Companionship in extremis

(Warning: contains confession of possible craziness.)

In a short essay on the Adventure Journal website, Erin Windauer describes the occasional but not rare sense of athletes, adventurers, and others that they are in the presence of someone or something which is benevolent or reassuring but which isn’t actually *there*.

Ernest Shackleton’s epic tale of survival after the sinking of his ship the Endurance in Antarctic waters is well known, but less known is what he and two of his companions experienced after they made their way by open boat, above, to South Georgia Island and trekked across to a whaling station to find salvation. Each of the three felt the presence of someone with them: “During that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia,” wrote Shackleton in his memoir, “it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.”

Though I don’t quite see the link between this sensation and the lab experiments summarized in Windauer’s piece, I can’t stop thinking about the phenomenon, which is one I’ve experienced in some of my winter races.

I didn’t even know that my feeling of being… joined? guided? accompanied? was a thing; I just chalked it up to being hungry, cold, and exhausted. And yes, all those stressors might have contributed to my sense that *something* was with me while I rode and walked off Two Top on January 8, thirty-six hours into the Fat Pursuit.  

But still: to have that experience in common with Shackleton is strangely satisfying.

January Racing Recaps

Fat Pursuit 2017 (part I): the first part of my race report on the Fat Pursuit

Fat Pursuit 2017 (part II): the rest of the race report on the Fat Pursuit

Fat Pursuit Numbers: some facts and figures on the Fat Pursuit

Fat Pursuit Bike, Gear, and Kit: a look at the clothing and equipment used at the Fat Pursuit

Arrowhead IV – Fast Until It Wasn’t: my race report on the Arrowhead 135

Ultra Effects, or Putting the Hell Back in Health: musings on the physical effects of racing

Ultra Effects, or Putting the Hell Back in Health

This week, about ten days after the Arrowhead, I started to lose my eyelashes, one of the classic aftereffects of long races. It’s not like my lashes are all falling out, but every time I wash my face, I lose a few, and I seem to find one of my desk every few hours.

Though bizarre and a little gross, losing some eyelashes is also probably the lamest of the myriad physical effects of races like the Fat Pursuit or the Arrowhead.

The main effect of the races was drastic weight loss, from eating and especially drinking too little during the races. When I got home after the Fat Pursuit (two days after finishing the ride), I weighed something like ten pounds less than I had the day I left for the race, and that was after eating and especially drinking like crazy on the road trip home: literally gallons of water, milk, coffee, soda, Gatorade (lime cucumber is the best!). I can’t say I looked good.

Two Days after the Fat Pursuit

My weight stabilized at my usual level after a day or so at home, but for another week or two I needed to eat about twice my usual amount of food (which isn’t small) to keep it there. Then I did the Arrowhead and kicked off the cycle again. My metabolism finally slowed again this week, just about the time the eyelashes started falling out. Maybe there’s a relationship between the two.

Running in parallel to a big appetite and major thirst is being insanely overheated. Perhaps this hyperendothermism is just my body processing all the calories I’m sticking in it, but for days I’m almost feverish, constantly on the edge of breaking into a sweat. My little girl, always cold, loves it: I’m a fireplace she can snuggle with.

Come to think of it, maybe this heat is a sign that my body’s repair processes are in high gear, fixing various kinds of race-induced wear and tear. At the trivial end of this spectrum of damage were issues like acne along my hairline and dry, lifeless hair (wearing sweaty hats for 55 hours will do that) or deep grooves in my calves from the cuffs of my compression socks (wearing sweaty footwear for 55 hours will do that).

At the more dramatic end of the spectrum of physical damage were the pains and agonies caused by making the body work so hard for so long. Especially after the Fat Pursuit, my feet were destroyed – pale, wrinkled, and so goddamn sore I couldn’t walk barefooted without wincing. Even now, the bony spots just behind my pinky toes are tender. My ankles, too, turned against me, swelling up so badly that my ankle bones vanished for several days. WebMD says this was “edema,” which sounds slightly better “athletic cankles.”

And though I escaped both races without any especially bad leg or back pain (problems I’ve had after other long races but tried to mitigate this year by cross-training to build strength), I could not escape truly ridiculous weakness and soreness, especially in the big muscle groups taxed to the limit by 22 or 55 hours of exertion. The day after the Fat Pursuit, for instance, I needed twenty minutes to put on my socks because I could neither bend my legs enough to reach my feet nor pull hard enough with my arms to yank the goddamn socks up. My traveling companion Ben thought this was amusing. Later, when we stopped on the drive home, I almost fell out of his minivan because I couldn’t unbend my legs in time to swing them under me as I leaned my torso out of the open door. Getting back into the minivan, I had to grab my thighs and hoist each leg up into the vehicle.

This lack of strength went deep. I limped around for maybe five days after the Fat Pursuit (only a couple days after the Arrowhead!), but a week after I finished my attempt at that first race, I went to the gym for my usual weight training class, thinking that I’d feel okay. Not great, but okay. I didn’t. I struggled with loads well under my normal working weights, and got dizzy from even a few reps. I’ll just sit down over here out of the way for a while.

Paralleling that lack of muscle strength was the loss of my voice. Scratchy the day after the Fat Pursuit and croaky two days later, my voice disappeared entirely on the third day and only started to return after about five days of not talking – during which I drank even more ridiculous amounts of water. I suspect that dehydration was the main cause of the laryngitis, but I’d also guess that exposure to cold, dry air for those two days – and to -20° F air that first night of the race – also played a big part. Honestly, I was a little worried, as I creaked out fragments of sentences during the week after the Fat Pursuit, that I’d permanently damaged my vocal cords. I see now that I didn’t. Close call though, and one I’ll have to prevent by covering my nose and mouth during future races in cold temps.

The other main effect of being outside in the super-cold temperatures at the Fat Pursuit was a touch of frostbite. My toes were fine, but the tip of my right index finger got burned when I had to barehandedly use my wrench to adjust my seat (an adjustment necessitated by some unpleasant chafing that’s best left to the imagination), and I pretty badly burned my upper lip. The lip required weeks of care: a topical ointment (thanks, Leah!), then ounces of petroleum jelly, then tube after tube of Carmex – five or so? Over the course of three weeks, the skin went from burned to horribly raw to badly chapped to really dry and then finally to normal, except maybe for the pink spot right in the center. Thank goodness my mustache does a good job of hiding it!

The frostbit fingertip took just as long to heal, and if anything passed through even more stages of healing: dry white flesh turned pink and hard, then reddish and inflamed. This skin grew increasingly tight until the fingertip basically molted, revealing fresh new skin underneath. Interestingly, none of the healing states were alive enough to register on my smartphone screen! I was glad when I molted if only because I could use my phone without seeming to be flipping off everyone.

Everything I’ve heard and read on frostbite says that the burned spots will always be more sensitive to cold now, and I think that’s true. My lip was very tingly even in some moderately cold weather before the Arrowhead, though not during the event. I did get my hands pretty cold during that race, though, and sure enough that right index finger got mad: tingling, then burning, then feeling as if it were exploding in my glove. It wasn’t – just warming back up.

That sensation hasn’t happened again, thank goodness, but most of my fingertips still feel funny. Not painful, but stubby and slightly numb. This happened after my first Arrowhead, too, and subsided after a couple months. I’m guessing that this dull feeling is due not to frostbite but to holding onto my grips for something like a total three days’ worth of riding. It’s an odd sensation. Not unpleasant, since it’s likely to go away, and even kind of perversely pleasing as a lingering reminder of the races, but also a reminder that – as with my vocal cords and lips, I’ll have to be very careful in future races to protect hands.

And then there are the ongoing disruptions to sleep: crushing bouts of exhaustion, extended spells of overnight sleeplessness, and wacky dreams. In the first few days after each of this winter’s races, I slept much less than normal – five or six hours a night, waking up sweaty and hungry and thirsty. The body just didn’t know what to do with the freedom to sleep again! After those few days, I shifted back to something like a regular pattern, but I still don’t quite know when sleep will crash down onto me at 3 pm or 8 pm, or lift off at midnight or 2 am. I just roll with it, five weeks after the Fat Pursuit and two after the Arrowhead. I’ll sleep when I can, and caffeinate when I can’t!

When I can sleep, though, I enjoy very vivid dreams about, or sort of about, the races. I’ve always had very literal dreams, and now – as I have after all my longest and hardest races – I’m having numerous dreams that are more or less replays of parts of the races: riding off Two Top in a whiteout; pedaling through West Yellowstone to the checkpoint, only it’s not West, it’s my hometown in Upper Michigan; walking up some Arrowhead hill…

I’ve also had some weirder dreams, like one – riffing on The Empire Strikes Back – in which I was riding in a long line of other fatbikers – many of whom I just knew, in that unspecified but certain way of dreams, were the folks who stayed in my same cabin at the Fat Pursuit. Riding over a snowy trail along the edge of a ridge, we encountered a group of Rebel soldiers on their tauntaun snow lizards, heading back to their Echo Base. No biggie. Maybe next year’s Fat Pursuit will include some miles on Hoth.

Sick about Trump

Someone (I wish I could remember who) pointed out in a fairly convincing way that President Trump and his coterie have already demonstrated (15 days into his would-be reign) many of the flaws that he so viciously accused others, especially Clinton, of possessing during the campaign.

Using secret unofficial email servers? Check. Needlessly endangering American troops? Check. Flirting with voting fraud? Check. Cozying up to Wall Street? Check. Seeming to obey unseemly foreign powers? CHECK. Using his official connections for personal enrichment? HELL YES CHECK. Surrounding himself with shady advisors who adhere tomun-American ideologies? DOUBLE HELL YES CHECK. Being nasty AF? TRIPLE HELL YES CHECK. 

This list could go on, but one accusation he hurled but hasn’t yet exhibited was that of Clinton being secretly ill. Like, dying. Practically dead! 

But Jesus on a tortilla, look at this guy! He does not look healthy! 

Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty

And with whispering now about his taking a baldness drug, c’mon – how long will it be till we find out that in addition to being guilty of all the sins he laid on others, he’s actually suffering from all sorts of illnesses?

Fat Pursuit 2017 (part II)

Part I here.

Heading out from the Chick Creek checkpoint, I felt good. I was eager for the next leg of the course, which I had ridden in the other direction during my two attempts at the 200k course. I remembered loving the innumerable long views up and especially down the forested mountainsides and finding the trail not too hard. I encountered a few 200k racers as they worked their way to the checkpoint, and was passed after a few miles by Perry and Josh, two good guys from Spearfish, S.D., who had been at the checkpoint with me. They were having a good time, and pulled away from me pretty easily.

I was trying not to push too hard, fighting the urge to go all out – an urge that has led at more than one race to a huge slowdown after the rest and refreshment of the checkpoint wears off. This more steady approach helped me cover the first seven miles of this section, and keep moving well as I started to climb toward the more challenging trail that would go to West Yellowstone. And the views did not disappoint: I stopped more than once to goggle at the spectacular vistas of the mountainsides patched with stands of lodgepole pines and open fields of white snow. Above, a cloudless blue sky. Twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Perfect winter.

Snow Bowl on South Black Canyon
10, 12, 14 miles from the checkpoint, I had little to do but ride and think about how I was riding. Mentally, I was fine: thinking clearly, remembering to eat and drink, reading the trail well. Psychologically, the same: enjoying myself, thinking positive thoughts, looking forward to discovering whatever was around the bend – and to facing the bigger challenges later. Physically, too, good: feeling no aches or pains even in places that had hurt last night (back muscles, knees), and especially feeling no real fatigue. I had the sense that I was moving slower than I had overnight, but my average speed was still well ahead of the where I needed to be to finish the race by the cutoff. In short, I felt good for having been riding 20 hours and 90 miles.

Despite all that good feeling, somewhere in the stretch, the fatigue of having been riding for 90 miles and 20 hours (not to mention having been awake for thirty) caught up to me. Very unlike the familiar feeling of nodding off, which wells up from inside, this came on as an irresistible external pressure to sleep. Mindful of the rule that racers cannot sleep on the trail (where snowmachiners could run them over), I looked for and found a little spot off to the side of the trail: a gentle slope between two lodgepole pines, corrugated not long before by some sledder. Without really thinking, I propped the Buffalo in the deep snow alongside the trail, pulled my sleeping pad off the front of the bike, and threw the pad down in the snowy spot. I shrugged off my hydration pack and draped it over the bike’s handlebars, then lay down on the pad. A second later, I woke up, chilled but refreshed. Twenty minutes had passed. As I pulled myself back together, a snowmachine approached. I raised a hand to the driver – Salsa’s Kid Riemer! He hopped off the sled, already shooting pictures and asking how the race was going. I told him that I had just had a little nap, and that I felt good. He commented on my upper lip, which I’d been ignoring since the checkpoint, and repeated what I’d heard at the checkpoint about the attrition up front. He guessed that only ten riders were still riding, and none of the pre-race favorites.

This heartened and surprised me, just as it had at the checkpoint. Had the night been that hard? Recombobulated, I climbed back on the Buffalo, said my goodbye to Kid, and headed up the trail. The little bit of extra mental and physical energy provided by the nap put me in a reflective frame of mind, and I concluded that though I wouldn’t pass up the chance to ride any section of the Fat Pursuit course again under less strenuous circumstances, I would probably choose this one if I could – any easy daylong out-and-back jaunt from Island Park. Someday!

The undulating trail was wide and white but far from uniform. Snowmachine tracks – the skis and the treads – covered almost all of it, but dozens of big and small snow boulders had rolled down off the slope to the left. Small softball-sized ones only rolled a few feet onto the trail. Bigger ones – soccer balls, beach balls – made it halfway across, into my path down the middle of the track. I enjoyed riding over some of them, feeling the Buffalo’s tires break them in half. A small amusement.

Around one bend, I saw a cluster of riders ahead. I assumed that Josh and Perry were among them, but when I approached, several sledders broke away and rode their machines down into a big bowl, leaving two bikers. I caught them and we aid out hellos. I didn’t recognize either of them, but Graham had started the 200 mile race with me, and Kellie had started the 200 kilometer race that morning. We rode together until we reached the big turn to the north, toward West Yellowstone. They stopped there, Graham lying down in the snow for a nap while Kellie had a snack.

I pushed on, remembering how hard this trail had been during my first attempt at the Fat Pursuit in 2014: a soft, ungroomed mess that I had not been able to ride for more than a few yards at a time. Today, the trail was firm and smooth, easy to ride even as it tipped upwards. As my computer’s elevation reading went up, though, the sun went down, though. The trail turned light blue, then gray, then black except where my headlamp and headlight shined. 5:00 p.m. came and went. I’d been riding for 24 hours.

Not being able to see much of the trail now, I just rode toward the yellow spots of light in front of me. Eat, drink, stretch, occasionally hop off to walk a tougher section. I crossed from Idaho into Montana. Somewhere on the climb, I caught or was caught by another rider, Greg, who said he was a friend of JayP’s. The surprise of seeing another rider – and especially of having more light on the trail – was a nice diversion from the trail and the trees. As we rode, I filed away details about him: his Canadian accent, his beautiful blue Kona Wo fatbike, his use of a silver beer growler for water. “That’s a good idea,” I told him. “Yeah, it holds a lot of water, but it all tastes like beer!”

Our trail emerged from the woods onto a high ridge – the South Plateau – and exposed us to a sharp wind, blowing from the west across our path. Finger drifts reached across the track, and here and there, the wind created weird patterns that looked like runes. Getting tired again, I knew that they weren’t letters, but I tried anyhow to decipher them. Though the drifting had obscured any snowmobile or bike tracks, some small animal was traveling just ahead of us, leaving a line of crisp paw prints the size of half dollars. We were leaving footprints, too, walking about as much as we were riding. I promised Greg that we would soon hit the faster sections that descended to West Yellowstone, but these downhills kept not arriving. After Greg pulled away from me at one point, I caught him as he prepared to bivvy, saying that he needed some sleep. I assured him that we were not far from West, and the second checkpoint, where I’d already decided to get some good sleep – or maybe I begged him to keep going with me.

However that conversation went, he did get back on his bike, and sure enough, we finally reached the downhill run to West. Doing 4, 5, 7 mph was marvelous. Greg pulled away from me again, a red human form, then a gray shape, then just a blinking rear light, then nothing but a fresh track in the snow. From my computer’s mileage reading, I could tell we were within a few miles of West Yellowstone now. A few signs appeared, some presenting miles-to-go numbers that seemed absurdly high. Gates barring entry to this or that road. The red light on a radio tower south of town. A dim yellow skyglow from the town itself. The descent ended with a straight trail toward the hotels and cabins at the south edge of West Yellowstone. Another rider suddenly passed us. Greg sped up to ride with him. Lagging and feeling really tired, I took a bad route to the checkpoint. What should have been a quick zip-zip ride over the streets turned into a tour of the eastern half of the town.

Finally, at 2:30 a.m., I pulled into the open garage where a few other bikes were resting. I leaned the Buffalo against an open spot on the wall, grabbed a few items off the bike, and headed up the steps into the checkpoint.

The Buffalo Resting at West
The volunteers gave me a hearty welcome. A number of other racers were there too, including Greg and the guy who had passed us as we reached town – my friend Jon, who said that he was going to stop there, that reaching West had been his goal. The living room was full of sleeping riders, some of whom, the volunteers said, had also decided to stop. They asked me what I was planning to do. I told them that I was going to take a nap and then continue. A photo by Jon’s girlfriend, who had been waiting for him at the checkpoint, suggests why they seemed surprised to hear this:

West Mess (photo by Anne Leider-Snyder)
West Mess (photo by Anne Leider-Snyder)
Taking off my vest and shell and hats, I used hot water to melt off my icebeard and sat down to eat a bowl of soup and two grilled-cheese sandwiches. I finished the soup, but halfway through the first sandwich, I realized I needed that nap. The volunteers pointed me downstairs. I decided to take a 90-minute nap to get through one full sleep cycle. I set my phone’s alarm (thank god you can just tell Siri what to do!) and crashed into sleep. After at least one major coughing fit, the alarm sounded. Feeling awful, I decided to grab 20 more minutes of sleep. When that alarm buzzed, I vaulted out of bed, feeling great. It was a little after 5:00 – 36 hours into the race, and one hour before the cutoff time to leave the checkpoint.

Back upstairs, I found different volunteers on duty and more racers at the table. Everyone was quitting or had quit except Graham and Kellie, whom I’d last seen in the afternoon as we turned north toward West. A volunteer asked me if I was planning to continue. “Yes! I feel good!” His eyes widened. “Really? Okay! Good. I’ll tell the race director.” I tried to hustle through everything I needed to do. Two more bowls of soup. A handful of gels to stash on my bike. Hot water in my pack, along with 2 or maybe 10 hydration tablets. New batteries in my headlamp and headlight. Last, a check of the forecast – “1 to 2 inches of snow during the day,” a volunteer told me – and directions back to the course – “Just turn right on the street here and keep going. The street turns into the trail.” 5:58! Time to go. I climbed into the Buffalo and pedaled out of the garage, turned right, almost instantly left town.

For a few miles, the course headed due north, between the West Yellowstone airport and the highway that runs up to Bozeman. I could hear an occasional car through the trees, but steadily I moved away from the road and reentered the black, silent woods. The riding was easy, and pedaling again – after three hours at the checkpoint- was comfortable and familiar. The sleep had been effective, providing physical rest as well as mental rejuvenation. I wasn’t sure exactly when the sun would come up, but I knew that I’d get a boost from the sunshine, and that the boost would help me in turn get up and over Mount Two Top, the 7,880-foot mountain that loomed as the next big challenge on the course. And the last big one, for after Two Top was a long downhill and flat run to the third checkpoint.

As I turned east off onto the trail that ran along the southern shore of the Madison Arm of Hebgen Lake, I checked my average speed. I was still ahead of the pace needed to reach the third checkpoint by the cutoff time of 6 p.m. – about twelve hours into the future – and thus also ahead of the pace needed to finish the race by midnight or a little later. That would mean a total race time of 55 hours or so. Longer than I expected, but feasible if my legs held up. Certainly, I had enough food and water to go that long.

Winding over these flat tracks, I was aware suddenly the sun had come up behind me, lending pale blue and gray tones to everything. At first, I could hardly see the trail in the flat light, but gradually the light sharpened enough that I could see the trail and, across the Madison Arm, the curving banks of Horse Butte – notable to me as one of the few places outside of Yellowstone National Park into which the park’s bison can safely migrate. I hoped to see some buffalo over there, but didn’t. On my side of the lake, a few trees, some shrubs and brush, acres of open country. I wasn’t moving fast but I was moving steadily, now mostly west, not needing to dismount for the few inclines or the occasional snowdrifts. I found another racer’s tracks and tried to follow them. The trail bent south, past mile markers, through an idle campground, and back into thicker trees. Above the trees, Two Top, maybe 10 miles away in gray sunlight.

The mile markers ticked by. I crossed Highway 20 (the finish was 22 miles away by car from that spot) and rode a short spur trail toward Two Top Loop, which would go up, over, and down the mountain. Coming off this spur to turn toward Two Top – now looming dead ahead, green-black with trees but bare on the summits – I saw ahead of me a pack of dogs. Wolves? No, too small. Just as I saw that they were sled dogs, harnessed up and raring to go, their driver shouted to me from off-trail: “Hey, can you do me a big favor?” I stopped. “What is it? I’m in a bike race.” He explained he’d dropped something on the trail and needed me to hold the dogs in place while he retrieved it.

So I dutifully stood there, one foot on the sled’s brake and both hands wrapped around a rope tied to the sled’s chassis, while he sprinted away and then returned with a lost shovel. “Thanks, man. You’re a lifesaver. Have a good ride!” He took the rope from me, tossed it on the sled, pulled up the brake, and shouted to the lead dogs. They ripped off down the trail, throwing up plumes of snow behind the sled. I stepped back onto the Buffalo and pointed myself at Two Top.

Heading toward Two Top
I had an unsophisticated strategy for getting over Two Top – and into the last 35 miles of the race: to climb the mountain as steadily as possible, going slowly but continuously, and then to attack the descent, making up time so that I reached the flats by mid-afternoon. I reached the foot of the mountain at about 11 a.m., riding as far up the climb as I could before dismounting for what I knew would be a long hike-a-bike session from about 6,600 feet to about 8,000 feet.

On Two Top
1,400 feet of climbing, more or less. I tackled the climb by going 100 feet at a time, more or less, fourteen times, more or less. On some steep pitches, my computer showed me gaining a foot with every step. 100 steps earned 100 feet. More often, I needed to take two or four or even ten steps to climb a foot. And of course, the Buffalo didn’t roll itself up the hill; I had to push it. Sometimes I had my hands on the bars and walked pretty naturally. Other times, I had to lean in, chest almost on the bars. Here and there, I had to put one hand on the stem and one on the seat and push from behind.

Climbing Two Top
Foot by foot, though, we made our way up, encountering a few groups of snowmachiners. One group, heading up, stopped just up the trail from me and, in unison, reached up to activate the GoPros on their helmets. Another group, coming down, slowed and stopped when they saw me. The leader looked at me and shook his head before roaring away again. I only talked to one group of sledders, two guys in U.S. Forest Service jackets who asked jovially how the race was going. I slurped water from my backpack while we chatted, then waved as they headed uphill. The fact that the riders were on different brands of snowmachines bothered me. Shouldn’t the government have a uniform fleet of snowmobiles?

Suddenly, the trail flattened and I saw the sign marking the Continental Divide, the boundary between Montana and Idaho. This spot isn’t the top of Two Top, but I wanted to commemorate the moment. Two tourists were taking pictures of each other at the sign, and I asked them to take one of me, which they obligingly did – without commenting on how much I looked like death warmed up.

At the Continental Divide (7,733 feet)
I was happy to be on top of Two Top, but the climb had already eaten up a lot of clock. I had about three hours to reach the third checkpoint – just barely feasible, and only possible if I could ride fast on the descent and then hold a good pace on the trails from the far side of the mountain to the checkpoint.

The bad part of Two Top is that the summit is not a peak but a wide ridge, a patchwork of snowfields and stands of trees, with the trail winding every which way. Up here, the snow and the wind turned the trees into the famous “snow ghosts,” some of the most amazing and bizarre sights I’ve ever seen:

Two Top Snow Ghosts
I could ride many parts of this flatter section, but now the light flurries that had started as I reached the divide began to intensify. In the fields, the wind whipped the snow at me; in the woods, the snow drifted down. I could not see any bike tracks, and even the snowmachine tracks were nearly obscured. One more group of sleds went past me as I crossed an especially wide meadow, giving me a wide berth and roaring up a steep bank that I knew I would have to walk.

I didn’t know that those helmeted snowmobilers would be the last people I’d see for eight or nine hours. I did know, as reached the slope they had zoomed over, that my Fat Pursuit was over. My average speed had now dipped under the minimum finishing pace, and I had less than three hours to cover almost twenty miles to the checkpoint. With fresh legs and compliant trails, I could meet this challenge. With exhausted legs and snowed-in trails, I could not. I was not going to reach the next checkpoint by the cutoff.

“Fuck fuck FUCK!” I was pissed. I shouted, I stamped my feet, I even felt a couple tears trickle down my cheeks. “I wanted this so bad,” I said out loud, possibly to the Buffalo. The bike didn’t respond. I hauled it up the ramp, through a grove of trees, and out into a wide meadow.

I climbed onto the Buffalo and pointed our front wheel at the trail markers I could see down the trail. In this open area, though, the flurries became a blizzard, raising walls of snow in front of me and obscuring the markers as I rode toward them. The snow under me was uniformly windblown, hiding the edges of the trail as well as any snowmachine or bike tracks.

This was crazy. As crazy a moment as I’d experienced in any fatbike race – and at least as crazy as biking through the forty-below temperatures on Saturday morning, 36 hours before. I thought for a second about whether I was in any danger. I decided I wasn’t. I was warm and dry. I wasn’t too hungry or thirsty, though I’d have gladly accepted anything to eat or drink that I hadn’t been eating and drinking since Friday evening. My legs were heavy, yes, but not sore, and I didn’t even feel tired so much as weary. As my outburst a few minutes before showed, I could still think, and make clear decisions about riding and resting, not just stopping and going as whims struck or my body allowed.

So no I wasn’t in danger, even if I couldn’t see how I was going to get off the mountain. But I was disappointed – that I hadn’t made better time earlier in the race, that I hadn’t gotten further down the course before the snow started, that now I would not finish.

But whatever. I couldn’t do anything about any of that now, but I could try to ride the Buffalo off the mountain and then as far down the trail as possible by 6 p.m. Maybe I could get to the last main junction before the trail turned north to the third checkpoint. Reaching that goal would be worth something.

I stood there for a minute, looking down the mountain, trying to pick out the paired posts that marked the edges of the trail. I could barely see the nearest ones, which were perhaps 20 feet away. I couldn’t seen the next pair at all. With nothing better to do, I dug out my phone and took a picture so I’d always be able to see just how bad the conditions were. Turns out, the phone’s camera was better at finding the posts in the blizzard than my eyes!

Two Top Whiteout
I had been racing for almost exactly 48 hours when I took this picture. I knew I could not finish the race as I’d hoped, but I also knew I had a lot of good work to do to get down to some spot where I could “self rescue” by riding back to Island Park or maybe get picked up by one of my cabinmates. I texted my friend Ben to let him know where I was, though he already knew thanks to the online race tracker. I told him I was going to ride and walk as far as I could and then update him.

Climbing back on the Buffalo, I headed down the mountain. We could ride some of the steeper parts, though the drifts made steering difficult. My computer showed that we were steadily losing elevation and approaching the turnoff from the trail over Two Top onto another trail that ran toward Island Park. Ride the downhills, hike-a-bike the intermittent uphills, pedal, walk, pedal, walk. Back into unbroken woods again.

The sky had turned from gray to black again, my third nightfall of the race. I don’t think I’d been aware of any dawn or dusk as it happened, only after it was over. In the dark, the snow kept falling, filling the flatter tracks and slowing me down even more. I crossed back into Montana, then back into Idaho. Montana, Idaho. Sometimes riding, sometimes walking. 6 p.m.

Around 7 p.m., I made the turn off the Two Top trail and onto a trail – Railroad Grade – that I remembered from my two previous races as being fast and fun, an undulating, curvy section that repaid a certain necessary effort with decent speed and the pleasure of riding fast.

I found though that Railroad was not fast this year. From one edge to the other, the trail was snowed in. An inch or two here, three or four inches there. Snow boulders like those I’d seen on Saturday afternoon – 28, 30 hours ago! – had rolled onto this trail too, but here they were points where snowdrifts could grow. I tried to ride or walk around these obstacles, but my body and mind were finally failing. I’d stumble and fall, or oversteer and crash. Getting up, I sipped a little water or tried to eat something. My water was almost gone, though, and every single item of food tasted the same – like sweetened chalk. 8 p.m. More than once, a tree dumped some of its snow on me as I stood on the trail. I wondered if somehow my headlight was causing those snow dumps. My computer died, so I had to remember how to put in fresh batteries.

As tired as I felt, I also felt relieved that I was, for all intents and purposes, done with the race. I just needed to get off the course. Walking and riding and stumbling and weaving, I made my way down Railroad Grade. To my surprise, I now picked out at least two sets of tracks – bike tires and footprints. I wondered who was ahead of me, and if I could catch them. 9 p.m.

My computer showed that I had just a couple miles to the spot where Railroad Grade ended. There, the racecourse went north toward the third checkpoint, eight miles or so away. Looking at my map, though, I could see that continuing straight west for about that same distance would get me out to the highway. I decided to do that. I texted Ben to let him know, then resumed the trudge. Somewhere in this last stretch, I saw ahead of me, smack in the middle of the trail, an LP gas tank, the sort that might sit outside some rural house. I knew that the tank wasn’t really there in front of me, and yet… As I rode closer, it of course vanished. I kept riding, laughing a little to myself at the oddity of that hallucination.

The turn off Railroad. 10 p.m. A bit more walking and riding brought me to the junction where I planned to keep going west. 10:20. I needed longer than I should have to do the math and figure out that I’d been riding for just over 53 hours – minus the two naps. I was very hungry.

Standing at the junction sign, I tried to figure out which way to go. The trail toward the highway did not start right at the signpost, so I started to wander around a little bit, trying to pick it up. My initial foray put me in the middle of a snowfield, up to my waist in snowmachine-churned powder. As I extricated myself, I saw a snowmachine coming down the trail from the north, the direction of the checkpoint. I waved, hoping the driver would see me, stop, and help me get oriented.

The sled wasn’t driven by just anyone, though: it was JayP, out looking for stragglers like me. Just as he had when he pulled me off the course in 2014, he asked, “How are you doing?” I answered honestly: “I’m tired. I’m going to head out to the highway from here, but I can’t find the trail.” He used his headlamp to find it, a freshly groomed track not ten feet from the signpost. “What happened to your lip?” With the tip of my tongue, I touched my lip. Stinging. “I think I might have gotten some frostbite.” Jay nodded. He said that he was going to go find two racers who were ahead of me but had gone off course, and then go back to the third checkpoint to retrieve the only other 200-mile racer, a guy who’d reached and then left the third checkpoint only to tire and return. I said I was going to ride out to the highway, then ride back to Island Park on the road. Jay said that he’d watch the online race tracker and see if he could meet me at the highway instead.

He roared off up the trail. 10:45. I climbed onto the Buffalo, immensely relieved that I knew how things were going to end. The groomed trail was wondrously smooth and firm, and I enjoyed riding the three or four miles toward the highway. Going oh so slowly, I crossed the Henry’s Fork again, a few miles upstream from where we had seen it on Friday night near Harriman State Park.

I began seeing more street signs, so I knew I was getting close to the highway. Up ahead, red tail lights. A bike, or a set of bikes. No, a car. No, a van – Jay’s van. I rolled over a berm left by a snowplow and onto a paved street. Kid Riemer, Jay, and Gary, a volunteer I’d seen at the first checkpoint on Saturday morning, came toward me, congratulating me on my race. I could barely speak, from both emotion and horrific dehydration. They took the Buffalo from me and packed it in the van, then helped me up and into a seat alongside Graham and Kellie.

We talked quietly about the race as Jay drove us back to Pond’s. I didn’t know what to say or think beyond the fact that the Fat Pursuit had been an extraordinary experience, and so much more than I expected in so many ways – duration, intensity, beauty, difficulty. My computer showed 55 hours of riding time and 176 miles covered. 

Hunched there in the van as we hummed along the highway, I knew I needed to do the race again in 2018. I just needed to go faster, so the race wouldn’t take so long. First, though, food and drink and sleep.

 

Fat Pursuit 2017 (part I)

My 2017 Fat Pursuit was extraordinary – the course, the weather, the scenery, the effort, the effects.

Though I didn’t reach the finish line this year, I had a hell of an adventure: 55 hours and 167 miles of riding my fatbike, the Buffalo, through a surpassingly beautiful, harsh, and rewarding place. Racing the Fat Pursuit was a privilege and a challenge and a joy. I can’t wait to go back next January.

The Buffalo, loaded for the race
The Buffalo, loaded for the race

The Fat Pursuit as an event has three separate races: a 60-kilometer race run in December and then a pair of 200s run the same weekend in January – the 200-mile in which I was competing, starting at 5 p.m. Mountain time on Friday, January 6, and a 200-kilometer (126 mile) race that started the next morning.

By race day, I had been preparing for a year – or maybe longer. I had done the 200k distance at the first and second Fat Pursuits in 2014 and 2015, but I missed the first year of the new 200-mile distance in 2016. I burned up my regrets over my absence at the edition by doing a lot of training – more and better riding, including more races, than I’d ever done as well as hundreds of hours of work in the gym. I also did a wide range of other preparation: testing literally every piece of required (and optional) equipment, studying the course to the point of memorizing segment distances, ironing out travel and lodging, visualizing myself riding (not walking!) past the Continental Divide marker and under the finish line arch…

When I left for Idaho with my friend Ben Doom two days before the race, I felt as ready as I could possibly be. On the long, fun drive out west, we talked about the course, about our bikes and equipment, about other racers, and about the weather, which looked daunting: extreme cold on Friday night, the first night of the race, then the possibility of snow later in the weekend, during what would probably be the last half of my race. I’ve done okay in cold weather, but fresh snow makes for slow riding.

We reached the race HQ at Pond’s Lodge in Island Park, Idaho, early Thursday afternoon, right on schedule. We checked in at the registration table, where I was assigned race number 9, and went through the gear check, which race director Jay Petervary – “JayP” – insisted on running on the sidewalk outside the lodge, with his two dogs running around like maniacs and snowmobiles – “snowmachines” in Western parlance – revving in the parking lot. When we finally headed over to our luxurious cabin, at the back of the Pond’s property, I was pretty confident that I would be able to go for 30 or even 40 hours – perhaps a bit longer if the extra time ensured a finish.

Staying in a cabin with a dozen other racers – some doing the same 200 mile race as Ben and me, some the 200 kilometer race that started on Saturday morning – I soaked up their excitement and their knowledge. I think I made a good half-dozen tweaks to my bike and equipment based on our conversations in front of the fire. A couple favorites: use the capacious zipper pockets on the underside of my pogies (the big, funny-looking overmitts that most fatbike era mount over their handlebars) to store stuff like nutrition gels and extra gloves or hats, and loop my dry bag buckles through my bottle cage so that the bag can’t bounce out.

At noon on Friday, we all trooped over to the racer meeting, at which JayP gave a surprisingly causal overview of the race course. Cold-cut sandwiches there for lunch, then back to the cabin, quieter now as we handled final prep and got our minds right for the start of the race. I stuck to my plan for the afternoon. Get dressed in all my race gear: wind briefs and wicking shirt, compression socks and thick wool socks, upper and lower thermal base layers, heavyweight cycling pants, synthetic soft shell jacket, wind vest, neck wrap, heavyweight gloves, thick wool cap, cycling boots, clear-lens glasses. Take short ride on (and shoot live video during!) the first section of the course. Hang out for a few minutes with an old friend who’d come up from Jackson Hole to see the start of the race. Double-check that all my extra clothes were accessible: down hat, fleece mittens, light gloves, headband. Install fresh batteries in all my devices (headlight, headlamp, bike computer, hearing aids). Get to the start line in plenty of time. Pose for pictures – so many pictures: pre-race solo portrait,

On the start line

group photo with my cabinmates, shot of all the starters under Pond’s arch…

Start line crew (by Anne)

Finally, just before five, Mike Riemer from Salsa Cycles, the main sponsor of the race, gave a short pep talk. While I listened, I reset my computer to get good data for the next 24 or 36 or 48 hours. The screen showed a temperature of -9º F, but I refused to believe it. I felt warm and happy and ready. We cheered the race volunteers and especially JayP, who then sent us off with a simple “Three, two, one, go!” My eyes welled up unexpectedly, but now we were rolling. There’s no crying in bike racing!

Rolling…

Section 1: From the Start to Checkpoint 1 (81 miles, 5:00 p.m. Friday till 11:30 a.m. Saturday)
The opening miles of the course routed us south over flat, fast trails along the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River – a famous and gorgeous fly-fishing creek. In a long loose line, we passed the ominously-named Last Chance resort, a few buildings at a wide spot in the river where the sunset shot light through the steam rising off the black water. Dozens of trumpeter swans were settling in for the night. I jockeyed with other riders for good lines on the trail, but tried as much as possible to absorb the beauty – the river and trees around me, the sunset fading to my right, the blinking lights and hunched shapes on the bikes in front of me.

Soon after Last Chance, we turned right, for a loop through Harriman State Park. Full dark. Headlamp and headlight on. -15º showing on my computer. Dismount and get in the queue of riders lifting bikes over the gate into the park. Take the moment to pop a gel and a sip of water. Back on the bike. Catch up to some riders, get caught by others. Greet Jill Martindale, going well on her splatter-painted Salsa Beargrease, Miami Vice, early in her own extraordinary adventure. Study a mechanically regular line of feline tracks running along the edge of the trail. Climb and descend the low hills. Glance at the black bulk of a bluff in the near distance – the rim of the Island Park caldera. Keep things smooth as the trail leaves the flat open fields and enters thick evergreen forest.

This narrower, tighter riding was tricky – a mental test. I’m not a very good rider on singletrack under perfect circumstances, but now I was maneuvering a 50-pound fatbike and trying to not to slow down the riders behind me. Their multiple headlights cast numerous overlapping shadows of me down the trail – negative racer #9s, to match the negative temps. -10° in higher warm spots, -20° in lower cold ones. Watching the mileage on my computer, I could tell we were nearing the end of the Harriman section, and soon enough the trail spit us out on an access road that in turn led us across the highway, exactly 10 miles straight south of Pond’s.

181 miles to go. I stopped for more food and a gulp of water, but my hydration pack hose was frozen. Uh-oh. I dry-swallowed the trail mix and tucked the hose deeper under my clothing, hoping my body would thaw it. As I chewed another mouthful of trail mix, I dug out a set of backup clothing. A headband went across my nose and mouth, a new layer of insulation against the headwind. I pulled off my headlamp to fit my down beanie over my cycling cap, then put the lamp back on my head. I loved seeing the bright yellow spot of light it cast wherever I looked. I pulled my down jacket from my seat pack and put it on too, being careful to pull both my shell’s and the jacket’s hoods up over the headlamp straps. Finally I snuggled my gloved hands into fleece mittens. Armored up. 8:00 exactly. Three hours in.

I knew from my course notes that the next section was mostly downhill, running sixteen miles from the flats of Harriman at 6,100 feet to the lowest spot on the course – the Warm River campground at 5,200 feet. Jay had suggested at the race meeting that Warm River would perversely probably be the coldest spot on the course, thanks to the berg of frigid air that would likely settle there overnight, so as I pedaled southeast across some open country toward the trail to the campground, I looked at my computer to get a sense of how cold it was right now. The temperature readout was blank. I tapped the screen. A flicker. -29° appeared. I could feel a headwind blowing. Cold that cold feels solid. A spring or summer headwind pushes back at you. A winter headwind like this encases you. Han Solo in carbonite, delivered to Jabba the Hutt.

I was happy to make the turn south toward Warm River, into the trees and out of the wind. This riding was fast, often easy, but the extra speed intensified the cold. My hands would go dead and come back, numb and revive, though I told myself this was more from a nervously tight grip on the bars than from the cold. Loosen up. Light hands. I pulled each hand in turn out of its pogie and shook it, warming the fingers. My toes too were getting cold. I flexed each foot and pointed each toe in turn. This little piggy went to market.

About two-thirds of the way to Warm River, the race detoured to Mesa Falls, a gorgeous cascade where the Henry’s Fork pours over the edge of the Island Park caldera. At the falls, racers had to go on foot to retrieve a piece of candy that we’d show volunteers at the first checkpoint – after 45 more miles and the rest of the long night. A cluster of lights up the trail told me that I was approaching the spur to the falls. Hooking a sharp right turn, I plunged down the steep, winding road to the falls, cursing because I knew I’d have to climb every damn foot of the road to get back to the trail. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Now my hands were numb for real. Feet too. I couldn’t feel them at all. Glancing at my computer, I though I saw a reading in the -30° range, but I was going too fast to be sure.

Finally I reached the bottom of the road. 9:41 p.m. 33 miles into the race. A sixth of the full distance. A big park building loomed in the dark, shuttered for the night if not the season. Another rider pulled up just as I dismounted. We instinctively started heading down the only path we could see. Another racer came back up path toward us. “What are we doing here?” he asked. “The path just kinda peters out!” I told him we were supposed to get some sort of candy to save for the first checkpoint. “Oh yeah, the fucking candy! I shoulda paid more attention at the meeting.” He fell in behind us as we walk-jogged further down the path. I could hear a dull roar – the falls. Off the Buffalo, my legs felt like they were being misused. Cold wet air billowed up from the river below us. Finally, we saw two crude wooden stakes with a plastic grocery bag tied between them. Mr. Confusion lunged around me and grabbed one of the candies – golfball-sized cordials for a local confectioner. Some sort of JayP joke. I chose a blue one to match my bike’s bags.

We made our way back up the path to the parking lot where our bikes waited. I put the candy prize in the bag on the front of my bike, tucking it into an interior pocket so that it could not, would not fall out even if I dumped my bike and tore the bag open. Standing there, my feet felt dead. I needed to do something for them. No time like the present. Take off my mittens, lay them on my pogies. Unzip the right side of my frame bag. Find my stash of chemical handwarmer packets. Pull out two pairs. Lay one on the pogies next to the mittens, rip open the other. Shake each packet, one in each hand, being careful to really mix the contents. One of my companions leaves, pedaling back up the road. Reach down and undo the four fasteners on my right boot: Velcro strap, Velcro flap, zipper, drawcord. Pull out my foot, a block of ice inside two socks. The foot in the air feels like the foot in Lake Superior in March. Place the warmer, faintly warm, inside the boot. Focus. Flatten the warmer out where the ball of the foot will go. Push the foot, now seemingly swollen with cold (impossible!), back into the boot. Focus. Flex the foot. Wiggle the toes. Carefully do up the boot’s fasteners: drawcord, zipper, flap, strap. Get each one exactly right to prevent the need to do all this again.

But I do have to do all this again, with the left foot. By the time I had the left foot out of the boot, though, I felt – imagined? – heat seeping up from the warmer into my right foot. Two minutes later I had the left foot back in its boot. I took another minute to activate the second pair of warmers and put them against my palms inside my gloves. The empty wrappers went in my garbage bag. I ate some food, put the mittens back on, put my hands back in my pogies. I climbed onto on the Buffalo. With a big push-off, I started pedaling up the hill. It was steep and took effort but I rode every foot, chest almost to the bars at some points. The motion felt good – generating heat to trap inside my layers, giving me reason to flex my feet over and over and over, recalling repeats I did in November on the steepest hill in Northfield – no harder than the tenth time up Radar Hill! I passed a few other riders walking the climb, and a few more where the road rejoined the trail.

I paused there for some food and drink. My hydration hose had thawed long ago and the water in the reservoir – scalding hot at 4:30 p.m. – was now pleasantly tepid. I made the right turn toward Warm River, just a few miles further downhill. This stretch wasn’t quite as fast as the leg to the falls road, but I still moved well, feeling warm for the first time in a while, and even, wonderfully, feeling sensations in my feet. With a bit of concentration, I could tell each toe apart from every other toe. Little piggies awake again. A rider came up and settled in next to me. I greeted him, but didn’t hear a reply. He moved ahead, then drifted, as passing riders often do, toward me. I overreacted to create space between us and steered right into the snow bank on the edge of the trail, flying off the Buffalo and burying myself in the pillowy snow. He didn’t stop, or even notice. I sorted myself out and got back on the Buffalo, following him a safer distance. My computer showed an elevation that meant we were nearly at the low spot of the course, but surprisingly also that the temperature had gone up since Mesa Falls to -15°! Remembering JayP’s prediction that this would be the coldest place on the course, I was heartened. Maybe the cold, forecast to last all night, had broken early! My computer showed a little after 11 p.m.

Warm River itself was just to my left, flowing in the same direction as my ride. Abruptly the trail crossed the river. The low spot. In a poetic sense, the course was uphill all the rest of the way. But in a real sense, the next leg of the course was all uphill: 26 miles – a marathon! – of steady climbing. My friend Minnesota Mark had said that this was “AC/DC time,” time to crank up whatever music was needed to do the work of turning the cranks. Owing to my hearing aids, I can’t listen to music while I ride, so I had decided to enjoy the fact that this would be the longest continuous climb I had ever done – and that when the climb ended, I’d have ten miles of downhill and ten miles of flats to reach the first checkpoint. I had more water and food, pushed the Buffalo up and over a steep initial ramp, and started pedaling.

And you know what? That’s all I remember of the climb. I started the climb at 11:20 p.m., a late night, and topped out at 5:48 a.m., an early morning. I have no recollection of the six-and-a-half hours between those moments. A quarter of a day, lost to memory. I must have just been riding my bike, eating, and drinking. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t take pictures of the dark trail or the starry sky. I didn’t send any late-night texts. I just rode the Buffalo, doing the thing I came to Idaho to do.

In fact the next moment I remember came even later, after the ten-mile descent that followed the all-night climb. Other riders have said that this descent was horribly cold, but I don’t know. Instead, I recall a moment of riding on the flat stretches before Checkpoint 1. Heading north into a light but insistent breeze, I could see dawnglow to my right, over the mountain ridge that I’d climb much later in the day, on the way to West Yellowstone. One of my cabinmates had said that a day’s coldest temperatures often occur right at dawn, a sort of thermal analogue to the sky always being darkest before daybreak. I pointed my headlamp at my computer. -39°. Definitely the lowest air temperature I’d ever seen. Pretty cold. Worth remembering.

My mental tape started running again there, partly with aches and pains. My stomach hurt from too many sugary foods overnight, and my head felt heavy. I had a massive icebeard on my face, pulling at my whiskers. The headband I’d put over my nose the evening before had frozen in place. I could feel an icicle on my upper lip. I’d chew it off, spit it away, and feel it form again, an unwanted extra tooth.

Ride, ride, ride. I was getting desperate to reach the checkpoint, but no matter what I did – pedaled, ran, walk – I was getting closer. Around 9 a.m., the full light of day became irresistible. I fished my phone out of my jacket and took a picture of Sawtell Peak in the far northern distance. The course would go over that mountain too, in the last twenty miles of the race.

Sawtell at 8 a.m.

Ride, ride, ride. More miles ticked by. I reached the last trail junction before the checkpoint. From study of the course map before the race, I knew that this junction was almost exactly midway between the first checkpoint and the start. A left turn would go directly back to Pond’s. Three, four miles of easy pedaling. A right turn would go directly to the checkpoint. Three, four miles of slightly harder pedaling. Later I learned that a dozen or more racers had come to this corner and turned left, including all the favorites to win.

I turned right. I had no reason not to. I was fine. Happy. Working hard. Somewhere on the approach to the checkpoint, I stopped again to take a selfie, expecting that I would melt off my icebeard at the checkpoint.

Saturday morning selfie

Then I got back on the Buffalo and finished this first, longest leg of the race. I reached the checkpoint at 10:15 a.m. I was 17 hours and 81 miles into the race. Well over a third done, at least by distance.

This first checkpoint is infamous because it is the site of the race’s dreaded water-boil test: to use whatever means you’d like to bring eight ounces of water to a rolling boil. I’d nearly failed when I did the test at my first Fat Pursuit, but performed far better at my second race the next year. This time too I acquitted myself well. In a few minutes of focused effort, I used my white-gas stove to turn a few big handfuls of trailside snow into 16 ounces of boiling water, which became a delicious cup of hot cocoa.

Boiling some water (photo by Gary Chrisman)
Boiling some water (photo by Gary Chrisman)

After turning off the stove, I went into the tiny canvas-sided shelter where racers could thaw out and rest. I sipped my cocoa and downed a cup of ramen that a volunteer gave me. Sitting awkwardly in a saggy camp chair, I hunched toward a massive propane heater, trying to thaw off my icebeard. The cold was so piercing, even inside the tent, that I had to actually touch the ice to the heater’s shroud before the beard started to melt. Gradually the icebeard shrank and fell off. I finished my cocoa and had more soup, chatting with a couple other racers, including the leader of the 200-kilometer race, which had started that morning at 7. After a while – you could have convinced it was thirty minutes or three hours – I was ready to go again. 11:30 a.m. I had been at the checkpoint for about 75 minutes – less than a minute of rest for every mile of riding. So far.

Going back outside, a volunteer asked whether I was continuing. I told him I was. I asked him who was winning. He said he didn’t know, but that all the “fast guys” had quit overnight. Looking at the racer log, I saw that almost every name on the list had been crossed off and had “scratch” written next to it. Apparently the night had been pretty hard.

I packed up my stove and cup, threw away my garbage, filled my hydration reservoir with hot water from a massive pot that the volunteers were feeding with snow, put my gloves back on, and picked up the Buffalo from its resting spot in the snow. I massive thermometer on the side of the checkpoint tent showed a temp of +20º, but my computer showed 5°. Either way, the sun was shining high in a blue sky. The next checkpoint was forty miles away in West Yellowstone, Montana. I hoped to get there by midnight.

Fat Pursuit Numbers

I’m working on a real narrative post on the race; this list of details is a placeholder and raw material for it.

167 miles: covered by bike or foot
55 hours: time I spent on course
29 percent: fraction of 2017 that I’d spent in the race when I quit at midnight on Sunday night
10,000 feet: estimated number of feet climbed during the race

Climbing
Climbing

2.2 hours: sleep during the race (20 minutes trailside on Saturday afternoon, 110 minutes at the second checkpoint on Sunday morning)
-20º F: the supposed air temperature at the start
-39º F: the coldest temperature I saw on my bike computer, near dawn on Saturday
22: minimum number of items of clothing I was wearing then

Saturday Morning Selfie
Saturday Morning Selfie

3 times: number of crossings of the Continental Divide (maybe more?)

At the Divide (7,733 feet)
At the Divide (7,733 feet)

8.25 hours: time needed to climb, cross, and descend Two Top mountain, largely in a blizzard

Two Top Whiteout
Two Top Whiteout

8 hours: longest time I went without seeing another person (4 p.m. till midnight on Sunday)
12 hours: minimum stretch I went without talking to anyone
6 hours: hours after missing the final cutoff time that I finally stopped

Sunday night selfie

18,000 calories: estimated energy burned during the race
1 time: number of times I filled my hydration pack with snow to see if the lining and my body heat really would melt the snow (they did!)

Sheridamn, Whyomin

On the first leg of our road trip to the Fat Pursuit, Ben Doom and I made it as far as Sheridan, Wyoming – 815 miles from Northfield (925 from St. Cloud, from which Ben started, heading down to pick my sorry ass up). We have 340 to go!

Having just done most of this drive this summer on our family vacation to the Black  Hills, I didn’t pay much attention till we crossed the Missouri River. Soon afterwards, the sun set – which seemed to take hours and hours. Before we reached Rapid City, though, we were traveling in full big-sky darkness. Even with high-beam headlights in front of me, the stars were distractingly bright. I can’t wait to see them again on Friday and Saturday nights from the seat of my bike.

After Rapid City, the country and the road emptied out. We hit the Wyoming state line, goggled at the massive coal mine power plant outside Gillette, paused for snacks when we hit that city, and then pushed on to Sheridan. 

The 80 miles between Gillette and Sheridan were empty. I usually think that I grew up in a pretty sparsely-settled place, but that stretch reminded me that the U.P. is Manhattan compared to Wyoming. In the time we needed to get from Gillette to Sheridan, we shared westbound I-90 with only three other vehicles: a filthy pickup truck that blasted past us at 90 mph right after Gillette, a dumpy compact car that popped up in front of us from some remote on-ramp, and an old Chevy truck that lumbering along in the passing lane. Even this bit of I-90 will seem heavily trafficked compared to the overnight trails at the race. Again, I can’t wait.

The Caldera Are Calling and I Must Go

A person can find all types of treasure, trinkets, and trash bearing John Muir’s famous line, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” which he originally wrote in a letter to his sister.

I don’t know what Muir thought of Yellowstone and the Tetons, but I bet he’d have found the Island Park area interesting: like Yellowstone, it’s got a fascinating geological history. For instance, Big Spring, near the northern end of Island Park, is indeed a big spring – one of the biggest in the world – and gives rise to Henry’s Fork of the Snake River.

More dramatically, the entire area occupies the floor of two nested caldera – collapsed volcanoes. The larger Island Park caldera is about the same size as the Yellowstone caldera, part of the supervolcano that – as the Onion jokes –  could choose to blow at any minute.

The Henry’s Fork and Island Park Calderas

Of course this relates to fatbiking! The Fat Pursuit course skirts the aligned western rims of the Island Park and smaller Henry’s Fork calderas, then runs south to the spot where the Henry’s Fork river drops off the edge of the caldera, forming the two Mesa Falls on its way to the Snake River. The course winds toward the eastern side of the Henry’s Fork caldera, climbing along its edge before dropping back down away from the rim to our first checkpoint. There the course starts to run north, climbing out of the Henry’s Fork again and then out of the Island Park caldera too on the way to our second checkpoint. Later, after the third checkpoint, the course bumps up and over the the rims again, just a few miles from the finish.

I doubt I’ll have the wherewithal (or the daylight) to notice these various encounters with the race’s geology, not maybe I can pick a few of the details up on the drive to the start in Thursday. And I’ll certainly hope that the super volcano doesn’t erupt while I’m riding in the race. That would almost certainly melt my bike and prevent me from racing the way I’d like.