"Sort of a Winter Wonderland"

A very cold and frosty run. (All photos courtesy of Andrea Hambach)

SORT OF A WINTER WONDERLAND

It seemed like a bad sign.

 I awoke at 4 o’clock on the morning of a race and couldn’t get back to sleep because I was worried about whether I was capable of finishing the event … and, given the conditions outside, whether I was capable of even surviving.

My self-confidence (like others’, I suspect) is prone to occasional bumps and bruises, but my concern about this particular competition was more than just a cold-handed slap. My running partner Yvonne and I had spent the night with friends (and race organizers) Andrea and Dave in Willow, Alaska, for the inaugural Willow Winter Solstice marathon/half-marathon. When we checked the outdoor thermometer at 6:30 a.m., it read minus-32 degrees. The clear dark skies were pinpricked with stars. It was a windless day that promised little respite in the form of rising mercury. We were about three miles from the race venue and at least four hours from sunrise. Normal, rational people would not have ventured outside on a day like this—they would have cranked up woodstoves, snuggled under wool blankets, or wiggled their tootsies inside of fuzzy slippers—but not us. We planned to run in it.

For Yvonne and me, that meant 13.1 miles of ice and hard-packed snow mainly across a series of low-lying lakes, starting at the Willow Community Center (on the western shore of Willow Lake) and turning around in the Willow Swamp 6.55 miles later so we could run all the way back to our starting point. This would be the longest run of my life—if I made it—and, by far, the coldest.

About 50 percent of the 31-person field would be joining us for the half-marathon. The rest would be running a full marathon—26.2 miles, all the way to a tiny island on Red Shirt Lake (in the Nancy Lake State Recreation Area) and then back again. (The marathoners were the REAL crazy ones.)

The route had been constructed and groomed with snowmobiles operated by members of the Willow Trail Committee, and the trails had firmed up nicely in the sub-zero weather. We would run the width Willow Lake, then down a back road, through a pond-and-swamp system known as Emsweiler Lake, then nearly the full length of the aptly named Long Lake, up and down a small hill to reach and cross Crystal Lake, then through another swamp to gain access to the full length of Vera Lake, and on to a patch of woods leading to the Willow Swamp, where a well-insulated Dave would be waiting at the half-marathon turn-around point with a bonfire, a clipboard to record bib numbers, a few samples of GU, some water, emergency gear, and a smattering of extra clothes.

Tracing the route on a topographic map gave me some comfort. Knowing the conditions did not.

After breakfast (a cup of yogurt with half of a banana and some whole-wheat cereal, chased down with two cups of hot coffee), the layering began. From the waist up I wore an ultralight long-underwear-style T-shirt, covered by a medium-weight North Face long-sleeved running shirt, topped by an old lightweight fleece long-sleeved hiking shirt, surrounded by a thin down-filled Patagonia jacket, topped off with an ultra-lightweight Patagonia Houdini shell. On my back, I carried a CamelBak hydration pack with a half-full 100-milliliter reservoir and a feeder tube, the end of which I stuffed beneath the outer three layers. Inside the pack were snacks, tiny earmuffs, toilet paper, a headlamp, a paper painting mask, and some matches.

Yvonne helps me get ready in the Willow Community Center.

Over my head went a fleece neck gaiter and a thin Buff. On top of my head was my trusty old fleece Mountain Hard Wear hat. On my hands were ancient, tattered pile-fleece mittens, each containing two hand-warming chemical heat packs—one for each set of four fingers, and one for each thumb. At the community center, I added a half-wide strip of dark blue duct tape across the bridge of my nose and tops of both cheeks, and a second smaller strip near the tip of my nose. (I made the error of allowing about a quarter-inch of nose tip to protrude from beneath the second strip.)

From the waist down, the layers were fewer. Beneath my Mountain Hard Wear skiing pants with Gore Windstopper, I wore a pair of cotton briefs and the bottoms that went with the ultralight long-underwear-style top. On my feet I wore a thin pair of calf-high liner socks and an over-the-ankle pair of blue-and-yellow running socks, topped by adhesive toe-warmer strips, my almost brand-new Ice Bug cleated running shoes, and the neoprene gaiters that Yvonne had recently made for me.

Yvonne, who is tougher than I am (and far more experienced in cold weather), wore fewer layers on top but more on the bottom.

At the community center, we met my brother Lowell, whom I had convinced a few days earlier to sign up for the race. He was eyeballing the other runners in the large main room, silently pleased that he wasn’t the only idiot about to venture into the deep freeze, but also wondering whether he had under-dressed. He wore fewer layers than either Yvonne or me and carried no heat packs. His hydration pack was fastened beneath his windbreaker, and his face was more exposed than ours.



My brother Lowell at the end of the race.

Lowell and I had been training hard for the past year. Both of us had dropped weight and body fat. Both of us had added muscle mass and tone and increased our endurance. But Lowell, who is 10 years younger, had set his sights on running mountain races in 2013 and was eager to test his mettle on this day. He had talked about sticking with me and Yvonne for at least the first half of the race, but halfway across Willow Lake he was already putting distance between us. And even though he somehow managed to miss Dave’s trailside bonfire and run perhaps an extra half-mile in each direction, he still finished almost 25 minutes before we did.

One of the real challenges of the race involved the mind-set needed to step outside in the first place. If the temperature inside the community center was, say, 70 degrees, and the temperature outside was minus-30, each runner would experience a 100-degree shift in temperature just prior to race start. Consequently, Andrea made sure to go over the race rules and safety protocols while we were indoors, and after she herded us outside she kept the preliminaries to a minimum. Within two or three minutes, we were tromping down the narrow shoveled path and through a fog of human breath to the wider race course on the lake.

The course was beautiful in the way that monkshood is beautiful—deadly if misapplied. (Only two half-marathoners of the 31 total runners failed to finish. One woman apparently appeared disoriented and hypothermic, and one man running with her seemed to be suffering from frostbite on his thinly covered abdomen.) As other runners ran, Yvonne and I mostly jogged, content in the early gloom to find a comfortable pace. Over the two hours and 45 minutes we were out there, the sky lightened at an almost glacial rate, and the sun crested the horizon at about the eight- or nine-mile mark. It didn’t crest it by much, but the vague warmth did feel good on our faces and was a definite boost psychologically.

At this point, it must be said that I would probably have been sitting at home in Soldotna if not for Yvonne, and I mean that in the best of ways. Yvonne is the one with the endurance experience (she had run the Crow Pass Crossing and the full Equinox Marathon, among other events, earlier in the year), and I was grateful that she had offered to run this race with me. It was immensely comforting to have her by my side through all the miles.

As we ran, I tried to keep my neck gaiter up over my nose and mouth, but my breath formed ice on the material, adding weight to the fabric and causing it to sag. When my lips were uncovered for long, they began to grow numb and non-functional. My eyelashes became moderately icy from my breath shooting upward past my gaiter. Elsewhere, I was sweating beneath my top layers and producing visible frost on my bottom layers. My toes had been cold at the start but were warm enough after a mile or so. My hands were fine, although my mittens later grew wet from perspiration, causing them to freeze hard enough that I could knock them together like blocks of wood.

I stopped once in each direction to pee. (Blame the coffee.) Yvonne and I also stopped at the turn-around to chat with Dave, eat a packet of GU, and drink a cup of water. Dave examined my nose and decided it needed more protection, so he lent me a black headband that he slid over my fleece hat and directly onto the middle of my face. On the front of the band were the white words “Will Run for Beer.” As silly as I looked, I was pleased to have Dave’s offering, and it most likely saved the tip of my nose from further damage.

As we ran back toward the community center, the extra face protection forced more warm breath upward and produced a curtain of ice on my eyelashes, obscuring my vision. Every 15 minutes or so, I used a bare hand to gently squeeze the ice clumps and pull them away. Yvonne, with her longer lashes, was practically blinded at times by the same condition.

Re-crossing Willow Lake was exhilarating because I knew I would achieve my goals of finishing the race and failing to die. Beneath layers of face protection and a veneer of frost, I was smiling as Yvonne and I reached the shoveled trail back to the community center, where Andrea was standing with her clipboard, stopwatch and a camera. She snapped a photo of us running the last few yards together, and then dutifully recorded our times before joining us indoors.

Inside, I began peeling off clothes like peeling the skin off an onion. Off came my hat, Dave’s headband, my Buff, my neck gaiter—all of them crusty with ice. My shell was frosty, my down jacket wet, my fleece shirt wet, my running shirt wet, my undershirt wet. I removed them all and allowed my skin to air out for a few minutes before donning something clean and dry. At a nearby table, we helped ourselves to some post-race chow: Dave and Andrea’s homemade chicken noodle soup and butternut squash chili, each simmering in its own Crockpot next to an assortment of saltines. On a smaller separate table were coffee and some hot water with packets for tea and cider. We warmed our insides as the center warmed our outsides.

I slept much better the night after the race. The tip of my nose was red and sore, but nearly everything else felt good, particularly my self-esteem. I’m not sure that I’d want to repeat the experience, but it’s nice to know that I could.