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Sunday, March 13, 2011
18 miles of Marin
Friday, March 11, 2011
Woodside
There's a map of this ride and elevation info at this link.
Are there any more commenters in the Bay area have some good suggestions for bike and/or running routes? MattC's route turned out fantastic, so I'm hoping to get some more good ideas. Thanks in advance!
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Me and the beast
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
The plan keeps coming up again
In April, Beat's signed up for the Santa Barbara Endurance Race. It's 100-miles of tough trail running with a reported 35,000 feet of climbing. There's a chance I'll be in good enough condition to keep up with him as a pacer for a short portion of this race. Depends if I can improve several aspects of my running in a few short weeks. I intend to work on this.
In May, several of my Banff friends are riding the Mah Dah Hey Trail as a mountain bike tour. I'd love to join them, write an article for Adventure Cyclist, and perhaps see a few Montana friends and haunts in the process. This dream is TBD, because North Dakota is a long way from California, and Beat probably can't swing the time off.
In June, Beat's signed up for the San Diego 100. Another fun road trip south. I'm hoping I can go visit my sister in Huntington Beach for at least one of these weekend ventures. I'd also love to travel to Juneau for a summer visit. This is something I've been promising friends there since last summer, but I'm unsure whether I'll be able to swing it, and a Juneau trip is very TBD. There's also the ulterior motive that I'd love a chance to swing up to Whitehorse for the 24 Hours of Light. I really want to enter at least one solo 24-hour mountain bike race this season. For reasons I'll explain next, the timing is bad for the 24HOL. However, everyone knows that 24HOL isn't a race, anyway. It's a Yukon mountain bike festival where you get to binge on biking to your heart's content. It shouldn't be a setback at all.
I can't afford any late-June setbacks, because in mid-July, I'm signed up for my first 100-mile trail run, the Tahoe Rim Trail 100. This is a big deal to me. I want to nail it. I know the Susitna 100 counts as my "first" 100-mile foot race, but I still believe Alaska snow expeditions and summer mountain trail running are different sports, requiring different skills, and I have lots of work to do to get in shape for this rocky, climby, higher-elevation run around Lake Tahoe. It's intimidating, but I'm excited for the challenge and the training.
August brings the Capitol Forest 100, a 100-mile mountain bike race in Washington. Beat and I are both planning to ride it, and unlike the WM100 there is no running option, so I guess he's going to have to buckle down and ride. Beat's already a much faster mountain biker than me, so I'm guessing by August we'll be raring to "race" each other rather than hang back together.
In September, Beat's going back to the Tor des Geants, crazy man. This means while he trudges 200 miles and 80,000 feet of climbing through the rugged and pain-inducing Italian Alps, I get to support him by drinking cappuccinos in village cafes and hiking all day in these incredible mountains! Hooray!
In November comes to big crescendo for the year, a trip to the Himalaya with Racing the Planet in Nepal. It's a stage race, TransRockies style, but on foot and much more self-supported. You carry all of your food and gear for a week-long run across 250 kilometers of incredible high country. Basically, it's a fast-pack trip, but Racing the Planet does a lot of the groundwork to design a network of trails that outsiders seldom have the opportunity to visit. Since I've never even been outside of North America (Hawaii excepted), I'm very excited for the prospect of visiting both Europe and Nepal in the same year.
In the past decade, I worked hard and lived sparsely enough to develop a fair amount of self-sufficiency, and always wanted to take time off to write, really write — not just doodle away on my blog, which is a fantastic outlet but shallow in many ways. Last April, I pursued that dream by moving to Anchorage and setting up my "writing shop," but I struggled. I didn't struggle because I didn't find instant success, which I'm not even seeking — yet. No, I struggled because I lacked self-discipline. I rode my bike all day. I started working on my writing projects, only to burn out after a couple hours and recruit a friend for a four-day trip to Denali instead. When given perfect freedom, I can be a fantastically lazy person (in my own activity-motivated way.) I got scared of nothingness, and instead sought out a structured work environment to reign myself in. I applied for a job. I moved to Montana. I don't regret it, but often I wonder if I really gave myself a chance.
I love writing. Observing life and giving a voice to my experiences is who I am. I sincerely believe that if I were forced to give up bicycling, hiking, running, even going into the wilderness, that I could probably adapt, and go on living a rich and full life all the same. But if I somehow couldn't share anymore, couldn't write, the sun probably would cease to rise. I would no longer be me. Simple and plain.
So this is my long way of saying that I'm going to go back to pursuing the dream I left behind in Anchorage. I have a few ideas, a few plans. I am going to finish my Tour Divide book. Last December, editor Diana Miller gave my first draft a thorough and thoughtful edit that I can really spend some time with, to develop that story in the best way I can. And it really is a worthwhile story, worth sharing, that I need to get out in the world. I've been dragging my feet on it for more than a year, and at this rate it will rot in a drawer, which I really don't want to happen. I have some new "book" ideas that I want to develop, see where they go. I have a few freelance relationships that I developed last spring that I can pursue, and I have several article, blog and column opportunities with Adventure Cyclist that remain. I also hope to develop what would be the more lucrative career path — layout and design, for both hard-copy materials and e-publications. In the newspaper biz, this is where I shined — as a fast-working (and award-winning) graphic designer. I feel that I have a lot to offer small businesses, nonprofits, and outdoor-related companies in this regard, because I can develop content as well. Maybe I can even land some contract work for special projects at local newspapers (do they have those in big-city California?) That would be a dream.
It also could be a massive failure, but I doubt I will ever regret trying. I'm lucky to still have few obligations, a fair amount of self-sufficiency for the time being, support from Beat, and of course Google's awesome health insurance plan. As long as I can avoid the urge to ride my mountain bike all day, I feel I have a productive year in front of me.
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
The second day
OK, tomorrow I will write a post about my upcoming plans. Tonight, I am just going to enjoy the lingering bliss from this awesome day.
Monday, March 07, 2011
I pack up my belongings and I head for the coast
To a whole new town with a whole new way
Went to the porch to have a thought
Got to the door and again, I couldn't stop
You don't know where and you don't know when
But you still got your words and you got your friends
Walk along to another day
Work a little harder, work another way."
- "The World at Large" by Modest Mouse
Last June, when I was anticipating a move from Anchorage to Missoula, I went for a 140-mile bike ride in an effort to make peace with life as a drifter. Seeking and embracing change is a big part of who I am. I move, I discover, I grow, and I move on. Anchorage held an unbelievable amount of promise, but the allure of change prompted me to take a chance on Montana. I left Alaska believing maybe I would find "my place," the place that would entice me to finally settle.
There are several reasons Missoula didn't quite work out; it wasn't just that I found a boy and dismantled my whole life for him. Although the boy, of course, was the overwhelming motivator for my recent move, he wasn't the only reason. It was starting to become apparent that I didn't quite fit in in Missoula. I regret that I had to leave a few truly great friends behind, not to mention some gorgeous terrain that I barely skimmed the surface of, but I knew that sooner or later I would need to choose between the few strands of potential woven into Missoula and the incredible potential of further developing my relationship with Beat. He couldn't move to Missoula for me. Even if I were completely dedicated to my life there, there were still no options for him. The ongoing joke in Missoula is: "How many Missoulians does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Only one, but twelve will apply for the job, ten will be electricians and eight will have doctorate degrees."
I of course have no idea what the future will bring, but I sincerely believe I won't ever regret this move. I certainly don't regret moving to Alaska for Geoff, even if, in the end, neither Geoff nor Alaska became a permanent part of my life. It was still the best thing that ever happened to me. I strongly believe this is the right next step, the next best thing to happen to me.
This move probably seems to have come abruptly, but it has been a longer time coming than this, as most of my friends and family members suspected. The window opened after Susitna. There was no longer a need to stay so I packed up my stuff. It didn't take long — one of the benefits of moving around so much is you never have time to accumulate a lot of excess stuff. I can still fit most of my life in my 1996 Geo Prism, although my life is heavily weighted in a single direction these days. Inside my car this time were two people (Beat was out for the weekend anyway and gave up his return ticket to help me drive down), one annoyed but increasingly accepting cat, and five — yes five — bicycles. Also some clothing, outdoor gear, a few dishes, and miscellaneous items. All the important stuff was in there, or stacked on the roof, Beverly Hillbilly style (I even kept the bike box for Beat's Fatback. It did not survive the Biblical rains of the Sierras.)
We left Montana on Saturday afternoon, bound for Salt Lake City. (My parents took this recent move surprisingly well. I think my many years of drifting has worn down their defenses.)
I can't say I felt a whole lot of emotion about leaving Montana. I really didn't spend enough time here to get attached, although I imagine I'll be back as frequently as I can afford, to visit my friends, ride some epic logging road loops with Bill in the Bitterroot, hike some goat trails in Glacier National Park with Danni and Dave, and finally climb all three of the Lima Peaks.
The drive of course was grueling. Turns out a 15-year-old car with 191,000 miles loaded to the brim with gear — and with wheels and a box stacked like a sail on the roof — can't move faster than 70 mph, and that's only on steep downhills, with a tailwind. Geo was at the limit of his endurance, but he motored along, just like he always has, ever since he was a young buck of 38,000 miles and I loaded him to the brim with camping gear and hit the road for my inaugural drive across America, back in 2001.
We blazed through many of my old stomping grounds — Idaho Falls (2004-2005), Sandy, (1983 to 1998) Salt Lake City (1998 to 2003), and Tooele (2003-2004 ... the place where my cat Cady was born.) Then we kept on going west. I told Beat all of my stories of my experiences in the Oquirrh Mountains, the Stansbury Mountains, Skull Valley, the Bonneville Salt Flats, Wendover, Elko, and the Battle Mountain rest stop where my family was stranded for half a day after the car transmission died during a vacation to San Francisco in 1989.
The farther west we traveled, the fewer experiences I had to share, until we crested Donner Pass in a wet snowstorm, I told Beat what I knew about the history of the place, and held my breath for the newness and strangeness of California.
Today I started unpacking, but quickly got more wrapped up in an urgent need to go for a long bike ride. I put my fixie together and headed over to the Google campus to have lunch with Beat, then continued grinding into the wind along the gravel trails that line the San Francisco Bay. It was a strange sort of place, both muddy and dry, and guarded by a fortress of towering electric lines. I watched a chorus of shorebirds rip through the air, breathed the salty air with pungent hints from the Palo Alto landfill, and soaked in a lot of sunshine. The return tailwind was so strong that the fixie almost ripped my legs off. In a space that holds millions of people, I saw very few. I allowed myself to feel some sadness for the end of winter, the end of my time in Montana. And yet, I only saw positive potential on the path in front of me.
I'll write more tomorrow about my plan for California, and what Beat and I have planned for the upcoming year. For now, I will say that, yes, this is going to be quite different. I rode around all day in a cotton T-shirt and a single pair of socks, passing people on the bike path who were wearing down coats (in other words, I'm sweltering in the heat and it's not even hot.) Yes, for the foreseeable future, the snowy photos in my blog will have to come from visits away from home, and the regular photos will probably appear more, well, regular. Maybe this blog will be less interesting. And you're certainly under no obligation to keep reading. But somehow, I doubt it. I am only excited about the future and all of the adventures in front of me. California isn't the end of the road. Not by a long shot.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
The journey reveals more along the way
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