The second skin feel

I actually waited for these ever since Nike came with the FlyKnit upper. I am already a big fan of the Free midsole having gone through two of them (both 3.0) putting around 400 miles on each. I was disappointed that Nike did not launch the Free FlyKnit on the 3.0 midsole and 5.0 was the only option but I pre-ordered and it came promptly a week before the store launch... so kind of special. And the free sock kind of helped with the sticker shock of $160. First some facts - I have narrow feet and hence Nike works for me since they come with narrower toe boxes. I run neutral and have built mileage on the Free over a period of time. I have midfoot strike.

It does indeed look like a sock and works like one. Though the Free 3.0 was conceptually not very far from the Free FlyKnit, the later has a very different ride feel. Over the last couple of days, I ran a 5K on a treadmill, and a 10K mostly on trails. It does not look it but the shoe does provide a lot a upper support but fits like a second skin. The 5.0 midsole is slightly thicker than the 3.0 but I did not feel the difference much. Throughout my runs on the treadmill and the trail I stayed on my midfoot strike. It runs better on a trail but collects stones in the waffle grooves. The green color is vividly bright, and I think I may have like a blue or the red and blue better. The upper grasps your ankle with a stretchy band which felt great even on the 10K but I am not sure how it will work for someone with a wider ankle. The shoe breaths much better than the current 3.0. which is great for Houston, TX where humidity makes it feel as if you are running your mouth full of GU. 

Overall I like it more than the present 3.0. and I feel it will work for people who are comfortable with a narrow toe box, a minimalist ride and really bright colors.

What is a journey?

One of my all-time favorite commercial is from Louis Vuitton, more for its creative rather than the product itself. Amidst haunting music from Gustavo Santaolalla, the voice over ponders – “A journey brings us face to face with ourselves; a journey shows us not only the world, but how we fit in it”. That has always stayed with me and I was reminded of it again on the MS weekend as I pedaled through the good parts, the difficult parts, the scenic parts and the dreary parts, parts that made me smile and parts that made me realize why I was doing this. As I came across riders with jerseys saying “I ride with MS”, the cause made even more sense. We do it to make this a better world one step at a time, in whatever little ways that we can. We do this because we are all in this world trying to find meaning and find our place in it. The BP MS 150 ride brought me a step closer to it.

Any first time rider could not have asked for a better weekend to do the ride. It was a chilly 40 degrees F with a slight tail wind. We had a great start with the Direct Energy Team sharp at 7:00 AM. With a quick check-in, photos and words of encouragement from the great volunteers we were off. I did curse myself for not getting the full gloves as my fingers froze for the first few miles. By the first rest stop it was all good. Never in my practice rides did I get any tail wind and therefore finding myself at the lunch stop at around 9:30AM was encouraging as well as a little disconcerting.

The rest of the distance for the day total of 88 miles was actually not that difficult. Maybe it was the adrenalin or maybe it was the crowd that made the distance go quicker. Talking about the ride itself, it is something that one needs to experience first-hand. People of all shapes, sizes and shades on bikes of every possible configuration riding in one huge mass for as long as you can see – riders with Tigger tails, plush kitties clinging to their jerseys for dear life, dressed in Minnie outfits. It’s a celebration!

We camped out with the Direct Energy Team at a RV park near La Grange which was a very cushy arrangement to say the least; including beer on tap which I realized does work as a pretty good recovery drink. 

It was a perfect day to camp too, in the middle of a ranch land amidst longhorns and a busy looking armadillo.

I had been pushing back on the idea of doing the Bechtel Challenge Route for day two even after being encouraged by a couple of friends. But the good ride on day one was convincing me that I should give it a try. Then someone conned me into believing that it was just 10 odd extra miles and the camp site we were on shaves off nearly 3-4 miles of the 10 miles. After getting a decent amount of sleep through the rather cold night, I was feeling pretty good apart from a slight cramp on my left shoulder. So at the start, when someone said let’s do the challenge route, I was immediately in.

Truly speaking, if I had researched the route I would not have done it. The fact that I did not even know that the route goes through a state park was to my advantage. Ignorance is bliss. Every hill in the park was an unknown and once I was able to absorb it, I had to collect the last ounce of will to climb. I thought of counting them at first and after a while I gave up. There were simply too many. I think it was somewhere in the middle, at the foot of a steep climb we could hear some beautiful bagpipe music but were not able to see where it was coming from. After chugging through the hill, the musician was finally visible dressed in all his Scottish finery and then I heard this rider who was next to me chuckle – “Oh! Its him, I thought I died and went to heaven”.

The challenge route made the ride extra special. I was happy to have done it. I would have felt disappointed if I had chosen not to do it. I was ending the ride into Austin with a little extra sense of achievement and the hilly terrain of the capital looked tame in front of what I had just endured. It also made me admire “pickle juice”. That is exactly what it is - salty brine from jars of pickle that tastes like flavored sea water, except it is saltier. But it is the best hydration available for riders. Cramping has been a perennial problem with me whether I am riding or running and with pickle juice I did not cramp at all. And you get them at H-E-B. As they say – you live and learn.

But any of this would not have been possible if I did not have all of you who supported, cheered, donated and wished well for me. Thank you. You all made it happen for me. The ride definitely changed a part of me forever… for the better.

Power of One

The BP MS 150 is my first serious fundraising effort and at the outset I would like to say that I am humbled by the experience.In the past I have been a donor to MS as well as other charities but never thought much about the cause. Somewhere in my heart I felt good about it but that was it. I was not aware of the difference it makes to the cause. The past week gave me an opportunity to realize a couple of things – the impact that charities have on the cause and gratitude one feels towards the people who donate for a cause.

Last week BP organized the fun 3 on 3 basketball event for fundraising. Cheering a couple of my colleagues was fun but hearing a MS patient tell us about her first hand struggle with MS and how she is rising to fight it was awe inspiring. Imagine getting up with excruciating pain every morning, suddenly being on crutches for 4 months and never knowing when it will strike again.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have received many donations for my fundraising effort and I want to thank everyone who has helped the cause. Donation by donation, I am getting to my goal and it has reiterated what I always believed in – the power of a single individual trying to make a difference. I had never imagined receiving this level of support. The view from the side of the recipient is completely different. It’s the feeling of fans buying tickets for your gig. It makes you believe that you are participating in the event for a cause along with a lot of your friends who also believe in it and you are assured that it will be a great ride. Without support from donors experiences like these won’t be possible. So, thank you once again.

It is just a couple of more weeks to the big ride and I feel ready for it. A little nervous but excited.

Donate to Sandeep's MS 150 Fundraising efforts

Milestone 100

Endurance sports is all about, well building endurance - to go one more mile, to bear the pain a little longer, to not give up. As a wise friend once told me - "there are a thousand reasons to give up, there is just one to carry on". Over the past many weekends I have been trying to simulate what I will face during the BP MS 150 over the two days. I rode fairly long for two consecutive days but could never reach the 100 cumulative mile mark. That was the magical number I needed to cross to be convinced that I am ready for the MS 150.

The week started fairly ok. I got in a couple of days of 5K runs on the treadmill. I was already signed up for a long ride at the 2013 Schlumberger Education Expedition ride for Saturday. And then someone told me that there is the Bluebonnet Express Ride which is beautiful and I should definitely do it. This was probably it. I was already signed up for the 79 miles on the Education Expedition ride. That would mean I just needed a little ride on the Bluebonnet to make it a century. Or that was the plan.

Day 1 - Saturday, 23 March 2013

It was gray and cloudy day. But at least there was no wind. That's what I was praying for. I have a mortal fear for wind. And I had my Direct Energy Team to ride with. So it was overall a good start. We actually blew through the first rest stop and averaged a good 17-18 miles per hour to the second stop. I moved to the longer route from there as the rest of the team was going on the shorter route. The ride to the third stop was not bad either. And then it started to drizzle. Nothing major, just annoying. After a 20 mile stretch with some wind I was on the last stop. With some encouragement from students from the Fort Bend ISD schools the last 10 miles were easy. Overall it is a great ride. Very enthusiastic volunteers from the FBISD schools, great rest stops and overall great support.

Day 2 - Sunday, 24 March 2013

I am not sure if one should look at the weather website before leaving for a ride or just ignore it. Because when I did reach the venue at Waller Stadium, it did not matter. Wind was gusting at 30-35 miles per hour (The Saffir-Simpson scale tells me that 39 mph would be a tropical storm) and it was cold. I saw people just turning around a going back home. For me it was too close to give up. I had one reason to ride - I needed my 100. After completing 79 yesterday, I just needed a little over 20 to get it done. There was a 25 miles option. I had to endure the wind for just a couple of hours, tops. Got on the bike and was immediately greeted by crushing wind and cold. It was relentless reducing me to a crawling heap of muscle and metal. I had read somewhere, to ride long distance, at any point you should be ready to ride 10-12 miles to the next rest stop. Breaking down the total distance into 10-12 mile chunks really helps. The ride to the next stop was grueling. Lots of uphill and headwind. The sight of a first rest stop brought tears to my eyes. Then was the tough decision, do I go 25 or 35 total. Well, depends on how much of a sissy you are - jiminy cricket replied. At the fork, I turned towards 35. And at that point I realized that I was probably one of the few on that route. Well, at least there was only cross wind at this time. Must have gone another 5 miles, when the game makers decided to hand me Cerberus. Just as I was turning at a stop sign, I saw him, this devilish mutt taking a crouching stance and moving in a flanking pattern. Within seconds, I had this maniacal hound chasing me while I struggled on granny gears trying to escape its fangs. Only a few days back I was reading a story on how a biker was seriously injured by a pack of dogs. I remembered something about shouting back at the dog, probably to prove who is the bigger dog here. That seemed to work. I did manage to escape unharmed for the most part. The rest of the ride was relatively uneventful. In just under 3 hours I was done with my 35 miles.

It is a great feeling when you are finally get something that you only imagined in the realms of the impossible... and then probably you look at the next one. Till the next one.

Donate to Sandeep's MS 150 Fundraising efforts

The Plane Great Ride

I dreaded the very thought of hills. After the “hill” section of the “Pedal the Prairie” ride, I was not sure if I was ready for hills. Hills have always been my enemy and therefore I have never tried to get better at them and it’s been a vicious cycle. After a lot of encouragement from my better half, timidly, I signed up for the 47 miles distance for the Plane Great Ride. She kept insisting that I should stop being a sissy and sign up for the 67 but visions of riders zipping past me on an uphill while I struggled with granny gears kept haunting me.

The ride is hosted in the rolling hills and beautiful scenery through the Sam Houston National Forest and farms of Grimes and Montgomery counties. The 70 mile drive from my home helped me convince myself that I will be able to finish this ride even if I had to carry the bike on my shoulder for the last 10 miles.

The ride starts in the Montgomery High School campus and goes through the farms and ranches before hitting the pine forests of Sam Houston National Forest. The scenery is breathtaking and that makes the entire effort worthwhile and now I know why so many people sign up for the ride.

It is also a very well organized ride with more frequent rest stops that help you through some of the tougher climbs. I loved the stop that was actually inside a thicket of pine trees and you could literally smell the pine needles.

The other thing that I realized was “hills are not that bad”. At least they are not as bad as wind. Every time you make the effort of going up a hill, there is a downhill reward. However, the effort fighting the wind is just lost. In fact after finishing the 47 miles in well under 4 hours, I was in fact regretting not having signed up for the 67. Well, you ride and learn and I am a little wiser now.

Click here to help Sandeep's MS150 fundraising effort

What? You pulled a Hincapie?

After I signed up for the BP MS 150 ride in December 2012, the next step was to start preparing for it. As I have told you earlier, before this I had never even owned a road bike. But how hard could it be? The bike machines in the gym are way easier than the treadmills, aren't they?

So I enlisted a good friend who had already done the BP MS 150 before to help me buy a bike. And that was when it started to sink in. This is a completely different game compared to running. And the bike and the equipment are the least of your worries because usually your budget will restrain you to the kind of bike that you will end up with. Keep additional funds for all the gear - clothing, helmet, shoes, pedals, spares, tools etc.

As I was going through the process of acquiring these things I started to realize that everything is different in this world compared to the running world that I was taking a break from for a while.

The first obvious one were the brands - for some reason, there was no sight of the familiar brands of Nike, Saucony, Asics and Brooks. I was having to decide between Giro, Louis Garneau, Canari, Specialized, Trek, Cannondale and Hincapie.

Then came the terminology, people, routes, training plans, quirks – things I was expecting would be different.

What took me by surprise was how different the effort itself was because in my mind it was just another endurance sport. It took the first long ride for me to realize that the definition of “long” in bicycling was different than that in running. The first long ride was 4 hours. And after that I just sat in front of the fridge the rest of the day. I was hungry and no amount of food would satiate it.

Then it was the pain. During my initial days of pavement pounding, after a long run I would have sore legs. Getting used to the saddle for 6 hours at a stretch is another ball game. And of course there was that clip pedal that I had to get used to. I was told I will fall a few times before I learn to unclip. What I did not realize was how clumsy I was and how bad a fall can be. I won’t go into the gory details but it will suffice to say that after a helmet that has an end to end horizontal crack, I have learned to unclip. But I keep consoling myself that I am not killing my knees any more.

The fact that bicycling allows you to cover a long distance at a slow pace, has allowed me to appreciate a lot of things that I usually zip through – rice fields, pine forests, beautiful ranch houses, longhorns. It has also made me realize that Texas is not all that flat and it can be really windy in the wide open spaces. I have a new appreciation for gas stations and how some of them serve more as watering holes for riders than actually selling gas to trucks.

I think it is a great sport to get into even if you have not done it before. If you go in with a spirit to explore it will be a lot of fun.

Click here to help Sandeep's MS150 fundraising effort

Why am I doing this?

I have been a runner for some time now but never ventured towards bicycling even though working in Houston and that too for BP; for the last 9 years, I have witnessed the annual pedaling frenzy that surrounds the BPMS 150 event. Two things happened in 2012.Firstly, after long deliberation we finally decided to move to Houston and bid goodbye to Marriott rewards and free air miles which in the new equation now looks like a pittance and I really want to kick myself for not taking this decision earlier. Secondly, on a whim I made a New Year resolution to teach my son how to ride without training wheels. By April of that year, the kid already had his first Triathlon under his belt. And slowly we started to venture into riding longer, riding trails and it started to be fun.

I was still not ready to commit riding the BP MS 150. After all, it sounded insane to ride 150 miles over two days. And if someone tells you that you actually ride from Houston to Austin, it sounds even more ridiculous. We usually drive to another city, not ride a bicycle. Then I started to read about the ride, the cause it supports and the Bike MS movement. I have always believed that sports should contribute to the greater good of society. And every little bit we can do in our capability, we should. I have always admired the work being done by the likes of Susan G. Komen, JDRF and Livestrong. They have crowd sourced charity from passions people follow and channeled them into causes that make this world a better place to live.

Multiple sclerosis is a chronic, unpredictable disease of the central nervous system (the brain, optic nerves, and spinal cord). It is thought to be an autoimmune disorder. MS can cause blurred vision, loss of balance, poor coordination, slurred speech, tremors, numbness, extreme fatigue, problems with memory and concentration, paralysis, and blindness and more. MS is not considered a fatal disease as the vast majority of people with it live a normal life-span. But they may struggle to live as productively as they desire, often facing increasing limitations. Approximately 400,000 Americans have MS, and every week about 200 people are diagnosed. World-wide, MS affects about 2.5 million people. And there is no cure yet.

And that is what finally helped me commit. It would be challenging, I had never been on my bicycle for more than 5 miles. I actually never owned a road bike. I could run a Half Marathon in around 2 hours. But BP MS 150 is two days of being on the saddle for at least 6 hours every day – well, at my speed it is definitely 6 hours. I will have to learn the sport from scratch. But then people who live with MS are facing challenges much larger than this. So I took the plunge. I registered for the race and will be riding with the Direct Energy Team. I am fundraising for the National MS Society and I would request you to kindly donate to this great cause at my Fundraising Page. Every small donation counts and I thank you for helping me with this great cause.

I have decided to tell the story of my journey through this blog, things that I will learn which might help others wanting to take on the challenge. Keep visiting this blog for updates, pictures of my training and stories and memories, as I collect them.