The White Mountains 100

At the pre-race meeting, Beat joked that our race numbers were actually the times we were expected to finish within. His race number was 47. Mine was 18. "The only way I'm finishing in under 18 hours is if something amazing happens," I replied. The White Mountains 100 took me 22:38 to finish last year. Last year contained "near-perfect" trail conditions. This year, I was told to expect more "mashed potatoes" and soft trails. Last year followed at least some specific snow bike training; this year contained single-minded running focus followed by a month of recreational mountain biking. And I was by no means in "serious" mode for this race (and my most serious race mode is honestly not even all that serious.) I was going to hang back with Beat for a bit. I was going to take photos, and enjoy my checkpoint meals, and generally just relish in my spring tour of Interior Alaska. What's the rush?

I don't have time for a full race report right now (don't worry; that will come.) But here's the Cliff Notes version:

1. I did carry my bivy kit and heavy down coat in the race, and was one of only three or four cyclists to do so. I estimate my bike/kit including food and water weighed about 55 pounds. I honestly felt silly given the conditions and support infrastructure of the race, and was audibly cursing my overpacked state for the last six miles. But, you know, whatever.

2. Despite my plan to "run" with Beat for the first mile or so, I couldn't keep up with the runners while pushing my bike and actually spend a short period of time at the very back of the race.

3. After initial struggle to pass the back-of-pack on the churned-up mashed-potato trail, I started to feel really strong and had a ton of fun on the steep rolling hills surrounding Beaver Creek.

4. It was a warm day, in the mid-30s, which did soften up the trails even more.

5. I was climbing really well. All of the hills that I was barely able to push my bike up last year, I was able to ride up this year, despite softer trail conditions. I rode nearly the entire way up the Cache Mountain Divide, a 12-mile climb to 3,500 feet. I attribute this newfound climbing strength to running.

6. The ride down the Cache Mountain Divide was more difficult and physically taxing than the climb, thanks to the churned up trails full of deep trenches, soft snow mounds and postholes. I crashed four times, once into a tree well that took me nearly five minutes to extricate myself.

7. I was really stoked to ride the third leg, Windy Gap to Borealis, during the daylight. I gawked at the gorgeous craggy canyon and zipped along the narrow, winding trail. I rode 20 miles in 2 hours and 20 minutes. Last year, this exact same section of the race took me 4:10 to complete.

8. It started snowing as I left the Borealis cabin, mile 80, at about 8:45 p.m. Despite fairly heavy snowfall, I let myself believe that continuing at the same strong pace I had been able to hold during the first 80 miles would put me into the finish around 16 hours.

9. I experienced one of the deeper bonks of my life at mile 94 as I started up the Wickersham Wall, a single fall-line climb that gains 800 feet in less than a mile. It was a strange sort of bonk - not woozy and nauseated, but rather completely red-lined in my lowest gear (pushing.) Even slow steps took me over my perceived maximum. I'd take 15 steps and feel like I was about to explode, then stop to calm my breathing and heart rate. I felt really lousy. Still, I was able to eat. During my three-hour-long extreme bonk, I was able to take in about 600 calories, and the food itself didn't upset my stomach (only the pushing.) During the race, I consumed most of the 2,500 calories I brought with me, on top of meals provided by the race organization. I have theories about this bonk that I'll delve into deeper soon, but I don't believe it was necessarily calorie-related. Still, it was awful. I pushed my bike, slowly, the entire last six miles. It was all I was capable of.

10. I still finished the race in 17:55, which is still less than 18 hours and a time I'm quite pleased with despite the end-of-race meltdown. The bonk kept me low-energy for the next 24 hours, but I otherwise have no negative after-effects from the race. I wasn't even sore. It was a fantastic experience. More to come. In the meantime, here are a few pictures:

Julie Malingowski rides through a burn area on the Wickersham Dome in the early miles of the race.

Somebody, perhaps race volunteers on snowmachines, built this awesome snow sculpture on top of the Cache Mountain Divide.

Brian Garcia approaches the top of the Cache Mountain Divide.

My favorite section of the race: Windy Gap to Borealis. Fast, fun, and fantastically gorgeous.

Beat and his new friend, Kevin, walk the final miles of the race on Monday evening. Beat finished on foot in 35 hours and 41 minutes, and awesome accomplishment. We're so grateful to the White Mountains 100 organizers and volunteers for putting on this incredible race. I really love it. More to come.

Yeah, we're going down

The trip to the starting line was mostly a quiet one. Ed, who was both the race co-director and a participating skier, was at the wheel of his old truck; I was the wide-eyed passenger fixated on the thick ice covering the road. The last structures of the greater Fairbanks area faded in the side-view mirror, causing me to breathe a nervous sigh. I always get this feeling when I know I'm close to the northernmost reaches of civilization, whether I'm in central Ontario or standing on the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay — just realizing I could draw a straight line north and likely hit nothing but trees or ice all the way to the North Pole fills me with a primal sort of wonder, and fear.

Dawn was slow to approach. The whole sky was cast in a pale violet light that seemed fixed in time, as though sunrise wasn't coming. I felt anxious, but not in the ways I expected to — not really at all about the race. I hadn't really trained and wasn't emotionally invested in whether or not I finished. Honestly, I didn't care. Racing bicycles on the snow was such a trivial thing in the wider context of my life, which was in the process of turning upside down. I had quit my well-established job to strike out on my own with a rather vague plan based on travel and freelance writing. I was moving away from my comfortable routine and beautiful familiar places in Juneau to the bustling urban culture shock of Anchorage. But I had a book project I was excited about, and a sense that if I was willing to take a chance on the unknown, good things would follow. I was set to leave Juneau for good on April 1.

It was the first day of spring, March 21, but the prolonged subarctic winter defied any hope of new life. Ed nodded toward the thermometer on his dashboard, which measured the outside temperature as we rolled north. There was a thick inversion that morning, holding the cold air close to the ground. When we left the house it was just above zero degrees, which I felt OK about, but as we dipped into low-lying valleys, the gauge quickly dropped to -11, and -14 and then -17. For the first time that morning, a different sort of nervousness started to creep in — anxiety about survival. It had been a mild winter in Juneau, and -17 was quite a bit colder than anything I had experienced that season. I wasn't trained for this sort of thing, and I wasn't acclimated. I could only hope I was prepared.

The quiet persisted, along with the violet dawn. Frosted birch and spruce trees streamed past. The radio, which had been fading in an out, crackled on again for a bit, broadcasting a pop station out of Fairbanks. "All the Right Moves" by OneRepublic came on. A couple verses passed before Ed, with his own style of understated humor, sang faintly along with one of the lines in the lyrics: "Yeah, we're going down."

I looked at him and laughed. "Maybe I'm reading too much into this whole thing," I thought. "Maybe I should just stop obsessing about unemployment and Anchorage and all of the things I'll miss about Juneau. Maybe I can just sit back and have some fun."

And the race really was fun. From the steep climbs and descents, to the beautiful mountain scenery, to the challenging overflow obstacles, to the incredible camaraderie among organizers and participants, the White Mountains 100 really was the most fantastic fun I've ever had in a single race. In the later miles I struggled with the cold and a bit of knee pain, but I genuinely never felt unhappy about any part of it. I finished the race in 22 hours and 38 minutes. Afterward, I reflected on that overwhelming positive feeling in my race report:

"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."

Now I'm going back to the White Mountains 100 under strikingly similar circumstances. At lot in my life has changed and is changing, and I'm filled with positive emotions about it all. The race starts Sunday morning at 9 a.m. Alaska time; this will probably be my last post before the start, so I wanted to post the links to the race pages.

Beat created personal tracking pages for each of us, including a map of the course, comment bubbles that can include short messages from the SPOT units (I have the word "Slogarific" pre-set in mine), and adorable little icons. Beat is going to compete on foot, so his icon is a little runner. Since I'm on a bike, I get a fat bike icon:

And, if my pace slows to a speed not conducive to bike riding, the icon should (in theory) change to a little bike-pushing guy. If you see this, you'll know that things are truly slogarific out there.

What conditions are they expecting for Sunday's race? Trail reports vary widely — I've heard everything from lots of snow and soft to hard-packed and fast. To me, personally, it doesn't matter all that much. I did the entire Susitna 100 on foot so I'm arguably better trained for bike pushing than I am for bike riding, but, at the same time, I'd of course prefer to ride my bike, because that's more fun. Either way, I am really excited. I'm get to ride my bike in Alaska! For 100 miles! We're going down! Yippee!

My tracking page is located at this link.

Beat's page is at this link.

Race updates and information will be posted here.


Beat's disclaimer: The tracking sites might be buggy, I made some last minute changes. They should automatically refresh but hitting the refresh button may help. If it doesn't work with IE, try Chrome (which you should be using anyways!) or some other browser. Things might get slow - sorry I won't be able to watch and fix anything :) There's some filtering going on to remove bogus coordinates, and the site does some calculations to infer how far we traveled - that may be wrong. Go to the SPOT pages for just the locations. The regular SPOT page is at this link.

Friends

My friend Keith has been a lot of things in my life. He and his wife, Leslie, were my first "trail angels" in the 2009 Tour Divide, providing me with shelter and much-needed perspective in the days leading up to the race. He's been my tour guide, my ski mentor, my bicycle dealer, my attached-at-the-wheels partner for a week of mud and suffering in TransRockies, my Thanksgiving dinner host and part of my "second home" in the unlikely but beautiful region of Banff, Alberta. The connection runs deeper as several of Keith's friends have become my friends. I have a what feels like a second (Canadian) family these days. And Keith introduced me to Danni in Montana, who inadvertently introduced me to Beat. It's intriguing the way these simple connections, born of a casual message from a stranger (Leslie wrote me an e-mail one fateful day in June 2009 that began, "I've read your blog ..."), can touch the deepest parts of our lives.

Keith had a four-hour layover at SFO, so I made the morning trip up to San Francisco to have coffee with him. It involved a 45-minute drive in rush-hour traffic on a rain-slicked I-280, a $12 parking fee and a mad dash across three terminals because I was already embarrassed how late I was. Still, all the rushing and hubbub of the airport dissolved as soon as I saw Keith's grinning face in the booth at Peet's Coffee. We had a great visit, talking about grand plans for future adventures and my new life in California.

"I miss Missoula," I said. "But so far, not in the way I expected to. It was beautiful with great trails and big mountains, but I find myself not really thinking about any of that. When I think of Montana, what I miss are the friends I made while I was there. I miss going up to Kalispell to visit Danni and I miss planning big backcountry national park adventures with Dave. I miss the bike adventures and going to movies with my friend Bill. We still chat online. It's not the same, obviously."

In my mobile life, I've had the fortune to make the acquaintance of some great friends, but they're scattered everywhere. There's the high school and college friends that scattered themselves; the ones I still keep in touch with now span the globe. There's the Utah friends who remained — the people I try to see when I'm "home." I have several current friends from past homes — former co-workers in Tooele and Idaho Falls, a former neighbor in Homer, a best friend in Juneau, and a surprising number of "new" friends in Anchorage, several of whom I was able to sit down and laugh with in February as though I'd never left. Then there are my bike friends: my other Canadian family in Whitehorse, Yukon; the "crazy Alaskans" connected by the White Mountains 100 who mostly live in Fairbanks; the enduro-freaks of the mountain biking community — all spread across the West; my Tour Divide friends; my Iditarod friends — several who reside in Europe. And now there are new running friends, and Beat's friends. They're all great people who have helped shape my life. And with the exception of very few, they're all hopelessly far away.

Since I was up north for the morning anyway, I agreed to meet up with a long-ago blog friend for lunch, a man named Shawn. I say long-ago because he and I had quite a bit of contact in my early days of blogging, in 2005 and early 2006. He was a friendly biking enthusiast in Arizona and I was an enthusiastic new Alaskan with an admittedly terrible camera. After commenting on my posts for several months, he wrote to me and offered to send me a Canon Powershot, free of charge. I've long since lost that camera, but it cemented my hobby of photo-documenting all of my outdoor pursuits in life. Shawn had some upsets in his own life, moved to the Bay area, and we lost touch not long after he donated the camera. I wouldn't have even suspected he knew I moved away from Homer, let alone Juneau and Anchorage and Montana, but through the magic of Facebook, he recently discovered I was living in California, and contacted me again.

We agreed to meet up in San Mateo for lunch. We'd never met in person, a strange phenomenon in itself, but in the context of modern life, never having met face-to-face seems to matter as little as a lapse of five years. I remembered Shawn was a foodie, the type who always posted photos of dinners on his blog, so I suspected the lunch would be tasty. I wasn't disappointed. There was a line outside Ramen Dojo at 11 in the morning. He waited in it for 20 minutes so we managed to slip in with the first wave, for a simple but sumptuous bowl of pork and noodles. We talked about biking and sea kayaking, culture and unemployment (Shawn was laid off from his job last year; he is still mulling how to shape the balance of work and life.) Shawn critiqued my chopstick technique. ("I lived in Salt Lake and then small towns — I never had a proper place to learn," I protested.) "Did you know there are 3,500 restaurants in the Bay area?" Shawn said. "You could eat at a different one every night for an entire decade."

We finished up lunch and agreed to meet up sometime for a ride. I left San Mateo with a warm kind of satisfaction — spicy lunch, yes, but also the knowledge that I had met a friend.

I've made a solid effort to taper this week, with only short rides and rest days, but I felt a strong urge to get out for a ride in the afternoon. It was just going to be what has become my routine favorite, the Monte Bello Road and back. But on my way up the road, a mountain biker wearing a helmet cam rode past. He asked me where I was headed. I was too embarrassed to tell him I was riding all the way up to the ridge just to head back down the pavement in an effort to make it a "short" ride ahead of a 100-mile snow bike race in Alaska, so I said, "Maybe Indian Creek to Steven's Creek Canyon."

"Oh, don't ride Indian Creek," he said. "There's a singletrack route that's way better. I'm riding with my dad; he's back a little ways. If you meet us at the backpacker camp, I'll point it out."

After I stopped to put on my jacket, the man's dad caught up and the three of us rode together. They introduced themselves as Jason and Scott. Harsh wind and hail pummeled us along the ridge, and Scott, the dad, made comments about my being hardcore, so of course I had to tell them I was a recent Montana transplant, and the weather, while wet and windy and actually quite cold, was "really not all that bad."

We started down the singletrack, a sideslope path that had been ravaged by the recent hard rains. We had to dodge deep trenches and patches of sticky mud, but that added to the excitement of the swooping descent. We dropped into the lush canyon, which was strewn with debris and deadfall from the recent high winds and heavy rains. Jason sidled up behind me, running his helmet cam, so of course I had to let off the brakes and swoop full-speed around the muddy twists and tight turns. I mean, I *had* to mug for the camera — never mind that it was a fairly reckless way for me to ride mere days before the White Mountains 100. Luckily, I didn't crash.

As we coasted back into town, they gave me the info for their Saturday morning group rides and asked for my e-mail so they could show me some of the "secret stashes" in the region. Scott grinned with the irony of the statement. They're not really secret, but they're known to local mountain bikers in a way that they can only be revealed by other local mountain bikers. Discovery is only possible in the presence of friends.

Then they actually did send me an e-mail tonight. I signed up for their Saturday group. I miss my Thursday Night Ride group in Missoula, but I'm grateful for an opportunity to make new friends.