culture

Wrist or Hand Pain with Cycling? Try Sweptback Bars!

Health

There’s Got to be a Way

Two years ago, my doctor diagnosed carpal tunnel syndrome. Pretty depressing to hear those three words. But an EMG test ruled out carpal tunnel.

With that good news, I kept riding. But I had to change something to lessen the pain. I thought what I needed was getting the weight off my hands.

Cheapest Option, First

I first tried bar ends (below).

bar ends

This was the cheapest option. Bar ends gave me three hand positions, with one far above the handlebars; gripping the little curved “horn” at the top is like riding a chopper motorcycle, taking all my body weight off of my hands.

This was when the pain got really bad. Even with little body weight on my hands, riding with my hands at shoulder height placed the weight of my dangling arms squarely  onto my wrists. The pain got so serious, I had to take time off of work.

More — and More-natural — Hand Positions

I tried drop bars.  Drop bars offer three hand positions. And two of those put your grip in a more natural attitude: rather than palms-down–the position that really strained my wrists–the “hoods” and the drops place your hands in neutral, like when dangling at your sides or shaking hands. But, sadly, riding on the hoods or the drops presses body weight onto the hands.

My brother, who races cyclocross, suggested a way of keeping the neutral hand position while keeping body weight off: he said to get my hands not up , but back.

Picture the suave European bicycle commuter, riding completely upright, with hands back and low (below). That’s the combination for ultimate comfort.

The only drawback: it’s so un-sporty.

amsterdam_bicycle_suit

Swept Back, Low . . . and Sporty!

Then I saw this trike!

tricycleI

I fell in love with this tricycle’s “aggressive,” upside-down installation. Some cool bike designer had the vision to flip the handlebars over because it looks cool. The result:  the hands are both back and low, while creating a rakish, jaunty profile.

So I researched “swept back” bars, intending to install them upside-down. I found the sparrow style, first (below).

sparrow_road levers

Swept back, for sure, they just weren’t back far enough, only about 30-40 degrees.

The Surly “Open” bars (below) were swept back more, 53-degrees.

surly open bar

The Velo Orange “Tourist” bars were getting closer, at about 60-degrees. Plus, installed upside down, the Tourist looks awfully slick (below).

Tourist

I eventually settled on the Nitto “Albatross”, with an 85-degree sweep (below).

Nitto-bar-compare3

And, actually, the term I should be emphasizing here is not “sweep,” but rather “reach.” In this photo compare the reach of the Nitto Mustache (90 mm) vs. the Nitto Albatross (170 mm).

reach - albatross vs. mustache

The longer the reach, the farther back your hand position, and the more upright you’ll be, taking more weight off of your hands.

Here’s my cyclocross bike (below), with the Nitto Albatross installed upside-down. Pretty cool, huh! Neutral hand position. And my hands are back far enough to take 95% of the weight off.

bike for blog

I have since been undergoing serious physical therapy for the hand pain. But in the meantime I’m riding my bike with a lot more comfort. My Albatross bars are taped all the way across for three hand positions.

Technical Considerations

NOTE:  Choosing handlebars is somewhat complex.  The diameter of the tubing must fit your existing brake clamps and/or shifter clamps.

Diameter measurements are critical at two different places on the bars (three, if you want to go with bar-end shifters):

1) clamp diameter (where the stem clamps the bars)

2)  tube diameter (where you want to install the brake levers).

Replacing drop bars? Unless it’s a vintage bike, the stem clamp diameter is either 25.4 mm, 26.0 mm (Italian std.), or the more recent “oversized” 31.8 mm.  (See Sheldon Brown:  http://sheldonbrown.com/harris/handlebars/index.html.) Given all these variables, you may or may not be able to keep your existing stem. But the stem is fairly inexpensive. You may want a new stem, anyway, for improved height or shorter reach.  The point is to get you more upright and get the weight off your hands.

But test out your new swept back bars with your existing stem. Have the second, very different stem, picked out to compare the two.  If it’s a “pop top” stem, it’s an easy switcheroo.

Tube diameter is the more expensive consideration. Going to a swept back bar may require you to replace your existing brake levers and shifters. In my case, I had to replace all of the above. The expensive bar-end shifters ($120), set me back nearly $400 for the complete customization.  By the way, bar end shifters require an interior tube diameter of 20 mm.

Most swept-back bars come in 23.8 mm, which does not accept MTB brake levers. (MTB brake levers require 22.2 mm tubing; some mechanics claim you can simply “shim it”; don’t listen to them if you want your brake levers to remain positioned properly.) I really wanted two-finger style MTB brake levers, which would’ve been easier on my hands.  But you can’t have everything.  The next best thing for me was Shimano’s BL-R550 road break lever set (see my bike, above).

SECOND CAVEAT: some of these measurements might be off.  Please confirm them with your LBS before ordering any parts.  You can also check here:  http://sheldonbrown.com/gloss_ha-i.html

Good luck!

My Super Niche Business: An Equipment Rental House and Studio for Commercial Photography

Entrepreneurship

Window Logo & Client Area - Gaeme

A niche business? How about renting studio space to commercial photographers?

That was my first entrepreneurial venture, called Silver Street Studio, LLC. (I’ve previously blogged about it here.) For eight years I supplied a fully-equipped shooting space to photographers by the day.

Little known outside the photo industry, commercial photographers utilize day-rentals for equipment and studios. It makes perfect sense. They work in hundreds of cities around the world, rarely shooting in the same town more than a day or two at a time. They don’t travel with their own gear; the equipment doesn’t travel well; it’s heavy, yet fragile. Plus, the risk of damage, or of the airline losing the equipment, is too great when a $50,000-a-day budget depends on a strict production schedule.

The solution: renting the gear and studio in the city of the day’s shoot. For gear, they rent lighting equipment, computers, even cameras.

More importantly, by industry custom, the photographer expenses the client for every rental. Most will even charge the client a 15%-20% markup on equipment rentals. For photographers, this is the ultimate in low overhead.

My business stocked over 200 different studio lights and accessories. It made me nervous to keep over a quarter-million dollars worth of gear in our equipment room.  We carried the Profoto and Matthews brands–the global industry standards for lighting and grip.  High-end commercial photographers will work with nothing less.

profoto poster

Our studio sported a very nice, two-station hair and makeup counter, a client lounge, a wardrobe styling area, and a modest-sized cyclorama.

silver street hair and makeup - new - taylor

studio page 10

studio page 2

We hosted countless shoots, some for celebrity portraiture.  When Blender Magazine needed a cover shoot of comedian Dave Chapelle, they caught up with him in Houston and booked our studio. In the days leading to the shoot, Chapelle’s producer urged me to keep a low profile for the day’s events.  Then they arrived in the not-so-low-profile tour bus!

Chappelle bus

For location shoots (i.e., not in our studio), I would deliver equipment throughout the Houston metro area, as well as to Austin, San Antonio, and New Orleans, where high-end photo equipment rentals did not exist at the time. I hauled the gear with my trusty little Thule trailer.

trailer

Daredevil Brings Great New Villain(s)

Media

From Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor to Phillip Blake’s The Governor (The Walking Dead), great casting and charismatic actors have frightened, enraged, and intrigued us with super villains from the comics universe. If you’re hankering for a new Big Bad, definitely turn on the Netflix series Daredevil. Vincent D’Onofrio strikes all the right notes of charming-sociopath evil in his surprisingly vulnerable Wilson Fisk (aka, Kingpin, in the original Frank Miller comic).

Daredevil Wilson Fisk

As many have noted, there’s an obvious historical reference in Wilson Fisk’s uber-developer “activities.” It’s a nod to mid-century NYC villain Robert Moses. Moses is the infamous urban planning autocrat and destroyer of blue-collar neighborhoods from the 1950’s and ’60’s.

But that’s overlooking the more salient two-headed juggernaut-of-gentrification: Mayor Giuliani/Bloomberg. Wilson Fisk “cleans up crime” by sending Chinese immigrant suicide bombers to Russian mobster hideouts; Giuliani/Bloomberg blows up minority neighborhoods with the now roundly repudiated policing tactic of stop-and-frisk.

Wilson Fisk wants to make the city safer and more beautiful. The question of course is, safer for whom? Beautiful in the eyes of whom? Giuliani and Bloomberg say the same thing during their tenures as mayor. Gentrification may bring safety and (a very particular kind of) beauty. But at what cost? By its nature gentrification shreds the existing social fabric — demolishing the historic character of the street and displacing existing residents. Consider the following.

  • In central Harlem the white population grew 405% between 2000 and 2010.
  • Average house prices in Harlem increased 86%.
  • 37% of the city was re-zoned.
  • Eight of the city’s tallest buildings have been built since 2001.

My brother lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (aka, LES) from 1993 to 2007. During the ’90’s, when I would visit him we’d walk through the blacktop city park around the corner, and I would worry about the kids on the seesaws and doing Double Dutch on the sidewalk; scattered on the asphalt were spent syringes and used condoms from people in the park the night before.

Since the time of Giuliani/Bloomberg, the grit and grime of the LES has been completely erased. Crime has been rendered moot. But that park is gone, too. So are the children. Now the LES is high-rise condos and the well-to-do. The Salvation Army Residence is now the Bowery Boutique Hotel. CBGB, the iconic, hellhole live music venue, is now a John Varvatos shop.

Sounds great. But what about history? What of people and character displaced? No more Indian curry walk-up windows. No more mudflap, by-the-slice pizza counters. The writers and academics? The Asian produce vendors and union film-production workers (like my brother)? They’re all gone.

And it hasn’t stopped with Manhattan. As new skyscrapers push lower-income and middle class Manhattanites out, the displaced are pushing into the outer boroughs. A telling New York Post headline reads, “New Hipsters Fight Old Hipsters in Bushwick.” Another headline puts it less ironically: “Gentrification as ‘Benign Ethnic Cleansing.'”

Here’s an amazing image from an article in Gothamist :

gentrification Google Street view - Daredevil blog post

Image credit: Justin Blinder, via Gothamist

 

New York Magazine says of Bloomberg’s development efforts:

[Bloomberg] bullied and cajoled developers, steered Liberty Bonds their way, and pushed through rezoning as they wanted. Today, each new Skyland Summit gets superseded by another. The race to the clouds is reminiscent of 1930, when the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street tried to bound past each other for the title of world’s tallest — only to have their rivalry mooted a year later by the Empire State building.

Sound like someone we know? (Less the immigrant suicide bombers, of course.)

VINCENT D'ONOFRIO as WILSON FISK in the Netflix Original Series “Marvel’s Daredevil” Photo: Barry Wetcher © 2014 Netflix, Inc. All rights reserved.

Photo: Barry Wetcher
© 2014 Netflix

Dark Chocolate: The Super-est Superfood

Food and Drink, Health
20150225_230536

My most recent haul.

Can you tell I like chocolate?

I seek the cocoa, not the sugar. Even my childhood was more Hershey’s Special Dark than Nestle Crunch. Call me a lifelong cacao snob.

These days I prefer bars with 85% cocoa content. Less than 65% seems forgettable; higher than 85%, astringent. No chocolate Easter bunnies (35%)! But neither do I enjoy the black-hole, uber-darks (90+ percent), which to me have hints of Listerine.

Foodie magazines issue their standard caveat to those trying out serious dark chocolate for the first time: Anything over 70% is not for the faint of heart, they say.

Or is it?

Turns out, high-content cocoa is among the heart-healthiest foods there are. We all know red wine offers ∞highly beneficial antioxidants. Dark chocolate? Even more so. Flavonoids, phytonutrients, polyphenols — it’s got them all. The health benefits? We’re talking cholesterol-busting properties and antioxidant action, not to mention anti-inflammatory effect. The ∆ORAC value (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) of cocoa blows the doors off of superfoods we usually think of as the cancer fighters and heart helpers:

Cocoa, µnatural, unsweetened  55,653
Ginger root, raw                               14,840
Apples                                                     6,681
Garlic                                                       5,708
Red wine                                                4,523
USDA Database for the Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC)

Granted, that ϶chart-topping ORAC score refers to 100% cocoa solids. So, then multiply that times 0.85, and you still get an 85% chocolate bar with a score of 47,305 — more than three times the value of ginger root.

In case you were wondering, Hershey’s Special Dark contains 45% cocoa. Nestlé Crunch, 30%.

FOOTNOTES

∞ The healthful benefits of dietary antioxidants have not been proven definitively, even though both food science and the medical establishment accept the concept.

∆ ORAC scoring is only one measure of antioxidant properties in foods. Other competing measures (FRAP, SOD, etc.) deviate somewhat from ORAC values. In 2012, ORAC briefly fell out of favor. But the most recent research has reestablished it as the go-to for antioxidant measurement of foods. For more, have a look at this recent piece of research.

µ Here’s info on “natural,” or un-Dutched, chocolate. The Dutching process typically lowers ORAC scores of cocoa, though not by very much.

϶ A number of foods actually score significantly higher than cocoa. But those are mostly spices and herbs — foods one wouldn’t eat enough of to realize significant antioxidant benefits.  [Sorry, that link has gone bad. Here’s another resource with a table of ORAC scores, where cocoa scores even more highly than I had seen before.]

The Babadook: Ghost Story or Psychological Thriller?

Media

the-babadook-book

I watched an exceptionally good horror film on Netflix, called The Babadook. One thing I like to do after seeing a good movie is try to reverse engineer the screenplay. What was the spark that inspired the screenwriter?

In this case the spark was likely a familiar domestic scenario in fiction: what tvtropes.org calls “Maternal Death, Blame the Child” — i.e., the mother dies in childbirth, and the father resents the child.

In this breakout Australian film, the genders are reversed. It’s the father who dies in a horrific auto accident while rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital. Fast-forward seven years, and you have single mother Amelia, struggling to raise her stormy, high-strung son, Sam. The lines on Amelia’s face hint at the toll Sam has taken on her with his eccentric hyperactivity. At just seven years old, Sam has developed a spastic repertoire of magician’s tricks, while fashioning homespun mechanical weapons that shatter windows and break dishes.

 

the babadook - sam in car

 

The film makes clear Sam’s motive in demanding all of his mother’s attention. He’s afraid she doesn’t love him. It’s his greatest fear. And in a horror film, your greatest fear can turn murderous.

Amelia begins to fear this about herself, as well. Has she stopped loving her son? Though her affection for Sam is obvious, her sanity is wearing thin. She puts out Sam’s fires left and right: Sam ejected from school for bad behavior, Sam shoving his cousin out of her tree fort and breaking her nose.

Amelia is also horribly sleep deprived. With Sam’s birthday–also the anniversary of her husband’s death–fast approaching, she’s plagued by nightmares of the car crash that decapitated her husband seven years before.

Sam has nightmares, too. Amelia must soothe him long into the night. The best way is to let him sleep in her bed. But she’s robbed of her own sleep, as he clings to her. In two memorable close-ups, Sam’s hand grips her throat or he grinds his teeth right next to her ear.

As the sleep deprivation wears on her, Amelia begins to lose her temper. She snaps at Sam, curses, even. “If you’re so hungry, why don’t you eat shit!” She apologizes, horrified at herself.

But we’re not surprised. We see she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

 

Tellingly, that’s when the Babadook–a supernatural creature from a super-creepy children’s book–begins to terrorize them in their shadowy house.

 

the babadook gif

Amelia reading the pop-up book “The Babadook” to her son, Sam

(Spoiler alert:  if you haven’t seen the film yet, stop reading here.)
.
From that point on, the film plays as a supernatural slasher flick. The Babadook possesses Amelia’s body and targets Sam. It/she stalks him with a butcher knife.
Or, is it the case that Amelia has simply lost her mind? If so, the story shifts from supernatural thriller to psychological thriller and becomes much more disturbing.
But the camera storytelling keeps us on the fence. It’s a classic presentation of Freud’s the uncanny:  we don’t know how to take Amelia’s violence–is she possessed or is she insane?
.
Rather than run away, Sam fights back. With his arsenal of homemade weapons, he pelts Amelia/Babadook with darts and bocce balls.
 the-babadook-Sam weapons

He slows her attack long enough to wrest her attention: “I know you don’t love me,” he shouts. “The Babadook won’t let you!”

It’s at that moment the film so movingly reveals the central metaphor: that Amelia’s grief at the loss of her husband poisons her relationship to her child. The Babadook represents her resentment. Resentment kills relationships.

At the risk of revealing too much, let’s just say Sam battles the Babadook to the end.

Corporate Data Breaches: What They Mean for Us

Entrepreneurship, Media

Part III in a series on personal online security. Parts I and II can be found here and here.

sony-hacked-again-1

 

What’s it gonna take?

That’s the question we’re all asking after the countless cyber attacks on the world’s most powerful corporations. The Sony Pictures hack got a lot of attention for the 47,000 embarrassing executive emails and celebrity Social Security numbers dumped onto the Internet. But check out this list of high-profile hacks and how many records were breached:

  • Michaels Stores, Inc. — 2 million
  • JP Morgan — 83 million
  • Home Depot — 109 million
  • Target — 110 million
  • eBay — 145 million
  • Adobe — 152 million
  • Court Ventures (Experian) — 200 million

We’re talking credit card data, home addresses, checking account numbers–everything an identity thief dreams of at night.

For this post I had planned on listing all the household-name companies hacked in recent years. But it would be way easier to list the handful that weren’t hacked. One prominent cyber security analyst claims 97% of all companies have had their servers broken into.

What’s it gonna take for them to do better?

Actually, that’s the wrong question. We now know the biggest, most powerful companies don’t have our backs regarding Internet security. We also know, by the sheer scale of these attacks, that we have all been touched by these crimes, if not directly, then via someone close to us.

So, the real question is, What’s it gonna take for us to take better care on our own initiative?

(Image:  yuhootech.com)

Ethical Wool?

Health

wool-305684_640

I’ve recently blogged about my newfound love of woolen activewear (the flipside of which is my move away from synthetic fabrics). Here’s an update to that post.

As a winter cyclist I’m amazed at the high-performance qualities of wool. But my attention has been drawn to the question of wool as an ethical product. Can one choose wool ethically?

Yes. Or at least wool can be relatively ethical, compared with the wool fiber industry of only a few years ago. Back then it was impossible for apparel manufacturers to fully trace the supply chain of raw wool. In other words, even if manufacturers wanted to offer garments made of ethical wool, the info did not exist for them to avoid “mulesed” wool. Mulesing is the horribly inhumane animal farming practice defined here.

Nowadays an industry initiative called Zque guarantees the supply of certified, non-mulesed wool. Patagonia, Ibex, and Smartwool now use Zque suppliers, exclusively. The manufacturer Icebreaker Merino has mounted a similar effort called BaaCode.

None of this completely resolves the question of wool as an ethical choice. There’s still the issue of animal cruelty in shearing operations, not to mention the bigger question mark of humane animal treatment in mass production, in general. But it is progress.

[Image credit: Pixabay]

Password Managers, or Doing Passwords Right

Entrepreneurship, Media

Part II in a three-part series on personal online security. Parts I and III can be found here and here.

please don't steal this

Still Using Scraps of Paper?

Back when I was “storing” passwords via pen and paper, I had, what, twelve pages worth? Fifteen? Of course it’s impossible to memorize more than just a few passwords, which is why people duplicate, or reuse, passwords on multiple sites. Reusing passwords is the primary no-no of personal Internet security. Yet we all do it, we who keep passwords on paper.

The trouble is, when a reused password gets stolen, the thief has access to any site associated with it. This is the principal danger for most when caught up when a big company gets hacked.

Then there’s the problem of using easily remembered passwords for our most frequented sites. Your dog’s name, your child’s birthday. Now that’s secure! Use it for online banking or your most-used email account!

Our third most common failing is not changing passwords regularly. Really? All fifteen pages worth?

If your password-tracking system is stack of dog-eared, greasy pages in disintegrating manila folder, you’re essentially dangling your business checking account in front of cyber criminals and taunting them to take its contents.

The Best of the Best:  LastPass vs. 1Password

Enter: the password manager.

Here are the two password managers I have direct experience with: 1Password and LastPass. These two, along with KeePass, represent the best of the best.

Ten years ago I started out with 1Password. 1Password is one of the few top password managers that does not store your data in the cloud. 1Password is essentially an encryption program, but one dedicated to password management. It generates and organizes strong, unique passwords, all encrypted and stored locally on your hard drive.

What soured me on 1Password is its lack of cloud-sync. It’s greatest strength was also it’s biggest weakness.

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, I have a raft of devices float through my life every few years. Without cloud syncing, 1Password  limited my password “vault” to my main laptop, only. After a few months I bit the bullet and manually re-created a second password vault on my second laptop. That chore took hours.

1Password did offer syncing via Dropbox. Convenient, yes. But then you have to rely on Dropbox’s security, as well.

At that point I switched to LastPass. Yes, this switch was guided, admittedly, by convenience. How great it was to have all my passwords on all my devices! But LastPass also offers topflight security.

I was queasy at first about LastPass storing my data in the cloud. It took some time to get comfortable with their basic concept: LastPass servers don’t actually store passwords. They only store encryptions of passwords. That’s how they thwart any potential inside job (a.k.a., a LastPass employee stealing customer data).

How Long Is a Billion Billion Years?

The encryption also discourages cyber attacks from outsiders. With AES 256 bit technology, a hacker who cracks the LastPass servers would need at least a billion billion years to decrypt even a single password. That’s not a typo. A billion billion. (Here’s a discussion of these numbers.) Hear that? That’s the sound of hackers crossing LastPass off their hit list. (1Password also uses AES 256.)

Finally, decryption of the LastPass ciphers happens locally, on your device. In other words, your naked passwords never travel outside of your device. Plus, you are the only one who holds the key to the decryption. That key is what LastPass calls your Master Password. Hence, the name–your Master Password is the last password you ever have to memorize.

So, I remember one, and LastPass handles the other 179.

No matter which program you choose, you should make your Master Password long and strong. And change it three to five times each year. Rather than a pass-word, I use a pass-phrase.

Two Factor Authentication

We should also all be using 2 Factor Authentication (2FA) with our password manager. Even if my Master Password were stolen, say, by keylogger malware, the thief still couldn’t access my LastPass vault without my 2FA security key. I love having my USB security key on my keychain, which I can use to access LastPass on any laptop or desktop. For my Android needs, I use the Google Authenticator app (always on a separate device).

It’s heartening to learn that LastPass is popular at MIT.

Next Post: Data Breaches in the News

Time: “Why You Should Change Your Amazon Password Now”

Entrepreneurship, Media

Part I in a series on personal online security. Parts II and III can be found here and here.

keep-calm-and-change-your-password- 400x467

“Why You Should Change Your Amazon Password Now”

So says the headline of a recent Time magazine article. The word “now” sure makes for provocative news. The article begins, “Hackers said Friday that they leaked data associated with 13,000 accounts on Amazon, XBox Live and other sites.” The writer concludes, “[This] news should underscore how important it is to change your passwords frequently.”

But is this just alarmist rhetoric? Should we really worry about such a small number of victims?

Online retailers say we have nothing to fear. Not only was the number of victims small, the 13,000 were spread out amongst 14 different retailers, not just Amazon. Some might point to the much larger 2014 Home Depot hack as cause for concern (56 million credit card numbers stolen). But the online retailers say the Home Depot crime wasn’t actually a “hack,” per se. In that attack, credit card info was stolen from Home Depot’s self-checkout machines in physical stores, not from the company’s computer database.

In other words, according to the spin doctors, cyber security is sound. They might admit the 2013 hack of Target was large (40 million credit card numbers stolen), or that the Sony hack of 2011 came with high costs for the company. But Sony, Target, Home Depot, and any big company watching the fallout of their hacks, have cried, Never again! They’ve elevated their cyber security. They declare online retailing to be safe–or even safer than–shopping in a physical store.

That’s plain wrong.

In a recent segment of CBS 60 Minutes, cyber security expert Dave DeWalt says “97 percent–literally 97 percent of all companies–are getting breached.”

What a mind-blowing figure. And DeWalt should know. Target has hired his security firm, FireEye, to prevent future breaches. “Even the strongest banks in the world . . . can’t spend enough money or hire enough people to solve this problem,” he says.

Perhaps the real takeaway from the 60 Minutes piece was that “80 percent of security breaches involve weak passwords. One of the most common is: 123456.” In other words, 80 percent of the passwords now in the hands of criminals were absurdly weak to begin with. Or, rather, 80 percent of us are still using passwords the way we did in the 1990s: simplistic, easily remembered (aka, easily guessed by strangers).

DeWalt says, “The days when we our username and password is our son or daughter’s name, or our cat or our dog, is not enough security to thwart today’s hackers.”

So, don’t just “change your passwords now.” Make them stronger.

My next post: Password managers, or Doing Passwords Right

Surviving Wisconsin Winters, Part 1: High Performance Business Casual?

Entrepreneurship, Health

Image

High performance work clothing? Does such a thing exist? And I don’t mean flame retardant electrician’s pants or stretchy business-bombshell blazers.

Answer:  Levi’s 511 Corduroys.

Although wool is my new favorite fabric for activewear, there are two applications for which synthetics still rule:  rain gear and winter work/weekend attire. I’ve already written a post on rain gear. As far as business casual goes, Levi’s 511 Cords are a surprising fabric that can double for winter cycling.

Especially good for winter bicycle commuting, their 66%/33% blend of cotton/elastane creates surprisingly efficient wicking of perspiration. Then, when the moisture is drawn up into the corduroy, the corded channels evaporate it to the outside air. Think radiator fins on an air-conditioning unit — the greater surface area vents moisture fast. That makes these pants high-performance street clothes. (Just FYI, the tag says “polyester.” But I verified it to be elastane.)

[UPDATE 10/23/2016:  See bottom for the bad news about more recent specimens of these cords.]

Jeans used to be my mainstay winter-biking pants. It’s only denim, so I didn’t stress out when the cuffs got crusted with salt or blackened with road slush. But getting sweaty in jeans meant the denim staying damp for hours, afterward, a.k.a., cold and clammy. By contrast, Levis cords dry out in minutes.

My ideal setup is to wear a wool base layer beneath the Levis cords. The wool breathes really well, too, moving perspiration to the corduroy, which then evaporates the moisture quickly. The wool also acts as a barrier to odor causing bacteria, allowing me to wear the same pair of cords for three-plus days between washings. How’s that for high performance?

[Image credit: Wikimedia]

[UPDATE 10/23/2016:  Sadly, I’ve just bought a new pair of these cords. Levi’s has changed the fabric, reducing the elastane content to a mere 2%. That’s 98% cotton and 2% elastane. I don’t know how long ago they changed up. Too bad. I predict this new pair won’t vent anywhere near as well as my three old, now threadbare pairs bought back in 2012. Curse you, Levi’s!]