Four weeks to go

On Friday, I jogged down to Cemetery Rd for another bout of intervals, trying to simulate ~1000m repeats with 3 minute efforts. The temperature was just right, and aside for a car with a male driver that passed me going way too fast (even after I tried waving to get the jerk to slow), throwing up a cloud of dust, it was pretty smooth. The roads by no means flat, so going out I felt faster than coming back. Yet the luxury of running on time, not laps or miles, is that its effort that counts. My track:


Today, I put in a good 20-mile long run--not super long, but at a relatively brisk pace. I'd intended to go another mile, actually, but was feeling rather dizzy/drained by the time I got back to the house--perhaps I started out too fast--so I called it a day. Also, early in the run (from about 1 mile in to mile 5), I was feeling an occasional twisting/pain on the side and back of my knee (sciatica?), especially on the downhills, which is worrisome. I thought about aborting the run, and perhaps should have, but decided I could always hitch back along Hwy 167 if it stayed with me through 10 miles. It disappeared, for now--I'll have to monitor it closely. Possibly it stems from my hips being slightly out of alignment after the hard half-marathon effort/Friday's workout. We'll see ...

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20 mi, 135 min; Cottonwood Canyon loop

Week total: 97 miles -- this will prove to be my highest weekly total for the year

Saturday, 10/9: 10 mi, 70 min; reverse Conway Ranch loop

Friday, 10/8: 4 mi, 28 min WU; 5 x 3 min hard, w/ 2 min rest (~ 4 mi); 4 mi, 30 min CD; Cemetery Rd (12 mi total)

Woe is he who eats too many wasabi peas

Enough said. I'd planned to go a few miles longer, but cut it short, exhausted. They say one's diet is crucial to training. I believe that, but seldom abide by it. Example A: today.

Also saw my biggest rattler yet on Conway Ranch Rd, in the vicinity of Rattle Snake Gulch (which, after this summer, I truly believe is rightly named). Girthy feller, maybe 3 feet long. Let me tell you, rattlers get a little nervous when you come up on the jog. Thank goodness for low light and shiny scales that gleam (unlike a twisted piece of sagebrush) from 100 yards away.

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16 mi, 112 min; Conway Ranch Rd-Hwy 167-Cemetery Rd-Black Point Rd-Mono City

Caving in

Yesterday, on an easy 9-miler, my legs were definitely feeling Monday's long effort. I went counter-clockwise around Conway Ranch, running on Goat Ranch Cutoff toward and then along Wilson Creek, which I'd never done in that direction.

No run today, though, I've decided, because instead I'm off a hike around Mono Lake--45 miles, three days, two nights. I've resisted the endless opportunities for backpacking/big hikes in the Eastern Sierra for a long time now, mainly for the sake of running, and I just can't do it anymore.

Back Friday!

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Begin circum-Mono

Tuesday, 9/21: 9 mi, 65 min; Conway Ranch loop in reverse

My longest run ever

... time wise. Seriously, now--how do people run for 4+ hours? (People are amazing.) I can't imagine it. To spend so long out in the elements? All that time on your feet? And mentally? That's forever to focus. Good on ya, marathoners. You've made the term mean more, and I mean that in the best of senses.

This morning, I cracked the 2.5 hour barrier for the first time, and that felt like just about enough. I think my previous longest run was about 2:28-ish, back in 2008 in preparation for my first marathon in Austin. I got back to the house, after my usual long loop to Cottonwood Canyon Rd, in 2:11 (drank some water I'd set out on the driveway), then added on 23 minutes in Mono City. By 7-min "badger miles"--to which, you may have noticed, I've come to ascribe (because I just don't care to guess at/drive my distances)--it was 22 miles. But, for once, I'll fess up and gloat that this was at least a 23-, quite possibly a 24-mile run. (The few marked, but otherwise unremarkable miles I did on Hwy 167 were at 6-6:30 pace ....)

And, what do you know, the decision to postpone my long run a day (which felt like such anathema since we, runners, tend to live by the calendar week) was glorious vindicated by the stupendous, refreshing, fall weather, with just a whisper of breeze. On Goat Ranch Cutoff Rd, I crossed over tracks in the sand and stopped, very briefly (a paws?), to verify that they were mountain lion--out for a stroll/on patrol on the road under moonlight, I imagined. They headed up into the Bodie Hills. An auspicious start to the week.

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23 + mi, 154 min; the usual grand loop to Cottonwood Canyon Rd

Carrying a torch

It's encouraging to have a practical purpose to inspire a run. Like you need to drop a letter in the post office box a few miles away, for instance. Or ... well, that's pretty much all I can think of.

But this morning I ran back to the house with another purpose. With a message. Last night, my housemate, a videographer, mentioned that he'd always wanted a classic shot of a rattlesnake striking the camera (affixed to a broomstick, of course). Conway Ranch Rd is the place, I said. Then, around 10 am, about three miles in, there a snake was, reclining lazily in the sun on the soft sand at the edge of the road. Heck, I thought, I'll just run back to the house to rattle off an alarm.

So, I drew a line with my shoe across the road's sand--opposite the rattler--to mark the spot. Then I giddy-upped the 3.5 miles yonder to Mono City, finishing my run earlier than I'd planned (only 49 minutes). But I felt like a scout relaying an crucial message (kind of like the fabled Pheidippides, who ran from the Battle of Marathon back to Athens to deliver an announcement of victory ... and then keeled over dead with exhaustion). There was umph to my step. Never mind that the news was slightly ludicrous, deranged. It felt good, too, to run in a new direction on 395, back toward Mono City.

J, I said, rattler! Lickity split, he duct-taped a pink, plastic coat hanger to the end of a spare crutch--the perfect implement for wrangling. We piled into his truck and drove over, noting that there were probably a thousand snakes nearby, and here we were chasing just one.

Of course, it was gone. It'd been about a half hour since I'd seen it. The snake had seen enough sun, I guess, and the chase was half-baked idea, in the first place. But at least I made the effort.

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AM: 7 mi, 49 min; up 395 to the back side of Conway Ranch (rattler!), and back

PM: 5 mi, 35 min; Lee Vining Creek Trail and around town

Wednesday, 9/1: 15 mi, 105 minutes; down old 395 to Cemetery Road, around Dechambeau Ranch, then through it, and on til Mono City

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

No snake this time

Just a knockout view down Cottonwood Canyon Rd. From that vantage point, the islands, the Craters, and the High Sierra past Mammoth all align, like stair steps, or a craggy, geologist's dream/bingo. Might be my favorite view around. And, best of all, the stretch is downhill--I can just roll, and gaze.

For once, the wind died down over the course of the day, rather than picking up, and I timed this loop just right--left just before 6, back just after 8. I also managed it about 4 minutes quicker than a week ago (then added on a few minutes at the end). I'm heartened by the fact that, while training for my first (and only) marathon in Austin, I launched into my first long runs about this week, twelve weeks out from the goal race. So, though I may feel a bit behind per my goal of running faster this time, I've got more long and medium-long runs under my belt already.

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19 mi, 133 min; my Big Conway Ranch lop (same as last week), i.e. Hwy 395-Conway Ranch Rd-Goat Ranch Cutoff-Cottonwood Canyon Rd-Hwy 167-Cemetery Rd-Mono City jeep trail

Week total: 91 mi -- after two weeks of travel, finally a solid week of training, the kind I need to string together

It's alive ...

Both the blog, and the rattler I saw today as I crested the hill northeast of Conway Ranch. I had shooed a garter off the road a few miles earlier, and must have been channeling a charmer's energy. The broken sagebrush strewn across the road even had a sinuous quality.

Luckily, I saw it before it was trouble. It was on the left side of the road, and I was jogging down the middle. Thick, girthy, its pale sides glinting in the post-6pm sun that was pouring its final moments over Conway Ranch. I suspected at first glance that the snake was no gopher, and it's six-tiered rattle confirmed that hunch.

I stopped, of course. I often feel guilty when I pause while "training", and feel the pressure to keep on, to keep the heart-rate up--I just can't help it. One part of my soul loves to linger, the other chafes. But I fought my guilt off for longer than usual this time. If anything, rattler's would have such an effect. I circled around it, squatted down. It raised its rattle and gave two shakes and side winded to the dirt lip at the edge of the road, with its head tracking my shins the whole time (don't worry, I wasn't dangerously close). I think I stood, or took a step closer, and then it slithered quickly over the little embankment and coiled, in a perfect pretzel shape, in the tight clearing between several sagebrush. Its rattle was upright before its body, like a shield, its head reared back--a classic display. It would take a fool to mistake this for an ordinary snake.

But I followed it, stepping off the road, and observed the rattler for a few more minutes. Its forked tongue--jet black at its prongs, a pearly coal further in--slid out and down, in a slow, sense-ful flicker, and then, sometimes, curled back over the top of its spade-shaped head. I stepped from side-to-side, trying for the best angle to see the creature, and it's dagger-face followed knowingly. From the road, before I left, I couldn't resist boyishly prodding its side gently with the twiggy tip of a sagebrush branch, and it turned toward the provocation violently, giving two isolated rattles--like the single click of a castanet--that were quite elegant and clear in their message. (When I told this story to a friend, she mentioned that it's usually males 18-30 who get bit by rattlers ... I can't fathom why.)


Then I went on another 14 miles, or so, down Goat Ranch Cutoff to Cottonwood Canyon Rd, to Highway 167 (a stretch I normally don't reach), and back on Cemetery Road to Mono City finally, after dark.

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19 + mi, 135 min; a big Conway Ranch Loop

Week total: 75 mi

Also: A Mono-logue post about a gull, "An elder in our midst"

Oregon ho!

I'm heading 8 hours north to today, and will be back Thursday, so the posts might be infrequent. Just back from a 16 mile, or more, effort out in the sage, on the old Conway Ranch loop plus Goat Ranch Cutoff out-and-back add-on. I tried to push the finish a tad and force the legs to turn over despite a shortened stride, which is inevitable when it comes to long runs. Otherwise, nothing eventful to speak of, really, except perhaps for a large redtail that lumbered off a pole, working hard without a thermal. I got far enough down GRC that I could see Cottonwood Canyon, which is the back road to Bodie--connecting Cottonwood Canyon Rd with 167, with Cemetery Road might make for a good long loop, when I finally need it. I swear, a map soon.

And remember: it's always an excellent idea to go for a big run right before you jump into the car for an all day drive. The legs love it.

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16 mi, 112 minutes; Conway Ranch Loop plus Goat Ranch Cutoff O+B add-on

Week total: 82 mi

Rattling off the miles

Today, prompted by a bulldozer up ahead (still widening the road), I diverged from my usual Conway Ranch Loop, running around the hill on the Northeast side of the ranch, instead of over it, on a jeep trail I'd never tried out before. The road dipped through a spot of willows near an irrigation ditch, and there, I leaped! Even belly up--clearly deceased--a snake triggers instincts I can't suppress.

I kept going, but as I so often do, turned around. Because it didn't quite look like a gopher snake. Sure enough, it wasn't. It was a rattler. I squatted, flipped it over.

How did I know it wasn't just feigning death, like a hog-nosed snake sometimes does? Well, red ants crawled over its body, and there was a coagulated explosion on one of its long sides (evidence that it had been run over). I brushed two fingers across its amazingly large, smooth, ribbed and layered scales (see photo ... someone else's), and noticed its black tongue was sticking out, still, from the point of its diamond head as if the snake died mid-taste. And I counted four tiers to its rattle (incredibly, these are modified scales), which means it was just four years old.

I paid a little more attention to the ground for the next few miles. A good run, otherwise.

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13 mi, 91 min; Conway Ranch Loop (slightly modified) with Goat Ranch Cutoff O+B extension

Tuesday, 6/27 -- AM: 10 mi, 70 min; old 395 to Cemetery Rd -- PM: 4 mi, 28 min; Mono City Sage Ramble

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.

First long-ish run

Fourteen miles today, my longest run since the late spring of 2009. Waited until the afternoon cooled, then did the usual Conway Ranch Loop, but added on a couple more miles out and back on a relatively level dirt road--I think it's called Goat Ranch Cut-off--that runs north of and roughly parallel to 167. (I'll make a map soon to delineate these various obscure routes.)

Near my turn around, I slipped past a cluster of rusty cars and trailers in an expected, disorganized junk circle (like they'd come to a watering hole altogether to drink). And there was a man, sitting outside, focused on something in his lap. He didn't notice me as I went by with the wind; the road was soft with shallow sand. I wondered if all those metal animals belonged to him, or if he'd simply joined their lot for the night. Or the summer? If longer, I suppose they arrived, gathered around him one at a time, like the sheep and Basque herders that ran not long ago in nearby hills.

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14 mi, 98 min; Conway Ranch Loop, with an extension down Goat Ranch Cut-off

Week in review: 65 mi/6 days + 1 rigorous hike

A step toward impulsion

There’s inertia to overcome, running day in and day out, and sometimes no energy to drive anywhere for variety. This morning, for example, I headed out on the good old Conway Ranch Loop (how quickly it’s aged!). The circuit’s quite nice, especially the middle five miles of dirt road that passes the tumbled boulders of Rattlesnake Gulch (I’ll try to have pictures soon), before climbing up and over a rise for views of the islets and the White Mountains in Nevada.

The run joins Highway 167 eventually, which crosses Wilson Creek on the way back to Mono City. It’s not a natural creek, but a once-upon-a-time ephemeral wash that, for a long time, has served as a return ditch, more or less, for Mill Creek’s water, after it’s siphoned through the Southern Edison power plant (on the other side of 395). The water has steadily cut (or “incised”) into the sandy soil, producing a soft canyon, maybe 50 feet deep in places, that might look natural to the untrained eye, but is far from it. Willows fill the bottom of this long winding trough, and do provide habitat. Running on 167 where it dips across Wilson, I’ve flushed black-crowned night herons and, I’ve seen them spiral down to that spot from afar, as well.

Every time I jog over the creek, I peer longing at the rippling water, about the width of a healthy sidewalk, as it flows under the road. On the downstream side, a culvert jets water into a roiling mound-of-a-pool, and a little dirt cul-de-sac blocked by three large rocks leads right down to its weedy lip. Today, I couldn’t resist. I ran over the creek and away, but u-turned eventually—actually, I turned a few circles, making up my mind—and ran at a clip back to Wilson Creek, where I tore off my socks, shoes, and shirt (stretched my hamstrings and calves, briefly), and waded in.

Quite, the, shock. The current strong, the water sweeping into and around a row of willows. I was worried about my feet getting painfully lodged between stones, so I lowered myself in and scuttled like a crab across the swiftest part to a quieter spot on the other side. Paintbrush stood at the edge of the pool, a dash of red matching my shorts. I was hidden from the highway (which was high indeed, for once) and couldn’t hear a thing, except for the motoring water.

Why was I indecisive in the first place? Well, it’s a long walk back. Took me about a half hour to trek home along 167, and then through the sage, to Mono City. Along the way a tiny convertible brimming with four smiling Japanese tourists pulled up, not to offer me a ride, but to ask, “Mono Hot Springs?” Ain’t any, I said. They were searching for the Dechambeau Ponds, which does have a fount of hot water (let loose by a search for oil), but it may be scalding, and it runs into a reedy, yellow-headed-blackbird-infested pond.

I told them to go to Travertine. Twenty-two miles North. Take a right after the Ranger Station. One of the women wearing a broad-brimmed, floppy hat lifted her hand and waved from the backseat as they blew past me going the other way.

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12 mi, 85 min; Conway Ranch Loop, doubling back, finally, to Wilson Creek

Independence Day

A good day, I hope, to declare a new blog?

S and I went to see the fireworks over the Bridgeport Reservoir tonight, parking behind the airport among the throngs of other cars (robust pickups, playing country music). The booms of the display echoed off the rampart-ish Bodie Hills, and the showers of flares and embers, like fireflies from various distances, were spectacular in the darkness over the still-glowing, many-angled horizon of the High Sierra.

Oddly enough, the show reminded me of an eruption I’d seen—caused, actually—earlier in the day, on my run. Adding a few miles on to a nice loop around Conway Ranch, I hit the jeep trail that diverges from E. Mono Lake Drive into the sagebrush along Mono City. It was around 11 am, not spectacularly hot, but with a flat, harsh light.

Suddenly, birds began exploding from the bushes on either side of the sandy road: a couple towhees, a sparrow, a meadowlark, and many pinyon jays—a whole flock. The jays didn’t lift off all at once, but one at a time, as I flushed them from the umbrellas under which they’d perched, one individual to a bush. Each lifted off in flurry of blue and gray feathers with a characteristic nasal call.

I stirred up about twenty jays over two-hundred meters of road, and they burst in every direction, with something like the whistling-thump of a launched firework. Then they all headed north, toward Highway 167, gathering in a flock like blue embers pulled by the wind toward the pinyon pine hillsides.

As their name suggests, they’re pine seed specialists. In fact, they apparently don’t have feathers covering their nostrils, unlike other jays, because they’d get gunked up with pinesap as they reached into a cone. Like other jays, however (notably, the Clark’s nutcracker), they have an incredible spatial memory which gives them the ability to store thousand of seeds and retrieve them, even under the Mono Basin’s occassional drifts of snow.

Pinyon jays are year round residents here, but should the Basin’s crop of pine fail, they would head, in mass, to a more productive, distant region. And that, as the Cornell Lab of O notes, “makes them one of the truly ‘irruptive’”—or patriotic?—“species of North American birds.”

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12 mi, 84 min run; Conway Ranch-Hwy 167 Loop