Is It Harder to Get Into a Top College Now?

Introduction

In my last post, I presented a list of college application “frequently asked questions.” Because research is a hassle, I didn’t do any. My answers were all based on what I’ve heard from parents in my community and from my older daughter. I regurgitated these people’s collected wisdom in slightly distorted form to inject humor. My main point was to satirize the doom-and-gloom attitude of pretty much everybody around me (except my wife, who also finds the prevailing attitude pointless and annoying).

                                                                     

That being said, I assumed that my answer to the first FAQ—”Is it harder to get into college now?”—was basically correct. (My answer was, “Yes, it absolutely is. Your child is way, way smarter, more industrious, and more resourceful than you, and yet won’t be able to sail through the process and attend a top college like you did.”) I took everybody’s word for it that top colleges really are more selective nowadays, simply because this opinion was always given with such an air of authority. I took it on faith that my community was actually basing this position on facts and research. It turns out that these people are all just a bunch of ninnies, mistaking fear for reality … Chicken Littles all, spouting falsehoods irresponsibly. This post debunks all that and presents a theory on the origin of this mass hysteria.

The conventional wisdom

All the parents and high school kids around me say the same thing: “It’s way harder getting into a top college than it used to be.” This is stated as irrefutable fact and when I’ve expressed skepticism, I’ve been shot down. The evidence given (if any) is the lower rate of acceptance—i.e., the number of rejected applications. So many more students are being rejected, the logic goes, our crop of kids may well be among them.

I have instinctively doubted this, and in trying to buck up my daughter I said, “It’s probably just more pack fodder. The field is larger, but not the front of the group that actually has a chance.” I chose this bike race analogy to try to make the dialogue briefer and a bit less dull. My point was, if you have 20 good racers who are all competitive, and then a bunch of poseurs buy fancy bikes and jump in to the race, without a prayer of placing high, your race hasn’t really gotten harder. It’s just gotten bigger.

My daughter refuted this counterpoint on the grounds that a) students with really good grades and SAT/ACT scores are being turned away, and b) everybody knows it’s gotten harder—this is just established fact. Out of sheer laziness and a sense that pessimists are usually right, I never pursued the truth. Until now.

The truth

The truth is, the increased difficulty of a top student getting into a top school has been greatly exaggerated. Here is a summary of my findings:

• The number of high school seniors is shrinking
• The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown
• Students apply to far more colleges than ever before, out of fear of being rejected and because electronic application methodologies like Common App have made this so easy to do
• This application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate
• This acceptance rate number is illusory because so many applicants are not qualified
• Colleges are deliberately encouraging behaviors that shrink this acceptance rate number, to appear more elite
• Looking at the metric that matters—the percentage of top students accepted by at least one top college—paints a picture that is astonishingly rosier

I will cite evidence from six articles (all from mainstream news magazines) to support all this. My conclusion? Virtually every member of my community owes my kid and me an apology for all the unwarranted anxiety they have caused by perpetuating this myth of increased selectivity.

And now, here is my point-by-point evidence of the above, to thoroughly document and explain what is really going on.

The number of high school seniors is declining

This article in The Atlantic states, “The number of American high school seniors is shrinking, having peaked in 2011.” This is also stated by Time magazine here. (Actually, the Atlantic cites Time on this point, but presumably The Atlantic does fact-check.)

The number of qualified applicants to top colleges has not significantly grown

The Atlantic reports that “according to [education company] Noodle[.org]’s data, the number of seats at competitive colleges has grown faster than the total pool of qualified applicants—raising a student’s chances of getting into a ‘selective college.’” Meanwhile, US News & World Report declares, “As selective as they’d like prospective students to believe they are, colleges and universities have been watching enrollment decline for five years, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Last year alone, it dropped 1.4 percent, or by about 270,000 students, at institutions nationwide…. Part of that is due to the shrinking supply of 18-year-olds and to families’ concerns about the high cost, and relative value, of college.”

Students are applying to far more colleges than before

The Atlantic reports, “Many high achieving students will apply to 10 or 15 schools, so you’re looking at doubling or even tripling the number of applications from the same pool of applicants. Application inflation is linked, [the Noodle.org VP] believes, to the Common App.” The Washington Post reports, “More than 800,000 students used the Common Application last year to submit some 3.5 million applications to more than 700 colleges. Plenty of students today apply to colleges they have hardly any intention of attending.” The New York Times explains it thus: “Enabled by technology that makes it easier to copy and send electronic documents and driven by the competitive anxiety that plummeting admission rates produce, top students have been sending out more applications…. In essence, the growth in applications per student creates a vicious cycle, causing admission rates at the best schools to artificially decline, students to become more anxious, and the number of applications per student to grow even more.”

Application inflation is greatly decreasing the acceptance rate

The Washington Post article describes the acceptance rate number in somewhat useful terms: “The top 20 national universities in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, for instance, enroll only about 100,000 students out of 17 million undergraduates nationwide. So the denominator is rising as the numerator stays the same in an equation that is more like the odds of playing the lottery for most students and parents.” This explanation is only somewhat useful, though, because of course colleges aren’t accepting students at random. This is the whole problem: the acceptance rate is being treated like odds in a lottery when in fact colleges have an objective basis to discard most applications.

This acceptance rate number is illusory

As reported in Time magazine, “What many parents and students don’t realize is that increasing numbers of applications isn’t necessarily a sign that it’s harder to get into a selective school; rather, it’s a sign of changes in behavior among high school seniors. More and more people who aren’t necessarily qualified are applying to top schools, inflating the application numbers while not seriously impacting admissions.” The New York Times makes a similar analysis: “[Admission rates] don’t represent the true odds of a well-qualified student’s being admitted to a top school. That’s because anyone can apply to college, well qualified or otherwise. Selective colleges immediately toss the long shots and dreamers from the admissions pile in order to concentrate on students with a legitimate shot at getting in. But they don’t parse their admissions statistics that way, in part because it’s in their best interests to seem as selective as possible.”

Colleges are deliberately shrinking the acceptance rate

US News & World Report declares, “Some [colleges] have encouraged the applications boom, with its resulting effect on their ability to predict yields, by urging marginally qualified students to apply. Known as ‘recruit to deny,’ this practice makes them appear more selective and boosts their standings in some college rankings.” The Washington Post reports, “Colleges buy more than 80 million names of test takers from the College Board annually. In some cases, schools simply encouraged more students to apply as a way to improve their standings in the rankings.”

As far as I can tell, my daughter has received solicitations from every college in the country, even the ones she’s sure would never accept her. She now holds the distinction of getting more junk mail than the rest of the family combined (to say nothing of her e-mail spam, which currently stands at over 2,500 messages with 50 in the last week alone). Hell, Carleton College even sent her a Frisbee!

The metric that matters

My favorite among these articles is the one from the New York Times, which makes a valiant effort to talk us off the ledge: “For well-qualified students, getting into a good college isn’t difficult. It probably isn’t that much harder than it was generations ago. The fact that everyone believes otherwise shows how reliance on a single set of data—in this case, institutional admission rates—can create a false sense of what’s really going on.” The article goes on to say: 

Some students are applying to 20 or more schools: to increase their odds of making a single match. The most important elite college admissions statistic, then, is not the percentage of applications top schools accept. It’s the percentage of top students who are admitted to at least one top school. And that number isn’t 5 percent or 20 percent or even 50 percent. It’s 80 percent. It turns out that four out of five well-qualified students who apply to elite schools are accepted by at least one…. Since there has never been a time when 100 percent of well-qualified students were successful in the college admissions market, the truism that elite colleges are far more difficult to crack than in years gone by can’t be correct: 80 percent is too close, mathematically, to nearly everyone.

Needless to say, this Times article should be required reading for all parents of college-bound teenagers, and for those teenagers.

My daughter’s reaction

When I presented all this to my daughter—the one person I’m willing to bother arguing with about this, because I hope to reduce her anxiety—she was understandably skeptical. She immediately began Googling all this for herself. “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ve already compiled the relevant articles for you.” She gave me one of those looks. Acknowledging that of course she’d fact-check me later anyway, I asked for a few minutes of her attention to read her some of the passages I’ve quoted above.

My daughter didn’t actually seem relieved. Perhaps all this seems too good to be true given the atmosphere of doom she has been trapped in for the last year or so. Or maybe being optimistic just feels weird and wrong at this point. She immediately came up with some hard questions. “What do they mean ‘top school’?” she asked. I cited the article: it defines top school as “one of the 113 schools identified by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges as the most selective.” My daughter, naturally, looked this up on the spot and read off the list. I’d heard of at last 90% of the colleges listed, and they really are elite. (My alma mater, UC Berkeley, didn’t even make the list.)

Next she questioned how the Times defined a “well-qualified” student. The answer is, it’s “combined SAT scores (or an ACT equivalent) of at least 1300.” My daughter stared in blank disbelief. “That’s not high at all. That’s like 60th percentile,” she said. Then she fact-checked herself: it’s actually 90th percentile. Competitive, sure, but not insanely high. Could the Times really be right about this? Well, they based their findings on the applications of 800,000 students. And they’re the New York Times, for crying out loud.

Why the hysteria?

So the natural question is, how could every adult I’ve talked to about this be so wrong? Why this widespread panic? I have two theories.

First, it’s far more exciting and engaging to paint everything in the darkest shades possible. FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) gives a nice urgent edge to your sidebar chatter at book club. FUD also makes better headlines, which might be all most people bother to read. Consider this one , in Business Insider: “It was the hardest year on record to get into elite colleges—admissions experts explain why.” What’s remarkable about the article is that it doesn’t really support this “hardest” assertion, but rather says much the same thing as the other articles I’ve cited. For example: “The steady uptick of college applicants, especially at elite schools, is stark, driven in part by the emergence of Common App, which allows students to apply to many schools at once.” It goes on to say, “There may be reason to view this lowering acceptance rate with some skepticism.” It trails off talking about how the strong cohort of high-scoring international applicants, “while it may drive down the overall acceptance rate, likely has less impact on US applicants than is sometimes believed.”

Meanwhile, beyond being typical drama queens, I think a lot of these parents are responding to their deep-seated fear that their kid(s) will wash out. (If so, they’re likely sharing their kids’ experience.) Perhaps by portraying the college admission game as nearly unwinnable they’re assuaging, in advance, the shame of their kid’s defeat.

It’s tempting to have sympathy for these beleaguered people, but in fact I’m kind of pissed off. Their willingness to be readily duped by deliberately misleading statistics, and to heap that unfounded fear on their poor children—and mine!—has caused untold unnecessary anxiety. And that’s not the only collateral damage. By creating so much fear and angst, our communities are teaching children to be self-absorbed and monomaniacal. My teen years involved a lot of messing around, having fun, killing time, and basically being a kid. Our current crop of teens are like 16 going on 40. Practically every action they take has their college admission in mind. As a group they’re just a huge buzz-kill. You know who they remind me of? Stressed out middle-aged parents. It’s pathetic.

Will it ever end?

Alas, I’m not sure getting into a good college will actually help. By that point, worrying and hand-wringing will have become a habit that is hard to shake. I’m basing this on a couple of things.

The first is an anecdote shared with me by an acquaintance whose sister works at Duke University, and whose job includes interviewing prospective students—i.e., those who have been accepted—to determine scholarship eligibility. She was struck, my acquaintance told me, by how unexcited and often downright sullen many of these kids were. I mean, here they’d been accepted by Duke, but they seemed so downcast! So finally she asked one of them why he wasn’t more excited. “I’m still waiting to hear from Harvard,” the ungrateful, over-privileged little shit replied.

Here is my second anecdote, from spending an afternoon at UC Berkeley at an internship fair. My role there, as I was quick to explain to every Cal student I talked to, was simply to answer their questions and describe the culture at the company I work for. I made it clear that I wasn’t the one evaluating them. But almost every student treated our chat like a job interview. They all had pretty extensive résumés, even the freshmen (which made up a surprisingly high proportion of the group, given that they were only like six weeks into their college careers). They all had this air of desperation about them.

One interaction in particular illustrates what I’m talking about. This student asked me, “What classes should I take?” I replied, “Well, I didn’t major in Computer Science, so I wouldn’t know anything about that.” She pressed on, “No … I mean, what classes should I take?” She was practically winking at me. I finally grasped her meaning: she meant what classes would look good on her résumé and help her get an internship at my company. I had no idea. I told her, “What I’ve witnessed in tech is that a lot of engineering types don’t write well. I think you should take a couple of writing classes.” She seemed perplexed and asked, “Can I?” I replied, “Of course you can! You can take whatever class you want! And you should … I mean, you’re at a world class university. You should take advantage of your opportunities here!” Her expression was priceless, like a light bulb on a dimmer switch gradually coming on. She had clearly never thought about college in any other terms than advancement and career prospects. “Wow … I guess I can!” she replied, astonished.

Call to action

If you’ve been sowing doom and gloom by parroting all this received wisdom about colleges being more selective, please stop. If you have a freaked out kid, please tell him or her to relax and try not to worry. And if you don’t believe me about any of this, go click on some of the links I’ve included here and read these articles for yourself.

As for me, next time some fellow parent trots out all this malarkey about college admissions being way more competitive, I’m going to tell him flat-out that he’s wrong. No, I won’t subject him to a withering argument … I’ll go one worse. I’ll ask him to read this post. This of course will end the dialogue forever, since as you well know, nobody reads this blog … except, apparently, you (and I hereby offer my congratulations at your intellectual stamina).

Postscript

This post only scratches the surface of my disgust at prevailing attitudes toward higher education. For a more comprehensive (but lighter-weight) survey, check out my previous post.

For further reading

• The Truth About Elite College Admissions
• College Application Frequently Asked Questions
• How to Choose a Major
• The Best Advice I’ve Received
• Going Broke at College
• The Importance of Goals - Debunked!
• Parables from the Rooster Father

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Can Too Much Exercise Damage Your Heart?

Introduction

I get a lot of bike-related articles in my e-mail, mostly via my bike club.  When I get an article from two separate feeds, I know it’s something big.  So it was with a recent front-page story in Velo magazine, “Cycling to Extremes.”  (I read the online version, available here.)  The subtitle:  “Are endurance athletes hurting their hearts by repeatedly pushing beyond what is normal?”

What is normal?  Alas, for American adults “normal” is almost nothing; a CDC survey found that nearly 80% of adult Americans get less than 2.5 hours of exercise a week.

But forget about averages and those who don’t exercise.  The point of this Velo article is that ageing endurance athletes—i.e., guys like me—seem now to be in danger.  The article declares, “In the case of endurance athletes who have competed for years — whose hearts have exceeded the threshold of normal heart rates for decades — going above what is normal defines them.  But it may also be killing them.”

In this post I examine the reactions of my pals to this disheartening article; indulge in some knee-jerk denial; examine some other anecdotal evidence; evaluate the article’s claims on the basis of the literature cited; and (perhaps most importantly) provide a scheme for greatly advancing the study of exercise-induced heart complications among the middle-aged.

 Reactions

My first reaction to seeing this article was, “Oh, crap.  I hope nobody forwards this to my wife.”  (She’s the designated worrier of the family, which leaves me free to pooh-pooh everything.)  But then, I’ve got people depending on me, so I thought I better take the article seriously.  First I looked at how my pals were reacting.  “Hummmm....this is a little scary,” one e-mailed.  Another replied, “Yeah very scary.  I routinely get dizzy when I get up - something that’s happened my whole life but” and here his e-mail ended abruptly.  (Had he collapsed mid-sentence?)  One guy mentioned an athletic 50-year-old pal who suffers from a heart issue like what’s described in the article.  Other responses:  “I have to admit, this article gave me pause, especially the way I like to ride bikes ... hung over, and hammering as hard as possible,” and “Alas, all along I thought I was doing something good for myself.”

Of course it’s tempting to deny the whole thing.  The article has some serious flaws—which I’ll get to in a minute—and I almost shrugged and thought, “Typical FUD, designed to sell magazines.”  But I resisted the urge.  After all, just because an article is flawed doesn’t mean its central assertion is false.  Besides, I respect the cautious position my pals have taken, and this isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the mystery of brilliant athletes suddenly dropping dead.  The article mentions two marathoners who died while running, and I also recall Matt Wilson, a local rider who died while cycling in 2011, and Steve Larsen, a guy I raced with as a junior, who died while running in 2009.

Never mind that my own heart has behaved perfectly my whole life (at least, as far as I know).  It’s possible I’m doing damage now that will only become a problem in ten years.  After all, I know guys who have smoked for years but don’t have lung cancer.  Yet.

I mulled over this article for about a week and a half, and just when it was starting to drift toward unconscious dismissal, I mentioned it to a cycling friend (my age) who said, “Oh, yeah, someone told me about that but said maybe I shouldn’t read it ‘cause it might bum me out.”  Why would it?  Turns out this guy has had a heart problem for some time now:  he’ll be riding along, just cruising, and suddenly his heart rate will go from like 140 up to over 200 and stay there for 30, 40 seconds.  Uh oh.

The “lumping” problem

My chief difficulty in deciding how much to worry, and whether or not to change my approach to cycling, is that of “lumping.”  Is it right to lump myself in with the guys cited in the article, and with the marathoners, and with Steve Larsen?  Is it right to lump runners in with cyclists?  And is it right to lump various heart problems together and treat them like one phenomenon?

Let’s take that last question first.  The Velo article uses two case studies to make its case:  Lennard Zinn, who while bicycling suffered symptoms of “his heart [flopping] like a fish” and beating way too fast; and Mike Endicott, who collapsed and lost consciousness during a cross-country ski race.  Was Endicott’s heart also racing?  Well, not at first.  Endicott’s words:  “Something was beating inside my chest.”  The Velo writer describes it as “his heart still doing something strange inside his chest” which led, after an hour or so, to ventricular tachycardia and “an immediate, unexpected loss of heart function.”  This seems a lot different from what Zinn experienced.  Were these two suffering from the same specific heart problem?  It’s not clear.

The article states that Zinn was diagnosed with multifocal atrial tachycardia, but Endicott’s exact diagnosis isn’t given.  The article talks a lot about atrial fibrillation (AF):  is this the same as tachycardia?  Again, it’s unclear (though this FAQ suggests not).  Moreover, the main study the article cites concerns “myocardial fibrosis, a condition that involves the impairment of the heart’s muscle cells, called myocytes, through hardening or scarring of tissue.”  Does myocardial fibrosis lead to tachycardia and/or fibrillation?  Do Zinn and Endicott suffer from myocardial fibrosis?  Once again, the article doesn’t say.

It’s not just this article that’s vague about this stuff.  I did a tiny bit of research on Steve Larsen’s death, and turned up something surprising:

Google’s big-font summary makes it pretty clear this was a heart attack—but it wasn’t, according to the first article cited.  Nothing else has been written to further clarify this matter; the autopsy itself apparently ruled out heart attack.  And yet people seem to remember it as such.  Two years after Larsen’s death, when I was corresponding with a friend about Matt Wilson, my friend wrote, “Steve Larsen was the guy who had a [fatal] heart attack two years ago here in Bend.”  Meanwhile, I’d always remembered Wilson’s death as having been from a heart attack, but in researching this now (for example, here), I can find no specific cause of death.

A dearth of data

Let’s get back to that Velo article.  My temptation, when presented with such ambiguity, is to read the research articles on which the article is based.  But the article, while making lots of vague references to unnamed studies, doesn’t provide much.  For example:  “Over decades of exertion, the myocardial cells of the heart begin to simply fall apart, and you’re left with an unhealthy ticker. Or so these new studies suggest.”  And:  “Long-term endurance exercise results in a five-fold increase in the risk of developing AF.  A review of the relevant research finds many small studies that correlate long-term sports activity with AF....  While none is conclusive, collectively they indicate a pattern.”  What studies?  What relevant research?  There are no citations given here; no footnotes; no hyperlinks.

The article does cite two specific studies.  One involved rats, and I’m going to dismiss that.  (My heart is bigger than a rat’s; rats don’t live 40 or 50 or 60 years, which is the age group I’m trying to learn about; humans cannot be made to exercise as hard as rats.)  Velo also cites a study published in The Journal of Applied Physiology:  “MRI studies revealed that some 50 percent of the veteran [>50-year-old] athletes had myocardial fibrosis....  In age-matched controls — people of the same age who didn’t compete — and young athletes, there were zero cases of the disease. Furthermore, the fibrosis was significantly associated with the number of years spent training, and the number of marathons and ultra-endurance marathons they had completed.”

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere!  I looked at the study itself to get more information.  You can read it here.  My big issue with this study is that it only included 12 veteran athletes.  Of these, 2 had previous heart conditions (1 probable previous mycarditis, 1 probable previous silent myocardial infarction).  The Journal study is candid about its limited scope, acknowledging that “Like many studies of this type, the numbers of veteran athletes are small (largely because this is a small and unique population), and generalization is difficult.”

And yet, without the ability to generalize, what are we supposed to do with this (largely anecdotal) information?  My frustration is that I feel I ought to evaluate and possibly modify my own behavior based on these cautionary tales, but I have no solid basis for assuming that my behavior matches the profile of the overworked athlete who may be damaging his heart.

Velo addresses this problem of definition by quoting Dr. John Mandrola, a heart rhythm doctor:  “What’s too much? That’s the $64,000 question. Though I will say it’s a little like what the judge said about indecency: ‘I know it when I see it.’”  Well, this just doesn’t do me much good, because I’m not about to go to Kentucky to visit this doctor, in the absence of any symptom of any problem.

I see four possible ways to respond to this information. 

1. I could completely ignore it—but I think that’s irresponsible. 
2. I could simply err on the side of caution, and ride less often and less hard than I currently do—but isn’t this completely arbitrary, since somebody who rides twice as much as I could similarly tone it down “a bit” and still be riding way more than I? 
3. I could continue riding exactly how I currently do, while adding myocardial fibrosis to the pile of things I regularly worry about (which will increase my cortisol levels to the detriment of my health) while feeling guilty for being such a poor custodian of my body.  No thanks. 
4. I can try to get more information about this, with a whole lot more data, so I can more reasonably evaluate and (if necessary) modify my behavior.

Number four wins, and that’s where my proposed solution comes in.

The solution

We need more information!  We need more than two anecdotes and a lot of vague references to “these new studies” and “the relevant research.”  We need more than studies on rats, and we need studies of more than 10 veteran athletes.  By “we” I mean “society,” and actually society is already really, really good at harnessing massive amounts of data and crunching them to derive useful judgments.  Think of how effectively Amazon predicts what we’ll want, and how well the advertising industry can anticipate, and create, our desires.  What if we could find a ready source of “big data” for studying the effect of gonzo endurance athleticism on heart health?

But we have it already!  It’s called Strava!  This social network has 8 million registered users, of which 1.2 million are active and something like 190,000 have premium accounts.  (These are estimations since the company doesn’t reveal these numbers; click here for details.  Suffice to say, this is a lot deeper pool of data than 10 test subjects.)

 The number of Strava users isn’t even the best part.  It’s the quality of the data set.  Consider the type of athlete who goes so hard, and so long, and so often, that he or she is actually at risk of causing heart damage.  How many of this type wouldn’t be on Strava?  The gung-ho Strava cyclist is exactly the kind of person who might overdo his or her training.  In other words, Strava members comprise the perfect group for studying this stuff. 

I’m envisioning a splash screen that pops up when the Strava user logs in.  It asks, “Are you willing to participate in an anonymous study about heart function and rigorous aerobic exercise?”  I’d guess most users wouldn’t have a problem with this.  And anybody who’s having heart trouble would probably be eager to participate, to better understand it all, and could indicate the nature and frequency of his or her problem.  Such a study could quite feasibly have millions of workouts per day to crunch (the average workouts logged per day being around 6 million last year, as detailed here).  You’ve got your control group and your heart-oddity group both covered, right off the bat.

And what great data there’d be to crunch!  You get exercise frequency; exercise duration; heart rate; and history (e.g., how much a rider’s performance is improving or deteriorating).  You could start to develop very precise profiles of those whose hearts are misbehaving.  Is there an age threshold beyond which these symptoms most commonly present?  Are there frequency, duration, and/or intensity thresholds below which no errant heart behaviors are observed?  What is the rate of heart trouble for riders exactly my age, who ride (on average) just as often, and in exactly the same heart rate zones I work out in?  Of those who work out like I do but who are 10 years older, how many have developed heart trouble?  Five years from now, when we see an even more comprehensive integration of “big data” into our lives, we’d probably have even more ways to correlate the data.  (We might know, for example, whether frequent purchases at Starbucks or BevMo factor in to the cardio health equation.)

Conclusion

For now, I’m going to assume that the hectic pace of my life, my many familial obligations, my relative sloth, and my unaggressive riding style will keep my heart in good shape.  I’m not going to bother shopping my Strava idea around, because I’m confident  that the Strava folks themselves, looking for a way to actually make some money, are bound to get the attention of the insurance people, who I assume are always looking for ways to avoid open-ended batteries of complicated tests.  I envision all of this happening without any effort from me, probably years before I start getting into the dangerous years where my heart starts “doing something strange inside [my] chest.”  And if you want to forward this link around to speed up the process, please be my guest!