STP 2017

In the summer of 2017, two friends and I rode STP over the course of two days (this was my first cycling event ever). At the time, I didn’t really know how to train other than just riding a lot of miles and I never really gave any conscious thought to hydration or nutrition. I clocked in about 1500 km over 70 hours of training from March till July (which was totally below what the official training plan called for).

On the event day, I ate whatever there was at the rest stops and drank the electrolyte drinks. I also ate this supplement called SportLegs that people were giving out. They supposedly improve muscle performance (however, sports dietitian thinks they’re more placebo than anything). I didn’t know anything at the time, and I just ate them anyway.

We were worried that our legs would be too sore to continue on the second day, but on the morning of the second day, we didn’t feel fresh, but nonetheless we made it through both days (with both legs still working!) and we were super happy with ourselves for having accomplished this. We joked that maybe it was the SportLegs (to this day we still don’t know). As we crossed the finish line, I said to my friends, “OK so we’re going to do STP in one day next year right?”. They thought I was joking, but I wasn’t.

The problems begin

The next event that summer was Obliteride 2017, a century ride to raise awareness and fundraise to fight cancer. I figured that since I had done STP, I’d be able to do this ride no problem. This is where problems for me started.

Around the 50 km mark, I started cramping up a little bit, and I still had 110 km to go. I started drinking much much more of the electrolyte drinks and eating, but the cramping just got worse and worse. It’s not that I didn’t have the strength – but each stroke I took, I felt the cramps. But the cramps weren’t SO bad that I couldn’t continue – I just had a terrible finish.

I went to see a physiotherapist to see what was happening, and she took a look, and she could only identify a slight pelvic rotation (my hips were leaning to one side of the bike), but she didn’t think that was the root cause. She couldn’t see anything wrong with the bike fit either, but thought it could have been a lack of training since Obliteride was much hillier than STP. I did the exercises she asked me to do and that was about it. I had also signed up for the Whistler GranFondo and Chilly Hilly as well, but I couldn’t even finish either of them. At one point, my entire right leg locked up on me and I couldn’t bend it for a couple of minutes. I began to worry if I could even continue cycling anymore.

Tackling the problem

I was so fed up with this problem, that I scheduled appointments with different doctors in sports medicine to get their advice. They all suspected that it was a nutrition problem and referred me to a sports dietitian. At my first appointment with the dietitian, she asked me about my lifestyle, how much I ate, exercised, etc. and immediately said, “you’re not eating enough for the exercise you’re doing” (I estimated that I was eating about 2200 calories/day). She wrote out on the whiteboard a high level guideline as to how I should eat.

I saw her for about a month and a half and after following her advice, my problems were solved! In a way, I got the OK from the nutritionist to eat as much as I want, even massive amounts of sodium and sugar, provided that I keep up my level of exercise. Knowing that eating more was the fix, I had no problem with that.

She also got me to measure my sweat rate, so I’d know how much water to replenish during big rides.

Training for STP 2018

I rode sporatically in the winter (I should have followed Rule #5 of the Velominati) and didn’t really start training seriously until June. From January to May, I clocked in only 848 km over 38 hours, which was only a bit less than year before at the same time, but I had started earlier in the year this time.

I made a plan for myself where I would do intervals twice a week with a big ride on the weekend (in June alone I clocked in 577 km over 25 hours). Two of the big training rides I had were century rides, where I got to work out the specifics in my nutrition and hydration plan. In total, I rode about 1600 km over 73 hours, not counting the intervals.

Three weeks before the event date, I started sleeping earlier and earlier (by about 15-30 minutes each day) to get myself used to waking up early since I would have to be on the road by 5:30am on event day.

Two days before the ride, I started carb loading (as per instructions from the dietitian).

My emotional state

I didn’t like the fact that training took so much time out of my week. I was already spending 10+ hours on the saddle, and I was beginning to feel mentally tired from all willpower required. The intervals drained me mentally even more because of the mental focus I needed to force myself to spin as hard as I could. It’s so easy to just stop when things get tough, and interval training was more mentally draining than any training ride I did.

As the event date drew closer, thoughts of my possible failure creeped into my mind, getting stronger day by day. I couldn’t think of anything else. I thought back to the wise words of Sun Tzu:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

知彼知己，百戰不殆；不知彼而知己，一勝一負；不知彼，不知己，每戰必殆。

I even started meditating to calm my mind. My coworkers could tell that I was more distracted than usual and provided me with good encouragement.

Race day

My friend and I started the ride around 5:30 am, and because there were so many cyclists on the road, drafting propelled us quickly and we made it to the halfway point around 2:30 pm. I still felt pretty fresh at that time which was good.

I knew that most riders do the ride in 2 days, so I expected not to be able to draft behind other riders. By about 200 km, I started feeling tired, but I knew I had to keep going. There was still 120 km to go.

I wasn’t having fun anymore. At this point, it was just a grueling grind to the finish, where the finish line was hours away. I wanted the day to be over. and thought to myself, “this too shall pass”. Looking at my bike computer frequently to see how far we’ve gone made it worse – slowly watching the distance ticking upward while thinking “when will this end?”

The temperature that day went up to a max of around 38 degrees Celsius. We rode in the burning heat, slowly becoming more and more dehydrated. I wanted the sun to set faster, so that it’d be cooler.

Judging by the dozens of people we saw at rest areas, we figured our pace was pretty good. But as we went further along, there were less and less people at the rest stops. Either they bailed, or they were much faster than us.

The finish line would close at 9 pm, and there was no way I’d get to the finish line in time. I wish I had trained harder.

For most of the last third, we rode mainly on our own, occasionally seeing another rider, whom we’d ride behind just to get an extra bit of a boost.

At the last rest area, there was almost nobody, maybe like a dozen people at most, but we were only some 25 km away. We could do this.

My friend and I would swap taking the lead every five minutes so that we could balance out the wind load between the two of us. The fact that the two of us rode together allowed us to talk to each other and help lift each other up. I think that helped a greal deal mentally and emotionally.

At dusk, we finally entered Portland. We were now just 30 minutes away from the finish line. We joined a group of other riders and rode together till the end.

I called out to the other riders with encouraging words like, “yeah! We’re almost there wooo”, but looking back I think I sounded too happy (despite my true feelings of misery) and the people around me probably thought I was a jerk for being so happy while they felt miserable.

Finally we reached the finish line at 10:30 pm. People were still there and cheering us on as we arrived. I almost shed a tear. I was overjoyed having finally achieving this goal.

Other friends who drove to Portland met us at the finish line and could see our happiness despite how filthy we were. We weren’t even hungry nor thirsty. We were in no mood to do anything. We just wanted to sleep. My friend was told that he sounded brain dead because he replied with one word answers and lacked the concentrated gaze that he normally had, whereas I was still considered having a sound mind.

The next morning, I woke up with quite the hangover even though I drank no alcohol. I was just REALLY REALLY dehydrated from the bike ride in the blazing heat.

After this entire ordeal, I told myself, “I’m not going to do this again next year”. I didn’t get back on the bike until late August – I think STP scarred me a little bit. I definitely don’t regret having done this at all, and I’m still very proud of what I did.

For Easter weekend, the interns and I went to Greece. Instead of only going to the famous tourist areas like Athens, we also went to a city called Volos to check out the beaches they had there.

Getting to Greece

Typically, we leave early in the morning for trips, but this time we left during the night in order to make our morning flight to Volos, Greece at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. Originally, we all thought the airport was in Frankfurt, but apparently, it was a 2 hour bus ride. Apparently, Ryanair likes to use airports named after big cities, but the airport itself isn’t located in that city.

We started our journey by taking the U-Bahn to the Stuttgart main train station to catch the a train to Frankfurt am Main. From there we would take a bus to Frankfurt-Hahn Airport. We arrived in Frankfurt at about 3 AM and during this time, we ran around the streets looking for our bus. Because of all these transfers, we barely had time to sleep. I think I only slept for about 4 hours intermittently. It was a good thing that not a lot of people took the train at night because this let us lie down on two seats and put our legs on the seats in front to sleep better.

After 2 train transfers, and a bus transfer, we boarded the plane. By now it was already morning. We were all still really tired. All we did was sleep. I’m surprised I still managed to fall asleep really well even with little kids and babies crying around me. I didn’t really get a chance to look out the window very much though. Although for the brief moments that I was awake, I managed to see the Swiss/Austrian Alps (I don’t know what our flight path was).

I left the house at around 11:30 PM, and arrived in Volos 10 hours later. If only we knew about the Frankfurt-Hahn thing, we would have tried to fly out of Stuttgart International Airport.

Volos

We checked out the town for a bit and stayed there for a night. This place isn’t very known among tourists going to Greece, so there weren’t a lot of tourists anywhere. We pretty much went to this place to check out the beaches.

We rented a car here so we could drive from Volos to Athens the next day. When we first got into the car we realized it was almost out of gas. We thought that it was normal to get the car with a full tank and return it with a full tank. While driving around Volos, we saw how the Greek drove. I’ve got to say that the drivers in Volos are some of the worst I’ve ever seen. I don’t know why, but nobody cares about driving on their own lane (lanes aren’t even painted most of the time). Nobody yields for pedestrians unless there’s a light. And while we were driving, people rode mopeds without wearing helmets and all they did was squeeze through spaces that cars couldn’t and cut off the cars. On the highway, they even drove on the shoulder.

After looking at the beaches, we drove up to the top of the mountain overlooking Volos, a site for archaeological excavation. It was supposed to be the ruins of a city from 5th century BC, but we didn’t really see any ruins except for some stones buried solidly in the grass. But what we did see was the most spectacular view.

In the evening, we tried Greek hard liquor called Tsipouro. The ones we got had 42% alcohol by volume. The taste of it was repulsive. I’ve drank hard liquor with a similar percentage of alcohol before, but those didn’t taste bad. The food they served with it was quite good though. I particularly enjoyed eating the octopus. Later on, we ate some more Greek seafood. We got to try other foods like ray-fish, squid, and cuttlefish. I’m craving some of that right about now.

On the Road to Athens

We all knew of the high oil prices nowadays so we thought it might have been more economical to take public transit from Volos to Athens. We asked about a car rental and after doing the math, we found that the two options were about the same, so we opted to rent a car. We drove the Opel Corsa for about 330 km from Volos to Athens. Little did we know, we had to pay tolls on the highway. The Greek also like to put up these mini-churches on the side of the road. On the highway, we could see these and they represent the people who died there.

For a while, we didn’t really know where we were going once we got into Athens. Once we arrived, we tried to find a suitable parking place for the car that was near a metro station. We decided not to drive around Athens since it would be very hard to find a parking spot. The car simply got us around Volos and to Athens. We stopped the car and asked people for directions multiple times. Out in the suburbs, not many people spoke English so communication was quite difficult. Although, on one occasion, one of the locals spoke Hindi, which one of us happen to know.

The first place we tried to park at turned out to be partially blocking a driveway so we had to move. While parking the car though, I opened the door slightly to look outside to check the spacing of the car to help the driver. At this moment, my phone slipped out of the car seat and onto the street. Luckily I realized my phone was missing as the car started driving away. I quickly got out and ran after some people on the street who picked up my phone. Luckily they were just walking away thinking about whether to keep it or not. I literally ran out of the car and called out to them saying, “Thats mine!” despite the fact that they might only know Greek and not English. If I had been even a minute slower, my phone would have been lost. Good thing the people who found it were nice enough to give it back. I was prepared to run after them.

After a huge sigh of relief, we found a new parking spot. We left the car near an apartment about 20 minutes by train from our hostel for two nights. Every now and then we’d think of the car and hoped that it was still there. Even if the lady who lived at the apartment said we could park there, we still weren’t sure if it would get towed or ticketed.

The Acropolis

Once we checked into the hostel, we walked up to the Acropolis, the location of the most famous landmark in Athens. Unfortunately, due to a restoration project, there was a huge metal crane in front of the Parthenon. I don’t know why, but landmarks I visit always seem to be under maintenance whenever I go there. But the good thing was that going up to the Acropolis was free because of Easter.

At the top of the Acropolis, there were a lot of remains of ancient Greek architecture. Among these was the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, The Erechtheum, and the Parthenon.

I don’t really know a lot about Greek history, but it seemed like these places attracted a lot of tourists simply because they’re famous. I doubt a lot of people have an in depth knowledge about the Greek culture. I’m sure a lot of people just looked at these ruins and thought they were just some old stones.

Greek Architecture around the City

Apart from the Acropolis, I also saw many other ancient Greek buildings. A lot of the Greek architecture was very similar because of their use of the columns, but it was still very interesting to look at.

It seemed like because it was Easter, a lot of the attractions that otherwise would have cost money were free. We would have had to pay to go see the Temple of Zeus.

Around the City

One of the things that was very peculiar about Athens is the amount of stray dogs on the street. I thought it might just be owners letting their dogs run around freely without a leash, but these dogs had no leash.

While we were walking around, a lady was walking her dog on a leash when the leash caught onto my friend’s leg. My friend, seeing this dog, decided to pet it. Unfortunately, that dog’s attitude isn’t same as what he’s used to in America. The dog tried to take a bite at his hand. Luckily, he moved his hand away fast enough before he got bit. The dog’s mouth was so close that its slobber got on his hands. The lady didn’t even apologize for it. It made us think that the Greeks weren’t very nice people.

Everywhere we went in the city, we saw tourists. In fact, there were so many tourists that I sometimes heard more people speak English than Greek. And as tourists, they were everywhere in the city center. There were tourists from all sorts of countries, but when it comes to interacting with the locals, it was either English or Greek.

Like in Paris, people tried to sell me things on the street. Instead of selling mini Eiffel Towers, they sold this toy tomato. When you throw it on the ground, it’ll splatter, but slowly go back to it’s original form. It looked so cool, but it seemed like something that would only be cool for about 5 minutes if I had one. A lot of people also tried to sell fake brand name sunglasses and purses. I’d laugh really hard if they tried to sell fake LV bags on the street in front of the LV store.

Apart from the old Greek buildings, we also hiked up to the top of a hill to check out the view from the top. There was also a church there.

I don’t really know why we went up to the top the hill in all the trips we take. It’s something that we always do. Try to get as high up as we can just to look at the bottom.

Christian Culture

Prior to visiting, I never knew the people in Greece were so Christian. Seeing that it was Easter weekend, I saw a bit of their Easter traditions.

At night, people held candles and all walked to a church. I don’t know what they did when they got there, but the walk attracted large tourist crowds wondering what they were up to.

Food in Athens

Since Athens is one big tourist trap, one can expect to see lots of restaurants selling overpriced food for tourists. But regardless of that, we got to try some really delicious, but probably stereotypical, Greek food. One of the things that confused me though is why they called their salad “Greek Salad” when just “salad” would have sufficed. Maybe that’s their way of getting tourists to try it.

People around the city were all grilling lambs for Easter, but unfortunately, I never got the chance to try some. I’m not missing it though, because I was never a fan of lamb meat anyway.

National Archaeology Museum

On our second day in Athens, we visited the National Archaeology Museum to look at the history of Greece. Luckily for us, we didn’t have to pay to get in because of Easter.

Unfortunately, a lot of the exhibits weren’t open so we didn’t spend a long time here.

More Beaches

Because we didn’t get enough of the beaches in Volos, we decided to visit a beach in Athens too. What surprised me here is the girl that decided to go sunbathing with her top off even though it wasn’t a nude beach.

At one point, we all sat down by the beach enjoying some beer. That the one of last opportunities for relaxation in Greece before we had go to leave the next day.

Going Home

In order to avoid traffic at the tolls, we woke up so early that we had to miss the free breakfast at 7 at the hostel. We all got up at 5 in the morning and by 6:30, we were on the road back to the airport in Volos. Despite getting a full night’s sleep, I somehow still slept for 3/4 of the car ride back.

On the drive home, we could see smoke coming from some of the houses. At first we thought someone’s house was burning down, but later we figured that it might have been people grilling lamb for Easter.

Later, we realized that we left way too early. We aimed to arrive at 11 am, but we arrived at around 9 am for a flight that departed at 2:15 pm. The airport in Volos was also in the middle of nowhere. We spent the next two hours doing next to nothing. During this time, I finally finished reading that book I started a while back.

When we returned the rental car, the amount of gas in the tank was in the red zone. We wondered if the car still had enough gas to go to the nearest gas station. It didn’t seem likely that there was a gas station anywhere near the airport. It was in the middle of nowhere.

We tried accounting for all the things that could make us late like looking for the right way to go, traffic jams, etc., and none of those things happened. For the whole trip one of my friends kept making fun of my other friend for making us all wake up early. In fact, he was so worried about being late that he thought we should skip coffee in addition breakfast. Skipping breakfast and not eating for 5 hours wasn’t very fun.

On the plane, I was bored out of my mind. My phone and iPod had all run out of battery and I was forced to sit there staring out the window. Even doing that was hard because I didn’t get a window seat. Because of my boredom, I took some random pictures.

We arrived at Frankfurt-Hahn Airport at around 4 in the afternoon, and from there we took the bus back. We all spent so much money in Athens that we all had just enough to get home. We didn’t think we’d make the 4 o clock bus in our original planning, so we arrived at the Frankfurt Hbf a lot earlier than expected. Getting to places early seemed like the trend of the day. We got there at about 6 in the evening, and had to wait until 9 PM for our train. By now I had been on the road for almost 12 hours. We ended up browsing through a bookstore and walking around town until our train arrived. After 17 hours, I finally got home.

More photos here

After being here for a little while, I’ve come to notice a bunch of things here that are just a lot different that what I’m used to in Vancouver, and I’ve made a list of these things here:

Old-style architecture with beautiful roads of cobblestone

Cool retro looking keys

Keyholes that you can actually look through

Tobacco companies are allowed to advertise and packs of cigarettes are readily available and cheap (about 5 euro)

Ads for Google Chrome but not any other browser

Obscure looking vehicles

Rides on the metro cost about 3.40 euro, which is about 4.50 CAD and about the same as Vancouver

For the rest of them I don’t have pictures for, but here they are:

• Lots of people of middle eastern descent, mostly from Turkey
• Nobody claps, but instead pounds their fist on the table repeatedly
• Some people wear their wedding rings on the right hand
• Car brands that only exist here (Citroën, Alfa Romero, Opel, etc.)
• Some people here actually drive Fords instead of European cars, but it’s the only American brand here that I’ve seen
• Since people don’t like using the 1c and 2c coins, they tend to round up transactions to the nearest 5c, which is probably why the cashier asked me if I had a 5c coin