This is a very quick post tbh, and kinda personal.
Growing up, I wasn’t great at sports. I also wasn’t great at much else – it took until university to figure out what I was actually good at, which turned out to be computation. That part clicked. Sports remained an open problem. Part of that is the label: when team sports leave you out early, “athlete” stops feeling like a word that belongs to you, even when you’re physically active most of your life.
The one exception was solo stuff. Urban and trail biking throughout my time in DXB, and running indoors during COVID when biking wasn’t an option. No teams, no tryouts. Just moving.
It was only at UMass that something finally clicked on the sports side, and it came from the most unlikely direction.
Lightsaber battling @ UMass Amherst and geocaching were how I got genuinely active. I had a pretty terrible diet through undergrad, but putting in 2-3 hours of trail biking + geocache hunting around the Pioneer Valley (Amherst, Hadley, Northampton) + lightsaber club meetups in the woods at dusk got me into the best shape I’d been in. Scroll down on my about page and you’ll still see a long exposure of me wielding the saber (I still own it) around the UMass OHill Observatory.
My main bike through all of this was a 1990 Trek 970, bought for $100 with about $300 in repairs. I was putting in 15-20 miles a day: trail riding, geocache runs, commuting every single day between Amherst and Northampton to see my now-wife. I replaced my Casio G-Shock with an Apple Watch SE around 2022 to track it all, and eventually built SaberStat because “lightsaber battle” wasn’t a workout mode. I was too broke for an Apple dev subscription, so we manually loaded this little utility into everyone’s Apple Watches at university and maintained a leaderboard.
Traditional team sports still didn’t interest me. This did.
After graduation I moved to Boston, deconditioned over roughly 2.5 years, and in 2024 had the Trek 970 stolen. I still think about that bike.
Between May 2024 and March 2026 I was probably in the worst shape of my adult life, and I could feel it. The 9-5, the free food, the sitting. A physical in winter 2025 confirmed what I already knew: I missed being outside, and I physically had to do something about it.
About ten months ago I started rebuilding. The anchor has been running a 5K every day, which has at least made me consistent. I got back into cross-country biking, worked briefly with a coach, and got a nutritionist consult to fix the diet without making food miserable. The folks at Marathon Sports looked at my shoes and found I’d been wearing the wrong size and needed orthotics; a lot of the knee and ankle pain I’d been carrying around just went away after that. (Sadly, my friend Frank is not here in Boston to do lightsaber battles with me.)
The current bike is a ~1994 Gary Fisher Nirvana that had been sitting unused and needed some work before it could go anywhere. It’s no Canyon, but I was very comfortable with my Trek earlier and this shares the same lineage. I’m already doing 20-mile Zone 2 rides @ ~11mph, cold weather included. The Apple Watch SE got upgraded to an Ultra 4 midway through all this; the SE was draining 40-60% in those 20-mile rides (and died on the days I pushed myself), which felt like a sign. Resting HR is 53, HRV is 118ms, and the aerobic base from undergrad apparently didn’t fully disappear.
Strava is active again after years dormant: six-week streak now, with more workouts logged before the gap than after it.
So, here’s the announcement.
I’m training for the Pan-Mass Challenge, a fully supported bike-a-thon across Massachusetts that raises money for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. I’ve lost family members to cancer. That’s why this one.
The PMC goes from Sturbridge to Provincetown — that’s a meaningful chunk of Massachusetts. What draws me beyond the cause is that it’s organized: crews, volunteers, riders, all pointed at the same thing. I’ve never trained for something this structured before. Lightsaber club meetups and solo trail rides don’t have fundraising links. The PMC does, and that changes what it means to commit to it publicly.
The plan: the 50-mile route in August 2027, then the two-day 177-mile route in 2028. I want to do it every year after that, if I am being honest.
None of this is even new, but it had never been structured like this before. For example: my wife and I hike whenever we can; & our honeymoon was at Acadia. She’s been around for every phase of this: the undergrad trail rider, the 2.5 years of Boston deconditioning, and now whatever this is becoming. Having her along for the hiking keeps it from becoming purely miles-on-a-spreadsheet. The outdoor stuff matters on its own.
The computation side of things has been figured out for a while; sports has always been the open problem. The PMC is the most concrete attempt I’ve made at it.
I’ll post the fundraising link here when it opens, and more details :)