From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XXX

Introduction

This is the thirtieth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. (No, XXX does not mean it’s rated X … it’s more like PG-13, maybe R, we’ll see what makes it in. If this ends up being my most popular Bits & Bobs post, I’ll know why.)

Volume I of the series is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume XIV is here, Volume XV is here, Volume XVI is here, Volume XVII is here, Volume XVIII is here, Volume XIX is here, Volume XX is here, Volume XXI is here, Volume XXII is here, Volume XXIII is here, Volume XXIV is here, Volume XXV is here, Volume XXVI is here, Volume XXVII is here, Volume XXVIII is here, and Volume XXIX is here. Are you thinking “pump up the volume?” (Didn’t think so.)

So what are albertnet Bits & Bobs? They’re generally passages from letters I wrote friends and family back in the days before email (or excerpts from emails, in the days after). If this sounds boring, bear in mind I’ve always wanted to be a writer so I tried pretty hard to be interesting. Also, these snippets are pretty candid, and in my youth I was socially clumsy and also tended to ride my bike at speeds some would consider dangerous … so read on because there’s always a chance you’ll enjoy some schadenfreude, righteous indignation, or relief that it wasn’t you.

The Bits & Bobs in this post are in chronological order. The different volumes are all over the place and can be read sequentially, simultaneously, serially, seriously, surreptitiously, scrupulously, sensitively, and/or sanctimoniously.

All of today’s dispatches were written when I was attending UC Berkeley.

September 17, 1990

Today I was out on my new Guerciotti, just having the time of my life riding. It was early evening, starting to get dim, when I barreled down Claremont Ave, this wide, smooth, slightly twisty road, something like a 9% grade. (The low bottom bracket of the bike makes it really stable—although I did hit a pedal yesterday at like 45 mph which was kind of scary.) Anyhow, I’m flying along and suddenly I slam into a pothole or something. There’s this incredibly loud noise and for a split second, I’m completely blinded. I still can’t figure this out; I really couldn’t see a damn thing. (My best theory is that both retinas detached from my eyeballs because of the impact, and then they reattached. Or maybe it was like a cartoon of some kind and my eyeballs spun around in their sockets.) Anyhow, when I can see again, I’m in the left lane and there are cars coming towards me. Not like right in my face, but approaching pretty fast because I’m doing 50 mph. (I noted this later, of course—it’s not like I was looking at my bike computer at the time.) Did I mention that both my wheels were basically caved in at this point, and my back one was a potato chip? It felt like somebody had removed my rear wheel and replaced it with a jackhammer. I actually didn’t have a chance to be scared; my mind was totally tied up trying to respond. All in a split second, I’m aware of several things: 1) My rear tire, and maybe my front, are absolutely guaranteed to explode at any moment; 2) The chances of crashing are so high that all I can really do is cut my speed and try to get back into my lane so that at least all I hit is the ground, instead of the unforgiving windshield of a ‘73 Plymouth Reliant; and 3) If I use my back brake, the rear wheel will definitely slide out from under me as soon as the tire blows, if not sooner. So, I slam on the front brake, which grabs on the caved-in section of the rim and lurches the bike around even more, but somehow I get my speed down to about thirty and get back into my lane just before my rear tire blows up, then the front.

From here on out it’s easy; I mean, hell, people bring bikes down from 30 mph after dual blowouts all the time, no problem. God, what a rush. Both wheels are completely totaled. The bent sections of rim look like beer cans that a party animal has flattened against his forehead. I couldn’t even roll the bike home; I had to carry it. I feel lucky to be alive, or at least lucky I’m not dead. But at the same time, I feel cursed that this freak thing happened at all. Half of me says I should go out for pizza to celebrate still being alive, while the other half says I should save my money for the new rims I have to buy now. One thing is certain: I’m not going to spend my evening studying. I’ve been through enough for one day.

September 23, 1990

It’s taking a while to make friends up here; as you know, for most of my life I’ve been pretty shy. In the last couple of years I’ve become a lot more outgoing, but because I was shy for so long, I don’t have nearly as much practice socializing as, say, you. At UCSB I had the benefit of being on the cycling team, where I had a leg up socially because I was a fast rider and people respected that. That should help me here, too, but the Berkeley team isn’t nearly so social and we won’t really get together much until the racing season starts in February. So I need a Plan B, and I have one: my strategy is to show up early to class, plop down next to any random person, and strike up a conversation. Now, the only way this could backfire is if I chat up some dude and he thinks I’m coming on to him. This could be awkward if he’s straight, and even more awkward if he’s gay. I figure I better not risk it. So I only chat up women, because if they get the wrong idea, that’s totally fine—women are really good at guiding would-be romance into mere friendship. I mean, it’s practically a cliché, right? Of course, there’s the remote possibility that this failsafe process will go astray and some woman will not only think I have romantic ambitions but she will, too. So just in case that happens, I only chat up really good looking women. I’m not on the make … just trying to gin up some friendships and I gotta start somewhere, right?

So, at the beginning of the semester I chatted up this gorgeous girl in one of my English classes, and again the next time the class met, and so on, and eventually I tossed the dice and invited her over for dinner. (I guess going for coffee would have been the more logical next step, being a bit more low-key, but I don’t drink coffee, and last time I went for coffee with a girl, I didn’t know what to order and got all flustered. I mean, I could have had hot chocolate but then I’d come off like a little kid, right? And tea is so fussy with the bag and the string and the little paper wrapper the bag came in, and the milk in the tiny pitcher, I mean, I don’t know, it all seems kind of twee. I don’t even remember what I did order that time, but I never had coffee with that girl again, which is a shame because she was fly.)

Damn, where was I? Oh, right, dinner. So I made H—, the girl from my English class, dinner at my apartment. My friend B— (who graduated from UCSB last summer and moved to Oakland with me) was there, at least for a bit before finding an excuse to bail, assuming I would want privacy, like this was some romantic thing. He subtly razzed me about this: when H— complimented our apartment and furnishings (most of them B—’s), particularly our couch and its pillows, Brett said, “Did you know these are throw pillows?” He didn’t actually wink at me as he said this, but it was obviously a subtle reference to “throw the ho’s,” a phrase in surprisingly widespread use by me and my Santa Barbara pals. We will say, for example, “Call me Hector. Hector Throw-da-Ho’s,” or we complain, “No meet da ho’s, no throw da ho’s,” or simply “No ho’s.” Of course we don’t mean ho as in actual whore; “ho” is just a handy synonym for woman, or perhaps for attractive woman, just like “freak.” And the “no throw da ho’s” lament is mostly true; most of us have nobody to throw most of the time.

Well, dinner went fine, and then H— and I randomly started watching “Akira,” a movie B— had rented, which was this Japanese animated thing that started off pretty well, with young attractive people zooming around on cool motorcycles, but at some point the main character has some kind of weird bodily mutation with his arms growing insanely and becoming like tentacles. I could tell H— was pretty freaked out so we shut that off and went up on the roof. It’s not that high up but had a great view of the Golden Gate and all that. Then it got a bit late and we went back to my apartment and the phone was ringing, which doesn’t happen that often, and it was H—’s roommate, calling to see if she was okay. I was surprised that a) her roommate would worry, and b) she was resourceful enough to find my phone number. Or was this a precaution? (“If I’m not home by 10, check on me, would you?”) So anyhow, I walked H— home even though it’s a pretty good neighborhood. It was a nice night and when we got to her place, she invited me in.

Well, this was unexpected. I figured I’d just see H— to the door, and then head on home. I don’t think I was even speculating about a friendly little peck on the cheek because this wasn’t really a date, not as far as I could tell. I mean, how do you tell? Was she inviting me in just to be nice? Or was this like in the movies and was supposed to lead to (dot dot dot)? Obviously I was over-thinking things, as usual. Anyhow, eventually it came to pass that I found myself sitting down in her apartment. I don’t remember what would have made me decide to sit down other than perhaps our conversation was ongoing and I didn’t feel like standing anymore. So now it didn’t look like my departure was imminent. So what was I supposed to do next?

It occurred to me that H— might be waiting for me to bust a move, and if I didn’t, she might take that as an insult. I sure didn’t want to insult her, and besides, she was super fly as I believe I mentioned already. The opportunity (even if it’s only a perceived opportunity) to bust a move with a fine betty doesn’t come along every day. A decision tree formed in my head: if I don’t bust a move and that hurts her feelings, that could jeopardize our friendship. But if she’s not waiting for me to bust a move and considers us just friends and then I do bust a move, that could also jeopardize the friendship, though honestly she must know she’s fly so how could she possibly blame me for wanting to bust a move? I figured, worst case, I bust a move when she’s not actually expecting—or wanting—it, in which case she’ll just turn her head suddenly to deflect the kiss, and I’ll immediately get the message, and then I can quickly blush and stammer out an apology, following which there’ll be no hard feelings, and then she and I can go on being friends. Right?

The scenario that I didn’t actually even consider, for some reason, was that she’d actually respond favorably and we’d suddenly be making out. Why didn’t this cross my mind? Who knows. Perhaps I’ve just been shut down by girls so many times, to auger in yet again seemed almost inevitable, scripted even. So imagine my surprise when I busted the most awkward move ever and it seemed to work. I said something totally inane, like “I like your sweater” and then I guess I must have reached for her, or maybe she read my mind and came forward, but next thing you know she’s sitting on my lap and we’re making out! Pretty thrilling stuff and she paused a moment to say something similarly inane like “I like your sweatshirt, too,” but mostly we’re just mashing faces. And then I become aware of this strange kind of rhythmic pulsing—not a sound exactly, but not exactly not. Kind of like a hydraulic rushing you might say. And I realize I’m hearing her pulse through her chest, which is proximate to my ear. This didn’t occur to me right away because the rhythm was pretty high for a heart rate. I mean, I wouldn’t expect a typical resting pulse rate (e.g., 60 or 70), since making out is kind of exciting, but we weren’t running stairs or anything either. Since my arm is around her, I can see my watch out of the corner of my eye, and what the hell, I decide to track the second hand and measure her pulse. Granted, in all the excitement I can’t vouch for the accuracy of my calculation, but it seems like her heart is going at about 130 beats per minute. Is she just super excited? Or maybe frightened? Or could she be having some kind of seizure?

After a few minutes our embrace subsides, as explicably as it had started, and we say goodnight and I head home. As I walk along up Alcatraz Avenue, I ponder the strangeness of recent events, this sort of hybrid between a romantic comedy and “Telltale Heart.” The song in my head (there’s always a song in my head) is “Walking On the Moon” by the Police. By the time I get home I just kind of shrug the whole thing off as just another of those strange things that happen to me.

I saw H— in class the next day, and afterward as we walked across Sproul Plaza chatting, H— seemed just a little off, perhaps a bit stiff, certainly not behaving like somebody who has just embarked on a sweet romantic adventure. Honestly, I’d have been a lot more surprised if she did seem all excited about the passionate turn our evening had taken, though I’m not sure why. I guess it’s because I wasn’t that excited either; I was feeling strangely ambivalent about it all, probably because my excursions into dating so often end badly, so why would this be any different? And thus it seemed, like I said earlier, almost scripted when she finally came out with it: “About last night. I like you and want to be friends, but I don’t want to be … well, I don’t want to get involved.” I didn’t need to ask “involved in what”—the answer was “it,” as in “it all.” Which was fine with me. From that day forward we were just friends. Which, as you might recall, is all I’d really been looking for anyway.

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Letter to a Middle-Aged Cyclist - Buy New Wheels NOW!

Vlog

This post is available as a vlog. And check this out: if you launch the video and then close your eyes, it magically becomes a podcast! Naturally, the traditional text-O-rama blog format follows below.

Introduction

I’m not much of a consumer, but recently a friend bullied me into buying new wheels for my road bike. Based on the outcome, and with all the zeal of a convert, I exhorted another friend, who complained about broken spokes, to buy these wheels as well. Seeing an opportunity to expand my beneficence, I hereby entreat all middle-aged road cyclists to buy new wheels too. Here are my top five reasons, followed by a handy Q&A.

Reason #1 – You’re not getting any younger

Okay, right off the bat you can find some pretty badass looking wheels nowadays. Case in point, these Dura-Ace C40s I just picked up. Have a gander at these bad boys.

Now, if you were 70 years old, would I be recommending these to you? Of course not. You’d be a geezer, unlikely to get much use out of them. When my dad was like 70, and had suffered some shoulder injury he thought to be permanent, he decided he needed a recumbent, because it was closer to the ground. “If I crash on a regular bicycle and land on my shoulder, it is done,” he explained sternly. Alas, he was too old a dog to master the recumbent bicycle, so then he bought a recumbent tricycle. Now he no longer needed to balance, but the supine riding position, he complained, gave him terrible neck pain. Well hell, I could have predicted that!

The awkwardness of the recumbent is not just a physical problem. There’s also the aesthetic consideration. Nobody should ride recumbents, any more than any tortoise should be flipped over on its back and laughed at. Fortunately, after giving up on the trike, my dad decided his shoulder was okay after all and bought a sensible Fuji hybrid/commuter bike. Not bad, except he never rode it either; apparently after his hip replacement he couldn’t swing his leg over the bike. So he asked me what I thought about him trading it in for a women’s model, with no top tube.

My instant reaction was, “What, are you crazy? What’s next, you gonna start drinking rosé? Dude, it’s time to man up, do some damn physical therapy, and ride the bike you got!” But if course there was no point in saying this. By the time a guy is asking you if it’s okay to ride a women’s bike, it’s too late to help him. “Sounds like a great plan,” I told him, “and I’m sure Performance would gladly swap your bike for a women’s model at no charge. After all, you’ve never ridden it.” This was a gamble, of course; would he take my advice, and if so, whose demise was approaching faster—his or Performance’s? (In the end it was a dead heat.)

I hope I’ve made it clear we need to put off the geezer years for as long as possible and hang on to youthful stuff with all our might. In this battle, aesthetics are important. If you’re over 50, you’re heading toward the years when you wouldn’t necessarily carry off those badass new wheels very well. Similarly, there’s something sad about a 65-year-old in a distressed-looking leather jacket and that’s where we’re headed. At some point that jacket would need to be traded in on a cardigan sweater because who the hell are we kidding? As Anthony Bourdain once said, “There’s nothing cool about ‘used to be cool.’”

[Above: my brother Max and I when we were younger and cooler (even if we weren’t, strictly speaking, cool). Can I still wear that jacket? Yes, I think … but not forever.]

Don’t even get me started on all the super-cool sports cars you see in the Bay Area—the Porsches, the McLarens, the Audi R8s, even your occasional Lambo—that inevitably have some 60-plus douche behind the wheel (driving responsibly, of course). Seeing this grotesque pairing of speed-obsessed engineering and delusional, over-moneyed, existential Viagra, I fantasize about the guy’s irresponsible 18-year-old grandson stealing the car and taking it out for a joy ride, maybe even leading the cops in a stupidity-and-adrenaline-fueled high-speed pursuit.

At least bikes provide a healthy outlet for midlife-crisis ya-yas. So we should all be using high-end, kickass gear while we still can. If we can still put the hurt on younger riders, and we can still make our racing bikes go jolly fast, we’re not too old to deserve really awesome machines. Yet. So you need to snap up and enjoy these wheels while you still have the mettle, the minerals, the sound & the fury to put them to good use. Seize the day!

Reason #2 – The price is right

I hear anecdotally that everything is cheaper now because of the COVID-19 shelter-in-place and the low price of oil. New cars, as described here, are still being shipped over here and there’s no place to put them because the dealers aren’t making a dent in their current inventory. It’s kind of a consumer’s market in general, apparently.

So when I broke my third spoke in under 500 miles on my current rear wheel, and complained to my friend Pete, he immediately urged me to buy new ones. He even sent me a link to where the wheels he recommended were on sale for $350 off. Within a few minutes I found them on closeout at another place for $600 off. DAAAAAAMN!

There’s also the price of not buying those wheels. Look, your gear is going to wear out at some point. Why wait until then, when the economy may well be booming again, and you’ll have to pay what the market will bear? And why run the risk of finding out the hard way that your hubs and/or rims are approaching wear-related catastrophic structural failure, like my crankarm back in 2011?

With my new wheels the cost analysis included the crap I’d have had to put up with from Pete if I’d stuck to my penny-pinching ways. He wrote, and I quote, “Do it do it do it do it. Don’t be scared.” I hemmed and hawed and he pointed out, “It’s not like you’re gonna go on some expensive vacation any time soon.” I acknowledged this point and he replied: “See, you’re practically making money on the deal!”

Not a bad argument, but the “don’t be scared” was even more powerful. Did you catch that? How he was, albeit subtly, impugning my confidence? Like I’m too scared to throw money around? I went silent for a bit and he texted me, “I assume your silence means you bought them!” He basically rim-shamed me into the purchase, and I hope I’m doing the same with you. If not, read on because I’m not done yet.

Reason #3 – Aero wheels actually will make you go faster

By “modern” I mean the truly aerodynamic ones. No, not like those super deep-dish time trial wheels, which is frankly overkill, but something a bit more aggressive than what you might have on your bike. In my case, I had been rocking the HED Ardennes, which claim to be aerodynamic but aren’t very deep (and frankly aren’t very durable—long, dull story). I’m talking something at least 35mm deep, from the edge of the rim where the tire sidewall begins to where the spokes go in. And the wheels need to have a relative paucity of spokes—not a mere 16 front and rear, like the early Shimano wheels I swore off of, but not your old-school 28- or 32-spoke build either. And bladed spokes, needless to say. Why on earth did my replacement HED wheel, which I just bought late last year to replace the defective one I bought in 2014, have non-bladed spokes? What, did they forget? What’s next, toothpaste without fluoride? Leaded gasoline? CRT televisions? Dial-up Internet?

Now, the bicycle industry has a long history of total BS when it comes to aerodynamics. I give you the aero water bottle, which led to famous victories by nobody ever.

They’re just hideous. I doubt anybody would use them even if they did confer a real advantage. Aesthetics, remember?

And you think the placement of these shifters, and the internal cabling, led to any actual benefit?

To some degree the bicycle industry pretended that making something needlessly ugly would automatically lead to aerodynamic improvement:

So I’ve been skeptical about aero wheels too (other than, obviously, disk wheels, tri-spokes, etc.). When I was pondering my last new wheel purchase in 2014, I incredulously emailed my teammate Sean (a legit bike maven), “It’s crazy ... the more expensive Dura-Ace wheels are heavier than the C24s … could that be right? Is the idea that the aerodynamics are so much better, it’s worth it? The order of the universe seems out of whack all of a sudden.” Sean replied, “Yes, that is correct. I too have trouble accepting the idea that heavier wheels can be faster, but apparently the aerodynamics more than make up for the weight gain, unless you are doing major climbing.”

So is he right? In a word, yes. There really is a big difference with these Dura-Ace C40s (35mm deep in the rim-brake version). It’s not subtle. Consider this: there’s a little downhill on Wildcat Canyon Road, where I try to get as much speed as I can to carry me up the next rise. I’m accustomed to hitting a little over 30 mph on that if I pedal fairly hard. With these wheels, putting out about the same perceived effort, I hit 37 mph! Digging extra deep yesterday, I reached almost 40. Going down South Park Drive, without pedaling, I can feel the bike picking up speed like it never has before, as though gravity had gotten stronger. (In a sense its effect is stronger, as it’s impeded less by wind drag.) Descending with these wheels is the difference between paddling your little canoe out on the lake vs. feeling a giant wave pick up your surf kayak and hurl it toward the beach.

Now, I know just what you’re thinking: your decisions these days are data-driven. You don’t want this mealy-mouthed, feel-good subjective nonsense clouding your AI-like judgment. So here are the cold, hard facts about my first two rides with these wheels.

My first ride was one of my favorite loops, 19.3 miles with about 2,500 feet of climbing. My previous best time of the year was 1:19:02, an average speed of 14.7 mph. On this route with the new wheels (their maiden voyage), I clocked a 1:16:26, averaging 15.5 mph. Pretty staggering improvement, eh?

Now, there’s a such thing as “new bike syndrome” where you automatically go faster because a) you’re excited about the new bike, and b) you’re frightened into riding harder by the looming specter of buyer’s remorse. Does new bike syndrome extend to wheels? Anecdotally I wouldn’t say so, and anyway we can account for that effect, to some extent, by looking at average heart rate across the two rides.

For the ride that produced my former best time, my average heart rate was 131 bpm, and I was in Zone 3 (>144 bpm) for 0:17:49. On the new wheels, my record-breaking ride was at an average HR of 132, with only 0:15:55 in zone 3 (and no time in or above zone 4 for either ride). In other words, the level of effort was comparable, one ride to the next. So, yeah—it was the fricking wheels! They actually made me faster!

Of course I can’t base this conclusion on a single ride. But the next ride corroborated this; it’s a bit shorter at 16.7 miles, with just over 2,000 feet of climbing, and I beat my 2020 PR of 1:07:43 handily, completing the ride in just 1:04:45 (15.5 mph vs. 14.8). This year I’ve done one or the other of these loops 17 times on the old wheels, and never averaged above 15 mph. With the new wheels, I’ve broken the coveted 15 mph average all three times on the longer loop plus the one time on the shorter loop. Four for four!

Moreover, factoring in longer rides (with more flat sections), my highest average speed of the year on the old wheels was 16.3 mph (on a 33-mile ride with 2,900 feet of climbing). On the new wheels yesterday, I averaged 17.6 mph (on a 39.4-mile ride with 3,300 feet of climbing). That’s an 8% improvement … stunning.

Reason #4 – New wheels will actually make you ride harder

Okay, I’ll confess that comparing my average heart rate across rides is somewhat specious, given the slippery nature of the term “average.” After all, the average person has one breast and one testicle. Coasting on downhills will lower the average heart rate figure inconsistently, etc. Meanwhile, by looking closely at some of my climbs, it’s clear I’ve been going harder lately. On the old wheels I recently clocked a non-stellar 8:13 up Pinehurst Road, whereas with the new wheels yesterday I managed a much better 7:39. My average heart rate over the slower ascent was a mere 140 bpm. Yesterday, my average for this climb was 148 bpm. Across the whole ride, I’d averaged 122 bpm for the first ride, and 133 yesterday.

So does this deconstruct my whole argument, suggesting that greater effort, not greater efficiency, explains the improvement in speed? First of all, no—the difference is too great, and too consistent, and I do have the pair of rides with very similar heart rate yet dissimilar speed & time. Second, it kind of doesn’t really matter if I could have gone as fast, or as hard, on the old wheels. The fact is, I didn’t. I’m going faster and harder now, clearly. When better equipment puts better performance within our reach, we’re much more likely to stretch ourselves.

There’s also the matter of momentum. The parts of my rides that aren’t big climbs or descents are still lumpy, and with the new wheels I find myself carrying more speed from a downhill into the next uphill, such that if I go a bit harder I can stay in the big chainring for longer stretches (in my case, from Summit Reservoir all the way to Inspiration Point), which inspires and enthuses me. It’s a virtuous cycle.

[Google Maps says it takes 23 minutes to ride the above route. With my old wheels I did as well as 12:58. My new PR with the aero wheels is 11:35.]

Reason #5 – COVID-19

Let’s face it, if we’re smart during this pandemic we’ll all be riding alone for the foreseeable future, with nobody to draft, so we need to be as aerodynamic as possible or we’ll a) get too frustrated to continue, meaning we’ll give up cycling, launching a downward slide into sloth and depression, or b) we’ll be unable to resist drafting others, meaning we’re one snot rocket away from bringing the coronavirus home and killing our entire family.

Meanwhile, returning to the fiscal discussion I started earlier, during shelter-in-place it’s harder to spend money. My credit card bill hasn’t been this low in years, and for the first time in forever all the transactions fit on one page. Why not splurge a little? Besides, there’s a good chance we’ll all be dead soon, along with our would-be heirs, so what’s the point in saving? It’s time to buy! Buy buy buy!

Questions and answers

Q. Why not just get a whole new bike, since there have been so many improvements in technology, such as disc brakes?

A. How can you even contemplate such a major purchase when the global economy is melting the fuck down?! I can’t believe you’re thinking so irresponsibly. Besides, better brakes will not make you go faster. Aren’t we slowing down enough as we head into middle age? Meanwhile, it might be pretty hard finding a new bike anyway ... the pandemic has caused a major bike shortage, as described here.

Q. Why wouldn’t I upgrade my mountain bike wheels instead? Maybe with some sweet carbon rims?

A. With the vast hordes of hikers I’m seeing in the regional parks, I don’t consider mountain biking safe whatsoever right now, or even fun. How are you supposed to socially distance on single track? I can’t imagine spending money on a bike I might not get to even ride in the foreseeable future.

Q. What about crosswinds?

A. Whaddya mean, crosswinds? What the hell are you even talking about? Listen to this guy … crosswinds.

Q. In your previous post about selecting bike wheels you touted the benefits of wider rims and claimed that “the HEDs really do ride better” and “the ride is really plush.” Now you’re pushing Dura-Ace wheels with a narrower rim profile. What gives?

A. You know what else is really plush? Your bed. Or we could ride around on beach cruisers. Look, we’re heading toward old age, infirmity, and death … this isn’t the time to make ourselves comfortable. To paraphrase Andrew Marvell, “The grave’s a fine and restful place/ But no one there is fit to race.”

Q. You seem to assume that all your readers are still gainfully employed right now, even though unemployment in the U.S. is now at historic levels, with more than 20 million people out of work. How can you callously pretend we’re all in a position to spend money on nonessentials?

A. Just buy the damn wheels.

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Strong Placebos

Introduction

Where placebos are concerned, I’m something of a believer. In this post I examine the placebo effect itself; non-deceptive (aka “open label”) placebos; non-ingested placebos; machine-oriented placebos; nocebos; and what I’ll call the “hypothetical reverse-placebo” effect.

What I believe about placebos

I believe that a placebo—that is, a non-drug substance like a sugar pill being used in place of real medicine—can sometimes work if the person taking it has any faith whatsoever that it will. When I say “sometimes” I don’t mean “it’ll work some of the time,” but rather that certain maladies, or at least the perception of them, can be treated with hope alone (in the guise of medicine). There is evidence that this is the case, and I’ll get to that. But first, I have a few examples of my firsthand empirical success with placebos.

The first is Airborne, the so-called immune system supplement. I would never have tried this product on my own. My wife bought it once, and I humphed and hawed and studied the packaging with extreme skepticism. Well, it has Echinacea, I reasoned, which pregnant women aren’t supposed to take, and use of Echinacea for immune system support has at least some research behind it, such as this.  On that basis I tried out the Airborne, and found it fizzy and kind of yummy, and insofar as I didn’t get sick afterward, I decided maybe its benefit is real.

On that basis, my “evidence” wasn’t much better than that joke about the guy on the bus holding an imaginary box, from which he pinches an imaginary powder that he then flings around in the air, and then a fellow passenger says, “What are you doing?” and he says, “It’s to keep away lions!” To which the fellow passenger says, “There are no lions on this bus!” and the guy says, “See? It’s working!”

But there’s possibly more to this Airborne thing. Often I think I’m getting sick, and I figure it couldn’t hurt to take some Airborne. And on several occasions when I was sure I was getting sick, I took it and then rallied. But couldn’t I have been wrong about starting to get sick in the first place? Yeah, sure. But it’s such a relief to keep a virus at bay, I’m willing to ingest a fizzy drink that purports to help, just in case it somehow does. Meanwhile, I’ve sometimes had a virus last for days and days when I didn’t take Airborne, and other times my cold seemed to go away faster after I took it. I haven’t kept great notes or anything—this is all anecdotal—and yet I feel there’s a correlation, or at least there could be.

Sure, Airborne has a silly story (“Invented by a teacher!” as if teachers knew anything about pharmacology) and sure, the Airborne company was sued for false advertising … I don’t really care. If they called themselves medicine they’d be hucksters, but what they’re really purveying is hope.

(Does the house-brand of Airborne work? Too early to tell … my wife bought some recently and I’ve just getting into my one-subject clinical trials. In general I trust generic drugs so I’m optimistic. And really, if you have optimism about a placebo, what more do you need?)

Moving along, I have good results with the Camelbak Elixir tablets.  This product claims to be an electrolyte source, which automatically aroused my suspicion when I first heard of it. Energy drinks claim to be a source of electrolytes, but generally have only a tiny amount of sodium and even less potassium. A gallon of Gatorade has only 6% of your daily requirement of potassium. (You can get that much potassium from four ounces of orange juice.) The other common electrolytes—magnesium, chloride, calcium, phosphate, and bicarbonate—aren’t even listed on the label.

All that being said, a pal recommended the Camelbak tablets for recovery after bike rides, and I was just desperate enough to try them.  Desperate?  Yep.  I have this problem of totally sucking on the second day when I ride two days in a row. It’s particularly bad on the second stage of the Everest Challenge bike race—to the point that on one occasion I actually got dizzy and thought I made have to abandon. So finally, the last time I did this race, I gave the Camelbak tablets a try, and—Eureka!—finally had a good second stage.

You might be wondering how I could believe in this product, given what I said about its mere trace amount of electrolytes. In fact, the Camelbak Elixir has just 2.3% of the US recommended daily allowance for potassium and 3% for magnesium.  That said, it does have some manganese, which could be useful. Wikipedia says, “Manganese is an important element for human health, essential for development, metabolism, and the antioxidant system.” But I learned that after the fact. My belief in the product comes simply from its having seemed to work.  (Full disclosure—Camelbak used to sponsor my bike team, and gave us free product.)

Because I’m not convinced that Airborne and the Camelbak tablets are based on real science, I refer to both as “placebo.”  Like, I’ll ask my wife, “Hey, do we have any of those placebos?” and she’ll know I’m talking about Airborne. Or on my recent Tahoe cycling weekend I told my pals, “Hey, I brought a tube of those Camelback placebo tablets.” My pals happily partook, without challenging my “placebo” label.

Look, I’m not an idiot. (Or at least, my position on placebos doesn’t by itself prove that I’m an idiot.) I rightly hold that homeopathic medicine is a total crock, and I believe that declining to immunize one’s child is tantamount to reckless endangerment. (If a person wants to try out questionable quasi-medicine on himself, that’s one thing—but putting one’s child at risk based on wacky beliefs is totally different.)

I believe in real medicine. But I also acknowledge that some things work without anybody understanding exactly why. As mentioned here, a chemist won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how aspirin works, like 90 years after it was discovered, and scientists still don’t think they understand aspirin completely. So if there’s some reason—any reason—to believe that something could work, I’ll might try it, so long as it’s not standing in for a proven medicine that I ought to be using instead.  And I limit my placebo use to scenarios involving a subjective experience of suffering.

Non-deceptive placebos

Some time ago I stumbled across an article about how patients being given a placebo found it effective even when they were told that it was only a placebo. I’ve just corroborated this with a little research, turning up multiple articles, eight of which read all the way through.  In case you are curious, here are links to them:  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8

That first link is to the original research, published in December of 2010, concerning irritable bowel syndrome. It’s a good start, though the study had had only 80 subjects. The researchers “tested whether open-label placebo (non-deceptive and non-concealed administration) is superior to a no-treatment control with matched patient-provider interactions” and found that 60% of patients receiving an open-label placebo reported relief from symptoms, vs. 35% who received nothing. That’s right, 6 out of 10 patients got good results from knowingly taking mere placebos.

That’s the good news about non-deceptive placebos. The bad news is that articles 2 thru 7 are all based on the same original study, so they don’t support it so much as reiterate it. Moreover, articles 4 thru 6 were published in 2016, and article 7 came out this year … which suggests no other studies on this subject have been done since the first one, almost seven years ago. I’d have more faith in this study if it had been replicated by somebody else. (This begs an interesting question: if I persist in believing in a study’s findings, even if they’ve not been substantiated, does that make the study itself an intellectual placebo?)

Article number 8, by the way, is a wacky “n=1” study (that’s right, just one subject) about a guy who takes placebo pills to alleviate writer’s block. As somebody who doesn’t have time for writer’s block, I’m going to lump that one in with homeopathic medicine.

Non-ingested placebos

Placebos aren’t limited to what you can swallow. This landmark study in The New England Journal of Medicine found that patients who underwent arthroscopic knee surgery fared no better than a placebo group, whose knees had incisions made but nothing else done to them (just instruments being handed around and saline “splashed to simulate the sounds of lavage”). This and other studies are described in this New York Times article, and the results were later replicated, as described here. The conclusions are twofold: 1) arthroscopic knee surgery isn’t very effective; 2) the very idea of knee surgery does provide some relief.

Fortunately, I can’t comment personally on the sham knee surgery thing; my closest experience with knee pain is the kind you can treat with ice. But I do have a ton of experience with a putatively pressure-point-based hiccups cure (click here for details) that might be more of a placebo thing. I’ve had excellent results with this cure for almost three decades, and I’m tempted to believe that it’s grounded in something physiological. 

But I’m not convinced, because the mere idea of this remedy is enough to cure my brother Geoff’s hiccups. We rented an apartment together in the late ‘80s, and worked together too, so I was always around when he got the hiccups, which was frequently. Knowing that this cure worked for him, I’d command him to stop hiccupping whenever he started up. The command alone was enough—he never even needed to apply the pressure to his finger! In fact, he eventually got kind of pissed off, because he wanted to have a sustained case of the hiccups from time to time, just to remember what it was like—but I’d never let him. Either this hiccups cure has a placebo component, or my authoritative command to stop was scary enough to cure his hiccups. (That was a joke, BTW.)

Machine-oriented placebos

Can a placebo work on a machine? Not exactly, but a human can enjoy a placebo effect from changes to a machine. I’m talking here about changes to our vehicles, primarily. This has come up a few times around bicycle wheels. Sure, if you put lighter wheels on a bike, it will take measurably less energy to accelerate it or propel the bike up a hill. That’s not a placebo. But not all technological changes have such a straightforward, undeniable benefit.  If we decide to believe a manufacturer’s claims, and then can “feel” the difference, but the improvement is really just hype, than we are enjoying a placebo effect, without having done anything to ourselves or ingested anything.

Case in point: my friend John bought some fancy new wheels for his racing bike recently, and explained their features and benefits thus:  

The bike shop owner described in detail the spoke lacing and why it had more “lateral stiffness blah blah when out of the saddle, but had more [unintelligible] when in the saddle.” I was all, “Really?  Cool….” The rear rim is “asymmetrical” in profile. Something about making it so spoke tensions are equal on drive side and non-drive side. Anyway, the result is new wheels on my bike, and… they feel great!  I kept trying to figure out what I was really feeling and what I was trying to convince myself of because I’d just spent a bunch of money.  I have to say they feel way smoother in multiple ways.  The most noticeable is that little bumps and cracks in the road are now less jarring, probably due mostly to the much wider rim.  I feel like they roll better too, but I could be making that up.

I myself am a believer in these wider rims, though I have to take it on faith that they really improve the ride. I went with these fat rims purely on the recommendation of ten or so bike pals who recommended them (details here.) Right away I could feel the difference … but was I perceiving anything real?  I told my dad, a former rocket scientist and engineer, about these fat rims and how the change they make to the tire profile makes the ride better (etc.), and my dad said (in a calm but authoritative voice, as if holding back exasperation), “I don’t see why they would.” More recently I put the question to a friend who’s a professor of mechanical engineering, and he also seemed puzzled at how a wider rim would improve the ride. I still do feel better on these wheels, but I don’t know enough to say where the design basis for this improvement lies along the spectrum between snake oil and aspirin.

Nocebos

In describing nocebos, Wikipedia is insistent on this point:  “We can never speak in terms of simulator-centered ‘nocebo effects,’ but only in terms of subject-centered ‘nocebo responses.’” Whatever, dudes. The point is, just as you can have a presumably unwarranted positive response to a non-drug, you can similarly unwarranted negative side effects from the same non-drug, or outsized side effects from a real drug. Prior to embarking upon this post, I’d never heard of this, but I guess it makes sense. This Times article nicely fleshes out the topic. For example, it describes how patients warned of erectile dysfunction as a side effect of a specific drug were three times as likely to suffer it.

In fact, I have firsthand experience of the nocebo effect—er, response—as well. The other night, I was suffering from some pretty bad hayfever, and I decided that my normal placebo—generic Zyrtec—wouldn’t be enough. (Even though Zyrtec has a bona fide active ingredient, it seems to make so little difference in my symptoms, I’ve decided it’s more of a placebo than anything. If this seems silly to you, consider this Times article about how hard the Claritin manufacturer had to work to get FDA approval, because the FDA medical officer declared it was “not very different than placebo clinically.”) Wanting real relief, I brought out the big guns: generic Benadryl. This drug has always worked wonders on my allergies, though its principal side effect—the near inability to wake up the next morning—is a beast.

Well, the drug did its job: my allergy symptoms were completely wiped out, though I had a really hard time getting up the next morning. My head was all muddy and I was stumbling around in the bathroom for quite a while trying to get my deodorant applied and my contact lenses put in. And then I spied something that kind of amazed me: the little pink generic Benadryl tablet, sitting there on our little bathroom shelf, uneaten.

I have no doubt this was the very tablet I thought I’d consumed, as it had been the last one in the package. So the antihistamine benefit, along with my Benadryl hangover, were both based on belief alone … a placebo paired with a nocebo.

Reverse-placebo effect?

This begs an interesting question: could the benefit of a drug be retroactively hampered by the suggestion that it was only a placebo? For example, if you suffered from appendicitis and had your appendix removed, and then were told later the surgery had been a sham … could your pain come back? In other words, is there any such thing as a reverse-placebo effect? Could you ruin the effect of a legitimate drug, or the results of an actual surgery, by telling the patient he hadn’t actually received it?

I don’t see any practical value in such a thing, but it would be an interesting thing to study.  Perhaps some silver-tongued professor or researcher is able to drum up some research funding. For what it’s worth, my recent experience with the generic Benadryl suggests that the placebo effect, along with the nocebo response, were unaffected by lifting the veil. I put the unconsumed tablet back in the package, shrugged, and continued to enjoy an allergy-free but decidedly hungover morning. But then, as I said, I’m a placebo believer.

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Riding Rollers - Frequently Asked Questions

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mature themes and mild strong language.

Introduction

Decades ago, when there was no such thing as a mountain bike and the stationary trainer was in its infancy, any racer who could afford it bought a set of rollers.  I wasn’t so lucky, and though as a teen I did win a turbo-trainer in a (rigged) raffle at the Coors Classic Christmas party, I didn’t own a set of rollers until college.  I somehow managed to lose those (maybe my roommate snagged them?) and didn’t buy another set until somewhat recently. 

I’m back riding rollers now, and this post is both a tribute and a useful how-to guide that will tell you (almost) everything you ever wanted to know, or didn’t even know you wanted to know, about riding rollers.  (I say “almost” because I don’t explain herein how to ride rollers.  Just get on and do it, and if you fall off, well, brush yourself off, acknowledge that it is sweet and fitting to hate yourself, and get back on.)

Did I miss something?  E-mail me. 

Riding Rollers – Frequently Asked Questions

Q.  Why should I ride indoors at all?  After all, the Velominati “Rules” website says, “If you are out riding in bad weather, it means you are a badass.  Period.”

A.  First of all, the authority of the Velominati has been thoroughly dismissed in these pages.  I’ve also written at length about the absurdity of choosing to ride in the rain.  Unless you live in such a cold or rainy place you have to capitulate, training indoors makes a lot of sense.

Q.  Why ride rollers instead of a trainer?

A.  You can always tell when a guy has been riding a trainer a lot because he’s pedaling squares.  Rollers, on the other hand, smooth out your form and enhance your grace on the bike.  But that’s only part of why you should ride them.

Frankly, you should ride rollers simply because it’s tricky—because as you get older you need to convince yourself you’ve still got it.  Plus, if you’re the parent of a teenager—a member of the narcissistic “selfie” generation—you must show him or her that there are still cool things you can do that he or she can’t. 

(My teenage daughter, reading this over my shoulder, takes umbrage at the suggestion she’s narcissistic.  She certainly isn’t, and has never taken a selfie, but since I’m running out of things I’m better at than she, it’s important that she sees me riding rollers and is suitably impressed.)

Besides, anything that improves your balance mitigates the risk that when you’re really old you’ll fall and break your hip, which is so often the beginning  of the end for the elderly. 

Q.  I’m a teenager, and I think learning to ride rollers looks like a lot of hassle.  And I don’t need to worry about balance because I will never get old and I will never die. 

A.  Wow, my blog attracted a teenager!  That’s amazing!  Wait, where are you going?  Come back, I won’t bite! 

Okay, look.  It’s time to admit that you’ll never have a massive presence on Vine, and nobody is going to “like” that Instagram photo of your cheesecake as much as the identical cheesecake photo sent around by a popular or attractive kid.  But imagine posting a YouTube video of yourself eating half a grapefruit, properly, with a spoon, while riding rollers no-handed (the acid test of m4d sk1llz in this albeit remote realm).  If your video were to end with you tilting your head back to drink the juice and thus crashing, that video might get a lot of hits!  Man, it’s a shame there was no Internet or YouTube when I was thirteen…

Q.  Say I buy a pair of rollers and like them.  Should I get rid of my fluid trainer?

A.  No, keep it around because sometimes you just want to zone out, mosh on the pedals stupidly, and not have to keep up that finesse.  I’m keeping my trainer even though the damn thing has developed this horrible knocking sound I’m too lazy to troubleshoot, which is embarrassing because years ago I positioned myself as an authority on choosing a trainer, and now this thing’s dying even though it’s not that old.  At least, it doesn’t seem that old.  Though actually, I came across this video involving the box that trainer came in, and I guess it’s not that new.

That little girl in the video?  She (the aforementioned non-narcissistic teenager) is over 5-foot-3 now and rode up Mount Diablo with me not long ago.

Q.  My wife has a policy about physical objects that take up space in the home or garage:  to justify its existence, she says on object “has to either be making me happy, or making me money.”  By this standard, how can I justify owning both a trainer and rollers?

A.  If we’re permitted to define happiness as “absence of unhappiness,” remind your wife how crucial exercise is to your physical and mental health.  Given your hopeless starch addiction, If you didn’t have all the tools necessary to facilitate your exercise, you’d end up looking like Henry VIII.  Would your wife really enjoy being crushed under all that weight?  Besides, without exercise you’d also be as grumpy as Henry VIII, and we all know how that panned out.  (This is an especially powerful argument in my household, as my wife has failed to produce a male heir.)

(By the way, I have made money via riding rollers.  When I was a UC Santa Barbara student, the cycling team set up a roller demonstration in the student plaza to raise money for our trip to nationals.  We put out a hat to collect donations, and offered to try really advanced tricks—stuff that had “never before been attempted,” like riding rollers no-handed or at 50 mph—if somebody would drop in a $10 or $20 bill.  Plus, when one of our more hunky roller-demo riders, the affectionately nicknamed Brad Longshlong, got his photo on the front page of the school paper, that was arguably better publicity than the team got when we won a national title.)

Q.  My rollers don’t have a magnetic resistance thingy.  I can pedal along at over 25 mph without actually getting much of a workout.  Is there any way to add resistance without spending any money?

A.  The best rollers, which would be Al Kreitlers with the Headwind Fan, give you all the resistance you could want.  But even if you have more basic rollers, there are a couple things you can do.

First off, when riding rollers, use your old “rain bike” with its non-compact crank (i.e., higher gearing) and its old-school, less aerodynamic wheels.  You can also put cards in the spokes to hamper the aerodynamics.  I haven’t done any scientific tests to see if this actually helps, but as everybody knows, cards in the spokes is just plain fun.  [Update:  new Q/A answered at the end of this post describing the results of this experiment.]

If you’re really serious about a good workout, your best bet is to set up your brakes so they’re always on.  You could do this with a toe-strap crudely wrapped around the brake lever, but the better way is to open the brake quick-release cam and then tighten the brake, using the barrel-adjuster, so it’s almost rubbing.  Then, during the ride, you can adjust the braking by turning down the QR cam to the desired resistance.

Q.  But won’t having my brakes on the whole time cause my rims to get super-hot, thus damaging my brake pads?

A.  As it turns out, the amount of drag necessary to give you a good workout doesn’t actually generate very much heat.  What really makes rims hot is braking on a descent, which involves much greater forces, such as gravity.  Consider this hypothetical scenario:  you and your brother Bryan are descending by bike to a party being held in a remote house along a mountain road.  The driveway is unmarked, so your other brother has promised to put out a sign or some balloons so you can find it… but he forgets, so you miss the turnoff, and then the mountain road turns to dirt, and you puncture several times until you’re out of spare tubes and patches, and you have to ride double on Bryan’s bike with your own bike over your shoulder.  Bryan is braking pretty hard to keep from stacking, which makes his hands so tired he has to stop periodically to rest them.  As you awkwardly climb off his bike, you actually burn yourself on his bike’s rim.  See?  All that weight, concentrated on one bike, gets those brakes hotter than your wrath toward the third brother … and yet, descending solo, your rims never get that hot, unless they’re carbon rims and you’re an under-skilled and overweight stockbroker riding Levi’s Granfondo.

Q.  The floor of my man-cave isn’t perfectly level.  How can I level my rollers?

A.  Palace a coin under each foot on one side.  Use British pound coins; they’re thicker.  If this isn’t enough to level your rollers, you need to re-pour the foundation of your man-cave, or set the rollers up in your wife’s secret underground lair (in which case you should put a tarp down to protect the hardwood floor).

Q.  Say I’m a teenager and don’t have my own rollers so I’m at my friend’s place riding his, and his foster parents’ four-year-old is fishing for attention by running across the room and diving into a bean bag chair, and I’m ignoring her because I don’t want to encourage her attention-junkie ways, and/or I’m just a dick, and finally she gets so frustrated at the lack of attention she comes up and grabs my handlebars and pulls me off the rollers.  What should I do?

A.  Do nothing.  In particular, don’t yell at her because then she’ll start crying and run and get her mom, who is one weird lady.

Q.  What if my cat, mesmerized by the spinning wheels and also not very bright, tries to jump right through my wheel?

A.  This could never happen.  No cat is that stupid.  The person who warned you about that “possibility” is a broken-down alcoholic and it’s really sad.

Q.  What if the power goes out while I’m riding rollers, and there’s not enough natural light to see by?

A.  If you’re in the basement of your apartment building and not near a wall, all you can do is crash.  If you’re near the wall and the power is going out for just a few seconds at a time (for example, if it’s 6 a.m. and the biggest winter storm in ten years is wreaking havoc), brace an elbow on the wall until the lights come back on.  If they go out for good, but you’ve already taken your NoDoz and you’re halfway through your workout and thus too amped-up and sweaty to go back to bed and don’t care to shower in the dark, just set up some candles on either side of the front roller, to use like airport landing lights.  You may find this mood lighting takes your relationship with your rollers to a whole new level. Next time I think I’ll scatter little rose petals around as well.

Q.  But wait, if the power is out, the fan won’t work!  What about the ravages of sweat on my equipment?  And won’t I overheat?

A.  Open some windows.  This works great if you can get some cross-ventilation, especially if it’s cold out and the wind is really blowing.

Q.  But what if the rain comes blowing in the window and gets all over my expensive wireless LAN equipment?

A.  Spec your man-cave out with a Meraki MR72 Ruggedized Access Point.  That bad boy is built to withstand harsh environmental conditions:  not just rain, but extreme temperature ranges from -40°F to 140°F.  (Trust me:  if it’s -40° or 140° out, you’re really better off riding indoors.)

Addenda

A couple of readers wrote in with more questions, and even did me the service of providing the answers. Plus, I now have the results of my cards-in-the-spokes experiment.

Q. Should I watch bike videos/races while riding my rollers?

A. Probably not. Even a very skilled rider (like my East Bay Velo Club pal Ryan, who wrote in with this question) may occasionally get too wrapped up in what’s onscreen, and veer off the side. This isn’t the same as a high-speed crash, but the bike can leave you behind and careen forward, possibly even into the TV. Meanwhile, as Ryan points out, “It is very difficult to watch a descent without leaning when you see the cyclists on TV lean in the turns.”

Q. What’s with these crazy-looking rollers that have a smaller diameter than mine? I’m oddly impressed and intimidated by them but I don’t know why.

A. You’re right to feel intimidated. As detailed here, smaller-diameter rollers provide greater resistance. Kreitler explains why: “For a given wheel speed, smaller drums rotate at higher RPM’s than larger drums, producing more friction in the sealed cartridge bearings. Smaller drums also create more tire friction because the roller has a smaller contact patch and indents the tire more.” If you don’t have the money to spring for a set of Kreitler rollers with 2.25-inch drums, perhaps letting some air out of your tires (so they indent more, increasing friction) would help. (Thanks to my cycling pal Phil for bringing this up.)

Q. So how did the cards in the spokes work out?

A. Really well, actually! Probably in part because my high-power fan (see photo above) points up at the front wheel, the wind drag of those cards makes pedaling a lot harder. In fact, depending on what cadence you prefer, how high your gearing is, how hard you like to go, and how strong you are, the cards in the spokes might offer all the resistance you need (thus obviating the need for messing with the barrel-adjusters on your brakes).