Inquiring Minds Want to Know
March 15th, 2009
Are the winds along the river slowing her down? Has she encountered any open water yet? Is she resting longer because she needs too? Or do the dogs need more rest? How do you stick Teflon to the pan when nothing sticks to Teflon? Is she encountering much glare ice on the river? Is she eating well? How about staying hydrated? What came first, the chicken or the egg? These questions seem to be rolling about in my mind constantly now. I wake at night wondering if Laura is running or resting. I eat my meals and wonder if she going to lose a lot of weight this year. Last year she lost 9 lbs on the race and that was eating all of the specially prepared food I had frozen for her (high calorie, nutrient dense).This year she made her own food!!??Scary! I take a shower and wonder what she’s starting to smell like now? Also scary! More than likely she smells like Algeval, a rub for the dogs muscles made from rosemary. It’s really not a bad smell at all, seems like perfume by the end of two weeks on the trail.
It’s hard to sit here and know she is out there facing down and overcoming many circumstances and I can’t ask her how it’s going. I know that there is nothing I could do to change anything that is happening to her but I still feel so helpless not knowing. Every time I see her icon slow down to 2-3 miles per hour I start to run possible scenarios in my head and then can’t look away from the computer screen until the next GPS update (16 min later) when I see her speed back up to 7 miles per hour. Did she just encounter a hill? A moose? Need a potty break? The possibilities are endless and I have a very active imagination.
Today I watched her run from Shageluk checkpoint to Anvik and then on to Grayling where she is resting. I don’t expect her to leave Grayling until 11pm or later tonight. The run she just completed was a fairly easy run, not a lot to report. She will have started running on the frozen Yukon River for the last 18 miles and will stay on the river for the next 120 miles. Her dogs have run on frozen rivers before so this shouldn’t be a problem for them but it may pose a problem for some of the other rookie teams. The river itself can pose dangers like cracked ice or overflow of open water on top of the ice. It is also more difficult to stay on a straight trail because there is no set “hard “trail. The whole river is hard so there is a tendency to zigzag back and forth as the teams move forward. Another feature of river running is the wind tunnel effect that can happen. This particular part of the river can have 40 mile an hour, head on winds. Right now the winds are behaving and are only 14 miles per hour. Laura will be resting now though so we’ll have to see what the winds look like later tonight. They tend to change quickly.
Well, we are over halfway through and the list of questions in my mind grows longer with each passing mile. I will do my best to answer as many as I can for you all but as you can see; only Laura can answer some of these. I can’t wait to hear the stories when she gets home, but even more, I can’t wait to see her get to Nome!