In article <
[email protected]>,
Fred Fredburger <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Ryan Cousineau wrote:
>
> > I only try to mention LIVEDRUNK in threads where the
> > subject of alcohol is already present or seems obviously relevant.
> >
>
> And, given the prevalence of NASCAR threads lately, that's pretty much
> all of them.
>
> > The problem is that somewhere along the line, LIVEDRUNK became,
> > reasonably, a shorthand explanation for dumb behavior, and then shortly
> > after that, professional cycling became an orgy of dumb behavior.
>
> I've read enough of your stuff that I have problems believing that
> you're less aware of life's general absurdity than I am. That doesn't
> wash. Maybe you just know fewer dumb sober people than I do. I find that
> alcohol sometimes even IMPROVES that situation. It's hard to say
> anything dumb when you've passed out.
Alcohol helps me deal with professional cycling.
An honest, sober truth here for a moment: does anyone else besides me
find televised road cycling mostly really boring? It takes three to six
hours to complete, and the actual "action" is sporadic and subtle.
Even something epic and decisive like key mountain stages in the Tour
typically end up with two to three hours of fairly normal riding
punctuated by about an hour of indecisive suffering usually followed by
a half hour or so of sudden, vital action, followed by 10-30 minutes of
guttingly hard work by those about to collect the spoils.
That's great, but it's the primary actual action (outside of 10 minutes
at the end of sprinter's stages) in the entire Tour, which lasts 27 days.
The random typical moment seen in a bike race involves a bunch of riders
cruising just a bit faster than the group 5 minutes ahead of them, with
no obvious transformation of the course of the race. Not many sports are
like that. Or the sport is golf, which is largely watched by its many
participants.
I say this as someone who loves cycling (virtually any non-downhill
discipline) as a participation sport. I can even watch track racing or
CX or the occasional crit. But I wonder if the nature of road cycling
was and is best suited to the print medium. If you distill a day's
racing into a single news report, it gives you the chance to concentrate
on the (very real, very intense) action that is inevitably scattered
about the race in bits and pieces.
For that matter, I think NASCAR has a similar problem: extremely long,
largely indecisive races that essentially come down to which of the
drivers in the front 10 manages to be the cleverest during the final lap.
I mean, yeah, I realize you only get into the front 10 by being a good
driver in a good car with a good setup, but they drove 600 miles to
settle it like that? I don't know if a NASCAR race ended last year with
a single driver gaining a substantial advantage on the field, but I
doubt it. In the few races where the track naturally tends to divide the
cars up into separate packs, they inevitably get chunked back into one
big group by some yellow flag or another.
But I digress.
I'm not really sure, Fred, what your statement all the way up there is
supposed to mean. I think you believe that I think the present state of
cycling is unusually absurd and that I'm trying to either explain it or
mitigate it through alcohol.
Yes and no. I think there's always absurd behavior in life, and my own
life is a bit of a celebration of it (you can't take a guy very
seriously when his personal website is "the world's only cybermorphic
weblog.") But the concentration of absurd behavior in cycling has
reached operatic proportions.
I don't say that because I'm impressed by the grand themes of the
various Alphabet Soup Wars that pro cycling is presently engaged in. I
say that because I think most operas have plotlines that range from
obvious to idiotic:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_plot>
Though I suppose the UCI attempt to reach greatness by pulling itself up
from its bootstraps is sort of Wagnerian.
> For whatever reason, some things get repeated a lot in RBR.
> groups.google.com says that livedrunk (sometimes spelled "live drunk"?)
> outnumbers Starbucks references (for any reason at all) by better than
> 2-1. So you're bigger than Starbucks, if you want to look at it that way.
I have the advantage of still being active in this group, unlike the
Sausalito Starbucks set, and preferring rbr to training. I suck.
Now, it's back to painting my kitchen. Stupid life. What am I saying? I
love my stupid life! I love my stupid cyclocross bike, I love
web-gardening for my bike club's website, I love that my Friday plan
involves (weather permitting) starting out before 7am, driving for an
hour with a friend, and then riding CX bikes a couple of hours along a
fire road to check out the access to a hot spring. Then we come back.
It's a good life! I recommend it! The modest consumption of alcohol
doesn't seem to hurt, either.
--
Ryan Cousineau
[email protected] http://www.wiredcola.com/
"In other newsgroups, they killfile trolls."
"In rec.bicycles.racing, we coach them."
