Iditarod Again, part two

The official start of the Iditarod Trail Invitational is always informal and mildly amusing. Race rules stipulate that competitors only need to hit a handful of checkpoints along the route — how they get there is entirely up to them, as long as it’s under their own power. A large majority of competitors stick to the Iditarod Trail — it’s the only established route. But race veterans have their secret tracks and shortcuts, and occasionally participants will test wild deviations. In 2009, two cyclists diverted from an L-shaped section of the Iditarod Trail to try their luck on the direct line formed by the frozen Kuskokwim River. After fifty miles of increasingly difficult surface conditions, the men hit a dead-end of open water with no other options but to backtrack two days' worth of travel. A pilot who was flying over the Kuskokwim happened to spot the cyclists in this most unlikely location, and landed to make sure they weren’t dying. The pilot offered to shuttle them one by one to McGrath, so they took the ride and scratched from the race. No one has attempted such a bold route deviation since.

 Still, because there’s no required route, most cyclists opt to deviate from the start on a “shortcut” that’s about eight miles longer than the established Iditarod Trail, but includes plowed roads and a power line access trail. Runners, whose top speeds don’t waver much, always stick to the shortest route — which is hillier, more remote, and has a higher chance of soft trail conditions. The official race starting line is simply a banner strung across birch trees on the edge of Knik Lake, an oval-shaped puddle that nearly touches saltwater on the shore of Knik Arm. Knik Lake would never be noticed by anyone were it not officially mile zero of the Iditarod Trail. The race start is same every year: Most of the bikers make a U-turn back toward the road, and all of the runners launch forward across the lake, sprinting as fast as their sleds will allow.

They always run. It’s a race with a “sprint” distance of 350 miles, but everyone launches off the line as though the gun just sounded for a 5K. Mix an explosive release of cortisol with showboating for three dozen spectators, and just about everyone’s fastest speeds in the race take place in the first hundred yards. Reality sets in very shortly thereafter, when the trail takes a sharp turn off the lake to climb a steep embankment. Those who haven’t already stopped to readjust their sleds scramble up the hill like scared cattle, throwing arms and trekking poles into churned powder as they clamor for the lead. At the top of this hill, everyone will be entirely out of breath and finally ready to accept that this is a race of days, not minutes. Paces adjust accordingly.

 Beat and I planned to run our own races rather than try to stick together. He still intended to run the 350-mile distance self-supported and not go inside checkpoints, which would clash with my plan to sleep indoors whenever this option was available. Clashing with these intentions were more deep-set motivations — I was sled-dragging this year to not only experience the trail in a new way, but also to share the experience with Beat, who values his yearly sojourn on the Iditarod Trail possibly more than anything else he does. Still, I understood the difficulty of linking mismatched paces in an environment where motion is our best source of heat, and also the rewards of solitude in a difficult journey, for both of us. I also suspected Beat was conflicted about partnering up, but if Beat wanted to hang out with me, I would gratefully accept his company.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

The small foot division was an eclectic group of familiar faces. Tim Hewitt, the Pennsylvania attorney who had completed the thousand-mile journey to Nome an unprecedented seven times — including fully unsupported in 2013 — was returning for an eighth. His wife, Loreen, was a three-time finisher of the 350-mile race making a second attempt on the full distance. Having stopped in McGrath in 2013, she was determined to see this journey through to the finish, along with their friend Rick Freeman, who called off his first Nome attempt in 2012 (along with everyone else that year). Shawn McTaggart, a recent transplant to Southcentral Alaska, was the only woman to have completed the trek to Nome on foot within the perimeters of the race, and was aiming for a finish on the Northern Route. Anne Ver Hoef, another Anchorage resident and regular participant in the short race, was also aiming for Nome. Steve Ansell joined Beat and me in the California-based contingent. John Logar of West Virginia was back for the full meal deal after completing the trek to McGrath in 2013. Jason Buffington, who the previous year placed well in the cycling division, returned to make an attempt on foot — upending the singularity of being the only veteran to embrace a new mode of travel that year. Jason would eventually team up with Parker Rios in a five-day blitz of the route. There were three rookies — Jason Boon from Minnesota, Carole Holley from Anchorage, and Peter Ripmaster, a fifty-states marathoner from North Carolina who showed up for the 350-mile race with an expedition sled that weighed ninety pounds. And then there was Dave Johnston — an unassuming Susitna Valley local with a knee-length pony tail and a playful demeanor that masked fierce determination. Dave won the previous year’s race in near-record time — a record that many considered untouchable. This year, he intended to break it.

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

Even though Beat and I started at a leisurely pace, by the time I scrambled to the top of the fifty-foot embankment of Knik Lake that should be called “Reality Hill,” my calves were already searing and my hamstrings were alarmingly sore. I brushed this off as “phantom pain” brought on by nervousness, but my sled dragged behind me like a reluctant pet willfully pulling backward, and I had to admit that I was probably undertrained for this effort. California living, while providing ample opportunities for warm January mountain biking and delicious sushi, is not conducive to training for snow-based efforts. Snow, even packed snow, demands different motions and more difficult efforts than one might expect, or remember while training on dirt. Add forty-five pounds of extra weight, and difficulty scales tip toward unsustainable. I’d made some efforts toward improving my strength. I increased my hill training, and frequently set out for jogs/hikes while dragging a two-wheeled bike trailer loaded with seventy pounds of cat litter, which Beat outfitted with disc brakes to add resistance and mimic the effects of snow. These efforts helped, but they didn’t really make me strong enough to drag a loaded sled 350 miles over hills, mountains, and rivers, in the span of a week.

 It’s my belief that women in general have to work harder to build strength for weight-based efforts. Historically men did all of the “man-hauling” in big expeditions, and even today mountaineers and polar explorers are male by a large majority. Women of course are more than capable of the strength for man-hauling — look at all of the women backpackers and firefighters out there. But with less muscle mass and lower body weights, most of us really do have to work harder to achieve the abilities that come more naturally to men. I admittedly did not work for it. I could have been lifting weights, pursing strength-building workouts … but I was having too much fun riding my mountain bike through California’s warm, sunny winter. It was my fault that I did not feel strong. And I still had 349 miles left to pay for my lassitude.

Still, the first miles were too wonderful to lapse into despair, just yet. The day had a crisp beauty, with expanses of sparkling snow and sharply detailed mountains on the horizon. We could see the towering peaks of Denali in high definition, and it was both gratifying and unnerving to realize that this journey would take us on a long arc around this massive mountain. Everyone’s mood was buoyant as the stress drained away and adrenaline remained. A mile from the start, Dave breezed by with a radiant grin on his face. He had walked with his family for a short distance before launching into a steady run — a pace he intended to hold for the remainder of the race. Most of the rest of us marched in single file along the trail, laughing and conversing like friends out for a Sunday stroll. I chatted with Carole, who had a pink skirt and a refreshingly laid-back attitude. We shared stories about our mutual friend, a previous 350-mile finisher who I spent some time riding with in 2008. He had been trying to talk Carole into the ITI for years, but she wasn’t much of a cyclist. “But I like running,” she said. “So I thought, why not try it on foot?”

Carole pulled hard up the many steep hills that ripple across this former glacier moraine of a valley, and I envied her strength and her home court advantage. When I said as much, she promised me she was struggling as well, that her sled had only recently been purchased at REI and she wasn’t yet sure what to do with it. She told me about a near-disaster in the minutes before the race, when a pole attachment broke and she barely fixed it in time to start. She still wasn’t sure whether her repair would hold. I supposed that there was a fair chance that most of us, even the locals, didn’t really know what we were doing out there.

 Except Tim, of course. As of the start, Tim still hadn’t decided whether he’d accompany Loreen for the entire distance, or make an attempt on an achievement that has eluded him in the past — the Northern Route record. Tim holds the overall record on the Southern Route, but believes the Northern Route can be blitzed in nineteen days or less. After knee surgery and a long recovery, he admitted that his knee probably wasn’t up to the task this year, and was conflicted about leaving Loreen to take on the difficult journey all alone. Tim was hanging back for now, but he and Dave were two people I did not expect to see again after the first day.

In general, the Iditarod Trail is not a difficult route to navigate. For most of its distance, the trail cuts through regions so remote that this thin ribbon of tree clearings, tripods, and snowmobile tracks is unmistakably the only way to go — as long as you can see any evidence of a trail at all. The only exception to this is the first thirty miles, where the Iditarod meanders through a maze of rural properties, dog mushing trails, seismic lines and trapper routes. Quite a few people have gotten lost during the Invitational, but it almost always happens on the first day. We were following Tim’s signature serpentine sled track and nearly took a wrong left turn, but were pointed in the right direction by Tony Covarrubias, a previous 350-mile finisher who ran out to cheer for his wife, Shawn. Most everyone else in front and behind our group of four — Beat, me, Carole, and Steve, plus Shawn — took the tripod-marked wrong way.

 The glittering sunlight faded away surprisingly soon, which is what happens when a 2 p.m. start meets a 6 p.m. sunset. Traveling at three miles per hour, we hadn’t even yet reached the fifteen-mile mark at the Little Susitna River before twilight began to settle. In 2008, I was turning onto the Yentna River near mile forty when the sun went down. With these landmarks still fresh in my memory, the difference in effort expended versus distance covered was disheartening. I think on some level I’d let myself believe that snow biking was not that much different than sled dragging. On some level, it’s not — as long as you’re pushing the bike, not riding it. This was going to be 350 miles with four miles an hour as a top speed, and no coasting. The reality of that was beginning to sink in.

We pulled off the trail to layer up, because in these low river valleys, the day’s balmy twenty degrees can plummet to minus twenty degrees as swiftly as turning off a light. Salmon-colored light stretched across the sky, and the profile of Mount Susitna — “the sleeping lady” — became a placating beacon on the horizon. Steve lingered to take it all in — the frozen meadow, the pipe cleaner spruce forests, the far-reaching mountains.

A biting breeze whisked around my cheeks and nose, and my toes began to hurt almost as soon as I stopped. During the limited gear testing we were able to complete over Christmas break in Fairbanks, I’d decided on a system that I believed would keep my feet warm without subjecting them to the sweat marination that resulted in painful trench foot, which I’d endured in all of my winter foot races so far. Gortex trail-running shoes, a pair of Drymax socks, and a pair of Acorn fleece socks — the kind they make for people who like to curl up on their couches and sip hot chocolate. If it was really cold, I’d add gaiters, and possibly an extra layer of fleece socks. My shoes were more than large enough to accommodate anything I wanted to stuff inside. I’d ordered them online — Montrail Mountain Masochist. In my previous races, I used women’s size ten, and decided I wanted to go a half size up. Ten and a half wasn’t available, so I ordered elevens. The problem is, I accidentally clicked on men’s shoes in the sizing chart. These were men’s size eleven. For perspective, my usual women’s eight and a half is 9.6 inches long, and these shoes were 10.9 inches long. They were enormous, and brand new. I’d ordered them too close to the start, and there was no turning back. 

Maybe it was because my shoes had too much open space inside of them, or maybe I should have better chosen my layers, but my feet became cold and stayed that way, almost constantly. I had led myself to believe that runners never get cold feet, and yet I could barely keep the blood circulating even I was moving. When I stopped, a vice of pain and numbness clamped down fast. Still, I was still so terrified the hot-coals pain of trench foot that I couldn’t bear the thought of putting on the pair of vapor barrier socks that I brought for extreme cold and emergencies. I decided that if I started to feel real numbness, I’d deal with it, but as long as I simply felt tingling pain, I’d just cope.

At mile eighteen, there’s a randomly placed wooden sign that points the way to Nome. Tim and Loreen caught up to us again just before this sign after finding their way back from their wrong turn before the Little Su. Tim yelled to us that we were going the wrong way, and we argued that “the Nome sign is this way,” and it turned out we were right. It was starting to feel late. We stuck in a loose group of six before dropping onto a slough Flathorn Lake, where Beat and I wanted to try a “sneak” the bypassed the lake on a direct line through the woods. The trail was hilly but solid, and we soon caught up to Anne and two others (maybe Jason and John), who had been following the tracks of four cyclists who took the traditional trail. The cyclists had apparently turned around, and Anne wanted to as well. I argued that the Iditasport 200-mile race used this trail three weeks earlier, and I was certain it went through.

 After several minutes of cold-foot arguing we continued forward, but Anne became more agitated about the possibility of hitting a dead end. When we reached the crossing of another slough of Flathorn, she made the decision to cut down the slough toward the Lake, and Beat decided to follow. I was a little too far behind the main group to argue, but I was strongly against crossing the slough. This was the slough where, at its mouth on Flathorn Lake, I broke through a pressure crack in the ice and soaked my right leg five years ago, ultimately freezing my foot. Sloughs are notorious for bad ice, and it had been a warm winter — the Susitna River Valley was only then coming out of a long thaw that left the whole valley nearly stripped of snow.

As I followed the group’s tracks, my heart raced and I began to hyperventilate. Old and well-earned fears of bad ice and this slough specifically swirled in my head until I thought I might not be able to fight off a panic attack … and wouldn’t that be embarrassing thing to succumb to less than twenty-five miles into this difficult and dangerous race? I concentrated on breathing and placing my feet precisely into Beat’s unmistakable set of large footprints, trying not to think about cold feet and bad ice and that one time I narrowly avoided a fatal plunge to the bottom of Flathorn Lake.

 No one broke through the ice, and as we re-entered the forest, my surging adrenaline lost steam and plunged into a lake of fatigue. “Has it even been ten hours yet? It’s way too soon to feel so tired,” I scolded myself as our dispersing group trickled onto the moonscape of the Dismal Swamp. A train of headlamp beams stretched across the frozen expanse. To the north, a fluttering display of Aurora Borealis stretched over the distant peaks of the Alaska Range. Using the string of faint torches as a trail guide, I turned off my own handlamp and gazed up at the sky, craning my neck to fixate on the arching glow. Phantogram was playing on my iPod, and marched in a trance, utterly mesmerized. In a way, it was like those silly dance clubs that felt so transformative when I was a teenager — those same soaring feelings still resided in my jaded 34-year-old body, only now they were flowing with the incandescence of the universe — the emerald Northern Lights, the white stars, the faint reds and blues of the Milky Way. Fatigue eradicated and fear forgotten, I stretched toward a sensation as close to transcendence as any I have felt.

 Immediate reality returned when the woods closed in again, and the fatigue came back more crushing than before. I focused on breathing as we marched up to the bank of the Susitna River, at a point on the trail known as The Wall of Death. This harrowing title is derived from the fact that the trail drops off the river bank at a near-vertical angle — a horizon line you can’t see until it’s too late, you’ve hit the ice patch at the lip, and you are going to crash brilliantly onto the river twenty feet below.

 My favorite encounter with The Wall of Death happened during the 2011 Susitna 100. It was my first attempt at a hundred-mile ultramarathon, a few months after Beat and I started dating. Beat stayed with me throughout the duration of what would turn out to be a 41-hour race, coaching me and offering words of encouragement. By mile seventy, I was in some of the most persistent broad-spectrum pain I had ever felt, I was sick and nauseated, and I had slowed down to the point that math was not working in my favor to reach the finish before the 48-hour cutoff. When Beat pointed this out, I threw a temper tantrum, declaring that “there would be no more hundred milers, ever” and that I didn’t even care whether I finished this one. Beat moved on ahead to give me more space while I went through the motions of angry muttering, sobbing, and finally defeated numbness. After twenty minutes of this, I crawled up the Wall of Death and found Beat sitting just off the trail. He had rolled out his sleeping pad and laid out a smorgasbord of chocolate, jerky, and crackers — he made a picnic for me.

 “Here, sit down and have something to eat. You’ll feel better,” he said.

 I curled up next to him and nibbled on chocolate until my pain and nausea faded behind feelings of peace and security. The gesture was so endearing that I let myself believe there was nothing that could prevent me from finishing Susitna — as long as I had Beat with me.

 Now, three years later, Beat and I had returned to the Wall of Death, spreading out our sleeping pads beneath a stand of tall birch trees. Before the race started, we agreed that we’d rest for a few hours just before dropping into the Susitna, because the next thirty miles was wide-open river with nowhere to camp before the next checkpoint. As it turned out, Anne and at least three others had the same idea. A few minutes later, Tim, Loreen, and Rick showed up at our crowded encampment. “Wow, it’s a party,” Tim said as they unpacked their gear. I don’t think Tim had ever thought to stop to rest this early in the race, but it was the best idea for the others who were planning to go all the way to Nome.

Before crawling into my bag, I added some snow to fill up my Hydroflask thermos before stuffing it into the down cocoon for body-heat thawing, then changed into two pairs of dry socks so I could put the wet socks against my torso to dry — because dry feet are the key to happiness. Most everyone else was snoring by the time I finished my little chores, and I whispered goodnight to Beat. I was far from alone on the Wall of Death, but I was really glad he was here with me.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

8,000 Miles Across Alaska

by Jill Homer

Giveaway ends November 10, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Iditarod Again, part one

Photo by Beat Jegerlehner

What does it mean, exactly, to return to the point of no return? It's not an oxymoron, but rather an inevitable cycle. For every threshold we cross — and in life, there are only a few — there remains a desire to wander back to the now-closed door and re-live the moment that everything changed. Maybe with renewed perspective, we'll finally be able to bring that jarring moment into focus and understand what it meant. And then we can turn from our threshold again, onto a beautiful new path. Like Frost's two roads in a yellow wood. We want to see what remains. We want to see what's different.

Everything changes, even memories, and yet emotions can be startlingly steadfast. Five years had passed, but there wasn't even a heartbeat separating the bewilderment of gazing through a barricade of birch trees along the shore of Knik Lake. Their shadows drew trenchant patterns on the snow, and everything beyond was still unnervingly unknown. 

Emotions were sharp but thoughts were jumbled at the start of the 2014 Iditarod Trail Invitational, with at atmosphere that was ripe for cognitive dissonance — as though a roving carnival had arrived at a mountain base camp. Temperatures hovered near freezing and the afternoon was intensely sunny, with low-angle light shimmering on the snow like a sequin carpet. Fifteen runners and forty cyclists, along with dozens of friends and family members, crowded the small parking lot of a community museum on the edge of Knik Lake. Clustered around the people was a jamboree of gear — carbon fat bikes still bearing the polish of nervous fiddling, steel fat bikes with bulging bags around their frames, sleds ranging from streamlined pulks to plastic toys with duffles strapped down by bungee cords. An enterprising hot dog vendor dragged her cart onto the snow and sold reindeer sausage and hot chocolate to lines of nervous athletes who, facing as many as four weeks on the trail, felt it necessary to force down one final pre-race meal. Few culinary experiences can match this sensation. Eating greasy carnival food and then immediately stepping onto a Tilt-A-Whirl comes to mind.

Anticipating the start of the Iditarod Trail Invitational, February 2008

The first time I started this race, in 2008, I was a child in my memory — a wide-eyed twenty-eight-year-old who had a rich imagination for possibilities but no real concept of the threshold I was about to irrevocably cross. The second time I started this race, in 2009, I was already old — perhaps too weathered and jaded for my actual experience level. My memories of 2008 held strong, and I was certain I could rewrite the story with fewer mistakes, more triumphs. In spite of this confidence, or maybe because of it, my heart never caught up to my ambition that year. Although I didn’t yet recognize the signs, my relationship at the time was failing, my job had become overwhelming, and I carried piles of dissatisfaction that I believed the Iditarod Trail could simply fix. But when I stood at the edge of Knik Lake that year, I didn’t recognize any of my pre-written script, or ambition, or hope. I saw only doom. It’s easy to say that in hindsight, knowing what I know now, but that is distinctly how I remember it — a wash of gray skies and flat light, and a feeling of undefinable dread. Within four hours, I had punched my right leg into an opening in the ice on Flathorn Lake. Within six hours, darkness plunged temperatures below minus thirty. Within twelve hours, I had serious frostbite on my right foot, and my race was over.

Anticipating the start, February 2014.

“I don’t feel any doom this year; that’s a good sign,” I told my boyfriend Beat, who was gearing up for his second attempt at the thousand-mile march to Nome. The last time I lined up beneath the banner stretched out over this frozen shoreline, five years earlier, I also stood beside my partner at the time. This is the point of no return — the reality that time is linear, and yet much about life is recycled experience. The Iditarod Trail Invitational is the kind of grueling yet addictive adventure that the same people keep returning to year after year, precisely because it can never be experienced in the same way. Those who knew the ITI would ask me why it took so long to return. Everyone else remained flabbergasted as to why I’d even return at all — I finished the race once, and then I was injured, and then I went through a break-up, and then I met someone new and wonderful, and then I moved to the warm and friendly state of California. There was no remotely rational reason why I should ever come back to drag myself 350 miles across Alaska wilderness, again.

 In many ways, an entire life cycle had passed in the five years that spanned the moment I hobbled out of Yentna Station with blackened toes, and the moment I marched back to the Iditarod starting line in shiny new Montrail running shoes. I had been old, and then broken, and then I cycled back to wide-eyed innocence. That childlike spark — and the desire to grasp onto it as long as possible — was why I was strapped to a sled this year. During my first two attempts in 2008 and 2009, I was a cyclist. I was only a cyclist. I rode bikes nearly every day of the year; I rode bikes in sleet and rain and streams of slush. I walked bikes for miles through places where it was impossible to ride, just to search for new places to ride bikes. I directed most of my disposable income toward cycling and fixated on parts and gear and shiny new components. My partner at the time was a runner, but I couldn’t relate to him on that level. Running seemed painful, slow; what was the point? No, I was not a runner. I was certain I never would be.

Life cycles have a way of masticating our assumptions, sometimes in the most surprising ways. I think I know myself, and then I crash into a whirlpool of change and realize my reality goes so much deeper. That my sense of self is just the exposed tip of an iceberg of consciousness. It’s thrilling and terrifying at the same time, to realize that there’s no way I’ll ever fully know myself, which means I’ll never stop discovering who I am. So, against wisdom I once possessed, I lined up at the reindeer sausage cart to drown my nausea in a lukewarm cup of hot chocolate. And I stood next to dozens of fellow winter cycling enthusiasts, sans bike.

My sled was the sum of my most recent answer to the ultimate problem. Endurance sports tend to generate a whirlpool of problems without obvious solutions: What gear will help me go faster? What food can I eat at moderate effort levels for twenty-four hours without barfing? How many electrolyte tablets should I take to avoid cramping? What shoes will prevent my feet from deteriorating into a cesspool of blood and puss? For every possible answer there are many variations and exponentially more questions. It can become dizzying and is one of the reasons I appreciate Alaska wilderness-based endurance efforts, because all of these questions are trumped the one — the only one — that really matters:

“How do I stay alive?” 

I’ve been mulling over this ultimate problem — well, all my life — but specifically related to self-sufficiency in subzero cold, since 2005. The answer is as simple as it is obvious: One must stay warm. Ah, but how to stay warm? That is where the whirlpool commences. Adequate insulation is important, but not the sole key to self-generated warmth. Bodies that are depleted of energy don’t produce heat, so sufficient calories are needed. Cells depleted of moisture are more susceptible to freezing, so regular hydration is crucial. Clothing, food, water — on a base level, that actually is all a human needs to survive indefinitely in deep subzero cold. But what to wear? And what to eat? And how to make water and prevent it from freezing? And how to carry it all, enough but not so much that it hinders forward motion? How to customize it to my individual needs — nerve-damaged toes that are always too cold and thighs that are always too warm? In real-life execution, even the most basic problems still have seemingly endless possible solutions. 

So what do we do? Trial and error, using what just happens to be the best-tested method at any given moment. Whatever this is, is bound to change — so it’s almost pointless to make assertions on paper regardless of how certain one is about their gear. Suffice to say that each item in my 2014 sled was different than those I carried on my 2008 bicycle, with one key exception: A fleece balaclava that had been a faithful head-warmer since I was a teenage snowboarder in 1997. My dedication to this pilled black fleece was more nostalgic than practical at this point, but it remained the single constant in an ever-changing repertoire. 

But, to answer the question of what was in my sled, without compiling too long of a useless list, and not including the clothing I wore at the start or the two liters of water on my back: A down sleeping bag rated to fifty below zero, a closed-cell foam pad, a water-proof bivy sack, a liquid fuel stove, twenty-two ounces of fuel, pot and spoon, an expedition down coat, Gore-Tex shell jacket and waterproof pants, spare fleece socks, spare liner socks, vapor barrier socks, synthetic puffy jacket, spare liner mittens, vapor barrier mittens, spare hat, goggles, buff, wind pants, thin fleece pullover, nylon waders, spare large plastic bags, repair supplies and med kit, survival knick-knacks such as fire starters and a personal locator beacon, electronics, forty-ounce insulated thermos, and twelve thousand calories — or about two and a half days’ worth — of nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, crackers, dehydrated chicken and noodles, and gummy candy. The total weighed in at about forty-five pounds, or exactly one third of my body weight. 

Beat’s sled clocked in at a whopping seventy-five pounds. An explanation is in order for this. Beat completed the trek to Nome in 2013 on the Southern Route of the Iditarod Trail, and soon after developed ambitions to trek to the South Pole. Although funding is the major obstacle to any polar endeavor, he thought it would be wise to test his abilities for an unsupported Antarctic expedition by conducting a dry run of sorts in Alaska. After much mulling on the prospect, he decided to take smaller steps, traveling the Northern Route of the Iditarod Trail over three self-supported legs. The first would be 350 miles to McGrath — the entire distance I was planning to travel — with everything he needed in his sled. Unlike me, Beat would not collect the two drop bags provided by the race organization, and at the time did not plan to go inside any buildings or purchase any food from lodges along the way. Even this truncated endeavor required more than thirty pounds of food and fuel, which Beat parsed out in high-calorie-density ziplock bags of peanut butter and dehydrated meals, among a few other items. 

Both of our sleds looked obese as we sifted through them in the final hours before the start, mulling last-minute crash diets. No one, including me, wants to drag forty-five pounds of dead weight over the Alaska Range, but the ultimate problem keeps me from tossing it all in the nearest oil drum fire. Ultimately, I want to stay alive. I could probably stay alive with less gear, but life is important to me and I’m not inclined to bet on the increasingly higher stakes of fewer supplies. Beat and I are both conservatives in this regard. And as residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, our testing opportunities are limited.

We were called from the museum parking lot down a steep bank to the lake ice below. This year, there were a host of familiar faces among the competitors, and amusingly, most of my friends were runners — longtime veterans Tim and Loreen Hewitt, Laurel Highlands co-race-director Rick Freeman, fellow Californian Steve Ansell, blazing-fast sled-dragger Dave Johnston, and going for her first attempt on Nome, Anne Ver Hoef. A buzzing vibration of nerves all but drowned the chatter in the crowd, and similar to past years in this event, I never actually heard the official "Go!"

Home roaming

Beat laughed we he caught me poring over Strava's heat maps again. "You're obsessed with this now," he said.

"I'm just trying to set a route for tomorrow," I said, wide-eyed as I scrolled over thin blue lines drawn across an area of the map that for me, until now, was entirely blank. Where I reside — in a metropolitan area of 7 million people that is surrounded by a patchwork of open space — finding new places to roam isn't as simple as just looking at a map. There's so much private land, watershed easements, gates, extensive and often convoluted use restrictions. It's easiest to just find routes that work and go to these places again and again. After all, once you've seen one oak-dotted hillside or redwood grove, you've seen them all, right?

 And yet ... I need new spaces. I recognize that I travel at a higher-than-average rate while enjoying the spoils of settled life. I don't think I could handle a fully itinerant lifestyle, and yet ... I need new spaces. Just when I think I've tapped out my immediate geography and there's nothing else to explore, new wrinkles and folds come into view. The heat maps revealed a slew of new trails that were close enough to shoot for from my house. I traced the map and then went out looking for them.

My fitness is not stellar right now. Interestingly, and opposite of my usual status quo, I have decent power for cycling in short bursts, but the power meter drains out quickly rather than kicking into good ol' endurance mode. I'm good for an hour, and then I suck. Perhaps this is what five weeks of inactivity, one week of semi-smart rebuilding, and two weeks of turning it up to eleven will get you. Muscles get tired, who knew?

But yes, my ride plan called for immediate 15- to 20-percent grades up the thick clay of Fremont Older, followed by pretty much carrying my bike down the hill when bricks formed around the frame and the wheels wouldn't turn anymore. (It rained Friday and Saturday. Yay! This makes me happy, but it also makes for a wet and muddy ride, for which I am embarrassingly out of practice.) Ten minutes were spent chipping away at concrete, then another twenty or so finding my way out of the steep, rolling maze of Saratoga. Then it was time to climb again, nearly 3,000 feet up to the crest of El Serreno.

 I pretty much spent my day's allotment of energy in the first six miles at Fremont Older, and had little to give for what was only the first of two huge climbs — that I knew about. By the time I dropped off the ridge, legs searing and shoulders aching, I considered the just descending all the way to Los Gatos and forgetting this whole silly exploration thing. But this path, this nondescript side road veering off a quiet neighborhood street, beckoned in a hypnotic way. It was a powerline access road that was overgrown with grass, strewn with deadfall, and eaten away by mudslides — calling out to me as though it was the most desirable trail ever cut into a mountainside.

And then it just kept on climbing. Like any good contouring powerline access road, it cut up one small drainage and down the next, direct and steep, up and down. I only acknowledged the ups. Climb and climb. Mist billowed around the forested mountainside. Curtains of rain fell through sunbeams thrown by a clearing to the west, and there were rainbows and sparkling raindrops. It was a beautiful afternoon on this most secret of trails, so close to home and yet so far away.

I turned a corner at the bottom of the drainage, into an enchanted woods with lush pines, real fall color, and a glassy secret lake. I exited the woods onto a paved road and saw the first trail sign of this secret trail, forbidding bikes. Oh, that explains it. I didn't see a single other person out there on a Saturday afternoon, in seven miles. It always irks me when public spaces that are clearly not frequented by anyone carry these restrictions. But I try keep it legal and don't intentionally poach trails, so I guess if I want to go back to this enticing place, I'll have to plan a long run.

 I couldn't dwell on my misdemeanor for long, because it was time to climb again. Climb and climb. My heart was developing that dull achy feeling that sometimes crops up when it's been beating too hard for too long. Climb and climb. I checked my watch and although I'd only ridden 23 miles thus far, I'd already climbed 5,000 feet and was still climbing. Argh. Climb and climb. Veered onto the Saratoga Gap trail, powered over some roots, more climbing. The sun went down. I turned onto Grizzly Flat with about twenty minutes to spare before twilight turned to darkness. Some mountain bikers who had just emerged and were packing up their car asked me, "Are you going in now?"

"I have to," I said. "It's the only way I can get home from here."

"You'll never make it," one of the mountain bikers said — presumably also aware of the no-trail-use-after-dark, you'll-almost-certainly-get-a-ticket rule. "We just finished, it's far."

"It's quick, mostly downhill; I can make it," I said.

"And there are bobcats," he warned, as though ranger danger wasn't scary enough.

I thanked him and turned into the dark forest in the fading light. Twelve miles and fifty minutes later, I was home. As far as I'm concerned, that entire ride was climbing.

Beat gave me a hard time for riding for six hours on Saturday when we had our official longish weekend ride planned with friends on Sunday. We met Pavel and Jan at the mouth of Steven's Canyon and headed back the way I came out just fourteen hours earlier.

Ugh, I was feeling the miles. Beat completed a long run yesterday, and Pavel is more of a short-range guy than an endurance cyclist, but Jan didn't take sympathy on any of us. He planned a punishing route — lots of singletrack and power moves and steep rollers that always feel like all climbing. Fun, of course; no one would argue that it wasn't fun. I certainly wasn't arguing. It's more enjoyable just to roll with it, and apologize when your tired legs cause you to drift farther and farther behind.

 All in all, it was a fantastic weekend of overdoing it — some bikesplorations, some social riding with friends, some sauna time for the sore muscles. I've got the heat maps out again and am already dreaming up the next adventure. Once I get my running legs back, there's almost nothing on there I can't cover. I'd love to see the whole Santa Cruz mountain range light up on my own personal heat map. After all, there's really no such thing as being stuck in one place.