March 31, 2009 toe update

I have buried this post in the archives to protect the squeamish.

March 2: At the Mat-Su Valley hospital, about 18 hours after I first discovered I had frozen the tips of all five of the toes on my right foot. (Despite appearances, the left foot is normal.)

March 12: This is an "after" picture. My doctor has the "before" picture, taken before she removed black-purple blisters on three of my toes; and the tips, which aren't really shown here, were still gray.

March 26: This is the first day I could truly put all my weight on my toes and walk normally without pain. The general feeling now, four weeks after the injury, is still one of tingling numbness and intermittent streaks of a burning pain. I still have to bandage it daily and still don't wear a shoe on that foot, to keep the circulation moving. As far as the level of numbness now, however, I have definitely had more severe numbness in my hands after long bike rides in the past. To the touch, I can feel most everything, even on the still-calloused tips. And, much to my doctor's annoyance, I haven't yet lost a single toenail yet.

Feeling stronger, but more uncertain

Today is Day 10 off the bike, and I have to admit, it’s killing me ... slowly. Every day, I develop a little more range of motion in my knee. And every day, I take that range a little too far. In the morning, I’m on top of the world and bounding up hills. And in the evening, I’m sore, stiff and frustrated, and rifling through the yellow pages to find sports medicine doctors. But I never call them when the morning comes. This evening, however, I’m announcing my intentions on my blog. Hopefully, it will hold me accountable for at least giving a doctor a call.

Today, I stretched my knee and coaxed it just beyond a 90-degree angle. I started out 10 days ago with a rigid 180-degree leg. After a day, I could bend it to 170 degrees, 160 degrees, and so on. It’s a strange way to heal, and it always makes me feel a day away from invincible when I get up in the morning. Now that I’m about a day away from being physically able to turn pedals again, I figure I should at least seek out some professional advice that I can ignore.

Since my walking ability has been upgraded to almost “normal,” I decided today was the day to do an “up” walk. I laced up my Montrail Susitna running shoes - which I was elated to find on super clearance more than a month ago and still haven’t used - and started pounding up the Dan Moller trail. The trail basically starts just outside my front door by following a snowy path up two unplowed streets, then diverges on a steep singletrack that connects with the snowmobile trail. Since I’ve only ever ridden the Don Moller on my bike, I’ve only ever seen the snowmobile trail. And I realized that today, more than six months after moving in next door, I was hiking up a trail I had never used before, wearing winter running shoes that I had never even before bothered to wrestle out of the closet. And I thought ... wow ... I really do ride my bike too much.

It felt good to get out for a real hike. But it doesn’t help my physical health to be so excited about the Iditarod Invitational. Today’s developments were equally inspiring. The peloton of three cyclists pulled out of Nikolai just before 8 a.m., and rolled together across the finish line at 3:20 p.m. for a three-way second-place tie that trailed Pete by nearly 20 hours. Further back on the trail, the weather took a hideous turn for the worst. -30 degree temperatures coupled with 45 mph winds created wind chills on the pass that were off the charts. After starting the traverse to Rohn, most of the remaining cyclists at that point were turned around with varying stages of frostnip. Several scratched. Another guy I’m rooting for, Brij, opted to wait out the storm. He’s currently at the Puntilla checkpoint, and I’m crossing my fingers that he’ll finish the race.

Either way, I was feeling inspired to bound up the hill in my brand new sneakers, iPod thumping and sunlight blazing off the white snow. The temperature read 11 degrees when I left, and I thought about how beautiful and warm it was here; how enjoyable it would be to go home, ice my knee and eat a Boca burger for lunch; and how much I envied those still healthy and strong, and still turning their cranks out on the frozen Iditarod trail.

350 saga

It's cliche to say, but this really is the kind of thing you can't make up.

Nearly everyone, even the race officials, expected Pete to be into the last checkpoint of the race by midnight last night, and across the finish line before 2 p.m. today - probably well ahead of the three-day mark. When this morning came and went with no sign of the lead cyclist, speculation started to fly. Did he oversleep? Did he burn out? Did the chasers catch him?

When Pete finally rolled into Nikolai at 10 a.m., the truth started to emerge. The trail across the Farewell Burn was not hard and fast ground. It was a minefield of invisible tussocks and ice chunks buried in new snow. Pete fell over "at least 100 times." But he kept riding. And as he trudged over those 90 miles, temperatures dipped beneath 30 below. He wore every piece of clothing he had, and he still felt cold. Sometime in the early morning, he finally reached Buffalo Camp - a wall tent with a wood stove inside, stocked with firewood. He laid out his sleeping bag and crawled into a short nap on the frigid floor, declining to start a fire because "someone might need the wood more than he did."

He left mile 300 at 1:45 p.m., with only six hours remaining before the course record passed him by. Even the current course record holder didn't ride the last 50 miles that fast - and no one knew what the trail was really like. People had speculated it would be hard and fast ... but people have a way of being wrong about these things.

On the homefront, suspense was building. Would he do it? Could he do it? And the best question, the one that floated into the forefront with thoughts of him grinding out frozen miles somewhere west of the edge of nowhere ... did he even care?

8 p.m. came and went with no news. That was it. Gone was gone. Spectators reacted with deafening silence. Then came the blip on the computer screen - just a small blurb, red text on a black screen - "1 Peter Basinger 2/27 7:40pm. A new course record is set!"

With 20 minutes to spare ... almost the same amount of time he lost on Mike Curiak during the course-record-setting 2004 Great Divide Race.

No one knows what he said. No one knows what he saw. No one knows what really happened out on that trail, all alone in the subarctic night, with dozens of miles separating him from anything. That's the beauty of the Iditarod Invitational. There is no crowd waiting to congratulate you at the end, no podium, no trophy. There's no prize money and no sponsors lining up to greet you. There's only you, and an amazing saga that only you know about, an adventure only you experience. And I think that you always know that, and nothing can take that away - even a course record.