Becoming Frozen

by Jill Homer

  Yellow race stakes made a sharp turn toward the riverbank, where a trail climbed into the woods. I was back on the inbound trail, but it no longer bore any resemblance to the smooth path I had ridden earlier in the day. Rain had transformed it into a quagmire, choked with gray slush and occasional puddles of standing water. Snowmobile tracks had carved irregular ruts into the surface. Optimism had ceased and riding had become impossible. There was only pushing now. Even then I wallowed, frequently punching shin-deep holes into the soft snow. The insides of my overboots were utterly soaked. I could hear water sloshing around but couldn’t feel it, so numb were my toes. My fingers felt like slabs of half-frozen salami. The rain kept coming down, cold and endless.

  After a seeming eternity of wallowing in purgatory, the churned remnants of trail emerged from the woods and faded into an open expanse. A paper plate stapled to a stake indicated this was “Dismal Swamp.” The sign might as well have read, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” The low-lying clouds dully illuminated the white plain, enough to pick out sporadic spruce trees from an otherwise bleak moonscape. I could see a long way across the swamp, but I couldn’t discern the end of this dismal place. I wavered for long minutes at the paper plate sign, utterly terrified.

  The sound of my feet plunging into slush had becoming maddening. When I stopped to collect my bearings, these sounds were replaced with screams from inside my head — the hot and cold throbbing of blisters and waterlogged skin, the dull ache in my legs, the sharp pains in my knees. My throat was raw and prickly; I hadn’t eaten anything since Rich Crain’s five-star soup, which was now about three hours back. The oranges and brownies at Flathorn Lake were a lifetime removed. I felt ill, not hungry, and I couldn’t bear the prospect of cramming a Power Bar into my roiling stomach. Although the rain had tapered off, cold water continued to trickle down my spine. My gloves were dripping as well. When I gripped the corners of my coat, I could easily wring out a large volume of water. There was no more plausible deniability — I was officially soaked.

  Even though I was saturated on the outside, I felt as though the last drops of vitality had drained from my body. I looked in the direction of Mount Susitna, which darkness and clouds hid entirely from view. My bike was so deeply embedded in the slush that it didn’t even fall over when I let go. I knelt down to rest my shoulders, and ended up crumpled in a heap. With great effort, I rolled onto my back and stared at the starless sky. Its charcoal emptiness was so serene, so restful.

  “Maybe it would be better to be dead and nothing, than to spend an eternity in Hell.” A whisper of wind whisked over the swamp. The chill was sharp, like needles in my skin. I turned back onto my side and buried my face in my wet gloves. I wanted someone to come rescue me, to take me away from this hopelessness. But I hadn’t seen a single person besides Rich Crain since I left Luce’s Lodge many hours ago. No snowmobilers would be out at 2 a.m. No one was coming.

  The chill found its way to my core, and I began to shiver. The numbness of my extremities had become absolute. The nihilist in my head — the voice who was musing about the nothingness of death — whispered how wonderful it would feel to let this numbness settle over every part of my aching body. Of course I didn’t want this. I wanted the pain to end, but I didn’t want to die. Logic waved urgently behind a hazy veil of indifference brought on by fatigue. It was thirty-five degrees outside, and my wet clothing no longer provided any barrier from the heat-sapping air. I could abandon all hope, but the consequences of failing to extract myself from this snowbank were clear. If I didn’t keep moving, I would die.

  I stood up. Once again, my cold salami fingers found a hold around the handlebars, and my exhausted shoulder muscles nudged the bike forward. After a few more steps, primordial instincts took over. My legs moved as necessary. The voices of pain and fatigue no longer screamed. The nihilist’s whispers quieted. My mind was as blank as the charcoal sky, as open as the featureless swamp. Only a single voice remained. It told me to march, so I did.

  There were brief moments of clarity. Occasionally I’d stare up at the sky, scanning for stars that I never found. The clouds lifted enough to reveal distant light pollution from Anchorage, which cast an eerie orange glow over the horizon. Amid the daze, I found my way across Flathorn Lake and into the wood-heated cabin high on the bluff. The lights were still on at 3 a.m. A volunteer with sleepy eyes fed me a warm bowl of paella and brownies, and helped me refill my Camelback bladder when it became clear I was still too dazed to figure out the complicated function of a zipper.

  As the food settled into my stomach, more clarity returned to my brain. I learned the volunteer was named Peggy, and she was irrationally cheerful for being awake as long as I had, if not longer. The cabin was one of several buildings on a property she owned with her husband. They owned a small plane that they could land right on the lake, in winter or summer. Peggy had offered her home, fresh food, and warm hospitality for racers ever since this event was known as Iditasport, back in the nineties.

  “Does anyone else look as bad as me?” I asked.

  “You don’t look bad at all,” she exclaimed. “Most people look far worse. You should see some of the runners. Some people won’t even get here until tomorrow night.”

  “Tomorrow?” I shook my head. That span of time was unfathomable. Of course, even on my schedule, it was already tomorrow.

  Peggy gave me two brownies in a plastic sandwich bag and made me promise that I’d eat them. “You have to eat,” she said. “It’s a lot harder when you don’t.”

  I crammed my hands back into wet neoprene gloves — like wedging a squirming child into a wet suit — and returned to the dull night. But in my calorie-assisted, newfound clarity, I noticed several things had changed. Large, chunky snowflakes replaced the drizzling rain. The slurping sound made by my footsteps had transitioned into an icy crunch.

  “It dropped below thirty-two,” I thought. Perhaps the slush on the trail would freeze, and I’d be able to ride my bike again. Despite the falling snow, the sky was beginning to clear. Hazy moonlight filtered through scattered clouds, and shadows of spruce trees plodded beside me. I didn’t want to listen to my footsteps anymore, so I removed my backpack, dusted away a fresh layer of snow, and fished out a little AM/FM radio.

  I turned the dial to the weather band. I often listened to this frequency when cycling, and as always hoped the soothing drone of a computer-generated voice would deliver good news — that the storm was over, temperatures would continue to drop, and the trail would be hard again. The channel was filled with loud static, but I was able to catch a garbled report. The temperature in Wasilla was 37 degrees, with scattered showers and light winds. The signal cut out before the monotone voice recited the forecast.

  “Ugh,” I growled. I switched the radio to FM, and found only one clear signal — a top-forty channel out of Anchorage. Pop music wasn’t my favorite, but any noise was more soothing than silence, so I listened as I walked. The station played songs I remembered from high school, one-hit-wonders and formulaic ballads that opened a floodgate of memories. There was dance music that injected some more pep into my legs and prompted me to try to ride my bike again. When these attempts ended in swerving failures, I marched in anger to Britney Spears. The early morning broadcast was pre-taped. There was no DJ, but every commercial break brought the same jingle — a gratingly upbeat tourism advertisement for the very place I was slogging through, the Mat-Su Valley. Even though every repetition made me want to rip the ice-encrusted hair from my scalp, I couldn’t help but sing along, out loud: “Yahoo, Mat-Su! Fun is at its peak in the val-leee.”

  For a while, the music faded into the background. I forgot I was even listening still, when a haunting melody filtered into my disconnected thoughts.

  “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 mesmerizing blend of surreal melody, movement-matching rhythm, and lyrics that speak to a certain mood.

  “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. It was just another pop song, but it injected my slow march with a sense of meaning. The distant orange glow of Anchorage still lit the horizon. I licked my lips, cracked and crusty, and felt a surge of comfort, as though this remote connection through FM radio bridged the bewildering gap between me and the familiarities of the city.

  The chorus cracked like a whip, slinging my mood from fathomless depths to a new height of elation I had never before experienced. Having given up all hope hours ago, I again attempted to mount my bike. The bike churned and swerved, and I was laughing even though these jerky movements were futile. I had no options but to mash pedals to the threshold of my physical strength. It was either that, or dance, or sprint to chase the joyful surge that was bursting out of my body. This was my first true encounter with the miracle of endurance euphoria — the phenomenon of having been so miserable for so long that even the tiniest hints of positive emotion resemble ecstasy.

  Many write off these emotional surges as nothing more than a natural high produced by hormones and neurotransmitters. Those who seek out these moments of ecstasy know they go considerably deeper than that. After all, getting high is easy. Synthetic drugs are undoubtedly simpler and arguably safer than riding a bicycle a hundred miles across frozen Alaska wilderness. Endurance euphoria requires an astronomical investment — hundreds of hours of training, hundreds of dollars in gear, more in race entry fees, vacation days, travel costs, and a healthy dose of suffering that usually exceeds even the worst hangovers.

  And yet, once athletes get a taste of this — this feeling — they never want to go back. Endurance athletes are the worst kind of junkie, scheming new ways to get back out there, to recapture the magic, to increase the speed or distance, or both. When I read about such endeavors in magazines, as much as they captured my imagination, I never really understood. Not until that moment. And it was more incredible that I could have ever imagined. With legs weighed down by fatigue and waterlogged overboots, I engaged in an awkward, beautiful dance, moving in synchronicity with the whole of the universe. All of the energy that had ever been created flowed directly through me, and I knew, with certainty, that I would never be “Just Jill” again.

  Still, because endurance euphoria only emerges in the midst of prolonged misery, and because it’s accompanied by muscle fatigue and poor nutrition and, in this case, the dangerous edge of hypothermia, it never lasts. Soon enough, I was back to being just miserable again, pushing my bike through the still-mushy snow, and screaming at the “Yahoo Mat-Su” commercial but too lonely to risk turning off the radio.

  Another hiccup in time happened, and then the sun began to rise over the Chugach Mountains. I blinked into the ochre light, reflected under a thin cloud cover. This meant I had been out there grinding away at the Susitna 100 for nearly twenty-four hours. An entire day. Not only did that more than double any amount of time I had ever spent engaged in a non-stop activity, but it exponentially surpassed the stress, fatigue, strain, and soul-crushing tedium of any other experience in my life. It was, by large degrees, the hardest thing I had ever done.

  And yet, it wasn’t necessarily becoming harder. Dull pain simmered in my legs, and a chill continued to encapsulate my core. And yet legs kept walking, arms kept pushing, and my body temperature continued to keep me alive. Even as flickers of lucid thought begged me to find a way to stop already, I wondered how far these newfound abilities could take me.

  For now, they returned me to the far edge of the dog mushing park, the final ten miles of the race. The trail was still well-groomed; rain hadn’t damaged it too badly. For the first time in twenty-five miles, I was able to pedal more than a few yards at a time. Endurance euphoria ignited again, and my excitement sent me into a renewed sprint. Through this, I failed to pay attention to the yellow stakes that had guided me for ninety miles. After forty-five minutes, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen a yellow stake in a while.

  I rode forward another half mile before deciding that I was, in fact, on the wrong track. Wrong turns are common in an endurance race, but this was my first unintentional detour, and I took it badly. I spun around and pedaled as hard as could muster back the way I came, fuming with frustration. Still-fresh happy tears were doused by angry tears, which dissolved into fatigue more crushing than any I’d felt yet. By the time I backtracked nearly three miles to a trail intersection with no stakes in sight, everything was spent. I was still lost and there was nothing left. I slumped off my bike and let it fall to the ground as I knelt into the snow and screamed. I was ready to surrender. My odometer had surpassed a hundred miles, and I didn’t care anymore about finishing the race. I already proved I could do it, hadn’t I?

  Just as I laid down to indulge in “quitting” — in the center of a swamp with no extraction opportunities in sight — I saw a skier skating along the far side of the swamp. I jumped up before he disappeared into the trees, and tracked his direction until I found a yellow stake. Even though my mind had just convinced my body there was no energy left to burn, my legs had no issues spinning pedals once I was back on track. Happy tears drowned the angry tears. Two and a half miles later, the snow-caked front wheel of my mountain bike rolled across the finish line. It was just after 10 a.m.

  I pulled up next to the sleep-deprived and sallow-faced race director, who made a note in his clipboard but didn’t so much as mutter “congratulations.” I stared in disbelief at my surroundings — a tiny warming hut with smoke billowing from the chimney, a mostly empty parking lot, and a yellow line drawn in the snow next to the dog mushing referee tower. It was the same scene I had left twenty-five hours earlier, but there was something odd about it now. Everything had shifted, as though I’d made my way through space-time and emerged in a parallel universe. The differences were so subtle that they were undetectable to my senses, but they nagged at my subconscious all the same.

  As I made my way toward the building, Geoff emerged and wrapped his arms around me. He had tears in his eyes and a grin stretched across his face.

  “You did it!” he exclaimed, and raised his camera to take a photo. I tried to smile but my face felt frozen. The emotions in his eyes mirrored the joy in my heart, but my body was too drained to emit expression. I stood there like a shell, unable to think of any reply except, “I finished.”

  The words sounded raspy and foreign, echoing from the hollow chamber of my throat. Any fumes of remaining energy drifted away like smoke. I looked blankly at Geoff, who hugged me again. He was talking quickly, and some distant part of me realized that I needed to find out about his race, and what he’d been doing for the remainder of the past day, and what we were going to eat for dinner. But for now, it was all the energy I could muster to hand him my bike follow him to Craig’s truck. Somehow, someway, I was eventually going to have to accept that I had finished the Susitna 100, and things could never be the same.

  _____

  Tough to Quit

  February 25, 2006

  Today Geoff and I went to lunch at our favorite organic greasy spoon, Cosmic Kitchen. (There are two types of restaurants in this town: the swank places that welcome XtraTuf-wearing locals with open arms, and the carrot-juice-brewing hippie places that also serve beef and cheese burritos the size of your head.) After months of hugging the horizon, the noontime sun ventured toward mid-sky, bathing the whole restaurant in white light. We took our plates into the glare of a south-facing window just as a family settled in next to us — only on the other side of the window, where snow-covered picnic tables lined the balcony. There they sat for nearly an hour — sipping coffee, munching on corn chips, soaking in sunlight, with steam pouring from their burgers and breath in the subfreezing air.

  That’s when I
decided it would be a great day for a bike ride. I left work a little later than I’d hoped, but I still thought it would be good to go out for an hour, absorb some vitamin D through that narrow slit in my balaclava, and come back with time to spare before Foreign Film night.

  One aspect of the Susitna 100 that I didn’t anticipate was letting go of this whole training thing. Giving up the multihour, four-times-a-week bicycle rides I’ve become so accustomed to almost feels like losing a job. I fear that suddenly I’ll find myself sprawled on my coach, pouring through classifieds for used bicycle parts and struck with that hollow feeling that my life is slowly sinking into uselessness ... meaningless ... joblessness. Sure, I could get some other hobby. Find a new passion. Maybe even get a life. And while I’m at it, I could apply for new jobs. It’s not as easy as it sounds.

  *****

  When the Susitna 100 was over, I just expected that spring would follow us to Homer. It was jarring to roll into a town still coated in ice, with snow clinging to bare branches, and realize it was late February in Alaska and winter was far from over.

  My body was in a state of shock. After Geoff drove me back to Craig’s house after the race finish, it was early afternoon on a Sunday, but felt like the middle of a summer night sometime decades later. The air inside the house was hot and musty, and I felt like an 90-year-old creaking my way along prickly carpet, grasping at walls for support. The skin on my feet tingled, and was so sensitive that it hurt to wear socks. I attempted to take a nap, only to be rattled awake numerous times as various muscles seized with painful cramping. My limbs seemed locked in rigor mortis. Even reclined on the couch, I’d spend long minutes battling a desire to roll my body over to a more comfortable position, knowing how much it hurt to move. Usually I’d give up and just lay frozen in the same twisted posture, staring at the gray gloom out the window. Geoff purchased a pizza for dinner. I thought I was hungry, but could only manage a few bites before wincing from its strangely salty and metallic flavor. In fact, everything I tried to consume tasted salty, even candy. My stomach churned so violently that even eating was a battle.