Originally Posted by sbxx1985

Crashes in the Tour de France often send riders hurling to the road because carbon-fiber frames and wheels tend to break.

Originally Posted by 3alarmer

Have you ever worked in a bike shop ? Are you seriously not aware of the level of expertise
that most customers receive when they have a concern or a perceived problem with a CF bike ?

When you translate the engineering into the entire product stream, it gets diluted quite a bit in
bicycle universe by the sheer magnitude of the number of low paid bozos in the service and repair industry.

That is not gonna change anytime soon.

Originally Posted by sbxx1985

Crashes in the Tour de France often send riders hurling to the road because carbon-fiber frames and wheels tend to break.

Originally Posted by sbxx1985

Crashes in the Tour de France often send riders hurling to the road because carbon-fiber frames and wheels tend to break.

Originally Posted by Heathpack

I am surprised at how often this comes up. It seems like some people prefer carbon & some steel. That's how life is. I'm not sure why we are spending so much time on the subject.

Originally Posted by rpenmanparker

Because the issue isn't people saying, "I really like steel," or "I prefer the way CF rides." They are saying things like "You can't ride fast on steel," and "CF asplodes and will kill anyone who rides it." Stupid claims on either side of the discussion are just screaming for someone to correct them. I and several of my learned colleagues have accepted the mission to straighten the 41 out. What is so hard to understand about that?

Originally Posted by rpenmanparker

Because the issue isn't people saying, "I really like steel," or "I prefer the way CF rides." They are saying things like "You can't ride fast on steel," and "CF asplodes and will kill anyone who rides it." Stupid claims on either side of the discussion are just screaming for someone to correct them. I and several of my learned colleagues have accepted the mission to straighten the 41 out. What is so hard to understand about that?

Originally Posted by Heathpack

Sure you go right ahead & do that, it will be a very fruitful use of your time I'm sure.

Originally Posted by rjones28

I think that, for many, winging it has more to do with familiarity than lack of preparation. If you prepare for big rides often enough, you internalize the checklist so the apparent effort is less. The more familiar you are with the routes in your area, the less time needed to plan routes. Experience just reduces the relative mental energy expended on preparation, at least for me.

Originally Posted by RollCNY

@Heathpack, I, like you, am a data collector. So I get that you aren't worried, only that knowledge and understanding up front are what help you do what you do. The problem with much of this is that it is entirely personal. From your description, I doubt you "bonked", in the truest sense of the term. I have " bonked" once absolutely, and it was after I forgot to eat for HOURS. I got tunnel vision, a total loss of energy, and a struggle to stay vertical. I will never forget the experience, just as I will never forget my hypothermia, or my closest call to dehydration. All of these terms get, in my opinion, over used, or used to lightly. From your description, you were tired, and hungry/frustrated. Pizza and a coke are good for that.

No matter how well intentioned we all might be, take our advice with a grain of salt. It is all specific to us. You have to figure out what works for you. Eat often, small amounts. I have to include protein, because my stomach revolts after 6 hours of drinking calories and eating carbs. Others will tell you protein is useless until after the ride. But it is all specific to your needs.

It is just like the camelback. Many here said don't use one, and I say they are no bother. All of this stuff you will have to choose what works best for you. And you will. You are like a honey badger latched onto cycling.

Originally Posted by rjones28

Many people with experience forget what it was like to be inexperienced.

Originally Posted by Heathpack

For me, it's very much the opposite. I do very high risk anesthesias all the time and not with an anesthesiologist, just me & my nursing staff, the consequence of a mistake is my patient dies. Most of my high-risk anesthesia is done in patients getting an MRI for serious brain disease, the catch 22 is that I can't treat them without a diagnosis, I can't diagnosis them without an MRI and I can't do the MRI without anesthesia which is a risky thing to do in a patient with brain disease. The risk comes because many of these patients have a problem in their brain which takes up volume. There's not supposed to be anything in the skull other than the brain, some spinal fluid and some blood. Add a brain tumor (say) to the mix and the brain starts to get pushed around. Push it too much towards the back of the skull and the breathing center of the brain gets squished and the patient never breathes again. The anesthesic episode seems fine however because the patient is on a ventilator so you don't have a problem until you try to recover them from anesthesia.

Once I anesthetize my patient, I immediately deranged the animal's physiology in multiple ways: I reduce the ability of the patient's blood vessels to regulate the flow of blood to the brain thereby increasing blood flow and consequently intracranial pressure, I decrease the blood pressure thereby decreasing perfusion of the brain and hence brain energy supplies, I cause the lungs to want to collapse a bit not causing oxygenation problems as you might think because I'm providing the patient with 5x the oxygen they get breathing room air but instead causing the patient to decrease its ability to get rid of carbon dioxide which will in turn influence blood flow to the brain.

So keeping all that in mind, I need to know what to do in any given patient is things start to go wrong. I needs lots of advance info- how able the heart is to push blood forward, how healthy are the lungs & can they efficiently exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide, can the kidneys take a little bit of decreased blood flow or do I need to recognize they are declining, what is the blood pressure/risk of stroke going in, how small is this patient and how cold/vasoconstrictor will they get during anesthesia, what is the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, etc. I have all kinds of things I can change before or during the anesthesia- the rate of IV fluids, the ventilation rate and pressure, the amount of anesthesic I am giving, the number of red blood cells (ieoxygen carriers) in the blood. I have medications I can give to manipulate the heart rate, the blood pressure, the degree of brain swelling etc, and every one of those drug doses are calculated for every patient prior to every anesthesia, even though most of the time we use no more than one of these drugs. All kinds of data are monitored during anesthesia- blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate, amount of carbon dioxide exiting the body with each breath and so on.

There's dozens of variables that can be tweaked on the fly but in order to response successfully I need lots of info about the patient's physiologic state going in. The more information I have in advance, the better. We kind of drill too, in that we have stereotyped responses to various scenarios. But still if the anesthesia is expected to be anything other than routine, I'll have a conversation with the nurses in advance about what to expect, when to follow protocol, when to involve me, what it will look like with this patient when things are going wrong.

So I guess to me all of this is a very normal approach to something tricky, I have been thinking like this every day for the past 20 years. Know as much as you can going in, you almost canot have too much information, you can always just disregard any extraneous data. Have an understanding what is going wrong and how to fix it before it becomes insurmountable. It's just second nature to me now and in fact not having information hurts my brain more than having too much information.

Originally Posted by RollCNY

We need a Carbon intervention for @BillyD. He freely admits he had never been on a long bike ride, and has even cut down on his short rides in favor of soft balls, err...., softball. Yet he bashes carbon frames at every turn. And he locks threads and throws in as nipple twist. He is clearly calling out for help. How can we sit back and let our mod flounder in ignorance like this? I am filled with shame, and some cheesecake. But mostly shame!

Originally Posted by RollCNY

Great point. Today is my birthday, and I am statistically mostly dead. Yay!

Originally Posted by Heathpack

And Heathpacks List of Suprisingly Tough Dogs
Chihuahua
Yorkie
Schnauzer
Corgi
Cocker Spaniel

Originally Posted by BillyD

HAPPY BIRTHDAY @RollCNY

Originally Posted by RollCNY

Thanks again, everyone. You are the best imaginary internet friends ever!

And of course, the sun is shining as I head to work. Rained all day yesterday on my day off. But sun today. Yay!

Originally Posted by sbxx1985

Crashes in the Tour de France often send riders hurling to the road because carbon-fiber frames and wheels tend to break.

Originally Posted by rpenmanparker

When you crash in the TdF, you go hurling into the road no matter what kind of bike you are riding and no matter what the final state of the bike is. Hell a slick spot on a paint line on a wet street and the same thing happens. If I thought I could always stay upright on a bike just by riding steel, I wouldn't ever touch any other bike material again. But I've got 30+ years of road biking history telling me that just ain't so.

Originally Posted by rpenmanparker

Because the issue isn't people saying, "I really like steel," or "I prefer the way CF rides." They are saying things like "You can't ride fast on steel," and "CF asplodes and will kill anyone who rides it." Stupid claims on either side of the discussion are just screaming for someone to correct them. I and several of my learned colleagues have accepted the mission to straighten the 41 out. What is so hard to understand about that?

Originally Posted by 3alarmer

...
and there are huge piles of eggplants, peppers, tomatoes, onions, and garlic everywhere I look at the farmers market.