Training Log Archive: Bash

Time for intervals again - Bash & Crash 500s! Only 32 days until my first 50 km trail race and I haven't done any specific training for it. Why do I *always* do this? It was brought home to me when I saw Gazelle (Wayne Cassidy) last week, who is also preparing for the Toad, and he confessed that he hadn't finished his long run that day - he'd stopped after only 4 hrs 30 min. Uh oh. I would expect him to finish the Toad in around that time. Given the small amount of time remaining, I doubt my longest training run will exceed 3 hours and I'll be happy to break 6 hours in the race. This year, it's only about finishing.

Crash and I met in Palgrave West before it got too hot. We were both feeling weary from the weekend so we just did four 500 m trail intervals. Not my fastest ones ever but far from the slowest. Crash is amazing in so many ways and today she demonstrated that she can fly just like Superman - but her landings still need a little work.

2:08
2:08
2:05
2:07

'Bent and I took a canoe and paddled upriver from Joe Lake to explore both sections of Baby Joe Lake. The water was high so we did shorter portages than usual.

'Bent and I went to see the Medicine Tree - a huge white pine surrounded by stones marking the 4 compass directions and representing Earth, Water, Air and Fire. As a Tree Hugger, I just *had* to say hi.

After yesterday's misadventures, you get 3 guesses on how today started. While other guests at the lodge were playing tennis, sailing, sipping their second coffee or reading books on the dock, I was changing my bike tire for the first time in real life.



'Bent stood nearby helpfully timing me and trying hard to limit his advice to the avoidance of any truly catastrophic errors I was about to commit. Elapsed time: 19 minutes 4 seconds. Clearly, I need a team car to follow me and just hand me a new bike whenever something like this happens. With luck, it will be another 18 years before I flat while riding.

Foolishly, I also decided to add some air to my front tire and ended up snapping off the top of the valve. So I got to change *another* tire. This one took 8:40 so at least I'm moving in the right direction.

'Bent and I paddled kayaks on Joe, Little Joe and Tepee Lakes in Algonquin Park. I was using 'Bent's kayak that I'll be using for Logs Rocks & Steel. He had a plastic recreational kayak from the lodge. Not really a fair fight! He definitely got a higher intensity workout.





We paddled past the canoe campsite where we were married but - as usually happens - there were campers on it so we couldn't go ashore.

Kayak portage training for Logs Rocks & Steel along the Tepee Lake - Porter Creek portage trail.

It was an awesome plan in theory. 'Bent and I were heading to Algonquin Park for our annual sorta-close-to-our-anniversary weekend at Arowhon Pines, the lodge that acted as HQ for our wedding on a nearby canoe campsite.



'Bent has been feeling out of the AR loop due to his knee injury so he really liked my suggestion to ride the 50 km Logs Rocks & Steel bike course on our way up north.



Conveniently, Getawaystix marked the course two days ago so I tucked my map and compass deep in my pack and we set out. It's been a wet year but for the most part, the trails were in great shape. The LR&S course is terrific AR riding with a mix of different types of trails and roads and a few tough, technical hills.







There are some good-sized mud puddles but I've ridden race courses with a lot more and a lot bigger. The one nasty section comes up around the 20 km mark - over 2 kms of tall, overgrown brambles that catch on everything. I wore bike shorts and now my legs are so ugly that I wore pants in the lodge dining room all weekend to avoid ruining people's appetites. (I hope no one is eating while they read Attackpoint.)



In the race, I think I'll find a way to protect my shins/calves. If it's cool enough, I'll wear tights.

'Bent had a weird fall where he just tipped over sideways on his way up a steep hill. With the recumbent bike, his bike rarely hits the ground but he wasn't able to unclip in time and he didn't want to twist his leg and land with his bad knee in a funny position. Awhile later, he noticed a crack in the stem where his handlebars are attached. He rode carefully for a short time, then well into the brambles section, the stem snapped completely. (This photo was taken after he'd done some emergency work to hold things together.)





If your bike is going to snap in half when you're a long way from the nearest road, it's best if it doesn't break at the key point that allows the bike to be steered. That's where 'Bent's bike broke. :-( He couldn't even walk his bike, so at first he carried it and I walked. Suddenly, this was becoming a *very* long day.



In retrospect, we should have retraced our steps and headed directly to Hwy 35 but we didn't have many brambles left and I really didn't want to do that section in reverse. Psychologically, it's also easier to go forward, especially since we wanted to see the whole course. I could see a possible shortcut out to Pine Springs Road near Blueglass Lake, where the Wilderness Traverse paddle began. Given our slow pace, I didn't want to leave the marked trail unless I was sure about our alternate route but unfortunately, Getawaystix (whose map is annotated with many extra trails) didn't answer his phone.

We remembered that the trail got better up ahead, then when we hit the road, I could ride to get the van. After awhile, 'Bent strapped the bike together with some spare parts and figured out that it would roll relatively straight if he ran with it at 8-10 kph. I got back on my bike and rode very, very slowly.



When we reached Pine Springs Road at about 8 kms post-catastrophe, 'Bent hid his bike in the bushes and I left him walking while I rode to the van. I pushed hard on the rough, hilly road since I didn't like splitting up. Like good adventure racers - not to mention a husband and wife on their anniversary trip - we had expected to stay together. So we only had one set of "team mandatory gear" between us - cell phone, first aid supplies, etc.

About 45 minutes after I left 'Bent, I was reminded of one other thing I didn't have... I got my first mountain bike 18 years ago and have never had a flat tire while riding. So when the rear end of my bike started feeling spongy, my first thought was that the suspension must be out of whack. Then, with a sick feeling, I got off the bike and saw that my back tire was soft but not flat. I kept going another 1.5 kms until I reached Hwy 35, and then it flatted down to the rim. Naturally, the bike tools and pump were on 'Bent's bike.

I called 'Bent's cell from a pay phone on the corner - twice. The recorded message told me that the number was invalid. It wasn't. I ran up the shoulder of Hwy 35 with my bike until I found a safe place to hide it, then ran a few kms more in my bike shoes until I reached the van and my cell phone. Of all the things I'd started out with earlier in the day (2 bikes, spouse, etc.), I only had my Salomon pack left. I still wasn't able to reach 'Bent so I headed for Pine Springs Road, picking up my bike on the way. I found him close to Hwy 35. He'd gotten a ride partway from some nice guys who were heading to a hunting camp; they'd even given him refreshments to make his hike more pleasant.



We drove back to pick up his bike. This stretch of Pine Springs Road, which requires 4-wheel drive, was a white knuckle experience in early April when GStix and I were course testing Wilderness Traverse. Much better today although still entertaining.

We still had one more challenge for the day. One of the highlights of Arowhon Pines lodge is its excellent food. The dining room closes at 8 p.m. and there is nowhere else to eat for miles around. Some speed limits may have been exceeded as we drove to Algonquin Park! There is an 8 km gravel access road to the lodge and we realized that we wouldn't have time to shower before dinner, so we did a quick transition at a pull-off along the access road, putting on long-sleeved shirt and pants on top of our muddy bodies so we could sneak into the dining room looking almost normal. The Maitre d', who presided over our wedding dinner, greeted us as we raced in at 7:50 p.m. saying, "Oh *there* you are - we've been talking about you." They were probably saying, "Bash and 'Bent would *never* miss a pre-paid meal - he's Jewish and she's Scottish." ;-)

It took awhile - and a big glass of wine - before the adrenaline stopped pumping like crazy.

Happy Ending: our story made the rounds of the staff, and the hotel manager came to our table with keys for the wonderful private cabin we'd stayed in for our wedding and haven't been able to afford since then - a fantastic upgrade. Very nice of them!

Rode from home to Albion Hills, then joined Harps, Goose and 'Bent for a ride around the Hot August Nights race course on a beautiful, cool evening. Crash rode with us for the first few kms until we finally found poor Phatty (who was supposed to meet us earlier) in the throes of a frustrating bike mechanical. The boys got lots of exercise taking turns pumping up Phatty's tire with a tiny little pump - again and again and again. In the end, he didn't get to do any riding at Albion tonight but maybe he can log some of the high intensity pumping.

Off to ride the Logs Rocks & Steel MTB course tomorrow!

NEW*** Untamed New England Day 4 report is now up.
Untamed New England Day 3 report is now up.
Untamed New England Day 2 report is now up.
Untamed New England Day 1 report is now up.
Untamed New England Pre-race day report is now up.

Only 10 days till Logs Rocks & Steel - yikes! Is there time to train before I taper? My run today was the same length as the LR&S trail run. I went from our place along the Bruce Trail Side Trail to the Glen Haffy stile and back. I felt heavy and slow, and the humidity made it hard to breathe.

The breathing part was real but the rest turned out to be my imagination:

1) Not heavy - I'm 19 lb under my Jan. 1 weight - a record. (Thank you, Untamed. Although this is a mystery since I've done nothing but eat since we stopped racing.)

2) Not slow - looks like this was my PB for this route.

But I still felt like crap. Hope there'll be some zip in the legs by next Saturday!

Oh, and twice I re-twisted my ankle that I twisted badly in Sunday's orienteering race. Time to see Dr. Leanimal.

The Tree Huggers have a post-race tradition known as the Ritual Exchange of the Sock. This is where you and your teammates return each other's soggy, rancid gear that you've found at your place after the race, and (usually) take the opportunity for a little post-race analysis.

In the spirit of this tradition, Harps and I met for a run at the north end of Hilton Falls so I could pass back a stack of gear belonging to him and Kirikou. (I also returned a huge drybag of gear to Relentless in Ottawa on the weekend!) BulletDog, Kona and Trek joined us for the run and had a fantastic time with all the forest smells and water features. BulletDog is sometimes nervous to make new friends but she liked K&T. Trek was very brave on his longest run ever and dared to wade a short distance into a few of the ponds. Kona and BulletDog swam happily and probably ran twice the distance we did. BulletDog spent much of the evening stretched out on the couch with her head carefully placed on a pillow, so she obviously appreciated the pooch party.

Parker, Pinot and - yes - even Kirikou were missed when work got in the way of their attendance.

Canadian Orienteering Champs Long
Carp Eco-Wellness Centre

Very similar performance to Friday's Middle distance. Both maps were very technical - lots of intricate detail in relatively flat terrain. Worthy of a Canadian Championship. Hard to relocate if you mess up even a little. Not the sort of race course you can just sail in and ace without doing a lot more orienteering than I've done in 2010.

I blew 2 controls out of 15 and the rest went fine. One of the problematic controls remains a mystery since I've heard of several good orienteers who had issues with it. Given that it was only 80 m from a trail bend attackpoint and several of us finally got it by coming in from another attackpoint in a different direction, I wonder if there was something confusing about the map in that area. Anyway, it's no excuse since I should have tried an alternate attackpoint much sooner.

Compared to the racer who finished closest to me (Cathy Hayhow - both of us were midpack just a couple of minutes apart), I made an incredible 28 minutes of errors on those two controls combined. Without those errors, I would finish 2nd by a minute, well ahead of 3rd. So on one hand, I stunk out there today. On the other hand, if this were a training session instead of the Canadian Champs, I'd be thinking that for the most part, I did pretty well on a tough course with much better speed than usual. Gotta do something about those humongous errors though!

Bottom line - if I don't make time to do serious O events more often, this is the kind of result I can expect in a championship level race. And that's how it should be - competitive orienteering *should* be difficult. To be honest, I don't see myself finding that time in the near future. For now, I'm still keeping my focus on adventure racing and (soon) ultrarunning.

Warm-up with T. Rex before COC Long race.

Long Course 6 - Splits

Canadian Orienteering Champs - Sprint
National Research Council campus, Ottawa

Phew, much improved from yesterday. In fact, this may have been the best sprint O race I've ever run in spite of a 1-minute error (according to the splits) when I ran past #6 to the wrong building entrance. The other 14 controls were tucked exactly where I expected them to be, I often read ahead to the next control as I ran, I was concentrating well, and I felt like I was running fast, which is an all-too-rare sensation! I won 3 splits, which almost never happens, but AdventureGirl! crushed me by 2 seconds in the finish chute, which is par for the course. She also got Igor (elite male silver medalist) by a second. :-)

The error was big enough by sprint standards to knock me down to the bronze medal, 6 seconds behind 2nd and 80 seconds ahead of 4th. Very happy with that. Also very happy that I felt totally knackered for the rest of the day. It's rare that I leave it all out on the race course.

Confession: I came to the COCs kinda hoping to medal in the Sprint because I thought it would be deliciously ironic to have tapered for a 15-minute sprint by doing a 3-day adventure race. Apparently, that's the secret! As Hammer says, I need to focus on races that are less than 18 minutes or more than 18 hours long. It's only the races in between that I have trouble with. ;-)



Note that AdventureGirl!'s medal is gold.

Enjoyed the COC Banquet and came home with a hot pink iPod shuffle from the silent auction! Tunes played on a pink Shuffle will definitely inspire me to run faster than tunes from my plain old silver Shuffle.

Sprint Course 3. - Splits

Headed out on the Kanata Beaverponds model map to remind myself how to orienteer after a few months off. Nothing like "just in time" training!

Canadian Orienteering Champs Middle Distance

Not good! I'd like to use Untamed as an excuse but I felt great physically so that wasn't it. I got thrown off at the start and allowed myself to get flustered. In championship orienteering meets, you get called up to different lines at 3 minutes before your start time, 2 minutes before, etc. At the final line, our start group was supposed to have a minute to be handed our map upside down, get the course number checked by a volunteer to see that it was correct, then write our names on the back of our maps with a marker. Instead, as we walked up to that line, the starter said urgently, "You're supposed to have started already!"

There was a big digital clock and the seconds were ticking away past our start time. We had done exactly what we were told to do by other volunteers, so I tried to convince her to hold us until the next full minute, then she could tell the officials to fix our times later on. But she just said, "Go, go!" The clock was already at 30 seconds past our start time and I totally lost focus - completely screwed up the first couple of controls. Then I settled in and probably had a decent race after that. Running felt good so at least I'm recovering well even though I can't orienteer!

Middle W45-54 - Splits

I can't believe I'm in the middle of a 6-hr drive to the Canadian Orienteering Champs, preparing to race again just 5 days after finishing Untamed NE. This has to go down as one of my sillier ideas. Meanwhile, my UNE teammates plan to sit around drinking beer and pulling pork. (Seriously - see Kirikou's log. I couldn't make this stuff up.)

Time to decide whether to head to Ottawa tomorrow for the Canadian Orienteering Championships. I'd paid for this event before I knew about Untamed NE, otherwise I wouldn't have considered racing again so soon. It appears that my feet are not too uncomfortable in shoes and my energy level is surprisingly good. The only issue is my formerly "good" knee, which I smashed on a rock during the team waterfall climb while wearing slippery cycling shoes. That knee doesn't bend all the way and I can feel it with every step. I will also need to take my Active Ankle brace along in case my partial ankle twist decides to go the rest of the way. So... time to get ready to race again. Yikes!

It feels like I've done nothing but eat for the past couple of days, yet today I lost 2 lb between morning and dinnertime. How can I get my body to behave this way all the time?!?

Untamed New England Pre-race day report

Untamed New England Day 1 report

Untamed New England Day 2 report

Untamed New England Day 3 report

Untamed New England Day 4 report

(Summary written before the full race report was done.)

The Coles Notes version of Untamed New England is that I was part of Team Running Free with Harps, Relentless and Kirikou. The race was long and tough - physically, mentally and navigationally - the kind of event that attracted me to AR in the first place. Our team - a mix of people from different teams - came together surprisingly well for our first time racing together, and we stayed in contention for the podium until the end, finishing 4th of 41 teams. That was a brand new experience for me and I'm still finding it hard to believe.

Huge thanks to my teammates for their excellent performance and support, and for keeping the race fun and competitive from start to finish. We had some laughs even while we pushed ourselves hard. It was a treat to get to know these guys better as friends in the real (as opposed to Attackpoint) world. I'd been really worried about the stress of racing with such strong athletes but my teammates were awesome and helpful, and I had a great time out there. I even got to do some navigation, which was fun! So glad I didn't wimp out when they asked me.

Untamed New England Day 4

It was about 10 p.m. on a beautiful night when we turned into the snowmobile trail network. The supplementary trail map seemed straightforward enough but we'd heard disturbing news shortly before we started this leg. Although the distance to the next CP was only about 15 km, it had taken GUATS five hours to get there! So we were alert and ready for the first sign of trouble. The trail began as a pleasant road but the honeymoon didn't last long and soon we were bouncing over rocks and logs hidden in tall grass, skirting huge puddles and getting our wheels sucked into mud pits - the usual AR trail riding that we love. We were going to head south for awhile, starting with a bit more climbing, then we were going to descend to a river where we would turn west. Everything felt right for awhile, but before we had gone far enough, the trail started turning east, then northeast, then... oh crap. Obviously, this trail wasn't going to take us to the river after all.

Earlier, we'd passed a turn-off to the west with a well-built bridge. There was nothing on our map to guide us but it was clearly a major trail and seemed like our best bet. We tracked distances and figured out our position and were thrilled when the altitudes seemed right. The trail veered south and took us down to the good quality road by the river we'd been aiming for. We followed it till it ended, then turned south again on rougher trails.

In this next small section, the topo map lied and so did the supplementary trail map we'd been given. Our destination wasn't something simple like a main road perpendicular to our direction of travel. We needed to be somewhat more precise, so we spent several hours exploring in different directions, always returning to a known point where we could get back to the river road if necessary. More than once, we figured out our general location based on an altitude that only existed in one area of the map. Another time, we found a numbered trail junction that was on our map and in one spot we found a "5" sign indicating that we were on major snowmobile trail #5, which was *exactly* what we wanted except parts of it looked anything but major in real life. None of this information helped much as we kept doing out-and-backs in different directions, eventually rejecting each route for different reasons. We looked at the map, came up with different theories, convinced ourselves of various things, listened to loon calls and theorized a nearby lake, etc., etc.

Finally we were left with one trail that we had only followed partway before taking a turn-off that resembled something on the map. (Silly us, using the map.) When we followed it farther this time, we emerged onto a huge gravel road. We'd probably been 50 meters from that road about 2 hours earlier. Arggh! Given the narrow margins in this race, this is one of our "what if?" moments. But we simply didn't have enough information to navigate through this section without considerable guesswork and luck.

The CP for this section was a cool idea - it was a pay phone at Coleman State Park. We had to call organizers to let them know we'd arrived. For the entire race, I'd carried two U.S. quarters in a plastic bag, waiting for this moment. The volunteer answered, "CP33." Kirikou checked us in then asked how many teams had been through. "Two." Aaaacckkk!!! We'd expected to drop a bunch of places after muddling around in that section but we had somehow moved into 3rd place - holy crap!! Plans for a short break were tossed aside as we dashed back onto the road and blasted up the hill to get beyond the out-and-back section and out of sight of any teams behind us.

Although we didn't learn this until the finish line, we had been given incorrect information. What the volunteer meant to say was that two teams had arrived at the Balsams Resort already. Three teams had been to the phone booth before us, so we were still in 4th place. For better or for worse, we pushed hard for the next few hours to keep our "podium position".

There were nice trails for awhile, then we headed back into rougher, hillier terrain. We were pumped with positive energy and feeling good. That is, until I found myself tipping over occasionally rather than fighting to stay upright when my tires were sucked into a muddy rut. Sleepmonsters were finally getting to me. Before this point, Harps and I had often consulted the map together at decision points but now I needed every brain cell just to stay awake riding technical trails. Fortunately, everyone on our team can navigate, and Kirikou was fully alert so he stepped in and started working with Harps. (This photo is of Bender and I didn't get to lie down at this point, but it sure shows the way I felt!)



We got out onto gravel roads and the danger level went up as we went faster and I stayed sleepy. On the way to our final CP, I asked Relentless to keep me awake by telling me about an embarrassing moment in his life. He generously complied and I remember his embarrassing story in detail and promise never to reveal it. I'm sure that when it happened, he never realized there would be a greater purpose for that red-faced moment, but it might have saved my life on the bike!

It was getting light now and we were almost back at the Balsams. The approach to the last CP was a long, steep climb where we mostly walked our bikes to a saddle between two hilltops. Just before the climb, Harps and I had each taken a caffeine pill and I was impressed to feel myself waking up with every step. The ride down was awesome fun, whereas just half an hour earlier, it would have been death defying. Guess I'll grab the caffeine sooner if I get foggy in future. There were signs on the roads saying "To Hotel" - what a beautiful sight! We arrived at the golf clubhouse where we'd eaten lunch a few days ago and pedalled hard with newfound energy, realizing that the ski club was only a few kms away now.

Untamed is such a well-run event that the lack of excitement at the finish line is surprising. We arrived at the ski club at 6:20 a.m. and walked inside to look for volunteers to tell us what to do next. Things had gone well over the past few hours and we expected to hear that we'd held onto 3rd place after Coleman State Park, at minimum. But instead this is where we learned that we'd been misinformed and we were heading out on the bonus rogaine section in 4th place. Rats.

We received UTMs for 10 rogaine CPs. Harps and I didn't mark them all on the map because we had to be back by 10 a.m. and they were quite spread out. The way it worked was that our rogaine time would be added to our race time, but we would be credited 4 hours for each CP we visited. In an interesting twist, we'd been advised beforehand that we could access our vehicles here, so before the race, we'd carefully set up the back of the van with 4 cans of Red Bull and 4 bottles of Boost. Those of us who had them had also set out dry shoes and socks, which felt heavenly. We dumped everything but our mandatory gear. Relentless carried mine so I only carried my pack with water. We started with a climb straight up the ski hill.



Harps handed me the map since he was using trekking poles to ease the load on his blistered feet. Partway up, Kirikou's Achilles began to burn. Relentless wasn't saying anything but he still didn't have any skin on the bottom of his big toe. Tough guys! I was lucky by comparison - just some painful trench foot on each forefoot and one minor toe blister. Videographer Randy Ericksen came up the hill with us, running ahead to get shots as if it was no big deal. Luis Moreira came up partway too. Apparently, people have more energy if they sleep - who knew?

From the top of the ski lifts, we ran a mucky trail to a saddle to pick up our first CP. Based on where the team behind us was, we couldn't finish lower than 4th now as long as we were back by 10 a.m. Then we ran a couple of kms along a high trail to Table Rock for our second CP. At this point, it was 8:07 a.m. and we were 2 kms from the finish, mostly downhill. We had almost 2 hours. The question was, do we go for a third CP - the one by Huntington Falls? It involved about 4.5 kms of travel, including a steep trail descent and a good amount of time on the main paved road, much of it uphill.

It was the kind of decision I wouldn't hesitate to make in a regular rogaine but this wasn't my call alone (although I held the map and was casually inching toward the trail junction, hoping people would follow!) We'd been out for almost 70 hours and everyone was soldiering through pain. We weren't all in agreement on the value of chasing another CP and there was well-placed concern over the risk of being late, which would mean the loss of all our rogaine time credits and a possible drop to 5th place. One team member disagreed with the concept of rogaine sections deciding adventure races and felt unenthusiastic for that reason.

I felt confident that we had enough time and argued that we should do everything within our power to get on the podium. Sure, the teams ahead of us might do this section perfectly, and we might stay in 4th. But maybe they would finish after 10 a.m. or they might only pick up two CPs, not realizing that we had time for more. With 3 CPs, we would even beat GUATS if they somehow arrived past 10 a.m. Bottom line: the odds of moving up to the podium weren't high but this was the only card we had left to play. Everyone on the team is competitive enough that in the end, we all agreed to go for it. The videographer ran after us, impressed by the drama. "This will be awesome in the DVD! That was the kind of discussion nobody ever hears!" Kirikou and I exchanged surprised glances (moments earlier, someone who didn't know us might have thought we were actually mad at each other) and he said, "I can't remember a race where there *wasn't* a discussion like that!"

Anyway, you can catch all this in the movie. (I'm cringing just thinking about it...)

It was a painful descent to the falls for poor Harps, who made pretty good time using trekking poles to take the load off his hamburger feet. Relentless and Kirikou led the charge. When we got there, the description said we were looking for a flag overlooking the falls on the south cliff on a promontory. Sounded simple enough but there was a long continuous section of falling water - not just one single waterfall. There were lots of cliffs and more than one promontory. We scoured the area high and low with no luck, checked the UTM and expanded our search area a bit, then finally decided we had to start down the steep trail. The CP was either a bit lower or else we weren't going to get it at all, but it was almost the time when we'd agreed to leave, so we had to start heading to the road. I was feeling guilty for dragging the team down there but luckily the flag was spotted a little lower than we'd expected. Phew! From there, it was a short descent to the road then about 4 kms back on pavement.



The first part was a stiff climb then we descended past the Balsams Resort and headed toward the ski lodge. Once again, not much excitement at the finish line although this time Leanimal was there to cheer and take our photo.

We finished at 9:32 a.m. and had 12 hours subtracted from our time because of the 3 rogaine CPs, making our official finish time 9:32 p.m. This kept us in 4th place, 36 minutes behind Team Granite and 1 hr 13 min behind Skandia, both of whom got 3 rogaine CPs like we did. GUATS was well ahead, finishing the final bike section 8 hrs ahead of us and increasing their lead to 14 hrs with their 6 rogaine CPs. It's hard to know what this really means since Granite and Skandia may have adjusted their rogaine strategy based on what would be possible for us. But regardless, it was close and we were very, very proud of our result - 4th of 41 teams.

Huge congrats to Getawaystix, Ursula and the Benoits for a decisive victory! The trophy might not be a beaver but it's pretty nice anyway.



Their friends could hardly contain their excitement at the post-race ceremony. ;-)





A few post-race thoughts... If anyone had told us beforehand that we would be battling with the leaders for the entire race, I don't think we would have believed them. I doubt that anyone predicted it.

Although Harps and Relentless are a strong, longstanding duo, Kirikou and I come from different team backgrounds. It can take awhile to develop the routines that make four individuals operate efficiently as a unit. There is always room for improvement but I was impressed at how smoothly everyone worked together from pre-race to post-race. Some of that originated in detailed e-mail exchanges that helped us understand each other and our usual roles, strengths and weaknesses. But a lot of it just fell into place on the race course without much discussion. That's why the disagreement over the rogaine CPs took a few minutes to resolve. Until that point, we hadn't needed a mechanism to make a decision in a situation where we had different opinions. It had simply never come up.

There was never any issue with egos. If something needed to be done, someone just did it. I hadn't expected to be involved in navigation but Harps made us all partners in the nav from the start and I spent lots of time with a map in my hand or looking over his shoulder on his request. I trusted his judgement and didn't need to see the map all the time. This kind of trusting partnership with another navigator would be essential if I wanted to try to be more competitive in AR, since I am rarely the fastest racer on a team so I can't be dealing with maps on my own even though I think my nav background can be helpful at times. I'm glad I got to experience this kind of arrangement.

Kirikou, the Bush Whisperer, was an awesome practical navigator, finding good lines through thick forest at high speed while sticking to a bearing. Relentless was always finding ways to use his strength, creativity and organizational skills to make the team move faster. Everyone's mood throughout the race was positive and fun with a healthy sense of urgency. The only time anyone yelled was when there was a risk of the team getting too far apart. The only debate was the one over the 3rd rogaine CP. That's pretty good for four people thrown together for three days in just about any situation! I think the way the team worked together was the main reason we exceeded most people's expectations. We had a decent physical performance too but that alone would not have been enough.

Thanks to Team Running Free for inviting me to join them at Untamed. It was an awesome experience - very challenging and exciting and loads of fun. All the best with the rest of your season!

Untamed New England Day 3

Our 2-hour nap ended when the alarm went off in the first dim light. Compared to other long races, I found it easier to get up after this nap and was amazed at how "rested" it made me feel. Apparently, there is something about gunning for the podium that helps you deal better with sleep deprivation. Who knew? I remember hearing GUATS as they headed out for their swim - not sure if that was before or after our alarm but I was excited for them!



My watch face was torn off in last night's brutal bushwhack, leaving only the strap around my wrist (!), so I'm not sure of times after sunset on Day 2. I do know that we somehow spent 3 hrs 55 min at TA3 before leaving on the short bike loop. That's hard to believe, given that we only slept for 2 hours, got up promptly and always seemed to be busy doing stuff. We must have been moving a lot more slowly than it felt like. Anyway, it was great to head off on the bike again after spending so long on our feet. This bike leg had been shortened so we only needed to visit one CP under a bridge - about 22 km return mostly on fun, rolling gravel roads and a good quality snowmobile trail.



We saw Milton Basement Racers and Goals ARA (maybe EMS too?) on our way down the road, all looking a little ragged after the trek - just as we had looked coming up that road last night. We figured that they'd probably slept in the woods so we'd better keep our pace up.

Back at the Primus TA, we prepared quickly for the swim/trek leg while watching the final teams come in for the 8 a.m. cut-off to make the full course.



Oooh, that was close! There would be 8 teams competing for the podium over the final section. We were still in 4th.



No photographers joined us for our swim/trek section but these teams did it the same way we did - putting mandatory gear into a dry bag for flotation along with the mandatory PFD, then using fins to kick. Besides, it would be just wrong of me to deny you this chance to see Getawaystix in his sexy swimming cap.



Like the other sections, the swim/trek leg had been reduced. We could choose 3 of 4 UTMs on the list. Because of worsening blister issues for Harps, we jumped at the opportunity to focus on swimming and limit our bushwhacking. He wasn't sure why it happened in this race since he's done longer races like Patagonia without serious issues. Last night's bushwhack was nasty though and a few pieces of grit could really wreak havoc if they got into your socks. I still have a few funny marks on my feet from that.

There were three CPs on islands and peninsulas along Aziscohos Lake. The easiest way to access them was to do a few kms of jogging/hiking along a road that ran parallel to the long edge of the lake, then bushwhack in to the shore. One CP was a few kms south of the TA and the other was a couple of kms north. Coming back from the first CP, Harps stepped into a wasp nest or something and managed to get stung a couple of times when he was already hurting. Unfair! The final CP was across from the camp so we ran right through the TA to get there. Our swimming system worked well and the water felt fantastic on this hot day. I'd planned to bring fuzzy rubber along for warmth but I didn't - in fact, I was wishing that I'd just worn a sports bra instead of a shirt. (Which alert observers may have noticed I did until 8 p.m. on Day 1. Mrs. Gally, you're a bad influence!)





After the long road marches, we were looking forward to more time on our bikes. Back at the TA, Harps took a final look at the maps for the rest of the race - advertised as a 100 km bike leg, but two CPs had been removed so it was somewhat less. We filled our water, replenished our food and made our packs as light as possible for the final push. It was relatively warm so I took out a vest and fleece that hadn't been used during the race. It wasn't much further now and it was warm. We were going to do this!



We rode some fun, hilly gravel roads and collected a CP or two before we arrived at the Team Waterfall Climb CP. Confident nav by Harps as always, riding by a few short course teams standing at the side of the road with question marks swirling around their heads.



This was a busy CP. We would be doing the waterfall climb (whatever the heck that was!), a conservation project and a bike & tie leg. We dropped our bikes and learned that Skandia had been out for a long time on the bike & tie and that Granite was not far ahead of us. Great - time to push harder! For the waterfall "climb", the four of us were carabinered onto a short loop of climbing rope and the biners were duct-taped closed. We had to make our way about 800 m up a rocky stream, punching 8 orienteering flags along the way, then we would climb up a steep trail beside the waterfall and be directed to our conservation project.

Harps and I had brought cycling shoes with some tread for this leg of the race, figuring that it made sense to save the weight of carrying trekking shoes when they would be needed so little. We hadn't counted on wading through a stream though! Cycling shoes were the absolute worst thing for negotiating the wet, sloped, mossy rocks.



At first, I just accepted that I would slip and fall a lot, and I didn't want to complain about it. But then my (usually) good knee started to swell up in pain after I'd splatted my kneecap on a rock. I realized that this little exercise could end our race so I started being ultra-careful, using my hands and feet to move along the ground where possible and aiming for little patches of gravel where I could get traction. Not the easiest thing to do when you've got 4 people on a rope and one of them needs to get the passport over to an orienteering punch, but we made it to the waterfall relatively unscathed. (That turned out to be my worst and most painful injury from Untamed. Nine days later, it appears that I lucked out with an external injury that made things swell up a lot for a week but didn't cause any internal damage.)









At last we reached the steep path up beside the waterfall where a volunteer checked that we hadn't removed the duct tape then told us we could get off the rope and follow the marked path to the trail work section.



If you ever want a trail built, call Relentless. We had to put in 30 minutes of trail clearing, and while all the racers made a decent effort, everyone was aware that this was a good chance to take the intensity down a notch, get some food down, etc. But Relentless went full out chopping down major trees, sawing through logs and snipping around the edges for neatness. I was amazed the volunteer let him leave after our 30 minutes was up. I figured he was hired.

From here, we had to bushwhack for about 10 minutes, following flagging tape through fairly thick woods to return to the CP for our next task. Upon our arrival, the volunteer asked to see our sat phone. There had been lots of mandatory gear checks throughout the race - something I like to see. Our sat phone had already been checked earlier. As one teammate dug into his pack, the volunteer quietly informed the rest of us that he wasn't going to find it because the organizers had found our sat phone at the Primus TA. Not the greatest way to tell us bad news!

After the swim/trek, we'd done some rearranging since our gear had been configured differently for swimming. The sat phone was set carefully on a nearby gear bin as things were being rearranged and, unfortunately, that's where it was found after our departure by the owner of said gear bin. Easy enough for something like that to happen, given the fatigue after 3 days of racing. Everyone was philosophical and accepting, and it was my impression that the only team member who felt angry about this at all was the one who was supposed to have the sat phone.

The cruel irony is that Team Running Free is extremely meticulous about mandatory gear. Even when we were doing a 2-minute swim many kilometers away from the nearest race official and out of sight of any other racer, the team culture was to follow the rules to the letter. "If you're not swimming with your pack in that dry bag, make sure you've got a whistle on your PFD!"

So the deal was, we would go out on the bike & tie, then we'd serve a 2-hour penalty at the CP from about 7-9 p.m. This would use up the final hours of daylight - not that the remaining daylight would have taken us into the next area of tough navigation but it's still good for the psyche to be moving when there's light.

Like the waterfall climb, the bike and tie turned out to be different from what we expected. There were two CPs along the same re-entrant - one high and one about 200 meters downstream along the same re-entrant. There was no trail down the re-entrant - just bush. It was a couple of kms along a gravel road, then a steep climb on an ATV trail to get to the re-entrant. Total round trip distance about 7-8 km. The bike had a "wrist strap" on it to ensure that the bike was carried through the bush to both CPs and punched at the controls.

The only other bike & tie I've seen was along a rail trail where the strategy was interesting since teammates had to figure out when to switch from bike to run to keep their average speed the same. In this case, the challenge was all about the bikewhacking which didn't get any of us too excited.

We'd expected the bike & tie to use two bikes and I had always assumed that I'd be doing a good percentage of the riding, given that these guys are all strong runners. But the bike & tie involved only one bike (fortunately, due to the bikewhacking) and as the teammate with the fewest blisters, I obviously had to be on foot. This was my psychological low point of the race - a combination of the upcoming penalty and the fact that I hadn't expected to need to run uphill after a bike at a time when every second had suddenly become very precious to us. The guys were great, taking my pack and even trying to tow me from the bike, which was interesting indeed! I snapped out of it quickly enough and hopefully didn't whine too much with my outside voice.

We met Team Spirit on this section - nice to see friendly faces. The downhill CP was a loooong way down the re-entrant. After we arrived, Harps handed the map to me to lead Relentless and Kirikou down to the bottom of the main valley, then a steep climb up the other side to a road that would provide a shorter downhill run back to the CP. Meanwhile, he would undertake the nasty task of getting the bike back uphill through the bush to the road we'd come in on. That was less bushwhacking than the route we would be taking and we hoped this would even out our time. (For any AR afficionados who may be wondering, the 100 meter rule was waived for this section.) The runners got back a little ahead of the bike, then we settled in for a 2-hour penalty stint.

We didn't want to advertise our penalty to our competitors so we tried to look like we were just hanging around doing essential things - and indeed we were. We tried to do things during our penalty time that would save us time later in the race. Harps reviewed maps; I purified water for everyone; we got our lights ready for the bike section; we ate; we drank; we took care of our feet. The one negative was that it got chilly and a little buggy. We were damp and (as you may remember) I had confidently removed some of my extra clothing from my pack since I didn't expect to need it on such a warm night. It wasn't a problem since eventually I unwrapped the tarp from around myself to go stand by a campfire a short distance away. It was at this CP that my little waterproof camera disappeared from the front pouch of Relentless' pack. Boo.

We kept an eye on the 2-hour countdown and were clipped in and ready to start pedalling the second the stopwatch went off. It felt soooo good to tear off into the cool night and start attacking the hills on the gravel road. Incredibly, we were still in 4th place but other teams had moved up closer behind us. I was most worried about MBR since they're so strong on the bike. We knew we would need to kick butt in this next section to have any chance of making the podium. We'd heard that Granite had spent quite awhile at the CP preparing for the next section, so it was still anyone's race and there was a lot of tough navigation left to go.

We climbed and turned and climbed some more and then we climbed a steeper section, all on gravel roads. We stopped near the entrance to a snowmobile trail system and looked at a big sign showing the map. It would have been great to have my camera to take a photo but the sign seemed to have a similar (inaccurate, as it turned out) trail map to the one we had on paper. Then we turned into the snowmobile trail system - and that is probably a good arbitrary point to make the break between Day 3 and Day 4 of the race...

Untamed New England Day 2

We headed out from the fire hall on our bikes around 1 a.m. - such a relief to be using different muscles! We'd been a bit chilled in wet clothes from our paddle but it didn't take long till we were removing layers and drying out. The ride started on rolling gravel roads and arrived at a track that ran along the Canada-U.S. border. Apparently, the team from Ecuador crossed the border here accidentally without the mandatory copy of their passport that racers were required to carry - oops! We turned onto an ATV trail that started out rideable with a steep uphill climb then deteriorated into mush at the high point. This was a common theme throughout these mountains - swampy ground as we got higher. The descent was a hike-a-bike slog down a mere hint of a trail. We constantly had to heave our bikes over fallen trees and through brush. We were with EMS and Granite so we assumed this was just the way it was for everybody, but after we finally merged with a nice gravel road, we met up with our friends, the Milton Basement Racers, who said they'd ridden beautiful smooth roads the whole way while eating caviar and drinking champagne. (OK, I made some of that up.) Needless to say, we were very happy for them. ;-)

After the next CP, we headed onto some snowmobile trails hoping to find a bridge across the river separating us from the trail system we wanted to be on. We were with Granite at this point and their navigator did a quick dash into the bush and returned to announce that we were close to the river. This was good enough for all of us, as we could bikewhack across the river and get to the road on the other side - a couple hundred meters at most. Wrong! What had appeared to be the river was only a creek, and there was swampy ground and thick vegetation all around it. We continued on our bearing heading east. This was one of the nastiest sections I've ever struggled through in an adventure race and certainly got my heart rate higher than anything else in this event. It's hard enough to get your own body through dense, tangled swamp vegetation. Now add a full suspension bike to the mix, with all kinds of parts to catch on branches at the same time as you're plunging unexpectedly into deep muck. We found the real river and crossed it, getting wet thigh-deep. Then the bikewhacking began again in earnest and eventually (oh, thank God) began to head uphill. Just as it seemed it would never end, we were spit out onto a gravel road.

We had a couple of CPs to find in that trail system before heading for the bike drop at a nearby lodge. There were some loose, rocky climbs but at least the sun was starting to rise, which gave us energy again. We figured that we'd probably lost 5 or 6 places as a result of our weird bike route but we remained calm because it was a long race and we had plenty of time to make it up. Harps was navigating perfectly and we knew the previous section would be tough for everyone. The only other team we saw after the bikewhack was Granite, but that didn't cheer us up because we knew they'd been through the same nasty experience as us. When we pulled up at the bike drop at the lodge, there was a strange sight... an empty parking lot with no bicycles in it. "Congratulations, you're the first team to arrive!", the volunteer exclaimed. Rather than the joy he probably expected, we burst into hysterical laughter tinged with shock. Granite arrived a few minutes later and we rushed through our TA to ensure that we could start the trek in first place on the leaderboard. (As it turned out, Granite had a small time credit, so we were actually in 2nd place. I'll take it.)







The first part of the trek was on roads that got progressively smaller. We ran the flats and downhills and speed-hiked the uphills. Even at 9 a.m., the morning sun was hot and we knew we'd have to be careful about fluids and electrolytes today.





Our route started to head cross-country and our navigation went well but we kept hitting nasty stretches of bushwhacking - open fields of raspberries, logging debris, thick cedars, etc. When we eventually popped out onto the gravel road leading to Magalloway Mountain, we met Luis Moreira who told us that Granite was in 1st place two minutes ahead of us on the road, and Skandia was a few minutes behind us, having gained almost an hour on both Granite and us in this section.



We were short of both water and water purification pills at this point, so our priority was finding a decent-looking stream before we climbed to the summit. We couldn't afford to worry about Skandia passing us, which they did shortly after we stopped at a stream. The climb up Magalloway Mountain was on trail but the taxpayers certainly saved a lot of money by not building switchbacks! Friendly volunteers surrounded us at the top and let us know that some CPs had been removed from the course.





All of us had a few hot spots, so we had previously decided to air our feet out for 10 minutes up here. As it turned out, this gave us a chance to plan our new routes for the revised trek. This photo shows my lovely feet which actually were - and remained - the least damaged of anyone on the team.



There was a mandatory team photo at a scenic overlook. We're in 3rd place in this pic and very happy to be there!



Because of where we needed to go next, the trail down Magalloway Mountain didn't make much sense. However, the mountain was steep on all sides and too cliffy to descend on the east side, where we actually needed to go. We opted to head down the north side and contour around as soon as we got past the cliffs. Although it took us a little out of our way, this was the closest access to the main road we wanted to hit when we reached the bottom.





If we thought the bushwhacking was bad before, it's only because we hadn't been here yet. Holy crap! We were on slopes so steep that we were skidding downhill and grasping at saplings whenever we hit an open chute. However, that wasn't very often. Mostly, we were tearing branches apart and stepping over logs onto lower ground that we couldn't see. It was in this section that I gave Kirikou his new nickname, the Bush Whisperer. He can fly through tough bush and is great at weaving together little sections where the going is easier.

That's why he was in front when we heard a crashing sound. The largest moose any of us had ever seen leapt to his feet, angry to be roused from his afternoon nap. (This photo is not our moose - it's one that the course testers saw.) He was glaring at Kirikou. All of us were eyeing trees and thick bush nearby in case the moose charged, grateful that trampling Kirikou would slow the moose down a little before he reached the rest of us. ;-)



The moose stared at us for what seemed like an eternity then decided we weren't worth the trouble. He trotted off and we all exhaled. After finishing the descent off the mountain through thick bush, we were rewarded by a sloppy slog through marshy land and stream vegetation and thigh-deep dunks in mud before reaching the gravel road. We were doing less running and more speed-hiking at this point since we'd drained some energy reserves in today's tough bushwhacking. We probably weren't drinking as much as we should because we were conserving our water purification pills and weren't keen to drink untreated water. I hooked onto the ever-helpful Relentless' tow line since that kept me alongside the boys without needing to focus too much.

We got to the ropes section at Garfield Falls about 1 km after several of us shared a hallucination of a sign pointing to the falls. (It was just a few tree branches and some leaves but we were convinced!) There was a Tyrolean Traverse, a rappel and a bit of stream walking before we climbed back up to where we'd left our packs.











We were the third team to do the ropes, which took about 20-25 minutes. Shortly after our departure, we met a couple of teams coming in, including Team GUATS, who were still doing a fine AR shuffle.

We stopped to purify water where we crossed the river, then headed toward CP22 in late afternoon sunlight. We ran slowly on flats and downhills, knowing that things would slow down soon and we wanted to get most of the trek done before we lost our light. We started in along a trail by a creek. In some places it was OK but it clearly hadn't been travelled in some time. We were heading behind the peak of Stub Mountain and it seemed like we might be too far on the other side of the valley, so we headed over that direction more. According to GUATS, it would have been quicker to stay near the indistinct trail since it got better from time to time. We bushwhacked steadily toward the head of the valley but it was slow going. As we got close to the top near the lake we were heading for, the bushwhacking got exceptionally difficult. There were times we simply couldn't move forward yet we didn't want to get off our bearing too much in case it got dark before we found the little lake behind the peak. We hit a trail shortly before the lake and had an easy walk down to the shore. Kirikou and I generously volunteered to walk along the shallows at the edge of the lake, peering into the forest to look for the flag. (This was hardly necessary but the cold water felt soooo good on our feet.) Relentless and Harps stayed onshore and found the flag.



Looking ahead to CP23, the final summit on the trek, it seemed obvious that we should get there via a ridge walk similar to ones that I've done in many rogaines in the past. It's usually fairly easy to stay close to the high point of a ridge in the dark, particularly if it's narrow and you're careful about pace counting, compass bearing, etc. So our first step was to return to the saddle. It wasn't far but it made all our other bushwhacking today - maybe all the other bushwhacking in our *lives* - look like child's play. It was dark now so we had little peripheral vision. I plunged over a couple of small cliffs and balanced on fallen trees, some of which collapsed and hurtled me into the unknown while others simply scratched me and tore my clothing. It was rare that we could see where we were putting our feet, so we were risking injury with every step. When the altimeter told us that we'd reached the saddle, I called a halt so we could re-evaluate our strategy. The ridge walk simply wasn't going to work. There had to be another way.

I've rarely used an altimeter in AR but it saved our butt this time and I will need to start using one. Using an idea from our ever-creative navigator Harps, we decided to descend about 600' to the 2600' contour, then follow it east until the ground rose to the ridge that we wanted. We could only hope that the terrain down there was faster going than the ridge, since we were adding significant descent and climb to our route. Luckily, it worked out that way.



This section was a full team effort. Relentless kept track of timing. Harps watched the altimeter like a hawk. Kirikou found ways through the bush on an accurate bearing. I watched the map and the bearing and confirmed that all the readings together were making sense and that the terrain was doing what we expected it to do at the time we were expecting it to happen. Coming from an outside team, I was impressed at how smoothly we worked together here and throughout the race without spending a bunch of time debating how to do it. I think this is why we did better at Untamed than most people, including us, expected.

Kirikou led us along a new bearing at the top of the ridge while Harps took altimeter readings. Unfortunately, we stopped short at a false summit near our CP, which meant we did some scrambling around to search for the highest point. It was here that the skin slid off the bottom of Relentless' toe so we had an emergency first aid break. Relentless is a strong workhorse and never complains but the pain must have been excruciating, especially in that bush. The rest of us didn't realize it yet but Harps' feet were turning raw as well, so both guys were soldiering through serious pain in some of the nastiest bush any of us had ever experienced. After nabbing CP23, we had a steep 2 km descent to reach a road. Kirikou led the way and there were some steep sections once again. I had a couple of impressive falls, managing to smash my hip and twist my ankle. I didn't want to complain though because at least my feet still had skin on them!

At last we hit the road near Bosebuck Camp (TA3/TA4/TA5) and did a steady uphill climb for a couple of kms. The next legs were loops from this camp so we knew we'd be seeing this hill again. We arrived at 2:44 a.m. in 4th place behind GUATS (who had an amazing trek), Skandia and Granite. We had planned to prepare for the next leg before taking a 2-hour nap but we were just too fried. We got the UTMs for the bike section, had some food, set up our sleeping bags and did some foot care. I wasn't tremendously effective here. I was in a fatigued state where I became paralyzed by indecision. Will we sleep well in the communal tent or should we sleep on our tarp? Should I use the Primus stoves to make some hot food or just gobble down a cold can of Beefaroni? Is it most important to take off my shoes right now and air my feet? If I take off my shoes, will I be able to get over to that tent where we're going to sleep? If I want dry socks for the next leg, do I need to leave my wet socks on in case I need to put my shoes on? Should I look for my bike and make sure it's OK? How much stuff should I get ready for the next leg so I don't hold the team up after our nap? It all seems silly and obvious now, and it's not as bad as it sounds because I was the second to get to bed. However, I didn't get any hot food, which would have been nice before a chilly 2-hour nap. I need to figure out how to get better at handling TAs when I'm super-tired.

Mmm, gotta say that nap from 3:15-5:15 a.m. was amazing!!

Event: Untamed New England 3-Day Adventure Race
 

Untamed New England Day 1

Note: Because my camera was stolen, all of these photos were taken from albums that have been posted online. Credit goes to Luis Moreira, Leanimal and a number of other photographers I don't know.

One of the many challenges of Untamed NE is the limited amount of time racers get with the maps before the race. The maps aren't pre-marked - you get a booklet with instructions and UTMs, then you plot the checkpoints. In some cases, information is held back until you reach the relevant part of the race course, then you receive a list of UTMs that you need to mark carefully on your map at a time when your brain is pretty much fried. Several supplementary maps are provided and you need to figure out where they fit with your main maps.

For that reason, we got up early to line up for race check-in at the Balsams Wilderness Ski Lodge. It was great to see so many Canadian friends at this event including:
- Team GUATS with Getawaystix, Ursula, Benoit L. and Benoit T.
- Team Spirit Canada with Urthbuoy, FB, T. Rex and Bender
- Milton Basement Racers with Tiny, Nosnhoj, M&M and Tom
- ATP/Salomon with Phatty, PhattyJR, LaFemme and Scott (token American)

Harps and Relentless have an established system for working together on maps, so they took the info for the early race legs and passed the other maps and instructions to Kirikou and me at the next table. We worked out our own system and prepared maps for several legs of the race. We only had 2 hours to work until it was time to turn in our gear bins and get on the school buses.







The bus ride to the paddle start on Second Connecticut Lake took about an hour. Harps and I sat together and planned our routes for the monster trek. There was significant overlap between two of the maps so we could both carry a map and share the navigation for a good chunk of that section.







One of my less-favourite features of Untamed NE is their unusual choice of boats. Each team was given an 85-lb Old Town Discovery canoe and a plastic recreational kayak. We're a strong paddling team but that advantage was neutralized somewhat by having more than two people in a canoe and having a kayak with low hull speed, i.e. a pig. Teams had different strategies for dealing with the kayak. I think all the top teams put it on tow behind the canoe. Some teams put their strongest paddler in the kayak but our strategy was to put our lightest paddler in the kayak for easier towing. Lucky me! Actually, it was pretty sweet getting my own boat - until we hit whitewater at night, anyway. Team GUATS got a laugh when they unveiled their clever strategy - 4 paddlers in the canoe with the empty kayak towed behind them.





When the start gun went off, we had four orienteering checkpoints to visit around the shoreline of the lake, then it was time for the first portage.









In Canada, a portage is usually a trail where you lift the canoe onto your shoulders and head for the next body of water. In the U.S., adventure racers often portage along paved roads, making portage wheels very useful. The first portage started with a couple of kilometers on pavement and a lot of teams - including us - used this time to work out the bugs in our portage wheel system. We ended up putting the kayak upside down on top of the canoe. If the placement of the canoe on the wheels and the kayak on the canoe wasn't right, it required a lot of strength to hold everything in place as we went down the road. We got our system working reasonably well and were able to run most of the portages on roads. There was about 10 km of portaging in the paddle leg.





We'd been close to the lead but fell back a few places when we adjusted our portage wheels. Bad timing! When we turned onto the "Moose Alley" trail, we got stuck in a conga line behind other teams for about 90 minutes. It was a new, rough, rooty, muddy trail that wasn't always quite wide enough to let a canoe between the trees. Portage wheels were useless. Even the few people who attempted to carry the canoe on their shoulders were stymied eventually. Most of the boats were carried by their ends or hauled up hills on the soft trail. This was tough, high intensity physical effort - not the kind of thing you want to do to your body on the first day of a multi-day adventure race. I managed to get hit on the head pretty hard by a kayak being carried in front of me - totally my fault but painful and disorienting nonetheless. We were all hot and sweating and running out of water. I wanted to kiss the road when we finally emerged from the woods!









We were instructed to run down a rough trail to an area where we would work on our first conservation project. We had to carry a log, a board, a hammer and spikes to build a piece of a boardwalk. Once we got there, it was pretty quick. The run was longer than we'd expected - over a kilometer each way - but at least it felt good to be moving again!









Back in our boats at last - yahoo! Our boys were a paddling powerhouse in the canoe. As long as I kept the kayak moving in a straight line at a decent pace so it didn't drag on the canoe too much, we kept moving up steadily and passing other teams. Other than Getawaystix, I don't remember anyone passing us on the water. Luckily, there were some long stretches of beautiful paddling because the more time the race course spent on the water, the better it was for us! We portaged through a town near dusk, then got onto a shallow river with a decent current and some exposed rocks that were really hard to see in the failing light.







I'm not sure if it was better or worse to be the lone kayaker in this section. On one hand, my boat was pretty bombproof and hard to tip. On the other hand, I was paddling whitewater by myself at night - eek! We had to find one CP on the way to the main hub where we were going to do our conservation project and orienteering relay. By the time we arrived, it was about 9 p.m. and dark. We were in about 5th or 6th place. The conservation project was easy. We had to run a loop and nail plastic trail markings on both sides of a flagged tree. Then it was the orienteering relay. This turned out to be a very fun, relaxed part of the race. There was only so much we could do with our food, water, clothing and gear, and we all got that done pretty quickly. Most people had to wait at least an hour for their teammates, so there was plenty of time to hang around the campfires and chat with other racers. Most of us weren't tired yet so there weren't a lot of people sleeping. I think we eventually saw all our Ontario friends here. We could read our trail mail and it was so nice to know that our friends and family back home were thinking of us.

We sent Harps out first on the "long hard" leg so he would have plenty of time to review maps for the next section of the race. I went second on the "short hard" leg (where Phatty and I spent some quality time together in the woods), then Kirikou blasted through the "short easy" leg, followed by Relentless on the "long easy" leg. It looks like the O relay helped to gain us some time, which we'd been hoping for, since we had 4 navigators on our team. Racers could review the maps with their teammates and point out any tricky parts. We didn't do that but it didn't turn out to be an issue.









We'd talked about changing into our bike shorts here because there was only about 6 km of paddling left and it seemed like it would be efficient. I'd been getting wet in the kayak so I decided to keep my dry clothes in the dry bag. Harps did a full change, so it was definitely sad when the canoe suddenly rammed a rock in the darkness and turned sideways. I had to veer around the boys to avoid hitting them and it wasn't looking good as water flooded into their boat. I eddied out 20 meters downstream and grabbed a branch to stay in place as I watched them struggle to overcome the weight of the water pinning the canoe to the rock.

Suddenly, there were yells and headlamp beams aimed down the river where a couple of big pieces of gear were floating away. I headed back into the current, trying to avoid rocks at the same time as I tried to keep my headlamp focused on the gear that was moving downstream. I was able to pick it up but the rest of the paddle was a little slow since my legs were tangled in the portage wheels instead of pressing on the foot pegs! The boys extracted the canoe and we headed downstream to the first transition area (TA1) at the Beecher Falls Fire Hall where the firefighters had prepared an incredibly yummy dinner of spaghetti, brownies and coffee. That meal was perfect!

We transitioned to our bikes here at around 1 a.m. so I'll save that for the Day 2 report.

Untamed New England - Pre-race

Harps, Kirikou and I arrived in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire at lunchtime after breaking our drive in Montreal. As we watched TV sports in the hotel last night, Harps focused on hydration like a good athlete while Kirikou and I toasted the upcoming race with a half-bottle of Wolf Blass Shiraz that worked out to $10 per plastic bathroom cup. It seemed appropriate for an adventure racing trip - similar to spending $500 for the opportunity to sleep in a ditch.

Today's pre-race lunch at the Balsams Resort was a better deal - lobster grilled cheese sandwiches, sweet potato fries, onion rings and that old pre-race favourite: deep fried pickles with dip. (Yikes - that one was the boys' idea!)



Dixville Notch is stunningly beautiful and the Balsams is a gracious old resort that has attracted wealthy guests for over a century. It would be fun to spend a weekend here some time and just hike and swim and eat fabulous meals.





Alas, that was not our plan this time. The gear bin weight limits for Untamed NE are strict and low, so we needed to put our group stuff together, do some final organization and sandwich making, then weigh everything again and again. Our personal gear bin for the 3-day race could weigh 35 lb but the tougher limit was the TA1 bag which needed to hold gear, food, clothing and other supplies for 24 hours of biking (including helmet and shoes), ropes (including climbing helmet) and trekking, all within a weight allotment of 9 lb/person above the bag weight. Go ahead... just try to do that! Rather than making too many tough choices between food and clothing, we opted to carry a big bag of food along for the initial paddling leg - enough to get us through to Saturday morning if necessary. Portaging would be more painful but Relentless (who had arrived from Ottawa) would be carrying the canoe pack and we knew he could handle it! :-)

I always get pre-race nerves, and today's butterflies were flapping extra hard. I've never raced in an Adventure Racing World Series event with a team aiming for a top 5 finish. Before last week, I'd spent less than 5 minutes in one-on-one conversation with Kirikou or Relentless outside of Attackpoint and e-mail. I knew Harps better but we'd never done any real training together. All three guys are strong athletes with successful reputations in AR and I imagined them getting frustrated at my pace. (Luckily, they ended up being great to race with and my worries were unfounded.) All the unknowns whirled in my brain and prevented me from sleeping even though we got to bed early. I'd also lost the great "rock, paper, scissors" battle, so I was one of the two lucky racers sleeping on the floor. I think I slept for 3 hours all night based on the last time I looked at my watch. Perfect thing to do on the eve of a 70-hour race - argghh!

Untamed New England 3-day adventure race starts on Thursday around mid-day and finishes on Sunday morning with a rogaine that should bring most teams to the finish line in the same time range. I'm racing on Team Running Free with Harps, Kirikou and Relentless. Other Attackpointers racing include Urthbuoy, FB, T. Rex, Bender, Getawaystix, Phatty, PhattyJR and LaFemme. Live coverage is usually pretty good. Please cheer all the Canadians on (especially us, of course! ;-) ) and send warm thoughts to everyone if it is raining at night!

http://www.untamedne.com/default.aspx

Grrrr... the low weight allotments for Untamed New England gear bins don't allow much room for things like food or dry socks. But hey, it's only 3 days.

Met Dee, Harps, Kirikou, Funderstorm and T. Rex for a Hockley Loop trail run on a deliciously cool morning. (T. Rex is behind the camera here.)



Oh, *there's* T. Rex!



Fun, taper-paced run with lots of good conversation. Picked apples and raspberries along the trail. Went up and down a bunch of hills!





Harps had to go drink beer somewhere and Dee had some other excuse, so they'd left Dee's truck at the 14K mark. It was too tempting for the rest of us so we skipped the final hour of running and finished our taper with a nice truck ride back to the start. Next time we'll do it all!

T. Rex came back to my place, as she had a wedding to attend nearby later in the day. We spent some typical girl bonding time - lounging, snacking, chatting and rappelling...

I put on all my lights, including the new bike front light purchased by my personal MEC shopper Kirikou ;-). Then I headed for a rough trail to do some bouncing around to ensure that everything felt solid. It was a very different way to ride, purposely taking aim at the biggest roots and rocks to really test the gear. It passed! If anyone had seen me decked out for night riding in the sunshine, they would have thought I was nuts. But that's not unusual...

On 'Bent's birthday shortly after our wedding in 1996, we decided it was time to start a family (Bash & 'Bent style) so we went to see some chocolate Lab puppies. 'Bent ran around the yard and one of the puppies ran happily at his heels. We'd found our new family member, Toblerone - aka Tobler, aka ThunderDog on Attackpoint. She became an awesome multi-sport athlete - running, bushwhacking, canoeing, biking, orienteering and swimming with us over the years. Those days are mostly gone even though she doesn't realize it and keeps trying to jog. Breathing isn't easy for her in hot weather and her joints get sore. But she's still that same little puppy inside, craving outdoor adventure.

Today is Tobler's 14th birthday and I'm so glad we have the chance to celebrate it. Most dogs don't make it to this milestone. We'll drive to the river for a nice swim, then BBQ steaks for both dogs and me. Happy Birthday, ThunderDog!

Several of us are doing a taper-paced Hockley Loop (Bruce Trail and side trails) on the morning of Sat. Aug. 7 - about 3 hours, 22 km with lots of hills. Meeting at the Bruce Trail parking lot on Hockley Road across from the Hockley Resort at 9:15 a.m. Let me know if you'd like to come!

Confirmed: Funderstorm, T. Rex, Bash, Kirikou (I think)
Maybe: Dee, Harps, Crash

A small triumph... For the first time ever, I managed to wrestle a kayak onto the van roof and go paddling on my own. Not sure I could have done it with my own kayak but it was possible to get 'Bent's lightweight kayak up there, and that's the one I need to practise with for Logs Rocks and Steel.

There was a strong wind blowing on Island Lake so it was a great chance to practise steering the kayak in difficult conditions without its rudder, which we had removed because it made portaging too difficult. That went fine. I also brought along 3 pairs of gloves to test to see if they might help to prevent the thumb blisters that I am almost guaranteed to get if I use bare hands for Untamed New England's initial 65 km paddle. Picked my favourite pair, left them all on the front patio to dry, and then we were hit by a heavy rainstorm.

Got a few e-mails from 'Bent in Kyoto just now. The Japanese keyboard added extra entertainment to his messages! He and his bro are having an awesome time.

Aurora Borealis could be visible in southern Ontario tonight and maybe tomorrow night too! Find a dark place to hang out.
http://www.examiner.com/x-38039-Toronto-City-Guide...

Wow, it sure is quiet with 'Bent in Japan. If I'm sending you too many long e-mails, commenting too frequently on your Attackpoint log or posting too often on your Facebook wall, rest assured that the flurry of communication will slow down when he's back. Living in the boonies, I can go all day without talking to a real human! (Lots of talking to dogs though.)

Short bike ride at 11 p.m. to check out my Nght Lightning light, which I haven't used for riding before. It was frying the leaves off the trees on its low setting, so it should do the trick. Gotta keep my helmet tight with that extra weight on top. If the light bounces around too much, the whole world looks out of whack!

I made the photos a little bigger than usual. If it doesn't look right in anyone's browser, please let me know.

U.S. Rogaining Champs results are up. The Milton Basement Tree Huggers were 3rd of 9 Coed Open teams (i.e. 1 or more team members under 40) and 13th of 37 teams overall. Since we stopped racing with more than 6 hours to go, I'll take that with a smile!

Some data for future reference:
- At the 50K mark on our "straight line between controls" string, we had actually travelled around 65K.
- We raced 67 km in 17.5 hrs. After we dropped out, it took 1.5 hrs to walk the 6K back to the Hash House.

CNYO Sugar Hill Rogaine - designated the 2010 U.S. Champs. Day 2.
Finger Lakes Region, NY



Tiny and I teamed up for this event because our regular rogaine partners had the audacity to make different plans for the long August weekend, i.e. running the 125 km Canadian Death Race (M&M) and exploring the temples of Kyoto ('Bent and his brother).

Since Tiny is accustomed to a speedy teammate, I planned to move as quickly as possible so I didn't carry my camera on the race course. There were some fantastic views of low mountains and lakes which you'll just have to imagine!

Pixie and Shirley, Tiny's wife and sister, came along to do their first 24-hr rogaine. They planned to get some sleep during the night then head out for another round in the morning. The idea was that they would be wider awake for driving home.



Tiny and I planned a good route, I think, using about 70 km of string (straight line distance between controls). Our goal was just over 2400 points. We knew where we should be when the sun set and it looked good in that part of the map. We would have to purify water in streams because the weather was hot and we wouldn't reach our first official water stop for a long time. (It turned out that we reached the first bottled water cache after 12 hours.)



This may have been the best rogaine I've done for keeping the pace up and sticking closely to our planned schedule. If anything, I wondered whether we should have been more ambitious. It's my fault since I chose the appropriate string length. We did light running on some flats and almost all downhills when we were on trails and roads where the terrain wasn't overly conducive to ankle rolling. Tiny turned a little green during the hottest part of the day but he kept soldiering on. I forced myself to drink more than I wanted to but I'm sure it was still less than a doctor or exercise physiologist would recommend. Regardless, I felt great. It helped that my summer rogaine pack was so much lighter than my usual load since I didn't have to worry about getting cold at night.

With two navigators and strong lights, our night navigation went very smoothly except for one low value control (40) in a re-entrant that managed to elude us after a particularly heinous bushwhack through thick forest and tangled blackberry bushes over our heads. (My poor legs aren't looking good today!) We came across the well-lit Monterey Shock Incarceration Correctional Facility but in spite of our curiosity to check it out more closely, we had no desire to be seen running past their gate in the wee hours. We saw a sign for it with a cartoon head of a fierce dog and the slogan "Home of Shock". Hmm.

By 5:30 a.m., we had 1690 points and were on schedule to head into the "densest point value" part of the map to collect the remainder of our controls closer to the Hash House. But that's when the Bash Rogaine Partner Curse kicked in. Tiny had been nursing a painful Achilles tendon for a few hours - something he hadn't experienced before - and it wasn't getting better. With Untamed New England coming up next week, it would be crazy to take the chance of damaging it further. It had been great racing with Tiny and we'd worked well together for as long as we could. So we hiked back to the Hash House and were served our own private breakfast of scrambled eggs and cereal before getting a good sleep in Pixie and Shirley's tent. The results aren't up yet but I think our score will stand up reasonably well even though we only raced for 75% of the time. C'est la vie.

Pixie and Shirley went out for a second round in the morning and ended up earning about 1100 points. Fantastic job for their first 24-hr event!



We had a wild time with the other GHO racers after the race ended.



GHOSlow was the life of the party.



Pixie and Shirley won the bronze medal in the female category. Ray & Terri won Super-Vet and I believe Team GHO Slow was 3rd in Super-Vet. (Awards were a little confusing due to the many categories and the issue of U.S. Champs eligibility.) Congrats to all!





One day later, I'm a little tired but feeling good. There are a couple of minor foot blisters that should heal quickly. It helped that I was able to keep my feet dry for much of the race - an all-too-rare luxury. The blackberry bush scratches are fading. My muscles aren't screaming and my Achilles was only a little tight this morning. So I'm in reasonably good shape to start tapering for Untamed New England!

Hiked back to the Hash House after we stopped racing.