Adventure Races

I competed in two adventure races over the last two weekends...

The first was in Macon and was a 4 hour sprint race. I raced with a friend from work... it was his first adventure race... we had a great time and finished 2nd in our division and 4th overall. Not bad...

The next one was the Goldrush 24... a twenty four hour ball buster of a race starting in Woodstock, Ga. I don't feel like doing a long description of this race, but I will give it a go... the race was too exhausting to truly capture in print...
We started in downtown Woodstock at 8:00 pm. We had been busy all day... plotting maps... strategizing... driving to Woodstock (through Atlanta and of course sitting in traffic for an hour)... dropping off all of our gear (canoe, bikes, etc)... 1 hour bus ride to the start of the race... prerace meeting... on and on and on... by the time the race started, I was ready for a nap.

We started with a 4 mile road run before the real trekking leg began. This beat my long run from training by a little under a mile... I only did one training run... not the way to start a 24 hour race. We bushwacked, creekwacked, and side hill stomped for the next 5 hours to the canoe leg. The route was exhausting... wet feet... large grain sand in our shoes and socks... and mostly the entire route was side hill trekking on a left to right slope... the slope was probably close to a 1 to 1 slope (a 45 degree angle to the horizon- non technical writing... strange). The grinding in our shoes would not be good later in the race. We found all the checkpoints... got messed up on our route due to a subdivision, but arrived at the canoe in good spirits. The canoe leg was cake... awesome night on the water (we started at around 1:00am)... it was chilly which was a welcome change to the heat of Macon. We knocked out the 15 mile paddle leg in around 4 hours.

Another trek/swim leg followed and never ended. We were in and out of the water... swimming for a while... then trekking over a little island... then swimming again... this went on for the next 10 hours. You could never get the sand out of your shoes... no matter what. It continued grinding for the entire 24 hours. The rest of the team had some bad chaffing problems (the descriptions of pain by these guys led to some cracking up by all team members that can only be appreciated if you are on no sleep or smoking pot (I hear). We got all the checkpoints on this section and arrived at the bike section just in time to head for the finish line...

We finished 3rd in our division and 21st out of 56 teams. We were really happy about this finish. There were a lot of teams who have a lot of experience and many of them had raced this terrain before. Not enough can be said for how much of an advantage that is from a strategy standpoint alone...

Anyway... back to the bike... it was a fun interlude...