by Jill Homer
“Biking is fun as long as it’s fun. But when it’s not fun …” I trailed off.
“Skiing would be fun. But walking?”
The man stopped to fiddle with something on his bike before I learned his name, but caught back up to me hours later, shortly after the trail veered onto the Yentna River. A briefly intense snow squall dissipated to flurries, and the gray sky was darkening with dusk. After all this time, I expected to be more settled into the journey, but stress was still twisting knots into my muscles. The unexpected pain caused me to wince as I looked over my shoulder.
Since I last saw him, the man had put on a jacket and removed his sunglasses, but his knees were still bare.
“How’s it going?” I asked.
“Well, I fell into some overflow back there,” he answered. “Yeah, I was trying to take a picture while going through those puddles. I dropped my camera. Fell all the way in. Shouldn’t have done that.”
His tone was upbeat for somebody who was no doubt soaked as the frigid nighttime hours approached. I probably would have become unhinged if I’d fallen into open water, given how stressed I felt over nothing at all. But this guy was still grinning. For the next hour we rode side by side on the hard, bumpy river ice. I learned his name was Mike Beiergrohslein. He was a pharmacist and father of two teenagers in Eagle River, Alaska. He’d signed up to ride to McGrath, but just two weeks earlier he managed to secure enough approval from his family and employer to join the Nome roster. This entailed sending the organizers an extra two hundred dollars for one more drop bag, and then he had to quickly cobble together supply packages to send to village post offices. Like me, Mike felt under-prepared and was going to “see how it goes.”
A brisk wind displaced the clouds, and temperatures plunged with the clearing sky. Mike and I reached the first checkpoint, a river lodge called Yentna Station, around 7:30 p.m. The lodge was crowded with a dozen others whose faces showed signs of strain after fifty-seven miles. A few ordered food, but I was feeling jittery and didn’t want to spend too much time getting comfortable. The day’s relative heat had left me terribly thirsty, and I continuously refilled a paper cup with two liters of lukewarm water and fruit punch from jugs on the counter. I chatted with Troy, a muscled Australian who had a deer-in-the-headlights demeanor, and a woman who seemed incredulous that the lodge’s bathroom was a bucket in a storage closet.
I made my escape just a few minutes before Mike, who was outside and still rearranging stuff in his bike bags. I expected he’d catch me again, but didn’t see anyone else for the next thirty miles. My clothing was damp with sweat, and the night felt menacingly cold. It was too hazy for stars, and a stiff breeze whistled along the river bank. When I turned to face the wind, the chill seemed to drain all of the air from my lungs. While my breathing was labored, it wasn’t constrained enough to cause concern. I took a few hits from my inhaler as a precaution, but discovered it had frozen in my chest pocket and emitted squirts of cold liquid rather than air.
Nighttime in the Alaska backcountry invites awareness of both the immediate and the infinite. My headlamp illuminated an island of light in seemingly endless darkness, highlighting the smallest details. Patches of overflow that would have looked like puddles in daylight became open holes to the bottom of the Yentna River. Blue ice gave way to packed snow, and scratches in the trail told elaborate stories about those who came before. The breeze licked at my lower back. I attempted to follow perfectly straight tracks in the snow and imagined the fast racers sprinting up this river at unconscionable speeds. The overcast sky reflected no light, and I was still a long way from anywhere, here at the beginning of a thousand miles.
Three miles from the second checkpoint, the trail veered onto the Skwentna River, which was more wind-swept than the Yentna. The surface was riddled with strips of gray ice that were indistinguishable from the surrounding snow. A gust of wind caught me off guard and washed out the rear wheel, toppling the bike on hard ice. I landed on my outstretched right hand, and then my bike and body continued skidding along the ice for several more feet before stopping. My wrist was throbbing, but I was relieved that I had avoided hitting my head. It made me angry that after ninety miles of being overly tense and careful on the ice, I managed to crash here.
I swung a sore leg over the saddle and resumed pedaling, but the front wheel refused to move in a straight line. The shimmy was enough to force me off the bike. I tried several times to wrangle the handlebars into submission, only to tip off the saddle again and again.
“Crap, I’ve forgotten how to ride a bike,” I thought, squinting into the darkness in disbelief.
I glanced down at the handlebars and realized they weren’t aligned with the wheel — the crash had knocked the stem loose, and the front end of the bike was skewed at a sharp angle. Laughing, I fished a bike tool out of my frame bag and readjusted the stem. As I tightened the bolts, I felt a sharp, tingling pain in my right hand.
“That’s strange,” I thought, slapping the fingers with my other hand to reboot circulation. I brushed it off as a symptom of the cold. Temperatures had plunged to single digits, and the wind carried a harsh bite.
Anger and confusion about the mishap dissipated quickly as I wove through the woods toward my favorite stop en route to McGrath. Skwentna Roadhouse is a commercial watering hole for snowmobilers, pilots, summertime boaters, and the quirky locals who carve a rough living off this land in the foothills of the Alaska Range. Similar to the original roadhouses sprinkled across Alaska during the Gold Rush, Skwentna offers beds and hearty meals to worn-out travelers. It has the last indoor plumbing available to racers for two hundred miles, and if you’re really feeling indulgent, you can even take a shower. During the Iditarod Trail Invitational, the friendly proprietors keep vigil at all hours of the night, and will cook a full breakfast for anyone who orders one, even if it’s two in the morning.
I was thrilled to arrive at Skwentna at the still-early hour of 11:30. Quick math revealed I’d averaged more than nine miles per hour, which is blazing fast for ninety miles of wilderness trail on a heavily loaded fat bike. My breathing remained under control, and I was pleasantly surprised by how fresh I felt.
Most of the cyclists ahead had moved on to the next checkpoint, eager to put in miles while conditions were good. I pondered whether I had another forty miles in my legs that night, but decided I needed to be conservative if I wanted to keep Nome on the radar. Fatigue seemed to be the main trigger for my breathing difficulties, and there was little to gain by pushing hard so early in the race. I sat down at the table with Andrea and Julie, two women who were racing to McGrath. They also were pondering whether to stay or go.
“Skwentna is a nice place to sleep,” I said, with a raspy voice that startled me.
Julie and Andrea congratulated me on making such good time with my Nome-loaded bike, which probably weighed at least twenty pounds more than the bikes of most of the McGrath racers.
“That tailwind helped,” I rasped. “I’ll probably slow way down tomorrow.”
*****
I tossed and turned for most of the night, sprawled on a bottom bunk in a hot upstairs room shared with Julie, Andrea, and another woman, Kimberly. Many endurance racers experience sleeplessness after a day of hard effort — our bodies are filled with adrenaline and stress hormones, heart rates remain high, and muscles stiffen. Personally, I retain a lot of water during endurance efforts. My extremities swell, and once I stop moving, I often need to get up to pee every hour. Sleep is badly needed to boost recovery, but the discomfort involved with flushing out lactic acid and rebuilding torn muscle fibers keeps me awake. After a few days, my system seems to normalize, and exhaustion becomes deep enough to trump most pains.
Normalization of extreme effort is a subject I find incredibly interesting. Scientists have yet to do much research into the adaptations of humans, but one scientist found incredible abilities in Iditarod sled dogs. A prof
essor named Mike Davis spent years tracking Alaskan huskies as they raced across the ice and tundra, and discovered these dogs rapidly adapt to sustained strenuous exercise. During their first hard day of running, sled dogs display most of the metabolic changes that human endurance athletes experience: depletion of muscle energy reserves, increased stress hormones, evidence of cellular breakdown in proteins, lipids and DNA, and oxidative stress. In subsequent consecutive days of exercise at the same intensity, these breakdowns reversed. Within four days, the metabolic profile of the dogs returns to where it was before the race began. Instead of breaking their bodies down to a point of no return, sled dogs gain fitness as they run.
Sled dogs are arguably the world’s greatest endurance athletes, with an aerobic capacity that is four times greater than an elite human athlete, cells that are crammed with energy-producing mitochondria, and an efficient digestive system that allows them to burn enormous amounts of fat and calories during high-intensity efforts. Most humans require the quick-burning energy of carbohydrates, and experience a system shutdown in the form of nausea and vomiting if they try to ingest more than three hundred calories an hour, even if they’re burning far more. Still, the biology of dogs and humans isn’t all that different. People likely possess more endurance adaptations than most of us even realize.
Is it possible we can become stronger as we go? The key, I have always believed, lies in management of the mind — adjusting our own expectations about what we can and cannot achieve, and focusing on the positive attributes of every experience. We — all of us — are more capable than we believe. However, the past year’s failures showed me the ways I succumb to weakness, even when I’m resolved to find strength. If I push my body too hard, real and long-term damage can follow. So how do we find balance? The ancestors of huskies tapped into the secret eons ago, but humans have been more content to avoid physical discomforts that are no longer necessary for survival. The sample size of humans with both the opportunity and willingness to seek the limits of endurance has been small. I realized that I was hardly an ideal specimen for experimentation.
Still, despite a difficult day of pedaling, a crash, and a night of almost no sleep, I felt fantastic as I pedaled away from Skwentna Roadhouse in pre-dawn darkness. I was doing it! After all of the doubt and anxiety, I’d made it through the first day, and this was the litmus test I needed. One small concern was pain and numbness in my right hand. The previous night, I assumed cold temperatures had caused the issue. But after six hours in a warm building, my hand continued to tingle and occasionally release electric shocks of pain. It hurt mildly to grasp the handlebars, so I balled up a mitten to hold between my palm and the rubber grip.
Darkness hung over the snow-blanketed swamps outside Skwentna and followed me into the cavernous woods of the Shell Hills.
“Is it ever daytime in Alaska?” I wondered. In late February, southcentral Alaska receives about nine hours of daylight — which seems like plenty until you contend with fifteen hours of night. I hit mile one hundred just after six a.m. Monday morning, when I’d seen all of four hours of sunlight and twelve hours of darkness.
As dawn crept over the southern horizon, thick fog enveloped the Shell Hills. The air became murkier as I descended out of the woods and pedaled into a gray, featureless pall that I assumed was Shell Lake. A headlight surged through the fog and pulled up beside me. The snowmobile belonged to the husband of a friend and frequent Iditarod foot racer, Anne Ver Hoef. Michael Schroeder had a cabin on Shell Lake, and ventured out first thing in the morning to greet Iditarod cyclists as they passed through. He offered a handful of chocolate-covered acai berries and warned of several miles of overflow on the swamps beyond the lake. This news was hardly a surprise given the warm conditions of the previous day. But could I distinguish wet, bad ice from solid ground? When I looked down, I could hardly see my own boots through the murky air. I missed the clarity of night.
Gray light gave way to shades of violet, then turquoise. But the world remained eerily two-dimensional as I pedaled across snow-covered swamps. Brown puddles added jarring detail to the featureless landscape, and I dismounted my bike to creep around each one, whether it was frozen or not. As I did this, another cyclist, Jim Ishman, passed. He was the first racer I’d seen since Skwentna, and chirped a loud hello as his rear wheel shattered the thin layer of the ice I was creeping around. Jim clearly had a much higher tolerance for risk than me, and it was interesting to watch him navigate this terrain. The temperature was about fifteen degrees — moderate by Alaska standards, but still hazardous if one were to break through a deeper puddle and tip over in slushy water. It wasn’t a chance I was willing to take, but I envied Jim’s technical prowess.
Jim put a boot down at the edge of the water so he could stop and chat. This made me cringe — my boots were supposed to be waterproof as well, but this knowledge didn’t inspire the trust I’d anticipated. Most Iditarod cyclists purchase an expensive, bulky boot manufactured specifically for winter cycling by the company 45North. The boots are outfitted with cleats for clipless pedals, which I think is the main appeal, but they also boast several pounds of heavy-duty insulating materials.
For years I used rigid mountaineering boots for cold-weather cycling. But after competing in winter races on foot, I’d come to the conclusion that flexible, lighter footwear has more versatility. When feet aren’t encased in a hard structure, they can more efficiently generate their own heat through movement. My system consisted of waterproof hiking boots, gaiters, and for colder temperatures, a water-resistant overboot insulated with primaloft material. I was confident my footwear would take me farther in comfort, and would probably still promote heat retention if I soaked a boot, but I remained terrified of this prospect. I’d probably feel this way even if I had my own pair of 45North boots — which to me looked like heavy clodhoppers. Wet feet are one of my fears, and as much as I’d like to believe that gear can help alleviate fears, this is rarely the case.
“Did you come from Skwentna this morning?” I asked.
“No, I bivied on the trail just before Shell,” Jim said. “Two hours sleep and breakfast at Shell Lake Lodge. Now I feel like a million bucks.”
I didn’t believe him — the part about feeling like a million bucks — but didn’t voice this skepticism. Although I felt relatively good when I set out in the early morning, my own sleepless night was catching up to me. My head was as bleary as the fog-shrouded swamp.
Jim motored ahead and I continued to pick my way around overflow. Morning haze lifted as though it were a curtain, slowly revealing mountains bathed in pink light. This was the beginning of the Alaska Range, and the mountains’ proximity startled me. Had we really come so far so soon? This valley seemed far displaced from the muddy, ice-crusted swamps of the Susitna Valley. The ground was blanketed in several feet of snow, and the trail cut through it like a curled ribbon, rippling over each pillowy mound. It resembled a pump track, which is a mountain biking term for a bermed course of dips and rises, specifically designed to give the rider an exhilarating roller-coaster sensation. The riding was sheer fun, which helped dissolve anxieties and boost energy.
By the time I arrived at Winter Lake Lodge, mile 130, all bad feelings were forgotten. I felt like a million bucks. The high-end lodge hosts an Iditarod Trail Invitational checkpoint in the kitchen of the main building, away from view of paying customers who fly in from Anchorage on chartered planes. A small dining room table was crammed with racers who had finished the 130-mile race, as well as racers in the longer distances who were preparing to head out. It was noon, so I ordered a lunch dish of rice, tortillas, beans, and chicken, prepared by a young man who worked at the lodge. A Midwestern cyclist who had decided to drop out of the 350-mile race with back pain, Charly, had been tracking the race all morning via a Wi-Fi connection on his phone. Charly informed us that the leaders had slowed to a crawl over the next segment, where the route begins to climb into the mountains.
/> “It’s all the new snow,” I speculated. “The Iron Dog had to break trail through three feet of powder, and there’s probably not much of a trail base beyond here.”
The Iron Dog is a two-thousand-mile snowmobile race that took place two weeks earlier. With the Iditarod Dog Sled Race not starting until the following week, the Iron Dog had been the only traffic on the more remote sections of the Iditarod Trail up to that point, which effectively made them our trail-breakers. There had been a major snowstorm during the Iron Dog, and the physics of more than a hundred snowmobiles driving as fast as possible over fresh powder had created a deep rippling effect on the trail, commonly referred to as “whoop-de-dos” or “moguls.” The bumpy conditions were a bane for everybody who followed.
Julie and Andrea were just getting ready to leave, and seemed especially nervous about the possibility of pushing their bikes for the next thirty miles.
“This section is always slow,” I shrugged, which they knew because they were both veterans. I remembered crawling up hills so steep that I had to punch my fists into the snow to keep from sliding backward when I walked the trail in 2014. The weight of the sled was almost more than I could manage, and that only weighed forty-five pounds. After restocking my bike with food and supplies from the Winter Lake drop bag, it was back up to seventy-five or eighty. Would I even be able to drag it up those hills? Of this I had no certainty, but I knew that if I kept crawling forward, eventually I’d get somewhere.
“Maybe it takes twelve hours and maybe we decide to bivy before Puntilla,” I said to Andrea. “It’s not really a big deal.”
Chapter 7
This Is My Life?
How did this become my life?
It’s a question everyone must ask themselves from time to time. My own inquiries resonate the most when I am wrestling a bicycle through somewhere uncomfortable and far away from home. This foray into the Alaska Range was no exception. The morning fog lifted into an overcast afternoon, and I had been walking uphill for most of the four hours that passed since leaving Winter Lake Lodge. Despite an exhaustive effort, I hadn’t yet reached the next milestone — the Happy River Steps — some twelve miles later.