Arizona Road Racers Spring Cleaning 5K

I'm in a very stout cohort for this ARR race. In the 65-69 age group, there was only 1 runner, and in 75-79 there were 2, but in 70-74, there were 7 of us, just as there were the last time I did this race in 2023, when I was in 65-69 and finished 5/7. Same thing this year, 5/7; 4 minutes slower but still the same distance off the podium. Which is fine; the podium was leftover medals from past ARR races.

So it goes, but so much for aging up into a better category when these 4 other faster guys (and by at least 3-6 minutes for 5K) age up with me. Time 33:13, 5/7 division, 45/63 gender, 67/109 overall. No pictures this year.

In Memoriam for Two Unique (and Useful) Men

It's always upsetting when someone you know has passed, more upsetting if they're your age or younger, and even more upsetting if they meant a lot to this community. Please read about Bob Grossfeld and Jon Talton.

Still Irrationally Devoted to the Harvard Band

The Harvard Crimson publishes a "weekly magazine of narrative journalism" called Fifteen Minutes, and the latest issue reports on "The Harvard Band's Extraordinary Alumni" - aka the Crusties. We are now a Harvard tradition, even though it only started in 2010.

Plus the other Harvard tradition: I can't be Sam Coppersmith, instead I'm Samuel G. Coppersmith '76. To their credit, they spelled my last name right each time, unlike Dave Carvalho's. Excuse me, David N. Carvalho '76.

Ironman Canada Ottawa 2025

    

Not bad for a 70-year-old, eh?

This was the first year for an Ironman race in Ottawa, and the city was great. People showed up to watch and cheer, and stayed out for hours. There were glitches and it was a confusing layout with 2 separate transitions, with the swim about 8 miles from the bike and run start points, but the volunteers and spectators were enthusiastic, plentiful, and great.

I finally made it to (the grass next to) the podium, by outwalking 2 slower guys to finish 5th in my age group, which made me eligible for an award, a piece of plastic in the shape of Ontario. Which I will treasure, as I think this will be my last full IM race. It just takes too much time to train and eliminates too much else of life.

I had a great swim and a pretty good bike. The swim map is amazing, basically straight lines with some adjustments to get around other swimmers. The bike was hard because of a stiff wind from the west, so half the time we were with the wind and half the time against, but you never make up what you lose going into the wind when it's at your back. But with the help of the volunteers at the aid stations, I kept replenishing my hydration and nutrition and did all 180 km (112 mi) without ever once getting off my bike, I just kept moving. I was in third place in my division through the bike, but just couldn't run. I have no idea how, but I hurt my hip during taper the Wednesday before the race, and it was too painful to run, but I could walk OK. I wound up walking with 3 others and we collectively pulled ourselves to finishes well within the 17 hour cutoff.

Swim 1:28:10

T1 14:07

Bike 7:15:26

T2 13:35

Run 6:57:38

Overall16:08:57

Division 5/7 (but we had 2 DNFs and 1 DNS, so give me credit for 5/10?), gender 1272/1331, overall 1782/1895 (I think the total participants by gender and overall are correct, but they weren't on the results page and derived from looking at the last finishers). I was 19 minutes slower than IM Arizona in 2021 but got 3028 points by being in the 70-74 age group (or finishing in the top 5) compared with 1812 points in 2021. Results are here (you need to search for 2025, the only year so far, with my name or my bib number, which was 113) and pictures are here.

Here's the finisher line video (if it doesn't start at 8:10:10, move the cursor to start there). If you look closely, you can see me think about running down the red carpet. I take one step, it hurts, and I immediately stop and start high-fiving people down the finish chute. Much better, and much more fun.

 

Plus two additional videos, one from Full Cycle Ottawa that give a pretty good sense of the course:

And the "post-race banquet" video from Ironman, shown at the awards ceremony:

Matt Levine Addresses My (and someone else's) Question

I was one of the two readers of Money Stuff who asked him this question, and we got it answered today:

No-crypto index

We talked last week about how (1) an increasing number of US public companies are pivoting to crypto treasury strategies, (2) those companies are starting to show up in stock indexes and, thus, in the portfolios of index funds, and (3) therefore many boring conventional diversified stock retirement funds actually have some crypto. I thought this was fine, writing:

The simplest and laziest way to get sort-of-index-ish exposure to crypto is to own the total US stock market, because the stock market now includes an ever-growing supply of crypto treasury companies. You might not want crypto in your stock index fund — Vanguard doesn’t want crypto in its stock index funds — but the whole point of an index fund is that you don’t want to invest in what you want! (Or in what a fund manager wants.) You don’t trust yourself (or your fund manager) to want the right things. You want to invest in what the market wants, and what the market wants is crypto.

That view — “invest in the market portfolio” — is pretty standard, but also a bit extreme. The more normal version of it is something like “your default exposure to financial assets should be roughly proportional to their market weights, but if you have some reason to deviate from the market weights, go right ahead.” My assumption is that most normal people don’t have any particularly good reason to pick one investment over another — if you are not a professional investment manager, you probably have better things to do with your time than deeply understanding financial markets — but some people do, or at least, have good enough reasons. 

For instance, a classic reason is what is sometimes called “ESG,” environmental, social and governance investing. If you think “I do not want to make particular stock-picking decisions, but I also do not want to own coal companies because global warming is bad,” there are investment vehicles for you. There are even indexes; there are indexes that are approximately “the S&P 500, but ESG,” for people who want to invest passively in the broad market portfolio but who also have ESG commitments.

Crypto is quite popular these days, but it’s also pretty obvious that lots of people do want to exclude it from their portfolios. (My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Allison Schrager has a column today titled “Bitcoin in Your 401(k)? That’s Not a Risk I Would Take.”) And so there’s a natural question that at least two readers have emailed me to ask: “Is there a broad stock market index that excludes crypto?” (That is: An index that excludes crypto treasury companies that are meant to be essentially pots of crypto wrapped in public-company stock, and also maybe crypto miners or whatever.)

As far as I can tell the answer is “no, but there should be.” Some people want to own the entire stock market, and the stock market these days includes a certain amount of Bitcoin in a fake mustache. Other people want to own the entire stock market except the bit of it that is crypto. Those people would buy that, so someone should sell it to them.

This is almost (but not quite) as cool as the time my law school girlfriend, years later, was a caller on Car Talk and got advice on what car she should get to replace her VW Dasher.

Could be the best thing that happened in 1967

 

From the December 3, 1967, Ed Sullivan Show: