This Saturday myself and three of my classmates participated in the Tour de Troit. It is a 30 mile bike ride around the city of Detroit. Roads are closed off and around 6,000 cyclists can take a leisurely ride around the city. I am not from Michigan and I have not spent a lot of time in Detroit. I have gone into the city for the occasional Tigers game and I ran in the relay event of the Detroit Marathon last year. Those weren’t really great ways of seeing the city. The Tour de Troit was unique because I could see a huge number of Detroit neighborhoods over the course of a few hours. We were all very impressed with how much the city varies. There were long stretches of abandoned factories, which are so frequently associated with Detroit. We also saw neighborhoods filled with row houses and families, as well as streets lined with large, ornate homes. The Tour de Troit also includes Bell Island, which I had never even heard of before. The island is incredibly green and the water around it was very blue that day, completely unlike urban bodies of water that I’ve seen back on the East Coast. The entire event felt very surreal. I am used to biking in streets that are filled with cars, and yesterday was a very cathartic experience after spending years being bullied by motorists. But perhaps the most relaxing part of the day was being outside with other medical students and not talking about physiology, drugs, or diseases.
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