Gliding Through the World: Gold Rush Race Report

I came in dead last again. The first time I came in last in a race with TNT in 2005 it was kind cool in a complete beginner way. But after a couple of years in the sport I had hoped to make some progress.

The race for me was over before it started. Not only was everyone was dressed in spandex, but they had the body types that suggested this wasn’t a bad idea. The pro teams (Salomon, Fisher, and Subaru) made up the front row. The next row was the local club teams such as Far West Nordic or the local high school. I was in the third row and was dropped faster than Donald Rumsfield after the midterm elections. There is a rule of poker that if you can’t figure out the idiot at the table, it probably was you. There were only about five skiers around me down the first hill, but I had little doubt who was missing a screw.

At least I thought that was only a metaphor going down the first hill. When I was putting on my skis, a spectator on the balcony above shouted that something dropped of my left ski. I quickly picked it up, put it in my pocket and told the guy that it must have been garbage. I had brought my skis in the day before to the shop to have them waxed and then figured it must have been something they had put on the ski. I didn’t think much of the Greek chorus on the balcony. In retrospect it was a bit like going to the beginning of a bike race and someone shouting out that there seemed to be a few gears left on the ground.

The release lever on my left binding was broken. It could not lock and as it was hit by snow would raise into the eject position. A small bump would then discard the ski, and I would be left with a single ski heading down the slope. The good news for the first lap was there wasn’t much loose snow on the trail. The course was a solid layer of ice having gone from temperatures in the mid sixties to freezing overnight. Snow plowing wasn’t any more affective than prayer on the descents. It was, as they say back east "wicked fast," and I gained strong momentum barreling down the hill.

The first ski ejection didn’t happen until the second turn. As I skidded first on my knees then on my belly I watched the last five skiers speed off into the distance. It was the final time I saw a fellow racer on the same lap. I ejected once more on the first lap, but for the second lap the snow had started to soften and I ejected six times. I started to make a routine of slowing ever so often to press down on the release lever and knock out what ever snow had accumulated. This worked well for the third lap.

I don’t want to make an equipment excuse for the race. I believe that you are responsible for your own gear. The race field was so strong that I doubt it would have made that much difference in overall placement. While I was recovering and putting on my ski I was resting and that had to have helped ski stronger in other places. I figure the net of equipment loss combined with a misplace turn was about five minutes which would have gotten me close enough to see other racers.

It was, however, a great day to be at Royal Gorge. With clear skies, the sierras were majestic, and the snow was so fast that I wound up with a personal best for the distance. Everyone did well; the course record was broken by a US Olympian who was the year behind me in school. It is an odd sport that sixty bucks gets you 81 spots behind Olympic competition. The only good news is that racing against the pros (other than watching amazing form) is that the equipment representatives are at the race as well. The wife of the Salomon rep was at the finish and was actually amazed that I had gone 30 miles on a broken binding. She offered to get me a new set of bindings and then commented how I should get better skis.

Still I am frustrated that I couldn't have done better. There is the notion that we should continually improve, that we learn from our mistakes and strengthen from our training. I don't want to be the "Charlie Brown" of skiing who constantly gets the football pulled away from him. I don’t want to be the replacement skier for the Wild World of Sport’s "Agony of Defeat." I want there to be joy in Mudville. I want Bill Buckner to field that grounder.

But the nature of sports is that there are those who finish last. Champions need people to thwart. I know that I want the reputation of a hero who wins gracefully, but that doesn't seem to be my casting in these endeavors. Instead I am out there both overmatched and under-equipped trying to make it around long after the glory has passed. I am there to give context to the struggle, to give the benchmark of the ordinary. I am out there to seize the best of what I have and to keep going even if means gliding through the world on broken skis. I am there to race.

California Dreaming on Such a Winter's Day

The legal boundary for gambling is the state line between California and Nevada, but for those with a keener sense of risk, the real challenge is the wintertime drive on route 80 as it heads over the mountain pass. Like all bets the drive can look deceptively simple. On a clear day traffic speeds along at times great than seventy miles an hour on two lanes: one that is almost reserved for the 18 wheel trucks and the other for their smaller gas guzzling cousins, suv’s. On those good days the mountains are less than four hours away from San Francisco, and the allure of spending weekday life at sea level and weekend life skiing on Olympic quality resorts has created a Gortex migrant class. Thousands go to the mountains in hopes of a weekend concoction of deep powder, blue skies, private hot tubs, and micro brewed beer. Most weekends this quadriceps indulgent lifestyle can be achieved.

But there are those other weekends when the gamble goes the other way; sometimes it snows. The book, The Perfect Storm, was about a series of weather coincidences that lead to massive waves in the Atlantic and George Clooney to try to speak with a Maine accent. Storms along Donner Pass up this ante; as bad as it got for Clooney he never decided to eat Mark Walberg. The mountain ridge is a jagged comb that clouds from the pacific scrape against as they head west. The week before the Great Ski Race it snowed 18 inches on three consecutive days, and I tried to do my best to make it over the pass.

I had rented a four wheel SUV from Hertz and decided to splurge on the $25 dollars worth of insurance. I was at a friends 40th birthday party and when I woke the next day and realized the combination of margaritas I had the night before wasn’t going to mix very well with trying to hit the slopes I got in the car and headed home. I was waved through a highway check that mad sure all vehicles had either chains or four wheel grip.

They don’t check, however, if the drivers have any understanding of physics because my journey home was filled with answers to high school problems of what would happen if a large mass hit a frictionless surface at a certain velocity. The times I slid were moments of chance. As I headed toward the snow bank on the side of the road there wasn’t much more I could than simply hope that something caught the pavement. I was lucky. Once the wind caught the truck directly ahead of me and pushed it one lane over. Another time with a different truck it sent it diagonally down the road before the truck managed to pull out and just avoid the 18 wheeler coming over the hill.

At least these were the times I could see. There were a couple of instances when the wind was blowing so strong at the drifts on the side of the road that I could not see the truck a few feet ahead of me, a white out. In one of my perhaps dumbest driving moments I tapped on my breaks because I wasn’t sure if the car a few feet behind me could see me either. I don’t know what it is like to drive through smoke at the Dayton 500, but I will admit that I was stupid enough to try to drive blind.

I think this idiocy of trying the pass might be the sieve that makes Easterners think all Californians are kooky. Those from the older states grew up with Snow Days and approach such conditions with the concept of there are times that one should not be out driving. This practical philosophy doesn’t occur to the Golden State where the ability to drive is almost in the state constitution, and the horror of missing a Monday meeting is almost unforgivable. The thing about being snowed in at the East is that everyone is. On the west coast, there is a good chance that your clients aren’t.

I did finally make it home in time for my father’s 71st birthday and was bright eyed enough for my banking job the rest of the week. A little bit of fear still lingered though as I knew I was heading up the next weekend to go once again over a mountain pass. Only this time, I would do it without a car.

The Great Ski Race goes 18 miles from Tahoe to Truckee. In its thirty second year it is a fundraiser for the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue, an organization that aids those skiers who have made extremely bad turns. It did seem a little strange to have a race that was about helping people get out of the wilderness would send just under two thousand into it, but this is the kind of irony that my brain shutdown in elevation.

Since the route is a point to point, there is a bus that takes those who park at the finish to the start. The weather looked liked it was going to be gorgeous as I waited in the parking lot. I watched slow moving sunrise was a dark shade of amber and then turned around to catch the moon set under the mountains.

With my weather fears slowly dissipating, I quickly found a new source of anxiety: the competition. Someone shouted asked the guy four people back from me whether he was planning on doing Western States, the 100 mile race through the mountains.

“No,” he replied, “not this year,” as if there were other years that he would have thought this was a sensible idea. The guy seated next to me on the bus ride was an ironman triathlete which took him about three minutes for him to mention in the same way that people from Harvard name drop their alma mater. He then talked about how he done really well at a twelve hour adventure race and how great his training was coming along. I do not know why I tend to be the recipient of these types of discussions, but I do think the khaki pants and 49er sweatshirt I wore as an outer shell before the race started didn’t really intimidate enough.

I did discover the one subject that will go on longer than a triathlete discussing his bike: a cross country skier talking about the wax on his skis. The largest example of how I am hack skier is that I really don’t have an opinion about wax; I just go to the ski shop and ask them to put on the race quality stuff. In the race skiing world this is as blasphemous as a Trekkie not having an opinion about who was a better captain between Kirk and Picard. The wax comes in skittle like color schemes suited for precise range of temperatures, moisture content, and snow age. There is usually a base and then a layer on top. The expensive stuff, the high fluorocarbon, needs to be applied in a well ventilated room, and at the Olympic is a closely guarded secret held by teach team’s wax technician, the skiing equivalent of porn’s fluffer. The guy on the bus next to me went on about his diagonal grooving and I was lucky enough to escape of the bus before he started into how he rescrapes his skis.

Standing in the starting coral after dropping off my sweatshirt and pants to be taken to the finish, I was able to get a glimpse of the other competitors and it was the largest collection of big beards I have ever seen in a race. Prospector chic never seemed to left the area, and I wondered how much warmer these mountain men would be in their home element than me.

Still there were a few reassuring moments that even though it was suppose to be a race, the most important part was to have fun. A group of women dressed up in Wizard of Oz costumes and another had a rabbit costume. Right before the third wave started a guy came out wearing only his bib and a Speedo. I began to think that this race was going to be the skiing equivalent of the bay to breakers if it were, of course, twice as long, held at altitude and went over a pass.

As the race waves went off, I had worked to get towards the front of my wave only to discover that I had misread the sign and that my wave was the one right ahead. I quickly jumped the rope and found myself at the back.

The course description is rather simple: you go up for eight miles and then you go down for ten with some rolling bumps to keep you honest. The eight miles is never super steep the way some bike rides throw stuff at you with names like Nasty Grade or the Marshall Wall. But while there are no deep moments of panic, there isn’t much of a break. It is a steady constant push like the opening chords of Led Zepplin’s Kashmir, a constant pounding as if you plugged yourself into a stair master at frappe setting for over an hour. Then after your legs have squeezed every last atp molecule out, you ski down the backside with the same kind of hope I had in the storm crossing with my car, of sliding correctly though not necessary at all stable around the switch back turns.

The good news is that they serve soup on the course, and the view is spectacular.

It was a great day to be outside, and I did my best to push myself up the slope. It was the first race that I have actually had skiers near me; on one prior race I was dead last at forty minutes behind the next skier . I have not learned how to ski while avoiding the person next to me polling territory faster than the land grant in Oklahoma and hope I was kind to my fellow racers. Once the starting frenzy had subsided, I was with a polite crowd for most of the day though my main competition wound up being a couple of junior high school girls a third of my age. At the very end of the race is a steep chute and I did a quality face plant before watching those two finish ahead of me. My only consolation was that instead of their red wristband, I got a green one that let me have one of the free beers at the end to help anesthetize my pounding legs.

The Great Ski Race lived up to its name. There was an abundant friendliness in the after party where it seemed everyone knew everyone. I saw the guy who wore a speedo clothed and warm, and the group of Oz characters finished the race with arms linked together like the movie’s Dorothy and Scarecrow. It was nice to bask just a bit in the local scene and the satisfaction that comes from the lunacy of a mountain crossing before I hopped in my car and headed home.

The Edge of Endurance

In the prologue of Heart of Darkness as Marlowe drifts on the Thames he laments “at the time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say 'When I grow up I will go there.' ... True, by this time, it was not a blank space any more. I had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery--a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over.”

That was over a century ago, and now as the edges of the unknown seem even more distant, epic journeys have almost come familiar. Not that you should travel up a river to see the dangers of colonialism - we are learning this in a desert instead, but there are now training programs for our personal physical limits, clubs that train together for Ironman distance triathlons, sherpas to help with major peaks, and cushy vacation packages that follow the Tour de France and practice the same hills. Instead of black ink, our world is being marked by chalked arrows, mile markers, and first aid stations.

But that edge is still there. There are impossible distances; like ultra-marathon runs, twenty-mile swims, and cross-country bike rides; as well as exotic places; such as Death Valley or the jungles of Borneo that linger both in our childhood consciousness and adult apprehensions. The most difficult of these races combine both of these elements. In March I traveled north with the Team in Training cross country ski program to see the start of one of the most challenging events on Earth, the Iditarod, and perhaps see one of the legends. The race has produced its share. Rick Swenson has won the race five times in three different decades. Col. Normal D. Vaughn completed the race at the age of 86. But the most famous of them is Susan Butcher.

The event is a 1,161-mile journey across the top of the world, over two mountain ranges and endless tundra. The sleighs are pulled by up to sixteen dogs, which is twice the number of reindeer that Santa uses. Granted he is only going long for a single day, and the Iditarod in a best-case scenario is an eight-day affair.

To succeed at endurance races requires months of training to gain not only fitness but also wisdom to make the correct series of decisions when racing in the artic. The choices that the mushers have must be brutal, a constant tradeoff between resting and pushing against the cold. Against the muted tones of wintertime and deprived of sleep the mind wanders, and the victors have to fight against the strong survival instinct to stop with the mental tricks they have practiced.

The ability to keep sharp is critical, because sledding isn’t just a physical task but a managerial one as well. The modern CEO dreams that all of his employees could be roped together and pull him towards greatness. A musher has to do this without the benefit of a stock option plan.

And like a CEO, a musher also needs to be an expert navigator. Rule 37 says mushers are restricted to traditional forms of navigation. Electronic or mechanical devices that measure speed and direction are prohibited i.e., Loran, night goggles and GPS. The rules have not been updated for IPods, but the call of the wild isn’t heard with headphones. It is the sound of paws on snow, and the swish of sleds on ice.

Susan has won the race four times, and was the first person to take a dog team to the top of Denali. She had an article written about her in the New Yorker, became a spokesperson for dog food, but still prefers life out in the deep bush than the comforts her fame brought her.

The one race that got away from her was when a crazed moose attacked her in 1985. The beast came into the team and started kicking the dogs. Susan held her off with her axe and parka, but the moose managed to kill two of her dogs and to injure 13 others. She spent the next two weeks in the hospital saving the lives of the injured dogs.

It would be tempting to say was her toughest trip to the hospital, but in December Susan was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). With current standard chemotherapy regimens, approximately 25-30% of adults younger than 60 years survive longer than 5 years and are considered cured. It is a brutal thing to get.

The boundaries of the natural world maybe smaller these days, but the human condition is still frail. Just as we once learned the safe trails to travel the wilderness, this century we are learning the routes around the map of the human genome. On the sixth chromosome is the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) region, a collection of genes that determines the proteins on the surface of cells used for the immune system to recognize its body’s cells. Cells that don’t have those protein markings, say of a parasite, are attacked like a moose going through a pack of dogs. The trick of transplants is to transfer organs that have the same MHC proteins. In the case of a bone marrow transplant, if the marrow is not completely compatible, the new cells can also attack the body – a graph versus host rejection.

Susan and her supporters looked for a bone marrow match. Her two daughters and sister were tested, and the hope was that whatever the allele is for bravery on midwinters nights that manifests on her cells was out there with someone else. If the Iditarod is about a solo voyage using crudest of navigational technologies, the race against cancer is the opposite of that. It is a journey of a community, a network of support that uses the best of friendships to ease the burden and the best of science to help find a cure.

But both are long to point of blurring. She took on the treatment with the same determination she always has. Her husband wrote :

You can imagine a walk with Susan though. She will not go on a usual walk. We of course have to push her chemo cart around wherever we go. I asked for the all wheel drive off road type but they didn't have any so you can imagine what it was like. There we are hauling the cart over mud puddles, through the brush, up hillsides, down gravel roads and finally through a fence and up some stairs to get back to the hospital. As a result of my experience I have and idea that I am going to try to market to the medical supply companys.

The CHEMO BACKPACK. This is the latest inovation for those active cancer patients who don't want to hang around the ward pushing their carts. You just strap this handy device on your husband or wife and take off.

A few weeks later they found a match and on May 16 she had the transplant. But about a month later the newly planted immune system began attacking her. The doctors managed to suppress the new immune system from attacking her stomach, but in this weaken state the AML returned. Her husband wrote:

I cannot describe what this weekend has been like. Even if I could I don't think I would for a long time. Seeing someone you love in pain is too personal to share. Seeing the mother of my two small children struggle to be brave for them. Seeing the kids treating there mom with the same gentle compassion that they would a new born baby. Hearing the youngest one cry for her mother at night. Seeing the older taking on a mothers roll to care for her sister. Thinking of these things is almost to much to bear.

If Disney were writing this story, Susan would recover by the love of her dogs and her two girls, Tekla and Chisana. They do one last race and someone manage to go the distance against the tundra and then credit would roll as Hillary Duff sang.

But these are not the sounds of this story. Conrad’s book spins a darker fate to the champions of the frontier. On Saturday Susan Butcher passed away.

I want to believe that Marlowe was wrong about the edge of the natural world; there are worthwhile boundaries to explore. The last century came not only with the brutality that he found in the jungle but also with the achievement of voyages to the major peaks of the world. In our new century we will struggle with the power of biology as the last one did with the dangers of atomic physics. These boundaries are never approached easily for the edge of endurance is at the threshold of human tears.

We lost one of our bravest.

Winter Included

Occasionally an email will slip through the spam filter or a piece of mass mailing will make it accidentally in the keep pile, and you are left with just a moment to consider the possibility of the glossy pitch, to daydream about the enclosed adventure, and to think that this race, however too far, could be really cool in a rebellious way that your friends, family, and quadriceps will think you are nuts and your fellow distance junkies will nod with that sounds hard. The one that slipped into my life was ski 50 kilometers in Alaska for Team in Training on one winter’s day.

The race has a locals’ scent that makes the event feel like a special hidden secret, like stumbling into to a bar and seeing Bonnie Raitt open a set, or like going to In and Out Burger and ordering an Animal style burger. In California it almost seems that the cross-training for Nordic skiing is apologizing - “Yes, it really tough. Yes, the drive every weekend to Tahoe is pretty far” but in Anchorage, skiing, like everything else, weaves into wintertime. The place has the mammalian need to continue to move against the cold.

It was hard not to be intimated by the race. There is an entire genre of the doomed icy narrative in which a bold (and almost always) male decides to push against the frozen climate. The legend is strong enough that it inspires actual people to take chances against Alaska as if it were nature’s own Vegas. In the nineties there was the Chris McCandless voyage “Into the Wild”, and recently there was the “Grizzly Man” journey down a bear’s digestive track. I really did not want to complete the trilogy and perhaps the best thing I did that weekend was to test my skis against the snow the day before and realize that this surface had the same lattice made with two hydrogen’s for every oxygen, that this was the same kind of conditions I had practiced at more local mountains, and that I was ready to glide even if part of the trail the day before was being used for the Iditarod.

The ceremonial start of the 1,000 mile sled race marks the end of the 17 day long Fur Rendezvous Festival, an affair that is the concoction of taxidermy, cold, and fashion. If Nordic skiing is about the purity of winter then the Fur Rondy is about getting close to the animal. Perhaps a little too close. The most spectacular hat-coat combinations still had the original mammal’s head and legs attached. The affect was the answer to the question of what would have happened if the NCAA mascots got really hard-core after a drinking binge.

For the Iditarod the starting area for the canines was similar to one for the humans but there was no theme music being played unless it was in a key too high for me to hear. Several blocks had been roped off, and the dogs barked anxiously for the start of the race. If there were a surprise about the event, other than you could watch part of it from a mall parking lot, was how small the dogs were. They are the mid-size variety, which at first felt like going to a monster truck pull but seeing how the vehicles had been replaced with Volkswagen Passat’s. The “strength to weight” ratio is often used by triathletes as an excuse for why they got dropped biking up a hill, and the dog size must follow the same principle. The musher’s must carry theirs and the dogs’ food on the several weeks journey and the bigger dogs just eat too much.

My biggest disappointment of the Iditarod was that it didn’t have a mass start. They launched each dog team a few minutes apart and there wasn’t the kind of pile up that happens with rental cars in the hands of Californians along the icy Steward highway.
My mild by comparison 50k race did have wave starts, and based on my dead last performance at Yellowstone the year before I was placed in the final wave. An hour before the race my teammates and I gathered at Robert Service high school, and we huddled on the floor to gain whatever knowledge we could from the locals. The one next to me had signed up for the 40k because he was afraid of the hills during the 50. This was not the kind of cheer I wanted to hear.

One by one the waves of skiers launched ahead. Ski starts are different than the swim scrum at the start of a triathlon. In skiing you must double poll - the equivalent of requiring everyone at a swim start to kick the first fifty yards, a personal dream of mine - and no one was run over. My wave had mostly my Team in Training teammates along with whatever elderly they couldn’t place anywhere else. The old folks quickly dropped us.

My entire race strategy was to sandbag the opening hills and then see what happens in the flats. The secret of endurance sports is learning to let go and trust your own pace rather than competition. I watched my two other closest teammates and my head coach blast up the hills and then out of sight as I did a quick gear change because the weather was in the quite balmy high 20’s.

Like doing taxes, going up hills isn’t that bad if you take them slowly enough. The down hills were more a problem. With the hundreds of skiers ahead of me, they had zambonied the descents into icy chutes. The race was going to be part luge.

Down the first hill I fell after the second bend. I hadn’t realized someone was on my tail. Normally if you are the downhill skier and someone tries to pass you on the inside right without saying anything like “track” or “on your right”, it isn’t your fault. But when the guy hit my boot, launched a ways down the hill, then skidded down the trail, and almost hit trees on the other side as if trying out for the opening of Wild World of Sports, I felt I had to say. “Dude, I am so sorry. Are you okay?”

He grunted as if I could understand bear and then pushed off. I was left to ski by self for a long time until I caught my first teammate at the second water stop.

We were starting to go through the main town of Anchorage. A phrase I heard while traveling outside of Anchorage was that they didn’t consider Anchorage to be part of real Alaska, and it reminded me hearing how people think of my hometown, San Francisco, isn’t part of the real America. Both get the high school isolationism of not being in the “in crowd.” If they were casting metropolitans as characters in “The Breakfast Club” San Francisco would be Judd Nelson’s “way too old to be in high school” rebel and Anchorage would be Ally Sheedy’s “very cute if she just would brush back her hair” babe still hoping to get asked to the prom. Anchorage is wonderful; how many other places have tunnels that you ski through?

Just over two thirds of the way through the course I picked off my head coach. I was so amazed that I fell on my tailbone. That vertebrate ached the rest of the vacation. I had also pushed my triceps to fatigue, and it hurt just to lift my polls. The fortunate thing about skiing in the flats is that you can get mostly by on legs and core strength. I knew for the hill at the end of the race I was doomed, but that was a ways off and I had to wonder who designed the layout. Marquis de Sade?

I past my last teammate with just a few miles left to go. The hill at the end was brutal, and I think I have one unhappy race photo waiting online for me somewhere. It is too bad they don’t take pictures a few minutes after finishing, because I discovered my race time was 3:54. I dropped almost an hour and twenty minutes from the prior year. A good portion of that was there was very fast snow, but I like to think in part some of it was that I am slowly becoming a real skier and I now have two t-shirts to show for it.

But I also know that my luck during the race was also from what I learned from seeing all the other mammals during the rest of the trip - the moose, the killer whales, the sea lions, and the bears - that winter is best conquered in packs. The foolishness of McCardness and Jack London was to fail to realize how great winters can be when shared with a group. And I want to say thanks to everyone along the way. I do want to thank the race organizers because that was one of the best races I have done in any sport. I want to thank all of my fellow skiers (even the one guy who grunted at me) because they were the politest group of slow twitch junkies I have met.

I want to thank all the people who help support me with donations either financial or just simply emotional. That a bunch of money is going to leukemia is a much better side effect of this trip than my hurt tailbone. You have really helped make a difference.

And I really want to thank my teammates and coaches for teaching so much, sharing so much, and laughing so often. It was one of the best adventures I have done.

Click here to show the map of the race.

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Life in the key of G

Life in the Key of G

After reading Ansai Boys by Neil Gaiman, I believe that life is a song. We sing of those that have come before us, their deeds and their memories. We listen to trance of meetings, hum with the beats of our days, and, in our luckier moments, dance to tune of love.

The past few months I have been living in the key of G, the one that best straddles both the major and minor scales. I have date and was dumped; I have struggled against a year-end deadline at work but came out with only a few scars. The chords of victory and defeat clashed, but it feels this holiday music is over and the Christmas gifts and New Years promises have been put away. A new allegro midwinter movement has started. The refrain is about a hill.

I have signed up for another 50k ski race and the first five miles is up hill. If the state were Delaware I would feel good, but the race is in Alaska, and they know hills, the way that say Idaho knows potatoes, Minnesota knows lakes, and California knows expensive housing. The state is big in a way that gives Texas an inferiority complex. It is the frontier where there are documentaries of how people get mauled by bears and Jack London short stories of how someone froze unable to build a fire.

The hill should seem familiar, because I go up to the Sierra’s on alternate weekends to practice the skating motion of cross country skiing. When done correctly it has the gracefulness of a waltz with each stride and poll plant in synch with three quarters time. Given my natural staccato disposition, I am learning the dance slowly. And in much the same way in junior high I developed my footwork to the B52’s Rock Lobster and Skynards’ Free Bird, I know that most of the time I look foolish, but the only way to get better is to practice.

The hill should seem familiar, because I have been running the Lyon street steps with a ski conditioning class. I know they must think I am crazy because the class is meant for downhill training, and I keep telling them it is same imaginary snow. I just hope they think I am a good kind of Bay Area crazy that signs up for distance events as opposed to the other kind that wanders Market Street with signs about support for seven races of space aliens.

The hill should seem familiar, because I have been doing endurance sports for a while. This is my eighth year doing an event with Team in Trainingand I have done more than a few others that weren’t for a cancer research fundraiser. Granted not all of my attempts have been successful, because some races are like trying to bust a move to J Giels Band’s Love Stinks or pretty much anything by Phil Collins. These are never good ideas.

The hill should seem familiar, because I think the mid thirties is a Sisyphean struggle. Between pushing and polling we hope our careers and families will move ever upward despite whatever turns we encounter. The constant coldness is offset by the scenery we can see out of the corner of our glasses. The place is beautiful if we could just rest for a few minutes. I think these are the same climbs as we had in our twenties, but we now have much better gear.

The hill should seem easy. But I worry about it, because after its crescendo there is still left a marathon until I am home. And that is another song to learn.

Map of Bear Valley Workout.

Map of Last Donner Workout.

Twice Around

I think the first time you do any sport you play by the Rocky I rule. The goal is to last the fifteen rounds of the experience while some short old guy says, "you're an animal". Bruised and bewildered you should finish aware enough to shout out for the shy pet store girl and if lucky collect an Oscar for best picture. You will get later attempts to handle Creed, the Russian, or Mr. T. The first time is about going the distance.

The clerk at the local ski store was the first person I told that I was thinking about skiing a 50k. I explained to him that I hadn't skied since Reagan was in office and the goal was by the end of winter to be able to ski that length under the five hours and fifteen minute time cut off with the small issue that it never snows at my home city. I asked "What skis would do you recommend?"

He looked at me at the same way that a dog owner looks at their pet when they realized it swallowed a golf ball. "You know that fifty kilometers is really far?" Instead of buying, I rented skis for a while.

At the Team in Training information meeting (a fundraising organization for Leukemia Research), Dave, who became one of my coaches, talked about how 25k was the equivalent of a ski marathon, and he was thinking about emphasizing the valor of 10k for novice skiers. I asked him what it would take for the 50k. He, too, said, "that 50k is really far."

But I spent the winter practicing anyway with patient coaching and quality three-hour car rides. I was in decent shape but still had technique problems. I have three athletic attributes - I am good on a kickboard in a pool, I get very hot when I exercise, and I have strong determination. Coordination isn't a personal skill and even now I still can only really pole on my left side and can't really balance very well on my right leg. I look longingly at the gracefully strides of expert skate skiers the same way that a prairie dog must look at a gazelle. At some point there must have been a common evolutionary ancestor, but we each had specialized a long time ago.

Headed to the race I was confident that I could make the time cutoff unless there was a snowstorm or I messed up my hydration. For the later I had been practicing by putting perpeturm, a sugary fuel mix like cool aid with the calories cranked up, in with water into my camelbak reservoir for nutrition. It is trail mix in a tang format.

For the weather, the six times I went to practice skiing I had nothing but blue skies and 40-degree highs. I had lucked into missing all of the snowy days in the Sierra, and it had been one of the driest winters in the Rockies. If it were to snow I would have to improvise.

The night before the flight to Bozeman, I put the perpetum in the camelback and carried small snacks on the plane. I had not been to Montana since right after graduating from college for my roommate's wedding and looked forward to seeing him, his wife, and their four kids. It had been a long time.

Bozeman is a charming compact town that blends quickly into the rolling hills and jagged peaks that surrounds it. A love of hiking is almost a requirement for citizenship, and there very well could be more dogs than people. It has successfully kept its main street, a victory against the malls of America, and shops range from the expected sporting goods store with a rifle as a logo and gift shop with a moose crossing sign in the window to the unusual authentic Thai restaurant named Smilers. In San Francisco a place called Bang and Tail would be a bar, but in Bozeman it sells biking and skiing equipment. Foot apparel is available at Boots and Shoes, with the later seeming like an afterthought when shuffling through the mud of the early spring thaw. It is a boot kind of town except for the scuba shop, which felt about out of place as me. If in California we dream of mountain retreats, then from time to time in Montana they must think of warm beaches. Escapism is universal.

My roommate's kids are being raised as good Christians and Red Sox fans. They wear the caps more of the second and don't seem amazed that the Red Sox won the series. Faith is the strength that gets you through winters not just Octobers. My Giants lack Montana's natural modesty and kindness, but my roommate's family has that by the bushel.

After a pleasant day spent in Bozeman, complete with a tour of the noodle on stick art sculpture and nice morning walk, I met up with the rest of my teammates for the bus trip down to West Yellowstone. Instead of looking out the window to see actual wildlife we watched a video about a pack of wolves called the Druids that were released from their cages and sent out with GPS collars into Yellowstone. They played, howled, and hunted together, and I thought about how our own little team of charity skiers had done a similar adventure of traveling out into a new world unsure of the terrain but confident that we could handle the task together. The wolves then ate a deer and bred off-camera to make a litter of four cubs, and I felt the analogy wasn't going to work as well.

The ski race wasn't the only thing in West Yellowstone that weekend; there was also Sno-Blast, a convention for artic cat snowmobile dealers. Snowmobiliers are people who enjoy nature with the smell of napalm. They wear thick helmets to mask the sounds of their engine for themselves but leave the noise for everyone else and large neon jumpsuits that make them look like the Pillsbury Doughboy with a Star Wars fetish. They are the answer to the question of what would happen if bad taste were given a bunch of money and proceeded to drink heavily, smoke consistently, and destroy the hotel hot tub.

Needless to say there was a slight body composition difference between the cross-country skiers and the snowmobiliers, and I was a little disheartened when the hospitality clerk got me confused with the snowmobile crowd. I wanted to lean over to her and say "no, really I am here to do the 50k," but I think she would have just pointed me to the bar and told me to keep drinking.

The town of West Yellowstone was friendly like that. The ski shop there that sounds like a San Francisco bar is called "Free Heel and Wheel" and serves a great mocha. Most of the town was motels and gift shops, but they did have an I-Max theatre that showed NASCAR racing twice a day and a small zoo consisting of grizzly bears and wolves. I wondered how the animals felt to be caged so close to an actual park and thought the experience must be similar to the prisoners in San Quentin who can look out across San Francisco Bay to the sourdough city. Escapism is universal.

After race registration, a pasta dinner, a good night's sleep, and two pancakes for breakfast I arrived at the starting line for a quick warm-up. I was in the last wave with most of my coaches and lined up next to them. For the first fifty yards of a ski race you must double poll, which is to say you can't use your legs. The gun went off and I pressed forward. I could poll well, but my entire team had passed me on the first hill. It was going to be a long day.

Thirty minutes into the race it started snowing. It was a light flurry at first but then turned to large wet flakes that clung to my sunglasses. The 50k race had become a great deal harder.

One of the secrets of endurance racing is know what you can and cannot worry about. Your thoughts won't change the weather and so it is important to concentrate on what you can control - your pace and fueling. I took the first sip out of my camelback and realized only then that after three days perpetum in water ferments. Nothing grows in Gatorade, but the problem of drinking something healthier is that it was healthier for other creatures as well. Despite my careful preparation, my camelback was useless, and I would have to rely in the food I kept in my pockets and the water on the course.

By the first water stop I had passed a coach and her partner. They have much better technique than I do, but the thick snow meant that gliding wasn't going to work very well. Without the glide we were left to run through the snow with two very large sticks attached to our legs so everyone was going to be awkward – dashing across the snow, we looked more like penguins that deer. With my heart rate was ten beats above where it should be, I was worried that I was going out too fast because but there was a loose 11:30 am time cut-off for the first lap and I had not this far just be push aside.

Despite the weather I kept getting hotter and spent most of the time looking at the backs of two skiers ahead of me. By the third water stop I passed them as well in full throttle to make 11:30. Right towards the end, just before the Subaru ski team lapped me, I caught another group of teammates/coaches.

I went down the long straightway to the lap marker at 11:34 and was very nicely allowed to continue. (The year before the cutoff was noon, so they weren't sticking too hard on this point). The race close was at 2:30 pm so I would need to the second lap in just under three hours.

I shed my useless camelback and long sleeve shirt and gave these to our team managers extraordinaire, Barb Smalley and Ananda Baron, who kindly checked on everyone. They were next to the race director and could listen on the radio for our race numbers - mine was number 390. Down to a red fleece vest and a short sleeve t-shirt I headed out again to do the course one more time.

I don't believe in second chances. Even if you arrive back to exactly where you were before, you will be older and more tired when you look at that same path. Not that there isn't the longing - I have the times when I wish I wasn't as shy like a life long audition for the lead in "Sideways" - but the things you do can't be taken back.

One of those days I wish I could do over was May 2, 2004, the last time I did a race with Team in Training. The Olympic distance triathlon race was meant to be a tune up for a longer one a few weeks later, but I made a series of mistakes and was betrayed by two of my athletic features - that I exercise hot and that I am determined to go through anything.

That day I was amped from watching my teammates do well the day before and when I passed the final transition on to the run course the cheering of young, attractive women made me want to push even harder. I drank water and Gatorade before and during the race, but in retrospect I should had five water cups at each stop instead of just one.

The last thing I remembered I was three hundred yards from the end of the race at the base of the final hill with the finish line just around the corner.

I woke memoryless in a hospital. A mere minutes away from the end I had a heat stroke and seizure and had to be helicoptered out. A heat stroke is when the water in your brain has evaporated and your circuits are literally frying. I fear for what I might have lost. Barb came as quickly to the hospital and after an overnight stay I was released physically okay but restricted from doing any events in the heat.

A few months later I realized that if I could go far in the heat then I should try it in the cold and decided to switch sports to cross country skiing and came up with the silly goal of a 50k.

Yes, I don't think we ever get truly get second chances, but what we can get is second loops. Often we tend to travel in circles and when we come to that familiar fork, more worn and weary, we know the weight of each. The first time through a loop is done with blind exuberance that we had in our twenties. But now as we wander the second time through what we lack with energy is made up with focus.

This ski race wasn't a comeback. I can't return to the heat. But it was a chance for me to show that I still could go out and seize a day. Perhaps I wasn't the dominant wolf in the pack, but I still could hunt and howl at the moon. This race was about going the fifteen rounds.

I slowed down to conserve energy and returned to the first water stop just as they were closing it. They had already removed the trail markers but still had some water and PowerAde left. They asked me how many people were behind me, and I told them at least six. As I left they poured some more cups, which I didn't realize were going to be left unused.

On the second loop without kilometer markers I had no idea how fast I was going because I could not see anyone ahead either and kept myself amused by mumbling movie quotes. My favorite was King Théoden from the "Two Towers" when he was on the wall at Helms Deep as a sea of orcs attacked, "Is this all you have Saruman? Is this the best you can do?"

But whom I should have been really quoting was Frank the Tank from the movie "Old School." The two of us shared a moment of being out on our own without much clothing convinced very much that there was a pack of like mind people following them. Franks wife pulled him aside and asks him what he is doing and in a slurred moment of exuberance he responded, "We are streaking".

I was out there, too, streaking and striding in my short sleeve shirt. Only there was no one in a minivan to pull me over. The skiers behind me had left the race, and I am making a new rule that you know it is a tough ski day when your coaches from Alaska and Latvia drop out because of bad conditions. Later back at the hotel, we would joke that DNF stands for "definitely not foolish" But I had only me, two flasks of hammer gel, and geeky movie quotes to keep me going.

I only started to really worry when I found the second water stop had been abandoned. I had not seen anyone in an hour and wasn't carrying water. I could still follow the deep tracks, and onward I trudged. I started to fall more going down hills because my core muscles were tired, and the climbs seemed twice as long the second time around.

I wasn't the only one worried. Ananda and Barb were frantically listening on the radio for skier 390. If it had been anyone else, anyone who they hadn't been to the emergency room the time before, anyone who tended to be at least somewhat sane during a race, they probably would have relaxed, but I was the last one out. Why was I out there with a short sleeve shirt? Could anybody see me? If they can put GPS collars on wolves why can't they put them on skiers?

50k is far. It is roughly five miles further than a marathon. Sometime between what would have been the second and third water stops I passed that point slower than I have ever run that distance. It was going to be a long day. The one little bit of luck I had graced me at the third water stop. They had still had a few cups left and some cookies, and again I left some water for the non-existent people behind me.

Invigorated I looked at my watch and realized that I was going to have to really step it up to make the 2:30 pm cut-off. I started to push hard again and saw my first person in about two hours who was taking apart some of the 10k course. He radioed back to the finish line, and Ananda and Barb were relieved.

I ran into the head coach with about 3k left on the course and kept pressing to make the time. One wrong turn during the final chute made a me have to go over some gravel to get to the finish line. My watch said 2:26 and I felt I did not go all this way to let mere gravel get in the way. I hopped over the gravel and skied back and forth to the finish line. Expecting me to come down a different route six of my teammates came running down to greet me at the end. Ananda quickly put an old fleece over my exposed arms. The clock was at 2:27:30. Two and half minutes to spare.

I finished 164 out of 164 roughly fifty minutes behind anyone else. Of the 209 people who entered the race 45 did not finish which is just over 21%. The people with common sense were from places like Saskatchewan, Colorado, and Vermont where winter isn't just a weekend folly. One of the Subaru professionals called it a day early, as did four of my coaches. I was the sole team in training participant to finish and one coach and our category two bike racing captain finished as well. I have never been dead last at anything and felt so proud.

I had gone the fifteen rounds.

And if Rocky can shout at the end of his match so can I.

I want to really thank Ananda and Barb. One day we will have an ordinary race day with fair temperatures and sunny skies. We have been through so much together, and I hope you remember the good parts. I cried a little when Ananda drove me to MacDonald's afterward because I was so happy to have finally reached that finish line that has escaped me for ten months. And so happy that I could share it with her.

I want to thank my mentor Tracy and her partner Sigrida for so much guidance and not to mention rides up and back the to slopes every other weekend. I hope my offbeat humor was offset with my spiffy iPod.

I want to thank the coaches and captains, and especially Scott for leading the entire gang.

50k is far, and while I won't pretend that it wasn't deeply personal I won't forget the other reason I did it. I am just so grateful to have done a second lap, but the purpose of the program is to give cancer patients a second lap of their own. During the course of training we heard statistics like 80% survival rate, which can seem abstract at times. But when I look at the numbers of the race as a comparison, I realize that 20% can include quite a few people who are noble and special on their own. I don't want to lose any of them.

Thanks again to all