Finally caught one

Date: May 20
Mileage: 16.2
May mileage: 711.9
Temperature: 58

Snowline climbing higher

Date: May 19
Mileage: 9.8
May mileage: 695.7
Temperature: 52

The commute home

Date: May 18
Mileage: 51.4
May mileage: 684.9
Temperature: 45

For anyone who was wondering

Date: May 17
Mileage: 12.1
May mileage: 633.5
Temperature: 43

Geoff finished this year's super-low-key version of the Kokopelli Trail Race, 143 trail miles from Moab, Utah, to Fruita, Colorado. He said he came in sometime after 5 p.m. today, which I think equals 17 hours and change. He said he rode most of the day with Dave Chenault and Fred (Wilkinson?), and the three of them finished pretty close together about 45 minutes behind Pete Basinger and Chris Plesko. Not sure about the other finishers. It sounds like a pretty brutal race. I just thought I'd post the report here since it's uncertain when he'll be blogging again.

I spent the morning fishing with Brian. We came up empty, again, which I guess is pretty typical for this time of year. I don't mind at all. I'm not much of a cook and don't even know what I'd do with a king salmon if I caught one. I just like to be out on the water, breathing in sea air, laughing at Brian's "old days of Juneau" stories and looking for wildlife. A humpback whale rolled up beside us, mere feet from the boat. It blew a spout of water and we could look right down into its blowhole, it was so close. It dove and came up once more about 50 yards away, kicking its tail up for the deep dive. I tried to snap a photo but the camera's delay netted not much - a bit of a tail fin. I posted it anyway.

Also, I received a copy of "Zinn and The Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance" in the mail courtesy of Dave Trendler at VeloGear.com. It came just in the nick of time, as the brakes on my road bike went out today. Both of them, at the same time. I nearly rolled right into traffic off the Juneau-Douglas bridge, just about the busiest intersection in town. I had to coast home from work, keeping my speed under 10 mph and using the rubber on the bottom of my shoes to stop. I wiped the brake dust off my rims and adjusted the lever tension as much as I could to no avail. I know how to replace brake pads but there's still rubber left on the current pads. It doesn't make sense that they wouldn't work at all. There must be something else wrong. I hope Zinn will show me the way. And if Zinn can teach me how to fix my mountain bikes (and my road bike, which is really just a mountain bike with skinny tires), then Zinn can teach anyone how to fix a bike. When I take the time to try, I'll let you know how it goes.

Needs

Date: May 16
Mileage: 78.6
May mileage: 621.4
Temperature: 42

This past January, I went hiking with a friend who has one of those uber-stressful, all-consuming types of jobs. He claims to love it and earns his share of fulfillment from it, but this job leeches just about all the energy he has to give, emotional and physical. It was all he could do that day to motivate for our one-hour stroll in the snow. My friend, the same guy who used to leap up mountains and scale canyon walls, requested that we turn around after a mile and a half. As we returned to my house, he admitted that his job had changed him. "Sometimes I come home from work and watch TV for five hours," he said. "I used to feel guilty about it, but now I know that sometimes I just need to watch TV for five hours."

I nodded and tried to be a supportive friend, but the little voice in my head was screaming Why? Why? Why? Why?! I wanted to grab his shoulders and shake out whatever oppressive worldview was convincing him he needed this job and tell him to get back to the mountains, get out of Alaska if you have to, go back to the desert and quit your job!

But then he said, "It's sort of like your biking."

The phrase caught me off guard, because it resonated with unsettling truth. I work a relatively lax job and then come home and pour my creative energy into a blog, and then I wake up the next day and pound out the rest on two wheels. I have excess energy to spend and he has a deficit he feels compelled to conserve, but both of us have a need to approach equilibrium.

"Really," I asked myself, "what makes his five hours of TV any worse than my five hours of biking?" I mean, after you carve out the obvious health discrepancies. Whittle it down to pure emotional benefit, on a strictly psychological level. I bring this up now because I have been a little bummed out in general since Geoff moved south for the summer, and I am turning into a heavy bike user - I mean, more than usual.

Geoff mentioned on the phone today that my May mileage was a bit off the charts for not actually training for much. "Here I am, down here training for the Great Divide Race, and I look at your blog and you're still riding more than I am." (Full disclosure: My cycling miles are much easier.) He said this before I told him that I had ridden for about five hours today.

"Oh, it must have been a nice day," he said.

"No," I said. "It was awful."

"How awful?"

"Well, in five full hours it never stopped raining. Not even for a minute. Not even a sprinkly lull. Driving rain. My hands and feet went numb even though I was wearing all of the neoprene I own, and when I pulled my camera out of my coat about halfway through the ride, there was several inches of water built up inside my pocket."

"Oh." That was all he said about it, but I could tell what he was thinking: "Why? Why? Why? Why?!"

But what I wasn't able to explain to him is how much better I felt at the time than I did this morning. I was uber-moody when I woke up today. For whatever reason - the weather, the fun fishing trip that had to be cancelled - I was just sick of the world. I had already absolved myself of any real need to do a long ride this weekend, and my plan was to get more work done today - work that I've been putting off, because I'm always biking or blogging or doing other stuff I don't need to do.

But by 1 p.m., still unproductive and even grumpier, I finally just gave up. "Whatever, I'm just going to go out for a long ride." I set out in the pissing rain with a change of base layer in a ziplock bag - just in case - and thought, "I'll just go until I feel like stopping." I was feeling pretty awful heading out and moving slow to boot - which I was bummed about, because through all this bike abuse, I am trying to increase my fitness. I'm so used to southeast winds that I thought I was riding a tailwind and feeling awful and moving slow. I decided to turn around at 33 Mile (the mile marker on the highway, just about 40 miles into my ride) because I was picking up a pretty serious chill and I doubted the dry base layer would stay dry long enough to ward it off. When I turned around, I felt a rush of air at my back and realized that I had, in fact, been fighting a headwind the whole way out. After that, just like last week, the ride just got better and better.

During the last 10 miles, I rode by a lot of bike commuters - more than I have ever seen - moving with the 5 p.m. traffic. It brought joy to my heart, because the weather was as bad as it gets and still people were out riding. One guy going my direction passed me. He was wearing heavy-duty rubber gloves. "How's it going?" I asked. "How do you think it's going?" he answered. (He didn't say this maliciously, just truthfully - it was awful out.)

And then of course I chased him but lost him in the construction area. The rain drove down and the feeling in my hands and feet faded and still I felt amazing, riding with that wind, feeling that I could just keep going. But I had already turned my thoughts to dinner and maybe still making this party I had earlier resolved not to go to, grumpy as I had been. But when I arrived at home, I felt perkier, decompressed - equalized.

I do believe it's possible to be a substance abuser of your body's own chemical stimulants, just like it's possible to become dependent on the tranquilizing effects of television. Whether or not this is a bad or good thing, I don't yet know.

Two for the road

Date: May 15
Mileage: 42.1
May mileage: 542.8
Temperature: 51

Today was a productive day ... productive in that I didn't get a long ride in, but at least my cats won't starve. The consolation prize is that my fishing trip for tomorrow was cancelled due to terrible weather on the forecast, so there may be a cycling window in there. A wet, cold window.

The two hours I spent riding the Dredge Lake trails was full of strange weather windows. Cloudbursts moved through, almost perfectly synchronized, every 20 minutes. For five minutes the rain would come down in unbroken straight lines, and then start to taper off just as a clear patch rolled in behind the storm. For about one minute it would be sunny and raining, and then the sun would take over and suck back the moisture from the ground in billowing puffs of steam. It couldn't have even been that warm, but buried as I was in rain layers, the aftermath made the glacier moraine feel like a tropical rainforest. Then the cold would come back, then the rain. Repeat.

I finally took my road bike back into Glacier Cycles to be fixed. True to my avoidance tendencies, I never even looked at it again after I vowed not to. The same guy who sold me the shifter cable two weeks ago was there when I walked in. So not only did I have to own up to the shame of not being able to fix a shifter cable, but I had to admit that I had deliberately held onto the bike and didn't use it for as long as it would have taken to move up through their repair backlog. The owner, Dennis, was there and took a few minutes to assess the damage. I braced myself for a grim diagnosis. Many would expect a bike shop proprietor to point out every little flaw in a machine in hopes of making a big sale. But Dennis is a really nice guy, and he only recommended replacing the stuff that was truly terminal. He prescribed a new chain, new cables, new derailleur pulley wheels and a new cassette. The chain and cassette were so bad that I likely wouldn't have been able to adjust the cable to shift smoothly even if I had all the patience in the world (which, obviously, I don't.) Dennis congratulated me on finishing the Iditarod Invitational and complimented me on an article I wrote for the Juneau Empire about it. Then the mechanic rushed my bike to the front of the line and finished it up today ... even though their sign out front still puts the backlog at a week and a half. Who'd have known? ... there really are perks to being an Iditaveteran.

So I took Roadie out for an evening spin after I picked it up. I've become so accustomed to my mountain biking habits that I momentarily forgot which bike I was on and jumped up on a gravel embankment. The resulting spinout startled me so much that I nearly endoed the thing. But it's nice to have my bike back and working.

Homesick

Mexican Mountain, December 2004

Date: May 14
Mileage: 33.4
May mileage: 500.7
Temperature: 39

My computer's hard drive is all full up again. I'm tired of deleting my music, so last night seemed a good time to go through the old photo archive and cull. Bad idea. Instead of throwing away 1,268 of the 1,269 shots I have of my bike in front of the Mendenhall Glacier, I spent all my time browsing the really old photo archive just so I could feel wistful and, well, homesick.

Cataract Canyon, July 2002

Every May, my old college friends converge from our respective far-flung paths for a spring vacation in Utah. Recent upheavals at work, compounded by the two weeks of '08 vacation I already spent just to do the Ultrasport in February, prevented me from joining them this year. I was disappointed about my situation at first, until I learned their plan was a river trip. I generally dislike river trips. Sitting all day in the hot sun, doing nothing, baking, burning, unable to do anything about it because you're stuck on a raft, with the monotony broken only by completely terrifying whitewater rapids, is actually not my idea of a good time. "No thanks," I told them. That was two months ago. Today, I would give just about anything to be sunburned and bored and minutes away from churning over keeper holes.

Outside St. George, Spring 2004

I doesn't help that Geoff is currently having an amazing time on his Utah adventure, bikepacking on all the four-wheel-drive roads and trails that we used to always talk about but never attempted because we were so inexperienced and those places were remote, so remote. Now I have a little Alaska experience behind me, and suddenly those deep desert spaces don't seem so far away - even though they're more inaccessible now than ever.

Dirty Devil sidecanyon, May 2005

I am angry at myself for throwing away the Utah vacation. There is the fact that May time off wasn't really an option this year - but the truth is I didn't try too hard. I feel like there was something I could have worked out with my co-workers, with my savings, with unpaid leave. Did I need a new mountain bike? No. Do I need a week to run my bare toes through warm sand, laugh with the friends of my youth and roast in the desert sun? Yes.

Pelican Lake, March 2004 (Ice fishing is fun)

Sometimes I feel torn between Alaska and Utah, unsure which one is really my home. Even though Utah is the place where I'm from, there are a lot of ways in which it's wrong for me. I wither in any kind of heat, I'm disinclined to return to the freeway and suburban lifestyle I grew up in, and, the truth is, I've fallen in love with Alaska. I like that I can leave my house, walk two blocks, and hike up a mountain. I like taking 1,269 pictures of my bike in front of the Mendenhall Glacier because I like that I can ride my bike to a glacier that often. I like that it's winter six months out of the year. I like the Xtratufs-in-church Alaska culture and the small-town bohemian feel of Juneau. But Geoff, who grew up in upstate New York, typed something yesterday that really resonates with me ... "When you spend time outside in southern Utah, the red dirt just gets onto your body, and then into your body, and eventually into your mind and heart."

Buckskin Gulch, May 2001

Homesickness is exactly that, I guess.