--As I’m sitting here being confounded by stupid Blogger… I give up and will post Monday.-From this weekend – an inspired moment – posted here – now after I have changed the damn tires and added a Mr Tuffy (I can’t believe I’m using them).I’ve just had a Beaufortian moment…
It happened when I started Chapter 9 : Observation, a Panegyric; On the Beaufort Moment
And profound enough it was like: DUH.
Do we need power meters to tell us we are exerting a massive amount of power? Do we need them to tell us just how fast we are going? Do we need them to tell us that the last effort wasn’t as fast as it should have been?
Hell no. What does it do? What does the power meter do? It digitizes. Captures the moment. And no that’s NOT a good thing. It removes observation from the experience. That’s bad? YES. If you rely on that little meter to tell you just how much power you are making at any given exertion or just how hard your heart is beating, what happens to the native feedback? What happens to the attention paid to your own body’s signal? Eh? It slowly atrophies to the point an athlete can’t measure their output without it.
It is too difficult to completely rephrase the chapter but I will pull one specific few sentences that suddenly and dramatically linked power to the Beaufort Scale.
(commercial description not included – get the book and read it to get the setup for the following)
“That commercial to me is the anti-Beaufort moment –it’s the exact opposite of everything Sir Francis Beaufort, the
Manual of Scientific Enquiry, and all the subsequent observational scales have stood for. Everything I have learned about the Beaufort Scale, about the ones that preceded and followed it, and about the people involved with them, demonstrates that our own body is the greatest perceptive instrument ever designed. Not only can it perceive sound, light, movement, temperature, aroma, taste, and time, but it possesses all the processing capacity and speed necessary to organize, categorize, and express that mass of data almost instanty, to then retrain and reorganize it, and to find in it utility and value and meaning. With neither cell phone nor LCD screen, neither keyboard nor electronics, Beaufort interacted with things, not representations of things, Beaufort lived an
un-virtual life, and the Beaufort Scale embodies that spirit.
And then some boob with a new gewgaw to sell tries to convince you that not only is your own perception insufficient to entertain even yourself, but that if your inattentive to the world the problem isn’t you—the problem is your technology.”
That last sentence screams: POWER METER… a gewgaw sold under the premise that you can’t get faster if you don’t know how much power you are making…
-So you maybe wondering what is the Beaufort Scale, I hope not but its possible, look it up – here’s a google link or two for you…
I mentioned the “Nature, Rightly Questioned, Never Lies.” In a previous entry a bit ago. And in a way – (maybe another rationalization) – in a way a blog is a modern Beaufortian device. A device that affords an observer to record the everyday, in their own words, and share – or not share, but in the process of recording helping them define and form their knowledge and base… maybe to go back and compare notes.
Here’s another thing. I’m a gadget lover. I’ve got digital cameras, video recorder, but I’ve retained that artistic aim with them. Maybe not the best of presentation, but the intent is generally more than oh… lemme take this picture… This Beaufortian moment does have me conflicted. I greatly enjoy capturing a moment, and it helped make a dreadfully long commute in the car bearable when I had a digi-cam and could capture events. I sometimes wish instead of collecting digital image after image, that maybe I’d just been able to write it down.
Is the keyboard, the blog, the diary, that much different than the moleskin book and pencil? This entry infact, was first a “Lemme grab my moleskin notebook!” but then I grabbed a memory stick and the laptop, and sitting here in bed where I was reading (quiet moment while the girls are watching a show they recorded earlier) I am hammering out the thoughts.
These thoughts though… Hammered out as they are right now, probably won’t see the light of day for a bit. However, the power of writing and thinking brings me this brilliant observation: My bike is at work. I need to get back into the office this weekend. And… the office has internet. Which isn’t a gewgaw as much as the modern Beaufortian collection depot.
That two-niner debate started by the engineer at Old Pueblo… same thing. Big Drunk Jon says the two-niner feels faster, does it feel faster, or is it faster? Does it matter? Well he’s using observational data to base it on his experience. Others felt its slower… maybe it is, for them. That debate is a melt down from a powertap hub comparison. (see the circle closing in, ever closer… hopefully trapping me at the point I run out of things to say). But it does make the point, as a cyclist, and an observant cyclist we should be able to tell if we are fast. If we are faster, stronger than before. We should have enough observational resources to know faster than a powermeter can tell us if we are doing well in a race, if we are doing well on a training ride.
As with most gadgets or gewgaws we as people eventually get tired with the old one and search for new ones, different ones, something that tells us a new bit of data we have no need for. The heart rate monitors, the power meters, the cycle computers, the gadgets and gizmos that we eventually give up once we satisfy what we know. I’ve done it with every metric on the car that is observable and recordable. Having a laptop and diagnostic software is great for monitoring it, but after a point, I could tell what it was doing and what the computer would say without it. Just as Huler and Beaufort would expect. The human as a system is ir-reproducibly complex, use that, train it, don’t let it go to waste. Don’t replace it with a downloadable recording device that has no chance of even sampling as fast as you can, record analyze or process the volume of data that you can.
Ask yourself, can the Power Tap hub tell you that when you made those numbers the wind was just off to the side, or that at 35 mph windspeed your wheels make a very particular sound? Do you need the HR monitor to know what level of effort you are giving? Can your HR monitor and your power meter combined tell you that it’s the nerves driving up your pulse, not your effort? Maybe they can, but its something that if you pay attention to routinely, something that if you hone your observational skills well enough, you can take advantage of under more varied conditions, and use to more advantage.
I was thinking – well a cycle computer or a cadence display might be helpful. But do you need something to tell you that you turning the big ring over in the 4th or 5th cog at a very fast clip and that some time later you, through intervals and hard work can then blast over the same hill in the big ring and the 3rd cog means you are making more power?
Enough postulating – I’ve already locked the damn thing up mistakingly saving directly to the stick while running on battery – but I didn’t lose anything so the momentary distraction was just that…
