Letting the gap open

Today I went from having nothing interesting to blog about to having more than will fit comfortably in one post, all from just a few minutes of surfing. Not that I'm going to just throw together a bunch of links and expect you to re-live my morning by following, analyzing, and commenting on them. Nobody around here does that. The best blog entries are original (btw, check out the article id, heh-heh), but of course an entry that sucks still sucks even if it's original. So we walk the line sometimes between originality and suckiness. Or sometimes just plain dull and uninteresting, like "I went out and rode intervals and then made pancakes and then organized the junk drawer in my kitchen, blah, blah, blah." Maybe this entry combines all these problems, and it's boring, dull, sucky, and unoriginal.

Back to our original (hah!) thought. This morning I read the most recent entry on Dale's blog. What a coincidence. I don't know Dale very well, other than running into him out training a time or two, exchanging pleasantries, and chatting with him for a bit inside the grocery store before the start of one of the GMSR stages. And since Fox 25 is one of the only stations my un-cabled TV gets decent reception on, I watch his wife anchor the news at 10 if I'm still awake at that ungodly hour. Which brings us back to the beginning.

Yesterday at work the kid who I share my cube with told me he's "stuck in a routine" of coming home from the gym at 9 pm (he's pretty big and trying to lose weight), playing video games until midnight, watching an hour of TV, then going to bed around 1 am. I was amazed. For a couple of reasons. One, he's very alert and productive on the job, generally beating me in every day that he's there (he has a travel job so he's gone about half the time). Not that getting in before me is all that difficult. Two, he plays video games for a few hours every night? Now, there are plenty of geeks for whom this would not be the least bit surprising, but this guy is not even a programmer. He seems pretty normal to me. And to him. It's a generational thing, and as Dale quotes Klosterman, I'm "willingly letting ... it open."

What's this got to do with bike racing? Well duh, you never let a break go? Maybe you should. We've touched on this before, as devoted long-time readers will recall. Bike racing is full of old fucks in denial about their chronological age. Nothing wrong with it when we're talking about fitness and competitiveness. That's what competition is all about. Even if they give us age groups... What about the rest of the picture? You know what I mean; you're pushing forty and still pretending to be twenty-three. I won't get into the details, as they're either obvious or you wouldn't understand. Yeah, it's a "lifestyle" thing.

Letting the gap open boils down to this: resist marketing. There's a reason why the 18-35 demographic holds so much importance for marketers, and it's not money. Marketing works on these people. I believe young and impressionable is the common term. I recognize that I have a handful of young readers. At least one or two of them have already demonstrated they're smarter than the average bear (does that mean anything to you?), and are probably more marketing-resistant than most. Good for them. What they're doing reading my crap I'll never quite understand. The rest of you, especially the ones who are old enough to know better who still think you need to have the latest _ _ _ _ _ whatever, get a fucking grip.

I never did get around to noting how Wompatuck is dominated by young kids now. I wasn't aware the two oldest of the thirty Keough brothers had moved on from Coast, and last night I wondered who the skinny guy in the Sakkonet kit who didn't shut up for the entire night, until he went to the front with two to go and won the race easily was. This really was crap. And I've probably managed to piss everyone off. Thanks for reading anyway. Does it feel like sunshine?