I like to bike to work as often as possible.  Today when I woke up, it was raining and the temperature was a cool 46 degrees at our house.  I wanted to bike, but I was not looking forward to having my butt get sprayed with cold, grimy water for an hour or so.  So I decided to rollerski instead.  It was just as wet as biking, but at least I was working harder, so I was warm.

So there I was striding uphill on Arctic Boulevard at 7:30 AM, soaking wet and preparing myself mentally to do battle with the midtown traffic on slick roads.  From the sidewalk next to me I hear a man’s voice.

“Dude, you are out of control.”

I look up just in time to see the guy give me a quick nod and a smile.  I like to think he was saying something along the lines of “You’re crazy to be doing that, on a day like today, in a place like this.  But I like your style.”

It made my day.  I broke out in a huge smile.  The comment was perfect for two reasons:

1) It was in almost the exact same spot where recently I was biking, when a waste-of-flesh teenager in a pickup truck coming the other direction cut me off by taking a left-hand turn in front of me.  As I slammed on my brakes to avoid a collision, he swerved towards me, gave me the finger, and then yelled “get off the fucking road” for good measure as he sped away.  So now maybe I won’t think of that experience every time I pass through that intersection.

2)  These days I feel like I am under control a lot.  Not much craziness happening in my life as a family man.  And I believe that being out of control every now and then is good for me.

So if rollersking through midtown Anchorage on a rainy day brings me back a little bit of craziness, well, I guess I’ll take it.

Back in January, while we were getting a bunch of snow, I bought a used bike on eBay from some guy in Utah. It arrived a week later, all boxed up. For the next two months, I kept thinking “I need to put that bike together before the winter is over.” Meanwhile, I muddled through the rest of the ski season, which consisted of a few nasty thaws, followed by cold temperatures and no new snow. The skiing wasn’t great for the last half of the season, but spring still seemed a long way off. I kept thinking that I had another month, at least, before I’d want to use the bike.

When the first week of April arrived, and with it a few warm sunny days, I realized that I was never going to get around to building the bike myself, especially during crust season. The roads were getting dry and the snow in town was disappearing quickly. It was time to get ready for summer. So I dropped the bike off at a shop, they built it for me, and I picked it up a few days later.

Well, that night it snowed about a foot. A few days later it snowed again - eight inches. Then, this past Friday it snowed again - 20 inches at our house. That Friday storm produced the third-most snow Anchorage has ever received in one day. It is snowing again as I write this. This is now the snowiest April on record in Anchorage, and this winter, despite mediocre skiing from November to March, is now the 6th snowiest on record. Crazy.

Clearly this is because I prepared for spring by putting my bike together. Now I wish I had put my bike together when it first arrived. We really needed the snow back then, when it would have lasted two months, not two days. Oh well, now I know what to do on November 1st - buy a new bike!

February 1
It has been many months since I last wrote a journal entry. It seems that when my dream of making the 2002 Olympic Team ended, I felt like there was no reason to keep sharing my story with everyone. But after quite a few months away, I am now in the middle of another winter and I have the urge to write again. Actually, I’ve had the urge all along - just look at all my work on my new general ski racing site, FasterSkier.com. But FasterSkier, as well as my job as a website designer and maintainer, meant that this site suffered from neglect. But I now realize that all those other sites are for, and about, other skiers. This site is simply about me, with no ads to sell or website sponsors to please or censures to tell me what I can and can’t say, and there is something very rewarding and therapeutic in that. (more…)