My favorite races: The Susitna 100
Part one of a series about the best endurance events, as subjectively chosen by me
It’s mid-February and I have racing on my mind. Perhaps you may have guessed from my previous post that I am conflicted about this. Some days, I wish there was a way to just snap my fingers and be free of this obsession. Of all the hobbies I could pursue, I managed to find one that is aggressively time-consuming, expensive, and so physically and mentally taxing that I wonder how much healthier I’d be right now if I’d never discovered these sports.
And yet other days — most days — I’m thrilled to still have such audacious adventures on my horizon, determined to make the most out of every day so I can best prepare for this adventure, and grateful for all of the incredible experiences, interesting people, and meaningful discoveries this hobby has granted me.
As mid-February arrives, I again have stars in my eyes as I remember that magical moment, now 18 years in the past, when I pedaled onto the vast frozen expanse known as the Susitna River. I had never ridden a mountain bike so far into the wilderness, so far from the nearest road — 33 miles. A brisk wind rushed down the river corridor, which was so wide that the spruce-dotted cliffs across the river seemed like a mirage. I had found the end of the world, and it was breathtaking in its beauty. Just then, a large gray figure darted down the opposite bank and ran along the frozen shoreline. It was far away but I was convinced it was a wolf. The way it gracefully loped along the ice, its size, its solitude … it couldn’t be a dog. My heart trembled with the fear and awe of it all.
“I don't think it matters what your religion is, or if you even have one — it's in these moments that you see God,” I wrote. It was Saturday, February 18, 2006.
The 2024 Susitna 100 begins this morning (Feb. 17) in Big Lake, Alaska. It will be the 28th running of the event, which has been held every year since 1997. This makes it the oldest consecutively-held winter endurance race in North America. If you count its Iditasport origins in 1987, it’s one of the oldest 100-mile ultramarathons still running. Unlike other long-standing races such as Western States and the Leadville 100, the Susitna 100 has never been and will never be a big deal. It’s barely known outside a niche group of endurance enthusiasts in Alaska. It sells out with 120-odd participants, and you can be sure that most of the participants are odd. The Susitna 100 is small, low-frills, unpredictable, and wild … all at the top of my criteria for a great race.
The Susitna 100 is also unique in that it pits three very different sports against each other. There’s a bike division, a ski division, and a run division. Each participant must carry a minimum amount of survival gear and food that often adds up to 15-20 pounds of extra weight in addition to the necessary equipment. There are typically three to four checkpoints along the way that offer food, water, and a modicum of shelter (often this shelter is a tent.) The course has changed several times over three decades, but it always features 100 miles of snow-packed trails across the swamps, streams, and rivers of the Susitna Valley. The trails are not groomed, and conditions can vary widely depending on trail use, the weather leading up to the race, and the weather during the race.
This unpredictability is why the three divisions — though technically separate — can psychologically race each other. The bikes indeed have the largest advantage, as they can blast along hardpacked trails at 10 to 15 mph or more. Skiers then to be more consistent and steady, and less susceptible to the whims of the weather. But they also struggle with overflow, glare ice, and excessively choppy trails. Then there are the runners, and, well … they have no advantages beyond the determination in their hearts. Beat illustrated the general mood of each mode of travel in this graphic he created a few years back:
A skier has won the event outright a handful of times — mostly in the earlier years of the race. I don’t think a skier has finished first in the Susitna 100 since 2010 when Chet Fehrmann won for the third time in a row. Since then, fat bike technology has made big leaps and trail grooming has become more frequent, giving wheels a solid advantage. However, Fehrmann did again come close to winning outright last year, when the course featured — as it often does in this warmer coastal climate — “excruciatingly soft trails.”
“There is nothing more frustrating for a biker to be following a skier,” the eventual overall winner, Nicolas Baudin, told Alaska Sports Report after the race. “Their pace is more consistent.” Baudin, along with many others, was at times reduced to walking and pushing his bike. Trail conditions eventually improved enough that he was able to surpass the skier’s consistent pace and finished an hour ahead of him.
The unknowns can be frustrating, and yet so intriguing. It’s this question — “Will I be able to blast out the course in 10 or 12 hours, or will I be churning and pushing for 30?” — that makes the Susitna 100 such a deviously enticing event.
My favorite Susitna story comes from my Anchorage friend Brij, who with his Snowcat-rimmed bike (today such bikes are called “mid-fat”) rode the 2005 event. It was snowing heavily from the start, and the skiers and most of the runners left the bikers in the white dust. A skier handily won the race, followed by three or four more. But there was much excitement that the next competitor in line was a woman on foot — and she was in front of every cyclist.
She was reportedly three miles from the finish and the organization was ecstatic. But an hour passed, and she didn’t arrive. More minutes trickled away. And then Brij rolled into the finish as the first-place cyclist. He reported that a woman was lying in the snow a few miles back and she needed help. The woman was the leading runner, and she had become so severely bonked that she had stopped moving and was only partially responsive. She was rescued and sadly had to DNF with three miles to go, but she was lucky to have not come down with hypothermia or worse. Brig was a light, well-prepared, fit guy who was more than two hours in front of the next biker. As rumor has it, the woman had packed only almonds to eat on the trail. Almonds are delicious, nutritious and pack a caloric punch, but they’re also low in the carbs most people need to get through more than 24 hours of strenuous effort.
As Brij was winning the Susitna 100 in February 2005, I was a sad, single 25-year-old living in Idaho Falls. I worked late as a newspaper copy editor, partied the rest of the night away, and slept all day. In my sadness and rebellion, I had developed something of a binge drinking problem. I owned a Gary Fisher mountain bike that I never rode. I was barely even hiking outdoors in those days. I had a gym membership that kept me somewhat active — mostly to sweat out the hangovers before I had to be at work. I was a full mess.
By February 2006, I had become a full-time Alaska resident living in a mountain cabin above Homer, where I worked for a small newspaper. I had moved to Alaska under the coaxing of my on-again, off-again boyfriend. For all of the problematic implications of following a man to Alaska, my short residency there allowed me to come into myself fully. In a matter of months, I had transformed myself into a fierce, strong, fearless endurance athlete who would ride that Gary Fisher mountain bike 100 miles across the frozen wilderness with only the gear I carried to ensure my survival.
I’ve told this story many times, as it’s essentially my origin story. But I’m still baffled how sweet, naive 25-year-old me managed to make this leap. I had limited winter experience (I was a sometimes snowboarder growing up in Utah) and next to no athletic experience. The Sustina 100 was my first-ever race of any kind. After the mustering the massive leap of faith to follow the boyfriend to Alaska, I felt drawn to make equally audacious leaps. I needed to become a tough Alaskan, which meant I needed a winter sport. I tried cross-country skiing and admittedly did not take to it. But I stumbled onto the notion of winter cycling … and knew I just had to try it.
The boyfriend and I spent Thanksgiving visiting friends in Palmer, five hours north of Homer. We were returning home when we decided to take the rare opportunity to visit the REI in Anchorage. I wanted to buy studded tires for my mountain bike, which would allow me to ride the icy roads around Homer. As we browsed the store, I looked up toward the ceiling and stared in awe at a bike hanging from the rafters. Sparkling under the fluorescent lights was a grape-purple frame with two enormous wheels. It was delightfully childish — Barney the Purple dinosaur with clownish balloon tires. And yet it was beautiful. What I was seeing was the original Surly Pugsley — the first commercial fat bike. I had never seen one in person. I was in awe.
Of course, I couldn’t afford the Pugsley. Seeing it took some of the enthusiasm out of purchasing the 2.1” studded tires that I had been anticipating for weeks. As I laid them on the register, I looked down and saw a brochure. It was crudely printed on a white 8x11” piece of paper folded in thirds. The Pugsley purple cover caught my eye. When I looked down, I saw a night scene featuring an oddly familiar mountain, a crescent moon, and the Big Dipper. Beneath the scene were the silhouettes of a skier, a runner, and a cyclist. The logo read “Susitna 100.”
“100 miles across Frozen Alaska on a bike,” I repeated to my boyfriend as we drove south toward Homer. He was driving and I was in the passenger seat, diverting my gaze from the icy Turnagain Arm to the thin brochure. “It sounds like the coolest adventure.”
He regarded me with a bewildered glance that warmed to a wry smile.
“You’re going to die,” he said.
I could write a summary of this life-changing journey into the Susitna Valley and back, but I’ve already written an entire book about it. It’s called “Becoming Frozen” and you should read it!
I returned with a bike in 2007, sporting far better equipment and preparation (but still no Pugsley, for which I finally emptied my bank account in late 2007.) The 2007 race was a calamity. About five miles from the start, another cyclist accidentally knocked me over while passing on a narrow trail, which caused me to topple into the deep snow and badly wrench my knee. It throbbed with pain and became swollen quickly. Despite suspecting something serious had happened, l slogged out the race. It was the first of too many races (more than I care to admit) where I finished a race that I wished I hadn’t. It’s true. I certainly regret a few DNFs, but I have exponentially more regret for races I finished but should have stopped, or races that I didn’t finish but should have quit a lot sooner.
Unsurprisingly, this finish left me injured for the next six months. An MRI revealed high-grade chondromalacia patella. A sports doctor told me I had severe osteoarthritis and my endurance racing days were over. In 2019, I had an X-ray on my right leg for an unrelated injury, and it clearly showed cartilage damage in my knee. When will this come back to haunt me? Surely my days with good knees are numbered. They’ve been numbered since I was 27.
For the time being, I am pain-free. For more than two years after the injury, I struggled with knee pain. I invested in many hours of physical therapy, bottles of glucosamine, and knee braces. How did I finally save my knee? Running! Running built the muscle strength I had been lacking as a cyclist. As soon as I became a runner, I immediately felt compelled to take my new sport to its extreme. For my first foot ultramarathon, I chose the Susitna 100 — because of course! Why run 100 miles when you can run 100 miles while dragging a 20-pound sled through deep snow when the windchill is pushing 50 below?
Beat and I met in the summer of 2010 and immediately strove to impress each other with our shared badassery in mediums we weren’t familiar with — me with running and Beat with winter. Yes, it’s difficult to believe that this man was once a longtime resident of sunny California who’d had only the scarcest brushes with snow. But these were our realities. I ran a few 50Ks in training and coaxed Beat up to my home in Missoula for weekend sled runs. But when the day of the race came, neither of us had a clue what were were about to get into.
Frozen hands. Finicky zippers. Temperatures dropping to 18 below. Winds gusting to 40 mph. Beat upset because I marched ahead of him when the ferocious headwind was scaring the shit out of me. Beat crawling into the sauna at Luce’s Lodge and sweating out his base layer. Beat with frozen clothes as we trekked through knee-deep drifts to Alexander Lake. The Alexander Lake triage center, filled to the brim with struggling racers. Jill becoming very tired at mile 60. Jill throwing an enormous tantrum at mile 75. Jill declaring that this was the worst idea ever and “there will be no more running.” Beat leaving Jill to pout by herself on the river ice, only to meet her a half our later at the edge of the Sustina River — the same spot where she watched the wolf five years earlier — and present a lovely picnic of trail snacks spread out on a soft jacket. Jill falling in love with Beat, deeply in love, more than she had ever felt before that point in her life. Jill and Beat slogging ever onward to 41-hour finish as Jill became convinced her kidneys were shutting down and temperatures dropped to 30 below. All in all, the most beautiful chain of events.
My last Susitna 100 was in 2012. I was going solo as Beat had already moved on to the Iditarod Trail Invitational 350. My friend Danni was there, though, and we shared some fun moments. But then the frigid night fell and my feet fell apart and I slogged it out in pain. I was happy to finish but vaguely disappointed in my 36-hour time. Perhaps I should have learned from my 2007 race that you just can’t repeat a life-changing experience. The sophomore effort is always going to be a let-down (but luckily, there were no lifelong injuries this time around.)
When I think of 2012, I still feel a little melancholy that this was my final Susitna 100, that I left it at that. But then years passed, and then a decade. Luce’s Lodge closed, my favorite race volunteer ever (Peggy of Flathorn Lake) was diagnosed with cancer and died, and then the Point MacKenzie store burned down. With all of those checkpoints lost, the course completely changed. Most of the people involved during the aughts have moved on. If I went back now, it would be a different thing altogether. Different is good. I still love the Susitna 100. I’m just not sure my nostalgic heart can weather all of the change.
But I will be cheering the loudest for the 2024 participants. Temperatures are supposed to be warm, although the lack of recent snow could make for a fast course. Still, in my dreams, a woman runner would take the overall win. Who knows … it could happen.
If you want to follow the race, times are usually posted at Ultrasignup Live. I have not yet seen the link to Saturday’s race, but I imagine it will appear on the Susitna 100 Web site.
I love all of this. Your storytelling is a delight. (I loved Becoming Frozen.) Thank you, always, for sharing!
Who is that kid on a mountain bike out in the snow?! My goodness, the crazy things kids do!