Chickpoints (Karen, Kristy, and me)
3rd in Women’s division
30th out of 49 overall
33 of 56 checkpoints
Time: 28:31
Stage 1C Paddle 7.11 miles in 2:05 – 3 CP’s
Stage 1D Bike 15.5 miles in 2:52 – 4 CP’s
Stage 1B Paddle 11.4 miles in 3:30 – 5 CP’s
Stage 1A Trek 5.5 miles in in 2:18 – 6 CP’s
Stage 2 Bike 17 miles in ~ 5:30 – 3 CP’s
Stage 3 Trek 5.6 miles in 4:15 – 7 CP’s
Stage 4 Bike 12 miles in ~2:30 – 2 CP’s
Stage 5 Trek 4.6 miles in 2:30 – 3 CP’s
Bike to Finish 5.25 miles 0:45
Discipline totals:
Paddle 18.5 miles
Bike: 49.75
Trek: 15.7
Total: 84 miles
Ok, enough of the data wrangling, here is what I can recall about the race almost two weeks later!
Pre-Race: Wednesday and Thursday
Knowing we had a 10 1/2 hr drive to get to Cable WI, we left after school on Wednesday and headed north. The old Taco still keeps on trucking, even with a frame rust issue. The only difference is we now carry the title with us in case we have to trade it in and move on! We made it pretty much to Madison that night and grabbed a cheap hotel. Thursday we stopped for last minute items at REI and a delicious breakfast at a local diner. During breakfast Steve gets a call from his teammate that he was biking back to his van with a new battery since it wouldn’t start when he woke up! Turns out the alternator was shot as well, so he ended up replacing it in the parking lot before driving on! We rolled into Cable and the resort with some time to spare before check in and pre-race meeting. I managed to get some of my food packed and some gear organized before we headed down for the meeting. The meeting seemed to take forever but finally we landed back at the condo for final gear prep. I had planned between 5000-6000 cals for the whole race, with 3 liters of water in the bladder to start, and two bike bottles on the bike. The weather was looking to be fabulous, way warmer and dryer than we had originally planned for but I still packed extra socks, gloves, and a hat.
Race: Friday – Saturday
The morning dawned clear and warm. We would essentially be on the clock when we were handed the maps and instructions, no phones or returning to the condo. Once we had the maps, we had about an hour to read the instructions and route plan. Given the multi-leg section at the start, we only had a rough outline of the entire course before we started. Karen and I worked backwards from the end to create some time domains and see what and where we’d need to drop some points. The only sections that were mandatory were legs A-D in stage one. We read the instructions carefully and planned our legs so we didn’t violate the rule of not repeating the same discipline back to back. The flower petal start made for interesting dot watching I bet! 3,2,1 GO and the teams scattered! We headed with a large number of teams down to the water.
Stage 1 Leg C – Paddle – We grabbed our paddle gear and headed to the boats. We headed out on the shorter of the two paddles, sticking with our plan of dropping points. We are a pretty decent team in the boat but figured we’d be faster on the bike sections than the paddle. We had a straight forward nav to the 3 points we planned for this section, then back to the beach for a quick transition.
Stage 1 Leg D – Bike – A quick shoe change for Kristy, potty break for me, and then off on the bike. We made it to the road when a team coming in said something in passing. It sounded like “you dropped aldkjflsdjflakd”. We stopped to check for cars coming and that’s when Kristy realized she didn’t have her pack on! Lol, I should have figured it out since I’d been staring at her back for a few hours at this point and should have noticed something was different! Back to the TA, grabbed the pack and then we were really off! This was a mountain bike section that totaled 18 miles with 5 CP’s, none of which were on the map. The instructions said to just ride the single track loop marked on the trial map and we’d find CP’s as we went. We had instruction/location hints for 3 of the 5, the other 2 were not listed so as to ensure teams didn’t short cut the trails. These trails are amazing, and that is coming from me, a self professed non-biker! I’d love to come back and session some sections to improve my rock garden skills. What I really enjoyed was that the penalty for screwing up on a rock garden was just a small fall, versus the falling into a giant ravine like in Brown County. This made me more courageous and I went over more rocks in this section than I’ve probably done in my entire ride history prior! And yet I was still woefully behind my teammates! Due to the technical stuff on the bottom most loop (described as double black) we decided to use the cut off trail and miss hopefully just one CP. In hindsight, I should have just sucked it up and told my team we should do the whole loop, but not knowing what else was in store, it seemed like the best option.
Stage 1 Leg B – Paddle – We hit the water around 1:30 pm and the wind was starting to pick up. This was the much longer paddle section and we should have accounted for the weather changing and done this one first! We planned to drop B6 since it was pretty out of the way for only a single point. This theme of leaving one behind made perfect sense at the time but looking back, if we had powered through on the paddle and the bike in this first stage, we would have picked up the two points to move into second place. The paddle was a slog but we arrived back at TA around 5 pm. We hustled to get out on the trek while the sun was still up.
Stage 1 Leg A – Trek – The trek section was fairly straight forward, the biggest challenge was deciding if the map was showing a small rise or a small depression! Coming from non-glaciated terrain in Indiana and Kentucky, our brains had to adjust to the smaller details! Writing this two weeks later, I find myself without a lot to say on the trek section. This means it was probably pretty easy and we all must have felt pretty good still!
Stage 1 Leg E – Skipped – We had a time line to beat for this leg and it just wasn’t in the cards with our planning. The nav section for this leg was where the compass was going to go bonkers and while it would have been really cool to see, we just didn’t have time!
Stage 2 – Bike – Leaving TA this time around would be the last until we returned at race end. This meant we took way longer in transition. To be fair, we hadn’t had time to route out the stages after the loop start so we did need to figure that out. Plus, they had some delicious hot food waiting for us! A good meal and some cold caffeinated drink after 12 hrs of racing really hit the spot. Stage 2 biking was 23 miles and 5 CP’s, all optional. Really, everything after Legs A-D were optional so teams got to decide what was their best plan. As a team, we usually decide to see as much of the course as possible, meaning we do a bit of each section. Personally, I really enjoy this since part of the draw of adventure racing for me is more about the adventure and less about the racing. The competitive part of me looks back and sees how we could have played to our strengths more and possibly placed higher. As for this bike section, it was more of the rocky single track that I enjoyed in the daylight, just less enjoyable in the dark. It was a lot of me muttering f@ck to myself as I would fall off my bike. One thing I didn’t account for was the mental energy required for technical mountain biking in the dark. This was way more fatiguing than I planned for. We picked off the 1 CP and then decided to bike whack over from the Danky Dank trail to a snowmobile trail, hoping for smoother riding. This allowed us to cut off a longer section of technical biking and instead cruise relatively quick down a wider and less rocky trail. The weeds were high but no major obstacles. Once we met up with the Danky Dank trail again, we had to do an out and back to get CP 2 but I still think it was a better option than trying to ride that dang trail in the dark! Back on track we hit CP 3 around 12:15 am and when we came to the water source marked on the map we saw it was at a shelter as well! We totally took advantage of having a table to sit at, and benches to lay on, for a short break. I was feeling pretty sleepy at this point, so I broke out the double shot espresso can from my pack. Kristy did some more map scanning and when we were ready to go, the decision was to just head to TA 2/3 and skip the last 2 bike points. CP 4 was way off the route to the TA and CP 5 was in the middle of a spaghetti bowl of trails. From the shelter to the TA was a straight shop.
Stage 3 – Trek – Nothing like a good O Course in the dark! We rambled around from 1:45 am to about 6 am picking up 7 Cps in a loose circle. I was pretty much just a warm body that counted to 74 (my 100 m pace count) over and over until my spot light was needed. I’d like to say I was more lucid this time than in 2019 but it’s hard to say! I did start having pretty severe stomach cramps around 3:30 or so. My team allowed for a short horizontal break and I immediately fell asleep in the middle of the trail for what felt like 30 minutes. They assured me it was no more than ten minutes but it made a huge difference! All told, we probably should have decided to keep working on the trek in this section and completely skip the Stage 5 trek. The points here were closer and there were more of them to get. Stage 5 only had 6 CP’s whereas Stage 3 had 14! This is probably something we should have seen and decided earlier in the race but at this point we stuck with our plan. It is these little nuances in whole race planning and routing that I am not awesome at, very grateful to pick up pointers from my teammates!
Stage 4 – Bike – This was basically just a bike to the next TA for the last trek section. We picked up the two that were more or less on our way (CP 21 & 22) and then took the southern route over to the TA. We hit the water at the cabin one more time since this was the last known water. Overall, the course was very dry and finding water to treat would have been not convenient after we left the lake.
Stage 5 – Trek – Ooof. I was feeling pretty spent when we hit this trek. I used my emergency can of espresso since this was the last major section. The CP’s in this trek were pretty far apart, something that I hadn’t considered before. The first one we went for required either a lengthy trail out and back or a cross country trek. The ladies decided to just go for it and off into the bush we went! If I were doing this solo, I would have been screwed. The shiggy was so thick, we couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead. I shouldn’t be amazed at this point since I’ve seen Karen and Kristy navigate a lot, but I am still so impressed when we just pop out of the woods and look, a CP! Such a cool feeling! From there, we hit a trail and walked as briskly as I could to the next one, CP 28. This was off an old and fairly obscure trail by a pond. The final one we picked was CP 27 and it took us some time to find. We must have come off the trail at a different point than we thought but eventually we nailed it down. We punched this CP at 11 am and decided to play it safe and just head back in. Given the leg fatigue and still having a bit of a bike back, it made sense to not go for another CP in this leg. We checked out of TA 4/5 at 11:48 am and made it back to the start at 12:31 pm.
Post Race Ramblings
Looking back at this race I feel like it was pretty middle of the road for me. I didn’t have any major issues, just some areas that I can try and improve on. I didn’t have any huge moments of elation or major breakdowns. I felt like our team showed up, saw the work, made a plan, did the job, and held it together! Having high hi’s and low low’s makes for a more interesting race report but it sure doesn’t make the race easier. This race wasn’t easy but with the weather being so agreeable, it felt easy, especially when compared to biking up that damn mountain in 2019 to get back to the start, shoving my head into whatever ditch water I could find to try and cool off! All in all, I feel like we did awesome! We saw most of the course, only skipping leg E.
Big thanks to USARA and all of the people behind the scenes who worked so hard to pull off a perfect race!
Things that tasted really good: I think my nutrition was fine, still probably carried more than was necessary.
Peanut M&M’s
Arby’s Sandwich
Arby’s Chicken nugs
Epic Venison sticks
Nature’s Bakery Fig Bars
GU pineapple flavor – super tasty!
GU TriBerry for caffeine
I forgot about my Stinger Mini Waffles until the very end! I didn’t eat my burrito this time but will continue to carry one!
Things I need to improve:
Technical mountain biking skills. I was able to keep up on the roads much better than before, just not on the trails so much.
Navigation. I really want to bring something to the team in navigation. The only way to do this is to race solo and with the new points standing, that means not being on the team! Argh! Orienteering meets perhaps?
The Rambling Hamblings 
Wonderfully written and love the pictures good moment and jelly of the skill set you are now on top of.
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