Good news!

I just spoke with a truck driver in Anchorage who told me he had my bicycle and was five minutes from Speedway Cycles, the bike shop that was going to give Pugsley a "cold-weather" lube and tuneup. I don't think I'll feel completely at ease until I have the bike in my hands, but knowing it has been found and is on its way to its destination is a big weight off my head.

I want to thank everyone who made some noise and helped mobilize FedEx in my plight. My status as just another person in a crush of delayed packages didn't entitle me to any special treatment, but I really think the response to my desperate situation convinced the company to take some action, and almost definitely made the difference between my package arriving today instead of sometime next week. So thanks to Angela at NPR, my bull-dog mother who spent more than an hour on the phone with a range of different people, my dad who wrote e-mails to the higher ups, and anyone else who weighed in. Also, I wanted to thank Manny in Anchorage and others who commented and offered to help me find alternatives. Understanding I still had options was hugely pacifying when I still felt like I was facing a big unknown.

Also, I forgot the link to this when I was one-track-minding through my Pugsley dilemma, but Jared Eborn with the Deseret News wrote a great piece for my hometown paper in Utah. You can read it here.

Also, my final pre-race interview with NPR, which is mostly devoted to talking about my missing bike. It, too, has a happy ending.

Finding Pugsley

Well, the saga continues. Today I had both my mom (who is much better at wading through the murk of corporate America than I am) and NPR's Bryant Park Project lobbying FedEx on my behalf. They both received a version of the same runaround I was getting yesterday, except for today the customer service people added bad weather as a reason packages didn’t go out earlier. I wanted to tell them that I live in Juneau - if the weather was too bad this week for flying, that must be the case 348 days out of the year. When the radio host told them she was from NPR, the customer service agent reacted by saying, “We don’t respond to threats.”

I dropped back into the Juneau office again later this morning to play their own weather argument against them - if the bike’s still in Juneau, I said, I want it back. The woman at the desk made a call, chatted for a bit and then said to the person she was speaking with, “Yeah, that’s probably her. I probably have her right here.” Then she cupped her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Are you the woman with the bicycle?” I nodded. I already had my tirade mapped out. I was ready to unleash when she got off the phone and said, “There’s really nothing we can do. We don’t know exactly where your package is. But if it went out Monday as you said, it really should be scanned into the Anchorage system by Friday.” Maybe FedEx is a good shipping company. I don’t know. Their customer service is sure terrible.

I’d like to believe Pugsley will be in Anchorage by Friday, but I have no real reason to optimistic about that. The package is literally off the radar, and probably has been since the moment I dropped it off. I am not without options, however. There is a bike shop in Anchorage that actually offers race-ready Pugsley rentals, at a special Ultrasport price that is nearly half what I spent on my own Pugsley in the first place (and these bikes may or may not be available this close to the event.) There also appears to be some benevolent souls in the core Anchorage winter cycling group that may be willing to lend me a bicycle. I don’t have a definite replacement lined up yet, but I am at least a few steps on the optimistic side of just going out and buying a pair of snowshoes and a sled. Either way, I’m showing up at this race. I am not going to let FedEx be the challenge that beats me.

I spent a lot of emotional currency on this problem yesterday, and felt a bit guilty about indulging my stress to such an extreme. After all, unexpected and even potentially catastrophic hiccups are just part of running the Iditarod. At the same time, if I have no bicycle, I have no race. So why should I conserve my emotional state? But working through all that negativity and panic and outright despondence has actually been cathartic. It has helped me clear my head of other building stresses and look more clearly into the big picture. This morning, I was trying on a new pair of socks that finally arrived yesterday, two weeks late (via UPS), which I let sit in their unopened package all day because, “If I don’t even have a race, why do I need socks?” But as I pulled on the warm wool socks this morning, I felt this rush of confidence. “Finally,” I thought, “My armor is complete.” I’m ready to go to battle. Steed or no steed. Firm trail or soft trail. Come what may.

My bicycle is missing

Date: Feb. 18
Mileage: 18.0
February mileage: 267.6
Hours: 1:30
Temperature: 38

Last week, when I was having a bad day amid all my bicycle preparations, I jokingly mentioned that I might not mind never seeing my bike again. Today I’m despondent that I may just get my wish.

This is hopefully nothing, and I am trying to take a stubborn stance of optimism, but the fact is Pugsley is lost in a FedEx vortex right now, and no one seems willing or able to tell me where it is.

When I dropped the bike off on Wednesday, I was under the impression that it would go out that day and be delivered Friday. But in actuality, it sat at the Juneau FedEx center until Monday and was in theory picked up in the afternoon - although no one knows for sure, because no one bothered to scan it. Now I have the national customer service agents telling me that my package does not exist, and the local people telling me that it may be on its way to Anchorage, but it definitely is no longer in Juneau.

I stopped by the office today and tried to swallow my panic as I explained how much I *really* needed to know where it was.

“Juneau’s a small market,” the man told me. “We only ship out once a week and the driver came and picked up all of our ground packages yesterday. They don’t get scanned until they get to Anchorage.”

“Any idea how long it will take to get there?”

“Actually, I don’t know how long it usually takes.”

“Is there any way to contact the driver?”

“We used to call him, but he stopped answering his phone and then he changed his cell phone number because he was getting too many calls about packages.” The man smiled faintly as if this news was supposed to make me feel better. It did not. It made me feel a hundred times worse. He shrugged his shoulders as though to tell me not to blame him. It made me want to blame him a hundred times more. How can you stand your work? I wanted to ask him. If it were my job to send packages into a dark abyss with no promise or even hope that they will ever reach their destination, I think my own ineffectiveness would drive me crazy.

“If it doesn’t get there by next Monday,” he said, “give us a call and we’ll see what we can do.”

Now I am trying to accept that the only thing I can do is wait and see. I have been going over my options in my head. The nightmare of lining up for the Iditarod with my Gary Fisher is more than I can bear. I could maybe rent a fat bike in Anchorage, but what kind of bike shop would be willing to rent out for an event like this? I wonder if it is too late to build up a sled and reregister for this race as a walker.

Please, Pugsley, come back.