White Mountains 100, part 2

I pulled into the Windy Gap cabin, mile 62, at 7:25 p.m. A sliver of evening sun still hung above the mountains — one of the glorious benefits of spring. But it didn't feel like spring, with a sharp wind tearing down the canyon as air temperatures plummeted. I ducked inside the small cabin, which was packed with racers. Ted, Brian, Chris and Scott were all there, as were two Fairbanks cyclists — Rocky Reifenstuhl and his wife, Gail Koepf. It seemed I had joined a tight-knit group of bikers and skiers, although on the outside we mostly traveled alone. I greedily accepted my allotted serving of three meatballs and rice. I didn't even wait for it to cool before I wolfed down the deliciously throat-searing meal. I could have eaten three times as much, and was beginning to understand why the race organizers limited the servings — otherwise, it would probably already be gone. Every scrap of wood, food, water and supplies had to be hauled in over dozens of miles of trail by volunteers on snowmobiles. It was all so precious — so hard to ride away from. Still, I was burning daylight. I hoped to get some pictures of sunset before I faced the final 40 miles of the race in the dark. So as quickly as I entered the cabin, I left.

Outside, I tried to take some pictures, but my camera was no longer working. Cold battery. Oh well. I started pedaling into the growing twilight, with a thick wedge of the moon casting a soft glow on snow-covered hillsides. The wind started to let up, which was disappointing, because it was finally at my back. It was replaced by a deepening cold, which seemed to pierce through the still air. I climbed up a long hill, generating a furnace of heat in my core, but my fingers and legs started to sting. I launched into a long descent, and by the time I dropped into the next valley, my fingers and legs were tingling and my butt had become almost completely numb.

I stopped to put my gloves back on and contemplated changing out my layers. I had an extra insulation layer in my bag, but it would require stripping down to my base layer to pull it on, which would mean removing my hard boots and the many insulating layers around my feet. It seemed easier to wait until the next checkpoint, which I estimated was about 10 miles away. I forget that on my snow bike, 10 miles often amounts to two hours. All I was wearing on my legs was a pair of thin spandex tights and soft shell pants. It had been perfect for the sunlit daytime weather, but was no match for temperatures that had already dropped 30 degrees and were still rapidly plummeting. I'm from the Southeast Coast. I'm not used to wild swings in temperatures. I thought I just wasn't pedaling hard enough. So I tried to ride harder.

It's a frustrating exercise — trying to use cold muscles that just won't warm up. The brain can make them spin the rotations, but it's helpless to add power. And meanwhile, the muscles' heat output lessens, the cold cuts deeper, and basically what is happening is the body is slipping into hypothermia, one cell layer at a time. Shivering kicked in. I thought, "OK, I have to work harder." And I thought I was working harder. But if I had looked at my watch, if I had looked at my GPS, it probably would have revealed that I was moving ever slower. But I didn't look at those things. I only looked at my thermometer, which appeared to have dipped beneath 10 below. And, of course, the intelligent thing to do would have been to stop riding my bike and start applying my insulation layers and chemical warmers. But cold bodies do not want to stop. They want to find warmth. And I was convinced the checkpoint had to be close.

I dropped into Beaver Creek, where even on numb skin I could feel another sharp dip in the temperature. The thermometer was frosted over and difficult to read. The red line looked bottomed out at 20 below. I remembered Jeff Oatley telling me the night before that Beaver Creek was the lowest — and therefore coldest — point on the course. "If you get cold on Beaver Creek, just keep riding. It will get warmer," he said. And the checkpoint had to be close. But the cold air filtered through my ice-coated face mask and filled my lungs with fire. I yanked the face mask down, gasping and coughing until I could breathe again, but then my nose began to sting. I pulled the mask up, and again, I could not breathe. I coughed and sputtered and shifted my mask, alternating between breathing free and trying to thaw my cheeks and nose. I was finally ready to just stop and deal with it all — building a fire if I had to — when I saw a sign indicating the checkpoint was only a mile away. I coughed the whole way there — the longest mile in the history of distance. Even though the trail was flat, sloping slightly downhill on the creek bed, my speed was barely above a crawl. I didn't really notice, though. Time had essentially stopped for me. I was moving as though in a dream, in slow motion, no longer fully conscious and therefore no longer accountable for the poor decisions I had made.

It was nearly midnight when I reached the Borealis-LeFevre Cabin, mile 82. I was incredulous, because I could not figure out how four hours had passed since I left the last checkpoint. But first things first — I had to thaw out. I stumbled into the cabin with a head ringed in ice.

"It's cold for me out there," I announced. "Yeah, I'm from Juneau."

"It's cold for everyone out there," the checker said. "Last I looked outside, it was 15 below."

"My thermometer said 20 below," I said.

"Sounds about right, down on the river," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if it's negative 25."

I pulled off my coat and the inside was coated in frost, as was my polar fleece pullover. "Wow," the checker said. "You're pretty wet."

"Yeah," I said. I opened my mouth to formulate an excuse, but I had none. I had made the most basic error, sweating myself out during the day and going into the cold night partly soaked. I hadn't even realized I had sweat that much during the day. A race volunteer asked me if I wanted hot chocolate. I nodded, but the drink wasn't really hot; it was barely warm. He placed the cup in my hands and I clenched my numb fingers around it. After he had turned away, my hand started convulsing uncontrollably and I spilled a bunch on the seat. I quickly mopped it up with my sleeve, hoping he didn't notice. These volunteers were going to think I was completely incompetent and call in an evacuation.

So I did my best to hide the tears in my eyes as my numb body parts came back to life. The bulk of the pain was in my butt and fingers, which looked swollen and red. My toes, the body part I had been so worried about, were basically fine. I had insulated them in so many layers that they were essentially a self-contained unit, but I hadn't really thought through the rest of my kit, at least not the needed layer changes for temps ranging from 25 above to 25 below. I carefully pulled off my softshell pants and put on long johns, then dry liner socks, then a dry base layer and insulation layer on my torso. I cracked open a bunch of chemical warmers and placed them in my boots, mittens and — when no one was looking — stuffed some down my tights. Others in the cabin were in various states of distress. Gail was severely dehydrated and in the first stages of shock. Chris told me his ski boots were too cold and his feet were giving him trouble. I was so wrapped up in my own issues that I didn't even think to offer him some of my warmers — he later told me he didn't have any of his own — an oversight I'm still kicking myself over.

For a while I sat and ate and waited for my body to warm up. I considered rolling out my sleeping bag and resting a while, but the cabin itself wasn't very warm. It was enough to bring my frozen body parts back to life but not the kind of place I wanted to stick around, especially since I finally had enough layers to deal with the temperatures outside. Moving seemed better than sitting. So an hour after I checked in, I checked out, returning to the tomb-like air outside.

The warmers, long johns and new balaclava seemed to make all the difference. The brutal cold stayed away from my skin and my core burned with new warmth. I even took the time to adjust my seat post and move my sagging seat post bag to the front rack. But as I pedaled into the blue-tinted shadows, I felt a new wash of fatigue. It was as though my hours-long battle with the cold had sucked the energy right out of my body, and it didn't matter how many frozen Sour Patch Kids I gnawed on — the energy just wouldn't come back.

I could say it was a struggle, but the landscape was too dreamlike, too compelling, to be a place of struggle. The moon wedge burned bright in a sky splattered with stars, and the twisted trees carved gothic silhouettes over the snow. I did a lot of thinking about the upcoming changes in my life and felt a beautiful sense of peace. Just as I had no real control over the cold, over my fatigue, I had no control over the future. And yet I could move through it, taking on the challenges with the best of my abilities, learning from my mistakes, and growing. Even when the race got hard, like life, it never stopped being worth it.

About 14 miles from the end, my knee started to go. I have issues with my right joint that my doctor once called "Angry Knee." Basically, overuse causes a flareup of chondromalacia that stiffens the joint until I can't bend it at all without pain. The onset of that all-too-familiar sharp pain causes no end of anxiety, because I have no idea how bad it will get or how long it will last. In 2007, I couldn't ride my bicycle for three months as I recovered from chondromalacia I acquired, interestingly enough, during the final miles of a frigid 100-mile winter race called the Susitna 100. And at mile 87 of the White Mountains 100, my Angry Knee was none too happy. My usual strategy is to stop riding, but that wasn't really an option on a remote trail in subzero temperatures. I just had to hope I could limp it to the end without too much long-term damage.

I did do everything I could to be as gentle as possible. I essentially stopped riding up hills; even the mellow ones I walked. Even still, the pain increased. I'm not sure why my knee chose this precise time to give up the fight. I think a large part of it was undertraining. I can climb all the difficult mountains I want, but unless I turn pedals, I'm not going to build up the essential muscles to support my joint through an excessive number of rotations in a short period of time. I also suspect that this knee doesn't like extreme cold very much. I stopped and ate a recklessly large handful of Advil pills, which helped.

About seven miles from the finish, I reached the Wickersham Wall. Lovingly named after a face of Denali that is essentially unclimbable, the White Mountains' Wickersham Wall gains 1,000 feet in a little less than two miles. Judging by the footprints punched into the trail, it must have been a walk for nearly everyone, but I really felt like I was tackling some high-altitude route on Denali. Every 30 steps or so I had to stop, gasping for breath and massaging my knee. My body was beaten, but — amazingly — my attitude remained upbeat. I could look back and see the headlamps of other racers, pinpricks of light in a vast and dark wilderness. Behind them, a sliver of dawn's blue light climbed over the horizon. And in front of me, the setting moon burned with a surreal tint of dark orange. I felt happy. My lungs burned; my swollen fingers ached and my knee sometimes screamed in pain, but I still felt happy. I think much of it was the realization that even though my body is my vehicle through life, life itself is my source of joy.

Dawn had broken when I rolled into the finish line at 6:23 a.m., for a finishing time of 22 hours, 23 minutes, in 14th place out of 49 finishers. I was satisfied to be done, but more than that, I was just grateful to have been a part of it. There are a lot of people that deserve a huge thanks — Ed Plumb and Ann Farris for organizing the race; John Shook for putting me, Chris and his wife, Maura, up for two nights, feeding us meals and letting us throw our stinky gear all over his spare bedrooms; Robin BeeBee for finding and returning my SPOT unit after it bounced off my bike near the end the route — my mother especially is grateful for this; all of the the volunteers who manned the checkpoints, working harder getting even less sleep than the racers; the medics who covered the entire course on snowmobiles, and everyone else who helped make the White Mountains 100 happen. Thank you. It was really great.

White Mountains 100

When I say it was spectacular, I mean it was really hard. And easy, too, because it never once became a burden or a chore. There were times I was so cold I couldn’t breathe, coughing and gasping for air as I pulled off my face mask even though my nose started to freeze within seconds. There were times that my right knee became so stiff that I couldn’t bend it as I limped up hills, wondering if I’d be able to “de-rust” the hinge enough to pedal the last 10 miles to the end. But these issues seemed unimportant, the inevitable fee for coming to the White Mountains 100 somewhat under-prepared. And they were a small price to pay for a chance to spend a day in my happy place — a place cut into a small, wind-swept mountain range in the heart of Alaska, a place where wildfire-scorched spruce trees stoop over frozen swamps and people grin through ice-ringed face masks. They too understand the beauty and discovery of these journeys through the soul.

This was the inaugural year for the White Mountains 100, a 100-mile bike, ski and foot race on a large loop of remote snowmobile trails 40 miles north of Fairbanks. The thing that impressed me most about this race was just how brilliantly organized it was. Basically, a small group of Fairbanks skiers decided it would be fun to hold an endurance race on their home trails. Within a matter of months, their race was full with 50 racers from Fairbanks and Anchorage (and one straggler from Juneau), a full army of friendly volunteers and a luxurious menu of trailside meals, homemade cookies and medical support.

Although I was intrigued by this new winter endurance race, I admit it was only on the edge of my radar. I had met one of the co-organizers, a skier named Ed Plumb, during the 2009 Iditarod Trail Invitational. I was holed up in Yentna Station with five swollen, purple toes and a black cloud hanging over my head. Ed offered a few kind words that helped put the whole sad situation in perspective, and even followed up to ask about my recovery after he successfully completed the race. He was kind enough to e-mail me early in the White Mountains 100 planning, and again when the race was nearly full. I decided to sign up even though I felt ambivalent about it. The cost of travel would be significant, preparations would be tough and I was coping with shifts in my own attitude about racing in general. As my life fell into deeper unrest, this ambivalence strengthened, until the race was days away and I realized that my preparations only amounted to about three weeks of actual focused training. My snow bike laid in pieces in my room. I hadn't yet chosen my "kit." I was mired in stressful logistics of moving away from Juneau, and I was ready to pull the plug on the race without regret.

But then I didn't. I'm so glad I didn't. Saturday was a whirlwind — meeting the friendly Fairbanks skiers, rushing around town with Bjorn as he bought up supplies for a three-week climbing expedition into the Hayes Range, attending the pre-race meeting, having dinner with the fast bikers and stumbling upstairs to my own explosion of gear. I finally crawled into bed at midnight and slept like a log out of sheer exhaustion. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. Sunday morning to carpool out to the start with Ed. His eyes had the glazed-over look of a struck deer, and he admitted that organizing the race proved far more all-consuming than he ever imagined. "I haven't even thought about skiing," he said, even as he faced the 100-mile effort that loomed in front of us. I watched the thermometer on his dashboard drift from 10 above all the way to 18 below in the low-lying valleys. I felt my own eyes glaze over, struck by a vague sense of doom.

The hour leading up to a race is always the worst, and the White Mountains 100 was no different. I stepped out of Ed's truck and the cold wind hit me like a sucker punch. I froze my fingers while trying to put my bike together, waited in line at the outhouse to purge the meager contents of my breakfast and forgot to sign in. But when someone finally yelled, "Go!," all of the fatigue and anxiety melted away as my mind instantly shifted to the focus of the task at hand. I pedaled up the first hill in a wash of relief, because I was on the trail and so I no longer had to think about it. All I had to do was pedal. And compared to the rest of life, pedaling is amazingly easy.

For many hours, the White Mountains 100 was pure fun. I was struck by the sheer amount of climbing. In my pre-race ambivalence, I actually never even looked at the elevation profile, which in the end would net nearly 8,000 feet of gain. I guess I should have expected as much from a race with the word "Mountains" in the name. Still, I relished in the work, powering up the nicely packed trail at a paltry — but satisfying — 4.5 mph. The downhill runs were like the best kind of mountain biking, smooth and flowing with a few blissful "big airs" over the snowmobile moguls. An air inversion caused intriguing temperature fluctuations — I'd climb high with the warm sun caressing my face, and then drop into a subzero sinkhole as my quickly-applied face mask filled with ice. For several miles I shadowed a couple of skate skiers, which was a cool experience in itself — two very different modes of travel, perfectly synchronized.

My main point of stress was overflow, which the White Mountains region has an abundance of. Overflow is water that gurgles up from ice-covered stream beds, refreezing on top of the snow until the ground is covered in mounds of wet ice. It's treacherously slick, but that's the least of the concern, because a badly placed foot can punch into deeper pools of unfrozen water, wetting vital gear and body parts — a bad, bad thing in subzero temperatures. Because of my previous frostbite experience, every loud crack or change of color on the ice was heart-stopping scary, but it only added to my overall excitement about the course. The White Mountains were harsh, they were real, and they were amazingly within my grasp.

And this harsh, real landscape was also breathtakingly beautiful. We coastal Alaskans have a tendency to write off the Interior as a flat, frigid swamp, but it is actually ringed with snow-swept mountains and craggy cliffs. The weather was gorgeous if a bit cold for this coastal girl, and a brisk headwind stung my exposed skin. Still, I felt strong and I was pounding down the calories. I stopped briefly at the Cache Mountain cabin at mile 36. A fire raged in the wood stove and the tiny single-room structure was clogged with racers and stiflingly hot. I ate handfuls of cheese cubes and a brownie as I chatted with Anchorage cyclists Ted Cahalane and Brian Garcia. Everyone was in a good mood but ready to admit we were starting to feel it. On a snow bike, tackling a mountain course in subzero windchill, a race pace of 7 mph feels fast and 36 miles feels like a long way.

And the big climb was yet to come. After several more miles of rollers, the course began the steady, 1,800-foot ascent to the "Divide," a 3,500-foot alpine pass. The snow had softened in the sun and was churned up by previous racers, which made the going incredibly slow. The trail was rideable, but it eventually became a decision of whether I wanted to struggle at 90-percent effort a move 3.5 mph or push my ~50-pound bike at 70-percent effort and move 2.5 mph. I was too tired to do the math, but walking sure felt better, so I walked. A few skiers caught up and passed me, justifiably gloating at the anchor I was dragging up the mountain.

But I am always willing to do the work for a breath of open mountain air, even if it is driven by stunningly cold wind. I stopped at the top for several minutes, completely exposed to the wind and cold, just to soak in the wonder of the moment. I sucked on some deep-frozen Sour Patch Kids and analyzed the wind's artwork, carved in flowing strokes across the open tundra. It was 4 p.m. I was 50 miles and eight hours into the race, still on my best-case-scenario pace, feeling strong. I hopped back on the bike and churned over the drifted trail, swerving and bouncing across the rough surface. I passed Ted, who was walking his bike downhill. "You're having better luck than I am," he called out. "It's not easy, but it's doable," I yelled back. A few minutes later, I bounced sideways off a mogul and landed face-first into a pillow of snow. I was still extracting myself when skiers Chris Wrobel and Scott Hauser came up from behind. I quickly rolled back into the snow as they whisked by, calling out to make sure I was OK.

Ten minutes and 1,000 feet of descent later, we were all standing at the edge of the Ice Lakes. The Ice Lakes are actually a mile-long stretch of overflow that is very unpredictable. Ice conditions change by the hour and we had all been warned to pass through this area with extreme care. Chris and Scott gave up on skiing early and donned overboots and ice creepers. I had bolts screwed into the soles of my boots, but they weren't quite enough to actually grip the wet ice. I skittered across the downhill-sloping surface as the frigid wind blew at my side, with my bike acting like an uncontrollable sail. I walked through ankle deep pools of slush, areas where any kind of fall would be disastrous. My heart raced and anxiety coursed through my veins like hot lead even as my body became colder and colder. I started to shiver but I couldn't move any faster for fear of losing my balance. My fingers went numb, but I didn't want to stop and find my mittens for the same reason. It was a painfully slow march to the other side, and I had no choice but to endure it.

Brian Garcia passed me near the last ice lake, riding his bicycle, which I thought was enviably bold. A mile later, I passed him standing by the side of the trail, eating M 'n' Ms with a packet of cream cheese, which I was jealous of too, having become tired of my own peanut butter cups and Odwalla bars, and having found frozen Sour Patch Kids to be too slow-melting and frustrating to be edible. I wanted to stop and chat and maybe ride with him for a bit, but I was still shivering and knew I had to keep moving before my body heat took too much of a downward spiral. The trail itself spiraled downward, winding through the spruce forest on tight and challenging winter "singletrack." It, like most of the rest of the course, was truly fun biking, the kind that makes you wonder why everyone doesn't just go out and buy a fat bike and move to Fairbanks. But then I'd hit another open area of overflow, and the cold wind would needle into my skin, and I'd remember that, oh yeah, this is Alaska — a hard place that doesn't easily forgive complacency. Still, I was soaked in the pink light of sunset and filled with my typical mid-race overconfidence. I had climbed the Divide. I had survived the Ice Lakes. The worst was behind me. It would all be coasting from here on out ...

To be continued ... (Sorry, but if I don't go to bed soon I'm going to pass out at my desk and drool all over my keyboard.)

Into the Interior

Well, I made it to Fairbanks. It's a beautiful first day of spring, sunny and warm - 33 degrees. Downright tropical in this part of the world. I haven't been to this region of Alaska in nearly seven years; I'm actually surprised how much of it feels familiar to me. We had a great trip up, traveling overland - the only way to travel. We took the ferry to Skagway and chugged up White Pass in my friend Bjorn's old Subaru (crossing our fingers the entire way). We visited friends in Whitehorse and continued north on the Alaska Highway to Kluane Lake, where we geared up for an overnight "ski" trip (I was on snowshoes) in the frigid mountains of the Yukon.

We started up Sheep Mountain on the grade of an old mining road. The surface was knee-to-thigh deep sugar snow with occasional - and often completely invisible until you punched through and twisted a knee - thin-frozen crust. It felt like wading through a bottomless bucket of sand. Strenuous and slow going. Bjorn broke trail most of the way. I tried to forge ahead to do my share, but I could scarcely keep up with him. I'm not used to hoisting 25 pounds of winter gear on my back, and he had that ski advantage (although, really, it hardly looked like an advantage in these conditions.)

We trudged upward for nearly five hours, barely making five miles during that time, and we were nowhere near where we had hoped to be - somewhere closer to the ridge of Sheep Mountain or at least in the alpine bowl. We did see some Dall sheep, however, not to mention a veritable highway of wolf and coyote tracks. But, sunset was well on its way and we decided we wanted to be closer to the car for the Friday drive to Fairbanks, so we started down. The worst part about the snow is it didn't even pack down, so we basically had to break trail through sugar going downhill as well. Bjorn didn't get to do much skiing at all. I actually felt like snowshoes were an advantage, since I could at least pick up my feet while he had to shuffle through the sand. He did manage to slide a little, though, even with skins on.

The part about the ski trip that I was really excited about was the camping. We set up the tent on the shoreline of the Slim River, donned down coats and fired up the stove to melt snow. Winds were light and dusk temperatures were about 15 degrees - really mild for the Yukon in March. We were able to sit outside around our "campfire" of a stove, drinking hot water (we both forgot to bring tea) and eating frozen turkey sandwiches and Snickers bars. There was no wind, and if we stopped talking, the valley was so quiet that we could hear animal sounds in the far distance - small creatures running, coyotes yipping, wolves howling. It was really quite special. We settled into our Arctic bags and fell asleep to the ranging silence. The overnight temperature dropped below zero and I got one of the best nights of sleep I have had in a long time.

The ski out on the Slim River was pretty mellow, which helped make up for our afternoon of wallowing the day before. It's certainly questionable whether I should have participated in a ~11-hour overnight hike just a couple of days before my bike race, but in this case, as in many cases, it was exactly what I needed. Things here in Fairbanks have been kind of stressful - as they should be, I guess, since I am gearing up for this 100-mile bike race. Trail conditions and weather both look to be good. I'm enamored with this harsh Interior landscape and I can't wait to get out on the trail. The race begins at 8 a.m. Sunday. I'll be carrying my SPOT unit along the way, so you can track my progress (or possible lack thereof) at this link: My Shared Page.

Race updates here.

Wish me luck!