Fast is Hard

5:01 sunrise
22:53 sunset

I "raced" my mountain bike last night.  I put "raced" in "quotes" because I'm not out there expecting to win anything nor is it really a mystery who will finish in what order (at least in my category).  Moreover, only a handful of people are at our community races.  In my category, there were two of us (and yes, I finished 2nd).  I also generally dislike the competition/ranking aspect of racing.  So then..... why was I out there?

Oh ya, I challenged myself to participate in one twoonie race with our local mountain bike club at the Mount MacIntyre course this year.  Goal #12 Fit for 40.

It's hard to try and ride your bike fast and I'm not very good at it.  Rule #10 (I can't believe I am quoting these f@*#ing rules) says it never gets easier, you just go faster. Maybe one day I will get faster?  I guess the goal was to put myself in an uncomfortable place, just to see how it feels and to suffer a bit.  To push harder to go faster than I would on my own.  Presumably in all of this I come out the other side having learned or experienced something new.

Do I look tired?  I was tired.  Check out my flushed face, more than an hour after the race was over.

And yes, there was this brief moment, in the hour or so after finishing, when my head felt empty, calm.  It's sort of like the wire scrub brush feeling in my lungs, from breathing so hard, was extended to my head as well.  Riding hard scrubbed all of the distracting thoughts from my mind and left me, along with a tired body, a tired mind.  And that feeling might make going out again next week worth it.

Comin' back from Cali, from Cali, from Cali

5:05 sunrise
22:49 sunset

So, I'm back from California.  That means I'm 40, which somehow seems okay to me now. It also means that it should be nice here in Whitehorse by now but this is not the case.  4C as I type and it was below zero this morning when I went up to the location for our 24 Hours of Light mountain bike festival that will be happening in a mere month. I know I complain about the weather all the time but come ooooonnnnnn.

Anyhow, I wrote about our riding in California here, a bike blog that I may contribute to on a more regular basis.  Suffice to say that it was great fun being on vacation with my friends and I only wish we hadn't done so much driving.  The RV we rented was hilarious but there is only so much chattering up and down highway 101 that anyone can take before starting to go bonkers.

Parking the RV at our campsite at New Brighton Beach

After six days of riding we settled into a weekend in San Francisco, which was awesome.  We rented this spiff pad in the Noe Valley/Castro area and then proceeded to eat our way around the city.  I only wish there had been more time!

This is at Kronnerburger where the tag line is: "Rare Salty."  It was both.

Neat-o dessert at The Slanted Door: lychee cotton candy

Birthday menu at NOPA. I had the tagine and the baked cauliflower plus bits and pieces of everyone else's meal

I also saw two really excellent exhibitions at SFMOMA (Garry Winogrand and Lebbeus Woods) and spent some quality time digging through the racks at a Thrift Town and a Ross store.  I was pretty restrained when it came to actually buying stuff.  Most of my money went into good food and drink, which I think is the way to go.  I did, however, splurge on this disco hoodie for my birthday.  But come on how could anyone resist?!  It's made from disconium!

So, the big birthday trip is over and now it's down to summer Yukon business.  As I have mentioned, year in and year out on this blog, summer is manic season and things are about to get crazy.  Last week alone our mountain bike club had an intro to mountain biking course on Monday, a group ride and twoonie race on Tuesday (I went to yoga), the Ride of Silence on Wednesday, a women's group ride on Thursday and I think on Friday I actually rested.  Summer's like that up here.  Now all we need is a bit of warm weather to accompany it all.

Tomorrow: will I be brave and go suffer through a Mt Mac Twoonie Race as per my fit for 40 goal #12?  Pfftttt, I am not feeling enthused.  We'll see.

40 is coming

Best birthday card ever.  Thanks mom.  You nailed this one.

Inside it says "And eventually, after a few cocktails, acceptance."

Here's to some acceptance and turning 40 in San Francisco!

Spring in the Yukon

6:08 sunrise
21:48 sunset

There is nothing better than spring in the Yukon.

Except that there is nothing worse than spring in the Yukon.

Let me explain.  By the time spring officially arrives (March 20 this year) the Yukon is awash in all sorts of lovely light and outdoor activities are frequently enjoyed under the most spectacular of blue skies.  Cross-country skiing or snow-biking or even just walking on our local trails makes me think that I love winter when I do these things in March.  We accept, here in Whitehorse, that our spring is a little later than it is for folks south of 60 and that's okay.  We don't mind the snow sticking around..... to a point.  But only to a point and April 26th is considerably beyond it.

This April has been nothing short of shite when it comes to the weather.

For awhile, the snow biking was okay.  And by okay I mean that the trails have been fairly well-packed and as the days have gotten longer it has been easier to ride after work.  But only okay because we have also had several days of snow (which makes the trails slippery or unrideable until they get packed down again). In a desperate attempt to enjoy being outdoors on a really sunny Saturday last weekend, we went to Fish Lake. Usually an awesome, hard-packed highway along the lake was, this time, a morass of new snow with a crust on top.  We walked our bikes around for about half an hour before giving up.

And the road riding has not been any better.  While a couple of days have been acceptable (read: +5C and sunny) the majority of them have been closer to 0C, sometimes below, complete with grey skies or worse, snow.  My first attempt to ride on the road this year came on April 9th.  It wasn't warm, but it was clear.... until I got on to the highway.  But heck, Sierra and I were already out there so we stayed.... through a sideways snowstorm and a road that quickly became a slushy mess.

Does this look fun?

 Fun-ny maybe, but it wasn't fun.

Even this week, walking my bike through the snow and ice that is my driveway seems... well, wrong.

But at least, as I look to the weather forecast for the last few days of April (coldest night -14C, warmest day +4C), I can pat myself on the back for having made plans - waaaaaaaaaaay back last summer - to spend my birthday in San Francisco.  Tomorrow I leave Yukon "spring" for 10 days of sun, friends, bikes and wine in California.  And I can't wait.  Perhaps when I return it will be summer.

Loving Hating Snow Biking (a Denali Highway snow bike trip)

8:08 sunrise

20:09 sunset

Hi.  It's been awhile.  We're back to 12 hours of light (yay!) but are still in the grips of winter temperatures. It was -29C this morning when I left for work.  Brr.

Two weekends ago I went on a really amazing fat bike trip with friends along the Denali Highway in Alaska. And by really amazing I mean jaw-dropping scenery/hospitable accommodation/intelligent and humourous company/breath-taking proximity to wildlife/deep silent wild kind of amazing.

And yet I haven't bothered to write about it.

Maybe it's because my riders in crime, Jill M, Jill H and Sierra, have all given hilarious and vivid versions of our trip.  I'm not sure I have anything to add.  Jill writes so beautifully about what it is like to be out there that even though my journey wasn't identical to hers I still feel that I experienced the days as she did. The other Jill - the cynic as she called herself - captured the nuts and bolts of at least half of how day one felt when she wrote "most of the way up this climb...required an endless mix of pushing and riding, neither of which was pleasant or efficient." And Sierra, my beloved bike-wife who saved me from losing my shit at the 18km mark when she started carrying my backpack, described each of us as dogs which may sound insulting but instead was full of affection and made me laugh.

Basically, I loved their versions of our three day trip and I haven't felt like I needed to write my own.  And besides, I document the crap out of everything with my camera anyway.  So there has been less blogging in my blogosphere lately.

But I have been thinking about one thing since I got back.  Actually, I was thinking about it when I was out there, mostly during one of the first long climbs when we were alternating between riding and pushing our bikes uphill.  When I was sweating my ass off and my heart rate was making my eyeballs thud just a little bit inside their sockets.  When I was thinking to myself that perhaps I wouldn't make it the 42 miles to MacLaren Lodge - at least not in daylight.  I've been thinking about why I choose to do this.  Why go off on long bike rides that make me slightly uncomfortable only to immediately forget about the parts that sucked and think that it was the best experience in the world?

I guess the obvious answer is what I just said.  As soon as the bad parts are over, I tend to forget about them.  And it's not as if I ever thought that we were in peril or that we would not be able to make it to our destination.  It's just that there were hard parts.  They were real.  And yet, once they were over, it's almost as if they never existed.  It's as if the Denali Highway bike trip was 100% easy-peasy, comfortable, luxury travel.  But it wasn't.  At least, not all of it.  At least, not for me.

I believe that it is important to experience the uncomfortable as fully and as acutely as possible.  I try to feel, to listen and to pay attention to the minutes during excursions like this when I am genuinely not having a good time.  When I am super tired or when a little voice inside my head pipes up about how being where I am at that moment is less than ideal and perhaps I should do something about it.  Like stop.

But somehow, in trying to access and make myself available to the annoyances in a journey like this, the good parts are made even better.  It makes the sky seem even more impossibly blue and the awe of being in the middle of absolutely-fucking nowhere even more astounding than I thought possible.  Finding a low - and letting it sink in - makes the coming high even sweeter.

So ya, our Denali Highway trip was amazing.  And I survived.  And it wasn't that hard.  But it was just hard enough to make me think... and to dream about what adventures we can get up to next year.

2013 - Fit for 40

10:05 sunrise

16:07 sunset

On May 6, 2013 I will turn 40.

The phrase Fit for 40 started being tossed around by Monika (who crosses into her 40s a mere 23 days before I do) a few months ago.  I figured it was time to make a list.  40 goals for turning 40.  Blending athletic and more... cerebral? experiential? goals I figure that completion of these things sometime before I turn 41 will make for a pretty fabulous 17 months.

Some of these I am working on now (#1, #38), some are ongoing resolutions (#14, #17, #40) and some of them are event specific (#3, #9, #10).  Several have been lifted straight from Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Years Rulin's (#19, #21, #33) just because I liked them so much.  Only one of them (#37) might be unreasonable in its challenge and logistics.  Learning to spell tomatoes correctly didn't make the list but the embarrassment of posting the spelling error publicly should mean I'll never make the same mistake again. 

All of them are posted here to keep me honest.

31/31

10:10 sunrise
15:58 sunset

Happy end of Dressember!  I think I am a little bit in shock that I actually made it.

Today marks the thirty-first day of me wearing the same dress. It was partly as a personal challenge, mostly as a fundraiser for Right To Play. You people AMAZE me - at the end of all this nonsense we have raised over $800 for a really great charity. In case you need a little extra encouragement to make a donation before January 2nd (the day my fundraising effort ends) here is what RTP does and why I think they deserve our support.

Right To Play's mission is to use sport and play to empower children and youth.  In their own words "play is NOT a luxury; it is a tool for education and health. It can bring entire communities together and inspire every individual. A game of football can teach children about tolerance and peace, and a game of tag can teach about malaria. Play helps teach important life lessons and develop skills like cooperation, leadership, and teamwork."

I want to thank each one of you who donated and I need to send a shout out here to the one donor I do not know personally.  I have no idea how you found this blog but, Adele, thank-you.

Even though I have no big plans for tonight, I tried to make my last outfit the littlest bit spiffy.  That is, if you consider the inside layer of a dress purchased at Value Village to be fancy.

Dress - Vero Moda

Headband - Reitman's, I think

Crinoline - Value Village, Richmond.  Used to be part of a dress until I dismantled it

Tights - Eek, I don't remember!

Shoes - Nine West

Happy new year everyone!  I am looking forward to 2013 (and being able to wear jeans).