My roommate has been buying this one cereal lately and leaves his empty boxes by the back door for someone to take out. Anyways, I have seen these empty boxes repeatedly in the past month and never take more than a moment to look at them as I walk into the kitchen.
However, each time I see them, my mind reads “Oat Cheese Cheerios”. Even though I know that they are Oat Cluster Cheerios (at least looking delicious from the box’s marketing perspective), my mind still registers Oat Cheese. Adding insult to injury, the more I think about Oat Cheese Cheerios, the more I see Oat Cheese Cheerios. The result is that I am curious as to what oat cheese would taste like. Maybe oat cheese processing requires the elimination of acceleration from goat cheese manufacturing. Kind of like decaffeinating coffee. I’d be up for trying some.
Question: What would you talk about if you were given 3 minutes at the TED conference? Answer: You’d talk about something you love. This 3-minute talk by Hotmail venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson is wonderfully executed, enhanced with fast-paced visuals, completely stutter-free and is the best way you’ll spend 3 minutes of your Thursday afternoon.
Spring break is apparently approaching but my break will coalesce in the form of a class-less week; work is never over in graduate education, it seems. Granted, I’ll be in Atlanta with Becky for part of the week, but I still have a growing amount of work to accomplish over those days. Having discovered some local bike routes in that area, I am anticipating some new cycling scenery during my visit. The routes warn of 5,000 feet of climbing for a certain 50-mile ride. It’s a laughable amount since I am nestled in the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia where 50 miles of riding from Blacksburg could accumulate 7,000 feet of climbing. Oh well, at least there’s a thriving cycling community in that area, too. They also have that big, annual race.
Most of my time lately has become swamped with academic deadlines and not enjoying myself on the bike. Riding conditions - precipitation, temperatures, the number of angry Monday-morning drivers - haven’t been too favorable lately, so my motivation for riding is less than it really should, given that the racing season has already begun. Fortunately, knowing that I am not riding enough and then watching all of the live Tour of California footage last week serves as encouragement to suit up.
The new VT team kit was delivered last week and we all discovered that the white of the bibs/shorts becomes see-through with the right amount of moisture. Today’s morning ride in the rain made me pause and think about how much people can see of me from behind as water is splashed up to my butt from the rear tire. Luckily, there isn’t too much white in the back of the bibs, mainly just on the side. When cruising around town after a hard training ride, you imagine yourself as being the cool spaceman, aptly dressed, atop your carbon steed, that all of the simpleton college students and locals ogle at; the thought that your shorts might be see-through makes you unnecessarily self-conscious and ruins the fantasy. But at least I had a really good ride today, thanks to a second bike that is capable of accepting the punishing conditions of wet roads and a myriad of splashback.
Following the first collegiate race weekend of the year, I have been launching through a variety of academic deadlines with practically no time spent on the bike. It may take me a few more of these weekends away to adjust to the absence and the returning frenzy. Though I did do some work while in Raleigh & Chapel Hill this past weekend, my attention was on bike racing, for obvious reasons. On the plus side, I have an active noise cancellation program running now and hours of academic determination to be proud about. I suppose.
So, the first race weekend was hosted by NC State - the Wolfpack Cycling Classic, featuring a road course and a crit for 2008. In the C group, my road race was 36 miles long while my crit was 30 minutes. My performance was probably some of my best ever, knowing how well I generally ride over those distances. However, from day one, I’ve heard that the smart riders win and I made a few bad decisions due to my inexperience that kept me from a podium finish.
I cannot sprint. Partly because I rarely practice those skills and partly because I am significantly better at endurance riding or climbing, my legs put out little power in those final moments in comparison to other C riders, even smaller guys. The road race would have been my time to shine. The pace was terribly slow to begin with, really slow, Blacksburg-Sunday-morning-group-ride slow. Just about 6 miles into the course, I made it to the front and picked up the pace, and picked up the pace a lot. My first bad decision was in not realizing that these guys would be unable to ride at this pace were it not for me pulling.
When a break would take off, it would never get more than about 10 seconds on us. Since I was pulling most of the time and my efforts to get someone else up front were unfruitful, I would wait until a flat or slight negative grade to pick up speed to reign in the break. All of my quick chases, in my low TT position on the tip of the saddle, were at 30 mph or more. What I should have done was make my own break - ramp up the gas to open a gap so that the front riders would lose my draft - and just go. I never made that move. And it really cost me. At the finishing sprint, I began in 2nd place but after 200 more meters, I was pushed back to 9th. I cannot sprint but I could have opened a huge gap that would have practically guaranteed me a victory.
The crit was the same though I didn’t pull for much of it. There were opportunities for me to break but I was unsure of my capacity to hold the field off. After the fact, I realized it wouldn’t have been difficult. The smart riders win - a proverb with truth and great legitimacy. For the record, I tried a break in the final lap and came around the final turn in 1st - just 100m to go! - but ended up sixth. Now do you understand how terrible my sprinting is?
I will take 2 race weekends off for academic and Atlanta purposes and then return for the cross-conference competition in Philadelphia. Hopefully, I won’t miss any other race weekends after that event and hopefully I can begin a better training regiment for those last and determining seconds.
But, I had a great time and bike racing is a blast. Crashes were generally kept to the B groups but a bunch of C riders went down early into the road race. Rollers and some encouraging words on the Blacksburg group rides have taught me how to handle such unfortunate circumstances. Crash or no crash, gold medal or no gold medal, sprint or no sprint - I enjoyed racing.
As children, both my brother & I were quite outdoor-centric. Sandboxes, be they constructed or improvised from dirt piles, were a common meeting ground where we would design small villages and roadways. Adventuring through the forests around the house or spending time at the grandparents’ cabin was done without the slightest consideration to sweat and the temporary discomfort of excess humidity. Though I can’t recall whether we were directly encouraged to spend time outside, it happened that we both spent a great amount of our childhood making our own trails and doing our best to find the way home. Video games never prevailed unless the winter weather suppressed outdoor possibilities.
Camping and fishing were less common but I do remember a significant amount of overt encouragement to engage in those activities. As a kid, fire and the preparation of our own food around said fire was an exciting concept particularly because it thrust an otherwise unusual amount of responsibility on our shoulders for safety. If I wanted to play around with a blazing marshmallow on a poker, I was welcome to; but if I kindled a forest fire from the lively revelry, not only would I receive a slap on the wrist from the state but my own health would be put at risk.
As I’ve aged, the outdoor appeal has been modified. Most of the time spent outdoors is for exercise or transportation; occasionally, I’ll walk around town with a camera and a quick eye, but there are scarce other reasons I trek outside to pass the time. The enjoyment of camping and fishing has vanished, replaced by the luxurious 300+ spring mattress under my covers and my vegetarian beliefs in regards to animal cruelty.
Last year at TED, Gever Tulley spoke about how kids are best raised when brought up in environments where they are exposed to danger. It develops responsibility, an intuitive spirit, and is quite possibly the best example of character-building out there. The video is good enough to go ahead and embed here. Please watch.
Ignoring the insignificant and random scars I have on my body from overly joyous, childhood adventuring, I am very thankful to have been raised with a long leash. I’m a firm believer that mistakes made are lessons learned. If mice are able to recover from their mistakes in a controlled lab experiment so that they eventually reach their rewarded cheese, humans are certainly clever enough to make grand intuitive leaps towards wiser choices and greater situational comprehension.
Hatchet is (or at least was) a very common elementary/middle school required read. I’m pretty sure that the majority of kids raised today would have no clue how to survive in the wild, even with the aid of a hatchet. For that matter, let’s see how many Americans, of all ages, are capable of surviving “in the wild”. It would be a fast way to eliminate the moochers of our society, possibly even lowering prices due to the supply-demand connection.
Alright, enough fantasizing of this strange cultural purification. Just nonsense - I should get back to watching the encouraging results of presidential primaries.
With the spring semester in full … swing … I am once again immersed in research objectives. Last semester was based on acoustic localization methods but this time around I am working on noise cancellation. Similar to the techniques utilized by Bose for their Quiet Comfort headphones, I am in charge of a portion of a project where I must actively cancel out engine noise without the convenience of having a error-correcting microphone in the mix. This has been done before but is protected under the watchful eye of the USPTO, so my solution has to be novel and ignorant of the past successes in the field. In actuality, many people at VT know how to do this, several within the very lab I work in, but I have opted to struggle along with this new area until time constraints encourage my begging for assistance. It’s far more fulfilling to solve a problem under your own diligence, even if it has been solved a million times before. (Why learn calculus in the modern world of computers? Self-satisfaction, that’s why).
So, that’s how I’ve begun dissolving into academia this semester. Cycling is taking a prominent stage, but certainly not my focus. Were the weather kinder, I’m sure I would be on the bike more, but an hour+ at the gym is enough for me while the temperatures remain at freezing or below. I have hardly lost my love for cycling, but I am not willing to put myself at risk of further frostbite if it is unnecessary. My paychecks in the future will come from somewhere other than UCI, I’m certain of it. I hope to be a weekend group rider, in my later years, who can smoke the invincible freshmen attitudes and put a stopper on their hopes of le Tour. They’ll thank me later for that wake-up call.
And, finally, on a totally unrelated note, I’ve discovered that I enjoy the click of an analog wall clock. Mine isn’t even telling the correct time, but the regular tap of the second hand is more than enough soothing normalcy to make up for the misinformation. What a great Tuesday.
