 a year to pay for the completely lifestyle related choices of other people just through the government. The total cost is about double this but isn't paid for in taxes. I assume I pay for that in my insurance premiums. So my bill totals to about $350 per year or $700 for my household. This doesn't count the intangibles such as lost productivity in businesses due to the illnesses, the lowered quality of living and the unhappiness that they cause and the like. And that's just one of the four major lifestyle choice illness groups. What would happen if that money the government spent on treating obesity related illness went to other health care prioirties, such as insuring uninsured children? In the mantra of "Think Globally, Act Locally" maybe those who call for the government to get involved in insuring more people should first look to their own lifestyle and the impact it has on their health and then look at the lifestyles of those with whom they influence prior to saying that the government should take more of my money. If we think that the government is the solution, instead of opting for universal health care, maybe we should look into mandatory diet and exercise programs...

The article also went on to note that in data from 2000, 64% of Americans were either overweight or obese. I think more people need bikes...a lot more people...

I can't help but think what the response would be if 64% of American had contracted HIV or if they we're diagnosed with a form of cancer. As I've said before, we may think that the consequences of these sorts of choices are individual but as long as we choose to share the burdens of society as a community the consequences of our choices may not be. If 64% of all people had HIV, we'd be spending many more billions of dollars of the government's tax dollars to find a cure. If we decided to spend a couple of billion to institute mandatory exercise and diet regimes the populace would scream about invasion of individual rights. Yet no one cries out when the government mandatorily takes money from their wages to pay for other people's bad choices. Some food for thought.

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Tuesday, January 20, 2004

Base Camp 3

In a sense, cycling is a bit like mountain climbing on the world's tallest peaks. You don't ascend to the summit of performance all at once. Instead, you progress in stages by establishing your fitness levels incrementally. Just as in climbing Everest, you start off letting your body get used to a certain level of exertion. At that level you increase the amount of training time from week to week for three weeks and then you descend back down to a lower level so that your body can recover and adapt for a week. The idea is that each time you climb back up, you can go a little higher and ask your body for a little more and it will respond.

For the next three weeks, I'm in the third of my base cycles. Base 1 was just long rides at low exertion levels. The focus was getting my body used to being back in the saddle and to encourage it to develop the needed physiology to sustain greater efforts later on. It was like doing multiplication tables: boring but necessary. Base 2 is where I added in effort. Everything was still endurance focused but I went harder and longer. I did hills and allowed myself to "stretch out" my cardiovascular system. That's exactly what it felt like too. I really had the sense that I was asking my heart and lungs to get ready to go back for some serious training. My legs still haven't been asked to do all that much "hard" work. Using my mathematical analogy; I was doing fractional math and working in decimals.

In Base 3 that will change somewhat. The biggest priority will be to finish stretching out my cardio. I'll starting doing long "tempo" rides which are focused on putting me at about 80% of my max heart rate and holding it. In addition, I'll start pushing up to my aerobic threshold for short to meduim periods of time. These will be intervals which will mean that I'll do three sets with recovery in between. The first week will be 30 minutes of tempo with about 22 minutes of intervals. By week three I'll be at an hour of tempo and 40 minutes of intervals. To this I'll add my first hill climbs. This is where my legs will get their first on the bike strength training. All climbing will be done sitting and I expect I'll have to get a little creative in my route selection. I have to find medium steep hills that are more than pop-ups and I have to find longer, more shallow hills. I've got a few ideas but we'll see. I do get to do hill intervals by the end of the period so I'm sure I'll be doing the "hill-of-death" loop before too long. Each week I'll do a tempo/interval set and a hills set. Add to that one ride that'll be done in one gear ratio only (known as single speeding). These are supposed to make me work hard on the climbs and to spin on the downhills. I'll also do some corning drills that'll help me to develop my accelerations out of the corners. The rest of the days are the same as Base 2 with more time on the bike. One of those days will be done on the MTB to keep practicing skills.

After Base 3, training gets really serious in the "Build" periods where the idea is to make your body do things harder than it's ever done before. That's where I have to decide where to focus my energy and develop my form. At least now though I'm out of the multiplication tables and into algebra and geometry. Race season starts about a month from now with the Tundra Time Trial and the Greenville Training Series and I'm on track to do solid rides in each.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Winner Takes All???

A number of years ago a heard a commentator on NPR discussing what was a new phenomenon he had observed in higher ed. Lots of four year schools whose missions had been traditionally focused on teaching were recruiting faculty that could competitively chase grant dollars for research. The reason, as he saw it, was rooted in a growing philosophy that if you didn't keep up with the research schools, excellence would pass you by. He felt that there was a growing attitude that said that you had to get in the game and then you had to work to win because second best wouldn't cut it in the minds of prospective students and their parents. Everyone had to be a Harvard or an MIT or a Berkeley or the students won't come. It was a "winner takes all" attitude. Additionally, the commentator said that this trend in higher ed was merely following a growing trend in popular culture.

Over the years I've tried to watch things with this idea in mind because I thought it was an interesting one. From my perspective, his views on the trend in higher ed turned out to be wrong. Too many studnets are too interested in having good teachers. A lot of the research oriented faculty that were hired have since left to pursue different careers and have been replaced by faculty who having teaching as a significant part of their personal missions. The second point, I believe, has turned out to be true. We are becoming a winner takes all sort of society. This is especially true in sports but is also true in other arenas as well. Artistic works are judged more and more often by the dollars they bring in rather than on their artisitic merits. If you're not at the very top of your class, then you didn't really matter. If you don't win the championship then you have failed. Note, this isn't the attitude of most athletes or artists or students. It's the attitude of the society that feels it had the right to comment on someone else's accomplishments.

The interesting thing to me is the effects this attitude set has. For some, it becomes a crushing weight. The ever-increasing mass of expectation eventually causes the individual to collapse. For others, it drives them to greater effort and accomplishment. In both these cases, the external motivation drives their behavior. A third type of person is the type who ignores the winner takes all strategy. This person sees the world as more than winners and losers but as goals met and lessons learned. Achievement comes from meeting goals and moving forward, regardless of what value society places on those goals. Disappointment comes from not doing the realistic things required to meet the goals.

For me, an example is my goal to go to the Master's National Championships. If I don't achieve that goal because I was slack and don't train then I will be disappointed in myself. If I do all that I can however and still don't make it then I can give up on the notion that I've "lost" and realize that I have learned what is realistic. In a sense, a better word is that I'll become dis-illusionsed. Not in the negative sense where I don't place my faith in myself or my abilities (or in someone else's) but in the sense that I no longer have illusions that with the effort I put in I can go to Nationals. I can evaluate things and decide what my next step is. In that sense, I have achieved a great deal whether I go or not.

Winning and losing, like any external system of reward and punishment, is artificial and is thus little more than a minor consequence to a person who is internally motivated. Both winning and losing have can consequences but we learn so much more by the process than by the externally measured outcome.

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Friday, January 09, 2004

To the Moon, Norton!

All the news sites are alive with the rumblings of a policy speech that will be given by the President. According to the rumors, Mr. Bush will call for a permanent manned outpost and the Moon and an eventual manned mission to Mars. The timing couldn't be better given the recent success of the Spirit lander/rover. I, however, have my doubts. The policy speech will discuss the phasing out of the Shuttle fleet (a good move in my mind) and the decommissioning of the International Space Station (a bad move in my mind). Let me explain.

I grew up at the end of the Apollo days and weathered the long drought of manned space flight until the Columbia's first flight. My professional career has been defined more by the accomplishments we have made with unmanned, robotic probes than science done by local human agents. Hubble, Voyager, Viking, Magellin, Galileo and several others have taken us to places we never imagined without threat to or cost of human life. The Shuttle on the other hand has proven an expensive delivery vehicle to low Earth orbit with limited scientific potential and enormous risk. That we have lost two of the five ships in the fleet comes as no surprise to me. The Shuttle system is an enormously complex one with two operational phases that allow little room for error. Because of this, if we continue to fly the fleet, as it remains, we will kill 21 more human beings and lose the last three orbitters. It's not a question of if but when. Failure of complex mechanical systems will occur sooner or later and with the Shuttle, if that failure takes place during liftoff or reentry, the energies involved will disassemble the system. What is needed is a replacement that is less complex, less costly and is reliant on more conventionally available technologies.

In going to the Moon, I see little benefit other than making sure the Chinese don't do it first. There is little benefit to being on the Moon unless one wishes to establish an observing outpost there and Hubble does a pretty good job of that. The difficult thing to me seems to be working out the issues of getting somewhere, not staying there. For this reason, I think the ISS needs to continue and to be expanded. NASA's mission should be to develop systems that will support and expand the ISS. We need more than two or three inhabitants. We need between seven and a dozen people on board in my mind learning everything there is to know about what happens to people in space over really long periods of time, say 12-24 months. We need to better understand what the long term effect of space habitation are on materials as well as humans. I see going to Mars as a good goal but we are very far off from actually realizing all the technologies and issues facing such a mission. The ISS, if expanded, offers an excellent experimental platform to discover these issues.

Going to Mars is hard. Half of the robot probes we have sent have failed to reach the target in an operational sense. We can fly-by but doing things more complex than that, especially landing, is a very risky proposition. We need to completely understand the reasons for that and a two week trip to the moon isn't going to teach us those. Long term space habitation is the biggest issue that must be addressed NASA's resources should be focused towards a limited set of goals with clear outcomes. Going to the Moon seems like a red herring to me.

Finally though, we have to accept that once we put people in space, some of them are going to die. In the last great age of exploration and the commercialization that followed, thousands of lives were lost to hazards that were not well understood. Navigational hazards, nutritional and psychological issues, technological failures and the vagarities of nature all posed major obstacles. If we can't get past wringing our hands for a year to 18 months every time somone dies progress will remain slow. It is admirable that we do not wish to endanger anyone due to flippancy or carelessness but the endeavor is risky beyond words. If human loss is unacceptable then we must send robots do to our scientific work for us while we remain close to home until we've worked out all of the issues we can possibly foresee. In any case, it will cost a lot of money.

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Wednesday, January 07, 2004

On the Limit

I've always wondered how much cycling I could do and still take care of the rest of my responsibilities. During break times the limit seems to be much more of a physical limit than a time-based one. It has a lot more to do with how many miles my body can handle. During the semester, things are different however. This week I'm supposed to put in 18 hours on the bike for training. That's about 2.5 hours per day. Add to that an hour of weight lifting three times a week and I'm right up to the limit of what I can do before I have to let too much slide. Actually, I probably can't hold this level of commitment for much more than a week or two before the intangibles catch up. It's not just that there's the on the bike time but there's also prep time each day (30 min), stretch and cool down time (30 more minutes) and the fact that my energy level dops pretty noticably about 30 minutes after that for about an hour. Basically, after school my life seems to become the bike for the rest of the day, especially on lifting days. I think I'll be able to hold a level slightly less than this (15/week) but only if I can put in some long rides on weekends. Time management will be important here.

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Saturday, January 03, 2004

Training Update

Well, I'm past the multiplication tables and into some real riding. After 1200 miles of Base 1 training I moved up to Base 2. The problem is that I feel like I haven't had near enough recovery time, but I sort of planned it that way. One more week of Base 2 riding and I'll get a week to rest and test. Things have gone pretty well and I feel like I've really got some power in my legs right now. My endurance feels good and that's probably the most important thing. This week I'll probably try and do some of my first hill intervals on some long rolling stuff out towards Zebulon. I'll wait until Base 3 to tackle the real rollers on Hwy 83. Tuesday night I'll have my first chance to try out my new light for my MTB at Dauset. I'll do a night ride with the local group of trail gods and see if I can hang with them a bit. I rode with them once about three weeks ago and got schooled big time. It was a reaffirmation that I've got a lot to learn on the dirt.

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Friday, January 02, 2004

Winter

In an ambulance chasing sort of way, weather interests me. I love it when severe weather happens, though I don't like the idea of actual real destruction and death. I love the impending crisis of it all, the preparation and the wait for the event to get here. Winter, in many ways in the best for this. You know that the weather will be bad, sooner or later. One question is when and how bad. Another is what kind of bad. Will it snow? Will there be freezing rain? Will major transportation and government facilities be shut down? Usually, it's slow moving and not all that deadly except to those who don't respect it.

The first winter we arrived in Kansas we encountered a cold snap in January that took temperatures to -60 F with the wind chill. It was the coldest I'd ever been. School was cancelled and everything shut down. No one knew how long the wind would last. The wind only lasted a day but we didn't see temps above 0 F for a week and temps above freezing for two. The excitement wore off pretty quickly. Our first winter here in Georgia was the incredible ice storm. It didn't do us much harm but it was stunningly beautiful and deadly at the same time. When the tree limbs started snapping with sounds like rifle shots we knew it was going to be interesting. The roads stayed clear so we got to drive around and enjoy the ice palace world until the power lines came down. A town north of us lost power for a week. We were lucky as we only lost power for about four hours. The next year is was four inches of snow, which was no big deal for us but the locals sure were shocked to see it. After that it was cold and last year it was lots of rain.

So, I wonder what it will be this year? To me that's part of the interest. Look at what's going on out West. See what's developing. See if anything will make it here and how bad it will be. I enjoy that a lot. I used to enjoy it with hurricanes too until Andrew and then I got to see the devastation that caused. Now I'm apprehensive about hurricanes, not excited. Something will hapen in January, I'd almost bet on it. February and March will have wind and rain and ugly storms with tornadoes and thunderstorms but January will have real winter weather. Me? I'm the winter weather rubbernecker.

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Thursday, January 01, 2004

The Grandaddy of Them All

While many feel that the BCS College Football National Championship thing is all screwed up, I couldn't be happier with the outcome (other than the whole National Championship thing in the first place). You see, all is right with the Rose Bowl this year; Big Ten champ vs. Pac Ten champ. I remember as a kid getting up early (8 am early) on New Year's Day in Oregon to watch the Rose Parade. After the parade I'd go out and play for a while and then come back in for the game. Back then it was Big Ten vs. Pac Eight, usually either USC or UCLA vs. Michigan or Ohio State. Usually the game was pretty exciting with implications in the College Football National Championship. I was pretty much unaware of what was going on in the SEC or the SWC or anywhere else. Sure there was Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Alabama and a host of others but all I cared about was the Rose Bowl. I'd try to watch the Cotton Bowl or the Sugar Bowl or something else but I wasn't interested. There was no parade, no Keith Jackson saying "Welcome to the "grandaddy of 'em all", no real pagentry. I always wished I'd see Oregon or Oregon State in the game but I was realistic about things. Later on you'd see Washington or Arizona or, even, Cal but as a kid I rooted for Bruin Blue or Trojan Red and Gold. You couldn't hate the other team though (this wasn't an SEC game). You had to respect them for their toughness, grit and determination.

So this year all is as it was when I was a kid. As I type this Michigan is driving but it's a hard fight with a 4th down conversion. Two great teams with Championship implications. Should SC be in the Sugar Bowl? Maybe, but I'm glad that they're not. Bring on the Grandaddy!

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