Dave Bogle, Jason Mittman, Julie Standing, and I traveled to the remote and beautiful Camp Eagle for Too Cool's 24 hour adventure race. It rained the night before, so the area was getting quite muddy.
At 8am the race started with a short run to the river, then each teammate had to take turns swimming across to the other bank to retrieve a poker chip, and then swim back. We brought along some fins we could strap on over our shoes, which helped, and so we hustled back to the checkin after the swim in second place, just behind team iMoat. Next up was a bike leg. They had us skip some of the usual trails, and we stayed on jeep roads for a bit, and then had us ride some of the normal trails backwards from how we usually take them. Seemed like every trail was muddy and slippery. And when it wasn't muddy, it was rocky and slippery. Despite the nasty conditions (or maybe because of them), we managed to keep iMoat in sight for the first half of the bike, when Dave's bike got a flat and we had to stop to change it. 3 or 4 teams passed us while we changed the tire, and then we were back on track. Then Jason's wheels slid out from him at one point and he took a nasty fall, hurting his back, though fortunately it seemed to be more of just a painful bruise than a scarier back injury. We limped our way back to TA still within about ten minutes of the leaders. Fun water leg next. It started by sliding down the new 150 foot slides into the river, awesome! Then a swim to the floating "iceberg", which we had to each climb to reach the checkpoint on top. Then a couple more points located underwater, tied under buoys. Good stuff. We finished up the leg and geared up to chase down iMoat. Next was a short bike/trek leg up to the top of the rappel overlook, and down into the stream below it by Armadillo trail. Since we were allowed to bike or trek, we left our bikes on the ridge, and took a shortcut bushwack on foot straight down into the stream, got the point, and climbed back up to our bikes. The alternative would have been to ride the entire Armadillo trail, which is long enough and technical enough to be worth skipping. We then biked across the ridge, got the point at the overlook, and took the steep downhill to the bridge over the river. Just before we reached the bridge we encountered iMoat heading the other way, as they chose to do the points for the leg in the reverse order. The final point was a couple miles south down the road and in a culvert, then it was straight back up the road to the checkin. We finished the leg in first place, having passed iMoat. Probably due to our route choice/shortcut. Leg five is a short trekking section. The first point we visit turns out to be a rare error by Too Cool... the numbers they gave for one of the points were off by a kilometer, so it plotted in the wrong space. At least the plot was close to transition, so when we couldn't find it in the area we were able to run back quickly and report the problem. They radioed Art and Robyn in, who looked at the plot and confirmed it was off, and they gave us the corrected spot. And a time bonus for having to deal with the mistake. Sounds good to us, off we went, still in the lead despite the delay. At the newly-corrected location for the errant point, we see a big hill with a bumpy road traveling down it. The volunteers at this spot give us a two-wheel kick scooter, and we take turns riding it down the hill, and then kicking it back up to the top. It was very fun for us. It was less fun for teams that got there an hour later, when the rain had kicked in again and turned the dirt into mud that stuck to the scooter tires! Off to get the other two points on the trek. Here, I make a huge error... while running along an old jeep road, I somehow take us way past the draw we were looking for, and enter an incorrect draw above it. After fighting our way up the draw, we finally decide from the direction that it's heading that it must be wrong, and so we cut up and over down into the correct draw. So we thought... this second draw was also the wrong draw. Fortunately, we were able to figure out that it was wrong rather quickly this time, but still, it meant that we had to climb up and over again to get back to the correct draw (that we'd run right past thirty minutes earlier). D'oh! Fortunately, we came down into this draw right at the perfect spot to land at the checkpoint. By now there were other teams in the area that had caught up to us while we'd been doing our unnecessary drainage exploration. What's worse, we still had one more point to get on this leg, and other teams were already heading back to start their next leg. Nothing to do but climb up to the ridgeline to get our final point on the fenceline, and then cut straight back down to the main road and run back home. We caught up to the Knights of Ni on the run back and said hi to them right before we got the instructions for the next leg. |