This sparkly world

My shoulder is feeling much better today. Still a little stiff and sore, but the "electric shock" pain is gone. I know the prudent course of action would be rest and relaxation, but I have this inability to waste good weather. Call it sun mania. As long as at least three of my limbs are functioning, I am going to find a way to get outside. I will of course dial it back if pain returns, but so far I can't find any evidence that this sleep injury is all that serious. So after a relaxing morning of rotating and rubbing it, I went trail riding.

Last week's rain showers took away most of our town-level snow, which is great, because it means that dirt's back. I have a whole singletrack routine that I like to loop in the Mendenhall Valley, and now that I live out there, the ride doesn't involve the exhaust fumes and highway drudgery of a 20-mile-round-trip commute from Douglas. In fact, once I leave Fritz Cove Road and connect with the Auke Lake trail, I can ride for a few hours on different trails while hardly touching the hard stuff (pavement). Dirt in December. Sometimes I forget about all the little things I have to be thankful for.

Of course, December dirt isn't exactly like August dirt. Frosted and mud-free, it's actually both smoother and grippier than the summer stuff. Then there's the beaver floods. In the summer, they must be avoided at all costs lest you end up waist-deep in foul-smelling sludge with a seized-up bottom bracket. In the winter, they add a whole new level of fun ... on ice! Seriously, you haven't lived until you've connected a couple of studded tires with sheets of frozen floods, squealing like a 2-year-old girl while the thin veneer shatters like plate glass beneath your wheels.

Then, once you clear all those beaver floods you were never willing to splash through during the summer, you find a whole new network of singletrack that you've never ridden before, swooping through a maze of ice-encrusted branches that sparkle like diamonds in the low golden sun.

And cyclists don't like winter? Seriously, I just don't get it.

Dodging the pain

Have you ever pinched a nerve? I think I may have, last night, while I was sleeping. I was tossing and turning in semi-awareness of a murky dream and then I bolted wide awake, vibrating with excrutiating pain that radiated out of my lower right shoulder blade. After several seconds, it went numb, but as soon as I moved, the searing pain shot through my body again, as though my shoulder was hooked up to electric cables triggered by movement. It was early, about 7 a.m., five hours after I went to sleep. I got up and paced around my room, reaching over with my good arm and massaging my back, trying to coax away the streaks of pain that would leave me frozen in place, moaning out loud. If I relaxed, the numbness returned, but not for long. I laid back down. I sat up. I paced some more. Nothing I did brought me any kind of comfort.

A couple hours passed. I read a book, standing, pacing, leaning against the door. The sun came up. The sky was clear and beautiful, and I was annoyed, because I really wanted to get out today. The pain was subsiding, with longer periods of numbness, but discomfort lingered, as did the periods of acute burning sensations. I sat on the bed and tried every position I could think of. I stretched and flexed. I held out my arms and clenched my fists, and as I started to sense a level of comfort, I realized I was perched in a position that was very similar to the one I make while riding my bicycle.

So I went for a bike ride. It will sound totally crazy but standing, sitting, even laying down caused me pain, but I didn't feel a thing as I pedaled up the road. Sometimes I would stand out of the saddle or lean hard into a turn, and the pain would streak through, but as long as I held steady, I felt comfortable. The temperature was 25 degrees - cold therapy. And since I suspected my injury was more annoying than serious, I kept at it, all three and a half hours I had left until I had to get ready for work - about 45 miles.

I'm not saying I believe the bike ride actually helped. As soon as I stepped off the bike at my front porch, the resulting streak of pain was so intense that for a minute I thought I might black out. And I couldn't muster that wherewithal to ignore the pain long enough to actually lift my bike up on the porch, so I just wheeled it behind the house. But I don't think the bike ride necessarily hurt, and it gave me several hours of much-needed relief. I popped some painkillers and my shoulder continued to throb, but the pain subsided over the course of the day. Still not sure what is causing this injury ... maybe it is a delayed reaction to a crash I took onto hard ice on my snow bike yesterday, or maybe I really did pinch a nerve in my sleep.

But the lesson here is, I think, as I work out the kinks in my life, my body is telling me to stay on the bike.

Sunday, Pugsley Sunday

This seems to be inadvertently becoming a tradition ... the last day of the week rolls around and I sleep in, eat a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, finally make an effort to look out the window and note that the weather is actually pretty nice, and head out with Pugsley for a relaxing late morning/early afternoon hunt for rare pockets of snowbiking. A recent long thaw means everything at sea level is pretty much bare. Must climb.

Lake Creek Trail - which in the summer isn't actually a trail, so most everything beneath the snow is undeveloped terrain. Climbing to snow means clearing the myriad obstacles - clumps of frozen muskeg grass, rolling glare ice streams and flake-frosted mud. Much of it involves mountain bike moves as technical as any I've ever tried, on uphill slopes as steep as any I've ever climbed, and yet I try them, despite rather painful falls on hard ground that await me, because I have this delusion that Pugsley is invincible.

I was hoping for more hard crust in the meadows but I guess conditions stayed pretty wintry up there this week. This is my best attempt to ride downhill through the fluff. I'm not sure how much I was still moving when the self-timer clicked.

Elusive winter singletrack. Day-old ski tracks sometimes make great bike trails, but they're so narrow that the swerve-margin is near zero. Skiers usually have dogs that punch deep holes in the track and make it very difficult to hold a straight line.

No matter. Half the fun is in trying. Furrowing my brow, biting my bottom lip and funneling every ounce of available concentration into 30 continuous feet of riding is surprisingly satisfying.

Frost feathers. Today was also the day I discovered that the "super macro" setting on the Olympus Stylus isn't half bad.

But frost has a way of even making the ugliest patches of nutrient-starved muskeg look enticing. The temperature today held steady in the 20s, which feels downright toasty compared to 35 and raining (you'll note in the self portrait that I wore neither a hat nor gloves, at least until I started bombing downhill.) I wish it could be Pugsley Sunday every day.

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