Training Log Archive: abiperk

Event: The Jersey Inferno
 

Jersey Inferno with Brent, Brian, and Jim, coming off his solo overall win at the Equinox. A bit of a dream team scenario. Race began with a King of the Mountain to CP1 - we were told just to follow the flagging, no nav necessary. We knew that we wanted to push the first leg so as to avoid a bottleneck at the rappel to TA1 at the end, so we pushed hard. Jim grabbed my pack and he and I took off. He gave me a push some at the beginning but then we settled in and he let me set the pace. Britt, Jeff, and Fritz from Rev3 were close behind. The trail kept going and going, far longer than the estimated 1 kilometer from Brent. For a long stretch, we didn't see any flagging, but Jim and I were able to rationalize it away... until the trail started descending. We paused to regroup. Rev3 turned back first, and we followed a few minutes later. Turns out we'd missed the flagging at the very beginning of the leg, as did a number of other teams. They just caught it more quickly. So, queen of the mountain - just the wrong one.

We oriented ourselves and ran back, collected CP1, and set off for the four mandatory and six optional CPs. A couple small nav bobbles but overall we moved well. Most noteworthy part was a calculated swim across a pond, to avoid an extra k-ish around. Refreshing, and we made up a fair bit of time on it.

We got to CP4, just before the rappel, and heard half a dozen teams ahead of us. Not wanting to wait in line, we opted to run an extra 2k on trails for the optional 5a and avoid the ropes. Ugly unexpected bushwhack on the back end, when a mapped trail didn't exist, but we felt good about the decision... until we got to TA and saw a bunch of teams that had been behind us.

We were pretty demoralized, but we put it behind us and got on our bikes. Later we learned from the RDs that they had decided to let everyone descend the rappel on foot because of the bottleneck. They were super classy, though, and offered us an extra 20 minutes on the course to make up for it.

Total estimate on mileage.

C • k-ish 8

The last 2/3 of the course were almost all single track mountain biking, with a short 2.5 mile paddle in the middle. Brent went into the race pretty depleted and started feeling crummy with about an hour to go in the trek, so we pulled back to maintenance mode for much of the rest of the race. I'm generally not a huge fan of long single track sections, but overall had a lot of fun here.

I was out of water and started to dip with about an hour to go. With the help of shot blocks, a few pulls of water, and fun stories from Jim, I bounced back in time for the paddle.

A quick paddle down a beautiful little creek. Brian and I were out in front with Jim and Brent bringing up the rear. Nice reprieve from the bikes, no checkpoints.

When we got into TA, the RD told us about the rappel issues and that we'd get a time bump for taking the long route. We learned that Rev3 was the only team that stood a chance at that point of clearing the course. We had no idea what other teams would or could do, so we opted for an extra 20 on the course rather than a credit to see how much more we could do.

C • Credit 3

Back on the bikes for as many optional CPs as we could get. We started off moving well and headed up the eastern side of the map. Lots of on-and-off the bikes for short whacks to the CPs. We made it about halfway to the northernmost point in an hour and stopped to evaluate. We didn't think we could clear everything and make it back by 7:20pm, so we took what we thought was a conservative approach and dropped CP-S, which would have been easy to get down to but involved an uphill slog on a pipeline to the next CP. Instead, we stayed on the powerline trail... that is, until the powerline trail unexpectedly dumped us into a high fence and a working farm, which wasn't apparent anywhere on the map.

So commenced a 30-40 minute hellacious bikewhack through dense thorns, trying to get around the farm to the road about 300 meters above it. When we finally got out and made it to the next point, we ran into two guys who we'd seen at the previous point, when we decided to skip S. They were coming from S.

At that point, we were pretty deflated. We had roughly 90 minutes left and didn't think it would be possible to get all the way north and back to the Blazing Saddles and the finish. We stared at the map for a good five minutes, weighing all our options, and ultimately decided to ride down for S and then straight to the final mandatory point, which was the start of a 3k-ish time trial on cross country trails. Jim and Brian took off, both with a chance of winning the Blazing Saddle award. Brent and I hung back and rode more conservatively. The ride was a bit more technical than I was anticipating, but still fun. My tire went soft at the very end of the trail, but we only had a few hundred meters on roads to the finish.

We punched in at 7:02PM, so very little to show for our 20 minute time credit. We'd left five points on the second mountain biking sections, good for a second place finish behind Rev3.

Overall, even with the rocky start and the decisions that didn't pan out, we had a ton of fun, and it was an awesome team effort to get everyone across the line in one piece. Final tuneup before Alaska. I finished the race feeling more prepared than I expected.

Now to figure out how to get all our gear to Anchorage...

Home from Chestnut Hill, ~10 pounds in pack. Just an easy walk to try to shake out heavy legs before tomorrow's Inferno.

Woods loop with the pups, 30 pounds of pack and baby on back.

Steady ride on the trainer.