Work Hard, Play Hard — Keeping It Together
This is my story of a rewarding weekend after a month of hard work and what Beer Bike — the biggest social event at Rice — was like attending and biking as an alum.
“Waseem works all the time!”
That’s something I hear quite often so it’s become white noise for me now.
But even I got worried about myself towards the end of February as a huge deadline loomed ahead of me. My teammates and I had been working tirelessly on allowing you to search for posts on Facebook for Android. My team was targeting to launch the product towards the end of March so it was going to be a rough month.
When the workload intensified in college, my lifestyle and health would start to deteriorate as I would try to make up for lost sleep with extra cups of coffee. I would also eat unhealthy, lose willpower, and not get much physical activity for weeks at times. This deterioration would make me slower and inefficient at work which would make things even worse.
This month, I was determined not to let myself spiral downwards the way I had many times in college. I needed something to counterbalance the pull of work. And I found it in athletic training.
1 month out
Carrie — one of my friends and coworker — challenged me to up my game through running and high intensity interval training workouts. And I amplified my motivation by deciding to bike for Beer Bike 2015 alumni race. For context, Beer Bike is Rice University’s biggest social event that involves a bike race and drinking competition. The 11 residential colleges and the graduate students participate with a team of 10 bikers in a relay race consisting of chugging 24 ounces (for men) or 12 ounces (for women) of beer or water depending on age and preference, followed by bike laps around the track.
There is a week full of festivities preceding the event which include Beer Debates, International Beer night, colleges doing jacks against the other colleges, filling up over a 100,000 water balloons for the giant water balloon fight before the races. There is a lot of excitement on campus and the energy is high during this week. With this much going on around the event, you can imagine what a big deal it is at Rice.
I had participated as a biker for the men’s team last year as a senior and it was a great experience. This year, I was determined to beat my personal record of 2 minutes and 30 seconds for a mile. I did not have a bike for practice so I worked on my strength and cardiovascular performance through HIIT workouts, weight lifting, and running short distances.
I began to work out at least 3–4 times a week and became more mindful of my nutrition intake. The feeling of progress and the endorphin rush after the workouts felt great! It became my motivation and my reward, and I was able to focus at a much higher level and crank out more work in the time following the workouts. The progress began to show as I trimmed a few pounds off of me, slept more soundly, and felt more energetic.
At times though, work got very demanding and it was super tempting to skip workouts. But I managed to keep it together by finding little ways to reward myself and Carrie made sure I was on top of my HIIT workouts.
Towards the end of the month, the intensity of my work came to a close and I felt like I couldn’t have done as well at work as I did without the physical activity that enhanced my productivity.
1 week out
I felt great about my progress and borrowed a bike from work during the last week leading to Beer Bike. I used the bike for some last minute training and adventurous rides on the weekend.
In the last few days, I learned that the alumni race has only 2 laps (0.66 mi) per biker instead of the 3 laps (1.00 mi) I did as an undergrad. Therefore, I couldn't break my personal record at the event and would have to time myself in California.
4 days out
I took the bike and warmed up by riding around the parking lot loop of my office. I then got on the straight track next to Bayfront Expy, started my tracker, and sprinted forward. Initially I rode as fast as I could but then I began to hold back some energy as I estimated how long a mile would be. I was gasping for breaths as my legs burned from pedaling. The pain became almost unbearable at one point and I had a moment of doubt — “maybe I’ve already ridden a mile; This is too much, I can do a time trial tomorrow instead.” — I then thought about the feeling of accomplishment I would have as I would look at my broken record and used that thought to charge forward further. By the time I was about to give out from exhaustion, I concluded that I must have passed a mile so I began to slow down. I checked my time on Map My Run and felt a rush of euphoria as I saw my new personal record.
I had managed to trim my time by 13 seconds between this year and last year! This was without clip-on pedals (that glue your feet to the pedal for more efficiency) and a special biking track!
Feeling accomplished, I decided to finish strong by doing a lot of squats and lunges at the gym. Walking was pretty painful for the next few days.
3 days out
On Wednesday, my sister was visiting in San Francisco so I wanted to spend time with her. However, it was also a day before the branch cut — deadline for getting your work in for the next release of Facebook for Android. I spent the entire day alternating between 3–4 hours of work and 3–4 hours of hanging out with my sister. I really wanted one of my features in by the 5 PM deadline so I proceeded to work the whole night and took a 1 hour nap before heading out with Sal — my roommate — for our flight to Houston.
2 days out — flying to Houston!
We got cozy in our Uber Pool — shared with another party of 2 — to the airport. The guy in the other party was also an Uber driver and we heard some really frank and interesting conversations around their driving experiences between Lyft and Uber.
By the time we got to the airport, Sal and I were super concerned about making it in time for our flight. The agent at the counter had to override the system to print our boarding passes cause it was past check-in time. Once through security, we ran to the boarding gate to find out we had made it in time cause boarding was delayed by 15 minutes.
Once on the plane, Sal and I took no time going to sleep. I woke up 2 hours later and got more work done. One of the benefits of working on mobile is that all of the code lives on your laptop so you can get by without access to internet at times. As I put my laptop away for our descent into Houston. The guy next to me commented on how small the font size on my IntelliJ windows was. This got us talking, and it turns out he’s a self-taught developer at Asana who studied economics at Rice and was also flying in for Beer Bike! Small world. The conversation was a good distraction from the frightening landing. As Sal put it, “The landing was a great adaptation of a leaf tumbling in the wind.”
Once we were on the ground, Sal and I got an Uber and headed straight to Rice. We both camped out in coffee house and I raced against time as the 7:00 PM deadline approached (5 in California). I got all of my code reviewed and ready 15 minutes before. I squashed it all into a single commit and submitted it to the landing queue. I’m not the only person frantically trying to push code to master this close to the deadline. So my land kept failing and it was now 6:55 PM. Finally, 4 minutes before the deadline and on attempt #6, the push was successful and my work was checked in. Whew! Time to enjoy the rest of the week!
Sal and I took an Uber to the Hobbit Cafe — a great Lord of the Rings themed restaurant under a giant oak tree with generous portions — where we met up with other friends from our residential college. International Beer Night was happening at the campus pub afterwards, but I was running 2–3 hours of sleep so I decided to check in to the hotel early, chill for a bit and then go to bed early.
Some time around 2:00 AM, Shaurya — former college roommate — got in to the hotel after wrapping up work in Austin and driving over. He had an equally ridiculous and tiring work day. Sal came in some time around then as well. Shaurya had trouble multiple times getting into the room cause the keycard that the hotel gave was not working. In general we were very underwhelmed by the hotel. Shaurya called Starwoods the following morning and got our night refunded and hotel changed for free.
The day before
I spent the earlier part of Friday hanging out at Black Hole with Shaurya, one of our favorite coffee spots.
Shaurya and I both got some work done. And then we met up with Sal to go grab lunch.
Afterwards, we went to Brown college to say hi to the current seniors and other people we knew.
We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around campus running into other alumni we knew and catching up on what they were doing. We also went to the Brown College alumni tailgate afterwards and met more people.
Later that evening, a group of about 9 of us met at Mai’s to grab dinner and catch up. That night there was supposed to be an alumni gathering at a local bar called Under the Volcano which is where we ended up next. While I’m glad I ran into people I hadn’t seen in a while over there, it was so loud and crowded there that you had to yell to make conversation which got tiring. A subset of us moved the party to a bar in Rice village called Gingerman where we stayed quite late in the morning.
Ready to hit the hay, Sal, Shaurya, and I got to our hotel around 3 in the morning.
It’s beer bike!
While getting up in the morning was really tough, Beer Bike itself ended up being such a blast! We were one of the early stragglers at the alumni tent as we got our favorite pick of the table and fresh breakfast tacos around 9:30 AM.
Other alumni we knew began to trickle in and we hung out in the tents till 11:00 AM and then walked over to the tracks. Both Sal and Shaurya were biking with me along with 7 other Brown alumni.
We started rummaging through the boxes of pedaling shoes, Brown biker jerseys, helmets. Brown has an arsenal of about 10 track-worthy bikes. We tried out the bikes as we decided which one we’d use for the race.
Before we knew it, the announcer asked the teams to assemble as the alumni race would be starting in 5 minutes. We did not have a pre-designated bike captain so no one had done the ordering of the bikers. I scrambled to open up a note on my phone and began typing in an order as I got suggestions from people around me. We had to make sure that two bikers who were planning to use the same bike had enough people in between their positions to give them time to switch bikes and adjust the seat height.
We sent off our first biker to the track and then time flew quickly. I was the 8th biker to go. The video below is a first person perspective of my biking experience and sums it up pretty accurately. Despite all the preparation and training, I was pretty scared once I actually got on the track. A huge shot-out to my buddy Spencer for the pep-talk!
I felt really accomplished and happy to have had the chance for another run on the track. Afterwards, we all walked back to the alumni tent and hung out over there while the undergrad women’s and men’s races happened.
Around 1:00 PM, Meagan and Katie (2 friends from Martel College), Sal, Shaurya, and I went to The Tea House and Yogurtland (same plaza) to get boba tea or frozen yogurt. To each their own.
Afterwards Sal, Shaurya, and I went back to the hotel for a long nap. We woke up in the evening and between then and the next morning was a continuous blur of fun, excitement, and bonding with old friends we hadn’t seen in a while as we hopped from dinner and bars later. Sal and I did not not sleep that night cause by the time we got back to the hotel it was time to head to the airport for our 6 AM flight.
The weekend of Beer Bike ended up being so much fun! It made up several times over for the lack of excitement in the earlier part of the month.
What’s next for me?
Our product launch of Post Search went really smooth and great! For the first time, you can have the same search experience on Facebook across all our platforms! Since the launch, I’ve found a more preferable work life balance and a lot more fun stuff planned. I’ve gotten multiple vacations lined up as I’ll be traveling to Colorado, UK, Canada, Pakistan, Japan, and potentially Iceland through this year.
