Luke Edward Ollett

Author: luke

  • I Wonder Why Taxi Drivers Have a Fire Extinguisher in Their Car?

    In most of the cars here and in Brazil, and possibly most of South America, there is always a fire extinguisher. Many times a rather large one. All I can figure out is that there is a large propane tank in the back of the taxis, which I suppose could be considered flammable, and likely at some point in the past, a child and un perro pequeño were trapped in a burning wreckage outside of some politician’s house screaming for a fire extinguisher. That politician then became rich with some legislation and a friend in the fire extinguisher industry.

    My friend Ken introduced me to some guys called Ryan and Rob who are at the end of their South American tour, and John Finch and I joined up with them for a night. For me these sort of travellers are dangerous since they have no regard for money, and it becomes easy for me to also disregard my money as we go out and purchase large alcoholic drinks at large, thumping nightclubs with large outrageous covers. (50 pesos is large to a wandering non-working individual.) We all go to a place called Asia de Cuba, which is a fancy club on the river in Puerto Madero. Thank you John for negotiating my entry even though I had shorts on. By the way, being the only one wearing shorts at a club where you’re not supposed to be wearing shorts and immediately going up into the VIP table section is a method to turn some heads and initiate some real game. We stay for roughly an hour and then decide to go to another dance club, but find out that place is closed at 3am for some reason on this day. So our new friends, thanks to Ken, say “we got a club”. They take us to downtown tourist town in Recoleta. We leave the taxi and you are bombarded with guys trying to get you into their strip club with enticing drink offers. We were not interested, as we intended on buying bottles. First one we go to, filled with very good-looking girls that instantly surround me while other guys find out that bottles cost $600 US. I am dragged away and we go to another one. This place has no girls in it. Next place is good enough and we stay. New friend Rob is straight to the back corner, intending on some late-night action with whatever money he has. Luke is at the bar explaining to three girls that their hair smells nice, although using the wrong word for “smell”, which is apparently funny. At the same time, these girls all want me to buy them a drink, but it costs 120 pesos. Fuck that. So I tell this girl that I will happily house her for a week, buy her breakfast, lunch and dinner, and take her to the zoo, but I will not pay for her drinks. Apparently I was pissing her off since this is her livelihood. I am happy to report that we eventually left around sunup and I did not spend any money at these clubs. No idea what happened to new friends Rob and Ryan.

    John and I are returning in a cab to my place first. The cab driver stops at some point and says that he cannot go any further since he pressed the button on the meter. We don’t care and tell him to keep going to my place as I did not want to walk the 12 blocks home. Cab driver refuses. John and the cab driver start arguing and we basically try to point out to this guy that he is a cab driver, his job is to drive us — why won’t he drive us? We get out and start to walk away and refuse to pay this guy the 12 pesos if he is not going to do his job. And then John says…

    “¡Qué pelotudo!”

    This guy gets out of his taxi and starts running at us with his fire extinguisher in hand and a look of pure evil in his eyes. John and I decide to run. Taxi guy gets back into his car and burns out in reverse to catch up to us. There are no other cars out and this guy could do whatever he wanted. In a moment of desperation, we decide to split up and I run the opposite way. But it didn’t work. Either way we end up at the same place we first got out, panting and breathing, with the taxista right there, obviously a little perturbed that we didn’t want to pay him. So John starts talking to him again, and we are discussing how we could “really” run away, but realise our options are futile unless we split up — and then one of us could risk serious fire extinguisher injury. So we paid him…

    Although we lost the battle, I did manage to steal his car’s antenna while John was talking to him. I pray to all the gods that I do not jump in a cab with this guy any time in the near future and I always check to make sure they have an antenna. Good for me there are at least 10,000 taxis in this city. Hopefully he doesn’t read this post.

  • Random First Impressions of Argentina

    First of all, I love this country. I knew I did when I visited this place 1 year ago and I am glad to see that I picked wisely. Granted there are still some 193 countries I still need to visit. I am glad that I have decided to make my first offshore residency here. I have a friend who happens to be in town right now, a Mr. John Finch, who describes this place rather succinctly: “They have everything that we do, just not as good.” This is very accurate, but I am sure there are numerous things that can be traded back home.

    Everything is ludicrously cheap compared to what we pay in the States, except for gas. Beer is cheaper than water. Wine is equally cheap. Medical supplies are a third of the cost. McDonald’s tends to be rather expensive from what I have seen, but I refuse to go there. It is marketed to the upper class here, I think, because it is the upper class who parties all night and emerges from a dance hall looking to scarf some bad-for-the-earth food. A nice meal out will cost you $20 (US) out of your pocket, with wine and apps and desserts.

    Dinner is always after 11pm. And takes a long time. Clubs and bars do not really start their festivities until well after 2am. It is easy to find yourself coming home at 5-8am. The trick is to use naps and just go slow when you are out. No need to pound two Jäger Red Bulls and then a beer, and then move to the next bar because the first five hottest girls you saw didn’t hit on you, and then jump in a taxi to find a hotel where you could get that last nightcap before 2am. Just relax and enjoy the evening and just when you thought things were not going on tonight, you find a huge dance party in the middle of the street.

    Cumbia and reggaeton suck in my opinion, but I cannot escape it. If you go out dancing with locals, you will need to dance to this. It is the most repetitive music I have ever come across.

    At night, poor people from the suburbs come into the city and drag these carts that are 4 metres tall with recyclables. These people are called the cartoneros and they keep the streets clean. I hear the city is trying to create a proper task force for this job, but until they do, this is a good job for the poor people to do. They don’t cause trouble, just drag a whole shit load of trash out of the city and into somewhere else.

    I saw a guy at the airport racing another guy in the little buggies they have hauling bags. A backpack fell off one and they didn’t even stop or notice. I wonder whatever happened to that person and their bag?

    The buses here have these strange air hoses hooked up into their hubs. You can hear that these buses are using a lot of air for what seems to be the shocks. Picture to come. I can only gather that these hoses pump air into the axle and then into the shocks or something. Doesn’t seem efficient, but my guess is that there was some corruption at some point and a deal had been made to make this the popular way to build buses. The buses are also privately owned and you can see in some of them that the driver has really personalised each one with custom mirrors and ornaments and black lights. A bus costs 90 centavos, or roughly a quarter. Same with a subway ride. They are also pretty fun.

    The city is documented in a small pocket book called the Guia T. Learn it, know it, love it.

    They are incredibly good drivers here. They have four-way intersections with no lights or stop signs and traffic just works. It makes me confident as I haul ass on the streets on my bike. When you cross the road on foot, you try to be as close to the car as possible to make sure that you get in between that car and the one behind it.

    I have noticed a lot of facial moles around here for some reason. Must be the weather.

    The city provides free water to everyone and it must be drinkable. Lovely for someone sweating gallons on his bike who can only find bathrooms. No problems yet as far as I can tell, but I have a miraculously strong stomach.

    For the most part, all young people live with their parents until they are in their mid to late 20s. Because of this, it is not easy to just go home with someone at the end of a night. So they have all these pay-by-the-hour motels, or telos, all over the place. Yet to try one out, but I did see a drive-in one in Santos, Brazil.

    So there is this strange phenomenon regarding the one peso coin around here. They are in very short supply and if you buy something that requires that coin as change, they will ask for another way for you to pay. You say no, and then they scowl at you, yell in the back, some kid runs out and goes outside and does something to get a coin for you. That or they just won’t sell you the thing you want, or they might even give it to you for free — like the banana I got today. This is all because the buses run some sort of cartel that was in conjunction with the Koreans. The buses would take all the peso coins since a trip costs 90 centavos, and then hoard them and sell them to the Koreans, who would then melt them down and sell the metal for more than the actual peso was worth. Fucking ridiculous, I know. So there is this big question of why they don’t introduce a card system into the buses — how hard could it be, everyone asks. But it seems there is just too much corruption somewhere down the line and it never happens.

    For such a large city, I can walk or take public transportation everywhere, and it is another great example of what we need to do more of in America. Fuck density issues — just raise car taxes and gas prices, and provide commuter buses and light rail and small hovercrafts.

    Good times, great people…

  • Fingernail Biting Habit

    Since as long as I can remember, I have been biting my nails. My mom said I was biting my nails as a baby. Before I was even talking. Although apparently I didn’t talk until I was 3 years old and that is long enough to cause some worry in the parental units around. People thought I was going to be a mute. And then one day I just blurted out a whole sentence — none of this “mama” bullshit. But I digress…

    I have always had success not biting my nails when I was travelling. Not sure if it was due to the dirty conditions I was living in or the fact that I had other things to keep me occupied. I never really could figure out when I bite my nails. From what I can gather it is a matter of imperfections. I feel the slightest thing sticking out and then I need to smooth the nail down. Which then causes another imperfection. And eventually I get to this point where I have somehow destroyed my nail bed and I have these large pieces of regular skin in front of my nail before the end of my finger. I use these as grippy points to be able to pick up things. Dimes have always been my worst enemy as far as picking them up, and I will often just leave a dime on the ground or need to slide it all the way over to a crack.

    Here is a picture of them as they have always been prior to this cold turkey effort.

    Initial Nails Picture

    The history of my attempts has gone something like this… First attempt was to buy the “No Bite” stuff, which I eventually began to grow fond of and would go through bottles daily, asking my dad to keep buying more. The next was to buy this stuff which was to stop horses from chewing on the wooden posts in their corrals. This was extremely effective and worked into my college days. However, this tactic came to an end when my neighbour and good friend played the best practical joke of all time on me. He and I were both playing sports at school — he swam and I played soccer. He would have early morning practice and then come back and want to sleep. I would just be waking up when he was sleeping, so I would sneak into his room and spray this stuff into his mouth while he was sleeping. I would get such a rise out of watching him first lick his lips, and then start to wriggle and squirm, and then eventually leap up spitting and gagging. I always wondered what that did to his dreams at that point. So Geoff, being the smart guy that he is, dumped out the entire bottle one day and filled it with water. When I would subsequently spray this stuff into his mouth, he would act out his reaction enough to make me feel satisfied, and then go back to sleep. Meanwhile I was biting my nails more and more and thought I had built up a tolerance even to the horse repellent. Since then there have been small bursts of weeks of no biting but never anything to write about.

    A week after that last picture, they look like this.

    1 week

    And now almost a month later they look like this. Look at that pinky!

    Almost a month in

    So the problems I am and will run into are these. I can’t help but get large amounts of dirt underneath the nails. I am just a dirty boy. So I then use my other nails to pick the dirt out from underneath them. Which in turn weakens the nails. So I just wash my hands more. Another problem is that they grow really long but are not that thick, so they can break easily, creating these imperfections that taunt me so much. Not sure how to solve this one, other than to cut them and then file them to be short again but allowing the underneath part to slowly grow until the end. The next is just maintenance. The skin around the outsides needs to be taken care of all the time it seems. What a fucking hassle! I also find myself flicking the nails, probably weakening them as well.

    I will admit that I do not really have the urge to bite them anymore, so maybe I have crossed the hump. But if I were to bite them, oh man, what a feast that would be.

    If you are wondering if I bite my toenails, the answer is I used to when I was little. But now I cannot reach them anymore, so I don’t have that problem.

  • Loska the Cat

    In my apartment in Argentina there are two cats. I am a fond lover of cats and I considered this to be a selling point on this place. One is a white cat that is not allowed inside due to the general attitude that the black cat is upset by its presence. The black cat, called Loska, must be about 22 years old by the way it moves and its general smell of urine. The only good thing this cat has going for it is that it somehow knows to pee in the drains, which unfortunately are in the house and not too far from my bedroom door. I should just let the white cat in and see what happens… what’s the worst that could happen? An elderly black cat gets mutilated by some thug white cat while it is peeing on a grate?

    Loska Peeing on a grate

  • An Uninformed Campaign Reform Suggestion

    It has become clear during this election that the populace has started to consider two notions that I have not been exposed to before.

    • I am sure this has been prevalent for many years, but the concept of having a two-party system is pissing people off. This comes from the fact that both options do not exactly get you to jump out of your chair and wave a hockey mom sign.
    • This idea that “I will vote for Obama just to make sure McCain does not get in even though I don’t really like McCain either.” (This example works in both directions of course.) Another extension of the two-party system, because people are beginning to realise that their party does not do everything for them but, due to the lack of options, they stick to its side. What better way to do this than to vote against the perceived opposition.

    Humans throughout time have had difficulty keeping track of anything more than some form of dualism. Good or bad. Light or dark. Rich or poor. Liberal or conservative. etc. In all of these examples there are of course grey areas, but these tend to be overlooked by the qualitative extremes. Our political system does just this, but instead of having starkly polar political opposites to choose from, we have decided to set our political compass in the grey and have chosen two poles that are very similar. The grey areas become the extremes (which should be the poles) and the grey areas occupy only a small percentage of the populace, mostly due to the idea that you will be ostracised if you leave the safety of the heterogeneous political middle.

    Two parties have an incredible sum of money at their disposal to promote their party. Any other party that wishes to compete on the equivalent political stage will require an election that proves they can acquire 5% of the vote, and then they can receive more funding. This we know would still be only a small step to matching the financial contributions being given to the two major parties. The media finances one of the two major parties only, giving no time or money to any other options that would represent more of a correction to the political system due to their distance from the political middle.

    Without even the possibility of a large standard deviation, what we have today will be able to last for a very long time. Any correction in either direction will only make small, insignificant changes to the average.

    I suggest we reform our political election process to promote equality to all possible political ideas, so that the public can make a totally informed decision as to how they want to live their lives, as opposed to giving them only two choices, sometimes only one.

    Install a campaign funding cap for all parties. If a party raises more than X dollars, the overflow will be evenly distributed to the other qualifying parties that have demonstrated themselves to the nation in the past. This will force parties to focus on political ideas and not spin tactics, since their money can only go so far. This will also encourage the reduction of corporate sponsorships of our candidates. Candidates will be forced to develop political answers and not spin tactics to make sure their message will be heard across the nation. The overflow idea will also grow a change in the American population. Instead of raising money to vote for candidate John, money will be raised to be able to hear new options come from the population, and other candidates. Excess money will be used to indicate to the nation that what you are hearing at the time is not enough and we want more options.

    This article explains how McCain pushed for a campaign contribution limit. This was done to make sure that the government could monitor more of the money going into campaigns, which is funny since this means that McCain is advocating a bigger government.

    And so it goes.

  • It’s About Time…

    In one day I will give a training class to a group of people that will want to hate me, but hopefully I can win them over and teach them to embrace change even if it is forced down their throat without too much notice. In one month I will be enjoying the sparkles of a new language while at the same time trying to create an online service that I plan on forcing down the throats of people without much notice. In 4 months time I will be diving in heavenly bodies of water in Central America, looking for the next would-be client to utilise my online service. In 8 months time I will have added one more continent to the list of continents I have visited with a trip to Antarctica, stopping briefly to see if I can force my online services on the sheep farmers from my motherland in the Falklands. In 15 months time I will be in Barcelona grabbing an MBA and surrounding myself with individuals who will understand my obsession of finding people willing to allow me to force my services down their throat without really any notice at all. In 24 months I will be in South Africa sneaking/schmoozing/buying/pleasuring/begging my way into the World Cup games, hoping to find the next set of people that would really like for me to come up with something that could really help them out without much effort or money. In 36 months time I will be in India, gazing into the eyes of a tiger while on the back of an elephant, trying to find the people that would love for me to come up with project 9 to solve their dilemma(s). In 48 months time I will be in a Transylvania castle wondering how this rose got so red, talking on my cell phone to 5 others that are doing the exact same thing I am doing. In 72 months I will be vacationing in Southern California at my modest East Side Costa Mesa home, trying to convince my friends that I need people from all sorts of industries to help me jam things down people’s throats while never really giving them any notice. In 97 months I will be riding down the Champs-Élysées, shocked and dismayed by the fact that I just completed the Tour de France. In 120 months I will probably be bored with what I have been doing and begin pondering my next escape from the almost normal world that I had constructed around me.

    It gets a little fuzzy after that right now, but I am glad it is so clear for the first part.

  • First Road Bike Crash

    luke_bike_crash

    Going into the last turn of the race with 100 yards to go, sitting in the top 20 spots, two guys crash to the floor, skidding and ripping their jerseys. I slammed my brakes, putting me into a 20-foot skid that was halted by a guy’s ribs as he lay on the ground, pretzeled into his broken bike. I somersaulted off the bars, doing a crab position onto the bike’s pedal, and then rolling onto the asphalt. I stood up with adrenaline sputtering out my ears and, looking around, I saw a pair of orange lenses on the ground. That day I had just bought a pair of orange lenses for my glasses and I freaked out that I had already broken them. I had to touch my eyes to assure myself that mine were still on my head. But I sympathised with the owner of the lenses. I then worried about my wheels, thinking they may have bent. I then picked a bike off a guy lying moaning on the ground, and then opted not to help move him for fear of a lawsuit. I then gave a high five to the guy I had been with earlier as we went into the turn, as he looked like he had gone through a similar experience.

    I expected my first road crash to be a gnarly skid at 30 miles an hour around a turn, which sent me skidding for 200 feet as the tight spandex tore off my body and was replaced with road rash, slamming into hay bales and bouncing ten feet into the air doing twists, only to land on a big-bosomed girl holding two one-litre beer mugs.

  • How Hard Can You Concentrate?

    Slacklining

    Slacklining 2

    My friend Dustin introduced me to slacklining. I think he got it in Israel when he was playing pro basketball over there. (Figures, 6’9″ white Jewish guy, right?) This is a great sport and if you YouTube it you can find many great videos. The rope is made of nylon and is basically constructed like a huge tie-down — the same kind you use for your dirt bikes in the back of the truck. The rope is maybe 2–3 inches wide and slices down the middle of your foot. The rope is wrapped around two sturdy objects a reasonable distance apart and is tightened until you can launch a small child from it 30 feet in the air.

    The only way I can do this is to focus into the distance at some unseen point and zone out. I have to concentrate harder than I do most other times in my life. Each step feels like a hike over an ever-growing mountain. The middle of the rope is the toughest, but if you keep your body balanced the rope mysteriously will not sway as you might think. I need to apply this concentration to other areas of my life. I always describe it to people watching me with: “…just as you feel you are going to fall, you can hang at that balance point, and you will stay up despite everything you thought you knew about gravity.” If you don’t think you will fall, then you won’t.

    One drawback to this sport is the setup of the damn rope — it just doesn’t go fast, and it is slightly scary ratcheting something to 10,000 pounds of pressure and then having it slip in front of your face.

  • A Theory on Washing Your Hands After Using the Restroom

    Apparently here in America, it is the unarguable truth that you must wash your hands every time you use the restroom. Well to all those that live by that truth, here is my response.

    I believe that an individual should wash their hands after using the restroom on an “as needed” basis as opposed to the blanket policy mentioned above. According to this Wikipedia page, you should be washing your hands pretty much all day and would require a sink installed onto your belt.

    Is the bathroom just a dirty place that will dump germs on you the moment you walk in? The bathroom is not dirty. The bathroom I use most regularly (work) is cleaned at least a dozen times a day. Thank you, Janitor guy! Would you wash your hands if you walked into a bathroom and then found all the stalls occupied so you turned around and left?

    Are the areas of my body underneath my underwear always dirty? Probably more so than the rest of my body due to warmer temperatures and movement. But I shower 1.7 times a day on average to stay clean and always scrub vigorously around my midsection. I believe hair removal is a major factor in reducing any smells and I take care to be trimmed up. The skin of my penis is no different than the skin on my arm or calf. Do you wash your hands after scratching your inner thigh? I don’t want to favour the skin on my hands — imagine what the skin on my neck would do if it found out I was giving preferential treatment to my hands.

    Having said that, I won’t argue the fact that sometimes your hands just need to be washed and that’s that. Fair enough, no explanation needed. During these times, please wash your hands. But why assume these nasty situations are happening all the time?

    Here are some interesting myths presented on the same Wikipedia page I mentioned earlier.

    Killing germs on your hands decreases your immunity
    This is a myth. The skin on your body is covered with microorganisms. Our environment is contaminated with good and bad microorganisms. You cannot kill all of the microorganisms on your hands. Your large intestine contains large numbers of microorganisms. All of these sources of germs stimulate your immune response. CDC guidelines for health care workers call for alcohol rubs to be used 60 or more times a day between patients and after touching contaminated surfaces. Killing germs on your hands will not decrease your immunity but it will help prevent disease.

    Washing your hands with soap and water kills germs
    This is misinformation. Plain soaps have minimal if any antimicrobial activity. In several clinical studies, hand washing with plain soap failed to remove bad microorganisms (pathogens) from the hands of hospital personnel. Hand washing with plain soap can result in an increase in bacterial counts on the skin. Occasionally, contaminated plain soaps have colonised hands with Gram-negative bacteria.

    From the rest of that site it is clear that you need to be using some serious alcohol-driven hand sanitisers to truly accomplish what you intend to do while washing your hands. So what is your main intention for washing your hands every time? Because if it is to disinfect, obviously it’s not helping. Also consider how long you wash your hands for. Someone told me that the proper way is to sing Happy Birthday to yourself every time you wash your hands, and the time it takes to sing the song is the prescribed time. Most people don’t do this.

    Every now and then you might see someone washing their hands really well. And in my head, I know they just had an “event” using the restroom and they want to get rid of the traces. If this is you, then you have already subscribed to my theory being discussed here.

    Now I am sure what I am saying is going to ruffle some feathers, but let’s go through some of the advantages that this theory will bring.

    • Time saved. If you are to properly wash your hands for 80 seconds at an average of 4–5 times a day, that is almost 7 minutes of my day, 2 hours of my month, one day of my year, a few months of my life.
    • Water consumption. The average sink uses 1.5 gallons per minute. Consider that with the numbers above — 10 gallons a day, 180 gallons a month, etc.
    • Money gained. Easy to calculate using the numbers above in relation to what you make at work.

    So having read all this, you might still be on the side of “better safe than sorry.” I can respect your decision as long as you can respect mine. I can assure you my hands are cleaned when they need to be cleaned. I think the end-all solution is to use super-strong alcohol-based soap and force everybody to wash for 20 seconds. Either that or everyone should wear the thing Duchovny wears on his hand in Zoolander.

  • One of the Hardest Things I Have Ever Done: Mulholland Challenge

    The Mulholland Challenge has proven to be one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. It is a 108-mile cycling race through the Santa Monica mountains of Southern California involving 11,500 feet of climbing with grades often over 6% and reaching 18%. Also on this particular day, the weather peaked at 105 degrees to make things that much more exciting. Here is a great quote from the people that put on this masochistic event:

    The Way of Planet Ultra
    Planet Ultra is a state of mind, a way of life, a place to seek solace and inspiration, to take refuge, to find insight and inspiration. It is both terra firma and terra incognita, myth and mystery, muscle and mind. We live with the motto “by endurance we conquer.”

    Very applicable to many situations.

    So prior to doing this ride I was scoping out blogs to get an idea of what I was about to do. This one gives a hilarious account of the ride, and although it made me laugh, I was half laughing from fear of this monster I was about to try and tame. This other site gives a more objective version of the ride but is not nearly as hilarious — it does show some interesting graphs that give you an idea of how much climbing is going to be involved.

    Well let me help the future Mulholland challengers as well…

    Pre-Race Preparation

    1. This race is hard. In fact, it is not a race as I learned early on at about mile 14. It’s a race of survival, just looking to make it to the end. So train beforehand or you will be ridiculed by all these old guys who dominate this race as you bail out. I had ridden one 80-miler beforehand with at least 100 miles a week riding for a few months. I still felt unprepared.
    2. Bring full-fingered gloves with a jacket. The first 30 or so minutes through the early morning canyons were agony with 41-degree temperatures. It’s worth the very little extra weight.
    3. Seat bag: tube, 2 CO2 and adapter, multi-tool (which I got Justin to carry, sucker).
    4. Get the compact crank setup. All the good riders had them, there’s no reason not to.

    During the Race

    1. Don’t drink their “Sustain” powder. Tastes like shit and makes you feel like you’re gonna yak at mile 93. Just go with the Gatorade.
    2. Take the anti-lactic acid pills. Just do it. I took 5 before we started and another 5 at mile 70.
    3. Don’t ride alone. Always have someone there to push you or you’ll succumb to the mountain mind games.
    4. I carried two water bottles. They recommended bringing a camel pack on the website but we already ignored their request to change our gears, so why bow to the water demands as well?
    5. In my jersey pockets I had 5 lactic acid pills, 2 Clif bars (which I didn’t eat), two gel block bags, an extra tube, a camera (which I got X to carry), and a banana at the start. I would pick up granola bars at each stop and eat them on the way.
    6. Drink more water than you think you need. You know you’re dehydrated when you’re sweating salt crystals.

    Ride Description

    I didn’t have a computer — I knocked it off one ride and have never replaced it. So this account won’t give you the mile markers you’re looking for, but the sites I mentioned above do a good job of that.

    We started at 6:32am and it was extremely cold. I opted not to bring arm or leg warmers for heat and weight reasons. Justin, Xavier, and myself were in the 5% of people who came as poorly prepared as we did. Going through Las Virgenes road is relatively painless and most people were not going really that fast. The hill is short and easy and then you get a fantastic downhill looking over at the Pacific Ocean as the warm air hits you coming from the west, providing only a small relief to my numb fingers.

    You go south on PCH and we were pushing pretty hard. I considered conserving for the unknown hills I knew were coming but competition brings out funny decisions in a person. A left turn onto Topanga Canyon and this horrible wind just smacked us in the face, lowering my morale as we trudged up this slow ascent. The wind eventually subsided as we got deeper into the canyon. Apparently on the way up Topanga a guy got knocked down by someone who got a flat tire. I would have cried if that happened to me.

    The first hill was a slow steady grade and I felt really good at this point and went up it quite easily. Apparently Xavier cramped at this point, mysteriously. The first sticker stop (you have to collect five stickers through the race) is about 30 miles in and a welcome relief. I felt comically delirious at each of the sticker stops. From here there are just a load more hills; none are particularly difficult until you get to Cotharin. Here is where I left my Impact Racing brethren and surged forward to not see them again for about 8 hours. This hill was brutal and the sun just started to come out.

    Eventually you get to the top and the road turns really bad with huge cracks all over it. Going downhill and hitting these things at 50 km/h and not getting a punctured tire is just ridiculous. I saw several guys pulled over on the way down; one apparently broke his steering tube and another guy went down hard requesting that he could ride to the “clinic” in Malibu. I heard of three bad crashes throughout the day. At the bottom you hit PCH and then you go south again. Riding PCH at speed gazing out over the horizon is an activity everybody should do in their lifetime. Eventually we arrived at Decker Canyon and began the hardest hill of the race. It started with 18% and probably averaged 10–12% and went on for some 8 miles. I rode well and found a group of Orange County riders to motivate me to get to the top. I got to the top and at the sticker stop I was laughing because I really didn’t think I should have been able to climb that hill.

    Next came some slow rollers through the interior peaks of the Santa Monica mountains. Beautiful scenery on a truly gorgeous day. I didn’t find this section so bad as the hills never got too steep, but I did have to do it on my own. At the second-to-last sticker spot you are at about mile 79. You are told that the next and last sticker spot is not that far away. But you have to go up Stunt Road. At mile 90 the road goes at a steady 8% grade for 4 miles. The key here is the mile 90 factor — not the hardest hill normally, but a very different story after the day you have just had. I had to stop twice on the way up, I believe for overheating reasons as I felt a little dizzy. You get to the top and they were the friendliest sticker stop yet — they pretty much carried you to a chair, fed you a bottle, and served homemade chocolate chip cookies.

    From here you have 1.5 miles of pretty tough climbing left and then you’re home free. This was the one part I almost cramped on and I attribute it to the homemade chocolate chip cookie. A great downhill looking over Calabasas is next and then you have an annoying uphill on Las Virgenes to go back to the hotel where the race began.

    Personal Reflection

    This race is not attempted by young people for some reason. It is all 30+ year olds with many well over 40. My cohorts and I were the only youngsters I saw, although Xavier and Justin said they spotted a 20-something rider and a few youngsters who likely did not finish the race. The only explanation for this is that young people nowadays are bred not to be masochistic. I think the older mentality is summed up through the quote I started this post with.

    After 8 hours and 36 minutes the ride was over. For the last 2–3 hours the theme of the ride was “just make it stop,” and the thought of lying down brought me to the finish. In the end, I have no regrets and am extremely happy with my performance. I would do it again, only after the Big Bear climb and maybe riding from LA to SF.

    What’s next? I’m thinking velodrome racing.