Hey blog!! I’m Will, the second of the six spokes!! The team is currently sitting in my living room, recapping and discussing the many takeaways of our first day biking from Stanford to San Francisco. I have listed them down below.
Biking is so much fun. We spent around 6 hours biking today, and it was genuinely just so much fun to ride with the team. It’s made me incredibly stoked for the bike rides to come. The feeling of cruising downhill is something genuinely unmatched, and I got to take my fellow spokesters through my old stomping grounds of the Great Highway and Ocean Beach! However, biking for long periods of time does come at a bodily cost, believe it or not! My legs are completely sore; walking up the stairs of my house was honestly a struggle, and I’m hoping they heal for tomorrow’s long ride to Vallejo, CA! Luckily, we have purchased some chamois cream to help with this soreness in the regions of the buttocks. We will try this cream out tomorrow and keep this blog updated on the effectiveness of this cream in alleviating lower body pain.
While biking, food is the best topic of conversation (We forgot to eat a proper lunch today, and were all starving - who would’ve thought). Never in my life have I been hankering for those wasabi soy sauce almonds so much, and boy did they hit the spot! We also have our sponsors, Stanford Digital Education, to thank for AMAZING COOKIES. When I say amazing, I mean amazing, show-stopping, never been seen/done ever before. SDE, if you see this, please drop the recipe. I do not know what was in these cookies, or if we were just famished, but we were truly inspired by them to keep pushing forward. While climbing a hill, I knew that the top would reward me with a coveted SDE cookie, and thus I pushed myself beyond my usual limits. We had a little snack at a play structure, which took us all back to the good old days.
We have the pleasure of three intersecting dietary restrictions on this trip - Kawther is vegan, I am allergic to nuts, and Hunter has a gluten intolerance, so we’ve carefully shopped for our favorite items and ensured there isn’t cross contamination. We went grocery shopping together for the first time today - our cart largely consisted of various sandwich making supplies (lots of turkey, ham, and break) and a large pack of the much desired WASABI almonds. Yum!
Biking on the interstate is illegal. We did not know this prior to our ride - today, we had multiple opportunities to decide between taking a steeper, harder route or going into the interstate for a bit, and we chose the steeper, harder route - which turned out to be the right decision! We had dinner with the founder and one of the first riders of Spokes America (the broader organization that Stanford Spokes is under), and they let us know this crucial law as we chatted about their experiences with Spokes and they gave us a bunch of advice for our trip. Below is a picture of us at Marnee Thai in San Francisco. Thank you so much Turner and Drew! We had so much fun with you!
5. Sleep is very important when biking this much. We got up at 5:30 AM today to load the van, and we are very tired. Good night - see you tomorrow in Vallejo!
A special thanks to SDE for an amazing send-off party today, Matthew Rascoff, who rode with us for the first few miles of our trip today, and Aaron Kehoe, our photographer from the Stanford Report for following our ride in his car, taking some amazing pictures, and being so fun to be around!
Feel free to submit any questions/comments on the ‘Contact’ page of our website!! See you tomorrow!