Signal to Noise

Wednesday afternoon was a great time to go biking. There is nothing better to beat my blasé attitude out of me in the middle of UPEI’s reading week then to hop onto a tandem bike with Dave and be propelled around Charlottetown on a beautiful warm-ish winter day. The streets were free of snow (though the amount of traction sand and run-off water was impressive) and car traffic was very light. A little over an hour later we finished our ride covered in damp sand–me taking the forward soaking and Dave with the telltale stripe up his back. Grit-filled satisfied grins all around. Thanks to Dave I have been biking in the first two months of this year.

As it turns out, the very next day I learned that “[c]ycling advocates in Charlottetown, including the Medical Society of P.E.I., are upset accommodation for bicycles is not part of a $5-million expansion of Riverside Drive“–and this was one of the very same roads on which we were biking the day before. Of course, given the limited number of roads into and out of Charlottetown, it was hardly a surprise that we would be biking on one of the access roads. The only other cyclist we met on our ride was biking from Stratford and into town on Riverside drive. It is not the most direct route to the heart of the city but it is the most scenic and the relative lack of traffic is a benefit to anybody on a bike.

Rather than comment on how biking is great and more bike lanes and paths would be good for Charlottetown (well, maybe I will comment on it by saying I will not comment on it) I simply note that I am raring to get back to work and am planning on how I can bike in every month this year. Time to get back on the rollers for a while and hope for a warm and clear day in March.

I have always been obese. Well, probably not really, I was probably within statistical norms for a few minutes after birth. And when I say that I am obese and have been for the last twenty years (which is closer to accurate) it is based on the body mass index.

I would also like to point out that at various periods during this time I was

• Playing competitive (let’s call it somewhat competitive) soccer three times a week
• Biking 200+ km per week
• Playing hockey (again call it semi-competitive) five times a week
• Practising taekwondo four times a week
• Generally being fit and outdoors and happy

My point being that I am a big guy and have been for a long time. I was fortunate enough to have a bicycle built for me by Gilles Bertrand at one time and I wanted a particular frame. I was told in no uncertain terms that for such a bike I would have to weigh less than 200 lbs or I would greatly lessen the life of the bike. I was a “gram weenie” far more than was healthy for a guy my size. I am far better described as torque-enabled or gravity-enhanced than as a mountain goat. I suffered up every hill that my more svelte friends ascended with (what appeared to me to be) the greatest of ease. My only revenge was the downhill where gravity and a tuck were my friends.

So, back to being big–I was and am. My BMI has always been high. To be fair, I just checked the scale and when I got down low enough to buy the bicycle I was only “overweight” on the BMI scale. I biked over 2500km that year around Ottawa.

I have come to hate the BMI. I hate being classified as being so overweight. “[Because of its] ease of measurement and calculation, it is the most widely used diagnostic tool to identify weight problem within a population” (Wikipedia). And there is nothing more comforting than a simple number when making a diagnosis, especially when the number is the result of a mathematical formula. Those things are great.

When I came across a NPR article called “Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus” I could not have been happier. I read it three times just to cheer myself up. Hey, I am still a big guy. I am bigger than I should be given my current lifestyle and physical ability but I would appreciate not having people rely on an abstract number that assumes uniform body composition across all members of a population and uses poor mathematics and statistics (as well as an early 19th century understanding of physiology) to classify individual fatness–particularly when the inventor explicitly said it was not suitable for that purpose. For the record, here is the top ten list in abbreviated form:

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.
2. It is scientifically nonsensical.
3. It is physiologically wrong.
4. It gets the logic wrong.
5. It’s bad statistics.
6. It is lying by scientific authority.
7. It suggests there are distinct categories of underweight, ideal, overweight and obese, with sharp boundaries that hinge on a decimal place.
8. It makes the more cynical members of society suspect that the medical insurance industry lobbies for the continued use of the BMI to keep their profits high.
9. Continued reliance on the BMI means doctors don’t feel the need to use one of the more scientifically sound methods that are available to measure obesity levels.
10. It embarrasses the U.S.

(from NPR)

Aside from the conspiracy theory tilt of the last three points I couldn’t agree more. There are lots of fat people and there is little argument that we (Westerners) are becoming fatter. I am a big believer that the reasons centre around eating too much and exercising too little. I know, that is the kind of rocket science that you just cannot believe I am giving away for free, but there it is: more calories come in than go out so we get fat. Our diet has increased in sugars and fats so the calories go up. We are more sedentary so we are burning off fewer calories. These problems are serious enough without confusing the issue with poorly constructed formulae and statistics to prove the point.

I had planned to do a lot of biking this year but I have found that I have very little reason to get on my bike for travel. I used to bike to work (which was a decent 20+ km each way) last year but I am working from home this year and do not really have the need to wander too far from my coding dungeon to ply my trade. The end result is that my bike has not been out of the barn yet this year.

On the other hand I have been riding tandems far more than I ever have. I am not counting kilometres too closely but the number is likely closing in on 400km already. Part of that is the training I was doing with a friend (he recently completed a two-day 200km tour in Toronto) and the rest is on a recumbent tandem that we bought this year.

Because I promised my youngest daughter that we would bike into school together this year, and as today is the second last (the penultimate for all you word geeks) day of the school year for my daughter, we saddled up bright and early for our ride into school. I brushed the spiders off of the recumbent tandem, adjusted the seat positions, and stuck a bottle in one of the cages (nothing like having a new batch of baby spiders on your bike to make an early-morning ride ever so less enticing–I did this before my daughter saw anything; that might have scuttled the plan before we got started). Then, a little before 8:00am we began our ride to school.

It is at this point where I should mention that we live at the bottom of a rather steep hill. If you think PEI is flat then you are right from the point of view that there are not a lot of mountains (“The highest elevation is 466 feet (142 metres) above sea level in Queens county.” from Prince Edward Island (province, Canada) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia). On the other hand, I live in Queens county and our house is approximately 3 metres above river level; I call that close enough to sea level. Also, Prince Edward Island may have more roads per square kilometre than any other province but they saved a fortune by not changing the grade of secondary roads from the natural rolling and winding paths that were their ancestors. So, this is my way of saying that the ride to school this morning was anything but flat.

I had anticipated the 14km ride to take a little under an hour. I was wrong. I had forgotten to factor in the recumbents-are-more-comfortable-but-make-hills-excruciatingly-painful-to-climb coefficient. For our ride that coefficient was approximately 1.3. My daughter rolled into school at 9:14am. I will try to have her at school on time tomorrow. It is best to end on a good note.

The next ride will be on a nice flat stretch where the recumbent tandem really does shine.

So, my legs are sore. She did her best but her nine-year-old legs were no match for my older and much greater mass. Some of the sweetest words I have ever heard were “Do you need a little burst of power now daddy?” and I heard them often enough to find them funnier each time. She would blast out twenty or thirty hard pedal strokes that would rock the bike side to side and then let out an exhausted sigh. The bike would slow a bit and then (inevitably) I would hear “I can recover quick if you need me to do it again.” It was a great ride.

I am smiling. She was smiling when she walked into school. One nice family moment and one more reminder that even a bad day on a bike is better than a good day in the office.

On Sunday I thought I had done the hardest 40 lengths of the pool I had ever done. They were slow and disjoint. At one point I wondered if I was going to swim the pool two lengths at a time (it did get a little better with time and pacing). Today I did the hardest 25 lengths of the pool I have ever done and Sunday looks like a swim with the tide by comparison. Friday beckons.

On a related note and at the risk of making it more crowded at the pool, it is great going swimming in the mornings at the CARI. There are very few people there and those that are there do not mind slow, plodding swimmers.

Now, time to get the muscle relaxants.