Senseless Syndrome

ramanujam January 22nd, 2007

The International Cycle Race on the East coast Road was my first cycle tour/race and i had good fun. Thanks to kiruba for letting us know about it and great thanks to sagaro for accompanying me and providing good hospitality. The day before the event we changed our category and decided to compete in the mountain bike category(30 km) and thought it would be an easy finish as we had planned to do a longer stretch before.

The previous day we both went to a stadium in Kilpauk and after waiting for long time and many confusions we completed the registration and got the riders license. The best part was one guy comes and tells…
A: You both are now representing Tamilnadu…
We: Oh!!
A:He is your coach and Mr.John will be your pilot.
We: Thats nice!

Earlier, i never knew how to go to Kilpauk and thought i could take a bus to some distance and then take an auto. I was reminded of…
Inda bus Kilpauk poguma?
Nee yerina enda bus vena pogum!
Fortunately that didn’t happen!
I decided to stay at Ganesh’s house since we had to leave at 4 in the morning. It was Vicky’s birthday and we called him at 4:30 AM and ganesh spoke like Vicky’s senior official and vicky was not able to understand what was happening. We then conveyed the wishes and started. A truck was supposed to carry our cycles from chennai to Mayajaal and unfortunately it left. So we had to cycle all the way from Thiruvanmyur to Mayajaal which added some 15 km just even before the race started. We reached there exhausted and the race started just 15 minutes later adding fuel to the fire.

There were a good number of foreigners in our category and almost everyone had the geared mountain bikes excepting us. We used the ordinary MTB. The race had awesome prize money and all those professionals were highly focussed and were beating the shit out of their asses. It was 15km up and 15 km down and by the time i did my first lap someone would have finished. The best part was we went to a kaiyendi bhavan and had our breakfast in between the race! 6 dosas and 2 vada costed 18 bucks….dead cheap and they were pretty decent and clean also.

Me and Ganesh at the small hotel…

Ganesh at the finish line….Everybody started clapping and people thought he finished first! Even till the evening lots of people shook hands with him thinking he won!Since he has stopped blogging, i will have to stress the fact that he got more claps than the winner

Exhausted…Just after the race.

For more pics check HERE

I learnt a lot of lessons from the race and met two really inspiring people. Mr. Venkatesh was the man behind the NGO which conducted the race and we had a good chat with him. This man is doing something great and i wish i could do my little help in achieving his goals. Then there was this 53year old foreigner who rode along with us in the 30KM category and completed in the top slot. Then i was amazed to see this guy at the start line of the 140km amateur race and he completed that race too in the top 20. What a man he is! I wasn’t able to even imagine riding a cycle at his age.

After completing this i have planned to take part in the chennai marathon and also try rowing. We even found some guys at ICR who were interested to do rowing. The best lesson learnt was to cushion your seat else you will not be able to use your ass for the next day and will have to sit on the bag in the classroom

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