Training Log Archive: abiperk

We got into Freemont around 3am and made it through the first few obstacles easily. It was actually more tedious than anything else, with water levels low and no choice but to scoot over rock fields. Then things began to get more interesting. The water was bigger, the shoots more technical, and the portages weren't as straightforward as they seemed. I never felt in danger, but I also wasn't entirely comfortable doing it in the dark. I ended up swimming twice (thank goodness for the Mysterioso gear that Mark recommended we order right before the race!), and somehow managed to save the boat, the packs, and my paddle when we flipped.

Finally, we exited the canyon and began the 12km trek to the Alcova Reservoir put-in. I walked ahead of the guys then, hauling the filled center beam from our boat, in part to warm up and in part to collect myself. It was my lowest point of the race, but relative to other expedition race low's, it really wasn't so bad, and I knew it even in the moment. I walked and cried and let the emotional release happen, and within 10-15 minutes, I had moved on. As we exited the canyon, a race medic drove up and offered us hot water to drink, which definitely helped, too. Later, I saw some footage of the section during the day, and it actually looked like a lot of fun. Wouldn't mind going back at some point and trying it in daylight!

We shuffled our way along the road to Alcova, the end of the race in sight. NV Journey rolled in as we were inflating, and we got on the water about 10 minutes ahead of them. We paddled across the reservoir, portaged over the dam, and then settled into the final stretch -- 20-ish miles down the North Platte, a relatively lazy moving river with few benchmarks along it to let us know where we were.

We all had moments of sleepiness on the water, and at one point we put down our paddles, laid back, and let the current carry us for half a mile or so. Otherwise, though, despite some failed sing-a-longs and stilted conversation, we were able to keep ourselves moving, and we whooped and hollered when we finally saw the bridge at the takeout.

We knew NV Journey probably wasn't too far behind us, and we made it our goal to get in and out of TA before they arrived. We frantically built our bikes and swapped mandatory gear from our paddle kit before taking off down the road for a 36-mile ride up and over Casper Mountain, our TA time just under 40 minutes. We never saw NV Journey come through. I wish they had splits of our TA times throughout the race -- we made a point to focus more on efficiency coming in and during our transitions (the moments we could control, during such a fast and furious race), and we all felt really good about how we moved through.

Brent and I were both pretty sleepy at the start of the ride, but once the big climb started -- 3000+ feet over ~15 kiometers -- we woke right up. We rode with 361 Adventures and Good 'Nuff, and it was really nice to chat with folks we hadn't seen yet on the course and hear about their adventures.

It began to drizzle as we neared the top of the climb, and then a steady rain started to fall just as we got to the paved road. We knew we'd gotten lucky with the weather -- we'd heard stories about teams getting stuck in cement-like mud on that road during a storm the night before.

Brent navigated us right to the CP on the mountain (which was actually a couple kilometers below the summit and had us fearing that we'd passed it and would have to climb back up), and then we coasted down the other side, flew through town to the final CP underneath a railroad bridge (talk about confident, precision nav from Brent!), and hit the finish line at 6:45pm, meeting our goal to be in Casper by dinner time... and good for 22nd place.

Overall, I'm so happy with this race -- we had a great team experience, we successfully raced a course (rather than focusing on other teams' performances) that offered a fantastic journey with stretches of far more interesting and complicated nav than we expected, and I felt stronger than I ever have before, expedition race or otherwise. It was the culmination of eight months of hard work and training, and it felt so so good to have it all come together.

Four days later, I'm nursing a few blisters and some tendonitis in my left ankle and right knee, but generally feeling good physically and mentally, and excited for the next challenge.

C • write-up 7

Around 1am, we were moving roughly 6km per hour, in complete darkness and into a stiff headwind. We'd ridden 120 kilometers, and still had 140 to go. We were all exhausted, unfocused, and irritable. We'd tried a brief puppy-pile on the side of the road, but the ten-minute catnap did little to boost our energy, and it was too cold to stop for much longer. We passed a sign -- 2.5 miles to a cattle farm -- and we hoped that there would be something there.

When we first pulled up, we saw rusted-out vehicles and a dilapidated old barn, filled with dead buzzards in the stalls and hundreds of bottles of animal antibiotics. "We can make this work," we tried to convince ourselves.

And then Brent called out from a few meters away. He'd found a modernized covered wagon, and it was unlocked. It was only a couple meters long, a meter wide, but inside was a bunkbed, mattresses, and a sleeping bag. It was absolutely perfect. Brent, Andy, and I snuggled up on the bunk, and Mark made himself a nest out of foam pads on the floor. We set the watch for two hours... and then another hour... and then one more. We learned later that AMK had caught a couple hours there the night before.

It was the best sleep I've ever gotten during a race, and when we woke up, just before sunrise, we had a new lease on life. We picked up our bikes, tripled our pace, and got back on course. The rest of the ride wasn't particularly fun -- more washboards (oh, those washboards -- at one point, I told Brent that I thought I'd broken my uterus and that even if we wanted to have another kid, we were probably out of luck), more sagebrush, a bunch of flats in Mark's skinny tires (the rest of us were, thankfully, riding tubeless - so glad I converted!) -- but it passed quickly enough.

We paused at the next two CPs for race-provided water, then again at the hottest point of the day, on the side of the trail next to a giant chemical plant, with plenty of warnings of toxic gasses in the air. "Well, the wind is blowing," we reasoned. "We can probably stay for a few minutes without getting too sick."

At the final point, in the abandoned town of Ferris, Randy Ericksen provided us each with a can of Pepsi, and from there the ride turned into a fun, twisty, sandy spin through canyons and up and over ridgelines. We rode for a few minutes with NV Journey out of the last CP, and on the final ascent East Wind sprinted by us, offering high-fives as they passed.

We rolled into TA just as a big storm was forming above us. We packed up our bikes, grabbed our packraft gear, and transitioned quickly to the last big section of the course -- roughly 45 miles of trekking and rafting across reservoirs, through whitewater canyons, and down swift rivers. We'd heard that the section was taking top teams substantially longer than predicted, so we prepared ourselves for a long night as we walked out of TA...

...for about 500 meters, until the storm broke over us and we pulled out our rafts, burrowed under them, and waited out the thunder and lightning, thankful that we hadn't yet made it onto the water.

Twenty minutes later, we were back on our feet, moving toward the CP on the banks of the Pathfinder Reservoir. Dart and Quest were just in front of us, and we all converged along the water, where we thought the point should be. And we looked... and looked... and looked -- wasting four hours of daylight, and trying to get into the mind of the RD to see if we were misunderstanding the purpose of the checkpoint (which, we thought, was really just to get people down to the water!!).

Finally, at 10:00pm, after hours of wandering and retracing our steps, we walked onto it, and fifteen minutes later we were inflating our rafts and setting off. Frankly, I still have no idea what happened. Something about discrepancies in the water levels? NV Journey ended up following us to the point and getting on the reservoir with us. Dart and Quest found it not long after we did. A maddening moment, but luckily not a race-altering one.

We paddled smoothly across Pathfinder, Brent's nav sharp as he traced the various coves and shorelines in the dark. We pulled out at the dam above Freemont Canyon, and paused to consider our options. Olof met us there and warned us that the whitewater was trickier than it seemed, and that Team Canada had ripped open both of their boats. Dart told us they were planning to sleep until first light and then run it. I was tired and cold at that point, and a little bit wary of heading into the canyon at night, but ultimately I acquiesced with assurances that we could portage around all of the obstacles.

By this point we were well into night three without any solid sleep, so we were hoping that the TA would offer some quality shelter. And we were in luck! Across the driveway from the jail was an old barn, where several other teams were passed out. We had our sleeping bags in this TA bin so we pulled them out, curled up in a stall, and got three glorious hours.

When we awoke, the barn was packed with racers, a mix of full-course teams coming in off the trek and short-course teams who'd skipped the last foot section and instead biked around to the TA. Adventure Enablers adopted a policy that we first saw at Itera in the UK, whereby once a team short-courses, they swap out race bibs as a visual indicator of who's doing what. We chatted with a few different groups as we readied our gear and bikes; it was clear that folks were finding the course less straight-forwarded than it seemed when we first looked at the maps.

The next section was a 36-mile ride with over 6,000 feet of elevation, which would take us to Sinks Canyon and the site of the rappel and caving sections. This ride was just fantastic -- long, steep climbs followed by blistering descents, capped off by an awesome stretch of single track on the Brewer's Trail that led us down to the canyon. I felt SO strong here -- such a nice affirmation of all the training and preparation that went into this race. I also dealt with my rear thru-axel loosening up a few times over the course of the ride. Couldn't figure out why -- Mark and Andy tightened it up, too, but it kept happening. Definitely need to get that looked at.

We passed Dart and Peak Life early in the ride and got into the canyon all alone. We transitioned quickly to take advantage of the empty rope lines, made quick work of the rappel, and then trekked up to the cave with media folks Brian Leitten and Genevieve Morton, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who was branching out into adventure sports. They provided a nice distraction, and the cave was a lot of fun.

As we returned to our bikes, we made the decision to go a couple kilometers out of our way for a pizza stop in Lander. We knew it was unnecessary and had the potential to take us out of race mode, but it was our only chance for real food for the rest of the race. I was also feeling tired by this point, a combo of general race fatigue and, I think, overheating -- I thought I'd forgotten my short-sleeve shirt in the previous TA and had been climbing mountains in a smartwool into the heat of the day. By the time we got to Lander 20 minutes later, I was pretty out of it. The guys took care of filling water and ordering food; I lay down on the grass for a few minutes and then walked across the street to a bike shop to see if I could buy something cooler to wear. $50 later, I walked out with a Lupine tech t (and of course, five hours after that, I found my own jersey wrapped up in my puffy jacket in my dry bag).

The pizza was only fair, but the stop was welcome, and when we got back on our bikes around 4pm, we found a steady pace and settled in for 160 miles of washboard dirt roads. It was a LONG ride, punctuated by bouts of sleepiness, extreme temperature swings, muddy quicksand, and so.much.sage brush. But it was also a section of beautiful landscape, incredible sunrises and sunsets, great stories, lively singalongs, and sleep-deprived political philosophizing.

We rode steadily through the first several hours, crossing paths with Sneaky Weasel Gang, who'd struggled on the second big trek, and Dart, who we left sleeping in a roadside rest stop bathroom... and wishing, for awhile, that we'd done the same.

We got into transition around 1am and found Denise and Ann Marie from NYARA, who were offering cans of coke and cold cheeseburgers (which were absolutely delicious). We made quick work of the burgers, said hello to our pup, who was sleeping in Denise's car, and then pulled out our space blankets and snuggled into one of the Adventure Enablers-provided tents for our first real sleep of the race.

We set the clock for two hours, getting us up in time to start the next big trek near sunrise, but unfortunately none of us really slept. It was an active TA, so it was loud and well-lit, and we just couldn't get comfortable. We got up with the alarm, transitioned quickly, and headed out for the second big trek -- 40 miles along the Continental Divide Trail... sort of...

The maps were marked with an orange-dotted trail meant to approximate the course of the CDT. And for the first while, it corresponded to orange blazes in the woods. We made our way through the first several miles of this section cleanly, following the orange dots and trading places with Dart, Peak Life, and Italy.

Then we got to an outhouse and a lake. The mapped route seemed to turn there, but the blazes continued along the dirt road. Peak Life left the trail at that point. We continued on for awhile longer, eventually losing Dart and Italy as well. Then we hit private property signs, covering the land between us and CP9, and we realized we had to make a decision. We could either try to snake around the private property, continue on the road and wrap around south to the point -- adding substantial distance -- or double back to the lake and cross there. After several minutes of back-and-forth, we ultimately decided to return to the lake, about 2k behind us, and look for the trail there. We picked our way through the woods slowly, traversing what seemed like kilometers of deadfall (victims of pine beetles), following property boundaries, searching for orange blazes. The area was full of decay but utterly beautiful, and I paused several times to take it in. It was one of my favorite stretches of the treks.

Finally, we found our way across and hit the CDT sign where the CP was hung. There, we ran into two thru-hikers who told us that they'd seen the Japanese team only four hours earlier. Knowing that the legends of East Wind were within striking distance was definitely an energy boost. We paused briefly in a campground to eat the two mountain house meals that we'd brought with us on the trek, and pondered where other teams might be. We'd been traveling on-and-off with Dart and Italy through the section, and we suspected the checkpoint would give other teams trouble. We just didn't know how much.

The rest of this leg was quite straight-forward -- just a LONG walk along the (actual) CDT. We ended up trekking for awhile with two other thru-hikers, a couple who had been hiking long trails together for the past three years. They told us that they'd been warned about the orange dots, that they mark a snowmobile route that's impossible to follow outside of winter. Good to know...

We parted ways with them just before dusk and then caught them again as they were setting up camp for the night. We warned them that they may be disturbed by teams passing through overnight, but they seemed unfazed by it -- I think they enjoyed the novelty of so much activity on the relatively desolate trail.

We kept pushing through the last couple CPs down to the road. Brent, who'd been struggling a bit in the heat, came alive again once the sun set, and as he, Mark, and Andy focused in on the nav to get us through a mess of trails that didn't line up with the maps, my energy began to flag. It was a familiar feeling for me -- I've done several expedition races with three navigators on our teams, as much as I love the confidence that brings, occasionally I end up feeling like the odd man out. Not a bad problem to have, and luckily I was able to keep myself from going too far inside my head at that point.

When we finally made it down to the road in the early morning hours, we were treated to the company of Ali, who took pictures and asked questions as we walked to final few kilometers to the transition, at a jail in an old ghost town.

Earlier thoughts of sea level aside, Brent and I benefitted considerably from having spent nearly two weeks in Wyoming ahead of the race, and we weren't bothered by the quick ascent. Mark and Andy, however, had arrived only days before the start, and they both struggled at the sustained altitude. We slowed our pace a bit and shifted weight around to manage their nausea and labored breathing, and after a handful of hours, their lungs started to respond and they were able to take in some calories. It was a preview of what the rest of our race would be -- there were very few moments when all four of us were feeling good at the same time, but we worked together really well to support those who needed it and manage issues as they arose. It made for one of the best expedition racing experiences I've ever had.

In the early morning hours, we found ourselves trekking with several other teams around Pickle Pass, the start of the final stretch of the leg. Once we traversed it, we had a decision to make. We could either ascend further up the next ridge before dropping down toward the TA, or we could drop to a valley and travel along it for awhile before going up and over another saddle toward the transition. All of the teams we were with chose the former, but we had all been out of water for several hours by that point and knew that it would likely be a few more before we'd find any, if we continued up.

So, we took the safe route, turned off, and dropped several hundred feet along a creek. We enjoyed the sunrise on our second day of racing and then Mark, Andy, and I realized that the caffeine we'd just taken wasn't having its intended effect. Instead of slogging through the rest of the leg, we called for a quick catnap. Brent rallied us when the alarm went off and we continued on, surprisingly refreshed from our 11-minute reprieve.

The rest of the leg felt like a bit of a slog as we went through a pass and then descended along a creek... and along it... and along it... With the 1:50k maps, it was hard to get a complete picture of what the trails did, and all the twisting and turning and criss-crossing meant that what we thought was 5k-ish to the TA was probably closer to 10k.

Finally, just as we started second-guessing ourselves and wondering if we'd made a wrong turn, we started seeing race photographers, and 15-20 minutes later we finally hit the transition and our bikes. All of the teams we'd been traveling with were coming in around the same time, so it turned out that the route decision was of little consequence, other than getting us water a bit more quickly.

We thought about whether we should sleep there in TA, but no one was particularly tired in the moment and we wanted to take advantage of daylight, so we built our bikes quickly, got some medical care on our feet, tried to down some food (which left me feeling a little bit nauseous, but luckily it passed quickly) and set off on an 83-mile ride that was largely on flat roads.

The Danes flew by us at the start of the section and then we were all alone. The first 100k passed super quickly as we took turns pulling and enjoyed a steady tailwind. We paused briefly at a gas station (in Daniel, maybe?) for sandwiches and another 10-minute catnap, and then enjoyed the company of a solo rider who was training for Ride the Divide 2018. The guy was super strong -- on a loaded-down mountain bike, carrying a quart of yogurt in one hand, and averaging 42kph. We chatted with him for several kilometers, as he took great care not to help paceline, and when he turned off our energy flagged just a bit. We took another quick breather at around the 100k mark and as we were getting ready to start up again, WEDALI was rolling through.

We rode with them through the rest of the road section and into the sandy canyon that would eventually take us to the next TA. Super fun to chat with them, swapping race stories -- and gummy candy! -- and watching the first storm clouds of the race roll through. We passed the Danes again -- who'd ridden by CP5 -- and then when the lightning got close enough, we all parted ways, stashed our bikes, and hunkered down while the worst of it passed.

It was dark when we returned to the trail, and somehow we got away from WEDALI without my realizing it -- not totally sure when or how. The final stretch of the ride had some surprisingly complicated navigation. I wasn't paying close enough attention to the maps at that point to know what made it so tough -- just enjoying the rolling dirt paths and fun stretches of single-track. Brent and Andy were on the maps and had everything really dialed in. We picked our way through the network of trails, passing several teams on our way to CP 6. We hit it relatively cleanly, then forded a river to the dirt road that would lead us to the next TA, rolling in at the same time as Dart. It turned out that several teams struggled quite a bit in there; as always, I was grateful to be racing with such sharp and confident navigators.

Event: ARWC2017/Cameco Cowboy Tough
 

ARWC gpx file, time negated so as not to double-up.

ARWC with Brent, Mark Lattanzi, and Andy Bacon. The race took us from Jackson Hole to Casper, a point-to-point journey of nearly 500 miles.

After several days of counting calories, sorting and weighing gear, and pre-race hoopla, we boarded buses on Thursday at 5:30am to make the six-hour trip to Jackson. Brent and I had a rough night's sleep the night before, as our pup - who spent race week with Denise Mast from NYARA - got sick all over our room (we think he found some gels at the afternoon briefing). We did our best to put it behind us and focus instead on the maps, which we received that morning, but not the ideal way to begin a six-day race.

The maps revealed a relatively predictable course, given the schematic Adventure Enablers had sent out a couple weeks earlier, but we've learned in past expeditions that predictable doesn't necessarily mean straightforward, and we hoped that there may be more nav and route choice than it seemed at first glance.

We pulled into the Jackson Hole Mtn Resort, which we'd visited the week before with my family, sorted our trackers and e-punches, met up with Ali Bronsdon, who would be doing Rootstock team media for the week, and listened as Untamed's Jesse Tubb trumpeted the National Anthem before the gun went off promptly at 1:00pm (or, rather 1:01pm, but given the delays over the course of the morning, it was impressively punctual!).

The prologue consisted of a short trail run around the ski resort, a few miles and 1000 feet of elevation. With no packs and everyone itching to move, it was fast and furious and particularly painful for those of us whose lungs tend to reside at sea level.

Since it was the world champs - and since we knew it would be a relative horse-race, compared to some other expedition races we've competed in - we set goals based on the course rather than the teams around us, and we made time projections on each leg accordingly. So we were happy to find ourselves back at the start to pick up our gear at 1:45pm, right at the fast estimate for the course.

We transitioned quickly to a seven-mile run along a flat rail trail to the packraft put-in. While I was hurting during the prologue, I was able to settle into a relatively comfortable pace for this second leg and enjoyed chatting with the other teams around us and talking about the course. We hung out with WEDALI for the first few miles, and then they started to pull away as Brent moderated the pace a bit to prevent heat issues from taking hold.

The run was an expected slog, but it was over soon enough, and we made quick work of inflating our packrafts and stowing our gear in the beam before setting off on a 19-mile paddle down the swift, braided Snake River. Brent and I stuck together in our boat, with Mark and Andy in the other. We were all in Alpacka Gnu's. This worked out well in terms of weight distribution, and we had a ton of fun navigating the various channels and confluences and rapids. Brent and I have packrafted together a lot and have found a pretty good rhythm, particularly in more challenging water. There are few people I trust more than him in terms of boat handling, which makes it really easy to have confidence that we'll get to where we need to be.

The paddle passed quickly as we chased the teams ahead of us and traded places with WEDALI, Silent Chasers, Storm, and Dart. We pulled out around 6pm, a couple hours earlier than we'd anticipated, and once again focused our energy on a quick and efficient TA to the first big section of the race -- a 38-mile trek and 10,000 feet of elevation, with zero checkpoints along it.

We headed out on foot with Main Nerve and trekked together for the first couple hours. The rules stated that you had to leave TA via the Palmer Creek Trail, but they were pretty ambiguous from there. We thought seriously about traveling a couple hundred meters up the trail before bushwhacking SW to a road and avoiding much of the ridgeline altogether. But enough people had the same idea and tried to ask questions about (or around) it at the pre-race briefing that RD Mark Harris mandated that everyone stay on the trail for at least a kilometer (and several hundred feet of elevation), at which point it wasn't worth doubling back.

Instead, we hiked up, up, up, pausing to fill our bladders since we knew water would be scarce along the ridgline. Main Nerve started to pull ahead after the water stop (they went on to have a spectacular race), and we spent the next several hours traveling and trading places with handful of teams: DART, Peak Life, Free Mind Italy, Storm, the Danes, maybe a couple others? We were treated to a glorious sunset along the ridgeline, and then we settled in at around 9,000-9,500 feet, where we'd spend much of the night. Surprisingly, for how tight the field was, we also found ourselves on our own a fair bit of the time, and we enjoyed the relative quiet of the first night of racing and the challenges of trying to follow the faint trail in the dark...