GLOBADOM

I suspect I’ve made it clear at one point or another on Wired Cola, but I’m a reasonably fit, pretty serious competitive cyclist. That was not true as recently as 2002, when I was no more than a guy who rode a bike to work sometimes.

More notably, until the Fall of 2001 I was pretty much a guy who didn’t do any regular exercise, and who had never been really fit. Sometime in 1996 I managed to be less overweight than usual, but that was it.

How did this happen? The short answer is that I found a way to make exercise a habit, and all good flowed from there.

The real trick is making exercise — or anything else — a habit. I’m not done with making good habits, not by a long shot. My current goal is to get into the habit of finishing things, or to put it another way, of getting things done. I have a lot of personal fixes I want to make, but they come slowly.

I am fascinated by self-transformation, both in myself and in others. From the number of personal-improvement books out there, I’d say many people are the same way. Here’s my consolidated, underinformed, simplified view of the literature:

Most self-improvement books are junk: if I could express the single bad idea I see existing in most self-improvement plans, be they diets, time-management, two-minute management, or winning friends and influencing people, it’s their obtuse assertions that this book has a canonical answer. One of the reasons there are so many self-improvement books is because there are so many paths to self-improvement. Not only is any one book-based plan right or wrong, it’s my guess that most of them will be wrong for you.

But most self-improvement books are worthwhile: yep. Because except in the case of outright charlatans, they are mostly the product of self-improvement specialists, be they Richard Simmons, Anthony Robbins, or David Allen, who have succeeded to some extent.

I think the contradiction arises because people vary in how they are motivated, and what they will find habit forming.

In my own case, let’s just look at one problem. In 2000, I was clearly eating too much and working out hardly at all. I was not in great shape.

By the end of 2001, I was a lot lighter, mostly because my eating habits had changed: The Lovely One started feeding me healthier food, and I dropped around 15 pounds in a year. The big transformation there was just eating what she served, and thus keeping portions in check (somewhat) and reducing the amount of crummy food I ate.

The next step was starting to exercise. In my case, I sort of stumbled onto riding my bike to work. I was motivated by a small desire to save some money, and a large desire to get some regular exercise. But I stayed with bike commuting like no other exercise before.

Why? Bike commuting had a few elements that suited me perfectly:

• it fit into my schedule: my commute is 60 minutes a day by car. By bike, it is now about the same, but with about a 30 minute allowance for extra clean-up, changing clothes, et cetera. By transit it’s probably 90 minutes at least. The real magic is that by replacing my commute with a bike commute, I combine two functions: getting to work, and getting in some exercise. From a time-management viewpoint, this is a massive win. If they were separate, I would be looking at about 90 extra minutes a day to get the same benefit.
• It fit my commute: long enough to be a workout, but short enough to be feasible, my commute fits into a sweet spot that won’t exist for all people. I even got some painful, transforming hills in the bargain.
• I had to finish the workout once I started it: oh, what a key this is! When I get up in the morning, there is only one key go/no-go decision: do I get into my bike shorts or not? Once that happens, everything else is set. Once I get out on the bike, I have to get to work. Once I get to work, I have to ride home. That may have been the most important factor in forcing me to stick with this habit. Some people will not need this kind of push, though.
• It was purposeful: commuting is a real activity. Even today, when I ostensibly cross-train to help my bike racing, I have a hard time sticking with calisthenics. They’re just so aimless, and there’s always a good excuse for avoiding them. But for some people, I think the pluses of push-ups (you can do them in your living room, and the weather is never a factor) make this activity a big win.
• the downsides of the activity didn’t bother me: if you fear traffic or are averse to bad weather, bike commuting won’t work for you. There’s not much arguing this. You might be able to pick a quiet route, or get over your fear of commuting in traffic, but you’ll probably be better off with a different activity.
• I like riding: this helps a lot. Cycling has aesthetic, mechanical, and even athletic attractions for me. In a world of sports that require skill and practice, cycling was one which required much less skill than most, and which I was already practicing on my way to work. Discovering that my commute to work was accidentally preparing me to become a competitive athlete was a shocking side effect. Liking cycling and being perky also meant I was never intimidated by the pretty serious hills between home and work. I rode them because to get to work, they had to be ridden, and because I wouldn’t believe they couldn’t be ridden.

The lesson here is not that cycling is a panacea: The Lovely One has never really enjoyed it, and many people I know look at one aspect or another of my workout and just shake their heads. The point is that cycling was a solution especially suited to my needs and my weaknesses. That last thing is important: cycling worked around the things I was bad at.

In comparison, The Lovely One walks our new, very energetic dog. She does this about 45 minutes a day. That activity works superbly for her, because it suits her personality and needs in a way that cycling does not.

Don’t worry, I’ll come back to this topic later.

Holy moly. I won the prime sprint in last night’s Tuesday Night training crit, which means I have won prime sprints in each of the last three crits I have entered. And adding glory to glory, I managed to pick up third place in the finish, too, and teammate John, after doing colossal amounts of work all race, came from way back to sprint into second place, and good on him!

Excellent teamwork, and I just felt at ease for the whole race. Suck 2 again, maybe even Suck 1. The guy who won the race just went a little earlier and more audaciously in the sprint than I expected, and I think I would have had the legs to beat him if I had been smarter.

The prime sprint? Went into my favourite corner third in line, confident at that point that nobody could get around me because 1 and 2 were so quick. was second into the complex set of esses before the straight, and when the first guy went, I just sat on him, looked back to make sure we were clear of the others, and then came over the first guy without any trouble.

Today’s a flex day for me, so it’s berry-picking time. The blackberries are in full force.

Viva Forteanism! Danica McKellar, most famous as Winnie from The Wonder Years, is more than just a pretty face. It turns out she studied mathematics in university, and even published a pretty serious mathematical paper. I won’t examine the details (because I can’t), but here’s the best question from her Stuff Magazine interview:

After the show, you attended UCLA, became a genius and published a paper on Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models on Z2. I really enjoyed the part on infinite occupied clusters.
It’s really complicated and not that interesting to most people.

After chatting with Erick a bit, I suggested that she was probably at a key point in the 2-D hotness/mathematical prowess graph: hotter than anyone more mathematically inclined than her, and more mathematically inclined than anyone hotter than her.

The inevitable questions came up: what’s her Erdös Number? It’s 4. What’s her Bacon Number? It’s 2. Is that the lowest combined Erdös-Bacon number? No. That has been presumed to be a prize belonging to Brian Greene, or maybe Bruce Reznick, though if you allow the latter claim, you are doomed to admit the very strong probability that the lowest current Erdös-Bacon sum is 3, and is held by…

Hank Aaron?!?

Well, let’s be clear: he is cruising to victory in the greatest bike race in the world, I’m showing remarkable power and ability in local low-category racing. But qualifiers aside, let’s talk about Lance Armstrong first:

He’s a machine. Having simply done enough to devastate his rivals by having only good days in the mountains while they sometimes had bad ones, he now leads the Tour de France by almost 3 minutes, and if anything he’s likely to take more time out of his rivals on the penultimate time trial stage (because of the nature of bike racing, the stages between now and Saturday’s TT pose no danger: on relatively flat stages, or ones where the mountains are far from the finish, Lance’s Discovery teammates can work together via drafting in a paceline to easily catch anyone who is still a threat to his GC hopes (there aren’t many: the tenth-place rider in the General Classification is a hopeless 12 minutes down)). The final stage on Sunday is almost always ceremonial for GC classification, though the sprinters are usually busy sorting out the places in their contest.

But as much as Lance has dominated this Tour, he has done so quietly, without an individual stage win yet. Meanwhile, his team, earlier maligned for situations in which they left Armstrong more exposed that is customary, has become a dominant force in the race. Overlooked is that two of Armstrong’s teammates have won stages in the last few days, they just took a lead in the relatively obscure team standings, and their hope for the future, Yaroslav Popoyvich, has a comfortable lead in the Best Young Rider (white jersey) category.

The punchline is that most of those achievements have come largely as side-effects of tactics that were designed to help Lance win. Even without Armstrong, Discovery would be a very, very powerful team.

Now back to me: after winning a watch in a race two weeks ago, I haven’t raced at all since. Did it hurt me? It did not. I went to the World Tuesday Night Championships last night, lined up with the Cat 4s, and went for it. I was feeling good all night, and proved it by winning another prime sprint, and then recovering well enough from that effort to pick up fourth place at the finish, to the surprise and delight of my teammates. Suck Level 2, and arguably my best race of the year.

The prime sprint was another one where I benefitted from the folly of others. In a bit of an experiment, I tried to take off from the pack far earlier than usual on the prime lap, and dared anyone to follow. As soon as I booked out, the pack instantly strung out, and was closing fast. So I moved across the road, denying the approaching front of the pack, now seriously single-file, any chance at my wheel. The leader of the pack followed my move, and by now we were closing on a tight corner. So I set up for the corner, still ahead of the pack, and whipped through in best ex-motorcyclist fashion at top speed.

Behind me I heard the distinct sounds of a crash in the corner. I carried on, pushed harder, and when I finally looked back, there was nobody behind me. I took the prime by hundreds of metres, and then spent a very slow hill-climb recovering from my efforts.

The rest of the race was fairly interesting: three escaping riders came up to me, I tried to hang on to their wheels, while my teammates (as I found later) were doing their best to shut down the pack. Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay with the escapees, but fortunately, I was able to stay with the pack when it came by, and spent my time sitting in and recovering. The pack caught two of the other riders as well, and we all sprinted for second place (the remaining breakaway rider took first place by a vast margin).

Tonight: Steamworks Tour de Gastown. You and 30,000 other screaming fans watching some of the fastest racers on this continent. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it, but I still recommend it. On the weekend, the brutally hard Tour de White Rock goes off, and I will be there, since I’ll be driving one of the support vehicles, also known as the best seats in the house.

Happy Birthday to The Lovely One! Birthday wishes to rsaloust at hotmail dotcom. Hopefully, the deck box waiting for her on the back patio will be exactly what she wanted. Tonight we go out to Wild Rice, and then for a little light Shakespeare.

Okay, the big guns have been quiet since Tuesday, if you’re interested in the GC. Friday isn’t much more important, and should be another day where Discovery just holds down the fort while GC no-hopers (is that too technical? What I mean is a rider who has lost so much time on earlier stages that they can’t possibly threaten the yellow jersey even if they make a relatively large time gain) go off for breakaways and stage wins, and maybe a few more riders find a way to sink out of contention of one jersey or another.

Then comes Stage 14. Observe that profile like Tuesday’s stage, this one features a big mountain closely followed by a big mountaintop finish. With the added stings of more days of racing, more depleted teams (Discovery lost Triki Beltran, one of their mountain specialists, to a crash this week), and time running out, this is a stage where all the favourites will have to be prepared for major attacks.

In other words? The game plan for Discovery is for the team to control the stage, fly up the second climb, burn themselves up, and then Lance takes over and finishes off whoever is left, just like on Tuesday.

If I’m reading the time schedule correctly, the expected finish will be between 7:30 and 8:20 on Saturday morning, PDT. The racing will be quite intense for the last hour or two as they face the Port de Pailheres and the romantically named Ax-3-Domaines.

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Originally uploaded by rcousine.

This is The Lovely One’s favourite shot. It’s the same bug, on the same Bug (The Good Thing).

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Originally uploaded by rcousine.

A beetle (a ladybug, really) on the New Beetle.

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Originally uploaded by rcousine.

This is our new dog, in an unusually big-nosed mood.

Well, can I call it or what? Tuesday’s stage was an awe-inspiring display of power. In short: Lance put the yellow jersey back on today, and all but destroyed the hopes of most of the theoretical challengers. It was an amazing thing to see Armstrong just open up, and then watch names like Ullrich, Vinokourov, Heras, and many more just drop away like they were in some other race.

Credit must go to those who stayed with him, and in the end there were three who lasted most of the way, and only one who went to the finish line with the Texan. Rasmussen, Valverde, and Mancebo: they rode with Lance. Rasmussen is well on his way to earning the King of the Mountains title; Valverde got an amazing stage win, and Mancebo helped his teammate Valverde to get there, but still stayed around to collect fourth place.

It’s not game over yet. There’s many more hard days. There’s many more chances for Armstrong to falter or suffer a mishap or just turn out to be old. But so far, all of his challengers look much older than he does.

Wednesday’s stage will be even tougher on the riders, with more hard hills, but the lack of a mountaintop finish should make for a less decisive event. Dropped riders can catch up on descents, and packs of riders can draft each other and make time on solo escape artists.