Discussion: Great play by play account ...

Great play by play account of your awesome race. I was one of the people who noticed the 5 km/hr pace on the bike portion and feared that mechanicals had gotten to you. Nope, just a monsoon ;)
Way to go, Michigan!

Great write up. I will just copy and paste it onto mine. lol. And maybe add the bit about me not having any breaks 30 minutes into the first biking section! (oy vey)

No brakes? WHA?

Yeah it was wild. I do not have disc breaks and not sure if it was due to the rain fall or Canadian soil but my break pads completely wore off. Was a good thing most of it was hike-a-bike otherwise I would have probably died. Once we finally got onto the paved road to the finish, of course the boys were excited because we could finally "ride" our bikes, but I had to walk the downhills until a volunteer named Rob came to my rescue and whipped out a bike stand on the side of the road (because he saw me walking the downhills) and tightened the breaks up enough as to where I had SOME kind of a break.

Wow.

Good write-up teammate. I have big regrets about not bushwhacking from 4 to 5 to 6. Off-trail orienteering is the best part of a race (until you get lost), but we decided on the conservative route as a team and sometimes a mental and physical break from the tough terrain pays dividends further on in the race. I do think we would have been 9th or 10th if we had taken on the greater risk/reward route.

Each day the odds of me racing the WT again get slightly better... although my right hand and toe are STILL numb as ever so we'll see if those have recovered by next July.

It took 5 months and several chiro treatments for my right fingers to stop being numb after Tierra Viva last year. I had a toe stay partly numb for the better part of a year after one 36-hr race.

What's odd about skipping the bushwhacking is we enjoyed it last year, did well enough at it to consider it one of our strengths, had done well enough at it at that point in the race, had drawn up our routes to do it...and then it seemed at the time to make sense not to and instead trail it up a bit. The team had a tiny bit "are we there yet" vibe whacking away from 4 to the hydro cut, which may have been a factor. I will regret that until next year!

Heal up!