A little doodle I did one day, can't remember when. Kinda goofy maybe, thus the childish name.
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One of my favorite purchases in the past several years has been our collection of nice, solid, good, honest, cast-iron frying pans.
I’ve always been a little suspicious of Teflon and all the other fancy chemical surfaces that all these no-stick pans have on them. You know these chemicals have just come out of the lab, and can’t possibly have really been tested thoroughly for their effects on human bodies, including the bodies of children, including over the course of many decades (they haven’t even been around that long!), including when inhaled in the form of vapor as happens when the inevitable pan-burning episode strikes. Once a few years ago we burned such a pan and the whole house had a strange odor. I also remember the whole family got sick – my memory is not reliable here, I can’t remember the precise timing of when we got sick, when the pan was burned, etc., having only linked the two in retrospect – but it only added to my pall of suspicion over these pans. I had been using them a tad uneasily for many years – our modern world is one of many risks and many compromises, and you never can achieve purity from contaminants of any kind. Still, as I get older, I increasingly prefer the kind of contaminants that my great-grandparents dealt with and survived, and their great-grandparents, and so on. The contaminants that just emerged from the labs over at Dow Chemical or what have you, I’m a lot more uneasy about. Not to brag, but I am descended from a long line of people who, for thousands of generations and without exception, survived to childbearing age despite, in most cases, living in a sea of excrement and rot and disease. But that was 100% organic excrement and rot and disease! Actually, we can all claim such a lineage - it’s called evolution. Okay, many and often most of their siblings didn’t make it. And when I say they survived, that means only until childbearing age. After that, their fates varied widely but tended toward death between ages 30 and 40 – something I assure you I am mindful of, lest I be accused of a post-Sixties romantic, naiive-Rousseauian preference for the state of nature (an accusation to which I am already vulnerable due to my preference for barefooting. Let me assure you that I am a modernist in many respects). But still, give me bacteria over the next DDT any day.
Better Living Through Chemicals Iron
Anyway, the pans. So, one day I threw out all the Magic Coating stuff and switched to the cast-iron. They’re great! Many of the big chefs use them, I have since read, you get a little extra iron in your diet from them, and – get this – in terms of their no-stick quality, most of the time they work just as well as these spooky chemical surfaces. The secret is, when you wash them, don’t use soap! You just scrub all the food off them with water, but don’t try to soap away the thin film of oil or grease that is on the pan, it’s totally sanitary. Gee, people did pretty well with cast iron for a long time before Teflon, don’t you think? And if you’re cooking something like eggs and worried about the sticking, it’s simple – just cook with lots of butter! Turns out that margarine (aka pure trans-fats) is another modernist invention that hasn’t worked out so well. I know it’s been deeply impressed upon all of us that fat is bad and will make us fat and clog our arteries, but there’s good & growing reason to believe that there may be nothing wrong with good dollops of butter with your eggs, as long as you go easy on the carbs.
Right, right – the pans. The other thing I like is the simplicity, the weight, the solidity, and the classic nature of these big black pans. I know David Brooks would say it’s all part of the Yuppie quest for authenticity blah blah blah, but combined with the good solid rational reasons for cast-iron, I just love these things. And I keep expecting them to become an enormous trend and start filling the aisles in Crate & Barrel and Target, because usually whenever you really catch on to something, it soon follows that you discover half the world is right there beside you; but so far no huge trend toward cast-iron that I’ve noticed. On second thought, when I catch on to things, the world is actually seldom right there with me. Everyone still wears shoes, for example. Oh well. Wait, I know – it must just be because I’m just ahead of my time. Like when I swore off the car-based lifestyle in 1989 and moved to Manhattan. Because even then it had long been clear to the attentive liberal that our nation's investment in cars and oil was a doomed world-historic folly.
Anyway, the pans. They're great. They are heavy, though.
I tend to latch on to a few big ideas and think about them extensively. Sometimes they are cliches that I see in new lights, sometimes they are basic insights I gradually piece together, sometimes they are insights that I stumble across and which hit me like lightning.
Of the latter, one of the biggest ideas I've come across, I encountered in grad school in a great book by legal historian Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law II. Stated simply, it is that:
General rules cannot be applied to particular circumstances without the use of discretion.
This may seem puzzling at first blush, curious at second, and obscure at third. But it has enormous implications.
What it means, basically, is that because general rules can never cover the vast variety of unique circumstances that crop up in real human life, applying those rules to a given case can never been done objectively or automatically – there’s no escaping the need to use judgment. No algorithm will be sufficient, whether that algorithm is applied by a computer, a bureaucracy, or a 19th century judge.
In the 19th century, American judges often envisioned themselves as kinds of computers or automatons, with the job of impersonally applying the law to individual cases, with no room for personal judgment. As Horwitz explains, it was a group called the Legal Realists who challenged this naïve view in the early 20th century. Today it is conservatives who cling to "procedural justice" over substantive justice because they view discretion as a morass into which they are afraid to venture, who fail to recognize this big idea. Thus a man like Antonin Scalia will send a man to his death, despite a drunk defense attorney, clear evidence of innocence, etc, as long as all the procedures were followed carefully in his conviction.
This idea explains what is wrong with sentencing guidelines that remove discretion from judges, the concept of "zero tolerance," any system for rulemaking that does not include a right of appeal, Scientific Management, or the idea of any kind of science of government or management, bureaucracies, and many other things.
However this reality poses a serious problem for the concept of the “rule of law not men.” How can the law be applied fairly, impartially, and predictably when we recognize that judges (by which I mean anyone who must apply or enforce rules in individual circumstances, from actual judges to bureaucratic clerks to the cop on the beat) must use discretion to apply it? What is the difference between a judge free to exercise her own discretion, and a dictator? How can businesses and individuals act with the confidence that they understand the law when it can never be pinned down?
This is a knotty conundrum of administrative law (but one that won’t go away by simply trying to sweep it aside, as conservatives would do) and of philosophy. My view is that rules should be thought of like fractals: they have an undeniable basic shape, and there are always points that clearly lie inside their boundaries and points that clearly lie outside, but they’re fuzzy at the margins.
Fractal image made by Jay Stanley using Fractint
From afar, those boundaries appear solid, but upon close examination they dissolve into an impossibly complex, ever-receding tangle of branches and sub-branches. And we must be alert to the possibility that even a point that appears to fall far inside or outside the boundary may not be what it seems. Judges must work within the core currents of the law, but apply their own judgment at the margins (subject to review and appeal).
This particular Big Idea will become increasingly significant as we move into the coming era. But that's a subject for another post.
One of the many problems with economics, I believe, is that it suffers from what we might call “figure-ground” confusion.
First of all, by figure-ground I’m referring to the difference between the foreground and the background, as in this famous optical illusion, where, depending on what your brain decides is the figure and what is the (back)ground, you see either a vase/chalice, or two faces looking at each other:
Most economists probably know that there are times and areas in our economy when competition thrives, but there are also times and areas when competition is decidedly flat or missing altogether. Still, most economics is oriented around describing the workings of competition.
In fact, I would argue that competition is actually a rare and transient quality in most situations. It is an inherently unstable, disequilibrious (if that is a word), and fleeting.
First of all, businesses talk a lot about competition and the wonder of the marketplace, but one of the dirty little secrets of capitalism is that businesses actually hate competition and usually cannot survive unless they find a refuge from it.
All of this is implicitly recognized in our culture (but not explicitly which is my point here). For example, athough the general discourse is all about free market competition, there is an entire realm of law, a legal tradition, that is based on a frank recogntition that much of the time competition is absent: anti-trust law. When I had cause to delve into antitrust law for a research project a number of years ago, I was stunned to discover the extent to which the utter absence of market competition is taken for granted by practitioners in this area of law. Concepts such as “market power” (the ability of an individual company to set prices arbitrarily because they are not subject to competition), “oligopoly” (the lack of competition and inevitable collusion that results when there are only a handful of competitors in a market – as is the case in a huge number of markets in our economy), are used routinely despite their flagrant violation of the broad cultural understanding of markets that dominates our discourse today.
In addition, business analysts talk about a (for companies) dreaded condition called “commodification,” which basically refers to situations in which companies have run out of ways to overwhelm customers with complex choices or otherwise confuse them, and must actually compete on price. As is generally recognized by these same analysts, this generally leads to ruinous price competition.
So when competition is not taking place in a market, what is? There are a large variety of ways in which competitors escape competition; examples of such "competition dodges" that spring to mind include:
All in all, competition is a much more rare and fleeting phenomenon than people usually recognize.
I am not a participant in the academic economic conversation, but I am sure it is collectively well aware of these “exceptions” to marketplace competition. Only my point is, they are not in fact exceptions and should not be thought of that way. It is the free market that is the exceptional circumstance, and instead of conceptualizing competition as the background condition and building the entire field of economics around it, we need to realize that *lack* of competition is actually the far more prevalent condition. That is, these ideas are no doubt all circulating within the economic conversation already, but someone needs to step up and translate them into a macro-level reconception of that conversation itself – recasting economics from something primarily concerned with “competition and how it works,” into something that explains “how do companies avoid competition and under what circumstances does it break out?"
Of course this raises what may be part of the problem here and why this hasn’t happened: such a reconceptualization could lead economics away from the realm where behavior can be explained with mathematics, and into the complex thickets of history and culture and politics. But, it might also bring economics closer to the complex thickets of reality.
But someone needs to make the figure-ground gestault switch. And if academic economists can tell us someone is already doing this, then I’d say the broader field and ultimately the broader culture needs to assimilate this point. Because this figure-ground confusion has huge, negative political implications. Granted, there are many reasons for the fetishization of markets in the United States right now, including the moneyed interests that find competition convenient to talk about if not to actually engage in, but the thinkers among us need to stop aiding and abbetting in that enterprise.
I participate in some Internet forums on running, and sometimes there is debate there over proper running form, with some participants resorting to physics and mathematics in order to make their point about the best running form. I find such analysis to be not helpful in the least. What *is* helpful is a good mental image. For example, “run as if you’re running on wet paint” (the point being not to push off the ground with your feet but simply to lift them). When swimming, “imagine that you are strapped to a backboard as if you’ve been in a car accident” (to keep your body straight in the water). I find this in many sports – that attempts to actually accurately describe the motions that your body parts should follow, are not nearly as much help in achieving the form that the instructor feels is best, as a good cartoonish mental image. When it comes to athletics, poetry is better than prose.
Maybe that’s true more broadly as well. If we look at the physics of our existence, it looks pretty unglamorous; on a physical level we appear to be nothing more than complex chemical reactions that have come about through some weird mathematical quirk (circular self-sustaining) in the universe. Take an old philosophical question such as: do we have free will? If you look at it closely, it’s pretty hard to see how we could. Everything that is, everything we do is the result of everything that has happened before, in an unbreakable chain of causation (quantum indeterminacy or not!).
We’d all like to believe that we are morally responsible for our actions, in control of our selves. But how do you explain all the people out there who go insane because they have a screw loose? Are they morally flawed? Is schizophrenia the result of bad choices? C’mon. Why do people improve when given lithium? Why do people act crazy when given other drugs, from alcohol to LSD? If these people do things because of chemicals in their brain, why are the rest of us any different? We tend to put the extreme examples in a separate category, but why wouldn’t subtler effects be just as chemical in origin? Why are some people grumpy, and others sweet? Couldn’t such everyday differences be as much a difference of variations in brain chemistry, as the difference between a schizophrenic and a “well-adjusted” person? Is a well-adjusted person that way in much the same way my bicycle is well-adjusted? There is just too much evidence that people are the way they are because of their brain chemistry.
Sure, experience and environment play a big role in how people are (though much of that, in turn, is stuff that happens to people, rather than anything we could even begin to think people have control over or choices about or free will concerning). And chemical brain states can reflect, rather than cause, mental states. But if take a murderer, for example, and try to break down the factors that led to their terrible act, it’s hard to see where “free will” enters the equation.
But on the other hand, who cares? Like the physics of swimming, the physics of our existence is, at the level at which we live our lives, unhelpful. The prose, the physics, is philosophy. But it is poetry – meant broadly – that is the stuff of life: to be or not to be; the path not taken, how do I love thee?
The problem with poetry, of course, is that it is a lot harder than in physics, to find grounds upon which different people can agree what is good and what is bad, what is true and what is not (though even in physics that ain't so easy as most people think). That just means you have to create your own life, there's no formula.
I’m sure this is a really trite and well-trodden line of thinking, but hey, I’ve just reached it myself, and it's my blog.
A quick little sketch I made years ago (in the early 1990s).
Jay Stanley - Trumpet & Bass.mp3 (256k, 0:34, 1.1 megs)
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If I had to pick one favorite piece of music in the world, it would probably be Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Since college, I have spent untold hours listening to this piece of music, ever since I borrowed my dad’s LP copy of a performance by the great Russian pianist Sviatoslov Richter, and I never get sick of it. The fact that it is like 4 ½ hours long does not hurt. It was the first CD I ever bought. It has gotten to the point where I consider it to be something like the soundtrack of my life; I have listened to it through all phases of my adult existence. I have this vision of listening to it on my deathbed and being soothed by it. I’ve never really branched out from the Richter recording, either, which, although it is not the most modern, crisp digital recording, is the most poetic and deep that I’ve ever heard. (I remember browsing in a Tower Records near Lincoln Center when I lived in Manhattan, and this woman and her daughter were trying to decide which recording of the WTC to buy. I shyly suggested they get the Richter recording, but they rejected it because it did not have “DDD” on it (it is “ADD” since it was recorded pre-digitally). They walked away with some glistening recording. I remember thinking, that’s like rejecting the Mona Lisa in favor of a photograph due to its superior clarity and resolution.)
The Well-Tempered Clavier, is a monumental work made up of 24 preludes and 24 fugues, one in each major and minor key, all done twice (books I and II). For a total of 48 preludes and 48 fugues.
To love the WTC, you have to love polyphony. Polyphony, or counterpoint, is a style of music in which the higher and lower notes proceed along the melody independently, in separate "voices." The simplest example of polyphony is a round, such as "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Frere Jacques," or other songs in which different singers begin the melody at different times and sing their parts overlapping, on top of each other. Of course, "Frere Jacques" is to Bach's contrapuntal masterpieces as a child's recital of the alphabet would be to a professional production of Hamlet.
How does polyphony get more complicated than a round? First of all, there are usually more than 2 voices – in the WTC, up to 5. Second, Bach did not simply repeat a melody over and over; he wandered off in all sorts of directions, with variations or bits and pieces of the tune appearing at different times in different voices. Third, the different voices are frequently different melodies altogether. Sometimes the second voice is a completely different tune. Sometimes one melody is the first played backwards, or inverted (where the original melody goes higher, the inversion goes lower). These last tricks are what give rise to the myth that Bach is a purely "mathematical" composer. While it’s true that his pieces sometimes have a rigorous order, he found within this order the ability to express the most subtle and sublime human emotions.
The tricky thing about counterpoint is that not any melody can be turned into a round (let alone the more complicated sorts). If you take just any tune, and try to turn it into a round, you can quickly end up with a godawful mess (believe me, I've done it, thanks to computer sequencers). Although the different voices are "independent," they must coincide in such a way as to make pleasing combinations and rhythms.
Another limiting factor is performance, which adds a whole new dimension to the trickiness of polyphony. After all, for a pianist or organist, with two hands, it's hard enough to play a polyphonic piece with two voices. Yet Bach composed works of 5-part counterpoint that can be played by one (very skilled) keyboardist. By having the performer leap up and down the keyboard, crossing hands at times, and playing the right combinations of keys with the same hand, Bach is able to create the illusion of five separate melodic strands. In fact, Bach composed polyphonic pieces for an instrument on which that would seem to be impossible: the violin. By rapidly alternating high notes with low notes, and throwing in the well-timed double-stop (in which the player presses down the strings in such a way as to be able to play two at once) here and there, Bach is able to create the illusion of multiple voices.
Some of us lame-o’s circumvent the limits of performance, however, by using our computers to make music we could never actually play live.
Almost all the music we hear today is not polyphonic but homophonic – composed of a melody with chords, like a bridge with periodic supports. Of course, there are bits and pieces of counterpoint in all varieties of music, but no major composers since Bach have made it the foundation of their music. Around the time of Bach's death in 1750, polyphony went out of style in favor of homophony. (Actually, polyphony as practiced by Bach went out of style BEFORE his death, and he was regarded as somewhat old fashioned during his lifetime.) Although later composers – Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelsohn, Brahms, and others – studied Bach's work, incorporated elements of polyphony, and even wrote an occasional fugue (see below), none ever equaled Bach's mastery at counterpoint. Bach represented the end of polyphony and also its culmination. Maybe that’s because he set such a high standard that no one has had the heart to try to surmount it.
The great thing about polyphony is that you can listen to it many times without getting bored, because it sounds different each time depending on what you pay attention to. You can follow one voice (the others surrounding it dancing around the edges and intruding into the focus of your consciousness in a pleasant way); you can listen to one voice, then skip to another, then another, at various points; or you can sort of sit back and enjoy the effect of all the simultaneous voices. Since humans can only pay attention to once thing at a time, what you can never do (Mozarts among us possibly excepted) is grasp the work whole, as is possible with a chord-based piece. Good polyphony overloads your circuits in a most excellent way, hitting that pleasant boundary between chaos and order.
The fugue is a particular kind of polyphonic piece that has a confining set of rules, much like some forms of poetry. A fugue, which can have two or more voices, begins with the first voice stating the theme by itself. It then moves on to a counter-theme while a second, lower voice enters, repeating the primary theme. When the second melody is ready to begin the countermelody, a third voice can enter. As each voice enters, all the others play around, doing various things, perhaps staying quiet for a while, repeating the theme, playing the theme in a new way, or introducing new themes. At certain points through the piece, the voices successively enter again.
If we represent the melody and countermelody with Xs and Os, it might look kinda like this:
voice 1: X X X X X O O O O O OXOXOOOXXXOOX X X X X X O O O O OOX ...
voice 2: X X X X X O O O O O OXOXXOOOXXXOO X X X X O O ...
voice 3: X X X X X O O O O O OOOXXXOXOXOXOXO ...
Two cool books related to all this:
Godel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter. Among many other fantastic things, an excellent mathematical and philosophical perspective on counterpoint and other things Bach.
The Bach Reader, ed. David & Mendel. A fun collection of primary sources on Bach’s life.
Oh how I have gone on. Anyway, free recordings of the WTC can be heard here but the quality varies widely. Other free Bach music is here (there may be better free sources I don't know about). I'd say don't fool around - go straight out and buy the Richter recordings. You can't own the Mona Lisa or the Statue of David but you can own this.
An improvisational piece I recorded a few months ago.
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As more and more people get more and more connected, a lot of people are celebrating the political impact of the Internet. I’m among them. But all this connectivity could be having an unexpected side effect.
In grad school I once came across an article that argued that nonlinear feedback metaphors and epidemiological analyses were a good way to understand charismatic religious movements in particular, and how social movements are propagated in general.
Randolph Roth, “Is History a Process? Nonlinearity, Revitalization Theory, and the Central Metaphor of Social Science History,” Social Science History Vol. 16, No 2 (Summer 1992)
U.S. history has been regularly punctuated by sweeping charismatic religious moments, evangelical revivals and “Great Awakenings.” Roth points out that, like many nonlinear physical phenomena such as dissipative systems (chaotic, self-organizing chemical reactions), these movements “emerge abruptly and with apparent spontaneity from microscopic disorder.”
Dismissing linear models developed by other historians, and drawing on work by theoretical ecologist Robert May, Roth points out correctly that nonlinear dynamics are a far more powerful way to understand social movements:
Let us assume that the nine members of a small community, because they are confused, indifferent, or ambivalent, at first decide randomly whether to support or oppose an evangelical revival. The random probability that all nine will support or oppose the revival after their initial contact with a revivalist is negligible. (220)
However, like any group the 9 are of course influenced by each other. Since they’re all influencing each other, it becomes a reflexive dynamic rife with feedback loops, and assuming that some of the group buy in to the revival up front, it is easy to see how those feedback loops could create chaotic swings in support. Roth lays this all out with graphics and charts but anyone with any nonlinear intuition will quickly grasp its truth.
This is a fascinating idea with big implications. As Roth puts it, these ideas
suggest that sudden shifts in support for and opposition to reviatization movements are more likely in egalitarian communities whose members are undecided at first about the movements and who are influenced predominantly by small circles of intimates. (225)
Furthermore,
Relationships among community members are as important as charismatic leadership and compelling ideologies in determining the success or failure of revitalization movements…. Where relationships among community members are not favorable, ideolgically compelling movements with strong charismatic leaders can fail despite years of proselytization. (226)
Although Roth does not draw it out, the implication is that disconnected, atomized societies are more stable than highly connected ones. Could it be a coincidence that the United States is the world’s most longstanding stable democracy is also one of the most atomized societies in the world, with our frontier history and our disastrous social geography of interstate highway system, suburban sprawl, and disconnected, isolated individuals who spend their lives in their private homes, their private cars, and their office park workplaces? While societies like Italy, which might have much healthier family and community life, are hardly paragons of political stability?
When you fly over rural Europe, you see how different the geographical pattern is from rural America: a bunch of dwellings clustered together in a little village, surrounded by farms. In the U.S., each farmhouse sits alone, isolated in the middle of vast stretches of farmland.
But hey – at least while Americans are out bowling alone they aren’t spreading around kooky ideas.
But of course of the things that the internet has done is help people connect to each and form communities, link up to others with similar interests and problems and worldviews.
With all this connecting going on, the obvious questions is: could the Internet be destabilizing the US, by creating the conditions for chaotic reverberation of radical new ideas through networks of closely tied, reflexively influencing individuals poised for spontaneous, self-organizing phase transitions?
If yes, one question is whether this is a good thing or something to be feared. In some ways the way I have framed it above, as “destabilizing” the U.S., is conservative. God knows we certainly need an infusion of some fresh, radical ideas in this country. In recent decades, the nation certainly has seemed politically unable to renew itself, move forward, and adapt to changing conditions through fresh thinking. Some revivals are just what we need. On the other hand, these chaotic dynamics are probably behind many a terrible movement to sweep through a society and I have no doubt the American population is capable of generating some really crazy movements.
On the other hand, this all may be attributing too deep an influence to the Internet. It may be that all but a few people are engaged largely in superficial networks and relationships online that do not sufficiently challenge or influence them the way that members of a genuine face-to-face human community do. If, as people constantly complain, the internet serves mainly as a way through which people reinforce their pre-existing beliefs, then few people are going to swing from one view to another. On the other hand, per Roth’s thought experiments, if some idea comes along that is sufficiently new that most people do not initially have an opinion on it, then we could see it spread like nonlinear wildfire.
Last August I signed up for the Eagleman half-iron distance race with my friend Dave, but I'm still taking it easy on my running so I switched to the "Aqua-Velo" (no run) division of this race. This was a bummer but the better part of discretion I felt. I have also signed up for my first Iron-distance race, for November 1, 2008, and right now all my training is about the Ironman, everything else is secondary. So, I didn't take this race as seriously as a real half triathlon ("Aqua Velo" sounds more like a spa treatment than a difficult athletic test), but it was fun to be back in a race after more than a year.
I had a peaceful swim. It was in the Choptank river in Cambridge, Maryland, a brackish offshoot of the Chesapeake, and it seems the jellyfish weren't biting on this day. But, I never really felt like I got in a groove -- navigation was a pain for some reason -- and my time was slow for me, 34:39 (though later on I heard buzz that the swim times were slow, for pros and everyone, presumably due to the currents and tides -- a glance at the times from last year confirms this). I did like that it was a one-loop course rather than two loops (same with the bike).
Then it was onto the bike -- and it was my kind of ride: almost totally flat, with just a slight incline here & there. First 10 miles I took it easy -- rest from the swim and warmup my legs. Second 10 miles I worked a little harder, but it was into the wind. Next 10 miles (20-30), I really kicked it up a gear. Next 10 miles I tried to keep it in that gear but started to flag around mile 35. I know it was then because 3 times I checked my odometer every 10 minutes (or so it felt) and I was still on mile 36 each time.
One turn I took somewhat aggressively, but not hugely, and found myself headed straight for a big ol' patch of gravel while in a big lean. So I had to straighten up and go flying into a gravel parking lot. Slowed down, got back on the road and had to spin up again. The cop standing at the intersection didn't say a word. I'm guessing it was probably the 50th time he'd seen it.
It being such a big race (2000+), and me being in the final (13th!) wave, the roads were absolutely littered with dropped cycling equipment of all kinds. It was actually somewhat hazardous, I had to really watch the road; almost hit a few water bottles. If I had slowed down and scooped it all up, probably would have paid for the race. Probably $200 worth of air cannisters alone.
Next 15 miles (miles 35-50) I kinda limped along a bit, getting tired, and there were some headwinds that came & went as we made various turns. Mile 50 I decided to try going into overdrive again, to see how it felt, and managed to stay there until the finish at mile 56. Because I was the last wave in a very large race I spent the whole race passing the trailing ends of the preceding waves. I must have passed several hundred riders. Maybe I should have left my handy-dandy bell on, but I wanted to be aero as possible. I was flabbergasted at how many people, including none-too-lean young ladies and lads, moving down the highway at not exactly a streaking pace -- were nonetheless riding $4,000 machines with Zipp wheels (around $1,000-$3,000 per wheel) and all the rest. Kind of disgusting -- excessive, decadent maybe. Also I'd be embarrassed to ride a machine like that, I don't feel worthy. In any case there is something satisfying about blowing by someone riding equipment that would feed an African village for 18 months. I got passed early on by 3 people, all aqua-velos -- a woman of around 50, a guy wearing a bike uniform, and a guy pedaling with his legs stuck out and wearing all black (crazy in that heat). By mile 40 I had re-passed the bike shirt and the bow-legged ninja, but no sign of the lady. At mile 45 one guy passed me for good. At mile 53, I finally caught the lady. That told me that, although she and I had nearly the same times, I paced myself better than she did.
For the whole 56 miles I had a song going through my head: "Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps" by Doris Day -- except I was signing "Relax, Relax, Relax." I'm a big believer that eliminating any tension not actually needed to propel yourself is key to good performance. And when you're in pain, you tend to tense up even more than usual.
Speaking of pain, the last 3 miles or so I could see part of the run course along the road as I came in, and it was brutally hot and there wasn't a stitch of shade and no trees and the runners all looked miserable. What had been a letdown, having to skip the run, became a cause of celebration. Plus I had not been saving anything for a run and the idea of doing the half-marathon at that moment turned my stomach.
On triathlons I always enjoyed the bike leg and found the run to be more or less painful. But doing the aqua velo, I found the last portion of the bike was pretty grueling. I remember thinking,"this feels just like the run usually does." Makes me realize it's not just the fact that it's specifically running that makes it tough -- it's that it's the last hour or so of the race, and you're nearing your limit. Here, since I didn't have to run, I was pushing myself and nearing my limit on the bike.
After I passed the mats and came into the transition area, my race was unceremoniously over. Some guy wandering around the transition took my chip and gave me a medal. Then it was time to drink, eat, swim in the river to cool off, generally chill, and watch the runners come in, including my friend Dave, who had a far tougher day than I did but did very well.
My bike time was 2:37:22, average speed for the 56 miles was 21.5 MPH. My overall time was 3:14:34, good enough for 4th place out of 47 men. (Also I actually won my age group for the aqua-velo -- but even though it was the fullest age group, there were still only 14 guys in it. Still it's good to be king of something for once, no matter how small the kingdom).
