Life Is An Adventure Race

by Jim Farmer (farmerjp@bellsouth.net)

My wife, Carol, and I will have celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary by the time most of you read this. It’s been the best ten years of my life, fourteen if you count the dating years. Carol was the one that got me into all of the things that make me who I am today. Being a kid from Brooklyn, New York, my idea of adventure up to that point was playing basketball drunk. That was forty pounds and many pants sizes ago.

Given our current lifestyle (read as insanity) we decided to celebrate our tenth anniversary by doing a three-day adventure race in Florida called Coast-2-Coast. Carol and I have raced together before but never for longer than twelve hours. In fact, Carol had never done a race longer than twelve hours before, period. You might remember that I experienced the joys of multi-day racing last July in the Beast of the East four-day adventure race. Swollen feet, little to no sleep and acid-trip-like hallucinations were the norm.

As most of you know, Carol and I put on a little race called the Greenway Challenge Adventure Race on May 15^th (pictures and video at www.northchick.org). The amount of work put into this race prevented us from even thinking about Coast-2-Coast until just a week before we had to start our adventure. It’s needless to say that a three-day adventure race necessitates more than just a week’s preparation but that’s all we had. This was even further hampered by the fact that we had to go to Kentucky the weekend before the race for my brother-in-law’s wedding, reducing our preparation time down to a few measly weeknights after work. Carol even had to make a trip to Atlanta to pick up the tandem kayak that we were borrowing for the race. We were scrambling to say the least. It was a race, in and of itself, to the starting line.

I felt a great sense of relief as we started the drive to Crystal River, Florida, on the Thursday before Memorial Day. We were at least moving in the right direction. We picked up our support person, Cathi Cannon, in Atlanta on the way down. Cathi was gracious enough to agree to do support for us. Why, I’m not really sure. She essentially gave up a long weekend plus two days to drive around central Florida carrying our crap and unloading and reloading it a couple of times a day at transition areas. It’s an understatement to say that we owe her big time.

Race check-in was short and sweet and at the pre-race meeting we were given the maps for the entire race along with the passport full of UTM coordinates for the various checkpoints (CPs), transitions areas (TAs) and orienteering points (OPs) that made up the course. CPs are required elements but OPs are not. Missing an OP saddled you with a two-hour penalty which is not that bad in the grand scheme of things, especially since our goal was to simply cross the finish line in the allotted timeframe after completing the entire course. After the meeting ended we went back to our hotel room and started the long and tedious process of plotting the coordinates on the maps and then making the all important route choices to get from point A to point B. With little quality sleep in the previous two weeks I was already battling the sleep monsters and we hadn’t even reached the starting line yet. That wasn’t a good sign.

The race started right outside the Days Inn at Crystal River where we had spent the night. All forty-eight teams got in their boats and waited for the starting gun as the sun rose above the horizon at 6:30 on Friday morning. In years past this race was a paddling race for the most part and 2004 proved to be no exception. One hundred, that’s correct, one hundred miles of water, lay in front of us, luckily broken up into manageable chunks. Due to the amount of paddling involved there was an amazing array of boat styles in the water. Everything from canoes and sit-on-tops to space age kayaks that had to be at least thirty feet long and weighed less than my mountain bike. One team even had a catamaran setup where they took two fiberglass tandem kayaks and fixed them together side-by-side with a metal bar on the front and rear. I admit that I had a little bit of boat envy but I knew that our vessel was relatively fast and very stable. The latter property would serve us well very quickly.

We began the first paddling section in an inlet and navigated to CP1 several miles away. At that point we were facing the open seas of the Gulf of Mexico as we made our way to CP2 approximately thirteen miles to the north. We had to go around a five-mile long levee in order to get to CP2 and this pushed us far from the shoreline. That’s when the fun began. We saw our first victims less than a mile from CP1. They were in a very fast, but obviously not so stable, kayak as they bobbed up and down in the waves clutching the bottom of their capsized boat. Their teammates were attempting to right them but without much luck so we decided to help them out. After about twenty minutes or so they finally got themselves back on track and we moved on. It didn’t take long to come across our second rescue of the day as another boat was taking on water quickly. Their boat was swamped and they were trying to bail it with their water bottles. You can probably guess that they were having little luck with this methodology. We helped them retrieve their gear as it floated away and gave them our orange juice jug that doubled as a bailer. Luckily, we were able to flag down a passing motorboat that helped them out and got them back in the race. You’re not supposed to receive outside assistance like that but nobody was going to say much since we were all wallowing near the back of the pack.

It felt good to get out of the water and see Cathi waiting with our bike gear at the TA for the next leg of the race. Carol had become a strong cyclist over the past year and I knew we’d make up time and enjoy the ride. We had to hit two orienteering points before making our way to the next TA. We started off on paved roads but soon found ourselves on sandy back roads on our way to the two OPs. The first one was fairly easy and didn’t take us long. OP2, on the other hand, will be talked about for years to come. Some racers hate the whole navigation and orienteering aspect of adventure racing but I’m one of those people that absolutely thrives on it. The mental challenge is what makes adventure racing my addiction. With that said I was very intent on getting all of the OPs in the race. This stubbornness proved to be my demise. OP2 was supposed to lie in a creek bed on a northerly section of the sandy road we were on just past an off-road trail. The race directors had told us in the pre-race meeting to look for four-wheeler tracks in the creek bed where the yokels had taken advantage of the low water levels that spring. About a mile before my guesstimated mileage point we came across a creek bed next to the road with jeep tracks in it. We were with another team at this point so their navigator and I poured over the map to see if we had missed something. Nope, this can’t be it. The road’s not going in the right direction yet and we hadn’t passed the trail to the left and the mileage is short. So we moved on. Sure enough, about a mile later we came across several teams dismounting their bikes and heading off into the woods to find the OP. The creek bed was there, the trails to the south and the west were there, but there were no jeep tracks. I knew we were in the right spot according to the UTM point given in the passport and my stubbornness convinced me that we were just missing it somehow. Two and a half hours of stubbornness was too much though, especially since the penalty for missing an OP was only two hours. We were four and a half hours in the hole at this point and we were only eight hours into the race. Turns out that the OP was back at the original creek bed. The race directions had given us a UTM coordinate that was a mile off. C'est la vie!

Although depressing, especially only eight hours into a three-day race, we moved on and made our way to the next transition area. Unfortunately, we had another dance with the race demons left on our card before that. Carol was trailing me by about fifty feet on one of the back roads while I looked at the maps on my map stand that I have mounted to my handlebars. Unbeknownst to me, Carol started to make her way up along my right side as I started to veer in that direction. She yelled at me and my immediate reaction was to look that way resulting in my bike veering even more to the right, just enough to lock our handlebars together. Luckily, Carol did a Superman over the handlebars and landed on the side of the road because I came crashing down hard on top of her bike. If she had remained there I would have cracked some of her ribs at the least. She had smacked her head pretty hard resulting in a cracked helmet and I had some serious road rash on my arm. We shook it off and trudged on to the TA.

After licking our wounds in the TA we got back in our boat for a short paddle down a barge canal to an island where we portaged across one of the locks. Before getting back in on the other side we had to find several more orienteering points along the multitude of trails on the island. It took us a little while to get our bearings but once we set eyes on the first OP we knocked off the others quickly. We ran for a lot of this orienteering section mostly because it felt so good to have our feet on solid ground for once. By the way, the OPs consisted of a white rope with dozens of poker chips zip tied onto it. The race directors purposely placed the strings of poker chips in hard to find places such as culvert pipes, trees and hedgerows. There was even one fifteen feet above the ground under a bridge piling which involved a little bit of climbing to get to. Joy.

After exiting the barge canal we entered Lake Rosseau on our way to the town of Dunnellon. The lake soon turned into a series of channels through a dense marsh as the sun set behind us. There were plenty of channel markers guiding us along and we just had to keep heading east to get to Dunnellon so navigation through the marsh was pretty easy as we maintained a steady pace. All that changed though after we hit an intermediate boat ramp and our channel markers disappeared. It was pitch black at that point so we decided to just keep heading east along the most viable channels we could find, eventually dumping us out in Dunnellon. It was at that point that we got a glimpse of our first big gator. We learned from our trip to the Everglades last year that you can tell their size based on the distance between their eyes. For some of these bad boys I just hoped that there were two smaller one-eyed gators swimming next to each other. Highly doubtful though. With a little help from some local fisherman and another team in front of us leading the way, we got to Dunnellon in one piece.

We fueled up at the transition area and packed up our trekking gear as well as our bike gear. The next bike leg was only eight miles long and Cathi wouldn’t have enough time to load our boat and get all of our gear packed and make it to the next TA before we arrived. So we just threw everything in our packs for the short ride and dumped our bike gear for Cathi to pick up later. About a mile into the trek we hit the ropes section of the race. Now, you might be thinking, “Climbing in Florida?” That’s exactly what I said when I heard it. Rope work in Florida means ascending up and then rappelling down a big tree. Pretty lame, I know. The good thing though was that we could ditch our climbing gear at the next TA. Up to that point we had to lug it around everywhere. Dropping several pounds of weight makes a huge difference, especially a couple of days into the race.

The trekking section involved simply following the Florida Trail and finding three orienteering points along the way. It was after 1:00AM when we got through with the ropes section so we knew that finding the ropes with poker chips on them would be difficult at best. After the OP2 fiasco Carol made me promise to spend no more than a half an hour scouring the brush for each of the OPs. Given the fact that missing an OP was only a two-hour penalty, I grudgingly agreed. I knew that our best chance came in numbers but we ended up plodding through the woods looking for the first OP by ourselves. After a half hour of fruitless searching we headed off to the next one. When leaving the trail on our hunt for the next poker chip we came across our gal pals from the Coast Guard team that we got to know while waiting in line for the rappel. They had teamed up with two guys from Atlanta and had just found the poker chip. They gladly told us where to get the chip, hidden under a tree of course. We then joined up with them to form an ad-hoc six-person team for the rest of the trek. Finding the third OP was a cinch with six people scouring the tree line and the rest of the leg was simply a manner of staying on the trail. This sounded easy enough but we soon discovered that this section of the Florida Trail did not receive a heck of a lot of foot traffic making it very easy to get away from the orange blazes that periodically marked the route. However, with six people spreading out in a search pattern we were usually back on our way in a short period of time. We arrived at the next TA, just south of Ocala, as the sun was rising in front of us.

Still feeling strong we downed some food and geared up for the next bike leg. This section of the Florida Trail and Greenway System consisted of hiking, biking and horse trails that were well defined and heavily traveled, unlike the previous section. We made good time on the windy single track, crossing over I-75 on the famous land bridge, and making our way to the Santos parking lot about thirteen miles from where we started. From there it was all road biking as we pedaled straight through downtown Ocala on our way to the Marshall Swamp Trailhead near the Oklawaha River for our next paddling section. After a quick transition we portaged our boat over a mile to the river. Thank god for boat dollies. I’d hate to think about Carol and me carrying an eighty-five pound kayak for miles on end…Oh, wait, that’s what happened later.

Although this paddling leg took only three hours or so it was in the heat of the day and there was no escaping the sun sitting high in the sky. Well away from the coast at this point, the one-hundred degree heat combined with the direct sunlight, little breeze and the fact that we had been racing for over thirty hours made this leg seem much longer than what it actually took. When we pulled our boat out of the water at the Moss Bluff boat ramp we were both feeling pretty haggard. It was 4:30PM, give or take, and we decided to try to get an hour of sleep. Unfortunately, our biological clocks combined with the commotion around the TA made it near impossible to nod off. In races closer to home taking naps or even sleeping for longer periods is typically not an issue while you’re on the trails. However, due to the heat, bugs, gators, rednecks and a variety of other factors, sleep was an option only in the transition areas for this race. Mr. Sandman would have to wait.

Mounting our bikes once again we headed off into the Ocala National Forest. This is where we made our smartest move of the race. While laying out the maps on Thursday night prior to the race I didn’t even consider skipping one of the orienteering points. Maybe it was stubbornness or maybe it was the fact that I was dog-tired. Either way, it didn’t cross my mind that the next orienteering point was way out of our way. While looking at our upcoming route in the TA though I started approximating the distance to OP14. It was at least thirteen miles if it was one. Plus, we had to return back to where we had started in order to continue on. This meant at least twenty-six miles on forest roads that were probably sandy and not very fast. Taking the two-hour penalty and moving on was a no-brainer at that point. Turns out that teams spent anywhere from three to four hours getting OP14. We finally made up for the OP2 disaster with this gem.

Feeling good about our decision to skip OP14 we decided to get OP15 through OP18, which were on our way, for the most part, to the next TA. We took a paved road for several miles before turning off onto one of the many forest roads in the National Forest. It was sandy and bumpy but we were making good time as the sun began to set on our second day of racing. Knocking off OP15 quickly we felt confident that this leg would be a breeze. You’ve probably guessed by now that this was not the case. We turned onto FS79 and were immediately confronted with ankle-deep sand on one of the seemingly endless hills that lay before us. Now these hills were no more than seventy or eight feet of elevation change, a measly bump in the road in Chattanooga, but I’d rather climb Lookout Mountain on a Kmart bike then try to ride up this sandy garbage. We would periodically find a decent patch that was rideable but no sooner than you got your feet clipped in you were spinning your wheels again and pushing. It seemed like an eternity to get to OP16.

OP17 lived off of a paved road just a little out of our way so that one was easily netted but we then had to make a route choice in order to get to OP18. It was debatable whether it was even worth going after it since it lived at the junction of two forest roads, the condition of which was a coin toss. It was on our way to the next TA but we could have taken another route, a little longer in distance but on paved roads the whole way. We were already three OPs in the hole so we decided to try to fetch it. We took a paved road to FS31 and got onto the lovely sand that we so cherished. It was close to midnight on a Saturday night so we weren’t surprised to see a few good ole’ boys driving their testosterone-rigs through the forest from time to time; however, FS31 had a line of them. It looked like the entrance to the drive-in theater in some backwoods town. We soon found out that the entertainment was not on the big screen but in the garbage dump a short ways up the road. Apparently, Ocala National Forest is home to quite a large population of black bears, some of which like to scour the garbage dump for snacks. In fact, one lady stopped to warn us about the bears. I told her that I was much more afraid of the other garbage-eating, beer-drinking, gun-toting mammals. I don’t think she got it.

The rest of the forest roads were mostly rideable but fatigue was setting in as we were more than forty hours into the race and the sleep monsters always arrive around 2:00AM. Carol was starting to struggle a bit but the end was in sight. It was amazing how she rebounded once we hit the paved road just a few miles from the TA. A little mental boost is all you need sometimes. Cathi had gotten us a pizza and we downed a few slices before heading into the tent for some much needed sleep. Carol said that she was going to sleep for four hours and I started to question it given the fact that we would be fighting cutoff times the next day, but I bit my tongue and bedded down. No problem nodding off this time around.

We awoke before sunrise and prepared for another paddling leg. This one would be epic with close to thirty miles of water in front of us. Paddling along the St. John’s River as the sun rose in front of us was serene and we felt refreshed. We made good time knowing that the heat of the day was not far off. There were a couple of teams near us as we approached the next checkpoint. As we stopped to get our passport punched we noticed the Coast Guard team behind us along with the boys from Atlanta. They apparently had as much fun as we did on the desert biking leg the night before. After several more miles of river paddling we got our first glance at the enormity of Crescent Lake. The distances on the map did not give justice to the vastness of this lake. The far side of it seemed to be on another planet. There’s something to be said for paddling on the meandering rivers versus the open lakes. The former offers a different view around each turn with the hope of our destination being just around the next bend while the latter simply taunts your already fried brain with the exact same image for what seems like an eternity. The far side of the lake seemed to get farther away with each paddle stroke rather than closer. About half way across Crescent Lake I started to notice the signs of heat stroke creeping in as my pulse quickened and I felt nauseous and had trouble concentrating. An island in the middle of the lake saved me as we pulled into a small tree-covered cove for a well-deserved break. It was enough to get me through the next couple of hours of paddling.

Cathi had quickly made friends in the transition areas early in the race and we were soon sharing amenities with the other teams. It was more like us taking advantage of their amenities since we didn’t have any. We simply loaded up our Subaru Outback with gear, food, clothes and the like and headed south. Other teams had multiple support vehicles, trailers and even full-size RVs. A little bit of overkill in my opinion but nice to have when you need it. On this occasion we used our neighbor’s large tent to cool off and change clothes in preparation for the easy fourteen-mile bike to the next boat launch. It would have been easy except for the sun beating down on our heads. I will still a little on the dizzy side.

At the next transition I downed a couple of cold bottles of Gatorade and placed a cool towel around my neck to keep my temperature in check. Overall I was feeling pretty good and so was Carol and with the sun starting its journey to the western horizon there was some relief in sight. Unfortunately, the setting sun was not what I wanted for the next leg of the race. Before the race started I knew that this would be the part that either makes us or breaks us. After a one mile paddle on Lake Disston we needed to find the mouth of Little Haw Creek and make our way north for a little over two miles until we hit Highway 305 and the next transition area. Looking at the “marshy/swampy” symbols on the map surrounding the creek I knew that this would not be a leisurely paddle. In fact, once we got off the lake we packed up our paddles and didn’t touch them again for the rest of the leg.

We hooked up with the Coast Guard ladies, Amy and Kim, once again right before we exited the friendly confines of the lake. They were tough as nails and we made a good team so we decided to gut it out together. After initially choosing the wrong waterway we dragged our boats over to the correct stream and began slugging our way up the creek (without a paddle). This was true swampland. The creek was dark brown from the tannins in the leaves and the ground was a mud pit in most places. Given our small statures the best way from point A to point B was by getting in the creek and taking turns hauling the boats over the ever-present logs and tree trunks that crisscrossed the waterway. After each portage we would play shuffleboard with the boats by shooting them along the creek as accurately as we could in order to attain the maximum distance. Someone else would have walked ahead and entered the creek waiting for the next shot. This game of leapfrog seemed to work well but the pace was painfully slow.

You might remember that this thing is called an adventure race for a reason. There are no Hollywood sets and nobody is sitting there making sure that nothing bad happens. This is for real. With that said I’ll elaborate a little bit on where we were and what we saw, heard, felt, smelt, etc. First of all, we were wading through a creek that varied from several inches deep to several feet. That doesn’t count the layers of muck in the creek bed that caused us to sink past our waist in some cases. The fact that you couldn’t see below the surface made it even more enjoyable. Now let’s talk about the critters. I saw at least five types of snakes and enough bugs to keep the Fear Factor folks busy for a while. Carol pointed out the Cottonmouth sitting below a log that one of the Coast Guard gals had just stepped over. They didn’t seem very happy when learning about the nasty results of a Cottonmouth bite. Now let’s talk about gators. Fortunately, there was not very much open water so the big boys left this area alone but there were plenty of their offspring floating around. I wanted to grab one of them just to say I did, but Carol advised against it. She’s the smart one in the family.

It seemed like we were making progress while heading directly north as planned. Night had set in and we donned our headlamps for the rest of the drudgery. Plodding through the creek at night wasn’t much different than during the day since you couldn’t see below the waterline anyway, but the orange reflection of gator eyes was a little bit eerie to say the least. The creek had started to turn to the east and we wondered if we were in the right spot. We decided to send a search party up ahead to find the TA and report back. To our dismay we still had a good three-quarters of a mile or so to go but the good news was that the terrain was beginning to dry up as we got away from the creek allowing us the opportunity to drag our boats on land. After getting the boats past the ever-present and highly annoying Cypress knees that lined the creek we were able to make good time in the pine forest to the west of the water. Amy and Kim had a great towing system that looked like weight-lifting belts with ropes attached at the rear. Amy and I acted as mules and drug the behemoths through the woods until we finally hit the road and pay dirt. We had survived but it was now almost 11:00PM on Sunday night. We had spent well over five hours in the swamp and the cutoff time of 6:00AM on Monday morning was somewhat in jeopardy.

As mentioned earlier, Carol and I were doing this race for fun. Most of you, justifiably so, think that we’re nuts for doing something like this for fun, but it is what it is. Doing it for fun meant simply completing the task at hand, the complete course, in the allotted time. Up to this point we had kept a steady pace and I had kept my competitive side in check. I pride myself in my ability to turn off the competitive juices when I want to and then being able to turn them back on when I’m racing competitively. When we discovered that we still had three-quarters of a mile to go in the swamp the switch got flipped. My game face was on and Carol knew it. The good thing was that she put hers on as well. I’ve only seen this in her on a couple of occasions and I was glad to see it then because we needed it. In the previous transitions, although we were efficient, there was no timetable and no pressure to get out quickly. We simply did what we needed to do and kept moving. In this case, however, I looked at the map and made a conservative estimate of the time needed to complete the last three legs of the race. Then I said that we had to be out of the TA and on our bikes at 11:15PM.

At 11:16 we mounted our steeds and headed out. Although we were in full race mode at this point we stopped to see how our fellow racers, especially Amy and Kim, were faring. There were several teams in the transition area at this point, all looking beaten after the swamp stomp, and we encouraged all of them to press on since they had come too far to quit now. After our rounds we hit the road for a twenty-five mile road ride to the coast. Our destination was the Intracoastal Waterway at Flagler Beach and we set our pace at sixteen miles an hour. Both of us were feeling the effects of three days of racing but were focused on the task at hand and made quick work of the bike leg. I was pulling for the first half of the jaunt but Carol soon got out in front and picked up the pace. She had the eye of the tiger.

We arrived at Flagler Beach with time to spare and got into our boat for the last paddling section of the race. During the marathon paddle across Crescent Lake the previous afternoon I had started to develop tendonitis in my right forearm not to mention the severe lower back pains that I encountered. The tendonitis worsened on this leg forcing me to paddle mostly on the left side. Luckily it was only about five miles or so long. It was a beautiful night once again and we could relax now knowing that we had some time to spare. We came across the Atlanta guys from the trekking section along the way and chatted with them to help stave off the sleep monsters that were starting their nightly taunts. Many a racer has fallen asleep in mid-stroke at two in the morning. It’s sort of hypnotic after a while.

After dropping our boat off with Cathi we hit the beach for a seven or eight mile run, okay it was more of a walk at that point, down the beach to the finish line at the Coral Sands Resort in Ormond Beach. It was going to be a beautiful finish, at least until I started flipping out thinking that we had gone too far and wanted to run back because I thought I saw people flashing their headlights at us a few miles back. I’m allowed to experience some hallucinations, right. After running into another team that brought me back down to reality we continued our beach walk to the finish line. As always, the finish line is anticlimactic with just a few race officials and a handful of support crew members waiting for their teams. After over one hundred miles of paddling, just under two hundreds miles of biking and about thirty miles of trekking over a three-day period we didn’t need other people to pat us on the back. It’s not the finish line that counts. It’s the journey to it. This was definitely one journey to be remembered.

P.S. If you think this sounds like fun then give me a shout and I can get you started. You can check out our club website at www.TrailBlazerAR.com or email me at farmerjp@bellsouth.net.