Life Is An Adventure Race

It’s been a while since I’ve written an article and I thought that nobody would notice, but apparently there are two or three people out there that actually read my prattle. I couldn’t let those dedicated readers down so here goes. A lot has happened in my life as an adventure race since my last article in February. I started an adventure racing club (www.TrailBlazerAR.com) in Chattanooga, participated in several adventure races and tried to find work somewhere in between. I hate when real life gets in the way of adventure racing but working does help pay for stuff. Speaking of stuff, I don’t even want to think about how much dime I’ve dropped this year on Required Gear List crap. The Required Gear List is the list of items that the race director makes you have with you before you can hit the starting line. It’s a combination of race equipment like a bike, helmet and climbing gear and safety items like strobe lights, Motrin and Ace bandages. Each race has a different gear list and the race directors can get downright picky. I had to buy a new locking-blade knife for my last race because the one I had was two inches long rather than the required two and a half inches. Of course, I had to have the absolute lightest one available but that’s because I’m an addict. More about that later.

After the frigid conditions of the North Georgia Adventure Race in January, I was ready for spring. Well, spring took a while to arrive but we lucked out at the NOC 12-Hour Dawn To Dusk Adventure Race in Bryson City, NC. It ended up being a beautiful March day in the middle of a month of nastiness. Unfortunately, my team didn’t have much success but we did beat all of the time cutoffs to finish the race, something that nearly half the teams couldn’t say. It was a tough 12-hour race since it had 24 checkpoints. That’s a checkpoint every half hour and some of them were not easy to find. We spent nearly two hours looking for CP2. Needless to say, we were deep in the hole and it was tough getting motivated again. Then came the killer. The UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) coordinate, that’s a positioning system for land navigation similar to latitude/longitude, given for CP4 was one kilometer off. That’s a KILOmeter, not a meter or centimeter or millimeter, but a KILOmeter. We had lost about 600 feet of elevation gain going to where we thought CP4 lived before being told about the error and going back up the mountain. Boy were we really in the hole now. But I’m proud of my team for gutting it out and finishing the race on time. It was purely out of pride. Maybe we were lucky to have stumbled early in the race though, because several teams, including many Chattanoogans, spent several hours trying to find CP15. They found out later that it either blew away or was stolen. Talk about frustrating. The NOC left a lot to be desired in putting this race together but Lecky Haller, the race director, was very apologetic and made assurances that the problems would be corrected next year. I guess that’s all you can ask of them.

The next stop on the tour was the Blue Ridge Mountain Adventure Race in Blue Ridge, GA, in late April. This race holds a special place in my heart because it was my first ever adventure race two years prior. I couldn’t make it last year because it fell the week before the Greenway Challenge and I was up to my eyeballs in minutia at that point. Once again, it turned out to be a beautiful day for racing, but our troubles started three weeks before the race when my wife, Carol, turned her ankle while trail running. This was going to be our first race together since Fall Creek Falls last August and we invited our buddy Mike Pollock to come along for the ride. He had never done an adventure race before but Mike’s always in good shape and never shies away from an adventure so he was a perfect fit for our team. With Carol on the DL, we found a last minute replacement and trudged forward. Our replacement was a good athlete but not a strong runner. I thought that this was fine since, in years past, the race started off with a short run, then a whitewater paddle down the Toccoa River, followed by mountain biking and a trek at the end. Unfortunately, this year, the race directors decided to put a thousand foot climb and an extra five or so miles onto the start of the race and impose time cutoffs along the way. Well, we didn’t make the last time cutoff and got a DNF. This race was doomed from the start. It happens.

I had a short respite in May and started training hard for the Southern Crush Adventure Race in June. But there was a little race called the Riverbend Challenge that was being held a week before the Southern Crush that kept distracting me. The Riverbend Challenge is a sprint adventure race held in downtown Chattanooga at the start of the Riverbend Festival every year. It’s a great little race that you can do solo or as a three person coed team. The problem is that I’ve finished in fourth place as a solo racer the only two years that the race has been held. Each year there was something that kept me off of the podium. The first year I forgot my helmet coming out of the transition area and had to go back and get it. The second year I had just gotten over the flu. I was determined to make this year different. I told Teresa Potts Wade, the race director, that if I approached the finish line in fourth place she should hold me back so I could at least finish something other than fourth. Well, guess what, she didn’t hold me back and I was fourth again. If I’m anything I’m consistent. No excuses this time though. I simply got my butt whipped. Kevin Croft, who finished third, didn’t help matters when he said that he was not in great shape this year. $^@O*&(^#*&%)!!!! Next year I’m going to wear a shirt during the race that says on the back, “If you’re reading this then you’re in fifth place.”

It was not shaping up as a great year of adventure racing for me but the race I had been prepping for the most was the next weekend and I was determined to take the bull by the horns. The Southern Crush Adventure Race was being held on Pigeon Mountain, GA and the nearby town of Lafayette. For those of you that have not been to Pigeon Mountain before I’ll simply say that it’s a rugged place with lots of caves, sinkholes, snakes and other nasties. It was about a fifty minute drive from my house so I had spent countless days riding and running the seemingly infinite trails on and around the mountain and GPSing them as much as possible. I collected every map I could get my hands on and, using my topo software, overlaid the trail maps and GPS data onto the mountain to try and make sense of the place. By the time race day came around I had hiked and/or biked every trail, both documented and undocumented, on the mountain. Remember that comment in the first paragraph about being an addict. A little over a week before the race I had lost my major client. Instead of looking for work I spent most of my time memorizing maps, training and trying to shave ounces off of my required gear. Thank god my wife is an understanding person; otherwise, I’d be signing divorce papers about now.

As expected, the race was a navigational nightmare with checkpoint flags in sinkholes well off of the beaten path and stuck in the middle of big fields. Of course, the maps given were as old as dirt and, in many cases, were more hindrance than help. Wait a minute. Did I mention the fact that the race was held at night? Yep, race start was at six o’clock on Saturday evening and it ended at six the next morning. Now, imagine finding a checkpoint in a sinkhole well off of a trail that isn’t even on the maps and throw in the fact that it’s the middle of the night. That’s where months of preparation paid off. As soon as I plotted the checkpoints on the map I knew the best way to get to each one. I had played these scenarios in my head for weeks. Unfortunately for my poor legs, a lot of these scenarios involved bushwhacking my way up and down the mountain. It’s been almost two weeks since the race and my legs still look like they’ve been through the Spanish Inquisition. But that’s the price of victory. I finished first in the solo division. The jinx had been broken. The bad part of it all is the lesson that I had learned: Ignoring my job, wife, family and friends for months at a time results in a win. God help me.