SKAN 24

“Why?”

Our six-year old neighbor looked up with a furrow in her brow.  C and I were unloading the car, parading multiple arm loads of gear – skis, poles, sleeping bags, coolers, glow sticks, and other essentials – past her and into our home.  Our neighbor asked what we were doing and we explained that we had just spent the weekend at Kincaid, skiing for 24 hours.

“Why?”  She quite possibly thought that sounded like the dumbest thing she had ever heard.

I think we gave her a George Mallory “Because it is there” kind of response, but if we’re going to be honest the only reason why we signed up for and participated in the SKAN (“Ski Kincaid All Night”) 24 hour race was because of the poster.

It is a pretty cool poster.  I noted in an earlier post about the Tour of Anchorage that C won an age group medal in the Tour.  A couple of weeks ago, she stopped by the NSAA office to pick up her hardware, and took the opportunity to ask if they had any extra copies of the SKAN poster lying around.  “Well, would you like to meet the artist?”

I don’t know that C really wanted to meet the artist, but there is no polite way meet such a question with a “No, I just want a damn poster.”  So C was brought back to meet the artist, who, as it turned out, was also half of the entire volunteer squad of two that was organizing and directing the race.  C complimented her work, described how we had seen the posters from previous years and how she had always wanted a copy, and slyly asked if there were extra copies floating around looking for a home.

“Well, have you done the race?”

“Done the race?  Good God no.”

“Well, if you sign up, we’ll have extra copies at the bib pick up.”

A short while later I got an e-mail at work.  “Scott, we have to do the SKAN.”  Um, ok.

For those unfamiliar with the 24-hour race format, such races are endurance events that ask the question, “how far can you go over the course of a day?”  I don’t pretend to know the deep history of 24-hour racing, but to the best of my knowledge they rose in popularity as mountain bike events, at least in this country.  I know there are some 24-hour runs that take place.  And here in Anchorage, we have a 24-hour ski race.  Typically a race director will set a course of some moderate distance and the participants will have 24-hours to try and do as many laps of the course as they can.  Most laps wins.  Pretty easy, at least until your legs fall off or you abandon the course to chase pink elephants through the dark and fall in a lake.  Then things tend to get hairy.

Having decided to ski, we still had options, and could have opted for 6- or 12-hour events, either solo as part of a team.  Showing an obscene lack of common sense, we signed up for the 24-hour solo category.  Our preparation consisted mostly of forgetting that the race was coming up and then frantically packing ten burritos, some bananas, and a bag of energy bars and calling it good.  My race strategy was simply to start skiing, eat a lot, take lots of breaks, and see if I could manage not to cry.

We pulled up to the race venue a little after 8:00 am and staked out a piece of real estate in the wax bunker, a cavernous cement monstrosity used by ski clubs for weight training and setting up wax benches.  For the SKAN, it doubled as base camp.  C and I stretched out our sleeping bags and wondered what we were in for.  Grant, who we knew from the ANR ski program and who, albeit unbeknownst to us at the time, was about to set a new course record, set up camp next to us.  We started to eat and wait for the launch.  In due course the whole lot of us wandered down to the stadium, stepped into our skis, and at 10:00 am started the journey.

The start of a 24-hour race is something to behold for its lack of excitement.  Off the front, skiers on teams who will get lots of rest between laps launch off the line in a jumpy wave of frantic double poling, but the soloists amble forward in no hurry to get anywhere because, let’s face it, we have all day.  A photo of the start gives the lay of the land.  I’m in an orange jacket way in the back.  C is next to me, but mostly out of view.

Finishing the first lap, C was all smiles.

 

In comparison, I looked a little concerned, which in and of itself should be concerning as a close look at my watch shows that I’m only 25 minutes into a 24 hour race.

We continued to ski laps, each one characterized by big hills separated by small hills.  We skied up and down the contours of Kincaid park, stopping after each lap to drink a little water, eat a little snack, and in one instance to pull over and re-wax our skis.  In due course we were ravenous.  Up the rise a picnic had formed.  “Aha! They are serving us lunch!  Fantastic,” we proclaimed, and hiked up the hill to get in line.  After filling a plate with two kinds of potato salad, a flaky meat filled pie, and a cookie, we started to notice a pattern in those around us.  Everyone was wearing blue jackets.  Each jacket was labeled “APU,” a local ski team and training club.

“Umm, is this the APU ski team spread?” we asked while staring at the ground and kicking clumps of snow about sheepishly with our ski boots.

“Yes.”

We learned an important lesson that day: stolen food tastes oh so sweet.

Sufficiently fortified with simple carbohydrates, I continued to ski and C went to take a longer rest.  C started documenting her race with a series of self portraits.  Here, after lap 4:

And here, looking similar after lap 5:

And looking hungry after lap 6:

And after lap 9:

Yes, Christie skied herself into the emergency room.  We had reconnected on her 8^th and 9^th laps after skiing our own races following the poached APU lunch, taking breaks as needed.  At 4:00 pm, the race switched from the first course to the second (we skied each course for six hours, first in one direction and then in reverse, effectively giving participants four different courses to help mitigate boredom).  The second course looped about the south side of Kincaid, returning to the stadium via a long climb called Hair Pin.  It was exhausting.  C declared after eight laps that her body was telling her to take a longer break, but she headed out again, hoping to get ten laps in before dark.  Back in the stadium, though, she was having trouble catching her breath.  A likely combination of fatigue, cold air, and exertion brought on an asthma attack.  Not too much later, C decided that a trip to the ER was in order.

Sometime after 7:00 and after nine hours of skiing, I packed C into the car and we made the trip across town.  An ER nurse did the intake.  “Have you had any exercise today?”

Does skiing 58 kilometers count?  We had to explain the SKAN.  “Wait, you’re skiing all night?  Why?  Is this for a charity or something?”

No, it isn't.  Why indeed.

 

Sufficiently pumped full of steroids, the hospital released C back into the night.  She wisely decided her race was done.  But mine kept going.

I was back on the snow at 11:00 pm, some thirteen hours after the race start, with ten laps done in daylight prior to the ER visit.  We were now on course three, skiing the first course backward.  Headlamps were required.  The long downhills I remembered from the morning had turned into long climbs, with a fun and fast descent of Elliott’s climb the reward, a trail generally only skied in the uphill direction.  The narrow reach of our headlamps served to block out everything but the stretch of trail ahead.  I skied the first lap of the day where I did not see a single other body on the trail.  At 2:00, I plodded back to the bunker for a burrito and a nap.

Sleeping in the bunker was surreal.  We’ve all been there at one time or another.  Bodies over-tired, mind both exhausted and restless, unable to calm itself and unable to make sense.  Shifting in and out of sleep and waking dreams.  Difference being that in the bunker you were liable to close your eyes and open them to find that a new body had crawled up and fallen asleep at your feet:

Conversations would come and go, people would sleep and rise, eek out another lap.  Grant’s girlfriend, who was running support for his race, would appear and cook up a mug of hot ramen and disappear back into the night.  That ramen fueled Grant to 38 laps (242 km).  I ultimately got up at 6:00 am, sipped some tea, and prepared to head back into the early morning, still well short of 38 laps.

It turns out that a storm had moved in.  The wind was blowing a fresh inch or two of snow around the stadium, and flakes continued to fall at a steady pace.  The storm would ultimately produce between 12 and 15 inches of new snow across the Anchorage bowl, but thankfully the full brunt held off until late on Sunday.  We were back on the second course, tackling the hair pin turns for which the Hair Pin climb was named in reverse at alpine speeds on skinny skis.  At least it felt like alpine speeds at the time. 

The falling snow captured plenty of ambient light, which was a good thing as my headlamp proved to be a distraction, acting like high-beams on a car in a snow storm.  With the lamp on, all I could see were individual flakes rushing forward, the trail itself lost in a continually shifting milky way of falling snow.  However, with the lamp off, the new snow did as new snow does: muffled sounds, smoothed the rough edges, blanketed the trails in contemplation.  It also slowed the skis, making for much more work.  But the sun was starting to rise, birds awoke and sung, and spirits rose… and then fell.  The trail on return skied up and over Little Niagra, a short hill always skied as a descent.  Coming the other way, the hill was a vertical wall that I had to somehow surmount.  One step after another, because I was reduced to steps on Little Niagra and unable to get any glide from my skis at all, I was at least grateful it was a short hill.

Back at the stadium, our race directors were cooking waffles.  More people started to emerge from tents and from the bunker, putting skis back on for a final go at the race.  Sometime after nine, I poled out of the stadium for the last time.  Roughly 40 minutes later – appropriately the slowest lap of the race for me – I came in and crossed the finish line.

Note the 1,000 yard stare, eyes turned inward, all attention turned to forward momentum and pain management.  In my mind, my form was perfect: weight transferred from side to side, perfectly aligned on a flat ski, arms powerful and well timed.  In short, I looked like the male version of Marit Bjorgen:

Take a close look at the photo above and the photo below of my actual triumphant finish, and judge for yourself how well I fit my mental image:

In any case, I was soon told that I did not need to ski anymore, and I reacted appropriately:

And here are C and I are once it was all said and done:

I ultimately skied 16 laps, which amounted to 101 km (about 63 miles).  Total time on skis was between 9 and 10 hours.  I slept for 3 hours.  The trip to the ER took about 4 hours all together.  That leaves about 6 to 7 hours for eating, sitting around, and waxing skis, i.e. wasted time.  Clearly, there is a lot of room for improvement next year.  C stuck around and stayed awake for the night, helping to cheer me on, doing what she could around the stadium to help out the race, and distributing glow-stick necklaces to those in need.  We were both exhausted, and ducked out of the award ceremony early.  We went to bed at 6:00 Sunday night (after struggling to stay up that late), slept a solid 12.5 hours, and would probably still be sleeping today if we had not had to get up and go to work.

A public thanks to our race directors, who appeared to do, well, basically everything, and a thanks to the race sponsors (although I would be surprised if any of the above happen upon this web page to receive their thanks).  The good SKAN folks are reporting by way of summary that 137 racers, a number that includes 12 24-hour soloists, skied a total of 4,071 miles, and I am glad that C and I got to contribute to that total to the best of our ability.  The race was a lot of fun, although once you figure in the ER bill (which has yet to arrive), the total costs (registration, new headlamps, food, medical care) probably make it seem ridiculous to participate on either a dollar per mile, dollar per lap, or dollar per hour basis.  To make it more affordable next year, we will probably aim to either eat less or skip the ER room altogether.  We’ll research it over the summer, see what makes the most sense, and report back to you.

Untitled

A preview of our weekend:

If you want something done right . . .

You have all noticed it, right?  Bright sunshine?  Melting snow?  The fresh smell of a winter’s worth of dog poop thawing out all at once?  That smell of poop can only mean two things.  First, Spring is almost here.  And second, the good folks at Febreeze should have done their homework before naming a scent “Alaskan Springtime.”

Well, maybe three things: spring, poop, and the Tour of Anchorage.  The Tour is an annual point-to-point race through the middle of Anchorage and, in my mind, marks the end of the ski season.  Not that we’re done skiing after the Tour.  Heck, we’re not even done racing (see http:// http://www.skan24.blogspot.com).  Even in a relatively poor snow year like we’ve had this year we can still look forward to groomed trails at least into April.  But nevertheless, with the Tour done, the ski season is done.  This is probably a good thing, as it minimizes the risk of my again sabotaging C’s skis.

As you may or may not know, cross country skiing is a mix of skill, fitness, and wax.  It is not a simple matter of purchasing skinny skis and starting to slog, you have to prepare those skis.  And not just once, but (ideally, albeit rarely in practice) multiple times over the course of a season in order to match your skis to conditions.  Cycling fans may equate “preparation” with doping, but in this case preparation means waxing.  It is a ritual that can be taken to an extreme, but even at its simplest requires picking an appropriate glide wax for the temperatures.  Pick the wrong wax and you can turn an otherwise fast pair of skis into long strips of Velcro that grab and hold on to passing snow crystals like a child to his mother’s knee on the first day of kindergarten.

Luckily, for big events, the major wax companies each have local representatives who pay attention to the weather and provide wax recommendations with the expectation that we, the skiing public, will dutifully purchase what they, our corporate overlords, say we should.  The Tour always takes place on a Sunday, and this year, as in previous years, Saturday was in part given over to waxing.  I searched on line for Swix’s recommendations.  C furrowed her brow at what I found.  “Purple?” she asked (for convenience, wax manufacturers use different colors for different temperature ranges).

“Purple,” I said with confidence.

Note that C and I may disagree on the details of what transpired next.  I make no pretense that I am providing a balanced accounting here.  This is my blog.  If C wants her own forum, she can start her own blog or respond in the comments.  Nevertheless, I assure you that what follows is exactly how it went down.  After finding the wax recommendation, I announced that I would go to our local ski shop to dutifully buy wax consistent with the recommendations of the professionals.  I turned to C.  “My dear,” I said, “I am prepared to leave our home and drive some distance to spend our hard earned cash on PRECISELY THE WAX THAT WE WERE JUST DISCUSSING.  Would you like to come?  I remind you, this will be your opportunity to PROVIDE VALUABLE INPUT INTO THE WAX THAT WE HAVE AVAILABLE WHEN, LATER TODAY, IT IS TIME TO WAX OUR SKIS.”

C was sitting in front of a very large TV that I did not even know we owned.  She looked up over a bag of pork rinds and let out a short snort of air through her nose.  “Can’t you see I’m watching my stories?  What do I want to be leaving the house for?  Just get on out and leave me in peace.”  She then turned the volume up, her attention divided between the screen and rinds, my entreaty forgotten.

I took my leave, bought some wax, and came home.  C had polished off the pork rinds and appeared to be well into a forty-ounce bottle of cheap malt liquor, perhaps her second as I did not remember the empty in the corner being there when I left.  I began setting up what passes for a waxing bench in our house, but is really just a couple of clamps put on our kitchen table and a bunch of newspapers that we hope will capture the mess.  I again turned to C.  “My dear,” I began, “I am now going to wax my skis.  As you know, since we looked at the Swix wax recommendation together and I then proceeded to leave the house for the sole purpose of buying wax consistent with that recommendation, I will be using PRECISELY THE WAX WE HAVE DISCUSSED.  Did you want to wax your own skis, or did you want me to wax your skis as well?  Please be advised that if I wax your skis, I will be applying PRECISLEY THE WAX WE DISCUSSED to your skis as well as mine.”

C, roused by my voice, shook her head to try and clear the malt-liquor haze.  “Where have you been?” she asked.  “What?  Wax?  Yeah, whatever, just wax my damn skis and shut up.  And get me another forty while you’re up.”  Her chin fell to her chest, a half eaten piece of fried-chicken forgotten in her lap. 

I proceeded to wax both of our race day skis.  I spent hours, ironing, scraping, polishing, back and forth along the grain, creating a canvas of speed and performance, the base saturated with perfection and love.  I took the skis out and walked them a few blocks to Chester Creek, a portion of the trail used in the Tour.  I held the skis aloft and cried, “Behold!”  The snow cowered, individual crystals trampling one another in their attempt to flee from the power contained in the skis, the perfect wax.

Later that night, as C woke up and began scouring the kitchen for left over pizza or a can of Spaghetti-Os, she did thank me for waxing.

“Thanks for waxing my skis,” she said.  “Now, what did you put on them?”

“Purple.”

Color rushed to C’s cheeks.  “Purple?  Purple?!  You put purple on my skis?!”

“Yes, the wax recommended by Swix, precisely as we discussed on multiple occasions over the course of the day.”

“Let me see that recommendation,” C roared.  I took her to the computer, and pulled up the Swix recommendation I had been relying on (which, by the by, is located at http://www.tourofanchorage.com/2009/SwixWax.pdf).  It took C no time at all to notice what you, the blog reader, may have also noticed right away just from the hyperlink.

“This recommendation is from 2009!”

“Ummm,” I managed.

“2009!” C repeated.  Suffice to say, over the course of the discussion that followed, C made it abundantly clear that if it had been up to her, she would NOT have used purple wax.  Chances are good I will not be given the opportunity to wax her skis again.  In my defense, I didn’t even know they had an internet in 2009, much less would have been posting wax recommendations.

Despite what I might characterize as an insignificant wax snafu, the Tour was a good day on skis for both C and I.  The race is run at three different distances: 25k, 40k, and 50k.  You may recall that C and I have swapped back and forth between the 40k and 25k over the last couple of years depending on how we individually judged our fitness and ability at the time to ski the longer distance without breaking into tears.  C’s work schedule kept her off of skis for a good portion of January and February, so she slotted herself in the 25k.  I signed up for the 40k.  C brought home an age-group silver medal (her second, with a prior age group gold in the 40k in 2011), while I toiled in obscurity in the middle of the pack (yet managing to shave 13 minutes off of my time from last year).  We don’t question whether faster skis would have brought C home the gold.  It is best not to poke at that wasp’s nest. 

A Breed Apart

On the sliding scale of interesting things that happen in the world, the recent meteor blast over Russia’s Urals ranks pretty high, at least from the perspective of a distant observer who does not count himself among those who were injured.  As an event that is over a week old by now, it has largely passed now from the newspapers and become a distant memory.  Curiously enough, a large portion of the media coverage was not focused on the physical science aspects of the story or probing the inherent questions of our mortality as a species.  (Anyone seeking a brief but sobering overview of the planet’s impact history could do worse than Bill Bryson’s treatment in A Short History of Nearly Everything, with his implied and express conclusion that our time is imminent—at least on a geologic timescale.)  The media rather turned its attention to the important question of why so many Russians captured dash-cam videos of the meteor blast.  See http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/15/why-are-there-so-many-dash-cam-videos-of-the-meteor.  The short answer: dash-cams have become a necessary defense to living with the worst drivers on the planet.  As the above-linked article points out, “Russia’s motorists are a different breed.”

I cannot argue with the Washington Post’s position.  I spent a couple of years between graduate school and law school living and working in New Jersey at a time in my life when I was an active climber.  I was a member at my neighborhood climbing gym, where I met Dimitri.  Dimitri was a solid climbing partner.  We were well matched and spent a lot of time together on plastic in the gym, on rock at the Gunks, and on ice from the Catskills up to the White Mountains.  Dimitri was well connected with the Russian ex-pat community in New Jersey, a community that was, as near as I could tell, made up exclusively of computer programmers and climbers.  As a result, it was not unusual to find myself on climbing trips with a number of Russians, often car pooling.  On those occasions when I found myself in the passenger seat, I quickly learned that, to the Russians, there was no gap in traffic too small to accelerate through and no excuse not to pass no matter the absence of passing lane or sightlines.  We would pull up at the Gunks, my forearms warmed up and ready to climb from having spent the entire commute gripped tightly to the grab handle.

But truly it was not just their driving that established the Russians as a different breed.  These guys could suffer.  Case in point: ice climbing in the White Mountains.  Dimitri and I set off from New Jersey to New Hampshire one winter with the goal of climbing Pinnacle Gully on Mt. Washington, a popular ice climb up the highest mountain in the Northeast, a mountain made famous for being the location of the highest wind-speed ever measured on the planet.  After a day spent climbing waterfall ice in the vicinity and a night spent in a nearby hostel, we woke up at 4 am, commuted to the state park visitors’ center, shouldered packs, and set off on the approach hike to Huntington’s Ravine.  It was cold.  The air temperature was -20 F, and the wind picked up as we worked our way up the approach trail, feet chilled inside double plastic mountaineering boots, bodies draped in down.  The last part of the approach was exposed to the full brunt of the wind as we crossed the open ravine to the base of the climb’s first pitch, a rope-length’s worth of steep ice. 

We dropped our packs, slid into harnesses, attached crampons to our boots, and started flaking the rope.  We were interrupted by gusts of wind that would grab hold of anything unanchored—packs, a helmet—and send it sailing back down the slope we had just hiked.  Everything needed to be tied off and anchored to screws hastily sunk in the hard pack snow, not sufficient to hold a fall but able to keep our gear from disappearing into the open bowl below us.  I was chilled.  More than chilled, in fact.  We had stopped moving to rack up, and stowed the down to be hauled up in climbing packs.  My hands had numbed and it was difficult to maneuver harness buckles, rack quick draws, tie knots, or otherwise do anything useful.  While living in Fairbanks, I had spent time walking to and from school at forty-below.  I took climbing trips to the Alaska Range, deep in winter, finding ice that shattered with a single tool swing, brittle from weeks of sub-arctic conditions.  I was cold on those trips.  It was unavoidable.  But I had never been as cold as I was standing at the base of Pinnacle Gully, face in the wind, pack flopping like a prayer-flag from an ice screw.  The wind was crushing my spirit.  It hurt to move my arms.  I could imagine no fate worse than having to actually start to climb, alternately draining blood from my hands and arms with each over-head swing of my ice tools on lead or standing motionless on belay, slowly paying rope, trying to focus on my partner rather than my shivering, tied off to a pair of screws and unable to stomp my feet to generate warmth.  I passed an internal barrier in the waiting, overcame my reluctance to let my partner down, and bailed.

“Dimitri, this is fucked.  I’m too cold.  I can’t do this.”

This is never an easy statement to make.  Climbing really is a partnership, two people, tied together, one unable to proceed without the other.  Ideally, when conditions are bad, you look each other in the eye and silently reach agreement: we’re out of here.  Neither lets the other down; both want to turn tail and head for warmth.  You’ll never find that ideal climbing with a Russian.  No matter how bad conditions are, only one of you will quit.  And in fact, Dimitri was ready, eager in fact, to soldier on.  Luckily, another party had arrived, a group of three, and similarly started preparing to climb.  By matter of coincidence, Dimitri recognized one of the three, a group—as it turned out—of Russians from New Jersey.  Computer programmers.  Dimitri digested my failure and came to a quick resolution.

“Ok, give me minute,” he said, and trotted across the bowl to consult with his countrymen.  In climbing, two teams of two move more efficiently than a single team of three.  Dimitri made the arrangements to join with the other three Russians, none of whom thought it was too cold to continue, all of whom embraced the suffering.  “No problem,” Dimitri said, returning from his consultation to grab his gear, “I’ll see you back at the visitors’ center.”

And that was that.  I hiked back out the approach while the four Russians roped up and started the ascent.  I imagine they had a good laugh at the soft westerner, bred and raised weak, afraid of the cold.  No matter.  Before long I was tucked back into the trees, protected to a degree from the wind.  And I was moving, heart pumping, blood flowing.  I started to warm, my spirit rising with my core temperature.  I ultimately settled into the visitors’ center, unprepared for a day-long stint of inactivity.  I read and re-read every brochure I could put my hands on.  I found a magazine, read it from cover-to-cover too.  I ate my trail food, drank from my thermos, and tried to nap.  And in time, later than expected, Dimitri and team appeared back at the visitors’ center.

Am I disappointed to have missed the climb?  Not really.  Among them, one team member dropped an ice ax, unable to maneuver it in the cold, the tool skittering off into the void below the climb.  The wind was hammering the Alpine Garden (as the area atop the gully is known), creating whiteout conditions.  Bodies went numb.  They struggled to stay standing, knocked by gusts of wind, as they tried to find the descent.   No one looked good as they came in out of the cold, eyes turned within, skin tanned like leather, bodies stripped of all moisture by the wind.  They suffered.  But then they would have had it no other way.  Just another quality day in the mountains for four programmers from New Jersey.

Musings at Year's Beginning

The New Year came and passed, with the the transition from 2012 to 2013 occurring while I was asleep in Tucson, Arizona.  C and I cobbled together a trip south for two primary purposes: visit my parents, who I had not seen in a long while, and enjoy some warmth and sunshine.  I'll address the second goal first by raising the following question for public philosophical consumption: In what kind of cruel world is it warmer in Anchorage than southern Arizona?  We woke up everyday to face unusually cold temperatures for the Sonorran desert, while Anchorage experienced unseasonable warmth.  Frankly, I was just as glad to miss the thaw.  I assure you, temperatures in the forties are no fun in January in Anchorage.  Our snow turns to ice, our ski trails turn to ice rinks, and our moods sour appreciably.  But I had been hoping for soul-restoring heat, which the good people of Tucson had apparently put back into storage for our visit, perhaps out of a misplaced desire to make us feel at home.  At least the sun came out and we reveled in its brightness.

My folks came over from their home some four hours further east to meet C and I for the duration.  We waited until late in the year to piece together our plans and had no available way of flying near their home at any reasonable price, so settled on Tucson as a convenient location to meet.  We spent the week sight-seeing, eating, and visiting.  C and I got out to run on local trails - serpents of dirt winding through forests of cacti - and did one hike through the desert.  But mostly we just sat around looking at one another, asking over and over, "Where do you want to eat?"

(With my parents, after wondering where we should eat lunch but before we started wondering where to eat dinner.)

If the question was posed to me the answer was usually, "somewhere that serves tacos."  And we did find a few places to trade our hard earned cash for corn tortillas and meat.  It is always a treat to be back in a part of the country where you can find $1.50 tacos served from counters or trucks where English is a second (and often un-mastered language) and the available fillings include head meat.  Of course these days, that means just about anywhere except for Anchorage.  I'll probably never know why is it so hard to make a good and cheap taco in this town.

One consequence of spending a week with my parents is that they inevitably fall back into their roles as disciplinarians.  As such, I spent much of the time as follows:

It is probably a good thing they didn't find the beer I snuck into the condo we rented, because I found out the number of lashings for drinking spiritous liquors was pretty severe (though not as bad as for misbehaving to girls):

This was really the first time I had visited Tucson.  I was in town once before over New Years to see Billy Bacon and the Forbidden Pigs play a special New Year's show.  That trip was a quick surgical strike: arrive, park, rock, depart.  Really the kind of trip that only happens fueled by youth.  On that occasion, I didn't really see any part of town other than the concert venue.  I was struck this time by three things that Tucson has in abundance: bike shops, tattoo shops, and head shops.  I'm pretty sure that any time, day or night, you could find a new Shimano Dura-Ace cassette, get an image to commemorate the 2013 presidential inauguration forever preserved across your chest, or buy a bong.  Curiously, we never went into a single one of the above businesses, although I'm pretty sure Mom would look pretty hardcore with some ink.

We did plan to do some wig shopping, so you can imagine my disappointment when we found the wig shop shuddered:

One look at the current state of Wig-O-Rama suggests that downtown Tucson has not found its stride.  It didn't seem to faze this guy, though:

I'm pretty sure he was planning a reception, or maybe a corporate event.  We ran into him again a few blocks later as C and I walked the Turquoise Trail, a painted stripe connecting historic sites in the city center that appears to attract a fraction of the tourist traffic of the Freedom Trail through Boston.  He offered us a blessing, which isn't exactly what I expected him to offer up, but we thanked him for it just the same.

Our week of deep desert chill came to an end, and we returned home.  I expected irony to follow and for Anchorage to plunge into bitter cold while Tucson soared into the 70s.  As near as I can tell, Tucson saw the opportunity and predictably warmed up, but Anchorage dropped the ball.  Instead, it has stayed warm here and even rained for two solid days, which did nothing but melt the snow and leave a sheet of ice in its wake.  Maybe you saw the viral photos of children ice skating on neighborhood streets?  We lived it.  At the beginning of the year, C and I registered to compete in the AMH Anchorage Cup, a series of ski races throughout the season.  Defying all sense of compassion, the race organizers declined to cancel the race last weekend, and C and I joined over 100 other people lacking the good sense to stay home.  I've never been so wet on skis.  The trails were slush and turning to puddles.  And I got my butt kicked by people who know how to ski fast.  But it was good fun (though look back a post or two for the discussion on Type 2 fun and take a guess into which category a ski race in the rain falls).

Few more pictures from in and around Tucson:

Musings at Year's End

Merry Christmas world!  As the year comes to a close, I find myself taking time to reflect on another year past.  Mostly, though, I find myself wondering just what the hell it is I did over the last twelve months.  Unfortunately, the only way I have left to keep track of my own comings and goings is by reviewing my updates to this blog.  The fact that there have been no posts -- absolutely none -- since sometime in September, leaves me in a particular bind.  How did I pass the time?  Was it time well spent?  Did I better myself in some fashion, perhaps finally learning the fine art of origami or the intricacies of long division?  Did I better the world in some fashion, perhaps replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED or stockpiling garbage in our spare bedroom instead of the landfill?  Did I better a neighbor, perhaps with a well timed application of the Heimlich maneuver or by simply staying out of someone's way while he or she was having a bad day?  I'll never know, and as a result, unless I helped you dislodge a poorly chewed piece of meat from your esophagus, you will never know either.

Be that as it may, I spent Christmas in my pajamas, which seems like the way it should be spent.  And someone was thoughtful enough to wrap up and gift me a pair of white clown gloves with rainbow cuffs, which seems like the way hands should be clad.  So the year is coming to a fine close.

Long time blog readers (Hi Mom!), will recall that this blog started as a chronicle of a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment.  (And, yes, long time blog readers that are paying close attention will also recognize that the Mom joke, and indeed the entire first sentence, are pretty much recycled from an earlier post).  Well, to bring things full circle, be advised that 2012 marked the last of the maintenance Rituxin infusions.  I was scanned for positron emissions (after injection with a radionuclide tagged sugar) in December, with what my oncologist described as no signs of uptake.  That means, in short, no cancer.  So, treatment worked as hoped and expected, and until anyone tells me otherwise, I pretty much wipe my hands of the whole thing.

In the meantime, I look forward to a 2013 filled with jet-packs, entire meals packed into a pill, technology that will finally let us all live a life of leisure, and all the other wonders that the future promises.  I also fear the inevitable rise of our new robot overlords and the evaporation of our oceans, but those are small prices to pay for the convenience of jet-packs.  Happy New Year everyone!

P.S.  Please let me know if anyone recognizes any of the people or places in the following photos.  It might go a long way towards helping me reconstruct the last three months.

Type two blogging

A cursory review of the “I just finished my first marathon” literature will find lots of people describing apparent life-changing moments.  People weeping with joy.  The best days of their lives.  Never again to meet a challenge in life, love, or career that can’t be met with the same dogged determination that carried them across the final six miles. Never to be forgotten.

 

I don’t remember it like that.  I don’t remember it like that at all.

Was I glad to finish my first marathon?  Sure, but only because I could finally do what I had wanted to do for some miles: stop running and, with that, hopefully, stop the pain.  I crossed the finish line of the Equinox Marathon in 2005, accepted my finisher’s patch with a vacant stare, and shuffled to an empty spot in the grass where I could sit.  Not comfortably, mind you.  If I tried to bend my legs, my hamstrings seized.  I tried to project an aurora of comfort and ease while grimacing, jacked at an obtuse angle.  Since I couldn’t stand back up without bending, I was effectively trapped, and ultimately resigned myself to concentrating on the ache in my legs rather than my increasing thirst which I could not attend to without rising.

I did not know it at the time, but I was having fun.  Type two fun.  Familiar to alpinists, type two fun is the kind that only becomes fun after being viewed through the haze of time.  Type two fun is usually no fun at all when you are experiencing it: cold, tired, afraid, maybe bleeding.  But once back at the bar with open beers, type two fun suddenly morphs into real fun, as you and your mates congratulate one another, exalt the day’s triumphs, and—here is the kicker—start planning to do it all again.  The amount of time it takes to go from suffering to thinking a second time around is a good idea is directly proportionate to the degree of type two-ness that your fun involved.  For me, the Equinox Marathon must have been pushing the limits, since it took seven years to once again think running the full course was a good idea.

But run the whole thing again, I did.  Last Saturday I lined up at the start with C’s family.  She, her sister, and mom were doing the relay.  Her dad was doing the full, perhaps a bit undertrained this year.  As he described it, the 26.2 miles of the race would be greater than the sum total of miles he ran to prepare.  I suspect if it hadn’t been the 50^th anniversary of the race, he would have sat this one out.  But why let details get in the way of a beautiful fall day in Fairbanks?

I was hoping to run under 4:00:00 this year, but failed to meet that goal by a fair margin.  The opening miles were slower than I expected or remembered, and I felt sluggish for the first five or more miles.  I started to feel better as I reached Ester Dome and the trail pointed upward, but by the time I reached the half-way mark it was clear that sub-four hours was going to be a hard sell.  I plodded out the out-and-back, a section along Ester Dome of single-track and mining roads where you get to pass runners ahead and behind and see a good slice of the field.  With a high-five from C (who was running leg 2 of the race and starting the out-and-back section as I was finishing), I headed for the Chute.  Runners descend about 1,000 vertical feet in a third-of-a-mile down the Chute, a steep, rocky, and loose bomb down a section line.  Any hope of making up time died as the pounding cramped my left leg.  I pulled off to the side of the trail to stretch and try to walk through the discomfort, losing about 5 minutes as piles of racers tumbled past.

Luckily, I recovered pretty well from the leg cramp, and continued on my way, cautiously at first.  The miles kept going.  A little girl offered up mini-doughnuts at an unofficial aid station, which I gladly took but didn’t end up eating.  Do you know where her hands had been?  Why risk the GI distress!  Before long, the final descent to the finish line appeared, I came around the corner, kept running, and finished.  Final time: 4:21, good enough for a top-quarter finish in the overall standings and a top-third in my age group, but pretty far off of my goal.  Nevertheless, I was satisfied with the day.  I felt good at the end, could sit and stand at will, and had time for a hot shower and sauna before the rest of the family started coming across the line.  And it didn’t take any time to think that I could do the race again.  No type two about this fun at all.

Once home (a trip characterized by high-winds and sheets of rain), I was able to download data from my Garmin and carefully analyze the day.  It took awhile, but I did discern why I was unable to meet my goal time: I didn’t run fast enough.  Something to work towards, I guess.

A photographer posted some pictures from the event that he has made freely available (http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/MostlyPeople/EqnxMarathon2012/25416697_LJcPZx#!i=2092604897&k=5zwkqsR).  I grabbed two of them.  The first shows off the fall colors on Ester Dome:

The second shows that, as sure as the night will follow day, if you take my picture during a race I will be scowling.  

Why can’t I just take a normal picture that makes it look like I enjoy running?  Maybe there was more type two to this race than at first I thought.