Not gonna lie, this week was a bit of a stinker. The weather’s been kinda crap and as much as I’d love to paint myself as the ultimate warrior who trains rain, snow, tornado, hurricane, cosmic gamma radiation solar flare blast of death awesome-sauce DudeGuy McBro, sometimes if I look out the window and it’s whiteout conditions, I’m just not gonna go outside. I have a bike, and that’s what I did. I did 20-40 miles each time. I can feel my legs getting a lot stronger, and that’s what we’re here for at the end of the day! I like running on the snow here and there if it’s in a neat place, but it’s far slower and the idea of slipping a little and tweaking my knee after I just got it back to running shape has no appeal to me. We’re just here for the vibes, yo.

One of my favorite feelings in the world is having a pair of strong legs. You can feel them working around while you walk, you can feel them when you’re just standing there. The way they just don’t fatigue anymore after hours of running. It’s always been my favorite part of these things, feeling your legs adapt and get better at doing the leg stuff.

In the Stead of Technicalities, Let There be Burgers

I’m really not in the mood to dump inspiro-vomit or training advice. I drafted out three different posts but they get scattered and feel less and less genuine each iteration so I’m scrapping it until I genuinely want to get into that. I had a memory resurface while I was on my bike, so this week I want to talk about Burgers.

It’s 2016 on the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d just come from a stretch of the Sierra Nevada that left me feeling disheveled and a little more than hungry. I did a 20 mile day in record time to get to Red’s Meadow to catch a shuttle to Mammoth Lakes and skipped on the Red’s Meadow food to get to town faster. I had just enough time to buy my favorite hat in the world that I wore on every outdoorsy endeavor from that year on which is now tattered and torn and has a permanent place on my shelf.

I began the shuttle journey profusely apologizing to the people around me for how ripe I smelled. On the way back I saw a family talking enthusiastically about meeting JMT hikers and how they’ve hiked 100 miles and how incomprehensible that was. I scanned the shuttle for PCT hikers who had hiked 900-or-so at this point and waited for someone to drop that bomb on them, but no one did which gave me warm contented feelings of being around a group of people who just does this for themselves rather than to sprinkle the razzle dazzle of it on anyone and everyone with a set of ears. That’s what the internet is for, after all (self awareness moment).

Mammoth Lakes is a bougie ski resort town that probably started out as a single lift back in the day, which necessitated a lodge, which necessitated stores and housing for the workers that incrementally built from the top down. The town creeps slowly down the mountain for quite a distance, and from the top to near the bottom there were no rooms available. I nearly walked all the way down before I found a place with a room open at an unheard of price, but I was hungry and tired and crusty and stinky and had dedicated the majority of my day to navigating my way across town after a full day of hiking. The room was happening. I paid for the room, threw my pack through the door, and left the hotel in search of The Fine Nutrients™.

Carl’s Jr was the closest available that wasn’t going to further destroy my bank account, so I walked in and placed an order for their largest Jalapeno burger with a side of loaded fries and a taco salad. They brought the tray out to my table and I noticed it was lacking… and wrong. But I didn’t care, I was too hungry to care. I was too everything to anything. I started with a handful of fries before heaving the burger into my dumb stinky face and tore into it. I mourned the loss of my additional items but I figured I could just go up and tell them I was cool with the misplaced burger if I could just get my fancy sides.

About halfway through the burger a staff member approached the table wearing a tired and harsh scowl, taking a silent moment to scruitinize this filthy creature in their restaurant having the audacity to eat food in their presence.

“That’s not what you ordered” they said firmly.

I set the burger down to chew and swallow my food, and in a moment of precision timing they took the tray away from me as soon as the burger landed and walked away.

I sat in confusion for a moment. Did they just take my food? Am I going to burger jail? The burger SWAT team is en route, surely.

The worker came out with a new tray with a new burger and all my fancy sides, set it down simply remarking “here” before dropping the tray in front of me and storming back to the kitchen. It’s easy to argue that I won here, I got more food than I’d planned for and while nothing could fully extinguish my ravenous Hiker Hunger it put a considerable dent in it at the very least. It didn’t really bother me in the moment aside from finding the entire encounter a little weird, but years later as I’m sitting on my bike peddling away for hours the: “NOW HOLD ON JUST A MINUTE” feeling hit.

The utter audacity, I tell you.

This Week

As always, there’s no formula. I’m simply going to keep doing what feels best, I anticipate it’ll be light on running again because I refuse to run on the neighborhood trails anymore. I want to run up the mountain, but I have to let the snow subside a little more before that’s viable. Fortunately we live in an era of never-ending drought and a questionable environmental future that may or may not absolutely devastate this region as a whole in the coming decades so it probably won’t snow so much that I can’t run soon. I’d put my dwindling savings on it. We’re a long ways away from the days of perpetually snowy winters around here.

Ravenous consumption and destruction of the only thing that could possibly keep us alive and flourishing for micro-dopamine hit trinkets and doodads has its perks I guess.

¯\(ツ)/¯