At 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, I’ll make my ninth attempt to finish the Arrowhead 135 ultramarathon. So far I’ve finished all eight of the Arrowheads I’ve started, and I hope to keep the streak alive this year!
Unlike last year’s low-snow/high-temp race in which I walked with my bike for at least 25 miles, this year’s race should be a more normal event. The entire course is apparently well covered in snow that’s been groomed for snowmobiles, which makes it faster for bikers and runners.
The Arrowhead Trail at about mile 37
And while I’d love another super-cold year, we should enjoy moderate temps rising from about 10º at the start to 25º by mid-afternoon and then falling to near zero overnight, with snow flurries starting after midnight and continuing past dawn on Tuesday. Should be pretty!
I aim to finish by 7:00 or so on Tuesday morning – making for a 24-hour effort – but my fitness this year is not nearly as good even as last year, when I was pretty undertrained. (Since the last Arrowhead, I’ve done about 25% of the miles I rode in 2023, and only amassed about 41% of the overall training time.)
Still, I hope the good conditions, my experience, a bit of sisu, and this good ol’ bike
The Blue Buffalo
will help me ride steadily, take what the trail gives me, and get to the finish line again!
The start, the three checkpoints, and of course the finish line are all favorite places of mine on the Arrowhead course. But in my 1,090 miles of racing (eight finishes plus a 10-mile navigation error in 2018), I’ve become fond of a few other spots too.
1. The turn east off the Blue Ox Trail onto the route toward Tower, which is only 9.5 miles in but always seems like a point of no return.
2. The US 53 crossing. Vroom vroom from the logging trucks, but also cheering from the assembled spectators. (But not when I took this shot, on the drive to the Falls the day before the 2020 race.)
3. Shelter 2, at a big snowmobile-trail intersection where the racecourse turns southeast. I’ve never taken a photo of this lean-to because… I keep forgetting!
4. The 35.1 mile mark, closing in on Gateway – seeing that there’s less than a hundred miles to go always feels like an accomplishment.
5. The quiet, narrow trail after Gateway – a respite after the hubbub of the checkpoint.
6. Any of the “Caution: Trucks Hauling” signs in the woods. I like the idea that the truck is hauling a load of caution.
6.5: The 67.5 mile mark, somewhere in the swamps northwest of Elephant Lake. Unremarkable, except: halfway done!
7. The sign for Elephant Lake and Melgeorges, which may or may not be accurate.
8. The bump down onto Elephant Lake, where you can see lights off in the windy distance. (Well, not in this photo.)
9. The first big climb after Melgeorges. Feel that soup sloshing in your guts as you march up the steeps! Look at the tire tracks and boot prints in the snow. Think of Dr. Seaburg’s advice: “If you can ride up further than the first boot prints, you’re beating that rider, even though they’re ahead of you.”
10. The hundred-mile mark, soon after Shelter 7, which is hard to spot because it’s dark as hell out there.
11. The view west from the top of Wakemup Hill, and the fast descent of that last big climb.
12. The radio tower off in the southwesterly distance, probably on Highway 1. But maybe it’s a mirage. Whether it’s real or not, I’ve never taken a photo because everything hurts too much. Somewhere around here, I had one of my favorite moments ever, back in the polar vortex year of 2019:
When I looked forward again, I seemed to be riding into a thin snow flurry, maybe six feet ahead of me and a foot above me. Was I actually just illuminating with my headlamp part of a low cloud? No, when I looked away, I saw black sky, the crescent moon, stars. But ahead of me, seemingly stretching off infinitely or at least to the finish line, was this weird line of snow. Finally, I realized that I was seeing my own condensed breath, carried by the tailwind up and away from me, where the water vapor turned to snow that floated down just as I rode through it. I started playing with it: a big lung-emptying exhalation created a miniature blizzard, a long hissed-out breath created a snaking line of flakes, turning my head as I breathed out created a fan of white dust…
13. The first glimpse of the Fortune Bay hotel building, a few hundred meters out from the finish line. I’ve never taken a photo of this either, but now because adrenaline and excitement has washed away the pain and I just want to finish the Arrowhead again.
I went riding yesterday afternoon on the mountain bike trails at the far western edge of town, a network of mostly flat dirt tracks through some woods along the Cannon River and a creek that flows south into the river.
I spend a lot of time on these trails in all four seasons, and I rarely encounter more than one or two people – and often I see no one, even riding two hours or so.
This ride was different! Not only did I meet another serious rider, but I saw a guy starting a campfire, a group of four college students at a fork in the trail, and several pedestrians. So much traffic, I could hardly find a quiet spot to stop for the obligatory bike photo:
I’m glad that my favorite brewery, Imminent, is more or less fully open again, but the emptied-out main floor and the giant table of cleaning supplies is so not normal.
The old building where I’ve worked my whole time at Carleton is being renovated this year, so we’ve relocated to slightly less old building that boasts all of two restrooms. I dunno about the women’s, but the men’s has two stalls – done up in heavy, dark wood like a lavatory at Hogwarts – which under the new pandemic rules, has the capacity for just one, uh, user at a time. Barging in and knocking didn’t work very well to determine occupancy, so a colleague installed a four-phase system for using the restroom.
Phase I: Arrive and flip the occupancy sign to red:
Phase 2: Do your business and as you leave, let Uncle Sam remind you to flip the sign over:
Phase 3: Immediately forget to flip the sign over, but be reminded by the other sign, pinned to the bulletin board straight across the corridor:
Phase 4: Flip the sign back to green and walk away, wondering if touching the sign negated the 20 seconds of hand washing:
Today, I should have been in Marquette, Michigan, racing the Marji Gesick mountain bike marathon.
Finishing the race last year was just about the hardest athletic thing I’ve ever done, up there with the Arrowhead and perhaps only exceeded by the Fat Pursuit. I super eager to do the race again this year, but alas: the pandemic forced its cancellation.
Instead, I headed into the woods here in Northfield for a ninety-minute bike ride on our far easier but still fun trails. Riding the same bike I’d used a year ago at the Marji, I reflected on how much training for and riding in that race changed me as a bike rider.
Some of the changes are pretty trivial, ones I could have achieved with plain old hard work: I use my brakes far less often now than I did 18 or 24 months ago, and I’m far better at riding technical stuff with some speed. But other changes are more interesting, and probably more valuable as we look, as a society, down the long tunnel of this pandemic, work against social injustice, and a tumultuous election. I think they can be reduced to a willingness to be patient and to suffer quietly. Right now is not the time (no matter what the president and his supporters think!) for a white guy to whinge. Just like this night last year, but I have to (metaphorically) just avoid crashing and keep turning the cranks. Maybe donating some money to Democratic senate candidates would be a good start.
Every day, more signs, posters, flyers, reminders about pandemic health and safety appear around campus. At this rate, the restrooms in our office building will be wallpapered in signage by Halloween. Today’s addition to the door into the two-stall men’s room:
The commodes are new-ish, and there’s a touchless paper towel dispenser, but pretty much everything else appears to be original to the building. This wooden stalls create a look and feel that’s very Hogwarts – but the building went up in 1915, just before the Spanish flu pandemic. I wonder if the college put up posters to exhort masking and washing hands.
Today was arrival day for first-year students at Carleton – the Class of 2024! I felt a touch of melancholy all day at the atmosphere: dreary weather, parents and freshmen moving into the dorms on strict shifts, everyone wearing masks and maintaining distance, small quiet groups instead of the big boisterous crowds… It’s just not right! But it’s also reality. More happily, I got in touch with my four FY advisees today. We’ll meet tomorrow morning at 10, which is going to be a nice moment.
Today, the weather turned dramatically, shaving off 30º F and turning from windy sun to overcast rain. Not only did this mean that I had to scotch plans for a ride, but also that fall has started, at least in the practical sense that I needed an extra layer when I went outside to today.
And if fall has started, then the pandemic has now touched – harmed! – all four seasons. We joked in April about how difficult lockdown would be during the winter, and thanks to Trump’s ineptitude, we might now get a chance to see. At the least, we’re going to have to read the dismal news on the pandemic while enduring the dismal autumnal drizzle. And today, students started coming back to Carleton, which means that those poor first-years are always going to remember literal and figurative clouds hanging over their first days of college.
Today was an ordinary day, but the pandemic shot through aspect of it.
In the morning, I went driving with Julia so she could practice on the freeway; she’s had her permit for 14 months and won’t have her behind-the-wheel exam for another three weeks because the exams are backlogged after having been suspended for months in the spring due to the pandemic.
In the afternoon I went riding with Pete and wound up as usual at Imminent, where they can only allow about half as many customers as usual due to physical distancing, and where everyone has to wear a mask unless they’re seated at their table. Awkward but also so normal.
And all day, I saw homemade Trump signs, emblems of the cult that has only hardened as the pandemic has wound on. Beyond the run-of-the-mill handmade ones and the obnoxious campaign ones with the “Keep America Great” slogan, the capper was a massive two-sided “TRUMP 2020” sign on a flatbed trailer along US 52 – entirely ringed with barbed wire. Never has there been a more apt metaphor for Trump.
Plexiglas everywhere! Pretty much any business worth its salt has put up plexiglas barriers at the point of sale, a quarter-inch of clear plastic between the coughing customer and the besieged service worker: at the campus snack bar, at the sandwich joint, at the coffee shop, at the brewery, at the bookstore… At the bank, the barrier was at least three feet high and all the way around the desk. This slot was a little wider than a sheet of office paper and just high enough to slide a sheaf of account-opening paperwork through – but low enough that your last knuckles would catch.
As the new school year approaches for both the K-12 public schools and the private colleges here in town, tents are popping up all over town. Julia’s cross country meet was held today at one of the elementary schools, where several tents stood near the playground. Later, I drove past the girls’ old elementary school and saw two more, mixed into some trees far from the building. They create a strange end-of-the-carnival atmosphere.
Wearing a facemask is by far the strangest, most ordinary, and most indelible part of the coronavirus pandemic. In the past couple weeks, I’ve finally habituated myself to putting a mask around my neck as I leave the house for work or errands or whatever, and pulling it up anytime I’m in a place where it’s required (work, Target, Imminent, Little Joy, the grocery store) or where it’s just a good idea (almost anywhere else). It’s still a little weird to have my face covered for so much of the day, but the weirdness fades a little every day.
The ubiquity of masks in my life and everyone else’s right now (even the lives of the covid-deniers!) contrasts sharply with their total absence before about March – except on the faces of a few Asian students or elderly people. From that standstill till now, about six months later, we’ve seen masks and mask culture expand into almost every facet of public life. They’re a big and interesting business now, for one things, available everywhere from Target or Walmart to Amazon or mom-and-pop shops to niche manufacturers or crafters. I must have about ten masks right now, a few handmade, some standard ear-loop mass-market, a couple high-end nearly-custom ones. (The last work the best.)
Masks are also a point of personal pride, civic duty, and political controversy. Places that have mandated masks teem with signs to remind people to wear them and why they should wear them. On social media, mask wearers talk about how they wear masks not for themselves, but for others. Covid-deniers reject the practice and the science and the responsibility, often conflating masks with some sort of social control by… someone: the government? doctors? Bill Gates? The logic escapes me, as does the resistance – wearing a mask is almost effortless! But at this crazed moment in American history, everything has to be charged to the highest possible pressure, and masks are no different.
