The Case Against the Metric System

Introduction

It’s easy to argue the merits of the metric system—its ubiquity in the developed world, the ease and elegance of doing calculations with it, etc.—but this is not very interesting. Meanwhile, proponents of the metric system (aka “metricites”) have often struck me as very secure in their position, to the point of smugness. My dad—a gruff, dyed-in-the-wool engineer—was this way, and after decades of sucking up to him, trying to gain his approval, I became disgusted with myself and looked for ways to occasionally nettle, annoy, and provoke him instead. Toward this end, I discovered that praising the imperial system of measure worked great. The withering, disgusted look he gave me, bordering on anger, was priceless. Ever since, I’ve been pondering the advantages of the imperial system and planning a more widespread assault on the metric. Here it is.

(A semantic note: in this country, the measurement system developed by the British, generally referred to as the imperial system, often goes by the term “US customary system.” I’ll use the term “customary” in this sense throughout this post.)

Leadership vs. subservience

Because some metricites will write off the customary system purely because most of the developed world has, I’ll start there. The prevalence of the metric system cannot be denied: look at this map of who uses what system.

Look at how many nations are on the metric system! Could this many people be wrong? Sure! Keep in mind that almost 3 billion people worldwide waste their time, ruin their privacy, and compromise their emotional health by using Facebook. And when they do, the vast majority use a terribly antiquated and inefficient keyboard layout. Don’t look to your fellow man for the best way to live a perfect life.

Meanwhile, consider that the map shown above would probably bear striking resemblance to a map of where you can get a good taqueria-style burrito, and what nation creates the best movies, software, and rap music. The US is not traditionally a follower on the world stage. We’re probably much of the reason English is the lingua franca of world trade, and our dollar is also the foremost global currency. Don’t look at that turquoise coloration and think “outlier.” Think “leader” (or at least “leadership potential” since, admittedly, the rest of the world doesn’t always follow us).

Temperature

This is an easy one. The fact of Celsius having zero as the freezing point of water and 100 as its boiling point is admittedly cute, but not actually very useful. My brother Bryan, solicited for comment on this debate since he’s an engineering sort but also an expansive thinker, has eloquently pointed out:

As elegant as the Celsius scale is, I find it’s a bit crude for actual measurement of the human condition. Most of our experience takes place between really cold and really hot, which is to say from well below the freezing point of water to a bit above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Much above 100 F, you’re kind of toast anyway; once your flesh starts burning it doesn’t really matter what the number actually is. It’ll never get anywhere near 100 Celsius, so that part of the scale [38 to 100] is just wasted. And if you want to talk about it being really cold with C, you have to use negative numbers, which is kind of awkward, especially if you want to compare temperatures.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Meanwhile, the other obvious benefit of Fahrenheit is that the units are smaller so it’s more precise.

Distance

No matter how handy calculating with base-10 may be, there’s no arguing that 60 mph—that is, a mile a minute—is a really handy mnemonic, since it’s roughly the speed we drive on the highway (the >60 mph speed limit being offset by roadside stops, etc.). If our destination is 300 miles away, it’ll take about 300 minutes. The kilometer cannot offer any similar trick. And since the typical speed limit on a city street is 35 and on a residential street it’s 25, we can estimate the time for a non-highway trip by just doubling the miles … so a five-mile drive across town will take roughly ten minutes. (If your community is more congested than this, leave your car at home and use your bike. In fact, do that anyway.)

Another benefit to miles is the word “mileage.” This is a very useful word, both literally and figuratively (e.g., “Your mileage may vary”). There is no equivalent in the metric system: “kilometerage” is not a word and if it were, it would be a dumb word used by nobody ever. Same with the word “milestone.”

Weight

As with temperature, the larger weight units in the metric system make it less precise, a kilogram being 2.205 pounds. But the lack of precision isn’t the only problem; it’s also the case that since a majority of humans would like to lose weight, this larger unit is demoralizing. Imagine eating right and foregoing fattening snacks for a whole week and then having to express your weight loss with a fraction: “Oh, boy, a lost a whole half-kilogram!” That kind of discouraging scale (no pun intended) is the last thing America needs.

Liquid measure

Actually, this is one area where Americans do dabble in the metric system: although we measure most liquids (fuel, beverages) with customary units (gallon, pint), there’s one product that’s sold in metric units: wine. How fitting, since so many wine lovers are annoying and pretentious. Humbler, more down-to-earth Americans drink beer, which is of course measured in ounces (excepting some small and/or lazy overseas breweries that don’t bottle or label their product specially for the American market).

Why does it matter that wine is sold in metric units? It’s because Americans have no sense of milliliters, so we can’t keep ourselves honest when drinking wine. It’s hard to develop a sense of volume with an ungainly basis like the liter, as it’s too large, and nobody ever uses deciliters—they’re too small (less than half a cup)—and there’s nothing in between a liter and a deciliter. With beer, you can keep track pretty easily: whatever vessel you pour that can or bottle of beer into, it’s a known entity: 12 ounces, one drink. From a temperance perspective, the 750-ml wine bottle is a black box: the servings vary with your glass and how much you fill it; the milliliters are like Monopoly money; you just pour and pour, and you wake up hung over and overweight. This is what happens when Americans indulge the metric system.

Another benefit to the customary system: when you go out for a beer, you can say to your pal, “Shall we go grab a pint?” This has a nice ring to it. What would you say in France? Perhaps “Allons-nous prendre un demi-litre?” (literally, “Shall we grab half a liter?”) That sounds terrible—how do you grab half of something? And “Allons-nous prendre un litre?” sounds like you have a drinking problem—I mean, drinking beer by the liter? Yes, I know the French wouldn’t actually say this; they’d say, “Allons-nous boire un verre de vin?” (literally, “Shall we grab a glass of wine?”). I rest my case.

Air pressure

When it comes to inflation, you can’t beat the pounds-per-square-inch (PSI) unit, because the proper inflation for a road bike tyre is a nice, round 100; for a commuter bike it’s a nice, round 50; and for a mountain bike it’s a nice, round 25. What are the metric equivalents? That would be 6.895, 3.447, and 1.724 BAR, respectively. Nothing nice or round about that. (Apparently some Europeans prefer kilopascals, which is just fricking goofy. Imagine pumping your bike tires up to 690 kPa, or 690 of anything, for that matter … I’d be afraid!)

Meanwhile, the giant size of the BAR presents an obstacle to precision. I can input my weight, tire width, and riding style into a handy-dandy mountain bike tire pressure calculator and it gives me a nice precise inflation number: in my case 25 PSI for the rear tire. Since the calculator is trying to be metric-friendly it also gives me 1.8 BAR … but that’s not right—that’s actually 26 PSI, which could be the difference between great handling and merely good. To be sufficiently precise we have to go into the hundredths, with 1.72 BAR, and who can remember that?

(Arguably air pressure measurement isn’t that important, but it’s simpler than some of the next few categories.)

Construction

As detailed here, much of American industry does use the metric system (which, I hasten to point out, is no reason everyday Americans need to do so in their personal lives; after all, it’s not like web developers speak in HTML at the dinner table). One standout is the construction industry, and for good reason. As my brother Bryan explains:

Using inches is really handy for doing the mental arithmetic associated with carpentry. When a carpenter uses inches, he’ll keep track of the bit smaller than an inch using fractions, with as much resolution as is necessary for the application at hand. For example, if he needs to cut a two-by-four to use as a brace while framing a house, he may only need to cut it to within an inch. If he’s cutting a piece to be used as part of an internal structure for something, he may need it to be accurate to half an inch. If it’s a finishing piece, he may want it to be much more accurate, say a sixteenth of an inch. Using fractions, you can decide before you start cutting what units you’ll use—half inches, quarter inches, and so on. Each division is twice as precise. It’s easy to adjust the accuracy of your calculations as you go, too. For example, if you find that ¼ isn’t accurate enough, say you want slightly more than a ¼ inch, you just go to eighths of an inch: ¼ is 2/8, so a smidgen more than that is 3/8 (three of them instead of two), and so on. The tape measure shows these gradations elegantly with longer and shorter ticks, making it easy to visualize these fractions as well. So in ‘merican, you have all these units to choose from that we’re all familiar with and that are easy to convert among: 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, and even 1/32. In metric all you have are centimeters and millimeters, which are significantly different in size, so if a centimeter isn’t enough resolution, you have to jump all the way to millimeters and keep track of a bunch of them.

Another thing that carpenters often must do is find the midpoint of a piece of lumber or whatever. So if a carpenter’s board is 21-½ inches long, he can calculate half of that easily: 21 divided by 2 is 10-½" for the whole part, plus ½ divided by 2 which is ¼ for the rest. It’s easy to add the ½ and ¼, since ½ is 2/4, making ¾” for the fractional bit and thus 10-¾” for the whole thing. Dividing that in two is 5 & 3/8”, which is easy to compute since dividing a fraction in two is just doubling the denominator. I feel like doing this kind of mental arithmetic keeps us closer to the numbers and to their scale, while just plugging numbers into your phone and tracking them to four significant digits makes you lose touch with reality.

Yeah, exactly! This guy knows what he’s talking about ... he even holds a math degree!

Firearms

Okay, that was a lot of math so this next category will be simpler: guns & ammo. This is another area where Americans are dabbling in the metric system. Traditionally, firearms were described in customary units, such as the .45 Colt, the .308 Winchester, and the .30-06 Springfield (all of which numbers indicated the bullet diameter in inches). These are all old school, and American. Now, your more worldly guns, like the Uzi and the Glock, use the metric system with their 9-millimeter round. Which is better? From a practical standpoint there can be no difference because the utility of a firearm, for civilians, is essentially zero. To split hairs we’ll have to consider the matter culturally. In that vein, I have to admit that the modern automatic weapons heralded in rap songs sound cooler and more sophisticated (e.g., “slapped a clip in my nine”) than older American standards—and that’s exactly why the metric system is a bad choice. America has a huge gun problem and the last thing we need is to be glamorizing firearms of any kind. If the .45 Colt and John Wayne seem anachronistic, that’s good … because guns are, too. The wild west days are over and (to paraphrase Ice-T) your best weapon now is your mind.

Shoe sizing

It’s pretty normal when thinking about the metric system to lump the European shoe sizing standard into it. Thus Americans are tempted to think that European shoe sizing, with its smaller units, is both a) metric, and b) more precise. In actuality, European sizing is a disaster. As explained here, this sizing is based on the “length of the last, expressed in Paris points,” which are 2/3 of a centimeter. There is absolutely nothing elegant or sensible about this, and even with this smaller unit of measure I’ve bought cycling shoes in half sizes (e.g., 45.5). Any perceived benefit of greater shoe sizing precision is an illusion, because with shoes you simply must try them on as the fit will vary widely across manufacturers (shoe size expressing only one dimension to begin with).

So why is this a mark against the metric system? Because Americans who have been brainwashed that the metric system is superior will automatically assume that European sizing is a) metric, and thus b) better. If Americans stuck to their guns (an unfortunate turn of phrase, I’ll admit) about our customary units, we’d probably kick this silly European shoe sizing basis to the curb as well. At least our size 12 shoe is approximately 12 inches long … give me one good reason why 45 makes more sense.

Let’s put this base-10 thing to rest

Naturally the metricites among my readership are all saying, “But wait, none of the above matters because base-10, base-10, base-10! Elegant calculations! Engineering! Stuff that matters!” Even if I indulge this by pretending that the industrial world is more important than the quotidian doings of your average joe, I take issue with base-10 being obviously better. Why? Because the base-10 system lacks sub-multiples. To explain this, I will quote from my friend Peter’s son’s friend, a recent high school grad named Kellen Sisco (who may or may not be ready for the worldwide fame he’s about to achieve through this blog). Kellen, in an anti-metric essay he decided to write (totally unconnected to this post, by the way), explains:

In base ten, there are two sub-multiples: 2 and 5, and these are both prime, inconvenient numbers. Now, contrarily, base twelve is good, as there are eight sub-multiples: 2, 3, 4 (which divides by 2), and 6 (which divides by 2 and 3). So, at least four times as many sums in base twelve will [yield] convenient numbers. Base 24 has 19 sub-multiples! Number 16 is a particularly liked number amongst mathematicians because it is good for halving and doubling. As one can see; number 10 is not a distinctly good number; numbers 12, 16, 24, and 60 are considerably better numbers.

Now, I don’t expect you to take this young man’s word for it that mathematicians like the number 16, or that 12, 24, and 60 are better than 10; instead, I’ll give you some real world examples. Consider mathematicians … what do they even do and why do we even care? Well, you like money, don’t you? And what math is lucrative, besides the boring engineering that goes into, say, building bridges? Answer: the Internet. Mathematicians do crazy-ass stuff like string theory which you assume is useless until they suddenly solve some Internet routing thing and become gazillionaires, etc. And I’m here to tell you, Internet engineers just dig hexadecimal, which is base-16, just like Kellin said. A classic dot-com interview question, when hiring engineers, is a pop quiz on network subnetting, which requires the kind of in-your-head division I described above in the construction example; it’s fractions, not getting out your phone and calculating to several decimal places. So beloved is hexadecimal among engineers, I had a boss who balanced his checkbook with it! Sometimes network guys will use octal (for arcane reasons), and when constrained by electrical engineering requirements around on/off (i.e., 1 or 0) they’ll use binary, but they don’t tend to use decimal unless they’re pressed into financial projections (the least fun part of the job).

And what about 12, 24, and 60? Well, it’s no coincidence we use those to describe time, whether we appreciate all the sub-multiples involved or not. We can say “Meet me at quarter past nine” and that’s really easy to grasp (and to visualize, clocks being as elegant as they are). With a base-10 time system we would all be totally screwed. Decimal time has a 10-hour day, so the units are impossibly huge: the minute is 1.44 times the size of ours, and the hour 2.4 times the size, so you’d always have to use decimals since you wouldn’t have handy fractions to play with. Just look at this preposterous base-10 clock:

I’ve tried to figure out how to express 9:15 a.m. in a base-10 time system, and my head exploded—and I’m no slouch at math (being well versed in binary, octal, and hex, and being nerdy enough to blog about daylight saving time, leap years, and leap seconds). If my head explodes contemplating base-10 time, surely billions of heads would explode worldwide if we tried to adopt it. And of course nobody has (except, briefly, the French, who abandoned it after less than a year … ‘nuff said).

Since we thus acknowledge base-10 is not necessarily superior, I think we can agree the metric system doesn’t automatically get a huge benefit from it. So to the STEM types promoting the metric system on this basis, I have this to say: you talk dog farts.

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From the Archives - The Trainer Diaries

Introduction

This has been a really wet month, so I’ve had to train indoors. As I described in an earlier blog post, training indoors requires a lot of gumption and discipline, and I’ve found that achieving the right intensity can actually help enliven the workout, while maximizing its benefits. In turn, riding good and hard is best achieved through use of a heart rate monitor, and a good tool for maintaining day-to-day consistency (i.e., keeping yourself honest) is a training diary.

Most training diaries stick to basic facts: duration, mileage, and heart rate statistics. Mine delves a bit deeper, into the thoughts racing through my mind during the workout and my general ruminations on the activity itself. I’ve decided to share some of my training diary entries with my albertnet audience, to provide a rare view into the harrowing psychology of indoor training. Enjoy.

A quick note on some terms: in this post, “bpm” means heartbeats per minute; “bpm avg” means my average heart rate for the whole workout (not including warm-up and warm-down); “tour” means any workout, be it outdoor or indoor; “above zone,” aka “TAZ,” means the amount of time spent above my heart rate target zone (in other words, the amount of time spent really hammering). If you come across other terms you’re not familiar with, check out this handy glossary.

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3/22/10 Tuesday

1:01:00 159 bpm avg 0:37:18 above zone

I woke up at like 5:30 a.m. because I didn’t feel well. Bad sinus headache and nausea. But I figured heck, if I feel lousy, I might as well be on the trainer. I climbed aboard and felt just awful. For the first fifteen minutes I couldn’t get my heart rate past like 145. I felt like climbing off, but then I thought, what am I going to do at this hour? Sit around and feel lousy? Go to work early? So I kept pedaling, and suddenly I started having very positive sensations. My HR was skying above the zone! I kept this up for a good while but at about minute 55 my HR dropped about 5 bpm and I was hit with a strong wave of nausea and had to quit. Ever since, I’ve felt really awful, but then hey, I felt awful to begin with!

In other news, while I was toiling away, Alexa strolled in and said, “I just hurled.” I was about to fly into action with the sponge & bucket when Alexa went on to say, “I got it all in the bucket and rinsed it out.” What an outstanding individual.

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3/18/10 Tuesday

1:34:06 162 bpm avg 1:14:22 above zone

A nice, long, grueling trainer ride. I was able to get to that dark place where the high heart rate can be achieved. I’m having trouble adjusting to civilian life now; I have this urge to go pound somebody’s face in. [Note: I wrote this rather rash comment under the influence of vast quantities of adrenaline and caffeine. I really don’t have these impulses most of the time, which is in large part due to, and the reason for, these workouts.]

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10/23/10 Saturday

2:00:21 161 bpm avg 1:43:26 above zone

This trainer workout—my first in five months—was truly the good, the bad, and the ugly. First, I had to spend some time getting my tunes together (I didn’t prep for a trainer ride because I was holding out some vain hope it wouldn’t be raining and I could actually ride). Then, my trainer wheel had a flat! I patched it, but the patch failed. Then, the trainer mech had come unscrewed and required attention. Then I had to find my old shoes somewhere in the garage, and the wrist strap for my heart rate monitor. Then I couldn’t find the tarp I put under the bike to catch the sweat. It took me like three hours just to get on the bike!

Once I got going, though, I had fairly positive sensations. Once I got my heart rate over the zone I of course tried to see how long I could last. When I climbed off the bike I was pretty much shot, and largely useless for the rest of the day, climbing stairs real slow like an old person.

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10/24/10 Sunday

1:01:00 149 bpm avg 0:00:02 above zone

Man, this was awful. Another rainy day thus another trainer ride, and I was already completely rendered from yesterday. I suffered so hard for this wussy average heart rate. For the last 20 minutes I averaged 152 bpm, and was determined to go long enough to get my avg up to 150. But at just over an hour, Alexa came running up, waving her hands and yelling, “It’s an emergency!” (I had prohibited the kids from bothering me except if absolutely necessary.) I assumed someone had gotten caught in the threshing equipment or something, and whipped my headphones off and stopped pedaling. “Misha defecated on the floor!” Alexa cried. I took this as a good excuse to call it a day workout-wise.

I don’t know why the cat did it. I’m guessing she remembers the time I was riding the trainer and she headed for her cat box and I instinctively shouted, “No, Misha, no!” because I didn’t want to inhale her toxic vapors at 160 bpm. Anyhow, right after cleaning up the cat feces, I noticed how hard the rain was hammering down and checked our main downspout from the roof. As I’d feared, the top of the downspout was packed with leaves and overflowing, flooding the backyard. To get on the roof I needed a ladder, so I had to get into the crawlspace under the house (we’ve lost track of the combo on the lock so I had to remove the latch with a screwdriver). I went up on the roof in nothing but drenched cycling shorts and socks, as it would have been pointless to change without having showered.

Good thing I went up there, as water was already pooling up and if I hadn’t cleared away the leaves right away we’d have had water coming down from our ceiling. I finished that up, put away the ladder, and—drenched and cold from the torrential rain—jumped in the shower. By this time Erin had come home, and—knowing I was at the tail end of my glycogen window—I asked her to bring me some cold apple cider (which I’d really enjoyed after yesterday’s sufferfest). She did, and after I drank it the ceramic mug slipped from my soapy hands, fell on the floor of the tub, and exploded, sending shards into my foot. The water from the shower made my foot appear to bleed extravagantly, like that famous scene in “Psycho.” Lindsay came in at that point and screamed. Man. Anyhow, a hard, hard ride with a hard, hard aftermath.

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11/7/10 Sunday

0:48:20 152 bpm avg 0:13:06 above zone

Man, this was grueling. It took a really, really long time to get into TAZ territory. Once there, though, I felt okay and was hoping to last an hour. But at 0:48:20, my left pedal broke! Cheap piece of crap. I have to admit, though, I was relieved to be done pedaling … and relieved that I’d relegated those cheap pedals to my rain bike, or I could have broken that pedal during the Everest Challenge or something!

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12/4/10 Saturday

1:45:26 161 bpm avg 1:30:34 above zone

I felt surprisingly good during this workout, especially since I felt kind of nauseated beforehand. I think it was just butterflies in my stomach, for I had big ambitions for this ride and knew how much it was going to suck. Actually, at moments during the ride I felt kind of nauseated too. Erin was working down in the office just behind me, and I became a bit self-conscious about all the spitting I had to do and all the belching. Something about this kind of effort seems to scour my respiratory system of all the mucus lining it, and once all that slime has been raised into my mouth it’s got to go somewhere. When you add two bottles of sugary drink, the amount of spitting just escalates. And one of those bottles was a fizzy drink, hence the belches.

Anyhow, it got me thinking about what would happen if I actually hurled while riding the trainer. I mean, athletes hurl all the time, don’t they? I had a teammate who would throw up every time we did sprint practice. In high school when Erin ran track, she and her pals would frequently puke after wind sprints. A colleague of mine hurled right after the Mt. San Bruno hill climb a couple years back. Can you imagine, on the trainer, if you just blew chunks? I mean, yeah, there’s a tarp and everything, but it would be a disaster. No way could I get to a toilet fast enough; once I’m unclipped from the pedals it’s hard to climb off the bike, elevated as it is on the trainer, and my cleats slip on the metal tubing and everything. I’d probably be halfway off the bike when I erupted and would end up face-down in my own vomit, like a rock star or something. After which I’d probably be forbidden to ride the trainer in the house and would have to brave the cold garage like Bryan. Dang.

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12/5/10 Sunday

1:07:05 153 bpm avg 0:09:56 above zone

Needless to say I felt El Crappo Grande throughout this tour. Oddly, about 35 minutes into it my heart rate—which had averaged only 146 to that point—suddenly popped up to 159, just above my target zone. For 2½ magical minutes, I was able to keep it up there, and was even thinking this might end up being a good ride. But then just as abruptly my heart rate dropped right back down again, and stayed down (until toward the end of my workout when, through sheer anger, I was able to dig in and get another seven minutes of hard-won TAZ). Anyhow, I’m left puzzled by that brief period of relatively agony-free heart rate elevation. Perhaps some kind of “cardiac event”? I sure hope not. I’d hate to die riding the trainer. Nobody could say, “At least he died doing something he loved.” And somebody else, probably poor Erin, would have to clean up all the loogies from the tarp since I wouldn’t be alive to do it.

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12/7/10 Tuesday

1:19:25 152 bpm avg 0:04:58 above zone

My heart rate monitor has been screwing up lately. Could be electrical interference from the fan or something; the readout sometimes just suddenly goes to zero. Of course, this gets me so enraged it might be a net positive, as anger helps me go hard. Conversely, happy thoughts can cause my heart rate to drop. I was hammering away the other day and Alexa walked in and set a muffin down on the bike cabinet for my post-ride glycogen window. I was so touched, my HR dropped like three beats-per-minute!

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12/11/10 Saturday

2:00:48 161 bpm avg 1:35:04 above zone

Sometimes I marvel at how variable my body’s performance is. Not just riding—that variability is totally understandable—but even just getting around. The other morning when I took a rest day, Alexa woke up before me and was impatient for her breakfast. Following her down the stairs, I found I could barely walk. I had to use both banisters to support my weight (like a girl at the gym clutching the railings of her Stairmaster) because my feet and legs didn’t seem up to the challenge. Many weeks ago I hurt my left heel playing soccer—against children! At these times it seems my body is just wearing out. But at other times—most of the time, actually—I can bound up and down stairs at high speed. It’s the same body; why does it take so long for it to get moving each day? Waking up in the morning I feel like Han Solo coming out of the carbon freeze.

I suppose it’s just the natural effect of ageing, which really pisses me off. After all, I’m trying to use sport to resist the effects of age. So far I think it’s working; slow mornings aside, my body is doing okay. My resting heart rate is down to 38, a personal best, and last time I tried riding outdoors, I could still make it up the hills. But I want more, I want better. By the time I’m seventy, I want my heart to beat only every so often. I want my heart not just to be the size of a fist (as they say); I want it to be as hard and as hard-hitting as a fist. When I get gallstones I want to tell my heart, “Just swim down there and crush out those stones!” When I go up a flight of stairs I want to not just skip every other step; I want to soar over the staircase entirely. So anyhow, during and after this ride, I felt like maybe I could achieve that. It was a good day. Of course I knew better than to expect anything but a sorry aftermath.

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12/12/10 Sunday

1:15:36 151 bpm avg 0:00:00 above zone

A sorry aftermath. I didn’t have the gumption, the night before, to set everything up, so I did it the morning of. That’s a drag, because I don’t wear my contact lenses when I ride the trainer (the salt in my sweat is like an abrasive between the lens and my eye), and my glasses won’t stay on my face when I tilt my head forward (as when setting up the trainer), so I’m basically stumbling around tired and blind, and as I dread the workout everything kind of slows down. So I puttered around at length before finally mounting the torture rack for this one. Sure enough, I felt like crap. When I feel good, there’s a kind of excitement to a trainer workout, but when I’m fried, it’s just totally boring and seems to last forever. It would help to have something to look at, though of course I can’t see very well. I felt like one of those pinky mice I used to feed Aisner’s snake: blind, hairless, helpless. These “Day 2” trainer rides are as hard on the mind as on the body. No, I take it back. They’re harder on the body.

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12/14/10 Tuesday

1:35:39 155 bpm avg 0:08:24 above zone

Hard to get up for this. At about 4:50 I woke up to pee, and when I lay back down the drumming of the rain on—what, the roof? a wheelbarrow?—was so loud I figured I’d have to put an earplug in, but I was too tired to reach for the earplug on the nightstand, and next thing I knew the alarm was waking me up (at 5:40). Of course I was being as quiet as possible this early in the morning, but downstairs in the kitchen the cat wouldn’t stop meowing, and I couldn’t find her jar of food. Erin must have fed her during the night, but where did she put the food afterward? The jar was just gone and the cat wouldn’t shut up. It was like a bad dream.

After silencing the cat with a dish of milk, I got out the Folgers. I’d never tried it before. Erin’s mom bought it in frustration at our not having any coffee around here. I was hoping to use it as some sort of secret weapon; I already have a strong association between this brand and my workouts, because on the trainer I listen to a lot of rap, including Eminem, who in one song raps, “Wake up and smell the Folgers crystals!” So I figured that literally smelling the Folgers, and of course drinking it, might inspire me to go harder. I know … grasping at straws. Anyhow, something worked, because I managed to get a bit of TAZ toward the end of this tour. Mostly, though, this one sucked.

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12/16/10 Thursday

1:00:56 145 bpm avg 0:01:04 above zone

As Lance Armstrong said, “Sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail.” Today I wasn’t even the nail, which after all is a useful (albeit small) building component that has a job to do. Today I was Barney, the big purple dinosaur, being rightfully beaten with sticks by hyperactive, evil little boys. That’s what I was thinking about as I futilely pedaled the bike. I’d seen such boys at a cookie decorating party one of Erin’s friends threw last weekend. I was in the backyard trying to have a conversation with some other sensitive dads about whether or not men can wear Ugg boots, and these two little monsters were yelling continuously and hitting everything in their sight with sticks. They were trying to shear limbs off a fledgling tree out there, and do whatever other damage they could to anything else they could find. Or maybe the real goal was to out-violence each other. I tried to dissuade them from hurting the tree, but I didn’t actively intervene—they might have turned on me. Was I that awful as a little boy? If memory serves, I was more likely to curl up on the ground in the fetal position, cradling my head, while blows rained down on me. Okay, that’s a huge exaggeration; probably most of the blows were psychological. Anyway, I wish those bullies could see me now! While they’re strolling through malls wearing Dockers and fanny packs, I’m in Lycra on a trainer pedaling away furiously like a hamster on his wheel. Hmm. Come to think of it, there’s no real comeuppance or redemption here.

I tried to motivate for a big effort this morning, but to no avail. My new game-changing secret weapon, Folgers coffee, is actually useless. I was trying to figure out, as I made the coffee this morning, what the Folgers crystals remind me of, and finally it hit me: Drano. They’re like brown Drano, and they have the same effect on my plumbing. Not much other effect, though. None of my other trainer tricks were doing much good either. The rap music was almost demoralizing. As Obie Trice yelled in my ear, “I’m hittin’ harder than those Hiroshima-type bombs!” I was thinking, “I’m hitting weaker than those plastic Wiffle-type bats.” I don’t know how much longer I can keep up this indoor-training charade. But outdoor riding is out of the question; at 5:40 this morning, the temperature was 37, with 95% humidity! Oh, and of course it was pitch-black out there. Dang.

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