Replacing a worn-out bike tire makes you feel thrifty and badass

I love the way road tires wear down to a flat shape right before the rubber wears through to the casing. That flat spot tells you you've put in some time on the bike. You've covered ground that would really show up on the map. You've gone from point A to point B. Or more likely, from point A to point A many times.

The last few hundred miles before the wear finally breaks through are super-suspenseful. Kind of like waiting for a kidney stone to pass, but without the pain. And then one morning you're innocently getting the bike of the rack for a morning ride, and your fingers run over the rough of a torn blister in the tire:

If you're in the U.K., I guess I mean "tyre."

And then you get to replace the tire with a nice, round, new one:

Old meets new.

Then a quick pump up to 95 lbs, and you've gone from flat-top to round-top:

I'm more of the 80 kg variety.

Ahhhh. That's better. 

Continentals are great. They look euro-sophisticated, with the dark gumwalls that haven't changed since forever and the "Hand-Made in Germany" that you wish was true but you know probably isn't. They set onto the bead with a satisfying "pop." And the gator hardshells are almost flat-proof. It took a stray decking screw to puncture the last one that flatted out on me.

Not that kind of goat. Side note: Awwww!

I hear grumbling from people like the Velominati that they "don't corner well," and blah blah blah. Listen: south-central Kansas is goat head country.

This kind of goat. Side note: Ouch!

I'm not going out there with some lightweight, flimsy-ass tire or (gasp) tubulars just so I can walk my bike home. 

And you feel like you've really extracted your money's worth when you throw the old tire away, or recycle it, or turn it into a monkey habitat.

Or is that a lemur? Could be a lemur. 

I don't think you get this kind of satisfaction with many other sports. You can't really wait for running shoes to wear out like this without putting yourself at risk of injury. Ditto tires on motorcycles or gas-powered wheelchairs. (though to be fair, if I lived somewhere with hills or technical roads, I wouldn't run my tires as long as I do)

Monday, July 31 link-o-rama: good neighboring, CTE, mysterious illnesses, and drug-smuggling Mexican ultramarathoners

Is good neighboring good medicine?

A few weeks ago, I was asked to give a plenary at the Chronic Disease Alliance of Kansas, in part on emerging threats. One of the emerging threats I highlighted was social isolation, which increases your risk of death by about a quarter. The reason I brought it up wasn't the shocking statistic (we've known that for a while, and we know people spend more time alone as they age), but because we're now seeing a remarkable rise in the number of young men not working and filling their excess time with video games (covered in a previous link dump; near the bottom). I've become interested enough in the topic that I'm hosting a workshop on it at October's Intersections of Faith and Health conference in Salina. So I was thrilled to see James Chung's well-produced (as always) video looking at ways for local people to be better neighbors. If the data is to be believed, it could be a really powerful intervention.

John Urschel, NFL offensive lineman and erstwhile MIT math grad student, abruptly retired after the JAMA publication of chronic traumatic encephalopaty data (covered in a previous link to health).

He has something to fall back on other than football. Bold prediction: this is the start of a trend. Football will gradually become like boxing and attract mostly down-on-their luck types who don't have another option for income. Or the NFL will make wholesale changes to the way the game is played (just kidding; that'd never happen).

Living with a "none of the above" disease.

This article on poorly differentiated syndromes and the promise of genetics in solving them is (rightly) pretty hard on doctors. But I'm curious about what patients and families would like out of doctors who are presented with unsolvable conditions (unsolvable with local expertise, maybe, but maybe unsolvable altogether). When I was still in full-time academic practice, I saw 2-3 patients per day with chronic fatigue as their presenting symptom. I do not recall ever coming up with a unifying diagnosis for any of them, although we certainly found some previously unknown diagnoses. I would have been happy--thrilled, actually--to send them somewhere that had resources and expertise to look more closely at their disease states. But I just didn't know or didn't have the resources. And I know most of those patients left thinking I was a bad doctor.

The Tarahumara of northern Mexico, made famous by the book Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, are being coerced into smuggling drugs by cartels.