Dartmouth Cycling Wiki | Profiles / Last Update Ever

Last winter break update ever.

So ends Matt’s blogging escapades. It’s been an interesting exercise. I’ve been thinking about whether blogging (which is a truncation of web-logging, by the way), is a worthwhile activity. I’ve come to the conclusion that blogs need to be used under very specific circumstances for them to be useful/interesting/etc… Blogs are great for having “rich” text, in the sense that your writing can be easily connected to other content on the web. For me, blogs are uninteresting when they just become a superficial account of life’s vagaries.

Here’s a new york times comment on blogs: “Give up the blogging. All you emo teens, militant 12 steppers, sexual conquistadors and fetishistic foodies: enough with the unsolicited opinions and diaristic diarrhea. Remember that just because something happened to you doesn’t mean that it’s interesting. There are plenty of self-important professionals like me who are paid to have opinions and rarefied tantrums for the reading public.”

It’s time for you to go back to buying newspapers and movie tickets.

On the subject of communication, I’ve found that the infestation of ipods into daily life has reached epidemic proportions. Has music from portable devices become the new background noise of life? Am I the only one that finds it incredibly rude when people interact with you while listening to music? Is constant immersion in a personalized sound environment a sign of the apocalypse? I think so. I have no problem with listening to music, and enjoying music. But very rarely do people listen to music without it being a secondary task, and in the most flagrant cases I find it disrespectful to the musician as well as to others.

I’m currently in the first row of seats on a flight to Baltimore. These are some of the best seats in the plane, b/c there is a lot of leg room. Even better, you can put your feet up on the wall in front of you, thus maximizing leg elevation time, which is highly correlated with “being pro.” The family next to and behind me have been eating a constant stream of movie theatre food since the flight left at 7am.

To the bike portion of the blog. The trusty powertap says I rode 1293.03mi + ~150mi from the 2 days the PT was dead/malfunctioning. 53 million joules of output. This was over 23 days on the bike. I also did a fair number of hikes. All in all, the “winter training camp” went as well as I could have imagined, and I definitely surprised myself at what I could do. I did very few “junk miles” (by this I mean plodding along in survival mode trying to get home because I was tired; or, sitting in in a group ride soft-pedaling).

The last ride of break was pretty fitting. Flint was in San Francisco visiting his girlfriend, so we got together to go do Mt. Diablo. I was pretty tired at that point (85,50, 65 miles the previous 3 days), and kind of wanted to back out, but I didn’t want to disappoint. Ended up 1) locking myself out of my house, thus preventing access to my helmet 2) sliding out through a corner, bruising my hip flexor, and ripping my shorts/jacket. It could have been a lot worse, so I’m thankful.

What’s next? I’m taking a break for a while, and doing all the non-bike stuff I enjoy doing.

matt