UBCTC Opening Day!

Last Saturday was UBC Tri-club’s welcome-back BBQ.

Group Picture at Iona Beach

The nice, breezy morning started with a 9am ride to Iona Beach from UBC. A total of 23 amazing riders showed up to negotiate the gusty winds, especially leading up to Iona Beach. This must had been one of the bigger group rides I’ve been in awhile, which was a load of fun - just imagine all of us crossing the entire mainspan of the Arthur Lang Bridge. The strong headwinds forced us to average about 20-25 km/hr heading west to Iona, and we averaged about 45-50 km/hr on the same stretch of pavement heading east with the tailwinds. I managed to record my maximum instantaneous speed at 50.3 km/hr.

Ride to Iona Beach

Next up was our Triathlon 101 clinic at 11am just outside the club’s office at the SUB. Vince, our club’s president, was demonstrating on how to change a flat tire. We must have had a lot of funny looks from ordinary people just walking by and seeing many spandex-clad athletes, oblivious to the bike clinic going on. It must have been another one of those publicity stunts on campus. Haha jeez.

Triathlon 101 Clinic

Before you know it, it was noon, which meant that the burgers and dogs were ready. The food suppliers crew, Andrew and Lauren, did a great job getting the food behind the scenes. Also, Iron chef Matt was our designated beef cooker, while Nathaniel mostly made sure that Matt was doing his job properly. It should also be noted that Brittany helped out with security, ensuring that only members of the UBCTC got to eat the food. All in all, the event was popularly attended and people had a good time.

BBQ at the SUB

The complete photo album can be found here.

One more year.

I’m stoked about my first post.

In preparation for the UBC Triathlon Club (UBCTC) Fall Classic Racing Series, I’ve decided to jump onto the Blog bandwagon along with my closest rivals in the club including Andrew Wight, Chris Scott and others. Sporadic coverage of yours truly pre and post-event thoughts will be posted here.

This summer was great! I got a chance to completely get away from engineering and become a free-spirit. I also achieved a few personal best times at the two half irons (Victoria and Vancouver) and quarter ironman (Nelson) races I did over the summer. In brief, I explored many new places to swim/bike/run with the help of my gps watch and mentored a bunch of friends (also recent grads turned free-spirits) who wanted to pick up running and swimming from scratch. By the end of this summer, I am proud to declare that they learned to suck it in (those side stitches) on the running track and learned the basics to front crawl in the pool, which was great to see. In doing so, I had some serious down time to reflect on the helms of my own techniques and training regime. I was enlightened to go on countless epic adventures along the way, including trips to Saturna Island, Eastern Canada, Victoria, Nelson, and Seattle, and I have many more memories that will last a lifetime. World domination as a free-spirit never felt so good. Alas, some good things do come to an end, shucks.

Going back to school this year, my family, friends, and even bullies are scratching their heads over the fact that I am here. Somebody’s going tell me that I really should be on a warm beach somewhere far and exotic. But perhaps as much as I want to embark the ‘real’ world after graduation, I figured holding off one more year to let the job market recover is a smart thing to do.

So here I am, a student at UBC doing a master’s in engineering and specializing into structures. It’s a professional degree – like shopping for those buy-one-get-one-half-off deals, except in this case, it’s one-more-year-at-UBC-get-another-degree deal. Hopefully, this is what I had bargained for. More importantly, that already means one more exciting year with the UBCTC!