STP 2009 - Photo Journey

I biked 202 miles from Seattle to Portland (STP) this year to raise funds for my favorite charity Asha for Education as part of STP 2009. Please visit my profile page to donate.

Mile 0: By my standards, we started early on the STP day! At 7:00 am 5 of us were flagged off from the start line - that's almost 1/2 hour before the start line closes! The rest of the Asha gang had already started almost an hour back.

I forgot my Asha bib at home (hushh - don't tell Raji!!) - but the others were proudly showing their yellow Asha bibs on their back along with the STP bib.


Mile 7: The morning was beautiful and we enjoyed riding on the side of lake washington with views of always gorgeous Mt. Rainier.


Mile 24: First food stop was REI at Kent and we reached there by 8:30 am or so. REI stop was, as usual, very cheerful atmosphere with energetic volunteers and good food! We met some of the other Asha-riders and posed for a quick group snap. By then a cat had already crossed Jay's path and he had a fall. The cat survived! :-)


As usual, there were loooong lines for honey-buckets!


As we rode south from REI stop, we could see Rainier right infront of us.


Mile 43.1: First big hill is Puyallup - which the STP booklet refers to as "THE HILL"! Well, after all the hill trainings we did, this was still tough, but nowhere close to Inglewood hill.


Mile 53.2: Finally we reached the lunch stop at Spanaway. Dave's killer bread was, as usual, amazing and with peanut-buteer and Jelly - yum! We reached Spanaway around 12:00 noon - took a long break and finally started around 1:40 pm from there.


We were now south of Rainier - stopped on the side of the road to take a look back at Rainier.


Mile 98.85: We took some mini-stops in between and finally reached Centralia - the mid-point stop around 6 pm. Unfortunately the free ice-creams and chocolate-milks were already over by then ... so we bought some ice-cream to console ourselves.


Our Saturday night stay was in Winlock - in a private house. We had to take a detour from the official STP route to get there (and remind you, that was kinda hilly!) and on the way we passed some farm houses which looked beautiful in the evening sunlight.


This is the house where 16 of us stayed overnight - it was definitely a fun experience! However, we had to ride about 2 miles extra because of the detour!


Mile 143.9: Because of our detour we missed world's largest egg in Winlock. After a few small stops at Vader and Castle Rock our 2nd day lunch stop was at Lexington park. We had to stand in long lines waiting for food.


After lunch when we headed towards columbia river, we had the first flat tire in our group (and thankfully the last one). One person took this opportunity to take a nap on the road-side while the others fixed the flat! Guess who?


Mile 151.1: Finally we reached at the Lewis and Clark bridge on the Columbia river. They open the bridge to cars and wave of bikers alternately - so we had to wait in a long line of bikers waiting to go over the bridge.


Though it can be risky, it is also fun to go over this long bridge with hundreds of bikers all round you!


Once you go up on the bridge, the reward is the downhill ramp.


Posing for a photo with the bridge behind us - we crossed Washington state and entered Oregon. About 50 more miles to go!


Mile 172: I had an accident. Few riders in front of us suddenly slowed down without any signs. I was close behind them and had to sway on my right to avoid hitting them. But that part was a very rough, dry gravel patch and the next thing I know I was on the ground. When I tried to get up, I couldn't even stand and had to sit immediately because of the pain on my hip. For a moment, I thought I won't be able to finish STP this time. Sankara, Pratheep and Vijay helped me dress my wounds in my legs and hands. After sitting for a while I was feeling better and also I was not mentally prepared to call it off when we had just about 30 miles to go!

Mile 173.85: I managed to get to the food stop at St. Helens high School which was only about a mile away from where I fell. I got my wounds properly dressed in their firstaid booth, took some ibuprofens, rest and food and was all ready to complete the rest of the 30 miles!



The weather was not really with us this time. Saturday was very hot with temperatures hoovering around 85 degrees. On sunday it was about 10 degrees cooler and rainy. We were about 10 miles away when the drizzles started looking more like proper rains and biking shoes felt like puddles.


Mile 202.3: All drenched, we finally made it to the finish line around 6:30 pm. Because of adrenaline rush and Ibuprofen I was almost oblivious to my pains and showed off my finisher medal proudly!


We pick up our luggage and posed for some more photos with other riders! It was time to freshen up and get back to Seattle, this time in a car!


In 14 hours and 12 minutes of biking (not including any time for stops) with an average speed of about 14.4 miles/hour I burned more than 10,000 calories, and sure got much more from all the calorie-rich food we ate all the way!

All this effort is to raise funds for the projects Asha Seattle supports in India. Asha Seattle is in a funding crunch this year - we need to raise $925,000 so that we don't need to do any painful cuts from our projects. With more that $550,000 either pledged or donated we are already half-way there - but we still need to raise the other $375,000 by the end of the year. This was one of the primary reasons I decided to do STP this year. Please consider donating from my profile page. Your donations to Asha are 100% tax deductible and 100% of the funds raised will go towards projects in India since Asha volunteers bear all the administrative costs of the organization.

The Real Heroes

When I was a kid, don’t remember about what age, but before my class 5th/6th, I had a very simple dream about what I would do when I grow up. simply stated, first I would earn a lot of money, then I would kind of ‘adopt’ a village, put my money in there to build nice quarters (yes, I used to live in quarters!), make it a neat and clean village, everyone will be happy and I’ll be a hero! Then I’ll move onto another village to continue my heroism. Innocence is bliss! When we are kids, our problem space is generally simple and we can come up with simple solutions.

I have thought about this ‘dream’ many times after I have grown up. Let me not get into the problem that I was trying to solve or the solution either. But the mentality – that when I have money, I’ll support someone else and that will make me a hero. My ideas have definitely changed over the years, especially over the last 4 years of my involvement with Asha and some other volunteering organizations. I do volunteer quite a lot of my time and donate to charities. But at the end of the day – I have a nice-paying job, air-conditioned car, wardrobe full of clothes and many of the luxuries I can do without. How much of my salary do I really donate? It’s so easy to get into the mindset that I’m donating because I’m generous, not because it’s someone else’s right to avail some very basic needs like everyday food and shelter.

Don’t get me wrong – donating time and money to whatever extent many of us do is great and certainly very helpful. And we should absolutely be proud of what we do. But that donation or volunteering should also come with humility. We are helping the underprivileged because it is their right. They are the ones fighting against incredible odds without many of the basic amenities that we all take for granted. Think of a farmer who goes out to till her land in the scorching heat of the summer knowing that most of her harvest will go towards paying her debt and very little, if anything, will be saved for her family. She will go back home and feed her children whatever she can afford and she will go without food for days. Think of a factory laborer who became jobless because the factory got closed. But despite all odds he sends his children to school – with the hope that they will have a better future. Think of a tribal family who were evicted from their age old land because some big corporation has constructed a mine or a factory there. With whatever little power they have they are fighting a ridiculously unequal war to regain their land and dignity. These are not rare fictional stories from any imaginary land – these are real people living in the same world with us and there are millions of them. Then there are countless others who are working for poor people’s rights – not with the goal of any recognition, but because that’s the right thing to do. These are people who probably have given up lucrative career to work for a cause close to their heart.

They are the real heroes. Whether it is Raja Harish Chandra or Bill Gates, they can donate millions and billions of dollars, but very few will ever be able to sacrifice to the extent of what many hundreds of thousands of heroes across the world do every day.

Fast unto death ...

I can not imagine someone fasting for almost 7 years - that is totally and sadly insane. Check out the story at: http://www.tehelka.com/story_main17.asp?filename=Cr032506_Iroms_iron.asp.

Just imagine the kind of mental strength it takes to continue fasting for this looong stretch. Sharmila is demanding the repeal of the controversial Armed Forces Special Powers Act or AFSPA, which gives sweeping powers to the army in the state. Committee has been formed on this issue and their suggestion is to scrap the Act - but the state has rejected that! Can we make the government listen?

Respecting others' opinion

This is something that I had written a while back - seemed like bloggable! So here you go ...

Do you Respect Others' Opinion?

For some time I have been thinking what does it really mean to respect other’s opinions. The reason I was sort of forced to think about this was because in some subject I differ from many people and I really find it difficult to ‘respect the other person’s opinion’ (whatever it means!) – Because it sounds so stupid to me! However, as we all ‘know’ or let’s say we all hear that one should always respect other’s opinion; I started thinking if I don’t have this quality in me. I know, or at least I think I know, many of my friends have this quality, at least in this matter! Is that because they anyway don’t have a strong opinion on the matter anyway?

There few things that I’m trying to answer here. What does it mean to ‘respect other’s opinion’? Is that a virtue or a good quality to have? Why or why not?

Before we even begin, we should get the definitions straight. The answer will greatly vary depending on what one means by the word ‘respect’. Respect (according to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language) is defined as:
A feeling of appreciative, often deferential regard; esteem.
Willingness to show consideration or appreciation
Similarly, the word ‘opinion’ is defined as: A belief or conclusion held with confidence but not substantiated by positive knowledge or proof.

The definition of opinion I think is quite clear, not many people are very likely to have widely different view of that word. However, respect has few aspects – feeling of appreciation is not the same as willingness to show consideration. The first one is much stronger and in that sense of the term I believe it is much harder to really ‘respect’ other’s opinion especially when you don’t at all agree with that opinion. But the second one is milder, and I can definitely agree that it’s easier for people to ‘have willingness to show consideration’ for other’s opinion even when you don’t believe in them.

I brought up this question among many of my friends. What I found pretty much from every one of them is that what they mean by respecting other’s opinion is basically ‘respecting other’s right to hold and/or express their opinion’. If you take the second meaning of the word ‘respect’, i.e. ‘willingness to show consideration or appreciation’, then the meaning of the phrase ‘respecting other’s opinion’ almost becomes similar to ‘respecting other’s right to hold and/or express their opinion’. It’s important to understand the difference: in one case you ‘respect’ the opinion itself and in another can you ‘respect’ the other person’s ‘right to hold and or express’ that opinion – where respect means ‘appreciative feeling’. Let’s take these two cases one by one.

If we are talking about respecting the ‘opinion’ itself (and by respect I mean to have a appreciative feeling), then I definitely can not always respect other’s opinion. On the contrary, I can and I do have contempt (opposite of ‘respect’!) for many opinions. For example, if you take the example of any supremacist of racist opinion held by many individuals and groups, I can have nothing but contempt for those opinions. And I strongly believe this is the case for most of the people (if not all) – where they have contempt or strong disagreement for some opinions. So, in this sense of the phrase, I don’t think people can really always respect other’s opinion neither will I call it a ‘virtue’, rather quite the opposite.

Now, if we take the other case, where we ‘respect other’s right to hold and/or express’ their opinion – I personally would agree with that. For example, say even though I have contempt for the Nazi supremacist opinion, I can ‘respect’ their right to hold that opinion or express that opinion. In this sense of the phrase, I think many people do ‘respect other’s opinion’.

Now the question is whether this is a good quality to have. In the first sense that we discussed before (‘respecting the opinion itself’), as I have already expressed, I don’t think this as a virtue, rather quite the contrary. But in the second sense, I think respecting other’s right to hold any opinion and to express them, is a good quality to have. Why? There can be several reasons for that. First of all, this is a diverse world and everyone has their own beliefs and way of thinking. Without any respect for holding different opinions at all everything will fall apart, there will probably be fights and hatred everywhere. There will be less tolerance for the diversity in opinion and that can probably lead to a variety of problems. Whoever has the power, will force their opinion on everyone else.

Finally, to conclude, depending on what one means by respecting other’s opinion, it might be a virtue or it might even be an evil! I don’t know how many people really know exactly what they mean when they say that they respect other’s opinion or that it’s a good quality to have.

STP 2007 - Journey in Pictures

Three of us who started late, none of us had a camera! The first stop on the route was Kent REI - we stopped there for breakfast. Arvind thought it was no big deal

Why take a snap when I'm busy eating? Ravi concentrates on his banana ...

Group snap before we head out after breakfast. Sree needed some squatting - biking 204 miles was not enough exercise for his strong quads.

Mount Rainier was gorgeous as usual ... this view along the route was the highlight for me for the first day.

The Whole Foods lunch stop was very disappointing - very very disappointing.

We had to start anyway with an unsatisfied stomach ...

We took every opportunity to stop, cool-down and eat, while Ankur tried some meditation

Then we entered a nice shaded trail - first time out of road traffic.

The Lake on the side of the trail reminded us of our Burke-Gilman trail that we rode many times during our training rides.

Mount St. Helens was looking amazing in the afternoon sunshine ...

Little before we reached the 1/2 point - another mini-stop. Aparajita was embarrassed that we caught her eating!

Finally in Centralia - 100 mile point! 100 more to go ... Vineet gives two thumbs up to the ice-cream Sree and I are devouring

We felt cheated when we found out that Bethel church (our night stop) was about 5 more miles along the route than where we expected it to be! But we reached just in time for dinner!

It was time to put some ice packs on the sore knees before we head off to bed.

Fueling up for the 2nd day ... however, Aparajita is little suspicious of our plan.

The second day started with the Napavine hill - it was not that bad after all.

By the time we reached Lexington, we were hungry again and had to stand in a long line for food

The Foods was much better than previous day's lunch stop. Sangeetha was very angry that we took her picture, but Sudarshan smelt something fishy

Finally we crossed Washington border and entered Oregon - we conquered the bridge you can see behind us

Climbing up gradual but very long St. Helens hill was more painful - it didn't seem to have any end to it

As we kept going .... and going ...

And then we reached St. Helens School food stop

We started count down - 10 more miles to Portland ...

I finally made it to the finish line!

And didn't mind showing off my finisher badge ...!

It takes an effort to smile after biking 204 miles!

It was time for a shower

A warm shower after a long ride is very refreshing! Getting ready to head back to Seattle - this time not on bike though!