Cycling in the Ozarks.

It had been a harrowing semester, averaging less than 7 hours of sleep a night, work days packed down to the minute, schedule so tight I had to keep reminding myself to breathe. After all that, spring break this year came highly anticipated, and gave me the chance to restore both my mind and my body.

Mizzou road race

As soon as classes ended, our team drove out to Springfield, MO for the weekend’s races at Missouri State. The road course on Saturday was a 35-mile loop over rolling hills with one long, steep climb. I stayed with the front group for the first 20 miles or so, until a false flat left me winded and paired with a rider from Depauw.

I should have dropped her the moment she started complaining about the climbs, but something made me decide to stay with her in case we could work together to chase the front. That was a mistake that cost me a better finish, and I consider it a lesson learned. “Race your race”, as they say. I finally left her behind on the big climb, and spent the rest of the race trying to make up for lost time. I finished fourth.

Quite proud of this photo of Naveen's finish.

Mizzou ITT and TTT

I hate individual time trials, mostly because I suck at them. Sunday’s weather was a biting cold, and I spent the 20km devoid of any motivation to be fast. The team time trial was a smidgeon better; my teammate Hope and I enjoyed being the uncontested champions, being the only group in our category to race.

We spent the rest of the day driving to northwest Arkansas, right in the Ozark mountain range. The 16 of us made ourselves at home in our two side-by-side cabins.

Arkansas Day 1:

Cold, wet, miserable weather. I decided to take the day off the bike, and explore the surrounding woods with Becky, Doza, Chris, and Stephen.

The evening ended with a bonfire, s’mores, and a good soak in the hot-tub.

Arkansas Day 2:

Summary: Petit Jean and Mount Nebo, 65 miles, 3000 feet of climbing

Eight of us (Naveen, Stephen, Doza, Cortez, Erik, Branden, Becky) drove 1.5 hours to the town of Dardanelle, and from there started a 50-mile ride that looped us through mostly flat terrain with one 3-mile climb over Petit Jean. The pace was good; I sat in behind the boys and cruised, silently thanking them for the cycling chivalry.

Finished with the “warm-up” 50 miles, most of us continued onto the looming Mount Nebo. I’d heard stories, and I was afraid. 23 percent grade? 18 switchbacks? Pros having to get off and walk? They were all true. If there could be sorrier excuses for climbing a mountain on a bike, I’d like to hear them. I was heaving and hawing, stopping to push my bike, yelling profanities, and sinking with despair every time I saw yet another switchback. When I finally got to the top, I was so angry with myself I simply couldn’t enjoy the feeling of getting there. I felt like I had cheated, like the summit wasn’t really a success, like I had lost a psychological battle with the mountain.

On the lookout. I'm not too happy.

The descent was extremely hairy. I gripped my brakes the entire way, leaned my butt far back over the saddle, and prayed my arms and my focus wouldn’t give out. I’ll be back, Nebo, next time with the bragging rights I failed to achieve this time around.

The Nebo group.

Arkansas Day 3:

Today was a rest day to finish up some schoolwork. Becky and I drove to a nearby town to do laundry, and spent most of the afternoon at a McDonald’s for internet. I have to say, backcountry Arkansas is like a foreign country. I swear that cashier has never had anyone ask if they have Wifi. Ever.

The weather was too nice to pass up a ride. Our cabin was located on top of a mountain, so Becky and I decided to descend the mountain and then climb back up. To the east lay Lake Fort Smith. To the south lay the small town of Mountainburg (population 682). We first took the descent to the lake, climbed back up, then descended into town, and climbed back up again, making about 25 miles of riding total. The climbs were enjoyable – long, steady inclines.

In the evening, Becky and I cooked a delicious dinner of pork chops, browned then simmered with onions, mushrooms, and apples.

Later that night, Naveen, Matt, Chris, and I drove down to Lake Fort Smith and plunged headfirst into the freezing cold water. A shrieking, invigorating good time.

Arkansas Day 4:

Summary: Mount Magazine, 40 miles total

Hour-long drive to the town of Paris. From there, we began a gradual incline for 15 miles to the base of Mount Magazine. Once the climb started, the seven of us (Naveen, Doza, Stephen, Chris, Erik, Wil) split off into groups. I went at my own steady pace, feeling the tailwind push me up the mountain, hardly noticing the miles go by, so focused I was on keeping my breathing and pedal stroke smooth. I met Erik and Wil at the top, the highest point in Arkansas.

The descent was brilliant. Erik and Wil are powerhouses, and I used that to my advantage. I locked myself onto their wheels and flew down the mountain, sustaining breakneck speeds. I never once touched my brakes, and felt completely in tune with my handling, rounding the curves in the road, and staying locked on. It was indescribable, truly one of the best moments of my short cycling career.

After getting back, we headed straight to the lake, soaked our tired legs in the icy water, and enjoyed the sunshine.

Arkansas Day 5:

Summary: Oklahoma border, 75 miles, rolling hills

Five of us (Matt, Stephen, Erik, Branden) set out from our cabin for the Oklahoma border. The scenery was beautiful and rustic – chipped barns, old houses, white-washed picket fences, cows, horses, and annoying yappy dogs that tried to bite our heels at every corner. The terrain was all big rolling hills with not an inch of flat road.

Legs feeling dead from all the accumulated miles, Branden and I sat back after reaching Oklahoma and went the rest of the way at a relaxed pace. The last five-mile climb back up to our cabin was painful. I had maxed out my legs, and they did not thank me for rounding off a long, hilly ride with a mountain.

Still, there are few things sweeter than the feeling of tiredness that comes with quality miles, and few things to make a person more content than to take a brief pause from worldly responsibilities to do nothing but sleep, eat, ride, and repeat. Already looking forward to next year.

On memory.

I read an article today in the New York Times Magazine, entitled "Secrets of a Mind-Gamer: How I trained my brain and became a world-class memory athlete."

The journalist's intentioned story on the U.S. Memory Championships - a series of grueling "events" in memorization administered to a highly-trained group of memory "athletes" - later turned into a participatory self-experiment. The result is a fascinating and introspective take on not only how to sharpen one's abilities to memorize, but also why it is so important that we retain these skills, even in the face of technological conveniences that preclude the necessity to do so.

Occasionally there are those articles that, as I read, I find myself muttering "yes" and "yes" under my breath, and this was one of those. Specifically, this point:

Until relatively recently, people read “intensively,” Darnton says. “They had only a few books — the Bible, an almanac, a devotional work or two — and they read them over and over again, usually aloud and in groups, so that a narrow range of traditional literature became deeply impressed on their consciousness.” Today we read books “extensively,” often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture. I always find looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, to be a dispiriting experience. There are books up there that I can’t even remember whether I’ve read or not.

Increasingly in the past several years, I have fought to balance my desire to read about as many subjects as possible, with the capacity of my brain to contain it all. I liken the struggle to a never-ending treadmill of information, and I'm always on the brink of falling off from not being able to keep pace.

One thing that I've always been self-conscious about is my memory, and the speed at which I retain information. My closest friends are characterized by being both extremely bright and very well-read (no, these are not synonymous), and always seem to blaze through the information that met them. I wouldn't call it an inferiority complex, but I did envy the ease with which they seemed to read something once, and still be able to discuss it at length months later. It always seemed to take me more time and more repetition to knock things into my noggin, and the consequence of that was feeling like I knew so little about anything.

My first response to these frustrations, a year or two into college, was to increase the volume of my reading. I filled my RSS feed with science blogs, magazine feeds, news feeds, Boing Boing, etc. I spent considerable time and effort poring over websites and articles, in this obsessive quest for all-around knowledge. It took me another year or two to realize that my plan was counterproductive. The good result was that I became interested in many subjects that I'm still fascinated by - for example, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, linguistics, sustainable agriculture - but the serious downside was that I stretched myself out too thin and didn't feel much more conversant about anything than before.

What I had been missing, just as the author of the article pointed out, was intensity of reading. The act of reading a book slowly and learning its contents carefully and thoughtfully, can never be substituted by an attempt to read everything that's published on the internet. It is still important for me to be well-informed on many subjects, but I had been going about it the wrong way.

In the past year, I've come to fully realize the relative efficacy of reading books or good magazines in terms of gaining and retaining knowledge, and have learned how not to be distracted by the overwhelming glut of information online, most of which is useless anyway. Sometimes, I still have lapses of feeling suddenly like I don't know a damn thing, and then feel overwhelmed by all this available knowledge on the internet that I should be constantly feeding to myself. But it is slowly getting easier, and importantly so, because my reading for grad school is necessarily intense and focused. Now, when I'm not reading papers, I have limited reading time for other subjects, and it is important that I learn how to make that time count. (I think that if grad school meant I didn't have time to read about anything other than statistical theory, I would entirely cease to be myself.)

What does this all this have to do with memory?

I spend a lot of time thinking about my memory in the context of retaining the things I read, but as a whole, I think the importance of exercising one's memory is increasingly undervalued in today's world. We don't have to memorize directions anymore - we have GPS devices. No need to memorize a shopping list, or a name or address, or the guitarist in that band, or the setting of that novel. These seem like trivial matters, but trivial matters collectively make up an enormous part of our everyday lives, and for most of these things, we depend on either the internet or other technological tools to do it for us. Memory, just like any other skill, is refined by practice and repetition. To me, dulling our abilities to mentally recall and reproduce would be dulling something that is fundamental to the human experience.

Recipe: Steamed fish and tofu.

It has been quite some time since I've posted a recipe, but my kitchen is busy as always. Despite feeling the onslaught of grad school - classes, teaching, reading papers - I still make sure to eat homemade meals most days of the week.

This dish I made tonight is my mother's recipe, and has always been one of my favorites. It takes the light tastes of fish and tofu, and drizzles it with a bold, spicy sauce. From start to finish, it takes no more than 30 minutes (20 if you're efficient) to get on the table.

Ingredients

microwavable glass or ceramic dish

1 large fillet of tilapia or other white fish (~10 oz)

1 package Japanese-style silken tofu

rice cooking wine

3-4 stalks spring onion, finely chopped

small hot chilis (like serrano), finely chopped

a neutral oil, like canola or vegetable

soy sauce

sesame oil

rice, for serving

Method

1. Thinly slice the fish. Sprinkle with salt and marinate it with rice cooking wine in a bowl.

2. Thinly slice the tofu. Chop onions and chilis.

3. Layer fish and tofu pieces alternately in the microwavable dish. In other words, place pieces of fish-tofu-fish-tofu in a row, and fill up the dish by repeating this way. Place in microwave, and set for 8 minutes. The tofu and fish will steam and cook together.

4. In a small pan, heat the neutral oil, then sautee onions and chillis until soft. Turn off heat. Mix in about half-cup (but I never measure, so use your judgment!) of soy sauce, and a few tablespoons of sesame oil.

5. When tofu and fish are done, drizzle the sauce over. Serve over rice. Goes great with some garlic-sauteed leafy greens.