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Tree Huggers Race report-
SAC Champs 06 Bark Lake Salomon Adventure Challenge Champs - Bark Lake Richard, Jamie and I raced together. The boys have done a couple of events together before, but it's the first time I've been in the mix. They're definitely a lot faster than I am, but they're reasonably good at hiding their frustration. I did the nav, and it ended up being a race where some fast teams went a long way in the wrong direction, so I felt less guilty about my poor fitness level. Breakfast was served at 2 a.m., and we were supposed to load into school buses at 2:30 a.m. for a 4 a.m. race start. Much to our horror, no coffee was available to fuel our addiction. How can you serve breakfast at 2 a.m. with no coffee???!!??? The only drinks provided were juice cups that were mostly frozen. There was only one school bus for 150 people, and around 3:20 a.m., we were advised to go back to bed and reconvene at 4:30 a.m. Turns out 2 of the 3 bus drivers thought "Saturday at 2:30 a.m." meant "Sunday". The race finally started 2 hrs 40 min later than scheduled. This meant that the initial trek was relatively straightforward, since the course designer had assumed that racers would be travelling in darkness for 3 hrs after the 4 a.m. start. The temperature was -1C, and it was hard to know what to wear. We began with a couple of km of trail running, then bushwhacked to a lakeshore CP. Then we went south along the lake, assuming that we'd find a place to cross its outlet creek to get on a big ridge that would keep us out of the swampy stuff. The creek never became well-defined, and by 7:30 a.m., with frost still on the trees, we were marching across a bog that occasionally gave way underneath us, plunging us into knee- or waist-deep water. The highlight was a 5 m swim across open swampwater. I've heard that some people only got their feet wet, but some of the top teams swam farther than we did, so I'm considering it to be more a case of bad luck than bad route choice. Once we got on the ridge, we hustled along it to a road network that led to the TA, passing Dave Zietsma's team going the wrong way. (Not sure if he was navigating though.) Someone told us we were in 35th place of over 50 teams, which I find hard to believe now, but it really took the wind out of my sails. We didn't have a particularly bad trek, but I'm guessing that a lot of faster teams were able to stay close together from the start, and our time for the section probably wasn't that much slower. The eventual race winner (to no one's surprise), Simon River Sports, was in 36th place at the first CP, so there's no shame in a slow start! Normally, if we're going to have a good race, it's due to a good trek, since that's where nav skills often matter more than speed. There isn't a huge differential in paddling speeds in these races, and the bike nav instructions were very specific - mostly snowmobile trail numbers that were posted on signs, and we had UTM coordinates for the intersections, so I didn't expect we could make up any places there. Oh well... We moved into canoes next, doing the Buzzard Lake canoe route, which has short paddling sections with lots of portages, including a couple almost 1 km long. We arrived too late to get a canoe with a yoke, so Richard and Jamie took turns suffering. Richard, who was moaning about being sick the day before, had a Lazarus-like recovery, jogging long portages with the canoe bouncing on his upper back, which swelled up into a huge, painful goose egg by the end of the race. The first time Jamie threw on the canoe, he forgot the sunglasses perched on top of his head and managed to slice his scalp. Blood ran down all over his face, giving him a Hallowe'en-like look that he chose to keep for most of the race, rather than rinsing off. We gained on teams as we paddled, and we passed a couple of them on the portages. As the middle paddler in a 3-person canoe propelled by kayak paddles, I had gallons of water flung at me over a few hours, and felt hypothermic for the last 90 minutes - losing dexterity, etc. I warned the guys that if I didn't feel OK within the first few km of biking, we'd have to drop out. I had enough spare layers in the transition bag to be completely dry on top, then borrowed Jamie's windproof pants to wear over my wet tights. Luckily, it didn't take long on the bike before I wanted to shed a layer - phew. We had about 5 km of road riding, then headed into a network of snowmobile trails. The first couple of km had been hit hard by a tornado, and there were lots of big trees and branches we had to heave our bikes over or skirt around in the woods - especially hard with Richard's recumbent bike. After that, we were on well-maintained - if occasionally very mucky - snowmobile trails, and there were signs at the relevant intersections. I was tracking distance and direction as we rode, so I was anticipating when we'd hit the intersections we'd been told about, and everything went like clockwork. We saw a couple of other teams, but it was pretty quiet out there. When we got to the first bike CP, I was chatting happily to the volunteers and munching on an energy bar when they mentioned that we were in 9th place. Impossible! We left the last CP in 25th. "Everyone is taking wrong turns today", the volunteer said. Eeek - time to stop eating and get on that bike. We're actually IN this race!! We took rolling gravel roads to the next CP, which was the decision point for the advanced section. We carried on, but we know some good teams stuck to the regular course because they were worried about hypothermia and approaching darkness. The instruction for the first advanced trekking CP was "follow trail to CP", and we wasted about 20-25 minutes with a wrong guess at an intersection. For the next CP, about 2 km away in flat terrain with few landmarks, I relied heavily on orienteering principles, with lots of pace counting and careful bearings. Just as well, since we'd been given a trail map of the area, which turned out to be nearly useless, as some of the trails were virtually invisible, so I was glad I'd aimed for a lake instead. We picked up the final advanced CPs, then learned that we were in 5th Coed, just 5 minutes behind STORM Racing. They're a fast team, so we were proud to be close to them, and when we came out at the trail, they were strolling 50 m ahead, with less than 1.5 km to the finish line. Well, we couldn't let them take it THAT easily, so we started to run to give them a scare. They started running too, then I stopped running and called out (quite sincerely), "It's OK, guys. We're not going to race you." To which my teammates said, "Are you NUTS?" They put me on tow, and dragged me along the trail at my top slow-twitch speed. STORM kept running too. We hit the road and were still less than 100 m behind them. They overshot the turn-off for the beach finish line, and turned a bit further up. We high-tailed it down the beach road as fast as we could, passing through the finish line in the opposite direction from them, about 20 seconds later! Good fun, even though it HURT!! We finished 9th overall out of 50+ teams, 5th Coed. With such a good field, we hadn't expected to be in the prizes, so it was a happy way to end the season. I compared notes later with a fast team that has won one of these races before. Their bike odometer read 110 km, while ours was 42.5 km - which explains why we were lucky enough to pass so many teams in the bike section. I guess if you missed one of the turns in the snowmobile trail system, you could go a long way before the problem became obvious, and then it was really hard to retrace your steps. The best/worst story of the day involved our friend, Dr. LeAnimal and her awesome all-female team, the Adidas Divas. During the advanced trek, she wandered into a Blair Witch wooded area, where bear baiting was taking place - meat hanging from trees, etc. Her foot was caught in a bear trap, but the worst injury was inflicted on her teammate, who pried open the trap to release LeAnimal, and required stitches to her hands at the hospital afterward. The impressive Divas finished the race in 6th overall anyway - they are tough cookies! Fun way to finish the season, although it was a serious reminder not to pack too light for shoulder season races, e.g. I should have brought extra tights for the post-canoe transition bag, but I had no idea my teeth would be chattering so hard. .
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