The dictator

I have certain misgivings about how much running I do on sandy surfaces. Certainly it makes you a stronger runner, developing both robust ankles and the patience to endure moments of slog, which sometimes seem interminable. But it probably isn't training me to be a faster runner. You lose the bounce in sand that comes with running on harder surface, and so, in sand, you're supposed to lean forward, engage your calves more, and lift your knees instead--great exercise, I suppose, that could pay off. But should it be a focus of marathon training, where efficiency is everything? I find that on a road like Goat Ranch Cutoff I weave restlessly back and forth from one tire track to the next in search of the most compact line (which often doesn't exist to my standard). At times, I feel like I'm grinding to a halt, but step sideways can get me going again. And I have noticed that the footprints I leave--some from weeks before, layered with tire tread, and the tracks of rabbit (a constellation of pads), deer (cloven), and snake (long-intestinal)--rock a bit too much. Dastardly heel strike! If I were smart, I'd make a point of running longer, harder efforts on pavement, since ultimately that's what the race will cover, and focus on my form on the sand for easy/"maintenance" runs. But, we'll see.

In any case, it's a good reminder that Mono Lake is always affecting me. Often it seems so distant, just a mirror reflecting islands (I never run right along the shore, though I'm planning to, soon, up at ten mile beach). But of course it lay down the old lake bed I run across day to day. It sits there, at the center of the Basin, and from eons ago dictates my training.

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15 mi, 105 min; Conway Ranch loop + some ever sandy Goat Ranch Cutoff O+B, and a mile more through Mono City

Several erratic thoughts, as usual

Tired today, after a late long run last night and an early-ish morning in town. Took a nap in the afternoon before an evening jog. Some days the legs are simply content to rise and fall (all I do is lift), and this, to my mind, is the difference between a run and a jog. When you run, you push forward, purposefully, with each stride; when you jog you lift your legs and let them end up where they may, which tends to be forward. Runners usually try to finish each run at the same pace or faster than it began, and, as one maxim goes, to finish at the same pace, it has to feel like you're speeding up.

But, I pretty much went jogging today. Let gravity carry me down the old 395 to Thompson Road, to Cemetery Road... I noticed the ants busy around the cracks in the retired 395, and wondered what kind of kingdom they've built below those fissures, with old pavement for a roof. I thought then of the fissures atop Black Point, which I've explored, which were formed when Black Point, a volcano, erupted under the ice age lake; and of how the earth's crust, just like our roads, breaks down, and things descend, or push up from below. Up the hillside, meanwhile, lay the moraine south of Lundy Canyon, buggy-sized erratics--granite boulders with flat faces, left at the toe of the ghosts of glaciers--speckled over the hillside. Mini monoliths, they reflect the western light amid the sage, creatures beached far from the deep from which they came. Later I found myself looking at the lip of rocks and sand the glacier-esque Mono County graders/machines had created at the side of the road--a mini moraine full of fist-sized erratics, and who knows what small bones.

I'm not sure what it is about this place, or running--maybe the views--but I'm often sucked into a bottomless whirl of scale-play (just as I'm often sucked into word play here). Forgive me. At Cemetery Road and Wilson Creek, I ran out and back on the Black Point Rd 10 minutes to make it an easy 10 miles by the time I got back to the house in Mono City.

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10 mi, 70 min; Old 395-Cemetery Rd-Mono City Rd loop

Disneyland

So, there's this wonderful development, just across 167 from Mono City. Why is it wonderful? Because it failed to develop. Out in the middle of the sage, on the West side of Goat Ranch Cutoff (the road's in two parts, divided by Wilson Creek), 7 or 8 big houses sit lonely, like ice age tufa. A new, low sign at the turn says Rainbow Ridge Realty, June Lake--it's no ridge, but I bet they do get killer views of 'bows over the Basin through their tall glass windows.

The roads in this stalled (for now) development which have the houses on them are in pretty decent shape. But get this--there's a small network of house-less lanes between them, complete with cul-de-sacs, which is quickly being reclaimed by the desert. The pavement is broken at regular intervals, and rabbit brush and sage have filled the cracks. Streets with names like Conway Rd, and Glacier Rd, are announced on weathered signs at pointless, dead end junctions--here, there is such a thing. When I run through this place, I would feel like a member of the legendary "Steeple squad!" leaping over these rows of bushes, except that, being tall, I hardly have to leap.

It's an experiment in what lasts, what doesn't. I wonder how often all the other roads around here have to be repaved to stand a fighting chance against the elements. And desert plants, why, they're downright vicious! Their gnarled taproots go 15, or 50 feet into the ground, in search of a hint of water. You think a pancake thin spread of pavement's going to keep them down? They root with vengeance.

Anyway, I began running through this bizarre landscape, a ghost-almost-town, because a) when I was dealing with real/potential injury, I wanted to avoid sand while staying near Mono City b) running mindlessly down short cul-de-sacs and dead end streets is a super way to eschew long stretches of head-on wind, and so stay fresh (sort of--purposeless running can run you down, too), and c) nothing tickles me more that thwarted suburbia. It's a runner's Disneyland.

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8 mi, 56 min; a ramble through the Conway Ranch development, 167, and the sage aside Mono City -- maybe I'll call this run "Disneyland"?

Friday, July 30 -- AM: 9 mi, 63 min; "inner Dechambeau loop" from County Park -- PM: 4 mi, sagebrush ramble by Mono City

Thursday, July 29 -- 10 mi, 70 min; 167 to Cemetery Road

Fire in the hills

Around 10am, I went out for a tour around Conway Ranch. Some entity with bulldozers--the County, I assume--has widened what was a perfect jeep trail. Now, the road is roughly graded, and the sage has been torn up and crushed along the edges and pushed into isolated pyres that will probably go unburned for years. Seems like a quintessential case of work for the sake of work--there's absolutely no reason, to my mind, why this road needed to be "improved." It might see a car, or two, on a good day. In any case, as you can probably tell, my aesthetic and environmental self (and economic, such as it is) found the change irritating. Pretty strange to see orange Slow, Work Ahead signs in the middle of nowhere. I did not slow, but I wasn't going fast, either.

Had thought about going for a moonlit double, but it didn't pan out after my South Tufa tour and store shift, which ended at 9:30pm. Too late. But the basin just started "pop'n" with rainbows and brilliant light before dusk after scattered thunderstorms much of the afternoon. People were pulling over on the side of the highway to snap pictures of the 'bows, and the Mono Craters were going on and off like Chinese lanterns strung toward Mammoth. Also, a lightning strike kindled a sizable fire in the Bodie Hills, which mushroomed a spectacular, billowing cloud high into the air (allowing me to imagine what a volcanic eruption might look like beside the lake). Added further drama to an already unbelievable landscape. We'll see how long it continues to burn ...

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9 mi, 63 minutes; Conway Ranch Loop, without the Goat Ranch Cutoff ext.

Gunning it

Roads out here often gun straight to the horizon. Take 167, which beelines what must be 20 miles from Mono City to Nevada with hardly a swerve in a horizontal direction. A more average road can, without warning, go a mile no sweat without a curve. Perhaps these cuts through the sage feel drawn out because there's nothing to contain them on either side--no shopping center, city block, or buffer of green to give the overall space a cupped sensation. The basin is a broad platter. Or it could be that lines on this landscape feel narrower, longer, because so little else around conforms to the edge of the yardstick humans are habituated to wheel.

I thought about this tonight, kind of, because my first tempo run on Cemetery Road (great name for a workout arena, right?) included a long straight stretch. Of course, I was hardly thinking about anything at all during the effort, except smooth breathing, an easy arm carry, and an efficient stride (not even how I eventually aim to go faster for 26.2, not 4+ miles). I started at the Mono City-Wilson Creek-Cemetery Road junction and headed northeast, covering at least a mile of dirt before a bend. Since it was my very first workout (of what will be about a 4 month buildup to a marathon), I did it on feel. It felt like a clip, but who knows really--perhaps I'll measure the route later. Figuring I'd manage at least 5:45 pace on average, I planned to go 11:30 out and back. There were some gradual declines (on the way out), and some inclines (on the way back), and by the finish I was feeling it, but still steady. I returned exactly at 23:00. I felt strong, and I'm pretty sure I covered more than 4 miles. A solid first wake up call for the ol' legs.

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10 mi, 65 min (3 wu, 4+ tempo in 23:00, 3 cd); O+B on Cemetery Road from Wilson Creek past Dechambeau Ponds turnoff

Paving the way

I’ve been thinking about roads lately, and for a long time. For running, I’ve come to realize, is largely about them. At least in the modern world. Often what I see, and think about, while on the jog, is no further than their shoulders.

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This evening, at the tail end of some thunderstorms, I set off on the sandy jeep trail on the bluff south of Mono City, across Mill Creek. I had some idea where it would take me. My notion turned out not to be wrong, just far more efficient.

I started heading East, but the road had a mind of its own and turned in large arc across a flat, ancient lake bed, back toward 395, passing a bounding mule deer in the greasewood, and a pile of bleached bones in a shallow, unnoticed wash. Eventually it sidled up to the fence aside the great avenue of mountains, and commerce, that is 395.

Aside this nameless road, 395 is monumental, in every way. So wide and loud. An impassable river, to some animals, I bet. A place where the Sierra’s wind is subsumed, at least on occasion, by that of trucks. And to think 395 was once a jeep trail—a wagon road.

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What I'll remember from this run, I think, is that, at the apex of this nameless road, I watched a FedEx truck roll down the grade of the highway in the distance. Or rather, it seemed to slide down the sage horizon. The semi’s white shape was striking, small and pill-like, before the looming, irregular foothills that ascend to the Mt. Warren. And its purple Fed and green Ex reminded me of the lupine I had to dodge constantly, because they were colonizing the road under my feet.

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Have you ever noticed the arrow hidden in FedEx? Look closely. And what to make of the fact that it points in the direction opposite its travels?

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Around here, it seems, lupine is the first to reclaim. In a burn area off the shoulder of 395 near June Lake, lupine sprawls. It’s a regal carpet. And further on, when I left the 4WD trails for Cemetery Road, there was lupine, still on the shoulder, though this road is graded yearly I suspect.

In spots, it had crept forward, a small animal that had dashed out, then suddenly stopped in tracks. And I thought to myself, I bet they’re spared by dirt road drivers, who surely like to squash things, because they’re so colorful. For some drivers, perhaps it's only subconscious.

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Lupine is a conqueror, I've learned, not just of roads. It handles stress, and is the first, relative simple wave of sage-steppe.

On the skirt of Mount Saint Helens, a similar environment in many ways to this volcanic basin, it was discovered that lupine inhibit the growth of other seedlings, but that those others that take hold ultimately do unusually well, because lupine plumbs the soil with nitrogen.

In other words, it hogs the road initially, but paves the way.

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10 mi, 70 min; Mono City-Cemetery Road loop via unnumbered road