Get a life

Date: Dec. 18
Mileage: 25.0
December mileage: 250.1
Temperature upon departure: 35

Geoff chided me tonight for making snap judgments and prejudicial statements based on an unfair assessment in yesterday's "Nordic Nazi" post. I was just letting off steam and it is my blog, but I am sorry if I offended anybody. That said, I'm a little disappointed that no outraged skiers shot me an insult-laced comment or two.

The other night, we watched a hilarious documentary called "Spellbound," which follows the ups and downs of eight young spelling champions as they prepare for the National Spelling Bee. At one point, the filmmaker asks one of the 13-year-old prodigies if she has any hobbies besides spelling. She gazes at the camera thoughtfully and says, "Well, I like to ride roller-coasters." She stops and thinks a little more. "I'm a vegetarian and I like to drink coffee."

I thought more about this girl - I think her name is April - today while trying to motivate myself to put in more mileage on the bike. I'm a little disappointed with where I am - behind where I was this time last year - but a little daunted with the options I have to possibly do more. They include, but are not limited to: Riding after work (I leave work at 10 and sometimes 11 p.m.); waking up earlier; limiting the quality breakfast time; and cutting into my other hobbies.

And then the little voice in my head said, "Other hobbies? What other hobbies?"

"Well," I reasoned, "I'm learning to ski (not happily). Sometimes I go to my friends' house and play Guitar Hero. I'm a sushi addict and I like ... to ... drink ... coffee ..."

The thought just trailed off. And after laughing at the idea of poor studious April's non-hobbies just days ago, I realized that I understand perfectly what's it's like to singletrack through life. That maybe I'm even guilty of it. And I started to wonder if maybe I should be out there exploring all the options - reading books instead of Outside magazine on the elliptical trainer; writing thoughtful letters instead of bike-oriented blog posts; painting instead of pedaling; volunteering instead of working long hours to support my habit; learning to knit or speak Spanish or bellydance.

Or maybe I should just spend more time on the bike.

Nordic Nazi

RANT ADVISORY: Anyone who considers themselves an avid cross-country skier should probably just skip this post.

This morning, I agreed to go cross-country skiing with friends up at Eaglecrest, a (shudder) groomed loop near the downhill ski resort. I have probably been skiing too many times this week for my liking; I was grumpy and a little undercaffinated; and I took a nasty fall while walking across the parking lot, which left my knee swollen and bruised. In every way, I was not off to a good start.

After a long weekend of partying, my friends were somewhat grumpy themselves, and the general environment of parka-piercing winds and sticky snow put us all in a surly mood. So we stomped our way over the trail, collecting clumps of snow under our skis and trying to shake it loose. This created a lot of awkward downhill moments when one leg was sliding and the other was sticking. I was skiing in this one-legged position down the set tracks when I came around a corner and met an oncoming skier. Since I was the downhill skier, I did what I considered the polite thing - I veered off the tracks and did a faceplant in the powder.

And as I looked up through a face full of snow, I could see this guy grimacing down at me. He was clad in one of those yellow single-piece spandex suits that makes a person look like a walking condom, and he was practically wagging his finger at me. “You are going zee wrong way,” he said in a German accent that my friend mimics so well.

“Huh?” I said.

“You can not go zis way on zis trail, especially because you are accident-prone perzon,” he said. (Never mind that the trail is in no way marked one way or the other, there is no map indicating it is not a two-way trail, and we had already been passed by countless people going the same direction.) He continued to lecture me about arrows (There were no arrows) and learning to read signs (no signs either) and “accident-prone” even as he started moving back up the trail.

I used to run into Ski Snobs all the time in Homer. The seem to make up a larger-than-average percentage of the sport's population. I always want to open my mouth to respond to them, to say, “Don’t you realize that because of your rabid exclusiveness and hostility toward beginners, your culture is going to age and die out? That pretty soon there will be no one left to defile all of the best frontcountry trails with corduroy groomers and parallel tracks that serve only to funnel people ‘in zis direction.’ And when that day comes, we’ll no longer have to yield to your totalitarian toe-the-line regime. We will take to the trails with our snowskates, our fat bikes, our airboards and skiboards, our snowshoes, our Yak-Tracks, our skijoring dogs and horses. So what if we have to dodge the ruts and postholes? We are not that fragile. And we will not submit to going ‘zis way.’ We will go wherever we want to go, whichever way we want to go, however we want to travel!”

“Multi-use winter trail enthusiasts, unite!”

But I never actually say this. Usually I just say something witty along the lines of “Whatever, Dude.” Then I daydream about escaping to the backcountry ski trails, where I can eat up great singletrack with my snaux bike and smile at the snowshoers as they stomp by. Someday. Someday.

Get in mah belly

Date: Dec. 15 and 16
Total mileage: 35.1
December mileage: 225.1
Temperature upon departure: 26

I always read with great amusement other cyclists' accounts of mid-ride hunger attacks - knocking on a stranger's door to ask for crackers, pocketing Snickers bars at a gas station or fashioning a bicycle pump into a weapon and using it to hold up the nearest McDonalds. These stories have novelty for me because I don't suffer from this problem. If anything, I suffer from the exact opposite. I have mid-exercise food aversion. As long as my heart's pumping, the thought of digestion repulses me. Once, while sitting near the top of Kings Peak in Utah, Geoff actually force-fed me a cheese sandwich after I had spent the entire day refusing to eat breakfast, lunch or snacks. To be fair, we were huddled under a rock during a lightning storm, and I didn't think I was going to survive long enough to require energy for the hike down.

If a bike ride is long enough, I will (usually) force myself to eat. But if I'm planning on being out for two hours or less, I don't even bother bringing anything, knowing the only purpose it will serve is gooing up my pockets. Now that it's the dead of winter, when bottles freeze and camelbaks give me shoulder pain, I often don't even bother to bring water (I know, I know. Feel free to lecture.) But that's how I set out today.

Conditions were a little closer to awful than not. At 11 a.m., we were in the midst of an heavy snowstorm that had dumped about two inches of new snow so far. Where I rode, on the shoulder of a narrow highway, the plows had pushed chunky piles of snow that ranged in depth from 2 inches to 7 inches, changing often and without warning. Riding in loose, uneven snow is fairly unpredictable, and the proximity of traffic forces me to keep a straight line, which means I have to slow down when I'm not sure what's ahead. Add to that the icy blizzard and a fierce gusting-to-40-mph headwind that brought windchills, well, far enough down to create a solid ring of ice around my face mask ... and I have what Geoff calls "perfect conditions for training for the Susitna 100."

Anyhow, it was tough. Covering 24 miles in two hours - because I was riding on a road and expected to go at least that fast - took about all I had to give. Despite the aforementioned facial ring of ice, I was sweating buckets while riding into the wind and even tore open my coat and thin fleece layer, exposing the bare pink skin around my collarbone. I was really that hot. I was in deep focus, earning ever pedal stroke through the deep stretches of snow and occasionally correcting a wild fishtail. I hardly even noticed the miles go by.

When I got home, I couldn't strip fast enough. I tore off clothing, leaving a trail of ice-caked layers on my way through the house. And standing in my bedroom wearing only a pair of socks, longjohns and a sports bra, I first noticed that I was wicked thirsty. So I went to the kitchen and started chugging warm water from the tap. And when that craving was abated, I started to feel something else - something that started deep in my head, a distant cry that fired over my synapses, rushed through my blood stream and emerged screaming from the depths of my stomach. It screamed "ice cream." And without even making a conscious decision to do so, I grabbed a half gallon of huckleberry swirl out of the freezer and began shoveling in large spoonfuls right from the carton. I did not even bother to mine the boring vanilla crap for the swirls of sweet, sweet huckleberry. No. I ate it all. I mean, I didn't eat the whole carton. Really. I promise.

But I did finally have a taste of what it's like to need a particular food so badly that the subconscious muffles out the rational voices and pushes a person toward instinctual gorging. I know it's not rational because after I finished inhaling about 500 empty calories of sugar and saturated fat, I felt intensely guilty. But not enough to skip lunch.