ThriveOnPlants
November 2011
October 2011
“He knows to to mind-fuck better than anybody. He knows every nook and cranny of the Tour De France, and over the years he’s done so many mind-fucks there you can’t even count them. Ullrich, Beloki, Basso: Mind-fucked. Everyone one of them.”
—Tour De lance, Bill Strickland.
“I wanted to get back to the point when I watched people ride bicycles about as fast as them can ever be ridden and my breath would catch because I knew how much it took to go that fast, how much sacrifice there was in the training and how much danger there was in the race, and how much beauty there was in the danger and the sacrifice. I wanted to watch some skinny guy ride a two-wheeled toy under a banner on top of a mountain with a name I could barely pronounce and fight back tears because for whatever reason and for all the reasons we love sports, cycling speaks to me in ways so central to who I am that the depth of the feeling embarrasses me.”
—Tour De lance, Bill Strickland
I’m at such a loss right now.. CT scan shows a narrowed artery. Today I go through the shitty experience of having a catheter shoved into left and into my left arteries to have a look-see and nothing conclusive is found. And I had to spend my entire day in the hospital, not aloud to move. A nurse literally had to hold pressure on my groin after the procedure for 30 minutes so I wouldn’t bleed out and die. And now I can’t do anything for the rest of the week so I can recover from this angiogram. And it was all for nothing.
I just don’t know what to say. Every journal I’ve read written by a rider who had endofibrosis described their experience and it sounded exactly what I go through almost every time I ride my bike. I’ve gone down dead ends for two years trying to figure this out, and I was sure this was it.
Play
As part of my slave-labor internship this semester I’ve been assigned to take on a shitton of data entry which began last week and will go on for the next 6 weeks. We’re doing two different studies in the human performance lab that require all participants to keep specific dietary logs over a course of three days.
I’m supposed to take those dietary recalls and input the data into a diet analysis software called Foodworks. It’s incredibly tedious. One dietary recall can take an hour or more. And a lot of these people don’t have any idea as to how to track their food intake throughout a day. The packet we gave them asks for specific amounts of each food and a calorie count from the lable, if applicable.
I get these people saying for lunch they are a “sandwich”. Uhh.. that doesn’t help me. What kind of bread? What did you put on the sandwich? How much? It’s so frustrating.
One of the not-so-surprising facts I’ve realized from doing these recalls is how many calories are in alcoholic beverages. A regular beer usually has at least 135 calories. Mixed drinks? Holy shit. Basically, if you go out drinking and plan to get pretty drunk, you’re probably consuming at least half a day’s worth of calories.
I laughed when I did one yesterday and the girl drank 6 beers at like 4am and then went to Mcdonalds on had a meal fit for a king. The next day her dietary intake was almost blank because she slept the entire day.
