Feb 19, 2022

Team: Tight Left, Wide Right (Josh, Ashish, and I)

57/61 overall, 54 pts, 9hr 41mins on course, 29 Km traveled

https://www.tanznavigation.org/routegadget/rg2/#4&route=50057

Friday: This race popped up on my radar last year and I just couldn’t get everything together in time. This year I planned ahead but still almost ran out of time! Not wanting to miss any school days, we were limited to leaving after school on Friday. The 6 hr drive didn’t sound that bad, if you were the first driver but I knew the last 2 hrs would be a struggle. To this end, and because who doesn’t love sharing the suffering, I asked Josh and Ashish if they’d want to race with me. These two are part of the trusted adventure crew who know how to travel and how to make it fun! Now we had four solid drivers to share the load! Heading out on Friday in a rental car (trust me, this was a good idea), we made decent time until we lost a tire in a chasm of a pothole! It wasn’t me driving this time, luckily. The last time we all traveled together was New Zealand where I had two different windshields get cracked while I was behind the wheel! That trip to NZ is also where we got our race name, since every time we changed drivers while there we would remind the new driver about the whole other side of the road thing! Pretty much at every intersection we came to, someone would say “tight left, wide right!”

A quick exit and Steve and Ashish had the tire swapped for the spare while Josh had the rental car company on the phone. A bit of back tracking to the nearest open location and a new, and larger, car was in our hands. All told, we lost about 2 hrs of time. Back on the road, we made good progress towards Oak Hill WV. We had missed the date to get lodging on site which was fine since we were coming so late. We got checked in, bags packed, clothes laid out, and finally asleep by like 12:30 am.

Saturday: We needed to be at the race start by 6:30 am for check in, to which Ashish was like why, the race doesn’t start until 8! Maps were handed out at 7, so a quick breakfast at the Tudor Biscuit World and we were on our way! The check in was smooth, and we chatted while eagerly waiting for maps. 3,2,1 and go time! The map was a single paper which I’ve grown to really appreciate after map wrangling at other races! The CP’s were pre-plotted so route planning was key. Each CP was worth the tens number in points, for example CP 29 = 2 pts, CP 81 = 8 pts. Teams who were not looking to clear the course could route plan to pick up as many points as possible. Other teams, like us, just chose a route and didn’t care about the point values. My take on this race was it was a chance for me to practice my nav skills. Josh and Ashish were both newer to map games but offered several good suggestions. We made a very optimistic route, choosing to make one big loop after starting with an “easy” CP close to the start. Dear reader, this was sooooo not the case…

We spent one hour and 15 minutes searching for CP 43. The route gadget trace is humorous in the amount of zig zags we made. All I can say is that we just got ahead of ourselves and tried to go faster than we could navigate. We for sure fell victim to the man-made structures vs the actual topography. Had we paid attention to that, we would have made our correction sooner. The saving grace was when we finally saw the small creek coming into the larger one and then paced roughly off of that. UGH!
After that horrible start, we had clear sailing for the next 4 CP’s. Part of that was slowing our pace and paying a lot more attention to the landscape. We had another bobble looking for CP 42, but only lost about 25 mins (and some leg strength) before moving on. From 42 to 30, we decided to cross-country up the creek and over the small cliff line to the top, rather than stay on the road. I don’t think this cost us much in the long run. At the top, the wind really whipped up and the temps dropped a bit. The weather was never that warm but luckily it also wasn’t raining. After CP 30, it was a wet trail on the ridge over to 70. We aimed off a bit too far on 70 and had to scout around. Luckily Josh spotted it on the next ridge over and we snagged it on our way out. Back at the top, we had a lunch break to celebrate and so Josh could add some bandaids to his feet. All told, this CP and break took about 1 hr. During our lunch break, Steve found us and we were able to give him some intel on 70 after he had looked for it several times. Bolstered by this, we packed up our lunch and confidently strode off in entirely the WRONG direction! Fifty minutes and 1 1/2 miles later we arrived right back at the lunch spot! All I can say is…yeah, I got nothing! We now felt extremely invested in getting CP 90, the one that we screwed up the direction on. It was our white whale, the one that we seemed destined to lose. Would it have been smarter to pick up other closer points that added up to MORE than 9 points? Absolutely! Did we do that? No, no we did not. We did stop and pick up CP 40 on the way out to 90. This at least was a confidence booster. From CP 40 to when we actually found 90, it was a solid hour of us moving and searching. CP 90 was supposedly right off the trail on a boulder but we actually found it over a rather large cliff. Heading back from 90, we were eight hours into our ten hour race. This meant we had to make some major changes to our route. We decided to just head back on the quickest way possible. We pretty much had to hit the water station area since it was the middle of our loop. We rolled in there at about the 9 hr mark and hooked up with another team who was also heading back to the start. They definitely provided us with the push we needed to keep moving and make the cut off!

All in all, I really enjoyed the format of the race! I’m trying to embrace that while I’m not very good at navigation, I do find it extremely fun! Team Tight Left, Wide Right made some bad decisions but had a great attitude the whole time!

Notes:

I tried my best to carry less this time and I think overall I was successful! I only had my 2L bladder and didn’t stop to fill it at all. I was completely out of water with about 30 mins of racing to go but since we were headed back in it was fine. I also didn’t sweat too much so that helped with the water usage. For food, I didn’t eat much. The PB&J was gold as usual! The chix nuggets sort of meh. I had a goo and some gel blocks but overall never felt too hungry. For clothes I layered the smartwool long sleeve with the merinotech tee, then my poly quarterzip on top. The long underwear and tech pants, with the tall Randy Suns kept my legs and feet comfy. I did add a thin wool sock as underlayer to the Randy Sun waterproof socks. I carried (and eventually wore) my red puffy coat, along with puffy gloves!