Tour Tidbit du Jour - 7/3/2012

The first week of the Tour de France is usually filled with crashes, as we saw today's carnage having the first abandons of the three week stage race. This is just a list of the people the doctors attended to, not all the people hurt or affected by all the crashing:

Crash at 70km: Yury Krivtsov (Lampre-ISD), cuts to knee, elbow, hip
Dimitry Fofonov (Astana), cuts to left knee
Janez Brajkovic (Astana), cuts to left elbow and hip
Crash at 140km: Kanstantsin Sivtsou (Sky), broken left tibula
Dominik Nerz (Liquigas), cuts and scrapes
Pablo Urtasun (Euskaltel), queasiness
Crash at 168km: JJ Rojas (Movistar), fractured left clavicle
Gianpaolo Caruso (Katusha), blow to chest
Crash at 300m to go: Marco Marcato (Vacansoleil-DCM), cuts to left knee

We know that Sivtsou and Rojas were the first abandons, but there might be more over night, as several other riders were taken to local hospitals for x-rays. What's bad about the crashing, if you keep on with the Tour, is there is no time to rest and heal, there's always another 100 mile race to do the next day. On Stage 1, several riders went down and injured their left arms trying to break their falls.

Luis Leon Sanchez sprained his wrist.

Photo: Graham Watson | www.grahamwatson.com

Wearing a brace seems okay before you start riding, but it is not comfortable at all while trying to handle a bike surrounded by 190 other guys, besides feeling every single bump in the road.  Tony Martin opted for one hand during most of Stage 2, suffering from a broken wrist.

Photo: Graham Watson | www.grahamwatson.com

But what if you're in the breakaway, you've got a dislocated pinky, and the final climb is on steep cobblestones? If you're Anthony Roux of FDJ, you suck it up, and climb one-handed.

Tour Tidbit du Jour - 7/2/2012

Young Peter Sagan rode his first Tour de France road stage yesterday, and won his first Tour de France road stage, and became the youngest rider to win a Tour stage in almost 20 years.

It turns out that Sagan is the youngest rider – he is 22 years and 157 days old – to win a stage in the Tour de France since Lance Armstrong won the stage in Verdun at the tender age of 21 and 296 days back in 1993. There are some within the Liquigas set-up who believe Sagan can follow in the American’s footsteps. “Did they say that? I would love to but I’m still at the beginning of my career. It’s too early to tell what’s possible and we’ll see if I can get a career like him.”

The youngest rider to win the Tour overall was Henri Comet at 19 years old in 1904 at the second cheating-marred Tour, where the first 4 finishers were thrown out for getting caught riding trains.

Twitterbots Need To Try Harder

I don't engage much on Twitter, mainly because it feels like the only parts of MySpace that people actually liked: quick reactions to anonymous posts. Twitter is fast replacing RSS feeds for pushing links to web sites, so now I have to keep track of both. Facebook's mission is for real people to share real things. Twitter, not so much, though nothing is stopping you from keeping it real there, it's just too easy to be fake. Plus, Twitter makes it very easy for search bots to contact you, even though what you posted may have no bearing on what they're trying to sell you.

Case in point: I reacted to the Euro 2012 headline of Germany trouncing Greece, and kept the original headline:

If that ain't a metaphor for the Euro Zone, I don't know what is. | Offshore Drilling, Euro 2012: Germany 4, Greece 2 bit.ly/KSh6LX
— Joseph Morris (@joeschmo1of3) June 22, 2012

Over a week later, because the headline had the phrase "offshore drilling" in it, some twitter bot attached to the blog of a retired offshore oil drilling engineer found me, and followed me. At least it was unintrusive, unlike the twitter spam of "ladies" who just happen to want to share pictures of themselves with you, just like those messenger "ladies." I guess spam evolves with the social media niche. With email, before the spambots automated everything, you had those stupid chainletters asking you to forward them, otherwise you would have bad luck. Now Facebook has the same thing, except it's pictures of the text that used to be in those chainletters, and they ask you to post these pictures for an hour or whatever. Hopefully Facebook will keep a tight rein on that crap, so spambots never get involved unlike how almost all email is redirected spam. On Twitter, there's the lonely ladies spam, but there's also the less annoying follow-you-follow-me spam. But twitter search bots need to do better than a two word phrase to try to get people to follow them back.

Tour Tidbit du Jour - 7/1/2012

The leaders of the different classifications in the Tour de France get to wear different colored jerseys on the very next race day, so you'll see a yellow jersey, a green jersey, a polka-dot jersey, and a white jersey somewhere in the peloton. The most combative rider, chosen by a jury for style or aggressive riding, gets to wear a red bib number (other stage races may hand out a jersey for this designation as well). There's also the team classification, where the best three riders' time for each team for each stage are added up, and the shortest cumulative time from day to day determines the best team. That team gets to wear yellow bib numbers. With how well Team Sky did in the prologue, they get to be the first team wear the yellow numbers.

However, it's pretty hard to pick out the team prize leaders from watching television when the peloton is all scrunched up. So this year, the Tour organizers, ASO, came up with a solution to all that, as Team Sky explained in a tweet:

For people asking about the yellow helmets. It's a new rule brought in this year by the ASO to mark out the team prize leaders #TDF12
— Team Sky (@TeamSky) July 1, 2012

So how do they look? Team Sky tweeted a picture of the riders milling about before the race:

The team and our new helmets ready to roll out. What do you think? #TDF12 twitter.com/TeamSky/status…
— Team Sky (@TeamSky) July 1, 2012

You can see Mick Rogers in the background with his yellow bib numbers and his yellow helmet. It will be interesting to see how the other teams have done up their helmets, or whether pure block yellow was the official mandate from ASO.

Tour Tidbit du Jour - 6/30/2011 - Prologue

From this broken collar bone in the Tour of Flanders:

Click picture for RSNT press release at the time.

To this much happier collar bone today:

Cancellara won his record fifth Tour-opening yellow jersey. Photo: Graham Watson | www.grahamwatson.com

In a nice pair of victory bookends, Fabian Cancellara's first victory in a Tour de France also occurred in Liege, Belgium, back in 2004, when he beat Lance Armstrong in the prologue by one second.

"Forgot Password" Means "Forget Password"

Because my dad wanted to watch back episodes of Franklin & Bash online, which our cable provider allows us to do, provided you authenticate your account with your bundled email login and password, he nuked his 20 year old email password by confusing it with his Netflix password. This is the same Netflix password, incidentally, he has never had to type in anywhere himself, since I set up Netflix on his TV and his web browser, yet this is what he thinks he has to type in when a cable network's online presence wants to confirm his cable/phone/internet credentials.

After he wasted half an hour on tech support, but before I knew my email address was getting all the account change notices, which I set up, so he would never have to change or worry about the internet account online, and just pay his paper bill like he's used to, I found him still on the phone, on hold, and told him to tell the guy on the phone goodbye, and his son would have him up and running in two minutes.

Two minutes later, 1 minute of which was wasted because my dad somehow thought it unnecessary to tell me the temporary password locked into his account by the tech support guy, he was able to access his email again. That is when I explained to him, Never Click Forgot Password because that means you will never use your old password again. "Forgot Password?" means "Forget Password," 'cuz that old password is gonzo. So thanks Franklin & Bash (why dad, why?) for erasing a twenty year old bit of my father's online identity.

Oh, and to make things even worse, I couldn't even replicate what got him running down the rabbit hole chasing a forgotten password. I went to TNT, I clicked on Franklin & Bash, a pop-over asked me to click on my cable provider, a splash screen asked me "to federate" the U-Verse account, and then I was watching a full episode *shudder*. My guess is that he didn't have an active session cookie with his AT&T credentials, even though that is his homepage and he can't avoid it. Whatever. Then I spent 10 minutes using aural memory techniques to drill the new password into my dad's head. Why? Because, obviously, my dad doesn't like to read anything on a web page except to find the OK button to click it, otherwise he would have known what to expect from reading all the prompts after he clicked "Forgot Password?".

One Hour

After 4 weeks back on the bike, from a layoff of 7 and a half months, I'm finally back in shape. Over 7 months, what happened? Tendinitis on the outside of my right knee from a repetitive stress injury caused by a bad habit of letting my ankle relax as I went through my upstroke on a fast pedal cadence. I usually ride for 9 months out of the year, then as bad weather conveniently kicks in, I can catch up on my other hobbies (video games, books, video games... I wrote that twice, whoops). The first month off the bike, the pain was terrible, and as it slowly healed, the damaged area included my upper calf. It wasn't until February that I could get out of bed without any pain. It wasn't until the end of April that I could flex and wrench that tendon without feeling any give or weakness at all.

That timing matched up nicely with three events: 1) I sucked the life out of Skyrim, which came out in November; 2) the Giro d'Italia was starting up and making me long for the bike; and 3) my weight loss from my diet plan had plateaued for 3 weeks. Weight loss, how, where? Well, hard to believe, but from January 2011 to the start of May 2012, I have lost 15 pounds. For a small guy like me who is not fat, that is quite a bit of weight, but I always knew I could get leaner. Since I was not exercising at all, I cut down my carbohydrate intake. I also varied my snack time from week to week, so my body would be expecting calories in my bloodstream at a certain time, not find it, and have to burn fat to make up for the deficit. Last year, without paying attention to my diet at all, I lost 8 pounds, I gained 2 over the Christmas break, and then lost 9 before I got back on the bike. I have not been this light on the bike since 2006. I can't wait for 2 months from now, when I hit peak fitness, then I can eat as much carbohydrate as I want. But that's not where I'm at yet. I'm just fit and in shape.

How do I know I'm at base fitness? I have two daily routine courses for the bike, one pancake flat, and the other rolling, that should take me one hour to complete. My first day on the bike, which I also call "puke day," I did my flat course in 1:13. This is 20 minutes slower than my peak fitness average. After 4 weeks, I'm down to one hour. I'm looking forward to see if I can break my record for these hour-courses now that I'm 7 pounds lighter than when I set them. And maybe that "beer softness" around my core will finally go away. We shall see.