Yeah studs

Date: Nov. 9
Mileage: 46.4
November mileage: 273.6

The roads were too icy for biking with the skinny tires Saturday morning, and Geoff was planning to enter a foot race called the Veterans' Day 8K, so I went with him. It was the third running race I entered this year, and, not coincidentally, only the third time I went for a run this year. We showed up three minutes before the start and were still pinning on our numbers as we took off down the path. My shoes came untied quickly and I stopped to tie them. This happened three times.

The race was held on a bike path that I ride often, and I found foot pace to be unforgivably slow. Maybe it's just my foot pace that's unforgivably slow. Either way, the pounding was hurting my shins and I was not about to amp it up. Geoff passed me on his return trip well before I reached the turnaround. He won the race at 29-something minutes. I finished a few eras later at 43 minutes and change.

I returned home feeling a little like someone had taken a swing at my legs with a meat tenderizer. I vowed never to run on pavement again. Then I finally sat down and took the time to switch out the tires on my Karate Monkey. I outfitted her with a pair of sparkling new Nokian Gnarly Extremes or whatever those 29" studded tires are called. And just like that, she went from being a blah touring bike to a heavily pierced, ice-crushing mountain bike vixen. She was beautiful.

Today I woke up to clear cold weather and a landscape coated in frost. I was feeling seriously sore - predictably - and figured my feet wouldn't be carrying me anywhere this morning. But thanks to all of my lopsided bicycle conditioning, I could still go out and spend four pain-free hours on a bike.

I hit up all the best trails in the Mendenhall Valley. They were crisp and dry and crunchy and in better shape than I've seen them in months. (In the irony of Juneau mountain biking, trails that are sloppy and muddy all summer finally become rideable after the season ends.) The area was peppered with frozen puddles and ice-coated roots that the Nokians ate up without complaint.

I was so stoked about the sunny weather and dry, hard-packed trails that I practically sprinted home on an ice-bike high. I jumped off the bike and landed on my aching shins, surprised by my continuing inability to walk normally. I hobbled in the house, where Geoff asked me how my ride went. "It was the best ride ever," I said. He just rolled his eyes, like he has taken to doing when I use this statement, but I mean it every time.

Why winter is more fun

Date: Nov. 7
Mileage: 37.0
November mileage: 227.2

Friday, again. Time to put in my long day for the week. I promised myself I'd ride hard up to Eaglecrest, push my bike for a while, and if the snow was good, spend the rest of the day playing. Six hours of daylight between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., every one used well.

The weather was fabulous - 40 degrees, fog and snow flurries at sea level. But at 3,000 feet, temperatures were in the high 20s and skies were clearing. The thin snowpack has had a steady diet of rain over the past few days, and in its refrozen condition was in great shape for biking. The road itself was pretty chewed up by a SnowCat, but I could ride right on top of the frozen muskeg. I spent some time pushing my bike and descending (you know, carving turns) at midmountain before I ditched the bike and headed high. The clouds started to clear just as I was approaching the upper elevations. Most of these photos are from my long walk along the ridgeline.

The snow was still in great condition on the ridge - hardpacked and smooth. I only sank in a few inches on my feet. I should have dragged my bike up there. It would probably be a little like riding sand-dusted slickrock.

Some trees have harder lives than others.

Clouds still hovered low over every ridgeline but mine.

There was amazingly almost no wind up high, rare for a winter day. Even rarer in late fall. I stopped at this spot and ate a Hershey bar. You know what's even better than sitting in the sun, soaking up its warmth and eating chocolate? Earning it.

Back down the ridge, looking for a way to this peak. I have to be really careful with my winter hiking because I'm still traveling without an ice ax and crampons (I really must buy some), and in the shade the snow was as hard and slippery as ice. I couldn't go anywhere where a fall would be disastrous, and I couldn't find a way to the peak.

Oh well. I'll just make up my own peak, like Dr. Cook's famed "first ascent" of Mount Denali.

Back down after several hours, realizing that I may just run out of daylight before I get any more riding in.

Cool clouds on the horizon.

Coming down was amazing fun. This is the "slickrock" muskeg that I was riding at mid-mountain. I cut off the road when it started to get sloppy and weaved through a few trees before emerging in the open. I saw a group of young skiers and snowboarders walking up the road. When they saw me coming, they started yelling, "Hey, biker! Yeah biker!" The terrain started to get a little sketchy, but I didn't want to lose face. I let off the brakes and slalomed through a shallow gully, punching through a small berm and shooting onto the bare gravel of the road just below them. I kept accelerating down the road as they cheered me on. I felt great about having actually survived the move and even better about the brilliant way in which I showcased my unique form of snowriding. I am Downhill Snowbiker.

I love winter.

The plan keeps coming up again

Date: Nov. 5 and 6
Mileage: 17.3 and 16.0
November mileage: 190.2

I feel like I have a lot going on right now. I have been putting in quite a bit of time outdoors - out of habit, out of mental necessity - but it seems like my mind is usually somewhere else. There is a little voice of reason that is starting to shout: Training! Focus! Training! It's early November. I need a plan, I really do. And yet, when I'm out on my bike, aiming for miles or speed or a few bumpy turns on the ice-crusted snow, I'll find myself gazing blankly at the horizon, legs spinning on autopilot, focus elsewhere.

By this time last year, I had a pretty good plan for Iditarod training. It centered mainly on hours of exercise and time in the saddle - valuable, but in hindsight, only a small part of what I needed to actually be ready for the race. This year, I know I need more time on my feet, more weight on my bike, more impact, more upper-body everything. And that's just the physical fitness part, which only amounts to about 20 percent of being ready. After that there are gear decisions and testing, food planning and testing, weather conditioning, sleep deprivation, bicycle maintenance practice and mental preparations. And even if I get all of that right, that only factors in to about 20 percent of my probability for success. Everything else is luck and willpower. That's why I love this race.

But yes, training is still important, and my inability to focus right now may become a concern if it lingers much longer. There remains the option of soliciting the help of a coach. For anyone who knows me, the very idea would make them laugh out loud. "But Jill," they'd say, "Coaches are for people who race, you know, more than once a year. Coaches are for people who enjoy structure and who chose activities based on fitness value, not on how many pretty pictures they can take along the way. Coaches are for people who enter races that aren't based 80 percent on luck. Coaches are for, you know, athletes. Real ones."

And yet, any coach who says he's interested in the abstract discipline of "ultra-endurance" has my attention. Would such a coach share my view that success in this arena has as much or more to do with mental landscape as it does with physical conditioning? Or would the coach defer to what may actually be more useful knowledge, encouraging me to buy a heart-rate monitor and stick to my planned 15-minute intervals even when I think the weather that day calls for six hours of long slow distance and a few dozen pretty pictures? There is a chance I would never see eye to eye with a coach, but it certainly is worth some dialog, at least.

Breaking the silence

Date: Nov. 3 and 4
Mileage: 35.1 and 62.0
November mileage: 156.9

Sunlight poured in through the window as the dentist hovered over me with a miniature sandblaster. He wore a sticker that read "I ensured freedom by voting today." It was still only 9 a.m. As he ground away 15-year-old retainer glue, the whine of the drill competed with the yammering of high-volume news radio for nobody's attention.

"Wow, it's a nice day today," my dentist said.

"Hmmm mmmm," I gurgled.

Outside, people on the corner waved campaign signs. The streets were full of noise, honking and traffic, yelling and whistling. "Can I really handle a full day of this?" I wondered. I parked at a nearby mall and pulled my bike off the roof rack. I suited up in clothing that would assure me warmth - something that's been eluding me on bike rides lately - two fleece jackets, long johns, rain pants, balaclava, neoprene booties. I pulled into traffic and rode north.

Beyond the businesses and polling places, beyond the houses and the campaign signs, the street became starkly quiet. Despite the nice weather, no one seemed to be venturing out the road - minds and hearts elsewhere, I guess. I relished in the solitude, in a place where rushing streams and soft wind drown out the constant yammering. But without the noise, I began to wonder why I had been so annoyed.

Political passion has eluded me for years. I registered to vote soon after I turned 18, and happily voted for Sandy City Council members in the 1997 election. I came back in '98 for my first statewide ballot. I campaigned fiercely for future Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson in '99, going so far as to wave a sign on a street corner. I joined a number of environmental activism groups, volunteered for university voter drives, and went with Nader in 2000. But shortly after I graduated from college, something snapped. My passion faded. I began to view voting as a statistical exercise in futility. I began to hear campaigns as meaningless rhetoric. I began to see major-party candidates as small variations of the same ideas. I became a political agnostic. I haven't voted in an election, any election, since 2002.

There was comfort in my apathy, safety in doing nothing. I never tried to defend my status as a non-voter, but I never did anything about it, either. I started to feel guilty in 2006, but failed to register before the deadline. I watched the results diligently and concluded my vote would have made no difference. I did not rush off to register after the election. I still hadn't registered by the 2008 primary. I did not register to vote until the first week of October, on the last day before the deadline, because I knew, despite my agnosticism, refusing to vote would only secure my place in purgatory.

The beautiful day kept me out on my bike until it was time to go to work. I did not have time to stop by my polling place first. I sat at my desk and tuned back in to the yammering, because that's what I'm paid to pay attention to. Bursts of excitement punctuated the air at the office, with all eyes on the election. By 6 p.m. Alaska time, major news networks were already starting to call the race. National reaction poured in. I browsed the Associated Press wire, looking for photos to include with the stories. The faces, the tears, the words captured my spirit in a way I haven't felt for eight years. Especially powerful was this photo, with Christine King Farris, sister of Martin Luther King Jr., and her granddaughter in Atlanta:

I took my break shortly before polls closed, went to the Douglas Public Library, and voted.

Happy birthday blog

Date: Nov. 2
Mileage: 29.7
November mileage: 59.8

It was a strange feeling, dropping away from the base of the ski resort and into a thick fog. Spooky ghost trees and skeletal branches masked the one thing I was really afraid of - ice. I hugged the shoulder in case I needed to bail into the gravel as wheels spun almost silently over wet pavement. Visibility closed in and the ghost trees disappeared, until all I had was a white line, drawing a vague path over the obscured road, buried and surrounded by a great gray kind of nothingness. A layer of frost collected on my black fleece hoodie and tights until I was little more than a shade of gray myself. With the unseen pull of gravity I flew through the cloud, cold tears on my cheeks, frosty mittens clasped on the handlebars, smiling at the invisible world. It was a strange feeling, being lost in a fog and filled with a sensation that can only be described as clarity.

.....

So Monday is my third "bloggiversary." That's right. I've been blogging at this site for three full years. It's funny to think back to my reason for starting this site - as a way to convince my friends and family back home that my new life in Alaska was great and they should join me. Three years and 843 posts later, I still haven't convinced anyone I know to move to Alaska, but I have discovered a wide world of cyclists, Alaskans, adventurers, thinkers and dreamers, and I feel like I'm part of a virtual community. I was going to have a reader appreciation day to celebrate. But I'm not quite ready yet, so I think I'll postpone it until after the election. Everyone's probably so over-saturated in election stuff right now that they're not even reading blogs, so it's just as well.

Harder than it seemed

Date: Oct. 31 and Nov. 1
Mileage: 72.4 and 30.1
October mileage: 587
November mileage: 30.1
October rainfall: 16.42"
October snowfall: 9.1"

I left the house on Friday telling Geoff I'd be gone about three hours, hoping to stretch that to six hours and 100 miles, and figuring I'd end up somewhere in the middle. The truth is I was feeling a bit battered from Thursday. After four hours of stomping around in heavy snow, I was sore in all sorts of new places, fatigued and somewhat windblown (or maybe just sunburned.) I also had a painful red ring (frostnip?) on my skin around both legs just below my calves where ice and snow had built up in my boots (yeah, I wasn't wearing gaters ... just boots and a thin pair of polypro tights.)

So I was not feeling 100 percent up to a long ride, but I was OK with that. I can ride all of the centuries I want, but my best training is still going to come from the spontaneous outdoor excursions where I don't quite dress right and don't bring the right gear and spend four hours hiking six miles and have random things happen like getting a boot stuck in the snow. There's still so much to learn. There's always so much to learn. The problem-solving, the hard lessons and discovering my strengths and weaknesses are my favorite aspects of winter training. Centuries are kinda ... boring.

Not to say I even came close to accomplishing one yesterday. I went out a little hard with an east wind sweeping at my side, just a touch underdressed for 39 degrees and scattered rain, and by mile 38, I'd had enough. I ate two Power Bars to try to coax my energy back, but it wouldn't come. I turned around. Several miles down the road, I took an extended break at Eagle Beach, laying on a picnic table and listening to the wind-driven surf lap the rocks. When I was too cold to rest any more, I reluctantly peeled myself off the table and took the short way home.

It was a hard day. Some days are like that. The only real downside to it all was that it killed any motivation I had for Halloween. Some holidays are like that. I woke up this morning resolved to do a pretty mellow ride today - active recovery of sorts. Surprisingly, I felt really good, and ended up pushing hard toward the end of the ride just for fun.

If I had a coach or any real training plan, I would probably have a better grasp on good days and bad. But for now, I really think it's better for a person like me to go with the flow; listen to my body; build up my strength with snowshoes, not weights; build up my endurance in hours, not miles; and sometimes get my boot stuck in the snow.

Worth the wait

Date: Oct. 30
Mileage: 35.1
October mileage: 514.6

October has not been kind to Juneau, weatherwise. The last dry day was Sept. 25, which was the day I left on my Golden Circle bike tour. It seems like ages ago. Since then, we've set a number of disappointing records ... daily rainfall records, consecutive days of rain, high wind speeds. We're still pace for a record number of wet days for the year (Up to 211 right now, but who's counting?) Complaining about rain in Juneau is like complaining about sand in the desert. But it would be a lie, I believe for any of us here, to say that waking up to the 34th consecutive day of dripping gray fog doesn't make us feel like eating a few thousand calories of pure carbs and crawling back into bed.

So my point is, after a streak like that, when the sun comes out, it matters. It more than matters. It nourishes. Like fresh bread and butter after a long fast, the long-hidden rays soak into skin and fill every cell with warmth and light. So when I woke up on Thursday to a clear day that I wasn't expecting, I knew it could only mean one thing - binge, binge, binge.

I took Pugsley up the Perseverance Trail. A couple of days ago, the bottom bracket started clanking and it got worse quickly. I know I'm gambling by riding this bike when the bottom bracket could crack in half at any second. But I figure the worse that can happen would be me becoming stranded. And what better day and place to get stranded than here?

But I didn't feel comfortable with the idea of riding a clanking, ailing bicycle for six hours, so I parked Pugsley and set out on foot up Granite Creek canyon. I wasn't planning on hiking, so I didn't have snowshoes with me. The snow quickly went from ankle-deep to knee-deep to thigh-deep. It was a huge, strenuous slog just to move slowly through it. The snow was crusty and heavy but highly collapsible - sort of like walking through shaved ice. I'm not even sure that snowshoes would have helped, because they likely still would have punched through and then become stuck in the postholes. Skis with good skins would have definitely been better - if I owned any. As it was, there were enough open stream crossings and bushwhacking that even the death sticks would have been difficult. It's all good, though. Any activity that's excruciatingly slow and needlessly difficult is great Iditarod training.

But, yes, Granite Creek Basin is a magical place and worth the slog. Hard to describe and impossible to photograph, but I love the way the ridge wraps itself around the valley like a chiseled fortress. And the snow. Oh, the snow. It was still crusty even higher on the mountain, and whipped by an intensifying wind, but I still wished I hadn't forgotten my snowboard, too.

Alder bushwhacking in thigh-deep shaved ice snow is almost as fun as snowboarding (um, no.)

But the sun. Oh, the sun.

I started to struggle when I was climbing toward the upper basin. There were steep pitches with no way around, and the wind chill was becoming a concern. When I left the house at 9:30 a.m. it was 35 degrees. But up in the basin it felt so much colder. It seems illogical that there would be that much difference in temperature, but I was convinced the temperature with windchill was well below zero. Could be that it's just early in the year and I don't have my cold blood running yet. But what matters is I was cold and that's why I turned around.

On the way down, I had an odd mishap. I was tracing a diagonal path, just above my original steps, down a steep pitch when I planted my right foot in a rotten patch of snow and sank all the way up to my waist. In my original struggle to extract myself, I managed to compress all of the snow around my boot until it formed an icy block. I'll admit there were a few moments of mild panic when I finally realized I was stuck. I knew I could tug my foot out of my boot to free myself, but I very well couldn't hike all the way down the mountain with only one boot. At least, not without losing a toe or two. But I pushed through the panic and formed a plan. I carefully pulled my leg out of the boot and spun my body around, laying on my stomach and holding the sock foot in the air. Then I used my mittens to dig a trench around the outside of the posthole, careful to remove the snow rather than push it over the boot. When I got down to boot level, I widened the trench until I could leverage my body and punch out the ice-snow barrier around the boot. The anxiety-filled process took at least 15 minutes, but when I finally freed the boot, I was so happy. It was the best part of the day. After that, I was careful to only step in my own footprints, despite the ankle-twisting risk, until I made it back down to the basin.

After that, it was a relaxing hike back down, with a little bit of elation about the genius way in which I conquered the boot-eating snow.

Then I rode back to town. The roads were bathed in direct sun. Everything felt so warm. Even though I was tired and hungry, I took off my extra layers, turned my bike away from home and rode north for a while, just to soak it in.