Nutrition Tips for the Dirtbag Athlete

February 2, 2016February 2, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Many of you have made your way to this site out of a shared passion for being outside. We share a zeal for crisp October mornings, in light snow and in coffee before dawn. In starry desert nights, in finally sending your project, and in cold beers with good friends after a long day on the trail.

But getting to the end of a long day in the mountains means, well, that you need to make it to the end of the day. You can have all the right gear and great fitness, but to survive a 10,000 foot day of ski touring, you need to eat right.

And in the spirit of the other week’s primer on setting skintracks, I’d like to offer a few nutrition tips on how best to keep your energy up for the long day ahead:

Finish your buddy’s breakfast – Nothing says “I’m really looking forward to having my life entirely in your hands this afternoon” like asking, “are you going to finish that?” while you’re topping off the tank before the trailhead. This is most effective after not ordering breakfast yourself, and mentioning that you ate at home. In the awkward time between the last refill of coffee and paying the check, start picking at stray hashbrowns on your partner’s plate and go from there.
Bacon by the pound – There’s a strong correlation between towns with good skiing and towns with hipster grocery stores. There’s also a strong correlation between hipster grocery stores and food buffets that charge by the pound. When confronted with a by-weight eatery, the intrepid dirtbag knows better than to waste precious grams on things like potatoes, condiments, and vegetables.
Pepperjack cheese is often overlooked as a staple.

In Missoula, at the Good Food Store, the hot bar price is $7.50 per pound, regardless of what’s on your plate. Well, my friends, that hot bar has bacon on it, and bacon is hard to come by raw for much less than $7.50/lb. Load up on cooked bacon at a discount, and if you can’t finish it with breakfast, be sure to lay in stores of pocket-bacon for a pre-lunch snack.
Hostess – The great staple of poor athletes: Hostess. The first time I rode my bike more than 100 miles, it was actually 135 miles. I was about 19, inexperienced, and riding with much stronger companions. The only way I survived to collapse into my tent was with the gratuitous ingestion of Hostess Fruit Pies and gas station burritos. In 2012 Hostess Brands faced bankruptcy and liquidated warehouses of product. Those savvy consumers in the audience stocked up when the market was hot.
Gels – Gels go by many names: gel, gu, etc. They are generally vile, but do offer a couple of real benefits. They’re an excellent proxy for how tired you are; if the gel tasted good, and maybe you’d like another, then you are very, very tired. The marketing departments will tell you that their proprietary blend of simple carbohydrates and electrolytes is easy your stomach and will keep you energized to perform your best; the scientists will tell you that that’s what PopTarts are for. Never pay for gels. They can be found slowly coagulating in the bottom of of every 10k race packet on earth, next to the car wash coupons and safety pins.
PB&J – Gels can snatch you from the depths of hypoglycemic despair, but there’s a limit to what the soul can endure. Better men that me have been fundamentally broken by diets too rich in “sports product.” The bread and butter of the dedicated dirtbag athlete is, literally, bread and butter. Peanut butter, that is, with a little jelly and, (if you’re feeling fancy) some banana. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich is as simple and reliable as it is time tested. More first ascents have been powered by PB&Js than by any other food source^{[citation needed]}, so throw a couple in your pocket and hit the trail.
Michelada – The dreamers among us know that no today can beat the promise of tomorrow, and it’s important to be well rested and ready for the next big thing. For proper recovery, I recommend a specifically tuned blend of electrolytes, carbohydrates, and the anti inflammatory properties of alcohol: The Bud Light Michelada. It’s spicy, it’s refreshing, it’s technically got vegetables. You earned it, so crack one on the drive home.

I Love Craigslist

January 26, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Several months ago I was indulging in one of my favorite morning rituals. I had a piping hot cup of coffee, and before the rigors of the work day took hold I spent a few minutes nipping at the crema on top of my americano while I scrolled through Craigslist.

I love Craigslist.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular; I almost never am. It’s very rare that I buy something on there. But there’s something exciting about wading through tomes of other peoples’ refuse on the off chance that a gem pops up. It’s the same impulse that drove thousands of young men to California and Alaska in search of gold. It’s the same impulse that drove many of you to buy a Powerball ticket in the face of impossible odds. It was the impulse that brought me to The Patriot.

There’s a lot of crap on Craigslist. A quick search turns up old stereo systems and gaming consoles, parts of aluminum ladders, and a finger skateboard (remember Tech Decks?). There’s certainly no shortage of old, rusted, unreliable vehicles that eager sellers are waiting to pawn off onto the next unsuspecting sap. By all rights, a rust bucket of a ’97 F-250 and a much older camper fit that description.

Fist sized holes have rusted through the wheel wells and there are cigarette burns on the upholstery. The stereo doesn’t work and the brakes rub. The camper used to leak, and I suspect that it still kind of does. It smells like a $40 motel room. The headlights allow for a safe nighttime velocity of about 45 mph. But the tires are still good and the engine purrs, and for $1,500 it was too good a deal to say no. I scrambled out the door like the prospectors of ’49 and by lunchtime held the keys to my brand new home away from home.

This is not a blog post about the untold possibilities of life on the road or a buyer beware horror story of inherited automotive woes. There’s time for all that. This is the story of the more than 100 MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) that were stuffed into every cabinet of the camper.

The MREs were mentioned briefly in the ad, but the extent of their volume didn’t sink in until after I got home. Almost every cubic inch of storage space in the camper was filled with plastic packets of beef stroganoff and vegetarian omelettes, and in order to store anything at all I would have to get rid of the meals. After brief consideration it was clear that I had no choice but to list them to the Craigslist barter section.

I could have listed them for cash, or laid them in with the barrels of water and cases of ammunition that I keep in the basement for when Ben Carson is elected President and the Canadians take the opportunity invade. But that didn’t seem in the spirit of what I thought was a bonus to the camper purchase. And really, Craigslist is like a throwback to the markets of Constantinople with the database indexing capabilities of today. It’s the greatest social experiment of our time, if we only choose to make it so.

So here’s how the ad read:

100+ MREs for trade – all offers welcome (missoula)

I recently acquired more than 100 government issue MREs (by honest means, I swear!). At first I was just going to sell them, but then thought the barter section is a better bet.

Here’s your chance to stock the bug out bag, sponsor a boy scout camp out, or host the gnarliest eating contest the 3am paid programming slots has ever seen. you can even mail them to those knuckleheads in Oregon if you want.

Assorted entrees, all offers considered.

I think the typos really sold it.

It may be my prejudices showing through, but I thought that the kind of people who make a habit of perusing the Craigslist barter section and are piqued by more than 100 MREs would have something interesting to say. It turns out that prejudices are hard won. Here is an incomplete list of things that I have been offered in the last few days:

An antique Sears Roebuck chainsaw
Aluminum ramps for loading an ATV into a truck
A 50cc Suzuki motorcycle (ran when it was parked!)
Other antique chainsaws
Granite counter tops for my kitchen and/or bathroom
A large variety of firearms
A larger quantity of ammunition
Advice that my perceived value of the MREs is greatly inflated (with citations)
A 1991 Pontiac Firebird (engine and transmission are included, but not installed)
A mounted ram’s head

I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the rest of this plays out. And if you know anyone looking to trade in preparation for the apocalypse, be sure to send ’em my way, I’m still taking offers!

Skintrack Etiquette: a primer for the uninitiated

January 19, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 5 Comments

New snow means new beginnings. The tracks of last weekend are not so different from workplace angst; we leave them behind for a few days once a week to recharge and recuperate. A fresh blanket of snow is the incarnation of opportunity. You, the backcountry skier, are unbound by roads and trails, and have absolute power over where you go.

The freedom can be intoxicating, but I’m here to remind you that with great power comes great responsibility. And so I would like to cover a few guidelines for skintrack etiquette.

The Skintrack* is an Extension of your Manhood – If you only learn one thing from this guide, learn this: The skintrack is an extension of your manhood. Not comfortable hucking a 30 foot cliff into breakable crust? That’s ok. Don’t quite feel like pulling 5 Gs as you carve out of that steep couloir? Don’t sweat it. As backcountry skiers we spend 90% of our time walking uphill, and so that’s clearly the best time to demonstrate our innate superiority over our partners.
Set a Steep Skintrack – You should always set a skintrack along the steepest grade possible. This is generally directly up the fall line, but occasionally requires short, squiggly switchbacks. Be sure to utilize every heel riser available and disregard the people behind you slipping backwards on the now icy track. Remember, setting a steep skintrack is a sign of unbridled masculinity, and it’s well documented that the steeper your uptrack, the more women will want to mate with you.
Never Share the Work – Breaking trail is significantly more difficult than hiking along an established skintrack. In some cultures it is considered acceptable to share this work, and take turns on the front. Well, my friend, some cultures approve of sister-dating and cannibalism, too. You should never relinquish the front of the line, as doing so is an act of weakness. If you bonk at noon and force the group to turn back early, that’s merely a show of your enthusiasm for the dawn. Good form.
Make Your Own – If you make the all too common faux pas of skiing with someone less manly than you, you may find that they set a skintrack differently that you might have. Best practices suggest that you should diverge from their path and set your own. This is the best way to identify yourself as an ideal mate to members of the opposite sex if you don’t happen to be currently breaking trail.

Step on the Tails – Another option for demonstrating your superiority is to walk on the tails of the person in the front. Disregard the fact that walking in the front is much harder. Actually . . . don’t disregard that. Use it to your advantage. Be sure to walk on the ski tails of whomever is breaking trail. This will disparage their fitness and discourage them. When they step to the side it will allow you to regain your rightful position in the front.
Show up Hungover – Occasionally, you will ski with someone who is in better shape than you. Under normal circumstances this would be a sleight to your social status, and the best way to head it off is to drink 15 beers the night before you meet up for a big day in the mountains. A hangover is the get out of jail free card for a lackluster performance on the skintrack. If you sufficiently poison yourself the night before a day of skiing, just making it to the trailhead amounts to a victory over your peers. Nevermind that you’re a liability in the backcountry, those haters can only aspire to the glory of your single handed 1:59am Fireball shot ski.
Pee in it – The last ditch effort toward inflicting yourself on the backcountry experience of your party: take a piss on the skintrack. Sure, you could have stepped to the side, or at least pointed out of the way, but that’s the kind of move that Jack McCall or Robert Ford would have pulled. Not you. You’re a real outlaw. Damn convention; damn the man. You pee on that skintrack and let the world know that you’re a force to be reckoned with. If you do it right, they’ll smell the Hamm’s on it a mile away.

*Skintrack (n) – The route and means by which a backcountry skier or snowboarder ascends a slope. It is done by affixing climbing skins (originally made of moose or elk skin, but now usually crafted from nylon) to the bottom of the ski to provide traction against the snow.

We Shouldn’t Increase Minimum Wage

December 8, 2015 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

I used to drive kind of far to get to work. A couple of years ago I had a ten mile commute with fourteen stop lights. There were two different ways to get from my house to the office, but they each had fourteen lights and at rush hour it took about 45 minutes to drive. In Missoula, Montana, the little mountain oasis, I had a commute that wasn’t all that different than if I lived in suburban Chicago.

Driving begets driving, and as long as I was behind the wheel it was easy to run out to the box stores on Reserve Street after work or drive someplace for lunch. I went through about two tanks of gas a week, and in the height of my last summer at that job it cost more than $4 a gallon to fill the tank.

Twice a week I stood at the pump, and as the meter spun frantically I did the quick mental math to calculate how many hours of my life I was pumping into my Ford Ranger. It didn’t matter if I’d finished a project at work, landed a new client, or just played flash games all day, a tank of gas cost me about two hours behind a desk.

There’s a lot about that anecdote that is classically American, and a lot if it I consider bad form. But the worst part is that the foundation of our work infrastructure lies in our time, rather than what we do with that time. It tells us that we live in a system that doesn’t care what you’re doing, as long as you’re doing it at your desk.

When you are hired at a new job, conventional wisdom gives that your employer is purchasing the work that you will produce during your tenure. Conventional wisdom here is wrong. Your boss is actually purchasing 2,080 hours of your life each year, give or take, and betting that you will use that time to produce at least your salary in value.

Of course, this assumes that you’re working a white collar job as a software engineer or something, but the fight to increase minimum wage factors into this in a big way as well. A minimum hourly base pay is, essentially, a safety net within a free market that all but guarantees that certain inscrutable employers will exploit their workforce at any opportunity. Forget for a moment that it’s not working (hence the national debate on raising the minimum wage), and remember that this position has a point. Workers in industrial America had a pretty rough go of it.

But the existence of minimum wage legislation is a necessary evil within a fundamentally flawed way at approaching work. It encourages slow, inefficient progress and allows the (arguably obsolete) 40 hour 9-5 grind to kill our fellow countrymen slowly over a 40 year career as an insurance salesman.

Advances in technology increase our capacity to work effectively at an exponential rate. In most industries you will not be expected to churn out work at that same accelerating rate, the same way you’ll probably be fired if you start showing up to work increasingly infrequently. The result is that there’s a tremendous amount of time wasted in the average office. Your employer pays for it financially, and you pay for it with something a lot more valuable.

Even the kinds of jobs that tend to pay hourly (and low) wages place value and ownership on the person, not the work. A job on a construction site or a fast food restaurant should compensate employees in terms at least of shifts, if not as a function of production.

If the difference appears mostly semantic, you’re not wrong. Payment by the hour or payment by the shift is basically just a different breakdown of the same job. But writing a job description to a task, rather than the time it might take to do it is a significant shift in thinking. The way we define pay informs what we value as a culture, and most of us work in a system that incentivizes being inefficient with the one thing we can’t make more of.

Buy the Subscription

December 1, 2015December 1, 2015 ~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

By now most of the people I know have more or less given up on Facebook. Sure, it’s still pretty good for finding a couch to crash on when your car breaks down somewhere in eastern Oregon, and I appreciate that it’s been the death knell for the 10 year high school reunion, but most millennials are shifting to other social media platforms to keep in touch day to day. The trend is increasing, too; Facebook saw a dramatic drop in teen use in 2014.

There are probably a lot of reasons for the exodus. Certainly, the baby boomer generation has embraced Facebook and made it less cool, in much the same way that no one born after 1982 can listen to the Eagles with a straight face.

To some extent, Facebook has faded in relevance because we’ve realized that we actually don’t care what the weird kid who ate whole tubes of Chapstick on the bus in 2nd grade is up to right this moment. But ultimately, the move away from Facebook (in favor of other social media platforms that are owned by Facebook) indicates discontent with the platform itself. Primarily, that the user experience feels a lot like that scene in Minority Report:

Overzealous advertising is the most annoying thing on the internet. We all hate sitting through Geico commercials before we can watch cute animal videos on YouTube, and banner ads always mess with the way pages load on my phone. The specificity of Facebook and Google’s advertising algorithms (and their collaboration with our fair NSA) is just creepy. It’s no wonder that there’s a litany of options for avoiding advertising. Free ad blocking software is available for every browser, and skipping the commercials is one of the biggest reasons for streaming TV shows illegally.

Advertising is at a fever pitch. It’s a quarter trillion dollar a year industry, which, for reference, is about as much as is spent annually by the US Military Industrial Complex. It’s a huge amount of money, and the passion and energy behind it led Gore Vidal to describe advertising as “the only art form [America] created.”

But it’s worth looking to the next most widely consumed medium of art: Journalism. Rigorous journalism is at once creative expression and public service, and it sets trends in the public mood as much as it follows them. A free and vibrant press is protected by the first amendment, but our congress doesn’t have a line item for it. Advertising has kept the lights on for hundreds of years.

A cynic might suggest that funding journalism is a tricky proposition. No entity should be excluded from oversight by the public eye, yet private funding yields a tabloid and government funding just creates a state-run newspaper that might be hesitant to look critically at the hand that feeds it. Ultimately, honest journalism serves the public, and the public is responsible for seeing it succeed. We can do this by spending $10 for every newspaper, or by turning to the free market.

In order to keep the presses running revenue comes in two forms: directly from consumers in the way of subscriptions or retail purchases, and through selling advertising. Advertisers buy exposure a certain numbers of eyeballs with the calculation that some percentage of those eyeballs will convert to sales of their product at some point down the road. It’s a sliding scale of revenue, but in the end one of four things will happen:

Cover prices and subscriptions will fund the newspaper (Netflix)
A combination of paper sales and ad sales will fund the newspaper (NY Times)
Ad sales will fund the newspaper exclusively (Fox/CNN)
The journalists will starve to death (VICE/Huffington Post)

We’ve used journalism here as an example because it has one of the most established funding sources of revenue, but the rule stands for all forms of art. If you value something you need to expect to pay for it, whether outright or by way of prospecting ad salesmen.

The important distinction is that real journalism benefits from an inflexible code of ethical standards to ensure that the business and the editorial interests remain separate. As the public grows more and more weary of the constant barrage of commercials and avoids exposure by streaming TV or DVRing the game, it drives the ad industry to be more compelling.

In the past decade we’ve seen the news industry fragment. Competition for audience and our reluctance to embrace traditional advertising has filled headlines with click bait and birthed “native advertising,” which disguises advertising as news and dangerously blurs the vaunted line between the newsroom and the publisher.

The free exchange of information allowed by the internet has triggered a second industrial revolution, and led to the rapid inflation in the currency of creative property. There is a tremendous amount of content and information out there. Most of it is trash, generated basically for free and only to funnel you toward an ad.

Curious about whether or not we’re about to invade Syria, but already spent your 10 monthly Times articles on articles about dessert? Locked out of a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay because you’re not a New Yorker subscriber? Just scroll down a few Google results and I’ll bet you find it for free. I just hope he hasn’t taken a job in marketing yet.

In sort of an awkward coincidence these bad bitches are hot off the presses just in time for the Holiday season. $12 gets you one!

The Gentleman at Large

Keeping an eye on the forest.

Miscellaneous Outrage

Nutrition Tips for the Dirtbag Athlete

Skintrack Etiquette: a primer for the uninitiated

We Shouldn’t Increase Minimum Wage

Buy the Subscription