Congratulations to Rottencheeseburgers (Bryce, Andy, Michelle) for their 2nd place overall, second place co-ed finish and Andi for her 3rd place co-ed, 3rd place overall finish racing with Odyssey. Both teams ran great races…and qualified for Nationals!!!
The inaugural Equinox Traverse starts Friday morning. Doug Crytzer of American Adventure Sports has teamed with Chris Caul to put together what promises to be an epic event (http://www.americanadventuresports.com/traverse.htm). We are fielding one coed elite team of Bryce, Andy and Michelle, while Andi B. is joining forces with a team from Odyssey. This will be a 48 hour unsupported race, essentially a two day expedition style race. As a bonus, this is both a double points race in the Checkpoint Tracker series (www.checkpointtracker.com) and a USARA qualifier (www.USARA.com). Good luck everyone!!! We can’t wait to hear the race stories from this one!
We came into this race with one goal, a top 3 finish. We feel like we are very much a team on the rise and a Top 3 would never be considered a guarantee for us. Tough competition has seemed to follow us this year and ‘Wild and Wonderful’ was no different. But we had our goal, the team was united behind it and we knew it would be and extremely tough slog. Odyssey put on a great race, an extremely tough race, and one that posed a tremendous challenge to any team in the field, regardless of whether or not they had raced in this area before over the last 15 years Odyssey has been putting races on here. I’m certainly proud of everything the team did, we left it out on the course, ran a very good race, every time we needed to push, we all pushed and did what we needed to do as a team to move forward. We ran our race, and came up tantalizing close to our goal. We have to thank Spokes Etc, WTB, Crankbrothers, Ellsworth, and all our other sponsors who help us along the way.
So often in adventure racing you have “what if” moments. It rewards mental toughness and strategic thinking, and forces you to have those qualities at 3am, while you’re under varied degrees of physical stress. Afterwards, when not in those conditions, you have time to look back and figure out how well you did and what you could have done differently. I’m not talking about bad stomachs, cramps, sleep monsters, etc. Those are things all teams have to suffer through; I’m talking about that decision to bushwhack vs. taking a trail, hitting a road that no one else finds, saying “we have to head” back when it seems like you have more time to finish the course. Our race essentially came down to a point “J” moment. We missed our cut-off by just over an hour. It took us roughly an hour to unsuccessfully get this point. That one decision (my decision) sent us from 3rd, to 23rd.
It’s what I love about this sport, and making those mistakes kill me, it’s the sort of thing I’m still working out as a racer.
Race Registration
Odyssey Race registration is always a bit of an experience, they’ve got it down to a science, a chaotic science. Given the website had us plotting 20+ points I was glad we got there early. After we got our maps and cracked open the passport we had…8 points to plot, and a 15 pt o-course that we would get later. We plotted our points, got our gear ready, did all the pre-race stuff you have to do, and slept a luxurious few hours before our 6am wake-up.
Race Day
We loaded on the buses to head to the raft put-in. Funny as these things are, my team said maybe 5 things to each other and we tried to sleep most of the hr long bus ride. We get to the put-in, start getting our boat positions…and wait, and wait, and wait. We’re on the last boat of the last flight of boats…AGAIN. Odyssey’s random drawing has had us pulling rear for the 2nd time in the 4 times they’ve had the rafting. Oh well, we had a 4 person male team with us and those guys looked like they could pull a boat…and they could. We ended up catching the flight in front of us, getting off the river, and on our way to CP2/TA2 in no time.
The path up to CP 2 was straight forward, you turn up, head up, and keep going up some more until you reach Fayetteville. Despite our boat position, we got to CP2 in 6th place, transitioned, and out of CP2 in 3rd or 4th place. CP2-3 was a fairly straightforward bike along the rim of the Gorge to a day use area near Thurmond. We headed into CP3 in 3rd place, right were we needed to be, and we set about getting ready for the o-course.
O-course
After doing all our initial plotting and planning for the race we knew the o-course was going to make or break the race for the entire field. When we got the map the first thing we noticed was the course was set predominantly in an area that had been heavily strip mined, which meant the piece of paper in our hands was, at best, a only good approximation. We set an initial pace that was going to get us as much daylight on the o-course as possible. We set out about 2:30 in the afternoon, giving ourselves about 10 hours out on the course. By sunset we had 8 points, and were halfway to our 9th point, having a few twists and turns but nothing terrible and feeling pretty good…oh what a few hrs of darkness will do to a racer’s morale.
We made the ninth point without any major issues. On our way to the 10th point we ran into some sort of industrial wood chipping outfit…all roads led into and out of this place. The very nice night-shift worker and his dog led us through the back way, telling us that we were pretty far behind other folks who had come through a bit earlier. We made it up to the point we were looking for, unhappy because of the 400 meter scramble through thigh high stinging nettles and made our way back to…the wood chipping place. We worked our way around to the backside of the place, eventually getting to the road we needed to find with the 2ish hrs left before our drop dead time, we set out to try to get as many of the final points as we could. We hit our attack point for our 11th point (J) and set out to get it…no good, we went back out and reattacked it… same. We tried one more time pressed on trying to use a little side trail to cut around…we gave up and headed back. We’d spent at least an hour trying to attack that point (didn’t find it) and now we and to rush to make it back.
We made the decision to try for two more, gave ourselves only 10 minutes to deviate off of our main trail for each one. Luckily, we were dead on for both of them and only took about 15 minutes of extra time to bag them….1 am, way late for our jump out and we had to cruise. No shape to run it out, we had to hustle the best we good…It was going to be close. The route out seemed simple enough, but like everything on this o-course, looks were deceiving. We had no major navigational issues, just took way longer than we estimated, and we came in much, much too late to CP 4, at 2:45am. Found out we were in 3rd if we could make the cut-off….If only I had not bothered sending us after J!!! After what seemed to be a long 22 minute TA (but pretty much what everyone else did) we were off at 3:11…and we had a flat. We pumped it up and got going, but we knew it would need to be changed eventually.
The Final push
So, doing the math, we had a 15 minute credit from being in the last wave of rafts, so just over 4 hrs to make the 7am cutoff at cp6. We had originally said this leg would take 5 hrs, we now had 4, this was going to take a herculean effort, quite a feat if we could pull it off. I set the initial pace guessing we’d need an hour from CP5-6, we needed to go 40km in 3 hours, mostly uphill. I could only handle that pace for about 5-8 km. Luke took the lead and we pushed, and pushed, and pushed. Time kept slipping by and it became apparent that we weren’t making the Cut-off. Our pace slowed, a bit, we kept moving forward, eventually coming to the turn-off and hike-a-bike.
This section was slow moving, we were all hurt, Nate had saddle sores that could be considered cruel and unusual punishment, everyone was looking forward to getting back to the road. We made it to CP5 a bit after 7am, 10 minutes to make the cut-off that was 10 km away. No surprise we weren’t going to get there in time. We make it to CP6 with me taking one very nasty spill on the bike along the way, but no nav issues to contend with. The area had changed considerably, much to the benefit of racers as that whole area is normally strewn with deadfall. After CP6 it was a short road ride up to Washington Carver for our finish.
All in all a great event. Our team worked well together, we pushed through, some very challenging sections. We tried to hit a goal, didn’t miss it by much and we’re getting ready to give it another go.
The 2009 Wild and Wonderful race was another excellent Odyssey event. We fielded 2 and 1/2 teams: Teamhalfwaythere.com, Teamhalfwaythere/RottenCheeseburgers and a combination of myself and Yoga Slackers creating Halfway Yoga. The short version of the race: We prepped, slept, paddled, trekked, biked, orienteered, biked, made a critical cutoff, trekked and finished 3rd.
The long version is a bit more entertaining…
I had been looking forward to this race for over six months. Way back in December, Jeremy signed us up and we put together a 4 person team. Unfortunately, life gets in the way and I did not think I be able to race. So, Nate stepped in and all was well. Just weeks before the race, my wife surprised me and I was back in the game - but without a team! I few phone calls and emails to Mark and Sara of Yoga Slackers, an addition of Luther Papenfus and bingo, we have a rock solid team.
The night before the race we all arrive, check in and plot all 8 points. 8 points? Huh? Yep, there is an orienteering course in the middle. We’ll receive and plot those 15 points at CP3. Additionally, the key time hack for the race is 7:00 am at CP 6. Some backwards planning, and we estimate it will take us 5 1/2 hours to get from CP4 to CP6. So, we plan on leaving CP4 at 1:30 am. We finish packing our stuff, attend the race brief, stage our bikes and packs next to the Odyssey vehicles and rack out. Unfortunately, some racers didn’t have their kit ready so they had to come back before 5 am to drop off their packs. Apparently, they thought since they were awake, we all should be. Lesson learned - camp farther away from the hub of activity! Grrrrr….
Race day. Eat, grab sunglasses, and get on a bus. Knock out a run/swim prologue and start paddling. The water was high and our guide wanted to do well (financial incentive and bragging rights involved), great combo - we hit those rapids head on! A little over an hour later and we were in TA and prepping for our trek. Foot movement for about another hour to CP1 and our bikes. Quick TA and we are gone. Excellent double track and single track. Couple of short climbs, overall great ride. Show up and CP3 in 4th just behind TeamHalfwaythere.com. Top off on water, plot points, quick plan and we are out of there.
Orienteering in and around strip mines is difficult. Huge kudos to Luther and Mark for some great nav. Like everyone else, the movement consisted of a lot of elevation change, scaling and descending small cliffs, and navigating in terrain not always accurately depicted on the maps. After over 12 hours, we ended up with 11 points and came into CP4 almost an hour late.
Very quick TA and we left at 2:31 am. We had 4 1/2 hours to get to CP6. We figured it would be close and if we pulled it off, we were in the top three. Essentially our race was against the clock for the next several hours, with little margin for navigational errors. Thanks again to Mark and Luther, we made it error free seemingly biking uphill the majority of the time. There was a short hike a bike a bit before CP5 just to change things up. We hit our critical intersections, always chose the correct route and and pulled into CP6 at 6:31 am - exactly 4 hours after leaving CP4.
From there some easy trekking to CP7 and then the finish. Through this section the views were incredible, sun was up and we were all in great spirits coming into the finish.
As always, a special thanks to all our sponsors for their assistance. We really couldn’t all compete at this level without your help.
Final results for all of us were: Halfway Yoga 3rd, Halfway Rotten Cheeseburger 5th and Halfwaythere.com 7th in coed elite.
Lastly, thank you to Mark, Sara and Luther. It was great racing together - I look forward to the next time we combine efforts.
Shane
Race Report
Wild Wonderful 24, 5/26/2009
Brian Hyland, Aaron Bernarn, Andi Ballou and Bryce Read formed TeamHalfwaythere.com/RottenCheeseburgers (RottenCheeseburgers).
Welcome to the Wild Wonderful 24 Adventure race in Fayetteville, WV. This is a 24 hour adventure race composing of White water rafting, running, trekking, mountain biking and orienteering all taking place in the hilly New River Gorge and surrounding area. This race is unsupported and we needed to carry all gear with us creating some heaaavvvy packs.
The race started off with a 12 mile white water paddle (class III-V rapids) and each boat had about 8 people and a guide. Normally these guided tours are slow and for fun, but for this race the guides were given monetary incentives for their finishes, so it was fast and non-stop. Once the race began one person from each boat had to do a run and swim to the boat, luckily we had a swimmer in the bunch, and ours (Karen a solo racer) made it back to the boat in 2nd. We pushed hard and worked well as a team. We jockeyed back and forth with a couple other teams and we also saw a few people from other boats go overboard. Apparently Brian hadn’t gotten his sea legs yet and he almost dismounted a few times. We finished up strong and were the first boat off the river in a little less than 1 hour and 20 minutes.
From there we transitioned to a run, we had about a 1.5 hour run ahead of us and took it slow and steady walking most of the hills and running the flats and downhill’s. We made it the TA in good shape and quickly changed into biking gear and stored all our running gear in our packs, adding a little extra weight.
Got on the bikes and started moving out, we estimated 3 hours on bike. The weight on our back definitely changed our balance and made for some fun windy single track to get out onto the main roads. We took a couple short breaks here to catch out breath and adjust ourselves, but overall we kept a good pace arriving at the next TA mid-pack.
CP3 we transitioned to foot for what would be a long and grueling Orienteering course (O-course). We plotted our points very quickly and away we went passing a bunch of teams still plotting (maybe too quickly). We took a look at the new Ocourse map and saw lots of strip mines and cliffs, never being in a strip mine we didn’t know what to expect. We gave ourselves a cut time of midnight that would give us time enough to meet all the race cut times. To start the Ocourse we had to climb a significant ridge with no trail which put the hurting on all of us. However, Aaron had other ideas he pretended to be cramping so he could sit down and be stretched out and touched by his teammates (I still haven’t gotten my tip). This sit down time was a race saver, we took a couple minutes and it saved our race, everyone was fine after that (well, until the bike whack from hell).
We continued on and made it to the 1st OP and met up with a few other teams and searched, where we thought the point should be but searched for a few minutes and Karen from team Calleva shared the location of her point and they were a little different. I made a plotting error and we wasted some time looking but quickly got back on track and joined teams for a good portion of the Ocourse with Karen where the more navigators the merrier. On to the next CP where we continued on a mesh of old fire roads and trails. Andi led us to the rest of the OPs without much hassle. We hit most of our points with daylight which made things easier. A couple of the points had great views, one we had to climb to was on a large plateau and looked like an African savanna, the same point had an overlook over a huge valley where we could see many miles of gorges, mountains and sky. This would be our last daylight OP and we took a few minutes to enjoy the view with some wholesome nutrition (i.e. Corn nuts, Fritos, Pringles, and M&Ms). That was a picture moment, however the last video I took of a harrowing 60km/hr ride down a mountain resulted in me putting the camera in my pocket still recording.
We kept a slow and steady pace on foot and hit more OP’s. One thing that did bother us was the fact that we couldn’t do the only thing our river guide asked us to do, which was sing the song Peaches. We could only muster up 4 or 5 lines, but we would have won a prize if trying to sing or remember that song was a category.
Getting off the Ocourse was not as easy as we had anticipated; we had left time for ourselves to get out and down the mountain to the TA by 1200 that would leave us 7hrs to make the 0700 cutoff time that was said to take between 4-7 hours. However, getting off the Ocourse was not what we thought it would be. We got on the trail we came in on and thought we had a simple way out, not the case. We got to a point were we said just head east to the cliffs and we will find a way down from there and that is what we did. We found a safe way down and did some butt-sliding all the way to the CP4 and the transition to the bike from hell.
We realized we had some time so we took a little; fixed up some feet and got ready for the bike. We looked over the maps and were surprised we hit 9 Opoints, at that point we had the most of any team that came through the TA. Andi led us to all the points with little to no error. We headed out on the bikes and started the climbs, about 50km with what seemed like no downhills (maybe a couple). The first part of the ride was mainly fire roads that winded and climbed out of the gorge. It was dark and windy, that’s all I can remember. We finally made it to the paved road were somehow we still had to climb up the mountain for a couple more hours. We road for a couple more hours and began to see the fatigue, Brian was talking incoherently when asked questions and the rest of the team was getting quiet.
The next thing we saw was a snake like figure of red blinking lights, we came upon a group of about 40 people walking their bikes up the hill. We passed them over a short period of time and continued on, but were getting close to our trail turn. We were supposed to be looking for 3 pieces of orange flagging and didn’t see them in time and rode right past it, about 2 extra miles of climbing up that hill. Came flying back down the 2 miles and hit the turn. We turned into what would be a brutal bikewhack, pushing our bikes up a dug-out muddy trail. That too, is a blur of curses and sweat. I can remember walking past a few teams that had passed us on our overshot and it looked like a war zone, bodies laying everywhere, heads down, people not talking and moaning. But we made it through and to CP5 where getting short on time especially with a tricky set of turns coming up. We pushed it to the start of a little village where dogs where nipping at our feet at the break of dawn. We missed the first turn and got off line for 10 minutes, but we backtracked and saw the sign for the turn we needed coming back and hit it and what followed was in my mind worth all the climbing. We hit a fire road downhill that was fast, technical and scary (while holding and looking at map and compass). At this point we had not been passed by any teams and time was running out on the mandatory cut time. We were thinking we might actually win if some of the other teams tried to bite off more than they could chew on the Ocourse. We rolled into CP6 and made the cutoff by 30 minutes, it took us around 6 hours to make it there. At that point we saw team halfway yoga with Shane and realized the other teams were making it off the Ocourse and on their way back. Alls we had left was a trek back uuuupppp. We had plenty of time and just pushed it back talking and having some laughs all the way back.
Race finish was great, good BBQ and got to see everyone all beat up. We finished great with a mixed experience team in which we had no expectations; we got 5th out of 50+ teams.
