From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VII

Introduction

This is the seventh installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here and Volume VI is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another.)

Every time I dip into my past essays and letters looking for little nuggets that could entertain or enlighten my albertnet audience, I think I’ll finally come up empty, my archives finally having been exhausted. But recently I found a folder from the mid-’90s with old emails in it, pasted into individual text files. Email was new then and I must have thought I could keep up with the quixotic task of archiving it. Ha! Later I decided I could just trust the email software archive (as this was before anyone realized these programs would go extinct and lock up past emails forever.)

The posts in this installment are from when I lived in San Francisco, post-college.

May 1, 1995

[Email to myself, testing my new address.]

Hey Dana:

Just a quick note to say that you’re really one of the most outstanding individuals I’ve ever come across. Keep up the fine work.

—Dana

[I mean, if I don’t give myself this kind of encouragement, who else is gonna do it?]

August 2, 1995

[To a friend who was dabbling in the new frontier of online quasi-dating, which back then meant meeting people in chat rooms, without any easy way to transmit photos back and forth. My friend had done lots of text-based chatting with his romantic prospect, and they’d even had a couple of long phone calls, but they hadn’t yet FedExed photos to each other.]

The way I see it, you and Cyber-Susan have highly compatible personalities. Keep in mind, however, that “she has a nice personality” is a disparaging remark in most circles. Humans are superficial about things like looks. According to Stephen Dawkins, this is a biological program that cannot be thwarted. (Not that he doesn’t have plenty of fruit-loopy ideas himself.) In any case, I see perhaps three possible scenarios involving your first face-to-face meeting with Susan.

1. She is a miraculous composite of Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, and Nicole Kidman. If ever there was a beauty that you did desire, and got, ‘twas but a dream of Susan. Her beauty sinks you into a swoon. Meanwhile, her voice, now unadulterated by the coarse fiber optics of the phone line, is the sweet singing of sirens. Her personality is sharper and brighter than ever when not dulled by the impersonal nature of the personal computer.

2. She is a hideous composite of a mole rat, a gorgon, and a bat. Her voice, when she gets excited (and I know she will!) loses the careful modulation she managed, through extreme effort, to keep up for six hours on the phone. In moments of passion, her speech sounds like the horrible screeching of two raccoons fornicating. The apparent wit and charm displayed in her e-mail messages turn out to be the result of painstaking labor, and a lot of plagiarism. The phone calls, you learn, were carefully scripted. After your initial, tactful efforts to put the “relationship” to sleep, she pursues you with terrier tenacity.

3. He is the zit-faced, pudgy, bespectacled Far-Side-looking teenage boy we feared all along. His voice is only as pleasant as it is prepubescent. But he’s got a great personality, and at least you have an interesting new pen pal.

But all kidding aside, I hope everything turns out swell. Just remember to use virus protection!

August 16, 1995

[In response to a truncated email.]

Your entire message read, “I am not sensitive about tasteless jokes at all, so give”

There is just trails off. I envision that right after you finished typing “give,” somebody sunk a large bowie knife between your shoulder blades. Then, before you could collapse onto the keyboard and type “67yhnyhhhhhhhhhhhh” with your face, he threw you aside, and, not knowing what else to do, sent the message. Either that, or you indeed did fall forward, and typed “tvgfruuuuuuuuuuuu” with your face, and he deliberately erased that part of the message.

What could the motive have been? Perhaps the perp was somebody who is offended by tasteless jokes.

September 12, 1995

I’m traveling on business with my boss. He has very high standards about the quality of his food and lodgings. We checked into our hotel and he decided the rooms weren’t up to snuff and switched to a neighboring hotel, causing god knows how many complications for those back at the office who think they know how to reach us.

Tonight we went to a restaurant and there was a bit of a wait, so we ordered a beer. Bass on draft. Well, it didn’t taste that good. I didn’t really care, but my boss sent them back. The bartender, who was obviously in training, suggested something else. It proved to be even worse. This time I really found it disgusting. It had the flavor of a sweaty gym sock (many of which I’ve sucked on in my day). Well, again, I wasn’t going to say anything, but we sent them back and decided we couldn’t go wrong with something in a bottle. Well, we ordered two Red Hook ESB’s, and as soon as the bartender set them down, I noticed that on the part of the label that goes around the neck of the bottle were pictured three Washington trolley drivers. I happen to have noticed, over the last month or so, that Red Hook no longer features the trolley drivers. So I checked the freshness date on the bottle, and the beer had expired in July! Sure enough, it too was gross—very flat and just kind of off. By this time we had our table, so we sent the beers back with the waitress, who must’ve told the young bartender, for he came out and apologized in person. A few minutes later the owner came out and also apologized. Then, when we had finally consumed the fourth beers, which were fine, the waitress brought out two more, on the house. Needless to say this was more than I ordinarily drink.

October 26, 1995

Cycling has gotten so hard. I shouldn’t take the bait when these weekend warriors try to school me. In the past I’ve let countless guys drop me since my fitness was not a question, but now that I’m out of shape I feel this need to convince myself of some essential quality that I (hopefully) still have. So I think to myself, “I don’t really want to do this to you—nor to myself—and my ego certainly shouldn’t need this, but it does, so now you must die.” And then we both suffer horribly, needlessly.

I duked it out with some newbie the other day, and it was just brutal. The whole thing lasted like half an hour, and he was like a Weeble Wobble, the little toy dude that weebles and wobbles but won’t fall down. This rider was, in fact, also like that little green goblin-head “stress reliever” toy wherein you deform this goblin’s face with your thumbs, force his eyes up into his sockets, then squeeze its head from the back so its eyes bug out, and this is supposed to relieve stress—except that he always comes back for more. Such dolls represent the futility of life: your foes are never really dead, you never get to relax. At least, not until you finally get out the power tools and make that fucking goblin BLEED. Or you jam the Weeble Wobble beneath the tire of the neighbor’s camper and it’s crushed like a boiled egg by the next time you see it. Victory, yes, but at a price. I finally dropped the newb but my stress wasn’t relieved, since I had to make sure he never caught back up. When will it ever end?

November 16, 1995

I’m so disappointed that the band “Smashing Pumpkins” turns out to be called “The Smashing Pumpkins.” I thought “Smashing Pumpkins” was a verb phrase, along the lines of “Smashing the Pumpkins.” Kind of like the novel Fools Crow: its eponymous hero has the original, humiliating childhood name “White Man’s Dog” until, as a teenager, he fools a band of Crow Indians and gets the better of them (killing several, I believe) and in return for his valor and cunning, is given the new, cool name “Fools Crow.” This name is a verb phrase emphasizing the act of fooling (i.e., “fools the Crows”).

Of course, “Smashing Pumpkins” is problematic anyway because nobody actually smashes pumpkins. They only smash jack-o-lanterns. That act does capture the random, energetic lashing out of a young grunge type, but can you imagine the force required to smash an un-carved pumpkin? It’d be pretty spectacular actually, with the guts and seeds flying everywhere. I think the band should be called Smashes Pumpkins.

December 1, 1995

[To a friend of a friend who was considering buying my used laptop PC, with or without an external monitor.]

No, no, no, heavens no, the built-in monitor doesn’t suck. It’s as good as monochrome LCD displays get. I just tried it out again and it’s fine. You open up the lid, there’s no screen, you pitch it back a bit, it comes on, it’s golden, it’s backlit, white-on-black or black-on-white, brightness control, contrast, wonderful. Better than most. A real selling point, in fact.

It’s just this. You’re working, late into the night, hammering away on that keyboard, and this is after-hours, when you’re working on your magnum opus after having stared at a computer screen all day anyway. Your eyes are tired. You’re grumpy. In fact, you’re feeling pretty shitty. And suddenly you don’t see the cursor all that well. You lose sight of where you are. Computer problem? Hell no—it’s a full-blown midlife crisis! You’re just frustrated. So you take it out on the computer. You say, “Dana, that bastard. He sold me a piece of crap. Typical of the kind of guy who would be friends with D–.” In reality, you’re just coming face-to-face with an awful truth: when the going gets rough, a 14” Sony Trinitron Multiscan HG Super Fine Pitch color monitor is a nice thing to have. You see, people buy color laptops and/or desktop computers for a reason. The monochrome LCD did not make the Sony color monitor a thing of the past. So that’s why I’m offering you the monitor as an optional accessory. It’s a magnanimous gesture, a way to say “Hey buddy, life is harsh. Your computer screen shouldn’t be.”

Look, all this e-mailing back and forth reminds me of a blind date. I’d hate for you to get all amped up creating a mental image of this computer, fantasizing about a sleek, thin, 4-pound gleaming miracle of modern technology but also fearing it’s an old, clunky, barely usable white elephant. The difference between expectation and reality can be a harrowing thing. You need to try before you buy. I don’t want this to end badly, like when I sold a phone answering machine to our friend D—. It was practically brand new when I sold it to him, but it broke almost immediately. I can’t believe it. Its life expectancy was much higher than that. It’s like my Sony TV: I loaned it to a friend while I went on my bike tour, and while he had custody, the picture tube blew out. I couldn’t very well make him pay for it, since I can’t imagine it was his fault; to this day (over a year later) he still has it, and is avoiding me. He’s got my VCR too—not much point bothering to get that back, without a TV to play it on. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not chapped or anything—I broke his CD player and tape deck while he was in Japan, years before, and he was cool about it. Yet we haven’t spoken since I got back from my tour. Meanwhile, over this lousy phone answering machine, D— won’t even e-mail me anymore. The last I heard from him was the message on my voice-mail telling me the answering machine I sold him broke. The failure of that simple appliance, I fear, has ruined our friendship. And what’s worse, I don’t think he even paid me for the damn thing. If he had, I could just refund his money and all would be forgiven.

June 25, 1996

Regarding your question about bottom brackets, and whether a fixed cup is threaded backwards (i.e., has a “left-hand thread”): well, here’s how it works. You have to find out what market the bicycle was intended for. No matter where it’s made, the thread orientation is determined by the location where the bike will be used. For example, Phil Anderson’s bottom bracket is a left-hand thread, because he lives in Australia. Just as the water spins the opposite way as it goes down the drain in the Southern Hemisphere, bottom bracket fixed cups are threaded backwards there. This is why most successful racers tend to be from northern countries: the southern ones have all kinds of bottom bracket trouble when they race up here.

I guess you’re probably not buying that. The rule actually goes like this: there are three different standards for threads on bicycle parts: English, Italian, and French. An English standard bottom bracket shell has a cup that is 1.37 inches in diameter, with 24 TPI (threads per inch), left-hand (backwards) threaded. (This is what you have.) An Italian standard BB shell has a cup 36 mm in diameter, with 24 TPI, right-hand threaded. (This is what I have.) If your BB shell were French standard, it would be stripped, frozen, cross-threaded, and utterly worthless.

October 28, 1996

[Email to a friend far better connected in cycling than I.]

Man, that sucks about Lance [Armstrong] having cancer. If it’s really spread to his brain, you’re right, that sure as hell doesn’t look good. I mean, you can’t exactly amputate a brain…

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All I Need to Know About Corporate America I Learned in Team Time Trials

Vlog

Ear hair. It’s becoming a real problem for me, but I don’t always get around to trimming it. Nothing motivates me to groom myself like posting a video to the Internet. For that reason (and because I’m told some people prefer watching videos to reading a lot of text), below is a vlog version of this post. Close your eyes and you’ve got a podcast. Scroll down and it’s a blog post. Enjoy please enjoy.

Introduction

I have worked for the same employer for over 25 years, and have made it through three acquisitions, a bankruptcy, and countless reorgs. Along the way I’ve had thirteen different bosses. How have I lasted this long? I joke that my spirit animal is the cockroach. But actually, I’d say my longevity is a combination of the right attitude and the right practices.

Of course it would be a stretch to say that the team time trial, a type of bicycle race, taught me how to survive in corporate America. However, as I will explain here, the same attitude and practices apply to each. The team time trial is a great metaphor.

What is a team time trial?

In road racing, the individual time trial—often called the “race of truth”—consists of each rider racing alone, against the clock  (typically sent off at 1- to 3-minute intervals). A team time trial, aka TTT, is the same thing but with teammates racing together to try to put up the best time. Crucially, it’s not the time of the first rider that’s taken. If it’s a five-person team, the third rider’s time is what counts. For nine riders, it’s the fifth or sixth. To be competitive, a team needs all (or at least most) of its riders contributing to the effort of taking turns breaking the wind for the others. They must cooperate perfectly.

Lesson 1: Work for the team

“Be a team player” is obviously a cliché. It’s something management routinely tells us, and they might even mean it, but it often doesn’t pack much punch in a culture like America’s where individualism, and individual success, are promoted so universally. So it is in sport, and in cycling in particular, with Lance Armstrong being perhaps the greatest example of the self-focused sportsman—a bully obsessed with individual domination, fearful of any personal ambition among his teammates.

The team time trial is ideally the purest antithesis of all this. A TTT team that works well together is a thing of beauty. Every rider is acutely aware of how every other rider is doing. If you’re totally on fire, you carefully channel this by increasing your output gradually, without disrupting the smooth functioning of the formation. You may take a bit longer pull, and you can even slightly increase the speed of the group while you’re on the front … but harmony is your first priority.

This is harder than it sounds. It’s almost automatic to accelerate when you start your turn at the front, because this is right after you’ve recovered in the line. But, if you’re a good team time trialist, you never forget how hard it is to latch on to the back of the group, after having slowed down to let the other riders past. This is the hardest part of a TTT because at the back, you’ve just finished your pull, aren’t yet in the slipstream, and need to accelerate slightly. If the guy on the front increases the pace at all as you’re latching on, he practically breaks your legs.

Let’s think for a moment about teamwork in corporate America. In your workplace, how much energy do you think people devote to helping their colleagues? Is much attention paid to buoying up those who are struggling? Other than managers, do people even care?

It’s amazing how many seasoned bike racers screw up the team time trial by kind of missing the “team” part. In fact, it’s often the team leaders that cause the most  problems—because their drive and talent and alpha-dog-ness is what made them leaders in the first place. Returning to my Lance Armstrong example, to watch him in a TTT was like agony for those of us who understand this event. He pulled too hard when taking the front, screwed up the rhythm, sometimes dropped his entire team, and—as came out later—would terrorize his teammates over the race radios for not going fast enough.

Not that Lance was the only team leader to do TTTs poorly. In the 1993 Tour de France, the Gatorade team was selected, in part, to support their leader, Gianni Bugno, in the TTT stage. This was supposed to be an opportunity for Bugno to take serious time out of the race favorite, Miguel Indurain, whose Banesto team was better suited to helping their leader in the mountain stages. But Bugno apparently couldn’t keep it in his pants and his team floundered in the TTT, actually losing 12 seconds to Banesto. How was this possible? Well, Indurain—though he was hands-down the strongest individual time trialist in the race—matched his team’s pace perfectly. As reported in Winning magazine, “When asked how it was that Banesto stayed more or less together while Gatorade were all over the place in the TTT, [Banesto team director] Jose Miguel Echavarri responded that ‘it was necessary that the king went with the people, rather than that the people try to follow the king.’”

(Ironically, pro cycling teams are run like companies, and yet all too often the prima donna behavior of riders like Armstrong and Bugno has been allowed, perhaps encouraged, by management … hence the revolving door of talent on US Postal, which can’t have been good for long-term team morale.)

When I was at UC Santa Barbara, our TTT was a perfect case study in selflessness. We were all completely devoted to the team’s success, despite the fact that our two best riders really didn’t get along. This didn’t affect how they rode—they unfailingly set their grievances aside and worked together flawlessly in races. Our reward for perfect teamwork was a TTT victory at the collegiate National Championships.

The next year, I’d transferred to UC Berkeley, and though on paper we had a more talented overall roster, we never got such good results. The reason, as all but one of our riders would happily explain to you passionately and at length, was our team leader. He was headstrong, self-absorbed, and a terrible team time trialist. The way he started his pulls, you’d think he was deliberately trying to saw his teammates off the back, like this event was about him showing us how dominant he was. Spiritually, a good team time trialist is almost like a Girl Scout den mother; this guy was more like Ahab—and every other living human was Moby Dick to him. (For a more complete case study of this strong, successful, but flawed individual, click here and do a page search for “Ace.”)

Okay, so how does this relate to the corporate world? Beyond being an obvious object lesson in the downside of selfishness, I think it points to the need for wider awareness than your personal ambition will give you. A TTT isn’t about you being fast; it’s about your team being fast, which requires a whole lot more than your own strong pedaling. In my experience of the workplace, revenue and earnings are the measure of victory, and maximizing them is extraordinarily complicated. Creating the right products and services, building them right, marketing and selling them effectively, and providing good support cannot be achieved by the smartest guy in the room performing brilliantly.

Yes, you need smart—but also patient, careful, and generous—people in countless rooms working together. Those who rise in the ranks by “promoting their personal brand” and striving to stand out may naturally have a hard time leading their teams toward the results that matter. A company will only thrive if it promotes those with a sensitivity to how well everyone is rowing together. A sales director at my company once joked to me, “I’m good at this stuff because I’m pretty stupid, so it’s impossible for me to overcomplicate things for my reps.” His humility, and his focus on collective results, have apparently served him well.

In all my years of bike racing, I was never the team leader. This isn’t because there’s anything wrong with me, some fundamental lack of ambition or fear of success. It’s that I’ve been lucky enough to be on teams with better riders than myself, and selflessly supporting them was the obvious and correct thing to do. Bringing my support (aka domestique’s) perspective to the TTT was a natural fit, and nice insurance against instinctively trying to show dominance and messing up the flow. Steeped in the art of looking after my team leader, I was a natural at looking after my team as we fought the wind together.

Similarly, in my work life I’ve never been the alpha dog, and my humble approach—i.e., helping others in the background vs. showing off—has worked out well. I sincerely believe it hasn’t held me back; if anything, I’ve been given all the responsibility and growth opportunities I can handle. Even if my approach isn’t the ticket to rising through the ranks at work, it does seem to help with career longevity. Maybe I’ve missed out on some promotions and the income growth that can bring, but I’ve also avoided the pitfalls of the kind of self-serving behavior that hampers the results an employer cares about. I believe there are certain risks in clawing one’s way up the corporate ladder too swiftly; whether or not I’m right, I can say that I’ve never been unemployed. For the last 26 years I’ve had continuous income, and that adds up.

I chalk all this up to my TTT mindset. Recently I had my annual review and my boss told me I “need more swagger.” I took this as a compliment.

To be continued

Dang, this has taken me more words than I expected. Tune in next week for three more (shorter) lessons gleaned from the tarmac crucible of team time trialing.

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Santa, Lance Armstrong, and the Christmas Eve Doldrums

Introduction

Please don’t read this aloud to a small child. And now that you’ve stopped reading aloud, I can tell you why: I don’t want to spoil anybody’s belief in Santa. In this post I describe the Christmas Eve doldrums, a way I tried to deal with them, and my heart-to-heart with my teenage daughters about the Santa myth.

Christmas Eve doldrums

I mean doldrums in both senses: the general idea of stagnation & depression, and also the equatorial region of the Atlantic Ocean with calms, sudden storms, and light unpredictable winds. What I mean is that the holiday season is kind of like monsoon season, or what we might now call hurricane season. Going shopping for presents is, to me, like deliberately heading into a storm. And though I enjoy the slowdown at work that comes with the holidays, I also find myself feeling overwhelmed by the socializing, the music, and (above all else) the retail cyclone we get whirled into.

Of course Christmas Eve night is the hardest of all ... it’s when I have to wrap the rest of the presents, including each and every item that goes into each kid’s stocking. My wife thought I was crazy to do this when we started doing Christmas stockings for our kids. My rationale was that my parents always wrapped each stocking item, so I ought to continue the tradition. I now realize that my wife was right: I am crazy, and so were my parents. But I’m kind of stuck with the tradition.

Perhaps it was in anticipation of this onslaught that one year my mom went off by herself on Christmas Eve and watched Billy the Kid, the 1938 ballet written by Aaron Copeland, on TV. (This was our piece-of-crap black-and-white Panasonic.) To me this seemed an incomprehensible act. I was like, What does Billy the Kid have to do with Christmas? And moreover, what does watching TV have to do with us kids, on the night before Christmas? I interrogated my mom about this and she replied, “Sssh—just watch.” So I watched for like twenty minutes, half-expecting Santa to burst out on the scene, and when it became apparent he wasn’t going to show, I got bored and wandered off. Now I can relate to my mom’s desire to do something normal, non-child-centric, and non-holiday-themed with her Christmas Eve, before all the tumult of Christmas Day.

Our escape

My wife and I are similarly stalling this evening. I’m blogging, obviously, but even before that we were AWOL from holiday activities. My wife sought the sanctuary of our bedroom (which, as a Christmas gift staging area, is off limits to the kids this weekend) to read a P.G. Wodehouse novel. I took to my home office to research a mystery that arrived in my e-mail earlier in the evening. The mystery is: what is the meaning of this painting?

My friend’s e-mail read, “We’re stranded at a holiday inn in silverthorne, co, because i70 is closed. This painting is in the lobby.”

Now, in case you don’t follow cycling, this painting has a very strange characteristic: it features two (possibly three) Tour de France champions in head-to-head competition despite the fact that they raced during different eras. Bernard Hinault, the second rider from the left, raced his last Tour in 1986. The rider in the lead, Lance Armstrong, didn’t wear the yellow leader’s jersey (featured here) until 1999.

Clearly, the artist combined two photos from the Tour de France: one from 1984 or 1985, and the other from 1999. Here they are.

The artist has replaced Fernando Escartin with Hinault, and took that dude in the red jersey and white cap along with him. And he swapped out Laurent Fignon for Miguel Indurain. (At least, I think the rider on the far right in the painting is Indurain. This would still be anachronistic; Indurain did overlap with Hinault by a couple of years, but didn’t finish either of those Tours and certainly wouldn’t have been near the front during a mountain stage. It’s also possible this rider is Alex Zülle, who made the podium with Lance in 1999. The painting isn’t good enough to know for sure.)

Why would the artist juxtapose Lance with Hinault? Was he or she making a statement about these being champions of similar caliber?

It could be. On the other hand, maybe this artist just had a couple (or a pile) of photos to work from, knew and cared little about who else (besides Lance) had raced a bike, and painted whatever he or she felt like. (It’s surprising to me how careless people can be. I saw a bike catalog once where the photographer had accidentally—or based on some aesthetic preference—flipped the photo so it was a mirror image, and the bike’s drivetrain was on the wrong side.)

It dawned on me that the artist might think he or she was being funny. “Wouldn’t that be great if, like, Lance and Bernie had raced at the same time?” This made me think of the silly painting—a takeoff on a more famous one,“Nighthawks”—featuring a similar character substitution.

“Wow, wouldn’t that be awesome for Bogie, Marilyn, Elvis, and James Dean to be, like, hanging out together?” Seems like a pretty thin idea to base a serious artwork on, but there you have it. I wonder: did this artist whose work graces the Holiday Inn in Silverthorne take himself or herself seriously? And did the manager of the Holiday Inn? And are these one and the same person?

Then I remembered this Miyata calendar I had back in like 1981 that featured paintings of riders on the Capri Sonne team, riding Team  Miyata bicycles. Each painting was taken from some cool old photo, with the focal point of the photo (usually somebody like Eddy Merckx) swapped out for a Capri Sonne rider. I started researching this calendar, which led to the kind of pointless time suck the Internet is famous for, and this dragged me ever farther in to the Christmas Eve doldrums. I couldn’t keep with it.

Besides, my kids were still up so I had to set a good example. Watching a classic opera on PBS is one thing, but browsing Internet photos is another entirely. So I decided to do something with my kids. We took a walk through the neighborhood to look at the candle-aria. At least, that’s what I thought it was called. My kids laughed in my face and corrected me: it’s luminaria. You know, the votives inside paper bags that line the sidewalks in some lucky neighborhoods (such as mine):

During the walk I decided, suddenly, it was time to have the uncomfortable conversation with my kids about Santa. “Alexa,” I said, “you do know there’s no Santa ... right?” She gasped in disbelief. “Dad!” she protested, “I’m sixteen years old!”

Ha! Once again my deadpan delivery fooled her. I love doing this with my kid. She falls for my facetiousness—hook, line, and sinker—every time. But I was curious to know: how long had she believed in Santa?

“Well, I guess until I was about eight,” she said. “It just seemed impossible to me that he could make it to every house in the world in so short a time. So I started comparing notes with my friends, and we all kind of concluded at the same time that Santa wasn’t real. Of course we played along to keep getting the presents.”

I asked my younger daughter. “Well, I’m not sure I ever really believed there was a Santa,” she said. “I guess I thought it went from person to person, that anybody could be Santa who wanted to give you gifts.”

I replied, “So when you and your sister left cookies for Santa, who did you think ate them? Me?” She said, “Well, no ... I guess I didn’t really think it through.” This is probably a good thing. It might have been troubling for her to think of some prowler sneaking into our home, eating these cookies, and leaving a bunch of presents.

I’ve written before, in my holiday newsletter and in these pages, about how if you spill the beans about Santa, then the Tooth Fairy myth is suddenly in great jeopardy, and we need that myth in order to keep our kids’ spirits up when it comes to losing a tooth, having blood in their mouths, and this weird tender hollow in their gums (often with a shred or two of loose flesh). I asked Alexa how long she had believed in the Tooth Fairy.

“I believed in the Tooth Fairy for about another year,” she admitted. “It just didn’t seem possible that you could get that tooth out from under my pillow without waking me. In fact, I did some tests where I put the tooth as far from the outer edge of my bed as possible, in a place you’d never be able to find, to see if I could catch you in the act.” I told her I remembered those times very well. It had been a pain in the ass. But I’m glad the seeming impossibility of my efforts extended the myth a bit longer.

(You may be wondering what Santa has to do with Lance Armstrong. Well, a friend of mine did a bike fitting for Robin Williams around the time Lance admitted to all his doping, and my friend asked Williams what he thought about it. Williams—who was a good friend of Lance’s—replied, “I was devastated. It was like when I was a kid and I learned there was no Santa.” This begs a question: did Williams really believe in Lance all that time, or was this a bit like Lindsay’s position on Santa: deciding not to think too hard about it? And how many others among us might have similarly suspended our skepticism?)

After the candle-aria—er, luminaria—walk, I felt the Christmas Eve doldrums lifting somewhat. I’d found this candid conversation with my kids heartening somehow; it’s nice to see that we can honor traditions like Christmas stockings while acknowledging the fiction involved and having a chuckle together. And it gives me hope that there will be a time, perhaps not too far from now, when I can slack off a bit on the stockings without ruining anybody’s childhood. But for now, I better post this little essay and get on with my night ... I have a lot of gift wrapping ahead of me.

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“Glycogen Window” for Sports Recovery - Proven!

Introduction

Haven’t heard of the glycogen window?  It’s a period of time, roughly half an hour immediately following exercise, during which any carbs you ingest provide extra benefit in restoring muscle glycogen.  In other words, if you exercise good and hard, you not only deserve a treat but are well advised to have one because it’ll help you recover.  Among my racer pals, post-ride chocolate milk is all the rage.  (Protein, calcium, and antioxidants are also touted as important recovery aids.)

I suppose I should add that this glycogen window thing isn’t widely viewed as hard science.  I first read about it in “Bicycling” magazine back in the ‘80s; cycling hero Andy Hampsten wrote about it.  I’d link to the article, but I doubt “Bicycling” has archived all their issues electronically like “New Yorker” has.  (Perhaps “Bicycling” assumes their readers have no patience for text, especially old text that has been regurgitated countless times anyway, with articles like “It’s you—fit, fast, and self-trained!” and “10 easy ways to improve your power!” run in constant rotation.)

Naturally, I believed what Hampsten wrote because he won the Giro d’Italia and the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France.  I began eating things like ice cream, fruit, or yogurt right after a ride or race, and immediately noticed an improvement in my recovery so I’ve stuck with it over all these years.  (Yeah, it could be a placebo, but if so, it’s a strong one.)

In this post I will make a cursory examination of the evidence against the glycogen window theory, before presenting substantive proof, recently obtained from a very talented young scientist, that the glycogen window is for real.  Here is the scientist, enjoying the fruits of her labors, both scholastic and athletic.

The case against glycogen window

It didn’t take long to find “evidence” against the glycogen window theory.  The first Google hit came from an online magazine called evidencemag.com.  I won’t summarize their arguments—you can read them right here—but suffice to say, I’m not impressed.  This article depends entirely on a) other people’s research, and b) sentences beginning with “there’s little evidence that,” which only show the lack of information available to the author.  Perhaps evidencemag.com will retract the entire article after reading this post and seeing my evidence. 

One other thing:  their headline is really wishy-washy:  “Why Most Endurance Athletes Don’t Usually Need to Eat After Workouts” (italics mine).  It wouldn’t hurt to define what an endurance athlete is, and why some would sometimes benefit.  Meanwhile, this glycogen window thing (according to what I’ve read in support of it) only works if you do it as a standard practice—which means that nobody needs to do it sometimes.

That said, one thing mentioned in that article does present damning evidence against the glycogen window theory.  It’s one of the footnotes, linking to an article that supposedly supports the notion:  a book called “The Lance Armstrong Performance Program: Seven Weeks to the Perfect Ride.”  Obviously, if Lance Armstrong—a known liar—says the glycogen window is legit, then it must be a myth, right?  Well, it’s not actually that simple.  You see, it’s clear Lance didn’t really write that book, but merely lent his celebrity to the project.  So we’re still good.

You know what?  I’m tired of paying lip service to the glycogen-window haters.  You can research their silly positions on your own.  It’s time to get to the proof that it’s valid.

Hard science

Occasionally, I make the time to carry out scientific experiments on my own.  For example, I proved that cyclists have extremely high pain thresholds (click here) and that rinsing—the practice of tasting something sweet without actually ingesting any calories—actually does increase athletic performance (click here).  But I don’t have time to test every theory I come across.  Thus, when I had the opportunity to leverage the considerable brainpower, time, and energy of my daughter Alexa, I jumped on it.  (As I’ve documented here, I’ve long dreamed of exploiting my children’s intellect for personal gain.)

Here’s how I got my chance:  my daughter was assigned a science project having to do with heart rate.  It was supposed to be a fairly simple affair, such as measuring the heart rate of each test subject before and after eating chocolate.  (Needless to say, it’s never a problem finding subjects for such a study.)  Obviously Alexa could have done a really easy project like that, but you can guess what happened:  I got involved and pressed my personal agenda.

It wasn’t hard to get Alexa to tackle a difficult research project, because a) as a budding athlete and lifelong lover of sweets, she has a vested interest in validating the glycogen window theory, and b) she knew she’d get some treats, in the form of candy and accolades, during the testing process.

Of course, using heart rate to measure the benefit of sports nutrition is not particularly straightforward.  Alexa’s methodology involved measuring the change (i.e., delta) in heart rate between lying down and standing up.  On the morning after exercise, this delta is usually greater than if the subject didn’t exercise the day before.  Alexa sought to determine if getting a snack during the glycogen window reduced this morning-after effect.  (Where did she get this idea?  From me.  I read it somewhere, ages ago, and a coach once explained it to me.)

You know what?  Alexa describes all this better than I have: 

One way of testing your recovery time is by comparing the delta of your heart rate between lying down (first thing in the morning) and standing up.  After physical exertion, your muscles are tired, and standing takes more effort, raising your heart rate.  This assumption is based off of the existing studies on the subject. My experiment will in part test this hypothesis. However, the main point is to examine the effects of  getting a sugary snack within 35 minutes of exercising (i.e., during the so-called “glycogen window”).  It has been proposed that getting this immediate sugar helps replace muscle glycogen (which is like the fuel in your car’s tank).  This greatly enhances recovery (i.e., getting over fatigue).  In my experiment, half of the test group will have some form of sugar after exercising, during the glycogen window.  By comparing the delta of their heart rates, I will be able to see how the heart rates of the people who had sugar compare to that of the people who didn’t.

Procedure

Alexa’s project got off to a fine start:  she baked cookies for her friend’s soccer team.  Half the team would get cookies right after soccer practice, and the other half would take cookies home to eat later.  (Just try recruiting kids for the control group without offering them tasty snacks, too!)  Unfortunately, the soccer practice got canceled, and though Alexa tried to get half the team to forego snacks after the next game, they all (predictably) flaked.  So she got pretty far behind on her project. 

I always try to strike the right balance between giving my daughter too much help versus letting her make her own mistakes.  So, in this case I helped my daughter find replacement test subjects, but made her drive the project.  This resulted in a real nail-biter:  Alexa didn’t have all the data she needed until the morning the project was due.  At 6:00 a.m. she was frantically collecting the final test results, writing her report, preparing her graph, and putting the whole thing together.  (Perhaps this was the best thing about the project:  she learned the hard way not to procrastinate, and got some good practice working well under pressure.)

Here is Alexa’s procedure, in her words: 

Procedure: People participating will:

1. Take their heart rate first thing in the morning.
2. Stand up and take it again, recording the data, to get a baseline heart rate increase (aka “delta”).
3. Exercise in some way (something aerobic) at some point during that day.
4. Half of the group will have something sugary within 35 minutes of completing exercise; the other half won’t.
5. The next day all will measure their pulse again, first lying down and then standing, and recording the data.

Results

Alexa ended up with ten test subjects, their ages spanning 12 to 50-something.  One subject was herself.  I participated twice:  I served as a with-sugar subject and then (a day or two later) as a without-sugar subject.

In the table below, a row shaded in yellow indicate a sugary snack was received within the glycogen window.  I’m subject #1 and #2.  Alexa is #3.  My brother Bryan is #7.  As you can see, getting a  snack resulted in much less of an increase in the delta; that is, subjects recovered better when they had a glycogen-window treat.

Here is the conclusion Alexa wrote: 

I have concluded that my hypothesis is correct, and having sugar after a workout helps you recover.  The percent change in delta was in every case greater in the people who had no sugar after exercising.  This shows that getting up was more of an effort for them, meaning that their muscles had not recovered to the extent that others had.  This is illustrated by the graph.  The red indicates people who did not have a sugary snack after exercising, and the blue indicates people who did.

Just look at this graph.  The data unequivocally support her thesis.

 Every responsible scientist notes certain caveats that could make the results less compelling, and Alexa is no exception: 

In one case, the data set was not complete, and without a proper baseline delta, I couldn’t calculate that person’s percent change.  If I were to redo the experiment, I would try harder to get that data in time.

Her final sentence is my favorite, with its unexpected twist at the end:

This evidence supporting my hypothesis could prove extremely beneficial in the area of after-sports snack debates.

Happily, Alexa’s findings guarantee that she (and her sister and I) will continue to get glycogen window treats after every serious workout.  For me as a parent, this is a win-win because this coveted sugary reward guarantees my daughters will continue to do serious workouts.  (Alexa will do a 45-minute trainer ride for just five or six jelly beans.)  It’s touching to see these kids racing into the kitchen after exercise, jockeying for position and throwing elbows, yelling “Glycogen!  Glycogen!”

A final note

I realize that neither Alexa nor I made any effort to prove that the lying-down versus standing heart rate delta actually means anything.  But hey, we can’t do it all.  If one of you would study that on your own and send me your results, that would be great.  Or better yet, get your kid to do it!

2013 - The Year In Review

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mature themes.

Introduction

If you’re familiar with this blog, you know it’s about nothing in particular. That’s not going to change, though today’s topic—a review of the previous year’s big news, month by month—has become a tradition. Read on, and you may discover that this “blog about nothing” has actually had its finger on the pulse of the most pressing issues and themes of our time. At least, that’s what I’m going to bend over backwards trying to prove. To the extent I fail, you can silently mock me. What could be more fun than that?

January

The big news in January was that, after fourteen years of lying through his teeth, Lance Armstrong finally admitted he’d doped throughout his cycling career. Of course I felt hurt by this, not just because I’d stupidly believed in him and even defended him for years, but because this über-athlete had now beaten me at my own game: writing. That is, he’d produced two so-called autobiographies that ended up being works of pure fiction, and far more convincing than anything I’ve written. When Lance spilled his guts to Oprah Winfrey, and she asked him why he’d been such a bully for all those years, he said he’d felt a need to “control the narrative.” How literary of him!

Not long after that interview, I felt duly inspired by The King all over again and I tried to “control the narrative” myself. I blogged about an on-the-road showdown with a rude stranger who thought that, despite being kind of chubby for a cyclist, he could get medieval on my heinie on a brutal climb. A climb, in fact, that’s one of my very favorites. Of course, I wanted my narrative to resemble something mellow and thoughtful, perhaps whimsical—something, in short, befitting my bike club’s byline, “Sweetness & Light,” rather than the Lance-style narrative which is more like “Silence of the Lambs.” So instead of giving my opponent “the look” and then brutally attacking him, I rolled by him gradually, as if silently offering him my wheel: “Really, take my wheel. I want you to. I want you to have it … really.” Yes, I managed to best the guy, but in the process assured myself that, Lance’s example notwithstanding, you can succeed at sport without being a jerk about it. (Full disclosure: I loved watching Lance give Ullrich “the look.” It’s even fun to watch now, in the same way it’s kind of fun watching WWF wrestling.)

February

No matter how much hard-hitting news is offered up in February, all most people care about is the Academy Awards. (If you disagree, count yourself among the most socially conscious people on Earth. Congratulations!) And perhaps no film got more buzz than the winner of the Oscar for the Best Short Non-Animated Film, “Curfew.” Frankly, I was as caught up in the ensuing Curfew-Mania as everybody.

And yet, I couldn’t help but feel snubbed, because even though I cannot deny a strong bias, I really felt that my own film, “Tire Lever Demo,” should have won that Oscar. I think it’s fair to say that most critics would agree about this, and yet my movie lost. The fact is, not all of us have the financial resources to mount a massive hype-fest to turn the media into a giant Oscar-buzz machine on behalf of our film. It’s unfair voting. It’s who you know. Or is it “it’s whom you know”? Is there an implicit “whom” in “It’s who you know,” i.e., “It’s who [whom] you know”? I don’t know. English is a tough language. Anyway, for the full story on that tire lever demo, click here.

March

As if my crushing Oscar defeat in February weren’t bad enough, in March I failed to sell my beautiful dining table, with matching chairs, on craigslist. (I almost called it a “dinette set” just now, but the first time I did that—when I bought the set—I felt my hairline recede about a centimeter and my bones become at least 10% less dense.) Not getting any money was bad enough, but it’s particularly annoying to have my top-quality (if somewhat soiled) merchandise vetted by the kind of highly particular and discerning consumer who somehow manages to forget that he or she is paying bottom dollar. It was all I could do to keep from verbally insulting those who interrogated me about the cleanliness of the chairs. In fact, I did end up insulting everybody who read the second version of my ad, which I also published in these pages.

Of course I don’t need to tell you how this all fit in with the big world news of March, which was the sale of a precious little bowl that sold for $2.2 million at an auction despite having been purchased at a garage sale. Will my dining room table and chairs ever be worth that much? Well, yeah, once this blog makes me world-famous and becomes the basis of the blockbuster movie “Curfew II – The Spawning”! Then the family friends who bought my table and chairs for $150 will be laughing in your face, “craig”!

April

The big national news in April read like the script for a really lousy episode of “Magnum, P.I.” I’m talking about how a former martial arts instructor tried to send poisonous ricin-laced mail to members of our government, including President Obama, in a complicated plot to frame his nemesis, all over a feud involving the Internet, social media, and a counterfeit Mensa credential. So the perp, Everett Dutschke, is going to prison for twenty-five years, following which he’s sure to launch a new type of martial arts that he “perfected in prison,” so he can be annoying all over again.

It was with a sense of relief, then, that I posted in April about the only type of toxic mail most of us have to deal with, which is e-mail spam. Of course there’s not much in common between ricin-laced paper mail and spam, but the stupidity of the average spammer and the stupidity of Mr. Dutschke are closely related. The most salient statement in my April “Open Letter To Spammers” could easily apply to deranged imbeciles like Dutschke: “It’s natural to be lured toward a grudging respect for the really cunning criminal, like the jewel thief who slips into a museum during the dark of night, outwits all the laser-beam motion detectors, and makes off with the big diamond. But your methods are so grossly ineffective, the fitting criminal analogy would be the last guy who siphoned gasoline from my old Volvo, puking his guts out in the process.”

May

I kicked off May with a post about arguing. The ostensible topic was grammar, but the real point of my essay was how wonderful it is when people engage in lively debate over differing points of view, even if in the big picture they mostly agree. For example, as recounted in this post, a dinner guest gleefully danced on my (rhetorical) grave when he discovered that a word pronunciation I’d denounced—that is, the last syllable of “processes” being pronounced “eez”—was supported by a creditable dictionary. I suffered the agonies of defeat until I found another dictionary that called this pronunciation “a bungled affectation.” The good news is, we both care about language enough to spar about it.

Our behavior was eerily prescient: not long after, no less an intellect than President Obama got into a lively debate with a Code Pink anti-war protester during a press conference. Despite the protester becoming a bit too heated and having to get dragged away by the Secret Service, Obama did subsequently take the opportunity to point out that the woman had brought up important ideas that deserve to be debated. Maybe I’ll invite the President to my next dinner party! Or the Code Red protester!

June

Okay, it has occurred to me that a mischievous reader or two, inspired by all this talk of debate, might feel like playing the devil’s advocate by pretending not to have heard of the movie “Curfew” that I mentioned earlier. Well, that’s fine, but nobody could pretend not to know of the big news in June, of an NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, blowing the whistle on PRISM, the US government’s Internet spying program.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I blogged in June about social networks and texting, trying to warn teens (and their parents) about the perils of dopamine-fueled social one-upmanship and how all these tweets and texts are like a morphine drip of social approval. Obviously it would have been beside the point to warn teens about safeguarding their privacy, since the current batch seems to be totally unconcerned with it. But I did touch on the odd nexus of freedom and our modern always-on communication style: “If your parents can reach you whenever they want, that’s not really freedom at all. Freedom is having enough trust that your parents don’t need to know where you are.”

Substitute “NSA” or “government” for “parents” and my statement seems truer than ever, does it not?

July

I spent most of July ignoring all the big, important, unpleasant mainstream news and focusing mainly on the Tour de France. (I provided a blow-by-blow report of several stages, via peer-to-peer instant messaging and a blog post wrap-up after each stage; I wasn’t about to “live tweet” anything because that would just annoy my one Twitter follower, who has chosen to follow me for no reason I can think of since I’ve never sent a single tweet.) It’s too bad I never bothered to consider this great bike race in a larger current-events context that might have given me some insight.

What am I talking about, you ask? Well, in my coverage of Stage 8, I asked the rhetorical question, “Isn’t that sweet, how the French still pretend one of their own could place high in the overall?” Somebody needs to come up with a term for a question that’s not only rhetorical but is also only implied; in this case the question was, “Why do the French cyclists suck so bad, having failed to win their home race for the last 28 years?” Had I kept my eye on breaking world news, I’d have found the answer: it’s simply that the French are more interested in other things, like beauty, as shown by an article titled “Could Snail Slime Be France’s Next Miracle Beauty Cure?”  Louis-Marie Guedon, a Franch snail farmer, “says the mucus secreted by snails are full of collagen, glycolic acid, antibiotics and other compounds that regenerate skin cells and heal cuts,” and “has developed a secret technique to harvest the slime ... turning the innovation into France’s first industrial-scale snail mucus extraction operation with a target to harvest 15 tonnes of it next year.”

It’s hard to fault France for focusing on aesthetics ... after all, somebody has to. Beauty is becoming increasingly rare throughout the developed world, and not just due to obesity. Some of the thinnest people in Europe are getting uglier every year. I’m talking, of course, about professional bike racers. Veteran race announcer Phil Liggett, also in coverage of Stage 8, said of Tour de France winner Christopher Froome, “He’s not the prettiest of bike riders, but he is the most effective.” This is an understatement. Froome is so grotesquely emaciated I wouldn’t be surprised if Kate Moss told him, “Dude, go get half a sandwich or something!”

Let’s face it, society doesn’t need bike racers to be more effective; incrementally increased speeds don’t equal increased excitement. What the peloton needs is to follow the lead of the French and get back to looking better!

August

Well, there’s no point beating about the bush: August was all about fear of shrinking genitals. Look, guys, it’s pointless to pretend you didn’t go to Hewlett Packard’s website and download their genital-measuring app, “Chubby Checkers.” And don’t insult my intelligence by insisting that you were totally ignorant of how the app suddenly vanished and you had to go back to low-tech methods of assessing your masculinity. I guess I’ll cut you some slack if you didn’t get the full story of how the app was removed when the sixties-era pop singer Chubby Checkers sued HP for using his trademarked name without permission, and how this month a judge ruled that the lawsuit can move forward. But it’s all true.

The size of—and frankly the decline of—my own genitals was also a prominent albertnet theme in August; consider this post, “Blogger Eats Crow Over Compact Crank!”  Here I chronicled the (much deserved) abuse I got from by biking pals when I switched to a lower-geared compact bike crankset. Trevor wrote, “The compact crank is the cycling equivalent of the old man’s walker. Don’t forget the tennis balls or, instead, you might as well dangle your own off the back of your saddle since you’re apparently not using them anymore. Display them like the now useless withered tokens they’ve become.” Paul advised, “Now that shrinking genitals are a reality for you, please consider that it impacts others … of most note, your wife. I consulted with [my girlfriend] before I made the switch [to a compact crank]. After buying her a bunch of expensive jewelry she caved.”

Now that we ageing cyclists don’t have the Chubby Checkers app anymore, maybe it’s time to Kickstart a new genital measurement product, perhaps something built in to a bicycle saddle….

September

In September I was pleasantly surprised to see that my favorite magazine, “The New Yorker,” had published a letter I’d sent them. Drunk on the idea that I’d actually said something useful, I elaborated at length in a blog post about doping vs. talent. Could this longer piece have been labeled a “bizarre missive”? Could my readers have been “confused by” it? If so, what a nice tie-in to the other big news of September, “Chinese Left Confused By Bizarre Missive on Xi’s Ring.”

It seems there had been a lot of buzz in the social media about whether or not China’s President Xi Jinping wore a wedding ring on state television. The official Chinese news agency responded with a one-line report, “Talk on the Internet about Xi Jinping wearing a wedding ring at the G20 summit is fake information.” Did a member of this news agency also comment on my blog post, calling it “fake information”? They might have. But you know I can censor such things.

October

Can ignorance be charming? Well, of course! Just look at kids misspelling simple words, or believing in Santa. Is ignorance among adults also charming? Well, not so much, though lack of prescience can at least be refreshing. At least, that was my hope in October when I ran a “from the archives” post from 1989 about entering the computer age. Among the brilliant technologies I mentioned were fax, long distance calling cards, remote-controlled phone answering machines, laser printers, and the computer mouse. I was vaguely aware of the existence of e-mail at that time, but didn’t know enough to write about it.

Well, perhaps in another fourteen years you’ll think it charmingly non-prescient of me to declare that the very pinnacle of the Internet’s global reach thus far was achieved this past October. I’m talking about a crazy confluence of government, social media, and dignified adults behaving like children in the most charming way possible. If you’re having trouble remembering that far back, here is the news story about a Chinese government official who was visiting flood victims the Zhejiang province and accepted a piggyback ride from a local, so as to keep his nice shoes from being spoiled by a puddle. If you think this made a charming “local color” item for the local paper, think again. Someone snapped a photo, posted it to a blog, and the government official was promptly sacked. It’s kind of sad that the great online global village must mean the end of adult piggyback rides, but there you have it. On the plus side, without the Internet I’d never have believed that government officials enjoyed such perks.

November

In November I did a post celebrating the amazing ability of children to memorize vast amounts of seemingly trivial information, such as (in my kid’s case) the Periodic Table of the Elements and a bazillion digits of Pi, or (in the case of my own childhood) terabytes worth of rock lyrics and “Star Wars” lore. The point of the post was to teach parents how to exploit this amazing faculty, but the implicit rhetorical question (there it is again!) was something like, “Should we be worried about where these kids will end up, since they memorize all this trivia at the expense of their schoolwork?”

Again, a closer eye on the news would have answered this question, at least if “Well, yes and no” can be considered an answer. Consider this November news story about a school dropout in Nepal who taught himself how to imitate the sounds of 251 different kinds of birds. This isn’t the quasi-skill of the weird birder you might have encountered on an Audubon Society outing, who makes sounds that, to his ear and maybe even yours, sound kind of like a bird. No, the guy in Nepal can actually summon hundreds of crows and command them about. He’s kind of like the Kurtz of the bird world. So you see, just because knowledge can seem trivial doesn’t mean it is, which gives me hope for my own children.

December

The release of my second (non-) blockbuster movie of 2013 should have been news in itself, despite (or because of) the scathing review I magnanimously posted in December. Who could have predicted that a strange movie like “Lego Dude vs. Dinosaurs Run Amok” would produce one of those “life imitates art” moments? And yet that’s exactly what happened this month, when a disgruntled theatre director rammed his car into the French presidential palace as a protest, just as (in my film) a motorist rammed his car into—well, not a gate of a palace, but a dinosaur. I guess another difference is that the French theatre director was merely arrested rather than being attacked by dinosaurs. But still, the similarity is uncanny, is it not? (Don’t answer that.)

Thank you

Thank you for another great year. Or better yet, how about you thank me? That is, if you’re still there. Do you hear any trees falling near you?

But seriously, you’ve been great, really. I know I couldn’t do this blog without you, though I actually probably could, and actually probably do. Anyway, if there’s anybody out there, have a great 2014, a year in which I hope more of the breaking world news is trivial. And if you’re reading this way after the fact, I hope you found this a nostalgic look back at 2013: The Year Of The Social-Media Scandals (e.g., Ricin, Piggyback, Jinping, NSA, and of course Chubby-Checker).

Santa Denial, and How Lance Armstrong Taught Me To Lie

Introduction

When Robin Williams, a longtime friend of Lance Armstrong, was asked how he took the news that Lance had been doping, and lying about it, all along, Williams replied, “It was like when I found out about Santa Claus.”  This makes sense.  The Lance myth is a lot like the Santa myth:  something that millions of people believed, in part because it’s such a sweet story, they wanted to believe it.

This past Christmas, when I was lying to my younger daughter about Santa, I was surprised how easy it was compared to past years.  Why should this be?  After much soul-searching, I realized that it’s because I paid such close attention this past year to the Lance saga, and how it was that he successfully lied for so long. 

In short, this post explains how Lance taught me to lie.

First, a disclaimer

I want to be very clear that I’m not in favor of lying, unless it’s to my kids about Santa or the Tooth Fairy.  That’s why, until I subconsciously absorbed some important lessons from Lance, I had so much trouble with these lies.  It just felt wrong trampling over my kids’ reasonable skepticism, which as a parent I normally like to instill.  So, even though my lying skills have improved, my moral compass has not strayed, and I’m not lulled into any “grey area” nonsense.  I offer up this essay to you not as a how-to guide, but as an intellectual investigation.  Who knows, perhaps a knowledge of lying technique can help us be more skeptical.  I sure wouldn’t want to be played like a sucker again, after defending Lance for years.

Interestingly, I’ve witnessed a similar evolution of the lying skills and techniques of Lance himself.  In the early days of his lying, he wasn’t so smooth.  In fact, it wasn’t until the accusations went from a trickle to a stream to a full inundation that he mastered his skills at deception.  For example, if you can find the video footage of his press conference regarding the Discovery sponsorship, you’ll see some awkward, inexpert evasion.  Nothing as clumsy as Floyd Landis’s first denial (i.e., when he was first asked point-blank if he doped, he said, “I’m gonna say no…”), but pretty clumsy.

Technique #1:  convince yourself first

It’s pretty clear from the Oprah interview and others that Lance doesn’t actually regret cheating at sport—he just regrets getting caught.  He doesn’t present his doping and his deception as particularly heinous or unique crimes; I think he found a way, very early on, to square all this internally.  He took moral comfort in having convinced himself (and his team) that everybody else was doping too; in having used his massive celebrity to give comfort to cancer survivors (whether or not he made any progress toward funding actual research); and in having generated a vast amount of wealth for the bicycle industry.  In light of all this good he was doing, he must have felt as though depriving some cheating European of those Tours de France was really no big deal. 

So it is with the Santa myth.  To witness the idealistic, innocent, and pure trust my child puts in me, and to take advantage of it with a bald-faced lie every year, requires similar rationalization.  So I remind myself that the truth would only hurt, and that my kid couldn’t be trusted to keep it to herself.  I think of all the kids on the playground whose holiday experience would be damaged by too early a revelation, and all those letters to Santa that wouldn’t be written, and so forth, and thus I rationalize my position.  This was easier this year after I read Lance’s (or was it Tyler Hamilton’s?) description of the vast number of team support people (mechanics, masseuses, coaches, doctors, PR folks, etc.) whose careers depended on his “discretion” (i.e., lies).

Technique #2:  make your lie big and bold

Remember all that mealy-mouthed stuff in “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”?  The writer (i.e., liar) resorts to a sideways trick of turning Santa (the living, breathing man) into something abstract, with statements like “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist” and by comparing him to fairies.  It’s easy to see why the writer would do this, but it’s amateurish.  When Lindsay asked me straight-out this year, “Daddy, are you and Mommy really Santa?” I knew this was no time for prevaricating.  So I snapped at her:  “Why do you love cancer so much?!”  No, of course I didn’t really say that.  That was Lance’s retort when the journalist Paul Kimmage accused him of doping.  It was big, bold, and (best of all) beside the point.  It’s the logical fallacy my older daughter once referred to as “red lobster.”

So what I really said to Lindsay was, “That’s crazy talk!  Of course we aren’t Santa!”  She looked so relieved.  This was the look of a kid who is all too happy to place her dad’s honesty and integrity above that of some stupid kid on the playground.  Once she had the answer that she wanted all along, her skepticism went right out the window.  Yes, I felt slightly bad about the power I had over her and how I was abusing it, but more than that I thought, “Wow, that was a way better response than I’d have made last year, which would have been the old answer-with-a-question dodge, like ‘What makes you ask that?’”

 Technique #3:  suspend disbelief by throwing a bone

Okay, so you’ve lied to yourself first, and then you’ve told the lie boldly and firmly, and your audience wants to believe you anyway.  That’s a good start.  But what about that niggling doubt that an intelligent person would naturally have?  If left alone, that doubt might start to fester, and end up being to Truth what a grain of sand is to a pearl.  Best to nip doubt in the bud, which can be accomplished easily with a few plausible explanations.

I was as amazed as anybody when Lance went from being a one-day classics racer to a Grand Tour stage racer (by way of cancer).  I’ve seen classics racers evolve into stage racers over time, like Sean Kelly, but even Kelly never won the Tour de France.  So from the very first doping accusations against Lance, I had the beginnings of doubt.  But Lance, in one of his novels, explained that the cancer stripped off the unnecessary upper body muscle he’d had from his swimming days, reconfiguring him as a stage racer.  It didn’t matter that he hadn’t actually lost any weight; I wanted to believe, and that explanation was good enough.  Lance also mentioned his higher cadence as a major asset to his stage racing; it didn’t bother me that I myself get more power out of a lower cadence.  I only cared that his transformation was explained in some way.  (So it is with Chris Froome’s believers, who accept his silly explanation—finally getting over parasitic worms—for suddenly going from mediocre cyclist to the world’s best stage racer.)

The ability of an explanation—whether it’s solid or not—to help suspend disbelief is something Malcolm Gladwell has called “the Photocopier Effect,” after an experiment by a Harvard social scientist, Ellen Langer.  Langer had just a 60% success rate cutting in line to use a photocopier when she merely asked nicely.  But if she gave a reason, like “I’m in a rush,” her success rate went to 94%.  The crazy thing is that when Langer gave a pointless reason, like “because I need to make some copies,” her success rate was still 94%.  The point is, if you throw someone a bone, you’ll get somewhere, whether it’s a good bone or not.

Not that all explanations are created equal.  I never bought Alberto Contador’s “tainted Spanish beef” explanation for his positive clenbuterol test, and I don’t believe Michael Rogers’ “tainted Chinese beef” explanation for the same, and I don’t believe Jonathan Breyne’s “tainted Chinese beef” explanation either.  Tyler Hamilton’s “chimera” (i.e., prenatal evil twin) explanation for his blood doping positive would be laughable if it weren’t so sad. 

So when Lindsay questioned the authenticity of Santa Claus, I threw her the best bone I could.  After denying that my wife and I were actually Santa, I said, “That’s not to say that there aren’t people who impersonate Santa Claus.  Have you ever seen Santa in a mall?  Definitely a fake.”  See?  Now she had an explanation for the fact that somebody had (evidently) questioned Santa’s existence to begin with.  I went on to describe a fake mall Santa who made me cry because when I asked for a “bow and arrow” it sounded like “bone arrow” and I couldn’t make the fake Santa understand what I wanted.  Another red herring, right up there with Lance’s higher pedaling cadence!

Technique #4:  Embroil others in your lie

One reason I believed in Lance for so long was that no disgruntled former teammate ratted him out (until one finally did and all the others followed).  As we now know, Lance didn’t achieve this cooperation by sitting everybody down and formally conspiring in the way that a James Bond villain might.  No, it was all subtle:  if you want to be in the inner circle, you better ride well and show your allegiance, and if you do, you may get a white paper bag, and if you use the substances therein and benefit appropriately, you’re going to the Tour!  But by the way, now you can’t say anything, ever, because you’d have to come clean yourself.  It’s kind of like when my big brother would steal two cookies from the jar, stuff one in my mouth, and say, “You tell, I’ll tell.”  Except the gag order on the Postal team was implicit.

So it was when I brought my older daughter Alexa in on the Santa deception.  I knew she wouldn’t believe in Santa forever, and I dreaded the day when I’d have to come clean and admit I’d been lying all along.  It was just my luck that when that moment finally came, I’d recently read Tyler Hamilton’s book and had learned of the power Lance had through speaking softly and wielding financial repercussions. 

Predictably enough, the first domino to fall was the Tooth Fairy.  (I think that myth is more fragile because teeth are lost one at a time, so you don’t have the momentum of mass belief that the Christmas season entails.)  Of course once your kids know you’re capable of routinely lying to their faces about the Tooth Fairy, they figure out the Santa deception almost instantly.

Alexa was blunt:  “Okay, Dad, I know there’s no Tooth Fairy.”  I was equally blunt in my reply:  “You’re right.  There’s no Tooth Fairy.  And now that you know that, you won’t be surprised when you no longer get any money for losing a tooth.”  That was the extent of it.  Alexa, of course, is no fool:  she instantly grasped that if she later decried Santa as a fake, she could kiss her Christmas stocking—and all that candy—goodbye.

So when Christmas rolled around, Alexa not only kept Mum about Santa, but—of her own volition—took an active role in perpetuating the myth.  Hours before Lindsay confronted me about Santa, Alexa (in Lindsay’s presence) threw me a perfect softball:  “Hey Dad, does Santa give lesser presents to kids in poor communities?”  I casually replied, “Well, yes, a really fancy gift in a poor community could cause a lot of envy and strife.  So Santa naturally scales it down.  Meanwhile, in very affluent communities he has to give fancier gifts because the kids are so jaded.”  For Lindsay to hear this intelligent discussion among older, more worldly people was a perfect ruse.  And when Lindsay later asked if my wife and I pretend to be Santa, Alexa said, with an exquisite facsimile of eye-rolling annoyance, “That’s what she keeps trying to get me to believe.”  I couldn’t ask for a better accomplice.

Should I be thanking Lance?

I suppose I could thank Lance for helping me learn how to lie.  But I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for this skill once Lindsay knows the truth about Santa.

That said, I suppose we could all thank Lance for all the stunning entertainment he’s given us over the years, from the seven Tour de France victories to the botched comeback and on to the thrilling scandal, which brought about a veritable orgy of self-righteous pontificating from so many journalists, bloggers, and Internet haters.  Meanwhile, Oakley and Trek could thank Lance for generating so many sales; after all, these companies get to keep all that money they made.

But before we start thanking the guy, we should remember that, unlike lying about Santa, Lance’s deception was not a victimless crime.  He robbed all the clean cyclists, and the clean would-be cyclists (who left the sport rather than doping), as well as the would-be clean cyclists (those lured into doping by the culture Lance so generously fueled).  Lance should get coal in his stocking.