I’d been worried by the weather forecast and worked hard to stay with some fast riders early in the day. That’s how found myself just having completed my fastest 100 miles in 20 years, facing 90 more miles and a hopeless looking tire. I figured I’d have to find a way to get back to the start (and my car), and making my bike rideable for at least a short distance seemed the best way to expedite that process. I booted the tire with a Park boot given to me by a passing local cyclist and the cue sheets I no longer needed. I considered adding my brevet card to the patch, but refrained. About the time I was re-installing the wheel, with widening 2mm slit, another brevet rider showed up who’d carried what none of the rest of us had; a tire. I swapped the booted tire out for the loaner. I couldn’t help feeling grateful for the return of tire karma for the old tires I’d given away when I was wrenching at Stonewall Century six months ago.

After a few easy miles to refocus, some motivation from a passing pack, and nice climb up Gates Pass, I was on my way again and was able to ride with another strong group of cyclists to finish before dark in just over 12 hours.

Saguaro National Park, Friday, February 26. Near Saturday’s 300K Route.

On that day Bonnie got pretty close, but fortunately came when I called her. Another dog wandering the neighborhood was not so lucky. It was interesting to watch. The skunk did not spray right away. The dog, a puppy, taunted it for about a minute before the skunk got fed up with the game.

If I was braver I probably could’ve gotten better photos. I hope it doesn’t take up residence under the deck. I guess I’ll pick up some moth balls next time I’m in town.

When you hear the voice, you know the woman.

I recognized the voice as soon as the NPR piece began. My sister and I must have been around 7 and 8 years old … 1972-ish. Soon after the fancy new stereo with turntable and 8-track was set up, my dad brought home our first 8-track; Mahalia Jackson.

Mahalia Jackson: Voice Of The Civil Rights Movement

Video
Transcript

A few excerpts:

“Although that’s one of the points that I made earlier. I mean, we’ve got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together, because our constituents start believing us. They don’t know sometimes this is just politics what you guys — or folks on my side do sometimes.

“So just a tone of civility instead of slash and burn would be helpful. The problem we have sometimes is a media that responds only to slash-and-burn-style politics. …

“… I’ve just got to take this last question as an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.

“That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out, A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side. And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now. …

“And so the question is, at what point can we have a serious conversation about Medicare and its long-term liability, or a serious question about — a serious conversation about Social Security, or a serious conversation about budget and debt in which we’re not simply trying to position ourselves politically. That’s what I’m committed to doing. We won’t agree all the time in getting it done, but I’m committed to doing it.”

His speech and comments reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Brokaw a few weeks ago in which Brokaw said, “We can’t get through these profound challenges…if everything becomes a food fight.”

Good luck to Obama in convincing Congress to govern instead of spending their time in office planning their next campaign. It will probably only happen if their constituents demand it, and that is unlikely when so many of those constituents are forming their opinions based on polarized and polarizing media.

Success came by following a manual process similar to that copied from the Neo Geek article below, Setting up MAMP, PEAR, and Headress:

PEAR Installation

1. After locating the framework you want on pear.php.net, download the latest version (or the version you need for testing) from the "Download" tab on that framework's main page.
2. Unzip the downloaded file.
3. Open the folder that was extracted to find another similarly named folder and a file named package.xml.
4. Copy just the folder to Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/. (I copied just the contents of that folder to the HTML folder in my example below.)

Notes on Step 4: 1) If you are using MAMP Pro, you still install your pear packages in the MAMP path shown. 2) There is a PEAR folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ PEAR packages you add manually go in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ not in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/PEAR/

I didn't want to change include statements in the scripts I was testing. Instead I created a folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ for the top level package name, HTML in this case, and copied the files in the extracted package folder into the HTML folder. So for HTML_Common there is a file named Common.php in my Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/HTML/ folder. If this path structure doesn't work for you, refer to the error messages PHP is generating to help you figure out where to locate packages.

Sign the motion “to amend our Constitution to: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights…”

More information –
Massive bot attack spoofs Facebook password messages

The New Mexico Brevet Series organizers and volunteers are awesome! The level of support was as good or better than any organized century I’ve ridden. At $25 per rider entry fee, I don’t see how they even cover their costs. Not only was there drop bag and sag wagon support, they provided sandwiches, fruit, brownies and soft drinks and home-cooked dinner afterwards.

Even though I’d ridden Tejas 500 eight weeks ago, I felt only minimally prepared for this ride. Seeing Radium Springs on my calendar three weeks out, I’d added a weekly long ride on the rollers of 3, 4 and finally 6 hours to get ready.

If you ride Radium Springs it’s probably a good idea to have a light that’s bright enough to comfortably ride with and a bright taillight, and a good amount of reflective material on your bike and clothing. Daylight is pretty short on December 6th, and the traffic between Hatch and Radium Springs really picked up late afternoon and evening. All the drivers gave me lots of room, but I’m sure they aren’t used to watching for cyclists that time of day/year.

Coming from the north, we stayed at Truth or Consequences, about an hour from the start rather than driving farther south to Las Cruces. That saved a little driving on Friday and Sunday. I hope to do more NM Brevets in the coming year!

the HRM trained group showed significantly greater increases in peak output (5.0% vs 3.5%)

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a power meter. I just can’t justify spending $1500 or more on one. I’ve read that some very experienced riders would take an old bike with a power meter over a new bike without one, but I’m not convinced. I found this article from March, 2009 that supports that view, “Put Down That Power Meter, Eugene“.

If this is repeatable, I think there may be two reasons why the HRM group did better than the power meter group, one related to recovery, the other related to adaptation. My guess is that when a rider is not well recovered, a heart rate based target will account somewhat for that. In other words, a power-based target remains the same no matter how tired an athlete is, while one’s heart rate is likely to be affected by fatigue and naturally ratchet the effort level to lower power. I know that training at consistent power is something proponents of power meters site as an advantage, but it could be an obstacle to good recovery.

The second reason, and probably the more important of the two: Hopefully as one adapts to training, the power that can be maintained at a given heart rate increases. By training with a heart rate target, the power level will naturally adjust upward. If training with power, as one improves, the power target would remain the same, while the heart rate decreases. My intuition is that by training with an HRM one’s power level is always incrementally adjusting, whereas a power target would often not be adjusted for as long as 2-4 weeks, until the next test.

For those reasons, even before I saw this study, I questioned the supremacy of power meters for endurance training. Though I’d guess that power meters are far better for anaerobic training; when the rider is doing short, hard sprints where heart rate response lags behind effort. It’s unlikely that sprint training was even included in this study, since HRM’s give such poor feedback in that situation.

Ideally one would use both power and heart rate data, but this study indicates that at least for some aspects of cycling training, a heart rate monitor can be as good or better than a power meter.

The abuse of these infant calves is merciless. There is no excuse for skinning animals alive and shocking them time after time with electric prods when it’s obvious they are too weak to stand.

Veganism for me started when I was in Vermont stuck in road construction beside a veal lot. I didn’t become vegan overnight, but immediately reduced my intake of dairy products, including Ben & Jerry’s, whose headquarters ironically, was just a few miles down the road from that veal lot.

“Operations at Bushway Packing, Inc., a veal slaughterhouse in Vermont, have been shut down by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vislack, pending further investigation. The footage that an undercover investigator from the Humane Society of the United States obtained was truly shocking, showing calves only days-old being shocked and prodded, and live calves being left in piles of dead calves.” –VegNewsletter

I’d hoped I could read more about the shutdown of the slaughterhouse without seeing any photos. I couldn’t bring myself to click play on the video on the HSUS website. The still image is almost too horrifying to bear.