60 stitches. Finished an Alpine stage in tears. Attacked the peloton on the run-in to a sprint finish with no hope of winning- just to show everyone he’s still in the race. Comes back to crush everyone in the time trial and maybe even get back into contention, then loses 30 minutes in the Pyrenees the next day. With his podium dream in tatters, does he give up? Pack it in? Hide at the back and save his energy for the Vuelta?
No, he attacks. What a stud.
I broke a finger and am typing0-impaired, so here is a short post. According to this NPR article, an engineer got together with Neil de Grasse Tyson and calculated the closest point on Earth to the Moon. The Earth is not a perfect sphere and has extra mass around the middle (hey, I resemble that comment!). This means that things nearer the Equator stick “out” farther than things closer to the poles.
By this measure, Mt. Everest remains the highest point above sea level, but Chimborazo in Ecuador, a 6000+ meter peak, actually reaches 2,400 meters (the article says 1.5 miles) closer to the moon- presumably as measured from the center of the Earth.
This is neat because I have been to Chimborazo. I got as far as the snowline at 4000 meters, so the peak of Everest is still closer to the moon than I have been. Shucks.
Also interesting is that by this standard of measurement Death Valley (Stovepipe Wells?) is apparently closer to the moon than the peak of Denail, though I didn’t listen to the audio to confirm this.
Fun stuff.
Numbers and statistics in sports are meaningless, I keep telling myself. Focusing on quality is the key to happiness and success-worrying about numbers just leads to stress, distraction and feelings of inadequacy. On the other hand, I like to climb up things and that kind of activity lends itself to keeping track of how much you’ve climbed- or maybe it’s just me that needs to keep track.
I like ski mountaineering, though I do hardly any of it, and the basic idea there is to climb up mountains and ski back down- hence counting vertical feet lends itself readily to understanding the difficulty involved in various adventures. A while ago I climbed and skied Shastina in Northern California, a 5,400-odd foot effort that left me pretty much wrecked the next day.
I really like climbing mountains on my bike too. I rode all 17,000 or so feet of the Death Ride two years ago and I was pretty wiped out on the last long climbing stretch.
All of which lets me appreciate the amazing achievements of Greg Hill and Mark Weir that much more.
Greg (short bio by Andrew McLean here) lives in Revelstoke, BC and last year (05-06) skinned (and hiked, presumably) 1,000,000 vertical feet. That’s really a lot of climbing, and a whole lot of skiing. Best guess is he put in 150 or so days on skins. This year he is trying to up the ante by putting in one hundred 10,000+ foot days. Competing at the 24 Hours of Sunlight probably helped his total- I checked the results and he skied 32 laps of 1,502 feet each for a total of 48,064 official vertical feet. Wow.
The one thing I find amusing about it is that Hill is Canadian, hence metric-oriented, so using vertical feet is really a gimmick. Climbing 304,000 vertical meters doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.
Mark Weir has been described as one of the most well-rounded cyclists out there- a downhiller who discovered he likes to ride up just as much as down. Last year (2006) he climbed 1,000,000 vertical feet- technically he did it in 11 months. Like Hill, doing it once only seems to increase his desire to do it again better/differently (you see? this is the problem with being numbers-obsessed!). He says that in 2006 about 220,000 feet of the gain happened on his road bike and he thinks he can do it all on the mountain bike this year.
My accumulated vertical on skins is pretty easy to calculate most years – zero. <sigh> In an effort to be (more) like Mark, I have started keeping track of my cycling vertical much more closely. For the year to date I am at 17,800 feet in six weeks- I only have to put in 20,462.5 feet every week for the rest of the year to match him. Hmm . . . tracking numbers is definitely overrated.
