Leaving Safety Behind - an update and correction
First, I need to clarify that it's not my intent to post a new entry to this blog on a daily, or even regular, basis. If life worked out that it happened, then that would be a blessing. I'm hoping to share what I can, when I have to / want to / have time to, and that what I share will be relevant and helpful, and may even stimulate thought.
Secondly, I need to correct an impression I gave yesterday, which was based on experience and expectation, but turned out to be wrong.
I was pretty sure that Dallas Seavey would have been told that he could pass Aliy Zirkle for the lead of the 2014 Iditarod sled dog race when he arrived in Safety, Alaska yesterday morning.
After reviewing his comments caught on camera, it turns out he was just trying to stay in front of his dad. He seems to genuinely not know that he had won the championship (when he arrived in Nome), and during the live broadcast I watched, he asked, in effect, "Where's Aliy? Where's Jeff?" when told he had won. He left Safety after 3 minutes not to become the champion, but to beat his dad, who had been champion the year before. He accidentally became champion, by trying to beat the defending champion.
It could be inferred, then, that the only piece of information that helped Dallas Seavey win the championship was that he was ahead of Mitch Seavey. Had he known that Jeff King had scratched, had he known that Aliy Zirkle was inside the checkpoint, trying to decide whether to venture out into the cold, he may have made a different decision. He had his focus on beating dad, he knew dad was behind him, so he kept moving.
When Aliy Zirkle, who has to be the most graceful runner-up I've ever seen, was interviewed after the race, she said:
"It's been tough for 8 days. It's been tough. But this afternoon was the toughest mushing I've ever done. It was... it was life or death mushing. So, it was incredible. I got to Safety and he [Jeff King?] was missing. I had never been on the trail. I was lost most of the time. So, I got to Safety and had to take care of my dogs. And myself. And then there's snow machiners there saying they're flipping their snow machines. The weather says it's going to get worse, so what's a gal to do? So I had a cup of coffee, then Dallas [Seavey] went through and I had to follow him, so there you go."
For those of us not from Alaska, "snow machines" are what I grew up calling a snowmobile.
To me, the important thing here is that Aliy Zirkle, who yesterday I proclaimed to be the best racer over the last 3 years, may have stopped in Safety for too long. Not because she ended up staying long enough that Dallas Seavey caught up with her, but - and I'm just guessing here - but what cost her the championship was the information she received by not getting back out onto the trail.
She knew it was life or death mushing, and instead of thinking, "I just put Mother Nature in her place in a way that not even 4-time champion Jeff King could do," she thought, when informed by weather experts, "It's gonna get worse."
I'm going to take Aliy Zirkle's 2nd place and file it in a category someone once labelled "paralysis by analysis." Dallas Seavey knew one thing, and that one thing was the location of his dad (behind him) and he focused on that and ended up champion. Aliy Zirkle knew that Jeff King was lost, snow machines were flipping, the weather was getting worse, and there was hot coffee inside the building.
When I look at a chart and try to decide whether to make a trade, I can get paralyzed by looking at too many charts. My (former stock-broker) brother has taught me, "you know, they could have drawn those lines in lots of different ways," when looking at wedges and trends and such. The data can tell you what you want it to. Are we bottoming? Is this a dead-cat bounce? Is there a trend change?
I've been in the ER looking at someone who's chart and rhythm strip and labs and everything else said "no operation necessary" and the look on their face told me, "go look inside." Can I reliably take everyone to the OR based on just looking at their face? Only if you're okay with a lot of unnecessary operations being done! But can you trade in the market today without over-analyzing each position? Yes, if you mind your stops, and hedge.
Dallas Seavey left Safety with the ultimate hedge - he knew his dad was behind him. Be that kind of dad, where your kid knows they can ride off into the night, in "life or death mushing" conditions, and they know they will be okay, because you are coming along behind them.
Alex Wade
3/12/14
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Leaving Safety Behind - the story
Leaving Safety Behind - the story
Last year, when my kids were 6, 4, and 2, I decided to become an Ultimate Insider at the Iditarod website. It only cost a little money and according to the pundits the dollars in my account would soon be worthless, so it seemed logical to trade a little bit of "nothing" for an Ultimate of anything.
The Iditarod is addictive - once you start watching the Run Dog Run videos, and once you pick a few teams to cheer for, and once you realize that for a week in early March, almost 1000 dogs run about 1000 miles just because the mushers are willing to let them, and stay with them while they do, it's just plain addictive.
If you spend even a little time getting into it, you'll come across the name of last year's 2nd place finisher, Aliy Zirkle. An extremely charismatic musher, Aliy quickly became my children's favorite musher. They wrote cards to her (although they didn't get sent) and we cheered her along, and we really really hoped she would find the speed to catch up to, and pass, Mitch Seavey last year.
We wanted it, not because we had anything against Mitch Seavey. Mitch is a man who, from what I can tell from watching interviews and reading his profile, deserves to win the Iditarod as much as anyone. Truth be told, I probably have more in common with Mitch Seavey than Aliy Zirkle, but at the start of the race, watching a video with Ms. Zirkle in it, my kids fell in love with her and we cheered for her the whole way.
Part of why we cheered for her is that in 2012, she had narrowly lost to Dallas Seavey, Mitch's son. In an 8-day race over 1000 miles, where you are only required to stop and rest for a total of 40 hours over the whole course, she had lost - or, if you prefer, not won - by a mere 59 minutes and 44 seconds. It would have been great - GREAT! - for her to come back the next year, presumably apply all she had learned, and then win the 2013 race.
Instead, in 2013 she raced well, and despite that Mitch Seavey won his second championship by 24 minutes and 39 seconds, over Aliy Zirkle. She'd closed the gap in the final stretch by a minute, but it wasn't enough. Second place, two years in a row. (She was 11th in 2011.)
2012 - second place by 59 minutes and 40 seconds. 2013 - second place by 24 minutes and 39 seconds. Surely this would be her year?
And so for the 2014 Iditarod we ponied up the money to be an Ultimate Insider again, watching videos of dogs running across the tundra when we were supposed to be getting ready for bed. Learning about Alaska, reading about the training and care and breeding of the dogs. Watching the GPS tracker and refreshing it before the 5 minute automatic refresh, because, even though they are only moving 10 mph or so, when you see the markers moving along the trail, and you realize your racer is gaining or losing ground or - heaven forbid! - passing a former champion! It's intoxicating. [Kudos - MAJOR kudos - to the Iditarod team for putting together a great race and website.]
Each racer has a strategy, there are very specific rules, and it gets pretty complicated, as you might imagine, running 16 dogs across frozen ground for 8 days straight. Suffice it to say that in a good year, the race is still pretty heated when the mushers and dogs get to the final 77 miles, from a checkpoint on the coast of Norton Sound called White Mountain, where they are required to stop and rest for 8 hours, until they finish at Nome Alaska. We anticipated a close finish and began to see the 4 time champion Jeff King putting to an end our hopes of an Aliy Zirkle win when his dogs just plain out-ran her dogs to the White Mountain checkpoint.
He rested the required 8 hours, and left for the final check point before the finish line. According to people on the scene, the wind was blowing 65 knots, the path was extremely icy, and Jeff King was literally blown off the trail and into some driftwood. I'm still waiting to hear if he was using a brand-new sled that he'd had shipped to the White Mountain checkpoint (presumably) just for the final sprint, but whether that's true or not, the sled was stuck in the wood. After an hour of trying to extricate it, Jeff King scratched. I can only imagine how that must feel, and how hard he must have worked to get that sled out of the driftwood, but there is only so much a person do. (My hat is off to you, Jeff King, for racing like a champion right up until Mother Nature pushed you off the trail. Readers should be aware that if a racer accepts any help at all, even help with feeding the dogs, then they are disqualified.)
Apparently Aliy Zirkle arrived at Safety - which is the last checkpoint before the finish line - without realizing she had passed Jeff King in the dark of night. She would have known she had left White Mountain almost an hour behind him. She arrived, instead of losing time to him as she had in the previous legs, ahead of him. In fact, she would have learned that he was out of the race. She was in first place. She would also have known that the next competitor would have been Dallas Seavey, who had arrived at White Mountain an hour and 48 minutes after her, and thus would leave White Mountain (after the required 8 hours of 'rest') no less than one hour and 47 minutes behind her. (Aliy Zirkle stayed one extra minute in White Mountain.)
And further, with the information that seems to be available to them, and was certainly available to me, she would have also known that Dallas Seavey had taken the same amount of time to travel to White Mountain from the previous checkpoint in Elim, well, within 2 minutes. He was traveling virtually the same speed. He was almost 2 hours behind. She was in Safety, knowing that the wind was so strong that it had blown a 4-time Iditarod champion off the trail... It's possible (but not certain to me) that she would know that Dallas Seavey was making the trek from White Mountain to Safety more slowly than she had. In fact, he left White Mountain 1 hour 48 minutes behind her, but arrived at Safety 2 hours and 16 minutes behind her.
I would love to know the details of what happened at Safety. I would love to know if Aliy Zirkle was asleep when Dallas Seavey arrived, if she was exhausted, if she was convinced no one would be foolish enough to go out into the wind, if her team was so strong it wouldn't matter what anyone else did... I do not know what she was thinking, in the middle of the night, 20 miles from the finish, after 8 days of racing.
What I do know is that Dallas Seavey arrived 2 hours and 16 minutes after she did, but left 19 minutes before she did. Dallas Seavey pulled into Safety and would have been told he was in second place, and that Aliy Zirkle was still in Safety. They may have talked. They may have looked each other in the eye, or maybe he slowed down just enough to prove to the inspector that he had the required items packed with him and for the vets to check his dogs, and 3 minutes after his arrival he departed Safety.
19 minutes later, Aliy Zirkle left Safety, Alaska, and raced faster than she had mushed those dogs in the past 3 days, and over the next 20 miles she made up 17 minutes on Dallas Seavey. She left Safety 19 minutes behind him, and arrived in Nome Alaska 2 minutes behind the 2014 Iditarod Champion, Dallas Seavey.
I woke up this morning just a couple of minutes after the live finish. (Last year it was at 2 AM my time!) I had hoped that Aliy Zirkle would win, for many reasons. I have two little girls that need role models that aren't entertainers. I'm much closer in age to Aliy Zirkle than to Dallas Seavey, and it would have been great for the Generation X racer to beat the younger racer. She'd run a great race, she'd really earned the win.
I can't really blame her for not leaving Safety behind. I think I'll remember this story forever, though, because the way Dallas Seavey won this year appears to be a lesson for life, especially when you think about the fact that he literally had to leave Safety behind, going back out into the dark, cold night to coax another 2 hours and 48 minutes of running out of those dogs.
If I could ask Aliy Zirkle one question, it would be, "what did your gut tell you to do when you were there in safety (in Safety, Alaska), before Dallas arrived?"
As a surgeon I've come to understand that sometimes you have to trust your gut. You have to make a decision that might not come down to championships or 2nd place, and it doesn't always come down to life and death, thankfully! As an investor I can't say that I always properly hedge, sometimes I leave safety out of the equation entirely. I try to trust my gut, and I'm getting better at that. I'm going to spend a bit of time processing this one - is the lesson here to throw caution to the wind and get back out on the trail? Is second place in the Iditarod such a bad thing? It's pretty impressive that she's done it three years in a row now - my Buffalo Bills fan brother points out they lost the SuperBowl 4 years in a row - no other team went to the SuperBowl four years in a row! You could argue that Aliy Zirkle is the best racer out there over the last 3 years.
And you could argue that if she'd left Safety 3 minutes earlier, she would have won. That assumes that Dallas Seavey wouldn't have squeezed a little more speed out of his dogs at the finish, rather than letting her overtake him. Iditarod has seen that before - that's why the rules clearly state that the nose of the lead dog determines the winner. Dallas Seavey jumped off his sled and RAN along next to it at the end, after coming back from 24th place earlier in the race! He is clearly a worthy champion, and perhaps the lesson here should be that the future may not be as uncertain as we are led to believe by the doom-and-gloom folks among us? Maybe the next generation is ready to do some hard work, after all?
In the context of Hedging Life, I think the lesson has to be, at least at first blush: Finish. Never Give Up. Dallas Seavey must have thought he was too far behind, he was just too far behind, as he left White Mountain. Imagine the spark that raced across his mind when he arrived in Safety and realized, if I just leave Safety, I might be the champion? Finish. Leave Safety behind, and finish. Whatever it is that you are waiting for, it's not in Safety. It's out in the dark, with the wind blowing hard in your face, and the trail uncertain, and someone younger and stronger than you coming along to make the trade if you don't. Take a minute, and look at your portfolio, and decide if you need more or less safety. Trust your gut.
Last year, when my kids were 6, 4, and 2, I decided to become an Ultimate Insider at the Iditarod website. It only cost a little money and according to the pundits the dollars in my account would soon be worthless, so it seemed logical to trade a little bit of "nothing" for an Ultimate of anything.
The Iditarod is addictive - once you start watching the Run Dog Run videos, and once you pick a few teams to cheer for, and once you realize that for a week in early March, almost 1000 dogs run about 1000 miles just because the mushers are willing to let them, and stay with them while they do, it's just plain addictive.
If you spend even a little time getting into it, you'll come across the name of last year's 2nd place finisher, Aliy Zirkle. An extremely charismatic musher, Aliy quickly became my children's favorite musher. They wrote cards to her (although they didn't get sent) and we cheered her along, and we really really hoped she would find the speed to catch up to, and pass, Mitch Seavey last year.
We wanted it, not because we had anything against Mitch Seavey. Mitch is a man who, from what I can tell from watching interviews and reading his profile, deserves to win the Iditarod as much as anyone. Truth be told, I probably have more in common with Mitch Seavey than Aliy Zirkle, but at the start of the race, watching a video with Ms. Zirkle in it, my kids fell in love with her and we cheered for her the whole way.
Part of why we cheered for her is that in 2012, she had narrowly lost to Dallas Seavey, Mitch's son. In an 8-day race over 1000 miles, where you are only required to stop and rest for a total of 40 hours over the whole course, she had lost - or, if you prefer, not won - by a mere 59 minutes and 44 seconds. It would have been great - GREAT! - for her to come back the next year, presumably apply all she had learned, and then win the 2013 race.
Instead, in 2013 she raced well, and despite that Mitch Seavey won his second championship by 24 minutes and 39 seconds, over Aliy Zirkle. She'd closed the gap in the final stretch by a minute, but it wasn't enough. Second place, two years in a row. (She was 11th in 2011.)
2012 - second place by 59 minutes and 40 seconds. 2013 - second place by 24 minutes and 39 seconds. Surely this would be her year?
And so for the 2014 Iditarod we ponied up the money to be an Ultimate Insider again, watching videos of dogs running across the tundra when we were supposed to be getting ready for bed. Learning about Alaska, reading about the training and care and breeding of the dogs. Watching the GPS tracker and refreshing it before the 5 minute automatic refresh, because, even though they are only moving 10 mph or so, when you see the markers moving along the trail, and you realize your racer is gaining or losing ground or - heaven forbid! - passing a former champion! It's intoxicating. [Kudos - MAJOR kudos - to the Iditarod team for putting together a great race and website.]
Each racer has a strategy, there are very specific rules, and it gets pretty complicated, as you might imagine, running 16 dogs across frozen ground for 8 days straight. Suffice it to say that in a good year, the race is still pretty heated when the mushers and dogs get to the final 77 miles, from a checkpoint on the coast of Norton Sound called White Mountain, where they are required to stop and rest for 8 hours, until they finish at Nome Alaska. We anticipated a close finish and began to see the 4 time champion Jeff King putting to an end our hopes of an Aliy Zirkle win when his dogs just plain out-ran her dogs to the White Mountain checkpoint.
He rested the required 8 hours, and left for the final check point before the finish line. According to people on the scene, the wind was blowing 65 knots, the path was extremely icy, and Jeff King was literally blown off the trail and into some driftwood. I'm still waiting to hear if he was using a brand-new sled that he'd had shipped to the White Mountain checkpoint (presumably) just for the final sprint, but whether that's true or not, the sled was stuck in the wood. After an hour of trying to extricate it, Jeff King scratched. I can only imagine how that must feel, and how hard he must have worked to get that sled out of the driftwood, but there is only so much a person do. (My hat is off to you, Jeff King, for racing like a champion right up until Mother Nature pushed you off the trail. Readers should be aware that if a racer accepts any help at all, even help with feeding the dogs, then they are disqualified.)
Apparently Aliy Zirkle arrived at Safety - which is the last checkpoint before the finish line - without realizing she had passed Jeff King in the dark of night. She would have known she had left White Mountain almost an hour behind him. She arrived, instead of losing time to him as she had in the previous legs, ahead of him. In fact, she would have learned that he was out of the race. She was in first place. She would also have known that the next competitor would have been Dallas Seavey, who had arrived at White Mountain an hour and 48 minutes after her, and thus would leave White Mountain (after the required 8 hours of 'rest') no less than one hour and 47 minutes behind her. (Aliy Zirkle stayed one extra minute in White Mountain.)
And further, with the information that seems to be available to them, and was certainly available to me, she would have also known that Dallas Seavey had taken the same amount of time to travel to White Mountain from the previous checkpoint in Elim, well, within 2 minutes. He was traveling virtually the same speed. He was almost 2 hours behind. She was in Safety, knowing that the wind was so strong that it had blown a 4-time Iditarod champion off the trail... It's possible (but not certain to me) that she would know that Dallas Seavey was making the trek from White Mountain to Safety more slowly than she had. In fact, he left White Mountain 1 hour 48 minutes behind her, but arrived at Safety 2 hours and 16 minutes behind her.
I would love to know the details of what happened at Safety. I would love to know if Aliy Zirkle was asleep when Dallas Seavey arrived, if she was exhausted, if she was convinced no one would be foolish enough to go out into the wind, if her team was so strong it wouldn't matter what anyone else did... I do not know what she was thinking, in the middle of the night, 20 miles from the finish, after 8 days of racing.
What I do know is that Dallas Seavey arrived 2 hours and 16 minutes after she did, but left 19 minutes before she did. Dallas Seavey pulled into Safety and would have been told he was in second place, and that Aliy Zirkle was still in Safety. They may have talked. They may have looked each other in the eye, or maybe he slowed down just enough to prove to the inspector that he had the required items packed with him and for the vets to check his dogs, and 3 minutes after his arrival he departed Safety.
19 minutes later, Aliy Zirkle left Safety, Alaska, and raced faster than she had mushed those dogs in the past 3 days, and over the next 20 miles she made up 17 minutes on Dallas Seavey. She left Safety 19 minutes behind him, and arrived in Nome Alaska 2 minutes behind the 2014 Iditarod Champion, Dallas Seavey.
I woke up this morning just a couple of minutes after the live finish. (Last year it was at 2 AM my time!) I had hoped that Aliy Zirkle would win, for many reasons. I have two little girls that need role models that aren't entertainers. I'm much closer in age to Aliy Zirkle than to Dallas Seavey, and it would have been great for the Generation X racer to beat the younger racer. She'd run a great race, she'd really earned the win.
I can't really blame her for not leaving Safety behind. I think I'll remember this story forever, though, because the way Dallas Seavey won this year appears to be a lesson for life, especially when you think about the fact that he literally had to leave Safety behind, going back out into the dark, cold night to coax another 2 hours and 48 minutes of running out of those dogs.
If I could ask Aliy Zirkle one question, it would be, "what did your gut tell you to do when you were there in safety (in Safety, Alaska), before Dallas arrived?"
As a surgeon I've come to understand that sometimes you have to trust your gut. You have to make a decision that might not come down to championships or 2nd place, and it doesn't always come down to life and death, thankfully! As an investor I can't say that I always properly hedge, sometimes I leave safety out of the equation entirely. I try to trust my gut, and I'm getting better at that. I'm going to spend a bit of time processing this one - is the lesson here to throw caution to the wind and get back out on the trail? Is second place in the Iditarod such a bad thing? It's pretty impressive that she's done it three years in a row now - my Buffalo Bills fan brother points out they lost the SuperBowl 4 years in a row - no other team went to the SuperBowl four years in a row! You could argue that Aliy Zirkle is the best racer out there over the last 3 years.
And you could argue that if she'd left Safety 3 minutes earlier, she would have won. That assumes that Dallas Seavey wouldn't have squeezed a little more speed out of his dogs at the finish, rather than letting her overtake him. Iditarod has seen that before - that's why the rules clearly state that the nose of the lead dog determines the winner. Dallas Seavey jumped off his sled and RAN along next to it at the end, after coming back from 24th place earlier in the race! He is clearly a worthy champion, and perhaps the lesson here should be that the future may not be as uncertain as we are led to believe by the doom-and-gloom folks among us? Maybe the next generation is ready to do some hard work, after all?
In the context of Hedging Life, I think the lesson has to be, at least at first blush: Finish. Never Give Up. Dallas Seavey must have thought he was too far behind, he was just too far behind, as he left White Mountain. Imagine the spark that raced across his mind when he arrived in Safety and realized, if I just leave Safety, I might be the champion? Finish. Leave Safety behind, and finish. Whatever it is that you are waiting for, it's not in Safety. It's out in the dark, with the wind blowing hard in your face, and the trail uncertain, and someone younger and stronger than you coming along to make the trade if you don't. Take a minute, and look at your portfolio, and decide if you need more or less safety. Trust your gut.
Leaving Safety Behind.
That HAS to be the title of my first blog post. Since 6:45 Am Central Standard Time, March 11th, 2014, I knew I needed to tell you (whoever YOU are) about leaving Safety behind. I've been struggling with the idea of how to describe my theories of life, how to help you get the knowledge I've been gaining bit by bit since I was kid, so you can have a great life. I want you to have a great life. I want you to be so happy that my fear of you starts to wane.
Because, to be honest, you scare me. When I lock my doors at night, it's you I am trying to prevent from sneaking into my house and - who knows what?
When I leave a little cash in my account, or when I take the opposite side on a trade, or when I put an ounce of gold in a safety deposit box, it's you I am afraid of. You who might derail the economy, or borrow too much or spend too much or work too little or sign some law that gives everyone everything.
So I hedge. I leave a little sleep behind to spend a few minutes on night watchman rounds in my own house. I buy stocks and options and then bet against them with a small portion of my assets. I buy a car made out of German steel with 385 air bags when an American-made Corvette would make me happier. Heck, the Porsche James Dean died in would make me even happier! But that's not safe.
I've always known that safety is an illusion. You can get vaccinated and still get the flu. You can eat right and still get fat. You can go out for a run and break your leg.
Today, however, I realized that although 'safety' is an illusion, Safety will cost you the championship. Come back later for the story of the 2014 Iditarod race, from the perspective of a trader / paranoid parent / investor / surgeon. This intro is meant to throw down the gauntlet (to myself) to make sure I tell you the story. You might hear the story somewhere else, and that's okay. I just want to make sure that the meaning of a dog-sled race at the edge of our continent is not lost on you.
Alex Wade, 3/11/14
That HAS to be the title of my first blog post. Since 6:45 Am Central Standard Time, March 11th, 2014, I knew I needed to tell you (whoever YOU are) about leaving Safety behind. I've been struggling with the idea of how to describe my theories of life, how to help you get the knowledge I've been gaining bit by bit since I was kid, so you can have a great life. I want you to have a great life. I want you to be so happy that my fear of you starts to wane.
Because, to be honest, you scare me. When I lock my doors at night, it's you I am trying to prevent from sneaking into my house and - who knows what?
When I leave a little cash in my account, or when I take the opposite side on a trade, or when I put an ounce of gold in a safety deposit box, it's you I am afraid of. You who might derail the economy, or borrow too much or spend too much or work too little or sign some law that gives everyone everything.
So I hedge. I leave a little sleep behind to spend a few minutes on night watchman rounds in my own house. I buy stocks and options and then bet against them with a small portion of my assets. I buy a car made out of German steel with 385 air bags when an American-made Corvette would make me happier. Heck, the Porsche James Dean died in would make me even happier! But that's not safe.
I've always known that safety is an illusion. You can get vaccinated and still get the flu. You can eat right and still get fat. You can go out for a run and break your leg.
Today, however, I realized that although 'safety' is an illusion, Safety will cost you the championship. Come back later for the story of the 2014 Iditarod race, from the perspective of a trader / paranoid parent / investor / surgeon. This intro is meant to throw down the gauntlet (to myself) to make sure I tell you the story. You might hear the story somewhere else, and that's okay. I just want to make sure that the meaning of a dog-sled race at the edge of our continent is not lost on you.
Alex Wade, 3/11/14
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