Interview with Amanda Harvey
Long distance winter biking events are not the first thing that comes to mind when you think about short-track velodrome racing. However when the outdoor stadium closes for the cold Minnesota winter season Amanda Harvey decided that there was still more biking to do. This journey led her from her first short fat bike race to eventually biking 350 miles across Alaska in the Iditarod Trail Invitational.
After experiencing the joys of her first winter race, Amanda discovered the St Croix 40 Winter Ultra and signed up. This led her to more and more adventures as she got familiar with the community and learned about events such as Arrowhead 135 and Tuscobia. Of course you can’t be a part of this community for long without hearing about Iditarod, and so a plan was hatched to work her way from SC40 to ITI in 5 years. Although the original plan was more like 3 years, things like COVID got in the way. However, eventually Amanda reached her goal of traveling through Alaska on two wheels.
Hear more in our conversation with Amanda on our St Croix 40 video interview, or you can read the lightly edited transcript below.
Jamison Swift – Hello and welcome. I’m Jamison Swift. I’m the race director for the St. Croix 40 Winter Ultra. And tonight we’re going to be having a conversation with Amanda Harvey. Now those of you who have been around the St. Croix 40 Winter Ultra for a while will recognize her as a participant, but probably even more so as one of our key volunteers who for quite a few years now has been overseeing our checkpoint. Making sure that everybody is boiling their water correctly and occasionally passing out a few tips and hints here and there. And Amanda has agreed tonight to chat with us a little bit about her journey, her five-year journey, from starting in winter ultras to eventually completing the Iditarod Trail Invitational in 2024.
And so we’re excited to have Amanda here with us and we look forward to seeing Amanda again in January when she’s going to once again stand out in the cold with all of us. Hopefully cold and snowy year this year.
So to start with, obviously you just didn’t wake up one morning and say, I want to start biking and I want to bike across Alaska. So tell us a little bit about your background, your athletic background, and kind of where you came from in the biking world.
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, I rode around bikes as a kid just to see my friends and get around town, to exercise with my dad after school. But my main sports were like dance and track and field. And mainly I danced for 16 years as a kid until high school. And then college came around and I wanted to ride bikes just to get around campus and explore Minneapolis a bit. And I moved to Tennessee after I got married to somebody else who also bikes. And there I found a community of like-minded folks in Nashville who rode just for fun to get pastries and breakfast and stuff.
But when we moved back to Minnesota I saw people at Stupor Bowl, which is a alley cat race in January, wearing these Coachella kits. And I was intrigued by Coachella. I didn’t know what it was. And then I learned about them being a team that races at the velodrome. And I did not know what that was, even though it was very close to where I grew up. And so I applied to be on Coachella and I was rejected.
But, there was enough rejects to form another team. And so, yeah, my favorite race on the velodrome where I learned to ride a fixed gear bike was the 500, so it’s 500 meters, which is just two laps around the track. I really enjoyed sprinting and going fast. And the thing about an outdoor velodrome in Minnesota is it’s closed in the winter because it’s full of snow.
So just looking to keep riding and I was invited to do a winter fat bike race, which I did on my husband’s fat bike. It was a really warm year that year, and so they shortened the course. So it was like 5K, it was really short, but it took me like an hour and I had an asthma attack across the finish line. And I was like, this is the first time where I debated, should I just lay down in the woods and wait till spring.
But for some reason I kept going back to winter racing and I got my own fat bike. And then I heard somebody posted on a Facebook group about the St. Croix Winter Ultra. And I thought that that sounded like fun and an adventure. I’d heard about Arrowhead 135, which sounded like a big adventure, because considering I really only rode like 20 miles at a time, 30 miles on a big day. Forty miles in the dead of night was pretty intimidating and 135 over three days was incredibly scary. So, yeah.
Jamison Swift – So Velodrome, which, you know, 250 meter track, like super fast, sprinting around in circles. And then you’re thinking, well, maybe this winter thing might be interesting because I need to do something in the winter. And you saw in a 40 mile race. And by the way, there’s also a 135 mile race. How did ITI come into this picture going from short track Velodrome to 350 miles across frozen Alaska?
Amanda Harvey – It took a few years. You know, once you get into the community and you start hearing things about other races and you learn about there’s this batch of Midwest races. I looked into races over in Europe because I wanted to think of places that’d be fun for my husband to go in the winter. But then you hear about ITI and it’s just the one that started them all.
If you go to the ITI web page and you see the qualifying races for that, that’s where you learn about all the other races you could do. It seemed really big and impossible and scary at first, but it seemed like also a good goal to work towards because being scared isn’t a reason to not do something.
Jamison Swift – So what motivated you for such a big goal? You said not being scared, you’re being scared isn’t a reason not to do something. What was really kind of driving you to look at these longer distance events?
Amanda Harvey – I really like adventure. So something that’s multi-day is super fun for me. I’m not a fast racer, so a lot of big gravel races in the summer are just sort of too short. You can’t sleep during them. And anytime I have to carry my sleeping bag around and it’s OK to take a nap, I’m happy about that. I’ve always grown up like camping and doing stuff outside, never in the winter, but being able to do big, big adventures was something that I was looking forward to trying out.
Jamison Swift – Very cool. So obviously you couldn’t just jump right into even Arrowhead. You had to kind of work your way up to Arrowhead and then eventually to ITI. So this ended up being a five-year journey for you. So what did that five-year plan end up looking like? Both, what were you planning for it to be? And then how did that play out?
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, I think it was probably going to be a three year plan. Finish Arrowhead 135 in 2020. Then I finished the Tuscobia 160 so that I had my in the next winter, so I had my two qualifiers in. But COVID snuck in there and provided a gap year. And so actually did a winter camping trip with friends during COVID.
That was really instructive and I carry a lot of that, those learnings with me, which is like a good thing to do, not just in races, but you could have time to make mistakes and adjust plans. Then I did the ITI winter training camp because they have overflow in Alaska. We don’t have a ton of overflow in the Midwest.
And I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t understand it. And I was like, I’m going to do this camp to try to experience what overflow is. So that’s one of the one less thing to be worried about.
Jamison Swift – Can you explain overflow?
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, it’s where on lakes, rivers, and ponds the weight of the snow on top of the ice causes it to sink down and the water underneath will trickle up through the ice cracks and then make slush. So on top of this the surface looks like beautiful pure snow but underneath it is like wet, sloppy mess. And then underneath that is like solid ice.
So even though you’re not going to fall into the lake, you still could get pretty wet with overflow. Being wet is a problem. I got lucky my year at camp that it was constantly like 25 degrees and snowing.
Jamison Swift – And being wet is never a good thing in winter ultras.
Amanda Harvey – No. So we had a lot of overflow to deal with every single day. And so I learned about the right kinds of layers for your feet and how to manage if your feet do get wet, like what do you do in those circumstances, how to stay warm, what your priorities are. It’s really instructional.
Jamison Swift – And that was at the ITI camp that you were able to learn all of that. And just to back up a second, started St. Croix 40 was 2019, followed by Arrowhead the following year, followed by Tuscobia 160. And then you did the camp. And the camp, said, prepared you for a lot of those things. What other learnings did you take from some of the earlier races going back to St. Croix 40 and Arrowhead, et cetera?
Amanda Harvey – My gosh. I mean, the St Croix 40, at the water boil check, I didn’t have the pump on my Whisperlite fuel canister. And so I put it on at the checkpoint, but I also dumped white gas all over my hands in the process. And so it turned out fine, but my skin was like all messed up because then I had the next 20 miles to ride with just my white gas gloves on.
So yeah, my hands took a couple of weeks to recover from that.
Jamison Swift – I can imagine.
Amanda Harvey – There was like a big long stretch of glare ice at that year’s St. Croix 40. So I reminded myself, like I practiced stable is safe, safe is fast. Falling down on the ice will take more time than just going slow and being cautious. And so learning to talk to myself during tricky parts of a ride is really helpful.
I also was afraid that I was going to be scared in the dark. The great thing about St Croix 40, at least if you’re on bike, is the runners are ahead of you. And so I could see their blinky lights in the distance. And it was really reassuring. I was never alone on the trail. I was able to go and catch each individual light and say hi to the runners as I went by. So that was really comforting.
Jamison Swift – Now in Arrowhead though, the bikers and the runners all launch at the same time and the ski folks all launch at the same time. So that would have been a different experience then. And it’s also multiple nights. Or did you have multiple nights your first Arrowhead?
Amanda Harvey – Absolutely, I am not fast. The first year I did it, I stayed for a few hours at Mel Georges. I shared a cabin with a runner, she wasn’t there when I was there, so we were just ships passing in the night. But yeah, if you’re out and alone at Arrowhead, you’re in the dark alone, you’re going down hills into the abyss alone.
It’s a whole different beast. When I got a concussion at Arrowhead my second time, I was alone in the night. So that was pretty scary. And, but you learn to just keep moving forward and eventually you’ll find a person.
Jamison Swift – So Arrowhead to Tuscobia, the ITI training camp, and then eventually to Alaska. Now, your first year in Alaska didn’t quite go according to plan, if I recall right?
Amanda Harvey – Right. Yeah, the first day, so the ITI starts at 2 p.m. I made it to the first checkpoint. I had a great time. I was enjoying the beauty of the area. Everything was wonderful and then the sun went down and the temperature dropped super quickly and I think I burped a tire and I had a flat. I had a friend there with me, Kendall, who helped me fill it up again with air. It was a rear tire. We filled it up with air and then it went flat again. It was like, all right, you’ve got to put a tube in this. It’s currently negative 15, but you got to do what you got to do. And then a whole bunch of other women happened upon me. And so I got a lot of support and encouragement from them. And I was borrowing other people’s pumps because mine wasn’t working great. And then I finally got a tube in and got going. And then my front tire went flat. Then the rear tire went flat. And at that point it was like late at night and I was on the river and they always tell you to not bivvy on the river.
You know what? I’m jumping ahead. Cause I was pushing my bike for a little bit with two other people who had flats. But then I realized like, it’s really hard to push. Like I’m not that out of shape. I don’t know what’s going on. Cause those other two people were just off ahead of me. And I look back and it’s because my rear tire flattened out and then wedged into the frame of the bike and was just like dragging along collecting snow.
Jamison Swift – You hear about that with mud, not with snow though.
Amanda Harvey – No, I think the cold air pumping into the tire, something with science happened, smarter people can tell me, caused the tire to suction onto the rim. So it’s like I had broken my pump at that point because it was so cold that the little lever just snapped off. So I was like, I can’t put any more air in it. And it was one of those times I don’t see lights around me. I’m just going to have to bivvy on this river until I can think of something about how I’m going to move forward. So I ended up shivering for two hours and just being like, I think I need to make my bike into a backpack.
So I thought I had three miles to go to the checkpoint (it was not a checkpoint but it’s just a roadhouse where you can get food and a bed). But it was seven miles and it took me all day the second day to to get to the to that point
Jamison Swift – And this is carrying your fat bike, loaded fat bike. Not pushing it anymore.
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, I not pushing it. I used the straps for my sleeping bag and made them into like backpack straps and just sort of carried my sleeping bag, which I thought would be annoying. But it helped me lever myself up because a fully loaded fat bike is probably seventy five pounds.
And I didn’t train for that, unfortunately.
Jamison Swift – Yeah probably nothing prepares you for something quite like that. So that’s where your journey on your first attempt ended. But then you came back again the next year. And how did that one go?
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, I managed to complete the whole race this year, 2024. I was pretty excited. We still had a similar temperature drop the first night, but I had a new bike. I had new tires. I was able to keep things rolling, which I was pretty excited about. And so being able to see what happened after mile 53 was all new this year is really cool to experience.
Jamison Swift – Was it all smooth sailing this year or were there…
Amanda Harvey – It was unfortunately not. I mean, where to start? I broke my hydration pack on day one and so had to spend time at the first checkpoint repairing that. We had a really big headwind come in, I think on the third day. And so it was a beautiful day of riding and then the headwind just blew the trail in. And this is not a trail that’s well it’s used frequently in the winter but not as frequently as the Arrowhead trail is and it’s not groomed and so the trail got blown in with loose soft snow so I had to like drag my bike over snow piles. I had like seven miles of walking to the checkpoint, which was just a wall tent that flapped and rattled all night. And the whole night I was just getting scareder and scareder. This is terrifying. This wind is not stopping. And somebody had gone out, fallen into overflow and came back to the checkpoint. So, people were coming in just laying down on hay bales exhausted.
Then when 5 a.m. rolled around and people were getting up to go, I was like, you’re insane. It’s dark. We should wait till light so we can see where the trail isn’t. But they convinced me to go with them and I’m really grateful they did because it was nice to be able to have a group of people to break trail with because pushing your bike solo through knee deep snow is not a fun time.
Yeah, and then the wind kept going. We went over Rainy Pass when the wind was starting to die down a little bit. That’s the Alaska Range that the Iditarod Trail goes over. And that was harrowing night. We estimated that the wind chill was probably around negative 75.
Jamison Swift – Wow.
Amanda Harvey – So it was pretty extreme. The race director was on his snow machine coming up behind us and I yelled at him. I was like, “whose idea is this?”
Jamison Swift – Hahahaha
Amanda Harvey – It’s like an alien planet through the mountain pass. It’s wild. And then the temperature stayed cold after I dropped onto the other side of the mountain range. So this is where it’s like a brutal 15 mile walk up a mountain and then a lovely 10 mile ride down through the Delzo Gorge, just crossing snow bridges. There’s an open flowing creek. There were birds chirping. It was beautiful and it made me forget what I had just been through. And then after that, you go through, there’s some other trials and tribulations that happen.
Jamison Swift – Awesome.
So all of this, but you made it to the finish, made it to McGrath. And if you were thinking back about how you did this whole adventure, this whole journey, five-year journey, obviously you ended up being successful, even though you had one year where it wasn’t, but how would you have maybe done things differently if you were to go back and talk to Amanda five years ago and say, “you’re gonna get there, but maybe you should do XYZ a little bit differently this time.”
Amanda Harvey – I would definitely work on my bike maintenance. Part of the reason my bike was having trouble that first year in Alaska was because I did it myself. A lot of upkeep and putting the sealant into my tires and pump them up myself, and I’m not a bike mechanic. So that’s the other thing I do now is I give it to a trusted friend to be like, tune this up, make sure it’s good.
And that’s been a really big help.
Jamison Swift – Sure, you run tubeless I assume then?
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, just so you can have lower pressure without worry about pinch flat. And I would like to say I haven’t had a problem with it except for the one time.
Jamison Swift – One time when it mattered. So bike mechanics, learning to be a little bit more in tune with your equipment and stuff like that.
Is there anything else that you think about that, like in preparation wise, did all of your preparation go as well as you hoped it would go throughout all of this?
Amanda Harvey – I think I would have probably started strength training sooner and more consistently. It’s something that I did pretty consistently in 2020 prior to Arrowhead, mainly out of fear. I was really afraid going into that race. But I think keeping that up is really important to be able to push your bike up and over hills and just having the mobility work to avoid injury.
It’s been a part of a problem for me for a few years, having some knee pain or elbow pain. So being able to minimize that sort of thing. So taking care of your body is important.
Jamison Swift – There are all these Midwest winter ultras, St. Croix 40, Tuscobia, Arrowhead 135, all take place here in Minnesota, Wisconsin area. There’s some other winter ultras out there. You had mentioned seeing some overseas ones. I know there’s also a few more here in the United States, like the Drift and Fat Pursuit. Fat Pursuit also does like a Fat Pursuit camp and things like that.
Did you ever look at any of those as options or what are your thoughts on some of those other races out there for preparation for doing a big event like Alaska?
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, I think they would be really helpful. I haven’t done those because I have my job has very limited PTO. And so I don’t have a lot of time to take off to go and do these things. Alaska is kind of a big deal. And that uses up most of my PTO for the year. But I think it would be really cool. Seems like the atmosphere out West is really fun.
I know of one person who did, I think, Fat Viking in Norway and had a wonderful time. Yeah, language barriers are a little scary to me, but a lot of people speak English over there in Europe, so it’s probably not actually a problem. Alaska is kind of like equidistant to Europe from here, so the effort to get there is probably actually about the same.
Jamison Swift – Sure. So to kind of wrap up here, what kind of advice would you give to folks who maybe want to do a similar type of journey? They’re going to start, they heard about this winter altar thing, they think it looks intriguing, they want to start this journey. They saw that you were able to get to Alaska in five years and be successful. What’s the best pieces of advice that you can give them for starting out and being successful and enjoying the journey as well.
Amanda Harvey – I think being humble and open to learning, you never know it all. Every year is going to teach you something different. You have your cold years, you have your perfect years, you have your warm years. So being able to be open to what the trail has to give you, I think is super important. And just never going into a race overconfident. You might feel like, all right, I’ve done all I can with my preparation. I just have to execute, which is a great feeling. But saying I’m going to crush this race can be a little scary. So I think just being open minded and making process goals. So, you know, always my first goal of a race is to finish. But if I don’t finish, what else do I want to do?
Do I want to be cognizant of changing my tire pressure? Do I want to make sure I don’t have any mechanicals? What are the practice skills that I want to do? Arrowhead I did unsupported this year. So making sure I did stop to melt snow and make a meal for myself because that’s just good practice for when I’m going to go to Alaska and I have to, I have an 80 mile stretch where there’s no services and I have to fend for myself.
Figuring out how to have process goals. What would make your race a success, even if you don’t win or if you don’t finish? What can you take and learn from the race.
Jamison Swift – Small little goals along the way.
Amanda Harvey – Yeah, and write it down. It really helps to write it out.
Jamison Swift – Any other last-minute thoughts for folks who are maybe wanting to, or are curious about Winter Ultras? And what would you say to folks who maybe are a little leery about jumping in? And what would you say to encourage them?
Amanda Harvey – I would say that the best thing about winter ultras is it makes me super excited for winter. Living in the Midwest, anywhere they get snow, people as they’re an adult, they get cranky about winter and they, you only have bad experiences with snow because it messes up your commute and you slip on the ice or whatever. But when you have something to look forward to, to do in the winter. It really changes your perspective on what’s going on. So any time it’s snowy, I’m so excited. I look forward to the cold. The colder, the better, because it’s just good practice.
I would also say that this is a really great community. Get to know runners, skiers, bikers. You get all sorts of people that you wouldn’t necessarily hang out with. If you’re if you’re a runner, you’ll meet bikers. If you’re a biker, you’ll meet runners. You get to expand your community of people you hang out with and people who do winter ultras. We’re like a little cult, we just want you to join us. And so we’ll do whatever we can to make sure you have the skills and the tools that you need to succeed.
Jamison Swift – Well, thank you so much for taking some time to chat with us tonight. We’re looking forward to seeing you again out in January. And now, what’s next for you? Is there another Alaska trip coming up?
Amanda Harvey – Yep, I’m doing Tuscobia 160 this year and going back to do the Iditarod Trail Invitational 350. So hopefully I’ll get my two finishes in, which means I’ll be eligible to do the 1000 if I feel like it. We’ll see.
Jamison Swift – One step at a time. All right. Well, thank you so much, Amanda, and best of luck with training this coming year, and we’ll see you out there on the trails.
Amanda Harvey – See ya.
St Croix Winter Ultra 