Monday, August 23, 2010

90 Miles and Feeling a Little Old

I have things to say, and ask, about the latest American scare (the "Ground Zero Mosque"), but let me first report on last Saturday, when I did 90 challenging miles in the Ardennes as part of the "Geants des Ardennes". That's geant as in: giant. With four of my Eendracht friends I did the 143K route, which included 15 named climbs. It was my first day in the Eendracht kit (approved, upon my return, by the home front), as it was my first time with the new team in hilly terrain. The last time I had done this kind of distance was in 2007 (the year of my last century), when I'd often get rides over 70 miles long, do hard training rides on a weekly basis, and actually race. Most of that has gone by the wayside, and I think it showed last weekend. It was a warm day, weather I used to thrive in. But two-thirds of the way in cramps started bothering me. I was able to get rid of them by getting out of the saddle (hamstring) or staying seated (quadriceps), and considered myself lucky that front and back never acted up simultaneously. It wasn't horrible, far from it, but after the half-way mark I basically found myself just riding trying to finish this thing comfortably. In the old days, when I was much further from that dreaded milestone birthday than today, I'd get better as these kind of days went on and would only allow people to pass me (especially on the climbs) if they looked like semi-pros. On the last climb Saturday, there were several people riding away from me, and I was just fine with that. How bad was it? Not very, really. I held my own just fine against my new teammates, and then some, and was having a hard time on only three of the fifteen climbs, but there it was the same for just about everybody. We're talking here about the Cote de Somagne (new to me), the Wanneranval (I had been on this hill, but not from this side), and the Cote La Roche aux Faulcons, the very last one (these days also part of Liege-Bastogne-Liege). They were hard work, at least on the 39x26 they were, but at the same time I never wished I had brought a 28. On the other twelve, I just had a blast riding uphill again for a change. I should also mention this young Flemish woman, dressed all in white, who easily held her own with us on the Cote de la Redoute-Est. She actually rode away from me (passing everyone else around) when I had a cramp setting in. Not that no woman should be able to hang with me on a tough climb, it's just that I've rarely had the experience. I caught up with her at the top, and we rode into Sprimont together. It gave me time to realize that she was easily young enough to be my daughter. I told you this post was about me feeling a little old.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Cold War Research and Cycling

The two can go together. Three examples. When I did research for my dissertation, in Berlin in 1996, I rode a rented bike to the archive in Lichterfelde, first from Kreuzberg, where I was staying with friends, later from Spandau. The latter rides were near epic: January in Berlin, and I was on the road around 7:30, riding part of the way through the woods, getting some breakfast 45 minutes in, at a bakery in Zehlendorf (where I'd also pick up some rolls for when I'd get my lunch-time pea soup at the Freie Universitaet, a ten minute ride from the archive). After lunch, you'd look out the window around 2:30 and see it beginning to get dark again. And so the ride "home" to Spandau (cheap room, though!) was also in the dark. In case you wonder, it certainly was cold on those rides. A few years later I worked on a project for which the material was at the U.S. National Archives at College Park, Md. That's only a stone's throw away from Greenbelt Park, where they have training races every Wednesday night. This, conveniently, is also the day the archive closes at five. So on those research trips (during the summer!) I'd drive over from Milwaukee (including stops in Pittsburgh on the way out and back to join PMVC on their weekend rides) with my bike in the trunk. Then, while in D.C., I'd drive over to Greenbelt Park once or twice during the week either to race or to do an hour of loops around the course by myself. The races were the best, of course, but after sitting on your butt the entire day working your way through box after box it wasn't exactly a chore to ride there all alone. The third example comes from last week, when we drove to Bonn so that I could do some work at the Archiv der sozialen Demokratie at the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. We found a hotel at the foot of the Venusberg (it says "berg," but it's really just a good hill). On the map, there were two roads that looked like good vehicles for an hour to an hour-and-a-half of exercise after a day spent with the files: the Bergstrasse and the Annaberger Strasse. I did them both, and can report that in Pittsburgh, the former would be a candidate for both Danny Chew's Dirty Dozen and Oscar Swan's ever growing list of ghost roads (a pretty steep grade, enough to give my arms a real work-out on the 39x26 while the poor surface forced me to stay seated). The latter proved to be excellent for hill repeats. It is a beautiful road through the woods that is closed to regular car traffic, and it too is quite steep, especially the first part, steep enough for me to reach for my 24 there. The climb is just about a mile long, and if I did my best, I could do it within six minutes. You do that several times in a row, and you really can get a worthwhile workout in a little over one hour. I was going to write next about the interesting stuff I found in all these archives, but I just remember yet another example of Cold War research-related cycling: Abilene, Kansas. Yes sir! Actually, when I spent two weeks there at the Eisenhower Library in the early '90s (1992, I think, staying at the long since disappeared Forester Hotel for under $35.-- a week, across the tracks from the also sorely missed Texas Cafe), I did have to get in the car for the two excellent rides I remember doing there, but it was worth it. On the advice of a friend over in Lawrence, I drove over on a Saturday afternoon to the Tuttle Creek Lake area, the site of a recent state road championship. They were indeed good roads, but what I remember most is just staying clear of a huge charging St. Bernard dog early in my ride on Green Randolph Rd. near Olsburg. (If that section had been uphill, I don't know if I'd be writing this today). The other drive was in the opposite direction, south into the Flint Hills to Council Grove. I had picked this course myself, having once done a race from the Prairie Chicken Capital of the World (Cassoday, but you probably knew that) to this historic town. The road between there and Strong City/Cottonwood Falls may well be my favorite in all of Kansas, and it was no chore at all to do an out-and-back there. The follow-up research for last week's work may well have to take place at Germany's Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, not a bad place for post-research riding, either. I'll keep you posted.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Group Ride!

My notes say that the last one was on June 20, which is far too long. There may be people who thrive, always riding by themselves. It is certainly good to have nothing but your own snout in the wind on a regular basis. But there is definitely a place for riding with others. Not surprisingly, I've had motivation problems the past six weeks (also because a planned riding adventure fell through). Same old flat loops near the home town week after week. Not that they're not pretty or that you can't do stuff on them, but one needs some stimulation, goals, and certainly camraderie beyond the love for the sport to keep things interesting and stay sharp. I do, at least. So last night I went looking for my sort-of Eendracht teammates (they've been nothing but nice since I joined two years ago, but I've had a hard time joining them on a regular basis) who do a pretty good ride every Thursday night at seven. There were only five of us (we found an additional rider half-way through our ride) and I ended up with 52 miles for the night, about 40 of which were with the group. In Holland, you have to negotiate traffic, traffic furniture, narrow bike paths and the like on every ride, but we found some stretches where we could ride a pace much better than any of us would have done on his own, and our average together was somewhere between 21 and 22 m/h. We even included two of what in this part of the world pass for little hills (Soester Engh; Soestduinen). Everyone was able to help at the front, and toward the end we were still motoring through a couple of towns at 24-25 m/h. Nothing dangerous, but you certainly had to pay attention, also because at this hour (going on 9 pm) the sun was hanging pretty low and there were times you could not see a whole lot up ahead (signs already of summer winding down). I got home at 9, a little late for the body to calm down in time for a normal night's sleep. The ride was well worth a slightly restless night, though.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Robert C. Tucker, R.I.P.

The great Stalin scholar died last Thursday, the New York Times reports. His two volumes on the tyrant are masterpieces of research, analysis, and writing. Citations, for example in studies on the run-up to World War II, have not been as numerous recently as they should have been, probably because Tucker emphasizes Stalin's aggressive (reckless, he calls it) side over his nowadays more fashionable caution. The two Tucker volumes take the story up to 1941, and the Times obituary confirms what I had feared for a while now: there won't be a third. Apparently a combination of writers' bloc, declining health, and the great amount of new material that has come out since 1990 caused the project to get bogged down. Maybe George Kennan saw this coming when he wrote Tucker to congratulate him on the publication of the second book and added: you must now complete the final volume! (Don't have the book with the letter handy at the moment). I was rooting for him too, being a confirmed ally in the world of Stalin scholarship. That sounds presumtuous (and it is), but we met once at a conference (the big conference on Stalin and the Cold War at Yale in 1999), and at one point during a group conversation between sessions about Stalin's possible motives in Germany after World War II (the subject of the paper I had submitted for this event), he declared: "well, I'm with van Dijk on this." It was very nice to hear, but not really a surprise, because his work was, and continues to be, the greatest single influence on my interpretation of Stalin's worldview and its importance for policy. It's wonderful to have Tucker's books, but I'm sorry to have to give up on ever reading volume three.
Update: Kennan wrote his letter in August 1994 and printed it in At a Century's Ending: Reflections 1982-1995 (Norton, 1996), 238-244. It is a kind letter, but one in which Kennan does question the particular psychological explanation (self-hatred) Tucker employs to make sense of Stalin's behavior. I could try to summarize it all here, but it's much better if you read it yourself. Btw, in the Washington Post obituary, there is also a link to a 1996 appearance by Tucker on the Charlie Rose program on PBS.

Monday, August 2, 2010

What's the World Coming To?

Just three examples from recent reading: Asia columnist, Banyan, in last week's Economist, as s/he was preparing for another assignment. Much economic development and improvement of people's lives across much of the region. Flip side: greenhouse gases produced by this coal-based growth. And: "[d]evelopment is laying waste to the region’s natural richness. The Chinese miracle is built on a raw, bulldozed landscape of unrelenting horror. In Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, once-vast stands of virgin forest are gone. Laos and Myanmar (“Elephints a-pilin’ teak”) are now going the same way. Asia’s sushi fad bodes ill for the bluefin tuna even on the far side of the world." Also because of the piece's conclusion, "political stuntedness is now Asia's biggest problem," one really has to wonder who/what is going to do anything about this dark side of Asia's development. See also Jonathan Mirsky's review of Bill Hayton's Vietnam: The Rising Dragon, in the June 24 issue of the New York Review of Books. "The environment is a deepening disaster. The rivers surrounding Ho Chi Minh City are 'biologically dead,' and the air in Hanoi is poisonous ... Sewage and other waste in both cities are dumped raw into the rivers and landfills and eventually poison the local water supplies ... people unsuccessfully complained about such pollution for years." It then continues: "but now that the urban middle classes are up in arms about smells and tastes, action is slowly being taken." I'm no expert on the rise of environmental protection in the West, but the little I do know suggests that this, pressure from within society, played an important part. In Asia, then, it may in part be a matter of timing: will pressure from within society become significant enough soon enough for meaningful action to have a chance to turn things around? Not that it has worked so well in the West, for example the United States. Last week's Economist also had a nice piece about the thriving rail freight sector there. That freight railroads are doing well should be good news (better carry stuff on trains than on trucks, at least). Of course, "coal is the biggest single cargo," which also brings us to one of the main reasons climate-change legislation got moved off Washington's agenda recently: resistance from coal-producing states. More than enough reason, therefore, to start reading the blog of someone whose concerns about these developments are based on a deep knowledge not only of the politics but also the science behind them.

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Leaving Afghanistan

That's what the Netherlands is doing officially today, after a four year military presence in the province of Uruzgan that according to most observers has been fairly successful, on its own merits and compared to the work of other Western forces in the country. If you believe this is already a lost cause (and war), the withdrawal is of course very timely. However, even the Dutch Social-Democratic party, the PvdA, which brought down the government last winter during discussions over a possible extension of the Dutch role in Afghanistan, did not use this argument. Instead, it argued that it was time for someone else to step up, that the Dutch had done more than their fair share. Sincere or not, they were thanked by a Taliban spokesman (no need to use "spokesperson" here), who in a rare interview with de Volkskrant last week called the PvdA decision "one of the most important decisions ever made for the Dutch government and people." There are many angles to this issue, and it is of course possible that the Western effort to stabilize Afghanistan will ultimately prove to have been in vain. What continues to bother me, however, is that this course of events was not inevitable. The withdrawal we're witnessing today is one of choice, not necessity. There was no popular groundswell against the Afghanistan mission among the Dutch public, no pressure from the military to relieve the strain on its resources (on the contrary, one might say). The choice was to go it alone, for selfish, domestic political reasons, and alliance interests be damned. The Hague pulled the plug right at the time a new U.S. president (one we profess to like and support over here) had begun to implement his own Afghanistan strategy (as opposed to the one of his unpopular predecessor) and had asked allies for support. It is some consolation that as of right now, it doesn't appear likely that last week's Taliban spokesman will get his wish, namely "that the PvdA will play a leading role in a new Dutch government."