Fulfil your childhood dreams: get a bike.

I've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately. I read Andy Pausch's The Last Lecture and the theme of the book was on fulfilling your childhood dreams. I didn't really have any childhood dreams. Except to play as much sport as I could. However, when I was about 13 or 14 my brother started cycling both on the track and road.  I used to go and watch. I  loved watching. It'd usually be a family outing, especially when he'd race on the track in Coffs Harbour and it would be a road trip and we'd get fish and chips for dinner.  One time, one of the much older guys asked me when I was going to start riding. I just shrugged and gave him a half-mumbled answer, not prepared to answer the truth of "when I can afford to buy a bike."  I couldn't afford a bike until I was 21. Well, I could have maybe a year or two earlier but my priorities were on other things.  Like getting a car during my cadetship at Bluescope Steel, which required back and forth travel between uni and work.  Finally, I got my first road bike. I bought an Avanti Monza with Sora groupset. I was pretty happy with it and rode almost everyday. On top of riding I was running a lot and playing hockey up to four times a week and training twice a week for hockey. I also ran to hockey training and then ran with the girls there for there warmup and still blitzed them. I was the fittest I had ever been. Then I got injuries. I was playing so much sport and not taking enough care of my body. My ITB was the main problem and it took over two years before I could get back on the bike. After many incompetent sports therapy professionals and many dollars later, I started to ride again.  

I've been back on the bike maybe a year or so, and really starting to ride a lot more (but still not enough) over summer, which is sure to drop off when uni starts back again. But the point is: I love my bike(s). I am happiest when I'm riding my bike and especially lately I've been doing repeats on the slopes ( I say slopes because they are only 3-6%) and really loving it.  I went back to Wollongong and rode up Mt Keira on the weekend and just wanted to make it up without stopping and ended up with a PB of 2 minutes. I was shocked and stoked, and by no means was I fast, and I struggled massively to get there and nearly vomited 500m from the end.  I achieved my childhood dream:to buy a bike. Now I have three: the avanti, a Cervelo s1 of which I bought the frame second hand and built up and a really old, single gear, raleigh girl's bike.

Now to achieve my adulthood dream: Get a control engineering job.
HR PEOPLE TAKE NOTE, you do not have to like cars to be a good control engineer, even if you are working on automotive control systems. You just have to love control. 

n plus one

There's many reasons for the title of this blog.  

The first comes from # 12 of the rules of cycling by Velominati, in which n + 1 is the number of bikes you must own. The reason I am writing this blog is because I'm also currently reading Boy Racer, by Mark Cavendish - it is an inspiring book as I can relate well to his tantrums and mistakes and hopefully I also learn from mine.  The one thing I have lacked however in my career is passion, and I'm finding it slowly, but its fucking hard in the corporate world to even get a job that you want because HR people often have no clue as to what the job is about.

Another reason for calling my blog n + 1 is that I have always loved mathematics, and mathematical induction is one of the things I recall from high school maths (mathematical induction basically uses n plus 1 to prove that something is true by proving it is true for n and n + 1 and therefore true for all positive integers.) I remember my high school teacher saying "if you don't understand this now, you'll never understand it, so just learn how to do it."  There was pressure for me to understand it, because I was apparently the smartest kid at school, or so I was told, but I didn't get it, so I just had to pretend - I understood what to do, just not why.  Six years later in a university random elective on cryptography I encountered induction again. But this time I got it. I understood. Mrs Monahan you were wrong, but that's ok. I have learned now, that everyone has different opinions and I shouldn't believe it when people tell me I can't do something.

And finally, this blog kind of follows on from the previous two reasons in that n+1 is something that we don't have, but want strive for and want to achieve. But are we really any better off by achieving it, or is it better just to cruise along without any ambition. I'm not sure. If the same thing is true for n as is true for n + 1, why do we keep striving for me. I guess it's because I'm very goal orientated and need a focus and a direction. If I don't have goals, then I am disillusioned and lost.    This blog is going to help me recall the goals I've achieved and keep track of those I currently have.