Cold November rain

Date: Nov. 15
Mileage: 29.0
November mileage: 430.4

No one appreciates the tyranny of 34 degrees and raining.

There's just no way to stay warm when it's 34 degrees and raining. Warm some of the time? Yes. Warm most of the time? Maybe even. Warm all of the time? No.

Eventually you’re going to hit a slow technical stretch or an extended downhill, and your energy expenditure is going to plummet. And where energy expenditure drops, so follows body temperature.

There’s just no way to avoid it. Wear waterproof clothing if you want to be soaked in sweat. Wear water resistant clothing if you want to be soaked in rain. Either way, you’re soaked, and eventually, hyporthermia’s going to get its icy fingers around your skin.

When it does, you have two choices: Surrender or fight. Surrendering’s easy. Go inside. Take a painful shower if you must. Fighting’s harder ... and in the end, more fun.

Imagine that you’ve just arrived at the bottom of a five-mile descent. You’ve spent the past 10 minutes blasting through dagger-like sleet as downhill windchills of 20 degrees needled through your wet coat and rain pants like they were tissue paper. Your muscles feel like they’ve been injected with ice water. You go to shift down your gears, but your fingers are rigid. Your arms are sluggish. Your legs are so heavy and numb that they feel like they’re half detached from your hips. Your whole body feels like it’s locked in slow motion, and you alone have to rally these half-frozen parts into high burn if you want to get your body temperature back to normal.

And that’s the fight. It’s comical at first. Sort of like a drunken race: battling sluggish motor functions and a slight urge to go to sleep. You shimmy the front wheel on flat pavement, stand up and heave back and forth. But then your heart starts to beat a little faster. Icy blood flows in and flows out a little warmer. The warmth filters into your muscles and finally bubbles out on your clammy skin, still exposed to the rain, still covered in soaked clothing. But warmth returns! It really can. And when you feel that warm tingle, you know it’s working.

Defeating the tyrant of 34 degrees and raining is a wonderful feeling. You feel like you could go out and conquer the world, any time, any weather, until you go to work and a co-worker says something like “Feels kinda warm outside today, doesn’t it?”

No one understands.

....

Thanks to those who have bought my book. Really. You’re awesome. If you’re interested in international shipping, bulk orders or signed copies, please contact me at jillhomer66@hotmail.com by Sunday night. I’m going to put in an order Monday morning. And you can still purchase it here. It’s worth it. Really. ;-)

Also, I wanted to thank my sister, Lisa, for the sweet tribute that she posted on her blog. It made be tear up a bit. Thanks, Lis :-).

November is lovely

Date: Nov. 10, 11, 13 and 14
Mileage: 17.0, 28.4, 60.3 and 22.1
November mileage: 401.4

November is one of the many months of Juneau in which you can have it all within the span of a three-hour ride: Rain, sleet, snain, snow, full-on blizzards, wind gusts that will suck the air right out of your lungs, more rain. That's essentially been the theme of my training this week: Mastering the art of the all-weather ride. After getting knocked around by wind on the Glacier Highway today (literally knocked around, in way that threatened to blow me into traffic), I opted to head up the Perseverance Trail even though I was riding my ice bike. I got caught in a blizzard and about six inches of new, wet, unrideable-with-skinny-tires snow. Common sense would dictate I turn around, but I thought - "eh, need to get a feel for these conditions. It'll make me tough." So I slogged through it to the top even though the work itself wasn't as strenuous as the activity level I was shooting for would have been. Now I'm headed to the gym for weight lifting and a more strenuous, less punishing interval session on the elliptical machine.

But I just wanted to write a quick blog post and thank everyone who bought my book so far. The response has been better than I anticipated given there was no build-up for it ... I pretty much just dropped it out there on Thursday. I've always been a bit dubious about the idea of bloggers writing books - the whole "why buy the cow" philosophy. But the support so far has been encouraging. You guys are the greatest!

For those who were thinking of purchasing a copy but found the shipping costs to be restrictive, I have an idea. Shoot me an e-mail at jillhomer66@hotmail.com and tell me where you live. I'll look up exact shipping costs from Juneau to your home and send you back a quote. If you decide you'd like a copy, you can pay me directly through Paypal (same e-mail address, or gold button in the sidebar of this blog) and I will send out for a bulk order on Monday. I can get a bulk discount that will offset the original shipping costs to me, so I think that should reduce the international shipping price quite a bit. Plus, I'll sign it.

Also, if you have a blog and are interested in reviewing the book, send me an e-mail or leave a comment with your blog site/contact info and I'll send you a low-res version of the eBook. (Not as nice as the one offered on the Web site, but perfectly readable on screen.)

I think an amazon.com listing is about six weeks away. But the publisher marketplace site really isn't so scary. Just think, for the price of a Subway extra value meal (or two, in the case of the paperback), you can have a month's worth of quality "Up in Alaska" material right at your fingertips. And you'll make me so happy. Go now! What are you waiting for? If you like the blog, you'll probably like the book. And if you don't like the blog, well, what are you doing here? (Click here instead.) ;-)

OK, that's enough of my marketing pitch. Back to you regularly scheduled bike punishment tomorrow.

Iditarod fundraiser

It's a book! I made it! Available here!

OK, so, the book. This started in June when an Alaskan author named Seth Kantner (one of my heroes, but that's the subject of another post) came to Juneau to promote his latest book, "Shopping for Porcupine." That also happened to be the same day my parents flew into town to visit me. I dragged them almost directly from the airport to the bookstore to attend Kantner's signing and slideshow. As he flipped through photos of his hard life in the frozen wastelands of the Arctic, I kept glancing over at my mom and dad, expecting to see perplexed looks on their faces. But, like me, they seemed enthralled. I decided two things that evening: I needed to go back to the Iditarod Trail - if not in 2009, then someday. And I needed to get my 2008 experience on paper - not just the quick first impressions of the blog, but everything I could remember.

Before that night, I had already been working on essays of other past adventures, some of which I consider turning points in my life. When I started working on the Iditarod story, I noticed a lot of similar themes that cropped up in some of my old stories. The complimentary details seemed worth drawing together. I moved toward fusing the two projects - like parallel journeys at different points in time. The result is this book: My personal story of the Iditarod Trail and the far-reaching trails that led to it.

I finished it in September and didn't really feel compelled to add much to it. But I wasn't sure what to do with it. There was a sense that maybe it was worthy of publication, but I know myself well and I knew I was just going to bury it in a computer folder and forget about it as I avoided all of the work of trying to get a piece of creative nonfiction published. Years would go by and eventually the computer's hard drive would fizzle out and that would be that.

As I mulled just posting it on a blog (not this one, because this blog is already really long without the addition a 75,000-word post), I came across the idea of self publishing. I have lots of mixed feelings about self publishing, as I'm sure lots of authors do. But I put it together as a book and needled a little covert copy editing out of a friend and was fairly happy with the result.

All was uploaded and done about two weeks ago, but I've been hesitating because I wasn't sure this was what I really wanted to do. But now I don't just want to think about it anymore. This is how all of my best decisions are made. :-)

If you click on this link, you can purchase the book and help support my next big winter racing effort. By buying my book, you get a stack of new and interesting "Up in Alaska" material that you can read in bed, and I get a small royalty that I can put into my new-coat-and-peanut- butter-cup fund. The link will take you directly to the publisher's marketplace site. I understand shipping may be a little high, especially if you don't live in the United States. If that's the case, I am trying to get this listed on Amazon.com, but it will take several weeks at least. You can also download the PDF.

Finally, some of my friends and people I've met are depicted in this book (first-names only in most cases.) I worked really hard to depict the events as accurately as I could, but in the end, I'm relying almost entirely on my own memory. So I apologize in advance if you feel misrepresented in any way.

Also, if you come to this blog solely for the pictures, I am also thinking about putting together a fundraising calendar. And if you come to this site solely to compare your bicycle punishment to mine, don't worry, I'm still training hard and will be back to typing about that soon enough. :-)