Life in the clouds

Date: Aug. 4
Mileage: 37.4
August mileage: 69.6
Temperature: 52

So those partly cloudy yellow sunshines promised by five different weather forecasting services never materialized. I'm OK with that. Really. Not bitter at all. I have perspective. I once lived in the desert. I remember the seemingly endless strings of days when the mercury soared into the triple digits. I remember the oven rides, dripping so much sweat and rubber that you could have scraped pieces of me off the pavement to make gravy. The hard sun soaked through my skin and I swore that someday I'd find a home where summer wasn't so stifling. It's true. I wished for it. I have everything I deserve.

But dragging myself outside with everything I deserve is a different story, and my motivation is hitting new lows. I headed up to Eaglecrest today for a hard climb, which is nearly always a good way for me to deal with grumpy. I approach the hill reluctantly while thinking about random things like salmon berries and California, but launch furiously with renewed vigor and focus. I become angrier and angrier as the pain festers and the clouds close in around me. And just when I'm certain I have to quit, when sweat percolates through my clammy cold-weather layers and sharp breaths of thick air tear at my lungs, my senses begin to retreat. All sounds are gasps and breaths; all thoughts are gasps and breaths. All scenery is fog whether it's cloudy or not, so it's strange how much clearer everything seems. Life in the pain cave is a life without details. 1s and 0s. In and out.

I emerged at the end of the gravel road. The construction no further along than last week, I slowly caught my breath as I stumbled toward the east bowl on foot. As my heart rate slowed, details began to re-emerge. An old army tank. An excavator. Weather-worn paint adding splashes of color to ski run signs. Everything obscured by the swirling clouds, and the sun was still 92 million miles away, but I felt so strong, I could almost see it.

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.