Dave Greten's Blog

Rowing the Blackburn

Q: When was auto racing invented?
A: When the second car rolled off the assembly line.

The key is to get sleep the night before the night before your big race. Because you will not sleep the night of the race. True to form, I woke up at 2:30 am on Friday night and stared at the ceiling for a long time. Scenes from the movie Rocky played in my mind.

This was my first Blackburn Challenge and, by far, the longest distance I had ever set out to row in one day. I was rowing in a double with a man who had rowed it annually for the past five years. Every athlete has a goal in a race and mine was to not disappoint him.

A consideration is this race is 20 miles long. Hopped up on adrenaline and anxious, there's a real chance you will burn yourself out early. This is especially true at the Blackburn. The start is on a beautifully flat river. The rookie mistake is to think you are invincible, pull hard for the first couple of miles and then limp along for the next 17.

Before I started racing, I used to hear the words "racing strategy" and laugh. "What strategy could there possibly be?" I thought, "You go out and run, row, or bike as hard as you can until you feel like you are going to puke."

What a foolish thought. There are many strategies to contemplate in a race. Doing well involves giving your maximum effort without burning out early yet having nothing left over at the end. It is as difficult as finding perfect balance on the head of a pin.

Another aspect to consider is "strategic hydration." In a twenty mile race on a hot summer day, you are going to have to stop to drink water. When do you take these breaks?

Early in the race two singles were approaching us, pushing each other hard. One kept looking over his shoulder. I could read his mind, he wanted to pass us desperately. I didn't want to let him. I love passing and hate being passed.

Sweat was pouring down my face. Even so, I didn't want to stop for a water break, not with this single bearing down on us. Being ahead is a huge psychological advantage. Another one of my racing strategies is "It's better to maintain being ahead than scrambling to keep up." This guy had a camelback, he didn't have to stop to drink from his water bottle. All he needed to do was turn his head into his shoulder and drink from a tube. No stopping required.

A wave of relief passed over me when my partner steered a perfect line, cutting the corner close, leaving the two scullers in our wake. At last a chance to drink. My first drink since we started 20 minutes ago.

I'm just scratching the surface of what went into this race. I mention nothing of course conditions, heart rate monitoring, or the giant wave that swept over our boat - flooding it - begging the question, "Should we stop to bail it out?"

A lot of this thinking, planning and drama is invisible to spectators. That's why it's always so nice to hear cheers. I was blown away by the volume of the cheers at the finish line, it swept over me like a wave. And there's nothing like hearing "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" and seeing your two year old daughter waving to you from the shore after you gave it your all.

I was talking to a woman on shore after the race was over. She wondered if we even heard them and I told her, "The cheers mean so much. I heard every one." Thank you everyone who turned out to watch us compete and cheer.

Amateur Hour

Once long ago, I was watching boxing on TV. Both boxers had impressive records - 9-1 and 5-0. And I wondered, "How come you never see boxers with records like 1-9 and 0-5?"

Then I realized boxers with losing records don't last long. They move on and get different jobs. If nothing else, these dabblers provide useful punching bags for the emerging professionals. No one pays to see the losers.

This was not a profound revelation. But I'm reminded of it when I see the state of journalism and modern media. Media professionals, the few who used to control the information pipeline, are being eaten alive by the unpaid amateurs. Newspapers' weekday circulation fell 8.7 percent in the past six months. Newspaper circulation is at its lowest level in seven decades.

To go back to the boxing analogy, back in the day Mike Tyson could level any number of tomato cans in a one-on-one fight. But pit him against 1,000 amateur clowns in the ring at once and he wouldn't stand a chance.

In modern media, the amateurs have taken over. And you don't have to look far to see the resulting lack of quality. When I troll blog sites, the number of written errors and mistakes makes me despair for the state of American intelligence. Yeah, I'm a snob, but I feel safe saying 90% of the writing on blogs is 100% trash. Is it too much to ask that bloggers revise their work just once before unleashing their thoughts on the world? Writers revise, that's what they do, and good writing is hard work.

Unfortunately, quality cannot keep pace with quantity. When you remove the filter, shouters and other idiots always outnumber the thoughtful and well-spoken. If you don't believe me, peruse the comments left on YouTube videos. We are, as Neil Postman ominously predicted, close to collapsing into a sea of self-absorbed triviality. A world where news consists of celebrity gossip, the latest pandemic scare, and stories about products that will improve our lives.

What is real news? I'd argue real news is information that someone powerful does not want to be shown to the public.

Samuel Johnson once said "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." When we take out the financial motive for writing, all we get are the blockheads.

Good Songs

Here's the top five I've been listening to on repeat this week:

"Hip Hug Her" - Booker T and the MGs
"You're Gonna Miss Me" - 13th Floor Elevators
"Wonderwall" - Ryan Adams
"Sequestered in Memphis" - The Hold Steady
"At War With the Sun" - The Big Pink
"Both Ends Burning" - Roxy Music

"Hip Hug Her" is a song I've been trying to find for the past 17 years. It's the intro music to the movie Barfly and I only just this week thought to type "barfly soundtrack" in Google. Idiot. This was one of my favorite movies in college.

"You're Gonna Miss Me" was featured in the opening to "High Fidelity." This is the scene. It perfectly matches his question, "Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable or was I miserable because I listened to pop music?"

"Wonderwall" was a great tune to begin with and Ryan Adams made it better with this arrangement.

"Sequestered in Memphis" has the line, "In the bar light, she looked alright. In the day light, she looked desperate. That's alright because I was desperate too."

"At War With the Sun" reminds me of 90s Britpop.

When I heard "Both Ends Burning" I thought it was some sort of new music movement. Surprise! This song is over 30 years old.

Knew I Had Seen This Before

Well played Mr. Graham, well played.

This gif is animated if you want to see it properly. The original photo was on this article.

The Internet Needs an Editor

I pulled this sentence from this article:

"Below are ten social computing technologies that I believe will be actively developing or maturing this year and either worth exploring or otherwise watching closely for 2010 and beyond."

and cut it down to this:

"Ten social computing technologies that are worth watching."

Which one is more effective? Which one did you read?

In the days when information was in short supply, you did the world a favor by writing long. That's when you could pull a Melville and write a 30 page description of the ocean. But now that information is as close to free as it's going to be, you have to go short. Cut your words down mercilessly.

Dear Google

I currently have 298 unread emails in my gmail account.

I gave up on my Yahoo mail account after it became clogged with spam.

I use Google Reader once a week to glance through headlines of the few blogs I still read. I'm overwhelmed with guilt every time I use it because so many unread stories have piled up in it since I last looked.

I am a member of Facebook but I keep the number of my friends well below Dunbar's number. I don't know how anyone can claim to have 500 friends, much less 1,000. Same goes for Twitter, I follow 70 and even that is hard. I protect my tweets because I fear saying something recklessly that will come back to haunt me.

In non-virtual world, I subscribe to The Atlantic, Newsweek, the local paper and the New Yorker. The New Yorker might feature the best writing of the bunch. But whenever the latest issue arrives I say to myself, "Dammit, I didn't finish the last one." There's currently a stack of them on my night stand.

So, Google Buzz. You're kidding me, right? Seriously, is this a tool for making my life easier? Or is it rather just another pipe for flooding my life with useless information? I've got enough of those, thanks.

It's getting increasingly hard for me to sift through the noise and find the value. And, here's the irony, your company was originally valuable for doing precisely that. Why did Google rise to the top? Because it sorted through the colossal mess of the internet and gave me the information I wanted. You put customers first and your needs second. That's the way to build market share. It's not built by thrusting features no one asked for onto gmail.

The way I see it, Google Buzz is a purely reactive move motivated by fear of Facebook and Twitter. You're letting your competitors define your moves rather than setting the terms yourself. As a result, you look weak and are saddled with some junky application that has annoyed users like myself. Please, get back to doing what you do best, providing me with technology that will help me with my life.

Sincerely,

-Dave

Mistakes Were Made

I will remember the years 2000-2009 as my most difficult decade.

In contrast to Shane, whose post inspired this one, I started the decade on top of the world. It was an odd place to find yourself at the age of 28. While Shane was a pauper in the world of the ultra-rich, I was one of the upper class. At one point in the 90's I remember looking around and thinking "I can't believe all this is happening."

Thank you internet boom. I was fortunate to catch the wave early and bail out before it crashed. By the end of the 90's I had it all figured out. And I couldn't understand why everyone else was so stupid to not follow my lead.

That was my mistake.

If success ever went to someone's head, I was that man. I threw away all the attributes that made me successful and replaced them with the worst traits imaginable. Self-righteous, arrogant and haughty. I was unbearable even to myself.

Looking over the timeline; it doesn't look so bad. Sort of like viewing Katrina damage from an airplane flyover. I got married (2000), sold a house and moved (2001), climbed Mount Rainier (2004), rowed in the Head of the Charles (2005), climbed Mount Kilimanjaro (2006), had my first child (2007) and bought a house, moved and got a new job (2009).

But between all that, there was a terrific amount of pain. I spent a lot the past decade figuring out what to do with the rest of my life. When all roads are open, it's tough to choose just one.

And I don't mention this often but between the years 2004-2007 Emily and I had significant marital problems. Looking back, we were a hair-trigger away from divorce. We're better now but that's the part of this past decade I gloss over. You just hear the good stuff. There's a lot I don't tell you and I never will.

One of the things I've learned is while you cannot control events, you can control your reaction to them. Looking at things dispassionately can be a good way to be. Looking at the world rationally allows you to make good decisions and think long-term.

My new philosophy is best summed up with the saying "Seek first to understand and then to be understood." A lot of people, like myself, screw up and make the latter more important than the former. Take it from me, you wind up looking dumb.

It may sound trite but people who are dealt a bad hand learn valuable skills. The mistakes I made in the previous decade, I won't make them again. And they didn't break me, they made me much wiser and stronger.

So here's to a new decade. May it be more prosperous and good to us all.

State of the Union

I can't help but think of this scene from The Godfather when I think of the current political situation.

In the clip, substitute Johnny Fontane for the Democratic party, reeling from the loss in Massachusetts and now uncertain about passing major health care reform.

And I'm hoping Obama does what Don Corleone does in the clip:

Items of Interest

What's the difference between rich and poor countries? It could be trust.

The 25 scariest science experiments ever conducted. I have seen video footage of the one called "The Pit of Despair" and it was heartbreaking. Science is great but I hate it when it outruns moral reasoning.

I'm interested in seeing this show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ayn Rand's greatest accomplishment? "Convinc[ing] so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished." And I say that as someone who managed to slog through the whole 1,000+ page mess that is Atlas Shrugged.

Very nice photo by Mark Lotterhand.

The Dream

I'm going to break a personal rule and write about a dream I had a few weeks ago.

In my dream I handed my daughter to an old woman to hold for a moment. When I turned back, the woman had put Lilah in a little straw boat and floated her down a river, like a baby Moses.

IDIOT! How could she do something so stupid. I ran downstream, looking frantically for any sign of her or the boat. Then I saw the boat, it was overturned and caught in some reeds. Lilah was nowhere in sight. I dove into the river head-first. I was like a robot. The only thought in my head was "Go. Go. Go. Do something. Do something. Do something."

I swam through the dark water towards the bottom. It was murky but Lilah's pink jacket started to come into view. I thought, "I need to get her to the surface as fast as possible and start CPR right away."

And then I woke up.

In a way the dream was relieving. One of my deepest fears is in a moment of crisis I might freeze, too overcome with emotion to move. In my dream this was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt like an unstoppable force. It was only after I had woken that the emotions swept over me and I could hardly control myself I was crying so hard.

Happy Fathers Day.