How to go for a run at 0 degrees

Not only am I new to the idea of running as a form of physical training (rather than as a last-ditch method to catch a tight flight connection), I am new to dressing for comfort in cold weather while running, necessary knowledge to have when training for a cold-weather race. Last night provided the perfect opportunity for gear testing: Low, low single digits dropping into the negative single digits.

Step 1: Never start a run without taking advantage of an opportunity to test some new, preferably slightly ridiculous cold-weather strategy, such as ways to keep water from freezing solid. Taping a Camelback bladder to your skin can work, as long as you're not opposed to carrying around a cold, sloshing water baby.

Step 2: If you are using a more traditional method for protecting water and gear, such as a wedging a backpack inside of a coat, make sure you can actually fit your coat around all of the crap you want to wear and/or bring with you.

Step 3: Don't forget the loose final pieces such as gloves, hat and headlamp. Don't worry that you look like you're about to go deep-sea diving. In a way, this is essentially what you are doing.

Step 4: After warming up by running through the city streets, don ice creepers for the run up the mountain. If you are a mitten user, it is preferable to practice this step a few times before you go out into the Arctic cold.

Step 5: Be sure to look around and enjoy the views. After all, you could be inside a warm building, jogging on a treadmill as you sip herbal tea and watch "Dancing With The Stars."

Step 6: Run, run, run. Don't stop running. This is crucial for circulation since you are only wearing running shoes and a single pair of socks in order to avoid blisters (and even then, if you are new to running, you may still manage to return home with bloody socks from toenails that you forgot to clip because, well, you're new to running.)

Step 7: Don't make the mistake of believing you're done after you've descended the mountain. After all, you still have three miles of cool-down (way down) before you return to the safety of home. Note: This is a surprisingly long way when you don't have wheels.

Step 8: Relish in the fact you spent two hours and 15 minutes braving the elements, which is actually much more fun than simply exercising. Vow never ever to bother with treadmills or trainers again, and begin plotting tomorrow's run.

... It's DARE

I expected to feel something like euphoria after completing the Sustina 100, but found the experience to be closer to the opposite of that. Geoff loaded my bike in the back of the truck as I stood in the bright sun with my head lowered. My skin felt clammy and chapped, my lips and mouth parched. Geoff gave me a Diet Pepsi, a special treat, but the cold liquid tasted like fire and sea water — a result of extreme electrolyte imbalance, mild nutritional deficiencies and of course dehydration. I was out of energy but I had no appetite. Geoff produced a cold pizza — he purchased it the evening before when he expected me to finish around 2 a.m., not 10 — but I couldn't even choke down a full slice. We drove in mostly silence an hour back to Palmer, where I peeled off my still-wet clothing and prepared to take a shower. My hair was wet and so knotted around my hair band that I couldn't untangle it. My bloodshot eyes stared back at my blotchy face in the mirror. I tried to yank my hair free until I broke out in tears. Every muscle in my legs throbbed. I felt like I had deliberately thrown my body into rush-hour traffic, and finishing the Susitna 100 seemed just as masochistically useless.

In the following days, with my body battered and the edges of my spirit worn soft, I attempted to get back on my bike and ride again. At first, I felt only a vague sense of transformation. As my distance from the Susitna 100 grew, the initial shock and pain of the race slowly replaced itself with a warm feeling of enlightenment and purpose, not unlike a religious awakening after a long fast. My memory intensified the beauty and emotion of the experience until I had to actively block my mind from a constant barrage of daydreams. When I closed my eyes, I only saw wind-swept tundra and snow. I felt like I had crossed a threshold, one that I could never return from. As I recovered, I followed the progress of another race — a little-known ultra-endurance race called the Iditarod Trail Invitational. Everything about the ITI captured the still-sharp edges of my imagination, and the words of the participants spoke to my new state of mind. Steve Reifenstuhl, who was in the process of running the 350-mile race to McGrath in 2006, wrote this about finishing the 2005 race:

"The edge with which I am dancing is where the mind can make the body perform beyond what is believed to be possible. It is spiritual, it is dreamlike, it penetrates to my core and when I come back from it, I know I was there, and it beckons for months afterward ... At the finish line in McGrath, the physical and the emotional unite in a crescendo of emotion, pain, elation. The "other" becomes a memory. This unique reality has been reached by the passage of miles, time, physical exertion, psychological strain and sleep deprivation. It is so close to me, yet a world away."

In 2007, I went back to the Susitna 100 much more prepared — except for I was overtrained, and finished the race with stage 3 chondromalacia in my right knee that kept me off my bike for more than three months afterward. In 2008, I took the quantum leap to the 350-mile race to McGrath, grossly underexperienced and underprepared, and finished the race after what is still the most intense six days of my life. In 2009, I returned to the race to McGrath with much more experience and preparation, and contracted frostbite on my right foot within the first 60 miles. Later that summer, I finished the 2,740-mile Tour Divide after 24 days of physically exhausting, often painfully lonely pedaling, convinced I had my fill of adventure racing, finally, and I didn't have to do it any more.

The temperature was 8 degrees and 25 mph winds plunged icy flakes of snow like daggers into my skin as Beat and I slipped micro-spikes over our shoes and started up the exposed hillside on Monday evening. After our seven-hour snow-bike adventure on Sunday, my legs felt heavy and sore. Something similar to wet concrete and cold acid pumped through my veins. I adjusted my face mask to block the fierce windchill, lowered my head and shuffled behind Beat up a gravel road where I've ridden my mountain bike several dozen times. Powder snow drifted like sand under my feet. I was running, but only barely. Climbing this hill had never been so hard. We turned left and traversed the face of Mount Sentinel as an eerie blur of city lights glowed through the blizzard below. We reached the ridgeline where the full Arctic blast roared through Hellgate Canyon. With hands and spikes on ice-crusted rocks, we picked our way up the mountain. Beat said it felt like mountaineering. I felt like I was slapping my own legs with a spiked paddle. It had been barely a week of mild running and hiking since I started to recover my sprained ankle, and already my body was seriously sore and tired. The cold was not much of a concern for me. But my speed was. Our 12-mile loop was going to take three to four hours at my pace, something a little beyond the cold-weather and physical exposure both Beat and I felt was prudent for a weeknight training run. We turned back. I stumbled several times. We returned after an hour and 40 minutes — an amount of time that would be a "short weekday quickie" if it were a bike ride — and I felt spent.

On September 1, after much mutual goading, my friend Danni and I both registered for the 2011 Susitna 100. The simple action of hitting "send" on the Web site filled me with the same raw anticipation that I felt five years ago, the same anxiety and excitement of the prospect of venturing into almost completely unknown — and for me, completely ridiculous — territory. Yes, I've finished the Susitna 100 twice (on a slightly different course, but still in the same region.) I still sometimes dream of it, with jolting lucidity, when my mind slips into the gray spaces between wakefulness and slumber, and I remember the childlike awe and wonder. I want to return that space, back to the beginning, with a similar state of mind. I want to venture far out of my comfort zone. I want to leave my bike at home, the one tool that has gotten me through so much. I want to strike out into the tundra with only my own body to rely on, maybe with my friends Danni and Beat, or maybe alone, to see the windswept Dismal Swamp in new light, with new eyes.

In other words, I want to run the Susitna 100. On foot.

And after a fall marked with more injuries than actual training runs, continuing struggle with simple efforts, and a general complete lack of running experience, I have absolutely no reason to believe I can even attempt it, let alone finish it.

But I had no reason to believe it in 2006, either.

And this just gives me all the more reason to dream ...

Embracing the cold

(Yes, I'm getting around to finishing my Susitna 100 story. I haven't had time to blog this weekend, so this is just a quick photo post.)

Sunday morning crept toward afternoon. The temperature outside was 11 degrees F with a brisk wind, overcast, and more than a little blah. Beat's in Montana for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and is pretty much fresh out of California in every way. This is his first time in Montana where it's really been "winter." His total experiences with winter as an adult are minimal at best, and he's still trying to acquire gear that most people consider standard issue, like mittens. Despite all this, he's willing to putting himself out there, in the thick of the ice and snow and bitter chill, even with untested gear and no prior experience to give him understanding of how his body will react to the cold. We went out for a shakedown hike on Saturday, in similar temperatures with a severe wind. We climbed more than 3,000 feet and six miles to the Stuart Peak saddle, the last two miles up wallowing without snowshoes in more than two feet of fresh powder. His feet went numb from the trail-breaking and we decided to turn around, and even then just made it back before dark, drenched in sweat, with temperatures plummeting toward the single digits. And even after all that, he still wanted to go back out in it today.

Since we hiked on Saturday, I suggested snow-biking today. It's even harder to stay warm on a bike than it is on foot, but Beat was admirably excited about the adventure. We took Pugsley and my single-speed Karate Monkey, which has studded 29" tires. We had one pair of pogies and new mittens, socks and balaclava that he just purchased at REI yesterday.

I thought we'd go out for two hours, three tops. We rode up Butler Creek Canyon on a road that had only seen extremely light snowmobile traffic since the beginning of winter. There wasn't much consolidation to speak of. It was hard work on the Pugsley and impossible on the singlespeed.

As we walked, the air started to clear, until we were bathed in sunlight. Smiles broke out and the layers came off. It still wasn't warm by any stretch of the imagination, but pushing bicycles up a medium grade through soft snow for thousands of vertical feet is hard work. Really hard work. Snow smothered the trees and the sparkling ice and light made for incredible scenery. We were downright giddy. This of course meant we had to keep climbing.

Just before we reached the top of the Snowbowl ridge, we ditched the bikes because the snow was ankle to shin-deep, completely unridable even on the descent. In front of us, drenched in late-afternoon sunlight, was Point Six, an 8,000 foot peak that looms a full 5,000 vertical feet above Missoula. Having ridden a bike up there before, once, I announced that "we can probably reach the peak by sunset."

I had forgotten that, by road, Point Six was still at least another four or five miles away. We began winding up the meandering path through the wind-drifted sugar, punching through to our shins, sweating and struggling and gasping even though I was only able to achieve a moving speed of about 1.5 mph.

Here Beat is in the midst of the slog, on one of the wind-scoured - and therefore harder packed - stretches of road. We were moving slow. I was exhausted, because I've spent a lot of time on my feet this week, wearing an ankle brace and overworking all of the other muscles in an effort to baby my sprained (but healing nicely) ankle as much as possible. I went into full-on endurance mode for a little while - mind shut off, plodding, one foot in front of the other.

The sun set and although we had walked for two hours since we left the bikes, we still hadn't gotten all that much closer to Point Six. We veered off the road and picked our way up to the very tip top of Snowbowl, were we could still stand near 8,000 feet elevation and look out over the Rattlesnake, the Missions, and the glowing city lights of Missoula. At our rate of speed, it would have taken us at least two more hours just to reach Point Six, and we were both low on food, and both dealing with frozen water issues. After all, we were out for a "two-hour ride" that was already becoming closer to seven or eight.

We ran straight down the mountain, kicking up clouds of powder as we slid toward the city lights. It took us about 20 minutes to undo more than 2 hours of climbing, and just like that, we were back at our bikes.

The ride down was fantastic fun. Beat managed to carve nice fresh lines with the Pugsley, but I was all over the place on my singlespeed, using my right foot as a second front wheel to steer through the hardening powder. My erratic lines and intense focus on the road did reveal some cool sights - like these fresh mountain lion tracks. The lion's tracks were laid on top of our uphill tracks, which meant it came through after we did.

It was a bit nippy on the way down - but in my own standard winter fashion (laziness), I wore the exact same clothing without changing, removing or adding layers for the entire seven hours we were out. Nice and toasty on the way up. Brrrr on the way down.

Not a bad "first snowbike ride ever" for Beat: Seven hours, 4,000 feet of elevation gain, about 20 miles of bike pushing, walking and strenuous downhill riding, temperatures in the teens and single digits, soft snow, wind crust, frigid breeze, darkness, and lots of time to dream up great ideas for cold-weather technical gear. It was certainly one of my more epic "little Sunday rides," and went down perfectly.