Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks

Introduction

Every year or so I get together with my friend Peter to do a monstrously difficult bike ride. This year would have been in celebration of forty years of friendship, except that neither of us actually noticed this milestone at the time. (I did just now.) Just to mix things up, we brought along Pete’s son H— and two of H—’s friends from the Colorado State University cross-country running team. This is a little bit like inviting Godzilla to your garden tea party with his pals  Megalon and King Kong, expecting them to sip daintily and take just a few cucumber sandwiches instead of trampling everything. If you like the idea of me suffering, well, read all about it right here.

This was a one-day assault on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail, which Strava says most riders complete in two to four days. Pete had done it in three days with H— a couple years back, and this spring H— decided it would be a pretty good idea to hammer it out in one. (So honestly, it was me being brought along as an afterthought.)

Executive summary

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I’m not a big astronomy fan. The old cliché about staring up at the stars and saying, “Kinda makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” doesn’t seem that profound to me, because all kinds of things make me feel insignificant (like being middle-aged, and an empty nester, for starters). I don’t need to travel to some remote place where there’s no light pollution just so I can feel like a trivial little speck.

Meanwhile, I learned through this exercise that if you travel to a sufficiently isolated place—in this case Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah—you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing. In the photo above, look how Peter (the farther-away dude, in black) is so diminutive compared to the rock wall next to him. (If you can’t even make him out, click the photo to enlarge, which goes for all the pictures in this post.)

And yet, this being by far the longest mountain bike ride of my life, I feel like my Man vs. Nature battle didn’t come out so very badly. Despite a protracted ordeal in an unforgiving landscape, I find myself “still alive and bitching” (to quote the philosopher king Marshall Mathers). You might be alarmed to know we were out for almost 11 hours with virtually no shade but I barely noticed … we had far bigger difficulties to surmount than that. For example: the CSU brat pack; the relentless pounding of our tires over unforgiving landscape; and the formidable Shafer climb (starting at mile 75). If all you care about is the fact of us pulling this off, congratulations, this Executive Summary is all you need, and you can click here for dessert. Otherwise, read on for the gory details!

Short version

Dinner the night before, at our AirBRB (a nickname I’ve just coined, I think), was De Cecco pasta with trailer-trash sauce. This sauce is made by sizzling some crumbly house-brand Italian sausage in a pan, glugging some jarred sauce in there, and heating it up. Since I drove like a thousand miles for this get-together, I splurged on some weirdly high-end sauce that’s like $10/jar. (Did I pay that? Of course not. I had a digital coupon or something.)

I slept poorly the night before because a) I’d eaten way too much pasta, and b) during the two-day drive out to Moab I adopted an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining, so I had percussive flatulence all night, loud enough to wake myself up (and probably some of the 100 or so species of arthropods we can presume were sharing my room, if this dwelling was typical). Did I regret all that Mexican food? No. Not even considering the long hair I found in one of my burritos, which was from a forlorn taco truck in the middle of a giant dirt lot in a remote part of Provo. I kept pulling on that hair and it just kept coming, like a magic trick. And yes, I did finish that burrito. Think of how many hairs are discovered and removed just before restaurant food is served, or hairs that we actually ate, unawares, because we were eating too fast. (Or is that just me?)

My breakfast on ride day was a seriously overripe banana (peel almost black) with peanut butter, and coffee blacker than the banana peel. The AirBRB had a coffeemaker, but they’d stocked the wrong size filters, so it’s a good thing I brought my own pour-over cone and filters from home (along with my standard-issue ground Peets). These items had saved me at the motel the morning before as well, where the only teabag-style “coffee” they provided for their stupid coffeemaker was decaf. I’m strongly considering bringing ground coffee, my cone, and filters with me every time I leave the house from now on.

During the ride I ate an untold number of Clif and Kind bars, washed down with about nine  or ten bottles of water. Knowing the precise number of bars wouldn’t properly document the actual caloric intake, because there’s a lot of chocolate in a Kind bar, most of which melted due to the desert conditions and couldn’t be extricated from the wrapper. I felt kind of foolish eating these bars because all of my riding pals ate almost nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I really need to get in on that.

By the time we finished the ride, showered, limped back out to the cars, and drove into Moab for dinner, not much was open. We hit the Moab Grill which was still hopping. I knew as soon as we sat down that a) I wanted wings, real bad, and b) Pete would refuse to have anything to do with them. He’s above wings, apparently. We’ve argued bitterly over it in the past, sometimes after brutal bike rides such as this, and never order them. (It’s not that I couldn’t eat a whole plate of them by myself with no appreciable dent in my appetite; it’s that they’re meant to be shared. Solo winging would be like drinking alone.)

Of course we had the three young bucks at the table, but what if H— took after his old man with the buzzkill no-wings-ever policy? And what if the other two dudes, G— and T—, were, like, vegans or something? You never know with elite athletes. So I tentatively asked, “Would anyone be into getting an order of wings?” G— grinned and said, “That’s practically I’ll I’ve thought about for the last two hours.” Score! God, those wings were good. Buffalo style, with ranch, of course. I miss them. I just love how you can shove an entire wing in your mouth and then zip the bones out in one motion, leaving all the delicious meat to be exuberantly chomped. I also had a Reuben that was pretty darn tasty, on marbled rye that the waiter specifically recommended, with hella fries dragged through mayonnaise. I also inherited like half of H—’s “Dyablo” burger (jack, bacon, jalapeños, roasted red peppers, hot sauce) that was super good despite the misspelling. I don’t know what is wrong with that kid that he doesn’t even finish his burger after a 105-mile mountain bike ride, but at least he likes wings. And it’s not like I’m complaining about the secondhand food.

The really messed up thing is that I’d brought a four-pack of Fieldwork IPA all the way from California to drink with Pete après-bike (or should I say après-vélo?), but we were so shattered from the ride, we just didn’t feel like drinking. And we didn’t. Okay … now are you getting a sense of how hard this ride was?

Long version

This long version is truly long, even for an albertnet post. What can I say? It was a long ride. If you think reading this is hard, go try riding White Rim sometime.

You may have noticed from the map above that there’s almost nothing on it but the crenulations representing topography, and one little actual paved road, that being Country Road 143 that we were on for a few miles. No towns, no trailheads, no warming huts, no bailout roads to civilization. Granted, if the map were more complete it would show the little visitor’s station we stopped at, ~80 miles into the ride. Other than that there was just nothing and almost nobody. But we had each other.

Wait, did I just imply that having each other was a good thing? Honestly, endeavoring to keep up with three NCAA Division I cross-country runners is one of the dumber things I’ve ever done. Yeah, sure, they were on bikes, which is more Pete’s and my thing, but then, fitness is fitness, and youth is youth. Plus, they had their inevitable rivalry, leading to irrationally exuberant accelerations. For the first 40 miles, it was more or less a death march hanging on for dear life behind them. It wasn’t just hard physically (I mean, duh) but psychologically too … I kept thinking, wait, we’re only 20 miles in  and the temperature is climbing and I’m already suffering and shouldn’t I be saving some energy for later, and specifically for that monster climb, instead of accepting this breakneck pace? I didn’t realize until I looked at the bike computer data afterward that these first 40 miles were almost all uphill. That’s because everything is so  wide open, you can’t get a sense for gentle gradients. I just thought it was the rough terrain and the pace that were making it so hard.

Obviously it’s only the shallow climbing that’s invisible. It’s pretty hard to miss a steeper climb like this one:

That’s the Green River in the background there, BTW.

Climbing on a road bike, on asphalt, is hard enough, but at least that’s just a matter of turning the pedals. On a really rough trail—and I was surprised how legit and rocky and complicated a lot of this trail was, compared to the dirt road I’d naïvely imagined—you also need to steer around the bigger rocks, bumps, etc. because at such low speed, they can stop you cold. Sometimes you can’t avoid an obstacle and have to use body English to pop your bike over it, one wheel at a time. Meanwhile, the whole time you have to lean really far over the front wheel or else it’ll lift up off the ground (even if only slightly) at which point you lose the steering and your brain shuts the whole operation down so you unclip from the pedals and are dead stopped. Riding with your weight this far forward, you have barely enough traction on the rear tire, so it slips from time to time, costing you priceless forward momentum. Add in that you don’t know how long the climb goes on, and it’s hard to have faith you can make it to the top.

Sometimes we did give up and walk our bikes, which was a major letdown. For example, check out the pitch shown below, coming at the end of a prolonged section of brutally tough climbing. Pete almost made it. I was maybe 2/3 of the way before realizing (or at least imagining) that if I waited until the even steeper bit ahead to bail out, my shoes might slide out from under me. Pro tip: as you start to walk your bike, grab the rear brake to lock that wheel, or the bike will drag you backwards down the slope.

By the way, the shade you see in  the above pic is almost all we got the whole day.

We started getting some nice downhills. I don’t mean the super-steep technical ones where you’re hanging your ass over the rear wheel to keep from face-planting (though we did get those too, and they were glorious) but the more relaxing easy ones where all you have to do is steer around the larger rocks (because who wants a flat tire or other mechanical out in the middle of nowhere?). Unfortunately it’s really hard to take photos or make movies while doing these, but one of the young bucks somehow managed:

It was bumpy enough that I lost five bottles, only four of which I managed to retrieve. Three losses were from the side pockets of my CamelBak. I didn’t use the bladder with it, because I needed room for tools, the first aid kit, food, and five water bottles. (If you’re interested in everything a seasoned mountain biker has in his pack, click here.)

The trickiest part of these downhills was that you’d occasionally hit soft sand, which can sometimes seem to grab your wheel and twist it, so your bike starts to jackknife. Gave me the heebie-jeebies every time.

We stopped for rests periodically, especially in the more scenic places like this chasm we peered into.

Here is our lunch stop. (This happened to be around 1 p.m. but really, every food stop was lunch. It’s like when you’re in the grocery store checkout at like 4 p.m. and the manager says to your cashier, “Go take your lunch now.”) Look at H— peering at his PBJ. He’s probably thinking, “Come ‘ere, you.”

At around the southeastern-most point of the loop, at say 5 o’clock (i.e., the position of a hypothetical minute hand on a clock, not the actual time), several of our phones chirped because we randomly had a cell signal for the first time all day. We stopped and fired off some emails, because after all this was a workday. Kidding! But I did snap the below photo and texted it to my brother, and he actually got it!

By the time I tried to send the same pic to my daughter, the signal had evaporated. Probably it had been bounced off a passing jet, maybe even a spy plane, and was a flash in the pan.

I was about to type a thousand words about how majestic and architectural the landscape was, but instead here’s another photo.

If you’ve ever wondered how these formations got to be how they are, and especially if you’re a female reader, let me explain (or mansplain) it all from a geologic perspective. Wait! Come back! I was kidding! I have no idea how this land got to be this way. I’ve had it explained to me half a dozen times over the decades but I never listened. It’s complicated. Something about sedimentary, igneous (or is it Ignatius?) deposits, once submerged by an ancient ocean, or was it crushed by a glacier? I actually have no idea.

You might be wondering: does Canyonlands have anything to compete with the amazing pupfish of Death Valley? Well, not that I saw, but there were occasionally these darling little cactus flowers. (Bike tire included for scale.)

I count at least two or three species of insect in there. It’s like a big bug party in the desert!

While we were stopped for that photo and some chow, an SUV rumbled slowly by. A puffy middle-aged woman was in the front passenger seat and gave us a bored glance. She was wearing one of those ring-shaped neck pillows people use on long airline flights. Perhaps she was just doing this drive for the commemorative bumper sticker and couldn’t wait for it to be over (though that’s exactly what she was doing).

At around mile 60, an inventory of pain had assembled itself in my brain and my inner voice was whining. My back hurt (mainly from the strain of climbing). My right collarbone hurt where the strap of the (overloaded) CamelBak was pressing down, because of the heads of the screws holding the plate in there that fixed my once-broken collarbone. All my toes felt broken, which tends to happen on really long rides (despite my excellent footwear). Perhaps most of all, my hands hurt from my bike’s continuous impacts with rocks and hard-edged slabs we kept bumping up on and down off of. I’d brought long-finger cycling gloves and short-finger ones, the former without padding and the latter with gel, and ultimately opted for the long-finger. I don’t know what I was thinking … they’re just what I normally wear mountain biking, for protection against poison oak. But was I going to find that here? (I can sense you shaking your head.) I couldn’t switch to the padded gloves because G— had forgotten his gloves and was thrilled I had a spare pair. Would it be a dick move to demand that he trade with me now? Yeah, it would, dang it. So my palms were really raw. Have you ever gotten a little overexcited while tenderizing a pork chop, working out some demons perhaps, and you realize the meat has become so roughed up and soft it’s almost like moss? That’s how I imagined my hands had become.

Eventually we made it to the base of the dreaded Shafer climb. G— and H— took off ahead, ostensibly to make it to the ranger station before it closed. We didn’t actually know its hours, and it was already 4:30 p.m. with zero chance of getting there before 5 anyway, but the young bucks were out of water and thus desperate. Here’s Pete looking back at me as if to say, “Okay, they’ve got enough of a head start. I’m going hunting … see you at the summit.” The look I returned, as I snapped this photo, said, “Release the hounds!”

(Full disclosure: Pete’s look back surely meant nothing of the kind, nor did my return glance. I’m adding these subtexts only now, to give this report some drama and the shimmer of fiction.)

In the photo above, if you look straight up from the top of Pete’s head (zoom in!), you can see the switchbacks we would have to face.

Pete’s chase was swift and ruthless. The climb was ruthless but not swift, not for me. This next photo is from two minutes later. Not only has Pete caught H— but look how far ahead he is of me! I think I even used my camera’s zoom for this shot!

I rode my own pace, having released myself off the back on my own recognizance as I so often do. I know better than to try to run with the bulls. Here’s a little video documentary I made.

If you pause video that near the beginning to look at my bike computer readout, you’ll note I was going only 4 mph. Go ahead, mock me … but also consider the grade was 14%. (See what I mean about the wide open topography making the grade look shallower?)

Almost twenty years ago, my wife and I did a mountain bike vacation in Moab and, for shits and giggles, took a sunset river cruise narrated by a quasi-historian. The script he read from was cheesier than all-you-can-eat fondue. Our favorite line, delivered toward the end after a long pause (calculated to build suspense, I suppose), was, “And now, in the darkness of night, we ponder the legacy that is ours.” So pompous, and so meaningless! My wife and I like to trot out that utterance from time to time. And perhaps pondering our legacy is what G— was doing when I came around a bend to see him stopped.

Or maybe he was just enjoying the shade and taking a breather. I’d kind of been counting on these runners to eventually tire so they’d ease up on us. I’d asked beforehand how long their longest event is; it’s the 10K which takes them like half an hour. Obviously their training runs are longer, but then nobody runs for eight or nine hours at a stretch … and yet this kind of duration is typical for Pete and me on our monster rides. (Our 2022 slogfest took 8:37:47 and our 2023 gravel adventure took 8:37:32.) H— , T—, and G— are like greyhounds, whereas I’m more like a lobster lumbering across the ocean floor. As I distance cyclist I am kind of made for this, or more to the point I kind of made myself for this. We’d only ridden for six or so hours; I was just starting to find my groove.

I could still see Pete and H—, utterly dwarfed by the canyon wall.

The landscape was so literally awesome, so  sublime, that I kept trying—but always in vain—to  capture its grandeur with my phone camera. Perhaps my best effort is this accidental video, that was supposed to be a still photo. Though it’s obviously pretty sloppy camerawork, I think it captures the feeling of this climb better than any of my stills.

Switchback after switchback, the climb went on and on. Obviously I was suffering hugely, but at least the trail was smooth here and I settled in to a rhythm of sorts. If you read my posts from my epic French Alps cycling “vacation,” you’ll understand my point when I say this kind of suffering is the devil I know. (If you missed that series, cancel all your meetings and click here.) I felt like I could pedal like this all day, and probably would. At least it was easy to appreciate the progress I’d made, as shown by this photo. (SUV and T—, or maybe it’s G—, included for scale.)

Just before the summit of the climb, I caught Peter and H—. (The only explanation for this is that H— was hurting and had slowed down, and Peter hung back for some quality father/son time, to witness the lad’s suffering.) At the top, H— wobbled off the trail, set down his bike, and lay down on the ground to rest. Pete and I rode a couple miles to the Visitor’s Center to see about water. It was closed but had a spigot and we filled all our bottles. Bringing them back to the young bucks gave me a welcome paternal feeling, and I reconsidered my earlier plan to file charges of Elder Abuse against them.

We woke up H—, topped up everyone’s bottles, and set back out for what we thought would be a 20-mile descent, the first five miles or so being on actual asphalt. Instead it was rolling (if mostly downhill). That might not sound too bad, but each time the road tipped upward, it was like a slap in the face. Our group broke apart and regrouped a few times and over the last few miles I did some quality wheel-sucking behind T—, who’d caught a second wind at like mile 95. At one point I actually hallucinated and thought I saw buildings, like a small town, in the distance, indicating that we’d made a horrible navigational error and were screwed. “Do you see those buildings down there?” I asked T—. He looked at me as though I were crazy, which I suppose in the moment I almost was.

Eventually we reached the cars, our ride actually done, and busted out the cooler. There were only three Cokes, which were snapped up by the lads, but Pete and I were happy to make do with beers. Here is our official post-ride Beck’st:

Fortunately Mother Nature had put out some nice furniture to relax on. I love how, in this final photo, H— appears to be deep in thought, doubtless pondering his life choices and how he ended up here.

I can’t wait to return next year. With an SUV. And a neck pillow.

Stats

• 105.1 miles
• 8:44:05 ride time
• 12 mph average speed (really not bad for mountain biking…)
• 7,283 feet cumulative elevation gain (based on Pete’s Strava, presumably more accurate than the bike computer value shown above)
• 6,207 feet maximum elevation
• 120 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 4,316 kilocalories burned

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How to Achieve Inbox Zero

Introduction

In last week’s post I made the case for Inbox Zero: that is, for being so on top of your email that your inbox is virtually empty (say, a dozen or fewer emails). To recap, Inbox Zero is about being more effective with email, meaning you’ll possibly read less of it, definitely re-read much less of it, and stop missing important emails because they were buried under all the unimportant ones. The goal is to make better use of our time, so that we spend less of it doing email. In this post, I am going to explain exactly how to achieve and maintain Inbox Zero, based on how I’ve managed it for the last several years.

[A note on the art above: a concerned reader was aghast at my use of A.I. to create the art for last week’s post. She was so keen to keep it real, she created this original art just for me—and you.]

One prerequisite

There is an important prerequisite to achieving Inbox Zero, at least the way I do it: you have to use Gmail as your email interface. This doesn’t mean you have to use a Gmail account. (More on this later.) Now, I’m not some major Google fanboy, and they didn’t sponsor or promote this post (or this blog) in any way. Google makes its money through ads, and I’m not big on advertising. I also don’t appreciate how their YouTube algorithm tried to addict me to sexy yoga videos. Moreover, I bristled at the original Gmail because the consumer version, when it came out, had ads that were generated based on its bot reading the email message content. This so unnerved me, I created a technique to stymie it. But Google eventually ditched the ads, probably after reading this blog and realizing I was right. (Yes, that was a joke.) But now I’m sold on Gmail.

When my employer switched to Google Workspace, and Gmail became a part of my daily life, I realized not only that its conversation view is much more efficient, but that the use of labels instead of folders makes all kinds of sense. In fact, labels are the key to maintaining Inbox Zero. So if you’re still committed to using Outlook, this post isn’t going to be of much help.

If you don’t use Gmail, don’t stop reading! If you’re not among the 76% of Americans use Gmail for their personal email, you can still keep your Yahoo or Hotmail account, and set up the Gmail interface (both on your laptop and your Android app) to pull in email from either (or both) of those platforms. The Gmail interface works great for my personal email (which is on my own domain, via the Yahoo/Turbify platform), along with my Gmail, of course. It’s nice to get everything in one place.

(I’m not going to explain how to port your Yahoo or Hotmail over to Gmail … that kind of task is what ChatGPT is for. It did a great job guiding me through the process. When one of its instructions doesn’t work—which will happen, as these interfaces undergo minor changes all the time—ChatGPT can course-correct very well. In fact, if you told ChatGPT, “I am having trouble with the POP3 settings because my neighbor is having a huge party and they’re making too much noise,” GPT will help by asking, “Would you like me to draft a speech or brief note that you can present to ask them to quiet down?” And if upon reading this draft you respond, “The note needs to be shorter and more emphatic because I want to write it in Sharpie on my husband’s bare chest,” GPT will accommodate that request as well. So, you may now wonder, why wouldn’t you just ask ChatGPT how to get to Inbox Zero? The answer is, because it’s only really good at rote technical configurations, not at strategy. Yet.)

My Inbox Zero strategy

As with all techniques for everything, there are five steps to reaching and maintaining Inbox Zero. No, this methodology won’t get you to where you literally have zero emails in your inbox, but when you start doing start-of-day triage and some catch-up throughout the day, you’ll get to where most of the time you’ll have relatively few. The crucial thing is to have no more  in your inbox than Gmail’s first page can display. The default is 50 threads. Anything that doesn’t fit on this first page is guaranteed to be neglected, because the chances of you ever seeing it are negligible. (Sure, you could find those emails with the search feature, but how will you know to search if you don’t know the email exists? Do you routinely search on “invoice past due”? Or are you waiting for someone to say, “What? You didn’t see my email?” so you can search on their address?)

With no further ado, here are the steps.

Step #1 – Create a few filters and a couple of new labels

This step is mainly necessary for your work email, and is optional if you work for a small business. But if you work for a large corporation, you surely get a ton of email that’s broadcast daily from HR, your marketing department, news feeds, vendors, and various other non-personal sources. You are generally not expected to respond to these emails, so they should definitely be considered lower priority. They shouldn’t compete for precious visible-inbox real estate with any email that a human took some trouble writing.

Thus, you should create filters that target the daily all-hands update emails and filter them out such that they don’t even hit your inbox. Since these messages are not as useless as direct marketing solicitations, you’ll want to also label them (automatically!) in case you need to find them later. Figure out how many labels you need: you might have a “Corp updates” label and another for “Industry news,” or you might just have a catch-all for “Bulletins etc.” Now, I know filtering out emails so they never hit your inbox can seem scary, but bear in mind two things. One, if you haven’t been doing Inbox Zero, lot of emails have always been invisible to you anyway, by being buried among others and/or not on the first page of your inbox. Two, you can always peek at the mass of unfiltered emails by clicking the “All Mail” link down the left of your screen:

(If you don’t see this “All Mail” link it’s because Gmail has hidden it; click the “More” link to expose it. In the snapshot at left, the view is expanded so there’s a “Less” link; that’s where the “More” link would be shown if this view were collapsed.)

For your personal email, the first filter should get rid of unasked-for solicitations like the daily email you get from Speedo because you once bought that bathing suit from them (you know, the one that didn’t even fit so you returned it). Filter out all these quasi-spammers—the companies you did choose to do business with who are now like remoras. (Myself, I have a Hotmail account that I use for all e-commerce so I can more easily ignore that spam. If I need to file a receipt I log into the Hotmail, find it, and forward it to my personal email. Otherwise I ignore Hotmail entirely; it’s at Inbox 48,376.)

With these various filters in place, at least you’ve somewhat mitigated the fusillade of daily emails, hopefully reducing it to under fifty so that facing your Inbox for daily triage will be less daunting.

Next, if this is your work email, create a label that is your boss’s name, and set up a filter that applies this label to each of this person’s emails to you—without removing the email from your Inbox. Make this a bold, perhaps red label. If you’re lucky and your boss is named Aaron, this label will automatically show up at the top of your list of labels (which is also your list of folders … more on this later). If your boss’s name isn’t Aaron, put an underscore character at the beginning to move it up. Going forward, instead of starting your workday by perusing your inbox, you can start in your “Boss” folder (or, if your emails don’t pile up too fast, you can still start in the inbox and just look for that bright red label.) The idea here is that the very first emails you should read are the ones from the person who has direct influence on your salary. In the below example, the person’s boss is named Zoe, so two underscore characters are required.

You’ll also want to create a label called “_Follow-up.” Make this a bright color, too. The underscore character before the “F” is to move this label to(ward) the top of the list. The “_Follow-up” label is important for both your work and personal email … more on this later.

Does it make sense to automatically flag emails from your spouse, the way you did with your boss? Perhaps, but only if you get a lot of email from him or her. (Mine just yells across the house, like me.)

Again, ChatGPT can walk you through how to set up the actual filters and create and color-code the labels. All kinds of helpful people have already documented this process in various forums etc., so ChatGPT can research and distill that process for you.

Step #2: Clean slate

Obviously if you’re currently buried in thousands of emails after years of neglect, you’ll need to start with something other than mere triage … it’s a little late for that. To achieve a clean slate, take a deep breath and ask yourself what the odds are that you’re really going to ever read emails 51 through 25,359 in your inbox. Once you have accepted that the answer is “hell no,” you need to just archive them all, in one fell swoop. First navigate to your inbox. Then find the little checkbox just below the “Search mail” field at the top of the Gmail interface. If you hover your cursor over it, a tool-tip will appear that says “Select.” Check that box to select the first 50 emails, or better yet, accept the offer to select all 25,359 of them (i.e., however many you have total). Then click the icon next to the checkbox that looks like a folder with a down-arrow on it, as shown below. This will archive all selected messages, which means they’ll no longer be in your inbox. Where do they go? Into the ether. Probably the same place electricity goes when you turn out the light. They’re still on the mail server, though, and you can still see them by selecting “All Mail” as described above. But you don’t need to see them. They’re dead to you. Get on with your life.

[A note on the screenshots in this post: some are a bit hard to read. Click on a picture to enlarge it.]

The only problem with that mass archival is that nothing is labeled, so it’ll be hard to find past emails. That’s the consequence of waiting this long to get organized. Proper implementation of Inbox Zero means being organized going forward, not just clutter-free. Thus, once you have zero emails in your inbox (or maybe half a dozen new emails since they continuously pop up out of nowhere), you need to do regular triage on all the new stuff.

Step #3: Triage and pre-labeling

Okay, let’s assume you now have a clean slate and an inbox that doesn’t represent years of neglect. When you open Gmail first thing in the morning, you’ll likely still see dozens of emails, and you’ll start to panic, but don’t. Just follow these rules in making your way through the pile.

Start with the boss. Remember that new filter you created that automatically labels emails from your boss? Read those first. (If this is your personal email, and you created a rule to automatically flag messages from, say, your kid who’s a terrified college freshman, start with those.)

Jettison spam. If you see spam or quasi-spam messages, delete them on sight. You can go down the list of threads selecting all the chaff via the checkbox, then click the garbage can icon on your toolbar. This is incredibly satisfying. If you’re seeing a lot of spam from a single source, create a filter to kill it off forever. (Zap Zappos! See ya later, Speedo!)

(I had to cheat with the snapshot above … that’s a view of the Promotions tab, where Gmail automatically moves the quasi-spam solicitations. If you don’t see inbox tabs like Promotions, Social, and Updates, enable them in Settings/Categories.)

Scan for important messages first. Scan through the subject lines for anything that looks important, like one from a friend you’re making plans with, or a work colleague you’re knee-deep in a project with, or a thread you’ve been working that has new activity, and open that first. Scanning never worked before, because you had too many emails. Now it’s actually a reasonable way to triage.

Pre-label your threads. For every email you open, all you’re doing right now is skimming it to judge its level of importance, and—crucially—labeling it. This is the most important rule: don’t wait until later to “file” it. Label it now, and it’ll kind of almost be filed already. (More on the “why” of this in a minute.) Note that you’re not moving this using the very obvious button on the tool bar (i.e., the one shown below). That will remove the thread from your inbox. You want to label it while leaving it in the inbox, for this triage phase.

Instead of clicking “Move,” click on the three-dot “kabob” icon (if you hover over it, a tooltip will tell you it’s the “More” icon) and select “Label as” from the drop-down menu. It’ll show you a list of all your labels, and you can either just scroll down and find the right label, or you can start typing the name of a label and it’ll zip right to it. Click on the label name, if you’re only applying one label, and you’re done.

You won’t need to bother with the kebab menu if you switch to the advanced toolbar. Here’s how to switch:

Then you’ll have a dedicated button to apply a label without moving the thread:

The great thing about labels in Gmail, vs. folders in platforms like Outlook, is that you can apply more than one label to an email thread. That way, it’ll show up in multiple folders. Well, not folders exactly … that’s the confusing thing about labels in Gmail. Yes, they label message threads, but they also act like folders. (Kind of like how light is both a particle and a wave.) When it comes to classifying a thread, you’re applying labels. But labels act like folders when you’re at the main Gmail screen and want to navigate your threads. It’s like your threads can be in two or more folders at once.

Let me give you an example. Several of my friends and family members like beer as much as I do. We send each other Beck’sts, which are beer-themed emails (click here for details). Often one Beck’st begets another, and we have stirring dialogues not just about our beers, but about other topics like being middle-aged, being a parent, etc. (Oddly, a fair bit of my modern correspondence begins with a Beck’st.) Since these threads aren’t just about beer, but also about friends and family, I want to label them accordingly. So I select “Label as” from the drop-down, and check boxes next to all the appropriate labels:

When I’m done, the thread will have all the labels it needs. This means I can hunt for it in my brother B—’s folder, or my friend D—’s folder, etc. If I remember, for example, that D— wrote me about becoming a grandpa, I can search on “grandpa” in his folder whether or not I remember (years from now) that he announced this via a Beck’st.

(Sometimes, you’ll have labeled and archived—i.e., filed—a thread only to receive a new response to it, perhaps from someone on the distro who hadn’t chimed in before. The thread will show up in the Inbox again, at which point you can add the new correspondent’s label to it.)

Remember, you don’t maintain Inbox Zero by taking action on every email right away—you’re just labeling it during triage when this is so easy to do. Triage consists of figuring out whom the email is from, and what it’s about (if you bother to file/label emails by topic). You’re labeling it now, so you never have to revisit it again. Then you can actually get some work done, knowing the most important emails have at least been read and you know what’s waiting for action. Disorganization is distracting!

Again, the pre-labeling is the game-changer … if you try to file emails later, you’ll waste gobs of time re-reading each thread to try to remember what it’s about. Label it the first time you see it, as this will only take seconds. Then, filing later is just a matter of jettisoning it from your inbox.

Flag for follow-up.  If an email will obviously require a reply or some other action, don’t just label it by sender and/or topic—also apply the “_Follow-up” label you created in step #1. Some email is just information, and some needs action. This is the best way to differentiate. Also, by selecting the “_Follow-up” label/folder, you’re basically creating a to-do list of emails requiring action. 

To add to my exhortation to pre-label, the key difference between an email folder (like Outlook uses) and the labels that Gmail uses is that a label doesn’t, by itself, move the email. It just gives it an identity that will persist forever (unless you decide to un-label it). A labeled email is breathtakingly close to being a filed email … all you have to do is get it out of the inbox (by archiving it, or removing the “Inbox” label, which amount to the same thing).

Step #4: Archive messages

Once you’ve read or at least scanned all the emails in your inbox, it’s time to tackle the ones you labeled “_Follow-up.” Since this (probably) won’t be that many threads, you can see them all at once (perhaps by clicking the “_Follow-up” folder, or just eyeballing them in the non-overrun inbox), and decide which are the highest priority. Once they’re dealt with, you can remove the “_Follow-up” label and archive them. If there are emails remaining in your inbox, perhaps a few of them should stay there (to be visible for a while, even if they don’t require action) but others can be archived right away, and all of them eventually. (There’s really no point leaving them in your inbox forever, especially when they’re already labeled.)

There are two ways to archive (i.e., file) email threads: the Archive button, and removing the “Inbox” label. Here’s how you’d archive via the button:

Or, you can click the little “x” on the “Inbox” label; now this message will no longer appear in the inbox.

This second method has the benefit of being applicable across labels. For example, it’s how you’d remove the “_Follow-up” label after action is taken. So when you think your inbox is getting out of hand, you can start at the bottom and work your way up, deciding when it’s time to click the “x” next to the “Inbox” and/or “_Follow-up” labels as appropriate. When you’re done, not only will you be closer to Inbox Zero, but you’ll have made great progress in your filing. If you get behind on that, but realize 20 of your emails are no longer timely, you can just check them all and click Archive. Since they already had labels, they’re now correctly filed, and you didn’t have to reopen them!

A final note on labels: I recommend that, upon sending an email that is not a response (i.e., starting a new thread), you go into your Sent items and slap a label on the message. For example, when I send a Beck’st, I’ll label it, so that even if nobody responds it’ll still show up in my Beck’st folder. And if somebody does respond, his response will already be labeled.

Step #5: Segregate email accounts (optional)

It’s not uncommon to juggle multiple email accounts. Over the past few years, I’ve had my personal email in Outlook; my high school mountain bike coaching emails on a different address, also in Outlook; and my Gmail, which is non-work business email (e.g., LinkedIn stuff). Now I’ve collapsed all three into my Gmail interface, to take advantage of all the features described above.

That said, I still like to have my personal email separate from business, so I created a rule that adds an “Inbox – albertnet account” label on all emails addressed to my personal address, and has these messages skip the main (Gmail) inbox. As with my other inbox, messages are automatically labeled as they come in, and then when I’ve responded (or have decided I don’t need to) I archive them by removing the “Inbox – albertnet account” label.

If your Gmail interface manages multiple addresses, you can set any of your addresses as default, so when you create a message it’ll come from that address, unless you manually change it for that thread. When you reply to a message, it will be sent from whatever account received the email, unless you manually change it for that thread.

Conclusion

I’ll grant you this has been a long, complicated post. It might be pretty daunting to imagine embracing this approach. But to recall last week’s post, an Adobe study of 1,000 white collar Americans found that on average they spent 8.9 hours a day between personal and work email … wouldn’t it be nice to streamline this? Wouldn’t you rather learn one methodology that makes you more efficient, than waste valuable time on into the future on this unavoidable activity? I’m here to tell you that I’m far more efficient and effective since I adopted Inbox Zero … you can be, too.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why You Should Embrace Inbox Zero

Introduction

How is your inbox looking right now? Would you say you’re on top of your email? Are you familiar with the term “Inbox Zero”? And why am I asking you all these questions when you have no easy way to answer me? Have I lost it?

Inbox Zero is the rare state of being so on top of your email, there is literally nothing in your inbox. This is more mythic than real—kind of a holy grail. But that’s not even completely accurate, because (as I have learned via some light research) not everybody even thinks it’s even a worthwhile ambition. In this post I will evaluate some of the widely held pros and cons of Inbox Zero, and establish why it is actually an unalloyed good thing. This is Part I of a two-part series. Part II, next week, will give you my step-by-step approach—which really does work—to achieving and maintaining Inbox Zero. This post is about convincing you to do it.

[“Art” above by ImageFX. No rights reserved.]

Before we begin…

Look, I know it’s really annoying that I’m organized and have achieved Inbox Zero and am flossing it here. I will also acknowledge that it’s really unfair how when you shoot spitwads at your screen to spite me, I can’t even see them. You know what else is annoying about me? I always get my taxes done on time (if only in the nick of time); I take great care of my teeth; and, when my wife is out of town and I’m living a streamlined bachelor-style existence, I even achieve Dishwasher Zero and Laundry Zero. Feel free to hate me for all this. If it helps at all, my body has very little core strength. I can barely run at all, and when my kids see me try, they burst out laughing. I’m a notorious cheap bastard. I pee on the rim. In fact I have lots of bad habits and I’m not trying to start a fan club here. My inbox is arguably the only part of my life I have largely under control, so try not to begrudge me it. Okay? Are we good?

Inbox Zero haters

I’m not going to get into a lot of history here, but the term Inbox Zero was coined by a guy named Merlin Mann, who gave a Google Tech Talk describing his methodology in achieving it. (Why wouldn’t you just watch that Tech Talk video instead of reading albertnet? Because it’s too long—you don’t have time. This post will take you five minutes, tops.) Mann himself had been planning a whole book about Inbox Zero, but eventually became disgruntled and halfway disavowed his own belief in the whole concept, or at least his practice of it. His book was eventually abandoned (either by Mann or the reading public, I can’t tell which). This opened the door to naysayers like Mike Sturm who wrote an article in Medium called “Inbox Infinity” with the tagline, “Why I’ve stopped caring about how many emails are in my inbox, and why you should, too.” Sturm maintains that it’s more important to focus on what truly contributes to life goals and well-being, which means taking a balanced approach to email management, blah blah blah.

This is defeatist bullshit. A “balanced approach”? Either you use a methodology or you don’t. It doesn’t work to “balance” your approach across two or more different systems. That’s like a “balanced approach” to birth control where you sometimes use a condom, sometimes practice abstinence, and sometimes pull-&-pray. Look, there is a best approach to your inbox and you should just use it. Sturm tried Inbox Zero, he failed, and so he tried to not just move the goalposts but redefine the entire game. Which he doesn’t get to do. The reality is, email is like a burning bush and we have to beat it back or it will consume us. I suspect you wouldn’t be almost 700 words into this post if you didn’t think there’s some truth to this.

Of course Sturm isn’t the only person who seems completely willing to neglect his or her email. For decades I have been hearing all kinds of people talk about how far behind they are on it; it’s practically a default. “Man, I have 476 unread emails,” a person will say, almost as if bragging. Why do people admit this kind of thing? Am I supposed to be impressed? It’s like somebody saying, “Dude, I literally haven’t had a bowel movement in 12 days.” I don’t want to hear it! You know what else is annoying? When you send an important email to a friend, family member, or work contact and they never see it because they’re so overwhelmed. Maybe you’re a small business owner and you invoice a client and don’t get paid, and then the client is like, “Oh, you emailed me? I didn’t see it! I’m so behind on email!” Look: if you’re a grown-up, that means you pay your bills, you do your taxes, and you keep up with email. I’m not interested in your excuses, particularly the sugar-coated versions of “I am a hopeless correspondent.” If you wouldn’t say to me, “I’ve stopped wiping my ass because I’d rather focus on life goals and well-being,” then don’t tell me you never saw my email.

Often, resistance to Inbox Zero (or passive failure to embrace it) is based on pessimism or resignation. This article in Ladders describes a survey of “1,001 Americans with ‘white-collar’ jobs” which found that 24% believe Inbox Zero is “impossible.” The survey also found that 27% called the effort “borderline OCD.” I find this second category pretty annoying. As with the blanket pejorative term “anal retentive” (a harsh accusation based on the baseless, widely discredited pet theories of a known clown), “borderline OCD” attempts to label perfectly valid behavior as being somehow pathological or at least unseemly. What if there were a psychological term for the polar opposite of OCD? Like, “Passive Lackadaisical Disorder,” or PLD? How come when a person tries to be meticulous, precise, and/or efficient, people cast aspersions, but those who are basically out to lunch get a free pass?

Who strives for Inbox Zero?

Personally, I don’t know of a single other person who achieves, or even tries to achieve, Inbox Zero. This doesn’t mean I’m not surrounded by people who do it and just don’t bother to mention it, of course. Instead of pestering my friends about this (what am I gonna do, blast out a giant group email?), I did some light research, and was surprised by what I found. The Ladders article asserts that 55% of people in their survey claim to have achieved Inbox Zero (which is a little hard to believe considering that 51% of those responding called it either “borderline OCD” or “impossible”). An Adobe study described here, also of 1,000 white collar Americans, found that 55% of Americans at least attempt to achieve Inbox Zero. It also notes that among 18- to 24-year-olds, 68% strive for Inbox Zero. (This flies in the face of a rumor I’ve often heard that younger people have given up on email altogether in favor of social media platforms. This same 18- to 24-year-old cohort leads the nation in checking work email before getting into the office and while on vacation.)

So: if you think Inbox Zero is just for weirdos like me, think again.

The case for Inbox Zero

You know what contributes to goals and well-being? Managing your time, and freeing your brain from the anxiety of a) knowing you’re not on top of things, and b) knowing you’re not doing anything about it. Inbox Zero is about being more effective with email, meaning you’ll possibly read less of it, definitely re-read much less of it, and stop missing important emails because they were buried under all the unimportant ones.

Here’s a sad story. For years I never made any attempt to manage my Gmail inbox, because I hadn’t traditionally used that account for real, person-to-person email. (It was originally connected to my LinkedIn account and that was about it.) I never give out my Gmail address, but Google has its ways of disseminating it (such as through auto-fill with other Gmail users). Surprisingly enough, a reader of this blog, instead of using the “email me here” link that’s at the bottom of every post, got my Gmail address from my Blogger profile and emailed me, at my Gmail address, about one of my posts. The post was a blow-by-blow race report of a Tour de Suisse stage, and included this tidbit:

The emailer was an employee of the aforementioned salad dressing company and here is what he wrote:

Dear Mr. Dana,

My name is Michael A— and I am working for Bruno’s Best. I just saw one of your blogs about the tour de Suisse 2014 in the internet. Nothing against the guys from Gruyère. They produce great cheese, but I am confident that our salad dressing is not that bad as well. J

Just in case you never tried it and will visit Switzerland anytime in the future, you are invited for a dinner at our place. 

Starter : Salad with Bruno’s Salad Dressing
Main Course : Fondue with cheese from Gruyère

How does that sound to you ? J

BEST regards,

Michael A—

I’ve maintained Inbox Zero with my work and personal email for several years, but did not bother doing it with Gmail until a week or so ago, and that’s when I saw the above email, from 2016! It breaks my heart that I missed this email. Not only must I have seemed rude not to reply, but I actually did visit Switzerland (albeit in 2023, though he did say “anytime in the future”) and I could have had a nice meal with this friendly guy! If your inbox is a disaster, how do you know how many important emails like this you may have missed?

I think maintaining Inbox Zero is something everyone should strive for, instead of just putting their head in the sand because it seems so daunting. I think of it like credit card debt: once you fall behind, it can seem hopeless to catch up, so you just resolve not to think about it. Living beyond your means via the convenience of credit might feel like prioritizing what’s important, like family, life goals, well-being, etc., but isn’t throwing money away on interest a pretty big deal? About 47-48% of Americans carry a credit card balance (according to Bankrate and Lending Tree), leading to a net $1.2 trillion in credit card debt ... a curious parallel to the 45% of Americans who don’t worry about their inboxes. The cost of missing emails, forgetting to follow up, and carrying that nagging sense of being behind on work correspondence is of course harder to measure than interest payments … but it’s a cost nonetheless, and not just to the person whose inbox is a mess, but to the people trying to reach him.

But the best reason to adopt Inbox Zero is to make better use of our time, so that we spend less of it doing email. The Adobe study found that those surveyed spend 2.5 hours per day, during the week, on personal email, and 6.4 hours per workday  on business email. Combined, that’s over half our waking hours! Whether that factoid is actually true or not, email is a big part of our lives so it seems absurd not to try to streamline it. And it’s worth noting that the 18- to 24-year-old respondents, who more often strive for Inbox Zero, spend only 5.8 hours per day on work email vs. the overall 6.4. (Wouldn’t you like an extra 36 minutes of your life back each day?)

Over the last several years, since embracing Inbox Zero, I have spent far less time on the following:

• Rereading email
• Searching for an email I know (or perhaps only think) I caught a glimpse of at some point
• Setting aside time, eventually, to file previously read emails, a devastatingly inefficient process because I have to re-familiarize myself with the context of each email
• Doing damage control because I was out of the loop on an important matter I should have kept abreast of

In addition, I have a far easier time prioritizing which emails I should read first, since I’m looking at a handful of them instead of a giant pile.

Tune in next time…

If you already do Inbox Zero but want to see how my method may differ from yours, you are my kind of reader and should definitely check out my next post, “How to Achieve Inbox Zero.” And if you don’t do Inbox Zero today but I’ve piqued your interest, you are also my kind of reader and should definitely check out my next post. And if you feel bored by this entire discussion but have somehow made it to the end of this post, your are also my kind of reader and should definitely check out my next post. And finally, if you are now absolutely certain that you never want to read another word about Inbox Zero ever again, you are still my kind of reader and should click here, and then come back next week anyway.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Cycling Smackdown - Man vs. E-Bike

Introduction

If you’re a cyclist, you are probably now accustomed to being passed up by non-cyclists on e-bikes. When this happens, you may be puzzled, for a fraction of a second, by how some non-racer-type in a big puffy jacket sitting bolt upright on a humble commuting bike is so much faster than you, and then you realize. My eyes still dart to the down-tube of the person’s bike, to confirm the presence of a giant battery pack, as if to reassure myself that the universe still basically makes sense (if it does).

Mind you, I am 100% in favor of e-bikes … for adults. Especially for commuting. But I am also 100% not in favor of kids on e-bikes. If you agree, and particularly if you don’t, read on.

Cycling Smackdown – Man vs. E-Bike

I was on a solo road ride. I was not happy. I felt old and slow and fat. This isn’t very charitable and you likely wouldn’t call me fat, especially if I remembered to suck in my gut if I thought you were looking at me (but then, why would you be)? But being fat and feeling fat are entirely different things. I think anyone can feel fat. As a cyclist whose midsection used to be concave, I am admittedly unfair with myself.

I almost cut the ride short. I’ll confess I was indulging in a disgraceful amount of self-loathing and self-pity. Some days you have it, some you don’t, and I was really lagging, dragging a baggy, deflated ego behind me. I guess that’s the problem with ever having been really fast on a bike … you can’t help but compare. But enough of this.

At about the halfway point of my 30-mile loop, I turned onto Happy Valley Road to do “Half Happy,” which is halfway up what would be a pretty tough climb if you didn’t take the merciful turnoff down Sundown Terrace. The grade starts out at 1% for a tenth of a mile, then dabbles between 2% and 5% until a final really steep bit and then the turnoff. Half Happy is 2.5 miles at an average grade of 3.5%. (You can view the Strava segment here.)

As it happened, two teenagers on e-bikes turned onto Happy Valley Road just after I did (coming from either Happy Valley Lane or Hester Lane, just after Highway 24). One of the kids was on the kind of total cop-out e-bike that doesn’t even pretend to be a proper bicycle and that nobody actually pedals (see photo above). It’s more like a mini-bike, with the fat tires and the manual throttle. The kid yelled at me, something I didn’t quite hear (not expecting to be accosted). I said, “Huh?” and he yelled again, “You wanna race?!”

In the same millisecond that I parsed the question, I answered it. This was long before I devoted any thought to actually considering his proposal. It turns out my lizard brain is able to direct my vocal chords, tongue, and lips without needing to engage my neocortex, because I was surprised to suddenly hear myself yelling, “Yeah, I’ll race you! Let’s GO!” My naysaying inner voice—that is, the wimp in my brain that had been complaining the whole ride—said, “Oh boy. This is not going to end well.”

But my arguably better brain, the impulsive one that at least isn’t so pathetic, shouted down the inner voice, yelling (silently, internally), “GO! GO! GO! GO! GO!” And for better or for worse, this wilder, bolder part of my brain was, at this time, in charge of my body. I launched the hardest attack I’m capable of.

Here is where we started our race:

This is of course the part of the story where, according to classic narrative tradition, I am supposed to say, “I threw her in the big ring.” If this were fiction, that’s how I’d structure it. But full disclosure: I was already in the big chainring (i.e., higher gear range) because the climb is only 1% at this point. Nevertheless, as I accelerated, out of the saddle, I shifted up a few gears on the back so I could really dig in. It was crazy: out of absolutely nowhere, I just had this enormous rush of energy, like I was a surfer who’d just caught a 40-foot wave. I was flying! I glanced at my bike computer: I was doing over 25 mph!

The two kids, who’d been flanking me on either side, were quickly falling behind, and one of them—to my delight—yelled, “Oh, SHIT!” Needless to say, now I was fully committed and as the climb got steeper I had to go harder and harder. My suffering increased exponentially as the grade went from 1% to about 4%. I was still hauling ass in the big ring, and couldn’t believe how much energy I actually had. I felt strong like bull! But how long could this last? Of course I didn’t want to just start well and fizzle, because as we all know, he who laughs last laughs best.

Why did I even care about this pointless duel? It’s because, like I mentioned earlier, I hate to see kids on e-bikes. Why do their parents think kids need this product? Kids throughout time (well, at least for the last hundred years or so) have gotten around just fine on regular bicycles. It’s a great form of exercise and, given that riding a bike replaces walking or running—undeniably slow, hard, and inefficient ways to travel—kids have historically loved the increased speed and range that a good old fashioned bicycle can provide. Perhaps modern helicopter parents (or recovering helicopter parents), having habitually driven their kids everywhere, have finally had enough, and now refuse to drive them—but feel guilty about adding difficulty to their kids’ lives, and thus get them e-bikes to cushion the blow. Or maybe these parents think the kids will have more energy for studying and extracurricular activities if they don’t have to pedal their way around. Maybe these kids are so oversubscribed that they don’t have time to ride regular bikes from one activity to another. Or it could be these parents are not only sedentary and out of shape themselves, but lack the imagination to think of their kids as able-bodied people perfectly capable of pedaling their own asses around. Whatever the case, these parents are clearly defective. The kids, for their part, are lazy and shameless. If, when I was a kid, my parents had offered me an e-bike (had such a thing existed, and had they been defective parents), I’d have been offended. Thus, when I see a kid on an e-bike, it’s as galling as seeing a cat on a leash, or a dog in a stroller, or a toddler with an iPad.

How could I keep this pace up? Could I keep this up? A boss once advised me, when I had an important decision to make, “Go with your gut”—but then, after a moment’s reflection (and likely remembering the business zeitgeist of the moment), he added, “but make sure your decision is data-driven.” Well, which is it? I guess you can do both: decide what to do based on intuition, but then keep yourself honest via whatever objective metrics are at hand. My decision to pick up the gauntlet having been purely impulsive, it was now time to look at the data side of things. I figured the e-bikes, if they hadn’t been tampered with, were configured not to go over 15 mph, therefore as long as I could average higher than that, I could hold the kids off. The climb was close to 5% in places so my speed dipped below 15 here and there, but overall this pace seemed doable. I now know this analysis was flawed: having reviewed my own research on this, and corroborating this with friends, I’ve confirmed that Class 2 e-bikes such as these kids were riding will actually go up to 20 mph. Fortunately, my oxygen-starved brain couldn’t really do math (e.g., calculating how long I could go below 15 mph and still maintain that average), so I had to err on the side of going as hard as I could anyway, numbers be damned.

I allowed myself a glance back to see how my opponents were doing. The kids were still at it, but my gap was pretty good. The really peculiar thing was how blasé their effort looked … until I considered what “going hard” on an e-bike means. On a traditional bike, of course, the rider is out of the saddle, his body thrashing as he rocks the bike, generally with an agonized expression. Often his mouth will gape open; sometimes I wonder, during an all-out effort, if I’ve managed to unhook my jaw the way some snakes can. But on a Class 2 e-bike the pedals are practically just for show, and once you’ve twisted the throttle to full-on, there’s not much more you can do … the bike is doing all it can, and its capability is governed not by pluck, grit, determination, or anything glorious like that, but just by the limit of its design (i.e., its governor). There is no “digging deep” on an e-bike … the outcome in a man-vs.-e-bike contest is in the hands of the real cyclist. I focused on the road ahead and kept the pressure on. My legs and throat were burning, but by God, I kept the speed up. Stroke after stroke, my legs kept turning over the big gear. It was like those trick birthday candles that relight themselves every time they’re blown out.

Protracted suffering ensued which there is no point describing other than to say it seemed to go on and on. Finally I got to the really steep part, just over two miles since the start, and still no annoying teens had buzzed by me. I looked back again … and they were gone. (There can be no fixed finish line in such an impromptu race; suffice to say, I gave the kids all the runway they wanted to try to beat me.) Looking down at my bike computer, I noticed I’d actually increased my average speed for the whole ride! On a climb! Frickin’ glorious. The hapless teens, through their hubris, had done me a solid!

In a perfect world, those teenagers would declare my victory “iconic,” and—inspired by what’s evidently possible even for an ancient guy like me—they’d go get real bikes and become athletes. But surely the more likely scenario is they’ll tell their parents their e-bikes suck, and demand better ones. Or, they’ll go on YouTube and learn how to disable their bikes’ governors. But whatever their story is, I’m sure I have the better one to tell!

Epilogue

At what point did the kids give up? Who knows … but if they’d stayed at it all the way to my turnoff, they’d necessarily have beaten me. Going back to the data, I see that the KOM for this Strava segment, set by a far faster rider than I, was at an average speed of 19.4 mph ... that is, below what the kids’ e-bikes were able to sustain. I find it remarkable that the kids quit the effort even though it didn’t cause them any pain or suffering. I guess they weren’t being “data driven.” Maybe without the opportunity to consult ChatGPT, they just didn’t know what to do...

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