Old Yarn - The Cinelli Jumpsuit

Introduction

What do I mean “old yarn”? Well, I thought about using “spun yarn” in the title but that phrase has been taken and I don’t want to confuse the search engines. What I mean is a story that would be from my archives, except I’ve never written it down before. It seems as though I have enough good old yarns, I might as well write them up, and where better to put them but albertnet? (Isn’t it odd, by the way, that “write it down” and “write it up” mean the same thing?) So here is the first of what may become many old stories I’ll post here.

Cinelli jumpsuit

A cycling pal was in Italy recently and emailed our club a photo of a cool t-shirt he found at a bike shop, featuring the word “ciao” with its first letter being the classic winged “c” from the Cinelli logo. (I had a Cinelli bicycle for a while but that’s another story.) This photo got the team chattering, of course, and another pal posted a photo of his niece rocking a sweet tomato-red Cinelli jumpsuit.

I myself have a similar Cinelli jumpsuit in canary yellow, and sent around this old video of it to the team:

It’s been a while since I wore that jumpsuit, but I’ve got some fond memories of it, and you’re in luck: I’m going to share them here. (If that doesn’t seem like luck to you, click here.)

I bought the jumpsuit wholesale when I was working at the High Wheeler (aka Thigh Feeler) bike shop in Boulder, Colorado in 1989. The head mechanic, JB, had one, and as soon as my brothers and I saw it we had to have them, too. (I worked there with my oldest brothers, twins B— and G—, following in the footsteps of our brother M— who’d paved the way years before.) Summer in Boulder is hot, and the lightweight cotton was nice and breathable, but obviously that was just gravy … the real point of the jumpsuits was how awesome they looked, if you didn’t mind certain people thinking you were a complete idiot. That wasn’t much of a problem; at the Thigh Feeler, we mechanics weren’t allowed on the sales floor and in fact were encouraged to enter the store through the alley out back. We in turn tried but failed to ban the salespeople (whom we called “retail scum”) from the workshop area, where they tended to borrow but not return our tools. It was damned unfair.

I suppose part of the flair of rocking the jumpsuit is that it showed you weren’t scared of getting it dirty from greasy bike parts (vs. wearing the standard-issue shop apron). I thought frequently of the line in the classic cycling documentary “Stars & Water Carriers” (at least, I think that’s the movie) where someone says, “The Italian mechanics are so slick, they wear silk shirts.” To complete my look—and because my hair was so long it kept getting in my face—I wore a bright red bandanna with the jumpsuit. Of course, in Boulder when I’d venture out for my lunch break nobody really noticed my attire anyway, as Boulder had all kinds of exotic birds already.

(According to Thigh Feeler lore, when it got really hot some mechanics, possibly including the three Albert boys or perhaps them specifically, worked wearing absolutely nothing but an apron and shoes. I’m not going to say this legend is true, but I’m not saying it isn’t.)

When I moved to California for college of course I brought the jumpsuit, though I didn’t have much occasion to wear it. As a student at UC Santa Barbara, I worked at the Associated Students Bike Shop, but only for very short shifts arranged around my classes, and there wasn’t time to go home and change. I didn’t suppose it would be a good look for a college kid anyway, especially one like myself who was hoping to attract the ladies.

The AS Bike Shop was actually a very good place to be if you were looking for ways to chat up pretty young things, because helping customers fix their own bikes was actually part of our job. Not surprisingly, the guys never asked for help because they were too proud, but the girls often did. And they were invariably pretty. What’s more, almost all their bikes were cheap beach cruisers so the repairs were easy. One dazzling blonde brought her bike in one day and said, “Oh my god, the tire is completely flat!” I replied, “Gosh, that’s too bad. If it were just kinda flat that’d be better, because we charge by the PSI.” She said, “Oh, no! What’s a PSI?”

So what does this have to do with the Cinelli jumpsuit? Hold tight, I’m getting there. There was a supervisor on staff named Willie, who was an older guy who, it was said, had done a bit too much acid in the ‘60s. He was generally fairly grumpy, particularly (it seemed) with me, because he said I spent too much time with the coeds. I would remind him that it’s my job, and these tricky beach cruiser repairs take as long as they take, especially when a total novice is receiving patient instruction. Willie and I would go around and around on this but got nowhere, as the real issue was unspoken: he was apparently discouraged from instructing the customers himself; perhaps that opportunity was supposed to be part of the student employee experience.

The other thing Willie didn’t like about me is how I tended to squeeze in short shifts between classes. Truth be told, I didn’t have enough hours, or a high enough wage, to really earn much money at the shop. This was supposed to be a work-study job where the shop paid half my wage and the university the other half, but I didn’t qualify for work-study. My dad made too much money, you see, and declared me on his income taxes (thinking he was some kind of wise guy, since I’d lived with my mom after their divorce). So I was making half what I should have at that shop, barely over minimum wage. I mainly worked there so I could buy my bike parts wholesale (though factually the cute coeds did factor in as well). The short shifts were a problem because, being a more seasoned mechanic than most, I took on the more complicated repairs, but often didn’t have time to finish them. “Sorry, Willie, I gotta get to class!” I’d say cheerfully. Nobody likes taking over a tricky repair midway, least of all a tired-out guy like Willie, but it was what it was. One day, as I abruptly abandoned a repair, he grabbed the rag off my bench and gave it a vigorous, angry shake, only to discover that the rag was where I’d put all the eighth-inch ball bearings of the headset I was repacking. The bearings flew everywhere and I couldn’t help but laugh.

When it came to what Willie took as my poor job performance, he didn’t have much recourse because I was on great terms with the manager and the school administration. The manager liked me due to what modern corporate America calls “affinity bias”—we were both from Boulder. He’s the one who bent the rules in hiring me in the first place. The school administrator liked me for a similarly non-work-related reason. We were required to submit a daily report with our hours and a description of what we were working on. The answer—“fixing bikes”—was just too boring for me, but I was unable to wiggle out of submitting the reports. So I just made up something inane every day, according to my whim. “Cultivating raisins,” I’d write, or “Stroking my ego.” One day the administrator phoned me up and drew my attention to my highly unorthodox reports. “Am I in trouble?” I asked. She replied, “No, not at all, I just wanted to tell you to keep ‘em coming! My job is really boring and your reports are the highlight of my day.”

So what does all this have to do with the Cinelli jumpsuit? Hang on, I’m getting to that. So, every year our cycling team put on a race weekend, including a criterium on campus. The riders (when not racing) had to help in various capacities, and the AS Bike Shop chipped in, and I volunteered to help Willie with the pre-race bike inspections. The main thing we checked was that the tires were glued on properly. Most racers back then used tubulars, aka sew-up tires, which didn’t have a wire bead that hooked into the rim, but were rather glued on to the rim with this messy cement, and it was hard to get right. An improperly glued tire could roll right off the rim during hard cornering, which almost always caused a crash and frequently a pile-up. So we’d try to roll the tires off with our hands during the inspection; if we could, the bike wasn’t safe to race, and the rider was basically screwed because he’d have just a few minutes to try to find another wheel to put on his bike. Most guys got really pissed off about this, but Willie and I backed each other up. “Hey man, this guy did you a favor,” we’d say. “Better you flunk the bike inspection than cause a big crash.”

Willie seemed to really relish flunking bikes. He even wore gloves, to increase his chances of successfully rolling tires. When a wheel/tire passed inspection, we’d stick a colored sticker on the rim to indicate it was race-ready. (The color wasn’t determined until the day of the race, so riders couldn’t cheat and bring their own stickers.) Every time we flunked a bike, we’d put a sticker on Willie’s wheel truing stand, like a victory marking on the fuselage of a fighter plane. Our cooperation during the bike inspection marked the best we’d ever gotten along.

And that, finally, is where the Cinelli jumpsuit comes in. Here I must confess I’m a bit hazy on the details … either I showed up wearing it and Willie looked so totally envious that I rode back home, changed, and brought it back for him to wear; or, perhaps I just figured he’d enjoy wearing it even more than I would and brought it just for him. Suffice to say, he got to wear the jumpsuit. He had kinda long, scraggly hair, a big moustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, and those features—along with his zany personality—made the jumpsuit a perfect fit. He was so stoked to be sporting it.

Well, the next year, a day or two before the annual criterium, I was working away at the shop and Willie came over and—without the normal brash, tetchy tone he used for nagging me about the coeds—he said, “Hey, um, you’re working bike check with me at the race, right?” I assured him I would be. “So, yeah, well, I was wondering if, uh, well, like last year, if you could—”

“Sure,” I interrupted him. “I’ll bring the jumpsuit for you.” He grinned hugely (a rare sight, to be sure), and the next day he again enjoyed rocking the jumpsuit at the race, where we added many more stickers to his truing stand. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he hassled me less at work after that … but actually, when I really think back, it was no different. He was still a pretty grumpy guy.

During my second year at UCSB, I applied to transfer to UC Berkeley and was accepted. That June, after my last final exam, I made a final visit to the AS Bike Shop. “Done with your last final, huh?” Willie said. “That calls for a beer!” As he opened the mini-fridge he remembered I was transferring and said, “Wait, this was your last final ever here, right? That calls for champagne!” I kid you not, he had a bottle chilled, and popped it open. There weren’t too many guys at the shop at that moment, so I ended up drinking a fair bit of it. And then I realized, “Oh, shit! I’m supposed to meet the guys to go ride!” I raced home, changed, and met a few of my teammates for an 80-mile road ride. The first 15 miles or so were just awful, trying to get my rubbery legs and buggered motor skills to cooperate. Then my body seemed to burn through the alcohol, and everything was just fine. Kind of odd, that.

Well, I moved away, up to Berkeley, where I got a proper bike shop job, with real pay and real hours (due to the higher cost of living in the Bay Area). I wasn’t teaching the art of bike repair to customers anymore, so it wasn’t as much fun, but it paid the bills. I was still racing, now for the Cal team, and in the spring we headed down to do the races at UC Santa Barbara. Obviously I wasn’t on the hook for helping with bike checks anymore, but nevertheless I headed over first thing to say hi to Willie. He seemed legitimately glad to see me, asked how I liked Berkeley, etc. Then his expression changed and he said, “Hey, I gotta ask you something. By any chance, did you … did you—”

“Yeah, Willie,” I said. “I brought the jumpsuit.”

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From the Archives - The Big [Bike Shop] Screw-Up

Introduction

It’s another slow news day at albertnet.  (More to the point, it’s a big everything-else day and none of the crap I’m busy with is worth writing about.)  So I’m plunging into the depths of my hard copy archives for a little poem to present.  Insofar as a central goal of this blog is to store copies of my work offsite, all is going according to plan.

As a bonus, I’m going to provide all-new footnotes on this poem.  Pretend you found this in your Norton Anthology of American Teen Poetry.

The Big Screw-Up – ca. 1986

Oh no, did I just wreck this stupid crank?

The tool slipped and all the threads came out!                                2

And really, if I want to be quite frank,

I gotta tell ya, J.B.’s gonna shout!

I can’t believe that I forgot the bolt

That holds the crank on under any load.                                            6

Oh lordy, did I ever feel a jolt,

When John looked at the crank and that bolt showed.

He’s gonna think I am a total jerk,

And that I don’t know anything about bikes.                                 10

And that at this bike shop I shouldn’t work,

And that I oughtta just go take a hike.

    Thank god, John fixed the crank quite easily

    But tools cannot save my dignity.                                                  14

Footnotes & commentary

Line 2:  the tool slipped and all the threads came out

If you think it’s a bit silly to write a sonnet about a mishap at a bike shop, consider that I originally envisioned this as a Broadway musical.  I worked on it for nine years before suffering a nervous breakdown.  That’s not true.

I’ll concede that I never gave much thought to the audience for this sonnet.  I mean, who the hell would even know what, and whom, I was writing about?  It’s actually entirely possible no living soul has ever read this sonnet.  And since almost nobody reads this blog, you could well be the very first reader of the sonnet!  You should win a prize, maybe a free take-apart eraser or homemade bookmark or something.

So, “crank” in this context is the crankset on a bicycle, which is what the pedals attach to.  The crank, in bikes of this era, was bolted on to the spindle of the bottom bracket:  that is, the axle-like thingy that spins around.  It was a press fit:  you stuck it on there, then cranked it down with this bolt, which pushed the crank farther onto the spindle until it was good and tight.

To remove it, you first removed the bolt, and then—because the thing was pressed on so tight there was no other way to remove it—you screwed this tool in there called a crank puller.  It had a threaded part, male, that screwed into the female threads of the crank.  Then there was this thingy that screwed inside of it and pushed on the spindle.  It’s kind of like how, when someone in a cartoon wants to pull a door open, he has to push his foot against the doorjamb.  Kind of.

You had to be careful with this type of square-shoulder spindle.  If you didn’t tighten the bolt enough, the crank could fall off, but some cranks were made of such cheap aluminum, you could destroy them by tightening too much.  If you just kept cranking on that bolt, the crank would move farther and farther up the spindle until the chainring mashed into the frame.  I once saw a guy do that on a really cheap bike, a Miyata Valley Runner (or “Valley Girl” as we called them).  

Line 4:  J.B.’s gonna shout

J.B. was John Burnell, the head mechanic at the High Wheeler (or “Thigh Feeler” as we called it).  He was a total bike guru and we were all in awe of him.  He was also a very nice guy, unless you crossed him.  We used to solder the ends of the brake and gear cables on all the bikes we built, and one time my brother Bryan accidentally let some molten solder dribble onto J.B.’s foot (he was wearing those Adidas race slippers, without socks).  J.B. issued an impressive litany of profanity, with significant volume and perfect inflection.  A cussing-out tour de force, and Bryan looked like he could have died of shame.

Line 6:  holds the crank on

Bikes weren’t quite as well designed back in those days.  If the crank was a tight fit on the spindle, you could probably get away with no bolt at all, at least for awhile.  But if the fit wasn’t so good, the whole thing would eventually rock loose and the bolt would rattle off and the whole crank would fall off onto the road.  This could happen in the first 30 days of a bike’s life, and is the #1 reason shops traditionally offered a free tune-up a month after purchase.  Nothing looks worse than a crank that literally falls off an almost-new bicycle.  (Except, perhaps, a morbidly obese cyclist wearing bright pink Lycra.)

Line 7:  lordy

Nobody says “lordy” anymore and I certainly didn’t at the time I wrote this.  This is a classic case of throwing in a worthless two-syllable word just because it happens to be iambic and pads out the line metrically.  No poet worth his salt would resort to such a cheap trick.  I could have so easily done better, though the most obvious expression that comes to mind would be blasphemy.  I’m not sure blasphemy belongs in a sonnet, at least one penned by a teenager.  In those days my brothers liked to avoid profanity by substituting “TANJ,” an acronym they made up for “there ain’t no justice.”  I found this so goody-two-shoes as to be more offensive than blasphemy.  Meanwhile, its double-entendre—there existed at that time a manufacturer of steel bike frame tubing called Tange—was erroneous because Tange was pronounced “Tan-GAY,” not “tanj.”

Line 8:  that bolt showed

How stupid was I, that I could forget to remove the bolt?  Well, oddly enough, this wasn’t a terribly uncommon mistake.  You see, bikes tended to come with a dust cap installed in the crank, which served no real purpose so all us racer-types left them off.  So removing the dust cap sometimes led the inattentive mechanic to think he’d removed the bolt.  Meanwhile, some cranks (such as Shimano) had a “one-key release” whereby removing what looked like a dust cap was also removing the bolt.  But all this is backpedaling (no pun intended).  It was a dumbass move.

Line 9:  I am a total jerk

As I came to realize years later, you have to be careful with one-syllable words when writing a Shakespearean sonnet.  As explained here, a pair of one syllable words will often have a natural inflection:  for example, saying “hot dog” or “pit bull” correctly requires the emphasis to be put on the first word.  It’s “PIT bull,” not “pit BULL.”  If the poet fails to understand this, he or she ends up with clunky lines like this one.  I could so easily have written, “He’s gonna think that I’m a total jerk” instead of “He’s gonna think I am a total jerk,” but I was as bad a poet as I was a mechanic.  Worse, probably.

Line 10:  anything about bikes

Count the feet on this line.  There are 5½.  What part of “pentameter” did I not grasp?  It’s not iambic penta-and-a-half-meter!  I guess “anything ‘bout bikes” would work better but is kind of cheating.  “And that I don’t know anything at all” would work fine, and then I could end line 12 with something about working at a mall, or cleaning bathroom stalls.  Oh well.  Too late now.

J.B. never accused me of knowing nothing about bikes, but once I was trying to file a new cotter pin for a cottered crank and getting nowhere, and he said, “You don’t know anything about cottered cranks!”  Then he paused, reflected on the state of the industry, in which cottered cranks were on the very brink of obsolescence, and conceded, “I guess that’s actually no big deal.”  Then he took the crank and the cotter pin away from me, expertly filed the pin to the right shape, and finished the repair.  You know what’s weird?  The industry has progressed so far from there that I don’t actually know much about the modern cranks on my own bike.  All this technology has passed me by.

Line 11:  at this bike shop I shouldn’t work

This line really makes me wince.  I suppose there’s plenty of precedent for a poet to put a prepositional phrase before a predicate (e.g., “at this bike shop I shouldn’t work” instead of “I shouldn’t work at this bike shop”), but nobody talks or writes that way these days, so such a construction sounds a) contrived, b) like the writer is trying to sound all belles-lettres-y, c) like the writer is trying to skate by on a technicality, and d) like Yoda.  Reading this over, I want to substitute “like I oughtta be fucking fired,” and meter be damned.

Line 12:  just go take a hike

God, it just gets worse and worse.  Nobody says “go take a hike” anymore, and nobody did in the mid-‘80s, and stupid expressions like this are so verbally weak as to be the opposite of poetry.  A poem should use vivid details that affect the reader viscerally.  This line should say something more bold, like “I should have molten solder dripped down the front of my shorts.”

Line 13:  quite easily

It’s true that J.B. fixed the crank, and I don’t remember it taking him very long, but I cannot remember how he did it, so maybe it wasn’t actually that easy.  It’s possible I only destroyed some of the threads.  The crank puller would thread in pretty far normally, but perhaps the bolt kept it from going in far enough to do real damage.  If there were good threads farther in, J.B. would have just had to tap out the wrecked ones to remove the damaged metal.  I don’t think he inserted a helicoil.  The fact that I’m still pondering this 30 years later tells you how gutted I still am about it.  I hope J.B. reads this and can at least appreciate my contrition.  He probably still remembers my jackass maneuver himself.  Someday a journalist will ask him, “Did you ever work with Dana Albert, the Campanile clock tower shooter?” and he’ll say, “Oh, yeah, he was a moron.  Once tried to pull a crank without removing the bolt.  But I didn’t figure him for a complete psycho.”

Line 14:  dignity

I have to admit, I feel pretty good about how well “easily” rhymes with “dignity.”  The notion of a tool saving something seems a bit of a stretch at first, but that’s exactly what J.B. did with the tap or whatever tool he used—he saved that crank.  Maybe it’s still going strong on some bike somewhere.

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Self-Help & the 8th Habit

Introduction

Don’t you hate it when this happens?

It’s always so tempting to mock the word “paradigm,” and other concepts from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.  (I mentioned this book to my brother and he said, “Let me guess … these habits include yachting, fine dining, and fox hunting.”)  And if more people knew the subtitle of the 7 Habits book, Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, they’d probably make fun of that, too.  In general, the entire self-help industry has been a giant target for all kinds of sarcastic vitriol.

For example, George Carlin is very funny on this topic.  He asks, “Why do so many people need help?  Life is not that complicated….  I really don’t understand:  if you’re lookin’ for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?  That’s not self-help … that’s help!  There’s no such thing as self-help!  You did it yourself … you didn’t need help!”

As much as I enjoyed that riff, I can’t embrace his distaste for self-help.  I myself have no use for glib aphorisms, much traditional advice (like the importance of goals), and frankly most of the books in the self-help section.  However, I’m a big believer in self-help as an endeavor, and actually respect The 7 Habits.  In fact, in this post I’m going to give you an 8th habit—an all-important one that I think Stephen R. Covey missed.

The self-help paradox

Some of the abuse that The 7 Habits gets is based on clichés like “paradigm” and “win-win.”  The comic strip “Dilbert” has been mining that stuff for so long, “Dilbert” itself can get repetitive.  (In Covey’s defense, “paradigm” and “win-win” weren’t hackneyed when he first trotted them out, and it’s only due to the massive success of his book that they’ve been overused ad nauseam.)  But I think there’s something else people are bothered by; after all, many other self-help books, such as Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, avoid the problem of trite language.  I think a lot of people instinctively recoil from the very idea of self-help.  (I know I did, when I was younger and cockier.)

Why should this be?  Well, many forms of self-help are aimed at people with drug, alcohol, or other addictions … not exactly the kind of person we hold up as a role model.  Beyond that, I think there’s a tendency to equate self-help with weakness, and whiny-ness, and perhaps with excessive humility.  Maybe showcasing the awareness of your own frailty can come across as emo.  If you meet a stranger at a cocktail party who within 30 seconds is mentioning his or her therapist, you might start looking for an excuse to disengage.

But if you look at self-help as commitment to improving yourself (and one that can be as private as you wish), and if you acknowledge that there’s a distinction to be made between good, sound advice in book form and all the chaff that any industry will naturally accumulate, I don’t think there’s any reason to automatically eschew the entire notion of trying to be a better person.  The alternative, when you think about it, is to think of yourself, “I’m just fine the way I am.” 

To me, that’s a pathetic way to be, and actually strikes me as more conducive to being emo.  When I witness emo behavior, I see it as an overblown, melodramatic indulgence and I want to shout, “Aw, just shut up!  I know you’re feeling all sad and vulnerable, but don’t wallow in it—work on it!  You could start by growing a pair!”  (Am I sexist?  Perhaps not—after all, I didn’t say “when I witness emo behavior in a male.”  I think “grow a pair” has, like “guy,” become almost a gender-neutral term.)

Frankly, I think the biggest problem with The 7 Habits is simply that not enough people actually read the book.  More broadly speaking, I think too many people—for reasons of pride, or insecurity, or laziness, or some combination of these—are unwilling to challenge their personal status quo.

So here’s my 8th habit:  get help.  Or to be more specific, don’t get too comfortable.  Concede that you’re not perfect, and work on yourself—and don’t pretend that your natural instincts about this process are any match for the careful, thorough thinking that very good minds have already done.  After all, if you knew how to be the perfect you, you’d be perfect.  And you’re not.  (Nobody is, except perhaps Atul Gawande.)

An example

I’m a cheap bastard.  When my daughter’s Stumpjumper (a great bike, but ~15 years old) wasn’t shifting right, I was determined to fix the shifter instead of replacing it.

I tried the easy route recommended by my mechanic pals (hosing the shifter’s innards down with WD-40), but that didn’t work.  This thing was completely gummed up.  So I took it apart.  Damn, that thing’s complicated.  There are all these washers and bushings and pawls, and it’s got 3 springs, one of which you have to wind up and hold tension on while you bolt the shifter back together.  I took photos as I went, but I wasn’t methodical enough, and missed important information, and wasted vast amounts of time in vain.  Throughout the ordeal there was this voice in my head:  “You’re an idiot!” and “Your brothers are right, you’re not mechanically minded!” and “You suck!” and “You call yourself a bike mechanic?” and “Like an idiot, you bought your kid an ancient bike you can’t get parts for and now you’re screwed!” and so forth.

I took a break from the shifter repair to closely examine these strong feelings I was having, and question whether there’s something wrong with me that I can’t take little failures like this in stride.  In the big scheme of things, a new shifter wouldn’t actually be that expensive.  Any third party would probably having trouble understanding why this meant so much to me—and maybe for good reason!  What if I’m being totally unreasonable, I wondered, and some deep fracture in my ego is starting to show itself?  These are all worthy ideas to investigate, and it’s a worthy thing to have the bravery to confront yourself and entertain such doubts.

So did I look online for a good therapist who could sort out my feelings of self-loathing?  No, in the final analysis I determined that that wasn’t the kind of self-help I needed.  I just needed a good website with some better photos of the shifter.  And man, I found an awesome site!  Click here:  this guy not only posted 17 great photos of the left shifter alone, he annotated them and provided complete instructions!

Frankly, I was plenty daunted by the website, because it gave me even less excuse to chuck the shifter and buy a replacement.  But more than that, this guy’s success, and his generosity in putting up the instructions and photos, inspired me.  He obviously has great patience, and a more methodological approach, and I thought, “Why can’t I be more like him?”  So I gave it another crack, and it really did end up being a self-help project (i.e., requiring my own effort and insight) because I couldn’t just follow the guy’s directions … I needed to conceptualize the pieces in 3-D, and try out various ways of putting them together (since I’d buggered the thing up to the point that some were installed wrong).  In case you’re interested, here’s my own set of photos:

(That last photo is a still from a movie I made, which was instrumental because even when I had the shifter assembled correctly, I still had to reach through a gap in the housing with a screwdriver and click the internal pieces back and forth, to work in the oil, before the lever finally started working—which it totally does now, like a champ!).

My point is this:  at the core of self-help is a refusal to let yourself off the hook too easily.  Sure, there is good advice out there about being compassionate with yourself, and the self-loathing voices that countless people have in their heads are not often very constructive.  But for every person who pushes himself too hard and needs to lighten up, I’d say there are 10 who are just too complacent to push their comfort zone, or too reluctant to get help on something they can’t handle on their own.

Giving up too easily can lead to serious consequences; standing down and accepting defeat is no good for the soul.  When I got that shifter working again, I just sat there for a spell, clicking away, putting it through its paces, as delighted as Eeyore savoring his birthday presents:  putting his (popped) balloon from Piglet into the (empty) honey pot Pooh gave him and taking it back out again.

Without getting help (and inspiration) from this complete stranger on the Internet, I’d have failed to fix the shifter, and that self-annihilating voice might well have taken to reasserting itself every time I looked at the mismatched replacement shifter on my kid’s bike.  Instead, the repaired shifter is now an emblem of my perseverance.  (Is it okay that I berated myself so much during the process?  Yeah, probably.  I’m a loud person from a loud family  so my internal voice is bound to be loud as well.  I think my self-esteem is fine.  Sometimes my stubbornness plays a little rough, that’s all.)

One more point to be made here is that not all self-help resources are touchy-feely.  A how-to guide, or the shifter repair instructions on a website, are still self-help.  Why are so many people perfectly casual about instruction manuals and how-to guides but suddenly get nervous when the book is about fixing yourself instead of some object?  A self-help book is either good or it isn’t … there’s no shame in giving it a go, even if (or perhaps especially if) the process might subject you to uncomfortable self-examination.

The cynical justification for the 8th habit

Okay, maybe you’ve been gagging on my whole essay here because you’re just too cynical to go in for this idealistic self-help business and my saccharine success story.  That’s fine—but you should still embrace my 8th habit—get help—for one purely pragmatic reason:  chances are very good your boss will appreciate it.

Who is it, after all, in the “Dilbert” strip who’s always spouting stuff about “win-win” and “paradigms”?  It’s the bosses!  Who are the people, in the real world, who have used these terms so much, and for so long, that they’ve become clichés?  The executives! 

Now, there are various ways to account for this.  One way is to say that executives just have a weakness for this stuff and those who spout banal platitudes and ideological sound-bites are bound to flock together.  But another possible explanation is that a willingness to embrace the self-help ethos is what actually helped propel these people to power.  I don’t think it matters which of these you believe, because the bottom line is, management does respect the self-help impulse.  (Over a dozen C-level executives are quoted in the “Praise for…” section of The 7 Habits.)

When you think about this, it makes perfect sense.  Any healthy corporation needs to foster a culture of earnestness, while rooting out cynicism (which can hugely erode employee morale).  I don’t think you can ever go wrong, career-wise, by erring on the side of humility.

So am I saying you should leave The 7 Habits on your desk for your boss to see, and/or gush to him or her about this or that self-help book?  Not at all.  This essay being the exception, I’m generally pretty quiet about my own self-improvement projects.  Moreover, there’s no telling what your particular boss might think of this or that self-help resource.  But if you suppress your cynicism, and acknowledge the reality that earnestness isn’t the 8th deadly sin, and at the very minimum resist the temptation to pooh-pooh the various professional development programs and rah-rah sales kickoff meetings or whatever, your attitude is bound to evolve, and this will be noticed.  Humility is a habit that very few people, I think, would hold against you.

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Ride Report - Mount Baker (WA) with Brother & Nephew

Introduction

It’s SOP on my bike club, after a glorious race, to send around a report, which traditionally focuses more on the food (which is always copious) than the glory (which can be elusive).  Since I chickened out of the Everest Challenge this year, I’m reporting on my biggest ride of 2015 instead:  Mount Baker, up near Bellingham, WA, with my brother Bryan and his son John.  Read on, or at least skim the photos, to be immersed in timeless themes:  Man vs. Nature, Man vs. Man, Man vs. His Father, Man Struggling to be a Man, Man vs. Food, Man vs. Bike, and (for the ladies) Fish vs. Bicycle.

Executive Summary (i.e., condensed version)

• Breakfast:  two cups strong coffee, black
• During:  Four bottles Powerade (red flavor); unknown quantity Gatorade (cucumber-lime); 3 Clif Bars (1 Thin Mint, 1 Beef Jerky, 1 Gluten-Free Donner Party flavor, which fortunately tastes more like leather than like scabs); two Powerbar Gels (expired ca. 2009)
• Lunch:  nothing
• Glycogen window snack:  one banana ( infirm, or at least not-firm); 1½ bottles New Belgium Long Table Farmhouse Ale (seasonal; highly recommended)
• Dinner:  homemade pasta with homemade meat sauce; garlic bread; garlic hot dog buns; meat lasagne; salad; pumpkin pie with whipped cream; whipped cream without pumpkin pie (sshhh!)
• Ride Stats:  120.2 miles; 7:57:36 ride time; 7,618 feet of vertical gain
• Verdict:  epic pass, though I lost most of the city-limit sprints

Full report

It’s a long road, figuratively speaking, to the non-figurative open road.  Family life, with its careers, chores, children, and logistics always interferes.  Maybe that’s why the great outdoors beckon so strongly.  Our biggest obstacle was getting Bryan’s fleet running.  I’d flown to WA without my bike (because the airlines are such thieving bastards) and had to borrow.  Both of Bryan’s spare road bikes were out of commission (but on the plus side, what a boon, to own two spare road bikes!).  “I almost had one of them ready to go for John before he went off to college,” Bryan said, and then added wistfully, “Four years ago.”  (John just graduated.)

So we headed to Bryan’s office, which has a full bike shop for its employees.  Pretty sweet perk, eh?  The company is called Faithlife, for those of you already polishing your résumés.  Here we are at work:

The first bike, a 1983 Team Miyata, had belonged to my dad for awhile, before he gave it back to Bryan.  Dad had a 180mm TA Cyclotourist triple crankset on there (all but fused to a Phil Wood sealed bottom bracket); Grab-On foam instead of bar tape; front and rear racks; old-school wheels that only took a five-speed freewheel; weirdly narrow handlebars; and of course a giant puffy saddle.  He’d also removed the gold “Team Miyata” panels.  Poor bike.  Bryan had stripped the crap off before but hadn’t replaced all of it yet.  Getting that bike running felt more like an intervention than a renovation.  I feared we’d have to go out and buy a new front derailleur.  Fortunately, every former bike mechanic has a big box called The Box, and Bryan’s was full of treasures.  Check out this sweet Dura-Ace mech, from around 1980 (and no, he has no idea where he got it):

The other bike, an ’84 Team, was in better shape and needed only brakes, a saddle, and a chain.  It actually had a chain, but it was older than George Burns and almost as dead.  We ended up keeping it on there because it was enmeshed in a codependent relationship with the equally worn-out cogs.  The saddle we threw on there was a Fi’Zi:k knockoff that came with Bryan’s new Fuji, and was designed to be thrown away.  It was better than nothing, but just barely.  Sitting on it was like sitting on one of those Spenco fake boobs we used to pass around in health class, to feel for fake tumors.  At least this saddle didn’t have any of those.  The brakes we installed were Tektro—also from the new Fuji, and also designed to be thrown away.

On ride day, I woke at 6 and thought I’d have to go shake the other guys awake, but they were already up.  Look, my nephew John (a college baseball player) even stretches out before exercise:

Couple quick things:  yes, that jersey does in fact match the Miyatas, and thanks for noticing.  (It was a hand-me-down from his Evil Uncle Dana, which is also where Bryan got both Team Miyatas.)  And look at that whiteboard:  we worked out the physics of this ride in advance.  The power required for the climb, all the vectors for taking high-speed switchbacks on the way back down … it’s all there.  We don’t stumble blindly into these things.

Here’s the requisite “before” photo.  We hit out at 7:12 a.m., fully caffeinated from good, strong coffee that Bryan made.  If I were a coffee achiever I could devote a paragraph to the beans, the blend, the machinery, etc. but I’m just a NoDoz Underachiever.  We didn’t have any breakfast, because we never do, and as for its being the most important meal of the day … oh, stuff it!

Man, it was fricking cold (41 degrees, 88% humidity, and I don’t want to hear about your “real winters” and all that—I’m a Californian).  Mist rose from all the fields as we rolled out of town.  Most of the roads had been repaved recently, and featured those rumble strips that used to keep drunks and somnambulists from going off the road, and I guess still do, but now they’re mainly for drivers who can’t resist texting while driving.

Speaking of annoying drivers, you know what’s all the rage in WA?  Putting an oversized engine in your jacked-up truck, and then, when passing cyclists, flooring it so the groan of the engine and the whine of the turbocharger make the bikers jump out of their skins.  We bikers need to be taught a lesson, you see.

We got a great view of Mount Baker, our destination, on the way out of town.  Cameras, for all their recent improvement, still do a lousy job compared to the naked eye.  I wish they responded quasi-intelligently to voice commands, so I could say, “No, don’t focus on the chain, focus on that ancient front derailleur!” or “Fix the exposure so Mount Baker shows up, duh!”  My hands were too cold to do a lot of futzing so I had to add the mountain in post-production.  (Full disclosure:  I’m not actually sure this is Mount Baker, and I guessed on the scale.)

We sprinted for every city limit sign.  I thought I’d do pretty well, because Bryan is even older than I am, and this was—I kid you not—John’s first bike ride of 2015.  (He commutes short distances by bike, but that’s about it.)  I know you’re tired of all the hackneyed excuses bike racers give, so I have some new ones:

• My contact lens prescription is on the weak side, and the city limit signs in WA don’t feature elevation or population, so they’re hard to discern from a distance;
• I was afraid to shove hard on the pedals due to that ancient chain;
• I’m just a big sissy.

When Bryan and John launched their sprint into Glacier, I was riding no-handed with the camera out so there was no way I could participate.  So did I at least get an awesome photo of the glorious sprint?  No … by the time this occurred to me the guys were too far ahead for a great photo.  My brain was being as sluggish as my legs.

It’s a bit hard to describe the climb up Mount Baker. Technically, it’s about 30 miles long, but the first 20 miles average just 1%. The climb proper begins 9.5 miles from the “summit” and averages 5.5%. (The road doesn’t reach the actual summit.) About a mile from the top is a pretty steep section, maxing out at 13.7%.

There are a few buildings along the road, one associated with a ski resort, but nothing was open so we couldn’t get any water. About 5 miles from the summit we had some Cliff bars which we washed down with recycled saliva (our own). The modern bars have caffeine in them and come in all kinds of new flavors. I can’t tell, in this photo, if John is savoring his, or using Zen techniques to ingest it without suffering.

Look at their shoes.  Those Lake cycling shoes Bryan is wearing?  They technically belong to John.  They’re his only pair, which is why he’s rocking the Nike sneakers.  Does he complain about having to ride 120 miles in sneakers?  No.  Does he complain about his dad swiping his stuff?  No.  Did he complain, six years ago when we last attempted this ride, that it rained the whole time and we got turned around by snow a couple miles from the Mount Baker summit?  No.  Does he complain about overuse of the serial-rhetorical-question literary device?  Possibly, and I couldn’t blame him.

By the way, here’s a movie from that ill-fated Mount Baker ride of 2009.  I still have the scar on my leg from where Bryan tried to take a bite.

Fortunately the weather was great this year … it was still cool on the mountain, but nice and sunny.

Go ahead and zoom in on that last one.  Note that Bryan’s gloves don’t even remotely match:  one is full-finger, one isn’t.  Guess what he’ll be getting for Christmas!

So how was John doing, considering that he’s not a bike racer, hadn’t ridden all year, has more extraneous muscle on his upper body than Chris Froome has in total, was wearing sneakers, and was riding a bike with wheels handed down from his aunt’s early-‘80s Univega?  Quite well, though he must have been suffering pretty badly to get gapped like this by his dad.

Actually, maybe he was gapped only because he was futzing with his GoPro or something.  He did admit later to having suffered, but who knows … maybe he was just being polite.

Here’s the only halfway decent action photo I got of all three of us.  It appears I may have suffered a mild stroke at some point, based on how the side of my face is collapsing and on how I’m grinning like an idiot.

Look, we made the summit, Artist’s Point!  The elevation is 5,100 feet and we started at (basically) sea level.  A friendly hiker snapped this photo, and also gave us a whole bottle of Gatorade, which was cucumber-lime flavor.  You know what?  It actually tasted pretty good.  That’s what hours of exercise will do for you.  (I remember enjoying some ice-cold Tequiza after an hours-long hike in Yosemite; I bought some when I got back home and realized it was actually quite gross.)  We were really stoked at the hiker’s generosity, because there was no water at the summit, either.  We only managed to fill our bottles once during this ride, about 80 or 90 miles in.

For those albertnet readers who’d like to get into a big argument about irony, here’s a photo that may or may not be ironic.  (Capri Sonne, aka Capri Sun, is one of those rare beverage companies not owned by PepsiCo, which is Gatorade’s parent.)

The descent was glorious (if a bit brisk).  Toward the bottom of this post is a YouTube video where you can see some of that.  Following the downhill, when we finally did stop for water, we compared our helmet-heads.  Bryan’s was fricking epic:

You can tell he was going fast by the piece of straw there.  My own helmet-head was pretty sweet, too.  I didn’t get the corn row effect, but the bugs are a nice touch. 

The redness is because the helmet I borrowed from Bryan was too small.  I was relieved it didn’t actually wear a hole in my forehead (though it felt like it was).  There was a missing pad above my crown, which due to my lack of hair and the male Velcro bits caused an unpleasant sandpaper sensation.  John suggested I put some wadded-up paper towel in there, and it really helped.  Such a fine lad!  His heart must go out to my brother and me, the way our hair is disappearing faster than glaciers in Greenland.  (Actually, our hair is migrating to our backs … but I digress.)

I did manage to win a city-limit sprint, into the little town of Nugent.  Just now I looked up that town to see if it was named after Ted Nugent, and I can’t find it on a map.  I guess it’s not a town at all … there’s just a random green sign that says “Nugent” so I didn’t really win anything.

The final sprint into Bellingham was one we’d talked about the whole ride; it’s the equivalent of the Champs-Elysées stage of the Tour de France.  Bryan and I were watching each other like hawks on the approach, and just as I was about to launch my sprint, Bryan said, “I don’t think that’s it,” meaning the city-limit sign.  I hesitated, and just then John came flying by us.  There was no way to catch him.  It was a brilliant move.  Later I accused Bryan of treason; after all, saying “I don’t think that’s it” is a lot easier than giving his son a lead-out.  Bryan denies any such tactics.  In any event, John has not only great strength but great instincts (exemplifying 3 of the 5 sprinting tips I give here).

Here’s a video of ride highlights from John’s GoPro:

Here’s the “after” shot, juxtaposed with the “after” shot from our 2009 expedition.  John has certainly grown.

We sat on the back deck and ate bananas as our glycogen window treat.  My legs really hurt … this was my longest ride of the year by almost 40 miles.  My dad was visiting as well, and I attempted to scandalize him by saying, “I’m going to take an over-the-counter muscle relaxant.”  I think it worked:  my dad (an acolyte of Dr. Andrew Weil) asked worriedly, “What kind?”  I replied, “Brewski.”  Man, that Long Table ale is yummy.  Like a Saison, but stronger.  I brought out one for John too because hey, he’s of legal drinking age now!

If you’re wondering how I came to drink 1½ beers, it’s because there was a limited supply, and John gave me half of his.  I commented on his temperance and he said, “It’s not that … you just look like you need it more.”

Dinner was straight-up massive, and tasty:  hand-cranked pasta, a previously frozen lasagne we’d thawed just in case which was nice and meaty, salad (well …salad), garlic bread, and some hot dog buns that had been given the garlic bread treatment.  Then the pie, and whipped cream.  Have you noticed that aerosol whipped cream seems so often to come in a 3-pack nowadays?  It’s almost entrapment the way its overabundance leads to fist-sized puffs atop tiny slivers of pie.

The aftermath of the ride and dinner was predictable enough….

Next time I do this, I’m bringing my older daughter, Alexa.  I just informed her of this.  She replied, “You are insane.”  You can imagine her eye-roll.