Aftermath

Date: March 8
Mileage: 15.5
March mileage: 15.5
Temperature: 41

Well, I've been off the trail for a week now. I'm finally back in Juneau, back at work, but still trying to plow through the solid wall of culture shock I first encountered when I stepped onto the tarmac at the McGrath airport. I feel like I have been away much longer than two weeks. It seems spring has come to Juneau since I've been gone, but little else has changed. Winter will surely be back for one final blast. Winter always comes back.

Physically, my body is recovering great ... for the most part. I went for my first bicycle ride since the race just this morning. I definitely don't have much oomph yet - my legs especially are sluggish and I still have to struggle up the smallest of hills. But at the same time, I don't seem to have any acute injuries. That's especially amazing after my first forays into physical activity: A few violent jolts following three days of basically sitting on a couch. On Wednesday, I set out for a walk to buy some sushi. It had been raining buckets in Palmer and my friends never shovel their driveway. I took one step on the wet ice and went down hard - legs up in the air, tailbone bounce, everything. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I laid there for quite some time, fretting that I had broken my tailbone. It did strike me as funny that I might have managed to injure myself worse in a driveway than I had on 350 miles of Iditarod Trail. But as it turned out, I was fine.

So on Friday I made the mistake of going night-riding at Eaglecrest Ski Area with my friend Libby. This is part of my late-winter transition back to being a somewhat normal person. I wanted to take up snowboarding again. But I'm pretty sure I haven't been on a snowboard since I went to Brighton in Utah with my sisters in November 2006. It was of course raining/snaining buckets at the resort (as you can see in this beautiful picture), and we were trying to negotiate steep slopes of slush as 15-year-old jibbers flew over our heads. First-time-of-the-season snowboarding is just not the thing to do when you already are stiff and sore and slow with your reflexes. I made it two hours before my knees began to scream bloody murder over every little carve. Then I took a fall off the lift and struggled to drag myself up like a 70-year-old arthritic woman who lost contact with her walker. I announced to Libby I was going to have to soft-ride it down and call it a day. I felt like a 70-year-old arthritic woman in a sport for teenagers.

So I'm definitely not back to 100 percent. But have had a week to reflect on the race. I wanted to thank everyone who wrote a nice comment on my super-long race report. In many ways, it was the easiest article I have ever written. I wrote about all the events I remembered exactly as they happened, and the words just poured out onto the screen. But it other ways, it was hard for me to go through and relive those moments. I got so wrapped up in the writing that I would have to take breaks and walk away from the computer and stare out the window at the dogs and the cars, just to remind myself that I was no longer in those situations, lingering so close to the edge of danger, locked so deeply in those emotional battles. This event became much more of a journey to me than a race, so much so that I'm still caught off guard when the first thing people ask me about it is, "Did you win?"

As a race, the Iditarod Trail Invitational was a success for me in many ways. I mean, I finished. With all of my body parts intact. And those were really my only goals to begin with. So, in that way, the race was a huge success. My physical fitness held up better than I could have even anticipated, given that I trained not really knowing exactly what I was training for. So much of the race involved heavy lifting, walking and bike pushing, all things that were only a small part of my training regimen. So to get through the race without serious shoulder soreness, or huge blisters, or foot injuries, was a big stroke of luck.

My gear performed even better than my body. After the debacle of Pugsley going missing in the FedEx vortex and arriving in Anchorage almost too late for the race, Speedway Cycles did a rush job of last-minute repairs to ensure my bicycle was in top running condition. The irony of the situation is that most of the work was done by Pete Basinger, who ended up having so many mechanicals of his own early in the race (Geoff has joked that he was too busy fixing my bike to work on his.) It goes to show that a lot of the success in gear performance is simply luck, but I am extremely grateful to Greg, Pete and Speedway for giving Pugsley every edge they could. I never even had so much as a flat tire in 350 miles.

I also am a huge fan of Epic Designs bags. My bivy burrito turned out to be my favorite piece of gear in the race. Being able to pull that off my front rack, unsnap the straps and crawl into my ready-to-go bivy set-up in less than a minute was especially comforting when I was completely bonked out, cold and discouraged. If I had needed to fumble with three stuff sacks and put everything together in those moments, I might still be out there frozen on the trail. The seatpost bag also held its shape well, even as I packed it and repacked it throughout the race without ever readjusting the straps. The only time it rubbed the tire was the last day, when I was wearing nearly all of my clothing and the seatpost bag was nearly empty. Those bags endured a lot of tossing and a lot of crashes. The only thing I broke was the stem strap on the gas tank. Not bad when you consider the abuse those bags endured. So thank you to Eric Parsons. I'm definitely going to be pulling out the checkbook for your summer line.

I also was pretty lucky with my clothing choices, with the exception of not having good overboots for the stream crossing. Temperatures during those six days ranged between about 25 above to 30 below. I discovered the best way to regulate my core temperature throughout the day was to remove hats, and actually did little to change my torso and leg layers until the last two days, when the sustained temperatures were well below 0 and the windchills were otherworldly and I put on nearly everything I had. I emit a lot of heat through my hands, and actually spent most of the race without gloves or mittens on - just bare hands in my admittedly cheap but warm Cabela's pogies. I did most of my chores with my bare hands. Only the last two days did I pull out my mittens, when the wind worked to flash-freeze all exposed skin. But the liner gloves hardly made an appearance.

So this is the part of the race reflection where I talk about "What Went Wrong." I had my fair share of rookie mishaps, misjudgements, and outright big mistakes. And right at the top of all that was my inability or unwillingness to eat enough calories. Bonking out on the trail the way I did, twice, was scary and pointless. Part of it was the sleep deprivation, but I think the largest part was almost complete bodily mechanical shutdown as a result of running out of fuel. I've never felt anything like it. For a half hour or so I'd putter, putter, putter, and sort of feel it coming. But when the real shutdown came, I'd slump into the trail and feel completely helpless. If I did not have a sleeping bag and my life had depended on it, I probably could have crawled out of those situations, but I'm not positive of that. In reflecting back on the food I actually put down, I was probably eating about 3,000-3,500 calories over a 24-hour period on days I went through checkpoints with meals, and as little as 2,000 on the days I had to feed myself. Hard to say what I was burning ... maybe 6,000? It definitely was a deficit that is NOT sustainable over six days. Eating while cycling has always been a struggle for me, but if I ever plan to do a multiday even like the Iditarod Trail Invitational again, I really have to focus and dial in a better nutrition plan.

In hindsight (skewed as it is, with a week of comfortable nights in beds behind me), I believe my emotional handling of the race could be better in the future, knowing what I know now. I left Rohn after nearly a full day of agonizing, still not entirely convinced I had what it took to even survive the terrain ahead, let alone finish a race. I learned over the course of the next three days that I do, in fact, have what it takes to survive Interior Alaska in the winter, as long as I make good choices, stay alert, and stay on the move. My long stay in Rohn and 12-hour bivy on the Burn were physically unnecessary (and, in the case of the long restless bivy that left my water frozen, actually physically detrimental.) But I used those long layovers to work through what was at the time paralyzing anxiety about the remoteness and the cold. I needed the layovers then, but I doubt non-rookie Jill would have needed them, at least to that extreme. Those alone would have shaved a full day off my time.

Finally, my bicycle was too %&@! heavy. I either need to work harder to cull my gear to a more sizeable mass (and it did cross my mind that cutting out all the uneaten food I carried would be a fast way to do this), or I need to work harder to build strength and train longer with the full gear set-up. I feel like simply being a woman puts me at a disadvantage in this regard ... I have less overall muscle mass to work with in the first place, but I still have the same amount of winter survival gear to hoist. There must be a happy medium.

A question I have been asked often this week is whether I am going to enter the race again. It's hard to say. I already am in "what now" mode and daydreaming about new adventures. I still have no idea where these dreams may take me. People have asked if my next step is Nome. And my answer is, I can't even fathom Nome. The race to McGrath is 3.5 times longer than the Susitna 100, but the increase in difficulty and effort was beyond exponential - it was a quantum leap. The race to Nome is more than three times longer than the race to McGrath. No, I can not fathom it.

Yet.

Day seven: Ghost trail to McGrath

Bathed in comfort at Nick and Olene's house, I made the mistake of reverting back to the status of a real person. I sat in discouragement as I examined my legs, a cacophony of bruises, swollen ankles and throbbing knees. I grabbed the loose skin around my abdomen and realized I had lost some weight. I had lost a lot of weight. Most of it was probably water, but still, it hadn't been that long. My head throbbed from a serious dehydration hangover and my stomach lurched from my frantic efforts to stuff down calories. Then I made the mistake of going online. I learned how worried people at home had become for my well-being. And then I checked the weather report. "Severe Wind Advisory" it screamed. "35 mph winds gusting to 50 mph. Wind chills to 60 below 0." I just shook my head. That couldn't possibly be real. I asked Nick, the wizened local, how he dealt with traveling in such weather. "I don't travel in this kind of weather," he said matter-of-factly.

It was late in the evening and I figured I had at most 24 more hours to ride into McGrath, and likely closer to 12. But I had seriously underestimated how many batteries I would need for the race and figured at the time I only had five, maybe six hours of good lithium battery power for my headlamp and about two hours of desperately low battery power with my one set of (near useless) alkaline batteries. If I left at 9 p.m., I would likely be caught out in utter blackness in the storm at 2 a.m. My only option was to leave around 4 a.m. and hope I had the strength to push into McGrath before the next night. Waiting until pre-dawn would also give me more rest, more time to rehydrate, more time to let the wind calm down, I told myself. I tossed and turned with words of Nick's wisdom ringing in my head. "I don't travel in this kind of weather."

At 4 a.m., the wind was as strong as ever. I remembered the way it tore at my face through my goggles the day before, and it was much, much colder now. Maybe 20 below, before wind chill. I put on every layer I had. The clothing provided a good climate zone for my body, but I could feel the fingers of death clawing at the air only centimeters away. "I will go two miles," I told myself. "And I will see how insane this really is. And then I will turn around." However, what I didn't know was that outside of Nikolai, the trail makes a sharp angled turn onto the river, back almost the way it came. And pretty quickly, I realized that the 35 mph wind gusting to 50 mph wasn't just no longer in my face. It was full on at my back.

In the arctic blast, Pugsley and I flew down the Kuskokwim River. I had to keep the tire pressure really low - about 6 psi - to punch through all the soft sugar snowdrifts across the trail. But for long, hardpacked stretches we would fly at 12 mph, 14 mph, without even trying. I felt like I was piloting an airplane. After an hour, a small chill began to set in near my chest and I started to shiver. I noticed that every time I sat down on my bicycle seat, it felt like a burning block of dry ice. It stole more and more heat away from my core until I couldn't feel my butt any longer. I quickly stopped, pulled three of the four chemical heat packs out of my mittens, stuffed one down my bike shorts for each butt cheek and one between my legs. The chemical warmers improved my situation nearly 100 percent. Later, in McGrath, I would notice a deep red burn on the top of each butt cheek. That may have been the beginning of tailwind-induced butt frostbite.

It was a reminder of how quickly things can go wrong, even when you feel on top of the world with a 35 mph tailwind. I did not know it then, but at nearly the exact same time, another competitor, a woman walker, was fighting that same wind into Nikolai. A headwind for her, the monster gusts would ravage her eyes until they froze shut. Completely blinded, she would grope around for her sled but somehow become disoriented and unable to get in her sleeping bag or even zip up her jacket. She would wander around helplessly until another racer, a cyclist, met her from behind, put her in her sleeping bag, and rode as fast as he could into Nikolai to send back help. She would acknowledge that she would likely have died if this cyclist did not meet her and help her when he did. I was heartbroken when I learned this later that night. How quickly everything changes.

As day broke, the trail became more and more drifted in. I suspected this would happen in the wind, especially where the river narrowed, but I still couldn't hold back the frustration after I had foolishly allowed myself to believe I could make a six-hour run over the final 50 miles to McGrath. For miles, the trail would be covered in anywhere from one inch to 12 inches of fine, sugar-like snow. Often, I couldn't even distinguish the trail from the rest of the river. I would scout around with my front wheel until it dropped down into the waist-deep snow just off the trail. Then I would climb back out, walk tentatively forward, and continue scouting until the wheel fell out from under me, again. My average pace dropped from over 10 mph back down to 2 mph. I still had 20 miles to push into McGrath. At first daylight, an average pace of 2 mph would put me in town right at sunset. I began to fret about my batteries, again.

I would later talk to Kathi, the first woman cyclist who was just under a day ahead of me, about this final stretch. She is arguably the most experienced female Alaska winter cyclist alive, and is hugely optimistic and open to anything. She would call it "a slog." She wouldn't even refer to the push over Rainy Pass with this derogatory of an adjective. She called Rainy Pass "a fun walk." So when Kathi calls something a slog, you have to know it's really A SLOG. To me, temporarily losing the trail every once in a while was frustrating. But the movement itself felt like wading through a giant, endless bowl of granulated sugar. My calves burned with the effort of the soft steps and my heart rate pounded. And all the while, the landscape of the open river lingered like an anchor caught at the bottom of the sea. I was the sailor tirelessly cranking away at the pulley, but the anchor never gave up its hold. Walking down a frozen river is the definition of monotony. I would fixate on a single tree and watch it take a half hour to reach me. Bluffs could take over an hour. I was losing my will, losing my mind. I stopped to eat a fruit leather. I ripped off the package with my teeth and the howling tailwind tore it out of my mouth and sent it fluttering down the trail. I watched it dance down the river until it disappeared from sight. It followed the exact path I wanted to take. I was so angry that my wrapper could travel to McGrath faster than I could.

I tried to keep my mind occupied. I thought about Geoff and what he must have gone through to let go of the race even when he had no choice. I thought about bicycle touring and how different touring really is during the summer. I thought about cycling and how different "cycling" really is from this endless effort I was experiencing. I thought about my frantic family and hoped they hadn't checked the weather report. I thought about the foods I might like to eat and decided I no longer cared about food. I thought about Juneau and my job, and I wondered how I could ever go back to it all. How I could ever really leave this trail. I caught The Wrens' "Happy" on my iPod shuffle and set it on repeat for at least six playings ... "is this how it's going to be? ... is this how you wanted me? ... broken down again ... it's almost over now." I could not think about the end in McGrath. The end was still so far, far away.

The hours passed by like minutes, and sometimes like days. My knees began to burn and throb, not unlike my right knee had at the end of the 2007 Susitna 100, right before I spent several months injured. I worried about the future, but in a way, I didn't care. The only thing that mattered now was step after step and The Slog. Then I started to see the signs outside of McGrath. "Ultrasport: 10 more miles" the first one read. Then, an eternity later, nine more miles. Then eight. Then I turned off the river onto completely blown-in snowmobile trails. Then seven. I walked as though locked in a slow-motion dream, where every effort I had to give amounted to nearly nothing.

After the six-mile sign, a gust of wind caught me from the side and knocked me off the trail. I laid in the snow, with my 70-pound bike on top of me, and I wondered whether or not I would be able to get up. I laughed because the thought of being pinned there was funny, but then, just like that, I started to sob. I had not cried once during the entire race. And there I was, six miles outside McGrath, bawling so hard that I had to gasp for air as my tear-filled eyelashes froze shut. I cried and cried and cried. I cried for my frozen water and heavy bike and burning knees and throbbing calves and piles of food I could not eat. I cried for the hard, unwarming sun and the wind and the driving cold. I cried for the distance and for my aloneness and for the remoteness and the mean, mean, unmerciful nature of it all. I cried because my adventure was nearly done. I cried because I knew I was going to survive it. I cried because I knew there was an end to the suffering. And I cried because I knew there would be no end to the drive.

About three miles outside of McGrath, the trail veered onto a road. A full-on, two-lane snowpacked-but-plowed road. People in Subarus and snowmachines puttered by, waving often but not even doubletaking the alien bicycle lumbering up the road. Riding the first road I'd seen since Day One, I decided I was going to sprint the final three miles into town. I was going to give it every thing I had. I laid into the pedals with my burning knees and pushed, pushed, pushed. My lungs seared and head throbbed. The bicycle odometer inched up to 9 mph and dropped back to 8. Eight mph. That was all I had to give.

I felt a subdued sort of peace as I rolled into driveway with the big Alaska Ultrasport sign, the warm home of Peter and Tracy, a couple in McGrath who open their lives to the dozens of stinky trekkers who push into their small town. I was told by Jeff Oatley that McGrath is an oasis in the tundra, a heaven where angels feed you grapes and wrap you in warm blankets. Peter's and Tracy's home did not disappoint. I rolled in at 4:20 p.m., just in time to sit down to family dinner. Bill and Kathi were still there, as were a few other Euro racers, and I didn't even have time to strip off all my layers before Peter sat me down at the table with a tall glass of orange juice and a big meal of pork chops and potatoes.

As I sat at the table, chatting about strange topics with the strange crowd and trying to stuff down the food I still was not hungry for, I could feel a piece of me being ripped away. I went into the race believing I would change out on the trail. Less than an hour into being done, I couldn't believe how changed I felt. How severe the final shift, it's still hard to say. But as I stumbled upstairs to take a shower and looked at my emaciated body in the mirror, I couldn't help but mourn the person I had lost. I was still Jill from Juneau, but I would never be the same. I had followed the ghost trail to McGrath and in a way had become a ghost, forever in flux, forever searching for an end.

Day six: Farewell Burn to Nikolai

I've read about the horrible experience of waking up from trailside bivies to new bad weather, or petrified muscles, or a sinking cold. No one ever writes about waking up to The Smell. It's so familiar to me now that I can wince just thinking about it, but I can't really describe it - sweet and salty, faintly chemical and toxic; it's the smell of the trail, and your tired, beaten body, exuding unending hard effort, which has soaked into clothing that's been wrapped around your clammy skin for six days. Out on the bike, The Smell filters and dissipates. Inside a humid sleeping bag, it collects and ferments. I woke up to a stench just this side of death; it scared me more than it repulsed me. I groped for my candy bar breakfast and tried to choke it down in the sickening haze. I managed to stuff down about half of it and added up the calories in my head. 400. Good enough.

I wriggled out of my bag and took my first look at the fresh air outside. About three hours had gone by since I laid down, and it was now 2 a.m. The sky hung still and calm and dark - the Northern Lights were gone. The night left behind a deep and piercing cold that I could scarcely imagine, and there I was, living it. It needled into my skin even without wind and wracked me with shivers before I had even taken a few steps away from my bag. I darted for chemical warmers in my bike bag and tore open five or six. They were as solid as blocks of ice, and just as cold. I massaged them inside my mittens, but nothing happened. They were as dead as the night.
All around me, soft things had frozen to rigid hardness ... my backpack, my bike pogies, the top of my bivy sack. Everything covered in thick frost. I felt like a tomb was closing in around me and I could scarcely believe it. I was in the middle of nowhere. I did not dare, DID NOT DARE, look and my thermometer. Some cyclists who passed me at 11:30 p.m. estimated it was about minus 25 when they went by. It could have easily dropped down to minus 30 or minus 35 in that area overnight. It can definitely be worse, but that was beyond anything I had ever experienced, and I couldn't deal with it. I crawled back into my bag and shivered until I stopped. Then I ate the rest of my chocolate bar, sipped a little water before kicking the icy bottle to the foot of my bag, and went back to sleep.

I tried to get out of my bag one more time overnight with similar results. I briefly considered just abandoning my bike and sprinting what I figured to be 25 miles into Nikolai, but finally decided to wait until the sun hit my bag before waking up. That didn't come until 10 a.m., nearly 12 hours after I crawled into the sack in the first place. It was in hindsight a horrible waste of time. I didn't sleep well and didn't make any forward progress. Veteran racers still gawk when they ask, "Did you really bivy for 12 hours out on The Burn?" Yes, I really did bivy for 12 hours out on The Burn. At the time, I felt I had no choice.

I climbed out of my bag one last time into the sun, knowing something would have to happen. A stiff wind had kicked up overnight, driving down the windchill, but the sunlight at least made the air feel tolerable. I reached into my bag and grabbed my water bottle. It was frozen solid. It had frozen. Solid. Inside the bag. My Camelbak, which I had left out overnight, was almost certainly in a similar condition. I stomped around and screamed, at no one, really. There was only The Iditarod Trail. And The Iditarod Trail did not care. It had no sympathy for for the fact that I had 25 miles to grind out, into the wind across a flat frozen expanse with no wind protection, all the while with no water, and the wind blowing so hard that I was doubtful whether I could get my stove to light in order to melt snow. The Iditarod Trail did not care. And I had no choice but to accept it.

I packed up and stuffed the insulation of my frozen Camelbak bladder with the chemical warmers I had torn open the night before, which I managed to ignite by sticking them under my arms inside my sleeping bag. I then stuffed the bladder inside all the layers wrapped around my torso, an ice baby against my chest and abdomen. I hoped my body heat would melt a little of the block ice I was now hoisting as dead weight. Then I ate a little snow, and pushed on, into the wind, toward Nikolai.

Drifted sugar snow obscured the trail and made long stretches impossible to ride. Even packed stretches were a chore to grind out at anything faster than 5 mph. Blasts of wind regularly knocked me right off of the bike. Across the long, open swamps, I could often hear a gust long before it hit me. I would step off my bike, put my head down, and brace for the furnace blast that tore through the air vents in my goggles and layers and layers of clothing protection and kicked up zero-visibility ground blizzards for hundreds of feet in all directions. When the wind wasn't gusting, I would sweat profusely. My thirst was hitting fever pitch, but I was too terrified that one of those gusts would freeze me solid to take off any layers. The Burn was no longer a joke to me. I really was among the walking dead.

About 12 miles from Nikolai, I came to an abandoned fish camp with a small cabin on the shore. I joyfully sprinted up to the structure - here was a wind-protected place where I could at least melt some snow and quench my raging thirst. But snow had drifted in against the door and frozen to concrete consistency. I kicked at it and kicked at it but I couldn't get it to budge. There was no way inside. As I did this, a plane flew over my head. It doubled back against the wind and flew over again. "Oh great," I thought, "they're looking for me now." I knew I had been going really slow. I knew I had stopped a lot. I knew I was suffering, but I also knew I was OK. I did not want to be rescued. I tried to wave at the plane, but I wanted to be careful not to send a distress signal. I made a small wave with one hand that I'm unsure the pilot even saw. I then pulled the Camelbak out of my coat, opened the bladder, and tipped it up against my parched tongue. To my extreme surprise, crisp, cold water came trickling out. It wasn't much, but it tasted like the nectar of heaven and it gave me a surge of strength and sense of well-being. I knew I could survive the last 12 miles. It would likely (and in fact, did) take me three hours to traverse, but I could survive it.

I arrived in Nikolai trail-battered and humbled. The tiny community of about 60 people suffers from a scourge of economic depression and out-migration. The buildings are weather-beaten and the youth are all moving away. Those who remain live by subsistence off the land and a handful of government jobs. They get by, but they know they are very poor compared to urban dwellers. But as I stumbled into the Interior Bush town, I believed they had everything, and I was grateful for all of it. I was taken in by Nick and Olene, and older Native couple who every year open their home to battered Ultrasport racers, feed them and given them a place to sleep. I was practically in tears when Olene offered me a cup of coffee and a big bowl of moose stew with white bread. "You probably won't like moose stew," she said. "It's the most delicious thing I've had yet," I answered. We talked for a while about Nikolai and her childhood in a fish camp, how all of the families moved into the town when the school opened, and how all of their children were now moving to the cities. All the while, Nick massaged the bloody skin of a beaver before stretching it out to dry on a rack in his living room. And there I was, Jill from Juneau, home. Night descended and I was not ready to leave. I did not want to leave. Ever.