Beer intervals
Dear Dr Kelby,
Earlier this summer, you provided sage advice for me, an aging racer seeking to "hold his own" on a cross-state ride held in late July. I carefully followed your plan and, modesty aside, I think I did alright vis-à-vis my younger companions. So valid were your suggestions that my success spilled onto my late-season race venues, culminating [sound of my own trumpet] in a solo victory in my state's criterium championship.
Unfortunately, you've opened Pandora's Box for me, and the pressure is building for next season. I've just completed an end-of-season wind down, and am preparing my winter and early spring schedule of weights, riding, and cyclo-cross, all of which have potential 'rehydration' components. Do you have any tips for me? [Please note: I do suffer, from time to time, temporary vision issues and wobbly knees. What am I doing wrong? Was I over-training, or not working hard enough?]
Grandpa Kim
USA
Kelby Bethards replies:
You pose a question valid to all cyclists: maintenance of fitness through the winter. It is a problem for those of us that live in areas that have seasons…..
However, beer fitness poses a new challenge. It is entirely possibly to become too beer fit in the winter. Yes, I know, this seems impossible. But, just as extreme, cycling fitness brings a trim, lean and powerful physique. Beer fitness tends to have its own physiologic attributes. Those are somewhat opposite of a racing physique.
Strong drinkers will grow larger abdominal regions. Sometimes the courage center of the brain becomes hyper-developed. And, if the beerclist isn't coordinated enough, he/she may end up with an enlarged bicep muscle on the favored side. A beercep, of sorts.
"So what", you beer affectionados may say. Well, the big beer belly muscle may impede pedaling and cause you to ride bow legged. I know you can use the belly to 'bounce' your legs off of, but this will only work a while before it causes you to puke on your shoes. The overdeveloped courage may make you attempt things that you cannot do, such as wheelies (as I attempted to get Lance Armstrong to do on the said "tour", which he was not brave enough to attempt - not enough beer I guess). And, if you have an enlarged beercep muscle, you may find yourself sprinting in circles next spring. That'd be a bummer in a final sprint.
Thusly, a cyclist must keep a balance. Yin and yang or whatever the hell it is. You must keep your lean, mean physique, yet enjoy beer season. After all, that's what winter if for. A few simple tips may help:
First of all, avoid the urge to do beer intervals in the winter. That isn't necessary. Just keep your fitness, keep your base beer miles and enjoy it. You don't want to overtrain.
B) Drink with both hands. At the same time if you wish… This will keep you from sprinting in circles and looking ridiculous.
3) Ride your bike to the bar or to the beer. Even in the winter. This allows you to 'earn' the beer. Even in the snow and so on. It also keeps the urge to do beer intervals, and beer sprints to a minimum, since you need to be sober enough to get home safely.
7) You mentioned opening Pandora's Box. Open that baby up, fill it with beer and hop in. I have a Mr T. rubber ducky you can borrow. I pity the fool.
Kelby Bethards, MD (Ft Collins orphan)
P.S. Yes Kim, you did very well on the said "tour" and held your own. Wobbly knees, eh? Low beer to blood ratio, I reckon.
another good read is over at CNN/Fortune. The Axis of Diesel.
This quote is somewhat familiar:
Except for pickups and a fringe of Volkswagen fanatics, the technology largely fell by the wayside.
Um. that'd be me and the gang from TDIclub. pretty loud and articulate bunch (if you take me out of the equation).
Its a good read. Bio or not Diesel is the answer. Hybrids as it points out are a LOT more expensive. Environmentaly quality doesn't come for free but that $7,000 price difference they quote can do a hell uv a lot more to clean up the planet than driving a hybrid over a clean diesel.
Got some images from the race to put up...
will get em up soon...
one burrito left to consume... FOOOOOOOOOOOOOD
GeWilli HUNGRY Me EAT LOTS of FOOD
7 comments:
Sounds like MB buys a lot of ads from them. For the price of an E320, I could almost buy 3 hybrids. That is hardly a premium.
2009 is a long way off. The majority of the diesels on the road TODAY do not run right and spew pollutants like there is no tommorow. I sure as hell don't like driving behind them. Riding behind them? Get real. Remember the protest at Fitchburg because they tried to use a diesel for a pace car?
The Lexus hybrid costs $8000 more because anyone who can afford is in the 35% Fed bracket, and the tax credit offsets some of the cost. It is not the cost of the vehicle, it is just simple supply and demand and Toyota is charging what they can get for it.
KL got her car for like 11,500 and it has been cleanly sipping fuel for two years now. Personally I'd still rather just have a regular car and drive sensibly, less hassle and I don't have to stand in a puddle of friggin' oil to fill it up.
Solobreak, your POV is not seemingly based on the current crop of direct injected diesels. IE the TDI.
A current common rail or old fashioned VE type pump with a variable nozzle turbo is far cleaner than a gasoline engine.
Downsides:
you can smell it.
gasoline downsides? you can't smell it and ya don't care that it has far more pollutants and far more toxic pollutants than a diesel outlined above.
Now that's running regular diesel.
stick some zero sulfur (all) biodiesel in there and you are essentially creating a tailpipe product that you can breath with no ill health effects.
it is the cost of the vehicle. published data that i've seen (don't have it linked here) is that hybrids are still selling as loss leaders. ie they still cost Toyota and Honda money for you to buy one. Its getting closer to even margin but still a loss.
That does not make economical sense.
Here's the thing though. Take a used car and that sort of BS is out the window.
Stand in a puddle of oil... i haven't done that except once or twice in the almost 260,000 miles my diesel has been driven.
Stop exposing trivial ignorances my friend...
Why do the VW diesels get among the lowest air pollution score of any vehicle in the EPA tests if they are "far cleaner than gas engines?"
http://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/E-VOLKSWAGEN-Golf-06.htm
These are based on NOx,NMOG,CO,PM and HCHO
emmissions at the 100,000 mile mark. Even the article you cited said Mercedes would need an EPA exemption for their 2009 model to be compliant.
People like the author seem to be baffled by the success of the Prius. First of all, corporate accounting being what it is, no outside party can tell you whether or not Honda or Toyota makes or loses money on the hybrids. They are both far more profitable than Daimler-Chrysler, so I think they know what they are doing. Because of CAFE, all car companies tend to make their profits on the larger vehicles, and provide incentives to get people to buy the better mileage cars.
The article you cited was pure fluff. The author doesn't seem to understand that nearly every model Toyota and Honda make are top sellers in their category, hybrid or not. Did it ever occur to him or you that people buy Prius' because they are good cars? If you have never owned a high quality Japanese car, then you wouldn't understand how much you can expect from one, and how little you have to put into it.
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/cars/pricing/best-worst-in-car-reliability-1005/best-worst-models/index.htm
Notice that Honda and Toyota are at the top of every category, and in Mercedes and VW at the top of the worst in many. People just want cars that work, with no hassle. I mean hell, your car sits in the driveway 5 days a week, and you still need to be in a user support group to keep it running. It doesn't matter what kind of mileage you get if your car won't start and the sunroof leaks when it does.
For the author to suggest that hybrids sell at a premium and the Mercedes does not is a complete joke. Lexus stole their market share in just a few years because nobody wants to pay $50000 for a car that drives like a 5 year old Camry. Germany lost WWII because they couldn't get enough diesel down the supply lines to run these overweight "engineering marvels" from Daimler.
look at that table...
Diesel's may be higher in NOx, but they emit zero CO and more or less zero NMOG,
PM is based on the amount of sulfur in the fuel, the fuel mix and the state of tune (timing) of the vehicle.
HCHO is also a gasoline emission byproduct.
The scoring system is fucked and flawed.
plain and simple. but some hippie myopic dickbag who things diesels spew wrote the shit up...
People love the prius. its a good car. nothing wrong with them...
people like toyotas... people love em...
i don't have any problem with them...
they are good cars...
if they were piles of shit they wouldn't be sold...
Now not to mention those fuel economy numbers are wacked and low... for the average TDI... but that's okay.
*shrug*
CO is zero? Even the tdiclub isn't making that claim:
http://tdiclub.com/TDIFAQ/TDiFAQ-5.html
The Insight passes SULEV, so I think it is a lot closer to zero than any diesel. (I love the "equivalent engine" line. What the hell does that mean?). Either way, I still can't see how you can claim "far cleaner than any gas engine"... just ain't so.
And there you go with the name calling again. Yeah, the EPA is a bunch of hippies. We should all go back to the Vista Cruiser, or billowing truck diesels like the jackhammer-warfare landscaping trucks I have to ride behind all day.
Once again, you dissappoint me. I thought that taking cheap shots at your beloved oil-burner would get a lot more flames out of you than this. I guess diesel really isn't that volatile. Maybe I should have just gone with "Kozy Shak sucks" or something like that.
Well i've got 4 gas analysis on my car on some DVD backed up from before leaving michigan...
it was down pretty darn low, with the CAT cold.
my dissapointment with the EPA certification is that its for very specific loads, and fully warmed up.
short trips the vehicles don't fully warm up... anyway... the hippie comment was a cheap shot, not good i know...
i resort to name calling way to easily... habit that's hard to break...
i'm also frustrated by the lack of resources i used to have for this debate.
literally a file cabinet full of stuff about the tdi, emissions and oils and fuel...
its been too long since i've had the debate that i'm rusty...
but you are a very worthy and intelligent person to have this discussion with and i must apologize for my poor handling of the back and forth... you deserve better, and maybe at some point i'll be able to deliver.
But well ahead of the hybrids as far as efficiency, high quality are the Yaris cars. Yeah they are Toyotas but they are cheap. Extremely fuel efficient and pretty good quality.
Sheesh, relax. Truth be told, I've always wanted a Mercedes and all your bio-diesel info has got me thinking that I might actually be able to make it work. If I could get a C-class station wagon with low miles and a 40 mpg turbodiesel I'd be psyched. For that matter, in the 5 minutes of research I did yesterday, I got a look at the many models of eurocar and van that are so much cooler than what we have to choose from.
My dissappointment with the article was that it looks like the technology will be leveraged to just keep making big-assed overpowered cars for yuppies to road rage about the town and country in.
The EPA has moved this country in the right direction. CAFE was the most car law ever put on the books, and it is a shame the bump in mpg got crushed by Zell and the others the oil lobby have in their pocket. It was through CAFE and the other modest conservation measures taken in the 70's and 80's that brought us extremely low gas prices for two decades. Only then did we return to the 50's and start with the bigger and bigger vehicles, the long commutes, and the 300 hp Subarus.
CAFE was a good way to get the rich fucks to subsidize the more economical vehicles. The real agenda of the Republicans is run up the deficit for as long as it takes to shift the country from income tax revenue to a consumption taxes revenue. Then the poor people can pay the deficit off. The sad part is that energy consumption tax will probably not be part of the equation. Low gas prices are the sacred cow of America. I doubt we will live to see the day when the US taxes the shit out of oil and drives consumption, and prices, back downward. CAFE is all we can hope for.
The recent popularity of the hybrids is a ray of hope that real social change could actually happen. At least this shows that a few people see their vehicle as something other than a race weapon in the battle for highway supremacy. The reason bikes have it so bad on the road is that most drivers see everyone else as the enemy (you too, from your comments about hybrids and RV's getting in the way of your diesel powered rocketship). People can scoff all they want at the hybrid owners, but to me they are more enlightened than some tool with an SUV or a Turbo Maxima flooring it down the street just so they can slam on the brakes at the next stoplight.
So anyway, isn't the Yaris just a re-tooled Echo? I liked the Echo, but they never has a hatch. The Prius is one of the only big hatchbacks out there now. The back of them is cavernous! Personally, I would not take the long-term financial risk of buying one, but if the same car were available with a regular Corolla engine, it would be near the top of my list. As it is, I'd have a hard time not going with a Matrix. The utility and long term TCO are hard to ignore.
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