Infosec is a high-stakes game of entropy

Every once in a while I get a little despondent about life in the security field. The shiny will rub off and I'll see the stark reality that my industry is built around the idea that people are awful. Billions and billions of dollars spent annually in hardware, software, and human assets to stop theft, and the worst of it is that if my whole job is to protect Person A's ideas, and your whole job is to try to steal them, assuming I do well at my job our net lifetime contribution to the world is zero.

We are just annihilation and entropy. We are exothermic and high-cost. We are creative but completely untapped for moving the world forward, and literally the only one whose ideas have a chance at succeeding is Person A, and that's only if they're able to afford the battle.

Imagine the world we could have created by now if all 3 of us were allowed to be creative toward a greater good. Imagine if businesses could innovate without fear of attack, if inventors didn't have to work so hard to secure patents just to stop theft. Maybe this comes across as a rant against fiat currencies, but books and movies show us what the human mind is capable of not just imagining, but also bringing to life. We know there have been scientific advances that were directly inspired by media. There was a US general, who, while watching the first "Predator" movie, jumped up and shouted "I WANT THAT!" when the predator became invisible, prompting decades of R&D into invisibity tech. But even that example was intended to be used toward the enormous industry of loss & loss-prevention, because what is a military if not an applied security institution?

But where would we be if all of us could take our ideas and turn them into reality? What medicines would we have? What access to information? What reaches of space?

But instead you just want to steal, and I just have to block. At scale that would suggest at least 2/3 of the planet is involved in some variation of this stupid dance.

Going back to sci-fi, one of the major themes in that genre seems to be that others got their shit together and figured out how to develop toward a common good. Star Trek IV made a big show of us still using money and how damned inconvenient it was, but it's a fairly common trope: societies rapidly advance after "moving beyond money". That's not to say they've moved beyond greed, because greed often underlies the plots of many sci-fi stories, but it's significant BECAUSE it's uncommon in those imagined worlds.

A society that isn't fettered with using 2/3 of its resources to just prevent malice makes for awe-inspiring visuals and ideas. Imagine if it could be ours, and all we'd have to do is stop trying to steal each others' crap.

But then maybe that lack of secure-by-design philosophy, born of centuries of fighting over resources, is why Jeff Goldblum was able to hack the mothership with a PowerBook 5300.

A whole pile of broken

 Not to be a negative Nellie, but I tend to turn to this outlet when I'm feeling less than delightful. It's my way of processing things more fully than I will just inside my own head, because I often don't pull the threads that tie things together until I commit them to the page.

Anyhoo.

Last time I mentioned Grinder Nationals, and how we're not going. It's an incredible disappointment to manage, but let's frame that discussion.

6 months ago I was racing on a fast new Zwift team. My role was the sprinter, and while I never once finished with the pack, I delivered enough intermediate sprint points to make a difference. I had a job and I did that job. I was seeing record power numbers in spite of poor finishing positions, and those power numbers made community racing fun, or at least as fun as itcan be indoors in the winter on Zwift. Fun enough, I guess.

But then I saw the announcement that Grinder Nationals would be held within my own state, organized by a guy who I met on one of my first ever group rides, and who has spent the past several years building one of the best gravel races on the east coast: Dirty Kitten.

As soon as I heard about it I signed up. I knew it was going to be a tremendous reach, and that it would require a fundamental shift in my training structure, but if a buddy was going to organize something so amazing, I was gonna support it.

I stopped racing Zwift and got outside, because May in Virginia is every season all at once.

Alastair's mountain bike team practices & races have given me opportunities to get in big mountainous training rides, but honestly I was getting worn out, then bored, then frustrated.

Riding wasn't even fun. I tried switching bikes, taking the TT bike out for a hit of fear and adrenaline. It rewarded me with a broken drink system and a bent derailleur hanger that put the mech into the disc wheel. Plus I'd forgotten how much I hate hate hate the Fizik Mistica saddle on that bike.

I put a bigger 11/40 cassette on the gravel bike, but while it has made the bike faster it also ruins the performance at higher speeds and still shifts terribly in the lowest gears. [I still think 11/36 is the right size, but ya know: supply chain]

Then I took Alastair out for a sunset-racing road ride on Monday and managed, within the span of 10 miles, to have the chain get skippy with stretch and have the rear shift cable jam.

The race is this weekend. I know I'm not going. I won't even be able to do the backup event I'd considered on the same date: the annual Cap2Cap century ride. Instead I'll be cheering for my son at a mountain bike race, which is great.

But now, in addition to saying I'm a racer without actually being one, I really don't even have anything to race. 3 bikes in various states of disrepair, and one part is on back-order until the day AFTER the season-opener at the Bryan Park Training Series.

It's a whole pile of frustrate, so I spent money on retail therapy. Gotta recable the race bike anyway: might as well freshen up that bar tape.

And oh my it's gonna be a garish delight for the senses. Because by some random happenstance my absolute favorite hideous color combination manages to be available for most of my accessories, and I'm leaning in hard. I may finish poorly this year, but you won't miss me. I cannot wait to bring the bling.

And this is the first step of how I get my groove back. Prepare your eyes.

A crossroads of anxiety where bikes sit squarely in the middle

 I say I race bikes. I find that I say it less frequently than I used to. Partly that's down to the pandemic, but partly it's down to refocusing on other things that matter a whole lot more than carbon and lycra. But I still say it, just the same.

I used to be pretty excited about it. Even as recently as February I was restructuring my year to set my sights on racing gravel and changing my training blocs from Zwift 1-hour max-efforts to multi-hour mixed-bag efforts.

Last Fall I did a season of Zwift Racing League that, while fun, kinda ruined my perspective on my own fitness and abilities. My 4.5W/kg and estimated VO2 Max of 62, which under almost any other circumstances would have been considered damned good, were insufficient to finish even a single race in the pack, and a 45-second 800W sprint was only good enough for 2nd place in an intermediate sprint, followed by immediately being dropped from the pack. Add an utter inability to read the race strategy and I didn't feel like I was holding up my end of the bargain for the team.

Since my power was already "good enough", I shifted away from ZRL to start thinking about Monstercross, which is always a hard race, but a great early-season test. And yes I met all my goals, but with a result that was much worse than in years prior, and it became instantly evident that Zwift was actually representative of the changing face of cycling: people are truly stronger and fitter than they were in 2019.

No worries: I'd have 3 months to build fitness for Grinder Nationals (100 miles, 6200', 80% gravel) in May, and I signed up for a 3-race series of progressively longer & steeper gravel races to gauge my progress.

It hasn't gone to plan.

The first race saw much the same issues I'd seen at Monstercross: I can start strong, but I run out of give-a-shit much faster than I used to. Within 30 minutes of the start I was off the pace, and by 35 miles I just wanted to quit.

The 2nd race...I skipped. Kids had been sick, work, yadda yadda. Plus it snowed on race-day, and just f* that nonsense. Lots of excuses.

Then the kids got super crazy sick and we went on vacation and I missed the whole week of training before the 3rd event, and it produced not only the worst race result I've ever had for actually finishing a race, but the highest relative effort I've ever seen for anything on a bike. My fitness wasn't improving: it was getting worse, and I had to walk the bike significant portions of the steep hills and still ended up with some of the worst cramping I've ever experienced.

One of the challenges I face at this time of year is an absolute hatred of Zwift. If it's even remotely tolerable to be outside, I won't get on Zwift. But my schedule doesn't really permit me to do many group rides, so it's solo or nothing. Alastair isn't even doing road with me because he's having a fantastic season of mountain bike racing, which is great, and gives me an opportunity to get a dedicated 2-hour block 3 times a week. But it's all solo, and it's so much easier to just ride "hard enough" when you're alone.

So I got permission to do a couple of group rides at non-standard times just to see how my fitness stacked up, and hoo boy not good. In the first, a ride I can usually do all summer long, I was nearly dropped in the first 3 miles. I rallied and stayed with it, but it was a surprise, and my average power was nowhere near what it had been last year.

In the 2nd, I was dropped HARD in about 5 miles. It was embarrassingly bad. So bad that I decided to pivot back to that skipped gravel race and just ride its course over the following weekend...which was the 2nd worst gravel ride I've ever done, and left me wondering just what, exactly, it is I think I enjoy about this sport.

If it's the racing, I'm not in the shape for that. If it's the adventuring, I sure as shit didn't enjoy that this weekend. If it's the people, I barely get to see them, and the people I like riding with hate gravel. It could be the time I get to myself, but even that gets old after a while.

So yeah I guess I race bikes? But maybe not because Alastair's having such a good time racing mountain bikes that we're canceling our participation in Grinder Nationals so he can focus on his points-standing in his current series. He hates gravel anyway so it's no big loss for him, and there's no way on God's green Earth that I could manage 100 miles on gravel right now.

I did just throw some money at the gravel bike to FINALLY embrace a mullet setup for the steeper stuff, but every time I get the TIME to test it the weather turns to shit. So...Zwift.

It's 80-degrees outside today, the sun has been shining, and there's about a 90% chance that the only way I ride today is on the hamster wheel.

I hate what I love.