Staying cold

Date: Dec. 11
Mileage: 28.2
Hours: 2:30
December mileage: 255.6
Temperature upon departure: 35
Rainfall: .58"

For me, the problem in dressing for Juneau winter cycling isn’t starting warm; it’s staying warm. I can have the ideal combination for long periods of comfort - sometimes hours. But if anything breaches the heat barrier - a lingering stop, or an extended descent - it often takes many teeth-chattering, skin-burning minutes of hard pedaling to find my way back to normal. Some days, I don’t find my way back at all.

The obvious solution is to just wear more than I think I need, but I hate that sticky feeling of being overheated in cold air. Taking additional layers to put on later is complicated by the soaking nature of the one condition that consistently breaks me - sleet.

Today I headed out in the gray slush for a quick ride to North Douglas, and decided to head up the Eaglecrest road at the last minute. I wanted to check out the snow depth and see if any pre-season trails had been laid yet. There’s definitely a fair amount of snow up there, but no trails. Using the area for training is a bit of a Catch-22, though. I don’t think I could get my bald-tire Pugsley up the icy access road, but once I’m there, my studded-tire Sugar becomes basically useless. Back to the drawing board.

I spent some time at the top tromping around the Nordic ski area, listening intently for snowmobiles and exchanging incredulous glances with backcountry skiers as they passed. Before heading back down, I took off my gloves because they had become completely soaked (as had basically everything else on my body.) I pulled up my face mask, adjusted my goggles, stuck my bare hands in my pogies and locked into the screaming descent.

The downhill run was so full of goggle-coating sleet and jaw-clenching ice patches that I didn’t even notice that the skin on my legs had started to tingle, and my fingers were going numb, and my torso was beginning to feel clammy and cold.

By the bottom of the hill, shivering had taken over. I still had plenty of energy, so I amped up the speed as much as my legs and the slush-coated road would allow. But all that seemed to do is intensify the wet wind chill, and I just couldn’t shake the shivering. My condition had started to improve, somewhat, by the time I made it home. I peeled off my dripping layers and turned on the shower, but then remembered how nauseated I usually feel if I reheat my prickling skin too quickly, and thought better of it. So I scavenged the refrigerator until I found a half-eaten cup of lentil soup, and stood in the kitchen in my underwear as the microwave reheated it. The thick, tomato-flavored soup oozed down my throat like melted gold, and tasted every bit as warm and rich. It was heaven sent, that soup, and you don't earn that kind of deliciousness by staying indoors.

But, I concur. Brushes with hypothermia are pretty funny until they're not. I need to rework my wet-weather layer system for days when even fenders can't ward off the endless shower of slush. Or maybe, next time I ride up to Eaglecrest in a sleet storm, I'll see if one of the backcountry skiers can shuttle me down the mountain in their Subaru.

Mind over body

Last week, the New York Times published an article, appropriately titled “I’m not really running, I’m not really running ...” about the effectiveness of dissociation in endurance racing. It’s commonly believed that humans use only a small part of their intellectual capacity, but dissociation plays off the idea that humans also tap only a fraction of their physical ability. The article calls it “mind over mind-over-body:” the art of tricking your mind into believing it’s not actually forcing your body to do the things that nobody but your ego and maybe a small part of your spiritual self want it to do. The result is an ability to jump higher, run faster, and cycle farther than the preconceived - and rather unimaginative - limits of the concious mind would generally allow.

Athletes who practice dissociation learn to block out the white noise of the human condition - past events, future goals, perceived fatigue, real pain - and focus completely on the immediate moment. Many athletes count. Some chant. Some fixate on a distant point, or a shadow, and watch only that. However they do it, dissociation whisks a person away from the task at hand and all of its complications, and transplants them in a simpler place far away from the weaknesses of the mind ... the weaknesses that tell a body it’s too slow, too tired, in too much pain, and tell it to stop.

In the article, an exercise psychologist asks the reporter to imagine she is running on a wet, windy, cold Sunday morning. “The conscious brain says, ‘You know that coffee shop on the corner. That’s where you really should be,” said Dr. Timothy Noakes. And suddenly, you feel tired, it’s time to stop. “There is some fatigue in muscle; I’m not suggesting muscles don’t get fatigued. I’m suggesting that the brain can make the muscles work harder if it wanted to.”

A scientist who tested this method based his research on a group of Tibetan monks who reportedly ran 300 miles in 30 hours. It's an unbelievable story, if only because monks aren’t typical athletes. They don’t spend all day training their bodies, ingesting scientifically precise diets and maintaining an unwavering focus on their fitness. But in their spiritual pursuit, while breathing in synchrony with the moment, these monks achieved something that many of the world’s most elite athletes would consider impossible.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that’s especially intriguing to me. It gives mere mortals like myself hope that we can overcome our own athletic mediocrity and rise to extraordinary feats. Geoff, who fits more in the athletic freak of nature category, finds the idea frightening. “If a person can really find their way into an order higher than physical pain,” he said, “what will stop them from running themselves to death?”

What indeed.

Whipping up a slushy

Date: Dec. 9
Mileage: 18.1
Hours: 2:15
December mileage: 227.4
Temperature upon departure: 36
Rainfall: .26"

Some days, my rides are less about physical fitness and more about psychological endurance. Unfortunately, I never know which one it's going to be until after I leave the house.

Within two blocks, I had no doubt about what kind of ride I was in for today. The roads were an absolute nightmare. Still mostly unplowed, a continuous cold rain had saturated yesterday's snow, which traffic stirred up into a substance that is best described as a dirt-flavored slurpee. I don't believe there's a bicycle invented that can efficiently navigate this stuff, or a car for that matter, and I found myself walking (walking!) my Surly Pugsley on the road (on the road!) to reach the trails.

The trail itself was devoid of traffic of any kind - not a footprint, not a pawprint, not even a shuffling porcupine track. Not a single soul had attempted to slog up the trail, and that wasn't big surprise. Imagine taking six inches of already wet snowfall, letting it melt a little over night, then injecting it with a quarter inch of rain, and you have a thick blanket of sludge that is only slightly more pliable than peanut butter, but a lot more slippery.

I walked for a while up the trail, holding out eternal optimism that any moment it would become rideable, and muttering my mantra that trudging with a bike is an important skill to forge. But even without me on top of it, the bike occasionally slipped out and fell over, or I slipped out and we fell over, and the whole thing was so stupid, and I was glad nobody was there to tell me so.

But it true Pugsley form, running the tires at about 5 psi no less, we were actually able to ride most of the way down. I slid around often. But not enough to crash. It was more like semi-controlled falling ... fishtailing fun ... like when I first took up snowboarding and learned that true control was an illusion, but true disaster was easily avoidable.

To be honest, I'm not sure why I don't just give up on rides like today's, rather than pushing through two planned hours on the cusp of either laughing out loud or screaming obscenities. I think it's because I believe that any hardship, real or perceived, is good for my mental fitness. I also fear that once I let myself give up on one thing, no matter how minor, I'll start on that steep and slippery slope that ends in me throwing in the towel on the whole Iditarod dream.