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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Virtual Reality Killer App!

Introduction

For many years we’ve been hearing about how Virtual Reality (VR) is going to be a game-changer across the human experience, and not just a whiz-bang enhancement to video gaming. This is an amazing technology just waiting to be monetized. We’ve heard various proposed use cases involving education, physical therapy, tools for first responders, etc. but decades on VR is still kind of a fringe thing, without the “killer app” that will launch it into the forefront of blah blah blah. Well, this post proposes a truly germane use of this technology that could benefit millions of people. Instead of boring you with an essay on what I’m proposing, I’m going to walk you through the experience I have in mind. Call this post “VVR” ... as in, Verbal VR.

The experience

You enter the VR facility, receive a brief tutorial, don a haptic suit and a virtual reality headset, and mount an omnidirectional treadmill. Immediately you are immersed in a totally new world … but actually, it’s not exactly new. It’s all too familiar, from the dry heat of a late spring day (courtesy of the haptic suit) to the sound of yelling and cheering, to the sight of a red-orange running track surrounding an unrealistically brilliantly green infield. It’s a lot like where you ran track in high school except that the bleachers are completely full.

You look down at yourself and you’re wearing the same track uniform, with the distinctive Cobra insignia, that you wore in high school. You explore your environment and find you’re surrounded by ultra-fit looking teens in the identical uniforms, many of them calling you by name. “Stacey, are you pumped?!” a girl asks. After a pause she gives you a simpatico look and whispers, “Gawd, I’m actually so nervous!”

You look down again and see that you’re definitely wearing track cleats. You realize you’re not just here to wander around. “Stacey, we gotta warm up, we’re up next!” someone yells. She jogs over to you and says, “Let’s go!” But before you can follow her, a gruff forty-something man with a Cobras cap, a tracksuit, a clipboard, and a whistle hanging on a lanyard approaches. “Stacey, I need a minute with you,” he says, and ushers you off to the side.

“Look, today has got to be the day,” he declares. “We’ve never been this close to winning Conference. All our top runners are totally peaking right now. This is a massive opportunity. And like we talked about after last practice, I’m not having you run any events except the 100 meter hurdle, so you can just focus purely on that. Obviously there’s no way you’ll win, but I really think you can get top three. Your speed, your form, it’s all there—but as I’ve said all season, you need to three-step it. It breaks my heart every time I see you heading for the hurdle, flying along, everything perfect, and then you suddenly chicken out and do that childish stutter step. You should be well beyond this. I know you can three-step because you did it that time in practice when I ran next to you and yelled at you the whole time. You did it perfect. I really thought that was the breakthrough, that you’d do it right from then on.”

It’s all coming back to you now: the dreaded three-step, the bane of your high school existence. When you graduated, most of your excitement was actually relief that you were done with track: you’d managed to get your letter, you’d put the experience on your college essay, but you wouldn’t be running in college, and nobody would ever hassle you about three-stepping for the rest of your life. And yet here’s this coach, practically frothing at the mouth, exhorting you all over again.

“It’s not just the points, Stacey. I mean, it is—you definitely need a top three here, and like I said you cannot get that with all the momentum you lose stutter-stepping—but it’s bigger than that. We need every girl to be totally on today. Do you remember how stoked everyone was when Barb won the 400 at the last meet? That lifted everyone. We were having a good meet but after that win, everyone dug deeper and we had a great meet. If you do your typical step-stuttering thing here you’re gonna bring down morale for everyone. We’ve worked on your speed and technique all season and I know you can do this, you have to do this.”

Here he peers over the top of his sunglasses and looks you right in the eye. “Are we good? Are you gonna do this right?” You manage to croak out some kind of response and he nods and trots away. There’s a lump in your throat. Before you can make another move, a girl has bounded over and says, “Okay, Stacey, today is the day! We all gotta give our 110%! It’s Conference!” When you don’t respond, her smile vanishes and she glares at you. “This is our senior year. Our last chance. Don’t you fuck this up for us!” This girl must be the team captain.

Now the first girl is grabbing you by the wrist. You’d marvel at the tactile accuracy of the haptic suit except that you’ve entirely forgotten this is VR … that’s how good it is. It really feels like you’re being tugged toward an actual infield by a real teammate. “Wait,” you tell her. “I … I kind of need to hit the restroom.” And it’s true. Along with the butterflies in your stomach you’ve got the age-old pre-race instinct, deep down in your body, to lighten the load. You really need to go. Like, number two. It’s a strong urge—your bowels are starting to churn. Your teammate points toward the restrooms and you start jogging over there. You start to worry: am I gonna make it in time? But when you get there you remember this is only VR and there’s only so much it can do. You need an actual restroom. Merely touring the virtual one would be no more satisfying than those nighttime dreams you have of eating, where the food always vanishes as soon as you try to take a bite.

You paid good money to play this game, but that’s not important now. You lift the VR goggles off your head and prop them on your forehead, and step off the treadmill. You head over to the lobby and tell the attendant, “I need to use a restroom.”

“Now?” he says. “It can’t wait? You still have 20 minutes on your game! By the time you take off the haptic suit, do your business, and zipper yourself back in, it’ll be half over!” But his eyes are smiling: he knows how pressing your need is. You nod vigorously. “Right over there,” he points. You stride swiftly to the restroom and push through the door.

It’s not just any restroom: it’s gleaming perfection, all brushed aluminum surfaces, a big drain in the floor and state-of-the-art sprinkler system overhead. There are giant fans in the louvered windows. It’s clear the entire room is totally sanitized and refreshed between uses. The throne-like toilet even has a bidet option. You’ve never been so glad to see a public restroom in your life. And that’s when you know: today’s VR experience isn’t about the game at all. It’s about this.

Conclusion

According to Johns Hopkins, about 4 million Americans suffer from frequent constipation, which “is the most common gastrointestinal complaint, resulting in 2.5 million doctor visits annually.” It causes bloating, sluggishness, and abdominal pain. Treatment is challenging, because laxatives cause side effects and prolonged usage can become a problem of its own. Diet and lifestyle changes are a good long term course of action, but don’t provide much help when you’re having a bad bout … maybe you haven’t had a good bowel movement in days, and you wish there were just some silver bullet providing instant relief. Well, I just contrived one.

Of course there are details to work out, like matching up the details of the specific gameplay and script with the player’s individual history. (For example, maybe you never did a sport, but at least used to run through the neighbor’s yard and had to make it to the far fence before their dog caught you.) The game makers could create versions involving other fraught human enterprises like dating or public speaking. Fine details aside, I think you can agree that the immersive VR technology now available could provide exactly what so many people really need: a non-ingested, 100% safe, 100% effective psychological laxative. Now someone just needs to go code this game!

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Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip - Part IV

Introduction

Well, albertnet used to be a blog about nothing. Now it seems to have become a blog about my cycling trip in France. Part I is here, Part II is here, and Part III is here. One day perhaps I’ll run out of Alpine tales to recount, and meals to describe, but that’s still a long way off. In this post I cover the famous Col de la Madeleine and the relentless Col du Glandon. Is the Glandon also famous, the Madeleine relentless? Yes and yes. Do cured meats figure strongly in this report? Yes!

Col de la Madeleine

Day 5 featured the second and third hardest climbs in the Alps, according to the organizers. We started with the Col de la Madeleine, 14.9 miles long at an average grade of 6.6%. The ride was hard even before the climb began because we had ten miles of gradual descending first, at a motor-pacing tempo behind the tour guide. My pool-cue-to-the-gluteus pain was still there, plus after four hard days of riding I was pretty knackered in general. When the climb started I was dropped instantly from our Epic A group (which had dwindled from ~15 riders initially down to 5, the others having switched to Epic B). Only a kilometer into the climb, my pals (along with some rando you see there on the right) stopped to wait for me at the only intersection, knowing I’m just dumb enough to take a wrong turn.

In this case I wouldn’t have actually gotten lost because a) my bike computer navigation was working fine (see Part II for details) and b) I remembered what the tour leader had said in the pre-ride meeting: “Don’t go towards Pussy!” (Click the above photo and look at the signpost on the right.)

From here I was immediately dropped again and made my slightly dejected, slow way up the mountain. There were lots of switchbacks, and tree-lined ravines to stare blankly into. The cement guardrails were the perfect height to flip a cyclist over the bars.

After some time I came upon Ian and Craig, stopped along the road. Craig had punctured and Ian was hanging out during the repair. I left them for dead and continued on up the road. This gave me the opportunity to watch their gradual progress, switchback after switchback, as they reeled me back in.

They eventually, inevitably, caught me and we rode together for a while, and then with about 7 kilometers to go they sailed off into the distance again. I slogged along solo, and a bit later came across a bunch of cows, their bells making a pleasant sound. Cows and cowbells normally buoy my spirits, but then I saw something kind of disturbing: many of these cows had weird plastic things attached to their snouts.

They looked kind of like the thick plastic ring-thingies you get with expensive four-packs of craft beer. What the hell were they, and did they have to be plastic? For some reason this brought to mind the frightening plastic-faced children in the train tunnel scene of “Pink Floyd: The Wall.” I was starting to kind of dislike the Col de la Madeleine.

That said, it sure was scenic. Check out this view, with Mont Blanc at the left edge of that range there.

I made the summit and enjoyed a brief picnic with my pals. I made a sandwich of good French bread with olive oil, guacamole, and these weird cigarette-sized sticks of cured meat; the package said simply “Galibier.” This weird creation was oddly tasty, under the circumstances. By the way, there tended to be a tub of guac at every picnic, and it was never very good … pretty much whatever you get in a tub at Costco. But then, we can’t expect the French to be great at everything and it’s nice to know the U.S. can still be better at something. (After all, the tub guac at Whole Foods is better than this, albeit more expensive than cocaine.)

Here’s the photo-op. I know “Altitude 2000m” might not mean much to my American readers. It equates to 6,562 feet elevation in Imperial units (or, as my brother calls them, “Freedom units”). Of course those of us who have conquered Mount Evans, with its summit of 14,270 feet, might have a harder time thinking 6,562 is any big deal. But the Madeleine gains over 5,000 feet and it has cows with weird plastic nose things, okay? Take my word for it, it’s grueling.

We had another glorious descent. Permit me an aside here on the topic of risk management. During my nights of poor sleep throughout this trip, as I tossed and turned, I often contemplated the danger of descending and the high stakes. “Oh dear!” my wussified, disgracefully declawed middle-aged psyche would say. “What if I crash?” Probably this interior monologue wasn’t actually about bike safety at all, but was based on some generalized anxiety that needed something specific to latch on to … basically an excuse to fret. Whatever the case, I as I lay there having these self-defeating thoughts I would resolve to take it super-easy on the remaining downhills. Fortunately, this soul-degrading inner voice was somehow vanquished during each ride as my normal, justifiable confidence reasserted itself. That is to say, the descents were glorious affairs, grand and sweeping and flowing and perfect. To paraphrase Faulkner, middle-age might have kilt me but it ain’t whupped me yet.

So, according to the tour organizers, the Madeleine is the third hardest climb in the Alps, and the Col du Glandon—which was our next climb of the day—is the second hardest. That’s a lot to throw at us, particularly the day after we conquered the very hardest climb, Col de la Loze. I had some butterflies heading into the Glandon, which were somewhat assuaged by this amusing sight:

We ultimately decided to brush this praying mantis off of Ian’s jersey, because what if this little insect hitched a ride all the way to the Glandon summit, out of his element and far from his kind?

Our group broke up right away, and I went straight out the back in accordance with what seemed to be the new status quo. I didn’t really mind; I have a talent for resignation (which serves a cyclist well). That weird pain in my gluteus maximus (or perhaps gluteus medius—what am I, a doctor?!) was still bedeviling me. But one of the great things about cycling is that there’s scenery to enjoy, even as you suffer. Prizefighters, for example, don’t get to look upon landscapes like this as they’re being pummeled.

After a few miles I caught up to M—, my roommate on the tour. We paced each other and chatted for a good while until I found myself in a strange dilemma. Riding in the saddle, my glute hurt. Standing on the pedals, I got some relief. But the very low gear on my rental bike (35-tooth chainring, 33 rear cog) was so low, pedaling out of the saddle felt lame—mincing, ineffectual little pedal strokes that barely move the bike forward. My ego couldn’t handle it. So I had to shift up before I could properly ride out of the saddle. Obviously this increased my pace and thus my labor, but burning legs is the proper kind of pain, the kind caused by hard work, as opposed to this blunt stab in my glute that suggested injury. The upshot is that I gradually dropped my pal and thus faced another endless Alpine climb solo. But I’m used to it. Bernard Hinault said once, “No kind of progress will ever overcome the loneliness of the long-distance rider,” and he would know.

As the climb progressed, the scenery changed from what you’d see on a postcard to something more spare, sparse, even kind of bleak—or maybe this was just my psychological state filtering what I saw. All the trees disappeared, and the grasses had a cropped, stubbly look, their green turning to a mossy yellow, suggesting (at least to me) a pallid, wan lack of health, as though the plant life couldn’t get enough oxygen. More and more, the rock seemed to be winning out, beating back the flora. The views were impressive but not exactly pretty. In the final kilometer of the climb (which averaged 10%) a guide dropped back to pace me along.

It was a relief to be near the summit because, as disciplined as I try to be, it’s hard to stop negativity from infiltrating my thoughts, sometimes even of the “can I even make it?” variety. Normally, as discussed here, I am good at stomping down this negative self-talk, but the sheer leg-wringing length of these Alpine grades can start to wear down even the most stubborn resolve. That’s where decades of accumulated suffering start to pay off, with a deeply resigned attitude that embraces the fatalistic notion that there is no choice, no alternative, just the reality of serving out your sentence. There’s almost a comfort in this, eventually; as Dostoyevsky wrote, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!”

Even as I reached the Glandon summit I had this other quiet voice gradually insinuating itself, with a message I knew was important but didn’t want to hear. We’d been briefed that the Glandon wasn’t our final summit, that we had to head from there to the top of the Col de la Croix de Fer, which I’d been up once before, twenty years ago when I first raced La Marmotte. The Croix de Fer summit isn’t far from the summit of the Glandon, and it’s not a steep pitch, but nothing seems trivial this far into such a brutal day of riding. I pushed the matter out of my mind until the end of the Glandon when it could no longer be ignored: I had another three kilometers to go. I dragged myself the rest of the way and eventually reached the true high point of the day, at 6,782 feet. The iron cross you see on the left there may or may not be the croix de fer. I didn’t have the energy to investigate.

A picnic was waiting at the van, and a staffer volunteered to make me a sandwich. What service! He sawed a couple slices off a perfect French bâtard (proving in the process that the expression “greatest thing since sliced bread” is way off-base). He added olive oil, and can I just interrupt this post for a moment to say how much I hate it when a menu at an upscale restaurant employs the abbreviation “EVOO” for “extra virgin olive oil”? When I see that I almost want to head for the exit. Below the menu item “Herb-crusted beef medallions” you see the accompaniments, “Tomatillo-garlic salsify, braised parsnips, EVOO hummus.” Pretentious fuckwits. Okay, where was I? Oh yeah, so some oil, then groovy French cheese (what type? doesn't matter), prosciutto (of course), and the albeit mediocre guac (and again, who cares because this isn’t a chichi bistro). Oh yeah.

If I ever open a restaurant I’ll serve this (with proper guac, of course, or maybe just avocado) and call it “Le Glandon.” I won’t explain the name on the menu and the description won’t say anything about “EVOO.”

There was a corny picture frame thingy up there and I tried haplessly to do a selfie with it. A German motorcyclist intervened and got a passable shot.

As you can see, the day’s effort has both grown and deepened my crow’s feet. Too much more of this and my face might just crack.

We started the descent but abruptly halted because we didn’t have everyone. I took the opportunity to snap one more photo, and as I did so the missing guy showed up and everyone sailed by, so I was chasing like a madman after that. The photo came out well, though, so it was worth it.

The little town of St-Jean-de-Maurienne where we finished up does not have a fancy hotel, so we were at a Best Western next to what looked like a rock crushing plant. It was the nicest Best Western I’ve ever seen, with little bicycle pictures all over the wallpaper. It had no restaurant so we went to this greasy-spoon type pizza joint, all Formica and linoleum, of such barebones tacky aspect it even had advertisements on the menu. In the U.S., this would be your sign to flee immediately, but we’d heard this place was good. The menu was entirely in French which led to some confusion. I almost ordered a pizza with “thon” on it, before learning what thon is: chunk light tuna, like out of a can. If memory serves tuna was a topping on the pizza they called “California,” though I may be conflating this with the Dutch frozen pizza line “Big Americans.” Anyway, I was able to find a pizza with no thon, though I think all the pizzas had some form of cured meat. The food ended up proving out my theory that the French are simply incapable of doing a bad job, even at their greasy-spoons. The pizza was excellent. Fun fact: in France, they don’t cut up the pizza for you. You have to hack away at it with a fork and knife. 

Some of the guys around me made the shock-and-awe move of ordering dueling entrees, such as a pizza and a calzone. It’s rare for me to be out-eaten, but I’d had a big-ass snack right after the ride in accordance with the glycogen window principle of sports nutrition, which has been scientifically proven by my daughter.

Ian ordered profiteroles and they were majestic.

All who know me understand that a) I have a massive appetite, b) I have no fear of saturated fats, c) the idea of “guilty” pleasures or “sinfully” rich never enters my mind, and d) I absolutely love free food. Since I’d already paid for this trip (it’s an all-expenses-included deal), all signs pointed to me ordering a dessert or two. Reader, I did not. I’d had too many gels, too much energy drink, too much chocolate milk, and too much Coke that day to even contemplate any more sweets. This is how you can finally begin to understand how difficult cycling in the Alps truly is.

Check back soon, because I will be reporting on Day 6, the hardest one yet....

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Self-Talk In Action

Introduction

Ageing isn’t all bad … I think I’ve acquired some wisdom, and at least the money is better. But, being an athlete, I find the inevitable decline of my body a bit hard to take, especially as I have a long history of judging my performance. Sometimes I begin to feel resigned to putting sport behind me … but then I catch myself and dig back in. It’s a constant struggle, and I’m having to talk myself down from negativity time and time again. This post explores the role of “self-talk” in how we see ourselves, and what it “sounds” like when this self-talk is put into action.

What is self-talk?

My cycling friend Mike Ceely, a licensed psychotherapist and founder of Ceely Sports, an athlete coaching company, describes self-talk on his blog, here. It’s a way that an inner voice responds to, and reinforces, a belief system. For example, he considers a gymnast who is a perfectionist: “Maybe her first coach taught her that mistakes were unacceptable. Because of this, her belief system is ‘people won't like me if I make mistakes.’”

Ceely goes on to explain, “The key to changing your beliefs is to listen to the language—often subconscious—that we use to evaluate ourselves.” I completely relate to this, as I beat down the nascent belief system that I’m too old to be an athlete. This comes into play regularly, when I try to keep up with the high school mountain bike racers whom I coach. My self-talk starts up when we’re five minutes into our ride and cranking up a 10% grade. This is the hardest part of the whole ride for me, as I really need to warm up but the kids clearly don’t. So I have this battle of voices: “I’m just not warmed up,” one says, and the other replies, “I’m making excuses. I’m just too old for this.”

Can self-talk be tamed?

What I experience going up that first hill is a fairly typical dialogue for those who don’t just give in and accept the unhelpful belief system. Ceely advises, “Stop using negative self-talk, and start using positive self-talk. This is the ‘outside-in’ approach. Tell yourself something long enough, and you start to believe it. Instead of saying ‘I’ll never get better’ say, ‘I want to get better.’”

Of course this doesn’t mean I should tell myself, “I will get younger.” Ceely points out that “positive self-talk must be realistic. Saying ‘I will win’ when you’re up against tough competition is not smart. Instead say something positive and unconditional like, ‘strong’ or ‘smooth.’”

The psychologist and author Benjamin Hardy, in this article, points out that past success can actually make it harder to stand up to negative self-talk. He notes, “Some of the most difficult negative thoughts will relate to your past. If you’ve been relatively successful in the past, your mind will always make you believe that you’re not as good as you used to be. Your mind will try to convince you that you’ve lost your touch.” In my experience, this seems like a very rational approach. After all, I have all this data—heart rate, average speed, stopwatch times up my favorite climbs—showing me that yes, my body is slowing down, my power output dwindling.

Hardy goes on, “The first step of silencing your mind is to not believe the negative and limiting thoughts that will relentlessly plague you if you’re growing and learning. See these thoughts for what they are—your subconscious wants certainty and predictability.” How true. So often I’ll be riding and will try to match the speed of a kid I used to drop, only to discover that my legs have checked out for the day. My body used to be pretty predictable … it performed pretty much the same, day after day. Now it’s like all the planets have to line up for me to feel “on.”

So what is to be done, when that negative voice comes over my mental PA system reminding me I’m in my 50s? Do I just ignore it? No, it’s more complicated than that. Hardy explains, “Simply trying to avoid negative thoughts is not enough. You must load-up on goal-directed stimuli, which include information, behaviors, environments, etc.”

Ceely describes the inner dialogue really well in this article, saying:

The inner critic is a natural psychological mechanism that all humans have. Its purpose is to problem-solve by pointing out your (real or imagined) errors and flaws. Historically, its purpose was to protect you. Pointing out your errors back in the caveman days was advantageous.

Because your brain uses language to represent ideas, it’s easy to confuse the messages of the inner critic as your own. Instead, think of the inner critic as a linguistic personification of a primal survival mechanism. It’s useful, but tends to overreact and be a bit hyperbolic… The key is to know that your inner critic is just one of many voices, or internal mechanisms, that try to communicate information to you. Think of your inner critic and other internal voices like members of a board of directors, where you are the Founder, CEO, and majority shareholder. You’re in charge. Your job is to listen to the board members, take their words into consideration, then make executive decisions.

Here’s the cool thing: you don’t have to believe everything “you” think. This means you can take the role of the higher self, the observer, the one who dis-identifies from the automatic narrative playing in the background. 

How this plays out fascinates me.

Self-talk in action

All year I’ve been focusing on mountain biking, which for the Albany High team means trail rides of generally 2-3 hours, with lots of breaks along the way. This past weekend, one of the guys on my road team emailed the group suggesting a (road) ride up Mount Diablo, which would be over 80 miles—twice my longest ride of the year—with lots of climbing and very few breaks. As you might imagine, this would be a real stretch for me. But I cautiously accepted, replying, “Sounds good, if you don’t mind a mellow pace,” etc., which I knew would come across as a coded message that actually meant “I’m gonna try to rip your legs off,” because that’s just the typical bike racer ruse. But I meant it … I’ve ridden so little on the road, my road bike still feels weird to me, like the handlebars are way too narrow. I literally haven’t ridden with the team once this year.

As we headed over the Berkeley hills the little voice in my head popped up and said, “I wonder if there’ll be a sprint.” As I’ve described here, and as you’ve surely noticed yourself, one’s self-talk leverages his or her entire history and doesn’t have to spell everything out. The sprint in question is the inevitable race to a particular pedestrian crossing in Moraga, a challenge which virtually every group I’ve ridden with in the last 30 years has taken up, until a bridge washed out and disrupted the tradition. The last time I rode that route, the new bridge was still under construction and had just one lane with a traffic signal installed, so for the group to make it through without stopping would be a toss-up.

Now the voices in my head started bickering:

“If there’s a sprint I should sit it out. This is my first group ride in months.”

“That’s nonsense. I always sprint.”

“It’ll be shoulder-to-shoulder, slicing & dicing, I’m not ready.”

“I’m always ready. I know how to do this.”

“What if my chain breaks under full power?” [This notion arose because recently, pre-riding a mountain bike race course, my chain did break and I crashed.]

“Stop being ridiculous.”

The negative voice, you’ll notice, was just making excuses, the kind that would serve the “I’m too old” belief system (which Ceely rightly abbreviates BS, pun intended). My self-talk CEO didn’t explain his rationale because he wants to rule with an iron fist. The problem with that kind of leadership, of course, is getting real buy-in from everyone. My inner critic wouldn’t be silenced.

We made our way down Pinehurst Road and the speed ramped up. Over the painful little climb on Canyon Road, a couple of guys were drilling it on the front, clearly starting to set up their sprint.

“I’ll probably get dropped right here and miss the sprint.”

“Pfff. No way. Start at the front, drift back, and work back up.”

“Missing the sprint would be kinda nice.”

“Missing the sprint is out of the question.”

Down the other side of the hill my inner critic worried about safety.

“There’s a giant pothole somewhere. It destroyed your car tire last year.”

“It’s a paved descent. This is just not that complicated.”

As we headed toward the sprint, the pace ramped higher and higher. Suddenly D— launched a blistering early attack, starting at the back and flying by us on the left. Everyone dove for his wheel. I got gapped and shifted into my highest gear to chase.

“They’re gone. I missed it. I don’t have the jump I needed.”

“They’re right there. At this speed the slipstream is huge. I can latch on.”

“What am I even doing trying to mix it up with these guys? I never had a sprint to begin with! I’m not a fast-twitch guy! What am I doing here?”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

If you were starting to get bored, fear not … this is where things get interesting. As you may have noticed, my inner critic isn’t very sophisticated. As Ceely described, this critic operates mainly out of fear: fear of failure, fear of injury. It’s old messaging, like a broken record. But an upside of being old is that I have a wealth of experience in road racing bunch sprints, and the movements have become so ingrained, they become almost automatic. My neocortex loves the tactical complexity required, and finally the thrill of the hunt becomes irresistible. All the negative self-talk drops away … I’m like a cat going after a laser pointer. Now the self-talk is more focused and intelligent … it hones in on the “goal-directed stimuli” described in Hardy’s article.

“B— is on the back but he’s just getting going. He’s the fastest sprinter here. If I get his wheel I’m golden.”

“And there’s his attack! And I don’t need a jump—I’m already going faster than the group because I’ve been chasing! Getting dropped was a gift! I love this sport!”

“Nobody saw him jump—his wheel is wide open! Get it! Get it! Harder, harder, drill it, I’m almost there!”

“I’ve got the wheel! Hold that wheel! Hold it! Shit, I’m golden!”

In case you haven’t had the pleasure of a cycling bunch sprint, this was the part where I was putting out all the power I was capable of, but without the wind resistance I’d have fought if riding alone. It’s a bit like catching a wave, I suppose … this extraordinary rush of speed and the delicious sensation of doing something I’d be incapable of if not latched on to my teammate’s wheel. Meanwhile, I could tell from my peripheral vision, and from the decrease in sound, that the rest of the group was gone. We’d made the jump to light-speed.

“Can I get around B—? No. I’m topped out. Can’t do it.” [This isn’t technically negative self-talk … it’s just stating a fact.]

“God, what a rush.”

“Second place in Walking Man is not bad.”

“Holy shit, who the hell is that?!”

Another rider inexplicably came flying by right as we reached the pedestrian crossing. It was Y—, D—’s  14-year-old son and a rising star in both road and mountain bike racing in NorCal. He’s got the build of a climber, which should make such a phenomenal sprint impossible, except that he’s clearly hugely talented. He also played his cards almost perfectly … the only reason he didn’t beat B— in the end is that he chose my wheel, probably assuming I’d start to pass B— and then (and only then) he’d launch his own sprint and overtake both of us. But I didn’t go fast enough, and didn’t start to pass B—… I just kind of sat there. Y— probably won’t overestimate me again. He’ll be going directly for B—’s wheel next time.

Did my negative self-talk start up again after the sprint? No, I’m more realistic than that. What would be the point of faulting myself after the fact, especially when I’d done a good sprint? Besides, since Y— races against my Albany High team, I automatically considered his feat from the perspective of coach. (My result doesn’t matter, it’s just for kicks.) Besides, I had more on my mind anyway: we still had Mount Diablo to tackle.

Epilogue

Sure, there was a little more self-talk on the way up the mountain, as I tried to keep up with Y— for as long as possible while still having enough in the tank to make the summit, and then make it home. But the inner critic quiets down a fair bit when adrenaline and endorphins enter the picture and things are going well. I ended up climbing Diablo a shocking nine minutes faster than last time (which was all the way back in September, when I was still coasting on my fitness from my DIY Everest Challenge). On the way home, I kept waiting for my body to give out, but it never did, and I even clocked a decent time on Wildcat Canyon, the last climb. Next time my inner critic starts naysaying, my inner CEO will simply reply, “You know nothing. Remember that Diablo ride? I got this.”

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Ready for Everest Challenge 2014?

Introduction

The one big race I do every year, the Everest Challenge Stage Race—two days of racing with 29,000 feet of vertical gain—is  coming right up.  In case that “29,000 feet” description doesn’t tell you much, consider that each stage of this race is like climbing a 5-mile staircase with 24,000 steps that would take you to the top of a 1,160-story building.  The first day is bad enough, but the second day is murder.  The third (and last) climb on the second day is, by itself, the equivalent of a two-mile staircase with 10,000 steps reaching the top of a 490-story building.

A friend asked recently, “Are you ready?”  It was not my wife who asked.  She knows better, having had quite enough of my blather.  It was my friend John who asked; he flew out from New York to race the EC two years ago.

I could have simply answered John directly, since he was reckless enough to ask and might actually be interested in the answer.  But why answer only him, when I could blog about it on albertnet, where other people, like my mom and a Russian hacker, might also see it?  Plus, maybe you’re considering racing the EC, or have already signed up, and are wondering more generally, what does it take to be ready for it? 

(Perhaps most importantly of all, this post will come in handy later, when the EC is over, as a retrospective building block for self-flagellation.)

My gut

My gut tells me that I’m ready.  But then, what does “ready” mean?  I’m very confident I can finish, since I have five times before.  Beyond this minimal sense, “ready” begs the question “Ready to do what?”  To a snowboarder, “ready” means “Ready to shred this gnar’!”  Which I’m totally ready to do, unless you’re talking about descending, where my modern chickenshit approach and undersized “big” chainring keep me decidedly within non-shredding, non-gnar territory.

So, what am I trying to do this year?  Well, after all the solid training I did last year, I ended up setting the wrong goal.  (I should have followed my own advice and not set a goal at all.)  I’d been so miserable on the final second-day climb in 2012, I vowed to take it easier in 2013 and pace myself better, especially on the first day.  (Day-to-day recovery is my Achilles heel.)  Did this strategy work?  Well, I certainly felt better on the second day’s last climb last year, but I was only 3 minutes 40 seconds faster ... and I was 20 minutes slower the first day.  So whatever suffering I saved myself then has been dwarfed by the year of self-loathing I’ve subsequently suffered.  (I’m reminded of a Steve Coogan line:  “Remember:  death is but a moment; cowardice is a lifetime of affliction.”)

So, this year, I’m going to try to man up and go as fast as I can, both days.  I know that sounds simplistic, but go try racing for more than twelve hours over two days and then decide if you still think this all-out business makes any sense at all.  So:  am I “ready” to go utterly destroy myself?  Well, can you ever be “ready” for that?  And conversely, aren’t we all born ready?

Of course, “my gut” doesn’t refer only to a subjective sense of readiness.  It also refers to whether or not I’m fat.  “Fat” in cycling parlance means having an abnormally low amount of body fat that is nonetheless still higher than what you wish you had.  I’m pleased to report that my fancy electrode-equipped scale tells me, as of a couple days ago, that I have 5.9% body fat. 

There’s some fine print, though:  you have to configure the scale with your height, age, and whether you’re an athlete or not.  This last setting probably tells the algorithm to simply lower the number so that the self-styled athlete doesn’t get pissed off and demand a refund on his crappy scale. 

The numbers

I keep a really detailed training diary.  I know, I know, I should use Strava for this, everybody keeps telling me that, but I don’t feel like sharing all my details with the world, especially if I’m updating the comments right after a workout and might write something untoward.  (The pro team Omega Pharma-Quick Step has a rule against riders tweeting within an hour of competition “when when emotions can be running high, and logic and reason can go out of the window.”)

Old-school Excel training diary in hand, I compared this year’s EC training to that of 2012.  (Of course how I prepared in 2013 is irrelevant, that race being an ugly smear on my memory.)  The below chart shows a comparison of the EC training period (beginning after vacation and ending in mid-September) for both years.  What I’ve discovered is that my preparation has been almost eerily similar:

Look at that.  Only ten seconds difference on Mount Diablo.  The biggest contrast is the number of Diablo ascents, but this year I did two fairly comparable rides in Colorado  (click here and here for details).  The difference in vertical gain might look like a lot, but actually, I gain that much vertical in just a couple of weekday (i.e., evening) rides.

Now, if I were a proper bike dork, I’d have a power meter and could look at all kinds of extraordinary numbers.  And in fact, it would help me during my rides as well.  I saw this in action last weekend when, on the second trip up Mount Diablo of the day, my pal Craig dropped my other pal, Ian, and me.  Craig just walked away from us (figuratively speaking).  At the summit, when Ian commented on this, Craig said humbly, “I was just watching my power meter and trying to keep it between 300 and 350 watts.”  To which Ian replied, “Yeah, I was just trying to keep mine between zero and 200.”

The requisite lugubrious day

I think it’s pretty unlikely that anybody training for a race like EC, and then racing it, will escape having a truly lugubrious day.  If he does, he’s either loafing too much (like I did last year) or is egregiously lubed like the pros.  (Yes of course I noticed that “egregiously lubed” is an anagram of “lugubrious leg guy,” except when it isn’t really, which is always.)

The trick, I think, is to get that lugubrious day out of the way during training so that you won’t have it during the race.  It’s like an insurance policy against having a particularly bad day when it really counts.  This almost worked in 2012 when I did a double-Diablo training ride fueled entirely by greasy dim sum, as chronicled here.  But I wasn’t quite miserable enough that day to call it lugubrious, which perhaps is why that last EC climb became my crowning lugubrious moment of the year.

What exactly do I mean by lugubrious?  Well, you know, just mournfully, pathetically, almost comically sad (though too sad for it to be funny).  This photo, I think, captures it pretty well.  Yes, I’m actually sobbing into my orange slices (after totally cratering in the 2003 La Marmotte).

So, you may be wondering, have I had my 2014 lugubrious moment?  Well, I almost got it out of the way really early, on January 1, when I raced the Mount San Bruno hill climb.  I went into the race angry, and was hoping to channel that anger into a great performance.  But as I wrote in my subsequent race report, “As I got dropped, I discovered that it’s possible to be bitter without being angry.  In fact, I just felt sad.”

Fortunately, that wasn’t my most miserable biking moment of 2014.  Nor was a frigid ride in the rain in February, though that experience was also awful enough to write about.  No, my worst ride of the year so far—which certainly deserves the lugubrious label—was my first double-Diablo after getting back from vacation (i.e., from missing almost three weeks of riding). 

Man, that ride was just awful.  I clocked abysmal times on the climbs, and couldn’t even keep up with my pals on the flat section back from the mountain.  (Because I’d taken so long on the climbs, Craig had to really motor to get home on time, and couldn’t wait up for me anymore.)  I finished up with over an hour of solo riding when I was barely able to turn the pedals.  By the end I was just totally shattered.  Everything hurt ... my legs, of course, and my butt, and also my forearms, my biceps, even my hands.  Even coasting hurt.  I came away from that ride feeling that the “good base mileage” rule is bogus—that I’d have been no worse off had I done no riding at all during the spring.  After that ride I was totally useless for five days straight.

(They say misery loves company, and I was duly cheered to learn that another pal on that ride fared even worse than I had.  Despite skipping the second trip up the mountain, he had to stop to lie down three times on the way home.)

Omen

All those stats I provided earlier may end up meaning nothing, as stats often do, so I should probably hedge my bet a bit with an omen.  I certainly have one to share, though whether it’s a good omen or not remains to be seen.

Last week I was hammering home through Tilden Park, at the tail end of an evening training ride, in the last moments of weak daylight before dusk set in, when I saw something swoop down from out of a tree.  Its trajectory was totally unlike that of a bird.  It came right at me and then swerved at the last second, but in the wrong direction so instead of going over my head, it went down and actually hit my thigh on its way past.  “What are you, blind?!” I thought, before realizing that yes, in fact, it was.  It had to have been a bat.  Moments after seeing it, I saw another creature of the same size and odd flight style, but this one was silhouetted against the horizon and was definitely a bat.  I got home and googled “bats Tilden park Berkeley,” and sure enough, bats can be found here.  Or they can find you.  (The other odd creature I’ve been seeing lately, but on Mount Diablo, is the tarantula.  I’ve seen three of them in the last month.)

So, what does it mean to be hit by a bat while riding?  Stay tuned to albertnet, because in early October I’ll give you the a full report on the 2014 Everest Challenge:  what I ate, and how badly I destroyed myself, and thus whether being hit by a bat is a good or bad omen.