(this is the continuation of 2021 ITI race report The Monsters in My Mind)
Mile 303
I am done. I know I only have an hour or two to dawn but it might as well be years away. My brain is shutting down, my body barely moving. This third consecutive night of sleepless motion is catching up with me. I falter: I am falling asleep while walking. Sarah’s feet are numb, and she is not OK, but she is moving now. I’m not. I drop my pack and curl up on the hard-packed trail. ‘I have to sleep.’ Sarah, ten feet ahead, does not object; silently, she stops with me and gets her stove out to make water, coffee, for the both of us.
This is the pre-dawn witching hour of Day 8 out here, on the Iditarod Trail. We are in the middle of barren tundra in an endless snowed-in white expanse on the remote overland route between Shell Lake and Yentna Station. There is no definition to the landscape, and we’re stopped right by the trail with no protection from the elements or speeding snowmobilers. As I rapidly drift into exhausted sleep, my last half-conscious thought goes to the reflective tape that a fellow racer donated to my ski poles back in Anchorage: a safeguard against being run over in just this situation.
I wake up an hour or two later, groggy and depleted. Sarah hasn’t slept. She’s in her sleeping bag but she has been up this whole time to melt snow for water, and brew up coffee to help me get back on the trail. Sarah did take off her cold, wet shoes, to try and save her feet. I see the shoes outside her sleeping bag; they’re frozen — and we are less than fifty miles from the finish, with a little over thirty hours until the cutoff. My foggy brain is slowly waking up and starts making sense of where we are and what is happening. ‘Sarah, your shoes are frozen. WTF. You can’t continue on.’ I’m peeling out of my sleeping bag, making motions to get ready for another push. Sarah moves about in her own sleeping bag and surfaces a bottle of water - my bottle, that she protected in her bag to keep it from freezing while I was sleeping - and a thermos with hot coffee; both are worth their weight in gold right now. She hands them to me before sinking deeper into her bag; without shoes, there will be no forward push for Sarah.
At this point, we both know that Sarah won’t be finishing the race. From start to finish, Sarah put our camaraderie and joint experience ahead of the realities of her own personal race strategy — yet I am in no position to repay her generosity and sacrifice. After more than three hundred miles, the race 90% finished, we have no joint path forward. The clock is ticking, and my choices are straightforward: stay with Sarah and drop out together; or get up and go, solo, to try and beat the cut off.
I choose to leave, guilty, sad, and angry. I’m angry at myself, for failing Sarah. I’m angry at Sarah, for prioritizing water and coffee - for me - over protecting her own shoes from freezing. But I’m mostly angry at myself, for being a terrible race partner and even worse friend to Sarah, who has been nothing but gentle, funny, kind, and so incredibly supportive to me. A flash of guilt stabs me in the chest: I am about to abandon a friend that I spent the entirety of the last six days with, sleepless nights and groggy days and all - and I’m abandoning her in the far-out middle of nowhere, Alaska, in single digit temperatures, confined to her sleeping bag for lack of footwear, beyond exhaustion, with no battery power left for her personal communication device. Yet that’s exactly what I do, after giving her my lightweight down booties as a feeble final gesture of support.
We didn’t start this race together; in fact, a week ago we didn’t even know each other. That doesn’t make my decision to push on and finish the race feel any less like a betrayal, even though it is the rational choice: I know that, in the short term, Sarah is safe in her trailside bivy. I know that my presence won’t help change her situation at this point, and me pushing on may help secure an evacuation even faster than if we both stayed put. But the reason for why I want to continue on has nothing to do with helping Sarah, and everything with me wanting to finish that darn race. I’m doing the very thing that Sarah has refused for the past week: I’m putting my own race above our joint experience and camaraderie, and I loathe myself for it. Yet - I go.
Shattered, I leave Sarah in the snow with a promise to send help. I am nine miles from the Yentna Roadhouse. Day is breaking tiredly and gloomily.
The next miles all blend together. I move glacially, one foot in front of the other, still carrying my skies. 40 pounds on my back, and no snowshoes for flotation; foot racers in the ITI typically pull a sled to distribute weight, AND they carry snowshoes. I have neither; thank god for hard packed trail. I realize that I am at the mercy of the elements: my only chance at finishing is if the trail stays frozen.
A sound rips through the snowy gleam: a snow machine! The machine is the first I have seen in the better part of a day, and following the same direction of travel as myself. Here is Sarah’s salvation - I am relieved.
The snow machine comes and goes while I have miles to go. I lose track of time and effort; all I know is that it’s hard. Every step is hard; every miles feels like forever. Every nap is just too short, each snack too small. Yentna Roadhouse comes and goes. Snow squalls come and go. Darkness comes — and stays. It catches me as I am approaching the crossing of the Su, the same Susitna River that was a veritable pit of bottomless snow and overflow when we had to cross it early in the race. I know I need to get across that river on skis, and I need to do it before my last remaining bits of energy wane. I rip open a Starbucks Via; there is no hot water or time to make a brew, so I dump the coffee granules straight on my tongue.
I get across the Su, my torn ski binding tenuously re-attached with duct tape. It’ll hold for a few hundred yards, and that is all I need: flotation to make it through the deepest spots. On the far side of the Su, my plan is to keep moving - but I can’t. The temporary coffee boost wears off; I’m fading fast. I spot another racer’s dug out bivy spot and gratefully make camp in the abandoned pit. The clock may be ticking, but I can’t keep pushing without sleep. It is snowing heavily now, and warm.
I wake up 30 minutes later, drenched. My hands are wet. My bag is wet. My clothes are wet. Everything is wet. At first I am tired enough that I try to ignore the discomfort and steal another wink of sleep, but I quickly realize what serious predicament I’m in. I’m wet. In these types of endeavors, the cold is often not the biggest threat - it’s moisture. Get wet, drop dead. I’m twenty miles from the finish, and soaked. The snow is coming down heavily, and burying the trail. This isn’t good. Adrenaline starts cursing through my veins. Yes, this race has been hard — but in some ways it’s also been remarkably smooth and easy until now Ski, eat, sleep, repeat. It’s been cold, but I haven’t felt at risk. Now I do, twenty miles from home.
It’s hard work trying to make forward progress on the buried trail. I warm up quickly, though I am acutely aware of how precarious my situation is: I only have so much steam left to keep moving, and only so much fuel to keep the engine fired up. With how wet I am, I can’t dig in; I can’t slow down. I have to make it.
Another witching hour on the trail. In the early morning hours I have to cross Cow Lake - another notoriously deep spot, with drifts and buried trail and no clear markers. Another spot for me to pray my duct tape binding may have another mile on it. I don my skis and lose the trail almost immediately. I start weaving back and forth across the swamp; the snow is impossibly deep here - even with my skis I’m sinking in above my knees. An hour passes. Without my duct tape binding, I’d be up to my waist on every step. Please don’t give out on me. Soon I see another headlamp in the dark; another racer, desperately trying to find a way through the snow drifted depths of Cow Lake. Together yet separately we finally clear the massive pit and negotiate a route into the forest.
And then… daylight. This is it: Wednesday morning; the race cutoff is at 2pm. I’ve got seven hours and thirteen miles to go. In another world, I’d laugh at those statistics but ten days into the race I’m not sure that I will make it. Actually, strike that: I’m sure that I won’t make it. So sure, in fact, that I start crying on the trail, with tears of frustration. I pushed so hard, I came so far - and now I’m going to time out? I check in with my husband Paul, who is watching via GPS from Utah. My watch is dead, so I don’t have an easy way to measure forward progress. Paul keeps texting me with mileages, insisting I can make it. ‘Go go go’ is what he says.
I keep going. At 11am I see a snow machine headed my way. I am tempted to flag it down and ask for a ride: there is no way I’ll make it. The rider seems to read my mind; he slows up as he comes towards me, and flips his visor up: ‘Yeeeeeah - you got this!!’ His cheer surprises me, until I realize he’s a race volunteer. ‘I think I’m going to miss it, won’t I? I’m too far out.’ I search his face for reassurance which I promptly get: ‘No way — you’re almost on the ice road. Keep motoring, you’re going to make it!’
I’m still wet and tired, but now I’m determined too. I keep marching onwards, skis mounted on my backpack. The promise of the ice road keeps me going - smooth, fast travel for the final five miles to the finish.
My gloves and clothes are soaked. I’ve been wearing a trash bag to help keep me warm since that disastrous bivy; the bag is torn to shreds. My pink cross country poles are magnitudes too tall to use on foot. My duct tape binding failed completely right after Cow Lake; the naked ski keeps slipping off my pack. I’m a mess. But I’m on the final stretch. I am crying again, even though my frustration has evaporated.
The finish is at Big Lake, amidst lake houses and recreation traffic. There is cell coverage here; I FaceTime Paul who has been glued to his screen, watching my dot march on towards the finish. And then…. I finish. 25 minutes under the 10 day cutoff, 350 miles through Alaska; with one broken binding; an amazing new friendship, and a wrecked one too.
But as I cross the finish line I already know: I will be back. There are lessons here that I have yet to learn.