The conference
Attending ICOSAHOM was a great decision. However, getting there by bike was not. I hadn’t brought shoes with me so after showing up on Monday morning to the plenary session in (still damp) cycling shoes I excused myself to buy some new kicks at the nearest department store as soon as they opened.
I was quite pleased with the purchase and did my best to walk with confidence, but I could still only manage to shuffle because my formerly “good” knee was protesting with pain from all of the riding the days before. And more vividly, I felt an astonishing hunger that would make me leave the conference and walk into town for a full meal every hour or two. In that first day, I tried everything from Montréal bagels (for breakfast and lunch) to convenience store nigiri to chicken sandwiches, charcuterie and shoyu ramen. On top of all of the food, I was having trouble staying awake during talks so I topped off my feasting with coffee and pastries during each of the conference’s three coffee breaks and by the end of the day I was feeling delirious.
Despite the numerous parasympathetic signals my body was receiving, I was also “locked in” and participating at the conference. I was working during talks to try and to wrap up my slides, and networking after them while having discussions of ideas with collaborators and friends. In the evening, I finally bid farewell to my colleagues and sat down in a quiet basement in a corner of McGill’s campus to focus on finishing my presentation for the following day. I hadn’t quite finished all of the calculations or slides for the talk, titled “High-Order Methods for Brillouin Zone Integration of Green’s Functions and Their Van Hove Singularities”, but at this point of grad school I was used to turning on my warp drive to assemble months of work into a neat presentation. I let some calculations run while I focused on the outline of the talk and introducing the problems and motivations of our methods in a digestible format on slides. I did as much as I could before returning to my student dorm and collapsing.
I woke up quite early for the day of my presentation because of a restless night in my very warm dorm lacking air conditioning and good ventilation. Luckily, I only had to present in the afternoon so I started feeding my surprisingly hungry body with savory pastries and went back to the conference. While listening to talks on boundary integral equation methods for wave equations and computational methods in quantum mechanics, I was polishing the figures for the results I had computed the night before and trying to simplify some rather dense descriptions of the algorithms I would later present. When it was finally my turn, I began my talk with a sincere apology for my exhaustion and advised that the audience ask clarifying questions if they found any of my explanations confusing or incomplete. It all went rather smoothly, except for a few long pauses when my train of thought would grind to a halt before suddenly coming back.
In the next session, my collaborator, Alex, presented work on our same project and it was really a joy to listen to his creative and inspired explanations of the same topic to a mathematical audience which I had just presented more plainly to a mixed math/physics audience. I also had lost a bet to Alex prior to the conference because I had assumed that our methods for interpolating logarithmic singularities might falter when applied to linearly-dispersive singularities at generic “Dirac” points in electronic bandstructures, sometimes referred to by their older name of “diabolical points”. Instead, Alex had insisted that our method would work because the math never lies and it turned out, after I ran the calculations, that he was right! Given our meeting point in Montréal, I had bet Alex a poutine and later that night at dinner I graciously gave Alex his prize and conceded my defeat. I have never seen a mathematician as excited as I did then.
With the hard work out of the way, I had two more days at the conference and to enjoy Montréal. I continued going to interesting sessions throughout the day and sampling meals and delightful poutines at the numerous business centers of the city before the Wednesday afternoon excursion. My body was still in pain from the bike ride, but it also felt clear that if I didn’t start to move again that I would only recover more slowly. I joined a group of students for a short hike up Mount Royal from the McGill campus, up dozens of stairs until we could finally see the fancy Montréal skyline. A friend, Ewen, and me took a respite from the muggy heat by eating mango popsicles before continuing the hike back down the hill.
Ewen and I met up again for dinner around his hotel in the Quartier Latin. Up until then, I had only wandered within a half-mile radius of McGill’s campus so that I wouldn’t hurt my ailing knee. Reconnecting with Ewen was great – we had first met in Lausanne at another workshop and I really enjoyed his witty remarks and positive attitude on life. We found a good pub at Saint Bock where we filled up on delicious fish ’n chips and then tried a full flight of savory Quebec beers. I was having a great time enjoying myself and finally unwound enough to forget some of the discomforts I had endured in my travels.
My fourth and final day at the conference was spent at Oscar Bruno’s minisymposium where I got to hear about the latest technology in boundary integral equation solvers and meet the people developing these remarkable methods. If I had any regrets about the conference, it was that I didn’t stay until Friday to listen to Oscar Bruno give his talk, because that man really knows how to fire away on all cylinders. I also tried setting up my plans for my return trip while I was listening and I decided to draw a route taking me from Montréal to my non-refundable hotel reservation in Randolph, VT 180 miles away. The thought of getting back on my bike the next day seemed far fetched, but I convinced myself that it would be the best way to see parts of Montréal that I hadn’t been to yet and also ride the Formula 1 track called the Circuit de Gilles on my bike. With that in mind, I tried doing my best to eat all I could manage at the coffee hours and I managed to fit in some conversations with the very friendly student organizers. At the end of the day, I attended the conference banquet at a stumptuous hotel in the city center and enjoyed a fantastic meal and conversations with newfound collaborators. I was even awarded a travel scholarship by the organizing committee, however I have not received any funds to this date. I certainly overate, although I didn’t think that was really possible, and walked a bit more around the city in the evening, seeing the city’s basilica, before eventually bidding farewell to Ewen and preparing myself for the trip home.
Quarter-life crisis
While this journey gave me the opportunity to scratch an itch for adventure and fulfill a yearning for freedom, it was far from a resolution of my quarter-life crisis. Instead, the trip became the crux of it. To answer why I felt that I was in crisis and what doing this ride meant to me I have to dig into some really painful personal stories that are of a very different tone compared to the rest of this blog. If you are reading this because you want to read about bikes and travelling, then I recommend that you skip ahead to the next chapter. However, I feel that there is value in sharing my personal struggles rooted in failed romance and uncovering my sexuality which are essential to understanding my mentality towards this two-wheeled ordeal. This starts with a confession: I think I am a heart-broken person with a long-distance cycling problem.
How did this all begin? When I was in college I fell in love for the first time with a girl who played the piano and visualized mathematical data so beautifully, albeit at a bad time. The day after I knew I had feelings for her was the day our college campus evacuated at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and we kept in touch remotely while taking an online course on nonlinear dynamics together. After courses ended, I mysteriously didn’t hear from her until towards the end of summer when I she reconnected and told me she had moved back to LA. The distance to San Diego wasn’t far, so she came by train and visited me for a week before the fall quarter began. I admit that I wasn’t a very sensitive person at the time and didn’t read the room when she went back to LA and slowly but surely stopped talking to me. Despite being ghosted, I felt that the distance between us wasn’t so far and I recruited a friend to ride 200 km in 10 hours from my house in San Diego to school in Pasadena. I had never imagined how broken I could feel after a bike ride and when I finally got to Caltech I collapsed on the lawn feeling too empty to smell the roses.
The friend who helped me ride my bike into a heart-broken situation was also the first to counsel me out of it by remarking that it sounded like the girl I wanted to see had some issues. And don’t we all have our issues? I was certainly oblivious to mine. Thankfully, I stayed that week in LA with my college roommate, which rescued my spirits for some time. Yet, as the academic year advanced into the hardest courses of Caltech’s junior year physics curriculum, I became very lonely, agitated, and depressed for the first time in my life, which I imagine was a common pandemic experience. Friends once again helped me out of this unhealthy state by encouraging me to visit them and move to Boston for a summer while I did a summer research project with the MIT professor who is now my Ph.D. advisor. It turned out that I started dating one of those friends and continued having long-distance relationship with her for another year before it fell apart when I moved to Boston to start my Ph.D. and she left to move to San Diego.
I wasn’t riding much at the time, but at least I brought my bike to Boston because I knew it was good for my mental health to go ride with friends and see new places like Lexington, Concord, and Walden pond with my cycling buddies. Only a couple of months later I had regained the courage to ask a friend of a friend out on a date. I thought it might actually go well until I got a text from her the day before saying that she didn’t want a date and preferred we stay friends. Outwardly, I tried to manage the disappointment and continued showing up as a friend, but inwardly I did not handle this well. I felt like I was trying to do the right things by asking people out on a date and responding to their emotional cues better, but the fact it wasn’t working reinforced a feeling that conventional romantic interests didn’t fit right with me.
That week I gave myself permission to break whatever rules I had put in my way regarding my sexuality because of my previous relationships. I found relief in accepting that I am bisexual and curious to meet men. I was done waiting for Godot, so I went the gay clubs of Boston, where I danced the night away and met several men that, surprisingly, I realized I didn’t want to date. To me, the main issue was that all these men just wanted to smash whereas I wanted to take my time to get to know each other to build an emotional connection before celebrating it physically. After many failed interests, fetish fridays, and nights at clubs, I eventually hid myself away for months to study for my qualifying exams.
To put it mildly, my qualifying exams were one of the most difficult, humiliating, and forgettable intellectual experiences of my life and I almost thought it was an insult that my committee let me pass. However, it meant I was fortunate enough to put the experience behind me and shift gears into training for my first Outriders B2P ride with another gay friend. The 200k ride was just for fun and to celebrate the LGBT community, and it ended up being so much more pleasant than my first 200k. It gave me the opportunity I needed to put myself back on my feet through exercise and training without the complications of looking for a relationship. But I was still curious about men and at the end of that summer I somewhat recklessly had a very-drunk one-night stand with a postdoc during a conference in Tokyo. It wasn’t typical for me, but it was a release I had yearned for and enjoyed.
In the months afterwards, I slowly became terribly sick from an infection that was eating my skin. Doctors ran all the tests they could, but they all came back negative and my condition worsened as lesions erupted all over my hands and itchy eczema consumed the rest of my body. The only way I could hide my hideous and contagious hands during the day was to wear plastic gloves with the excuse I was being cautious about COVID, and at night the only way I could prevent scratching myself was by wearing the thickest gloves I could find to sleep. The itching was incessant and I couldn’t stop scratching until I damaged my skin to the point that crystals of interstitial fluid formed on every follicle. This was the nadir of my physical health and I was also slowly losing my mind as each night I could no longer resist the terrible itch. I was so defeated by the lack of diagnosis for three months and the bleak outlook, yet I managed to self-diagnose with the skin-eating parasite scabies, which was later confirmed by a dermatologist, because I could pick the mites out of my the skin of my hands and pop them. I received permethrin and ivermectin treatment for another month before the mites ultimately perished, but that experience left me utterly dehumanized and so afraid to trust another person romantically, and of my own reckless behavior when drunk, that I chose to avoid attempting relationships for another two years.
However, I did want to regain my health and returning to cycling was my best option. After the winter and spring passed, I started riding with the MIT Cycling Club in summer and meeting new friends. At first I was slightly disappointed that it seemed like everyone in the club already had a partner, but I just stuck with the sport and enjoyed the good company and better fun of racing bikes. That winter I also took an interest in randonneuring by doing the Rapha Festive 500 on a trip home to San Diego with my friend who rode with me to Caltech. At MIT, I took a leadership role in the team by organizing logistics for our winter training camp in Tucson and the spring road racing season. All the while, I enjoyed being a part of the supportive and fun-minded community. However, as the season wrapped up I was burnt out from organizing all the logistics of travelling to races on weekends and I preferred embarking on my own solo adventures which were summarized in the first chapter of this blog.
Getting to spend so much time on my own on the bike can be peaceful, but by and large it is also a struggle with isolation and my inner demons. I am quite alone on these all-day rides but I keep the loneliness at bay because a part of me imagines that I might be riding to reunite with a lover or to experience something new that may fill my heart. I go riding because I am looking for something to calm the voids left behind by trauma. I want to leave the old behind and find something new to live for on these big adventures. I am grateful to be in good health and have the choice to ride. I believe that the world is our classroom and I am its student, learning new lessons around every bend and over every hill. I lived by these words during my training, but it turns out I had issues that were impossible to move away from.
After getting myself to the conference in Montréal, I was shocked to see the same postdoc from my one-night stand in Tokyo. In my head, I cannot separate him from the horror of my scabies infection, even though I can’t know if he gave it to me. I tried doing everything in my power to avoid him, but he found me during a coffee break to ask how I was doing and state he wanted to see my talk, but I wasn’t thrilled about any of it. Thankfully, Ewen distracted him and he didn’t show up to my talk, but I felt shaken after travelling so far and long only to return to my broken heart. So maybe I have to move on from long-distance cycling before I move on from the heartbreak.
But if long-distance cycling has given me anything, it is the capacity to sit down with something uncomfortable for a long time and make it into something better. As I write this, I am recently over yet another romantic rejection and the decision to understand and write about some of my trauma here has been therapeutic. And in some circuitous way my long-distance cycling journey has given me the patience, strength and confidence to sit through the process and trust that I will still be intact when I reach the other side.