Alaskan Pack Fodder

I leave today for five or so weeks. In the COVID era, I try not to get too deep into specifics. I'm not overjoyed about leaving, but I make more money at the radar sites than I do on my bike. I'm even less pleased that I rode outside exactly zero days in the past month. Rain, cold, and online school kept me on the trainer instead of on pavement. Most years I would have ridden outside anyway, but without a base of outside riding and the built-up tolerance for wet and cold, I bailed. I couldn't afford to drive my immunity down and get sick. Even an unusual sniffle would have set off alarm bells, and 'Rona testing would have been required. Maybe quarantine. Maybe I would learn that I wasn't in fact negative, but just asymptomatic. Then, just like the President, I would be invincible. I would still be out a ton of money, so I rode the trainer. I wanted to ride outside. I'm facing a long, dark winter inside. I wanted to feel the thrill and fear of a long, technical d...

I haven't done a field test in forever to test my functional threshold power (FTP). Without a real training plan or any specific goals, I haven't seen the need. Instead, I just picked a number to set my FTP at in Training Peaks. When I get a notification from the website, I up the number and adjust my ranges. It's probably on the low side currently, but it's in the ballpark.  It's also nowhere near where it once was. I'm not the same rider. The decrease in power is more than a little disheartening, but I have to be realistic. It's what I earned. Age, injuries, and life have taken their toll, but it really comes down to the work. I fell off the wagon and onto the couch more times than I care to admit.  It's quite possible that I could be as strong, if not stronger than I was when I was 40, if I only stayed faithful to a training plan. But that wouldn't be me. Once I achieved a goal, I lost focus and chased things that sabotaged my long-term progress. ...

It's one thing to resolve to be a better person. It's quite another to actually be a better peson. Better is relative, of course. Better than what? When you're the social equivalent of Ebola, the bar isn't set very high. I could certainly do the bare minimum, but that wouldn't result in the transformation I'm looking for. I need the kind of change you see on home renovation shows where they strip a house back to the timbers and re-imagine it as something with an open floor plan and the like. Take a sledgehammer to the drywall and see how much asbestos is hidden back there. If I want these changes to stick, I need to make them achievable and sustainable. Little things repeated like a mantra until they become automatic. It's really no different than making a cycling training plan, except this one actually matters. Do the work until it isn't work anymore, until you actually feel "wrong" for not doing it. I'm not sure, at age 50, that such chan...

I’m back in Anchorage now. Within a few hours of landing, I got hit with an announcement that kinda turned my world upside down. I’m still processing it and what it may or may not mean for my future. For an idiot with a blog, I’m not huge on sharing intimate details of my life that don’t involve saddle sores, so let’s just leave it at that.  Why bring it up only to refuse to provide all of the juicy details? Well, let’s just assume any lapses in posting are probably related to the current situation. As I have aged, my self-perception of superiority has been replaced with the acknowledgment that at my core I’m a deeply flawed human being. No matter how well I do something, someone else does it better.  Often I can do better, but don’t. I’m self-destructively egocentric, which sabotages effective prioritization of the elements of my life. I’m pretty much the stereotypical mediocre recreational roadie.  So, my guts are knotted up and the future is a great unknown. In this re...

I was almost giddy as I did some administrative tasks that morning. I chatted with one of the mechanics. The reason for this unusually good mood? It was my work last day before I got on a plane for home. Then the phone rang. It took me a minute before what the raspy voice on the other end was telling me. Flu-like symptoms. A test. Can't travel until cleared. Fuck. The email traffic started rolling in confirming what I already knew. I wasn't going anywhere. The rest of the day wasn't quite so cheery. I mean, I get it. I've been delayed by the raging pandemic before and know how it ruins plans. I'd rather be delayed a week or so than for someone to bring the 'rona to the radar site, where medical help is limited to what expired medicine you find laying around, what you brought from home, or a medivac that could take a week to come in. Nope, I'd rather not risk that sort of thing. I can't really complain, even if I still do. I'm making money. I'm fe...

I was onto something Monday. I think the same old, same old was starting to get to me. Easy enough when you're riding the trainer. I doubled down on that by sticking to the same route for the last year. I knew every inch of it. Every sprint, every incline, everything. As soon as I saw the leaderboard for a given segment, I already knew if I was going to try. I just felt like I had a pretty good handle on where the edges were. Then today I tried a new route. I had no idea what was in front of me. I just gave everything I hit my best. I fell in with a group of four or five really strong riders and started rotating pulls. There was another rider in the group, and I knew he was deluded as I am about our relative abilities in a sprint. It was the way he closed gaps and hung back on the lead up to a sprint told me he was going to jump. My eyes narrowed a little. As we approached the sprint, he drifted back off the front and sat on my wheel. When the line came, he hit an aero boost and st...

I used to have purpose. Every time I got on the bike, I knew why I was there. These days? Not so much. I wish I could blame it on a global pandemic or something, but the truth is I had been flailing for years. A string of injuries, over-training, under-training, not training, career change, weight gain... It all added up. I miss that competitive drive. It was what fueled me to lose weight, to grind through painful intervals, and to ride in weather most sane people avoided. I knew the other guys were out there too, putting themselves through the same pain and making the same sacrifices so they could mix it up on race day. Seems like a lot of effort for races few cared about, which resulted in more financial loss than gain. Some of us are just wired to pin on a number, toe the line, and then see how we measure up. Eventually that wiring short-circuits or the whole system is replaced with something else. It's not there was any glory involved. A win might get you a pair of socks or a b...

After my close call with the canti Moots CX frame, I got to thinking. Always a dangerous thing for me, but maybe this time it will lead to something good. Never has before, but I have to stay positive. My Lynskey Urbano project has been languishing for too long. A few hours of wrenching would put it on the road, yet I never could muster the motivation to do it. Sure, I have had a mountain of projects and obligations during my precious time home, but somehow I always found time for a nap or some mindless TV. I could have been wrenching, but it never seemed to occur to me. I know why. in·er·tia.   / iˈnərSHə /    noun.   PHYSICS Learn to pronounce a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force. I was rolling along with it when I first got it, all exited and stuff about the possibilities, and then I ran into a brick wall and it sat. I can't remembe...