Take me back to the start

Date: March 9
Mileage: 23
March mileage: 38.5
Temperature: 34

Every time Geoff and I go for a ride together, he can only listen to the creaks and groans emanating from my bike for a few minutes before he demands I pull over to assess the damage. Today it was a rickety bottom bracket and a rear hub that has become so loose the wheel sways from side to side as it rolls forward. Geoff is always disgusted with the perpetual state of disrepair in my old bikes, especially my mountain bike. And I take full responsibility for their sorry conditions. I put a lot of miles on them on awful trails and awful roads in awful weather. And the only question I ask when gauging my bikes’ fitness is, “Do I think (whatever part is creaking or clanking) will snap in half on me today?” If the answer is no, then it’s time to go.

That said, people like me shouldn’t own old bicycles, just like people who never check the oil and ignore the “check engine” light shouldn’t own old cars (Yes, I also own an old car.) Geoff has spent our first few days in Juneau pimping out his Karate Monkey, and has planted the seeds of 29er dreams in my head. I used to think a 29er was too much bike for me, but Pugsley and his huge tires essentially make him a 29er, and a sometimes-70-pound fat load to boot. My reasoning now is if I can handle Pugsley, I can handle anything.

Right now, though, I’m still just trying to handle cycling. I realize I haven’t given myself that much recovery time since the Iditarod Invitational. But how could I pass up a blue-sky day after a night just cold enough to freeze up the gunk, with Geoff actually ready and willing to join me for a mellow ride out Douglas Highway? We took the pace easy but I still felt heavy and tired with noticeable sharp knee pain toward the end. I may have to take another week or so off the bike. But if the sun comes out again, all bets are off.

Recovery continues elsewhere, including my efforts to re-establish a healthy relationship with food. From the second I recovered my appetite - during the “morning after” in McGrath - I’ve been eating everything in sight. I think I’ve gained two or three pounds back since the race - not that those pounds were all that missed in the first place. It actually would have been kinda cool to keep them off. But I’m so afraid of the spectre of the bonk now that I’ll find myself sprinting to the vending machine at the slightest tinge of hunger pangs. That would have been a great move during the race, but I have to remind myself that pounding M’n Ms at 4 p.m. is not healthy in the real world.

Beyond my semi-broken bikes and semi-broken body, every day I come to a new realization of just how valuable of an experience this race really was for me. One life lesson that comes to mind happened after Bill Merchant caught up to me at Bison Camp and I admitted to him that I had somehow tossed my headlamp during the day. I bit my lip and waited for the lecture about my stupid, boneheaded carelessness. Instead, Bill confided that he took a number of of own spills that morning, and one of those falls had snapped his GPS off its handlebar mount. “It’s lying out there a snow angel somewhere,” he said.

“Oh man, that sucks,” I said, thinking that Bill must have been devastated to lose a $300 gadget, and so early in his race to Nome. He just shrugged. “I didn’t really need it,” he said. “I’m just glad it wasn’t my mittens!” I remember looking at my own $20 pair of mittens and thinking about how carefully I had been guarding them, how much I valued them. Out on the trail, the value of your paltry possessions takes on a whole different meaning. Clothing becomes as valuable as the body parts it protects. Electronic gadgets are heavy luxuries. A hack repair job that keeps a bicycle running is as good as gold. Cash is worthless. And kindness can change the world.

Good lessons. And here I am, a week later, back in the real world, coveting a new bicycle.

Life is a mystery.

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.