Do you listen to music when you ride?
I sure do, but I have a few rules: never when I am on a group ride or riding alone on busy streets. Always with both earbuds when doing uphill intervals on secluded roads and only the right earbuds in other situations.
I guess my liking of listening to music while riding comes from the countless solo long rides I have been on over the years. Between 2010 and 2014, I spent most of my weekends training in Vermont, around Jay Peak. The norm was getting up at 6 am, driving south for 90 minutes, riding for four to six hours, driving back home, have dinner, going to sleep, and repeat.
On some of the hilly roads in northern Vermont I could sometimes ride for an hour without seeing a car. It was the perfect training ground. Not many (none?) of my friends were training for week long adventures such as Haute Route Alps or the CTS Tour of California Experience like I was. It meant that while my buddies were riding locally in groups, I was riding by myself in the US, listening to music.
My playlist is pretty eclectic: French crooner Charles Aznavour, classic rock band, 80s and 90s hits, Quebec rock band Offenbach, and my all-time favorite Engelbert Humperdinck.
One weekend, I decided to change things up: Northern Vermont on the Sunday and Upper New York State on the Sunday. Most people are familiar with Lake Placid, NY where the winter Olympics were held in 1932 and 1980. The big mountain in the area is Whiteface Mountain. There is a private road that goes to the summit. From the little bridge in the Town of Wilmington to the summit, the distance and the elevation gain is the same as Alpe d’Huez, a little-known fact.
While there is little traffic on that road, it is quite narrow, so I elected to apply the “right earbud only” rule. On that day, I climbed the hill twice. On the second climb, I decided to listen to the Beatles Red Album (1962-1966). That is when I discovered that you can’t listen to the Beatles with only one earbud. Try it with All My Loving. You can clearly hear Paul’s bass and George’s guitar on the left side and there is pretty much only the singing on the right side. Ringo is faint on each side. That’s just the way they were recording back in the days I guess. In other words, if you listen to the Beatles with only one earbud, you only get part of the song.
Which brings me to politics. Politics, or more precisely, the reporting of politics and how it shapes people’s political opinions and views of politicians is a passion of mine. There are people on “both sides of the aisle” who believe their source of information gives them the whole truth when in fact, they are only getting a part of it, like listening to the Beatles with only one earbud. I personally have a very broad and diverse source of information which ‘crosses across the aisle”. I have a paid subscription to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. I read Politico and Breitbart. I listen to NPR and Rush Limbaugh. I watch CNN and Fox News. To me, being informed means using the “left” earbud and the “right” earbud.
I have recently concluded that the best way to gauge if someone is informed about political matters, is to ask conservatives to articulate in positive terms why President Obama was so popular with people on the left and to ask liberals to articulate in positive terms why President Trump is so popular with people on the right. If someone can not positively articulate the other side’s position on a political issue, it tells me that they are unaware of what’s playing in the other earbud and it’s time for them to broaden their sources of information.
One of the main obstacles to being truly informed is that some people believe certain news outlets present what is normative, that they present THE reality, when in fact it isn’t so. Personally, I prefer All My Loving with two earbuds. The same applies to all the other songs on the Beatles Red Album and Blue Album.
With all of that said, I’d rather climb Whiteface Mountain listening to the Beatles with only one earbud than being at a dinner party listening to only side of a political matter.
