Trails, trails, trails, trails!

Do you ever have one of those weeks that just goes on and on and on forever, but when it's all over and finally done with, you realize that you got way, way more done than you would have thought humanly possible? How does that happen? This week was one of those weeks. My body is crying out for a rest week, but I managed to swim 4500 yd, bike 163 mi, and run 27.61 miles before my body finally gave in.

Monday: Swim 2500 yd, Spin Class

Mondays make me want to bash my head against a wall. It's my day with the most clients, and the most stops all over the city. It's my day with the most paperwork, and the most emails coming in and going out. I never get naps on Mondays. This particular Monday, some drama made it feel like I would never get to the pool. I don't even remember what the drama was, just one of those minor aggravations that needs attention and eats up precious time in my split shifts. When your "off" time are the hours when everyone else is at work, you never really get off time. I felt particularly uninspired by the time I got to the pool, and much to my dismay I'd managed to arrive with the full hour to swim. Now what am I going to do?! I wondered. I swam a ladder set of 100's to 500's, still stewing about the money I'd lost over the weekend. I was supposed to do some fast swimming too, but my body just won't go fast in the water these days, and I just don't have the energy to push it. Then I taught a Spin class. There were two people. It was one of those "why do I even bother?" days.

Tuesday: Run 6.2 miles

Tuesday is my reward for Mondays. I have a big, gaping hole in the middle of my day where I'm home before most people get to work and don't have to go back to work till everyone leaves the office again. I love Tuesdays. This particular Tuesday I got an extra present when I discovered another trailhead that led to a completely new network of trails right near my house. I'd been staring at these trails crawling over the hills for months trying to figure out how the hell to get to them, and here they were! I tramped and tromped around the trail that was either up or down and never flat. I ran off on side trails just to see where they would go, and for once they all turned out to be real trails (not the kind where the trail disappears into some shrubs after a quarter mile) that all orbited the main trail. I ached so hard to have someone to be running with, and had imaginary conversations with people I knew and other people that I hadn't met yet about what a great time we were having out here. It was a little sad to tell you the truth. No one will ever be able to run on my weird schedule.

Wednesday: Run 5.08 mi, Spin Class

Wednesday was another day of misfires. Even though my morning client had rescheduled and I had the morning off, I got up early to make sure that my last post would get out on time. Then I got dressed to go on another trail run. I was already dressed and reaching for my phone and keys when the phone dinged: a 2 hour reminder for one of my irregular clients. Shit! It was a beautiful morning and now I'd fucked it up! With a heavy heart, I changed and went into work. Five minutes before the session was supposed to start, I got an email: "Claire, I'm held up at the Indian consulate, can we push it back half an hour?" Ugh, fine! I could push it back half an hour, but not more. In the end, he wound up missing the appointment altogether, and I pouted about my missed run and relaxing morning. I did eventually manage to squeeze in a run on the treadmill (ignoring a phone call, 3 text messages, and who knows how many emails that reached me in that 45 minute window). I longed for a time before people could even interrupt me on my runs, when my phone, laptop, and mp3 player weren't all the same device.

I hadn't run fast since a handful of short workouts back when I still couldn't afford food, so I decided to do the only speed workout that an endurance person knows how to do: Yasso 800's (the treadmill version, where you pick your dream pace and try not to fall off the back of the belt before the computer clicks over to half a mile). I put the treadmill on 9mph just because it was a pace that I had never dared run on the treadmill before. Much to my surprise, I didn't fall off for 5 intervals. I was a little disappointed to figure out later that it was only 6:40 mile pace. On the bright side, I'd gotten so rusty at thinking about running faster that I'd forgotten how long my rests were supposed to be. I guessed and decided to walk for 90 seconds, or less than half what my "official" rests should have been. So I was pretty proud of myself after all. I'm an expert at only seeing what makes me look coolest.

Immediately afterward I had to teach a Spin class. I don't know where the crop of participants for this class comes from, but it seems to be different people every time. This time, I had a whole bunch of Spinning newbies who didn't line up their bikes in the way they were supposed to. Instead they just rode the bikes where they were stored next to the wall. I would have corrected them, but they all showed up late. They had also fixed the broken speakers in the room, so life was going to be good. On the first high-energy set, I yelled for everyone to "STAAAAAAAAAND UP!"

"Can you please not yell?" a newbie grimaced. "It's very loud."

My face fell. I'm sure I gave her a dirty look or rolled my eyes. I wondered if I could tell her to move her damned bike from under the speakers if she didn't like it. It wasn't so much the yelling that I was afraid of (I could always adjust the mic volume), it was the fact that I don't bother to find the "clean" versions of the songs on my playlists, so half the songs have an f-bomb, shit, or some sort of politically incorrect term like 'ho, or the "n-word" (never outside a hiphop song!). I could tell that this old geezer was going to rat me out. Why do people always have to rain on my parade?! Doesn't she know that I'm the best ever and she should feel honored to take my class rather than one of those soft Spin classes taught by an instructor that doesn't even own a bike???

I don't deal well with criticism. At the end of the class she apologized. "I don't want to sound like an old fuddyduddy. I actually liked the class very much. It's just very loud now that they've fixed the speakers. Is the mic tied in to the master volume?" She used the word 'fuddyduddy.' She was redeemed.

Thursday: Swim 2000 yd, Spin class, Run 5.4 mi

Which brings us to Thursday. Thursday is a clone of Monday, only in lieu of emails, I finish with my latest and most pain in the ass appointment. This particular Thursday featured a 6am start and a 9pm finish in addition to some very annoying work responsibilities having to do with the company newsletter.

The only interesting part of the swim was that I swam 3x200 IM. I did every inch of the fly, because I am that cool.

I thought for sure that this was going to be the Spin class where no one would show up. It was 11:58 and I was still by myself. Half way through the warm-up, however, I was still pulling bikes out of the closet for latecomers. Since this is a new facility, they are still building a membership base and I had just set the record for the biggest Spin class ever! I made sure that the mic volume was low this time.

After my class I had 3 hours where I didn't have to be anywhere. It's not usually enough time to leave the City, but it was a beautiful day and after yesterday's forced indoor run I was determined to avenge myself. I drove the half hour home, drove right past my exit and took the next exit toward the only trailhead where the hills are runable. At the first detour I saw off the main trail, I took it having no idea where it went. Immediately it turned into scrambling terrain with deep grooves in the rocky soil and the grade was probably north of 25% (look at the photo to the right, then really look at how steep it is). It stuck me on the back side of another hill that I'd never seen except from a distance and wondered how to get there. I didn't see a single soul on those trails, and found myself running out toward where the hill dropped off into the sea. Eventually it was time to go home again, and I bombed down the mountain feeling like the luckiest mofo on earth.

Friday: Run 5.93 mi

Fridays are supposed to be another light day, like Tuesday, but this Friday was different. It was bottom-heavy, having me work deep into the night with people who had already paid for late cancels this week, but still wanted to pay for another session to get it in. I begrudgingly obliged. Also, the newsletter, which I had been prepared to send out on Tuesday was still hanging over my head.

I'm sure everybody has this guy at there office: the guy who takes 15 different steps to sharpen a pencil. Well all I was waiting for were some photos from our company's version of that guy. He had dicked me around for days, then when I told him that he had missed his deadline, he sent me off on this wild goose chase that had me sitting in a loading dock outside a locked office with a contraption that let me plug my computer into my car's cigarette lighter and trying to pull off the office wifi. It didn't work. I arranged to meet him at the office Friday morning. When I texted him, he didn't reply. I circled for half an hour looking for parking, then called him. He didn't answer. I drove home. I got all the way home before he called. "I'm in Pacifica. There are three ways to do this: you can hand me the CD tonight at the location that I'll be working at, you can upload them to flickr your own damned self, or we can let it go till next month."

"I've got a better idea..." he said. So I wasted half the day setting up a drop box (whatever that is) and then calling him to get him to actually drop the shit in it. Then he had another brilliant idea...


When it was all said and done, I only had another hour to run. I had planned to explore another trail, but with little time to spare, I was going to have to go to the nearest trailhead and see if I could find my way across. There is a trail in there that they have locked off and fenced in with barbed wire. I figured that if I ran far enough on small enough trails that I could find my way in through the back way. It must be thousands of acres in there, and I wanted to see what was so special. I ran and I ran and I ran over trails so faint that you could barely see them and over hills so abrupt that you'd have to be crazy to climb them, but everywhere I went there was that same barbed wire fence. What's so special that they put up a fence miles long in the middle of nowhere? I'm determined to find out. Needless to say, I didn't even make it across to the trails I'd originally meant to run and for the first time ever I repeated a trail run in Pacifica.

Saturday: Bike 103.? miles

There was another SF Randonneurs 200K. I looked at the map, and it was to be nearly identical to the ride that I'd done a few weeks ago to Point Reyes (and every other long ride I've tried to do out of SF), including my favorite highlights of the Golden Gate Bridge, downtown Sausalito with its unfriendly cops and clueless pedestrians, and that damned chipseal bike path with the rotted wooden footbridges. Fuck that!

I decided that I would save my money, sleep in an extra hour, park at the end of the damned bike path, and wait for the riders to come by. When I stepped off my bike at the end of the bike path, I saw a swarm of day glow jackets and a motley clump of bikes (some $10K full carbon deals, others steel frames with racks) that could only mean one thing: brevet riders. I couldn't have planned it better if I'd known what I was doing. I hopped on.

The one problem with an otherwise perfect plan: We were at the bottom of the first real hill, and while the fastest guys in the brevet had 10 miles of 20+ mph riding under their belts as a warm-up, I'd only ridden about 3 blocks and was cold as ice. The hill did not work out the way I wanted it to. For awhile I managed to keep Natasha in my sights, but only managed to catch them at the bottom of the hill because of a traffic light.

I decided only to ride as fast as the slowest guy with a cue sheet, so as soon as one guy fell off the back, I pounced on him. "Is this pace pretty typical for a ride like this?!" the guy asked me.

"You're in the lead pack, man," I told him. "If you wanted 'typical' you should have slowed down a long time ago." I felt sorry for him. When he told me that this was his first brevet, I wasn't surprised. With his beat-up aluminum frame, rear rack, backpack pannier on one side, and worn-out clothes he looked more like a commuter that had gotten lost than a long-distance rider. In fact, later he told me that that's just what he was: a commuter who had been riding the first hill ouside San Francisco every single day to train. He was strong. I hoped he wouldn't lose heart, but still, I ditched him at the first station when a more experienced Straight Man Over 40 came along.

This guy had introduced himself as Mojo before I had even been dropped on the first hill, and it wasn't till later that I noticed that he was riding fixed: 49x17, "gangster gearing;" the gear ratio that I had found too tall to even commute around SF and here he was riding 125 steep, rolling miles on it. For many miles it was just the two of us, and when he came around me to take his turn at pulling I rolled up next to him. "To be honest, I'd rather ride next to you than behind you. This is a long day to be staring at a stranger's ass..."

Not much else happened. We passed the spot where I went down a few weeks ago. I almost got dropped at another rest stop. A couple of women, one with a steel frame and one with a big, fat ass passed me so I dropped Mojo for a few minutes until they couldn't be seen anymore over the horizon behind me...

Sunday: Run 5 mi
Not much running was happening on this hill.

This run was originally going to be a 10K through Chinatown put on by the Y where I work, but when I saw that they wanted $35 for a 10K "fun run/walk" I decided that they could go fuck themselves. That's more than they pay me per class and who wanted to drive into the City on my day off? So I went back to the trails to do more exploring.

I went to a trailhead that I had found by accident on another day when I was lost, and tried to connect Friday's dots from the other side. This trail climbs 1000' in the first mile, and it became clear pretty quickly that there wouldn't be much running today. My legs, which had felt fine when I woke up suddenly began burning from my hips to my toes even when I was walking. I did eventually manage to find my way from one trail to the other (over about a mile of improbable paved road up on top of the mountain), and then turned around to start exploring the side trails. The paved road curved down the side of the mountain to a lake I'd never seen before. I took a picture of it, but since I couldn't see an obvious route down to it, I decided to turn around and follow a better marked trail that I'd passed on the way up.

When I got to the turn-off it said, "Something something something Point: 2 miles." I stood there at the top of the trail just looking. I could see where the trail probably ended on a bald hill overlooking the water off in the distance. I looked and I looked and I looked. Two miles down, two miles back, another mile or so back to the car, nine miles total today. I've done about 3.5. Do I really have another 5+ miles in me? I knew I didn't, and got frustrated with my body for giving out on me. Some days when my brain is full and the sun is out, I just want my body to go on and on and on and on forever. I sighed and headed back for the car.

There's a trail that goes around the whole bay. You really could run and run forever!

When I got to the parking lot, I had run a total of 4.85 miles. Well come on, Claire, at least make it five! I thought. So because I had stood at the top of a trail that ran down to the ocean and had decided not to run on it, I ran laps around the parking lot for .15 miles until my watch clicked over to 5 miles even, then I pooped in the porta-pottie and went home.