Well, i’m assuming that mark and gwu are somewhere between pdx and eugene now on their silly mountain bikes (although gwu is riding my bike)! I hope you guys make it home safe.

Ben, that’s cool that you saw some pro players up close… did you get to see kobe in that hotel room?! hah..i’m sorry, i think that whole situation is kinda sad. don’t they teach you about things like that in nba boot camp?

Some of the things i’m going to write about are kinda ‘out dated’ but i have photos..so at least look at them and ignore my lack of writing skills.

So this first pic here shows how much pain i was in on that last lap around mt. tabor. i think at this point i was sucking in air so hard i thought my lungs were going to explode! our first lap was at that blistering 23mph which thankfully slowed down to around 20mph. so much for ‘climbing’ up hills…the pace was so fast it didn’t matter. Anyway, i don’t think i’ll be racing any time soon, unless of course some one pays me to do it..hah. i did appreciate having ben, gwu and of course diana there cheering me on.

Moving right along, i have some selected pics from mark and robin’s reception. this first one on the left shows how gwu was so anxious to play ball, he was willing to steal one from a poor unsuspecting toddler. The next one is of the cake cutting. unfortunately i don’t have a good pic of mark shoving cake in robin’s face. i thought that both did a great job on the reception and i hope mark will post more pics soon.

You know, i didn’t realized writing and adding images on this blog can be difficult at times. the formatting is kinda screwed up at times.

So moving right along, the next big thing for me was STP or seattle to portland. my brother and i had talked about doing this sometime last fall. in fact, i had convinced him to spend lots of money to build a new bike.

to keep a long story short, about 4000 miles later, we were both ready to finally take on STP. after months and months of riding, we felt that the ride should go well. actually in retrospect, i probably didn’t need to train that hard but i guess it was a good thing.

on friday (july 11th), we had a friend drive us up to seattle in our rented chevy trailblazer. i actually think brandon’s durango was bigger. but we basically needed a vehicle to take up two bikes. my brother and i spent the night at a UofW dorm room which was about the size of a closet. we were lucking at reed…let me tell you that. after having our last real meal at denny’s (lots of carbs in those pancakes)…the 5hrs of sleep we got were great.

the next morning ,we managed to start with the first wave of one day riders at 4:45am and headed out through the suburbs of seattle. about 5hrs later, we were already in centralia…our 100mile mark. not bad, we rode and impressive 20mph ave! this is something that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do if we were riding alone but the fact that there were hundreds of riders to draft with..it made things a lot easier..but dangerous at the same time…20 man pacelines are not fun!

i think the pic on the right was taken at around mile 120. yes, we are still smiling because we weren’t aware that we were going to get some headwind back into portland and also some rain. ya, my parents also managed to score some team malaysia jerseys not available to the public back home…cool!

the rest of the ride was pretty uneventful except for the flat tire my brother had along the way and the second one he noticed 2 miles into portland that he refused to fix! he was riding rim all the way to the finish line baby!

the second half did take a little longer due to the headwinds but we were feeling really good at the end and in fact dropped the group that we were riding with. at the last rest stop about 30miles from pdx, a lady noticed my brother’s jersey and told us that she lived in malaysia in 1976. turned out that she went to the same school we did, where my parents work and she even remembered them. i called my dad on the cellphone and he was amazed that we had met up with her. he did remember her and it turns out that she’s debbie armstrong who was a gold medalist in the winter olympics in the mid 80s! truly a small world.

we finally cruised into the finish line around 7pm for a total time of 14hrs with 11hrs of actual saddle time. our average was a good 18.1mph. my brother was pleased since he was planning for 12hrs of ride time but i think i was convinced that we could have done it in 10hrs. we did spend way too much time at the rest stops because of the group we were riding with. but that’s okay because i think that’s one of the reasons why we were strong the last 30miles to pdx. (i think i’m trying to wipe mud off my face from the rain)

in retrospect, i didn’t think the ride was extremely difficult since it was pretty flat. the temperature was bearable but the headwinds did slow us down a bit. i don’t know if i’d do it again because i’m realizing that i would rather ride faster for shorter distances than to hammer for 11hrs. if anyone wants to do it…mark (since you’re going to be up there next year), it would be fun to maybe do it in two days and have a party at the midway point. but again, if i feel like i’m riding stronger next year, i’d want to ride it in one day and try and break my record. you’d also have to ditch your mt. bike and get a real bike, mark!

yes, finally some confirmation. the ride route was suppose to be 206miles though.

after riding in 40 degree weather during the winter, doing a 10wk(6 days a week) training program for my century in May, and later doing 100miles for saturday rides…it was finally over! or was it…