Am I your huckleberry? RAAM 2015

Ever since I qualified for RAAM at Sebring in February, I've been trying to decide whether to take that massive plunge in 2015.  For most of the spring, I thought it was a toss-up; I was taking a wait-and-see approach to my first season of ultracycling, with an eye toward deciding after the year was done.  Then, after my 488-mile performance at the National 24-Hour Challenge, I felt certain that I wanted to give it a go. There were all sorts of reasons why, ranging from the love of a good challenge to support from many friends, some of whom even volunteered for the arduous task of crewing.

As the summer wore into fall, though, I found myself drifting back toward uncertainty as certain realities sank in.  In my ill-fated race in Saratoga, I spoke for a little while with Rob Morlock, a 3-time RAAM finisher with a sub-10-day result to his name.  He volunteered that, toward the end of one of his recent attempts, his saddle sores had gotten so bad that, in places, there was no skin left -- his sit bones were visible through what remained of his flesh.  The more race reports I read, the more I realize that this may be closer to the rule than to the unfortunate exception.  The physical challenge is utterly serious for even the very best athletes.  Marko Baloh, a legend in the sport, lost part of his lung when he got pneumonia.  Christoph Strasser, one of the strongest racers ever, was hospitalized a couple of years ago when he spiked a 105-degree fever in the middle of Kansas.  And, of course, Bob Breedlove was killed in a head-on collision with a car in the middle of the night.  RAAM sounds like it's closer to going off to war than to any event with which I'm familiar.

At the same time, my own race experiences were underlining the gravity of the proposed endeavor.  My lack of heat acclimation in DC's unusually cool summer meant that, at the Mid-Atlantic 24-Hour Challenge in August, I was getting dizzy from dehydration after only 10 hours.  The situation wasn't much better at the Silver State 508, where, despite relatively clement 90-degree temperatures, I found myself throwing up on the side of the road 100 miles in.  The last half of that race was one of the most painful things I've ever endured, from 60-degree temperature swings to an inappropriate bike fit that made every minute agonizing.  Toward the end of that race, I reflected on RAAM -- which is 6 times as long, and which shoots straight across the low desert in the first couple of days before cresting over 10,000' peaks -- and thought, "Not a chance in hell." Of course, the mind rounds off corners, and in retrospect it's easy to remember the accomplishment while the pain seems more like an academic fact than anything real and consequential.

So, here I am, 8 months out from RAAM, facing the big decision: do I take the plunge?  After thinking it over more than I'd like to admit, my answer is: No, at least not next year.  There are many reasons, but here are a few.

(1)  The financial cost.  If you do it on a shoestring budget -- i.e., without an RV, and with neither rider nor crew having much in the way of creature comforts -- the cost would probably come to at least $25,000, and it could well be higher.  Even if I could defray some of that with a full-court fundraising campaign, it still would still be a monumentally expensive undertaking for someone who works for the government.  There are many reasons why RAAM competitors skew older, but I think one of them is that younger people often can't afford it.  I'm not sure I can, and I'm not willing to take on huge amounts of debt for the sake of a single bike race.  There are shorter events that provide rewarding challenges without threatening insolvency.  And, anyway, since when is a 500-mile or 24-hour race considered too short?

(2)  The social cost.  There's no avoiding the fact that, to race 3,000 miles in June, you really ought to be riding something close to 10,000 miles in the 8 months leading up to that point.  We're talking 300 miles a week, and often quite a bit more, week in and week out.  That is serious business for someone with a demanding full-time job, a relationship, and aspirations of reading the occasional book.  The event would consume more than half of my vacation time for the year, and more than all of my budget.  I'm not sure any event is worth living like a hermit for the rest of a year.

(3)  The professional cost.  I'm starting a new job with the United States Attorney's Office next week, and by all accounts it is a more intense place than the one I'm leaving.  I'm excited about the opportunity to be a "real lawyer" with all that that entails, but it will be a pretty steep learning curve, and there will be times when it will displace workouts or races.  Given RAAM's monumental difficulty even for those who are ideally prepared, it seems exceedingly irresponsible to commit to racing it at the same time that I'm trying to get my feet underneath me in a new, demanding position.

(4)  FOMO is B.S.  In the last year, I've stumbled across a new, insidious acronym: FOMO, or "fear of missing out."  It's up there with "YOLO" in terms of things that no one above age 12 should ever write or say, but there is a point to it: People sign up for things that their friends are doing because they think they might otherwise regret not having been there.  There's a significant element of that with RAAM; it's the Kona of ultracycling, and many of my friends and competitors will be there.  But, the thing about fear of missing out is that it's unavoidable.  If you can't do everything in life -- and no one can -- you're always missing out on something, and it's only a question of prioritizing things in the right way.  There's certainly a part of me that will find it hard to sit on the sideline for RAAM, but I'd also find it hard not to do all of the other things in life that RAAM would force aside.  "Fear of missing out" isn't enough: I have to be utterly certain that I want to do RAAM for its own sake, and I'm not there right now.  Sometimes you just have to say no to things.

I've been mulling over this tentative conclusion for the last couple of weeks, and it's only getting stronger.  It's the right call for me, at least right now.  In many ways, I'm like the first-year triathlete who's done reasonably well at a couple of sprint triathlons, and who's thinking of signing up for an Ironman the next year.  I've always told such athletes that there's no rush, and that developing their chops at the shorter distances is an admirable and worthwhile things to do -- it's not "Ironman or irrelevance."  In this instance, I'm taking my own advice, and I'm looking forward to everything that life will have to offer in 2015.

Long rides are revelations

Yesterday a friend from years back, reacting to the 3CR video I posted on Monday, observed that the music I chose had lent the ride a particular tone.  After watching it once through, she'd enjoyed muting the sound and experimenting with watching it again to different songs, and noting how the choice of music dramatically altered the feel of the journey.  She recommended that I give it a try, and pointed me to some songs that she'd found apropos.

My first reaction was to be flattered that she'd found the movie worth watching a second time, much less that she'd used it as an aperture through which to experiment with ways of seeing the world.  And her observation about the power of music rang true.  Years ago, before I discovered the liberation of commuting by bicycle, I'd spent 45 minutes a day in the subterranean anonymity of a Metro train, staring a thousand yards ahead of me through crowds close enough to touch.  Earbud cords dangling, I'd often passed the time by re-imagining the scene as something out of a movie, playing songs ranging from modern rock to trance electronica to Tim Burton-esque gothic meditations, and observing how the world changed from moment to moment.  There might be a well-dressed lady reading a book while huddled into a cranny of a packed car.  What was she reading?  Who was she -- what was her story -- and what was she feeling just then?  I could convince myself it was anything and change my mind in an instant, all by choosing a different sequence of notes to play as a backdrop.  With the proper music, I think one could imbue a Transformers fight scene with a convincing air of poignancy.  It's powerful stuff.

So, on a superficial level, I agreed with my friend's thought experiment: I doubtless could have told the 3CR story in innumerable ways simply by making alternate choices in iTunes.  Each of those choices might have elicited something different in the tale.  Indeed, anyone else on the ride would have chosen differently in narrating his own journey, much as he might have been looking in a different direction at a given moment and noticed a particular scene that resonated with him.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that, interesting though my friend's thought experiment might be on an intellectual level, it fundamentally misconceived what I'd tried to do.  It suggested, I think, that the tone of the story I'd tried to tell was on some level fluid and mutable, and that the choice of music was an arbitrary decision that led to a particular result.  On that theory, another choice might have been as valid or resonant, just... different.  But I couldn't disagree more.

There's an age-old epistemological debate about whether mathematics is invented or discovered.  That is, are the equations we've found to hold true mere human constructs used to describe relationships in the world as seen from mankind's perspective, or are they immutable truths that would exist whether or not we are here to consider them?  If no humans were alive ponder the question, would it make sense in any deep way to say that the principles of multiplication hold true?  Is mathematics an invented human notion or a revelation of fundamental principle?

What does any of that have to do with long bike rides?  To me, a surprising amount.  My friend's observation that the feeling and meaning of the movie I put together could be changed in interesting ways through the choice of tune struck me as suggesting that there was no "correct" music in any deep sense.  But for me, there was.  One of the most valuable things I've taken from long, solitary rides is that, when you have nothing but time to clear your mind and open your thoughts to the world, the journey impresses itself upon you in ways that are unexpected but powerful.  For me, that often takes the form of music.  When my mind is clear and I glimpse a falcon diving from the sky, I can't control the feeling of awe it creates, and what accompanies that awe is a feeling that translates itself into music -- particular music -- often inexplicably.

I'll never forget my first Ironman, in which, about 40 miles into the bike ride, profoundly alone in the alligator swamps of Maryland's Eastern Shore, I was suddenly overtaken by "Step by Step," a frivolous pop song recorded by boy-band New Kids On the Block some 15 years earlier.  I hadn't heard it in those 15 years.  But there it was, clear as day, and it was in my head for hours.  To this day, I can't hear that song without remembering a particular tree I'd been looking at when it came storming into my conscience.  And with that frivolous song came a feeling that, hey, this is an intimidating event, but it's nothing to get worked up about, and I spent hours in a mood that was veritably punchy, singing aloud to the firmament.

So, too, at 3CR.  The songs that I chose in that movie weren't random.  They weren't things I chose out of iTunes because I thought they were catchy.  No -- they were songs that were in my head for important parts of the journey.  They evoked a particular sense of exuberance and wonder that I felt while my ears were pinned back and I was flying along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway.

Well it's a great day to be alive...

A great day to be alive

I'll never be able to hear that song again without suddenly being back there.  The ride, the story, wasn't something I invented for this blog.  It was something that was revealed to me, hour by hour, and that I've tried to recount as faithfully and emotionally honestly as possible.

That exuberant journey took on a far different and more important tone when I learned the morning after the ride that Matthew O'Neill, a 33-year-old rider in the event, had been killed by a truck on the third day of the ride.  When I heard that devastating revelation, I spent the rest of the day, including the long train ride back to San Jose, on the verge of tears, and sometimes well beyond the verge.  I suddenly was back nearly 8 years ago, when I got the call telling me that my brother had fallen into the coma from which he never emerged.  I had all too clear an idea what Matthew's family and fiancée must have felt, and it destroyed me.  That, too, is part of this story, and the movie I created was the most profound celebration of life I could craft, while also being a violent cry of despair that such senseless a tragedy had marred this most life-affirming of journeys.  It was a tribute to the wonderful, cruel, ecstatic, senseless colors of the world.

Would you wanna, would you wanna

Come dance with me

Would you wanna, would you wanna

Fall in love with me

Would you wanna, would you wanna

Come dance with me

Fall in love with me

Come and dance with me

The truth is, the songs I chose could not have been anything other than what they were.  Nothing else would have represented the journey that I lived, the images that flicker behind my eyes, and the adventure I'll treasure until the end of my days.  Those songs chose themselves.

That's really the thing with randonneuring, and with long rides generally.  I don't know if mathematics is invented or discovered, but to me, long bicycle rides are revealed.  I've found that I can plot whatever course I want, but the fact is, when I get out on the road, I take the world as it is and the journey as it comes.  Hopefully I'll have my heart and mind open to it, whatever it brings.  And when it's done and I sit down to write about it, I'll tell what happened in a way that is as true as I can make it.  It's all I can do.

I'll see you on the road.

"The Tartar Steppe" -- A great read for athletes and beyond

No one will be surprised to learn I read a fair amount about endurance sports.  Sure, there are lots of "Get Psyched Up!" ghost-written biographies out there that amount to, "Me train hard go fast.  You no go fast; that ok."  Some of them are decent, but they do tend to blend together.

The thing is, I'm only modestly interested in hearing tales of glory recounted.  I'm more intrigued by the psychological side, specifically, why endurance athletes are driven to be weirdos.  They do objectively unreasonable things at great expense along every relevant dimension -- physical, financial, and interpersonal. And, when you ask many of them, they'll have a hard time telling you why; they'll often admit that training can dominate their lives and races are often stressful, but somehow putting those two negatives together creates a positive, and an addictive one at that.  Why?

Endurance athletes' biographies are largely unhelpful in answering this question, although it's really the reason that their books exist.  Behind the hand-waving, mostly it seems to boil down to (i) proving something to oneself or others, (ii) the desire to set and meet goals, and (iii) the search for meaning that's so often missing from life in a cubicle.  Fair enough, but it sort of begs the central question: When the point is proved and the goal is met, does that lead to happiness over the long term?  Is the searched-for meaning ever found?  I suspect that, for many people, it might be painful to think honestly about the answers to those questions.

I've struggled a great deal with this stuff, sometimes publicly.  My posts here, here, and here ruminate explicitly about it.

In the past few months, I've been pleased to discover a few books that are helpful in thinking about why endurance athletes do what we do.  The thing is, the most insightful books on endurance sports I've found haven't been about endurance sports at all -- at least not literally.

Here's one of them.

Although it's a bit obscure, several creditable lists identify The Tartar Steppe, written originally in Italian, as one of the best novels of the last century.  The dust jacket accurately describes it as "a meditation on the human thirst for glory."  A young military officer, Giovanni Drago, is posted to a remote fort in mountains that overlook a vast desert.  He intends to leave as soon as possible, but gradually becomes entranced by the romantic notion that an invading army will someday materialize in the mist-shrouded distance to allow him to achieve glory on the battlefield, and his life will then be purposeful.  Drogo dedicates himself and his life to visions of this distant dream, only to find in times of doubt that he no longer has any choice but to continue, as his years in the fort have rendered him lost anywhere else.  When at last the enemies amass at the gate, Drogo is old and infirm, and he is transported from the fort in preparation for the dreamt-of battle.  Having dedicated his life to the pursuit of a vision, he finds that it has materialized too late.

A "meditation" is the right description here: The Tartar Steppe is a novel that compels one to think.  It's an enigma.  For most of it, almost nothing happens, but that "nothing happening" is largely the point.  In literal terms, the book has nothing to whatever to do with running or riding a bicycle, but I think on some level it has everything to do with those things.  How often do we, as endurance athletes, sacrifice aspects of our lives in pursuit of a distant vision of glory?  How often do foresake opportunities to do memorable things, all because we're "training with dedication"?

So once more Drogo is climbing up the valley to the Fort and he has fifteen years fewer to live.  Yet he does not feel that he has changed particularly; time has slipped by so quickly that his heart has not had a chance to grow old.  And although the mysterious tumult of the passing hours grows with each day, Drogo perseveres in his illusion that the really important things of life are still before him.  Giovanni patiently awaits his hour, the hour which has never come; he does not see that the future has grown terribly short, that it is no longer like in the days when time to come could seem an immense period, an inexhaustible fund of riches to be squandered without risk.

Will we be faster next year?  Will we go farther?  The year after that?  Then what?

To RAAM, Or Not To RAAM?

The 2014 Race Across America route (~3,000 miles)

Long before I began dabbling in randonneuring, I knew of the Race Across America (RAAM), upon which Outside Magazine has conferred the title of  "The World's Toughest Sporting Event."  In its 30-odd years of existence, only 200 or so riders have finished it solo.  About 10 times as many people have summited Mt. Everest.  It's a 3,000-mile bike race that, in its present incarnation, begins in Oceanside, CA and ends in Annapolis, MD.  It involves over 100,000 feet of vertical elevation, including stretches below sea level in the desert and mountain passes approaching 11,000 feet.  Temperatures in the day can reach 100 degrees, and at night can plummet to near freezing.

Racers have about 12 days to complete the journey.  By contrast, Tour De France riders travel about 1,000 miles less, and take twice as long to do it.  (Of course, they are going pretty freakin' fast.)  At root, the question is: can you ride 250 miles a day, on average, for 12 days in a row?  The distance is obviously unfathomable, but the even bigger challenge is the lack of rest.  Last year's winner, Christoph Strasser, apparently was on his bike for about 23 hours and 15 minutes a day, for just under 8 days.  That is, he slept less than an hour a day while riding about 400 miles a day, on average.

There's nothing healthy about it.  Hallucinations and profound confusion are ubiquitous, and there's a medical condition, Shermer's Neck, that exists nowhere else on earth.  It involves certain riders' neck muscles becoming unable to hold their heads up any longer -- they simply give out, and riders' heads flop around like a rag doll's.  Not that this is enough to stop victims, as many times they prop their heads up so that they can continue riding.  (The condition can last a couple of weeks.)

In all, despite extremely demanding qualification standards (for example, riding 400 miles or more in a 24-hour race), each year there's about a 50% DNF ("Did Not Finish") rate.  For a great insight into the challenge and the motivations of those who do undertake it, the award-winning documentary Bicycle Dreams is well worth checking out.

Each summer for the past several years, I've followed the event pretty closely. Live GPS tracking is available online, and certain online forums provide regular insight.  The race is always an object of fascination to me.  RAAM is to competitive ultracycling what Ironman Hawaii is to triathletes.  It's the best of the best, taking on an unfathomably difficult event -- one as difficult mentally as it is physically -- in which there's no prize money and precious little press coverage.  Only a couple of people in the world are able to make a full-time living off of RAAM and other ultracycling events.  For the great majority -- not that there are many to begin with -- it's a labor of love that they undertake in addition to full-time jobs, commitments to family, and the like.

In short: RAAM is the sort of thing that, if you have to ask why people do it, you'll never understand. It's climbing the mountain because the mountain is there.

For as much as I've followed RAAM over the past few years, until recently, I've never really imagined it as something I'd want to do, much less something I'd be qualified to undertake.  It was only in the summer of 2012 that I rode more than 200 miles for the first time, and that was in a brevet, which isn't competitive or time-pressured.  I remember when, in 2011, a close friend told me he was attempting the inaugural 1200k (750-mile) Big Wild Ride in Alaska, and I thought he was utterly nuts.  I'd long loved extremely challenging all-day rides like Mountains of Misery and the Diabolical Double, each of which is 125 miles of insidious mountain climbing, but I'd never reached the end and had any desire to keep going for another 11.5 days.

In the past couple of years, though, I've begun to dabble in longer cycling events, and for whatever reason, I've yet to hit any sort of wall.  In my first 12-hour time trial, in Saratoga, NY in 2012, I was hoping for 220 miles or so, but I wound up with 256, which was a little beyond the old course record (although I took second to Matt Roy, who set a new one).  Last year, I completed my first 600k (375-mile) brevet, a solo effort, and then took on the Big Wild Ride 1200k (750-mile) Grand Randonnée.  Each event was crushingly hard and took absolutely everything I had in me, but I finished each well ahead of the cutoffs.  Most recently, I competed in my first 24-hour time trial at Bike Sebring, and, despite being monumentally undertrained, somehow did well enough to come within shouting distance of an AG course record.  I wound up with 441 miles, which was comfortably more than the 400 required for RAAM Qualification.   I also wound up ahead of several riders who have finished solo RAAM in the last couple of years.

THE PRESSURE OF STRANGE PEERS

I've long observed that the triathlon social scene -- for better or worse, but probably for worse -- has a subtle but distinct pressure to it.  For most (privileged, first-world) people, attempting a triathlon is a worthy ambition.  Those who do it, though, and decide to stick with the hobby, quickly come to find that there's a pressure to go longer.  There seems to be a subtle assumption that everything short of Ironman is merely a prelude to the real challenge.  (For the record, I think this is completely insane.  I have huge amounts of respect for those who work hard at the extremely painful task of going faster at shorter distances.)

But it turns out that doing an Ironman's not the end of it, either.  Sure, it may start as a once-off "bucket list" item, but it often doesn't stay that way.  Crossing the finish line of an Ironman is a singularly intoxicating experience.  There aren't many times in life when we're surrounded by crowds cheering a huge undertaking, and the glow is real.  Regardless how well one does, though, the glow inevitably fades, and one's left with a firm conviction:

I can do better.  I can go faster.  I have more to give.

And there's certainly pressure to try.   The more time one spends training with the tri crowd, the more it becomes one's social scene as well.  That's a great thing in many ways, but it can become a cycle that robs one of perspective.  You come to realize that the conversations are no longer, "you're doing a triathlon?" or even, "You're doing an Ironman?  Crazy."  Instead, they are, "Cool, which ones have you done?  What's up next?"  Twice-a-day workouts become the norm, and the pattern of one's life comes to revolve around an event or two each year.  It's a metaphorical treadmill that's every bit as real as one upon which one might train for a winter marathon, and it's hard to get off without worrying that life will lose its momentum and meaning.

There are at least three problems with this.

First, the endorphin rush of endurance racing is an addictive drug.  The drug may be benign compared to some alternatives, but it's every bit as real.  The first rush of an Ironman finish line is an amazing high, and one wants more.  Years down the road, though, it becomes clear that the thrill of finishing is no longer enough -- the question is whether one is getting better.  If you're disappointed in your performance, you want to avenge it the next year.  If you're thrilled, that's great, but it doesn't last, because you suspect you can do even better the next year, and you start to associate your self-image with being an athlete of a certain caliber.  From that perspective, to cut back is to regress, to fail, to die a little bit.  The shape of one's life begins to coalesce around racing and training -- where you can work, whom you can date or marry, and the rest of it.  The phenomenon of triathlon divorce is very real.

Second, endurance athletes can sometimes become monomaniacal and forget the concept of opportunity cost.  The pursuits take so much time that it's difficult to maintain other hobbies.  And, when one's recreational satisfaction comes primarily from a single pursuit, that pursuit has to be maximized.  Put simply, if a meaningful part of one's happiness is triathlon performance, it's important to keep on the trajectory of performing better.  But the law of diminishing returns applies here: going a couple of hours faster in an Ironman might require doubling one's training time.   It may in fact be true that one would be happier with three hobbies, each of which one does less well than one might with exclusive focus on a single pursuit.  But it can be hard to see that forest from inside the city walls.

Third, there's a telling pattern in my mantra above: I can do better.  I can go faster.  I have more to give.   The common word is "I."  One's performance is inherently a self-regarding thing.  Going faster, going longer, and doing better makes no one but the athlete better off (and the athlete part of it is questionable).  Past a point well short of Ironman, racing triathlons doesn't improve the world; that 8th Ironman probably doesn't provide much additional inspiration for one's sedentary friends to get off the couch.   In fact, it turns out that the field of positive psychology explains why such a pursuit rarely leads to meaningful long-term happiness: helping others is more important to one's happiness than focusing on one's self.  It's important to be healthy, but no reasonable person can argue that training for Ironmans for years on end is necessary to achieve that.

In short, I've come to think that Ironman triathlons are fundamentally self-regarding endeavors.  To be clear, I don't think that, by any stretch, Ironman athletes themselves are generally self-absorbed.  I mean only that -- in my opinion -- for people with other responsibilities, such as commitments to a "civilian" family, Ironman training falls far beyond what's necessary to be a healthy companion and role-model.

ULTRA-DISTANCE BIKE RACING IS EXACTLY THE SAME

Why all the talk about triathlon?  It's what I know.  I signed up for my first Ironman in the fall of 2005, thinking that the race in 2006 would be a one-off, Herculean adventure.  But I did better than I thought I would and wanted to give it another go.  My brother passed away at the the same time, and triathlon became an indispensable part of my coping strategy.  Somehow, in 2013, I found myself having founded a triathlon team, and I was toeing the line at my 9th Ironman.  In all those years, I had trouble finding a relationship that was happy for more than a few months at a stretch, and I found myself thinking of career opportunities and romantic prospects in terms of whether they'd be compatible with training for 20 hours a week.

Over time, it has become clear to me that that isn't the future I want.  It isn't how I was raised.  My parents made huge professional sacrifices in order to spend more time with me and my brother, and when he passed away in 2007, it was obvious that they felt they'd chosen wisely in spending every moment with him that they could.  I want that same relationship with a family, and for me at least, Ironman training is largely incompatible with that vision.  At some point, one has to get off of the treadmill, and I've found something of an alternative in long, meditative cycling events.

As it turns out, though, ultracycling has the capacity to be an "out of the frying pan, and into the fire" proposition.  If one completes 200k and 300k brevets, it's very difficult not to dream of the epic adventure that is a 1200k -- it certainly happened to me.   One can complete a 1200k with much less training than Ironman requires, but if you happen to be on the faster end of things, people notice.  After my strong performance at the Big Wild Ride 1200k, my ride report made its way through the local ultracycling community, and I began finding myself on local rides with people I'd just met telling me that they'd read it, and opining that "RAAM is clearly in your future."  I took it as a compliment, if not very seriously.  But with each success in ultracycling events, the pressure and allure grows.  The ultramarathon bike racing community is a very small one.  Everyone knows one another, and the annual reunion of the most talented people is at Race Across America.  RAAM is the ultra-racing pinnacle, where the best of the best come out to do battle with the impossible.  For those who finish it, there is nothing more to say and nothing more to prove -- you're in the books for all-time, and much as one can always call oneself an "Ironman," one will always be a "Solo RAAM finisher," a finisher of the toughest race in the world.

I'm not going to lie: there's very serious appeal to that notion.  For whatever reason, I seem to be good at this whole ultra-marathon bike racing thing -- I'm competitive with people who have finished solo RAAM multiple times.  Although Sebring intimidated the hell out of me, there's no question that I belonged there, so to speak.  Heck, had I ridden my bike for the last hour, I'd have broken the age group course record.   As a result, I have a "golden ticket" to compete with the best in the world in a sport I'm passionate about.  Such opportunities are vanishingly rare in life.   It's extremely tempting to get swept up in the enthusiasm, and to plan my life around RAAM in 2015, with the idea that it's a "once-and-done, once-in-a-lifetime" adventure that I have to try before life obligations make it impossible.

And yet, and yet... well, that's exactly what I said about Ironman in 2005.  I wanted to do (what then seemed to be) the impossible by finishing that absurd event, figuring that life would make more sense on the other side.  In fact, merely more Ironman races lay on the other side.  RAAM is just the same: many, if not most, of those who finish it come back in successive years to try to improve on their performances.  They're RAAM finishers -- they're somebody, the few, the anointed -- and, from there out, their race results are often described in terms of "Solo RAAM finisher So-And-So."  So few people in the world know what RAAM is, much less appreciate it, that it seems (from my current perspective on the sideline) that it would be difficult to leave that world behind once one's crested the summit.   It would be hard to return to civilian life afterward.

There's also this: entering RAAM is phenomenally expensive -- the effort would cost $20k-$30k, most likely -- and it takes a village.  You're required to have a crew; in practice, you need 6-9 people who will agree to take 12 days off of work to follow you across the country very, very slowly as you gradually become an insane nightmare of a human being.  To the extent I've described Ironman as narcissistic, RAAM turns the volume to 11.  I wouldn't even know how to ask people to do such a thing without feeling like an ass.  And you have to be willing to commit a very serious amount of time to training in the six months leading up to the event.  Not as much as some people like to pretend, but it's a very real undertaking, and I would never dream of entering RAAM without being committed to finishing it and doing well.

SO HERE'S WHERE I AM

Having written far too much already, here are my present thoughts, in no particular order.

(1)  I'm presently interviewing for a couple of jobs that would require substantial travel commitments.  If I get one, it may be difficult to prepare adequately for RAAM.  If things work out that way, it'll be okay; there are plenty of ways to get into trouble without finding reasons for my neck muscles to disintigrate.

(2)  If I don't wind up accepting a position that would make adequate training impossible, I will assess the situation toward the end of 2014.  This year I'm planning another 24-hour race, another 1200k, and very likely an attempt at the Furnace Creek 508 (a 500-mile race in Death Valley in October).  Furnace Creek, which is a "mini-RAAM" with a massive amount of climbing, would give me a much better sense of whether I have a realistic shot at RAAM.  A flat 24-hour race gives one vanishingly little information; Sebring is not in the same galaxy as RAAM and the sheer physical and mental fatigue that it entails.  From everything I know, solo RAAM finishers tend to think that qualification based on a 24-hour race is a dangerously misleading thing.  It's like running a good 10-mile race and thinking oneself qualified to race the Badwater Ultramarathon, a 135-mile Bataan march across Death Valley in July.  The 750-mile Big Wild Ride, in which I got 3 hours of sleep in the course of my 67-hour solo voyage, is a little more analogous, but at the end I was in no condition to keep going.

(3)  Regardless how enthusiastic I may be about RAAM, and regardless how well prepared for it I think I could be, I will not consider racing it if I am not utterly confident in my ability to lead a balanced life while preparing for it.  To be specific: if preparing adequately would require real sacrifices at work, or would require that I be anything less than a good and present significant other and friend, I won't do it.  It isn't worth it.  End of story.  There are other ways to have fun.  In fact, if my significant other isn't on board with my making an attempt at RAAM, I won't do it.  It's a team effort or nothing.

(4)  I would only consider entering RAAM if I had a crew of volunteers who are truly enthusiastic about the undertaking.  It requires a massive commitment.  If I have friends who think of it as an appealing adventure, terrific; if not, then not.  Friends should not have to make unwilling sacrifices in order to perform unreasonable favors.  Narcissism must know a limit.

(5)  If all of the above considerations somehow point to "yes," I'll think very seriously about racing in 2015, with the absolute understanding that, no matter what happens, it would be a one-off attempt.  Regardless whether I were to DNF in the first 10 miles (hopefully not) or win the race (*snort*), that would be it.  I want things in life that are incompatible with a lifestyle of perennial RAAM racing.  The idea would be to take the opportunity to toe the line with the best in the world and then to move on without regret, come what may.  And, if everything did line up in such a way that an effort at RAAM happens, I would be damn well prepared, and would head into it ready to put in a performance commensurate with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

So that's where I am.  However things play out, I'll continue to think RAAM is a phenomenal undertaking without parallel, and I look forward to following my new friends as they do battle across the country this June.

He's going the distance! He's going for... speed?

Six months since my last blog entry!  And a lot has changed.  About the time I wrote my last entries, which narrated my 67-hour, 750-mile epic ride in Alaska, I realized I needed to change some things up.  It's not that I was unhappy on a broad scale; instead, I felt I was in something of a personal rut, where the individual pieces were enjoyable but weren't adding up to a feeling of progress or evolution from one year to the next.  And so, showing precisely the sense of proportionality that has caused me to sign up for patently absurd events that I've later found myself struggling to cope with, I sold my house in Arlington and most of my furniture, bought a condo in downtown D.C., and switched jobs -- pausing briefly only to race an Ironman in the snow at Lake Tahoe, because I have moron issues.

In all, except for the Tahoe debacle, I did almost no training of any sort for nearly three months.  That's not false modesty -- I didn't run a step or swim a yard, and my cycling was pretty much limited to commuting.  I put on 10 pounds and put my energies into establishing my new footings, and frankly, that was just fine.  I've realized that, as the winter descends each year, I fall into a state where I pretty much want nothing to do with working out, and I refuse to train just for the sake of it.  After eight years of training at Ironman volumes, I've reached a point where I'm doing this stuff exactly to the extent that I'm passionate about it, and only when I'm excited for an upcoming adventure.  For the foreseeable future, I'm not signing up for any Ironmans a year in advance and obligating myself to train full-time on a distant day when my interests could be elsewhere.  I'll do what sounds fun, and I'll figure out what that is along the way!

The good news is, I've found my next adventure!  The bad news is that it's a 24-hour cycling time trial in Sebring, Florida, only two weeks from now.  Oh dear.  It'll be great to escape whatever arctic misery is being inflicted upon D.C. for a few days, but I'd be lying if I didn't confess to being slightly terrified of the whole thing.

In summer of 2012, I raced a 12-hour time trial in Saratoga, NY.  I was self-supported and really had no idea what to expect, so I set off faster than I should have and just did what I could at every step along the way.  12 hours later, I'd somehow managed to cover 256 miles at an average speed of 21.3 mph, which was far more than I'd expected, and which put me only a couple of miles behind the winner, who'd set a new course record.  The event was a heck of a lot of fun, but there are three differences that concern me about Sebring:

1. It's in February, not July.  When I raced the Saratoga 12-hour, I'd ridden Mountains of Misery 200k six weeks before, a 400k brevet in the Fingerlakes region a month before, and a 12-hour mountain bike race only two weeks before.  In other words, I'd been crushing myself in preparation.  For this race, it's pretty much the opposite: I was historically out of shape only two months ago, and I've only ridden my bike outside for a couple of hours in total in the last five months. 
2. When I finished the 12-hour race in Saratoga, I basically never wanted to see my bike again.  The last hour involved something close to delirium, when the aggressiveness of my bike position really started to catch up with me, and I was struggling to look up the road instead of downward at my front wheel.
3. The race at Sebring is twice as long.  Oy vey.  My parents, who will be down to crew for me, are in for some memorable times.

The rational answer is probably to race the 12-hour option at Sebring, but I'm captivated by a unique aspect of this race, which is that the last 12 hours of it -- i.e., the nighttime portion -- take place on the famous Sebring International Raceway!

The race starts at 6:30 a.m. at the entrance to the 3.75-mile raceway.  All competitors -- including century racers, 12-hour racers, 24-hour draft-legal racers, and 24-hour "RAAM style" racers (my category) -- will get things rolling with 3 quick laps on the raceway.  We'll then shoot out on a 90-mile "long loop" through flat-to-rolling Florida countryside:

The 90-mile long loop. 

Upon returning to the raceway about 100 miles in, the century riders will stop, and the rest of us will launch on a series of 11-mile loops adjacent to the raceway, which we'll continue until darkness falls about 12 hours into the race:

The 11-mile short loop

At that point, the 12-hour racers will finish their day and start drinking heavily while they watch the 24-hour masochists funnel onto the illuminated raceway, where we'll ride 'til dawn.  

The promise of racing on a famous international raceway strikes me as a heck of a good time -- it's just too bad it comes at the end of 12 hours of hard work!  The track is as flat as it's possible to get, but it's by no means straight.  To the contrary, there are 17 turns in under 4 miles, which means that -- especially riding at night, when exhausted -- it will take a huge amount of focus to keep the things pointed the right direction.

Here's a video of a guy racing it considerably faster than I will be:

One extremely cool feature of this race is that racers' crews will actually line up in pit row during the overnight portion of the race, so it's as much like an actual F1 race as it's possible to get on two wheels.  Unlike many triathlons, spectators will actually be able to see racers pretty often -- every 12 minutes or so!  Radios and cell phones are allowed for racers to communicate with their crews, so it's truly a team effort.  And when dawn breaks on Sunday morning and the race ends, everyone can walk 50 yards to the hotel for an afternoon of well-earned slumber.  In all, it strikes me as sufficiently memorable and crazy to be a great time, and I'm heading there with the overriding intention to have fun and see what happens.

In terms of goals, it's really hard to know.  Given my dire physical shape a couple of months ago, I'm comforted by the fact that it's literally impossible to fail to finish a 24-hour race unless one marshals Einstein's principles of relativity in a manner that is pretty damn unlikely.  I did well at a 12-hour race (256 miles, on a slightly tougher course), but that was a lifetime ago and only half the distance.  

For reference, a 400-mile performance qualifies one to race solo Race Across America (RAAM), a which is a pretty cool honor.   Most people don't get close to that number, though.  Last year's winner, a RAAM finisher, covered 432 miles, and the course record for my age group is 449 miles.  I don't have any real sense of what I can do, particularly since 100% of my training will have been done on my Computrainer, and objectively speaking, I started way too late in the day to be ideally prepared.  But I've done what I can in the last couple of months -- lots of intervals during the week, and on the weekends, progressive long rides of 3.5 hours, 4.5 hours, 6 hours, and finally, 10 hours split across 2 days, all in Zone 2-Zone 3, and none with any coasting.  That's more mileage than I've ever done on a trainer, but it's still not in the same galaxy as some people who will be racing this event.  Chris Hopkinson, last year's winner, will be returning this year in preparation for RAAM 2014.  He trains like a pro cyclist -- about 30 hours a week of cycling, not to mention a 48-hour nonstop trainer ride he did for charity a couple of months ago.  (How he also has a family and holds down a job, I'll never understand, but he seems to do it in remarkably good cheer.)

In all, I don't have particular mileage targets -- I'm just going to try to follow Theodore Roosevelt's advice to "do what you can, with what you have, where you are."  Pacing these events is tough, because there's no such thing as negative splitting or even pacing.  Everyone falls apart eventually, sometimes repeatedly.  The only certainty is that, however good or bad you feel, it won't last.  At 2:00 a.m., on the track after having ridden for 20 hours, things will almost certainly get a little weird.  I'll just go as fast as I'm comfortable going at any given moment, pound the calories, and see what happens.  Anything's possible! I just want to have fun with this, and it's unlikely it'll be the last event of its kind that I do.  So I'll look at it as a lesson first and foremost, and I'll certainly make some mistakes along the way -- all of which will be gloriously recounted here in a couple of weeks.  What could be more fun?  Let the adventure begin!

My Big Wild Ride (Alaska 1200k), Part 1: The Gathering Storm

(Update: I've made a movie of this event that can be found here.)

I'm not quite sure where to start.  The beginning, but where is that?  Maybe in 2005, when, looking for a change of athletic pace, I bought a bike, not having ridden one since I was a kid.  A week or two later, my first ride with a touring club, a 40-miler through the rolling hills of northern Virginia, felt like a monumental victory over the unfathomable forces of nature.  I still remember, toward the end, encountering a road that seemed to rise into the clouds -- the Snickersville Turnpike.  Improbably, I clawed my way to the top, and on my next few rides with the club, I asked other riders about it, confident that it must be legendary in the area.  "Sure, pretty road!" they'd say.  "Pavement's a little rough but it has nice shade in the summertime." No whispered words about having their souls crushed.

Three months later, having fought through a few 50- and 60-milers, I made the leap to my first century ride.  At the time, it seemed a distance too immense for comprehension: 100 miles.  On a bicycle.  I remember having dinner with a friend's family that evening and, by way of apology for being unable to carry on a conversation or even use a fork competently, explaining what I'd done earlier in the day.  Their unspoken reactions were transparent: "Geez!  But why?"  It's what cyclists did, I thought.  The culmination of a year or even a cycling career.  The apex.

Over the next few years, though, I came to see that a century is just a threshold beyond which greater adventures await.  In training for a series of Ironman races, my club would do a couple of mere training rides each season that were even longer, and those often were bookended by swims and runs.  A century was just another distance, albeit a nice round one with a catchy name.  Indeed, in the next few years, I found that many of my favorite rides were exceedingly mountainous treks of about 125 miles: Mountains of Misery, in Blacksburg, VA, and the Diabolical Double, in Garrett County, MD, being just two.  

Amidst my growing ambitions, a counterintuitive trend emerged: longer distances weren't more painful than shorter ones, at least psychologically.  Quite the contrary, in many ways they were liberating.  I found that, the shorter the ride, the less I enjoyed it for its own merits and just thought of it as a training exercise to be completed as quickly as possible.  Shorter rides were mere tasks, boxes to be checked on the training agenda, and subconsciously I'd continuously query whether a given ride was done yet.  Conversely, when I rolled out on a 125-mile challenge ride with 15,000 feet of climbing, the finish line seemed distant to the point of being hypothetical.  It forced me to live in the moment and to enjoy the process -- the pocket-sized victories viewed from summits in the sky.  These ambitious rides weren't in service of a larger goal, but instead were the goals themselves, and their own rewards.

Then, a few years back, my buddy Max, a fellow triathlete and a comparable aficionado of masochistic endurance challenges suggested that I join him for a local randonneuring event, a 200k brevet with the D.C. Randonneurs.  The unsupported, noncompetitive event was a first for me.  It took place on one of those frigid, clammy March days for which the mid-Atlantic is known, and the course was gorgeous and relentlessly hilly in equal measure.  Including a few miles added due to wrong turns, we finished in about 11 hours, and I think I ate an entire pizza afterward before collapsing into bed with the intention to sleep until summertime.  I completed a couple more 200k brevets in succeeding years, each time at the end thinking that I couldn't imagine pedaling a mile further.  

Then, in 2011, Max, who'd managed to complete at least one 600k brevet, announced that he'd registered to ride the inaugural Big Wild Ride 1200k later in the summer.  I had no words.  Even as one known to his friends for deriving joy from adversity, I simply could not contemplate how someone might hope to complete such an event, or why one might be tempted to try.  I was impressed as heck with his audacity, but not even a small part of me found allure in the prospect.  It seemed to redefine excess, and I preferred my insanity with a splash of self-preservation and a twist of common sense.  Such an undertaking had no discernible place in a reality-based world.  Unfortunately, his attempt to prove me wrong was tragically derailed early on when he struck a large rock in the road during the ride's first night; the inconceivable remained just so.

The Fingerlakes in summertime.  Tolerable.

In 2012, in an effort to ramp up my cycling volume to prepare for the inaugural Ironman Mont Tremblant later in the year, I decided to stretch my limits on the brevet front.  First came a 300k brevet in Frederick, MD, in early May.  The heat was simply indecent, and there was no shade to be found amongst the cornfields and extended climbs.  My friend and I finished in 14 hours or so, but for the last few hours we were running on fumes and greasy roadhouse food.  Undaunted, in June, we headed to the Ontario, NY for a 400k with the Randonneurs of Western New York.  That incredible journey started with 5 hours of cold rain and ended 18 hours later with a midnight spin along the shore of Lake Erie, with moonlight twinkling on the breaking waves.  It was just magical, and in my weakness, I thought, yeah, I could do more of this.

And so it was that I agreed to join Max in the summer of 2013 for the second running of the Big Wild Ride 1200k.  It would be the focus of the spring and summer, and hopefully the adventure of a lifetime.  This spring, my 200k, 300k, and 400k qualification requirements went off without a hitch.   The 600k proved more troublesome; due to personal conflicts, I couldn't join the brevets hosted by the local chapters in late May and early June, which was especially problematic in that the BWR required that riders qualify by June 21.  Kevin, the RBA for the Alaska Randonneurs, graciously allowed me to qualify using a 600k permanent, ridden on my own, merely 3 weeks before the 1200k.  This was a little nuts insofar as it meant that my first 600k and 1200k would be ridden only 21 days apart, but I survived the 600k and was optimistic as I boarded the plane for Anchorage.  After all, I reasoned, it was just a little more pedaling and eating, and a lot more chamois cream; what's the big deal?  Famous last words.

ALIGHTING IN ANCHORAGE

The ride was slated to start on Sunday night, and Saturday was dedicated to getting to Valdez from Anchorage.  I therefore flew into Anchorage on Thursday afternoon via Alaska Air, somehow managing to pay only $20 for my bike.  Upon reaching town, I built up my bike and Max took me on a tour of the Coastal Trail, a local cycling and running Mecca.  It was an immaculate day, mid 70's, sunny and crisp, with air that seemed more appropriate to a mountain resort than a city.

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

I couldn't believe that just that morning I'd been in D.C., where the temperatures were predicted to reach the high 90s and the humidity was unspeakable.  

With the 4-hour time change, bedtime came early, but the next day brought more exploring, first an easy 30-minute run around Anchorage, and then a real treat: a ride down the Seward Highway southeast of Anchorage.  This was the road we'd take on Saturday to the ferry in Whittier, and it stood on its own as one of the most gorgeous stretches of tarmac I'd ever traveled.  The contrast of the sheer cliffs on the left with the water and snowcapped peaks on the right was like nothing I'd ever seen.  What a treat.

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

STAND in the place where you (wanna) live!  At least in July.

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

Vogue!  Just over the railing is a great waterfall.

Our appetites for Alaskan cycling whetted, Max and I headed to the Big Wild Ride meet-n-greet at a local bike shop.  You could definitely tell it was an Alaskan shop, with lots of fat-tire bikes and other nods to survival over speed.  Surprisingly, of the 45-odd registered riders, only one was from Alaska.  D.C., in contrast, was very well represented, with 6 or 7 riders.  Riders hailed from shores as distant as New Zealand, England, and Japan.

About 1/3 of the crowd!  I'd know most of their names pretty soon.

With bike inspections on the menu, there was a wide variety of randonneuring setups on display, from classic steel:

Gaansari.

Boulder Bicycle.

Gunnar.

... to carbon (complete with disc brakes!)

Volagi.

... to titanium and carbon

Serotta.

... and recumbents.

Bachetta.

And then, last but sure as heck not least, there was this understated little number:

Cervelo P5.  No bar tape.  Holy crap.

I'm a triathlete.  I know me some tri bike.  And that, my friends, is some serious, bleeding-edge tri bike.  Man alive.  My own tri bike is comparable; I rode it successfully in a 12-hour TT last summer and a 300k earlier this year, and Breyers couldn't make enough ice cream to tempt me to try to ride it 750 miles straight.  I figured there were two possibilities: the owner was a RAAM vet who was planning to swat the course aside like one of Alaska's notorious mosquitos, or he'd somehow gotten terribly lost.  As it turned out, Scott, its owner, was a very down-to-earth guy with reasonable ambitions who simply had but one bike available.  That's the best of all possible reasons, but even so: good grief, man.  My neck ached in sympathy.

¡VAMOS A VALDEZ!

The ride would end in Anchorage, but it would start in Valdez, a mountain-ringed port town a full day's journey to the east.  

We'd turn that frown upside down!  (Sorry)

Saturday's plan, therefore, called for us to travel (by car in our case; by coastal train in others') from Anchorage (A) to Whittier (B), and then to take a 6-hour ferry across Prince William Sound to Valdez (C):

The drive to Whittier was a 2-hour jaunt down Seward Highway, the coastal road we'd biked the previous afternoon, and once more it lived up to its billing, offering everything from seascapes to glaciers and verdant hillsides that looked straight out of Ireland.  My only disappointment was a suspicion that the ride itself couldn't possibly measure up to the pre game.

From sea to shining sea

Pretty much that whole expanse of water is a tidal zone.

Portage Glacier!  I think!  Maybe.  Or one of its friends.

July in Alaska is nothing like July in D.C.

Ireland or Alaska?

In Whittier, a desperately small port... settlement, we enjoyed a leisurely lunch at a seaside inn with a panoramic view overlooking Prince William Sound.  Max opted for an exotic reindeer stew; I contented myself with the fish tacos.

Our appetites sated, we joined the other randonneurs in loading our bikes aboard the ferry.

$200,000 worth of bikes strapped together.

We then settled in for one of the most amazing things I've ever experienced.  Whittier and Valdez -- and hence Prince William Sound between them -- have legendarily awful weather.   This day, though, one could not have imagined anything more perfect.  What's more, Prince William Sound is known as being a cruise destination because it's picturesque beyond description.  It was incredible to have such an experience folded into the ride logistics; the only challenge was figuring out what to photograph when everything seems like the most picturesque scene one's ever seen.

Max (L) and me (R) settling in for the ride.  I need a haircut.

A patriotic view of Whittier as we pull away.

Whittier fading into the distance.  Look at that sky!

That guy in the white shirt knows where it's at, photo-wise.

Glaciers and jagged peaks everywhere one looks.

This is my biggest smile.

It's gonna be a bright, bright, bright sunshiny day.

The forbidding mountain range to the north.

Even the clouds needed a nap on their way across the peaks.

And then this happened just off the bow:

Thar she blows!

Yup.  That there be a Humpback Whale.

As we rounded a rocky outcropping to the north, we came upon a beach colonized by sunbathing seals.

It's a tough life living basking by the emerald sea.

They'd also taken over a guidance buoy.

Here, kitty kitty!  No?  Fine, be that way.

VALDEZ

We arrived in Valdez on a perfect Alaskan evening.  I say evening even though, as of 8:00 pm, it wouldn't be dark for another several hours.  After grabbing some food in the restaurant downstairs, we tried to bank as much sleep as possible; Sunday night, at the very least, we'd get none whatever.

I somehow managed about 11 hours' sleep and awoke at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday to confront the following dilemma: when an endurance event begins at midnight, what the heck do you do with your day?  The smartest answer almost certainly is "as little as possible," so Max and I immediately crossed it off our list and headed out for a ride.

Actually, it wasn't quite so insane.  The first 35 miles of the ride are some of the prettiest, with mountains, glaciers, and magnificent waterfalls on display.  There's also an epic 9-mile, 2700-foot climb to the top of Thompson Pass and an unmissable descent on the other side.  Unfortunately, given the midnight start, we'd visit this area under cover of darkness.  We therefore hit upon the perfect solution: we'd catch a lift to the top of the pass and ride down the 2700-foot descent back toward Valdez.  Not a pedal stroke of effort would be necessary!

On the way to the peak, we passed Bridleveil Falls, an incredible sight.  Its size is hard to convey.

Raindrops are fallin' on my head!

Here it is in motion:

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

And just past the falls was a canyon that seemed to stretch forever.

It was deeply hypnotic.

On the way to the summit, more summits!

The earth was cleaved in two.

And mountaintop lakes.

I could see for miles, miles, miles, miles...

We'd travel these roads again some 12 hours later.  In the meantime, though, we had the chance to descend down the south side of Thompson Pass.  Here's part of the thrill-ride.  Sorry for the camera shake -- things are bouncy when you're moving 50 mph!!!

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

Toward the bottom, we passed through the canyon shown above, which led us back past the falls.

Video can be played on YouTube in 720p HD.

Man, what an appetizer. 

Upon returning to Valdez, I showered, looked over my bike, wrote a blog post about my last-minute thoughts, and tried to relax.  I also spoke for half an hour or so with a documentary film crew, Greg and Joe of Throwing Wrench, who'd be shadowing us through Alaska in the coming days.

It was nearly time to roll out like a Hobbit in search of my own personal Smaug.  Bilbo had Gandalf; I had bear spray.  Bring it on.

(This is Part 1 of a triptych.  Part 2 is here.)