Friday, December 07, 2012

Half Past Done

A snapshot of the brief sliver of sunlight that appeared over the Santa Clara Valley during my bike ride this afternoon, because that's the only way I've seen sunshine for better part of the past two weeks — brief slivers. I'm enjoying it, actually — the rain, the mud, the quiet fog, the deserted trails. But it means I've been doing a lot more trail running recently. Enough that I can actually monitor my daily progress and make little tweaks to my pace in an effort to learn the not-so-gentle art of increasing speed. Yesterday, I ran around a tight corner and directly into the obstacle of a massive fallen tree. My pace fell from 7:18 to 10:07 as I climbed through the maze of branches. An unwelcome side of my personality was actually annoyed that happened. Enough was enough. Today I got back on my bike.

Quick 18-mile pedal into the hills and back, and I felt like my strength was starting to come back on this route I pedal often enough to know what strong should feel like. I think the running, and perhaps even the "fast" running, is boosting my recovery from whatever it was I'm trying to recover from. (Oh yeah. The autumn full of endurance racing.) Fast trail running is full of conflicting emotions for someone like me — exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Although I've been pushing for speed on descents, just to see what it feels like, I've gleaned much more enjoyment from my uphill grunts — going as hard as my ragged lungs will let me and feeling proud of anything close to a 10:07-minute-mile average. I have no doubt I'll always be a much more enthusiastic climber, but I am feeling (tiny) sparks of new confidence on descents these days. And I realize downhill confidence will do more to improve my abilities as a runner, and, ahem, my times. So learning to actually *run* downhill is something I want to keep working on, even if it makes me feel like I'm one step away from a horrible fall.

I've been relatively quiet this week because 1.) I haven't been able to shoot anything remotely resembling a good photograph, and 2.) In addition to chugging forward on a book project, I decided to start a new blog.

Don't worry, I'm not going to kill "Jill Outside" after seven long years of virtual life. It's just that recently I've thought about all of these subjects I want to write about, these events I want to cover, that don't fit the scope of a blog called "Jill Outside." And as I thought more about it, I realized that a lot of these subjects are things that don't get a lot of coverage, period ... or at least, not much more than superficial blurbs from the media. Since I'm so passionate about esoteric endeavors such as snow biking, mountain running, bikepacking, fastpacking, and explorations of the cold and remote regions of the world, I'd like to do more to tell these stories to the world (wide web.)

On Tuesday I launched a site called "Half Past Done." There's more about the focus of this new blog and its name on the About Page. I'm going to work on updating it regularly with news items, book reviews, commentary, profiles, and interviews. It will give me an opportunity to do more of that everyday journalism thing that I've been missing since I left the newspaper industry. And I do hope it will eventually catch on and become a successful site, but for now it's a "for fun" type of project.

So far I've added a post introducing Eric Larsen's upcoming fat-bike expedition to the South Pole (planning to follow up on this trip regularly), an awesome new bikepacking event in Scotland, an introduction to expedition racing, and a synopsis of the major bikepacking races of 2012. The site is in its early development phase, so I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions about coverage, design, readability, etc. I'm definitely not sold on the layout, but I actually do like the way the rotating window allows me to display up to five posts with photos "above the fold." But I might rework it if too many readers find it irritating. I'll be grateful for any feedback about things like that. 
Sunday, December 02, 2012

Fun mud run

Photo by Monika Arnold
I had a great day watching trail-running "superstars" and hanging out with friends at the North Face Endurance Challenge Championship. But I will say this — sitting outside all day in damp and windy weather is exhausting, and running a non-serious 10.5K during what for most runners was a grueling endurance test is a bit guilt-inducing. My leg came late in the day, long after the wet trail had been trampled into slippery mud puree — and a river ran through it. I ran hard because for the first time all day my body temperature was back to normal, and I didn't want to lose that warm feeling. Each time I passed a fifty-miler, I gave them a sincere (and hopefully not too gratingly enthusiastic) "nice work." If they responded with something like "killing it," I pointed to my bib and said, "Marathon relay. I'm just here to get in your way" ... which usually sparked a little smile.

Photo by Monika Arnold
As a late joiner I didn't find out until race day that I was part of team "Do the Bachmann," to which I immediately balked, "You mean that crazy-eyed Congresswoman Michele Bachmann?" No, as it turns out the bachmann is a friction knot that's useful for getting climbers out of binds. The four-person marathon relay started at the civilized hour of 11 a.m., so we had the opportunity to watch the first finishers of the fifty-mile race, which started at 5 a.m. After that excitement, we set up shop on a wet tarp under a tree, and let the drizzly hours roll by as we cheered for our own team — Jenn, Julie, Jill and Monika (or, as she rewrote on her bib, "Jonika.") I was slated to run last and didn't feel comfortable partaking in the pasta lunch or other after-race indulgences. So instead I sat on the wet tarp, becoming progressively more chilled and hungry. Weirdly, I paid $39.50 for that privilege, still felt stoked about it, and would likely do it again. The group was fun, the sloppy mud got into everything, and the jokes flowed freely.

When it was my turn to run, though, I was like a sled dog finally released from its kennel. I ran uphill until my lungs burned and then launched into the mud-river descent with a kind of reckless abandon I almost never indulge in, even when trail conditions are dry and manageable. Flawed thinking convinced me that it would be a spectacular finish for Team Do the Bachmann if I arrived at the arch covered in mud and blood, and thus gave myself permission to fall. And of course, because I effectively wanted to fall, I didn't fall. I lurched and skidded and once took a single-foot "ski" that lasted for two flailing seconds, but I didn't fall. When I finally returned to the flat section around mile five, whatever glycogen reserve I had left over from breakfast finally tapped out, and I sputtered through the last 1.5 miles in a bonked haze. I was still pushing to make it in under an hour, but just missed it. 1:00:45. Our team's finishing time was 5:01:32.

I stayed with Monika in San Francisco the night before the race, and we arranged a big group for dinner in the city after the race, so all told it was a 24-hour adventure with an hour of running, full and exhausting. But the best part? I think I convinced Jenn and Monika to sign up for the 50K version of the NFEC next year. There's nothing like a good mud run to coax friends into the murky world of ultrarunning. 
Friday, November 30, 2012

Have swimsuit, will run

This week has been an enjoyable one for running — empty trails, slopping through peanut butter mud, splashing into shin-deep puddles, skidding across wet wooden bridges, and feeling the cool caress of misty rain on a warm November afternoon.

This week has been a wet one in the Bay area. I'm not far enough displaced from my life in Juneau to be all that impressed by coastal California weather quite yet (60 degrees and steady misting rain for days? Southeast Alaskans call that "July.") But this particular weather system is the largest winter storm I've seen since I moved here 21 months ago, and may be the largest one here in many years. Scientists are calling this an "atmospheric river" — a conveyer belt of torrential downpours that threaten to soak regional hills and mountains with double-digit inches of rain and send flooding into the valleys. Scientific American ran an interesting article about "Megastorms" and the extent of damage such storms are capable of causing. It's a sobering reminder that even California's splashy fun storms are not to be taken lightly.

This storm also coincides with the largest trail running event of the year around here, the North Face Endurance Challenge Championship. It's a 50-mile money race for fast runners, and a high-participation event with multiple distances for the rest of us. There was a time when I considered signing up for the 50-mile or the 50K event, but decided that I prefer to run low-key trail races, of which there are abundant options around here. However, my friend Monika decided to put together a team for the marathon relay, and recruited me to run the fourth leg. Three women on our team are mainly road half marathoners, and I can't promise anyone an amazing or even adequate 10K, so this "endurance challenge" falls squarely into the "fun social outing" category for us.

Still, despite its short distance, this race feels eerily similar to UTMB — the NFEC 50-mile and 50K races were extensively rerouted due to flooding and safety concerns, so now all of the runners are going to be crammed into tight loops of fire roads in Golden Gate National Recreation area. And by the time our marathon relay starts, six hours after the 50-miler, the course likely to be a morass of mud as shoe-sucking and soul-crushing as those churned-up trails in France. Granted, running that kind of terrain for 110K is maddening, but for a simple 10K, it's likely to be more like splashy fun. Still, maybe this wet weather is just my bad luck. Maybe I should stay far away from anything deemed a "trail running championship."

I hope for the sake of California and its economy that this doesn't develop into a Megastorm, but I do think the severe wetness will make for an interesting experience for every runner involved in major races this weekend.
Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I've missed these mountain benders

Even after I nearly crumpled while inching out of bed on Sunday morning, it was difficult to accept how wrecked I felt. Despite appearances otherwise, it's actually rare that I so completely thrash my body. As an athlete, I'm conservative to a fault. I'm always holding back on the throttle for fear I'll burn out my engine, saving gas for the next mile while never quite knowing how hard I can go. That's one of the things I love about a mountain bender, when the sheer difficulty of the terrain forces me to engage those uncomfortable high gears. Timpanogos ran my quads through a cheese grater, tenderized my calves and crushed my glutes between a vice. The result was that oh-so-sore, oh-so-smug satisfaction that I gave that mountain my best effort. 

My dad, with the exception of his minor knee injury, seemed to be in a lot better shape than me on Sunday. He read my last blog post and mentioned something about "whining" so I wanted to add a postscript in case there was any confusion — my dad does not whine. He'll be sixty in January and he's strong, possibly as strong as he's ever been. He's also smart and knows when to say when, but he's open-minded and willing to try new adventure possibilities. Beat also had a spring in his step Sunday morning. I think I was the only one who was roughed up by the effort alone, proving that I do in fact need to work smarter with my training. 

Still, Sunday was our last day in Salt Lake, and we didn't want to waste it. Beat and I set our sights on Red Pine Lake, a relatively "mellow" climb up a gulch above Little Cottonwood Canyon. Yes, only eight miles with 3,000 feet of climbing in snowshoes. Easy peasy. A weak cold front moved in, and it was a bit of a blah day — gray, colder, with flurries in the mountains and a hazy inversion starting to spread over the valley. As we started up the trail, I struggled to keep up with Beat. My quads were throbbing, and I could no longer reach my high gears. Still, any day in the mountains is not a bad day. I would probably go into the mountains every day if I could. At least until my body gave out, which, at this rate, would only take a couple of weeks.

Lower Red Pine Lake. The wind picked up as we ascended out of the forest, and I had to put on my coat. The ambient temperature was a few degrees below freezing; the windchill was likely in the teens, and Beat was still in his short sleeves and no hat. I'm a bit of a cold wimp (it's true) but that shows how much heat we were generating during the climb. Hard work.

Upper Red Pine Lake. We walked along the edge, taking great care not to step into the hollow crevices between car-sized boulders. At the far edge of the lake, we watched two skiers and a snowboarder make their way down the ridge. Their position looked precarious. There were exposed rocks everywhere, and they would make one or two tiny turns before stopping for a long while, scooting laterally, then making two more tiny turns.

I can't say I envied them. A friend of mine asked why, since we obviously enjoy playing in the snow, didn't we just go skiing while we were in Utah? My quick answer is that I don't know how to ski, but that's not entirely true. Once upon a time I was a decent snowboarder, and I'd be more than willing to carry a board up a mountain. But as I've grown older, I've reached a level of acceptance about who I am and what I truly love, and gravity sports haven't fallen into that scheme. Descending a mountain is the price of going up, which is the part I enjoy, whether I'm running, hiking, snowshoeing, or yes, even mountain biking to some extent. Another benefit of growing older is that I no longer care if this makes me strange.

Sure, I can still have a good time on a snowboard, but I'd prefer to keep it to open, powdery, purely "fun" terrain. I understand that skis are more efficient than snowshoes, but I'd honestly rather be bogged down by gravity than constantly fighting against it. Fill me up with adrenaline, and I'm an anxious mess. But give me a good, endorphine-soaked slog, and I'm happy. In that regard, our weekend Wasatch mountain-bender was wonderful. 
Monday, November 26, 2012

Humbling mountain

Above 9,000 feet the powder became bottomless, a kind of fluffed sugar that scattered under our feet. I might as well have been driving a ruler into a bin of plastic balls for all the good my ax was doing, and every step only deepened the waist-deep trench that Beat and my dad had already cut. We were moving forward at a rate of about four feet per minute, which, to put into perspective, is a 22-hour mile. And still, the upward lunging and swimming was as anaerobic as I ever go, where every minute of gasping motion required another thirty seconds of rest. Beat and Dad had already expressed their skepticism about this exercise in futility, but I persisted, pointing up to the crest of the small ridge we were climbing and saying, "But we're almost there, and then we can at least see what's up there!"

We thought Mount Timpanogos would be an ideal place to stage a longer day hike on Saturday. About three weeks ago, a huge storm hit the Wasatch Front, and nothing has happened since. This single layer of snow on top of dirt means avalanche danger is about as low as it gets during the winter months, and we were hopeful that the warm temperatures since had reduced the snowpack to a manageable level. Plus, the southern approach to Timp is the most traveled trail in the Wasatch, something of a hiker highway during the summer months, and we wagered that there might even be a packed trail all the way to the upper meadow. If the conditions didn't pan out, we reasoned, we could turn around. My dad isn't stoked on suffering and we weren't looking to get into anything "epic."

The hike started out fairly benign. We took pictures of waterfalls.

We marveled at sun halos.

We worked up a sweat.

As we climbed, the trail became less defined, until we were following a set of knee-deep tracks across the steep face of the mountain. Above us was a veritable layer cake of cliff bands glazed with ice. I couldn't discern any rational path through the vertical maze, not for hikers at least. The summer switchbacks had been smothered by feet of snow, and unless the tracks we were following went all the way to the rim, we'd have to pick out the safest route on our own.

We held to the tracks until we reached a frozen waterfall between two cliff bands. The middle ledge was only a few feet wide in spots, off-camber at about a 45-degree angle, and precariously perched above a twenty-foot sheer drop that plunged into a steep gully. One ice climber who was preparing to scale the waterfall informed us that there was about an inch of loose powder on top of glare ice where he stood. We weren't even wearing crampons, and skittering across that section in dull microspikes seemed like a death wish to me. The climber pointed to a tree-lined ridge where the summer trail went through, and suggested we might find an easier route to that ridge if we descended a few hundred feet.

The downclimb became our first little mountaineering challenge, because our upward zeal had taken us up a slope steep enough that we had to descend backward using axes as anchors. I've never had a climber's mindset, and instead of hyper-focus, I often become strangely distracted on exposed terrain. It's as though my endurance-trained brain uses similar escapist tricks to numb the discomfort when I encounter scary exposure, which, although soothing during a long run, is not what I want to have happen while staring through my legs down a seemingly vertical ladder of snow and ice. Still, winter climbing techniques are something I would definitely work on if I had more opportunities, as I do love the buzz of having conquered a difficult problem once I reach the bottom (which is where I was when I took this photo. As you can see, there's still some lesser downclimbing to be done.)

The true slog began as we sought a less-steep, less-exposed route to the rim, which we weren't even sure existed. It was clear my dad had pretty much stopped having fun the minute we pulled out the axes, but he continued to be a good sport about my sometimes overzealous desire to continue up the mountain. I didn't want to torture my dad, and I honestly didn't even care if we made it to the rim. But Mount Timpanogos had suddenly presented us with this intriguing problem, this beautiful puzzle, and I was aching to see whether we could solve it. It didn't help my dad's cause when our route became increasingly more physically demanding, until we were expending vast amounts of energy for a 1,320-minute-mile pace. There are few activities I love more than a good, ridiculous slog.

There's also a sense of realness to winter travel, a truth that I don't find to the same extent in my summer adventures. The ease and predictability of dirt, the soothing prettiness of flowers and leaves, the comfort of warm temperatures — these are all things I cherish. And yet, when winter strips these things away, leaving behind a much starker, less complacent reality, I feel like I'm seeing a new face of the mountain — perhaps the true face. Mount Timpanogos is a breezy (if long) walk-up in the summer. Now that I've seen it in the winter, I know this mountain for what it is — steep, harsh, and guarded by a fortress of cliffs.

A couple of gullies we hoped would provide access to the rim turned out to have short vertical sections that required mixed rock and ice climbing. We found one potentially climbable snow ramp that would simply take us to a ledge below another set of cliff bands, where we'd have to renew the search for walkable gullies. But by then we were well aware of how loose and bottomless the gully snow was. Even though avalanche danger was minimal, I couldn't help but imagine one of us losing purchase and tumbling down on top of the others, an avalanche of bodies. We called it good and turned back without regret. I was satisfied because at least we tried without taking unnecessary risks for our respective experience levels, and my dad was satisfied that maybe he wouldn't have to stage an intervention for his daughter who apparently goes manic over waist-deep snow slogs.

"I've never worked so hard to climb Timp," my dad observed as we made our way back to the valley, which I found to be true myself even though we weren't anywhere near the peak. In all, we were moving for seven hours, "walked" about eight or nine miles, and climbed perhaps 3,500 or 4,000 vertical feet in total over our wanderings. My quads were thrashed, my calves ached, my shoulders were sore, my hands were numb and head was swimming through a beautiful fatigue more appropriate to a very long run than an eight-mile hike.

Three hundred yards from the car, we had our first mishap — my dad took his microspikes off, slipped on ice, and wrenched his knee badly. He was okay, but it added a punctuation point to our day's lesson from the mountain — sometimes the best adventures are unintentionally epic, small in scale, and huge in humbling life experience. I appreciate being reminded how tiny I am, from time to time.

Friday, November 23, 2012

White Friday

Beat and I flew to Salt Lake City to spend Thanksgiving with a large portion of my very large extended family. Between aunts, uncles, first cousins, and their children, I think there were at least forty people crammed in my uncle's rec room. This was Beat's first big Mormon family Thanksgiving. We made jokes about eating green jello mixed with carrots and overcooked turkey, but the food was actually quite good and my family members kept the uncomfortable questions to a minimum. The funniest statement came from my 82-year-old grandmother, who, upon first meeting Beat, exclaimed, "Wow, you're much cuter than I thought you'd be!"

Before the pie was even fully distributed, my sister and some cousins and aunts started gearing up for their Black Friday shopping assault. Apparently this revered holiday tradition has now trickled into Thursday, and they were all planning to hit the stores in a few hours. In my opinion, Thanksgiving is the best holiday to spend with family (less baggage and stress than Christmas), and the fact that U.S. retailers basically just gave the middle finger to Thanksgiving made me feel a bit melancholy. Although I have my own personal issues with consumer culture, I don't have a problem with Black Friday in general. I do understand how the economic machine that I depend on to prop up my lifestyle hums along. Still, as an individual, I can think of few cultural phenomenons that I'd be less likely to enjoy. Maybe a Justin Bieber concert. But no, even at one of those I could zone out and daydream. Black Friday is just torture, simple and pure. In fact, if Hell did exist, it would absolutely be a custom-designed type of place. Some people would live out their purgatories riding bikes in 40 below weather through Antarctica-like nothingness. I, on the other hand, would spend eternity trapped in the crowds at Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

Luckily, if you don't want to spend your holiday weekend in a retail mosh pit wrestling others over cheap televisions and DVDs, it's not all that hard to get away from the crowds. My dad, Beat, and I headed east into the Wasatch Mountains to climb a 10,200-foot peak called Gobblers Knob. It was, after all, the day after Thanksgiving.

Utah has been unseasonably warm all week, and the bright sun combined with radiant heat off the snow seemed to turn Mill B Basin into an oven. The terrain varied from slush to breakable crust, requiring a number of stability maneuvers that I haven't exercised in a long time. The combination of heat, rough terrain and altitude made for a tough climb. At one point after a particularly slow slog up a slope, I finally caught up to my dad and Beat and said, "I'm struggling. I don't know if it's the elevation or heat or both." It sounded ridiculous coming from a Californian who was wearing virtually the same outfit I wore at a Bay-area 50K trail run two weeks ago, given the ambient temperature was still likely in the 40s, but there it was. I was toasted. And of course it became windy and frigid on the summit ridge. Even after applying most of our extra layers, we had only time to eat a rushed lunch of Nutella sandwiches and tortilla chips on the peak before our fingers and toes were frozen.

The mountains are always joy-inducing, regardless of conditions. And even with the "heat" and weird snowpack, today's conditions on Gobbler's Knob were just about ideal. Strangely, we only saw three other people the entire time, near the trailhead. That fact is even harder for me to understand than the lines of people wrapped around Best Buy. Because if Heaven did exist, it would absolutely be customized, and mine would be a lot like this. 
Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Pain in the neck

Something about the Mount Tam 50K sparked a "must run" stoke that has yet to dissipate. When I get up in the morning, I feel excited about running. I want to hit familiar trails and try to run faster; I want to seek out new routes and run longer. It's hard to say why my run stoke is so high right now, but it may have something to do with the fact that every time I've ridden a bike in recent weeks, I felt like the reduced-power slug that I probably actually am. And yet, somehow, whenever I set out on foot, I feel comparatively strong, light, and free. So I go for a run, feel great, and then the hidden knot in my neck tightens again. After every run, without fail, I've grappled with a stiff neck for a day or two. It's baffling, and annoying, because since when did a sore neck become a running injury?

This started at the Horseshoe Lake 50K, which was a little more than a month ago. I woke up the next morning with a sharp pain down the center of my neck, and assumed I had wrenched it after I was stung by a wasp during the race. The rigid stiffness faded over the course of the week, and may have gone away completely if I didn't run that road half marathon in Moab a week later. Unknown forces during that thirteen-mile fun run took my little knot and tightened it into something more permanent.

See what I did there? Even though my neck first felt sore after a trail race, I try to blame the half marathon because I think road running is the root of all running-related injuries (not really, but I do carry disproportionate prejudices against running on flat pavement.) But after The Other Half, I was stricken again by a seriously stiff neck, and it's come back to some extent after every run since. I rode my bike for 170 miles in Frog Hollow with no ill effects (at least to my neck), and yet a six-mile run a few days later left me hobbled again. I finally decided this nagging neck soreness might not go away on its own and scheduled an appointment with a massage therapist next week. Based on his opinion, I'll decide where to go from there. In the meantime, I try to limit my running to shorter routes every other day. Which is how, despite rain and colder temperatures, I ended up on a bike ride today.

Here's another habit I've formed since I moved to California that I'm not proud of — I don't ride my bike in the rain anymore. Now, granted, it only really rains here from October to March, and even then only a few times a month. But on the days it does rain, I don't ride. If I want to exercise, I go for a run. I really enjoy running in the rain, and now view non-commute biking in the rain as wholly unnecessary and bad for bikes. It's sad to me because I used to thrive — thrive — on rain riding when I was an Alaska resident. People gave me kudos for riding through snow and subzero temperatures, but it was the rain riding that really made me tough. When I was pedaling in the driving rain with thick droplets clinging to my face and an icy stream running down my back, I wasn't training to be a fit cyclist. I was training for life, to be strong, to be resilient, to be ready for anything the world could throw at me. Now I'm a wimpy Californian with a stiff neck who has to dig through the back corner of my closet to find my cycling rain gear.

I tried to muster strength up the long road climb, but I was feeling sluggish. A steady drizzle tickled my skin, but it was still too warm for rain gear. It was a blah gray day, nothing terribly scenic, and I considered bailing from my ride early. Then I reached the ridge. A storm that had just minutes before been simply gray and drizzly suddenly broke loose. The mountain was enveloped in thick fog, driving rain, and gale-force winds steamrolling eastward from the coast. The Santa Cruz Mountains form a barrier between the Pacific Coast and the warmer Santa Clara Valley, and Montebello Ridge is a prominent spine. Weather collects up there, so even if conditions are nice and calm in the valley, it can be hurricane nasty on the ridge 2,500 feet higher. Suddenly surrounded by horrible, uncomfortable, bike-rattling weather conditions, I couldn't help it. I broke into a big smile.

There was little else to do but pull up my hood, pull on my gloves, and pedal full-tilt into the angry storm. Wind buffeted my little bike and a deeper chill seeped through my wet shirt. I had the best time descending the wet Bella Vista Trail, laughing in the face of driving rain. I relished the fading light, obscuring fog, and violent wind, because they reminded me of everything I used to love about riding bikes in weather, real weather. It will batter you and drive you to distraction in too-large doses; I learned that the hard way. But in small doses, few things are more fun than riding bikes in bad weather.

The rain left me fully soaked and had to bundle up for the long descent, but as soon as I dropped out of the storm, I was treated to a stunning sunset. This photo doesn't capture the visual at all, but there was this beautiful wash of pink light over the sky and valley, and the clouds had an eerily bright tint.

Yeah, this photo didn't grab it either. Guess that's why it's good to get out there, in the cold and driving storm, to see for myself. Either way, I was buzzing after my ride, and wonder if I can now return to my regularly scheduled "ride stoke." For reasons that don't make any sense, this evening has been relatively neck pain-free.