May 18 2020

I started my birthday with breakfast, big business decisions, and reading the news: the 40^thanniversary of Mt St Helens eruption, when 3,000 feet blew off the top of the volcano, and ashes spread worldwide. Today, the pandemic coronavirus, and what will we do? How will this end?The skies are cleaner now than they’ve been for – maybe as long as most of us can remember. We’re making use the awesome human power to travel vast distances in space-time without leaving home, with our imaginations, with computers and books.



Mid-morning, I gathered up my baby one-year-old and headed out for a hike on Pt Pinole, which is a big remote peninsula out near where the Sacramento River flows into the San Francisco Bay. They used to

manufacture dynamite here, for the gold mines and new trains. The views of water stretch out in most directions. On the Bay View trail, paved since the last time I came here, I looked over the rolling hills and the pickleweed and beyond the bright indigo of a pair of western bluebirds towards the blue horizon; further inland, on the Nitro Trail or the Angel Buggy Trail, I walked under the old eucalyptus trees planted long ago to muffle the sound of explosions. All of the trails in
the park are wide and flat, paved or gravel, and easy to push a stroller across. It was a relief to my back, which has gotten so used to carrying the baby in a backpack.
Eucalyptus was a curious choice to plant, I think, given that the aromatic oils of the Australian eucalyptus are explosive, and those long strips of bark are famous for curling around hot embers to spread

wildfire. Scattered here and there amongst the eucalyptus are the old manufacturing bunkers, nothing left now but the three-sided boxes of 18” thick concrete, each embedded in steep berms 20’ high and thick and growing with grass. The light comes in through the tree trunks in long dappled golden streaks.
 I love abandoned industrial places. They remind me of the future. What things will be like after the end of what we call the Industrial Revolution. When things go back to some new normal. Native pickleweed and rushes and oak trees mix happily with European imports like fennel and ivy and mustard. Since birds and seals don’t always want to fly or swim 100 or 500 miles to find a pristine national park when they’re ready for their next meal, places like this one are usually teeming with happy animals. I’ve been mostly a cyclist and a walker for most of my life. I travel like the wildlife, on my own power. So I find these smaller, maybe polluted, open, wild spots. Near me, wherever I’ve lived. I used to live a mile away, and would come down here once or twice a week for a soothing recovery ride on my bicycle, or maybe to cool my legs in the estuary. This is the second or third time I’ve been back in the eight years since I moved a dozen miles away, the first time in a car.

The Hayward Fault runs through Pt Pinole. Life is uncertain near the junction of tectonic plates. Volcanoes erupt and earthquakes shake, mountains reach their full grandeur and rolling hills abound. I’ve lived on the Pacific Coast of North America for twenty-nine years, so I’ve gotten used to this combination of slow change and sudden danger, instability and scenic glory. 

And here we are. The year when Covid-19 scared the world into stillness. This historic moment gives us some perspective on the big picture, like a breathtaking vista from a tall mountain. The layout of the land is visible from where we stand, and you can see the whole territory laid out like a big topo map. When we come down from here, we will be in a new place. But where? What will be different?But also the big businesses are winning more than their share of subsidies, regulations are being repealed, and the billionaires in America have gotten 10% richer in the first 6 weeks of our shelter-in-place, while small businesses and indviduals go broke.  Many of us feel isolated, without regular face-to-face contact with people outside our household. Governments are rolling back regulations about pollution and privacy.

Which side of the mountain will we be on when we come down? Or should I ask, where will be the mountain? We have the power to choose our destiny. Humans have become a geological force.We reached the end of the peninsula and turned east along the Marsh Trail, where the trees give way to rolling grass. My mind stopped wandering and my legs picked up the pace. When I’d gone out as far as my legs wanted to go, 3.7 miles on my cell phone pedometer, I put the Baby Tommy down in the first patch of tall, golden grass that was soft and not prickly. He smiled and grabbed the grass heads. He showed me six or so varieties of wild grass. He hugged me. He would’ve stayed out in the field all afternoon. Since I live in an apartment, the only place where I feel confident that the ground will not infect him with a deadly virus is someplace very remote. We drank some water from the bottle I’d brought from my bike shop. I took some photos. We made a phone call. Then it was time to go.

A Publication About My Grandfather's Life in the North

Studying to split firewood with Grandpa,
November 2007

Well, the secret's out - I've been writing a memoir about my grandfather's journey from New York City to the Bering Sea by canoe, starting in 1971 when he was 50 years old.

My grandfather told the most wonderful stories to me, and to dozens of other people, about his journey and his life in the north. When so much of the rest of my life comes with trigger warnings, about personal stuff, societal problems, and environmental issues, I find that my grandfather's stories give me comfort and a sense of direction. So I decided to preserve his truth and his stories. I'm preserving them for my future self, and for others to whom they may be meaningful.

Here is one for you to read, on Tamim Ansary's excellent storytelling blog:

https://memoirpool.com/2016/02/08/jonahs-roost/

Bicycles, Commuters, Athletes, and Intellectuals

Our bike shop, Lulu's, at 3089 Telegraph Ave
in Berkeley, California

For years, I was an elite racer,
riding the most expensive equipment, smiling for photos, and driving or flying thousands of miles a year to race Olympic and National champions. It was a beautiful and fulfilling endeavor.

It was also a little surprising, since I grew up in an intellectual family that looked down on athletes as "shallow." We rode bikes. My daddy used bicycles as interesting example problems in the course he taught with Peter Doyle, called "Geometry and the Imagination." We went places on bikes - to school, to my daddy's office, to the pick-your-own strawberry farm, to summer camp three states away. But we didn't "work out."

After years as an athlete who rode in weightless circles for the sake of pure motion, it's nice to be back, running a commuter shop that caters to scholars. Because getting around was the whole reason that cycling became my passion.

Riding to Preschool behind
the "World's Greatest Geometer"
(my father)

Cycling medals, National and State championships

Randy Shoquist

I woke up this morning with a memory on my mind.
Randy Shoquist was a great match sprinter, and he was this really humble bike mechanic.
The first time I met him, I was riding my Schwinn High Plains around Portland, and I'd tacoed one of the wheels. It was a $300 mountain bike I'd had since I was 12. I went to 3 or 4 shops and all of them said it would cost me $150 to replace the wheel. I was just a poor college kid making minimum wage on my summer break. Thne I took it into Randy at Coventry Cycles...
"And he bent it back for you?" Dennis asked.
"Yeah."
"I did that 3 or 4 times yesterday."
"Randy stepped on my wheel a couple times and handed it back to me, charged me $10 minimum shop labor. I was pretty happy.
"The next time I encountered him was a few years later when I started racing. He had the flying 200 record at Alpenrose. He held that track record for 30 years. It was amazing.
"Then a couple years after that, Mike Murray, who was in charge of the velodrome in Portland, said that Norrene, my racer friend who promoted and took a couple people to the London Olympics, did "more with less than anyone else he knew. And Randy Shoquist did less with more."
And I looked at him and I said, "Randy went really fast."
That was what mattered to me. The physicality of it. Not whether you were sponsored or traveled to a bunch of fancy races. Physical speed.

"Opening up a bike store, now, makes me feel kind of like Randy."
"And it's a humble kind of bike store."
"Yeah."

Photo by James Mason, http://www.pbase.com/image/129875942

Disciplines

What I do, I like to do well. I’ve had some success racing bicycles on the road, the track, and in cyclocross. I’ve won elite national medals on road and track, and a masters national medal in cyclocross.
Last year, I got back onto the velodrome after a decade of absence, and I combined that with road racing and cyclocross. I had some success. But I learned – the hard way, as I seem to learn so many things – that, though I can do any of those disciplines well, I can’t do all three disciplines at a high level in one season.
“Discipline” has as much to do with punishment and domination as it has to do with devotion, understanding, and a life of faithful practice. Depending on its inflection, “discipline” can give a life structure and purpose, or, like in an abusive relationship, it can leave a person broken, fragmented, shut down, wandering, and lost.
So which discipline is it going to be this year? Well, cyclocross. That choice has more to do with timing than anything else. After a three-discipline season in 2012, I was hammered, overtrained, molested by a long string of injuries and illness, burnt out, and sick of cycling. I tried to quit racing for good in April. By June I had discovered (the hard way) that I love and enjoy and want and need to race my bike. It’s the end of July and I’m just toeing my way back towards the discipline of riding. Cyclocross happens late enough in the year that I can still hope to get all the way up to speed before the season ends.
The pure intense physical endeavor of racing is fun and games and punishing pain and grim hard work and serious indolence and satisfaction. I’m, tentatively, stoked.

Free Range Human

What does it mean to be a free range human?



Being a free range human means that my life, my work, my income, my self-expression come naturally and develop organically in healthy relationships to other people and the world around me. It means that my routines are comfortable and have enough space to let me be myself, and enough structure to allow me to coordinate with other people and develop stronger disciplines over time. For years I tried to fit myself into other people's molds and ideas of excellence, for instance the full time job. The most fulfilled people I know might roam around and move stuff for a living; they might sit and think for a living; they might ride bikes and talk to people for a living. It's a different combination for every free range human I've met, as unique and recognizable as a fingerprint. It's a way of dancing with life.

I started racing bikes in 1997 out of Portland, Oregon, where truly elite level racing was kind of rare at the time. For better and worse, I was always strongly independent and suspicious of authority. I quickly racked up some impressive national level results, but I also racked up some physical issues. I quit racing for a couple years, and when I started my comeback, dealing with the injuries and nagging issues became a necessity. In 2006, at the urging of my friend and teammate Sonya King who was interning as a PT in his office at the time, I started working with Curtis Cramblett on some lower back pain that kept me from racing and training. He was a big help, and he helped me to resolve my low back pain.

Injury would rear its ugly head again during the 2012 season and the 2012-2013 winter, in the form of debilitating pain in my right knee and my right hip. That’s a full year and a half of right leg dysfunction. I worked through it on my own and managed a good late summer season on the road and track, and a good mid-season of cyclocross racing. Then my knee started bugging me again, then my hip, and I missed the most of the end of the cyclocross season. I had a dismal nationals and skipped world championship altogether because I could not train or race around the hip pain.

I am stubborn and it took a complete athletic breakdown lasting months to send me back to the physical therapist for help again. I emailed Curtis. Curtis is a busy guy who travels a lot, and he recommended his colleague at Revolutions in Fitness, Mark McMahon.

Mark does excellent work. He’s got skills – he’s like a Rolfer, a Chiropractor, a Physical Therapist, and a Bike Fit expert all rolled up in one. He refers to different techniques and modalities from moment to moment depending on what will be the most beneficial. He doesn’t waste time. Like Curtis, Mark is also a sweet and inspiring guy. Working with Mark, I was consistently back in training within 2 sessions – after the full year and a half of tenuous contact with the bike.

We’re continuing to work together to resolve the issues that I’ve accrued over the years. Be better than I’ve been, and let Mark help you work stuff out before it becomes debilitating.

Tour de Nez 2012

Last Sunday was the Tour de Nez in its 20th anniversary. It is often a national calendar race, though not this year. A technical course, with seven corners and a corkscrew going into the final stretch. We had a high-quality field this year, with several riders each from four great pro teams (Exergy, Primal, NOW/ Novartis and Vanderkitten), and about fifteen local racers. It was windy, hot and dry. All of that makes for kind of an unforgiving peloton – there is not much “pack fodder” to help to hold things together, and things small gaps tend to increase in the wind.
About 12 minutes into the race, Mary Maroon, a very accomplished top local rider who wins many local races, broke away from the group by herself. “It’s not my job to chase that,” I thought from the middle the pack.
After a couple of laps, three riders – Taylor Wiles from Exergy, Emily Kachorek from Primal, and Robin Farina, last year’s national road race champion, from NOW/ Novartis – jumped away from the group to bridge up to Mary, making a four rider breakaway. I was boxed in at the time, but a few seconds later I jumped away with Ruth Winder, Vanderkitten, and we worked together to bridge up to the four, making a six rider breakaway.
For about a lap the three major pros did all the work at the front. Robin warned, “You have to work or we’ll start attacking you.” I moved to the front of the group and took a pull. Neither Ruth nor Mary had pulled through by the end of that lap. Robin attacked. Ruth fell off the pace.
The four of us worked together, and Mary kept about a bike length off the back of our group. She was playing invisible. The three pros were content to ignore her. But Mary is an excellent sprinter. I didn’t feel comfortable working that much harder than she was. I dropped to the back of the group, behind Mary, and sat out my pull. The other three suddenly noticed. Someone attacked and opened up a small gap. I accelerated around Mary, around the group, and took a fast pull. We dropped Mary.
The four of us worked together for the rest of the race, eventually lapping the rest of the field.
I was bawling an hour later. And I knew that I would be – that kind of physical intensity brings stuff up. Sad things.

I am racing as well as I think I ever have, and I feel like I have plenty of head room.
“It sounds like you do,” said Uncle George on Wednesday evening, over dinner just after I finally arrived in Rochester.
My dad’s eyes sparkled. He has a lot of trouble speaking these days. His mouth is a big mess. He can smile with his whole face.
“I almost didn’t race. I mean, really, fifteen or ten minutes before it was time to warm up, I really was tempted to get back in the car and drive home. So what if it’s three and a half hours each way? But I talked myself into engaging with the hard part of the warm up, and I lined up.”
“Where was this?”
“Reno, Nevada. I drove over Donner Pass to get there. It’s the course where I rolled a tire and crashed and hurt my knee last year. [My knee has been bothering me with intermittent intensity for the entire year.]
“I was feeling so good and strong and confident. Amber Rais was a few bike lengths off the front, and I was leading the pack after her. I took that corner really aggressively, I leaned hard into it. I was flying. And then my tire rolled, and I fell down.

"So this year I had trouble convincing myself to trust my tires, to trust the course. I kept reasoning with myself not to worry, but there is that visceral fear. It is not a course where you can afford to be afraid of the corners, because it is so technical. So I didn’t do very well in the sprint, and I finished fourth.“
“Wow,” Aunt Sally said on Thursday night, just back in Rochester after a conference in San Diego. In California, standards are higher. You’ve got to win the sprint. I’ve got to trust my tires. I came home yesterday.

Adventure Stories

My grandfather has been an inspiration to me for a long time. Maybe he's the reason I race bicycles. A week ago, my uncle Tom went to Ontario to move my Grandpa down to California. Grandpa flew in on Saturday night.
He’s had an interesting life. As a young man he was a successful chemist who registered 30 or 40 patents working for the USDA, including the original patent for epoxidized oils. Then he quit and left town, taught environmental studies for a couple years, canoed from New York City to Alaska with some of his studies, and finally settled on his forest in northwest Ontario.

My mom used to take me and the rest of the family up to Ontario sometimes to visit in the summer. When I was 3, they would plunk me down in a patch of blueberries and let me eat myself blue in the face. As long as the blueberries held out – and they were prodigious – I wouldn’t move. When I was 9, I learned to paddle and steer a canoe on my own. Me and Grandpa were stronger than the Eagle Scouts.
When I was 15, my parents bought an 80-acre parcel adjacent to Grandpa’s. We spent three weeks exploring the ins and outs of the twisting Wabigoon River that knit the two properties together. Our family stayed on an old homestead under a stand of poplar just downstream from the waterfall, 100 feet from the gradually collapsing log cabin. We built a raft to cross the river, and a rope swing for jumping into it.
I spent a lot of time staring at the water flowing past, like time… The river is a rich brown the color of tea, dyed from the tannic acid in the leaves that the water passes through. The tannic acid suppresses bacteria and keeps the water clean and pure. Grandpa says that his water tastes better than water from wells or water from lakes or water from anywhere else. A leader from the Native American reservation downstream agrees, and likes to visit periodically. Grandpa’s good health and spirits were always a strong indicator that the river water is clean and safe and good to drink. But at 91 ½ years old, I guess he was ready to move to a place… where water comes out of a faucet, instead of a bucket carried in a wheelbarrow hauled up from the river ½ mile downhill.

On Monday morning, I saw him for breakfast in my Mom’s apartment on Garber Street. He likes to have his tea by 6 or 6:30 am. We discussed, amongst other things, my bicycle racing. I did pretty well on Sunday, ended up fifth place, with some good prize money. “But where is your bicycle this morning?” he asked me.
“I don’t have it today. It was just so early and I drove. I’ll bring my bike next time,” I promised. Not the biggest promise I’ve ever made him, but a real one.

After Thursday’s group ride, I came back to visit again. Lunch. Warm smile, regard. Grandpa sat on Mom’s window seat overlooking the bay. She’s on the fourth floor on a hill facing the bay, and the view is incredible. I spent the afternoon setting up my old laptop for my Mom to use and encouraging her to clean. Grandpa napped on the window seat. When he woke up, Mom pointed out the fog rolling in through the Golden Gate. It looks pretty good even through a limited pane of glass. But being out there...
“The view from Grizzly Peak this morning was amazing. The bay is so blue, and the mountains are so majestic, and then there’s all this industry in the middle of it, the cranes in Oakland, all of the tall tall buildings in the City, all stretched out below me. Every time I come up over Pinehurst and catch a view of the Bay, I feel like I’m in an adventure novel, and I am an adventuring heroine.”
Grandpa nodded his head in recognition.
“It’s amazing. I’ve lived here for – almost ten years. And the view still takes my breath every time.”
Again, Grandpa nodded. I’m pretty sure he feels the same way about the forest in Ontario. “Good morning, morning” he used to say each morning, and the Whiskey Jacks came flying out of the trees into the clearing where his cabin is. They used to eat toast or pancakes from a tin pan on top of the woodshed, or sometimes from his hand.

Flight of Fancy

Amelia Earhart sold her airplane to buy a fast bright yellow car sometime in her late 20s, so she could drive across country from California to Boston to help her mother, who was sick. It was the beginning of a few long hard flightless years of poverty for her.
After she was whisked out of her burgeoning career in social work to fly across the Atlantic as the first female (passenger) to do that, she got famous and spent the rest of her life not just setting records but lecturing endlessly around the country, in the name of equality for women and airplanes for everyone. She pioneered feminism and the passenger airplane industry.
Maybe it's a little ironic to listen to her extensive biography while driving across the country, my act of active rebellion against airplanes.
I wanted to travel with a little more continuity, on the ground, to see the world I was traversing end to end. I wanted to manage my own luggage, my own security, my own destinations.
Flying in an airplane can feel a little like going through a worm hole, teleporting from one place to another. You hand over your ticket, your luggage, your money to someone else, and sit down and wait until you are in the destination airport. It's as if the San Francisco airport is connected directly to JFK (or perhaps Denver) with just a wait of a couple of hours of waiting time in between.
I've heard that it takes about the same amount of fuel, gas, petroleum, to fly across the country non-stop in a full 747 as it does to drive across the country in a small car with 2 people in it. So it's not like there's a big fuel advantage one way or another. But it's easy to forget, when flying, about the petroleum being burned on our behalf, about the enormity of the journey.
When i was in my early 20s, i swore to myself that i would never be sponsored by petroleum or automobiles. I guess at this age i would add airlines into the picture as well. Racing bicycles for oil is antithetical to the reason i started racing in the first place. But traveling all over the place, flying, driving, whatever, supports the industry as much as advertising.
My big trip is strengthening my resolve to go home and really invest in the local racing scene, in competition with the local racers I meet each week. Traveling is physically exhausting and expensive, drawing energy away from the endeavor to train and race. And yet maybe I had to travel to regain the sense of perspective and appreciation for what I have at home.

And that's liberation. Freedom.

Flight

Today is the eleventh day of the big cross country road trip. I've spent 50 hours driving across country from California to Ithaca, NY to Northampton, Massachussetts, plus about 5 hours of driving around locally to get to the races.

I've listened to 16 hours of Susan Butler's biography of Amelia Earhart on CD, studied German and French, taken in Reno, Salt Lake City, Rawlins Wyoming, Boulder Colorado, Omaha Nebraska, and Penitentiary Glen Reservation in Ohio, listening to the radio stations to get a flavor for the culture as well as looking out the windows. I've seen meteor showers, sunrises and sunsets, the continental divide, industrial pastoral cornfields, the Mississippi River, mountains, planes, sunshine, and night, plus my father and my brother Dylan.

This afternoon will be my fourth big UCI race of the trip. Admittedly eight weeks of lost training due to knee injury in August and September took a big toll against the hope for a big breakthrough early this season. I'm hoping to find my legs somewhere along the road - one of these truck stops... Maybe today...

So what possessed me to make the journey?

When i was 19, the famous coaches told me that I'd someday be a world class legend. When I was 25, I went hungry for grocery money and ended up in the hospital. I didn't dare to race seriously again until last year, when I was 33. Some part of me still wants to redeem the legend... I'm not young any more, but possibly I am not quite too old.

I've always found a kind of comfort in motion and being on the run. It's where I feel the most like myself, somehow, like the birds at home, Lulu and Mary and Lucy. They are creatures of light and sound and atmosphere and air.

When i started at 19, racing was some kind of rebellion; now it is the thing that brings me closer to my family, especially my father, and gives me the time and attention and patience to be with him. Training, racing, traveling, are my refuge and the thing that let me be myself so I can be fully present with him. I am used to thinking of flight as some kind of dysfunctional issue, "She's just running away from her problems." But sometimes flight is the best solution.

Flying, after all, is what racing bicycles is all about.

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