Why I'm not so good at training

Date: Feb. 8
Mileage: 36
Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes
Weather: 39 degrees, partly cloudy, ESE wind 5-10 mph
Details: Interval training; intensity 60-95 percent
Note: Still lots of ice on the road beyond the shrine.

My future TransRockies partner, Keith, recently started a rigorous training program under the direction of an actual, flesh-and-blood coach. When he asked me if I'd ever consider working with a coach, I said, "No, because eventually the coach would tell me I needed to stay inside on a sunny day, and that would be the end of that."

Not that I'm against coaching in any way. I recognize that if athletes want real results, they need to treat fitness like a science, and that involves doing things they'd rather not do, at times they'd rather not do them. It's just that I have this thing called a "job," which already tells me where I need to be and exactly when to be there, five days a week. I'm not about to take up a second "job" that revolves around bicycle racing and threatens to ruin one of the things in life I truly love - riding bicycles. The day something stops being fun or rewarding is the day I quit, cold turkey. (This ideal has also led me to quit several of my past jobs.)

That said, I am trying to establish a little more of a structured fitness routine under my own rather broad and unscientific terms. Today I planned to do something involving intervals. I had scheduled a trip to the gym, where the handy settings on the elliptical machine help me specifically monitor the time, power output and even heart-rate estimates of each interval. But when I woke up, the sun was trying ever so slyly to peek out of the clouds. Winds were light. Temps were in the high 30s, promising to hit the 40s. Basically, it was April outside. The kind of day where I would definitely tell my imaginary coach to step aside so I could go have some fun.

But I still wanted to do my intervals. I'm not a watch-watcher, so when I'm outside, my interval training is about as unscientific as it comes. Basically, I pick a single song, generally in the two- to three-minute range, with which to ride my intervals. This song is usually from the pop punk days of my youth, which means it's short enough to sprint to, snappy enough to keep the pace, and obnoxious enough that after the third or fourth playing, I am going to purposely enter the pain cave just to block it out. I set my mP3 player so I can sprint to that song, recover to another random song, and then repeat the sprint song. Today I listened to "Cool Kids" by Screeching Weasel.

At first, the interval training went really well. I was sweating and gasping and my heart was pounding into my throat. Then, a pretty song like "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufjan Stevens would come on and I'd exhale long and slow, shoot a couple of snot rockets, and pedal into the happy daze of post-interval endorphins. Then, like a foghorn out of a thick mist, Screeching Weasel would launch into their namesake rant and "na na na nana nana na nana" - suddenly I was rocketing into clear blue air.

I was supposed to do this for 30 minutes (after a 10-minute warm up) and turn around for a cool-down. But the farther I pedaled north, the more the sky opened up, and the more alive I felt. I felt as awesome as the Cool Kids in the song that wouldn't leave me alone, but rather than become annoyed with the noise, I relished in it, craved it, and pumped harder every time the track started anew. My veins gushed molten lava; my lungs breathed fire and the sun cast a stark shadow directly in front of me. Time seemed to stand still, but what actually happened is nearly an hour passed, and I found myself all the way out at the construction zone near Eagle Beach, feeling fairly exhausted.

Plus, I was 18 miles from home, it was 11:55 a.m., and I really needed to be home by 1 p.m.

Did I mention that I haven't done any speed work all winter long?

The result was I really bonked while I was still a fair distance from home, but I couldn't let off the pace. So I struggled and my head spun and there was no more Screeching Weasel to help me along (I was definitely too annoyed with that song to put up with it at that point.) Sometimes the fog would sink in and I'd find myself limping up the road at about 10 mph, so I'd shake my head around like a driver trying not to fall asleep at the wheel before amping it up again.

Definitely more than a bit too much, too soon. But I have to admit, it was fun while it lasted.

I wonder what my coach would say?

Good thing I don't have one.

Food is fuel

Date: Feb. 7
Mileage: 67
Time: 4 hours, 47 minutes
Weather: 43 degrees, rain showers, southeast wind 10-20 mph (felt like spring. Thanks El Niño!)
Details: Distance road ride on the "southern circuit:" North Douglas, Thane, Back Loop Road; intensity 50-80 percent
Note: Left knee tendons are feeling a lot better but right knee had some light patellar pain while riding into the headwind. Been a while since I felt that.

Endurance athletes tend to develop very literal interpretation of the “food is fuel" mantra. This is especially true of touring cyclists, whose access to different varieties of food becomes more and more limited as they travel through isolated areas and tiny towns. Eventually, quality and nutrition are relegated to the sidelines as energy-starved cyclists go on an indiscriminate calorie hunt.

When this happens, these cyclists will find themselves standing in gas stations, questioning why they should spend $1.75 on an organic, vitamin-fortified Clif Bar when they can get the same calorie punch (and similar fat-protein-carb levels) in a much smoother, much tastier, 75-cent Snickers Bar. When these cyclists start entering multiday races, the situation deteriorates even further, until they’re questioning why they should bother stopping for dinner when four Snickers Bars will provide all of the energy in a fraction of the time.

I found myself buried deep in this rationale during the Tour Divide. By the time I left Grants, New Mexico, I had already lost nearly 15 pounds and was running a deepening daily calorie deficit. Before leaving town, I stocked up with two days worth of supplies, because I didn’t expect to reach another food resupply before Silver City, about 275 miles away. One of the supplies I bought was a pound of Sour Patch Kids. This portion of my “gummy snack” food group was supposed to last two days. I ate a breakfast of pastry, orange juice, fruit smoothie, banana and coffee at the last gas station out of Grants and set out toward Pie Town. It didn’t take me long to crack into those Sour Patch Kids. I continued to mindlessly munch on them until about 15 miles outside of Pie Town, a mere five hours later, when I hit the bottom of the bag. In the matter of a single morning, I had consumed an entire pound of Sour Patch Kids. Do you know how many calories are in a pound of Sour Patch Kids? Sixteen hundred! Guess how many grams of sugar? Three hundred and thirty! That’s a third of a kilogram! Of pure sugar!

I still ate a huge lunch in Pie Town, including a piece of banana creme pie and two cans of Pepsi. I don’t even remember what I ate during the afternoon, but I remember sitting down that night at my campsite to a dinner of two huge cookies, a bag of almonds and dried cherries. And that was just one day. Needless to say, I came home from the Tour Divide very, very addicted to sugar.

Kicking this addiction has been my continuing battle ever since, especially because my life revolves around convenience foods. I genuinely do not have time to cook, plus I don’t like to cook, and I’m not very good at it as well. But my “food as fuel (and only fuel)” mantra has gone too far. I actually still eye king-sized Snickers Bars at the grocery store and think, “Well, that could work for dinner.”

I am not and never will be a food snob; I require about as much culinary variety in my diet as my cat. But I do want to eat at least somewhat healthy, and I want to stop the guilty mid-day gummy bear binges (and the resulting extra pounds now that my calorie deficit has become a surplus.) So my goal from this point on is to drastically reduce my candy intake, limit my simple carb intake, and eat a lot more fresh raw fruits and vegetables (which are already a pretty heavy staple of my diet.) I get around the whole cooking nuisance by making a lot of gigantic salads and veggie-laden sandwiches; using tuna, surimi, black beans, cottage cheese, sushi and hummus as sources of protein; buying only whole-grain bread and tortillas and trying to stick to low-sugar cold cereals (even though my favorites are flavored Cheerios and Honey Bunches of Oats); and snacking on yogurt, flaxseed tortilla chips, fresh salsa and fruit.

If you have any other ideas for relatively healthy, no-cooking-required, can-be-eaten-on-the-go foods, I'd love to hear them. I want to be healthy and strong for White Mountains 100! Hot food is overrated anyway. But Sour Patch Kids will always be little morsels of heaven.

Leaving Banff

I had a great last couple of days in Banff. The weather, which had been stellar all week, really opened up on Wednesday and Thursday with blue skies and temps that actually climbed above freezing (as Canadians call it, "Zero.") My long streak of visiting Canada amid the best weather possible continues. I have this theory that Canada loves me.

On Thursday, Keith and I skied up the Chickadee Valley.

It's been a while since the Banff-Jasper region had much fresh snow, and the conditions included about two inches of fresh powder surrounding a slick, well-packed skin track. It was winter singletrack at its best. I continued to pine for my Pugsley. My trip to Banff was intended to ignite new passion for skiing, but I just happened to visit during a week when the snow biking couldn't have been better.

The skiing was pretty good too, though. A little more than a decade ago, when I was still a teenager, a friend asked me what my own personal heaven would look like. I replied, "Canyonlands with snow." (Canyonlands is national park in Utah, famous for its towering redrock cliffs and large desert plateaus.) In Chickadee Valley, I caught a glimpse of my original vision of Jill Heaven.

Later that day, I hiked to the top of Sulphur Mountain to kill a couple hours before the night's planned all-you-can-eat sushi bender and the long drive to the Calgary airport.

Sulphur Mountain is a special place for me. I first walked to the top on June 10, the morning after I arrived in Banff ahead of the 2009 Tour Divide. I was a mess of emotions, and a large part of me did not want to start the race. But as I stood on the Sulphur Mountain observation deck and looked out over the southern horizon, I felt this strong sense of peace that the Tour Divide was the right thing to do. This is that same view, eight months later. Mount Rundle is on the left and the Spray River runs down the valley on the right. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route follows that river south.

I really had a great time going back to Banff, visiting the incredible people I met down there during the summer, revisiting special places cast in the blue light of winter, learning new skills and discovering new spaces of almost celestial beauty and fun. Thanks so much to Leslie and Keith for being great hosts, friends and teachers. (Click on the link to check out Leslie's blog. She's a distance trail runner and her blog awesome.) Banff really is a little slice of paradise.

Moving on ...

I'm back in Juneau and have a total of six weeks to train before the start of the White Mountains 100, a snow-bike race in Fairbanks. I used to use this blog as a training log to track my mileage and hours, but quit doing that shortly after I got frostbite during the 2009 Iditarod Trail Invitational and became a bit ambivalent to training. My plan for the next six weeks is to narrow my focus and pay more attention to the specifics of my workouts - both riding and hiking - so I'm going to start tracking again. I may not have enough time to really dial in my fitness, but at least I can push my own physical limits up to the event. So, for today's ride:

Date: Feb. 6
Mileage: 35
Time: 2 hours, 3 minutes
Weather: 39 degrees, light rain, southeast wind 10-15 mph
Details: Tempo road ride to Herbert River and back, intensity 65-90 percent
Note: Tendons behind left knee still sore from skiing, otherwise felt strong.

High country

This is a place that I love.

It's the corner of the Continental Divide, where Atlantic meets Pacific meets Arctic. "The apex," one might say, the center; the place where life can flow in any direction - a single drop of water, a fractal flake of snow, a moment in time. It's near here, on the Columbia Icefield, in the Canadian Rockies.

Look East. Look West. Look North. That's opportunity. But to start at the beginning, we look up.

This is a place where few venture; a world of rock and ice and little more. Water flows down; we climb. Trees give way to a sterile moonscape of pure beauty.

This is a place where I put on my sleeping-bag coat; turn to face the frigid wind and blasts of cold. I'm a biosphere of warmth, as long as I'm moving. I huddle in my sleeping-bag coat and march strong.

This is a place where I wander; both over the snow and inside my mind. I think about the far-away places the flakes atop these pinnacles may someday reach; the Mackenzie River, the Columbia River, and Hudson Bay.

It reminds me that nothing is permanent and nothing stays the same. It helps me feel more secure with uncertainty; more comfortable. I bundle up my sleeping-bag coat and start down.

This is a place; just a place. The Triple Divide is just an idea, someone's theory, somewhere else. We're just a couple of hikers out for a stroll - somewhere high, somewhere quiet, flowing home.

Today I rode a really nice bike in the snow

Keith and I are registered as partners in this year's Trans Rockies, a mountain bike stage race that takes place in British Columbia and Alberta in August. Keith is a rep for Rocky Mountain bicycles, which means I found a way to become a sponsored racer without actually being a real athlete. Hooray! One of the perks of our team sponsorship is use of a sweet, high-end mountain bike. Today I had the opportunity to try this bike out.

These are our team bikes - Rocky Mountain Element 90s. I'm not nearly enough of a gear geek to rattle off the different parts, but they're full-suspension, 26" aluminum bikes, weigh in at about 25 pounds, and have super bomber wheels, drivetrain, shocks, blah, blah, blah. The bike is worth nearly as much as what I paid for the car I've driven for the past decade (and for what my car is worth today, I'd have to sell 10 of them to buy myself this bicycle.) Needless to say, I was itching to take it out for a ride.

Drivetrain shot! Check out those sweet platform pedals. :-)

We took them on singletrack just outside Banff. Trail conditions were ideal for a ride on a lightweight, full-suspension bike: about 2-3 inches of fluff on top of frozen dirt, with just enough crust and narrow tracks to really make things interesting. We cut through the snow and floated over hidden rocks and roots. We hammered through wind-drifts and powered up steep hills like they weren't even there. This bike is significantly lighter than both my hardtail 29" Karate Monkey and Pugsley, which unloaded weigh in at about 30 and 36 pounds, respectively. Amazing how much a difference those 10 pounds can make. You don't even miss the big wheels because you are hovering above the ground.

Not to mention shifting and braking more smoothly than you ever thought possible because you have spent so much time riding lackadaisically maintained bicycles that have lived in soggy, icy Juneau for far too long.

Of course, snow is snow, and eventually powder will steal little wheels' traction. We did get spun out on a few hills, but for the most part our ride was best of both worlds - all of the fun of singletrack riding in the summer with all of the serenity and scenery of the mountains in winter.

After our singletrack ride, we headed out to Lake Minnewanka for "resistance training." I highly recommend this workout for other "sponsored" athletes like myself. Just put three inches of wind-crusted fluff on top of glare ice and be amazed at how hard you have to work for slow progress on a flat surface.

Keith isn't usually an outdoor cyclist during the winter. It's always fun to introduce snow-biking newbies to the initial shock of how much more difficult and challenging cycling really is during the winter. And it's not the cold factor (although I have to admit conditions for us today were downright tropical - just below freezing with intermittent sun and clouds.) But, no, the biggest challenge is the stuff on the ground: snow and ice and slush. The surface is ever-changing, but the one constant of winter cycling is that there's always something waiting to trip you up. And powering over, through and around these frozen water obstacles is, in my opinion, every bit as fun as rocks, roots and sand. Seriously. Did the groundhog see his shadow today? I hope so, because I'm not nearly ready for winter ... or my vacation ... to end.

Skoki!

On Saturday, Keith and Leslie surprised me with overnight reservations at the Skoki Lodge. Skoki is a National Park backcountry lodge with no running water and no electricity that can only be accessed by skiers and snowshoers. The trail starts at Lake Louise, heads up a canyon, crosses two passes and drops into a narrow valley surrounded by hanging glaciers and spectacular peaks. The lodge itself is a historic building built in the 1930s by the Banff ski club.

Five of us skied in for the night - Stuart and Anna - a couple of Brits now living in Banff - my friends Leslie and Keith, and me. I was nervous about going there as a "second-day skier," but my friends assured me that some guests went in on cross-country skis (crazy people, I tell you) so it was probably doable by me on heavy powder gear. The trail turned out to be a nicely packed, gently inclining snowmobile trail that would have been perfect for Pugsley. Thanks to its national park status, Pugsley wouldn't be allowed on that trail; still, I couldn't help but daydream about all the great "pedal turns" I could be making. But I was stuck on skis, so I made the best of it. :-)

Climbing up Deception Pass. The weather was gray with occasional snow flurries, but it wasn't socked in enough to destroy the view.

The trip into Skoki only involved one downhill run long enough to take off the skins, which I was grateful for. Despite my perception that I'm in decent shape, I was feeling exceptionally tired from the day before. I tried to explain to my friends that skiing downhill was a lot more work for me than skinning uphill, even up steep hills, because once that terrain sloped downward, I had to use so much more muscle power to fight gravity. Stuart said, "You know skis are easier if you use them instead of fighting with them." This is probably true, but when a person has two strips of fiberglass, which they can barely control anyway, that are threatening to carry them off the edge of a cornice into icy oblivion, I don't think the person can be blamed for fighting them with every ounce of energy they have. Pugsley may be a beast to push uphill, but at least he has brakes.

Look at that wedge! That's pure technique right there. But I have to admit, once I got going and no longer had time to mull over my certain doom, I actually had a lot of fun.

First tracks! Awkwardly executed. But, hey, you can't beat the scenery.

In the early afternoon we arrived at the lodge, complete with a roaring wood fire and a large spread of snacks. Even though I had already sustained some fairly mean blisters after two days in the hard boots, I also seem to suffer from something my friends call FOMO disease, which is short for "Fear Of Missing Out." So I went out for an afternoon tour. Leslie and I looked for a route to an alpine lake up a side canyon. We stopped at this lightly dusted, boulder-strewn slope for several minutes, considering the dire consequences of my trying to ski down it. We decided to turn around. Now, if I had my snowshoes, I might just have beautiful pictures of a hanging glacier over a frozen alpine lake. Yes, I know skis are more efficient. But not if your trapped in noviceland. Then you can't go anywhere fun.


Well, I guess you can go to Skoki Lodge, which is a fantastically fun place. It's a bit like a classic 1930s Euro ski experience with a bit of Bush Alaska hunting lodge thrown in. Highly recommended by this Banff tourist.

Big first day

Before I came to Banff, I'm not sure I was completely forthcoming about just how little experience I had on skis. That back when I was a snowboarding teenager, two or three times I traded gear with a skier friend for a single run, just for giggles (at each other's expense, of course.) That in 2006, I dabbled in cross-country skiing but had pretty much given it up because I spent more time on my butt and face than I did on my feet. No, when Keith asked me what my level of skiing was, I told him "beginner." I should have said "essentially a first-time beginner whose handful of ski outings only served to convince me that I was incapable of the activity."

Today, we hit Sunshine ski resort first thing in the morning. I was a complete stress case up the first lift of the day, trying to swallow an urge to hyperventilate as Keith calmly explained what we needed to do at the top of the hill. But as I coasted off the lift, much to my amazement, I didn't fall. And to my further amazement, the skis turned when I told them to. I guess it makes sense - skis are just like big extensions of feet. And when I started to think that way, flow just started to happen.

We made four runs on the lift and Keith was a fantastically enthusiastic teacher. He kept yelling out, "I didn't even tell you to do that! And you just did it!" I kept the wedge but started to make tighter turns as the day progressed. I was completely surprised that the skis were allowing me the simple pleasure of surviving down a hill. I've never been anything but a flailing mess on cross-country skis. I'm just not sure what changed. Maybe it's fat skis. Maybe it's edges. Maybe I just wanted it this time. By our fourth run, Keith took me up the intermediate lift, and I was started to forget I was even on skis, with the movement and flow evoking the feeling of being on my board, until I lapsed into a mindset that I was on a board ... which usually resulted in a few seconds of confused terror as I approached a horizon line and tried to lean onto my "back edge" (yeah, leaning back on skis ... not a good idea.)

But the four runs more than served their purpose, so it was time to go touring. We hopped the boundary line, put on skins, and delved into a part of skiing I could really get into: ski walking ... which peacefully carries skiers into beautiful and quiet places.

Here I am skinning toward some fantastically beautiful place. I should note that all of these pictures were taken by Keith, who took my camera because he wanted to document my "first time touring." I really should have just clarified the documentation as my "first time skiing," because it essentially was.

We skinned for about two hours along a ridgeline of the Continental Divide (crossing from Alberta into British Columbia), did a few turns in the powder (resulting in two serious entanglements on my part. That's one advantage of snowboarding over skiing. One piece of gear and it's difficult to get tangled in it.) We took an hour to skin back, floating over the knee-deep postholes left by boot-packing snowboarders (yeah, a skier advantage, for sure.) Then we did a few more lift-served runs. We finally ducked into the lodge at about 4 to sip coffee, dry our skins by the fire, meet up with Leslie and Stuart, and eat pizza and sweet potato fries for dinner.

By 6:30 we were back up on the hill for a "moonlight tour." We skinned up a pitch so steep I'm pretty sure it would have caused my well-worn snowshoes to slide backwards, but the skins held it together, to my amazement. We walked to the top of the lift and the scooted into the backcountry again, working our way though a thin layer of powder up yet another ridgeline. Because I had a mental image of the steep terrain we skinned up, combined with the darkness and weird depth perception, I started fight back an increasingly strong surge of fear. It almost overpowered me near the top (you know, mild panic episode.) But as soon as we started down, the fear just melted away. In the full moon light, the landscape glowed silver and blue. My friends' ski tracks carved dark shadows into a blank slate of snow, and I followed their turns like a child tracing a curving line - not perfect by any means; not even pretty. But the flow was there, and with it I found peace and satisfaction.

We returned at about 8:30, after a 12-hour day that included more than nine hours of downhill skiing and ski touring, all of it new to my brain and muscles, full of the stress and tension and fear of a novice. I'm deeply tired. My knees are sore. My hip flexors feel like a rubber band caught in a stretched-out position.

And I can understand why people love skiing.