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Arizona Trail Magic—Epilogue A well-known writing professor friend of mine once told me that an author never owes his/her audience an apology, but I feel compelled to offer at least an explanation of the months’ long delay in completing my AZT race report. The simplest way to put this is that I have been paralyzed by conflict. Not person to person conflict, mind you, but the conflict within my own mind, body, and spirit. When I finally closed the book on Day Five of my AZT adventure, I was 100% certain that I had made the correct decision, but the tincture of time has a way of changing the goal posts and the farther I got from the end of my race, the more I didn’t want to revisit what I feared was a decision made in haste and in error. With the distance of a number of months now between me and the AZT, I am now ready to pick up the keyboard and finish my story. As I lay in my bivy at the Picketpost trailhead, gazing up at the impossibly dark sky punctuated
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Arizona Trail Race, Day five The only way I am going to stop rolling is to slam my head into the ground. I am suspended above the ground--momentarily--completing my second somersault, having been pitched over my handlebars while descending a steep, rocky road in the middle of the Arizona desert. My right thumb is hurting badly enough that I know I have done some damage to it in my initial contact with the ground and I tell myself to keep my arms tucked at my side to prevent either a further injury, or doing the same to my left hand. The Gila River is out there somewhere Seeing the rocky terrain come back into view, with the additional hazard of desert flora quickly approaching, I resolutely thrust my helmeted head onto the ground. Crack.  There is audible evidence of contact as my helmet does its job by deforming with the rock it has struck, taking the worst of the impact away from my skull. Amazingly, this contact does exactly what I had hoped that it would--it stops m
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Arizona Trail Magic, Day Four Saddle sores, it turns out, are almost as painful while pushing a bike as they are riding on one. It seemed odd, but as I pushed, lifted, lowered and generally coaxed my laden bike on the narrow trail of Oracle Ridge, the pain in my left butt cheek was growing unbearable. Pushing, and occasionally riding, on this rather questionable surface through the dark, I was experiencing more than my fair share of bumps and bruises, nicks and jabs from rocks and sticks and flora that seemed to have it out for me. It sounds silly, but at this early, pre-dawn hour, I was fully convinced that nature was out to get me and that these inanimate objects possessed a desire to inflict pain and suffering on me at every opportunity. One of the more rideable parts of the Oracle Ridge trail Growing frustrated at the seemingly random, yet capricious discomfort I was being subjected to, I decided to do something about the pain that I could  prevent--sort of. Stopping in
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Arizona Trail Magic, Day Three Rolling down Broadway in the pre-dawn darkness, I was leaving Tucson on a mission to rendezvous with the famous Mt. Lemon and its two infamous roads: Reddington, and the Catalina Highway. For a city of its size, Tucson rather quickly degrades into sandy washes just outside of its eastern limits. The Arizona Trail descends into one of these washes, deep with sand, making forward progress extremely difficult, and in the dark, precarious. Fortunately, I was not alone, as some distance behind me and gaining quickly was a pack of coyotes on their noisy early morning prowl. Their yip and howls were the perfect pairing with the moon that was rising over the city to my west. The Reddington Road is famed for its ATV and 4WD traffic and I had read about numerous close encounters between both of these and AZTR racers in past years. This wasn't my primary reason for leaving so early in the morning, but it was certainly nice to be climbing completely alone o
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