Yesterday afternoon, I decided to add some more bike miles to my monthly tally. At about the halfway point, I stopped at the Naples (Florida) Pier, the area’s public beach, for some water and people watching. Although the town of Naples rivals any place in America for the number of…

Until just a few years ago, I always thought of myself as just a not-very-good sleeper who could perform at a high level without a lot of zzz’s. As a kid, my natural state was “pretty wound up,” some combination of anxiety, energy, and ambition, that became most obvious after…

In early January 2010, I went to Jupiter, Florida to ride in my first U.S. qualifier for Paris-Brest-Paris. The 200K distance was a challenging yet doable ask after a snowy east coast off-season. …

Happy New Year and welcome to the first edition of Squaring the Curve for 2018! My holiday season, along with practically everyone else’s (or so we’re led to believe), was predictably hectic and further complicated by a variety of family illnesses both large and small including a particularly close call…

Water is a vital component of survival, performance, and long-term well-being. How long can we go without water? Basically, we need to find a source within about three days (depending on activity level and environment) or we’re in big trouble. We intuitively know that water must be important (think about…

In last week’s post, I presented five things that we need just to survive — oxygen, water, food, stable body temperature, and sleep — and proposed that we should consider fulfilling our basic needs of these requirements before moving on to more sophisticated ways to enhance and optimize performance at…

No matter how old I get, I hope I never stop trying to “get better”. But the other day, while checking out some complex new discovery claiming to improve brain function, I thought to myself, “What’s the use of complicated approaches to getting marginally better at something if you’re not…

“So often times it happens that we live our lives in chains. And we never even know we have the key.” (The Eagles, Already Gone) I co-teach a class in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon every fall where, to facilitate the formation of project teams, we ask students…

In 2011, I qualified for Paris-Brest-Paris, a 1200 km (~720 mile)-in-less-than-90-hours cycling sufferfest. It was first run in 1891 and some say it was the precursor to the famed Tour de France. …