How I intend to spend my mid-life crisis

 In one more week, I'll be 40 years old. As the black balloon birthday approaches at breakneck speed, I also came down with a mild case of post-adventure blues, courtesy of the Summer Bear. Hammering solo through two sleepless nights drained more out of me than I cared to admit. My hormones were depleted, and tinges of sadness trickled into the void. As a general insomniac, sleep deprivation tends to cause more sleep deprivation, and by Tuesday I was in full zombie mode. So on Wednesday, I returned to the gym. I hoped a good session would help work out some of the crimps in my back and shoulders, left over from aggressive bike-pushing. But more than that, I really look forward to visiting the gym these days. Yes, it has air conditioning, and there's that. But also, there are few places I find such definitive purpose right now — in quantifiable ways I see myself building strength, and this sparks hope.

Lat pulldowns are the quickest cure for bike-pushing aches, and adventure planning is the quickest cure for post-adventure blues. It had to be right quick, too, because I needed an adventure in time for my birthday. I couldn't let 40 come and go without doing something. The week of my actual birthday is already booked, and this coming week I could only squeeze in a day or two, preferably close to home. Without too much rumination, I got it in my head that I needed to aim for four 14ers. I climbed three 13ers for my 39th birthday, and it was a formative and rewarding experience. So four 14ers for 40 just made sense. Never mind that, with the exception of the Decalibron (yawn), bagging four such mountains is no small effort. Especially given my tentative situation with my MCL, where abilities are still being tested. Chossy rock scrambles, steep slopes covered in loose talus, and boulder hopping would be several steps too far in anything but small doses. So I needed mountains with Class 1 to easy-2 approaches, which usually means climbing all the way up and then descending all the way down a popular mountain on its main trail. Finally, I settled on four peaks in the Sawatch, where a 33-mile route with close to 12,000 feet of climbing would suffice. Even if I spread that over two days, it's a big bite compared to any other foot effort I've made in more than three months. And I've only been legitimately free of injury for about three weeks.

So, let the training begin! I climbed the west ridge of Bear Peak on Thursday, logging an encouragingly fast time. On Friday I waited until 11 a.m. to start a run up Santias, set out on the fully sun-exposed ridge when it was 92 degrees, and completely cooked myself before I was even halfway up the mountain. It was bad. I stumbled onto the summit and sat down, feeling terribly woozy. My vision was blurring, my heart was racing, and when I held my hand to my face, I could see that it was trembling. That's when I noticed my shoulders were quaking, too. "Oh shit," I said out loud. Heat exhaustion? Not a serious case, but absolutely, this was a mild bout of heat exhaustion. I crawled into a pathetic square of dappled shade beneath a scrub tree, and after 10 minutes decided it would be best to just get myself off the mountain as quickly as possible. As quickly as possible turned out to be the slowest I've ever descended Mount Santias, but I did make it down. Humbled.

Things did get better. On Saturday I allowed for a short and relatively mellow bike ride to test out my new helmet, after the Summer Bear put the terminal dent in one I've been using for nearly five years. Beat found a deal for both of us to acquire the Giro Aether MIPS — lightweight, excessive venting, and superior protection, based on a number of reviews. Light roadie helmets are best for my propensity to ride long with a sensitive neck, so I'm a fan. On Sunday, I ran 15 miles at Walker Ranch and Eldorado Canyon. It was relatively uneventful, which is exactly what I was hoping for.


Monday rolled around — my last chance at a training day before a short taper. (Ha!) I was going to return to Sanitas, but the trauma was still fresh enough to recoil at the thought of running that sun-blasted ridge again. The sky was blue and the forecast was refreshingly thunderstorm-free — and it was supposed to be 65 degrees at 10,000 feet versus 90 in town. Beat had spent Saturday night on an all-night training run around Buchanan and Pawnee Pass with his PTL partner Daniel, and I was envious of his mountain adventure. So I made a last-minute swerve to pack up my hiking backpack and head over to Brainard Lake for a jaunt up Mount Audubon.

 I felt good, encouragingly so. My knee wasn't sore or unstable in spite of the Summer Bear, followed without much rest by my highest-mileage running week of the summer (27 miles! Woo!) I was sleeping well again, and felt fully recovered.

 The wind above treeline was intense, blowing at least 40 mph most of the time. With an ambient temperature that was probably in the low 50s, the windchill was impressive. It felt legitimately cold. I relished in the thrill of shivering and goosebumps, and put off adding more layers for a long time. I eventually did pull on a hat and shell, after I'd reached the summit and my ears and fingers had long since gone numb. But before that, as I climbed into the blasting gale, I was mostly lost in a different world, only popping into the present to make mental notes of places I passed.

"The wind training here is probably just as good as Niwot, although I'll have to cross-check the slopes for avalanche exposure."

"This would be a decent place to hunker down and bivy."

"St. Vrain would be great for a long snowshoe loop."

I was thinking about the way this landscape would look in the winter, long after the lakes are frozen, the rocks are covered in snow, the windchill becomes more terrifying than thrilling, and any attempt to climb a 13,200-foot summit would be a whole lot more difficult than a four-hour hike in the summer. I find this is mostly what I think about right now — wistfully, when I have heat exhaustion, and a little more anxiously when I'm faced with the realities of a chilling gale in August. But it's my whole preoccupation: Winter training.

 As my black balloon birthday approaches, so does an important six-month deadline — the one I set for myself when I put my name on the list four months ago. "You have to decide for sure by the end of August," I scolded myself. I could get away with base-building before then, but training would have to begin in earnest when the event is just six months out. Now the date approaches. And it's time to take a dump or get off the pot, so to speak.

So what did I sign up for?

A thousand-mile walk along the Iditarod Trail, all the way to Nome.

Yes, I said walk. Ever since I completed the route with a bicycle in 2016, I've been certain that the Iditarod Trail on foot is something I wanted to do. The ultimate challenge. A most pure and raw way to experience a pure and raw place that I love. I was briefly planning to walk the route 2017, but then my health fell apart drastically, and I was diagnosed with Graves Disease. I managed a trial run in 2018, a walk to McGrath. This meager effort tore me apart so completely that I'm still trying to process the experience. I've been chipping away at writing a race report for the 2018 Iditarod Trail Invitational, if only to make sense of what happened, and to justify reasons why I could be better next time, if I allow myself a next time. But writing about it only leads to the same conclusion — "Walking to Nome is impossible."

 Here's the rub — one has 31 days to complete the 980-or-so-mile route. Thirty-one days is the race cutoff, yes, but it's also a necessary deadline to beat spring. Having spent most of March 2019 residing in Nome, I can say with some certainty that even 31 days isn't going to stay ahead of the more dangerous aspects of the melt, which arrive earlier every year (the Bering Sea shoreline broke up on March 15.) But for optimistic purposes, let's give ourselves 31 days. That's 31 miles a day, dragging a 50- to 60-pound sled, in all weather, in all conditions. One rest day, one day where storms inhibit progress, just a sprinkle of bad days here and there increase the mileage requirement substantially. And this isn't like running a 50K every day. The weight of the sled, weather challenges and variable-but-always-resistant snow conditions make it closer to hiking four 14ers with 12,000 feet of climbing.

It's not just the math that keeps me up at night, but the realities that math will bring. The necessary sleep deprivation that will drive me to those dark, discouraging places in the depths of my mind. Dealing with debilitating fatigue during storms and sketchy ice crossings, when I most need my wits to be sharp. Actually pushing limits for a month. A month! Just 1.5 days of Summer Bear gave me a terrifying taste. And the solitude — the deep and seemingly eternal solitude. This actually is one of the draws for me, but also by far one of the scariest aspects of walking to Nome. The entire field of the ITI will be ahead of me, the dog sled race will pass me by, and then I'm going to be all alone out there. Utterly alone. Encased in a depth of solitude and necessary self-sufficiency that few can grasp in the modern world.

Some will ask if Beat is planning to walk to Nome again. He is. But we won't plan to stick together. It's not what I want. The short answer is that Beat's pace would kill me, and if I forced him to stick to my pace, we might end up killing each other. I joke, but the whole reason I want to do this is for the unprecedented solitude and self-reliance. If I planned to have a partner, I'd rather that partner be my bicycle. Beat I can plan an actual fun adventure to do as a couple. I'm thinking, if I survive, New Zealand will be my demand for 2021. ;-)

But it's only been two years since I dragged my sled 312 miles in 8.5 days, which math says is just under 37 miles a day. That effort just about killed me, and the thought of trying to keep it up for three times as long is ... well ... it's impossible. As far as I know, the walk to Nome has been completed by only two other women in under 31 days. The first, Shawn McTaggart, competed the Southern Route in 2013 in 30.5 days, and the Northern Route in 2014 in 28.5 days. Loreen Hewitt, at age 58, set the record on the Northern Route in 2014, 26.25 days. I had the pleasure of accompanying Loreen for much of the route to McGrath when I first walked the short distance in 2014. I was able to observe her patterns and get a sense for her strategy. I know enough to know that Loreen is an incredible athlete, with endurance I can't match even though I'm 18 years younger than she was then. Also, her pace would kill me.

Still, I scheme. I imagine what my training will look like — strength training, and lots of it. I read reports about fastest-known-time attempts on thru-hiking routes, to get a better sense of what others do to push themselves to the limit day in and day out, without the benefits of a bicycle. And now I need to decide. Either I put my intentions out there and train as though I intend to achieve them, or withdraw my name from the roster and shrink back to lesser ambitions. I hoped the Summer Bear and its test of fortitude would help me decide, but it didn't. Perhaps four 14ers on my tentative two feet will do the trick.

The walk to Nome is impossible, though. It's still impossible. It will always be impossible.

I'm pretty sure I wrote this phrase in one of my books, but the fact that something's impossible has never been a good reason not to try.