Mountains

PLODding Along: Day 6

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 2 Comments

I was chatting with a friend a few days ago about adventuring, racing, fitness and this silly 10 day “challenge.” The conversation went something like this:

F: Can you average it to three hours a day? Four hours one day, two the next?
B: Nope. At least three hours every day. More if I want.
F: Well, how hard do you have to go?
B: Oh not hard at all. I draw the line at flat walking. Flat running is fine. Brisk, hilly walking is fine. Flat walking doesn’t count. But there’s no minimum heart rate threshold or anything like that to constitute “exercise.”
F: Slow and steady, then.
B: Exactly.

And “slow and steady” really is a great way to describe it. See, “slow and steady wins the race” is one of the most misguided expressions in English, and I bet whoever came up with it didn’t win very many races. Slow and steady does not win the race. Fast and steady wins the race. That’s why it’s so hard. Slow and steady is for when you have no business lining up on the front row in the first place, and are just trying to get out alive.

Day 4:
1hr 6min – Hockey
1hr – Momentum (circuit training)
1hr 14min – Bike ride

Day 5:
3hr 17min – Backcountry ski

Day 6:
3hr 6min – Hike on/around Sentinel

All in all, I think I’m starting to hit a stride a little bit. Day 4 was brutal. Day 5 was sleepy. Day 6 was just sort of numb. I think that’s a good sign?

I’m still working on the nuances of the new blog platform, but showing progress. Stay tuned for an actual plot of PLOD over time.

PLODding Along: Day 3

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Two days in, now, to the ten day challenge, and aside from almost falling asleep at dinner on night one, morale is high.

Day 1:
1hr 6min – Lunch Run
1hr 14min – Run home the long way
54min – Hockey Game

Two separate one hour runs is a lot for this old dog. I almost fell asleep on the couch before hockey. Logistically, the easiest workout is a run. I can just leave from home and be on trails in ten minutes. The problem with that is that if I try to run three hours a day for any more than two days in a row I’ll be in physical therapy until my IRA matures. So for Day 1 I counted a hockey game, and for Day 2 I mixed in some hiking.

Day 2:
1hr 2min – Lunch Run
2hr 23min – Brisk hike on and around Sentinel

Day 3:
18min – Lunch Run
1hr 40min – Ski
1hr 3min – Run

I am tired. The plan was to run for a while at lunch and then skin on/around Snowbowl for a couple of hours after dark. Life got in the way of first run, so I cut it way short and then planned on just spending a little extra time on skis. My habit of not carrying a watch bit me, though, and perceived elapsed time surpassed actual elapsed time and left me back at the car with 62 minutes of exercise left to do.

When I got home the conversation with my roommate, the indefatigable cheerleader Emily, went something like this just before 9pm.

E: How’d the ski go?
B: Pretty well. Except that I lost track of time and came back too early. I have to run an hour still.
E: Ho man I’m so glad I’m not you right now.
B: I get that a lot.
E: Welp. I’m going to bed. Good night!

So I went for the stupid run.  I think I’ll keep running off the docket at least through the weekend.

So That I Might Not Die Just Yet

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 10 Comments

I am a lazy person. So lazy that were I Independently wealthy and left to my own devices I would probably spend most of my time holed up with a huge bowl of rigatoni and watching The Wire for like the fourth time. That I’m not independently wealthy would really only offset the couch-sitting and Wire-watching to the evening hours, though, if there wasn’t a yang to my lazy yin. See, in addition to being lazy, I also have a lot of anxiety about the fact that I’m lazy. And that tends to keep me pretty busy.

There’s nothing quite like a good adventure to keep the lazies at bay, and TomRob and I have got one cooked up for this spring that we think sounds pretty neat. It involves skis, bikes and a week or two in May, and I, for one, can’t wait. We’ve got a couple of magazines interested and have managed to scrape together a little bit of support here and there, and it’s always humbling/invigorating to have others take a material interest in your follies. It’s also sort of terrifying.

Obviously a sponsor or editor understands that itineraries sometimes change, or that you might have to call an audible here or there in the interest of safety, but they’d be understandably upset to find out that you played the lazy card and just rode Uber around Portland to drink at different breweries for two weeks (unless you were writing for VICE, I suppose). And obviously we wouldn’t have pitched the trip if that was even an option in our minds, but the other night I woke up at around 3am with the thought: This might be really hard. And not just regular old, eat-a-lot-and-crash-out, Type-2-fun hard, but the kind of difficult that blows deadlines or curtails itself into what amounts to bait and switch.

What if I can’t do it?

Now, the bar for what counts as physical fitness in this town has been set pretty high. It feels sometimes like you can’t swing a cat without hitting a pro runner or cyclist. Another byproduct of being a lazy person is that I am not one of these professional athletes, even by a long shot. Any time I race I strive only for adequacy. sauced

Exercise in Missoula is as much a social pursuit as it is about fitness. If you’re going to spend time with a friend, more often than not you’re going to be running, riding, or skiing. But while the baseline for fitness here is probably above national average, a brutal trip is a brutal trip, and it’s been years since I worked out hard ten days in a row.

In fact, my exercise regimen over the last few years has been based almost entirely on the following three pillars:

griz1) Avoid diabetes

2) Still fit in that American Flag Speedo (it was kind of expensive)

3) Survive adventures

We’ve got plenty of time before we take off, and with the fear of failure in mind it seems like as good a time as any to check in on the ‘ol fitness. I’ve picked the nice, arbitrary, Fibonacci number of 3 as the number of hours that I’ll exercise every day for the next ten days. This is, certainly, meant to serve as training, but more so to help me figure out whether or not this trip will kill me by the end.

Because no study (even a wildly unscientific one) is worth the paper it’s printed on without some way to measure results, I’ve developed a metric for this one. I like to call it the Perceived Likelihood Of Death, or PLOD Index. So over the next ten days, while I exercise for at least three hours a day, I will record on hourly intervals how likely I think it is that this trip kills me, and chart them on the PLOD Plot. The scale is 1-100, as in percentage of certainty of death.

I’ll also make an effort to give nightly occasional updates here.

“Bonk-Thirty: The Guatemala Edition” or “A missed opportunity”

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment
As a recreational cyclist, one who moved to Guatemala to pursue a job that relies heavily on cycling, I’m probably due for a post that assumes cycling as its foremost topic. This realization coincides nicely with my first Central American bonk, which is convenient for making a decent story.
The day began innocently enough as I set off in the back of a pick-up truck towards the small town of Santa Maria de Jesus, on Volcan de Agua. My goal was to learn a route that had been scouted several months ago by a different guide and marked with red paint. Kevin, another guide, joined me as far as the trailhead but returned with the truck, as he hates bikes. I dropped into the beginning of the descent extremely skeptically. Up to this point the riding has been decent but by no means noteworthy. The trails are not designed or maintained for riding, and are used almost exclusively by local farmers as modes of transportation between their homes and their fields. Furthermore, the beginning of this ride was littered with household trash that was staggering even for rural Guatemala, and I was already crabby because I was sure that riding in this area alone I would be robbed and have to walk home in riding shoes and a montanacyclocross.com kit. My mood degenerated more when I came to the first split in the trail and found that while the turn was, in fact, marked with red paint, that that paint mark was located directly in the center of a rock that laid directly between the two trails. Rats. Fortunately, two farmers were resting in the shade nearby and through limited frustration, broken Spanish, and enthusiastic gesticulation I determined the proper way. My skepticism of this trail continued for another minute as I was stuck behind two Mayan ladies carrying twice their body weight in corn. However, it lasted only a minute and as soon as I made my pass I was unleashed upon an Eden of singletrack bliss. I was far enough from the town, now, that the litter had diminished to the infrequent discarded Tortrix bag, and there was absolutely zero indication from the quality of riding that this trail wasn’t designed, engineered, and built exclusively for riding mountain bikes. Flowing banked corners were punctuated by root drops and rock gardens before entering into a river of cooled pahoehoe, which through a geologic lens was nothing short of awe inspiring. Short, technical climbs sustained elevation throughout the descent, making the ride almost tantric as it continued despite relativley modest change in elevation. Eventually the singletrack flowed into a dirt mountain road, which through years of neglect and torrential rain had managed to form a series of doubles which were easily cleanable even by my modest (read: essentially non-existant) capacity to leave the ground. Road gave way to road, and by the time I returned to Antigua I was on cloud nine, reveling in this discovery of decent trail. In my euphoria, I set off immediately towards another small mountain town, El Hato, to investigate reports of trail there.
My plan for the day had been to research and learn the ride from Santa Maria. Check. It had taken less time than anticipated, however, and my plan expanded to ride to above El Hato, find a trail to another town, San Mateo, and ride the road back from San Mateo to Antigua. It seemed simple enough, I was feeling good, and my breakfast of two pieces of banana bread and two endurolytes seemed ample to continue fighting the good fight. Incorrect. Perhaps this is a good time to discuss road building trends in Guatemala. The mountains here are very steep, and the “engineers” seem to have been focused on getting the most bang for their buck when it came to paving supplies. There are no switchbacks to speak of, and almost no roads that follow the contour of the hillside. The roads here go straight up, and straight down. The first climb out of Antigua to El Hato is challenging but not entirely uncivilized, and having ridden it before I was
mentally prepared. It’s about a 5k climb and only the first 1.5-2k are very steep. After that it settles into a difficult and consistent grade that is well suited to riders who prefer to settle into a tempo and go. I’m one of those riders, and I generally enjoy this climb. I arrived without Incident in El Hato, which was pretty much the end of the fun part. Recalling instructions from another rider, I continued around a bend and was greeted by a cobblestone hill that I can, with a clean conscience, describe in the same breath as the word “Koppenberg.” I composed myself briefly and assaulted this stone wall with the full utility of my small chainring. I had considered switching my bike to a single speed before moving down here for ease of maintenance. That would have been imprudent. After summiting this road I was battered down for another ten minutes by equally steep, albeit paved climbing. I eventually found what turned out to be about 3k of singletrack which can at best be described as mediocre. A much more interesting discovery happened halfway through this traverse to San Mateo when I realized that I was about fifteen minutes shy of a bonk. Double Rats. I rolled into San Mateo as the lethargy and moodiness began to take hold, and sought out a tienda to replenish myself before the cruise home. As soon as I purchased my Pepsi and fried pigskins, I was accosted by a number of grown men who started asking for money. I gave them the second half of my snack and headed back to Antigua. Then shit got real. The road out of San Mateo, it turns out, is not a simple cruise along the ridge to El Hato. It is a 6k climb of above 20% that frequently exceeds 30%. It did not take long to be become quite clear that the Pepsi was not going to cut it. After what seemed like an eternity of climbing in my granny gear and doing those pitiful little switchbacks from curb to curb (the ones that silently yell, “please run me over with that bus and end this miserable disgrace to my Coat of Arms.”), I made it to the ridge and descended with irresponsible alacrity through through El Hato and back to Antigua. Once there I wallowed for a while in self-pity before ordering two lunches from the nice ladies across the street, devouring those, and passing out with Xela in her bed. It wasn’t until I awoke that I learned of my greatest regret since arriving here.
That regret, of course, is missing a horse race on All Saints Day a few towns over. This is not your regular Kentucky Derby slosh fest, but something special. The sort of thing that might have convinced Hemingway to hold out long enough to have a look. My details of this race are sketchy at best: told third hand over a bar, but are ample to ignite any imagination with a pulse. Imagine, for a moment, that you could combine the Beer Mile with the Italian Palio. Now add that lawless, chaotic din and the irreverent disregard for the provision of life and limb that typifies the Central American third world. Now, you have the All Saints Day horserace. The premise goes something like this: local contestants toe the line next to their horse on one side of town. The gun goes off and the men drink a beer as fast as they can, mount their steeds, and race across town to the other side, where another beer is waiting. The race goes back and forth across town until a winner emerges. And that’s the beauty of this race. I don’t know what sort of time constraints there are on the competitors, but there must be some, because unlike the Beer Mile, or the Palio, or almost any other race out there, the winner is the last man standing/riding. It goes until all but one individual has incapacitated himself and withdrawn, which is a truly beautiful concept. With this race in mind, you can count on my returning to Guatemala during the first week in November at some point in the future. Any takers?