False dichotomy

I may be in a battle with myself and a “hate-love” relationship with racing, but I only have love for Alaska’s White Mountains

Finishing the 2024 White Mountains 100

It’s hard to be a fading athlete. I know the descriptor “fading” falls in line with aging, but that’s only because everyone is aging, every second, so our declines can always be dismissively blamed on the passing of time. Still, ever since I contracted pneumonia during the summer of 2015 at age 35, I’ve battled to regain a glimmer of the effortless strength I knew when I was “young.” 

I’ve watched the “VO2Max” reading on my Garmin watch fall from the high-40s to the mid-40s to now, sometimes, the high-30s. It used to call me “superior” and now I’m merely average. I used to believe I could beat any environmental challenge — “there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing.” But now I avoid committing to races and longer adventures during the summer and early autumn months because wildfire smoke and high pollen counts constrict my breathing too much to train effectively. My breathing deteriorates a little more each summer, in line with the world’s rising AQI, and I wonder if there will come a day when I’ll be too “old” to even venture outside without protective measures. So I look to the winter, with its cold, clear air, in a vain attempt to recapture the freedom I effortlessly knew when I was “young.”

The White Mountains 100. Since its inception in 2010, I’ve thought of it as “my” race, a venue custom-designed to play to my strongest strengths with its cold, remoteness, beauty, self-sufficiency, and slog-inducing trail conditions. Although I’ve never been the speediest in any endeavor, the White Mountains 100 promised my best opportunities for improvement. When I stopped improving, I took it personally. This childish indignation is best illustrated by my most recent run around the loop in 2019. I trained my heart out all winter and was in “the best shape of my life” although I wasn’t — I wasn’t in nearly the shape I had been without even trying in 2015. But I told myself this and set an ambitious goal. I was on pace until it started snowing — something that is completely normal and should be expected in a winter race. Several inches of wet powder slowed me substantially, and I wasted the rest of the experience locked in a 15-hour temper tantrum. My attitude was so bad that at mile 93 of the course, I heard a snowmobile and decided to stick out my thumb. I was going to quit out of spite. And I probably would have quit if my friend Wendy hadn’t been on the back of that snowmobile after stopping her race for legitimate reasons at mile 61. I’m grateful I didn’t have an opportunity to quit, but I still feel ashamed when I think about my bad attitude in 2019.

Suddenly, five years passed. After COVID, my father’s death, and the other twists and turns of life that are all of our lives in the 2020s, I never had a chance to process this anger. So in 2024, I signed up for the two races that brought me so much anger and shame in 2019 — the White Mountains 100 and the Bryce 100 — to explore whether it’s true that I have accepted my limitations and achieved the enlightenment to embrace racing existentialism: “Perhaps racing has no meaning or purpose, therefore I am free to create my own meaning and purpose.”

Danni at the start of her fourth WM100. First time on a bike.

The Alaska endurance scene is robust but insular. It has to be when Outsiders must travel so far to participate in Alaska events and vice versa. For that reason, one can look around a crowd and understand exactly how they stack up against the others. I felt woefully inadequate at the pre-race meeting as I sat among the strong and fast Alaskans. There was Laura McDonough, who has dominated the winter foot races since well before I entered the scene as a fresh-faced Alaskan in the mid-2000s. At 63, Laura still runs circles around me. There was Virginia Sarrazin, age 47, the tough Canadian who organizes the Raven 50 in Whitehorse. There was Meg Inokuma, who is my age — 44 — but she’s phenomenal. The way Meg can skitter over the snow as though she’s floating boggles my mind.

And then there were … a lot of people I did not know. The men on foot, the bikers and skiers — there were so many strangers, so many young, fresh faces who weren’t part of the scene when I first showed up in 2010. I sat next to my friend Danni, who also regularly travels from Outside for ridiculous Alaska races, and thought about how young everyone looked.

“We’re part of the old guard now,” I thought, feeling bewildered by the notion.

Gotta hand it to the guy who took a splitboard around the loop. He has skills.

The morning of the race was warm, windless, and sunny — not necessarily a good omen in an event held on trails that can turn to slimy mashed potatoes under the March sun. But I was in a good mood and happy to be there. The bald domes, the big sky, the scrubby black spruce — the scenery of the White Mountains never grows tiresome, no matter how many times I find myself standing at the trailhead on Wickersham Dome. I launched up the trail feeling strong, jogging the 12- to 15-minute miles I hoped to maintain. Still, I swiftly fell to the back of the pack. On the first long downhill, I heard a “whoosh” and jumped off the trail. A snowboarder flew past me, carving tight turns down the narrow trench barely wider than a snowmobile. This would have been jarring if I wasn’t aware someone was attempting the “first splitboard finish” of the White Mountains 100. But it was still pretty jarring. A dude on a snowboard. What is this world coming to? Kids these days.

The March sun climbed high into the sky, heating the air and intensifying the glare on the snow. Everything felt so warm and bright that I could barely tolerate my existence. I felt as though I was crawling through the desert. My head pounded and my throat was parched as I mindlessly rationed my drinking water even though I had plenty and was surrounded by frozen water. My stomach lurched even though I was only consuming the Honey Stinger chews and fruit snacks that I packed because I knew temperatures were going to be “hot” and I wouldn’t be able to digest my usual cold-weather fuel of fruit, chocolate, and nut trail mix. The guys around me were stripping whatever layers they could, but I was down to a base layer and not willing to risk the chafing and sunburn of removing anything more. And anyway, it wasn’t actually hot. It was, at most, 45 degrees. Each time a breeze cooled the beads of sweat on my skin, I was reminded that my vulnerability was to the cold, not the heat.

By late afternoon, the trail began to fall apart. Most bikers and skiers in the top two-thirds of the pack never had to experience these chewed-up trails. But being at the back of heavy traffic only further disadvantages the slow folks. I strapped on my snowshoes and wore them happily for 20 miles. When I tried to run, the tips of my snowshoes occasionally caught a posthole and I flipped forward. This is another reason I love snow — you can fall all you want. You’re probably not going to get hurt. Indeed, many cyclists punched their own snow angels beside the trail. I enjoyed tracing the swerving tracks and the stories they told.

I probably would have worn my snowshoes happily for the rest of the race. But just before checkpoint two at mile 38, my feet were already burning with the beginnings of trench foot. In packing my snowshoes, I neglected to include gaiters. I didn’t think I’d need the extra warm layer when I was already worried about sweating out my socks. But without gaiters, all of the snow that my snowshoes flipped into the air was packing into my running shoes. My socks were soaked and ice blocks of packed snow filled the space between my toes and the tips of my shoes. This was not ideal at 45 degrees and would be downright dangerous as soon as the temperature plummeted after dark.

I hadn’t even reached the checkpoint before my feet hurt too much to continue. I stopped, removed my sopping socks, and let my pruney macerated feet dry out for 10 minutes on the trail. Then I lubed the waterlogged skin, put on dry socks, and sadly put away my snowshoes. My priority now had to be keeping my feet dry — or at least mildly damp — at all costs.

I tried to make a quick turnover at checkpoint two, where most of the guys around me were rehydrating after running out of water. I believed I was feeling strong, and excited for the sun to finally set as I started up the long, gradual climb to Cache Mountain Divide. Still, it wasn’t long before the guys passed me as though I was standing still. We were all walking, and normally I’m a decent walker. On this night, for reasons unknown, I was a slug — crawling, straining to stretch my legs as far as they’d go, and only becoming more bogged down.

I wondered what was wrong with me. I was quick to blame my training. Sure, I did my share of running in Boulder. But all of my snow training had been super slow — either snowshoeing in the high mountains, dragging a heavy sled, or slogging through Colorado mashed potatoes. Now my legs only know how to do 2 mph in snow. I watched the men float away from me and tried to pretend it didn’t matter. I reached for more Honey Stinger chews but remembered I needed to ration. This is probably the real reason I was moving so slowly up the Divide — I’d essentially only eaten a highly rationed portion of pure sugar for 12 hours and was starting to bonk. But it was easier to blame a past version of me for making all of the mistakes.

Not long after the sun went down, the full moon rose over the boreal forest. I settled into my slog — the quiet passing of time, the subtle movements of the sky, the magical light on the mountains. The colors were all silver and gold tinged with metallic blues. The trees were the deepest shade of black, blending into abstract shapes that told endless stories: dragons and ghosts and herds of caribou rippling across the tundra. Nighttime is my favorite time in an ultramarathon, which is why I love participating in ultramarathons. I don’t necessarily possess the drive to motivate myself out here, far from the nearest road, in this scary landscape after dark. Mentally, I require an impetus. And yet, as soon as I’m here, basking in all of the magic and wonder, I wonder why I don’t venture out for 24-hour adventures more often.

The Divide was particularly magical on this full-moon evening. I lost myself to its strangeness, becoming fully immersed in the moment and enjoying a perfect flow state until my watch buzzed. I looked down and saw that it was midnight. Sixteen hours since the start. My goal for this halfway point had been 13 hours. Again, my ego returned to stomp all over me. It chided me for being slow and somehow convinced me that flowing freely through this incredible landscape wasn’t enough.

Battling my ego became tougher after I crested the Divide and passed the sweepers. They were sprawled out on their snowmobiles, enjoying the gorgeous, windless night. The sweepers were courteous and friendly, but they also decided this was the time to start stalking me. For the next 11 miles, they passed me five or six times, and then I’d pass them again, ad nauseam. The interruptions became so frequent that I had to turn off the audiobook I’d been listening to because although I could hear them just fine, I couldn’t pay attention. I resented how often they disrupted my solitude on this gorgeous night only to ask me, “Are you okay?” for the umpteenth time, as though I hadn’t answered that same question 20 minutes earlier.

“Being at the back of the race sucks,” I grumbled to myself. Ego agreed. “No more races for you; you’re too slow.”

I tried to bring myself back to center. Despite the glaring light of the full moon and wispy clouds blocking much of the sky, the Northern Lights were out and putting on a fantastic show. I gazed at the sky, mesmerized, grateful for this moment where I could move my body and dance with the sky. But then I’d hear the whine of a snowmobile and my ego would crash to the forefront all over again.

Finally, I made it to checkpoint three, mile 61, where I enjoyed my favorite treat of the race — meatball soup — and chatted with the guys who had passed me well before the Divide. One had fallen knee-deep into overflow and needed to take the time to dry out his feet. I’d miraculously avoided falling in overflow, thanks in no small part to race volunteer Kevin Breitenbach, who gave a brilliant presentation on the stuff during the pre-race meeting.

I’ve been racing in Alaska for 18 years. Before this year I had a vague understanding of overflow but mostly understood it to be a perplexing and unpredictable phenomenon that gurgles up from random places at all temperatures and defies the laws of physics. But with a couple of hand-drawn diagrams and a five-minute presentation, Kevin explained how overflow is groundwater pushed up from the shallow permafrost in drainages. The flowing water remains insulated by snow until it reaches the trenched-out trail, where it is exposed to the frigid air. Sloped ice continues to build until an ice dam forms and more water collects beneath the snow behind the sloped ice. This is why the uphill side of sloped ice is always wetter and more rotten than the downhill side, which doesn’t make sense for flowing water and gravity but does make sense when Kevin explains it. Thank you Kevin!

Here is a photo of nice, harmless frozen overflow (aufeis) after dawn along Fossil Creek. I encountered the worst overflow in the dark. For more than a mile after leaving checkpoint three, I skittered across a terrifying minefield of cracking ice and sudden puddles wearing only my unprotected shoes and second-to-last dry pair of socks. The wet ice spread across the swamp for hundreds of yards in all directions. I couldn’t even tell which slope was the uphill slope. I would have pulled on the pair of trash compactor bags and snowshoes I carried for this purpose if I realized what I was getting into from the start. But by the time I understood the extent of this icefield, it was too wet to sit down and fix my footwear. I had to keep going, testing each step five times with my trekking poles, gritting my teeth, and often breaking through anyway. Luckily the standing water was never more than two inches deep, which the GTX layers of my Hoka Speedgoat GTX shoes managed beautifully.

After the overflow, the night became acutely cold and I could not warm up. Truthfully, it wasn’t the night that was acutely cold … although I didn’t have a thermometer, I’d be surprised if ambient temperatures dropped below 15 degrees. But my body was cold, shivering in my jacket and kneading hand warmers in my mittens as I contemplated whether to put on my “oh shit” layer — a puffy down coat and pants that were my insurance policy for the not unlikely event that I sprained an ankle and couldn’t walk. If I put on my warm layers, my body would be warm, but my sweat-soaked jacket and base layer would soon soak those things, and then I’d have nothing.

It was 4 a.m. and the relentless sun would be up soon enough, so there wasn’t much danger in soaking out my down coat. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I need an “oh shit” layer — some sort of safety net — at all times to keep my anxiety in check. Otherwise, anxiety will win. And if anxiety wins, I won’t be able to continue with the race or adventure.

I’ll never be able to understand or emulate runners like Meg who start a 100-mile winter ultramarathon with a tiny running vest and have the checkpoint volunteers fill her two flasks with exactly 8 ounces and 14 ounces of water because she knows precisely what it takes to reach the next checkpoint. No, I have to carry my fears. I have to carry my fears on the outside because they’re so much heavier to carry on the inside.

(I repeated this justification to my friend Corrine and she replied, somewhat mockingly but also with understanding, “Oh, that’s so deep!”)

Though the relentless sun returned, my depleted body still required hours to warm up. I was still shivering even after I left checkpoint four, where I finally had to put on my garbage bags and snowshoes to cross several creeks. After this crossing of Wickersham Creek, I stopped to remove the garbage bags just off the trail when a man and his son passed on snowmobiles. The man was driving an antique snowmobile — something from the early 1970s. I forget the details although we talked about his machine for five minutes while I nodded and asked questions as though I was a snowmobile expert. The man asked if I managed to keep my feet dry in the creek, so I held up the leg that was still dressed in a garbage bag and snowshoe.

“Oh, that’s good!” the man said as he pointed to his helmet to indicate I was smart. At the moment, my ego needed a boost and happily gobbled up the compliment.

The sun again climbed high in the sky, the trail softened, and the overflow along Wickersham Creek was as wet as I’d ever seen it. Still, I struggled to feel warm. My body was depleted and no longer effectively regulating temperature; it didn’t matter how relentlessly the sun contributed to “second-day heat.” My feet were white and wrinkled and wet and angry. There was nothing I could do about my feet; I was already wearing my last pair of “dry” socks, safety net be damned.

Still, I had a reasonable amount of “pep” for a trench-foot-afflicted, dehydrated, mildly hypothermic person with 30 hours on my feet. The sky was glaringly bright and cloudy — somehow both at the same time. The air was intolerably hot and frigid — somehow both at the same time. I jogged the trail where my energy levels would allow, but I’d felt so nauseated for so long that I was deep in a bonk. The jogging was always short-lived before dizziness set in. I sat down for a short feet-drying break at the Eleazar’s cutoff and stared at my watch while it flipped over to 30 hours, which had been my finishing goal. I still had 10.5 mostly uphill miles to travel, and while I hoped it wouldn’t take four or more hours — which would make for my slowest finishing time yet — I suspected it might.

Still, did I care? It was hard to say. My ego had quieted down a lot beneath the noise of my hurting body. But if I looked deep inside, I was content. I was happy. A lopsided smile crept over my tired face because I was here, in my soul country, Alaska, and I had traveled 90 damn miles, on my feet, and how neat is it that I possess that level of freedom, that I possess the means and the health to even do that? And I was on Cache Mountain Divide at midnight, and I saw the Northern Lights, and I was smart and battled the overflow and won. I worked my body to a level where mushy day-old meatball soup tasted good. I worked my mind to a level where the forest told me stories of past and future hope. I worked my emotions to a level where I was happy — so happy — that I had 10 more miles of simple-minded, trench-footed bliss to enjoy before the painful realities of the real world engulfed me again.

At the top of the Wickersham Wall, I was still happy, still the opposite of angry. I wouldn’t have jumped on a snowmobile if someone offered me a thousand dollars, which was a relief. But as the miles crept closer to the real world, I thought about racing and physical limitations. I questioned the wisdom of clinging to an endeavor simply because it’s what I’ve been doing for so long.

After all, the whole reason I’ve stuck with endurance racing is to recapture the self-awareness, the wonder, the awe, the triumph, the discovery, and the sheer audacity I felt during my first endurance race. The experiences began to require “bigger, badder, better” for the same hit of wonder — I suppose, just like any addiction. But then the body said “Slow down,” and the mind said, “This isn’t so simple anymore.” Since then I’ve been searching for a balance. Can such a balance be found? Can I still have goals that aren’t the biggest or baddest and know I’m likely to not be at my best — but still find meaning in the goals, still enjoy the process, still find excuses to run 30-milers around Canyonlands National Park as “training” and crawl up the Cache Mountain Divide at midnight?

And I suppose every “aging” athlete asks themselves these questions. “To be or not to be? Keep racing, or quit forever?”

As I rounded the crest of the final hill at the “1-mile-to-finish” sign, I fumbled with my iPod. It had been turned off for a while, but it’s my tradition to let the random number generator pick a song to forever remind me of my experience. The good ol’ 13-year-old iPod Shuffle rarely lets me down. And this song: So perfect. Just unbelievably perfect:

When you don't know if you should fall
If there'd be a net at all
Pleasure gets so easily abused
Show me something that can’t be bought
It’s harder to do than I thought
False dichotomy, no choice to choose …

— “False Dichotomy” by Metric

It doesn’t have to be one or the other, does it? That’s such a superficial way of looking at life. Life is messy and complex, and so are our most meaningful endeavors.

I finished my eighth White Mountains 100 in 33:58, which is one minute faster than my slowest time of 33:59 in 2018. Sure, in 2018 my leg muscles were shredded from the 2018 Iditarod Trail Invitaitonal, but my fitness was also particularly strong from my training that year and from the ITI itself. Plus, I was six years younger, with a watch that still told me my VO2Max was 48, and had only been battling asthma and autoimmune disease for three years, not nine.

Anyway, we make our excuses, don’t we? Maybe I could improve my breathing with VO2Max-specific training. Maybe I should do one of those couch-to-5K programs, let myself get completely out of shape beforehand, pretend I’ve never run a day in my life, see what might have happened if I started from square one. Then again …

Hate.
Love.
Hate.
Love.

It’s a false dichotomy. Opportunities are boundless. The biggest mistake I can make is consciously limiting my options.