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Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond
Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond
Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond
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Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond

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"Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond" is a collection of essays from the Web site "Jill Outside." Jill Homer's intent with her lifestyle blog was to document daily adventures from the perspective of a nonathletic, small-town journalist who recently moved to Alaska. The blog quickly took on a life of its own, drawing readers from all over the world, who encouraged her to pursue a burgeoning interest in the extreme sport of snow biking.
What followed is a transformation that few could have predicted — Jill's development into an athlete who completed a 2,700-mile mountain bike race and crossed three hundred and fifty miles of Alaska's frozen wilderness under her own power.
The following is an excerpt from the book, an essay about the roots of a deep-set desire:
"Why?" Personally, I have never been all that interested in getting on a podium. I'm sure I would enjoy it were I ever to achieve it, but instead I continue to seek out races that are way over my head and glean satisfaction from simply surviving them. It would be logical for me to choose shorter, more surmountable goals, then work on my speed, work on my skills, perfect my strategy and finish knowing I did the very best I could do. But that whole approach seems so mechanical to me — not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's just not who I am. I view my cycling not as mechanics, but as art. I don't want an instruction manual. I want a blank canvas, as clear and wide as the summer sky, that I can imprint with my joy and sorrow, and color with my blood, sweat and tears. Then, long after the race is over, and long after the race results have been relegated to the deepest regions of the Internet and the instruction manual has been rewritten, the experience is still permanently rendered in my heart — a work of knowledge and beauty.
"Why?" It's easy for me to say I race for fun, but I don't. Yes, I do think biking is fantastically fun. But if I was purely interested in fun, I would spend my holidays on fair-weather joy rides, taking in front-country scenery and sipping cold drinks on a beach. Instead, I take the hard way into the back-country, purposefully experiencing discomfort along the way.
I could say I do this for my health, but battering my muscles and bones amid physical extremes, not sleeping and stuffing my stomach with refined sugars isn't doing my body any favors.
I could say I race for personal challenge, but that's not entirely true either. Trying to build a bicycle or learning Spanish would be challenging for me, but I don't spend my time immersed in challenges that are actually useful. Instead, I go out and destroy bicycles, and grind my body into the dust, and cry out in pain and frustration and get back on the bicycle and do it again. I pay a lot of money to do this. I allot a large chunk of free time and vacation to this — all because of these beautiful works of art. These works only I can see. These works that I can never forget. And I cherish the hard moments, the moments of despondency and unhappiness. I cherish these moments because they're intense and real, like bold, red brush strokes through a life of placid beige. And then, when the placid beige gets me down, as it sometimes does, I close my eyes and see the flickering green aurora that filled the sky the night I bonked on the Iditarod Trail ... the night I was so scared and weak that no movement before or since has been as difficult ... the night I was so overwhelmed and uncertain that I wasn't entirely sure I would survive. And the green waves of northern lights were so bright that they still reflect warmth and joy in my heart, two and a half years later.
"Why?" I want to take the image of something impossible to me and make it real, make it possible, just for the sake of creation. In that, I feel a glimmer of what it's like to fully live.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJill Homer
Release dateAug 8, 2012
ISBN9781476100913
Arctic Glass: Six Years of Adventure Stories from Alaska and Beyond
Author

Jill Homer

Jill Homer grew up in Sandy, Utah, and graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in journalism in 2000. She began her career working for weekly and daily newspapers in Utah and Idaho. In 2005, she moved to Homer, Alaska, to pursue adventure in the Last Frontier. She never viewed herself as an athlete, but she was searching for a unique kind of outlet that provided both physical and psychological challenges. Endurance cycling fit that description. Two years of (mainly mis)adventures landed her in one of the most difficult endurance races in North America, a 350-mile winter traverse of Alaska wilderness called the Iditarod Trail Invitational. The unforgettable experience was the genesis of her first book, Ghost Trails: Journeys Through a Lifetime. Her second book, Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide is a continuation of what she views as her ongoing challenge: To drink life by the gallon, every day. She currently works as a freelance writer and editor in Los Altos, California.

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Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Arctic Glass is drawn from Jill Homer's blog about her adventures competing in (mainly) winter biking and running races. Jill is a person who thrives on challenging herself in extreme conditions as well as someone who needs to be outdoors in wide open spaces on a regular basis. Because the chapters consist of blog entries, the book as a whole felt somewhat disjointed. Towards the end it felt like I was reading about the same thing over and over again with the exception of a change of venue or date. Overall, this book is an interesting look in the world of racing under extreme conditions. A copy of this book was given to me through the LibraryThing Member Giveaway.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    this was quite a fascinating book. i have 4x4 through so many of these places and been to so many of the places mentioned, well except for alaska and nepal anyway. it was very interesting and she does a good job of really putting you there with her. i will have to look up the other writting she has done.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a collection of essays that Jill Homer wrote as a journalist in Homer, Alaska. Good stuff, but her essays are heavy on endurance and endurance sports. Although well written, I found it to drag a little.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There are lots of great sports and activities centered around snow.. but biking? I would have thought this possible under perfect conditions with special tires but that is not what Jill Homer writes about in these essays. I was reminded of an old exchange, only with a twist:Question: “why climb a mountain… with a bike in the snow?”Answer: ”because it’s there”It’s also difficult, painful and dangerous. The “why” question fades as we read through the journey and begin to understand the drive and beauty. The writing style is easy and light…sort of friendly. Potentially life threatening situations are diffused as we know the author survives to write and continues biking! There are vivid descriptions of the scenery, people and the author’s mind set. Every chapter is headed with one great photograph. Although I don’t feel I could undertake a 100 mile trek through the snow at sub-zero temperatures in the dark, I am motivated to take a nice long bike ride or hike in the mountains!I loved reading this book. Cold snowy landscapes draw me with a strong force and I love to find books that take me there. Arctic Glass took me to places I might never see (at least on a bike!) and I got to feel like Lucy in Narnia with the crunch of snow under my feet.

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Arctic Glass - Jill Homer

Introduction

It was two days after Halloween 2005. The timing stands out thanks to a macabre memory of a jack-o-lantern frozen on my neighbor’s porch. Temperatures had thawed just long enough to melt the pumpkin’s grin into a pained grimace, and then the ice returned to encase its zombie face in frost. I was riding my mountain bike from my new job at a weekly newspaper in Homer, Alaska, to a ridge high above town, where I lived in a large single-room cabin. The streets were already packed with snow in early November, and likely to stay that way until spring. I figured it would likely be my last bike commute of the season, and I remember experiencing a moment of panic, looking into the hollow eyes of that ghoulish jack-o-lantern and wondering what winter might bring. I had been living in Homer for two months, and the strangeness of everyday life in that small fishing village was beginning to take hold.

At the cabin, I climbed to the loft to write an update for friends and family. Since I moved thousands of miles away, I made a point of staying in touch via e-mail. The letters usually contained quirky stories about my Alaskan neighbors and co-workers, as well as accounts of stormy kayaking trips or the time a bear stomped all over our car as my then-boyfriend and I were backpacking to a snowbound wilderness cabin. In this particular letter, I mused about ways I could continue riding my bicycle through the long winter. To illustrate what I was dealing with, I attached a photograph of the cabin, blanketed in more than a foot of snow, with a backyard surrounded by nothing but spruce forest and the distant white peaks of the Kenai Mountains. Several friends wrote back to comment on the incredible setting, and requested more photos. I found I enjoyed writing these letters, and my friends’ comments sparked an idea that many people have when they want to reach out to the world at large — I should start a blog.

The next day, Up in Alaska went live. I styled the blog after a song by Modest Mouse, Grey Ice Water. The lyrics tell the story of a lonely person who got a job up in Alaska to escape a bad relationship. My reasons for moving to the forty-ninth state were different — I wanted to pursue a relationship with a man who had been my on-again, off-again boyfriend for four years, Geoff. Both of us were stuck in something of a quarter-life crisis, wondering if we were indeed pursuing our ideal adulthood. Moving to Alaska was initially my idea, although Geoff was the one who latched on to the plan and kept the spark burning when I stated to lose my nerve. Eventually we relocated from Utah and Idaho Falls to the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, with only a job offer and a Geo Prism loaded with belongings. The sentiments of Grey Ice Water were similar to mine — new start in a strange place. The song ends with quiet repetitions of the line, On the Arctic blast. I always heard the words Arctic glass, and imagined islands of blue ice floating in a colorless sea. Even after I learned the correct lyrics, Arctic glass stuck out as the image I see in my mind when I think of Alaska. So I assigned the address of my Alaska-based lifestyle blog to arcticglass.blogspot.com. I subtitled it Jill’s subarctic journal about ice, bears, and distant dreams of the midnight sun.

Unlike most blogs that loosely follow their stated purpose until the writer eventually loses interest, Up in Alaska quickly took on a life of its own, growing into something far more extensive than I intended. Simple musings for my friends and family captured the attention of readers from around the world, who encouraged me in my half-serious ambitions to pursue winter cycling. What followed is a transformation that even I wouldn’t have predicted the day my blog went live, when I was still a twenty-five-year-old newspaper editor whose timidity often prevented me from embarking on relatively benign adventures. I couldn’t have foreseen a growing passion for the outdoors and endurance challenges, or comprehended becoming an athlete who completed a twenty-seven-hundred-mile mountain bike race and crossed three hundred and fifty miles of Alaska’s frozen wilderness under my own power. Along the way, I also developed a passion for writing and photography that continues to drive my pursuit of adventure. Without the introspection my blog facilitated and the community it exposed me to, I believe my life would have taken a decidedly different track. Arctic Glass was the reflection I needed to develop into the best version of myself.

This book is an anthology of thirty-three adventure stories and essays spanning more than six years and places ranging from the frozen Alaska wilderness to the Himalayas of Nepal. Endurance racing, bicycle touring, love of mountains, difficult life decisions, overwhelming challenges, and self-actualization amid stunning outdoor landscapes are the common themes in this compilation. It chronicles the best of Arctic Glass, and in doing so captures vignettes of the adventure of life.

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1.

Alaska, again

November 3, 2005

So this is my new journal about life in Homer, Alaska — a place where it snows in October, where moose traipse through my backyard, and where everyone can spell my last name but if you can’t spell Xtratuf, well, so help you God.*

This is kind of the obligatory first entry where I have to explain to people who I’ve really lost touch with that I live in Alaska. I lived for a while in Idaho Falls, Idaho — home of potatoes and the self-proclaimed northern Mormons, and life was good. But after a brutal hot summer and several months of distant coercion from Geoff, I somehow was talked into moving to Alaska, home of grizzly bears and the self-proclaimed northern Libertarians. And — life’s still good. I guess it’s possible to be happy anywhere ... just as long as those studded mountain bike tires and stack of DVDs arrive before winter.

So, now a little about what we’ve been doing for the past couple of months. We arrived in town September 11, and by the next day found a cabin loft on the ridge above town. We have two acres of spruce trees and fireweed, an early season snow base, and our closest neighbor is a horse. We’ve spent the past few weeks filling the place with secondhand stuff and furniture Geoff builds with lumber he scavenges at the dump. He found a job working construction with some quintessential Alaskans — the Xtratuf-wearing kind. I work at a small-town newspaper called the Homer Tribune, where I’m the arts and entertainment reporter, production editor, and somehow the Webmaster (which is really funny, because I have such an incurable case of attention deficit disorder when it comes to technology.)

On weekends we do Alaska stuff like go sea kayaking in the freezing rain and backpacking to a cabin in the snow so we can chop wood, catch grayling and to return to discover that a bear has walked all over he top of Geoff’s car. The usual things, you know. So, anyway, I plan to post to this blog regularly in lieu of the mass e-mails I’ve developed a bad habit of sending to friends and family. I’m also going to continue posting pictures.

* Xtratuf is a popular brand of rubber boots. However, to an Alaskan, calling Xtratufs rubber boots is like calling a Chanel purse a fabric bag.

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2.

Gateway to an adventure lifestyle

November 15, 2010

Before I moved to Alaska in September 2005, I had few athletic aspirations. I was content to run on an elliptical trainer at a gym three days a week for forty-five minutes, and occasionally go backpacking on weekends. After I relocated to the far north and faced the stifling prospect of spending six months of the year huddled away from the cold and darkness, I decided I needed to cultivate an active winter hobby. A random introduction to the esoteric sport of snow biking captured my imagination and changed my life dramatically.

Have I ever told you the story of the 2006 Susitna 100? I know it’s out there — my blog essentially blossomed around my training log for that race. I wrote about my experiences before and after I finished. But, amid the relentless march of time, I don’t feel like I gave my first adventure race the reflection it deserved. After all, the Sustina 100 was the pivotal moment of transition between a former version of myself — then more tentative, fearful, and inexperienced model — and the stronger, more adventurous and independent version that I’ve continued to develop in the aftermath. As with all major developments in life, this change is an ongoing process that will never end. But it began at an REI store in Anchorage, Alaska, on a snowy afternoon in November 2005.

I was walking out of the store when the brochure that changed my life appeared in my peripheral vision — torn, wrinkled and taped to a bulletin board. The cover illustration featured a silhouette of a gear-laden mountain biker pasted over a photo of snow-swept tundra. White text advertised The Susitna 100: A 100-mile race across frozen Alaska. The brochure filled me with an inexplicable sense of recognition — like looking into the rippled depths of a fun-house mirror and seeing a vague image of my future self. I tore the single sheet away from the wall and carried it into the storm.

It made sense that this brochure captured my attention. I was a new resident of Alaska, and still uncertain about how I would remain active year-round in the Winterlands. In anticipation of long months of snow and ice, I purchased a pair of studded tires for my mountain bike, a 2003 Gary Fisher Sugar. So I was already a subscriber to the idea of riding a bicycle in the winter. But what didn’t make sense is how the Susitna 100 managed to capture my intrigue. After all, I had only ridden my newly converted full-suspension mountain bike in snow a few times, and found the riding to be profoundly more difficult than the summer version of mountain biking. The Susitna 100 encompassed a hundred miles, which was profoundly more mileage than I had ever ridden a mountain bike in a day. And this profoundly long stretch of profoundly hard mountain biking was also framed in the context of a race. I had never competed in a race before. Ever. Not a hundred-mile summer mountain bike race, not a cross-country race, not a five-kilometer run for charity, nothing.

I did once enter a three-mile Fun Run, back in middle school. I was the kid who hung way off the back of the pack, happier to walk and chat with my other non-athletic friends than struggle toward the anonymity of mid-pack. My underachiever friends and I proudly pointed out our positions in third-to-last, second-to-last, and last place every time we walked by the results board in the hall of our school. In the fourteen years that had passed since, little changed in my attitude toward athletics, and I happily stayed far away from competitive sports.

So it made sense that my initial admissions of interest in the Susitna 100 were met with disbelief and confusion. My parents, who had just recently digested my unsettling decision to follow a guy three thousand miles away to Alaska, secretly began to wonder if I was on drugs. My friends back in Utah, who once watched me crumble into blind panic during a relatively harmless rafting trip in the warm desert, quietly changed the subject when I spoke of my dangerous fantasy. My then-boyfriend, Geoff Roes, shrugged and told me I could enter the race as long as he didn’t have to as well. He had even less interest in winter bicycle racing than I should have. He did, however, harbor a fleeting interest in competitive running, but at that point even his running aspirations had yet to develop into much more than the occasional snowshoe race.

But Susitna retained its inexplicable intrigue. When Geoff discovered the ski, bike and foot race offered a fifty-kilometer version called the Little Su 50K, he resolved to join the madness and train to run the short race. From this spark, he would eventually win the Little Su 50K after running the hardest race of his life. He would go on to log a course-record-breaking performance in the 2007 Susitna 100, and eventually dominate endurance runs across the country as one of the top ultramarathoners in North America. But that’s Geoff’s story. This is my story.

Training for the Sustina 100 taught me that not only is training good preparation for a race, it’s good preparation for life. I froze my fingers and then learned how to keep them from freezing. I steered into snow berms and taught myself bike handling. I toppled over the handlebars and discovered how to absorb a crash. I knelt into the snow and gobbled down peanut butter sandwiches before the chill could grab me. I pressed deep into the daunting wilderness and discovered that wilderness would embrace me back, as long as I kept my heart open to accept that beauty trumps fear.

Despite my training, when I showed up at the start of the Susitna 100, I was an emotional, mental, and physical rookie in every way, and I looked the part. The night before the race, I had spent ninety-five agonizing minutes gluing my hopelessly tight studded tires to my bike’s twenty-six-inch skinny rims (for the record, studded tires only work on ice, and are useless in snow.) Threads of the sticky substance still clung to the wheels and dangled from the spokes. For my mandatory survival gear, I had stuffed a flimsy dry bag with fifteen pounds of sleeping bag, water and clothing, and strapped it to a seat post rack. I dangled a stuff sack with an inflatable sleeping pad and batteries from the handlebars, and wore even more water and clothing on my back. For food, I strapped a square handlebar bag to the inside triangle of my bike, filled it with chocolate and Power Bars, and added chemical heat packs to keep the Power Bars from freezing (an amusingly hopeless idea.) I wore a snowboarding coat, rain pants, and thin overboots; beneath that, hiking boots, a fleece jacket from The Gap, and polyester long johns; and beneath that, an actual cycling jersey and padded shorts. For my hands, I had neoprene kayaking gloves and over-mittens; for my head, a balaclava and hat. As I wheeled my back-heavy, full-suspension mountain bike next to rows of sleek fat-tire snow bikes, I felt like I was standing at the starting line of the Tour de France with a beach cruiser.

Morning light had not yet fully emerged at the 9 a.m. race start, although it was difficult to discern dawn from day beneath a thick ceiling of clouds. Snow reflected the dull gray hue of the sky. Spruce trees stuck out of the drifts like skewers, and the only thing that broke the winter silence was a tight cluster of about sixty skiers, cyclists and runners, perched at the edge of a colorless wilderness.

Geoff’s race didn’t start until 11 a.m., so he buzzed around the starting line and shot photographs. I was so nervous that I couldn’t bear to smile at him or even glance at anyone else. I stared at my feet and legs, wrapped in what looked like a moon suit, and tried not to think about the alien landscape beyond the safe haven of the parking lot. Suddenly, I heard the dry crackle of tires on cold snow. I looked up and watched the other cyclists launch toward a narrow corridor that cut through a tangle of trees. Skiers and runners nudged around me. Like a diver who waited too long to come up for air, I jolted out of my daze and struggled to join the surge.

The first few miles of the Susitna 100 passed through a dog mushing park, a tight maze with side trails veering in every direction. I skirted around skiers and runners and spun my heavy legs as fast as I could muster, hoping to catch the pack. Amid a rush of adrenaline, all of my pre-race fear had been replaced by a muffled sort of elation. I’m in a race, I thought, an actual race! Everything I had studied about endurance racing prior to the event — the nutrition, the hydration, the pacing — dissolved into the simple novelty of racing. I pedaled faster. My blood surged. I attacked hills with no one in front or behind me. I skidded down steep waves of snowmobile moguls as my rear tire bumped loudly against my seat-post rack. The snow on the trail was hard-packed, and I managed to pass a number of skiers and runners, and catch a few cyclists as well. I felt great. I pounded out the first ten miles in less than an hour. Snow bike endurance racing was fun.

Then the dog mushing park ended, and just like that, Alaska emerged. Snow drifts stretched across flat, frozen swamps, with only yellow stakes to indicate the presence of a trail. I stepped off my bike and walked through the sugary powder, something I had practiced a lot, so the effort didn’t faze me. A cold wind blew from the direction of solid white mountains in the distance. The humidity was high and the temperature hovered near freezing, which made the snow covering the trail at once crusty and soft. I pedaled and walked, walked and pedaled. Skiers passed me. Wide bike tracks in the trail indicated most of the cyclists could ride what I could not. I struggled up short, steep climbs. My tires continued to bump against my rack on every descent. I tried to readjust the rack, but couldn’t position it higher because the saddle was in the way of the gear bag. I finally just decided to gamble that the whole thing wasn’t going to blow apart in the duration of a hundred-mile race.

I dropped onto Flathorn Lake and pulled up to the twenty-five-mile checkpoint at 12:45, having covered the first twenty-five miles in just under four hours. It seemed a decent pace, and if I could hold it, I would reach the finish by eighteen hours, my best-case-scenario goal. The inside of the cabin was blissfully warm, and there were homemade brownies and orange slices on a table. I refilled my water bladder and gulped down some food. Every sugary, gooey morsel slid down my throat like chunks of something magical. I had never tasted food so fulfilling or delicious. I had never tasted food in a race before.

When I walked back outside, hints of sunlight were starting to break through the clouds. I rode along the shoreline of the lake until the trail wound back into the forest. I stopped to gaze across the white expanse behind me. A warm, tingling sensation filled my throat — a physical reaction to the sensation of being at once completely at home and completely out of my element. Only the wind broke a lasting silence. A strip of spruce trees lined the lake, like a thin black brush stroke across the white canvas of the horizon. I had never seen such a place before, a place so beautiful and so surreal, a place so distant from the familiarities of modern life that it seemed frozen in time. Sugar and endorphins surged through my blood. I didn’t know whether to cry or sing. But I remembered that I had already made a decision to race, so I turned and pedaled into the woods.

I crossed the Susitna River at mile thirty-three. Across the frozen white corridor, a gray figure moved along a stand of trees. I squinted as the figure stopped briefly. I saw the bright reflection of two eyes, then it turned and darted into the woods. A wolf? A lynx? What else could it be? The warm, tingling sensation rippled across my skin. This was not my place, this was the place of skulking moose and prowling predators. This was their home, and my presence in it meant nothing to them. The realization filled me with a sense of meaningfulness, because the world was so big and I was so small.

Back in the woods, two snowmobiles passed, churning up the trail as they motored through the soft snow. Where I had been riding slowly before, I was again reduced to walking. A skier caught up to me, and we moved together for a while. He could do little more than carve parallel tracks in the sand-like snow, which matched my pushing-riding-pushing pace. We chatted a bit, words I no longer remember. He stopped for a rest at Eaglesong Lodge, the mile forty-five checkpoint. I decided to keep moving. The trail between the two checkpoints was only a connector created specifically for the race. The track was narrow and the snow unconsolidated. I walked and pedaled, pedaled and walked. I gnawed on Power Bars which, despite mild temperatures, were frozen solid. Chocolate-flavored saliva bubbled out of my mouth as I tried to chew.

Darkness fell as I reached Luce’s Lodge, mile fifty-two, at about 6 p.m. I was beginning to feel woozy and decided to skip the spaghetti dinner I had planned to eat at the checkpoint. The warmth inside the building added to my wooziness, so I made a quick exit. A skier on the porch was removing his hat as I stepped outside. His face and hair gave him an uncanny resemblance to a friend of mine back in Utah named Curt. Hi Curt, what are you doing here? I blurted out before I caught myself. The skier shot me a blank stare and without another word, I rushed away.

Wow, I must really be out of it, I thought as a hurried down the hill, back to the cold darkness of the Yentna River. My thoughts cycled backward through the slow march of the day. I had been racing for nine hours and traveled fifty-two miles across a remote expanse of frozen river valleys. Nine hours was as long as I had ever spent riding a bicycle in one day. Two of my training rides were eight hours long, and once three years earlier I rode for nine hours straight during a cross-country bicycle tour. But this effort was beyond anything I had ever experienced, and I was only halfway done.

Out on the river, the once-expansive landscape dissolved to the flickering beam of my single headlamp. I strained to pick out yellow stakes amid the black void. I was terrified of losing them, as though they were the only thing tethering me to Earth. The river was too wide to see either side, and the darkness beyond my headlamp beam was full of unknowns. I was a tiny island amid an ocean of emptiness. I might as well have been pedaling on the Bering Sea.

My breath felt strangely labored, my lungs and throat raw. I stared at the yellow island in front of me and wondered what being in this race really meant. Venturing beyond the safety of urban development into a wilder region of the Last Frontier had been a fantastic adventure, but the Susitna 100 was more than that. When I looked down at my hands, wrapped in gray neoprene, I saw hands capable of piloting a bicycle across frozen swamps and over snow-covered hills. When I looked at my legs and feet, hidden beneath wide overboots, I saw limbs that could propel my body no matter how tired my mind might become. When my breath swirled in front of me, I saw distant shadows of myself, the shadows of fear and doubt and insecurity, dissolving into the cold air. And when I glanced behind me, I saw the empty expanse that I had somehow managed to cross, under my own power, with my own gumption. With every passing mile I was transforming, from just Jill to something else entirely — an adventurer, perhaps.

Up ahead, a bright circle of light broke the darkness. I grinned and pedaled toward it. The soft snow on the trail kept my speed to a minimum — four or five miles per hour on my handlebar odometer. But I was pedaling. The distant light flickered and glistened. Minutes passed, and then miles. Then an hour passed. Uneasiness began to gnaw at my confidence. The light didn’t seem to be getting any closer. I did feel pretty out of it. Was I moving at all, or in the midst of my excitement had I somehow forgotten to pedal? I looked down at my odometer. It still registered hundredths of miles passing. I squinted toward the light and sighed. There was nothing I could do but keep pedaling.

Two hours passed between the time I first noticed the light and the moment I finally pedaled toward an open canvas tent, a generator and a small fire right on top of the river ice. In that time, I had traveled just over eight miles on infuriatingly flat and wide river ice. The checkpoint was perched at the intersection of the Yentna and Susitna rivers, and designed to point competitors in the right direction, so they didn't end up miles the wrong way down the Susitna River. In my excitement at seeing the tent, I veered off the wrong snowmobile trail and had to push my bike through a quarter mile of knee-deep snow to return to the right trail. As I slogged toward the tent, a man waved wildly at me as though I hadn’t yet figured out I had gone the wrong way. He introduced himself as Rich Crain and handed me a cup of lukewarm soup that he dished up before I arrived. I sipped the soup and asked him about the trail ahead.

It’s all stuff you’ve done before now, he said. You’re back on the lollipop stick. Might snow tonight. Shouldn’t be too bad. You only have about thirty-five miles left to go.

I pumped my fist and waved goodbye to Rich. I had made it all the way back to the Susitna River, and everything in front of me was terrain I had seen before, which I already knew was mostly good trail. I grinned because I felt like I had the Susitna 100 nearly in the bag. I didn’t yet realize that the real challenge was just about to begin.

About a mile from Rich Crain’s tent, I rounded the cliffs of the river bend and plunged back into an all-encompassing darkness. I stopped to tighten the clamp on my seat post rack and contemplated changing my base layer. There was a strange chill in the air. I couldn’t quite place it. It didn’t feel like bitter cold, frosty or sharp; it was more of a dull, penetrating chill that saturated the air. I looked up at the starless sky and felt tiny needles of moisture bouncing off my nose and cheeks. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized it was raining.

Rain? Rain wasn’t good. How often does it rain in Southcentral Alaska in February? I had planned for blizzards, I had planned for deep-space cold, I had planned for snow and ice and even sunlight, but I hadn’t planned on rain. The light drizzle picked up volume until large droplets were bouncing of my ultra-breathable — and therefore minimally water-resistant — coat. The trail’s thin crust began to break apart. I could feel my tires churning up slush, and then the bike stopped moving. I pushed it several dozen yards and tried to ride again, laboring and churning up slush until the wheels seized. I stopped, and then tried to pedal, then stopped again, then repeated this process ad nauseam.

Yellow race markers veered up the riverbank and into the woods. I knew without a doubt that I was back on the same trail I had ridden in the early afternoon. But it was the same trail only in location; it no longer bore any resemblance to the smooth, icy path I had ridden earlier in the day. It had become a quagmire, swept with gray slush and occasional puddles of standing water. Ski and snowmobile tracks carved irregular ruts across the trail. My own wheels knifed into the trail like warm butter; riding was impossible. As I walked, I occasionally punched shin-deep postholes into the soft snow. The rain kept pouring down, like spray from an unseen waterfall, cold and endless.

The windswept plain between the Susitna River and Flathorn Lake is known as Dismal Swamp. As I pushed my bike, the bleak landscape filled my mind with dread, as though I was approaching a mystical crossing where the name isn’t ironic, it’s an actual warning. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The sloshing sound my feet made as I waded through the slush was maddening. I stopped when I couldn’t bear to listen to it any more. My legs throbbed with a dull ache. My feet were wet and hot where blisters were forming. My throat was raw and tingling from breathing so hard for so long. I hadn’t eaten anything since the frozen Power Bar six or seven hours earlier. I felt more ill than hungry, so I didn’t even consider eating anything else.

Instead, I sat down in the snow and gazed at the bleak sky. A stream of cold water trickled down my spine. I held up my gloves and noticed they were dripping rainwater. So was my coat. My legs felt clammy and cold. I was officially, thoroughly soaked. The wet clothing did nothing to block the frigid wind from chilling my skin. I burrowed deeper into the drift beside the trail. I wanted someone to come rescue me, to whisk me away from this hopeless place. But I hadn’t seen a single other person besides Rich Crain since I left Luce’s Lodge. The chill seeped into my core. I started to shiver. Logic began to frantically wave at me from behind the hazy veil of my bonked daze. I knew I could abandon hope all I wanted, but I wasn’t going to survive much longer if I refused to move when my body was completely wet in thirty-five-degree rainy weather. So reluctantly, I stood up.

This is the part where my memory begins to blur. Somewhere in the back of my primordial instincts, I found the strength to keep moving. Moving meant pushing my bike through the slush; nothing less, nothing more. It must have been hard work, because I do remember stopping occasionally to catch my breath and look up at the sky, straining to see stars that I never found. I must have stopped at Flathorn Lake lodge again, since that was the seventy-five-mile checkpoint, although I don’t remember doing so. The checkers must have fed me some of their famous jambalaya. Or at least I assume they did, because for a while after Flathorn Lake, the bonk eased and my memories are much clearer.

The rain turned to snow. Large chunky flakes fell on my wet clothing and clung to my eyelashes. The slorp sound of my footsteps became more of a crunch. Temperatures were turning more favorable, which simply meant they had dropped below freezing again. Would the trail set up? I shivered against the creeping chill. Shadows of black spruce trees plodded beside me. I didn’t want to listen to my footsteps anymore. I took off my wet, snow-covered pack and fished out the little radio I brought with me.

I turned the dial, searching for the weather band. I wanted the familiar computer-generated voice to tell me the storm was moving on, the temperatures were falling, and the trail would freeze solid again. I caught a single, static-garbled report that the temperature was still thirty-seven degrees in Wasilla, and then it cut out. I switched to FM. My radio found only one channel, a mainstream pop station out of Anchorage. I walked and listened. The radio station played songs I remembered from high school, cheesy ballads that brought an actual if subdued smile back to my face. They played dance music that pumped life back into my tired legs and even prompted me to try to ride my bike again, which usually ended promptly in swerving crashes. The radio station played the same damn Yahoo Mat-Su commercial so many times that I wanted to rip my ice-crusted hair out of my head. And then they played a song I had never heard before.

"It’s coming up … it’s coming up … it’s coming up …" I stopped walking, held my breath, and listened. The music caught my attention in the way certain songs just do sometimes, a consuming blend of surreal melody, mood-matching rhythm and lyrics that spoke to the moment.

"You’ve got to press it on you … you just think it, that’s what you do, baby … hold it down, D.A.R.E."

D.A.R.E by the Gorillaz. Just another pop song, but it filled my slow march with rush of new meaning. I looked up at the sky and saw the eerie orange glow of Anchorage city lights reflecting off the low clouds. I licked my lips, cracked and crusty, and felt a strange kind of warmth, like a glow, starting from those city lights and seeping all the way to my soul. I pushed a grin through my dry lips, and then I broke out laughing. I felt amazing; I didn’t think I had ever felt so amazing. I certainly never felt that way before, what I recognize now as endurance euphoria: the

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