Summer dreams

Daylight Savings Time always gets me dreaming about spring. Why did it have to come so early this year? We logged another 9-10 inches of snowfall today to add on to our 50 inches in March alone and 200 so far this season. That stuff stacks up and always seems to take its sweet time melting. So spring is nowhere near my horizon. Might as well dream about summer.

I think I have my 2007 endurance race season planned out. It’s a meager one for sure ... probably another trilogy this year, with a few long independent rides and maybe a mountain running race or two thrown in. The Susitna 100 has come and gone, so here are the other two:

24 Hours of Light (June 23-24?):
I know close to nothing about this race. I don’t even know exactly when it is. But I do know that it’s around the solstice and it’s in Whitehorse, Yukon, which is a small jump across the pond from Juneau. The only description the Web site gives is “No lights allowed (or required) ... Ride sweet singletrack and rolling terrain all night long with the glow of the sun as your guide.” It sounds like the 24 Hours of Kincaid with Canadians. Let the good times roll!

I wish I had a chance to ride more 24-hour mountain bike races. I live for the challenge of self-supported wilderness events, but the setup of a 24 gives me a place to shine. They’re perfect for me ... I’m not fast, but I can ride long stretches of time without stopping. Middle-of-the-night sleepiness is not a problem for me. Technical trail is only a problem if I’m unfamiliar with it and dogged by my typical lack of confidence. But give me 16 identical laps, and I’m bouncing off ledges with the best of them. In short, I actually love solo riding the hamster runs. But only one of them is within my reach this year.

So my other race is:

The Fireweed 400 (July 6-7):
I know. They’re so close together. That’s how it goes. I’ll probably ride this race one way or another. If Geoff gets into the Mount Marathon race, we'll turn it into a mini vacation and fly out together. I’ll ride the full 400 if I can find a willing (and therefore crazy) support crew. A friend in Anchorage is trying to help me recruit right now (If you’re in the Anchorage area, and you think hours of hours of puttering behind me in a rental car sounds like fun, drop me a line) If not, I’ll ride the 200 and consider an unofficial ride back.

This is a pretty serious roadie event - possibly the largest in Alaska - and I look forward to showing up at Sheep Mountain with my $600 flat-bar touring bike with its platform pedals and 27 gears, wearing running shoes and a big backpack so I can pretend that there’s not some petroleum-powered vehicle shadowing me the whole time. I do plan to train hard so I can ride it seriously - you know, at least come in before the cutoff. I have no idea what kind of pace I can maintain on a road bike. This is what makes this race so appealing to me. It's such a new concept for me.

Everything else is tentative. The Soggy Bottom 100 is in September, but it’s a lot of effort and money for me to take a weekend off work and buy a plane ticket to Anchorage, so it’s unlikely I’ll be able ride it this year. Same goes for any race in the Lower 48. The one exception is a trip to Utah I am planning, likely during the first week of May. Every year, Fat Cyclist and his friends put together a “Ride Around the White Rim in One Day” extraveganza, but I think RAWROD 2007 is in April. I’d like to organize one of my own White Rim assaults, but don’t have a friend in the world who would be willing to do it with me. So if you live in Salt Lake/Moab/Denver ... or anywhere, really ... and are interested in meeting in Moab for a self-supported (No vehicle. Carry all water and food) single-day ride around the White Rim trail sometime between May 4 and May 9, please comment below or send me an e-mail. I am serious about organizing this. And it would be cool to ride with some of my Mountain-West-based blogger friends if you're available (Dave Nice? Chris Plesko? Dave Chenault? Anyone? Bueller?). Anyone interested can reach me at jillhomer66@hotmail.com.

Reason to believe

Today was one of those days when it felt like a bad idea to get out of bed. I have very few of these, and I never know what to expect from them.

I spent two hours in the morning on the elliptical trainer at the gym, dripping sweat all over a borrowed book. It just feels so good to work some energy out, and when I move without expectations, it doesn't hurt.

After Geoff came home from work, we ate yet another meal of leftovers from the lunch counter (I swear, I am going to become very fat eating organic wholesome hippy food from Rainbow Foods.) Then he convinced me to go cross-country skiing at the glacier campground.

On the drive there, we approached a mass of traffic that can never be a good sign in this small city. Geoff let off the gas as I squinted in the distance for flashing lights, but saw none. Before we even knew what was happening, we found ourselves in the middle of a vehicle mosh pit. Cars were spinning in circles behind us, fishtailing beside us, veering directly in front of us, slamming into guard rails and into each other. Geoff wove his 1989 Honda Civic through the twirling cabaret of rubber and metal. I sat as rigid as a statue in the passenger seat, clinging to my hip belt and staring wide-eyed at the carnage ... almost beautiful in its slow-motion flow, like some cracked-out Disney on Ice dance where the grand finale is not exactly happy. By some divine hand, Geoff navigated his rust bucket over the ice untouched, and we slipped by the front of the storm ... a thick pileup of about a dozen cars in various states of crumpled. Didn't seem to be any injuries ... just a lot of business for the body shops in town.

"What just happened there?" Geoff asked after I started breathing again.

"I think we just avoided a 30-car pileup," I said.

After that, I couldn't imagine anything I wanted to do less than ski in the valley, but there was definitely no turning back at that point. Once on the trail, I did about a mile of grumpy kicks before I decided it was time to turn off my mind to how monotonous and tedious I think Nordic skiing is. Instead, I started chanting. "Kick ... Glide ... Kick ... Glide." I closed my eyes and felt the tracks slip backward beneath my feet. "Nordic skiing is great," I told myself. "You don't even need to be able to see." So I turned on my iPod and scooted along until I reached camp site No. 6. I always stop there when I ski by. I like to spend a minute beside the mound of snow that was once a picnic table and look at the sweeping view of a now-frozen swamp that was once so lush and clouded by mosquitoes. It was, after all, my first Juneau home. I feel a strange sort of comfort there.

Because I often fill my iPod shuffle at random from an amassed music collection of about 3,000 songs, I definitely have faith in the serendipity of shuffle. As I stood among the snow-masked memories of camp site No. 6, iPod chose to play an old song - one I downloaded back in the Napster days and don't think I've even heard in years: An Aimee Mann cover of a Bruce Springsteen song:

"Struck me kinda funny ... Seem kinda funny sir to me.
Still at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe."

Adventures of Unipedal

Date: March 8
Mileage: 5.1 (Made it further than last week)
March mileage: 6.2
Temperature upon departure: 34

This is the second time this week I've become self-aware of my own ridiculous behavior, and felt compelled to photograph it. Since I obviously set this picture up, I probably didn't look quite this ridiculous for the better part of three miles. But the truth can't be that far off.

I think my doctor is right about the resistance of outdoor cycling. It's just too much, too fast. But I made good on my promise to myself to try, and mostly good on my promise to stop once it hurt. Juneau received a massive amount of snow early in the week, and that's been followed up by a warm spell and a steady stream of sleet and rain. The snow pack funnels all of the melt-off into the streets, which means shin-deep slush, snow dams and flooding that can reach knee level. You don't pedal in this stuff. You ooze through it.

I noticed the strange feeling return almost immediately, and by mile 1, there was definite pain. By mile 1.5, I was mindlessly pulling my leg off the pedal. At mile 2, I just left it there, rigid and sticking straight out like a splintered board.

You'd think that pedalling with one leg would be either twice as hard or twice as slow. In reality, it's both. Since three weeks of rest and relaxation haven't exactly done wonders for my muscle strength, my left leg became tired pretty quickly. I made it another half mile that way, grinding through the slush at 8 mph. Cars streamed by and launched slush geysers far over my head. I wiped the cold goo out of my eyes and thought, "I must look like an absolute idiot." Out came the camera.

I feel a little frustrated about another defeat, but not that much. I can't expect whatever injury I have to become instantly healed just because I went to see a doctor. I thought a little more about my doctor's advice to wait another 10 days to get an MRI (I already have an appointment set up to do so, should I decide at that point that it's needed.) I think it's sound advice. I have considered the possibility that he's just waiting for my insurance check to clear before he welcomes me back in for tests. I mean - truthfully - young, single people who show up at a clinic driving cars like mine don't have the best reputation for paying their medical bills. But there's also the fact that ... however slowly ... my knee is getting better every day. If that stops happening, I'll start waving my Visa card around. I'm sure somebody out there will hook my leg up to a scanner. Until then, maybe there will be more Misadventures of Unipedal.