Life Is An Adventure Race

by Jim Farmer (farmerjp@bellsouth.net)

The North Georgia Adventure Race, NGAR for short, has become a rite of passage for adventure racers in the southeast. In the not-so-distant past, simply crossing the finish line of an adventure race was an accomplishment for even the strongest teams. However, race directors started to cater to the masses by making courses more achievable and providing alternate courses for those that fell short but still wanted the opportunity to cross the finish line. A typical thirty-hour race, for example, would be completed by the winning team in around twenty hours or so and probably three-quarters of the teams would finish the race on either the full course or one of the alternate courses. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a problem with this in the least. In fact, I’m a huge proponent of the “let people get their money’s worth” approach. But at the same time, there needs to be some races that have that mythical quality about them. NGAR is that kind of race.

In January 2003, six inches of snow and below zero temps resulted in a handful of finishers and a whole bunch of support crews, including mine, rescuing their teams from the mountains betweens Suches and Blue Ridge, Georgia. In 2004, the snow was replaced by rain. That, plus the cold weather, produced similar results to the previous year. I cleverly sat that one out and volunteered with my wife, Carol. Despite the horrid conditions I couldn’t stand not being out there with my adventure racing brethren, so January 2005 would signal my return to the fray.

Bryan Goble, a fellow TrailBlazer from Atlanta, had just come off a phenomenal year of adventure racing with multiple victories including the Beast of the East and the E-Fix and a top 25 finish in the Subaru Primal Quest. You might remember that he was my “Little Drummer Boy” at Primal Quest, but that’s another story entirely. Bryan is an AR addict, like myself, and one of the best navigators in the region. I talked him into joining me for NGAR so all that was left was finding a strong female. Bryan’s teammate from Primal Quest, Tristen, a Nashvillian, agreed to join us. Things were shaping up as we tried to drop a few “holiday” pounds before the day of reckoning in the middle of January. Unfortunately, Tristen’s tendonitis started acting up in the weeks before the race and her doctor advised her to sit it out. We had four days to find a compatible racer with the correct combination of chromosomes.

Kim Daly, an Army gal from North Carolina, read our desperate pleas for a fem-bot on the message boards and agreed to join us for the ride. This was despite the many warnings from Bryan and me as to our complete lack of tact and manners. I guess being in the service made here immune to such incivilities, so she was good to go. After three days of emails and phone calls taking care of last-minute details I was sitting in the gym at the East Fannin Elementary School in Blue Ridge on Friday night waiting on my teammates to show up for the required gear check-in. Bryan showed up in plenty of time but there was no sign of our mysterious new teammate. Gear check-in ended at 8:00 and teams would be penalized fifteen minutes for every minute they were late. At 7:30 I started to get a little bit anxious. Luckily, Kim popped her head through the door a few minutes later. I have to admit that the pucker factor was high for a while.

After the race meeting at 8:30 we were given the maps for all but the first leg of the race. Once we got back to our hotel rooms I started plotting the checkpoints on the maps using the UTMs given in the passport while Bryan got his gear together. Bryan then took over to lay out the route choices for our journey since he would be the lead navigator the next day. It was after midnight when we finally got the support vehicle loaded up and all of our gear sorted out. It didn’t seem much longer after that when the alarm when off at 4:00AM and another day of adventure racing was about to begin.

After some last minute instructions from Tony Berwald, the race director, we were given the passport instructions for the first leg of the race at a little past 6:00. Quickly plotting the three checkpoints for this leg we headed out onto Aska Road on foot and then quickly turned up Stanley Gap Road for the start of the half-marathon up and over Rocky Mountain, with about fifteen hundred feet of climbing right off the bat. We got to the Lake Blue Ridge Recreation Area in just under three hours and were sitting near the top 10. Finishing in the top 10 was our arbitrary goal so we were content for the moment. A quick transition to the paddling section on Lake Blue Ridge and a heads-up decision to put our boat in farther up the peninsula instead of using the boat ramp, kept us near the front.

With neither Bryan nor I sporting huge pecs, lats and all those other upper body muscle thingies and Kim not being a very strong paddler either, we gave up several positions on our counter-clockwise trip around the lake. However, after paddling upstream along the mouth of the Toccoa River I was given a chance to stretch my legs as I took the passport and sprinted the two miles from Tilley Bend to the canoe launch at Sandy Bottom and back. It was the only time in the race where teams didn’t have to obey the one hundred foot rule and I took full advantage of it. We jumped up several spots and finished the rest of the paddle leg, including an advantageous portage across a peninsula in the lake, still in the hunt. Another quick transition had us heading out onto our bikes for the longest section of the race. We would not see our support crew again until the next morning. Of course, I say support crew as if we had a NASCAR-like pit crew changing our shoes with rivet guns and sticking gas cans full of gel in our mouths as we transitioned. Unfortunately, our adventure racing budgets could only afford to hire Bryan’s fiancée Eva for the grand sum of three thank yous and a bunch of dirty clothes to deal with. Eva is a support crew veteran though and made the TA as smooth as butter each and every time. A NASCAR crew couldn’t compare. She looks and smells a lot better to boot.

The following race leg will be talked about for years to come in the adventure racing community. The AR message boards were lit up in the days following the race with polarized comments and verbal fisticuffs over the “fairness” of this section of the race. The plain and simple fact is that all is fair in love, war and adventure racing. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. This leg would consist of a brutal bike leg up and over both Green Mountain and Stanley Gap followed by an optional orienteering section and then finished off by a long bike ride to the south that included the Fish Hatchery area and up and over Winding Stair Gap. Since Kim was a last minute replacement we didn’t have a good handle on her mountain biking abilities before the race; therefore, our estimates were based on the pace that Bryan and I would normally go in a thirty-hour race. Our failure to readjust our estimates would be our demise.

The rides up Green Mountain and Stanley Gap quickly became hike-a-bikes as I shouldered the load for Kim who had started to feel the effects of eight hours of racing. The weight was considerable as we had clothes, food, mandatory gear and running shoes for what we had estimated would be twelve or so hours on our own. We had hoped to get to the orienteering section before dark to let the remaining sunlight aid us in our search for the small navigation flags hidden in the woods, but we ended up barely making the bike drop before total darkness set in. This is the point in the race where a time machine would be a godsend. ONLY IF we had reevaluated the last bike leg we would have realized that our seven-hour estimate was more like ten to twelve hours given the current physical state of our team. A 5:00AM cutoff at the Skeenah Mill Campground meant that we would have to leave the orienteering section immediately, rather than trying to knock off some of the “optional” orienteering points before continuing on. Despite warnings from Kim, Bryan and I, fearful of dropping spots in the race due to the time penalties assessed for missing the orienteering points, gave ourselves until ten o’clock to get back to our bikes. We knocked off two of the three points we searched for and then made a fateful decision to go after CP14 to try to make up for missing CP11. On the map it looked like an easy trot up two miles of jeep trail, but the maps can be, and usually are, deceiving. The trail was lined with fallen trees forcing us to climb over and through the carnage or bushwhack our way up the ridge. Stubbornness set in and we burned up way too much energy and time getting that last punch before returning to the bike drop area well after eleven. It was our Waterloo.

Almost out of water and food we started the cold ride from the Stanley Gap area to the Skeenah Mill Campground where the next TA would be. Although it is illegal to meet your support crew or get any other assistance while on the course, it is legal to use the public facilities available along the course. So we planned on getting water and using the heated bathrooms at the campground to regroup. The ride to Skeenah Mill was about thirteen miles of both paved road and jeep road. Relatively flat, it would be the easiest riding we would have all night. Unfortunately, our waning energy levels and the twenty-degree temps started to take their toll as it took us close to two hours to knock it off. With a total of forty five to fifty miles of riding on this bike leg and some brutal climbs to CP17 and up to Winding Stair Gap, it didn’t take long to do the math. Bryan and I laid out the maps in the bathrooms at the campground and didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that we had already worked out in our heads on the way there. Not only would we not make the 5:00AM cutoff to finish on the “full course”, we would also miss the cutoff for Alternate Course 1 and would be lucky to make the cutoff for Alternate Course 2. The prospects were not good. After a quick powwow with Kim we decided to call it a night and hand in our passport and put our tails between our legs.

D, N and F are three letters that I despise, but for NGAR 2005 as well as for 2003 and 2004, they were very common letters. Teams started dropping like flies and when the front-runners, Team Mighty Dog, dropped due to illness it was apparent that only one team, Team SEAR, had a chance at making the 5:00AM cutoff. They had been in 30^th place going into the optional orienteering section but had smartly skipped it. Incurring twenty hours of penalties due to their omission meant nothing as the rules clearly stated that teams would be ranked according to the cutoffs first and then time penalties second. The top teams, us included, had gotten caught up in the “o-frenzy”, afraid of losing positions due to the time penalties, but had lost sight of the grand prize, which was finishing the full course. The tortoises had beaten the hares. Although frustrating when you’re on the losing end, this is what makes adventure racing so special. The fastest team isn’t always the winner.

There were several reasons for the miscalculations made by the top teams. First of all, Tony, the RD, had given an estimate before the race that the winner would be finished in twenty hours. Most teams assumed that the estimate included the orienteering course, but it didn’t. Also, the optional orienteering course was too far away from one of the race cutoffs; therefore, it was very difficult to estimate how much time could be spent orienteering before jumping back on the bikes, especially for teams that were not familiar with the area. Bryan and I knew this area like the back of our hands though, so we had no excuse. These issues will be the fuel for debate concerning the 2005 NGAR for quite a while, but the fact is that adventure racers have to deal with incomplete and sometimes misleading information all of the time. Most of the teams, including ours, failed to adapt. Chalk another one up to experience.

Team SEAR (Southeastern Adventure Racers) finished first and Team NADS (North Atlanta Dirt Scorchers) finished second, both teams filled with TrailBlazer members. Bill Hill (SEAR), Jay Scott and Star Affolter (NADS), the latter from Chattanooga, were my teammates from the Subaru Primal Quest last year and kudos to them for finishing at the top of one of the toughest adventure races in the country. Not a bad way to start off the race season for those guys. Hopefully, I can pick up the pieces and have a successful year as well. Spring is not that far off, so it’s time to shed those holiday pounds and get the adventure racing legs back under you. Of course, a great way to get rid of those cobwebs is to sign up for the Greenway Challenge Adventure Race right here in Chattanooga on May 21st. It’s beginner friendly but challenging enough for the experts as well. You can get details at www.northchick.org.

P.S. If you think adventure racing is for you then check out our club website at www.TrailBlazerAR.com.