Southern New Mexico

The first thing I saw when I woke up in the morning was a baby bird, dead in the grass just inches from my face. Above me, an adult robin, presumably its mother, hopped frantically from branch to branch, screeching into the still air. I stood up quickly and moved my bag away from the scene of the accident, which just riled up the distraught mother even more. Morning sun filtered through tall ponderosa pines. The baby bird laid lifeless on its side. And I was on such an emotional edge at that point in the race that I just broke down bawling. It was so sad - the dead baby, the despairing mother, and an unknown tragedy that seemed to occur while I slept in ignorant bliss. The world was such a hard place and sadness lurked under every tree. Who was I to fight despair?

After about 10 minutes, I pulled myself together enough to realize I was crying over a bird, and packed up quickly so the robin could mourn in peace. I started pedaling up a beautiful, narrow canyon alongside a network of sandstone formations that I had failed to notice during the dark and storms the night before. I rolled through the high plateau of the Gila and reached the Beaverhead Work Station, the first public building I had seen in nearly 100 miles since leaving Pie Town. The ranger station was closed on a Sunday, but a glowing Dr. Pepper machine hummed on the front porch. The morning was warm and Dr. Pepper sounded delicious, but the machine only took coins and I had none in my wallet. A feeling of desperation built as I rifled through my backpack, digging up a nickle here, a dime there. Then I started tearing apart my bike bags, formulating something like hope when I discovered a quarter and more dimes. I found the last needed nickle in my handlebar bag, and 15 minutes after the treasure hunt began, with my entire kit strewn asunder, I walked triumphantly over to the machine and fed it 75 cents. I sat down on the grass with my cold Dr. Pepper and cheese crackers, mapping my next move.

I had, at that point, about 200 miles left to ride. The last 125 were known to be fast. I had crossed the Canadian border at 9:45 a.m. exactly three weeks before. I did some quick calculations in my head and realized that if I could manage the last 200 miles in 23 hours, I would be able to come in under the border-to-border women's record. There were a lot of uncertainties about gunning for it. I wasn't racing the Great Divide Race, and had knowingly broken a GDR rule - cell phone use - so I wasn't sure a possible new record by me would even be recognized. I had also never ridden all through the night, or even done that much night riding during the Tour Divide, and wondered whether I could even handle a 26-hours-straight-through push. But there was excitement in the thought of gunning for the record, and even more excitement about the thought of being done in no more sleeps. I decided if I had a good afternoon and felt even marginally energetic in Silver City, I was going to go for it.

Storm clouds started to build as soon as I left Beaverhead, and my stress levels elevated in direct proportion to the darkening sky. As I climbed a dusty set of switchbacks, my GPS shut down on its own. I turned it back on, and it shut down again. I changed the batteries to a brand new pair, and still the screen flickered and faded. My stress switched to full-on panic. I needed GPS. I tried to reason with myself - I could probably navigate the route without it. There wasn't that much navigation left to do. The ACA maps were perfectly clear by themselves. But GPS was my lifeline. It confirmed whether the turn I was making was the right one or not. It cleared up vague spots on the maps. It told me how far I had left to ride, how many feet I had left to climb, how many streams I had to cross, where the possible bailout points were and where I could find off-route towns. GPS was my friend. At that moment in the race, it was my only friend. I did not want GPS to abandon me.

I put the unit inside my frame bag, where it wouldn't be jolted around as much, and hoped that if it had a good break, it would start working again. And in the short time I had been fiddling with it, the dark clouds dropped and rain started to fall from all corners of the sky. There was no escape this time. I put my head down and pedaled into the deluge, and watched with dread as my tires dug deeper into the softening road. Within minutes, the surface was complete sludge. The tires sunk in and dredged up clumps of clay that stuck to everything. Then I felt the all-too-familiar stall of the back wheel, and I knew it was all over. I was going to be lucky to simply hike from that point. More likely, I would be hoisting the bike in strenuous intervals between chipping mud off the frame and trying to coax the wheels to turn. For how long and how many miles, I had no idea.

The bike-carrying intervals did indeed increase from that point, followed by periods of lunging with my mud-caked luggage cart, followed by rare stretches of riding. I could only guess how fast I was moving because GPS was dead and my odometer only registers above 2.5 mph, a speed I would reach only rarely. The rain fell in hard, fast spurts and then dissolved into a steady shower. It was Juneau-esque, which is a feeling only those who live on the northern Pacific Coast will understand, but it's that feeling you get when the liquid sky engulfs you, and you sink beneath its cold, gray weight, and you know, you just know, that it is never going to stop raining. Ever. For the rest of your life. It's a feeling of complete hopelessness, so complete that my body was no longer willing to co-operate with my flailing motivation, and I often found myself involuntarily stopped on the side of the road, just moaning - "Why does this have to be so hard? Why, Why, Why?"

The afternoon moved like molasses - sludgy, gooey, adobe-colored molasses. I was basically on the edge of emotional breakdown, crying more than was really appropriate. But the tears did help stave off an urge to just sit down on the side of the road and give up on life, which is what hopelessness was urging me to do. And every time I reached the near-breaking point, with my feet lodged in the goo and refusing to move, some drill sergeant of reason deep inside would nudge me and yell, "What choice do you have? What the hell else are you going to do?" And I would look up and actually laugh, out loud, because the situation was so ridiculous. Too ridiculous to take so seriously. I would muster a smile and chant my Iditarod motto - "Keep yourself warm, keep yourself fed, and keep moving. You'll get there ... eventually."

However, keeping myself warm turned out to be difficult. The temperature had plummeted when the storm moved in, and it was still dropping. Pushing my bike through the goo was strenuous, but the effort wasn't steady enough for me to work up consistent heat in soaked clothing, and pretty soon I started shivering. I was wearing arm and leg warmers, a fleece pullover, waterproof rain coat and pants, wool socks, vapor barrier socks and a fleece hat; I was in Southern New Mexico, in July, wearing what amounted to winter layers, and I was freezing. It was almost too ridiculous to bear. And all that time, the intense aroma of the Gila permeated every slow step. The smell was so strong and distinct, a sweet and spicy pinon with a smoky hint of charcoal. I wondered if I would ever look back on that fragrance with a sense of fondness, but I doubted it. At that moment, I could only associate it with an awful feeling in the pit of my stomach, the way I associate vanilla air fresheners with car-sickness. The smell of the Gila was a hate smell, and despite its beauty, I hated the Gila.

That strong (and short-term) hate of the Gila carried into darkness, after I covered a short stretch of merciful pavement only to reach another gooey, unrideable climb. Old mud had already hardened into a wheel-and-drivetrain-seizing cement; I didn't even bother trying to scrape off the new mud. I just unhooked my frame bag and balanced the bike on my shoulder over the worst sections of road, and pushed the rest. When I finally reached the highway, I was as lucid as a zombie, shell-shocked into an apathetic stupor by a special form of torture. A friend later asked what I thought about the "maddening" steep hills that rolled into Silver City, and I honestly don't remember them. All I remember about that night were the lights of the city glimmering in the far distance, and the beautiful sound of rubber whirring on pavement, and how that slowly lifted me out of my daze until I was wandering around the 24-hour Super Wal-Mart at 11:30 p.m. trying to remember what it was that I was doing there. I "came to" near the produce section and stood there for a few seconds, very still, absolutely, bewilderingly confused. "Why am I in Wal-Mart? Do I need to buy groceries? Underwear? What year is this? Am I still living in Idaho Falls? Where am I?" And then, like a half-drowned person rising out of the murky water, I remembered. I'm in Silver City. I'm on the Great Divide. I'm 125 miles from being done.

But at that point, I knew there was no way I would finish by the next morning. Even if I were fresh - and I was obviously so far from fresh that I'm pretty sure somebody at the Silver City Super Wal-Mart had already called a coroner - I would still have to ride 125 miles in nine hours to even scrape the record. I was glad that the goal had become impossible. I knew I had burned up enough of my energy matches in the Gila that I was going to be lucky to limp the last mile to the Super 8, but yet the guilt of a racer burns deep.

I crawled into bed a shadow of the cyclist who left the Beaverhead Work Station 14 hours earlier, with a new resolve to just sleep for as long as my body felt like sleeping. If I couldn't make the record, I had all the time in the world. And still, not since I fell asleep in a flu stupor outside of Cuba had finishing the race seemed so impossible. 125 miles might as well have been 125,000.

7 a.m. came and I woke up like clockwork, launching into my morning routine without giving it any more thought than an office drone who worked the same 9-5 job for 40 years. I took off my dry clothes and put on my wet shower-washed clothes. I brushed my teeth and slathered on bug spray and sun screen. I packed up my bike bags. I walked into the hotel lobby and loaded a paper plate with free continental breakfast. As I sat in front of the Weather Channel stuffing my face with day-old pastries and coffee, the almost otherworldly thought popped into my mind. "Holy cow ... this could be the last day of my trip!" And with that, my mind started to race. How did I feel? Were my legs still functioning? Was my bike still working? Could I grind out the last 125 miles in one shot? I wheeled the bike outside and sprayed it down, methodically working away the cemented-on mud with a butter knife and a garden hose. As I cut through the adobe layers, I discovered a rather large sharp rock lodged between the chain and the derailleur pulley wheel. How long had that been in there, grinding away at the chain? Both tires were webbed with cracks throughout - they looked like one of those faux old-timey paint jobs people use to make furniture look antique. So many things on that bike were on the verge of falling apart. "Please just hold it together for 125 more miles," I said. I was speaking to both my bike and my body.

As I started down the road, I was amazed at how well I had recovered from the night before. Maybe it was the pull of the finish, or the warmth of the desert air, but the turnaround was complete and irreversible. I was a Divide-driven machine, and there was nothing, nothing that could stop me. The Separ Road could be soup and I would swim the distance. My bike could implode and I would carry it the rest of the way. I could almost smell the border - cinnamon and tamales - and the smoke-marinated hate smell of the Gila faded into distant memory.

And I rode. My legs were coated in sweat and soaked in desire and I was topping 19 mph on the sandy but mercifully dry road into Separ. I enjoyed a long lunch and chat with a local at a trinket store called The Continental Divide, and as I rounded the frontage road off I-10 to the final stretch of pavement, I saw my parents standing next to their car. They had driven to New Mexico all the way from Salt Lake City just to watch me finish and take me home. I hadn't expected to see them mid-way, and we had a tearful - and for me surreal - reunion as 18-wheelers streamed by. "It's just 65 more miles now," I announced. "If I don't make it, please just run me over with the car."

Most people had told me that the final 65 miles to the Mexican border, on a tiny two-lane road dubbed "The Lonely Highway," would be a slog. "You'll just want to be done," they said. "And it will go on forever." I switched my iPod to shuffle-all, hoping for fun surprises, and dropped into my aero bars (one of the few times on the trip that I did) as random U.S. Border Patrol trucks rumbled by. I tried to switch into slog mode, but my mind didn't want to be there. It wanted to be reflective, and nostalgic, and absolutely thrilled to be spinning in the serene solitude of The Lonely Highway on a beautiful day.

Music streamed in my ears and my mind cycled through my all of my bicycling experiences the way one's life might flash before their eyes. I was touring the rolling hills of Southern Ohio; I was sprinting along shoreline of the Great Salt Lake; I was pounding rotations beneath the neon strobelights of spin class; I was pushing through the endless powder of the frozen Kuskokwim River. I was everywhere I had ever ridden, condensed into the short miles I had left in a very long bike race. Waves of emotion pulsated through my memories - hunger and desire, happiness and love. And through it all, there was a sense of sadness. Sadness because I really was almost done. It wouldn't be long and the Divide would become just another one of those memories, and my life beyond could never be the same.

My parents passed me again 12 miles from the border. "We thought we were going to miss you!" my mom called out from the passenger's seat. "You're really cooking!"

"12 more miles I called out," and realizing what my average speed had been, added, "I'll see you in 45 minutes!"

The highway mile markers flew by, and I became sad to see them go. Life on the Divide was hard, but some of the time, even most of the time, it was extremely good, and it was intense, and it was real, and every pedal stroke I made was a tiny decision to give all of that up. I rounded a small hill and saw a clump of trees in the distance. "Wow," I thought. "That's Antelope Wells. It really is. I'm actually going to finish this thing." My heart vibrated with disbelief and anticipation, and the mile markers pulled me closer, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.

As I passed mile marker 1, I hit the "next" button on my iPod to cement forever an official finishing song. To my amusement, the song iPod picked was something I don't remember downloading and didn't even know was on there - "Morning Has Broken" by Cat Stevens. But as I closed in on the tree-dotted oasis in a vast, open desert, the joy of the music and the lyrics fit better than I could have ever planned ...

"Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, Eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God's recreation of the new day."

I approached the waving arms of my parents, standing in front of a closed border gate in an otherwise abandoned station, and gave my best yellow-jersey fist pump as I rolled to a stop. I exchanged hugs and congratulations with my mom and dad, and the first thing I said was, "I can't believe I rode the entire Great Divide and it never got hot!"

"Um," my dad said, "It's 98 degrees right now."

I looked out toward the scorched earth of Mexico. "Really?" I said. "Wow, that crosswind works better than I thought."

"We almost didn't get here before you," my dad said. "We didn't think you would make that kind of time. That was, what, less than nine hours?"

The sun shimmered down at 5:24 p.m., 24 days, seven hours and 24 minutes after I left Banff, some 2,700 miles away, on an equally sunny Friday morning that seemed a lifetime before. Mexico was an arm's length away and I didn't have a stroke left to pedal. What exactly that meant, I wasn't yet certain. But I hoped that after the shimmer faded, and my bruises healed, and my muscles rebuilt themselves, and the hard brutal road became a memory, that I would someday understand.

The rest of the story:
Canada
Montana
Idaho
Wyoming
Northern Colorado
Central Colorado
Southern Colorado
Northern New Mexico
Central New Mexico

Scratched at mile 90

I did not have a good feeling about the Soggy Bottom 100(+) from the get-go. For starters, I haven't been able to complete a ride longer than 35 miles since the Tour Divide ended. During the few rides I tried, I've ended up with quite a bit of pain in my heel, weak ankles and an overall lethargic fatigue. I signed up for the Anchorage race in a moment of cubicle-induced spontaneity during a tough day at work. I knew I wasn't ready for a long race. I guess I just hoped my Divide-strengthened mental fortitude would get me through (because pretty much everything else about me was left weakened by the Divide.)

Things started out badly when I missed my flight out of Juneau after waiting in the baggage line for 45 minutes (I showed up an hour and 15 minutes before my flight, and Juneau's airport is tiny. But Alaska Airlines refused to check my bag because I was "too late" and I had too much necessary gear to just leave it behind.) The next available flight was five hours later. I had to call and cancel plans with a few friends in Anchorage, which really bummed me out because the Anchorage visit surrounding the race was really the main reason I was going. I burned up what was becoming a beautiful day by taking a scenic drive out to the end of the road and mulling whether I should cancel the whole trip.

I let my uncertainties linger, and without ever making an assured decision about it, I ended up on the plane flying north. My friend Amity and her baby, Josie, met me at the airport and we went to Speedway Cycles to pick up a bike that a man named Danny, who I've never even met, was letting me borrow. I was expecting something pretty basic or even a beater, but the mechanics presented me with a freshly tuned full-suspension Specialized S-Works Epic. A real race bike. I handed my camera to Amity and told her to take a picture of me at the start, because it was probably going to be one of the nicest bikes I ever had even short-term possession of. The photo turned out blurry, but you get the picture.

It rained in camp the night before but by morning it was bright and beautiful. Nearly 40 people showed up at the race start. I had slept pretty well despite sharing a tent with a 9-month-old baby in close proximity to a dozen other racers. I had a good stock of Sour Patch Kids, chocolate covered coffee beans and tuna. I felt pretty good. "It's possible I can really do this," I thought as well took off up the long, 3,000(+)-foot climb to a summit that we would have to crest three times.

The Resurrection Pass trail on the Kenai Peninsula has to be the best bike trail in all of Alaska. It's 40 miles uninterrupted of singletrack from point-to-point; it was built for walkers but is nearly 100 percent rideable, even for people of my skill set, and offers really quick access to some amazingly scenic Alaska backcountry. I love this trail, and I never get a chance to ride it because I live all the way in Juneau, which is for all practical purposes in a different country than Anchorage. I knew when I crested into the alpine tundra that the scenery alone was worth the price and hassle of the plane trip.

However, by the time I started descending toward Cooper Landing, I knew I was in big trouble. I had taken a couple of falls on some root-clogged sections making silly mistakes that I usually only make when I'm really fatigued. My energy level was dropping rapidly despite the chocolate coffee beans, and both of my heels were on fire. I'd suspected that the Divide left me with achilles tendonitis, and the searing pain seemed to confirm my fears. It took me more than five hours to reach Cooper Landing, mile 45. I lingered around the trailhead for about 20 minutes, drinking water and mulling my situation. I was pretty certain at that point that a scratch was inevitable. But Amity wasn't at the trailhead and I didn't feel like begging a ride, so I decided I should try to get myself back to the start. I had traveled too far to not at least give it my best shot.

The ride back up to Res Pass was borderline agonizing. My heels screamed with pain every time I pushed hard to power up a hill, but walking hurt almost as much, so on anything steep I just stepped off the bike and gimped slowly. The pain was annoying but I questioned whether it was really unworkable. After all, I was in for at least 90 miles of the race. I might as well do all 110 and finish the thing. But the 20-mile Devil's Pass spur included another 2,000-foot drop and climb. And I kept thinking about the 2007 Susitna 100, when I started experiencing knee pain three miles into the race and continued to push through it for 20 more hours. I ended up with advanced chondromalacia an couldn't ride my bike for three months afterward, and still struggle with occasional "angry knee" to this day. I still view the 2007 Susitna 100 as "the race I should have quit." And I started to wonder if it was really worth risking the rest of Juneau's short hiking season just to finish a silly race. Plus, I was moving slow enough at that point that finishing may have taken 15 hours or more, which would put me back in Hope late and potentially without a ride back to Anchorage. The 2009 Soggy Bottom was definitely becoming "a race that I should quit."

And as soon as I made that decision, I felt great about it. I passed the Devil's Pass cutoff and continued riding straight without a tinge of regret. Shortly after the cutoff, I slashed the sidewall of the rear tire of my borrowed bike. The tear also destroyed the tube. I spent 30 minutes patching a hole in an old 26" tube that I was carrying as a spare, figuring out how to work the new pump I had just purchased in Anchorage, fixing an old piece of tire rubber to the rip and praying that the haphazard repair would hold, knowing that any other major tire problem would leave me with a 20(+)-mile gimpy walk back to Hope. After that, I took all my weight off the seat on all of the rooty sections, which was murder on my heels, but I wanted to preserve the tire as best as I could. That little mishap only further reinforced my decision to quit the race.

I ended up back in Hope in time for the post-race festvities, with cold Coke and freshly grilled brats. I caught a ride home with Pete B., who actually managed to finish the Soggy Bottom in under 10 hours despite being hit head-on by a truck just over a month ago. It was interesting to talk with him about that day on the Divide out of Summitville, Colo., and piece together the string of events surrounding the accident from our different perspectives while driving around the Turnagain Arm. I can't believe he's already racing again. He's definitely a tougher person than I.

He was also nice enough to drive me to the airport at 6 a.m. this morning. The trip over the glacier-capped Chugach/Wrangells was spectacular as it always is on a clear day - one of those rare occasions where the flight itself is nearly worth the agony of the race that coaxed me north in the first place.

I suck at tapering

So the Soggy Bottom 100 is in less than 48 hours. When it comes to tapering for a bicycle race, I tend to be a bit unorthodox. Some people rest, fill their glycogen stores and hydrate. Others do easy spins to loosen up their muscles. I like to get up early after five hours of sleep and go for long, hard hikes. It may be a questionable taper strategy, but it sure does fire up the synapses.

I wanted to go real big today, but I had to be at the office in the afternoon, so I dialed it back to the longest Juneau hike that I have completed before - the Juneau Ridge to Granite Creek Basin.

From the top of Mount Juneau, there's a good view of the airport runway that will be the launching point of my doom early Friday morning.

It was ultra-hot today ... meaning it was in the low 80s. But the sunlight reflecting off the snowfields made it feel much warmer. Stranged to feel so scorched while walking on snow.

I tried for the Juneau Ridge five times last year, and every single time I was shut down by bad weather. I was so frustrated last season that I never got to do anything "big." I love that this is now officially a hike I can knock out before work, as long as I motivate early.

The view northeast: I can see Canada from my house.

The Juneau Ridge is a good connecting point to the real backcountry - the Juneau Icefield. Someday (hopefully soon) I'm going to plan a multiday trip out that way. I will need to find a partner that is good at reading maps first.

Mount Olds. Someday I will bag that as well.

Five hours. 12.5 miles. 5,430 feet of vertical. Just like resting, only better.

Silver city

My friend Brian and I had a great morning fishing for coho salmon off South Shelter Island. Calm waters, sunny skies, temperatures in the high-70s, kicking back on the boat and crazy arm-busting action for 45 minutes. We caught four silvers and lost two, and spent the rest of the time listening to jazz and working on our farmer tans. This fish is my first of 2009, a big ol' coho. Delicious.

On the way back, we pulled up next to a humpback whale that was just bobbing motionless in the blue water. We decided it was sleeping. Later, Brian wrote to inform me that "they don't really sleep like humans, but they doze with half of their brian sleeping while the other pays attention to breathing and danger." I wish I had the ability to do this. It would make for killer ultraendurance cycling times.

Master fisherman Brian with the four silvers we caught.

I arrived at home to find this letter from State Representative Cathy Muñoz. Not only am I a registered D, I don't even live in her district. How sweet is she?

OK, I'm torn between finishing up my Tour Divide report and going to sleep so I can get up early and aim for a big peak. Hmmm. Weather report calls for more heat and sunshine. Looks like an early bedtime for me. 'Night!

OK, NOW it's summer in Juneau

For the past three months, my friends in Juneau have been updating me about everything I've been missing during the "best summer ever." Why, they asked me, was I wasting all of my vacation days in a wet and cold place like New Mexico when I could be somewhere sunny and warm, like Southeast Alaska? Well, I arrived July 16 beneath a drizzly wash of gray that hasn't cleared up for more than a couple hours until, well, until today.

My reintegration into society has also been a little on the drizzly and gray side. I had a rough go of my first week back at work - difficulty focusing, productivity down, more mistakes than usual. It's hard to transition from 12 hours a day on a bike to 10-12 hours a day in a cubical. It occurred to me that I was actually lucky the weather was gray, because it helped me keep my head turned away from the window.

I'm also still homeless. I've had a tough time finding an apartment that will allow me to have a cat, and where I can afford to live alone. Juneau rent is ridiculous. I supposedly have a good job and I'm looking at places that would cost me nearly 50 percent of my take-home income. I'm still holding out hope for a place around 30 percent. And in the back of my mind, I'm remembering how easy it was to just throw down a bivy sack and fall asleep wherever I decided to stop at the end of the day.

And then, just this morning, I woke up to sunlight on my face. I had three hours to kill before my work meeting so, with a pile of dirty laundry next to my suitcase, a stack of old medical and credit card bills on the desk, a list of landlords to call, and a fridge empty of food, I used those hours in the most productive way I could think of - I climbed Mount Jumbo.

3,337 feet for hundreds of square miles of perspective. Soaked in sweat and sunlight. That's when you know you're having a good morning.

First week back

I still need to write up the last chapter of my Tour Divide trip report. I'll be bummed when I'm finished. I've had a lot of fun writing it - like reliving it, in a way. My goal for the summer is to really dig in to my whole summer experience and flesh it out even more - which, for those who already think my blog is too wordy, probably sounds impossible. Believe me, it is possible. Writing about my life is how I process things, and right now it feels like there's a lot to process.

In the meantime, I'm trying to make the most of being back in Juneau while hammering out my 60-hour work weeks (my boss went out of town this week. Hopefully it gets better.) I've had a few chances to head up into the mountains. Last Sunday, I walked up Mount Juneau with two guys who were both named Dan. I just happened to meet the Dans at the trailhead. They were impressed with the pace I kept, so I think I may have just scored some new hiking partners for the ridge traverses that I really want to complete this summer (but, really, only the weather can decide that.)

Tuesday was Mount Jumbo in the rain. The workout was great but the scenery wasn't very good.

On Friday, I finally took Pugsley out for a ride. In the interim between the Tour Divide and now, my mountain bike has pretty much fallen apart. The tires don't seem to want to hold air anymore; the shock also seems to be leaking; the chain is stretched out; the cables are really tight; the grips have almost worn through and large chunks of foam are breaking off the seat. It's literally falling apart. I sent her off to Gustavus for some TLC, but without a swath of new parts, I'm not sure how well she'll fare. I've actually thought about converting the mountain bike back into a touring/commuting bike with a rigid fork and skinny tires, and using Pugsley as my trail-riding bike for the rest of the year. I'd love to get a new mountain bike, but there are a lot of necessities I need to nail down first - a place to live being at the top of the list.

On Saturday, I entered the Tram Run with my friend Abby. The race follows the lower Mount Roberts trail, gaining about 2,000 feet in four miles. I rode my bike to the race start, and was about halfway there when I realized I forgot my bike lock. I looked at my watch and calculated what it would take to swing it, then turned around in full-on sprint mode back to the place where I've been staying, adding five miles to a 10-mile ride. I grabbed the lock and made it to the start with 90 seconds to spare, dripping sweat, heart rate in full-on red zone, head spinning, trying to remember how to spell my name on the sign-up sheet as someone stabbed at me with safety pins to attach a race number to my shirt. I locked up the bike just as they yelled 'go.' Abby shot off ahead. I started the race in recovery mode just to get over my bike sprint, but I picked it up a little. Not much. Running is just ... well ... it's hard. Abby ended up winning the race in 37 minutes, chicking every single one of the guys by more than three minutes. I finished in 50 minutes ... third place woman. I'm not sure about my standing overall. It was fun, though. Just like hiking (in fact, for a lot of it I actually was hiking. Mount Roberts is steep.) I just figured out that my time last year was just 30 seconds faster - 49:36. I'm happy that I'm not in worse running shape than I was a year ago, when I actually did at least some running prior to the race.

My biking fitness, on the other hand, is a little on the dismal side. I have minor tendinitis in my Achilles tendons, although it seems to be aggravated more by running than biking. I still feel weak on climbs. My enthusiasm on the bike is on the low side. Although I didn't feel like the Tour Divide wore me down much directly after the ride, it definitely feels that way now. Which is why I'm feeling quite a bit of buyer's remorse for something I did last week amid a particularly tough day at work - I used air miles to buy a plane ticket to Anchorage so I could ride the Soggy Bottom 100. The ride is this Saturday. I'm still going to go because air-mile tickets aren't transferable. But right now I have that fear-in-my-heart feeling and I don't really want to talk about it.

I can just ignore that fear by staying on my feet. I hiked Blackerby Ridge today. That is a mean, mean trail. It forces you up 2,500 feet in a mile and a half on a narrow staircase of roots covered in slimy mud and lined with Devils Club. I'm still pulling thorns out of my hands. But once you get up into the rolling alpine, it's all worth it. Even on a dull day, the views are spectacular. I watched a bald eagle stalk, pounce and carry off a baby ptarmigan (sad but fascinating nonetheless.) The marmots were singing. The lupine was blooming. It's summer in Juneau.

Central New Mexico

I awoke to the sting of raindrops hitting my face. I groaned loudly and fumbled with the nylon of my bivy sack until I succeeded in closing the zipper. A headache pounded in my skull and my stomach gurgled and lurched. My first thought was, "Damn, I'm even more sick than I was yesterday. I totally have giardia. I'm going to die out here." But as I began to emerge from my sleepy haze, I realized that the crappiness I was feeling wasn't nausea. I was really, really hungry.

The rain picked up intensity as I thrashed out of my sleeping bag and stuffed it in its drybag as quickly as possible. I had somehow kicked off my shorts during the night, but before I even bothered to pull them back on, I walked over to my bike in my rain jacket and underwear and tore into my food stash like a half-starved raven. I pulled out a mashed package of Grandma's Cookies and shoved the whole mass into my mouth. The I opened a package of almonds and inhaled those, followed by infuriatingly well-wrapped cheese snacks and handfuls of Sour Patch Kids. I can't remember ever feeling so hungry in all my life. It was almost an out-of-body experience, with the repressed civilized side of myself standing aside, somewhat bemused and somewhat horrified as she watched my hands involuntarily tear through mass quantities of junk food. A full-on feeding frenzy.
When it ended, with my stash half depleted, I pulled on my shorts and rainpants and darted around camp, picking up random loose objects that I had strewn about during my sickly apathy the night before. With a sugar rush coursing through my blood, my energy went into overdrive, and I marveled at the turnaround even as I braced myself for another wave of nausea. It didn't come. My body was retaining the food. But my elation about that could only last so long. The rain was starting to come down hard, which probably meant more bad roads, which meant I had to start riding 30 miles into Cuba as fast as my tired, can't-climb, severely undernourished legs could carry me.

I had only traveled about eight miles from what felt like an extraordinarily remote campsite when I began to see car after car parked along the road. At first I thought, "Makes sense; it's the fourth of July weekend." But the cars went on for miles. Bumper to bumper. No campers. No campsites. Just cars. Many had made poor parallel parking maneuvers and ended up 10 or 20 feet down the embankment. Then I started to see the painted school buses. And the crowds of people huddled in cotton quilts, sleeping in the grass as the rain pelted down, and the half-collapsed Wal-mart tents, and the piles of garbage bags, and the extracted car seats, and the shelters made out of bed sheets and the red-eyed, dreadlocked 20-somethings walking their mangy dogs at 7:30 a.m. I stopped one of the dog-walkers and, pretty much expecting the answer, asked him what in the world was going on.

"Duuuude," he droned in a half-stoned, half-excited whisper. "Don't you know? It's the Rainbow Gathering, man. Like 10,000 people are all here together. It's amazing."

The guy's demeanor was right out of a bad movie about the '60s. I just smiled. There was trash everywhere. Unconscious people were sprawled in the mud. Rotten garbage cars had been driven off cliffs. The entire thing was horrifying. How could this guy not see that? But he didn't appear to see much of anything. He just looked at me with his glazed-over eyes and grinned.

I have a bit of a hippy-dippy background myself. I used to hang out in drum circles, listen to the Grateful Dead ... when I was 15. Now I wanted nothing more than to be far, far away from a culture that seemed to be about little more than driving a bunch of obnoxiously decorated vehicles to places where they literally didn't fit, getting really baked, trashing the forest and passing out. They were standing on the wet roadside thumbing rides, yelling at me to "Get high on life," and they couldn't see the hypocrisy of it all? Very rarely do I feel like a bike snob, but I wanted to yell back and tell these people to get a bike, and try going somewhere - somewhere real, not somewhere cooked up by the hippy bureaucracy as a magical Mecca and artificially enhanced by chemicals.

Anyway, I was happy to put the Rainbow Gathering behind me and begin the long descent into the fog-shrouded valley that encircled Cuba. Clumps of clouds draped the pine-covered hillsides in a way that made me feel homesick for Juneau. Of all the places on the route that could resemble my rainforest home, I never expected to find one in New Mexico.

I dropped into Cuba on a long pavement descent as I squinted into the pouring rain, opening my eyes just long enough to see the numbers on my speedometer surpassing 40 mph. I replenished my food supply in town, and bought a little extra in case I had to spend another night out. It was 125 miles to the next real town, Grants, and although it was all pavement, I was skeptical I'd make it there in a day knowing I was possibly still sick and already had 30 miles behind me.

Despite my obnoxious breakfast and equally huge second breakfast at the Cuba Subway, I tapped into the food supply right away. My appetite was out of control. I considered that a good thing. I had obviously ridden the previous day on a serious calorie deficit, and was trying to recover from illness, but I was still confounded by where all that food might even be going. I calculated a rough calorie estimate and came up with 3,800, which seemed unreal as it was only 10 a.m. But I wasn't trying to follow any kind of weight loss plan at the time, so I didn't really care.

The Cuba-to-Grants route traverses a sparsely populated Navajo reservation, where open space is abundant and buildings are few. It was another stretch where I started out with an obnoxious amount of water - six liters - and still decided to stop halfway for more, despite the fact that temperatures were very mild - high 70s at worst - and drizzling rain was still falling from the sky. Such is my paranoia about the desert. My maps indicated there was a store at mile 45, but when I reached it, I discovered it was a laundromat. That was a little unsettling - I had heard plenty of stories about unfriendliness on the reservation - but decided to go inside anyway.

The laundromat was packed on a Friday afternoon, with crowds of children weaving through the halls as their parents folded clothing and leaned against rumbling machines. All faces looked up as the white girl in bike tights walked inside, holding a red water bladder. A Native American man in his 70s who had no teeth and was at least six inches shorter than me approached. "I'm wondering if there's a place in here where I can fill up my water?" I asked.

"Sure," the man said through a big, gaping grin. He pointed to a bathroom in the corner. "You can get water in there. But we have pop machine, too. You can get a cold Coke; it's much better." He directed me over to the Coke machine and started fishing around in his pocket, pulling out a handful of coins.

"Oh no," I said. "I can buy my own soda."

"It's no problem!" he said, and made a move to put his own coins in the slot as I whipped out my wallet and showed him a dollar.

"No, I have cash. I want to buy a soda," I said.

He nodded and smiled. "Where you coming from today?"

"Cuba," I said. "I'm going to Grants."

He shook his head. "No, that's too far. You go to (I forget the name of the town). I have a son there. You stay with him."

"It's really OK," I said. "I know I can make it to Grants."

He laughed. "So you're Super Bike Woman! Fine, OK, that's good."

Other people put down their folding and walked up to ask me more questions about my trip. The children giggled and one girl handed me a piece of paper she had been coloring. So much for unfriendliness on the reservation.

In fact, even after I left the laundromat, three more people stopped on the side of the road to ask me if I needed water or directions. One woman even offered me a swig of her Gatorade. The overreaching friendliness and the cool, moist air put me in an incredible mood. It was everything I did not expect from "The Rez," and the surprise was refreshing and invigorating. I felt like I could pedal fast and strong enough to launch the bike airborne. And the stronger I pedaled, the more I ate. The headwind picked up, and I just pedaled faster and consumed with gusto. At one point, I reached into my framebag, and all I had left were the three waterlogged Clif Bars that I had been carrying as emergency food since Canada. I had managed to eat everything else. I guestimated at least 8,000 calories - Michael Phelps territory. That made me feel almost as proud as the incredible time I was making.

I reached Grants by sunset, just as spectacular thunderstorms raged to the south. 155 miles in 13 hours with a leisurely breakfast stop, one day after feeling as sick as I've ever felt on a bike. Grants felt like a huge victory, and I celebrated with Pizza Hut, full-on laundry at the laundromat, and a full hour of doing nothing but watching CNN. (On the Divide, any time that's not spent biking, eating or sleeping feels like a waste. But that was the day after Sarah Palin resigned as governor of Alaska, and I had been seriously deprived of current events and political gossip.)

Life was good again.

The next morning, I studied my maps and realized that the next stretch comprised of nearly 300 miles of mostly dirt with only one fuel stop available - a tiny little town with just two cafes called Pie Town. Many veterans of the route warned me that Pie Town was always closed, and it was the Fourth of July, so I called the Pie-O-Neer cafe from Grants. I got a message saying they would be open until 4 p.m. It was 8:30 a.m. Pie Town was 80 miles away. It had rained a ton the night before, and I expected to find plenty of mud. It was impossible. I left a pleading message: "Hi, my name's Jill. I'm riding through town on a bike with the Tour Divide. I'm sure you've seen others come through. Anyway, I'm calling from Grants. I'm going to try, but I don't think I'll make it there by 4. I was wondering if I could ask you to leave a lunch on the doorstep, maybe a hamburger or sandwich and pie, and a gallon of water, and a check. I can just pick in up on the doorstep, and I'll leave cash. I don't really care what the food is. At this point, I just need calories and water. Please. I'm good for it, I swear. I have lots of cash. My name is Jill Homer."

I pedaled out of Grants in an unexpected bubble of strong emotion. I'm not even sure where it came from. Many people have asked me at what point of the race did I realize that I could finish it, and the exact moment has been hard for me to pinpoint. Sometimes I think Montana. Sometimes I think 65 miles from the end. But, after further reflection, I think that was the moment. Pedaling along Route 66 out of Grants, New Mexico. I realized that I had only 400 miles left to pedal. Just three more days if things went well. And that realization filled me with everything from elation to strong doubt. Tears streamed down my face as I pleaded to God, the Universe, the Powers that Be, my own inner strength, anyone and anything that might be listening: "Please be with me. Please stay with me. Please help me get through this."

I left the pavement and pedaled up the Pie Town road, a long, rolling traverse of seriously washboarded clay. My teeth rattled and my butt clenched with the worst kind of saddle sore agony, but I didn't really mind because anything was preferable to mud, and I had been expecting mud. The road did start to become softer as it climbed. I concentrated hard to tap into my snowbiking Zen and imagine myself as light as a feather: "Let me float on top of this. Just let me stay on top of this." The tires skimmed the sloppy surface, tossing mud but rolling true, and I pedaled with everything I had in my tired legs, with the Pie Town carrot dangling over the horizon.

I rolled into town at 2 p.m. and strolled triumphantly into the Pie-O-Neer cafe. A guitarist and base player strummed mellow country songs in one corner as a handful of people listened from tables and snacked on burly pieces of scrumptious-looking pie. Before I could announce myself and ask if they got my message, a woman rushed up to me and wrapped her arms around me in a gigantic hug. "You made it!" she exclaimed. "I can't believe you made it!"

"I made it," I smiled.

The guitarist in the country band was just finishing up a song. "We did not think you were going to get here in time," he said. "After all the rain last night, I thought that road would be soup."

"Actually, it wasn't so bad," I said.

He smiled and shook his head. "Well, congratulations. That's some amazing riding."

The woman nodded. "And, I have to say, you're the cleanest and best-dressed person in this race."

I laughed. "Really?" I looked down at my outfit. I had a big chainring grease stain on the front of my jersey, and my baggy shorts were rumpled and dusty.

"When Matt Lee got here, he was covered in mud, red eyes - he looked half-dead," the woman said. "He just fell in the door, mumbling, 'I need food.' He really looked like death. I thought, 'That can't be healthy.'"

I laughed again. I was about to give her my "Here in mid-pack we have more fun" speech when she pulled me over to a table and sat me down. "What do you want?" she said. "We don't have a lot on the menu, but I can see what I can cook up."

The first thing that came into my head was salad, so I asked for it. She told me they didn't have salad, but she had a bunch of veggies in the fridge and she could whip one up. She offered me a spinach quesadilla and tomato vegetable soup, and I enthusiastically ordered it all. Fresh food! Real, fresh food! I was so giddy that I completely forgot about the pie.

I devoured the healthiest and tastiest meal I had consumed in three weeks as the country band played an impressive set of original music. The woman brought me new Pepsis as fast as I could knock them back. She directed me into the kitchen so I could fill up my water and choose from a spread of pies. I chose coconut cream. "Good choice," she told me. "That one won an award from a big food magazine last month."
I left Pie Town feeling like I was pedaling my first mile of the day even though I had 80 behind me - another example of why human kindness is the most valuable resource on the Divide. I made a couple of short stops to explore some super-intriguing old adobe buildings and began climbing into the Gila National Forest. The desert soon turned back into pine and hemlock-studded hillsides, with the distinct feature of an almost barren forest floor beneath the tree canopy.

As evening approached, the thunderstorms that had been encircling the mountains all day began to close in. I hadn't yet decided how far I was going to ride that evening, but I knew it wasn't going to be to real shelter. The route would soon dip away from the forest and back into the open desert. After that, I knew there would be at least 20 miles in which I would be completely exposed before I re-entered the national forest, and there were no camping options before then. I lingered for a few minutes near the top of a long descent and tried to decide whether I should stay or go. I decided to go.

I crossed onto a gravel road that cut through a wide-open ranchland with a few scattered houses. The clouds in front of me sunk in and became dark to the point of near-complete opacity, which told me that just a couple miles away it was raining, hard. The wind picked up velocity to my side, and as I glanced behind I could see another opague storm advancing quickly toward me. A glimmering curtain of lightning flashed through the crescent of the two storms, and I knew that if I didn't catch the one in front of me, the one behind me surely would. My heart rate shot to primal speeds, and I pedaled as steadily fast as I could manage through the eye of the storms, wondering when they were going to join forces.

It's hard for me to describe just how frightened I am of lightning storms. To me, they are the scariest, most unpredictable aspect of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route. At least with grizzly bears, you know 99 times out of 100, they're going to run away. Lightning has no such guarantee. Incredible streaks of electricity tore through the sky as I traversed a region that didn't even have a stop sign to cower beneath. I was the tallest thing in a one-mile radius, whether I was on my bike or crouched on the ground. And if I stopped moving, the back storm would surely catch me. As long as I kept pedaling, I could at least hold out hope that the gap held.

And that's where I was at, stress-pedaling right into the heart of an electric storm as another one approached, when I heard the loud zip of my rear tire spitting out mass quantities of air. I stopped and inspected the damage. I was running slime tubes, and my frame was coated in green goo. The slime was bubbling out of a hole in the tire, but whatever I ran over seemed to be gone. I picked up the frame and spun the wheel around until it stopped gurgling. Then I pulled out my air pump and started pumping frantically, hoping the slime would hold.

I inflated the tire to about 25 psi and decided that was good enough, but when I started riding, air started to spit out again. I swore out loud. I did not want to have to change the tube, which on my bike involves undoing the brake caliper and generally takes me long enough that I would undoubtedly end up underneath the back storm. The air stream stopped quickly and I decided to stop and pump one more time. As I kneeled in a puddle atop a road had been innundated with rain only minutes before, I looked up and noticed a full rainbow draped over the heart of the storm, and all around it was an incredible ceiling of phosphorescent red light, a reflection of the sunset that burned through a thin clearning to the west. Streaks of lightning continued their violent dance beneath the rainbow stage. It was so breathtaking that I even through the dark fog of the stress I was feeling, I knew I was witnessing a moment of powerful beauty. Beauty more powerful than fear. I pumped a few shots of air into the tube, and it seemed to hold. I got back on the bike and continued approaching a vibrant curtain of color and lightning that filled the entire sky. "Be brave," I chanted. "Be strong."

Before I reached the front storm, the road turned mercifully to the west while the storms continued their swift march east. I began to climb back into the forest, but stopped before I entered the canyon to look back on the now-fading sunset one last time. In a corner of the valley many miles behind, I saw tiny bursts of bottle rockets exploding in the shadows. "That's right," I remembered. "It's the Fourth of July." I watched the fireworks for a few minutes, listening to their tiny pops and smiling at their miniscule streams of blue light that were pitifully dwarfed by the booming thunder and blazing red sky. "Why don't those people just save their money and look around?" I wondered out loud. Couldn't they see that their efforts were so, so small; and nature was so, so immense?

I pedaled a few more miles until the road seemed dry again - a small patch of land that hadn't been pummeled by storms - and began setting up my camp. After weathering that horrific storm, and having found the courage to power through it without breaking down and cowering in a ditch, I felt a surge of confidence that can't be duplicated by any other kind of success. And as I laid down beneath a near-full moon revealed by a new clearing in the clouds, I realized that this was the answer to that ever-present question: "Why do you do this?" Why does someone like me - who doesn't possess any remarkable athletic talent, and who isn't all that competitive, and who still harbors plenty of fears about things remote and lonely and wild - why do I participate in incredibly difficult, expensive, time-consuming, admittedly dangerous ultraendurance races when I might find more success and fewer challenges in more reasonable endeavors? And that moment, in the Gila forest, perfectly framed the reason:

Physical fitness is fleeting. Strength is forever.