Sun therapy

Date: Nov. 11
Mileage: 17.2
Hours: 1:45
November mileage: 278.2
Temperature upon departure: 35
Rainfall: 0.0"

I woke up this morning to lead legs. Stomped around the house, ate my carbohydrate-and-caffeine breakfast, and couldn't stop the sensation of blood congealing like cement in my veins. Clearly there would be no purposeful exercise this morning. I thought about building a cardboard divider shelf for my piles of winter clothing. I thought about cleaning the bathroom. I thought about reading Geoff's copy of "The World Without Us." I thought about the sunbeams streaming through the still-drawn blinds. I thought about the way the warmth of the sun trickles through clear air. I could probably go out in the 35-degree morning wearing polyester pants and a T-shirt. I thought about visiting the places where summer still lingers. Places best reached with a snow bike.

I shook out my legs some more and slogged over the bridge. The Gastineau Chanel was a stagnant sheet of glass. As a body of water connected to the Pacific Ocean, it's strange to see it so still. Like the world stopped spinning, and where gravity settled is where I stood. Strange to feel so heavy and light at the same time.

Out Thane to the Dupont Trail, a cliffside that holds onto its mossy greenness and thick shade well into November. The sunlight dissipated in the frosty humidity of the rainforest. I finally began to warm up, at least enough to melt some of that seemingly lead-based cement from my legs. Maybe too little too late, with a dozen places to be and no more time or reason to head further south. But for those few moments, everything looked like June. If I closed my eyes, I could almost feel it - as though summer is a state of mind, like tiredness. And suddenly I was lighter on my legs, lighter on top of the mud. Just lighter. And free.

Hit the beach on the way home. A stretch of jarring boulders gave way to perfectly smooth sand. I skirted the surf as it crept up so calmly it was nearly impossible to detect until it was on top of me, like a bathtub slowly filling with water. I returned home cured of my lead legs, feeling like I could go back out and conquer an entire afternoon if given the chance. Not what I expected ... but could it be true? Is the best way to relieve fatigue just to ride it out, ride it out? Or is the best cure simply to spend some time in the sun?

The hours

Date: Nov. 9 and 10
Mileage: 18.1 and 30.2
Hours: 1:20 and 3:45
November mileage: 261.0
Temperature upon departure: 37
Rainfall: 0.30"

My recent realization that the sun now sets before 4 p.m. has been a bit of a blow to my mood. At the beginning of the week, I was riding a sugar snow high and it was all I could do to straighten my face after hours of silly perma-grin. Now I am feeling the effects of greasy snow indigestion (not literal indigestion; just sort of a sinking feeling that not all is well.) At first I blamed the waning daylight. But now, I'm wondering if some of it could be mild overtraining.

For this race I plan to line up for in February, spending as much time as possible on the bike, on the toughest trail conditions, in the crappiest weather I can endure, is the most valuable training I'm going to get. Speed intervals, "time trials," weight lifting, hill climbing - these were all great exercises to build up my base. Now it's time to build up endurance. Even more so, it's time to toughen my morale. I need to learn to spend hours on the bike, days on the bike, learn to trudge beside my bike for hours, days, and not lose my mind in the process. It's a daunting task - especially because I there's a decent chance I could jump the gun and lose my mind in training.

The first 10 days of November, there has been a lot of riding. The miles don't show it, because almost all of the riding has been snow riding, muddy trail riding, road miles on the mountain bike, and trail-hopping road miles on the Pugsley (which so far I have been unable to coax over 14 mph without the benefit of gravity or wind.) So while the miles don't show it, the sheer hours of exercise have stacked up. I've probably jumped from 9-11 hours a week at the end of October to 16 this past week. Maybe more. I don't know. It's obviously not wise to make jumps like that, so I'm going to start keeping track.

It's funny, because I haven't felt any physical effects of "overtraining." There have just been a few hints of slipping morale. Like yesterday, when I purposely set out on my road bike in marginal weather and turned around at the first sight of snow flurries. Then today, riding the trails on a Saturday morning, I became overly annoyed with just about everybody I saw. Two people on the Salmon Creek trail stopped me to point out the girth of my wheels (Don't they know it's rude to call something "fat"?) and then chide me for not riding with studded tires. The trail was wet gravel covered by about two inches of slushy snow. I wanted to launch into a lecture about how studs are great on the street but nearly pointless in these kind of trail conditions - but instead I just smiled and through clenched teeth said "Yeah. We'll see how it goes." As I headed back up the trail, even as I vowed to never, never go trail riding on a Saturday again, I wondered about the real reasons behind my quick-tempered irritability.

I think I'll keep increasing the hours of my long ride(s) each weekend, the way I planned, but flatten out my weekday riding (I don't have much more weekday time to burn, anyway.) See how it goes. Hopefully it will keep me from snapping at a hapless hiker. Then, when training calls for the necessary dissection of my morale, at least I'll have happy memories from November.

*****

Late, completely unrelated tangent: I don't do political diatribes on my blog, but Geoff and I just returned from a showing of the documentary "No End In Sight" and I can't get it out of my head. This movie about the Iraq war isn't simply a vehicle to preach to the enraged choir, as Michael Moore's movies have done. It's a very simply laid-out, calm play-by-play of the events and decisions that led to the current situation in Iraq, as told my members of the military, former members of the Bush administration, and others who were very close to the process. The feeling it ends with is not anger, but an almost overwhelming sadness. That's why I highly recommend seeking it out and seeing it. Not because it will leave you in despair, but because it will inspire you to take action. It definitely has me asking myself what I can do. Especially today ... Veterans' Day.

Five hours of fog

Date: Nov. 8
Mileage: 56.2
November mileage: 213.6
Temperature upon departure: 33
Rainfall: 0.0"

Juneau can be so cruel. Even when the clouds break apart long enough to reveal more than a few fleeting moments of sun (and even that's rare. So rare), high pressure systems tend to build up a lot of fog. In many ways, fog-shrouded sunlight is the cruelest weather of all. You've been told the sun is out. You can sense it. You can imagine it. You can cling to the faith that it is in fact up there, somewhere. But you can not feel it. And you can not see it. In fact, you can't see anything further than five feet in front of your face. And, come to think of it, you're becoming more than a little tired of staring at the patterns made by the frost granules collecting on your handlebars.

So it went for my five-hour ride today. It started out well with a jaunt up Perseverance Canyon with Geoff in the morning. We were able to climb out of the clouds early and ride most of the trail with the sunlight in view, even if the canyon itself was entirely cast in shadow. After lunch I set out for what I was hoping would be 3.5 more hours of fast-paced distance riding. But my legs were feeling sluggish after a week that consisted mostly of hard climbing and weight lifting. I wasn't thrilled to be on my mountain bike on the road when just a few more degrees of warmth would have allowed the road bike. And I was grumpy about the fog. As it became even thicker in the waning afternoon, I became even more grumpy. Have you ever ridden a spin bike all alone in an empty room with four white walls? It was a little like that, except for add the terror of streaming headlights created by drivers who probably have no clue about your existence. Lucky I was on my mountain bike. I spent most of the afternoon bouncing across the snow-covered soft shoulders.

It was not my favorite ride ever. I thought I had until 5 p.m. to ride but I was wrong. Sunset was at 3:53 p.m. today! I had no idea! (curse you, Daylight Savings Time.) I did not have appropriate bike lights (yes, I know I should have been using lights in the fog. But I did not know the fog was as bad as it was when I left the house, either.) I would not have even figured out how early the sun was actually setting if the fog hadn't lifted a little as I worked my way north. I was tipping my head back and reveling in the newfound warmth and light streaming over the Lynn Canal when I first noticed that the sun was low on the horizon. Really low. Holy cow!

I had to turn tail there and ride south like a banshee. Of course I couldn't resist stopping to take a few pictures. It was like I had just been granted sight after an afternoon of blindness. Everything I saw was amazing and colorful and beautiful ... trees, ravens, even the cars that were attached to the headlights. It was so nice to actually see them.

And of course I did that thing where I point the camera straight at the sun. The lens can't quite handle the glare, but I always enjoy the otherworldly images it compensates with. Plus, I just like to take pictures of the sun.

The break in the fog was short-lived, though. The blue sky was nearly gone by Auke Lake, and the fog only thickened up as the sunlight faded away during my frantic ride home. I tried to mash out those last miles before my invisibility became absolute. I will never ride in the winter without a headlight again. Another long ride, another lesson learned.

Recovering junkaholic

Date: Nov. 7
Mileage: 15.2
November mileage: 157.4
Temperature upon departure: 34
Rainfall: 0.01"

I went to the dentist this morning, a few days after I became convinced that I had a massive cavity threatening to abscess into my jaw. Turns out I have nothing of the sort, but at least now there are a dozen really expensive digital photographs of the insides of my teeth stored in a computer somewhere in the purgatory of Airport Row.

I’m of course relieved by my no-cavity status, but there’s a thin layer of disappointment on the periphery. As the season of giving in approaches, I’ve been harboring this crazy scheme to reduce sugar in my diet. So far, I have struggled to find the motivation to even begin. I was beginning to believe a massive cavity may be just the kick-start I need to motivate toward ultra-clean living. But I need to be honest with myself. I’ve set a lot of goals in the past two years, and none of them have touched my diet. The sugar that remains is going to have to be surgically removed.

Not that I haven’t made an honest effort to cut back. For as much junk food as I eat these days, there was a time when I was absolutely devoted to it, defended it, and would have starved without it. When my friends and I ate dinner on our backpacking trips, I’d smirk as they toiled over their little camp stoves while I munched effortlessly on Snickers bars. Food is food, and energy is energy, I reasoned. I believed I was free. But I’ve changed since then. In my blog description, I define myself as someone who “likes to eat goldfish crackers and Pepsi for breakfast.” This isn’t untrue, but it is, and is becoming more so, a remnant of a past life. For as much as sugar calls to me, the lingering benefits of “healthy” food shout louder.

Geoff and I buy our fresh produce in bulk, Costco style, and even with the lag time of Juneau shipping that cuts longevity in half, we never fail to finish it. Geoff's a vegetarian, so there's not much meat. When I buy cereal, I try to stick to the whole-grain, low sugar types, and Geoff’s job as a cook at a natural foods deli has infused a lot of organic flax-seed hippy food into the mix. I’m a lot happier now than I was when I was a junk food junky, and my energy levels are off the chart compared to then. I attribute much of this to “better diet.”

And yet, my devotion to junk food remains. If sugar cereals show up in the house, I devour them enthusiastically and without regret. There’s a cupboard in the house I can’t go near - stocked full of store-bought cookies and six different kinds of chips and and Pop Tarts and Wheat Thins and granola bars and fruit leathers and trail mix and hot chocolate and ... the list goes on. Every time I open this cupboard, large amounts of simple carbohydrates disappear just like that. The reason this cupboard exists is because a former version of myself converted the once sugar-free Geoff to the church of high fructose corn syrup. Now his grocery choices (and mine) threaten to lure me back to the flock.

It seems a noble but impossible battle. Just tonight, I polished off a dinner of veggie burger on whole-wheat bread, green salad with sliced apples, baby carrots and balsamic vinegar, and a huge bowl of Rocky Road ice cream. I can’t help but wonder if my dentist had the decency to chew me out, if I would have eschewed the ice cream and munched on a banana instead. Probably not.

On the bright side, the dentist appointment got me out of bed in the pre-dawn darkness of 6:45 a.m. That gave me time to ride Pugsley up Perseverance canyon, eat lunch, and complete my lower-body weight routine at the gym. I should make a habit of waking up early. I wonder if that would convince me to go to bed before 1 a.m. Probably not.

Pugsley's first sun ride

Date: Nov. 6
Mileage: 21.9
November mileage: 142.2
Temperature upon departure: 33
Rainfall: 0.0"

A perfect bike ride is a lot like a well-crafted chocolate chip cookie. Alone, the ingredients range from bland to intolerable: Tuesday morning, clear skies, light breeze, several inches of new snow, 33 degrees, early season inexperience, untested iPod mix and some tempered enthusiasm. But throw them all together, mix vigorously and bake in the rare November sun, and you have a bike ride that’s so rich, so sweet and so satisfying that you swear you could consume 100 of the same and never tire.

These rides are so delicious, in fact, that they inevitably stir up guilt from depths of pleasure. You question the wisdom of your line through the buttery snow; you wonder if its seemingly weightless airiness may suddenly turn on you, kick you sideways, send you sliding uncontrollably into a tree. You look up to a stream of snow tearing off mountain peaks in distant wind that hardly touches you; you feel the chill of ice water running down your neck. You ponder the tingling in your toes, and you think, “This can’t possibly be healthy.” And yet you crave more.

Three to four inches of new snow made the climb up Perseverance Trail extra tricky today - it was just enough snow to cover the rocks and roots to the point I couldn’t see them, but not enough to cushion the force of a direct hit. Luckily, Pugsley was more up to the monster trucking task than I ever anticipated, as I was completely consumed with staying ahead of the back wheel as it spun out atop the slippery surface.

Coming down the canyon was a passionate dance with terror and empowerment. My snow-riding skills are rusty, but my enthusiasm is as fresh as the day I first put a wheel to powder. Both are magnified by the sheer unpredictability of powder snow - I can lose control, quickly, sometimes for no discernable reason. My victories today gave way to horror, which in turn fed further victories. But after carving frantic cursive in the singletrack, skirting the steep edge of oblivion and swerving back to safety, my lingering impression told me I could do no wrong.

The final mile of descent, atop frozen gravel infused with soft patches of snow, was the most otherworldly experience of all. Sharp fragments of sunlight filtered through the trees; their bare branches were coated in snow, completely black and white except for yellow slashes of light. My iPod that had been playing really mellow Neko Case for the past half hour switched over the Jimmy Eat World’s latest. In a bombardment of amped-up rock, my speed increased to 25, 30 mph. The cold air tore at my face and tears filled my eyes as the wintry world blurred by. It reminded me of the time I rode the Slingshot - an amusement park ride that straps people in a large circular cage, pulls back on a fixed line and catapults them into the air. In the G-force rush, there is no up and down, no ground and sky, no real and imagined. There is only shadow and light, spinning and spinning to the end of the universe.

I rode to Salmon Creek afterward just to extend the fun, but by then my ride had consumed more than three hours, and it was time to go to work. These perfect rides are hard to come down from, and like a person sinking into the aftermath of a cookie binge, I feel a tinge of regret. Not because I overindulged, but because I was forced to stop.

My new frame bag

This just arrived in the mail today, a new frame bag custom-made by my friend Eric in Anchorage. The picture's not great because I just slapped the bag on the bike during my dinner break, pump mount and all. But it seems to form-fit Pugsley like a fine glove, matching gray colors to boot, and it's so sleek and shiny. It's my first-ever custom-made piece of outdoor gear. I feel like I'm moving up in the world.

Eric's an engineer by occupation, and he's created these frame bag designs that have a lot of clever and innovative features - an internal mesh pocket, removable dividers that allow different compartments and also reinforce the already-obvious bombproofness of the bag. The top edge tapers out to allow maximum space without compromising your leg clearance. There's reflective strips on the webbing, heavy-duty zippers ... I keep discovering new stuff. It's a baffling concept to me ... to tell somebody, long-distance, "Uh, yeah, I'd like a frame bag for my, um, let's see, it's a 16-inch Pugsley," and have them return with something so idealistically perfect. What those engineers can't do.

Frame bags themselves are a cool concept ... it's all part of the dream of carrying all of your survival gear on your bike, but keeping it off your back and off the back rack. They're very popular in Alaska winter endurance races, where equal weight distribution is crucial to maximizing your snow floatation, and a lot of time hopping on and off the bike means any bulk on the back is going to demand a fair amount of wasted energy while constantly swinging one's legs over it. I estimate my frame bag can hold somewhere between 350 and 400 cubic inches of heavy gear, all in the bike's triangle. Seems a whole lot more efficient than a water-bottle holder and a bike pump mount.

Eric is currently making these for anybody who's interested ... "Handmade bombproof in Alaska, Full suspension bikes, cruisers, funky geometry, whatever you want!" Here's his MTBR Classified ad. Or e-mail him at stampeeding_wilderbeast at yahoo dot com.

Hey, it's the sun, and it makes me shine

Date: Nov. 4
Mileage: 42.8
November mileage: 122.3
Temperature upon departure: 37
Rainfall: 0.0"

Don't you hate the mornings that you wake up feeling a lot less than spectacular? Maybe you have this lingering dull pain in your mouth, and a headache too because you were up for several hours in the night worrying that you have a cavity. And your legs still burn from weightlifting two days ago and your caffeine's not kicking in and you know you have a heavy afternoon workload waiting for you at the office and you think some Chips Ahoy and a nap sounds about perfect. These mornings are even worse when they happen on the only 25-hour day of the year. But even without that extra hour weighing on your conscience, there's the weather forecast calling for "mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers" to consider. Letting any morning that promises to be not only long but dry pass by in bed is an unforgivable waste.

It was in this condition I slogged out on my mountain bike this morning, anticipating ice on the road and hoping to hit some trails if I could muster the motivation to pedal all the way out to the valley. I caught the tailwind north and slipped onto the Mendenhall trail system as soon as I could, winding through the neighborhoods and homeless camps atop frosty mounds of mud.

I crossed over to the glacier moraine and continued to ponder turning around. The mud was becoming softer, and anything that wasn't mud was an outright puddle. Splatters of wood chips, dead falls and other beaver carnage obstructed the trail. I practiced my moving dismount to jump the gnawed-off logs without stopping, until I finally splashed down into a huge stretch of beaver dam overflow. Piloting the mountain bike like a paddle boat through the hub-deep cold water, I nearly bogged down in the silt before I made it to shore. But I hammered hard up the last knoll and cleared the swamp without getting so much as a knee brace wet. I stopped on the edge of Dredge Lake to stomp out the water in my booties and soak in the satisfaction of my small victory. It was there I first noticed the sky shining through a patchwork of thinning clouds, backlit by a hidden sun and bursting with rays that nearly reached the ground. The world was suddenly infused with shadows, and light, and slivers of warmth. It felt like newfound energy, and renewal, and, come to think of it, the aftermath of a pretty fun cyclocross-type obstacle course, which definitely demanded to be re-ridden, only faster.

Funny how some mornings start out with head/muscle/toothache grumpiness, and end with a 40-mile mountain bike ride. Don't you love mornings like that?