Endless Mountains: The Best Week of My Life
By Anna Stewart
Sid Billups, Dave Preston, Anna Stewart, and Sarah Schroder of Team Grit Racing.
Brace yourselves, there are too many things to say.
This team was formed through poking around and seeing what stuck. Not a whole lot of intentionality, just seeing who was up for an adventure. All three of my teammates this year had never done an expedition race, and so it was a new test for them and a new test for me to be in the role of team captain. I can’t take any credit for how it all played out because I think it’s just one of those moments where lightning struck, and the result was magic. I’m not a fan of ranking experiences, but I also don’t know how else to express that what I experienced may have been the best week of my life.
My sense is that we all had our hesitations leading up to the race. My bad calf continues to be a thorn in my side, and since I’m lucky enough to be a newbie at chronic injuries, I was having trouble assessing whether the muscle would put up with 5 days of racing. Others on the team piped up at various times wanting to forewarn the other three that they were also very unsure of their own readiness as life so often gets in the way of training to the level we aspire to. Nonetheless we converged in North Adams and started my least favorite part of expedition racing, organizing gear and food into all the right boxes, bins and bags. I have begun to expect that at some point in this process I will have a mini meltdown because it’s the type of organizing that breaks my brain in half. This year it was made worse by not having properly assessed my bike and realizing that no amount of torquing could get a seized up pedal off, so I had to reorganize my bike box packing to make it work. I still am mostly starting from scratch on bike mechanic skills, so it’s a good reminder to add that to off season goals.
We got our gear sorted, checked in, and then went out for a team dinner. It immediately became clear we had an ease with each other, despite me being the only one having already met and raced with everyone previously. We got in our carb loading and then got to bed early thank goodness.
We woke up at 5am and loaded up onto the busses for the two hour drive to the start of the race at the peak of Mt. Defiance, which also gave us a chance to spy what would be our first embedded trekking section during the leg A paddle at Fort Ticonderoga. I switched into performance mode briefly for a rendition of the national anthem, and put my big girl pants on for the high note at the end this year, after some encouragement from the team. Even after all these years, I continue to be extremely anxious and impossible to reassure about my singing, but felt all the warm fuzzies this year as a surprising number of people went out of their way to say nice things about it as we encountered them out on course. It was kind that people took a moment to boost the confidence of an insecure former theater kid.
We jogged down the mountain and grabbed the first few points with Dave taking on nav duty. I was immediately frustrated that I had to continue to enforce slowing the team down because even though I felt amazing, running on pavement is traditionally risky business for my calf. Injuries that don’t feel like injuries until they are INJURIES are their own type of soul crushing.
We finished the prologue, arriving at the designated cafe where we received our set of maps as well as breakfast and got to work planning out the first few stages. We had decided to focus on mandatory points early on, but did commit to clearing the Fort Ticonderoga optional points because they looked pretty straightforward, and gave a lot of bang for their buck in terms of point density. Plus, who doesn’t want to run around a Fort with such historical significance!
We got legs A, B, and C mapped and went down to hop in our boats to start the paddle. We got hit with our first run of bad luck when we discovered that Sarah’s water bladder burst inside the paddle bag. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Sarah wanted to make sure that she kept up with fueling early in the race and so she had loaded up the bladder with all the electrolyte powder. The result was all of our paddle gear was now COVERED with sticky syrup that then fermented in the bag for the entirety of the rest of the race. Yum.
Our second hit of bad luck came fifteen minutes later when I asked Dave to shorten the tow line on my solo kayak that we had attached to the three person canoe to keep me from falling behind. As Dave grabbed the line he fumbled his canoe paddle and dropped it in the river. In the process of grabbing it, the rapid shift of weight tipped the canoe almost past the point of no return and the boat was partially flooded. Luckily for me it was the funniest thing I had ever seen, and so I spent the next few minutes pretending be concerned while quietly laughing my ass off.
We hit our first nav problem solving challenge when we were too trigger happy trying to find CP 9. We made the decision to follow the start of an elephant trail that another team had clearly punched through a thicket of reeds on the water to find the CP which had the associated clue “drowned lands; shoreline.” We ended up having to literally pull ourselves through the reeds by hand, at which point I proceeded to laugh at this chaos so hysterically that I must have been close to collapsing a lung. We then cased the shoreline through mosquitos and muddy swampy bogs for about 30 minutes until we realized we had landed the boats too early; we finally found the CP down the shoreline much further than we anticipated. I assure you, our egos didn’t smart at all as we watched other teams casually paddle straight up to punch the point without ever having had to get out of their boats, as they had found the intended access route about 100 feet further down the river from where we had headed into the reeds.
We paddled on and it began to drizzle, and then pour. We paddled past numerous active osprey nests and clearly ruffled a few feathers with our presence. As night descended, we arrived at the second embedded trek at a rugged shoreline dense with foliage and a short, slippery, technical bush wack up to the first CP. It was POURING and dark. The team suited up in various combinations of rain gear and we shivered as our bodies adjusted to movement again following sitting in the boats for so long. My shoulders were aching after such a long stretch of paddling. The team appeared a little wide eyed at what the heck they had signed up for as we pushed up the steep climb towards the trail. Minutes later we heard the sound of falling rocks immediately above us when a section of slope gave way as another team climbed up. To our horror one of their team members who was unable to avoid being swept into the rock fall was tossed down the side of what was basically a cliff. She landed in a heap and was frighteningly slow to rise. We converged with the other members of her team and assessed. Incredibly, while she had some bumps and bruises especially on one knee, she had not hit her head and after some rest was able to continue the trek. Oh, AND the rest of the race. What a badass.
We pushed through the trek loop in the rain, and after some steep climbing that was verging on rock scrambling, I pulled out my trek poles as my calf began to complain about the relentless strain. While it was slow going, we were managing to keep ourselves relatively warm and dry, and Dave’s nav continued to steadily get us were we needed to go. It was about this time that as a team, we began to understand how much we were the right people, at the right time, in the right place. To keep us motivated, the humor began to descend into absolutely incomprehensible madness. This continued with increasing intensity for the entire race, and I’m pretty sure that we got some side eye from other teams as we probably appeared three sheets to the wind for about 80% of the five days. But in my humble opinion there are worse things then bad jokes, and nonstop, slightly hysterical laughter. We owned it.
We cleared all the mandos and headed in to TA (transition area) as the sun began to threaten to rise and the rain slackened. We built our bikes and ate some hot food. Sarah and Dave took a 15 minute power nap on the pavement and I spent some time cleaning up my pinky finger which I had somehow sliced open on the previous trek, and only noticed I had done something to it when I grabbed my compass and noticed blood all over my hand. It wasn’t an ideal time to have an open wound as the water we were paddling in was not even fit to filter for drinking water. I crossed my remaining fingers that I wouldn’t be dealing with infection on day 4.
We headed out towards the early bike CPs, and midmorning got our first luxury food stop of the race at Old School Bagels in downtown Fairhaven. We stuffed our faces to our heart’s content and caught up with some other racers also in the middle of grabbing their bagel breakfast. On a whim I basically bought an entire carrot cake, and after realizing that I was already stuffed to the gills with food, I shared it with as many people as I could. The team was moving along well after the refuel, although everyone’s backs were starting to tighten up, so I did my best to apply some amateur massage skills to keep everyone loose. I started to connect with a deep sense of pride that I really could sometimes bring myself to the table to support the team in any way I knew how. My race performance under pressure has been spotty over the years because of self doubt and fear, but I’m getting better at just bringing forward whatever I can in the moment, even something as simple as a shoulder massage.
We got back on the road and headed towards the Slate Valley trail system. Sid and Dave found their happy place here. They are extremely proficient mountain bikers and the prospect of getting to take a big bite out of the single track had them in waking-up-on-Christmas-morning vibes. Sarah and I did our best to keep up with them, and I was reminded that I need to spend some more time getting my technical MTB skills under control if I want to keep building momentum in adventure racing. Also because damn it, it looks fun to go flying around those hairpin turns!
The nav on this section was predictably complicated as single track is notoriously difficult to make sense of as the trails are twisty, overlapping, and hard to follow. This section took us much longer than we anticipated, and so it was here that our timing expectations started to slip a bit. We finally got the mandos done and then hightailed it to TA2, arriving around 8pm, breaking down bikes, eating some hot food, and taking a 3 hour sleep tucked away in a corner of a field near the pit toilet. Originally we had planned on getting to this TA at 3pm so now we were a good 5 hours behind schedule. But the late timing in some ways gave us an opportunity to have better quality sleep in the TA rather than tough it out sleeping out on trail in our bivy’s. I was worried about being able to power down at this point as I was feeling quite good, but luckily was able to pass out for the full 3 hours. I know for those of you who have never done this type of racing how bizarre it must seem that we might have trouble sleeping after being awake for 35 hours, but adventure racing is as much a mental sport as a physical one. When you get into race mode, it can be tricky to be able to come back down from that active flow space and go into rest mode.
We got up and headed out from TA2 around 3am to start the big trek. I almost immediately started to feel unwell, and realized that I maybe had not consumed as many calories as I needed before we went to bed. We stopped for a moment, and I realized I was in enough in a hole that eating had stopped being enticing and even thinking about it was actually making me nauseous. I took an anti-nausea med, and started to slowly take in little bits of food. Sid swooped in and took on carrying my pack as well as his own as we started a long arduous climb. I started to recover slowly and was able to reclaim my pack and keep pace with the team. It was one of those moments where I began to realize that I truly could trust these three people to have my back in a way that allowed me to dig so much deeper into my reserves when things got hard.
The sun rose, we ticked off more points, and by early afternoon arrived in the vicinity of CP 31 at a beaver pond. We searched, and searched, backtracked, searched again, backtracked, searched again and 4 hours later finally had to admit defeat and drop our first mandatory point of the race. As disappointing as it was, our team was operating as such a machine at this point that it seemed like we had inexhaustible mental and physical resources to just keep plugging away hoping to finally find it. Sarah was crushing it as our resident pace counter and general mathematician particularly during this section. I was bummed to have to bail on the point, but I was so impressed at our resilience to keep trying that my pride in the team never faltered for one moment.
We headed back to TA because we knew we were now many hours behind schedule and we needed to sleep and regroup as the sun set on day 3. We planned for a 2 hour sleep, and I set my alarm to wake the team in the middle of the night to get moving again and try to try to claw back some time. When I woke and went around to poke everyone that it was time to get up, we quickly realized that we had a big, BIG problem on our hands. Out of nowhere, Dave’s face had swelled up so much that he practically couldn’t open his eyes all the way, and he was hit with a pounding headache, and essentially flu-like symptoms. We gave him another two hours to sleep and all went back to bed. Two hours later, no improvement. Sarah, Sid and I got up and started to prep for the next bike section, and checked in on Dave to see if there was anything we could do to help him figure out what was going on, and what we needed to do about it. He said the words nobody wants to hear, “I don’t think I can go on.” As crushing as it was, a part of me was like, well yeah, you look like your body has had some sort of allergic reaction that didn’t look too far away from being anaphylaxis. We took his temp and he didn’t have a fever, so we just continued to let him sleep as Sid assembled his bike, and we continued to putter with our own food and gear. Randomly, around this time we also had a volunteer at the TA rush over and ask if we had hit the SOS button on our tracker, which we hadn’t. The volunteer said that the one of the RDs had just called because the tracker was pinging that we had SOS’d, but clearly we were still just sitting in TA at the time. Maybe the tracker was trying of it’s own volition to inform us that we were in deep doo-doo, which I suppose we were.
We knew that if we could just get Dave out of TA3 that only a 5 minute bike ride away was a general store that was now open for business. We crossed our fingers that he would be able to at least make it there and eat some real food before making any big decisions. It was an astonishing show of grit that he found it somewhere within himself to get out of bed and also trust us enough to shepherd him onto his bike and out of the TA. He looked absolutely miserable, and still he pushed on.
General stores at expedition races are MVPs to teams about to hit the end of their inner resources. Nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, is better than a hot breakfast sandwich and fresh coffee to make you feel reborn. In Dave’s case, all this plus some Tylenol sinus tabs, and Visine drops for his inflamed eyes seemed to finally bring him round. The bad jokes started up again and we realized that just maybe, we were going to be able to finish this adventure as a team. So, we got going again as a refreshed foursome.
I took on both mapping our route, and navigation for awhile so Dave could focus on recovering and we nabbed a few more points and rode or pushed our bikes up some big climbs. We had to cut out a giant swath of the course at this point in order to ensure a chance at finishing the race, so we sadly were not able to go to either of the quarries for the cliff jumping, or the single track loop. In retrospect, that decision was easy because all of us were feeling such a deep sense of camaraderie to each other that the course had become vastly less important than the team itself. Dave continued to improve, and we traveled along with some other teams now that we had skipped our way back to the mid pack in terms of timing. The last big climb before we hit TA 4 felt like the hill that never ended, with about 17 false summits to crush your soul into a million pieces. At this point, we all noted that our butts had grown golf ball sized swellings due to the constant pressure of sitting on the bike seats with heavy packs, which over the course of the race ranged from 15-25lbs. It’s unsettling to grow a butt cheek on your butt cheek.
We arrived at TA4 and Sid took a moment to attempt to remove a bug that had flown into his ear during the previous leg and had become entombed in his ear canal. We prepped to take on the next paddle leg and pulled out of TA ASAP so we could beat the sunset and the rain we had heard was on its way. After a slightly mortifying nav error that lost us some time, we got ourselves out on the water as the rain rolled in. For the second time in the race we grappled with a nighttime downpour. It became clear that we were tired, and at risk of getting cold quickly if we didn’t hammer down on the paddle. Sarah and Dave set the pace, and Dave absolutely crushed the navigation on this leg. In the meantime, Sid and I got increasingly drowsy following the hypnotic swish back and forth of the mandatory safety glow stick zip tied to the back of Sarah and Dave’s packraft. It felt like we were chasing the lure of an anglerfish, especially since we had turned our headlamps off at this point so we could see the silhouettes of the land features better. Finally, after we grabbed the second CP and my eyes were threatening to close, I decided to test the waterproofing on my mp3 player and speaker and put some music on to wake us up. The 2 minutes that followed has now become a core memory that I’ll take with me forever.
One of the first songs that played was a club remix that had the classic ramp up to a beat drop. As another team looked on from about 20 feet away, the four of us collectively let go of our remaining sanity and held a 60 second rave, in our packrafts, in the middle of the night, in the pouring rain, on day 4 of an expedition race. We waved our hands over our headlamps to mimic strobe lights, taking in the added bonus light show from the glow sticks as we hurled our heads around to the beat of the music. It would be a struggle to recall a moment in my life more chaotically spiritual than that one.
We used the music to pump us up and paddled hard to keep our heart rates high, realizing that if we moseyed into TA5 at a lazy pace we would be freezing our butts off immediately the instant we got out of the boats. It was still pouring, and despite wearing all our rain gear, staying dry was just not in the cards as we made it to the TA. We needed sleep, but how? Sid, Sarah, and Dave’s bivy’s were only aspirationally waterproof, and my tent could only just barely fit two people very uncomfortably. The TA had almost no shelter from the rain, so the u-haul that was on site to collect gear had become the emergency shelter for upwards of 15 cold and tired racers. We were told that if we slept in it we would need to vacate at 3am so the u-haul could be used for it’s original purpose. Eventually, Dave and I squeezed into the tiny tent, and we inhaled a bit too much CO2, as the ventilation in the cheap popup tent turned out to not be sufficient in a downpour. Eventually Dave realized that we were both practically hyperventilating the rebreathed air and unzipped a vent that left us with a better sleep experience. Sid finagled a shelter with his bivy and clamshell bike box, that sort of worked? Sarah struggled to figure out a sleep system as the bivy on it’s own was simply not sufficient, and asked about squeezing into the tent with me and Dave, which unfortunately was just physically impossible. So this absolute legend of a human ended up sleeping face down in her tyvek painter’s suit on the stone picnic bench at TA check-in. Luckily other racers didn’t seem to mind checking in over top of her as she slept. Me and Dave were left feeling like we had left Leonardo DiCaprio out on the ice flow to die as the Titanic sank when we couldn’t make enough room in the tent for Sarah.
Getting up the next morning was slow going. NOBODY had slept sufficiently. We finished last night’s work of packing up the rafts, and assembling our bikes once again. We set out for some road riding, using a hand drawn map provided for us to copy in TA of a shortcut that would allow us and other teams to continue to make up some ground. I tensed up at the exposure to fast driving vehicles on this particular route, although luckily it was not a long stretch. Road riding is just not my thing. We stopped and took a crack at an optional CP near a cemetery right before TA6 and were thoroughly bumfuzzled, so we bailed after an hour of searching. It was one of the moments where I found myself saying, I REALLY hope nobody at home is watching our dot right now. While we were in fantastic spirits, I think our technical nav skills had started to slip pretty significantly at this point. Case in point, a few minutes later we rolled straight past the turn into the TA and had to climb back up a big chunk of hill we had just bombed down. Arriving in TA, we assessed and concluded that we needed a team nap. Unfortunately the sun was blazing and we were short on shade. We all did the best we could to hunker down, but sleep was again a challenge as we started roast. Sarah attempted to manage the absolutely bonkers state of her feet. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen blisters like that, but she just shrugged her shoulders and got on with it.
We headed out on our very last trek of the race towards TA7. We had worked out the timing very carefully as the race clock was starting to earnestly tick down. At this point we were back at the pointier end of the race having made up a lot of ground with our numerous shortcuts. We had been warned that this trek and the last bike section to the finish could potentially take a lot longer than it looked on the maps, so we wanted to give ourselves a lot of buffer time. At this stage of the race (midway through day 5) we would glance at the CPs available on each leg and more often than not say something akin to, “ain’t no way we are wading into that topographical nightmare to find that CP.” So this trek ended up being very straightforward because we rarely strayed from the trail.
Finally we made it to the last TA right before sunset. We were rewarded with an awesome ski lodge with all the luxuries including real bathrooms, fresh filtered water, and a roof over our heads. We set up our bikes first thing as the sun set, and problem solved through a very scary moment of misplaced gear. Before heading out, we took a brief nap on the floor of the closed up kitchen away from the main lodge area where racers were rotating teammates through the o-relay. We had decided that the o-relay was too risky to take on in terms of timing. In retrospect, it was a very good idea to just get in a good nap before the last bike to the finish….
There was not a lot of distance between us and the finish line back at North Adams when we left TA7. Unfortunately, that did not coincide with the level of effort required to get there. Everything started out great until we tried to find CP 76. We ended up on the wrong body of water, but were able to quickly self correct and head down a double track trail going in the right direction. As we moved along, the trail got fainter and fainter before disappearing entirely. Dave assured us that if we just continued to head west, we would hit the trail we needed, but 30 minutes of bikewacking turned into an hour, turned into an hour and a half. We trudged through dense foliage, hefting our bikes over deadfall, up steep hills, and through rocky, fast moving creeks. I became concerned that if for some reason we felt we really had gotten ourselves off track, that we wouldn’t be able to navigate back to our starting point where the trail had disappeared. Then the creek we were hauling our bikes through started to turn east which was absolutely the last direction we wanted to head. Dave continued to hold steady as he noticed my anxiety starting to rise, and kept encouraging us to keep pushing west. As an added detail to all this, Sid was doing this whole leg in BIKE SHOES. Bikewacking is hard enough without also having to do it in shoes that are made for clipping into pedals rather than walking or hiking.
We kept on, and to our profound relief, after pushing the bikes up a steep incline, we landed on a trail. We didn’t know where on the trail we were, but I didn’t give a crap because I was so happy that we weren’t going to die out there after all. Yes, I know I have a flair for drama. Sue me.
We took our best guess at the direction we needed to head on the trail, and were able to start to piece together where we thought we were. We passed by an old rickety hunting lodge and waited to hear the chainsaws start up from whatever serial killer was about to emerge and take us out. You know what though, Freddy Krueger can come at me bro, because if you try keep me from my post race burger, and frou frou cocktail when the finish is so close, I WILL END YOU.
All of a sudden Dave looks to our right and sees the lake, and again like magic, THE CHECKPOINT. I turned my face towards the sky and let out a whoop that probably gave away the location of the CP to every team within 5 miles. We punched, and then got back on the grind, hiking what felt like and endless series of flooded trail systems that were impossible to ride. We probably hiked-a-bike for another 3-4 miles and I accidentally took a plunge into the most toxic looking mud puddle/pit on the trail after slipping off the edge of the margins around it.
This was now around 3am in the last few hours of day 5, and so my ability to stay awake was starting to seriously falter. Sid was powering through all the hiking in the wrong shoes, and it seemed like even his seemingly unending tolerance for pain was starting to slip, as I’m sure his feet must have been in agony. Finally we were able to get back on the bikes and start rolling downhill into town. On the way, Sid got the unique pleasure of being splattered with toad viscera when the little amphibian couldn’t get out of the way and was sadly pin-balled through the spokes of his front wheel as though sucked into a jet engine. Never a dull moment. RIP little buddy.
I’m sure all the teams gunning for a spot on the podium would find this next bit incomprehensible, but at least for me, the best way to explain it was that we didn’t want it to end. How could we just roll across the finish line and say goodbye to all the juicy, painful, glorious, itchy, fatigue ridden, adrenaline soaked moments and just go back to real life? So, less than mile from the finish, we stopped for breakfast at Dunkin Donuts. I think it provided us a quiet moment to just be together with the four of us and start to comprehend what we had just accomplished. We must have given RD Abby a fright, as the Dunkin Donuts happened to be adjacent to a hospital, and I suppose it seems more likely that a mile from the finish if we had stopped moving it MUST be because someone was in dire straits. But no, we just wanted to drink coffee and eat donuts. So after seeing our dot hold still next to the hospital, she came by to make sure we were alright, and ask some completely valid questions about what the heck we were doing stalling with the finish line in sight.
We freshened up and powered on to cross the finish line at 5:38am. The rest was hot showers, numerous naps, good food, smelly gear sorting, debriefing with racing friends, and watching already very swollen feet continuing to balloon in size as our bodies relaxed.
In the end, we really didn’t take as big of a bite out of the course as we would have wanted. But it has become apparent that a good team can completely wash away any disappointments about final standings, while a good final standing can not wash away a bad team experience. I’m lucky enough to have had fantastic teammates in all my previous expedition races, all of whom I’m grateful for. They all unwittingly have been participants in teaching me about trust, digging deep, and most recently, what it means to be a leader. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that Sarah, Dave and Sid actually let me convince them to do this in the first place. They absolutely CRUSHED their first expedition race, and I feel I have been given the best gift of all in getting the chance to ride along with them as they moved through it. Dave had our backs with the nav, Sid had our backs carrying extra weight and putting us on tow, Sarah had our backs with the math, pace counting, and time management. By the end of the race, our team mantra became “500 meters,” our way of saying, it’s just around the corner. The three of them never, EVER complained, they just trusted that 500 meters away-ish, we would eventually get where we needed to go. I can’t wait to see what we all do next.
None of this would have been possible without the help of my coach Jenny Segger who was endlessly flexible helping me get all trained up for this race, talking me down when I sent panicked emails about my readiness, all while I was also in the midst of saying goodbye to Philly and moving to New England four weeks before the race. In addition, thanks to Rachel Popelka who swooped in to add some PT action to keep my calf in good working order. Lastly, so many thanks to Alexa Landis who took over my FB page for the race to dotwatch and help lay out the narrative of what we were up to. It was so cool to come back and read all the analysis and comments from everyone!!
Now, a less joyful note to all racers who also joined in on the fun this week. So much of what we love about this sport is the experience of being on a team. Part of why I love partaking in events put on by Rootstock Racing is I have always felt that RDs Brent and Abby have our backs when we are out on course. They are our 5th and 6th teammates. They are watching out for us whether we are racing for the podium, or in the back of the pack. So it was a disappointment to discover in our sleep deprived haze, we left many of the dorm rooms and common areas in a pretty disastrous state on Sunday as we packed up and headed for the hills. Lets remember to look after the RDs and the volunteers more carefully in future, because they are doing their best to look out for us.
As a final thought, now is a time that feels confusing and complicated, because the larger experience of the world is one full of instability and discord. Sometimes I worry that racing is an indulgence that I need not partake in because more time should be spent creating a better world for all of us. Representing, protesting, or simply supporting those who were not lucky enough to be born into a world that believes in them. What must it be like to not have opportunities to CHOOSE to test ourselves in the face of adversity and discover our confidence when we overcome it. What an astonishing level of privilege we racers possess to have the time, money, and mental/physical resources to be challenged in such a way. For so many, life is instead an Endless succession of problems and tests with unfair rules that must be overcome in order to feel the slightest sense of safety and stability. My hope is that all people can have opportunities to face a challenging world in ways that speak to them. A world without challenges would be a boring, and empty one. But to have a life where the challenges are regularly insurmountable because of cruelty and greed, is one that is fully oriented around fear, pain, and loss, which is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
In addition, only a month ago a dear friend and cornerstone of the racing community Shelley Johannesen was laid to rest after a tragic accident. I proudly carried a patch with her initials on my pack through the entire race, and thought of her often, asking myself in the tougher moments how she might have showed up to be with the team when times were dark. What an honor to be able to remember her as we traveled through the beautiful wilderness. We miss you Shelley.
All of these layers bring to mind a quote from Dan Savage that is a reminder of how we can move through the complexities and contradictions of the world we are lucky enough to inhabit for a little while. The original quote is in reference to the AIDs crisis, an experience that, in complete contrast to racing, was marked by a total lack of either choice or agency on a systemic level. But nevertheless, I hope to share it as a representation of finding a balance in embracing play, work, taking care of ourselves and others, and living fully.
"We buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night."
To my friends, let’s continue to play in the woods, mourn those who are no longer with us, and fight for a better world where everybody can have a chance to do what we do (if they find themselves unhinged enough to want to do it). See you out there, 500 meters down the trail.
