I'm now a Twit!

I've been quiet, I know. I haven't been posting as much, and I've been truant in all your comment sections as well. I apologize. I've had a drought of things to report right around the time that I discovered Netflix instant viewing, and my reading and writing time has taken a huge hit as a result. Pretty soon, though, I will run out of Law & Order SVU seasons to watch, the bike season will pick up, and I'll burst back on the blog scene.

In the meantime, though, I've joined Twitter. It was kind of an accident, really. I just wanted to see what the site was all about, but I couldn't figure out how to browse without setting up an account, so I did. I'm not entirely convinced that people want to know about it every time I sneeze, but I think that this could have some pretty useful applications this summer. First of all, I figured out how to put a feed on my sidebar (see it???). So now when there are long silences from me, you can see what's been going on in mini-posts that are guaranteed never to exceed 140 characters in length.

Also, since I can "tweet" (or "twit") from my phone, I'll be able to give instant updates from races and trips. I'll be able to keep you posted from the road in France, let you know when I'm stranded in the middle of buttfuck New York, and have friends update on my progress in some of the longer races that I do. In the off-times I'm going to try to keep the play-by-play on bodily functions to a minimum, and instead "twit" about interesting articles I read, or cool tid-bits I pick up from books. I'm going to TRY to keep it an interesting way to share information that everyone would care about.

And speaking of interesting tid-bits from books... I'm reading The Cyclist's Training Bible (little more than The Triathlete's Training Bible or Going Long with a different picture on the front and less consideration for swimming and running. Friel has made a mint printing the same book under 3 different titles! It's not even the best book out there, fer goodness' sake...). In the "Special Considerations for Women" section, he had an interesting paragraph about "Contraception." It went like this:

Contraceptives and Performance

A study at the University of Illinois showed that women who are on the pill may have an advantage in endurance sports such as cycling. During long endurance runs at a low intensity, women taking oral contraceptives showed an increase in growth hormone. They used significantly find [sic] carbohydrates and more fat for fuel than those women not taking the pill. This suggests that using oral contraceptives may improve a woman's capacity for burning fat, may allow her to get into shape faster, and may extend her endurance range in races. I am not aware of any other studies that have tested this finding, so the results should be taken with some reservation.
If you are not currently using an oral contraceptive, talk with your health-care provider before starting. Don't take the pill only for race-performance reasons.

I find this fascinating! I'm not on the pill, nor have I ever been. I have reasons for considering it (not for contraception, obviously, and not for performance enhancement, duh), but have always discarded the idea because of the oversimplified assumption that if testosterone makes you faster, then estrogen must make you slower. Boys = fast, girls = slow. So don't take extra girl hormones. I've heard that the pill can make you fat. Fat = slow.

Anyway, as the voices of experience, what have you ladies found?

Innocent? (play Barry White tune here)

Or DIRTY???

(play Riding Dirty here)