So much beauty it'll make you cry

Date: Jan. 10
Mileage: 65.4
January mileage: 238.2
Hours: 8:45
Temperature upon departure: 22
Precipitation: 0"

Disclaimer: There are a particularly gratuitous number of pictures in this post. It may make the post seem obnoxiously large. You have been warned.

I didn't have many goals for today's ride. I wanted to spend at least eight hours outside, slowly as I am trying to ween my knee back into long rides. I wanted to spend most of the day riding trails and check out some new trails. But I have to admit, I wasn't that particularly excited about it the prospect of an all-day bike ride.

My mood kicked into manic mode at the first sight of blue sky after breakfast. There's no way to overemphasize this: There's really nothing like a (partly) sunny day in Juneau. We all spend so much time slogging through downpours that even I sometimes catching myself wondering why anyone would take a job here, buy a house here, commit themselves to living here for any amount of time. But then the sun comes out, and every lingering speck of S.A.D. disintegrates. We have great selective short-term amnesia, we Juneauites.

I knew, looking across the Douglas Island bridge first thing this morning, that the day was going to be beautiful.

Even the commute was nice.

Temps were in the low-20s ... preferable to the soggy mid-30s by any Juneauite's standards, and absolutely ideal in my mind.

The Mendenhall Glacier was looking very azure this morning.

The Mendenhall Lake was covered in a little more than an inch of fresh snow resting atop glare ice. A great day for speed. Not a great day to make figure 8s.

As I crossed the lake in the light mist, I heard this low, loud howl. "It couldn't be," I thought, but I made a U-turn toward the sound anyway.

Sure enough, I caught a glimpse of the black wolf called "Romeo" as he loped along the shoreline. The story behind Romeo, by local legend, is one of a lone and lonely wolf who was somehow separated from his pack (another story has his entire pack killed by wildlife officials.) So now he lives on the outskirts of suburban Juneau, looking for dogs to be friends with (another story has him looking for dogs to eat.) Either way, he is regularly sighted near the lake, but he still takes my breath away every time.

I soon made my way over to the north end of the valley. This is what I imagine the pre-Alaska Range Iditarod landscape looks like.

Pushing my bike up the Lake Creek trail was completely exhausting. Most of it was a steep sheet of glare ice covered in a very meager layer of snowmobile-chewed snow. One would imagine that, when training for a bike race, it would make the most sense to ride one's bike. But I've found that my most valuable training comes in taking my bike for long, steep walks. I'm never working harder than I am at 1.5 mph.

I sweat a bucket and a half while slogging up there. But when I reached the wide-open trails of Spaulding Meadow, I knew the ice climb was worth it.

Totally worth it.

Totally, totally worth it.

Back to the lake by sunset, making a few more loops on the ice before hopping over to the nicely foot-packed trails of Dredge Lake. I had hardly noticed the day had slipped away.

And just like that, it was nearly 4 p.m. Even though I absolutely had to be home by six, I had a hard time peeling myself away from the trail. I felt completely strong. My knees felt completely strong. I wasn't even hungry. It was like I hadn't ridden a single minute the entire day.

I can't believe I let myself count these rides as "training."

Riding corduroy

Date: Jan. 8
Mileage: 30.8
January mileage: 172.8
Hours: 3:00
Temperature upon departure: 33
Precipitation: 0"

We make our own gravity to give weight to things.
Then things fall and they break and gravity sings.
We can only hold so much is what I figure.
Try and keep our eye on the big picture,
Picture just keeps getting bigger.
- Ani Difranco, "Hour Follows Hour"

Juneau has a city-owned ski area that shuts down early in the week. Monday morning is a good time to chug up the mostly deserted access road, look for fresh snowmobile tracks and exhale some anxiety into the cold mountain air. All the snowmobile trails I tried today were a bust, with light use and even lighter snow. I paused by the Nordic ski area for a minute to look wistfully at the freshly groomed paths. I wouldn’t dream of touching that area with my bicycle, not even on an off day, lest I reap the wrath of the Nordics and their exclusive rights. (Never mind that I would have a much lighter trail impact on my bicycle than I would on skis, what with my flailing falls and notch-digging side steps down the tiniest of hills. I’m a terrible skier.)

I was just about to turn around when I noticed a pair of snowboarders crawling (yes, literally crawling) up the mountain using their boards as ice axes. Finding my own way up the mountain seemed like a fun challenge. I pedaled past the resort building and began to work my way up the cat track. I followed the signs marked with green circles as my best hope for a shallow incline, and spun with fury until my back wheel refused to move. (I will continue to hope that someday Surly decides to make an Endomorph tire with more aggressive tread. Although knobby tires don’t improve - and may actually hurt - traction in cross-country snow biking, I’m convinced they would make all the difference in mountain snow biking.) The ski runs rippled with corduroy, a fresh grooming job disturbed only by a single set of wheels and feet. I spun madly where I could ride and trudged where I couldn’t, slowly picking my way up the slopes.

Somewhere near the top of the mountain, where all the runs were labeled “more difficult,” I hit a slope I could no longer negotiate and began to slide backward. I whirled around and dug my heels into the snow, grasping the frame of my overturned bike that threatened to keep sliding. Beneath my feet, I had a great view of several tributary runs snaking down the mountain, the confluence ending in a lift now hundreds of feet below. I shivered with the realization about how steep it all looked, how I had somehow stranded myself up here with only wheels to get down, and how this somehow looked very familiar. And then I remembered why.

I actually remember it very well: The first time I went snowboarding at a resort. I even remember the date: Oct. 28, 1996. Some friends and I ditched school to catch the opening day of Park City Ski Resort, the first day of first season the resort had ever allowed snowboarding. We felt like we were ushering in history. Never mind that I didn’t actually know how to snowboard. My friends did. They promised to teach me. They directed me toward a lift that carried us up to the highest point on the mountain. They shouted at me to follow them as they coasted down the ramp. I took a face plant right off the lift, and when I stood up again, I was alone.

I slid and tumbled and scooted my way to what appeared to be the edge of a cliff. Only a single black diamond sign on a nearby tree indicated that it was intended to be any sort of human path at all. I peered over the edge, where more than a thousand vertical feet disappeared below me. I remember feeling a piercing dread, so intense that it made me feel faint with heat even as snowflakes swirled around. I didn’t think it was possible to survive such an descent, but I had to try. So I stood up, dug my back edge into the snow, and scooted, hopped and scooted down the cliffside. As I became more comfortable with that action, I began to zigzag from side to side, slowly picking up speed and a sense of exhilaration as I pressed toward the safety of low elevation. It certainly didn’t work out perfectly. I fell. A lot. And it hurt. A lot. I couldn’t sit down for three solid days after that fateful first time. But I made it. And in the end, I decided, I had always known that things would turn out OK.

My bicycle broke into a dead run before I had even swung my leg over the top tube. The wheels swerved wildly and I thought I’d never pull out of it, but somehow the tires gripped into the snow and began to roll in a (mostly) straight line toward the green-circle haven. From there, it was just me and my wheels, cutting a thick line in the windswept corduroy as a cloud of fine powder kicked up behind. Plummeting toward the lift, I felt a familiar sense of fear-stoked peace that reminded me that there are many routes, but only one destination, when it comes to bliss.

And I still believe that somehow, things are going to turn out OK.

Anxiety

Date: Jan. 8
Mileage: 12.1
January mileage: 142.0
Temperature upon departure: 30
Precipitation: 0"

I was worried this feeling would begin to set in, after the New Year came and went and February crept ever closer - a fluttering anxiety punctuated by increasingly more frequent shots of dread. My once-abstract fears are developing a voice. And that voice says, “Dang ... you’re really going through with this, aren’t you?”

As Geoff and I work out more of the little details associated with the Iditarod Trail Invitational, our focus is beginning to zoom out on the big picture. And the big picture is, well, very, very big. I miss the days when I could just think solely about the physical prospect of riding 350 miles on snow. Or the psychological prospect of pushing a bike through fresh powder, in the darkness, in a blizzard. Or the physiological prospect of staying warm over a whole lot of subzero hours. Or the educational prospect of route-finding in a wilderness I’ve never before set foot in. Or the intellectual prospect of planning the exact food I’ll need to eat and the exact clothing I’ll need to wear without missing a beat. Now I’m beginning to think about all these things, all the time. I believe Geoff is beginning to feel overwhelmed as well. After we came home from camping on Saturday, he plopped down on the couch and said, “You know, when you really think about it, the Ultrasport is really scary, and basically impossible.”

I get the feeling that during the next six weeks, my mind is going to be all over the place - I mean more so than usual - as I meander through the remaining details while trying not to drown in the big picture. This anxiety seems to be both a good and bad thing. Yesterday, while I was down with a cold, I became consumed with fears about getting lost. So I spent my free time learning what I could about my GPS, looking at maps, mulling electronic maps, and finally ordering one. It became a productive "rest" day. Today I felt better, so I set out for a Dan Moller Trail hike-a-bike. The point of this workout is to build up my “pushing” muscles on the 2,000-foot climb and improve my “handling” skills on the screaming descent. The downhill is usually a reward after what is essentially a tedious hike. But I somehow failed to leech much enjoyment in today’s bumpy ride, lost as I was in the landscape of my mind. Even now, I try to remember this morning and only see images of Rainy Pass the way I envision it: ice-hardened, windswept and devoid of any discernable trail.

I keep telling myself that I’d probably be crazy if I wasn’t afraid, and that I’m going to conquer this race by doing the same thing I’ve been doing all along: Taking it mile by mile by mile, one baby step at a time. But I'm beginning to realize that the first step may be the hardest.