Embracing the cold

(Yes, I'm getting around to finishing my Susitna 100 story. I haven't had time to blog this weekend, so this is just a quick photo post.)

Sunday morning crept toward afternoon. The temperature outside was 11 degrees F with a brisk wind, overcast, and more than a little blah. Beat's in Montana for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and is pretty much fresh out of California in every way. This is his first time in Montana where it's really been "winter." His total experiences with winter as an adult are minimal at best, and he's still trying to acquire gear that most people consider standard issue, like mittens. Despite all this, he's willing to putting himself out there, in the thick of the ice and snow and bitter chill, even with untested gear and no prior experience to give him understanding of how his body will react to the cold. We went out for a shakedown hike on Saturday, in similar temperatures with a severe wind. We climbed more than 3,000 feet and six miles to the Stuart Peak saddle, the last two miles up wallowing without snowshoes in more than two feet of fresh powder. His feet went numb from the trail-breaking and we decided to turn around, and even then just made it back before dark, drenched in sweat, with temperatures plummeting toward the single digits. And even after all that, he still wanted to go back out in it today.

Since we hiked on Saturday, I suggested snow-biking today. It's even harder to stay warm on a bike than it is on foot, but Beat was admirably excited about the adventure. We took Pugsley and my single-speed Karate Monkey, which has studded 29" tires. We had one pair of pogies and new mittens, socks and balaclava that he just purchased at REI yesterday.

I thought we'd go out for two hours, three tops. We rode up Butler Creek Canyon on a road that had only seen extremely light snowmobile traffic since the beginning of winter. There wasn't much consolidation to speak of. It was hard work on the Pugsley and impossible on the singlespeed.

As we walked, the air started to clear, until we were bathed in sunlight. Smiles broke out and the layers came off. It still wasn't warm by any stretch of the imagination, but pushing bicycles up a medium grade through soft snow for thousands of vertical feet is hard work. Really hard work. Snow smothered the trees and the sparkling ice and light made for incredible scenery. We were downright giddy. This of course meant we had to keep climbing.

Just before we reached the top of the Snowbowl ridge, we ditched the bikes because the snow was ankle to shin-deep, completely unridable even on the descent. In front of us, drenched in late-afternoon sunlight, was Point Six, an 8,000 foot peak that looms a full 5,000 vertical feet above Missoula. Having ridden a bike up there before, once, I announced that "we can probably reach the peak by sunset."

I had forgotten that, by road, Point Six was still at least another four or five miles away. We began winding up the meandering path through the wind-drifted sugar, punching through to our shins, sweating and struggling and gasping even though I was only able to achieve a moving speed of about 1.5 mph.

Here Beat is in the midst of the slog, on one of the wind-scoured - and therefore harder packed - stretches of road. We were moving slow. I was exhausted, because I've spent a lot of time on my feet this week, wearing an ankle brace and overworking all of the other muscles in an effort to baby my sprained (but healing nicely) ankle as much as possible. I went into full-on endurance mode for a little while - mind shut off, plodding, one foot in front of the other.

The sun set and although we had walked for two hours since we left the bikes, we still hadn't gotten all that much closer to Point Six. We veered off the road and picked our way up to the very tip top of Snowbowl, were we could still stand near 8,000 feet elevation and look out over the Rattlesnake, the Missions, and the glowing city lights of Missoula. At our rate of speed, it would have taken us at least two more hours just to reach Point Six, and we were both low on food, and both dealing with frozen water issues. After all, we were out for a "two-hour ride" that was already becoming closer to seven or eight.

We ran straight down the mountain, kicking up clouds of powder as we slid toward the city lights. It took us about 20 minutes to undo more than 2 hours of climbing, and just like that, we were back at our bikes.

The ride down was fantastic fun. Beat managed to carve nice fresh lines with the Pugsley, but I was all over the place on my singlespeed, using my right foot as a second front wheel to steer through the hardening powder. My erratic lines and intense focus on the road did reveal some cool sights - like these fresh mountain lion tracks. The lion's tracks were laid on top of our uphill tracks, which meant it came through after we did.

It was a bit nippy on the way down - but in my own standard winter fashion (laziness), I wore the exact same clothing without changing, removing or adding layers for the entire seven hours we were out. Nice and toasty on the way up. Brrrr on the way down.

Not a bad "first snowbike ride ever" for Beat: Seven hours, 4,000 feet of elevation gain, about 20 miles of bike pushing, walking and strenuous downhill riding, temperatures in the teens and single digits, soft snow, wind crust, frigid breeze, darkness, and lots of time to dream up great ideas for cold-weather technical gear. It was certainly one of my more epic "little Sunday rides," and went down perfectly.

... it's coming up ... it's coming up ...

About a half mile from Rich Crain’s tent, I rounded the cliffs of the river bend and plunged back into an all-encompassing darkness. I stopped to tighten my seatpost rack and contemplated changing my base layer. There was a strange chill in the air. I couldn’t quite place it. It didn’t feel like bitter cold, frosty or sharp; it was more of a dull, penetrating chill that saturated the air. I looked up at the starless sky and felt tiny needles of moisture bouncing off my nose and cheeks. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was raining.

Rain! Rain wasn’t good. How often does it rain in Southcentral Alaska in February? I had planned for blizzards, I had planned for outer-space-like cold, I had planned for snow and ice and even sunlight, but I hadn’t planned on rain. The light drizzle picked up volume until large droplets were bouncing of my ultra-breathable — and therefore minimally water-resistant – shell. The trail’s thin crust began to break apart. I could feel my tires churning up slush, and then the bike stopped moving. I pushed it several dozen yards and tried to ride again, laboring and churning up slush until the wheels seized. I stopped, and then tried to pedal, then stopped again, and again and again.

Yellow stakes veered up the riverbank and into the woods. I knew without a doubt that I was back on the same trail I had ridden in the early afternoon. But it was the same trail only in location; it no longer bore any resemblance to the smooth, icy path I had ridden earlier in the day. It had become a quagmire, swept with gray slush and occasional puddles of standing water. Ski and snowmobile tracks carved irregular ruts across the trail. My own wheels knifed into the trail like warm butter; riding was impossible. As I walked, I occasionally punched shin-deep postholes into the soft snow. The rain kept pouring down, like spray from an unseen waterfall, cold and endless.

There is a place, a windswept plain between the Susitna River and Flathorn Lake, known as Dismal Swamp. As I pushed my bike, the bleak blank landscape sucked every last ounce of hope and joy out of my being, like a mystical crossing where the name isn’t ironic, it’s an actual warning. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The sloshing sound of my feet through the slush was maddening. I stopped when I couldn’t bear to listen to it any more. My legs throbbed with a low roar of pain. My feet were wet and hot where blisters were forming. My throat was raw and tingling from breathing so hard for so long. I hadn’t eaten anything since the frozen Power Bar six or seven hours earlier. I felt more ill than hungry, so I didn’t even consider eating anything else. Instead, I sat down in the snow and gazed at the bleak blank sky. A stream of cold water trickled down my spine. I held up my gloves and noticed they were dripping rainwater. So was my coat. My legs felt clammy and cold. I was officially, thoroughly soaked. The wet clothing did nothing to block the frigid wind from chilling my skin. I burrowed deeper into the drift beside the trail. I wanted someone to come rescue me, to whisk me away from this hopeless place. But I hadn’t seen a single other person besides Rich Crain since I left Luce’s Lodge. The chill seeped into my core. I started to shiver. Logic began to frantically wave at me from behind the hazy veil of my bonked daze. I knew I could abandon hope all I wanted, but I wasn’t going to last long being completely wet in 35-degree rainy weather if I didn’t keep moving. So reluctantly, I stood up.

This is the part where my memory fades to an almost unrecognizable blur. Somewhere in the back of my primordial instincts, I found the strength to keep moving. Moving meant pushing my bike through the slush; nothing less, nothing more. It must have been hard work, because I do remember stopping occasionally to catch my breath and look up at the sky, straining to see stars that I never found. I must have stopped at Flathorn Lake lodge again, since that was the 75-mile checkpoint, although I don’t remember doing so. The checkers must have fed me some of their famous paella, or at least I assume they did, because for a while after Flathorn Lake, my mental images became much clearer. The rain turned to snow. Large chunky flakes fell on my wet clothing and clung to my eyelashes. The “slorp” sound of my footsteps became more of a crunch. Temperatures were turning more favorable, which simply meant they had dropped below freezing again. Would the trail set up? I shivered against the creeping chill. Shadows of black spruce trees plodded beside me. I didn’t want to listen to my footsteps anymore. I took of my wet, snow-covered pack and fished out the little AM/FM radio I brought with me.

I turned the dial, searching for the weather band. I wanted the familiar computer-generated voice to tell me the storm was moving on, the temperatures were falling, and the trail would freeze solid again. I caught a single, static-garbled report that the temperature was still 37 degrees in Wasilla, and then it cut out. I switched to FM. My radio found only one channel, a mainstream pop station out of Anchorage. I walked and listened. They played songs I remembered from high school, cheesy ballads that brought an actual if subdued smile back to my face. They played dance music that pumped life back into my flagging will to live and even prompted me to try to ride my bike again, which usually ended swiftly in swerving, crashing failures. They played the same damn “Yahoo Mat-Su” commercial so many times that I wanted to rip my ice-crusted hair out of my head. And then they played a song I had never heard before.

“It’s coming up … it’s coming up … it’s coming up …” I stopped walking, held my breath, and listened. The music caught my attention in the way certain songs just do sometimes, a consuming blend of surreal melody, mood-matching rhythm and lyrics that spoke to the moment.

“You’ve got to press it on you … you just think it, that’s what you do, baby … hold it down, DARE.”

“DARE” by the Gorillaz. Just another pop song, but it filled my slow march with rush of new meaning. I looked up at the sky and saw the eerie orange glow of Anchorage city lights reflecting off the low clouds. I licked my lips, cracked and crusty, and felt a strange kind of warmth, like a glow, starting from those city lights and seeping all the way to my soul. I pushed a grin through my cracked lips, and then I broke out laughing. I felt amazing; I didn’t think I had ever felt so amazing. I certainly never felt that way before, what I recognize now as endurance euphoria: the out-of-body elation one experiences when one has been so miserable for so long that even the tiniest hits of positive emotion feel like ecstasy.

But because endurance euphoria only hits in the midst of prolonged misery, and because it is accompanied by extreme fatigue and poor nutrition and, in my case, the dangerous edge of hypothermia, it never lasts long. Soon I was back to being miserable again, pushing my bike through the crusty but still-soft slush, screaming at the “Yahoo Mat-Su” commercial but too lonely to risk turning my radio off.

After a seemingly endless number of hours, the sun started to rise over the distant Chugach Mountains. I blinked against its strange ochre light, reflected off the thinning clouds. It meant I had been out there grinding away at the Susitna 100 for nearly a day, an entire day. Not only had I more than doubled the amount of time that I had ever spent engaged in an outdoor activity, but I had exponentially surpassed the amount of stress, fatigue, strain and outright soul-crushing tedium of any single effort I had every experienced. It was, by large degrees, the hardest thing I had ever done. And yet, it wasn’t necessarily getting harder. The dull pain and chill simmered beneath my limbs, but my transformed legs kept walking and my transformed arms kept pushing. Even while every cell in my body begged me to stop, I couldn’t help but wonder how far these new-found, robot-like abilities could take me.

I returned to the dog-mushing park, where the well-used trails had set up in the morning cold, and mounted my bike again. For the first time in more than 25 miles, I was able to pedal for more than a few feet. I figured I couldn’t have more than five or six miles left in the race. Endurance euphoria crept up again, and in my excitement I failed to pay much attention to the yellow stakes that had guided me for 93 miles. After a half hour or so, I realized I hadn’t seen a yellow stake in a while.

I rode forward another mile before deciding I really was on the wrong track. It’s quite common to become lost in an endurance race, especially if you’re me, but this was my first time and I took it badly. I turned around and sprinted back the way I came, fuming with anger and frustration and what suddenly felt like crushing fatigue. I backtracked three miles to another intersection, where there were still no signs of yellow stakes. I got of my bike, laid on the trail, and indulged in a screaming temper tantrum. That was it. I was ready to surrender. My odometer had surpassed 100 miles, and I didn’t care anymore whether I finished the race. The Susitna 100 could claim victory in this battle. I wanted out of this war.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a skier whisk up a parallel trail on the other side of the swamp. I jumped up and followed the skier’s line until I found a yellow stake. I rode two and a half more miles and reached the finish line just after 10 a.m. I stared in disbelief at my surroundings — a tiny warming hut, a crowded parking lot, and a sallow-faced race director standing in the snow with a clipboard. It was the same scene I had left 25 hours earlier, but somehow had become irreparably different. Geoff ran up to me and wrapped his arms around me. He snapped another picture and I tried to smile. My face felt frozen, my soul drained. I couldn't think of any words to say, except "I did it." Through my raspy voice, they echoed with a strange sort of hollowness. Somehow, some way, I was going to eventually have to accept that I finished the Susitna 100.

…. To be continued (Yes, I’m working up to a point, but it’s fun to write a long rambling race report first.)

... it's coming up ... it's coming up ...

This is the continuation of my story of the 2006 Susitna 100.

Morning light had not yet fully emerged at the 9 a.m. race start, although it was difficult to discern beneath the thick clouds that filled the sky. Snow reflected the dull gray, black spruce trees stuck out of the drifts like skewers, and the only thing that broke the winter silence was a tight cluster of about 60 skiers, cyclists and runners, perched at the edge of a colorless infinity.

Geoff’s race didn’t start until 11 a.m., so he buzzed around shooting photographs. I was so nervous that I couldn’t bear to smile at him or even glance at anyone else. I stared at my feet and legs, wrapped in what looked like a moon suit, and tried not to think about the alien landscape that lay ahead. Suddenly, I heard the dry crackle of tires on cold snow. I looked up and watched the other cyclists launch toward a narrow corridor that cut into a tangle of trees. Skiers and runners nudged around me. Like a diver who waited too long to come up for air, I jolted out of my daze and struggled to join the surge.

The first few miles of the Susitna 100 were routed through a dog mushing park, a tight maze with trails darting off in every direction. I skirted around skiers and runners and spun my heavy legs as fast as I could muster, hoping to catch the pack. Amid a rush of adrenaline, all of my pre-race fear had been replaced by an elated sort of anticipation. “I’m in a race,” I thought, “an actual race!” Everything I had studied about endurance racing prior to the event - the nutrition, the hydration, the pacing - dissolved into the simple novelty of “racing.” I pedaled faster. My blood surged. I attacked hills with no one in front or behind me. I skidded down steep waves of snowmobile moguls as my rear tire bumped loudly against my seat-post rack. The trails were hard-packed, and I managed to put every skier and runner behind me, and catch a few cyclists as well. I felt great. I pounded out the first 10 miles in less than an hour. Snow bike endurance racing was easy.

Then the dog mushing park and surrounding neighborhood trails ended, and just like that, Alaska emerged. Snow drifts stretched across flat, frozen swamps, with only yellow stakes to indicate the presence of a trail. I stepped off my bike and walked through the sugary powder, something I had practiced a lot, so the effort didn’t faze me. A cold wind blew from the direction of solid white mountains in the distance. The humidity was high and the temperature hovered at about freezing, which made the snow covering the trail at once crusty and soft. I pedaled and walked, walked and pedaled. Skiers passed me. Wide bike tracks in the trail indicated most of the cyclists could ride what I could not. I struggled up short, steep climbs. My tires continued to bump against my seatpost rack on every descent. I tried to readjust the rack, but couldn’t position it higher because the saddle was in the way of the gear bag. I finally just decided to gamble that the whole thing wasn’t going to blow apart in the duration of a 100-mile race.

I dropped onto Flathorn Lake and pulled up to the 25-mile checkpoint at 12:45, having covered the first 25 miles in just under four hours. It seemed a decent pace, and if I could hold it, I would reach the finish by 18 hours, my best-case-scenario goal. The inside of the cabin was blissfully warm, and there were homemade brownies and orange slices on a table. I refilled my Camelbak bladder and started gulping down food. Every sugary, gooey, juicy morsel slid down my throat like chunks of heaven. I had never tasted food so fulfilling, so delicious. I had never tasted food in a race before.

When I walked back outside, hints of sunlight were starting to break through the clouds. I rode along the shoreline of the lake until the trail wound back into the forest. I stopped to gaze across the white expanse behind me. A warm, stinging sensation filled my throat - a physical reaction to the sensation of being at once completely at home and completely out of my element. Only the wind broke a lasting silence. A strip of spruce trees lined the horizon, carving a thin black brush stroke across the white canvas of the lake and Mount Susitna. I had never seen such a place before, a place so beautiful and so surreal, a place so distant from the din of modern life that it seemed frozen in time. Sugar and endorphins surged through my blood and I didn’t know whether to cry or sing. But I remembered that I had already made a decision to race, so I turned and pedaled into the woods.

I crossed the Susitna River at mile 33. Across the frozen white corridor, a gray figure moved along a stand of trees. I squinted as the figure stopped briefly. I saw the shine of eyes, then it turned and darted into the woods. A wolf? A lynx? What else could it be? The warm, stinging sensation filled me again. This was not my place, this was the place of skulking moose and prowling predators. This was their home, and my presence in it meant nothing to them. The realization filled me with a sense of meaningfulness, because the world was so big and I was so small.

Back in the woods, two snowmobiles passed me and churned up the soft trail ahead. Where I had been riding slowly before, I was again reduced to walking. A skier caught up to me, and we moved together for a while - he could do little more than carve parallel tracks in the sand-like snow, which matched my pushing-riding-pushing pace. We chatted a bit, words I no longer remember. He stopped at Eaglesong and I decided to keep going. I wanted to make it to Luce’s Lodge by dinnertime. The trail between the two checkpoints was only a connector created specifically for the race. It was narrow and not very well packed. I walked and pedaled, pedaled and walked. I gnawed on Power Bars which, despite the mild temperatures, were frozen solid. Chocolate-flavored saliva bubbled out of my mouth as I tried to chew.

Darkness fell as I reached Luce's Lodge, at about 6 p.m. I was beginning to feel woozy and decided to skip the spaghetti dinner I had planned to eat at the checkpoint. The warmth inside the building added to my wooziness, so I made a quick exit. A skier on the porch was removing his hat as I stepped outside. His face and hair gave him an uncanny resemblance to a friend of mine back in Utah, Curt. "Hi Curt," I blurted out before I caught myself. The skier shot me a blank stare and without another word, I rushed away.

"Wow, I must really be out of it," I thought as a hurried down the hill, back to the cold darkness of the Yentna River. My mind played backward through the slow march of the day. I had been racing for nine hours and traveled 53 miles across a remote expanse of frozen river valleys. Nine hours was as long of a day of cycling as I had ever put in. Two of my training rides were eight hours long, and once three years earlier I rode for nine hours straight during a cross-country bicycle tour. But this effort was beyond anything I had ever experienced, and I was only halfway done. I smiled with a sense of supreme satisfaction.

Out on the river, the once-expansive landscape dissolved to the flickering beam of my single headlamp. I strained to pick out the yellow Su100 stakes amid the black void. I was terrified of losing them, as though they were the only thing tethering me to Earth. The river was too wide to see either side, and the darkness beyond my headlamp beam was all unknown. I was a tiny island amid an ocean of emptiness. I might as well have been pedaling on the Bering Sea.

My breath felt strangely labored, my lungs and throat raw. I stared at the yellow island in front of me and wondered what being in this race really meant. Venturing beyond the safety of urban development into a wilder region of the Last Frontier had been a fantastic adventure, but the Susitna 100 was more than that. When I looked down at my hands, wrapped in gray neoprene, I saw hands capable of piloting a bicycle across frozen swamps and over snow-covered hills. When I looked at my legs and feet, hidden beneath wide overboots, I saw limbs that could propel my body no matter how tired my mind might become. When my breath swirled in front of me, I saw distant shadows of myself, the shadows of fear and doubt and insecurity, dissolving into the cold air. And when I glanced behind me, I saw the empty expanse that I had somehow managed to cross, under my own power, with my own gumption. With every passing mile I was transforming, from "just Jill" to something else entirely - a racer, perhaps.

Up ahead, a bright circle of light broke the darkness. I grinned and pedaled toward it. The soft snow on the trail kept my speed to a minimum - 5, maybe 6 mph on my odometer. But I was pedaling. The distant light flickered and glistened. Minutes passed, and then miles. Then an hour passed. Uneasiness began to gnaw at my confidence. The light didn't seem to be getting any closer. I did feel pretty out of it. Was I moving at all, or in the midst of my excitement had I somehow forgotten to pedal? I looked down at my odometer. It still registered miles passing. I squinted toward the light and sighed. There was nothing I could do but keep on pedaling.

Two hours passed between the time I first noticed the light and the moment I finally pedaled toward an open canvas tent, a generator and a small fire right on top of the river ice. In that time, I had traveled just over eight miles on infuriatingly flat and wide river ice. The checkpoint was perched at the intersection of the Yentna and Susitna rivers, and designed to point competitors in the right direction, so they didn't end up miles the wrong way down the Susitna. In my excitement at seeing the tent, I veered off on the wrong snowmobile trail and had to push my bike through a quarter mile of knee-deep snow to return to the right trail. As I slogged toward the tent, a man waved wildly at me as though I hadn't yet figured out I had gone the wrong way. He introduced himself as Rich Crain and dished me up a cup of lukewarm soup without me even asking. I sipped the soup and asked him about the trail ahead.

"It's all stuff you've done before now," he said. "You're back on the lollipop stick. Might snow tonight. Shouldn't be too bad. You only have about 35 miles left to go."

I pumped my fist and waved goodbye to Rich. I had made it all the way back to the Susitna River, and everything in front of me was terrain I had seen before, which I already knew was mostly good trail. I grinned because I felt like I had the Susitna 100 nearly in the bag. I didn't yet realize that my race was just getting started.

To be continued ...