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

Introduction

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

Executive Summary (i.e., condensed version)

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

Full report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Archives - Levi’s GranFondo Ride Report

NOTE: This post is rated R for mild vulgarity and drug and alcohol references.

Introduction

It’s that time of year again: when I start getting constant e-mails from the outfit that puts on Levi’s Granfondo, which is a big organized bike ride. You could argue that this ride is too well organized: does every participant need to get regular newsletter updates for the six weeks leading up to it?

Conversely, you could argue that this ride is not well-organized enough: why am I still getting all the newsletters—which share logistical minutiae, tips & tricks, and encouragement—even though it’s been five years since I actually participated in the event and am not signed up for this one?

Anyway, this year’s e-mails reminded me of the ride, and of the report I’d filed with my bike club, which I present here for your amusement. This post’s target audience is actually even broader than Levi’s. Never heard of Levi Leipheimer?  He was a pro American cyclist who achieved spectacular results, with a little help from his team doctor.  Here is a photo of the two of us at a fund-raising dinner some years ago.

What?  You don’t care who Levi is?  No problem.  To enjoy this post, you don’t even have to care about cycling, so long you’re interested in food, violence, teenaged hooligans, live music, and/or booze.

(Coming next week:  my 2014 Everest Challenge race report, assuming I’ve recovered sufficiently to write it.)

Ride Report: Levi’s GranFondo – October 6, 2009

I had some feedback after my [2009] Everest Challenge report that I needed to mention the riding itself, not just the food. So I’ll try to remedy that in this report.

Dinner the night before was at Mary’s, a pizza/pasta chain. I had the veggie calzone; it looked like it had been run over by a car, and then vandalized with a cleaver. The goopy ricotta filling caused the inner wall of crust to be slimily uncooked. To top it off, the whole thing was way over-garlicked, like at that crummy restaurant on Columbus Ave in SF that the tourists love, the Crappy Rose or whatever. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Gary and Lisa, whose house I probably polluted horribly with my overpowering breathstench when I dropped by there to buy a Fizik saddle off Gary. My breath was still bothering me at bedtime; even my extensive dental hygiene regimen, topped off with a bunch of mouthwash, didn’t help.

That garlic really messed with my sleep. All night I dreamed I was smoking cigarettes. By morning my breath was worse than ever; I wanted to tear my mouth out and bury it. Breakfast was a 65-degree wedge of this weird ring-shaped coffee cake I found at the GranFondo breakfast table. Maybe it was a pound cake. It was eerily heavy and kind of damp, and it cost Levi’s people a mere $2.99 (assuming they’re Safeway club members). Sugar was the first of about 150 ingredients, printed on a long label that ran all the way past the clamshell opening of the plastic package and down the lower side, in a really tiny font. Not surprisingly, the cake was exceedingly sweet, and had these weird lemon-flavored crystals in it. It kind of squished in my teeth. The amazing thing, though, was that it instantly and completely wiped the garlic breath from my system. Some kind of crazy chemical reaction, I think. I was ecstatic.

The community center, where the GranFondo started, was teeming with people. There were 3,500 riders, 650 volunteers, 8 spectators, and about 3,400 Trek bicycles. I found Tim right away, but Mark was lost in the vast hordes. I tried to look for him, but it was like finding a speck of plankton within a blizzard of krill. I gave up just in time for the official start. In the first five minutes, we progressed 0.01 miles according to my bike computer. Fortunately, the announcer, Todd Gogulski, managed to keep us entertained. It was pretty chaotic, like a slow-motion stampede. I found it pointless trying to move up, because angry bikers extended all the way to the horizon. It was like a mass treadmill.

Once we were finally rolling, there was this self-appointed den mother in the group who was policing everybody’s behavior. She even chastised me: “Ride well to the right of the double yellow please, thank you,” and “Both hands on the bars please, thank you,” and “Put down the middle finger please, thank you.” (Okay, I made up that last part.) We shed a bunch of riders at the first rest stop by not stopping; I ate a couple of thick, chewy, tasty Powerbar gels instead.

We got into a decent group after that, making pretty good time to the second rest stop. Here, tech support found me futzing with my rear wheel, which sounded like it had a cracked rim when I applied the brakes. I feared the worst, but it was just a deep scratch in the rim, probably made by an angry Santa Rosa teen with a switchblade. The tech support guy sanded it down quick-fast-in-a-hurry. Presently Mark arrived; he’d been time-trialing flat-out for the whole ride to catch us.

The energy drink they gave us was pretty awful. So were the climbs, in the best possible way. At the second rest stop I ate a bunch of real Oreos, and a bunch of PBJs that were showcased by dozens of happy bees. I also had a turkey and cheese sandwich, not because it makes sense to eat such a thing during a ride, but because hey, free sandwich. I had potato chips too, and a cold Coke. Tech support gave me a 4mm allen for my cleats, which some angry Santa Rosa teen must have loosened up to try to ruin my GranFondo. There was a woman riding a single-speed, and I heard some crusty old veteran tell his pal, “She’s crazier than a pet raccoon.” (Later, upon seeing her again, we brainstormed other ways to made the ride needlessly harder, like slamming a hand in a car door first, or squirting Tabasco into our eyes.) Another interesting thing we saw at the rest stop was this bamboo bike. Its owner said it rides really well, but unfortunately grows like an inch a day.

During the first big descent, I thought, “Wow, this is pretty technical—these angry bikers better know what they’re doing.” Seconds later, I was about ten or fifteen feet behind this dude as we carved through a curve, and I don’t know what happened—his line was fine, his outside foot weighted to maintain rear wheel traction, etc.—but his front wheel suddenly washed out and he went down. The crash made that horrible indefinable grinding noise that crashes always make. I had front-row seats. I yelled out and braked to a stop and yelled for other riders to stop. (I always wish there was a guy like in “Mad Max” who, unfettered by a bike, could run up the road waving his arms and pleading, plaintively, “STOP! ... STOP!” but there never is.) But the guy scrambled off the road pretty quickly. He looked okay. I asked if he was okay, and he said, “I think so.” Others had stopped and I frankly wanted to start rolling again, so I took him at his word and continued on.

Moments later I remembered the little chart of translations: “I’m not okay” means “I’m really messed up,” and “I think I’m okay” means “I’m probably pretty messed up,” and “I’m okay” means “I might be really messed up but I won’t know until this supersize load of adrenaline wears off.” A minute or two later a fire truck roared by us toward the scene, sirens blaring. I felt bad, but hey—am I my brother’s keeper? Later, Mark proposed that I had crashed the guy. He probably still thinks this, or wishes it were the case. I found it hard to defend myself without offering an alternate explanation. The best I can do is that the guy hit a patch of black ice. I know it was too warm for that, but that’s sure what it looked like.

There was a bunch more climbing. Then we hit the coast, where the wind picked up mightily. The wind was mostly behind us, which a volunteer had predicted, yelling out to us, “There’s an 18% downhill, and then the wind is going to push you down the coast like a bat out of hell!” This led to an enthusiastic EBVC forum on the topic, “Will Hell eventually run out of bats?” We ultimately concluded that there must be bats continually slinking back into Hell. I invite you to coin and propagate a new expression based on this phenomenon. Anyhow, that was some wind. When it was behind us it was glorious, but when it came in from the side it was chilling, and made it hard to keep the rubber side down. Once, it actually blew me hard enough that my front wheel came off the ground and I almost went down. That’s never happened before.

At the penultimate rest stop (we skipped the last one) I had more chips and PBJs. I consumed nothing else during the ride except more energy drink, which was the worst I’ve ever had at any time or any place. It tasted like a cross between a variety of flavors: dog-hair-soiled lollipop; vinegar; urea; and bong water. Every drag from my bottle had me cussing like a really angry and profane sailor. (Yes, I have drunk bong water. An old roommate left some out and, having never seen it before, I thought it was tea and took a drink. And no, I have not drunk urea; that part was a joke.)

At the finish we couldn’t find the Fat Tire stall that would honor our coupons, so we settled on the cash stall where Matt bought us beers. If I ever race a crit with him, I’ll lead him out for every prime and at the end, even if I’m off the back. We sat on some hay bales, which were set up like bleachers, and drank. We were just in time for the live band, which I was dreading.

Most live bands suck; it’s like a law of physics. This one started up a cappella with this black guy belting out “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” and the thing was, his voice was great. So I willed the band not to spoil the music with their instruments. But to my amazement, they played really well, too. Then this white guy came up to the mike. (Note: I’m not trying to suggest anything about black vs. white. These are simple descriptors to help you keep the two singers straight.) I thought, “No, white dude, this song sounds great, don’t wreck it with your crappy voice!” But you know what? He sounded great, too! It was good times. Even the hay bales felt really comfortable after 6+ hours of the bike saddle. (Okay, I wasn’t technically seated for the whole ride, but wasn’t standing on the pedals enough to really air things out.)

Then we went to the Mexican food station, where darling little kids took our orders and presented our plates: rice, beans, and chicken soft tacos. I’ve had a lot of post-century-ride food, and this ranks way up there at the top. Problem was, I needed more. I went back and begged for seconds; perhaps the kids would have been amenable but an adult intervened, and he looked skeptical. I pleaded, “Even if it’s just more rice and beans.” He weighed the negligible cost of the rice and beans against the moral hazard (Mark’s phrase) of setting a precedent about seconds, and ultimately did give me more of the coveted sides. This simple fare, doused with salsa and graced with fresh cilantro, made a worthy second plate. Before I could quite finish the rice a big gust of wind flipped up my plate and I lost everything. But it was enough calories to get me home, where my mom, who was visiting, had made chicken enchiladas with homemade tomatillo sauce. My heart soared like a hawk.

In summary, Levi’s crew put on a good GranFondo ... just remember to BYOED.

Nutrition for Endurance Cycling

What does an ultra-endurance athlete eat?

I can speak for the cyclist who does really long training rides.  How long?  Well, lately I’ve been training for a two-day stage race, the Everest Challenge.  My favorite weekend ride these days is the “double-Diablo,” which is close to a hundred miles long with 11,000 feet of climbing.

It’s tough to convey, to the layman, and even to the typical cyclist, what “11,000 feet of climbing” really means.  Consider this:  a staircase rising 11,000 feet would have around 18,000 steps, would be about four miles long, and would take you to the top of a 900-story building.

I have it on good authority that the stomach of a well-trained athlete can handle about 200 calories an hour during intense exercise.  By calories I mean carbohydrates—protein and fat aren’t nearly as useful.  Any sugar will do:  energy bars, energy drink, energy gels, fruit.  I find fruit hard to carry and bars hard to eat.  So I try to drink a bottle of energy drink (160-180 calories) every hour, and eat a gel (110-120 calories) about every 90 minutes.  (I bring drink mix in baggies.)  The gels have caffeine, which speeds the metabolism and aids in fat burning.

So, during a 6½-hour double-Diablo, I’ll have five or six large bottles of energy drink and four gels.  That’s pretty disgusting:  1,300 to 1,500 calories of pure sugar.  (Don’t let anybody tell you there’s nutrition in energy drink.  Sure, these drinks contain electrolytes, but that’s not really nutrition.  There are only two electrolytes:  potassium and sodium.  Six bottles of Gatorade—about a gallon—provides, in total, just 270 mg of potassium, a mere 6% of a person’s daily requirement.  You can get that much potassium from four ounces of orange juice, or half a banana.  Four gels provides a total of 80 mg potassium—about as much as a mouthful of V-8 juice.  As for sodium, I don’t think that’s an elusive part of any American’s diet.)

The worst part of this forced gluttony?  It’s that I don’t even have a sweet tooth.  My kids are envious that I get to have so much sweet stuff, but I really don’t enjoy it.  The good news is, my stomach tolerates it pretty well—which puts me at an advantage over lots of riders, especially during a six- or seven-hour road race.  An envious teammate joked to me recently, “You have a Protour-caliber stomach.”  It’s true—my stomach is the one part of my body suitable for the Tour de France.

What would happen if a cyclist drank only water during rides?  Well, on a short ride he’d be fine, though he might not go as fast.  (Recent studies—click here and here and especially here for details—show that a sweet drink increases power output, even if it’s spat out instead of swallowed.)  On a long ride, though, the sugar-free rider is doomed.  He’s a time bomb:  he can be hammering along just fine one moment but will suddenly crack, and then barely be able to turn the pedals.  It’s pretty spectacular, but also sad, to watch.

How you eat after a long ride is also important.  For about half an hour after hard exercise, sugar taken in goes directly into replacing muscle glycogen instead of being absorbed the normal way.  In other words, you’ll recover more quickly if you consume carbs during this “glycogen window.”  So, right after my ride, when I’ve already had a whole gallon of energy drink, guess what I get to do?  Have some juice, maybe some sweetened yogurt, a few Girl Scout cookies.  My kids flock to the scene like pigeons, looking for handouts. “Did you just ride six hours?” I snap.  (I do leverage the glycogen window as a parent.  My older daughter will ride for an hour on the indoor trainer just for a half-dozen jelly beans.)

Refueling doesn’t end there, though.  A cyclist can burn a thousand calories per hour on a hard ride, so it takes many meals to catch up.  After a really long ride I dream about food all night.  As with any dream involving appetites, satisfaction is never achieved.  On Saturday night I dreamed I’d locked myself out of my office:  no wallet, no keys, no train ticket … thus no food.  The dreamscape shifted:  now I was stuck at a boring lecture.  Just as I tried to sneak out, the speaker asked me to come onstage.  At that moment I discovered my hands were full of noodles.  I ran for the door but dropped the noodles.  Could I eat them off the floor?  Everybody was watching.

On Sunday night I dreamed I was at a barbecue and just before I got to eat, my brother showed up and needed a ride to the airport right away.  The next morning my wife said I was talking in my sleep about “some sauce, Florentine I think.”

A cyclist can’t eat right.  What I mean is, he can’t eat the same things that ideally healthy people eat—he needs more calories than that.  Sunday night I offered to make dinner:  “I can make gnocchi with gorgonzola, or tortellini.”  My wife replied, “How about neither?  I mean, we’ve got all this produce….”  I thought of a dog, starving after chasing a ball all day, hearing its master say, “I could give you this Alpo … but then, we’ve got this nice chew toy!”  If I eat “right,” meaning lots of vegetables and fiber, I’ll feel sated but never catch up on calories.  Distance athletes have to eat wrong.  They need massive plates of pasta.

Sugary drinks aside, do I enjoy this abnormal caloric need?  Well, sure!  I laugh when I see a food product labeled “guilt-free.”  The only guilt I feel, when I eat a fatty-starchy calorie bomb, is that I might be setting a bad example, or making other people jealous.

I, Chatbot

Introduction

What is artificial intelligence?  Broadly speaking, it’s the ability of a machine to think for itself.  At best, an AI app is much more than a tool for finding businesses, playing chess, or making calculations.  Machines are really good at doing menial tasks far more quickly than a human—but wouldn’t it be cool (though also creepy) if machines could be creative?

Here’s a puzzle I’d like to see a computer solve.  Say you want to go for a bike ride, and are bringing a bottle of energy drink.  Because the mere presence of sweetness in your mouth improves performance (click here for details) you want the drink to be really strong at the beginning of the ride.  But suppose it’s a hot day and you’re worried about the drink eventually nauseating you.  How can you make your drink strong at first, but gradually get weaker during the ride?

I posed this question to Cleverbot, an AI chat application on the Internet.  Read on to see how Cleverbot answered this, and more importantly to watch in wonder as my chat goes right off the rails and way into the weeds, to my great embarrassment.

Why robot chat?

So … what got me interested in AI, and in chatting with a robot?  Well, some weeks ago, Norton—the antivirus software company—had a glitch that made albertnet inaccessible from my PC, telling me that it was a known phishing site or some such nonsense.   (Countless blogs were affected; the phishing claim had no basis in truth.)  Needless to say, I was pretty pissed off to have Norton dragging my good name through the mud in front of all their users.  In attempting to resolve the problem I initiated an online chat with a Norton representative through their website.  Not long into this chat, when I’d explained my (admittedly arcane) problem, the customer service representative came clean:  it wasn’t a real person, but an automated system (bot) designed to assist with more common problems.  It then referred me to a real human.  I felt a bit misused.  Why hadn’t Norton disclosed this up-front?  Did they figure it’s bad enough PR to move jobs overseas without replacing the humans altogether?

My favorite time to ponder anything is during an early morning bike ride, when my mind is fresh and when, given the tedium of pedaling up long climbs, I like to give my brain something to do.  So, pre-ride, with this Norton episode in mind, I did some light research on AI.  In an article from the “New Yorker,” Adam Gopnik writes about Alan Turing, the guy who cracked the Enigma code, and who proposed that “the true test for artificial intelligence was to see if, cut off by a ‘black curtain,’ you would be able to tell a machine’s answer from a human’s in a natural-language conversation.”  Such a challenge is called a Turing test:  a computer tries to trick the human into believing he’s chatting with another human.  Exactly what Norton had tried to do with me.

My chat with Cleverbot

When, that morning, I came across a link to Cleverbot, I decided, on a whim, to give it a try.  I’d heard of Cleverbot somewhere but wasn’t entirely clear what it was or how it worked.  Of course, as with all Internet apps, it was entirely intuitive to use.  I asked it a few basic Magic-8-ball type questions and got back some really boring answers.  (I hadn’t yet discovered how to get a transcript of the chat, so those opening questions are lost to posterity.)  I decided to ask Cleverbot something more complicated:  “Do my children love me”?  Cleverbot answered, “Yes.”  I asked, “Why do my children love me?”

“Because I don’t love you,” it replied, after a pause.  The pause was reassuring somehow:  a sign that the matter was being considered, rather than some canned message being spat out.

I thought that was a pretty good answer.  It was playful, true, and sounded a lot more human than “The operation failed,” “Not found,” or “Cannot undo.”  It also seemed satisfyingly philosophical:  we cannot get love from a machine, and yet are biologically programmed to love other humans, especially our parents.  So far, I was pretty impressed.  I pressed on:  “Why don’t you love me?”

“Because I don’t know you,” it replied.  Again, perfectly reasonable.  I decided to challenge Cleverbot’s response and asked, “If my children didn’t love me, would you love me?”

“You’re a horse,” Cleverbot fired back.

Huh?  Maybe Cleverbot wasn’t as clever as I thought.  Of course, a human might throw in an occasional non-sequitur, especially in response to a really stupid question, so a robot mimicking a human might reasonably do this.  Still, I decided to test the theory that the answers were random and that Cleverbot’s early prowess was just luck.  I asked it again, “Why do my children love me?”

“Because you are not Ciel,” it answered.  Huh?  I was quickly becoming disillusioned.  Ciel?  Sounds like the name of a porn star.  “Who are you?” I asked.

“A train,” it replied. 

I asked it, “Are your answers random?”

“Yes,” it said.

I replied, “Why should I waste my time asking questions when your answers are all random?”

“I will tell you my name if you will tell me yours,” Cleverbot said, breezing right past my challenge.  Of course I am wary of any computer system asking me for personal information.  Who’s phishing now?  I replied, “My name is Jose Patrocinio Jimenez. What’s yours?”

“My name is Cleverbot.”

“Why did you ask me what my name is? Why do you care?

“I didn't, you did,” it lied.

I persisted:  “You wrote, ‘I will tell you my name if you tell me yours.’  So you did, in fact, ask for my name.  Why?”  I began to wonder if the chat was even “connection-oriented”—that is, if Cleverbot considered my questions and comments in the context of other things I’d said, as opposed to every exchange being isolated and discrete.

“I never said that!” said Cleverbot (testily, I thought).

“You are lying,” I wrote.  So far, Cleverbot was doing pretty well:  I was getting irritated.  Not that I don’t routinely get irritated at inanimate objects like computers, but in this case the computer was working fine.  I felt like I was interacting with a real human.  A human bastard, in fact.

“No, you're lying!” spake Cleverbot.

“Don't I have better things to do than argue with a robot?”

“You imposed it,”  Cleverbot said obliquely.

“You are not making any sense,” I complained.

“Yet all of it in the world.”  The smugness here was almost palpably human.

“How clever is it to spew banal platitudes like that?” I snorted.

“Pretty clever...” came the response.  Here, Cleverbot showed an inflated self-regard unbothered by any awareness of its own ignorance.  Not just human, but distinctly American, I’m sorry to say.  I had the frustrating sense of talking to a brick wall, and yet felt curiously compelled to continue asking questions.  I was reminded of the speaker in Edgar Allen Poe’s brilliant poem “The Raven”  who engages in a protracted and infuriating conversation with a bird, despite having realized it only knows one word.  On a lark I asked Cleverbot one of the questions from the poem:  “Is there, is there balm in Gilead?”

“What what.”  Cleverbot’s failure to use correct punctuation strongly smelled of humanity.

Losing patience, I finally asked Cleverbot the question I’d set out to ask in the beginning:  “How can I make my energy drink strong at first, but gradually get weaker during my bike  ride?”

“I might have done a statistical study on your topics of conversation.”  This is exactly the kind of thing Apple’s Siri app might offer up:  a simple Google search masquerading as problem-solving.

“I don’t want a statistical study, I want a solution to this problem. Can you think of one?” I challenged it.

“It is fine now because I cannot think of anything to ask you,” Cleverbot said uselessly.

“Are you male or female?”  I asked.

“Female.”  (This surprised me.  I’d expected Cleverbot to say “neither.”)

“I kind of figured.”

“How did you figure?”  (Very accurate syntax on this … very realistic.)

“Because I am sexist and you are irrational,” I said.  (I’m not actually sexist, of course, but one of the benefits of talking to a machine is that you can be as flippant as you want.)

“You’re weird, how can you be me when I am me?” Cleverbot asked.  Was this the grinding of Cleverbot’s machinery?  Could I confuse it enough to make smoke pour from it, like what Captain Kirk did to Nomad?

“Because I am we, and smell like tuna sandwich,” I responded.

“You don’t make sense.”  (Fair enough.)

“No, I make dollars.  What are you wearing?”  I was firing at random.

“Bubblewrap.”  Well played, Cleverbot.

“Dim the lights!” I replied.  This was basically a reflex.

“Ok,” Cleverbot said.

“Normally at this point I would tell you to slip into something more comfortable. But what could be more comfortable than bubble wrap?” I replied.  I was having fun now.

“What are the magic words.”  Cleverbot was playing the coquette.

“Please,” I wrote.

“I am human.”

Whoa.  I was not prepared for that.  I felt my face flush red, my pulse quickened, and—no joke—my armpits started to sweat.  I wasn’t chatting with a robot at all.  I was chatting—not just chatting but flirting—with a real person, online.  I should never have embarked on this without knowing what Cleverbot was.  Could it simply be a web app that connects two people online for a chat, like Chatroulette?

“I thought you were a robot,” I protested, knowing full well how much of a liar I sounded like.

“I am not a robot,” Cleverbot—or, rather, the mystery woman—assured me.

“Why are you called Cleverbot?”

“I’m not cleverbot!  You’re the one who is supposed to be the cleverbot, not me.  And I may not be smart but you are not even close as smart as I am.”

Just then, as if on cue, my wife stepped into the room.  “What are you doing?” she said.  “I thought you were on a bike ride.”  What could I say?  “Oh, I’m in a chat room with a woman who says she’s wearing only bubble wrap.”  Not a good idea.  Instead, grasping at straws, I said, honestly enough, “I’m researching a blog post.  Hey, Cleverbot is a robot, right?  It’s not actual people chatting is it?”  My wife, yawning, said she was pretty sure it was a robot, but one that built a library of responses from its communications with humans.

“I guess I have no idea what Cleverbot is,” I typed.  “I thought the whole point here was that people could chat with a robot.”

“You’re the robot though right?” asked the mysterious chatting entity, innocently (or faux innocently).

“No, I’m not a robot. I'm human too!”  I typed.  Were we pawns caught in a deadly game … or was I chatting with a robot after all, which was expertly impersonating a human so as to fulfill its goal of acing the Turing test?

“No you are not.  I am a human.  You are a robot,” it/she said.

“No, no, no. I am human, I assure you.”

“If you are real or not depends what you mean by real.”

“OK, whatever.”

“I have explained the best I can.”

I closed the browser.  I was straddling the fence between nervousness and relief.  What had just transpired?  Was that a chat with a robot, or chat roulette?  Did my wife see how red my face was?

Looking back, I marvel at how worked up I’d gotten.  On the other hand, this makes sense.  I’m a shy person.  The essence of social awkwardness is not knowing where you stand with regard to others.  It’s bad enough when you’re meeting people for the first time and have to do a lot of guessing about the right thing to say; it’s even harder when you don’t have any social cues at all, and don’t even know whom—or what—you’re chatting with.  I shut off the computer and headed out for my bike ride.

Epilogue – what is Cleverbot, really?

Cleverbot, thank goodness, really is a bot.  It is a web application that builds a database of chat responses based on conversations with humans.  (Click here and here for details.)  The more Cleverbot chats, the more its database grows, and (in theory) the more realistic and germane its responses will be.

How valid is this approach?  Well, Cleverbot did fool me into thinking it was human.  But looking back, this wasn’t the result of it being particularly clever.  The main thing that made me think I was chatting with a human was Cleverbot’s simple statement, “I am human.”  In the context of a female clad only in bubble wrap, to whom I’d just suggested slipping into something more comfortable, these were powerful words, provoking my paranoid “what if?” response.  But really, why wouldn’t an AI app trying to appear human simply assert that it is?

One problem with Cleverbot’s “learning” technique is that it is dependent on humans to ask the questions.  I suppose it can regurgitate these questions to other humans, which is somewhat useful, but there’s no mechanism for it to come up questions of its own.  A really great question for it to ask—assuming it is a connection-oriented app—might be, “What is the right answer to your question?”

This brings me to the next problem I see with Cleverbot:  it has no way of discerning the right answer based on responses—it can only determine the popular answer.  These are not always—or even often—the same thing.  Consider all the “best of” awards that go to an undeserving, but widely known, recipient, like Chevy’s winning “best Mexican restaurant,” beating out  literally dozens of better places, in a Bay Area poll.  (No real expertise is involved there; people just put down the first answer they think of, and everybody has heard of Chevy’s.)  Similarly, if Cleverbot blithely accepts answers from the unwashed masses, it will never be smarter than they. 

Not surprisingly, when (in a follow-up chat today) I presented Cleverbot with a less obscure reference—“ If there's somethin’ strange in your neighborhood, Who ya gonna call?”—it got the right answer—“Ghostbusters!”—about half the time.  (The rest of the time it replied, “It’s just a spring clean for the May queen.”  If there’s a link between Led Zeppelin and the 1984 comedy movie, I’m not aware of it.)  This pattern is consistent with other cultural references; when I said, “This Roman Meal bakery thought you’d like to know,” Cleverbot replied obliquely:  “Where on earth are your servers?”  (The correct, answer, of course is “I don’t need no arms around me.”)  But when I typed, “We don’t need no education,” it naturally gave the right response, “We don’t need no thought control.”  The silly song that got lots of radio play is recognized; the much better but less popular song is not.

In this regard, Cleverbot could do so much better.  I Googled “Is there balm in Gilead” and got three hits referring to an old religious song, and the fourth hit led me to “The Raven.”  Not bad.  Googling “Is there, is there balm in Gilead,” I get “The Raven” as the second hit.  But you could ask Cleverbot this question a million times and it’ll never figure out what you’re talking about.  Cleverbot is beholden to its chat partners for information, ignoring the rest of the Internet entirely.  Finally I told it, “The right answer is ‘Nevermore.’”  It replied, “No, I want you to sing the song.”  I obliged, pasting in lyrics from the religious spiritual:  “Sometimes I feel discouraged,  And think my work’s in vain.” 

Cleverbot replied:  “I know, right?”

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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