My (Hypothetical) Post-Race Interview - NBS Criterium

Introduction

If you’ve ever read my “biased blow-by-blow” reports of pro bike races, you’ll have noted that I like to put words in the racers’ mouths when covering their post-race interviews. This is because they so often have so little to say (either because their brains have been too deprived of oxygen, or they’re just camera-shy and/or vapid to begin with). Since the bike races I’ve done myself over the decades haven’t had media coverage to speak of, I have had very little opportunity to try fielding reporters’ questions myself. But what if I did?

Here’s how I might have described a certain race I did as a 15-year-old, had the press seen fit to interview me about it (and had a lot of time and patience in doing so). Note that, unlike in the case of actual interviews that I take liberties with on this blog, what I recount in this hypothetical interview really happened as I describe it, to the extent I remember everything accurately (which I do). Naturally, I needed to put words in the mouth of the fictitious interviewer, so I had some fun with that.

Note: the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Boulder, Colorado is now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) and is the home of one of America’s atomic clocks. Note also: the photos in this post aren’t from the race I recount, but from the final stage of the Red Zinger Mini Classic on the same course later that year.

Interview – NBS Criterium – Spring 1985

INTERVIEWER: What does it mean to race here at the National Bureau of Standards?

DANA: Well, it’s a very cool course; any time you have a figure-8 shaped criterium on a hill it’s gonna be exciting. And I guess the Bureau is a pretty important place for, like, scientists.

INTERVIEWER: I understand your dad, a rocket scientist, works here and was out watching you race today. Did that make this race extra special?

DANA: You heard wrong. He doesn’t work here, and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to watch me race. He did drive me to one race last year, but he didn’t have a very good time because I got my ass kicked. I think he was ashamed of me. It was a very quiet, uncomfortable drive home. It’s too bad he wasn’t here since things obviously went better today.

INTERVIEWER: Walk me through the race. It really looks like you had a solid plan and executed it.

DANA: No, not at all, that was an illusion. Things actually started off really badly. My mom drove me to the race but had run out to do some errand first, which took longer than she thought, so she got me there too late and I couldn’t race in my normal division. Fortunately they let me race with the men later in the day, but of course I wasn’t nearly as confident in that group. I was pretty furious, because even though I’ve historically kind of sucked at this sport, over the winter I finally hit puberty and was riding well, and was really pumped to have a go here. But going up against grown men … that’s another thing entirely.

INTERVIEWER: Were you excited to have your big brother in the peloton with you? Did you guys work together?

DANA: Not at all. Several times this season he’s come in second to the same guy, and of course it would make sense to help each other out to try to finally beat this dude. But my brother naturally assumed I’d be useless. In fact, when we were suiting up for the race in a restroom here at the Bureau, he advised me that if he got in a breakaway, he wasn’t going to wait for me, I was on my own. I was thinking, like, thanks for the support, asshole.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your big attack. It really seemed perfectly timed.

DANA: Actually, it was totally spontaneous. I was staying up near the front watching for my brother or his nemesis to make a move, kind of waiting to see how things shook out. Although I was feeling really good, my breathing was pretty loud—I have some seasonal allergies which can make my respiratory system a bit noisy. So some douchebag with a mustache says, “Jesus Christ, kid, are you about to collapse a lung or something?” It just pissed me off so bad, being spoken down to like that by this complete stranger who just assumes, like my brother, that I’m a hopeless case. I wasn’t going to take that, but then I couldn’t figure out a clever response, so I just decided—very spur-of-the-moment—to attack the shit out of him, and of course everyone else in the process. It was a very unguarded, uncalculated move, born of pure anger and adrenaline, and I think I caught everyone—including myself—completely by surprise. When my attack blew the pack apart and only two guys were able to join me, I was stoked, especially since the two were my brother and his nemesis, both of whom had done well all season, so I knew they were super strong.

INTERVIEWER: You seemed to work really well together.

DANA: Yeah, we knew the break had a chance to survive so we were all motivated to share the work and really commit. In my case, less was expected of me since I’m just this scrawny-looking kid, right?

INTERVIEWER: It seemed like you were actually dangling at the back quite a bit, like you might even get dropped.

DANA: Yeah, it really sucked because the last time I raced here, I crashed out and was hauled off in an ambulance. Everything had been going great—this was the last day of the week-long Red Zinger Mini Classic and I was in a 3-up breakaway with the GC leader and the guy in second overall—but it started raining, and got a bit slippery. In my case it was especially bad because I’d punctured during my warm-up and borrowed a wheel from a friend. Unbeknownst to me and probably to my friend, he’d mounted a track tire on there that was not designed for wet conditions. So on the fastest corner, in the descent, I slipped right out and that was the end of that. My shorts were so badly ripped, my junk was hanging out as I lay on my back being attended by paramedics. All these spectators were crowding around, including my brothers, who gave me endless shit afterward for reaching down and tugging the ripped Lycra to cover my johnson. Their point was that if I’d really been injured, I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to do this. Whatever, dudes. Anyhow, I was really spooked by that crash, and my mojo was shot, so I couldn’t keep up on the downhill today. Every lap I’d lose ground and have to chase like a madman on the climb to catch back up. So that kind of sucked.

INTERVIEWER: Did you figure you were doomed, then? How could you possibly go for the win if you’re always gapped like that?

DANA: Well, in the end I managed to use it to my advantage. The other two were so sure I wouldn’t be a factor, they only marked each other. With a couple laps to go I realized that if I could possibly get my head together and not get dropped on the downhill on the final lap, I’d be in perfect position and have the element of surprise. So I just gritted my teeth and willed myself to just bomb the last descent and not get gapped, and it worked! I was tucked right in as we made the final corner! Heading up the hill toward the finish, seeing my brother and this guy watching each other, I decided to go early and see if I could get a big enough gap to hold it. So I went right up the fucking gutter and totally caught them napping—it must have seemed like I came out of nowhere. So now I was just going for the line, absolutely all-out, kind of channeling into my effort a lifetime of sibling rivalry and being bullied, so I didn’t care a whit if I pedaled so hard I ripped myself in half, and I was watching that finish line approach and just kind of begging it to come closer before I got caught. And to my shock and pure delight, finally I was over it and nobody had come around.

INTERVIEWER: Your victory salute was really something … a whole lot of whooping and punching the air. What was going on there?

DANA: To actually win, and against my big brother, and all these men, after having been so distraught at missing my start earlier, and to have success after so many fruitless years in this sport, particularly after my friends had kind of abandoned me since my sucking at racing apparently made me a dork … there’s just so much satisfaction in winning here, such a feeling of absolute vindication. It surpasses my wildest dreams. And now I get to give my brother so much shit, for the rest of our lives. I just wish I could go find that dickhead with the mustache and give him a hard time for bagging on me. I’d love to tell him, “I hope the rest of your race went better, not having to hear me breathe anymore because I dropped your ass.”

INTERVIEWER: I think you’d better head to the medical tent. You’re showing signs of acute testosterone poisoning.

DANA: Naw, I think I’m okay. I’m a teenager, these levels are normal for me!

Postscript

So, forty years on, is it the case I’ve given my brother endless shit about having beaten him in this race? Well, yes, but it hasn’t been quite as satisfying as I’d hoped: he maintains that he doesn’t remember it. At all. I find this astonishing. I mean, if I never brought it up until recently, yeah, that kind of makes sense, but I feel like I’ve reminded him a great number of times! I guess at the end of the day, this was just an unimportant local bike race, not any kind of championship or anything, so nobody would bother to remember it at all, much less care. Except me.

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From the Archives - Journal for my Younger Daughter

Introduction

Around the time Lindsay, my second daughter, was born, I started keeping a journal about her life. (I did the same for her older sister, and you can see an excerpt here.) My journal project was inspired by those baby books where you put in footprints, birth size and weight, developmental milestones, etc. Those baby books are typically surpassed only by exercise bikes and crock pots in unfulfilled good intentions. Usually the first couple of pages are diligently filled out, and then the new parents get overwhelmed and the rest of the book is blank. 

I endeavored to do better. The result? A mammoth 400-page document, spanning my daughter’s entire life thus far, which I presented to her when dropping her off at college. Here’s an excerpt, emphasizing episodes I think are funny (but which shouldn’t embarrass my kid, who after all has suffered enough, what with me as her dad).

A note on the text: it’s written in the second person (i.e., “you”) because the journal’s real audience is my daughter. You albertnet readers just get a taste.

(Art in this post is by Lindsay’s Grandma Coral, except one picture by Lindsay.)

September 15, 2004 (age almost-1)

I’d forgotten how messy it is when a baby tries to feed herself. You’ll sit at the high chair happily for twenty minutes or more, grabbing everything on your tray, shoving much of it in your mouth, spitting much of this back out, and dropping a lot. Watermelon is a favorite, as are Cheerios (or “ring shaped oat cereal,” as the parenting books call them), refried beans (cold), little blocks of cheese, pieces of bread, cut-up fruit . . . just about everything except baby food, which you never really took a shine to. I’ll be all stoked at how much you ate, until clean-up time when I discover what looks like at least 90% of it on the floor, in your chair, and in the pouch of your bib (when we manage to get the bib on you, which is seldom). When you’re done you scream and cry throughout the clean-up, just like your sister used to do. Then you want to be held, which is a problem because I don’t want to have to change my outfit in addition to yours.

April 7, 2005 (age 1-½)

When I say, “Where’s your nose?” you grin, grab my finger, and touch your nose with it. Then you touch my nose with it. Then you start moving my hand around to different parts of my head: “That’s my ear,” I’ll say, “and that’s my mouth … that’s my cheek.” It’s not entirely clear how much you’re directing the hand and how much I am; it’s like a Ouija board.

You love throwing things away. Every time I empty the trash I have to watch out. The cat’s dish gets thrown out a lot. You’re just like your mother.

April 3, 2006 (age 2-½)

[Our cat] Misha kept getting on the table during dinner. I admonished her, “Get out of here Misha! Go catch some bugs!” (My point was that she’s supposed to be a hunter, not a scavenger, and yet I wouldn’t encourage her to catch birds.) Well, you and Alexa really liked this utterance. I’m not sure whether you grasped the point or not; you may just have seen it as a stock put-down or something. Anyway, the other day we were getting in the car and you and Alexa had some dispute, perhaps over who got what car seat. With a somewhat self-satisfied air (I think you’d prevailed in the dispute), you said, “Go away, Alexa! Go catch some bugs!” Man, she was pissed ... especially, I think, because your mom and I were laughing at what you said. I think this was your first joke ever, or at least your first joke that actually made somebody laugh out loud. I know plenty of adults who haven’t yet achieved that milestone.

April 11, 2006 (age 2-½)

I was reading No No, Jo to you. It’s about a kitten who’s always making messes by trying to help, and each page ends, “But does Sam [or whoever] thank that kitten? Sam says...” Then you open out a flap that shows the kid reacting to Jo’s mess, saying, “No no, Jo!” The idea is that the child to whom you’re reading the book can provide the chorus, or punch line, for each page. But you weren’t doing it. You’d done it before, but this time you were in a needy, weepy way because you’d just awoken from your nap to find the babysitter was here. You like the sitter okay, but of course you recognized that her presence meant your mom would be leaving. (I would be leaving too, but that’s no big deal for you.) It was tough even getting you to let me read to you to cheer you up. I thought you might be coaxed into helping me say the “No no, Jo!” part, so I prompted you. “What does Sam say?” I asked. “Please?” you whimpered.

April 18, 2006 (age 2-½)

We had Easter at your Grandma Judy’s house up in Oregon. After the egg hunt we had breakfast and then a walk. Your mom was enjoying the walking so much that she asked me to administer the chocolate bunnies to you and Alexa while she and my mom walked some more. This seemed like a fine work detail at first, until I saw the size of the rabbits. They were huge! Probably four inches tall, and solid chocolate. Of course you and your sister were thrilled and started gnawing on them right away. Soon you had chocolate all over your mouth and hands. As your mom was leaving she’d said, “Dana, it’s up to you to keep them from making a mess!” I gave you and Alexa each a paper napkin. I policed the devouring of the chocolate for a long while, maybe fifteen minutes, but man, what a tedious job. At several points I thought of taking the chocolate away because it was just too much, but of course that would be like taking candy from a baby. A lot like that in fact. So I tried to encourage you to save some for later. I gave you each a bag to put your bunny in. You dutifully wrapped the bunny in the napkin and put it in the bag, and then, once the delight of this operation wore off, you took it back out and started gnawing again. Finally I couldn’t bear the tedium, not to mention the ghastliness of it all, any longer and started to pack for our trip home. Your mom returned to discover that you (and/or Alexa) had smeared melted chocolate all over the cream-colored upholstery of one of Grandma Judy’s dining room chairs. Your mom snapped at me, I snapped back at her, my mom was hurt because she’d actually bought the bunnies and they’d cost a lot, and at last we fully appreciated the glory of Christ’s resurrection and the thrilling mystery of the rabbit that lays eggs.

June 7, 2006 (age 2-¾)

You were going to tag along with your mom to your sister’s ballet class, but I got home from work right before they left. Your mom saw an opportunity and changed her plan, leaving you home with me (vs. chasing you around the community center for 45 minutes). Oh, man, you were not happy about this—in fact, you had a complete meltdown. I was so exhausted from work, I went straight to my last-resort solution to the crisis: I put in a video for you, which is a rare treat. Then I put a beer in the freezer (we didn’t have any cold) and set a timer to remind me it was in there, lest it get forgotten and burst. When that timer went off, some 10-15 minutes into your video, you thought I’d set it for you, to limit your video time (a standard practice, but one which frankly hadn’t occurred to me in this instance). To my pleasant surprise, you ejected the tape and brought it to me, without any fuss. After that we seemed to be reconciled. It just goes to show, beer is probably the solution to most parenting difficulties.

September 26, 2006 (age almost-3)

You often use the word “instead” when you’re not actually comparing two options. “I want milk instead,” you’ll say, apropos of nothing. I guess it makes sense, because whenever you propose the having of something you’re also implicitly rejecting the not-having of that thing; i.e., “I want milk instead of no milk,” or “I want milk instead of nothing.” Very philosophical of you.

January 23, 2007 (age 3)

Your mom used code words the other night so you wouldn’t understand an idea she proposed to me. She referred to me as “the paternal guardian” or some such thing. “Call him ‘Daddy,’” you told her. Ah, the power of context (though in this case, for her to refer to me in the third person, when talking to me, should have helped throw you off the scent).

April 4, 2007 (age 3-½)

You call butter “toast,” as in, “I want more toast for my bread.” You call your lacy shawl “my marriage.” You call guinea pigs “bunny pigs.”

April 7, 2008 (age 4-½)

Last night at dinner, you had a bite of your mom’s dinner roll. “I don’t like this,” you said. “It tastes like Play-Doh.” I asked you how you knew what Play-Doh tasted like. You said, quite reasonably and matter-of-factly, “Because of this [roll].” This is a nice example of the logical fallacy of “Petitio Principii,” and you delivered it expertly, even convincingly.

July 16, 2008 (age 4-¾)

I sent in proofs-of-purchase from a cereal box and ordered you and Alexa these “Mommy and me” matching wristwatches (big and small). To my surprise, both you and Alexa wanted the black Hot Wheels watches instead of the pink Barbie ones. They arrived yesterday. They feel like they’re made of rubber. They’re black, with a tire tread texture. I asked if you liked them (and may have asked how you would rate them vs. the Barbie version, I can’t recall). You said, “These are cool. Cool is better than beautiful, because beautiful is just paint.”

August 25, 2008 (age almost-5)

You and Alexa were awake, first thing in the morning, and stayed in your beds, talking. I sneaked the door open, and silently peered in. Alexa asked you, “Lindsay, who’s your favorite person in the whole world?” You replied, “That Otto kid at Dandelion [preschool].” Alexa didn’t like this answer at all; as became evident, she wanted you to say that she was your favorite. She told you you’d hurt her feelings, and lectured you on how family is supposed to be more important than mere friends, but you wouldn’t back down. This discussion repeated itself a week or two later, and this time, though he was still your favorite, you couldn’t even remember Otto’s name. (I reminded you, but you seemed unsure that you’d had this right to begin with.)

December 18, 2008 (age 5)

We bought a new[er] car. I had cautioned you and Alexa to behave during our visit to the dealer, and you and Alexa really did. I had also said, almost as an aside, that it would be better if you didn’t appear too excited about the car, since it wouldn’t help our negotiating leverage for the dealer to know we were in love with it. I was a bit concerned about how excited you and Alexa would be about the built-in booster seats (which really are cool). Not surprisingly, that was the first thing the dealer brought to your and Alexa’s attention. I’m sure he recognized that if he could get you girls jazzed on that feature, we’d have a hard time walking away if he didn’t meet our price—sort of the “threat of tantrum” technique that grocery stores use, stocking every aisle with crappy toys and hoping parents will just bite the bullet and buy them, to lubricate the grocery shopping process.

Well, we all piled in for a test drive, and within minutes you said loudly, “I don’t like this booster!” I asked why not. You replied, again loudly, “It doesn’t have any armrests!” This was going well. The dealer’s implicit “You wouldn’t deprive these delightful children of their beloved built-in boosters, would you?” was being answered with an implicit, “Try me. Your boosters are overrated.” I decided to take a gamble and pretend to try to resolve your misgivings, figuring that you’ve never yet accepted a token bone thrown your way: “But Lindsay, if I weren’t sitting in the middle seat, we could fold down the middle armrest and you’d have that!” You replied, with an irritated don’t-you-patronize-me tone, “I want two armrests! I have two arms, so I want two armrests! I don’t want this booster!” So the booster seats were effectively neutralized as a bargaining tool. Yesssss!

July 22, 2010 (age 6-¾)

Alexa finished a meal recently and instead of taking her plate to the counter, she took it into the dining room. “Alexa, I know you’re licking your plate. Stop that and bring it in here,” I told her. She commented that if nobody sees her, it shouldn’t matter. “God can see you,” I said, just to see what my daughters’ reactions would be. You replied, “Does he care?” This was a departure: at other times, you’d referred to God as a she. I asked, “So God is a he, huh?” You replied, “Yes, God is a he and Goddess is a she.” I asked you who is in charge. You paused for a moment, reflecting, and then said, “They fight a lot.”

June 6, 2011 (age 7-½)

You read more and more picture books by yourself, but with chapter books you still prefer being read to. Right now I’m reading aloud Clarice Bean, Don’t Look Now. Every so often I pause and ask you questions to see if you’re catching all the details and subtexts. Yesterday I asked, “Do you think Clarice should have told Betty that she had tickets to the ‘Ruby Redfort’ movie premier, to cheer her up?” You replied, “No, that would make it worse because Betty wouldn’t be able to go—her family is moving away, but she hasn’t told Clarice that yet.” I said, “That’s right, we know something that Clarice doesn’t. And what is that an example of?” Without missing a beat, you replied, “Dramatic irony.” That’s my girl!

July 31, 2011 (age 7-¾)

You and Alexa were complaining about not having enough little Lego dudes to play with. Your mom suggested you make your own little Lego guys out of Lego bricks. Alexa complained, “That’ll never work!” Your mom replied, “Then the Lego set has failed the whole family and we’ll never buy them again.” This infuriated Alexa, who cried, “That’s not funny in the least! We don’t have the right kind of bricks for that!” Always acting in solidarity with your sister, you wailed, in an equally affronted tone, “It’s like trying to do a math problem but you don’t even have a brain!”

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From the Archives - Brutal Bicycle Training Contest - Part II

Introduction

If you read my last post, you were left hanging, your interest (ideally) kindled about who ended up winning the 2005 Albert training competition. (If you didn’t read my last post go do that first.) This post provides the electrifying conclusion of the protracted, wrenching, ego-drenched battle between brothers. By way of review, the brothers in question are Bryan (at left in the photo below) and Geoff (at right).

Where we left off, I led the competition—after 362 days—by a mere 3.5 points over Geoff. To emphasize how close this was, that’s just 0.12% of my total score to that point. Geoff and I were absolutely neck-and-neck, and both already fried from three brutal weeks on the bike.

Thursday, Dec 29

GEOFF (before riding, and remember, he’s 9 hours ahead of Dana and Bryan): As I look over the [training competition] spreadsheet for inspiration, less than half an hour before I suit up for my final effort of the year, I feel a sense of doom, not unlike that feeling I had when Dad was going to spank the whole lot of us, and I was sent around to friends’ houses to round everyone up. I know I’m going to have to do great things here in the next few hours, and this causes my bowels to constrict with fear. I wonder what will happen... By the time you read this I’ll probably have posted my score. I hope it’s a big one.

GEOFF (42.0 points, indoor – 2 hrs 25 min): In an attempt to demoralize and crush the opposition, I have produced this score. I felt pretty good and decided to shoot for two hours above the [heart rate target] zone. After 1:45 above the zone, I just fell apart. I got off, caffeinated, drank apple juice, emptied my bladder and soaked my head, which got me through another turbulent five minutes, but then it just ended. My legs would go around in circles no longer. I threw in the towel and started cleaning up and warming down.

But then I decided to try again, as this is the end of the year, and climbed back onto the torture rack, made my best effort to turn the pedals around some more, but no, it just would not happen. I was knackered. Had the stuffing completely knocked out of me.

So there it is, 42 points. Dana, if you can top this effort, why, you deserve the win. Who knows though, maybe I’ll feel inspired on Saturday, and will get back on the bike. I doubt it though....

DANA: You bastard! I have no time to ride today and no energy anyway. But I’ve been checking the FTP site all day, waiting to see what you did, and fantasizing about a sub-30 score, the natural result of the fatigue that I hoped would finally catch up to you. But no, instead you get medieval on my heinie, you just shock-and-awe me, with this grotesquely monstrous score. You are a bad, bad man. D’oh. I’m already terribly dreading tomorrow’s hammerfest. It’ll be doubly painful given the obvious futility of my attempt...

[SITUATION: GEOFF AHEAD BY 38 POINTS]

[Here’s a photo from 2006, of the three of us studying our ride data together. We were data slaves long before Strava even existed.]

Friday, Dec 30

BRYAN [catching up from Thursday]: Man, Geoff! What in tarnation are you? The Terminator? Look at these scores! Look at the slope of that graph! Every stinkin’ ride is over 30 points! And getting back on after throwing in the towel, that’s heroic! But I happen to know that Dana’s out there right now, putting the hammer down, even as I sit here waiting for the next round of nausea and the next mad dash to the toolit to puke my guts out. I’m thinking Saturday’s calling your name...

DANA (40.4 points, indoor – 2 hrs 5 min): NO GIFTS.

BRYAN: Good grief, the mother of all mother scores! Look at that score-per-hour number! Only two hours, and an hour and a half of it above the zone! Well, this is certainly going to be a battle. NICE RIDE, DUDE!

DANA: Thanks! I only wish it didn’t totally wreck me. At the dinner table afterward, I was almost too tired to chew. In fact, I became too tired to eat before I was really full. I just couldn’t stay vertical another minute, and collapsed to the floor on my back. Even typing this note is a serious chore.

GEOFF: Well shoot, you certainly are an ornery little cuss, aren’t you? Man, 40 points. Now of course I have no choice, I have to ride again. I only hope I can do something great. Man, nice effort! An ‘A’ for effort! Of course you’re going to dig deep tomorrow and I just know that you’re going to pull ahead again, and that on New Year’s Eve I’m going to have to make myself suffer again, and that it will be in vain. Oh well, I’ve never been so close to the victory before. I guess that’s worth something.

DANA: If you had any first-hand knowledge of how badly I suffered for these points, you wouldn’t be worried at all...

[SITUATION: DANA AHEAD BY 2 POINTS]

Saturday, Dec 31

GEOFF (39.7 points, indoor – 2 hrs 12 min): Well there it is, my final effort. I somehow outdid myself. At the time, it felt as if I had given it all I had. Yet I didn’t fall off the bike. Nor did I have to crawl around afterwards, I was still able to walk. Shoot, my lips didn’t even turn blue. Now I’m feeling like such a wimp. Why oh why didn’t I stay on just another ten minutes? I could have shattered through the magical 40 Point Barrier.

Oh well, I guess I should be proud of myself. It was a near death experience, after all. At one point my eyes filled up with tears and overflowed for almost no reason. At another point my pulse sailed up above 160, where it stayed for what felt like an hour, though in reality it was only a few minutes. I was sure that I’d died and been relieved of my suffering, and decided that I’d stay on the bike for the rest of the year [i.e., until midnight]. Then of course my pulse plummeted again, and it was back to reality.

So there it is, almost 40 points. Will it be enough? Will age and treachery overcome youth and skill? Or will Dana pull it off yet again? We’ll soon know. The ball’s back in your court. Punish me, young man!

DANA (pre-ride): MAN! I’m so impressed, I can’t even bring myself to call you a bastard. That’s amazing! Look at that score-per-hour, right on the heels of your 42-point MegaTour! I’d also like to point out that you took the world record for score-per-month of all time, besting my 400.2 mark from 2003! You also got the second-biggest week of all time (second to your own record, of course). Now, I’m going to swing my leg over the bike today, but I can’t imagine I’ll have the strength to even begin to convince myself that victory is possible. You’ll know soon . . . perhaps very soon, if things go badly enough for me! Nice ride, dude!

BRYAN: What an incredible finish! I’d say that you really wanted this one. An incredible week, an incredible month, shoot, an incredible year! Nice work. We’re all very proud of you over here!

DANA (10.6 points, indoor – 1 hr): Today’s ride was horrible, but at least it was brief. That is, it took me just an hour (actually 59:45, which was as close to an hour as I could get) to ascertain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was no way I could score enough points to win. I’ve attached the final graph, because it tells a poignant tale. About 35 minutes into the workout, my spirits faltered and my pulse dropped to about 145. This angered me, and I hammered as hard as I could and finally crossed the [target] zone threshold. At this point I had all the grace of a fish flopping on the floor of a boat, being murdered with an ice pick. After about 90 seconds of this I was actually crying. I blew up, and my heart fell to just over 130.

I was getting ready to climb off the bike when I had my Tom Simpson moment. Remember, just before he died on Mount Ventoux, when his famous last words were “Put me back on my bike!”? That’s what I’m talking about. Reflecting on the absurdly short duration of my ride, and motivated by an equally absurd refusal to accept defeat, I decided to try to recover and go a bit longer.

And so, 48 minutes in I decided to try one more time to burst over the zone threshold, and (I foolishly hoped) somehow pin myself there [i.e., above my heart rate target zone—that is, redlined]. And as the graph shows, I actually did get it up there for awhile. When I finally detonated for good, which of course was inevitable, I decided to just keep hammering as much as I could despite the extreme, piercing, shattering pain. At this point I was uttering strange animal noises, somewhere between groans and screams but really more like yelps (given my lack of breath). And then something really strange happened: after maybe 30 seconds of this my heart rate began to soar. It got into the upper 160s and stayed there awhile, for about 45 seconds, and then suddenly I not only couldn’t pedal anymore, but couldn’t hold myself up on the bike. I crumpled into the handlebars and it was all over. Good thing I was on the [indoor] trainer or I’d have stacked!

So, not a great score, but it did get me above the 100-points-in-a-week barrier, for a personal best. It also got me above the prestigious 300-points-in-a-month barrier. It also brought my margin of loss down to less than a percent, which I have to be happy about. Best of all, it’s finally over.

BRYAN: Well shoot, Dana, my condolences. It was a valiant effort, I must say, as your last ride’s data attest. I believe you’re the better man for it, however, and I fear what you will do in the coming year. Did you realize that you shattered your previous total scores, as well as your best week? Very impressive...

GEOFF: Well Dana, your description of your final ride has filled my head with all sorts of thoughts. First of all, there’s respect and admiration for your grit and determination and your ability to torture yourself. My hat’s off to you! Then of course there’s the enormous sense of relief that you didn’t actually die trying. Erin would have killed me! There’s also the recognition of having been right there with you, having experienced exactly the same emotions. There’s a common bond here which I’m sure many people will never know. Oddly enough, I seem to be missing the thrill of victory. Maybe it just needs to sink in.

[FINAL SCORE: Geoff 2,941; Dana 2,914; Bryan 1,567.]

Final commentary

BRYAN: Gentlemen, nicely done. I am impressed and awed at your biking prowess. It’s a privilege to be crushed into oblivion by you.

DANA: I tried. That’s all I can say. Of course that’s not true—I can always say more. For example, nice job Geoff! I’m actually not that bummed about losing this year, because I lost to such a gritty opponent.

GEOFF: Well, I can scarcely believe that I actually won. I honestly thought it was impossible to beat Dana on the bike. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who made this victory possible, including the artists whose music made it possible to dig a bit deeper, my parents for providing me a genetic gift for determination, my equipment suppliers whose gear stood up to the task, the promoters and producers of this great sporting event, and of course my unwavering fellow competitors, whose dedication and guts are an inspiration to us all. So, what am I doing after the celebration? I’m goin’ to Di’neylan’!

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From the Archives - Brutal Bicycle Training Contest!

Introduction

For over a decade, every year I held a year-long bike training contest with my brothers Bryan and Geoff, and sometimes a few friends. It started January 1 and ended December 31 and was a points competition. We didn’t race head-to-head, nor did we compare times (like Strava does). Instead, we used the data from our heart rate monitors to score each ride in terms of duration and intensity.

(Here’s what these heart rate monitors looked like … fairly primitive by today’s standards, though they did offer data upload to a PC so we could crunch the numbers. Yes, that 39 on the screen is my heart rate … I was much fitter back then, and this was at rest.)

Intensity was determined by each rider’s average heart rate, and what percentage of his maximum heart rate this average represented. The closer to redline a guy rode, the higher his score was, based on an accelerator applied to his base score; i.e., total score =  [duration]*[avg HR]*[accelerator].

There was also a bonus based on the amount of time spent with the heart rate over the target zone (i.e., more than 85% of the max heart rate). This meant that whatever part of your ride was at absolute redline earned you big bonus points. In a nutshell, you scored high by hammering your ass off for as long and as hard as possible. (Downhills and other periods of low-intensity riding were chucked out by a special software algorithm Bryan coded.) So the real total score = [duration]*[avg HR]*[accelerator] + [bonus].

We tracked one another’s scores closely via a shared spreadsheet we would trade around via FTP. The score per month and running total were displayed graphically. We commented on each other’s rides, cheering and jeering, and often going off into the weeds with stories of family life. Often we’d review and update the spreadsheet several times a day.

(Here’s a photo of Bryan, Geoff, and me taken in 2006, during a training ride for the 2006 La Marmotte cyclosportif.)

The contest of 2005 was particularly close, with the winner not determined until the final day, December 31. This meant we spent our Christmas and New Year’s Eve holidays pedaling like madmen. It’s a wonder our wives put up with it.

This post gathers up our scores and comments, with a pretty graph at the end, so you can read the amazing story of our end-of-year death march. (If you’re not that into bicycling, fear not: there are some great side stories about our kids barfing, which ought to pique anybody’s interest.)

A final note: Geoff lives in The Netherlands, so he’s nine hours ahead. This meant I sometimes knew his most recent score before I rode, but not always. Sometimes we didn’t update our scores right away (either due to time constraints or a backhanded keep-‘em-guessing strategy).

Training contest showdown – December 2005

Saturday, Dec 24

GEOFF (35.8 points – indoor, 1 hr 52 min): Dana, I’ve taken your [virtual] yellow [leader’s] jersey! How ya like me now?!

DANA:  (14.1 points – 1 hr 21 min, 21 miles, 2,913 vertical feet of climbing): Doggone it! I didn’t see a score for you as of this afternoon, and thought maybe you’d taken the day off. So I went out and hammered (as well as I could, anyway), thinking I’d be padding my lead. Instead, I lost it! I just didn’t have it today … too many hard rides already this month!

I’m going to have a hard time putting up the big scores this week because I can no longer ride indoors. We’re having the kitchen painted, and though the painters put up a plastic sheet, it’s been punched full of holes, and the fumes have filled the office [where I ride the trainer]. I considered riding with a gas mask down there but that would get mighty gross. So I rode in the rain today. What a mess. My chamois was like a thick soggy pancake by the end, and my socks weighed a pound apiece. To dry out my shoes, I stuffed inside-out diapers in them (for lack of newspaper). It’s supposed to keep raining, so this next week will be a real test of my gumption! And I’ll be in Sacramento for Christmas so I won’t get any riding done…

BRYAN:  Man, Geoff, nice ride!

[SITUATION: GEOFF AHEAD BY 19 POINTS]

Monday, Dec 26

DANA (17.2 points – 1 hr 23 min, 21 mi, 2,976 vertical feet):  D’oh! We didn’t get back from Sac until this afternoon. I’d hoped for a longer ride but simply ran out of daylight. Man, I can see the contest slipping through my fingers! I live in fear of the next Geoff Albert MegaScore. And I didn’t even get the lead back today!

[SITUATION: GEOFF AHEAD BY 2 POINTS]

Tuesday, Dec 27

GEOFF (32.6 points – indoor, 2 hr 1 min):  Well that was painful, but I’m pleased. Man. I was practically hyperventilating for the full two hours. It was one of those struggles to keep the pulse up. Thinking about the rest of the week is terrifying. Such pain, such misery. It will not be fun. If I weren’t such a coward I’d just throw in the towel and announce that I won’t be riding any more this year. But I can’t, of course.

BRYAN:  Well, Geoff, shoot, it looks like you’re poised to take away my score-per-month record and there’s nothing I can do about it. On the other hand, you’ve earned it!

DANA:  (7.2 points – 1 hr 34 min, 20.6 mi, 2,920 vertical feet): Nooooooooooo! This was just what I was afraid of. I suffer long and hard to eke out another tiny advantage, and then Geoff comes along and obliterates it. [Here, I did my ride before seeing Geoff’s score, so when I went to post mine, I saw right away that he had hugely outscored me.]

That does it. I’m going to play this like a numbers game. No more strategizing about how much rest to take to feel best on training day. I’m going to have to ride every day, on the off chance that I’ll feel good. If I feel lousy, I fall off the bike and drown my sorrows in my own sweat. If I feel good, I go as long and hard as I can. Trouble is, tomorrow is my last day of vacation and I doubt I’ll feel very good, if today is any indication. Man, I’ve been on the sofa most of the day, between loads of laundry. My legs feel like they’ve been actually injured, like somebody shut them in a car door. Man o man. I felt SO lousy on this ride. I had big ambitions, too. I ate breakfast, mixed up two big bottles of Gatorade, two Clif bars, clothes for any weather . . . I was going to ride for hours and get a shock-and-awe score. I figured I’d finished yesterday’s ride with something still in the tank and would feel good. The horror! I just didn’t have it. I felt slightly less than mediocre going up Spruce, fairly lousy on South Park, and absolutely abysmal on Lomas Cantadas. There were times on that climb when my bike would come almost to a complete stop at the top of the pedal stroke. I went from intending to conquer the world to simply hoping I could limp home. Even my arms were tired.

In other news, just before bed last night Lindsay had sudden, violent bout of projectile vomiting. Her aim was uncanny:  she sprayed down a large pile of silk sweaters, fanned her blast over to our goose down pillows, nailed the down comforter and duvet, coated a bunch of clothing, and created a huge slip hazard on the hardwood floor. Never has such a small person created such a huge amount of laundry in so little time. Plus we had the bedroom windows open due to the paint fumes, so without that comforter I froze the rest of the night. I dreamed that I was riding with soaking wet chamois and tights. D’oh.

BRYAN:  You’ve got to love those little vomiters! Last night at the dinner table (our family has been afflicted to varying degree with illness) Jamey announced that she felt like she was going to barf. So we told her to go to the bathroom. Then we heard her heaves—they sounded like those of a full-grown man! That little angel hit the toilet with every blast, and there were four of them! So we tucked her in with her bucket. Poor little fellow, with her sheet-white face...

Last night Lydia was complaining of some serious stomach problems and today she’s hurling hard. She even threw up out the window of her uncle’s car, spattering all down the side of the car! This was in heavy traffic, no less.

GEOFF:  Good grief! I’m counting myself very lucky that I haven’t had to clean up vomit in a while! The last time was when Max didn’t make it to the tiled bathroom in time, stopping mid-stride to empty his system on the brand new carpeting upstairs. I couldn’t help but grin as I was scraping it out with a spatula, just like Mom used to do. I don’t know how I got the vomit patrol task, but I did.

DANA:  Speaking of Max, I chatted with him the other day, international long-distance, and bragged that I ate roll-mops [raw herring wrapped around a dill pickle spear] as my recovery food after a cold, wet ride. I was bragging, of course, but he unknowingly deflated my wimpy American swagger instantly by asking, “Was it yummy?”  It hadn’t occurred to me that a food that gives one (wussy American) man culinary bragging rights can be another (cool European) man’s (well, boy’s) delicacy...

BRYAN (20.6 points – indoor, 1 hr 3 min):  I’ll take it. It won’t help much, but it was a good ride, all things considered. It sure hurt to ride the trainer. I had forgotten how much suffering and drudgery it is. In fact, I wondered for a few minutes why I’m even doing this…

DANA:  Not bad! Your score-per-hour is stellar, as always. Did John work out with you?

BRYAN:  Nope, just solo. I think he was feeling a bit ill and went to bed early. It was a late-night ride. Now I’m feeling sick too! My belly’s all queasy and I feel like I should be puking, but I’m not—yet. Fine by me, but I sure didn’t feel like mounting up last night. I was hoping to ride every day through 12/31, but it’s not going to happen.

GEOFF:  You know, I’m feeling a bit ill myself. My head’s heavy and hurts, like one of those colds coming on. Of course it sure doesn't help that I only got five hours of sleep last night…

[SITUATION: GEOFF AHEAD BY 27.5 POINTS]

Wednesday, Dec 28

DANA (30.4 points – 3 hours, 47 miles, 5,975 vertical feet):  Boy, this one hurt. I psyched myself up as much as possible first, reading a Tour de France book beforehand while waiting for my NoDoz to kick in. I achieved some good time-above-zone early on, by suffering hugely, and then about halfway through I started to fall apart. Man. I felt every pedal stroke today. Each one was so hard, I was able to count them. There were 14,387. Oh, such horrible suffering. Every climb the Berkeley hills can throw at a guy—South Park, Fish Ranch, Claremont, South Pinehurst, Pinehurst, El Toyonal, and Lomas Cantadas. I’m glad I took the lead, but of course it’s another of those ahead-by-a-hair deals that will certainly be crushed out like a cigarette tomorrow.

I was absolutely destroyed at the end of this ride. Erin saw me come in the door and gasped at my blue lips. (It wasn’t that cold out; I think it was the problem I had after the 2003 La Marmotte, when my body was having trouble reoxygenating.)  Boys, you know you’re hurting when you have to sit down in the shower.

BRYAN:  Remember how I was feeling sick, like I should be booting, but I wasn’t? Well, I guess it just took a little while to come on, but boy did it! It’s like a hydrant! Wet cleanup in aisle 3!

DANA:  Dude ... what a grind!

[SITUATION: DANA AHEAD BY 3.5 POINTS]

To be continued…

For the thrilling conclusion to this barbaric, ego-fueled struggle, tune in to Part II, coming to albertnet on December 31!

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The Closet, or My Claustrophobia

Introduction

Ever wonder what it would be like to be really, really claustrophobic? Well, I am. Read on for a tour of this sometimes absurd phobia.

The Closet, or My Claustrophobia – June 10, 2010

I’m terribly claustrophobic. When I have a bad dream, it often involves being inside a tall tower, making my way up a spiral staircase and having to crawl through progressively smaller openings between floors. Often I’m trying to keep up with somebody who is much better at squeezing through. Usually I reach a gap that’s too small to squeeze through, and I don’t have enough room to turn back. I’m trapped.

In my waking life I’m pretty good at staying out of small enclosures, but my phobia can still strike. Nine years ago I had a bizarre episode. I was at home alone and attempted to fish a cat toy out from under a solid, 7-foot-tall cabinet (aka “entertainment center”). There was a six-inch gap below the cabinet, but a strip of trim between its underside and the floor made for a narrow gap. Lying on my side on the hardwood floor, I was able to work my arm underneath and feel around for the lost toy. I groped around until I found it, then tried to pull my arm out. Alarmingly, it got stuck at the elbow.

No matter how I twisted and turned my arm, I could not get it out from beneath the cabinet. How had I gotten it in there? It was like a strange puzzle. Could it be, I wondered—my anxiety growing—that removing my arm might actually prove impossible? Was this a one-way deal, like a fish hook or a funnel? My arm writhed, chafing against the rough wooden trim of the cabinet. The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on me, but I couldn’t find it funny. My breathing got faster as I started to descend into panic.

Of course there was no actual danger, but such is the nature of a true phobia. Anybody would be uncomfortable being, say, buried alive in a coffin or trapped in a mine, but the true claustrophobe falls prey to utterly irrational notions. I have always cultivated in myself a highly ordered, rational mind—my older brothers used to call me “Logic Lad”—but part of my brain doesn’t always play along. So it was now, as I lay there stuck and fuming. I knew full well that, in this large, high-ceilinged living room, I could not run out of air –and yet I believed I already was.

It’s not hard to guess where this claustrophobia came from. It was brought on, or at least hugely exacerbated, by a cruel game my brothers called “The Closet.” They stumbled on it when I was nine and they happened to throw me in the front hall closet where we kept coats, boots, and the vacuum cleaner, and discovered to their delight that I began to freak out. So they hauled me out of there and dragged me down the hall to a tiny linen closet. It had shelves from floor to ceiling that extended to within eight inches of the door when it was closed. I had to turn my head to keep my nose from getting crushed as the door slammed shut.

My cheek was pressed against a stack of towels, and I inhaled the faint scent of the detergent they’d been laundered with. This could have been a pleasant smell had I not suffered the sensation of gradually suffocating. The smell became stronger as, hyperventilating, I beat against the door of the closet and begged for mercy. The doorknob on the inside had been broken off and never replaced, and I tried in vain to turn the stub as a brother held the knob on the other side.  When I thumped against the door, the dull thud told me my brothers were leaning against it; even if I burst the latch I’d still be stuck. My tormentors cackled and shrieked with glee. That their voices were muffled by the door made me feel I was stuck not just in a closet but in an impenetrable vault.

“Guys! Please let me out! The air is getting thin!” I wailed. They became utterly engulfed in laughter. When they could finally talk they all mocked me: “‘Ooh, the air is getting thin!’ Did you hear that? ‘The air is getting thin!’” They laughed their asses off. I beat my toes, knees, hands, and elbows futilely against the door as tears streamed down my face. Only my brothers’ eventual boredom could save me, but I couldn’t help but beg for mercy. The irrational part of my brain foolishly believed my brothers weren’t 100% cruel. Finally, when my energy gave out and I could only sob quietly, my brothers finally lost interest and set me free.

In a just world, I’d have come out swinging, decking each of my brothers in turn, maybe breaking out some sweet karate moves they never knew I had. But in the real world of my childhood, I had absolutely zero recourse. I suppose I could have gotten in one good sucker-punch to somebody’s kidneys, but that would only make things worse: they’d beat the crap out of me and then put me right back in that linen closet. They’d discovered my Room 101.

Not that they needed any excuse to put me in there. From the day they discovered The Closet, my brothers would inflict it whenever they were bored or had a new friend over who hadn’t yet witnessed the spectacle. My brothers never questioned their God-given right to torment me for their own amusement. The twins, three years older than I, were very shy at school and swim team, but at home, with my parents perpetually absent, they ruled like storm troopers. The middle child longed to be accepted by the twins, and thus unquestioningly did their bidding. (They enjoyed snubbing him anyway.) I was the baby: quiet, bookish, and aloof, which made me a natural target for the twins and their lackey. Any time I was approached by more than one brother, I’d instinctively make a run for it, but they’d always catch me, and begin dragging me towards the hallway.

Come with me for tour of the brutal ritual. My skin burns against the cheap, nylon, orange-red carpet of the house as they drag me. In the front hall, just before the living room, is a flight of stairs down to the basement, and there is a wrought-iron railing around the stairwell. As we pass this railing I tear a hand free from my brothers’ clutches and seize it. The instant my hand touches the iron rail, I get a big shock from the static electricity my body has stored up from being dragged across the carpet. I rip another hand free and, lacing my arms and wrists through the railing, grasp each hand with the other. My brothers continue pulling on my body, so I’m stretched (like taffy, it feels like). The rails are fashioned in a twirl, like fusilli, and they chafe painfully against my wrists. Grunting and laughing, my brothers keep pulling until my hands get too sweaty to maintain their grip.

I grab the edge of the floor where it ends at the stairwell. The carpet is secured by tiny, headless nails, which scratch my fingers as I’m pulled away. Next I lunge for, and reach, the edge of the sofa, a big blocky thing upholstered in cheap velour, its color halfway between burnt orange and silly putty. My panic is giving me a superhuman grip, so as my brothers pull on my ankles, the sofa slides away from the wall. Pathetically, even as I suffer I secretly hope my big brothers admire my strength.

My brothers cooperate, like hyenas. “Go after his arms! Pry his fingers off!”

I can’t resist forever, and they eventually pull me free, drag me down the hall, jerk me to my feet, and stuff me into The Closet, squishing the door against me until the doorknob latch clicks shut.

That’s when the real misery starts, that I already described.

Thank God I’m through with all that. Over the years I inevitably caught up to my brothers in size and strength, and who knows, maybe they developed some humanity. The Closet was finally abandoned—but the claustrophobia I’m stuck with. Which is how, decades later, I managed to find myself inordinately close to panic from seeming to be trapped in a large, airy room.

I tried rocking the cabinet with my free hand, but it wouldn’t budge. For the first time, I longed for the cheap stapled-together furniture of my college days, which you could knock over with harsh language. I focused my gaze on the stuccoed ceiling of the living room, high above me. This is a huge room, I told myself. My wife will be home in six or eight hours and there’s no way I’d suffocate in that time.

Could anybody else help? To distract myself from my confinement, I listened to the world outside my house: the percussive sounds of a construction site; the groaning power-take-off of a garbage truck; a commercial vehicle backing up, beeping shrilly; the neighbor’s baby screaming; the squawking of birds in the trees. I was calming down enough to appreciate how much goes on in a quiet neighborhood, not including a grown man stupidly pinned to the floor of his living room. I was eventually able to actually chuckle at my lugubrious plight. I pictured my wife finding me, and laughing at my predicament—except actually she wouldn’t, on second thought. Only the legacy of my brothers’ taunts had me imagining such a thing.

And then, seized with fresh determination, I tried again to free myself. With a flinging, twisting, rotating, wiggling, and yanking motion, I finally ripped my arm out from under the cabinet. I suffered a sizeable scrape in the process, but it was worth it—I was free! I chucked the cat toy over to Misha (how long had she been slyly watching me?) and got on with my life.

Epilogue

Looking back now (in 2015), do I think I was emotionally scarred by this?  Any shell-shock?  No, probably not ... the claustrophobia my brothers discovered had to be somewhat innate.  And do I hold a grudge?  Nope.  Take a look at my last post ... my friendship with my brothers is alive and well.

10 Fascinating Facts About Inner Tubes

NOTE:  This post is rated R for an instance of mature thematic content.

Introduction

I tuned up the Albert fleet on Saturday, and in the process came to a shocking realization about bicycle inner tubes.  I tried to explain it to my wife, which led to another shocking realization about inner tubes.  Pausing to reflect, I realized that this seemingly unexciting bike part actually presents a vast store of fascinating lore.  I share that lore herein.

I should perhaps mention that in writing this I assume you care about bikes, bike parts, the dynamics of mixed marriage (which in this context means a bike person married to a non-bike-person), childhood cruelty, and/or gearheaded stuff in general.  If you don’t care about such things, you may want to skip this post.  Not sure?  Take this brief quiz. 

1.  Which of these is/are not a type of bicycle inner tube valve?  (Select all that apply.)

a.      Presta

b.      Presto

c.       Proust

d.      Schrader

e.      Shrader

f.        Schrödinger’s cat

Score:  if you yawned, rolled your eyes, sighed heavily, or muttered grumpily during the quiz, you should probably read something else.  If you answered b, c, e, and f, read on—this is your kind of post.  If you answered something other than b, c, e, and f, and are disappointed not to have achieved a perfect score, you should enlighten yourself—keep reading!

Fascinating fact #1:  you can run out of inner tubes

Obviously this fact isn’t fascinating, or even interesting, in the context of most bicycling enthusiasts.  But for a veteran rider in possession of a garage, it’s almost unbelievable.  A seasoned cyclist builds up an endless supply of inner tubes, and while it’s true they tend to be punctured, the growth in their numbers seems as boundless as the growth in world population.  It’s like the tubes actually mate and produce offspring.  As a renter, I actually had a complaint once from my landlord about my collection of tubes and tires being a fire hazard.

So:  this weekend.  It was my trusty commuter, Full Slab, that had a flat, and though I successfully patched the tube, the valve spontaneously failed when I went to inflate it.  No problem:  I pictured my pile of inner tubes, which in my mind was like a giant nest of black snakes.  But is it turned out this pile was not only depleted but completely gone.  Had my wife thrown my tubes out?  I’m sure she’s been sorely tempted, but she wouldn’t dare.  For the first time, I had to contemplate the idea that I could actually be out of tubes.  What would I do?  Actually buy some?  I haven’t bought a tube for my commuter bike in decades.

Finally, when I thought to look among my endless supply of tires, to see if a tube was hiding in one of them, I did find one—and the tire it was in was in better shape than the one I’d planned to use.  But still, this was a close call.  I was rattled.

Fascinating fact #2:  spice don’t care

As I washed black grime from three bike repairs into the clean white kitchen sink, I described my amazing no-more-tubes hypothesis to my wife.  She replied, perhaps a bit testily, “I thought you had boxes and boxes of those.”  I conceded that I have a couple of Vittoria EVO-55s new-in-the-box, but that I’d never waste one of them on Full Slab.  “I can’t even get the EVO-55s anymore—nobody seems to carry them,” I lamented.  She replied, “This is where I excuse myself from this conversation.”

On the one hand, I shouldn’t be surprised by my wife’s lack of interest.  But wasn’t this the same woman who bike toured across the country with me, and commiserated when I was getting two punctures a day in southern Arizona?  I had no more anticipated her lack of interest than she can believe that I really don’t care about camouflage chic, silhouettes, or a person’s “colors.”  (Come to think of it, she is probably as nonplussed by my stockpile of jeans as she is by all my spare bike tires.)

I suppose there are marriages where both parties are equally interested in cycling, but I’m not sure I’d want to be in one.  (What if a couple straddled the great Campagnolo/Shimano debate?)  In most cases, the minimal overlap in men’s and women’s interests looks something like this:

For details on that (fascinating!) overlap, click here.

Fascinating fact #3:  tubes once spawned a game like Russian Roulette

Imagine four teenage boys sharing an unfinished basement:  that’s a great way to build up an amazing stockpile of inner tubes.  One day my brothers and I decided to get rid of the pinch-flatted tubes that couldn’t possibly be patched.  So we got out the Zéfal Plus “Double Shot” floor pump—a monster with two air chambers designed for maximum inflation speed—and took turns pumping ten strokes into the inner tube while the others plugged their ears.  We  kept going until the tube exploded, which in the confines of the basement made a deafening bang.  Then we tied off the ends of the exploded tube and went at it again.  Of course the tied-off tube exploded even sooner.  We did this again and again.  It was terrifying when one of my brothers would somehow escape the explosion so I was sure to get it.  The pump took both hands to operate so there was no ear-plugging for the hapless pumper.  The tube would get grotesquely, unbelievable huge, and would actually tremble with over-inflation before exploding.  The brutal game went on for at least an hour.  I hope the hearing aid industry makes great strides in the next few decades.

Fascinating fact #4:  valves can fuel sibling rivalry

During high school, in the mid-‘80s, I worked at the High Wheeler (aka Thigh Feeler) bike shop in Boulder with my brothers Geoff and Bryan.  (Our other brother, Max, had worked there prior to us, but we never quite managed to all be on the payroll at once.)  One summer Geoff and I worked the same shift, building new bikes all day long.  We had an ongoing disagreement about the usefulness of valve rings.  I argued that they helped you keep the valve straight, helped you get the pump chuck on there, and enabled you to ride a flat without the tube bunching up around the valve.  He argued that … wait a second, this is my blog, I’m not going to bother giving his silly arguments!  He can comment on this post if he wants his position articulated.

Geoff was forever stealing the rings from my bike’s valves (whenever I went on break), to deprive me of them.  I had to keep spare valve rings on me in case I discovered his treachery too late, like during an after-work ride.  In retaliation I was forever putting rings on his bike’s valves.  There was a lot of cussing.

Every new bike Geoff built went out without valve rings.  Based on the rings’ being metal and shiny and knurled, he couldn’t bear to throw them out so he saved them in a little box on his workbench.  One day I collected like twenty of them and put ten each on his valves, all stacked up.  This had the added benefit of putting his wheels off-balance.  Plus, he couldn’t fight back in like fashion:  my bike only ever had two valve rings to remove.  Geoff responded by hiding his spare valve rings.  I scrounged up a couple more somewhere and this time I used Loc-tite and screwed them down good and tight with a pair of pliers.  Geoff got his revenge by putting reflectors on my bike’s wheels and pedals.  I got back by taking apart his bike’s headset and mounting a big front reflector.  Et cetera, all summer long.

(Full disclosure:  I have stopped using valve rings, though I carry one with my spare tube.)

Fascinating fact #5:  how you inflate your tubes says a lot about you

It’s tempting to divide all cyclists into two groups:  those who use a pump, and those who use a CO2 cartridge.  To me, a pump makes all the sense in the world.  You can use it as many times as you want, it doesn’t tend to malfunction, and it doesn’t generate waste (in the form of an empty CO2 cartridge that ends up in a landfill).  You also run less risk of discovering the hard way that the tire isn’t seated properly on the rim, because a pump fills the tube so gradually.  The cartridge user strikes me as the kind of convenience addict who also favors the Rabbit corkscrew and the plastic squeeze bottle of ketchup.

Zoom in on that photo:  “Our CO2 is obtained from a naturally ocurring [sic] volcanic source.”  I ask you:  is there any other naturally occurring volcanic source than a volcano?  And why bother gathering your CO2 from a volcano when naturally occurring CO2 is all around us?  I’d be far more impressed if Genuine Innovations managed to gather the CO2 emitted by a bike race peloton, where each racer increases his carbon footprint with every breath.

Bike pumps also reflect the ideology of their users.  For decades I used the Zéfal HPX, the greatest frame pump ever made.  Here it is (I’ve added a cat to provide scale).

Should everybody use this pump?  No, function isn’t everything.  There’s a great argument to be made for the classic old plastic Silca, with the Campagnolo steel head.  Aesthetically, that product approached the platonic ideal of bike pump and to this day I sigh to think of its perfection. 

Never mind that those plastic Silcas tended to foomp.  Foomping is where something goes wrong in the pump head and the full pressure of the tube, compressed mightily by a skinny bike tire, bursts back into the pump, blowing the handle and shaft right out the back and across the road.

I haven’t been consistent myself with regard to bike pumps.  After a few decades I got sick and tired of my Zéfal rattling, and as my strength waned with age I started to care more about weight, and switched to an absurd Silca mini-pump that barely works.  On a solo ride, I spend like ten or fifteen agonizing minutes forcing enough air into the tube to limp home.  On group rides, I keep from wasting everybody’s time by borrowing a proper frame pump.  To the extent the owner of the proper frame pump despises me, he is justified.

But that still doesn’t cover the spectrum of inflation options.  You also have foolish children (and childlike adults) who take their bikes to gas stations and use the compressors there.  A car tire requires a huge volume of air, so these compressors are really tricky.  You can explode your bike tire in the blink of an eye.  Bike shop compressors are better behaved, of course, but lots of mechanics I’ve known still used a good old floor pump.  Why?  I don’t know.  Love of precision?  Love of effort?  Fear of compressors?  It is true that even a bike shop compressor will turn on you occasionally, if you haven’t seated the tire right.  Once Bryan had inflated a high-pressure 2-inch-wide Tioga City Slicker and then noticed the bead popping off.  High pressure and high volume is a terrible combination—it’s terribly loud when it blows.  He dropped the compressor hose and gripped the tire with both hands, squeezing it to the rim to keep it from blowing off.  “Help!” he cried.  “Somebody come let the air out!”  We all just plugged our ears and pitied him.  He ran to the back door of the shop and threw the wheel.  The tire exploded—BLAM!—in mid-air.

A final group I shouldn’t leave out are the homeless.  Homeless bicyclists sometimes go dumpster-diving for tubes and tires and then ask the shop to loan them a pump or compressed air hose to inflate it with.  At the Thigh Feeler, we took care when throwing out a tire with a tear in the sidewall.  If the tire could be booted, we’d often take it for ourselves.  If not, we’d use a utility knife to utterly destroy the tire to make sure some homeless guy didn’t pluck it from the dumpster, fail to see the sidewall tear, mount it to his bike wheel, and end up crashing due to a sudden blowout.  Sometimes we’d get chewed out by a homeless guy for this practice.  (Boulder may be the only place I know of where the homeless feel such entitlement.)  One time a homeless guy begged to borrow our compressor hose, ignored the mechanic’s caveats and warnings and advisories, pumped up his tire, looked at us haughtily like we were all idiot yuppy scum, and pedaled off.  Twenty feet away—BLAM!  The tire blew, as did the guy, spewing profanity as he stalked off dragging his crippled bike beside him.

Fascinating fact #6:  self-sealing tubes really do work

In the early ‘90s, I worked at The Square Wheel bike shop in Berkeley.  One day we took delivery of a flashy new product:  the Specialized Airlock self-sealing inner tube.  These tubes carried an unconditional guarantee from the manufacturer.  I was skeptical, but they really did work.  As a demo, we had a mountain bike wheel in a truing stand with a big knobby tire and the Airlock tube installed.  I would do endless demos, driving a nail right through the tire with a hammer.  Air would start hissing out, and then I’d give the wheel a good spin, and within seconds centripetal (or was it centrifugal?) force would force goo into the hole, and the hissing would stop.  We did these demos constantly and never failed to get gasps from our customers.  After hundreds of such punctures the tube finally gave up the ghost:  it had run out of goo.  The next time the sales rep came around, I handed him the tube and asked for a warranty replacement.  He inspected the countless holes, laughed, and credited us for the tube.

I couldn’t help but notice the number of one-star reviews for this tube (click that last link to see).  As I’ve noted before, I can’t always relate to these one-star reviewers.  Maybe these tubes have gone downhill since the early ‘90s, or maybe these reviewers just don’t have the touch.

Fascinating fact #7:  inner tubes spawned an urban legend

At this same shop a fellow mechanic recommended latex inner tubes for tying up your girlfriend.  He boasted that both he and his girlfriend absolutely loved latex tubes for this.  Amazed, I informally polled the other mechanics and several of them agreed:  “Oh, yeah, latex tubes are the best for that!”

Now, I cannot be sure, but it seemed then and it seems now that this was urban myth.  I can totally understand how anybody handling a latex tube—which is as soft and smooth as kid leather—might wonder if its extraordinary tactile properties aren’t wasted on a product that spends its life inside a bike tire.  There’s also an obvious inclination to equate this bike-oriented latex product with the only other latex product young men are typically familiar with.  On the other hand, those tubes are fricking expensive and bike mechanics are usually so broke they won’t even fork out for latex tubes for their bikes.  Moreover, was this kind of kinky stuff really that common?  The only way for me to suss out the truth would have been to interview the girlfriends, but I wasn’t about to open that Pandora’s box.

Fascinating fact #8:  any valve core can be replaced

The first successful non-replaceable-valve-core replacement, which is the only one on record, was achieved in July of 1999.  Since this is as amazing as the first heart transplant, I am proud to say that I was the one who pulled it off.  (Full disclosure:  I’m merely the only person I know of who has done this.  Surely others have not only done it, but would say “We used to do this all the time, and what’s more, we didn’t even have…” and so on.  But for the purposes of this essay let’s agree this is impressive and you’re impressed, okay?)

I conceived of the idea as my wife and I drove to Moab, Utah for a mountain biking vacation.  Right before the trip, I’d snapped the end off of the presta valve on my mountain bike, and the extra tube I’d hastily pulled from my pile had a huge pinch flat and probably couldn’t be patched.  I grimly contemplated how badly a bike shop in Moab would gouge me for a new tube.  I couldn’t face that prospect.  So I pondered the possibility of fixing the valve.  I figured I could push the broken-off valve end into the tube, then cut a small hole across from the valve.  I’d then extract the valve guts from the donor tube and insert them into the valve stub through the hole I’d made.  Then I’d patch the access hole and be good to go.  I mentally rehearsed the operation over and over, looking for any reason why it wouldn’t work.  I had been quietly ruminating on this for a good while as we drove along, and finally my wife asked me what I was thinking about.

“You first,” I said, feeling trapped somehow by her question.  She’d never understand … would she?  She replied, “I was just thinking that once we have a house, we can get a piano, and a kitten, and have a baby!”  Great.  Now I was really stuck.  She continued, “Now it’s your turn … what were you thinking about?”  I had nowhere to go.  “I was pondering the world’s first inner tube valve-core replacement,” I confessed.

You may be interested to know that the valve replacement was a resounding success.  To this day, that tube is performing flawlessly in my mountain bike.  If you spin the wheel slowly, you can hear the quiet ticking of the old valve core as it rolls around inside the tube.  (If you do not find this interesting, you may yet be interested to know that my wife and I do have a house, a piano, a grown-up kitten, and not one but two children.)

Fascinating fact #9:  how you fix flats says a lot about your life

For this next bit I’m indebted to my teammate Marty.  As he expounded on a ride a few years back, puncture repair and phase of life are closely related.  As a teenager, you carry a patch kit on rides and patch the tube right there on the side of the road.  As a pre-adult, you carry a spare tube, and patch the original tube when you get home (so the number of tubes you own is always n+1 where n is the number of wheels you own).  By college you’ve got a few extra tubes and don’t always get around to patching the old one right away.  Once you’re working and making money, bike wheels start to accumulate, and when you run out of non-punctured tubes you just swap out the wheel.  By your forties, you have multiple bikes and can’t be bothered with swapping out a wheel, so when one bike has a flat you just ride the other one.  Eventually, in your fifties, all your bike tires go flat through disuse and you can’t be bothered even to pump them up.

My own experience matches this pretty well.  As a teenager, I was too cheap even for a proper patch kit.  There was only one patch kit on the market back then, because it was (and remains) the finest of its kind ever conceived.  I’m talking of course about the Rema Tip Top Two-wheel repair kit:

What you see there are the remnants of my last kit (I used up the last of the cold vulcanizing fluid patching Full Slab’s inner tube) along with a couple of vastly inferior patches from a modern, cheap, lame patch kit.  It disgusts me even to look at them.  Anyway, the only change in the Rema Tip Top since the 1970s is that they no longer provide a tiny little rubber tube whose function nobody could ever figure out to begin with.  It didn’t attach the tube of vulcanizing fluid, and was too small in diameter for the fluid to even flow through.  My personal theory is that it was included merely as a conversation piece.

But as I was saying, I was too cheap even for this exalted product.  I carried around a little bottle of super-glue and some squares of rubber cut from old inner tubes.  This worked pretty well until one day in the winter of ’85 when a friend and I were riding the Morgul-Bismark.  I punctured, and couldn’t repair the tube because it was too cold for the glue to work.  It was about 20 degrees out.  My pal, as it turned out, didn’t even have a patch kit.  I can’t remember how we eventually got my bike back running; probably I had to shove the patched tube down my shorts or something.

In the intervening years I’ve gone through dozens of new tubes, as the punctured ones piled up.  I have gobs of patches, but the vulcanizing fluid always dries out.  A couple years ago when my wife asked what I wanted for my birthday, I described in great detail the cans of Rema Tip Top cold vulcanizing fluid, with the brush built into the lid, that we’d use at the Thigh Feeler.  With one of those babies, I could patch every single one of my tubes and have plenty of fluid left over.  But my wife must not have been paying attention—she must have heard “blah blah blah fluid blah blah patch tubes blah blah blah” because what she went out and bought me was not a big can of cold vulcanizing fluid, but just a little tube of it.  At least she got the right brand.

By the way, if you’re annoyed at my constant use of the term “cold vulcanizing fluid,” I confess that it’s one of my pet phrases, my use of which I realize almost begs to be mocked.  In fact, my wife has mocked me for it, and for “Syncromesh,” “double-clutch,” and “constant-velocity joint.”  So, yeah … pile on.

Suffice to say, being out of this fluid is exactly how a veteran cyclist builds up his seemingly inexhaustible stockpile of inner tubes.

Fascinating fact #10:  the mythical “third valve type” does exist

Look:  it’s neither Presta nor Schrader! 

This is on a kids’ bike I got from my brother Geoff, who now lives in the Netherlands.  You pump it up with a Presta pump chuck, but there’s no little valve top to unscrew.  I have no idea if this valve type has a name. 

If I had a son, he’d probably be really proud to have these special valves on his bike.  My daughters, who each had their turn with this hand-me-down bike, were less than impressed.  I guess they take after their mom.