Room 18
The floor slopes so much in the hotel that they level the left and right side of the bed with different numbers of 2 x 4 blocks.
The longest climb
Anyone who has been to the Delaware will attest that the hardest clim in Leadville is from the second to the third floor of the Delaware Hotel.
My Grand Strategy for the 2009 Leadville Trail 100
A Note from Fatty: Thursday night at midnight (MDT), the contest for the Orbea Orca / Diva With Shimano Di2 Components ends. If you haven’t checked this bike out, go here for details, and then go here to donate. Good luck!
Thursday morning, I head out to Leadville. But I’m not driving alone. Nosirree. As you’d probably expect, Kenny is driving with me.
But not just Kenny.
Three other members of the core team — Dug, Gary, and Ricky M — are coming along, too. And so is my sister Kellene and my bro-in-law Rocky.
And they’re not even racing. They’re coming for the road trip of it. They’re coming to crew for me.
They’re coming, in reality, because it’s my 21st wedding anniversary, and it’ll be good to have some friends and family around.
Where I Am, Fitness-Wise
This was me, March 28 of this year:
I’m sorry, I probably should have warned you before showing you that picture.
Anyway, this was me, last week:
Oh, and just in case you didn’t notice the quads:
Notice any important differences? That’s right! For the first time ever, there’s a photograph of me wearing different glasses than Oakley Racing Jackets! I am now the proud owner of a pair of Oakley JawBones, in LiveStrong yellow.
These are the most comfortable cycling glasses I have ever owned. And as a 10+-year user of a different frame, that’s not a trivial statement (Full Disclosure and Gloat: Oakley provided these frames and prescription lenses to me at no charge).
But aside from the glasses, there’s also the difference that I’ve lost about 23 pounds since the end of March, and have very good power right now.
I’ve been riding hungry, and I’ve been riding angry.
But I have not been riding very far, and I think that is going to impact me on race day.
My Plan of Attack
Since I had until recently put the race out of my head as a possibility, I find myself with an odd situation: I am coming to the race without any requirement or goal, except to have fun.
So I’ve decided to try an experiment: I call it “go ’til you blow.”
I don’t think this experiment needs much explanation. I’m just going to ride really hard, until I can’t. No computer this time. No stopwatch. I’m just going to ride, really hard, and see what happens.
Here, by the way, is my prediction of what will happen: I will have a good, fast time all the way to mile 60. Then, on the flats between mile 60 and 75, I will find myself being passed with increasing frequency. By the time I get to the two big mountain passes in the final quarter of the race, I will be so bonked that I will not even know who I am.
And this is what I will be riding (click here for larger version of image):
The Gary Fisher SuperFly Single Speed. I have dubbed mine “The SingleFly.” It weighs 18.5 pounds and it is my favorite bike I have ever owned.
Fully rigid and currently geared at 32 x 20. A conservative choice. I’ll be spun out on the flats, but will have a better chance of remaining on my bike in the climbs.
It should be an epic day.
Let’s Get Together, Yeah Yeah Yeah
If you’re going to be at Leadville, why don’t we get together and go for a casual, easy mountain bike ride the day before the race?
I’ll be at the parking area right by the dam at Turquoise Lake at 1:00pm this Friday. Arrive on time and I will take your picture with Kenny, who has agreed to go topless for the occasion.
Oh, and also we’ll take a picture of you with me, and you can tell your friends that you met Stanley Tucci while in Leadville, and isn’t that weird?
Short Posts, With Pictures
Starting Thursday afternoon, I’m going to start doing posts from my phone, which means they’ll be short posts, they’ll be frequent posts, and there will be lots of pictures.
So check back often.
The Funeral, and What’s Next
Yesterday was Susan’s funeral.
Leading up to it — the night before, and the morning of — I had the same symptoms I have before a big race. Nausea, inability to focus, aimless wandering, constant checking and rechecking to make sure I have everything I need.
But during the funeral, I was OK. By “OK” of course I mean that I cried pretty much through the whole thing, including during when I spoke (I had myself go first, so I wouldn’t be nervous and unable to pay attention to others through the whole thing). But since that was expected, I was OK with it.
Kenny made and printed a 5×8 photo collage to go with each program:
The service itself was really good. It seemed every speaker knew and loved the same things about Susan: her creativity, her self-effacement, her love of family, and her courage and strength.
The funeral was hard on my kids, but they were brave and they made me proud.
And since I asked the core team to be the pallbearers, I got a once-in-a-lifetime photo: the core team, all wearing ties:
What Now?
Since Wednesday, I’ve been focusing on the funeral during most of my waking hours. Having tasks and a deadline has been helpful.
So now that it’s over, I’m giving myself some new tasks, some of which are definitely more task-like than others.
- Race the Leadville 100. I no longer have any reason to not race the Leadville 100. Furthermore, I feel like I have incentive to attack it like never before. Tomorrow I’ll detail my race plan, but for now: I’m going to ride it, and I’m going to race it hard.
- Ride the Philly LiveStrong Challenge. The weekend after Leadville, I’m going to Philadelphia to participate in the LiveStrong Challenge. I’m very, very excited to finally meet some more members of Team Fatty, although I must say that I’m a little bit afraid of my co-captain, Philly Jen. Since she has more energy than an unmodified human could possibly have, I suspect that she is either doping, or is a warrior robot from outer space. Either way, I’m concerned.
- Get the kids’ school year started. They’re really excited about this, I can tell you.
- Figure out and pay all the medical bills. I’m really excited about this, I can tell you.
- Work on a book proposal. I think it’s time I write a book.
- Write something funny for this blog. Some of you may recall that once upon a time I had a sense of humor. I’d like to find out if I still do.
Thanks
This week — no, I guess it hasn’t even been a week, actually — has been the longest of my life. I appreciate the thousands of comments and email messages you all have left. Your support has made an awful time much easier to cope with.
PS: I got this email from Riley, a friend of mine who’s also racing the Leadville 100 this weekend:
I’m in Leadville, and decided to take a pre-ride up Columbine. Of course I was wearing my “Win” jersey. It happened to attract the attention of the guy in attached picture. He asked me how you were holding up; and I told him that you were fighting even more. He sent his regards and condolences.
Thanks for sending that in, Riley. That’s very cool of both you and Lance.
Susan Nelson
Yesterday was long. It started with a meeting at the funeral home, taking care of the business end of Susan’s funeral. Then I worked for a while on the program for the funeral itself. Then I took my boys to buy us suits.
And then, when I got home, there was a big chunk of the core team, hanging out at my house and ready to go for a ride. I have great friends.
Then I wrote Susan’s obituary for the local newspaper. As I did that, I realized a few things. First, that I had more to say about Susan than what I could fit in an obituary (especially since the newspaper charges me $3.50 per line). Second, that more people who care about Susan read my blog than are likely to get the Deseret News (a Utah-wide newspaper). And finally, I wanted to make sure that any of my readers who are able to make it to the funeral have the information they need to get there.
And if you’re not able to make it to the funeral, well, what I’m writing here will be pretty much the same thing, but with a lot fewer stutters and stammers.
Susan Ellen Nelson
Susan Ellen Nelson (born Reeve) passed away August 5, 2009, after a long and hard-fought battle with breast cancer. She finished her life at home, at peace, and with her family: her husband Elden, sons Nigel (15) and Brice (13) and twin daughters Katie and Carrie (7).
Susan was born September 15, 1966 in Columbus, Ohio, to Richard and V. Karen Reeve, the first of three children. Susan’s sisters are Celia Reeve and Christine Krueger.
We Meet and (Very Soon After) Marry
The best place for me to really start telling Susan’s story, though, is when we met. Specifically, we met April 27, 1988. My college roommate was engaged to one of Susan’s roommates, and I was along for the ride when he stopped by her apartment.
When I saw Susan, I was immediately stricken. In addition to her general hotness, she had eyes that conveyed her smile so perfectly.
Plus, I really liked her dark red hair.
I was not the kind of person to ask girls out on dates without spending time getting courage up, but in this case I made an exception.
When I went to pick Susan up the next day, I did a double take — her hair color was now blaze-orange. Which I also liked, but was confused.
As it turns out, Susan was in cosmetology school at the time — she wanted to learn hair as a skill to put in her quiver for her love of stage makeup — and her hair would change style and color roughly twice a week through our courtship.
Our courtship, by the way, didn’t take long. We married on August 13, 1988 in the LDS Los Angeles Temple — about 3.5 months after we met.
After twenty one years (this Thursday) of a truly happy marriage, I can’t help but be amazed that I made such a good choice so quickly.
School
Before long, Susan went back to college, finishing her BA in Classical Civilizations at BYU. Here, I learned about Susan’s incredible gift of memorizing. For her upper-level Latin classes (yes, at one point Susan could speak Latin), Susan would memorize page after page of Latin and their English translations.
I would tease her about the practicality of learning Latin, but Susan wasn’t really in school for the language. She loved history and mythology, whether it be ancient Greek or modern JRR Tolkien (or, eventually, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) — if Susan became interested in something, she immersed herself in it and quickly became an expert.
Family First
While Susan loved history and mythology and stagecraft and art — and took to any and all of these quickly and naturally — once we started having children, she threw herself into being a mom with patience and energy. And I see many things I love about Susan in each of our four children:
- Nigel has Susan’s patience and creativity. Like Susan, Nigel really never gets angry. They’re both calm in every circumstance. And like Susan, Nigel loves to draw, although he has taken this ability in new directions — on the computer — which Susan always loved to see. Like Susan, Nigel is happiest when he is creating something.
- Brice has Susan’s love of reading and learning. As Susan lost the ability to get around, she and Brice spent more time together than anyone else in the family, reading out loud to each other for hours. Like Susan, Brice has the ability to bring text to life. When he reads aloud, everyone in the family gathers around. Like Susan, Brice is a perfectionist, and always turns in (much) better work than is required.
- Katie and Carrie: I don’t know if identical twins usually have identical talents, but both Katie and Carrie — in addition to looking very much like Susan’s pictures from when she was a little girl — are artistic whirlwinds. Like Susan, they love to draw and paint and sculpt and paper-piece and anything else that lets them create with their hands. The day Susan introduced them to the fundamentals of jewelry making was a watershed moment for them of Keppleresque proportions. But Katie and Carrie have different art emphases — Katie loves to draw, Carrie likes to make things — and watching and helping the girls develop their different talents was one of Susan’s greatest pleasures.
Susan has left me with four smart, kind, and creative children. This is almost certainly her greatest legacy.
Arts and Crafts and a Novel
Susan was a talented artist, entering her Freshman year of college as a scholarship art student. Her interests in art varied and grew, from pen and ink to paper piecing to sophisticated scrapbooking projects. Susan published several scrapbooking articles in magazines, and even had a monthly column in one.
In the past five years or so, Susan’s interest in art moved to jewelry making. In particular, Susan loved twisting, shaping, and melting silver wire into beautiful and complex bracelets and necklaces. Even as cancer took her ability to walk away, Susan remained positive — from her easy chair, she could still wield her acetylene torch.
As she was forced to spend more time seated, Susan had the idea to write a young adult-oriented novel. While many would think this was just too daunting a task, Susan simply got to work, outlining, writing, and editing her first novel. Chemo and radiation and the cancer itself would often make it difficult for her to write, but she continued, encouraged by the fact that teenage girls from around the neighborhood demanded that she keep writing so they could see what happens next.
Susan’s novel is within a few pages of completion. Susan told me what happens in the end, and I may do my best to finish it for her and see if I can honor her by bringing it to publication.
Cancer
For a more detailed telling of Susan’s battle with cancer, you may want to read a recent post, Fighting Like Susan. The brief version is that Susan fought cancer for more than five years. She endured a mastectomy — and moving shortly afterward with twin toddlers in tow. She endured chemo. She endured a hip replacement. She endured radiation multiple times, and more chemo.
And when there was nothing left we could do, Susan endured — for months and years longer than anyone expected — assault after assault by cancer on her body: bones, lungs, and brain.
And throughout, she remained herself: creative, focused, and kind.
And also — very importantly — she was brave.
In an act of constant courage, Susan agreed to let me tell her story, as it happened. Because of this, thousands of people, all around the world, were inspired to take up her fight against cancer.
And I mean “thousands” very literally. More than 500 people — people she never met in real life — joined her namesake LiveStrong Challenge team, raising money to fight cancer. And those 500 people — along with many, many others, have raised well above half a million dollars in the past half year.
When I ask myself, “What could be the purpose — the point — of Susan having cancer?” I think that Susan proved something essential: sometimes we have to make our own purpose from the circumstances we’ve been given.
And if you consider that people have emailed me saying that, inspired by Susan’s story, they have decided to join the fight against cancer, or they have quit smoking, or they have decided to be brave and get a mammogram — well, that’s a powerful purpose.
The money we have raised in her name will help in the fight against cancer, but Susan’s legacy goes way beyond that. It is, in fact, immeasurable.
Funeral and Donations
Funeral services will be held Monday, August 10, 2009 at 10:00 a.m., with a gathering at 9:00 a.m. at the LDS Chapel located at 890 N. Main St, Alpine, UT 84004 (Official address is different, but this address will get you to the right spot).
In lieu of flowers, please donate via Paypal or send donations to Elden Nelson, 407 Quincy Ct., Alpine, UT 84004. Donations will be used for the Nelson children’s education funds.
PS: One of the most touching tributes I’ve seen on the web is the Twin Six home page. And so maybe you can imagine how I felt this morning, when, on a ride to the top of the Alpine Loop, I saw this at the summit:
As well as this, at the “half-mile to the top, start going fast if you can” marker:
And there was another, at the finish line for the toll-booth sprint (Dug beat me by a bike length by the way).
Whoever did this, thank you.
PPS: To the more than 2000 of you who have left comments and sent email since I left the short post about Susan dying, thank you. I haven’t read all your comments yet; I tend to dip in and read until I’m too choked up to continue. I will get through them, and I appreciate everyone reaching out the way you have.
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