From the Archives - Drama in Philosophy Class!

Introduction

When I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, choosing classes was never easy. The most important requirement of a class was that it fit into my cycling schedule. A two-hour span between classes, followed by a one-hour class, was either a total waste of riding opportunity, or truancy waiting to happen. Beyond this, I tended to go with classes that looked interesting, or—better yet—easy. So when I came upon Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking, a class essentially about logic, I was really intrigued.

Right off the bat, I wondered if you can actually teach somebody how to think logically. I suspected that you couldn’t—that this was a kind of talent. I also felt like I kind of had this talent, since I was pretty good at math and at writing persuasive papers. Moreover, a childhood nickname my brothers gave me was “Logic Lad.” Believe me, my brothers were not given to ever saying anything nice to me, so this nickname must have been a grudging capitulation around an undeniable trait.

This confidence was tempered by (or perhaps a delusion brought about by) an insecurity, which was that I only thought I was a rational, logical person. To have such swagger and be woefully ignorant of my own inability to think critically was a frightening proposition. So, as a hedge against being an unknowing intellectual poser, I thought I better take this class in order to validate, or possibly bring about, my (supposed) capability to think critically.

Little did I realize, when signing up, how much drama this course would occasion. Read on for the torrid tale of our first midterm exam and its aftermath.

Drama in Philosophy Class – February 8, 1989

I had high hopes right from the beginning about Philosophy 3 – Critical Thinking. The textbook is really cool. Verbal arguments are encoded with all these cool symbols, bridging the gap I always felt there must be between math and clearly written arguments. But I was kind of disappointed, right off, by the professor. She just didn’t strike me as the total braniac that I hoped she (and all my professors) would be.

How could I assess this so quickly, and who am I to declare such a thing? Well, it’s mainly due to her imprecise, unstructured delivery. She loves to ramble worthlessly during lecture, repeating herself continually in a monotonous, tiresome tone. Also, her grammar is pretty bad for a UC professor: “Does anyone else need a syllabi?” or “Another criteria we look at is…” or “While the price of gold really might have fell…”

I know grammar knowledge isn’t the same thing as intelligence, but still … I don’t think an Oxford professor would ever slip up like that. But beyond all this, my main problem with this professor is that her lectures dang near put me to sleep every time. (I know, I know … this could be me. I’ve slept through all kinds of classes, even ones I know would be interesting if I were only awake to hear them.)

But you know, the professor isn’t that bad, actually … she does impart some useful lessons. But the Teaching Assistant (T.A.) for the class bugs the hell out of me. He seems to have recently moved here from some Eastern Bloc country, which wouldn’t be a problem except that his poor grasp of English hinders his ability to clearly teach this subject, given the importance of clarity when dealing with tricky argument forms. For example, when teaching a syllogism, it’s really important not to say “In case he” instead of “In the case that he.” Consider this sentence: “In the case that he does not bring an umbrella, he will get wet.” No problem there, right? But if your T.A. says, “In case he brings an umbrella, he will get wet.” This has an entirely different meaning and makes our protagonist seem pretty deranged, wouldn’t you say? I tried to explain the difference but this T.A. absolutely could not follow me. His English skills were not up to the job. Usually after he talks for a while, everybody ends up shrugging at the futility of it all, and loses interest.

As with most T.A. discussion sections, much of the period is devoted to the Question & Answer session. There are two possible scenarios for how this goes. If the entire class is unprepared or asleep (or both), nobody will ask any questions and the T.A. will wait patiently for about ten minutes before becoming irritated. Then he quizzes the class, perhaps to try to snap us into attention. He doesn’t get any satisfactory answers, either because the students are actually clueless, or they’re toying with him (I can’t figure out which). After five or six students give unsatisfactory answers, I’ll try to end the stalemate with the correct answer. For example, if the question is, “What is a sound argument?” I will say, “It’s a valid argument that has true premises.” Then T.A. will shake his head and field five more wrong answers, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally he will announce the correct answer: “It’s an argument which has true premises and is valid.” How does he not recognize my answer as correct? Perhaps it’s his poor grasp of English … maybe he has memorized the correct answer by rote and thus requires the wording to be identical. Critical thinking indeed!

The other question and answer scenario is somewhat less common. Here, a student actually comes to class having read the material and attempted the homework, but is completely lost. Well, the T.A.’s job is to eliminate confusion, so the student has come to the right place. Or so he thinks! Invariably, the student gets nowhere. He will ask something like, “What is the difference between cogent and sound arguments?” and the T.A. will throw the question out to the class: “Anyone? Anyone?” After waiting for about five minutes for a response from another student, the T.A. will say, “Hasn’t anybody done the reading?” After another awkward pause, he lets the question die, hoping the student has given up hope. If the student repeats the question, the T.A. says, “Well, it’s in your textbook.” If the student still persists, then the T.A. says, “You’ll have to come to my office hours.” This last resort is brutally effective, as no student in the history of higher education has ever gone to a T.A.’s office hours.

But you know, the T.A. isn’t actually my main gripe with the class. After all, being surrounded by other students could lead to a stimulating discussion anyway, right? That’s the whole point of the small discussion sections. But I have yet to hear a single intelligent utterance from any of my classmates. Mostly I just hear a lot of whining. And after the midterm exam, they turned their bitching up to 11. In fact, our discussion section was so heated, it was almost like a student revolt.

Interestingly enough, we hadn’t even gotten our tests back, so the class wasn’t responding to poor grades, not exactly. But I think they highly suspected they’d augered in, based on two things: one, almost nobody finished the test (or even came close), and two, the professor had announced at the post-exam lecture that almost everybody crashed and burned. The median score was a 56%. So my classmates came to class armed with numerous reasons why the test was like, totally unfair. The T.A., arrogant  as ever, took a big risk at the beginning of the period by venturing that the students, not the test, were at fault. Instantly the jackleg spokesman for the students fired off a rebuttal: “Isn’t your argument fallacious?” Well, at least the guy had picked up a bit of the lingo.

The T.A. responded: “At my Thursday review section, before the exam, I asked how many people thought the class was easy. Almost everybody raised his hand. Then I asked how many people had done the review problems. Out of 48 students, four raised their hands. Out of that four, only one had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check his answers. If this is indicative of the whole class, we can conclude that the students did not study hard enough.”

 I have to admit, this makes some sense. But, this being a class on logic, he probably should have trod more carefully. For one thing, it’s not necessarily a given that his Thursday section was intellectually similar to ours. They might have all chosen that section (day and time) based on their athletic or party schedules, for all we know. Second, it’s possible that after his first boring question, a lot of the students lost interest and couldn’t be bothered to keep raising their hands.

Our class demanded a “recount.” I found this absurd. The T.A. hadn’t asked our section these questions, so he had counted nothing … how could he now “recount”? And if he asked our class the same questions now, what were we going to say? That we had also neglected to do the review problems? Yeah, right. Amazingly, the T.A. indulged this “recount,” and guess what? It turns out everybody in the class had done all the review problems and had gone to the Reserve Book Room to check our answers! Obviously the test was a gross miscarriage of justice! Of course all this was immaterial. It’s not the T.A.’s job to write the test, so if the test is unfair, that’s not his problem. Nor could he do anything about it.

This pointless debate went on and on, the class growing increasingly impassioned and the T.A. becoming increasingly flustered. I had no interest in the proceedings because, notwithstanding the median score, I felt pretty confident that, unless I was the most self-deluded person on the planet, I’d done fine. The test had seemed easy to me, almost eerily so, and I had finished early. I couldn’t get too worried about my grade because, if I had done poorly, the low grade would be the least of my worries. Being the most self-deluded person on the planet would be a deep, deep hole that I’d probably spend the rest of my life trying to climb out of.

Feeling a strange combination of boredom and discomfort, I began doodling. Unfortunately I am a very poor doodler. I find my doodles tiresome and annoying and end up scribbling them out. So I got sick of that and picked up a flyer advertising a Spring Break trip to Mexico. Then I read a flyer about how I, too, could earn extra income at home doing telecommunications. Before long, I decided that the discussion had to be more interesting than the flyers. Tuning back in, I realized that there was actually an educational opportunity available to me here: I could listen for, and document, the all the logical fallacies committed by the students—proof of their unpreparedness, as these same fallacies were the very subject of the exam! So here they are, taken directly from my notes:

“We did fine on the homework. But when you put a gun to a guy’s head and tell him to recite the Constitution, he won’t be able to do it. Likewise, with our time restrictions, we couldn’t perform well on the test.” WEAK ANALOGY

“We couldn’t be expected to study that long. We got so many tests right now we just don’t got time for everything. If we spent all our time studying for this class, we’d, like, fail all our others! Besides, think of the stress we’re going through!” APPEAL TO PITY

“Exams are always too long. Like this History test I had we had basically fifty minutes to write three essays. And one of them was on material we hadn’t even covered! Soooo lame!” RED HERRING

“Look: 300 students did poorly. Four T.A.’s and one professor blame us for it. Obviously, you guys must be wrong.” ACCIDENT (general rule applied incorrectly to a specific case)

“Two of my friends didn’t even finish the test and neither did I. So don’t eee-ven try to tell me you gave us enough time!” HASTY GENERALIZATION

“I saw this one dude walking up to turn in the test, and he was just filling in random dots like crazy.” RED HERRING

Some of the arguments I wrote down, while not committing specific fallacies, seemed illogical anyway. See if you can pinpoint the weaknesses in the following arguments:

“In the categorical syllogism problems, the examples were too hard. I mean, what if we don’t know the difference between reptiles and mammals?”

“When you said ‘open book,’ you set a trap for us to fall into. That’s not fair!”

“We only had a minute for each [multiple choice] problem. Maybe we’re just not fast enough readers!”

“When you have that many problems in front of you, they just all start to melt together.”

“What if the ten percent of the class that did well were just a product of chance?”

“I got ahold of last year’s midterm and it was a lot shorter. How do you explain that?”

“I tried to calculate how much time we had for each problem, but it was hard because each section had its own numbering. By the time I figured it all out, I only had half an hour left and I didn’t finish!”

“It was totally bogus. I mean, they were all the kind where you have to, like, stop and think!”

“All the examples seemed like they were from poems.”

This last statement caused me to almost burst out laughing. That would have been unwise indeed … the whole class could have turned on me! From this point forward I was focused purely on not smirking or snorting … not only would I look like a dick, but I would actually be one. For once in my college career, I wished I couldn’t stay awake.

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I laid out the first half of my case against Chris Froome: that is, why I think (and have long thought) he’s a doper. My aim isn’t to change anybody’s mind on this—I doubt that’s possible, and actually I don’t really care—but rather to explain my position, lest any Froome fans read my biased blow-by-blow race reports and decide I’m a jerk. (I’m not actually out to inflame anybody with this blog.) So in this second and final post on the topic, I finish the effort of humbly explaining my position. I hope you’ll conclude I’m a more or less reasonable person, even if you don’t happen to agree with me about Froome.

In my previous post I countered the following two challenges to my position, taken from a debate I had with a friend: 

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

In this post, I take on my friend’s other two challenges:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else.

The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and use Froome’s essentially clean slate as the basis for our own assessment?

First of all, the Lance era wasn’t the result of one guy (and his team) getting away with murder. The rampant doping throughout those years demonstrated a fundamentally flawed system of enforcement. The last Tour title to be stripped (retroactively) was 2010 … not that long ago, and three years after Postal/Discovery released its grip on the Tour. The sport has a deep, deep hole to dig out of.

How deep a hole? To make the math easy, let’s round down and say that 10 dopers were exposed by the USADA investigation without ever having tested positive. Let’s say each rider was tested 10 times a year for 10 years. That’s 1,000 false negative samples. When you consider all the different substances riders were tested for, across these 1,000 samples, and when you factor in the wide variety of PEDs these riders ultimately admitted to having used, the number of false negatives snowballs even further. And yet when’s the last time you heard of a bona-fide false positive?

Clearly, the drug testing system has been woefully ineffective, erring radically on the side of false negative tests. For us to believe Froome’s salbutamol test was a false positive flies in the face of this reality. (Frankly, there isn’t a single rider in the peloton today whom I’d give the benefit of the doubt if he tested positive for anything. I’d say, “What a shame, I’d hoped he was clean.”)

So why should we trust the UCI’s decision regarding Froome? After all, they based their ruling on WADA’s findings, and there are plenty of signs that WADA is still not doing a good job of policing the sport (click here and here). The UCI’s refusal to share WADA’s reasoning in clearing Froome is making things worse. What we need is transparency but what we’re getting is, “We got a lot of documents from Sky … it’s all good, trust us.”

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the whole peloton is doped, and I’ll allow that perhaps things have improved a bit, but I reserve the right to be suspicious of this or that rider whose performance looks a little too good to be true. When the rider in question is Froome, the suspicious signs start to pile up, as I discussed in my last post.

Note that even if we decide to accept the veracity of the UCI’s recent decision on Froome’s positive test, this shouldn’t put our every suspicion to rest. If we conclude Froome is a clean rider just because the UCI cleared him for salbutamol, we would be committing the logical fallacy of “denying the antecedent.” The fallacy goes like this: 

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: Not A
• Conclusion: Not B

It is easier to see how this is a fallacy if we consider a simple example:

• Premise: If it rains, I will bring an umbrella
• Premise: It is not raining
• Conclusion: I am not bringing an umbrella

Of course this conclusion does not necessarily follow. Even if it’s not raining, I could bring an umbrella for another reason, such as rain being forecast. For the second premise to be true is not a necessary condition.

Broken down into its simplest form the “Froome must be clean because the UCI dismissed his case” argument would run like this:

• Premise: If the UCI finds Froome guilty of doping, he is a doper. 
• Premise: The UCI did not find Froome guilty of doping. 
• Conclusion: Therefore, Froome is not a doper. 

Denying the antecedent is a universally recognized fallacy. That is, arguments of this form are automatically classified as invalid. To put it more bluntly, just because Froome found his way out of this salbutamol mess doesn’t mean he never doped. Plenty of riders have cheated and gotten away with it. (In like fashion, we don’t conclude Al Capone wasn’t a murderer just because he was convicted only of tax evasion.)

Lance Armstrong employed this fallacy for years, defending himself on the basis of being “the most tested athlete on the planet.” Arnaud Démare used it as well after hanging on to the side of his team car up a key climb in the 2016 Milan-San Remo race, stating afterward, “‘There are judges in cycling. If I had done something forbidden, I would have been disqualified.’” I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that my friend stumbled into this fallacious argumentative form in defending Froome, and perhaps other Froome fans are also falling prey to it as well.

How does the positive test for salbutamol prove anything? How does it suggest a years-long sophisticated doping program? How would salbutamol help Froome win four Tours? Why would he deliberately use more than he needed if it doesn’t enhance performance?

Here I will lay out, in clear logical terms, the reason I think Froome’s positive test suggests a wider doping program. 

• Premise #1: Willingness to cheat via one substance indicates a willingness to cheat via others
• Premise #2: You cannot accidently go over the legal limit on salbutamol, because the legal limit is so high; i.e., a positive test indicates abuse, typically through oral or injected dosing
• Premise #3: In sufficient quantities salbutamol will enhance performance, so a rider can gain an advantage from abusing it
• Premise #4: Froome went over the legal limit
• Conclusion #1: Froome didn’t accidentally inhale an amount of salbutamol that exceeded the legal limit (i.e., he lied about how he took it)
• Conclusion #2: Froome deliberately abused salbutamol to gain an advantage
• Conclusion #3: By abusing salbutamol, Froome has demonstrated a willingness to abuse other substances; i.e., this positive test gives us valid reason to be suspicious of him generally

The conclusions above proceed naturally from the premises; that is, the argument is logically valid by the prepositional form modus ponens, which goes like this:

• Premise: If A then B
• Premise: A
• Conclusion: Therefore, B

In other words, if we assume that a positive test for salbutamol automatically indicates abuse (Premise #2), and that abusing salbutamol can provide an advantage (Premise #3), and that Froome did test positive (Premise #4), then we can logically conclude that Froome abused salbutamol to gain an advantage (Conclusions #1 and #2). If we assume that abusing one drug indicates a willingness to abuse others (Premise #1), and that Froome abused salbutamol (Conclusion #2), then Froome can be reasonably suspected of abusing other drugs.

Because the reasoning is valid (i.e., follows the standard logical rule modus ponens), you can only attack the argument by showing that it is not sound; i.e., you’d have to declare that one or more premises is/are untrue. So let’s look at each premise in turn.

Premise #1 is something I happen to believe, even if I can’t prove it. A rider may decide to be clean because he’s afraid of being caught, or he’s afraid of side effects, or he is a moral person and/or his ambitions in the sport are noble. If a rider has no moral problem with doping, and isn’t afraid of the drugs, and thinks he can get away with taking them, he’ll generally do it, and will not restrict himself to one substance. I mean, why would he? Look at the all the USADA-snared American dopers who confessed (along with other admitted dopers like Michael Rasmussen, David Millar, Frank Vandenbroucke, and Marco Pantani): none of them stuck to a single PED. They all took a variety.

(It is certainly the case that a rider might eschew a particular PED or practice on the grounds of safety; for example, a rider might use testosterone because it’s common, but avoid blood boosting because hotel-room blood transfusions are dangerous. A drug like salbutamol is probably less scary than a lot of PEDs and I wouldn’t be surprised if taking a variety of more commonplace drugs like clenbuterol, triamsinolone, salbutamol, and/or corticoids in combination is a popular alignment with the “marginal gains” ethos that seems to define the modern sport.)

(By the way, here’s Froome’s therapeutic use exemption for prednisolone, a corticosteroid.)

Premise #2, about it being impossible to go over the legal limit of salbutamol via an inhaler, I believe based on my firsthand experience with salbumatol, and from having discussed the matter with a pulmonary M.D. who also happens to be a former professional road racer. You don’t get any performance benefit by inhaling salbutamol because that doesn’t deliver a high enough dose. For the same reason, you won’t test positive by inhaling the drug—you’d have to take a ridiculous number of puffs (18 to be precise). I have a blog post dedicated to this topic, where I’ve done the math. To get the benefit, and to test positive, require either orally ingesting or injecting the drug.

Premise #3 is widely established: using high quantities of salbutamol can give you a performance advantage (click here and here). The fact that this substance is regulated strongly supports the notion that it can confer performance benefits in sufficient quantities. “We have an upper limit because we have multiple publications showing that systemic use of beta-2 agonists, including salbutamol, can be performance enhancing,” WADA senior director of science Olivier Rabin explains here. 

Premise #4 (the positive test for salbutamol) is not disputed by anybody.

If you don’t agree with one or more of these premises, that’s fine, but don’t conclude that I’m a knee-jerk blowhard who bases his conclusion on nothing at all. I hope that, whether you agree with these premises or not, you can see why I’d put stock in them. On the other hand, if you agree with these premises but not the conclusions they produce, then you are not a logical thinker and are reading the wrong blog. Please, go somewhere else.

In case you’re thinking of dismissing one or more of my premises out of hand simply because you can’t imagine Froome cheating, consider this: when asthma is poorly controlled, the sufferer cannot perform as an athlete. I know this from experience. (If you have asthma, you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, take my word for it because I’m an asthma sufferer and a cycling coach, or go ask an asthmatic athlete or a coach.) To win a grand tour, you have to not only be a top rider, you have to be functioning at close to 100%. An insufficiently mitigated asthma attack takes you way below 100%. By the time I start wheezing, I’m crippled. Any athlete is. And when you get to that point, it’s really too late to try to correct with salbutamol: your race is ruined. My doctor cautioned that for exercise-induced asthma, salbutamol is a prophylactic measure—you take it before the exercise, you don’t wait until you have a problem. Thus you wouldn’t wait until after the grand tour stage, during which you padded your GC lead, to take more of the drug. Froome breathed well enough to put time into his GC rivals on that day at the Vuelta, so he should not have needed extra salbutamol post-race.

It’s also worth noting that a therapeutic use exemption (TUE), such as Froome has for salbutamol (and has had for prednisolone), is not universally acknowledged as an automatically legitimate justification for an ongoing regimen of a prescribed drug. The British House of Commons did a deep investigation into TUEs leveraged by Team Sky, and concluded, “The use of triamcinolone at Team Sky during the period under investigation … does not constitute a violation of the WADA code [because a TUE was in place], but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky. In this case, and contrary to the testimony of David Brailsford in front of the Committee, we believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.” Froome himself has acknowledged the slippery nature of TUEs: according to this article, “In 2015 at the Tour de France, Froome explained that during the race he had a medical condition which could have been treated with a TUE. However, he objected to using a TUE, explaining in January 2017 that, ‘I didn’t feel having a TUE in the last week of the Tour was something I was prepared to do. It did not sit well morally with me.’” (Obviously his TUE for sulbutamol during the Veulta did extend through the last week, as his positive test was after stage 18.)

To reiterate, this salbutamol positive is not the cornerstone of my belief that Froome is a doper. What it does do is increase my skepticism that WADA has turned the tide and is now able to enforce their rules.

A final note

Again, this two-part post came about because a reader suggested it’s unfair or at least unbecoming to bag on a rider on my blog just because I think he’s a doper. I’m not too concerned about that ideologically. If I advertise my race coverage as biased, and acknowledge that my aspersions are speculation, and in light of the fact that this guy put himself in the public eye through his choice of career, why should I spare him my public indictment? My blog is a medium that anybody can choose to ignore as he pleases (and most do). I don’t get enough pageviews to make a tiny blip in Froome’s reputation, nor will Froome’s fans be moved to change their minds. Plenty of more mainstream media, along with countless cycling fans, are denouncing him already.

And for the record, I bag on Froome in particular, while going easier on other suspect riders, because he is ungracious even in victory, as I described here and here.

If you don’t agree, at least I’ve explained the rationale behind my bias against Froome. I know I can’t please everybody, but at least I’ve tried…

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Cycling Commentary - Why I Believe Chris Froome Is a Doper

Introduction

I have been doing “biased blow-by-blow” bike race reports on this blog for over five years now. My gimmick is that, not being a professional journalist, I don’t have to hold my tongue. If I suspect a rider is doping, I’ll say so. And I don’t couch my aspersions carefully, like “Chris Froome is a rider I’m a bit suspicious of though I hasten to point out he’s never had an adverse analytical finding that was upheld in the final analysis by the UCI.” My blow-by-blow reports are written in real-time as I watch the race ... I don’t have time for lots of qualifications or to make my case as I go.

And who wants to read a lot of mealy-mouthed, timid, caveat-littered prose, anyway? If 90% of my readers think this or that rider is doping, they should have no problem with shorthand like “filthy doping scumbag.” And if they don’t like my flippant style and/or think a rider is clean whom I say is doped, they probably won’t (and shouldn’t) spend much time on my post anyway. This is all according to design. I laid out my overall biased blow-by-blow format at length in my first report and have included the “biased” caveat in every subsequent report. I have never claimed to be fair or responsible.

But as a friend asked recently in an email, what about those who do disagree with me? I’m tempted to dismiss them; after all, a blogger could drive himself crazy trying to please an audience that may be almost entirely hypothetical (and which in any case provides almost zero feedback). So my guiding principle with this blog is “screw the reader.”

All this being said, my recent Tour de France Stage 1 blow-by-blow report seems to have really struck a nerve and offended my friend, and he cautions me against writing stuff on my blog that could adversely affect people’s opinion of me. Meanwhile, I got an email from another friend saying how strange it was reading my Stage 1 post while hanging out at his brother’s house, because his brother still thinks Chris Froome is legit. My first thought was to get these people together to form a support group—maybe they could invite Ross Perot, and after the Tour they could all set out together to find out who really killed Nicole Brown Simpson.

But then I figured, why not write a post carefully laying out my case against Froome in a non-flippant manner, so that at least an inflamed reader might come to understand that my position is not just a wild hunch or totally unfounded character assassination? Sure, I might still get a few stubborn readers experiencing actual indignation at my position, but hopefully the more common reaction among those who still disagree would be more like, “I beg to differ, but I guess I can see how he’d think that.”

(Perhaps even Froome himself would shrug off this indictment; after all, he has been philosophical about this kind of thing before. Cyclingnews reported, “For those who expressed skepticism, Froome says he has empathy. ‘Cycling has its troubled history,’ [he says], ‘and being a multiple Tour winner comes with a level of suspicion and questions that need to be asked.’”)

A two-sided argument

In formal rhetoric, a one-sided argument only puts forth one’s own position, with no regard for opposing views. This can sometimes be a useful approach, such as when your audience already agrees with you and you’re trying to whip them into a lather, like at a political rally. My blow-by-blow reports are obviously one-sided. My goal with them isn’t to convince, but to entertain.

In contrast, this post will present a two-sided argument, which is where you anticipate your opponent’s view. In actuality I don’t have to guess, given the protracted email debate I had with my friend on this topic, running more than 10,000 words. I have attempted to consolidate his argument into four salient challenges to my position:

• Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?
• Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?
• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would a positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

I will address each point in turn. And because most of the dialogue out there in chat rooms and website reader comments is pure drivel, driven by a lot of emotion and aggression and not much reason, I aim with this post do be as logical and dispassionate as possible. I hope you find that refreshing.

So here I go. Before we dive in, let me be clear: of course I cannot prove that Froome is a doper. If nothing less than a giant body of irrefutable evidence is what you’re after, don’t even bother with this—go read something else. Second, Froome’s positive test for salbutamol is not the cornerstone of my case, though I will address it; as longtime readers know, I have believed Froome to be a doper all along, way before he got popped.

Why suspect Froome just because he’s “too successful”?

Much of the Froome-bashing in the cycling community centers around the notion that when something looks too good to be true, it probably is. The way Froome dominates the sport is, all by itself, somewhat suspect. But is it fair to accuse somebody of doping just because he wins a lot? This “he’s too good” innuendo, my friend contends, “besmirches Kobe [Bryant] and Mohammad [Ali] and Michael J [Fox] and [Michael] Phelps.”

Okay, first off, “[Fox]” above was just a joke. I know my friend meant Michael Jordan. I was just testing you … did you jump up and say, “Aha! Dana is deliberately misconstruing his friend’s argument so he can readily refute it! Classic straw man fallacy!”? Good, then … you passed!

My assessment of Froome is not just based on how much he wins, but on how he wins. Nothing about his grand tour victories looks convincing to me. Why? Simply because Froome, who is built like a climber and out-climbs the entire peloton, also has this uncanny ability to win individual time trials. This does not make sense. I raced for a good many years, and have watched bike races for decades, and most racers I know have always believed that you could be a good climber and a good time trialist, but no single human could be both the best climber and the best time trialist. Climbers thrive in the mountains due to their high power-to-weight ratio. This doesn’t help on the flats where you need more raw power and your mass actually helps you push through the wind. (If you wanted to prove this you could put me and pocket-climber Domenico Pozzovivo atop the Col du Lautaret and watch me roll away from him.)

(Here’s Pozzovivo being sawed off a small group on a flat road during the Tour last week, BTW.)

Then look at your best apparently clean time trialists: Fabian Cancellara, Tony Martin, Tom Dumoulin. Why do I say “apparently clean”? Not just because they haven’t tested positive, but because their performances are realistic. They win some TTs, they lose some, but moreover they’re almost never the best climbers in a race. The grand tour winners who have particularly excelled at time trials—Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain, and Greg LeMond among them—usually just held their own in the mountains (or got dropped). So it is with Dumoulin, which is why I have so far given him the benefit of the doubt.

Here’s a tidbit: of the World Championships time trial winners throughout history, only three were of below-average height (i.e., less than 5’10”). All three of these were 5’9”. Two of the three, Serhiy Honchar and Santiago Botero, were subsequently caught doping. The third, Chris Boardman, was no climber—his race weight was 10 pounds higher than Froome’s, even though he’s shorter. Look here at Dumoulin: he’s got the build of a time trialist. And look at Froome: he so doesn’t.

Body type matters, and historically climbers and time trialists have been at opposite ends of the physique spectrum. This can make stage racing exciting. It’s unsurprising when a great climber like Nairo Quintana finishes outside the top 50 in a grand tour ITT. That’s what clean racing looks like. On the flip side, when a twiggy pocket climber like Froome can beat a time trial specialist like Cancellara or Tony Martin in a time trial, and also beat a pure climber like Mikel Landa or Pozzovivo in the mountains, that looks suspicious. What other riders could crush it in both disciplines? Lance Armstrong, Alberto Contador, Bobby Julich, Levi Leipheimer, and Tyler Hamilton. Doper, doper, doper, doper, and doper. For Froome to lose the TT in this year’s Tour by only a second just doesn’t look right. It looks like he had some “help.”

Now, both of the friends who commented on my Stage 1 blow-by-blow have brought up Peter Sagan specifically. One wrote, “You built a perfect case for Sagan being, by your criteria, a doper. Too consistent. No one can win the green jersey that many times.” The other wrote, “I still like Sagan. If he ever has an irregular test or a non-standard test or a not-quite-normal-but-we’ll-allow-it test, I’ll be super bummed.” I like Sagan too, and I like to think he’s clean. So let’s look at his case to see how a very successful rider doesn’t automatically trigger my doper-alert response.

Certainly Sagan has won a lot of races. That said, he’s a great sprinter, and sprinters end up with a lot more opportunities and thus a lot more wins than stage racers, for the obvious reason that it takes three weeks to notch a single stage race victory.

But Sagan has also lost a lot, when you are counting the number of races he tried to win vs. the number he actually did. (That is to say, a stage racer might target two or three races a year, whereas a sprinter targets dozens.) I can’t be bothered tabulating Sagan’s win/lose ratio, but he doesn’t completely dominate in his métier, like Froome does. Sagan has failed seven times to win Milan-San Remo. He failed to win a single stage in the 2014 and 2015 Tours. He does appear to be human.

As for the green jersey, not all sprinters prioritize it over getting Tour stage wins. Once a sprinter falls sufficiently far behind in points, he’s probably going to focus on a few key stages he’s really confident he can win, and not worry so much about the green jersey. Meanwhile, a fair number of sprint specialists miss the time cuts on mountain stages and never make it to Paris. So Sagan’s string of six victories in that category is not unbelievable.

Meanwhile, Sagan is a very clever rider, and winning sprints takes a lot of tactical savvy. My best-effort assessment is that doping doesn’t make as much difference in one-day races as in stage races, so I’m less suspicious of sprinters in general. (Okay, I guess you could suspect Sagan of abusing Adderrall.) (Yes, that was a joke.)

Doesn’t Froome’s consistency demonstrate legitimacy, as opposed to the erratic performances of, say, Floyd Landis?

It’s easy to confuse consistency with believability. Yes, a rider whose performances are totally erratic and unpredictable may arouse reasonable suspicion. But unusual dominance should not be confused with consistency.

Any rider who can win a grand tour is consistent—that’s what a GC victory indicates. To get there requires massive preparation and sacrifice. For a rider to win a single grand tour in a single season—indeed, in his whole career—is a remarkable feat. But for a rider to absolutely dominate in the grand tours is incredibly difficult. Since joining Team Sky team in 2010, Froome has finished 12 grand tours. He won half of them, and finished on the podium in 11 of them. Not even Eddy Merckx had such an amazing run. Even if you gave Lance Armstrong back his victories, he wouldn’t have that astounding a track record. Froome’s achievement is all the more incredible when you consider that modern riders often build an entire season around a single grand tour, vs. the era Merckx, Hinault, and LeMond raced in, when riders were expected to get results throughout the season.

And what other riders, besides Froome, have won all three grand tours consecutively? Only Merckx and Hinault. Last year Quintana tried to do the Giro/Tour double (i.e. win both in the same season), but was so tired coming into the Tour he ultimately lost 15 minutes to Froome. In 2011 Contador tried to do the Giro/Tour double and (possibly due to riding clean, though this is only conjecture) managed only 5th at that Tour.

Froome hasn’t managed the Giro/Tour double yet, but last year he handily pulled off the Tour/Vuelta double which is exceedingly rare. (The last rider to do it was Hinault in 1978.) Froome’s unusual ability to recover from one grand tour in time to win the next is indeed suspicious, because recovery is exactly the challenge that EPO and blood bags help with. Again, Froome’s unprecedented consistency, in the absence of any other suspicious factors, doesn’t automatically suggest cheating … but combined with his improbable dominance in both climbing and time trialing, and his positive drug test, it doesn’t look good.

Now let’s look at whom Froome has beaten in some of these grand tours: Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Andres Kloden, and Denis Menchov, all of whom are convicted dopers. Since EPO hit the scene, what ostensibly clean rider (by which I mean a rider who hasn’t tested positive) has won the Tour de France with any regularity? Until Froome, no clean rider since Miguel Indurain (23 years ago) won more than a single Tour. This isn’t because Froome’s competitors are weak, and this isn’t “erratic” performance on their part. In the modern era, to win even one grand tour requires perfect preparation, great health, a solid team, and some luck. I can believe in Cadel Evans’s Tour win because he was so good for so long, and had so many near misses until finally all the planets lined up and he managed to win.

Froome, on the other hand, won last year’s Vuelta despite (by his account) suffering major asthma problems. And he won this year’s Giro with a crazy 80-kilometer solo breakaway that erased over two weeks of relatively poor riding that hadn’t even put him on the virtual podium. So he can be erratic, too.

See my next post for part two of this polemic, when I’ll cover the last two arguments my friend presented:

• The Lance era is over – why shouldn’t we trust the UCI’s decision on the salbutamol case, and base our assessment on Froome’s essentially clean slate?
• How would the positive test for salbutamol suggest a wider doping program anyway?

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - STEM vs. Rhetoric

Introduction

Some seventeen years ago, before the novelty of e-mail had worn off, I forwarded around a funny message I got from my boss. My friend M— forwarded it to a bunch more people, and one of them sent a rebuttal that I found a little too pat. Moreover, his opening sentence, “Your math is off,” struck me as a little smug. So, notwithstanding the absurdity of the original e-mail, I decided to defend it to the death. (Actually, being in the wrong actually increased my motivation: as a lover of rhetorical finesse, I have a natural fondness for the quixotic job of advancing untenable positions.)

I present the transcript of this debate because I think it’s funny, and because everybody loves a good smackdown, right?

(A note on the title: of course the term “STEM” hadn’t been coined yet in 1997. But my title, you may find, is decent shorthand for the subtext of this debate.)

Knowledge vs. Money - a debate between strangers

From: Dana Albert
Sent: Friday, November 07, 1997 5:36 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients:
Subject: FW: Equation

Check out this funny e-mail from my boss!

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Team,

I think we could call this the rule of the VP level at (insert client here)...

Do you know too much?

We all know that:
Knowledge is Power and  Time is Money.

And, as engineers learned in school:
Power = Work / Time

So, if  Knowledge = Power, and  Time = Money, then  Knowledge = Work / Money

Solving for Money, we get:  Money = Work / Knowledge

Thus, Money approaches infinity as Knowledge approaches ZERO, regardless of the Work done.

Therefore:
The Less you Know, the More you Make.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--~--

From: M—
Sent: Monday, November 10, 1997 11:18 AM
To: Dana Albert
Cc: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: FW: Equation

Dana,

Below is follow up from my friend—working on his PhD in Physics...

M—

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From: S—
To: M—
Subject: Re: Equation
Date: Sunday, November 09, 1997 8:22PM

Your math is off. You must assume that work is independent of knowledge for your math to be correct. Since knowledge and work are correlated money does not go to infinity. Work is probaly proportional to knowledge to some power greater than one (first order approximation).. i.e. work = C * (knowledge)^(1+n). Where C is a constant. So if we go back to the eq M = W/K. We get M= C* K^(1+n) / K, by substituting in the relation for work. Finally simplfying, we get: M = C*K^n. So we see that as Knowledge increases money, actually also does increase. All is good in the world still.

S—

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From: Dana Albert
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 7:16 PM
To: M—
Subject: RE: Equation

M—,

I find your friend’s rebuttal to my boss’s treatise interesting. I will analyze the rebuttal in terms of the three branches of rhetoric: ethos (authority), logos (logic), and pathos (emotional feeling).

First, ethos: the fact that your friend is working on his Ph.D. in physics is not nearly as impressive as an actual degree in physics. All that being in graduate school means is that he already has an undergraduate degree and has passed some tests. Meanwhile, we can only speculate on the quality of his undergraduate education. I did immediately notice that your friend’s his message had punctuation errors (such as only one space after a period), spelling errors (such as “probaly”), and grammatical errors (such as the sentence fragment “Where C is a constant”). Suffice to say he doesn’t win huge points in the ethos category.

Moving on to pathos, we immediately see that he bases his rebuttal largely on equations. I was not moved.

Finally, his logic is based upon what I would call a faulty premise: that knowledge and work are correlated. Where did he ever get that idea? It is futile to build an argument on an axiom that is not generally accepted. An effective argument must not only have valid reasoning, but must also be built upon sound premises—thus his equations, nothing more than smoke and mirrors, evaporate.

Clearly all is not “good in the world still.”

Sorry,
Dana

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From: S—
To: M—
Subject: I am a Rocket Scientist!
Date: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 4:35PM

Mr. Albert feels that my argument fails for three reasons: I do not have the authority to make such statements, my rebuttal did not stir his emotions, and that knowledge and work output were indeed uncorrelated.

Mr. Albert challenges my authority, citing my numerous typos, and my lack of education. In science, authority has no baring on the validity of an argument. Just as the church’s authority could not stifle Galileo’s heresy, Mr. Albert’s authority can not stifle my heresy. I would also note that he is not immune to typos himself: “I did immediately notice that your friend’s his message had punctuation errors”

Mr. Albert goes on to say that my argument fails to move him. Perhaps, Mr. Albert, my equations failed to move you, because as an English major you fail to understand them.

Finally, Mr. Albert rejects my assumption that work output and knowledge are correlated. I challenge him to reject the assumption the next time he is interviewing a potential employee.

The success of the scientific worldview has been in large part due to the rejection of pathos and ethos, in favor of logos. While Mr. Albert certainly has pathos and ethos in abundance, it does not obscure the fact that he lacks logos. Mr. Albert defends his boss’s abuse of math and science in an attempt to prove that the less you know the more money you make. The argument is empirically false, and the argument should be rejected for that reason alone. I simply wished to point out where the logic of the proof collapsed.

S—

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From: Dana Albert
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 1997 8:16 PM
To: M—
Subject: RE: I am a Rocket Scientist!

M—,

I will continue to uphold the validity of my boss’s statement about money, knowledge, and work. This is fun.

The following sentence, committed by Mr. S—, I find comical: “In science, authority has no bearing on the validity of an argument.” Perhaps Mr. S— is quibbling on the definition of “valid,” which in strict logical terms can mean “correctly inferred or deduced from a premise.” I see no point in doing this: valid, in a normal context, means “(1) Well grounded; just: a valid objection. (2) Producing the desired results; efficacious.” Now, does Mr. S— really believe that authority has no bearing on the validity of an argument? If a doctor diagnoses sickle-cell anemia and the patient insists it’s just a cold, does the doctor back down? When a judge or attorney evaluates the merit of forensic evidence, whom does he call on: a forensics specialist, or an art historian? Perhaps Mr. S— is unimpressed by credentials, but he can hardly speak for the entire scientific community.

For Mr. S— to point out my typo is an excellent example of what in logic is called the “red herring fallacy.” While I did make a typo, pointing it out is irrelevant to the actual argument, which concerns my boss’s statement about work, knowledge, and money. I cited Mr. S—’s grammatical errors because I was attempting to evaluate his level of education. My level of education, on the other hand, does not figure in the validity of my boss’s argument. Meanwhile, since the quality of S—’s education is still very much in question and pertinent to our ongoing discussion, I did notice that in the very sentence in which Mr. S— points out my typo, he commits another punctuation error by neglecting to end his sentence with a period. Perhaps he wasn’t sure whether the period should go after the quotation mark or before it and just gave up. But I digress.

Mr. S— suggests that the failure of his equations to move me emotionally is due to the nature of my undergraduate education. On the contrary, elegant and conclusive math—such as that exemplified by my boss in his original statement—moves me almost to tears. Moreover, a solid argument can impress and persuade anybody, regardless of his or her background. To confine one’s audience to nerdy scientists seems pointless, given that my boss’s original statement had universal appeal to any of us weary cogs of industry.

I was surprised to see that Mr. S— returned to his ill-fated premise about knowledge and output being correlated. This assertion is arguable at best, and simply cannot stand up to ages-old, commonly accepted axioms such as “time is money” and “knowledge is power.” And yet his first attempt to support this assertion is a suggestion that I keep his assertion in mind when conducting job interviews. I can assure Mr. S— that when conducting job interviews, I actually keep in mind the fallacy of this assertion. When I interview an applicant, particularly one weighted down with extra degrees, I invariably have the following question in mind: “Okay, he’s got plenty of knowledge, but after such long residence in the ivory towers, will he work hard enough to finish his projects on time? Will he complete a variety of tasks, or get bogged down in his habit of perfectionism? Or will he decide that his job is a nuisance, and return to academia for another degree?”

Meanwhile, it appears that Mr. S—’s submersion in his graduate physics program has given him a skewed perception of “the success of the scientific worldview.” All around us are examples of science’s failure to persuade people. For example, it is scientific fact that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer, yet millions of people begin doing it every day. Why? Is it because they refute the validity of the scientific findings? I doubt it. More likely it’s a clear example of scientific logos being overpowered by the pathos of cigarette ads showing beautiful sexy cool people smoking, combined with the ethos of the Marlboro Man and assorted smokers in the entertainment industry. Again, Mr. S— seems to confuse the prestige of his field with the realities of rhetoric.

Mr. S—, meanwhile, himself seems to try to infuse his argument with ethos by titling his message “I am a Rocket Scientist!” and repeatedly citing the strength of logos in science as if it were exemplified in his own arguments. Alas, it is not. For Mr. S— to claim that “Mr. Albert . . . lacks logos” is both incorrect and a good example of the logical fallacy called “ad hominem.” For Mr. S— to assert that my argument is illogical is one thing; to assert that I as a person “lack logos” is a personal attack. I will not dwell on this attack, since it is far more interesting to wonder what problems he has found in my logic. Incongruously, he attempts to support his attack on my logic by claiming that my boss’s statement about knowledge and money is empirically false. First of all, what does empirical evidence have to do with the quality of my logic? Dismissing the premises of an argument does not in itself do anything to evaluate the logic of conclusions that proceed logically from those premises.

Let us use a simpler proof to elucidate Mr. S—’s mistake. Assume this premise: it is raining outside. Assume also this premise: if it rains, Mr. Jones will carry his umbrella. If we assume these premises to be true (i.e., it is raining, and Mr. Jones does carry his umbrella when it rains), then we arrive at the logical conclusion that Mr. Jones is therefore carrying his umbrella. I believe this is a classic example of inductive reasoning, called (if memory serves), “modus tollendo ponens.” Now, if we discover that we were mistaken about the rain—that it is in fact not raining—does that mean we were being illogical when we concluded that Mr. Jones was carrying his umbrella? Of course not. Our logic was impeccable; we were simply wrong about one of the premises. For Mr. S— to state that my premise is the point “at which the logic of the proof collapsed” suggests that he aspires to an understanding of logical proof which he has not yet achieved.

This brings us to what apparently is the last possible foundation of his argument: his assertion that knowledge and output are interrelated, and that this statement is empirical fact. Even when I take into consideration Mr. S—’s lack of experience in the corporate world (immersed as he is in academia), I still must believe that examples of knowledge without output are all around him. What about the tenured professor who hasn’t published in three decades, who recycles the same rote lecture year after year? What about the grad student who has read every single book on his subject and still hasn’t started on his doctoral thesis, and never will? What about all those who finally get their Ph.D.s, only to take dead-end jobs in the service sector, letting their nine years of education slowly fall to oblivion? Meanwhile, we see other examples of output without knowledge, such as the factory worker who knows almost nothing about the textile industry but is nonetheless capable of sewing more than 500 elastic waistbands a day. Clearly, Mr. S— is unwise to base his entire argument—and his condemnation of my logical ability—on such a problematic assertion as knowledge and output being interrelated to a significant degree.

I hope that clears up the matter.

Dana

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From: S—
To: M—
Subject: Re: Equation (fwd)
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 1997 1:44PM

M—,

I’ve been busy researching the correlation between knowledge and wages, but I offer the insights of C—, a fellow graduate student.

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Forwarded message
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 1997 11:36:23 -0700 (MST)
From: C—
To: S—
Subject: Re: Equation (fwd)

I find this entire discourse fairly meaningless in light of one error. Even if we accept the premises that knowledge is power, and that power is equal to work divided by time, the conclusion that these two relationships obey the laws of communicability is fallacious. The original author has fallen into a fairly common trap in the sciences. As with the infamous “Intensity” definition in optics, the true meaning of power depends upon the specific context, or less generally, discipline of science in which it is used.

Since an astronomer uses “intensity” to mean “watts per square meter” and a radiometric scientist uses “intensity” to mean “power per steradian” (the true SI definition), can we state that the ratio, area divided by solid angle, is a meaningless quantity and should thus be discarded? Of course not. As I see it, there are two definitions of power in play. As a businessman might use the term, power is the ability to wield influence over others. Fortunately, the science definition is more exact. It is presented appropriately in the original document, power = work/time. You may disagree with the former definition, but my fundamental point is undeniable: business power cannot be made equivalent to science power.

You may attribute any typos in this document to my telnet settings (which do not properly justify and update the window as I edit) rather than to how much attention I paid to spelling back in the sixth grade. Thank you.

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From: Dana Albert
Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 1997 5:40 PM
To: M—
Subject RE: Equation (fwd)

M—,

I find C—’s assessment to be refreshingly clear and conclusive. With surgical precision, he has gotten right to the crux of the matter: the inappropriate merger of mathematical equations with abstract aphorisms.

However, I can’t help but point out that the original treatise (“the less you know, the more you make”) is meant as comedy—and, like other examples of the comic genre, depends upon its good-natured audience to gloss over the certain things (in this case the math/aphorism incompatibility). If the director of “Trading Places” had been hung up on the impossibility of a panhandler becoming a successful Wall Street trader, the movie never would have been made. In like fashion, if Mr. C— had responded directly to the knowledge/money treatise, he would have spoiled our fun. I much prefer the protracted debate in between, especially when my opponent is off in the weeds. ; )

Dana

Deliverance and Cycling Tioga Pass

Introduction

During my recent camping vacation with my family I tried to get some bike rides in.  You may have read about my Ebbetts Pass ride.  I did one other memorable ride during the trip—memorable more for my difficulties than anything else.  My goal was to head south on Highway 395 toward Lee Vining, where I’d turn west on Highway 120 (aka Great Sierra Wagon Road), which goes over Tioga Pass and into Yosemite National Park.  In addition to the pass itself, I faced several challenges:  the Nabokovian dilemma; shortage of time; shortage of water; fear; even a missing receipt.

Nabokovian dilemma

I guess “Nabokovian dilemma” isn’t a household phrase … yet.  (Quick, send everybody you know the link to this post!)  I’m referring to a memorable passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory, when he describes his boyhood mania for butterfly hunting: 

oooOne of [the characteristics of butterfly hunting] was the acute desire to be alone, since any companion, no matter how quiet, interfered with the concentrated enjoyment of my mania….  In this connection, I remember the visit of a schoolmate, a boy of whom I was very fond and with whom I had excellent  fun.  He arrived one summer night ... from a town some twenty five miles away.  His father had recently perished in an accident, the family was ruined and the stouthearted lad, not being able to afford the price of a railway ticket, had bicycled all those miles to spend a few days with me.
ooo On the morning following his arrival, I did everything I could to get out of the house for my morning hike without his knowing where I had gone....  Once in the forest, I was safe; but still I walked on, my calves quaking, my eyes full of scalding tears, the whole of me twitching with shame and self  disgust, as I visualized my poor friend, with his long pale face and black tie, moping in the hot garden   patting the panting dogs for want of something better to do, and trying hard to justify my absence to himself.

The dilemma here is simply the desire to be two places at once, in my case due to conflicting impulses to a) pursue my individual cycling mania and yet b) be with my family.  Like the young Nabokov, I sought to sneak out early.  I hoped to get in a couple hours of riding and then arrive back just in time to make pancakes on the camp stove—but I was pretty sure this wasn’t actually possible.

Normally, this conflict would barely have registered, but the campground we were at was, though very pretty, also kind of spooky.  When cruising around choosing a site we couldn’t help but notice how many of them resembled a shantytown or homeless encampment, or even an Occupy site (Occupy Eastern Sierras?).  Sagging, faded lawn chairs; ad hoc canopies; larger furniture; I could swear I even saw a car or two up on blocks (though surely this is the embroidery of memory).  One empty site was completely covered in broken glass.  Our kids were oblivious, only noting the wonderful little forest of aspen trees.  I came to realize how much I rely on nice cars, spiffy tents, and other newish REI-style gear to signify recreational campers like me as opposed to downtrodden folks who got nowheres to go.  I wasn’t sure how enthusiastic my wife would be to be abandoned in this place at dawn.  (It was obvious she shared my misgivings:  during our reconnaissance, she hummed the dueling banjo theme from “Deliverance.”)

Meanwhile, there was a fellow camper who had given us pause.  Erin first encountered him while depositing our payment in the unmanned registration box.  He wore a t-shirt that said, “If it weren’t for flashbacks I’d have no memory at all.”  He had a mean-looking dog on a leash with a choker collar.  Erin, though friendly to the guy, nonetheless cut to the chase:  “Can you assure me your pit bull won’t attack my kids?”  He denied only that the dog was a pit bull.  Later he came by our campsite and was friendly enough, describing to me in great detail a bike ride I might try the next morning.  He looked pretty much like a cyclist, but he also twitched and trembled, which made me wonder if the build of a meth addict might be fairly similar to a cyclist’s.  True, he had cycling sunglasses, sort of, but they were gas station Oakley knockoffs.  What if his suggestion of a morning ride was just a way to get me out of his hair while he robbed my family?  Of course you’re shaking your head at my paranoia, and rightly so, but I’m just not used to strangers in “flashback” t-shirts being so friendly.

Probably I’d have ignored all of this entirely had it not been for my ill-fated attempt that night to find water.  The campground map showed various locations of (albeit non-potable) water spigots.  At least we could use this to wash up and do our dishes; we didn’t have much drinking water.  I wandered all over the campground and couldn’t find a single spigot.  A pickup truck coming the other way passed me really slow and the front passenger asked what I was up to.  I explained I was looking for water.  He flashed a gap-toothed grin.  “Just keep going thataway,” he chuckled.  “You’ll find water.”

So I kept going and found myself in the campsite at the end of the line.  There was a kid of maybe sixteen sitting by the campfire.  I asked about a water spigot and he looked completely bewildered, even frightened.  “What?” he said, his voice shaky.  Suddenly two adults appeared, looking alarmed, as though I’d been harassing the boy.  At this moment I realized the kid looked exactly like Blaster, the huge scary gladiator guy from “Max Max:  Beyond Thunderdome” who, once deprived of his knight’s helmet, looks baby-faced and vulnerable.  I repeated my simple question to the grown-ups, one of whom engaged me in conversation while escorting me away from his campsite. 

He was gaunt and ponytailed and looked like a classic rock guy from the ‘70s who’s been ridden hard and put away wet one too many times.  “What site you campin’ at?” he asked casually.  Unwilling to divulge this I said, “Oh, down that way a piece.”  (My subconscious slippage into his vernacular almost had me saying, “Down thur a right fur piece.”)  He acted as though the notion of a spigot at this campground was completely absurd, but gave me elaborate instructions on finding the creek.  (Duh.)  I was afraid I’d have to take some false turns rather than lead him to my site, but eventually he stopped walking with me and headed back where he came from.  Dang.

One other thing.  According to the flashback guy, this campground had a resident bear.  This bear was normally unaggressive, but Yosemite-area bears are known to rip cars open like sardine tins to get at the food inside.  Flashback said that this particular bear could recognize a cooler.  Most of the sites had bear boxes but ours didn’t; I wasn’t about to ask a neighbor to share.  So I had to cover up our cooler in the back of the car and make sure we didn’t bring any toothpaste or deodorant into the tent.

Suffice to say, part of me thought it best to keep an all-night vigil with a large Maglite across my lap.  But the other part wanted that morning bike ride, so I went right to bed.

Shortage of time

I woke up somewhat early, but not as early as I’d hoped.  When I’m camping it takes awhile to find all my stuff, unlock my bike, etc., especially when I’m trying to be completely silent.  Plus, there was the matter of the pre-ride, uh, lightening ritual.  The outhouse was really far from our campsite.  I brought my own toilet paper, and good thing:  the outhouse had none.  Given the little aspen forest we were in, I might just as well have gone there.  As it was this outhouse offered nothing except a platform to sit on and a little privacy.  Oh, and of course graffiti to look at in lieu of a magazine.

But then, this was a special campground with special restroom graffiti:

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about ;

‘Noli me tangere; for Cæsar’s I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

What? you’re asking.  Are you kidding?  Of course I am.  Just making sure you’re awake.  But those lines, from Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, did cross my mind for some reason.  Maybe it was the No-Doz.   Needless to say, most of the graffiti was totally unoriginal, like the old “Here I sit all broken-hearted” ditty (too vulgar for this family blog, but I could paraphrase it:  “Here I set, growing petulant, tried to defecate but was only flatulent”).  But then I came across this:

Yo momma is a myth

Atlantis is a myth

So yo momma is Atlantis

You may have guessed that I got out my pocketknife and carved below it, “This argument is not sound, because its first premise is obviously false.  Also, this argument is not valid because it commits the logical fallacy of ‘the undistributed middle.’”  But you would have guessed wrong:  I never, ever indulge in graffiti.  Besides, I couldn’t remember, that early in the morning, the name of the logical fallacy.  I could recall the logical structure the argument was surely trying to resemble—modus ponendo ponens—but what was it called when the mechanism was erroneously reversed?  Before I caught myself, I wasted a good many precious minutes pondering this matter (and related questions like “What kind of idiot thinks that’s worth carving on an outhouse wall?”).  Curses!

Shortage of water

It had been my idea to only buy only one 2.5-gallon bottle of drinking water the night before.  I’m just cheap, especially when it comes to bottled water, which always tastes uncannily like the tap water of the region (except in the Bay Area, where tap water tastes better than bottled).  In my defense, I had reasonably trusted the campground map showing water spigots.  Now, preparing for my ride, I had to decide how much water to deprive my family of.  I eventually set out with only one bottle.

No problem—I could just refill at the Mobil station at Lee Vining, where 395 meets 120, right?  Well, this gas station—perhaps because it has remarkably good food—tends to have a line at the cashier.  And a lot of motorists go through there.  What would I do if my bike got ripped off?  Walk ten miles back to the campground?  You must think I’m the most paranoid guy in the universe, but consider that along the roads near my home, there have been several recent cases of bike theft and even of cyclists getting mugged.

Plus, my bottle was just water, not energy drink, so I was relying on gels for sustenance.  Ever eat a gel without washing it down?  Didn’t think so.  It’d be easier to eat a sleeve of Saltines without water.  Of course I didn’t start pondering this until I was well underway, riding hard over an unknown distance toward Tioga Pass, a climb I’d only ever gone over in a car.  I had no idea what this ride would be like and how long it would take.

Fear

One problem with riding a road for the first time is worrying about traffic.  I had seen a pretty good shoulder on Highway 120 on the drive over on the previous day, but it only takes a short section of shoulder-less road to create a hazard.  Plus, I’d seen lots of these Cruise America rental RVs on this road.  The very idea of Rental RVs strikes me as dangerous, like discount sushi or amateur dentistry.  I recently watched a guy in a brand-new RV spend about 90 minutes backing it into his campsite.  He looked really stressed, as did his wife, standing behind it guiding him in.  She saw me looking, and to ease the embarrassment I said, “That’s a really great-looking RV.”  She replied, “Stick around … we may be selling it soon.”  Now, pedaling my way up the pass, I could just imagine a similarly hapless RV newcomer with no sense of the size of his camper whacking me without even realizing it.

If you’ve ever considered riding over Tioga Pass, I can tell you it’s just fine climbing it from the east.  There’s a generous shoulder the whole way up.  Heading the other direction (downhill towards 395), there are sections of the road where guardrails cut into the shoulder, but these are short; plus, you’re going pretty fast, so the likelihood of being passed at all is pretty low.  Even during the climb, very few vehicles passed me.  They tended to come in clumps:  half a dozen fuming SUVs stuck behind a Cruise America RV.

Another problem was the weather.  Despite having grown up in Colorado, where afternoon thunderstorms are a given, I stupidly set out without a jacket and now the clouds above were purple-black.  The air had that strange electricity you so often get at high altitude.  What is it our brains detect?  A constant shifting in barometric pressure?  The whiff of distant lightning?  A sudden increase in humidity?  The peculiar foreign wind of a storm system?  I wouldn’t say the sky darkened because it had never actually gotten very light.  A cold wind bullied me.  Here is what Tioga Pass looks like with better weather (I didn’t bring a camera on the ride; this photo and those following it I took a couple days later, during the drive home).

As I reached 8,000 and eventually 9,000 feet of elevation, all this became stronger.  I was hit with that delicious cool-rain-smell.  And of course I was suffering.  While my conscience continued to nag at me (“What might be happening to your family back at that eerie campground while you pursue your pleasure/suffering centers?”), I begin to bask in the sheer epic-ness of this ride.  I, a speck of under-fit cyclist, seemed about to be caught in a thunderstorm at 10,000 feet on a little highway in the wilderness.

Missing receipt

It costs $20 to drive to and/or through Yosemite in a car.  Your receipt gets you unlimited access to the park for seven days … if you have the receipt.  I couldn’t find it the morning of the ride and decided to plead my case using other receipts we’d gathered (a rather expensive lunch at the Ahwahnee Hotel dining room, and a batch of groceries that included day-old discounted sushi, which was disgusting) that proved we’d been in the park.  All this just to get past the toll gate so I could finish the last bit of Tioga Pass and say I’d done it.  Worst case, I could pay another $10, though then I’d have nothing to buy food or water with.  And this was looking like about a fifty-mile ride.  Hmmm.

In the event, there was a long line of cars at the entrance gate and I didn’t feel like bothering with it, especially since all manner of social outcasts, possibly including a bear, were probably converging on my family at that very moment.  So I headed back down the east side of the pass. 

The descent was sublime.  My wife and kids had felt something between awe and outright fear when we’d driven down it, but I’ve been descending mountain passes since I was thirteen and can’t get enough of them.  Descending Tioga Pass is sweet.  Good road surface, very few cars (not a single one passed me on my descent), and world-class scenery.  I even outran the rain (which did finally come to pass, but later in the day). 

Epilogue:  Mono Lake

Just a few miles from the campground, at the point in the ride when I needed to eat my last gel but had no more water left, I saw the sign for the Mono Lake visitor’s center.  I headed over there.  Here’s what you need to know about Mono Lake: 

• It’s pronounced “Moe No,” not “Ma No.”
• This lake is the breeding ground for 90% of the seagulls in California, due to a vast number of tiny flies that feed on an even vaster amount of salt-loving algae.
• Those crazy crystalline formations, called tufa towers, are not made of bird dung (which is what I told my kids), nor is “tufa” the Paiute Indian word for “tofu.”  The formations are made of calcium carbonate (i.e., limestone).
• There’s a drinking fountain right outside the doors, perfect for a paranoid and parched cyclist.

When I got back to the campground, my family was just finishing up breakfast.  Nobody had bothered them, not even a bear, and they had plenty of water left.