Totally Winning!

 

Photo by Sarah Manriquez, Paris Photographics

I won a medal. 

It’s an award for being oldish. And fast-ish. female-ish.

It says so right on the back: “1^st Place 50-54 women”.  On the front it notes that the event in which I was fastish, oldish, and female-ish was the 2022 Equinox Marathon (adding, for an added dose of accurate-yet-arbitrariness, that a marathon is 26 miles, 385 yards).

Totally winning!

For all that humans are clearly way into “winning”, we’re terrible at defining what it means, what is doesn’t mean – and whether it’s okay to care.

As a little kid, I got used to losing.  And losing again.  And again.  This wasn’t because I’m a total loser – although, yeah – but because I was the younger kid in a family that like to play challenging games such as bridge, Facts in Five, and no-holds-barred croquet, and didn’t pull punches for lame excuses such as “being six years old”. 

So I lost. In my impressionable little mind, the significance of winning was rife with ambiguity.  Based on my primary role models, success was something to be loudly celebrated, and also something to be downplayed to the point of secrecy.

I can still picture the grinning flourish with which my dad would play a 50-point-bonus bingo in Scrabble – ha, take that, third grade opponent!  Every time his preferred baseball team scored a run, he’d leap off the couch or out of his stadium seat in a spontaneously dorky happy dance.  At the bowling alley, he’d hop and lean as his ball rolled, as if kinetically controlling it from afar, brow furrowing deeply if it spun awry.

Conversely, my mom stressed that competitiveness was gauche.  When I received my first standardized test results at the age of eight, she allowed me to see them only after I made a reticently British promise: “You mustn’t tell any of the other children your scores.” This proved awkward, given that other kids had been given no such instructions; I ended up feeling weird and ashamed. 

Outside my own family, the social rules were equally confusing.  Kids cared about winning to wildly varied degrees. I found that I usually won at games like Rack-o and Mastermind, and lost badly at games that were clearly way cooler, like dodgeball – where other kids’ competitiveness tended to leave me covered in welts.  Plus, other families had very different rules from my own.  I was mystified when I realized little kids were often allowed to win.  To me, this was cheating, and thus Not Fair.  Being Not Fair was bad. 

But… what is fairness?  This confused me as a child, which is not surprising, given that it still confuses me – and possibly everyone else.

A pause from facetiousness: there’s a much bigger question buried in here about societal fairness in all its forms, built from multi-generational evil, greed, oppression, and arrogance. We humans theoretically want to create fairness, but at the same time it’s clear that we don’t; history demonstrates just how badly we’ve done. I can’t pretend that I’m doing justice to such a big topic in a brief and flippant blog post, but at the same time, it lurks beneath everything, and to ignore it is to perpetuate it.

In an effort to create fairness, children’s sports and academic challenges are usually divided by age or grade level. Most adult sports are divided by gender, and some also have age categories – although in the Iditarod, for example, the genders and ages of the musher and the canine athletes are considered immaterial. Boxing and wrestling have weight classes.  Adult cerebral competitions such as crossword championships are not divided by age, gender, height, or weight, and there is no Jeopardy category for people like me who seem kinda smart but are irretrievably terrible at Jeopardy. 

Everyone would agree that a chess tournament in which kindergarteners had to go head-to-head with Grandmasters would be… uncomfortable.  But things get weird when someone has to decide where the cutoffs should be, because all the pertinent variables exist on a continuum -- youth, old age, weight, height, and (yes, newsflash) gender.  Plus, the expected “handicaps” associated with youth, age, weight, height, gender, and other factors varies widely. The basketball player with the greatest physical advantage doesn’t look much like the ideal gymnast or jockey.

When one of my kids turned 13 and suddenly found that she had to compete in the “adult” category at rock climbing competitions, the boundary was abrupt and artificial.  Being small for her age, she couldn’t reach many of the holds intended for people over five feet tall.  It wasn’t “fair”.  But, as she and I discussed, it also wouldn’t have been “fair” if adult-sized 13-year-olds competed as children. There was no perfectly “fair” solution.  There never is. 

Life is not fair.  Has everyone had this conversation with every kid, everywhere?  

Some parent-child discussions of unfairness -- spawned by racism, sexism, violence, and fear -- should never, ever have to occur.  This is not the kind of unfairness that’s inevitable; it’s the kind that’s insidious.

As for the inevitable kind – I now realize that both my parents taught me that life is not fair, but in different ways.  My mom’s perspective was that life wasn’t fair, so I should chalk up any victories to that unfairness, and take no credit for them.  In fact, I should be vaguely embarrassed by them.  My dad’s perspective was that life wasn’t fair, and thus I shouldn’t whine about the bowling ball being too heavy when he beat me, his 45-pound opponent. “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools,” he told me.  Really, he did. 

As a teen, I continued to excel at academics but lose at sports – unless you count garnering the third-place points in unpopular high school track meet events (3000 meters, shot-put) in which only three girls participated. The scattering of other times I’ve “placed” in sporting events have all been equally suspect.  A triathlon in which there were only three female participants?  A dawn to dusk winter solstice run at forty below zero in which I was the only woman to keep trotting for all three hours and forty-one minutes?  Yeah.

These “wins” felt like participation trophies – those “thanks for showing up” prizes that didn’t become common until I was an adult.  Curmudgeons waxed pompous about how such awards would make an entire generation – the millennials – weak, lazy, and coddled.  Every generation of old farts says this about “young people today” and (I remind myself as I age into old-fart-ness) each generation is wrong.  Participation trophies were born out of a noble effort to remove emphasis from crushing the opponent. They stemmed, albeit indirectly, from a growing societal discomfort with the much larger win/lose unfairness that has poisoned us across centuries.  As such, I applaud them.  But they didn’t work out.  Even six-year-olds knew that participation trophies didn’t convey pride of accomplishment – not because winning was everything, but because some other metric was necessary to replace it, and “merely existing” was not sufficient.

This shiny new marathon medal can easily be downgraded to “participation trophy”.  There were only twelve people in my narrow age/gender group.  There were nine women in the older 55-59 group, and two of them beat my time – one by a whopping 26 minutes. And the fastest women in the race, taking 8^th and 12^th places overall, against all ages and genders, were two 42-year-old women. In other words, someone named Meg, only eight years younger than me, beat me by more than an hour and half.  When Meg crossed the finish line, I was eight miles back, bumbling off Ester Dome while eating a lint-covered cookie from my pocket.

This is where my brain goes, when there is some hint that I might have won something – I automatically figure out why the win is meaningless.  Is it a victory if other people got sick?  Got hurt?  Went home?  Never showed up in the first place?  

I learned this tactic from my mother, but this outlook is by no means unique to her; .Jay holds even more firmly to this perspective than I do.  He managed to be embarrassed and in denial when he won the Iditarod Trail Invitational, a thousand-mile human-powered race across the wintery wilderness of Alaska.

It's easier for me to argue against this mindset when it’s put forth by others.  I mean, come on, Jay!  Celebrate a little!  I want my family and friends to feel joy, pride, inspiration, thrill, and adventure when they succeed.  I especially want this for my kids.

What I don’t want, though, is for them to fall into the trap that limited my dad’s joy: wanting someone else to lose.  When I was about twelve, Dad forbade me to read the dictionary because he didn’t want me to improve my Scrabble game “unfairly”.  Um… Dad?  Being so dead-set on winning at a board game that you want your own child not to learn, and to do badly is… not a good look for a middle-aged man. 

Nor do I want anyone to fall into the trap that limited my mom’s joy: being so socially averse to the pitfalls of the win-lose dynamic that success can never be celebrated, or even noted. 

As a child, I managed to extract the worst aspects of each parent’s viewpoint.  I concluded that neither parent was proud of me, and that I should not be proud of myself. 

Totally winning! 

As an adult – and particularly as a parent – I’m realizing (a bit late) that I need to flip this upside down. I can reject my mom’s restraint while embracing her fierce sense of equality and social justice. I can reject my dad’s pettiness while embracing his joy. 

I want this for my kids.  I want them to see their own privilege and advantages with absolute clarity.  I want them to try to create fairness wherever it’s possible to do so.  I want them to understand that “winning” doesn’t mean someone else is a “loser”.  Success is not pie – or if it is, it’s the kind of pie that you can bake more of, and share.  If we’re all competing, we’re ultimately doing so not against one another, but against our past and present selves, and our past and present aspirations.  Everyone can increase their Scrabble score, reduce their marathon time, or learn to bake a more delicious pie. I want my kids to seek out and celebrate other people’s successes.  But I also want to them to celebrate their own successes – to grin the way my dad used to grin, and leap off the couch to do a happy dance.

I want this for myself, too – because why not?  My “victory” over other individuals who happen to be my age and gender is silly and misleading, but my time in the crazy-hilly Equinox Marathon was the fastest I’ve ever run, in my fourteen attempts over the past twenty-one years.  I was faster because I trained just a bit more, and tried just a bit harder, and sometimes even remembered to stretch.  I challenged myself, and I felt good about that -- and maybe it’s okay to admit it. 

Totally winning!

I won a medal.  It means something, and I appreciate that.  It also means absolutely nothing – and I like that about it, too.

Exercising my point

 

A few weeks ago, a friend (I’ll call him Falstaff -- not for his own protection, but because I’m whimsical, and also a jerk) remarked that he’d had a really crazy idea. Maybe next year, he – like me -- would sign up to race in the Sluicebox 100.  A hundred miles of mountain biking!  Over every hill Fairbanks has to offer, including some you didn’t know existed!  Bonus swamps, mosquitoes, ruts, rocks, roots, and forest-fire smoke! 

“But Laura soon brought me back to reality,” Falstaff added. (I’ll refer to his wife as Laura because her name is Laura.)  “She said, ‘But then… you’d have to exercise.’ ”

Ugh.  Exercise. 

I don’t have oodles of willpower. And I hate exercise. That’s why I never do it.

Whoa.  Whoa.  Wait a minute.  You can’t deny it, Nancy.  We’ve seen you at it. Repeatedly, blatantly, apparently shamelessly, and we might add, totally publicly. 

Yeah.  I know, I know.  I’m the one who runs to work when it’s fifty-four degrees below zero.  And yes, I’m the one who owns the only double-tag-along bike in Fairbanks, and pedals around town on this bicycle-built-for three, panniers bulging with library books and kids singing an out-of-tune duet of the Alaska Flag song. Yes, I’m THAT woman.  I also hike rather a lot.  I ski a fair bit.  I even brachiate across the monkey bars whenever the mood strikes me – which is pretty much whenever my parenting duties lure me onto a playground.  Mea culpa, mea culpa.  I do every one of these things.  But I don’t exercise.

Um, Nancy, that’s a ridiculous claim.  You mountain-biked a hundred miles yesterday..

Oh.  Right. I mountain-biked a hundred miles yesterday.  As a result, I’m facing a few challenges today – such as thinking, walking, and typing. (If you don’t understand the typing part, you’ve clearly never spent 17 hours and 54 minutes rattling over assorted rocks and tree roots, fingers locked desperately around the handlebars, clutching at the brakes.) 

I admit all this.  But I do not, I repeat, exercise.

The word “exercise” is freighted with meanings and connotations.  Merrian-Webster has a lot to say about “exercise”.  The definition that most people seem to have in mind when they sigh that they “ought to get more exercise” is 2(b): bodily exertion for the sake of developing and maintaining physical fitness.  Then again, 3: something performed or practiced in order to develop, improve, or display a specific capability or skill and even 4: a performance or activity having a strongly marked secondary or ulterior aspect resonate, too.  None of these definitions is really something I want to take up in my free time.  None of them sound like something it would be easy to stick with, via self-discipline alone.  None of them, in short, sound like much fun.

Out of curiosity, I typed “exercise…” into Google, and let Autocomplete do its magic.  The first item on the dropdown list was “exercise in futility”. Well then.

I tried “exercise is…” I found that “exercise is medicine.”  I also learned that “exercise is good for you” – and, immediately below that, “exercise is bad for you”.  Finally, for those who like their Google responses wordy and directly cribbed from Public Health Reports, “exercise is a subset of physical activity that is planned, structured, and repetitive.”

Planned, structured, and repetitive?  Oh, heavens, Google.  Indubitably, I enjoy activities that drive my heart rate way up.  I can have fun doing things that make me sweat.  I frequently thrill to the challenge of hobbies that require enthusiastic muscular activity, balance, control, or interesting bodily positions.  (If you can think of activities that combine the best of all of the above attribute, especially if your name is Falstaff, please exercise decorum in the comments section). However, my enthusiasm for all these endeavors notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure I don’t like anything that is “planned, structured, and repetitive.”  Nor do I want to undertake “bodily exertion” solely for the sake of physical fitness.  Or, if I did, I wouldn’t have the strength of mind necessary to persuade myself to do so.

I do, however, want to “undertake bodily exertion” for plenty of other reasons.  I want to get places, using simple forms of transportation that don’t burn any gas, don’t break down, and don’t prevent me from seeing and smelling the details of the world along the way: commuting as exercise, shopping as exercise, and errands as exercise.  I want to roam and explore, feel the wind in my face, and find solace in solitude and wonder in wilderness: hiking and skiing and canoeing as exercise.  I want to use my body as a tool, to lug our water, build an outhouse, and haul the wood pellets that heat our house: life as exercise.  I want to challenge myself, pushing the limits of how far, how fast, how long I can go, and finding the space inside myself that comes from movement and exhaustion: racing as exercise.  Last but most certainly not least, I want to play, chasing my kids and lurching them skyward, rolling and tumbling, laughing with movement and blatant bodily fun: joy as exercise.  I want these things.  I revel in them.  No willpower required.

So, yes – you’ve seen me out there.  Much as I’d like to think some sort of penumbra of invisibility protects me from the embarrassment of public recognition (even as I chandelier myself in blinking LEDs all through the 17-month-long Fairbanks winters), friends, acquaintances, and amused-at-my-expense strangers are fond of telling me that I’m a local landmark. I can only hope that I’m a familiar character in the manner of the charismatic produce guy at Fred Meyer West, and not in the manner of the woman with the paranoid persecution complex who keeps running for public office.  However, whatever you think of my idiosyncrasies, and whatever you think it is I’m doing on Alaska’s roadsides, trails, and trackless yonder, I’m certainly not exercising.  Not even when I’ve been rattling along from seven a.m. until well past midnight.  Did I mention that my legs aren’t obeying me terribly well, and my hands are a bit unwieldy today?

The Sluicebox was conceived, organized, and mapped via hours of toil, paperwork, and painful logistics by some of my more selfless, over-committed, and insane friends -- such as, for example, my husband.  The work of putting it together is so Herculean that it may not occur again in its current form.  Moreover, not everyone’s dreams of challenge and adventure require an event long enough to listen to an entire George R.R. Martin audiobook (although some people’s dreams are long enough for the whole series, and then some).   However, I have confidence that other opportunities will rise up, Phoenix-like, from the smoke of a hot, dry Fairbanks summer. 

Like its winter equivalent -- the White Mountains 100 -- the Sluicebox is an over-the-top endeavor.  It’s ridiculous.  It’s numbing.  It’s astonishing.  And it does not, I still maintain, require exercise. 

As such, Falstaff should shake up his terminology, reclaim “exercise”, and get out his bike.

Leaning ... toward baking cookies for the office

Photo courtesy of the Breakup Triathlon

A few days ago, a friend of mine brought my attention to an online story highlighting Susan Stamberg's stellar career with National Public Radio.  The article – perhaps inspired by the recent Lean In buzz -- focused on the question of what advice older women would give to their younger selves.  Reader comments were numerous, but my friend enthused that “by far the best comment” was:  “Dear Self: To be taken seriously, dress better and learn earlier how to act like a pro in meetings. Keep your "business face" on in all communications and don't bake for the office.”

When I saw this, I blanched. If this quote offered any indication of the grading scale by which I am measured, I thought, I am not just doing poorly; I am earning an irredeemable F.

Professionalism is not my strong suit. 

Last Sunday, I was standing around in Spandex shorts and a sports bra, drenched, when I spotted someone I knew.  I greeted her by name, my voice only slightly obscured by the huge chunk of honey-oat bagel I was shoving in my mouth. 

She smiled uncertainly – the polite greeting of someone who has no idea who the heck you are, but is much too nice to say so.

“I’m Nancy,” I reminded her.  Was it the raggedly dripping pigtails on either side of my head that threw her off, or was the bare skin of my torso blinding her with its fish-underbelly whiteness?  “I interviewed you for the ACCAP job last week.”  Then I bit off another large hunk of bagel.

Dignity and I are not closely acquainted.  Not ever, not in any context.  But should I, I wondered, be trying a bit harder in the “professional” realm?

Officially, I’m the Network Coordinator at the Scenarios Network for Alaska and Arctic planning, a climate change research group at the University of Alaska.  Unofficially, the nametag outside my cubicle grants me the title “Head Monkey.”  It was put up about three years ago by a coworker (and friend), as a joke.  It sports a photo of a chimp (which, I of course know as a biologist, is an ape, not a monkey).  It was never taken down. 

I regularly wander around the office in sweatpants, T-shirts left over from college, and bare feet. I make jokes in meetings – and some of them are vaguely risqué.  I sign my emails “N,” call people by their first names regardless of rank, and admit to my collaborative partners at government agencies that my work schedule is dictated by when the school bus comes and goes.  I also (oh, the shame!) wantonly leave apple cake and leftover brownies on the break room table.

Is this really so wrong?  And does it have anything to do with gender?

Well, maybe.  I can’t possibly comment on Lean In, in which Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, exhorts women to strive for the professional pinnacle.  For one thing (note to internet commenters in general – this is kinda a key point with regard to vehement and vituperative editorializing), I haven’t read it.  However, I do know that women are still mired in a wage-gap rut that has barely closed in my lifetime.  ABC news reports that “Women working full-time earned just 80.9 percent of what men earned per week in 2012.”  The Center for American Progress Action Fund puts the figure at 77%.

There's simply no joking about this.  It’s a problem long overdue for a solution, and it pisses me off.  But if I (a PhD-holder and a research professor, for heaven's sake) am not setting myself up to be taken seriously, am I somehow part of the problem?

Ok, I lack dignity, I tell myself defensively, but it doesn’t have anything to do with being a woman.  Besides, I usually have a reason for it.  My semi-nude bagel-consumption was perfectly logical, given that I had just completed a triathlon.  The young woman I’d interviewed – who was, in fact, the top candidate for the job – had done the same.  She was just as damp as I was, and probably just as hungry.  Moreover, there was no clear avenue toward “professionalism” in this soggy context, because I was in the awkward position of not being able to tell her that we were about to offer her the position.  The paperwork hadn’t yet cleared with HR.  (Gods of bureaucracy, I have you in my sights, y’hear?)

Instead, I started a conversation about something I knew she’d relate to.  At her interview, she’d mentioned that she’d been out of the workforce for a short time because she has a two-year-old.  So I talked about small children.  And stomach flu.  That’s right – knowing exactly how much I had in common with this vibrant young scientist, based on her résumé and her interests, I talked about my puking first grader.  And when, a few minutes later, I spotted another post-race coworker in the poolside crowd, we talked about … daycare for her toddler.

I know, I know.  Anyone care for a stereotype with their bagel?  How on earth can I be taken seriously if I don’t know how to “keep my business face on”?  Indeed, many debaters in the wage wars argue that women earn less than men because they choose to do so.  Women pick careers that are less stressful, more flexible, more open to part-time employment, more “female” – so that they can spend more time with family.  On the other hand, others argue that the reason women choose to be the ones to take more time off with kids is because they are being paid less to begin with.  

Either way, was this a choice I made?  And if it was, should I feel defensive about it?  Irascible?  Guilty? What flavor of guilty?

I like chocolate-chip-guilty the best – I always have.  Luckily, when I went back to work on Monday morning, I found that our IT director, wizard of computer hardware and cookies, had left a generous number of the latter in the break room.  He’s a new dad, and working only part time these days, but he still manages to keep up with the software licensing, the network issues, all our terabytes of data storage, and the gooey treats.

As it happened, my boss was home sick that day.  His two little girls had passed on to their daddy the latest horrific chest cold.  Luckily, he got hold of me via email.  Sure, I told him, I could cover the interview he had scheduled with the guy from Switzerland’s public radio.  This sort of thing happens regularly around here, and we always cover for one another.  When the temperature hits forty or fifty below zero, people’s cars get finicky.  There are sudden dental emergencies; sick parents who live on the other side of the map; and ailing dogs.  Once, my boss called me at the last minute to give a presentation for him.  He couldn’t make it in to the office, he explained, because his goat was kidding. 

When the Swiss guy showed up, I was wearing old jeans and a t-shirt, but that was fine, because so was he – and this was a radio interview, after all.  I told him a heck of a lot about climate change science in the far north.  I also told him about the vagaries of living in an environment underlain by thawing discontinuous permafrost.  I described how Jay and I built our cabin.  I described the variety of biomes to be seen in the space of the half-mile walk to the school bus stop.  He asked more questions about those personal aspects of the interview than about anything else.  We called each other by our first names, and I offered him coffee.

Back at my desk, I found an email from our tech lead.  Like me, he’s part of the office’s four-person “management team”.  “A few of us are headed over to HooDoo today after work.  If others would like to join, I'll pitch in for a few pizzas…”  He’d cc’d the entire staff list. 

Well, why not?  If you work in a cool office, then everyone is invited to the local brewing company at the end of the day.

Somewhere between the brewery invitation and the quick dash across the road with the inhabitant of the cubicle next to mine to see if Hotlicks Ice Cream had opened for the season, I decided that the well-meaning advice about how to be taken seriously as a Professional Woman was not so much wrong, as utterly inside-out. 

We don’t need women to dress better.  We don’t need them to “keep their business face on” at the expense of taking time to care for their children -- or their parents, or their dogs, or their goats.  We certainly don’t need them to stop baking chocolate-swirl pound cake with streusel topping.  What we need is for men to do all these things, too.  And at my office, it’s happening.

Yes, it’s important to Get Stuff Done at work.  Yes, sometimes we all need to stop multi-tasking and focus on getting the report written, the documents signed, and the &%$@ paperwork back from HR.  Sometimes it’s even necessary to come in and work a bit of utterly unpaid overtime on the weekend (although if you’re a non-exempt employee you must never, ever admit to this, lest you face dire consequences such as paperwork, and maybe spanking).  Being professional can be important, and I even have a few semi-respectable clothing items to prove it.  But in my opinion, being human is more important than being “professional” – for women and for men.

Being human means having a life that’s complicated, messy, multifaceted, rewarding, funny, and real.  It means juggling the pieces to make them fit as best you can.  When I drop by the office on weekends, I bring along the kids, and let them draw on the one-sided paper supply and make cool stuff out of the cardboard and plastic recycling.  Jay does the same.  No one has ever complained about stray rainbows on the whiteboards.  Being human means passing on our well-worn stroller/bike trailer to the guy down the hall with a new baby, giving the little green pull-wagon and wooden cars to the triathlete with a toddler girl, and donating the itty-bitty moose slippers to whomever snagged them from the break room.  I’m not sure who that was, but there are an awful lot of small people to choose from.  And if the coworker who asks me for breast-feeding advice when we run into each other at the coffee pot is male, I’m not in the least bit surprised.

Of course, even as I paint this rosy picture, I know I’m incredibly lucky.  I work thirty hours per week.  So does Jay.  We use the extra time to hang out with our kids, take part in ludicrous outdoor adventures, and (upon occasion) bake stuff.  We choose to live an inexpensive lifestyle, but we’re also immensely fortunate to have the skills, the degrees, and the jobs required to make this workable.  Most people don’t.

This brings me back to that wage gap, and all the politics and social injustice that go with it – a hydra of a problem if ever there was one.  The United States is woefully backward with regard to affordable childcare, healthcare coverage (particularly for part time workers) and wage gaps not only between males and females, but also between CEOs and workers.  I could rant about this for pages (or for hours, depending on whether you like to take your rants visually or aurally) but that would be, as I’ve been noting in fifty different spots on the spreadsheet-du-jour, “Outside the scope of this project.”

I will add, however, one salient postscript.  In the ABC article I perused, Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women's Policy Research notes that “there may also be some reluctance to hire women for high-powered, lucrative jobs when there is the chance that they may take time off in the future to have children.” 

Our top candidate for that ACCAP job – the mother of the two-year-old – mentioned in the course of the interview that she plans to have another child. 

Well, excellent.  When she does, maybe someone will have an extra car seat or a pair of moose slippers to pass on to her.  It will be easy to find her -- because yesterday the Bureaucracy Gods reached down from on high and gave us the green light.

Welcome, New Person.  I’m the Head Monkey; feel free to ask me whatever you’d like.  There are muffins on the counter.  I hear you enjoy triathlons…

Most Improved

At the front of the room, Ed (our fearless leader, multi-tasker extraordinaire, crazy-man of the back-country, and peerless interpretive dancer) advances to the next slide.

Most Improved: Nancy Fresco

What?  Oh.  Yikes.  I grin awkwardly, as if I expect people to boo. 

They don’t, of course. The applause is cheerful.  In fact, the crowd at the White Mountains 100 post-race party is almost impossibly cheerful.  About everything.  Folks are happily nibbling on veggies and hummus while comparing second-degree frostbite.  They are slurping down soup while discussing the hallucinations they experienced after forty-plus sleepless hours on the trail.  Nonetheless, I feel the need to demur in the face of their congratulations. 

“But… I cheated!  I switched from skis to a bike!” 

Given that more than half the 65 participants rode snow bikes on the hundred-miles of backcountry trails that make up the race course, “cheating” is perhaps not exactly the most politic term.  Still, I can’t shake the feeling that it is the right term. 

I take part in a fair number of long-distance races, but I’m definitely not a racer.  In 2011 and 2012, I was a skier in the White Mountains 100.  A classic skier.  A slow classic skier. Ok, fine, I was an outright shuffler.  This year, for a change, I rode my shiny new fat-tired bike – but for all its lovely purpleness and high-tech panache, I didn’t really expect it to make me anything more than modestly speedier.

Theoretically, any competitor – whether on wheels, on skis, or on their own two hoofs – can triumph in the 100. In reality, in the four years that the race has existed, the snow bikers have always won – albeit not by much.  In 2010, bikers took the top six slots, but skiers nabbed ten of the top twenty.  In 2011, a skier took fifth, less than an hour behind the lightning-fast top biker.  In 2012, skiers took fourth, seventh, eighth, and ninth.

This year’s race, however, was indubitably the most one-sided to date.  Due to bitterly cold conditions at the start and considerable snow accumulation later in the event, the advantage fell squarely to those who rolled rather than those who swished or tromped.  For the same reasons, it was a race even richer than usual in grisly tales of fortitude and exhaustion.  It was also, for me, a race full of peculiar surprises that left me feeling – well, feeling as if I really had somehow cheated.

Sunday, 8 a.m. 

Sixty-five crazy individuals crowd the trailhead at Mile 28 of the Eliot Highway, stomping, chattering, and lining up to enjoy the questionable joys of the port-a-potty.  It’s twenty below zero (Fahrenheit).  I may be just a trace too caffeinated.  Just… a… trace.  A quart of Cheerios are bouncing in my innards.  The snow is packed like white pavement.  I decide not to reduce my tire pressure at all.

Sunday, 10:09 a.m. 

Rolling, rolling… I haven’t taken out my audiobook, or even my snacks, for that matter.  Can I really be at Checkpoint #1 already?  But yes, there are my neighbors, in their new guise as volunteers: Mark, bundled up like a camera-wielding yeti, and Trusten, proffering the cocoa and Fritos.  Second breakfast of champions -- or hobbits.  I’m pretty sure I have more similarities to the latter, but so what?  I’m feeling as happy-go-lucky as Peregrine Took.

Sunday, 1:30 p.m. 

Wait… have I already completed the section of trail that was billed as being badly drifted, soft, a potential slog-fest of push-a-bike?  I did have to let out quite a lot of air in order to float my less-than-ladylike weight on my squishy tires.  I took a few remarkable headers into snowbanks when I hit soft spots in the flat, flat light, as clouds came in.  But I chalked that up to my monocularity and general klutziness.  Clambering out from under the huge purple bike and shaking the snow from my hair, my ears, and my pogies is par for the course when Nancy goes biking.  The key fact was, I was still riding. And now I am just outside Checkpoint #2, and…

…and…“Kevin?!”

I see Kevin plenty when I amble the hundred yards from my workplace to his, in order to buy more inner tubes or blinky lights and gossip about snow conditions and suchlike -- but he is not someone I am supposed to see during the White Mountains 100.  That is, I wasn’t supposed to see him after we all shouted, “three… two… one…go!”  For a turtle such as myself, Kevin is supposed to be nothing but a memory of fast-moving snowdust.  But here he is at mile 39.  And he is biking in the wrong direction.

Quickly, sadly – but with impressively upbeat resolve – he explains his dilemma:  a burst water system, drenched clothes that he’s spent the past two hours drying out at Checkpoint #2, and to top it off, a frostbitten stomach.  For (arguably) the fastest racer in Fairbanks, the race is already over.  There’s nothing I can do but remind him of what a great season he’s had, and wish him well as I head into Cache Mountain Cabin.

Sunday, 1:50 p.m.

One ultra-cheese-laden baked potato later, I have my second shock of the day. 

Joel. 

Forty-five miles of crazy-fast riding with the lead pack, a bad knee, and here he is, another amazing athlete, limping in to scratch from the race.  And here am I, slowpoke Nancy, with nothing to offer but a couple of heartfelt hugs and a handful of cookies.  It’s not fair, I think.  He helped me sort, crate, and transport all those cookies, and everything else, besides…

It’s at this point that I began to feel as if there’s something amiss.  How could I be going strong when these two are not?  I hit the trails again, potato-powered, yet still thrown off by my speedy friends’ misfortune. 

On.  And on. And up. And up.

Sunday, circa 5 p.m. 

This year, I get to actually see the Cache Mountain Divide.  In daylight.

Just as I summit, pushing my bike through the soft, steep snow, I hear a sound behind me: an even whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.  The sound of a skate-skier.  It is, of course, the super-human Mike Kramer.  That Mike should pass me is a given.  That it should take until mile 50 for him to do so is unthinkable.

In previous races, I plodded over the Divide near the back of the pack, and crossed the notorious ice lakes in pitch darkness.  Checkpoint #3 -- Windy Gap Cabin -- was a refuge I reached at about one in the morning. The cabin was always a glowing beacon signaling the first stage of exhaustion.  The forty miles of race that lay beyond it were the miles covered in a semi-somnolent and aching blur.

Sunday, 7:02 p.m.

This time, I arrive at a respectable suppertime, even if the supper I eat is not terribly respectable. 

“Number thirteen, checking out.”  I might have sounded kinda official, were my mouth not stuffed full of chocolate.

“Already?”  Teresa, an ever-smiling volunteer (not to mention a strong skier and darned talented research ecologist) has already given me the second-hand hug that Jay left for me, as well as the message that went with it: “Have fun!”  She’s seen me mixing the Gatorade double strength and chugging Coke (sugar and caffeine, gurgling down with a belch).  Still, she seems surprised that I am ready to take off. 

And so, in truth, am I.

My haste is certainly not attributable to competitiveness.  Although I ask after Jay, I don’t check the sign-in sheet to see how many people are ahead of me. My previous finishes placed me 54^th and 53^rd out of an annual field of 65.  For me, it’s always been about (as Jay wants me to be reminded) having fun.  And finishing.  And maintaining a standard-issue numbers of fingers and toes.  So far, so good.

Sunday, 7:17 p.m. 

I leave Windy Gap full of junk food and energy.  I leave because there is daylight still to burn; even in a mist of softly falling snow, I have some chance of witnessing the long and mountain-hedged valley that glides on down toward Borealis.  Or, in this case, rolls on down.  Bikes, I discover, are pretty darned swift in this section. 

There’s a skier ahead of me.  But… wait… I cannot possibly be passing Mike Kramer – can I?  My brief hello sounds apologetic.  He disappears behind me in the snowy twilight.  Still skating.

Sunday, 10:20 p.m.

Hello, Borealis Cabin.  I remember when you used to seem like an ambitious destination, a whole twenty miles from the trailhead.  When did twenty miles become the “home stretch”?   There is clearly something wrong with my life choices.  Hey, can I have one of those brownies with my ramen?  Or in my ramen.  Or, really, whatever. 

I’ve been plugged into my epic audiobook for quite some time now, and I’m at a dramatic point.  Actually, all of George R.R. Martin’s points are dramatic, or bloody, or licentious, or all of the above.  I need to find out what happens next, so I’d best be going. 

Wait… you there… relaxing in the upper bunk… you’re not… you can’t possibly be Janice Tower, can you?  Because, even though I don’t know you, I certainly know that I’m several orders of magnitude slower than you are.

Um… feel better, ok? This can’t be right.

Sunday, 10:40 p.m.

The kind and patient Borealis crew herd me upstream to cross Beaver Creek, avoiding the section that, earlier in the day, half-swallowed Ariana’s snowmachine in slushy overflow.  On the ensuing uphill I pass a fellow biker who wants to know how long the hill is.  “At least a mile,” I tell him, with ebullience that he does not seem to share.  I think I drank some more Coke at that last stop.  Did I?  Dunno.  Boy, this fresh snow sure is pretty.  The beam of my headlamp glitters on each flake.

Just after midnight, Monday morning

I need to stop at the trail shelter because Mark and Trusten are there.  Except that Trusten is asleep, and Mark takes a photo of me without actually noticing that it’s me.  What, are my frosty outerwear and androgynous-bundled shape not distinctive enough?  But Jim is there, and he is all good cheer.  When is he not?  He seems perplexed that I don’t want to ingest anything.  How could anyone resist that same Sam’s Club sack of corn nuts that came across from Checkpoint #1? 

“I just wanted to say hi!”  

Wickersham Wall is waiting for me, after all.

Some time after 1 a.m., Monday morning

At the Wall, I find Amy and Cody.  This isn’t right.  Amy, who generally inhabits an office just down the hall from mine, is probably faster than me at all things climate-change-ecology-related – but she and Cody are definitely faster than I am at all things bike-related.  But really, right now, “faster” is not an operative word, and logic is a bit foggy.  I turn off the pseudo-medieval clash of dynasties that has been pouring into my ears, and focus on putting one foot in front of the other.  Push.  Push.  Bicycle.  Snow.  Mountain.  Up.  Push.  We are not conversing.  We are pushing.  But somewhere along the way, I extract a promise of a ride home from the finish line from my overly-kind compatriots.  Asking favors of exhausted people in the wee hours is not exactly Kosher, it occurs to me.  But I ask anyhow.

I assume they will pull away from me after the wall, but somehow, the opposite is true.  In the Land of the Wobbly, the least wobbly takes the lead through the darkness – and that, peculiarly, is me.  I know these last six miles of trail so well that I feel them rather than seeing them.  Slow downhill, short steep up, long down, slow up, and… yes.  The last downhill.  Finally – and yet… already?

2:35 (ish) Monday morning

Ann, Ed’s counterpoint and tireless mastermind of Endurance North, is in the trailer – race headquarters – so I bang on the door to get my hug and my sort-of-official finish time.  We chat and laugh.  Andrew, who skied the course in the Nancy-speed league two years ago, comes to give me another hug, and to usher me into the cocoon of the heated tent.  A few other folks are sipping drinks or snuggled on cots.  I don’t ask how many people finished ahead of me – except for Jay.  Jay kicked butt.  I knew that already, though.

4:00 Monday morning

Just.  Keep Talking.  I have no idea what I’m talking about.  Work?  My kids?  Something inappropriately personal and humiliating?  It doesn’t matter, so long as I am keeping Amy awake on these snow-deep roads. 

Back at the wall tent, after many minutes spent staring blankly at one another, unable to fathom how we’d muster the energy and warmth to load all three bikes onto the car’s roof racks, Amy, Cody, and I became the beneficiaries of Andrew’s goodwill.  He made it look so easy, as I fumbled with my wheel and my hex wrench in the snow. Even in my tiredness, though, I knew I wasn’t exhausted.  Not really exhausted.  I know that further zone of Tired.  I’ve visited it in other years.

And so home.  And so to bed, where Jay wakes up enough to congratulate me, and I him, in blurry solidarity.  And so to sleep.

12:00 noon Monday

Oh, the sheer joy of snoring until noon, and then lolling on my window seat in sweats!  I slowly amble through my work emails.  I answer a few.  I’m a bit on the droopy and aching side, but I sigh deeply and contentedly.  Parents don’t get to sleep until noon.  Ever.  But other than approximately one minute of awake-time at 7:30, when the children were permitted to come kiss their comatose Mommy goodbye, I got my slumber. 

I check the race stats.  I discover that there are people still out there.  As in, a lot of people.  I note that, out of 65 competitors, 35 of them on bikes, Jay took sixth place.  This seems about right.  I also note that I took 15^th.  This seems all wrong. 

“Podium!” comments Ned.  Ned is one of the true stars of the event, in my books. While Kristen, Jay and I were on the trails, he took care of three six-year-olds with a joint penchant for naked trampolining.  It takes me a moment to figure out what he was talking about.  But yes, it seems I was the third woman across the (somewhat ambiguous) finish line.  I tend to forget about fine points such as gender.  Besides, this is clearly wrong, too.  I can’t be third, or fifteenth, or anything above thirtieth.  I must have cheated.  Somehow.

11:00 p.m., Monday

I’ve gotten a bit of work done today.  I’ve also picked up the kids from the bus stop, helped them with their homework, and read stories with them.  We’ve done dinnertime and baths and more playing and more stories and bedtime for little people. It’s time for me to go to bed, but just for good measure, I check the race stats, again – just one more time.  There are still people out there.  Thirty-nine hours into the race, longer than even I have ever been out there, they are still slogging.  They have seen not one sunset on the course, but two.  Nine of them.  They are still going.  One of them is Michael.  I’m pretty sure I told him the race was “fun,” in years past, as we chatted while dropping off our kids at preschool.  Another is our perky and optimistic neighbor, Sarah.  Jay and I have given her lots of race advice over supper.  At this point, is either of them coherent enough to hate me?  And why isn’t it me out there?  It ought to be me, shouldn’t it?  Those are my people, struggling on through the deepening snow. 

9:09 a.m. Tuesday

I am at work, being semi-productive.  But I’m also waiting, waiting. 

At last, at last, Sarah, the red lantern, crosses the finish line.  Forty-nine hours.  She has not slept.

8:00 p.m. Wednesday

Finally, here I am at the post-race party.  This, more than the race itself, is my event.  I booked the community center.  I hit Sam’s Club.  I made the ten-gallon pot of sausage-and-bean soup.  I baked the eleven loaves of bread and the four double-size batches of brownies.  I enslaved my husband and children – and the ever-patient Trusten – to arrange all the tables and chair, fruits and vegetables, cheeses and dips, cups and spoons.  Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves.  Everyone has tales to tell.

Kevin is here, and so is Joel – both of them good sports to the core.  So is Michael, complete with frostbitten fingers and broad smile.  So is Sarah, although I wonder whether someone should send her home to sleep a bit more.  Tom (classic skier, playwright, Scrabble fanatic, and proud winner of the “Most Grunts and Moans” Award) skied seven hours slower this year than last, and has blisters the size of the Goodyear blimp -- yet cedes the Agony of de-Feet Award to Bob, uncontested.  On that score, no one can ever compete with grinning, imperturbable Bob.  Don’t look at the photos, just trust me on this one.

My own “award” is no more serious than any of the others.  There are no prizes.  In the real world, outside of this steam-and-spices-cozy room, no one -- except for a few stalwart and over-loyal friends and family members -- cares who won, who lost, who was “Racer of the Year” (yes, you, Jay), or who got honors for excessive puking. 

And within this room? 

Ah.  There, I realize, is the beauty of it.  Within this room, we all care.  We shout out stories.  Most of them are funny, in a Type-Two fun-after-the-fact kind of way. All of them have merit.  No one is less deserving of credit, or kudos, or attention, or cheers: not the ultra-fast guy who had to scratch, with red frozen welts on his stomach (yeah, he showed them to me – chicks dig that kinda thing); not the woman who didn’t quite make the 48-hour cutoff; not the winner, Tim, who crossed the line in a breathtaking 10.8 hours; not the indomitable Mike, who skated on until 5 a.m.; not the Carrolls, who finished at the next 5 a.m.; not Laura, who beat everyone else on foot (boys and girls both); not the good-humored medic who flooded her snowmachine; not the “crossing guards” at Beaver Creek. 

The sloggers, the plodders, the zoomers, the blistered and goofy and crazy – it takes all sixty-five, plus a horde of amazing volunteers and two astonishing Race Directors, to make the White Mountains 100 what it is.  It’s not really one race, but sixty-five different races, and then some.

So, yes, I cheated.  I totally, utterly cheated by switching from skis (which would have placed me in the Monday Night of Doom crowd) to a bike (which still placed me almost eight hours behind the winner, because when all is said and done, I’m Just Not Fast).  But, on the other hand, I didn’t cheat at all, because the only person I was racing against was me. (It’s always a tie.)

“Have fun,” Jay told me. 

“Have fun,” Teresa passed on, with a hug. 

“Have fun,” I reminded myself. 

Yes.  Yes, I did have fun.  I wasn’t really “most improved” – but so what?  I wasn’t trying to be “improved” any more than I was trying to cheat.  Snowbike or no snowbike, I had a blast. 

I wonder how I should do the race next year?