A little housekeeping

There was a "winter storm advisory" for the Santa Cruz Mountains above 1,200 feet on Thursday, so I set out in the afternoon to see if any rare white flakes had graced the tip of Black Mountain. There wasn't any snow, but there was thick frost forming on the gravel and smooth ice across puddles. After a week of smoggy inversion, the air was so clear that I could look out across the valley and see intricate details in the cityscape and red sunlight stretched over the white domes of the Mount Hamilton Observatory, some 25 miles away. It was a beautiful afternoon, punctuated with a toe-tingling descent into the eerie quiet of the canyon at dusk — and finally, for the first time this year, actually dressed warm enough for the 2,700-foot plunge (thanks winter storm advisory.) Happy Hour. Or two.

I've been working on some blog updates, and I wanted to address something you may or may not have noticed on Jill Outside ... ads. Sigh, I know. It's an experiment. I'm working on setting up some advertising contacts for Half Past Done and decided I should test the waters with Google Adsense. But as I researched the program, it occurred to me I could get a much better sense about the earning potential of such advertising at my personal blog, which receives a decent number of direct hits every day. I've stated before that I never wanted to monetize this blog, and I don't. I'm doing this with a plan for it to be a temporary change. Still, it's interesting to see what this blog has "earned" in the 24 hours these ads have been up. While the numbers aren't going to send me to Disneyland anytime soon, I can't help but wonder what might have been if I sold out on day one of this blog's seven-year lifespan. That would be a fun vacation.

I also finally linked to Half Past Done in the sidebar. There's a feed-reader below the logo so you can view the headlines of the latest updates.

Also updated my blog links. There were more than a few dead or nearly-dead ones in there (why do so many bloggers abandon their blogs? This makes me feel lonely.) I'm going to fill up the links with more of the blogs I browse occasionally and enjoy, but the link lists are truncated to the top ten most recently updated. This is my own way of acknowledging my gratitude for frequently updated blogs.

Finally, I updated the book list with the most recent links, including my most recently published book, the blog compilation "Arctic Glass." If you enjoy the content at Jill Outside, the best support you can offer is one of those "cups of coffee" purchases of an eBook. If you don't have an e-Reader or iPad, you can purchase a PDF or text file from this link that can be read on any computer. Your support is appreciated.

One last update — the book projects. I am getting very close on one of them. It's a memoir about the year I lived in Homer, Alaska. If I tried to blurb it in one short sentence, I would call it "A love story about Alaska" but this makes it sound kitschy. There's a few different elements to this story — new Alaskan, quirky community, the trials of navigating young-person poverty and a need to survive harsh winters, and a sudden and strange desire to ride bicycles very long distances in the snow (I promise this is only a part of the book's content.) I've been working to incorporate more humor and less endurance focus in this book than my others. I need to work it through the editing process and, of course, finish it first. But I am hoping for a spring release, early summer latest. I am thinking about titling it "Becoming Frozen," in honor of my many Modest Mouse references in the early days of this blog.

Thanks for reading. Your support may help me avoid real jobs through another great year of adventuring. 

Sidelined

Beat and Liehann in better (if sleepy) times, before the Crystal Springs trail race on Saturday. 

Liehann was the first of my good friends who was serious about racing the Tour Divide, and had a plan in place for June of this year. This weekend, he was over at our place discussing the build of my Moots 29er, researching Rohloff hubs, and mulling the finer points of bikepacking kits. On Saturday morning, we coaxed Liehann out to his longest foot race to date — the 35-kilometer version of the Crystal Springs Trail Run. Although he'd never been much of a runner before moving to the Bay Area from South Africa in 2011, Liehann recently started venturing over to the dark side, reasoning that all training is good training. He was off to a great start for an exciting year.

Then, on Monday morning, Liehann got on his mountain bike to commute to work, along five miles of paved bike path between his house and the Google campus. It had rained on Sunday and the pavement was slightly damp, but he didn't think much of it as he pedaled up a pedestrian bridge that passes over a busy freeway. As he started coasting down the other side, he hit the brakes just as his rear tire lost traction on the slick wooden planks, locking up the wheel and pivoting the bike, which slapped him on the ground like a dead fish. At first he was confused. He knew he hit hard, and didn't think he could get up, so Liehann called Beat and asked him if he could borrow a car, pick him up, and take him to work. By the time Beat arrived, a park maintenance guy was there with a small vehicle, and the two tried to move Liehann into the cart. When lifting his shoulders a few inches off the ground caused Liehann to nearly pass out in pain, they called 911.

Several hours later, Liehann got his first glimpse of the X-rays, which he described as "a shock." His femur was broken in five pieces, a web of fractures near his hip joint. The prognosis — minimum four to six weeks on crutches, three to six months recovery. Late that evening, surgeons inserted a few large chunks of metal into his leg.

And just like that, the first half of 2013 has been dramatically rearranged for Liehann. Beat and I went to the hospital to visit him on Monday and Tuesday evening, and it's been sobering to watch Liehann accept this — no Tour Divide this year. No MLK weekend trip to Hawaii. No more mountain biking or trail running for a long while. No work, difficulty conducting day-to-day tasks, and loss of independence for at least a couple of weeks. Several months of physical therapy and painful recovery. We try to reassure him with statements of "you know, it could have been a lot worse." And it's true — it could have been. But honestly, that statement tends to ring a bit hollow to me, because of course worse things can happen. Worse things can always happen, but these vague non-realties don't diminish real and disappointing setbacks.

Liehann's first baby step after surgery

And there's also that element of disbelief, that "wait a minute, these things don't happen." Liehann is an avid mountain biker; he rides rugged trails all the time. He's a new trail runner, where inexperience increases the chance of falling. A couple of years ago he participated in the Freedom Challenge, a 2,350-kilometer self-supported mountain bike race across South Africa. These things are dangerous, but badly breaking a leg while bike commuting to work on a paved path, away from traffic, in a solo crash? These things don't happen ... do they?

It's human nature to look for take-away lessons, some kind of rationale we can construct from the random and unpredictable events of our lives. In Liehann's case, only one lesson comes to my mind — "Life is dangerous. All of it. Dangerous." And in that regard, it almost seems silly to fret about running through the dark woods or launching down a rocky trail on a mountain bike. You can never know what will take you down, so why worry?

For his part, Liehann is taking it well, reaching acceptance and looking forward to activities such as swimming and, in a more distant future, gentle walking. Beat urged him to use this time to "write a kick-ass app." As for me, I made my slowest road bike descent ever on Monte Bello Road on Monday, throttling the brakes as fear gripped me and every tight corner threatened to take me down. But on Tuesday's trail run, I loosened up a little, making an concentrated effort to hold a sub-8-minute pace down the Wildcat Trail in my ongoing goal to become a more confident downhill runner. Life is dangerous, after all, so I might as well embrace it.

But it wasn't 65 and sunny

I said it more than once last week, when admitting how sad I'd be to leave Alaska, "Well, at least when I go back to California, it will be 65 degrees and sunny." And when I recorded our stay in the Colorado Creek Cabin log, I signed out, "Back to the land of bright sunshine and 65 degrees." I'm not really sure where I formed the opinion that Bay-area winters are just like its summers, without those pesky 90-degree days. But this view is seriously skewed toward warm-weather optimism, not usually in my nature. Reality has fallen closer to days in the 50s, nights in the 30s, and when it rains, it's 40-something. Weirdly, this sometimes feels colder than Fairbanks' dry frigidity.

I had a hard time getting back into the swing of things earlier this week. Alaska took a lot out of me, and readjusting to squinting at the sun whenever I went outside was strange. Many of my friends are declaring their 2013 goals and launching their new-year fitness routines. In a way, I'm doing the same, and after much consideration, I have but one goal — sustainable excess. You may ask, "Jill, how is this different than any other fitness goal you've ever had?" The answer is — not so much different as sharper. I want to continue to chip my way closer to the edge.

We all have to define what fitness means to each of us individually; for me, ideal fitness would be that of a through-hiker or distance bicycle tourist, putting in long day after long day and only becoming stronger as I went. Of course, infinite progress is impossible, and rest and recovery are crucial. But finding the last rung of balance before the tipping point is a wonderful challenge, and one I hope to take up whole-heartedly this year, both in my writing and my running. (Yes, running. A far-out hope tells me that this is the year to try the big distance thing with running.) There will be plenty of biking in 2013, of course, but mostly for fun and travel. I would go into my specific goals for 2013 but that will be a long-winded post. Soon.

For now, it's the first week of 2013-in-training. Fairbanks had me nicely wiped out and I had to ease into it slowly. I spent the early part of the week riding, because it was just so fun to use bikes that I could propel at speeds faster than six miles per hour, seemingly without effort. Leah came out on Friday and we rode the Steven's Creek Canyon loop, 25 miles with 3,300 feet of climbing. She rocked the mud and water crossings on her skinny cross tires, and I only froze my feet and fingers a little bit in the moist, 50-degree air.

Steve and Beat, both Iditarod hopefuls, at the start of the Crystal Springs 50K. 

Saturday was the Crystal Springs 50K in Woodside. There were going to be lots of friends there, including our mountain-biker friend Liehann (in for the 35K, his longest run to date), Michele the ultra-ironman woman (she once participated in an event that featured ten Ironmans in ten consecutive days), and Karen, a cool chick from northern Northern Cali. I felt a bit uncertain about this race because I hadn't run all that much since my last 50K trail run, which was three weeks earlier. Actually, after glancing through my blog, I should amend that to no running. Sled dragging doesn't exactly count. But, in the name of sustainable excess, I decided that my ideal fit self should be able to cover this distance on foot every day (my friend Leslie hiked an average of nearly fifty kilometers a day for three solid months on the Pacific Crest Trail earlier this year. It is doable.)

Ah, running. Sometimes I try to take quick impromptu selfies without posing or changing my expression beforehand to see if I look similar to the way I feel when I am running. This photo would seem to indicate ... yes. Sweat beads, slack jaw from mouth breathing, wayward Camelbak hose, wet wipes in easy reach, earbuds, and Oreo crumbs on my lips — yes, exactly. Is it any wonder why I want to figure out how I can do this all day, day after day?

Crystal Springs actually went well for me. I was running solid until mile 21, when my hips locked up and my IT band in my right leg tightened as well, forcing me to walk most of the small hills along Skyline Ridge. The hip pain was left over from sled dragging, as it was the same nagging pain that dogged me on the strenuous hike into Tolovana Hot Springs. Compensating for my hips is what likely led to the IT/knee issue. Anyway, typical boring runner complaints, but it was demoralizing to suddenly drag so much on the one thing I consider myself good at — climbing. It was also frustrating because I had been having a good day, and even though I didn't know my pace (GPS conked out) I thought I might be in range of a 50K PR. But instead of fighting it, I settled back and gratefully accepted what my body could do at that moment. Important lessons to remember in the long-distance game.

I was able to loosen up the hip joints a bit on the final three-mile descent, and finished in 5:53, still my second-fastest time in a 50K. I also finished ahead of Beat and Steve by a fair margin because they were too consumed with Iditarod fretting and scheming to run fast.

A bad photograph of Beat chasing some deer down the High Meadow Trail. 

On Sunday, I had grand schemes to attempt another long run, but it was 45 degrees, raining, a lazy Sunday morning, and admittedly easy to demotivate. We boosted ourselves out the door for an eight-mile run on the sometimes brutally steep PG&E climb. To up the ante, it was about 2 p.m. and we had only eaten a small breakfast so far, on a 50K recovery day. The "bonk run" part wasn't intended, but it did add to the overall effect I was going for in this particular training run. My hips were a bit angry on the climb, but once we started down I thought I was doing okay. That is, until Beat teased me about running slowly. I protested that "I'm running this as fast as I always do," then looked down at my watch and realized I was running an 11-minute-mile, down a smooth fireroad. Ah, well. It's a start ... start of a brand new year.