The Naturalist: Journey to Iceland
This is the second installment on our columnist’s journey to compete in an extreme, Ironman-distance triathlon in Iceland during the pandemic. The first was published on June 12: shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2021/06/12/the-naturalist-simultaneous/
Are you drowning, or are you swimming? Or are you simultaneously doing both? Should it come as any surprise that, like life, the answer is especially biased by place?
Iceland was founded in 874 by Vikings on the outs with the Norwegian king. To this day, the Icelandic language descends with minimal changes from the Old Norse spoken at the time. The first European parliamentary democracy, Iceland was not ruled by a king or one man, but starting in 930, by the Alþingi, a representational people’s government that met once a year. The location was the plain, Þingvellir, created long ago when the tectonic plates of Europe and North America pulled apart from one another.
Iceland had the first modern European literary tradition. Though written down during the Medieval period, the Landnámabók is the story of the families who settled Iceland. One of many Icelandic family sagas, here is a country’s origin story told about everyday people, not aristocrats, using shockingly straightforward prose. A radical change from the stories of kings told in the embroidered style of court poetry.
All this takes place on a volatile, volcanic island in the North Atlantic, where eruptions continue to re-shape the land to this day — and to influence the entire world, as did the ash plumes of the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption that grounded thousands of trans-Atlantic flights.
As one of the youngest geological places on earth — an otherworldly landscape of sleeping glacier-topped volcanoes, shocking volcanic rock formations, and verdant floodplains feeding herds of horses in every imaginable color — it leaves the impression of an ancient world out of sync with human time, a Tolkienesque setting out of Lord of the Rings. And only New Zealand ranks later in human settlement of a major landmass.
In short, a physical world that evokes epic, extraordinary events at every turn.
Last month, I wrote a column about my struggles to prepare for an extreme Ironman-distance triathlon in Iceland. Specifically, the 2.4-mile cold-water swim leg of the race starting at 12 a.m. under the midnight sun. What I called “the simultaneous” was the state of being, balanced between fear and flow, to complete such a swim. Especially when I didn’t know if I would be able to do it.
I now write with an apology, because I let you down. On Saturday, July 10, I finished the swim, and then I finished the entire 140-mile-plus race within the 18-hour cutoff time. My goal was to finish the race, and I did. I wanted so badly to finish it for you, so that I could write about it here. To be able to tell you what I had learned from within the realm of “the simultaneous,” as experienced on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes peninsula, a landscape so fantastical as to be the setting of Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
But something, or more appropriately, someone got in the way. Nights of panic about what you would think of me if I didn’t finish. Fretting endlessly that I would fail you — those who reached out with tremendous encouragement, those who came out to so generously swim with me.
Simply, I got in the way. I wanted a transcendent experience, to explain how an endurance race in Nature (with a capital ‘N’) could be transformational — to cross over into the sublime and then write about it for you. Instead, I prepared meticulously to do one thing, to finish the race. Then I carefully delivered with data-driven pacing, scientifically researched nutrition, and back-up plans for all weather scenarios.
Mini-supercomputers attached to my bike and wrist, I was inundated with targeted analytics. I plotted out multiple chess moves in advance. I could not fail, because every choice had a real-time cost-benefit analysis, each outcome limited to only that which was optimized to finish the entire race.
But I had set the wrong goal. There was neither a state of fear nor flow, no blessing bestowed through these all-consuming, visceral extremes of consciousness. Instead, I spent 17 hours in that dull headache that is diligent, rational execution of a plan. My goal should have been failure. The epic epiphany that is failure. To push past planning. To push past boundaries of perception. To push into self-discovery from grand mistakes and digging out of holes of my own creation. I entirely ignored the words of my first column, that finishing was never the point, that completing the race was not the reward.
My race-finisher medal says, “Where the brave shall live forever in the halls of Valhalla.”
This cringe-worthy cultural appropriation has an ironic bent. There was nothing brave about my calculated finishing of the race. No great leap of faith.
In the Norse mindset, Valhalla was an ultimate reward not for success, but for a complete failure achieved with unrestrained and uncompromised commitment and belief.
My husband — amazing as my required support team during the race, chasing my bike in a van through lava fields to provide new bottles of nutrition and hydration — is my hero and the person that got me into endurance races.
He’s never the one to prepare carefully for a race or game out contingencies. Maybe because he is a former Marine, he loves improvising a solution, flying by the seat of his pants, and then bearing a burden with fortitude. He doesn’t finish every race he enters. But he truly enjoys them. People use the word “inspirational” about him.
In my four years as a serious endurance athlete, I’ve never had to abandon a race or missed a cutoff time. When heading into a race, I am obsessive in my preparation, triple-checking my plans and every item that I might need to cross the finish line. And I don’t enjoy my races as much as my husband. He emerges with stories of perseverance through comradery, new friends made and selfies taken with strangers whom he persuaded not to quit a race.
The race in Iceland was my wake-up call. There were so many perfect moments for the simultaneous …
No Man Is an Island
Swimming in the twilight of the midnight sun, trying to reach a strobe-light beacon a mile in the distance, the water inky and dark. Dodging Artic terns, when the birds dive-bombed my bike, pecking my helmet amidst the machine-gun clicking of their attack call.
The literal counting of sheep for 10 straight minutes, in order to distract my mind from the crawling of gnats over my entire face. I was unable to brush them away, because the bike climb was too steep to let go of the handlebars.
And the crosswinds — so insanely strong that the race organizers rerouted the course to avoid a mountain pass that could be fatal under the conditions. These required that I lean my bike 20 degrees into the wind or be blown over. The race in Iceland was an embarrassment of riches. So many opportunities to experience “the simultaneous.” So many openings to abandon the self and its chatter, to slip purely into only the moment at hand. I was there, but I wasn’t present. My mind was in the future, plotting out the next tasks to reach that all-important finish line.
Not until the marathon-run portion — or, more aptly, power walk — up the 23%-grade access road over the mountain pass of the Snæfellsjökull glacier, atop its extinct volcano, did my myopia come into focus. In a new history of the Vikings by Neil Price, I learned that the Norse envisioned the self as having four divisions. The hamr is your outer form. The hugr, most analogous to a soul, is interior and your true essence. The third division is your hamingja, the spiritual embodiment of a person’s luck, but with an independent will that could choose to abandon its host; the saying that someone’s luck has “run out” is an old Norse proverb and meant literally.
And lastly, the fylgja, a female guardian spirit (even for men) that is the link to one’s ancestors. Upon death, the fylgja moves down the family line. Each of us carries our entire family within us. Here is your temporal GPS, a spiritual continuity, a connection linking your present to a past and consequently a future.
As I crossed over the mountain pass, I stopped to grab handfuls of glacial snow, which I let melt against my face and head to ease a deepening sunburn. Above me was the bluish glacier, in the distance, the coastline with a crescent beach of golden amber sand, and in between, the intense adobe of a mountain face rich in iron.
Looking down the road on the other side of the mountain — I would have to fully ascend it again on the return of the out-and-back course — I could see an area of beige desert with steaming sulphur vents. Then a series of grayish-brown waterfalls filled with glacial silt, all surrounded by the irregular shapes of moss-covered lava rocks.
Descending quickly, wild shapes and shadows abounded in the ancient lava, so many anthropomorphic forms that I felt I was being diligently watched at all times. It comes as no surprise to me that the animism of the ancient Norse religion, where elves, dwarves, trolls and nature spirits live in the rocks and the entire landscape, found its zenith in the natural wonders of Iceland.
In fact, respect for these beliefs survives to the present. Such supernatural beings are collectively known today in Iceland as huldufólk, or hidden people, and their traditional haunts seriously considered when planning public infrastructure projects.
Running down the mountain, I found the road and myself crossing over the top of a series of caves formed by a wide gulley below. Here was Sönghellir (Song Cave), famed over the ages for its incredible acoustics and as a shelter when required. Suddenly, cutoff time be damned, I was going in. I used my emergency headlamp, working my way into the main cave.
Then the deep, buttery reverberation. Without thinking, I had let loose that melody of redemption that is the Finale of Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” Enveloping me with layered sound were the colorful cave walls, covered in centuries of graffiti. Names connecting generations that had sheltered there in a time of need or a song of hope. It was in that moment, that I thought of the passage from John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main …”
The simultaneous isn’t about some exquisite balancing on the knife’s edge between fear and flow. It’s acknowledging that you won’t fall, because you already are, have always been, part of the knife, a piece of a whole, a community, a line of your fylgja. Because your island is part of the continent, part of the main.
The richness and the reward is finally learning just how deeply you belong within the human fold, no matter if it was as obscured from you, as those hidden people living in the rocks. No finish line, no feat, no token medal can provide this. How can your hamingja run out on you armed with this knowledge?
The informal national motto of Iceland is “þetta reddast” (THAH-tah RAH-dahst), in essence, that “everything in the end will work out O.K.”
I learned the hard way, that this is not just some glib individualism, simply surface over shallow water. No, it is fathoms deep in its plurality.
Are you drowning, or are you swimming? Or are you simultaneously doing both?
Deep breath. All together now: Þetta reddast!
