That time I biked a mountain

One of my goals for the year was to re-engage in Neuralink, to find a happy new relationship as a heavy hitter at the company. To that end, it’s been an interesting year. I made the switch to the team I’d always hoped for, to the project I’d missed since it was canceled and I got shuffled off it in the summer of 2019. And not only is the work cool, I’ve now got teammates with whom I belong. They’re a bunch of folks who all escaped academia, who aren’t the Neuralink standard-issue Gen-Z engineers that make me feel a million years old. The new sense of belonging I've found at Neuralink this year has extended beyond the team: since the spring, I’ve been doing weekly runs with a Neuralink crew (and perhaps gaining a bit of a reputation around the office as a proper athlete, thank you very much).

Last year, I sorely regretted missing out on a company-sponsored bike ride, but a non-work friend talked me out of it for plans on which she subsequently bailed. As I was in the midst of my sixth IVF cycle, it may not have been the best plan to bike hard anyway. But this year, newly minted athletic reputation in hand, I was not going to miss out. Only, after all my training, my bike had other plans: on the day of the Napa Valley ALS ride, I got myself three flats within the first 23 miles and bowed out, wrapping up with a 14-mile run to find some way to honor the cause while I waited for my guys to wrap up their century ride (which the five of them adorably finished together). I can’t lie, it was all quite disheartening.

I hardly had it in me to shell out a couple hundred dollars more to participate in another company-sponsored ride just a month later when the Kelly Brush Ride for spinal cord injury was announced. But when a colleague reached out about a week and a half in advance to offer Neuralink funding to fully cover it, I could hardly say no. After all, it was just a 50-mile ride, and with all the 33-mile rides to work I'd done this year, that shouldn’t be too much to take on. I said yes, made some fairly back-bending arrangements to accommodate a party in SF the night before (crashing with a colleague I hardly knew on a mattress in his spare room surrounded by sporting equipment). Game on.

Neuralink friends trauma bonded over a ridiculously rainy ride through the mountains.

Early morning yesterday, while driving toward the event, I learned what I’d actually agreed to take on: this wasn’t some casual 50-mile roll through the park. I’d unwittingly signed up to bike 4000 feet of elevation around Mt. Tam when I’d not previously biked more than a few hundred. And, to top it off, the sky opened up as we made it to the starting line. My flimsy biking rain jacket purchased a decade ago for my commutes in Denmark was hardly a match for the weather. I had to bike with one eye open at times because the rain was whipping at us so hard it hurt my eyes. My poor colleague (who actually knows what he’s doing on a bike) stuck with me the whole time, and I can only imagine his boredom as I truly pushed my quads to their limits.

There’s a point of pride in being the slowest person to not give up. It taught me I was braver (and perhaps also sillier) than I imagined. It’s nice to know the years at Neuralink, with my adventurous world-traveling twenties slipping further into the rearview mirror, haven’t entirely stolen my sense of adventure. And it’s nice to have a friend who will waste four and a half hours biking with me around a mountain for which I am wildly unprepared.