When study for upcoming Christmas exams became too much for two UCD fresher students, they combined ingenuity with training to design this festive masterpiece.
By Brian Canty
Two first-year students in UCD were so sick of studying for exams recently they decided to draw a huge snowman using Strava.
Physics freshers Simon Jones and Adam O’Reilly, two keen racing cyclists, might have had exams all this week but it didn’t stop them putting their heads together and coming up with their very own snowman; with a little help from the well-known GPS tracking app.
Simon did the heavy-lifting in plotting the route – at the not insignificant size of 62 kilometres - while Adam, from Oldcastle in Meath, tagged along and recorded the ride.
There were wrong turns and one-way streets to encounter but they got the job done. And their finished product is a very fine piece of work, as you can see from the above picture.
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“I was bored one day just studying - or procrastinating - and I thought it’d be cool to come up with something like that,” explained Rush native Simon.
“It was hard to do and it wasn’t my first idea; I tried to do a Santa head around Howth Head but I couldn’t make it work so I ended up with the snowman.”
After some trialling, they set off last Friday morning and were done by lunchtime.
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“I had to double back a few times and I had a bit of hassle with one-way streets; no matter what I did I had to go down one-way streets,” he continued.
“I don’t know the city very well so I ended up going down Pearse Street past the police station so we ended up walking up on the footpaths with the bikes on our shoulders.”
Simon wasn’t entirely happy with the finished piece as they took a wrong turn in Ballsbridge, south Dublin; though neither was accepting blame.
“Maybe no one will notice but it’s annoying me, I had the map in my Garmin but it didn’t update,” he said ruefully.
“It got a fair bit of a response around home in Rush. I’ve been dying to be famous for cycling since I took it up three years ago but seeing as I haven’t won a race I had to think of other ways!”
They even managed to make a carrot for a nose and place a very dubious top hat on their man too. Brilliant!
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