1) Eating to much over the holidays is bad

2) Water does not go uphill

3) A person riding a bike must pedal to go uphill

4) Stanford Students are intelligent

The New Year's Day ride up Mount Hamilton proved that there are some exceptions to those assumptions I mentioned. Here's why:

1) I would have benefitted from eating more over the holidays because the wind at the top of the pushed my around like a sheet of paper in a drafty room. There is a lot of talk about power to weight ratio in cycling, but in this case it was frontal area to weight ratio and mine was far too high to battle the strong winds descending from the summit of Mount Hamilton. Although the weather instruments near the top only read about 40 mph for the strongest gusts when we were up there, I'll argue that the wind was much stronger than that (and any subsequent telling of this tale will recount stronger winds). Not only did it require an effort to keep the bike up right, it required a serious effort to keep going forward while we were descending. In this case, it would have been nice to have a little more weight coming down the hill, weight which could have been acquired from overstuffing myself during the holidays. However, maybe my mistake was stopping to use the facilities at the top.

2) Water usually travels downhill. That's why we have "waterfalls".

On Mount Hamilton, the water was not only traveling uphill (propelled by the gusty wind), it was being churned so much that the puddles were turned white as the wind blew them uphill. If we can have whitewater rafting with white water flowing downhill, why can't we have white water cycling where cyclists fight to descend a wet windy mountain where the water is blowing uphill? On second thought, I'll pass on that one after Sunday.

3) Generally when you are cycling, you need to pedal to go uphill. If you didn't need to pedal the Tour de France wouldn't be much of a race.

4) This depends on how you define smart. If SAT scores and GPAs are the only criteria then this statement holds. If you factor in common sense and rationality, then the assumption starts to break down rather quickly. I get to make an example out of myself here, but if you look harder enough you'd find out something they don't want you to know and something that I won't tell you. My rationality went out the window when Jeff came down the hill and said, "The wind pushes you up the hill in some places (point number 3)". So knowing this and being a (supposedly intelligent Stanford student) why did I want to keep going?

Simple. Testosterone (he'd already done so I couldn't let him outdo me, that is no way to start off the year), Curiosity (what is it like to have the wind push you up a hill), and the fact that we were only 7 miles away at that point. Our mistake was truly when we decided to start up from the park to "warm up" before we descended. I think we were all subconsciously thinking about going to the top and that was a good (rational) way to get ourselves a little closer. If you've ever been up Mount Hamilton, you'd know that we really didn't need to head toward the summit from Grant Ranch to go up, because the first section from Grant Ranch heading toward the base is a slight climb. You really do have to wonder what were we thinking. Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask. The right one might be, "Were we thinking?"