Training Log Archive: glewis

Event: USARA Nationals
 

USARA Nationals with Kevin and Becca. Wasn't sure what to expect as it was our first time. Would be happy with top 15, figured that if everything went perfectly and we got some luck, we could finish 10th in coed.

I rode up with Mark and Becca; Kevin met us right before dinner with the entire GOALS crew - it took a table of 10 to feed us! The pre-race meeting was rather unformative, but we did confirm that we'd be paddling first and biking second. Also confirmed that there would be no food/gear drop of any kind outside of what was on the bikes. Would have been nice to have some of this information beforehand, as I would have packed extra food and a bladder for the paddle bag. Oh well. Checked into our room after the meeting, and went to bed around 10. Wasn't a great night of sleep, but I probably got 3ish hours.

Arrived at map distribution right around 5, only to realize that breakfast was not included in our hotel stay (I ended up spending almost $20 on two breakfast sandwiches and two apples). Had I known, I would have brought a cheaper and more plentiful breakfast. Oh well.

We got our packet and settled in to plotting; we had about 40 utms to navigate. We checked with the two other GOALS teams for accuracy; there were two mistakes, but mostly due to a confusing set of lines that looked a lot like UTMs...We were ready on the busses for a 7:45 take off. Arrived at the canoes for a mass boat start after a bit of tinkering time, right around 9. On the bus ride, we discussed how the race would really be decided on the foot sections at the end of the race. They were big, and we knew that the terrain for the o-section was technical. Our plan was to race our own race on the paddle and bike, and hope to make up ground on foot. With the specific composition of our team, foot is always our best portion.

The plan for the paddle was to stay relatively close together as a group of 3 teams, and split up into groups on the embedded o-section at the east end of the paddle. We nailed the first few CPs of the paddle and made our way towards a turn-off with around mid-pack of the boats. Most chose to continue to CP 8, but we stuck with the plan and arrived at the boat drop before CP3, about the 6th boat there. We figure that 15ish boats went straight to CP8.. I took Eric, Kevin, Val and Diana on a westerly loop, while Bruce, Bruce, Mark and Becca took the easterly route. We arrived back the boats at the same time (to the second, it was impressive). We decided on a boat-whack to CP8, which got a little confusing as I was following a map without trails. I misinterpretted a trail for the road, which cost us about 10 minutes. We arrived at CP8 at the same time as a team who paddled around, so no loss or gain. It was worth a shot. We banged out the rest of the paddle as best we could, arriving 21 minutes behind the two Rootstock teams (we had passed the TA as they arrived). To me, that was an acceptable gap. It seemed that we were in about 20th place, which is similar to what we expected. We weren't really racing against anyone at that point, but it boosted our morale to know that a 4+ hour paddle only yiedled 20 minutes. We TA'd quickly to jog up the road to our bike, where we TA'd again to hit a long, long bike section.

Some quick road riding took us to the Lehigh River Gorge and the trail that runs along it. We motored up to CP 10 (really, we estimated that we were one of the quickest teams on the trail every time we hit it). Here we crossed the river with our bikes (about chest high at a few points, and very tough is traditional bike shoes) and made our way to Pocono Biking, where our King of the Mountain time began. We followed a line of about 5 teams up the narrow, busy streets to the start of the real climb, where we took off past them with a smooth cadence on the pedals. We were nearly at the top of the road (and the climb) when Kevin landed a flat. The tube change took less than 5 minutes, but 8 teams passed us in that span. Included in that was GOALS masters, who we met up with at the beautiful CP at 100 mile view. The ride along the ridge to the next two CPs was fine, but we adopted a new slogan on the downhill to 14: "We won't win the race on this trail, but we can certainly end it here." Kevin is pretty risky on the downhills, I take it easy, and Becca is not a fan of MTB, so we knew that we should just play to our strengths. Conservative downhill riding it was! We met up with GOALS masters again at CP15, and decided to ride the road into town and hike up to CP 16 from CP 17. Bruce Wong (!) liked my plan, so I was pretty proud. We ran into a slight bit of trouble locating CP 17, but found it, hid our bikes, and made the trek up and back smoothly. Here is where we ran into UNE masters for the second time. We would find ourselves with them for seemingly half of the 30 hour race.

The "bike" around to CP 18 and 19 involved very little riding and a whole lot of pushing. By the time we popped out of the woods at 19, it was close to 6PM, but we were only 90 minutes behind the lead teams. We found a spigot that we used to fill up (a highlight of the race for Kevin and I - it was nice to get full mouthfuls of water without using the hydration pack) and headed down and up busy rt 93 to a double track which led us to the end of the KOM stage; it probably took us about 4.5 - 5 hrs. We ran into Strong Machine here, and Becca and Cliff really hit it off as they talked about ice cream sandwiches and child birth. We ended up pulling away from them on the downhill to the gorge again, where we motored to an uphill hike-a-bike to CP24 at a cabin. We spent around 10 minutes looking for CP 23 at the bottom of the hill, and about the same looking for the cabin at the top. Frustratingly, we found it with UNE masters as three more teams arrived to borrow our nav. From here we commenced on an utterly useless bikewhack to avoid a hunting property. The user of the cabin had made it clear that the trails were perfectly usable on the property, but I think that Troy with USARA wanted something a bit more challenging. The push up a boulder field was memorable though, and we popped out on a trail sooner than expected.

This section on Bald Mountain was the worst nav-portion of the race for me; I struggled to stay found on the map, and my altimeter had lost 100 ft of accuracy in the previous 30 minutes. We ran into Strong Machine again who helped us stay found and trekked with us out to CP 26, where Cliff kept us motivated ("Great bearing Glen. Really, fantastic bearing!"). We made one final nav booboo on our way down to the manned CP before heading out to the gorge trail for one final time. At the end of this ride was another river crossing. Not as deep or long, but just as slippery. A bike push up another steep hill and we were soon riding trails towards the TA. We passed UntamedNE.com on foot, and remarked that the o-section must be huge for them to be out this far. We TA'd around 12:35, the 17th team in.

We elected to do the o-map first, in order to use the super-detail to keep us found in the nighttime. We set off at 1:02AM after eating the last two pieces of pizza at the TA. What followed was the greatest section of nav that I've ever completed. We hit nearly every CP dead on, even landing some super tough ones that had no backstop or attackpoint. We ran into UNE here, and kinda got frustrated at their 6-person caravan trekking through the woods. I was having fun nailing the nav, but they were in the same spot as us doing the same loop, and it was tough to not do everything with them. (The even more frustrating part came at race end, when the team who was borrowing Joe's nav beat us by one place. I wish they had beat us with their own work...). The only problem we had was a bad bushwhack out of CP 14, which was the only point that required a re-attack. Joe had shown up right as we were doing this, and led us exactly to where I had been two minutes prior. I must have just not seen the CP. We took it slow of the rest of our route and made it back to TA at 6:42, finishing the whole loop in 5:40. We probably lost 40 minutes with the bad bushwhack, and another 20 with sub-optimal route choice. Throw in that it was dark throughout, and we were very happy. As it turns out, were only the 5th team to clear the section. With high hopes for the final section, we set out with our sights on clearing the course.

It took a miracle for me to spot the first CP from 200 meters away through an open-forest. The next CP was in a turnpike drainage, and I had a good bearing but got thrown off when Mark Lattanzi's team came back from the loop (in the opposite direction) from a place I wasn't expecting. We got turned around for 40 minutes looking for the turnpike. Not my proudest moment. As we arrived at the turnpike, we found Rootstock 2 and NYARA masters looking utterly beat-up. They admitted that they had left points on the trek, which made us feel pretty good about our route-choice on this section, which maximized early CPs. It had become apparent that we would also be leaving CPs on the course. The lower loop at Hawk Falls took longer than expected (about 80 minutes), and was aided by the friendly Cherubini brothers who pointed out CP 38 (This apparantly took some teams 2+ hours to find, or even give up on. Maybe I had a misplot, but I felt that it was going to be exaclty where they told us it was.). They also told us about the difficulty of a few other points, so we made our way out the section having decided which points to drop. As we exited this section, AMK and NYARA came down the hill just getting started. We were shocked that AMK was still out there, although I do recall seeing that their o-section had taken close to 8 hours to complete. We finished up with one more CP before crossing underneath the turnpike and grabbing the last 3. Becca and Kevin did their best to get me worried about finishing on time, even though I knew that we were in great shape. Because of this, we passed on a team picture coming into TA (i was convinced that we didn't have 15 seconds to spare) and hurried out on the last bike ride. We had seen UntamedNE.com riding up the roads through the park, so we chose to do the same to exit the section. We arrived at the boulder field CP to a hoard of bikes (about 6 teams worth) and received the shocking news from Brent that Abby, Jim and Brian had won! We grabbed the last three CPs in shock (really, we were so excited for them!) and road down the final hill into the finish just past 29 hours.

We would have loved some finish line food or drink, but had to settle for a beer from Bruce Kuo and some expensive pizza and ice cream at the waterpark. In the end, we finished 8th in coed and 10th overall; an incredible result considering that we had no idea what to expect going in. We had a feeling that we had managed top 10, considering how many strong teams we heard had been dropping points. Still, seeing the results posted was an unmatched excitement. I'm feeling a whole new level of confidence going into this winter. Can't wait to build on this next year!

To top it off, we ended the season ranked 4th! A great year of racing ended about as perfectly as we could have hoped.