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

Thursday, April 24, 2008

When I was a kid, I remember that there were lots of different type of gas stations where I grew up and where we traveled as a family.  I remember Texaco, Phillips 66 (so named because the first station was on Route 66), Amoco, Standard, Union 76, ARCO and Husky along with the companies we have now like Shell and Exxon (though Exxon seemed pretty new fangled at the time for some reason).  I honestly can't say I remember BP (where I tend to buy most of my gas now), Conoco (which in now part of a huge multinational that is ConocoPhillips that owns Chevron and Union 76 among other things) or Citgo.  I loved the interesting signs like the old orange 76 ball and the Chevron sign.  For some reason, where I grew up these were markers of the great wild open for me.  Not too surprising given that we didn't have a road as celebrated as Route 66 was in song and lore.  Of all the signs, my favorites were the Texaco Star and the Mobil Pegasus.  An interesting note, in Oregon it used to be that it was illegal to pump your own gas (it probably still is).  I remember the first time I drove outside the state, I stopped at the station and waited for the attendant to come out for quite some time before I figured out that I would have to pump my own gas.  Fortunately, it's not a particularly difficult operation to master as I hadn't ever done that before.  I'm sure the guy at the station looked at me like I was in idiot while I fumbled around for things.  After I went to grad school and started my first teaching gig, I returned to the state and nearly knocked the attendant at a station over getting out of my car to fill up.  I didn't expect him to be there and we both met as I was standing up getting out of my car.  I just laughed as I realized how things had changed.

Anyways, back to the present.  While racing up near Gainesville, GA a few weeks back we passed a restored (though no longer functional) Texaco station.  Having my bikes and a camera, I decided to snap a few pics which I thought I'd share.  Enjoy the trip down memory lane and thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, April 21, 2008

I thought I'd give you a little bit of a break from the almost daily litany of bike geek stuff on this fine Monday. In place of that, I thought I'd write down a few of the things that I find just really amazing. This is not a "Top Ten" list but just some things that have occurred to me that are really cool.

Glass: I think that's it's so amazing that we figured out how to turn sand into glass using heat. What's just as amazing is what we've done with that technology. I mean windows are cool but I'm thinking of all of the artistic expression that comes out of working with glass. The one I was particularly taken with this weekend was stemware. Simple in function but supremely varied in form (unless you look at stemware from the point of view of topology and then it's all the same). Everyone has their favorite type of stemware. My tastes tend towards slim, elegant curves that fit comfortably into the hand and do little more than show off the color of the beverage inside.

Guns: I think it's rather amazing that our main weapon systems basically are little more than fancy ways of either throwing spears and shooting arrows. While I know that much warfare is now conducted with explosives, which are a pretty radical departure from the spear/arrow thing, it just seems like we'd have done better than this now. Maybe if we did better, we wouldn't need them. I wonder what would be so bad about going back to spears and arrows.

Spectral Analysis: I am continually blown away by the fact that we can learn so much about light and then learn about something that produces it. To me it is one of the crowning triumphs of the human intellect that we can understand the size, mass, temperature, rotation, composition and structure of a huge ball of self-luminescent hydrogen that is farther away than we can imagine just by looking at the light that object gives off.

Arches: As old as humans have been building things (well, almost) and still so cool. Strong, stable, beautiful, elegant, functional. Why don't we build on a human scale with these things anymore? Arches remind us of tree branches over our heads, reconnecting us from the natural world from whence we came. They remain modern and yet timeless. The Romans built with them and so do engineers when the project is big enough. There should be more arches in more places (well, fewer Golden Arches maybe).

There are more. I'll write them up when I think of them. Enjoy a Monday of wonder.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, April 18, 2008

A few more thoughts on the data I've collected so far. I've gotten through the first 6 chapters of the Training and Racing with Power book and I'm coming across all sorts of interesting tidbits. One of those is looking at my average power over various time intervals in the form of Watts/kg or how much power I produce for my weight. When I look at the data for intervals longer than 10-20 minutes I find that I am a strong Cat 3 rider. When I look at my averages for a 5 second and 1 minute sprint, I barely show up on the chart. Now I expect that some of that is coming from the fact that I did the sprint parts of my test at the end when my legs were a little fried so I need to go back and do a test that's a little more friendly to figuring out what my sprint power is, but this does confirm my thesis that I have a complete total of about 4 fast twitch muscles in my entire body.

With some focused training I will probably be able to improve those numbers to some degree over the course of the next year but I won't be winning any flat races soon and I probably need to resign myself to either only racing time trials and road races with longer climbs or working as a super-domestique for some powerful sprinter or explosive climber on a team somewhere (Are you listening Security Bank guys? I can pull like a diesel for miles and miles if you need me to...be happy to do it...have bike, will travel...).

So, time to get to class. Have a great weekend and I'll try to post an update sometime over the weekend (this could be the kiss of death and I won't write for another three months).

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Well, the results are back from the first real training ride outside with the PowerTap and the data is interesting. The first thing is that I was definitely right about the data being a lot noisier. I'm not really sure how to interpret it beyond looking at the averages right now because there are lots and lots of spikes due to variations in terrain. The second thing I learned during the ride was that I tend to go too hard early on climbs and then blow up near the end. Several times on the hills yesterday I would really punch it at the bottom of a hill and push my power up over 450-500 watts. I could hold that for a minute or so but I would tend end up having to back off and only being able to ride at 250 watts at the top. Once I figured this out, I would hit hill and try to stay between 300 and 350 watts and I would do a lot better. I knew this for long hills but I was surprised to see how true it was for shorter ones as well. The third thing I learned was that I seem to go a lot harder outside than inside on the trainer, at least in terms of the power I put out. The ride yesterday was the best ride I've done in terms of the averages and was better by about 5% than my indoor trainer test. I'm not sure why that is. It could be that I get pretty hot riding inside and so maybe my heartrate is a lot higher for a given power output. I could be that with the trainer I don't get the little mini-rests you get out on the road. That I had higher higher average power for all the different time intervals was a big surprise because I don't really feel like I rode all that hard in terms of riding at my LT heart rate. The cool thing was that my energy burned for the ride was nearly 2000 Calories. I was tired near the end but not wiped out.

So, I guess I have a lot to learn about this training with power thing. Fortunately, the book I ordered, "Training and Racing with Power" by Allen and Coggan came in yesterday. I've looked at the first couple of chapters and they are definitely well-written. In skimming the third chapter I realized that there will be lots of numbers to keep track of. Last night at 10:30, it seemed a little overwhelming but I imagine it'll be like the first time I read Friel's book. At first there was so much information that I had a hard time keeping track of it all. After a couple of times through the material in bite sized chunks, I got a pretty good handle in things.

This leads me to another topic having to do with riding and racing. Some guys I know are complete geeks about the data and numbers and all of that. They measure everything they can measure and evaluate their performance based on that. Other guys couldn't care less about the data. They just want to ride and base their training on perceived effort and how it feels. They have a certain elan or passion when they race. I tend to be somewhere in the middle. I understand that without the data, an objective measurement of performance and improvement is next to impossible and in this sense, the more data one gets, the better. On the other hand, I ride because I love how it feels in so many different ways. When I think of going fast, I love how it feels to have my muscles and lungs and heart all working together to create power (which is part of why I love time trialing...you go fast and you're solitary-just feeling your body and it's response to the command of "go faster"). In a way, I want the data but I don't want to be overwhelmed by it or controlled by it. I can understand why guys hire coaches to do this sort of thing for them. They just want to ride and if the coach can look over the data and say, "Next week you need to do this and that and we'll look it over from there." then that's the way to go.

Since I can't afford a coach at the moment (but soon I think) I'll have to do it myself. I hope the book will teach me what I need to know and I'm guessing I'll have to subscribe to the WKO+ software out at TrainingPeaks at some point in the near future since it seems to have all the tools to track everything I need it to (and it goes well with the book).

Today is a recovery day after three hard days of training. I'm tired and my muscles hurt a bit today so that's a good sign I need a day of easy spinning. The only bad thing is that I'm going to be on campus for most of the day so I'll have to spin on an exercise bike in the gym on a beautiful day which seems like a waste. I will get a little light lifting in so that's a silver lining I suppose. One nice thing is that I felt like I got stronger each day during the mini-block so that bodes well. Friday, Saturday and Sunday will be another three day block before I settle back into my more normal rhythm of Monday and Friday being recovery days. I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing but I think Saturday will be a two-a-day since I have a wedding to be at in the middle of the day. Maybe two 25 mile TT efforts. Sunday will be a long ride, maybe a century, in order to work on the endurance side of things and maybe to see some roads I don't see as often as I'd like.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

So, here's an update on my training rides from Monday and Tuesday.

Monday's ride stunk. I'm not sure exactly why it stuck but it did. Maybe I didn't eat well enough that day, maybe my legs were blocked from the recovery week or maybe I just felt bad but whatever the reason I did OK for about the first 35 minutes and then just sort of faded away. I was able to hold the 325 pace only in the first hill interval and then everything after that was downhill, so to speak. When I looked at my power data (I'm becoming a data geek) I lost about 20 watts in each interval at the same basic heart rate. What was worse is how bad I felt through the whole hill repeats part of the workout. I managed to do two sets of jump intervals and actually felt OK for those. It was a disappointing day to say the least.

Tuesday morning's ride, fortunately, went a whole lot better. I did 4 fifteen minute intervals with five minutes of recovery between each on the TT bike. The first interval was in an easier gear with a higher cadence and then I dropped the cadence and increased the gear on each successive interval. Intervals 1 and 3 were steady state and I averaged right at 300 watts for each which was good. Interval 2 was an over under interval where I would spend a minute at 275 watts and then a minute at 335 watts. Interval 4 was the same thing but at 250 and 300 watts. I finished off with some one legged pedaling drills. The whole ride felt a zillion times better and I have a feeling that Monday was an isolated thing.

Today's ride will be rollers/hill intervals again but out on the road this time. The weather's supposed to be great so I'm going to do a ride out to a place where I know that there are some good short climbs (we don't have anything really long around here). I'll add jumps at a variety of different road markers (county line signs, city limit signs, etc.) where I'll go off with everything for 20 seconds and then back down to hard tempo for 40 more. The idea is to begin developing the power needed to get away from a group and then hold that. Over the next couple of weeks I'll move to 30/30 and then 1 minute hard and 1 minute tempo.

Today will be the first time I take the PowerTap out on the actually open road for a hard training ride. Up until now I've either done recovery rides on the road or the two hard rides on the trainer. I'll be interested to see how well I'll be able to look at the data to determine anything. Things on the trainer I easy because every thing's controlled. On the road, the hill is as long as it is and not necessarily as long as I'd like it to be. However steep the hills is is however steep the hill is. I can change my pace to meet the power output level I'd like but I wonder how well that'll happen.

Anyways, the weather's going to be perfect (lower 70's, no wind) so I'll see you out on the road.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, April 14, 2008

With the weather forecast calling for wind and rain today, I'm forced inside onto the training for the first hard ride of the new training block.

My goals are threefold for the next two three week blocks in preparation for the Union City, LAgrage and Rome Georgia Cup weekends. First, I want to develop more climbing power. Second, I want to increasing my TTing ability so that I don't lose power as the ride progresses. Finally, I want to develop an ability to jump out of the group and build a gap over a field in the first 3-5 minutes, i.e.-create or get into a break and then make it stick.

Today, I'll work on the first of the three goals with some hill intervals/hill repeats. The goals will be do do a set of 5-6 hill repeats that build in effort. The first part of each repeat will be done at a somewhat lower sustainable power for between 3 and 7 minutes and then the last minute will be a hard effort at my one minute max power. So here's the workout:

20 minute standard warm up
10 minute tempo exercise at 250 watts
4 minute hill interval @ 325/400 watts
6 minute recovery at 225-250 watts
5 minute hill interval @ 325/400 watts
6 minute recovery at 225-250 watts
6 minute hill interval @ 325/400 watts
6 minute recovery at 225-250 watts
7 minute hill interval @ 310/385 watts
6 minute recovery at 225-250 watts
8 minute hill interval @ 310/385 watts
if able to complete last interval then I'll add:
6 minute recovery @ 225-250 watts
8 minute hill interval @ 310/385 watts
6 minutes of recovery at 225-250 watts
5 sets of "jumps" 20 seconds all out, 40 tempo at 225-25- watts
5 minute recovery @ 200-225 watts
5 sets of "jumps"
5 minutes of recovery at 200-225 watts
5 sets of "jumps"
10 minutes of cool down at 175-200 watts

I have to say that it's a whole lot easier to plan training sessions inside on the trainer but boy will it be boring. Tomorrow's supposed to be cold and windy so my morning ride will likely be inside as well. I'll probably to TT intervals at around 300 watts for 15 minutes followed by a recovery time of about 5 minutes at a power of 200 watts. Add the typical warm-up and cool down and that should be about 2 hours there as well.

I'll let you know how the workouts go but it's back into the fire. There was a Nike ad during the Sweet Sixteen/Elite Eight weekend. It said that there are no Cinderellas. I like that idea. No Cinderellas, just those who work hard and put in the training time and sweat and suffer and all the rest. I won't just win in May and June because I want to.

No Cinderellas.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, April 13, 2008

As I hang out here and "watch" the CyclingNews on-line coverage of Paris-Roubaix, I thought I'd post a brief update on the power tests I did on Friday.  The protocol was pretty simple: a 20 minute warm up, a ladder up the gears until failure to see where my LT heart rate and power were, a 30 minute TT test to get at the same things (kudos to Robert J. for pointing out that this was a better measure than two 10 minute TT efforts like Carmichael recommends), various sprints at different time intervals up to 1 minute and a final 4 minute all out effort.  Of course, interspersed in these were various recovery periods.

So what are the numbers?  My lactate threshold heart rate is 171 this week.  My 1 minute max power at this HR is 385 watts, my ten minute power is 310 watts and my 30 minute power is 290 watts.  On my four minute effort I was able to have an average power of 325 watts.  My 5 second sprint power is an anemic 638 watts and my 30 second average is 438 watts.

I'm not exactly sure what these numbers mean, but I've ordered a book that should help me interpret them and put together a training plan.  The one thing that concerns me though is that the software that came with the PowerTap creates two different sets of training zones based on my heart rate and one my power.  The biggest difference is in the recovery zone where I can go up to about 145 bpm on my heart rate but that creates over 200 watts of power which takes me way out of the recovery zone based on my threshold power.  Hopefully the literature will help to clear this up.

One more day of recovery rides (if, in fact, that's what I've been doing...hmmm) and then it's back to build training.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Friday, April 11, 2008

If you've been watching ESPN's coverage of the Masters, you will undoubtedly have noticed one very obvious thing; Spring has arrived here in Georgia. Just as one sees avalanches of azalea blooms cascading down the hills Augusta while being shadowed by the blooming dogwoods and other flowering trees, the rest of the region has burst forth in color. I was overwhelmed with this fact on the last two days of riding that I've done.

Over the last couple of weeks I've either been forced to ride indoors due to bad weather or have been riding too hard to notice that things have been moving towards this point but this week has been a recovery week. That, along with the arrival of spring like weather finally, has given me the chance to get out and ride at a more human pace. In the middle of my Wednesday afternoon ride I sort of came out of my shell long enough to look around and go, "Wow! When did everything get so green?" Once I did this I sort of realized that stuff was blooming all around me and that the scenery wasn't the mix of grays and browns I've been traveling through the last few months.

So, spring is here; at least until Sunday when it's supposed to get cold again (winter has to have one last gasp). We'll have some ugly weather tonight if the worst of the weather predictions are true but that's OK as I'll be doing my power tests and stuck inside on a trainer. Tomorrow will be a long ride with the wind at my back and pizza at the end of the route. Early April in Georgia seems to be what mid-February in Florida was when I lived there...wonderfully glorious. I'm not sure it makes up for August but I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 08, 2008

As I ramp up for the next round of training I thought I'd discuss the tools I hope to use to get better in the next go 'round.  Up until now I've based my training on looking at how my heart rate responds to whatever I do.  I have a pretty good sense of what my heart rate is when my body is producing and using up/cleaning out the lactic acid my muscles produce (right now that's at about 166 bpm).  This is good because it allows me to gauge my training efforts and plan training workouts to teach my body to more efficiently utilize certain energy production systems in certain types of situations (anaerobic for sprinting and short interval efforts, aerobic for longer steady effort time trials).  This has served me well but it's only part of the picture; the part that tells me how hard my cardiovascular system is working.  What my heart rate isn't telling me is how much work my muscles are able to do with what the cardio system is providing.

The way to determine that is to look at the amount of power your body (which is mostly legs with some core muscles) produces when you ride.  When I first started training for real, this was a very expensive type of data to access.  Usually it was only available to pros and labs.  Over the last few years, the costs of these measurement tools have come down along with their weight and the accuracy of their measurements has increased.  These various power meters measure how much energy you produce per unit of time (usually in joules per second or watts) by measuring the torque of some rotating part of the bike and the rate or speed at which that part is rotating.  This allows you to look both at how hard your cardiovascular system is working and at how much energy you produce to get a more complete picture of how your body is responding to immediate efforts as well as how well it adapts to repeated demands in terms of training "loads" over time.

The power meter I ended up getting (mostly due to cost and portability) is called a Power Tap (the SL model to be precise).  This measures power by using a specially built rear wheel hub that has a couple of strain gauges in it to measure the torque the chain exerts on the cassette while also measuring how fast the rear wheel is turning.  The nice thing is that I can move the wheel that the hub is built into back and forth between my road bike and my TT bike which allows me to train with power on both.

My last two rides have been used to get the thing and all of it's ancillary electronics working on the road bike.  Everything has gone pretty well and the timing was perfect as this is a full recovery week where I do little but spin at low heart rates.  This allows me time to play with the position and getting everything to work without feeling like I'm wasting valuable training time.  The only problem with the system is that the display unit that sits on my handlebars only had three lines and I want to see a more data than that so for the time being I left my old Polar cyclometer on the bike to give me a little more data.

Today a did a 100 minute ride on my rollers to get a sense of what my average recovery power was and I averaged right at 200 watts which would propel me along the road at around 18 mph (which is about 8 m/s for those who like base metric units).  For those who wonder how efficient cycling is, the amount of power used by three average light bulbs can push 185 lbs of weight (80 kg of mass) down the road at a pretty respectable speed.  The next two days I'll take the bike out on the road to make sure everything will stand up to the wear and tear of some road rides and get some more base data.  On Friday I'll do a set of trainer tests designed to help me set my training levels in terms of my power.  These will consist of a ladder exercise where I shift up a gear every minute and keep track of my average power and average heart rate in each step.  This will allow me to find my personal power curve, get one estimate of my lactate threshold power and my time to failure after I cross my LT.  I'll then do a pair of TT tests where I'll go as hard as I can for ten minutes and find my average HR and power a another estimate of my LT.  These will allow me to set my training zones for when I'm out riding ont eh road and I want to do a set of hill intervals or whatnot.  Finally, I'll so a series of hard sprint efforts to find my maximum anaerobic power over 5, 10 and 30 second intervals as well as a 1 minute effort.  For a data freak like me, it should be cool.

Once I've done that, I'll be able to set my efforts in my next three week training block and then repeat to determine what improvements have occurred.  I'm also hoping to pick up a book or two that will help me with this process.  I understand Joe Freil has a new version of the Cyclist's Training Bible with info on power and there's another book that's supposed to be the standard for this sort of thing.  More to come soon.

Thanks for reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Sunday, April 06, 2008

In cycling there are events that, for a variety of reasons, are known by the descriptor, "Epic".  My wife and I were discussing that on our way up to Gainesville, GA this weekend and we came to the conclusion that, in cycling, "Epic" is a euphemism for "Miserable".  If that is true, then this weekend's racing was definitely "Epic", at least on Saturday.

The Gainesville Georgia Cup event started the same way they always do and that's with a time trial.  This one was 9 miles long and involved a good bit of low grade (2-4%) climbing in the first half.  What made it hard, however, was the rain.  

We knew that the rain was going to be there but the forecasters were divided on how much and when.  Some said that we were going to be deluged with enormous amounts of it along with thunder, lightning and possibly severe weather while others said that it would blow through by early Saturday morning.  What happened landed somewhere in the middle.  We had a bunch of ugly weather Friday night but by Saturday most of that had blown through.  What was left was a steady rain that varied from little more than drizzle to downpour over the course of the day.  With the rain came early fog dew to the atmosphere trying to cool off and things were dreary.  

My TT went pretty well.  I didn't feel as good as I had in Perry (maybe about 90%) of that but I felt a lot better than I had at Tundra or Albany.  I could tell from the beginning of my warm-up.  The rain was both a mental barrier (you didn't want to ride hard with rain pelting you in the face and obstructing your vision) and, to some degree, a physical one (it was hard to get your muscles warm and keep them warm).  Still I rode a strong race and my new position seemed to be pretty fast.  I ended up finishing third which gave me some confidence that I might do well for the weekend's overall general classification.

The afternoon stage was different than usual.  Usually we do the TT and a short criterium or circuit race on the first day and a long road race on the second.  Due to scheduling issues, we did the road race on the same day as the TT.  This means that you do the two hardest stages of the race on the same day (if the TT is a longer one) which is tough.  The course was a 27 mile loop with several short, steep climbs and one mile long "wall" that we'd travel around twice.   Add to that the rain and some wind that came up and we had an "Epic" ride.  Racing in the rain is about the most physically exhausting thing a rider can do.  Because you're wet, the road's wet and your bike's brakes and rims are wet, you lose the ability to maneuver well and stop in any kind of reasonable time.  Now put yourself in a pack of 75 guys riding on one side of a narrow, two-lane country road with no shoulder and you can understand why the race was so hard.  For two hours and thirty minutes your mind is constantly looking and listening for that telltale sign that a crash is about to happen.  And even if you do hear or see it coming, there's a good chance you won't be able to avoid it.  Add to that the fact that you're fighting cold conditions in little more than a lyrca body suit and what is a hard race becomes something you're often trying to merely survive.  For me, the worst part of this kind of race physically is the cold.  I have a really hard time staying warm in these types of conditions and the combo of the wet and the wind made for a long day.  The best description for the day was "Flanderian" after the type of racing that one usually sees in Belgium this time of year (and that happened today by all accounts).

I rode well in the road race but once again the race was marked by defensive racing rather than something more aggressive.  Both times coming over the top of the wall, there was a lead group of riders that got a gap on the field.  Both times, riders on the front of the group choose to sit up and rest and not press their advantage and not let anyone else onto the front to push the pace.  What should have been something that was a deciding factor in the race became little more than a selector to eliminate the weakest of the field.  Given that I finished with the pack, I remained third overall.

Today we did the crit and after seeing a couple of ugly crashes due to the course design I decided not to really mix it up in the middle of the field.  I couldn't finish lower than 5th on the overall as long as I finished with the main field and I knew I wasn't going to contest the sprints so I sat on the back of the race and turned it into interval training.  The rider in 4th overall ended up jumping me in time due to a bonus sprint but that was OK with me as the race wasn't something I was targeting to do well in.

All in all it was a good weekend resultswise, even if Saturday was miserable.  I finished 4th in the General Classification (the sum of the overall times for all three races) which is a really good result.  Had I done just a bit better in the TT I would have lifted that quite a bit.  I now go into a week's rest and recovery and then start the buildup for some racing in late May and early June.  During that block, which I think will be two hard weeks followed by a week of rest and then two more hard weeks, I'll be looking to lift my fitness to a super high level.  

There are some state championships on the line early in the summer and I want to be ready for those.  I'm planning to do a blog series on my next big block of training to let you, my faithful readers, know what it's like for a serious (but probably stupid) amateur athlete to get ready to race.  I've invested in some new tools that I'm hoping will help me train better so I'll be keeping you informed on how it goes.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

I have to give a shout out to The Geek (aka The Science Fiction Twin) for pointing me to my latest musical obsession: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. If you like gospel and southern roots rock then you've got to listen to this woman and her band. She sounds like a cross between Ray Charles, the Allman Brothers and Janis Joplin with a deep soul connection to the Hammond B3 Organ. Her song, "Nothing but the Water" may be the very best song I've heard all year long. It makes me think I'm at a revival and makes me want to raise my hands...expect you don't hear the amazingly sultry sounds of a Hammond B3 at most southern revivals I know of.

We're talking about songs and prayers of lament in the Bible study I lead this week and I have every intention of talking about Negro spirituals and the blues as recent expressions of lament in American culture. I think that some of her music fits within this tradition. For much of the modern American evangelical church, lament is a lost practice. This is one of the things that has led to a faith that is flat and shallow and doesn't speak to any of the real issues in people's lives anymore. I think that's why music like this is so important. Unlike the tripe for Jessica Simpson and Fergie and so many other pop bands these days, this kind of music reconnects us with our need to cry out when we hurt or grieve or feel disconnected from the God that sustains us all in this life. It gives voice to the sense of brokenness we all feel and our need to get right.

Anyways, enough of the sermon. Give this music a serious listening to. You won't regret it.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |