Week 3

Monday: Weight lifting, 0:40. I received six allergy shots first thing in the morning. I didn't have a reaction like last week, but I felt down for the rest of the day. The weight lifting was more than I could manage, and stopped after two sessions of 12 lifts, 12 reps at the same weights as last week.

Tuesday: Run, 1:18,  6.2 miles, 1,171 feet climbing. Moderate pace.

Wednesday: Mountain bike, 4:48, 41.2 miles, 5,412 feet climbing. This was a pleasant afternoon ride where I traced a scenic, mostly dirt route from home to Gold Hill. There were plenty of steep climbs, but for the most part I rode about as easy as possible for myself on this type of terrain. I've been aiming to track my heart rate more closely, since my resting heart rate has remained noticeably higher since I moved to Colorado in April. When my breathing issues were at their worst — July and August — my exercise heart rates were lower than usual. But now that I'm feeling better, I'm also exercising with a higher heart rate. This ride earned Strava's "Epic Suffer Score" of 312 with a heart rate above 166 for 47% of the ride. It's perplexing, because this ride didn't feel hard, nor was I fatigued afterward. Still, I've decided to make an effort to go even easier on my long rides, although I'm not sure that's possible (at some point you're just not going to get up a hill.)

Thursday: Weight lifting, 0:40; Treadmill intervals, 3 miles, 0:30. Since I was feeling better for this gym session, I went through a series of treadmill intervals of 2 minutes slow, 2 minutes fast up to 6-minute-mile pace. The results were similar to last week — my highest heart rate was 191. The weight-lifting session was great. I'm in that beginner period that leads to fast improvements. It's so much more fun than going in the opposite direction.


Friday: Run, 1:26, 6 miles, 1,654 feet climbing. Our friend Roger came for a visit from Australia. He's been to Boulder before, but never up the iconic Flatirons, so I took him for a jaunt up Bear Peak.

Saturday: Run, 3:26, 12.5 miles, 4,110 feet climbing. Beat and Roger were headed out for an 18-mile run, but I decided to leave later and run a shorter route. I ran down Eldorado Canyon and cut across to Shadow Canyon on a somewhat overgrown social trail with a lot of shoulder-high grass. Despite walking slowly along this trail, I still had a breathing reaction where it felt like my chest and throat were tightening. This is one of the reasons I prefer running alone, because I don't feel as self-conscious about slowing way down or stopping for a while to sit on a rock. Beat and Roger caught up to me while I was resting. We left the grassy slope, and I began to feel much better while marching at Beat's pace up steep Shadow Canyon. So, another run with a mild breathing reaction, but I handled it much better than my episode two weeks ago. The breathing reaction happened when my heart rate was in the low 140s. But overall this was another high-heart-rate effort with a Strava "Suffer Score" of 405. This score is a generic calculation based on distance, elevation change, and typical heart rates. So a 405 score should be interpreted as a very hard run, rather than the recreational jaunt that I view it as. It's a little too soon to determine whether this is a bad thing, or just my own individual status quo.

 Sunday: Hike, 6:00, 14.3 miles, 3,185 feet climbing. We offered to take Roger on a hike into the high country, and headed to Hessie for an out-and-back up to Devil's Thumb Pass. There was surprisingly only slightly more snow on these slopes than there was a month ago, but temperatures were lower and the wind was fierce.

 Before this outing, I was not aware that ptarmigans lived in Colorado. We spent some time cooing at an adorable group of white-tailed ptarmigans and marveling at their living conditions. Gusts as high as 40mph would rip across the slope, and they just shut their cute little eyes and burrowed into the snow.

 Beat on Devil's Thumb Pass. High winds and the fast-approaching sunset deterred us from continuing along the Continental Divide to King Lake Pass.

Beat and Roger celebrating our miniature "epic" in the Colorado high country.

Total: 18:48, 41.2 miles ride, 42 miles run, 15,535 feet climbing. This felt like a good training week, except for the brief breathing issues on Saturday, and perhaps too little biking. I'm feeling better every week. I do need to continue to monitor my heart rate, as that may be a concern. (I might be sick. I might be out of shape (i.e. good endurance, less cardiovascular fitness.) I might be overtrained. I know. I have this theory about altitude adaptation that I'm currently researching. Also, the allergy shots are not easy on my body. That's definitely an additional stressor.) But all-in-all, more positive directions. All we need is a little more snow, lower than 11,000 feet.

Eight years later

On this day in 2008 ...

On November 1, 2008, I sat in front of my clunky desktop PC in Juneau, Alaska, pondering what I wanted to do with this PDF file I'd spent a few months creating. It was a book I cobbled together from personal essays and blog posts, about this obscure thing I did earlier in the year — riding a fat bike 350 miles over the Alaska Range and into the frigid Interior — and a loose timeline of past events to provide some explanation about how a Mormon girl from Utah with no athletic talent and lots of fears could reach that point.

My blog was as popular as it would ever be, with nearly 100,000 hits per month, and I figured at least a small percentage of readers would be interested enough in the story to buy a book. But would anyone else be interested? Selling a book is a difficult prospect. In order to catch the attention of publishers, the story has to appeal to a larger audience than the few interested in esoteric outdoor sports. Even if the book did sell, the process could take years. I was a journalist, and the thought of "Ghost Trails" being released in 2011 or 2012 — when not even I would care about the story anymore — seemed like a pointless endeavor. So on that (likely rainy) November evening eight years ago, I wavered at a self-publishing Web site, contemplating the possibilities. Could it be that easy?

That's how I started down this path of writing and publishing adventure memoirs. It's been a sometimes bumpy but mostly enjoyable ride. I'm still a journalist at heart, and think of my own writing as such. It's not high literature and it's not painstakingly revised, but it's real, occasionally raw, and as honest as I can make it, within the confines of my own flawed memory. I want my stories to be timely, but I've been known to sit on a project for years (in fact, I'm trying to revive a 2012 project right now.) In the midst of the learning process, I've managed to sell tens of thousands of books. And this is a cliche, but my greatest reward has been comments from people who found inspiration and embarked on a new adventure. Overall, the results have been pretty good for a Mormon girl from Utah with no athletic talent, lots of fears, and exhaustive dedication to weird endeavors that will never appeal to the mass market.

Now it's November 1, 2016, a date I specifically chose to release "Into the North Wind." Today this "Ghost Trails" sequel becomes available on Amazon and other online retailers. I was planning to write something more to celebrate the release, but I've been feeling a little ambivalent about it as of late. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's this phase I'm going through. Today I was working on queries for the Guardian, and thought, "But I don't really want to be a writer. I should try to get more editing work. Maybe I can find a coach who will know a revolutionary way out of my breathing malaise, and I'll start training hard. Because if I was just a little more tired every day, I wouldn't spend so much time worrying about writing."

I am grateful to everyone who bought "Into the North Wind" so far. I've sold 150 copies of the photo book, which was more than I expected and more than made the project worth it. The best journalism combines photos and words, and it was fun to finally do this in book format. There are still a few more copies available at this link:
http://www.arcticglasspress.net/agp/?wpsc-product=into-the-north-wind

There's also a less expensive regular (black and white) paperback on Amazon:
Into the North Wind: A Thousand-mile Bicycle Adventure Across Frozen Alaska

And finally the Kindle version, which can also be read on phones and iPads using a free app from Amazon.
Into the North Wind

As always, I appreciate your support over all these years. Thank you!

Week 2

 Monday: Mountain bike, 3:53, 37.9 miles, 3,969 feet climbing. This week started out with a solid ride on Monday afternoon. I was still grumpy about my weekend fails, so I didn't take any photos, but enjoyed a beautiful autumn ride with bare trees, snow-capped peaks, and temperatures approaching 80. As I was descending the upper (gravel) section of Sugarloaf Road, I swung around a corner at high speed and encountered a cow moose standing on the right side of the road. I screeched my brakes and made a quick stop. She lowered her ears, bristled the hair on her back, and took a few steps toward me. I swung my bike in front of me and backed toward the trees, all but certain I was going to have to shimmy up one of them because she was about to charge. Just then a white car approached. The driver stopped and asked if I wanted him to accompany me past the moose. I nodded gratefully, and the moose went back to grazing on bushes as we rolled past. This was the third most unnerving moose encounter I've had. The first two were in Alaska of course, and one was just two years ago in Anchorage.

The semi that got stuck a week ago

Tuesday: Rest. I'd intended to go for a short run, but I only have about an hour to spare on Tuesdays, and this hour was taken up by failed efforts to dig out a large box truck that had become stuck on our dirt road. This was the sixth installment of Beat's CNC machine delivery saga, after one partial delivery, three no-shows, and one large semi-truck that also became stuck in the middle of the road for 13 hours. Anyway, we're learning more about life on a narrow mountain road, and we hope the delivery company is wiser now as well. The digging was hard work so this didn't really feel like a rest day. Beat eventually pulled the box truck out himself with a Toyota Tundra that he recently bought from a friend.

Wednesday: Treadmill, 0:30, 3.5 miles. Weightlifting, 0:40. My breathing struggles seem to have two triggers — being outside, and sometimes (not always), hard efforts. And "hard" effort isn't the right term, because my worst difficulties usually crop up during moderate efforts (heart rate 150-160bpm.) Anyway, a friend suggested trying a high-intensity workout indoors, which is a good idea. I set out to boost my heart rate to 185 on the treadmill by running two-minute intervals: two minutes jogging at 12:00-minute-mile pace, and two minutes increasing the pace 0:30 each time. I eventually boosted the speed to 6:00-minute-mile pace and got my heart rate up to 192. I made it through two minutes before I felt nauseated and had a horrible side stitch, but had no breathing issues. I think treadmill intervals work because it's a controlled, low-risk environment, which vastly reduces anxiety. As others have suggested and as I've suspected, anxiety about "not breathing" plays a large role in my attacks. So I plan to continue with these intervals during my gym sessions, to see whether I improve. At the very least, it's nice to know that underneath all of the mucous and anxiety, there's still a modicum of high-end fitness left in my body.

I should also talk about my allergy shots, which didn't go so well. I made it through two rounds of shots before I had a reaction — my left arm became noticeably swollen and I felt some chest tightness. The nurse noted some wheezing, so they cut the session short. This was disappointing, as I really want to continue with the cluster immunotherapy and get this over with (if I have one more reaction, I have to go to single shots, which will take months.) At the same time, I experienced breathing reactions when I wasn't exercising. This means it's likely I have allergic asthma. Maybe allergy shots will actually work. One can hope.

Thursday: Mountain bike, 1:41, 13.3 miles, 2,299 feet climbing. This was a medium-effort ride with no issues.

Friday: Treadmill, 0:30, 3.5 miles. Weightlifting, 0:40. I did the same treadmill intervals with the same results. This day I wore my own heart rate monitor and saw 197(!!) I'm not sure if this is accurate, but it was a surprise as I'd long assumed that my anaerobic threshold was in the mid-180s. I also didn't feel nauseated this time and really enjoyed running a six-minute-mile pace, but doubt I could hold it much longer than two minutes. The weightlifting session went well. I was already able to boost a few of the weights on my fourth session overall.

 Saturday: Mountain bike, 2:36, 18.6 miles, 2,948 feet climbing. I tried out this allergy mask, which I got in pink because it's a little less scary, and also felt a little less self-conscious because it's so close to Halloween. Anyway, I didn't love it. Even on my best days, my face is a nonstop faucet of snot, so constantly pulling it down to blow snot rockets probably negated its effectiveness. I don't see myself using it a lot in the winter, but I think it may be helpful in the spring and summer during high-pollen and wildfire smoke days.

 Sunday: Hike, 4:30, 8.5 miles, 3,253 feet climbing. This week was a scorcher, with temperatures climbing into the 80s nearly every day. One positive aspect of record high temperatures is clearing the steep and avalanche-prone mountains of snow, so I thought it would be fun to go hiking on Sunday.

 We headed to South Arapaho Peak. At 13,400 feet, it's one of the more prominent mountains in the Indian Peaks. As we expected, it was very windy and not warm, but in some aspects not all that different from the time my friends and I hiked up James Peak in July.

 Snow-filled wind shelter at the peak. Okay, it was a lot windier and colder than James Peak was in July, but with a soft shell and mittens I was perfectly comfortable. I did have difficulty breathing for the last 1,000 feet to the summit. Up here, my heart was beating 140-150 and I was gasping. I had to stop and take breaks to catch my breath. Beat asked why I was moving so slow, but I couldn't move any faster. It was perplexing. I suppose this makes some sense, though. I've tried to pretend that altitude isn't an issue for me, but I'm beginning to suspect that it may be a major factor. If I'm a poor breather in general, it makes sense I'd do worse at 13,000 feet. Either way, this theory will need more experimenting and I doubt I'll get too many more chances to hit 13,000+ feet before winter clamps down.

Despite gasping slowness, this was a fun hike, although I turned my ankle on the way down and collapsed onto my back, smacking my head. It hurt something fierce but thankfully didn't result in injury. My left ankle has been a bit of a liability ever since I broke it after tripping while carrying a television down a flight of stairs when I was 19 years old, and never went to the doctor (but it was definitely fractured at the very least.) The dumb things we do when we're young, eh? (Says the 37-year-old who's recently become quite bad at breathing.)

Total: 15 hours, 69.8 miles ride, 15.5 miles run, 12,479 feet climbing. All in all, this was a good week. I may have to do 1.5 rounds of allergy shots this week (I hope this works out.) So I'll have to continue to tread lightly. But I'm satisfied with 15 hours of effort.