Baked Alaska

Sourdough "Unofficial" Olympic Triathlon
Fairbanks, Alaska, July 17, 2004
1500 (?) yd swim / 24.8 mi bike / 10k run
And We Were Lucky to Get That

Allow me to explain. The race I had planned and trained for, the Sourdough Half-Ironman, was scheduled to take place on July 17th, about 30 miles northeast of Fairbanks, Alaska, a locale not known for its triathlon community. In fact, the 2003 Sourdough had attracted all of about 34 participants, which was one reason that I wanted to go there. In California, I race in events with 1000, 1300, 1800, or even 2500 other nutty triathletes, which is fun and all, but I was looking to experience something a little more low-key. Also, I'm about as typical a triathlete as Fairbanks is a typical triathlon hotbed, so I liked the symmetry of our atypicality. I've also wanted to go to Alaska for about 20 years, at least, and I figured my self-indulgent, self-promotional, self-funded book and book research tour was a perfect excuse to make it happen.

I picked the Sourdough tri off a web page because it was a half-ironman, and my perhaps faulty reasoning led me to conclude that if I was going to travel all the way to Alaska for a race, it better be a nice big meaty race. I was also intrigued by the contact info for the event, as prospective entrants were urged to call Bad Bob Baker at home for more information, and to bring a dish to the post-race potluck. I was hooked like a Chena River salmon. I added the Sourdough to the schedule, and Coach Lisa set me up with a series of grueling workouts to build my endurance in the pool, on the bike, and on the road, and sometimes all of the above in the same day. I remembered how tough my first half-ironman had been, and I vowed to be better prepared this time. I had done massive bike rides, long runs, and insane bricks combining the two. My swim times were getting faster, and only my suddenly flaring shoulder bursitis gave me any cause for concern. I was so ready.

Just as I was looking forward to a well-earned taper, around the 5th of July or so, my phone rang one morning. "Is this the Fast Skinny Triathlete?" a male voice inquired. "Um, no," I answered, "no fast skinny triathletes here. You must have the wrong number." Turned out it was Bad Bob Baker himself, with some troubling news. Apparently millions of acres of Alaska were on fire, a fact that had escaped my notice, and one of those fires was blazing away just about 30 miles or so northeast of Fairbanks. The astute reader will recognize that location as the site of our race. People were being evacuated, Fairbanks was a mass of smoke, and firefighters were flying in from all over the country. Bob wasnıt sure how things were going to turn out, but he promised to keep us all posted. I was thrown into a tizzy and immediately ate three bowls of cereal. Itıs a weakness . I was wondering if I should try and get my non-refundable air tickets refunded or at least credited, save some money for some future hare-brained adventure. But I had arranged to meet wonderful family friends Carol and Richie in Fairbanks, and they were changing their Alaska touring schedule just to meet me, so I figured I'd better go, even if visibility was zero and the air smelled like ash and destruction.

Meanwhile I kept training as if a half-ironman was going to happen and simultaneously started researching other half-ironman races that I could fit in sometime later in the season. It seemed like too big of a letdown to do all that training and not do a half-ironman so I settled on FIRMman (whatever) in Naragansett, Rhode Island, on September 12, as an acceptable backup that would allow me to visit my friends in Boston and New York. (Ready, guys?) I also started pretty obsessively to follow the weather conditions and firefighting status in the Fairbanks area. It was hard to tell what was really going on, but it sure didn't look like the typical July rains were coming to help put the fires out and clear the air.

Around the 9th, Bad Bob sent an email saying that they'd scouted the course, and the highway was open, but there was a ton of smoke and hundreds of firefighters in the area, so it seemed like maybe only a 50-50 chance that the race would happen. He said he didn't have permits to move the race to another location, but that maybe we could have a fun ride and run somewhere and we could still eat salmon. I felt that even if the race did get cancelled, I'd get a good story out of the trip.

Finally, the day before I was due to fly north, Bob emailed again. The race was cancelled; there was still smoke everywhere and firefighters who took a dim view of triathlons in their workplace, but Bob was trying to arrange a "fun event" for the Saturday, and of course the salmon was still baiting me. I briefly debated skipping the hassle and expense of traveling with my bicycle, thinking maybe I could rent or borrow something, but nah... I like having my own bike. It's comfy and it's pretty fast and it's mine. So I packed the bike and the wetsuit and a few copies of Slow Fat Triathlete, and Tim helped me get the bike box through the airport, and I was off, north to Alaska.

Faced with over three hours at the SeaTac airport, I hopped a hotel shuttle and grabbed dinner at the 13 Coins, one of the most oddly decorated restaurants I have ever seen. It featured overstuffed purple vinyl booths with backrests eight feet tall. Even the stools at the counter were giant thrones, with backs that towered over my head. The whole thing was topped off by an arrangement of rectangular wooden lamps. Very weird, but the food was good, in an old-fashioned Italian-American sort of way. Little trays of antipasti, huge plates of pasta or veal parm. I had a tasty, heavy, unsophisticated carbonara. I was glad of it though, since the Alaska Airlines folks thought that the best food to serve on a four-hour flight from Seattle to Fairbanks was a little paper cup of ice cream. Ice cream? For dinner? Sounds like something I would do, except about 4 times as much.

It was 10:30 at night by the time I got to Fairbanks, and it was still light, though pretty hazy from the smoke. Carol and Richie were there to greet me and help me with the enormous bike case, and they immediately proclaimed themselves my support staff for the triathlon, whatever form it might take. Richie is a retired rocket scientist, so he was well qualified to help get the bike out of the case and get both of them into the rented Daewoo Leganza. Hey, I'm too cheap to rent an SUV, even in Alaska. Richie had the bright idea of taking the lid off the bike case and sliding the bottom half, with the bike still lashed inside, into the back seat. This worked pretty well, but then we had to figure out how to get the top half of the case into the car too. It absolutely required an advanced engineering degree to solve that mystery, which involved a lot of angles and rotation and leaning back the front seat. Eventually it was all in place, but I couldn't see out the back or see my wing mirror, so the drive up to our rental place was a little hairy. I was looking for moose on the side of the road, too, so that made my driving more erratic than usual.

We were staying in a cozy apartment beneath the house of Mike and Floss Caskey, an exceptionally friendly and gregarious couple, both born and raised in Alaska, who take their hospitality very seriously. The Caskeys' place is outside of town a little bit and up on a hill. If the air had been clear, we would have had a very nice view of the Tanana valley, the Alaska Range, and even Denali itself. As it was, we could see some nice cottonwood and birch trees eight feet from the window. Carol and Richie, who had been in Fairbanks for a few days earlier in their trip, assured me that this air quality was crystalline compared to a couple of weeks earlier, when everyone was wearing dust masks. I felt fortunate.

I hadn't been in a sub-Arctic summer for about ten years, when I organized a fishing trip in the Siberian taiga in July, so I'd forgotten the reaction my body has to 24 hours of daylight. At about 12:30 am, I realized that not only was I not sleepy, I was positively wired, as though I'd been sipping espresso all evening, and multiple shades and blinds on the bedroom window were not fooling my body at all. My body knew it was light and wanted to go outside and play. My mind, however, nixed that idea. Eventually got to sleep around two in the morning, and then of course slept until ten or so.

So it was a slow start to my Alaskan adventure. Fortunately Carol is an energetic, highly intelligent, cheerful, and organized person, exactly the kind of lovely assistant one needs on a triathlon trip. Richie is a wonderful lovely assistant too, kind, funny, flexible, a fine photographer, and always ready for coffee and/or dessert. And he's a rocket scientist. But our first morning it was Carol who figured out what we needed to do in what order and prodded Richie and me until we got off our butts and did it. She also got us tickets for the Riverboat Discovery, a semi-historical stern-wheeler that paddles up and down the Chena and Tanana rivers, introducing tourists to the wonders of the Alaskan interior. We fueled up for the riverboat trip at the Alaska Coffee Roasting Company, which was sort of my discovery, though I didn't even know how great that was going to be. The ACRC has a fantastic bakery, churning out flatbread pizza things, great breads, succulent scones, decadent tortes, and other goodies, but what really makes it memorable is that the coffee is the best I have tasted anywhere in the world. I'm not exaggerating one bit. I have never had better coffee. I started out with a latte there, which was rich and thick and foamy, but I soon switched to drip coffee so that I could better appreciate the fresh, fragrant, perfectly balanced nectar without the distraction of milk and foam and all.

After the great lunch and coffee, I was prepared for the riverboat, and I didn't even care if it was silly and hokey because the coffee had been so incredibly great. The parking lot was filled with tour buses, and the four decks of the Discovery III were filled with the buses' contents. We scrambled up to the very top and commenced to bake in the hot sun. "'Well, we could break the all time temperature record today," the tour guide announced. Once the boat cast off though, there was a tiny breeze, and we were pretty interested in what was going on. We passed the original Discovery, a much smaller and less tourist-friendly, but more authentic paddle steamer, and the homestead of "Captain Jim," the intrepid riverboat pilot who had plied these waters in the 1920s. The coolest thing on the Chena leg of the trip, though, was a visit to Iditarod hero Susan Butcherıs house and kennels. We stayed on the boat while Susan regaled us with dog and mushing lore, showed us cute puppies, and then harnessed ten dogs to an ATV for a whirlwind lap around the property. Those dogs really do love to run. After the dog demo, we cruised along to the confluence with the Tanana, a huge silty river, a tributary of the mighty Yukon. On the Tanana, we saw Dixie Alexander dress a chum salmon in 35 seconds and explain the summer fish camps of the Athabascan tribes. A few minutes later, Dixie appeared on the other bank of the river in a reconstructed Athabascan village, demonstrating the hand-made, finely-beaded fur coats that have brought her fame and a place in the Smithsonian. Young native Alaskans, Eskimos, Aleuts, Athabascans and Tlingits, all students at the university, herded us around the village and gave us mildly informative talks about Athabascan hunting techniques, canoes, trapping, tanning, and other survival skills.

After we returned to the dock and cruised through the obligatory gift shop, it was time for a little more food. We decided on the Pump House, a restaurant housed in the building that used to pump water out of the Chena River to blast water into gold-bearing rock back in the old mining days. Nowadays it sports lots of antique furnishings, moose antlers, and a range of food from bar snacks to fancy stuff. We opted for the bar menu and sat out on the deck, sipping drinks and scarfing our sandwiches and ribs. Outstanding french fries, very tasty riblets, below average mojito. But you don't go to Fairbanks for the mojitos.

We stopped by the hardware section of the Fred Meyer megastore for some bits and pieces for my bike, which had been having persistent aerobar problems. The elbow rests kept falling off and were proving difficult to fix, so I was looking for washers, foam, and of course duct tape. When we got home we had a message from Bad Bob, so I gave him a call and got the scoop on the activities planned for Saturday. Bob had measured out an Olympic distance course at Chena Lakes Recreation Area southeast of town, well beyond the smoke of the fires. He had also suggested meeting up with us and with my fellow Bay Area resident Dave Mandelkern, who has a triathlon quest of his own, for a pre-race pasta feed the next evening. We agreed readily. I was looking forward to meeting Bad Bob, who I had pictured as a shaggy, grizzled sourdough type with a lumberjack shirt and big boots, and also to meeting Dave, whoıs on a mission to complete 50 triathlons in 50 states before he turns 50. He's only 45 now and heıs got 14 states under his belt, so heıs well on his way.

Friday morning involved fiddling with the aerobars and coming up with a jury-rigged solution. I tested it out on a brief pre-race spin, about 30 minutes, and it felt pretty comfortable even though the elbow rests were now about an inch lower than they had been before they started falling apart. A quick run off the bike, about 20 minutes, and I was ready to shower and start the tourism part of the day. But first, of course, a bite to eat. We had noticed Sam's Sourdough Café on our drives through town, and we felt compelled to eat some real Alaska sourdough something or other. Richie tried for sourdough french toast, Carol for a sourdough BLT, but I got bacon and eggs with a couple of sourdough pancakes, and I scored. They were almost sour enough to pucker your mouth, with a wonderful elasticity and texture. I was delighted. Next stop was Creamerıs Field, a refuge for migratory birds. We walked around the woods and fields, but not too many birds are migrating in mid-July, and we failed to see the nesting sandhill cranes in the meadow. But we needed the walk after all that bacon.

Next up was my attempt to contact the Fairbanks News-Miner, the local paper, where some editor had expressed interest to my publicist in perhaps interviewing me. Unfortunately, I hadnıt been able to reach my publicist to find out who that editor was. So a series of phone calls and a visit to the newsroom helped me to figure out that the story was now in the hands of sportswriter Danny Martin ­ who happened not to be in the office that afternoon. I went back to the University of Alaska Fairbanks to do a quick tour of the museum and pick up Richie and Carol, and it was time for more food.

We were meeting Bad Bob &Co at Gambardellaıs Pasta Bella. As we pulled up in front of the restaurant, I saw a neatly-groomed redheaded man in a green polo shirt and khaki shorts sitting in an attitude of expectation. The polo shirt said "Race Director" on the front, which seemed to indicate that this was Bad Bob Baker himself. He was totally unlike our imagining, but he was a lot of fun to hang out with, and so was his wife Sharon. Dave and Terilynn showed up a little later. Theyıd missed their phone messages since they were out scouting the course. Unfortunately, they were scouting the Steese Highway course, having also missed the message about the relocation of the race. They were pretty relieved to find that they were going to be about 50 miles away from the smoke and ash of the area theyıd been driving through. Bob brought out a course map and explained the race: two laps of a half-mile swim course, three laps on the bike, and an out-and-back trail run. He had gone to a heck of a lot of trouble, considering there were only going to be about 15 people. We ate luscious pasta, which tasted freshly made to me, and after about three hours of chatting, we dispersed to our lodgings to prepare for the "big race. "

As we left the restaurant, it started to rain pretty hard, which boded well for the air quality. We sat in our apartment with all the windows open, listening to the rain and the thunder and inhaling the welcome smell of wet earth and plants. We found out later that unfortunately the lightning that came with the little storm had managed to ignite some new wildfires in the Fairbanks area, which was sort of a drag. But at the time it seemed lovely. I struggled to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and ignore my body's awareness of the strange light at midnight. Go to Part Two: Race Day and Beyond