Summer's winding Down and School is Starting

I was originally suppose to start this blog months ago but was delayed by many things. Now, thankfully I can tell my tale of things that matter to me. To start off, I am a 6’1” triathlete coming from a running background. In the good ol’ days, one could see me running everything ranging from 5k track races to 100m sprints. I had lots of fun doing this, but I wasn’t improving.  I remember placing last in a 3000m track event, but that was during a provincial meet. Nevertheless, this didn’t discourage me from continuing to run, except, I grew weary of running and I just started to improve my swimming. Naturally, I took up biking to see how things would go. Turns out buying a cheap bike as your first bike may not necessarily be the best idea. She weighed, and I’m not joking +40lbs. I digress from this because it isn’t important. After purchasing my bike, I felt I could do a triathlon, so I signed up for the Vancouver Triathlon. Everything seemed well, up until I got mono. I was sick for the race. When I did recover I did everything but run. And it has been like that ever since. I only run so I can do triathlons.  That pretty much sums up my life up to summer: get sick before races and not compete in them.

As summer came this time around, I took the precaution to not do anything stupid. Like walk 15km home at 4am or get heavily drunk 5 consecutive nights in a row. Stupid things like that were removed from my life 2 weeks prior to my race in Vancouver on July 4^th. With all the excitement and anxiety of my first race dawning on me, I did a lot of bizarre things the night before; the strangest of which was baking a cake.

They say that you learn a lot from your first race. It’s true. The most important thing you learn is how to keep you body functioning. THE NUMBER ONE RULE IS TO KEEP HYDRATED. I learned the hard way that without water on the bike ride, you’re fucked for the run. Everything is cramping up and trying to ingest a gel will make hurl. Happily, I placed third despite my mishap with nutrition, making me the only UBC tri club member to place on the podium for that race, but the glory is short lived. The people who place 1^st and 2^nd were children, albeit very fast children (both placed top 25 overall). I was taller than both of them even when they were standing on the podium blocks. Worse yet, the person I outted 3^th from was ages behind me. 15 mins to be exact. So the podium was kind of bittersweet.

Finally, the remainder of my summer, after my summer courses ended and I finished volunteering my time at summer camps, was devoted to triathlon. A full time athlete is a difficult occupation. It requires physical and mental endurance, as well as restraint from drinking, partying, and staying up late. Also, for my age, long distance workouts are frowned upon. Even with all these restraints, I still managed to get in around 15 hours per week of exercise, whilst occasionally drinking.

 As the summer draws to a close and my ridiculous triathlon training comes to an end, my days are beginning to shift back into the life of an engineer. Math that has once entered my brain and then left is slowly trickling back. As Calculus becomes more comfortable, I have to move on to more difficult things. Complex Analysis. I hear lots of terrible stories about this course.  People cry at the mention of complex analysis because of what they’ve gone through with it, but I guess that’s how life goes; you don’t progress if you don’t suffer. Being in the engineering physics program at UBC means I’m going to be suffering a lot for the next 4 years and extensive training days that I’ve had over this summer are going to be distant memories. Replacing my time will be Math, Physics, Robotics, Math, Physics, Math, Math, and likely more Math. It’s a good thing I don’t mind math.