I don’t know about you but for me, February flew by. I’m not even sure why. It was busy at work. I rode my bike lots and lots in the evenings. It’s a bit of a blur.

So what’s up?

On the bike riding front, I’m on track with my yearly distance goal of 5500 km. In the first two months of the year I’ve ridden 916.9 km, divided pretty evenly between January and February.

What was all the riding about? Well, I completed the Tour de Zwift. I raced in the ZRL (Zwift Racing League) as team captain of TFC Dynamite. I raced as a team member of and sometimes team organizer (aka “herder of cats” a job for which my academic life has prepared me well) of TFC Phantom in the WTRL team time trial series.

Along the way I did some social recovery rides. Zwift now has Black Celebration rides year round but there’s special focus on Black History Month in February. It was great to see some of the rides hosted by Black Girls Do Bike. I’m glad Zwift decided to keep this going.

There are also the Pride rides now every two weeks on Zwift and there’s the LGBTQ+ Zwifter community group on Facebook.

February was also the month I got back to the gym and in person fitness classes. I’ve been enjoying lunch hour TRX and yoga classes. Since Ontario is dropping its vaccine mandate for regular gyms at the end of this month, working out on campus feels like a safer choice. Universities in Ontario are keeping our vaccine mandate through the end of winter semester at least which means everyone working and working out at the campus fitness centre will either be vaccinated or have a medical exemption and be tested regularly.

Overall, I’ve logged 75 workouts in the 222 workouts in 2022 group. It’s mostly a mix of Zwift, dog walks, Yoga with Adriene, plank challenge, and lunch hour group fitness on campus. The more I do the better my knee feels (except for walking which I have to moderate). Luckily there are other people who walk Cheddar!

There’s a lot of numbers in this post, a lot of tracking of various sorts and I’ve been thinking more about the gamification of fitness ever since reading C. Thi Nguyen’s work on games and agency. You can hear a great interview with him in which he talks about fitness, fishing, and rock climbing. It’s on our list of recommended podcasts for the week. He talks about the giddy glee we get when we score points and what it adds and what it takes away, sometimes getting us to focus on the points and their pleasure rather than the intrinsic joy in the experience itself. Maybe more on this theme later…

Oh, oh, oh. Speaking of joy, I also did one more thing that I cannot recommend enough, Snow Yoga with Alpacas. The instructor is excellent and the alpacas will make you smile. Guaranteed.

I haven’t been fat biking. We’ve had a February of snow, followed by freezing rain, and rain and then ice. I really hope to get out once more at least before the season is over. For the same reason I haven’t been bike commuting either. Oh, and while I feel like I have been doing a lot of yoga (a lot for me anyway) I still haven’t finished Adriene’s 30 Days of Yoga, the Move Challenge. I’ll get there. Just a few left. Tracy blogged about it never being too late to start. I hope it’s also never too late to finish.

I also haven’t been lifting serious weights. Things to look forward to…

I have been reading, mostly fluffy fiction and gripping mysteries.

February is also the start of birthday season in my house. I have three kids with birthdays in February, March, and April. They’re 25, 27, and 29 and have turned or are turning 26, 28, and 30. I can’t believe that last one. 30! I’m soon to be the parent of a 30 year old. Not to make it all about me but there it is. This year we’re actually able to see one another indoors and have celebratory meals together. It felt so good.

Of course, we’re ending the month watching in horror as events in Ukraine unfold. I’m too much of a pacifist to feel good about any of this. War is brutal. I’m sad and frightened for us all, but especially for the people of Ukraine.

Attend

1. “Demoralizing Fatness” with Kate Manne (Cornell University), Thursday, March 3rd, 7 pm, free and open to the public with registration.

“Kate Manne is Associate Professor in the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University. She is the author of Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford UP, 2018), Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Crown PRH, 2020). Her recent New York Times column, “Diet Culture is Unhealthy. It’s Also Immoral,” explores how body discrimination is used as a form of moral shame.

Fatness is often moralized. Through a variety of channels—the news, entertainment, social media, and ordinary conversation—fat bodies are depicted as a moral problem, and fat people as a moral failure. The atmosphere may be one of moral panic or, by turns, patronizing concern and ostensibly well-meaning hand-wringing. The idea that fatness is a moral issue is partly suspect in its objectifying tenor (as in the well-known trope of “headless fatties”), its fundamental lack of humaneness, and its embracing of body policing and even, arguably, a fascist body politics. This is a kind of moralism and moralizing that is hence often itself at odds with fundamental moral values. But the argument also fails on its own terms. As I show in this talk, fatness is not plausibly a genuine moral issue.”

Listen

2. Are we measuring out lives all the wrong way? Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen on the Ezra Klein Show

“When we play Monopoly or basketball, we know we are playing a game. The stakes are low. The rules are silly. The point system is arbitrary. But what if life is full of games — ones with much higher stakes — that we don’t even realize we’re playing?

According to the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, games and gamified systems are everywhere in modern life. Social media applies the lure of a points-based scoring system to the complex act of communication. Fitness apps convert the joy and beauty of physical motion into a set of statistics you can monitor. The grades you received in school flatten the qualitative richness of education into a numerical competition. If you’ve ever consulted the U.S. News & World Report college rankings database, you’ve witnessed the leaderboard approach to university admissions.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on Apple, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

In Nguyen’s book, “Games: Agency as Art,” a core insight is that we’re not simply playing these games — they are playing us, too. Our desires, motivations and behaviors are constantly being shaped and reshaped by incentives and systems that we aren’t even aware of. Whether on the internet or in the vast bureaucracies that structure our lives, we find ourselves stuck playing games over and over again that we may not even want to win — and that we aren’t able to easily walk away from. This is one of those conversations that offers a new and surprising lens for understanding the world. We discuss the unique magic of activities like rock climbing and playing board games, how Twitter’s system of likes and retweets is polluting modern politics, why governments and bureaucracies love tidy packets of information, how echo chambers like QAnon bring comfort to their “players,” how to make sure we don’t get stuck in a game without realizing it, why we should be a little suspicious of things that give us pleasure and how to safeguard our own values in a world that wants us to care about winning the most points.”

3. Maintenance Phase, Wellness and weight loss, debunked and decoded.

Tuesday’s episode is on Jordan Peterson’s carnivorous diet.