Good day for winning

I was slumped over the conference table at the monthly employee meeting, mulling the hierarchy of the day's headlines, when my boss announced to the entire newsroom that I had been chosen for the monthly $50 employee appreciation award. This is like winning employee of the month, but instead of a plaque (and the inevitable magic-marker mustache), I get $50. Huzzah!

Back at my desk and checking my e-mails, I discovered that my Anchorage friends, Eric and Brij, both won the Anchorage Daily News video contest. Eric won the grand prize of a 50" plasma-screen TV, and Brij gets the first-prize video camera. Brij will probably use it to make more movies about slobbering grizzly bears. Eric plans to sell that monster TV to fund a monster mountaineering trip at the end of the month. Thank you to all who took the time to vote. Huzzah!

Somewhere in the midst of all that prize-snatching madness - 3:02 p.m. Mountain Daylight Time, to be more exact - Dave Harris rolled into Grand Junction, Colo., a little less than three days after he left. In those three days, he rode a mountain bike 350 miles over a remote and dusty trail, climbing a total of nearly 50,000 feet in the midst of desert heat and soul-crushing loneliness. The few who attempt the course call it the Grand Loop, and Dave rode it faster than anyone ever has. I'm not clear on how extensive his obliteration of the old record was. It's at least five hours.

"Dave was in the zone feeling no pain," his friend and teammate, Lynda, wrote upon serendipitously running into him on the river at a 3 a.m. bridge crossing. "Steve described him as giddy and jubilant. He only stopped for about 5 minutes and spent most of it stuffing his face. Looks like all systems were working. He was giving off incredible energy!

"... and then he was gone. As we watched him ride off into the moonlight goose bumps stood up on my arms and I was flooded with a mix of awe and envy. I told Steve I had goose bumps and he said he did too. He said we just witnessed something special."

(photo by Mike C.)

Congratulations, Dave. We have a winner.

The Fat Cyclist phenomenon

(and other reasons why I love blogging)

Date: June 3
Mileage: 28.8
June mileage: 50.2
Temperature upon departure: 65

Yesterday my new Fat Cyclist jersey showed up in the mail. Then today, like a stroke of good luck, the sky opened into some oh-so-rare short-sleeves weather. So I donned my stylish new jersey - for good luck - then proceeded to run over a chunk of glass the size of a molar, break one of my brake arms while changing the flat, and forget to release my foot from my clipless pedals at the Glacier Visitor Center - slamming my knee (my bad knee) into the pavement in front of God and a whole lot of tourists. Yes, I did Team Fatty proud.

How this jersey found its way to my doorstep is an interesting story - at least, it’s interesting to me. When I started keeping a blog in November 2005, I was not really a cyclist. I was an occasional recreational rider with a few touring miles behind me, but I was not a cyclist in the pure sense of the word. But as a new resident of Alaska, I had some growing interest in a strange thing called snow biking. Snow biking events don’t start small in Alaska. The entry-level event crosses into a realm most would consider endurance - 100 miles. And I was a lot of things in November 2005, but I was not an enduro-nut.

It was around that time that I first came across Fatty’s blog. His self-depreciating humor and amusingly spot-on dieting misadventures snagged me. Pretty soon I was reading all about his one-day trips around the White Rim and Leadville 100 races. And I got to thinking ... here is a self-proclaimed fat guy who scarfs pounds of mashed potatoes and spends his time writing open letters to the Internet, and he can handle these long rides. Why not me?

Of course it’s not as simple as that. But there are so many ways in which random intersections across the paths of strangers can change our own course. The way my entry into endurance cycling parallels my change in Internet habits is not a coincidence. I didn’t see these possibilities in myself until I watched others stretch their wings.

Now I'm one of hundreds of anonymous cyclists pedaling the world's roads and trails in an orange and black jersey, connected only by one man's blog. It may seem like an arbitrary connection, but if I ever saw another one of those shirts making its way up the road, you can bet I'd stop the person it's attached to. We're on the same team after all.

Fatty has since moved the focus of his blog from cycling/diet guru to avenger of cancer. After his wife, Susan, was diagnosed a couple of months ago, Team Fatty reached out in inspiring ways. Cards, letters and tokens of appreciation rolled in from all over the world, and now Fatty is rolling out a new jersey - pink, to fight Susan's breast cancer. And we who accidentally stumbled across Fatty's small corner of the Internet - the wannabe endurance riders, the mashed-potato lovers, the fat cyclists - have united in support of a stranger.

"People who say the Internet is an ugly place have been hanging around the wrong parts of the Internet," he wrote.

I completely agree.

I could get used to this

Date: June 1
Mileage: 21.4
June mileage: 21.4
Temperature upon departure: 63

You know, there is definite appeal to the lifestyle of a recreational rider ... heading out once in a while - when the weather's nice - bent on taking it easy, soaking up some sun and splattering a little mud on the cycling clothes that hardly see the outside of the drawer.

Deep down, part of me still wants to play the part of the hammerhead: pounding up mud-slicked slopes in the driving rain in an effort to convince myself - and my reluctant muscles - that somewhere inside this soft body is a person that still has a little grit in her teeth.

But there's another part of me that's glad to just enjoy mountain biking for the luxury it is, in the role of a person who can spend all morning chipping away at 21 miles, touring the entire Mendenhall Valley and guiltlessly embarking on trails that are little more than a mile long.

There are other roles I missed out on when I was a trainin' fool:

The role of a mediocre technical rider who would really, really like to be able to hit hairpin turns. Even though I realized that making this turn would require completely lifting the back wheel off the ground and pivoting it 90 degrees, I still tried it a couple of times - hoping that somehow the laws of physics would change.

The role of a caution-to-the-wind summer rider who can't believe how much &#@$ snow there still is below 1,000 feet, but took a couple of slushy spills trying to bomb through it on the downhill coast.

The role of a sightseer who spends a lot more time on break than is really necessary, and a trail guide who was stopped by and gave lengthy directions to no less than seven tourists.

These recent weekend rides have been vastly different from the ones I left behind - centuries that hugged the darkness on both ends, plowing through five inches of fresh snow and loneliness in a world that knows enough to go inside when it's cold.

And I'm not complaining.