Auspicious beginning

I admit I crawled back into bed after my alarm went off at 8 a.m. I do this a lot of mornings. It's a bad habit — a manifestation of my general mood during the past several weeks. Ugh. Morning. Why bother?

I forgot that I had specifically set the alarm today so I could finish packing. My friend showed up at my house at 9:45 to load my stuff in his car. "Um, did I wake you up?" he asked.

"I fell back asleep," I mumbled. I rubbed my face until the world finally came into focus. I blinked rapidly as my eyes and mouth jolted wide open.

"It's, it's so blue out," I stammered as I stared up at the sky. "Where did the three-week storm go?"

"It's a sunny day," Bjorn grinned. "An auspicious beginning to our trip."

I darted around my room, gathering up a huge assortment of gear. First we crammed Pugsley in the hatchback, along with all of the bike's winter gear. Then went in my big backpack, stuffed with my 40-below sleeping bag, bivy, food, water bladder, winter clothes, sleeping pad and supplies. Then I threw in my bag with the race gear — more winter clothes, smaller sleeping bag, food, supplies and repair stuff. On top of that went the snowshoes, ice ax, trekking poles, crampons and winter boots. Bjorn set his sled on top of the pile.

"I'll grab my personal stuff tomorrow morning," I said. "I hope you weren't planning on bringing any of your own stuff."

Finally packed for the 5 a.m. Wednesday ferry out of Juneau, I set out for a bike ride. It was the first time I'd seen direct sunlight since February. Before today, I looked and felt much like one of those light-powered green glow sticks that's been lodged in the dark for far too long — a faint, sad glimmer of myself. And as much as I like to believe that my body operates independently of external forces, I am, in the end, maniacally solar-powered. I felt stronger, faster and fitter than I have in weeks (indeed, I have been doing quite a bit of tapering. See earlier sentence about sleeping in every day.)

The high March sun felt hot and I stripped down to my short sleeves before tearing through nearly every mile of trail in the Mendenhall Valley — some clear, others clogged with ice. I rode the muskeg meadows above Lake Creek until the snow became too deep and soft, then wove through the mossy moraine surrounding Mendenhall Lake, finishing up with the Brotherhood Bridge singletrack spurs. It was fast, hard, highly focused riding, and for three hours I thought of nothing but the next bend, the next log, the next half-frozen beaver pond. I was happily locked in the extreme present, functioning like a machine whose sole purpose was to power and steer a bicycle, without reasoning, without anxiety, without regret ... until the front tire skidded out on a downhill stream of wet ice and my body pitched forward. It's an interesting experience — snapping back to reality in those terror-streaked fractions of seconds as your face approaches the ground, perfectly conscious of the humor in the first thought that enters your head: "Crap, I'm going to hurt myself right before my race!"

Luckily, I took the landing well, bashing my left knee somewhat painfully but not enough to even slow my pedaling for the rest of the ride. Right now I'm just finishing up my work and then it's on to more packing. Bjorn and I have a couple of days to kill before I need to be in Fairbanks on Saturday (he's headed north for a long climbing trip, so I'm going to fly back to Juneau after the race.) We're thinking if the weather looks good, we will probably do an overnight backpacking trip in the Yukon on Thursday-Friday. It should be a good lead-up to the White Mountains 100 as long as we don't go too hard. And if we do, well ... I'm really going to try to avoid it. But I've never been all that good at tapering. Especially if the sun gets involved.

Pugsley's Sunday best

So, happiness, home, taking big leaps into the unknown ... Now, let's move on to more important things, like bicycles!

This coming Sunday is the White Mountains 100. I've been so focused on life in general that this reality just slammed into me, hard. When I first started talking to friends and family about the Anchorage move, I assured them (and myself) that I was going to drop out of the White Mountains 100. It was too much to deal with, at exactly the wrong time. But as I really started to work out the logistics, I realized that I could pull off this race for fairly low expense, and because of that, I'd probably always regret it if I didn't at least try.

The White Mountains 100 is a 100-mile snow trail race in the Interior, near Fairbanks. The fact that it begins the day after the spring equinox doesn't really mean a whole lot in that part of the world. It's still stark winter and temperatures can drop to 40 below. So far, weather reports call for temperatures in the region to be fairly mild, with highs in the 20s and lows in the single digits. With my winter of "Juneau lite" training, I'm really hoping that report sticks.

Still, I plan to come prepared. Prepared with a lightweight tint, that is. Because this is a 100-mile race with sheltered checkpoints that are roughly 20 miles apart, I don't anticipate sleeping out unless there's an emergency. Because of this, I'm going to only carry emergency sleeping gear: A foam sleeping pad, a water-resistant bivy sack, and a down sleeping bag rated to 15 degrees (above zero.) This system combined with my spare clothing should allow at least a couple hours of down time if I break an ankle or do something else that prevents me from walking to the next checkpoint. The bivy system, spare clothing, and a pair of down booties are in the handlebar bag.

In the frame bag I plan to carry my nylon waders, two liters of water in an insulated water bladder, spare batteries, bike repair gear, medical gear, a few chemical warmers, goggles and food. Another liter water bottle will be in an insulated pouch on the handlebars. Those giant pogies also have a way of accumulating things as well.

The seat post bag will simply hold my big down coat, as well as any clothing that I may shed over the course of the race. As for clothing, I'll probably start out the cold morning with a base layer, softshell pants, a vapor barrier vest, a thin polyester pullover, a thick pile polyester pullover, and a softshell coat. I'll have liner gloves and shell mittens, as well as a thin balaclava, a hat, and a thick balaclava.

As for my feet — I am nervous about my feet. I had fairly serious frostbite on my right foot last March, and now, a year later, the foot is still much more sensitive to cold and pressure than my left foot. My right foot gave me a ton of trouble before the Tour Divide, but during the winter it has gradually normalized, although I have yet to really test it in extreme cold (Yeah, thanks a lot, mild Juneau winter.) I'd say the best gauge I have is the five-hour Christmas Eve ride I did in Whitehorse, when temperatures were near zero and the windchill pushed 30 below. I was fine then, so I'm hoping by using the system I'm comfortable with — my studded, waterproof expedition boots, liner socks, vapor barrier socks, thick wool socks, chemical warmers and gators — that I can ward off further damage, and maybe even avoid discomfort.

As far as feet go, the trail reports are a little ominous: "The 40-mile stretch between Cache Mtn cabin (Checkpont #2) and Borealis LeFevre cabin (Checkpoint #4) has quite a bit of overflow, glare ice, and bumps. Racers should be prepared to deal with very icy surfaces and/or patches of open water." Overflow (and bad ice) is what froze my toes last March, so I am going to place the biggest emphasis on keeping my feet dry. My mobile system is waterproof to my shins, very water resistant to my knees, and if I put on the nylon waders, it's waterproof to my hips. The studded boots also work great on wet ice — this has been tested extensively in Juneau conditions. Studded tires would be a nice bonus, but I'd really rather walk the glare ice than give up the float of the Endomorphs.

Walking will also slow me down enough to really gauge the condition of the ice. Believe me, frostbite sucks. If by some horrible mistake I do end up getting my feet wet, I'll take off everything that got wet and try the system I ignored in the 2009 ITI and have subsequently been thinking about for a year — dry wool socks, chemical warmers, plastic baggies and down booties wrapped in duct tape. That should get me through to a place where I can dry my boots.

As far as the race goes, I'm not in perfect physical condition right now, so my main objective is to have fun and enjoy the starkly beautiful environment of Interior Alaska. On the roster there seems to be more skiers than cyclists, but there will be a few women on bikes, including Julie Malingowski from Fairbanks and Janice Tower, a longtime (and extremely fast) winter cyclist.

Right now, I'm really glad I decided to do this. It's sort of like having a bachelorette party the night before a wedding. I'm ready to take this next big step and I think my life will be better for it, but it's nice to have one last day of freedom — my "last" race.

I'm looking forward to it.

Leave the city, part 3

It broke my heart to know you waited
I had so many things to do
It's true as far as a lot of stuff
You could have had a little better luck
But with you, I'm not givin' up
Tonight I'm not givin' up
— Magnolia Electric Co. "Leave the City"

It's one of the great cliches in life coaching — if you had a million dollars, what would you do? It's the kind of question people usually laugh off, but if you are stalled out and genuinely unhappy about your situation, I think it's an important one. The answer has always been very easy for me — I would live in a place where I had access to a lot of different adventures — good singletrack, long open roads, mountains and extensive winter trails. This place would have a community of like-minded souls — snow bikers, endurance athletes and mountaineers — that I could look to and learn things from. It would preferably be a small town, but I could stomach a mid-sized city. If you think this sounds like Salt Lake City, you're right, but I have another, most important requirement — it has to be in Alaska.

And what would I do for a non-recreational occupation in this place? That answer is even easier. I'd write. I'd interview interesting people and attend intriguing events, and I'd write about them. I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time writing soul-sucking query letters seeking publication, but I'd probably do a little of that, because it's always more fun to write for an audience (Hence my four-plus years of keeping a public blog.) And I would buy a nice camera, and take photos. And I would buy an art store out of their pastels and markers and paper, and I would start drawing again. I'd probably also buy a piano and renew that hobby — just to really round things out.

But here's the next question — what if I didn't need a million dollars? Nix the piano, camera and pastels, because that stuff is pretty expensive. And just cut it down to the basics — a place where I can sleep, store my bicycles and house my cat. A few spare dollars for lube, tubes and gasoline. Enough left over to buy rice and beans and Sour Patch Kids. Not forever, but just for a while. Maybe those soul-sucking query letters would even help pad the rice-and-beans fund. But even that wouldn't be fully necessary — at least for a while. One of the great secrets of life is that it's actually quite simple to follow dreams — as long as you follow them simply.

So here is my plan: My last day at the Juneau Empire is March 31. From there I'm going to make my way north and west. I'm moving in with a friend in the big city — Anchorage. During the month of April, I plan to fly to Salt Lake City. I want to visit my sister and meet my first nephew, who was just born last month. I want to visit my baby sister in Huntington Beach, and a few friends in between, hopefully in the form of a bike tour. This will probably take up most of the month. After that, it will be springtime in Alaska. I'm not sure exactly what will happen. I'm going to just ride the wave and see where it takes me.

So why Anchorage? Because, for better or worse, Anchorage is the center of Alaska. The city offers easier and cheaper access to so many places, from the Kenai Peninsula to Denali to the Brooks Range. There are many things I want to see and do that, if I stay in Juneau and continue working 50 hours a week, I will probably never have a realistic chance to experience. Moving to Anchorage will also be easier than moving to a random city because I have several friends in the Anchorage area already, from Kim, who has agreed to take on my cat and me as roommates, to Craig and Amity, a couple of my oldest friends from Utah. Having several familiar faces in town definitely helps ease big transitions. And Anchorage does have a great community of cyclists.

Plus, Anchorage is the state's center of commerce, so there will be more opportunities for income should the funemployment fund run dry.

So why didn't I just do this a year ago, when I first said I was going to? Well, there are a lot of reasons I stayed after I first "quit" my job in November 2008. One is my passion for newspaper journalism and my loyalty to the Juneau Empire. I realize the newspaper business is a slowly sinking ship, and that by opting out of my current newspaper job, I may not find another opportunity to re-enter this market. The Empire has done a lot for me over the years and I feel guilt about leaving. Another big reason is that I genuinely love Juneau. It is definitely a little bit of a "love-hate" relationship, especially during long stretches of snain (similar to the one we're currently in.) But Juneau is a place that grows into you like moss, filling the bare surfaces of life with brilliant green beauty. I can definitely see myself returning someday. In fact, at this point, I'm all but counting on it.

So, then, why am I leaving? Because I have been unhappy for a while now. This series of blog posts have been the exploration of the root of my unhappiness. It may seem I'm blaming a lot of it on my environment, which of course isn't fair, but my environment does make it extraordinarily difficult for me to make any real changes in my life. When more casual acquaintances ask me why I'm leaving, I tell them it's because I "need a change of scenery." It sounds frivolous, but there a lot to that statement. The change of scenery I need is within the landscape of my own mind. If I continue to plow through my routine, and the only change I make is acquiring a Prozac prescription or taking up skiing, then I will always be haunted by the knowledge that I ignored an opportunity to make more meaningful change. The truth is, I don't really have a lot to lose.

As I discussed this move with my closer friends and family, no one was surprised. My closest friends in Juneau all said, essentially, "We'll miss you, but, yeah, you should do this." My family has expressed their unconditional support, even for my funemployment (which will be entirely self-supported and health-insured, by the way.) It means a lot to me that people who know me best have shown so much support, and has sharpened my belief that this is the right thing to do.

I am anxious and excited, nervous and scared. I am still planning to travel to Fairbanks next week for the White Mountains 100. I'm trying to buffer the expense by hitching a ride with a Juneau friend who's driving north for a crazy winter climbing trip. Then I will fly back to Juneau, solely so I can spend a week training my replacement (yes, this is purely for loyalty to the Empire, because it would be a whole lot easier just to drive north once.) I am hoping to get a few last mountain trips in Juneau before I go. I will truly, deeply miss this place.

But I have to go.

Leave the city, part 2

Half my life spent on a highway
Half my life I didn’t choose
And I have seen the North Star
Shining in the freight yard
And I knew it was a hard time that he'd come through
It’s made him thankful for the blues.
— Magnolia Electric Co., "Leave the City"

The abstract notion of going home begin to take shape as I drove north. It was a strange feeling to leave Salt Lake City, the place that had always been my home, and return to a city where I had no house, no family, no real belongings besides a few boxes, stuffed in the corner of a storage unit, whose contents I had long since forgotten. I was leaving behind all the good things that happened during the summer and going home to my disappointing history and personal failures and 9.85 total miles of singletrack bike trails.

Even though I had many reasons to love Juneau, these realities weighed heavily on me as I approached White Pass and the British Columbia/Alaska border. I was 20 miles from the ferry that would take me away from the present world I had grown comfortable with and strand me on the island of my past and immediate future. I wasn’t quite ready to face it. I parked near a high alpine lake and pulled my bike down from the roof rack. The saddle was missing chunks of foam and the frame was still coated in New Mexico mud - remnants of an adventure that left me feeling disappointed and hollow, if only because it had to end, and it was finally done. I rode along the talus-strewn shoreline until I found the faint summer footprint of a snowmobile trail weaving through the dwarf spruce trees. My nerves, long numbed by the robotic routine of driving 2,500 miles, suddenly buzzed with the thrill of new discovery. I traced the path through sock-grabbing bushes, over boulder fields and around switchbacks. As the terrain grew steeper, the trail became fainter, until I could do longer distinguish it from the rocky, bush-choked terrain. Like most places I had come to know in this region, it was a dead end.

As I did when I first moved to Juneau, I had an incredibly difficult time settling in. I couldn’t hold my focus; my mind wandered. Six weeks passed before I found my own place to live. At work, I made silly mistakes and missed deadlines. I told my friends and co-workers that I had been “Great Divided,” and I was just trying to regain my composure after the culture shock of the summer. But it wasn’t the truth. The Great Divide was a tiny gap next to the one I was trying to bridge - the divide between the former me, who had a partner and plans and future goals, and the new me, who suddenly didn’t have any of that.

Faced with the prospect of reinventing myself, I turned to the places where I felt the most at home. I was burnt out on cycling and still suffered lingering, nagging pains spurred by pedaling, so I took to the mountains on foot. When the terrain was easy, I ran; more often, I climbed or scrambled or staggered. The clear air was freeing, the views spectacular. I could look out across ridges stretching beyond the horizon - places the didn’t dead end; places that, if I could muster the strength and stamina and skill, could carry me as far away as I longed to wander. They were places where I could be free without guilt or regret. They were places where I could be alone without feeling lonely.

And it’s strange, because these are the places where I started meeting new people. I was three days off the ferry when I met someone while climbing up Mount Juneau. We went on a handful of subsequent hiking dates. I met another new friend on Ben Stuart, and yet another on the Sheep Creek Trail. Another friend set me up with a skier/kayaker. I was a biker/runner. We both acknowledged we had little interest in the other’s passions, but we found common ground in the mountains. We had our first “date” on Blackerby Ridge. We climbed up to Cairn Peak in a drenching September rain and watched the clouds clear just as we settled in to a hut perched on a high ridge between two glaciers. I looked out over the stark white ice field and felt a thrill of wonder, because Juneau really was larger than I had ever imagined.

I’m not sure how or why that all started to fade. The snows of late autumn came, driving me to the limits of my novice mountain skills, driving new nostalgia for my past life, and driving a wedge between the skier and me. Conditions at work, which had already been so consuming and stressful, deteriorated even further, until the time-suck often took me away from my last remaining passions - cycling and writing. And just as quickly as Juneau had opened itself up to me, it closed again. I’d wheel my bicycle out to a dead end, and then another, and then another, until the sameness stripped away any motivation I had to keep pedaling. I continued to climb mountains, but under the armor of winter they became more prohibitive, more frightening, more exhausting, in a way that made me feel like my skills were actually getting worse rather than better. But the most frustrating part about it all was there was nowhere I could go to escape the long shadow of my past self, still lingering on the other side of the divide. Everywhere I went, her joy and discovery echoed like a sad song, reminding me of everything I’d lost, of everything I wasn’t. Without even realizing it, I’d become invisible, a ghost haunting a world that had moved on without me.

To be continued ...

Leave the city

Broke my heart to leave the city
I mean it broke what wasn’t broken in there already
Thought of all my great reasons for leaving
Now I can’t think of any
It’s true it was a hard time that I’ve come through
It’s made me thankful for the blues
— Magnolia Electric Co., "Leave the City"

I'll never forget my first few moments in Juneau, as I stepped off the ferry into a cold, black, startlingly empty summer night. It was July 2003. I wasn't an Alaska resident yet; I was a tourist, one of four friends spending an entire summer coaxing a sputtering Ford Econoline van around the 49th state. We left the van and our bikes in Haines. The ferry landed just before midnight. No one told us the terminal was 14 miles out of town. We stood in the dark with our overstuffed backpacks, somewhat stupefied by a sense of being stranded. After several minutes of indecision, we split into three groups. Geoff and Jen set up a tent in a gravel pit across the street. Chris hopped in a taxi. I started walking. By dawn, I had reached the downtown library.

We'd had big plans for Juneau. We were going to hike the trails our guidebook gushed about — Mount Juneau and Mount Roberts. We were going to see the glacier. We set up our tents at a small campground recommended by the same guidebook. Our site was literally notched into a steep hillside overflowing with mud and devil's club. The other campsites were strewn with elaborate tarp shelters, plastic bags and loose garbage. We later found out this "campground" was actually a city-sanctioned homeless camp. The rain started the afternoon after I hiked to the library. It didn't stop. All of our tents started to leak. We pulled them together, wall-to-wall, and threw our single tarp over the damp cluster. My sleeping bag got soaked. So did my pillow. For three days, we played cards and wandered around the T-shirt and trinket shops downtown, waiting for the rain to let up. It never did. We never even caught a glimpse of Mount Juneau or Mount Roberts, towering invisibly somewhere over the fog. We discovered only tour busses took people to the glacier, at 15 bucks a head, and we lost interest. When we finally boarded a ferry back to Haines, all four of us had relieved smirks on our faces, because we knew, unlike those unfortunate residents, that we had the power to leave this place. We had traveled all the way from the Top of the World Highway to Prudhoe Bay to the tip of the Homer Spit, with the Denali, Seward, Whittier and Richardson highways in between. We had it on good authority that Juneau was the worst place in all of Alaska.

I moved to Juneau in August 2006. It wasn't fully intentional. I was burnt out with my job in Homer, Alaska, and just happened to receive a cold call from the managing editor at the Juneau Empire. She offered me a job on the spot. It seemed like a sign. I'll never understand how I talked my ex-boyfriend, Geoff, into moving to Juneau with me — to this day, no matter how many pretty pictures I post on my blog, I still can't talk my friends Chris and Jen into coming back here to visit. But three years after bidding good riddance Juneau for good, I stepped off the Alaska Marine Highway ferry and set up my tent again, this time at the Mendenhall Lake Campground.

The new job was stressful. It took me three full weeks to find a place to live that would accept two cats and two people that we could afford — and even then, the single-bedroom basement apartment cost more than we had been paying for a large cabin on the ridge above Homer. I stayed 10 days at the Mendenhall Lake Campground. The August rains were thick and unrelenting that year; from Aug. 7 to Aug. 20, I never once saw the sun. During my last nights at the campground, the tarp shelter I had built over my tent — the same tent that accompanied us to Alaska in 2003 — had long since failed. My sleeping bag was soaked. My pillow was soaked. I used work clothes to mop up puddles of water on the floor. I couldn't believe I had dragged myself back to this dreary, soul-crushing place. I didn't think I'd last through September.

I've often wondered what makes a home a home. Is it the place where you were born? Where you grew up? The place where you form the most memories? Your favorite memories? The place where most of your family chooses to reside? How about friends? Is it the place where you find work? Or passion? Is home simply the place that you find yourself wandering day after day, moving through buildings and city streets and trails until they become an inherent part of your story, of you?

By the time Geoff broke up with me in April 2009 — and, yes, the split was a long time coming — I had come full circle with my feelings about Juneau. I was as hollow and homeless as I had ever been when we boarded the ferry to drive south. Geoff asked me what I planned to do when I returned. "I'm never coming back here," I said. "There's nothing for me here."

Even though I had already committed to return to the newspaper in July, for most of the summer, I believed I was done with Juneau. I reconnected with my family and trained for the Tour Divide and thought vaguely about my future — a frustrating and mostly futile exercise because all I could see were dead ends in every direction. I put it out of my mind.

During the 24-day Tour Divide, I relished in my homelessness. It was wonderful to wake up in the morning and realize that not only did I not know where I was going to sleep that night, but it didn't even matter. I had everything I needed in life strapped to a bicycle; the whole world was my home. Thoughts of a more substantial future started to creep back into my mind toward the end. I can barely recall the night I spent in the forest outside Cuba, N.M. I had been throwing up all day with what was likely food poisoning. I was dehydrated and sick and so tired I was delerious. I laid out my bivy sack in an open grassy meadow. Before I lost conciousness, I stared up at the Big Dipper. The moon, hidden behind mountains, cast a dim glow that turned the sky royal blue. I blinked with vague recognition. It looked just like Alaska's flag.

A storm moved in before the next morning, bring with it temperatures in the 40s, an overcast pall and steady, drizzling rain. I climbed up to 9,000 feet and looped around a stunning overlook of the valley below. The gray light of the rain drenched the ponderosa pines in rich greens, and wisps of fog draped over the treetops like silk scarves. It looked so much like the hillsides of Southeast Alaska in an August storm that I choked up with emotion. For the first time all summer, I felt truly homesick — not for the place where I grew up, but for Juneau.

It seemed like a sign.

... To be Continued.

I guess this is the peak

I only had one goal for this weekend, and that was to do a lot of biking. This was my weekend to "peak" my rather scattershot training for the White Mountains 100, but I figured it was time to finally buckle down and put some long hours in the saddle. I tried to get all of my chores done during the week just so I would have all day to ride and all night to relax and visit friends on Thursday and Friday. I was aiming for 12-14 hours of pedaling over two days. And since the weather was forecast to be less than stellar (read: truly miserable — heavy wind, sleet, 32-35 degrees), I had to nix any kind of snow riding in favor of tagging some dead ends, which is what we here in Juneau are referring to when we go "road biking."

On Thursday I set out in hard-driving snow. I rode about 10 miles south into the wind with my eyes practically clamped shut, then decided to loop north instead. I stopped and grabbed my goggles just in time for the snow to deteriorate into steady rain, and continued out Glacier Highway toward the ultimate dead-end prize, "The End of the Road." Somewhere during this time I became fixated on the idea of tagging all of the major dead ends in town, which I once figured would net about 150 miles of riding. I've never ridden every road in Juneau in one day, or even in two days. It started to seem like a good goal — a way to give some sense of purpose to what was, in all honesty, long hours of pretty miserable riding.

I made it to mile 28, but the construction crew flagger on Glacier Highway told me they had just blasted and said I couldn't go any farther. When I protested and pointed out the truck she just let through, she said, "No bikers." I said, "But I'm wearing a helmet." She held her ground. "We'll be clearing the road for two more hours," she said. I turned around, frustrated that I wasn't going to be able to tag even my first dead end. But as I rode past the Herbert Glacier trailhead, I realized I could burn up some time attempting to reach the glacier by pedaling my mountain bike along the snowy trail.

The trail wasn't very snowy at all; it was literally a five-mile-long sheet of glare ice, with a few hundred yards of hard-packed snow and a tiny bit of dirt. The ice was thick and wet. I have a pair of studded tires on my mountain bike — Nokians, which are the best, supposedly — but I normally don't trust them as far as I can throw them. Still, I was feeling extra bold Thursday, and I figured the worst that would happen would be skidding out and landing in a clump of devil's club stalks. The studs actually got really good traction on the bumpy ice, and because the trail was so hard, I could ride as fast as I dared. As I neared the glacier, the trail shot up a steep embankment just above the Herbert River. I was nervous about the climb and didn't have much speed going into it. Sure enough, the rear tire skidded out about halfway up the hill. I put my right foot down but quickly realized my overboot had absolutely no traction on the wet ice, and both my body and bike were starting to slide backward. I lunged at the cliff to my left, grabbing a handhold and planting my left foot on a tiny rock sticking out of the ice just as the bike slid out behind me and skidded sideways all the way down the hill. I clung to the cliff, almost entirely supported by my hands, until I finally decided there was no way I could walk or climb down the trail. So I slowly lowered myself, sat on my butt, and slid down with my feet in front of me like a child on a slide. You'd think I'd be intimidated enough to turn around at that point, but I stood at the bottom assessing the short climb and finally decided I just needed more speed. I slipped and fell on the ice just walking my bike back to the point where I wanted to start. But I got back on the bike, gunned it with as much strength as I could muster, and powered up the ice with the studs crackling like bacon on the greasy surface. And I made it. I was seriously proud of myself. It was the best part of the whole miserable training weekend.

I went to the glacier, rode the ice-coated moraine for a bit, and returned to the highway. The flagger lady was still there, blocking the way. I wasn't quite ready to give up yet, so I formed a new brilliant idea about bypassing that section of highway on the beach. I have ridden long stretches of Eagle Beach before — however, never at high tide. I splashed through several sloughs before I landed in one that was a lot deeper than I had anticipated. Suddenly, the water was over my top tube, the bike stopped dead, and I put my foot down into hip-deep water. Not only did I get all of my food and extra clothing wet, but I soaked my feet and legs as well. At these temperatures, I have learned that soaked feet can go about an hour before things become seriously uncomfortable. I had at least 90 minutes of hard pedaling just to get home if I turned around right there, which, obviously, I did. I wasn't able to tag my dead end, but it was one of the more adventurous "road rides" I have ever done. And I still rode for seven hours, about 70 miles total.

Today, I aimed south again, but conditions were beyond brutal. The wind was driving the horizontal sleet so hard that it iced up my goggles within seconds, but without goggles I was entirely blind. Sideways gusts knocked me into traffic, and I couldn't look up for more than a couple seconds at a time. Luckily, I'm good at dressing for this kind of weather, so I was never cold. I was just miserable. There was nothing to see, nothing to do; I couldn't even listen to music because I had to rely on my sense of hearing to tell me where cars were since my eyes weren't working. The wind was blowing 25 mph, gusting to 45, with a mixture of snow and sleet and serious gray-out wetness. After two hours, I was 20 miles from home, thinking, "This is really quite stupid. I don't have to be doing this." I turned around right at that random point — 7-mile Douglas Highway — and rode the crazy tailwind all the way home. As the weather deteriorated even more, I put on a T-shirt and shorts and drove to the gym to finish out my last two hours of training on the elliptical trainer.

It wasn't what I thought it would be, but I got my 12 hours for the weekend. And because of the intermittent adventures and the fact that I managed to stay warm in complete crap weather, I feel good about how it went overall. I do think I'm physically ready for the White Mountains 100 — maybe not the best biker I could be, but I'm strong enough for most of what a race like that could throw my way. Hopefully.

ITI, day four

Photo by Sean Grady, Kuskokwim River area, March 2009

The two venerable veterans of the ITI, Pete Basinger and Jeff Oatley, on Wednesday night were battling it out on the home stretch of the 350-mile race, the Kuskokwim River. Temperatures were still warm, in the mid-20s. This year will probably be remembered as the "Pineapple Express Iditarod." I'll be interested to hear if the temperature even dropped below zero degrees, anywhere on the trail, in these first four days.

There hasn't been much chatter about the trail conditions out of Nikolai, but it seems this 50-mile stretch was expected to take the leaders 8-10 hours to ride. Pete left for McGrath at 4:50 p.m. and Jeff left at 6:19 p.m. Wednesday, and in eight to 10 hours, anything can happen. Still, Jeff has a big task ahead of him if he wants to catch Pete. A 90-minute head start is hard to make up if you have a determined competitor out front. Since I leave here in about 20 minutes, and hope to wake up early in the morning for a bike ride, I probably won't find out who won the race until more than a half day after it's finished.

It's interesting that the winner is going to wrap it up in three and a half days, after all of the reports of horrific trail conditions this year. In 2008, when conditions were supposedly relatively good, winner Jay Petervary took 3 days and 14 hours to finish. The race record is 3 days, 5 hours. It makes those of us watching the race from afar wonder what kind of magic Zen-Jedi power people like Pete and Jeff have over the trail, apparently riding when even snowmobile driver Craig Medred is complaining "at what point is a trail so bad it no longer qualifies as a trail?" and most of the other competitors are walking at a 2-3 mph pace. The third-place finisher may come in nearly a full day behind Pete and Jeff. Lou Kobin, who is still on great pace to take the women's record, will probably finish after the five-day mark. What is this magic that makes Pete and Jeff so fast? Is it their bikes? Are they running when nobody is looking? Did they learn levitation? Or is the secret just to grind, grind away without ever stopping?

So many factors of the ITI make it such a fascinating event. As a spectator, it is fun to speculate on weather and trail conditions and athleticism. But as racer — which, yes, I do hope to be again someday — to me, the ITI is about determination, facing fears, and ripping at the very fabric of your soul just to see where it shreds. It is such a different existence than to be here now. Just watching the ITI — very similar to the way I did in 2007 when I became irrevocably hooked on this race — feels surprisingly hollow.

But, then again, I have been amazingly useless all week. Insomnia has been dogging me for about 10 days now, which usually causes me to sleep in really late, which then necessitates going to the gym so I can squeeze in 70-90 minutes of harder effort rather than the 2-4 hours of biking I generally like to do before work. When I can't sleep at night, I read from a big stack of library books about mountaineering and the craft of writing, which have both served to be somewhat depressing. (Seriously, at least three people die in every single mountaineering book.) I've also been going back and trying to revise my Tour Divide project, which for all practical purposes is completed in the first draft, but right now I am in a "dislike" stage with this project, and I don't feel like dealing with it. This often happens with me. Something turns my stomach for a while, but I usually go back to it, eventually.

It's not entirely pretty, but it's part of life — seems to be typical for me, a February/March slump. It does mean I have to make a hard decision about the White Mountains 100, which starts March 22. I'm going to make an effort to force myself into a long bike ride this weekend to see how I feel physically, and then I still have to decide — is it worth a $500 plane ticket? Is it worth all the logistics? Am I really ready?

I hate to turn my back on the only race I planned to do this season, but timing right now is not on my side. Hopefully, I will be more clear about it on Friday.