I had come prepared for the possibility of motionlessness.
Ghost Trails: Journeys through a lifetime by Jill Homer:
We crossed the last city street and entered the campground at the end of town. All around us, generators hummed amid the yellow outdoor lights and lighted windows of motorhomes and trailers. My and Geoff's campsite was quiet and dark -- just a small tent and two bicycles leaning against trees, all covered in a fresh coat of snow.
Synopsis: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing meets Pickets and Dead Men. A fistfight ensues.
called the Iditarod Trail Invitational, and it's 350 miles on bike or on foot through snow -- sometimes with a trail, sometimes without.
I'll stop there so we can all make startled and admiring noises together.
Right. Shall we continue?
A gritty and gripping account of Homer's first attempt at the Iditarod Trail Invitational (350 miles across Alaska on a bike), each grueling chapter in Alaska is interspersed with chapters detailing how Homer went from a non-athlete to an uber-distance girl. It's also the story of her relationship with her then-bf, Geoff, an ultrarunner. He takes her rafting and she nearly drowns. He takes her hiking and she has a panic attack in the snow. He convinces her to quit her job and drive to Alaska, selling jewelry at Rusted Root shows. He convinces her to bike across the country. Therein a madness is born.
Not the madness of the relationship, although truth be told, her bf doesn't come off as a tremendously nice person in the book, but the madness that drives Homer to train for and enter, a race like the Iditarod Trail Invitational.
Y'all, I like biking and I like snow and I even like biking in the snow, but this just sounded way more hardcore than I can even imagine being. Minus 40 F and you have to camp by the side of the trail after pedaling and pushing your bike through knee-high slush for 18 hours. Holy crow. That takes determination.
(The following year, Homer entered the Ride the Divide race, 2,740 miles from Banff Canada to the Mexican border...and set a new women's record. I think hardcore might not be an adequate word here).
Now, while the book's got a ton of editing mistakes and Homer has a few oddly purple prose moments ("People actually lived like this for entire winters. There were probably others who lived like this their entire lives, in tiny cabins set against the continent's largest mountains, with only mortared logs and wood stoves to hold back the constant needling of the fingers of death") they're greatly overshadowed by her incredible skill at bringing the reader right alongside her in examining and appreciating her surroundings:
The morning was clear and cold and bathed in a kind of intense beauty that was nearly incapacitating, as delirious and exhausted as I was. All I could do was keep my feet on the pedals as my eyes darted around in awe. In the blindness of the night before, I had climbed all the way into the sister peaks of Mount Denali. After 165 miles of watching them from a distance, I was finally carving my way into their direct shadows.
The trail, only shallowly tracked by the two snowmobiles the lodge manager had mentioned, softened quickly in the sun. After three miles, I gave up the hard pedaling and resumed walking with my bike. A red fox darted down the trail beside me, stopping briefly to look back before it raced ahead, much faster than I could ever hope to move.
There's also a very raw and almost painful earnestness with which Homer describes her relationship with the ultra-runner. An earnestness that I think will be achingly familiar to anyone who's ever been too hard in love.
But all that's overshadowed by the fascinating tale of a girl in the wilderness who seems continually puzzled to find herself out there. There are so many times Homer really wants to quit the race, or times when she bivies by the side of the frozen trail and wonders if she'll wake up again; in contrast to Pickets, Homer's displays of strength are almost reluctant and clumsy. Once she's started the race, she seems surprised and a little dismayed when things go wrong but keeps going simply by reminding herself there's really no other option.
In Pickets, I felt like Loewen got thrust into difficult situations through no fault of her own and plowed through them with more of an amused resignation.
Then again: 350 miles by bike across the frozen tundra.
Homer's second book is about how Geoff broke up with her just before she started the Ride the Divide race. I'll definitely be picking it up.
We crossed the last city street and entered the campground at the end of town. All around us, generators hummed amid the yellow outdoor lights and lighted windows of motorhomes and trailers. My and Geoff's campsite was quiet and dark -- just a small tent and two bicycles leaning against trees, all covered in a fresh coat of snow.
Synopsis: Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing meets Pickets and Dead Men. A fistfight ensues.
called the Iditarod Trail Invitational, and it's 350 miles on bike or on foot through snow -- sometimes with a trail, sometimes without.
I'll stop there so we can all make startled and admiring noises together.
Right. Shall we continue?
A gritty and gripping account of Homer's first attempt at the Iditarod Trail Invitational (350 miles across Alaska on a bike), each grueling chapter in Alaska is interspersed with chapters detailing how Homer went from a non-athlete to an uber-distance girl. It's also the story of her relationship with her then-bf, Geoff, an ultrarunner. He takes her rafting and she nearly drowns. He takes her hiking and she has a panic attack in the snow. He convinces her to quit her job and drive to Alaska, selling jewelry at Rusted Root shows. He convinces her to bike across the country. Therein a madness is born.
Not the madness of the relationship, although truth be told, her bf doesn't come off as a tremendously nice person in the book, but the madness that drives Homer to train for and enter, a race like the Iditarod Trail Invitational.
Y'all, I like biking and I like snow and I even like biking in the snow, but this just sounded way more hardcore than I can even imagine being. Minus 40 F and you have to camp by the side of the trail after pedaling and pushing your bike through knee-high slush for 18 hours. Holy crow. That takes determination.
(The following year, Homer entered the Ride the Divide race, 2,740 miles from Banff Canada to the Mexican border...and set a new women's record. I think hardcore might not be an adequate word here).
Now, while the book's got a ton of editing mistakes and Homer has a few oddly purple prose moments ("People actually lived like this for entire winters. There were probably others who lived like this their entire lives, in tiny cabins set against the continent's largest mountains, with only mortared logs and wood stoves to hold back the constant needling of the fingers of death") they're greatly overshadowed by her incredible skill at bringing the reader right alongside her in examining and appreciating her surroundings:
The morning was clear and cold and bathed in a kind of intense beauty that was nearly incapacitating, as delirious and exhausted as I was. All I could do was keep my feet on the pedals as my eyes darted around in awe. In the blindness of the night before, I had climbed all the way into the sister peaks of Mount Denali. After 165 miles of watching them from a distance, I was finally carving my way into their direct shadows.
The trail, only shallowly tracked by the two snowmobiles the lodge manager had mentioned, softened quickly in the sun. After three miles, I gave up the hard pedaling and resumed walking with my bike. A red fox darted down the trail beside me, stopping briefly to look back before it raced ahead, much faster than I could ever hope to move.
There's also a very raw and almost painful earnestness with which Homer describes her relationship with the ultra-runner. An earnestness that I think will be achingly familiar to anyone who's ever been too hard in love.
But all that's overshadowed by the fascinating tale of a girl in the wilderness who seems continually puzzled to find herself out there. There are so many times Homer really wants to quit the race, or times when she bivies by the side of the frozen trail and wonders if she'll wake up again; in contrast to Pickets, Homer's displays of strength are almost reluctant and clumsy. Once she's started the race, she seems surprised and a little dismayed when things go wrong but keeps going simply by reminding herself there's really no other option.
In Pickets, I felt like Loewen got thrust into difficult situations through no fault of her own and plowed through them with more of an amused resignation.
Then again: 350 miles by bike across the frozen tundra.
Homer's second book is about how Geoff broke up with her just before she started the Ride the Divide race. I'll definitely be picking it up.