Alaskan Pack Fodder

A lot of my posts here have to do with how my body is failing to live up to its obvious potential. I'm so, so disappointed in it.    Mostly it's just when I'm sick or hurt, I'm pretty much focused on being sick or hurt. Ever since my children started preschool, I've been sick a lot. Ever since I took up the sport of competitive falling down, I've been hurt a lot. Mark Twain said, "write what you know." In my case, I may write a lot of complete bullshit, but I know sick and injured. I consider it peak form these days.   However, as I approach retirement and a serious curtailment of my access to socialized medicine, I'm trying to document as much as I can and investigate ailments that I previously ignored. For me, it's not about gaming the system as much as creating a baseline for the future. I "gutted through" a lot of stuff over the last 26 years, and I'd like to know how bad I screwed the pooch here. I want to know how much c...

Last Friday I did what will hopefully be my last Air Force "fitness" test.   I'm old, beat up, and weigh more than I have in almost a decade.   One of the components is a waist circumference measurement. I usually don't have any problem maxing out the score on it, but I'm the first to admit the standard is a little weak. Screw it, I didn't make the rules.   I weight 15 pounds more than I did last year when I tested. Granted, that was after riding around Mississippi, so I was lighter than normal back then. Still, I'm probably a good 10 above my usual weight this time of year. I didn't check my waist measurement beforehand, because I figured it wouldn't be absolutely horrible based on how my jeans fit. More importantly, I just didn't want to know. I have enough to regret as it is.    Last year my waist circumference was 34 inches. This year it was 33.5 inches. They used the same type of measuring tool (basically a spring-loaded tape measu...

Some days it just doesn't go quite as I planned.   Some mornings I can't get moving. I'll laze in bed, hitting the snooze button so I can get 15 more minutes of pseudo-sleep or surf the interwebs on my phone.   Maybe I'll pop right out of bed, only to be attacked by a hacking fit or a pervasive sense of 'meh'. Sometimes I have to spend great amounts of time just getting my sinuses clear so I can breathe. Other times I'm walking around in a fog until the caffeine cuts through.   Sometimes the kids remind me halfway through my workout that we need to leave in 15 minutes for whatever before-school extracurricular activity they have signed up for.   Sometimes I just plain have trouble reading the clock and doing the math to ensure I have adequate time.   Whatever the reason, some days I just cut it short.   Usually I find that I push harder, knowing that the pain will only last so long. My averages and peaks go up, resulting in a similar Training St...

I'm looking at my last season of fairly reliable availability to go put on my underwear and go ride a kid's toy against other people with Walter Mitty-esque delusions. When I start my next career, I will be starting more or less at the bottom. As my goal is continued employment (and the making of the monies), I'm going to take what they give me, smile, then ask for more. Hopefully a perception of reliability will make them overlook my countless personality defects. This means I may or may not be available for any given race, and long-term planning is out the window    So, facing this variable future, a hardcore racer boy would make sure he went out with a bang. He'd throw everything he had at training and diet to ensure the best chance for results. He would as be focused and determined as a honey badger in his quest.    I'm finding it hard to muster that sort of drive this year.    A lot probably has to do with stres...

Here are the facts (as far as I can tell): Chris Froome tested for twice the amount allowed for the asthma drug Salbutamol  after Stage 17 of last year's Vuelta. Salbutamol is a specified substance on WADA, which does not require a TUE for inhaled use as long as the user stays below the threshold. Salbutamol in high doses or ingested through other means has performance-enhancing qualities. Froome and Team Sky have decided to fight it, which could draw out the case for over a year. _______________________________________________________________________ I think Froome and Sky have screwed up royally.     He could have stood up immediately upon notification, taken the hit while maintaining his innocence, emphasized his "strong" support for anti-doping efforts, and served out his sanction during the off-season. At the same time, he could have worked with the UCI and WADA to determine if there were any extenuating circumstances that ...

I recently had a high-resolution MRI done on my head. After a lifetime of taking what we used to call "dingers" where I'd see tweety birds and then get back up and play some more, I figured the current and more ominous designation of "traumatic brain injury" necessitated me seeing if I had done any serious damage.    I'd had one done after my car accident, but I guess the technology is much better these days, and I had cracked my helmet pretty good when I went down in the fall. I'd rather know what I was dealing with before I followed the proud NFL tradition of killing my girlfriend and our unborn child because of accumulated head trauma. If I were a betting man, I'd wager my wife would be really pissed at me, so it's best to head this one off at the pass.   I got my results back yesterday. I know it will surprise nobody when I say that they found nothing but a lifetime's accumulation of bile, bitterness, and regret. No visible damag...

It took six days of inactivity to wipe away a month of work.    All of that steady progress, and a case of the sniffles (and body aches and hacking coughing fits and...) knocked me back on my ass.   Now I'm just trying to start climbing back to a reasonable level for this time of year.   If I really think about it, getting sick in January is much better than getting sick in March or April. Ever since I first welcomed the germ monsters into my home, I get hit with one plague a year. If this is it, and I have a string of reasonable health running up to race season, I'll be happy.   It doesn't do much for the motivation, though. Seeing hours of sweat negated that quickly never is. I know in reality that the impact is less significant than the squiggly lines might indicate, but I tend to latch onto whatever stimuli I can to motivate myself to crawl out of bed early in the morning. Squiggly lines that have some abstract...