The online peleton
I think of myself as a bicyclist. I almost always ride alone. I ride hard and feel good about it afterwards.
On Saturday, I did 50 miles on my road bike—a good distance but not terribly special, or difficult. Except for one thing. This time I was riding with a friend and he pounded me into the ground. I suffered on the flats and even more on the hills, pushing as hard as I could and still watching him steadily pull away. We’d stop at a crossroads and he’d ask which way we should go. Inside I kept saying, “Oh damn, oh damn, the short way, whatever’s the short way. Get me home, make it end. Please.”
But out loud I’d answer, “It’s your ride. You pick.” So I suffered, and when it was over, finally, I was spent and I was sore.
But I knew I’d had an excellent ride, maybe one of my best rides ever. Not just because I was challenged and had a great workout, but because I learned so much. The main lesson was that I can’t do it alone. I’ve been riding regularly but always by myself—with no-one there to push me, kick my ass, rub my nose in the dirt.
So now I have to rev up my solo rides 3 or 4 notches, and I have to find some group rides and some training partners. They’ll make me hurt and that’s what I need if I’m going to get better.
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It’s the same thing with all my wonderful thoughts and ideas about what we’re experiencing online and in other media. I read, watch, observe, and my reactions are so terribly clever. Or at least that’s what I think. But if I don’t put my thoughts out there—and give others the chance to ignore them, or shoot them down, or maybe even appreciate them and make them better—then I’m just riding alone and probably not riding all that well. If I don’t join the group ride, I’m not going to grow.
Flaunt your weaknesses?
I’m a Flash developer. I’ve been doing the work for several years and I’m not nearly as good as I should be. “Good enough” doesn’t cut it, and “better than most” is hard to define and/or defend. When I say I’m not as good as I should be, I really mean not as good as I could be. And when you’re talking about what you do for a living, that’s just embarrassing.
I remember reading once about Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was fresh off the boat, but already a pretty impressive bodybuilder. He hadn’t won even his first Mr. Olympia. He soon became aware that his calf muscles weren’t developing as well as the rest of his body.
If you were a young bodybuilder with a lagging bodypart, you’d probably want to hide it, don’t you think? This is just one of those things that made Arnold the huge success he has been for the past thirty years. He was concerned and actually ashamed of his calf muscles and so he cut off his workout pants at the knees—so that everyone could see his weakness and so that he would always be conscious of the problem.
He ensured that he would be hyperaware of his most difficult bodypart. As a result he knew he would have to focus on fixing it. Compared to other muscles, calves are notoriously hard to build up but Arnold made absolutely certain that he would have to work them more than anything else.
He ultimately won the Mr. Olympia—the most prestigious bodybuilding title—seven times and was known both for his well-balanced physique and for his excellent calf development.
Now how do I go about cutting off my Flash workout pants, and do I have the guts to do it?