MS City to Shore 2011

Every time I do this ride it's different. The first time is hard because unless you're one of those strange people who ride 80 miles a day on a regular basis, you're likely to have trouble pacing yourself. The second time I had myself incredibly well trained and it was very fast and almost easy. And so on.

This year, I did a just fair job of training. On the good side, I knew what I was in for. On the bad side, I'm now 5 years older than the first time and feeling it a bit. So I decided I'd leave a bit later to get more sleep and take it easy. So instead of getting up at 5:30 AM I set my alarm for 6. I woke up at 6 and then immediately fell back asleep and reawakened at 6:45 and flipped out. The only saving grace was that I had looked over the race materials the night before and knew for certain that I had until 8 AM to be on the road and the starting line is around 30 minutes from my house.

Although I'm older, I've retained the ability to dress myself and make coffee, and really, what else do you need? I was out of the house at 7:05, got parked by 7:35 and on the road at 7:40, less than an hour after I'd woken up.

The weather forecast had been ranging from lousy to dreadful, but it turned out to be near-prefect, in the 70's, slight sunshine, no wind and no rain. I did about 2 hours of this ride in the rain one year and it is no fun at all.

The first few miles of the ride rolls through the southeastern part of Cherry Hill (I think; New Jersey suburbs are mysterious to me except I can find Wegman's). Even in the early stages you can see the various sorts of people who do this ride. There are a number of people roughly like me- middle-aged folks riding solo. Mostly men but a decent cohort of women too. We're generally serious riders and keep up a decent pace. There are the socialites- people doing the ride with a friend or two, riding 2 or 3 abreast, talking non-stop, and generally holding up the people behind them. There are the big young men, whose discussions revolve mostly around how fast they're intending to do, who zoom past periodically. And there are the teams. These are mostly corporate and vary widely in quality. The bigger companies/organizations have dozens of people, some of them very fast and some very slow.

The ride was almost shockingly problem free for me. I never felt overly fatigued. In a 5-6 hour ride like this, you can divide it roughly into 4 parts- the beginning, where you're feeling fresh, then part 2, where you're warmed up and rolling along pretty well. Usually the trouble, if there is any, happens in part 3, from miles 40-60. At this point, you are definitely no longer fresh, and unless you've been training like crazy, you've now ridden further than you have at any point in the recent past. My 4 longest training rides ranged from 30-36 miles, for example. Your legs are dead and your butt is not too happy either. Once you're past the 60 mile mark you can start to feel the finish approaching and you get an adrenaline rush. Just in time for the bridges.

The ride is almost entirely flat and miles 10-65 are pretty rural. Then it gets more populated as you approach the shore, and fiendishly, at mile 74 you can see, looming in the distance, the two bridges from the mainland to Ocean City. The race personnel, so supportive for the first 73 miles, delight in razzing you as you approach this point. The bridges are tall and very much exposed to the elements. The first year I did the ride, there was a stiff onshore breeze that made it necessary to pedal pretty hard to get down the bridge, much less up it.

The bridges encapsulated my problem with this year's ride. As the event has gotten larger, the participants' understanding of group cycling etiquette has decreased. You can no longer count on your fellow cyclists to call out obstacles or signal that they're slowing or stopping. A lot of people were routinely violating basic rules of the road, mostly by insisting on riding side by side, even on busy roads with traffic coming from the back. It's both rude and dangerous. This caused me to ride impetuously at times, bursting out of a pack and swinging almost left of center to pass. This isn't fun to  do anywhere, but on a bridge it's insane.

I have an idiosyncratic way of climbing, where I go as fast as I can in high gear until the hill starts to bite, when I downshift and continue pedaling furiously until I near the top at which point I all but stop and coast over the crest. I don't know anyone else who rides like this and I'd imagine it'd be infuriating to someone trying to ride with me, which is part of why I prefer to ride alone. Here, though, I kept getting caught behind clumps of people not riding single file and not staying to the right, and since I hate slowing down going uphill, not only was I dealing with the climb but I was trying to not get rear-ended by a car as I swing around.

But these are quibbles. I enjoyed the ride, once I knew I was getting there in time to do it, and I raised $1000 for a good cause. At the end, they have food and music and a t-shirt and buses back to the start point.

Advertisinguese

To understand how advertising works, you need to pay attention to the way the words are put together. For instance, here's the exact wording of a poster at SuperFresh: You won't find better tasting beef at any other supermarket in the Northeast. Guaranteed. Woodson and James Angus Beef.


So what exactly does this mean? The key point to understand is that in advertising language, saying your product is "better" is the ultimate claim. In order to broadcast that claim of print it in a reputable outlet, you must offer hard evidence that your product is, in fact, superior to the other product. To say your product is "best" means only that nobody else is better, so, for example, you can say your brand of salt is the best-tasting, even though salt is salt and it all tastes the same, or that your detergent is best for removing stains. It would really mean what people think of as "best" if they said it was better that every other detergent for removing stains.

So what I saw on the sign was a weasely way of trying to get the word "Better" into the ad, and it certainly sounds superior to, "Our beef will taste at a minimum the same as beef from every other supermarket in the northeast," which is what it means. My two favorite weasel phrases? "Fresh picked," (well duh, of course it's fresh when it's picked) and "Hearth baked," (hearth means oven, and you got some other place you're baking stuff?).

I'm also intrigued by the guarantee. Do you think they'd argue with you and refuse to give your money back if you said you found better-tasting beef? What if you got your beef at someplace other than a supermarket. And what if you'd bought your beef in a border state, like Maryland, which is not technically in the Northeast? And who the heck are Woodson and James? Are those first or last names? And do you think they're real names or names the marketing manager thought sounded western and rancher-like? Same for Target's Sutton and Dodge Beef.

Not sayin' there's anything wrong with SuperFresh beef, just that it's not better when you use the words that way.

Why, despite my charms, you might not want me for a father.

Actual conversation:

"Hey dad, want to see something?"

"How would I know if I want to see it if I haven't seen it yet?"

How to ruin a moment

I was very unhappy today to pick up the newspaper and see WE REMEMBER and a huge picture of the World Trade Center buildings. Thanks, Inquirer for telling me that and how I'm supposed to remember.

Part of what makes this day powerful is the collective memory but I think what makes it significant is that everyone had their own memories and their own reactions. The media frenzy has unduly influenced the first part and all impeded the second part. My strongest memories are intensely personal. Of course they are a piece of the national consciousness because I live in America, but they're my own feelings and I'm finding it difficult to focus on them with everyone shouting WE REMEMBER.

There's not really anything to be done about it. Considering that the national holiday called Memorial Day has been reduced to a barbecue opportunity, it's good for people to stop and remember that they're part of something larger. I'm just sorry to have the experience diluted because people want to sell newspapers and ads on their TV shows.

The main reason I got into advertising as a career was that I always liked products. I know that sounds silly, but I clearly remember being fascinated by commercials for cleaning products that miraculously removed stains. I also grew up in the dawn of the convenience food era. Frozen foods were pretty new because only recently had a large enough portion of households acquired freezers. Pre-prepared foods were called TV Dinners because they came in aluminum trays that you could take into whatever room your family's TV set was, (Yes, set. I didn't know anyone who had more than one. They were huge and expensive). We had them when we had a babysitter. Fried chicken with mashed potatoes and peas. All in a tray. Amazing.

So now, with every conceivable kind of food now available in pre-prepared form, and microwaves at the ready to heat anything, whatever are the geniuses who invented convenience foods doing?

As far as I can tell, they are working along 2 different paths. First, there are what I think are referred to as superfoods. These are familiar sorts of foods that have been "improved" by filling them with things that are good for you with minimal noticeable change to the way they look or taste. The most obvious one we have around is pasta. You know what's in pasta? I've made pasta. It has two ingredients. Flour and water. I have to say that I'm impressed by how companies like Barilla have tried to make pasta better for you while using pretty natural ingredients. But I don't expect my pasta to include lentils, chickpeas, flaxseed, barley, spelt, oats, egg whites and oat fiber (guess there even oats has to be enriched with oat fiber). This give Barilla Plus extra protein, and fiber, plus ALA Omega-3 fatty acids which the label said is essential, though it doesn't mention what it is essential for.

Is this bad? Depends on what you mean. All of those things (except for spelt, which I'm pretty sure doesn't really exist) are good for you, and the stuff tastes pretty much like you'd expect pasta to taste. So that's good. But does it lower the incentive for people to eat a real healthy diet consisting of real foods? Of course it does. Why eat foods that naturally contain protein, fiber and essential fatty acids when you can get it packed into a noodle?

The other thing food scientists are doing is making food even cooler. My favorite that I saw today was packaged cake mix to make cupcakes with creamy filling like a Twinkie. I'm guessing that the fatty acids in those aren't the essential ones.

You again?

Today was this year's first day of school. I, of course, had been doing inservice for the past couple of days. which for me mostly consists of a few meetings and then a semi-successful search session of burrowing through my huge piles of accumulated paper to try to find the stuff I need for my classes. This is something I usually do over the summer but I didn't get to it this year.

The most humiliating part of this process was when I reached into one of my desk drawers and pulled out a 3 inch-thick pile of papers and realized that I had no idea what any of them were. Why were they there, along with the binder clips and white board markers? It's a little frustrating because I'm not trying to be messy. I'm actually pretty well organized mentally, but it comes to paper, I just have no organizational sense and hate filing. At home, I put every paper for filing in a box until it's full and then I tape it shut. If I then don't open the box for another 6 months I throw the box away.

People who have read this blog know how fond I am of meetings. This year was a bit better because there's a lot of new going on. The biggest change, of course, is that the guy who had been head of school was suddenly explore-new-opportunitiesed, so we have an interim head of school, who was already going to be the new head of academics. This seems to be a positive development and that is my last word on the matter.

I've been looking forward to the start of school for a simple reason. I like it there. I like what I do and I like the people. The kids are fun to hang out with.That was my biggest takeaway after the first day, that I'd spent the entire day smiling.

And of course we start the year with spectacular weather. I was completely clueless this morning. I knew it rained during the night, but it's been raining all the time so I didn't thing anything of it. Then I saw a tree down, and big piles of rocks in the road, and then the roadblocks started. It took me a while to get in, but my daughter, who normally has a 10 minute drive to school, took close to an hour.

This year there's a big new rule: NO GUM CHEWING. They told us to say we were a gum-free school but I can't do that with a straight face. I did, however, make a kid disassociate himself from his gum. Also, I've been told that we will be taking the radical step of (gasp!) decorating the walls. Not with gum, I presume, but perhaps some student work? Make it look like a school, perhaps?

And finally (for tonight), a quick peek inside the math office. We have a new teacher this year and at one point, he asked me if I'd be willing to switch rooms with him one period. Then another teacher, who would have to approve and make the switch official says, "So are you going to make the change?" And New Guy says (jokingly), "Well if he doesn't, I'm not going to speak with him again for the rest of the year." I don't respond, and eventually the other teacher says, "So?" And I said, "Well, I'm just wondering whether I'd prefer New Guy not speaking to me all year."

Back for more tomorrow.

News you can't use

I know that everyone turns to this blog to catch up on the news of the day, so here goes.

I saw going through Google News and saw the following headline "A Bit of Urine Makes Mouse Embryos Transparent." Of course, my first reaction was, is that a good thing or a bad thing? My second reaction was "Cool, I wonder if that would work on anything else." Just because our floor does not turn transparent when my dog pees on it does not eliminate all the other possibilities.

The reality of is that it makes scientific observation of lab mouse embryos easier because they can see inside without destroying it. Boring, yet interesting.

The other thing I saw was a sports article whose headline contained the utterance "Ruh-row." Everyone seems to think this originated with Scooby Doo. I knew this to be false, because Astro, the dog on the Jetsons, said "ruh-row" (and referred to himself as Rastro) and the Jetsons was on the air before Scooby Doo. Amazingly enough, I found an article on the Chicago Tribune website confirming this, but saying that the origin was confusing because the guy who did the voice of Astro was the same guy who did the voice of Scooby Doo, albeit 7 years later.