This article was written by Sarah Barber for the spring 2023 issue of ATRA’s quarterly newsletter. A lifetime resident of Boise, Idaho, Barber has been a Life Flight Paramedic for seventeen years, and currently works in dual capacity as a clinician and a Quality Manager. When she’s not flying in helicopters or collecting data for continuous quality improvement, she can be found trail running with her dog and camping with her husband in the mountains of her home state and throughout the northwest.
Synchronicity. It means different things to different people, but it’s become so pervasive in my life that I almost never use the word “coincidence” anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in random chance, but I live by the unapologetically Gladwellian philosophy that all things happen in a bigger context and with more choreography than we usually realize.
Last fall, one of my track club teammates was Instagrammed by a faceless handle who acknowledged her athletic grit and suggested she might want to try snowshoe running. My friend’s response? No. Hard No. Meanwhile, I felt a little slighted. Why hadn’t this mystery recruiter recognized my grit and asked me to try snowshoe racing? But no matter. I was busy prepping for the USATF Club Cross Country National Championships and coercing others to join me in forming a big enough team to score. I also needed women with grit, and the time window to enter the race was narrowing. So I reached out to @boise_trail_team with a plea deal: come race for my cross-country team, and maybe I’ll try snowshoe running.
This is how I met Amber Tookey – via Instagram. Then I got to know her a little better using Google, ultrasignup.com, Strava, and athlinks.com. It was quickly evident that we had done some of the same trail races and that we mingled in overlapping social spheres, but somehow we had never been introduced. It was also evident that she was faster than me, though she hadn’t always been. Just like a gap in someone’s resume might threaten their employability, her race history had a year that was unaccounted for and bookended by unimpressive seasons—minimal racing and finishes that were well off the podium.
She wasn’t able to commit to traveling to club cross country nationals in the eleventh hour, but she also wasn’t going to let me forget that I had indicated an interest in snowshoe running. Keep in mind, we still hadn’t met face-to-face. Via text message, Amber explained that the US Snowshoe Association National Championships would be held right here in Idaho, our home state, and proceeded to hook me up with a pair of lightweight aluminum frames from her main sponsor, Dion Snowshoes. We texted back and forth for several weeks, and this self-proclaimed wannabe snowbird surprised her friends and family by rejoicing when a few snowflakes arrived in November.
I felt lucky to have met someone who changed my attitude towards winter because snowshoe running is not a common activity in the Pacific Northwest—most people around here just ski. Amber explained that the winter of 2016-2017, often referred to as “Snowpocalypse” in our region, was when she found her first pair of snowshoes at Outdoor Exchange, a store that sold used sporting goods. She refused to be imprisoned by the harsh weather, preferring trails to treadmills regardless of the season.
Snowshoe running was not the answer; snowshoe running was the question, and the answer was a resounding YES. Hard-wired to compete, Amber’s first race was the national championships in 2019 where she came in 4th and qualified for the world championships.
The first time Amber and her husband Chuck took me to Bogus Basin, the nearby ski area, to try snowshoeing, I didn’t like it. But I was pretty sure I liked Amber and Chuck. If I’m honest, I didn’t really enjoy the second or third time on snowshoes either—it was just so hard. Feeling winded and pushing my body to perform is part of my daily routine, but needing to stop every few minutes to catch my breath was unfamiliar. Amber seemed light-hearted and patient, more focused on taking photographs and giggling as she endo-ed in a patch of fresh powder. However, it wasn’t long before she got down to business, slaughtering a four-mile tempo effort that left me in her snowflake dust. My improvement curve was steep, though, and soon I could tuck in behind Amber and Chuck, getting snow flicked in my face for a few minutes before they dropped me.
Our weekly 45-minute commute up the mountain generated deep conversations, revealing more and more common ground. We quickly figured out that Amber’s house is about a mile from mine, which meant that I no longer needed to meet them at the base of the ski hill for carpooling. It took a little longer for Amber to tell me that she had been discharged from the hospital less than two years ago after winning a battle with leukemia.
Amber Tookey, snowshoe racer/trail runner/cancer survivor.
Wait…WHAT? How was it possible that this uber athlete who was routinely crushing Strava segments all over town had undergone chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and was still on a tapering dose of what she called her “cancer meds.” She showed me pictures of a bald, gaunt woman in a wheelchair, pandemic-inspired mask in place. I recognized her eyes.
Flash forward to January of this year: we were deep into training for the US Snowshoe Association National Championship race. I could now run over six miles on snowshoes without stopping, and Amber was PR-ing her tempo runs. Three weeks out from the race, we burned a Saturday driving over one hundred miles to Jug Mountain Ranch to preview the course. As we studied a map and fiddled with our gear, a voice called out across the parking lot, “Sarah? Is that you?”
I looked up to see several people clustered around a waxing table and a quiver of Nordic skis. My longtime friend Barb Kreisle was waving at me, so I went over for a hug and a hello, thinking I’d introduce her to Amber and Chuck. I knew Barb’s husband was an oncologist, but what I didn’t know was that he had been an integral part of Amber’s care team and had been the one to discharge her from the hospital just in time for her to celebrate her 35th birthday at home. The connection was immediate.
“We have a house right near here,” Barb said. “Do you need a place to stay the night before the race?”
Bill Kreisle is a man of few words, but his delight in seeing his former patient with a full head of hair and a strong physique was undeniable. The fact that Amber was a dark horse for the national championship win made our presence as houseguests even more exciting.
On the evening before the race, conversation veered toward past national championships. Amber was in better physical condition now than she had ever been at a snowshoe race, and I badly wanted her to win. Last year, in Cable, Wisconsin, she came in third among the women, making the worlds team and finishing less than three minutes behind the winner. The event wasn’t held in 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, but in 2020 in Leadville, CO, Amber finished tenth. “It turns out that doing a race at ten thousand feet is no fun when your hemoglobin is, like, seven (author’s note: this is roughly half the normal value)…I had to walk more than a few times,” she told me. This was during the first phase of her cancer treatment—right about the time the medication had stopped working.
Although Amber’s life had changed course dramatically in 2019 when she first learned that she had cancer, a bone marrow transplant was never part of the original plan. The physicians at St. Luke’s hospital had hoped that an oral medication with minimal side effects would eradicate the malignancy without complication. But when the oral chemo failed, Amber’s only hope for survival was a bone marrow transplant from a matched donor, who in this case was her brother. The procedure itself is grueling, and the recovery is more so. Amber had to dig in for an arduous second effort—she was already worn down from the first—and with stakes far higher than any athletic competition. In an all-or-nothing end game, she had one choice: full speed ahead, embracing the opportunity to grow her own grit and mental toughness. No one in their right mind would have asked for a circumstance like this, even knowing what the eventual outcome would be, but I think if you asked Amber, she’d tell you that she wouldn’t be the person (or the athlete) she is today if she hadn’t gone through all that.
I went to the start line of my first snowshoe race feeling more nervous for Amber than I was for myself. She definitely had a shot at the win, but she would have to pull together a phenomenal performance in order to beat the other top women. Several of them had won the national title on previous occasions, and Amber was most certainly the underdog. When the gun went off, she and another favorite put at least 10 seconds on me in the first five steps. And they appeared to be…having a conversation?? Ouch. Thanks to a well-designed racecourse, the initial switchbacks allowed me to monitor Amber’s progress for a mile until she disappeared into the trees. At the half-way point, a flat-and-fast out-and-back section was my next opportunity to watch the race at the front unfold. I saw the leader coming towards me. It wasn’t Amber. The next woman wasn’t her either. I was worried—this wasn’t how I envisioned things at all. Then came Amber, and she looked like she was…Well, she looked like she was struggling, but frankly, so was I. So was everyone, in fact.
The dumpster fire in my lungs made me too hypoxic to calculate the time gaps. All I knew was that it didn’t look good. I also knew that Amber had several things working in her favor for the remaining miles of the race. For starters, she was intimately acquainted with the route, having studied every corner, undulation, and landmark that would inform her decision to inject an extra dose of speed into her stride. She was also approaching the relatively steep downhill mile that led to the finish. I’ve never seen anyone run downhill on snowshoes as fast as Amber (except maybe her husband), so perhaps she could gain some time there. Above all else, though, Amber’s the type to chew off her own arm before surrendering a victory, and she credits her experience with a life-threatening illness for bolstering that tenacity.
As I lumbered toward the finish line, I felt like I was dying and I wanted to slow down. Then I thought about Amber who might have actually been dying a few years ago. She didn’t slow down—she dug in and fought hard, and I hoped she was doing that again today.
Amber didn’t win the national title that day. However, she never gave up, and somehow she clawed her way back into second place, closing the gap to the leader all the way, digging in hard for that second effort just as life had taught her to do. Dr. Kreisle was at the finish line with an uncharacteristically huge grin and a hug for his proverbial comeback kid. Later, we learned that February 4th, the day of the race, is World Cancer Day. Definitely not a coincidence.
