Training Log Archive: glewis

Event: Crooked Compass Adventure Trek
 

Crooked Compass with just Bruce after Kevin was unable to join. Long drive out to Chaneysville, PA; left the house at 3:30 - arrived before 7. Pretty chilly, but it didn't take long to get into the zone. Bruce had already arrived (slept in the car the night before?) and was perusing the maps. I joined him after I got all prepped for the race. Opted to start in the mandatory rain jacket to avoid carrying extra gear; would be easy to ditch when I warmed up. Course seemed simple on the maps, as there were just two of them. Set up in a large clockwise loop with 4 Mandatory Points (M1-M4) that had to be visited in order; the optionals could be done at any time but set themselves up into 2-3 little sections; after M1 and after M3. The interesting thing that we noticed was that the opening separator was a massive 2.5-3 km bushwhack up and over a large spur. We were confident that if we nailed this we would have enough time to clean up the rest; this was the longest individual section and the only part that offered much of a navigational challenge.

We started right at 8, following a large group down some sidehill into a reentrant. We got our first taste of the density of the brush here, as the rodo interspersed with the occasional thick thorn vine made us taking whatever game trails we could find. The work to M1 was easy enough, as we checked the supplemental trail map when necessary and kept ourselves found at all times. We stayed a bit south of other teams, trying to save some elevation where we could; the altimeter was extremely useful here, and would prove so throughout the rest of the race. We could actually see a few teams arriving at M1 as we approached from a distance, so I'm guessing that we were less than 10 minutes back at this point, about 1 hr into the race. We grabbed our passport from the volunteers and headed south to grab C, B, and A before heading north to E and D. It seemed like every other team chose to save elevation by getting E first before cycling back to C. It was tough to tell where we stood, as passed a few teams going in an opposite direction to us. In the end, I did like our choice, as we were able to nave smoothly and run on some trails. After F, there were a number of choices, and they all stunk. We had 800' to gain, and could choose between any number of huge uphill bushwhacks. We scoped out the terrain at F and chose to head magnetic north to a ridge trail, hoping that we could run around and gain back some time. We had not seen any lead teams since M1, so we had no clue how we were doing. The bushwhack was steep and think, and probably took up about 30 minutes. Despite the steep uphill, we found ourselves rather cold. I had to put gloves back on, and actually needed Bruce's help zipping the map case because my fingers wouldn't pinch correctly. The cold gave us some good motivation to start moving again. We had a pretty quick run around to M2, and finally saw some teams (albeit short-course) who were approaching M2 from the east. We descended quickly down into M3, running on the steep rocky downhill, under the impression that we had some work to do to get back some time.

We were greeted with some shock at M3 (about 3.5 hours in); we learned that we were only 15 minutes behind Untamed and were the 2nd full course team in; our route choices had really paid off. We stopped here for longer than expected as Bruce and I tried desperately to untie my frozen shoelaces so that I could get a rock out. No dice; I decided to wait until they got wet again. We chose to get G, H, J, K, then I. Looking at tracks, other teams did K before H, but I don't think that cost us any significant time. Our only hiccup came on I, as we were having a nice chat with someone who raced on an AR pro-circuit back in the 90s (Bruce called him AR-man) and took the wrong reentrant south. We caught it quick though and were back on the point within 5 minutes. We really did a great job supporting eachother with the compass and monitoring direction, and I think this CP highlights that best.

We headed out to the road and ran around to grab L, and then hit a snag trying to find the Wasson trail. Good work with the altimeter told us that we had clearly missed it, so we were able to just bushwhack across the ridge and down the reentrant into N. From there we shot a bearing over to M (Bruce was great with the bearings). It was thick, and I later heard that following the spur was much cleaner. After M we had a nasty downhill whack to a trail which we took over towards Q. Brent had warned pre-race that this was a rough section, and he was right on. Bruce's tracks show only 30 minutes out and back to Q, but it felt quite a bit longer. Regardless, we moved well, but were finally caught up to by Jeff, Joe and Diana here, but we managed to keep some good distance on the trail back to O. The area around O was covered in small reentrants, but we used a good bearing from the stream junction and hit it dead on. From there we took another huge uphill whack to a road. Our big mistake here was not grabbing M4 at this time - we were probably only 200 meters from it. We took the road and a trail up to P, and I found it a bit challenging. Writing this 5 days later, I only now put the supplemental and topo maps together in a way that revealed where the CP was. Fortunately, a gaggle of teams were converging and it wasn't too bad. Unfortunately, one of those teams was UNE masters. We punch quick and headed back to M4, hoping to have the legs to outrace them to the finish. It was all downhill from M4 (about 1.5 miles) and I tried to push as hard as I could, believing that we still had a chance at 2nd overall. Bruce's legs didn't like my pace, but we arrived at the finish to realize that it didn't matter. Joe had astutely grabbed M4 before P, and was able to take a much shorter trail back to the finish, to the tune of a 3 minute lead. We also got another surprise during awards, as we learned that another 2-man team that we hadn't seen all day beat us back by almost 45 minutes - word is they took some bizarre route involving P before M2...

We ended in 4th overall. Bruce's tracker showed 5,500' of elevation, which explains the pains in the calves and quads that does't normally come with an 8 hour race.

Not a bad start to the race year, as the nav was spot on. Had a great time with Bruce too; felt like we were finally able to co-nav well together in our first race as a pair in 18 months. Great little training day for UNE as well.

Lifting at PF; went light on just about everything with an eye towards being fresh for the Crooked Compass this weekend.

Light spin on the bike to keep legs loose.

Rain for today stopped so I ran at East Brandywine Trail after school. Ran from Skelp level to trestle bridge on the pavement and then took a series of alternates back to avoid much asphalt.