Race Predictions - Two days to the Enduro

It started with that heavy-head feeling. Then a few errant coughs and sneezes. Soon after, the throat was sore, and my body was tired. It’s official … I’m sick.

Of course. Two days before the 72.5-mile ride I have trained five months for, I get sick. I suppose I could blame the recent bout of cooler weather, or my husband who brought the vile virus into the house to begin with, but I won’t. People get sick. That’s life. Correction – that’s my life two days before a race.

Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to make some race predictions, at the risk of what superstitious people might see as jinxing myself. So here it goes.

I predict I will finish both the Laramie Enduro Mountain Bike Race and the Copper Triangle road race, which takes place next weekend, Aug. 7. I predict it will take everything I have and more to finish the Enduro. I predict I will feel like crying, quitting and dying, but I will do only the former of the three. There may be tears – there will probably be blood.

After doing a solid 50 miles of singletrack last Friday, I took two epic crashes, both of which dotted my body with a nice painting of black and blue marks and red scrapes. I predict I will probably add to those on Saturday, although I predict I will not actually hurt myself badly enough to stop. I predict I will wish I had given myself an excuse to stop, but, finding none – I will continue until I die or finish. I predict despite my massage yesterday and daily treatments and stretches, that my neck will hurt so bad I’ll want to yank my head off.

I predict it will be fairly cool with some decent cloud cover. I’m an optimist, so I predict it will not rain. I predict I will have to walk the last climbing section of the headquarters trail (fellow Enduroans know what this means).

I predict (and pray to any God who will listen) that I will finish in less than 10 hours, and at the finish line I will want to drink lots of beer, but I will be too exhausted to do so. I predict my race partner, Jim, will lift my spirits and I will lift his. I predict we’ll have several good stories to tell by the end of the day.

I predict I will tell myself I am never doing this race or any other of its kind again. I predict this will be a lie.

So there it is. The day after the race the plan is to go up to Yellowstone and Jackson to detox from the saddle for the few days, then come back to town and repeat on a road bike the following Saturday. I predict I will worry less and take that race easier than the Enduro.

Hopefully I will come back a winner for having finished both races. I can’t even consider having one of them being the first race I don’t finish in my cycling life. Positive thoughts.

One final prediction: I predict these next two weekends will be fun in only the sick way races that take all day to complete can be. Wish me luck … I might need it!

Too bad, so sad

Have you ever found yourself reading a really good book that happens to be really sad? More importantly, did you ever notice that a huge proportion of books ARE really sad?

This is the realization I came to a few weeks ago when a friend came over to La Casa de Hughes (actually, more like La Duplex de Hughes) for dinner. She works as an LPN at a nursing home, and had a depressed patient she was worried about. She thought it would help cheer her if she could spend of her ample free time reading some good books.

“No problem,” I told her, knowing that my husband has fought to keep every single book he’s ever owned, including his textbook on Medieval Russian Literature from his junior year of college. Let me tell you how thrilled I have been to lug heavy boxes across the country in countless moves for books he will never so much as open again. Yet I digress.

What this means is we have one of those huge, industrial shelves that normally hold pots in a restaurant holding books in our office.

So, taking my friend up the stairs, I was sure I’d find something for her patient to read. After all, I had read almost everything on those packed shelves, and there are many wonderful books in there I really love.

“We just need to make sure that they’re not sad,” my friend said. “I tried looking through my books at home, but I couldn't find any that weren't sad!”

I started diving through the spines on the shelf, reading out some of my favorites.

“A Farewell to Arms – sad. The Color of Purple – kind of depressing. Book of Lost Things – gloomy. Marley and Me – God no!”

Textbooks notwithstanding, it seemed almost all of my books were either weird (I love John Irving, the freak) or super sad.

I’m not sure why I didn’t realize this before. I even made the mistake of taking Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to read during our Costa Rican honeymoon last year, only to end up buried for hours in the hammock on our private patio overlooking a magical rainforest, hiccupping sobs of tears with each page I turned. And this is my idea of a good time.

So I settled on Seabiscuit and Memoirs of a Geisha – not entirely uplifting, but at least not bawl-your-eyes-out reads.

The experience got me thinking about good books, and why they’re sad – why they almost have to have some sort of sadness to make them interesting. Perhaps it’s the genre I’m into – I don’t dig the scifi or mystery or romance stuff, so I guess the kinds of books I enjoy must rely on drama to build climax because they can’t rely on other tools of storytelling, such as mystery or a lot of suspense. I love following awesome characters in their stories, and to identify with awesome characters' trials and tribulations, there might be some tears involved.

Below I’ve created a list of books I love and think are great reads, but I’d love to hear about your favorites. Give me your suggestions – and what do you love about the books you love? I can’t wait to hear. I’m always looking to add more to my list, and don’t worry — I’ve got plenty of Kleenex.

Kat’s list of five favorite summer reads (nothing too heavy):

1.) Three Cups of Tea

I’m in the middle of this book right now, but I’m in love. This is such an uplifting and inspiring story of a man’s journey to build schools in war-torn Pakistan. It puts our lives as spoiled Americans in perspective.

2.) Travels with Charley

What a great summer read. The story of John Steinbeck, touring America in his camper with his poodle, Charley. My favorite part? His observation that the interstate system has homogenized the American experience. And this was in 1960.

3.) A Prayer for Owen Meany

This is my favorite book of all time. I love it for the way John Irving pulls you into his weird tales of perfectly ordinary people.

4.) The Secret Life of Bees

A tale of triumph and the female sprit, as well as a lesson in entomology, all wrapped into one heartwarming and empowering story.

5.) Water for Elephants

An enchanting tale of the circus life and the depression, which leads to a lot of action and a fantastic finish.

Bike to Work Challenge: DAY 50!

Riding to work today felt just a little different.

The wind blowing in from the west was the same, as was the flow of traffic and my path to work.

But there seemed to be something a little different - maybe it was the smugness I was feeling at achieving the first quarter of my goal.

In March, I issued a challenge to myself to Bike to Work 200 days this year. I think this is quite a feat considering I live in a place with some of the shitiest weather you'll ever see - but that was kind of the point. If I could do it here, people in other places really have no excuse.

In the past three and a half months since I began, I have slipped and fallen three times on ice, ridden in 50 mph winds more than three times, and witnessed some of the most amazing vistas right down the hill from my house. One morning, when I was pedaling with my head down, I almost ran into an antelope buck who was crossing the street, trying to get out of my way. I think it freaked me out as much as him.

50 days of riding means I have biked to work an equivalent of 300 miles so far. It's not an earth-shattering number, considering I ride 100 in a weekend with my training, but it has saved nearly a full tank of gasoline for my car.

Of course, my feeling of smugness eroded somewhat when I realized that 50 days in 3.5 months puts me exactly a half month behind my goal, and if this is when it's warm, how many days am I going to get when it starts getting cold?

I didn't know if 200 days was a realistic goal when I set it, but once I started looking at the calendar and realized that vacations, retreats and travel for work would eat up my possible slack, I decided I would allow myself to make it up with bonus trips. These are trips I would normally take with my car (like visits the store, to run short errands, etc.), but I count them as a day if I do them on my bike and they are a comparable distance.

In short, I have lots more work to do - work that will get much more interesting once the snow starts again in September. But until then, I'm enjoying the sun on my face and the beautiful ride that is Laramie in the summer.

The Delinquent Blogger — Me

There are some people in this world who are on top of things. They go to the dentist every six months. They get their movies back to Blockbuster on time. They get their oil changed every 3,000 miles like clockwork. In short, they are in tune with the demands of life and they excel at meeting them.

I am not one of these people.

I am from the other kind of people. I lose my keys frequently. My cell phone goes dead on a regular basis from me forgetting to charge it. My house goes through cycles of clean and unclean, tidiness and disarray. My family members always get to celebrate their birthday with the arrival of my card about two months after their birthday. Sometimes I feel guilty about it, but mostly I think others should lower their expectations for me. It’s worked for my brother for years. If I had to characterize “untogetherness,” I would defend it by saying I’m not wholly neglectful; I’m merely a person who operates on cycles.

So it is not surprising to me to pull up my blog, only to see that my last post was March 24, when I began my personal bike-to-work challenge. You may be disappointed in my ability to keep everyone updated, but I want to tell you that you can at least feel satisfied knowing I will update eventually — I just like to build the suspense. For about four months. Once again, low expectations.

However, now that my summer classes and vacations are done until my mountain bike race July 31, I have my blog on my to-do list. So, although I’d like to pretend that I’m jealous of the first kind of people — the together, oil-changing, birthday-cards-on-time folks — I realize I’m somewhat flighty, preoccupied and unreliable in this sense. And you know what? I’m OK with that.

So stay tuned … I’m in a cycle of busting out some blog entries this summer. Finally!

The Bike-to-Work Challenge

The thing about living in Wyoming is there's always an excuse NOT to do something. It's too far ... it's too cold ... it's too windy ... blah blah blah.

In the past, I rode my bike to work in Florida (13 miles each way) and Missouri (1.5 miles each way - with a monstrous hill and a creek in the middle), but I have found LOTS of excuses not to ride the 3 miles from my house to work in my year's worth of living in Wyoming, where it starts snowing in September and doesn't stop until June.

Thinking about what a whining little sissie I've become in a place where people are supposed to be "cowboy tough," I decided it was time to make some goals.

Goal 1: Get off thy (increasingly) big butt and register for some bicycling races this summer.

Accomplished. With the help of my riding buddy in Missouri, we have signed up to do the Laramie Enduro, a 70+ mountain bike race on the trails of my mountainous backyard on July 31, and the very next week the Copper Triangle, a 78-mile road ride that crosses Fremont, Tennessee and Vail passes in Colorado. I was planning on jumping without looking when a friend said, "Vail pass - whoa. When's the last time you drove over that?" Shut up. I don't want to think about it.

Goal 2: Put together a plan to train for said races and stick to it.

Thanks to Amazon.com, I got some great books to help out with Goal 2, and I think I've been about 70 percent compliant with the plan I've set up, so I feel confident that I'll be ready for these races in a little more than four month's time.

Goal 3: Bike to work at least 200 days this year, beginning March 15.

Let me start by saying that this a completely arbitrary number. I thought it would be challenging. I have no idea of how attainable this goal is, and I didn't really think about it that hard. Now looking at it, I'm kind of scared, but 200 is a nice, round, ambitious figure that will sound super cool if I can say "last year I biked to work 200 days." Not that I would :-)

From a geeky perspective, if I accomplish Goal 3, that means I will save 6 miles a day from my car's odometer, which is 1,200 miles a year. Given that my car averages about 35 miles per gallon in town in cold weather, that means I will save 35 gallons of gasoline. At a price of about $2.50 per gallon, this will save me about $88 in a year. So as you can see, I'm not doing it for the money. I'm sure there will be times when I will be willing to pay $88 for a ride. But it will save me nearly four trips to the gas station, and considering I only fill up once a month now, that will cut my annual gas bill by about one-third, which I think is impressive.

At this point, I'm happy to report that I have six days of commuting under my belt, and already I have biked through two blizzards and crashed on the ice once. So even if I fail miserably, and drive to work more than 55 days this year, at the very least I will have earned some interesting stories to share. Stay tuned ...

Taking it to the Mattress

Recently, after fits of tossing and turning, and noticing more squeaking and creaking, my husband and I decided to make one of our most adult-feeling purchases to date: We decided it was time for a new mattress.

I have to admit, the impetus for this decision came in two forms: 1.) We finally saw a bedroom set that appealed to our extremely picky style; and 2.) Annoyed with each of us feeling like the other is intruding upon his/her side, and with a 60-pound dog adding herself into the mix about halfway through the night, we realized it was time to upgrade to a king-size bed.

So, with the shipping confirmation of our bedroom set from Crate & Barrel safely in our inbox, we were prepared to conquer the next step: the mattress.

If you haven’t shopped for a mattress in an actual mattress store, I recommend it for experience’s sake alone. There’s something surreal about lying on a bare mattress with your shoes on and your partner next to you, both of you trying to surmise how you’ll feel about lying on this surface for the next decade or so. I mean, how better to contemplate this decision than lying on your back, staring at ceiling-tile stains in a fluorescent-lighted showroom while listening to a taped infomercial explaining the benefits of the coils and padding under you.

If you have had the pleasure of this experience, then you know that the salespeople rank second in voracity only to those found on used-car lots. They insist that you take your time and “get comfortable” to assess the full impact of their products while they stare at you and follow you around from bed to bed, grinning like idiots. Luckily, our salesman was gracious enough to leave us alone as we tested about a half-dozen mattresses.

We started by lying on our backs, then flipping to our sides, facing each other and trying not to laugh — we tried instead to focus intently on how our backs felt, how our hips felt, how our entire body was cradled in layers of some fiber said to be invented by NASA.

Then we’d move to the next and repeat the ritual, which only confused me more. After all, I remember really liking our current bed when we bought it six years ago, only to frown upon it now, with its “compressed” coils and its unsupportive pillowtop. I blame it on my advancing age. I stand by my purchase.

Of course, adding to my confusion was the fact that these mattresses come with a 20-year warranty. Yet at a recent dinner party, former mattress-selling friends of mine told me the longest I’d ever want to keep a mattress was 10 years — tops. With dust mites and sweat and skin particles and all. Gross. They actually informed me that in that time your mattress will double in weight from these things. Super gross.

With all this in my head, who the hell knows what to think? You would think I could just lie down and say “yes” or “no.” After all – who knows what the future holds? Doesn’t every big decision go like this? And don’t all those big decisions turn out to be smaller and smaller with the passage of time?

“You know, with the purchase of this mattress you get two free pillows,” the helpful salesman added as he casually strolled back to check on us.

Turns out, that’s all I needed - Sold. After all, neither of the houses I bought came with free pillows.

Warning: FOOD PHOBIA

AFRAID OF FOOD

I know, you wouldn’t know it by looking at me. As a healthy, active, yet curvaceous young woman of 28, I have never been known to miss a meal. But lately, I’ve been more and more bothered by a looming question: Will my food kill me?

In a bizarre habit I think I have in common only with my dog, I have a history of eating the same exact thing, in the same exact amount, every day:

I start with a ½ cup of Quaker oatmeal sprinkled with a tablespoon of brown sugar, which I heat up in a Tupperware in the microwave at work. I follow that with a light Yoplait flavored yogurt at 10:30 a.m. as a snack. Then for lunch, a can of tuna in water with Light Miracle Whip, French’s mustard and dill relish with six multi-grain Saltines. I complement this nastiness with a piece of seasonal fruit and wash it all down with some Crystal Light.

At around 3:30 p.m., I eat a 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn, and hold on for dear life until dinner rolls around. And the whole day, I’m sipping from my battered Nalgene bottle, drinking about 60 ounces of water during the day.

Sounds pretty healthy, right? I thought so too, until all these bastards in the media had to tell me the facts about what I was eating.  

In the past two years, I have learned that nearly every single thing in that daily diet, if consumed enough, will kill me.

The first hubbub was about tuna. OK, aside from the fact that what comes out of those 50-cent cans looks and smells a lot like catfood, I always figured I hated it, so it has to be good for you. Plus, it’s a low-fat, cheap source of fantastic lean protein.

Then I learn that the water those fishies are swimming in is polluted, so they’ve been steadily accumulating mercury in their bodies, which they store and pass along to us. 

Before this, the only thing I knew about Mercury was that it is perhaps the most awesome substance on earth. I remember breaking a thermometer once in the sink and I pushed around the stuff for about a half hour. I was enthralled.

But, apparently, it’s particularly bad for women and kids, and your body stockpiles it instead of flushing it, which is bad.

Well, I thought, it gives me another excuse to add to my anti-baby rhetoric:

“Kids? Umm, no, sorry – I have about a half pound of mercury stored in my body from 10 years of eating canned tuna every day for lunch – not exactly a baby-friendly zone anymore.”

So I never liked tuna anyway. But yogurt to me, is the perfect food. A good balance of carbs, protein, calcium, with a dollop of fruit mixed in. Perfect. Until I got the news that the milk used to make my delicious Yoplait is full of hormones they pump the cows with to make them produce more milk. Then of course there’s the fact that “light” yogurts are sweetened with aspartame, which is about as good for you as arsenic.

So by not wanting to consume as much sugar as what’s in a half-can of regular soda, I get cancer instead. Nice. By the way, this one kills two birds with one stone, since the Crystal Light that I consume by the pitcher is also sweetened with that artificial shit. But it is yummy.

Moving on, with the worst blow to my day: Microwave popcorn has a cocktail of carcinogens in every delicious bag. Apparently the materials these dipshits put on the bags to prevent the cancer-causing artificial butter from soaking through the bag rubs off onto the popcorn and can also cause cancer.

So, as I’m reading this one, (because I didn’t believe the fat jerk at my office who snidely told me my favorite 100-calorie snack would kill me as he munched on his second helping of Doritos that day) I find out that they don’t know how much rubs off on the popcorn, but it probably take a lot to make you sick, so don’t worry about it. Little do they know I eat it every day, and when I’m done with the popcorn, I take my finger and rub off all that artificial butter crap so I can be as disgusting as possible while getting the full cancer-causing effects.

The least of my worries is probably the piece of fruit. Yes, I know that it’s bathed in pesticide perfection, waxed down so it doesn’t wither and then shipped sometimes half the world away to reach me, but if a damn piece of fruit is going to be the thing that does me in, so be it.

The last thing I learned led to my new belief that everything we classify as a modern convenience is the devil. Including the plastic containers in which we store our food and drink. When they get warm or old, they like to release harmful chemicals into the food and drink, just to teach us a lesson about innovation.

So all that water I’ve drank out of my decade-old bottle? Cancer. And it’s supposed to be particularly bad if you leave it in a hot car. Which was ALWAYS for the three-and-a-half years I lived in Florida. In fact, I would even drink the hot water that had been roasting in the bottle for hours in the car. Nothing like hot, leeched chemicals to quench your thirst in 98-degree heat.

Ever hear that ignorance is bliss? I couldn’t agree more when it comes to this subject. I mean really, how are you supposed to eat anything? Everything is processed or mass-produced in a way that is most likely unhealthy. I don’t exactly have a banana tree out back with chickens and turkeys wandering around, waiting to be slaughtered. So what are we to do?

This last weekend, the health-food-that’s-bad-for-you topic came up as I chatted with my aunt, my cousin and my 92-year-old grandmother (who believes farmers and food manufacturers would never do anything that might compromise your health), and I finally reached a conclusion.

My grandmother still runs her entire farm in Nebraska by herself at 92. She has lived a long, healthy, disease-free life eating the organic vegetables she grows in her garden, raising hormone-free, antibiotic-free beef and chicken, and working every day with her hands outside in fresh air on her farm.

I, on the other hand, sit on my butt at a desk all day with a sore back, staring at a screen that will no doubt damage my eyesight over time, breathing ventilated air like an animal in captivity.

I have tried the past few months to deviate from my normal menu, but it’s not easy. I admit: my semi-obsessive food routine brings me comfort during my day. It alleviates stress – it reduces any further decisions I have to make. And it just makes me feel better.

So I decided: If the 100-calorie bag of microwave popcorn that brings me 15 minutes of pure bliss every afternoon also brings me the risk of cancer somewhere down the line — I’ll take my chances. And I will not longer be afraid to enjoy every minute of it.