Pedal powered vehicles are some of the best parts of the Air and Space Museum

The post about Skylab's probable clipless pedals was fun to write. But the sweet 70's leisure suit vibe of the Skylab ergometer couldn’t touch the wood-wheeled elegance of this bike, one of five (5!) surviving bikes built in Dayton by the Wright brothers. Tim Moore, the author of Gironimo!, who completed one of history‘s hardest Giro d’Italia courses on a wood-rimmed bike from the teens, would kill for this bad boy:

Its price in 1898 was $42.50. The inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that  this works out to a little over $1000 in 2018 money:

Since the calculator only goes back to 1913,  I assume we can tack on a few bucks, although I think inflation was pretty low at that point in time. And knowing that this bike, the St. Clair, was Wright Cycles' mid-range model below the Van Cleave, it’s at least in the price ballpark of modern day bikes.

Here's the St. Clair with the original Wright Flyer in the background:

That’s the actual bike next to the actual airplane that flew at Kitty Hawk in December 1903. The Wright Flyer is five years newer than the St. Clair. That's what I call A-U-T-H-E-N-T-I-C-I-T-Y. It will not surprise you to know that I was more excited about the bicycle. And not because the Wright Flyer has been re-skinned twice since it flew.

Lucky for me, just around the corner was the Gossamer Condor to merge my interests:  

To explain the significance of this Saran-wrapped beauty, you have to step back a few years. In 1959, the Kremer Prize was established by London’s Aeronautical Society. The rules were simple: a human-powered plane had take off by itself (no catapults allowed) and climb to an altitude of ten feet to clear a marker. Then the plane had to make a 180° left turn, travel to another marker a half-mile away, and make a 180° right turn before clearing the same ten-foot marker prior to landing:

https://hackaday.com/2015/01/27/retrotechtacular-the-gossamer-condor/

This was a beast of a challenge, and not just because it pre-dated the metric system. Even the strongest cyclists (who, I'm guessing, aren't the best pilots in most cases) can only sustain about half a horsepower for any meaningful amount of time on a good day. Which means that any human-powered aircraft has to be really, really light. It also introduces a chicken-and-egg paradox: is it easier to teach a cyclist to fly, or is it easier to train a pilot to generate the necessary wattage to keep the fragile plane aloft? Gossamer Condor builder Paul MacCready tried it both ways. First, his son Tyler flew the Condor because of his small size and his experience flying hang gliders. Then, racing against what they thought was a Japanese team with a balsa-and-paper plane, MacCready hired professional cyclist (and onetime US National Team member and 1989 contestant in the Human-Powered Vehicle Race across America) Greg Miller as pilot. Greg proceeded to set the world record for man-powered flight in the Condor, but he reportedly couldn't negotiate the Kremer course and crashed in a later test flight (see the video below). When Greg had to go to Europe to race, MacCready found Bryan Allen, an avid amateur cyclist and hang-glider (and now scientist at Jet Propulsion Lab), to do the penultimate Kremer test:

The Flight of the Gossamer Condor, of which this clip is an excerpt, won an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1978.

Let's geek out over the similarities and differences in the Wright Flyer and the Gossamer Condor:

Did Skylab have early clipless pedals?

In case my newfound e-bike fandom didn't give it away, I made a quick trip to Washington D.C., last week. We hit the Smithsonian museums hard, and it was worth every minute. But the most entertaining elements for me by far were the pedal powered equipment. Here's the bicycle ergometer from Skylab:

You know this is my personal photo by the fuzziness and poor composition. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2explore/11456762794

http://spaceref.com/nasa-hack-space/skylab-shoe-fashion---with-duct-tape.html

I can't embed the video here, but take another look at Pete's mounting of the bike. He clearly works to get his feet situated in some kind of clip or strap before he starts pedaling. I tried to find schematics, but I can't find the contractor for the bike. The orbital workshop itself was built by McDonnell Douglas (right):

And while there were early, proto-clipless pedals around for cycling, this was at least a decade before Look pedals debuted at the Tour de France (see Greg winning Worlds in Look clipless below in 1989; Sean Kelly and Dimitri Konyshev are still rocking clips and straps):

https://www.cxmagazine.com/greg-lemond-echelon-dirt-gran-fondo-hood-river

https://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/space_level2/conrad_bicycle.html

Look at those handlebars! 

Astronauts Charles C. "Pete" Conrad Jr. (seen space-cycling above), Paul J. Weitz, Joseph Kerwin, (Scientist; I love that Skylab missions included people simply and officially dubbed "Scientists."), Alan L. Bean, Jack R. Lousma, Owen K. Garriott (Scientist), Gerald P. Carr, William R. Pogue, and Edward G. Gibson (Scientist) undoubtedly knocked out some Zwift-style mileage on that baby. 

Legend has it that the bike was rated to 300 watts, but it could really only get to about 270 watts reliably. I have no idea why. But 270 W is no joke.

All the exercise was intended to prevent muscle atrophy. Since astronauts are in microgravity, their muscles don't get the same routine, day-by-day work that yours get just in the process of sitting and standing. The data that came back from Skylab was fascinating: cardiac output was down 30% (mostly from a 50% reduction in stroke volume; heart rates actually went up) upon the astronauts' return to earth. Peripheral vascular resistance was up, presumably to keep the blood pressure up with such a big drop in output (mean arterial pressure didn't change). No matter how long the astronauts stayed on Skylab (approximately 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months), they returned to normal within 30 days of landing. 

I wondered if the same shoes that allowed them to clip into the floor allowed them to clip into the pedals. Skylab had a bungee cord system that was designed to strap the astronauts down. Here it is being used with the "treadmill" (really just a piece of teflon-coated metal) on the third mission (left).

But Pete's not wearing the bungee harness in the photo, so he must be clipped in. I can't find a good source, but the shoes were definitely up to the challenge, even if it took a little duct tape:

https://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov/Mission/miss/40

Even though I'm not much of a runner myself, I'll admit that the bike looks like less fun than Skylab's famous "exercise wheel," or as I prefer to call it, the "Zero Gravity Stripper Pole":

I tried Jump Bikes. Now I think e-bikes may be the future of commuting.

I'd never been on an e-bike before I went to Washington, D.C., last week. I've seen a lot of them. I thought they looked goofy: the giant downtube, or the giant hub on the wheel providing power:

electricbike.com

And I'm consistently annoyed by the gas-powered "Whizzer" style bikes that people ride on the bike paths in Wichita, blowing blue smoke and making noise.

ebay.com

So I was a skeptic. E-bikes seemed lazy and ugly. They seemed to fill a niche that didn't really exist: why not just buy a moped or scooter? But just before I left for D.C. I saw reports that Uber, the beleaguered ride share company, had bought Jump, a dockless e-bike share company that is only in a few markets (D.C., San Jose, and San Francisco). Uber riders have been able to book JUMP bikes via the Uber app since January 2018. For the time being, JUMP’s app will continue to exist, but I suspect they'll eventually be completely integrated into the Uber app. When I got off the train to my hotel, sure enough, I saw one. The bikes are aesthetically pleasing, with their little aerodynamic basket in front: 

The Jump is on the other side of the fat (phat?) downtube. 

Dockless bike shares are controversial among a certain set of people, who complain about the possiblity of "abandoned" bikes littering cities. This has naturally and appropriately drawn sarcastic scorn from critics of car culture, who point out that cars themselves are mostly "dockless":

Uber's motivation for buying up Jump was apparently that a big fraction of Uber's trips are very short (maybe under 3 miles). And since the demographic that would tend to use the bikes is at smartphone saturation (for better or for worse), it makes sense for Uber to try to divert those rides to e-bikes, where the company wouldn't have to divert 80% of revenue toward drivers (because the "driver" of the e-bike is you, and you're paying for it. Get it?).

So, needing to entertain myself for a couple hours, I tried one. Step one was to download the app, just like Zagster and a million other such companies. 

Obviously, I tried a few other sharing services while I was there, too. All those apps on my phone? That's not even all of them I could have put on there. I know I missed D.C. Insider, Ofo, Mobike, and Capital Bikeshare (I used Capital Bikeshare, but you don't need the app to do it). There may have been others. D.C. is to bike/scooter share what the Idaho panhandle was to anti-government militias in the '90s. 

Ofo trying to capture the Blind Melon revivalist market.

And that's not even counting the scooters.

Once the app was downloaded, I got an account number emailed to me, and I chose a PIN. The same email warned me to "start slowly to get familiar with its boost." 

I scoffed. Please. I've ridden a million bikes. I've ridden almost as many motorcycles. I know power.

Next was checking out the bike. The app tells you that you can either walk up to a bike and check it out, or reserve one through the app. No need in my case, since I was standing by the bike. But in case I couldn't find a bike right away, I could have held one for up to 20 minutes ahead of time, with the knowledge that the clock would start ticking once the reservation was made (if I didn't make it to the bike in time, the reservation would cancel automatically).

Next, I needed to actually rent the bike. I was instructed to enter my account number and PIN using the keypad on the back of the bike, then to remove the U-lock and slip it into the two holster loops on the left:

This is actually from the end of the ride, since I was too big a bonehead to remember to photo it up front. FYI: The solar panel only powers the electronics.

Then I was to adjust the seat height to one that works best for you. This was a little complicated because, as a #bikesharerenegade who often lets his kids ride bike shares with him, I needed to adjust the seat several times for my kids and me. I was not reassured that Jump bikes use the same janky, slippy clamp and post as virtually every other bike share:

Then: "Test your brakes. And get ready for the smiles." Oh, I was ready:

That goofy smile is system-delivered. Tan lines are an upgrade. 

The jump bikes have a threaded bottom bracket. Yay! 

A spring keeps the front wheel from flopping around.

We headed for the proving ground, Rock Creek Park:

This is from the bottom of the park, looking up north and east.

That gentle upslope you see is no joke. It's actually a pretty legit climb, a little over a quarter mile at a near-seven percent grade. It would easily qualify as the biggest hill in Wichita were you to transport it 1500 miles west: 

We coasted down the hill without really even pedaling, then turned back uphill. And wow. When you step on the pedals, the bike really jumps. I immediately regretted my initial scoffiness. It was legit, even a little unnerving the first time. When my daughter did it, she couldn't help but laugh with delight at the acceleration. That same eleven year-old daughter of average athleticism absolutely hammered this hill on the Jump Bike. I should have timed her, because I legitimately think she would have been in Queen of the Mountain range, thanks to the e-bike boost. My friendly neighborhood wattage calculator, assuming 75 watts from my daughter, gives me this (the Jump Bikes generate 250 watts, according to WikiPedia):

The bikes have three speeds, courtesy of Sturmey-Archer:

But honestly, you don't need the bottom two unless you want to climb Quintana-style. Even a modestly fit rider can crush hills on this thing.

The bike was cheap: $2 to rent, which buys 30 minutes, or 11 miles at 250 watts:

That's enough to get me halfway across Wichita. If you go over 30 minutes, you're $0.07/minute for additional use. If you run out of pedal assist power, you can note that when you end the rental and Jump will "take care of it from there," which I assume means swap out the battery. If you leave the service area of the bikes, you're warned that you might get charged a fee for retrieval. This is dirt cheap; about half what it costs over time to ride a scooter share (yep, they have those in DC too). This leads me to my final point on e-bikes, and potentially e-bike shares: they're the future. They're the future because they're so democratic. They're cheap, and almost anyone with even rudimentary bike skills and basic fitness can ride one. My mom is in her seventies and has not been on a bike since her teens, I suspect. But she could easily pedal an e-bike 20 miles in an hour or so. And if she couldn't, it probably wouldn't be because of leg, lung, or heart fatigue. It would be a matter of regaining some basic bike handling skills and butt toughness. 

A full charge gets you about 30 miles of range, just slightly below what my Chevy Volt gets on a charge. I drive said Chevy Volt because I can travel the vast majority of miles I travel under electric power. The reason I drive a Volt instead of, say, a Nissan Leaf is because I like the insurance policy of a gas engine behind the electric battery. If I go beyond the 40-ish miles the battery gives me I can get another 240 miles from the gas engine. The beauty of e-bikes is that I’m that insurance policy. If the battery quits, there’s a couple hundred watts of human power on the pedals to get me home. 

The advantage of the "e" in e-bikes is mostly sweat. Or lack thereof. Jump bikes make me think a future garage may have not two cars, but a car and an e-bike. The e-bike will be adjustable so that the bike can be used by multiple members of the family:

The lovely and talented Tracy Williams, MD.

The bike could be shared like the car was. But the cost of owning the bike would be essentially zero compared to the cost of a fancy gas-powered wheelchair. And you can criticize the decreased work of riding an e-bike versus an unmotorized bike, but riding an e-bike is still a helluva lot more exercise than piloting a gas-powered wheelchair. And it gets you out to interact with humanity in a non-fist-shaking, non-furious way. Ever see somebody on an e-bike with road rage? Me neither. It goes fast enough, relatively sweat-free, to get you places in a reasonable amount of time, but not so fast that it turns you into a raving lunatic at every 20-second delay for a crosswalk or light. 

At the end of our test session, we locked the bike back to a rack:

Biggest criticism? That U-lock is tough to get in place if the space is tight. You have to wrassle a really heavy bike around to get the tines on the lock to line up with the holes through the frame and wheel. It's tough. A much better design would be like Zagster's here in Wichita:

I don't think security would be an issue, since 1) the bikes are tanks, and 2) they're tracked with GPS. The Jump bike automatically ends your ride when the lock is put in place, though, which is nice. To incentivize people to put the bikes back where they'll be easy use (and presumably easy for the Jump folks to pick up and charge), they offer $1 credit for returning any bike parked outside of a virtual fenced-in "hub" back to a hub. Try as I might, I cannot find a map for these. 

Updated 5/14/18 with a picture of the Sturmey-Archer shifter.

"Every parking space is a wasted $30,000"

I have a low-grade smoldering obsession with parking right now. Blame it on strongtowns.org. It drives me crazy that when you look at a google image of my hometown, the parking takes up more space than the buildings themselves:

Acres of empty lots for temporarily abandoned cars in downtown (downtown!) Wichita.

The tax revenue from that parking? Zero, basically. The revenue from paid parking? I can't find the number, but I know it is low, because most of the spaces don't have a meter, and the ones that do have a meter tend to be 1950s models that only take quarters.

Anyway, I've fallen into a YouTube rabbit hole recently around parking. Other noteworthy bullets from the brief video above from Jeff Tumlin:

• For a single family, getting rid of one car = affording an additional $100,000 in mortgage
• Parking "search traffic" accounts for 8-74% of downtown traffic
• All parking meters need to accept forms of payment that people actually carry. Most of us don't carry change anymore
• The "right" price for parking is the lowest price that achieves about a 15% availability target

If you're really into this, and want to hear some health-related data, and you have an hour to spare, wade into this:

I'll encourage patients to record medical visits on their phones...IF I can use the recording as my documentation

In my telemedicine days, I complained constantly about the dual data entry I was forced to do. "Dual" in that I was seeing patients through a platform that could easily have recorded the visit, but I was still obligated to generate a note for billing purposes. I don't mind writing notes; I write pretty comprehensive recommendations on platforms like RubiconMD. It's the tedium of being a data entry clerk and recording things that no one will ever read that's tough. Notes are for doctors to communicate: What problem are we collectively trying to solve? What changes are we seeing in lab results or symptoms or tumor size?

For that communication to happen, the notes need to be pretty short, including some objective measures and beyond that, basically just the assessment and plan. No doctor has ever--ever--reviewed the Review of Systems from another doctor's note. Ever. But we're required to record an ROS so that we can bill under E & M (Evaluation and Management) codes, introduced to much criticism in the mid-1990s. Ditto the family history; when I see an endocrine patient, I sometimes have very specific questions about genetics and family history that are astonishingly unlikely to be included in a note from a primary care doc or, say, a general surgeon. But I dutifully click through the multiple screens that it takes to enter the information, just so that other docs can ignore it. This process, combined with the poor design of most electronic health records, is a primary driver of physician burnout, according to a 2013 RAND analysis. The assessment and plan is, I'm confident, the only part of the note that is consistently read by other docs. That's why, back in my salad days of old-fashioned transcription, I put the A/P at the top of my note. Docs could read it first, and then they could look at whatever other parts of the note they needed to only as-needed.

Notes increasingly are for patients, too. Open Notes, a project originally started in Boston kinda sorta over the objections of docs, has proven popular with patients and with providers. Patients like having access to the chart (duh). But I think the actual recording of the visit, like in the video above, may serve a better purpose for the patient, who can go back and review the doctor's words. The written note, conversely, may be a better place for the patient to record corrections or to report new symptoms. 

The "Snapchat for medical visits," as some people are calling apps like Medical Memory, gives me the cold shivers. That comes as no surprise to anyone who has bumped up against my fear and loathing of social media. But even now, without the aid of dedicated software, patients surreptitiously record the audio of a large number of visits (as much as 15% of patients, according to one cross-sectional study. Why not allow docs to use the patient recording (with both patient and physician consent, and with both having access to the recording) to account for the majority of the documentation? In such a model, the physician would simply have to record an assessment and plan?

It's reasonable to wonder how the recording could be used for billing, since coders historically go through written notes and check off various elements of the exam. But I'm confident that most of the complexity of the visit could be ascertained from the content of the assessment and plan; it would require no more coaching (and far less implicit encouragement of "chart buffing") than what coders do with residents and docs now.

Re-post: You wanna do the Dirty Kanza 200? Here’s how.

If you're one of the lucky ones from last winter's lottery, you're a month out from the 2018 Dirty Kanza as of today. Maybe you're nervous about preparing. Well, since I'm a completely mediocre cyclist (see: painful, sunburnt non-finishing of last weekend's Open Range 200k) and I've still managed to complete two Dirty Kanza 200s, I thought I'd share again my experience with the DK and what I think makes for a successful day. Warning: what follows is advice for people like me who perform in the vast middle of the range of abilities on a bicycle:

Based on my performance, it is obviously not for people who expect to be on the pointy end of the race. If you're one of those, you can find good advice from folks like Ted King, Rebecca Rusch, Allison Tetrick, and Dan Hughes.

1. Prepare your body

If you want to really enjoy the day of the DK and feel confident about finishing, I think more preparation than that is probably needed. One of the hardest things about the ride is just the act of being on a bike for 12 hours or more. Not many of us do that routinely. So my recommended routine is something like 8-10 hours a week in the months leading up to springtime. Too late for that now, I know. But you still have some time to build fitness. Since hills are hard to come by here in central Kansas (not to worry, there's a crapload of climbing in the DK itself; see the profile below), I make sure 3 hours per week are intervals. I don't do anything fancy. I don't have an interval timer. One day a week I go to my favorite road/crit loop, pictured below, and I ride laps for an hour. At three spots on the map, each one of them 1/8 to 1/4 mile long, I sprint. If you don't have a nice tidy loop like this, just pick out landmarks ahead of you 300-400 meters and sprint to them a few times an hour on your usual rides a couple days a week. After each sprint, or just pick out a landmark a few hundred meters ahead of you and sprint to it. Rest a couple minutes and do it again.

That's the loop around Botanica in Wichita. 

The next best thing to do to prepare yourself is to ride a couple hard gravel races ahead of time if you can. Here in Wichita, I like the Rage Against the Chainring series. The races are short, about 50 miles each, but that's okay. The DK200 itself is really just four 50-mile races stacked up in a day.

And--this is really important--make sure you go for at least a couple of very long rides before the big day. Like, at least 3-4 hour rides. This isn't for cardiovascular or leg fitness as much as it is to see if your shoulders, back, and butt can handle long stretches on your bike. If you have trouble on these rides, be sure to get your fit checked out (see #2 below). 

Practice your hydration strategy. Again (dead horse alert), you probably go on rides without thinking much of food or water all the time. This is not one of those times. I'm a legendary sweater (I'm sweating just typing this [not really]), so I know my fluid needs are above the norm. I take that into account in my preparation. After intentionally riding long distances on some warm days, I came up with a strategy is to fill two large bidons with Skratch. I like Skratch because it doesn’t upset my stomach like more sugary drinks do. Preferably one of the bottles is insulated to stay cool. I drink it second. On top of this, I wear a one-liter hydration pack that’s just water. I found I could easily drink all three on a typical 50-60 mile ride.

Food-wise, you need mostly carbs, with a touch of protein thrown in. Don't make this complicated. Even as a physician, I get bored with talk of "nutrients." Use trial and error. My experimenting taught me that, even though I'm disgusted by gels, I needed to eat one gel every hour on long days like the DK. As they say, strawberry goo forever. Between every gel that I manage to choke down, I eat a snack-size Payday. After some experimentation with other bars, I found I liked them because they didn't melt in my jersey pocket. So if you're doing the math at home, that's eating every 30 minutes. It's not scientific. It's just what I've found my stomach can handle. 

2. Pimp your ride

This seems obvious, but between now and the race, make sure your bike works. You'll be amazed how many clickety-clackety derailleurs you hear on the course. This advice extends from the grips or bar tape to the tires to the drivetrain. That little click or loose spoke is annoying on a commute or a two-hour ride, but it’s potentially catastrophic on a 15-hour ride over rocky gravel roads. If your bike needs tuned up, do it a week or two ahead of the race so the cables have a chance to stretch before the big day.

Do you need anything new on your bike? Well, I'd at least consider new tires if yours are more than a year old. You'll wanna replace those old, squeaky brake pads with new ones, since the descents in the DK can be fast and hairy.

Really consider a GPS. I know they're expensive, and my goal here isn't to convince everyone to spend a bunch of money on their bike. But pre-loading the route makes it soooo much easier and nicer to stay on course, especially during the times you find yourself all alone. And occasionally someone gets asked for their GPS data to prove she finished the course and can't provide it. Don't be that person. 

3. Race day

Don't overdress. Kansas can still be a little chilly early in the morning in early June, but don't let it fool you. It'll be hot later in the day. That 80 or 90 degrees later on is what you should dress for, not the 50 or 60 that morning.

Have a plan for support during the race. If past is prologue, you'll have a color-coded spot to seek out in the parking areas of the checkpoints:

But the crowds are huge, so have a plan for your support to flag you down, or have a plan for where to find them within your designated area. I like the idea of having a flag flying to look for.

That's Colby Reynolds, past DK Half-Pint finisher and my badass 2017 Crew Chief. (other crew included wife and kids)

Have some other food handy with your crew. The DK is many things. For that one day, it's a license to eat. I hit the bananas and pickles at the rest stops, along with a bottle of Coke (I drink bug juice exactly one day a year, and it invariably keeps me from sleeping that night). Cut the ends off your Payday bar wrappers. They can be hard to get out of the package.

Take care of your butt. I know, I know: you ride a lot. But you don't ride 200 wet, dusty, sweaty miles in a day very often. I've used Chamois Butt'r and Deez Nutz, and I honestly can't tell them apart. They both work. I use a lot more Chamois Butt'r because they sponsor the DK along with some other local races here, and I want to reward them for their support. Use the stuff liberally. Apply a little at each checkpoint if you're unsure. This last year I forgot to re-apply at the third checkpoint, and by the time I hit Emporia, my perineum was a white-hot glowing ember.

As far as that goes, make sure you wear your best shorts for the DK. 

Ride with a goal in mind. If you have a heart rate monitor, set a goal HR and try to stick to it. Ditto power if you have a power meter. Speed is an unreliable indicator of effort in gravel races. Even former pros run lower speeds than you'd expect.

17.9 mph ain't no joke, but it's not what World Tour guys are used to riding, either. 

It can be very seductive to fall in with a group going ten percent faster than you're comfortable early on in the race. But you're gonna be out there for 12 hours or more. Going faster than is comfortable early on is a recipe for suffering later.

Don't try to win the race on the descents. Every year I've done the DK I've seen people have horrendous, ass-over-teakettle crashes on rocky jeep road descents. Jim warns everyone about it every year, and it still happens. And even if you don't crash, the risk of getting a flat tire going 45 mph down a rocky path is high. Be careful. 

This was the result of stupidity on firm, level ground, not a descent. But there were no witnesses, thank heavens.

5. The finish line

Sign your name on the DK Poster. This is mandatory:

Enjoy sitting on something--anything--that isn't a bike seat. 

Here's a checklist of what you may need for the DK:

1. Four to eight large water bottles (preferably half uninsulated, half insulated)

2. Hydration pack: If you're a light sweater, you may be able to get by without this, but it's risky in my opinion.

3. A dozen snack-size Payday candy bars. I eat one of these an hour (alternating with gels).

4. A dozen gels (pick your favorite flavored goo and eat one an hour). Alternate, minimally tested choice: Ted's Untapped Maple syrup.

5. Skratch. I use it in my water bottles and keep my hydration pack filled with water.

6. Three gallons of water (for refilling said hydration pack and bidons)

7. six-pack of Coca-Cola. Long races are the only time I allow myself bug juice. Old-fashioned Coke, with its caffeine buzz and high sugar content, is hard to beat at checkpoints.

8. Pickles and bananas. The data on pickles for cramp prevention is light and inconsistent, but the salt tastes great on a hot day. The bananas are bland and smooth enough to still taste good at the end of the day.

9. Sunscreen. Don't even try to go without it. Reapply at checkpoints, too. 

10. Butt lube. I like Chamois Butt'r. Have enough on hand to re-apply at every checkpoint.

11. Three extra inner tubes. This goes whether you're running tubeless or with tubes (I've done it both ways, and I can't say one is dramatically better than the other).

12. Patch kit.

13. Chain breaker. I hear stories of broken derailleurs every year, and if you can't shorten your chain your day is done. Get one that has an attached multi-tool or carry a multi-tool separately.

14. Extra chain link. Make sure you get one that matches the size of your chain, i.e., 10-, 11-, or 12-speeds.

15. Multi-tool. See above. 

16. Extra brake cable if you have cable-pull brakes. This isn't to carry with you, but it's nice to have at a pit stop if things go wrong. 

17. Extra shift cable. See above. 

18. Chain lube. When you lube your butt, lube your chain. I like wax-based lubes because they're less finicky about wet or dry conditions. 

19. Glasses cleaner and rags.

20. Extra water to clean your bike at checkpoints in case of heavy mud. 

21. Mini-pump (or a frame pump if you're old school).

22. Three CO2 cartridges (one for every spare tube).

23. Tire levers.

24. Headlight, fully charged (so bring your charger).

25. Taillight, fully charged (so bring your charger). 

26. Gloves.

27. Lawn chair.

28. Three moist towels folded inside plastic zip-loc bags. They'll be nice and warm when you take them out to wipe off your face between stages. 

29. GPS, fully charged (so bring your charger). I know this sounds like a techie ad for unnecessary doo-dads. And yes, the race organizers do a good job with cue sheets. But having the course loaded onto your GPS is so much nicer. And later, you'll have the GPS data to use to brag to friends. And you'll be able to turn off your phone. Phone reception is non-existent for much of the course, anyway, and your phone will drain its battery trying to find a signal.

And do bring your helmet, jersey, shorts, socks and shoes. That goes without saying. 

I won't be in the DK200 this year. I'm planning on doing the 25 mile ride with my son. Look for me at the finish line. See you there!

Skyline School celebrated 50 years. I got to be there.

Last Saturday, I got the privilege of being asked to emcee the 50th anniversary of my alma mater Skyline School. Skyline was formed in the late '60s from the consolidation of four smaller schools in Pratt County, Kansas. The event was incredibly uplifting and was carried off without a hitch by Foundation President Lisa Befort. I thought I'd share my closing statement here. Ignore some of the non-sequiturs; they were inside jokes you had to hear earlier in the night to be in on:

Earlier this afternoon, that feeling you got in your chest when you smelled popcorn or when you found your name scratched on the wall behind the stage or when saw your old locker or when you found your class pictures hanging on the wall: that feeling has a name. It was originally a medical diagnosis. In 1688 medical student Johannes Hofer introduced the diagnosis of nostalgia. Nostos being the Greek root word for homecoming, and algos the root word for pain. Together: a wistful yearning for the past. A made-up word. Jim Webster would have been proud. Nostalgia’s symptoms were thought to include fainting, fever, indigestion, stomach pain, and sometimes even death.

Pratt is named for Caleb Pratt, who served in the First Kansas Infantry in the Civil War and was killed in action at the Battle of Wilson's Creek. But the Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion, published 1888, reported that nostalgia “developed to a morbid degree” among Union soldiers over the course of the Civil War with 5,213 cases identified, resulting in 58 deaths among white soldiers and 334 cases and 16 deaths among the Union’s black soldiers. So let’s all be careful tonight.

So much of life is temporary: what we do, who we love, our friends, our enemies, even our names. But where we come from is permanent. And just like a church isn’t its walls, where we come from isn’t just a dot on the map. For many of us, where we come from doesn’t even warrant a dot, just coordinates.

Where we come from really is the sum total and interaction of the people and experiences of our youth. Not geographic happenstance. Where I come from isn’t a mile and a half northeast of Byers so much as it is the experience of Linda Broce crying as she said goodbye to me at the end of my first-grade school year. It’s the memory of the first of many times a teacher showed me kindness and expected nothing in return.

It’s not a school that looks from the highway ever so slightly like a federal prison as much as it is Brenda Piester trying to convince me that my future was infinite and undifferentiated and completely up to me. She was wrong about that last part. Most of my path has been decided by the generosity of people like her and others.

It’s not Pratt County so much as it is Debbie Withers and Carolyn Heaton teaching me not to take myself so seriously. And then Brad Pagenkopf and Ed Hayter and Jane Bolen teaching me that, well, maybe I should take myself a little more seriously than that.

It’s my first crush. And then the first time someone broke my heart. Both here.

It’s that on this basketball court, I first learned that what was best for me wasn’t necessarily the thing that was best for the team.

It’s that out on that dusty track east of the building I first realized that the best feeling I would ever know was the knowledge that win or lose, I’d tried my hardest at something.

It’s that in these classrooms I learned from kind words from people like Misty Beck and Araceli Coss that there is no shame in having a hard time. And the Fibonacci sequence. Thanks to Kim Lee and Steve Sparrow and Larry Sittner, I learned the Fibonacci sequence.

It’s the knowledge that once upon a time, people decided that it was worth their time and their money to give the kids of the little towns and farms of this county their own place to be proud of and their own place to be from, and it’s the reassuring knowledge that the voters, some of whom are in this room, but many of whom are no longer with us, approved their plan in a special election by a 3:1 margin.

Now that is what you call nostalgia. Everyone still alive? Good.

I have many people to thank. Thanks to Lisa Befort and AC Boland, who invited me back to do this. They knew how much I love the sound of my own voice. Thanks again to the Foundation Board. Thanks to Bob and Janice Moore for their razor-sharp memories. Special thanks to Misty Beck, The Harvey Weinstein to my Quentin Tarantino. She is one of the funniest people I know and one of the people on earth who I’m related to who I love the most. But most of all, thanks to all the people who have poured their taxes and their careers and all their good intentions into the futures of the kids who attended school in this building.

Replacing a worn-out bike tire makes you feel thrifty and badass

I love the way road tires wear down to a flat shape right before the rubber wears through to the casing. That flat spot tells you you've put in some time on the bike. You've covered ground that would really show up on the map. You've gone from point A to point B. Or more likely, from point A to point A many times.

The last few hundred miles before the wear finally breaks through are super-suspenseful. Kind of like waiting for a kidney stone to pass, but without the pain. And then one morning you're innocently getting the bike of the rack for a morning ride, and your fingers run over the rough of a torn blister in the tire:

If you're in the U.K., I guess I mean "tyre."

And then you get to replace the tire with a nice, round, new one:

Old meets new.

Then a quick pump up to 95 lbs, and you've gone from flat-top to round-top:

I'm more of the 80 kg variety.

Ahhhh. That's better. 

Continentals are great. They look euro-sophisticated, with the dark gumwalls that haven't changed since forever and the "Hand-Made in Germany" that you wish was true but you know probably isn't. They set onto the bead with a satisfying "pop." And the gator hardshells are almost flat-proof. It took a stray decking screw to puncture the last one that flatted out on me.

Not that kind of goat. Side note: Awwww!

I hear grumbling from people like the Velominati that they "don't corner well," and blah blah blah. Listen: south-central Kansas is goat head country.

This kind of goat. Side note: Ouch!

I'm not going out there with some lightweight, flimsy-ass tire or (gasp) tubulars just so I can walk my bike home. 

And you feel like you've really extracted your money's worth when you throw the old tire away, or recycle it, or turn it into a monkey habitat.

Or is that a lemur? Could be a lemur. 

I don't think you get this kind of satisfaction with many other sports. You can't really wait for running shoes to wear out like this without putting yourself at risk of injury. Ditto tires on motorcycles or gas-powered wheelchairs. (though to be fair, if I lived somewhere with hills or technical roads, I wouldn't run my tires as long as I do)

Paris-Roubaix 2018. I love bike racing.

Peter Sagan finally winning the Hell of the North is no surprise. He hasn't won three World Championships in a row and Flanders and dozens of Tour de France stages by accident. But Silvan Dillier rode like a hero to get second. And Taylor Phinney gave Americans some hope with a fantastic eighth-place finish. Wow!

Docs, you can get paid for ambulatory blood pressure monitoring

But it's not easy:

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, Days 25-29

This is it. Was it. My last week in Catherine's tutelage. It wasn't a great week, phone-wise. The NCAA Tournament was a meltdown of epic proportions, with upsets every day, and I couldn't help but hit refresh on the ESPN website (but not the app; I learned that buzz-filled lesson long ago) a couple times an hour for score updates. We even had the tournament here in Wichita, complete with artisanal basketball folk art:

The geometry of the stripes is wrong, but I like where the artist's head is at. 

For Day 25, she told me to Clean Up the Rest of my Digital Life. Step one: unsubscribe from email lists that don't interest me. I actually did this a few years ago. I was prompted to do it by my former employer's excessive institutional email habits. The university collectively never met an email it didn't like. Need safety training? Email. Leftovers from Grand Rounds available? Email. But Catherine's reminder was a good way to re-examine my inbox and hit the delete button on the bottom of a few emails. It felt good, like electronic spring cleaning. 

Step two was to save myself from the tyranny of my inbox. As an aside, I've seen screenshots of people's unread email badges, and I don't know how they sleep at night:

Honestly, either read the emails or disable the badge.

*cold shiver*

Catherine recommended apps to help me prioritize email senders, but I feel like I do this pretty well already, and after my less-than-great experiences with Freedom and Moment, I'm not excited about adding new software. So instead, I decided to set a 6 pm hard stop on email checking. It's not hard to do, since I don't have an email alert on my phone, and the little red badge doesn't show up when I have an unread email.

Next was a suggestion to use folders to keep myself sane. Catherine had some very specific advice in this regard. One piece was to make a "needs response" folder. But that's what I use my inbox for. Anything still sitting in there is unresolved. I move resolved emails that I want to keep to topic-specific folders and keep a to-do list on Wunderlist (with alerts/notifications turned off, natch). So I didn't change anything.

Then Catherine recommended setting up a "commerce" email for the Amazons and Zappos of the world, so that those emails wouldn't come to my main address. Nope. I actually like getting shipping updates from those companies in my inbox, and I fastidiously unsubscribe to any lists that don't deal with those. I'm not interested in sales, because I rarely buy anything that I don't need pretty quickly.

She followed this advice with instructions to set up a VIP list on my phone and email so that I'm sure to get emails from important people. Good idea, and done. 

Next I was instructed to set up a "Justin_Important" email to alert people who emailed me on vacation that if it was really important, they could send an email to the "Justin_Important" address and I would get back to them. But honestly, it seemed impersonal, and I'd rather have some email pile up while I'm on vacation than put people off. Maybe that makes me soft. So I didn't do it, but I will continue to use auto-respond emails when I'm out of town to let people know I'm not immediately available. 

Catherine gave me some instructions to use for social media, but I was like, "What? I haven't had a social media app on this phone for years. Get outta here."

We're in the home stretch (Day 25 was labor-intensive). Catherine told me to activate drive mode for my phone, which I did with the last big iOS update and which I love. Then she told me to unlink accounts I might be using for log-ins. I don't have many (or any) of these, but if I did, the recent Cambridge Analytica mess would've scared me off them a lot faster and harder than Catherine ever could.

Day 26 was my day to Check My Checking. What Catherine means is, when I reach for my phone, I'm supposed to ask myself, "What's the best thing that could happen? What's the likelihood of this?" The idea is that mindlessly checking my phone has a much higher risk of making me sad than of making me happy. It's a good strategy, and it reminded me to stop mindlessly clicking through the news websites whose bookmarks I deleted a couple weeks ago, but whose URLs I still have locked in. Day 26 reminded me of one of my college roommates who is now a college professor. He publishes a lot, and the work and focus required to do this makes his mornings pretty valuable. So he has a rule to never check his email before 12 pm, because there is a very high chance of there being something in his inbox that will ruin his day. 

Day 27, Catherine reminded me to perform some Digital Sabbath Life Hacks. That is, come up with some ways to separate myself from my phone periodically. I can't do a day a week like she suggests, or probably even a day a month. My income is just too tightly bound to phone availability, probably like many of yours. But I tried three-hour breaks, and I liked it. Catherine took Day 28 to remind me of The Seven Phone Habits of Highly Effective People, which was a nice review of the strategies we'd gone through in the last few weeks. 

Day 29, Catherine told me to set a monthly reminder to evaluate my phone usage. Wunderlist to the rescue:

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, Day 24

Today's the day Catherine tells me I need to Manage My Invitations. At first I thought she meant calendar invitations. But she means invitations from my brain. 

She seems to be getting back to mindfulness. Okay. But the more actionable advice for today comes from one of the quotes she includes in her book, in which a person relates the feeling of discovering that she was reaching for her phone out of habit, not necessity, and that if she pauses and asks herself what she needs from the phone, she discovers she needs nothing. So she puts it down. I think I'm at that point. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, days 20-23

Well. That did not go well. My Saturday was fine. I raced in the first race of the Rage Against the Chainring series, and finished 16/55 in the "B" race, about as good a result as I could have hoped for:

I spent precious little time on my phone Saturday, but I can't prove it since I deleted Moment over the weekend. I just couldn't handle the notifications, and I couldn't justify having the app without having it remind me to stay off my phone. So it's gonzo. 

Sunday, though, was tough. I started strong and left my phone in an inconspicuous place, and I did well staying away from it through the morning and early afternoon. I did fun things with real people, per Catherine's instructions. I didn't even get any Rubicon consults. Come evening, though, the seeding for the NCAA men's basketball tournament came down the tracks like a locomotive. And I just. Couldn't. Stop. Myself. from looking to see where my beloved Kansas State Wildcats ended up. I didn't even consciously cheat. I just walked by my phone and casually picked it up and tuned into the NCAA website:

Answer: on a collision course with a first-weekend exit. 

And once I'd peeked to see where the 'Cats were, I couldn't resist looking to see where the rest of the Big XII ended up, and then where Wichita State was seeded, and then a bunch of posts on The Ringer and ESPN about how easy the Xavier/UNC bracket was. I killed an hour, easy. On a day I was supposed to be phone-free. Sigh. 

But yesterday (Monday) was a new day. It was the first day of My New Relationship with my phone. Catherine told me to answer a series of questions she calls "See/Think/Feel/Wonder."

What did I observe (see) about myself and my behavior and emotions during my twenty-four-hour trial separation?

When I actually managed to keep away from my phone, say before and after the hours of 4-6 pm CST, I felt great. I did meaningful work around the house, I asked my kids questions, and I did the laundry in silence (sans podcast). I was a better person than I am with my phone distracting me. 

What do these observations make me think about? When I reflect back on my experience, what thoughts come into my mind?

I feel like, even after three weeks of conscious effort and months or years of half-assed behavior modification before that, I still have work to do. 

Now that i've made it through the Trial Separation, how do i feel about my phone itself, as well as my relationship with it?

I still feel like my phone is very, very valuable for specific tasks, like my to-do list, my calendar, and podcasts. And being a phone, of course, And texting, to a smaller extent. But the rest of my phone is an elaborately designed distraction device. It is definitely expendable for large swaths of the day. 

Now that I've completed the Trial Separation and begun to deeply observe my relationship with my phone, what do I wonder? What questions do I have? What do I want to know more about? What would I like to investigate further or look into more?

I wonder if I could really go back to having just a home phone and a paper planner, or if I could at least revert to a flip phone. I know it would cause me to carry a paper planner around, which would be a drag, but I already carry a notebook and pen most places, so it wouldn't be a big deal. I'd miss being able to coordinate my calendar with my wife. I'd miss getting my kids' school calendars automatically through Google on my phone. I'd like to investigate more how I could handle those issues through my work computer. 

What was the hardest part?

Finding the results of NCAA tournament bracket seeding in a house with no cable subscription, obviously. 

What was the best part?

I had several Beyblade battles with my son without the threat of phone interruptions. 

What surprised me?

I was surprised that I fell back into phone use so easily. It really disappointed me that I was so weak.

What did I learn from the experience that I can use once my official breakup is over?

If I really want to stay away from the device, it needs to be in a different room. It's that bad.

Day 23, Tuesday, today, was to Phast. Catherine said to pick a time today to take at least a half-hour break when my phone would be either unavailable or turned off. This was easy. I knew I had a couple high-level tasks to complete this morning before going to lunch and then going to KUSM-Wichita to teach at one pm. So I silenced my phone at 10 am and stuck it in my briefcase. I used a desktop computer to order Chipotle for carry-out. Then I sat down and ground out a couple hours' work on the use of the Diabetes Prevention Program for osteoarthritic pain. It felt great to work without interruption or distraction from my phone and to have something to show for the morning. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, Days 18 and 19

Day 18 is to Meditate. Spoiler alert: I didn't do it. I know meditation brings many people a lot of joy and meaning. I know that some very high-functioning, productive people like Yuval Harari swear by it. I know some good evidence (albeit tainted by low adherence rates) exists for its practice. 

Here's the thing: I hate it. Every time I've tried meditation, on my own or in groups, I've heard a voice inside my head yelling "You're wasting your life. You're wasting your life. YOU'RE WASTING YOUR LIFE," over and over. I don't think that counts as an insight.

 There is one exception. I have trouble going to sleep at night. It's not a new problem. Once upon a time, someone taught me to repeat a mantra to myself as I lie in bed. I take a deep breath and think to myself, "I'm relaxing my feet, I'm letting go." I exhale and do my best to completely relax my feet. Then I take another breath and think to myself, "I'm relaxing my calves, I'm letting go." I exhale and relax my calves. And so on, until I'm either asleep or to the top of my head. It works. But I don't think true meditation is supposed to put me to sleep.

And since the entire reason I'm trying to break up with my phone is to stop wasting my life in a different way, I refuse to meditate. And I damn sure refuse to download a "meditation app." Using my phone, which I'm trying to free myself of, to engage in an alternative activity that also makes me feel bad is what they call a "double whammy" in my neck of the woods. No thanks.

So on to Day 19: Prepare for Your Trial Separation. Catherine tells me to identify what it is I'll be taking a break from. She recommends going screen-free, including movies, computers, and television. I'm not sure I want to do it. My kids loooooove going to movies, and A Wrinkle in Time just came out, and I'm not sure I want to miss seeing it with them. Plus, Catherine says to make plans for fun things to do. So I'm making plans to see a movie.

Then I'm supposed to tell people what I'm doing and get them on board. This is actually pretty easy. I don't want to be obnoxious about this. My goal here isn't to make people think I'm superior. And I suspect people who can't get ahold of me will just call my wife. She recommends setting a phone greeting to let people know I'm phone-free, but I don't think I'll need it. I don't have a landline, so I can't forward calls. 

Preparing with hard-copy instructions is next. I have a bike race Saturday that I'll be using my Garmin to navigate. No phone needed. But Sunday, I'm expecting no travel. So I shouldn't need a map.

Catherine says to carry a pen and paper for a "to-phone" list once I'm done. I've already started doing this, so I'm set. 

Podcasts: those are gonna be hard. I'm not sure how I'll brush my teeth without the sweet, sweet, honey-filled timbre of Mike Pesca's voice in my ear. But I'm committed to giving it a shot. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, days 16 and 17

Day 16 was to Practice Pausing. In ironic honor of this, I decided to try to write this blog post while listening to a podcast. Couldn't do it. I've never been a good multi-tasker. I'm so bad at it that I suspect anyone who says they can multitask is a liar. Which I suspect is exactly what Catherine would say. So I've proved her point. 

Anyway. The idea for Tuesday was to deliberately practice being still. To embrace boredom. She told me to pick a situation when I find myself reaching for my phone to kill some time. As I've said before, this time for me is almost exclusively potty time. And it's a problem. I go in for what ought to be a very simple procedure, and I walk out ten minutes later because I've been sucked into a New Yorker article about the Steele Dossier, and anyone in the vicinity mistakenly thinks I'm suffering from weapons-grade constipation when I've really just had a driveway moment on the toilet. 

So I committed to doing it the old-fashioned way. Not by dragging a newspaper into the stall with me. I don't have that kind of self-confidence. By staring at the stall door, or by wondering why the screws on bathroom partitions are always loose even though they use those one-way screws:

And it worked! I mean, I didn't time myself, even though the little scientist in me said that I should. I was in and out of there in no time. Nobody in the office thinks I'm all bound up over the last couple days. Good stuff. 

What I didn't experience was any kind of zen moment of really having my brain lock in on something profound. But it's early in this experiment.

Day 17 was to Exercise My Attention Span. This is like weightlifting, but for my brain. Catherine tells me that my newfound phone-free time can be spent doing something as simple as reading (done), something just for the sake of it, like practicing math in my head, or putting focus toward more meaningful tasks. I chose option 3. Yesterday I decided to spend some down time planning out a strategy for a clinic I'm consulting with to incorporate team-based strategies into their routine clinical care. In a ten-minute session, I planned out several steps to get a diabetes educator trained for the clinic, to get the clinic hooked up with their local pharmacy for a collaborative practice agreement around medication adherence, and to track outcomes related to these interventions. I raced to write all the steps and contact information down because I was afraid of forgetting it. But that's okay. The exercise made me feel like a downmarket Cal Newport.

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition: Day 15

Welcome to week three, Reclaiming Your Brain!

This week is all about "mindfulness." You know, the technique that doesn't seem to help with weight loss? But this week isn't about weight loss, its about getting my attention span back.

Yesterday, Day 15, was my day to Stop, Breathe and Be. Catherine tells me the idea is to remind myself to pause before I reach for my phone. I'm to stop what I'm doing, take a slow deep breath, and tune into the details of my experience at that moment. This could mean taking note of the physical sensations my body is experiencing, or it could mean looking at my fellow human beings, or it could mean noticing my thoughts. It doesn't mean checking my phone calendar for the eleventh time that day.

What I found with my two Stops, Breathes, and Ams, was that I most frequently reach for my phone when I need to take a note. Since writing may lead to better memory formation than typing, carrying a pen and a scrap of paper seems like a good strategy moving forward. 

And I almost forgot: I was supposed to by an alarm clock several days ago. But my inner Money Mustache took over, and I couldn't bring myself to spend the money. Lucky for me, my wife dug this baby out of a drawer, and two new AAA batteries later, I'm rocking like it's 1999:

Probably only doctors can afford a bedstand as sweet as this one. 

My first night with it had some hiccups. My son had a nightmare and kicked me out of bed at about 2 am, so I had to lug the clock to the guest room with me. But when it went off this morning, it was a rush of nostalgia straight to the brainstem. That almost mechanical beeping took me straight back to residency. I was up for good at 5:45. Did I ride my bike like I'd planned? Um...no. But I did read Joan Didion, and that's a pretty good way to start the day. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, Days 13 and 14

Catherine has short assignments for me from the weekend, so I'm batching them.

Day 13 is a day to set physical boundaries for my phone:

1. Establish no-phone zones

These are places where no one uses a phone, period. The idea is to remove the decision making, and to reduce conflict. If everyone knows that the kitchen table is a place they're not allowed to have a phone, then we don't need to discuss it. It's settled. 

Our dining room table and bar in the kitchen have long had this designation, so we were ahead of the game. I would like to add bedroom to this list, but my family physician wife's call schedule makes it impractical. So my phone is staying out of the bedroom, but hers stays. I can live with that. 

2. Give your phone a wake-up time

• I'm to assign my phone a wake-up time at least an hour after I get up

Done. I actually did this a few years ago after leaving my full-time academic medicine position. I no longer needed to worry about midnight emergency calls, so I decided to make it official.

• I'm to choose something restorative or fun to do with myself in my phone's sleep time

I'm not completely sure it counts, since Catherine uses very morning-specific examples, but I'm working my way through the Joan Didion collection We Tell Ourselves Stories in order to Live. 

Day 14 is the day I'm to stop "phubbing." (phone snubbing = phubbing) Lucky for me, the things Catherine has had me do so far have set me up nicely for this. No phone at the table? Hard to phub my wife and kids, then. Having notifications for texts and whatnot shut off? That's that many fewer potential phubs. I'm not sure I'm at 100% un-phubbiness, but I'm asymptotically approaching it by the day. 

Other people's phubbing of me, though: that's another story. It is becoming hard not to be the grumpy old man demanding uninterrupted eye contact from people. Catherine recommends leaving a "phone basket" by the door of my house, but that seems pretty weird. Instead, what I think I'll try is a game the next time I'm with friends, especially if we're out: first person to touch his or her phone at the table buys dinner. I think this will make it seem more like a shared activity and less like me judging others for their phone habits. 

One of the many privileges I have in life is that in many social situations I have most of the power. Often, I'm the person in the room that people want to talk to. I know that sounds conceited or self-important, but it's just the way it is. I'm there because someone is paying me to be there, and it makes face time with me valuable. So as the powerful person in the interaction, I recognize that it's easier for me to set and enforce these rules on others than it would be for them to set the rules for me. Translation: my position makes it easy for me to be kind of a jerk about these things, and it's important that I self-consciously try not to be a jerk. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, day twelve

Today's assignment seemed a lot like the assignment from Day One, when I downloaded Moment to keep track of my phone time. Because today is Day 12: Download an App-Blocker. The idea, Catherine says, is to download an app to block specific sites and apps that I get sucked into. The irony of this is not lost on her. She recommends FREEDOM.

You knew that was coming. 

The idea is to set up "block lists" of problematic sites or apps. I came up with "News" and "Blogs."

News

• The Atlantic
• CNN
• ESPN
• FiveThirtyEight
• Slate
• The Ringer
• Vox

Blogs

• Kottke
• Longform
• Geekologie
• The Morning News

I don't really have any time-sucking apps; they were all deleted earlier in the project. I guess I could put email in that category, but occasionally I'm in a pickle and have to use my phone for email. So I didn't want to block it, especially since I have all the alerts turned off, anyway. I'm lucky that I don't have to use social media for work. 

Next, I'm supposed to set times. My most productive time of the day is generally about 9-12 AM, so I thought it might be good to block myself during that time. Off I went. But even though I consider myself to be at least fluent in technology, I could. not. figure. out. FREEDOM. FREEDOM (the app, not the idea) sucks.

Is this a joke? Should I follow Freedom right before I block it? 

FREEDOM was more like this:

I feel your pain, Mel. Just don't go blaming this on the Jews. 

So I deleted FREEDOM. Instead, I decided to get rid of all non-essential bookmarks. All the websites you see above got deleted. If I get a hankering to see what they're saying, I'll have to type in the URL manually. I'm pretty happy with my compromise. 

How to break up with your phone, Double Arrow Metabolism edition, Days 10 and 11

Playing catch-up here at Double Arrow Metabolism after being on the road for work. Today (yesterday, actually) is day three of Changing Your Habits week: Change Where You Charge It.

Catherine tells me that to break the automaticity of checking my phone before bed, in bed, and first thing in the morning, I need to create a charging station for my phone and other mobile devices that is outside my bedroom. In effect, I'm transforming my cell phone into a landline. So the ringer volume is going to the top, baby. 

This means I'll have to get an alarm clock, which I still haven't done. 

But in the meantime, I'm to pick a new charging station. I think my kitchen island is a good candidate: 

Then I'm supposed to take all my chargers from other places in the house (especially the bedroom) and move them to this spot. To enforce this for everyone in the house, Catherine tells me to start a "phone bank" where I'll have to pay money every time my phone gets charged somewhere else. I'll put my daughter on the case.

Day 11 is Set Yourself Up for Success day. Catherine tells me this is when we add triggers to make it more likely to do the things I want to do, or things I know I enjoy, instead of reaching for my phone. 

One thing that my phone delivers that I love almost without guilt is podcasts. Trouble is, sometimes podcasts don't play in the order I want them to, and I end up messing around with my phone at stoplights. I don't text and drive; Apple's Do Not Disturb While Driving feature, while the target of some criticism, has basically fixed that temptation for me. But the update to the Podcasts app that's system-delivered on iPhones was a nightmare for this. I never could figure out how to get it to auto-play, and I was constantly looking at my phone at stoplights, trying to get the next podcast to play. Mike Pesca, host of The Gist (one of my favorites), fixed this for me. He recommended the Overcast app. It's spectacular. It allows me to have podcasts enter my feed in order, and it'll just play them one after the other. I highly recommend it. I literally deleted the Apple Podcasts app after I tried it. 

Sometimes, though, I'm just not feeling the podcast I'm listening to. I can only take so much news about the dysfunction of the White House, for example, before I have to turn to something else. And there's not really a good control on the dash of my car that lets me go to the next podcast. So I end up janking around with my phone at intersections, trying to skip to the next show. I can think of a couple interventions for this: First, I'm going to try to set up a playlist before I get in the car for long trips. Second, I'm going to take advantage locally of a new radio station that I really like, or just listen to NPR when I get stuck on a podcast I'm not into. 

At home, I plan to keep going to the library and having a book from my "to read" list nearby all the time. That's not a big change, but it's a part of my routine that I like and that I'm proud of.