One month

Date: Jan. 30 and 31
Mileage: 30.1 and 41.0
January mileage: 810.5
Temperature upon departure: 34 and 29

Like a straight shadow through my meandering thoughts about careers and choices and the future in general, the Iditarod Trail Invitational continues to rocket toward me. The race begins March 1, now just a month away. At the most random and sometimes inopportune moments, I'm hit with jolts of piercing anxiety that make my job pressure seam downright pleasant. It is one thing to be fearful about another hiccup in your career path, and quite another to be fearful about even staying alive beyond the next 38 days. Not that death is really all that likely in the race. I'm more likely to be killed on these sloppy Juneau streets while training for the race than I am in the actual race. It's just that death appears so much closer in environments as hyper-real and unsanitized as the Iditarod Trail ... like a straight shadow over a meandering life.

But, yeah, where was I? Oh yes, my month-to-go pre-race report. I'm in a strange mood right now due to a combination of poor nutrition, lack of sleep, and stress. It's my fault. I'm busy and preoccupied. And, like I said, hit with occasional anxiety episodes that can not be avoided. But beyond that, preparations are going well. I have been able to make time for decent training, and a fair amount of riding, even though conditions have been less than ideal. I nearly have all of my gear rounded up, and just have a few things left of my list to buy: Ultralight hip waders as a much-better-than-garbage bags solution for dealing with overflow; a front rack for my Pugsley; food (yes, lots of peanut butter cups included) to send in my two drop bags; hand and foot warmers; new tires, a new rear hub, chain, cassette and other random bike parts for the Pugsley. There are of course a few more little things, but I have nearly the bulk of it rounded up, and I feel pretty good about my gear this year. I'm not really confident that my bike's going to be much lighter than last year, but I will have less stuff on it and will be better prepared all around.

There's going to be a good crowd headed down the trail this year. There's 50 racers signed up. From my estimate, as many as five women plan to ride bicycles to McGrath, which is incredible! I'm not sure there's ever been more than two! There's at least one woman headed there on foot. I'm guessing Louise Kobin is the favorite to win the women's race to McGrath. She's the closest to a pro endurance cyclist. She finished the ITI in 2007 in about the same time it took me last year, only she finished under much tougher conditions, with the flu, and a bout of hypothermia. And me, well, my top goal is to survive. And work on turning my weaknesses into strengths. And finish. And if all three things happen, I'll compete hard with everything I have left. If you win, the prize is free entry into next year's race. Which, if you think about it, really isn't a prize, because then you'll be tempted to enter this stupid race yet again.

The defending champion, Jay Petervary, recently reported he has a torn ACL from a ski accident. That certainly doesn't sound good. It will be a bummer if he can't race this year. He's a pretty fun guy to watch tear up the trail, for all of five minutes before he leaves you in a cloud of snow.

The latest trail reports have been filled with gloom and doom. They usually are right before the race. This year's fear is not enough snow. The Irondog trailbreakers have been having a hard time getting over the Alaska Range because of all of the alder brush in the way. If snowmobiles can't get through, even around the long-way through Hell's Gate, then we certainly can't get through at anything much faster than a bushwhacking 0.5 mph. Forty-five or possibly even 70-odd miles of that would more hell than I'm willing to endure, that's for sure. I'd turn my bike right around at Puntilla and ride/push the 165 miles back to the start before I attempted that.

I wish I could send them some of our moisture. The West Juneau Weather Station reported 68 inches of snow in the month of January, with more than nine inches of solid precipitaiton (much of that straight rain.) I keep looking for excuses to avoid the sloppy mess, but I'm nearly out of punches on my gym pass.

Finding myself

So my "Find Me SPOT" arrived in the mail today. It's my parents' Christmas gift to themselves me. The deal is I carry a big orange hunk of plastic with three easy-to-use "Help, "I'm OK" and "911" buttons, and the device tracks me wherever I go and transmits my location to a remote Web site. After I reportedly lost myself for three days during last year's Iditarod Trail Invitational race, I think my parents just decided the SPOT would pay for itself in anxiety medication.

Today I set out on snowshoes with the SPOT and my GPS to intentionally get lost in the woods. I have an unnaturally terrible sense of direction for an adventure junkie, and I'm trying to sharpen my woeful skills in reading the terrain and route-finding. The idea is to cut my own trail through the dense woods, reading the topo maps, distance and elevation on my GPS as I go, and track my progress so I don't wander around in circles. And yes, I recognize that it is pretty hard to get hopelessly lost when you are tromping your own rather obvious path through the snow. That's my insurance policy. Even then, there is always on the periphery a light urge to panic - "Aaaa, I'm lost in the woods!" - an urge honed after many years of having a spectacularly bad sense of direction.

But GPS reading could come in handy if I ever find myself actually lost in a more remote section of this state. Rain fell hard in the late morning as I set my snowshoes into a foot of unbroken, oversaturated snow and began the dull trudge. I know I'll never convince readers of this blog that the combination of 35 degrees,wind and heavy rain is the worst weather in the world, but it's something I believe with unwavering faith. Maybe it's because the weather is like that in Juneau quite a lot. Quite a soul-crushing lot. Enough that it can really help a person overlook all of the beautiful days that make living here worth it.

Either way, the trudge. Breaking trail through a foot of new, wet snow is a crazy hard workout. I set out today for a five-hour hike, but five hours of hiking in stuff like that is really closer in effort to five hours of running. Heart-pounding running. At 1.5 mph. In other words, another great Iditarod workout. I'm seriously sore right now, in muscles that I actually use quite a lot - like my quads. I'm going to have to incorporate the trudge more often.

But I did successfully wander off into the woods and direct myself to a full loop that took me up the steep slopes on the south side of Mount Jumbo, down across several miles of muskeg and stream crossings, then dropping down the mountain through the devil's club stalks, log jams and overflowing creeks. I ended up on the far side of the Treadwell mine - way beyond the point where the shoreline trail ends. I came to a cliff and actually had to climb down an old mining structure, into a creek, to get around it. Lucky for waterproof boots (yep, definitely waterproof.) When I realized how far south I had come, I had to pick up the pace along the shoreline to try to make it home before dark. My snowshoes felt like they weighed 40 pounds, which was probably close to their actual weight, from all of the ice I had picked up walking through overflow.

During a five-hour trudge like that, with the decisions I'm facing, you'd think I'd have a lot of time to sort through my life. But it's strangely just the opposite. I don't think about my outside life at all. Even though I have all of these modern devices that keep safety from really being an issue in that situation, I still find myself every bit as alert and focused in the moment as I would if I were actually lost in the woods. Even though SPOT knows where I am, I don't know where I am, and every step I take carries me farther into the unknown. So all I think about are the crunch of my footsteps, the snow patterns on a tree trunk, the way each tree looks different from the last tree, the cloud-obscured features of mountains, the deer tracks that I hope mark the best path through a thick grove of spruce ... I like it when this is all I think about for five hours: the simple path forward. Things which never seemed obvious before become obvious. Landscapes become landmarks. I lose myself and find my way home.

Conflicted, part 2

Date: Jan. 26 and 27
Mileage: 25.6 and 27.1
January mileage: 739.4
Temperature upon departure: 22 and 26

I admit I was more than a little disappointed when the snow returned. Deep snow followed by heavy rain followed by unseasonable warmth followed by a healthy freeze had settled Juneau's snowpack in a way that almost everything was rideable, everything. All of those places that I usually need snowshoes and a fair amount of time to access - the Douglas Island backcountry, Spaulding Meadows - I could ride, and quickly, covering so much normally forbidden ground that I could hardly haul myself off the snow and into the office in the afternoon, knowing that any time not spent chewing up crusty backcountry before the snow fell was time wasted.

Then came the snow, soft powder, 12 inches or so, much to the delight of skiers and disdain of crust-seeking cyclists. I was pushed back on the roads, all 80-odd miles of them, again facing one of the things about Juneau that has gotten under my skin: the dead ends. How many times can I ride up to Eaglecrest? How many pictures can I take of the Mendenhall Glacier? What adventures are left for me here?

And yet, as I set out today to climb the Eaglecrest Road for the 235th or so time, a thick blanket of new snow enveloped the canyon in quiet. The road was devoid of cars on a Tuesday. The trees were brushed in shades of gray as breaks in the clouds revealed a soft glow of color behind bald white peaks. I took a deep breath of cool, moist air and wondered, "How can I leave this place?"

A clever reporter called it "Bloody Monday," the day when American companies announced they were axing 55,000 jobs in a single day. My boss pulled me into his office and pulled out a thick stack of papers bound by a big black clamp. "All of these are the resumes I've received for your job," he said. (my current job, the one I've already quit.) He reached in his drawer and pulled out another thick stack of papers. "These are for (the new job, the one I'm being offered.) We've received resumes from Washington, New York, Texas, Florida, even journalists overseas. Most of them were laid off. Now they're ready to come all the way to Juneau, Alaska." He set his thick stacks of papers down and smiled his most disarming manager smile. "All I'm asking is for you to make this really simple for me. Trust me, there aren't a lot of jobs for journalists out there."

What kept looping through my head all day was an ad campaign for Best Buy that captured my attention over the holidays: "You, Happier." It was a memorable slogan, but not particularly effective for a person like me. All I saw when I looked at those ads was: "You, with a Playstation," or "You, paying $99 a month." Either way, nothing changes. You're still you.

"You, with a new job." What would that really mean? I'd still drive a 1996 Geo Prism, ride my Karate Monkey and my Pugsley, live in a two-bedroom apartment with a roommate and four cats. I wouldn't change those things because I already enjoy my life and what I have, and I wouldn't have any real reason to change them. So what were the sloganeers at Best Buy hiding from me? "You, in management." "You, never able to climb to the top of Mount Roberts on a weekday again." "You, with a slightly larger stockpile of money." "You, on a career path that may not be the best one for you." "You, Busier."

There are really only two forces inside myself at odds right now: The force that loves newspapers and loves community journalism and yes, loves to work. And on the other side, the force that leads me to believe that time is the most valuable thing in this life, and all money is good for is buying more of it. It's a happy problem to have - too many choices. And I am a truly lucky person. Not just for the opportunities I have, and for the confused but unconditional support extended to me by my friends and family, but also for the confidence I have in myself. Because when I finally reach a decision, I'll know it must be the right one.