What a year it has been for the Race to Alaska! Winners have been crowned, but it’s the last few teams bringing up the rear that are showing why this race is so special. Here’s a report by the R2AK media team from the finish…

The docks in Ketchikan are quiet. The finish line bell is hanging moribund upon its post. The remaining beers are sitting around, warm by now because nobody has been down to check on the ice. Meanwhile, several thousand tracker enthusiasts are using industrial-strength Visine in a spray bottle to continue staring intensely at the four remaining dots moving north. Like they have been for three weeks.

The winning sailboats finished in a quarter of that time. Those canvas jockeys raced hard, slept little, then wrung themselves out. They’d ploughed through their GORP but barely touched their dehydrated beef stroganoff. There is a massive difference between a weeklong sprint and three weeks of waking up every morning to discover your body is still the equipment. There’s a dose of psychological violence when you know others have finished, celebrated, flown home, mowed their lawn, and resumed life while you are still out there eating damp space food in the rain.

Monday started at 5:30 AM when Team Notes pushed off from the north end of Grenville Channel. After a long stretch of traveling with Lillian, they had gone separate ways the day before. There’s no knowing from a tracker if that was a tactical choice or just the pivot solo racers sometimes make when they can smell the barn.

A couple of miles away and just slightly to the north, Team Apple Bottom Boy and Team Belly Full of Tea (Apple Full of Belly Tea Boy) left their spot in the Gibson Group and pointed themselves toward Telegraph Passage and the mouth of the Skeena River. The route probably offered some protection from the day’s gusty nasties – maybe just a way to get it to punch with a slightly smaller fist.

Lillian, suffering, started a bit later and chose differently, keeping to the west and ending the day on Porcher Island. Locals welcomed her in, and it was good timing, since the sky had begun one of BC’s favorite games: using rain to pretend the land is actually underwater.

Notes took some less-than-true local advice. Someone in Port Edward told him that the tidal rapids on the backside of Prince Rupert were “chill,” so Nathan went that way. Chill, much like reasonable, affordable, and just around the corner, is a word whose meaning depends on who’s doing the talking.

Apple Bottom Boy and Belly Full of Tea (Tea Full of Belly Apple Bottoms) got to Prince Rupert, and it looked like that might be the end of their day. Then Esther promptly left again after only a few hours. This time, alone. And just like that, for the first time since before Cape Caution, the four remaining racers were all traveling solo. That was the original idea, of course, but soloists moving at similar speeds tend to find each other out there – for safety, for sanity, and for another human brain that can remember the actual lyrics to the song that has been driving them crazy.

With the deadline hunting right behind them, the time for resting up before each big push is done. Now it’s all push: through weather, through fatigue, and through the strange interface of the tracker, where an eight mile crossing looks like nothing from a couch and feels like the entire Old Testament from a paddleboard.

Humans are generally advised to leave something in the tank. Save some money, get some sleep, keep a little in reserve for the inevitable. It’s solid advice—right up until tomorrow stops happening. Bruce Willis in Armageddon understood the loophole: if there’s no tomorrow, you can really open up the throttle on today.

For three weeks, tomorrow has been the primary adversary for the muscle-powered contingent of the Race to Alaska. Every mile cleared today came with the grim knowledge that the morning would demand forty more, and every hour of sleep skipped was a high-interest loan that would eventually come due. You can empty the tank clawing around a headland, but there’s always another one waiting behind it, lurking like credit card debt clad in spruce trees.

The proximity to “Done” ruins all the math. When the smell of the barn hits those salty nostrils, the body’s internal union rep stops complaining about unpaid overtime and agrees to work the shift. Legs declared legally dead suddenly find a pulse. A sensible anchorage starts to look like cowardice. Maybe the brain keeps a hidden reserve behind glass with a little hammer next to it, or maybe a shower stall is a performance-enhancing drug when viewed from twenty miles out.

Whatever the chemistry, by 0600 on Wednesday morning the final four teams were all within forty miles of Ketchikan, moving north believing that today was the only day left on earth. Team Belly Full of Tea led the pack toward the dock and, presumably, the Hecate Solo Star Award.

Behind Esther came Team Apple Bottom Boy. We have all known, conceptually, that Eric was traveling on a stand-up paddleboard, but the prose has thus far ignored the physical reality of the name. He has been standing. For roughly half of the 500-something hours since the horn blew, he’s been on his feet, balancing on a high-tech piece of driftwood while dragging it 750 miles north with a glorified spoon. We noticed the paddling; the standing seems like a massive oversight on our part.

Somebody get that man a chair.

Next up is Team Lillian Signed Up to Suffer. Lillian has attempted the R2AK twice before in this boat, and on her birthday she is finally going to finish the thing. She also rowed something like ten miles farther than Team Notes, less a dramatic pass on the inside corner than the ancient racing technique of continuing to row after the other person stops.

Which leaves Team Notes anchoring the rear. Nate has run a quiet, media-agnostic sort of race, mostly because he’s too busy being a quiet badass to bother with the cameras.

Forty miles is a long way to move a small boat, but forty miles toward a burger is different from forty miles toward another wet tent. For 22 days, they have had to save something. After the finish, they can spend it.

Note: Feature image by Lynnette Oostmeyer.