Embracing the snain

Date: March 26 and 27
Mileage: 21.3 and 55.4
March mileage: 255.9
Temperature upon departure: 34

I went to the doctor again Thursday, and am now feeling confident enough in the durability of my toes to start venturing out for some longer days of exercise. The weather, however, didn't have the same ambitions. 34 degrees with intermittent snow and rain ... actually snowing one minute, raining the next, repeat. In Juneau, we call it snain. It's even uglier than its name, and uglier still to try to ride a bike in. Gooey slush erupts from the road in a geyser of moisture that even the best mountain bike fenders can't contain (and I have to use a mountain bike just to plow through the thick slop) Meanwhile, moisture falls in cold streams from the sky. Imagine straddling a cold-water geyser in a downpour. That's what biking in snain feels like. It's impossible to stay dry.

But I've actually figured out a great system for my feet. It only took seven layers (nine including the bandages), but I think I've actually found a way to keep my toes relatively dry (with the exception of trapped sweat, which is closer to damp than the swimming-in-a-slush-pond soaked that my feet usually are after a snain ride): Loose nylon sock to hold sweat somewhat away from the toes, loose vapor barrier sock, huge calf-high wool sock, tights stretched over that, sandle, waterproof overboot, and double-layer rain pants pulled over the top to keep water from seeping in. Dare I say such a setup can keep my feet dry indefinitely? It certainly seems that way after five hours in the slush geyser. Can't say that at all about the rest of my body.

Mostly based on the weather, I had decided to spend the weekend venturing forward in moderation. Riding in snain for anything longer than two hours is miserable, and working out at the gym for anything longer than two hours is miserable. But do both in the same day, and you have a four-hour day that is definitely tolerable. That was my plan. It went well yesterday. I kept my feet dry and I started reading a bad book (why is it that so many bike touring books are nearly unreadable? As in, "I ate this pie, and it was good, and then I rode up this hill, and it was hard." How are all these books getting published? ... said the self-publisher.)

Anyway ... two hours of riding followed by two hours at the gym was the plan today as well. I rode out toward North Douglas but quickly found myself in two to four-inch deep glop. Cars were swerving all over the road and I was having a tough time riding a straight line myself. I turned around to seek out something with a semblance of pavement, and started north toward the Valley. I was riding strong with a tailwind, walking all of the snow-covered bike paths, and actually feeling pretty good. I decided to push on a little longer than two hours, took the long way around Mendenhall Loop, hammered against the pounding headwind, jogged the unrideable bike paths, and had to stop at the Breeze Inn for a Snicker Bar and Gatorade because I was pretty severely bonked and wasn't carrying any food. Then, with sugar coursing through my blood, I decided to tack on another extra 10 miles of slow slush riding out to Thane before finally heading home. And just like that, a planned 20-mile ride became 55. I arrived home at 4 p.m., having left a little after 11 a.m. and telling Geoff I would be back at "1 at the latest."

"I was starting to get worried about you," he said. "I thought you had to be hurt or broken down or something, because there's no way you stayed out that long because you were actually enjoying yourself."

I looked at him, with my polar fleece jacket and rain pants dripping brown water onto the linoleum, waterlogged mittens wadded up in my hands, wet hair clinging to the clammy skin on my neck, socks pretty much comprising the only dry piece of clothing on my body, and I just smiled ... because I had been enjoying myself.

Getting back in shape is hard

Date: March 25
Mileage: 35.2
March mileage: 179.2
Temperature upon departure: 33

Yeah, I'm ultra-busy at work right now and, OK, I still have frostbite on my toes, but I really have to get this bike thing going again. No more sitting at my computer with my foot up. No more sleeping until 9 a.m. If I am going to work myself up to the best biking shape of my life, I am going to have to trim the fat ... in more ways than one.

I was in pretty good bike shape a month ago. OK, I let it slide a little after that January trip to Hawaii, and in February I did a lot more hiking and swimming through waist-deep snow to prepare for the pushathon I was expecting the Iditarod Trail Invitational to be (I was right about the pushathon; I just happened to miss the bulk of the race.) But then came the frostbite, the downtime that followed, the somewhat conservative venture back to activity, and finally, less than a week ago, getting back on the bike.

I've been doing lots of interval sessions on the elliptical trainer at the gym ... good, high-heart-rate stuff. I thought my fitness was at least late-November level. Maybe even December. I actually had an entire morning available to ride before I had to be at work today, so I planned my most ambitious ride since the pseudo-comback ... 25 miles of tempo riding with a five mile, 1,200-foot climb thrown in.

I wrapped up my bad foot in its requisite 16 layers and put the legs into high gear, rolling north. I knew I was in trouble when four miles in, with a strong wind at my back, I already felt like vomiting. I took it down a notch, but still, the pedaling felt hard. Much harder than this same stretch of road felt the 100 or so times I rode it last season. "I'm really not in very good shape," I thought as I sucked down gulps of cold air. And why would I be? It's been four weeks of crutching and limping and 90-minute elliptical spins in a 70-degree gym and chocolate chip cookies (mental health first, I always say.)

It didn't bode well for the rest of my ride, but I made it to North Douglas and turned into the wind. It really was blowing hard. Bummer. Head down, churning, feet toasty warm but hands half-frozen and locked in place (the coming of spring always makes me stop thinking about mittens until it matters), it was time to fix my blank stare on the glowing circle at the end of cave and suffer.

But I had time. I still had time. I can't afford to waste the time I have, so I turned right at Fish Creek Road, and commenced the climb. I was really hoping I was at least still a good climber. I was a good climber in Hawaii. I am not a good climber right now. At least, I wasn't today. Halfway up I had to stop for water. The effort called for something more, something energizing yet mindless, like 90s pop punk. I pulled out my iPod, flipped through the artist list until I found the Suicide Machines. When I was in 12th grade, I would listen to the Suicide Machines while I stayed up all night churning out uninspired drawings so I could fill up my portfolio with the minimum required to earn my AP Art credit. Come to think of it, my life is not so different now.

I mounted my bike again and smiled at the rush of purple noise.

"I tell you that the world's a scary place
And you tell me we're caught up in the same race
Everybody's worried that they'll never get their share
I got left behind cause I wasn't even there."

Thirty seconds later, I was well out of the pain cave, gazing at a sunlit strip of fog stretched over the mountains and singing out loud, "All my dreams were just islands in the sky! All my dreams were just islands in the sky ..."

It was a strange boost out of nowhere. My hands warmed back up. I climbed hard and shot down the hill, spraying snow and slush at 40 mph. I felt much stronger and even rode a bit faster fighting the headwind home than I had felt coasting with it on the way out. I had spent most of the morning believing I was doomed for this coming summer, but the climb reminded me that success in cycling is still, for me at least, mostly a mental battle.

But I still have a lot of work to do.

Pictures from the drive home

No time to bike or blog these past couple of days. It's not even Hell week at work yet. That's next week. Some day I hope to look back on this span of months as "perspective." Right now I'm just hoping that three years of endurance training gets me through.

At least I had a good dinner break ...

Snow line

Egan Drive

Sandy Beach

There's always tomorrow.

Feels good to come back

Date: March 22
Mileage: 38.2
March mileage: 144
Temperature upon departure: 38

I intended to stick to roads for a while, but the trail looked irresistible where it branched away from the highway. Packed by a steady flow of feet and still firm in the late morning, it cut a six-inch deep line through the snow-crusted woods. It was so narrow that both pedals scrapped against the sides - true winter singletrack - but so smooth and flowing that I could navigate my rigid-fork mountain bike with ease. I breathed in large gulps of air, tasting warmth and fresh moisture. Light from the noon sun streamed through clouds directly overhead. Spring thaw has begun.

I wove through the woods, lost in thoughts about mountain biking and summer. I dropped down the moraine and rolled onto the lake. The narrow trail became bumpier - less traveled - and the walkers had inexplicably tracked a series of tight, hairpin turns across the wide-open lake ice. In the midst of a hard maneuver, I rolled right over a minefield of deep footprints in refrozen slush. I slammed on the breaks and put my good foot down as blood rushed to my head. I felt light-headed, weak and a little bit nauseous, staring right into obvious but also obviously harmless overflow. "Great," I thought, "now I'm going to have to add overflow to my list of fears I overreact to." Also on this list are the open ocean, breaking waves, whitewater and fast-flowing currents. Come to think of it, all of my irrational fears have to do with water.

But I swallowed my overflow phobia and crossed the lake to the face of Mendenhall Glacier.

It seems inevitable that every time someone catches you taking photos of scenic spots, they are going to ask if you want a photo of yourself in front of said spot. It's a nice gesture, but I have mixed feelings about posting a photo of myself modeling the floppy bulk of footgear I need to wear these days to protect my feet from the 40-degree air.

Overflow! Spooky!

The intense blue hue of glacial ice is intriguing, but I find the texture of newly exposed layers truly fascinating. To the touch it feels rough and gritty, like cold sandstone. I like to look for fine particles of crushed sediment encased in the age-old ice, geological layers uncovered by gravity and relentless melt. The face of a glacier is almost uncanny in the way it resembles the wind-eroded rock formations of the Colorado Plateau. Ice and fire.

Can you tell I'm really excited about my monthlong sojourn to the Utah desert? Come mid-May, my blog will probably feature pictures much like the ones above, in shades of red.

Moving on

Date: March 20 and 21
Mileage: 22.1 and 26.7
March mileage: 105.8
Temperature upon departure: 41 and 35

My blog has been a bit boring as of late, so I thought I'd point everyone to some great links on the Web. First is Geoff's exclusive interview with Jeff Oatley, the winner of this year's Iditarod Trail Invitational. The second is the blog of Cory Smith, who competed in the race on skis. He offers a three-part race report full of gripping detail.

Since I returned from Anchorage, several people have asked me what my future is with the Iditarod Trail Invitational. Everybody has either assumed that my frostbite has scared some sense back into me and I'll never return, or that my failure in this year's race will only fire me up more for next year. Both assumptions are untrue. My answer is I'm "probably" not going to enter the ITI in 2010 (emphasis on probably.) This was a decision I had made several months before I froze my foot. My obsession with this race dates back to early 2006, and it's had a strong grip on me ever since. I've never quite been able to pin down the reasons why. The extreme nature of the race never really fit my personality in the beginning, but my individual growth in the past three years has been largely shaped by it. When old friends of mine asked me how I could have possibly found my way into endurance cycling, I would jokingly blame my direct descension from Mormon pioneers. My great-great-and-so-on grandparents dragged wooden handcarts across the untrammeled American plains. If ever there was a gene for enduring a good slog, I inherited it from them.

But in my mind, that wasn't a real answer for why the Iditarod Trail had such a forceful grip on my imagination. I thought I'd find my reasons by finally just lining up with the race in 2008, but my experiences on the trail largely created more questions than answers. I recall several times while slogging through the sugar snow on the Kuskokwim River, long after I had taken to holding out-loud conversations with myself, saying, "This is absurd. This is the bone-dry-desolate-frigid-middle-of-nowhere. What are you doing out here?" So I spent a good portion of the summer writing personal experience essays based on that exact question, which I eventually turned into a book. That helped usher the race out of my head for a short period of the wet, gray summer. But come September and the first hint of cold weather, I was itching to get my name on the ITI roster again.

The grip of my obsession started to loosen somewhat shortly after I made the commitment. I think part of the problem is I was having so much fun training. I started to ask myself, legitimately I believe, if having that same big scary goal at the end of it all was really necessary. I truly enjoy the focus, drive and energy involved in preparing for a race like this, but I started to wonder if I could direct that focus toward something new. As I looked to make changes in my life and "something new" became more of a possibility, I began to divide my focus, and it was freeing. In doing so, I actually became more excited about the ITI, the "grand tour" of the stunning Iditarod Trail and a tough expedition that stood to further boost my body and mind toward my new goals. From that point, I approached the race much more in "tour mode" with less pressure on myself to finish than I felt last year. But because this race still takes so much intense focus, gear prep and hard training just to survive the thing, it felt right to tell myself the the 2009 race would be my last, at least for a while. Then next winter could be more about unwinding - snowboarding more often and actually taking the time to learn to cross-country ski, and bike train to get the sub-20-hour Susitna 100 finish that I really deserve. :-)

Then came the big failure of 2009. I certainly don't blame the race for it. I'm pretty much done even blaming myself for it. Fluke things happen every day, everywhere. After I worked through the initial pain and disappointment, I was left with this inexplicable but plain sense of closure ... a sort of, "Well, this is how the ITI chapter ends. Now what?"

It's all a bit complicated and hard to explain. And of course I'll never say that I'll never go back to the Iditarod Trail. I may even end up back there next year. But for now I'm thinking dirt and sand, heat and elevation, and even though my emotional involvement so far doesn't rise to the level of obsession, I'm happy with my goals.

I've been somewhat cryptic about my summer plans thus far because the fact is I'm still injured, trying by not quite succeeding to keep a holding pattern with my pre-race fitness, and still unable to commit 100 percent. (I learned the hard way with the 2006 Susitna 100 that once something goes up on the blog, it's a done deal.) But, either way, I've put the wheels in motion to go back to the roots of my cycling obsession, which took hold years before the ITI obsession and 24-hour mountain bike races and daylong training rides in snow and ice. In the beginning, all I cared about was traveling between two far-away points on my bicycle. I look forward to being a bike tourist again. And who knows? Maybe those Mormon pioneer genes will pull me through.

First day of spring

Scattered blizzards rolled through Juneau for most of the day - near-white-outs followed by squinting windows of sunlight. I drove to the gym with a high-intensity workout in mind. I've been using my quality time at the gym to catch up on back issues of the New Yorker and read "Desert Solitaire" for the fifth time (but only the second in the 2000s.) In a sign of improvement, I couldn't focus enough to read today ... seeing red spots and streaks of white ... the colors of strength, returning.

After 97 minutes and 1,353 estimated calories burned (yeah, right), I drove home feeling tired but unfulfilled. A rolling white-out filled the air with static and dissipated as quickly as it arrived, and to the south, the Channel shimmered beneath patches of blue sky. The temperature seemed to climb by the minute. I walked toward my house, weight firmly pressed on both feet, and wondered if this was my window. I've been plotting my return to the outdoors for a week now. It will be a while still before I can hike, ski or snowboard ... sadly, all of the activities I had planned to engage in with more fervor once winter cycling season was over. But cycling, where feet are off the ground and don't do much of anything anyway, is actually an ideal activity for a bad foot.

I broached the subject with my doctor yesterday. She regarded the idea in her semi-disapproving way but said as long as I monitored myself for infection or any kind of rapid changes, I could probably do the things I felt comfortable doing, but I should start slow. I'm in wait-and-see mode with any long-term damage, and there's little I can do but wait for my cells to do their thing; my only job is to keep my foot warm, keep it dry, keep it clean, keep it circulating, and avoid doing anything that causes pain. Check.

I ate lunch and prepped my armor - one loose, moisture-wicking nylon sock, one vapor barrier sock, one heavy duty super thick wool sock, my open-toe walking sandal and a brand new pair of NEOS Explorer overboots that I just bought from Geoff. I'm in general not a huge NEOS fan. (Before someone comments about how NEOS could have saved me on Flathorn Lake, I just want to reaffirm that they wouldn't have. My own system was waterproof to my shins and very water-resistant up to my knees, but I punched through the ice into open water at least as deep as my hips, and likely deeper.) But, really, NEOS are good footwear for keeping the toes warm when it's 20 below; they're also good footwear for keeping frostbitten toes warm when it's 40 degrees and partly cloudy with scattered snow showers.

I thought an hourlong ride sounded reasonable. I took Pugsley because he's my only bike in full working order right now. The first pedal strokes up the Douglas Highway were strange - at once dully familiar and exhilarating. The sucker hole in the clouds opened wider and full-spectrum sunlight poured onto the street. I glanced up at the afternoon sun, much higher in the sky than I remember it being. "This is a good thing, getting out," I told myself. "You need vitamin D to grow new skin. Or is that bone?"

Most of the ride passed by semi-consciously, the way you can sometimes drive to the store and have no memory of how you got there. I had a lot of energy in the reserves, but mentally I held back quite a bit, and ended up slipping into autodrive. Strong but tentative. Baby steps. As it turns out, the ride was a pretty good circulation jog. I felt great afterward. When I sit in my office desk for too long, I get "dead foot" feeling, which makes me nervous. And in my experience so far, the only way to return to healthy tingling is to stand up and move. And what better place to move around than where I belong, outside?

I'm not yet ready to just go ahead and start churning out hill intervals and centuries, but I'm more optimistic now that I'll get there in the time I need to be there. Baby steps toward summer. A good way to start out spring.

Yeah spring.

This is shaping up to be a tough month

My company had another one of those employee meetings today. I'm not at liberty to say what was said in the meeting, but let's just say it was another dose of bad news, the worst yet, but certainly not the last in a heavy regiment of bad news.

We were all herded into the press room, a cavernous cement warehouse that's always quiet in the afternoon. The first among us had to wait a while. The walls dripped with anxiety and a fierce silence. Small jokes crackled and dissipated. The air had a finality to it, cold and sterile, like a morgue.

I leaned against a post, unable to stand on both feet. I felt like the one trying not to burst out laughing at a funeral. The morbid urge almost seemed logical. It seems like we're just getting what we paid for in this crazy backward economy of ours, throwing around fake money and goals until neither have much meaning. Funnier yet to be a journalist, part of the very entity trying to carve out some sense in this cold war of financial panic, only to learn we're next in line in a toppling house of cards.

So do you fall down or brace yourself to prop up what is certain to become an unbearable load? Neither option really ends well. Thus, the silence.

After most everyone had filed out of the room, my boss approached me. "Is this the part where you bolt out of the building screaming and I never see you again?" he asked.

"No," I said. "I'm not going to do that. Yet."

He looked up, toward the door. "Why?"

I smiled. "I think you know me well enough by now to know I'm not one of those people motivated by money. Good or bad."

"That's good," he said.

I shrugged. "Or bad."

"And next month?"

"I'm still going," I said. "Either way."

"But you're coming back?"

I smiled. "That seems hugely optimistic at this point, doesn't it? But, yeah, I want to be optimistic."

He shook his head. I didn't envy his expression. It's tough to be a manager in tough times. Better, I think, to be one of the tucked away rank-and-file. "You seem to have a good outlook," he said.

I laughed and held up my right foot, with its thick wool sock hanging out of an ugly medical sandal. "You know, when you have hobbies like mine, regular life never seems that bad."

We returned to our desks, grateful, as they say, to be living and breathing.

The rest will be OK. One frozen-toe step at a time.