Happy to be home

Date: Jan. 22 and 23
Mileage: 16 and 100.4
January mileage: 633.5
Temperature upon departure: 11 and 15

We were 30,000 feet over Yakutat after another brutally long, overnight flight from Kona to Honolulu to Anchorage en route to Juneau when the clouds started to clear. I gazed with chest-tightening awe over the ice field below, shimmering pink in the morning sun as glaciers flowed like suspended-motion whitewater rivers around the coastal mountains. My forehead was pressed against the window when a flight attendant came on the intercom and said, "If you're reading a book or looking at a computer, you better put it down and look out the window right now, because it doesn't get any more beautiful than this." I realized that she was right. Hawaii is beautiful; often stunningly beautiful. But it's true when they say there's no place like home.

My total sleep on that endurance flight amounted to about an hour and a half, tops, and I was already seeing double when we arrived in Juneau at 9:30 a.m. We stepped out of the airport for our first taste of outside air since Kona - 10 degrees and sustained 25 mph wind driving the windchill below zero. It felt 80, maybe 90 degrees cooler than the warm breeze over the Pacific the night before. We were still in our Hawaii clothes. "Ga! It got cold again!" I yelped, and ducked quickly into my roommate's car.

But beyond the chill, the day was absolutely beautiful, and I knew that sleep deprivation is one of the skills I have to hone for the ITI. So after we arrived home and unpacked just a bit, I headed out for a bike ride.

My roommate told me the week before, a "Pineapple Express" direct from Hawaii had blasted Alaska with unbelievably warm temperatures. He said the temperature rose to 55 degrees in Juneau, about the same temperature it was in Honolulu the night Geoff ran the HURT 100. The warm temps brought rain on top of the old snow, which had refrozen to concrete-like consistency. You can hardly ask for better snow-biking conditions.

I quickly adjusted to the huge temperature drop and headed up the Dan Moller trail. The trail is steep enough that I can only ride up the majority of it in the most supreme conditions. Thursday had those conditions. I sweated and gasped my way up five miles of crust, stopped at the Ski Bowl and turned around, almost shaking with nervousness about the idea of dropping 2,000 feet in five miles on a trail that's roughly as hard as a sidewalk. But as soon as I let off the brakes, I was caught up in the rush of pure, well-earned speed. I caught several blips of accidental-but-sweet air off the snowmobile moguls and careened through pockets of sunlight as spruce trees whirred past. It was so, so fun. Worth any amount of sleep deprivation.

Today I set out for a long ride. Last week, while Geoff and I were waiting for our rental car in Kona, we ran into Jeff Oatley, a cyclist and ITI veteran who lives in Fairbanks. It was yet another completely random and unlikely encounter of which we had several during our stay in Hawaii. We talked for a bit about the race. Jeff asked me how many "hundred milers" I was doing in prep for this year's ITI. "You know," I told him, "I don't think I've done any hundred-mile rides yet."

Today I set out in below-zero windchills, on my Karate Monkey because ice conditions are so treacherous right now. But I felt great, completely fresh - probably because I'm coming off a week of serious tapering - and decided that maybe today would be the day to go for 100 miles.

It was not easy. Five miles from the end of the road, all road maintenance ended, and the leftover snowcover was deeply rutted and frozen solid. I found a snowmobile trail off to the side and used that, but even that was so hard and rutted that my arms started to hurt from lack of front suspension, and I nearly bucked myself off my bike twice before I finally made it back to the relative safety of ice-covered pavement. I drifted through various levels of sleepiness but mustered up the courage to cut away from the direct route home and ride the spur I needed to complete to net 100 miles. I actually started to feel good again as I returned, only to run over a tack with my front wheel and discover that I stupidly had not put my tire levers back in my pack after the Hawaii trip. My options were to try to remove a tight studded tire on a metal rim with my bare fingers in below-zero windchill ... or walk three miles home. I chose the walk. It actually felt good at first ... warmed my feet right up ... but quickly became a tedious march that seemed to never end. I returned home just over nine hours after I left ... still not a bad time for a winter century. What's more important to me than the mileage is simply spending that long out in the subfreezing weather, eating frozen Clif Bars and drinking instant-brain-freeze slushy water. And pushing my bike for a fair distance. That's the experience that counts.

Painless view of HURT 100

Date: Jan. 17
Mileage: 77.6
January mileage: 507.1
Temperature upon departure: 75

Geoff told me that, even though I attended the race meeting with him Friday night, it wasn't very likely that I'd find the race start on my own Saturday morning. "I'll be fine," I answered. He left at 5 a.m. with the car for the start of the HURT 100, a 100-mile ultramarathon that climbs 25,000 vertical feet over the five loops of a rooty, muddy, narrow 20-mile course. It was Geoff's "training race" for the Iditarod Trail Invitational. I don't claim to be nearly that ambitious about my training, so I set out to spectate the race and do some urban road biking.

I left the hotel room at 8:21 a.m., hoping to cheer Geoff on at the end of his first loop. Unfortunately, he hotel had stranded us on the 43rd floor, one floor down from the top. The first elevator arrived vacuum-packed with people. The second came 10 minutes later under similar conditions. The third had a little more room, but not enough for me and my bike. By 8:43 a.m., I began contemplating the walk down 43 flights of stairs with a bike on my shoulder. At 8:48 a.m., I decided I would have to change out of my bike shoes into some more walkable tennis shoes. At 8:49 a.m., I had my back turned to the elevator, prepared to spend all day riding clunky clipless pedals with tennis shoes after hoofing down 43 flights of stairs just to avoid the endless wait. That's the minute that an elevator with enough room for me arrived.

I rolled out onto the streets of Waikiki and, as predicted, became instantly flustered. Traffic around Honolulu is intense and I don't think I've ever encountered a less bike-friendly city. It's strange - Weather in Honolulu is 80 degrees and mostly sunny year round. You'd think that kind of environment would nourish a strong cycling community, but I encountered few bike paths and even fewer cyclists out and about in an entire day of riding. I wove through rush-hour traffic and made my way toward the hills, but somehow ended up at a race checkpoint. They pointed me in the right direction of the race start, about six miles away. I arrived at 9:45 a.m. just in time to miss Geoff's first loop through.

I spent some time talking to Pam and Anne, two ultra-runners from Anchorage who came to Hawaii to support their fellow Alaskan runners and enjoy the sun. Anne competed last year in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, dropping out just south of the Nikolai checkpoint after she sustained frostbite on her eyes and face. So we had a lot to talk about - perspectives from last year's race, this year's training. Anne's training schedule baffles me. It must amount to 40 hours per week. She was leading the foot race before she was injured last year, and with her mental tenacity, may just give Geoff a run for his money this year. :-)

Geoff was running a strong, consistent race, and it was easy to gauge when he would be coming into checkpoints. After missing him the first time around, I met him most every time at the race start and the seven-mile checkpoint. I took advantage of the two and three-hour gaps between to ride the hills on the outskirts of Honolulu. It was focused riding with hard climbing in mind, and I ended the day with 77 miles and 7,300 vertical feet of climbing, according to my GPS. Still, because I spread the riding out over most of the day, and spent so much time chatting with ultrarunners and cheering on Geoff, it really felt like I didn't ride at all.

Not counting our brief leapfrogging in the 2007 Susitna 100, this is the first time I ever watched Geoff race a 100-miler. It was amazing, really. He seemed to just coast through it. He was driven and focused, definitely, but I was not seeing the hurt I had expected to see. In an effort to try to help him as much as I could, I cut through sketchy neighborhoods and rode in the dark just to see him through most of the checkpoints. But he had little use for my or anyone else's help. He drinks checkpoint water and eats checkpoint food, but he is otherwise very self-supported in his racing strategy. This style often catches race officials and other runners off guard. For me, the fun wasn't in helping Geoff but in meeting other faces in the ultrarunning world. I tend to get caught up in an ultracycling bubble, and forget that there's a whole other world of amazing people who are even crazier.

Geoff won the race in a course-record-settling 20 hours, 28 minutes. Anne, Pam and I were all there for the 2:28 a.m. finish, cheering into the night as Anne waved her "Go Alaska Runners" sign. Three Alaska runners started the race. Blisters forced Dave Johnston to exit the course at mile 40. Evan "yes, ladies, he's single" Hone of Eagle River, on the right, finished 10th in 28 hours. The Hawaiian race officials were genuinely impressed by the strong showing by runners from the land of ice and cold. Geoff didn't let them in on his secret - that he trains not on the tundra but in Juneau, Alaska, probably one of the few regions of America where summer trails are more tree-shrouded, muddier and root-choked than Hawaii.

I learned a few things about biking while I was in Hawaii:

1. I have somehow become a really strong climber. Finally on a bike that weighed less than 25 pounds with tires that had less rolling resistance than a flat-bottomed boat, I found I could shoot up 10, 12, even 14-percent grades like they were nothing.
2. I am a terrible road biker. On the skinny tires and low handlebars, I felt so jittery and cautious inching around switchbacks that it often took my nearly as long to descend a road as it did to climb it.
3. I have been told Honolulu traffic is worse than many metro areas, but I don't understand the appeal in urban road biking. Don't understand it at all. All that stop and go, constantly fighting back the stress and strain while streams of hot steel roar past. I'd take grizzly bears and ice over that any day.
4. I was blocked out of the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific because I was on a bicycle. I was told there was no "running, jogging or bicycling" allowed in the area. When I explained to the security guard that I was simply a tourist on a bike, and expressed my viewpoint that I was no different than the lines of cars streaming in, he looked at me like I was an alien from Alaska.
5. Now that I've seen the Big Island, I can't wait to go back there on a bike tour. Look at that road up Mauna Loa. Doesn't that look amazingly fun?

Hawaiian desert, Hawaiian snow

Geoff's and my first reaction after arriving in Kona on the Big Island was startled sense of relief. We had spent five days plunged into the heat and crowds and traffic and HURT 100 race fanfare of Oahu. All the clamor and noise and Mai Tai-flavored, manicured beaches had come to define Hawaii for me, my first time in the state. So the sound of rustling palms in an otherwise quiet breeze over the open Kona airport was almost startling. The town rested on an open hillside, swept in dry grass and desert-like vegetation. "Wow," Geoff said. "This place is like, normal."

We drove out to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and set up camp beside a rust-colored lava flow, speckled with dry-climate plants that could have easily stood in for salt brush and juniper. I felt like I was in Utah, camped on the sandstone with only the endless ocean horizon 3,000 feet below us to suggest otherwise. Geoff was recovering from his 100-mile race and the purpose of our Big Island vacation was to take it easy. Geoff napped while I unpacked the car, chatting with this habituated nene - a Hawaiian goose - who even honked back.

We headed down the coast to get out of the smog that was seeping along the volcano's cone - sweet-smelling like antifreeze and abrasive in my throat and lungs. Geoff and I called it "vog." It was nasty stuff. Geoff was more than a little creeped out by the idea of a National Park straddling a 13,500-foot volcano.

We came to the end of the road, cut short by lava flow. "Shouldn't this be evidence enough that this is not a place where people should be hanging out?" Geoff said.


But I felt at ease among it, much more so than I had endlessly fighting the human lava flow of Honolulu. After that experience, I had decided I wasn't going to bother renting a bike on the Big Island. It didn't take long to realize that I had just picked the wrong island to rent a bike.

Volcanic activity billowed in the distance. I felt close enough to reach out and touch it - a plume more than seven miles away. The open space was baffling - and real distance very hard to gauge.

The next morning, I followed a trail near our campsite down to the coast, dropping 2,500 vertical feet in a thick cloud of vog. I ran when I could to make distance in limited time. The sweet-smelling pollution irritated my eyes and scratched my throat. The heat of day trickled ceaselessly down my neck and back. I was trying to get a good workout, sweating buckets, thinking there was nothing remotely healthy about hiking through vog in the heat with minimal water (50 ounces, the rest we had at our dry camp site, and gone amazingly quickly.) But I was so happy to be out and alive, jogging through jagged lava flows and visible heat waves, surrounded by beautiful devastation.

The next day we moved camp to a spot on the coast near Hilo, back in the rainforest with its towering bonsai trees and thick spruce-like needles. We soaked in a thermal hot pond amid fruit orchards and farmland. "The diversity on this island is amazing," Geoff said.

Time seemed to always crunch in, but we found enough of it to head up the backside of the big volcano, Mauna Loa. Back in the desert, with its lava-speckled tundra and rolling yellow grasslands, could have easily been a scene in the early winter in central Utah or Nevada. I felt happy and at ease again, and I wondered if this was what I was looking for in the new places I visit all along - familiar pieces of home. I looked across the valley to the snow-capped peak of Mauna Kea. "I want to see that," I thought. "I want to find some Hawaiian snow."

Geoff set up a comfortable resting point by the Volcano Observatory and I went for another time-crunched jog up Mauna Loa. The jagged lava rocks ripped at my shoes and scratched my shins. I quickly ran out of breath, and soon thereafter became dizzy and had to slow to a walk. The bright blue sky and black rock spun around in misshapen circles. "Am I really this out of shape after four days off the bike?" I wondered. But a glance at my GPS revealed the root of my problem. I was quickly ascending to 12,000 feet, after too many years spent living at sea level, with no acclimation to speak of. I smiled at the harsh elevation and harsher sun, and kept climbing.

I found my way to the snow fields and sat down to catch my gasping, raspy, volcano-ash-scratched breath on a petrified piece of ice at 19 degrees North. It was a beautiful way to spend my last day in Hawaii, and my favorite part of the whole trip. We're back in Anchorage now and just waiting for our final flight to Juneau, home, and I'm excited to go back. But a big part of me is going to miss that harsher side of Hawaii, the side that doesn't taste like Mai Tai, the side that few ever talk about.

Tomorrow I'll talk about Geoff's Hurt 100 race. It was actually a lot of fun - even for him.