A second reckoning of sorts

On Wednesday I woke up to bright November sunshine and unsettling dread. I don't venture very far into my personal life or politics on this blog for good reason, but I know that many people felt this way — as though we'd suddenly become strangers in our own country, poised on the precipice of a bleak future where the things we love and need will only continue to lose value: Public lands, open space, wildlife, water, friends and family who are sick or struggling, people who don't fit into the majority. And on and on. 

I don't need to rehash what's already all over the Web. Many have posted much better missives than I could write. But I was among those bewildered and distraught after Tuesday's election, much more so than I even expected. So I retreated to one thing that will, I hope, always bring comfort — moving through the outdoors. Bicycles still exist, so there's that.

 I spent much of the first two hours crying. It's true. All of these pessimistic thoughts about the future flooded in, and I did everything I could to shut them out. It's interesting what thoughts and memories took their place. In the young woods outside Nederland, I imagined approaching a stranger and asking them if they wanted to share a hug. Strangely, when I rode through town, I didn't see a soul on the streets. As though everyone just up and left.

 There was the trail where I relived the moment when I found out my grandmother died. I was 16 years old and working a day shift at Wendy's, cleaning tables when my dad came in. I remember so vividly the afternoon shadows across the carpet, so stark against the winter sunlight, and the sour smell of my rag as lukewarm water dripped through my fingers. It felt like acid. That's what I thought then. I still clench my hands when I think about it.

 There was this trail where I finally crashed on an easy surface after churning through a couple miles of chunder — loose rocks on top of loose dirt. Crashing has become such a familiar feeling — the sudden jolt, the throbbing pain, the warm blood trickling down my skin. I swore loudly until I heard a dog barking, which surprised me because I thought I was in a more remote area. I wasn't really swearing about my bloody knee, anyway.

 On the Switzerland Trail I thought about all the luck I've had, and how I reside in a place with so much beauty and opportunity, how I'm surrounded by so many smart and compassionate people. My health has continued to improve. On this day I felt almost "normal," riding easy again without any hint of hard breathing. I felt grateful for this simple ability to move freely, without anxiety and without pain. I try not to take this for granted. Just like every privlege I have in life. I try not to take it for granted, but I still do.

 There was Longs Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain mostly devoid of snow in November. I wondered if people in the future will miss winter.

 There was thick smog over the valley, and I wondered if the people in the city could taste it, if people felt acid in their breaths, like I sometimes do.

Recently I found an old iPod that I must have loaded up with music back in 2012, and relived memories from a year that seemed so wonderful. Hindsight often works that way. I climbed up Flagstaff for the first time since I had an asthma attack here a month ago, and marveled at this relative strength. Metric's "Speed the Collapse" came on, and I repeated the song a few times as I leapfrogged with another mountain biker. 

The wind presents a change of course 
A second reckoning of sorts 
We were wasted waiting for 
A comedown of revolving doors

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!