DILLINGHAM -- Active runners in this Southwest Alaska town of 2,300 must eschew variety and inure themselves to redundancy. They must prepare to run, ad nauseam and mostly alone, on a limited selection of paths, city streets and road shoulders.
Andrew Berkoski, the 46-year-old owner of the Subway restaurant in Dillingham, in 2010 traveled to Antarctica to compete in a marathon. A few months later he ran an ultramarathon in the Gobi Desert in China. To prepare for these two wildly different events, he trained exclusively in Dillingham, a community with no running culture, only one established local race, a modicum of pavement, no "runnable" trail system and no place to exercise indoors.
Dillingham's three main paved roads total 28 miles, plus three short segments of multi-use paths that parallel the pavement. There are also two substantial gravel roads: a 5-miler that connects two of the paved roads and allows for a nearly 10-mile loop; and the 8-mile Snake Lake Road, the only connection to four primitive but commonly used hiking trails. A lack of regular maintenance makes these trails problematic. Throughout the winter, all but the first half-mile of Snake Lake Road is closed to traffic and buried in snow.
Consequently, local runners who want to train year round must repeatedly travel the same main roads, the same pocked city streets and fractured sidewalks, and the same back roads in order to log their miles. Berkoski, who lives about 13 miles outside the city, ran to work at the Dillingham City School District every other weekday throughout the year, in order to keep up with his training. To prepare for the desert, he sometimes trained inside his family's tiny sauna, jogging in place and performing situps and pushups in 140-degree heat.
During winter, regardless of the weather, Berkoski left his house on foot at 4 a.m., headlamp lit and work clothes in a knapsack, to beat the traffic on the shoulder-less and mostly unlit Aleknagik Lake Road. On non-running days, he rode his bicycle to work and back, then went for a short run (5-6 miles) to keep his mileage up. On Saturdays, he ran roughly the equivalent of a marathon.
He trained this way for at least two years in preparation for Antarctica.
Dillingham's Cindy Tuckwood, preparing for a triathlon in Wisconsin this summer, trained by running and biking along a road construction zone at 5 every morning, hiking and climbing mountains with her three young daughters, and, once the winter ice melted, donning a wetsuit and swimming three times a week in a lake 20 miles from home.
The wetsuit covered everything but her head, feet and hands, providing just enough warmth to allow her to train in early spring. "I do wear goggles and swim cap," she said, "(but) your face, feet and hands all get extremely cold the first couple of swims. The first swim is always the worst. After that, you just tell yourself, 'Heck, I already did it once, so this is a piece of cake.' "
Every day, Tuckwood's alarm clock wakes her at 4:30 a.m. A few minutes later, she clips a leash onto her dog's collar and is out the door, running in the dark during the fall, winter and spring. A veritable exercise machine, Tuckwood, 46, logs about 50 miles a week on foot, several hours on her bicycle, and does six sessions of P90X workouts in addition to the summer swims.
By the time her daughters and husband arise, Tuckwood, who works as a substitute teacher for the local school district, is ready to focus on breakfast and family.
She has been training this way for the past 15 years.
In many remote communities such as Dillingham, dedicated runners are rare -- and it's easy to see why. Like Berkoski and Tuckwood, those who exercise regularly here are mostly do-it-yourselfers, making the best of this community's recreational deficits: no outdoor track, no swimming pool, no public gymnasium, no rec center, and just one event in the Alaska Runners Calendar.
Although a free-to-the-public 5-kilometer color run began here in 2014, the only established local race is the annual Tony's Run, which began in 1992 in honor of Anthony Jones, a Dillingham Police Department officer killed in the line of duty.
Being disconnected from the road system also means travel expenses for anyone wishing to train for an event outside of Dillingham. Promoters hoping to draw competitors to Bristol Bay for races face the same obstacle. Typically, round-trip airfare from Anchorage to Dillingham, or vice versa, is at least $500.
There is, however, a silver lining to training here: Success remains possible.
Berkoski's training in snow, frigid air and on icy roads paid off in Antarctica, where he finished first in his age group (40-49), fourth among all male runners, and fifth overall among 70 finishers.
Berkoski said he also benefited from the tedium of his Dillingham training. Logging all those miles at home was "good because I had to play mental games with myself. I had to get used to the monotony." In Antarctica, with its tightly restricted use of public space, the marathon course was laid out in one 8-mile loop -- and the runners repeatedly navigated its hills, snowfields, mud, slush and streams until they reached 26.2 miles.
In the Gobi a few months later, Berkoski once again had to put his mind on hold during his first ultramarathon. Sometimes he faced wide-open, sandy stretches several miles long.
But this time, despite his sauna regimen, the desert heat of more than 120 degrees got the best of him. He dropped out midway through.
In the Wisconsin triathlon, Tuckwood also had a first-place finish, topping a small women's field. As she ran 4 miles, swam a half-mile and biked 15 miles, she did just what she always does in Dillingham: Just go. Just work hard.
The monotony of training in a Bush community doesn't faze Tuckwood because she doesn't dwell on it. "We live in Dillingham. I don't think about where I could be," she said. "I just get out and run with my dog. You can make up every excuse (not to work out), but if you make it a priority or a commitment, you're going to do it. I just do it."
Clark Fair, a Kenai Peninsula resident for more than 50 years, is a lifetime Alaskan now living in Dillingham.