Passover

Long night waiting for election results to come in. This state has far too many of those things. But I had a good morning in the subtle saga of knee recovery (Yeah. I guess this is yet another one of those kind of posts. You have been warned.) Geoff told me there was a new Modest Mouse CD out, so I downloaded the whole thing and spent more than an hour listening to it, doing my PT stretches and riding my bike trainer. It was a good hour, mostly because of the music, but also because I rode three whole 20-minute sessions on the trainer. I've done this before, post-Susitna even, but this was the first time I made it through even 20 minutes without throttling the handlebars to displace pain. It's still a little hard for me to sort out good burn - like the kind in my seriously out-of-shape quads - from bad burn - like the kind that comes and goes in front of my knee - but I'm pretty sure today's riding was all about good burn.

And because I didn't want to overdo it, and because I had an extra hour to kill due to the whole election thing, and because if I spend too much time sitting at home I start to go nuts on the cookie supply, I went to the pool and swam a mile. It took 47 minutes. I'm getting a little (so very little) bit faster. I'm going to buy a swim cap and something that will hold my nostrils shut so I can cut through the water like a normal person.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my bike fit dilemma. These comments have been incredibly helpful. Not only have people provided good suggestions, but they've also helped keep me closer to the surface of reality when I wake up surrounded in sunlight and think "Today's the day to ride for four hours!" So thank you, again.

Chain reaction

These adventures in knee recovery are becoming really boring. I need to find something else to write about ... anything ... maybe tomorrow.

I went to visit a physical therapist for the first time today. She had some interesting theories about the origin of my knee pain - including a misaligned hip and an atrophied VMO quad muscle. She gave credence to my posthole overextension theory, but emphasized that weak leg muscles won't support shock on a weakened knee. This injury has been building up since the dawn of my bicycling, she theorized, since I first sat down on a bicycle seat that I never bothered to measure on a bicycle I never bothered to check to make sure fit. I just bought these things online. A bicycle is a bicycle, right? Right? They're not precision instruments so specialized for body types that the slightest diversion leads to a chain reaction of deterioration and degeneration that can not be recovered? Right?

So now I'm doing my prescribed stretching/ITB band strengthening exercises and staring in bewilderment at my bikes. Did they really betray me? I liked it so much better when I was the idiot that injured myself.

And the bigger question ... if I do recover from all of this, can I trust them? How can I really know that it's not just going to start all over again? Will every mile I pedal be another notch in my inevitable decay? Is there a way to get my bicycles ... you know ... tested for this?

I'm feeling a bit flummoxed by all of this. But at least now I have an excuse to sit on the couch with a pillow between my knees and call it "exercising."

Running start

Today I hiked up the Salmon Creek trail. It's of the few trails around Juneau I hadn't explored before - mostly because it was closed for several months during fall. By the time it reopened, I had enough time to learn it was an old utility road that meandered lazily up to a city water supply reservoir. It sounded painfully boring. But painfully boring makes for pain-free walking, so I gave it a chance.

Despite the wide road it follows, the trail itself was a narrow slit through the snow, so smooth and hardpacked it was like singletrack from heaven. Every step on it sounded wasteful and wrong ... crunch, crunch, wish I had my bike ... crunch, crunch. The mainland mountains towered overhead. Beyond those peaks is the icefield that separates the Alaska panhandle from British Columbia. Whenever I think about this precipitous geography, it reminds me how thin my sliver of civilization is in this vast and untouchable wilderness. I like this reality. It makes me feel so alone ... and so alive.

I was only about an hour up the canyon before trail use had dropped off so dramatically that I had to stomp my own path through crusty snow. I turned on iPod and turned around, pounding a little faster through the postholes until I made it back to the main trail. "The Bleeding Heart Show" by The New Pornographers started playing. It's the kind of song you don't even really listen to until the chorus suddenly erupts in a string of joyful "Hey-Las." I don't know what happened. I broke out in a sprint.

Even beyond the music, I could hear my steps breaking across the snow ... crunchcrunchcrunch. No thoughts about bikes or knees or active recovery. Just running because running feels good sometimes, because the icefield looms overhead and you are alone in front of it, because you have nowhere to go and yet everywhere to be. I didn't stop until I was back at the trailhead, about two miles from the last step I had walked.

I still feel like my body is trying to tell me good is good, but trust and truth are two very different things. I go to PT on Monday. I don't think I'll tell them about the running, but I do think I'll keep my options open.

Out like a lamb

I'm taking a break from the Great Indoors.

The workouts are unquantifiable, but you can't beat the views.

Or the potential for new freckles.

My 14-mile month

I feel like I'm going to be riding my bike again soon. I can't say why I feel so confident about it, especially since I have yet to obtain a proper opinion on the matter. But it just feels intuitive. It's like that time I hobbled around with undiagnosable muscle injury for a month (blood clots, probably.) One day, all of the tension just drained out. I didn't know it was over at the time, but I could feel it happening. It's more likely this time around that I've traded denial for self pity for clingy optimism. But who knows? I've been reserving strong judgement or reckless experiments for my PT appointment on April 2. And after that? I think I saw a horoscope somewhere that said April's the month to begin anew.

Today was a nice day, the first in a while, but I wasn't really able to capture any interesting pictures. The top picture was actually an attempt to photograph a bald eagle perched on a branch. But Juneau raptors are much more wily than the pet eagles in Homer. They generally move out of the way far too fast. So the eagle is long gone. What I do have is a photo of enough green to prove that I don't live in a black-and-white world. The massive snowpack is receding, however slowly.

I went out for a walk today wearing only my rain pants, a T-shirt and a hat. It was warm ... relatively ... it was 38 degrees. But the reflection of sun off the snow adds at least 40 degrees to the air temperature. I could have done that walk in a swim suit. I mostly just wore the hat because I have been swimming a lot lately, so any unrestrained hair flies around like the follicles on a person hugging the static electricity ball at the planetarium. The landscape was so bright white that I could not stop squinting. Couldn't make myself open my eyes. So I took a photo to illustrate the walk. Yet another self portrait. Yawn. Sorry.

Geoff and I spent the afternoon skiing at Eaglecrest. Well ... not exactly. Geoff spent the afternoon cross-country skiing. I did one lap and decided the snow was entirely too fast and scary, the possibility of further injury far too high, and the attraction of late-afternoon laziness too difficult to resist. So I plopped down at the top of a 15-foot snow berm and read a New Yorker magazine. For about 40 minutes. Just reclining in my self-molded easy chair, soaking up sunlight on my pasty Alaskan skin and deep-freezing my butt.

On the way home, Geoff's Civic rolled over to 300,000 miles. I decided to document the occasion. Unfortunately, the only photo that didn't come out irreparably blurry reads 299,999.9.

It's funny to be proud about the mileage achievement of a car. If anything, I should be ashamed to admit on my bicycle blog that I have been near a car that has actually been driven 300,000 miles while commuter bicycles everywhere gather rust. But there you have it. This car has been everywhere. It has more good stories over the course of its lifetime than some people do, and there should be no shame in owning a good car. Well, except for that whole global warming thing.
Tomorrow is supposed to be 39 and sunny. How will I stay off my bike?

Big day indoors

My hair is now officially an indoor fire hazard and my eyes are sore from squinting at small pages, but other than that, I feel pretty good right now.

So I spent four hours working out indoors today. I wasn't all that bad, physically or mentally. And it didn't even turn out to be a nice day outside, so I feel like I won this small battle.

I started at the pool, noon sharp. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about pool swimming. It makes me thirsty like the land of 1,000 suns, and makes my skin and hair feel like I just got back from such a place. But it goes smoothly enough in the meantime, and there's great people watching pretty much nonstop ... because I still can't put my face in the water without taking a big draw of liquid chlorine. I still need to figure that one out.

Open swim lasts two hours, and I thought I'd try to stick in out the entire time. But at about minute 94, I was hit with a need to visit the bathroom at a degree and urgency I did not anticipate. One minute I was fine, and the next, it was as though the entire weight of the pool and everyone inside of it came crushing down on my bladder. I did the last half-lap pulling frantically with my arms while squeezing my legs together. Then I waddled quickly into the locker room. By the time I came back out, about a half dozen children had taken residence in my lane. And since there was only about 20 minutes left in open swim anyway, I decided to call it good. 144 laps.

The I went to the regular gym. I did I few quick upper body lifts to cool down, and I ate a little baggie of dried fruit and nuts. Then I took up residence on an elliptical machine with a copy of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime," which I bought at a garage sale months ago and have been meaning to read. Good book, and fast reading. Before I even knew it, I was on page 136. Two hours, 15 minutes.

Now it's been seven hours since I returned. I left the gym feeling a little depleted, mostly because it's impossible to drink in two hours the seven gallons of water the pool seems to drain from me. But other than that, I felt pretty strong. No knee pain out of what is ordinary. Good signs. Happy day.

Swim: 95 minutes, 2 miles (10,600 feet).
PedalRun (or whatever it is you actually do on a elliptical machine): 135 minutes, 16.8 miles (Distance according to the digital display. Who knows how accurate that is, but since I don't even know what an elliptical machine is supposed to mimic, what does it matter?)
Actual distance traveled: About 400 feet.

Life is a mystery.

Clean slate

The only exercising I did today was a 45-minute walk along the Mendenhall Lake shoreline. It was a rest day, but it seemed important to get out - if only just to look at a waterfall and snap a picture of a glacier. Thing is, there are a lot of places in Juneau to go "see." Lately, especially so on these sleet-streaked, featureless days, I seem to gravitate out here. Maybe it's the lack of contrast. Staring out across a rotting sheet of ice and wondering where it meets the sky. I spend more time looking in than out.

I've been working on changing my outlook about things. Before now, my philosophy about endurance cycling - and life in general, really - has been that if you want it, really want it, so bad that you've convinced yourself you need it, it's possible. Out of shape? No food? No water? If you had to bike that 100 miles to survive, you'd find a way to do it. Of course, I never lived by anything that extreme. But I like to operate under the delusion that I control my own destiny.

I'm learning, though, that wanting things ... even needing things ... isn't enough. Life is a little control and a lot of chaos, so in the end, you're not really the one behind the wheel. If you don't have any water, don't have any food, that's a correctable problem. But if that problem persists, you'll die, eventually. No matter how much you tell yourself you'd really like to keep going.

But I staggered upstream through a tough week on the job and it worked out for me; now it's over. Hooray. I have this plan to complete several hours of low-impact, high-energy activity tomorrow ... swimming, elliptical machine and the like. Maybe four hours. My idea was to test how my endurance is holding up. I'm actually looking forward to it, even if it is hamster wheel stuff. But then I hear that it's going to be a beautiful day ... partly sunny ... clean pavement ... may even hit 40. And a larger part of me is wondering how I can make that whole bike thing work. I'd like to ride out to the glacier. Snap a picture of some blue sky with a red roadie in the foreground. It sounds so idyllic. I know I'm going to resist temptation, though. I'm not even worried.

Maybe I just don't want it badly enough. But I guess that's not the point.