Updates

Beat and I went mountain biking today. It was blissful. The hills were green and alive. The trails were tacky and muddy. Biking felt great after all the running. I ran five days this week, 36 miles total (slowly, but it was all running, even up steeper hills.) Now my legs are finally sore, which is a definite improvement over inexplicable shiftlessness. Biking is hard, too. I just want to have power again, to pedal strong, and to run until my muscles actually hurt, rather than feel like my body isn't listening to me and is instead being defiantly lazy. Beat is in great shape compared to me; I just have to conclude that walking to Nome is good for you.

I'm not sure what's wrong with me. I don't think this is a rest issue, necessarily. I felt worse after a full day of rest (during a 6.5-mile run Wednesday) than I did today during a three-hour bike ride, one day after a hilly 9-mile run. Plus, it felt great to get out today, and breathe some fresh air after what feels like a week spent indoors (it's strange that I feel this way, given that I went outside for at least an hour most every day. But compared to my lifestyle last month in Alaska, this is a readjustment to a more anchored and indoor-based routine. Essentially, I need to go outside to stay emotionally healthy. The physical stuff is not as big of a concern for me, although I'd like to figure out why I feel so weak. I think it might be time to get the heart-rate monitor out and start doing some short bike intervals, to give me a chance to push the red line without that looming injury threat. Maybe that will get the adrenal system back online.

Keith taking a break from the daily grind of his job

In a recent comment, long-time reader Ingunn asked for a few updates about injured friends that I wrote about here. I suppose if I'm going to publicize the grizzly stories of my friends' injuries, I should follow up with the happy endings. The first is my friend Keith Brodsky from Banff, who was rear-ended by a motorcyclist while we were road biking in Yosemite last May. Keith suffered a lumbar fracture and a few other more minor injuries, and spent a quiet summer recovering from a broken back. But Keith made a full recovery and has been back at it for months. I believe he started biking again last October. He spent the winter working for a heli-ski company in the Canadian Rockies, and ski touring around Banff on his days off. Basically, Keith has been doing what Keith does best — living the dream in paradise. His wife, Leslie, completed her Pacific Crest Trail hike in November, and they have plans to bike tour around Utah in May.

Liehann at the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow

My friend Liehann, who crashed his bike on a pedestrian bridge and broke his femur in five pieces back in January, is also recovering quickly. He's back on the bike, although he's still taking it easy and mostly sticking to roads for now. It also will be at least three more months before he can run again. But he's still considering riding the Tour Divide in 2014, and may even feel strong enough for a longer bikepacking race later this summer.

And finally, Ingunn asked about my book projects. It will probably come as a surprise to no one that I accomplished close to zero progress on my books while I was in Alaska. I fear I may have even made backwards progress on my "Becoming Frozen" book project. After the Homer Epic, I spent a few extra days in Homer and had ample time to wander around on my swollen feet and ponder the words I've been writing about it. Of course I came to the conclusion that it's "wrong, all wrong." Since then I've been revisiting some of the early chapters to see where my visions diverge.

Oh, Homer. Why are my memories of you
so vivid and yet so hard to nail down with words?

This is an ongoing dilemma I've been having in my writing lately — I begin to disagree with certain aspects of it and want to dramatically change things around before I've even given my project a chance by simply finishing a draft. In other words, I hate almost everything I write. I didn't always have this problem, and I feel the need to do some serious self-evaluation about what's changed. I think part of the issue is the way I've turned myself into a "publisher" of sorts. Back before I wrote "books," writing was fairly effortless. "Ghost Trails" was initially intended to be a personal journaling project rather than a book. I wrote "Be Brave, Be Strong" as a sort of escapist coping mechanism when I was going through a tough personal time in early 2010. Those stories just flowed out and took almost no time to actually write. Now I can't look at anything I do without that intimidating "publication" threat looming over me, and it does create a mental block.

I need to get back to my roots of "writing for me," which is cliche but that's why I started these memoir projects in the first place. Who cares if they ever see the light of day? I mean, clearly I care, but that's not the reason I should be writing them. I do have some non-memoir nonfiction projects in the works, and also two potential collaborative projects, which I hope to start in the near future.

So there are my updates for now. I appreciate reader requests for content. They help me get around occasional blogger's block.

Moving forward

I've gotten out for a run most afternoons this week but have yet to bring my camera along, so I'll have to settle for a picture from my last full day in Alaska that I never had a chance to post. Anchorage had just received more than a foot of new snow followed by a cold snap, and it was 8 below zero when I woke up that morning. But the air was calm, and after Nome it felt downright balmy. I had to take the Fatback to the bike shop to be dismantled and crammed into a tiny road bike box, and figured I might as well extend the ride for an hour or two since I was going out anyway.

The Chester Creek Trail was smothered in soft powder that had been stomped up by walkers, but the strenuous 5 mph grind suited me just fine. I didn't see many people out on this cold morning except for a Ukrainian woman who my friend Dan told me walks this trail all the time. He also told me she doesn't like bikers. Sure enough, she waved me down to yell at me for "wrecking" the trail. It was laugh-out-loud humorous, actually, given I was pressing nice, smooth track over the snow as she made shin-deep craters. That's one thing about Anchorage I've noticed ... anti-bike sentiment seems to permeate rational thought, whether it involves commuting or trail use. But it was too beautiful of a morning to get worked up over it:

 And riding the fluff made me sweat. At one point I took off my fleece jacket and was down to a short-sleeved T-shirt from a California trail race. But the windchill was too cold on my exposed skin, so I put the jacket back on. After I dropped off my bike at Speedway and met a friend for lunch at the Middle Way Cafe, I observed, "It's nice and warm here in Southcentral." My friend gave me the side-eye and then pulled out her phone to confirm it was still only 10 degrees outside, which is actually very cold for Anchorage in late March. "Huh," I said. "California heat is probably going to take some adjusting to this week."

Maybe it's the heat. I have been struggling this week to plod back into a routine. But on a positive note, I landed some part-time work while I was in Alaska. When I visited Homer last month, a former boss of mine, Carey, offered me an opportunity to pick up some contract work with her current employer, Report Alaska. The small media company produces weekly newspapers for rural Alaska villages, and Carey needed someone to help lay out and copy edit the Bristol Bay Times (Dillingham) and Arctic Sounder (Barrow.) It seemed like an ideal fit for me — something I can do from my home in California, but stay connected to Alaska journalism.

Work started this week at the bottom of the learning curve, without a lifeline. On Tuesday morning, I made a grave error with the file sharing that resulted in *all* files being deleted from the server. That alone should have gotten me fired on the spot, but luckily they had ready backups in place as I was not the first person to make this mistake ("you're actually the third or fourth," Carey told me.) After that I was chained to my laptop for the better part of fourteen hours, re-teaching myself skills I haven't used in three years, for newspapers I'd never even read before this week. Once I get around the learning curve, my workflow should move faster, and it will be fun to spend two days a week working with people in a "newsroom" of sorts once again (never mind we're spread out from California to Texas to Homer to Anchorage to Kotzebue.) And I have to laugh at the concept of doing virtually the same thing with the same editor I worked for seven years and a veritable lifetime of experiences ago. Life can be cyclical like that.

An image I just found from last month's Homer Epic 100K. There was *some* running involved. Photo by Don Pitcher.

And I'm running again. Or I should say, I'm trying to run again. I want to ride my bike, but my bike won't get me exactly where I want to be in a few weeks and later this summer, so for now I run. I go out with my heavy legs and little bottle of water and feel sick to my stomach, but still I run. I know I've on the tired side of fitness right now, so I don't push it too much, or for too long. But still I run. I thought I had Alaska to blame, but yesterday Beat decided to join me for his first run since he arrived in Nome, and his first time moving faster than 3mph in more than a month. He killed it ... bounding down the trail like a gazelle while I more closely resembled an arthritic elephant flailing to keep up. It seems after a thousand miles of strenuous walking, he has retained decent running form. As for these buckets of goo I call my legs ... I have no one to blame but myself.

So I run. I finally broke the 8-mile barrier today and found that I started to feel much better and move faster in the final miles. Maybe I'm just in ultra-long-distance-endurance shape right now, that level of slow-burn fitness where it takes me an hour just to warm up. If that's the case, I guess it's not a bad place to be.

Easing back in

Alaska, with her enticing siren song of beauty and adventure, never fails to tempt me into the depths of physical exhaustion. For a month she persuaded me to dig deep, and so I dug, and dug, until April came and I was flat on my back in California, deep in an energy hole just in time for the launch of spring training. And so it goes. Winter is for playing until I'm exhausted. Spring is for playing until I recover. 

I can't even complain because I didn't walk a thousand miles to Nome, but March was a big month for me — enough that I feel like I'm well down the backside of the bell curve of fitness. Beat and I returned from Anchorage on Wednesday, and amid the flurry of unpacking and catching up, I attempted two short runs on Thursday and Friday. Both were busts. It was hot, so hot (67 degrees one day, 76 the next!), and my legs weirdly felt frozen — as though I haven't run in more than a month ... which in truth, I haven't (snow "running" is a different sort of motion for me than trail running, and I didn't even do much of that.) But I figured I at least needed a shakeout. Even six miles turned into an exhausting effort. I was nauseated and sweating, feeling like I was attempting a run in a 120-degree desert and not the temperate coastal climate in which I live.


So I'm back in California, happy to be settling back into a routine, but frustrated with my current level of fitness and general blah-ness — much like I was in April 2012. And like last year, I figure the best way to deal with it is to go for long bike rides. What can go wrong with a plan like that? (Stagecoach 400 slow meltdown revisited? Good thing I decided not to ride that this year. I only have two tough ultramarathons in May, which is like, at least a month away.)

 But yes, long bike rides. My friend Leah's spring break was this week. Originally we had been hoping to squeeze in a little tour, but with responsibilities stacking up we only had time for an overnight: Car camping and a nice, long ride on the Arroyo Seco trail in Los Padres National Forest. This is the same segment I rode as part of a 280-mile spring tour last year, and I was excited to go back and experience those beautiful mountains when it had not rained several inches in the days leading up to the ride, and I was not completely bonked and out of food.

True to form, we did not get an even remotely early start, despite a forecast calling for afternoon thunderstorms. I didn't care about snoozing away the morning as I had one of my better nights of sleep in a month, sprawled out in our big REI tent with my air mattress and 32-degree bag draped like a comforter over my body. The outside air temperature that night was warmer than some of our Alaska friends' houses. It felt divine but I knew it also foretold of uncomfortable heat during the day. Despite this knowledge, my memory is filled with frozen fingers and shivering snack breaks in Alaska, with a longer-range memory of fending off the drizzling chill in this same region last year. So I filled up a backpack with enough extra layers to handle subzero cold, and enough food to supply a multiday bike tour. But luckily, since my rational side still expected 80 degrees, I also had a ton of water. That thing must have weighed 15 pounds. And I haven't ridden with a backpack in more than a month. My lower back still hurts from this ride. 

 But we had a ton of fun. Arroyo Seco is an old dirt road that has not been open to vehicle traffic in many years, and is quickly being reclaimed by the Los Padres Mountains. The first four miles of climbing away from the Arroyo Seco Gorge are still road-like, but after that overgrowth and landslides have fostered natural singletrack, along with some wide-open washed-out sections. I think it's super fun riding, in a spectacular natural setting that sees relatively few visitors for a place with close proximity to San Jose and Monterey. And the best part is, there's an intriguing web of hiking trails connecting more old fire roads. This area is ripe for exploration.

 We finished the Arroyo Seco trail after eighteen miles and dropped six more on the road into Fort Hunter-Ligget before deciding to turn around. The region was beautiful, with groves of huge old oak trees, sandstone hills, and a golden eagle soaring directly overhead. By that point the afternoon sun was out in full force, lighting the dusty pavement on fire. Even Leah, who is acclimated to California temperatures, found the heat to be less than bearable. But she motored on ahead as I struggled, feeling dizzy and overheated and sick to my stomach. Even returning to the trail didn't help my condition. At one point I was in front of her and pulled off the trail. "Photo break?" she asked. "No, just regular break," I replied and slumped over the handlebars.

 My physical state began to improve as clouds moved in and the wind picked up, bringing a band of thunderstorms that dropped the temperature at least 15 degrees. Leah was worried about rain and sticky mud, but I was more relieved that it wasn't so hot.

 But it was a fun ride, despite my feeling out of shape and pasty, and the beauty of the region did wonders to ease the sting of having to leave Alaska behind.

 Our ride was 48 miles with 7,900 feet of climbing according to my Garmin — much of that gain accomplished in the ceaseless rolling terrain of the mountain traverse. We finished in just under seven hours, with 6:01 of moving time. Leah remarked that she was surprised by how "slow" the ride was — and I was thinking, "wow, I barely remember what it's like to average 8 mph for a whole six hours."

But even though we didn't squeeze in a full tour, Leah was happy. I was happy as well; it's nice to see firsthand all the ways that California is big and beautiful, too.