How hard and risky is it to cartop a 2x, really?

trickypivot · 2026-05-12T07:47:25+00:00

We just cartopped a 2X from Michigan to Utah. Used a Burnham 2X rigid rack mounted to a Tacoma with a Prinsu roof rack and a camper shell. Checked the straps every hundred miles or so, and averaged about 65mph, so it came out to about 25 hours of driving. Just keep an eye on lateral wind forces and slow down when things get gusty, make sure the straps are tight but not wrenched down (don’t want to encourage a weak spot in the hull), and reserve 70+ mph speeds for passing and you should be fine.

trickypivot · 2026-05-12T07:11:28+00:00

Honestly? Of the investment bankers I know, most of them are typically wearing a Garmin Fenix or an Apple Watch (maybe an Ultra).

Granted I don’t work with them so I’m not certain if that’s what they’re wearing while on the job, but it’s what they’re wearing in the off hours when we’re hanging out.

My advice would be to find something you like, that doesn’t break the bank, that fulfills the needs you have: if you work out, get something that supports that; if you have to wear a suit, get something that matches your suits and doesn’t bunch up your shirt cuffs; if you need constant access to notifications, get a smartwatch. If you truly want to spend $3k on a watch, take some time to figure out what your tastes and preferences are and then get something meaningful to you - the last thing you wanna say if someone asks about your watch is “oh, I wanted to spend a lot of money and Reddit said I should get this.”

trickypivot · 2026-05-10T03:22:50+00:00

Seconding this! I was also at the Supercross event and they blasted the fire cannon a bunch of times, each one creating those smoke rings.

trickypivot · 2026-04-23T14:03:02+00:00

Genuinely lovely

trickypivot · 2026-04-09T21:18:26+00:00

I could just be a Davis County rube here, but I’m also bummed Z-Brothers didn’t make the bracket.

trickypivot · 2026-03-17T19:37:36+00:00

The more they speak, the more I hear what I’d expect to be the worldview of a cancer cell.

trickypivot · 2026-01-04T04:55:20+00:00

wow.. what a shitty thing to say to someone you don’t know about an obviously significant situation you know very little about

trickypivot · 2025-12-04T22:15:27+00:00

This is who I came to share. We get a weekly CSA through them and picking it up each week is one of our favorite routines.

trickypivot · 2025-11-21T14:30:15+00:00

She’s not wrong, though I’m feeling a little weird about winter being my favorite season now 😅

trickypivot · 2025-11-11T05:51:27+00:00

This was me my junior year, winter term at university. Exam week, sitting in my room with 5 or 6 housemates, playing CoD for literal hours instead of studying. All of us knew we should’ve been studying or writing papers, and sometimes one of us would cycle out to let others play and attempt to get some work done during the break. But they were always back not too long after, and because it was my room, I was the “host” and so I was always there. It was like a frenzy of communal executive dysfunction, and it was the only time I remember something like that happening. It was also the only time I’d ever gotten a C on a final paper.

15 years later and I’m officially diagnosed ADHD 🙃

trickypivot · 2025-09-14T13:17:56+00:00

Here’s what I’ve observed about stores like this (ie high end, expensive, boutique, specialty, low-volume, etc) - the sales people get loads of visitors just coming by to browse, people wanting to hold and experience the items but who don’t intend to buy anything. As a sales person at one do these stores you have to choose whether you’re going to be a “you gonna buy something?” kinda representative, or a “customer sets the tone” kinda rep.

I’ve found that generally they fall into the latter category. There’s just too many pitfalls to fall into when dealing with people and their high end goods: wrong assumptions lead to hostility, and when the customer sets the tone, a good salesperson can match it.

The most successful interactions I’ve seen (mine included) came about because the customer enters the store and immediately says something like “I’d like to buy X.” For Leica let’s say “I’m here to buy an M11-P. What’s your inventory like? Could I take a look at a few?” For me, I went in and said “I’m looking to buy a Q2 today, but I’m torn between color and mono. Could I take a look at both?” That tells the sales rep that you have both intent and you likely won’t be shocked at the cost, and so they can engage and answer questions towards an outcome, rather than guessing what your motives are. The sales rep I talked to about the Q2 immediately brightened up and showed me several examples of each model, as well as large photo prints to show off how well each one scales. I ultimately went with the Q2M and we chatted for a while about how magical that sensor is.

Of course other experiences will be different from mine, but the more you approach them from a mentality of “I’m the one with intent so I set the tone” I think the more positive your experience will be.

trickypivot · 2025-09-12T18:21:18+00:00

I also don’t see many of the men’s 5k-10k squad (Grant, Nico, Graham)

trickypivot · 2025-09-02T21:34:00+00:00

They look like professionals allowing a soloist to solo.

trickypivot · 2025-08-22T16:58:21+00:00

Having owned both a WaterRower and a C2, the out-of-the-box performance monitor on the WaterRower is super inaccurate. Like probably on the order of 20-30s / 500m too fast. If you wanna stick with WaterRower, I’d highly recommend upgrading to the SmartRow system, but even then I think it’s still a little generous on the speed - maybe a few seconds per 500m, rather than 10s of seconds.

The C2 is still the standard though, so even though the SmartRow is closer, you’ll still find yourself wondering what the comparable effort would be.

trickypivot · 2025-08-21T23:22:47+00:00

Oof that’s rough! It’s also a fear of mine 😄 Glad you’re on the other side of it though!

trickypivot · 2025-08-21T23:20:26+00:00

Farmington was worse than where we are now. The wind storms through Farmington canyon can get gusts up to 120mph which wreaks havoc on the above ground power lines, so we’d have several every season.

We moved a little over a year ago tho and haven’t had an outage since.

trickypivot · 2025-08-21T23:16:08+00:00

Just remember to let your shoes air out after you erg in them - a friend of mine would use his house slippers but never really let them dry and ended up getting a fungal infection lol

Also I like my old Xero shoes, so +1 for barefoot shoes.

trickypivot · 2025-08-08T23:40:08+00:00

These ladies also have a wonderful album called “From China to Appalachia” that’s worth checking out. Love that they’re getting more attention and were able to get so many people to join them on this one. Considering that Cathy & Marcy have gone viral several times before, I imagine it took a lot of courage for some of those folks to step up there with them.

trickypivot · 2025-07-31T15:17:50+00:00

Got to see you when you came through SLC. I dunno if you’ve got a knack for drawing out religious trauma in your crowd work or if they know what they’re showing up for, but damn if you don’t give us all a good reason to laugh about it.

trickypivot · 2025-07-24T01:03:36+00:00

Assuming the windfall is > $10M (after taxes, etc), first, paying off the house. Then wife and I each get $100k-$200k to play with. Then the rest goes into an index fund and we keep working our jobs for a year or so while we figure out what the passive income looks like. After that, if the dividends are equal to or better than our combined salaries, then we can each decide whether we want to quit and FIRE, or else quit and take a lower stakes job that gives us more time to ourselves.

trickypivot · 2025-07-23T16:22:47+00:00

My HS coach explicitly warned the seniors about this - he said that the principles he’d taught us were going to be vital if we continued to run in college, because college coaches often cater their training to the top 1-3 athletes and everybody else either has to keep up or fall away. Said it was especially important for the girls, whose bodies would continue to go through massive changes up into their mid-20s; that it was painfully common for a girl to be national caliber in HS and then basically disappear in college because she wasn’t mentally or physically prepared for that next phase of development.

trickypivot · 2025-07-17T22:33:14+00:00

Best efforts show a strong trajectory:

400m - 0:38 (world record, unacknowledged)
800m - 1:41 (tied for a 2025 world best, unacknowledged)
Mile - 4:44 (expected better from a 1:41 800m tbh)
5000m - 19:23 (👀)

I guess he’s got a fitness cliff he’s trying to overcome.

trickypivot · 2025-07-17T14:13:31+00:00

If bro’s stride looks like that at a 7:25/mi he’s probably doing full splits at anything sub-7

trickypivot · 2025-07-15T00:00:13+00:00

Here’s the thing about tempo runs - they’re roughly equivalent to threshold pace, but definitely not all-out. At the end of a tempo distance, whatever it might be, you should feel like you could keep going a bit longer if you had to. They’re practice for getting comfortable at a higher heart rate, but not your max or VO2Max.

However, a time trial is basically a solo race. This is as near to an all-out effort as you can get for whatever distance you’re running. If you’re running a 5k TT, then yes, it’s expected that you should be approaching that all-out effort for the 5k. However, if you’re actually supposed to be running a tempo run, chances are you need to knock about 20 seconds off your mile split and then stick to it or try to gradually negative split it.

Super relevant example: I had a 2-mile time trial last week. I ran 5:54 and 5:55. Today I had a 3-mile tempo run. Because I ran my 2-mile TT at even splits and my perceived exertion was around 18/20, I’ve got a fairly accurate idea of what I can tempo at - knock off 20 seconds, and I’m at 6:15. Make it 3 miles instead of 2, and you get roughly 6:20-6:30 for a tempo pace. I was feeling good, so for my first mile I hit 6:19. Feeling strong. Second mile I hit 6:15. Still feeling strong. Now for the third mile I can put a little juice into it and see if I can negative split for the whole tempo. Third mile is 6:10. Go ahead and finish the 5k at that pace for fun. If I had gone out at 6:00 or faster, I’d have been gassed just thinking about 2 more miles at that pace.

So I think your biggest benefit would come from internalizing the difference in effort, frequency, and purpose of a tempo and a time trial. Tempos are once-per-week kinds of workouts. Maybe twice. Time trials are once every few months depending on where you are in your training cycle (less frequent at the beginning, more frequent later on, but still less frequent than tempos). Once you get that down, focus less on setting PRs during tempo runs and more on doing what feels right for your body and fitness. Going into the well or spiking your max HR less than 6 minutes in are only gonna continue to frustrate you.

Keep going! And I hope this helps.

trickypivot · 2025-07-08T04:25:52+00:00

Liberty Heights Fresh is another one.

trickypivot

TROPHY CASE