The Stern Opportunity

Never again! I know: “Never say never.” But for now, I have enough of biking.

381 and 146. No, the first figure is not the tuition I owe Stern; that number has 2 digits more. It’s the minutes it took me to finish the 100 miles. And 146 is not the number of red lights that nice police officers waved me through during the ride (although that could be true). It’s the average heart beat per minute.

It’s funny; being not native speaking is sometimes a good thing. Not only because I create a lot of amusement for my classmates when I repetitively mistake ‘big’ with ‘tall’, which you realize quite fast when you get these puzzled looks from your peers, not to mention the angry face your opposite gives you because of your rudeness. But Swiss-German comes in quite handy; you can swear vociferously from the bottom of your heart while lingering up the hill on mile 78 or changing your flat tire for the second time that day without distracting anybody.

It’s amazing that one can survive with nutrition with fancy names like C2 high-octane carb blend PowerBar or 5-hour energy – amino acids drink. Acids? What did they give me at the rest stop back there in Congres, NY? Well, obviously any doping that I did by eating those things was completely innocent – I don’t know what I was eating. I think; “I didn’t know” was the most common statement of the average bike professional last year. But given one of the more aggressive guesses of 4h 10mins (39km/h), which would have meant to be only 1 km/h slower than this year’s winner of the Tour de France, surely it would have been a very welcome additional energizer.

During the ride there is plenty of time to come up with revolutionary ideas and conclusions, for example how one could transform water into ice or if the water really drains in opposite direction on the other side of the equator. It actually does; if your bath tub is 500 times bigger than average – that effect is caused by the coriolis force (we all love Wikipedia). Sadly, the only, not very new, cognitions I had were that a) I still have no clue of Accounting, only how to type in cell commands such as =-(C21-B21) and b) I have some really weird songs on my iPod. - And no, this does not include the Platinum Edition of Modern Talking.

There were also pleasant moments. I want to give a big thanks to all the friendly and helpful volunteers that cheered (and doped) me. A special thanks to the guy with the white Deloitte shirt who let me patiently ride in his slipstream for miles. Actually, the whole bunch of uniformly dressed bikers from all the various bike clubs that lead the field of more than 7000 riders through the rainy streets of NYC that morning was great. They would always warn from holes or puddles. I couldn’t have done it without you guys!

Also many thanks to the participants of the guessing competition. All together NYU Stern students among Janice Gumera, Vinay Ganti, Jacob Robinson, Carolyn Demisch and Ashley Donnenfeld helped to raise more than $2000 to cure MS. So who was the closest guesser? The victory goes to Nadia Karaseva who obviously consulted with her spies and carefully evaluated her guess of 390 minutes. For all the others some statistical data from Minitab. Mean: 443.5 / Standard Deviation: 102.9. Due to reputational reasons the biggest donator will not be disclosed in this article.

Thank you again to everybody for participating. By the way; some (un)reliable sources say that Dean Gary Fraser will do the 100 miles MS Bike Ride next year – well, “never say never”.

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