If I don't die or worse I'm gonna need a nap

I followed old snowshoe tracks up the steep face of Mount Jumbo. It may have been my phantom trail. It may have been someone else's. New snow had filled the holes, but a faint dotted line still cut a clear path through the forest. The trees were candy-coated top to bottom in snow. Avalanche danger was high, but I felt safe beneath 30 and 40-foot canopies, trees so big that any avalanche save for the Apocalypse would have to cut a similarly skewed path.

I was listening to Ani Difranco and reminiscing the carefree days of college when I began to notice a new theme cutting through my nostalgia. I never noticed it before, but Ani Difranco often sings about gravity ...

"We can't fight gravity on a planet that insists
that love is like falling
and falling is like this." ~"Falling Is Like This"

I tried to shake the feeling of dead weight off my snowshoes, but it was quickly working its way up my legs. The mountain angled steeper and the snow cut deeper, but I kept trudging. Why ... sometimes I'm not really sure. These are the hours of the day and these are my habits. I'm happy with them, most of the time. But sometimes, it's true, I feel oppressed by the gravity of my own routine, my own goals. I stopped walking and started flipping forward through the songs on my iPod, listening to my heart pump hot lead through my arteries as clumps of snow from high branches plopped down beside me. The faint trail rose like a wall. Gravity can often seem so oppressive, can become such an anchor, but where would we be without it? Static molecules hung in outer space.

I realized that I liked the way my molecules came together. Gravity is what makes me, me. I decided I could take a little more of the climb. And, anyway, the longer I stood still, the more I became a target for the snow bombs raining down from the trees.

"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 keeps getting bigger." ~"Hour Follows Hour."

I had the big talk with my boss today. In an amazing twist of mutual negotiation, we both left the meeting smiling. The long short of it is I may (under final approval of the corporate overlords and Geoff) take the new job temporarily. Help head up the new design team, train any new employees, work on reshifting the freelance budget and solicit new content while balancing the budget and axing unnecessary costs. Things which I may or may not be any good at, but which, for a short interim period, may be fun to try.

Then, in late-April, with the blessing of my boss, Geoff and I will hit the road south and (hopefully) set up living quarters in a dry cabin near Teasdale, Utah. We plan to be away from Alaska for several months. Geoff is going to train for a half-dozen or so ultramarathons. I'm going to live the dream - riding my mountain bike in the Boulder Mountains, Capitol Reef, far points beyond, building up heat and elevation acclimation and something like ultra-fitness. My ultimate goal is something that I'm not quite yet ready to commit to and therefore not yet ready to solidify on my blog, but something which is probably becoming obvious by now.

Hard? Extremely. Too much to take on? Probably. The best of both worlds? As much of a balance as I'm probably ever going to find.

After that is exactly that - the big, heavy unknown.

"They can call me crazy if I fail,
All the chance that I need
is one in a million,
and they can call me brilliant
if I succeed.
Gravity is nothing to me,
moving at the speed of sound.
Just gonna get my feet wet
until I drown." ~Swan Dive

One month

Date: Jan. 30 and 31
Mileage: 30.1 and 41.0
January mileage: 810.5
Temperature upon departure: 34 and 29

Like a straight shadow through my meandering thoughts about careers and choices and the future in general, the Iditarod Trail Invitational continues to rocket toward me. The race begins March 1, now just a month away. At the most random and sometimes inopportune moments, I'm hit with jolts of piercing anxiety that make my job pressure seam downright pleasant. It is one thing to be fearful about another hiccup in your career path, and quite another to be fearful about even staying alive beyond the next 38 days. Not that death is really all that likely in the race. I'm more likely to be killed on these sloppy Juneau streets while training for the race than I am in the actual race. It's just that death appears so much closer in environments as hyper-real and unsanitized as the Iditarod Trail ... like a straight shadow over a meandering life.

But, yeah, where was I? Oh yes, my month-to-go pre-race report. I'm in a strange mood right now due to a combination of poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and stress. It's my fault. I'm busy and preoccupied. And, like I said, hit with occasional anxiety episodes that can not be avoided. But beyond that, preparations are going well. I have been able to make time for decent training, and a fair amount of riding, even though conditions have been less than ideal. I nearly have all of my gear rounded up, and just have a few things left of my list to buy: Ultralight hip waders as a much-better-than-garbage bags solution for dealing with overflow; a front rack for my Pugsley; food (yes, lots of peanut butter cups included) to send in my two drop bags; hand and foot warmers; new tires, a new rear hub, chain, cassette and other random bike parts for the Pugsley. There are of course a few more little things, but I have nearly the bulk of it rounded up, and I feel pretty good about my gear this year. I'm not really confident that my bike's going to be much lighter than last year, but I will have less stuff on it and will be better prepared all around.

There's going to be a good crowd headed down the trail this year. There's 50 racers signed up. From my estimate, as many as five women plan to ride bicycles to McGrath, which is incredible! I'm not sure there's ever been more than two! There's at least one woman headed there on foot. I'm guessing Louise Kobin is the favorite to win the women's race to McGrath. She's the closest to a pro endurance cyclist. She finished the ITI in 2007 in about the same time it took me last year, only she finished under much tougher conditions, with the flu, and a bout of hypothermia. And me, well, my top goal is to survive. And work on turning my weaknesses into strengths. And finish. And if all three things happen, I'll compete hard with everything I have left. If you win, the prize is free entry into next year's race. Which, if you think about it, really isn't a prize, because then you'll be tempted to enter this stupid race yet again.

The defending champion, Jay Petervary, recently reported he has a torn ACL from a ski accident. That certainly doesn't sound good. It will be a bummer if he can't race this year. He's a pretty fun guy to watch tear up the trail, for all of five minutes before he leaves you in a cloud of snow.

The latest trail reports have been filled with gloom and doom. They usually are right before the race. This year's fear is not enough snow. The Irondog trailbreakers have been having a hard time getting over the Alaska Range because of all of the alder brush in the way. If snowmobiles can't get through, even around the long-way through Hell's Gate, then we certainly can't get through at anything much faster than a bushwhacking 0.5 mph. Forty-five or possibly even 70-odd miles of that would more hell than I'm willing to endure, that's for sure. I'd turn my bike right around at Puntilla and ride/push the 165 miles back to the start before I attempted that.

I wish I could send them some of our moisture. The West Juneau Weather Station reported 68 inches of snow in the month of January, with more than nine inches of solid precipitaiton (much of that straight rain.) I keep looking for excuses to avoid the sloppy mess, but I'm nearly out of punches on my gym pass.

Finding myself

So my "Find Me SPOT" arrived in the mail today. It's my parents' Christmas gift to themselves me. The deal is I carry a big orange hunk of plastic with three easy-to-use "Help, "I'm OK" and "911" buttons, and the device tracks me wherever I go and transmits my location to a remote Web site. After I reportedly lost myself for three days during last year's Iditarod Trail Invitational race, I think my parents just decided the SPOT would pay for itself in anxiety medication.

Today I set out on snowshoes with the SPOT and my GPS to intentionally get lost in the woods. I have an unnaturally terrible sense of direction for an adventure junkie, and I'm trying to sharpen my woeful skills in reading the terrain and route-finding. The idea is to cut my own trail through the dense woods, reading the topo maps, distance and elevation on my GPS as I go, and track my progress so I don't wander around in circles. And yes, I recognize that it is pretty hard to get hopelessly lost when you are tromping your own rather obvious path through the snow. That's my insurance policy. Even then, there is always on the periphery a light urge to panic - "Aaaa, I'm lost in the woods!" - an urge honed after many years of having a spectacularly bad sense of direction.

But GPS reading could come in handy if I ever find myself actually lost in a more remote section of this state. Rain fell hard in the late morning as I set my snowshoes into a foot of unbroken, oversaturated snow and began the dull trudge. I know I'll never convince readers of this blog that the combination of 35 degrees,wind and heavy rain is the worst weather in the world, but it's something I believe with unwavering faith. Maybe it's because the weather is like that in Juneau quite a lot. Quite a soul-crushing lot. Enough that it can really help a person overlook all of the beautiful days that make living here worth it.

Either way, the trudge. Breaking trail through a foot of new, wet snow is a crazy hard workout. I set out today for a five-hour hike, but five hours of hiking in stuff like that is really closer in effort to five hours of running. Heart-pounding running. At 1.5 mph. In other words, another great Iditarod workout. I'm seriously sore right now, in muscles that I actually use quite a lot - like my quads. I'm going to have to incorporate the trudge more often.

But I did successfully wander off into the woods and direct myself to a full loop that took me up the steep slopes on the south side of Mount Jumbo, down across several miles of muskeg and stream crossings, then dropping down the mountain through the devil's club stalks, log jams and overflowing creeks. I ended up on the far side of the Treadwell mine - way beyond the point where the shoreline trail ends. I came to a cliff and actually had to climb down an old mining structure, into a creek, to get around it. Lucky for waterproof boots (yep, definitely waterproof.) When I realized how far south I had come, I had to pick up the pace along the shoreline to try to make it home before dark. My snowshoes felt like they weighed 40 pounds, which was probably close to their actual weight, from all of the ice I had picked up walking through overflow.

During a five-hour trudge like that, with the decisions I'm facing, you'd think I'd have a lot of time to sort through my life. But it's strangely just the opposite. I don't think about my outside life at all. Even though I have all of these modern devices that keep safety from really being an issue in that situation, I still find myself every bit as alert and focused in the moment as I would if I were actually lost in the woods. Even though SPOT knows where I am, I don't know where I am, and every step I take carries me farther into the unknown. So all I think about are the crunch of my footsteps, the snow patterns on a tree trunk, the way each tree looks different from the last tree, the cloud-obscured features of mountains, the deer tracks that I hope mark the best path through a thick grove of spruce ... I like it when this is all I think about for five hours: the simple path forward. Things which never seemed obvious before become obvious. Landscapes become landmarks. I lose myself and find my way home.