I'll be something better yet

Well, the anxiety dreams have returned. In my latest, I'm pulling my winter sled up a steep dune in an endless red-sand desert. The drag is incredible; I can barely move my legs. When I look down, my skin is beet red, bubbling with beads of sweat. I'm following a parallel ski track, a very faint one, and I have to squint because the glare is so bad. It's hot; I feel dizzy. The sun becomes brighter. I'm blinded by white glare, sinking in the sand, gasping for breath, and then I jerk awake. Real sunlight is pouring through my bedroom window (because I slept in until 8:15 a.m., because I haven't been sleeping well at night), and I'm drenched in real sweat. It's 57 degrees inside the house, 20 outside.

Is this what I fear right now? Heat and sweat? Well, yes. What happens beyond my skin begins to feel more manageable than what happens within. I find comfort in the world around me. Saturday morning greeted us with a few inches of snow, and refreshing cold — around 10 degrees.

Beat and I set out for a hike up Bear Peak, with light packs and an easy "taper" pace. I couldn't regulate my temperature well — one minute I was overheated with my jacket unzipped and hat removed, the next chilled and bundled again. My breathing seemed far too labored. Later Beat saw my tracks in the snow and called me out for lazily dragging my feet. "I'm slipping," I thought.

It was a beautiful afternoon, though, with the city shrouded in fog and delicate rime clinging to the charred branches of skeleton trees. It's always worth the effort to spend time outside on a day like this, always. But I wasn't thrilled with whatever was happening beneath my skin. I did not feel exuberant. I did not feel strong. I felt beaten — far, far too soon.

When I come out in the open to admit my fears, people will reassure me. They'll tell me I'm just having pre-race jitters, that I'm tapering, that I'll be fine. And I'll smile politely and nod, because I want to believe it, too. But this is what it feels like to me — like my fitness is so much sand in my fist, slipping through my fingers, scattered by the wind.

On Sunday I took my sled up Niwot Ridge. Beat had a lot to do at home, so I went alone. A surprising amount of snow had accumulated since the last time I trekked up Niwot. The spacious and typically empty trailhead parking lot was bustling with skiers and snowshoers. I didn't want to maneuver my sled in crowds, so I veered toward the less-popular forest road. Surprisingly, only one or two skiers had broken a skin track on this route. At first I snowshoed outside of it, out of respect for skiers, but conditions were incredibly difficult for trail-breaking — a thin layer of fragile wind crust over shin-swallowing sugar snow.

Shamefully I drifted over to the skin track, and realized that my sled so perfectly planed my snowshoe tracks, that it left the trail smoother than before. Indeed, a couple miles later, a skier passed me and complimented my trail. "Ten points for the pulk track," he said. As I looked back at him, I saw that my sled was full of snow — I could barely see the duffel behind a foot-high pile of clumped powder. Because my sled was wider than the skin track, it scooped up snow from both sides, not unlike a plastic shovel. Damn. No wonder this climb was becoming harder and harder. "It's not just me," I thought. Even at this higher altitude, in much tougher conditions, I was feeling better than the previous day.

"Beautiful day," the skier commented.

"Yeah, but windy," I replied. "It's gonna be fierce above treeline."

"We'll deal with that when we get there."

Despite my heavy sled and stupid snowshoes, I more or less kept pace with the skier for more than a mile, shadowing a few hundred meters behind him. He had just left my line of sight for good when I saw him again, scooting toward me at a surprisingly slow rate of speed, for a descending skier.

"You're not going to the ridge?" I asked. He'd already surpassed most of the boring forest road skinning — the only terrain left was the steeper, open slopes above treeline.

"It's nasty up here. And I'm exhausted," he admitted. "You must be shelled, too."

"Yeah, this has been quite the slog. I'll probably only go another half mile, to that research shack."

The skier's track ended, and all that remained was deep, crusted powder. No one else had been up here, at least since wind-driven snow disappeared the tracks — which in the strengthening gale, seemed to be happening in a matter of seconds. I stopped beneath the last larger stand of trees and put on my knee warmers, overboots, wind fleece, balaclava, buff, and mittens. This was not my first Niwot rodeo.

I'd already been at this for three hours and hadn't even broken the five-mile mark yet. It thought about turning back, but the alpine zone is never an easy place to reach, and enduring these conditions is always good practice. I lifted one snowshoe up the 25-degree slope and punched through wind crust into a thigh-high hole. To garner the momentum necessary to move forward, I had to bend forward and thrust my hips against the backward force of the sled — not unlike the cable pull-throughs I do at the gym — then swing my leg sideways like an awkward ballerina so I could punch another hole a few inches ahead. Sometimes my leg anchor stuck, and sometimes the snowshoe slipped backward to where I started. My pace — were there any GPS sophisticated enough to measure such tiny increments of movement— no doubt dropped below 0.5mph. My heart rate shot to the maximum I'm able to maintain.

All the while, shards of snow blasted me in the face. All in all, this wasn't a terrible day on Niwot — sustained winds of 35mph, gusting to 55mph — but an abundance of blowing powder made it feel more intense. My breathing deteriorated quickly. I turned my back to the wind and took a few puffs from my inhaler. I concentrated on taking slower, less shallow breaths. I desperately wanted to turn around, and knew that on a typical endurance training schedule, any hard efforts at this point probably do more harm than good. But I don't have typical endurance fitness. At this point, what I mostly have are doubts. Anything I can do to boost my confidence is worth it. Again I turned to face the wind.

Thrust, punch, breathe. Thrust, punch, breathe, breathe, thrust. Occasionally I found a patch of crust that supported my weight, and walked almost normally. But this would only last a few steps, and then I'd crash through rotten Styrofoam into another thigh-deep drift. The crust was so thick that I'd struggle to pull my foot out of the holes, as though I was real-life sinking in the sand I'd dreamed about. When I couldn't quite extract a foot, I'd drop to a squat, paddle my arms through the snow and crawl-hop forward like a deranged rabbit. This is a situation where I will fully admit that skis would be far preferable to silly snowshoes, although I think skis would also stall out beneath the crust. Really, these were workable conditions for exactly no one, least of all me with my 40-pound sled. But if I could move forward here, and control my breathing here, well ... perhaps I can do it anywhere.

Half-blinded by blowing snow and drifting laterally in search of solid crust, I ended up too far left of the shack. Now with four hours on my watch, having traveled a literal half mile in one hour and 15 minutes, I decided to call it good. Despite engaging the most strenuous activity physically possible for me, at 11,500 feet, I'd maintained reasonable control of my breathing. My heart rate, while fast, hadn't reached concerning levels. I wasn't dizzy. But I was shelled. Truly shelled. I staggered with the wind and started punching a new trail down the slope — because even my deepest postholes were already partially buried in spindrift. It was going to be a long hike out.

Back where the skier had turned around, my beautiful sled track was already filled with snow, and the walking was somehow even more difficult — the slippery spindrift was off camber enough that my right snowshoe kept sliding sideways, which turned my ankle uncomfortably. I wanted to cry, but not in that emotional way that's caught me off guard recently, so I didn't cry. Anyway, being shelled after six miles of hiking just two weeks before you hope to do 350 is not something to cry about ... yet.

The emotions came anyway, though, as trail conditions became easier and I descended into rumination about the state of the world. For that sort of angst, as it often does, iPod helped — The Bleachers with a fitting reminder that we all have deep flaws, and no one is coming to save us. So go ahead and live your life anyway.

All my heroes got tired
All the days, they got short.
And a love that I dreamt of,
Came to me at my worst.

Yeah, the nights I don't remember.
Are the ones I can't forget.
When all your heroes get tired,
I'll be something better yet.