Friday 12 February 2016

In your face, Neil Armstrong!

I know today's not Thursday, but I was mentally drained out yesterday after spending over two and a half hours navigating through the mess that is Bangalore Traffic. I just googled "World's worst cities for traffic", and knocked down Istanbul 20 positions on my bucket list.

Nightmare! Nightmare!

Keeping up in context of my previous blogpost, let's rewind the calendar a couple of weeks in time and review the week before this week. Sounds a bit confusing, so bare with me here-

Saturday (30th January): 
If you haven;t been living under a rock, you probably would have heard by now that my teammate, Naveen John, has signed a professional contract, the first Indian to do so. I was pretty honored when he called me up to host a Q&A session to talk about the state of cycling in a sport in India. 5 seconds after the call, the introvert in me started browning my pants. But the opportunity to provide an insight into the sport in the country to those not involved got me excited and in the end, the session went really well.
You can check out the recording of the session here - http://youtu.be/JAi1bEJHJ7o

Sunday (31st January):
To get used to the Time-Trial, I did a 5 hour ride on the TT rig and found one of the most scenic routes around Bangalore (Bangalore-Kunigal-Magadi-Ramanagar-Bidadi-Bangalore). Unfortunately, the last 25 kilometres were dust ridden and I suffered from a bad case of dust allergies following this ride.
Note to self: Avoid riding on Mysore road at all costs. Unless there's a race named "Mysore-Bangalore". 

Monday (1st February):
To relieve the muscle tension following yesterday's ride,I signed up for a deep tissue massage session. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the pain level of the massage session as 9! 10 being breaking a collarbone(s). 


Tuesday (2nd February):
My dust allergies had increased exponentially overnight, so I skipped today's training ride and treated myself to a season of How I met your mother.
Note to self: Never do that again.
I did however decide to head to my internship that afternoon. Did I tell you me internship is kick-ass? My internship is kick-ass!

Wednesday(3rd February):
My lungs were burning when I woke up. I then headed out for a hill reps session. 
My lungs hurt a bit, but I needed to squeeze in my as much training as possible into my legs leading into the nationals. In hindsight it might not have been the best decision, but only time will tell.


Thursday & Friday (4th & 5th February):
I took days off from my internship, but did manage to get in a couple of rides. 
At around the same time, I stumbled upon the eBook "The Martian". Mark Watney is now officially my all time favourite fictional character.
The movie does no justice to the story. Check out the book!

Until next week!

Thursday 4 February 2016

Bourne is back!

This is going to be a short one..

It's 10:26PM on a thursday night.

I've been staring at 3 different PDF's trying to figure out the difference between Engine dynamometer data and chassis dynamometer and prepare for tomorr'w presentation which has been advanced 24 hours.

My dust allergies have joined hands with dehydration to force my body into zombie level of energy for the past 4 days.


My right knee has been hurting since Sunday's long ride.

I might have been cheated out of a chance to represent my state at the national championships which happen in less than 20 days.

And the next season of Sherlock won;t be out till 2017!

Clearly, the 2015 Sarvesh would have raided the refrigerator, hogged on chocoate fudge ice cream and went to bed angry with how the universe just doesn;t give him a break.

But 2016 Sarvesh is slightly different-
1. He is absolutely loving each and every time he gets on the bike.
2. He has an amazing group of friends and family supporting him.
3. He has realized that it's gonna be okay.
4. Matt Damon is back as Bourne and ithe installation releases in July 2016! Who cares about Sherlock?

What a cheeky narcissist! I know, I'm working on it.

Until next week.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Googling "meaning of poop"

I've developed an annoying habit off late. Good, but annoying. Not sure how I developed it, but it's good that I did, yet annoying.

What's the habit you ask? It's wherein I go over each and everything that happens to me. Break it down to pieces. Go over those pieces in various perspectives and finally settle on one perspective with a much better clarity.

I spent the last 30 minutes re-phrasing the previous sentence in the google search box to find a suitable word. Not a good method to do so. Someone ought to come up with an app, which would combine the English dictionary, grammar and permutations & combinations formulas. 30% equity, please.

Now, what I've realized is, that this is a good defense mechanism but there are two annoying sidekicks of this pattern.
One, It is agonizingly slow. I usually get hit with an epiphany of alternate perspectives about 8 to 9 days after an event occurs.
Two, when that does happen, the complexity overdose is overwhelming requiring multiple self-reflections and commiserations. Or in English, I feel like a 9 year old who's found out that Santa Claus is not real. My apologies to all the 8 year-olds reading this blog.



Whatever I felt earlier was the best thing in the world, suddenly seems like human discharge (This is where the blogpost title comes into relevance. You are in for a surprise when you hit the search button!), and what I once thought was nasty, seems..alright!

"Dude, I came here to read cycling and stuff man. Why you no write racing stories?"

The reality is, I came up with 6 different drafts over the last 5 weeks describing each week's proceedings, but I was not satisfied with any of them. After much self reflection and head-scratching, I've realized that that was happening because I hadn't yet received the required quota of epiphanies to truly understand what had happened.
So, I've come up with a strategy. I will post weekly updates every Thursday but with a week's delay.
More time = better clarity = Funnier blog to read

Sounds good? Cool!