Dartmouth Cycling Wiki | Profiles / Return Of The Update

Hello all,

My resolve to do daily updates has, like a wild horse, been broken. I'm deeply ashamed. Not.

A couple of thoughts have been floating around my mind recently, and I'm narcissistic enough to think you might care:

1) For some reason, there have been numerous articles about the economic losses of gift-giving, which some have termed "the deadweight loss of Christmas." The idea is that people spend more to get you a gift than you would have been willing to pay if you had bought the gift itself. In my view, it's just a classic information asymmetry problem (eg, the gift-giver has imperfect information about your gift preferences). An economist has calculated that the loss in the billions, from the information that, on average, a dollar that people spend for themselves creates nearly 20 percent more satisfaction than a dollar that someone else spends on them.

I think there is a fairly big problem with this line of thinking. Arguably, the less you know about someones' preferences, the more liquid of a gift you'll give (eg gift card, gold bullion, cash, etc...) The real deadweight loss only comes when your senile grandma gives you the holiday sweater, so to speak.

2) Which leads into thought #2, gift cards. Gift cards have become a major component of holiday spending. I really don't understand why. From an economic viewpoint,they make no sense-- by buying a gift card, you are giving the company an interest-free loan. For this reason (combined with the fact that there isn't a 100% use rate of gift cards, and that people tend to spend more than the gift card amount at a store), companies love gift cards, and market them heavily. Don't buy into the bullshit. If you want to give a gift-card, just give the person cash-- tell them that it's the gift card you can use anywhere!!

3) Which leads me to thought #3-- I really hate the holiday season. With a vengeance. Make it stop soon.

I first heard about the concept of "kaizen" in the Harvard Business Review, in its implementation at Toyota. Kaizen translates from the Japanese to "continuous improvement," or " to take it apart and put back together in a better way." It's a business productivity improvement protocol, but I think some of its concepts translate nicely to bicycle training, and life in general. The following snipets were taken from the Wiki page on kaizen: (a)Kaizen is a daily activity whose purpose goes beyond improvement. It is also a process that, when done correctly, humanizes the workplace, eliminates hard work (both mental and physical), and teaches people how to do rapid experiments using the scientific method and how to learn to see and eliminate waste in business processes. (b) Kaizen must operate with three principles in place: process and results (not results-only); systemic thinking (i.e. big picture, not solely the narrow view); and non-judgmental, non-blaming (because blaming is wasteful). (c) The cycle of kaizen activity can be defined as: standardize an operation -> measure the standardized operation -> gauge measurements against requirements -> innovate to meet requirements and increase productivity -> standardize the new, improved operations -> continue cycle ad infinitum

So, there are a couple things I like about this approach. One, it's about economy of motion/elimination of waste. Two, it's about experimenting to find out what works and doesn't. Three, it's about trying to make things better, but without focusing just on the end result.

Now, an update on the cycling front. I ended up doing a pretty hard block of training on friday through sunday-- 71, then 75, then 80miles. I went out hard every day, felt pretty good every day, and I feel I did some quality work. Sweet. Took monday off, then did a split day tuesday (35mi in the morning, then 40mi at night at the port of oakland crit), then took today off. I'm planning another hard 3 day block starting friday-- I'll be doing the Mt. hamilton loop friday (~100mi, ~10,000ft of climbing-- Matt Rossman knows about this loop, it's pretty sweet), then ~75miles on saturday and sunday. Sweet.

rock out, matt