Le (yet another) Tour

Date: September 16&17
Combined mileage: 43.6
September mileage: 183.9

I have an idea for a decent endurance biking event in Juneau. It came to me today as Geoff and I, while tooling around on a short ride, decided to cross downtown to look at a particular house for sale. The city is carved into a mountainside, not unlike San Francisco, in a way that each city block becomes progressively steeper. I flew across the first five blocks (about 5-7 percent grade) ... began to labor at the next two (10 percent) ... started wheezing at blocks 8 and 9 (15 percent) and wavered alarmingly up the last two blocks (judging by hikes that I've done in the past, I'd say these streets easily push 25 percent grades). About 30 feet from the summit stop sign, I glanced over at a cement barrier and became terrified at the thought of putting my foot down - for fear I would slip backward back down the street and over the edge. But I also wasn't sure I was going to make it - I was feeling light-headed enough that I feared for my consciousness. This happened on the tail end of a casual, 15-mile ride. Now, I'm not in the best shape I've been in all year. But I'm not exactly in the worst shape of my life, either.

So here's my idea for the endurance cycling event - it's a road ride, because the four-mile-long mountain bike trails around town aren't exactly distance-friendly. The cyclists start in downtown and ride out to the end of the road the turn around and return to town, covering the Mendenhall Loop on their way home (~80 miles). Then they cross the Channel bridge, ride to Douglas, out the end of the road, and back (~30 miles). Then they ride out to the southern end of the road, at Thane, and back (~14 miles). So, by covering every bike-legal mile of highway in the whole area, I have a 124-mile ride. I thought I could flesh it out to 150 by then weaving the course through every side street in downtown Juneau, so at the end of their century-plus, all the riders would have to climb and then descend, climb again and then descend again - every heartbreaking, breathtaking road in town. It's the Tour of Juneau. A 150-mile road ride isn't exactly a groundbreaking endurance event, but I thought all those short, steep late-ride climbs could really make it interesting.

Now, if only I could get the city to go along with me. I wouldn't even know how to begin to put together an mass-participant event, but it sure would be fun to try. I already have a T-shirt design idea. Because you can't drive to Juneau, it often carries the reputation in the Lower 48 that it has no roads. So I was thinking the slogan for my road bike Tour would play off that line at the end of the movie 'Back to the Future:' "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."

Um, yeah. I should probably try to get some sleep now.

Orca skyward

Date: September 14
Mileage: 32.3
September mileage: 140.3

Today Geoff and I rented an 18-foot skiff with an outboard engine and eight hours of cloudless daylight to motor aimlessly around in. We had this crazy idea that with no experience, no depth finder, no anchor and one halibut pole, we were somehow going to come home with dinner. We headed out to Shelter Island just as the last of the morning frost melted away in a blaze of sun. We pulled in to a place called "Halibut Cove" (which means there's got to be halibut there, right?) and began fumbling around with a bag of still-frozen-solid herring and tangled hooks when Geoff let out a loud gasp. I whirled around just as a massive whale erupted from the surface no more than 200 yards in front of our tiny boat. With a thunderous roar it twisted its sparkling black torso, flashing a white underside and falling headlong back into the water, tail sinking beneath a geyser of white spray. Geoff and I just sat there, still balancing dead herring and hooks in our hands and giving each other a "did that just happen?" kind of confused stare.

The camera came out after that, as did many dozens more orca and humpback whales. The rest of the day's theatrics were decidedly less dramatic - but, I gotta say, there's nothing like a good opening to really carry a performance. We watched a pod of five synchronized-swimming humpbacks breach and pull their tails back in the water in perfect unison. Three playful seals came up right next to the boat and splashed around for several minutes as they swam away. Every once in a while, a chorus of whale songs echoed across the channel. Eagles coasted overhead as we skimmed the smooth water and distant icefields - almost never visible from shore - sparkled in the sun. Oh ... and we didn't catch a single halibut.

Despite our failure to bring home fresh fish, this turned out to be an exceptionally good weekend, and I have the sunburn to show for it. Yesterday we did a "bike tour" of Juneau. We rode out to the valley, crossing the path of a marauding black bear before connecting with the Spalding Trail. We hiked up (well, more like stair-stepped up) a plank-lined drainage to a high meadow, where we could soak in the clear air and work on our much-neglected sunburns. We ate lunch at this locally lauded Thai place that actually was pretty good (which, for this city's restaurant reputation, is pretty much shocking). Then, with stomachs full of basil tofu and vegetables, we rode the 15 miles home in a casual - almost effortless - hour. There should be more weekends like yesterday and today ... but right now, lingering in the last breaths of summer, I'll gladly take just this one.

The kids aren't alright

Date: September 13
Mileage: 23.8
September mileage: 108

Right now I work as a wire editor, which basically means I have my pick of dozens of national and world news articles to run in our local paper. Recently, one of my coworkers accused me of running "too many fat-kid stories." I can't help if all the published scientists are so single-mindedly focused on obesity (well, that and global warming.) I think these reports are justified. They scare me, too.

The latest study is saying that one in five children younger than 18 will be obese by 2010. Not pudgy. Not slightly overweight. Obese. It makes me wonder where these kids find the time to put on all this weight. You can't tell me that 20 percent of the youth population is genetically predisposed.

I guess what I don't understand is exactly when it got so bad. I come from "Generation Y," albeit the very, very front edge of it. But we had video games and Carl's Jr. and 7,578.2 satellite channels. We ate Doritos and Dr. Pepper for lunch and zoned out in front of the computer for hours (back in the days when texting was still called "chatting.") Now that I've joined the line of cane-waving, "back-in-my-day" generations, I'm just trying to make sense of the great health epidemic of our time, and why it seems to be hitting the youngest generation (Generation Z? Generation iPod?) so hard.

When I was a senior in high school, I wrote an opinion column for my school newspaper decrying exercise as an egomaniacle waste of time. Teenagers don't need to "exercise," I reasoned, because a teenager's life is exercise. They participate in school sports. They thrash around for hours at rock shows. The financially strapped among them (of which I was one) have to walk everywhere (because, when I was 17, it was not cool to ride a bike.) "Kids only exercise," I wrote, "because they're vain and think a few situps are going to make them look like Gwen Stefani." Yup. I had it all figured out.

I would have been royally outraged if the government tried to take away my Dr. Pepper machine. I would have laughed at efforts to slim down school lunch (we wouldn't even eat the greasy junk they served.) But, most of all, I didn't want someone telling me to spend precious hours of youth lifting weights or running on a hamster wheel, when there was a world of real fun right in front of me. It made so much sense then. What happened?

The thought of what children must be doing that causes them to grow so large almost scares me more than the public health implications. Could they really be spending that much more time staring mindlessly at screens, downing an endless supply of processed food until they're too numb and stuffed to think? That's bleak. It's one thing to eat yourself into an early grave. It's another to waste away in a soulless existence.

I know that obesity is a complicated issue, and I believe it's not always a matter of lifestyle choices. Some children are genetically predisposed. Others struggle with larger issues such as poverty and parental indifference, issues that often accompany unhealthy lifestyles. But how can we help the rest? Those overwhelmed with such rapt indifference that they let the world go by through their television monitors and turn to food for the shallow sparks of joy food can provide? If only somehow we could make biking cool. That, I have faith, would solve everything.