April 14, 2008

What's nice about a GPS watch?

Joe Hall asks why one would want a GPS-enabled watch. Roughly speaking, there are three features I want:

In principle a gizmo like this might be useful for getting you un-lost, but the fact that you don't have a real map, just a view of where you've been, makes it pretty hard to use for anything other than backtracking. If, for instance, you're doing a loop and there are multiple trails but not a dense enough network that you can just vector in on your start point directionally, than without a trail map a GPS is pretty useless. Pretty good for out and back trips, though.

Posted by ekr at 10:01 PM | Comments (4)

March 30, 2008

I gotta get me one of those suits

Speedo has put an immense amount of effort into developing faster swimsuits, and swimmers using their newest suit, the LZR racer, have broken 13 world records in the past 6 weeks. Understandably, FINA (the governing body for swimming) is somewhat concerned:
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands - The slick new swimsuit that has led to 12 world records already this year will be examined by swimming's governing body amid debate about the quest for speed in the pool.

"There are concerns about suits being like triathlon suits, which are thicker," FINA executive director Cornel Marculsecu told SwimNews.com on Monday. "There are buoyancy issues. We have to review this."

There have been 13 world records set since mid February, 12 in the LZR Racer, a full-length body swimsuit made by Speedo, a brand of Warnaco Group Inc.

There's a lot of science in the LZR. Principally, there are a bunch of features (bonded seams, water repellent fabric) to reduce drag, but the most interesting one is that it's deliberately stiff and supportive around the waist:

The internal core stabilizer supports and holds the swimmer in a corset-like grip and helps them to maintain the best body position in the water for longer.

Body position really is important in swimming—when I was doing triathlon it was one of the things I found hardest to learn. I can't say whether something like this would have helped me and I don't know enough about the technology of swimsuits to say if any of this helps. I skimmed Speedo's site and they claim to have research that shows that these suits improve oxygen efficiency, which basically maps to performance. That said, it's certainly that case that your clothes can change swim performance: baggy suits create more drag and wetsuits dramatically increase performance due to bouyancy and (as far as I can tell) especially keeping your lower body high thus reducing drag even without the need to kick (cf. pull buoys).

The most interesting part of Speedo's site for me was the interviews with athletes who talked about how much they loved the suits and how nice they felt to swim in. The topic of the impact of technology on sports (and fair competition, and purity, etc.) has been discussed ad nauseum, but one thing that rarely comes out in such discussions is the user experience, namely that going fast is fun, and even small differences in your gear make a big difference in how responsive and fast you feel. One of the great things about racing is you get to use your very best, fastest gear—often stuff you couldn't train with every day, either because it's too expensive or (as with racing flats) it's too hard on your body to use all the time. Of course, after a while you get used to the good stuff and then it doesn't feel as great which is another reason why most athletes reserve it for race day. (I've heard this said by swimmers about shaving down as well.)

Posted by ekr at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

December 29, 2007

Vancouver climbing gym capsule reviews

Dropped in at two Vancouver area climbing gyms this week, Vertical Reality in Surrey and Cliffhanger in Coquitlam. Both gyms have bouldering and routes, but I just bouldered.

Vertical Reality ($10 to boulder, $15 to toprope) is in a sort of industrial park in Surrey. It's a bit ghetto, dimly lit, with short walls. There's a lot of bouldering, though, and the bouldering walls are incredibly dense, with multiple colors of tape on nearly every hold. They've even run out of tape colors so a lot of the labels are like yellow with red stripe. This all makes it fairly hard to track the problems—you definitely need to scope them before you get on. Also, the problems are deliberately rated about one V-grade harder than normal. Bonus features: free coffee (though it is Folgers) and during the 1-3 drop-in period the staff will belay you (I didn't do this).

Cliffhanger ($13.50 to boulder, $15 to toprope, includes gear) is a fair bit bigger, but still substantially smaller than the gyms in the Bay Area. There's one big bouldering wall that's fairly overhanging, plus a small doorway/roof, and problems scattered on the route walls. The problems here seem to be a bit more accurately rated, though they'd just had a comp and so they were all numbered, so you had to mentally map that 1-10 were V0, etc., which was a bit irritating. The problem density was pretty high again, with some hard to see tape colors so you still had to really scope them out before getting on the wall. Some of the doorway/roof problems were especially cool—powerful and reachy. Negatives: if you want to top-rope you need to pay a $6 belay test fee the first time. I've never seen this anywhere else.

Other notable features of both gyms:

Also, next time I bring my own shoes. Rental climbing shoes really suck, especially since you definitely want to wear socks—which screws up your feel for the rock—unless you'd enjoy a case of foot fungus.

Posted by ekr at 5:03 PM

November 27, 2007

A frickin' GPS on my frickin' wrist

I started running back in the last 1970s, so I well remember the days when just having a digital watch seemed pretty cool and actually having a stopwatch (or as it was labelled, a chronograph!) with a lap timer was ridiculously high tech. So, it was with some trepidation that I forked over for the Garmin Forerunner 305 a combined Watch/HRM/GPS ($179 at Costco, pricematched via Zappos, with a $50 rebate). This is a pretty impressive technical achievement: big for a watch, but pretty compact for a GPS, especially considering that this is a technology that only went operational 15 years ago.

OK, so once you get over the sheer technical whizzbangery, how well does it work? Pretty well, actually. It's pretty much Garmin's standard GPS system crammed into a watch form factor along with a heart rate monitor receiver, so you can do all the standard GPS stuff: time, time in motion, lap time, speed, distance, altitude, heart rate, etc. As usual, Garmin's UI is a little cryptic, but it's extremely configurable—you can set each screen up with a variety of fields and configure what's displayed in each field. It's really surprisingly nice to have distance and instantaneous speed, and it's a lot less annoying than the foot pod pedometers that non-GPS systems use.

There's also a bunch of mapping type features. You can retrace your steps (useful for running in unfamiliar environments) as well as save workouts and then race your previous performance. I haven't tried that feature but I'm looking forward to in the future, since it seems a lot easier than memorizing the time at various waypoints.

As far as comfort, the watch is a bit of a brick, but it's actually surprisingly comfortable once you get it on. I actually noticed the HRM chest strap more—it's about average comfortable, which is to say not great but not terrible. It's probably the first sports watch that I've ever had that I wouldn't want to wear on a daily (non working out) basis. It's not really practical for that anyway since it runs on rechargeable batteries and only lasts about 10 hours on a charge. On the other hand, it seems fine for running and ought to easily last your entire run unless you're doing some kind of ultra.

Posted by ekr at 10:08 PM | Comments (2)

October 14, 2007

Gebrselassie breaks the marathon record

I just noticed that Haile Gebrselassie set a new marathon world record at the Berlin Marathon on September 30th. The new record is 2:04:26, 29 seconds better than the previous best, set by Paul Tergat in 2003.

Posted by ekr at 10:09 PM

September 25, 2007

Backpacking: Jennie Lakes Wilderness

Brian Korver and I took a 3-day, 2-night trip in the Jennie Lakes Wilderness in the Sequoia National Forest.


The trailhead is out past Freso, so we got there about 4:30. The first day was short, out to Weaver Lake. The second day was fairly long (GPS nav says 16 miles and 4000-5000 feet of climbing), out to Marvin Pass. By the time we got there it was looking pretty cold and windy, so we decided not to go to Mitchell Peak and headed down to JO Pass and Jennie Lake. Jennie Lake is at 9040 feet, and by 7:30 it was so cold I repaired to the tent. About midway through the night, I noticed what I thought was rain on the tent and brought our packs into the vestibule. Turns out it was snow. Cold, but an impressive view. The trip back to the trailhead is mostly downhill and fairly easy.

On our way back we stopped by Grant Grove and checked out the Boole Tree and the General Grant Tree. I knew giant sequoias were big, but actually seeing one is a bit different.

GPS distance: 27 miles (nominal, 23 miles)
Total ascent: 7000 ft
Cost: $20 park entrance
Pics here.

Posted by ekr at 8:30 PM

April 28, 2007

Rope deal!

Climbing rope is expensive, but for some reason prices vary quite dramatically. So, while your basic 60m rope in 10.2-10.5 mm usually runs about $150 for standard or $170-180 for dry treated (mostly useful if you're ice climbing or your rope would otherwise be likely to get significantly wet), 20% discounts (to $120 for non-dry are pretty common). But right now Backcountry.com is running a special on Beal Edlinger 10.2mm 60 meters: $97 for dry treated. I've heard pretty good things about this rope and bought the non-dry version (now out of stock) for $83 yesterday.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Eu-Jin Goh for pointing this deal out to me.

Posted by ekr at 10:25 PM

April 26, 2007

High altitude adaptation, viagra, and you

I've written before about Cynthia Beall's work on oxygen adaptation. This week's Science has a short article with some more information about the biochemistry behind it:
But exactly how do these women manage to carry extra oxygen in their blood? They do not produce more hemoglobin the way Andeans living at high altitude do. One possibility is that the women with high oxygen have an adaptation that Beall is exploring independently in these same Tibetan villagers. She found that some villagers exhale extra nitric oxide in their breath, a sign of additional amounts of the gas in their blood. In those Tibetans, nitric oxide dilates the blood vessels so they can pump more blood and oxygen to organs and tissues, as measured by images of heart and lung blood vessels. The Tibetans can boost their blood volume--and so pump more oxygen to their tissues--without producing more hemoglobin or raising the blood pressure in their lungs. That's the reverse of what happens when mountaineers suffer from oxygen deficiency: The blood pressure in their lungs rises, the blood vessels constrict, and fluid builds up, suffocating the lungs.

The next step, says Beall, is to try to see whether these two lines of research meet. She wants to find the underlying gene behind the women's high-oxygen blood--and see whether it is related to genes that regulate levels of nitric oxide in the blood. She notes, however, that it's quite possible that the Tibetans have evolved more than one way to boost blood oxygen, and that these are independent adaptations. Gladwin suggests that Beall's team also measure nitric oxide and blood pressure in the lungs in pregnant women, who are under the most physiological stress at altitude and presumably would benefit most from this adaptation. "Study the pregnant women," he says, "because that's where you'll see evolution in action."

I wish I knew more about oxygen metabolism at high altitude, but a brief lit search seems to support the nitric oxide connection, in particular that there's some evidence that low nitric oxide levels make you susceptible to high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), as well as that you can use nitric oxide to treat HAPE. Given this, it's not too surprising that Viagra, which also operates via nitric oxide, appears to improves high altitude exercise performance for some people. Interestingly, in both treatment studies, one group of people responded and one did not, reinforcing the genetic variation in nitric oxide response theory.

One of the notable (though not surprising) aspects of high-altitude mountaineering is the semi-controversy over the use of supplemental oxygen, which many conider prudent but some old-school climbers seem to regard it as weak. (This mirrors a general attitude split in climbing circles about whether risk is something that should be minimized to the greatest extent possible or what makes climbing fun.) I'd be interested to see how attitudes towards viagra develop, especially if it becomes clearer that there's a specific physiological basis for nitric oxide treatment, rather than just a matter of some people being tougher than others.

Posted by ekr at 9:12 AM

April 15, 2007

The return of Tatyana McFadden

A year ago, I wrote about the case of Tatyana McFadden, a wheelchair-bound athlete who wanted to race with/against runners in track:
In some sense, McFadden considers her most recent lawsuit a victory in itself: She finally has reached the last impediment, she said. She wants the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association to count her wheelchair racing results in region and state meets toward the overall team competition. The MPSSAA contends that it already has exceeded its obligations by adding eight nonscoring wheelchair events to this year's track championships.

...

Instead, it made Bowler a hero to most able-bodied runners. At Mdrunning.net, a popular Internet site that features a chat forum and message boards, Bowler's letter -- especially when combined with McFadden's decision to file another lawsuit -- created a frenzy. The board's proprietor, local distance-running guru Brad Jaeger, argued that awarding McFadden points at the state meet would "absolutely ruin the whole sport." Teams usually win the state championship by scoring about 70 points in the state meet, Jaeger reasoned. So if Maryland awarded McFadden the usual 10 points for first place -- right now, she's only asking for one point -- that would drastically alter the meet. And should McFadden compete in the maximum four events? Atholton virtually would be ensured a state title.

Ultimately, there are three somewhat orthogonal issues here:

  1. Whether McFadden races alone or at the same time as non-wheelchair athletes.
  2. Whether her performance is compared to (for purposes of placing) non-wheelchair athletes.
  3. Whether her performance counts against the team score.
Last year McFadden claimed she just wanted to race alongside others (the first issue) but now wants to score points.
The McFaddens had simply hoped the judge would allow Tatyana to compete at the same time as runners. In most of her previous high school races, McFadden competed -- often alone -- in events designated for wheelchair athletes. She would score one team point for each event.

"The judge said many, many times the scoring system was not part of the case," Tatyana said. "I don't care about points."

First, recall that wheelchair performances are dramatically superior to non-wheelchair performances. The gap between wheelchair and non-wheelchair performances significantly exceeds the ordinary male/female gap. I'm not sure whether this is actually unsafe in the sense that it poses a threat to non-wheelchair athletes, but I'm fairly confident it could me made reasonably safe by segragating McFadden into her own lane until the point where she would be far ahead. Actually, it's the fact that she's so much faster that makes this possible, since she will quickly be far away from the other runners.

However, this gap also means that having her compete against ordinary runners, either individually or in aggregate (counting towards team scoring) is incredibly distortionate. Either her team will always dominate (remember she will win 3-4 events) or every other team will have to field wheelchair athletes (presumably by co-opting non-disabled athletes, as I suggested previously.)

So, what's the rationale for allowing this? Fundamentally, it's being suggested that it's unfair that the disabled not be allowed to compete on the same team as others. Certainly we've come to think of fairness as a basic social norm and so this argument is superficially compelling—if at all possible McFadden should be allowed to compete. But that doesn't actually give you a complete answer because it doesn't explain why she should compete in track. If you look at the wheelchair racer that McFadden is using, it's basically a hand-powered tricycle. The assumption that people seem to have is that this should be viewed as an unusual form of running, but it's actually just as reasonable if not more so to view it as an unusual form of cycling. Of course, if wheelchairs were treated as bicycles, McFadden would be at a significant performance disadvantage. Treating McFadden that way would be no more fair than treating her as just another runner. he problem here is that wheelchair racing is a fundamentally distinct sport from both cycling and running and that unfortunately for McFadden, it doesn't have much of a constituency.

As for team scoring, at some level, the set of events which is included in Track and Field is arbitrary (what does the shot put have to do with the two mile relay?). But it's not clear to me at least that any basic fairness norm implies that a certain sport (especially one which is highly unpopular) should be included in that set.

Posted by ekr at 12:36 PM | Comments (2)

February 23, 2007

Women cyclists?

Reader Paul Hoffman writes:
Women athletes are supposed to compare more favorably against men in sports that do not require as much upper-body strength. Women also face barriers in team sports where there is expected to be lots of locker-room camaraderie. So why are there essentially no professional women bicyclists?

There are actually several issues here. Women do compare more favorably against men in sports that don't require upper body strength. For example, the gap between men and women in the clean and jerk, even for comparable weight classes, is order 20-25% (see the figure below):

By contrast, the world record gap for running hovers around 10%. But more favorably doesn't mean favorably and the 10% gap in endurance sports is fairly persistent. Cycling actually is mostly a team sport so it's fairly hard to get individual performance numbers, but if you look at the cycling part of triathlons it becomes clear that the gender gap is fairly persistent there as well. The best men's bike time at Ironman Hawaii 2006 was 4:18:23. The best women's time was 4.52:11 by a woman who dropped out on the run. The best woman's time by a finisher was 4:59:04.1. So, it should be clear that there's no practical way that women cyclists can compete along with elite men. That said, there are professional women bicyclists. They just compete in their the own races, which (of course) get less money and less press attention so you don't hear about them.

1 It's actually surprising that the gap is larger here because wind resistance is such an important factor in cycling performance and power goes up as a cubic function of speed, whereas in running power goes up much more linearly with speed. I don't have a great explanation here. Perhaps that body mass is a more important factor in running and that women tend to have lower power/mass ratios?

Posted by ekr at 11:38 AM | Comments (5)

February 19, 2007

Coming soon, the Coca-Cola Conference on Diabetes

The Amgen Tour of California started yesterday. Am I the only one who finds it a bit ironic that the name sponsor of the race is the company that makes EPO?.

Posted by ekr at 3:44 PM

January 21, 2007

Hyperbike performance skepticism

Gizmodo points to this site advertising the hyperbike, a new kind of human powered vehicle:

The designer makes a number of claims, including that:

I'm quite prepared to believe that it's safer, not because it's more stable—bicycles are actually extremely stable at speed once you know how to balance them—but because the user is in a protective cage. It wouldn't be that hard to build a recumbent bike with similar properties if you wanted to.

I'm a lot more skeptical of the performance claims. I wonder if anybody has actually ridden this than that fast. Here's what the site says:

The Hyperbike will be the fastest & safest human powered vehicle on the road.

The circumference of an eight foot diameter wheel is roughly twenty-five feet and cadence, or the rate at which a person pedals, is most comfortable at a rate of 13 beats every 15 seconds. Gearing that allows an operator to rotate the wheels four times each pedal cycle, or at a 1:4 ratio while at the comfortable cadence rate will produce a speed upwards of 50mph.

Using the whole upper body, an operator, unobstructed by a seat and able to "throw" weight into each pedal thrust bouncing each stroke, like hill climbing on a conventional bike, will move the Hyperbike fast and effectively on all grades.

This is simply confused. The limiting factors in bicycle top speed have nothing whatsoever to do with the gearing of the bike. This is easy to see by doing some simple math.

Your average reasonable road bike has something like a 53/42 chainring combination on the front. That means that it's got 53 teeth on the big ring. It probably has an 11 or 12 tooth smallest cog on the back. For convenience, let's say it has a 52/13 for a 4:1 maximum gear ratio. The wheel itself is approximately 700mm in diameter, or 2.2 meters in circumference. So, every pedal revolution at the highest gear ratio moves you forward about 9 meters. A typical amateur cycling cadence is 80-100 rpm, which maps to 720-900 meters/minute or 27-34 mph. By the simple expedient of putting a readily available 11 tooth cog on the back and 55-tooth chainring on the front you can get to 41 mph at 100 rpm.

But these limits are purely theoretical because what's really important is power. Plugging these speeds into Analytic Cycling we can compute the power required to go at these speeds, which is 300, 561, and 947 watts respectively. For reference, few untrained cyclists can maintain 300 watts for more than a minute or two. Even elite cyclists have trouble maintaining 500+ watts for any length of time. To put this in miles per hour terms, maintaining 25 mph for an hour is doable by amateurs but quite hard. The hour record stands at around 31 miles.

At this point it should be obvious that the gearing isn't the limiting factor in the performance of a bicycle. But a bicycle only works the lower body whereas the hypercycle lets you recruit your upper body muscles as well, so maybe that helps. First, this isn't as big an advantage as you think. The upper body muscles are comparatively weaker than the lower body muscles, which is why racing wheelchairs are somewhat slower than standard bicycles despite having superior aerodynamics. So, all other things being equal, you might get 30-50% more power with the hyperbike but you'd be unlikely to get twice as much. Because the power/speed curve is cubic this might get you a speed improvement of 20%, but nowhere near doubling the speed.

But of course, all other things aren't equal because the vast majority of the energetic cost of riding a bicycle is wind resistance. The completely upright position of the hyperbike is vastly aerodynamically inferior to the partly upright position of a typical road bike (let alone a recumbent bike, which is why land speed records are always set on fully faired recumbent bikes). I would imagine that this increases the surface area by 50-100%, which would more than compensate for the somewhat increased power of recruiting the upper body muscles.

Just as a final check, if you plug 50 mph into Analytic Cycling's model, you come away with a required power output of 1695 watts, even with normal bicycle aerodynamics. If you can put out 1695 watts for more than a few seconds I'm pretty sure there are some people on the Olympic team who would like to talk to you.

UPDATE: The power/speed relationship is cubic, not quadratic. The air resistance/speed relationship is quadratic, but then you multiply by speed again.

Posted by ekr at 1:16 PM | Comments (1)

January 19, 2007

Creating good athletic divisions

A perennial problem with any athletic event is designing a fair reward structure. Say you're organizing an amateur mass-market athetic event like a road race. What divisions can people win in? The obvious and natural thing to do is to simply have everyone in the same division; the first X people across the line are winners and everyone else.... isn't. The problem here is that this restricts the pool of potential winners to a fairly small group, say men between 20 and 40. There's practically no athletic event at which even the best women are competitive with the top rank of men and there's a fairly sharp performance peak around 30-35 (depending a bit on what the sport is).

Now there's nothing necessarily wrong with just giving awards to those people but it's clearly a turnoff for people to be "competing" against others whom they have no actual chance at beating. And turning competitors off isn't a good way to get more people to enter your event. So, there's a lot of incentive to find some reward structure that gives a broader class of people a chance to win something. This even crosses over into professional sports where it feels unfair to force people to compete against others who are clearly qualitatively different—though it's worth noting that within gender (the most common division) variation greatly exceeds between gender variation and yet nobody thinks it unfair that I have to compete against men with 2:30 marathon times.

The three most common divisions that are used to partition up contestants are gender, age, and weight. All of these have the advantage that they seem superficially fair because they're either uncontrollable (age and except for edge-cases gender) or only marginally controllable (weight), which gives the appearance of fairness. In my experience the next most common division is "local contestants", which is also not really controllable and clearly arbitrary.1 All of these divisions also have the advantage of being (mostly) readily verifiable.

This sort of division works well for some sports but not as well for others. In martial arts, for instance, weight matters and there are often weight classes, but there's enormous skill variation between athletes. If you let white belts compete against black belts what you get is less a match than a rout. In martial arts with strict ranking systems you can just pair up people of the same rank (or maybe one-up or one down) against each other. 2. In less formal sports, sometimes how long you've been training is used as a proxy. Since most dojos don't keep particularly good records of when people have trained or what rank they have attained, and those records aren't centralized, it's pretty easy to sandbag. The theory here is that it's better to be a winner in the beginner's division than be a loser in the advanced division, so you claim you're a beginner.

One way of countering sandbagging is to turn it into a repeated game. Bicycle racing is divided into 5 "categories". The way you move up from one category to another is by winning races. If you're too dominating in a category you get promoted to the next one. What makes this work is that people tend to race each other repeatedly, so they tend to find their own level. Obviously you can sandbag a little bit, but you can't win very often because you'll eventually get moved up.

This doesn't work as well in non-iterated situations. An interesting case I ran into recently is rock climbing. A typical bouldering competition involves a bunch of problems of various difficulties, with harder problems being worth more points. Because climbing is so skill-based, it makes sense to have divisions, but it's so hard to compare people's skills that the competitions I've heard of (note: I've never done one but I've spoken to people who have worked them) have competitors self-sort into divisions. Obviously, this is incredibly susceptible to sandbagging. Competitions deal with this by promoting people who look too good into the next division.

Unfortunately, this strategy is inherently unstable because it's precisely the people you would expect to win (the best people in the division) who are most likely to get bumped out for being too good. A related problem is that there's a lot of variation in experienced difficulty for problems that are nominally the same grade, so it's precisely when you're having a good day and the problems seem to be easy for you that you have to worry about being declared too good. And of course you can still sandbag some by figuring out where the line is and climbing right up to it. What mostly seems to suppress this sort of thing is that it's considered unsporting. This works in a small community, but in my experience once the stakes get big (or even not so big) people seem to lose their sense of sportsmanship. Do any readers who've done comps have a read on how much people try to game the rules?

1. It's also interesting to look at the evolution of sports, which seem to accrete finer divisions. For example, the Ultimate Fighting Championship used to be totally open but later weight classes were added. A while back triathlon introduced the "clydesdale" division for heavier athletes (the female version is called Athena). Clearly, heavier athletes are at a disadvantage but it seems to me that this division is still regarded with a bit of suspicion.
2. A related problem in martial arts is that you need to keep the divisions fairly small because otherwise the tournament requires two many matches to converge on a single winner.

Posted by ekr at 8:45 PM | Comments (3)

January 3, 2007

Puttin' on the foil, coach

Ross Bernstein's The Code: The Unwritten Rules Of Fighting And Retaliation In The NHL provides these 10 reasons why hockey fights start:
  1. Retaliation and retribution.
  2. Swinging the momentum
  3. Intimidation
  4. Sending a message
  5. Trying to draw a reaction penalty
  6. Deterrence
  7. Job security
  8. Protection
  9. Prison justice
  10. Bad blood

There's a bit of redundancy here, but it's striking the extent to which fighting has been integrated into game strategy. For instance, here's reason 2:

The second reason for fighting is to provide a spark or catalyst to wake up your team. Fighters will challenge opponents when their team is down for the sole purpose of winning the fight and thus swinging the momentum of the game. If a player battles like a warrior and wins, the crowd gets pumped up and the players get a shot of adrenaline to inspire them to work harder. It is all about gaining a mental edge or psychological advantage in hockey and a good scrap can achieve that in a heartbeat.

Here's Marty McSorley:

The code can be completely different for guys when they are playing on a bad team. When you are an enforcer on a bad team it is your job to go out and try to turn the game around. A tough guy knows that he can swing the momentum 180 degrees from a dull, boring game to one the fans are totally into, and the players respond to that. That guys knows when he has to use his shift to try and stir it up out there in order to get his teammates and his fans back into it. That is a tough job, I have been there. It is particularly tough when you are playing on the road and an opposing team's home ice. It goes against who you are as a person and as a player to go out and start something when nothing is going on. But hey, it is the nature of the beast with this role.

I would also add that when that situation arises, it means even more to be able to do it with respect and honesty. What I mean by that is if it was my responsibility to go out and sti something up, then I would go up to their tough guy and bring it up with him directly. ... I would talk to him directly and put him in a position to address me out on the ice, with respect.

Now that tough guy knows the code and knows that he needs to match you, because that is your job. ... Even if he is tired or sore, he knows that he needs to face you and give you your shot to turn your team's momentum around that night. It is a battle, one on one, and we both know our roles. A victory will spark your team's emotions and foce them to play harder, while a loss can do just the opposite. It is a tough job, but a true fighter relishes that momentum out there and fights for his teammates.

Another notable point is that many of the former players interviewed by Bernstein (admittedly most of them enforcers) believe that fighting is a critical part of keeping the game orderly, because it gives players an informal way of keeping other players in line for behavior that the refs don't notice (or that might not be explicitly illegal). The "instigator rule" which gives extra penalty time to whoever starts a fight comes in for particular criticism on the theory that it interferes with informal dispute resolution resulting in more aggressive play, more injuries, and more heated fights when they happen. I don't know if it's true, but it seems clear that if the NHL really cracked down on fighting effectively, it would dramatically change the strategiy shape of the game.

Posted by ekr at 9:59 PM | Comments (2)

December 27, 2006

OK, this is creepy

Went climbing last night at The Edge. Normally when you drop in at a place like this you can't find anyone to belay you, so you end up just bouldering. The Edge has an unusual feature: auto-belay devices. Basically, it's a web belt attached to what seems to be a spring-loaded device at the top of the wall. You attach it to your harness and as you climb it automatically takes up the slack. If you fall off, it pays out slowly, lowering you to the ground safely (at least theoretically).

The obvious advantage of a gizmo like this is that it lets you climb on your own without a belayer. Also, you can train continuously without having a belay slave. The major practical disadvantage is that it doesn't lock, so there's no way to hang and work out a move. If you fall, you have to start over again from the bottom, which means that it's a lot harder to work through difficult moves, since you're tired by the time you get there.

Psychologically, though, it's even weirder. When someone is belaying you and you fall, the rope stretches a bit (assuming it's a dynamic rope) but then you stop dead. With an auto-belay, you just fall slowly. If you're used to a regular belay, your first thought is "my belayer has screwed up and I'm about to fall to my death". That's not really an easy reaction to suppress, which makes it a lot harder to climb near your limit, as well as making letting go to descend at the top of the climb a real act of will.

Posted by ekr at 11:26 AM | Comments (4)

December 22, 2006

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Extreme Liability

Mrs. Guesswork and I are watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Extreme LiabilityFire and in my sheer frustration over the plot holes I'm reminded of Tom Franck's hatchet job on Quidditch. Amazingly, HPATGOEL is even more nuts. Spoilers below.

For those of you who haven't seen the movie or read the book, Harry gets drafted into the highly dangerous "tri-wizard tournament"—and I mean drafted pretty literally. In order to enter the tournament you have to put your name in the titular goblet of extreme liability (GOE) The names are then randomly selected out of the GOE Now, the tournament is supposed to be limited to people over 17, but someone (hint: the villain!) puts Harry's name in anyway and then when his name gets chosen of course) it turns out that the GOE "constitutes a binding magical contract" and Harry has to compete in the tournament whether he wants to or not. Did I mention it's extraoardinarily hazardous, as in, three challenges each bearing an extreme risk of death? Putting someone else's name in the goblet seems like it would be a pretty good way to take care of someone you don't like.

Anyway, everyone thinks that Harry is a big cheater for putting his name in. Ron is especially pissed at him, since Harry didn't tell him. We, of course, know that Harry is innocent because he's too incompetent a wizard to have fooled the cup about his age without help from Hermione his heart is pure.

In the first challenge each of the champions has to retrieve a golden egg from a dragon. Ostensibly the nature of this challenge is secret, but as usual the security at Hogwarts is so terrible that everyone seems to know. There are four different dragons which appear to be of rather different breeds and levels of viciousness. The candidates get a random dragon and there doesn't appear to be any attempt to make them equally vicious or to handicap the competitors for the level of dragon viciousness. Naturally, Harry gets the most vicious of them, so much better to demonstrate that he's the best.

The golden egg contains the secret to surviving the next challenge, which is even more insane. In this challenge, the sadists running the tournament have hijacked one of each contestant's friends, doped them up, and tied them up under the water guarded by vicious mermaids with nasty big pointy teeth (now we know why Ron was so pissed at Harry, since he's the one tied up down there. One wonders if Ron's parents had to sign some kind of waiver.) One of the other contestants bails out, presumably leaving her friend to her death. Harry, being a complete goodie two shoes, decides to save both Ron and the other girl. In doing so, he finishes last (except for the girl who quit, of course) but gets promoted to second because of his extraordinary courage and selflessness. Remind me to try that one to move up a couple places at my next race. It's a bit surprising that the guy who gets bumped down to third—who looks to be about twice Harry's size—doesn't decide now would be a good time for Harry Potter to sleep with the fishes.

Anyway, it barely matters since the last challenge is a maze and the only difference between being in first and last place is the order in which you enter the maze, which, since it's constantly shifting and pretty much everyone runs into everyone else, seems like a relatively minor advantage. Even drop-out girl gets to start, about 15 seconds behind Harry. In other words, you could have spent the first two challenges playing PS/3, avoided getting alternately singed and wet, and just jumped right to stage 3.

Posted by ekr at 7:34 PM | Comments (3)

December 18, 2006

How to train for competitive eating

Asahi reports on Nathan's hot dog champ Kobayashi's training regimen:
"Eating is my job," Kobayashi says. His life very much resembles that of athletes participating in conventional sports. Two months ahead of an event, he gets into fighting mode and starts maintaining meal logs. To put on weight (he now weighs between 70 to 80 kg at competitions) Kobayashi eats six to eight high-protein meals a day, totaling about 10,000 calories. But he emphasizes that his usual meal style is normal, eating conventional food at an average speed.

Wannabe speed eaters should start by increasing their food intake, Kobayashi advises. He emphasizes the importance of keeping logs. "Without precise logs, you can't tell whether your stuffiness comes from overeating or poor metabolism."

The champ lifts weight to tone up his muscles and improve his metabolism. He says that having a high metabolic rate makes weight control easy. Also by staying active, he is able to maintain motivation when no competitions are in sight. "I don't directly work on my abs so I won't damage them," he says. He has started running 10 kilometers in the morning and 10 kilometers at night to improve stamina.

I know elite triathletes who put in less than 20 km (13 mi)/day. A lot less.

Posted by ekr at 8:28 AM