Seattle

After bashing Northwest Airlines because of their shitty service, I now have to plug for Delta--they got our bags onto our connecting flight in 5 minutes. We had the stewardess make everyone stay in their seats (like that ever works) to shove our way from the second-to-last row of the plane up to the door and then sprinted, I mean like heartrate at 180 sprinted--to the other gate for the connecting flight, where they had already given away our seats because they assumed we weren't coming. And they got the bags there anyway. Fantastic.

Anyway, we're now in Seattle. We spent two days doing touristy stuff, and eating fresh cherries, and hanging out with my beagles. Then we decided to go trot up to the Muir campground on the slope of Mt. Rainier. This is 5000 feet over 4.5 miles. I thought it would be significantly steeper, but it was all doable. The path starts at the visitor center, which is at 5400 feet. Apparently, the geniuses who built the visitor center miscalculated, and built a roof that can't handle any snowload. So, when there are 20 feet of snow on the roof, bad things happen. They go through ~$1000 of diesel fuel per day to melt the snow off the roof in the winter. Seems like a bit much, eh? But that is our national park service for ya.

The trail starts, kind of steeply, and its paved. Yes, paved, like asphalt. This is to keep everyone on the same path, but coming down we saw plenty of tourists who felt like they were privileged enough that the signs saying "keep off alpine meadow" didn't apply to them. Eventually the trail is no longer paved, but still very highway-like. We saw two marmots, the first was doing something normal like running across the trail, but the other one showed no fear of these big clomping human animals, and continued to sit there and eat its breakfast of flowers while we took pictures. It probably wants a cut of the profits from selling its picture for postcards or something. Finally we got past the regular tourist turn-around, and the trail becomes an actual mountain trail, and climbs steeply a bit more. Then we got to the snowfields, where the walking gets much easier.

I love walking in steep snow on mountains. Its so monotonous that you can just zone yourself out and you find yourself in your own little world of thoughts and white footsteps in dirty brown and pink snow. Especially when you're only on a snowfield and not a glacier, this is a very enjoyable way to walk. Lift the leg, swing the foot back and kick it into the snow like a pendulum from the knee, stand up on it, repeat with other leg. Slowly, steadily, rhythmically, side-stepping first one way and then the other, and then you get to the top of the little steep part, and trudge on to the next steep part. Those heavy mountaineering boots that seem so unwieldy on the rocks and dirt are completely at home in the snow, and after a while you feel like you're almost part of the mountain. Its a cool feeling. Around Anvil Rock, this big rocky thing that sticks up next to the snowfield, our beautiful sunny day became a lot more cloudy, and we walked into the clouds that were smashing themselves into the mountain and then whooshing over the top of the ridge. Naturally, it got much windier there, and I started wishing that I was wearing appropriate mountaineering pants instead of running shorts... It also started to get whited out. Luckily we were at the beginnings of a more or less marked path up to the campsite at that point, instead of just people randomly walking up a snowfield, so we followed this path up to the little pass, where there were a couple low stone buildings and people with tents.

We waited for my mom, who is probably the fittest mom I know. I can't think of too many moms who can do what she does, all with a smile on her face and poetry in her head. Its usually about a 10 minute wait every hour or so, so we went inside one of the little stone guide buildings to wait, fed her some chocolate, and we headed down. It was cold and windy up top, so we started out moving really fast. We could see enough through the cloud that I was confident we were going the right way--this was nothing like those whiteouts I've been in where you get completely disoriented and can't tell up from down or left from right because everything is so white. The snow was nice and dirty, it being July and all, with plenty of strawberry snow for variation. The clouds weren't that thick, either, otherwise I don't think we would have gone all the way up. So, we started down, and as it got steeper we did a lot more boot skiing, which is wickid fun.

Then we hit the first butt-slide. This is where other people have slid down on their butts and made a nice channel, sort of like a waterslide, down the slope. We had brought some plastic bags, so we sat on those, and you picked up speed really quickly. It was so much fun! so we went bouncing and whooping our way down the mountain. What had taken ~2 hrs to go up took ~30 min to come down. Eventually my butt got too cold and wet, so I started boot skiing a lot more, but my mom and Ed were having a blast butt-sliding.

It was kind of sad to get off the snow, because suddenly your boots feel heavy again, and you clomp downhill without sliding at all, and its a lot slower. Soon we began to see the tourists on their afternoon walks, most of them looking exhausted and wearing flipflops and stopping to sit down a lot. We saw a couple groups of people who had done the whole mountain; that sounds like it would be a fun trip. There are some tricky crevasses to get around above the campsite, so they recommend doing it with a guide, but my dad thinks he wants to join one of those groups at some point this summer. Hopefully he'll have good weather.

Yesterday we rented road bikes and my dad took us on his favorite 60 miler. We went around lake washington, which is the lake to the east of Seattle. We started out on this bike path that goes along rt 90... just keep pedaling and you'll get home! We got to Mercier island and did a lap on this really pretty windy road that contoured along a hillside with views of the lake in a forest. Very nice. Crossed the other bridge on 90 and loopety-looped around Lake Samammish to another bike path that took us back to Seattle. Nice ride.

Now we're off to the olympic peninsula for some walking and eating and the usual stuff with dogs. Hopefully it won't rain too much.

I realized three things this morning.
1. Its easy to get up early to train if you're excited about the workout.
2. I GET FREE LUNCH!
3. My arms are so sore that its hard to wash my hands.

And now I go to Seattle. So, no races. And, I miss mt. snow. But, I think seeing my parents and the beagles and being a tourist and eating mountains of sushi and getting my legs ridden off by my dad and climbing big mountains and eating more sushi makes it worth it. Good luck to those of you who actually race in the summer!

So, I normally don't write about training rides/runs, because, well, they're just not all that interesting. Unless I took some awesome pictures, there just isn't much point in sharing my experience of turning the pedals over and over to the giant world of the internets. Because who cares? But last night... that was almost epic. Particularly for a weeknight. Epic things aren't supposed to happen on weeknights!

Christian, a Colby cyclist, is in town all summer, so we got together to ride. Christian is crazy. He might even be described as sketchy by people who have raced with him. Most importantly, the kid can f#*&@n HAUL on a bike. I think my first mistake was to suggest doing a 4hr ride with someone who is decidedly faster than I am. The second mistake would be to actually DO that four hour ride. Luckily, Colin came along so I knew I wasn't the only one suffering.

I planned out a route, ~60 miles, that went out and about and circled west of 495 before heading back east. I even went to the length of printing out the map. This was a good thing. We started a little on the late side, 5pm, and I quickly decided that I do not ever want to ride with Christian in traffic again. He's only been in Boston for a month, so I gotta give him some credit, but seriously, he is going to get killed or badly hurt one of these days. We finally get out past all the traffic onto 117. There is a slight tailwind, but we're moving at 26mph. Which is really fast in my book. The plan was to take this road out to past rt 62 before we hit up some of the smaller roads, and this plan was a good one. And then, on one of the smaller roads, we got to a fork, while we were going down a hill relatively fast, and we took the left fork, and we should have taken the right hand one. But, since it was uphill to turn around, the lazy cyclists just kept riding, assuming that we'd be able to find a way back to our original route. Oops.

Eventually we wound our way back to 117, realized where we were, kept going the wrong way, and then changed course completely, going south through Marlboro. I was cooked at this point. We hit a little hill and it was just explosions going off in each quad. This happened on every little bump that passed for a hill afterwards. We determined that whimper pace is when the heart rate is in level 2 or so, but the legs have exploded beyond help. We got to rt 20 finally, and started working our way home. It hurt. Then it got dark. Colin had a blinkie, I had a white light thingy that almost passed for a light, Christian naturally had no lights, punk. Then Colin's light fell off. Now I was starting to feel kind of sketched out.

We got down the hill into Wellesley, and made it to comm. ave with no mishaps. Rode the carriage road back up the hill, getting onto the grass any time a car came down that street. I don't think I've ever been so glad to get home from a ride. My legs were cooked, but it was more the mental exhaustion of not knowning when a car was going to slam into you that wore me out. Oof. It ended up being 3.5 hrs, ~65 miles, although I clocked 80 for the day after going to work and back. That was SIGNIFICANTLY faster than I normally ride... So yeah, between the darkness, the humidity, the lostness, and the speed, I feel like that almost counts as epic.

"That was a god damned good show"

According to some old guy watching ~$800 of fireworks go off, in time to music, with the push of a button. Ahhh, the Landgrove fourth of July party. Food, fireworks, and fun. Despite the rain.

And then we took Jackie on her first 40 mile ride, which cinq-tuppled her longest ride ever. There was no crying, and fun was had by all. Although she might just be a good actress. I hope she decides to ride her bike again. Maybe starting at 5:30pm wasn't such a great idea.

And then the car tried to die (again). This is after I backed through some tree branches, caught some branches in Ed's bike (its a big bike!), and broke my roof rack. I didn't think I'd hit the tree branches that hard... I go through them all the time with my bike on the roof and its fine! Stupid rain weighting them down! At least the bike stayed on the roof for the rest of the drive. We'll see how salvageable the rack is...

Inner workings of my brain

During waking hours, its something like this:
60% Food
17% Skiing/biking/orienteering/training
10% Other outdoor fun
5% The weather
3% Obsessive planning/my future
3% Random thoughts
2% The task at hand (whatever that may be)

A beagle's thought breakdown could be:
65% Food
15% Walks/sniffercising
10% Getting attention
8% Napping
3% Playing

I see some correlations. I want to go take a nap in the sun now...

Putney MTB

This race went oodles of times better than the last one. That was probably helped by the fact that it wasn't really technical, and although it climbed a lot, the downhills were straight-forward enough that you could recover relatively well. The course rode a lot like a ski course, which makes sense given that most of the trails were ski trails. It started with some fast single track, and then climbed for a while in a way that made you think you weren't actually climbing, but rather that something was rubbing in a way that was seriously slowing you down. Then you got some downhills, some tricky bits where I almost fell off, and then a long climb that they called heartbreak hill. Go down heartbreak hill, back up the other side, out into a meadow with an awesome view, and down to start the last hill into the finish. A fair bit of climbing, but as I said, fun fast downhills that let you recover decently well.

I got a ride with Jess and Tal, who are experts, which meant I was there at 9:30 for a 2pm race. yay for sitting in the sun all day and then trying to race. I pre-rode the course, and decided that not biking for two weeks doesn't help your legs go round and round in circles. In fact, they hurt, a lot, and I was in granny gear and wondering why it wasn't easy enough. The experts went off, and I sat around in the feed zone waiting for them. Linnea went down hard early on, she hyperextended her knee and banged herself up pretty good, but she said it was easier to ride than walk, so finished the race (4 laps). HARDCORE.

My race was fun, and I only fell off my bike once. I had a spectacular save in the same spot next lap. There isn't that much to say about this race, except that each lap, the hills felt bigger and my legs hurt more. I was in fourth coming through the first lap, and decided that I could make up time, and maybe that wasn't such a great idea because my legs didn't have much to give after putting in a hard effort. My derailleur started skipping a bunch, like 2-3 gears at a time, about halfway through second lap. This frustrated me, because I had made sure it could get into the granny gear (which it hadn't been doing during warmup), and I believe as a result of that I screwed up everything else. But new brake pads were AWESOME; I can slow down now! Overall, the downhills were enjoyable, and after a dip in the connecticut river and some soup at the Putney food co-op, I was feeling pretty happy. Ready to do this crazy sport again!

You know you need new rollerski wheels when...

These wheels were originally the same size. ~1300 miles was all it took.