The Friday Thing #810

Well, this is has been an eventful week…

The Friday Thing #810 sticks with cycling this week – despite it being the cause of quite some pain over the last few days. Earlier in the week, my friend DougB had sent me a New Yorker piece about storytelling and how the phrase has become overused and overwrought. The irony is the piece was one of the most difficult things I have read in a while – not content wise, prose wise. It was just extraordinarily hard to make sense of. I suppose ironically that may have been the author’s point. Within it though, I found a turn of phrase I really enjoyed and noted down for future use. “It is what I have experienced from time to time, following the birth of a child, when I feel myself, for months on end, more place than person”. The “more place than person” part stuck with me for reasons I cannot quite explain.

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Later in the week I read a fabulous piece of storytelling in The New York Times that another pal, PaulB, shared with me. For some time, I have been boring my friends, and readers here, with the superhuman feats of the cyclists who take on the Tour de France every year. Three weeks of relentlessly riding bicycles up very large hills. I am convinced that this is the most arduous sporting event on earth and each year, I marvel at the athletes who literally race their bicycles up mountains. I rode my bicycle up one portion of one stage of the Tour last year and it took me 2.5hrs. I was quite proud of that ride up Mt Ventoux while also knowing that the pros complete it in under one hour. That’s quite hard to fathom….until now.

Though they didn’t include Ventoux in their story, the NYT produced this terrific visualization of the speed differential between pros and amateurs using data from Strava. Yes, you can tell great stories with data and Strava really is a trove.

Check out the Col du Tourmalet – a very serious climb rated “hors catégorie,” or “beyond categorization.” The amateurs in this visualization get a 30-minute head start on Tadej Pogacar of Slovenia yet over the course of 9.5 miles simply he flies by them. It’s incredible. And it’s epic storytelling.?

One other story this week was this one from PR Week about my new role here at Microsoft - it garnered a wee bit more attention than I had expected. Thank you!

That’s all for this week – I hope you enjoy both of these. I’m off to rest up and listen of course to Nothing Compares 2 U by Sinéad O'Connor. RIP.

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Cheers & happy Friday.

-Steve?