by Jill Homer
“Probably an electrolyte imbalance,” Geoff speculated. “Everything tastes too salty because your body actually needs more salt. If you ate some more sodium, that might help with the cramping.”
I nibbled on a potato chip but only made it through one. There was no flavor behind the unappetizing saltiness. It seemed as though my body had shut off some of its unessential functions, like taste, in order to reset the whole system.
“How are you feeling?” I asked Geoff.
He shrugged. “Pretty much fine,” he admitted. “My legs are sore, but it’s not really worse than after any of the other long runs I did.”
Geoff finished first in the Little Su 50K with a time of three hours and fifty-three minutes. He started racing at 11 a.m., and he was done before 3 — about the span of time I spent riding less distance between Flathorn Lake and Eaglesong Lodge, when trail conditions were still good. He won the race handily. There was one other runner, a well-known female ultra-runner, who nearly caught him around mile fifteen. After he crossed an open swamp, he looked over his shoulder and saw her emerge from the trees on the other side, so he picked up what until then had been a relaxed pace. But he never pushed his limit. He didn’t just complete his first ultramarathon, first winter race, and first serious race in a decade. He dominated it.
I wasn’t entirely surprised — Geoff had always been a natural athlete. On the other hand, in the five years I’d known him, I had never seen this competitive side. I’d hiked with him, backpacked with him, ridden across the country on loaded touring bikes with him, and embarked on plenty of shorter mountain bike rides with him. All of these opportunities to compare our abilities allowed me to cling to the impression that Geoff and I were closely matched in strength and endurance. His Little Su 50K performance proved we were nowhere near the same league. He had a penchant for long-distance speed that I couldn’t even fathom. My race pace had wrung every ounce of my strength, and it still only produced a comparatively mediocre performance. I was thrilled for his win and proud of what I’d accomplished on my own, but it was difficult not to feel inadequate.
We drove home later that evening— Geoff graciously did all of the driving — and I slumped back into work on Monday morning. Carey offered a exuberant congratulations when I walked in the door, and told me to go look in the refrigerator. Inside, beneath the unidentifiable Tupperware containers and age-old remnants of birthday cakes, was a six-pack of Pepsi. On my desk was a package of Goldfish crackers — two of my favorite things, according to my blog, where the intro at the top of the page flippantly declared that I was a “small-town journalist who likes to ride my bicycle in horrendous conditions and eat Pepsi and Goldfish for breakfast.”
“Aw, thanks,” I said with a lopsided grin; my face still felt numb. “I’m just starting to get my appetite back, so this will taste awesome for lunch.”
“How are you feeling?” Carey asked.
“Oh, you know, like I got run over by a truck,” I replied. “I am glad I finished, but I’m even happier that it’s over.”
Carey just shook her head. “It’s crazy, but congratulations. What now?”
I shrugged. “That’s a really good question. I guess for now we put out this week’s paper. And maybe later this week I’ll think about riding my bike again.”
“If I were you, I’d take at least a week off,” Carey said. “Lay on the couch or something. Once you have kids, you’ll be wishing you could do stuff like that.”
“I suppose,” I said, letting my voice trail off. There was work to do, but more than resting my body, I wanted an opportunity to turn off my brain and zone out for the rest of the day. I still needed to process a large amount of fear, anticipation, elation, and anxiety that consumed me during the past week. My emotional center, more than my legs or my heart, was ready to flatline for a while.
Newspaper work, of course, never makes that easy. That same afternoon, Jane pulled me into her office to point out several nitpicking customer complaints about two ads I had designed for the previous week’s edition. The advertising intern, Emily, quit in December. Rather than hire a new intern, Jane delegated the job to me. Designing ads was a time-consuming job that I juggled along with my editorial assignments — reporting on arts events, editing sports and news stories, compiling community news items, and designing pages. After Jane started dropping advertising assignments in my inbox, I was incensed. But I knew the “too much work” argument would get me nowhere, so instead I protested the ethics of having someone from the newsroom cross over to ad work.
“How can I be objective about news items from local businesses if I’m also designing their ads?” I protested.
Jane didn’t have an answer for that, because she didn’t believe it to be a valid question. “Julie is still going to deal with the customers,” she told me. “I just need you to put together the ads.”
But that wasn’t true. I still had to deal with the customers, only through the convoluted channel of fielding their complaints through our ad representative, Julie, who then complained to the publisher, Jane, who often complained to the employee who was technically my boss, Carey. (“Why is she telling me this?” Carey would wonder aloud.) Eventually this time-consuming game reached its intended source, and by then any issue had been blown out of proportion and twisted beyond recognition. I wondered if most people who worked office jobs had to endure similar moments of impotent rage — standing in a cold, cement-walled room and staring ashen-faced at the floor while their boss berates them for getting a numeral in a phone number wrong, because the instructions were scrawled in bad handwriting.
“Now I have to give them a free ad,” she barked. “You’re lucky they didn’t pull their contract altogether. Julie is livid. It cuts into her commission, too, you know.”
Of course it was all my fault. I was just the person at the end of the chain, the low woman on the totem pole who was slowly being crushed. It didn’t matter that Julie was supposed to review every ad and send proofs to the customer to have them approved before printing. I doubted any of this actually happened. It was easier to blame me in the aftermath.
“I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “It’s been a really busy week.” I looked up. Jane knew, at least on the periphery, about my bicycle race. She never mentioned it but sometimes made quips about my mountain bike chained outside, or my wet bike clothes drying near my desk. Of course I couldn’t use my hobby as an excuse for mistakes in my work. Still, I was becoming more convinced that my hobby was the only thing keeping me anchored in my work. Having bike rides to look forward to most days of the week helped me tolerate an endless stream of deadlines and demands that I viewed as unfair. Hard efforts helped me burn off frustration. I did what was asked of me, mostly without complaint. Couldn’t she tell I was limping around the office right now, and maybe infer it was because of this extremely difficult race I’d just completed? Couldn’t she cut me some slack, just for today?
“Don’t let it happen again.”
I hobbled back to my desk, fuming.
“Everything all right?” Carey asked.
“Just ads,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “When is she going to rehire Emily’s position already?”
Carey shook her head. “She’s not.”
*****
The following afternoon, the throbbing soreness in my legs had dissipated enough that it seemed possible to lace up my New Balance shoes and hit the street for a recovery run. The road was slicked in a layer of hard ice, which was subsequently coated in just enough frost to give the ice sand-like traction. It was an ideal running surface, actually. Overcast skies and light wind made for an ideal day for a run, but there was a sharp bite to the air and daylight was fading at 4 p.m.
“How is not spring yet?” I wondered as I plodded along the neck-high snow drifts lining the driveway. A rush of hot blood flooded my sore muscles. My feet throbbed with sharp pains from still-open blisters.
Logically I understood the slow progression of the season, but a deeper part of me just expected that the Susitna 100 would mark a grand, ceremonious end to my first winter in Alaska. After more than three months of pedaling through slush, pickling my skin in a marinade of grit and cold rain, braving long outings in below-zero air, and blinking against blizzards, I succeeded in overcoming the hardships of winter training. I vanquished fear and emerged victorious in an intensely difficult endurance feat. I had done this impossible thing. I had finished the Susitna 100. Yet I was still a lackey at my work, and it was still winter.
I supposed I couldn’t expect everything to become different. And yet, everything was different. I hadn’t yet managed to pinpoint any tangible reason why.
I widened my stride as I crossed Diamond Ridge. It felt like prying open a rusty hinge. Forced into movement, muscle tightness began to break apart, until all hints of soreness subsided. The sun slipped into a narrow opening between the cloud ceiling and the sea, and the ice road reflected a dazzling shade of tangerine. I had to squint against light that was suddenly everywhere; there was no turning away from it. Even the snow was on fire, glittering like a disco ball as light shifted from orange to coral to ruby. If I had any unknown superpowers residing in my body, then beauty was their elixir. I picked up my feet and started sprinting, breathing the searingly cold air and running as though the hundred-mile slog never happened, and my legs were healthy and strong, and the energy of the universe was all mine to absorb and release.
Two miles earlier, I wasn’t even sure that I’d make it to the end of my driveway. I’d convinced myself that the nutrition deficiencies and muscle breakdowns I’d sustained were debilitating, and that I’d be broken for weeks. But in my mind — where it mattered — the fast and free runner still resided. She was always there, even at my lowest moments of the Susitna 100. She never left.
Perhaps that’s what shifted during the Susitna 100. The inner runner, or Adventure Jill, whatever I wanted to call her — that free-spirited side of myself that I all too often buried beneath anxiety and obligation — had finally broken free. In many ways, my past adventures had been well-calculated to minimize risks. I leaned on others to make decisions and put safety nets in place. I kept close to my comfort zones so I could avoid discomfort. I thought experience expanded my comfort zones, but in reality they narrowed as anxiety and fear gained leverage. All those years, I kept Adventure Jill on a leash to prevent her from dragging me into terrifying and dangerous situations. That had been the mistake. Backing away from unknowns only trapped me in a suffocating corner surrounded by my own misperceptions. It took long enough, but I finally realized it was worse to be trapped than it was to be afraid.
*****
For the weekend following the Susitna 100, Geoff and I indulged in our first lazy morning in a while. Our local paper boy, who was actually a middle-aged man in a Ford pickup, plowed through four new inches of snow covering our driveway and delivered the Anchorage Daily News. “Hey, now I can probably actually get my car out of the driveway tomorrow,” I announced to Geoff as I cracked the front door just enough to pull the thick Sunday edition inside and wave at the driver as he backed away.
“The plow guy is coming later today,” Geoff called back from the loft, where he was answering e-mails on the desktop computer.
“Even for only four inches?”
“He’s been good about that. Charges us twenty bucks every time, but at least he’s consistent.”
It was true. Our snow plowing bill averaged a hundred and twenty dollars per month, which was more than we paid for heating fuel. I wondered if Geoff ever pondered the irony that we invested more money in leaving our home comfortably than we did in living there, but I didn’t say that out loud. Our driveway was more than a hundred feet long, and I didn’t want to shovel it, either.
“So what do you feel like doing today?” I called back toward the loft as I threw the newspaper on the table and filled up my espresso maker with whole milk and chocolate syrup. It may have been a week, but as long as I could feel Susinta aches in my legs, I was going to indulge in hot milkshakes for breakfast.
“You want to go for a ride?” Geoff asked.
“You want to ride? A bike?” I replied, surprised. Geoff’s interest in two-wheeled activity seemed to wane with each training run. His studded-tire mountain bike, which at least saw some commuting action early in the winter, had gathered a layer of dust nearly as thick as the one on my road bike trainer. His Honda Civic worked better for post office trips, and he didn’t want to waste energy that was better conserved for running, skiing, and construction work. After his Little Su win, there was no doubt that running was going to continue to be a major part of Geoff’s life. He was already talking about summer races, and had even registered for a couple of spring events in the Alaska Mountain Running series. In the meantime, I was becoming more entrenched in endurance cycling, researching twenty-four-hour mountain bike races and four-hundred-mile road rides under the midnight sun. I wondered if our outdoor interests would ever realign.
“Sure, why not?” Geoff said. “We could just do something mellow.”
“Crossman Ridge would be fun. Usually it gets enough local snowmobile traffic to always have a decent trail even when there’s new snow.”
Crossman Ridge was a strange neighborhood, even for Homer. A strip of cabins and other rustic structures lined the crest of the hill above Bridge Creek Reservoir, about a mile beyond the end of the town’s winter road maintenance. These homes were snowed in for six months out of the year, requiring residents to commute by snowmobile and shuttle all of their supplies — heating fuel, food, and water — on cargo sleds. Despite this inconvenience, about a dozen residents lived there year-round. It was arguably an ideal living situation — wild Alaska living just a few miles from all the conveniences of a city. Building codes didn’t seem to apply to the Kenai Peninsula in general, and Crossman Ridge residents especially seemed to not adhere to standard protocol. There were all manner of structures up there — plywood and Tyvek shacks, yurts, and even an old blue school bus that had been partially converted to a dwelling. It was abandoned for the winter, but a peek into one of the broken windows revealed a clean living space and newer cans of food as evidence that someone had resided there recently.
I enjoyed riding my bike on the snowmobile path beside these mysterious residences. It had the mischievous excitement of trespassing through backwoods properties where reclusive residents would shoot first and ask questions later (I reminded myself the trail was legally a public road, although this was only marginally reassuring.) Even as a trespasser, I felt a connection to the place — the promise of Alaska, the appeal of self-sufficiency, romance of escaping societal constraints, and gumption to carve out a life from the land.
“When do you think we’ll move to a cabin out in the woods? Like, really out in the woods, where we have to chop wood and mush dogs into the nearest village?” I mused to Geoff as we pedaled away from our driveway, just a few minutes after it had been freshly plowed by a contractor with a large truck and twenty more of our dollars.
Geoff laughed. “What do you mean, when we move? It’s perfect here. Anyway, where would you ride your bike?”
“We’d live on a hundred acres and I’d slash and set my own trails with a chainsaw, then groom them with my snowmachine. I saw one for sale when I was putting together the classifieds this week — an Arctic Cat. Only seventeen hundred dollars. I could probably sell my Geo for that much, or make a trade. We’d be set.”
Geoff shook his head and pedaled ahead of me on the muddy gravel of Diamond Ridge. “So now you want to move to the Bush? You’re always saying that you’d get cabin fever and probably die.”
I pulled up beside him. “Probably. I mean, a world with no bike trails, maybe that I could live with. A world with no Internet? Yikes.”
“Yeah. If it wasn’t for your blog, I would never know what you’
re thinking about.”
The words hit like ice water and came out just as we launched down the steepest section of Diamond Ridge. The roar of wind drowned out the conversation, and we refocused on the bumpy descent. Verbal communication had never been one of my strong traits, and e-mail and text messaging was more than a convenience for me. Written communication bypassed the part of my brain that always became bogged down in speech, and I relied on it heavily. I went to great lengths to avoid confrontations, even benign ones. There was a reason I found my way into the editing side of newspaper work — reporting caused far too much anxiety. Every time I needed to call a source for an interview, it often took three or four tries to build the courage I needed to dial all seven numbers on a phone and let it ring through.
As difficult as it was for me to talk to strangers, it was exponentially more difficult to address uncomfortable subjects with people I knew well and loved. I was willing to lie through my teeth, even though I was a terrible liar, just to avoid expressing difficult truths. I spent the entire previous summer telling Geoff I was “still working on it” when he broached the subject of moving to Alaska, even though at the time I had no intent of doing so. Pretending I was going to move to Alaska was easier than admitting to him or myself that I suspected our relationship had run its course. The idea broke my heart too deeply to ever say it out loud. It was more comforting to lie, until the lie became truth. I was grateful on so many levels that it had. But I couldn’t deny that the roots of this lie were still firmly in place. Even though our life in Alaska had evolved into a beautiful truth, it didn’t fix our communication problems.
