There is something about winter that encourages looking into the future.

Perhaps it is that you can see farther through the trees all stripped of their leaves. Perhaps the winter demands that you focus on the essentials and carefully points toward what is possible. Perhaps thoughts travel faster and farther in the cold.

Natalie and I have been busy planning our year. There is no sparkling sunshine or cherry blossoms to distract us. The landscape is clear and we can survey our farthest horizons.

Despite the obvious, we have identified some spectacular landmarks and have mapped out a year of adventure and exciting new projects.

Stay tuned for reports from the field as we press on in 2011.

I’ve been on something of a de-cluttering rampage over he last couple of weeks. I think it might be the vestigal packing + moving instinct that 12 years of annual moving has imprinted on my brain. It could be my inner minimalist getting me back.

There are a couple of tennents of the decluttering process that I have routinely observed. They take their inspiration from the three gatekeepers of mindful speech:

1. Is it kind?
2. Is it true?
3. Is it useful?

No to all three keeps the silence.

My de-cluttering gatekeepers are these:

1. Is it a source of great pleasure?
2. Is it true to my current life and values?
3. Is it useful?

No to all three means I chuck it.

But one item has consitantly squeaked by on a technicality. My old beaten up silver sidis. They had been such a complete and unqualified pleasure to own that their glow in my memory has blinded me to their current beauty, relevance, and usefulness.

I bought them on a bike messengers salary, well before I bought myself a decent decent bike. I spent three times as much on these shoes as I ever had on any other. Before I understood the ass kicking superpowers cowboy boots bestow, I understood the power of silver sidis. I wore them every day all day and the only other shoes I needed in my life were perhaps a pair of bunny slippers. My sidis took me everywhere and in return I kept them shined with silver shoe polish.

Eventually, the Velcro lost it’s bite and the treads were worn down to the very sole around the cleats. I regretfully replaced them with a newer model pair of black sidis.

When I uncovered them in a box, I saw in them something different than that static memory that had retained their super powers. I saw in them something familiar and present – my current pair of sidis. They are about 4 years old now, and in the exact same way, they are both worse and better for the wear.

When I have to replace these shoes, will I hold on to them too, for all of the miles and the climbs, and the perfect tailwinds they conjure? Will I see I them the super power that my silver sidis held?

I don’t think so. The spell has been broken. The superpowers are in the use and the time and the beauty of experience. Simply put, the ass kicking powers are in the act of kicking ass.

I’ve learned rather quickly that pregnancy has its own numerology. You count back to the estimated date of conception, count down to the due date, and count up the times the baby kicks. You count on your life never being quite the same again. My numbers are these: 21 weeks pregnant, 7 weeks into my second trimester, and experiencing everything for the first time.

I’ve let go of a whole series of other numbers that were old and familiar friends. My resting heart rate, my mile pace on a 5 mile run, my racing weight, and how much time passes before l really really need to pee. Again.

Pregnancy is at once a private miracle and the most mundane fact of our existence. The only thing that makes my experience at all remarkable is that I should be surprised to learn, as if for the first time, the truth that I am not my body. My identity is not as neatly housed as I had thought. Much of my adult life I have been healthy and injury free. I consider myself lucky. But it also means that nothing has challenged my working theory that my mind and body are generally in agreement about things. We like broccoli. We can run effortlessly, if not fast, on most days. We don’t really take naps.

None of these things are true anymore.

I want to be perfectly clear. My wonderment and gratitude far outweighs any consternation on most days. I can’t imagine a more splendid use of my body than to make a new person, even if that new person may already have clear ideas about broccoli and naptime. I want to throw a welcome party moment to moment on each passing day for the new little critter inside me.

But there are some unexpected moments that I have come to value more dearly. Cyclocross races every Sunday. Each week I pin my race number to my jersey and I race. I may find my heart rate higher, my pace slower, and my finish placement sliding, but that is no longer relevant in my new numerology. I want to be counted among a field of women. Not first, not top-ten perhaps. Just one among many who are doing with their bodies something remarkable and common, hard and temporary.

Welcome to the world. Baby, that’s as good as it gets.

I had just taken a 10 pound bag of farm fresh beets through hours of scrubbing and boiling, cooling and peeling, slicing and spicing, pickling and canning until victory was mine: 12 perfect pints of pickled beets lined up like little soldiers.

During the struggle, I overheard a snippet on the radio about pickles and warfare.

Caesar distributed them to his troops to fortify body and spirit. Napoleon’s need for a stable pickle supply for his soldiers led to the development of modern canning techniques. Pickles were rationed in WWII, so that the good guys could eat them and fight the bad guys. And we all know who won.

Despite what it looked like, the carnage in the kitchen wasn’t a battle against the beets at all. It was a struggle against our common enemy: the perishable summer.

The sun is setting earlier now and I regularly hear crunchy yellow leaves beneath my feet. I must accept that some of my tomatoes may never ripen. But I won’t accept the fall without a fight. And so I march into battle with a knife in my hand and a middle finger for the end of summer.

After it was all over, I savored my victory. They were a little sweet and a little sour. And some cold day in November I am going to pop open the spoils of war and feast on a slice of stolen sunshine.

At the bottom of our last major descent of the day, my tandem pilot Bob yelled back to me “Sprinkle water on the drum brake!” I watched a weak trickle from my water bottle sizzle and pop. Water turned to gas, and it was gone. Burned up by the accumulated heat of so much resistance. If I had been capable of poetry at that point, I would have understood this as our last physical sonnet to glory.

The Rapha Gentlemen’s Race prides itself on its brutality. It is unmarshalled, unsanctioned and takes as its battle cry “Glory through Suffering.” This route dispatched us to 123 miles of grinding climbs, false summits, dust and gravel. The day handed us searing heat.

Before the race I had questioned the necessity of hitching “glory” to “suffering.” With some cheeky Buddhist logic, I dismissed suffering as a matter of perspective or mental attitude. But by the time we hit Pittsburg Road, I was reminded of the noblest truth of all:

Suffering is as ordinary and inevitable as the next breath. Glory is a state of mind.

Only 7 of the 27 teams that started this race made it to the finish intact. Riders went down with one flat after the next on the steep gravel descents. Tires blew off of rims. Riders spun out and fell at 3 miles an hour. Chains dropped. Chains broke. Drivetrains derailed. Sunstroke and dehydration plucked off even the strongest riders.

At the bottom of that last major descent, our remaining team had nothing to race but the sunset. We’d been the first to start at 9 in the morning and we’d be the last to finish, 11 ½ hours later. At this point, I winced at every bump in the road. I had sunscreen in my eyes and my hands had gone numb. We all got quiet. I think we were looking inward for what was left. I poured my last drops of will and joy into the pedals to keep them turning. It all burned up, meeting the sun at the horizon.

As I rolled into the finish, I realized that glory wasn’t waiting for me. And that all I was left with were fleeting moments of beauty and hours of transition: Water into gas. Hurt into motion. Sun into darkness.

And maybe beer and a shower.

I just bought a pair of blue leather clogs at a consignment shop and I dare say they are haunted. The toes look like they’ve kicked and the heels look like they’ve dug. I swear to you, they have as much verb as they do noun in them. They bear the evidence of having been cobbled, worn, and recobbled with quirky asymmetry. They have gobs of glue at the seams, a few repairs to the heels and say “Oscar Austad” on the bottom of the wooden sole.

For five dollars, I bought more than a pair of clogs. I stepped into the ghost of one particular pair of feet that have wandered elsewhere. Oscar, wherever you are, thank you for your shoes.

In years past, I might have been able to answer with confidence. You just do a gut-check: yup, feels like summer. So you take them off. Or you look to outside indicators: Fleet Week, Pedalpolooza, Rose Parade… and you take them off. But this spring it has rained like gangbusters, and it just keeps coming. It has soaked my intuition and drowned my faith. Times like these call for a new methodology. See if you qualify for fender removal below:

This is what it looks like when we plan our future.

Beautiful photos by Shetha.  See the rest of them here.

I was there.  Not in spirit, like someone sitting with coffee and a waffle at the kitchen table thinking cheerful thoughts for a hearty bundled-up peloton.  No, I was there in the wind-chapped flesh.  Only I was a half mile across the highway, a half hour late, and in an industrial park of misery.

For brevity’s sake, let’s call that Hillsboro.

In retrospect, I can see I was ill-prepared.  It wasn’t what I didn’t bring – I brought my earnest intentions, a buttered muffin, and a Max ticket. . . It was what I failed to leave behind that did me in.  I deboarded at Orenco Station with the useless assumption that NW 231 st surely mustn’t be too far from NW 235th, where you were all waiting cozily to begin your ride.  I set out, at 13 minutes to nine, to find the next block, orient myself, and head your way.  After five minutes, it became clear that the street grid was pocked with condos in the way you might imagine a really rough patch of the space time continuum to be pocked with black holes.  I sought a native guide, a woman with an eager terrier and a snappy jogging outfit.  Her directions were confident, her hand gestures were vigorous, and she shouted over the sounds of wind and traffic “head that way, you’ll see signs!”

Yes I did.  I saw signs for HWY 26, a tile warehouse, Ocean Beaches, any number of likely contractors for the US Defense Department and the garage door opening industry.  I squinted into the sun, and like a dog circling three times before settling down for a nap, I circled around and around before settling down into a serious funk.

I wanted an urban planner.  I wanted an explanation.  I could have been dropped into the middle of Paris and gotten directions from a mime troupe with better results.  Or at least found my way to a cafe au lait, a pain au chocolate, a bon jour!

I pulled the phone from my jacket and called home.  Austin consulted the internet, and I was once again on my way.  But by the time I arrived at the Longbottom Coffee and Tea, it was 9:47 and you were gone.  The Portland Velo ten o’clock ride and a group of triathletes were milling about speaking breezily of recovery zones and electrolytes, so I pointed myself into the wind, and headed toward the hills.

It was too late in the game to trade up my patch kit for a suitcase of courage.  I would like to report a certain pluckiness or determination to make the best of the situation, but over the course of the next three hours, there were down trees and wrong turns.  And, as long as we are being honest here, there may have been a roadside tantrum of sorts, either the cause or the result of a pair of day-glo polar fleece mittens blown down the road like a pair of addled tumbleweeds.  But we don’t talk about that anymore.

At long last, Austin met my arrival with embraces, declarations of love, and a grilled cheese sandwich.  We took a trip to Stumptown Coffee just to be sure that both body and spirits were restored.  (Mocha, lots of whip.)

So this is just to say that I tried, and that I would still love to go for a ride.

Next Sunday?  Maybe someplace closer in perhaps?