Sequestered somewhere safe

This week was a fitness test of sorts for me — I wanted to put in a string of hard efforts to see whether my breathing and heart rate remained consistent throughout. One goal was to top 20,000 feet of climbing — I did that with 21,507 — with around 20 hours on the move, and I did that too. It was a good week — long and meandering, given to beauty and reflection.

Wednesday was Beat's birthday. While I'd be thinking about it all week, the fact embarrassingly slipped my mind that morning. We were standing at the back door, watching the hummingbirds and talking about the day, when he said, "so my computer just reminded me it's my birthday." He'd forgotten too. I asked him what he wanted to do, and surprisingly he decided on a long bike commute from work, via the steep Betasso Link Trail, Magnolia Road — four miles of pavement with a 12 percent average grade — then onto rolling gravel and the flooded county road that would take us home. It was an interesting choice for a birthday but ultimately a beautiful ride. Churning up Magnolia Road, there was plenty of time to ponder birthdays and summer and the relentless march of life.

Riding the Betasso Link Trail, climbing 800 feet of difficult singletrack mostly to avoid a road tunnel.

One of my Facebook friends recently posted a thread of comments that I've been thinking about this week. Mike lives in Salt Lake City, and he's someone who I met only briefly, after the 2013 Bryce 100 race near Bryce Canyon. Our initial interaction is one I don't remember well. If it weren't for the strange universe of social media, both of us likely would have soon forgotten the other. But for the past four years, I've frequently nodded in agreement with the words he writes. Our viewpoints match on many levels. Now Facebook's algorithms assume he's one of my close friends and prioritize his updates. I find this both amusing and unsettling — and I imagine this happens similarly with online dating sites — that software can know us better than we know ourselves.

His most recent update was a simple one — "AMA" or ask me anything. One person asked him, "why do you run so much?" His reply: "I don't know the answer, really. The closest I can get to an answer to that is that I have a lot of passion and having a well like long-distance running assures that it's sequestered somewhere safe. There are a lot of ways in which I regret it."

Beat at an overlook on Magnolia. It was a beautiful evening.

This is something I can't help but mull over as I spent another large chunk of a week in pursuit of movement, dreaming of larger and longer pursuits. And of course there aren't simple answers, which is why I have a 12-year-old blog that effectively churns through this question, again and again. But Mike's answer is a good one. We may be (relatively) intelligent creatures, but we're also creatures with eons' worth of primordial energy coursing through our veins. There was a time when all of this energy was paramount to survival, but now there's too much to spare. It's all too common to succumb to neuroses, anxiety, boredom, and illness as our lives become more comfortable. It's an overly simplistic description of a complicated issue, but the development is illustrated in societies that only recently adopted modern lifestyles. Technology improved quality of life in some ways, and lessened it in many others. (New Yorker article here.)

Approaching Twin Sisters Peak on a soon-to-be-flooded county road.

The problems of the world are large, and they appear as though they're becoming larger. As individuals in a world of seven billion people, confronting these problems feels logically and emotionally like hanging off a railing of the Titanic with a bailing bucket in one hand. Despair seems to be the most natural reaction, and yet we still need to live our lives. We still need to forge hope, which we nurture through our interactions with other people. By improving understanding and empathy, we stand a better chance of fostering the cooperation and innovation necessary to confront humanity's sweeping problems.

Hope is forged by embracing the future. But I believe despair is best conquered by embracing the past. This is why long-distance runners, cyclists, swimmers, and others are often most happy in the midst of their pursuits. Within these movements we create a primitive world where we can generate and thrive on our own energy. Our passion — the energy all too easily funneled into worry and pettiness and rage — is directed to the peaceful rhythm of forward motion. When we pursue this motion with others, we connect with them on a fundamental level, which is the basis of intimacy. And when we run alone, we travel into a space that's almost effortlessly free of the usual barrage of thoughts and worries. If we sat on a couch all day, we'd only become more isolated, more physically unwell, and more anxious. Comfort is its own oxymoron.

Beautiful light in the evening. I was soaked at this point because my rear wheel stalled out
in a deep, sludgy mud puddle, and I tipped over and submerged most of my body.

Mike said in some ways he regrets long-distance running. This is true as well. It's a selfish pursuit, absolutely — most everything that humans do could ultimately be categorized as selfish. Is running any more of a waste of time than playing music or painting or planting a garden when there is a supermarket down the street offering the same products more efficiently and cost-effectively? It's all up for debate at this point in history. We can decide our role in the world is meaningless, or we can decide what's meaningful to us and those we care about. Staying present, staying connected, staying away from despair — that all means something.

Can long-distance motion decrease our quality of life, leave us injured, make us sick? Of course. Nothing in life is risk-free. Am I sick because of my lifestyle? Possibly. Like many diseases, thyroid issues are becoming increasingly more prevalent. The cause is as likely to be toxins in the environment or luck of the genetic draw as anything else. I do think it's interesting that I became hyperthyroid when I became sick. My body is still exuding excess energy even as it deteriorates.

Now that I'm less sick, I certainly appreciate being less likely to have a deadly thyroid storm. But one of my favorite aspects of newfound health (for which I have modern medical science to thank) is how great I feel now, compared to several months ago. I don't suddenly have all this extra fitness where I'm so much faster and stronger than I used to be. I'm just happier ... less desperate ... as though there's nothing I can do that will leave me flattened (of course there is.) Still, I can run the difficult Walker Ranch loop on Monday, "PR" my Tuesday-afternoon routine hilly gravel 10K, pedal five hours for Beat's birthday on Wednesday, increase all of my weights during my gym routine on Thursday, and enthusiastically agree when Eszter wants to run Boulder's classic "Five-Peak Skyline Traverse" on Friday.

Boulder's mountain skyline is comprised of five summits — Sanitas, Flagstaff, Green, Bear and South Boulder. Any one of these is a solid effort, so to tackle all five in one go has become a popular hiking challenge (or running, or run-hiking in my case.) Our route was 22.5 miles with 6,600 feet of climbing, traveling north to south. Even though Eszter grew up in Boulder, several of the trails were still new to her. I started out in Boulder as a runner (run-hiker), so the only new ground I covered was wandering around Flagstaff as we attempted to find the summit. We went to the overlook, but I think it's still 100 or so feet to the true summit. I guess that means we'll have to go back.

Selfie from the top of Green, where we "made it count" by scrambling up to the geographic marker. I run these mountains frequently, but it's rare for me to scramble all the way to the true summits, being slightly technical and ultimately meaningless, as is the case with many endeavors. It is fun to embrace an arbitrary challenge and make it count.

Challenges are good, but this run was pure fun. We watched the skies for intermittent thunderstorms, jogged through mud beside vibrantly green hillsides and wildflowers, stuck close together and chatted about life and everything else for most of seven hours. 

Watching a storm move in from South Boulder Peak. Eszter was curious about scouting out a more aesthetic route off the mountain by exploring a ridge Beat's friend calls "Hairy Backside" — thus avoiding the out-and-back to the summit and completing a true traverse. I was naturally frightened by the characterization "Hairy Backside." As is often the case, I let my fears get the better of me and talked her out of it. The weather proved a strong deterrent as well, with thunder rumbling closer.

South Boulder selfie by Eszter 

Fearfulness is my default setting and I battle it every day. Were it not for my prioritization of adventure over pure self-preservation, I probably would have been paralyzed by fear long ago, sitting on a couch somewhere and watching these summer thunderstorms, wide-eyed and trembling despite shelter and safety. That I've been able to accomplish the adventures I've accomplished is still a source of bemusement for me, a testament of the possibilities when we reject our worst instincts. Of course it would have been even better to explore Hairy Backside. But we were both glad for the shelter as a deluge of rain and hail hit us while we descended beneath the tree cover of Shadow Canyon. Every time thunder clapped, Eszter yelled, "Boom!" and we both laughed. Are humans inclined toward silliness because everything we touch is dangerous? Just something else to ponder.

Fearfulness did get the better of me this weekend when Beat and I considered heading into the high mountains for a mud/posthole/snowshoe adventure. After poring over any information I could find online, I became convinced there was risk of wet slab avalanches on the upper slopes. Maybe — or maybe there was barely any snow on the trails we hoped to hike. I won't know now. My inclination is to avoid snowy mountains altogether. I do hope I'll face this fear eventually.

Eldorado Canyon.

Instead we rode bikes on Saturday and committed to a hard run on Sunday. I struggled from the beginning; it was a warm afternoon and the UV index was severe. Also, my legs were a touch dead. How did that happen? In all of my experience, this is usually the place where training "counts." Our bodies can do what our bodies can do; it's usually more than we think, and not necessarily as much as we'd like, but it's a fairly straightforward progression. More interesting, in my experience, is the practice of shifting perspective. So it's hot and my legs are dead — why should that matter? No reason to focus on these negative details when the hillsides are vibrantly green and wildflowers line the trail, and as always it's a great day to be alive and moving through the world.

Exploring a climbing access trail in Eldorado Canyon.

I plodded up Shadow Canyon, my long-sleeve shirt stiff with dried sweat and the skin on the back of my neck still radiating solar heat into a buff. I suppose I can't completely shift my perspective, nor do I have an endless well of energy. Sometimes, only fumes remain. What we do with that matters more.

The plains are so green these days.

Someone asked Mike why he would post an "Ask Me Anything" request. He had an introspective answer to this question as well:

"I believe in vulnerability as a practice. Every good thing I've ever had in my life has come from a place where I could have failed (and often have). If we're to have the courage to love and be loved when it really matters and the stakes are high and we're scared, we need to know how to lay it bare."

In that spirit, if you've made it this far into this rambling post, I invite you to "Ask Me Anything." Post a comment or e-mail jillhomer66@hotmail.com. I'll write answers for my next blog post. If I feel the question is inappropriate there's a chance I'll ignore it, but I hope to achieve a similar vulnerability. 

(Not) born to run

This weekend, for the first time since January and my thyroid diagnosis and dropping out of the Iditarod, I returned to a training mentality. Three runs over the weekend were less "gently test the waters" and more "visualize those far-reaching places where my body is laid bare and my mind soars, and assess whether I can thrive — let alone survive — on the journey to those places." There is still plenty of gentle experimenting in everything I do — I've conditioned myself to fear a fast heart rate and any form of stress, so I don't see myself charging up or down mountains anytime soon. But when I can lope along at a steady 150-160 beats per minute with strong legs and lungs, nothing feels better. I just want to do that forever. 

Eszter and Scott are in town for a couple of weeks amid their nomadic wanderings, and joined Beat and me on our long run in Golden Gate Park on Sunday. Golden Gate is a ripple of foothills — 7,000 to 9,000 feet — with endlessly steep and rocky trails, loose chunder gullies, and spring runoff surging through the creeks (luckily all spanned by some form of bridge, as my shaky phobia rears its ugly face amid rapids of any size.) Negotiating semi-technical terrain during a "run" is not a strength of mine by any stretch of the imagination, and I always feel a little intimidated when traveling with folks who are more athletic than I am, even if they're professed non-runners. This is especially true in my current state of fitness, when I never really know whether I'm going to have a "good day" or a "bad day" — the bad days being those when I might start gasping while walking 20-minute-miles. Happily, Eszter and Scott are easy-going and fun. The outing passed quickly amid good conversation about everything from religion to the ethics of cell phone use.

From Windy Peak, this is one of Eszter's classic photo genres: "people pointing at things in the distance." The four of us stopped at our looping route's "aid station" (a semi-frozen gallon jug of water in our Subaru) at mile 17, and then Beat and I continued for seven more miles into a more mysterious and quiet segment of the park. The granite crags and ponderosa pine forests reminded me of the northern Sierras, sparking happy memories of novice runs in the Tahoe area in 2011. Back then, my personal limits were still deeply obscured and anything felt possible.

Earlier in the day, while we hiked up Windy Peak, the four of us talked about how we got our start with active lifestyles. One of several writing projects I'm dabbling with right now deals with my running journey. A piece of the narrative puzzle came back recently when I read Mary's blog post about being a young runner. Why was I never a young runner? There was the time I followed a cute boy to cross-country tryouts during my sophomore year in high school, but only made it as far as waiting in the bleachers and watching girls race around the track for several minutes before slinking away unnoticed. For the most part I was fiercely anti-sport, writing articles for my high school newspaper about the insignificance of exercise, and forging a teenage identity around being part of a "punk" group at odds with the "jocks."

It went back to seventh grade, when students had their athletic aptitude assessed by the Presidential Fitness Test. One of these tests was the mile run, for which 12-year-old girls were given an arbitrary standard of 11 minutes and 5 seconds. For healthy, normal-weight girls — of which I was — an 11-minute-mile was supposed to be the bare minimum of what we could achieve with our basic training from gym class. I'd already experienced humiliating failures in pull-ups, tumbling, rope climbing, and other activities that may have been so bad they've now been completely purged from my memory. But I was going to run that mile. I knew I could run that mile.

I do not remember my time for the mile. The memory now comes in flashes, a sensation of my heart pumping sludge near the end of that lap around the grassy grounds surrounding my middle school. It was overcast in the springtime, and the scent of freshly mown grass made my eyes water. My legs ached as I sprinted toward my gym teacher, who was holding her watch and shaking her head. There were other girls sitting in the grass nearby, and in my memory they were smirking and giggling quietly. As a even younger child I'd always suspected, but now I knew without a doubt — I was desperately nonathletic.

I've been thinking more about these moments from my youth, and how my status as a "desperately nonathletic" person has followed me ever since. Of course the simplistic deconstruction of this narrative will assume I will always have something to prove, and my ego has driven many of the decisions I've made as an adult. If the standard is running a not-slow mile or completing an unassisted pull-up, I still haven't had much success. Because as the years pass, my limits become more predictable, and my body becomes less reliable — I realize that all of my running is not really about running. It never was, which is why I never cared to "race" until I discovered a race that could guide me 100 miles through the Alaska wilderness, and why I never cared to "run" until I watched friends travel light and fast into distant dreamscapes beyond Juneau's mountain ridges. Regardless of my capabilities and what arbitrary goals I can achieve, this will always be a journey. This weekend was a simple but good one, indeed. 

Back to summer

 The seasons change constantly in the Rocky Mountains. For all those days of summer we had in February, we enjoyed our fair share of wintry days in May. I mostly dread summer and didn't want it to end, but last week's three feet of snow disappeared as rapidly as it came. 

There were three days over the weekend when everything was a mess. Luckily we plowed the road on Friday, so by Saturday at least that was available for running — albeit through many puddles and shoe-sucking mud. Beat wanted to venture onto the trails, but shin deep slush was too strong a demotivater. We only made it about 200 yards, and I was the one who cried uncle.

 Trail conditions were significantly better on Sunday, so we ran the Walker Ranch loop. There was still plenty of slushy, splashy fun to soak the shoes.

 I was in the midst of what I've come to think of as a "bad week," experiencing similar symptoms to my winter struggles — labored breathing, feeling tapped out at a low heart rate (140s), and also feeling more off balance than normal. There were also a few other symptoms unrelated to exercise — a rash across both shins reappeared for the first time in months, I woke up several times in the night, and my thoughts became fuzzier.

I know many of these symptoms could be "poor recovery," but it felt like I might be hyperthyroid again. When I asked a physician friend how likely it was to swing between too much and too little thyroid hormone on a weekly basis, she theorized that my body was just adjusting to new normals after being hyperthyroid for so long. It still feels as though I fluctuate between the symptoms of two extremes — one week I feel sleepy and cold and my hair falls out, and the next I'm having trouble breathing again. Always between the two are increasingly longer strings of "good days," where I feel much closer to my "old normal." I'm certainly not the only one on this kind of rollercoaster — I've found many such discussions online. Most of those people talk about fine-tuning medications, nailing down "triggers" — mostly food- and allergy-related — and removing stressors to avoid the downswings.

 Avoiding stressors — I recognize that I can and possibly should dial back my efforts during "bad weeks." In a way, I already do, since my breathing prevents me from pushing myself, and motivation tends to decrease as well. I still carry the "so be it" mindset that I forged during the winter, when I didn't quite know what was wrong with my body. Whatever it was affected the activities that bring me joy, but these activities didn't seem to make it any worse. I decided I was going to live my life through it, rather than around it. This still holds if "it" is thyroid disease. All of the medical evidence shows that my hormone levels have been consistently dropping and I'm in a healthy place right now. If the rest of my body takes more time to catch up, or even if it there's always these types of fluctuations, so be it.

 By Monday, as though by magic, I was already feeling better. This came after a night of poor sleep (also increasingly more rare), when I woke up at sunrise. (Which happens at 5:30 a.m. this time of year. Too early. Bah, summer.) There was a lovely skiff of new snow on the hillsides. It looked like snowline dropped to 8,000 feet overnight.

 I set out for a run toward Bear Peak, and it was a little too soon for that trail. Through the burn, a few more trees had fallen down, and I lost the trail amid slushy drifts that were occasionally thigh deep. On the way down, I wrenched my left ankle in the melted space underneath a concrete snow drift. It wasn't injured in any way, just sore, which made me grumpy. It didn't require hobbling, but I lost my desire. Any ambitions to make up for all those shorter snow days with a "long run" faded, and I turned around and mostly walked home.

For good measure I rested on Tuesday, and set out on Wednesday for a ride into town. One thing that summer always reignites is a strong desire to explore new places, which means longer and longer rides if I set out from home. I suppose if I can make the time, there's nothing wrong with this. The rear tire on my mountain bike developed a bubble. Rather than risk tire failure, I borrowed the fat bike that I rode to Nome, which is technically Beat's bike. The Eriksen had an unfamiliar handlebar setup and a saddle that I strongly dislike, but it felt right to be reunited with this bike. I never had a chance to ride "Erik" in Alaska this year, and I'd missed him. The temperature had warmed to 80 degrees, and there was a fierce downslope wind generating violent gusts. I was being tossed all over the road; eventually I just had to creep along the switchbacking descents, and then creep forward because much of the uphill riding was due west. Well, I chose this.

My body felt strong, which never fails to be an empowering sensation after these brief downturns. The 80-degree temps felt comfortable (A nice change from feeling overheated while running through the slush on Sunday, when it was sprinkling rain and the temperature was much cooler.) The wind buffeted me around, which was oddly motivating, like a boxer egging on his opponent. Without too much effort, I pedaled upward through the gales, eventually climbing onto a network of closed forest roads. There are so many of these roads in Colorado that I'd love to spend a summer exploring, if only I had the strength and the time — they're always rocky and steep, and this time of year they're little more than rutted stream beds. I hoped to sniff out a link to the West Mag trails and Eldora, but the snow was still unworkably deep above 9,000 feet. I trudged along for a half hour while closely watching the time (because I hoped to reach Boulder by 5 p.m.) My feet were numb and the icy snow cut my shins, which were still raw from the now-faded rash. Time moved too quickly, and I was getting nowhere. Finally, I conceded. "This probably isn't the best choice."

So I turned around, in time to catch a glimpse of the tiniest train approaching Rollinsville. It was 5:30 by the time I rolled into the Google parking lot, which would make this a 6.5-hour ride, 57 miles, 6,500 feet of climbing. That's about how far I need to roam to visit entirely new places now. With luck that will keep expanding. With more luck I'll continue to be up for such wanderings, even when I can't be as fast as strong as I think I should be. It's still my best way to live.