Training ... or not

Date: Aug. 2
Mileage: 32.2
August mileage: 32.2
Temperature: 54

One thing I will never understand about runners is why they like to get up so early. You have all day Saturday in which to put on a marathon, and you start the thing at 7 a.m.? That way, not only can your racers not enjoy their Friday nights, but when they do themselves a small favor by sleeping soundly until 6:40 a.m., toasting a burnt waffle for breakfast, and stumbling to the race to register three minutes before the start, you eye them with the same suspicion you would if the runner had showed up wearing stilettos? No, I say, be a sport and start your race at 10. That way, the rest of us, the normal people who sleep in on Saturdays, can at least see the finish.

I arrived at the finish line of the Frank Maier Marathon about 20 minutes after Geoff finished (and won) the race in 2:49, so I guess that would have made it about 10:10 a.m. It was embarrassing to admit that during the entire time he had spent running 26 miles, I had been sleeping ... and after telling him I planned to ride the entire course and take photos, I didn't even show up in time to see him finish. Such a slug. And to think, just a couple of weeks ago I had a fleeting moment of insanity in which I thought about entering the half marathon. But as I considered it more closely and realized that the entire distance I've run in 2008 probably didn't add up to 13 miles, I thought better of it.

So after I congratulated Geoff, I went for a quick ride up the Perseverance Trail. I met a strong rider on the climb who caught me and crushed me on the downhill. He steamrolled down stuff that I have to hold my arms out for balance just to walk down. We met up at Ebner Falls and rode back to Douglas Island together. I asked him his secret to tearing up the downhills and he said "ride a lot." We were both surprised to meet another serious mountain biker - somewhat of a rarity in Juneau - and agreed to ride together again. Yeah, new friend! His name is Terry. He took the picture of me at Ebner Falls (above.) Not a self-timed shot, I promise.

So I am at a crossroads now in which I have to decide whether to continue my carefree summer of sleeping or start more serious bicycle training again. There's this event in early October that I have latched onto, for whatever convoluted reasons I carry in my subconscious, but it's in there, and I have already started to move on these small hopes and ambitions. The race has been created with the benign label of "Trans Utah," which does nothing to convey the sinister nature of this mountain biking demon that could well become a desert classic. It's a fully self-supported multi-day race, 320 miles, about 40,000-50,000 feet of climbing, remote, with a mixture of potentially scorching desert riding and potentially frozen mountain riding. Scary! That, combined with the fact that it traverses some of the most beautiful patches of my home state, makes Trans Utah very appealing.

It also may or may not be as tough, physically, as the Iditarod, although considerably less walking should make it faster. Also, Trans Utah has a duo category that would allow me to ride and work together with Geoff, if I can talk him into it (which helps ease my anxiety about two very scary aspects of self-supported racing: Navigation and field repairs.) And should I survive it - or at least bail out at a prudent juncture, I can join the annual Grand Canyon trip with my dad.

The only drawback is that I'd have to start training. Hard. Now. Climb lots. Climb some more. Do many, many runs up the same trails just so I can spend all of my time climbing. And hope that my sea-level-acclimated lungs can somehow find oxygen at 10,000 feet. I'm torn, and feel like I'm leaning against it, but I did put in a leave request at work, and now I'm writing about it on my blog ...

What do you think? Should I do it?

Hiking with Geoff

Because Geoff and I are both into the Outdoors and both spend a large chunk of our time involved in outdoor activities, I think most of our friends just assume we spend a lot of time outdoors together. This couldn't be further from reality. There are a handful of good reasons for this: Right at the top, our schedules (I work nights and weekends; he works mornings on weekdays.) Then there's the fact we both value our solo time, usually have different training goals (which means he runs and I can't keep up with him) and also have different ideas about what makes for a fun few hours outdoors (which means I go out and ride my road bike in the rain and he darts up muddy trails and we both believe the other is enduring hell on earth.) So any time Geoff and I go outside together, it's actually a rare event ... a novelty. A date.

Today he actually agreed to go hiking, one of our rarest dates of all. I think even if I had perfect memory, I could still count on one hand the number of times Geoff and I have hiked together in two years in Juneau. Geoff does not hike. Geoff runs. The way he sees it, it could take him two hours to run ten miles up a crazy steep mountain and back, or it could take him five. He'd just rather bust it out in two. For him, the five-hour effort is twice as hard, but that's what he gets when he has to follow his stumbling, slow girlfriend up the mountain. Lucky for me, he's planning to run a marathon tomorrow (his first!), so he didn't mind doing a "low impact" walk up Blackerby Ridge. ("I don't think my heart rate went above 100" he told me as we were crabwalking down the sheer ladder of roots that we had to climb up for a vertical half-mile just to reach the ridge.) I, on the other had, would have redlined at anything faster than 1.5 mph.

(Geoff carried a cold Pepsi and a bag of Sun Chips for his "peak" snack - I have taught him well.)

The ridge was pretty well socked in with clouds and the views were obscured at best, so having Geoff there definitely made all the difference between a fun hike and a fairly disappointing one. We finally discussed at length what went down the last few days of his GDR, including psychoanalysis about whether or not he really "had" to quit. I said yes, his motor stopped firing, he was done. He still thinks there may have been a few tricks the kick start his sputtering engine, and it was great fun to speculate about what might have worked as we slid down the muddy trail. Before I knew it, we were back to the trailhead. It was a solid five hours, but one of my more effortless-seeming workouts in a while. Yes, solo outdoor activities are a wonderful thing. But company is kinda nice, too.

Goodbye July part 2

Date: July 29 and 31
Mileage: 20.1 and 95.4
July mileage: 747
Temperature: 50 and 52

I had a bit of a disappointing bicycle month, so I thought I'd try to bump up the ol' monthly mileage today by riding a quick out-the-road-and-back-and-then-some century. I waited around all morning for some kind of break in the weather, and when that didn't come, I set out at 1:30 p.m. in the rain. I still hoped to be home in time for tentative dinner plans - not that I really believed I could crank out a five-hour century, but I was hopeful for something close - and motivated by the prospect of getting out of the rain as soon as possible.

Things went really well on the way out. I zoned and zoomed and hit Echo Cove with my average still well above 18 mph, feeling strong. That all fell apart, of course, once I turned around. I ate a Power Bar at Echo Cove, but hit a bit of a bonk about 10 miles later (I'm notorious for not eating until I have to, and never enough.) So I reached into my side pocket only to realize that both bags of Shot Bloks had fallen out (um, oops.) Oh well. I've taken my aversion to eating-while-riding far enough, often enough to know that there's no great danger or even all that much discomfort in being hungry on the bike. But it does make me slower. So my hopeful five hours was already pushing toward six, and then I got a flat tire. It took me forever to fix, because my spare tube failed and I spent at least 10 minutes probing the punctured tube for its microscopic leak so I could patch it. It's actually pretty funny how frustrated I become when I am trying to do simple field repairs. It's a part of my psychology I really need to work on, because I let the shadow of that flat tire and all the time I lost fixing it hover over me for the rest of the ride. Luckily, I caught up to a bike commuter near town, and having someone to ride and talk with did help distract me from my wet glower. Riding with him also caused me to skip my spur that would have made the ride an actual century rather than just a fairly uneventful 95 miles, but I was late and had pretty much had it by then anyway. I really need to learn to do that spur at the beginning of the ride.

It was after 7:30 by the time I got home, but Geoff didn't care because he had stayed late at the gym anyway. We ended up meeting up and having dinner with a friend who had a long layover between Anchorage and Seattle, so it all worked out. Our friend peppered us with stories about all the fun stuff he did in Anchorage because it was warm and beautiful today. "It was pretty clear until we were about 10 minutes from here," he said, "and then we just flew into this dark cloud."

Yup. What can you say? It really doesn't end, and as complainy as I've been, I guess I'm OK with that. Only three more months until snow!