On the blog of the U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a shout-out was posted yesterday to the Heathy Trucking Association of America and the Trucking Solutions Group 61+ Driver Health Advisory Committee’s health walk at GATS last week, which I wrote a little about in advance of the show. Held at the Dallas Convention Center on Saturday, Aug. 28, the walk was the latest in a series of such held to bring awareness to all about the importance of good health in spite of the over-the-road lifestyle’s challenges.

The tenor of the commitment so many individuals are bringing to the issue has taken on the character of what the Secretary called in his headline a “movement.” He wouldn’t be the first — check out my colleague Misty Bell’s column in this month’s Truckers News, “Health Movement Gathering Steam,” for slightly earlier use of the term.

But while the Secretary rightly lauded the legions of drivers stepping up to the challenge of leading by example in the area of health, he failed to make note of a similarly focused endeavor at GATS that, unlike the walk (which he noted “was conducted indoors, away from the heat of the Texas sun”) saw drivers out in the open, jogging to promote awareness of the health issue. Thankfully, the Truckers News Fit for the Road program’s inaugural Too Hot to Trot 5K on Aug. 27started out early, at 7 a.m., before the heat was too very oppressive, and it brought out many of Saturday’s eventual walkers, among others, to the Dallas Katy Trail for a  three-plus-mile run or 1-mile walk. Among the participants were Convoy for a Cure USA organizer Cindy Stowe,  Trucking Solutions Group member and FedEx Custom Critical-leased owner-operator Linda Caffee (quoted in the Secretary’s post), and so many more.

Check out the vid below for scenes from my conversations before and after the run with several drivers and industry reps among the participants, from the 5K’s first-place finsher, Right Weigh Load Scales’ Andy Mount, to Jasmine “Jazzy” Jordan, Landstar owner-operator Lance Willey and Summit Transportation’s Doug East. . . .

And if you’re wondering how I fared on the run, well, I wrote about that last week. Enjoy.

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In the P.R. copy blasted out with announcements about the new TrekDesk Treadmill Desk, the company talks about the dangers of the “sedentary lifestyle,” noting studies of various characters that have probed “rising obesity rates and ill health caused by ‘Sitting Disease’ (a term given to the multitude of syndromes and diseases caused by sedentary lives).”

Though I imagine the flatbedders out there would take issue with any characterization of their jobs as totally lacking in physical activity, it’s true that, in large part, drivers and owner-operators spend the majority of their days in seats behind the wheel, just as office workers like myself spend most of the day quite sedentarily at desks. The TrekDesk Treadmill Desk, as you can see, is a standup desk that allows its user to place a treadmill below to enable walking in place while working. Long hours can lead to, as one user notes on the TrekDesk site, an average of almost 7 miles walked a day, quite a boon to heart health and muscle tone.

This isn’t going to work in a truck, no doubt, excepting perhaps in the biggest of big bunks; the closest thing we currently have only stimulates muscles — the massaging, vibrating seats of manufacturers like Qualitex Seating. And though there was in fact a STANDUP Act focused on driving introduced in Congress last year, it had nothing to do with building modular stand-up-driven trucks. Which leads to the begged question: With all the focus lately on driver health, from driver-led efforts to regulations, when will the truckmakers themselves, well, stand up and make it possible for drivers to walk in place while driving?

Oh, wait, there’s the whole seatbelt thing, and the distracted driving thing…. Would it be possible to shift gears while walking in place? … Let us pause while I attempt to throw off the dirt that’s quickly piling up in the hole I’ve dug here …

In any case, welcome to Thursday. If you missed myself and Max Kvidera on Allen Smith’s Truth About Trucking online radio program on the subject of cargo theft last night , you tune in and give it a listen in Smith’s archives here. Of particular note in the conversation were discussions of connections between the cargo theft problem and the growing dearth of parking in high-traffic lanes, where most cargo theft occurs. As attorney Jared Palmer and others on the National Cargo Theft Task Force lobby for federal money (from both Justice and Transportation departments) to help states and local jurisdictions implement the new federal UCR on cargo theft (which will go a long way toward helping the industry highlight the growing cargo theft problem), they are indeed looking at the potential for transportation dollars to help.

As news of the sentencing of two accomplices to the murder of driver Jason Rivenburg came out yesterday, the need for secure parking for the nation’s drivers is ever more apparent. Last night, a caller noted that that need for security extends not only to the general motoring public but to drivers’ cargo, drivers’ freight, the increasing theft of which adds to the cost of so many manufactured goods for the general public. Jason’s Law is a fine bill to get behind, but as you push it forward, make the cargo theft connection apparent when you speak to lawmakers.

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Three years ago, when Ellen Voie (pictured) launched the Women in Trucking organization, she boasted that she’d be so happy when membership levels reached 1,000 that she’d get the org’s logo tattooed on her body. On Aug. 26, the first day of the Great American Trucking Show in Dallas, she followed through on her boast live before listeners of the Sirius XM Freewheelin’ radio show broadcast from GATS. The WIT logo was inked on the back of her right shoulder by artists with Monster Tattoo (www.monsterink.net), and joining her in the chair were WIT member and driver Sherri Franko and three other members; more than 100 people, all told, attended the “tattoo party.” In advance of the event, Voie promised not to “scream or cry.” See for yourself if she made good in the video from the tattoo party below, or via YouTube.com, search “Ellen Voie, tattoo.”

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Tune in Wednesday at 8 p.m. Eastern for the Truth About Trucking online radio program with host Allen Smith. My fellow Truckers News/Overdrive Senior Editor Max Kvidera and I will be guests on the subject of cargo theft, the topic of note in the latest, September edition of Truckers News, out now in digital format and hitting the truckstop racks as we speak. Cargo theft has risen sharply in recent years, some now referring to it as the early 21st century’s “signature crime,” for several reasons. Not least among them is the fact that in many cases the crime carries a light penalty — investigators I talked to in the process of reporting my part of the story, to which nearly all of the Truckers News editorial team contributed in some way, noted some perpetrators walking away from thefts of cargo worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with no more than a $2,000 fine and 2 years’ probation.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Report only recently included “cargo theft” as a standard category, and with no federal minimum sentencing guidelines and no stiff move toward implementing the cargo theft UCR down the chain from federal to state and local jurisdictions, tracking the full scope of the problem is difficult, to say nothing of actually investigating the crimes. State cargo theft units and multijurisdictional task forces balance the need for speedy information gathering in reactive theft investigations with a more proactive approach, spending much of their time networking with industry and insurance contacts to help both in preventive measures.

Similarly, perhaps, reporting on the problem — and its potential solutions — led us to time spent with insurance investigators, federal, state and local police, individual truck drivers and owner-operators, carrier representatives, locking device manufacturers, data analysts, elected representatives and more. The result, hopefully, is a clear picture of what we’re up against in organized cargo theft rings, as well as what you can do in concert with law enforcement and carrier reps to combat the problem. Join us on the Truth About Trucking show Wednesday for a further look behind the magazine’s pages.

Also, several preventive measures are detailed in the three videos that follow here, shot on location with three of my primary sources for the story, FBI Special Agent Torrence White of the Memphis Cargo Theft Task Force, Scott Cornell of Travelers Investigative Services’ Specialty Investigations Group and Charlie Coe, a colleague of Cornell’s and formerly with the New Jersey State Police Cargo Theft Unit.

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Well, folks, I finished — no surprise to regular readers, I’d guess, since you’ve seen a little proof I can do some long-distance running. Get over a couple miles, though, for me, and it hurts. Add to that the constant walking around the show floor at the Great American Trucking Show (picture from the bobtail lot) here in Dallas I’ve been doing for past couple days and a 5K run isn’t perhaps the most relaxing way I could have spent the morning. I came in just over 28 minutes in Truckers News Fit for the Road’s Too Hot to Trot 5K, sponsored in part by John Christner Trucking and the Healthy Trucking Association of America, a good three minutes behind the second-place female finisher, Jasmine “Jazzy” Jordan herself, whose left knee has been bothering her mildly off and on since she completed her cross-country journey run to benefit the St. Christopher Fund in June. Great seeing her out there, and getting to run a little with her at least during warmup (she pretty much left me in the draft the minute the 100 or so runners started the long opening climb of the race trail) — see the brief clip that follows.

And I was a good ten minutes behind the winner, Andy Mount of Right Weigh Load Scales. a guy with a few years on me and a boatload of running experience under his belt (a few marathons, various competitive races…). “As an exhibitor at the [Great American Trucking Show],” said Mount, “I decided to come out and run, support the cause of truckers’ health, and it was a great course, a very well-run event.”

I well agree. I’ll be writing more about this in the coming days, so stay tuned. And enjoy the little vid here. . .

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Sitting outside Overdrive sister mag CCJ’s Commercial Vehicle Outlook Conference in Dallas yesterday and typing away on a story, one of the presenters, with whom I’ve talked in years past, walked by and nodded my way with a quip I’ve heard near countless times over the years from folks who know who I work for. “Put in in ‘Overdrive,’” he said. I laughed, for what I was at that exact moment looking at on my laptop screen made the quip doubly appropriate:  

What some view as a classic trucking music record made in 1989 by independent hauler Joe Lee Smith (pictured), his “Smokin’ Joe in Overdrive,” has now been re-released, just over twenty years after it was recorded. Smith, a long-hauler with more than three million miles under his belt, conceived the record as the first professionally produced and recorded rock-n-roll trucking album. And it certainly was, so much so that the country music-dominated nature of the market at the time pretty much kept it off the airwaves. 

But it made its way onto racks some of the major truckstop chains at the time and sold several thousand cassette copies. And over the years, the album attained something of a cult status, and Smith, well, he’s still out there and just recently traded a Peterbilt 387 for a 379, leased to 101 Transportation of Lakeland, Minn. Visit Smokin’ Joe’s website to listen to some of the album’s cuts, which some have compared to Molly Hatchet and which to my untrained ears sound like a trucking-themed collection of songs laid down by a late-1980s pop-metal band — quite rare indeed… You can pick up a copy there for $15 shipped.

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Tip of the hat to Marathon Trucker Jeff Clark for this one (and, readers, if you’ll be at the Great American Trucking Show, beginning this coming Thursday, join Clark and I and Jazzy Jordan, among so many others, at Truckers News‘ Fit for the Road program’s Too Hot to Trot 5K Friday morning)…. Self-described “liberal curmudgeon” and historian Stephen Budiansky, writing in the New York Times last Friday, took on stats commonly wielded by champions of the “local food movement” to suggest that transportation of food is always wasteful. He notes in particular the choice of New England hothouse tomatoes over naturally grown California varieties in winter as a choice example of the hypocrisy of some of these “locavores,” given the vast energy stores required to keep said hothouse, well, hot.

“The statistics brandished by local-food advocates … are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus,” he writes. “This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food.” He goes on to note the efficiency of tractor-trailers as a piece of the total energy pie in a head of lettuce, or just 300 out of a total 5,000 energy calories: “shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.”

He also notes the same for trains, though Clark was smart to question Budiansky on that score: “I have never heard of produce being shipped by rail.”

Interesting read, in any case, for anyone who trucks produce. “Math lessons for locavores.”

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It’s going on a year since I chatted with Daniel Audet of Truckstar Radio for my Truckers News “Exit Only” piece about TruckStar Radio, his online radio show. Audet, formerly a hotshot boat hauler and industry blogger, is still going strong with TruckStar, and tonight I’ll visit with him on his show to talk about my August Overdrive story about the new PreExisting Condition Insurance Plan, one of the first pieces of the health-care-reform-bill puzzle to come to fruition. Given the struggle for many in the industry, as in the general population, to qualify for quality insurance, the plan, though not exactly the most affordable in the world, represents at least an option for insurance coverage for folks with turbulent medical histories.

Follow the last link to give the piece a read, and to tune into Audet’s show — and/or call in and talk — visit http://www.thetruckstar.com. He’s starting up at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight and I’ll be on shortly after. If you’ve checked out the plan, by chance, I’d love to hear about your experience signing up. Catch you on the airwaves…

Following find my video interview with Audet from last year:

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The folks behind the AutoTex Pink wiper blades tell me the blades are sized to fit 85 percent of heavy-duty trucks on the road, as well as all manner of autos — but that’s not the most interesting thing about them.

The idea behind the blades comes from wiper-blade manufacturer Wexco Industries cofounder Paula Lombard, who wanted to create an automotive product that would benefit breast cancer. “I wanted to create something that benefits women and breast cancer research,” she says. “You see many products that benefit breast cancer, but not in the automotive industry [Convoy for a Cure events, upcoming in September and October, notwithstanding]. I thought that a windshield wiper blade that tied into the female market would give us a unique opportunity. Plus our product benefits the cause year-round, not just in October, which is breast cancer awareness month.”

Lombard, via Women’s Business Enterprise National Council’s local chapter meetings, ended up partnering in the AutoTex Pink effort with Kathy Orbe, owner of Encore Design in Montclair, N.J. Encore specializes in the package design & branding of consumer products. “We designed the package graphics and a striking ‘Wipe -Out Breast Cancer’ mark for use on the packaging and all collateral sales materials,” says Orbe.

Visit the AutoTex Pink site for more information; a heavy-duty section of the site is in development — for now, if you want to purchase, you can get info via the heavy duty page on the Wexco site.

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