The special ones

It's quite strange to have a resting heart rate over 80 bpm. I'd guess my body couldn't settle down without the rich oxygen it was used to. Who knew that sleeping at 12,000 ft woudn't be easy?

Fortunately, I didn't have to deal with this problem for long — the 2 AM alarm made sure of that.

Twelve hours earlier we had walked in from the Portal, six and a half miles to Trail Camp, and of course, I couldn't resist bringing my fly rod. I don't think I've ever seen so many rainbow trout as I did at Consultation Lake. Anyhow, the trout provided dinner the night prior, and the morning brought a cold darkness and 99 switchbacks like a stairway to heaven.

Summit at sunrise, fourteen thousand five hundred feet above the Owens Valley still in shadow. Funny enough, there's perfect cell signal at the summit. Give your mom a call.

Once a year, for a day or two, Yosemite’s high country belongs to cyclists.

Tioga Road, closed since November under winter snow, reopens sometime between May and July, whenever the National Park Service finishes clearing, repairing, and inspecting the pass. The announcement usually comes only a day in advance. To ride it car-free, you have to be ready to drop everything and go.

At 2:30 a.m., I left San Francisco with Olivia, my riding partner for the day and someone I was meeting for the first time. We reached the Tuolumne Grove Trailhead parking lot around 6 a.m., just as the first light began filtering through the trees.

By 7 a.m., in the crisp fifty-one-degree air, we rolled out of the parking lot and onto Tioga Road, its dark pavement stretching upward into the distance.

Ninety miles. Seven thousand six hundred feet of climbing. Tioga Pass at 9,718 feet. We were back in San Francisco around 6 p.m., tired from the ride and still processing how much we had packed into a single day: an early drive, a quiet road through Yosemite, and hours of climbing and talking with someone I had only just met that morning but who, by the end of the day, felt more like a friend than a stranger.

If you had told me before December 2024 that I’d be doing a half Ironman, I would have laughed.

First, I didn’t own a bike. Second, after years of college football training, “long distance” meant 100 yards. Third, the longest swim I’d ever done was the 75-yard swim test Cornell made me take to fulfill the PE graduation requirement.

For me, the race was a test of limits. And they were tested before I even reached the starting line. On the drive from San Francisco to Palm Springs, my car’s wheel snapped off its axle on the highway. That meant a 1 a.m. tow, a random roadside motel, and almost no sleep the night before the race.

Race day brought more chaos. A bottle cage snapped off my bike, taking my electrolytes with it. By the end of the bike leg, I was fighting debilitating cramps that carried into the start of the run.

Things don’t always go your way. Sometimes they go spectacularly wrong. But that made crossing the finish line even better.

Out of reach — until it wasn’t.

I came to Cornell planning to walk onto the lacrosse team, still bitter about how recruiting had gone at MIT. Then 2020 happened. Plans disappeared. Practice was banned. Football wasn’t even on my radar — I’d never played before.

Then a friend invited me to a secret practice. I went. I was hooked.

Everything was foreign: route trees, formations, blocking, tackling, special teams. I had no reason to believe I could start. But I worked. By my second season, I had earned my first start.

Junior year, I tore my left MCL at the Naval Academy. I’d never faced a serious injury before. But I came back and started every game my senior year.

None of it happens without my teammates. Football is special. Sprint football is even more special.