In the shelter of the trees at Rohn, one of the prettiest checkpoints on the Iditarod Trail.
Princess or witch?
As night was settling over the Alaska Range on Monday, 36-year-old, Norwegian ultra-athlete Justinas Leveika looked well on his way to becoming the fastest cyclist ever to pedal a bike along the Iditarod Trail from Knik to McGrath.
Just after 6 p.m., he rolled into the remote Rohn checkpoint on the north side of the Alaska Range better than halfway through the Iditarod Trail Invitational 350 to McGrath. He’d left Knik barely 18 hours earlier, and he had nearly all of the serious climbing required in this race behind him.
Just holding pace would have put in McGrath with a time of somewhere around 1 day, 12 or 13 hours – well under the record time of 1 day, 18 hours, 32 minutes set by then Anchorage fat-tired cyclist and now Bellingham, Wash, mountain biker John Lackey in 2015.
And then….
Well, let’s all just welcome Leveika to an Alaska wilderness that can, in one minute, glow like a beautiful princess and, in the next, turn into an ugly witch.
Leveiki pedaled out of the cluster of spruce surrounding the lone Rohn cabin at the confluence of the Tatitna and South Fork Kuskokwim rivers and onto the icy surface and interlaced gravel bars of Kusko draining north to Nikolai just a little after 7 p.m.
His GPS satellite tracker showed he made good time for about 8 miles downriver to where the Post River enters the Kusko from the west. From there on, the numbers indicate he pushed a little and rode a little for six or eight miles more to Eygpt Mountain.
There, it would appear, he was finally forced to get off the bike and push and push and some more. There is usually one of two reasons for this. The trail is buried beneath new snow or blown in with old snow.
In the timbered country around Eygpt Mountain and out into the brushy scrublands of what was long ago the Farewell Burn, new snow is the likely culprit. Clearly, there hasn’t been enough snowmachine traffic back and forth between Nikolai and Rohn in recent days to pack in a rideable trail, and Leveiki is getting an energy-draining lesson in what this means, if he didn’t already know.
Between 3 a.m. and 10 a.m., his speed rarely topped 3 mph and was regularly under 2 mph. Over the course of those seven hours, he covered less than 13 miles, plodding along beside the bike at an average speed of 1.83 mph.
It does appear that he was able to again start riding in places after shortly after mid-morning. He at one point hit a speed of almost 5 mph. But his average from 10 a.m. to noon still barely reached 3 mph.
At that speed, he would still be more than 12 hours from Nikolai, almost 40 miles ahead on the trail.
As far as the Invitational race goes, he still looked to be in good shape. His nearest competitor, Fairbank’s Curtis Henry, was still 20 miles back and pushing his bike as well.
Meanwhile, defending 350-champ Tyson Flaharty from Fairbanks and trailmate Seth Harney from Buena Vista, Colo., were another 10 miles behind Henry, but they appeared to have benefited from taking a five to six hour break in Rohn.
They were closing in ever so slowly on Henry. There is no telling whether they will catch him or not, but t would be more than a little ironic if Flaharty did, given that he intentionally wasn’t racing to McGrath this year.
He’s entered in the Iditasport 1000 to Nome, and headed up the trail at an energy-saving pace aimed at maintaining the necessary gas in the tank to get there. It would add an interesting tortoise-and-the-hare element to this year’s race were he to catch up.
