totient: (Default)
2025-07-04 10:49 pm
Entry tags:

iron butt

Part of an occasional series on superpowers. My superpowers are all Mystery Men level superpowers, but they're real.

I have what I'm told is called in motorcycling an Iron Butt.

Partly that's literally being able to sit for a long time with no side effects. I bicycled 3700 miles across the United States, averaging 8 hours a day in the saddle for a month and a half, and did not get any saddle sores.

But also with only a little bit of adjustment to my hydration and caffeination routine I can go 8 hours without a bathroom. This means when I drive the limiting factor on how far I go between stops is almost always the range of the vehicle I am driving. I rented a particularly fuel efficient car one time and drove it 450 miles without taking it out of gear. It hated this and kept trying to get me to take a coffee break. In less fuel-efficient cars sometimes I will refuel at a full service gas station and go two tankfuls between getting out of the car at all.

Being able to drive anywhere in my general region that much more quickly is a big factor in how I choose to make medium-distance trips. Beyond the question of how long the travel takes compared to a train or airplane, I'm sure I'd also find driving less enjoyable if I needed more stops.

I have actually rather a lot of superpowers, some inborn and some developed (or perhaps, I am told, earned). This one I suppose is some of each.
totient: (Default)
2024-03-05 12:06 pm
Entry tags:

more superpowers

This is one of my more dangerous superpowers: I am immune to poison ivy, mosquito bites, and similar skin reactions. Mosquitos definitely bite me and the big scary back woods ones that give other people enormous welts will raise a teeny welt on me. When I had the chicken pox as a kid I ran a fever but didn't have any pox (and I definitely had chicken pox, because later I *did* have shingles).

This is dangerous because I can unknowingly have urushiol on my skin and have it rub off on other people if I'm not careful.
totient: (Default)
2024-03-03 04:46 pm
Entry tags:

superpowers

Taking a moment to appreciate one of my several superpowers: sleep. I can go to sleep:

  • in a wide range of temperature, light, and noise conditions
  • at a wide range of times (sustainably, 14 to 19 hours since I last slept, but I can and do stay up for 30 hours and then sleep for 12 to manage jet lag when taking a redeye)
  • quickly
  • soundly
  • for a set amount of time. That is: If I go to sleep intending to sleep for a certain number of hours, that is how long I sleep, without an alarm.
  • or, until a subtle alarm goes off, if the amount of time I need to sleep is unknown in advance. The alarm can be well below the ambient noise level.

I also don't need as much sleep as some people: 7.5 hours a night is generally plenty. I can function on 5 hours for weeks or months at a time and 2 hours for about four cycles. That last one only works if the "up" phase of my sleep cycle doesn't exceed about 17 hours, which means it precesses like mad.

What I can't do is go to sleep within 45 minutes of either sunrise or sunset. Something about that light level kicks off my seratonin. It's my sleep kryptonite.

I've had most of these superpowers since birth, but some of them didn't develop until I started a meditation practice back in 2001 or so.