Leaving warm and sunny Juneau

Date: Feb. 21, 23
Mileage: 25.5 and 19.7
February mileage: 601.7
Temperature: 34 and 36

I fly out Tuesday afternoon with Pugsley and two big bags of miscellaneous gear in tow. I'm going to spend the next several days in Anchorage and Palmer completing last minute prep, giving Pugsley a makeover, mad-rushing to buy gear I've forgotten and generally just getting my head out of the crush of things I have going on here in Juneau. I'm going to miss it here, though, because the weather has been so clear and seasonable and generally smile-inducing. I have been trying to get out for bike rides but haven't had a lot of time. I thought I was pacing myself well this year, but I'm still going to end up packing late into the night tonight.

Weather in Anchorage for the next week also looks pleasant - highs in the 20s and not a lot of snow on the forecast. Sunday's forecast in the Mat-Su Valley calls for partly sunny and highs in the 20s. Skwentna on Monday has a high of 30 and a low of 11. Puntilla Lake on Tuesday calls for snow showers, a high of 18 and low of 2. Nikolai and McGrath later in the week calls for intermittent snow showers, highs in the teens and lows near 0. All in all, a very encouraging forecast. Of course you can't put a lot of weight on long-range forecasts, but I can keep watching them and crossing my fingers than no -40s or 60-mph winds pop up.

I'm sure I'll post again before the race, which starts at 2 p.m. March 1, so I'll post up my SPOT shared page and race updates links then. I wanted to announce that Scott Morris, organizer of the Arizona Trail Race, mapping expert and all-around ultra-mountain-biking geek, has offered to track my progress on my blog this year. Those of your familiar with his coverage of Mike Curiak's 2008 self-supported tour know how thorough he can be. (Incidentally, Scott will be tracking Mike Curiak's ride again this year as well.) He'll probably stay busy with Mike's page, but I'm guessing Scott will provide at least some commentary about trail conditions, splits and other racer's positions along with really cool Topofusion-generated maps. So be sure to check in on this blog during the race.

Also, I won't be available to send out orders for signed copies of my book for at least two weeks. But you can still support me in this race by purchasing the book for yourself or your crazy outdoor-nut cousin using any one of the other Lulu or Amazon.com links in the sidebar of this blog. The eBook is only $8! Your support, as always, is appreciated.

Also, Ultra Rob is again holding a fundraiser for my race. For every item of cycling and outdoor gear purchased through his site from now through March 1, he will donate 20 percent of the commission to my Iditarod effort. If you have something in mind that you were thinking of getting, now is a good time. Check out the wide selection here.

Wish me luck! It's a total lie when people say just getting to the starting line is the hardest part, but it sure ain't easy.

Stoked

Date: Feb. 19-20
Mileage: 41.2 and 16.5
February mileage: 556.5
Temperature: 32 and 34

There is little I can do to improve my fitness ahead of March 1 at this point. So I set out this weekend to simply do "fun" rides, thereby hopefully shoring up happy memories that I can look back at wistfully when things get rough in the race, as they inevitably will. "Oh yeah," I will tell myself. "Snowbiking used to be fun."

It may be the mild taper or the fact that six months or three years (depending on how you look at it) of training focus is narrowing toward something specific, concrete and real ... but I both physically and mentally felt better and stronger than I have in a long time. Everything came together at the right time - the warmth, the sunlight, the speed, the snow. It felt like a big smile from the universe, directed right at me. I decided to believe that's a good omen.

Yesterday morning, Pugsley and I motored out to the Valley at 18, 19 even 20 mph. I thought there was some kind of crazy wind at my back, but it was just calm and warm and partly sunny, same as it has been for more than a week. (How can it even be February? This is solid April weather.) I hoped to hit up a few trails but assumed they'd be mush in the heat. Strangely enough, a cold air mass hovered right over the Valley. Temperatures fell to 25 or so. My front derailleur, covered in road slush, froze solid. But the Lake Creek snowmobile trail was hard-packed and recently groomed. I dropped my tire pressure, churned up to Spaulding Meadow and coasted back down on a feather ... snow almost too soft to ride, but not quite. It feels like riding on a cloud. It's probably the closest bicycles come to powder skiing.

Today was even more strangely perfect. It was 34 degrees when I left the house, not a good snowbiking temperature. Low-lying clouds hugged the mountains and I rode toward the Dan Moller Trail because I only had three or so hours to spare, and the Dan Moller Trail is the most fun trail close to home. I approached the trail expecting what I should have expected - mush, slush and fog. What I found was a perfectly flat, very recently groomed snowmobile trail. Nobody had used it since it had last been groomed, and I mean nobody. There were a single set of footprints that turned around about a half mile up, and after that, it was a smooth, flat, well-packed trail ... everything ideal for uphill snowbiking.

I took my rear tire pressure down to about 4 or 5 psi and left the front around 8 ... because I seem to get better grip for climbing when the front tire is little more solid. I set to the riding, 4 or 5 mph, which is flying up this trail. It takes all the effort I have to give ... running a heart rate of 165+, gasping for air, stripped down to my base layer and still gushing sweat. In marginal conditions - soft snow or steep climbs - riding a bike a 5 mph can easily take four times more effort than walking a bike at 2.5 mph, which is why bike pushing is so regularly employed in most endurance snow bike races. Only the strongest of the strongmen can afford to expend that much extra effort without an equal speed payoff. But on a day like today, when I'm only planning to ride for three hours and rest as much as I want later, I can burn as hot and high as I feel like burning. I was red-zoning at 5 mph, and feeling awesome.

As I climbed higher, the fog began to clear. The trail pitched steeper, and I started the push. I assumed that any second, a snowmobile was going to come up and chew up my perfectly smooth, perfectly predictable trail, making for a fish-tailing rough ride down. Last Friday, at the exact same time of day, I saw at least two dozen snowmobiles blast up this trail. I told myself I should turn around right then and enjoy what downhill I could, but the sunlight beckoned me higher. The edges of the hard effort were starting to cut through. My GPS ticked off feet of elevation like seconds on a clock, but I didn't slow down. I felt like I had to beat the rolling fog, had to beat the approaching snowmobiles.

But neither came. The sky became clearer. I crested the ridge. It was Pugsley's first ascent. I congratulated him. I took a drink of ice-free water and walked along the ridge, watching wisps of intensely illuminated clouds swirl along the mountainside.

The contrast of dark and light was intriguing ... hard to capture with a camera. But, then again, it's different up there, heart still pounding and hair still dripping from the hard climb. You squint against an expanse of snow and see every shadow and color with a pulsating intensity. Cameras never capture that.

After that, there was nowhere to go but down. I kicked off the ridge and shot down the steep face of the Douglas Ski Bowl, digging in deep with my rear wheel but hardly losing speed. I dropped into the bowl and mashed the pedals to churn up a 100-foot knoll, the last hard climb. I slowed but didn't put my feet down as I took a lingering look over the canyon, draped in clouds but clearing, and launched into the final descent. The trail, unbelievably, almost in a Twilight Zone way, was still perfectly groomed. Not a single snowmobile had been up there in at least three hours, and possibly all day. For the first time ever, I was able to ride this trail without a single mogul or snowmobile ski track or soft spot or chewed-up edge. The risk was gone so I released the brakes and let gravity reign. I glanced down at my GPS, registering a max speed of 25, 27, 29 mph. On snow! With a rear tire at 4 psi!

I arrived at the bottom of the trail less than 20 minutes after I left the ridge, five miles and 2,300 feet of elevation behind me. I pulled into the empty parking lot practically drenched in ecstasy, almost in disbelief at what just happened, just like being 19 years old and carving my way to the bottom of a black diamond run on a snowboard for the first time. After I did it once it was never quite the same, but today was just like that. Remind me to send a donation to the groomer with the Juneau Snowmobile Club.

I used to have a next-door neighbor who, whenever I told him about something cool that happened, would say, "You're stoked."

Exactly. Stoked, fired up, and ready to leave scorch marks on the snow.

Goodbye to a good car

Date: Feb. 18
Mileage: 28.1
February mileage: 498.8
Temperature: 36

The low-lying fog was just starting to break up when I wheeled my bike out of the shed just after 10 a.m. Streaks of sunlight tore through the gray curtain and dusted the road, which was already slushy atop a thick layer of decaying ice. I was dressed for springtime, a fleece pullover and tights, and it felt like springtime. In fact, this whole week has been unbelievably, unseasonably nice. It makes me glad I'm not moving away from Juneau just yet. If my original plans had worked out, this would have been my last week in town. It would have been a tough week to leave behind.

As I lubed my chain, I caught a glimpse through my spokes of Geoff's 1989 Honda Civic. The bike rack was gone, as was the strap that held the trunk shut. Melting snow dripped down the sun-faded paint and icicles clung to the rusted edges. I remembered Geoff told me a guy was coming to pick it up at 11 a.m. Geoff listed the car in the freebie ads last night for $100. He had six calls on it by morning. And as I rolled away, I realized that glimpse would likely be the last I'd ever see of that car.

It was early January 2002 when I first met the Civic. I was visiting Geoff and his family in New York when Geoff's brother offered to sell him a 13-year-old car for $700. Geoff, who lived in Utah, thought that sounded like a perfectly rational business deal. He bought the car and then talked me out of a perfectly good American Airlines ticket so I could help him drive it across the country in two and a half days. I took one look at that car - drooping bumper, rust holes all the way through the body, and 200,000 miles on the odometer, and said to Geoff, "That thing is never going to make it to Utah."

The cross-country trip was fairly uneventful. I saw Indiana for the first time, and Kansas. We spent the night in the car at a rest stop in Wyoming at 8,000 feet. Temperatures probably dipped below zero. I shivered in whatever K-mart sleeping bag I owned at he time as Geoff wheezed and mumbled with a fairly nasty flu bug he had come down with. I thought we were going to die, and I blamed the car.

I had to drive the rest of the way with Geoff unconscious in the passenger's seat, but we amazingly made it to Salt Lake with everything still in one piece. I gave that car three months tops. Geoff spent nearly every weekend in either in the Uinta Mountains or the Southern Utah desert, driving hundreds of miles a week and bouncing that car down the worst kind of roads the BLM and Forest Service can dish out. One time we took it on an excursion to find an over-mountain route from Heber to Little Cottonwood Canyon. Geoff dropped the car into first gear as we bounced over boulders the size of basketballs, skirting cliffsides and grinding up pitches so steep I didn't know if I'd be able to walk down them once the thing broke down. I couldn't imagine four-wheel-drive trucks going up that road, but the Civic kept churning along. Loathing boiled up from my gut. I thought we were going to die, and I blamed the car.

Later that year, Geoff bought a 12-foot aluminum boat in Wyoming. He drove the Civic all the way back to New York to visit family and had a friend gerrymander a towing hitch on the back. He then drove to Wyoming, picked up the boat and trailer, and drove it back to Utah. For the rest of the summer and fall, he'd head up Parley's Canyon twice a week to fish for perch and rainbow trout. Even when it got late in the year and there was snow on the road, there Geoff was, driving down an icy 6-percent grade towing a boat and trailer with a Honda Civic. I thought he was going to die, and I blamed the car.

But the years just kept rolling by, and the odometer kept rolling up. There were countless more trips to the desert, more trips out East, that first trip to Alaska, that first winter in Homer, the frequent hair-raising drives up the Sterling and Seward highways, moving to Juneau, a summer trip all over Western North America and then back again to Juneau. The odometer crept above 300,000 and then 310,000. I never lost my faith that the Civic was going to die, any minute now, and yet somehow seven years passed.

The brakes finally went out, completely, in early February. The '89 Civic has 313,000 miles on it. Geoff finally had to come to a decision ... $500 of brake work that would probably bring to light the myriad other repairs needed, or going car-free.

And Geoff, who mostly bike commutes these days anyway, put his car up for sale.

I know we're cyclists and not supposed to get all emotional about cars, but I can't help it. I'm gonna miss the clunker.