by Jill Homer
I’d been pedaling about as hard as my air intake would allow for fifteen hours, more than ninety miles. I needed a lot more than soup. But soup was all they had. I looked toward the two volunteers behind the table. They were none other than Bill Merchant — the founder of the Iditarod Trail Invitational — and Tracy Petervary, Jay’s wife. Tracy was an accomplished Iditarod cyclist herself, with finishes on both the northern and southern routes, including the women’s record on the southern route. Both were people of whom I thought highly and admittedly felt intimidated around. People who both knew I intended to make a bid for Nome the following month. They were the last people I wanted to face in this situation.
Beat escorted me to the heater and instructed me to sit down.
“Thanks,” I said. “I won’t be here long. I don’t need to sit.”
“Jill, you don’t look okay,” he said. “Is this really what you want to do? You don’t want to get sick all over again.”
“No.”
Tracy brought me an open can of lukewarm chowder. Beat, ever the pragmatist, continued to press for the smart decision and not compromise my lungs any further. I started crying, so I held my breath and buried my face in my jacket, because I was deeply ashamed. Of all places, it had to be here, at mile ninety of a relatively easy training ride — at least easy compared to the Iditarod — having my meltdown in front of two people who I least wanted to witness me having a meltdown. Beat, my partner in many adventures as well as in life, has witnessed plenty of my meltdowns, and wrapped an arm around me.
“I don’t know … why I’m having problems now,” I blubbered. “I feel like there’s something wrong with me.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “You’re having a bad day. It happens.”
“They’ve all been bad days, lately,” I sniffed, and held my breath again to suppress the sob I could feel building in my gut.
“Look, we don’t have to do this,” Beat said. “Let’s call it here. I’ll ride back to the start with you. We’ll go home and figure it out.”
I was still holding my breath and biting my lip. I nodded weakly.
Tracy smelled trouble and stepped in. People quit races for lots of reasons and usually regret it later, so she tried to be helpful when she urged me to continue. “You came here to ride, didn’t you?”
I shrugged. I did come here to ride — but not to force myself through two-plus days of hypoxic despondency. Tracy meant well, but her urging only heightened my shame. It was just biking. Why couldn’t I do it without gasping?
Beat interjected. “She had pneumonia last summer and it’s been a long recovery. The last thing she needs now is a relapse.” He turned to me. “I’ll ride with you. We should go back.”
I conceded, but the worst shame was yet to come. As we wheeled our bikes away, I turned to face Bill, who nodded at me sympathetically. Bill had witnessed some of my worst Iditarod missteps. He and Kathi were riding to Nome in 2008 when they passed me in a deadly cold swamp called the Farewell Burn. I’d become desperately sleepy and rolled out my bivy sack in a low-lying hollow where the temperature was thirty-five below zero. The winds were picking up, and it was still early in the night. It was a terrible place to bed down, and any veteran would have continued moving if they had any sense. Bill called out to ask if I was okay.
“Yes,” I replied. “Just tired.” Bill said nothing more. He respects people enough to let them make their own mistakes.
He again didn’t offer up advice or criticism after I dropped out with frostbite early in the 2009 race. But in 2010, I received a cryptic message from him about “needing to have a talk” before I could enter the ITI again. This e-mail was prompted by my online advocacy of satellite-based trackers, which Bill despised. His views were understandable — at the time, the technology was relatively new and devices were prone to malfunctioning and miscommunication that could prompt unnecessary search-and-rescue efforts. Bill wanted to explain why my insistence on trackers would not be tolerated in the ITI. It was a simple disagreement, but I was going through a difficult time in my life, and took this message personally. I felt as though a respected mentor was breaking up with me.
I vowed to never return to the ITI. But later that year, I met Beat. Much of our courtship was propelled by outlandish endurance challenges, and I was the one who urged him to try winter racing in Alaska. He wanted me to take up ultrarunning, so we raced the 2011 Susitna 100 together, on foot. Beat was hooked. He walked to McGrath in 2012 — a year of heavy snowfall, low temperatures and high drop-out rates. He went to Nome on the southern route in 2013, the northern route in 2014, and then there was the intense expedition through the snowbound Interior in 2015. In just four years, Beat took this strange hobby further than I had dreamed in a decade. By then, I was just trying to keep up. Bill respected Beat, and I believe this helped me re-enter the fold when I signed up to walk to McGrath in 2014. My return to the race that year had been so triumphant. But here, looking into Bill’s eyes, which were kind but sad, I felt hopeless.
“I guess that’s it for Nome,” I said to Beat as soon as we were out of earshot. We’d only been pedaling for three minutes before I was winded again and needed a break.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Beat said. “First we need to get back to the road.”
Chapter 5
Giving Up, Then Giving In
Despite my silent boycott in 2010, the Iditarod Trail Invitational always felt like a family. It’s an event that draws people in without fanfare and inexplicably lures them to return, year after year. Even if they haven’t raced in a decade, no one ever leaves the ITI, not really. The annual reunions are filled with a unique cast of characters that society would never bring together were it not for a unifying interest in suffering in the cold.
The 2016 gathering was full of familiar faces. There was Bill, of course — the old-fashioned, grizzled sourdough whose autobiography would send chills down your spine, but who had a kind and empathetic side as well. His wife, Kathi, hailed from Germany and had a steely matter-of-factness about the most daunting aspects of Alaska.
There were the folks who had been around since almost the beginning: Tim Hewitt, the sixty-year-old lawyer from Pennsylvania who had walked to Nome an astonishing eight times since 2001. His wife, Loreen, had joined him for at least the short race nearly every year since 2008, and walked to Nome herself, setting the women’s foot record in 2014. Jeff Oatley of Fairbanks held the overall bike record to Nome after an astonishing ten-day ride in 2014, and had more finishes on the short course than anyone else. His wife, Heather Best, held the women’s bike record to McGrath and continued to lower it every year.
Then there was the second generation — a group I counted myself among. These were people who first signed on in the mid-2000s, before most of the information surrounding the race was widely available, and there were still a lot of unknowns. Jay and Tracy Petervary lived in Idaho and had raced nearly every year since 2007. Both had ridden bikes to Nome twice, and Jay returned for a third finish in 2015, making it through the abandoned Interior just before the storm hit. Shawn McTaggart, a shy and unassuming woman from Anchorage, was the only woman to walk both the northern and southern routes of the Iditarod Trail. Eric Johnson, a doctor from Utah, had finished the route to McGrath six times, but even after several attempts, had never reached Nome.
The third generation was people who joined the fray after 2010, when the popularity of the Iditarod Trail Invitational started to explode. (And by explode, I mean that more than a handful of people had heard of it.) This group included Beat as well as most of the fastest individuals — cyclists such as Kevin Breitenbach, John Lackey, and Tim Berston, who have blitzed the 350-mile course in less than two days. There was Dave Johnston, an Alaska-based ultrarunner with a laid-back, surfer dude personality and an ability to run farther than all but a few others in the world. He holds a McGrath foot record that most believe will never be
broken.
Then there were the rookies — wide-eyed individuals who had read everything they could find about the race, and who still didn’t have a true understanding of the adventure in front of them. They had meticulous race plans that were going to fall apart in ways they never anticipated. They had top-of-the-line gear that was going to rip, bike parts that were going to break, food that was going to become inedible, and water containers that were going to freeze shut. In short, they had all of the potential for all of the mistakes that all of us made when we were rookies. I envied them most of all.
In this family, the last Saturday in February was like Christmas Eve. This was the day when we converged from our disparate corners of the world to gather around the tables of a pre-race meeting at a hotel in downtown Anchorage. Jittery nervousness hung in the room like static electricity, and we distracted ourselves with small talk about the weather (Very warm. Too warm. It was forty degrees outside and the streets were bare, scoured of all of their usual mid-winter snow.)
Inevitably, the conversation would turn to whether I was racing this year. For the past several years, I’d attended the pre-race meeting with Beat even though I wasn’t racing, so it was a natural question.
“Well,” I’d say in a drawn-out breath. “I’m signed up to ride to Nome …”
After dropping out of the Fat Pursuit in January, I came down with a stomach flu and then a cold that put a deeper notch in my fitness. Beat also contracted his second respiratory infection of the season — although we never seemed to share these bouts of pneumonia or bronchitis, at least one of us had been sick for most of the past six months. January trickled into February. I told Beat that I was going to downgrade my participation to the 350-mile division, if I raced at all. Since our training season had been less than ideal, Beat decided to ditch the plan to ride a bike to Nome and stick to what he knew — traveling on foot. He reasoned that because he wasn’t in great shape, he didn’t have the stamina or experience to risk a cycling effort. However, a thousand-mile hike with a heavy sled was okay.
“You know how crazy that sounds, right?” I replied. But I didn’t argue. Our plan had always been to ride to Nome together. In early February, it appeared that neither of us would.
Because Beat no longer planned to ride, he insisted I borrow his fat bike. The lightweight titanium frame had been built by a company called Eriksen, and it was custom-designed by another elder of the sport, Mike Curiak. Mike is a wheel-builder in Grand Junction, Colorado, who began racing the Iditarod Trail in the mid-1990s. He raced the first Iditasport Impossible in 2000 and set a record that wasn’t broken for fourteen more years. By the mid-2000s, he’d branched out to unsupported expeditions. A meticulous engineer, Curiak refined his equipment every year, designing and building a new bike before testing it out in the field. The old bikes were sold, and Beat had acquired three of them at this point — an art collector of sorts. Arguably no one had more experience cycling the Iditarod Trail, or a better understanding of exactly what equipment was best for the job, than Mike Curiak. When the Eriksen became available, the prospect of piloting the perfect bike helped soften the disappointment that Beat and I wouldn’t travel together.
Most cyclists love to geek out on new gear, but I am not one of those cyclists. I’m content to take suggestions from others, tend to become comfortable with what I have, and refuse to give up my well-used bikes until they’ve been ridden into the ground. I’d probably still be riding my first fat bike, a 2007 Surly Pugsley with outmoded geometry and rusting parts, were it not for Beat, who is without a doubt the most dedicated gear geek I have ever known. As an athlete, Beat prefers the typically minimal sport of running. But as an engineer, he gravitates toward the latest and greatest technology, and his gear collection reflects this. Although he is six inches taller and forty pounds heavier than me, we have the same inseam measurements, so we can comfortably share bicycles. And because I’m the more avid cyclist in the relationship, I tend to be the prime benefactor of Beat’s gear enthusiasm.
After I’d recovered sufficiently from the Fat Pursuit and resumed training, Beat set me up on his Eriksen. With only five weeks until the race, it was rushed introduction, but Eriksen and I got along well. The bike was light and nimble, as well as robust and comfortable. I took Eriksen out on steep hill repeats and mountain bike trails, aiming for at least fifteen hours of training per week. In the friendly climate of coastal California, I began to feel strong again. Still, I couldn’t garner much optimism. After all, well-groomed dirt singletrack and seventy-degree sunny days bear zero resemblance to conditions I’d encounter in Alaska. Even after racking up more than thirty-thousand feet of climbing per week and increasing my weight limits at the gym, I knew this training was a shallow mimicry of the strength I’d need to battle deep snow and high winds. If I lost control of my breathing in such conditions, it wouldn’t take much for the situation to change from difficult to deadly.
Pessimism is a powerful force, but even repeated blows to my confidence weren’t quite enough to kill my long-suffering Nome dream. Although I’d slacked on all of the preparations necessary for the thousand-mile race, I never removed my name from the roster. Two weeks before the start of the race, it became necessary to declare my intent. The Iditarod Trail Invitational provides only limited support, and almost none beyond the 350-mile finish line of the short race. As such, athletes who intend to continue toward Nome must mail supplies to remote villages through the United States Postal Service. Because services in the villages are extremely limited, boxes must contain all the food necessary for each segment of trail. Some athletes also mail themselves replacement items, such as bicycle tubes, medical supplies, and batteries. It’s difficult if not impossible to proceed in the race without these supplies in place, and slow mail service necessitates sending boxes at least two weeks early. If I sent out my boxes, there was still a chance I could aim for Nome. If I didn’t, my decision to stop in McGrath would be final.
Beat refused to advise me one way or the other. “It’s your decision,” he insisted, but added, “They’re only groceries. If you don’t go on, you’re out a couple hundred dollars. But, if everything goes well and you get to McGrath feeling good, and you didn’t send the boxes …”
“I’d always wonder what if,” I interjected, and sighed. “I hate what ifs.”
Beat had already procured a few hundred dollars’ worth of high-calorie-density food for his boxes. In an effort to waste as little as possible when I inevitably stopped in McGrath or sooner, I gleaned my supplies from his rejected items: Ziplock bags of peanut butter, trail mixes made of peanuts, almonds, M&Ms, and dried cranberries, crunchy granola bars, Snickers bars, chocolate, bags of crackers crushed and vacuum-sealed, a few bags of beef jerky, mashed potato powder, two freeze-dried meals for each box, and gummy bears.
Since the calories didn’t quite add up, I went out and bought a few of my own treats: peanut butter cups, fruit snacks, shelled pistachios, and dried cherries. It was a lot of sugar — it was almost entirely sugar — and I recognized that. But a decade of endurance racing history has shown me that when I have a sour stomach, there’s not a lot I’m willing to stuff down my gullet besides sugar. Also, when I’m cold, ingesting sugary food helps my body fire up the internal furnace. Sugar fuels quick energy and heat, and if you keep the calories coming in, you can avoid energy crashes. I compare it to feeding a wood stove with kindling. Sure, logs are better, but logs won’t do you much good if you can’t keep the fire lit. Sugar was easy and it was effective. Of course, this food didn’t provide many nutrients for an endeavor that could take nearly a month, so I added multi-vitamins and salt tablets. When thrown together it looked terribly unappetizing, but I reasoned that I wasn’t going to actually eat much of this food, anyway.
Beat and I packed everything into fifteen flat-rate boxes, and I carted them to the post office on an unseasonably hot February day in Los Altos, California. The boxes looked ridiculous stuff
ed in the back of our Subaru Outback, and even sillier when stacked on the counter of the tiny neighborhood post office. One customer who watched me hoist the heavy boxes over five separate trips finally asked what I was mailing to Alaska. It’s one of those social interactions where you consider whether you’re going to tell a long, confusing story, or just lie. I usually pick the latter.
“They’re supplies for schools,” I mumbled, then rushed away before he could ask more questions, hoping the post office workers didn’t overhear this and decide to check. The boxes were all marked “Please Deliver to School” — the only public buildings in these villages — so it made my lie plausible, but also inexplicable. Who sends boxes of candy to schoolchildren?
One week before the race, I finally loaded Eriksen with all of the supplies I planned to carry on the Iditarod Trail. The rear rack contained a small bag with my down parka, booties and down pants, for quick access. There were two narrow panniers with spare clothing — extra hat, mittens, balaclava, wind-resistant pants and shell, primaloft shorts with attached knee warmers, extra underwear and socks — as well as a stove, pot, fuel bottles, repair kit, freeze-dried meals, nylon waders (used for open water crossings), two trash bags (to protect gear or clothing in the event of rain), and a toiletries kit. In the triangle of the bike was a fitted frame bag that contained the rest of my food — up to four days’ worth — a waterproof bag with electronics, headlamp and spare light, bicycle pump, anti-chafing lube, blister tape, and wet wipes for hygienic purposes. I planned to carry three liters of drinking water in a hydration pack on my back, where I also stored my camera, inhalers, pills, and wind-blocking skin ointment. The sleeping bag, waterproof bivy sack, and pad were rolled into a bundle on a front rack, which Beat had modified so we could attach it to the bike’s fiberglass suspension fork with soft straps. An hour before sunset on Sunday afternoon, I took the load out for a final test ride on trails near my neighborhood.
