Haunted

It's just my luck that the minute one Iditarod race wrapped up, another one started. This year's dogsled race is actually pretty compelling, with your favorite redneck and mine, Lance Mackey, tearing up everyone's expectations. The backlash from this is that every day I have to scroll through dozens of pictures like the one above (by Al Grillo, Associated Press) on the AP wire - sometimes lingering on them well past the point of productivity - and the images have started to show up in my dreams.

I have a strange dichotomy following me through my post-Susitna life, the one in which I'm not riding my bike at all and yet spending more time thinking about riding my bike through increasingly more difficult and more mind-bending situations. Now I can't even imagine how I'll survive another year if I don't ride the 350 Iditarod trail race to McGrath in 2008. The strange dichotomy of this is that I can't imagine how I'll survive if I do. Why must it haunt me so?

I thought about the logistics as I was riding on my bike trainer today - 90 minutes working up to top resistance, a new post-injury record. I really wish I had the guts to ask more questions of the people who really understand the race. After the Susitna 100 ended, I spent about three hours sitting in a sweltering cabin and waiting for Geoff to find the energy to stand up. Also waiting in the cabin to find that energy was John Stamstad, who shared a table with us during the entire hazy recovery period. Stamstad ran the Susitna 100 on foot, but back in the '90s he was one of the pioneers of Iditabike ... as well as just about every other endurance mountain bike event that existed at the time. I mean, he's the John Stamstad. I had about a million and a half questions to ask him. But instead, I just spent a couple of hours sitting five feet from him, staring into sluggish space and saying nothing. He comes across as the type of guy who does not want to be bothered, and I do not like to be the one who does the bothering. At one point, Geoff asked him if he was going to do any rides while he was in Alaska.

"No," he said, "I don't race bikes anymore."

And in those five words came a million and a half more questions. But all we ever heard was those five words. It's good I found my way into editing, because I'd make a terrible reporter.

I guess the Iditarod Invitational is one of those experiences you really just have to figure out for yourself. I learned this during my first Susitna 100 ... nothing I read before the race helped me much during it. But still, I'd like to know ... what does -40 really feel like when you have no where else to go?

.....

Also - in the interest of being a good reporter - I should disclose that "Up in Alaska" did not win a Bloggie. So much time lapsed between voting and now that I nearly forgot all about it, but Fat Cyclist's latest post reminded me. He didn't win either, and that is truly a travesty. Up in Alaska, on the other hand, doesn't really deserve to win "Best Sports Blog." I'm sorry, it doesn't. It's only a bicycle blog because its sole writer is obsessed with bicycling, and it's a marginal bicycle blog at that - tainted with a lot of Alaska lifestyle, mundane stream-of-consciousness, wilderness daydreaming and other activities that have nothing to do with sports. Not that I wouldn't have loved to win ... and thanks to everyone who voted, regardless of who you voted for. Maybe next year. :-)

Summer dreams

Daylight Savings Time always gets me dreaming about spring. Why did it have to come so early this year? We logged another 9-10 inches of snowfall today to add on to our 50 inches in March alone and 200 so far this season. That stuff stacks up and always seems to take its sweet time melting. So spring is nowhere near my horizon. Might as well dream about summer.

I think I have my 2007 endurance race season planned out. It’s a meager one for sure ... probably another trilogy this year, with a few long independent rides and maybe a mountain running race or two thrown in. The Susitna 100 has come and gone, so here are the other two:

24 Hours of Light (June 23-24?):
I know close to nothing about this race. I don’t even know exactly when it is. But I do know that it’s around the solstice and it’s in Whitehorse, Yukon, which is a small jump across the pond from Juneau. The only description the Web site gives is “No lights allowed (or required) ... Ride sweet singletrack and rolling terrain all night long with the glow of the sun as your guide.” It sounds like the 24 Hours of Kincaid with Canadians. Let the good times roll!

I wish I had a chance to ride more 24-hour mountain bike races. I live for the challenge of self-supported wilderness events, but the setup of a 24 gives me a place to shine. They’re perfect for me ... I’m not fast, but I can ride long stretches of time without stopping. Middle-of-the-night sleepiness is not a problem for me. Technical trail is only a problem if I’m unfamiliar with it and dogged by my typical lack of confidence. But give me 16 identical laps, and I’m bouncing off ledges with the best of them. In short, I actually love solo riding the hamster runs. But only one of them is within my reach this year.

So my other race is:

The Fireweed 400 (July 6-7):
I know. They’re so close together. That’s how it goes. I’ll probably ride this race one way or another. If Geoff gets into the Mount Marathon race, we'll turn it into a mini vacation and fly out together. I’ll ride the full 400 if I can find a willing (and therefore crazy) support crew. A friend in Anchorage is trying to help me recruit right now (If you’re in the Anchorage area, and you think hours of hours of puttering behind me in a rental car sounds like fun, drop me a line) If not, I’ll ride the 200 and consider an unofficial ride back.

This is a pretty serious roadie event - possibly the largest in Alaska - and I look forward to showing up at Sheep Mountain with my $600 flat-bar touring bike with its platform pedals and 27 gears, wearing running shoes and a big backpack so I can pretend that there’s not some petroleum-powered vehicle shadowing me the whole time. I do plan to train hard so I can ride it seriously - you know, at least come in before the cutoff. I have no idea what kind of pace I can maintain on a road bike. This is what makes this race so appealing to me. It's such a new concept for me.

Everything else is tentative. The Soggy Bottom 100 is in September, but it’s a lot of effort and money for me to take a weekend off work and buy a plane ticket to Anchorage, so it’s unlikely I’ll be able ride it this year. Same goes for any race in the Lower 48. The one exception is a trip to Utah I am planning, likely during the first week of May. Every year, Fat Cyclist and his friends put together a “Ride Around the White Rim in One Day” extraveganza, but I think RAWROD 2007 is in April. I’d like to organize one of my own White Rim assaults, but don’t have a friend in the world who would be willing to do it with me. So if you live in Salt Lake/Moab/Denver ... or anywhere, really ... and are interested in meeting in Moab for a self-supported (No vehicle. Carry all water and food) single-day ride around the White Rim trail sometime between May 4 and May 9, please comment below or send me an e-mail. I am serious about organizing this. And it would be cool to ride with some of my Mountain-West-based blogger friends if you're available (Dave Nice? Chris Plesko? Dave Chenault? Anyone? Bueller?). Anyone interested can reach me at jillhomer66@hotmail.com.

Reason to believe

Today was one of those days when it felt like a bad idea to get out of bed. I have very few of these, and I never know what to expect from them.

I spent two hours in the morning on the elliptical trainer at the gym, dripping sweat all over a borrowed book. It just feels so good to work some energy out, and when I move without expectations, it doesn't hurt.

After Geoff came home from work, we ate yet another meal of leftovers from the lunch counter (I swear, I am going to become very fat eating organic wholesome hippy food from Rainbow Foods.) Then he convinced me to go cross-country skiing at the glacier campground.

On the drive there, we approached a mass of traffic that can never be a good sign in this small city. Geoff let off the gas as I squinted in the distance for flashing lights, but saw none. Before we even knew what was happening, we found ourselves in the middle of a vehicle mosh pit. Cars were spinning in circles behind us, fishtailing beside us, veering directly in front of us, slamming into guard rails and into each other. Geoff wove his 1989 Honda Civic through the twirling cabaret of rubber and metal. I sat as rigid as a statue in the passenger seat, clinging to my hip belt and staring wide-eyed at the carnage ... almost beautiful in its slow-motion flow, like some cracked-out Disney on Ice dance where the grand finale is not exactly happy. By some divine hand, Geoff navigated his rust bucket over the ice untouched, and we slipped by the front of the storm ... a thick pileup of about a dozen cars in various states of crumpled. Didn't seem to be any injuries ... just a lot of business for the body shops in town.

"What just happened there?" Geoff asked after I started breathing again.

"I think we just avoided a 30-car pileup," I said.

After that, I couldn't imagine anything I wanted to do less than ski in the valley, but there was definitely no turning back at that point. Once on the trail, I did about a mile of grumpy kicks before I decided it was time to turn off my mind to how monotonous and tedious I think Nordic skiing is. Instead, I started chanting. "Kick ... Glide ... Kick ... Glide." I closed my eyes and felt the tracks slip backward beneath my feet. "Nordic skiing is great," I told myself. "You don't even need to be able to see." So I turned on my iPod and scooted along until I reached camp site No. 6. I always stop there when I ski by. I like to spend a minute beside the mound of snow that was once a picnic table and look at the sweeping view of a now-frozen swamp that was once so lush and clouded by mosquitoes. It was, after all, my first Juneau home. I feel a strange sort of comfort there.

Because I often fill my iPod shuffle at random from an amassed music collection of about 3,000 songs, I definitely have faith in the serendipity of shuffle. As I stood among the snow-masked memories of camp site No. 6, iPod chose to play an old song - one I downloaded back in the Napster days and don't think I've even heard in years: An Aimee Mann cover of a Bruce Springsteen song:

"Struck me kinda funny ... Seem kinda funny sir to me.
Still at the end of every hard day people find some reason to believe."

Adventures of Unipedal

Date: March 8
Mileage: 5.1 (Made it further than last week)
March mileage: 6.2
Temperature upon departure: 34

This is the second time this week I've become self-aware of my own ridiculous behavior, and felt compelled to photograph it. Since I obviously set this picture up, I probably didn't look quite this ridiculous for the better part of three miles. But the truth can't be that far off.

I think my doctor is right about the resistance of outdoor cycling. It's just too much, too fast. But I made good on my promise to myself to try, and mostly good on my promise to stop once it hurt. Juneau received a massive amount of snow early in the week, and that's been followed up by a warm spell and a steady stream of sleet and rain. The snow pack funnels all of the melt-off into the streets, which means shin-deep slush, snow dams and flooding that can reach knee level. You don't pedal in this stuff. You ooze through it.

I noticed the strange feeling return almost immediately, and by mile 1, there was definite pain. By mile 1.5, I was mindlessly pulling my leg off the pedal. At mile 2, I just left it there, rigid and sticking straight out like a splintered board.

You'd think that pedalling with one leg would be either twice as hard or twice as slow. In reality, it's both. Since three weeks of rest and relaxation haven't exactly done wonders for my muscle strength, my left leg became tired pretty quickly. I made it another half mile that way, grinding through the slush at 8 mph. Cars streamed by and launched slush geysers far over my head. I wiped the cold goo out of my eyes and thought, "I must look like an absolute idiot." Out came the camera.

I feel a little frustrated about another defeat, but not that much. I can't expect whatever injury I have to become instantly healed just because I went to see a doctor. I thought a little more about my doctor's advice to wait another 10 days to get an MRI (I already have an appointment set up to do so, should I decide at that point that it's needed.) I think it's sound advice. I have considered the possibility that he's just waiting for my insurance check to clear before he welcomes me back in for tests. I mean - truthfully - young, single people who show up at a clinic driving cars like mine don't have the best reputation for paying their medical bills. But there's also the fact that ... however slowly ... my knee is getting better every day. If that stops happening, I'll start waving my Visa card around. I'm sure somebody out there will hook my leg up to a scanner. Until then, maybe there will be more Misadventures of Unipedal.

Spun out

You can always tell when Geoff or I are injured or burnt out, because those are the only reasons my road bike ends up mounted on an ancient magnetic trainer in the front room. It just sits there, propped on stacks of flattened USPS boxes, gathering dust as rain and sleet pound the front window and Geoff’s disassembled car racks crowd in like bars in a jail cell. Roadie on the trainer has become a depressing sight to me.

I set it up when the weather or trail conditions have become too much for me. I ride it for a day, and it reminds me how wonderful blowing snow and cantaloupe-sized ice chunks can really be. But when I set it up today, it was under doctor’s orders. It felt less defeatist and more purposeful. I started one of two DVDs I own - and have seen about 20 times - and set into easy spinning.

I didn’t feel any knee pain. I didn’t feel normal ... but no pain. The feeling was more akin to a slightly dislocated joint that was looking for its proper place. I planned to ride for an hour, and every 10 minutes I increased the resistance. At minute 52, a voice in my head started saying, “Please stop. Please just stop.” I was confused. The strange feeling was still there, but no pain yet. “Please stop,” it said again. So I listened. I jumped off the bike with 8 minutes to go. A few hours have gone by since. I have the same generally-improving stiffness I’ve had for weeks, but still no pain. I’m beginning to think I really am crazy.

The problem is, I don’t know if that voice spoke up because I was bored, or if it was protesting some inner trauma that I didn’t ever consciously connect to. I have never been very good at “listening” to my body. In many ways, I can’t even hear it most of the time. I actually believe that’s one of my assets, considering the sport I’m most interested in is endurance cycling. I’m not exceptionally strong or physically talented like Geoff. If I ever measured my VO2 max, it would probably be right around average. I’ve never been adept at muscle building, and my balance and hand-eye coordination are both atrocious. All of these attributes scream “NOT AN ATHLETE.” But when I get on a bicycle, I shift my body into neutral and turn my willpower on overdrive. Then I let my mind do all of the heavy lifting. It tells my body to keep going, and my body listens. It assures my body it can go forever. It makes my body believe that. My body has never failed me.

Until now, maybe.

I try to shrug this whole knee thing off and believe it’s not a big deal - despite the daily complaints on my blog that may indicate otherwise. I guess the complaints are closer to my reality, though. It’s been hard for me. It hasn’t been that long, but I already feel like I have a swath of emptiness in my life where bicycling once was. I’ve heard recovering alcoholics use the same words to describe their addiction ... that there’s simply a hole there, and nothing is ever going to replace it. But the big difference between them and me is they’re doing everything to stay away from that hole, and I'm trying to get back in.

I think maybe it’s time to try again. Don’t worry - I’m not going to overdo it. I’ll take it slow. I won’t push through any pain at all. I’ll listen if my body says “Please stop,” even if it is just saying it because dagger-like sleet is falling from the sky and a 50 mph crosswind is threatening to pin me to the pavement. But I need to show my body who’s boss. And it’s about time it started listening again.

No news is good news, I guess

Well the doc didn't really find anything in my knee. He yanked my leg in weird directions and scolded me repeatedly for tensing up. He said he felt "residual inflammation." He said he heard "creaking." He diagnosed me with "angry knee." He recommended the same ol' "RICE" crap ... Ice, Compression and Excessive amounts of Advil. But not Rest. He recommended Rehabilitation. He told me to get back on the bike. "Don't ride outside," he said. "There's too much resistance. Put your bike on a trainer and spin easy."

I went to the gym afterward and ran on the elliptical trainer - no incline - for an hour. That motion feels pretty much normal at this point. Then I sat on the ancient stationary bike, set the resistance to "2" and started spinning. It felt really strange. Not necessarily painful ... but if I stopped thinking about it, I would eventually become aware of other physical reactions that are typically associated with pain ... white-knuckling the handlebars, biting my lip, and pressing my head against my arm. It felt unusual. Unnatural. I lasted 10 minutes.

The doc scheduled a follow-up for two weeks from now, and recommended waiting out an MRI scan until then. He seemed really confident in my health. His reassuring head shakes gave me a boost of confidence, but also made me second-guess everything that's transpired in the past three weeks. Maybe I'm looking to the wrong doctor. Maybe what I really need is a good psychiatrist to tell me why I might have a tendency toward self-defeating hypochondria. I know medicine can't do much for you unless you have a traumatic injury ... and this is almost definitely not. I have a fair amount of experience with "waiting it out." Strange, inexplicable and incurable ailments run rampant in my family. But the bad knees seem to be exclusively mine.

Lots of snow

The latest storm has dumped nearly two feet of snow on Juneau. The city closed all of the schools and gave non-essential government employees a paid day off ... which means none of the streets were plowed and all of the snow-day beneficiaries were funnelled onto nearby trails. I love days like this. I somehow ended up in front of snowshoer rush hour and punched a new path up the mountain. I walked up for one hour. It took me 35 minutes to walk down. I wandered off the main trail and postholed a few times up to my thighs - even wearing snowshoes. It was a real struggle to get out. The first time, I wrenched my bad knee beyond its point of sharp, blinding pain. After that, I just threw all of my body weight toward the direction of the trail (or my best guess of were it was) and swam out. I'm still not sure all of this snowshoeing is helping my physical situation. But I do think it's helping me maintain some kind of an aerobic base.

That other Iditarod race is going on right now ... the one with all of the puppies and the people on sleds. After spending the past week watching the progress of bikers and runners as they made their way over the Alaska Range, I'm amazed at the speeds in which those dogs can move. As a handful of ultrasporters continue on to McGrath and Nome, the Iditarod mushers are already passing them like they’re not even moving. Also out on the trail right now is Mike Curiak, a who is bicycling self-supported to Nome. Self-supported meaning he carries all of his gear. He buys nothing. He stashes nothing. He mail-drops nothing. He enters no buildings, sleeps in no cabins. And if a friendly musher offered him some smoked salmon on the trail, he would probably refuse it. There’s a rumor that he’s training for some 2008 expedition that will be even more remote and difficult. More remote and difficult than a 100-percent self-supported winter bicycle ride to Nome? I can’t even imagine where in the world that could possibly happen, but my money’s on a bicycle ride to the South Pole. Go, Mike, go.

Speaking of expeditions, there's a raffle going on right now to support Dave Nice's 2007 Great Divide Race bid. He had his bike stolen during last year's race, so this is bound to be his year. And you can help him! Visit Fat Cyclist's site for all the details.

I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow in my continued effort to figure out why I’m not riding. I’m hoping for a good diagnosis, expecting a vague and unhelpful diagnosis, and steeling myself for a bad diagnosis. If it turns out I’ve rendered my right knee unusable for an extended period of time, I’m already formulating a cycling plan. It involves a frame-mounted foot strap, a clipless pedal, and "quad of steel" workouts for the unipedal.