The third time's the charm - a cliché of uncertain origin.

I've raced the Cycle-smart International at Look Park in Northampton MA for the

last three years – That's my entire cyclocross career. So if there is one place that I should be able to gauge my progress as a cyclocross racer, Northampton should be it. The Northampton course itself is a relative constant. In the last three years there has been no substantial earthquakes, tsunamis, meteor strikes, or urban development in Look Park. For three years Jen and I have pre-rode the course on Friday, eaten Thai for Friday night dinner, slept at The Knoll Bed & Breakfast, had cereal for breakfast in the Look Park parking lot, warmed up using my patent routine, and ridden for the same club team. I went into the Northampton race this year somewhat hopeful that this being my third attempt, somehow I'll do better – Hmmm, when I re-read this paragraph it kinda reads like the definition of insanity.

The first time that the precursor to the cliché “the third time's the charm” appears in literature is in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Letters addressed to R. H. Horne in 1839: ‘The luck of the third adventure’. The proverb is more explicitly stated later in Alexander Hislop's The proverbs of Scotland, 1862: "The third time's lucky", and

then exactly struck upon in Traits and stories of the Irish peasantry. By W. Carleton, Volume 1, 1877: “you've got two difficult tasks over you; but you know third time's the charm – take care of the next.” Why is the third time the charm? There are a few theories. The one I like is that it refers to the belief that under English law anyone who survived three attempts at hanging would be set free. There's a story that goes along with it – the story of John 'Babbacombe' Lee. Lee was a West Country sailor who was convicted of the murder of Emma Keyse at Babbacombe Bay in 1885. He was sentenced to hang at Exeter prison and three attempts to execute him all failed. The Home Secretary of the time, Sir William Harcourt, commuted the sentence and Lee was later freed. It's probably more likely that the phrase is just a folk belief that, having had setbacks, we ought to persevere and not give up - as immortalized in the phrase 'try, try and try again'.

Another annual event that I've attended my entire cyclocross career is the Capital District Bicycle Gala. The Gala is an HRRT sponsored event where 150 cycling enthusiasts and their friends get together to talk about all things cycling. "Is it better to have luck or better to have ability in cycling?" That was the question posed during a conversation at the 2015 Capital District Bicycle Gala. Luck or ability; which pays the highest dividends to cyclist? My last three years of Northampton race results may bear out the answer.

	2013		2014		2015
	Saturday	Sunday	Saturday	Sunday	Saturday	Sunday
Finish	72	82	70	79	73	84
Field	140	143	137	127	134	139
Percentile	0.5143	0.5734	0.5109	0.6220	0.5448	0.6043
Mean Percentile: 0.5616
Standard Deviation (S): 0.0422
Mean +/-2S: 0.4771 to 0.6461

The table of Northampton results above “clearly” (after you study it a while)

indicates that by doing the same thing over and over again in a somewhat controlled environment, I get similar results (all three finishes are within two standard deviations of the mean finish) – as I should have expected. If luck was to come into play, three attempts seems to be the right number of times to try according to Sir William Harcourt, who commuted Lee's sentence. Four is overkill (pun intended) as pointed out by W. C. Fields when he said "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it."

So, I'm taking W. C. Fields' advice and not be a fool about it – as the Germans proverb goes “luck sometimes visits a fool, but it never sits down with him”. I'm going to do something different next year at the 26th annual Cycle-Smart international cyclocross race. I'm not going to practice, practice, and practice again.


Photos at:  http://www.pbase.com/j_harvey/2015_cyclesmart_international