California cold snap

It's been cold in the American West this week. Where I live, a winter cold snap means frost-coated leaves in the morning, ice patches that linger through the day, unobstructed sunshine, azure skies and clear visibility that gives depth to the farthest horizons. So most everywhere else it's cold, but here, it's perfect. 

Beat had quite a bit of Iditarod prep to work on this weekend, including molding a new sled from a sheet of plastic. So I spent a quiet weekend writing and reading ... oh, who am I kidding? There was still a much higher ratio of running and riding. On Saturday, Beat and I got out for a hill climb up Black Mountain, 10.5 miles with 2,800 feet of climbing. Physically there wasn't much notable about this run, but the views were nice.

On Sunday I joined a girls' ride with Leah and Heather, and took the opportunity to wear my new Castelli bike skort. I'm finally starting to part with some of my more ancient active wear (like a pair of Nashbar bike shorts from 2003), and I've noticed that the majority of my sports wardrobe is now comprised of race T-shirts and skirts. Leah noted that I'm probably one of those women who only wears a skirt when I'm splashing around in the mud — and this observation would be true. But I spend significantly more time splashing around in the mud than I do at formal parties, so I might as well prioritize my cute attire (thus the tossing out of saggy-butt bike shorts.)

The temperature was 33 degrees when I left my house and warmed up to the mid-40s by late afternoon. Frost and ice lingered in the shaded canyons throughout the day, so the puffy, hat, and gloves were required for the longer descents. That's right, puffy in the 40s. I'm not nearly as thick-blooded as I'd like to believe.

 We made our way from Leah's apartment in the Mission to Mount Tam, and then worked our way back through the Marin Headlands on a steep and undulating network of fireroads and trails.

 It was a strenuous route but a mellow ride — fifty miles, 6,680 feet of climbing, over 6.5 hours. There was plenty of chatting, laughing, picnicking, and coasting down ribbons of singletrack so smooth and relaxing that they seemed to instantly erase the thousand-foot grunt we'd endured to get there. Some rides are just like that. No epic battles. No lingering pain. Just smiles in the sunlight.

I like to go outside and move through the world. If there's one central trait at the core of my being, it's this. And somedays, maybe most days, this one thing is enough. 

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.