Mountain Biking Skills Session

Finally, after three months of hiatus, my full suspension bike, the Ibis Mojo tasted the local dirt. I took it to the world famous I-5 Colonnade for couple of hours of intense skills practice. The park is usually empty during the work days, when I run through it on my lunch breaks. But it was empty on a Sunday afternoon, in the winter when most real mountain trails are covered with snow here. Or are there so many good winter coastal destinations where all mountain bikers go? A guy I met at I-5 said that it gets "a little busier" in the summer months. The place rocks and I cannot thank enough those many people who must have spent hundreds of hours building the sweet tracks here, so that two guys could have the whole park to themselves on a sunny winter afternoon.

Between Three Kings and Hromnice

There is a Czech saying that loosely translates as: "On New Years Day, a hen's step ahead, on Three Kings Day, one step further, on Hromnice Day, one hour more". As I look at it, it makes no sense whatsoever in English, it does not even rhyme, which it does nicely in Czech. Anyways, the saying is referring to the daylight increases after the Winter Solstice. The Three Kings Day (Epiphany) was January 6th. Hromnice day is February 2nd, still three weeks away. But the days are getting longer at an alarming rate of 1-2 minutes per day here at the far-far-north-west. And we are not even as far north as Prague! (Seattle 47.6097, Prague 50.0833).
For now, we keep our bike lights charged, blinkies, as well as headlamps and reflective vests for running ready. The dry, cold and sunny days make all the surrounding mountains visible, I think I saw Mt. Baker from the Volunteer Park water tower the other day - that hill is 90 miles away. Of course, "The Mountain" seems to be looming above the horizon no matter which direction you look. Here, we look at it from the Snoqualmie Alpental ski area, just off the Edelweiss chairlift:

Run-Bike-Run

When Roger, one of the people behind 4th Dimension Racing, Evergreen Trail runs and Northwest Multisport Trail Duathlons, asked me on Sunday how I liked the Northwest after moving here from the Bay Area, I only had time to answer: "A lot!". It would be a long explanation and I am not even sure if I could coherently and logically explain to myself what I like or don't like here. Marketa sums it up: these runners and bicyclists here are for real, unlike the Silicon Valley slightly overweight crowd in tight colorful kits with some lard escaping the Lycra. People here will outrun you and bike commuters will zoom by you when you are in a big ring and thinking how fast you're going.
So to make things even more interesting, they have created trail duathlons, where, in the long version, you can run on trails, then hop on your mountain or CX bike and ride several laps, and after you are done with the bike, run again. I had no idea how this worked, how to arrange gear at the transition area or how to dress for the race. But I guess I figured it out before the start and then I only had tons of fun. I know how cliche this sounds but the green grass, forest singletrack, ferns, slick roots, sunny breaks, rain sprinkles, snow covered mountains on the horizon, and the pleasure of moving and finally riding my mountain bike on technical enough trails just made my mood excellent.

This was the first race of a 3-race series, all taking place at Ft. Steilacoom in Tacoma. There are few more oficial photos here:
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h5189720e
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h51897c12
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h51897c72
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h51949172
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h519b7d0a
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h51a444cc
http://stevesandersphotography.com/p840101718/h51866242#h51a56f0e

And a Garmin track here: http://connect.garmin.com/activity/259059105

...And A Happy New Year

Mt. Rainier National Park, January 1, 2013

2012 was a strong bicycling year, with 3,560 total recorded miles and almost 320,000 vertical feet. It was a year of my first loaded bicycle tour, my first bike overnight trip, my first 8-hour mountain bike race and one European bike marathon race. It was also a year when I could go for a bike ride pretty much any time I wanted during my six months of unemployment, in a state when there is always a good riding weather and dry trails. Yet towards the end of the last year, I realized that while riding my bikes is fun and thoroughly enjoy it, it does not really fill my life with a purpose. Moving to Washington state also made me realize that eight months of no rain was boring, skiing and snowshoeing is what I love to do in the winter and mountain biking can easily be the sport I do in summer months (it used to be when I lived in Connecticut and it was perfectly fine). I even think bike commuting to work in rain is OK and hubs, bottom brackets and other bike parts can and should be replaced sometimes.
So 2012 was really good for me getting in shape, yet happiness does not get measured by miles ridden or feet climbed, or races won or lost. And I hope 2013 will be a happy year full of new roads and trails discovered, but mainly one filled with a sense of doing something useful, for myself, for my family or for the humanity, and not just riding along.

Merry Christmas from downtown Seattle

Escaping the rain

While I enjoy my work bike commute here even if it rains, I have not taken my mountain bike on trails yet. I guess there is a deep resistance in me to go mountain biking when the weather is "bad" or trails are wet and muddy. I did venture out to the mountains though, last weekend skiing at Stevens Pass in a foot of fresh powder was great, made even better by a 2-hour drive to the slopes and $40 lift ticket. This week, Stevens Pass got four feet of fresh snow on friday and six (!) feet Saturday.
I start to get it, when it pours in Seattle, it dumps powder couple of hours worth of drive away. So when a group of colleagues organized a snowshoeing trip to Mt. Rainier, I signed up, thinking, well it is not going top be as much fun as off-piste skiing the steeps and deeps, but perhaps I would try to get an aerobic workout on snowshoes. The Paradise area at Mt. Rainier looked very different than three months ago when I was there last.

Paradise, photo by Bob

Snow was deep, deep enough to make my large borrowed snowshoes sink while breaking the first track of the day. After a couple of hundred meters, I was breathing hard and the trail was downhill.

But after a while, I got the rhythm of making small steps and trying to glide on the surface and I was surprised how fast I was moving. Given the time I had for this hike, I went fast for about an hour and half before I had to turn around.

The trail theoretically looped back to the lodge but I was afraid to venture into the untracked terrain, since besides a sandwich, water and couple of power bars, I had no special gear with me. Starting the climb back in early afternoon, the clouds broke and some rays of sunshine made the scenery even nicer, if that was even possible.

I have to say that this three hour walk covering a distance of probably four miles was amazing, besides the obvious beauty of the surrounding nature, and for the intensity of exercise. I am still a firm believer in skis as the right tool for moving in or on snow, but this new experience was great. A huge Korean barbecue which concluded the day made it just perfect.

Who's listening?

Now, I'm not much into urban legends and conspiracy theories. As a kid, I used to read lots of sci-fi books, but today, as a scientist, I am always surprised how primitive those ideas were to the real adventures in science.
There is one observation that has been nagging at me for a while, though. It probably has no statistical significance, but coincidentally it happened again this week, just couple of days after I spoke about it with my colleague at work. Here it is: has it ever happened to you that you had a conversation with somebody about something, and then your smart phone would display ads or news articles related to the topic you had talked about? And I mean just talked about, never went online to explore it or sent emails about it etc. I swear it happens to me. My explanation is simple: Apple, Google, the Russian mafia or whoever, sometimes turns your phone microphone on and eavesdrops on your conversations. Sounds crazy? I guess.... Here is what actually happened this week: yesterday, I had a lunch break conversation in the kitchen of our company about the abundance of long and steep flights of stairs around Seattle. A group at work goes running sometimes and we would ascent stairs on East Howe St. as a warm up on our way to the water tower in Volunteer Park (more stairs inside). Just a block away, I found even longer flight of stairs, at East Blaine St. So we just chatted how it came that steep hills of Seattle are so rich in these moss covered slippery stairs, which are great for running up until your calves burn with lactic acid.

This morning I made a coffee and ate breakfast while surfing Google news on my iPhone. And there it was: among local Seattle news (if it wasn't enough the darn thing knows where I am!) was a note on a new book release: Seattle Stairway Walks: An Up-and-Down Guide to City Neighborhoods by Jake & Cathy Jaramillo. These guys have also a nice website and a blog at www.seattlestairwaywalks.com. What a great idea! So for my today's lunch break run, I went both up and down on long flights of stairs and also snapped a few pictures.

 
So if Google (Apple?) happens to be also reading this blog, please, keep eavesdropping via my iPhone and bring me news about more trails and fun places to run or bike. For encryption purposes, I could always switch to Czech, at least until my son who studies computer linguistics in Brno, gets a job with one you non-evil corporations.