Notes from Quarantine 

Week 2

I’m sitting in the kitchen listening to an episode of “Prairie Home Companion” from the 90s (surreally enough, the episode features an operetta titled La Influenza) and watching Nancy make kardemummabullar (Swedish cardamom rolls).  Yep.  Things are pretty desperate at our house.  Fortunately, today is the last day of our CDC sanctioned quarantine.  Unfortunately, under Governor Brown’s executive order 20-12, confining all good Oregonians to their homes, our situation really won’t change that much tomorrow.

Nancy making kardemummabullar

It has been a pretty good week here in Tumalo, my home town. (Ok. So I’m not Garrison Keillor, and my home town is really probably Anchorage, Alaska, but we do live somewhere in unincorporated Deschutes County near the village of Tumalo.)

We discovered that Newport Market would shop for us and bring the groceries out to our car, so we were able to get food without violating our quarantine, and we didn’t have to eat frozen burritos all week.  And we figured out how to use Zoom (well, Nancy figured it out), so we could attend virtual dinner parties.

Yellowknife Wireless, our internet provider, generously gave us an additional free 200GB of data streaming, so we’ve been able to have parties as well as keep up with the progression of the virus and the multiple viral internet memes and song parodies.  (My favorite so far: My Corona by Chris Mann, google it).

The dogs have been happy to have us in quarantine.  They have been gracious enough to invite us along on their daily walks in the woods.  Our neighbors to the east have 80 acres of undeveloped juniper stands that they kindly let us walk on, and across the road is thousands of acres of BLM ponderosa pine forest to wander in, all while staying much more than 6 feet away from our fellow vectors. 

(Thankfulness note: I give thanks for living in a place that I can take a walk while still maintaining social distance.)

Holly and Cody, our brown mongrel rescue dogs, feel it is their mission to help the woodland critters stick to an exercise program.  Bunnies are chased back to their holes and squirrels are run up their trees.  On a good day, no one gets hurt.

Holly encourages the running (and high jump) career of a local squirrel 

Cody enjoys a well deserved rest after the hunt

Aside from internet surfing and walking the woods, I’ve been trying to get a jump on my spring chores.  We have a little more than 3 acres of pasture that alpacas graze on in the summer.  The irrigation water gets turned on in 2 weeks, so this week I’ve been getting ready.  I picked up the pine cones (pine cones in alpaca fleece, messy), trimmed the lower branches on the pine trees and cleaned up the weeds along the fence line.  Once the water gets turned on, I’ll be busy fixing irrigation heads and getting fertilizer laid down, so the alpacas can come in May.

Alpacas in the summer pasture

Oh. And then there’s the training thing.  It was announced this week that the Namib Race would be postponed until November. Disheartening, I'm sure, for my fellow desert racers in training, but definitely the right call given the current status of the pandemic.  I’m signed up as medical director for the Gobi March in Mongolia at the end of June, and I am cautiously optimistic that it will be safe then to travel and hold this race.  And I am hopeful that the Atacama Crossing will take place in September.  How hopeful, you may ask.  Hopeful enough to train for it.

As I write this, it’s snowing in the hills outside, a good thing, but unfortunately the ski areas have been closed by executive order 20-12 and the cross country trails are no longer being groomed, so Nordic skiing is no longer a training option for me.

So it’s down to biking and running 

I’ve taken the bike outside twice this week.  And gotten snowed or sleeted on both times.  Given the blowing rain and sleet at the moment, I’ll probably ride in my garage today.  (I used to be hard). As mentioned in earlier posts, I’m hoping to get some if not most of my fitness doing lower impact exercise.  When I do feel like a little bit more impact, there are miles of trail and logging roads literally out my door.  I’ve been playing around with running with a 6kg pack.  Have to say:  Not really pleasant.  But I guess I’ll have to get used to it.  I haven’t been able to meet with my coach, Jaime Dispenza, of Laughing Dog Coaching, but he has been putting an entertaining and challenging program onto my TrainingPeaks app.

But before training.  Fika.  Swedish noun and verb for coffee break with snacks!

(Thankfulness note: As always I give thanks for my lovely wife who makes me treats and Fikas with me!)

And then on Monday it’s back to work.  Oh, yeah.  The work thing.

Notes from Quarantine

Week 1

Wow. What a crazy ride this last few weeks has been. I must admit that, at the beginning of March, the magnitude of the coronavirus infection had not fully sunken in. Which, as a medical professional, is embarrassing to admit. Apparently, however, I was not the only one. We’ve known that sooner or later, another pandemic respiratory virus was coming. And, now that it is here, it looks like we are not ready for it.

My little part in this story (as it unfolds):

As I may have mentioned, I was scheduled to race in the Masters World Cup Cross Country Ski races in Cogne, Italy this month. The races were canceled at the last moment, and we were left with the decision to cancel the trip entirely or go ski in the Italian Alps. We had been closely monitoring the epidemic in Northern Italy: there were no cases in the Aosta Valley, and the CDC travel advisory for Italy was still at level 2 (travel, take precautions). Nancy and I had a long talk about the risks and the benefits, we scrapped the Milan leg of the trip, but we opted to go ski. In Italy.

Naturally, probably about the time we were checking our bags, the CDC raised the travel advisory to level 3 (avoid nonessential travel). But by this time, essential or not, we were committed. We flew into Frankfurt. Google said we were 7 hours from Cogne in our rental car, but after 5 hours on the rainy, crash strewn autobahn we were still 4 hours away, so we spent the night in Basel. The next day, after making our way through the Great Saint Bernard tunnel into the Aosta valley, we passed a large banner celebrating the upcoming Masters World Cup as we came to the lovely village of Cogne.
 
Poster for the Masters World Cup in Cogne

We had an amazing few days in Cogne. The weather was favorable, the skiing was great, and the food was tasty. We stayed at the Bellevue Hotel and Spa in a room with views from Monteparadiso all the way up and down the valley. And the people of Cogne, despite facing economic hardships from the cancellation of the World Cup and uncertain spread of the virus, were absolutely beautiful, going out of their way to take care of us.

From Cogne, we could ski to the villages of Epinel, Valnontey and Lillaz. We skied up the Val Ferret, with Mount Blanc peeking over our shoulder, and had coffee and torte at the Hotel Lavachey.

Nancy skiing near Valnontey with Monte Paradiso in the background

Nancy and I skiing Val Ferret with Mont Blanc behind us

But every day a bit more of Italy closed down, on Monday they shut down the hotels in the Aosta Valley and on Tuesday they closed the borders entirely.

We managed to get through the Mont Blanc tunnel to France without incident and spent 3 days in Chamonix. Our last morning in Chamonix, we read about the ban of travel from Europe to the States starting at midnight on Friday the 13^th. We were scheduled to fly out of Frankfurt on the 14^th. I called our airline representative to see if we could get on an earlier flight. She kindly laughed at me. While we had been sleeping, all of those seats had filled. But she did say that our flight had not been cancelled. Yet. So we went skiing. And then we drove to Frankfurt.

I must admit I wasn’t holding out much hope when we woke up in Frankfurt on the 14^th. The flight departure board at our airport hotel showed pretty much only cancelled flights, from every major carrier.
 
Fortunately, I had purchased our tickets on the discount airline Condor, which appeared to be the only airline flying to the US this day. And so we made it home. We passed through the cordon of folks in hazmat suits without requiring any special probing and were able to catch a flight to Bend.

Where we are now in a self imposed 2-week quarantine per CDC recommendations for all travelers returning from Europe. Fortunately for us, we have enough toilet paper and frozen burritos to make it through, and we live in a pretty nice place to be quarantined in. 

Thankfulness note: I give thanks that we have a place to live and food to eat.

Every morning we walk in the woods with our dogs. And I’ve been able to run the back roads and bike my garage (it’s been a little chilly to ride outside, although the weather is turning for the better) while still maintaining appropriate social distancing. I have been trying to adjust my training and diet to keep my immunity at its optimal levels.
Podium Runner article on training and your immune system

I am feeling guilty about not being able to go back to work. My colleagues have been on the front lines as the pandemic comes to Central Oregon and some of them are working extra shifts in the emergency department this week because of a decision I thought I was making solely on my own behalf. And already it appears that our hospitals, along with most others, are running short of the equipment necessary to protect them and keep them healthy. My heart goes out to them. But I will be back there next week. Probably on the day that the masks run out.