2013 - The Year In Review

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

Introduction

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

January

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

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

February

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

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

March

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

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

April

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

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

May

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

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

June

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

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

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

July

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

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

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

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

August

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

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

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

September

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

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

October

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

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

November

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

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

December

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

Thank you

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

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

Race Report - Everest Challenge 2013 (Stage 1)

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and coarse humor.

Introduction

I decided to do something different with this year’s Everest Challenge report and turn it into a performance art piece with mimes acting it out for a group of homeless people down at the Civic Center, but I’m running low on time.  So I’m going with text and photos for the fifth year in a row.

I hope that, like me, you don’t really care who won or how.  All that chess-game-on-wheels stuff happened way up the road from where I was.  But you know what?  You can line up the guys who beat me—let’s make it a line at a buffet in a Vegas casino—and I’ll eat those motherfrockles under the table.  In fact I’ll bet you money I could destroy them in a beer chugging competition, the birdlike climber bastards!  And now that the EC is over I’m going to catch up on lost beer, believe me.

Pre-race

This year we met at Mike C’s place in Oakland because we’re born competitors and enjoy duking it out for parking there.  Paul had brought the Intimidation Van again this year and was already loading bikes on its ass-kicking roof rack when I arrived with my wife and my daughter Lindsay, who almost certainly has developed some grudging respect for me after seeing that van and grasping my association with it.  She begged to be allowed up on the roof.  She was so stoked.  Ten years from now she’ll probably be our soigneur, and by then (if Chris Horner’s example teaches us anything) we’ll all be top pro racers with giant salaries and will give her a Rolex for Christmas.

Next Ian and Craig showed up, and this new guy named Lee.  By “new” I mean not just new to our group, but freshly minted.  I think he said he was like 28.  I’m not even sure his fontanel has closed up yet.  Basically he’s like that new Death Star that was still under construction and we’re all Millenium Falcons.  He came all the way from London for the race, with no plan for getting from San Francisco to Bishop.  He mentioned his situation on some social media platform, which caught Ian’s notice.  (These Brits look out for each other.)  To sum up:  we EC veterans, when we’re not riding bikes, are all dithering with our 401(k)s and living wills, while this guy is just winging it, pointing himself blithely and vaguely at unknown distant couches … and yet he still lands a spot in the coveted Intimidation Van.  Well played!

A week ago Paul e-mailed the group recommending that everybody bring something to supplement the chocolate chip cookies his girlfriend would be baking (for the second year in a row).  I mumbled something aloud when I read this, knowing my daughter Alexa might be in earshot if the word “cookie” was involved.  That was as close as I came to issuing an edict, but on Thursday morning I was working from home, my wife gone somewhere, and Alexa and Lindsay started crashing around in the kitchen.  A couple hours, some loud disputes about chocolate chips, and three sticks of butter later we had a bunch of banana bread.  Actually, it was kind of chocolate chip cake with banana added.  Glorious. 

I thought this banana bread would make me a hero among the guys, but they’d also stepped up their game.  Craig’s kids had made like three kinds of cookies including soft ginger snaps and spicy chocolate cookies, Paul had a massive supply of chocolate chip cookies and Mike had styled us out with oatmeal cookies and auxiliary chocolate chip ones.  I just realized that the sheer number of instances of the word “cookie” in this post will draw unprecedented traffic to this blog.  Sweet.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is the terrible fire raging just west of Yosemite that required us to detour north through Sonora.  The smoke was terrible.  We stopped at a visitor’s center due to Mike’s micro-bladder and the air outside the van was really unpleasant to breathe.  The stuffy van air, filtered through our respiratory/flatulatory systems, was actually preferable.

Lunch was at J’s Place in the tiny town of Bridgeport.  The air was a bit better in Bridgeport, and the temperature quite pleasant, but the air conditioning in J’s place was jacked way up.  We all went back to the van for sweatshirts, and that’s when I realized just how fit and awesome we all were.  I’ll bet anybody with double-digit body fat would have been perfectly comfortable in there but not us elite über-athletes.  Speaking of temperature, in the endless race-planning e-mail string Mike had written, “High temps look lovely:  92 degrees in the valleys, and high 70s on the peaks.  I don’t know the conversion to Kelvin or whatever it is folks use in the UK.”  I followed up with some more advice for Lee:  “At the Everest Challenge the vertical gain isn’t measured in meters, but in shitloads.  You should calibrate your Garmin accordingly.”

My Philly cheesesteak was way better than the grey-meat, Velveeta-clad, white-spongiform-roll atrocities I’ve had in Philly, but not as good as that place in North Beach.  The fries were pretty sturdy.  Mike sort of out-ate me by supplementing his animal flesh sandwich with a salad, but I let this roll off my back.  I mean, salad?  As in, what chicks eat?  How about a nice glass of Crystal Lite while you’re at it?

I’ll get to the dinner report, but first check out this photo.  Zoom in.  See all those little white specks on this bike?  No, not some new spatter-paint bike finish; that’s ash from the fire.  I’d also like you to check out how new the tire is on this bike.  More on that later.

After checking into the motel we went for our traditional spin-the-legs ride, joined by Jamie and another guy from the UK.  I can’t remember who was forcing the pace at the front—I was sitting in as usual—but it was ridiculous.  (Craig would mention later that this was the hardest he went all weekend.)  This was on one of those grades that are common in Bishop that are much steeper than they look.  Plus, we had a headwind.  My legs felt terrible.  I finally had to go up to the front just to slow it down.  Then we stopped for a photo-op and headed back to Bishop.

We’d got to the registration early this year, and the pasta feed wasn’t really going yet.  Having the race a year early shrunk the size of the fields, and the overall operation was scaled back appropriately.  So we decided to skip the free meal and tank up at Astorga’s, the Mexican place our teammate Marybeth recommended last year.  Just about everybody ordered the Twelve, their three-item combo platter (chile relleno, enchilada, taco, rice, beans, garnish).  I got mine with a side of flour tortillas so I wouldn’t have to tinker with a fork while eating all my platter-shrapnel.  It’s much better to pack it into a burrito that I can guide into my mouth like a branch through a wood-chipper.  Oh, I just remembered that Mike got steak fajitas, because I got one of his tortillas, some of the steak, and most of his shrapnel.  Glorious.  I’d say we each ate at least 3,000 calories there, but we didn’t get any guacamole because, you know, we had to stay fit and trim for the race.

Stage 1 – 88.5 miles, 14,965 feet of climbing

We had two suites this year in the motel.  I was in the MegaSüite which had four beds, and it was a hive of pre-race jitters on Saturday morning.  There was only one bathroom, which meant the toilet was busier than a Model-T assembly line.  The Bishop water table probably still hasn’t recovered.  The bearings in the bathroom fan are probably shot. 

Breakfast was Crisp Lice, which is what I call house-brand Rice Krispies to make my kids laugh.  (If you didn’t laugh, or at least chuckle, how did you get so bitter?  You didn’t even race!)  Mike had some highfalutin home-cooked meal with quinoa and a low glycemic index.  I’d have thought he was trying to intimidate me, but we were racing different categories!

“You’re putting on deodorant?  Before a bike race!?” I heard Paul ask.  “Yes,” Lee replied.  “I have to smell nice for the ladies!”  A  moment later he added:  “Because I’m going to be riding with them!”  Laughs all around.

During the race I drank eight bottles of Cytomax, one bottle of Heed, and a bottle or two of water.  Ian was working support for us again, though he started the support role a bit later so he could ride the first mountain pass.  (I know, so selfish, right?)  Mike, an EC newcomer, had given Ian very clear but complicated instructions, I think even in writing, but somehow for the second year in a row I simply neglected to do this.  I guess I don’t learn because every time I do this race I destroy another few billion brain cells, plus the desire to race it indicates that a certain amount of memory has been repressed from the previous year.

My strategy for the race this year was a peculiar mix of fatalism and a desperate, groping embrace of my radical free will.  You see, last year I had my fastest-ever time on Stage 1, only to completely crack on Stage 2.  I was determined not to repeat this, and thus to go easier on Stage 1.  This meant willingly letting other riders go on climbs, even when I could simply choose to ride faster.  This takes a lot of discipline because it means descending solo, which is slow.  A group is so much faster because you can all slingshot off each other (really, one of the most exhilarating aspects of this sport).  The fatalism comes in when you remind yourself that the time gaps between places are pretty big, and dinking around on a downhill or stopping to get fresh bottles at the van won’t make much difference in the overall placing.

Still, that crucial moment of letting myself get dropped by the leaders, maybe 2/3 of the way of the first climb, didn’t go quite like I’d planned.  I was sitting in sixth and saw that the grade was only getting steeper.  We’d all been absolutely hammering for a good while and it was time for a gel.  I’d have liked to wait for a lull in the action but that clearly wasn’t going to happen.  The problem was, I ripped the top off the gel package too high up, and couldn’t get the bleb to break (i.e., I couldn’t get any gel out).  I thought of putting it away, but figured it would burst in my jersey pocket and soil everything.  Plus, I needed those calories.  So I tore at the plastic with my teeth, getting more and more panicked and violent, my breathing more labored, and I imagine I was thrashing my head around like a bull terrier trying to rip the bull’s nose off.  I kept catching little bits of plastic with my other hand and stuffing them into my jersey pocket to assuage my liberal guilt for expelling so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while cycling.  Finally I got the damn thing open and the gel down my throat, but I was breathing so hard I actually kind of inhaled it, and by this point I was completely anaerobic.  I backed off my pace and moved to the side to let the rest of the pack pass me, hoping that by the time I hit the back of the group I’d be recovered enough to latch on.  (As always, we had a stiff headwind for most of this first climb.)

Well, imagine my surprise at discovering the pack was no longer there!  I’d been the last rider in this front group without even realizing it.  Of course I’d have loved to glom back on the first five guys but it was simply impossible.  I drifted back to what was left of the group (it had pretty much shattered by this point and had been a small group to begin with).  By the way, I’m not trying to imply that the gel mishap cost me the race.  My plan had always been to release myself from the race leaders on my own recognizance; this just forced the issue.  You cannot imagine the amount of grief the guys gave me when I told this little gel story.  You’d think I started out by saying, “I had the race in the bag until….”

I found a few guys to ride with until very near the first summit, when I decided I was bound to detonate if I kept it up.  So, I did the first descent solo, and in fact for most of the race I was all alone, fighting the wind.  By the way, my compact crank certainly cost me some time because I only have a 50x12 top gear, and spent a lot of time coasting when pedaling a 53x12 would have been faster.  But then, I’m kind of a grandma on the descents these days anyway, after a big crash in 2011.  I’m not going to run out and buy an 11-25 9-speed cassette (if I could even find one) because I just don’t care.  I get major points with the wife for being such a wussy descender.

Still, things went pretty well for most of the first stage.  On the second climb I was able to dial in the pace I wanted, vs. struggling to turn over my lowest gear.  I kept my heart rate around 150, my cadence around 70, and was comfortable.  Sure, I had the impulse to say “Screw this!” and start hammering, but my memory of destroying myself on the final Stage 2 climb the year before kept me in line.

I only had one moment of difficulty.  I was pedaling along into the wind on a straight section where the grade had eased off a bit, and having gotten a bottle of water from the neutral support decided to mix up some energy drink.  I had a Ziploc baggie of the mix, but when I pulled it out of my pocket I realized it had ripped.  I desperately tried to guide the powder into my bottle but the wind was blowing it everywhere, especially right into my face.  (This was Cytomax, which has such fine granules it makes baby powder seem as course as gravel by comparison.)  With one hand I held the bottle, with the other tried to increase the size of the rip in the bag, and the cap of the bottle was in my teeth, and my precious drink mix was literally slipping between my fingers.  Then I hit a bump and my bottle splashed all over my hands, making them a magnet for the drink powder which quickly formed a sticky pink candy on everything.  It was like one of those disasters at the Willy Wonka factory.

On the flat section leading toward the Paradise climb (a nasty little bonus grade on the way to the final of the three main climbs) I caught two guys who had dropped me earlier.  One of them was a pretty tough-looking dude with his arms completely covered in tattoos, and biceps so big he’d had to slice the cuffs on his jersey’s sleeves.  He was leading at the base of the Paradise climb and suddenly veered left and started swinging his head around as if looking for something.  “I keep hearing voices,” he said (soberly).  I joked that if the voices told him to do anything violent, to please ignore them.  He didn’t chuckle or anything, just kept looking around.  I took this as my cue to exercise my radical freedom and get the hell away from him.  In the process I dropped the other guy too, and was all alone again.

On the final climb I passed two fellow Masters 35+ racers who had dropped me at least three hours before.  I don’t mind admitting I enjoyed that.  And, due mainly to the smaller field, I got my best result ever in an EC stage:  sixth place.  For the nerds out there, here are some power and heart rate stats:

 - 281 watts at 155 bpm on the first climb (vs. 285 watts at 154 bpm last year);

 - 253 watts at 152 bpm on the second climb (vs. 260 watts at 153 bpm last year);

 - 233 watts at 147 bpm on the final climb (vs. 240 watts at 148 bpm last year).

Before you get all smug about being way stronger than I, consider that those are “dog-watts”—that is, they’re based on my rate of vertical gain and my weight (from the formula f=mgh) without considering wind resistance, etc.  A real power meter would’ve read higher.  Being solo for more of the first climb is surely why I put out less power than last year but at a higher average heart rate.  (No, I wasn’t fitter last year.  I’m fitter this year.)

Food was a bit more sparse at the top, though they had burgers, leftover pasta, some ad hoc soup, Coke, and granola bars.  I had something better:  my kids’ banana bread.  Man, that was good.  Jamie was already there, having placed a stellar third in the Masters 55+, and the other guys rolled in before long, one at a time according to their start times.  (Oddly, no two of us raced the same category this year; because of the August heat, Craig was doing the Clydesdales so he could start earlier.)

My legs felt fine after the race, but my gut was roiling.  I had had to resort to one bottle of the race-provided energy drink.  I’m sure it works just fine for a great many riders, but EBVC lore is full of horror stories and now I’ve lived one.  I figured a trip to the outhouse would settle everything, but I couldn’t find one.  Some joe said there was one around the other side of the parking lot, but he was probably just making me waste energy and wear down my cleats because he has a teammate in my category or something.  Fortunately, during my walk I had two of the most amazing bursts of flatulence of my life.  The second one actually lifted me off the ground I think.  After those I was golden.  Needless to say I described this to the others, and Paul and Craig have both had exactly the same experience.

Here we are maxin’ out at the top.  Note the sweat on Craig’s sleeve.  Mike’s too, for that matter.  By the way, that bike in the background of the second photo isn’t one of ours.  I assume that its owner wandered off into the woods, curled up into the fetal position, and died (which is what Mike was fantasizing about doing). 

Ian had driven the Intimidator Van to the base of the final climb, and we all rolled down there to sit around in the heat and wait for Lee to arrive.  His category started over an hour after the rest of us, but still it seemed to take forever for him to show up.  He’d kept us waiting a bit after the shake-the-legs ride too, due to his advanced hair styling regimen and other sartorial niceties long abandoned by our ageing set, so we were less than patient.  Craig even managed to recruit a replacement—a guy who would call himself Lee and fake a British accent, so we could pretend we made good in driving Lee the twenty miles or so back to the motel—but finally the real Lee showed up.  He’d ridden well, with a respectable rolling time, but had punctured twice.  He only had one tube, so he had to bum a tube off another rider, but its valve was too short, etc.  He ended up spending forty minutes battling this. 

Post-race

Remember that photo above, of the bike with the Willier-branded SRAM brake caliper and the ash, and the brand-spanking-new Continental 4000S tyre?  (It’s a tyre because it’s on a Brit’s bike; click here for details.)  Well, the quality and newness of those tires deprived me of the opportunity to play my favorite game, Blame The Victim.  Lee just had some bad luck.  The shard of glass responsible for both punctures stayed in the tire and he didn’t find it within the tire tread until we were back at the motel.  Here it is now:

The maid had neglected to replace our shampoo, but it worked out for the best because I borrowed some English shampoo from Lee that is designed specifically for men.  Not only that, but it’s a revitalizing formula, as well as a sport formula.  (If there were a doping control at EC, I’d probably have washed my hair and man-parts with mere soap, just to be on the safe side.)  Did this shampoo actually revitalize me?  Damn right it did.

Dinner was magnificent.  We went to the Upper Crust Pizza Company for the fifth year in a row.  Last year I vowed to get my own pizza for an appetizer, because it was so painful not eating more than my fair share last time.  (Ian said this restraint was also painful to watch.)  But Craig offered to split a pizza with me, and then Ian said we could all three share one if we got the XL “Giganticus” size (as Ian called it).  So we did that, and refused to share with the others.  This didn’t bother Mike or Jamie, who also ordered appetizer pizzas.  Plus our entrées came with soup or salad.  This year they didn’t have the curiously spicy cream of mushroom, but instead potato-leek that was so good I discreetly licked my bowl.  I hope nobody saw me.  Actually, I don’t even care who saw me.  And I’d do it again.

My entrée was the spaghetti Bolognese.  It was very good, though the sauce was not so rich that it would be a solid at room temperature, which is my gold standard.  Not the hugest portion either, but the pizza helped and I also inherited some steak.  This steak was very rare, which I really dug.  It awakened something primal in me, in fact, and I’m thinking of having some rare steak in the cooler during next year’s EC, just to prime me for an attack.  I don’t know who I’ll attack or why, but it’s going to be glorious.

To be continued…

You probably feel sorry for yourself because this story has been so long.  Gosh, I feel really bad.  But don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to rest and recover, maybe put a cool washcloth over your tired eyes and get a manicure on your mouse hand, before I get around to writing the second and final installment.  Check back, because something disastrous happened on day two that’s almost daytime talk show material.  You won’t want to miss it.

Blogger Eats Crow Over Compact Crank!

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

Introduction

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog post called “Man vs. Compact” explaining how the relatively new, smaller bicycle chainwheels (aka chainrings) figure in the manliness equation.  If you’re not familiar with what gearing says about one’s manhood, here’s a very brief primer:  a high gear helps you go fast on the flats and downhills, while a low gear gets you up the hills—that is, it makes up for lack of brute strength.  Thus, large chainrings and small rear cogs are macho, while small chainrings and large rear cogs are embarrassing.  As I wrote in my original post, I’m aware that some males are so secure in themselves, or so ignorant, that they aren’t even beholden to this chainring/machismo link—and I pity those males.  I concluded my post by saying that “at least in this one tiny realm—compact vs. standard crank—I can hold my head up high.”

Well, you can guess the rest.  This post is about me being a hypocrite, and incurring the ruthless and well-deserved ridicule of my cycling pals.  If you’ve ever felt kind of bummed to miss out on watching the gladiatorial battles in the coliseums of Rome, you may well enjoy my friends’ barbs.  Meanwhile, if you yourself ride a compact crank, or are on the fence about giving in to one, take heart because I’ll also discuss, in nerdy mathematical terms, the tangible benefits a compact crank can offer.  (No, this isn’t actually for your edification; it’s so you can pity me all the more, for offering up a weak argument that any real man would simply dismiss as surely as he would a statement like “This pink shirt actually goes with my skin tone rather well.”)

Why’d you do it, man?!

If my bold earlier post wasn’t a setup for eating crow later, I don’t know what is.  Yes, that’s my compact crank you see above.  Here’s how it came about.  Recently, I bought a new bike frame which required a new bottom bracket, which in turn required a new crankset.  This stuff isn’t cheap.  I decided that so long as I was shelling out all this money, I wanted the new crankset to offer some material distinction over my old one (besides its basic compatibility with the new frame).  Switching to a compact did provide a functional difference.  (It’s a lot like the rationale I applied when my dining room ceiling caved in and, after having it sheetrocked, I had to have the whole room repainted even though the old paint had been perfectly good.  I went with a different color because I couldn’t bear to shell out all that dough just to get back to where things were.)

That was one of the reasons, anyway.  On top of this, my 12-27 rear gear cluster recently wore out.  I’d bought myself this cassette for my 40th birthday as a concession to ageing, and I’m lucky it lasted as long as it did.  Alas, given the brutal climbs I like to do, like South Park Drive and its even harder big brother, Lomas Cantadas, I can no longer get by in a 39x25.  And yet, because I’m cheap and thus still riding 9-speed cassettes, I can no longer find top-end Dura-Ace cassettes in 12-27.  To twist the knife even harder, I have a stockpile of Dura-Ace 12-25 cassettes just gathering dust, waiting for a fountain of youth I’ll never find.  With a compact, a 25 is once again large enough, so I’ll have plenty of Dura-Ace cassettes to last me through to my adult-diaper years.

Preemptive invective

Some twenty years ago, I went to my first-ever corporate job interview.  This was at a headhunting agency.  In those days men wore suits and women wore skirts.  The headhunter interviewing me started off by saying, “Before we begin, I want to point out this run in my nylons.  Better that we just acknowledge it now, and move on, than have it distracting us the whole time.”  I respected that, and perhaps it has influenced my behavior because I decided that, rather than have my cycling pals discover my compact crank one by one and excoriate me for it in dribs and drabs over the rest of the summer, I’d just come clean and preemptively bring the onslaught.  So I sent out a group  e-mail announcing my switch and inviting my pals’ invective.  “Those of you still rocking 39s should have no problem casting aspersions on my manhood,” I wrote, “while those of you with compacts can castigate me for my hypocrisy.  That’s just a start, of course ... I’m sure there are all kinds of angles you could come at me from.”  This they did.

My just deserts

The first response, though not vicious, was decidedly firm.  Jan wrote, “With a compact crankset, the term BigRingRiding is nothing.  NOTHING!”  He’s referring, of course, to the website “Big Ring Riding,” a celebration of the manlier side of cycling (you know, the aspect of cycling that Christopher Froome is ruining forever).  This feedback stung, because at UCSB I was the self-appointed captain of the Big Ring Club, whose main activity was riding bikes while using the little chainring as seldom as possible.  If I remember correctly, I was the one who coined the terms “good ring” and “bad ring” to describe the big and small chainrings, respectively—a usage that became ubiquitous among our members.  In a way, I’ve gotten myself kicked out of my own club.

The next response, from former UCSB and current EBVC teammate Trevor, was exactly what I deserve: 

        The compact crank is the cycling equivalent of the old man’s walker. Don’t forget the tennis balls or, instead, you might as well dangle your own off the back of your saddle, like little fuzzy dice and a St. Christopher medallion, since you’re apparently not using them anymore. Display them like the now useless withered tokens they’ve become.
        It’s brave of you Dana, to embrace defeat out in the open. I would say it’s like ripping the band-aid right off, but rather than suffering a few pulled hairs to let a healing wound breathe, you’re laying naked in your decrepitude and impotence, in your willingness to disengage from the good of cycling. The “good” ring, if you recall, is no more for you.
        It’s okay Dana, go easy big guy. Getting old and weak is tough stuff, not to mention losing your ‘nads like that. How awful. Right out in public, too. You deserve a rest and that compact should do nicely.

(As you may have guessed, Trevor still rides a 39.  In fact, he only recently went to a 25-tooth rear cog, and is working through his own shame issues over that.)

The shriveled gonad theme appeared again in Paul’s response:  “My original ‘shrinking genitals’ comment still holds true but now that it’s a reality for you (or will be soon—shrinkage times vary from rider to rider), please consider that it impacts others ... of most note, your wife.  I consulted with [my girlfriend] before I made the switch.  After buying her a bunch of expensive jewelry she caved.”

Ceely suggested corrective measures:  “I’m picturing a new episode of 'Intervention.'  Dana shows up at Cole [the coffee shop where our group rides meet]; conversation abruptly stops.  Two bouncers pull Dana off of his bike while Trevor says, ‘This is for your own good, Dana.’  Cameras zoom in on Dana while he is spouting off expletives.  A couple of mechanics pull off his compact crank while Dana sobs, saying ‘I’m sorry, I’ve let you all down!’  Mechanics put on a proper crankset, and for good measure install a 11-23 cluster on the back.  Everybody hugs, Dana is still weeping, and Dr. Phil appears and says to Dana, ‘This ain’t my first rodeo, son.  A man’s got to have manly gearing.’”

You may be surprised to know that the next comment, from Ian, stung me as much as any of the others:  “When will you be buying an electric group then?”  This is a subtle dig at my hypocrisy, as in addition to bagging on compact cranks I’ve blogged quite frankly about how stupid I think electronic shifting is.

Constructive criticism

Among the jabs were some more instructive comments.  Lucas alerted me to a blog explaining how larger chainrings provide a tangible mechanical benefit.  The blog cites  a “New Scientist” article:  “Tests by Burgess have shown that larger sprocket wheels are more efficient than smaller ones, because larger wheels reduce friction in the chain drive, which is more important than the marginal increase in weight….  In his tests, Burgess showed that doubling the sprocket size increased the efficiency of the chain drive from 98.8 per cent to 99.4 per cent.”

Of course, it’s not feasible to double the size of our chainrings and cogs, because 24-tooth small cogs and 100-tooth chainrings simply aren’t widely available.  However, that bit of arcana from Lucas led to a great photo from Muzzy:

As you can plainly see, the springs on that saddle bring to mind the tennis balls, fuzzy dice, and shrunken testicles that Trevor had mentioned.  Muzzy also offered up a real-world suggestion of getting a T.A. Cyclotourist crankset with an inner chainring so small as to be almost invisible:  “Dana, you’ll psychologically destroy your competition on the starting line of Everest Challenge with a setup like this.  They’ll look over at your  11-20 cassette and just give up before starting!”

Surprisingly, I also got some encouragement about my compact.  It came from Jamie, one of the best climbers on our club:  “You’ll love your compact, especially for the Everest Challenge.  More power, less fatigue—a winning combo.”  I appreciate the spirit of this message, but the problem is, Jamie is more than fifty-five years old.  To get this kind of advice from someone his age is the wrong kind of rite-of-passage; it’s about as gratifying to my male ego as getting a gift subscription to “Prevention” magazine.  Nothing against Jamie, of course—he could crush me on any climb, any day—but in the peculiar logic of maleness I’m far more receptive to statements like “Don’t be a wanker!” from young pups like Jan.  Note that I’m not the only guy who’s loathe to take advice from his elders; Gary wrote, “A few of the older guys I ride with up here in Santa Rosa have compacts and tell me often that I really need to get one. I just can’t do it as I’m afraid I may actually use it.”

(Trevor’s response to Jamie’s prediction:  “He’ll love it? Oh no he won’t. He might use it, but he won't love it. Not by a long shot. Because he knows the truth of it all.”  Perhaps if I were a bigger man, Trevor’s statement wouldn’t be so true.  Of course, if I were a bigger man, I’d climb even worse than I already do.)

Waxing nerdy

Some of the responses (you can see how raw a nerve this topic hit, eh?) were technical in nature.  Ken wrote, “Does the mid-compact [i.e., 36/52 instead of 34/50] create a less severe shrinkage than a full compact? Should one worry about an asymmetric shrinkage effect? And for that matter, what exactly defines the ‘compactness’? Is the deleterious effect tied to lower BCD, thus damning all users of the new Shimano DA11 cranksets (which have only one spider that handles everything from compact to cajones grandes), or is it strictly chainring tooth count?”

If “BCD” threw you, rest assured it threw me too, though only for a second.  It means bolt circle diameter, which is the characteristic of a crankset that determines how small an inner chainring you can use.  (For example, the Campagnolo cranksets that were the norm in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s peloton would take nothing smaller than a 42-tooth inner ring.)  In fact, BCD is a matter of mere trivia; all that matters in terms of machismo is the tooth count, as it alone produces your effective gearing.

Why does tooth count matter, but not BCD?  Well, because the teeth of the chainrings and rear cogs are (obviously) the same size, the tooth count is representative of their effective outer diameter.  Ultimately, the ratio of the number of teeth in front to the number of teeth in back is directly proportional to how far you’ll go with each pedal stroke.  Think of it this way:  with the bike in a given gear, if you pedaled it forward exactly one pedal revolution, measured in inches the distance traveled, and then divided by Pi, you’d get the all-important “gear inches” value.  This value is a very handy way of expressing exactly how high or low a gear is.  Fortunately, we don’t actually have to measure anything; we can calculate gear inches using the following formula:

The equation above only holds for road bikes with 700C wheels (which measure roughly 27 inches).  One benefit to the 27-tooth cog is that it makes it really easy to calculate the gear inches:  the gear inch number is simply the number of teeth on the chainwheel, because the two 27s cancel out. 

I tried to explain this to Craig on a recent ride up Mount Diablo.  He didn’t grasp it, because this was our second trip up the mountain and he was too hypoxic to process new ideas.  (I was too, but for me this was pre-digested lore that I spouted off as easily as running a macro.  [“Karma police, arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge.”])  The benefit to this chatter was that Craig’s rhythm got all screwed up so his pace slackened, which was a great relief to me. 

You may be asking, “Why do gear inches matter?” or even “Why the hell do gear inches even matter?”  Well, they’re front and center in deciding if a compact crank can offer a silver lining now that it’s destroyed my male credibility.  As it turns out, if we examine—in gear-inch terms—the overall range of gearing created by a 39/53, 12-27 setup and compare it to a 34/50, 12-25 setup, we can actually find tangible evidence that—masculinity aside—a compact actually kind of makes some sense, in a very finite revenge-of-the-nerds kind of way.

The myth of 18, 20, or 22 “speeds”

Even back when I actually had what was known as a 10-speed bike, I knew that it didn’t really have ten speeds.  This is because I come from a family of science-y types (my mom was a hospital laboratory technologist and my dad a bona-fide rocket scientist).  I understood that you shouldn’t ride with your chain in a “crossover” gear (i.e., small chainring and smallest rear cog, or large chainring and largest rear cog) because it flexes the chain sideways too much, causing it to wear out early.  So that knocks off two speeds right there.  Moreover, I understood that in terms of gear inches, certain combinations of chainring and cog produced duplicate gears.  That’s right:  with almost every gear combination, a small chainring and smallish cog ended up being exactly the same gear as the big chainring and a largish cog.

My brother Bryan, at age fourteen, was a computer whiz.  I don’t mean in the modern sense of a kid who knows how to install programs or set up a printer and is thought to be a whiz because his benighted parent somehow can’t figure out these things.  No, Bryan was a computer whiz in that he could make the pre-Apple, pre-IBM-PC computers (and teletypes) of the day do anything at all.  He programmed our dad’s HP-85 to produce gear charts plotting each of our bikes’ gear-inch profiles on a logarithmic scale.  We taped these charts to our handlebar stems, so we could always know what gear to shift into next—that is, the next highest or next lowest gear.  While our pals were guessing wildly about how to shift (and dropping us, I might add, being physically superior), we smugly had the real answers.

The silver lining of compacts:  one more speed

So, just because you have two chainrings up front and ten cogs in the back doesn’t mean you have a 20-speed bike.  You can knock off two “speeds” for the crossover gears, and another three or four for the duplicated gear-inch combinations, making your bike a 14- or 15-speed.  Now I’m going to provide my real-life examples of gearing duplication, using my 9-speed traditional and compact setups, to show why the compact offers some technical superiority.  In short:  the compact gives me 13 actual discrete useable gears, while the traditional 39/53 crankset gave me only 12.  Look:

On the left is my old 39/53 12-27 setup.  I’ve shown duplicate gear combos in red, and aligned things so you can see the overlap in gear-inch values between the two chainrings.  There are 12 useable gear combinations with this setup. 

Why not 13, you ask?  Well, let’s think about how people actually shift when they ride.  Say you’re on a hill and it’s either flattening out, or you’ve decided to accelerate over the top.  So when you’re in the little ring and you’ve gone through the first (i.e., largest) four cogs, your next move is to throw the chain into the big ring and then shift to the second-largest cog in back (so you’re in the 53x24).  This is just a slightly higher gear than you were in, which is exactly what you want.  Moreover, your next two shifts are also reasonably small increments, and easy to make—just shift again on the back, down to the 21 and then the 19.  Now say you’ve maxed out your useful cadence in the 75-inch 53x19.  The next highest gear is the 81-inch 39x13.  But are you really going to shift back to the small chainring and then from the fourth-largest cog to the second-smallest to get this gear?  Yeah, it’d be a nice gear to be in, but when you max that out you’ll have to go right back to the big ring, and back up three more cogs in the back.  Nobody would actually do this.  It’s just too much shifting (and probably most riders—myself included—never realized that was actually the next highest gear to begin with).  So in actual practice, that 39x13 is a totally wasted gear.  You’ll never use it.  With 9 cogs in the back and a double up front, you’ve really only got a 12-speed bike.

With the compact, marching through the gears from lowest to highest is a much simpler affair.  After maxing out in fifth gear (the 34x15), you throw her in the big ring and shift to the 2nd cog in back (the 23), and then (as you continue to accelerate) you just drop down in the back, one cog at a time, the whole rest of the way down the stack.  So you get 13 useable gears instead of just 12.  For those of you who are “more visual,” here is a pictorial representation of what I’m getting at:

One more thing:  with a compact, because you don’t need that (embarrassing!) 27 anymore, you get a tighter gear range in the largest cogs (21-23-25 instead of 21-24-27).  Look at that chart again.  With a compact, the gear-inch difference among these cogs is only 3 to 4 inches, whereas the 39 chainring gives you larger steps:  5 to 6 inches.  The size of these steps makes a big difference when you’re in these low gears, because that’s when your cadence tends to be the lowest  as you slog up some brutal grade.  With a 39, you might be turning the 27 pretty well but not quite up for the 24, whereas with a 34, going from the 25 to the 23 is a reasonable upgrade to your effort.

Conclusion

So, do I put enough stock in all this technical arcana to want to vindicate the compact?  Am I drunk enough on my own bathwater to rescind my earlier position and declare the compact superior?  Of course not.  The compact, whatever its practical benefits may be, is a humiliation.  It’s a bit like if you discovered somehow that your toddler would actually nap so long as he got to snuggle with a stuffed Barney.  Sure, you might resort to this, but you’d sure be a lot happier if your toddler had chosen something cooler, like a Totoro.

The Barney analogy actually fits this compact crank discussion perfectly.  The writer Adam Gopnik wrote an essay in “The New Yorker” years ago complaining about how, though he was raising his kids in Paris, the insidious purple dinosaur somehow managed to find them—and, worse, his two-year-old son Luke not only declared that he liked Barney, but upon seeing the effect this had on his father, tended to announce this pretty often, just to taunt him.  But finally Luke saw the light:

“At breakfast, Luke made an announcement.  ‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘I don’t like Barney.’
‘You don’t like Barney?’ I asked, incredulous, delighted.
‘No, I don’t like Barney.’  He paused.  ‘I like to watch Barney.’”

So:  do I like my compact?  Well, at least on the uphills, I do like riding with the compact.  But no, I don’t like the compact.  How could I?

Man vs. Compact

Introduction

Cyclists are a weird breed. On the one hand, we really know how to suffer (at least the non-poseurs among us) and much of our sport consists of slogging away brainlessly on some climb—so you’d think the expression “strong like bull, smart like tractor” would apply to us. On the other hand, there’s a tremendous technical aspect to the sport: heart rate, nutrition, power output, pacing, and then all the myriad bike-related concerns like materials, aerodynamics, frame geometry, and gearing—which suggest we’re all nerds. So: are we brutes or nerds? Ultimately we’re both.

It may not be obvious to the non-cyclist, and particularly to the non-male non-cyclist, that something arcane like bike gearing can say something fundamental about the manhood of the rider. Well, it can and does. Whether a male cyclist is a nerdy gear-head type or not, he is required to be aware of the statement he makes (like it or not) with his gearing choice. In a previous post, I wrote about how the rear cluster of cogs on a bike factor into the manliness equation; here, I’ll discuss the front end: the crankset and its chainrings.

If you feel that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, and that moreover a woman needs a bicycle like a fish needs a man, this post is probably not for you (unless you read it with the sole goal of discrediting me). But if you are a cyclist, especially a male one, or are married or otherwise conjoined to one, read on!

Gears and machismo

Some years ago, when chatting with my wife, I became aware that not everybody understands the link between bicycle gearing and manhood. Here’s a brief background. A high gear helps you go fast on flats or downhills. A low gear gets you up the hills. Your choice of gearing determines how fast you can go (the high end) and how steep a hill you can climb (the low end). The larger the front chainring, the higher the gear. The larger the rear cog, the lower the gear. All of this can be precisely calculated mathematically, but there’s an aesthetic component too: a giant front chainring is macho, and a large rear cog is embarrassing. I’m aware that some males are so secure in themselves, or so ignorant, that they don’t even notice such things. I pity those males.

Perhaps you think this link between gearing and machismo is my own personal hang-up. Well, it’s not. Members of my bike club recently got into a protracted e-mail discussion about whether to use a “compact crankset,” which is a relatively new offering from the industry. The discussion stemmed from a link somebody forwarded around to a blog explaining (with very nerdy language and graphs) why a compact (which has a 50-tooth outer chainring and a 36-tooth inner chainring, aka 50x36) is superior to the more standard 53x39 setup. While the benefit of the compact is clear, there are downsides, with the manliness factor chiefly among them.

One of my teammates wrote, “When riding my compact people would regularly spot my weedy [50x36 compact] gearing then deliberately bump into me in the coffee shop, spilling my drink, spit on me, or worse, and then laugh at me when I declined their offer of a fight. With my current 53x39, on my other bike, no one messes with me for fear of the total ass-kicking my manly gearing implies in spite of my weedy build.”

Another rider, one of the best climbers among us, who finished a stellar fourth place in the Everest Challenge stage race, wrote, “Alas, at my ripe old age and being an Everest enthusiast I did make the switch to a compact last year and like it. The only downside that I’ve experienced is that it does tend to shrink your genitals.” Another guy chimed in, “I just glanced over at my bike and feel like very unmanly ... yes, I race with a compact. I, in fact, have a brand new Dura-Ace 53x39 sitting in a box, waiting for me to turn into a man.”

Historical arcana

Back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, any kid getting into bike racing was all but required to learn about gearing, because there were limits as to how high a gear he or she was allowed to use. (The idea was to produce “higher overall cadences and lower overall stress per pedal stroke.”) After every race, the top finishers had to report to the “roll-out” area, where a referee would put the bike in the highest gear, and measure out how far it rolled in one pedal revolution. If the bike rolled too far, the racer was disqualified. The “intermediate” age group (age 14-15) could use up to an 85-inch gear (gear inches being the rollout distance divided by pi). This restriction equated to a 53-tooth chainring with a 17-tooth small cog (i.e., 53x17), or a 44-tooth chainring with a 14-tooth small cog. The older “junior” age group (age 16-17) could do a 95-inch gear (53x15 or 45x13).

Other than juniors, though, nobody thought too much about chainring size. Road bikes only ever had two chainrings. The inner ring almost always had 42 teeth (though cheaper Japanese bikes often had 40), and the large ring almost always had 52. (Juniors seeking an edge could use a 53 and still pass the roll-out.) Tourists, who were generally referred to as “fat tourists,” had triple-chainring cranksets, but no other road riders used them. (When mountain bikes came along they always had triples, for various legit reasons.)

Evolution of wussy gearing

As road cycling became more mainstream, however, a problem developed: gearing standards were being developed for racers, but a new breed of wealthy enthusiasts was unable to make it over climbs with racer-like gearing. Thus was born the 39-tooth inner chainring. My friends and brothers and I went right out and bought them, because going from a 42 to a 39 up front meant we could use smaller cogs in back, which gave us a tighter range of gear ratios (and looked cooler, which was probably the main point). When I raced in college I seldom used a rear cog larger than a 19, and boy did I feel cool. Meanwhile, an enthusiast could use a 39 up front and a 24 in back and still do okay.

As ever weaker and wealthier enthusiasts joined the sport in the ‘90s, the triple crankset—with a tiny third chainring for climbing hills—became common even on non-touring bikes. I was shocked when Shimano introduced a triple version of their top-end Dura-Ace crankset. This was a bit like if Tabasco came out with a non-spicy version for kids.

I can’t stand the look of a triple crankset. To me, it’s the equivalent of white socks with khakis and loafers. There’s just so much stuff there, and moreover the rear derailleur needs to have a longer cage. Above all, it makes your racing bike look like a touring bike. There’s nothing wrong with a touring bike—if you’re touring. (That said, my wife and I used mountain bikes for our big bike tour.) A triple on a racing bike that’s supposed to be sleek and fast—I just can’t handle it.

Thus, when the compact came out—both rings just three teeth smaller than standard—I was glad. It’s a nice compromise and enables a racer-type to handle the steep hills without his bike looking ugly. Since its introduction, I’ve seen the number of triples dwindle among angry bikers, and I’m grateful.

The compact paradox

So if the compact crank is such an elegant way to give low gearing to a bike, why does it cause so much angst to male racer-types? One answer would be that we shouldn’t need it—after all, we raced for years with 39s. But the Bay Area, especially the East Bay where I live, is full of brutally steep climbs. My standard 90-minute ride includes over 3,000 feet of climbing in just over 20 miles. My favorite climb averages an 11% grade for two miles. I’m not as strong as I used to be. Do I fantasize about putting a compact on my bike? I do.

But if I did that, I’d have to live with myself. When a man heads toward middle age and resorts to lower gearing, something inside of him just dies. Meanwhile, a compact crank costs about $600. That’s if you buy Dura-Ace, anyway, and I’m not about to step down to the inferior Ultegra crank just because I’m not man enough to push the gears I used to. Spending money to get around human weakness is arguably one of the greatest problems facing mankind and I refuse to participate if I can possibly help it.

Paradoxically, the aesthetic presentability of the compact ends up being a problem of its own. The stigma of a larger cog in the back (which also achieves a lower gear) is a lot more obvious to the observer, so to run a compact instead is like trying to fool everybody. The compact doesn’t scream “wanker,” but a riding buddy noticing your higher cadence on a steep climb is likely to figure out you’ve got one. The trained eye will have no problem discovering it.

Recently I reunited with an old friend I hadn’t ridden with in over twenty years. He’s a big strapping guy, a former Marine, and of course we were both curious to see how the other has held up over the years. Still an athlete? Check. Willing to tackle gnarly climbs? Check. Cool bike? Check. But then he turned a discerning eye to my drivetrain. “You’re not running a compact, are you?” he asked, dismay lurking in his voice. I was so relieved to be able to say, “Of course not!”

The result

As a consequence of my stubbornness in a) riding a standard crankset, and b) wanting to ride the big hills, I’ve had to resort to using a rather unpleasantly large cog in the back: a 27. After spending my whole childhood working my way from an embarrassing 32-tooth large cog to ever-smaller ones (a 12-17 was my coolest rear cogset), I’m spending my adulthood going the other direction. Until I bought a 12-27 cassette a couple years ago, I hadn’t resorted to gearing that low since I was a pre-teen! (In that light, the junior gear restriction can seem pretty silly.)

I do take some heart from the pros, who aren’t above using the larger rear cogs, or at least considering it. I came across a quote about the Dutch rider Laurens Ten Dam (who won the brutal La Marmotte road race in the French Alps the first year I rode it):

oooo“Ten Dam said his success today [in the Mt. Baldy stage of the Tour of California] came in part because he asked his Twitter followers which gear to use on the stage today - a rear cassette with a maximum 25 tooth cog or one with a 28? The answer came from his former teammate Rory Sutherland, who said, ‘If you don’t use a 25, then you’re a “watje” (wuss).’

oooo ‘And what did he show up to the race with? A 26!,’ laughed Ten Dam.”

Conclusion

I’d be self-delusional if I thought I was a really studly guy. Not only do I not have much hair on my chest, I have very little chest to have hair on in the first place. Plus, I don’t have cool razor stubble like dark-haired dudes. And, I drive a station wagon. But at least in this one tiny realm—compact vs. standard crank—I can hold my head up high.

As for that 27-tooth rear cog, at least I’m not trying to pass myself off as a strong man. I have low gearing, yes—but I own up to it. And every so often, I swap out my rear cogset to a good old 12-25, just to cheer myself up.

dana albert blog