Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

Tonight was the big Karaoke competition. The Baccardi girls showed up, with prizes in the form of calendar, t-shirts, and a $100 gift certificate for the winners.

I'll start off by saying that I hope this never happens again. Being inherently competitive and prone to pre-race freakouts, Karaoke is supposed to be my escape, my safe-haven of acceptance and musical release. The competition tonight turned everything into strategic, goal-oriented scheming... which is not what Karaoke is supposed to be. Should I dance to "La Bamba" with my friend Lena? Or will that make my competition look good? These are issues that don't belong on Thursday nights.

Rutgers Cycling (plus Jenks)... Tiny Arms!
There were a number of stellar performances. Jenksy rocked "Video Killed the Radio Star". Tooly McSandbagger came out of the woodworks to sing "I am Beautiful" like a eunuch. SpikyHairWill and I owned "Mr. Roboto". These performances would make up the final podium.

What's Mr. Roboto without The Robot?
So the Baccardi chicks called us (theJenksster, Will & me, and my man Tooly) back up for a group performance of "Oops I Did It Again", to finally determine the winner. Perfect for the feminine McSandbagger, you might think. But oh no. While he was crooning, I was running to the bar to grab plastic cups for myself and Will. Why? Two words for you, my friends... Fake breasts.

In the end, it was close. The winners would be determined by audience loudness. Jenksy was eliminated first, but not for lack of effort (his veins were popping out of his neck so bad that Will and I kept having to remind him to breathe). It came down to McSandbagger vs. Team BME/RutgersCycling. His contingent was loud, including a girl who could whistle really obnoxiously. Our contingent was loud enough that my ears hurt.

Thank You Very Much, oh Mr Roboto
The Baccardi Girls conferred in the corner, making possibly the biggest decision of their slutty lives...

Tension mounted. Nerves were on edge. Would talent triumph over effort? Would entertainment defeat douchebaggery?

WE WON KARAOKE!!!

Don and Will, Karaoke Champions
Just think about that statement. Will and I were the victors in the Karaoke competition. Ridiculous as that sounds, it put $100 in our pockets and gave us indisputable bragging rights. We will buy a Vacuum Cleaner for the apartment. And maybe some DVDs for indoor training sessions.

Most importantly, we won. I love winning. I should do it more often. What a great feeling. Quite the difference from this morning. Moods this good are rare indeed. Karaoke f'in winners.

Jiminy Cricket Has Muttonchops

As sometimes happens, especially after a tough ride, my ability to self-censor pretty much shut down this morning. Fortunately, I have friends who know what's appropriate and can set me straight.

I had a whole post planned for today, but it'll have to wait. Instead, I'm going to take the easy way out and post one of the things that lifted my spirits. Not the copious amounts of bagel, donut, and coffee that I've consumed since 11, because I don't know how to post those to a blog. No, no. This is way better.


Muse, "Knights of Cydonia"

Big Daddy ROCKS

Having survived today's workout-of-doom, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's recovery day. A brief summary of the ride:

• 50 kilometer "warmup", including 20k of 4-man pacelining to try to make it home in 25 minutes (we were late, but only a little). Big props to BeastMaster and SpikyHair for the massive pulls
• 5 sprints in the Hermes Miss-N-Out. Worked my tail off, got worked over by HermesCraig, was eliminated... or, rather, The Devil took me when I was the Hindmost. What a stupid name for a race.
• 20 sprints behind the remainder of the race. While they did their tactical nonsense, I was sprinting 2x per lap. Hooray. SpikyHair beat HermesJenks... which just might knock Jenksy down a peg?
  
• 25 sprints on the deserted, well-lit, well-paved road behind my apartment. In the dark. Among the various fauna of Busch campus (deer, cats, and inexplicable old Asians)

It ended up being something like 60 total miles, about 3.5 hours. Lots and lots and lots of sprinting. Yowie kazowie.

So tomorrow I'm recovering. Maybe an hour on the rollers, turning such a tiny gear that I may risk crashing. But Coach also wants me to get back in the gym... for good reason, too, as my core leaves much to be desired.

Here is my plan for the gym... Core work is probably important, and I guess I should do squats or something, but everybody knows that there's one thing that drives the ladies wild: Biceps. Also, SRAM components.

So I'm going to wear a sleeveless t-shirt, both to show off my massive guns and to prominently display my developing tan-lines. I'm going to grab some dumbbells (2lbs, or 5lbs if there's girls watching) and saunter over to the mirrors. And then I'll start curling.

Each curl will start with a grunt. I'll use my back, wrenching the weight upwards with the force of a mighty gorilla or typhoon or something. My positive self-talk will be out loud, and I'll exclaim "Big Daddy Rocks!". Finally, for the coup de grâce, when the massive dumbbell has reached its apex, I'll reach my arm up towards my face and kiss my bicep, rewarding it for a job well done.

Repeat with the other arm. 2 sets of 8 reps. Go big or go home.

Exposé

There are a lot of people reading my blog who might not know the truth. The real truth. The deep dark truth.

Fortunately, a world-renowned filmmaker took it upon himself to document the virulent misdeeds that abound in the dirty world of Collegiate Cycling. Filmed over the course of the 2006 cyclocross season, using interviews, hidden cameras, and obnoxious pestering, this movie will open your eyes.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
D is For Dope

Race Reports are Stupid

This weekend was great, and I learned a lot. I just can't bring myself to write a race report. It's not that I'm particularly displeased with the way things went. It's not even that I couldn't find an amusing spin to put on things (I fooled myself into attacking too early on Saturday, then today I sprinted to win the bunch sprint, only to hear the bell for 1-to-go)

Much respect to BeastMaster, who has transformed my rides these past two days from races into base miles. That needs to go into the blog. Also, respect to Rich for his solo D win and to Alex for his great sprint for 4th in the B's.

But gah, who wants to hear about my race? It's late March, and most of my audience is already racing anyway. Here, you want a race report? Chris attacked. I blocked. I sat in. I went. It was over. Woooo! Honestly, though, I really dd enjoy myself, it's just that race reports start to get monotonous, you know?

What was unique about my weekend was the coffee shop at turn #5 today. Every 2 minutes, the field passed by, and we had a perfect view of the unfolding drama. 53x12Will had a great idea, which I implemented.

LiveUpdate!

Will, by the way, got 19th.

Life is good. My team is awesome. C racers need to learn how to corner. Every Army rider needs to downgrade 1 category. To Harvest Moon for celebration!

Bucknell Race, mid-weekend

yowza. i've never been so smoked, but i do love the racing. certainly i'm fatigued from playing substitute den-mother, since mark is too cool for us this weekend. it has occurred to me, though, this was the first race i've ever done that was long enough to need a water bottle. which may be part of it. it would've been an easy day for me, since beastmaster was off the front, solo, for 22 of the 36 miles (and took 2nd, by the way), but i decided to attack once he got caught.
the demise of my attack is a surprisingly long story. let's not get into that.

overall, today has been the awesome...

• left HP at 6:05
• best rest stop ever... stopped at a Holiday Inn somewhere in PA. not only could we use their clean, warm, perfumed bathroom, but we could also take advantage of their free internet kiosk.
• got to the race in time to register, dress, pin, and warm up, which had never been a guarantee
• avoided every crash on what would've been a great, if fast, 'cross course
• put in a pretty good attack, even did the ol' shake-n-bake (as taught to me by will and american flyers)
• checked in to the hotel, which turns out to be one of the nicest i've ever stayed in., and not too expensive. if the jacuzzi hadn't been shut down, we would've used it. spacious, clean, quiet, and with free cookies.
• massive team dinner, care of Damon's, the Applebee's-wannabe across the street. the waitress dealt with our giant order like a champ, then hooked us up with garlic bread. it may not seem like a big deal to you, but i nearly cried with joy
  

one final story: some crazy kid from bucknell decided to tighten his rear wheel's skewer by hand-screwing it. instead of using the quick-release, this kid just tightened the skewer by hand, leaving the lever at the end very exposed. i informed him of it, suggesting he have a teammate show him how to properly use the qr. when i told will this story, he said he would've been a lot less polite, because that kid could've crashed half the field. well, whatever was left of the field after the crashes, flats, and mechanicals. war of attrition, baby.

Paving Over History, Chapter The First

Last night, as usual, I was wandering home from the Harvest Moon, singing Journey and trying in vain to design an experiment for some now-forgotten reason. My aimless meandering took me into the parking lot of the Kirkpatrick Chapel, which on a hill at the end of the College Ave campus. I've been through there before, but last night I was particularly uncoordinated... which I will blame on my residual fatigue from 53x12Will's 30+ mph, pull down the length of Amwell Rd that morning.

So there I was, zig-zagging like a good, if lethargic, infantryman, when I almost bumped into a signpost. And by almost, I mean abruptly. Sizing up my opponent, I squinted at the offending sign and was surprised by what I saw.

Apparently, this parking lot was the site of an important moment in American history. In fall of 1776, the British had been trying to cross the Raritan River in pursuit of Washington's troops. If the redcoats had been successful, we'd probably be drinking tea and driving on the wrong side of the road.

Fortunately, Alexander Hamilton was a badass. He'd put together an artillery corps, outfitting and supplying them out of his own pocket. With no infantry support from the retreating Washington, Hamilton took a risk and positioned his men on the hill that is now the site of Kirkpatrick Chapel and its parking lot. Firing volley after volley, Hamilton's corps hampered the redcoats' progress. By the time the British could finally ford the river, Washington's army was long gone, and I can only presume that all the Englishmen's oxen were dead as well.

The site of this selfless assault is now a parking lot. Only 200 years later, artillerymen in the same location would be overlooking a nondescript parking deck. The only monument to the courage of Hamilton and his troops during this key moment in history is a sign post into which intoxicated students occasionally stumble.

Dogfights

"Pretending air-to-air combat with identical aircraft makes it difficult to gain an advantage. Pilots are more tempted to push their vehicles to the edge of their performance to gain a simulated 'kill'. In my air force career there had been numerous incidents of dogfighting pilots crossing that edge, losing control, and having to eject - or dying when they didn't... In fact, it happened so often worldwide the airforce ultimately banned the practice of identical jets simulating a dogfight." (Mullane)

So if the jets are of different designs, then the pilots will play to their vehicles' respective strengths. Dogfights between identical jets, however, neutralize the characteristics of the machinery - the question becomes, which pilot is willing to risk death in order to win.

I love dogfights. Top Gun was an awesome, if mildly innuendo-ridden, dogfight movie. The dogfights were the only redeeming aspect of Pearl Harbor.

My teammates and I dogfight. In fact, these aren't 1-on-1 affairs, they are all-out duels with 3 to 12 very competitive, very individual protagonists. Like jetfighters, one has to wonder: are we mismatched, or are we essentially identical? I don't know the answer to that. Some of us are fitter than others, and we all have our own strengths; still, on any given day, any one of us can beat all the others, if he rides smart and the stars are aligned properly.
SpikyHair and BeastMaster Bleed From Their Eyes
It's really a beautiful thing. We go on these crazy rides to the middle of nowhere and back, with the Raritan River and the Watchung Hills setting the scene. We ride with the knowledge that every hill, every Rutgers sign, even everywhere that Jenks decides arbitrarily and without informing anyone, is a finish line, a stage on which drama will inevitably unfold. The roads are our arena, and like fighter pilots and gladiators, we battle to the death.

Okay, not to the death. That would defeat the purpose of riding for fitness, and besides, the cars are doing enough to try to kill us anyway (just kidding, Mom and Dad!). Not to the death, but close to the death. Seriously, we are playing on the edge of goodnight-sweet-prince death, dogfighting like evenly matched fighter pilots, driven to win. Drastic maneuvers push the limits of stalling their jets... Hill sprints flirt with the limits of stalling our hearts.

It's best not to think of training in such terms, but we do it all the time! Think about it... My heart rate has gone over 195 a handful of times this week. The highest heart rate I've ever recorded was 199.

We throw around the term Maximum Heart Rate a lot, usually as a reference relative to which we can estimate our "Heart Rate Zones". It's a blase term, but the physiology of a Maximum Heart Rate is pretty freaky.

The cells of the heart, like those of any other muscle, contract when an electric current passes through them. Near your Maximum Heart Rate, your heart's cells are contracting more than 3 times every second. Waves of electricity are passing through each cell every 300 milliseconds. If you were in a doctor's office and this happened, they'd call it tachycardia and freak out.

If the gap between waves gets any smaller, if the frequency of contraction gets any higher, the waves stop being waves. They overlap, and the cells don't recover between contractions. Instead of contracting as one continuous section of heart, the cells contract whenever they can, and the wall of the heart shimmies rather than shrinks. Blood doesn't get pumped through the body, it gets tickled. This is called fibrilliation. It will make you dead.

Fortunately, the body doesn't like being even close to Maximum Heart Rate, because the body doesn't like being even close to dead. We're not actually in any risk, unless our hearts are already damaged. We may puke, we may cramp, we may even pass out, but our bodies will do their best to keep us alive.

So we go to HermesCraig's Miss-N-Out (aka Elimination, aka Devil Takes the Hindmost, aka "Lord Chancellor Knottingbury takes the last sportsman and refuses him his foie gras after the foxhunt on wheels" [SpikyHair 2007]), or we go to CapnChaz's Candy Mountain Ride, or we just say "hey, I'm doing 2nd bridge 8am Thursday, meet at the Brower". And we push each other, dogfighting, until we're close to death. And then we go home.

I love this sport. But good god, I do get antsy when 2 awesome rides take place during my F'IN REST WEEK!!! Have fun you jerks.

Mullane, Mike. Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut. New York: Scribner, 2006.

Body Image

Don't worry, this post is not about my body image... although Will and I are trying to give each other complexes.

Two things have brought about this post. First, I made the mistake of watching about 3 minutes of a daytime talk show, Dr. Keith. The good doctor's guests yesterday included two "plus-size" actresses. Make no mistake about it, these ladies are morbidly obese. They were on the show to talk about how hard it is to thrive in a world where thin is in.

Then I did a quick PubMed search in order to make an empirical[1] response to Jenks' psychobabble response to my scientific response to Jenks' question, and I stumbled across an interesting, unrelated article. The study[2] looked into the behavior of Israeli women to compare 3 groups: Anorexics, Aesthetic Athletes (AA) like dancers and gymnasts, and Non-Aesthetic Athletes (NAA) like runners, swimmers, volleyball players, etc.

The article reports that while most of the AA group were physically sound, a significant number of them displayed behavior usually correlated with anorexia. The authors suggest that this legitimizes the hitherto uncommon diagnosis of Anorexia Athletica. Most importantly (for my point), they note that in general, the NAA group had a very positive self-image.

Dr. Keith's guests would probably not be too thrilled about this conclusion, because it correlates hard work to feeling good. If wallowing in self-pity feels good and requires nothing more than a PC sob-story, why should anyone work hard? Their stated concerns seem to be that they are getting pigeon-holed, that their weight is putting them at a disadvantage only because society perceives their body type as abnormal. Granted, I could only watch about 3 minutes of the show before I was enraged and had to change the channel; still, I think I got a pretty good idea of their message.

It seems that the morbidly obese don't have it too easy in Hollywood. It seems that they get type-cast into roles as "the fat friend". Why don't producers and writers just create roles where the actor could be of any shape or size? Why is Hollywood so image-based?

Give me a break. You want writers to be less imaginative, to not have any idea what their characters will look like? You want Hollywood to stop playing to our sexual desires? Good luck!

No, you don't have to be anorexic to be a starlet (this means you, Lohan). At the same time, though, you can't spell morbidly obese without morbid. These actresses are condemning themselves with their own bodies, and instead of trying to correct this problem, they're going on talk shows and bemoaning the unrealistic ideals to which women are compared.

I want to compare them to cigarette salesmen, but that's not quite right. While I despise smoking, I recognize the right to smoke (within reason - and I don't feel like debating this topic today). Being employed in Hollywood isn't a right... if it was, tall blondes from the Midwest with a bus ticket and a dream would be marching on DC every week. Dr. Keith's guests were hawking a self-destructive lifestyle to the daytime-tv-watching parents of little girls who need to learn that it's not OK to let yourself get that bad.

These actresses claim that life is tough for them. I have no doubt that they have their share of hardships... but do they think it's easy to be fit? I think the real Tough points should go to the people who go out to dinner with friends, then fight the urge to finish the giant portions that restaurants serve. Tough points go to the people who wake up at 5am to get a workout in before work. Tough points go to the people who are pestered with cries of "you're too thin" just because they've gone from "obese" to "healthy" on the Body Mass Index scale.

So no, you don't have to be anorexic. And no, it's not OK to be morbidly obese. There is a compromise!!! Non-Aesthetic Athleticism!

Buy your daughter a soccer ball, or a lacrosse stick, or (dare I hope?) a bicycle. Encourage them to use these toys.

For the love of god, turn off the damn TV.

[1]
Abiss, et al. "Dynamic pedaling strategies during the cycling phase of an Ironman triathlon". Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Apr; 38(4):726-34

[2]
Bachner-Melman, et al. "How Anorexic-like Are the Symptom and Personality Profiles of Aesthetic Athletes?". Med Sci Sports Exerc. 2006 Apr; 38(4): 628-36

Pimp-Slapped

My advisor is hosting a visiting professor. He's only in town from Japan for 2 days, and while I don't know what the rest of his itinerary includes, I can tell you that Day 1 of his trip has included a great deal of ass-kicking.

The most noteworthy (as far as I know) of his various academic smackdowns came during his visit to my lab. He listened intently as Tiff, Kim, and I explained and demonstrated our research. The clarification questions he asked were good, not "I should ask a question to feign interest". In spite of a considerable language barrier, it became clear that dude-san knows his stuff.

I mentioned that I wasn't clear on why a particular value in my derivation of "adaptation" kept being approximately 0. There are a few possibilities that I'd considered, but nothing was really standing out as the answer.

"Maybe your task is too simple", he posited. BAM. A pimp-slap if there ever was one, but sometimes you need to get pimp-slapped to see the light. Holy crap. Of course! The subjects' adapatation was too rapid, because the task was too simple, and the brief linear increase in "G" (don't worry about it) was drowned out by inherent biological variability. It's so damn simple!

So, I've got my work cut out for me. Lit review, experimental design, Labview coding, data collection, data analysis. Yowza. I swear, though, I love being in this position. It is the equivalent of a crit racer, sitting in the top 10 with 2 to go, suddenly seeing the gaps that he's going to use to get to the sprint. I am the midfielder, seeing the holes in the defense that will let the ball move from midfield to the back of the net. The veil is lifted. God, this feels good.

I got out of the lab just in time to join the usual suspects for a recovery ride. Everyone but Jenks and Will P. wore full Rutgers kit, which made the whole ride a lot safer (I never wear anything else outdoors anymore). We did the Monday Night Loop, which involves laps around Busch and Livingston campuses, also known as "the cool kids' campuses". Pimp-slap #2 came during the first lap, when Jenks initiated a rousing BikeCapella chorus of Bohemian Rhapsody, which is by Queen, you philistines. That's right. Thanks to Jenks, we pimp-slapped the recovery ride upside its frozen windy head.

The final pimp-slap was, once again, directed at me, as well as CaptainChaz, PlaidRich, and 53x12Will, the sole survivors of lap 2. Somewhere around the Watermelon Loop course (3/4 of the way into the lap) it began to hail. I'm all for epic conditions, but not on a recovery day. Oof. Touche, Mother Nature.

For dinner (thus far) I had 4 "servings" of rice and a tall glass of Endurox. Delicious. I'm gonna go ahead and give this day a 9/10. La Vida e Boa.