Let him ride?

Levi Leipheimer (and various other interests, I'm sure) is pouncing on the election year buzz, using a campaign style website to drum up support to get him on the 2008 TdF. I went and left my name, even though this certainly has a Johan Bruneel kingmaker feel to it. I like Levi, his total lack of affect notwithstanding. I also think that if the ASO keeps kicking people out, we're going to be crowning, like, the guy who comes in 47th.

Never Ceasing

My amazement/admiration at/of the interweb's ability to bring out the crafty in people (or, perhaps, not the craftiness, but the venue though which to dispense that craftiness). A buddy of mine sent me a link to Ikea Hacker (itself an outpost on this particular fiefdom of blogs) the other day, along with the popular interweb admonishment, "You've got to see this." Here's the result of open source thought, focused on affordable Swedish home furnishings:

A bike rack, composed of around 40 Euros worth of materials. Yup, you could head over to Nashbar and pick up the same functionality for the same number of clams, but wouldn't you feel better having "hacked" something, even something as innocuous as a Scandinavian stripper's pole?

I gotta say I love the idea, and, by extension, the whole site itself. It's like Pimp my Ride for poor homeowners in their thirties. Any cursory examination of its riches will reveal a TV cabinet hacked into a terrarium, dishes that become clocks, and a bathroom designer named splatgirl. Sounds perfect.

Those Sleepless Evenings

Well, the Tour kicked off (for real—a 3.3 km prologue does not a cycling stage make) this morning, Fabian Cancellara and CSC defended the yellow despite crashes in the final few hundred meters...Mark Cavendish, hyped as a future superstar, also crashed in the run into the finish and ended up in the second pack...And a past winner sprinted for the final victory.

Sound familiar? Yup, the script looks like it was basically the same for ToC as is was for that other tour, the one they hold each July in the easiest to conquer country in Europe (a Europe that, depending on who you ask today, swelled by one member). I know this because it's one of those oddly sleepless nights, those ones in which you turn off the light and then sit there with your eyes closed, not a touch of fatigue on your body. Maybe it's because Monday is my day off from training and I'm not battling the standard grind (no classes today thanks to the Dean of Students' office, which wanted to run a drug-and-alcohol survey today), but I've also got a bunch of stuff rattling around in my head, and that's always a recipe for sleeplessness. So I got up, made a small bowl of polenta with maple syrup (gonna miss that next year...), and headed on over to Cyclingnews, which I check out more often than the weather outside my window. Looked over the results to today's ToC stage and thought I feel like I've seen this episode before...

Maybe this tour will be different. Maybe someone will win without backing into first place. Maybe the Rock Racing team (who are these guys? Freddie Rodriguez at 34 alongside Mario Cipollini at 40+, wearing racing kits that look like H.R. Giger and Axl Rose designed them?) will implode into one giant neutron star of carbon fiber, spandex, and sunglasses (actually, it'll be a small star, since they started 3 MEN SHORT due to doping issues BEFORE THE RACE EVEN BEGAN—remember, this is the team with T.Hamilton who, last I heard, was still suspended from cycling), maybe Chris Horner will look around and say "Hey, I can win this, screw you guys" before leaving his boring Astana teammates in the California sunset.

Is that Bono?

O.K., enough vitriol. I don't usually go in for stuff like that, and I'm pretty psyched that the racing season is getting going. But it's now 11:10, and I have to work tomorrow. So why can't I sleep? I don't know...I just spent a blissful weekend in Maine with my sister and new brother in law, writing reports and training around 4 hours a day. My plans to go to Virginia are shaping up, and that's certainly exciting: 12 days with J. Dukes in Charlottesville and Chingateauge (ponies! ponies!), surfing, riding bikes, getting into trouble, cycling the Blue Ridge Parkway (one of the best rides you'll ever go on—you look down on either side and wonder how you've been transported to France (the aforementioned easy to conquer country whose presidents get more and more distressingly wonderful with each new iteration)), and talking about radio and books. So that's on my mind.

I also just found out that PowerBar named me to their elite team, so I'll be getting nutritional help from them this year. I'm still not used to this whole sponsorship thing; it's not unlike getting your license or turning 21. You keep waiting for someone to show up and tell you it's all a dream and that you're in a lot of trouble. But so far the wheels haven't come off, and I'm feeling pretty set for the coming year. Rudy Project for hardhats and glasses, Nathan for bags and hydration system stuff, PowerBar for food, and Craft, my team, for general support.

But beyond that, as I tried to fall asleep, I started thinking about two of my classes for tomorrow. One is reading this great article by Burkhart Bilger (funny name—great writer) about "The Cheese Nun," from a New Yorker a few years old. It's a perfectly crafted article, written in a parallel structure, the two strands being (obvious if you consider the main character) food and religion. Bilger never explicitly crosses the two lines (although he flirts with it in the end, in an uncharacteristic moment), and I'm hoping they pick up on how he makes clear the wonderful, similar invasiveness of these two ideas. My other class, one I picked up from a sick teacher-friend, is reading The Things They Carried, which is a marvelous book. And although the eponymous story often gets the most play, I think one of the other stories, "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," is O'Brien's masterpiece, an allegory about America's involvement in Vietnam, as well as a canny examination on the truth of storytelling. This is a story so postmodern it practically deserves its own horn-rims, but appears at first blush to be a simple old traditional story about a character's (d)evolution.

O.K., well, I've succeeded in putting you to sleep, I'll bet. I'm gonna try again, but you'll probably see me off prowling the forums at ST, to Janda's dismay.

The Month of Reading Exclusively

I'm pleased to report that, with the temperature hovering around 20 F, I just got back from a run in shorts. The kids around campus double-taked and catcalled, but that's what you get for hanging out with teenagers. I'm sure it wasn't earnest, given the pasty complexion of a runner's legs in February.

It's been a hard sell, getting my running legs back this year. 'Cross season still feels like it ended only a few weeks ago, and I'm coming to terms with the truth that, in triathlon, there really isn't an off-season. A few weeks of skiing and then back to it. Problem is, around here, outdoor riding is a bit out of the questions, I swim in a 3-lane pool at a motel (!), and there are about two running routes not totally iced over at the moment. HTFU, you say? It's not a question of toughening up, I think (hey, I just went running in shorts, remember), but it's a matter of retaining my enjoyment for these three sports. I've watched, over the past few weeks, all the Paris-Roubaix races between 1996 and 2002 (Johan Museeuw won three of 'em, but it turns out he had more drugs in him than a Vassar freshman at the Homo Hop), ran on a treadmill twice, and been reduced to using an elliptical machine before my buddy Noah showed up and shamed me out onto the dark roads without a headlamp.

It'll all be fine in a month, when bike season gets going, or when I head south to spend 10 days with J. Dukes in Charlottesville.

Until then, I've embarked, to save my sanity through madness, on one of the great reading months of my life. My juniors, see, are designing their own unit during February. I've got two sections of the little buggers, and it's almost impossible to get 14 sixteen year-olds to agree upon one book, so those two sections split into a total of five groups. Their choices reflect the kind of marvelous schizophrenia of high school juniors:

Dune, Frank Herbert (thank god this is better than the godawful movie—David Lynch's worst)
Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card (I liked this book better when I first read it, back in HS—now it seems to me that every slightly non-savory character is given a non-white, non-American male differentiation, and that the aliens, the buggers, have a name just a bit too close to another, not-too-distant racial slur)
Ender's Shadow (never read this, but the group reading Ender's Game really needed to read something else, since you can get through EG in about 45 minutes; not sure if I'm looking forward to it)
The Inferno (I told you they were schizoid)
The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, by Oliver Sacks and
Stiff, the Curious Lives of Cadavers, my Molly Roach (yes, Roach).

Yup, those are my juniors, morbid sci-fi freaks. My life, for the moment, has become a pretty awesome monastery of reading, teaching, and training. The best part about the classes, though, is that I only have to read the books; they have to do all the discussing. They're getting better.

Headed off to swim.

The New Bike

I usually like my posts to have some merit or interest beyond myself and what I'm doing, but I've got a new bike. In the (almost) words of Lester Burnham, from American Beauty: "It's a 2007 Dura Ace Cannondale Six13. The bike I always wanted, and now I own. I rule." Pictures.

The 3/4 shot.











The Profile.













The Crankset.











Yeah, white bar-tape, just like the Europeans, just like that kid in youth soccer who showed up with white cleats, when you thought, wow, that kid better be good, or I'm gonna break his ankles.





Tomorrow I'll post something actually interesting.

Phew

A month?! I can't quite believe a month has passed, so much that I just used one of the three exclamation points one is alotted per calendar year. I won't flatter myself by apologizing, just castigate for being lazy.


That said, a lot's been going on: I decided not to come back to Putney next year, since I've lived in the NE for 28 years and it's time for something new (also, Vermont looks like Hoth right now, with the snowdrifts reaching my office windows, and the wind howling, (if you need to go look up Hoth, well, there's not much more we can talk about)), so I'm back in the good old Carney and Sandoe meat-pool, getting referred to schools that I never knew existed.


Two cool things to check out, out there in Blogoland: Sprinter Della Casa, a blog run by Aki Saito, who runs the Bethel Spring Series, a six-race series that kicks off, every year, the first weekend in March. It's the series in which I first raced a road bike, snapping a chain and borrowing a way too small Giant OCR; I also had more fun on a bike than I'd ever had, up to that point. I stumbled across Aki's site and liked it, especially this post, on shaving your legs. He makes a reference to Breaking Away, so of course I'm a sucker. Right now Aki is out in California, crowing about 80 degree days and seven hour rides. Yesterday I geeked out on my trainer, watching the 2002 Tour of Flanders and trying to average 240 watts for two hours. Somebody, please...

Also, check out Swimplan if you're into the whole horizontal-in-the-water game. You enter some information about how much you want to swim, and upon what you'd like to improve, and it spits out good, not-boring workouts. Workouts that go by quickly, even in the three-lane motel pool at which I spend too many hours of the week (read: >0 would be too many).

Finally, my new road bike is built. It's a Cannondale (probably the last one I'll buy, now that it's been bought by a company that owns (insert vomit sounds here) GT, Mongoose, and Schwinn; you can probably kiss that nice "Made in the U.S.A." decal goodbye), of course, just like my last one, but I scored a Six13 frame pretty cheap, with the sweet new cranks, and finally decided that I needed a bike with Dura Ace components on it. In truth, I built my dream bike, and I'll toss some pictures up here tomorrow.

That's it for now; get some rest, people: the Groundhog saw (didn't see? Whichever) his shadow, and we're gonna be shoveling for another six weeks.

The View from Here

This is the view outside my window. It's beautiful any day of the year, but today it is particularly pretty, I think. The cold is returning to Vermont after a week of March-like weather, and anyone skiing today will have to wear more than a t-shirt. The forecast calls for 6-12 inches of snow tonight, but you wouldn't know that right now, as clear as things are. That's Mount Monadnock in the distance, the most-hiked mountain in the world. In between is the Connecticut River Valley, full of fog.

I've been trying to figure out, recently, whether or not I should trade this view for a different one, and I've gone back and forth again and again. The truth is, I love teaching at Putney. The kids are marvelous, I get to do whatever I want (as long as my students are learning) in the classroom, and my new boss is inspiring. As recently as yesterday, I found myself thinking: "I could do another year here."

But then I went out for a bike ride (the first of the year, beating last year's early mark by 19 days, I believe). It was warm, in the high 30s, low 40s, and I only needed to wear two pairs of shorts and leg warmers. I did one of my favorite 25 mile loops, with some rolling hills and one big climb (908 feet gained in 1.56 miles). While I was out, I realized that I've been thinking about Putney in terms of doing time. The phrase "I could do another year" is a term usually utilized in another kind of compulsory educational system. Staying here at school would mean stability for another year, financial and career-wise, but I think I would mortgage some of my soul for that stability. I've written, elsewhere, about why Cyclocross is so important to me, so much fun. People who don't do it don't understand, because mostly they hear about how much it hurts, how it "Sucks the most." But Cyclocross is not unlike cooking in a professional kitchen. You know the course, and what's most likely going to happen, so you set up as best you can for that familiar situation. But then the orders start pouring in, the gun goes off, and you do the best you can. During a 'Cross race, you're never thinking much farther down the road than the next few feet of track. You have to pay attention. Same thing in the kitchen. Sure, you have to plan ahead, keep track of the orders lining up in front of you, work with the others at the different stations, but most of your focus is on what you're doing right then. It is exciting and terrifying at the same time, with the possibility of injury or success constantly present.

I like situations like that, in which you must do for yourself or fall behind. Teaching's the same, too. You have to respond to your students, stay flexible and excited and energetic. If I were to stay at Putney, I think, I would lose some of that excitement, that sense of keeping the flaming balls aloft. So here's what I'm thinking. Trading that view for this one. Extra points if you can figure out where it is: