garbage miles

In running (and sometimes riding) training parlance, “Junk Miles” are those that are accumulated without fitting into the specifics of a training program. They are ridden too fast, or too slow, ridden at the wrong intensity or duration for what the program dictates on that given day, and therefore they reduce the effectiveness of that training. Or so they say.

A lifetime ago, some friends and I decided to take ownership of the phrase in a different manner. Since we were not really very disciplined or even very interested in specific training, we didn’t have to worry too much about the goals and purpose of sticking to the program. “Garbage Miles” came into our shared language, instead, as a way of differentiating between prime singletrack and the often less-than-inspiring riding that must be endured between those sections of Nirvana. So, on any given day, Garbage Miles would be those ridden on pavement to the trailhead. Or a hellishly washboarded and steep fire road that connects the bottom of one epic descent with the top of the next.

It started out as a kind of joke, this grading of riding. We shifted the parameters defining Garbage Miles from those regarding sub-optimal training to focus more on the aesthetics of a ride instead. It gave us something to talk about on those corrugated dirt climbs beneath a withering sun. “So, what grade of Garbage Mileage is this, on a scale of one to five, with one being ‘pretty tolerable’ and five being ‘absolute suck’”?

“I dunno. The washboards are pretty fucked, but the gravel’s fine, and that view is all-time. It could be hotter. I’d say this is a high two or a low three.”

Back and forth, talk and pedal, eat a little, pass the time. Chew the food, chew the Garbage Miles, accept the Dao that a full life by necessity involves these dualities; pleasure and pain, euphoria and suffering, long grinding climbs and hero dirt singletrack descents. If one can’t embrace all of this, one should at least move through the sucky parts with dignity.

At some point I began to widen my personal description of Garbage Miles, and narrow my definition of the rewarding miles that were the carrot dangling before my psychic donkey. Weather too hot? Garbage Miles. Rain turned the trails into a greasy mess? Garbage Miles. Those little bugs that fly around eyes and ears and nostrils but don’t sting or bite, but can’t be escaped until your speed exceeds eight miles an hour, and you’re on a 13 mile climb? Garbage Miles. Headwinds? Garbage Miles (but at least those face bugs are out of the picture). Trails all blown out and full of square-edge braking holes at the end of a drought summer? Garbage Miles. Trail hammered to shit by the 300-rider horse jamboree the previous week? Garbage Miles. Knee giving you some trouble? Sore back? Feeling that extra 20 pounds of gut from a year of sitting at a desk managing the flow of product to enhance the riding careers of others while growing fat and resentful and ultimately too ashamed about being so woefully out of shape and slow that you can’t stomach (literally) the thought of riding with said others anymore and so you may as well just pack it in and not ride at all but then you try and waddle out on one of your favorite local trails and suck so much that you wonder how you ever found motivation to ride in the first place? Garbage Miles.

You can see where this is going.

I eventually realized that what had started out innocently enough had, over the course of a decade or so, mutated into a full-blown suitcase full of excuses not to ride. Mountain biking had started from a place of ultimate stoke – at first I was excited to ride anywhere, try anything, suffer whatever consequences with barely constrained impatience before going out and trying again. The more I rode, the more I came to understand the landscape of mountain biking, and by extension, cycling in general. The better I got at riding, the more I began to develop a sense of what I preferred. Picking and choosing began to enter the conversation.

Decades passed, and this picking and choosing evolved into what could only be described as trail snobbery mindset. At one end of my personal judgment of the entire world, there’d be peak singletrack, defined by something like the 403/401 loop in Crested Butte; a big ride linking a pair of long, fast and thin ribbons of trail together by a pair of meaty alpine climbs. Suffering and reward in equal measure, wildflowers, and massive landscapes. At the other end of this spectrum, there would be just about everything on the Baja peninsula. Sand, rocks, thorns, more sand, more rocks, more thorns, unrelenting heat, random vicious headwinds, and washboards that age vehicles in something like accelerated dog years.

Trail snobbery and a suitcase full of excuses not to ride did not do my 2012-era self any favors. I was overweight, recently unemployed, and stuffed to my eyeballs with self-loathing. My lack of motivation needed no added assistance, but there it was. The nearest riding to me for the next decade was at Fort Ord, home to the Sea Otter Classic. The Ord trails do not, by any stretch of the imagination, hold a candle to something like the 403/401 loop. But they are a whole lot less stabby/bleedy/sandy/shitty than Baja’s feast of thorns. It was there I began to disassemble my idea of Garbage Miles, slowly extricating myself from the self-built puzzle trap of my own judgy bullshit, one Garbage Mile at a time.

I came to love the Ord trails. You can pedal into them with all your anger and misery and the brown sandstone just sucks it all up. You can scream your fury and hurt into the world and the shrubby manzanita and lichen draped oaks will swallow your cries without even noticing. Linking amiable but featureless dirt roads with entertaining sections of singletrack that were benign enough to let me think through my bullshit without requiring me to be at some sort of peak gave me room to interrogate my prejudices as I rode. And I learned something.

There are no Garbage Miles. Every mile is perfect. Even the slowest, most painful, humiliating grind into a headwind so stiff it makes you feel completely powerless in the face of nature is beautiful, if you are willing to consider the alternative of not being able to ride at all. Being able to ride is a gift. Doesn’t matter what the trail is like or how masterfully you shred it.

I crossed the border into northern Baja five days ago. Drove through a camera-studded gap in a 30-foot tall wall of rusting Cor-Ten steel that would be obscene in its symbolism if it wasn’t so laughable in its execution, and pitched up in a dusty town jampacked with dentists who tend to a steady parade of aging gringos and their messed up teeth. I spent three days in the chair of one of those dentists, having other sins of the past couple decades rectified. Yesterday, after five hours of driving into a profound and beautiful emptiness, under strict orders not to let my pulse elevate too much for another week, I pedaled gently down a washboard dirt road until it devolved into a sandy arroyo singletrack that ultimately petered out into a deep sandy nothingness. Not really even any vegetation to speak of. As I trudged back the way I had come, less than an hour later, I felt the knots in my back from driving and sitting clenched with nerves in a dentist chair begin to loosen. The sun dipped to the horizon and the weather immediately cooled. It was sublime.

There are no Garbage Miles.