Announcing two new members of our blogging team . . .

. . . Nick Hornby and David Roche!

Just kidding.

Really, though, these guys are great and should be blogging for us.

Nick Hornby you know about. He’s the author of High Fidelity, the book that Phil once said that no woman should be allowed to read because it’s a cheat code for understanding guys. I’ve been reading an old collection of his book columns for the Believer, and it’s so bloggy . . . it would fit in so well right here. OK, he’s not gonna be blogging here; his monthly blog (I guess that’s too low a frequency of posts to be a “blog,” so let’s call it a “colummn”) is here . . . I guess I’ll put it in the Blogs We Read page.

Hornby’s what I’ve called a writer in the David Owen mode (that is, David Owen the American journalist, not David Owen the British politician): serious, earnest, somewhat intelligent but a bit of a blockhead. Which I mean in a good way. Not clever-clever or even clever, but he wants to get things right. There’s kind of a paradox: Hornby’s shtick is that he’s an unpretentious regular guy, writing about unpretentious regular guys—also, though, he’s a brilliant and successful author. It’s a little different than John Updike, who wrote about his uncultured hero Rabbit, while maintaining the urbane “Updike” character for his public image. Also different from Kingsley Amis, who basically tore himself apart in his attempt to be the regular guy befitting his literary and political ideology. In his blogging columns, Hornby is pretty upfront about the tension between his literary-intellectual and regular-guy personas.

Our other new blogger (not really) is David Roche, who I’d never heard of until I read this interview of him by Dennis Young. Roche is a funny guy, also very analytical, would be a good blogger for us. Like Hornby, he also has a column, but it’s in Trail Runner magazine, and it’s full of articles like “New Study Shows Strategically Reduced Carbohydrate Intake Does Not Improve Performance,” and I could care less about trail running. That interview, though, it’s great.

Here’s a sample:

A few studies have come out with athletes pushing 120 grams of carbs per hour, showing improved fatigue resistance late in events. But my mind was opened to how I could solve the Leadville equation during Stage 18 of the Tour de France. Victor Campenaerts won the stage unexpectedly, and after the stage, his sponsor Precision Fueling & Hydration released his data (rare in cycling, where everyone holds secrets like they’re Gollum). He did 132 g/hr, pushing closer to 150 g/hr at times. I had never heard of anyone trying that and succeeding at such a high level. So I went for it, and I think I showed that it’s possible in running too.

Cycling is conducting the biggest uncontrolled performance experiment in the world. In ultras, the margins of human performance are not here yet. I was 1.6 percent ahead of Matt Carpenter, and I bet someone is going to be a few percent ahead of me. In cycling, everyone has (very roughly) the same power at baseline. When the margins are that narrow, the best training/fueling wins, and that’s one reason why doping has such a troubled history in that sport—it’s a confounding variable that fucks up a true understanding of human biking performance over longer time horizons.

All this self-experimentation . . . he’s kind of like a sane Seth Roberts.