No agenda

"What are you training for right now?" is a common question I hear from my friends.

"Nothing," I answer. "I'm not training at all."

They usually look perplexed. As long as they've known me, I've had some sort of epic event marked in red pen on my calendar, even if it was months away. Right now, smaller goals are only penciled in, lightly, and in the meantime I don't have any tangible motivation to ride my bike.

So I just ride my bike.

On Friday, I followed a sucker hole to the Valley, giggling out loud when I first glimpsed my shadow amid the swirling clouds. Tourist traffic was light that day, and the Steep Creek trailhead was closed due to bear activity, so I had the rare privilege of having the Dredge Lake Trails all to myself. I laughed and sang along with my iPod and looped the moss-covered corridors as filtered sunlight flickered through the trees. Two hours passed in what seemed like a dozen rapid heartbeats. I returned home soaked in rainforest bliss.

Recently, my friend Dan, whose sole bike is a Surly Cross Check equipped with ~38c tires, drop handlebars and a homemade rack that could support a small deer carcass, asked me what "mountain biking" was like around town.

"Let's go riding on Sunday!" I said. "I bet you could ride your Cross Check on the Perseverance Trail."

So we met up in the morning. I had to pump the big ring to keep up with him on the pavement, and still had to leave it there as we shot up the steep trail. Dan followed my line, splashing through streams and weaving around wet boulders. By the time we reached the top of the canyon, we had already decided we were going to tack 22 more miles and 1,500 feet of climbing onto our ride with a dash up to Eaglecrest Ski Area, so I was surprised when he suggested we take the Red Mill spur down.

"I don't know. It's pretty technical. Not to mention choked with brush. We'll be soaked."

But Dan has this summer goal - which is right up my alley, actually - of running or hiking every trail in town. The fact that he was on a bike did not seem to be a hindrance to this goal. He wanted to check off the Red Mill trail. So we veered up the loose gravel and began our traverse of the steep sideslope. The narrow slash of a trail was littered with slippery wet rocks and roots. We both did our fair share of wavering and kicking off trees and the hillside. But when the downhill began in earnest, Dan locked in. He leaned way back, hovering over his narrow rear tire as we tackled a succession of dropoffs, our bikes harmonized in a chorus of clunking down the rocky pitch. I was nervous but determined; if Dan could ride a freakin' rigid cross bike down this trail, I told myself, then I could handle it. Clunk, squeal, clunk, clunk. A whitewater creek rushing beside us drowned out all other sounds. We skidded to a stop at the Perseverance Trail intersection, massive smiles spread across both our faces, and commenced the screaming descent in a blur of wind-induced tears and white noise.

Life's good when you have no agenda.

30 plus one week

This week, I have been getting out more often than I normally do - in a social sense - which means I have been sleeping later and getting outside a little less. It's a good thing, I think; after all, life is but a river that ebbs and flows. Autumn seems like the perfect time for an ebb. The rains move in; the temperatures creep down; life slows to a trickle. But come winter, the trickle begins to freeze and accumulate until it has transformed into something sparkling and new and almost electric, in a way that makes life come alive. I love winter. It truly is my favorite season.

It occurred to me today that I have been 30 for a week now. I'm supposed to be having some type of pre-mid-life/post-post-adolescent crisis, but to be honest, I've hardly noticed. I guess I do find myself looking in the mirror and thinking things like, "I'm 30 now. Maybe it's about time I started wearing makeup;" or, "Maybe I should buy some non-outdoors-specific clothing that isn't a hand-me-down from my 22-year-old sister;" or "I'm 30 and my worldly possessions amount to a few boxes of clothes, a kitty cat, a car that after being "totalled" by $700 in brake work is officially worthless, a road bike that has a similar status, a battered mountain bike and one beloved Pugsley." But my inclination right now is still toward less stuff and more mobility. I guess turning 30 hasn't done as much to spur me toward adulthood as I'd hoped.

And I won't even talk about my athletic pursuits right now. It's probably been pretty obvious from my blog that I'm all over the map, both demotivated and excitedly trying new things; both wrapped up in frequent adventures and discouraged by the "sameness" of the space I occupy. The sun came out yesterday afternoon and I watched it with bitter jealousy from my cubical at work. Today the rain rate was back up to a tenth of an inch per hour and I decided to go peak bagging anyway. Mount Roberts was my goal, with an ambitious hope for Sheep Mountain should the weather take a turn for the better.

The rain let up but it left behind a brutal, bitter cold wind. On the ridge, it was blowing 35 mph and easily gusting to 50 and even 60 mph (a speed where the wind takes your breath away, and pushes unsuspecting hikers nearly off their feet.) The ridge is somewhat narrow in spots, but not too exposed, so I layered up as best as I could with the random things I had stuffed in my Camelback over the past few weeks - a fleece pullover, a soft-shell pullover, winter mittens, a hat, a headband (which I pulled over my nose and mouth), and dry wool socks in a ziplock bag (lifesavers, those were.) Hard to gauge the windchill this early in the season. It felt below freezing, but then again the first real chills of the season always feel uber-cold. It was probably 45 or so degrees at elevation, not accounting for windchill.

The wind was relentless, and continued to get worse. Mount Roberts has a few steep, loose spots that were sketchier than I remembered, and I ended up turning back short of the peak because I had become consumed with the idea that I was about to blow off the mountain. I'm not really sure what the wind speed would need to be to actually blow a 130-pound person off a mountain - probably at least double the strongest gusts that hit today. But the wind felt intense enough that I was genuinely jittery. Every time a gust hit, I just crouched down and held my hat until it passed. I was certainly relieved when I reached the tram terminal and ordered the biggest, hottest cup of coffee they had, and "cheated" the rest of the hike by riding the tram down to sea level. It was a good day. That kind of hard, cold wind makes me feel alive. Like I said, I'm definitely a "winter person."

New project

I have been taking it fairly mellow these past couple of days - low-key run on the Mount Jumbo trail yesterday, and a mud shower of a bike ride up the Perseverance Trail today. I was definitely starting to feel some muscle fatigue and soreness from the running. It was good to do something else today, although I have to say that after three months of basking in the blissfully ordinary weather of the Lower 48, I am not digging the rain riding, what with the head-to-toe mud splatters and big pieces of grit in my teeth (I know, I know. Fenders. Now where did I stash those?)

I took this picture today lest anyone accuse me of no longer riding my bicycle. I learned that if you place your camera on your bike seat and set the self-timer, you come out with an bike's eye image, as if your bike were taking a picture of you, rather than the other way around.

But now, with the reality of autumn sinking in, I have started sitting down with the 45 minutes of idle free time I have in the day (I can bump this up to 55 if I avoid Facebook, 75 if I avoid blogging), and begun to map out ideas for an autobiography about the stretch of time between March 1 and mid-July. I think if I can find momentum, this will be a really fun project for me. For me, writing about experiences is not just a creative outlet - it's a form of art. The experiences themselves are the initial photograph, the immediate capture of a moment in time. Blogging is the rough sketch, drawing from that photograph a form that is only beginning to take shape. But writing, something I only rarely do, is like painting. I look back at the photograph. I spread my sketch on canvas. Then I take out my paints, my best ideas, and I surround the sketch with color strokes, shadows, hints of light, until it takes on a deeper, richer meaning. I used to paint often, but I no longer own the art supplies, so now I write. I think writing will be an excellent way to spend some down time this winter, and it will give me an excuse to sit in coffee shops and look intellectual and maybe meet other people of this type. :-)

But all good writing needs to be about something, so I am trying to dream up a central theme. The natural beginning is my 12 ill-fated hours in this year's Iditarod bike race. It has all the good dramatic elements to set up a story ... the struggle, the danger, the failure, the frostbite. I want this to be about more than riding bikes, but I don't want to fall into the narrative trap of a story about losing a relationship and trying to find myself. There are other ideas bouncing around in my head. It's fun, actually, thinking of myself as the character in my own story. I have to write what's true, but the truth is so much more fun to paint than fiction.

But as with anything I do that feels more committed, I'm intimidated by the scope of it all, even if I never finish it, or if I finish it and hate it, or worst of all, if I finish it and love it and never take it anywhere. Since I started mapping out chapter one, I went back and read and re-read my early March blog entries. And already I'm learning valuable lessons from myself, namely something I wrote shortly after the race, when I was still on crutches:

I don't want to ever become the kind of person who doesn't dare to fail and fail spectacularly. I don't ever want to be unwilling to approach the unknown. I don't ever want to live a life free of risk.

So I'm resolved to finally take a pen to paper (or Microsoft Word, whatever), and I'm blogging about it to put yet another flighty goal out there in a way that will keep me at least semi-committed.