Return to Racing

 On September 25th, I participated in the Giant Acorn olympic distance triathlon at Lake Anna State Park in Virginia. Lake Anna is about a two hour drive south-west from Baltimore, as shown below.

It was my first time racing in about two years, so expectations were set accordingly and I went in with the following plan:

1. Use the swim as a warm-up.
2. Stay relaxed on the bike until I finished two bottles (one sports drink, one water), then think about pushing it.
3. Stay safe and have fun!

The swim start was delayed due to fog on the lake, so the first racers set out closer to 9am than to the originally scheduled start time of 8am. I think the race directors made a good call since about 45% of the swim was away from shore.

I stuck to the plan, started near the back, and stayed wide (and way clear) of other racers on the swim. The water was warm and visibility was pretty good after the fog burned away. There was a giant inflatable wavy arm man (of the kind one would expect to see at a used car dealership during a Labor Day sale) positioned just to the right of the timing mats for the swim finish. From ~700m away, I had a good target for sighting my return to shore.

The bike ride started with a pretty good climb from beach-level out to the park exit. The race organizers suggested (appropriately) that athletes should start in a low gear. Sure enough, I saw some riders struggling to start going up the first hill. The course was a lolly-pop shape, covering about 25 miles on rolling country roads. A spectator named Joe who was taking pictures (and who met Chelsea) captured a shot of me on the bike at the end of the bike course. You can tell it's the end because:

1. I'm going downhill.
2. The bottles are empty.
   

 The run was a two-lap course within the park, consisting of a loop with an out-and-back side spur. The run course began by climbing the same hill that the bike course started on, which meant that racers had the opportunity to test themselves on that hill three times (once on the bike, twice on the run)!

I wound up with the following splits and overall time:

• Swim       27:28.9
• T1          3:20.2
• Bike     1:17:43.9
• T2          2:07.6
• Run        50:30.3

Total        2:41:11.1

After two years away from racing, it felt good to go out and do an event like this. To make the run extra special, I paced things out such that the last six miles of a September 100-mile running challenge posed by a friend from Fargo took place during the race's 10k.

Thoughts on empathy and nuclear weapons

About 100 years ago, chemists and physicists began developing models of atomic structure that have remained largely unchanged through today.  At that time, the idea that negatively charged electrons orbit around a positively charged and far more massive nucleus was a novel idea.  Some experts greeted it with skepticism.  However, after careful experimentation using new techniques, it became clear that previous models of atomic structure simply did not hold up.

About 300 years ago, Isaac Newton developed calculus while applying mathematical models to the motion of physical objects.  That area of study, now covered in high school and freshmen level college physics courses, is referred to as Newtonian Mechanics.

Newton was a very clever guy, maybe one of the most brilliant scientists of all time.  Why then, did he not discover the structure of the atom?  He certainly had the requisite mental capacities; curiosity, ingenuity, conceptual creativity, logic, and deductive reasoning.  I hypothesize that what he lacked was the technology, the new techniques that were made available in the early 20th century, that enabled other scientists to understand the atom 200 years later.

What does this have to do with sensitivity and safe spaces?

A number of friends and acquaintances have expressed varying degrees of concern about the results of the US elections last month.  It took me some time to understand how it could be there was so much fear and apprehension about the incoming president when I felt so little.

Part of the reason is that I am an able-bodied, straight, white, educated, land-owning, employed, male.  With the exceptions of having a famous family name or overwhelming wealth, I grew up with every advantage.  I've never felt like I was treated differently in any way because of some aspect of who I was.

I am normal.  I am, in some ways, like Isaac Newton.  We both are curious, able-bodied, white, educated, employed men.  He and I also don't come pre-configured with sufficiently sensitive technologies to understand everything going on around us.

While it took 200 years for scientific measurement technology to align with physical reality and concepts that experts in the field could understand, a person today can practice empathy with minimal effort and essentially no cost.

I set out writing this post with a hope of using an analogy to describe a situation in a very non-threatening way.  It's not clear to me if it has translated as well from my brain to the computer as I had hoped.  It certainly turned out longer.  At any rate, I hope it might lead to some useful discussion or prompt a thought or two.

If you made it this far, you deserve a funny picture as a reward.  Here is a photo of the cat telling me to hush.

Muenster says I'm rambling and need to stop.

Thinking about some numbers

Yesterday, I ran across a video in which the NRA accuses the president of being a hypocrite for simultaneously advocating arms control laws while he and his family are protected by armed secret service personnel.

How much of a hypocrite is he for receiving protection?  I am not aware of any units with which to measure or quantify hypocrisy, but I did find some numbers and facts to think about:

Crime rates are often normalized to instances per hundred thousand person years.  In other words, in a year in a place with 100 thousand people, this is a measure of how many times the crime in question might be expected to occur.

New York City in 2010 had 6.4 homicides per 100k people.

Canada in 2006 had 1.9 homicides per 100k people.

Japan in 1989 had 1.1 homicides per 100k people.

The United States has been around since 1776.

This year is 2013.

The United States has existed for 237 years.

The United States has one president at a time.

1 [person] * 237 [years] = 237 [person years].

Four presidents (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy) were assassinated while in office.

( 4 [homicide] / 237 [person years] ) * ( 100k / 100k ) =
1687 [homicide] / [100k person years]

Being president is 263 times more dangerous than living in New York City.

As a point of reference, Wikipedia's US Armed Forces page claims there are approximately 1.456 million active duty personnel in the US military.  At the same time, icasualties.org/ reports a total of 6661 US military fatalities (combined) in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

1.456M [personnel] * 12.25 [years] = 17.836 million [ person years ]

( 6661 [fatalities] / 17.836 million [person years] ) * ( 100k / 100k ) =
37.5 [fatalities]/[100k person years]

Being president is about 45 times more dangerous than being on active duty in the US military when the country is conducting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a result of this analysis, I conclude that the president is not a hypocrite in wanting some protection, or at least in accepting some if he wants it or not.  Based on the numbers, turning down presidential protection would be downright foolish, just like walking unaware through a New York subway, Baghdad, or Kabul.

Holiday challenges

My gym in Boulder had a holiday rowing challenge.  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, athletes put in 100km on the rowing machines.  Being in Fargo, I had no problem with doing a majority of my exercise indoors.  As a result, I became very familiar with the rowing machines at the NDSU student wellness center gym.

I finished the challenge a couple days early.  Two of the toughest sessions were 5km time trials.  While a 5km on the bike might only take about 6 minutes, 5km on the rower takes about 18 minutes and involves quite a bit more suffering.  My final 5km effort involved changing the damper (resistance) setting on the rower every 500m and going to a lighter and lighter damper setting over the course of the effort, while maintaining a consistent pace.

After the rowing challenge ended, I decided to take up a new challenge as I wait for warm weather to return to the frozen tundra of the north.  My next idea was to run 100km between Christmas and Martin Luther King Jr Day.  I was able to knock off a few kilometers in California while visiting my folks for Christmas, and have been continuing to chug along here in Fargo.  Most of the running has been outside in <20F weather, while some has been on the indoor track at the NDSU wellness center.  In a few cases, the "run" has been little more than slogging along in sub-5F temperatures.

Below is a plot of my progress toward completing the running challenge (the blue line), along with a plot of the progress required if I were to run the exact same distance every day from Christmas until the MLK holiday (the red line).  As long as the blue line stays above the red line, I am on pace to finish this challenge too.

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Thoughts based on a recent Fargo Forum opinion piece

In the December 30th edition, in an opinion letter titled "A ‘tired’ defense still valid", the author argues that weaponry is needed to protect freedom from government-imposed tyranny and goes so far as to imply firearm owners might have to rebel against a government that tries to implement arms controls.

Tyranny is defined as: cruel and oppressive government or rule.  There are existing restrictions on gun possession.  For example, Title 18, United States Code, Section 922 (g) & (n) prohibits felons from possessing firearms.  At the same time, the 8th Amendment guarantees Americans will not be subject to cruel or unusual punishments.  It is a short logical leap to conclude a government that implements firearm control is not automatically a tyranny.  Put away your plans for armed revolt; we don't need them!

The Jeff Cooper line of thought made sense in an isolated, post-revolution, frontier community where a small conspiracy of armed perpetrators could use force to inflict their will on a small unarmed population.  That model does not scale well to a country with over 300 million people spread over nearly 4 million square miles of land, with widespread deployment of modern electronic communication systems, law enforcement agencies, and a justice system that works pretty well most of the time.

I am reminded of a conversation with a USMC veteran who told me the most potent person in an infantry platoon is not the rifleman.  It is the radio operator.  Our best defence against tyranny is not a handful (or even a large number) of citizens with rifles.  It is several hundred million well-informed citizens who speak up if they see something wrong and make good choices about who they elect to office.

Subterranean cycling and a bit of word-play

Three weeks ago, I arrived in North Dakota after an uneventful drive from Boulder, CO.  The new job started right away, and I'm finally getting into a somewhat stable weekly routine.  I've even found a coffee shop where I can sip tea and use the complimentary WiFi to check e-mail, read news, and compose new blog posts.

This image of the North Dakota flag was copied from Wikipedia, a fantastic source for information about most everything you can think of.

 Yesterday we had some snow fall in the afternoon with a little accumulation overnight, so when I got up this morning, I became a subterranean cyclist.  I filled up a bottle of water, unfolded the rollers in front of the TV and stereo in the basement, started a DVD from Netflix, and rode tempo until the credits ran.  Oofda!  When spring comes around, I think I'll either be reasonably fast or have hung up the bike and quit.  On the plus side, the probability of being hit by a motor vehicle while riding in the basement is small, probably in the same neighborhood as the probability of being hit by an aircraft.

Towards the end of the week, I managed to make two jokes that were generally well-received.  The first was at work Friday afternoon when a system engineer miss-typed and assigned a project requirement to "menufacturing".  I pointed out that is where one would go before opening a restaurant.  Then on Saturday morning grandma asked where a bus, parked in the mall parking lot, was from.  The side of the bus read Beaver Bus Lines.  I concluded, "It's from some dam place."  Beaver Bus Lines is a charter bus tour service based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

The tea in my cup is running low now, and it's about time for lunch, so I'm going to log off and find some food.

New Jersey

Not the state (I drove through there for the first time last June; a story for another time) but what I picked up this past Friday at track cycling nationals in Carson, California.

Last week from Thursday through Sunday, USA Cycling hosted the 2012 elite and paralympic track nationals at the Velo Sports Center at the Home Depot Center.  I raced a pair of individual endurance events from the elite program, and then piloted tandem for Chester Triplett, a visually impaired cyclist based in North Carolina.

In order, my schedule was as follows:
Scratch race qualifier and final on Thursday
Paralympic 4km pursuit on Friday
Points race qualifier and final on Saturday
Paralympic 1km time trial on Sunday

I rode small gears for the scratch races on Thursday, did just enough work in the qualifier to make the final, and then treated the final as a hard opener to make my legs primed and ready for the pursuit on Friday.  The scratch race final wound up being rather fast, with the field splintering inside the last 20 laps (of of 60 laps total for the 15km race).  I finished 12th place out of 24 starters, with the dubious designation of being the last-placed rider who was on even laps with the eventual winner, Ian Moir.

On Friday, Chester and I put a big gear on the tandem, affectionately nicknamed The Battle Tank and warmed up for a 4km pursuit.  We opened up the first kilometer of the ride a little faster than optimal, but were able to throttle back our intensity and settle into a pace we could sustain for the duration of the race.

Mid-way through the race, we caught Kevin (and pilot Robert) which clinched the win.

We ended up posting a 4:37.7 in the pursuit.  We were both quite satisfied with that time for our first pursuit together.

On Saturday, I was back on the single bike for a points race qualifier in the morning and final in the evening.  The qualifier went smoothly.  Like the scratch race, I rode patiently and did just enough work to make sure to qualify for the final.  The final was 160 laps of high intensity suffer-fest.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Also like the scratch race, I intended for the points race to leave my legs primed and ready for the 1km time trial on Sunday.

The kilo was early in the afternoon on Sunday, immediately following the team sprint event for the women.  A picture of our kilo start is shown below.

Kilo starts are hard on tandems.  Chester and his former pilot broke a bike once doing a standing start like this.

Our final time in the kilo was a 1:11.0; not what we had hoped for.  However, there were quite a few easily-identified areas where we could have done better, so there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to pick for next time.

On Monday I hit the road from LA and drove across southern California, through Las Vegas, cut the corner of Arizona, across Utah, and back into Colorado.  There was a closure on I-70 in Glenwood Springs, so I was forced off the road and took a little down time before completing the drive to the front range.  Now I'm back in Boulder for a short window before taking off to my next adventure with the new job in North Dakota.

Back on June 25th, I drove from Washington DC to Boston in a day, and in doing so traversed New Jersey on the New Jersey Turnpike.  I think I like this new jersey better...

To quote Hannibal from the A Team: I love it when a plan comes together!