Evening ride

Sometimes I like to go for a solo ride. A purposeful solo ride. One where I’m all but certain to not see a single other human being, even by fluke or chance. Such was my mood Tuesday night. I had planned to join the Dirt Girls for their weekly singletrack jaunt, but my ankle was feeling extra tender and I was feeling extra de-motivated. I didn’t want to risk hike-a-bike or anything even steep enough to necessitate out-of-the-saddle pedaling. I opted for a quick trip to the store and maybe a logging road spin … something mellow but high in the mountains … above the flow of traffic and beyond the frenzy to capture every fleeting hour of the fading summer … somewhere alone.

I started at Snowbowl, ducked under the gate, and turned ginger rotations up the gravel road. The air at 5,000 feet was already steeped in the complex aroma of autumn — sweet with decaying leaves and berries, bitter with smoke and dust. I babied my ankle until I forgot about it, just as the grade steepened, and I rose breathless into the cold wind and mindless passing of time. There were no thoughts, no obervations, only fleeting snapshots — the flicker of sunlight and shadow, the rustle of yellow leaves, the ever-thinning pine forest, the deepening saturation of pink light.

At 7,600 feet, my cell phone rang. I jumped as though awoken, blinked toward the setting sun and answered it. It was my friend John, who is out trying to set a record on the Great Divide right now, and was searching for perspective during a low point. The ride had been hard. The easy days had been difficult, the difficult days almost unbearable. The clock had reached its breaking point, and so had his resolve. How do you keep grinding through something when it ceases to have meaning for you? Is it best to stop? Cling to an impossible goal? Rewrite the meaning?

I furrowed my brow and fumbled for an answer. I had nothing to offer. My mind was still far in the distance, left somewhere far below, in the hustle and traffic of the city. My body had traveled here independently, and I didn’t want to say so, but I probably shouldn’t have answered the phone.

“If only you could see this sunset. It’s incredible …” I started to say, but I had forgotten he wasn’t far away and probably already could. That doesn’t stop the questioning of purpose, the relentless search for meaning.

I listened some more, and mumbled empty words of encouragement. The cold wind sank into my core. I started to shiver. He could hear it in my voice.

“I should probably let you go,” he said. “I’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow.”

I put away the phone and looked toward the horizon. There was nothing to see anymore, no snapshots to take. It was dark. I flicked on my headlight, pulled on the meager layers I had carried up the mountain, and rode toward home.

The reality of running

My friend Danni turned me on to a blog called “Hyperbole and a Half,” where a cartoonist combines MS Paint-type drawings with witty commentary to describe real-world situations. There’s a particular post that cycles through my mind every time I embark on an adventure or workout, called “Expectations versus Reality.” “This discrepancy between the way I imagine things unfolding and how they actually happen is most dramatic when I overestimate my ability to perform a pointless feat of athleticism,” she writes.

So on Monday evening, I went for a run. I need to preface this story with a couple of qualifiers. First of all, I am purposely training to run right now. I have a couple of fall and winter goals that may include pacing an ultrarun if all goes well. So while there will still be much bike riding in my future, with the possible exception of riding Pugsley in the Susitna 100 and/or White Mountains 100, my winter events may center around running. Because of this, I feel strong motivation to improve as a beginner runner. Secondly, I woke up before 5 a.m. Monday in Sandy, Utah, drove 530 miles to Missoula, worked six straight hours, and then set out for my run. So I was quite tired.

I changed into shorts at 7 p.m. and started running from the back door of my office. I jogged aimlessly around the streets of downtown Missoula, which eventually landed me on the bike path, so I picked up speed and headed toward the university. In the distance, I could see a steady train of students working their way up the switchbacks to the famous “M” on the mountain. Through my already runner-addled train of thoughts, some kind of spark crackled in my mind. “I should run up Mount Sentinel!”

I cut through campus and started up the trail. I purposely took the direct (steep) route just to avoid the congestion on the switchbacks. I have to say that so far, I have really enjoyed my runs. They tend to progress at a significantly higher intensity than I am accustomed to, and my cycling-forged endurance and hiking-forged impact tolerance allows me to go a fair distance without negative effects. So I am engrossed in “runner’s high” for upwards of 90 minutes to two hours. Even though my lungs are burning and my head is spinning and my heart is racing and I am fighting off an urge to puke, I am really enjoying myself. I have yet to go for a run longer than two hours, so I haven’t yet had to deal with the dreaded prospect of eating whilst gasping for air, but for now, I am convinced that running is “super awesome.”

Mount Sentinel rises to 5,200 feet from Missoula’s 3,200 feet, so climbers have to gain 2,000 feet to reach the summit. The direct route can’t be more than a mile and a half. It’s steep. It’s not very conducive to running. Similar to my failed “mountain running” attempts earlier this spring in Anchorage, I always try to run until I physically cannot function, and then I fast-hike just below the level of blowing up.


I still consider this running, because the intensity level is so high, generally several notches higher than what I experience while actually running on solid ground. And I was feeling great on Monday evening. Heart was pounding, head was spinning and endorphins were coursing through my blood. Elevations disappeared quickly below me, deer bounded along the ridgeline in front of me, and a beautiful sunset blazed in the sky. A couple of times, my body sent out overwhelming pleas to stop and rest, which I acknowledged with the excuse that I needed to take photos of the beautiful sunset. But I kept those stops quite short, and only made two.


I crested the summit and started down just as twilight started to sink in. I didn’t have a headlight, but didn’t need one as the shimmering city lights of Missoula cast an orange glow on the mountain. Downhill running is still very difficult for me, but I have listened to the advice of friends who tell me to trust my feet and just keep moving, with generally positive results. I felt like a mountain goat, dancing down the rocks as college students perched on a boulder cheered me on.

Halfway down the mountain, with my speed about as high as I can maintain without losing control, I kicked a large, sharp rock with my left foot, hitting my right ankle squarely and painfully. I cried out and slowed my pace, hobbling as I tried to find my rhythm, but I didn’t stop. “Running is all about pain management,” I told myself. “This is nothing.” I continued gimping for a bit until the pain subsided. I veered over to the concrete M and took the mellow switchbacks the rest of the way down, just for good measure.


As I ran through town, the pain started to return. By then it was dark, close to 9 p.m., and I was starving. I kept up the pace back to my office, then went home. Once at home, I looked at my foot and noticed that my sock was smeared with blood. Removing my shoe induced a few tears, and then I peeled off the bloody sock to see a swollen, bruised ankle. I think I must have kicked the sharp edge of the rock into my ankle, resulting in the cut and bruise, and continuing to run on it probably didn’t help things. It’s certainly not a bad injury, but stiff, and it may prevent me from running for the rest of the week.

Pedaling my fixie gingerly into work this morning, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to Hyperbole and a Half: “As I'm lying there, crumpled and broken from my most recent attempt at meaningless success, I feel complete bewilderment at the motivation behind what I just did. There was no point. I'm sure that the decision was based on some scrap of reasoning, but in retrospect it seems that chaos and unbridled impulsivity just collided randomly to produce a totally unexplainable action with no benefit and all consequences.”

At least I can still ride a bike.

Reconnecting

I made a quick trip to Utah this weekend to attend my grandfather's funeral. It was a memorable event — having every single person in my rather large, dispersed family, gathered in one room to share their memories of him, many of which closely mirrored my own. He was selfless, he was strong, and he could fix any problem and make it seem effortless. In my "Lone Peak" tribute a couple weeks ago, I described my grandfather as "Superman." My dad repeated the paragraph in his eulogy, and later told me that a couple days after my grandfather's death, he climbed to Lone Peak to reflect. "It was the first time that he was there with me," my dad said as tears filled his eyes. It sent my own waterworks flowing, because I had experienced a similar closeness to my grandfather on the mountain. He was still alive when I climbed Lone Peak, but I had a inexplicably strong feeling that he was beside me on the summit, which is why I went through the ritual of writing him a note — if only to physically acknowledge that feeling of closeness.

I also had an opportunity to spend time with both of my sisters this weekend — a rare occasion to have the three of us together. As we returned from our Saturday night outing, my youngest sister, Sara, made a rather unexpected request — she asked if I wanted to go hiking with her on Sunday. My jaw dropped just a little.

I love Sara, but usually when I describe her to my friends, I say, "Picture the opposite of me. That's my baby sister." Sara is 23 years old, which officially puts us in two different cultural generations (me, X; she, Y). Sara lives in Huntington Beach, Calif. — the "bedroom burg" of 200,000 people amid a sprawling mass of millions. I consider Missoula — the "big city" of 70,000 — to be about my limit of crowd tolerance. Sara works as a sales associate for Bloomingdales in Newport Beach. I've spent my career purposely seeking jobs that place me at an arm's length from the public (it's why I prefer editing to reporting) and would probably pass out or break a bone if I had to stand in high heels for longer than three minutes. Sara loves shopping and has enough clothing to fill many closets. I still wear T-shirts I owned in high school, and not a small number of clothing handed down to me from her. Sara thrives amid urban culture. I get social anxiety in small-town bars. My favorite food is sushi. Sara despises seafood; she once caught a beautiful halibut right out of Kachemak Bay in Alaska and refused to eat a single bite. My favorite things in life are my opportunities to explore remote and wild places. Sara once answered the phone when my dad and I called home triumphantly from the top of Twin Peaks and replied, "Let me guess ... you're calling from the top of some peak" with such derision that we still tease her about it.

And I was pretty sure Sara hated hiking. So when she suggested we go, I thought she was just humoring me — offering a sisterly activity that she thought I would like and she might be able to tolerate. We decided on Bell Canyon. I hadn't been there since high school, but I had a vague memory that it was "easy." And because I was going for an "easy" hike with my non-outdoors-acclimated sister, I decided to go for a run beforehand to work up a good sweat. I ended up running for two hours on the Corner Canyon trails. The singletrack was crowed with mountain bikers on a Sunday afternoon, and I not only felt jealous of them, but also self-conscious, because now I was the annoying runner clogging up their trails. They were all very nice to me, even coming around blind corners when they had to slam on their brakes as I jumped off the trail (I probably have much to learn about runner etiquette, but I did everything I could to stay out of their way.) But I do forget that a two-hour run in afternoon heat is quite a bit different than a two-hour mountain bike ride. I covered a similar distance that I would on a bike (10 to 12 miles), and by the end I was well-toasted.

So I came home and Sara and I headed to Bell Canyon. I still have vivid memories of getting lost on this trail when I was 11 years old, and my route-finding hasn't improved at all in two decades. I guided Sara through a bewildering maze of faint trails, and she took with good humor my continuous advice to "go toward the sound of water. We want to follow the creek."

As we walked, we talked about our grandfather and our individual memories of him, and also how he reminded us of our own father. We talked about our lives in Montana and California. Sara told me she was really enjoying her regular sessions in bikram yoga. I crinkled my nose and said, "What is about bikram that you like?" because to me, spending 90 minutes in a 110-degree, humid room while twisting my body in uncomfortable contortions sounds like one of the lower levels of hell.

"Well," she said, "It's a challenge just to get through it, and there's something so satisfying about that. It teaches me to remove my focus on the past and anxiety about the future, and only exist in the present, which is helpful in the rest of my life."

My jaw dropped a little again. She could have asked me what I love about snow biking or endurance mountain biking or hiking for that matter, and my answer would have been similar if not precisely that. Maybe Sara and I have more in common than I even know.

We found the main trail and it quickly turned skyward — gaining a foot of elevation for every three feet of distance along a narrow, rocky slope with boulders the size of couches. I grew self-conscious again because it was a lot more difficult than I remembered — not quite the beginner hike I'd promised Sara. But bikram yoga must have put her in good shape because she powered up it. Sweat was pooling underneath my Camelback and Sara didn't so much as complain, even though she lives at sea level and never hikes and we were crawling up a rock garden above 6,500 feet. I started to suggest turning back because the afternoon was growing late. "No, I just want to see the waterfall," she said. "We have to be close." I had no idea whether we were close or not, but I didn't want to deny Sara her well-earned reward. If I couldn't produce a waterfall, I'd probably never convince her to go hiking again.

But pretty soon it was 5 p.m., and we had been hiking for an hour and a half, and we were supposed to be home by 5:30. "There's a chance we passed the cutoff to the waterfall," I said. "But at this point, I have no idea, and we really need to head back." She accepted it and we started down. As crawled down the rock garden overlooking the valley, she said, "This is a good lesson for life, too, that it's about the journey, not the destination. I mean, this is so beautiful, and if I only cared about getting to a waterfall, I might've not noticed it."

At that moment, I was brimming with pride for my baby sister, because she's wiser than me in the places I excel.