Hello and welcome to An Altitude Problem, where summer is flying by so fast that it blurs into a green and blue streak and we have to turn our heads fast if we want to focus on any details.

Many of the trails are still not dry enough to ride. It has been a spring of trying to be a good steward of our trails, of not being able to ride because everyone has their own idea of when the trails are ready. Snow still clings above 10,000 feet. Deep drifts lie across trails. Wildflowers bloom with wild abandon that is rare even for here.

We find ourselves in our usual summer panic- trying so hard to get out and worship the weather that when work interupts, as it inevitably does, we deal with actual grief as we see our golden summer slipping away as we spend the days inside. Every night, in reflecting over our day, success is measured in the precious few minutes that were not dictated by owners, guests, clients. It is measured in the moments that were ours, however few- the half hour that we squeezed in a quick bike ride down to the pond to let Andy swim after sticks and ducks and diving swallows. But then the phone rings and we look at each other and tell it to shut up, but it doesnt, so we answer it and work starts again.

I have not posted to this blog in over a month. I have barely done anything that did not need immediate attention in the entire month. But the good news is, in our priority hierarchy, enjoying life does occasionally require immediate attention. So there have been a few evenings when we have forwarded the phones to Marci, gotten on our bikes, and just ridden.

I am two races down in a seven race series. Every other Wednesday, I get together with several hundred sinewy, leathery locals, as well as people who drive up from Denver and surrounding counties, for about 15 miles of sweat and dust and punishment, followed by an after-party sponsored by a local brewery, free beers and prizes from local businesses. Sometimes I convince B to come out and cheer me on, but it is getting harder to do. He says it's boring just standing around waiting for me to cross the finish line.

The first race, I rode harder than I have ever ridden. At least that's what it felt like. I came in third place, but I spent the next week coughing from all the dust that I had inhaled. The second race, I felt relaxed, because I had decided to simply ride, but after I started riding, my competitiveness kicked in, and although I did not push myself to pain, I steadily lost the racers behind me until I was in second place. It felt so easy. Then I took a wrong turn. Onto a downhill trail. Which I rode fast. About 3/4 of a mile later, I came to an intersection that was not marked, and concluded I was in the wrong place, then turned around and climbed back up to the Y that I had taken the wrong fork off of. I took the right fork, quickly catching and passing the stragglers, but could not catch the strong riders at the front. I came in seventh out of ten in my category, about ten minutes behind the leader. Then there was the issue of them recording my number wrong, and me not getting a time until three days after the race, and not being pre-registered (along with the rest of my team), having to stand in line to register four minutes before my start time, attaching my race number to my bike with twist-ties as they were anouncing ten seconds to start, leaving no time for a warm-up. The only thing that did not go wrong was mechanical failure. Oh, and to compensate for my lack of a warm-up and my lack of a good diet that day, I swallowed a mocha Clif Shot, 25mg of caffeine in addition to sugar, while standing in line to register and not only did the resulting jitters carry me through the race, they kept me wide awake until 4:30 a.m., which lead to me being sleep deprived for the next two days.

(Incidentally, I attended a friends home sales pitch for Vemma/Verve tonight and drank a can of Verve, a cocktail of caffeine, vitamins, minerals, and fruit, which is probably the reason I am so strung out right now, my fingers flying over the keyboard while B and Andy have already gone to bed. They even asked me if caffeine kept me from sleeping before giving me the can, and I assured them it did not. Joke's on me. I guess I have just never liked drinks with caffeine enough to drink them in the evening, so I have never experienced caffeine insomnia like this before. But seriously- if I concentrate, I can feel the molecules vibrating in my fingertips. I can feel my heartbeat against my chest wall. I can almost catch a thought as it whizzes through my head.)

The day after my first race of the season, I had a day off, and my mom had just finished her last radiation treatment in Edwards and was in Eagle at my grandparent's, packing and getting ready to move all of her stuff back to Kansas. I had had a Clif Shot before that race, too. I had not yet put it together that that was the reason for my insomnia, but I was wide awake at 4:00 a.m. In those wee hours inspiration struck, so I got up, tiptoed around the house, found my bike jersey and bike shorts, ate a small breakfast of homemade bars (raw cacao, raw almonds, dried coconut, coconut oil, dried cranberries, all extruded and crushed to a gummy consistancy and rolled into bite-sized logs), got my bike, and hit the road in the early dawn chill. By Copper Mountain, the sun still had not risen high enough to shine into Ten-mile Canyon and my hands were numb and icy, and I was chilled to the bone, and I couldnt tell if the shakies were from cold or hunger. I stopped at a gas station and microwaved a breakfast burrito, blowing my three week strictly vegan stretch, and ate it while warming my hands around it. Back on the road, I dug in my backpack until I found two sunglasses bags, just wide enough to slip my four fingers inside them, and curled my thumbs inside my palms on top of my handlebar grips, and started up Vail Pass. Before long, the rising temperature was in a contest with my gaining altitude, the later it got, the warmer it got, the higher I got, the colder it got. Finally, the sun won and I stripped off my makeshift finger-warmers. I crested the top of Vail Pass, and spent a half hour searching for the bike path down the other side, finally getting directions from a road construction crew to go down Black Lake Road, and the road would eventually turn into the bike path. Good to know. Not very obvious. I sped down the west side of the pass, freshly cleared, a narrow trail between five-foot walls of snow, popped out above Vail and rode over several miles of chalk- "Go, Lance! Allez! Armstrong!" and found myself in Vail, the bikepath becomming a street through a golfcourse neighborhood, cryptic again, and I stopped several pedestrians in Lionshead to ask for directions again. Following their instructions, I rode the frontage road, then bike path down to Eagle-Vail, where I stopped at a bike shop and asked about the best way to get to Eagle. Follow Highway six, they told me. I rode on, dodging highway crews and clinging to narrow shoulders and glancing nervously over my shoulder for traffic.

I almost made Eagle. I had been battling a stiff head-breeze all day that became a 20mph headwind between Edwards and Eagle. Every time I came around a curve, it slammed into me like a wall. At one point, I looked behind me and was shocked to find another biker on my wheel, drafting. I had thought I had the road to myself. What if I had done something unladylike? I stepped on my pedals, not sure if I was slowing her down, and wanting to give the other person the option of riding faster, and when I looked back again a half-mile later, she was falling behind. But that push took it out of me, and my shoulders were beginning to knot up, and my neck was stiff and sore, and soon the other biker passed, then dropped me, and then my mom's car came into view, and she picked me up and drove me the last eight miles to my grandparent's place, since they were getting tired of waiting for me to show up so they could start for home. It would have been a 75 mile ride, but I only did 68 miles of it.

And then I parked my bikes and barely rode, and worked for two weeks. The story of my life. Feast and famine. Starve and binge.

I did not do this ride on my mountain bike, as you may have gathered. B and I launched Operation Sell in the last month, and as a result, we have rid our house of unused bikes. His full-suspension Trek and a Gary Fisher hardtail that I took as a trade in to make my old mountain bike more affordable for it's new owner have gone to new homes, as well as a heavy commuter I bought on a whim for $18 from a neighbor, gone to begin it's new life as a fixed-gear track bike in Keystone, and the cash they generated made it possible for us to buy road bikes. Mine is a Craigslist treasure, a 2006 Bianchi Volpe that has not a scratch on it, original brake pads showing no wear whatsoever, cables not yet stretched out, chain still gummy with factory grease. It's story was that some woman in Breck bought it new and stored it with good intentions and almost no rides for several years, then took it to a local consignment shop, where a guy from Keystone with an un-athletic girlfriend whom, he reasoned, would love the sport if she just tried it, bought it. It was used half-heartedly and un-athletically a handful of times and spent the rest of the time living in a dark, dusty storage unit. A month after it was posted on Craigslist, I spotted it and texted the guy, fully expecting him to say he had sold it and had forgotten to take down the listing, but he still had it. I rode it and decided it should be mine. It's name is Penelope. Her steel frame rides smoothly over the pavement. She's a cross between a cyclocross bike and a touring bike, holes in the frame for mounting racks and paniers, reinforced wheelset for handling changing road conditions. Light she aint, but she's a loyal steed. She whispers under me, silken miles slipping beneath her wheels, in silent agreement with every decision I make. She makes losing a few miles per hour to her solid weight a small price to pay. She has carried me up Loveland Pass to A-Basin with my snowboard on my back, then flown back down, the snowboard catching the wind and threatening lift-off. She has silently stayed with me to work at the bike shop, waited patiently leaning against a post while I had beers at the Tiki bar on the way home, took charge when I realized that microbrewery beer on an empty stomach was maybe not the best idea and urged B to ride slower because I was sloshing. And maybe a little sloshed. But not too sloshed to ride, lest anyone get the idea that Penelope is an enabler of illegal habits. B took the money from his bike sale and put it into the cheapest actual road bike we could find at my bike shop, even cheaper with my employee discount. It's Trek's entry level aluminum road bike, but it's light and nimble and practically pedals itself up hills. I ride smooth and quiet, he scampers like a mountain goat. When I want to ride long rides or make good time, I ride it, since we ride the same size frame. While Penelope glides gracefully, if slowly, the Storm Trooper is unstoppable and jumpy. Kinda like me on caffeine.

We made a flying trip to Kansas to see cousins and aunts and uncles last weekend. It was good. I don't know if it was the slow pace out there, the timeless expanses of grass, the hard blue sky, the ceaseless lazy patterns of wind through golden wheat, my eight mile run from Leoti to Marienthal during which I got enough stares from passing farmers to make me wonder if I had turned into E.T., the refreshing energy of four diminuitive flaxen-haired little farmboys, or just the chance to sit and do nothing for ten hours of driving, but I came home on a tear. I simply looked around when I got home and threw out everything that stirred a twinge of stress when I looked at it. Gone went useless knick-knacks and piles of papers and destroyed dog toys and clutter and my registration for a fifty mile mountain bike race on the 4th of July. Since the refund policy is so good, I will get every dollar back except the $1.00 processing fee. It would have been fun, and by now I am regretting it a little bit, but then, it was hanging over my head like an angry cloud- the need to train, the lack of time to train, the dread of knowing I might not make the cut-off time and have to be humiliated, the potential stress of failing spectacularly, the wondering if my money might have been better spent. I stopped throwing things away just short of quitting my bike shop job and evicting Bobby and Andy.

And now, the thing that is stressing me out is that it is tomorrow, and I have to work an eight hour shift on my feet being Little Miss Sunshine today, and watch another beautiful day pass from inside a florescent-lighted building, and I hear two kinds of snoring in the bedroom, whistling that comes from an upside-down dog, and snorting that comes from that human I love, and I still don't feel tired. I think I will go take a shower and wash off all the sweat from my bike commute and the grime from a day of adjusting dirty derailleurs, and see if the hot water can't maybe relax me enough to join them.