Vinnie Tortorich

“The man in the suit has just bought a new car from the profit he’s made on your dreams.” – Traffic

I walked into a sushi restaurant one day. The sushi chef was an American. I turned around and walked out. He might have been the best sushi chef in the world. But he didn’t fit my image of a sushi chef. There was another time when I walked into an Italian restaurant and could see in the back that all of the food was being cooked by Mexicans. Once again, I turned around and walked out. Why? It just didn’t look right to me. It might have been the best Italian food in the world. It didn’t matter. Does my theory hold any weight? I don’t know. Let’s take cars. Italians make the Ferrari. The Japanese and Americans copy their designs and make sports cars. But they’re not Ferraris. You can take all the specs of a brand new Corvette, and in most cases, it will out-perform the car from Italy. At the end of the day, if it doesn’t have the badge of the prancing horse, it just ain’t a sports car. The founder of the company, Enzo Ferrari, once said the only true American sports car is a Jeep. Why? Like the Ferrari, the original Jeep was built for a purpose. It only does one thing really well. I told you that to tell you this. Serena and I were having dinner last night with a mutual friend. The friend was in town from Hong Kong where she lives with her husband and kid. They started talking about the good days and this trainer they once shared. Let’s call him Rodney, which is not his real name. I don’t personally know Rodney but we’ve exchanged niceties from time to time. There is something very interesting about him. In my guess, he goes about 300 pounds. Most of it jiggles. I asked the two women why would they pay an expert who can’t take care of his own body? The first answer I got was that he was nice. I realized right there that Rodney and I were vastly different. I don’t think anyone has ever paid me for being nice. I’ve been fired for not being nice enough. But guess what, I’m not going to change. After prodding a bit, our friend admitted that Rodney wasn’t really a good trainer. Often she would have to motivate him to motivate her. She said her husband shared my view of Rodney. She also told me Rodney charges one third of what I charge. Then we went into one of those “I guess you get what you pay for” conversations. In my opinion, she wasn’t even getting one third. The point I’m trying to make is there are a lot of so-called experts out there. And they’re not all just fat like Rodney. Some of them look quite fit. There are whole Web sites dedicated to these folks where you can hire a “coach” to help you do anything from marathons to triathlons to mountain climbing. In reality, you’d be better most of the time coaching yourself and saving the money. In the cyber world we’re living in today, it seems that anyone can hang a shingle out and become an expert on something. There’s not a lot of regulation on this. It’s a “buyer beware” market. In the fitness game, the client can end up hurt, and with that I have a real problem.

“I used to ride with a vending machine repair man. He says he’s been down this road more than twice.” – Sheryl Crow

I’ve eaten most of my meals out since I’ve become an adult. This is the antithesis of how I grew up. Until I was 18 years old, just about every meal was eaten in my house or at my grandparents’ houses. That’s kind of how Italians do it. Because of my job and my lifestyle, the only time I’m near my house when it’s time to eat is at breakfast. The other two meals are generally in restaurants. It seems like restaurants go through phases. In the mid-80s you couldn’t go into a restaurant without them asking if you wanted blackened chicken or blackened fish. If they could blacken ice cream, they would have. Shortly after that, everything became pesto. Pesto pasta, salad with pesto sauce…all of a sudden I couldn’t get away from pesto. Until they decided everything was about capers and hearts of palm. The list goes on and on. A style of food seems to come around, we beat it to death, then move on to another style. I told you that to tell you this. I was talking to my nephew the other night. He was complaining that his balls hurt. He’s complained about these balls for the past month or two. At first I thought he had a groin pull. Since I’m not a doctor, you know, like Perez Hilton is not a fitness expert, I told him he should visit a real doctor. Let’s call my nephew Mike because that happens to be his name. He never rides a bicycle. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he owns one. I started thinking about bicycle seats and how all of a sudden after hundreds of years of using one type of seat, someone decided that it was bad for your perineum (AKA, the taint). If you still need directions, that’s the area south of your balls and north of your bung. All of a sudden bicycle companies were telling us we would become impotent if we rode on bicycle seats. Let me tell you. It ain’t gonna happen. At 48 years old and over 15,000 miles of riding per year, I’ve never once had a problem. Maybe the best example would be Lance Armstrong, who’s known for sporting one nut. He lost the other to cancer. That guy has no shortage of kids running around. Lest we not forget, he kept Sheryl Crow happy. Three years ago you could hardly buy a seat that didn’t have the middle cut out. There was no shortage of doctors coming out of the woodwork to say that if we didn’t use these types of saddles, the human race would be over with. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a little. But you know what I mean. These saddles came and went. Kinda like sundried tomatoes. Remember that era? By the way, my favorite saddle is the old style Brooks saddle. I have them on every one of my bikes and my spinners. Brooks has well over 100 years of technology. It’s the best saddle out there.

It’s an age-old argument. It’s been done in every sport. Would Babe Ruth have been as good today against modern pitchers with all of their fancy pitching coaches, steroids and gadgetry? Would Mike Tyson be able to beat Muhammad Ali in his prime? Who would win a competition between Lance Armstrong and Eddie Merck? Or for that matter, what about Merckx versus Fausto Coppi? Put them all in the same competition. Who wins? Clearly Lance has the better equipment. It weighs on average 5-7 or even 10 pounds lighter than what Merckx and Coppi rode. Not to mention slopping top tubes, computer-generated carbon fiber frames and metal taken straight from the space shuttle. How do we measure all of these great champions? Is one better than the other? Does modern technique, training and nutrition have any bearing on this? I told you that to tell you this. Last weekend something small and largely insignificant happened that may shed some light on this subject. It passed by so quickly that no one took notice. No one except me. Oh, some people made reference to it in the small ultracycling world. But I’m not sure they were thinking of the bigger picture. Let me explain. The Furnace Creek 508 ultracycling race, also dubbed as the “toughest 48 hours in sports,” took place once again in Death Valley. It was won by 52-year-old Terry Lentz. Although his age may seem significant in this story, it’s not really. I’ve done pieces on my good friend David Holt, who’s 59, and also finished in the top 10. He won an ultracycling race last month, and it’s hard to pull it together just a month later. But I digress. Terry’s story is a little different. I don’t know Terry Lentz personally. What I do know is limited. But here goes. Terry Lentz came in third overall back in 2008 in the same race. What makes it significant is that Terry did it on a single-speed fixed-gear bike. If Terry is so good, why wouldn’t he ride a regular geared bike and win it all, some said. Others mentioned that he picked the specific gear. I had a different view. I thought he was a fucking stud. Why? I ride a fixed-gear bike sometimes. I’ll go over 100 miles and do 8-10,000 feet. I’m here to tell you folks, it hurts. You only have one gear and you can’t coast. Terry came back this year. Once again, in true Lentz form, he picked a wacky category to be in, called Classic Bike. In this particular division, you’re only allowed to use equipment from up until 1980. This simply means that you have shifters on the down tube, not integrated into your brake system. You have steel-frame bikes, which are much heavier than the carbon fiber bikes of today. You have to have a certain number of spokes, so $3,000 Zipp wheels are not allowed. You’re only allowed six gears on the back. Basically, you’re working with antiquated equipment. It’s heavy and it doesn’t give you the advantages that the companies today tell you that you get from high-end gear. How did Mr. Lentz fare using this type of equipment? Not only did he win the race out-right, but he beat a formidable competitor, Chris Ragsdale. Not only was Chris using the best, most recent gear available, he also set a new world record this year in ultracycling. He broke the 1,000-kilometer record. Does this mean that Michael Phelps would beat Mark Spitz? Does it mean Mary Lou Retton would beat Nadia Comaneci? I don’t know. But it does give us some insight that in any competitive event, it’s won by people, not equipment.

I think I’ve mentioned this before, but here it is again. Ultracycling and ultrarunning is difficult in two ways. The more obvious way to the casual observer is the general length of the event. The average “go to the gym and exercise fanatic” may spend an hour a day, five days a week doing an aerobic activity. In an average month, they do about 20 hours of aerobic exercise. When you consider an ultracycling or ultrarunning event on the short end generally takes 24 hours, and sometimes goes as long as 60 hours, with little or no sleep over a weekend, you can understand the amount of training needed to stand at the starting line. In the second way, at the height of your training, you could be looking at on average 22-25 hours of training per week. This comes to over 100 hours of aerobics per month. I’ve done these events off and on since the mid-90s. I have the same thing in common with most other ultra athletes. We’re champions at scheduling and allotting our time to squeeze out every moment of training, every day. After training for the first four and a half months of this year for the Furnace Creek 508, which sets off on the first week of October every year, I figured out that I couldn’t put the proper time in to complete the race. I sent the director of the event, Chris Kostman, an e-mail stating that I would be dropping out this year. I then started informing some of my riding buddies that I would be free for the casual 50-100 mile ride on the weekends, and not the 200-250 mile rides they were used to me going on. I told you that to tell you this. About a week after dropping out of the race, my two riding buddies, Steve and Johnny, had a ridiculous idea. They thought that since I couldn’t do it solo, maybe we could do it as a four-man team. My knee-jerk reaction was no for several reasons. First and foremost, I hate doing relay ultraraces. I have done a couple mountain bike versions of this. I hated it because you warm up, go really hard, cool down just long enough to where you have to warm up, and go again. In a 24-hour mountain bike race, this means you go at it in time-trial form for an hour, every fourth hour, for a 24-hour period. The second reason: I had been riding with Johnny for the better part of 20 years. Here are a few things I learned for certain in that amount of time: he loves to go 40 or 50 miles. Sometimes he can be talked into a 60 or 70 mile ride. In all the years of riding together, I had only known him to go over 100 once or maybe twice. He is neither fast nor slow. He’s got one speed in between the two. Steve is a completely different story. I’ve written about him on this blog before. I refer to him as the Jewish Rambo. He never misses a day of doing upper body exercise. He’s got biceps like Popeye. At 52, this guy has little to no body fat. But when it comes to aerobic activity, Steve is just not a big fan of it. He literally rides a bike two days per month. It’s always a Saturday on weekends when he doesn’t have his son. He will actually ride the most impressive 35-40 miles you’ve ever seen. Then because of his lack of aerobic conditioning, his legs will cease up and cramp, rendering him useless. These cramps have been so bad in the past, that he would be literally two miles from finishing and we’d have to go back and get him in a car. Johnny and I would make bets as to which mile Steve would cramp up on. Steve was also a fan of not taking enough water. We would use this information and the temperature of the day to figure out how to win that bet. Then there was a third problem. Our four man team only had three men. To find our fourth man, we went to the fairer sex, and got one of my best friends and dearest clients, Christina DeRonde, to sign on. This was no easy feat, as she had a busy schedule. Beside raising two beautiful girls, she does a full season of short course, medium course and Ironman distance triathlons. To put it simply, her tri-bike gets shipped from event to event, hardly ever making it home. She just finished the Nationals in Tuscaloosa, Alabama last week. She has another event coming up shortly. I guess you could say when she came to do our event she tapered off a bit. Needless to say, I wasn’t worried about Christina being ready. Between May and October 1, I watched Johnny and Steve become “real athletes.” Johnny started dropping a couple of pounds that he started to put on with the stress of the economy the past couple of years. He also started talking about different gearing for his bike. This was a guy who never cleaned a chain or pumped up his tires before this. On the weekends, it was common to see him go from 100 to 120 miles, and follow it with a 50-mile Sunday ride. Steve also stepped up to the plate. At first I would notice two full water bottles on his bike. He saw the advantage of drinking water with electrolytes in it. He started carrying two extra water bottles on his seat post. He rode his bike so much he needed new tires and a tune up. He did two more things this summer that was very impressive. He went over 100 miles for the first time ever. He also took precious weekend time from his lovely girlfriend Evonne to spend a weekend with me in Death Valley, going over his first stage of the race. Death Valley was cool that weekend. It only got up to 118 degrees. I was proud of the boys. I was also happy that Christina decided to sign on. What I didn’t expect was what happened when the race started Saturday morning. My original prediction was that we’d finish somewhere between 7 and 10 in a division with 14 teams. Let’s face it, I didn’t really train hard for this event. Johnny and Steve had never been in a cycling event of any sort in their lives. And the star of our team, Christina, was still working off sore legs from Nationals last week, where she had an impressive time. Johnny started the race. I thought it would be great if he went first. There’s a lot of climbing, perhaps 6,000 feet of it, and the stage is about 85 miles. I always think of Johnny as being very resilient. He’s not the fastest climber in the world. But he always gets it done, and I knew he wouldn’t cramp. Not only did he avoid cramping, but he did that stage in five hours, at least 45 minutes faster than we expected. Johnny told me later he had to stop once to pee, and he considered doing it off the bike, but didn’t understand the logistics of how that worked. Steve went next and picked up where Johnny left off. In a stage where I expected four hours and 20 minutes, he ended up doing it in four. By the time I got on the bike, we were in sixth place. I chose the third stage for one reason and one reason only. Not only was it the longest stage at 99 miles, but it also includes the fabled Towne Pass climb. It’s an 11-mile climb. It’s unrelenting, with grades anywhere from 8 to 13 percent. My original intent was to put out a hard effort to the climb, followed by a moderate effort on the climb, then a strong finish on the descent into Furnace Creek, which is the halfway point. That didn’t happen. After seeing the effort my two buddies put in, I knew I had to suffer and do my best throughout the whole stage. By the time my stage was over, we were no longer in sixth place, we were in fourth. I give Christina a lot of credit for her first long stage. Not only was there plenty of climbing, she was doing something she had never done before. She was riding in the middle of the night with the only light coming from the headlights on our chase vehicle behind her. This is an amazing feat. When I first started riding with Christina several years back, she was so scared to go downhill, she would literally take her feet out of the clips. She was barreling downhill heading to Shoshone in the pitch black of night. This type of intense effort continued all day Sunday as we finished the race in fourth place, in 32 hours and 48 minutes. This surpassed my prediction of a best-case-scenario of finishing in 36 hours. I’ve known all three of these people for at least 10 years, Johnny for 20. They proved something to me this weekend. I saw a side of each one of them that I had never seen before. I c
ame away with a greater respect for each of them.

“I may be going to hell in a bucket, babe. But at least I’m enjoying the ride.” – Grateful Dead

I have a brother who’s overweight. He’s my height and pretty much has my same frame. He was a great athlete in high school. Just like me, he was recruited to play college football. But that’s where our stories get dramatically different. I went on to play football. When I was done, I was determined not to become another one of those has-beens who gains a bunch of weight. So far I’ve succeeded. Just shy of my 48th birthday, I tip the scales at 169 pounds on my heaviest days. My brother is the antithesis of this. He never played college football. Instead, he picked up a fork. From what I can tell, he hasn’t put it down yet. To be brutally honest, if it wasn’t for that fork, he wouldn’t get any exercise at all. My brother now tips the scales in the 350 to 365 pound range. It fluctuates depending on if he’s at the feeding trough or starting a wacky diet that’s guaranteed to work. He made a statement toward me once saying I’m prejudiced toward fat people. I told him he was wrong. My prejudice is toward fat people who never try to do anything about it, like him. By the way, I don’t look at wacky, lose-weight-quick diets as really trying. That’s like saying I’m a business man, and your business is Amway. The scenario I actually used with my brother was such. Consider this: You’re driving through a neighborhood and all the houses on the street are in fine order. The grass is cut, the garden tended to, the paint is fresh on each house, except for one. This one house is in total disarray. The lawn is brown, the shutters falling off and there’s weeds everywhere. It’s a total mess. I asked, “How do you feel about the people who live in that house?” He said,”I’d think they were lazy and didn’t give a shit.” I agreed. “Now you know how I feel when I look at you,” I said. I told you that to tell you this. There seems to be a new epidemic sweeping the nation. YouTube has no shortage of what’s becoming known as the fattest kids. In some cases I wonder if people aren’t using that Kardashian method just to become famous. I have a video in this blog with a 7-year-old child weighing over 400 pounds.

The sad part, I saw that same kid a couple of years back on a TV show. They were calling her the fattest toddler when she was over 200 pounds. Do I blame the kid? Hell no! It’s the parents’ fault. Because of my acute memory for dumb things, I remember the mom on the show. She had a southern accent, not that this has anything to do with the rest of the story, just thought I’d mention it. The mother seemed to have limited mental faculties. She told the host of the show that she had no control over her daughter. Are you effing kidding me? Oh by the way, mommy was fat herself. In my opinion, the authorities should have rushed in right there and taken this child away. But that didn’t happen. We allow this imbecile of a mother to waltz out of that studio with that child in tow, and go on to pack another 200 pounds on her. Now she’s the star of a YouTube video. Haven’t we gone after people for a lot less? Remember the mom who was caught disciplining her kid in the backseat of an SUV? We were shocked as a country. This woman was tried and hung in the media. Where is the judge and jury on this one? When does child services jump in? Where’s Tipper Gore? I thought she tries to save all the children. I’ve now worked myself into a frenzy. I will now go and find a picture of awoman who’s never had a weight problem, Sophia Loren, to calm my nerves. Thank you and good night.

“We are stardust. We are golden. And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” – Joni Mitchell

When I was a kid, there were plenty of fruits and vegetables around. All of my Italian great uncles grew gardens. I’m not exaggerating when I say we probably had in the neighborhood more than five acres of vegetable gardens. You name the fruit and vegetable, we probably had it. From sweet potatoes, onions, broccoli and cauliflower, it was all there. There were fig trees, lemon trees and even orange trees. It was so abundant, my family and my extended family couldn’t eat it all. I remember if I had a hot date or wanted a new baseball glove, I simply picked vegetables and sold my product at the roadside until I got what I wanted. I remember feeling like a real man when I got to work the plow. I always carried a pocket knife so I could scrape the dirt off of a carrot or turnip and eat it while I was working. It might sound like a cliche, but it doesn’t get any fresher than that. The one thing that I remember was that our vegetables looked exactly like the ones in the stores, if not better. As a matter of fact, the only time we bought things from the store was in the off season. Let’s face it, Italians still need tomatoes. Then all of a sudden something happened. Slowly but surely the fruit and vegetables in the store were better than ours. Oranges started coming in a seedless variety. I remember thinking as a kid, if there were no seeds, how would you get the next crop? Oranges also started to come without navels. Tomatoes seemed to get bigger, redder and plumper. There was a new name for these vegetables and fruits: hybrids. That’s right folks, genetically manipulated. You know what else was special about them? They cost more, and the consumer paid. This went on for years. Then something strange happened. We started getting our old fruits and vegetables back, the ones with the seeds. Or else Joni Mitchell said, my apples had spots again. The fruit was back to regular size. It all went back to its original taste. It was that plump, juicy taste that had been missing from the hybrid. There was a problem. My old fruit and vegetables didn’t just come back on the market. They came back with a vengeance. They were called organic. The old stuff that was now new again with its new name also came with a premium. It cost more than the expensive hybrid fruit. And we bought into it. First there was Mrs. Gooch’s, Whole Foods and Henry’s Market, just to name a few. They all had a kumbaya flair to them. The people who worked there were hip and wore Birkenstocks. But trust me, they were plenty corporate. They trade on the open market just like oil companies and dot-coms. I told you that to tell you this. We seem to love nostalgia in this country. Everything that’s old again is new again, then old again, then new again. Take the bicycle world for example. In the early 1900s everything was a single speed fixed gear. Then you had to have many gears. Then you had to have even more gears. Now there’s a throwback to the single speed fixed gear. You don’t have to do much research to figure out that they all came in steel form, then aluminum, then titanium, then carbon fiber and now the world is headed right back to steel. Let’s face it, you have to keep changing it if you want to keep selling bikes.

Running shoes, same thing. First there were very thin flat soles, then more cushion, then a little more, then shoes were rated on how stable they were. Now we’re back to minimum stability and minimum cushioning. I guess the point I’m trying to make here is that sometimes we’re all too eager to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If bike equipment has changed so much over the years and diets have gotten so much better, then why are so many old cycling records holding up? Eddie Merckx didn’t have a fancy technical diet, trainers and gurus like cyclists have today. A lightweight bike in his era weight five to seven pounds more than a bike today. Before you go out and buy an expensive bike, look in your garage. Or try going to eBay, you might be surprised at what you find.

Sophia Loren…what was hot then

Paris Hilton…what’s hot now

Which one is better?