Training Log Archive: kgeisen

Event: No Sleep 24hr AR (USARA)
 

Raced as Virtus with Chuck. Not our best performance but a great race and good teammate.

Bike 1: Race started off with truck-led start on park roads. We opted to stick with our plan, which was to take the lake trail to a gravel? road mapped off of the trail. Missed our turn bc road is no longer there, retraced steps (pedal strokes), HAB out to road and then continued as planned. Definitely not the optimal route as most teams came into TA1 ahead of us. We passed one 2-man team and then 361 adventures, who were plagued by mechanicals.

Trek 1: Already getting hot. Started out well, did some running, quickly tagged CPs 6 and 5 then were a little slow on our approach to 3 (creek-reentrant jct) and got a little distracted talking to a new 8 hr team on our attack and spent FOREVER on 4. Only two teams behind us when we got back to TA, and one of them was 361 who'd had to return to start in the meantime.

Bike 2: Mix of road and trail. Great job on CP 7 and 8, saw Dave and Jessie around here but we were still ahead of them, but our highlighter had bleached out in the sunlight and Chuck started leading us to TA2. I didn't realize it at first and then when I heard him thought "that doesn't sound right" and had to pull out clue sheet to check then chase him down. Retraced our steps again and ended up getting CP9 about the same time as D&J. Uneventful ride to TA 2, though I definitely struggled on the trail.

You could either paddle first or trek/do ropes first from TA2. We opted to paddle, thinking the time for that would be harder to judge than for ropes and that if we were close on cutoff time it would be easier to judge our time back on the trek.

Paddle 1: Pretty little lake, uneventful paddle. CPs required getting out of boat and trekking to them. We had a misplot on CP10, thankfully Toporadicals came while we were looking and we realized the mistake. CPs 11-13 were all in cool reentrants. Decided to skip CP14 to avoid the long (relatively) out and back it required figuring that our time was better spent having more time for the 5 trek points in pretty close vicinity to each other.

Trek 2: I still think our above reasoning was solid...if we could have found the ropes CPs. What an exercise in frustration. I think we had three hours of trekking on confusing trails and never found them. Very demoralizing.

Bike 3: It was around 9? when we left TA2 and already dark, so we opted to skip CP20 because it required riding on shitty trails that we'd already struggled navigating. Took a road route to CP21 and made good time. 21 was at a lookout tower where instead of punching the passport you had to write "number stamped into outer rail?" Apparently a lot of teams understood that to mean the bottom rail, but the RD was there and told us they were accepting any number on the tower but the intent had been the number on the top rail. That's what we'd been planning anyway, so that's what we did. And then we immediately missed our turn to the next TA, riding all the way down a huge, long hill before catching the mistake. Retraced our steps (sensing a theme here?) and turned onto the "road" which was reminiscent of last year's Bushwhack Rd. At one point, Chuck said, "I wouldn't even take my Jeep on this road!"

TREK 3: The big trek. We knew we didn't have time to clear this, so when route planning we'd pinpointed 5 that were relatively close. Started out going for CP26 (crevice behind boulder - base of cliff). Clue might as well have been "needle in a haystack". Took a LONG time to find it and probably only did because Wedali found it when we were nearby. Next up was CP30 (I think) (reentrant). Did not look hard on the map, but somehow we got off-track so much that we couldn't figure out what the heck we'd done. Ended up bailing on it and heading back to check out of TA.

Oh the wonders of Pokemon Go. Jacob rediscovered it at Six Flags yesterday with friends, so today instead of me forcing him to join me on our 2 mi run he was the one waking me up and bugging me. "Let's go run!" With him ahead of us, the dog was dragging me like crazy until the second half when he remembered he's like 100 in dog years.

Walk with Jeff and Jacob

Pretty chill ride. Mound --> Callaway Fork OOB

Walk to the lake to release the frogs we raised from tadpoles.

Part of Jacob's unofficial summer running program. He's way out of running shape. Still faster than me, of course. Hot out. Bleh.

Happy dog and mildly unwilling husband.