I ran a race on Sunday so I technically could have taken Monday off, but I wanted to take my visiting friend on my favorite loop around Mission Creek. I could have taken Tuesday off but Tuesday is team practice day at Kezar which I skip about as often as my Grandmother skipped Sunday Mass (i.e. only on her death bed). I had already RSVPed to my neighbor’s birthday run on Wednesday and since I knew I’d be taking a day off to drive to Tahoe on Friday for a company trip, I figured that, despite the steadily increasing soreness on the side of my foot, I should go ahead and run on Thursday too.
After the eleventh mile on Thursday (the 48th of that five day span), I was walking with a bit of a limp. Nothing a little ice massage and 24-hour break couldn’t heal, I thought. But on Friday I was still sporting a Quasimodo-ish strut and on Saturday morning in Tahoe, when the rest of my coworkers piled into cars with goggles and boots and company-expensed lift tickets on their jackets, I stood on one foot in the parking lot like a pathetic flamingo, waving goodbye in the rain. My boss stayed back with me and agreed to participate in whatever non weight-bearing activity I could come up with.
Since swimming in the lake wasn’t exactly feasible and snowmobiling is about as appealing to me as driving around in a convertible sports car (pastimes I don’t understand), we walked to the nearest rental store and asked for a pair of bikes. The employee, a woosh-haired kid with lanky arms, started laughing through his braces. A woman that was arranging a stack of skis behind the counter stopped what she was doing to turn over her shoulder and raise her eyebrows at us. An older bearded man at the cash register who looked like the store manager and a Knower Of Things Related To Outdoor Sports looked at us with a confused face as if he was unsure if we would understand his English and said, “You know it’s raining outside?”
Under different circumstances I might have let myself get talked out of the idea. I did, after all, have a thick novel, a perfectly lovely leather couch by a crackling fire, and Olympic figure skating playing on flat screen TV back at the hotel lodge. But the thought of everyone else having adventures in the mountains filled me with a college freshman’s determination to have fun at all costs. Not R&R fun. Extreme fun. So I put on my confident “What on earth is everyone so concerned about?” face and proceeded with the checkout process for the rentals. My boss bought a facemask and I considered getting some waterproof gloves but they were $40. I found two ziplock bags in my backpack, dumped the crumbs and banana peel slime, scraped off the wad of gum, and put them over my wool mittens, tucking the tops into my jacket sleeves for optimal air-tight element protection.
The rain was coming down in sheets. Within five minutes my snow pants had tripled in weight from absorption of water. We tried to stick to the bike path but when the snow was too deep we had to ride along the highway where ski-and-snowboard-laden SUVs splashed us with their grumbling chain tires. My boss’s ski gloves "resisted" water with as much success as Justin Bieber resisting arrest and when we stopped to check the map, he rung out a small faucet’s worth of rain from each one with yellowish-white hands that had clearly stopped receiving circulation. The map was soaked and disintegrating but after a quick study, we knew the general direction of our goal: Lily Lake. It was the place the lanky braces kid told us would have been beautiful in nicer weather and the destination we had deemed worthy of our epic trek.
A couple miles down the road, my boss, in an I’m-not-complaining-just-stating-the-facts tone, said he was not able to use his brakes because his fingers were unresponsive. We pulled over into the nearest cafe and I asked for two plastic bags that I tied around his hands (Dear Gortex, You should consider partnering with Ziplock for your next product line.). My fingers, although relatively dry, were also frozen but I refrained from mentioning it. I actually couldn’t stop laughing because, besides my mission to achieve maximum Fun, the entire scene was so ridiculously miserable as to be legitimately funny. I also think the cold was making me slightly hysterical.
We rode on. We rode through puddles up to our pedals and across clumpy ice that made our handlebars shake and our back tires fishtail. The worst parts were traversing snowy bridges or unplowed back roads in low gears moving slower than if we were to just walk carrying our bikes on our backs. The best parts were the climbs that required enough physical effort to get our pulses up. There was a moment on the mountain when we were pedaling up a trail that was essentially a creek, water and mud spraying from all directions, where I was seized with rush of crazed adrenaline and it occurred to me that there was nowhere else I would rather be. My elevated heart rate was sweeter than sex. It was also the only thing keeping blood pumping to my extremities (at least that is what I hoped was happening since I couldn’t actually feel anything past my knees or elbows).
At the crest of the hill my boss asked how long it generally takes for frostbite to set in after feet go numb. Just out of scientific curiosity. I’m not sure how close we were but we never made it to Lily Lake. I like to think we were only within a couple miles when we surrendered and turned back. Going down the mountain was much more challenging than the climb. I’ll take a tingling fire in my quads over a needle-stabbing numbness in my brake-clutching fingertips any day. The sight of the highway at the bottom of the back road was a relief, scenery be damned. There was too much rain to see beyond a ten-foot radius anyway so, as long as my tires could roll forward without sliding from side to side, I had no problem riding next to metal side rails and piles of dirty plowed snow. My mind lost the capacity to do anything but fantasize about a steaming hot shower.
Much to my momentum-obsessed chagrin, we made one last stop at a thrift store on the side of the road where my boss bought another pair of socks. Our shoes were essentially ice sponges at that point (I was secretly hoping the extended cold treatment would heal my injured foot). When he sat down to take his shoes off, his entire body--from his hands to his thighs to tiny muscles on his back--was trembling in unsettling jerky spasms. I made a short speech about perseverance and endurance which gave us just enough emotional inertia to get to the first bridge where a wall of gale force wind nearly knocked us off our bikes and knocked our spirits back down to base survival mode.
When we finally made it back to the rental store, I half expected the employees to throw us a parade. A few of them did clap. Most of them just shook their heads. When I tried to make a joke about Just a little water never hurt anyone ha ha, it came out slurred and in slow motion from my frozen lips. My boss, definitely not in a joking mood, said he would rather run ten marathons in normal weather than walk the mile back to the hotel in the rain. But a sunny ultramarathon was not on the menu, so walk we did (me limping on my bad foot) in a single-minded zombie delirium for warmth.
