Functional Threshold Power

It's not just a fitness thing

Author

Aaron Weber
February 25, 2025

Today’s song is Gimme Sympathy, by Metric. It’s a bop, of course, but it also supports my ongoing claim that while rock has lost its preeminence in the popular music pantheon, it remains relevant as a source of inspiration. In this case, Gimme Sympathy is a response to Gimme Shelter, but also to the rivalry between the Rolling Stones and the Beatles:

After all of this is gone
Who'd you rather be,
The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?
Oh seriously, you're gonna make mistakes, you're young.
Come on, baby, play me something, like "Here Comes The Sun"

So it’s an optimism thing, more or less. We could use it.

(Also: interpolation and sampling of rock songs seems less popular than interpolation and sampling of R&B and soul. Is that just the style, or do R&B samples just work better for today’s hot hits? Sure, you can point to Lil Nas X riffing on In Bloom for his song Panini, which even gave Nirvana their highest-charting single decades after the band broke up, but that’s kind of a rare exception, isn’t it?)

Stray Thoughts On Bikes

Some of these may be entirely obvious to everyone else but I find them interesting.

  • Prowess in weightlifting is measured in kilos. Prowess in running is measured in miles per hour or minutes per mile. Prowess in cycling is measured in watts per kilogram, and in particular the measurement of functional threshold power (FTP), which is roughly the highest wattage you can produce over a sustained period of time.

  • When driving a car, you pick a speed and try to stick to it by changing the gearing and amount of power you expend. When riding a bike, it’s better to choose a sustainable power output, and change speed and gearing to maintain it.

  • The derisive name for a cyclist you do not like is “Fred.” Fred spends money like a pro but rides and (most importantly) dresses like an amateur. I can’t remember the equivalent term for a motorcyclist you dislike, but I think it might be “dentist.”

  • “Cycling” refers to competitive road (and sometimes gravel) riding in the same way that “weightlifting” refers specifically to Olympic weightlifting. That is, it’s a distinction that matters almost exclusively to insiders, and knowing or making the distinction is part of what makes you an insider.

  • The French origins of cycling as a sport persist in terms like gilet (vest) and bidon (water bottle).

Fear

Matt Yglesias was always the divisive hot take guy, sometimes trenchant, sometimes wildly wrong, generally clever, but not all that helpful. But let’s take a look back at this article from 2015 and sort of collectively say “oh shit, he might have been right about that one.”

And some more recent commentary:

  • The Atlantic: “What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

  • Foreign Affairs: “U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties… What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”

But come back to optimism for a moment. Because we’ve been here before, and we’ve won. Nazis marched in Boston this week, and they kept their masks on, because they know that if they showed their actual faces they’d be ruined, because they know they’re wrong.

We can still recover from this. We can take action, big or small, and move back toward the sort of world where healthcare isn’t over-politicized, where people control their own bodies, where we fund and achieve and celebrate amazing scientific breakthroughs.

Joy