Cheers to 2018

Story of today's 2018 Celebratory TT, and then scroll down to see and read about my favorite 5 rides with Photos at the end.

View from Doi Chang, Chiang Rai, Northern Thailand.

So today was the last ride of 2018, and for what it was, I did want to finish it off with something special.

Note: Special* to cyclists might not seem special in any way to a non-cyclist, and will also likely include significant amounts of pain, but it is almost always worth it (99.9% of the time), and usually, and thankfully, the brain tends to forget about pain and focuses on only the good parts.

Even more thankfully, life is also pretty much the same.

Thinking back on 2018 with regards to Cycling, I think it was clearly the best year I’ve had so far. Both with performance but even much more when thinking back on the places that I was fortunate enough to be able to ride.

I have picked out some of my favorite rides below, but for now I’ll just say, yes it was a good year on the bike.

Off the bike though, it was one of the most up-and-down years of my whole life.

Wild Guava I found about 10km from my house. Nice MTB riding out there, and even nicer when nature is giving you sweet and sour fruits to enjoy on the way.  So beautiful as well, look at this shade of pink!

The first half of the year was spent teaching, I think it’s also safe to say it was my favorite semester ever, out of the 22 semesters that I’ve been a teacher, having the chance to be able to (try to) inspire the 2nd + 3rd year students at the University of MahaSarakam was a real privilege.

When school finished, a HUGE trip, round the world actually, was just due to begin.

New friend (Mr. Phai) and a super strong rider as well, together we managed the fastest time today in the ChiangMai200 Audax ride. Blazing down those beautiful curving roads was just too much fun! What a gorgeous ride to Phrao Town.

During this big trip, I took flights, trains, ferries, buses, and of course, bicycles :) This included 3 new countries for me, and 3 others I'd visited before.

Summer's trip started off wonderfully with my first ever visit to China. Hanging out (and eating a LOT) with my girlfriend, and also getting to ride MTB in LiuZhou for about 2 weeks.  That was followed by a trip to Greece, then Bosnia (included below), then the USA, the 'cycling mecca' of Boulder, Colorado!, through all of which I was able to ride absolutely tons on both MTB and Road.  Incredible (those are all mentioned down below as well).

I think I was lucky enough to be able to squeeze in almost 4000km of riding over the summer, none of which was on any of my own bikes, further than that I think it might actually have included more than 15 different bicycles! (Ps, I love you Li! I love you Wes! two people who most made that hilarious and crazy opportunity possible)

Followed by that, my parents announced their willingness to move over here, to Thailand, to be near me while working as well, SUCH great news - but then my mother's father passed away.

Not only could I not go with them to the funeral (as I had used all my savings to go and visit my family (including grandpa), after all the other trips were finished, just the month before), but it also delayed my parents coming here. The house we had arranged fell through, my girlfriend couldn't find a good job in ChiangMai, and that dream of moving North is pretty much on hold indefinitely...

I come back to Esaan, I am waiting for my parents for weeks, and then my father's mother passes away. By this time I have to continue work again, as I have been off work for months by this point (I had quit from the Uni, but not yet started working for Mark), and it really is clear that the time on the bicycle is the one and only physical thing in my life that remained the same through this time (very thankfully however, physical is not all, and spiritually, we all have direct access to the ear of our Creator (and love and guidance, and tons of other great things). Learning to trust that God will take care of the future is for some (definitely myself included) a lifelong journey.

However, even though God is always there, we humans have the tendency to really focus on that which we can see, and for better, probably more though for worse, you can imagine that I got to be really quite selfish with my "bike time" during this period (it went on for awhile too, and it is so uncool now to think of all the times I chose to ride a two-wheeled machine instead of spending what could have been quality time with another human instead).

Beautiful photo, but this is actually a month-long flood in the province of Kalasin. I ride on these local roads at least once a week, and it was tough to be out there having fun some days seeing so many people just sat on the sides of the road doing nothing (because they had nothing left to farm).

So, all in all, the second half of the year being one of the most stressful times of my whole life, I also mentioned that yes, I have a new job! This job that allows me a huge amount of free time, I am working for my best friend, which some people say 'is dangerous,' but I think its awesome, he's one of my oldest friends, and we are different enough that we get along just great. But, I also have almost zero oversight and everything I do is almost completely up to me.

Working for one's self allows a lot of time to ride a bicycle, but in the daily life I guess I need a bit more structure than that to stay sane.  The job also includes a huge amount of variables (literally, between the time I was planning out yesterday's bike ride and now writing out this blog post, we have actually changed what country we are visiting next, that trip happening in just 6 days, all 6 of which I am going to be heading to yet another country myself).

So different than my past 9 years of work, in which teaching has pretty much no variety at all except that which is in the teacher's own control.  Its not bad, but its true.  Once the school year gets going, teaching can really be monotonous (teacher in the role of 'motivator' here is key!).  I would say that the first part of the year being so wonderful, followed by the second six months of the year being so incredibly UNmotivating, I even started to tear up, crying while riding just thinking about this during the final hour of today’s solo time trial.

Such lack of excitement for what I was doing each day with regards to work really made me appreciate what it is/was to be a teacher, it makes me very thankful that I have had such experiences, and really also maybe it’s just my opinion, but it shows that each of us needs in our lives both the feeling of being a student and also the feeling of being a teacher. This relationship is just very special (doesn't need to be in school, this can take very many forms), it can be with one, a few, or even hundreds of other individuals, but to me I see that as one of the things that most promotes growth in our life.

Growth which I/we can then appreciate when I take the time to reflect (like during a solo bike ride :) )

Learning something, then teaching, sharing an experience, then striving for more, reflecting both forward and back, but always with the intent to understand - Some things I don't believe can be understood though, and in that case, then focus on simple appreciation. That, in not a nutshell, is most of what being a teacher means to me, but also just being a human.

Being happy that things went a certain way, because with an optimistic outlook, we can see that things DID turn out better than they otherwise could have. And it really is that simple.

SO back to the bike - I intended to do a 50 km hard ride today, my last day on the bike for about 3 weeks I think.  Thought it would be basically a 10 minute warm-up and then one big lap around the entire new town that I live in (the town is called KonKaen). The ring road has about seven or eight traffic lights, and aside from that it’s just wide open roads, a few small hills and basically mostly just flat quite smooth tarmac.

This morning was slightly windy, gently humid, and completely overcast with thick fluffy clouds. It was so cool, so perfect for what I intended to do, that my 1.2 L of water lasted me the entire three hours.

I not only rode a solid 50, but I found that I still had quite a bit of energy left, enough to then push it out to 80 km. Then I really started to think, "wow, this may be the fastest I have ever gone without stopping to rest. I haven't had to pee, I am still not thirsty, one of my bottles is still full... this could definitely be a new 'fastest ride ever'". And about 5 minutes later, thats when the real pain started to sink in :)

At that time, the mind starts playing tricks, the feeling, the urge to quit grows ever stronger (especially since I have now passed what I set out to do, the 50km at 'hard pace'), but it also got me thinking along these lines, and therefore the reason that I am taking the time to write this entire thought process out :)

I have two Cycling heroes, not talking about guys we watch on TV, these are people I know :) I met both of them online through this cycling-running app called Strava, but now have been so lucky to meet up and ride with both of them several times in real life.

Peter Hardie and Patrick Beilby are both heroes to me, both hugely inspirational to me, though each in very different ways, and while I was very lucky to meet Peter and ride with him a few times this month in fact, this year I only talked to Patrick online. So, at around 80 km I started thinking of a few things Patrick has told me over the years, and after really struggling to keep up the will to stay at near threshold effort for a final 20 minutes (after already doing it for 120 minutes), I managed to not only go through my memories of all of 2018's riding, and pick out five rides that have been absolutely magical this year, I also was able to stick it out! I made it through the full hundred kilometers, and even finished with a smile on my face.

That was some serious effort, no way around it, a solo time trial is one of the most tough things that you can do on a bike, it takes more mental fortitude than anything, because you are simply going as fast as you yourself can go (so the speed is not necessarily important at all, it only matters if you are racing), but just holding your own power, holding your own will, and just making it through to the finish, and once you do finish it is something with an immediate payoff. You can really be proud of what you’ve done (hopefully :-) assuming everything went well :-)).

And so Patrick that ride today was for..... haha well obviously it was for me, it was a solo TT, but I am giving a big shout out to you! Thanks for everything you do, all the people that you inspire, all the people who you take time to give out motivational tips, pointers, definitely not only to me. Keep it up man, and have a great day today.

(And one more thing - I am confident to give you a big shout out this morning, because I can say that you shouldn't worry that I’m associating your name with any nonsense - this was a full solo, unsupported, Smile turning-to-grimace-turning back to smile type ride. Glorious (and thankfully temporary) suffering. No motors no drafting no Strava trickery :-) )

Have a wonderful day everyone, and if you have time, I urge you to go ahead and look back on the year (Strava makes it so wonderfully easy right!?  I love it.), look through and pick out your 5 favorite rides.  Because they were fun, they were pretty, they were absolutely awful but you made it through, for any reason, just go through and pick out 5. Just for you, to appreciate what you've experienced in this year of life on the bike, but also I would like to hear about them as well. Feel free to post in the ride comments if you want.

And as always, ride hard, ride safe everyone.  Cheers to 2018.  Be well.

If you're curious, Strava makes a very cool year end summary video (I think its free?)
Here's a link to mine for 2018 (link)

Playing around outside the coffee shop, waiting for it to open :)

Memorable Ride #1

I knew that 2018 would probably be my final year teaching in Esaan, and so I made sure to do as many rides as I could with the local guys.  The dude in the red shoes is one of my close friends, he teaches at another university near Sarakam, and I can't even count how many morning we have gone out together into the dark, stopped for coffee, and sprinted off to school to get there in time to sign in... And it never got old once :)  Thanks a lot P'Ex man.

The young guy in the photo is Mr.Great, and he has come a long way - both on the bike, and as a young man - and its been a pleasure to ride with him this year!

So this photo is not necessarily one single ride, but it is definitely my favorite part of this year on the bike - purposefully riding with others, even when I know they might not go as fast or as far as I want to, but just to enjoy the company of others (that was my own goal this year, to focus on people more than numbers, and while I still failed at this on many occasions, I did better than in years before).

Karst cliffs and wonderful packed dirt roads. China has a lot of both.

Ride #2

Visiting 4 different cities in an absolutely mind-blowing 18-day visit to China, this ride lasted about 4 hours, riding around the Karst cliffs of YangShuo (in Guilin, GuangXi) in Southern China.

My girlfriend agreed to rent mountain bikes with me, and I was so happy! She can ride just fine, but doesn’t appreciate my always pushing for the ‘just 20 minutes further, then we’ll turn back’ type of thing. Not hard to understand :), but I just love riding with her!  So I always want it to go on…

But, not only did she allow me to go ahead on my own to try out some mega steep cement climbs, while she very patiently waited behind (in the heat, Southern China is basically a tropical land the same as Thailand), but she also ordered dumplings and beer for me to be ready when I got back!

These were some of the best dumplings we had during the entire trip (and boy did we eat a lot of dumplings in LiuZhou), and what was also incredible was how the entire list of things she ordered ended up only being 19RMB (just over 3$). I got 10 small dumplings, a huge bowl of noodles, a 1L bottle of beer, a 1L bottle of water, and 2 bottles of sweetened Green Tea.  Stuff in Thailand is definitely cheap, but MAN is stuff in China ever CHEAP!

Strava ride and Photos here (Link)

Ride #3

Both of my parents like bicycles, and like to ride them (both on road and off-road!) and my dad actually has 3 bicycles in 3 different countries right now - he’s doing even better than me!

Riding in Greece with them though in June 2018 was just a treat on an entirely new level. We rode together for an entire day on the island of Aegina (rented bikes in Athens and then took them on the ferry to get there), and then watched the sun go down over an incredible seaside view while enjoying some cold beers. We rode just about 100km this day, and the scenery was just gorgeous in a way that I have never experienced before.

The ride ended up being so great, that it even made us forget about a pretty terrible experience during the morning trying to make the ride happen - First, getting lost in Athens on the way to the ferry, the two flat tires (one of which was on the ferry itself, in a ‘bike-parking’ area full of random bits of sharp metal, finally getting to the island itself and riding onwards, the bike shops that people directed us to being closed due to the Saturday afternoon siesta…I ended up going around into the trash bins behind one of the bike shops to cut off a chunk of rubber with my pocket knife, used it as a tire boot for my dad’s inner-tube, and it held fine until we finally found our way to the third shop (it was open :) ) and then the second tire punctured irreparably, when I went to change it I found that the bike rental shop gave us the wrong size spare tubes (they gave us 26” tubes, and we rented 29” wheel bicycles).

My mom took this photo, the ones with all 3 of us are a bit too blurry due to my lame iPhone skills. Thank you Greece for a well-rounded day of memories!

See our day in photos on Strava here (Link)

Ride #4

Amazing day, truly hilarious.

This day would be one of the most random bike rides I think I have ever done, starting off with my not even being sure of whether or not I could even find a bike to rent, to then ending up riding for 6 hours, 4 hours of it on a single LONG long gravel climb (getting a Strava KOM for it even!!!!!), while wearing running shoes, hiking pants, and a small hiking backpack including a rain jacket, an apple, and my full-size Canon camera (but no helmet, and yes I did crash actually on the downhill, such extreme gravel gradients I just slid right off the ground).

So to start the day, I went walking through a park near our hotel, as (I thought at the time) this would be the one chance during our 8 days in Bosnia that I would have a chance to ride. As is turns out, there was a wonderful ex-cyclist there renting bicycles of all shapes and sizes, I found a very cool red-and-silver 90’s era mountain bike, non-working shocks but nicely smooth 21-speed gearing, and knew I had to take the chance.

With only 2 water bottles, and just 36 Bosnian Marks (local currency), I managed to make one of the best memories of the entire year. Climbing up to 2100 metres was just incredible, and I think the temperature changed from about 16C (at our hotel) to -2C at the top of Bjelasnica (the mountain I found on Strava about one minute before going out the door to look for a bike).

Much more than just the bike ride itself, the whole day was just hilarious - I ended up spending 15 of those marks to buy a phone care (in case something happened while I was out, I had absolutely no idea of anything, no language, no direction, I thought I should at least have a way to call for help :), and then I spent 15 marks on the bike rental.  I clearly remember that I had just 6 marks left, because when I stopped to look for water, there was none, and then finally the only shop after 2 more hours of riding to the next town was only willing to give me water if I bought something to eat.  I just scanned the menu for the cheapest item, it was a simple vegetable soup that came with bread, and it cost 5 marks.  Left with just 1 mark, I heartily enjoyed the bread dipped in soup, drank as much STEAMING hot water as I could handle (they were only giving me water from the espresso machine, probably better due to possibly getting sick from water from the tap itself :) ), and then continued on my way.

The mountain itself was actually a ski slope in the winter, so coming up the backside of the 100% gravel climb was great!  I was totally alone, passing through an area that could have easily passed for Scottish rock-strewn highlands, and finally ending up into a ghost-town of a grafitti-covered ski resort (Sarajevo has HUGE amounts of spray-painted everywhere).  Going up was very tough, but fun, but going down was insane.  It was so cold that I didn’t want to pick my way back down the back-side, so I just went straight down the ski slope itself.  The average gradient was 21%, the whole thing was almost 4km long, so imagine how insanely steep some of those drops were.  I can’t believe I did it, but hey, it was probably better that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

(Haha, this is great writing all this out, yes I would probably pick this day as my favorite ride of the entire year.  It was just one new experience after another, and then again, SO awesome and funny :)  completely unplanned… STILL not done yet though with the memories, because about a month later I get a message on Strava from James Hayden (2017 winner of the TransContinentalRace), asking me for more personal details about this Bjelasnica gravel climb.  It was chosen as one of the checkpoints for the upcoming year, and he was really just doing his homework :)  He ended up winning that year as well, and how funny that he was asking me for advice, he might have seen that I had the KOM and I just couldn’t stop laughing wondering how he was probably picturing me on an expensive downhill-jam-style Specialized Epic and wearing full MTB kit with crash helmet, when instead I was probably the absolute farthest from that at the time… ah so great :) !!!)

See the Strava link for this ride (Link)

Ride #5

This was a special trip for my whole family, as we had not taken a vacation together since the year after I graduated from high school (11 years ago).

We have all seen each other many times of course, but just not all 5 of us together going out to do something new like this, like a vacation.

My sister lives in Colorado right now, and so the rest of us (4 of us) went out there to spend an incredible 2 weeks together. Very full of biking, beer-tasting, and Mexican-food eating.

This sister is quite an athlete, extremely impressive, and she got up early with me one morning for this dirt road ride you see in the photo above.  In the middle of July, just about as warm as Breckenridge, CO ever gets, it was 2C in this photo.

I wanted to go up, she came with me, and when we came down it got COLD.  We weren't really prepared for the wind to be so cold, and she said it was both the largest hill she had ever descended, and the coldest she had ever been on the bike.  Huge kudos to her therefore for climbing so high with me, and flying down that monster hill in the cold.

Thank you also to Wes, for borrowing not 1, not 2, I am not even kidding, he asked around to borrow FIVE bicycles for me to choose from when I came to visit.  Now how awesome is that?!?!?  These were not 'just' borrowed bikes either, every single one of them cost more than the bike I am riding at the moment myself - so needless to say, it was a really fun trip :)

Link to Strava info for this Ride with Sis (Link)

BONUS Ride

Ok, I know its been 5 rides already, but there's no way I can pass on this one.  This ride happened at the end of November, when I had already finished all my goals for the year, and just enjoying riding into what I call 'bonus miles.'

These are times just made for leaving the data at home, and remembering why we ride our bikes in the first place.  Last year it was a 12 day mountain bike trip with a friend, and this year it was a couple of big Audax rides that I had no intention of joining until just 2 days beforehand.

The 400km distance has always made me nervous, but this time, for whatever reason, I was totally in the mood to try.  I had nothing else to prove for the year, already completing both my distance goal and hours-on-the-bike goals, and so I thought I'd have nothing to lose.

The guy you see in the photo is an all-star of these type of rides, just a super-determined rider and a guy just generally very enjoyable to talk to, he got me to go along with him on this with literally just 48 hours notice.  I wasn't even in the same part of the country when I decided to do it.

To make quite a long story short, I ended up being the quickest rider for the event that day, despite getting lost a number of times (I think it was actually 6 different wrong turns I took in the night), I beat my target time by almost an entire hour.  Now that felt good!

The story has an absolutely hilarious ending though, in that the hotel I had booked cancelled my booking the night before, so I not only reached the finish line in the dark, but I then slept on the floor STILL in my cycling clothes, and slept the entire night on the bare floor with nothing but the stuff with which I had just done the 400km event.  A water bottle, some arm warmers, a bunch of granola bars, and my socks and shoes.  Audax isn't a race, but I was the first person to finish, and so it was just hilarious to feel like this was my reward for hurrying through to the finish, this was proof that one shouldn't brag about Audax, because it is in fact NOT a race, but an event where everyone who finishes is a 'winner' for the course (and I would have much benefitted from waiting for friends, and letting them see that I was without place to stay, and maybe some kindness would have been a much better reward than a lonesome night on a quite un-clean floor).

Here's a link to this huge day from my Strava file (Link)

Double Bonus.

And ok, after all that, I also can by no means forget this one here (LINK), but I wrote an entire blog post about that day, so.... if you're curious.... it was a big one..... actually even longer than that 400 Audax mentioned as #5 above.  Massively hot, but successful days in Esaan :-)

And for info on that day from Strava, see it here (Link)