Getting my lungs back

After I left the Tour Divide, I spent the next week convalescing at my parents' house and feeling half dead. Temperatures in Salt Lake City were well into the 100s, and I could understand why weather services issue heat warnings for the elderly and infirmed. My body was so weak that I could barely cope with anything. I slept up to twelve hours a day, wheezed when I spoke, and became desperately winded while walking with my mother across a Target parking lot. An albuterol inhaler helped, but two different antibiotics didn't seem to do anything. After I returned to California, my doctor speculated I'd developed a viral pneumonia. My resting heart rate was still in the 90s, and he was alarmed that I'd damaged my heart. Several tests confirmed normal heart function, and enough time passed that concerns about pulmonary embolism also declined.

With its harsh symptoms and recovery, the "Tour Divide lung crud" is as sick as I've ever been. Admittedly I harbored jealousy about other Tour Dividers who bounced back from their respiratory illnesses as I struggled through a slow walk around the neighborhood, clutching an inhaler and frequently stopping to catch my breath on the day I'd hoped to finish the race. It's humbling to realize how quickly fitness can be reduced to zero, and this illness has been a reminder to never take health and vitality for granted. Physically moving through the world is my greatest source of joy, and it's also a gift that could be snatched away at any time, without warning.

I don't need to go into detail about how I spent the month of July, but it was a slow recovery that got a boost once I started running again. I wore a heart rate monitor and went for lethargic jogs. At first I couldn't breathe when my heart rate spiked to the high 130s. But before too long I didn't become winded until the 140s, and then the 150s. My usual tempo pace falls into the 160s, and I first achieved that about three weeks ago. Every run felt like an improvement to my lung health, while a couple of bike rides set me back. It was more difficult to control my exertion levels on the bike, and I had an asthma attack while mountain biking in Santa Cruz with my friend Jan. This prompted me to cancel a backpacking trip the following weekend, and I thought I would probably lose the rest of summer to the lung crud.

Still, I continued to make improvements with running, and boosted my mileage as I clung to hope for late summer adventures. I received an invitation to join friends on a five-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. Concerns about the altitude and other commitments prompted me to say no, but at the last minute I decided to go. It was a wonderful trip that I'll post about soon, but felt especially encouraged by a couple of outings in Salt Lake City that I tacked on at the end. It was just five weeks ago that I couldn't walk along a flat sidewalk without gasping. By Aug. 8, I felt strong enough to attempt Lone Peak.

Lone Peak is my childhood mountain. I used to gaze up at its higher slopes while walking to school. Looming over the southeastern corner of the Salt Lake Valley, Lone Peak is a broad massif with a prominent point 7,000 feet above the valley floor. If you start from the valley, you have to climb all of those 7,000 feet, and the loose-dirt trail that gains 1,200 feet per mile is the easy part. At 9,000 feet elevation the trail effectively ends, and the next 2,500 vertical feet entail difficult route-finding up a boulder-choked cirque, scrambling up rocky gullies and traversing a tricky knife ridge. I've summited Lone six or seven times in my life, and I forget how hard it is, every time.

Although it was 90 degrees in the valley, the air at 11,000 feet had a sharp bite. Still, the sky was clear, and there was almost no wind. I hesitated for long minutes over the tricky maneuvers of the knife ridge, trying to work up the nerve to wedge my Hokas into a crack or swing my whole body over a yawning couloir while clinging to an overhanging slab. My heart continued to beat steadily, as though it understood that adrenaline spikes might trigger a breathing attack that would not help the situation. I was surprised how easy it was to breathe up here. For weeks my lungs felt as though they were clogged with silt. For lack of a real medical explanation, the silt analogy is the best I have. Tight airways forced shallow breathing, but slight increases in effort seemed to help break up the "blockage." Progress was so gradual I hardly noticed, but this day was the first my lungs felt almost clear. I scrambled onto the table-sized boulder that forms Lone Peak, steadied my legs to stand amid the dizzying drops on all four sides, took a deep breath, and smiled. Then I quickly dropped back to squatting position, because damn, this peak is exposed.

After nine hours of steep hiking and scrambling on Sunday — not to mention the five days in the Wind Rivers before that — my legs were sore and creaky on Monday morning. But my lungs felt great, which is basically the same as being well-rested. I still had eight hours to kill before I needed to be at the airport, so I joined my dad for a nice jaunt up Mount Raymond and Gobbler's Knob, two 10,200-foot peaks in the heart of the Wasatch.

Dad said Mount Raymond was a bit of a scramble. It was fun scrambling, of course, and not too exposed. But my hamstrings felt shredded from lots of over-stretching on Lone Peak, and my legs were covered in cuts and bruises from less-than-graceful maneuvers. Breathing, however, remained steady. I was thrilled. What a gift this is — the ability to move through the world.

I won't take this for granted again. 

The last good day

I wrote about day eleven of the Tour Divide a month ago in the post, "On not letting go."  I promised myself that vignette was going to be the only thing I publicly wrote about the experience, but I've never been able to stick with resolutions to cut back on blogging. Rehashing each day over the past month has been cathartic, as it usually is (catharsis is 85 percent of the reason I continue to update this blog after ten long years.)

Day twelve dawned hopeful, as I rose from a patch of sage about 28 miles north of Wamsutter, Wyoming, where I'd effectively passed out after sleepily crashing my bike the previous evening. I'd pedaled 162 miles the previous day without an asthma attack, and I put most of the Great Divide Basin behind me. Watching the Northern Lights shimmering above this vast desert was one of the more incredible experiences of my life — even though I wasn't yet convinced the display wasn't just a vivid hallucination. (It was real. A severe magnetic storm on June 22 brought the strongest Aurora Borealis displays in more than a decade. Just one day after the summer solstice, far-northern latitudes were too bright to witness them. But they were quite spectacular in southern Wyoming.) Also, I'd come up with a plan to cope with my wheezy, winded status quo. The plan revolved around even lower exertion — I'd soft-pedal into dusty headwinds and walk steeper climbs. I probably wouldn't be that much slower because, well, I hadn't been that much slower.

The ride into Wamsutter was uneventful, and I reached the I-80 exit town just before 9 a.m. There was a Love's truck stop that turned out to not be a great resupply place. (They didn't have sunscreen. Who doesn't have sunscreen? Also, faster Tour Dividers had cleaned them out of all their string cheese. Boo.) But they did have fresh melon and a Subway, and anywhere I could get cheap coffee in the morning was perfect by my standards. Mike and Marketa rolled in at about 9:30 and left first, while I was outside next to a gas pump cleaning my bike with the free paper towels. I purposely waited about five more minutes for a gap to form, because I was feeling especially self-conscious about my slow pace. Mike and Marketa might encourage me to ride with them, and trying to keep up would be a sure ticket to breathing attacks.

South of town, this Tour Divide alternative to the GDMBR cut through the heart of hydraulic fracking country, with huge trucks and semi-trailers streaming through a veritable tunnel of dust. I managed to get behind a truck that was traveling at eight miles an hour — slower even than me! — and dampening down one side of the road with a water spray. This would have been a good thing for me, but trucks on the other side of the wide gravel road were kicking up even more dust as they moved into the shoulder, and the spray itself had a weird chemical smell that burned in my sinuses and throat. There was no way around the water truck without spiking my heart rate, and I could already feel my lungs closing.

About six miles past town, I stopped, looked back and thought, "Well this is it. I'm going back to Wamsutter."

But then I thought, "No, I can't quit here. Not here. Not so close to Colorado." I was convinced Colorado would save me.

This is a new section of the Tour Divide route, so it was all unknown to me. Once you pass through Wamsutter, you think you've got the hard part of the Great Divide Basin over with, but that isn't the case at all. Although you're no longer in the geographical boundary of the Basin, the shadeless sage desert continues for sixty more miles, all of the creeks are little more than patches of stagnant muddle puddles with a thick oil sheen, and fracking traffic remains heavy on dusty dirt roads. We were given cues for this section but not warned that there were no viable water sources for sixty miles. I'd planned to get water out of one of those nonexistent creeks, but luckily I am a water hoarder and left Wamsutter with nearly four liters plus two bottles of juice. Marketa wasn't so lucky and ran out of fluid fairly early in the day. I managed to catch Mike and Marketa about fifteen miles south of Wamsutter, and she was struggling.

Mike and Marketa were an interesting duo. Mike was in his 50s, from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with this laid back attitude that would convince you nothing was ever hard for him. He was an Ironman triathlete who only recently took up long-distance cycling, and bikepacking was especially new to him. He was one of those guys who watched "Ride the Divide" and thought, "Hey, I could do that," and a year later he was riding the Tour Divide at a strong pace. Marketa was just 20 years old, from the Czech Republic, and quite chipper all the time even when she was hurting. Through the communication barrier I only learned a little about her, but Mike told me she was a semi-pro mountain biker who won races in the Czech Republic.

"How did you two hook up?" I asked Mike.

Mike told me they'd leap-frogged for several days before she finally latched onto him two days earlier. Their paces were well-matched, and she seemed very happy to have someone to talk with. I gathered that Mike also didn't understand everything Marketa said to him, but seemed to be a good sport about being on the receiving end when Marketa was feeling chatty.

"Sometimes, you know, you just need to let a woman talk," he said to me knowingly. I laughed.

I enjoyed Mike and Marketa's company, and I'd stop whenever they stopped, which became more frequent as Marketa struggled without fluid on this hot, dry afternoon. Both Mike and I offered her water, but she wouldn't take it. These days, Tour Divide rules explicitly forbid accepting support from anyone — even another racer — along the trail. I admired Marketa's integrity, but the experience led me to ponder why the bikepacking community has chosen to go down this road in competitive events. The sport was pioneered from a self-supported, Fastest Known Time / Individual Time Trail standpoint. These routes can be challenged any time, and those who don't decide to line up for the "race" don't have the advantage of other riders present on the course. From a fairness standpoint, it makes sense that competitors can't share something as simple as a swig of water or a candy bar. Still — these contrivances to pretend you're all alone out there are often confusing. I chatted with others who were frequently unsure what constituted "support" — one questioned whether taking advantage of a bike shop that stayed open after closing hours was unfair, and another believed that visiting a medical clinic was not allowed under the rules. I got the sense that many people felt like they were riding on egg shells, with the SPOTs tracking their every move, and everything they did was open to misinterpretation. There aren't easy solutions to keeping this kind of self-supported, self-policed race format fair without tightening rules to encourage solitude. But I still think it's unfortunate that in an aggressively competitive ultramarathon like UTMB I can offer aid to a fellow racer, but on a weeks-long adventure like the Tour Divide, I have to stand back while another person suffers, and do nothing.

After battling a series of steep rolling hills that the road just shot straight up and down, the three of us stopped together in Savery, Wyoming, where someone from the local museum left a cooler of water out on a picnic table. Mike and I debated whether this constituted illegal support, but I argued that this was here for everyone, and even if it wasn't, we could just walk into the museum bathroom and get water there. Once we got the ethics debate out of the way, we all enjoyed the water thoroughly. I remembered that I had camped at this museum before, during my bike tour from Salt Lake City to Syracuse, New York, in 2003. Back then we set up our tents on the lawn and played with a stray cat, who I ended up giving the tuna I planned to eat for lunch the following day, because she looked hungrier than I'd ever be. "2003, huh? You really are an old-timer," Mike said to me, and I smiled. I've been a bike tourist for nearly 14 years now, and it's a major part of my personal history. There's really nothing better than traveling by bike.

I sure was excited to see this sign. Wyoming was done! My suffering was over! Of course it's ridiculous to believe that an end can be drawn by something as arbitrary as a state line, but this is the kind of mentality we foster in efforts like the Tour Divide. It's too huge to conceptualize the big picture, so we compartmentalize it into what are ultimately arbitrary pieces. "I you can make it to Butte, you can finish." "Once you leave Montana, the hardest days of climbing are behind you." "Once I escape Wyoming, all the dust is going to magically settle, my lungs are going to clear up, and I will fly!"

For tonight, I had the Brush Mountain Lodge to anticipate. Brush Mountain was my only real carrot on the route. In 2009, the proprietor of the lodge, Kirsten, walked outside and flagged me down at 10:30 at night when I was in a particularly dark emotional space. She invited me inside, fed me fresh fruit, offered a warm bed, and more than anything else, was a kind and understanding voice when I needed a friend. Of all the "support" I enjoyed in 2009, the Brush Mountain Lodge was one that truly made all the difference. I couldn't wait to go back. "I just need to make it to Brush Mountain," I had decided before the start, "and I'm as good as there."

The 23-mile climb from Savery was a grinder, and although the scenery was beautiful and I was stoked to be in Colorado, the struggles mounted early. Soon my lungs were constricting and I stopped in a cloud of mosquitoes to try to take in more water. Gasping led to panic, and this ignited another good session of bawling. I actually cried for the better part of twenty minutes, mashing pedals and gasping between sobs because this really wasn't helping with my breathing difficulties, but the mosquitoes were too thick for me to stop. I couldn't even tell you why I was so upset. Maybe I was crying because it was hard. It was just too hard. I was finally coming around to the truth that my weakened body and lungs wouldn't be able to sustain this effort, not for a thousand miles or a hundred. No amount of patience or persistence could save my race. I understood, but not out loud. Only in sobs.

I arrived at Brush Mountain just after sunset, to the customary warm reception. Mike and Marketa were there, and Kirsten was cooking up cheeseburgers for everyone. She asked about my ride and I raved about the beautiful sunset, the northern lights I'd witnessed the previous night, and all of my memories of this scenic valley and our first meeting six years ago. When coughing erupted, I tried to tamp it down with the big jug of ice water on the table. I was so incredibly happy. Even though I'd been so sad just minutes earlier, I'd gotten that emotional gunk out of my system and swung around to renewed optimism. It was going to be all right. It was all going to be all right.

That night, I posted my daily report to Facebook: "Sunburn. Dozens of mosquito bites. Lungs filled with dust. The physical challenges of the divide have been quite different this time around, and I'm not even quite sure how to battle what seems to be a worsening allergic reaction. But I made it to Brush Mountain Lodge, and it feels like coming home."

But ... be brave

Up at 9,000 feet, with frost coating my bivy sack, it was finally cool enough that I made it through the night without dousing myself in sweat ... or at least that's what I assumed. There were a few coughing bouts, but I'd become used to those. Night coughing was just part of the waste removal routine, like peeing. But the night sweats were disconcerting. They caused feverish, weird dreams and sucked all the moisture from my body, leaving me dehydrated, exhausted, and achy in the morning. If I could stay away from the night sweats, I actually woke up feeling okay. 

It helped that I woke up here, on the shoreline of Wind River Lake. It was a day-use picnic area, but I stashed my bike in the outhouse for bear safety and did a little stealth camping down the shoreline. I sat on a picnic table eating my morning bars and breathing frosty air that seemed to flow freely into my lungs. Today was going to be a good day. I could feel it.


Coasting along the Brooks Lake Road, it didn't take long before self-generated dust clouds were already aggravating my breathing. The last time I rode the Divide, this entire segment was covered in snow and mud, forcing a gooey slog that required more than three hours to travel six miles. I thought it was so terrible then, but right now, I missed it. I missed the snow. I missed the mud. The Divide had become this hot, dry, dusty, mosquitoey place that was tearing me apart.

"The only reason I got through this the first time was because 2009 was a wet and cold year," I thought. I'm fair-skinned, heat-sensitive, allergy-prone, and possibly (apparently) a little bit asthmatic. My body is just not well-designed for the summertime outdoors.

After a refreshingly frigid coast down Highway 26, I found the Lava Mountain Lodge opening up their small store at 7 a.m. I was just in time for morning coffee and a microwaved breakfast burrito. Heaven! Sarah Jansen was there and offered to let me take a shower in her room. It was tempting, as I hadn't had a shower since Helena. But I was already considering shooting for an early day in Pinedale and spending another full night indoors with lots of available fluids, in hopes of giving my ragged lungs some rest and relief. 

Once I was nicely saturated with caffeine, I started up Warm Springs Road with my new old secret weapon — cinnamon bears. Even though I'd already had protein bars and a burrito in the morning, I intended to keep a steady supply of sugar coming in throughout the day, to see if that helped with my energy levels. I'd spent the early days of the Divide really trying to make the nuts, cheese, and dried fruit diet work. Constantly needing to process complex calorie sources — and thus avoiding them when I was struggling — only seemed to deepen my physical malaise. No, candy it would have to be.

The route veered up a new segment above Union Pass, a steep and rocky climb on ATV doubletrack that emptied into a high-altitude basin with breathtaking views of the Wind River Mountains. It was one of my favorite segments of the route, and I relished the sensation of floating high above the world as I laid into the pedals with all of the cinnamon-bear-fueled energy I could muster. I just wanted to be a cyclist again, to breathe that fire again, to move freely through the world in the way I knew my body was capable. I just wanted a day that wasn't a struggle from the start ... that wasn't the same amount of struggle whether I was pushing up a hill or passed out on a picnic table ... that wasn't a struggle just to do the most basic task in a terrestrial animal's existence. I was tired of struggling to breathe.

Sarah passed shortly after the descent and complimented me on keeping up with my daily mileage goals, which I hadn't really calculated, but I was somewhere in the range of 1,300 miles on day ten. "I'm only going to get slower," I said with a resigned sigh. Sarah mentioned she was planning to stop in Boulder, which is about twelve miles past Pinedale, in hopes of getting the Great Divide Basin out of the way in one big effort the following day. I thought this might be possible for me as well, if I could clear out my congestion. I'd ride to Atlantic City during the day and tackle the Basin overnight, when the wind, dust, and heat likely wouldn't be as bad. Then I'd be in Colorado, home to high-elevation coolness and afternoon thunderstorms, and maybe, just maybe, I'd could conquer this crud, once and for all. 

Although these optimistic hopes flitted through my thoughts, my mind's wanderings increasingly slipped into the stagnant tailings pond of my frustration and malaise. I wanted to keep fighting, but why? My old mantra, "Be Brave, Be Strong," whispered from a far distance, but these words no longer had the tone of triumph and hope that they once did. "Be Strong" sounds mocking when when you're in the grips of progressively deepening physical weakness. "Be Brave" sounds sarcastic when the battle is clearly futile, and soon I only heard this phrase the way Modest Mouse sang it in what had become my favorite song to listen to on the Divide — "Be Brave" 

Well the Earth doesn't care, and we hardly even matter

We're just a bit more piss to push out its full bladder

And as our bodies break down into all their rocky little bits

Piled up under mountains of dirt, and silt,

And still the world, it don't give a shit,

But ... Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! Be brave! (Be brave!)

It may sound like I had already given up hope, but I really hadn't. I clung to the theory that dust and allergies were the root cause of my malady, that I just needed to get out of Wyoming to find relief, and that I'd be healthy again by the time I reached the hard sections in New Mexico. When the nihilistic thoughts crept in and questioned why I needed to keep pedaling, I'd argue back. "I want to be brave. I want to be strong. I want to feel alive. Isn't that enough?"

Often, people who participate in these endurance events compare the experience to living a whole life in a day. In the case of the Tour Divide, it's a few weeks, but the sentiment in the same. When I look back on my first Divide ride, I remember it as distinct periods of wide-eyed childhood, angsty adolescence, strong young adulthood, and wizened but weary older adulthood. This time around I jumped very quickly into the elderly years, and in retrospect, believe the experience served as a window into old age. My mind swirled with a barrage of hopes and dreams, and often utter awe: Look where you are! Look! But when the dullness set in, I'd stare off into the distance with a gray pall over my thoughts and emotions, and I'd begin to understand how someone could wile away the last years of their lives staring at a television. Even more than my weakened body, my mind craved a deep and dreamless sleep that wouldn't come.

I understood the desire, too, to rage, rage against the dying of the light. I devoured cinnamon bears and demanded more from my legs on the rolling descent from Union Pass. But in the Green River Valley, I ran up against a wall of wind fortified by relentless dust. A steady stream of vehicles kept the dust in motion on that bumpy road, and my breathing became alarmingly raspy. I started coughing, and then I was gasping, and then I was sprawled in the sage next to the road, clutching my chest and panicking.

I couldn't do this anymore, I couldn't do this anymore, I couldn't do this anymore ... but, breathe, breathe, breath, breath. Be brave, be brave, be brave. (Be brave!)

I managed to calm my breathing, but after that I was terrified of hard efforts, and even more scared of the clouds of dust, which I couldn't do anything about. The asthma attack had frightened me, but even more than that, it left me utterly exhausted, in a way that even cinnamon bears couldn't cure. I didn't feel sleepy, even, just empty. After the attack, there were 35 more miles into Pinedale that I remember almost nothing about.

Yet optimism stayed with me. I do remember walking into a hotel lobby, pulling down my face mask, and taking a deep breath. My lungs were so congested that it stopped short and caused me to cough violently, but I let myself believe this was my first healing breath of dust-free indoor air, which I planned to spend the next ten hours breathing. I didn't even care about a shower, or access to real food, or even sleep. Oxygen is and always will be the top priority.