Mountain Bike Training Camp

As some of you may know, I am competing in an endurance mountain bike race in South Africa next April, called the Cape Epic. There will be 500 teams of two. After the 1st day, which is a team time trial to determine the starting lineup, you race for 8 days straight. The race is over 500 miles long in total distance, and the shortest of the 8 race days is 46 miles, while the longest is 82 miles. The shortest amount of elevation gain in one day is over 4,200 feet, and the most elevation gain in a day can reach 9,000 feet! The rules are simple: You have 10 hours to complete each stage (day) of the race. You must stay within 2 minutes of your teammate at all times. If you don't complete any stage of the race, you are disqualified. If you miss the 10 hour cutoff limit once, you are deemed a "non-finisher" and are allowed to restart the next day. After a second missed cutoff time, you are disqualified and are not allowed to continue on. Needless to say, my teammate and I are hoping to just complete the race and be official finishers of one of the hardest mountain bike races on the planet.



You can imagine that this race will require quite a bit of preparation. My teammate for the race, Rou (who is from South Africa and owns a Safari Tour Company called Pioneer Africa) is now living in Santa Fe, New Mexico and has been riding and training in the unfair elevation of at least 7,500 feet. Being that we must ride together for the entire race, we decided that it was time to get together and do some training to see where we each stand. I've been training in a hot, humid, tropical climate on a tiny island with a maximum elevation of 1,500 feet. He's been training in the mountains of New Mexico in cool, dry air. Who has the advantage and who has to pick up his training regimen? Well, that's what these next two weeks are all about! I flew into New Mexico on October 1st, and will be flying out on the 17th, giving us over two weeks of quality training time. Our one goal that we discussed on the way to his house from the aiport was straightforward: Ride Every Day! Shouldn't be too hard for two guys who love mountain biking and have a very pressing need to ride. (The less preparation you go into the race with, the more it's going to hurt!)

I wanted to share a bit about some of the rides we've been going on so far, and also try to demonstrate for anyone out there willing to watch some videos, why mountain biking is one of my passions. Why would someone possibly want to pedal literally thousands of feet uphill on a dirt trail or road for thousands of feet? Well, the challenge of it is one aspect. There's nothing that feels as good as getting to the top of a really difficult climb ... except the great reward you've earned: The ride down! And going down isn't always as easy as it seems. On long downhills you often are dealing with fatigue (from the climb) and technical single-track descents with a lot of obstacles that you have to navigate, jump, and avoid. It requires great concentration and the ability to relax and trust your bike's suspension and wheels to do their job, which is very hard to do sometimes when you are going over 20mph and there are trees, rocks, drops, and streams to avoid on a trail that's only a few feet wide! But it's one of the greatest rushes in the world! Hopefully you'll be able to get a taste of that from some of the videos.

The rides in this post are right here just outside of Santa Fe. On Monday we are going to spend a week in the car and are heading up to a few of the great mountain bike Mecca's of the US, namely, Durango, Colorado (home to some of the mountain bike legends), Fruita/Grand Junction, Colorado, and Moab, Utah. Until then, it's all about the trails around Santa Fe, and I must say that they are some of the best I've ridden. For example, the trail we rode today, from the Santa Fe Ski resort to Santa Fe, is definitely what I would call and "epic" ride. A distinction not a lot of rides get!

So I arrived here on Monday, and on Tuesday we took both our bikes into Rou's LBS (Local Bike Shop, for those of you who don't speak mountain bike). The shop is called Mello Vello and is right in Downtown Santa Fe. The owner Dave is a really great guy: very professional and a fantastic mechanic. He gave our bikes (2007 Ibis Mojo's) a checkup and some TLC and we had them back that afternoon for our first ride. If you are ever in Santa Fe and looking for a bike to rent or advice on local trails, check this shop out. There's a group of guys who ride from the shop at 5pm every Tuesday evening for a weekly group ride.

So off we went on the Tuesday group ride, this one was right from the shop and up to a trail called the Dale Ball trail. Rou and I both have these handy gizmos we bought so we could track and compare our training, so if you click here you can see everything about the ride: time, distance, speed, elevation, my (fast) heart rate, even a map of the course we took. It was a short ride ... just over an hour, 12 miles. But we managed to get in over 1,600 feet of climbing on the undulating up and down course. It was a lot of fun riding with the group, and it felt like we were a bunch of kids riding dirt bikes as we practiced jumps (for a video camera of course!) and rode through the streets of the city going down back alley shortcuts with steep staircases. Nothing like a reminder of why you love to ride! I managed to get caught in my pedal going around a tight hairpin at one point in the ride and my bike and I both went tumbling down a short hill, causing a huge "log jam" behind me as I had somehow managed to get to the front of the pack of 11 guys that were riding! Here's a picture of me looking plum tuckered out after a climb at 8,000 feet elevation and only 18 hours after I arrived from my 27 hour journey.


On Tuesday we rode the Rail Trail, which is a very cool 13 mile long trail that runs from Rou's house in El Dorado right into Santa Fe.
It follows an old rail line and has some beautiful desert scenery, some fun little jumps, and couple sections of really fast, tight, swoopy single track. It's not a bad way to get into town! So we dropped our bikes off at the shop for a few final things that we needed to have done and then caught a ride home with Rou's wife Mary.

By Wednesday Rou had decided that I was fully acclimatized to the altitude (it takes normal people more like a month... he must think I'm super-human...) so we drove up to 9,600 feet where my light head and I began our first big ride, 30 miles and over 2 hours, though much of it was downhill. The ride was the Winsor Trail from Big Tesuque to Little Tesuque. Here's a profile of the ride. As you can see, it was pretty much straight downhill for the first 9 miles! This is 9 miles of downhill singletrack, some of the best I've ever ridden. It was fast and smooth in parts, but very challenging and technical in others. We took a breather at the end of the first big descent and I just couldn't stop laughing and grinning it was such a blast to ride down. It's been a long time since I've ridden a trail like that. Here's what the HUGE grin on my face looked like (I took this picture to remind myself of what pure joy looks like!

And here's a short video clip of one of the 14 stream crossings at the lower portion of the trail:http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif


On Thursday we did another big ride, this time with a bit more climbing. We went for nearly 3 hours, 25 miles, and climbed over 3,300 feet. To some of the crazy bikers out there, that might not sound like THAT much climbing... but we rode from the Aspen Vista Trailhead, at 9,700 feet, to the Radio Towers/Santa Fe Ski Resort the top of which is 12,050 feet above sea level!
When I reached to top of the mountain, up past the ski lifts and the radio towers, I checked my GPS and it registered 12,050 feet, higher than I've ever been on a bike. I jumped off my bike and let out a huge WOOOO HOOOOOOOO! Then I promptly had to put my hands on my knees because I felt like I was going to pass out from the thin air! I turned to Rou and said, "LET'S GO! NOW!" I didn't want to stay up there and experiment with how well I had acclimatized to the high elevation! It probably didn't help that my heartrate was up over 160bpm. It was interesting because Rou's heartrate was consistently lower than mine was at the higher elevations, but very similar at the lower elevations, indicating that all his training at high elevation has increased the hemoglobin in his blood to help transport more oxygen to his muscles, whereas my muscles were screaming for oxygen and my heart was pumping its darndest to get it there!

So after climbing over 2,000 feet in just 5.5 miles, we descended FOUR THOUSAND FEET in 8 miles!! The first four miles was a gravel access road, leaving four miles of single track downhill bliss! The night before we had discussed trying to film some video of the Winsor Trail, since it is such an amazing ride. So we managed to build a helmet mount for my Canon Powershot digital camera out of a tripod stand and a helmet mount for a bike light. This is the alien-looking configuration that we came up with:

Now that you've stopped laughing, I'll try to continue. By the way, the funny orange sunglasses increase the contrast to help you see the trail when you are riding in the shadows of the trees. I know the camera mount looks funny, but it WORKS! Here's a picture of Rou I took while riding uphill, without stopping. I just reached up, hit the power button and then snapped the photo:

So not only was this an epic ride in terms of the trail, but you can see that it was absolutely beautiful with a forest of Aspens all turning color now that Fall is upon us.

So here is one of the videos I made of the big descent. I'm learning right now how to splice the 7 separate videos we took during the descent together... and to convert them to a size that's under the 100MB upload limit! Look for it in my next post!

Coiba National Park, Panama

Over the past few years I have received a number of requests, mostly by graduate students or researchers, for copies of my Master's thesis which is titled, "IDENTIFYING AND UNDERSTANDING RESOURCE USERS OF PANAMA’S COIBA NATIONAL PARK". Just today I received a request from a student at the Graduate School of Kuroshio Science, Kochi University, Japan. It's amazing how far reaching one study can be and how the internet connects people so easily! I am posting this link so that in the future anybody interested can download this PDF of my thesis.

DOWNLOAD FILE

I conducted this research during the summer of 2001. Working with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) was a really amazing opportunity I had while in graduate school at Duke University. It was early in the Spring of 2001 and I still hadn't solidified a topic yet for my master's research, though I knew I wanted to do work on Marine Protected Areas. I attended a lecture one afternoon being given by Dr. Todd Capson of STRI. Though his topic was on terrestrial conservation, I attended anyways just to hear his talk. Afterwards, I went up to him and on a whim asked, "So, do you do any marine research that is like the work you presented today?" His eyes lit up and he began to tell me about a "pet project" of his that had to do with a large marine protected area on the Pacific coast of Panama. And that's how it all began! A random question after a random presentation I attended. I've always been a believer that you never know where life is going to take you. And that day it took me to Panama.



So I spent over three months that summer designing and implementing a social science research survey in fishing villages all over the west coast of Panama. Here's a map of where I worked.

If you can read the city names, I interviewed fishermen from Puerto Armuelles in the west to Mariato in the east. My research question boiled down to this: Who are the people who fish or otherwise utilize the area in and around this large marine protected area? So I got to travel up and down the coast all summer long, walking into large towns and tiny villages, walking up to total strangers, asking where I could find and talk to fishermen. I met some really amazing people during my travels.



I remember one fisherman in particular who lived in the tiny island village of Bahia Honda, which you can see in the inset on the map next to Pixvae. The only way to get there was by boat. And there was no public boat or ferry to take you there. You just had to ask around to see when a boat was going. So I happened to catch a ride on the boat of this fishermen. When I arrived in the village, he told me I could stay in his house. What I hadn't realized was that there was no hotel, no restaurants, of any kind in this tiny village! So he made room for me in his very simple cinder block house with no power, no windows. I even had a small bed and room to my own. There was no running water either, and no indoor bathroom. He showed me where the "bathroom" was. We walked outside and there was a small concrete block "room" with four walls and no roof. There was a large wooden door, but it had no hinges. So you just had to lift it up and slide it over when you went in or out. Inside was a large hole in the ground covered by a toilet. He told me this is where I could "shower", and then walked me across the square where there was a water pump. You had to prime the pump (the only one in the village), then fill a bucket with water, and carry the water over to the concrete bathroom. Then, as you stood there with your head poking out above the five-foot tall walls, you scooped the water from the bucket into a little cup that had a small hole in it that let the water flow out in a crude shower-like fashion. And that was that! It was at times like that when I would have flashbacks of growing up in California and complaining angrily that my sister had used up used up all the hot water in the shower! Had I only known how good I had things! I also remember on the first morning I woke up in that village, I was sitting in the house with that fisherman, his wife, and his little baby girl and the baby stood up from a crawl and took her first steps across kitchen floor.



This is a picture of my accomodations in a small village called Pixvae. The bottom left door is for the jail. The top left door with the cross on it is, appropriately, where the village priest lived. The bottom right was an office, and the top right was a small room with a single bed where visitors to the village could stay. You could see through the floorboards right into the room below.



This is a picture of a fisherman who caught a swordfish that was almost bigger than the hand carved canoe he was in. As we approached this village, we happened upon this small canoe that just hooked a fish with a hand-line. The man in the back was digging his paddle into the water to slow the boat down, while the man in the front was holding tight onto the line. The fish was dragging the canoe through the water. It looked like they had landed a big one, so we pulled up along side them to watch them bring it in.




As different as it might look on the outside, life's pretty much the same wherever you go in this world. I'll post up some of my pictures from Panama when I have time. It's stories and moments like those that really make traveling worthwhile. The most memorable and most enjoyable events always seem to be when you are completely out of your element experiencing life in a way that you never knew existed. I know I'll always have a friend and a place to stay if I ever wander back to that tiny little island village in Panama.

Coral Spawning

I finally witnessed something I've always wanted to see, which is the once-yearly coral spawning event. I had seen videos of this before but had never witnessed it in person. I think once while I was on the great barrier reef I saw the "slick" of coral eggs on the water from land, but I've always wanted to see it up close and in person. Here's the video I shot of this amazing event which took place on Friday night, July 6th, 2007:



Getting to witness this event wasn't as easy as one might think. The corals usually spawn 6 days after the full moon in July. We weren't sure of the exact day, since they can always spawn a day early or late. Since the full moon was on June 30th, there was also a chance they were not going to go until after the full moon at the end of July. On my first attempt I went out to LauLau Bay on July 5th and met up with John, Angleo, Bev, Brie, and EJ. We snorkeled out the main dive cut and explored around for over an hour. It was a beautiful night-snorkel, and the water was nice and calm, but no spawning!

On my second attempt, I was lucky to be in the company of a PhD coral biologist, Dr. Peter Houk ("Dr. Coral") who taught me how to spot the spawning corals. We left in his small boat from Smiling Cove marina at 7pm, since the corals usually spawn between sunset and the moonrise. So friends Pete, Fran, Michelle and I headed out to a spot right next to the Dimple dive site. We saw a spectacular sunset on the way out and the water was as smooth as glass, with Pete guiding us with the GPS course he had plotted and downloaded onto his handheld GPS.



There was a fisherman moored to the Dimple dive buoy, so we picked a spot a little closer to the reef crest and found a nice sandy patch to drop our anchor on. As we were getting geared up, Pete started seeing coral eggs on the surface of the water. So Pete and Fran jumped right in and headed for the shallow water along the reef crest while Michelle and I took a little longer getting our dive gear sorted out in the dark. Unfortunately I experienced some user-induced issues with my camera which rendered it unusable, but Michelle was kind enough to let me borrow hers, since she had two underwater cameras ready to go. (Thank you!) While we were in the water sorting out the cameras, I noticed a "fire worm" or "bristle worm" swimming through the dark water column heading straight for Michelle's light, and it didn't look like it had any plans to stop! (Eurythoe complanata?) I warned her and she tried to get out of the way, but she didn't do a very good job. Luckily it didn't sting her as it brushed against her kicking legs as she swam frantically to avoid it. (They don't call them fire worms for nothing!) Here's a picture I took of one on a reef in the Virgin Islands. You can see the venomous bristles exposed. I've never seen on on the reef here, so I was excited to see my first one in Saipan.



As I made it over to the spot where Pete and Fran were, I could see a lot of eggs in the water column and on the surface, but I couldn't see the actual corals that were releasing the eggs. Finally, Pete flashed his light at me and pointed out a colony of Acropora coral that was loaded with eggs.



It hadn't begun to spawn yet, but it was about to. The trick is to find a coral that is full of the pink eggs and you just have to sit there and wait it out. In my case I sat with my face in this coral for over 30 minutes before it started releasing its tiny eggs. It was sure worth the wait, though! Having my dive gear on made it very easy to sit and watch, (while taking pictures, of course!) even though we were only in about 5 feet of water. When the coral started to release its eggs, Pete came over and used my octopus (my 2nd regulator) to breathe off of as we watched the show. It started slowly at first, just releasing one or two eggs, but then after a few minutes it really started to pump the eggs out. We managed to catch a few other colonies that were in the act of spawning as we made our way back to the boat.

As we relaxed in the boat and enjoyed some great food that Fran had brought along, we saw another neat show, this time it was all the plankton and other small sea critters that our lights were attracting. I started just looking overboard shining my light on the thousands of little pink and red eggs on the surface of the water, but then I started noticing a whole world of little things that were attracted by my light. We saw tiny worms, shrimp-like stomatapods feeding on the coral eggs, and even a tiny cubozoa (box) jellyfish! Coral eggs are actually a egg and sperm combination packet, and after floating on the surface for a while and mixing with all the other sperm/egg packets that were released, they break apart so the eggs can be fertilized by sperm from another colony. As we decided to pull up anchor and head back home, we could start to make out a thin layer of an oil-like substance on the surface of the water which was actually the sperm from the packets that had broken apart.

The ride home was beautiful, as the water was still like glass. We all had our lights shining ahead into the water watching fish jump, bioluminescing critters shine, and the reflection of the stars on the water.

Now, if I could just witness those turtles hatching... !

My Nephew's First Sea Turtle! (And a story about mine)

I had a great trip to Hawaii to celebrate my parent's 40th wedding anniversary, and one of the highlights was taking my 4 year-old nephew Alex out snorkeling where he got to see his first sea turtle! I'm not sure who was more excited, me or him. I did manage to dive down and get this great picture of him looking down at the turtle. It took a couple of days to talk him into braving the scary ocean waters, but once he did it I think he was pretty excited, though he decided to stick to the safety of his boogie board/viewing platform.

I was amazed at how "tame" the Hawaiian Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas) were in comparison to the turtles here in Saipan. The green's I've seen here in Saipan tend to bolt in the presence of people, whereas these turtles didn't seem to mind at all that I was swimming around them. Of course, knowing that these are an endangered species and that they are protected by the federal Endangered Species Act, we made sure to keep our distance and to not disturb or harass them in any way. But even so, at one point as I was snorkeling with my brother John I was startled when I looked down because a large female was about 2 feet from my leg and had just drifted right up alongside me without my knowing it. I would have to guess that the turtles in Saipan might be a bit more weary of people since they do still get occasionally poached here. The difference in their behavior is pretty obvious, whatever the cause.

Another big difference between the turtles here in Saipan and the ones I saw in Maui is that many of the Maui turtles I saw were infected with the fibropapilloma virus, which is a wart-like virus that is unfortunately increasing in prevalence in Hawaiian sea turtles. The first Hawaii case was reported in 1958, and incidences of the virus have increased in number and geographical range ever since. The virus causes large tumors to grow on the turtles, usually beginning on their eyes and spreading to the neck and flippers. The tumors can block the turtle's vision, can impede eating when on the mouth, and can eventually lead to emaciation and death. The Kahului Bay area, where we were snorkeling, is known to have a high incidence of this disease.

When I was studying at the University of Hawaii in Hilo, I had the opportunity to spend a couple days working alongside Dr. George H. Balazs, who is the famous "Turtle Doctor" of Hawaii. It was an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get to hand-catch turtles in the wild and bring them in for their "yearly physical" on the beach with the Turtle Doctor! That was the first time I had ever been that close to a turtle. Mind you, the researchers had to go through a lengthy federal permitting process in order for us to be able to handle or even touch the turtles, and we were all trained in the proper procedures so no turtles were harmed. Normally any contact with a turtle would be illegal. The turtles got weighed, measured, scanned for tags, tagged if they had none, and checked for disease. We did not see any evidence of fibropapilloma on the turtles we caught and tagged, which was a good sign.

My other working experience with turtles was while I was at Duke at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, NC. There I worked on a project with Dr. Larry Crowder, and it was my responsibility (along with a few classmates) to take care of 500 baby Loggerhead Sea Turtles (Caretta caretta) that we were raising for a sex ratio study. Sea turtles are curious critters because their being male or female is not a genetic thing, like it is in humans with our X and Y chromosomes, but rather it has to do with the presence or absence of testosterone and estrogen while they are developing in the egg. Sea turtles lay their eggs in the sand on beaches, and the temperature of the nest determines whether or not they will be male or female. At higher temperatures, the enzyme that converts estrogen to testosterone breaks down and the turtle will be a female. At colder temperatures, that enzyme sticks around and converts the estrogen to testosterone and the turtle will hatch a male. At least that's how I remember it! But the catch is that with turtles you can't tell if they are male or female until they are large. Males have much longer tails than females do. So when a nest hatches, you have no way of knowing how many are males and how many are females. But of course my ingenious professor at Duke figured out a way! Along with another professor from Florida Atlantic University, Dr. Jeanette Wyneken, they designed an "experiment" where they took 1,000 hatchlings, right as they hatched, and raised them in labs at Duke and FAU for a few months. When they are a few months old, their sex organs finally start to differentiate into male and female. But those are internal, of course, just to make things harder! So we (and by we, I mean the Doctors) had to perform a laproscopy (basically like an arthroscopic surgery) on these little turtles in order to get a peek at their internal private parts. We had a sterile operating room set up with 2 or 3 marine veterinarians, along with the researchers and a crew of helpers. After the turtles were stitched up, we let them recover for a few weeks before releasing them into the Gulf Stream where they would have been had we never scooped them up off the beach. Because of this experiment, they were able to get some invaluable data on the sex distribution of sea turtles all along the U.S. east coast. This was the first time anything like this had been done. They could also use the data to predict the sex ratio of males to females in the adult turtle population.

Now with all the talk of Global Warming, you might start to wonder if rising sea and land temperatures could change the sex of sea turtles. That was one of the driving forces behind the study. As things warm, we might be seeing more and more female turtles being born without the males. Some researchers are even suggesting that a warming of 7 degrees F could eliminate male sea turtles altogether. So turtles could be another potential victim of Global Warming. Isn't it about time we get serious about addressing it? So many of our precious natural resources are at risk, not to mention the potential human toll. Living on a small island where the impacts could be so severe really changes your perspective on things. My friend and colleague Albon who lives in the Marshall Islands has it even worse ... their highest point is only a few meters above sea level! So anyways, that's what I was doing for a few months in a lab in NC after I finished graduate school. Pet-sitting 500 baby sea turtles.

The Moretti Family in Hawaii, 2007

Here's a picture of the entire Moretti family taken during a delicious meal at Sarento's On The Beach, Maui. From the left... Carolina (my sister-in-law, holding my nephew Alex), Mark (my brother, holding my niece Sofia), Les (my Dad), Sally (my Mom), Me, John (my brother), Mia (John's girlfriend), Julie (my sister) and Ryan (my brother-in-law).

Happy 40th Anniversary Mom & Dad!

I can't imagine being married for 40 years, but they did it! Congratulations Mom and Dad! I'm looking forward to celebrating with you in Hawaii next week!

Bali

A photograph from my recent trip to Bali, more of which you can see at:
www.moretti.smugmug.com