bitter pill: photo gallery

there are thousands of photos of the bitter pill on the GMARA website and if you like that sort of thing i'm going to suggest you go look at them.

and not just this race, either. that is one huge collection of photos of people being awesome.

i just want to show you the ones that illustrate our day.

at registration. we look so clean. and we still smell good.

this is what it looks like getting on the busses.

this is what the people look like on the bus.

here we are, getting our last briefing before the maps are handed out.

after the maps are handed out

this is us with our map. it is an awesome map.

right out of the start the photographer can see a long train of headlamps.

this is the last time the race management will see us for eight hours.

here is the moment we arrive at the first transition.

all ready to take our boat

getting organized

and off we go!

here we come!

handing up the gear

barb gets the checkpoint on shore

we heave the boat up

and carry it across the road

we are now free to change gears, get refreshments, and pick up our bikes.

free! we're free!

heading out on the bikes

this is barb coming into the finish...

...and me right behind her

awesome.

and we even win the cookies!

time to go home.

once in a blue moon

tuesday night was the full sturgeon moon, a blue moon by the definition of "second full moon in a season" and i was on my way home from my tuesday night running race and i saw the huge red moon just rising over the mountain and i was sad that i didn't have my camera with me but i live a good fifteen minutes east of where i was just seeing the moon come up, and closer to the west side of the mountain, so i figured that by the time i got home if i ran inside real quick and got my camera set up, i might catch the moonrise again.

well, actually i live so close to the western side of the mountian that i had to wait an hour for the moon to come up and then when it did i hadn't guessed correctly how far north it would be clearing the mountain with relation to my desk window so there was actaully a tree in the way until i went out to lie on the lawn.

also since by the time the moon has cleared MY horizon here at home it is high enough in the sky that it loses that spectacular red giant look that it has an hour earlier when it's low on the real horizon, and not the horizon of people on the dark side of a mountain.

still, it made a pretty picture.

bitter pill: long rambling reflection

i've been looking at adventure races for a long time. i did a twelve-hour mountain bike race once, not signed up as part of a relay, but to do the whole thing myself.

because awesome.

century ride?

awesome.

but i'm looking at a lot of these adventure races you see all over the place and a lot of them have the same tone as that time in college a bunch of the brothers of pi lambda chi for some reason jammed their bulky selves into sportcoats and ties and came to our spring recital and reception following and stood around uncomfortably making small talk and drinking punch so when they invited us to come to their toga party, we had to go.

it was the kind of party where they lay down plastic on the floors to catch the swamp of cheap warm beer. it's not so much that people were careless with the drinks, but actively flinging them around while dancing spastically.

and everybody is all kind of thinking they're hardcore crazy partiers but it just seemed kind of messy and unpleasant to me.

so when you look at a lot of the activities in a lot of these adventure races, a lot of what they call "challenges" is a lot like that. they'll hand you a dozen hot peppers to eat before you run up a hill, or throw your bike chain in a leech infested pond and let you dive for it before you can ride, or have you eat a pound of pierogies before you do a hill climb, or they'll apply electric current to you (an awesome way to find out who might have an undiagnosed heart condition), or a guy will jump out and try to hit you with a stick.

and everybody's all standing around congratulating themselves on being hardcore crazy people but really it's like watching japanese gameshows.

but i saw the posting for this race and i saw it was being run out of catamount, and i like to support events out of catamount.

and, um, i'm not going to lie to you: the poster had really excellent design. it was probably the poster that sucked me in.

so i went to the website and i read the descriptions and looked at the pictures and it seemed to me that while this race was going to have difficult challenges, they were going to be skills-based challenges and not how-much-goofy-stuff-are-you-willing-to-tolerate challenges.

additionally, the whole tone of the descriptive materials suggested to me that it is important to race management to get everybody to dinner on time, and not to show you how quickly you will be dropped if you're not fast.

but they don't mollycoddle you, either. they make you carry a lot of gear you totally won't need unless you have an emergency, in which case you will need that stuff. and they set up the course so that if you are an elite athlete, you will still have a challenging day. they don't tell you how much of the course you should cut to meet your ability level, but they let you know there's no shame in doing only as much of the course as you're going to be able to do in twelve hours.

it is a lovely and refreshing way to approach it: here's your map. here's the course. barring emergencies, we'll see you at the transitions. please try to be on time for dinner.

and then when you cross the finish line next to last in time and last in points they give you an ovation that they mean and they treat you, all of them, the race management and the other racers, they treat you as if you are every bit as epically tough and brave as the champions.

this is the important part: in their attitude they don't qualify your achievement in terms of "for you".  they don't say how well you did for dumpy little middle aged ladies in their first race. they know how hard it is out on the course. they know how many hours you spent on it and they treat you with the respect of those who meet shared challenges on equal footing.

you admire their strength and stamina. they admire your courage and perseverance. you all take in as much fluid and food as you can, you cheer for the winners, for the sponsors, for the organizers, and then all of you rush right home because it has been a long day and you need to sleep.

see you next time.

awesome.

bitter pill: lovely afternoon

so after all this we marched into the first transition area where the race staff were happy to see us.

we had a short wardrobe change and put all our gear in the dry bags. i had spent a LOT of time in the weeks previous configuring and reconfiguring my gear for the different activities (yes, i know. race organization calls them "disciplines".) and i am really glad i invested all that time in knowing exactly where to put all the things and how to organize them while i'm switching over because if it hadn't been automatic at that point, it would have been way too confusing.

so we got our boat and we got it in the water.

i am not sure why we were pointed in the direction of the hardest possible way to put the boat in at that access instead of the nice easy slope, unless teams who were coming from the previous controls (which we had prudently cut) were approaching from that way and they wanted to keep the traffic flow uncomplicated.

we were pretty happy about this paddle because during our course sleuthing and practice, last monday we just happened to have paddled from this canoe access down to the cochran road access, which means we'd seen nearly all of this segment of the course and knew where to find the channel.

we also had the opportunity to look at the banks and say "ugh. i hope they don't put a bag in there. they'll probably put a bag in there" and then once we had the map we could laugh and say "of course. they put a bag in there."

the nice people at the transition reminded us about the one checkpoint at which the teams might travel separately, the one up the huntington river, where one of you might stay with the boat and the other might wade upriver to the control.
by the time we got there, another team was already portaging their boat upriver, so of course all of that information evaporated from my head. it's not like they hadn't told both of us, and it's not like it wasn't in the printed "destructions" (as i kept calling them), but we missed that fine point entirely anyway.

so portage up the huntington river we did.

it's ok. it was one of the nicest parts of the day, and if barb had left me with the boat and gone herself, i only would have fallen asleep and then i'd have been all groggy and cranky.

this way, i was able to pause and have a little chat with some interested passers-by while barb got the bag. they were lovely people, and curious as to why we were so oddly outfitted and what we were carrying in our packs and i explained for them some of the other bizarre appearances they had seen as the day progressed.

they were still a little mystified as to why we would do such a thing.

"it's an adventure", i told them.

and it is, too. you can go up on a mountain and you can plan for yourself a stupid crazy day of bizarre tests of skill, but if you know where everything is going to be, it is more of a drill and less of an adventure.

there is a particular pleasure in answering the question "where are you going?" with "we don't know."

there was fog in the morning and sunshine in the afternoon and we saw a bald eagle perched in a tree.

it's an adventure.

a word about the boat: these are rental boats, which is nice, because it means we don't have to lug our own boats around with us, but the old adage applies:

if you're the rental company, you want the boats to be able to withstand the rigors of what joe public might do to them, and sustainable at a price joe public is willing to pay to use the boats.

short version: this is the heaviest boat i have ever carried.

we get to the second transition area where we reconfigure our gear for bike travel, which is the thing we're actually good at. we are happy to pay our dollar to get water and lemonade at the lemonade stand. we could have had cookies and other goodies, but i simply wasn't in the mood.

i just wanted to put on dry clean socks and ride my bike.

i am awkward and uncomfortable on foot but on a bike i feel strong and graceful. by this point in the day, though, we look at the clock and realize that all we have time for is to simply ride from the transition up to the finish. we have no time for checkpoint 14 or any of the other bike points, except for number 20, which we know ahead of time is right on that bridge where the geocache is.

geocache? how did that come into it?

oh. well, august 17 is international geocaching day, in the middle of international geocaching month and i am trying to meet the geocache challenge of a cache a day for the entire month and a twelve hour adventure race in which i am forbidden to have a GPS is no excuse NOT to find a cache, so i have busted my butt course sleuthing partly to figure out which geocaches might be right on the racecourse and which might be findable without a GPS and i have settled on this one particular cache that's on this one section of trail that i'm 90% certain is on the course.

if for some reason i get skunked on that, it's going to mean i have to leave the race venue when we're done and go find one of the backups.

but who wants to do that?

so actually one of the first things i check as soon as we get the maps is DOES THE COURSE GO OVER THIS CACHE?

why, yes. yes it does. checkpoint 20 is right on it.

so it is a double triumph for me. i have found my cache for the day, and i am on my bike, heading home on a trail and a road i know well and have ridden before.

we are too exhausted to even notice checkpoint 21 when we pass it, too intent on what we know is going to be a brutal, unpleasant climb up governor chittenden road.

we know it is going to hurt, but we also know we can do it, so it is a triumph.

we are the second to last team to finish, so there are a lot of people hanging around enjoying hors d'oeuvres and the ovation that rises up catches me quite by surprise and i am crying.

the guy in the tent, he asks me if i'm ok and i repeat that old sports saying: bleeding, sweating, crying: if you're not doing two of those, you're not trying hard enough.

and i point out that since i am not bleeding, it is fitting for me to cry.

in the tent we notice that nobody cares at this party how bad you smell. in the tent we learn that other, more experienced teams have made some of the same mistakes we made. we learn that one hardcore guy showed up to the race with broken toes. and we learned that while on the course one guy broke a finger and got it straightened by a teammate.

dinner is good and the company is good and it turns out that barb and i win a prize because (we learn suddenly) there is an unofficial contest at this race for the team name that laurie yager likes best.

dumpy little middle aged ladies.

that's us!

our prize is a big box of delicious cookies.

later on i will tell you about the awesomeness of this race and its culture, but for now i have cookies to eat.

bad driving

yesterday on route two by conant farm i was behind one of their tractors turning left into one of their fields.

a giant tractor is not a fast mover, and it is even more not a fast mover when it is turning left.

but the car behind me REALLY NEEDED TO PASS. so that driver passed me on the left and then passed the tractor on the left, WHILE HE WAS ALREADY TURNING LEFT and in order to keep from slamming into the tractor, the driver of the car had to swerve out onto the lawn.

while accelerating crazily.

i did the only thing i know how to do, which was to follow that driver until i could get a good picture of the car, a dark blue nissan maxima 35 se with vermont license plate AMT 598.

i followed the car to the interstate and then went home and called the state police.

by that time, of course, the driver is long gone. the kid at conant farm said not to worry about it; if she'd smashed into the tractor, the tractor would have hardly had a scratch.

bitter pill: how we spent our morning

at 0400 they took our bikes and loaded them onto a truck. there were people with packs walking around with headlamps in the dark wearing the odd fashion of backcountry athletic clothing: tights, zip-off leg pants, bike shorts with leg warmers, removable sleeves, packs full of gear, and compasses and map bags dangling. everybody drinking up water or coffee or whatever calories and water they could take on in the last few minutes before the point of no return, the point at which everything you use or eat or drink is a thing you carry yourself.

food and drink in the parking area before the race starts are like free stuff. take as much on as you can NOW so you don't have to lug it, and you don't have to lug the containers.

at 0415 they loaded us onto schoolbusses to take us to the race start. they tell us that our first leg of the race will be travel by foot, and the ride to the start will be about 20 minutes. by the time we turn right in richmond, i know we are going up into camel's hump state forest somehow.

they let us off the busses at the parking area on the duxbury road and immediately a line of men forms along the edge of the lot in the bushes, shedding the extra water. the women probably drank as much and might have had to pee, but will wait, i think, until they can squat in the woods.

at that point i remember wishing i had refined enough the skill of peeing standing up to join that line, not so much because i need to pee, but because women who can join the line and pee standing up are badass.

at about ten minutes to five they give us the maps. the map each team gets is huge; it has all of the territory of the race on it and it covers portions of six regular quadrangle maps.

it's dark out. the ground is wet. i am overwhelmed by the hugeness of it, the newness of it.

i think of a thing i heard in a lecture on preparing for your first race, a youtube video for UCTV with larry nolan in which he says "no matter how prepared you think you are for your first race, you're not."

i think we'll just get out there and do our best with it. we have practiced hard, but no amount of practicing the skills actually matches up to being dumped in a parking lot at five in the morning with a huge map and 65 other people about to head up a mountain in the dark.

smile. it helps.

i should have taken more time to really orient myself to the map, to really match the detail on this map with the large amount of stuff i actually know about this area. i should have done it, but instead i only really oriented myself to the first point and even though we passed a map on the way up, i was too overwhelmed to do the thing i always do on the trail when i pass a map, which is TAKE A PICTURE OF THE MAP, especially if it is a map on which trails are marked, or a map that includes a "you are here" marker.

this map had both of those things but i did not think of it. people were going up! people who knew more than i did were just going by, or quickly checking the map and then heading up the mountain.

after the first checkpoint i looked at these other people. they were not sighting bearings; they appeared to be looking to follow a handrail, which seemed like a good plan to me.

a handrail in this case is a feature on the map that you can follow until it connects with another known feature on the map.

in this case the handrail was a road and a stream.

the plan was to follow the road to the stream and then take the stream up to the second bag.

and there were dozens of sets of footprints doing just that, so it seemed like a good plan.


...except the farther up the streambed we got, the fewer footprints we could see. at some point most of the racers had chosen a different way, and now the only thing we knew how to do was to follow that stream until we reached something we could recognize.



omniscient narrator from the future knows that there is a flat place where if you are on the right bank, you just keep following the stream to the second bag, but if you are on the left bank you might not see that you are now on a different fork of the stream, a fork that is seasonal and not on the map.

omniscient narrator from the future also knows that more than one team will make that same mistake and each of those teams will have a different story to tell about what comes next.

what came next for us was that we continued up that streambed until we were certain we were in the wrong place, and we had a choice: return to the last place where we KNEW where we were, or attempt  to head east and uphill and maybe catch a land feature that would tell us where we were exactly, or come to a place with enough of a view to perform a resection and find our place on the map.

an altimeter would have come in super handy. the only one i have is attached to my GPS, so i didn't have it.

so the best we could do without being able to sight any landmarks was to make guesses about where we were by way of terrain profile.

taking bearings from identifiable landmarks

we are either here, or here, or here, we reasoned. if we go uphill and east we will end up at the peak of this, this, or this. if we come out on the middle one, there will be a flat area. if we come out on the eastern one, there will be a checkpoint. if the thing we come out on doesn't have either of those two things, we will know that we are probably on this peak over here and although that is not near where we want to be,we will at least be able to make decisions about where to go next based on information instead of guesses.

the view from here.

we come up on the peak and we do not find a bag. we do not find a flat area. we know it is bad news, but at least now we have a good idea of where we are.

the point where the lines converge was our location.

 and then we see a light place ahead of us and we go there to see if there is some kind of lookout from which we can take compass readings on any two identifiable mountains.

it takes some doing, because it is hands-and-feet-climbing but we end up on a small rock just over a sharp drop and we cling to the least slippery spot and start sighting and measuring things.



hooray for having brought a map protractor! hooray for having made a little string thing to draw lines over distance! hooray for carrying a spotting scope!

because now we know where we are.

the tricky bit is that the terrain between where we are and where we want to be is so rough and we have lost SO much time that the sensible thing for us to do at this point is to go down the least steep part of the hill, where the terrain will be less likely to kill us, which then puts us in a place where the fastest way to ANYWHERE we want to go is simply to go back via the start to the first transition area, skipping a number of control points.

our new plan is to head by the easiest terrain roughly west and downhill until we run into the stream and then follow the stream back to the road.

and we're doing just that and i say to barb "hang on. i just want to look over this stream bank on the off chance there's going to be a bag" and there was CP2, just sitting there.

"really?!!?", barb says.
"i kid you dafuq not. we have found the second bag."

now, for the first time all morning, we know EXACTLY where we are and we can take a good bearing and we think maybe we can get CP3 on the way over to the transition, but we decide to have lunch before we really think too hard about it.

barb checks her phone to see if race management has sent us a text asking where we are.

they have not.

it is noon. we have spent seven hours on this. after we eat, we decide that we do not wish to spend any more time on this mountain and that we would just as well head down to the transition and pick up our boat.

the race officials cheer mightily when they see us come; they have begun to worry about us. one of them has run some trail looking for us. they have sent us a text (just after the last time we checked) and they are happy to know we are ok and happy
to send us on our way.

while you're asleep

while you're asleep your body repairs itself in ways it does not when you are awake.

i'm going to be sleeping a lot today.

sleeeeping....

while i'm out

yay. if everything went according to plan i left the house before 0400 this morning and am now in hour two of my race.

i won't be live blogging it.

in the meantime, you should go watch this incredible vimeo movie, and you should watch it in full screen.

you should also go to the guy's webpage, where he lists all the buildings and  shows the stills he used to make the movie and oh, my goodness, there is a MAP!

go on, scoot.

tomorrow is race day

tomorrow is race day and i am more frightened of it than ever. is is not possible now for me to get more in shape, or be more prepared.

all i can do is rest my joints so i go into it healed up as best i can and check and recheck my gear, practice with it, practice my basic trig, practice measuring map distance.

i am getting up now at four to be used to it, because tomorrow at the venue they will be announcing what the first discipline will be at 0415. at 0430 will be the team meeting. at 0445 they will hand out the maps.

at 0500 the race will start and we will find out where we are going and exactly how scary it will be.

today i will do the last of the food preparation. i will pack the foods in bags and such and portion them out so i can give barb her food to carry.

the last of the gear will be assembled and packed for tomorrow so all i'll have to do when i wake up is dash out the door.

in a twelve hour race you burn a insane amount of calories, so what i have made to bring with us (and that does not include barb's stash of  gels and such) is:

logan bread, a famously dense and nutritious bread invented for backpacking, baked as mini muffins for convenient race eating
banana bread, baked as mini muffins
savory oatmeal cookies
blueberry muffins, baked small

i have also made a batch of soy sauce eggs, which will provide some midday protein and salt, and the sandwiches i'm making for lunch are roasted sweet potatoes and mushrooms with caramelized onions and pesto in a spinach wrap.

i am also bringing (barb does not know this) two king size snickers bars, because friends of mine who have raced these big adventure races tell me that at some point in the race you are so drained and sad that you NEED a candy bar. you need the sugars and you want a TREAT, dammit.

i also have some little tablets to drop into water bottles for a replenishment drink. because electrolytes.

my dinner for tonight is already made, and bedtime is EARLY.

open letter to the lady on the horse

dear lady riding a horse in rush hour traffic in williston village,

well done.

we all know that horses are permitted to be ridden on most roads (horses, bicycles, and pedestrians are forbidden from travel on restricted roads), and many of us know that in addition to the statute permitting horse traffic on the roads, many (but not all) of us are familiar with the additional requirement that the vehicle (car, bicycle, horse) be UNDER CONTROL.

yes, people who ride on governor chittenden road, i'm looking at you.

until yesterday afternoon i had never seen anyone actually ride a horse on the road in traffic, unless you count riding a back road, and while often these back road horsemen are totally fine, too often i encounter people riding out of control, skittish horses IN THE WRONG LANE  ON A PUBLIC ROAD.

people who ride on governor chittenden road, i am looking at you.

again.

but there you were, lady riding a horse in rush hour traffic in williston village, sitting a calm animal waiting your turn patiently at the four way stop even with traffic backed up all the way to the police station.

and on the other side of the intersection i was behind you in traffic when you signaled left not just properly, but also in a way that indicated to me that both you and your horse knew what you were doing, and also that you both were making sure i was paying attention, because you looked me right in the eye before actually taking the whole lane and i'm pretty sure i got a good look from the horse, too.

he is neither stupid nor flighty.

anyway, well done.

see you on the road.

love, flask

the reasons why

i've had a lot of time recently to think really hard about WHY i am doing this race, the bitter pill.

you get a lot of time to think while you are out training, and a lot of time to consider it when you are practicing with all your gear.

i think i have written before about the feeling of mastery in this world, and how we all need to feel that. we all need to feel that we can manage in an emergency, that we are prepared for whatever comes, that we are resourceful and capable.

this is a fundamental need, but it manifests in us in different ways.

for me, it manifests in ways that echo survival skills. i like to forage wild foods and i like to do a lot of things old style and when i make jams with wild fruit old-style with no packaged pectin i think "this is how they used to do it." and wen my egg lady shows me her crock of "winter eggs" she says 'this is how they used to do it" and i am all full of admiration because i love my modern conveniences, but by golly i NEED to know that i could survive without them.

i need to be able to find my way outside. i need to be able to find things. i need to know what i can eat, where to find water, how to make shelter. i need to know that i can travel from place to place under stress and carrying gear.

so this race, a skills-based race, is a lovely recreational way to do that. we don't know what the course will be, or how long it will be. we only know that we will travel by land and water, on foot, on bike, and by boat. we know that sometimes there will be trails or roads we can use and sometimes not.

it is going into the unknown and meeting whatever challenges come.

so for me it's less a race and more just an opportunity to go out and meet surprise challenges. my favorite part when people see me training or preparing and ask about the race is not when they ask what activities are involved, but when they ask what distance will be covered.

because we don't know.

i have formed some guesses about where the race will go, but they are only guesses based on what terrain features i think the organizers are likely to use and how they might connect.

my guesses sound like well, first it'll go down the cross vermont trail into jonesville by bike and then up to gillett pond for the swim and then somehow to beaudry's store and across to honey hollow road and then down to the river to return to wiliston by boat and either bike or foot travel. or maybe it goes up the BVAR and over ricker and down cotton brook to the reservoir with a swim to the boats and a paddle down to little river state park.

go ahead. get out your map. i'm not showing you mine. if you want to play course sleuth, that's your lookout, but you get to do your own darn homework.

today is a light day for me.

it is wednesday of race week, and i am resting my knees.

today i will practice my basic trig, my map reading, some knot tying, and caramelize a mess of onions because i am the team provisioner. i have made the teams breads and cookies designed for nutrition and portability. i am making the team lunches.

my teammate is in charge of the gels and energy things and i'm in charge of the actual food.

later on i will tell you what's on the menu, because while we don't know how far this race will take us, we can be pretty sure it will take about twelve hours which means we will be burning insane amounts of calories and when you do that you have to stay topped up.

speaking of which, the sun is rising and it's time for snack because i've been up for two hours and i get like that.

maybe i will put on water for the eggs. maybe i will start cooking the onions.
the day is young and there are a lot of possibilities.

in a jam

sometimes i'm a crappy friend. i never call or write to ask how you are and i often go months happily without talking to anyone outside of people i happen to see when i go out. i do not habitually remember birthdays or anniversaries and actively avoid party invitations, even though i enjoy most of the parties i go to.

but yesterday i woke up and after a while i decided that the perfect thing to do in preparation for saturday's race would be to get in my boat and paddle a section of the winooski river that i suspect is part of the course.

it's a lot easier to go do that if you have someone to go with so you can leave a chase vehicle at the takeout. and really the perfect person for me to bring along on this project is my friend barb who will be my teammate saturday, only she's at work by the time she reads the email i sent her at about  0615.

she thinks it would be an awesome idea, but of course her boat is at home and it will take her an hour and a half at least to go there and get her boat, so i just asked why don't *i* just go over to your house and load your boat on my car and she was doubtful i could do it myself but i'm a brute so i went there and got her boat and then i scouted the possible put ins and take outs and looked real hard at those rapids and then i came home and because barb will be coming straight from work without benefit of having eaten, i made sammidges.

i make good sammidges. today's secret ingredient is currant jelly.

the sammidge is turkey and swiss with mustard and currant jelly in a spinach wrap with carrots and wilted kale. it is kale from my egg lady, and currant jelly i made last week with currants from egg lady's garden.

and then because i was feeling ambitious, i made blueberry jam. i make small batch freezer jams, which is all of the goodness and none of the hassle of canning, plus a whole batch is only two to five of those teeny little jars, so you never have too much jam and you can keep a wide assortment of flavors.

i make mine a little on the sticky side, because i like to work old-style with only the naturally-occurring pectin, and if i need extra pectin i boil up some apple peels i have saved just for the purpose.

yes, really. i have a bag of apple peels in my freezer, and i can do that because i am using feral apples that never see a fertilizer or pesticide, so the skins are pretty decent, barring whatever crap just falls from the sky, but you get that everywhere.

anyway, you have to cook jams down to a little higher temperature if you want it to gel if you're trying to go for either naturally occurring pectin or reduced sugar, so your choices are usually either slightly runnier or slightly stickier, because that's how pectin and sugar work.

but it's jam, not a delicate panna cotta, so as long as i can spread it on toast or put it in thumbrint cookie, i'm happy. two ingredients: fruit and sugar.

i brought some for barb.

long live the king!

monarch butterflies are in trouble.

the biggest problem is roundup-ready crops in the midwest, followed by logging in the butterflies' winter grounds in mexico, but they have encountered rough weather this spring and summer and there are few of them to be seen.

last week on vermont public radio i heard a show where the vt center for ecostudies is asking people to report even single monarch sightings, so i am.

i have seen five of them this year.

do you remember when they were everywhere?

do you remember monsanto telling us that roundup ready crops were going to be good for everybody? and that they couldn't possible escape?

oh, wait. this wasn't supposed to be a post about a huge corporation trying to control the world's food supply for enormous profit; it was supposed to be about the dwindling monarch population but oddly the two concepts are linked.

anyway, the bad news is that monarchs are in more distress this year than biologists had anticipated. the good news, however, is that because they are insects, they have the capability of bouncing back very quickly if they get some lucky breaks.

they will need some good weather and good nutrition.

help 'em out if you can, and report 'em if you see 'em.

a visit with my egg lady

king with one of the ducks

i have mentioned my egg lady before.

wednesday i made nice fresh bread and those awesome oatmeal cookies, so i had fresh to take my egg lady and i wanted to take it when it was fresh because that's when it's best.

i went thursday morning and she didn't have a full dozen eggs to spare, but she had a half dozen and sent me with some kale and two cucumbers fresh off the vine -and by fresh off the vine i mean we went to the greenhouse and she picked them.

homer and chicks

also i got a quart of blueberries which i picked myself, and egg lady and her husband were picking currants, so i helped with that and got some of those, too.

it was a pleasant way to spend an hour in a garden without having any actual responsibility for the garden.

while we were picking currants they found a caterpillar they couldn't identify and instead of just killing it on suspicion of being a pest, they went and offered it to a chicken.




while i was picking blueberries, i heard these little peeping noises and i looked over to see homer (a laying hen with kind of housepet status) wandering around with three new chicks that she adopted and hatched out when the guinea hen who laid them stepped off the nest and decided not to come back.

he's watching. and he doesn't approve.

so they're imprinted on homer and the hen who laid them wanders around the yard and doesn't particularly care.

king, on the other hand, observes you closely when you are there.

he's the gander.

he watches everything you do, and he does not really approve. it's ok if you walk on the paths, but if you touch anything he will hiss at you and peck at you, even if the thing you touch is your own bag you just set down for a minute.

i have a lovely cucumber salad and some nice fresh currant jelly. later on i will have blueberry jam and some blueberry muffins.




mmm, tasty.

currants

packing it in

in case you are not following my training log on the dumpy middle aged ladies page, i am certain that you need to know how things are going with my pack for next saturday's race.

it is information you simply can't live without.

else i just feel like telling you. whatever.


my pack now weighs 28 pounds. that weight includes some gear that my partner will be carrying, as well as six pounds of beans. i am not carrying any of my race food yet, but i will bet you that it won't be a full six pounds of anything.

my objective for this last week is to carry around a pack just a little heavier than i'll have to wear on race day, just so it will feel lighter.

28 pounds is, by the way, just about the conservative limit for recommended safe long term pack weight for a healthy adult: 15% of body weight. in a pinch, we're supposed to be able to carry 40%, but not without doing nerve and spinal damage in the long term.

so yeah, twelve hours with a 26 pound pack is about the limit for me.

every day i play with my pack - it is actually two packs, since i am at all times carrying another pack INSIDE the first one and i unpack and repack them according to how i will use them on race day. because of my physical limitations, i will have to wear bike shoes on the bike and hiking boots while on foot and i am NOT swimming in either of those pairs of shoes, so that means three pairs of shoes.

it'll probably be easier on my feet anyway to change,  but it's more stuff i have to carry. plus my partner and i have bike wheels of different sizes, so we can't make do with one spare tube for the team and an innertube is a heavy item for its size.

i am carrying some equipment i maybe don't strictly need and actually the whole race will just be easier if i never have to break out the calculator or the bug netting or the piece of paracord, but i can think of situations where having those things might shave a lot of time off the trip.

if you have ever been faced with loose gear or been standing in mosquito-dense woods trying to decide which route to take to get to where you want to be and you just KNOW there's a mathematical way to figure out your best option but you don't know how to do it and you are too distracted by the swelling in your eyelids, you know why i'm opting for the extra weight.

plus i'm also carrying an inhaler and an epipen. it would be really swell if i didn't need either of those things, but they're not really optional equipment. the time to realize you SHOULD have your epipen is not when you're ten miles from it on rough terrain.

 here is my pack configured for foot travel. yes, we have to carry our bike helmets and our PFD's.

 here i am configured for bike riding. the main difference is that i switch out hiking boots for bike shoes and wear the helmet instead of a hat.

if you are asking why i don't just wear the helmet and not carry it, it is a crappy hot helmet. i'll be blast before i let my good helmet get all beat up by wearing it on this race.












and here it is configured for both the swim and the paddle. all of the other gear goes inside the drypack and i switch out for water shoes and wear my PFD.

yes, we are required to wear the PFD's while both paddling AND swimming. and i have croakies for my glasses.

i'll only be wearing the pack while portaging the boat. while paddling it will be stowed in the boat, and while swimming i will be towing it alongside.

of course on race day i won't be wearing jeans and a turtleneck. on race day i will be wearing a pair of zip-leg quick drying cargo pants and a long sleeve quick drying technical fabric shirt.




we are all required to carry long sleeved pants and shirt through the whole race, and i figure i will just wear mine. it will protect me from sunburn and scratches and stinging plants.

they don't call it the bitter pill for nothing.

i suppose they could call it the "refreshing lozenge", but that'd just be too hard to swallow.

basic black

i'm not using the stupid term "african-american".  i'm just not.

for a little while i was because i think any group of people gets to be called by THEIR preferred term, but it's a sweeping generalization to think that black people in general prefer it, and i have two very good reasons NOT to use it.

reason one:

it is a piece of US- arrogant claptrap.

this man is not an african american.

this man is bob marley.

this man is not an african american.

this man is thierry henry.

this woman is not an african american.

this woman is miriam makeba.

this man is not african american.

this man is alexandre dumas, père.

this man is TOTALLY not african american.

he is, in case you live under a rock, nelson mandela.

so just in case you're counting, that's jamaican, french, south african, french, and the FREAKING MOST FAMOUS AND DISTINGUISHED PRESIDENT OF SOUTH AFRICA EVER.

they are none of them anything-americans. they are all, however, black people.

but let's just go with the idea that we wish to discuss only black people in the united states.

ok, fine.

here's reason two not to call them african-americans: white people are not required to carry around an awkward sign indicating our ancestral geography. we are not norwegian-americans or turkish-americans or latvian-americans.

we are just americans. it is the default value and default value is a position of privilege. so let's just stop making black people carry around the extra baggage of having to be some other kind of american that needs qualification.

you know, not the real kind.

some secondary kind that needs extra labeling.

and you know what? i didn't even know until a couple of weeks ago that eric holder is a black man. you know, the attorney general of the united states?

because i only ever hear him on the radio.

and quite frankly, unless i am trying to describe his appearance or maybe understand something about his personal life and experience, i don't NEED to know he's a black man, not any more than you need to know that i sunburn easily and that my family is typical of early 20th century eastern european immigrants.

my appearance and my family history may come up in conversation and may even be relevant information, but you do not need this information to qualify my citizenship in the united states. when you marginalize people and you call them "other", their problems are somebody else's problems.

if we just take all americans and call them "americans" regardless of ancestry, then we're all in it together. we might consider the specific concerns of inner city youth or rural poverty or women's equality or racial bias but i think it will really help if we can look at these issues as things that affect americans. these are things we all (citizens of this country, citizens of the world) need to address and maybe not put up so many dividers about some mythical "us" and "them".

so that's why i'm not using this "african-american" nonsense.

black people are not necessarily american, and black americans don't need to have a physical trait labeled in such a way as to continue the systematic marginalization of thirteen percent of the population.

sometimes we need to discuss skin color and how that makes life different for some of our citizens. it is not ok for even the identification of that skin color to signal a different, inherently lesser citizenship.

we may talk of race. we may talk of citizenship. unless we are prefixing ALL of our citizens with a racial identity when we talk of them, we oughtn't do it to any of our citizens.

if i say "race relations", "gender studies", or "sexual orientation", you think of black people, women's issues, and gays, right?

it is easy for dominant groups to be so entrenched in their privilege that they forget white people have race, men have gender, and straight people have a sexual orientation.

so.

i will not be using the term "african-american" unless i am talking of  specific concerns unique to immigrants to the US from africa.

oh, and by the way:

do you know what these people have in common?

yep.

mozambique, kenya, south africa.

africans.

suppose any of them had emigrated to the united states.

that'd make them african-american, right?

wednesday writing prompt

here's your writing prompt for today, since some of you like that sort of thing.

you know, because it's thursday.

please write a short atmospheric piece that uses these words:

deuterostome
vexillographic
salubrious
anarchic
finch

be sure to post it in the comments or link to it wherever you end up posting it.

it's simple little writing exercises like this that keep the juices flowing.

i am looking forward to reading your work.

basic trig

in middle and high school i couldn't be bothered to learn simple trigonometry, because it's really hard for me to learn anything if i don't see why it's cool or if i don't see how it's useful.

if anyone had taken the opportunity to show me how trig dovetails with my natural love of map navigation and the ability to calculate elevation or actual distance to travel with just my orienteering compass and a calculator, i would have been all over that stuff.

as it is now, i am nearly fifty years old and only just now practicing basic trig because - what? i can use my clinometer to figure out where i am? i can calculate distances if i can solve triangles?

and it doesn't take me a whole lot of thinking to realize cases in which i might have different legs or angles and i found myself thinking: i bet if i knew some basic trigonometry i could just do the math and save myself some time in the field.

*sigh*

so that's what i'm doing today.

and baking cookies.

and maybe bread.

and then later i'll run a 5k while wearing my pack.

yay!

short track and the wrap up

the catamount classic pro XCT weekend is over.

i am whipped. i worked hard, but not a fraction of the hard some people worked on that thing.

the general opinion of the riders is that the course was very much fun. the general opinion of the spectators is that the venue is beautiful and the people are nice and the race was fun to watch.

it was a very good weekend to be lea davison, who won big in both saturday's and sunday's races. she managed to pull this off a short two weeks after winning big at the national championships, and that is a lot of big.

she also got to do this here, on her home course, with her family and friends and well-wishers to see it, and her fan base includes a whole big pack of little girls and for sheer noise and energy at bicycle races, i think a pack of little girls can go head to head with a crowd of drunk germans any day.

during her races you didn't really need the announcers to tell you where lea was on the course since the roar of cheering followed her wherever she was.

if you're a cycling fan, you already know who was there and don't need me to explain it. for the rest of you, i will tell you that there were current and former national champions (US and other countries), former world champions, champions in other disciplines (cross country mountain biking is only one of many bicycle disciplines), up-and-comers, local kids, and the regular guys who show up every wednesday night.

corporate sponsors fuel the prize pool, but unlike a lot of sports where you go to see the elite levels of competition, there is a small-d democratic attitude in which it is less about star quality and more about shared experience.

we can ride the same courses as our mountainbike heroes, on the same day they ride them. we cannot go as fast or as long or launch those jumps with the same confidence, but we can all of us get on our bikes and ride until our legs blow up, until we are sweaty and our souls ache.

a young girl happened to say yesterday that a part of the course was hard, punishingly hard.

and a professional rider turned to her and said it was brutal.

two days ago i stood, jaw dropped, while mary mcconneloug volunteered the information that she was frightened by some of the jumps in the course. you know, the same bits that frighten me and the other middle aged ladies.

try to imagine another sport in which such a conversation might take place.

try to imagine a group of little girls and middle aged guys going out into, say, fenway park after an important ballgame and playing a little pickup game.

or just wandering out onto a world cup ski course after a race.

so anyway, it was a lovely weekend.

and i have pictures to share with you.

see the whole collection

protection of law

human rights and basic dignities are not just for the good; they are for all of us.

they are for judges and librarians and terrorists and child molesters.

it has nothing to do with leniency and kindness and everything to do with rule of law. the protections of law work for when we are aggrieved, but they also work when we are transgressors. rule of law only keeps the good safe if it keeps the criminals safe. we are obligated to apply the same standards of decency to all citizens (of the country, of the world) regardless of their goodness or their deservingness not to protect criminals and persons of depraved cruelty, but to protect ourselves.

i was once detained and questioned on suspicion of being a terrorist.

i had done two things: i had taken a picture of a railroad bridge, and i had taken a picture of the smokestack of an abandoned factory.

neither of these things is criminal, but they had made me into a suspect.

the reasons i had done these things are none of anybody's business, but i will tell them to you anyway: the bridge made a pretty photograph, and the smokestack was an NGS benchmark. i hunt benchmarks for a hobby. this involves finding them as described in the NGS factsheets and usually taking a picture of them to document that you have found them. it is like birdwatching for map nerds.

but the burden of proof is not on me. i should not have to prove that i was engaged in nothing criminal in order not to be treated like a suspect.

another time i was questioned rather abruptly by armed men who came racing up to me in a black SUV while i was taking pictures of fuzzy kitties.

the problem, i guess, was that i was within a mile of the canadian border and the department of homeland security believes it has the right to search anyone for any reason within 100 miles of the US borders.

that is a hundred mile constitutional protection-free zone, and ALL of my state conveniently fits into that area where DHS believes it has free latitude to ignore the 4th amendment.

when i say i have nothing to hide, it does not mean that i invite you or the police or any government agency to come search my person or my bags or my home.

i do not drink or use drugs. i do not own or transport weapons. i pay all required taxes and i don't stiff waiters. i mostly even drive the speed limit.

but if some officer decides i "look suspicious", i am suddenly a criminal.

why?

because i won't consent to being searched without a warrant. all an officer has to do is suggest that he feels in danger, or that i might be resisting arrest and all of a sudden there's no warrant needed, and i can legally be fingerprinted and have DNA samples taken.

and if they decide to call you "terrorist", you have no rights. not to due process, not to speedy trial, none of it.

all somebody has to do is invoke the sacred name of "national security" and you lose all your constitutional protections.

when we decide it is ok to withhold legal protections and basic rights from people we judge to be bad people, we are both usurping the power of the judiciary AND we are abdicating our own rights to protection.

if protections and dignities are only for the good, who gets to decide who the good are?

you? a suspicious border guard? a corrupt TSA agent? your neighbor who doesn't like you?

no.

the protections of law are for everyone. you, me, that terrorist guy. basic human dignity is for all of us. you, me, that convicted drug dealer.

rule of law and transparency of government is what makes us - forces us to be- the nation(s) we hold ourselves up as. it means we necessarily have to take responsibility and to face risks and to have to look and think hard about why we can claim that we are good people and someone else is maybe not.

we cannot occupy any moral high ground by simple virtue of where we happen to be standing, and we do not get to dispense with rule of law whenever it becomes expedient.

otherwise there's no protection for anyone, and rule of law simply ceases to be.

no excuses.

a day at the races

later on i will show you pictures and tell you more about it, but yesterday i saw some amazing pro racing and today i'm on my way out the door to go tot he second day of the catamount classic.

i did not get to see much of the pros out in the cool parts of the course because i had second clipboard on the timing line, but that gave me really super views of the starts and finishes and a good view of what it's like at the officials' table.

so it's cool either way.

the most exciting thing of the day was the women's pro race.

i know, right? usually women's anything takes a back seat to the men's race, with second billing and second class payouts.

at this race, for the first time in mountain bike history, the pro women's payout was bigger than the men's and the women's race was run as the top billed race.

the top billed race is the last of the day, and someone has to have that second slot but it's nearly always assumed that the women's race just isn't that important.

well, this race organization for a lot of reasons decided to put their money and energy behind the women's race and there were no disappointments.

to be sure, both the men's and women's national champions were there, and some champions of other nations and a world champion or two, but the crowd was mostly there to see lea davison, who is FROM HERE, racing in her brand new national champion jersey for the first time.

the crowd was carrying signs and wearing goofy newspaper hats ( i have one) and the little bellas, a girls mountain bike mentoring group that sabra and lea davison started, were all there to yell and cheer for heroes as only little girls do.

i had second clibpoard in the timing line (a position of no importance when all the race technology works, but a critical thing in an emergency), so i had an excellent view of the start and finish and was able to set up my camera to shoot some video while i was standing at the fence.

highlights of my day: the UCI officials let me ring the bell for the women's race to signal bell lap.

and i was there to see lea take up the vermont flag and cross the finish line a full two minutes ahead of the field.




i gotta go; it's time for me to go back to the venue for the second day. it will be amateur racing on the long course and pro racing in the afternoon on the short course, plus a children's race in the morning.

race weekend

today is the first day of racing at the catamount classic pro XCT.

i will be there all day today and all day tomorrow.

today i was lurking in the woods near the course (ok, i was practicing orienteering) and i over heard a lot of what riders were saying about the course while they were on it.

the general opinion is, in a couple of languages, that it is fun and it "goes well". the riders make woo-hoo noises and they laugh, which ought to make the course designers happy.

this afternoon i heard one of the pro riders tell his pit crew: "ok, now all we have to do is take some video of me going off a jump and we can call it a day."

there's a UCI official whose job it is to ride the course on a MOTORCYCLE to inspect it.

there are banners.

the course goes right by the edge of the beer tent.

and a thing you maybe don't know about a lot of bicycle races is that there are different classes of race that go on the course. there is the pro division but there are also junior and three categories of sanctioned lesser races and also a citizen's class, which describes people like me who hold no UCI racing license.

so old guys and little girls and current champions all ride out on that course and today a race volunteer was telling me about a former world champion who is here, a woman who sometimes stood by the sidelines to cheer for the middle aged ladies instead of going back to the trailer to put her feet up. the race volunteer says she won't ever forget the graciousness of that.

it is exciting and it is beautiful.

how to kill anyone you want

their music too loud? don't like their tattoos? just don't like the way they look?

you get to kill them, and in sixteen states it's perfectly legal.

just follow them. follow them closely. it is preferable if you can get them to throw the first punch, but you can simply impede their progress until somehow you are in a fight.

once you are in a fight, you have every right to defend yourself with deadly force.

up until the fight you have no obligation to retreat to safety or avoid physical confrontation, even when instructed to do so by law enforcement officers.

because, hey, you know your rights and basically your rights are to kill anyone who you believe to be a credible threat to your body or property, even if you placed your body and property in their path.

see? it's ALLLLLLL self-defense.

stand your ground.

and if the person you want to kill isn't on your ground, go stand on the ground he's on and defend yourself.

if you are reckless and paranoid, it is open season on anyone you can engage.

the weight of my pack

last night i ran my usual tuesday night trail run, only i did it in long pants, hiking boots, and a full pack.

that's how i'm going to have to go for the bitter pill, and because i am not yet carrying my food for that race, my pack contains four pounds of dried beans.

in my pack: boots, water shoes, dry pack, dry bag, four pair spare socks, hat, gloves, bandana, bug hat, bug dope, first aid kit, bike tools, pack towel, dry bag, compass, map bag, notebook, pencils, calculator,  loop of para cord, knife, carabiners, spotting scope, camera, camera battery, lip balm, headlamp a hundred ounces of water... and dry beans.

i wear it around the house while i'm doing laundry and stuff and a couple of days ago i was whining to myself that it's hard going up stairs with the extra weight.

and then i said to myself: it's only 23 pounds and you have in recent memory weighed more than 23 pounds more than you do now and you went up and down stairs without complaining, so how 'bout you drop and give me 20?

don't take the pack off.

catamount classic

this weekend is going to be the catamount classic pro XCT, which is kind of a big deal.

eric working on the course

the course is solid and fun and designed and mostly built by eric bowker and marc stannard. a truckload of sponsors and volunteers will be making the race run, and while i do not know yet to what jobs eric will assign me come race weekend, i have been very busy making accurate course maps and GPS data files so that racers and spectators can look at the maps and also download the files onto whatever devices they are using.

this helps the riders in their course inspection and study, and it helps the spectators know where they want to stand.

it's also important for the UCI officials who will come in a day or two to have the map for course inspection. there are rather a lot of rules.

so here's my fully annotated map of the course. isn't it pretty?

how's your clean logic?

i notice that more and more the toilet paper i buy is cheaper, flimsier, and more expensive.

but toilet paper commercials have now moved on to selling us expensive stuff we don't even need.

https://www.cottonelle.com/test-your-cleaning-logic

i mean seriously.

my asshole just doesn't need to be that clean all the time. sure, i wipe it off and once a day i give it a good cleaning while i'm in the shower, but nobody is going to inspect it, i'm not going to put it on the furniture, and i'm not preparing or serving food with it.

in fact, not only is it going to stay hidden away in my pants, but it's snugly nestled out of sight and away from accidental reach deep between my ass cheeks.

so no, i do not need expensive, space hogging, landfill-using manufactured merchandised stuff to improve my "care routine" and i do not need a greedy money-grubbing corporation to start selling me substandard toilet paper that doesn't work as well just to help shame me into buying more stuff that i can't afford, either for my budget, or for the budget of how much stuff we can cram into landfills.

if i'm doing a colonoscopy prep or have an injury or something i might need and use some kind of wet wipe but i really resent the trend in industry to oversell to an already strapped american population.

my asshole is clean enough, thank you. and cottonelle, you're just assholes.

all the way down.