Moving on

Date: March 20 and 21
Mileage: 22.1 and 26.7
March mileage: 105.8
Temperature upon departure: 41 and 35

My blog has been a bit boring as of late, so I thought I'd point everyone to some great links on the Web. First is Geoff's exclusive interview with Jeff Oatley, the winner of this year's Iditarod Trail Invitational. The second is the blog of Cory Smith, who competed in the race on skis. He offers a three-part race report full of gripping detail.

Since I returned from Anchorage, several people have asked me what my future is with the Iditarod Trail Invitational. Everybody has either assumed that my frostbite has scared some sense back into me and I'll never return, or that my failure in this year's race will only fire me up more for next year. Both assumptions are untrue. My answer is I'm "probably" not going to enter the ITI in 2010 (emphasis on probably.) This was a decision I had made several months before I froze my foot. My obsession with this race dates back to early 2006, and it's had a strong grip on me ever since. I've never quite been able to pin down the reasons why. The extreme nature of the race never really fit my personality in the beginning, but my individual growth in the past three years has been largely shaped by it. When old friends of mine asked me how I could have possibly found my way into endurance cycling, I would jokingly blame my direct descension from Mormon pioneers. My great-great-and-so-on grandparents dragged wooden handcarts across the untrammeled American plains. If ever there was a gene for enduring a good slog, I inherited it from them.

But in my mind, that wasn't a real answer for why the Iditarod Trail had such a forceful grip on my imagination. I thought I'd find my reasons by finally just lining up with the race in 2008, but my experiences on the trail largely created more questions than answers. I recall several times while slogging through the sugar snow on the Kuskokwim River, long after I had taken to holding out-loud conversations with myself, saying, "This is absurd. This is the bone-dry-desolate-frigid-middle-of-nowhere. What are you doing out here?" So I spent a good portion of the summer writing personal experience essays based on that exact question, which I eventually turned into a book. That helped usher the race out of my head for a short period of the wet, gray summer. But come September and the first hint of cold weather, I was itching to get my name on the ITI roster again.

The grip of my obsession started to loosen somewhat shortly after I made the commitment. I think part of the problem is I was having so much fun training. I started to ask myself, legitimately I believe, if having that same big scary goal at the end of it all was really necessary. I truly enjoy the focus, drive and energy involved in preparing for a race like this, but I started to wonder if I could direct that focus toward something new. As I looked to make changes in my life and "something new" became more of a possibility, I began to divide my focus, and it was freeing. In doing so, I actually became more excited about the ITI, the "grand tour" of the stunning Iditarod Trail and a tough expedition that stood to further boost my body and mind toward my new goals. From that point, I approached the race much more in "tour mode" with less pressure on myself to finish than I felt last year. But because this race still takes so much intense focus, gear prep and hard training just to survive the thing, it felt right to tell myself the the 2009 race would be my last, at least for a while. Then next winter could be more about unwinding - snowboarding more often and actually taking the time to learn to cross-country ski, and bike train to get the sub-20-hour Susitna 100 finish that I really deserve. :-)

Then came the big failure of 2009. I certainly don't blame the race for it. I'm pretty much done even blaming myself for it. Fluke things happen every day, everywhere. After I worked through the initial pain and disappointment, I was left with this inexplicable but plain sense of closure ... a sort of, "Well, this is how the ITI chapter ends. Now what?"

It's all a bit complicated and hard to explain. And of course I'll never say that I'll never go back to the Iditarod Trail. I may even end up back there next year. But for now I'm thinking dirt and sand, heat and elevation, and even though my emotional involvement so far doesn't rise to the level of obsession, I'm happy with my goals.

I've been somewhat cryptic about my summer plans thus far because the fact is I'm still injured, trying by not quite succeeding to keep a holding pattern with my pre-race fitness, and still unable to commit 100 percent. (I learned the hard way with the 2006 Susitna 100 that once something goes up on the blog, it's a done deal.) But, either way, I've put the wheels in motion to go back to the roots of my cycling obsession, which took hold years before the ITI obsession and 24-hour mountain bike races and daylong training rides in snow and ice. In the beginning, all I cared about was traveling between two far-away points on my bicycle. I look forward to being a bike tourist again. And who knows? Maybe those Mormon pioneer genes will pull me through.

First day of spring

Scattered blizzards rolled through Juneau for most of the day - near-white-outs followed by squinting windows of sunlight. I drove to the gym with a high-intensity workout in mind. I've been using my quality time at the gym to catch up on back issues of the New Yorker and read "Desert Solitaire" for the fifth time (but only the second in the 2000s.) In a sign of improvement, I couldn't focus enough to read today ... seeing red spots and streaks of white ... the colors of strength, returning.

After 97 minutes and 1,353 estimated calories burned (yeah, right), I drove home feeling tired but unfulfilled. A rolling white-out filled the air with static and dissipated as quickly as it arrived, and to the south, the Channel shimmered beneath patches of blue sky. The temperature seemed to climb by the minute. I walked toward my house, weight firmly pressed on both feet, and wondered if this was my window. I've been plotting my return to the outdoors for a week now. It will be a while still before I can hike, ski or snowboard ... sadly, all of the activities I had planned to engage in with more fervor once winter cycling season was over. But cycling, where feet are off the ground and don't do much of anything anyway, is actually an ideal activity for a bad foot.

I broached the subject with my doctor yesterday. She regarded the idea in her semi-disapproving way but said as long as I monitored myself for infection or any kind of rapid changes, I could probably do the things I felt comfortable doing, but I should start slow. I'm in wait-and-see mode with any long-term damage, and there's little I can do but wait for my cells to do their thing; my only job is to keep my foot warm, keep it dry, keep it clean, keep it circulating, and avoid doing anything that causes pain. Check.

I ate lunch and prepped my armor - one loose, moisture-wicking nylon sock, one vapor barrier sock, one heavy duty super thick wool sock, my open-toe walking sandal and a brand new pair of NEOS Explorer overboots that I just bought from Geoff. I'm in general not a huge NEOS fan. (Before someone comments about how NEOS could have saved me on Flathorn Lake, I just want to reaffirm that they wouldn't have. My own system was waterproof to my shins and very water-resistant up to my knees, but I punched through the ice into open water at least as deep as my hips, and likely deeper.) But, really, NEOS are good footwear for keeping the toes warm when it's 20 below; they're also good footwear for keeping frostbitten toes warm when it's 40 degrees and partly cloudy with scattered snow showers.

I thought an hourlong ride sounded reasonable. I took Pugsley because he's my only bike in full working order right now. The first pedal strokes up the Douglas Highway were strange - at once dully familiar and exhilarating. The sucker hole in the clouds opened wider and full-spectrum sunlight poured onto the street. I glanced up at the afternoon sun, much higher in the sky than I remember it being. "This is a good thing, getting out," I told myself. "You need vitamin D to grow new skin. Or is that bone?"

Most of the ride passed by semi-consciously, the way you can sometimes drive to the store and have no memory of how you got there. I had a lot of energy in the reserves, but mentally I held back quite a bit, and ended up slipping into autodrive. Strong but tentative. Baby steps. As it turns out, the ride was a pretty good circulation jog. I felt great afterward. When I sit in my office desk for too long, I get "dead foot" feeling, which makes me nervous. And in my experience so far, the only way to return to healthy tingling is to stand up and move. And what better place to move around than where I belong, outside?

I'm not yet ready to just go ahead and start churning out hill intervals and centuries, but I'm more optimistic now that I'll get there in the time I need to be there. Baby steps toward summer. A good way to start out spring.

Yeah spring.

This is shaping up to be a tough month

My company had another one of those employee meetings today. I'm not at liberty to say what was said in the meeting, but let's just say it was another dose of bad news, the worst yet, but certainly not the last in a heavy regiment of bad news.

We were all herded into the press room, a cavernous cement warehouse that's always quiet in the afternoon. The first among us had to wait a while. The walls dripped with anxiety and a fierce silence. Small jokes crackled and dissipated. The air had a finality to it, cold and sterile, like a morgue.

I leaned against a post, unable to stand on both feet. I felt like the one trying not to burst out laughing at a funeral. The morbid urge almost seemed logical. It seems like we're just getting what we paid for in this crazy backward economy of ours, throwing around fake money and goals until neither have much meaning. Funnier yet to be a journalist, part of the very entity trying to carve out some sense in this cold war of financial panic, only to learn we're next in line in a toppling house of cards.

So do you fall down or brace yourself to prop up what is certain to become an unbearable load? Neither option really ends well. Thus, the silence.

After most everyone had filed out of the room, my boss approached me. "Is this the part where you bolt out of the building screaming and I never see you again?" he asked.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to do that. Yet."

He looked up, toward the door. "Why?"

I smiled. "I think you know me well enough by now to know I'm not one of those people motivated by money. Good or bad."

"That's good," he said.

I shrugged. "Or bad."

"And next month?"

"I'm still going," I said. "Either way."

"But you're coming back?"

I smiled. "That seems hugely optimistic at this point, doesn't it? But, yeah, I want to be optimistic."

He shook his head. I didn't envy his expression. It's tough to be a manager in tough times. Better, I think, to be one of the tucked away rank-and-file. "You seem to have a good outlook," he said.

I laughed and held up my right foot, with its thick wool sock hanging out of an ugly medical sandal. "You know, when you have hobbies like mine, regular life never seems that bad."

We returned to our desks, grateful, as they say, to be living and breathing.

The rest will be OK. One frozen-toe step at a time.