Hi everyone! Sorry for the delay in blogging, but I’ve been pretty busy the last week prepping, running, and recovering from the craziest race on earth – the Klondike Road Relay!
There’s a lot you need to understand about this race before I can even do this recap. It’s a 109 mile/175 km road relay that runs from Skagway, AK to Whitehorse, YT in Canada. 10 people run legs that vary in distance from an incredibly steep 5 miler through White Pass at night to a 16 miler over rolling hills at dawn. It can take an entire day to finish the race, and you have to cross over an international border in the middle of it! And if all of that doesn’t sound difficult, here’s the hardest part – Skagway is in a pretty remote area of Alaska. If you want to get there you’ve only got a few options: fly or take the ferry from Juneau, or drive there. Coming from Anchorage, the easiest and cheapest way for us to get there and have an RV to use during the race was to drive there using the Alcan highway. Yes, this is the same highway that we drove last year to move up here (you may remember my stories about crashing into a snowbank and blowing out a tire).
A few months ago my coworker casually asked me if I wanted to run this race with her team, and I said “Of course!” not knowing anything about it. The planning period got a little crazy at times, but when we finalized everything I ended up with leg #7, an 8.8 mile portion that starts around daylight on Saturday morning.
I was a little worried about running on little sleep, but figured that Ragnar had prepared me for it, right? So last Thursday night I showed up in a parking lot in Anchorage to meet the rest of my team and the RV that would be my home for 72 hours! Our team name was “The Fanny Pack” and we had a fanny pack that played music out loud that we could wear while running!
Clearly this is a fanny pack on the back of our RV 🙂
The first thing I realized about this race is that the initial excitement wore off pretty quickly. Driving in the dark through remote areas of Alaska was terrifying because of all the moose we almost hit on the road, and it was pretty much impossible to sleep the first night due to crazy bumpy road conditions and a super early morning border crossing that required all of us to be awake and coherent when talking to the border agent. The excitement started to pick up again once we were in Canada, especially because we saw a bear right on the side of the road!
By the time we got to Skagway we’d been driving for 20 hours nonstop. I’d never been there before and was so excited to check the town out. We had just enough time to do some sight seeing and get dinner before our first runner started the relay at 7:00 pm!
Downtown Skagway was actually pretty cute!
The start line of our wave at 7:00
Since we were so pumped up about actually running the race and it was still pretty early in the night, we had way too much fun cheering runner #1 on. She had to go up a giant hill that lasted for a few miles and we made sure to blast music out of our RV and give out lots of high fives to her and the other runners around her to keep them from getting too discouraged. Runner #2 got similar cheers, but it eventually started to rain and I became too tired and cold to leave the RV. By the time runner #3 was finished, I was so deliriously tired that I have no idea how I held an actual conversation as I spoke to the border agent at the crossing into Canada. I decided to go to bed so that I’d be able to get a few hours of sleep for my early morning leg.
I woke up around 6:00 and had an hour to try to drink water and eat a little bit of food before my leg started. The runner for leg #6 was super fast, and before I knew it I was out in the chilly dawn starting my very first international race in Carcross, YT! The good news was that my leg was gorgeous and I had some really great weather. The bad news is that within 2 miles I realized that not sleeping, eating, or drinking enough water in the last 24 hours was going to make this a really tough run. It was one of the hardest races of my life, especially because of the very last hill (which let’s be honest, was more like a mountain) where I totally lost all desire to keep going. But at the top I got a great view from the scenic overlook and it was just enough to keep me going for one more mile.
This is the Carcross Desert – the smallest desert in the world at only 1 square mile. It was so cool and I really wanted to explore it!
I couldn’t get enough of these views!
As soon as I passed off the lanyard to runner #8 I had to rush over to the side of the road because I honestly thought I was going to puke. I ended up keeping it together, but I couldn’t stop shaking and couldn’t really stomach eating food for a while (chocolate milk luckily saved the day!). Once I changed into warm and dry clothes I felt much better, and I was able to refuel properly just in time to be able to cheer on our final runners. Around 4:00 pm we met our last runner in Whitehorse and cheered her on to the finish in 20:25:21!
I was so excited to be done, but just because the race was finished didn’t mean things got any easier! We spent the next few hours showering at an athletic center in town, eating crazy amounts of pasta at Boston Pizza, and taking a nap before hitting up the after party at a hotel in downtown Whitehorse. I didn’t stay too late, but it was really cool seeing everyone who had finished such a crazy hard race together in one room. After another mostly sleepless night, me and my two coworkers woke up early and hit up a Tim Horton’s for tons of coffee and donuts before driving 14 hours back home to Anchorage. We got in at midnight on Sunday and I literally had to take a sick day on Monday to recover.
Our drive was brutally long, but the views made up for it. Notice that this Canadian road sign is in French!
If I had to sum this race experience up in one word, it would be: hard. While the running part of the race was extremely difficult because of my lack of proper self care due to living on an RV for 30 hours before I ran, it was honestly the best part because I got the opportunity to run alone through the mountains in the Yukon. It’s an experience that few people will ever get, and I’m really glad I got the chance to do it. But it’s extremely hard living in a tiny space with mostly strangers for such a long period of time, and next time I think I’ll try to do it with people that I know instead. I thought this race would be like Ragnar but it was so different – and sooooo much harder. There’s no way to train for the physical and mental exhaustion that happens before running your leg, and it’s hard to have to keep living in an RV for so long after the race is over. But if you’re looking for an incredibly beautiful, challenging, and unique relay and can get up to Skagway at the end of the tourist season I recommend signing up! I might sound crazy, but I think I’ll be there next year…
Have you ever run an international race? What is the longest amount of time you’ve traveled to get to a race? Will I see you here next year? 🙂
Mom in the Mtns 
What a cool experience! I once saw a baby bear when I went trail running. Glad I didn’t run into Mama.
That’s so scary! I haven’t run into a bear while running (yet) but I do frequently run into moose. I’m just glad we were in the RV when we saw this bear!
what a fun experience, even if it ended up being difficult! isn’t it so crazy how hit-or-miss a run can be despite our preparing for it? i swear, i can sometimes eat and drink the something before a run that goes amazing, but then if i try the same routine a few weeks later, my body hates me. the adventures in running!
Ugh yes it’s the worst! I knew this run was going to be terrible because there is no way to adequately prepare for it when you’ve been in an RV for over a day. We all joked about our “training” next year including running after not sleeping for an entire day!
Congratulations! Those views are insanely beautiful.
Thank you! It was definitely a gorgeous run!
Congrats on your finish! That sounds like a lot of fun. Alaska is so beautiful and what a great way to see it!
Thanks! Most of the race took place in British Columbia and the Yukon so that was a really fun way to see Western Canada in the fall. We drove past Wrangell-St. Elias National Park in Alaska but it was too cloudy to see the really big mountains so there’s no pictures of that unfortunately. Skagway was really pretty too!
OMG this looks so insanely beautiful! I’ve been briefly to AK (to help my ex who is a bush pilot fly back to CO) but need to do a ton more exploring up there. And in Canada. Now that I live in Portland, I’m so excited to adventure so much more up here! And you really make me want to do some of these races! I kept thinking relays had longer stages, like half marathon stages… Hm…. 😉
Ooooh you should definitely come up here! It’s so gorgeous all year long. This trip was not for the faint of heart and I’d recommend that it not be your first trip up here (unless you fly to Juneau and take the ferry to Skagway, driving from Anchorage is too intense) but you should consider it someday! I think the races in Anchorage are much more “normal” given that they’re in the city and don’t involve hours of driving!
What a great race opportunity! The views are amazing. I need to visit Alaska. I’m adding it to my bucket list. And maybe that part of Canada too! I’ve never done an international race. Sounds like you had a good experience considering the lack of sleep!
You should definitely come here! And the Yukon and British Columbia are gorgeous too, but I definitely had a culture shock when I drove through them last year. The highway goes through some remote places and while the views are gorgeous, it’s pretty intense to see signs saying that you’re out of the 911 response zone and know that there are so many things that can go wrong out there (bears, snow, blown tires, etc.). Whitehorse is tiny compared to Anchorage and most places in the Lower 48 but I thought it looked so much bigger after living in Alaska for a year!
Wow! It does sound like a tough race! I love all of the scenic photos (and the bear, yikes!) I can’t imagine running over 8 miles on such little sleep – great job!
PS. I love the fanny pack design on your RV – hahaha!
Haha thanks! I’m so mad the fanny pack stopped working before my leg, otherwise I would have worn it to match the RV!
Wow, beautiful pictures! That little desert is so awesome!!! How unique. The RV living does sound a bit tough, but you were tougher!! Congrats on another race completed! You are rocking this!
Thanks! It was so hard, I can’t even begin to talk about it on here. I still don’t think I’ve recovered fully. But it was worth it because I got to run in such a beautiful place!