Orthotics or placebo?

For many years, I have worked in the sporting goods industry and most particularly in the ski-boot and climbing boot business. All along, I've heard from a bunch of self proclaimed gurus about the absolute need for some kind of insoles designed to “position,” “correct” or even “enhance” a sportsman's standing position while practicing a sport. I've tried them all, or most of them, from Superfeet to Comform'able without ever finding the holly grail in posture, comfort or performance. True, I never was in dire need for adjustment to begin with.

My narrow foot would fit most ski boots and I could go without pain, except if the boot was too tight, which is the way I thought for too long that ski boot should be fitted at the expense of my big toe-nails. I still have a pair of Superfeet insoles in my ski boots, but it's more placebo than anything else, and today, an article in the New York Times sheds a brand new light on the wisdom, the theory and the rationale – if there was one – for those miracle wedges. I think it's about time someone wrote that in the “corrective insole” department too, the Emperor appears to have no clothes!

More on bizarre weather...

As an ironic segue way to yesterday's blog, last night has seen some huge amounts of rain in Park City, which might negate my denial about global warming where I live. Yet, I won't dwell on this isolated weather incident which means so little in the grand scheme of things. I just wanted to talk about a TV debate I saw yesterday about natural catastrophes and their relation to climate change, as record breaking floods are currently taking place in Australia and Brazil. My reaction is that our planet is bursting at the seams with too many people. Just consider that in 1940 we were only 2.3 billion people on this planet, and today we're almost 6.9 billion; a three-fold increase!

To accommodate all these folks we've built in places that were not proper for human habitat, creating landslides, flooding, deforestation, and other ills, so when we compare the natural cataclysms of 60 years ago, they had far less impact with only one-third of the population exposed. We're now engaged in a vicious circle in which more people are spewing more bad stuff into the atmosphere, which might make the weather worse, and living in places were no one was not supposed to dwell in the first place. If after that, people don't see that our number-one planetary priority is population control,
they'll never get it...

Snow, skiing and global warming?

While the Alps are in right to wonder about the (melting) relationship between snow and climate change,

America has been blessed so far with a normal winter except perhaps for the usual eccentric behavior in large cities that never were in the snow-removal business, but to this day, nothing is too alarming in terms of a dwindling snow cover.

Am I in denial of man-produced climate change? Not in the least, but I feel that until now we've been lucky to dodging the bullet at our mountain resorts. The only thing that I have observed is that warmer spring conditions seem to have come earlier in recent years and that the snow melts at an impressive rate of speed during the months of May and June. This said, our Utah skiing remains great and I hope this condition continues at least for another two or three decades!

Learning to think for ourselves...

The Tucson tragedy has shown to those who sincerely wanted to see it, the corrosive effect of negative political chatter and invectives. Yet, it's a lot easier to listen to pre-digested opinions that to build our own views from scratch, based on what we like, what we feel and what genuinely make sense to us. We simply don't seem to have time to arrive at that level of understanding in the busy world we live in and are showered by a constant bombardment of all kinds of information, true, exaggerated and false.

Anytime we hear, see or read about something, we really need to put our critical thinking cap on and make the effort to find out how that news information stacks up with what we know and who we are, and only then, draw our own conclusions. Of course to accomplish that more easily, it helps a great deal to already know who we are ...

“Googling” Haiti

During 2010 I had made several recommendations about Haiti that of course no one in position of power did read and one year after the quake, the same mess is still here, for all of us to see, with less than 5 percent of the debris cleared. What's striking to me is that even the so much admired president Clinton who was the UN special envoy and jointly oversees the Interim Reconstruction Commission along with Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has been woefully ineffective.

Of the more than $5.6 billion that was pledged at a March 31 donors conference, some $3.2 billion in public funding is still owed and one is in right to wonder how the difference was spent. Sure Clinton and Bellerive said progress has been made — that half a million people have moved out of the camps that remain home to about 1 million. The aid group Oxfam disputes that figure, saying it's based on imprecise headcounts. The bottom line is that everyone has been dragging their feet and that barring unconventional thought process and idea, the situation will still be the same one year from now. Here again, we might have been better off asking Google to handle the whole project...

Revisiting the measure of skiing

Around the same time last year, I was wondering in this blog how we should measure skiing. I offered a variety of tools from keeping track of actual mileage on skis (seemingly hard to do!), to counting the number of days, and my conclusions called for using what's called in ski-jargon, “vertical drop,” the measure of a ski hill height times the number of descent. So the more “vertical” is tallied, the more skiing has been accomplished. This wasn't a perfect solution; it didn't take into consideration the number of miles covered nor the time it took. Another important variable not accounted for was the quality of the grooming - or its absence - as well as the type and quality of snow. My “vertical” yardstick wasn't perfect but if we were to accept it, how can we keep track of it?

The subject has intrigued me for a long time and ever since, I've always relied upon remembering how much vertical rise was associated with each Deer Valley lift, then made a point to count how many daily rides I made on each lift I used. That way, my ski day over, I could easily enter these numbers, using a spreadsheet and finding out my “vertical skiing.” Perhaps a few other die-hard might go through this exercise, but the vast majority of Deer Valley skiers won't see that daily accounting as their favorite après-ski activity!

Being the old geek that I am, I had thought of easing this chore by purchasing a wrist computer. The first that came on the market in the eighties was the Avocet Vertech, that took the rugged look of a sport-watch. The system was based on the altimeter that showed a barometric pressure and an altitude reading. The reading would change whenever there was a variation in elevation, or in the weather, and needed to be constantly adjusted, generally by matching the altitude to a known elevation. In addition to recording daily descent and number of runs, the Avocet also displayed elevation, temperature and time. One main drawback of that model was that it had to be sent to the factory for periodic battery change.

A decade later, Suunto, a Finnish manufacturer of liquid-filled compass, jumped in the all-in-one watch design by offering the Vector, also combining altimeter, barometer, and compass. Compared to its predecessor, the product was found to be more reliable, had user-replaceable batteries and was somewhat more stylish, so I picked it as my wrist-computer. It would become my trademark wristwatch. It proved to be quite sturdy albeit a bit larger than a normal watch; it displayed altitude, temperature and time, but most importantly was supposed to record my total daily ski descent. The biggest downside of that watch was the complexity of its controls. Not only was the manual required reading, but you needed it anytime you wanted to use a specific function of the watch.

In spite of my determination at understanding the inner workings of that device and reading its instructions on countless occasions, I could never figure out how to make it work and remembering the procedure for any length of time. I had in fact bought myself an oversized, $200 sport-watch and this frustrated me so much that I had made it my 2010 new year's resolution to finally mastering that smart timepiece. I would try on several occasions and again, would end up throwing the towel. This was until I found a much better “mouse-trap,” but my story has ran long enough for today; I'll introduce you to this brand-new device in a next blog, so just stay tuned...

Beware of the web!

Don't believe anything you read on the web or you receive in your electronic mail box without checking whatever you can verify. This morning, a friend of mine did broadcast an email message stating:
“This January is quite special, it counts:
5 Friday
5 Saturday
5 Sunday
This only happens every 823 years, etc.”

Before taking that information to the bank, I just checked and found out that instead of 5 Friday it was 5 Monday. Does that make the month of January 2011 unique? I don't think so; if you do, please a comment and explain why. Otherwise, make sure to always check the assertions you find on the web...