The (next) ultimate bike tour

Date: April 7
Mileage: 27.2
April mileage: 242.1
Temperature upon departure: 41

So I’m thinking about heading up to Banff on June 11 and lining up with whoever else shows up for the 2009 Great Divide (formerly known as the Great Divide Race.) I’ve actually been thinking about this since 2006. When Geoff decided to enter the race last year, I certainly didn’t feel ready myself and wasn’t at a point in my career where I felt comfortable just dropping everything for a trip south. I still don’t feel ready for such an extreme physical endeavor, but I am at a good place to hit pause on my life in Juneau for a few months. This may be the best window I ever get. Might as well go as far as I can.

Why the GD?
Since I first found out about the existence of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, back in 2003, I’ve looked to it as an ultimate bike tour. I started out as a road tourist and I’m not bothered at all by the fact that this route mostly follows gravel roads and jeep tracks. In fact, I prefer it. I appreciate a good piece of singletrack as much as the next mediocre mountain biker, but I certainly wouldn’t want to ride a couple thousand miles of singletrack, or even a couple hundred, at least not until I become much more comfortable with technical riding. What I do want to ride is large swaths of vastly empty space, beautiful mountains, stunning desert vistas, punchy snow, soul-crushing climbs and soaring descents. The GDMBR is set up in such a way that a person like myself with my talents (turning cranks, hike-a-biking, looking past pain and generally outlasting myself) actually stands a chance of succeeding.

But why the race? Why not just tour it and have fun?
One of the more rewarding things I’ve done in recent years is my 2007 “fast tour” of the Golden Circle. I set a time limit of 48 hours to ride 370 miles of remote Alaska and Canadian roads that I had never ridden before, all by myself. I packed light, rode well into the evening, slept in a bivy sack in bear country with tuna juice all over my hands, saw beautiful country, sweated in 90-degree heat, fought fierce headwinds, suffered a fair amount, sought refuge with friends, shivered through subfreezing mornings, and finally crested that last pass knowing I “could do it.” I met my goal. The fact that I had that time limit on top of the crushing distance, that I pushed and pushed and pushed and overcame the loneliness and hardships, made the ride so much more rewarding. It still look back on that trip as one of my best accomplishments, right up there with my first Susitna 100 and the 2008 ITI. The Golden Circle wasn’t even a race, but it had the perimeters and therefore challenges and rewards of a race. And I realize that it’s one thing to push yourself near the limit for two days, and quite another to try it for 25. But you never know if you don’t go.

Are you and Geoff going to ride together?
No. Geoff has several ultramarathons he’s been planning and training for the better part of a year. And I’m of the opinion that ultrarunning is his true calling and he owes it to himself to give it his best shot while he’s near the top of his game. The truth is, if he did decide to drop everything and join me, I’d be inclined to try to talk him out of it.

My reasons are partly selfish, too. I benefit most from endurance challenges if I go it alone. The solitude is one of the virtues I seek, although I also value new friendships and comraderie ... that’s one of the main benefits of lining up with others in the context of a race. And the fact is, it is a race. It’s hard to commit to riding with another person for the entire distance. Groups are only as strong as the weakest rider (cough, cough, me), and are almost guaranteed to never hit their highs and lows at the same time. While teamwork most certainly helps fellow competitors work through the low points, it can be tough on a relationship. I’ve joked with other endurance junkies about creating a couples race on the GDMBR. We’d call it the “Tour Divorce.”

So why the Great Divide and not the Tour Divide?
For those unfamiliar with the whole issue of the two races, the race split in two last year based on differences of opinion about the route and rules among its participants. It remains two races, and anyone who wants to line up with other people has to pick one. So that’s my answer. I had to pick one. The GD has a race philosophy I’m already familiar with. It also seems smaller and more willing to fly under the radar, and that’s probably a good place for an in-over-her-head competitor to be. Plus, GD starts a whole day earlier than the TD, and that one-day head start may give me more opportunities to ride with others.

And just how qualified do you really think you are?
Probably the best ride on my resume is a 2003 bike tour from Salt Lake City to Syracuse, N.Y. Sure, we only averaged about 50 miles a day on pavement (propelling about 70 pounds of bikes and gear a piece, mind you.) But no other ride I’ve done could have better prepared me for the realities of camping in ditches, having to find all of your food and water, pushing through the bad days and relishing in the good, and generally just living outside among strange people in a strange land for weeks at a time. The 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational, of course, helped me become more familiar with the realities of back-to-back 15 to 20-hour days of solid physical work. Life in Alaska has made me more comfortable with remote places and bear country. As far as endurance races, I’ve only done a couple solo 24-hour races and a handful of winter races. I’m of the opinion that race history does little to help a person finish the GDMBR. It’s really more about good planning, a healthy dose of luck, and heaps of mental fortitude.

So how do you plan to prepare?
Geoff and I leave Juneau on April 22. We’re heading to San Francisco so Geoff can run the Miwok 100K, and I’ll have some time amid the travels to amp up my bike mileage. We’re going to spend the month of May near Teasdale, Utah, where I can ride and camp in the desert and Boulder mountains and hopefully (hopefully!) adapt to heat and elevation, both big weaknesses of mine, living as I do in a temperate rainforest at sea level. I realize a month isn’t a lot of time to prepare, but it’s more than many people get. The idea for this forlough started out as being all about Geoff’s races and my fun forays into bicycle camping. I also wanted to spend more time focusing on my writing. Adding the GD as a big punctuation mark was a distant dream that started to make more and more sense. Who knows if I’ll be ready come June 11? The worst I can do is fail. But it will be incredibly exciting just to try.

What about your foot?
It's mostly better. My toes are still quite sensitive. I’m hoping the pain continues to wear off so I can start to walk longer distances more comfortably, but I am no longer in danger of doing further damage as long as I don’t freeze them again (possible but very unlikely on the GDMBR in June).

What gear will you take?
Super cool stuff! More to come ...

Adventures with Roadie

Date: April 5 and 6
Mileage: 76.2 and 39.1
April mileage: 214.9
Temperature upon departure: 36 and 37

We’ve had a fairly rainy weekend in Juneau, just in time to coincide with my efforts to log more hours on the bike. Right now I want to log miles for the sake of logging miles, to spend that time with my butt in the saddle and heavy weight hanging off my back so I can become reacquainted with the pressure and flow. When it rains the whole time, like it did on Sunday, the ride becomes one of those “put your head down and pedal” kind of rides. Or, as I like to think of it, “five hours of looking at wet pavement.”

One would think that such a ride would be unbearably dull, maddening even, but I never feel that way. The whirring wheel and fountains of rainwater put me in a meditative place, a place where I truly feel like I have room to think ... think openly, that is, not necessarily deeply. Between a high heart rate, focus on cadence and hours worth of fatigue, I’m certainly not composing any sonnets in my head. What I do most often is replay random memories from the past, often events or conversations I haven’t thought of in years. It’s like watching vaguely familiar television reruns through a haze of insomnia. Amid the sleepiness and indifference, the most mundane moments shine through with startling clarity.

I watched the crank spin on my creaky old touring bike and thought back to the day we first met. "Roadie" showed up in a box from Georgia. I left him in there until the night before our first ride. I attached the stock pedals and stock seat, tightened the headset and mounted the front wheel. Early the next morning, I wheeled him outside for the first time and teetered a bit down B Street en route to the start of the Salt Lake Century.

I was about 22 miles into the ride when a stranger pulled up behind me.

“Mind if I ride with you for a bit?” the man asked. I couldn't see him but he sounded non-creepy enough.

“Sure,” I said.

“You lose your group?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m alone.”

“You’re not riding with anyone?”

“Nope. All alone.”

“You know these things are easier if you ride with people.”

“I don’t really care,” I said. “I’m not looking to set an Olympic record.”

“Well, I already got dropped,” he said. “I had to cut back but I’m going to try to catch up to them at the next station.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, and then he said, “What’s with the big backpack?”

“That’s all my food and water,” I said. “I didn’t realize there’d be rest stops every 15 miles.”

“Have you ever ridden a century before?”

“Not in one shot,” I said.

“So have you been training pretty hard?”

I thought about my old bike, which for the past several weeks had been piled in pieces in Geoff’s basement. Then there was the mountain bike I was still mostly afraid ride. Truth was, since I returned from my cross-country bike tour a half year before, I hadn’t ridden more than a couple dozen times here and there. “Not really,” I said.

“So what made you decide to ride a century?”

“Cycling Utah covered my entry fee,” I said. “They want me to write an article.”

“How much do they pay you?”

“Oh, about 50 bucks an article.”

“You’re riding 100 miles for 50 bucks?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sweet deal, huh?”

“Well, it’s more than I’m getting,” he said. “It was my brother’s plan do this. We’ve been training all spring. He has one of those training plans.”

“How’s that working out for you?”

He laughed. “I feel like crap. How are you doing?”

“Not so bad,” I said. “This is kind of relaxing, out here by the lake. But ask me that question again at mile 80.”

He moved ahead to pull for a while. He coasted beside me a few moments, checking out my bike.

“Nice bike,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s brand new.”

“Brand new?”

“I just opened it yesterday.”

“Opened it?”

“It came in a box.”

“And you just decided the Salt Lake Century would be good inaugural ride?”

“I needed a bike,” I said. “My editor told me I’d be nuts to try this on my mountain bike.”

“I think you’re nuts to try it on a bike you’ve never ridden.”

“It’s pretty comfortable,” I said. “I like this bike.”

“What’s with the flat bar?”

“The what?”

“The handlebar.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s a touring bike.” I sat up straight and grinned. “Built for all-day comfort. I’d rather ride far than fast.”

He laughed. “I’d rather do both.”

Not long after, he stopped at the next aid station to look for his friends. I already had a backpack full of food and water, so I just kept going. By mile 75, my gut had seized up with cramps, but I doubled over and kept going. Sweat gushed down my neck as streaks of red light shot through my blurring line of vision. My butt and hands throbbed and my legs felt like they were slowly being crushed beneath a blunt object. Through it all, Roadie kept on rolling along, carrying me farther than I ever thought I'd really be able to ride in a single push. And by mile 92, all the pain seemed to break free. A wave of peace washed over me. The final miles limped by in a happy haze.

"This is what it feels like to ride far," I thought. It occurred to me that my "Fast and Far" riding companion never passed me again. "Far and kinda fast," I smiled.

The Salt Lake Century opened up a new way of thinking for me. My cross-country bike tour showed me all the ways riding a bicycle can stretch out the distance between two points to an appealingly infinite space. The Century taught me the ways cycling can bring truly far-away spaces together, bridging a void that becomes even more meaningful en route.

Today, Roadie and I rode hard, seeking short dives into the pain cave and hints of sucker hole sunlight. I've been hedging on the same decision for so long that I think I should just go ahead and mentally commit to another big adventure. Open that brand new bike box and set out, so to speak. More on this tomorrow.

This season isn't so bad

Date: April 3
Mileage: 42.2
April mileage: 99.6
Temperature upon departure: 21

Most people I know in Alaska are not hugely in love with the season of Spring. Around here we call it "Break Up," an ugly name for an ugly time of year. We've all endured a long, volatile relationship with Winter. There were times it was beautiful; others when we curled up with our SAD lights and looked photographs of our old love, Summer. But through it all, Winter stuck around, and now we're left with piles of baggage ... snowpack over our heads, punchy trails, chunks of ice swept beside the roads. As our inevitable but ugly break up with Winter begins, we begin to slough off the baggage only to find the ugliness Winter had shielded from us all this time ... piles of dog crap, sticky mud, a thick layer of loose gravel and sloppy slop slop. People put on rubber boots and walk around with sour looks on their faces, because it's too punchy to ski and too muddy gross dirty to do anything else. By the time the temperature climbs above 55 and the first sprigs of green appear on the alder branches, it's already nearly Summer and we're too drunk on warmth and endless daylight to really notice. But Breaking Up is hard to do.

I made good on my promise of getting up yesterday at 6:30. It was actually closer to 6:15, although I dawdled around and wasn't out the door until 6:51. The rising sunlight burned bright gold against a high, thin cloud cover. The thermometer said 21 when I left and the air tasted sharp and almost shockingly cold. It's funny how quickly the familiarity of Winter can dissolve away. That simple taste of freezing air jolted away the last of my sleepiness and I started pounding up the road. I climbed to the Dan Moller trailhead. Geoff had assured me that the trail wasn't even in. He ran up their two days ago and reported sinking up to his knees in fresh snow. But I had faith in Juneau snowmobilers, and knew that warm days followed by freezing nights meant even a handful of tracks would make a bomber trail.

I was right. Deep, rippling moguls meant I had to walk most the way up to the Douglas Ski Bowl, but I was rewarded by a screaming, air-catching singletrack ride down. I like to believe that downhill snowbiking has really improved my technical mountain biking skills. There's a lot of strange handling in snowbiking, including shifting my weight from side to side to stay on top of a fishtailing rear wheel. I guess I'll find out how many skills I've actually developed when I hit the dirt this summer. I'll have to remember that dirt is a lot less forgiving of endos than snow.

I was home before 10 a.m., which is usually about the time I set out in the morning. I rushed to a doctor's appointment and was given a clean bill of health. No more doctor visits. No more bandaging. No more sandals and booties. I can wear two shoes again, although I did yesterday and was uncomfortable the whole time. I'm still going to have a significant level of sensitivity in my toes for some time.

"It's amazing how fast people can grow skin," I said as my doctor sloughed off most of the remaining dead tissue.

"You seem to have been working double time," she said. "What's your secret?"

I didn't say it to her, but I'm going to go with cycling.

I put in a short day at work ... short meaning about six hours. It's a far cry from the previous six days, where 10 hours was starting to seem like an easy shift. My boss took a vacation and I've been in charge of the whole crazy operation since last Saturday. Thus, "Hell Week." I was working 10 or 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day - seven days of 10-13 hour shifts. Stress-filled, high-octane shifts at that. The kind of shifts where there's not even time to eat, and even bathroom breaks were so limited that I waited until my eyes were watering and I couldn't possibly hold it any longer even if the building was on fire. I was getting calls from the production department at 1 a.m. I was still trying to wake up at an early enough hour to have time to exercise. Now that it's all over, finally all over, I can look back at this past week with some sense of accomplishment, like a semi-successful endurance race. Agonizing, but, because it doesn't last forever, ultimately rewarding. I'm glad it's over.

After work, I spent 30 minutes trying to wrench my road bike back into some form of working condition. I haven't ridden this bike since early fall, when I turned my Karate Monkey into a skinny-tire touring bike and no longer had a need for this creaky old thing. I received this bike back in 2004 as payment for some writing work I did for the IBEX Bicycles Web site. It retailed back then for about $600. I've probably put something in the range of 15,000-18,000 miles on it with very few replacement parts (my Karate Monkey, on the other hand, is exactly one year old and facing the replacement of nearly everything. Pugsley at age two and a half has had two total makeovers.) Roadie, however, just gets more and more decrepit every year. I changed the tires, threw on some old platform pedals (my toes can't handle the clipless shoes yet), adjusted the brakes, greased the chain and made small shifter adjustments, tried to bend the fenders in a place where they wouldn't rub the tires, and took off down the road. Without even trying, I was suddenly blasting down the North Douglas Highway ... 20 mph steady, amping up to 25 many times although dropping to 15 up the hills. It still felt like I had a small motor attached to the rear wheel. I could hardly believe it. I pounded up Eaglecrest Road at 7-8 mph (I'm usually going 4-5 mph on my Pugsley and Karate Monkey), and was home from a 27-mile ride in a little more than an hour and a half. Geoff came back from his run as I was hosing the bike down.

"Holy cow, this bike is super fast!" I gasped as Geoff ran up.

"That bike is piece of crap," he said.

I propped it up lovingly and wheeled it back in the closet. How great of a season is it when you can snow bike in the morning and road bike with actual skinny wheels in 43-degree air in the evening? That's Break Up.