Impulse

I don't have a lot of time for exposition, so I'll just get to the meat of my post. Beat purchased the most awesome expedition snow bike ever built, and today I took it for a test ride in Utah's San Rafael Swell.

Mike Curiak's purpose-built titanium Moots fat bike, nicknamed Snoots. Proven as a top shelf expedition bike when Mike rode it 1,000 miles completely unsupported to Nome in 2010, carrying 21 days worth of supplies. Why would Mike sell such a beautiful specimen? In his words: "I've owned this bike for a handful of years. Ridden it across parts of Colorado, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Utah, and Arizona. And yes, all the way across Alaska on the Iditarod several times. The original inspiration to build and own this bike was so that I could ride from Ross Island on the Antarctic coastline, following the Overland Traverse all the way up to the South Pole. I spent literal years of my life following this dream — getting the body, bike, mind, and all attendant parts ready. For many, many reasons, I have since decided to move onto other, more engaging projects."

Why would Beat purchase such a bike? In his words: "Because I think ahead. It's logical to pick up this bike to me. It works on all levels. I doubt you could get a bike this purpose-built made in the next five years, maybe ever (other than a one-off), and even if we wanted to have one custom-made, it would take us years to learn how it should be made. I think carbon frames will overrun the space with their inherent advantage in design flexibility and ease of production — but with that, expedition readiness can only decrease. Look at how few true innovations have happened in bike tech over the last 20 years — even in the main categories. A few people still fiddle with real innovation (two-wheel drive for example, which I could maybe see some very specific use for, but which is supposedly horribly unreliable) but that's it. And moreover, obviously this is the ONLY actually proven design that exists — because no one's come even close to the unsupported Nome trip."

Mike told me he couldn't argue with Beat's logic. Even so, for the past few weeks that Beat and I have been discussing this opportunity, I considered trying to dissuade him. Why would I choose to pass up such a bike? Because while Beat can appreciate the functionality and uniqueness of such a bike, and, ahem, afford it ... the job of actually riding the bike falls squarely on me. Oh sure, Beat will flirt with the notion of a long winter bike expedition. But in the end he will probably always stick to what he knows and loves — foot travel. I'm the one who soothes myself to sleep at night by fantasizing about riding bikes in Greenland and Baffin Island and, yes, across Alaska. But the prospect actually bringing these dreams to fruition is intimidating and scary, and owning an expedition fat bike can only nudge them closer to reality. Having possession of the Snoots is a great privilege. And you know what they say about privilege and responsibility.

I made a meager effort to talk Beat out of making this purchase. "It's way more bike than you and I need," I said. "What already have a fat bike that almost never gets ridden. Because we live in California."

"For now," Beat fired back. "But I'm thinking ahead. This bike probably won't still be available when we move to Alaska eventually."

Indeed. Possibilities are pretty endless. They could be a year or more down the road, but Snoots will be there when we decide to make those leaps.

Mike discouraged shipping this bike, so he and I made a plan to rendezvous in Utah, since I was planning to be here with my car for the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow, and Mike lives relatively close by in Grand Junction, Colorado. We met up in the town of Green River. Mike gave me a quick rundown of the Snoots' special features and set me free with this incredible bike. It was a beautiful day — 55 degrees and sunny, too beautiful not to ride. Just 11 miles west of Green River off I-70 is a narrow vein of the San Rafael Swell called Black Dragon Canyon. I steered clear of the canyon's faint jeep road to test-drive the Snoots in the places where it would shine most — the loose sand and boulders of the wash.

It was enlightening to ride this bike on terrain that it is really good at — sand — as well as terrain that I am not so good at — rocks. I was surprised how responsive this bike is — twisty maneuvers were no problem for the Snoots. Fat bikes have this way of making me feel invincible, and I found myself "sessioning" a few boulders that I normally wouldn't go near. It was no issue to lift the wheel onto ledges. "Note to self; front end looks heavy, isn't that heavy." But then I hit a flash-flood washout, a gorge about six feet deep with no way around, and struggled mightily to lift the bike over my head. The whole bike was sort of heavy. "Note to self: Not a big deal. You have difficulty lifting the carbon roadies over your head, too. Try lifting some weights once in a while." All-in-all, it's actually a super fun desert bike, too.

I rode about ten miles up the canyon, until I had climbed 2,000 feet and ended on top of a bench, riding a boring flat jeep road. Normally I love riding jeep roads, but this suddenly smooth and well-drained road just felt beneath the Snoots, somehow. It was time to turn around anyway. I had so much fun with the descent. At one point I launched off a small ledge (also unlike me) and touched down on the slickrock slab below with a dramatic bouncy bounce in both tires, which I had inflated to 10 or 11 psi. "Oops, maybe I shouldn't be riding this bike like this," I thought. But in the next breath, "Nah, Snoots can handle it. Snoots will break me before I break Snoots." Either way, I probably shouldn't be riding an expedition/touring fat bike like a dually with five inches of travel, lest I do break myself.

I so love the San Rafael Swell. Between the ages of 18 and 19 I transitioned from a teenager who spent every weekend going to movies, seeking out obscure live music shows, and frequenting terrible dance clubs — to a young adult who spent nearly every free weekend camping with friends in the San Rafael Swell. This is the region where I cemented my appreciation of the outdoors and fell in love with the desert. Every time I visit the San Rafael Swell, I'm whisked back to the happiest moments of that time in my life.

Icing on the cake — the petroglyphs at the mouth of the canyon. I'm super excited about the Snoots, but first thing's first. Headed down to Frog Town on Friday. 

Exploring Santa Cruz

Beat and I enjoyed a quiet weekend, working on a few projects and being lazy tapering for Frog Hollow. My friend Jan was in town for the weekend, and was interested in venturing out for a mellow ride on Saturday. Jan moved to Seattle recently and has been enduring autumn in the Pacific Northwest, so he was stoked about clear sky and temperatures in the 70s. He told us about the horrors of bike commuting in the cold rain, and I was quick to commiserate. "I lived in Juneau for five years. They get three times the annual precipitation of Seattle." Jan related his trials and I joined in with back-in-my-day war stories about showing up at the office covered face to foot in road grit and rigid, refrozen sheets of ice, which is what happens when it's 32.1 degrees and you ride a bike through three inches of slush, even with fenders. I'd have to stand outside the building until I peeled off the top two drenched layers, shivering with full-on convulsions as my extremities went numb, and, Sonny, you don't know the true indignity of bike commuting until you've commuted through a winter in Juneau. 

But it's true that weather toughness is like muscle mass — it steadily gets softer and weaker the longer one lives in a friendly climate. Now I'm Californian through and through, and I don't even blink when it's 70 and sunny in late October. Yawn. 

2008 Jill would not be amused.  

But it's refreshing to view one's routines through the lens of someone who sees more rareness in opportunities. Jan wanted to ride in Santa Cruz, which is one of those places that is so close and yet feels so far away. I admit my first reaction was, "Ugh, traffic." But there wasn't any; it's less than an hour of driving, to visit a place with incredible diversity in terrain and landscapes. In just one twenty-mile ride, we climbed desert-like sand slopes, rode through a lonely eucalyptus grove stranded in a grassy plain, dropped into loamy, root-choked singletrack winding through a dense redwood forest, and skirted coastal cliffs.

Descending into the coastal fog after riding the trails and fireroads of Wilder Ranch.

Pelicans. Lots of pelicans.


More seabirds on an envy-inducing perch.

Whenever a taller friend comes to visit, we usually lend them our 18-inch Fatback, because it's our largest bike. This was Jan's first time on a fat bike and he had that giddy "monster truckin" grin on his face for much of the ride. The fat bike market is exploding right now, with exponentially more choices in frames, forks, wheels, rims and tires than there were just three years ago when Beat purchased the Fatback. This trend is also pushing fat bike design away from its snow-and-sand origins, and more into the all-terrain market, with bikes featuring tighter geometry, carbon frames, knobbier tires, suspension forks, sometimes even rear suspension. These developments annoy some "old-timer" fat bike enthusiasts, because the industry already offered bikes better suited for trail riding, called mountain bikes. I also agree that fat bikes really shine on soft and loose surfaces, and prefer my mountain bike for dirt. But I can't deny that riding a fat bike is simply fun — smile-inducing fun — whether it's on snow or dirt or pavement. Jan agreed. We managed to get Fatty off trail for a fun diversion of beach riding in a cove below the cliffs. I would try to ride sand more often if there were more accessible, longer stretches of beach in the area. But every strip of nearby coastline that I've noticed is either closed to the public, closed to bikes, or blocked by cliffs.

Skimming along the cliffs was my favorite part of the ride. Beat was on his singlespeed and spun out at a relaxed pace. A stiff tailwind helped scoot us along, so I just leaned back and coasted with my camera out.

So many pelicans! Thanks for getting us out for new explorations in our back yard, Jan.

Beat has been hard at work on gear for his upcoming walk to Nome. Now that he knows exactly what he wants, he's been designing, building, and sewing a lot of it himself. He started from scratch on this year's sled (version 6.0), built from a sheet of ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene. The lightweight sled is five feet long, with a built-in shield silnylon cover that doubles as a bivy sack. The front flap allows venting while keeping out snow, and there's a plastic dome at the head to keep fabric away from Beat's face when he's sleeping. The rear section rolls back into the sled with a VX21 fabric flap. I crawled inside and it was cozy in there, like a warm cocoon rather than the suffocating coffins that closed-up bivy sacks usually mimic. Innovative stuff.

There are more pictures of Beat's Nome sled at this link. There are probably only a couple dozen people in the world who'd appreciate a good, lightweight, sleep-in pulk, but who knows? Maybe this stuff will go the way of the fat bike someday. 

Fun in the pre-season

Even amid frigid winds and fog so thick it was visibly streaming sideways, I felt a tinge of disappointment when Leah suggested we skip crossing the Golden Gate Bridge and instead keep our Wednesday evening ride on trails within San Francisco city limits. She was feeling under the weather and I understood her reluctance to go out for hard climbs and descents on the exposed ridges of the Marin Headlands, but urban trails? How fun could those be?

We wound through the forested corridors of Golden Gate Park on sandy singletrack, then cut south toward Mount Sutro, a small greenbelt beside the University of California San Francisco. Foggy daylight faded to blue-tinted twilight as we climbed a narrow trail through a dense eucalyptus forest. Drooping branches and frayed bark captured the fog, which rained down on us as fragrant precipitation. It was a seriously spooky place, made more so by the fact that we were bound on all sides by urban jungle. I couldn't help but imagine creepers lurking in the shadows. We rolled over the 908-foot peak — one of San Francisco's "seven summits" — and descended back into the dark and spooky woods on a muddy, rocky, twisting trail.

It was so much fun. I admit I headed out to the city hoping Leah would put the hurt on in the Headlands, and I'd have to burn up all my matches keeping up with her. That would have been a great training ride. But I'm glad we went on an adventure instead. After all, what is training besides an excuse to continue having adventures?

I've had a lot of fun with my "training" this week — doing what I felt like doing, plugging into Strava, making efforts to crack some PRs. On Sunday I was especially sore after the Coyote Ridge 50K — which was the most I've run, actually run, in quite a long time. Beat and I set out for a "post 50K" Montebello climb where he nearly broke his own PR and I struggled, rolling up about 10 minutes later. That was not what I wanted; I wanted to be more like Beat, who by now thinks a 50K run ain't no thing. For the next few days, I set out to do better.

On Monday, I had a decent 18-mile road ride around Mount Eden and Redwood Gulch, and cracked a few Strava PRs. But on Tuesday I only had time for a run. Every Tuesday, I'm working on deadline and lucky if I can squeeze in an hour from door to door. I have a 5.5-mile road and trail loop that I often run if I have time, and it's become my Tuesday routine. This Tuesday was the first in a while that I managed a run without IT band pain flaring up. About a mile and a half from home, I realized I was making sort of good time, so I decided to tack on an extra 0.7 miles and try to break my 10K "personal record."

My PRs for short distances are all embarrassing. I feel very awkward when I try to run "fast" — for me, this means anything in the 7:xx-minute-mile range — and since I'm convinced forced speed is a quick ticket to injury for someone like me, and it doesn't really enhance my goals of developing longer steady-state endurance, I never try. My 5K PR is still 31:52 (!!), established in the only 5K event I've ever run, back when I was not even remotely a runner, at the 2006 Sea to Ski Triathlon in Homer, Alaska. I've since run five consecutive kilometers faster than that, of course, but never as an actual 5K distance, which I think is a prerequisite for a PR.

Anyway, my 10K PR was 57:14, the fastest I've run my favorite 6.2-mile trail loop at Rancho San Antonio (which has 960 feet of climbing, I might add, if that makes this 10K time any less pathetic.) The goal for the last 3K of this Tuesday's loop (which has 680 feet of climbing) was to get that time below 55 minutes. I ended up running a couple of laps around my apartment complex at 7:30 pace but just missed it — 55:05. It was all quite silly but fun. It doesn't mean anything, but I was really enjoying myself.

On Thursday I set out on a double-climb of Montebello Road. I have this long-term project in mind that I call "One Hundred Miles of Montebello" — ten consecutive climbs and descents of a local road that climbs 2,000 feet in five miles, for a century with 20,000 feet of climbing. Everyone I tell about this dream thinks it's a horrible idea, but I'm determined to see it through someday, even if I can't con anyone into joining me. It would be at least a twelve-hour ride, so more daylight is needed, and it also would be more likely to motivate for if I'm engaged in focused bicycle training — I'm thinking it's a project for next April or May. So the hundred-miler is a ways off, but I've never even done a double-back of Montebello Road. Today was as good a day as any to start practicing for my project.

The double went really well. I tapped into my steady-state endurance, kept a good pace but didn't push into the red zone, and wrapped up the ride with 28 miles and 4,400 feet of climbing. Later I plugged my GPS data into Strava and learned I cracked my own all-time top ten list on this climb that I ride all of the time — twice! No PRs, but I'm stoked about how generally strong I feel right now.

This whole long training post was really supposed to be a lead-in to a question that some have asked me — what's next? Recently, I was reminded of an essay by Terry Tempest Williams. For the life of me I can't locate the direct quote, but to paraphrase, Williams wrote, "For every person there is a land with which one resonates above all others." For me, this is that land:

Alaska. Winter's Alaska, with all of its wild, white, open space. This, specifically, is the Iditarod Trail. Or even more specifically, it's a perfectly groomed segment of the Iditarod Trail near Finger Lake that I had the pleasure of riding in February 2008. A lot has changed since then, but one thing that never seems to change is how deeply this imaginary line has needled its way into my identity. I dream about it often; I find it entering my thoughts when I am scared or elated, joyful or lonely, inquisitive or bored. For a number of reasons, I haven't attempted to return to the route over the Alaska Range since I contracted frostbite on my foot in 2009. Nearly five years have gone by. I kept my runaway dreams at bay with patches: two amazing runs in the Susitna 100, three exhilarating rides through the White Mountains north of Fairbanks, a reluctant but beautiful sled run in the Homer Epic 100K. Next year, 2014, it's time to go back to the 350-mile journey to McGrath. And this time, I decided to attempt the route on foot.

I made this decision back in April when I signed up for the Iditarod Trail Invitational. I've since wavered back and forth on this. For the entire month of September, I was so demoralized by my experience at the PTL that I wasn't sure I wanted to go to McGrath at all. Then October came, my attitude and strength flipped a 180, and Beat started prodding me about the prospect of going to Nome on a bicycle. "You will love it so much," he said, and I suspect he's right. But I'm not ready, not yet. And yet, if I do aspire to ever ride a bicycle beyond McGrath, I should probably practice by riding a bicycle to McGrath once more.

Before PTL, I was much more confident about my decision to try this route on foot. It's not that I don't love snow biking or that I'm not a significantly stronger cyclist than I am a runner (I do and am.) What I was looking for in this endeavor was authenticity in the experience. It's difficult to describe, but on foot everything seems to happen more immediately and directly. There's nothing else to lean on, nothing else to blame, no mechanical boosts, no imaginary companions (I admit I become emotionally attached to my bikes.) It's just me. Taking a bicycle to McGrath remains one of the most difficult things I've ever done, and I can't even fathom how much harder it's going to be on foot. But a large part of me really wants to find out. Finishing the 2012 Sustina 100 on foot, alone, on my terms, has been my most rewarding running accomplishment yet. I had an incredible experience in that "short" race two years ago, and want to pursue a similarly raw and authentic experience in 2014.

However, I know that the rewards in a walk to McGrath are going to largely reside in post-race reflection. Walking to McGrath stands a good chance of being awful while I'm doing it. The ride to McGrath can be just as awful, but it also has a better chance of being a lot more fun. As Beat likes to joke, "Bikers complain about bad trails but that's the only time it sucks for them. It always sucks for runners." That's obviously an overly simplistic way of characterizing biking versus hiking — but there's some truth to this as well. Dragging a sled to McGrath is a lot like pushing a bike for 350 miles.

Beat says I need to decide soon, and he's right about that. The "pre-season" officially ends after the 25 Hours of Frog Hollow, which is just over a week away. Then I really have to buckle down and start preparing for winter. It's scary and exciting ... and I'm glad I rose out of my post-summer malaise in the nick of time.