The Best American Sports Writing 2014 (58 page)

It is as if, one exasperated relative told me, “the mountain swallowed this man.”

 

Seward is a town unburdened by stoplights at road's end 126 miles southeast of Anchorage, its 2,700 year-rounders residing on a neat thatch of rectilinear streets named for presidents everyone can still agree on: Washington, Adams, Madison. Founded to be Alaska's railroad gateway, today it is a town of lesser ambitions—a fish-processing hub turned tourist burg at the head of mountain-ringed Resurrection Bay, an inlet of the Gulf of Alaska that can glow the unreal green of Immodium A-D, thanks to the glaciers that are patiently grinding the surrounding peaks to flour and shipping them to sea on muscling rivers. When the sun shines, this place is a calendar shot of Alaska's greatest hits: Ocean. Mountains. Wildlife. Ice. Often all in one frame.

After Labor Day, when I arrived, nearly the last of the wedding-cake cruise ships had scooped up its Sansabelt-slacks'ed passengers and sailed south for Seattle. The herd of RVs that migrate here each July and August had drifted north to rental lots in Anchorage. The brief, frenetic, moneymaking Alaskan summer was over, and an autumnal drowsiness had taken hold of town. Locals had already tugged on their winter “Seward Slippers”—tall Xtratuf rubber boots. At gewgaw shops like Once in a Blue Moose, with its Bear Poo Chocolate Peanut Clusters and
ALASKA: JUST FOR THE HALIBUT
T-shirts, the discounts had begun.

It was from downtown where I first looked up and saw Mount Marathon—a great green pyramid, fat at the base and tapering with geometric precision for 3,022 feet to a rocky point. (Out of sight it climbs more than 1,500 feet higher.) In a land of big peaks, what makes Mount Marathon remarkable isn't that symmetry or height, however, but sheer insistence: as it stretches north for nearly a mile, the mountain forms almost the entire western border of town. It is literally Seward's backdrop and backyard, its playground, constant neighbor, and companion. When you look to the western sky, it fills the eye. It refuses to be ignored.

Like many contests of dubious judgment, the race started with a bar bet: Who could run up the big peak behind town and back in under an hour? On Independence Day 1909, Seward was a six-year-old pioneer village full of miners and other hard men. Al Taylor, a dog musher and one of those strong fathers of Alaska, reportedly took the wager. Dressed in wool pants, leather boots, and his Sunday-best white shirt, Taylor pounded up the dirt streets and into the woods. He reappeared just over an hour later and bought a round for the house, according to Millie Spezialy's history of the race. In 1915, the race up Mount Marathon—the peak was soon named for the punishing run—became an annual July 4 event. Since then, only capitalized calamity—World War, Great Depression—has canceled the contest, and then only temporarily.

One morning I headed to the trailhead with Sam Young. Young is 58, with a long upper lip, a high forehead that slopes to neatly combed-back hair, and the flatness of a Nebraska upbringing still in his voice; in another era he could have been a Dust Bowl preacher. Only his battered running shoes hint that Young is a two-and-a-half-time Mount Marathon winner. (The “half” is race lore: in 1986, after a spicy back-and-forth duel, Young and Bill Spencer, who holds the course record of 43:21, agreed to cross the finish line hand in hand.) Young has run it more than 20 times, and when he speaks of the race, his soft voice seems to cradle it like something of great value.

We stepped into the forest on a scratch of a trail. Suddenly there was mountain. No warning, no foothills—just 50 feet of rude geology. The course at times isn't one trail, but a veinwork of paths—and Young started up one called the Roots. Soon I was 40 feet up a slick wall of mud, clinging to the bones of hemlock and spruce, wishing I had a belay. Gravity tugged patiently, waiting for its chance. “You slip here, your ass is grass,” Young shouted. “Now imagine doing this while buzzing with fear, adrenaline, and oxygen debt.”

For decades, fewer than 10 runners competed, and it was a free-for-all—any way up and back was fair game. Men sprinted down alleys, clambered over cars, sabotaged each other's shortcuts; the night before, fences sprung up in yards that had never before boasted one. Winners won fat purses, their fame carried across the state by bush plane. (By 1950 the prize was $2,500—about a year's pay at the time. Now, instead of cash, winners get a trophy and free entry into future races.) The race's popularity swelled with the running boom of the '70s. Today, a cap of 1,000 men, women, and children as young as seven turn out, from housewives to elite athletes ($65 entry for adults, $25 for kids). About 90 percent of the adults are returnees; until a recent rule change, all finishers gained entry into the next year's race. Few relinquish their spot—and lottery bids are coveted. The only thing harder than running Mount Marathon, the saying here goes, is getting the chance to run.

“Harder” seemed unlikely. After the Roots, we plunged into the Alaskan bush, which in summer is a rioting jungleland—five-foot pushki with its blistering burn, hypodermic devil's club, alder as tight as prison bars. This “Little Shop of Horrors” crowded the trail, grabbing, stinging, thickening the air with humidity. At one point Young took a step off the track and nearly vanished into the green.

The path itself averages 38 degrees, or roughly the equivalent of one of those eastern ski runs with a name like “Widowmaker” or “Paul's Plunge.” Frost it with mud that goes snot-slick after every frequent Alaskan rain, and it becomes a gruesome alpine Slip 'N Slide. Don't wear your tennis whites. “You've got to put your hands on that mountain,” Brad Precosky, a six-time men's winner, had told me about certain parts of the ascent. Now put yourself nose-to-butt on this greased 3,000-foot ladder with 175 others. Seen from downtown, the up-trail is a grim, slobbering conga line of humanity.

Not for the best racers, though. Moving high above Young, I asked to see his competition form. He Gollum'd past me, his back bent and breath measured—a simian out for a postbanana stroll. A decently fit guy, I tried to keep Young's pace for 50 yards and nearly upchucked my breakfast frittata. Not even halfway up, sweat already spilled from my chin, and each calf was asking what the hell was going on. I slipped. Slid. Took a step. Slipped again. Ahead, Young kept moving higher. He fed off the altitude, growing more talkative as he climbed, casually mentioning how he used to roll rocks down on the competition to distract them. “Small stuff, nothing that would hurt anybody,” he said. “There's a lot of trash going on up there.”

 

If it seems strange that anyone could embrace such suffering, Alaskans show no such dissonance. Each Fourth of July holiday more than 25,000 people descend on little Seward to drink beer, squint at the lame fireworks that fizz in the twilight of an Alaskan summer midnight, and watch the race. Proportionately speaking, in unpeopled Alaska, that's close to all of Pennsylvania turning out to cheer a Punxsutawney turkey trot. Fans jostle five-deep behind the barricades at the finish line and pool at the mountain's base like NASCAR fans bunching at turns in hopes of witnessing mayhem. The
Anchorage Daily News
, the state's largest newspaper, covers the race as if it were the Kentucky Derby—dissecting course conditions, handicapping the top runners.

One beautiful ex-racer with the wonderfully Pynchonesque name of Cedar Bourgeois told me with damp eyes how the race had taught her skills she'd never had before—drive and mental discipline. Bourgeois is a local celebrity, a Seward-raised girl who won the women's title seven times in a row. Today, she owns Nature's Nectars, a coffee shop in the harbor that pours some of the state's best espresso to groggy fishermen. The Mount Marathon Race, she said, had done nothing less than change her life. “I would have to equate it to motherhood.”

Young and I hit the halfway point, where jungle yielded to tundra. Above us a dim trail zippered up a hard gray forehead of shale to Race Point. The day blossomed around us—the Kenai Mountains pinned up a mouthwash-blue sky. Tour boats bound for Kenai Fjords National Park dragged their wakes up the bay.

On race day, there's no time to sightsee. After Race Point comes a caveman's steeplechase. Runners hurl themselves down the mountain at a full sprint. (After ascending in about 33 minutes, elite downhillers like Precosky will plunge from the top to the finish line in less than 11 minutes. The fastest on record is 10:08.) First they scramble down a long, steep snowfield at highway speeds, then run through shin-deep beds of loose shale that feel like sandboxes of shattered glass. Young flew down it with the poise of a mogul skier.

It's a helluva staircase. Just as heart and quads are redlining, runners then hit the Chute, halfway down the mountain. It's a tilted gun barrel filled with scree or snow that funnels down to a small gulley called the Gut. The Gut's centerpiece: a pretty creek dotted with yellow monkey flower and three small waterfalls. Runners have to gallop down this creek, which is strewn with what feels underfoot like wet kitty litter. At one point I slipped, lunged for a lifeline, and grabbed a fistful of devil's club, a feeling not unlike squeezing your mother's pincushion.

By this point, “people don't know their names,” Young said. “They are unconscious, the walking dead.” Now appeared the final obstacle between racers and the crowd's embrace: the Cliffs, several nasty crags, perhaps 25 feet high and sometimes glazed with rain or dust. Young picked an easier line for us. I was so tweaked, I nearly crab-walked down it.

Even so, the worst part of the race is yet to come. After so much up and down, the final 1,000-meter sprint to the finish line on nearly flat asphalt is excruciating, race veterans told me. “Everybody knows how to run on the street,” Young said, “but not after you've been through a blender.”

 

Why would anyone do this? you ask. The answer is that the peril of the Mount Marathon Race and the pain it inflicts are the very things that give the event its enduring allure; you could even say they are essential. Decades before Tough Mudder began roughing up paying customers, people were slapping down their money, then falling down—hard—at the Mount Marathon Race. On the flying descent, runners have fallen and had to have six-inch spear points of shale extracted from their hindquarters. Seward fire chief Dave Squires, who has aided injured racers for 26 years, told me he has seen everything from dislocations and neck injuries to angry tattoos from sliding down snowfields. A woman once rolled her ankle while evading a pissed-off bear. Another year a man was impaled by a tree branch. One roasting July 4 in the 1980s, 53 people were treated for heat illness. Squires has seen racers suffering from compound fractures—bones actually jutting from their bodies—still running toward the finish line. “Sometimes not very good,” he said, “but they're still running.” Among three serious injuries in last year's race, an experienced mountain runner from Anchorage chose an unusual line above the Cliffs, tripped, fell—and suffered lasting brain trauma. A pilot from Utah slid 30 feet down a muddy ramp and off the Cliffs, lacerated her liver, and was hospitalized for five days—saved only from graver injury by a quick-thinking EMT who broke her fall.

In 2009, U.S. Ski Team member Holly Brooks was leading when she collapsed in front of Seward's emergency room, not far from the finish line. She had acute exertional rhabdomyolysis—her muscles literally shredding themselves. It took doctors an hour to find a noncollapsed vein in which to insert an IV. Soon after, Brooks checked herself out against their orders and limped to a 212th-place finish so she could run again. Last year, she won.

“Many people say that if you're not bleeding from at least one spot when you get down, you didn't try hard enough,” Lori Draper, a longtime member of the race committee, told me with a smile. Organizers proudly say that the race is never canceled due to adverse conditions.

Even on a normal day, the mountain can be unforgiving. Every year hikers must be rescued. A decade ago some Navy SEALs, the service's hardmen, went for a hike, worked their way onto cliffs with no exit—and had to be plucked to safety by helicopter. Over the last 25 years, the mountain has killed three hikers, though previously never during the race.

Earlier, when we finally had reached the trailhead where we'd begun, Young had taken my hand. “Did I see blood?” he had asked, examining a sliced finger. “This mountain gets a piece of you, every time,” he'd said.

And here you, the reader from the Lower 48, must understand something: this is how Alaskans like their home.

Alaska is different from any place you have ever seen. Everything is bigger here: The animals. The weather. The man-eating topography. In Alaska humans still don't matter for much. “Out of the car, into the food chain,” locals like to say. Wilderness? It's not some abstraction; it lives at the end of Washington Street. Go on a hike among the bears and cracking ice; feel the unease at your own contingence in the face of so much Bigness—the flip side of which is an almost electric thrill. This is why Alaskans love this country, and why they stay: to feel the surer pulse that thrums closer to the sharp edge of the blade.

Here you can test yourself daily against the country's harshness. And if you measure up, life feels that much fuller, the pulse that much more vibrant. “There's something beautiful,” Bourgeois said of the best downhillers, “to see a dance made out of chaos.” And if it sometimes draws a little blood? Well, that's just the world telling you that you're still alive.

There's just one caveat that comes with loving a place like this—with loving its fractured glaciers and its posing moose and the wisps of the northern lights on blue-cold nights when the mercury pools in the bulb, and with loving its mountains so much you will heave yourself against them in a muddy embrace: you must never forget that Alaska doesn't love you back. The moment you forget that, the moment you let down your guard, this place will kill you.