Susitna 4, chapter 3

The first person I saw out of Luce's Lodge was a runner. I could see his white headlight bobbing up and down from a long distance up the river, and smiled at the realization that he was actually running. This made sense, as he was more than twenty miles in front of me. I did some quick math and realized he was on a sub-24-hour pace, moving with forceful speed — or at least as much speed as this soft trail would yield. In all the years of the Susitna 100, 24 hours has only been broken by a few people. When we finally crossed paths more than five minutes later, I realized he was my friend, David Johnston. I raised my poles and waved my pogies around. "Yay, Dave!"

Dave stopped running. "Is that you Jill?"

"Yeah."

"You're doing awesome!" he exclaimed.

"I'm doing awesome? Holy cow, you're doing awesome," I said, feeling embarrassed that Dave was actually stopping to talk to me. "You should go, you're in first place!"

Dave waved his arm. "Aw, I don't care. I just can't wait to get back to Luce's. I have a beer waiting for me there."

"Sounds, um, relaxing," I laughed. "Hey, thanks for stopping to chat. I enjoy passing everyone like this on this course."

"My favorite part is seeing everyone," he said with his characteristic grin. "The rest just hurts bad with many mental sacrifices."

I laughed again and waved as he continued running. I admit I enjoy being involved in sports that are still small and quirky enough that even the race leaders still stop to chat and guzzle beers. Not that there's no competition in the Susitna 100. Dave still had Joe Grant hot on his trail, and would have to continue to make mental sacrifices all the way to his 24:11 finish.

Boosted by more friendly faces, I made good time to Alexander Lake, the turnaround point and mile 53 of the race. The bottoms of my feet had been simultaneously aching and burning, so I pulled off my socks to do another foot check. The skin looked like it belonged to a dead person — ghastly white and wrinkled deep into my foot. There was a patch of gray on both heels. Trench foot. I couldn't decide how to proceed. I had only one more pair of dry liner socks that I was going to save for my second Luce's stop. If I removed my insulation socks, my feet were going to slide around in the size ten shoes and probably blister badly in the process. And if I removed my vapor barrier, I was going to expose my soaking wet feet to the cold — now 13 degrees and rapidly dropping beneath the clearing sky. I slathered on more Hydropel and ate my soup slowly in hopes my liner socks would dry some.

I checked out of Alexander Lake at 1:38 a.m., about ten minutes after another woman foot racer, Jane. I still wanted to travel by myself, but I felt better about being in the proximity of another person, now that there were fewer people to encounter on the inbound trip. As much as I relish in my chances for solitude, I still value the presence of other people — which is one of the reasons I enjoy racing. And because the Susitna 100 was a race, I admit I realized that Jane and I were in second and third position at that point, and I didn't have to concede second just yet.

Jane's red blinking light provided a navigation point as I traced the trail back across a series of frozen swamps. At the first long straightaway, I turned off my headlamp and caught my first glimpse of the aurora borealis. As my eyes adjusted, the soft white blur sharpened into a masterpiece of light, tinged with streaks of green and magenta. I shed a few tears at the overwhelming beauty before I became lost in it. Time seemed to stop, and Earth stood still as the lights pulled me inward. I was mesmerized, listening to the distant echo of my own footsteps as my mind freely danced with the sky.

The Northern Lights are so much more dynamic than their depictions in photos and films. Columns and shapes pulsed and expanded like rapid brush strokes, painting multi-dimensional images that instantaneously blended into new brush strokes. The transition was so seamless that it almost appeared static, until suddenly the circle I had been watching became an arch, and then a elliptical stream stretched across the star-speckled sky. I believed I could see the universe expanding in front of me, as though a thousand light years were passing in the space of a thousand footsteps. I had never experienced Northern Lights with such encompassing depth, and it occurred to me that the fact my body was so exhausted helped open my mind to the surreal intensity of it all. There was also the simple fact that the whole reason I was out here at all, fifty miles from the nearest road at 2 a.m., was because I had crazy hobbies like the Susitna 100. I smiled at the sheer providence of finding myself in the right place at the right time, which often seems to be the place I find myself whenever I leave the confines of my comfort zone.

In an seeming instant, I was back at Luce's Lodge. I had walked most of twelve miles with my headlamp off and neck craned toward the sky, only occasionally switching on the yellow light to gain my bearings, or trace out the trail once I lost Jane's blinking red beacon after stopping too long to take photos. It was a truly special experience that I can scarcely piece together now, and any descriptions I write appear rather weak. But I'm beyond thankful I was there to witness it — slow enough to be there, fit enough to be there, crazy enough to be there.

Released from my aurora trance, I returned to a world where my feet hurt and the rest of me was becoming increasingly tired. I crossed paths with Danni about two miles after I left Alexander Lake, and figured there was a chance she might catch me, but I should probably count on spending the rest of the race alone. I also noticed my wet toes were beginning to feel pangs of cold. I checked my thermometer and saw the temperature had dropped to five below. A thin fog had settled over the river, masking the remnants of the aurora. It was 6 a.m., and I still had 35 more miles in front of me.

Sustina 4, chapter 2

The week before the Susitna 100, Danni participated in a ski mountaineering race in British Columbia. When I commented on the intensity required in a race like that, Danni said, "It is a different challenge than just putting your head down and letting time go by." I considered her accurate summary of the Su100 as I shuffled through a thick layer of wind-swept powder across the Dismal Swamp. It wasn't all that long ago in human history that marching was a harsh necessity of war, or an outright punishment. What is it about modern life that has turned long marches into a hobby, even a pleasurable one? One might postulate that our first-world lives are simply too convenient and easy, while our biological makeup still thrives on physical labor and struggle. Since I consider myself more of an artist than an athlete, I suspect a desire to peel away the agglomeration of our modern lives in order to obtain a better view of our basic selves. I am never more basic than when I am alone in the wilderness, walking.

In the irony of basic human nature, the tougher the situation I find myself in, the more emotionally fragile I become. By mile 27, I had been on the move for nearly eight hours. My hip muscles were already sore from the effort of pulling the sled. The arches of my feet ached and I often had to clench my toes to stretch the tendons. The day's cold had been mild but the sun was beginning to set, and I could feel wisps of chilled air across my skin. Danni and I left Flathorn Lake together but our comfortable paces were a little bit different, and I found myself ahead. My first strike of loneliness hit as I wended through a narrow strip of forest beyond the swamp and reached the bank of the Susitna River. Race officials had placed a sign marking the "Wall of Death," a short but icy and steep headwall that often catches bikers and skiers unaware. For the marchers, it's just a hundred feet of trail in a hundred miles, almost not worth noting, but I paused at the top all the same.

I was hit with a vivid memory of the minutes after my emotional meltdown in the 2011 Sustina 100. I crawled to the top of the Wall of Death and found Beat at the top with his sleeping pad laid out on the snow, and a spread of chocolate and other snacks on top. It was his peace offering after I had reamed him out for lecturing me about time cutoffs when I was feeling sick and demanded he leave me alone. One year later, the memory met me with a smile, and I wanted so much for Beat to be here with me so we could have our junk food picnic on top of the Wall of Death. Tears started to fall into my open grin, and I consoled myself with all of the mushy nonsense that the tough exterior of my non-basic self would usually squash. But no one was here to see me gush, so I gushed, relishing in the empowering acknowledgement of strong love.

I dropped onto the Susitna River and started jogging, a snowshoe-laden shuffle that I doubted was any faster than my walking speed. But in that moment I was so filled with joy that I had to find some way to express it. I don't sing and I was much too anchored by snowshoes and a sled to dance, so I ran. The horizon greeted me with a fortress of mountains, drenched in the pink light of sunset. It was so simply beautiful that I started bawling all over again. Mountains! Snow! Alaska! My basic self needs little to be happy.

I munched on deep-space rocket fuel and squinted at figures coming toward me from the distance. The lead bikers. I had been expecting them. The current out-and-back course of the Susitna 100 allows me to see nearly every other person in the race as they pass. As I was achieving mile thirty, the lead bikers were nearing mile eighty. They'd be done within three hours, before it was even late. I knew I had more than 24 hours in front of me, and laughed at the thought of what they must think of me and the other foot racers.

I had an idea because I've been a cyclist in this race before. Even with my "skinny tire" mountain bike, I'd never been beaten by foot racer, even the course record holder (my ex-boyfriend, Geoff, who ran the Su100 in 2007 as his first 100-mile ultra in 21:43, a time I can not fathom.) Back then, I thought the foot racers were kind of quirky, to say the least. The former lollipop course meant I never even saw them. They were the ghosts of the Sustina 100, haunting the quiet hours long after most everyone else had finished and gone to bed.

But perspectives shift, and now, five years later, I enjoyed being a ghost on the trail. The new out-and-back course makes it much less lonely. Once I turned onto the Yentna River, I could see a parade of white lights moving toward me, sparse but consistent all the way to Luce's Lodge. I reached the 41-mile checkpoint twelve hours and fifteen minutes after the start, at 9:15 p.m. As far as I could remember, that was at least an hour before the time I checked in to Luce's Lodge last year. I was already moving faster. Still, I vowed to keep my promise of minimal checkpoint time. I wanted to be at Luce's for a half hour at the most. I ordered a quick grilled cheese sandwich and ripped off my gators and multi-layered sock system for a liner sock change. Although I hadn't felt much pain while walking on the river, my feet looked like they were in bad shape. Some of my toenails were flaking, and I had several small blisters on my toes. The skin on my soles was white and deeply wrinkled, a symptom of being soaked in sweat for twelve hours. I had wondered if the outside temperature was too warm for my vapor barrier system, but I was so concerned about fending of frostbite that I figured, "feet can't be too warm." Apparently, they can. But at this point, my shoes were soaked from the snow, my insulation socks were soaked, and I had no choice but to stick with the vapor barrier or risk the combination of wet and cold.

"Ah, how much worse can it get?" I thought. I still had 59 miles to go. 

Susitna 4, chapter 1

After 55 miles, my steps had a sort of rhythm to them, a dance. I could see Jane's red taillight blinking several hundred meters directly across the frozen swamp, so I felt safe in turning off my own headlight. Cast away from that comfortable island of light, my eyes began to adjust to the delicate contrast of gray on black. All of my senses sharpened. I could taste the moist air — almost sweet, and cold ... zero degrees and dropping. I could feel the hot prickling on the pads of my feet that I had been trying so hard to ignore, so I clenched my toes and walked faster. The moonless night opened like a door in front of me, and my peripheral vision caught a flash of silver. I glanced north and for the first time noticed columns of light rising from the boreal forest, high into an indigo sky. Tinged with subtle hints of green and magenta, light streaks rippled across the horizon and dissipated into a glowing arch. My exhausted mind conjured the image of a great symphony. Fingers of light extended from the arch like the bows of string instruments, glowing forms took the shape of flutes and trumpets, and colors rippled like sound waves — only the night was entirely silent. The only noise in this alien world was the rhythm of my steps, a lone dancer accompanied by an orchestra of light. I was dancing with the sky, moving in harmony with the aurora borealis, and the exhilaration of it all filled me with such a strong burst of emotions that my eyes filled with tears.

I was crying, again. I had cried several times in this race. The first tears fell when I descended the "Wall of Death" where Beat made a picnic for me during last year's race; returning to that spot made me think about how much he meant to me. The second tears came as I climbed over an ice shelf on the Susitna River and glimpsed the pink light of the setting sun splashed across the mountains of the Alaska Range. Now I was crying over the Northern Lights. Three times during the Sustina 100 I had reduced myself to a blubbering mess, and the race was only half over. And yet, I was halfway into this incredibly difficult hundred-mile foot expedition, and the only emotion that had gotten the better of me was extreme happiness. Instead of suffering and pain, beauty had become the one thing I could scarcely endure.

Ever since I signed up for the 2012 Sustina 100, I had been grappling for a tangible reason for exactly why I wanted to go back and race this particular course on foot. I had taken on this challenge last year with Beat, and we finished together in 41:16. A part of me feels like I should try different things, visit different places. A larger part of me knows what a slog this race really is — that traveling on snow is similar to running a hundred miles up a moderately steep incline in terms of effort, and dragging a 25-pound sled nearly equals the difficulty of something entirely self-supported. When I picked the steepest 50K courses I could find in the Bay Area to train for the Susitna 100, I coud only lament that these training races weren't hard enough. Completing the Susitna 100 on foot is really hard. I had this opinion at least partly validated when elite ultrarunner Joe Grant approached me after the race and admitted he had no idea what a slog the Sustina 100 would turn out to be. Joe finished in a smoking-fast 26 hours and 14 minutes. I can only imagine how fast runners might view this 100-mile time as disappointing. 

Still, I really wanted an excuse to return. I was happy when my friend Danni admitted she also wanted to sign up for Susitna 100 again. I figured if Danni could go back, I could go back. Danni made it to mile 85 last year and wanted redemption this year. I guess the act of racing makes us all feel like we have something to prove, and I decided my 2012 goal would be a 36-hour finish. I didn't convey this goal to anyone, because it was an aggressive ambition for someone like me — fairly new to the sport, couldn't train specifically for the conditions, and planned to set out alone without any support from Beat this time. But I knew it was achievable in most trail conditions if I could stick to an infallible plan — average three miles per hour on the move and limit my checkpoint downtime to three hours. My secret plan involved snowshoes to make me impervious to changing trail conditions, and a determined walking pace that I could maintain indefinitely. I knew I needed to avoid the trap of running more than a couple hundred meters at a time, and even then just to shake out the walking muscles. Remember those old Looney Tunes episodes where one cartoon character holds onto the suspenders of another as the hapless victim unknowingly scrambles in place in a futile effort to get away? That is exactly what running on snow with a 25-pound sled feels like to me. It's a massive energy drain that nets frustratingly little gain in speed. Some runners can handle this energy drain. I, well, I wanted more happy moments than agony if I could manage it.

Danni and I spent a relaxing night in a hotel on Lake Lucille in Wasilla, where we could see Sarah Palin's house (but strangely, we could not see Russia.) The weather in Southcentral Alaska had been warm — near or even above freezing — since we arrived, and Saturday morning in Wasilla was no different. I groaned as we fired up the rental car and the thermometer read 29 degrees. "It's going to be a massive slush fest," I grumbled. The softer snow becomes, the harder the trail makes us work. So you can imagine how Danni and I both squealed with audible delight as we made our way twenty miles west toward Point McKenzie and watched the thermometer plummet to six degrees, then two, then zero. In the strange phenomenon of Alaska weather, this isolated pocket of cold air was sitting exactly where it needed to be. This was a good omen, a good omen indeed.

The race launched and I immediately broke my promise to myself by running, hard. The whole field was running and I didn't want to get caught way off the back, so I quickened my stride and sucked down single-digit air as my heart rate shot to the 170s. The snowshoes were still strapped to the back of my sled. My face was coated in frozen sweat but my smile was as wide as the expansive valley in front of me. It was a beautiful frosty morning, the sun was out, and I was running in Alaska. No matter that I had nearly exhausted the high burners with 96 miles in front of me. I wanted to run while it still felt good to run.

Those early miles — after the endorphins settled in but before the toxins started to accumulate — were pure bliss. I relished in the simple movements that I knew were capable of carrying me a hundred miles across this land. The reclining profile of Mount Susitna loomed in a distance I knew I would have to not only close, but travel far beyond, and back. There was a certain satisfaction to the audacity — choosing a difficult place to go and the most difficult way of getting there. I no longer try to justify the ridiculousness of it all, only point out that this is the general direction of modern achievement. We still need to look inside ourselves and excavate the stuff we're made of, even if are the proverbial cartoon caracter with a hook attached to our suspenders.

I've also compared the Susitna 100 to a nicotine patch for the little-known but crazy-potent Iditarod addiction. Like many who have been out there before, I yearn to return. The Su100 course on foot is beautiful and difficult enough to get my fix without venturing down the more dangerous and exhaustive rabbit hole of the longer stuff. I'm excited for Beat and his chance at the 350 miles to McGrath starting this coming Sunday, but I feel apprehensive as well. So much so that I spent some of the quiet hours of the Sustina 100 thinking about it.

About three miles from the first checkpoint, I caught up to Danni. We had both run a fair number of those first miles in an effort to make the first cut-off, which in my opinion is unreasonably tight at seven hours for 22 miles that happen be the hilliest of the entire course. We had both stressed over making this cut-off, but arrived at Flathorn Lake by 2:45 p.m. with an hour and fifteen minutes to spare. The afternoon was becoming warm and we were both excited and feeling good. Of course, we had a long way to go, but our doubts were beginning to fade into the background.