Why I'm not so good at training

Date: Feb. 8
Mileage: 36
Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Weather: 39 degrees, partly cloudy, ESE wind 5-10 mph
Details: Interval training; intensity 60-95 percent
Note: Still lots of ice on the road beyond the shrine.

My future TransRockies partner, Keith, recently started a rigorous training program under the direction of an actual, flesh-and-blood coach. When he asked me if I'd ever consider working with a coach, I said, "No, because eventually the coach would tell me I needed to stay inside on a sunny day, and that would be the end of that."

Not that I'm against coaching in any way. I recognize that if athletes want real results, they need to treat fitness like a science, and that involves doing things they'd rather not do, at times they'd rather not do them. It's just that I have this thing called a "job," which already tells me where I need to be and exactly when to be there, five days a week. I'm not about to take up a second "job" that revolves around bicycle racing and threatens to ruin one of the things in life I truly love - riding bicycles. The day something stops being fun or rewarding is the day I quit, cold turkey. (This ideal has also led me to quit several of my past jobs.)

That said, I am trying to establish a little more of a structured fitness routine under my own rather broad and unscientific terms. Today I planned to do something involving intervals. I had scheduled a trip to the gym, where the handy settings on the elliptical machine help me specifically monitor the time, power output and even heart-rate estimates of each interval. But when I woke up, the sun was trying ever so slyly to peek out of the clouds. Winds were light. Temps were in the high 30s, promising to hit the 40s. Basically, it was April outside. The kind of day where I would definitely tell my imaginary coach to step aside so I could go have some fun.

But I still wanted to do my intervals. I'm not a watch-watcher, so when I'm outside, my interval training is about as unscientific as it comes. Basically, I pick a single song, generally in the two- to three-minute range, with which to ride my intervals. This song is usually from the pop punk days of my youth, which means it's short enough to sprint to, snappy enough to keep the pace, and obnoxious enough that after the third or fourth playing, I am going to purposely enter the pain cave just to block it out. I set my mP3 player so I can sprint to that song, recover to another random song, and then repeat the sprint song. Today I listened to "Cool Kids" by Screeching Weasel.

At first, the interval training went really well. I was sweating and gasping and my heart was pounding into my throat. Then, a pretty song like "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufjan Stevens would come on and I'd exhale long and slow, shoot a couple of snot rockets, and pedal into the happy daze of post-interval endorphins. Then, like a foghorn out of a thick mist, Screeching Weasel would launch into their namesake rant and "na na na nana nana na nana" - suddenly I was rocketing into clear blue air.

I was supposed to do this for 30 minutes (after a 10-minute warm up) and turn around for a cool-down. But the farther I pedaled north, the more the sky opened up, and the more alive I felt. I felt as awesome as the Cool Kids in the song that wouldn't leave me alone, but rather than become annoyed with the noise, I relished in it, craved it, and pumped harder every time the track started anew. My veins gushed molten lava; my lungs breathed fire and the sun cast a stark shadow directly in front of me. Time seemed to stand still, but what actually happened is nearly an hour passed, and I found myself all the way out at the construction zone near Eagle Beach, feeling fairly exhausted.

Plus, I was 18 miles from home, it was 11:55 a.m., and I really needed to be home by 1 p.m.

Did I mention that I haven't done any speed work all winter long?

The result was I really bonked while I was still a fair distance from home, but I couldn't let off the pace. So I struggled and my head spun and there was no more Screeching Weasel to help me along (I was definitely too annoyed with that song to put up with it at that point.) Sometimes the fog would sink in and I'd find myself limping up the road at about 10 mph, so I'd shake my head around like a driver trying not to fall asleep at the wheel before amping it up again.

Definitely more than a bit too much, too soon. But I have to admit, it was fun while it lasted.

I wonder what my coach would say?

Good thing I don't have one.

Food is fuel

Date: Feb. 7
Mileage: 67
Time: 4 hours, 47 minutes
Weather: 43 degrees, rain showers, southeast wind 10-20 mph (felt like spring. Thanks El Niño!)
Details: Distance road ride on the "southern circuit:" North Douglas, Thane, Back Loop Road; intensity 50-80 percent
Note: Left knee tendons are feeling a lot better but right knee had some light patellar pain while riding into the headwind. Been a while since I felt that.

Endurance athletes tend to develop very literal interpretation of the “food is fuel" mantra. This is especially true of touring cyclists, whose access to different varieties of food becomes more and more limited as they travel through isolated areas and tiny towns. Eventually, quality and nutrition are relegated to the sidelines as energy-starved cyclists go on an indiscriminate calorie hunt.

When this happens, these cyclists will find themselves standing in gas stations, questioning why they should spend $1.75 on an organic, vitamin-fortified Clif Bar when they can get the same calorie punch (and similar fat-protein-carb levels) in a much smoother, much tastier, 75-cent Snickers Bar. When these cyclists start entering multiday races, the situation deteriorates even further, until they’re questioning why they should bother stopping for dinner when four Snickers Bars will provide all of the energy in a fraction of the time.

I found myself buried deep in this rationale during the Tour Divide. By the time I left Grants, New Mexico, I had already lost nearly 15 pounds and was running a deepening daily calorie deficit. Before leaving town, I stocked up with two days worth of supplies, because I didn’t expect to reach another food resupply before Silver City, about 275 miles away. One of the supplies I bought was a pound of Sour Patch Kids. This portion of my “gummy snack” food group was supposed to last two days. I ate a breakfast of pastry, orange juice, fruit smoothie, banana and coffee at the last gas station out of Grants and set out toward Pie Town. It didn’t take me long to crack into those Sour Patch Kids. I continued to mindlessly munch on them until about 15 miles outside of Pie Town, a mere five hours later, when I hit the bottom of the bag. In the matter of a single morning, I had consumed an entire pound of Sour Patch Kids. Do you know how many calories are in a pound of Sour Patch Kids? Sixteen hundred! Guess how many grams of sugar? Three hundred and thirty! That’s a third of a kilogram! Of pure sugar!

I still ate a huge lunch in Pie Town, including a piece of banana creme pie and two cans of Pepsi. I don’t even remember what I ate during the afternoon, but I remember sitting down that night at my campsite to a dinner of two huge cookies, a bag of almonds and dried cherries. And that was just one day. Needless to say, I came home from the Tour Divide very, very addicted to sugar.

Kicking this addiction has been my continuing battle ever since, especially because my life revolves around convenience foods. I genuinely do not have time to cook, plus I don’t like to cook, and I’m not very good at it as well. But my “food as fuel (and only fuel)” mantra has gone too far. I actually still eye king-sized Snickers Bars at the grocery store and think, “Well, that could work for dinner.”

I am not and never will be a food snob; I require about as much culinary variety in my diet as my cat. But I do want to eat at least somewhat healthy, and I want to stop the guilty mid-day gummy bear binges (and the resulting extra pounds now that my calorie deficit has become a surplus.) So my goal from this point on is to drastically reduce my candy intake, limit my simple carb intake, and eat a lot more fresh raw fruits and vegetables (which are already a pretty heavy staple of my diet.) I get around the whole cooking nuisance by making a lot of gigantic salads and veggie-laden sandwiches; using tuna, surimi, black beans, cottage cheese, sushi and hummus as sources of protein; buying only whole-grain bread and tortillas and trying to stick to low-sugar cold cereals (even though my favorites are flavored Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats); and snacking on yogurt, flaxseed tortilla chips, fresh salsa and fruit.

If you have any other ideas for relatively healthy, no-cooking-required, can-be-eaten-on-the-go foods, I'd love to hear them. I want to be healthy and strong for White Mountains 100! Hot food is overrated anyway. But Sour Patch Kids will always be little morsels of heaven.

Leaving Banff

I had a great last couple of days in Banff. The weather, which had been stellar all week, really opened up on Wednesday and Thursday with blue skies and temps that actually climbed above freezing (as Canadians call it, "Zero.") My long streak of visiting Canada amid the best weather possible continues. I have this theory that Canada loves me.

On Thursday, Keith and I skied up the Chickadee Valley.

It's been a while since the Banff-Jasper region had much fresh snow, and the conditions included about two inches of fresh powder surrounding a slick, well-packed skin track. It was winter singletrack at its best. I continued to pine for my Pugsley. My trip to Banff was intended to ignite new passion for skiing, but I just happened to visit during a week when the snow biking couldn't have been better.

The skiing was pretty good too, though. A little more than a decade ago, when I was still a teenager, a friend asked me what my own personal heaven would look like. I replied, "Canyonlands with snow." (Canyonlands is national park in Utah, famous for its towering redrock cliffs and large desert plateaus.) In Chickadee Valley, I caught a glimpse of my original vision of Jill Heaven.

Later that day, I hiked to the top of Sulphur Mountain to kill a couple hours before the night's planned all-you-can-eat sushi bender and the long drive to the Calgary airport.

Sulphur Mountain is a special place for me. I first walked to the top on June 10, the morning after I arrived in Banff ahead of the 2009 Tour Divide. I was a mess of emotions, and a large part of me did not want to start the race. But as I stood on the Sulphur Mountain observation deck and looked out over the southern horizon, I felt this strong sense of peace that the Tour Divide was the right thing to do. This is that same view, eight months later. Mount Rundle is on the left and the Spray River runs down the valley on the right. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route follows that river south.

I really had a great time going back to Banff, visiting the incredible people I met down there during the summer, revisiting special places cast in the blue light of winter, learning new skills and discovering new spaces of almost celestial beauty and fun. Thanks so much to Leslie and Keith for being great hosts, friends and teachers. (Click on the link to check out Leslie's blog. She's a distance trail runner and her blog awesome.) Banff really is a little slice of paradise.

Moving on ...

I'm back in Juneau and have a total of six weeks to train before the start of the White Mountains 100, a snow-bike race in Fairbanks. I used to use this blog as a training log to track my mileage and hours, but quit doing that shortly after I got frostbite during the 2009 Iditarod Trail Invitational and became a bit ambivalent to training. My plan for the next six weeks is to narrow my focus and pay more attention to the specifics of my workouts - both riding and hiking - so I'm going to start tracking again. I may not have enough time to really dial in my fitness, but at least I can push my own physical limits up to the event. So, for today's ride:

Date: Feb. 6
Mileage: 35
Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Weather: 39 degrees, light rain, southeast wind 10-15 mph
Details: Tempo road ride to Herbert River and back, intensity 65-90 percent
Note: Tendons behind left knee still sore from skiing, otherwise felt strong.