We left Mora at 2 A.M. with snow falling, headed for the Arctic Circle. Mora was Mora, Sweden, the small town that鈥檚 famous as the end point of the 90-kilometer Vasaloppet, the oldest and largest race in cross-country skiing. I听first completed it back in the 1980s, when I was making a film with National Geographic听about doing, in a single year, all the races in the European series known as . One of the sponsors was , which also sponsored the Swedish marathon team that听dominated the race circuit that year. Out of pity for my sad skiing ability, Karhu asked the team鈥檚 coach, Kjell Kratz, to help me out, and we鈥檝e been close friends ever since. Over the decades, Kjell鈥檚 red house, which is a short walk from the finish line of the Vasaloppet, has become a second home for me.

The week before, I鈥檇 skied the 2019 and a crazy new event, , which involves negotiating听the same course at night, helped along by torches, headlamps, and moonlight. After the race, I听walked back to Kjell鈥檚 house through a sleeping neighborhood, thinking how lucky I鈥檇 been to stumble into this world of skiing, snow, and Scandinavia. It had sustained me in dark times and was always there for me鈥攚aiting, never disappointing. In previous听years after the Vasa, I鈥檇 felt a mix of relief that I鈥檇 made it to the finish听tinged with a melancholy that this signaled the beginning of the end of winter. It made me long for an endless ski season听where the snow was always fresh and the tracks stretched forever beyond the horizon.

A few years ago, I heard about an event in Finland called . The idea seemed irresistibly loony: a 420-kilometer cross-country ski all the way across Finland, from the Russian line to the Swedish line. Border to Border听had been held every March for more than 30 years, run by volunteers, never advertised or commercialized, just one of those wild听challenges that attracts a self-selecting group of ski nuts. I听signed up and was trying to figure out the best way to get there from Mora听when Kjell, who was then 76, announced that he was going, too, and that we would drive.

鈥淭hat鈥檒l take us two days, right?鈥� I said. It was about 750 miles away, and Mora was just south of the Arctic Circle. This was during an old-fashioned Swedish winter that seemed to bring heavy snow every day.

Kjell eyed me with a look of disappointment that I鈥檇 come to know well, like the time I听suggested we might want to stop and sleep when driving from Mora to a race in Italy. 鈥淭wo days?鈥� he said. 鈥淥ut of the question. It is nothing.鈥�

Which is how we ended up leaving Mora in the middle of the night, heading north to Lapland, the region that鈥檚 home to nomadic reindeer herders known in Finland, Sweden, and Norway as the Sami. Kjell is a famously fast driver. One time, near the start of the Vasaloppet, he听dropped me off to stay with a friend. Her husband, a renowned Swedish race-car driver, saw Kjell roaring away, came into the house wide-eyed, and asked, 鈥淲ho was that lunatic?鈥�

Kjell had lined up a job waxing skis at the a few days after the finish of Border to Border, and his Volvo station wagon was packed with exotic waxes of every variety. As we rocketed past a double semi on a blind curve in heavy snow, I fell asleep pondering the flammable qualities of fluoro.

We drove up the eastern coast of Sweden, the sun rising over frozen pieces of the Baltic. We arrived just after dark at a cluster of buildings deep in the woods, buried in snow. The place was called the , and when I听tried to find out more about it online, two nearby attractions听were mentioned: and .

About 30 skiers were there, most on the older side, and they had the lean and perpetually tired look of endurance devotees who鈥檇 probably pushed their bodies too hard. A few very fit-looking younger women鈥擜mericans and Canadians, as it turned out鈥攕tudied posted maps that showed each day鈥檚 route. They described the first day, tomorrow, as an 鈥渆asy warm-up.鈥� It was 42 kilometers, with a long climb.

A sign announced that there would be two dinners served each evening, one around five, after skiing, and another at eight, after the nightly briefing for the next day. At the first dinner, the group ate with the quiet determination of people who understood that eating enough was a key to success.

Later that night, after I鈥檇 taken a sauna鈥�in Finland there鈥檚 always a sauna鈥擨 stepped out and looked at a frozen lake, glistening in the reflected glow of the moonlight. A short dock led to a ladder descending into a hole in the ice. I stood there sweating, the snow falling softly, and knew there was no place in the world I鈥檇 rather be.

The next morning, we bused a short distance to a trailhead near the Russian border, which was beside one of the endless frozen lakes that we would cross during the event. A pair of Germans took off, and I knew that finishing first each day would mean a lot to them. I鈥檇 never done a multi-day ski event before, but I鈥檇 done enough group bike trips to know that there will always be people who act like they鈥檙e wearing a numbered bib. For reasons I didn鈥檛 quite understand but accepted gratefully, I never felt competitive in these situations, perhaps because there had been听other parts of my life in which winning had meant too much.

Kjell had followed the bus in his Volvo; now he studied the snow with the concentration of a bomb maker soldering wires to a detonator. I鈥檇 brought two pairs of skis. One was prepped with wax tape, a magical application that went on like masking tape and delivered shockingly good results in a wide variety of conditions. The other was treated with standard Start hard waxes for cold weather. (Kjell was a Start rep and viewed all other waxes with suspicion.)

Conditions this听morning: ten degrees Fahrenheit, with a projected high of fifteen. 鈥淧erfect skiing weather,鈥� Kjell announced, but I knew he would say that of anything short of rain. He handed me the hard-waxed skis and announced solemnly, 鈥淭hese will work.鈥�

He was right, of course. When you鈥檙e a mediocre skier, there鈥檚 a certain magic to having perfectly waxed skis鈥攊t鈥檚 as if you changed running shoes and suddenly started knocking off miles two minutes faster.

In the Border to Border ski, inevitably, the first five or so kilometers were across a frozen lake. Minnesota is called the Land of 10,000 Lakes and actually has . Finns call听Finland the Land of 1,000 Lakes, and it has听. Somewhere in there are the makings of what passes for a joke in this taciturn country and something very profound about the Finnish people. As the saying goes, the introvert Finn looks at your feet while talking; the extrovert looks at your knees. These are people defined by understatement.

This temperament suits the landscape perfectly. Finland is not known for visual extremes, breathtaking vistas, or high peaks. Mostly it鈥檚 marked by endless expanses of forests, lakes, rivers, rolling hills, small towns, and neat farms. During Border to Border, there was no hint of spring at all.

We started our ski on a track made by volunteers听who used a snowmobile dragging a weighted sled. Around midmorning, we connected with the beautifully groomed trails of the Ruka system.

In the cross-country world, is famous for being a place where elite teams gather to train in the early season. Ruka鈥檚 managers store massive amounts of snow鈥攊ncreasingly a thing in nordic skiing鈥攁nd there鈥檚 always skiable track by the third week of October. For a groupie like me, skiing in the Ruka system was like trotting onto the field at Fenway. With small caf茅s situated along the route and trail signs pointing in every direction, this was the alternative universe I鈥檇 long sought, where skiing was the organizing principle of life, both transportation and sport, and other endeavors, like work, were of far less importance. Life was here. That other stuff was what you did because you really couldn鈥檛 ski all the time.

The Border to Border volunteers had set up lunch on the porch of a trackside caf茅. Kjell was waiting inside. 鈥淭he wax is fantastic,鈥� I told him, sitting at a wooden table. He frowned. 鈥淥f course it is.鈥�

The three women I鈥檇 seen the night before鈥攚ho鈥檇 called today a warm-up鈥攃ame in. I was surprised that I was ahead of them, but Kjell shook his head, smiling, and said,听鈥淭hey were here a half-hour ago and just went back to the bus to get some clothes.鈥� I laughed. The salmon soup was amazing.

That night we stayed in a sprawling spa hotel just off the track. I walked in, still a little dazed from the cold, sweating from a cluster of short, sharp hills in the final kilometers, and for a moment I thought I might have been hallucinating. This was a destination resort, geared to families, complete with a water park. It was warm and slightly moist inside, almost tropical. I stood there, feeling the melting icicles that hung from my sweaty hat, while families walked around in white robes headed to the spa or pool. Kjell approached with a beer in one hand and room keys in the other. 鈥淚 love this place,鈥� he beamed. 鈥淭he wax room is superb. The first dinner is in an hour. Sauna now.鈥�

The Finns consistently rank as in surveys that show the United States far below. After a long and troubled history, they have carefully constructed a society that seems to work better than most, where health care and education are considered a right of citizenship and conspicuous displays of wealth are discouraged. Their ethos of fairness affects every element of society. Even traffic fines are assessed based on income, which is how a Nokia executive ended up paying for听speeding in a 30-mile-per-hour zone. But this benign image of Finland hides a bloody, complicated history of desperate fights to maintain a distinct Finnish identity free of foreign dominance.

I thought about that history the next day听when we skied for hours atop by German-organized slave labor. A Finn I met, who was out for his daily ski, told me: 鈥淲e are skiing on a road of bones.鈥�

, the Finns fought the Russians, first alone and later in an alliance of accommodation with the Germans. Facing a far-superior force, the Finns , maximizing their ability to be comfortable in bitter cold against Russian conscripts who were ill prepared to live and fight in such conditions. They built just behind the front lines and taunted the freezing enemy.

This deeply acculturated embrace of winter was ingrained in the Border to Border ski; every 15 kilometers or so, a few volunteers would be waiting along the track by a fire, resting and snacking. In near zero temperatures and heavy snow, they looked as comfortable as Hawaiians on the beach.

On the second day, we slogged a slow and snowy 53听kilometers. When I first looked at the daily distances in Border to Border, I听figured that 10 kilometers per hour would be a nice pace. But on a day of heavy snow and no need to press hard, I found myself quite happy to poke along at a rate听that started to feel more like walking on skis than skiing. When I finally finished and met Kjell in the lobby of that night鈥檚 hotel, he pointed to my Garmin watch. 鈥淚 think we should get you a calendar, not a watch,鈥� he said. Which, as nordic ski humor goes, wasn鈥檛 bad.

We were staying at one of the sport hotels popular in Scandinavia. A banner in the lobby read,听鈥淓at. Sleep. Train. Repeat.鈥� I鈥檇 stayed in Swedish hotels like this and always found them idyllic. There were small rooms, big buffets, and a听sauna that was always hot.

I鈥檇 feared my body would start breaking down after back-to-back long days听but was pleasantly shocked to feel myself growing stronger and more comfortable with the distance, most likely because of the easy pace, regular feed stops, and absence of outside stress. It was still exhausting, but a world in which the most critical questions of the day were听how to wax and how much to eat is rejuvenating in ways that are difficult to replicate. Most of the third day was spent on groomed trail systems with warming huts at intersections. Every so often, there was a fire pit听where locals would be roasting the inevitable sausages on sticks. The perfect ski life started to seem normal, as if this was听how one was intended to live.

The fourth day was the longest scheduled, at just under 90 kilometers, the total length of the Vasaloppet. At the start of every Vasa, I鈥檇 felt a mix of dread and anxiety about my ability to finish. But this morning, I was relaxed and comfortable. The weather had turned warmer鈥攁round 32 degrees鈥攚ith snow falling, making for the ultimate waxing nightmare. I was on my , using Start wax tape, and after the first five kilometers, I could have sold the product to other skiers for a fortune. Every wax combination seemed to be failing: snow got stuck under skis, which led to much scraping and cursing. I had no problems, and I felt somewhat guilty and baffled, as I had been many times before, about why Start tape wasn鈥檛 used more widely.

I鈥檇 long ago learned from my long-distance cycling hero, the late Bob Breedlove, that the secret to tough days is to not think about the finish听but to consume the course 鈥渓ike the ant eats the elephant, bite by bite.鈥� It was difficult to read my Garmin wrist GPS in the wet snow, so I gave up trying to figure out where I was. Late in the afternoon, I came to one of the feed stations that had been set up inside the traditional, tepee-like structure used by the Sami. As soon as I stepped inside, my goggles fogged, but when I pulled them up, there was Kjell, deep in a heated conversation with one of the volunteers鈥攚ho was the tallest man I鈥檇 seen in Finland. All at once I felt exhausted. It always seemed that way when doing the long stuff. You feel fine when you鈥檙e moving, but once you stop, the hammer falls.

鈥淗ow did you get here?鈥� I asked, the words feeling strange coming out of my frozen mouth. As far as I could tell, we were deep inside a Finnish wilderness. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a road,鈥� he said. I stepped outside. In the near whiteout, I could barely see Kjell鈥檚 Volvo in the falling snow. I鈥檇 never felt so happy in my life.

鈥淓nough?鈥� he asked gently. He was telling me it was OK if I wanted to bail out and head to the hotel. 鈥淓nough,鈥� I said.

In the short ride to another sport hotel, down a beautifully plowed dirt road that seemed to stretch to the Arctic Circle, I experienced a strange feeling of relief. I鈥檝e come in last in events before, but I was not a guy who DNF鈥檇. Today, putting my skis in the car, I felt not a twinge of regret or shame as I watched other skiers cross the road, heads down against the snow, determined to finish the last 20 kilometers. I鈥檇 always told myself I did these crazy endurance events for fun and not to prove anything, but of course听that was just a convenient lie. I always had something to prove, though I couldn鈥檛 have told you precisely what it was. Perhaps now, after decades of skiing, I was stumbling into some hidden secret:听that it鈥檚 OK听to enjoy the sport because, well, it鈥檚 enjoyable.

I devoured both dinners that night and listened to two Canadians and an American laugh about the day. They were dismissive of what they鈥檇 accomplished, in the way of people who are accustomed to making the difficult seem easy. The next day鈥檚 ski was 鈥渙nly鈥� 46 kilometers, they said. A walk in the park.

But it turned out to be the hardest day we had. Most of the route was on a narrow track laid down by a snowmobile and sled. The snowstorm of the day before was followed by a vicious cold wind that obliterated the course anytime there was a break in the trees. I found myself struggling across a wide expanse of what I thought, from the map, was a bog听and wondering if I was even close to being on course.

I had also stupidly skied past the last feed station, eager to be done for the day. So now I was bonking. In the distance, I could just make out a stake with a yellow ribbon, the course marker听used by Border to Border volunteers. The wind was straight in my face, blowing icy snow that bit into my skin, making it hard to look up. My race poles had narrow baskets that went through the drifted snow like spears. I floundered across the bog exhausted, finding it hard to start moving again anytime I stopped. In the Arctic, there鈥檚 a phrase used to describe people who retreat to their tent and don鈥檛 want to come out: 鈥渢ent flu.鈥� I had a bad case.

Ultimately, I was able to see the red houses where the day鈥檚 route ended. There were no hotels along this section of the track. The overnight stop was an old schoolhouse that had been converted to a clubhouse for a local ski team鈥攚ith, of course, a large sauna attached. I bent over to take off my skis and felt dizzy, staggering a bit as I came up. One of the German guys walked听back from the sauna鈥攈e鈥檇 finished long before鈥攁nd put a firm, steadying hand on my shoulder. 鈥淗ard day,鈥� he said. I nodded. 鈥淕o eat.鈥� He motioned toward the ski club.

Inside was a food spread I鈥檇 been dreaming about for the past few hours. Kjell was there with a small group, watching a Norwegian biathlon race on TV. I ate and ate, too tired to talk. I could feel myself falling asleep while eating, which I hadn鈥檛 realized was possible. I finally stood to eat, so I wouldn鈥檛 end up with my face in the food.

The organizers had advised everyone to bring a sleeping bag for the stop at the schoolhouse, and I鈥檇 dutifully brought one. But when Kjell saw this request on the itinerary back in Mora, he was adamant: 鈥淲e don鈥檛 do this,鈥� he said. So I dragged myself out to his car, and we drove back to the hotel where we鈥檇 spent the previous night. At a small store across the street, I bought as much chocolate as I could carry, ate most of it before I got inside the hotel, and feel asleep on my bed, still wearing my ski clothes.

The last day was long听but mostly on beautiful tracks and easy terrain, the sun shinning, no wind, the sort of day that makes听you want to ski forever. There was an end-of-term lightness with the group, a few听impromptu sprints to see who still had some snap鈥擨 didn鈥檛 even try鈥攁nd many hours of quiet skiing. Mostly I skied alone, not wanting to worry about keeping up or holding anyone back, deep in my own thoughts and rhythms. I reached the banner at the end of the course, with that unique听feeling of relief and regret that comes from finishing a challenge that鈥檚 right at the edge of your capabilities. I took off my skis, sweating, a bit unsteady. Two students from the nearby high school brought over hot cider and the now familiar sausage on a stick. They hovered quietly, watching me, and I realized they were wondering if I might fall over. Finally one of them, a tall girl with hair so blond it looked almost white, said softly, 鈥淚t was a good ski, no?鈥�

The tour ends听with a banquet and a night of skits presented by the different nationalities represented during the ski, but Kjell would have none of that. His wax plans for the Birkebeiner had changed, and he wanted to drive back to Mora immediately after the finish. I was too tired to argue, and the thought of being back at Kjell鈥檚 house had its appeal. We stopped at the home of a friend of Kjell鈥檚 a few miles from the finish for coffee. He was a Start wax pro married to a former Finnish national team skier. He lived in the听farmhouse he had been born in, right on the Torne River that separated Finland from Sweden.

When I asked him what happened to his family during the war, he said his mother鈥檚 family had gone over the river into Sweden, and the Germans had used the house as a field hospital. When his family returned, the floor and walls were saturated in blood. They spent weeks cleaning. He talked about it with the matter-of-fact tone that summed up the tough resilience and determination of the Finns. It鈥檚 such a national character trait that they have a word for it: . It was sisu that got you through war and the long Finnish winters.

We made it back to Mora in the early morning. The finish line of the Vasaloppet on the town鈥檚 main street had been dismantled. There was a hint of a warmth in the air. A few cyclists were out before sunrise; winter was ending. But I felt better knowing it was still out there in Lapland, waiting. For a brief moment, I thought about going back and starting over. Then Kjell said, 鈥淚t took us 16 hours to get there. Next year I think we can do it in 12.鈥�

I told him I thought he was right.

The post The Best Way to See Finland? Ski Finland. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

When I first saw him, I had to laugh.

Bob Breedlove

Bob Breedlove

It was in the middle of Arizona on the first day of a training camp, hot and windy, and most of us were suffering. But there was this one guy who kept riding up and down, smiling and waving, easily doubling our distance. Though he wasn't a big guy, his muscles bulged out of ragged shorts and a jersey with hacked-off sleeves, as if the Incredible Hulk had taken up cycling and was suddenly bursting out. And he was wearing these bright orange gloves.

I assumed, of course, he was a total nut.

That night, I was looking forward to a lecture at the camp by Dr. Bob Breedlove, a fellow I'd never met but a legend in the cycling world. He was the Eddie Merckx of ultra-cycling, a guy who had done it all. He was a veteran of several Race Across Americas (RAAM), including first place finishes on a tandem, and was the only human who had ever completed a RAAM and then turned around and raced back across the country. They called that little feat a “double crossing,” and Bob Breedlove had done it in 22 and a half days. Plus, he was an orthopedic surgeon and expert on the arcane sciences of endurance sport. Clearly a very impressive human.

And in walks the same guy I'd seen imitating the Incredible Hulk in orange gloves. “I'm Bob Breedlove.” The packed room burst into applause. He gave a big grin and looked embarrassed. “I like to ride bikes.”

It's no secret that athletes who can perform at the top level of super endurance endeavors may not lead the most balanced of lives. The same obsession that blesses them with hyper-intense moments is often an excuse to lead sharply focused and limited lives. But Bob was a guy who burst through life like a kid running through a sprinkler on a hot Iowa day, full of infectious joy and curiosity.

He had this way of making the ordinary seem extraordinary鈥nd the extraordinary almost ordinary. That middle America, that Iowa stuff, like family and community, he embraced with a fierce, almost giddy enthusiasm-married to a wonderful woman he met when he was six, father of four, a Deacon in his church, a non-stop Iowa booster. Bob was the kind of guy who thought it was so great that Des Moines got a minor league hockey team, he not only went to every game, his family invited young players to live with them during the season. Over the last few days, The Des Moines Register has been full of letters from former patients Bob had operated on and refused payment from. “I had lost my insurance but Dr. Bob still鈥�”

Of his truly superhuman cycling feats, he was perpetually modest and almost nonchalant, more interested in you than himself. In 2003 he asked me to ride the 750-mile Paris-Brest-Paris (PBP) event with him when his tandem partner dropped out at the last minute. I had never ridden a tandem and had no desire to ride one, but, of course, I said yes. It was like Michael Jordan calling and asking if you wanted to play in a pick up game.

Bob showed up in Paris with his longtime support crew; a brand new Calfee tandem painted in red, white, and blue and cases of Spizz, the liquid diet he lived on for long rides. It was a traveling endurance circus radiating this unlikely mix of confidence, good will, and sheer silliness that was Bob's unique style. We laughed and joked across France. At one of the final control points, Bob stopped a Swedish woman rider who was in the process of turning in her number, abandoning the race.

“What are you doing?” he asked with that big smile of his.

“I'm finished with PBP,” she announced, sounding angry and relieved.

Bob nodded. “Sure. Hey, what's your favorite 100-kilometer training ride back home? An easy one.”

This exhausted woman stared at Bob as if he were mad, but then he gave her that grin and she described a beautiful ride of rolling hills near her home.

“Fine,” Bob nodded. “So that's the ride you're going to do today. Forget about PBP. All you do is get on your bike and ride that ride in your head. You can handle that ride any day, right?”

She stared and then started to smile, if only a little. “That's all you have to do today,” Bob said gently. “Just ride that little 100k ride you love. Easy as pie.”

Later that day, back at the finish outside of Paris, I saw her hug Bob and burst into tears.

I spoke with Bob during this last RAAM and he was in terrific spirits, having a great race. “We should do RAAM as a team,” he teased. “That way I can slow down and see more of the country.”

There's a photo of Bob on the RAAM site as he climbs Wolf Creek pass in Colorado. He's got that focused look, a hint of a smile, muscles glinting, a big vista behind him, and 2,000 miles yet to go. That's Bob Breedlove. My hero.

For more on Breedlove and the accident that took his life, read

The post Bob Breedlove: Life of a RAAM Legend appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Take, for instance, the thighbone theory, an ostensible favorite of his longtime coach, Jos茅 Miguel Echavarri. “The secret’s in the length of his build,” he says. “His legs provide more power than other riders can generate.”

Or the weight theory, advanced by Spanish cycling journalists like Inglo Munoyerro, who has followed Indurain since he was a teenager. “He used to be a little heavier,” Munoyerro says. “It makes a big difference.”

Then there’s the temperament theory. Temperament, as in the placid demeanor that Indurain manages to maintain even in the most trying of moments. Temperament, as in his uncanny ability to mask his emotions (read suffering) from his opponents. And temperament, as in patience, a point that teammate Andy Hampsten stresses. “Miguel was willing to work his way up through the ranks of his team,” he says, “even though he was already good enough to be the star. It helped him develop without burning out too early.”

There is also the heart-and-lung theory, one that I’m a bit partial to. True believers in the heart-and-lung theory insist that Indurain’s heart beats once a day or so and that his lungs are the size of a pair of Honda Civics parked side by side. Sports Illustrated was quite taken with this notion, promising in a 1993 article that Indurain’s lungs were “so huge that if you look carefully at his lower back as he pedals a bike, you can make out their gentle heaving.”

And finally, my favorite: the alien theory. Alien, as in something not of this galaxy; alien, as in, “He’s an extraterrestrial,” which is what former world champion and rival Gianni Bugno of Italy said after Indurain trounced the field by more than four minutes in a 1992 Tour de France time trial. I like the alien theory because it’s the only one that makes any sense. Clearly the secret of Indurain’s success can’t be a magic thighbone, or cycling teams would regularly raid the NBA for talent. Besides, Indurain is only six-foot-two, not even the size of a decent point guard.

Nor is it plausible that superstardom came to Indurain simply because he lost weight. I’ve seen pictures of the young Miguel, and it’s not like he was being recruited by the World Wrestling Federation. Maybe he’s lost a few pounds since his more awkward years, but not more than five.

Apparently, however, something did happen. And Indurain, who as a young scrub in the 1980s always showed promise but rarely demonstrated brilliance, became arguably the greatest cyclist of all time. This month, he stands poised to win an unprecedented fifth consecutive Tour de France, with the possibility of a sixth hanging on the horizon like a harvest moon.

Which is why, last spring, I went to the outskirts of Pamplona, where Indurain makes his home not far from the family farm where he grew up and where his team, Banesto, is based. I wanted my own theory.

The Banesto boys have parked the getaway cars at the edge of Estella, a small Basque town about 70 miles from Pamplona. There are several land-yacht Mercedeses, a large equipment truck, a small van, a camper, each vehicle emblazoned with BANESTO and rigged with a roof rack for cradling exquisite Pinarello bikes.

In three months this little armada will be caravanning around France while Banesto’s soldiers fight for their lives in the Tour de France before a worldwide television audience and thousands of reporters, most, no doubt, hoping they’ll fail. But on this April day, it’s just spring training, and the crowd that’s gathered is here to celebrate the beginning of the European cycling season.

Estella, where this 122-mile race starts and finishes, is a beautiful little town set among hills and bisected by the Rio Ega. Under the steeple of a twelfth-century Romanesque church, the town square is roped off and packed with racers wearing flashy uniforms that advertise their sponsors, everything from a baking conglomerate to a national society for the blind. The eight teams are all Spanish, and though there are security guards, no one seems to mind the hordes of kids who scurry under the ropes to hustle autographs and gawk at the Campagnolo gear. It’s a bright and balmy day, with the musky smell of txistorra sausage, a Basque specialty seasoned with garlic and red pepper, wafting from a tent next to the registration desks. The crowd lines up for hunks of txistorra on slabs of crusty baguette, as, much to my amazement, do most of the 148 racers. Indurain, to my disappointment, is nowhere to be found.

“I will ride over 30,000 kilometers this year to help Miguel win the Tour,” says 21-year-old Vincente Aparicio, explaining the ethic to which all of Team Banesto adheres. It’s 15 minutes before the race, and Aparicio is sitting on a bench, enjoying the warm sun and the quaint prerace fanfare. He’s dark and delicately handsome, and if he ever wins the Tour himself, his looks are sure to attract sponsors. But, odds are, the most he can ever hope for is the chance to win a stage. For now, he says, “I work for Miguel.”

Banesto, perhaps more than other teams, has been constructed with one mission: to win the Tour de France. A large banking corporation pours tremendous resources, roughly $11 million per year, behind two dozen cyclists and a couple dozen support staff with the explicit purpose of constructing an environment, both on and off the course, that will allow Miguel Indurain to be the best bicycle racer in the world during one month of the year. The race strategy is surprisingly simple. Their star devastates the opposition in time trials–he has won all but one of the Tour time trials in the last three years–and then, with the help of his team, refuses to be dropped in the mountains by spindly climbing specialists. It’s a strategy no other team can imitate, quite simply because nobody else has Indurain.

Suddenly, a police motorcycle rolls into the square, siren blaring and lights flashing, clearing a path for a single cyclist. The man’s Banesto cap is canted jauntily low over his right eye in his trademark style. Even as he is rushed by a frenzied crowd of mostly children, he seems bemused, a touch detached. The red-coated officer looks over his shoulder and realizes that the man he is supposed to be guarding has almost been knocked off his bike by a group of ten-year-olds and is now signing every race program, hat, and official Banesto water bottle thrust his way. The other teams work hard to ignore Indurain’s arrival.

I press Aparicio, the young Banesto soldier, for Indurain secrets. Does he train differently? More speed work? More distance?

“No,” he answers, a smile playing across his face, as if it were a silly question. “Of course not.”

Does he train with the team?

Again the smile. “We never train as a team,” he says. “We race as a team. One hundred race days a year.”

Does he train with his brother?

“He trains alone, like we all do.”

So why do you think he keeps winning the Tour de France?

Shrug. It’s a look that screams, Don’t you understand? Then he says, “He is Miguel, of course.”

Straddling his bike, signing autographs on this morning, Indurain radiates none of the repressed fury of a Bernard Hinault or the wiry tension of an Eddy Merckx, both of whom have five Tour de France victories to their credit, though not back to back. And unlike Greg LeMond, who always seemed a little uneasy when he wasn’t on his bike, Indurain looks quite at peace in this adoring throng. Interestingly, napping is said to be his only real hobby. He has a long, quintessentially Basque face, taut and somber. At 180 pounds, he has the overdeveloped legs of a racer on a lean frame that, no, shows no sign of baby fat, and his femurs do seem to stretch from knee to shoulder. I strain hard to see for myself the humongous lungs, and I stare at his neck, hoping to spot his carotid pulsing at the fabled 28 beats per minute. In truth, he looks like just another strapping bike racer, though something about him does seem quietly powerful and deeply private. So private that Prudencio, his younger brother and a domestique on Team Banesto, will often sign autographs for Miguel when the star grows weary of the crowds. His expression says, I will stand here and make nice and pleasant, but do not think for a moment that you are going to come close to where I live or what I hold dear.

Just as I press through the ring of giddy children, Indurain disappears in a scrum of Banesto riders. He pedals past me, and I see that smile: You there, with the notebook and recorder, you want more than an autograph, don’t you? Well, my friend, you will learn…

About an hour later, I do learn a little, not talking to Indurain, but watching him. At the start of a long climb about 50 miles into the race, a promising young Banesto rider named Santiago Blanco gets a flat tire. Quickly, a teammate in the second pack exchanges bikes with him, but there is a moment of panic as other Banesto riders gather around to help Blanco work his way back to the lead group, which is now out of sight down the road. Suddenly Indurain drops back from the lead to help, and a somewhat chaotic Banesto team takes on a tight, synchronous shape. “He doesn’t make a big deal out of it, yelling instructions like a lot of the Italians,” Andy Hampsten, the longtime 7-Eleven and Motorola rider who this year became Banesto’s only American member, will comment later. “It’s more a look and a nod, and in a low voice he says, ‘Tranquil, tranquil…’ That’s all it took. We regrouped and started working Santiago forward.”

Twelve miles farther, in Tafalla, a rural Basque village not far from his birthplace, Indurain “broke the pack into a thousand pieces,” as a teammate will declare after the race. He rides out in front for 19 miles, showing classic Indurain form: His bicycle hardly rocks back and forth, and his mouth is closed instead of open and gasping for air. Then, purposefully, he relinquishes the lead.

In the bars of Estella, where the patrons have passed up the wildly popular afternoon Basque soap opera Top Street to watch the race on television, Indurain’s mediocre performance is, oddly enough, deemed further proof of the man’s brilliance. Indurain led the pack just long enough to send a clear message: This year, like the four years before, he has the stuff, he has the goods to control a race, but today he will let somebody else have the glory.

Indurain crosses the finish line in the middle of the field, and immediately he’s off his bike and speaking to reporters and fans in a voice that seems laughably flat. It’s my chance to stare face to face with the great one. My chance to pick his brain. What happened today, I want to know. “People always want you to be at the top, but that’s not always possible,” he says. “I try to give my maximum, but if the day is not mine, another teammate will lead our team.”

He answers other questions in the same maddeningly detached manner. Did it give him a thrill that the race went through Villava, his hometown?

“When I am in the race, I’m only thinking about the race.”

Will he ride in the Giro, the Italian equivalent of the Tour de France and an event he’s won twice?

“It’s possible,” he says.

I want to scream, Miguel! Miguel! What’s going on here? Is it your femur? Your weight? How about temperament? Are you an alien? But I don’t.

I begin to understand, however, why Pedro Delgado, the only other Spaniard to win the Tour in the last two decades once said, “I was his roommate for years, and even I don’t know him.”

The Spanish cycling reporters all accept Indurain’s aloofness and find my frustration a tad amusing. Apparently, they like that he’s this way. Eventually Indurain–still smiling, still polite–is spirited away in a Banesto Mercedes. That’s when a local, sensing my frustration, takes me aside and asks, “Have you been to the Bar Maika in Villava? There is a man there, he knows Miguel better than Miguel.”

Villava is a pleasant collection of houses and apartment buildings that feels more like a suburb of Pamplona than the centuries-old Basque village it is. From the outside, the Bar Maika looks like any of Spain’s thousands of little bars. Inside, though, it is something of a religious shrine. Locals come for a shot of Rioja wine and gaze through the acrid cigarette smoke at four yellow Tour de France winner’s jerseys that hang in glass cases on one wall. Framing the yellow jerseys are a pair of shocking pink ones, awarded to Indurain for his wins in the Giro d’Italia. It’s an odd juxtaposition, a bit like wandering into the Dew Drop Inn and finding a bunch of Super Bowl trophies jammed up next to the Donkey Kong game.

This is the world headquarters of the Miguel Indurain fan club, Pe帽a Miguel Indurain. In the rear is a tiny office where I find Aitor David, a local welder, who organized the club in 1990. “Really,” he says, “I was just making official what had existed for years.” David remembers when a 14-year-old Indurain won the 400-meter district track championship and tells the story of the time when Miguel’s first bike was stolen and his father bought him another one and how Miguel cried when he raced with it and was beaten by the older kids who had better bikes. “People like to say Miguel was a poor farm boy,” says David, shaking his head and chuckling. “Farm, yes. Poor, no. His father bought him a better bike. His first fast bike.”

On Sunday afternoon, when the bar is filled with the transgenerational mix of old men and young families that is so common in Europe and rare in America, certain truths–about Indurain and European cycling–begin to emerge. This is an intensely professional sport within which still beats the heart of an amateur. And what impresses David and the loyal patrons of Pe帽a Miguel Indurain is not the amount of money that Indurain makes (about $4 million a year), but the expertise and grace that he brings to his profession. They love Miguel because he can ride a bicycle better and faster than anyone else in the world, which is really a very simple and pure endeavor. And of course they love the fact that Miguel has not interpreted his extraordinary talent as a mandate to become a personality. Where others see dullness, they see the kid who hated to lose to the older boys and laughed when they misspelled his name when he won his first amateur victory in the 1983 Spanish championships.

Around the Bar Maika, most Indurain fans can recount his progression to Greatness: In 1985, he raced in the Tour for the first time and dropped out after the fourth stage. The next year, he quit after the 12th. Then gradually and carefully–two of Indurain’s favorite adverbs–he worked his way to the top: 97th place in 1987, followed by 47th, 17th, tenth, and then finally his victory in 1991.

“Miguel is just so intelligent,” says David.

I like this notion and put it at the top of my list, next to the alien theory. But what exactly does he mean?

“On any day, a dozen, maybe two dozen riders can win a race,” David explains. “Miguel has the deep intelligence to always know himself, his teammates, his opponents. He never chases an unimportant breakaway and always has a strategy to win.”

What David really means, I decide, is that Indurain has some profound sense of self and place that has served him well, allowing him gradually to reach a potential that others might possess but never realize. It is not accidental that Indurain has raced for only three teams his entire career–his local club in Villava, an amateur team sponsored by Reynolds, and Banesto, his sole professional squad. And at Banesto, Indurain is still guided by his coach from his amateur days, Jos茅 Miguel Echavarri. Indurain has referred many times to his team as a family, “with Echavarri as the father and the other riders as my brothers.”

When the 150 original members of Pe帽a Miguel Indurain fan club rush out of the Bar Maika to light bottle rockets after their man wins a stage in the Tour de France, they are celebrating not just his victory, but a way of life. This is not Madrid or Barcelona, full of rich and important people, but a village culture that they are proud to call uncomplicated and quiet–just like Indurain. They love that Indurain has lived most of his life on his parents’ farm with his brother and three sisters. And when he married a local girl–not some Paris model–last year, they moved to their own small farm about a mile away. Isn’t it amazing that a guy they see all the time out on his training rides could win four Tours de France and be the odds-on favorite to win more Tours than anyone else in history? So what if he’s not very quotable–neither are they.

“When he comes from the Tour,” David tells me, as if victory in July were something to be counted on, just like the running of the bulls through the streets of Pamplona in June, “he always goes straight to the church and presents a jersey in thanks for his success and leaves flowers at the statue of the Virgin of Rosario.” The club leader smiles and sips his martini. “And Miguel comes here, and we celebrate all night.

“This year,” David continues, “there will be more wine, more fireworks, more people.” He shakes his head in wonderment and gestures toward the people passing outside the bar. “The streets will be filled like never before.” He then looks at the yellow jerseys. “We always believed he could win many races,” he says, finding it hard to keep pride in check as he reveals what is perhaps the most complete theory yet about Miguel Indurain. “It is destiny that Miguel wins. He is Miguel, of course.”

Stuart Stevens’s book Scorched Earth was recently published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

The post “He Is Miguel, of Course” appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

鈥淥K,鈥澨齮he doctor said when we settled into his examination room. 鈥淲hat do you want to be?鈥�

I looked confused, so he explained.

“You want to be bigger? Leaner? Faster longer or faster shorter? More overall endurance? You want to see better?”

“See better?”

“Human growth hormone does that for some people. It improves the muscles in the eyes.” He tried again: “So, what do you want?”

This was quite a concept. Freud wrote that anatomy is destiny, and here was a doctor giving me a chance, in my late forties, to alter my body in the most fundamental way. It was strange, but also strangely alluring.

It had taken me a while to arrive at this moment. I was sitting in the San Fernando Valley offices of a physician whose identity I've agreed to conceal鈥攍et's just call him Dr. Jones. For reasons I'll explain shortly, my goal was to experience firsthand some of the banned performance-enhancing drugs that are often abused in the endurance sports I participate in, like cycling and cross-country skiing. The menu I had in mind included human growth hormone (HGH), testosterone, and some variety of anabolic steroid, all of which are used to increase strength and shorten an athlete's recovery time by repairing muscle cells faster. Also high on my list was that powerful stuff called erythropoietin, better known as EPO, a hormone that boosts oxygen levels in the blood by prompting the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells. EPO is known to have amazing endurance-boosting effects; not surprisingly, it's been a scourge for years in professional biking and skiing. In 1998, to cite one famous example, the Tour de France nearly came to a halt when a leading team, Festina, was caught using EPO, HGH, steroids, and testosterone. The entire squad was disqualified, and dozens of riders either staged protests or withdrew in reaction to the drug tests and police raids that followed.

All of these are prescription drugs, and they all have legitimate medical applications. (HGH, for instance, is used to treat Prader-Willi syndrome, a rare disease that stunts the growth of children.) But you and I are not supposed to have them without a doctor's supervision, and they're absolutely forbidden in most higher realms of sports. There are exceptions鈥擬ajor League Baseball doesn't drug-test at all鈥攂ut if you were caught using these substances in, say, the Olympics, the Tour, the NFL, or any NCAA event, you would face disqualification and suspensions, though the penalties and the testing processes vary wildly. This is one of the key problems that the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), an independent drug-policy group headquartered in Montreal, is attempting to address鈥攚ith the goal of standardizing everything from a list of banned drugs to the testing-and-appeals process. WADA's hope is that these rules and procedures will be adopted by sports federations around the globe.

When I first began my quest, I'd assumed it would be easy to slide into the underground where performance drugs are bought and sold. But when I asked around, nobody, not even friends who were top amateur and professional athletes, knew where cheaters actually went to score. Their comments were always vague: “Well, they get it, believe me,” they'd say, or “How about the Internet?”

So at first I just hit the streets. I live in Santa Monica, California, and I started going to Gold's Gym in nearby Venice, the place that launched Arnold Schwarzenegger and other bodybuilding greats. At Gold's you can easily meet gym rats who know where to find muscle-enhancing goodies, and after a few weeks of hanging out, I found myself sitting in a beat-up sports car with one of my new lifting buddies, a beefy guy in his early thirties who showed off his stash with unveiled excitement.

“Look, here's a good thing to start with,” he said.

He handed me a bottle of pills. It was Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid that lifters use to add muscle mass. This is one of the drugs that sprinter Ben Johnson was caught using at the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, where he was subsequently stripped of his 100-meter gold medal.

“Where do you get this?” I said.

“A vet I know,” he answered casually. It took me a second to realize he meant veterinarian, not military veteran. “Vets and Mexican farmacias, that's where you get the best stuff.” I looked at the label on the bottle鈥攖hese were literally animal pills. They're used to bulk up livestock, and they're banned from greyhound racing, where they're given to dogs to make them stronger.

“Start with this,” he went on, spilling out several doses. “Good base, can't go wrong.” I must have looked shocked, because he gave me a friendly punch in the arm and said, “You want to get big, don't you?”

That night at home I sat staring at the pills. Veterinarians? Mexican pharmacies? I shuddered and threw them out. I knew the only way I could play this game was under a doctor's supervision.

That's what led me, a few weeks later, to Dr. Jones. He was an internist by training and a specialist in the hot new field of anti-aging medicine, which involves helping people鈥攚ho are always affluent, since these treatments are expensive鈥攖ry to stave off the effects of growing old with a combination of nutrition and drugs, including HGH, steroids, and testosterone. A doctor I knew had tipped me off, with a wink, that Dr. Jones also used these drugs to “work with a lot of athletes.”

Inside his waiting room, I'd squeezed in next to the World's Largest Man and a woman who I thought might be an actress鈥攖hough I couldn't be certain, since she was wearing a hat and sunglasses indoors. The jumbo guy was somebody I was pretty sure spent Sunday afternoons chasing quarterbacks on television. Such people were, I would come to realize, the core of Dr. Jones's business: athletes and attractive women of all ages. Plus rich guys over 50. And the odd Playmate or two. Oh, and me.

Dr. Jones was an intense guy with a wiry build, close-cropped dark hair, and Al Pacino's restless energy. He ran a small, boutique operation: high service, high price. (I ended up spending around $7,500 for drugs in my eight-month program.) Dr. Jones knew what I was up to and agreed to help me try the drugs in a safe manner. What he did for me鈥攕upplying drugs solely for the purpose of increasing my athletic prowess鈥攊s not illegal, but it would certainly be frowned on by many of his colleagues. For that matter, many of them disapprove of the whole notion of anti-aging medicine, believing these drugs should be used only to fight specific maladies, not the natural process of aging.

But that doesn't bother Dr. Jones. He takes anti-aging drugs himself, and in his rapid-fire style, he told me he wasn't in the “sickness” business, as he described the work of ordinary doctors. He was in the “improvement” business.

Which is how he came to ask what I wanted to be.

“I want to be leaner, stronger, with better endurance,” I told him. “I don't want more mass.” I thought for a moment. “And seeing better…that sounds good, too.”

He looked up from taking notes and nodded. “I can help,” he said.

And so he did.

No one knows听how long athletes have taken supplements, but it's been going on quite a while, since well before the modern era of drug manufacture. The coca leaves that South American runners used for centuries provided a natural boost. Back in the early 1900s, when racers in the first years of the Tour de France ate bull testicles as snacks, they were simply trying to increase their testosterone levels.

According to sports historians, the use of drugs in athletics appears to have been routine by the post-World War II era. Amphetamines were the favored way to improve endurance, while steroids were the muscle builder of choice. At the Olympic level, abuse was rampant, and it wasn't until the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City that any rudimentary drug testing was enforced, largely in response to the obvious doping going on by Eastern Bloc teams. Much later, in the breakthrough 1998 lawsuit that several hundred former East German athletes brought against their trainers, doctors, and coaches, the “vitamin” regimens they were duped into following鈥攊n fact, they were given steroids鈥攚ere compared to torture by the Nazis. East Germany's state-supported system of doping, which often began before puberty, left a legacy of Olympic medals鈥攁long with deformed offspring, heart attacks, facial disfigurement, and lifelong sexual dysfunction. Sometime in the late 1970s, what was called “blood packing” began to supplement amphetamines. More red blood cells translates into more oxygen being distributed throughout the body, thus resulting in increased endurance. This was before EPO, and in those days blood was drawn, usually by team doctors, spun in a centrifuge to increase the concentration of red blood cells, and reinjected into the body.

This worked just fine until a certain line was crossed鈥攄ifferent in every individual and hard to predict鈥攁nd thickened blood started turning to sludge. Heart attacks and strokes followed. Athletes would mysteriously die in their sleep, because their lowered heart rates were unable to pump the enriched, heavy blood. According to Dutch media reports, from 1987 to 1990, 17 Dutch and Belgian professional cyclists died as a result of abusing EPO.

Because no foreign substances were involved, blood packing was considered legal, if unethical. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, eight U.S. cyclists, including gold medalist Alexis Grewal, gave themselves transfusions of previously frozen packed blood inside their hotel rooms before competing in the 118-mile road race. The International Olympic Committee tested the riders, detected the doping, and briefly covered up the results before announcing, in 1985, that new rules were being written to ban any “artificial” means of altering one's blood chemistry.

When EPO emerged in the late eighties, blood packing became pass茅. EPO occurs naturally in the body, but only in tiny amounts. Researchers at Amgen Inc., a California pharmaceutical company, figured out how to synthesize it in quantities that could help people who weren't producing enough red blood cells, like cancer patients suffering from anemia. EPO was also a gift from the gods for athletes looking to cheat. It was easy to administer鈥攁 clear liquid injected with simple shots鈥攁lways effective, and, until recently, impossible to identify, because there was no chemical test to alert doctors to its presence.

The difficulties of detecting EPO finally drove anti-doping officials to decree that they would disqualify any athlete found with a red-blood-cell concentration鈥攌nown as the hematocrit level鈥攐f more than 50 percent. (The hematocrit level for an ordinary, active person is between 34 and 46 percent.) Of course, the 50 percent mark only gave athletes a defined limit. You could use EPO to jack up your levels higher than that while training, and as long as you competed with a level of 49.9 percent, you'd be fine.

It wasn't until the Sydney Olympics in 2000 that anti-doping experts, led by Fran莽oise Lasne, a researcher at the French National Anti-Doping Laboratory, had come up with a method to distinguish the red blood cells produced by EPO from those produced naturally鈥攅nabling chemical detection of the drug. But each year, with new generations of drugs, cheating becomes more sophisticated, and EPO isn't the only substance that boosts red-blood-cell production.

Johann Muehlegg, the German cross-country skier who in 1999 left Germany's team to race for Spain, relied on a drug called darbepoetin鈥攁 genetically engineered version of EPO鈥攖o raise his levels at the Salt Lake Games. He won three individual races: the 30-kilometer freestyle, the 10K pursuit, and the 50K classic. When his darbepoetin use was detected by a chemical test before his third win, he defended taking it, since the drug, at that time, was not officially banned. Under the tortured rules of the Olympics, he was allowed to keep his 30K and 10K golds, which he won before he was tested, but had to return the 50K medal, which he won afterward.

Great. As if you could race dirty on Saturday and clean on the Monday before. Obviously, the playing field is still not very level.

The abuse of drugs in sports has been an interest of mine for years, but it wasn't until the mid-eighties, when I started competing as an amateur in cross-country ski races in Europe, that I was suddenly immersed in a world with two classes of racers: athletes who played clean, and those who didn't.

The Swedish skiers I hung out with back then, some of the best long-distance skiers in the world, were all convinced that the Finns were the worst Scandinavian cheaters, and they appear to have been right. In 2001, following a series of positive doping tests at the World Championships, almost the entire Finnish men's team was suspended, and the country's men's and women's coaches were banned from international competition for life.

It was maddening to see skiers I knew to be playing fair, guys who trained their hearts out with little financial reward, lose to the cheaters. Over the years, it only got worse, the drugs more potent, the means of evading detection increasingly devious. Every time one of my athletic heroes tested positive, I was furious, as if I'd been personally betrayed.

But there was another feeling, too: deep curiosity. I'd read reams about cheating as an issue, but I'd never read anything describing what it felt like to do it. Obviously, the allure of victory was incredibly powerful鈥攚hy else would the best athletes in the world risk their health and lives abusing these drugs? So I wondered, Do performance drugs make you just 1 percent faster and stronger? Or 10 percent? Are the enhancements so subtle that only elite athletes gain an edge, or are they powerful enough that an everyday wannabe like me would notice a dramatic change?

Though I knew I would be courting health risks, I decided there was only one way to find out: try it myself, and see what it did.

My plan was simple. I would train as I always do鈥攁bout 15 to 20 hours a week鈥攚hile taking various supplements under Dr. Jones's supervision. I started in January 2003. In eight months, I intended to ride the 1,225-kilometer (761-mile) Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle race, a once-every-four-years sufferfest that's popular among amateur ultracyclists. I would first have to qualify by completing a series of 200-, 300-, 400-, and 600-kilometer rides within certain time limits. The PBP was a quirky event, a ride rather than a real race, with no prizes, no ranking of finishers, no doping controls. So if the drugs helped me, I wouldn't be knocking anybody else down in the standings. And since this was a monster ride鈥攚hich I'd have to complete in less than 84 hours鈥攊t would serve as a real test of my augmented self.

The only remaining question: Where to begin?

“Let's start with human growth hormone,” Dr. Jones announced that first day in his office. I wasn't surprised. HGH is the foundation of his anti-aging regimen, and it's one of the hottest banned supplements in sports. It's a protein produced by the pituitary gland that's involved with various strength- and growth-related body processes, including normal growth during childhood, adult sexual function, bone strength, energy levels, protein formation, and tissue repair.

“Between 20 and 30 years of age,” Dr. Jones explained in a long, impressive presentation, complete with fancy computer graphics, “our growth hormone is at its absolute peak. And then all of a sudden, it drops.”

He ticked off the negative effects of low HGH levels: “Total cholesterol goes up, good cholesterol goes down, bad cholesterol goes up. Reduced body tone, decreased muscle strength, reduced lean body mass, increased total body fat, reduced exercise performance, decreased mental function.”

It was the bit about “reduced exercise performance” that athletes seized on in the mid-nineties. If lower HGH levels hurt performance, the reasoning went, then higher levels would help it. And while there are sophisticated tests for steroids, there is still no means to detect HGH. It was so widely abused at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta that athletes joked about renaming them “the Human Growth Hormone Olympics.” Dr. Jones started me out small, with only 0.1 international units a day, five days a week鈥攁bout what he would give a Rodeo Drive matron. (The international unit, or IU, is a worldwide standard calibrating the effective dosages鈥攚hich vary in volume depending on the drug鈥攆or substances like hormones and vitamins.) I told him I wanted more, and I wanted more than just HGH.

“We have to introduce one at a time,” he said firmly. “That's the only way to monitor what each does. We start slowly and build.”

I asked him what to expect.

“I really can't promise you anything about the growth hormone except that it costs a lot of money,” he said with a smile. (My HGH cost about $750 a month.)

“Do you take it?”

He nodded. “I take a lot of things.”

“What does it do for you?”

“That doesn't matter. It may do something for me, nothing for you鈥攊t's very response-specific.” He warned me not to expect too much, too fast. “Nothing will happen very quickly. This is a gradual process.”

I didn't listen, of course, or believe. Who would? For the first time in my life I was injecting a foreign substance into my body, and it was simply impossible not to expect swift and dramatic changes. Dr. Jones showed me how to prep my leg with a prepackaged alcohol pad, then load the syringe with 0.1 IU of HGH, painlessly sliding in the ultrathin needle.

“My 81-year-old mother does this, so you can, too,” he said when I flinched at the idea. “It's no different from what diabetics do every day.”

Yeah, except that it seemed so wrong鈥攁nd so bizarre.

On the weekend of March 1, after only a few days of treatment, I traveled to Furnace Creek, California, and rode in the Death Valley Double Century. I didn't feel very augmented: The race was a minor disaster, and I limped over the finish line so late that they were timing by calendar, not stopwatch. I felt disappointed not just in my performance but, oddly, in my drug.

I was soothed a bit the next week when I went in for my first follow-up with Dr. Jones. I handed his nurse the stylish silver kit I'd been given to house my HGH bottles and syringes so that she could safely dispose of my used needles.

“You're not using the growth hormone?” she asked, puzzled.

“Sure I am. For two weeks.”

She held up a small vial with an unbroken seal. “This is the growth hormone. It hasn't been opened.”

I pointed to a large vial filled with red liquid. “That's what I've been injecting.” Then a quick burst of panic. “What is it?”

“Don't worry. It's vitamin B12. We use it to mix with the growth hormone. This is just the extra B12 we didn't use yet. Don't worry, B12 is good stuff. Gives you more energy.”

“I'm an idiot.”

“The growth hormone does help with cognitive functions,” she said cheerfully. “They're starting to use it with early Alzheimer's.”

After a few weeks of the HGH, I began to notice subtle changes. My skin started getting… better. Sun blotches that I'd had on my arms for a year faded away. One morning I woke up and a scar on my forehead鈥攚hich I'd gotten from a mountain-bike endo two years earlier鈥攚as more or less gone. Even though I was training like a madman, I looked more rested. Younger. A little fresher.

Then I started to realize that my eyesight really was improving. I'd been thinking about getting glasses to read fine print on maps, but now there was no need. The glasses I used for night driving stayed in the glove compartment, unused, unnecessary.

Dr. Jones had a specific protocol he wanted to follow, partly for safety reasons and partly so I could discern what each drug was doing. After the HGH, he added testosterone, giving me a 200-milligram injection and a pump vial full of Testocream, white stuff that I rubbed on the sides of my stomach. “It's like with a bathtub,” Dr. Jones explained. “The shot fills the tub. The cream keeps replenishing it every day to top it off.”

For most men鈥攁nd women鈥攖estosterone production peaks in your twenties and slowly declines. Testosterone urges the RNA, or message center, in muscle cells to create more protein, hence more muscles. Higher testosterone levels have been shown to increase energy and aggression, in both men and women. Anti-aging types believe that testosterone decline is a big factor in the loss of muscle and the increase in fat that are standard signs of getting older. Not to mention a loss of libido. There can be side effects from taking it鈥攔anging from acne to high blood pressure鈥攂ut the drug's many fans think the trade-off is worth it.

I walked out of Dr. Jones's office smiling broadly, then waited for a werewolf surge. And I waited. But the truth is, I didn't feel much of anything. No irresistible bursts of lust or rage, no particular feelings of omnipotence. That afternoon I went home and celebrated my newfound energy and aggression with a long nap.

It wasn't until I added EPO听to my diet, two weeks later, that I began to notice serious differences.

“You have to be careful with this stuff,” Dr. Jones warned after explaining the routine: three injections a week of 1,500 IU each. I was expecting a lecture on the dangers of thickened blood, but he meant something else: he wanted me to take it easy while racing, lest people catch on.

“One of my bike racers who isn't really a climber went on a training ride and dropped the best climbers on his team,” he said. “They were like, 'Um, what are you taking?'”

It wasn't cheap鈥�$2,000 for ten vials totaling 100,000 IU. At my prescribed dose, each vial would last two weeks. Before the first EPO shot, my base hematocrit level was 43.8 percent, well below that magical 50 percent disqualification level. That seemed like a reasonable goal鈥攈ematocrit levels high enough to be bounced from the Olympics. Sweet.

The morning after I took my first dose, I woke up with a strange headache, a very distinct kind of pain that I would come to associate with EPO. It defied all manner of ibuprofen and aspirin but gradually went away.

Within three weeks, my hematocrit level had risen to 48.3. By this time, my testosterone levels had shot up to 900 nanograms per decaliter, from a previous mark of 280. (My starting level was just below normal.) My HGH had increased only slightly, which Dr. Jones found unusual. He upped my HGH dosage to 1.2 IU a day, speculating that the long hours I spent training might be keeping the level down.

Despite these measurements, I remained skeptical about all the drugs until March 29, when I rode an event along the central coast of California, the Solvang Double Century, at what for me was a fast and hard pace, finishing in around 11.5 hours. About ten hours in, it dawned on me that something was definitely happening. Sure, I'd been training hard, but I'd done enough of that to know what to expect. All around me were riders鈥攇ood, strong riders鈥攚ho looked as worn out as you'd expect after ten hours in the saddle. I was tired, but I felt curiously strong, annoyingly talkative and fresh, eager to hammer the last 40 miles. The last time I'd ridden 200 miles, I felt awful the next day, like I'd been hit by a truck. After the Solvang race I woke up and felt hardly a touch of soreness. I also felt like I could easily ride another 200, and I realized that I'd entered another world, the realm of instant recovery. I'll be frank: It was a reassuring kind of world, and I could see why people might want to stay there.

When I checked in with the good doctor soon after the race, he wasn't surprised about what I'd experienced. “With your hematocrit levels higher, you don't produce as much lactic acid, which means you can ride harder, longer, with less stress. The growth hormone and testosterone help you recover faster, since you're stronger to start with and recover more quickly. All those little muscle tears repair much more quickly.”

He shrugged. “It works,” he said. “It always works.”

It all started to make sense. Feeling like I did after the 200-miler would be a huge advantage in a long stage race like the Tour de France. I understood what five-time Tour winner Jacques Anquetil meant back in 1967 when he said, “You'd have to be an imbecile or a hypocrite to imagine that a professional cyclist who rides 235 days a year can hold himself together without stimulants.”

Back then, “stimulants” mostly meant amphetamines, which kept riders going through day after day of hard stages. The new drugs had the same rejuvenating effects but simply worked much better, without the crash and depression of uppers.

I began to adjust my training schedule for harder rides and less rest and I felt fine. It wasn't a huge difference鈥擨 added about 10 or 15 percent more effort to my training鈥攂ut had I been competing at a top level, it would have represented a major advantage.

A month later, when I added a basic anabolic steroid to the mix, I felt like I'd grabbed on to a car moving at 60 miles an hour. The effect was powerful, fast, and difficult to modulate.

Dr. Jones gave me a steroids tutorial over lunch one day, at a Middle Eastern place on Ventura Boulevard. He explained how “steroids” is a broad term for various synthetic substances related to the male sex hormones, and that they promote the growth of skeletal muscle and the development of male sexual traits. Though each steroid has different effects, they generally increase the amount of nitrogen in the body, which in turn stimulates protein synthesis.

All of which is a fancy way of saying that steroids help the body create muscle. They're used medically to treat everything from anemia to leukemia to AIDS, helping patients build strength.

Dr. Jones took out a pen and drew a chart on the paper tablecloth. On one side he listed various kinds of steroids: Anadrol 50, Winstrol, Deca, Anavar. Then he added columns labeled MASS, STRENGTH, WATER GAIN, RETENTION. For each drug, he filled in a number from one to a hundred.

“What you want is something that doesn't give you a lot of mass but adds strength,” he said. “I'd start with Deca. It has almost no liver toxicity and has the nice benefit of helping joint pain. In Europe, it's used for arthritis. There's only one reason everybody doesn't use Deca.”

“You grow two heads?”

“Worse, at least for most athletes. You can test positive for up to a year.”

I stared at the chart, fascinated. Then it struck me that there was no column for side effects, nasty little consequences like liver damage, impotence, and steroid rage. I asked Dr. Jones about this.

He sighed and gestured along the wide table. “We don't have enough room to list them,” he said. “The problem with steroids is that they do have some benefits, but nine out of ten people who are drawn to them can't resist abusing them. Then there's all the black-market junk out there. I'm not going to lie to you and tell you that if you try this stuff a little, it will kill you. It won't. But you stay on it very long and you'll have problems.”

“Like?”

“Your hair may start to fall out. Your testicles shrink. Of course, the testosterone can cause all that, too. But any steroid will accelerate it.

“Deca's not so harmful to your liver,” he went on, “but most steroids can knock the hell out of it. You can get huge mood swings. Anger, irritability. Sex is a mess. There's a surge in libido, then it falls off a cliff and you don't even want to think about sex. Then, when you stop your dosage, you start to shrink. Depression can set in. Your body starts to slide back to what it was, and most people don't like that. People forget that it's the drugs and not them. It's like when you take Viagra and you think that's how you'll always perform. No, no, no.”

All the same, I wanted to try it.

“If you want to try 200 milligrams of Deca for a limited time, coming back to my office every week, OK,” said Dr. Jones. “It'll probably help your shoulder, if nothing else.” My left shoulder had been hurting for a year since a bike accident. He explained that Deca helps the joints retain water, which eases pain.

Throughout this experiment, I'd been e-mailing people whom I'd encountered on various Web sites, like Extreme-Athlete.com, where steroid users get together and compare notes. That night I went to one of the bodybuilding sites I'd joined and listed what I was taking: the HGH, the testosterone, the EPO, and now the Deca. I thought I was really pushing the limits, but, tellingly, I was immediately mocked for my timidity and puny dosages.

“Dude, why not just take aspirin?” wrote a guy who called himself the Great One. “Try like 600 milligrams of test and 400 to 600 of Deca a week, girlie boy. And what's with this human growth stuff? My mom takes that. Why not Dianabol?” he wrote, referring to a particularly potent anabolic steroid. “You afraid of getting strong?”

It was standard practice on these sites to close messages with a quote or a quip like “I may die, but they'll need a big coffin.” The Great One signed his with a thought from Nietzsche. “Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor,” it read, “is henceforth called evil.”

Once I started the Deca, I didn't even think about lifting weights. I wanted to get stronger, not bigger. Within two weeks, the pain I felt in my left knee after 100 miles or so鈥�100 was now just a standard ride鈥攚ent away, coming back only on the most brutal hills. My shoulder felt much better. And then one morning I stepped on the scale.

Two hundred and nine pounds.

I was stunned. I'd never weighed this much. When I first saw Dr. Jones, I weighed 195, which was high for me.

Immediately I hopped on the bike and rode like hell for a few hours. When I got back, I stepped on the scales: 201. I'd lost eight pounds on a not very hot day when I was drinking plenty of fluids?

“What's the problem?” Dr. Jones demanded when I told him I was freaking out over the weight gain. He had me stand on a machine that measured body weight and fat. I weighed 207, but my body fat had dropped to 6.5 percent, down from 10 percent.

“Don't give me this you're-getting-fat crap,” he said in an exasperated tone. “You sound like some teenage girl. You've lost six pounds of fat and gained 12 of muscle. That's why you're heavier. And like I told you, the Deca supersaturates the muscle cells with fluid. That's one of the reasons your joints feel better.”

At this point my little adventure started to feel pretty creepy, as if there were something inside my body taking over. Which, in a way, there was. I was getting big without trying. When I went for ocean swims, I had trouble getting into my wetsuit. I didn't look cut, though鈥攊t was more of a puffy, rounded bigness, making me look like a shorter version of Shaq. Without a jump shot. I did my final 600K qualifying ride for Paris-Brest-Paris on June 15, out of Princeton, New Jersey. This was 200 kilometers farther than I'd ever ridden. By now my HGH levels were 20 percent higher than when I'd started. My testosterone was 300 percent higher. My hematocrit level hovered around 50 percent. I weighed 205鈥攁 ten-pound gain鈥攂ut my body fat was the lowest it had ever been.

We left Princeton at 4 a.m. on a misty, muggy morning. It was a strange course. The first 200 was flat and easy, then came 200 killer kilometers that involved 12,000 feet of climbing, then another fairly hilly 100 and a flat final leg. The whole thing would take me about 31 hours.

I'd been overseas the week before and was tired and jet-lagged at the start. During the easy section, I dragged along, barely staying awake. But when we moved into the hills, I started to feel stronger. I wasn't fast up the hills鈥攂ut then, I never had been. My weight gain was a hindrance, but I had deep reserves of power and endurance. I rode through the darkness with an image of myself as some kind of tank, just moving along, unstoppable.

At 2 a.m., we took a break at a convenience store in Easton, Pennsylvania. It was Saturday night and the place was filled with kids coming and going to parties and dates. I got a glimpse of myself in the glass of a freezer door. I had a light on my helmet and a bunch of other blinking gizmos attached to my arms and ankles. My face looked like one of those “thousand-yard stare” photos from Vietnam.

What have I done? I wondered. I had a life once, and now I'm standing in the Easton WaWa in the middle of the night, looking like a cyborg, with thousands of dollars of drugs coursing through my veins. I started looking forward to the moment when the whole thing would be over.

The week before I arrived in France, it was more than 100 degrees, and people were dying all over the country. But a few days prior to the August 19 start of the PBP, the weather broke, and the ride started at 5 a.m. in a light chill. Perfect cycling weather.

I was riding a tandem bike with my pal Bob Breedlove, an ultracycling legend from Des Moines, Iowa. Bob called me out of the blue in June and said he wanted to do the PBP on a tandem鈥攁s he had three times before鈥攂ut that his regular riding partner had bailed. Bob liked to ride long and fast; he'd celebrated his 50th birthday the previous summer by riding across the United States in nine and a half days.

About five hours into the ride, Bob mentioned casually that he preferred doing the race on a tandem, because the heavier bike made it so much more difficult. “A course like this is terrible for a tandem,” Bob said happily. “All the hills! You'd do it much faster on a regular bike, no doubt about it.”

But we muddled through. I felt shockingly strong until the final 200 kilometers, when my stomach started to shut down. Unaccustomed to the aero bars on the tandem, I'd also developed agonizing saddle sores. These were typical woes of ultrariding, but through it all, my legs and heart felt fine. Five months earlier, I couldn't have imagined riding this far and feeling so strong. We finished the 1,225-kilometer ride in just under 76 hours鈥攕leeping only twice for a few hours. The next morning, if it weren't for my saddle sores, I could have easily done it again. Obviously, Dr. Jones's program had worked.

I'd started months earlier with the goal of using the performance enhancers to complete the PBP. Now that it was over, I was relieved. When I got back from France, I immediately quit everything: no HGH, no testosterone, no EPO, and, God knows, no steroids. It was wonderfully liberating to be freed from a routine that had started out feeling illicit and interesting but had become just an annoying daily chore, like taking vitamins.

Since then, I haven't had my hematocrit level checked, nor my body fat, HGH, or testosterone. But already my eyesight is starting to slip a bit and I find myself squinting to read small type. I'm sure my recovery times from a hard workout have increased. Even if I keep training as hard, my endurance will drop.

Looking back on the whole saga, I find myself wondering whether I'd keep taking these drugs if I could afford them.

For me, it would be a quality-of-life question, not a performance issue. If the HGH weren't so expensive, I'd probably continue with it, at least until I had a good reason not to, like some new evidence that it makes you grow extra ears. (The side effects of HGH are reportedly mild鈥攐ne is fluid retention.) If nothing else, it helped my eyesight, and I had more energy. Lately, I've been reading studies about how endurance athletes suffer from low testosterone, which leads to early signs of osteoporosis, so I'm going to continue to monitor my levels and, if they drop too far, consider boosting them with the cream.

With the EPO, even if somebody gave it away, I wouldn't go down that road. Using it is too much of a literal and figurative headache, and if you get sloppy there's always the danger of nasty results. And I would never touch steroids again, unless I had some specific medical need. It's all just too powerful, too strange, and it's hard to read a list of the side effects and not feel like you're playing Russian roulette.

As for the larger issue of drugs in sports, eight months in the world of the artificially enhanced convinced me more than ever that it's critical for an organization like the World Anti-Doping Agency to succeed. This group, founded after the Salt Lake Olympics by Canadian anti-doping leader Dick Pound, represents the most serious international attempt to come to grips with sports doping. WADA is the logical response to an argument that gets aired from time to time: that since cheating is impossible to eliminate, the only recourse is to simply legalize everything鈥攖hat way, no athlete has a hidden advantage over another, since everyone would be free to try anything that might increase endurance.

Like a lot of powerfully bad ideas, that one has a certain mad logic. But it would turn every sport into a test of how much damage an athlete was willing to risk to improve performance, and would basically force every serious athlete to cheat and risk his or her health. Athletic contests would have a strange life-or-death quality. If we don't keep drugs out of these events, they become freak shows, the athletes like gladiators鈥攚ith us playing the role of decadent Romans, urging them on.

Besides, on a fundamental level, drugs ruin the simple joy of competition. With drugs in the mix, it's not about the athletes, it's about the chemistry.

Now that I was off the program, I started to think about what I'd train for next. Probably something shorter than the PBP鈥攕ay, the Canadian Ski Marathon, a two-day, 100-mile event. I got a calendar out and began to work on the training schedule. I'd done the race before and knew it would be long, cold, and brutal.

Sounded fun to me. And this time I'd do it on my own.

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IT SEEMED LIKE A LARK. The idea was to spend seven days and six nights in April skiing the Last Degree to the North Pole—the last degree being latitudinal, from 89 to 90 degrees north, roughly 60 miles. When I heard that the plan was to spend a week doing it, I almost laughed. Nine, ten miles a day? I’d been an avid cross-country ski racer for years, and even a long race like the Swedish Vasaloppet—57 miles—takes no more than six hours. This pace was a piece of cake.

Ousland (left) with polar trekkers Per Helgesplass, Carlijn Hoekstra, Correne Erasmus-Coetzer, Stuart Stevens, and Jan-Erik Warbo.

“We will be pulling sledges,” B酶rge reminded me in his understated way when I tracked him down on his cell phone in the mountains outside Oslo, Norway.


B酶rge was B酶rge Ousland, the Norwegian polar adventurer who would lead the trip. Just 40, he’d already made a name for himself as one of the all-time greats of polar endurance, with feats that were nothing short of staggering. B酶rge (pronounced “BORE-gay”) was the first person to ski solo to the North Pole (in 1994), the first to ski solo across Antarctica (1997), and the first to ski solo across the entire Arctic ice pack, from Siberia to Canada through the North Pole—a 2001 feat that put him on the ice for an astounding 82 days. He almost always did it without resupply, eating and wearing and burning only what he could drag. Just him, alone on the ice. With one big mother of a sled.
“When I started from Siberia,” B酶rge said, “my sled weighed 170 kilos.” One hundred seventy kilos? That’s nearly 375 pounds. I couldn’t drag that much across a hockey rink.


“But for this trip, the sleds are only 35 kilos or so. Not so bad.”


Seventy-seven pounds. That was probably enough to be really annoying by the end of a day, but still manageable. Which seemed to be in keeping with the spirit of this trip. It was B酶rge’s idea to lead a small group to the pole, making the journey just hard enough to give people a taste of what he goes through, but not so hard as to terrorize everyone who might sign up.


“I suppose it’s a good idea to train for this,” I said. B酶rge laughed. “I go hiking with tires. I drag them behind me.”


“You hike dragging a tire?”


“Three tires, usually. All in a row. That way the tires get better traction and it’s harder. I like tractor tires. I do it for several hours a day. You should try it.” “Sure,” I promised, knowing hell would freeze over before I hit the trail with three tractor tires scraping behind me.


Still, I did need to get a feel for this towing-a-sled stuff. So I went to the place I ski every season, the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and borrowed one of those kiddie sleds parents use to pull their tots around. Where the kid is supposed to go, I strapped in a very cold 45-pound weight. The sled was attached to my waist with a padded belt—just like B酶rge does it, but where he uses ropes to drag his sled, this one had long metal bars, intended to make the whole arrangement more stable.


Which worked, sort of. Going uphill was fine, but when I turned around, the weight of the sled started pushing me downhill like a big hand. In a heartbeat, I was flying, desperately trying to hang on. I blew past an astounded family, who scrambled for their lives, and then I wiped out in a sharp turn. I felt the sled roll and I was jerked and twisted in a jumbled, snow-flying-everywhere mess.


I got up, cursing.


“What are you doing?” A woman was screaming at me from down the trail. Doing? I was falling on my ass. Wasn’t it obvious?


I jerked the sled upright. “Be careful with that baby!” the woman yelled. I gave the sled a good whack with my pole.


“Stop that!”

FOR THE FIRST PORTION of my journey, I would fly eight hours from New York to Oslo, and then nearly three hours north to the island of Spitsbergen, an isolated mining outpost far north of the Norwegian mainland. Three hours north from Oslo? I would have assumed you’d wind up in Russia. And Spitsbergen was merely the jumping-off point, as B酶rge informed me when I finally stumbled off the plane.


“From here it’s only two and a half hours more by jet,” he said reassuringly. “Then a little by helicopter, then we ski.” I just nodded. Sure. Whatever. “We go in that plane.” He pointed to a stubby, strange-looking twin-engine jet that sat on a runway bathed in the perpetual far-north twilight. “Antonov 74. Short takeoff and landing. Russian.”
B酶rge was less ferocious than I expected: tall and handsome, with a quick smile, a soft voice, and the easy physical grace of a professional athlete. As I’d learned more about him and his preposterous feats, I’d envisioned a Nordic superman, heir to all those Viking badasses who charged out of longboats cleaving skulls with bloody axes. And he was a tough guy, all right—though he’d grown up in a family of artists and intellectuals in the Oslo suburbs, he’d always been drawn to risk, working as a professional diver in the North Sea and as a Norwegian navy commando before becoming a full-time adventurer in 1994. He and his longtime partner, Wenche Spange, have a 14-year-old son, and B酶rge came across more like a hipster dad than a Viking warrior.


“There is just one problem. Not such a big problem, but…” He shrugged, conveying the ridiculousness of trying to do anything on schedule in the Arctic. “The runway up north, it has cracked. Cricket will explain.”


Cricket was a Frenchman named Christian de Marliave, 51, one of the four French polar junkies who run a small private outfit called Cerpolex that specializes in logistics for Arctic travel. Every April, with help from a couple dozen Russians, Cerpolex creates a temporary ice-pack air base some 75 miles from the North Pole. For fun, they call it Barneo, making it sound like a transplanted South Seas never-never land: the Barneo Ice Airport.


I met Cricket after a short drive that took me to a small guest house in Spitsbergen’s main town, Longyearbyen, where the trip’s four clients had already arrived. None of us knew the others yet, so we exchanged vague hellos, glances, and nods, everybody trying to look unflappable as Cricket calmly related the absurd-sounding situation. “The runway has cracked, but the Russians are filling the crack with water and it should freeze the repair, no problem,” he told us. We nodded. Of course.


Before making the Arctic his life, Cricket had been a mathematician. He still looked like a professor: wiry, intense, and chain-smoking, with a perpetual air of fatigue. “We should be able to leave in a day or so,” he promised.


It took three. Every morning there was more delay as the Russians used ice axes, shovels, and a bulldozer to repair the runway. “The water fix, it didn’t work,” Cricket explained. “I’m not sure why. So now they just extend the runway another 500 meters in the opposite direction. It’s hard work.”


B酶rge told us not to worry. “I know they are French,” he said of Cerpolex, “but they have always come through in the end.”


Eventually we took off, temporarily parting ways with B酶rge, who took a different plane with a group he was guiding on an overnight trip to the pole. (B酶rge had guided with Cerpolex since 1998—two trips every April.) After a long flight over the frozen polar ocean, we landed and stepped off the plane at Barneo. Suddenly I couldn’t stop laughing. It was a giddy, senses-overwhelmed, nearly hysterical laugh. At minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, the air was so cold it felt like pure refrigerant. Everything was brilliant white and busy and confusing. The engines of the jet were screaming and the Russians were shouting and the Ukrainian pilots were passing out bottles of vodka from a hidden compartment.


We landed amid what looked like a frigid outdoor aviation museum. An old biplane was sitting off to the side, as if awaiting its next bombing run over the Somme, and a faded pair of blue-and-orange Russian helicopters, big things, sagged on the ice. One side of the runway was lined with large, posh tents, while on the other, about a hundred yards away, stood a motley collection of multicolored tents that looked ready to blow away in the wind.


“Does anybody know where we are going to sleep?” someone in my group hollered over the noise.


“Cricket said we could sleep in the mess tent,” I yelled. We started walking to the large tent closest to the runway. It was banquet-sized, and I figured it had to be the right place.


“No, no!” Cricket shouted as he rushed ahead of us. “That’s the Russians. We’re over there.” He gestured toward the smaller tents that were now barely visible in the blowing snow. They seemed a long way off. We started walking.


What followed was the coldest night of my life—if night is the correct word for the pole’s 24-hour sunlight. We ended up not in the French mess tent, but in an unheated supply tent, where we pushed aside frozen loaves of Russian bread and loose heads of cabbage that rolled around like cannonballs, clearing space for our bags, the five of us piling together like so many bear cubs. Helicopters seemed to take off every few minutes and dogs howled constantly, competing with the screaming wind.


By a stroke of luck, my bag ended up next to a huge box filled with frozen but tasty French cookies. I’d doze a little, wake up shivering, eat some cookies, listen to the dogs, and doze again. Every now and then, I’d bolt up, convinced I was freezing to death, and then I’d drag myself over to the mess tent and talk to Brigitte Sabard, a 40-year-old Frenchwoman who ran Barneo’s kitchen. Somehow she conjured up an incredible meal: vegetable soup, crepes, and a reindeer stew. I would spend a lot of time in the next few days thinking about those crepes.

“HOW WAS IT AT THE POLE?” I asked B酶rge the next morning as we got ready to board a Russian helicopter that would ferry us the 30 miles or so to the 89th degree.


“Cold,” he said, looking tired. I started to tell him about our supply-tent nightmare, but then it occurred to me that he had actually slept at the North Pole, while I was eating cookies and hanging out with Brigitte.
“We leave right after lunch,” he said. I felt like saluting. North to the pole!


The martial feeling intensified when our little group nervously piled in for takeoff. It was an eclectic bunch. There was Carlijn Hoekstra from the Netherlands, a 22-year-old medical student who hoped to become the first Dutch woman to ski to the North Pole. She was tall and athletic and had been dragging tires for months alongside a canal in Holland, an experience she described as “fun.” She had never—ever—been on cross-country skis before trying on a pair at Spitsbergen, but she was smart and quick to laugh and had a perpetually upbeat manner that I doubted would crumble.


There was one other woman, a South African named Correne Erasmus-Coetzer, 44, who was determined to become the first South African woman to ski to both poles. Back in December she’d made it to the South Pole, which meant that she had a very clear idea of what we were in for. A tiny but incredibly strong person, she didn’t try to hide her apprehension. “You have no idea,” she’d say, smiling, almost shuddering.


Two Norwegian guys completed our band. Jan-Erik Warbo, 50, was an ebullient former Oslo ad executive turned real estate magnate who spent a lot of time pursuing new challenges like sailing across the Atlantic. Per Helgesplass was a quiet 33-year-old who had just spent a year in China at some godforsaken place near Mongolia, managing a factory for a Norwegian company. He’d never done anything like this. So why this particular trip? “It’s the North Pole,” he said when I pressed him. “I’m Norwegian.” As if that explained it all.


The flight from Barneo to just past the 89th degree was a quick, noisy trip over the ice. As we landed in a whoosh of white, it seemed terribly important to the Russians to get us and our gear off the helicopter ASAP, as if we might come under mortar attack at any second. We frantically hurled our sleds out the door while the Russian crew chief scowled and yelled, “Go! Now!”


Then we were standing on the ice and the helicopter was taking off and we all waved, aware of the cinematic melodrama of the moment. B酶rge looked at us and grinned. “Always north,” he announced, quoting a famous line by his countryman Fridtjof Nansen, the 19th-century Arctic explorer.


We nodded. Then we awkwardly strapped on our waist belts and headed in the same direction.

“I HATE THE SENSATION of being cold,” B酶rge said. “It is so painful.”


I looked to see if he was joking. We were skiing together on our first full day, a few hours into what would be our standard eight-hour slog. “What?” he asked when he saw my amazed expression. “I like the cold, but I hate being cold. Don’t you?”


A few days earlier I might have said yes, I like the cold—but that was before I’d been immersed in temperatures that ranged from a high of minus 22 to a low of minus 40. Until then, I thought “cold” was zero degrees Fahrenheit. But that was nothing. I was coming to grips with the horrible realization that when you spend days and days skiing across the polar ice cap, the only time you get warm is when you’re actually skiing. But even then there is the constant struggle to wear just the right combination of clothing so you never sweat. Once you get wet, you either stay wet or find yourself in a cocoon of ice.


“This is like jogging in a meat locker all day,” I said as I kept fiddling with different layers.


“No, no,” B酶rge said. “A meat locker is much warmer.”


That first day fell into the pattern that would repeat itself without variation. We got up around 8:30 a.m. (Norway time), ate B酶rge’s special mix of sugary instant porridge with added oil, packed the sleds, and then we’d ski, with the eight-hour day punctuated by four 15-minute breaks that mainly served to make me stiff. At some point B酶rge would pick a campsite—always on old, stable ice near pressure ridges, small hills of ice formed when huge sheets are forced together by polar ocean currents. The ridges provided shelter from the wind (though the winds were never strong) and broke the monotony of camping on open ice. It took us an hour to set up, another to melt snow and cook. We’d talk and do gear repairs, and then try to sleep.


B酶rge was a great believer in strict routine. He had spent a good portion of his life contemplating the factors affecting risk, and to him routine was a matter of sanity and safety in a place where the basic constants of life did not apply. Here you moved and slept and ate not on earth, but on drifting and shifting ice, which at any moment might split, spilling you into the Arctic Ocean, more than two miles deep.


On the ice, B酶rge did everything, large and small, exactly the same way, every time, so that each moment was built around procedures he’d internalized to maximize efficiency. He and I were tentmates, and one morning I backed out of our tent, which prompted him to gently scold, “Never turn your ass to a polar bear.” He meant it. B酶rge had a precise method for exiting a tent. First he’d open the flap a bit and peek around, then he’d stick his head out and survey the campsite. Finally he’d move out quickly, turning a quick 360, his hand never far from the pistol he carried at all times. He’d encountered polar bears on many trips and had been forced to kill one that charged.


The carefulness extended to B酶rge’s sled—his sled “system,” he called it—which was meticulously organized and packed. He’d created a self-contained life support vehicle, like a miniature space capsule. It was molded with a gently sloping nose, to ride up and over obstructions in the ice. The sled converted into a strange little pontoon boat, so that B酶rge could paddle across open areas of water. Or drag it behind him when he swam across cracks in the ice.


Yes, swam. This last was another B酶rge concept: Instead of skiing miles and miles around a break in the ice—or being stranded waiting for the ice to move together—he had come up with the notion of swimming across, using a specially designed survival suit that fit over his ski clothes. B酶rge had hit the water 23 times during his adventures. “The water is warmer than the air,” he reminded me.


“That’s insane,” I said.


“Maybe we will come across some open water on this trip,” he said hopefully.


“You just want to show off.”


“Of course. It is a great system.”

I’D ENVISIONED SKIING to the North Pole as a long race over a bumpy course. But it was more like backpacking on snowshoes. The hardest part wasn’t the moment-to-moment cardiovascular challenge, but the cumulative effect of exerting yourself in such extreme temperatures. That and doing everything and anything wearing several layers of thick mittens. And while B酶rge was relentlessly organized, I was… Well, I was not.


The first night we made camp, I unzipped the plastic cover of my sled. B酶rge looked inside and flinched. “What has happened here?” he demanded.
My sled looked like a teenager’s closet floor, with junk just thrown in at random. “What are these?” he asked, picking up a bag.


“Hand warmers. Lots of them.” He stared at them like they were shrunken heads. “Do they work?” he asked.


“Hell, yes, they work. Here.” I handed him one from my pocket. He took his mitten off and held it.


“It’s warm,” he marveled, smiling. Then he handed it back quickly. “This is dangerous. If I got used to hand warmers, it’s one more thing I’d have to carry.


“This sled,” he decreed, “is a disaster.” br.
So were my hands. No matter how many gloves I put on, or what kind, they would not stay warm. By the second night on the ice, my fingers had started to blister.


“How did this happen?” I asked B酶rge, staring at them.


“You are in the Arctic,” he shrugged.


“B酶rge,” I sighed. “I think I’m going to kill you.”


“Ahhh, mutiny on the ice! But B酶rge has gun. B酶rge trained killer.” He laughed, reaching into his medical kit for tape.


“You think this will be a problem?”


“Only if you need your hands,” he said. “If we have to amputate, we can always tie a fork to your stump, like they did on the Greely expedition.” He was referring to the 1881 American expedition to Ellesmere Island led by Adolphus Greely, a famous Arctic disaster in which only seven of the 25 explorers survived a long winter on the ice. ” ‘We are dying like men!’ ” B酶rge cried, recounting their words when they were finally rescued.


Within a few days, we all began to show the red blotches of minor frostbite on our faces, but it was remarkable how well everyone held up. No one complained, ever, and I was the only one with a serious problem. At first my fingers just hurt. Then each fingertip swelled up with a mushy blister. Then the blisters popped and skin started peeling off. I ended up with second- and third-degree frostbite on both hands, and spent two weeks back in New York walking around with mummy-wrapped mitts.


My hands made me eager to reach the pole quickly, but our progress seemed unalterably slow. Every night in the tent, B酶rge would take us through a little ceremony of checking our position on the GPS. First he would move the stove—”the little glow of happiness,” he called it—from the cooking vestibule of the tent to inside. Then he’d pull out a small yellow GPS and rub it vigorously between his hands, finally announcing how much ground we’d covered that day.


“Sixteen kilometers,” he’d say. Or 10, or 22. Never more. These announcements filled me with disbelief. We skied all day and only traveled 16 k? I fantasized about dropping the sleds and making a mad dash for the pole.


“It’s only 36 kilometers farther,” I said to B酶rge on our fourth night. “We could do that in one long day without sleds.”


B酶rge perked up at the notion, as if I’d described some delicious meal. “Four k an hour—we could do that easy,” he agreed. “I think the French are at the pole now. We could meet them.”


A French team had constructed a wacky “drift station” that looked like the Apollo 13 capsule. A French polar explorer named Jean Louis Etienne was planning to get inside it and drift on the ice for three months. We’d run into this group at Barneo, and when B酶rge had asked how well the capsule floated, one of the French scientists had shrugged and said, “We’re not sure.” B酶rge just nodded, but I think I saw him biting his lip not to laugh.


“If the French are there, they’ll have heated tents,” I smiled.


B酶rge agreed. “And wine. And real food.”


We both thought about it a moment. “But without your sled,” B酶rge finally said, “you have no security.”


“I’d take my chances on the French.”


“That they would put on your grave,” B酶rge said, rolling over to sleep. ” ‘He took his chances on the French.’ ”

THE NORTH POLE has been called “the horizontal Everest,” which is a clever way of disguising that it’s just a point on a map—an idea more than a geographic reality. On the fifth night, our last before we reached the pole, the drifting ice carried us a half-mile north.


“We are surfing toward the pole,” B酶rge announced happily. “I think the weather is changing.”
“I hope the French aren’t there,” Correne said wistfully. “I’d really like to have it to ourselves.”


“Not me,” I grumbled. “I hope they’ve opened up a bistro. With a wine bar.”


That final day, the sky clouded over and the wind increased. I was skiing along in my typical daze when B酶rge suddenly stopped, pulled out his GPS, and started rubbing it. He looked down at the screen and motioned us all ahead. “Line up,” he said. We shuffled forward. My hands hurt so bad that I’d given up holding the pole grips and instead just looped the straps around my wrists.


“Two hundred meters,” B酶rge said.


Ahead, the landscape looked exactly like it had when we started. For all I knew, we could have been skiing in one big circle for the last week.


“What is that?” Correne asked, pointing to tents in the distance.


“A Russian group,” B酶rge said. The French had apparently drifted away. Correne frowned.


“They’re not on the pole,” B酶rge assured her. “Just near the pole.”


We skied on slowly, with B酶rge counting down the meters. “Ten, nine, eight…”


And then he held up the GPS. Ninety degrees. We were on the North Pole!


Everyone whooped and hollered and did their best to look triumphant. Mostly, though, we were just tired and relieved. I took off my skis and started walking toward the Russian tent.


“Where are you going?” B酶rge asked.


“To the Russians,” I said. “They will have vodka.”


“Good idea,” B酶rge said.

THE WEATHER CLOSED in just as our helicopter was landing back at Barneo. I was shocked that it could fly at all, but as B酶rge reminded me, “They are Russian.”


We were stuck at Barneo for days, waiting for the weather to clear enough that the jet from Spitsbergen could land. We were caught in a furious Arctic storm. (“If the ice cracks under the tent,” B酶rge said casually one afternoon, “just run. Don’t try to save anything.”) We all slept in a big Russian military tent with a kerosene heater. We read, played cards, ate, and slept. And drank. French wine and Russian vodka—quite a bit, actually.
On our last night, the usual after-dinner drinking turned into a party that went on for eight hours. Brigitte hung towels over the windows and we lit candles and soon it felt just like our own very special, very selective Arctic nightclub. U2 was on the boom box, and we all started dancing and suddenly it seemed very hot and layers of clothes began to come off—lots of layers, since we all had a half-dozen or so. We were sweating, and the men were shirtless and the women mostly, too, though some wore bras or Norwegian fishnet underwear. We laughed and danced and toasted and then we all dashed outside. Half naked, we pranced in the Arctic, then scrambled back inside to start it all over again. Gradually, we staggered back to our tents, dragging our clothes.


We were still sleeping the next afternoon when one of the Russian airport personnel burst into the tent. “Come now! You must help with the runway!”


Everyone at Barneo was turning out to form human lines that would mark the runway for the pilot. “Line up!” the Russians shouted. “Every 20 meters!”


I was standing there, huddled in my huge down coat, when I heard the plane. I looked up and suddenly it exploded through the clouds, so close that I think I saw tire treads. In a flash it was past, screaming down onto the ice.


“Excellent!” one of the Russians declared, slapping my back, as we hurried to the mess tent. My heart was still pounding. “Now we must drink vodka!”


And so we did.

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