cartwheelsandcake – Page 11 – Cartwheels and Cake

How To Incorrectly Layer

Today Paul and I went on a bike ride. The ride is known in Boulder as “Super Flagstaff”. If you’re really curious, you can read a breakdown of the sections here. Suffice it to say, it’s a hard 4.5 mi, ~2,000ft climb. The average grade is somewhere around 8% (though it goes up to 20% in parts) with the hardest bit in the last mile. The whole thing unceremoniously tops out at 7,625ft at a row of mailboxes on the side of the road, where you feel like you’d like to collapse.

The Strava record on the course is … Continue reading

Hello 2020.

You’ve arrived.

New year. New decade. New adventures. New president (?)

Way back in 2000 a teenaged me decided to celebrate the new year, new decade, and new millennium by writing in a journal every day. Because New Year’s Day isn’t a real day, I started on January 2nd. And I (mostly) kept that goal.

Fast forward 10 years, and I did the same in 2010. Also starting on January 2nd. I honestly completely forgot to start on the 1st. Again.

And so, I suppose, it only seems right to do it again in 2020. Starting on January 2nd again, … Continue reading

The Second Attempt: [Part 3 of 3]

THE SKI/CLIMB (part 1):

We grabbed our skis and climbing gear from the car, and headed out to the start point. By the time we actually started climbing it was just after 3:00 AM.

I was so hopeful, because our two skis done after hard bike rides had ended up feeling really great. This one, not at all. We were tired from the start. My legs felt like lead. I was so sleepy that I would close my eyes for four glides, open them for a few minutes, and close them again. I was practically sleeping on my skis. We … Continue reading

The Second Attempt: [Part 2 of 3]

THE BIKE (part 1):

It sort of felt hard to believe we were now about to bike to Mount Hood, but off we headed.

We took off from Hood River to start the climb up. It’s hard to replicate a climb like this, because unless you’re biking up a mountain it’s rare to have so much uphill and so little downhill. We’re talking 7,300ft of climbing over 46 miles. The elevation profile looks like this:

There’s one 1,000ft descent around Mount Hood Meadows, but it’s a bit disheartening because you then have to make up that loss (and more) to … Continue reading

The Second Attempt: [Part 1 of 3]

So, clearly it’s been a few days since we tried this thing again. I didn’t write an entry immediately, mostly because I was sleeping. SO TIRED. And then I didn’t write an entry because the task seemed daunting, and with all the “picnic-ing” I was suddenly I bit behind on the rest of life. And THEN I didn’t write an entry because I was trying to process the whole thing, and felt like it would do well with a little space. FINALLY, I really want to make a video but I haven’t yet. I had some technical difficulties (now resolved) … Continue reading

Second verse, same as the first

We are minutes away from packing up the car to try this all again.

We’ll still have a safety kayaker (hooray!) but we’ll ultimately be self-supporting (still not unsupported though). We’ll be taking two cars, dropping one at Timberline with skis and climbing gear, and one at Hood River with swim and bike gear. Logistically, this makes it a little more challenging/time consuming, but ultimately it doesn’t change much.

I mainly feel better about this second start, since the swim was the biggest unknown. And, well, now we know things. But we’re still not sure if our planned adjustments will … Continue reading