Climb mix

So the other day, Fat Cyclist challenged his readers to come up with a list of seven perfect songs to listen to while grinding the pedals up a killer hill. I didn't give such a list much thought until today, while turning the elliptical pedals at the gym and listening to the new Modest Mouse album ... yeah, again. So there I was, cycling through my boring routine and staring off into space when I noticed my field of vision begin to narrow. I snapped out of la-la land and realized that not only was my heart racing, but I was turning some crazy RPMs on the digital display. I didn't even make a conscious choice to go so hard. What made me do it? "Florida."

Exercise music is completely personal, of course, based on cadence preferences and general taste, among other things. But in my opinion, "Florida" is the most perfect hill-climbing song ever recorded. It has everything I need in a climbing song - a catchy beat punctuated by bursts of energy, an ethereal enough melody to mimic complacency whilst pushing through the pain tunnel, and lyrics that won't challenge you to think too hard while you're in there.

This got me to thinking about taking up Fatty's challenge to make a hill-climbing playlist. So these are my seven songs. They are not my seven all-time songs, really, just the ones I'd put on my iPod right now, today. This list would probably be different tomorrow. I'm not sure how well these links will work. Not all of the songs had handy YouTube videos, including "Florida."

A lot of you have probably already posted your own seven-song list at Fatty's place. But feel free to send it my way. My iPod is dying for some diversity.

"Florida" by Modest Mouse - "I stood on my heart supports thinkin', 'Oh my God, I'll probably have to carry this whole load.'"

"Fire It Up" by Modest Mouse - "When we finally turn it over; Make a beeline towards the border; Have a drink, you've had enough."

"The Bleeding Heart Show" by The New Pornographers - "Watch 'em run, although it's the minimum, heroic."

"Wolf Like Me" by TV on the Radio - "We could jet in a stolen car; but I bet we wouldn't get too far; before the transformation takes; and bloodlust tanks; and crave gets slaked."

"What Never Dies" by Sense Field - "Some don't want to see you win; Some don't want to see you fly; Some don't want to see you live; They just want to see you."

"Looking at the World From the Bottom of a Well" by Mike Doughty - "Oh all the days; That I have run; I sought to lose that cloud that’s blacking out the sun; My train will come; Some one day soon; And when it comes I’ll ride it bound from night to noon."

"Miami 2017" by Billy Joel - Hey ... don't judge me.

Gear displacement

I've been on a bike-gear acquiring tear lately. It's hard to say why. Logically, I know I'm only compensating for my current cycling inabilities. And psychologically, it hurts to watch this stuff linger unused in its original packaging. But emotionally, it feels so good to receive shiny little bike pieces in the mail and dream of a parallel universe where they're getting all that shine scuffed off on mud-soaked trails (or roads).

My recent purchases include a seatpost clamp, several water bottles, tire levers, tire pump, bike shoes and clipless pedals. This is my first clipless system ever. I have come out strongly against such a system in the past. I do not like the idea of being attached to my bike. But, then again, I do not like the idea of being detached from my bike, either. Clipless may aid an eventual transition back to cycling. And they may help better align my pedal stroke. So I placed an order for Look pedals and some skinny, ugly roadie shoes. When they came in the mail, I was so excited that I wore them around the house for an hour.

Also arrived recently in the mail were a couple of pairs of Ergon grips. Mr. Ergon himself sent them to me. Honestly, I was more excited about the idea of Jeff Kerkove offering to send me something than I was about the gear itself, but they do seem pretty cool. My hands regularly lose circulation and go "dead" when I ride for long stretches of time, so I'm excited to try them out. Someday.

Then, today I was struck with - in several separate instances - urgent desires to go out and buy a new seat, a new bike rack, and a short-sleeve jersey. I don't currently own even one short sleeve jersey. I need one, I reasoned, for my trip to Utah. Ha! That trip's in just over two weeks. What are the chances I'm even going to be bipedally mobile by then, let alone be up for a long enough ride to necessitate sweat-wicking technology? I'm better off spending my spare cash this week on a hair cut and a 40-ounce bottle of SPF 45, which is something I really will need for a week in Utah (but don't think merchants actually stock in Juneau.)

Even though Geoff's birthday was the other day and I didn't have any other ideas for a present, I have purposely been avoiding the local bike shop. I'm concerned I'll walk out with the latest carbon-fiber bank-account-drainer. I'm lucky that I live in a small enough town that I couldn't find a Pugsley if I wanted to. But why must eBay have such a convenient payment system? And why is Nashbar having so many great spring sales? Wait a minute ... free shipping? Must ... close ... Web ... browser. Now.

Breakup

Signs of spring everywhere lately. Not new growth, per say; not sun, either. Just melt and light. Melt releases a world long smothered by winter. Streams flow free again. The tips of small willow trees peak out from the mushy snowpack. I go snowshoeing on an old, familiar trail and it becomes new again.

Early in my walk, I found a green plastic Easter egg. It had a fun-sized Hershey bar inside. It was all alone in the snow, in an odd enough place that it must have been dropped, not hidden. This is where I found it, near a half-frozen waterfall. And I was in a strange enough mood that I carried it with me on my hike and made it the subject of photographs.

My outdoor activities as of late, as sparse as they've been, have been fairly uninspiring. I'm reading nonfiction books about long-distance bicycle touring again, which, if my past habits are any indication, is a fairly clear sign that I'm slipping into a rut. I've been envious of Geoff and his training. I try not to let that sentiment show when he describes his latest adventures to me, but sometimes I find myself tempted to turn the conversation back to baseball.

At least I still have snowshoeing, but likely only a couple more weeks worth. Rain showers strip the snowpack away like acid. April is the beginning of the dry season in Juneau, but that's definitely relative. Dry season here would be monsoon season in Utah. At least we're not having snowstorm tornadoes like the rest of the country.

I also have Folk Fest to drain me of all of my energy, and a 3 a.m. night does that well. Last night at the Alaska Hotel, I ran into a friend from Anchorage plays fiddle in an old-timey band. Her real life is filled with legislative lobbying and bar exams and "good, old-fashioned Asian discipline." But fiddling is her passion. "Folk Fest changed my life!" she screamed with startling intensity that could have been the Alaskan Smoked Porter speaking, but I think any self-restraint would have only stripped away the truth. I envied her too, because she had lifelong love where I only had a flirtatious night out.

Today, while burning my way through 90 cardio minutes at the gym with a Runner's World magazine, I read twice an article about marathoner John Kelley. In his story arc, it seems he never experienced a life half lived. He just started out strong and kept going. He's still going.

"The things we do should consume us," Kelley told the reporter. "If they don't, our lives won't have any meaning."

Folk Fest

Yet another setback on the road to recovery. Maybe. The truth is, I've been functioning in this semi-injured state long enough that I don't really remember what normal is supposed to feel like. But I do try to be careful. These days, with summer approaching ever faster, I try to be so, so careful.

Today I had some grocery shopping and other mind-numbing errands to do. Before that, I decided to go for a walk on the beach. You know, slow walk on a flat gravel beach, skimming the surf and picking up seashells like toddlers and little old ladies can do. But the tide was coming up and on my way back, I had to climb up into the rocks to get through. I tentatively chose every step, taking advantage of every handhold and generally following the mantra of three-point contact. However, I was probably just shy of that number when I set my foot down on a slanted boulder and lost contact immediately. I plummeted down the slimy surface in a blinding flash of white pain. It felt like my knee had finally ripped clean from my leg like it's been hinting at all this time. I lay crumpled on the rocks for several seconds, unsure of how to make my next move. If I got up to walk and learned I couldn't, I knew I'd be devastated. And not only that, I'd be stranded alone on a beach with the tide coming up and not a soul knew I was out there. But if I got up and learned I could still walk, I'd have a short hike and a long afternoon full of shame and regret ahead of me. Of all the fun things I could have done to unravel any progress I've made, a toddler walk on the beach would be about my last choice.

After the white streaks stopped shooting across my field of vision and my knee-jerk panic reaction subsided, I accepted the reality that I was OK. I stood up and oozed my way off the rocks at a literal rate of about 100 yards an hour. When I made it back to the safety of smooth gravel, my gait and speed returned fairly quickly back to normal. It seems that all I really did was bend my knee too far when I fell forward, and that pain I felt was just the "10" version of the normal pain I feel in other knee-bending tasks, such as pedaling a bicycle. No new damage, right? Just a little warning from the tender tissue. That's my story. I'm sticking to it.

Well. It seems I've gone off rambling about my knee again. I really intended this post to be about Folk Fest, which is an annual old-timey-and-other-acoustic-music event created to fill out a week of that dull time between winter skiing and summer fishing. Folk Fest is huge here in Juneau. I really had no idea. Half the town packs the city auditorium so tight that there's no room to dance, which is probably a good thing in my case, and countless musicians spill out in the streets, the bars, the motels - anywhere - to start their own renegade sets. We went tonight to see the headliner, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, because we heard they were the real deal. And they were. Alaskans really love their old-timey music, which always struck me as amusing because of our distance - both culturally and geographically - to rural Appalachia. But I am starting to understand the draw. This music will grab you and fling you around in leg-kicking frenzy and spit you out in an idealized world where nothing happened after 1929. I'm not going to pretend I know anything about the culture of old-timey. But I do know that it's a fun escape when it comes through town.

Also, since I'm on the subject of rambling, I wanted to say hello to all of the new people from all over the world who dropped by Thursday (thanks to Blogger for the link love.) More than 5,000. Wow. You may have even read a few posts and are probably wondering why someone would devote an entire blog to a knee injury. But there could be worse blog themes, don't you think? I mean, what's the deal with those people who pretend to have an informative regional blog and then just spend the whole time talking about their hobbies? Pathetic, really, when you think about it.

Hooked

Do you ever wonder how seemingly normal, otherwise-well-rounded people find their way into endurance sports? Of course there will always be genetic anomalies out there who can burn endless miles without even trying. But where does the rest of the field come from? How does a person look at something like a 24-hour bicycle race - the stomach-turning loops, the joint-throttling repetition, the creeping night fatigue and the 20-hours-per-week training it takes to get there - how do they look at something like that and say, “hey, that might be something I’d be good at”? Or even scarier - “hey, that might be fun.”

I’ve ask myself this question before. I feel like I can trace it all back to a single moonlit morning, when my friends Monika, Curt and I decided we wanted to see what the top of Mount Timpanogos looked like at sunrise.

The Timpanogos trail is in itself a fairly mellow hike. At 18 miles, it’s long but mellow. Of course there’s a fair amount of elevation gain, but since Boy Scouts and BYU students make up the bulk the trail’s regulars, it can’t exactly be listed under Xtreme. But throw in three recent college grads, a long night of partying, a sleepless 2 a.m. launch time, two frozen water bottles, six Jolly Ranchers and a single can of Red Bull, and you suddenly have something that skirts the gaping chasm of “Epic.”

I remember struggling up the ridge line at mile 7, about 5 a.m., when our silent suffering started to slip into audible abuse. After several long minutes of groans and grumbles and my comments about the brilliance of freezing water for a hike in the 35-degree chill of a September morning at 10,000 feet, we all just stopped. Cut to silence. And looked at each other. I could see in my friends’ eyes the dead-end fatigue I felt in myself. It was suggested that we turn around. I glanced up trail. The ridge was no more than a half mile away - and beyond that I imagined the wind-blasted ridge line, the strenuous scramble to the peak, and the inevitable sunrise over the Heber Valley.

And so I said, "Well, the hard part's over now. It's all mental from here." Somehow, I talked myself into believing that. And Monika and Curt, as though too tired to argue, nodded. So we marched.

At the peak, Monika - the only one smart enough to bring any sort of breakfast - shared her strange little soft cheese wedges with us before she and Curt passed out on their own respective rock ledges. I sat beside a weather tower and watched wisps of pink clouds burn away as the Wasatch Range stretched deeper into the morning. In the new clarity of daylight, I had a bewildering view of what seemed to be thousands of peaks. I wanted to climb them all. And even stranger, I thought as desperately lapped at wet ice through the narrow neck of my water bottle, is that I wanted to start that second, from that peak. I wanted to walk to the next peak, and then the next. As exhausted as I knew I was, I craved some sort of journey into the eternity I could suddenly see.

I think that's when I knew.

What's your story?

The time it takes to heal

Traveling at godspeed
over the hills and trails
I have refused my call
pushin' my lazy cells
into the blue flame
I want to crash here right now
the hourglass spills its sand
if only to punish you

for listenin' too long
to one song

“Sing Me Spanish Techno,” The New Pornographers

So I did a couple of things today that bummed me out. The first was visiting my physical therapist in the morning, still crusty-eyed from another rough night of sleep and carrying the shame of relapse. Instead of getting the stern lecture I deserved, I got some wince-inducing stretches that didn’t even touch my knees. For some reason, the PT has started to direct almost all of her focus on my IT band, which I don’t even understand. All I do know is I now have a new burning sensation - in my upper leg - and no real source of hope. And, if nothing else, a physical therapist should offer hope, don’t you think?

So after that I hobbled over to the gym and renewed my membership. I had a membership when I first moved to Juneau, back when I was a real baby about all the rain. But once I adapted to the whims of seafaring life, I downgraded my membership to punch passes and then barely used them. Life was good then. I got out a lot, and I fell way behind on my celebrity gossip. But now that I’ve sworn off cycling, my options are limited. It’s really best to keep my swimming down to two days a week ... at least until I chop off “that rattrap,” which is what Geoff calls my hair now. And I do need to do more weight training in order to build strength where atrophy reigns. So it’s back to hamster wheels and People magazine for me.

In the meantime, I continue to search for reasons. Back when life was good and I had no idea which body part Britney Spears shaved that week, Geoff and I actually had a couple of discussions about my one-note bicycle training. It think it was after we came home from some short cross-country ski outing. I started complaining about the various areas where I was more sore than I should be (in my ongoing effort to prove that skiing isn’t actually fun). “Well no wonder,” Geoff said. “It’s not like you ever use your feet.”

And it’s true. When I wasn’t bicycling, which was really rare, I was skiing, running on the elliptical machine or lifting weights. In fact, after snow first covered the mountains and I stopped hiking, I didn't participate in a single full-impact activity. I had been shielded from gravity since October. No wonder my knee buckled under the first sign of stress.

Now that I’m several months wiser, I’d swear my allegiance to cross training in a millisecond if I thought it could help. I realize, though, that I don’t really have a choice.

FanGirl

So, as it turns out, venturing out for a mild 18-mile bike ride is overdoing it in my case. The effect is not unlike rewinding several weeks. I knew I had gone wrong when I woke up to sharp pains Saturday night and realized I couldn't bend my leg. Now my co-workers are commenting on my limping again. I'm aware that I've hit rock bottom .. well ... at least several times during the past eight weeks. But this has to be it. The very bottom. I am officially turning my back on cycling until I get this thing under control. The decision makes me feel at once relieved and devastated.

As my own prospects of a summer season becoming increasingly dim, I find myself drawn in to the exploits of the endurance mountain biking counterculture. I've never really been able to count myself as a sports fan - in fact, the prospect of sitting through an entire game of any sport is about as appealing to me as watching laundry dry. But ever since the Iditarod Invitational, any tidbit I can find about gonzo races and the grimy athletes who compete in them is like candy to me. The more spartan and obscure, the better. Not doing any cycling of my own only fuels my fanaticism. Gwadzilla recently made an interesting observation about the state of specatorship. When a person says they "like" baseball or "like" music, it usually means they like others' baseball feats, others' music. Now, when I say I "like" cycling, I'm often thinking about events in the coming weeks that I'm not even connected to, but yet I look forward to them with a strange kind of zeal:

Arizona Trail 300, April 13: This race is still a pretty small affair, and I don't know much about it. But of all the mountain bike races out there, I'm most interested in ones that follow a multi-day, self-supported format.

Trans Iowa, April 28-29: I get a big kick out the fact that what seems to be the most popular event in grassroots distance mountain-bike racing happens to cross the state of Iowa. Now I've only glanced Iowa - barely - on the Interstate, so I'm in no position to judge. But ... Iowa? That anomaly alone makes this race very intriguing.

Kokopelli Trail Race, May 19: As far as I understand it, this race one of Mike Curiak's inventions. He's since passed the torch to others, which is just as well in these no-fee, no-support, no-podium events. This is one of the shortest of the gonzo events. At "only" 142 miles, it seems like it would be a good introduction into self-supported endurance racing.

Grand Loop Race, June 1: Another multi-day race. This one sounds intense. Not only is it 360 miles with about 48,000 feet of climbing, but racers attempt it in the stifling heat of the desert in June. It bills itself as one of the last, true, pure wilderness events, and I buy that assessment. Dave Harris is considering attacking this route solo, sometime in May, away from the already-small crowds and oh-so-subtle hype of the race itself. I like this kind of thinking, because it reaffirms my belief that the largest and most daunting events transcend competition into something else entirely.

Great Divide Race, June 15: This has to be the grand-daddy of all North American mountain bike races, although with more experience, I might be inclined to argue that the Ultrasport 1,100-mile race to Nome is even harder. Either way, GDR is the real deal. The amazing part is, there are 17 racers who are actually planning on attempting it. Some familiar names on the roster, too. The smart money's probably on Pete Basinger to be the first to Mexico, although Jay Petervay, Carl Hutchings and others I haven't even heard of will definitely put the hammer down. This should be a race to remember. I'm personally really looking forward to watching Dave Nice tackle the trail on a fixie of all things. These people are crazy! That's what makes these events so fun to watch.

There's probably a whole slew of other races that are still outside my radar, but if I stay off my own bike much longer, I'm sure I'll find them soon enough.