If it ain't raining, we ain't training

Date: Aug. 24
Mileage: 50.3
August mileage: 536.2
Temperature: 52

Hunter down in Ketchikan (where it really rains) told me about this old Army saying, and I've decided to make it my motto for the upcoming fall. My goal for the next couple of weeks at least is to rapidly increase my time and effort on the bike ... mostly to see how it makes me feel and assess where my endurance is after two months of pretty lax base training. (And yes, if it makes me feel awful, I will dial it back.) Increasing time and effort to me means more miles and purposeful climbing at a tempo pace (and tempo pace to me means sustainable, but just barely.) So yesterday and today it was three and a half and three hours, respectively, of near-hurt (and sometimes outright hurt), with one beautifully restful stop each day for photos. Tomorrow I plan to do some hill repeats, Tuesday go easy, Wednesday ride another three-hour tempo, and Thursday do something long. On Friday I'll step back and see how I feel. I think it's a worthy experiment to see what kind of cycling condition I'm in - not that I have any reason to believe I'm in great shape, but I hope my muscles have good memory.

So far, these harder sessions have been less enjoyable while I'm riding, but they've left me feeling upbeat and energetic the rest of the day - more so than I have been during the work afternoon in a long time. It may just be that I still have a little California sunshine left in my blood, but even that's wearing off quickly in the latest rain deluge, which is not likely to let up anytime soon. It is, after all, nearly September. I can't expect to see the sun again in any kind of standard capacity until November (and no, sucker holes do not count).

Which makes any goals for longer, harder bicycle training sessions even more difficult. Bad enough to head out on a bike knowing you're facing three hours of self-inflicted pain. Worse yet if the slate-colored clouds have dropped to sea level and sharp daggers of rain are stinging every square inch of exposed skin. I don't even care about being wet and cold anymore, but I still have sunburns on my face, and those raindrops hurt.

More than a test of my fitness, this will be the ultimate test of my motivation. But I chanted Hunter's Army motto a couple of times this morning, and I have to admit, it did make me feel better. If it ain't raining, I ain't training ... because if it ain't raining, I'll likely be out on a leisurely hike, or otherwise doing something enjoyable to soak of every second of sun I've earned.

Eric's Lost Coast

Date: Aug. 22 and 23
Mileage: 14.7 and 46.0
August mileage: 485.9

I met Eric Parsons in April 2007, shortly after I posted an online forum message seeking a miracle-working knee doctor in Anchorage. I didn't find a doctor, but I did find a similarly injured, similarly minded cyclist living in Anchorage. We met up while I was in the city during a journalism convention. We limped around town and trails in the Chugach Mountains and commiserated. He told me he injured his right knee during the 2005 Iditarod Invitational and was still struggling to recover two years later. I told him I was unhealthily obsessed with that very race but didn't think my right knee, still locked up after two months of recovery following the Susitna 100, would ever be up to the challenge. I thought I could see a little bit of my future in his past, and it was cathartic to have a new friend who understood the psychological struggles related to long-term injuries. So after I returned to Juneau, we kept in touch.

The more I came to know Eric, the more I questioned whether he was crazy or just extremely, adventurously brave. He made regular multiday, solo mountaineering trips involving technical climbs when his knee was too sore to ride a bicycle. He attempted to paddle his tiny packraft through the fast-flowing ice of the Knik Arm, in January. He quit a cushy state engineering job and opened up a home-based bike bag business called Epic Designs. Then he got knee surgery and after that he really went nuts, with route-pioneering, bike-and-raft combo trips that pressed deep into Alaska's trailless wilderness.

Eric's latest adventure is a bicycle expedition along 300 or so miles of Alaska's Lost Coast, from Yakutat to Cordova. The route, undeveloped and remote, involves strenuous and slow coastal riding, bushwhacking, river crossings, glacier traverses, rafting through ice-clogged open water, the Gulf of Alaska's legendary storms, wind, rain, cold, etc., etc., etc. People have walked and kayaked this section of coast before, but no one has ever attempted it with a bicycle. Last Tuesday, Eric and his friend, Dylan, left Yakutat on their Surly Pugsleys loaded with Alpacka rafts, paddles, camping gear and what I assume must be a lot of butter, and set out into the wild to do something no one has ever done before - ride the Lost Coast. Last I heard from them, two days after they left, they were camped at the base of the "violent calving face of the Hubbard Glacier" and trying to figure out how to get across it. That's just the first of many, many obstacles, some of which may not even be surmountable ... but at this point in time, there's only one way to find out.

Eric is carrying a satellite phone on the trip, which he expected would take two to three weeks, and plans to call in with what he promised would be infrequent updates. I volunteered to post them on his Lost Coast Expedition blog (I know, after this and the Great Divide Race, I should start advertising my services as an adventure blogger.) I wanted to be a part of it because I think what Eric is doing is a truly pioneering experiment in just how far a mountain bike can go. Just as ultraendurance races such as the Great Divide Race and the Iditarod are starting to gain glimmers of recognition from the general public, cyclists like Eric are taking distance mountain biking to a whole new level - off the trails, off the maps, off the charts. Eric admitted this expedition has a high chance of failure - and in my opinion, that's a sure sign of the rare-in-modern-times opportunity to blaze new territory.

And as crazy as I think Eric is, I still like to believe I can see pieces of my future in his past.

Happy at home

Date: Aug. 19 and 21
Mileage: 52.4 and 44.3
August mileage: 425.2

I was working my way through one of many cattle shoots at LAX early this morning when a man behind me pointed to gray mass hovering over the airport outside the window and asked "is that smog or fog?"

"It looks like fog to me," I said. Then the woman in front of me turned around and said, "Oh no, that's smog." I just glanced out the window again at the cloud, somewhat amused that, regardless of what it actually was, I was in a place where it's hard to tell the difference.

And with that, I left California after what feels like a short lifetime but was actually just a long week of fun in the sun.


My cute family on the Matterhorn. My 26-year-old sister, Lisa (not pictured), was deeply traumatized by this ride when she was 4 years old. So the mechanized abominable snowman has made its way into family lore, and the ride is now a fam favorite.

So after my mom informed me they had purchased Disneyland tickets for the whole fam-damily, I did not admit to her that I was not excited about going ... especially on my birthday, especially when I had acquired a perfectly good if flat-prone bicycle that, despite the fact I ride all the time, I really just wanted to take out for a long day of exploring. But my mom loves Disneyland. Don't get me wrong ... I loved it too, as a kid. But my adult paradigm started to run against that grain and now I feel uncomfortable around all of the excess and crowds, who, as my dad quoted from an article, "single-handedly prove that the American economy is doing just fine when all of these people are paying so much money just to amuse themselves." Disneyland really plays up that "When You Wish Upon A Star" theme, which I think could serve as a thinly veiled slogan for the most toxic edge of the American Dream - that we should have everything we want handed to us out of thin air. That said, I'm certainly not a poster child for eschewing all over-consumption, and I can enjoy excess with the best of them.

After an ill-advised trip down Splash Mountain, my sisters get a small taste of what it's like to be a cyclist in Juneau.

Plus, Disneyland is just so nostalgic. It took me a while to get over the hump of herding myself through masses of humanity and exhausting my energy reserves by standing in long lines, but I finally hit my stride and started to really appreciate the time I could spend with my two sisters, who I never see anymore, and just enjoy the oddball way in which two 50-somethings and their three grown, childless offspring can enjoy a warm day of youthful amusement.

I don't know about the "Happiest Birthday on Earth." The crowdedest, maybe.

Thursday was a much more even day. I crawled out of bed early and rode my borrowed bike up the coastal highway to Long Beach, only to discover that the coastal highway through Long Beach is a high-traffic commercial zone that veers pretty far inland. Live and learn. We took a surfing lesson in the afternoon, where I learned how to get thoroughly battered in small waves by something that is considerably heavier than a boogie board. I was finally hitting my stride and nearly standing up on the board when the lesson ended two hours later. I'll likely never try it again - it's too hard for me to work through my irrational fear of moving water just to get out there in the first place. But, as my sister Sara said, at least we can knock "Try surfing" off our bucket list.

Oh yes, I took a picture of the picture.

I flew back into Juneau at 2 p.m. Friday. As usual, the city was obscured between a predictable but almost comforting blanket of fog. I was sleepy and mentally exhausted from 10 hours of airline transit, but I couldn't wait to suit up over my sun-blistered lips and unusually tan face and head out for a ride in the rain. I couldn't decide where to go. Muddy Perseverance? Sloppy Eaglecrest? Soggy trip to the glacier? They all sounded so appealing, and I feel like I haven't been here in weeks. I'm sure that feeling will wear off soon, but for now I will head out an enjoy it. In the same way I warmed up to Disneyland, these first few post-vacation rides in Juneau may prove my theory - that novelty and nostalgia are the perfect combination.

29

Today's my birthday.

I'm going to Disneyland.

It's true. Hope I live.

Vacationy post

I realize that the following photographs are probably interesting to nobody but me. But that's what vacations are about ... having a good day and wanting to remember it, so you take your stand-and-grin family photos and post them on your blog.

I hooked up today with three riders from the area, readers of this very blog who offered to not only lend me a (very nice) bicycle for three days, but also took me on a morning tour of the area. The man who lent me his cyclocross bike, Mark, told me he didn't want me to go home and write the usual "IHATELA" visitor news. I have to say, the sprawl of humanity that covers the area freaked me out at first, but I'm really warming up to Southern California. We started in Huntington Beach and headed down the Pacific Coast Highway (I called it the "PCH" and my mom said "That sounds so Californian!"). We rode to Laguna Beach and then up the canyon to Irvine, rolling through some bike-path-laced hills back toward the PCH. Fun, really mellow ride, something short of 50 miles, a little daunting with all of the traffic and two flat tires, but a refreshing and scenic taste of this piece of California. Thanks guys!

We all went to In-N-Out Burger for lunch. Their menu is, um ... limited. Sorry guys, I still don't understand the hype. But it was a fun lunch. And a great ride. This is the best aspect of being part of the cycling community - no matter where you are, you have friends.

My two little sisters flew in this morning. Just about the time they came in, every single one of the clouds in the overcast sky had burned off. Just like that. In Juneau, that kind of cloud dissipation takes weeks. I was shocked. We hit up the beach first thing.

Later, we talked them into a group bike ride with the three working bicycles we had dug up, and one that had a wobbly front wheel and off-set (and rusted permanently that way) handlebars. This picture illustrates well what my sisters thought about the bike riding.

Before the midway point of our five-mile ride, the rear brake arm on Sara's Wal-mart mountain bike snapped off and the front pads were so worn they didn't work anyway. We turned around a limped home, with Sara bombing into the grass just to stop, my dad attempting to perfect the skewed steering of the wobbly wonder, my mom pedaling some bike that made loud grinding noises with every turn of the crank, me being yelled at by a passing (not oncoming) cyclist for riding into "his" lane in the 5 mph-max zone as I was trying to help Sara, and the whole time I felt really bad about riding the good bike, which no one wanted to ride because it had drop handlebars. But we laughed about it all the way home. Yes, we tourists are silly.

But that's what it's all about.

You don't see that in Alaska

Whenever my friend Brian and I go fishing for halibut out of Juneau, we always get so many laughs out of the whale-watching tour boats. They motor in erratic circles around the bay like drunken drivers, chasing distant humpback spouts, and when they finally see a tail or a piece of fin, everyone rushes to one side of the boat and erupts in a loud chorus of oooooooo's.

Yeah, those silly tourists, they sure are funny. So funny that I debated whether or not I was ever going to admit to climbing onto one of those silly tourist-clogged boats to take a whale-watching tour out of Dana Point. But when I walked away with one of my coolest wildlife encounters, well, ever ... I decided it was probably worth taking a little ribbing from my Juneau friends.

We saw a couple of blue whales, estimated to be 60 and 70 feet long, respectively (two of the largest animals that have ever lived!). Blues, as far as I know, don't come anywhere near Juneau, but they don't seem to have any qualms about approaching silly tour boats. This one just lulled atop the water for a long time, spouting occasionally and briefly dipping under the water. It was so close to the boat that I couldn't even capture the full length of it with my camera lens, no zoom required. The tour guide, unable to determine what the whale was doing, finally just announced that it was probably asleep and we were moving on.

But the really surreal experience came later, when we were heading back in, sun-fatigued and half napping on the benches. A little girl walked up to the captain and announced she wanted to see dolphins. The captain just mumbled something about "we'll see what happens," and not five minutes later, the boat floated straight over a pod of 500 or 600 dolphins. They were shooting out of the water on all sides of us like salmon in a waterfall, a kind of rolling dance almost synchronized to the bounce and clap of the boat. A dozen or so locked on to our wake and swam right below the boat, like they were racing us, and we tourists just hung over the railing, gazing into the cerulean water and quietly wishing we could join them.

Now I've seen wolves in the wild, grizzly bears within feet of the trails I was riding and black bears in the Utah desert. I've seen moose and caribou and bighorn sheep and mountain goats way out in the wilderness where few humans venture. I see all kinds of marine mammals on routine bike rides and more eagles than I could ever count. But I have to say, those dolphins really did it for me. I can't help that I was on a commercial tour boat in Southern California.

Huntington Beach

So that's where I'm going on vacation. All week long, friends and co-workers have been asking me, "so where are you going?"

"Somewhere in Southern California ... near L.A. ... (trailing off.)"

You don't know where you're going?"

Um, no ... it's a family vacation. My parents planned it ... (trailing off.)"

"What are you, 7?"

But in a way, that's what this vacation is pretty much about. Being 7 years old again ... for all of the good and the bad of it. Today we set up on the beach and I actually went boogie boarding. I never saw much point to it before, but it is pretty fun. A couple of times I tried to paddle under the crest of the wave, like surfers do on TV, riding out that beautiful curve until it meets its natural conclusion. It didn't quite work that way for me. It was more like an underwater thrashing while the breaking water dragged me over a lot of abrasive sand. Even more fun was fighting the crazy tidal current as it dragged us out to sea.

I put on two different coats of SPF 50 and I still have a couple of burn patches on my back and legs. I think I'm blinding all of these beautiful Californians with my previously unexposed areas of pasty Alaskan skin.

My dad and I found a whole pile of beach cruisers in a garage at this condo we're staying in. Only three were semi-workable, and even then just barely. I don't think I'd ever get much of a workout spinning a clankety single-speed at 9 mph along a crowded bike path, but I suppose it's better than nothing. I didn't find much in the way of bicycle rentals in this area. I'll have to fan out my search area on Monday. I don't really know how far out of town I'm going to be able to get.

If anyone near Huntington Beach has a working bike they wouldn't mind renting to me, for compensation of course, for a week ... maybe you could send me your contact info to jillhomer66@hotmail.com. Anything would be much appreciated!