Hawaiian desert, Hawaiian snow

Geoff's and my first reaction after arriving in Kona on the Big Island was startled sense of relief. We had spent five days plunged into the heat and crowds and traffic and HURT 100 race fanfare of Oahu. All the clamor and noise and Mai Tai-flavored, manicured beaches had come to define Hawaii for me, my first time in the state. So the sound of rustling palms in an otherwise quiet breeze over the open Kona airport was almost startling. The town rested on an open hillside, swept in dry grass and desert-like vegetation. "Wow," Geoff said. "This place is like, normal."

We drove out to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and set up camp beside a rust-colored lava flow, speckled with dry-climate plants that could have easily stood in for salt brush and juniper. I felt like I was in Utah, camped on the sandstone with only the endless ocean horizon 3,000 feet below us to suggest otherwise. Geoff was recovering from his 100-mile race and the purpose of our Big Island vacation was to take it easy. Geoff napped while I unpacked the car, chatting with this habituated nene - a Hawaiian goose - who even honked back.

We headed down the coast to get out of the smog that was seeping along the volcano's cone - sweet-smelling like antifreeze and abrasive in my throat and lungs. Geoff and I called it "vog." It was nasty stuff. Geoff was more than a little creeped out by the idea of a National Park straddling a 13,500-foot volcano.

We came to the end of the road, cut short by lava flow. "Shouldn't this be evidence enough that this is not a place where people should be hanging out?" Geoff said.


But I felt at ease among it, much more so than I had endlessly fighting the human lava flow of Honolulu. After that experience, I had decided I wasn't going to bother renting a bike on the Big Island. It didn't take long to realize that I had just picked the wrong island to rent a bike.

Volcanic activity billowed in the distance. I felt close enough to reach out and touch it - a plume more than seven miles away. The open space was baffling - and real distance very hard to gauge.

The next morning, I followed a trail near our campsite down to the coast, dropping 2,500 vertical feet in a thick cloud of vog. I ran when I could to make distance in limited time. The sweet-smelling pollution irritated my eyes and scratched my throat. The heat of day trickled ceaselessly down my neck and back. I was trying to get a good workout, sweating buckets, thinking there was nothing remotely healthy about hiking through vog in the heat with minimal water (50 ounces, the rest we had at our dry camp site, and gone amazingly quickly.) But I was so happy to be out and alive, jogging through jagged lava flows and visible heat waves, surrounded by beautiful devastation.

The next day we moved camp to a spot on the coast near Hilo, back in the rainforest with its towering bonsai trees and thick spruce-like needles. We soaked in a thermal hot pond amid fruit orchards and farmland. "The diversity on this island is amazing," Geoff said.

Time seemed to always crunch in, but we found enough of it to head up the backside of the big volcano, Mauna Loa. Back in the desert, with its lava-speckled tundra and rolling yellow grasslands, could have easily been a scene in the early winter in central Utah or Nevada. I felt happy and at ease again, and I wondered if this was what I was looking for in the new places I visit all along - familiar pieces of home. I looked across the valley to the snow-capped peak of Mauna Kea. "I want to see that," I thought. "I want to find some Hawaiian snow."

Geoff set up a comfortable resting point by the Volcano Observatory and I went for another time-crunched jog up Mauna Loa. The jagged lava rocks ripped at my shoes and scratched my shins. I quickly ran out of breath, and soon thereafter became dizzy and had to slow to a walk. The bright blue sky and black rock spun around in misshapen circles. "Am I really this out of shape after four days off the bike?" I wondered. But a glance at my GPS revealed the root of my problem. I was quickly ascending to 12,000 feet, after too many years spent living at sea level, with no acclimation to speak of. I smiled at the harsh elevation and harsher sun, and kept climbing.

I found my way to the snow fields and sat down to catch my gasping, raspy, volcano-ash-scratched breath on a petrified piece of ice at 19 degrees North. It was a beautiful way to spend my last day in Hawaii, and my favorite part of the whole trip. We're back in Anchorage now and just waiting for our final flight to Juneau, home, and I'm excited to go back. But a big part of me is going to miss that harsher side of Hawaii, the side that doesn't taste like Mai Tai, the side that few ever talk about.

Tomorrow I'll talk about Geoff's Hurt 100 race. It was actually a lot of fun - even for him.

Wind and waves

Date: Jan. 14, 15 and 16
Mileage: 30.5, 55.1 and 34.2
January mileage: 429.5
Temperature upon departure: Low 80s

My Hawaii trip so far has been a comedy of errors, but I'm starting to settle into the flow. I feel perpetually lethargic because of all of the heat and sun and the Benadryl I'm sucking down (I seem to be allergic to a lot of different things down here.) But this island is nothing if not beautiful and an adventure in itself. True to my vacation record, even Hawaii managed to throw exciting weather my way.

The first thing we did after the car rental place opened for the morning Wednesday is drive around looking for the start of the Hurt 100. We ended up on a high bluff at sunrise, where I caught my first glimpse of downtown Honolulu. From a distance, it's breathtaking.

I rented a road bike from this place called The Bike Shop. It's light and fast and holds its own on gravel, but the traffic on this island takes some getting used to. It's been really windy, which has been great for my training in the limited time I have to ride. It helps me get my heartrate up without gaining too much speed, which can be scary and hard to control in tight traffic on a strange bike when you're used to none of it.

We camped the first two nights at a private campground on the edge of the North Shore. It was a beautiful spot and crawling with feral cats and chickens. We of course adopted one of the cats, feeding it pieces of ahi tuna and leftover cereal milk. While walking on the beach, Geoff randomly bumped into friends of his, Kelly and Adrian from Smithers, B.C. Neither had any idea the other would be in Oahu. Really, what are the chances?

The day we arrived, the National Weather Service issued a high surf warning, forecasting 25-35 foot waves on the North Shore. The beaches were all closed and I could see few people even braving walks on the shoreline as I rode by, hoping to catch a glimpse of monster wave surfers. I did see one windsurfer out in the roiling mass. His kite jolted wildly back and forth until it dipped low and I lost sight of it. I never did see it come back up.

On Thursday night, we were handed an voluntary evacuation notice with instructions for a nearby shelter that we could go to. We were a little confused about that, especially because our camp site was many hundreds of yards off the shore, so the high surf didn't threaten us. We're in a strange place and inclined to take weather warnings seriously, but there was nothing on the notice that raised any red flags. They were calling for 40 mph sustained winds with 50-60 mph gusts and heavy rain. Similar weather in Juneau is called "autumn." We reinforced our little backpacking tent and hunkered down.

On Friday, the island of Oahu closed all schools and told all non-essential government workers to stay home. I went for a bike ride. It was a little hurricaney, but hardly the kind of weather I think of as "extreme." It was still 75 degrees outside. The drenching felt good.

We headed back down to Honolulu today so Geoff can prepare to run that crazy hard 100-miler tomorrow. We decided to rent a hotel room because it's so much less of a headache than trying to camp close to the race start, which is right in town. A last-minute booking for a $60 room netted us an ocean-view setting on the 43rd floor of one of Waikiki's myriad high-rise hotels. I get a little light-headed if I spend too much time looking out the window, especially with the wind rattling the glass. But I'm excited for Geoff's race tomorrow, and certainly glad I don't have to run it.

Aloha ... can I come back?

I found this photo on an old post that I started writing but never finished. I'm not sure exactly when I took it. It looks so serene, so welcoming, so cold ... so very different from the place where I am at right now.

OK, so I'm killing some time in the nether regions of the Alaska Air check-in part of the Honolulu airport. It's 3:53 a.m. Honolulu time. There is some infuriatingly mellow island music blasting over the loudspeaker in this not-quite-inside, not-quite-outside kind of a room, and I'm already down to boxer shorts and a T-shirt, sticky with heat and sleep deprivation. Just need to make it until the Thrifty Car Rental place opens. Just a little longer ...

I know, I know. I'm in Hawaii on vacation and I'm not allowed to complain, especially since I haven't even escaped from the airport yet enough to give island life a chance. I guess it just feels good to vent after really bad flights. I know everyone has bad flights. This was the worst flight ever. I know everyone has worst flights ever. It's just that after 11 hours on a single leg of a flight between Anchorage and Honolulu, long after the foil-wrapped hamburgers ran out and the toilet seats were ringed in urine and the flight attendants were rationing water, sitting in 85-degree heat amidst a plane completely full of screaming children and adults whose good humor had pretty much worn out, I will say it was all a little too Superdome for my taste. And, having gone through and survived that flight, I will say that it's amazing the suffering so many people will endure to get themselves someplace warm on a vacation. I am pretty sure it is beyond any endurance I have ever exhibited to bike myself someplace cold.

Now I am sitting cross-legged on a floor near the only electric outlet I could find and observing how embarrassingly white my legs are, having seen no significant amount of sun in about three years, and wanting to put something on to cover them up, but I just can't deal with more sitting and sweating quite yet. I need to find a refrigerator to go sit in. Did I really think I was going to be able ride a bike in this climate? Ha ha ha. Maybe after I finally get some sleep, we shall see.

I really shouldn't complain. It's all good for me. Food, water and sleep deprivation training at its finest. I need to get past it, though, because I'm having strong urges to go somewhere quiet and be really lazy.

I guess I just need to think of that distant place I left 24 hours ago - seems so far in the past - with 2 inches of rainfall and an untold accumulation of snowmelt backing up behind several feet of snow base, driving my car to the gym through standing water deep enough to splash in through the closed door, running for two hours on an eliptical machine before getting in the dungeon-like shower only to have the power go out two minutes in, groping around a strange room wet and naked in the dark and thinking, "Wow. Here we go again." Snow. Rain. Avalanche. The city's only connection to its power plant gets taken out for months. Again. All in a day's life in Juneau.

Could be worse. Could be here.

I feel so fast

Date: Jan. 11
Mileage: 41.3
January mileage: 309.7
Temperature upon departure: 35

Ever have days when you would rather do just about anything besides drag yourself outside? I actually have lots of days like this. I can usually overcome the feeling, and was nearly to the point of beginning the suit-up process when Geoff returned from his morning run and said, "Do not go out there. It's nasty out there." What, you might wonder, could possibly be so bad? Deep subzero temperatures? 50 mph winds? Whiteout blizzard? No, in the case that statement was a warning that it was warm outside. 35 degrees warm. Warm and wet and sloppy.

Still, I reluctantly persisted. I dug my rain gear out from the bottom of the pile - first time it's been above freezing in more than a month. I left Pugsley at home in favor of studded tires, knowing that rain quickly turns packed snow into the slipperiest substance on Earth.

I put set the wheels down on wet ice and pointed north. As the studs scraped over the slick surface, I accelerated at a rate I could hardly fathom, and I was riding uphill, with no wind. The breeze of my own momentum flowed around my bare hands and bare face. The air was moist and almost warm in a familiar but distant way. I felt like I was flying. For the first time in weeks, I was pedaling a surface free of snow, free of sand, free of churned up sandy powder and chunks of ice. For the first time in weeks, I was pedaling without resistance. It was just me and rubber and studs on ice, and nothing could stop us.

The point of the ride was to climb, but I rode all the way to the end of North Douglas because I suddenly possessed so much extra time usually reserved for churning out slow miles. I reached the end of the road, 15 miles out, in one hour. If it were summer, I'd be ashamed of 15 mph. But today, I felt like I had pounded out a personal best time trial.

After that, I did the five-mile climb. It was way too easy.

I'd need to ride for six hours and 45 minutes Monday to complete my 10-day goal of 40 hours. That is certainly not going to happen, but overall I'm not disappointed about how the current training binge went down. In the past nine days, I battled two days of subzero temperatures, one all the way down to -18, 50 mph wind gusts, frigid wind chills, 40 inches of snow ... I ran the hard winter gamut, basically. And what does the NWS weather forecast call for the last day of binge training? Lets see ... ooo, a flood warning!

HEAVY RAIN WILL BEGIN LATE TONIGHT SPREADING NORTH OVER THE
PANHANDLE. TEMPERATURES WILL REMAIN ABOVE FREEZING AND WATER WILL
INCREASE THE WEIGHT AND DENSITY OF THE SNOWPACK. MANY DRAINS ARE
LIKELY TO BE BLOCKED WITH SNOW. THE IMPACTS WILL BE STANDING WATER
INCREASED SNOWLOADS ON ROOFS AND THE POTENTIAL OF SNOW CAPSIZING
BOATS. STREAMS WILL RISE AS THE FREEZING LEVELS GET HIGHER. SOME
AREAS COULD RECEIVE UP TO TWO INCHES OF RAINFALL.

This winter is nothing if not harsh.

Hold back the rain

Date: Jan. 10
Mileage: 30.1
January mileage: 258.4
Temperature upon departure: 24

Saturday, tempo ride, 30 miles, 2.5 hours. My knee felt much better today. Still some soreness, but I've concluded the problem was almost entirely in having my seat too low. I originally lowered it to help leverage better steering control on the foot paths (i.e. winter singletrack.) I greased the seatpost heavily because it is a tight fit anyway and always a beast to adjust, and I'm guessing that caused it to slip down a little more before it froze in place. I fixed the problem today with a little help and a lot of leverage from Geoff. I am going to install a new seatpost soon.

But I felt a lot more comfortable and even a little faster heading out North Douglas today, despite yet more new snow. I pedal as hard as I can, until my quads are screaming, but that doesn't really translate to speed in these conditions. I've decided that any time I average more than 10 mph, I can count the ride as a "tempo" ride. Nearly 40 inches of snow has fallen since Jan. 2. That would translate to a 120-inch snow month if it continued at this rate, but it's not going to. A warming trend has commenced, and rain is in the forecast now. I wish the rain would hold off for two more days. After that, I'll be gone. But it probably will come Sunday. And when it does, rain on top of several feet of dry powder snow is going to make everything, and I mean everything, horrifically sloppy, nasty and completely unbikeable. Since I've lost my momentum in my 10-day training binge anyway, I see a bit of slumming at the gym in my near future.

But, on a different note, I wanted to share something I found during random Internet browsing:

It's a picture of guys in the U.K. reading my book! They didn't send this photo to me. I found it while I was browsing the blog sites of other 2009 Iditarod racers. I'm guessing one of them is John Ross, who's living the dream and training for the Iditarod Invitational in another typically wet, cold coastal climate. I was pleasantly amused. I never really thought about the possibility of other racers reading my book. I hope it doesn't dissuade anyone from showing up at the starting line. (I have to admit that I question my own sanity when I think too much about my experiences last year.)

I haven't posted about the book in a while, but it's still available. I've made a few edits since the original version and it is slowly becoming more polished. Such is the nature of spontaneous indie publishing. I've sold a little more than 500 copies since November, which is awesome! I'm slowly working on increasing the distribution. It's available now at Hearthside Books in Juneau and Speedway Cycles in Anchorage, and should be up on Amazon.com pretty soon. I'd love to further increase the distribution, but have taken close to no time to actually market the book. I still have yet to send out review copies to several magazines and publications that requested one (I keep running out of my own stash of books.) If you have a favorite little bookstore or bike shop that you think may be at all interested in stocking a book like this, send me an e-mail at jillhomer66@hotmail.com and let me know where/how I can contact them so I can send them my pitch. I'm happy with the lucrativeness of this book so far, but I think I've nearly tapped out the market from my blog. Time to branch out.

Powder dump

Date: Jan. 8
Mileage: 52.4
January mileage: 228.3
Temperature upon departure: 6

It's amazing how warm single digits feel after a short swing into the subzero range. Even when the sun is gone, and icy flakes are falling from the sky, there's a certain warmth to the air that can only be felt after dips into something much colder - like climbing out of a glacial lake on a cool spring day. I think that may be the only reason people can tolerate living in Interior Alaska. I check the current weather for McGrath almost every day. During this past cold snap, which lasted more than a week, every time I clicked on weather.com I saw current temperatures of -43, -47, even -55. Weather.com always includes a "feels like" reading with the actual temperature to account for windchill, but during the cold snap, the "feels like" temperature just read "N/A." I thought about writing weather.com and telling them they should change "N/A" to "outer space" or "standing on the moon." But maybe, just maybe, after a week or so of that, -45 just feels normal. Or not. Either way, if McGrath has a cold snap like that forecasted for the week of March 1, I am going to think hard and twice about starting the race. Cold weather training can only go so far for those of us who do not live in outer space.

Thursday, long slow distance and more weather exposure, 52 miles, 6 hours. Thursday was not really a great day on the bike. A snowstorm moved in, and with it a gray pall over the general cold. I pulled on my goggles and rode into the whiteout, plowing through the powder and trying to imagine what I could think about to get myself excited for many hours of that. It really was just one of those put-your-head-down-and-ride kind of days. It's good pshycological training to have days like this from time to time. One of the skills most endurance cyclists must hone is pushing through boredom. (And thanks again to Brian for the photo. I see him out often while I am riding, and it's a little like having my own personal photographer.)

After about four hours, I started to feel sharp streaks of pain in my right knee - old injury flareup. It happens from time to time. I am never quite sure how seriously to take these flareups. Whether I should turn around right there and soft pedal home, raise my seat up a little more and carefully push through it, or ignore it entirely. I decided on option two. But I couldn't get my seat to raise in the cold with the seatpost somewhat rusted and frozen in place. I finally decided to turn toward home and finish out six hours - on the low side of what I was hoping to ride Thursday, but still in range of my goal. The knee pain continued to bother me throughout the evening, so I decided Friday would be a bike-free active recovery day, even though I was trying to push through this 10-day period without any recovery. It was just as well, anyway, because the forecast was calling for 18 to 36 inches of snow Friday.

Friday, active recovery on snowshoes, about five miles, 2.5 hours. Geoff and I went on an afternoon snowshoe hike that turned out to be a little more strenuous than an actual recovery day. An hour of snowshoeing is generally more difficult than an hour of cycling, and two and a half hours leaves me good and tired. But I really like hiking when I am having knee pain, because it heavily works my lower quad muscles and actually helps me feel like I am pushing out the inflammation that is causing the pain (obviously, there's probably no real physiological proof of this, but that is the image I see in my mind while I am walking.) Anyway, like most placebo effects, it works wonders, and I actually feel much better tonight. I think I'll try to get back on the bike tomorrow and take it generally easy, and hope the pain doesn't come back. If it does, I may be in for a longer rest period.

I don't think the 36 inches of snow are going to pan out, but it's a foot at least and still falling. Even though I don't live in the "feels like outer space" region of this state, 2008-09 is definitely shaping up to be a harsh winter.

Much better

Date: Jan. 7
Mileage: 38.1
January mileage: 175.9
Temperature upon departure: -5

Wednesday, cold-weather acclimating, 38 miles, 4.5 hours. Clear cold weather arrived as promised this morning. I was giddy about it. Not only was it a (brief) respite from the snow, but it also was a chance to try out some gear combinations I have been thinking about running. I wanted to ride longer than four and a half hours. But it seems that although I possess the willpower to drag myself outside in subzero weather, I am still unable to drag myself out of bed earlier than 8 a.m. Before I receive criticism from early risers, I just want to say: You try working until close to midnight and then get up before dawn in the midst of a four-hour-a-day cold-weather training binge. It's not easy.

The last time I went riding in the danger cold - New Years Day - I found myself dangerously close to hypothermia. The last time I went riding in hard subzero windchill - yesterday - I sustained mild frostnip on the tip of my left thumb. So today I gave a lot of thought to how I dressed and what I packed. I added an extra layer on both the top and bottom - polyester longjohns and polar fleece pullover. I also crammed my helmet onto an extra thick fleece balaclava and wore a neoprene face mask. And I used my bike pogies instead of mittens. Amazing what a difference a few small additions can make. A world of difference. The difference between quiet suffering and exhilarating freedom.

It was about 5 below zero in downtown Juneau, with cold mist wafting off the "warm" seawater of the Gastineau Channel.

I rode out to the Valley for a couple hours of trail riding. Before I left the house, I loaded up my bike with an excessive amount of clothing, food, and a couple random objects just to add weight. I've resolved to start riding with more weight to get used to the sheer grind of a loaded bike. I also tried out the water system I am thinking about going with in the race - one 32-ounce bottle in an insulated sleeve on the handlebars, and a 6-liter MSR bladder in pack on my back. I don't plan to typically carry six (well, seven) liters of water, but I did today, just to see if it bothered me. And to tell you the truth, I didn't even notice the extra weight. At all. I'm sure I was moving slower, but when it's minus double digits out, there's an east wind kicking up, and the whole world is washed in stunning color and light, you tend to have other things on your mind than your excessively heavy backpack.

The air felt extra frigid on Dredge Lake (a sinkhole on the glacier moraine), so I pulled out my thermometer to see what the temperature was. The red line was barely there, a little sliver hovering above the bottom-out zone of minus 20. That would make it 17 or 18 below zero - officially the coldest temperature I've ever seen in Juneau, and, with the exception of last year's Iditarod race and its 30 below on the Farewell Burn, the coldest temperature I've ever ridden in. And the amazing thing about it is that I felt toasty warm the entire 4.5 hours. It feels like a big victory, getting my cold weather gear right. It's liberating to affirm that I can move freely through weather and seasons that most people find oppressive and debilitating. When I pull off a long ride in near-record cold without incident, I feel like I can do anything.

My friend Brian took a photo of me riding along Glacier Highway while he was out trolling for cold-weather photos for the Empire. I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure I'm grinning in this photo.

It's crazy to think that temperatures will be nearly 100 degrees warmer in Honolulu next week. Melting will feel strange.