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Mapping the world, one waxy strand at a time…

The Longest of Days

12 Comments Posted by on May 21, 2012

A not-atypical conversation in our house:

5:30 Monday morning – alarm goes off.

Brent: What does that say?

Me: 5:30 AM.  But why did you set the alarm?

Brent: Um, because I have to go to work today…

Me: Oh right.  I thought it was Sunday.

I suppose that’s what happens when you wake up at 5:30 AM Saturday and don’t really go to sleep until 8:30 PM Sunday…

This weekend had us in the foothills of the Catskills for the 2012 running of New York Adventure Racing Association’s The Longest Day.

Five years ago, I stood at the paddle TA of this race (then in its 12-hour incarnation) in absolute awe.  Brent – my husband of one month at the time – was in his second season of racing and it was his first event outside of the Philly area.  I was seeing an adventure race for the first time because the race coincided with a drive up to Massachusetts for a wedding, so I decided to see if they needed any volunteers.  As the racers flew in on their bikes and grabbed their kayak blades, I turned to NYARA head honcho Denise Mast and said, “there’s no way I could ever do anything like this.”

Hard to believe that was half a decade ago…

With Bruce out of commission for this year’s race, Brent and I teamed up with Brian Reiss of Adventure Pocono fame, and Team ARMD’s Joel Ford.  We had raced with Brian last year at the Rev3 Epic and I had joined Joel and the rest of the ARMD crew two years ago at Untamed New England.  While none of us knew quite what the day would hold, I was confident that as far as team dynamics were concerned, we were in for a fun 24 hours in the woods.

Before the race – too cool for school…

The race began at 10:20 AM on Saturday morning with a short relay separator.  Half of the team members were to follow a loop in one direction, the other half would run in the opposite direction, and when we passed en route, we were to hand off a small plastic easter egg, which would be used to mark attendance later in the race.

Joel at the start – thanks to “Extreme” Prestige Worldwide Photography for some great shots!

At go, Brent and I joined the 60-odd other runners gunning through the grass to the trailhead.  It shouldn’t be news at this point that I hate sprint separators at any race, and this weekend was no different.  By the time we reached the halfway point, I found myself gasping for air.  I knew that if I just pushed through it and got to the true start of the race, I would be okay.  In the moment, though, I wasn’t sure how I was even going to make it back to the trailhead.

Photo doesn’t lie…

Of course, fifteen minutes later, the separator ended, and with our pink egg stashed snuggly in the top of my pack, we took off down a railroad bed for the first section of the race.

We’d learned earlier in the week that there would be some unique scoring rules for this year’s race.  The event was broken down into several distinct sections, and for teams that cleared all of the flags in a given section, there would be bonus points awarded to the final tally.  Because the course consisted of a mix of mandatory and optional CP’s, there would significant strategy involved in every decision.

When we received the maps early Saturday, Brian and Brent noted that there was more opportunity to maximize points in the first half of the race, so with that in mind, we set out to clear the early sections and go from there.

So as we took off running alongside the railroad bed with Brent setting the pace, I knew without question that we’d be pushing the pace in those early hours.  The only problem?  I wasn’t recovering.

In fact, I ended up spending the first six hours of the race wondering what I was doing out there.  Sure, there were some totally logical reasons for my early fatigue – the lack of sleep in the days before with a 4:30 AM wakeup call to make it to graduation on Thursday morning, a rough semester that had ended just the day before, the fact that we’d raced seven times in the preceding eleven weeks – and yes, we were gunning from the start.  But that didn’t stop me from beating myself up as we ran up and down the trails of the Shawangunk Ridge.

      

Because of the nature of the course – the combination of optional and mandatory CP’s, the amount of route choice each section required, and the possibility of those bonus points – we had no real sense of how we were doing in this early section.  So when we pulled into the first TA to learn that there were two teams in front of us who had cleared the first loop (SOG, who’d come and gone nearly an hour before, and Calleva, who checked in only moments earlier), we were happy with our progress.

We refilled our bladders – completely dry after only four hours of racing – and transitioned onto bike.  For the next 15-16 hours, we would be jumping in and out of the saddle as we rode, pushed, and lugged our bikes up and down the steep terrain from checkpoint to checkpoint and section to section.

The ride out to the second loop began on roads, and I felt immediate relief as I pedaled along the smooth asphalt.  We paused for a couple points before crossing a wide creek and heading back into the woods.  And once again, I began to sag.  ”Dammit,” I almost said out loud as I hiked my bike up a particularly rocky trail.  ”If I’m so much better at riding roads than trails, I should just stick to f*ing triathlons.”

Of course, everyone was hiking up those trails.  And everyone was sweaty and dusty and laboring for breath.  But sometimes it’s really hard to get out of your own head.

Eventually, we reached the ridgeline where mandatory checkpoint #5 was supposed to be.  But instead of a flag, we found a dozen racers wandering around the overlook just beyond the summit.  We joined in the hunt, ultimately spending 45 minutes searching for the missing CP.

Though we never did find it – we later learned that someone passing through had cut it down before the race – the break from the hills and the company of other racers proved to be exactly the reprieve I needed.  When we started up again en route to the next section, I had sufficiently recovered (mentally as much as physically) from those early hours.  Aside from a few minutes of sleepiness in the middle of the night, I felt solid for the rest of the race.

The other highlight of that unexpected pitstop?

I got to see my first rattlesnake!

Half an hour into our search, as a handful of us were rooting around a small clearing, I heard a distinct shaking sound.  Brian looked over and saw a 3-ish foot long, 2-ish inch thick tan snake slithering along the rocks.  Several people crowded around for a closer look.  If the sound of his tail was any indication, he was not amused.

He disappeared into the woods a few seconds later and I was disappointed that Brent and Joel weren’t around to catch a glimpse of him, but when they came back down to the overlook, Brent said that they’d run into a rattler of their own – and had the photo to prove it.

We all decided to take a risk and abandon CP 5 at that point.  From the top of the summit, we rode down and into a maze of trails for the next section of the race – an optional Memory-O.  Here, we had the first checkpoint mapped, and when we arrived there we found a map for the next point, and so on.  It was a fun twist and we found ourselves criss-crossing the loop with Teams Calleva and Untamed Adventure.  Once again, we had a sense of the top handful of teams out on the course, but we had no idea where we fell within that handful.

We pulled into the next TA about an hour before dark.  There, we ran into race co-director Charlie Hunt, who explained the issue with checkpoint 5 and told us that we’d have a 45-minute extension on the upcoming section, upping our next time cut-off to 11:45 PM.  It was unclear whether that extension would hold for the remainder of the race, but we weren’t thinking about it in that moment.

We rolled out for another short stretch of road – sweet reprieve once again, especially as a generous gardener allowed us to fill our empty bladders with his hose – and headed toward the next loop.

The next several hours are a bit of a blur at this point, but here are the highlights:

-The fast, rolling trails of Sterling Forest (I had no idea I enjoyed night riding so much!)

-The unexpected opportunity for an extra three points that had Brent swimming through a bull frog-infested pond late into the night.

This was as good a shot as I could get of Brent’s night swim. He’s that little gray spot in the middle.

-The all-night gas station convenience store we found at 11 PM.  We’d made a decision before the start to leave behind precious calories and in favor of racing light, banking on the promise of refueling opportunities on the course.  By late Saturday, we hadn’t passed anything for several hours and were all running dangerously low on food.  While Brent futzed with maps, I ran into the store to load up for the two of us and quickly deposited four clif bars, two bags of GORP, a snickers bar, a bagel with cream cheese, and two sodas onto the counter.  ”That’s a lot of food!” the clerk said.  ”Yeah, we’re in the middle of a long race,” I replied.  He promptly dropped two more bagels into the pile. “Take these too, then!”

At some point in those overnight hours, we paused for a brief pow-wow.  The next cut-off was listed as 4:00 AM.  We weren’t sure whether it, too, had been extended by 45 minutes, but we did know that if we wanted to get through the next section, we were going to need that extra time.  We decided to take the risk.  If we were wrong and ended up getting disqualified, we reasoned, then at least we would have gone down fighting for every point.

We spent the next couple hours slogging our way up a 2-mile climb to the top of a fire tower.  Just a few minutes into the ascent, we passed Team Calleva running down the mountain on foot.  They’d opted to leave their bikes at the bottom and trek up and back before riding around on roads to the next transition.  And as the stretch of steep rocky trails kept going and going (and going), we wondered if we should have made the same decision.

Eventually, we reached the summit, wrote down the clue for the CP (1933, the year the cabin at the base of the tower was constructed) and began to make our way down.  After one more short rock-riddled stretch, we were able to ride down the bulk of the mountain.  Even after Brent took a nasty fall, pitching over his handlebars and landing on his wrists and knees, he shook himself off and jumped back on, pushing the pace as he negotiated the technical terrain with the three of us following close behind.

And it was a good thing.  We were fighting a fast-moving clock and weren’t sure whether we’d make it to the next transition before the 4:45 AM cut-off.  We pulled through Mandatory CP 14 at 4:23 AM, skipped the bike and foot orienteering loops there altogether, and blitzed the next several kilometers of trails for the TA.

We arrived with roughly 95 seconds to spare.

There, we deposited that little pink plastic egg into a basket (proof of our presence – it turned out that there was no one there to make sure we’d pulled in in time), collected ourselves, and got back on our bikes once again.

Though we were quite tempted by the last big optional loop of the course – between that TA and the boat put-in was the now-defunct Jungle Habitat in West Milford NJ, an old Warner Brothers’ wild animal park that was abandoned in the 1970s – we knew that we would never make it through even the first point and get to the kayaks by 6:30 AM, the late cut-off for getting on the water.

(photo care of “Weird NJ”)

We made quick work of the next transition and shoved off at 6:15 AM for a short paddle around Greenwood Lake.

We moved smoothly enough from checkpoint to checkpoint – except for one minor communication issue.  At the first flag, I jumped out of the boat to punch the control, and as I was turned around and Brian was resettling gear, Brent and Joel pushed off for the next point.  We thought they were continuing on down the lake and so we headed that way as well, following not far behind a yellow kayak with two racers in it.

After 10 minutes, I looked more closely and realized that the racers in front of us had square-bladed paddles, not the rounded edges of our Werner blades.  A few seconds later, we heard a distant yell from the back bank of the lake.

Brent and Joel, it seemed, had turned left while we had gone straight.  After 10 futile minutes of yelling for us, they finally connected with a man in a motor boat who joined in the effort.  As Brian and I turned to meet up with them, the motor boat pulled up beside us.

“Abby and Brian, I take it?”

“Yep, that’s us,” we responded.

“Your friends are back there.”

Yeah. Thanks.

We managed to keep in eyesight of each other after that, and when we pulled off the water at 8:50 AM, we had an hour and a half to climb up to the final ridge, nab as many of the remaining optional checkpoints as we could, and get ourselves into the finish.

We took off through the small town and began the steep climb up to the ridge.  Fifteen minutes later, we’d found the last mandatory point.  Then we had a decision to make.

We could run the ridgeline – a rocky, technical stretch of the Appalachian Trail – a mile each way out and back for a possible two-point punch before running the final 1.5 miles in the other direction for one or two more optional flags before transitioning back to our bikes for the final short stretch to the finish, or we could play it safe and skip the out-and-back.

But of course, there’d been no playing it safe for the previous 23 hours.  Why would we start then?

We took off in the opposite direction of the finish.  The run took longer than we anticipated, but Brent navigated to the point with relative ease.  We turned back at 9:47 AM.  We had 2.5+ rocky miles to run, one more transition, and a ski slope to bike down.

I think all of us were pretty sure we’d never make it.

We’d retraced our steps by 10:01.  At that point, Brent was beginning to bonk and I was pretty sure my right IT band was about to rupture.  He downed a tube of shotblocks, I gritted my teeth, and we continued on.  We got to the attack point for the final optional point at 10:06.  There was no time to spare.

We continued on and spilled out onto the road that would lead us to the Bellvale Farms Creamery, where our bikes awaited us.  Instead of wasting precious seconds slipping into our bike shoes and clipping in, we stashed them in our packs, pulled on our helmets, and took off down the intermediate slope at the Mount Pete Ski Lodge.

At 10:17 AM, we pulled into the finish.  We’d left everything on the course.  We had three minutes to spare.

Still, we had no real sense of placement.  With so many variables in play and so many strong teams in the field, the best we could hope for was a spot on the podium.

The awards ceremony was still a half hour away, so we set about sorting gear and recapping the past 23 hours and 57 minutes.

“You know,” Joel said to me as we walked away from the finish, “you got pretty frustrated with yourself out there.”

“I know,” I replied rather absently, thinking about repacking the car and getting home, always a challenge after an overnight race.

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” he continued.  ”You rocked that course.”

I’ve heard this many times before (the being too hard on myself) and since it’s a hard switch to flip off I’ll no doubt hear it many times again, but something about the way he said it struck a chord.  When I volunteered at that Longest Day in 2007, I’d never run on trails, had mountain biked perhaps 10 miles in my life, and had only ever been in a canoe at overnight camp.  Sure, there’s plenty more I can do to improve, but I feel pretty good about where I am right now – and even better about how we are as a team.

As further affirmation of that, when we returned to the ski lodge for the awards, we learned that we’d won the race, with Team SOG in second and Rev3 in third.

Now, admittedly, we finished on top because of that bonus scoring.  The monsters of Team SOG had killed the course, collecting more checkpoints than we did and covering more ground, but because we’d cleared one of the sections they didn’t, the points swung our way on this one.

Still, we worked ourselves into the ground for 24 hours.  To be among the top competitors felt pretty good.

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If a picture is worth 1,000 words, what’s a video worth?

4 Comments Posted by on May 14, 2012

Three weeks ago, Brent, Bruce, and I headed south to Front Royal, Virginia for the 2012 running of the Rev3 Epic Adventure Race.

The race, which debuted on the AR circuit last spring, felt like a reunion of sorts.

First, we were teaming up with Jeremy Kuhlen, a Team GOALS staple of years past who comes out of retirement every couple seasons.  He and Bruce have raced together dozens of times, and he and Brent had joined forces a few years ago.  I’d only met Jeremy once before but had heard such great things about him that I looked forward to the opportunity to spend 26 hours in the woods with him. (Spoiler – he didn’t disappoint.)

And second, while this was the fifth race of the season for me and Brent, it was the first in the mid-Atlantic region, and so the first time since last fall that we’d be seeing most of our adventure racing friends and racing against the usual northeastern lineup.  And holding true to last year, the race featured a number of the top teams in the nation.

Now, at this point, I’ve written a couple dozen AR race reports, and no matter how much detail I offer and how many photos I post (admittedly, often not too too many), I inevitably end up feeling like adventure racing defies written description.

Rev3 put together a pretty stellar video recap of this year’s race, so rather than doing a leg-by-leg rundown of my own, I thought I’d show you what a day-long adventure race looks like through the eyes of a handful of cameramen.

First, a few highlights (or lowlights):

1.  The first six hours of the race took place under hot sun with rising temperatures.  At 4 PM, a storm rolled through.  It rained on and off through the early morning hours, when a steady downpour commenced and continued through the rest of the race.

2. The week before the race was one of the busiest of the school year for me, and I was operating in a serious sleep deficit from the start.  By 10 PM, I found myself staggering down the trail, unable to keep my eyes open.  I was able to run just fine, but whenever I slowed to a walk I was done for.  Luckily, we ran most of the overnight orienteering loop.

3. I remain firm in my belief that honey nut cheerios and pita chips are the perfect race foods.

4. At various points throughout the race, members of our team struggled with some pretty serious physical issues.  We made up for it with good strategy and route choice and Brent’s rockstar navigation.  We rolled into the finish at 10:45 AM Sunday morning to a third place finish.  All things considered, we all felt pretty good about that.

And without further ado, the video.  I realize it’s a bit lengthy at nearly 14 minutes.  If you have the time, though, check it out.  It paints a pretty spot-on picture of adventure racing and offers some really entertaining sound bytes.  See if you can spot the reality TV stars in there.

And true story – I did eat the cheeseburger.

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A Tire-d Tale

10 Comments Posted by on May 8, 2012

I know I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on here – we’ve raced a total of six times since March 1 this year, spent a week traveling through North Carolina and Tennessee, scaled two high points, and planned a 24-hour race (not to mention chaperoned a high school camping trip) – so I thought I’d start with the most recent and work backward.

This past weekend saw the 2012 running of the American Adventure Sports Yough Extreme, a 10-hour adventure race in southwestern Pennsylvania’s Ohiopyle State Park.  This was my fourth time participating in the Yough, and each year I’m reminded that this is a race of strength and speed.  It’s a linear course with relatively little in the way of navigation and strategy; to do well, you need to pound your way up and down Sugarloaf Mountain once, twice, sometimes three times throughout the day.

This year, Brent and I teamed up with Brian Komoroski, a veteran of GOALS sprint and 12-hour races who recently moved to Pittsburgh.

At 2 PM Friday afternoon, our friend Bill, who was racing in the solo division, pulled up in front of our house with his mom’s SUV.  Bill had recently installed a new roof rack on the car, and the plan was to load all three bikes up top, pile in all our gear, and swing by Brent’s school en route to the PA turnpike.

We made it through the 7 miles of suburban roads unscathed, all the while joking about the new and untested bike rack.  We picked up Brent and swung toward the highway.  And then, not 10 miles later, a panicked Bill pulled over onto the shoulder.

“A tire just flew off the roof!”

“Sure it did,” Brent and I responded.

“No really, there’s a tire on the turnpike.”

Brent turned around to peer through the back window.

“Um, there really is a tire on the turnpike.”

We all jumped out of the car and looked up.

“Whose is it?” I asked, before noticing that the claw that had been holding my front tire was now conspicuously empty.

Brent took off down the shoulder.  I sprinted after him.

Somehow, the wheel had rolled off the top of the car and, when it hit the ground, continued rolling across all three lanes, coming to an upright stop when it hit the median.

I ran the 100 meters back to where the tire had come to rest, and when a brief lull in traffic presented itself, I sprinted across.  I grabbed the tire and, holding it close to my chest, leaned back as cars whizzed by not 18 inches from my nose.

Within a minute, the pre-rush hour traffic broke again, and I took off for the safety of the shoulder.

Brent, who had paused briefly to tie his sneakers, looked on incredulously.

“I didn’t even see you run across until you were on the other side!  What were you thinking, doing that in those shoes?”

I looked down at my feet, and sure enough, I found them covered in bright orange crocs.

We laughed and walked back to Bill, still standing by the SUV in disbelief.

Miraculously, the wheel seemed unscathed.

After loading my front wheel and Brent’s securely in the trunk (Bill’s was still attached to his bike), we got back in the car and headed west.

Little did we know that our highway adventure was a preview of what was to come.

Four hours later, we pulled into the parking lot of Ohiopyle’s Wilderness Voyageurs and unceremoniously registered and received our maps.  As in previous years, the 2012 course promised lung-burning sprints and quad-groaning climbs as we traveled up, down, and around Sugarloaf.  Starting at 8 AM the following morning, we would have ten hours to collect eight checkpoints between start and finish.

Brent, Brian, Bill, and I headed out then for a quick dinner and a full night’s sleep in our own private tented cabin in the park’s campground.  Kudos to Bill for that find!

The next morning, following a brief pre-race meeting, all participants congregated on the pedestrian bridge across the Yough River and got ready to run.

Lots of photos taken on the course, but so far only the pre-race and start shots are posted.

In keeping with custom, the race began with a 4-5 mile sprint for the first CP.

We’re tucked in behind the girl in zebra tights

Following the early surge, I settled in a few meters behind Brent and focused on finding a controlled, manageable pace.  I generally hate these early sprint separators, that necessarily bring with them the bursts of adrenaline that threaten to give way to breathing issues, but this one went reasonably smoothly.  A short time later, we returned to the TA, punched our second flag, jumped on our bikes, and began our first ascent up Sugarloaf.

I will say again that if you like tests of speed and strength, the Yough is a great race for you.  For me, however, it proved to be a mental battle in the early hours of the race to commit to the day.  It was our sixth (and shortest) race in 9 weeks, and my energy lagged as we climbed up and up the steep, technical trail.

Brent had said that it would be a 5-kilometer ascent, so when my odometer read 5k and there was no end in sight, I fought hard to ward off grumpiness.  At 6k, I was getting desperate.  At 6.5, I remembered that Brent had measured the 5k from the trailhead, rather than from the TA.  At 7k, I finally caught a glimpse of the open field and the Sugarloaf warming hut, the site of CP 3.

We dropped our bikes, and as we took off on foot for the next section of the climb, Brent noted that his rear wheel was soft.

“We’ll need to change that when we get back,” he said.

But that was still a few hours away.  Neither Brian nor I thought much of it.

The next CP sat near the summit of the mountain, and after a few kilometers on roads and trails, we hit it cleanly.  From there, we had a decision to make.  We could follow the rolling trails around to the boat put-in, or we could cut down the side of the mountain to a flat canal path, and run the remaining handful of kilometers to the next TA.

Bill was traveling with us at that point, and the four of us headed for the adjacent powerline and began the slow bush-whack down to the water.  The descent was relatively moderate at first, but the further we went, the steeper it became.  At times, we were sliding down the rock- and log-strewn cut at what seemed like a near 90-degree angle.

We grabbed hold of what we could and skidded our way along the mountainside, calling out for falling rocks and debris that had been dislodged in our travels.

Eventually, we reached the flat path and shook out our quads on the gentle run toward the boats.  We reached the water at 11:30 AM and set off in our rubber duckies for a nine-mile paddle on the Middle Youghiogheny River.

The water was low, with the dry spring we’ve had, but the rapids were still moving and Brian navigated well through the class-II swells.  Though the three of us had never paddled together before, we reached the take-out smoothly, hitting land at an hour and forty minutes, our fastest run to date in the Yough Extreme.

We made quick time back up the mountain, running the lion’s share of the climb and trekking when it got too steep.  We were in third place at that point, second in the premiere division behind Team SOG, and we felt good about our prospects for a strong finish.

As they say, famous last words…

When we reached the TA, we discovered that in addition to Brent’s back wheel going soft, my front was completely flat.  We changed Brent’s without incident, but when we went to swap out mine, the new tube wouldn’t inflate.  We pumped it up and it went flat.  We pumped it up again, and it again went flat.  Brent shot it with a CO2 cartridge and it promptly deflated.

When Brent took it out of the tire and inspected it, he found a series of small punctures along the seam of the tube.

Defective.

By this point, the storm that had been threatening was right on top of us.  Rain poured down and thunder rolled as more and more teams began making their way to the TA.

Brent pulled out our final spare and handed it to Brian.  I turned to Team SOG’s Dan and Kristen, racing as a coed-2 that day, to see if they had extra CO2.

That’s when Brian realized that the tube had a Schrader valve, incompatible with my Presta tires and our Presta pump.

We were sure our race was over.  But somehow, no coed-3 teams were coming into the clearing.

Our friends of Team Gung Ho had reached the TA minutes earlier, and they generously offered us both a tube and more CO2.  This time, we successfully changed the tire and ran our bikes across the field to join the crowd pushing up the steep ascent toward checkpoint 8, on the other side of the mountain.

We alternated riding and pushing for the next few kilometers along the saturated trails.  When we reached the top, we hopped on and began pulling away from the teams around us – until my back tire skidded out on a wet branch, and I went flying off the bike, hitting my helmeted-head hard on the trail.

I was disoriented at first, but recovered soon enough and climbed back on my bike, taking stock of the bruises that were quickly popping up along the right side of my body.

We continued on and Brent deftly read the trails, leading us directly to the flag in the center of a park scout camp.  We made our final turn and began a steep descent to the checkpoint, when I rode over a small log.  As my front tire popped up, I heard an abrupt hiss, and I was thrown over my handlebars and chest-first into the right bank of the trail.

Brian, who’d heard the hiss from 15 meters away, ran back just as I was getting to my feet.  Together, we discovered the fourth flat tire of the day.

I questioned whether the wheel’s flight on the turnpike had, in fact, caused damage to the tire.  Brent was sure it was just bad luck.

With the flag only meters away, I walked my bike to the bottom of the trail, and we paused to consider our options.

“We could try patching the tire with duct tape,” Brent said.

“I think this one’s pretty much shot,” I said, rubbing my chest.

Brent leaned down to inspect it more closely.  ”Well, here’s your problem,” he said, holding the tube by its valve.

Brian and I looked over to see that the valve had been completely sheared off.

This is what a Presta valve normally looks like:

This is my tube:

Our best guess is that the tire nicked the log.

Duct tape was not an option.

I opened my pack to pull out one of the already-punctured tubes, when several teams converged on the flag.

Bill didn’t have any spare tubes.  Team Gung Ho was out, too.  Solo racer John Miller had one left.  Brian, who had raced with John the previous summer, pleaded for the tube.

“If you get a flat,” he said, “we’ll be coming up right behind you, and we’ll give it back to you.”

John generously pulled out his lone spare and Gung Ho gave us another canister of CO2.

We made a quick switch, all the while waiting for one of our coed-3 competitors to fly by.  When we were set, we took off for the final climb up Sugarloaf, this time on roads.  It was a quick and uneventful ascent, and when we reached the top, we elected to forego the more direct Baughman Trail in favor of the gentler, less thorn-riddle, Sugarloaf Trail.

It was a wet and messy ride down, and after two hard falls, I struggled to trust myself – and my bike – on the technical terrain.  I started off slowly and cautiously, gradually gaining confidence as we continued to drop.  We passed one team on the trail and were building momentum, when Brent came to an abrupt stop, less than a mile from the bridge where we’d begun that morning.

“Another flat!” he screamed.  I wondered if the race staff could hear him cursing from the finish line.

Once again, we were stalled.  Before long, though, the team we’d ridden by moments earlier approached, and miraculously, they had both CO2 and a 29-inch tube to spare.

Five minutes later, we were dropping our bikes in the TA and sprinting the final 100 meters into the finish, 8 hours and 40 minutes after we’d started.

Team SOG had finished nearly two hours earlier, but somehow, we’d managed to secure second place in the premiere division.  It seemed that almost all of the coed-3 teams experienced problems of one kind or another that day.

As usual, the Yough Extreme was a race of strength and speed – but this year’s was also a race of mental fortitude and perseverance, and it was a profound affirmation of the generosity of the adventure racing community.

One of my favorite parts of adventure racing is the team dynamic; to race well, you need solid individuals and an even more solid group.  But last Saturday reminded all of us that when someone is struggling, that group expands exponentially, and we all find ourselves on the same team.

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Of Roses and Thorns

13 Comments Posted by on March 28, 2012

This photo was taken at roughly 8:00 AM, en route to checkpoint #1 during last Saturday’s Start2Finish Natchez Trace Adventure Race, a 12-hour event set in the rolling hills of western Tennessee. At the time, I was thinking, “well, it can only go up from here.”

If only that were true…

Brent and I had arrived at the park’s Pin Oak Lodge the previous afternoon. We connected with our teammate, JP Bordeleau, who had driven down from Chicago that morning, filled out paperwork, stationed our TA, ate dinner, packed our gear, and climbed into bed at 8:30 PM.

I had had the opportunity to race with JP two summers ago at Untamed New England and was looking forward to the chance to team up again. The three of us fell into an easy rhythm, swapping race stories and watching college basketball before turning off the lights around 9:30 for what has to be a record-setting pre-adventure race night’s sleep.

We awoke at 5:30 the next morning and made our way out to the start, eager to get a look at the maps. While most of the teams there were regulars at Natchez, familiar with the terrain and the organization, this was new territory for us in every way, and we were unsure of what the day would hold.

At 6:55 on the dot, the race director handed each team a large topographical map and coordinates for the first three sections of the day.

We quickly plotted the checkpoints and jumped on our bikes for the first leg. There was just one problem. The map offered no trails whatsoever, and the clue for CP #1 was George Trail.

We pulled out of the TA as we discussed our options. The CP looked to be on the edge of the lake, presumably at the bottom of the trail. We could ride several kilometers around on roads and assume we’d come across the access trail eventually, or we could take the first possible turn and bushwhack the kilometer or so to the flag. We opted for the latter and made a quick right toward the water, and when the trail ended, we lifted our bikes onto our shoulders and entered the dense woods.

For what felt like hours but was probably only about 30 minutes, we pushed, pulled, coaxed, and dragged our bikes through the Tennessee thicket.

This is the only other photo we took during the race.

Finally, we reached the flag and rode back out the infamous George Trail toward checkpoint 2. As we negotiated our way through this early section, we began to get a feel for the organization of the trail system. Each major trail, it seemed, bisected the main road in alphabetical order. We’d end up relying on this pattern later on in the day.

We pulled into the first TA and learned that we were in fourth place.

“How’s it going so far?” asked a chatty volunteer as we changed into running shoes and Brent set about plotting three new checkpoints.

“Not bad,” Brent replied. “We’re flying pretty blind out there and we made the mistake of bushwhacking for the first point, but we’re starting to get a feel for things now.”

“Yeah,” the volunteer responded, “you guys are definitely at a disadvantage here. Not to worry, though, the next section doesn’t rely on trails at all, so it levels the playing field. Just be careful – the navigation is tricky.”

We thanked him for the advice and took off for the woods, eager to make up time in what’s normally a strong discipline for us.

With Brent manning the maps, the three of us moved well through the first two points, picking our way through the dense, thorn-riddled terrain.

“I nearly lost an eye back there,” Brent said as we broke through to the road en route to the third flag.

“Me too,” I replied. “These woods are thick!”

We ran down the road as Brent and JP matched the contours of the map with the terrain. Awhile later, we turned back into the woods in search of one of the many spurs flanked by two of the many re-entrants and even more creek crossings.

I have no idea what happened in here. What I can tell you is that we spent well over an hour wandering amongst the brambles, searching spur after spur for the third point. We passed by CP 10 and then 9 and then 10 again. Brent looked at the maps. JP looked at the maps. Even I looked at the maps. None of us could get oriented.

We criss-crossed the woods, and the woods criss-crossed us. By the time we finally found the flag – and again, I have no idea how we did – our arms and legs were riddled with thorns, and I had taken a nasty whack to the face. My right eye was red and puffy, and so blurry I could barely keep it open. A trip to the doc a couple days later would reveal a corneal abrasion. I’d walk out with a prescription for two weeks of antibiotics and the instructions to steer clear of thorns.

But I digress…

Once we finally found the elusive point, we nabbed the final flag on the o-course and ran back to the TA to retrieve our bikes.

We were in seventh place and the lead team had pulled out of the transition nearly two hours earlier. My eye was a mess. JP’s rear tire was flat.

The boys changed the tube as I packed up the gear, and we set off on a 15-point bike-o. We were all sure that we’d blown the race.

I don’t remember much of the next 2+ hours. I know that Brent made a great comeback navigationally and led us smoothly from point to point. I know that we moved relatively well through the network of trails and roads. And I know that with one eye squeezed shut, I had absolutely no depth perception as I attempted to keep myself upright on the narrow single track.

As we flew down the main road toward checkpoint 19, two away from the next transition, we heard a rustling in the woods. We pulled to a stop at the flag and saw one of the coed teams riding down a narrow trail.

When they saw us, they paused, surprised. “You guys must have taken a different route than we did. Have you cleared the course so far?”

“We did,” I replied. “But not particularly well.”

We shoved off down a trail for the final CP, crossing paths with one more team en route. When we returned to the road, we saw another group of three.

By the time we made it back to transition, in the midst of a heavy downpour, we’d managed to pull ourselves into second place. We reached the TA and retrieved the coordinates for the rest of the course, and when we set off for the paddle, we learned that we’d made up more than half an hour on the lead team.

At that point, it was 2:30 PM. We’d been racing for 7.5 hours and had 4.5 to go. There were five points on the water and an additional 20-ish on the bike. Since all CPs were optional and we were pretty sure we wouldn’t be able to clear the course, we decided to drop the two furthest points on the water and focus on the final leg.

After a quick trip around the top half of the lake, we pulled out of the TA for the last stretch of the race, a large o-loop that would have us riding on everything from smooth roads and gravel paths, to muddy single-track and red-clay power lines. One more navigational blunder cost us an additional 40 minutes, but otherwise we moved well here from point to point.

Somewhere around checkpoint 39, I realized that my back brake was no longer working. Awhile later, JP discovered that his rear tire was soft.

With time running short and our bike woes slowing us down, we opted to drop the final two points. Instead of using up precious seconds to change JP’s tube or work on my brake, we shoved off for the TA, confident that as long as we made it in by 7 PM, we had done enough to secure a second place finish.

We pushed through the final several kilometers and turned down the long driveway with 13 minutes to go. We contemplated dropping our bikes and swimming the 200 meters across the lake for the final CP, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

We reached the finish at 6:51 PM, with nine minutes to spare, good for second place overall. A few minutes later, Team Los Locos crossed the line for the win.

Despite the thorny navigation (pun intended), it was a great day in the woods. We could have easily fallen apart amidst the early bumps and technical frustrations, but instead, we pulled it together and were thrilled with our comeback. It was an early-season reminder of what makes adventure racing so special – on days like this, the team really is bigger and better than the sum of its individual parts.

We parted ways later that night, JP for the 8-hour drive back to Chicago and me and Brent for the 15 hours to Philly and, after a week of roadtripping, a swift reorientation to the real world.

Next up?

After three races in the past four weeks – a nap.

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He Says – 50 Peaks, State 12: North Carolina

7 Comments Posted by on March 22, 2012

Months ago, we targeted spring break for two things: adventure racing and highpointing. For the first time in seven years, our spring breaks overlapped, so we decided to head south for some warm weather and southern adventure. After a successful race in the swamps of coastal South Carolina, we set our sights inland to higher and drier ground. Originally we contemplated hitting four or five peaks, but we decided we needed a more leisurely week between our race in South Carolina and Tennessee, so we focused our attention on Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and Tennessee’s Clingman’s Dome, which sits upon the border of North Carolina and Tennessee.

After two days of recovery, we loaded up our packs and set off for Mount Mitchell, about an hour northeast of Asheville. After driving the windy heights of the Blue Ridge Parkway and searching a bit for the trailhead, we found ourselves at the Black Mountain Campground in the depths of a mountain valley in Pisgah National Forest. We began trekking, and after a nice ramble along the creek, the trail began climbing, and it just kept climbing for the next three hours.

The route spanned six miles each way and roughly 3,700 feet of elevation gain, but it felt like 15 miles at least. As Abby climbed easily, I wheezed and stumbled, my legs heavy and listless, my breathing labored and heart-rate elevated. When Abby mentioned altitude, I laughed at first before realizing that my lethargy could, in fact, be attributed in part to the rapid elevation gain.  But I suspect I was mostly impaired by the lactic acid still coursing through my legs from the weekend’s race in South Carolina.

After finding a sustainable, if slow, pace, we steadily climbed the mountain, traipsing through beautiful alpine groves and crossing gurgling creeks and idyllic if diminutive cascades.

Peek-a-boo!

After a final stretch of trail, meandering through moss draped trees and downed logs, we emerged at the top of Mount Mitchell, our twelfth high point at 6,684 feet, the highest peak east of the Mississippi. As has been true of most of the highpoints to date, a road allows visitors to reach the summit without having to hike, but surprisingly few people had made the trip to the lofty mountaintop.

We enjoyed the quiet break at the top, sitting upon the circular viewing platform, taking pictures and taking in the view of the surrounding mountain range as thunder rumbled on the darkening horizon.

The obligatory posed shot

With raindrops beginning to splash about us, we set off for the descent, electing to take some different trails when possible. The return passed quickly, and after I lounged beside the creek at the Black Mountain Campground, soaking my feet in the icy mountain water, we drove back to Asheville, discussing what we would do for “lucky” 13.

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2012 Palmetto Swamp Fox: On Being The Rabbit

14 Comments Posted by on March 20, 2012

This past weekend, Brent, Chris, and I took to the swamps for the 2012 running of the Kando Adventures Palmetto Swamp Fox, a 12-hour adventure race in South Carolina’s Francis Marion National Forest.

It was the second time we had made our way to McClellanville; the three of us traveled south for the same race two years ago and were hooked on the great organization, the unique terrain, and the opportunity for an early season tune-up.

With my spring break and Brent’s coinciding for the first time in six years, we decided to take advantage of the overlap to plan a short road trip, bookending the week with the Swamp Fox on one end and another race in Tennessee on the other.

So, I drove down with our gear as soon as I finished teaching on Thursday evening, Brent followed by air the next afternoon, and Chris and his girlfriend, Debbie, made their way from Delaware on Friday morning.  All four of us converged on a house that Chris had found, just a mile or two from the start of the event.

We had all wondered how different this year’s course would be from 2010, and when we received the checkpoint coordinates at 5:00 AM Saturday morning, we were excited to find a new adventure awaiting us.

The race kicked off promptly at 7:00 AM with a short sprint separator.  In the spirit of St. Patrick’s Day, each team had to run to the local middle school to retrieve two riddles.  We would not be allowed to start the first section until we returned to the start and solved the riddles.

GOALS is generally a pretty strong team, but we’re rarely out first when it comes to pure speed.  On Saturday, though, Chris jetted to the front of the pack with me and Brent following close behind, and by the time we ran back to the start, we had solved the puzzles and were all surprised to find ourselves out in front as we shoved off for a 20+ kilometer paddle.

The early morning fog was burning off and the water was like glass as we kayaked through the Intracoastal Waterways.  For a brief moment, we all paused to take in the scene – and then we remembered that there were 50-odd teams chasing us.

As we pushed for the first checkpoint, Brent was careful to match the contours of the channel with the route on the map to make sure that everything lined up.  Everything, he said, seemed to be in sync.  We were looking for two tributaries that jutted up to the north; our plan was to take the second right turn.

We approached what seemed like the correct spot, but there was only one river coming down.  Since everything on the map had been accurate to that point, we assumed that meant we needed to push on ahead a bit further.

We would later discover that the maps dated back to the 1970s.  Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, had decimated the waterways and changed the course of the channel for decades to come.

Oops…

Half a mile past the first tributary, we paused to regroup.  Several teams passed by as Brent and Chris studied the maps, and when we ultimately made the decision to turn back, several others opted to do the same.  We pushed for the turn and paddled up toward the first flag, watching as boat after boat turned to join in the chase.

By the time we reached the checkpoint, our early lead had vanished.  Now it was time to play catch-up.

We pulled the two kayaks up a mud-slicked bank and received plots for two additional checkpoints.  Brent sat down to triangulate the coordinates (something new to me!) and we made the seamless transition to foot for a short orienteering course.

There were four flags in an area roughly 2-3 square kilometers, and we could retrieve them in any order.  As we started off on a clockwise loop, we saw racers running in every direction.  We had no sense of how many teams were in front of us.

The flat terrain and well-groomed trails allowed us to sprint from point-to-point.  There was no such thing as AR pace during the Swamp Fox; we were pushing near-maximum speed for the entire day, our only respite coming as we slowed to search for and punch each of the flags.

We arrived at the first point on the o-course to see the flag hanging high in a tree.  Brent dropped his map case, grabbed the passport from Chris, and ambled up to punch the card.

As he jumped down, I took a breath.  My legs had felt heavy at the start of the run and I was preparing for a long slog to the next point.  But minutes later, we were pulling up in front of an orange flag, hanging in the center of a swamp.

When we raced here in 2010, I was mildly panicked the first time I stepped into the swamps.  This time, though, I had a pre-race heart-to-heart with the race director, who assured me that with three people running through the muck, any alligators would steer clear of our path.  To my surprise, his easy logic stuck, and I felt reasonably calm as I prepared for our first trip in.

I got a temporary reprieve, though, when Chris jumped onto a log and ran out to punch the flag.

It would turn out to be the only trip into the swamps all day.

We pushed for the next two points and then returned to the TA for the second paddle leg.  As we pushed off in our boats, a volunteer told us that there were four teams ahead of us, and seventeen that still hadn’t made it to the first checkpoint.

We had another hour of paddling, followed by a second short foot section and one last kayak to the bikes.

This was the first time Brent and I had been in a boat since Nationals, and Chris had only been out recreationally in recent months, so during that final paddle, we all began to fatigue.  The winds grew stronger and the tides was pushing against us, and we were all starting to feel rather deflated.

“Where are all the ‘gators?” Brent said.  ”I want to see an alligator.”

“We’re still in the channel,” Chris or I replied.  ”The water’s too brackish.”

We debated the salinity of the water for a minute or two and then, off in the distance, we saw a fin pop out of the water.  We watched as a lone dolphin glided through the channel not 50 meters from us.

“Okay,” Brent said, “that makes up for it.  That may be one of the coolest race experiences we’ll ever have.”

And then, it got cooler.

A few minutes later, we saw a second fin surface, just off the shore.  While the first had been noticeably rounded, this one was more angular.

“Are you sure that’s a dolphin?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure,” Chris replied, but he didn’t sound quite as confident as he had before.

We continued watching as the animal skimmed the water, not diving up and down as the first had but rather cutting through the surface.

And then the fin turned, and started heading right toward us.

“Um, guys,” I said, “are we really sure it’s a dolphin?”

“I’m not positive,” Brent – my SCUBA instructor of a husband – said, curious.

I didn’t want to wait to find out.  We dug our paddles into the water and pulled hard.  And then, ten feet to our right, the fin paused and a big, grey dolphin popped its head out of the water and smiled at us.

“Okay, I take it back,” Brent said, once we recovered. “THAT was one of the coolest things we’ll ever experience in a race.”

The dolphin sightings carried us through the next half hour, and just as we began to drag again, Chris spotted a small alligator sunning itself on the banks of our tributary.

“Finally!” Brent yelled.

Even I was excited.

It was enough to get us through that last sluggish kilometer on the water, and when we rounded the final corner and pulled in front of the boat dock, we found ourselves tied for the lead.

We were now 5 hours into the race, and there was one bike section and 15 checkpoints separating us from the finish.  And I was ready to ride.

With Brent manning the maps and Chris and me following close behind, the three of us weaved our way along pebbled dirt roads and pine needled trails.  Though the terrain was just as flat as it had been in 2010, the bike course this year brought a welcomed variety.

We pushed hard from point to point, Brent’s navigation close to perfect.  Within the first handful of CP’s, we’d passed the one solo racer who was in front of us, but we felt a handful of other teams nipping at our bike shoes.

Each time we thought we’d begun to open up a lead, we’d see them pull in to search for a point within minutes of our departure.  It was perhaps the first time for any of us that we’d ever been the rabbit in such a close field.

Four of the final five checkpoints formed a small loop at the far north end of the course, and when we’d mapped it earlier, we thought we would tackle them in a counter-clockwise circle, bushwhacking through the swamps for the final point.  As we rode, though, we realized that we would need to move nearly 5 miles an hour – on foot, through swamps – in order to equal the time it would take us to bike around to the point.

When we did the math, it was an easy decision.  The only problem?  That meant that we’d chosen the wrong route for that last stretch, and with two coed teams close behind, we thought we’d lost our chance at the win.

We hit checkpoint 22 and then powered through to 23.

The night before the race, a small forest fire had broken out near CP 22. When we arrived there, the ground was still smoking.

As we turned back onto the main road for CP 21, we had a chance to gauge how close we were to the trailing teams.  We hoped that we wouldn’t pass anyone until we were comfortably moving down the trail toward the flag.  But sure enough, within a few minutes, two teams were coming toward us, on the back end of the loop that would take them to the finish.

I watched Brent’s whole body deflate as he calculated our chances.  We thought it was over.

Still, we didn’t let up.  We sprinted up the trail, dropped our bikes and ran for the flag.  Then we jumped back on and retraced our steps to the trailhead.  We turned back on the main road and, as with the trip out, found ourselves sliding through loose sand as we willed our bikes to move.  Brent and Chris made steady progress but I struggled to power through.

Then, Brent turned back and looked behind me.

“They’re right there,” he urged.  ”And we’re so close.”

I gritted my teeth and continued on, and when I made it through the worst of the sand, I turned around to see the coed team turn right for checkpoint 22.

This was our chance.  If we could hold on for the final 10k sprint, the race was ours.

We pulled back into a pace line and shot forward.  We dropped our bikes for CP 24 and I ran into the woods to punch as Brent rearranged the maps.  From there, we had 8 kilometers on smooth roads separating us from the win.

We stuck close and powered on.  I was terrified that if I fell off Brent’s wheel, I’d never get back on – so terrified that I nicked his rear tire several times before Chris was able to convince me to ease up.

Finally, we crossed the last major intersection.  We sprinted by our rental house and flew past the middle school where we’d retrieved the riddles earlier that morning.

At 4:20 PM, 9 hours and 20 minutes after we began, we dashed in and punched the final CP.

Seven minutes later, the second place Northern Lights powered in.

All six of us agreed that it was the hardest we’d ever pushed in a twelve-hour race.  They were gunning to take us and we felt their presence every step of the way.

It was a hard fought one-two finish – and it sure made for an exciting race.

Brent, Chris, and I came out of the day with a comped slot in the East Coast Adventure Race Series Championship, to take place in September.

Then, as Chris and Debbie headed for home, Brent and I began our week-long trip from the lowlands of South Carolina to the hills of Tennessee, where we’ll team up with JP – one of my teammates from the 2010 Untamed New England – for Saturday’s 12-hour Natchez Trace Adventure Race.

But first – we’ve got some high points to climb.

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‘Gator Gab

9 Comments Posted by on March 11, 2012

Today, on the car ride home from a local orienteering meet…

Brent: I hope we see more ‘gators this year.

Me: I’m sure we will.  It’s been a lot warmer.  And as long as we see them from the comfort of our canoe, I’ll be just fine with that.

Brent: Not me.  I want to see one on the ground.

Me: I guess if it’s from the bike and we don’t have to go into the swamps again afterward, I’d be okay with that.

Brent: We should throw him some of our gear and then pose for pictures.  ”‘Gator wrapped in space blanket.”  ”Gator blowing whistle.”  It’ll be fun.

Me: “Gator eating Brent.”

Brent: It’s a lie that ‘gators will drown you before they eat you.

Me: What do you think you’re supposed to do if a ‘gator gets you?  Should you play dead? … I guess you’re probably not doing anything voluntary at that point.

Brent: Probably not…

Race prep is as much mental as it is physical, right?  

Next up: Kando Adventure’s 2012 Palmetto Swamp Fox. Because what would a season be without a chance to hang out with some of these guys?

(Photo is actually from last summer's Costa Rica race. Luckily we won't be contending with Latin American crocs when we head to South Carolina on Saturday.)

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Hitting the Fan

15 Comments Posted by on March 6, 2012

The title of this post came to mind at roughly 5:05 AM on Saturday morning, as I began narrating my race report in my head.

We had peeled into the Bolton Valley Ski Resort – the site of the Green Mountain Adventure Racing Association Frigid Infliction – about half an hour earlier, trying to recover from the early morning snow and a wrong turn up to the mountain that delayed our arrival, and in that time we’d completed registration paperwork, “organized” gear, eaten breakfast, hit up the bathroom, glanced at maps, and – 30 seconds before the start sounded – discovered that none of us seemed to be able to get into our cross-country skis.

Let me back up…

The biggest winter adventure race in the country, the Frigid Infliction combines snow shoeing, post holing, cross-country skiing, ropes, and, of course, map-and-compass navigation. After making the trek to Central New York for our first CNYO Snowgaine a few years ago, Brent and I began eyeing this Vermont event, and earlier this winter we decided that this was the year to make the trip. We convinced GOALS teammate Tracey to make the trip up from her home in Massachusetts and readied ourselves for a full winter of training.

The only problem?

There was no winter to be had…

Which meant:

(1) There was no opportunity for snowshoeing.

(2) There was no chance to learn how to cross-country ski.

(3) We had no reason to pull out any of our winter gear.

All that is to say, when Brent and I left for Vermont on Friday afternoon with a car filled with unsorted gear that hadn’t been used in a year or more, we were probably the most unprepared either of us had ever been for a race.

So when the the start sounded just after 5 AM Saturday morning and teams shot past us on skis, there was little we could do but laugh.

Photos c/o GMARA

Fumbling in the early morning darkness with fierce winds whipping all around us, we eventually fought our way into our bindings and, with no other teams in sight, we set off on the first leg of the race, an uphill climb to the first TA.

But remember that whole “learning to ski” thing that never happened over the winter?

Yeah.

Within half a kilometer, I had abandoned all attempts at skiing and instead opted to carry my skis and poles up the mountain as I post-holed my way through the shin- and knee-deep snow.

Fortunately for me, Brent and Tracey were both rather rusty as well and I was able to match their strides with relative ease as we slowly made our way to the top of the ridge. Still, we surprised ourselves. We began catching teams at the first split, and Brent, who hadn’t had a chance to digest the course before the start, made a quick decision to turn left up a trail – instead of following most other teams to the right – that brought us to the transition with only a handful of sets of skis in sight.

Buoyed by the thought of making up so much ground, we staged our skis in the snow and pulled out our snowshoes. I think I had one shoe on and was loosening up the other when a volunteer came over to see what we were doing.

“Guys, this is a post-holing leg,” she said, “not snowshoeing.”

Right. So much for a quick turnaround.

We pulled off our shoes and stashed them in our packs and took off into the woods for the first CP.

Well, “took off” might be a bit of an overstatement.

With snow hip- and waist-deep by this point and nothing but our ski boots to prevent us from breaking through, we labored slowly, with Brent up front doing the hard work and me and Tracey following close behind.

Trails were off-limits for this section and we quickly discovered that crawling on all fours was the quickest and easiest way form of travel. So off we went, slithering through the featureless snow with nothing more than Brent’s expert nav skills to guide us.

Before long, we came across a set of ski tracks that seemed to be heading in the right direction.

“My hope is that these are from the person who set the point,” Brent said as he paused to catch his breath.

“I was thinking the same thing,” I replied.

We followed the tracks for several minutes, and sure enough, they led us straight to the orange-and-white flag. When we arrived, it was clear that no other teams had reached the CP yet, but because there were two checkpoints in this leg of the race and they could be collected in any order, we all assumed that everyone else had opted to go for the other one first.

We made our way toward the next flag and as we were getting ready to go back into the woods, we found Molly, Dave, and Jason of Team Untamed beginning the trek in.

“Hey Molly!” I said cheerfully, greeting my friend who I hadn’t seen since the previous summer. “How’s it going so far?”

She offered a big hello and a weary smile that left us wondering what had happened to leave them feeling down so early in the race.

Instead of just following in their tracks, Brent led us down a small hill, where we broke through the tree line and began crawling toward the point. This lower attack gave us a more direct line to the CP, but it also made for slow, labored travel as we attempted to traverse the rolling terrain through waist-deep snow.

Brent continued to break snow most of the way, and when I took over several minutes later, I realized just how hard he’d been working for the past few hours. Clumsily, I picked my way through the mess of branches and up and down the shallow ravines. We finally began to hear voices and looked over to see several racers gathered around the flag, just 15 feet above us.

Though travel had been slow, Brent’s strategy had worked well. Now all we had to do was get to the point.

Easier said than done.

I clawed at mounds of snow and grasped for small trees as I willed my entire body up the small slope toward the CP. But no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t make any progress. It was the first seriously frustrating moment of the day.

Eventually, we fought our way to the flag, and after a quick punch, we moved easily down the trail that had been beaten down from the teams that had opted to follow Untamed.

As we made our way back to the TA, we heard lots of chatter about an elusive Checkpoint 1. It seemed that there had been a flag on that first leg of the race up the ski mountain. In the frenzy of the start, as we were trying to recover from the morning craziness and get organized for the race, we’d misheard the directions and assumed that the TA was the first point.

Not a typical GOALS mistake, but nothing we could do about it at that point. It turned out that only three or four of the teams ever found that first checkpoint. The experienced trio of Team Untamed had blown by it as well. Now I understood why they had looked so glum.

We made it back to the TA shaking our heads and quickly transitioned to snowshoes for a drama-free loop of checkpoints. We all enjoyed finding our footing and even got to run for stretches.

As we reached the final snowshoe checkpoint, Brent looked at his watch. If we arrived back by 10:00 AM, we would have the opportunity to go out for a bonus checkpoint. We had 20 minutes to make the cut-off.

We ran back to the TA and pulled off our snowshoes.

“You’ve got two minutes to get into your skis and go,” a volunteer told us.

“Does the bonus get us an extra checkpoint or just an hour time credit?” Brent asked, reading through the race directions.  In the chaos of the moment, Brent thought he received confirmation that if we were able to get out in time, we would have the opportunity to go for an extra flag, effectively making up for the early CP #1 blunder.  We would learn later that this wasn’t the case.

The good news: we wrestled with our skis and managed to shove off down the mountain with fewer than 30 seconds to spare.

The bad news: we had to ski all the way down a mountain.

I made it approximately 10 meters before my feet flew out from under me. I stood up and tried again. 10 more meters, 2 more skis pointing up in the air.

This wouldn’t do.

So, once again, I pulled off my skis, balanced them in my arms, and ran down the mountain, laughing all the way at the show that Brent and Tracey were putting on.

There were a few close calls – some nearly-clipped tree trunks and nearly-torn ACL’s, but the two made it down without incident, and when we turned down a relatively flat groomed trail toward the bonus CP, somehow they convinced me to give the skis another shot.

I clipped in – I was becoming pretty good at getting in and out by that point – and to everyone’s surprise, I managed to stay on my feet as I slowly found my rhythm and chased them down the trail. Before long, we were moving along the path three-across.

“Look at us, guys!” I yelled. “We’re a team of skiers!”

We glided along for a kilometer or more. A competent skier came flying down an adjoining trail and when he saw us, he said, “Are you guys part of the race? You sure don’t look like you’re racing.”

All three of us nearly doubled over in giddy giggles. We were having a blast.

As we neared the turn-off toward the checkpoint, Brent paused to look at the maps and I clipped out of my skis for a quick pitstop. When I came back, my left binding wouldn’t open. No matter how hard I tried, no matter which way I pushed or pulled, no matter how much I yelled at it, it wouldn’t budge.

With that, my short-lived ski career was over.

Seriously frustrating moment #2.

Dejected, I picked up my skis and poles and trudged up the hill behind Brent and Tracey. Even though I’d carried my skis for 95% of the ski legs of the race, I was beyond dispirited.

Still, I plodded along, avoiding the deepest snow and shuffling where I could as I tried to keep up with my teammates. We climbed the final ascent for the flag and then turned for the TA.

Half an hour later, I ran down the final hill and dropped my skis on the ground. With aching arms and heavy legs, I nearly hugged the volunteer who told me that they were transporting our ski equipment back to the finish.

We pulled on our snowshoes once again and headed for the last major obstacle of the day, the tyrolean traverse.

There was a bit of a backlog when we arrived at the ravine, so we had the chance to scope out the different lines. To save time and with the blessing of race staff, Brent opted to attempt the notoriously hardest rope while Tracey and I stood in line for the mid-grade rope. None would be easy. All were graded up-hill. Brent’s was the steepest and the one that Tracey and I had chosen required racers to negotiate around a tree 2/3 of the way across.

Brent started first and I hooked in a few minutes later. Before long, we were both hanging from the middle of the ravine, side-by-side.

It was a slow process, pulling ourselves across the static rope, but I made steady progress until I hit the tree. There, the combination of fatigue and calorie deficit began to set in, and when I looked over to see my struggling husband clinging to a tree (his line really was the worst – it was no coincidence that only two other teams opted to cross it all day), I started to get a bit woozy.

I grabbed the rope and attempted to shake out my arms, and when I began pulling again, I discovered that my pack had been snared by the tree.

“Are your snowshoes tied on?” someone called from the other side of the rope.

“Well enough,” I yelled back.

A beat.

“Okay,” she replied. “I’m going to need you to reach down and grab the branch behind you.”

I looked down to see that my snowshoe had fallen out of my pack and was hanging from the tree. Carefully, I pulled it back in and tied it to my front caribiner. A minute later, my other shoe fell into the ravine. Then the first one followed suit.

Eventually, I managed to pull myself across, and one of the many great volunteers out on the course sent my shoes across with a pile of gear. Brent and I reached solid ground at the same time and sat down to wait for Tracey, an awesome climber who made it across all too quickly.

From there, we shook out our arms and pulled on our snowshoes for the final leg of the race, a final trek up and around the downhill ski slopes and into the finish.

Race staff at the tyrolean had recommended that we attempt no more than two checkpoints here, but we were moving well and ended up nabbing three with ease. We contemplated a fourth but ultimately decided that we didn’t have quite enough time. We ran down the final descent and clocked into the finish at 2:42 PM. With the bonus checkpoint and the hour credit, we estimated that this would give us a good shot at the #3 spot on the podium.

As we sorted gear and chatted with friends, all three of us agreed that it was one of the best 12-hour races any of us had ever done. A great staff and an awesome and challenging course. The past ten hours had flown by.

GMARA capped off the event with a festive post-race banquet. We sat with our friends on Team Pain Syndicate and rehashed the day, and when the standings were announced, we cheered for our tablemates, who’d managed to nab that phantom checkpoint #1 and snag first place and a slot at the USARA National Championships.

It turned out that the bonus, in fact, did not count as a separate checkpoint and instead only offered an hour time credit, which meant no chance of a podium finish for us.  Though we were all a bit disappointed by the confusion, knowing we may have made different decisions with more information, we left Bolton Valley that night thoroughly satisfied with – and thoroughly exhausted by – the first race of the season. GMARA put on a great show, and we’re all looking forward to making the trip up again in the future (perhaps a year when we can actually train for it a little bit).

As Brent and I drove south toward his parents’ house for a few hours of sleep, I looked out the window at the piles of snow lining the road.

“The nice thing is,” I said, “I think I’ve had my fill of winter for the year.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Brent replied.

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Midnight Cowboy Rides Again

12 Comments Posted by on February 29, 2012

A year ago last Saturday, I came home from a late night at work to a date with the spin bike.  I hopped on at 10:00 PM, and six hours and eight or nine episodes of American Dreams later, I hopped off with an indoor century ride under my belt.

That night, I looked like this:

365 days later, I went for a ride looking more like this:

You know, minus all the snow and evergreens...

Brent and I spent Saturday evening at a local university aquatics center, cheering on his students at their league swimming champs.  In between a junior breaking the women’s 500 freestyle record and a senior breaking the men’s record in the same event, Brent turned to me.

“I’m kind of tempted to get our ride out of the way tonight.”

We’d been planning to get out the next morning for our final long road ride before March Madness – three races in four weeks – but neither of us was particularly enthusiastic about heading out in the 30 degree weather that was predicted to greet us.

“I could be convinced.”

An hour later, we were begging off dinner plans with friends at the meet and driving home to layer up.  The thermometer in the car read 38 degrees.

At 9:30 PM, dressed in bike shorts, fleece tights, wool socks, two fleece tops, two pairs of gloves, one pair of mittens, and my blue puffy jacket, I locked the front door and we shoved off for Wissahickon.

We started our ride on the gravel path at the bottom of the gorge, and I was lulled into a false sense of security.  With the trees and the hills protecting us from the day’s battering winds, I pulled down my buff and stashed my puffy jacket in my pack.

All too quickly, though, we emerged from the woods and headed west, down the wide, windswept roads of the Philly suburbs.  Though my legs felt fresh, the rest of me struggled against the dropping temperatures.  When we pulled into a convenience store parking lot at mile 15 for a quick bathroom stop, I couldn’t fathom being out for another three hours.

When we hit the town of Skippack, we turned south to weave our way down to the towpath.  We biked through sparsely populated farm towns beneath clear skies.  Though it was nearing midnight and we were both chilled to the core, it was impossible not to feel energized by the rolling roads and bright stars.

Just before we hit Valley Forge, we stopped to refuel, and I made the brilliant decision to take off my two pairs of gloves.  It seemed counterintuitive, but I remembered Laurie telling me that mittens alone had made all the difference during a recent ski trip.  I figured it was worth a shot, and by the time we hit the park, my hands were positively toasty.

Still, it was only a brief reprieve.  This was the part of the adventure I was dreading.  The Schuylkill River Trail connects downtown Philadelphia to the northwestern ‘burbs with miles and miles of flat, paved paths.  Though the riding is fast, these trail is notorious for serious winds even on the best of days.  And after Saturday’s gale-forced blasts?  I thought it would take us hours to fight through the final twenty miles.

But then a funny thing happened.  We found ourselves bombing down the pancake-flat towpath with no resistance to speak of.  Our MPH climbed higher and my legs had just as much pep as they had when we started four hours earlier.

There was absolutely no wind.  A miracle if there ever was one.

We glided through Valley Forge and onto Norristown, where we turned off our lights to avoid drawing attention to ourselves through the one somewhat sketchy stretch of the trail.  From there, it was onto Conshohocken and Spring Mill, where I proclaimed, “even if the wind stops us in our tracks for these few miles, this will go down as the easiest tow path ride I’ve ever experienced!”

Brent, ever the contrarian, told me that my memory was faulty, that there had been plenty of wind-less rides down there in the past, but I prefer my version of the story.

We spun through the last stretch of towpath and when we turned off the trail and headed up into the hills toward home, we climbed easily.  Though my chapped face and numb feet were well aware that I’d been out on my bike for four and a half hours, my legs hadn’t gotten the memo.

Talk about a pre-season confidence boost.

When we turned onto our street, we both proclaimed ourselves officially ready to race.

By the time we’d thawed out, showered, and refueled, it was nearly 3:30 AM when we climbed into bed.

The next day, I posted on facebook, “The pro/con of starting a 5-hour ride at 9:00 PM on a Saturday night — Pro: empty roads, starry sky, rare night training, and the ability to sleep in Sunday morning. Con: losing feeling in your toes 45 minutes in.”

A friend responded with, “So hard core,” to which I replied, “Hard core or lazy. Riding last night meant we didn’t have to get up this morning. I slept until 10 AM for perhaps the first time in my entire life.”

Best decision ever.

—-

And because I don’t have a single picture from our overnight adventure, I’ll leave you with some shots of this year’s Oscars Extravaganza Cook-Off:

One of my contributions to the spread:

Second runner-up: Brazilian Meat Skewers and Wedding Rice (a la Bridesmaids) –

 First runner-up: Hugo Cheesecake (or Midnight in Paris, depending on who you asked) –
And the winner is…

Mupcakes!

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The more things change…

12 Comments Posted by on February 21, 2012

Last summer, Brent and I had so much fun in Hawaii that in the past three weeks, we decided to quit our jobs, sell our house, and move ourselves and our pups to the Big Island.

This is the view from our new backyard:

Okay, that’s a lie (though that was the view from our backyard in August).

In reality, this month has been filled with a lot of work, a lot of training, and a lot of scouting and prepping for the 24-hour race we’re designing.

And while that’s all well and good, it’s not so exciting to write about another long ride through suburban Philadelphia, another 5-hour brick workout at the gym, or another day of exploring parks-that-shall-not-be-named as we put together the course for the Cradle of Liberty.

Taken in one of the parks we'll be using for the Cradle - can you guess which one?

But all that’s about to change.

This Sunday marks our ever-exciting annual Oscars Extravaganza (I promise actual photos this year), and a week after that we’re heading to Vermont for the first race of the season!

From there we’re off and running on what’s shaping up to be a ridiculous spring and summer of racing and traveling.

So stay tuned, my friends.  Because epicness abounds.

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