bike calculator

Inspired by a few young engineers and their obsession with reading the output from their spin bikes at lunch.

Bikers love performance calculators.  Here's one I like.

How I understand it.  If you can put out your weight in watts, you are doing good.  Say a 150 lb person producing 150 watts continuous.

If you can sustain 1.5x your weight in watts, you are doing very good.  Say your 150 lb person producing 225 watts.  2x your weight in watts, and your are an age group placing runner or cyclist.

If you are Lance Armstrong or Greg Lemond biking up a mountain, you are putting out maybe 500 watts continuous.  Enough to light up a few dim bulbs.

-Larry

appliance poetry

"Freezy breezes encourage sneezes"

My recently departed father clung to the familiar in his final days.  Including his attachment to a little electric heater he must have bought in the 1950's.  He used it to keep the pipes warm in the drafty old collection of garage and gas station buildings on a downtown corner in my hometown.

I ended up inheriting this little piece of Americana. I gave it a first try in my garage this past weekend shortly after the snow storm.  Actually still worked pretty well. Using his tools, working an old car and truck of his vintage, I get a bit nostalgic. Remembering the 'quality' time with Joe under the hood.

There was a time of optimism, innocent and unbridled, when this nation dared to dream large, going to the moon and building the interstate highway system.  When a small manufacturer in Indiana wrote poetry about an electric space heater.

"If you dislike a chilly bath,
Let Arvin dissipate your wrath.
With fan-forced heat that fills the room
So fast there is no cause for gloom."

-Larry

"last took an aspirin during World War II"

From Running Times.

....By the way, if you're of Whitlock's speed and you "go out jogging" for 3 hours a day, you're doing more than 140 miles per week.


...Yet this 78-year-old man is one of the greatest age-group runners ever. In flight, his torso straightens, his limbs align, his chin comes up, and he glides over the ground. He's run a 5:41 mile in the second half of his eighth decade. He's run 6:00/mile pace for 5K in his early 70s. After a year away from racing with an arthritic knee, in September he ran a 1:37 half marathon, finishing 304th in a field of 3,411. And then there's his crowning achievement (so far), a 2:54 marathon at age 73, a time that most runners half that age would be ecstatic to call their own.

born to be wild

Running around an indoor circle track, lots and lots of times, with my training partners.  Followed an older fellow with a music player and headphones on.  It got obvious as we approached that he was singing to himself, loud enough to be heard about twenty foot back.  And doing hand motions too.

We hung back in his wake listening for a bit.  He was singing "Born to be Wild" by Steppenwolf.   So we (at least me) started singing along with him.

He didn't hear.  So stopped singing, smiled to him and went on by.  Around and around and around.  

Yeah, darling
Gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once and
Explode into space 

-Larry

Even More Reasons to Get a Move On

From the NY Times.  Get grandma off the couch of doom.  Or..burning it is a helluva lot more fun the depriving the self.
 
“Physical inactivity,” they wrote, “is one of the strongest predictors of unsuccessful aging for older adults and is perhaps the root cause of many unnecessary and premature admissions to long-term care.”

-Larry