Brand new camera

Date: Jan. 18 and 19
Mileage: 36.6 and 54.5
January mileage: 445.4
Hours: 3:00 (plus 3:00 at the gym) yesterday and 4:30 today
Temperature upon departure: 39 and 28
Precipitation: 1.61 inches!!! (All rain, all yesterday.)

Last week, I received an e-mail from Stephanie at Olympus. She told me she had looked at my blog, enjoyed the cycling/photography concept, and just happened to have in mind the perfect camera for me: The Olympus Stylus 770 SW. She told me she would send me one, no strings attached ... I'm sure knowing that any blogger is going to brag publicly about free gear. But what she didn't know is that I already owned an older version of this exact camera, and had been abusing it quite heavily since April. Even after I told her so, she didn't withdraw her offer. "You'll like to new version," she told me. "This one is freezeproof."

Mendenhall Lake

The sparkling new silver camera came in the mail on Thursday. Today I took it on its first ride. Not a bad day for a first shoot, and not a bad little camera. I don't have an memory card yet, and the internal memory limited me to 11 pictures. I decided this was a good thing, because I was aiming for a long ride, and I wanted to keep moving. Instead, I spent way too much time during my ride self-editing my photos. Definitely an amazing, beautiful day.

Auke Bay, with enough steam to show that is really is somewhat cold out.

Juneau had its first sunlight in nine days, coming off a string of some of the crappiest weather January can conjure. I've had people tell me they'd prefer cold winter rain to subzero temperatures. I can't even fathom that. Subzero, rare as it is here, brings all that crisp dry air and clear skies. Dress for it right, and this kind of weather is both comfortable and exciting. Rain and temperatures in the 30s, on the other hand, can only mean one thing to me as a cyclist: That I'm going to be really wet, and really miserable, and I'm eventually going to be really cold no matter what I do.

Tee Harbor

Friday was one of those "put your head down and ride" kind of days. In continuously heavy rain, especially with the kind of flooding we get against the snowpack, it only takes about a half hour for my outer "waterproof" clothing barrier to be broken. After one hour, I'm soaked through and through. And that's the way I have to ride, in temperatures in the high 30s, a 15-20 mph wind and windchills hovering between 20 and 25, for as many hours as I can endure it. I can usually hold out about three hours without completely changing my clothing. But by the end of the ride, especially if I make a single stop or, as I did yesterday, slow for a while to talk to Geoff as he runs, I usually have to spend the last half hour of the ride racked with chills, hating every minute of my miserable existence. Maybe weeks of unbroken subzero temperatures would teach me differently, but until then, there is no weather I hate more than cold rain.

SPRING! (Not really, but it doesn't take much to coax a little green around here.)

But today! Today was exactly the shot I needed. Blazing sun and temps just cold enough to refreeze all the slop. I'm on day three of my current long training push ... exercising about five hours each in four consecutive days (a little short today, a little long yesterday.) Either way, it eats up a lot of time. Geoff is training at a similar level right now, and between us, we're putting in more than a full-time job's worth of hours in the selfish pursuit of fitness. We've had to make more and more concessions in the things we normally do just to clear up the time. One of the things we've given up is grocery shopping. I thought it was pretty funny when I was eating frozen ravioli two nights in a row and spooning peanut butter out of a jar for lunch. But I think we've both started to run a bit of a calorie deficit (go figure ... keeping food out of the house is a good way to go on a diet.) I stood on the scale at the gym yesterday and learned I weigh five pounds less than I did at this time last year. No necessarily a bad thing, but I was just beginning to think that a little extra pudge might even pay off during the Ultrasport. Because there's no way I'll avoid running a calorie deficit in that event, and it's not like I'll even notice a little extra junk in the trunk once I slog out there with 60 pounds of bike and gear. This is the excuse I've drummed up to hit the ice cream ... if only we had some.

Auke Lake with Mount McGinnis in the background.

But where was I? Oh yes, the Stylus 770 SW. I had great fun with it on this sunny, beautiful day. Miles and miles of rubbing up against Power Bars in my pocket has scratched my old Olympus's viewing screen to the point of abstraction. This camera's screen was crystal clear. I am excited to test out its "freezeproof" claims. I already know it's basically bombproof. In August, I inadvertently used my old camera to break a rather rocky fall off my mountain bike, landing directly on the hip pocket that held the camera. I put a gouge in the casing nearly a millimeter deep, but the camera didn't even flicker. The Stylus 770 SW is waterproof, too. It's definitely not a top-of-the-line, professional camera. But I think pro cameras really aren't practical for cyclists. Cyclists need something small, something simple, and something that can endure a 15-foot huck off a gnarly cliff and still take pictures at the bottom. If National Geographic ever comes knocking, I'll go buy something with a zoom lens.

This little point-and-shoot Stylus really is the perfect camera for me. I'm not just being a shill by saying that. I bought the same camera long before Olympus volunteered to sponsor my blog efforts. Does a comped camera make me a sponsored photographer? I guess this is my blog, so I say it does. Be sure to click on the Olympus logo in the sidebar. Yeah Olympus!

I broke both my snowshoes

How, you might ask, does one go about breaking two individual snowshoes on the same day? By accidentally running them over with a car? No. By hucking off cliffs? Sounds fun, but no. By practicing my kickboxing with a Sitka spruce? No, it's really much more mundane than that. First, you take a pair of cheap collapsible snowshoes. Then you use them to break your own trail up a typically steep slope in Juneau, Alaska, through wet, deep, heavy, heavy snow (I mean, really, is there some kind of lead pollution in the precipitation that nobody knows about?) Fail to notice that the back end has come loose after two miles. Continue stomping around, breaking crucial plastic parts and filling up the tubes with lead-based snow. Act surprised when the back end finally snaps off. Try in vain to wedge it back on to the front. Repeat with other shoe.

I was hoping to put in a long day on my bike sometime this weekend, but the weather turned absolutely atrocious: Temperatures in the high 30s and heavy, heavy (lead-based) rain. This heavy rain has been going on for more than 24 hours, and has turned all of our snow-packed roads to precarious wet ice sheets and our trails to mush. The rain continued today. I could ride in this for sure, but I figure any more than four hours in this kind of weather only stands to teach me three things:

1.) How many changes of clothes I can pack in one drybag.
2.) How long I can endure moving mild hypothermia.
3.) How long I am willing to put up with absolute misery just to ride a bicycle.

None of these are very fun lessons to sign up for, so I rationalized putting off the long ride at least a day, if not until next week. (I could, after all, just put in three longish days on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.) Snowshoeing, on the other hand, sounded much more appealing today. Snowshoeing also stood to offer some valuable lessons:

1.) How my new GPS maps work.
2.) How much of a chance I stand in navigating myself now that I have GPS maps.
3.) How well my high-end endurance is holding up, because I have yet to find a more strenuous activity (that doesn't involve the highly unappealing act of running) than uphill snowshoeing.

So I set out up the Auke Nu trail knowing I could cut out at Spaulding Meadow and navigate myself somewhere else. I was hoping to connect with the Montana Creek trail or something similar. It's not a far distance on screen, but it was a pretty ambitious idea given the conditions. The trail was only broken to the John Muir cabin turnoff, a grand distance of about 0.8 miles. After that, I was sloshing through a foot or more of new, unbroken snow that had been condensed and softened by the rain. About two miles in, I found myself pausing every 50 steps or so to catch my breath. I felt like I was hiking at high elevation.

My right snowshoe finally broke while I was wandering above Spaulding Meadow at an elevation of about 1,500 feet. It took me 15 yards to notice, mainly because I was often sinking up to my knees in the snow, even with snowshoes on. I tried to continue, but it quickly became apparent that the half-snowshoe setup was really throwing off my balance. The other one broke off shortly after I turned around. I kept my half-showshoes on all the way down the mountain, but my heels sunk in so deep that it continued to feel like I was walking uphill.

The hike rounded out to about three and a half hours. It was shorter than planned, so I spent another two hours at the gym. I finished reading "Freakonomics." I did come home with a few other valuable lessons, too.

1.) GPS is pretty good at overall tracking, but despite its claims, it doesn't seem to make satellite connections when there is heavy tree cover ... at least, it doesn't at my slow rate of speed. My odometer listed my total moving time as 1 hour 25 minutes and my stopped time as more than 2 hours. I took my fair share of breathers, but I can guarantee I wasn't stopped for 2 hours. It also listed my final mileage as 3.5. I would estimate, based on the maps alone, definitely more than 7. The total elevation gain, 1,900 feet, seemed much more accurate.
2.) My new boots are really comfortable for hiking, but because they're about three sizes too large, I have to wear at least three pairs of socks to avoid weird rubbing. This will probably be ideal when it's minus 20 out, but it feels uncomfortably similar to walking on hot sand when it's 35.
3.) Never pin expedition hopes on a pair of no-name snowshoes purchased for $20 on eBay.

Oh well. At least I got 2 years out of them.

Slow snow

Date: Jan. 15
Mileage: 25.1
January mileage: 355.3
Hours: 3:00
Temperature upon departure: 32
Precipitation: .48"/3.5" snow

Holy cow, I had a tough ride today. It wouldn't appear that way on paper. I rode to the end of the North Douglas Highway and back.

That’s right. A 25-mile road ride with a mere 1,000 feet of elevation gain. The ride I know by heart. The ride I’ve done in as little as 1:20 on several occasions, mostly windless days in July. The ride I could barely recognize today through windblasted daggers of icicle snow as I bumped and bounced over a heavily plowed-in shoulder. The ride that kicked me endlessly sideways with wind gusts that stopped me in my tracks and constant effort that left me wheezing up the smallest of hills. And when I sat down to lunch after three hours of tough riding, I really believed I earned it.

I brought my GPS to play with the new electronic map I just received in the mail. I had a ton of fun watching the contour lines roll beside my virtual dot. I rattled off my stats as Geoff was leaving for work. “Wow, my top speed was 20.6 mph!” I told him. And then, “Wow, my average speed was 8.3 mph.”

Geoff just frowned. “That’s like running speed,” he said.

And just like that, three hours of tough riding were quantified. I felt deflated, and little bit cheated.

There’s a few truths in snowbiking that I think most would find frustrating: The truth that you will never be fairly reimbursed for your efforts, and you will never ride the same "trail" twice. I find that aspect of snowbiking intriguing, but I think that much uncertainty turns some people off. How could I be happy with 8.3 mph? On pavement? (Well, if a deep and slippery slurry strewn with hidden blocks of ice counts as pavement) Especially when I know I got so much more worked over and pedaled so much harder than I ever did during any and every time I averaged 19 mph along the same route? In a society that values speed as an absolute measure of quality, I, the snow biker, have truly failed.

And yet here I am, happy. Go figure.

On a gear-related note: When I posted about my food ideas, I received some good suggestions. So I thought I’d run this plan by the InterWeb and hope for similarly good advice. Basically, it’s a lot of clothing in a big handlebar bag. I ran through my list of potential Ultrasport clothing and packed all but my most basic layer in a random stuff sack. Then I lashed it to the handlebars and rode with it today. I was surprised to discover that all that extra bulk up front didn’t seem to affect the bike’s handling at all. There was plenty of clearance everywhere (brake area is a little tight once the pogies are on, but still perfectly workable.) Plus, that particular stuff sack was packed pretty loosely. I envision even more capacity in a compression sack, and weight doesn’t seem to be an issue (I'm not sure how much this bag weighs. Maybe six pounds?). I’m interested to hear others’ thoughts, whether or not it’s a bad idea to put that much stuff on the handlebars. Most people use front racks. I don’t think I need one, and I’d rather not buy one, but I don’t want a simple handlebar bag to become a fatal decision, either.

If you’re curious, here’s a list of the stuff I had in the handlebar bag: Down coat, heavyweight fleece pullover, base-layer polypro tights, base-layer polypro shirt, lightweight polyester longjohns, heavyweight polyester pants, liner socks, 2 pair Smartwool socks, heavy wool socks, extra liner gloves, lightweight polyester balaclava, heavyweight fleece balaclava, fleece hat, neoprene face mask, earband, underwear, big mittens.

Another interesting tidbit: I don’t use chamois. I basically haven’t for more than two years. I still own a couple pairs of ancient bike shorts that are technically padded, but the weather only allows me to wear those maybe 10 or 15 times a year. The rest of the time, I just wear whatever I want. I like the versatility. And I’ve never had any issues with the nether region. I have been thinking about a chamois for the Ultrasport, if only because the event is so, so long. But I’m almost more inclined to just stick with the stuff I know works for me. A chamois on a well-calloused butt may only cause misery.