Question for the Day

How does someone whose idea of a decadent meal is fried tofu wind up with GI issues requiring a CT, MRI, and possible surgery?

Fuck.

I'm having a bad run of things.

Hydrodissected

Today, I had one of the weirder experiences in the ongoing saga that is my less-than-optimally-functioning left leg.

I got to watch plains of muscle tissue in my quad "poofed" apart with saline solution.

It was strange.

They did another ultrasound to see the owie spot. Then, they exercised me until it hurt pretty bad. Then, they ultrasounded me again. Then, they took a very long needle filled with saline and lidocaine and stuck it in the spot that hurt.

I got to watch this all play out on the ultrasound screen.

Gradually, the doctor went deeper, essentially blasting away the scar tissue around a nerve in the quad.

They strange thing was, because of the lidocaine, I felt nothing. It was as if it were someone else's quad that was being topped off with saline.

After the procedure, they put me on the bike again. It felt better. Not amazing, but maybe 20-30% better. The lidocaine certainly took a lot of the edge off.

So... we'll see over the next few days. It's likely I'll need a few more rounds of the hydrodissection before I'm close to being fixed, but it is a hopeful move I think.

What it seems like happened is somewhere at some point, I tore my quad. The tissue never healed quite right. The scar tissue started choking off nerves in my quad. This made my leg hurt and feel weak. I did a bunch of stuff to compensate for the lost power. The rest of my leg got messed up.

I hope this is it, and I can be fixed very soon.

Fingers Crossed (and an Emily Dickinson poem); also, the Intentional Fallacy

One more Dr's appointment on Monday. This might actually fix the problem.

I don't know what it will be like to be pain free. I've pain in daily pain for almost two years. Some days it's a little pain; some days it's a lot. It's always there. It's kind of like that friend who you don't really like, but he or she doesn't get the message, so he or she always clings on to you.

And now, an Emily Dickinson poem:

Pain -- has an Element of Blank --
It cannot recollect
When it begun -- or if there were
A time when it was not --

It has no Future -- but itself --
Its Infinite contain
Its Past -- enlightened to perceive
New Periods -- of Pain.

The text of the poem came from American Poems, so I don't put much stock in its textual presentation (much of Dickinson's corpus was butchered by editors and executors who wanted to standardize the quirky presentation of Dickinson's poems).

The page also features a comments section. It's as bad as the Youtube comments section, only, perhaps, at times, maybe, a little more erudite.

Here's a good comment:

Comment 8 of 8, added on April 18th, 2007 at 8:25 PM.

It has so much mystery in it. ( Element of Blank ) If only we knew what was goin through her mind the moment she wrote this. I read this poem is English class and I absolutely fell in love with it. You can only see how lonely Emily was. I love the way she said It has no Future--but itself--. She totally speaks the truth in her own way. I write poetry my self and I have to say Emily Dickinson is my role modle!

I'll preface my comments by acknowledging that textual analysis is my business, so reading stuff like this makes me a little crazy.

Does it really matter what was going through the authors mind at the moment(s) of composition? Really? There doesn't seem to be all that much mystery here; I don't need to pretend to ventriloquize a long-dead author to get what's going on in the poem: pain is so totalizing that one can neither remember before it, nor imagine beyond it.

It's endemic to responses to Dickinson to try and deeply personalize all her poems - a poem about pain has to be about Dickinson's isolation and loneliness.

The problem with this is that the reading can't be sustained without imagining poor Emily (because I once had a high school English teacher tell us, "it's okay to refer to Emily by her first name, she wouldn't have minded") cloistered in her room in Amherst. Day and night she writes. She must be so lonely!

Or, maybe not.

That's the problem with authorial intention. It requires us to impute motivation, thought, and affect based on what's on the page and whatever knowledge we have of an author's life.

To get all New Critic on it:

"the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." (Wimsatt and Beardsley)

The über hybrid and other adventures

I'm playing the waiting game on my leg. The fancy, fancy doctor isn't available until late July. Right now, my options are to have the RU team doc do the procedure or try to find someone else.

My primary doc did suggest one other guy. After examining his website, I decided to pass.

I didn't race Somerville, and was mightily bummed. About four days before the race (two days after I'd had a decent ride at our local training crit), my IT band flared up like a beast in my right leg.

My right leg is the good one, the one I've never had any problems with.

Well, I had some pretty ghastly problems with it. It was bad enough that I was scrolling through my contacts list through tears of pain mid-ride to find someone to pick me up.

No one was home.

I took 4 days completely off. I iced, I stretched, I ibuprofen'd, I re-learned to love my foam roller, and I lowered my saddle. The pain went away. Cool.

This past week has been better I took Monday (Memorial Day) and Friday off. Saturday, we rode to Princeton at a pretty ghastly pace. Sunday, Mr. T took ProfessorAndy and me on a ride that will live in infamy.

T promised a 70 mile ride to "check out the Tour of Highbridge course."

So we rode out to Highbridge and did a lap of that awful, awful course. Seriously, it's terrible. It would be one thing to have the climbs. It's another thing entirely to have to descend on utterly bombed-out pavement. It's sketch-tacular. I'm glad not to be on a team that makes me race such nonsense.

We start heading back, and it's clear T doesn't really know how to get home. Around mile 60, we're out of water with none to be had, and T says "I didn't think this ride would be this long."

If I wouldn't have crashed myself, I would have smacked him in the back of the head.

We found the one open convenience store, complete with two guys sitting out front endlessly buying and playing scratch tickets, and got water. T bought me a box of Good and Plenty so I wouldn't kick him in the nuts.

Around mile 70 my ITB started being grumpy again. Fortunately, it wasn't the piercing, tear-inducing pain of a week ago, but a much more manageable ache with occasionally shooting pain.

10 miles later we were home.

__

The über hybrid:

On the way out to Highbridge, we met the über hybrid and its owner at a traffic light.

The über hybrid started its life as a Specialized Crosstrail. The Crosstrail is, I'm sure, a very nice hybrid.

The über hybrid is what happens when you upgrade it in a serious way.

Here's the spec (that I could see):
Full XTR (the newest one)
Thomson Post and Stem
Bontrager Switchblade 29er Fork

And, my personal favorite:
Reynolds Topo 29er Clinchers

This was quite a bike. It's spec far exceeds what lives on my current XC mountain bike.

I don't quite get it, but I also think it's kind of awesome.

Sean Connery Lives in My Leg

We've concluded that my left leg problem is caused by Sean Connery's habitation in it.

The Jenkster came up with this brilliant conclusion while discussing the possibility of an entrapment of blood vessels or nerves in my left leg.

I saw my doc (DWLLENiDTS) again yesterday and he looked at me on the bike. This was, I have to say a stroke of genius. My symptoms are weird, and there's been no way to really describe them accurately when I'm not experiencing them.

My doc examined me and measured both my thighs before I rode.

52.5 cm on the right, 51 on the left.

There's been some atrophy.

Then, I got on the bike and warmed up for about 10 minutes. Then I did about 110% of threshold. After about 4:30 I was in pain and needed to be done.

I hopped off, and he measured and examined again.

54.5 cm on the right. 51.5 cm on the left.

Curious.

The strength of the left leg post-exercise wasn't there, but after about 10 minutes of rest, it came back almost to where it was pre-exercise.

From this, my doc concluded that the issue is likely not Chronic Exertional Compartment Syndrome. My left thigh would have swollen up a lot more. However, that the left leg didn't swell in proportion to the right suggests that there's a blood flow problem to the muscles of the quad.

This lack of blood flow results in a lack of oxygenated blood to working muscles. That results in pain and weakness.

Pain and weakness result in my constant frustration on the bike.

So, we're gonna try the ultrasound again and, I hope, meet with some fancy ultrasound guy who will be able to visualize the entrapment and break it up with an injection of saline and lidocaine. This, I hear, is pretty standard and successful for athletes around these parts.

Now, we're just waiting on fancy ultrasound guy.

I'm hoping to evict Sean Connery soon.

An Open Letter to Giant Bikes NA Marketing Person

Dear Giant:

I've been watching daily coverage of the Giro D'Italia on Universal Sports, and I was excited to cycling commercials during the daily coverage. One can only take so many Grill Daddy, Full Bar, Topsy Turvy, and Rosetta Stone commercials. Seeing cycling commercials on tv makes me feel like an actual advertising demographic.

While, I'm very much a Rabobank fan, I fail to see how your road bike commercial will inspire anyone to buy a Giant bicycle. Who made the call to make Robert Gesink your North American spokesperson? That was a terrible idea. I follow cycling and have no idea what this guy has done.

What does Gesink (and Giant for that matter) have to say about the bikes? Not much: "they are light and stiff and good for professionals, but normal people benefit too."

Okay...

Here's a little marketing 101. If you are trying to sell high-end bikes to people, you have to make them believe that they are not normal. You have to make them believe that if they buy your bikes they, too, can ride along with the Rabobank team and be awesome. Instead, you show us "normal people," a dork on a TT bike and another clearly non PRO rider on a road bike.

Normal people don't sell $7000 bikes. Normal people don't even sell $500 bikes.

Here's the problem as I see it, Giant: your bikes are booooring. They are nondescript. I cannot tell one model from another. Your commercials reinforce this. Your bikes are "light and stiff"? Sure. Lots of bikes are. Tell me what Rabobank is riding. Tell me why it's awesome. Tell me how I'll climb like Gesink if I get whatever bike Rabo is riding this year.

Notice Giant, I can't actually tell you which model your ProTour team is riding... that's the magnitude of your failure.

I know which model of De Rosa bikes LPR is riding for crying out loud... that's absurd.

Right now, Giant, if I buy your bikes, I'm going to be like the dork on the TT bike in your commercial. That's all I know.

So, I have some homework for you: Watch some Specialized commercials. I recommend Boonen's Transition commercial from a few years back. Anything from the "I Am Specialized" campaign is also good. Then, watch some Cervelo commercials. Who can forget the Paris-Roubaix failure testing commericial?

That was years ago, and I still have the vision of them dropping weights on carbon frames.

Giant, your bikes are good, but they lack a clear identity that makes them desirable. Your commericials don't help. Hire a good marketing person, see what the "cool brands" in the industry are doing and copy.

Right now, your ads look like an infomercial for the Land Rider auto-shifting bike.

Yours,

AngryMark

p.s. Adam Craig is a really funny and awesome dude, but your mountain bike commercial failed to capitalize upon this.

We Got a Shoe Problem




Between my girlfriend and me, we seem to have amassed enough cycling shoes that our office looks like a stockroom.

This is the unforeseen consequence of my decision to abandon the Specialized shoes. I have four (well, now three) pairs of very nice and new or lightly used Specialized road and mountain shoes that need a home.

I also have a pair of Sidi Ergo 2s that were purchased to replace the Specialized shoes, but they are too big.

Then, there's the old Sidis that are too big (your feet shrink when you lose 100 lbs).

Then, my GFs Sidi road and tri shoes.

So many shoes...

I'm hoping to clear this mess all out within the next few weeks. You need shoes? I got 'em: Specialized S Works Road (lightly used) and Mtb (new) Shoes in Team Ltd Red (size 42), Sidi Ergo 2 in Steel Lux (size 42.5, new), Sidi Dominator 5 (size 43.5, used).

I just want one pair of road shoes that fits perfectly and two pairs of shoes for cross.

I wish Rocket 7s didn't cost $1500.