“Are you guys racing or what?” The caller was Madden. He sounded nervous, as if this morning’s Two Rivers’ Tune-up represented his serious racing debut instead of mine.
It was a cold November morning, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I was running in and out of the house, loading Mowry’s old utility truck. Any concern I might have felt about the sting of the air was dispelled by the thermometer dangling outside our cabin door. Twenty below zero. Nothing to it, I thought. Training in Fairbanks, we dealt with temperatures in that range all the time.
My gear seemed unusually stiff. The lines weren’t pliable. Normally limp harnesses were kinked and had to be stretched apart. But I was too busy to pay attention to that since I had drawn the first starting position.
I was running eight dogs. Rainy and Casey were leading, with Pig, Bo, Screech, Beast, Betsy, and Raven filling the spots behind. It wasn’t our best team, but one selected to minimize surprises. I hadn’t given much thought to my personal gear, placing faith in my familiar motorcycle suit, a trusted 14-year-old memento of my days as a photo-lab delivery driver. I had a balaclava covering my head, but it wasn’t tucked in, leaving most of my neck and face exposed.
Leaving the field, the trail joined Pleasant Valley Road. As soon as I made the turn, I felt the wind burning my cheeks. I gritted my teeth and concentrated on keeping the dogs rolling. Other teams were following at two-minute intervals. I’d started first and, so far, I was leading. If they were going to beat us, let ’em earn it.
No one caught us until we were well past the river, on the return loop. Dipping up and down with the trail, I heard a scraping sound and glanced backward. If a musher coming from behind called for the trail, I would have to pull over and let the sled pass.
A team was breathing down my back, all right, but the sled had no driver! The ghost team belonged to Jeff Boulton. About three miles into the race, his lead dogs had tangled. Boulton stopped, straightened them out, and was reaching for his sled when his excited dogs jerked the hook loose.
Rainy hesitated when she saw the crowd waiting at the finish line. Mowry clapped his hands and, coaxing her, ran with the team. People were clapping. For a few minutes I dared to dream that I might have even won. I even had Mowry scared.
“I didn’t want you to win the first time out and wind up with an unruly student on my hands,” the Coach said later.
He didn’t have to worry. All but two other teams completed the course faster. I finished fifth, beating Boulton and another musher who was delayed by a huge dog fight.
At the finish line, Kathy Swenson mentioned that she had planned on racing, but didn’t think it was worth it at 40 below.
Forty below zero. She had to be kidding! But it was no joke. Heat escaping through our cabin door had produced a false reading on our thermometer at home.
As we waited for results to be announced in the steamy convenience store, the winner of the race, Paul Taylor, slapped me on the shoulder.
“Pretty cold out there today,” he said, mentioning that he’d wondered if his lips were freezing in the breeze.
“How’s your face?” Taylor added, frowning.
Now that he mentioned it, my face felt sort of strange. My cheeks were rock hard to the touch, and cold. That’s odd, I thought.
Back at the cabin, Madman, Mowry, and Studer were fooling around in the kitchen when I finished feeding the dogs and came inside.
“Man, what happened to you, O’D!”
It wasn’t my imagination. Something was wrong. I had frostbitten my cheeks, a chunk of my neck, and both earlobes. My face was just beginning to swell. Within a few hours I puffed up like the Michelin Man. By morning, my mouth was framed with a pair of angry-red apples, and I had a pink golfball in place of my Adam’s apple.
“First-degree frostbite,” said the doctor, quickly assessing my predicament as he put on his coat for an emergency trip to the hospital. “That area will be extremely sensitive to the cold.” He prescribed a simple treatment: Avoid outdoor sports for at least three weeks. “Sooner than that and you might have scarring,” he said.
“Doc, you don’t understand. I’m in training.”
“You better train inside.”
I shook my head. Train inside? Not for the Iditarod.
My face was funny-looking, but the situation wasn’t. Even after my face had healed, the new skin remained more vulnerable. I fought back against nature, accumulating a new arsenal of cold-weather gear. The old motorcycle gear was scrapped for a $98 Refridgiwear snowmachine suit, sized triple extra large, allowing me to layer additional clothing underneath. Penny Wakefield, a local clothing designer, made me a lambskin hat and a face mask with fur sewn on the inside. My face mask collection soon threatened to crowd us out of the cabin.
“Just smear your face with Vaseline,” said Studer, comparing the trick to a swimmer rubbing on grease before attempting the English Channel. I was skeptical, but I began routinely globbing it on before tending to chores in the dog lot. It actually made a big difference.
I dressed for each run like a commando suiting up for a mission. The outfit started with long underwear, top and bottom, covered by polypropylene snow pants, and a thick, hooded pullover from Apocalypse Design, a local expedition outfitter. For foot protection, I used a $175 pair of huge white bunny boots, the U.S. military’s gift to the Arctic.
Despite my careful preparations, pieces of my body kept dying. Mowry would return home from a run sweating like a pig. I’d retreat to the bathroom to survey the expansion of bloodless white areas on several fingers, already tipped by deadened blisters.
“You’re hopeless, O’Donoghue,” the Coach said of my mounting scars.
I bought more gloves. And I bought more chemical hand warmers, which I clung to like talismans, rarely leaving the cabin without stuffing another handful in my pockets.
The warmers were neat little things. Tear open the plastic wrapper, shake the tea bag-sized sacks contained inside, and the warmers usually produced steady heat. I say “usually” because those warmers, which cost about 50 cents apiece, had a high failure rate. Roughly one in three was a dud.
I also experimented with larger fluid-filled heat pouches. These were miraculous, providing a 20-minute burst of intense heat when you flexed a metallic disc floating inside the clear fluid. Unlike the dry chemical warmers, the pouches were recyclable. If you placed a stiff white used one in boiling water, the contents liquefied and cleared, becoming as good as new. Alas, the pouches proved worthless. Routine jostling in the sled triggered them. They were always dead when I wanted one.
In Alaska, nothing takes the place of field-testing.
My biggest success against the cold came from dietary changes. Stuffing myself with bacon, buttery muffins, and cheese before training runs — that helped quite a bit. Even more important was drinking before, after, and during runs. Sipping a thermos cup of warm Gatorade, soup, even a beer, as I cruised down the trail, pumped more heat through me than a suit lined with chemical warmers.
The dead forest grew cold, then colder still. I had a full thermos, but it was difficult to tap into while jumping fallen logs and weaving between old tree stumps. More hot Gatorade spilled than reached my cup, leaving my fingers burned then chilled inside swiftly crusting gloves.
The snow is often thin in the unsheltered Burn, but recent storms had helped me out. Our trail was adequate, and a steady line of reflectors gleamed from the skeletal trees ahead. The wind ebbed and finally died by early afternoon.
I knew I was 93 miles from Rohn and Nikolai, and that it should take about 16 hours, an hour less than I’d already spent, to make the crossing. But statistics didn’t tell me anything about my own wretched progress, not after camping, the repair jobs, and riding my shattered sled. I realized that I had no handle on the actual size of the Burn. Somehow that had never come up when I covered past races, nor in my conversations with the coach.