Everyday Extraordinary

[Note: I wrote this essay in March, 2003.  It seems that I was a less sarcastic beast back then -- twins will do that to you, not to mention PhDs.  Life has changed, of course. There was no Facebook in 2003, blogs were not nearly so epidemic, the global population was smaller, and Tamarack Knoll (our lovely 13-person not-really-a-commune, about to celebrate its 10th anniversary) had yet to be founded.  Nonetheless, I've skied to the lake -- Ace Lake -- many a time since 2003, and in some ways the musings below seem as timely as ever, if not more so.  So here you go: everyday extraordinary.]

And what is so rare as a day in June?

Then, if ever, come perfect days
--James Russell Lowell

I skied to the lake today. I pushed shut my cabin door behind me - - no latch, no lock -- snapped my boots into old-fashioned 3-pin bindings, and shoved mittened hands through pole-loops. My skis slipped down onto the hummocky nameless trails. Left turn, right turn, quirky dip and drop, the crunching glide of crusted snow -- and I stood in the lake's frozen center, ringed by an audience of black spruce, willow and alder.

I live here, I told myself. The lake is not mine, any more than the snow is mine. But this Alaska woodland is my home. How many people experience such a luxury? Even if I visit the lake every day, the experience is nonetheless rare. I turned my face up into the early afternoon sun, and let the scarcity of this ordinary experience soak through me.

Uncommonness is a form of currency.  Our world is valued according to a human obsession with scarceness; we deride the unwanted and abundant, and covet what we have least.  We rename our world as our values change. Rainforests were dark, forbidding jungles, until we realized they were vanishing. The Army Corps of Engineers worked hard to drain bogs, but the fast-disappearing bogs have lexically morphed into wetlands, which the Army Corps works hard to protect.

In early April, the lake is still solid enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler across, were it not a mile or more from the nearest road. The snow is tracked and pocked from the passage of skis and boots, paws and claws and hoofs and dogsleds, but I stood alone today, inhaling a sense of space that is itself unusual amidst burgeoning 6 billion of our species.  The air hung still and cold enough to crackle dry in my lungs, but the sun-glare off the snow shouted "spring!"

I remember the lake in December, darkly different. Then, even during our three daylight hours, the sun hovers so low as to be muted dawn at noon, and the snow has a dim blue cast to it. Each sunlit minute is savored.   At the year’s zenith, in June, a whining density of mosquitoes amidst the cattails lurks in wait for any red-blooded beast lured by the waterside's succulent greens. The chemistry of mammals has changed little in a million years; I imagine that I taste just like a moose to a mosquito. I wonder how we might feel about mosquitoes if we saw them only singly, and fleetingly. If mosquitoes were rare, would we value them?  The lake is different yet again in September; the edges first crust with ice, just as the cranberries underfoot burst ripe in the uncanny color of blood.  The last drops squeeze from a succinct growing season, eagerly appreciated for its very briefness. Alaskans do not take summer for granted, for it too is in short supply.

I've read that when it was common, lobster used to be a poor man's food. Around the time New England was given that unimaginative name, armored bottom-feeders washed up on the shores in piles two feet deep, and sank into fishy-smelling decay. The grandfather lobsters, sixty or seventy years old, were each 40 pounds of irascible crustacean. Pilgrim children, undoubtedly less virtuous than we imagine them to be, whined at the dinner table as they worked to crack those menacing claws - "not lobster AGAIN!"

Twenty years ago, a different generation of children spurred parents to fight each other at shopping malls to bring home supply-limited cloth and plastic objects with names and birth certificates. I was the only little girl in my class who did not own a Cabbage Patch Doll. I relished that fact as a different form of uncommonness.

But craving rarity is not merely a game for children.  Humans have enslaved whole generations, and consigned thousands of lifetimes to scrabbling and blasting deep underground in a desperate quest for tiny crystals of pure carbon. If diamonds were as common as granite, they would be nothing more than sharp rocks to us -- hazardous rough-edged pebbles amidst the warm and softly weathered beach sands.

I am no different. I have chosen to eschew diamonds and gold in favor of rock-jumbled mountainsides, pawprints in the snow, and the smell of damp moss, but my senses still clamor for the unfamiliar, the out-of-the-ordinary. I have heard scoffing directed at urbanites who want to protect wilderness, irritation at idealists in high-tech footwear, and anger at self-proclaimed environmentalists living climate-controlled lives. But I think I understand the paradox, and the apparent hypocrisy. We humans don't realize what we have until the last of it is trickling between our fingers. When all we see is tangled, thorny, predatory-fanged forest, we dream of conquering the wilderness. When all we see is concrete and girders, we beg to have our wilderness back, our bears and cougars and wolves back, at any price. How can I - how can anyone - learn to value what we already have?

Wanting what we do not -- and cannot -- have may be something unchangeable in the human makeup, as inbred a tendency as speech and fear. We may be eternal questers, dreamers, coveters, hoarders of diamonds and dolls. But while we cannot change our nature, we can guide it. Billions of types of rarity enrich this world, and it is within our nature to reject fickle fads and self-imposed needs. In their place, we can choose to cherish those rarities that will nourish best: the sight of the first robin in spring; the one person in the world who loves us most; the taste of a thousand varieties of wheat near-lost to monocrops; ephemeral streaks of aurora across an arctic sky; the one place, tucked between the mountains and sea, where tens of thousands of caribou give birth.

I ski to the lake, as I have a hundred times, and more. I stand on the ice and watch two squirrels chatter and chase in spring courtship. The average lifespan of a squirrel is only two or three years; for them, perhaps, this is the only spring, the only chilly sunlit day, the only chance. I turn my face up into the early afternoon sun, and let the scarcity of this ordinary experience soak through me.

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.

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?