Video blog

Since I discovered the motion picture button on my camera, I have become more interested in doing a little video blogging. Not a whole lot - because most home movie clips usually weave between grating and boring and mine are no different. I shot some footage up at Eaglecrest yesterday. I wasn't going to post it. Mostly because video always seems to take something I find scary and exhilarating - such as shimmying through fresh, heavy powder at a barely controlled 10 mph - and makes it look like a flatly lit slog down a ski slope. Plus, I shot an introduction, forgetting that my face was covered in mud from the sloppy climb and my bike helmet was pushed way back because that's what it takes to strap a camera to my forehead. I realized that I've never appeared "live" on my own blog before. This first shot doesn't make for a very flattering portrait. But then I remembered ... I've been doing this blog exhibitionist thing for more than two years. Since when have I worried about flattering or boring? So I'm posting my video blog No. 3. I attached a good song to it to make it more entertaining: "On the Radio" by Regina Spektor.

"Trickster"

April showers

Date: April 8
Mileage: 30.2
April mileage: 229
Temperature: 35

I love spring snow. I've always loved spring snow. But I even love it here in Alaska, where spring snow is not so out of the ordinary.

A thin white blanket settled on Juneau overnight, a temporary shield from the dull browns and wet yellows that dominate the landscape in April. So even though I had scrubbed Pugsley shiny on Sunday, thinking we would not be going out again for quite a while, I couldn't help but drag him up to Eaglecrest today.

Streaks of sunlight danced across the unplowed road, until the drifting clouds finally closed together. In a swirl of flurries I pushed up the slope, right on the trail of a pair of tele-skiers. When I caught up to them, they got a few good laughs. (I didn't point out that I, a post-holing hiker pushing a 35-pound bicycle, had caught up to them.) I did concede that I looked ridiculous, coated head-to-toe in slush and grit as I was, walking a bicycle up a ski slope in April.

"Can you control that thing downhill?" one skier asked me.

"When there's six inches of new snow, not so much," I said. "But the base seems good so it's worth a try."

I turned off at a green run called "Trickster" and kicked off. I don't remember much about the ride down because I was terrified, hearing only the squeal of my wet brakes and seeing only blasts of white, wet powder kick up from my wheels. Within minutes I was back at the road. The snowpack was quickly disintegrating to slush; my 4-inch tires blasted me with so much water I could barely keep my eyes open. There was little I could do but clench my fingers and toes in wet gloves and wet shoes and embrace the full-body pain that is a 20-degree windchill (downhill at 40 mph in 35-degree air) through soaked clothes on soaked skin. I hate it when rides come to this and I should, really should know better by now. I know enough to know that once the chill starts, I only become colder and colder and colder.

I also know enough to know that it's not the end of the world. Biking hard never seems to warm me up to optimal temperature (the faster I go, the harder the windchills cut through), but it does keep the hypothermia at its lowest level. The worst part about a too-cold, wet ride is coming inside once I'm done. I never have the time to warm myself slowly, so I have to go with the rip-the-bandaid-off route: A hot shower. It's the kind of pain that's hard to describe, but easily forgotten - memory is usually merciful when it comes to that level of trauma. If I could realistically remember the way those hot showers feel, I would probably never get on a bicycle again, at least when the temperature was below 60. Descriptions that run through my mind during those intense moments generally follow the lines of "A Million White Hot Needles of Death." That is, when I'm not trying to rip my hair out as a way to feel less pain.

So I took a bad shower and vowed, again, to always, always overdress when I'm cycling in wet conditions. Two more inches of snow fell while I was at work. The sun broke out again as I was returning from my dinner break. Filtered yellow light sparkled on the snow, which coated every tree, every limb, every tiny branch. Snow gave the land a color and depth that I had forgotten in the featureless wash of early spring. It looked so soft and billowy that I wanted to dive right in, and roll around.

It hurt to go inside again, but not in the same way.

Inbetween times

Date: April 6 and 7
Mileage: 12 and 29.5
April mileage: 188.8
Temperature: 41 and 39

I yelped as wet snow soaked through my socks, filling the empty space where I stood in a snowdrift, thigh deep and sinking. It was a struggle to even lift my leg in this slush, so close to liquidation that it had become a solid, like wet cornstarch or quicksand. A deceptive solid. Not solid enough to hold me, just solid enough to trap my foot - soon to be, I feared, trench foot.

I swung around to search for the trail. I had abandoned my bike a mile back to press on as a hike. Now I was swimming. It was time to swim home. Time to give up on this whole snow hiking/biking thing. Time to leave the mountains alone until their permanent surface re-emerged from this rotting seasonal veneer. Time to think about "summerizing" the Pugsley to prepare him for the season of salt water and sand. Time to give up on winter.

So we wait now, for something. Summer, I guess. I know summer only in vague terms. It begins the day the Mount Juneau trail finally clears; the day the first black bear makes a raid on the Rainbow Foods dumpster; the day I can finally wear bike shorts. Geoff, on the other hand, knows exactly when summer begins. He has the date marked on the calendar. April 22, 6 p.m. The day the last spring ferry heads south out of Juneau.

Then I will be alone all summer long, and it's starting to sink in. I remember the last time I lived alone in Juneau, watching 2 a.m. Cartoon Network in a damp hotel room and eating my best meals at the Safeway deli. I like to think I can keep my own bad habits in check. But then I think about the Subway guy who saw me so many times he had my *exact* sandwich memorized and even asked me out, and remember there are fates worse than loneliness.

Geoff asks me every day why I don't just leave with him. "Because I have plans," I say. "Because I have cats," I say. "Because I have health insurance," I say. "Because I have a job," I say.

"Always with the jobs," he says.

"I need to feel like I have a grasp on the future," I say.

"And that too," he says.

When I'm at work is when I feel most content about my decision to stay. It's earlier, when Geoff is elsewhere and my time is only mine, that I wonder why it's so right to aspire to life in front of a computer screen and so wrong to aspire to life on a bike ... even with cats to support.

But then I ride my bike and feel happy. And I go to work and feel content. And the snow will climb higher up the mountains. It will finally disappear. And then it will return. Not every moment inbetween has to be an adventure. There will be time for that later. Always later.

Training vicariously

Date: April 4 and 5
Mileage: 46.2 and 41
April mileage: 147.3
Temperature: 42 and 45

Just about every time I go out riding these days, I imagine what life will be like for Geoff during the Great Divide Race. Sometimes I feel jealous. But most of the time, I just feel a pained, pre-emptive sort of empathy.

I think a lot of casual fans imagine the challenge of the Great Divide Race is its length. And it is long - 2,500 miles long. But I think the most important route statistic, the one that is overlooked all too often, is the sheer amount of climbing - more than 200,000 feet along the way. And if you have a goal to ride this route in say, 24 days, you are going to be spending a lot of time in your granny gear slumped over your handlebars. 100 miles per day on a mountain bike? That sounds tough. 10,000 feet of climbing per day? That sounds like something that already has been outlawed in most developed nations.

So I think about the sheer audacity of the Great Divide Race and smirk when I set out on a training day like Friday - hill intervals. My goal was not to ride intervals up the hill but to ride the entire hill as an interval, then bomb down it, then up again. Since the "hill" is five miles long and gains about 1,200 feet, I didn't expect to just sprint the whole way up it. But my first run felt strong; I kept a good average up the steep stretches and didn't let up on the more gradual portions. I was a spin master, conqueror of hills.

I swallowed a lot of goo and gravel running 40 mph downhill without a front fender over my fat mountain bike tires, but I made the U-turn feeling awesome and thinking "this hill thing isn't so hard after all." Then, about halfway up the second climb, I started to unravel. I began to feel ill from all the acid gushing through my legs. I started hallucinating big sparkly snowflakes near the top, though I'm not sure it was even raining. I made the run back down and returned for a third and final climb, locked into the small ring before the end of the first mile, my quads transformed into tenderized meat mash by the top. I felt cooked, toasted ... which is good. It's what I was going for. But when I looked at my GPS for the day's totals, it told me I had climbed 4,183 feet. And all I could think about was multiplying that by 50.

Today Geoff logged his weekly "tempo run" by racing a 10K out in the Valley. He briefly urged me to sign up for the race and I briefly considered it. After all, I'm in ideal shape to go out and ride eight-hour days whenever I want - why not go out and pound out some easy nine-minute miles? But then I thought more about pounding my legs on pavement for six miles, and the fact that I haven't done any running, at all, since like ... well, let's just say I don't run much. I did a 45-minute 8K about two years ago and it completely wrecked me. All that impact left me sore and limping for two days. Not to mention what running does to my knees. It made me think about something I read in an article about the CrossFit trend. It made the point that in the modern world, people become so specialized in their fitness that nearly everyone, even the most "in shape" among us, is in actuality "unfit." All of the evolutionary skills our bodies are set up to master become lost as we cultivate useless pastimes and untested muscles. I need little machines to work my body? I can't run a 10K to save my life? If these were cavemen times, I would be the first to be eaten by a saber-toothed bear. Or so the CrossFit cult tells me.

Anyway, I did ride my bicycle out to the race to act as a roving spectator, and I had a lot of fun. I pedaled along the course and took pictures of Geoff and shouted encouragement to other racers and friends. I pedaled back to the finish line and watched Geoff finish in second place. As he cooled down, I returned for one final run to the turnaround. I passed the last runner, who was being shadowed by a couple of race sweeps on bicycles. I shot her my biggest grin and a thumbs up. "You're doing awesome," I said. She just lowered her eyes and shook her head. I got the feeling that she was burrowed deep in her pain cave, and didn't want some random chick on a bicycle shining any artificial light through her tunnel. I started to worry that I hadn't sounded genuine in my encouragement. It's tough to be in last place, especially when you have race sweeps hanging right off your rear. I wished there was a way I could turn around and tell her how much I admired her. I wanted to say "Look at you! You're running 10 kilometers and you're succeeding, which is a lot more than I lined up for this morning." But of course I didn't do that. I left her alone on my final pass. But I cheered really loud when she reached the finish line.

It inspired me to think about taking up running.

But first I need to master my distance climbing.

Breakuping is hard to do

Date: April 3
Mileage: 30.1
April mileage: 60.1
Temperature: 41

I wasted a fair amount of time this morning moping around the house, gazing at my Karate Monkey and randomly making little adjustments on the bike. I felt like a kid who just received a brand new snowboard for her birthday ... in July. A coveted new toy and nowhere to ride it.

Every spring, every community in Alaska must endure the awkward transition known as "Breakup." Breakup is like the period between Christmastime Academy Award contenders and summer blockbusters when every movie you see feels like a barely-constitutional alternative to waterboarding. Or like the horrible year in junior high when even the cutest kids get braces and pimples and walk around looking like they've been slapped with a fugly stick. Basically, Breakup is when all the ice begins to melt and everything gets really sloppy. Winter activities become unappealing because the snowpack turns to messy slush, and summer activities are still impossible because everything is covered in messy slush. Nobody in Alaska really likes spring much. I don't really mind it, most of the time. I appreciate the longer daylight, and 41 and raining beats 31 and snaining any day ... and I think, if we Southeast Alaskans are really honest with ourselves, it's basically Breakup here year-round. But even I have days when I feel the walls closing in; this is the time of year I impulse-buy stuff. This is the time of year I mope.

I dragged myself out the door, finally, with a resolve to go for a hike. I stupidly picked the East Glacier Trail loop, which has a ton of stairs, reasoning that I could take the stairs up and the switchbacks down. But with all the newly-thawed waterfalls gushing over the trail, there was more steep, wet ice than I could deal with. I took a hard fall right on my back before I decided the trail was too treacherous to climb any higher. Then I had to inch my way down endless flights of ice-slicked stairs.

I tried to salvage the afternoon by going for a bike ride. But I had spent so much time cleaning my new bike after yesterday's ride ... I couldn't bear taking her out in the slop again. So I grabbed my creaky old Roadie, which I don't really bother to clean anymore, and rode grumpily along the glass-strewn gravel still coating the North Douglas Highway. I hit the headwind on the way home and tried to crank out some intervals, but my heart wasn't in it. I need something to train for.

Thursday nights are basically my "Saturday night," but Geoff is now only weeks away from his trip south, and is pinching pennies with surprising zeal. So we can't really go out any more unless I'm buying. He made this lasagna by mixing a can of tomato soup and tomato paste, then pouring it over flat noodles with a thin layer of peppers and a little Parmesan cheese. It was tasty ... but a little hobo dinner-esque (and totally my fault ... I was supposed to go shopping.) We watched this horrible quasi-musical movie on DVD (amazing the dregs of filmmaking that can be dredged up on Netflix.) The whole thing was funny, actually ... just an off day.

How many more months until winter?

It's a Monkey!

Date: April 2
Mileage: 31
April mileage: 31
Temperature: 39

My Karate Monkey is done! Strange how these things come to pass. It wasn't even a month ago that I was happy as could be with my Gary Fisher. How does a person shift from "I need a new bottom bracket," to, "eh, what the heck, I'll just buy a whole brand new bike"? Very quickly, very easily, I'm afraid. Combined with all my winter-riding expenses, my bank account is now hemorrhaging money at an alarming rate. But since when do I care about money? Give me shiny goodness!

A close-up shot of the Reba fork. It has a pop-lock, which I like since I do so much pavement riding just to access trails. And when it's not locked out, it's oh-so-buttery smooth. You can't even tell you're bouncing up and down.

And here's the drivetrain. Nothing to really brag about, but it is notable in that it's brand new. When I built up Pugsley last fall, nearly everything I stuck on it besides the frame came secondhand. With the Monkey, just about everything is factory new. Those platform pedals are a multiple-crash-deformed relic from the Snaux Bike days. The Ergon grips were Sugar's. The seat, seatpost and fenders belong to Geoff. (I still have to acquire my own.) But, beyond that, this is the newest bike I've owned since my touring bike circa 2004.

I guess my chosen build of the Karate Monkey is a little strange. I took a perfectly good, rigid, single-speed-ready steel frame and slapped a bunch of bling on it. I'm not ashamed. People with knees like mine aren't lining up to own single speeds, and I'm not against suspension. I just didn't think I required full suspension anymore. I don't think I'll even miss the bouncy on back.

Geoff was actually the first person to ride the bike. It's fitting, since he was the one who actually completed the build (I know better than to touch most of that stuff unless it's a dire repair emergency. As a mechanic, I'm a bike's worst nightmare.)

I spent a short three hours this morning test-riding my new Monkey. I think most cyclists get a pretty strong sense of their bike's "personality" during the first ride. Despite the big wheels and burly frame, I was sensing a "female" vibe from this bike ... sensitive, but with a high pain threshold. Since Karate Monkey is kind of a mouthful, I think I'll call her "Kim." (I know, I know, but when have I ever been all that creative with bike names?)

Most of our ride today was on wet pavement, but I did try her out in all the terrain available in Juneau in April:

Kim in snow (Like a hot knife in butter.)

Kim on the beach (Like a dull knife in butter.)

Kim in mud. (Ahh, just right.)

I like Kim. I think she and I stand to become good friends. Even now, when I'm with Kim, I can close my eyes and imagine a world where there's no job to keep, no cats to feed, no rent to pay; a world where the trails don't fade out and the road doesn't end; a world where I can lift my head up, and just ride.

Out with the old

Date: March 31
Mileage: 30.1
March mileage: 636.3
Temperature: 38

My Gary Fisher Sugar sold on Sunday. I went to my local bike shop to pick up a shipping box, realized they were closed on Mondays, and drove around back to dig one out of the rubbish pile. (I was disappointed to discover that there was no Orbea in that box. Just tattered packaging materials.) Tomorrow I will box Sugar up ship him off to his new home in the frozen land of Minnesota (where I'm sure he will feel right at home.) Tonight is our last night together.

I wanted to take him out for one last ride, but I didn't want to tarnish the scouring I gave his drivetrain or risk damaging a part of a bike that no longer belongs to me. I felt a tinge of regret when I realized I couldn't remember our last ride together. Since I discovered he needed a new bottom bracket, he's sat idle - and sometimes in pieces - in my front room. There was never a grand send-off, never a tearful goodbye. I like to joke about being in love with my bikes, but when I'm honest with myself, does it really matter? Can I really be so emotionally attached to aluminum and steel? Well, yeah. Yeah I can.

When I think about Sugar, I think about years (three years!) and miles (thousands!) during which that aluminum and steel carved its way into who I am and how I see the world. When I think about Sugar, I think about myself as a fearful novice coasting the gravel rollers of the Idaho Falls hillsides. I think about gaining more confidence on the steep singletrack of Millcreek Canyon in Utah. I think about honing my exploratory skills on the elaborate web of trails beyond my new home in Homer, Alaska. I think about discovering my endurance on the soft slush beyond the Susitna River. I think about perfecting my technical moves as I repeatedly circled the same loop during the 24 Hours of Kincaid. I think about realizing the power of unconditional joy as I kneeled into the dirt, nearly cashed out, at the top of Resurrection Pass. When I think about Sugar, I think about growth. I think about change. I think about loss.

But the truth is, this is good for me. It's good to make a clean break. The fact is, Sugar is still a good bike and deserves to be ridden, deserves to be thrashed, deserves to be ground into the dust he was destined to become. No bike deserves to rot amid the cobwebs and asbestos in an apartment basement. Every mountain bike deserves a dignified death by steady abuse, if not a brilliant flash-out in a blaze of glory. If I'm not the one to levy that abuse, if I've moved on, then I have to let him go.

It does help that I have something to distract me ...

Hoo boy!