Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic

For most people who run the "classic," it represents the single event around which everything revolves. Stay up to late partying on a sunday night, and your 2 hours of sleep become "sleep deprivation practice" for the classic. Not much else could make me subject myself to rediculous hardships, like not eating for three days, running 14 miles every day after work for 2 months, limiting myself to 4 hours of sleep a night while working a full time job, packrafting 15 miles of the kenai river at midnight every day for a week, swimming in glacier lakes to the point of hypothermia almost daily, skiing every day off all summer long, and the list goes on and on.... The point is that running the classic feels like the one thing that every thing I have ever done was in preperation for.

I would love to tell my partner Craig "chunk" Barnard and I's story here, but a link to Roman Dial's race report can tell the story better:

http://packrafting.blogspot.com/2009/08/wilderness-classic-report-unofficial.html

National Geographic 'adventururer of the year' Andrew Skurka did a great writeup for Backpacking light Magazine as well:

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/race_report_2009_amwc.html?id=ZNBuBXJH:209.124.128.160