Try This One Dumb Trick

Try this one dumb trick to improve your health and make new friends. It cures cancer and burns that pesky belly fat. It’s an ancient technique that the stars used to get ripped for 300. It’s a trick so simple, you wouldn’t believe you’ve never tried it! It will change your life forever.

Are you ready for it? Here you go! Take off your fucking headphones.

brad-dancing
Don’t be that guy.

It may come as a surprise to a lot of you out there, but you are not currently starring in some Truman Show-esque film about your life. You do not need a sound track.

When you’re out for a trail run, would you rather hear that Best of Boyz II Men album you’ve been listening to recently? Or the mountain biker coming around the corner? Or how about the 250lb lion that’s been stalking you for the last 30 minutes? And what about that nice lady who said “hi” to you but you didn’t hear her and didn’t say “hi” back and it really hurt her feelings? Have you thought about her feelings? Let’s be real – that velvety a capella can wait.

And when you’re riding your bike through rush hour traffic you can probably just hum those John Williams tracks to yourself, you know? As a mostly invisible and wholly vulnerable object darting around like a high stakes game of frogger, should you really be depriving yourself of your second most useful sense? Maybe you don’t care if you get splatted, but it’s rush hour already and that will definitely snarl traffic and people have, like, places to be.

I guess the big thing is that whether we like it or not, we all live here. We’re a society. And part of that means dealing with each other every once in a while. A chaotic community like ours can be overwhelming, for sure, and we all need a little time to ourselves. I understand the need for solitude as well as anyone, but the solution is not to strap on a sensory deprivation helmet and wander into traffic.

Headphones are great, and have a lot of applications. They’re my number one go-to for avoiding conversations on planes and fully appreciating The Dark Side of the Moon. But let’s be reasonable, people, and pay a little bit of attention.

 

There Will Be No Blog Post Today

There will be no blog post today. The requirements of the Missoula XC preclude my fealty to the attention to detail to which you are accustomed, and which you deserve. I have no excuse beyond that I am sleepy. I hope that you will find it within yourselves to forgive my sloth, and check back next week for a new and exciting edition from The Gentleman at Large.

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Race season is here! pc: Tom Robertson

There will be no blog post today, but not for lack of thoughtfulness. I tried, I really did! I even had lots of ideas.

I considered for a while that only two weeks after the last edition, we’re already past due for a third installment of the God Bless Our Parks series.

I thought about laying out a study on how long a person can subsist (thrive?) on caffeine and cortisol alone.

I explored for a few minutes how our current national discussion might be different if that bigot from New York had been arrested on a fluke but that redneck from Indiana had carried of his plan instead. Would the conversation still have migrated toward xenophobia? Or would we have considered for a moment that religious extremism is religious extremism whether the evangelist is brandishing a Quran or a Bible, and that heaping additional punishment on the perpetrator of a violent crime (to say nothing of his or her community) based on his or her ideological convictions is a violation of the rights guaranteed to said violent criminal by First Amendment to the Constitution of Our Great Nation, and that if we actually have any interest in stopping such violent crimes we might be better off exploring the disenfranchisement and alienation that fuels extreme ideology in the first place. And that’s not even to mention that there is only one common thread that runs through every single mass shooting foreign and domestic, which exists more consistently than ideological extremism and even hate. That is, of course, that a gun was used to kill a large number of people.

But then I figured that by press time we’d all have just shrugged our shoulders and written off violent crimes like those that took place in Orlando and Los Angeles the other day as inevitable, as an unfortunate byproduct of living in the Best Goddam’ Country On Earth, and gone on with our lives. (Well, some of us, anyway.) I was also busy with race promotion stuff, and didn’t have the opportunity to read up on today’s mass shooting; I was worried the post might have come off as stale. In the fast paced world of blogging, it’s important to stay relevant!

So to you, my adoring fans, I am sorry. But I promise to do better next week with a new edition of witty, biting, and insightful commentary on how you’re hanging the toilet paper wrong, or the best way to level a wobbly table in a restaurant, or something. But to tide you over, here is a quick clip of what I’m pretty sure Teddy Roosevelt had in mind when he founded the Park Service:

 

To Make Driving Safer, Make Cars More Dangerous

Each morning we get out of bed. We stumble into the kitchen, grope around for the coffee machine, and flip on the TV to check in on the news. Maybe we have a bowl of cereal, or fry an egg, or just decide to eat later. We have a moment of quiet early in the morning before it’s time to go to war.

Before we leave for work we don our suits of armor (Chevy, Toyota, etc.). The world is a dangerous place, and we need to protect ourselves and our loved ones before we send them into the fray of public roads.

My dismay at American car culture isn’t a new phenomenon, but I’m still amazed by it. You can tell if someone is home by whether or not their car is there – driving is synonymous with simply leaving the house. We’ve gone to war to keep it inexpensive. 1% of the people born in 2013 will die in a car crash.

Let that sink in for a moment.

There are a lot of reasons floating around for why driving is so dangerous. Speed limits are too high. Road design is unsafe. Distracted driving! It’s those damned kids and their text machines. Or, there’s the fact that we’re essentially a nation of idiots, hurdling through the world at 80 miles an hour without a second thought or with any real oversight, all day every day. The sheer volume of driving in this country is the leading driver to why so many people are maimed and killed doing it.

On the one hand, maybe that’s fair. Folks should be more careful out there if they don’t want to die! That rationale holds up for motorcyclists who, generally speaking, go out alone. But drivers of cars and trucks are a bit different. They’re encapsulated in 5,000 pounds of steel, and a collision with one these is significantly more damaging.

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Maybe cars are too safe for the driver. Image from CNN

The only real way to make driving less dangerous is for people to do it less. We could incentivize this nationally with a more reasonable tax structure (gas costs less than bottled water right now), but that disproportionately penalizes poor people. Better, I think, is to effect change in how cars are built.

They’re too damn comfortable. Want to make a car that fewer people die in? Try building one without:

  • A radio
  • Air conditioning
  • Heat
  • Padded seats
  • Power steering
  • More than 40hp

When’s the last time someone you know died in a Yugo?

But the big step to making driving safer is to build cars less safely. Cars are way more dangerous than they seem, and these 5 Star safety ratings are killing us. Commercials cut slow motion video of crash testing with glossy montage shots of smiling children, implying that crashing your car with your family in it is somehow unavoidable, or not that big a deal. Want to make driving really safer? Ditch the seatbelts, line the dashboard with spikes, and put the airbags on the outside.

Automobile design is inherently backwards. It puts a premium on safety for the person with the most control, which can’t have any effect but to embolden drivers at the expense of everyone else. It’s no different than if nautical policy in the event of a shipwreck was to ensure the captain and crew are on the first life boat. Damn the women and children.

The fact of the matter is that driving is the most dangerous thing we do (except for drinking poison), and we don’t think twice about doing it. Want to see driving get safer? Then change the way we look at getting behind the wheel in the first place.

Don’t Forget to Have Fun

I’ve got a little bit of a complicated relationship with my bike. For five or six years, all I wanted to do was to ride, and to ride as fast as I could. I passed on dinners with friends to spend time on the stationary bike, got most of my calories from weird powders and gels, and pretty much every time I rode it was at an uncomfortable pace.

At the time, or for most of the time, I loved it. There was never any danger of doing it for a living, but I got good enough to travel to big races and to start with the guys who do do it for a living. The hard work really was fun.

raceseason
Race Season – pc: Kevin Horan

After a year or so of bad results and burnout, though, I got tired and disillusioned. My expectations soared while my results stagnated. After a bad season I quit racing, and then I quit riding. I told myself that it wasn’t so much that I stopped loving to ride bikes – I just needed to see other people for a while.

See, when I moved to Montana I was way into climbing on rocks. And ice. And trail running. And backpacking. And hunting. And you get the idea. After a season or two of racing, though, it was all I thought about. After racing lost some of its luster, I went looking for some of the things that I lost.

Backcountry skiing moved to the forefront and got me back in the alpine, and I even took up running-when-not-chased. Riding bikes moved to the background, and while racing is still very much a part of my life, I didn’t even own a mountain bike for a few years (which is my circles was akin to sacrilege).

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Ski Season – pc: Ben Brunsvold

And then I bought one again. It’s not light, or particularly speedy. It’s not much for racing. It’s a big squishy thing that’s made for long days and backcountry trails, or, more simply, for fun.

I’ve been riding it a lot, and being back on the bike is like meeting an old friend in a new place, or hooking up with an ex. It’s simultaneously familiar and new. It’s exhilarating. It’s fun, and it’s reminded me why I spent so much time riding in circles in the first place.

Riding without tracking my power profile is great. I don’t ride with a watch, or keep track of how far I ride. If I don’t feel like going I don’t go. Sometimes I try hard and sometimes I just screw around, but every time I get out it’s fun. And now that I’m back on the bike, I’m starting to remember what motivated me to train so much a decade ago.

Through freezing, rainy training rides and mind numbing hours on the rollers; through long drives to races I didn’t finish; through an identity that was caught up in unrealistic expectations, racing for me was rooted in fun. And now that the expectations are gone and the fun is back, I wonder if it would be so bad to pin on a number again.

So go hit a jump (or don’t, whatever), or have some beers and get sunburned on the river, or call in sick and spend all day smoking ribs on a Tuesday. Take a little time to have fun.

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Fun Season (aka late night campus bike jousting)

Comment Section Scavenger Hunt

The Internet is an amazing tool. It has single-handedly changed the way we interact with the world and jump started a second Industrial Revolution. It connects communities, streamlines commerce, and helps to save countless lives every day. It is more prolific than planes, trains, and automobiles, and it’s only 25 years old.

An anonymous, unregulated internet is the greatest social experiment of our time (of all time?), and the ways in which we use it are a reflection of our real beliefs and values. Some people exemplify our collective capacity for Good, while others are probably evil. Most people simply articulate the absurdity of our current approach to work or play jokes on people who are just trying to do their best.

That that internet is a quirky, creative, amazing place is probably best summed up by the fact that when you Google “picture of the internet” you get various iterations of this more or less helpful and well-intentioned diagram:

internet

And this not-at-all helpful but certainly amusing picture of, well, I’m not really sure what I’m looking at:

theotherinternet

We all use the web, and we all use it for slightly different things. It has changed the way we do pretty much everything we do, not the least of which is get our news.

The twice daily newspaper gave way to the daily, and for years weekly news magazines offered a distillation of what was going on in the world. The weekly magazine was, without knowing it, foreshadowing its own demise by providing what the people really wanted: a curated meta-analysis of current events.

But the world was made smaller by the internet. The news cycle shrank from a week to the more or less continuous barrage of Breaking Headlines and Not-Quite-Journalism that we have today, and consumers needed a more effective way to make sense of it all. On the one hand, we have Buzzfeed. On the other, we have the comments section.

These pithy tetes-a-tete offer glimpses at Our Collective Id as denizens of the internet lurk behind their keyboards and spew whatever detritus that comes to mind as the gospel truth. The comments section on news stories is essentially the Cliff’s Notes to the internet. It’s a symphony of ideological clashes, xenophobic rage, and honest misinformation, seasoned with a handful of trolls just trying to get your goat.

It’s a beautiful thing, the comments section, and I frequently skip the story all together just to see what We The People think about it. I encourage you to give it a look, if you haven’t before. But because it can be a bit overwhelming, I’d like to guide your efforts with a brief scavenger hunt. If you can find a news story with a comments section that contains everything here, please share it!

Online Comment Section Scavenger Hunt

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