Traffic Waves

Dear Aggressive Drivers,

I sit on the 9th floor of my office building. For some reason, I am told I am extremely lucky to be assigned a window office, with a view of I-10 Westward into Katy. The eastbound (toward downtown) lanes of this monolithic highway are just 100 yards away from the office building.

Because I get to work around 7:30am, I get to see people commuting to downtown from 7:30 - about 9:00am each morning. Most of the time the traffic seems to be going around 40-50 mph, but sometime the cars come to a standstill in every lane. Yesterday morning, I glanced over to see a car merge terribly (probably without a blinker), which caused the cars behind to have to swerve and slam on the breaks. This caused a huge traffic jam, even though no accident had occurred.

What was interesting is that the traffic acted as a "wave," propagating backward. What I mean is that on I-10, at some point there was a line of cars that slowed down across all lanes of trafiic. Naturally the cars behind them had to slow down as well, causing the people behind them to slow, etc, etc. The first line of cars then started to speed up again, and then the next line sped up and so on. So from where I looked from above this debacle, it looked as if there was a slow moving, higher density mass of cars moving backwards along the highway. Very interesting.

As I continued to glance every once in a while, it was cool to see these traffic waves propagate down the highway. Almost beautiful, except for the fact that it was a big mass of commuting, polluting cars that caused the phenomena.

It made me realize that a lot of traffic is caused by aggressive driving, you. You want to go where you want to go as fast as possible, and no one is more important than you. If you can merge into a lane and get one or two more cars ahead, even though you are being dangerous and aggressive, you will. Your action creates traffic, which will make commutes for everyone longer. The problem is that you, as an aggressive driver, do not care about this because the traffic that you create will not affect you. What will affect you is the aggressive driver ahead of them that pulls the same stupid move and causes traffic for them (I also find that slow moving traffic makes everyone more aggressive, exacerbating the problem). You, aggressive driver, are too stupid to figure out that IF the whole culture of trying to get to your location as fast as possible, no matter what, was eliminated, then they would actually get to their destination faster.

This seems counterintuitive at first, but trust me it's true. Traffic is caused by fluctuations, which are caused by aggression. If everyone would go a common speed, everyone would get home faster.

I think this is the same reason people get so irate about bicycles riding in the road. It causes their car journey to be 10-30 seconds longer than it would be otherwise, and so they think it is appropriate to put the cyclist's life in danger.

So, drivers of fury, please be kind and considerate to yourself and others, and drive with less aggression. Thanks,

Me

Plyometrics

The "Off Season" of cycling is almost upon me. There is one more race that I will compete in this year, the Texas Road Race Championships, at FT. Hood. After that, I will plunge head long into training for next spring.

Most people in cycling take a true off season, meaning they are off the bike for 2 weeks to a month, and then starting their preparation for the next spring. After reading Chris Carmichael's book on training, I have decided that I will try not taking a dedicated off season, and continue to ride all winter. This works well because most of my riding is to and from work, which I would not want to stop for fear of having to drive five days a week (which I haven't done yet since I started work!). My hope is that instead of having to work from a moth off deficit, I can use the base miles from last year to build to a strong 3's racer. The only problem that I will surely face is burn out, but after assessing my mental state (taking 5 seconds to tell my self to HTFU) I have decided that I will not burn out.

So for the off season I will be running, cycling, and doing routines of plyometrics. I learned of plyometrics from a tweet from Lance about his workouts last fall. I didn't take to them to much last year, as I was trying to work on sustained power and endurance. I was very successful at increasing this (i.e. going from last to podium in TT's), but lost a lot of my top end power for sprinting, which resulted in less than desirable finishes near the end of the year. This year, I hope that weight lifting and plyometrics early in the training season will increase that top end power.

For now, I will not use a coach. It's not really the money that would be spent on a coach, but the need to be self-reliant and have only one person to blame if my plan is unsuccessful: myself. The only problem is that I know that when I have a coach or mentor, I tend to keep on track better and not get lazy or complacent. I think these are the things that could derail my success for next year the most.

I'll plan in time to work on my ever improving golf game as well. Uncle Larry gave me a really nice set for a wedding present and I have been out 4-5 times to Memorial Park to practice already.

The Married Life

There have been significant changes in my life over the last couple of weeks, first of which is marrying..... wait, what was her name? Oh yeah, ally!

The wedding, on Sept 11, was really beautiful and I really enjoyed getting to see so many people from the past. At one point, I was looking over the crowd of people gathered to celebrate with ally and I. I couldn't help but start to think about how all of these people had affected me and made me who I am today at some point: some more than 10 years ago, and some that I had met only months ago. It was neat to see the melding of two random groups of people, brought together by our marriage.

The best thing to see was how well the bridesmaids and groomsmen got along. None of the girls had met the guys, and they all only knew of each other through stories that Ally and I had told. Even though the situation was potentially awkward, they all got along very well and had a good time talk about memories they had with Ally and I.

Many thanks to ally's mom, Bernardita, my mom, my aunt, Sharky (wedding planner), and to Paul Dorsey, just to name a few.

Life has gotten back to normal here in Houston. I hadn't ridden my bike to work in about a week, and I had forgotten how much I love/hate making the commute on two wheels. My bike is slowly starting to show the wear and tear of not being cleaned as often, as it is really hard to clean the bike in an apartment with no garden hose available. Maybe I will have a post on how I manage this feat.

Ally and I also got a dog! Her name is Snookie, named after the infamous MTV star, Nicole "Snookie" Polizzi. Snookie the dog is not exactly like her namesake, but is very energetic and puppy-ish. We got her from the houston pound, and I believe she is some type of German Shepard Dog/[something else] mix.

I am in the process of teaching her more complicated tricks such as stay and roll over, because she mastered sit and shake within the first week. She is also pretty much potty trained. I can't get her to stop barking when we leave the house, b/c I'm not sure how to correct something that I am not there for. Having a dog definitely keeps things interesting and noisy around our moderately spacious apartment.

The next race I have coming up is in late October, and is the Texas State Road Race in Ft Hood. The road race is in a military base, so they can completely close the roads, which should be fun. I am really looking forward to it, but I already have my eye set on next year. I will be racing with Shama Cycles, and will hopefully have a year of winning 3's races.