Endless Ride Mountain Bike Race

Health & Fitness
Screenshot

I recently competed in my first cross country (XC) mountain bike race & it was a blast!

The event was named The Endless Ride, named after the seemingly endless days associated to the summer solstice. The event started at 7pm, which seems crazy, however in Seattle at this time of year the sun doesn’t set until after 9:00pm.

Lemon Peel, who are the event organisers have a highly inclusive approach to their events. They support classes for different ages alongside supporting mountain bikes, gravel bikes and runners! I guessed and entered myself into Cat 2 Open as I was certain the Cat 1 Open was going to be outrageously fast.

The course used the Grand Ridge trail system, which connects Sammamish to Issaquah. Total distance was 12.5km, with 350m of climbing. While it mightn’t sound too tough, when you combine sections with 15-20% gradients, roots, rocks & ruts – even with the massive gearing on a mountain bike it is definitely challenging!

My race plan was simple, go out really hard in the first 3km to try and get a gap on the pack as that section only had 50m of elevation. Between 3km and 8km, I knew I was going to lose time as there were competitors who were 15-25kg lighter than me. The weight difference doesn’t hurt you on the flat or downhill, but is a huge penalty on gradients over 4%.

Overall this worked out pretty well, by the time I got to 3km mark – I couldn’t hear or see my competitors behind me. As expected, some of the other racers got past me by the 6-7km marker. Fortunately, I was past the steepest sections by that point and the downhill started at 8km mark. I crossed the finish line in 53 minutes and was shocked to hear my name called for 2nd place at the ceremony.

From an effort stand point, it was definitely an all out – Garmin said it was “highly impacting V02 max”. That doesn’t surprise me whatsoever, my max HR is 183bpm (which I hit) and I averaged 170bpm even after accounting for the downhill where it ‘recovered’ to 160bpm.

It was a heap of fun being on a course with other people racing!

Moving To HTTPS

Websites

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, it makes sure that information sent between your browser to the website you’re viewing is encrypted and can’t be decrypted by any machine or person in between.

Traditionally HTTPS was only used on important sites such as banks or checkout pages in ecommerce websites where your privacy was considered paramount. HTTPS wasn’t broadly used in the early days of the internet as SSL certificates were only available to purchase from a relatively small number of companies, they were expensive and it came with a performance penalty due to the additional work needed for establishing the secure connection and the ongoing encrypt/decrypt process.

In 2010, low single digit percentages of internet traffic were encrypted. By 2015, encrypted traffic was at about 25%. In the following 10 years, the barriers that were holding back adoption have been removed. Thanks to Lets Encrypt, you can get free SSL certificates. Web hosts integrate with Lets Encrypt, automatically issue/re-issue and install the SSL certificates. The original performance penalty has been removed. With HTTP/2 (the second version of the HTTP protocol) which requires HTTPS, websites load dramatically faster. Couple that with a big push from companies like Google, suggesting it is a ranking factor with their algorithm and by 2025 over 90% of all internet traffic is encrypted.

I’m late to the party, but I’m doing my part in switching to HTTPS :P

Dirty Bloom 50mi Mountain Bike

Health & Fitness, Photos

Since I bought my Scott Spark RC mountain bike last year, I’ve been eager to attend my first mountain bike event. Last week while on Instagram, serendipitously I was served an ad for Dirty Bloom 50mi. The ad said it was their inaugural event, as such it had very limited spots and there were only a handful left. There is no time like the present, so on a whim I signed up four days before the event.

Dirty Bloom is held in Wenatchee in Eastern Washington, it is about a two and a half hour drive from Sammamish across I-90. It’s just close enough that I could drive there in the morning versus needing to go the day before and stay in a hotel – so the alarm clock was set for 4am. I arrived into Wentatchee at about 7:15, went to the nearest McDonald’s to grab a coffee, bacon & egg muffin and change into my cycling gear.

The course for Dirty Bloom is 50mi/80km in length with 8000’/2666m of elevation. For those that aren’t familiar, any ride (regardless of distance) with over 2000m of elevation is going to be a tough day. I was lucky enough to get a ticket for RAMROD (Ride Around Mt Rainier in A Day) last year, it was 160mi/255km with 10000’/3333m of elevation and it was a huge effort.

As it turns out, the climbing was front loaded on the course and was absolutely savage. At the 5km mark the climbing started with gradients regularly going into 12-15%. In sections, they were so steep, I couldn’t ride them even in the lowest gear and had to push my bike.

Without question, this uphill section was the hardest effort I’ve ever done on a bike and lasted three (3) hours and 15 minutes. For some perspective, my max heart rate is 183bpm. When I do a one hour max effort and bury myself, I can sustain a heart rate of 168-172bpm and produce 300w. I averaged 162bpm over this section, absolutely brutal!

When I made it to the second aid station, the elite riders had completed an additional loop and were passing back through that aid station a second time before making their way back toward the finish line. A whole bunch of them commented how tough the course was.

I’d been riding for about 4 hours at this stage, guessed I had at least two hours of riding to the finish line, followed by a 2.5hr drive home. While I knew I could have completed the extra loop of about 20mi, I decided to drop it and begin the ride to the finish line.

I’ve heard people speak of ‘single track’ a thousand times, but having never ridden a mountain bike event or a trail network as massive as this before – I didn’t fully understand the wonder and magic of it. With the exception of another 2.5km climb, the next 23km were downhill – blasting through meadows covered in wildflowers, fast, flowy, up, down, left, right – it was like a rollercoaster!

I crossed the finish line in 6 hours, an average HR of 155bpm & just under 50km under my belt.

Can’t wait to do my next mountain bike event!

Opportunity (Revisited) & How I Moved To The USA

Work

I joined Wotif Group in January 2014 and that same year it was acquired by Expedia Group for AU$703M. While I was nervous about what the future would hold with regards to possible/likely layoffs, I could see an opportunity ahead and it ultimately led me to joining Expedia Group.

I’d been working for Expedia Group for a little over three years and I was a Director of SEO responsible for Expedia, Wotif & Lastminute in Australia and New Zealand.

Expedia Group sends out an email each week listing all job openings and I saw two job listings for a Sr Director for SEO, one to lead brand Expedia and one to lead a collection of brands associated to Expedia that leveraged the same technology platform such as Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif and several others around the world.

I remember speaking to Claire about these job listings at the time and I described them as the Mt Everest of jobs for someone in the organic search profession:

  • eight different product categories (hotel/flight/package/etc)
  • dozens of countries and languages
  • huge footprint with millions of URLs in each
  • underpinned by sophisticated product & technology capabilities
  • generates an astonishing amount of revenue annually
  • handful of ecommerce websites operate at this scale in the world

If I missed this opportunity, these jobs wouldn’t become vacant in the near future.

I knew that these roles would be advertised both internally/externally and would garner a lot of applications. Claire asked ‘what if I get it’ question and I said we’d cross that bridge down the road if we needed to cross it. Given the interest in these roles, there was no certainty that I’d get an interview, let alone be successful in getting one of the roles.

Claire commented that she knew I’d get it immediately, forever my biggest supporter <3

As it turns out, Claire was right and after a bunch of interviews I was offered one of the Sr Director roles in August 2017. That bridge that I couldn’t see on the horizon, yeah it was now firmly in view!

It took a few months for the US visa for myself and family to be processed but it came through in November. I relocated at the beginning of January 2018, with Claire and the kids coming in June/July once the US school year had ended.

While moving to the US was completely unplanned, it did turn out to be an incredible opportunity which I’m eternally grateful to Claire, Hugo & Evie for enabling.

If you see a great opportunity, give it a rip – something amazing might happen!

Opportunity (Revisited) & How I Joined Expedia Group

Work

This post is about taking advantage of an opportunity and how I ended up joining Expedia Group leading to a career spanning over 12 years.

I’d been working at Mantra Group on the Gold Coast for over nine years, really enjoyed the work, having a lot of success growing revenue for them with interesting projects and working with some great people.

I’m at squash, waiting for my next match and have the discussion referenced above about opportunity. After returning home that night from squash, I tell Claire about this discussion regarding (missed) opportunity and said that the next time an opportunity presents itself, I’m going to say yes.

The literal next day, I visit the largest job website in Australia and enter a search for SEO roles in the Gold Coast/Brisbane area. Foreshadowing, but on the very first page of the search results, I see a cool job with Wotif Group who were Australia’s largest online travel agent.

True to my word, it looked like a good opportunity and I was going to apply.

After writing a fresh resume, I sent it to a good friend Dan Petrovic who owns an amazing marketing agency for review. My ask to him, would you at least schedule me for an interview. It turns out, my first and second draft weren’t good enough. I submitted my third revision and rolled the dice.

I got an interview and ultimately got that job, I’m now a Sr Manager for SEO at Wotif Group.

Fast forward to later that year and Expedia Group acquires Wotif Group for AU$703M. I’m worried about what the future might hold, it is common place for the acquiring company to execute layoffs* following a merger or acquisition.

Not wanting to get caught out by that, I started applying for a new job and had six interviews lined up. At the same time, I was asked to fly to the USA and be part of a project team to help integrate Wotif Group into Expedia Group.

I remember having a discussion with Claire and saying to her, I think I need to say yes again. I didn’t know what the future might hold, but felt like there could be upside on the other side of that decision.

True to my word, I said yes, cancelled the interviews and flew to the USA. While I was in the USA, I was called to a meeting with HR and offered an Expedia Group employment contract.

If I’d never had that discussion at squash, never started re-evaluating opportunity, I’d have never made it to Wotif Group, which would have meant I’d never have made it to Expedia Group.

Without a shadow of doubt, that discussion changed my life.

* My concern about layoffs was well placed, Expedia Group executed layoffs three months later.