We Run and Ride

The chicken or the egg dilemma on triathlons and fidelity

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

It’s a classic question of cause and effect.

In this world it is not often easy to separate cause and effect. The classic example of that challenge is the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” If the chicken came first, from where did it come? And if the egg came first, what created it?

Actually we know the answer to those kinds of questions. They are generally more complex than people normally like to consider. But for our purposes here, it is the questions that matter most.

Don’t be chicken

For example, if a forty-something man or woman decides to do triathlons in the middle of their life, is that a chicken expressing its cage free lifestyle or is that a spirit waiting to hatch all over again? Even religion recognizes the need to be “born again” as a reflection of new commitment in life.

And if that forty-something man or woman discovers, as a result of their being “born again” in the athletic spirit, a community of people with like interests and enthusiasms, is that a self-fulfilling prophecy or the product of circumstance.

And if that forty-something man or woman suddenly finds a love interest among that community, and takes up with that person, is that a chicken or an egg proposition?

Free range chickens

Free range chickens on the lookout for fun.

Because it happens all the time, it seems. Triathletes, in particular, seem to be prone to transformative relationships taking over their lives. The enthusiasm for the sport is matched only by the propensity to engage in athletic flings with people of the other sex, even if it is the same sex.

In other words, sex is often involved. And that brings involvement, which leads to romantic entanglement or commitment, which often leads to leaving unsatisfactory or unhealthy marriages.

It is apparent that many triathletes discover something in themselves that leads them to deep personality changes. Or, their personality is changing for better or worse and the lure of a deep commitment like getting fit and racing triathlons is the ideal environment to indulge those changes.

Cracking eggs

Getting a leg up on the process.

There are tensions that happen when one partner dives into triathlon training at any level. The spouse left behind can feel neglected, for example. Or, if both spouses are training, there are questions as to whose training is more important. During an Ironman year, training can require hours away from home, weekends spent in camps and hotels and tents and oh, you get the picture.

Marriage is also, in essence, a triathlon of sorts. The three sports are love, money and sex. You have to work at all three disciplines it seems to be a success in marriage. Like all athletic endeavors, and marriage is just that, people vary in their abilities in all three of these disciplines.

A person that excels in love may suck at the money part. Same goes for great sex. That person might be great in the sack but their capacity for true love and the work of relationships may be lacking. And those with lots of money may feel their coin can buy them both love and sex.

Try Athletes

There’s a lot of chickens on the farm.

And so, lacking in any of these categories in their marriage or relationship, people sometimes go seeking––or fall prey to–– temptation in any of these categories. It so happens that there are people competing in triathlons that come from all these different disciplines.

Some have money and all the equipment in the world, but their lives feel hollow. Others crave a physical connection that is either lacking or insufficient, and go seeking sex or something like it among people who are similarly excited about life. Still others simply want to be loved, and the triathlon community, while habitually narcissistic in many ways, has a nice habit of affirmation.

Egging yourself on

But that’s the problem. All that feedback serves as signals that people care. And on that morning following a nice comment from someone on Facebook a quieter conversation begins between two people and suddenly they’ve got a training date set up. Hours on a bike or the run can be a very intimate setting. Lives can be shared, and disappointments too. Intimate secrets emerge. Intimate promises get intimated.

Chicken legs and all

And sooner or later, those two people hook up for another training run. Or a ride. or a swim. It becomes a habit. Then a commitment. Athletic sparks fly, and sex sooner or later takes place. It’s almost an inevitability among people working so hard to improve their bodies. They want to give them a test run. At home it may not even matter to the spouse what muscles show or what weight is lost. Just mow the lawn and take out the garbage goes the standard line. That’s what matters.

Or the person doing all the changing no longer cares enough to take care of those things. Either way is a formula for tragedy.

Life tectonics

And so it becomes a matter of life philosophy, a set of seemingly irreconcilable differences emerges. Then it becomes a matter of life tectonics (my phrase) in which the fissures of a marriage become as evident as a fault line in the landscape. The earthquake may come slow or fast. It may rumble deep for a time or come about in a cataclysm of bald accusation and confrontation. But it rattles and shakes things the way only deep differences or shallow needs can drive the tectonic forces of a human life.

Then comes separation or divorce. Hurt feelings and liberated spirits. There is no strict pattern to what the outcomes will be. Some people simply need to move on from marriages that were not meant to be, or that grew stale, or dangerous, or sad.

Selective breeding

You can analyze all that from a biblical perspective, and demand that marriage should never be broken, but there are a lot of laws and rules from the Bible to which people no longer pay attention. Even the most devout religious belief system is a highly selective product of choosing which laws matter most from scripture. It’s true in all the major religions from Judaism to Christianity to Islam. Zealots hold to the letter of some law and turn it into dogma.

I can speak only from the Christian perspective, and hold to the fact that it is love that drives most good in the world. So it is with sympathy that I regard the challenges of keeping and holding onto love in this world. There is love that drives the universe, and that is agape love, that which holds societies and hope together. There is also interpersonal love, that which underwrites the urge to create communities and care for one another. And there is sexual love, which is the gut-level drive to connect, to bond and to transcend.

Chickens in transition

Among my friends there are many who are on their second marriage and quite happy. These were not athletes splitting up with their mates to try a quick fling with a fellow athlete. So the dynamics of re-relationship are true amongst all people, not just triathletes.

But what we’re talking about here is a percentage and a trend among triathletes that is too evident to ignore. It’s a sport that draws people seeking challenge and change. It’s no coincidence perhaps that the sport intrinsically speaks a language that sets the stage. There are “transition stages” built right into the sports. There are three disciplines pulling you in new directions.

There is also spandex and hard nipples and bulges and the fine healthy sweat that come from hard efforts. It all beckons and bribes the spirit into new passions. Like the Leg Lamp in the movie Christmas story, lights come on and the imagination starts to rise.

Tastes like chicken

It’s not everyone who does triathlons of course that gets involved with other people. There are many couples who make it work from within the sport.

However, a wise spouse that does not want to do triathlons should have that conversation about time commitments and obligations. If one spouse who does not pursue endurance sports acknowledges the need in another person, there are healthy ways to encourage that need and continue to grow the relationship in substantial ways.

All of us make choices in these areas. For example, I get asked frequently if I’m training for an Ironman because my companion is in training for Ironman Wisconsin. We talked last year about the nature of that commitment, and I assured her that I support her effort. In fact I’m doing a substantial amount of training with her because it is enjoyable, fun and a way to share in the process. In a couple weeks she spends an entire weekend at Ironman camp. They’ll ride 120+ miles and run 13 and swim quite a bit. It’s all necessary to prepare for a race the length of an Ironman.

But I seriously have no desire to do the Ironman distance. Back when I raced in road running and track I had no real desire to run a marathon either. The marathon distance just did not resonate with me the same way seemed to attract others. I was always of the attitude, “More power to them.”

Some of us simply find our happiness qualitatively, not quantitatively. So when asked if I’m training for Ironman, I just smile and say, “No.” I say. “I’m going to do a Sprint and see how that goes first.”

Triangulations

Which came first, the pumpkin or the vine?

But I’ll be excited to watch my companion Sue compete in her Ironman race this September. We’re sharing the travails and the triumphs of training together.

As a side benefit, I get to give her foot and leg rubs with regular consistency, and she likes that. Sometimes she even has energy for more things.

The basic truth is this: As an athlete I understand the effort she’s putting in, and can see and appreciate the progress. I remember how I felt during those 100-mile weeks in distance training. Any extra thing that comes along can feel like a burden. I was obsessive about sleep, about eating right, and staying off my feet when I could. My late wife called it Golden Leg Syndrome. I could take the teasing, and so could she, because she also enjoyed seeing me compete and win. She knew that meant a lot to me at the time.

Solving the chicken conundrum

But as for the point in life where people depart from one person to another, it’s a simple fact that we all have a past and commitments in life. Some of this is satisfactory to our self-perception, and some not so much. We must all still live in the present, and while this does not justify people taking leave of marriages for selfish reasons, it does help explain the chicken or the egg challenge to some degree. Triathletes engaging in extra-marital relationships is both a product and a sign of personal actualization. Some of this is wonderful. Some of it not so much.

Eggs with feathers on them.

Thus to the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” we simply answer “Yes.”

Don’t you see? The egg is the chicken, and the chicken is also the egg. It’s only our impositions and perceptions that demand a resolution to that question. Both the chicken and the egg came from processes far larger than stunted questions about form and priority. Despite the contentions of those Intelligent Design nitwits, there is no such thing as irreducible complexity. Absolutely everything is complex, and everything is part of a process. Throwing God into the equation is nothing more than a lame excuse to sell the idea that the chicken automatically comes first.

That’s the problem with this world, in fact. People try to sell the concept that red herring questions actually solve problems rather than examining the broader aspects of why and how people (or chickens) become what they are. And do what they do. Partisan politics, for example, tends to take the chicken or the egg approach to forcing people to make choices that are much more nuanced and complex than “lower taxes” or “ban abortion.”

Here’s your answer

So it’s not just that people do triathlons and start messing around with other people. It’s that taking any sort of step toward self-actualization is going to set off a chicken or the egg response inside the soul. It happens in lots of other places. But because the triathlon is basically a free range chicken ranch where lots of people get together in one place to strut their chicken stuff, we simply see it a lot more often.

Bawkbawkbawk. Go lay an egg. See you at the Sunday Group Ride.

Posted in triathlon | Tagged triathlon and adultery, triathlon and cheating on spouses, triathlon and messing around, triathlon and relationships, triathlon and sex, which came first the chicken or the egg | Leave a comment

Summer engagements and the drivetrain of love

Posted on July 13, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

One of the vexing problems with any bike is the optimal function of the drivetrain. That is, the chain and the crank and the hubs and derailleur. That’s a bunch of moving parts that have to function in good relationship in order to have a bike in working order.

This weekend while riding the hills of Wisconsin once again, my shifting left much to be desired. I slipped the chain early in the ride while jumping from the small to the big ring. It flopped off in all its greasy glory. Even after cleaning the thing the other day it was black with dirt already. A ride in the rain will do that, and there was no time to clean it before our trip north. Or so I told myself.

So I stopped to push the chain back onto the big ring and rode back up to meet the mates. The rest of the ride I paid careful attention to my shifting, usually pushing the left shifter gingerly while I watched the chain shift onto the big ring. Ugh, I’m terrible at that. Too hard sometimes, not hard enough at others.

We rode the Ironman loop and traversed the hills known as Three Bitches once again. I’m starting to love those bitches. There’s a side to all of us that rather loves a bit of bitchiness. A ride without a bit of bitchiness to it can be boring. We’d rather ride up a hill and bitch about it than have nothing to talk about it. Plus we rode much bigger hills during the Horribly Hilly 100 and the Three Bitches no longer seemed so bitchy. We didn’t even bitch about them. That’s the good kind of bitchiness. Life can be a bitch. It’s all in how you deal with it that matters.

The bad kind of bitchiness

Bitchiness in both men and women can be a big problem in relationships. It often takes form in one of those couples fights over nothing. It might start with an unspoken complaint about some aspect of daily life and evolve into something entirely different. Stuff like that happens all the time in relationships.

That type of challenge can be really hard for athletes to manage. There are so many nuances to relationships between athletes. Competitiveness. Time and commitment. Jealousy. Disappointment. Victory and loss.

Dealing with it

I know one couple that runs and rides and swims together. One of them recently got injured. She was miffed that she could not run and participate in their mutual program to qualify for Boston. But rather than come out and say it, and risk sounding like a complainer, she secretly harbored a small grudge that he could still run and she could not.

Well, that sank deeper into her emotional pool until it emerged as a full-on hurt. They fought with silence for a day or two before she confessed, “I just want you to miss me when I’m not out there running with you.”

Progress

Actually, that’s really sweet. It is also an apt expression of how we often can’t find the right feelings sometimes in our relationships. It’s like our emotional drive train slips a gear and the chain falls off. We go for a day or so hoping the other person will come by and help us put the chain back on. But ultimately we realize that we have to do that dirty work ourselves. So we bend over and tug and pull and lurch the chain back on and start pedaling to catch up to whatever our mates are doing up ahead.

Then it makes us even madder that they never noticed our chain fell off in the first place. Which starts another whole set of revolutions, and the argument can escalate from there. “You don’t miss me” becomes “You don’t pay enough attention to me” to “You don’t care about me.”

At that point the chain is not only falling off the relationship, it is tangled in the spokes as well. That means you both have to slow down and sort things out together. It might even mean standing out in the rain or the heat with water dripping off your forehead and running down your ass crack as you tug and pull on the greasy chain of love or friendship together.

Yet, it tends to be a greasy chain of love and trust upon which we depend to drive our relationships. We wish it could always stay shiny and clean and working like new, but it doesn’t. Like all collaborative relationships, the drivetrain of love accumulates a little dirt and history along the way. Unresolved feelings tug and pull. A collection of hurts or neglect gets jammed in the links. A gritty conversation or two creates noise and wears down the components. The drag of past relationships gets in the way. All need to be maintained and cleaned up with regular purpose and practice, lest we break a chain and have to start all over again.

Digging in the Dirt

It’s not fun all the time. In fact it’s not fun most of the time dealing with the darker side of our personalities in relationship with others. Peter Gabriel so effectively captures the process in his song, Digging in the Dirt:

Something in me, dark and sticky
All the time it’s getting strong
No way of dealing with this feeling
I can’t go on like this too long

He acknowledges that past hurts can contribute to present disappointments and doubts. It’s almost as if the grease itself sinks into our soul.

The more I look, the more I find
As I close on in, I get so blind
I feel it in my head, I feel it in my toes
I feel it in my sex, that’s the place it goes

We wish our the Derailleur of Destiny were forever functioning in our favor. We flick the shifters of faith on hope that they will work. We ride up and down and around listening to the quiet whirr of our chain. Round and round it goes. Any small click makes us jump. A constant noise makes us worry. We are both chained and unchained from this process. That’s because We are human.

But if you recognize that your relationships take maintenance and that love might require a little lube to keep it working smoothly (both materially and spiritually) then you can be prepared for what comes along in life.

As to that effect, there are some basic tools needed to sort your feelings out and get them back in proper order on the drivetrain of life.

1. Trace those feelings in the direction of their true source, not their potential purpose.

Too often we decide the outcome of our desires about hurt feelings before we even know where they’re coming from. We want to exact a pound of flesh for feeling hurt when half the time the drama is principally in our own heads. The other person to whom you are directing your negative emotions may not even know that you are mad or needy or feeling neglected. But if you establish what started your cycle of emotion, you can often get that out in the emotion and deal with it rather than starting a tangle of other emotions that have nothing to do with solving the problem and everything to do with winning a fight.

2. Try forgiveness first.

If you feel hurt or angry toward your lover or your friend, give forgiveness a try first. The power of forgiveness is that you are not proceeding toward blame, but toward resolution. Anger is a both a weapon and a burden. Lay down your arms and take up faith and trust. Likewise ask for forgiveness if you know you are the one that committed a goofup. It’s a great place to start.

3. Think about the long term.

Long time friends, couples and family have a history together. That can dredge up old feelings of hurt and unforgiveness. But if you think about the better parts of your relationships first, it often provides a passageway to discussion. But even beginning couples and associates need to think long term. It does you no good to win in the short term and lose the relationship completely.

4. Be prepared to recognize unfruitful relationships.

At some point all people run into situations where personalities simply don’t mix. This does not mean you have to angrily dump that person from your life. But you can manage the amount of contact and types of interaction you have with them. This is true both in real time and on social media. It’s true in a pace line and on the track, in swim lanes and all the other places athletes interface with teammates and competitors. It’s a competitive world and we have to cut our losses and choose our victories carefully.

5. Think about the power of love.

Love truly is a wonderful thing. But we also have to think about it as well as feel it. That’s the gateway to deeper relationships. When you understand the foundations of feelings for other people, you can accentuate those benefits by acknowledging their value in your life.

And sometimes, you can find yourself riding a shiny, clean bike with an absolutely silent chain. There are no complaints coming up from the drivetrain. Suddenly, that person you love rides up next to you and the silence of riding together is golden. Not a word needs to be said. Just the smile and the turn of the pedals is all you need. It can be uphill, or you can both be suffering and just laugh. “This hill is a bitch,” you whisper to the one you love, or your riding friend. And then you ride up that bitch of a hill together.

These are our summer engagements and they depend upon the drivetrain of love. The process can last forever if you do some maintenance and pay attention to signs of trouble along the way. Then the ride is beautiful.

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, cycling, cycling the midwest, doing pulls in cycling, triathlon, We Run and Ride Every Day | Tagged big ring, cycling and relationships, drivetrain, Ironman loop, relationships, relationships and training, shifting your bike, small ring, Three Bitches | Leave a comment

Announcing the Tarsnake Award from We Run and Ride

Posted on July 10, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

Arriving home late last night, I was surprised to find an interesting item on my doorstep. It was a real, live tarsnake. Attached to the tarsnake was a baggie with a note inside. It said,

TARSNAKE AWARD. YOU’RE THE FIRST RECIPIENT! PASS IT ON!

From: Anonymous.

Not, it’s not THAT Anonymous. That would be scary as shit. Instead, this is an Anonymous who obviously reads this blog. Who understands that tarsnakes really ARE out to take over the world, or at least knock you off your bike. Or trip you up while you’re running.

In case you’ve never wandered over to take a look at the Tarsnakes page on this site, here’s a description of their function in this strange little world we’ve created.

Tarsnakes also have metaphysical qualities. A tarsnake can be any thought or other phenomena that serves to trip you up along the way, cause you to swerve or crash, or just force you to take additional notice of the world.

Thus they are not all bad, but are instead the yin and yang of the road. You might want to consider them a tool for awareness. A brand of consciousness. The random reality of existing in the moment.

So, given the significance of tarsnakes, I am going to honor this gesture of insight on the part of my friend Anonymous. Because I think it’s pretty cool that they went to the trouble of picking up this big tarsnake and actually delivered it to my door.

Because honestly, I have collected a few tarsnakes myself recently. The photo at right shows a 30-footer I gleaned from the street where I live. Looks pretty harmless all curled up like that, doesn’t it? Don’t be deceived. These things can kill you. Or at least wake you up a little.

See, I’m in the process of producing a book titled A Field Guide to Tarsnakes. It’s both funny and philosophical.

I also have designed a cycling jersey and tee shirt based on the theme RUN OVER THE TARSNAKES. I’ll reveal that design next week, and you can order one if you like.

As for the Tarsnake Award, I’m going to set this up as a package that can be awarded and redistributed At Will by those who receive it. I’ll only ask that folks who receive it submit the recipients name and location so that we can track where this award goes.

Let us all hope it travels around the world like the peripatetic gnome in the movie Amelie, and let’s see who deserves recognition for Running Over the Tarsnakes with the best of them.

The first winner will be announced next week.

And thanks, Anonymous, for always being there when one least expects it.

Posted in Tarsnakes | Tagged anonymous, cycling jersey, run over the tarsnakes, tarsnakes, Tarsnakes also have metaphysical qualities | Leave a comment

For this neutrino, it’s sink or swim time

Posted on July 9, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

Last weekend the workout plan included all three disciplines, the run, ride and swim.

Saturday was a relaxed hour run in a forest preserve called Herrick Lake. The preserve is a mixed habitat preserve with limestone gravel trails circling through deep woods, open meadows and wetlands. Along the way the songs of birds accompany your skritching strides.

Sunday was a bike ride, and given that Sue had four hours to ride and I was up late finishing the social commitments of the 4th of July party at my house, it was not on my calendar to rise at 4:30 and get to Naperville for the ride.

But she did, and that meant it was up to me to figure out when and where to ride. During church a thought popped into my head. “It’s time for the summer ride through Morton Arboretum.” The Arb is 15+ miles from my house to the East. I would never ride that during heavy traffic periods in the suburbs but Sunday mornings are perfect.

Thoughts collide

The ride takes you through Fermi Lab, which was quiet and calm but for the hum of neutrinos zipping back and forth between South Dakota and Batavia.

Well, that’s honestly getting ahead of things a little bit. See, the proposed new experimental focus for Fermi will be the study of neutrinos, which are apparently microparticles capable of passing through any type of matter they choose to penetrate. Here’s how one scientific website describes neutrinos:

Neutrinos are similar to the more familiar electron, with one crucial difference: neutrinos do not carry electric charge. Because neutrinos are electrically neutral, they are not affected by the electromagnetic forces which act on electrons. Neutrinos are affected only by a “weak” sub-atomic force of much shorter range than electromagnetism, and are therefore able to pass through great distances in matter without being affected by it. If neutrinos have mass, they also interact gravitationally with other massive particles, but gravity is by far the weakest of the four known forces.

So, as I rode through Fermi Lab I was pretending to be a neutrino. That would actually be great, you see, because the wind resistance you normally experience on a bicycle would be greatly reduced if not absent altogether. You could ride at whatever rate you like because your body would slip right through other matter without much resistance. And that would be awesome. Perhaps I had ridden right into the Theory of Everything!

Superpowers

Because how cool would that be, to able to walk through walls? Perhaps Jesus himself was a big bundle of neutrinos capable of waltzing through time, space and matter? Or maybe Jesus was a Superhero, with superpowers?

But that raises the question as to why any comic book character never been called Neutrino? The ability to pass through matter would be the coolest superpower ever! It appears that these supposed science fiction comic book folks are still way behind the real discoveries of science.

Of course this neutrino thing could all be a farce just like the moon landing. Those guys and gals at Fermi could have concocted this neutrino stuff up in their own heads. You have to be pretty creative with your scientific imagination to wow the world and gain federal funding. “Look!” the scientists at Fermi said while filling out the grant for their newest experiments. “We just shot a neutrino to South Dakota! Now give us that money so we can shoot some more!” It’s a little known fact that scientists are really like kids with bb guns. They just shoot shit until someone tells them to stop.

All for science

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the funding science. In fact it matters not to me whether there are really neutrinos or not. Besides, I trust those Fermi people. They already gave us quarks, which are just about as cool and resulted in a design software called QuarkXPress that was all the rage in the 1990s. That’s how cool quarks turned out to be.

So we have to give the Fermi folks a little rope to work with on the neutrino thing. They’ve got a decent track record of busting up particles and having things like computer software after them. Let’s not forget the Higgs-Boson Particle either. That highly informative website “How Stuff Works” described the Higgs-Boson this way.

Particle physics usually has a hard time competing with politics and celebrity gossip for headlines, but the Higgs bosonhas garnered some serious attention. That’s exactly what happened on July 4, 2012, though, when scientists at CERN announced that they’d found a particle that behaved the way they expect the Higgs boson to behave. Maybe the famed boson’s grand and controversial nickname, the “God Particle,” has kept media outlets buzzing. Then again, the intriguing possibility that the Higgs boson is responsible for all the mass in the universe rather captures the imagination, too. Or perhaps we’re simply excited to learn more about our world, and we know that if the Higgs boson does exist, we’ll unravel the mystery a little more.

So it really is all about behavior in the end. If you find a form of matter that behaves the way you’d expect it to behave, then you’re onto something that could describe how the

whole universe really works. That goes nowhere to explain the behavior of Donald Trump’s hair, which still mystifies scientists, political pundits and those brainy geeks at TMZ. But we’ll save that subject for another day, Because The Donald is clearly from another dimension altogether and deserves to be shot out of a cannon of some sort or another. Just to see how his hair behaves.

Other dimensions

That’s the kind of thing Fermi folks are trying to figure out with all this neutrino and Quark stuff. How and why stuff works. Which is why it was initially a shame that as a nation we did not let Fermi build the Superconducting Supercollider, which was supposed to be a 50-mile tunnel under the Illinois landscape.

That ended when the competition to build the facility got all political when Bush the First became President. Then the SS project moved to Texas, where billions of dollars were spent before the whole project was cancelled because ants were chewing through the power cables.

It’s true. The United States gave up on the project because ants put a stop to it. So the newest collider in the world is located in Europe, where ants apparently do not exist? Here’s how one scientific website describes the supercollider they built over there.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, the largest and most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world.^[1]

So for a while Fermi has been relegated to interpreting results from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider while swatting at neutrinos with tennis racquets until that federal funding comes through for the study of neutrinos. It’s going to take one huge tennis racquet to hit a neutrino all the way to South Dakota. Or perhaps scientists at Fermi Lab will just use their BB guns.

Subatomic male ego

All these scientific thoughts of mine collided while passing the former collider “ring” at Fermi Lab. The “ring” was once used to smash subatomic particles together at high speed and analyze the output. That sounds a lot like what I used to do with my Hot Wheel cars as a kid, but the foundations of science do have to start somewhere, and it’s really not all that complex in the end.

Much to my surprise during my tour through Fermi I was caught from behind by a gal cyclist on a shiny new bike. I wrote about this phenomenon of getting caught from behind the other day. For a moment my male ego was broken into a thousand quarks of self doubt. But then I thought about my girlfriend who regularly scorches my ass on the bike anyway, and it didn’t hurt so much to get caught by yet another fit female with a bright smile and a shiny bike.

I knew that somewhere to the south, my girlfriend was already three hours into her four-hour ride. And when she was finished, she had an hour more to run. So I stopped feeling sorry for myself at having gotten caught and put my focus on the plan to ride to Morton Arboretum and then circle back to meet Sue at Centennial beach in Naperville. All would be perfect in the workout universe if the timing worked out.

Salt and blood

The trip through Morton turned out to be as compelling and illuminating as the journey through Fermi. It struck me that while the Morton Arboretum is a privately funded arboretum begun by the Morton Salt family, the organization depends on public support to be a self-sustaining operation. Annual membership is about $80-$90 for an individual, which gives you the right to walk or ride or run the grounds so long as you don’t walk or ride or run where they don’t tell you too.

But my membership is temporarily expired, so I rode into the Arb on my bike on the sly and made a figure eight loop of the roads with all the other runners and riders circling through the preserve. Fortunately none of us collided with the other.

But I did stop to listen to a loud, clear call of a chestnut-sided warbler erupting from the trees. That was a mistake to slow the bike, because the biggest cloud of mosquitoes you can imagine descended on my person. That was when I discovered that was actually a flesh and blood human being, and not a neutrino. Yet I do have the type of nutrients mosquitoes crave, which are blood and salt. And when I smacked one enterprising skeeter it produced a broad splat of bright red blood on my arm. That convinced me it was time to keep moving, lest I contract malaria or West Nile Virus and die on the spot.

Lost in the sun

So I pedaled the heck out of Morton to head southeast for the rendevous with Sue. And that worked out great, because we texted each other and agreed to meet at the gate. I was standing there innocently observing the sweat trickling down my arm when she emerged in a striped bikini that turned me back into a pile of neutrinos. She looked so cute in that suit my brain particles started to split off and unbundle in random fashion.

I suddenly felt lost in the sun. That meant all rational thought dissipated and you could have walked up to me and put your hand clean through my chest and never touch any other matter. That’s what happens to the male gender when it gets turned into a bundle of neutrinos through collision with the right bundle of matter.

We walked into the park together and settled down on our beach towels to soak up a little sun to the point. where I got overheated. That meant it was time for a swim. Sue threw me some goggles and I jumped into the lap lanes to try my luck navigating the cloudy expanse of the Centennial pool. Without lines to follow on the bottom, I had to really concentrate to swim in a straight line. On the way back, without the lane rope to guide me, I kept swimming into the concrete abutments. That was not good. My hand hit one of the abutments in time to prevent my head from doing the same. “Whoa,” I thought to myself. “I am definitely not a neutrino at this moment.”

Water world

Schéma du faisceau de neutrinos CNGS entre le CERN et Gran Sasso. Au terme de trois ans d'analyses complexes, l'expérience OPERA dédiée à l'observation - depuis le laboratoire INFN du Gran Sasso (Italie) - du faisceau de neutrinos CNGS en provenance du CERN, à 730 km de distance a permis de conclure que les neutrinos parvenaient à destination plus rapidement que prévu. D'après les calculs, les neutrinos ont en effet 60 nanosecondes d'avance sur les 2,4 millisecondes qui devraient leur être nécessaires pour parcourir la distance séparant le CERN du Gran Sasso à la vitesse de la lumière. / Diagram of the CNGS neutrino beam from CERN to Gran Sasso. The OPERA Experiment, dedicated to the observation of a neutrino beam sent by CERN to the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, has completed a three-year complex research study showing that neutrinos covered the 730 km distance separating the two sites sooner than expected. According to calculations, neutrinos are in fact 60 nanoseconds ahead of the 2.4 milliseconds it would take light to cover the same trajectory.

It made me realize once again that swimming through water can be much tougher than you think. The human body has mass, and try as you like to imagine that water is a simple substance that you can push out of the way at will, alas it is not so. In fact without that mass to push against, you could go nowhere in the water.

So I kept on with the freestyle stroke and got in about 400 meters of hapless paddling before returning to the safety of the Gatorade blanket and my girlfriend’s fine shape in the sun. For all the mysterious physical properties of the universe, and despite my best attempts to imagine myself as a free-flowing neutrino, I still have a ways to go in the pool. One can only imagine what the means in the realm of open water swimming. Maybe I can hire a Fermi physicist to shoot me across the pool with their neutrino gun. Then all I’ll have to figure out is how to turn around. Can neutrinos do a flip turn?

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, cycling the midwest, swimming | Tagged cycling, Fermi lab, fermi national accelerator laboratory, flesh and blood human being, large hadron collider, morton arboretum, Morton salt, mosquitos, nuetrinos, physical properties of the universe, riding, running, swimming | Leave a comment

How to survive the Tour de France (and its commercials) without guilt

Posted on July 8, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

A part of me feels very guilty right now. I’ve been watching the Tour de France at high speed on DVR.

In the past, there was a certain commitment to following the Tour. You had to choose the morning or evening broadcast and protect yourself from hearing news of the actual results so that you could watch the Tour in innocent ignorance.

That meant you had to sit there for three hours while the cyclists made their way from Pour le Charles to Puie do Fuey, or whatever exotic route they were following on Stage Whatever. That put you thoroughly at the mercy of Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin, the Gods of Tour Announcing. You trusted their guidance through twists and turns, crashes and controversies. The Tour was a soap opera then.

Fast forward

These days, most of us cheat the process.

Yes, there has always been technology to cheat while watching the Tour. Going way back, it was the classic VCR that did the trick. But rewinding tapes was always a bit like riding a bike backwards. Challenging, but not much fun. Fast forward was never fast enough for my tastes. The whirr and blurr of the tape. Skitchy twitchy. Old Tyme TV. Sucked.

By contrast using the DVR is a so simple it’s like television on EPO. You can zap back and forth almost at will. If a stage lags you can bunny hop across the slow bits checking for crashes or other snippets of excitement. You can stop and rewind so easily…

And truth be told, this totally sucks in terms of being a true cycling fan. Think about it. Here are these guys literally putting their careers and lives on the line. And there you are, zapping through their pain and effort as if it were just another episode of Seinfeld.

The pace of sports

I’m sure soccer fans can relate to our fast forward habits. The recent women’s World Cup was also recorded on DVR in my household. While I love soccer, it can be admitted that the DVR came in quite handy during that series of matches. You can flip along through all the passing and defense and watch until the score changes up top. Then you zap back, watch what led to the goal, and move on.

That is a nasty way to watch soccer. And yes I feel guilt beyond reason. But there’s also a profound difference between watching soccer and watching the Tour de France live on TV. Soccer has no commercials during the game. None. Sometimes ads pop up on the scoreboard or with a shrunken screen, but there are no real interruptions. I like that, and still watch games in their entirety when time allows. I also like it when there are no American football lines on the field. Playing futbol on a football field is like having sex in a fishing net. A tangled mess.

Tour de Advertising

The Tour, however, is nothing but commercials. They all repeat every time they pause for a commercial break. This means that watching the Tour each year is like sharing time with a an extended family you don’t really like. The only exception to this rule over the years was the Bacardi Mojitos commercial from a few years back. Best commercial ever. That was a summer to remember.

Um, Colonel Sanders. No.

This year’s commercial stock is not so joyful or compelling. Let me go on record stating there is no reason on this earth to waste a moment of your summer watching those creepy Colonel Sanders commercials. Who thought bringing back a re-creation of a white cracker Southern Colonel was anything close to a good idea. Yes, the real Colonel Sanders was apparently a decent human being. But who honestly cares? Those commercials are the fare of nightmares. The dude playing Colonel Sanders is Darrell Hammond doing an SNL skit for commercial purposes.

It’s supposed to be a testimonial to the heritage of the KFC brand. It comes off like nothing of the sort. The Colonel Sanders dude gives off a pedophile vibe, or something like it. What secrets is that guy hiding besides the recipe for his chicken? Why doesn’t the Colonel just get it over with and wave the Confederate flag, or make a racist crack about black customers? That seems to be the hobby of choice below the Mason-Dixon line these days.

Whose line is it anyway?

I’m sorry, we were talking about the Tour de France, weren’t we? But that’s my point. The Tour telecasts are so rife with distractions it is easy to forget there is a bike race going on at all. Fortunately we have those “Inside the Peloton” camera views this year to show how frightening it can be to ride at 35 miles per hour with a bunch of other snarkily competitive guys trying to run you off the road. And that’s not an exaggeration. Even Tour favorite Vincenzo Nibali was seen having to hump his bike over a curb in Stage Four to keep from being run off the road margin. You take what you can get with all that bike traffic. The Tour is a constant argument over whose line is it anyway?

The near-crashes happen suddenly, and in infinite array. In the final sprint of Stage Four (I think it was) Andre Greipel had to ride like a cowboy to keep another sprinter from stealing his position in the draft line. It was shoulder to shoulder, and the view from the helicopter above showed how acute that competition for space can be. Greipel is built like The Incredible Hulk. He gave a shove and the other rider bounced off. Riding in the Tour de France is not a child’s game by any stretch of the imagination.

Funny that

However, there are funny moments. The very next day in the intermediate sprints, Greipel and a slew of other sprinters wound up noodling their bikes after the sprint. They were 300 meters ahead of the field, and with nothing else to do for the moment, Peter Sagan gestured to Greipel that they should form a group of sprinters and make a breakaway. Griepel could be seen laughing the way one brother might laugh with another about the insane directions of an abusive father. Nothing of the sort would ever happen.

But perhaps Sagan has a yearning to say “screw it” to the face of Tinkoff Saxo owner Oleg Tinkoff, who has been making faces and spouting remarks toward Peter Sagan in the press, demanding more results out of the highly paid bike rider. Sagan answered with some wins before the Tour, but not in the Spring Classics. Tinkoff admitted later that he was a bit too excited about his bike racing team.

They seem to have come to a truce. But you know what? Even bike riders can hate their bosses.

Good and bad bosses

The ultimate “boss” of the Tour is the money it generates. That’s the explanation of course for all that advertising. Without it, NBC doesn’t give the Tour the time of day. Of course you might be better off watching the Tour on some Internet feed with European announcers (Eurosport?) that pee their pants every time a rider gets thirteen feet ahead. That’s a sport in its own sense. But here in America we watch the Tour in the same mode that we watch pro football or hockey or any of an assortment of advertising-driven sports. We consume our sports like a bowl of potato chips. Handful by handful.

Some of us even say screw that, and use the remote like a Playstation gamer, nailing that button until it hits four forward arrows >>>> so we can zoom zoom zoom through the commercials and get back the real commercial, which is all those bike riders wearing sponsored kits. Think about that.

Tits and kits

We go from those Bacardi girls shaking their tits to views of hard cycling asses in tight kits. It’s all one big titillation of sorts. So French, in its way.

And speaking of thick accents. Who can deny that the Geico Gecko simply asks to be run over like the scaley reptilian rat that he is. God I hate that gecko. I love nature but hate that accent-spewing Gecko. Splat. Gecko Road Kill.

See, the Gecko is symptomatic of the idea that we HAVE to sit and listen to commercials in which a cloying gecko pretends to be cute so that we’ll consider Geico a nice company that cares about our insurance needs. The gecko is a beggar. Geico only cares about getting your money. That’s it. End of story.

Commercial reality

The same could be said of all those sponsors of the Tour. It’s an advertising medium and it always has been. The Tour was invented as a way to sell newspapers during the slow news summer months. But some of the early courses were so hard and dangerous the cyclists themselves branded the organizers a pack of murderers and scoundrels. Nothing has really changed. We view the carnage of those cycling crashes as if they were fast-moving snuff films. Because it sells.

Even the team sponsors know that. They want “results” because it puts their brand in front of millions, if not billions of viewers. And in this world, there is still no such thing as bad PR. How else do you explain the entire Republican Party platform and its efforts to gouge the economy by lowering minimum wages, turn Social Security over to the banksters, poison the environment with every kind of industrial waste known to humankind and discriminate against every type of human being on earth? Yet the GOP still has its 30% base in America, in part because Fox News is a great PR machine. They long ago realized that the news is nothing for than an advertisement for an ideology.

The Tour de France as an advertisement

Who can deny the Tour de France is an ad for French tourism? It’s a convincing and enjoyable show, with all those aerial views of French chateaus and farmers driving tractors in the shapes of bicycles. It’s wonderful summer fare. No criticism there.

And you really can’t argue with the commercial value of four riders dangling off the front for hours. Those are commercials too, of a sort. Yes, the breakaways sometimes succeed, but rarely. That’s why everyone loved Jens Voigt. His motto “Shut Up Legs” was an Everyman’s ticket to the insanity of solo breakaways. Jens made it work because he was not afraid to work.

Winning a stage

Of course winning a Tour stage makes the career of a cyclist complete, in some sense. It’s a pretty damned hard thing to do. And why does it matter so much?

Because when you’re sitting around the dinner table at the age of 89 years old, and conversation slows, you can lean forward over your chopped liver and spout the words that everyone hates to hear you say. “I won a Stage at the Tour de France!”

“Yes, Grandpa. We know that. Now eat your chopped liver.”

To which you can lean even farther forward, piss your diapers and let go with a loud and outrageous fart, and yell, “Natural Break!” Because that’s what Phil Liggett calls taking a piss in the Tour de France.

It’s a fine line indeed

See, the veneer by which we judge the Tour is just that. It’s a thin slice of reality we view, made even thinner by the fact that we hardly have the patience or concentration to wade through the presentation and get to the meat of the matter.

Which is this: Cycling is still (and always will be) one of the toughest sports in the world. Head out to compete at your local criterium if you think it isn’t hard. You’ll get your ass kicked by thirty-five people most likely.

And that’s at the lowest of the low rungs in the cycling world. Category 5 is for people with chain grease on their calves and dirty bar tape. But it’s real, and it’s hard to ride fast, and that’s what matters. You know where you stand in cycling, win or lose.

But on the day you finally finish in the middle of the bunch sprint, people will wonder out loud why the hell you are so excited. But ignore them, and save that memory of your accomplishment for the day when you are 92 years old and sitting at the dinner table with a dozen guests. Then you can lean forward, let go with a tremendous fart and yell, “I finished in the middle of the bunch sprint!”

People will have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. But you won’t care, because finishing in the middle of the bunch sprint is an accomplishment. Maybe only you will ever own that pride. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Just fart and smile with knowing pleasure if they insist you’re just old and crazy.

Because finishing in the bunch sprint gives you a sliver-sized glimpse of what it’s like to race in the Tour, where riders frequently tear along narrow roads at 30-35 mph, and that’s just to keep up. The crashes? Those are signs of how hard it is to do just that.

So respect that effort. And truly, when you zap through the commercials and tune back into the racing, try to appreciate the fact that these are some of the best athletes in the whole world. It’s the Tour de France, for God’s Sake. People have died in this thing.

It’s not a war, but it could be. Better to channel our conflict through vicarious battles than to point our religion and politics toward another country and blame them for blasting too many fascist commercials our way. That’s how wars start, and Crusades too. The Tour de France may be silly and frivolous in some respects, but it serves a valid, vital purpose in human existence. It shows that we’re all human and trying to occupy the same roads on the same planet. It may seem silly, but that’s the most important lesson of all.

Posted in bike crash, Christopher Cudworth, climbing, competition, cycling, doing pulls in cycling, it never gets easier you just go faster, We Run and Ride Every Day | Tagged bunch sprint, category 5, cycling toughest sport in the world, le tour, Tour de France | Leave a comment

Making good on a promise to keep a cleaner bike

Posted on July 7, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

My Felt 4C road bike was valued at $2300 new when it was named Bike of the Year by Bicycling Magazine back in 2006. I purchased the Felt from a local bike shop that let me try a few different models including the Specialized Allez and a Trek or two perhaps.

They recommended the Felt over the other models. Of course they likely had a stock of them to move off the floor, and the rep had likely given them permission to drop the price a few hundred, so I purchased the Felt for $1700. Then we added new Specialized shoes for $250 and some other gear as well. A helmet, yeah. Tire bars. Tubes. A new kit. No one said cycling is a cheap sport. But I was on the way to become a road cyclist.

Instantly I realized the stock seat on the Felt bike was not for me. So we traded that out for a Specialized split seat that did not make my nuts go numb. That was no superficial switch.

The first day I truly rode the Felt was a revelation. Speeds that were impossible on my Trek 400 steel frame (circa 1984) bike seemed completely manageable on the Felt.

Toward the end of that first ride I was feeling the joy of soaring downhill when a piece of metal flipped under the tire and PFFFFFFFTTTT! I had my first flat on the Felt. Changing that tire took 10 minutes or more but I was back on the road and happy for it.

Probably the best thing that ever happened to me as a cyclist was getting that flat at that moment. Had the bike gone unscathed for weeks it likely would have become like a crystal goblet in my mind. You know that story, right? The zen master who carries around a crystal goblet yet treats it rather roughly is asked by a student whether he was concerned with it breaking or not?

The zen master says: “In my mind it is already broken. Now I can enjoy it in its fullness and not be worried about its loss.” Or something like that. You get the picture.

The nick in the metal of the front wheel that came about from striking that piece of road metal never went away on its own. I tried sanding it down a couple times, but the metal was too tough. How strange that a piece of metal on the road could nick that surface yet a piece of rough sandpaper could not smooth it out?

That’s one of the tarsnakes of life. The damage we ride around with is often caused by seemingly small accidents that through persistence become a part of our existence.

At first we try to fix them, to no avail. Then we learn to live with them. Like floaters in our eyes, we learn to look around them. Then they become part of how we view the world, and even the things our lovers most recognize in us. The small scar on our lip or an indention below the knee from some childhood accident or mid-life surgery becomes a point of reference in our existence. We kiss these intimations and cherish the closeness they represent.

In some ways it is the same with our bicycles. My Felt has dings and scrapes on its carbon fiber paint job. I purchased some Testors red paint to cover the spots where paint flecked off from those unintentional encounters with a garage door or similar moments. I’m a little careless at times with my bike. That’s not something about which I am proud. I’ll lean the bike against the door and like a dog that does not want to sit or wait it will slide on its own, rubbing its top tube against the house. It picks up a line of paint that does not come off by rubbing it with a finger. I take those off with an application of Goof Off.

I try to be so much more careful with my girlfriend’s Scott bike while putting it in and out of the car. But still I caused a hairline scratch on the top tube. I feel guilty about that. But like all relationships and the objects we carry about in life, there are moments when we fail in attention to detail. For that we must ask forgiveness, and try not to do it again.

That is perhaps why I spent an hour cleaning my Felt bike yesterday. While riding with a friend last weekend I asked how it happened that his rear cassette was always so clean? Do you take it off the wheel, I asked?

Yes, he told me. For he is Mechanical. He fixes my bike. He’s always tweaking his bike even during the ride.

Me, I get on and ride. Often my bike is dirty. The chain and cassettes are black with grease. I spray more lube on them to make the ride go okay, but in truth I should be embarrassed. A dirty bike is not a point of pride.

That is why I purchased a can of chain degreaser at the local bike shop. It is called White Lightning and it works like it says. I sprayed it on the entire drive train and the black gooky grease fell away like magic. There is no disclosure needed here. I bought the stuff myself and this is an endorsement I make of free will and of no benefit. White Lightning chain degreaser works. My cassette shone in the afternoon sun. I wiped down the chain with a paper towel to remove the residue and replaced the lube with a shot of Finish Line Dry Teflon Bike Lube.

But I did not stop there. The degreaser also washed away flecks of grease clinging to the frame in places. The bike began to look a lot better. So I pulled out a tub of Turtle Wax car wax and gave the bike a nice shine.

I’ve never done that before, but the Felt deserves a little good treatment. It has carried me tens of thousands of miles now. It will likely carry me tens of thousands more. Sure it needs new shifter cables to match the new brake cables my mechanic installed, but life is always a work in progress. The Felt succumbed to bike wobble on a Wisconsin hill and yet we both came out with only minor repairs.

And when I toe the line for a criterium in the next couple weeks I will not be instantly shamed by the condition of my bike compared to those shiny new jobs with shiny new riders. My cassette will be clean, as will the chain. My frame will shine along with the finely shaved skin of my legs. There is something to be said for feeling the part as well as training to ride. There is something to be said indeed.

Posted in bike crash, bike wobble, Christopher Cudworth, cycling, We Run and Ride Every Day | Tagged Bicycling Magazine, bike maintenance, cleaning your bike, criterium, Felt Bicycles, shaving legs for cycling, white lightning chain degreaser | 1 Comment

Not on your life should you ever get caught, but hang on…

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

One of the unwritten rules of cycling and running is that no one should ever catch you on the road. Ever. Of course it is a rule that I made up in my head. It’s not written down anywhere, or codified in The Rules on Velominati. I’m a little surprised they missed that one.

Catching on

Perhaps they are smarter than that. It is an absurd proposition to think that you’ll never get caught by anyone. There are millions of cyclists faster than me, for example. And nowadays people even catch and pass me while running. I don’t like it. And I try to keep it from happening. But it does.

That didn’t happen much when I was young and fit. There were very few people then running six minutes per mile in training. It seems like there are even fewer doing that now. There aren’t even that many people these days who seem to race faster than 6:00 per mile! I see 5K race results in which the leader of the race runs just under 18:00. To me that’s unfathomably slow for a race win. We once did 3 X 3M at 17:00 in training, for God’s sake.

Sniffing the Go Glue

Now that I’m flirting with 6:00 pace in training again, it’s an interesting proposition to see what might happen if that pace becomes possible in a race.

On that subject, recently I discussed training pace with a friend. We were talking about both cycling and running pace. His physiologist and coaching buddy is doing a study on speed and aging. Apparently one of the basic reasons we slow down as we age is that most people simply quit doing the speed training they once did. He put it this way: “The idea that if you want to do a 4:10 mile, you should got out again and again trying to run a 4:10 mile in training is absurd. You have to train faster than 4:10 pace to be able to sustain that rate of speed for a mile. But that’s what most people do in training. It’s true for both cycling and running.”

As a result, few of us actually get faster. That is, until someone is trying to catch us.

Coming up from behind

Admit it. You’re riding or running along and happen to notice someone coming up behind you. They might be 400 meters back while you’re running, or half a mile back when you’re cycling. You pick up the pace and it is amazing how fast you can go when you don’t want to get caught by someone else. You’re thinking, “Not on your life am I going to get caught…”

Top athletes use such motivation in their training. They know that no matter how fast they might be going in a workout, someone, somewhere else must be going faster. Such notions haunt the dreams of athletes at every level. We don’t like to get beat, but we really don’t like to get caught. That means someone is so much better than you…they are not only going faster, they also made up tons of time and are actually passing you by. AAAAAHHHHH! I can’t stand that feeling.

Lessons learned
I once got caught in open country by two women cyclists. They rolled by at 22 when I was going 19. I asked if I could join them. That’s etiquette, you see. They said yes. But you don’t just grab on to them and hang on. No class in that.

They were better cyclists than me, so I only did a couple pulls. Mostly I rode behind them for 10 miles at between 24-26 mph before they pulled away. I kept them in sight for the rest of the ride. That became the goal. As they pulled away I thanked them for letting me ride with them. Yes, I’d been caught. And yes, they pulled away again. But that pressure to keep up drew me out of a malaise of riding the same pace every day.

Delusions of grandeur

It happens in running as well. We fall into habits that don’t help us get faster. We run out the door at some nutso pace and try to keep it the whole way through a run. Then we get home and look at Strava and say, “Shit! I did 7:53 per mile today. Last week I did 7:51. I suck!”

No, you don’t suck. You’re training methods suck.

It’s a basic fact. Instead of falling into bad habits like racing ourselves for average pace per mile on the same route, we instead need to “fall in” with faster runners in order to be pulled along to a better pace. Otherwise we face a lifetime of getting caught. Instead we’re caught in a cycle of self-perpetuating delusion that we’re getting faster by going hard all the time when we’re really not.

And is that the right way to train? Not on your life.

So choose your moments. Don’t be afraid to push when you get the opportunity. But don’t go out there trying everyday to beat your average pace. That’s not going to happen.

But when that day comes along and you sense someone behind you, use it as motivation to dial it up for a bit. Yes, there is always someone better who may catch you on the roads. But you become a better person when you vow, on occasion, not to let that happen. Latch on and roll to the best of your ability.

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, competition, cycling, doing pulls in cycling, running, the rules velominati, We Run and Ride Every Day | Tagged catching on, coming from behind, getting caught from behind, not on your life, smarter than that, The Rules by velominati, training principles, young and fit | 2 Comments

Happy Fireworks Day

Posted on July 3, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

This morning on my ride with a friend, he related a recent political bit he’d seen on a late night show in which residents of a beach town in California were interviewed about the meaning of Independence Day. You can imagine some of the responses. One person thought America was celebrating its independence from the South, as if we’d won our independence as a nation from the Confederacy.

One could argue about whether that has ever really happened. With Confederate flags still the emblem of choice for so many Americans, have we really earned our independence as a nation? Do we even deserve to claim American exceptionalism when there is clearly a faction of society that does not embrace the values of equality for all Americans?

The racism simmering ever since President Obama took office has finally boiled over like a kettle of country corn. The flame beneath the American melting pot has been set on high the last six years and the hot breath of racism has steamed into the political atmosphere where it overheats the dialogue and cooks the frog of freedom to death.

Racism and nationalism a dangerous mix

Meb Keflezighi of the US, crosses the finish line to win the Men’s Elite division of the 118th Boston Marathon in Boston, Massachusetts April 21, 2014 . AFP PHOTO / Timothy A. CLARY (Photo credit should read TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

Last year I wrote about the achievements of Meb Feflezighi, the African-born naturalized American citizen who won the Boston Marathon. The article was titled “Why Meb’s Boston victory confuses so many people.”

The basis for the piece was a statement I read about how many Americans refuse to see such individuals as true citizens of our country. This is true on several fronts. Some don’t like the idea that someone moved here and calls themselves an American. Others don’t like the fact that Meb has a different skin color than their own. It’s that basic and stupid.

When I posted that article to the Running section of Reddit in hopes of an enlightened discussion on the subject, it was lambasted as naive and idealistic in its assessment of racial problems in America. One angry troll ripped me for claiming that racism was a problem at all in America. “None of the people I know are racist,” he complained. “95% of the people in America are over that stuff.”

Only, they’re obviously not. Not only is race still a sensitive issue, it is a principal source of domestic terrorism, and has long been that way. White supremacy organizations are determined to dominate and dictate the social order. Once such band of nutniks, the KKK, tries to hide its fascist intentions by claiming to be a “Christian organization concerned only with keeping the white race pure.” But the KKK’s history as a terrorist organization defies those claims. The KKK has tortured and killed in the name of white supremacy. It is a racist, dangerous element of society. There is nothing about the KKK that Jesus would have advocated or admired. It is likely the KKK would put a Jew like Jesus to death on its own racist terms.

Basic questions

Does racism by itself actually cause problems? Or is it as harmless belief system? Is racism a lifestyle choice or a genetic predisposition?

These are questions that come to mind quickly on the heels of a man walking into a church with a concealed weapon. Then he sat through a service in order to target his victims and kill people in cold blood. His motives were demonstrably racist and he clearly stated that he want to kill people whose skin color he detested.

Clearly he’s not alone in his racist hatred. Almost a dozen churches have been burned since the murder spree. Racism is alive and well in South Carolina and many other states like it across America. The argument erupted over the symbolism of the Confederate flag and its close ties to slavery in the United States. America has responded symbolically by turning its back on the Confederate flag and demanding it be removed from state capitols and other public places. Walmart stores stopped selling Confederate-branded junk.

It’s all about the base

But these moves won’t sway people who feel their independence is being adversely impacted by the mere presence of black people, Latinos, Jews or any other race of human beings. Certain political parties and boldface sociopaths make a habit of courting this base of hateful, fearful racists as a voting bloc. Donald Trump and his comments about Mexicans comes to mind. There was a backlash in media agreements and retail partners pulling out of deals with The Donald, but here’s the sick truth: His Republican polling numbers actually went up. When it comes to race-baiting, it’s all about the base.

Men like The Donald do not accept that we are all human, and one species. They’ve bolstered their self-image by denigrated the value of other people for so long, it is a tradition in their kin and their kind. The Donald has proven he is as ignorant as some hillbilly Southern cracker with his vendetta against Mexicans. He may be wealthy, but he’s still stupid as a brick when it comes to basic human rights and equality.

Men like The Donald raise their kids to be racists and band together like a sports team with uniforms and team insignias and tons of other symbols of their habitual hatred. Some even own sports teams, yet view their athletes as property and chattel.

Defiance and true independence

I’m old enough to remember well the display of fists in the air when Olympic athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos made that gesture as a statement that American interests were divided when it came to equality for blacks. I was 11 years old at the time, yet already appreciated through other events in the news that black people were still being victimized by racist policies in America.

I’d had my own direct experience with racial fear in an incident with two small black boys with whom I played during my brother’s baseball games. Those two kids were great fun until I accidentally plowed into one of them and gave him, quite ironically one might say, a black eye. The next time I saw them they told me they could no longer play with me because their mother said they had to stay away from white kids. I was six years old then, and stunned that a thing like that could happen. But I accepted and understood that their mother wanted to protect them. Who would not?

It wasn’t hard to see the significance and strength of those two athletes on the podium at Mexico City. They’d worked hard to earn their medals, yet America still deemed them second class citizens.

I now see that gesture as a plain and reasonable statement about the falsehood of independence when it is not granted equally. America celebrates the 4th of July the same way we choose to celebrate Christmas. It’s all about the Fireworks (or presents) and not much about the gratitude for life and equality that underwrites both religious faith and Constitutional rights.

World class attitudes

As athletes we know better than most that people of all races are equal. The ebbs and flow of what race pr people wins races is changing all the while. Yes, in many years the African nations and people of African heritage dominate track and field from sprints up to distance events. But white and Asian and Cuban and European athletes all also earn medals of Gold, Silver and Bronze.

Just as importantly, we recognize the importance of actually granting people the opportunity to compete on equal terms. Just a decade or so ago African and Middle Eastern women were discouraged from even participating in sports. Attitudes are changing about gender as well as race, and sexual orientation as well.

That’s what the Olympics are supposed to be about anyway. Of course drugs and cheating still affect the outcomes in many ways. But you’ll note that people of all races and colors get caught cheating. It’s a human thing that proves equality in a quite ironic way.

Your own constitution

So while we celebrate Independence Day on the 4th of July, what we’re still effectively celebrating is a Happy Fireworks Day. Because unless we go beyond the surface reality of the 4th and big fireworks and actually respect independence for all people, not just white Americans, we’re left with a holiday as shallow and superficial as Christmas, which Fox News defends so vigorously with claims that it is being “attacked” when in fact it has already been raped and pillaged of meaning by the very faith that invented it. Christmas is a co-opted pagan holiday adapted to win converts and create payoffs for faith. Similarly, the 4th of July is a pseudo-patriotic holiday designed to celebrate unity when the nation is miserably divided by hate-filled ideologies that refuse to recognize the equality of legitimate American citizens.

So for now, Happy Fireworks Days. We’ve still got a long ways to go towards real independence for all.

Posted in competition | Tagged 4th of July fireworks, african athletes, donald trump comments about mexicans, independence day, john carlos and tommie smith, KKK, phantom fireworks, race and competition, racism, racist, terrorist organizations in America, The Donald, white athletes | Leave a comment

Oh look! It’s time for the Tour de France, and Lance is back

Posted on July 2, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

Well we nailed June to the wall, didn’t we? For me it meant riding up and down and all around Wisconsin and Illinois.

Horribly Hilly was like a stage of the Tour de France. 72 miles and 6000 feet of climbing. And so it has been interesting to imagine doing twice that, and turning around the next day and doing it again?

Same with the Century I just rode. Pro cyclists ride 100 miles like it’s a slow walk in the park. For me it was an accomplishment to ride nearly 18 mph for the distance. My legs were not as sharp as they were for the Horribly Hilly. It happens.

Well, by comparison these Tour riders do 100 miles at an average pace of over 27 mph some days, and keep up that pace for 21 days of racing.

This year, the Tour de France starts out in Utrecht, Belgium, where race fans are crazy and the roads will punish the lazy, distracted or unfortunate. So we should not be surprised if in 2015 one of the lead riders takes a fall again. It happened last year to Froome and Contador. Froome busted his ass and Contador a leg, if I recall.

Flipping hard

Apparently my fave cyclist in the world, Matthew Busche, winner of the 2015 US National Championships, was not selected for the Trek Tour team. If you’ve never read his blog, it gives tremendous insights on the rigors of being a pro cyclist. Here’s what he wrote about doing the Team Time Trial in the Dauphine race in France:

No seriously, they are… not really so fun. They are never easy and the pain just grows throughout the entire ride. It is a different animal than the individual time trial because rather than set out on a pace you can hold for whatever distance/time, you need to go above that level while pulling, then when you pull off you need to quickly recover enough in time to be able to jump onto the back of the line then rest a little more before your next pull. It is an exercise in self-control because once you go above your limit and can’t recover, you will be dropped for sure. And as guys drop off, the recovery gets shorter, which means your pulls come quicker, which means the lactic grows more! All in all, I don’t think it is something anyone really look forward to.

That should make you feel better as a cyclist, knowing that these guys suffer and fail just like the rest of us. And when it’s on a Grand scale, as it is in the Tour de France, the pressure on the athletes is immense. There are only nine team members on these Tour squads. Everyone has a role. Just the competition to make a Tour team is beyond most of our imagination. Then you have to line up and race all out for 21 days. And on rest days you still ride your bike for three hours.

Last year “Flip” Busche raced in the Tour and even tried a couple breakaways. But he also crashed a lot. Five times I think it was, yet he kept on going. It goes to show that it takes experience, grit and a bunch of luck to race well in the Tour de France.

Lance is back. Sort of.

Which brings us to the fact that Lance Armstrong will be riding two ceremonial stages of the Tour course this year in advance of the peloton. Of course there are many who hate the fact that Armstrong will be coming anywhere near the Tour. His doping record and treatment of those who opposed him during his reign as the king of cycling are stuck in the craw of many pro cycling fans, and will be forever.

In conversation with a few cyclists during a recent ride, there were those who passed on judging Lance to be a worse cheat than most. “He was still the best cyclist among all the other cheaters,” one fellow observed. “And they were all cheating. Make no mistake about that.”

It may be true that cyclists such as America’s Greg Lemond did not cheat to win their Tour titles, while Lance did. It is also true that Lance ruined lives with his torturous aggression toward those who opposed him or threatened to blow the lid off his anti-doping ruse.

But the fact remains that Lance Armstrong came out ahead in bike racing through 14,000+ miles of racing to win seven times in the Tour de France. He controlled his own destiny and acted strategically. Heresponded to challenges better than any Tour bike rider in history. And despite his own worst flaws, and there were many, he used his reputation to do some good in this world.

The supposedly new breed

So it’s an interesting challenge to consider what these new, supposedly dopeless bike riders have to offer the Tour this year. One still really has to wonder. As one commentator on a YouTube video of Alberto Contador said, “Almost everybody in the top of professional sports is doping one way or another…If you want to have such achievements and see people do these kinds of stuff, you gotta take it with a pinch of salt and just admire it as it is.”

The challenge in watching the Tour is that we do want miracles to happen. We thrill at the sight of a rider launching off the front of a thinning pack on a mountainside. We long for that rider to transcend all our expectations. Our dreams get tied up in those efforts, those men “dancing on the pedals” as Phil Liggett likes to call it.

Well, are those moments still tainted by doping? Perhaps the differences between riders is now natural, not supernatural. In any case, it’s best to consider how goddamned hard it is to ride up a long, steep mountain grade at nearly 20 mph.

We apparently don’t like cheats in the world of cycling, so we must accept that the Tour itself is a superhuman event. Those are human beings inside those colorful kits. They have human brains too, and human flaws. They may be better riders than anyone else in the world, but the roads are still made of asphalt, and the mountains piled high with rock. When they emerge from the treeline and start climbing to altitude, the air gets thinner as the road gets steeper. They are trained for these exertions, yet on any given day the body may or may not respond.

The human factor

The competition looks interesting, with Vincenzo Nibali returning to defend against Quintana, Froome, Contador, Talansky, Van Garderen and the rest. Analyzing who will win is always fruitless. No one really knows. Not when there are cobbles to navigate in the first week, and mountains to climb the last two.

I prefer to watch the Tour and find a rider to root for along the way. There are so many good reasons to cheer for so many riders. The sprinters with their preening victory celebrations, like prize fighters or track runners. The pure climbers with the race for the absurd polka dot jersey. The heroics of a French rider on Bastille Day. It’s like a Pixar film. Drama and humor and fashion all mixed together.

Once you learn their stories and motivations, and how much difficulty in training and life they must overcome to achieve results, the Tour is one big rolling soap opera. It has made me cry over the years, and cringe as well.

Those crashes. They are so fast and nasty. Riders getting thrown into fences like Johnny Hoogerland did a few years back? That was beyond category in terms of discomfort. Despite their “big engines” and gravity-defying legs, they are just like us, only better. That’s what makes the Tour de France so interesting and exciting.

Posted in Christopher Cudworth, climbing, competition, cycling, cycling the midwest, We Run and Ride Every Day | Tagged Alberto Contador, chris froome, cycling, Lance Armstrong, saxo tinkoff, Team Sky, Tour de France | 1 Comment

SPECIAL EDITION: Supreme Court rules on whether cyclists can shave legs

Posted on July 1, 2015 by Christopher Cudworth

(Washington, DC) In a 5-4 partisan vote with conservative justices aligned with a defendant who found shaved legs on cyclists “offensive and sexually confused,” the Supreme Court today handed down a judgement that will likely rock the cycling world for decades to come.

FILE - In this Oct. 6, 2011 file photo, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia participates at the third annual Washington Ideas Forum at the Newseum in Washington. Scalia and Attorney General Eric Holder are scheduled to speak at an American Bar Association meeting in New Orleans this weekend. Scalia will be addressing ABA members and answering audience questions on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2012, at the Sheraton New Orleans Hotel. The discussion will be led by Boston University School of Law dean emeritus Ronald Cass. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

Justice Antonin Scalia gestures to indicate the polarization he believes will come about in society if cyclists continue to shave their legs.

The majority opinion, authored by Justice Antonin Scalia, went to great lengths in describing why so many people find leg-shaving among cyclists offensive.

“This is a sexual and social ambiguity that causes distraction in the public sector,” Scalia wrote. “Leg shaving can cause confusion among people trying to determine the gender of people on bikes. The resulting delays can put the lives of both cyclists and motorist in grave danger by causing latent consideration and pondiferous predilections. As a result we consider leg-shaving a distraction that constitutes an illegal action on the roads on par with texting while driving, not wearing seatbelt and holding twitchy poodles in your laps. That last part I just made up,” he stated. “But you see my point.”

“I also want to point out the polarization of society that allowing cyclists to shave their legs can produce. When you get a hairy-backed, bearded, gun-toting driver of a F-250 in the same lane as a spandex-sporting, shaved legs cyclist on an aero Cervelo, that’s placing on imposition on the traditional roles of people on the roads and frankly constitutes Cruel and Unusual Punishment for the driver of the F-250 to have to look at a person’s shaved legs in public.”

Prosecutors in the case raised the prospect that allowing cyclists to wantonly shave their legs could lead to other risky behaviors. Lawyers pointed to “The Rules” cited on a website called Velominati: Keepers of the Cog, as evidence that cyclists are being encouraged to flaunt themselves in public. “We submit as evidence, Rule #6,” prosecutors said. “Free your mind and your legs will follow. Your mind is your worst enemy. Do all your thinking before you start riding your bike. Once the pedals start to turn, wrap yourself in the sensations of the ride – the smell of the air, the sound of the tires, the feeling of flight as the bicycle rolls over the road.”

“We think this shows that cyclists are conspiring to flaunt both the rules of nature and the laws that govern society. This purely sensual experiment is indicative of an anti-authoritarian mind and a danger to society. Shaved legs are an open statement on the order of a hate crime against the rest of society.”

Based on this and other testimony by motorists claiming to have been distracted by men and women in spandex with shaved legs, caused Antonin Scalia to cite Rule #33 from Velominati.

“Rule #33 // Shave your guns,” noted Scalia in his majority opinion. “Can be taken to mean that legs are guns. We believe it to be Constitutionally confusing to suggest that guns should be shaved when the Second Amendment clearly says ‘the right to bare arms shall not be infringed.’ As Constitutional originalists, we think the language of the Constitution is sacrosanct.”

When reminded in the Dissenting opinion written by Justice Greenberg that the actual language of the Second Amendment reads “to bear arms” and not to “bare arms,” Scalia went public to scoff at his liberal Justice counterpart. “Who is she to tell me what the Constitution says? It says whatever I mean it to say. That’s my right and responsibility as a Justice of the Supreme Court.” When asked if the ban on shaved legs for male cyclists applies to women cyclists as well, Scalia gave his famous gesture of “two fingers up” and pronounced. “Two different things. Those are two different things.” And that’s all he said.

In the Dissenting Opinion Justice Greenberg cited Rule #33 in its entirety to make her point that leg shaving among all cyclists is an honored tradition, not a breach of the social contract. “Legs are to be carefully shaved at all times,” she incorporated in her opinion. “If, for some reason, your legs are to be left hairy, make sure you can dish out plenty of hurt to shaved riders, or be considered a hippie douche on your way to a Critical Mass. Whether you use a straight razor or a Bowie knife, use Baxter to keep them smooth. “This Rule,” she wryly noted. “Means that you can be a hippie douche whether your are a man or a woman.”

Some journalists asked Scalia and the Conservative Justice Team standing by his side in equally black robes about whether the new ruling on Shaved Legs in Cyclists was somehow a compensatory response to the controversial ruling on gay marriage recently passed down by the court. “What would make you think that?” Scalia huffed when grilled by the media. “This court has been consistent in all its rulings, especially those that confuse people with corporations and politics with religion. We’re very consistent with our inconsistency. You should know that by now.” Justice Clarence Thomas nodded at that. Or perhaps he was merely nodding off.

The Supreme Court is soon expected to hear cases determining whether runners should be allowed to wear shorts over their running tights and if triathletes can wear wetsuits while picking up groceries at Walmart.

Posted in cycling | Tagged Justice Antonin Scalia, justice Clarence Thomas, Justice John Roberts, Justice ruth bader ginsberg, Justice samuel alito, Obey the Rules, supreme court ruling on shaved legs, Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage, The Rules, velominati | 1 Comment

	Jim Nielsen on Marty Supreme and Me
	Warren on Marty Supreme and Me
	Christopher Cudworth on Marty Supreme and Me
	John Enright on Marty Supreme and Me
	Christopher Cudworth on A November 18 to remember

We Run and Ride

The chicken or the egg dilemma on triathlons and fidelity

Summer engagements and the drivetrain of love

Announcing the Tarsnake Award from We Run and Ride

For this neutrino, it’s sink or swim time

How to survive the Tour de France (and its commercials) without guilt

Making good on a promise to keep a cleaner bike

Not on your life should you ever get caught, but hang on…

Happy Fireworks Day

Oh look! It’s time for the Tour de France, and Lance is back

SPECIAL EDITION: Supreme Court rules on whether cyclists can shave legs

Follow Blog via Email

Recent Posts

Archives

Categories

Follow me on Twitter

Leave a comment!

Christopher Cudworth Fan Page

Follow Blog via Email

Blogs I Follow