Susitna 100 (Fatbike)

If I’d driven out to the Mat-Su Valley on my own and found a bunch of fresh snow covering the trails, there’s no way I would have bicycled a hundred miles through it. But I wasn’t out there on my own. I was riding in the Susitna 100, and whether the ride was fast or slow it’d be embarrassing not to finish it, so I pushed on despite the slow trail conditions.

Push is a literal term. When biking through fresh snow, or fresh snow recently churned up by snowmachines, it can be nearly impossible to bicycle up even moderate grades. Your wheels bog down, spin out, and then you’re walking and pushing uphill. This year, Susitna 100 riders established some fine boot packs up a countless series of small hills out in the Susitna Valley.

The first twenty miles of the Susitna 100 head west out of Happy Trails Kennel, then south toward the Point Mackenzie road. The trail crosses the Little Susitna River four times, with numerous small hills in between. This year, those hills witnessed cyclist carnage. Riders fell off their bikes when they spun out at the bottom of the hills. They launched off bikes on the downhill when front wheels got stuck in ruts of soft snow. On a calm morning in the Susitna Valley, cries of “F***” rang out across the tranquil aspen forests, meadows, and swamps.

If I hadn’t been in a race, I would have turned around. I was far more tired after rushed riding and pushing for twenty miles than I would have been after riding firm trails for 50 or 60 miles. But peer pressure can be a positive thing, so I kept riding and tried not to think about how long 100 miles through soft snow would take.

From the Point Mackenzie checkpoint, the Su 100 route heads west to Flathorn Lake. I settled in just behind a group of strong riders. Mentally, it’s easiest not to set the pace. When conditions are grim, it’s easiest to stare at someone else’s rear wheel and enter a timeless pedalling trance. That meditative state is particularly important in parts of the Susitna Valley, where the trail follows straight seismic lines for miles. You don’t want to look around too much and think about how long it’s taking to get to the horizon.

The trail got even softer on Flathorn Lake. I wondered why a couple riders up ahead were going so slowly, then realized the snow was so deep they had to walk their bikes on completely flat terrain. When I got up to where they started walking, it was a confusion of deep tire ruts and postholes in the soft snow. It wasn’t a good sign, when the next thirty miles were the same flat terrain right up the Susitna River.

Fortunately for us mortal participants, the Susitna 100 isn’t really a wilderness race. There are checkpoints around milepoints 20, 32, 49, 60, 77, and 90. The Flathorn Lake checkpoint is a cabin owned by locals, and they had spaghetti with moose sausage ready, in addition to a bunch of cookies, Cokes, and other snacks. Four hours and thirty two miles into the race, I pounded some and felt the carbs jolt my body into a marginally higher form of consciousness.

It is incredible how much food a human can consume during peak periods of physical output. Bike nerd websites recommend consuming up to 350 calories per hour during hard riding, which is really hard for snowbiking when it is hard to keep the bike upright in soft snow. I had a feedbag of food on my handlebars with broken up snickers, shot-blocks, powerbars and so on. I would cram food in my mouth every fifteen minutes but no quantity of food is enough during the ride.

Many outdoors people have experienced a tough trip that reduces humans to an infantile state. Really cold, really exhausting, really food-deprived conditions can reduce us to the adult equivalents of children who only can think about satiating our hunger and desire for warmth. This year on the Susitna 100, I didn’t wait for conditions to infantilize me. Instead, I brought powdered Pedialyte to mix in with water on the ride. Pedialyte is designed for infants who are suffering from severe dehydration. If you’re an adult who needs to drink Pedialyte, you know you’re having an awesome trip.

The volunteers who host the Susitna 100 do an incredible job. Iditarod legend Martin Buser lets racers use his property as the start and end point. Other volunteers open their cabins, and others bring in wall tents and stoves for the more remote checkpoints. Rich Crain from Talkeetna hosts the 5-Star checkpoint, which is a wall tent about halfway up the portion of the race course that follows the Susitna River. The first part of the Susitna River was the slowest part of the race course, with numerous areas where the snow had drifted deep enough to require pushing the bikes. I can’t remember how long it took to ride and push from Flathorn Lake to Rich’s 5-Star checkpoint, but his little white tent with a woodstove was a welcome sight after miles of soft snow.

That was also the halfway point, more or less. Doing the mileage math, I figured I was on track to finish the race sometime in the middle of the night, or around dawn if very soft trail conditions persisted. During the late afternoon on a Saturday, dawn didn’t seem too far off. It was warm out, so I wasn’t going to freeze to death. I was riding with another guy from Anchorage, and it’s a huge morale booster to have some companionship, especially on the hardest parts of the trail, and especially with impending darkness.

There is a wilderness state of mind that has no name, but which is recognizable to people who don’t mind arduous trips. You could call it resignation, but it is much more positive than that. It is the recognition you are going to do something hard for a long time, maybe an indefinite period of time, and that’s ok, maybe even gratifying. Unlike most activities in our lives, whatever you’re doing has no hard deadline, no human-imposed schedule, and when you finish is dictated at least as much by conditions as your physical fitness level. And your desire to be there or not is completely irrelevant. In a long race, the sooner you enter this state of mind the better.

I entered this long-trip state of mind sometime around the halfway point. It was a slow eleven or so miles to the next checkpoint, but that was ok. I ate some more spaghetti, felt energized, and set out at twilight for the last forty miles of the race, still riding with BJ from Anchorage. It is seventeen trail miles from Eagle Crest down to Cow Lake. The first part is on groomed snowmachine trails maintained by the Willow club, and then the trail heads south through the Big Swamp. At night, the swamp seems vast. The only natural landmarks are stunted spruce trees. There are occasional cross trails and markers for other trails. Other than that, there is just a bike track in front of you and stars overhead.

Night riding is one of the great joys of fat biking. I love to ride after work in the winter, when even a moderate pace through Anchorage’s singletrack feels like I’m flying as the trees and turns rush by. As BJ and I rode south through the swamp, still hours from the finish, the warm air and immense darkness was tranquil, joyous.

Not that the pushing-of-the-bike was over. Several steep pitches necessitated pushing to get from the swamp over to Cow Lake. And there were another 23 miles from Cow Lake to the finish, including quite a bit of climbing out of Cow Lake. But the trail conditions improved and late race adrenaline kicked in, as did the Coke and Slim-Jims I ate at the Cow Lake checkpoint. We Alaskans have our race nutrition dialed in.

The last part of races tend to go the fastest, at least mentally. In the case of the Susitna 100, the course got faster too, and I finally managed to average ten miles per hour for the last part. The most gratifying part is never finishing, however. As the great river explorer and whitewater pioneer Buzz Holstrom said, it’s in “the doing of the thing:” The night biking, the long flat light views up the Susitna River, the people like Rich Crain who set up a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere so spandex clad aliens on bicycles can go on a weekend trip.

As with so many Alaska journeys, it’s always incredible to reflect on how strong other people are. The fastest runner in this year’s Susitna 100, Dave Johnston, finished the race in under 22 hours. Other racers skate and classic skied too, which is far more effort than cycling. Leading cyclists averaged nearly ten miles per hour through the soft snow this year, an incredibly fast pace for tough conditions. That’s the same pace that last year’s Iditarod Invitational winner set over a ten day period from the Mat-Su to Nome. He rode significantly faster than I did except he was camping and didn’t have all the support from checkpoints. We live amidst some incredible athletes, as the top finishers in races like the Susitna 100 always demonstrate.

You don’t have to be an incredible athlete to do these races, however. You just have to want to keep going.