Fierce Beauty Page 16

  Upon arriving at the quarters where all the competitors were staying, I looked for any familiar faces that might be able to answer a few questions. I needed to know where the biathletes were staging, if there was transportation to the course, and where the waxing rooms were.

  It wasn’t long before I spotted two women I knew. In my excitement I embraced one and stepped toward the other. She abruptly straight-armed me in the chest and snapped, “Don’t touch me. I don’t do hugs.” I stood back in stunned silence. A smattering of inconsequential words fell between us before they blithely walked away.

  So this is how it’s going to be.

  After training on the course for nearly a month while living among the bristle of these territorial women, I welcomed the first race in the series. Slated to be a fifteen-kilometer individual race, it would encompass five skiing loops and four shooting stages, one between each loop. The shooting position for each stage would alternate between prone and standing. With only five bullets to hit five targets, every missed shot would add an additional minute of penalty to the racer’s overall time. With competitors finishing within seconds of one another, the addition of a single minute weighed as heavy as an entire day.

  I had trained for years, I had saved the money, I had gotten the time off work, and I had sacrificed—all for this day. Today was my turn to race in the U.S. Olympic trials.

  Excited, I reached the course very early. My prerace habit drove me first to check the start list to see where I’d be in the lineup. I scanned the sheet and felt a faint clench in my chest. I scanned it again … and again.

  My name was nowhere to be found.

  After a flurry of questions, I finally located the race director and pointed out the error. He acknowledged my revelation with a slight “Huh,” shrugging it off by saying they must have lost my packet of race applications. To my massive relief he concluded, “Since this start list has already been sanctioned, we cannot change it. The only way you can race is if we tack you on last behind all the other women.” Although this wasn’t a desired position, I was grateful to be penciled in and have a chance to race.

  Relieved, I skied out to the firing range and began the process of zeroing my rifle. This vital procedure recalibrates a rifle to the greatest degree of accuracy for the present conditions. As expected, the staging area was a complete crush of coaches, equipment, and athletes. Trainers and sponsors hauled out mind-boggling amounts of gear. One area looked like a neon picket fence with what appeared to be dozens of new skis strategically placed side by side for participants who had earned them.

  Unlike these women whose sponsors granted them armloads of new skis, boots, poles, and racing attire every season, I would be racing with the same three pairs of skis I’d owned since the start of my career. These skis were priceless to me. Not only were they all I had, but they had been given to me by a dear friend, along with a single pair of perfect graphite poles.

  Year after year I’d raced with this same gear. Each piece was a trusted companion. We’d experienced and accomplished so much together. My upper body was a perfect fit to transfer power through this lone pair of poles. My lower body intimately knew the design, balance, and feel of each ski. My skis even bore a handwritten set of initials, a private message I’d inscribed on the tips to encourage my heart forward when the pain was great. This was not simply my gear. It was a part of me.

  Because zeroing is achieved in a prone position, I protected my poles by stowing them in an upright stance along the low fence behind the range. Since I was alone, I was forced to shoot five shots, get up, ski back to a general spotting scope, track where my shots had gone, evaluate the needed clicks to bring the group into zero, make the adjustment, and ski back to the firing line. I repeated this process many times until all shots were within a nickel-size area in the center of the target.

  In the crush of athletes and their entourage, a coach began to set up for his team right behind me. I rose to my feet and started to ski back to the fence to reload my clips. As if watching a slow-motion collision and being helpless to stop it, I saw one of his heavy spotting scopes topple over. It landed with a sickening crunch directly on my poles!

  For others this would’ve been a minor inconvenience, but for me it was catastrophic. I’d just witnessed my only pair of poles—my friends—destroyed right in front of me.

  Mouth agape in disbelief, I skied up and pointed out to the coach what he had inadvertently just done. He simply stared at me, then at my poles, and declared they weren’t broken. I picked them up, placed them firmly in my hands, and made the same quick downward thrust that one would make at the start of a race. My right pole exploded as if an umbrella had opened inside its narrow shaft.

  He dismissed me with a palms-up shrug that a person might give to someone who owns a garage full of extra poles. I explained that these were my only poles. His expression clearly showed he didn’t believe me.

  The best the coach could manage was to offer me one of his personal poles out of the hundreds that perforated the staging area. It was eight inches longer than my remaining pole. The difference in length meant only one thing for me—pain, and lots of it. I had trained my entire racing career with the same length of pole. I knew raising my right hand eight inches higher than normal with every stride during a nine-mile race was going to create the mother of all backaches. Pushing down my rising angst, I purposed to receive his spare pole without anger and not let this distract me from doing my best.

  I returned to the firing line to continue my zeroing process. After shooting several more rounds, the straight-pull bolt action on my rifle felt … different. I bolted it again and watched—to my horror—a tiny piece inexplicably fly off into the snow. I lunged to the spot where I saw it fall and was able to quickly retrieve the miniscule part. Immediately I scooped up all my things and rushed to the indoor staging area.

  En route, a train wreck of scenarios collided in my mind. In all my years of shooting, totaling tens of thousands of shots, this had never happened. In the world of biathlon rifles, mine was one of the simplest, with few and heavy moving parts. The Soviet Baikal Vostok was renowned for remarkable durability in less-than-ideal circumstances. This was not a fastidious, prima-donna rifle. Mine was the less prestigious, less expensive, and often-maligned workhorse of the biathlon world. At that time there were only four other known rifles like mine in all the United States. With the race starting soon, I knew that if I couldn’t get this rifle back together quickly, no one would.

  After bursting into the staging area, I spread out my gear and rapidly dismantled my rifle. As if I were in a timed military-ops training drill, I then reassembled it as fast as I could. As another biathlete passed by, I asked if her coach might have any experience with this rifle. Her over-the-shoulder response was, “That’s what you get for buying a Soviet rifle.”

  Although a verbal rather than a physical slap, I still felt its fiery sting across my face. Again I was reminded of how alone I truly was.

  Once my rifle assembly was complete, I gingerly tested the bolting action. Everything felt normal. I rebolted over and over, harder and faster each time. When it showed no sign of its prior mysterious trouble, I thanked the Lord for His intervention, gathered my gear, and skied as hard as I could back out to the range. As I slid up to the entrance, I saw a course official taping it off, formally signaling that the range was closed!

  My rifle was completely unzeroed. Since the prone target is about the size of a silver dollar, I would probably miss all my prone shots. Out of twenty shots, fully half would likely be lost; ten minutes would be added to my time. Ten minutes! Before my race even started, I was already days behind.

  My heart fell like a stone. After all this work I wanted to cry.

  Willing myself to stay focused, I sought out the man who had broken my pole and pleaded with him to help me. I asked him to watch me ski into the range once the race had started, spot my first group, and advise me how to click for the next three trips into the range. T
his is what all coaches do for their teams, and since he had severely hindered my chances of doing well, it seemed like an appropriate request. My presence at this race series threatened few, certainly none of his skiers. For me, this was only about the opportunity to compete in the U.S. Olympic trials.

  Beginning my warm-up process, I took note of the weather and course conditions. Although twenty degrees is not considered that cold, the humidity combined with a brisk wind made it feel closer to zero. The ambient weather had been even less kind. Several days earlier, falling snow had turned into falling rain. Once the storm front passed, the rain-sodden snow had frozen into a solid, bricklike consistency, making the course extremely fast and sketchy.

  Now it looked as if a new storm was approaching. A heavy, ominous overcast filled the Alaskan sky. The flat, shadowless day was perfect for a shooter but, since it camouflaged all terrain, horrible for a skier.

  Every biathlete has an individual and very specific method of readying body and mind to race at optimum performance. This process entails a series of skiing slower laps to gradually warm the body. As the muscles begin to heat, hot laps at near maximum speed are added to the mix to prepare the heart and lungs for premium output. This process is done with great calculation and timing so that once the athlete is warmed up, she will immediately begin the countdown toward ignition before her body begins to cool down. At this point, timing is imperative, because once the warm-up suit comes off, the competitor has a relatively small window before she begins to cool down, tighten up, and use vital stores of glycogen. The colder the conditions, the smaller the time window the racer has to get her warmups off and ski race started.

  The lady biathletes were under way. Like brilliant-colored rockets, every thirty seconds a woman exploded from the start gate in an impressive flurry of power and grace. “Three … two … one … go! Good luck, racer,” the start official repeated in a serious monotone to every skier.

  I was only slightly aware that it was bitterly cold once I had peeled down to nothing more than my Lycra racing suit. Completely adrenalized, I skied into the start box and assumed an aggressive start position. The official began his countdown: “Ten … nine … eight …”

  My body felt like a volatile coil compressed into a launch position. “Seven … six.”

  With my eyes straight ahead, I felt an instinctive deepening in my knees and hips. I was a lioness ready to leap into the hunt.

  “Five … four … Hey, wait a minute. Who are you?”

  Frantic about completing my countdown, I gushed the entire story of my allegedly lost application and official add-on in one second flat. The official blinked several times as he studied his list. Suddenly his mouth pressed into a straight line. Then he exhaled forcefully. “Well, no one told me!” he said, grinding the words between his teeth. “You can’t start now. It will throw off the entire men’s list. You’ll have to go after all the men. No, wait, we have a couple dozen junior racers after them. You’ll have to go completely last.”

  I was astonished. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing!

  Stunned, I stepped out of the start box and back into the bull pen. In bewildered silence I pulled on my warmups as male racers crowded into the small arena. Because the course was now filled with competitors, there was nowhere for me to warm up except a tiny circle outside the starting area.

  Repeatedly I felt anxiety climb into my throat and squeeze. I knew that a breakdown would be the end of my day. I fought the crush in my chest by willing myself to focus on skiing circles so absurdly small that the length of my skis hardly fit within them.

  While circling I had plenty of time to consider my physiology education. I knew that the human musculature and liver can store only a finite amount of glycogen. This is the quick-burning “gasoline” that fuels the body in both aerobic and anaerobic activity. Once this fuel source is depleted, the body must resort to other, less efficient means of energy production. Because I didn’t know how many men or junior racers there were, I couldn’t leave my circling post to go indoors and warm up. My weakening heart, muscles, and hope all consumed vital energy. Soon all I felt was intense cold.

  I continued to circle … for nearly two hours.

  Completely exhausted and rigid with cold, I was at last allowed back into the bull pen to make final preparations to begin my race. The start official looked surprised to see me as I slid back into the box and onto the line. “Three … two … one … go! Good luck, racer,” I heard him mutter as I sprinted away. Having to use part of the first loop to warm up again, I felt terrible.

  Skiing as fast as I was able, I skated into the range and popped off five quick shots. As expected, they were all misses. While jumping back up to my skis and heading out of the range, I looked into the gallery at the coach who’d promised to spot for me. He was talking to a friend and hadn’t even noticed I’d come in. I called his name, and he turned and glowered at me. He’d clearly not only forgotten our agreement, but he was also annoyed that I’d interrupted him.

  Again I fought the rise of complete despair. I skated hard out of the range.

  In my beleaguered effort to make up time, I powered down the trail like a human freight train. In this particular race the second loop was the longest. As I sprinted into a major intersection, only then did I realize that all the course officials were gone. They must have thought the race was over; there was no one to guide me in the correct direction. Although the loops were designated by color, they were not marked in any manner I could distinguish.

  Instantly I chose the course that had the most wear. Because it showed the most ski tracks, I felt certain this was the right direction. As I ventured into the forest, a slow dawning began to rise in my frantic brain. The skate tracks had thinned out. Everyone had turned around.

  I was hammering down nothing more than a warm-up loop. I was completely off course!

  Turning around and retracing the useless distance, I went back to the unmanned intersection and scoured the area for any identification of the right trail. Seeing a flattened color marker down in the snow, I chose the course upon which it lay, hoping that when the marker was struck, it had fallen onto the correct track.

  Fight for this! echoed in my head. I skated into the range for my second shooting stage. This time I stood. With my unzeroed rifle I was grateful to hit three targets. Struggling, I tried to stay positive and ski the next loop fast.

  I arrived at the range for my third shooting phase, where I would be prone again. Knowing that I would certainly miss all five targets, I shot as quickly as I could and jumped up to my skis again. While moving forward, reslinging my rifle onto my back, and returning my hands to my pole grips, one of my poles slipped from under my arm. The tip hit the snow right in front of my boot.

  The result was much like ramming a broomstick into the spokes of a bicycle.

  I didn’t even have time to put my hands out before landing hard on my chin. As if cracking my head on an icy surface wasn’t bad enough, this sad chain reaction unfolded right in front of the spectators’ grandstand. And if that didn’t kill every last molecule of pride within me, scrambling up off the snow and having a camera—an ESPN camera—pushed into my face did.

  The only documentation my family would have of my entire journey to get to this point would be of my missing all my shots and then tripping myself in front of God and country on national television. And if one person on earth might’ve missed my idiotic wreck, that individual would certainly be able to catch it on the sports comedy reel later that night!

  All fragments of pride I had about racing in the Olympic trials for biathlon lay shattered beyond repair as I skated over them and out of the range.

  Still driving hard, I entered a nearly empty range for the last five standing shots of the race. Again I hit three targets and dropped two. The crowds were gone now, and the entire area lay vacant and hollow. Grateful they’d left, I felt completely deflated and embarrassed that I’d fallen in such a dumb way in front of everyone.


  This feeling exposed a deeper sadness. The great depth of my humiliation was only eclipsed by the greater depth of my pride. None of my vanquished efforts to do my best mattered now. What more could possibly go wrong on this day? That single thought seemed to hang in my draft as I reslung my rifle and skied away.

  The last loop before the finish consisted of a steep descent that swept sharply through a maze of turns toward the icy seas of the Cook Inlet. As the snow continued to harden in the dilapidating weather, I felt as if I were howling down a bobsled course instead of a skate-skiing track.

  Crouching into a full tuck, I fought to keep my chattering boards under me. Banking one ski-shuddering turn after another, my eyes watered from the combined assault of cold and speed. As I screamed around one of the final turns, I looked down the track to see a fully grown moose standing broadside across the trail!

  She was huge, and because she stood perpendicular to the course, she blocked the entire track.

  At the speed I was traveling, I had about two seconds to decide if I could fit under her belly or under her tail. Belly? Tail? Belly? TAIL!

  Like a rocket, I flashed behind her. She lunged forward and kicked straight out at the sudden intruder beneath her hocks.

  Thankfully, she missed. My speed carried me well beyond her reflexes. My prayer was reduced to, Don’t fall, don’t fall, don’t fall! During a brief backward glance, I saw her spin toward me and take several trotting strides down the course. Her large ears were pressed back, and her head was down in a position of clear warning: “If I could catch you, I would kill you!”

  By God’s mercy I didn’t fall. The icy track quickly carried me beyond her threat.

  It wasn’t until I reached the bottom of the incline and began racing across the flats that I realized this was the highest heart rate I’d ever experienced while skiing down a hill! Now the only obstacle that stood between me and the finish line was one of the toughest uphills in the entire park. The incline was known by a number of foul names because it was so difficult to climb with a body already taxed to its limits.