I never really paid attention to the calories burned during cycling until recently, and it’s still somewhat shocking when I look at it. With my love of cycling rekindled by AIDS/LifeCycle I have spent a lot more time in the saddle this year. Between short criterium races, my longest at 140mi, or the most elevation with the Death Ride, I have needed to be very mindful of my nutrition before, during, and after these rides. In short, cycling can burn a lot of calories.

Waking up on the last day of big gay summer camp is always a downer. In the warm and muggy air of Ventura, the love bubble starts to pop and you’re left with one last bike ride before returning to the real world. This year was my second AIDS/LifeCycle, and I was not excited to wake up for day seven. Once the tent and gear were dropped off, my breakfast consumed, there was nothing but a measly 70 miles remaining for ALC 2022.

After Red Dress Day it’s easy to think “we’re almost to LA!” This part will be easy!” and then BAM you wake up at 4:15 and realize that there’s almost 90 miles until the next camp. Lompoc to Ventura is one of the most beautiful days along the route, taking us through Goviata pass, Goleta, Santa Barbara, and down the coast line towards Ventura. Beautiful but not easy.

Roughly 275 miles ridden in the past four days and it’s time for a rest day of only 43 miles. Only. The things cyclists say sometimes never cease to astound me. Day Five on AIDS/LifeCycle also has the honor of being Red Dress Day, a day which brings out make up, costumes, and of course dresses.

Most of my training and cycling has been solo, but today was so much fun because it was all about teamwork. The day starts with a good steady climb known as “the evil twins”, includes a gorgeous and long descent to the coast, and finishes outside the town of Santa Maria. For one reason or another I found myself cycling in largely small groups of 2-4. Teamwork means coordination, communication, and speed.

Riding from King City to Paso Robles is short, 63 miles, but challenging for two reasons: “Quadbuster” and the heat. Attempting to avoid either giving me too much trouble, I woke early at 4:15 and was able to be one of the first 20 riders out of camp. Shivering in the cold and foggy pre-dawn air, I was reminded of my stiff legs, stiff after almost 200 miles in two days in the saddle. For a number of reasons Day Three can be brutal.

The second day of ALC is the big day, by the cue sheet it’s 109 miles, but yours truly ended up clocking 112 miles. The road is rough but fortunately the tailwinds are generous almost the entire way from Santa Cruz to King City. I woke to my alarm at 4:15am and started today’s journey.

This is my second year of AIDS/LifeCycle and the differences are incredible. The ride is different, and I am also a very different rider. I have put down over 2,500 training miles. I am riding a lighter aluminum tube bike, which replaced the bike I broke on ALC 2019. I am one of three representing Team Germany, Jens and Ulf flying all the way from Berlin to raise money and support the community in California. Today was day one, 81 miles from the Cow Palace in San Francisco to Santa Cruz. Today was incredible.

Designing, working with, or thinking about data consumes the vast majority of my time these days, but almost all of that has been “in the cloud” rather than locally. I recently watched this talk about SQLite and Go which served as a good reminder that I have a pretty powerful computer at my fingertips, and that perhaps not all my workloads require a big Spark cluster in the sky. Shortly after watching that video I stumbled into a small (200k rows) data set which I needed to run some queries against, and my first attempt at auto-ingesting it into a Delta table in Databricks failed, so I decided to launch a local Jupyter notebook and give it a try!

I was recently emailed by a new friend asking for some tips on how to break into software engineering. I love emails like this for two reasons: I really want to help everybody be successful in this industry, and I think we need more people from “non-traditional” educational backgrounds to enrich the industry. Since I had some scarce free time, and I ended up writing them a novel of a reply, I wanted to share my tips with anybody else for whom they might be useful!