High Points on a Jagged Trajectory

2005 marked my fifth year as an amateur adventure racer. The battle of clawing my way up the rankings to a level of respectability has been fought on several fronts including: gaining experience and increasing fitness, preventing and recovering from injury, minimizing the deleterious, but inevitable, effects of age, and finding the “right” team. If one were to graph my progress, the trajectory would be positive, but jagged.

A few of the recent highpoints include: placing Fourth in the Wisconsin Fall Classic, Second in our Division in the Florida Swamp Stomp, and Fifth in the Michigan Coast To Coast.

I celebrated my 47^th birthday the day our Team competed the Wisconsin Fall Classic, a 6-hour Sprint race. Among the more gratifying statistics was that the combined age of two of my teammates equaled my own. Then, in February, my teammate and I competed in the 36-hour Florida Swamp Stomp.

Early in 2005 I learned of the Michigan Race. Having competed in an expedition-length (more than two days) race before, I was confident that, with the right team, I could perform well. Following several attempts to connect with a participating team, I at last received a response to a posting I placed on the organizer’s website.

The Team, Dead Reckoning, is based in Canada. My first meeting with them would be the day prior to the Event.

Several teleconferences and emails ensued, during which we got to know one another better.

A sinus infection kept me from training almost the entire month leading up to the race. This had the additional consequence of my not learning, until literally days before my departure, that the rear shock on my mountain bike had failed, and the blade on my kayak paddle had delaminated. So, not only were the last days of May spent readying my office, my gear, and myself for the drive to the race start, I also had to scramble to ensure I would receive these essential items in time for the race (in the case of the paddle blade, it had to be shipped to Michigan from the manufacturer).

On Tuesday, May 31, I hitched a ride with another team that was heading up to the race from Chicago.

We arrived in Frankfort early the following morning. I awoke to a lower back that was so sore I had trouble walking. Had this happened to me a few years earlier, I’d have been worried. Among the lessons that racing ADMimbing have taught me is that my pre-race anxiety sometimes manifests itself as pain, usually in the back, neck or shoulders. So I continued, along with the team, in preparing for the race. I also had plenty of Vitamin A (Aleve), which helped.

I spent a good part of the day inflating, and learning to use, a pack raft, as it was to constitute at least one section of the race. We readied our gear, attended the course talk in the town’s high school gymnasium. Then, our Captain ADMief Navigator, Joe ADMnor, respectively, worked into the night mapping “the course,” while I, Lisa, and our crew, Lynn and Emil, readied the gear.

The course would follow a predominantly easterly direction, ending in the town of Oscola, on the shores of Lake Huron. Teams were given a total of 77 hours in which to complete the Course, with an estimated distance was 250 miles. This assumed, of course, no navigational errors.

Team Dead Reckoning ADMew at Check-In

The race began on the beach at 7:00 a.m. on June 2. Everyone was required to start with his feet submerged to the ankles.

Following a one-mile run, we inflated our pack rafts for a ½ mile paddle across an inlet of Lake Michigan.

Lisa: First Out

Our first Transition Area (TA) involved switching into our bike shoes and beginning on our 65-mile ride over paved roads, two-track gravel roads, lots of sandy paths, and even through some swamps, which required a bike carry once in a while.

Less than one hour into the bike section, I was the last person on our team drafting line. My team just kept pulling ahead. No matter how hard I tried, the Team kept pulling ahead. I thought to myself “This is going to be a long race!” Perhaps fifteen minutes later, a rider approached from behind and yelled “Hey, your Team says you should wait for them!” I thought he must have mistaken, and told him so. To this, he replied “Maybe, but there’s a team of three back there with the same race number you have!” Somehow, I had gotten ahead of them. To put it mildly, this effectively changed my attitude for the better.

On one steep hill Joe shouts out “71 K!,” just as I pass him. This meant I was pushing 50 MPH, which is faster than I have ever reached even on my triathlon bike. Another “high point” of the Bike Section was our riding a zip line, bikes in tow, across a river.

Glad to be off our bikes, we next embarked on a 36-40 mile trek over sandy, two-track fire roads, through dense forests to the top of several high points in the area. We also bushwhacked our way through the aptly-named “Big Devil Swamp.” In fact, the

brush was so thick that one of the countless overhanging branches withdrew one of my $75 trekking poles from my pack, never to be seen again (at least not by me).

We exited the woods, located the “Bike Drop,” mounted our bikes, and rode to the next TA. We knew we were now in Fifth Place, and wanted to keep it that way. The ride to the next TA was not only a navigational challenge. We also struggled through sandy rutted roads, in which we would pick up speed, only to have a front wheel dig in, causing one or more of us to spill off our bike. After what seemed like hours, we make it on to a paved road, only to have the Team behind blow past us as though we were standing still!

One of our goals was to minimize time in the TAs. Our relative success at this enabled us to “leap frog” a number of Teams. Such was the case when we transitioned from Bikes to canoes at roughly 3:00 a.m., 21 hours into the Race, to begin a 49-mile paddle on the Au Sable river.

As our direction of travel was predominantly easterly, the sun as it appeared above the trees, became an oppressive force, reflecting off the water and the front of our aluminum canoes. We finished the section, as expected, in just under ten hours. It was now 10:00 a.m.

Our next TA would find us switching back onto our bikes for a 15-mile ride to the “O” (for orienteering) course, followed by another relatively short bike section. Owing to the importance of navigation, the O course often serves to spread out teams. Of course, it’s a lot easier to find something in daylight, so getting to this section as much as possible before dark was a driving force for us. Following a somewhat slower than usual transition, we departed the TA, confident we’d be out of the O course well before darkness fell.

Shortly into the bike leg, my rear tire went flat. The spare tube was defective and, by the time we replaced it with a second tube, we’d wasted well over half an hour. The next gear malfunction was my pedals. As we pedaled through the increasingly deep sand of the fire “roads,” it became necessary to dismount and push one’s bike. Unfortunately, my cleats were locking to my shoes, which meant that the only way I could dismount was by falling off the bike. Eventually, they were so tightly attached that I needed help just to get them off the bike! This ate up valuable daylight, was particularly exhausting for me, ADMnsequently did not begin the O course until just a few hours before dark.

The O course was quite challenging, but Joe ADMnor managed to locate all of the five checkpoints (while a team could be officially ranked without locating all of these, any team that did locate all five checkpoints and finished the race, regardless of their finish time, would be ranked ahead any team that did not).

We reached the next TA at 2:30 a.m. on Saturday, exactly 43 ½ hours since the race start. We knew that, to have any chance of maintaining our Fifth place position, we could not afford the luxury of sleep. We ate, drank, took care of my blistered feet, and grabbed all necessary gear for the next three sections, and headed off into the darkness.

Shortly into an eight-mile trek, we encountered the second and final zip line, then continued to where we inflated our pack rafts for a 5-mile paddle that began for us at sunrise. My sleep-deprived state caused me to feel as though I were paddling across a gelatinous substance with sunbathers waving at me from the “nearby shore” as I passed by. Our Team opted to paddle an extra ¼ mile, which permitted us to run the final two miles to our last TA, instead of paddling an additional two miles. As we prepared to leave the TA, our Crew yelled to us “There’s another team coming into Transition!.” It was Team AGS, which had been gaining on us steadily through the night. From there, the race for us became an all out sprint, notwithstanding we still had 22 miles to go.

We ran our bikes over a dam, and up a hill to the paved road. We then formed our Drafting Line, and rode as hard as we could for just under an hour. Conor set a blistering pace, that I could just barely maintain. We reached the final race leg, a twelve mile canoe paddle. We did not see anyone behind us.

A little over two hours later, we passed spilled into Lake Huron, whose 2-3 foot waves, while manageable, were something to which we had not been accustomed. We bore hard right, spotted the finish markers, and paddled hard. As we landed, our crew pointed behind us to Team AGS, which finished just 8 minutes behind us, the smallest margin separating any of the top finishing teams.

Only 8 minutes separated us from 6^th place team

Team w/Crew: we REALLY needed them!

“Token American” takes the floor