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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Meanwhile, you yourself are a fairly performance-oriented endurance guy IIRC (I don't know if you own a power meter, but I wouldn't be surprised)

Only for indoor training. I stand by Zwift as the killer app for indoor cross-training and having a good trainer makes "hills" feel pretty comparable in-game to being outside. I'm not a competitive cyclist though, so outdoor rides are almost always just fun with friends. But yeah, I'm generally fairly serious about running performance, at least within the confines of being a too old never-was that's not willing to change my diet meaningfully.

It is interesting that these sports don't code right-wing the way that bodybuilding and fighting do. It might just be idiosyncratic, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a hormonal element - living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it (although my impression is that it takes quite a bit of high-effort volume for that to be an issue). There are some striking similarities between the cultures of running/cycling and powerlifting/bodybuilding though even if the politics don't jump off the page:

  • The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds. Bro-nerds, but nerds nonetheless. If you want an earful about physiology, just ask a bodybuilder or a runner.

  • Highly welcoming of newcomers. The fastest guy at the track and the biggest guy at the gym go out of their way to make newbies that show interest feel welcome, to try to make sure that they know it's a journey for everyone, and that no one's looking down on them as they get started.

  • These are places where you can find something of a männerbund. Guys work hard together, encourage each other, drive people forward when they're feeling lazy, celebrate successes together, and commiserate in failures and injuries.

Some of this is just that sports are generally excellent, but I wouldn't say the same things are as true in basketball or golf. There's something about the sports where everything is stripped away other than pure physicality and the numbers simply don't lie that's a little bit different.

living increases testosterone and endurance sports taken to extremes actually suppress it

I was going to mention this as another example of sloppy equivocation but it seemed like it was straying a little far afield. I'm reasonably familiar with the relevant literature, and it seems like we're awfully ready in conversations of this sort to ignore other androgens, androgen receptor status, the differences between acute and chronic effects, what actually counts as a clinically significant effect size, etc. etc. This might be a reasonable analytical approach if you zoom out far enough (pretty obviously in the case of men vs women, for example) but that's surely too coarse a level of resolution to distinguish between "lift 2x, run 5x" and "lift 4x, run 2x" within the same individual.

The guys in these sports are just absolute nerds.

There's definitely a performance engineering mindset out there in Line Go Up activities, and I appreciate it. But I also see a kind of religion mindset, where as a trainee you do the thing because it's virtuous, a form of worship, and as a coach or advisor you tell people what they should want and what the virtuous thing to do is and baldly assert that one thing or another is true without empirical evidence or sometimes even without a priori logical argumentation--pretty far removed from methodically figuring out how to get from a well-defined A to a well-defined B and rebuilding Neurath's boat. Rippetoe is an obvious case in point, and I say that as someone who pretty much got into lifting thanks to Starting Strength (in fairness, he got a lot worse after 2017 or so). Older heads make it sound like the HIT types of the early 2000s were like this as well. Alan Couzens is an example from the endurance world (and I actually agree with quite a bit of his advice.).

are places where you can find something of a männerbund.

True, though probably 99% of my training has been solitary so it doesn't seem terribly salient to me.