Adventure Racing 11:45:00 [3] 60.0 km (11:45 / km)
Heavy rain moved in around 2AM, and it was still drizzling when we woke up. With the bike still in the car, I managed to squeeze into the passenger's seat and do most of my pre-race prep out of the rain.
We were bussed up to the Sterner Mill section of Nockamixon SP, and after a quick prologue we were off on the foot-O section. Our route was 14, 12, along a fishermen's shoreline trail with lots of poison ivy to M1, 8, 6, 4 (with Untamed NE), 3, 1 (searching with GOALS and others for a while), 2. At this point, we headed back along the stream with a number of teams, hoping to find an easy ford over to 5. We ran out of options when the stream turned into a large pond, and watched another team cross while we prepared to follow. When they started stumbling and going in over waist deep, we decided it was too early in the race to be that wet, and bailed out to the road. We picked up 9, 10, and 13 en-route to the boats.
Our plan for the second section was to quickly put Jason ashore on the south side of the lake, and let him pick up as much as he could in 2.5 hrs. In the meantime, Kate and I would take the boat to a cove between A and M3, and pick up A, F, E, D and M3 before paddling to N to regroup at 1:30PM. We saw a nice landing spot a little before our intended cove, and I wrapped my PFD around a tree on the trail to mark our canoe's spot on the shoreline. We found A, a small reentrant off a larger one, and my plan was to swing left (west) to intersect the trail heading north to F and E. But apparently our reentrant was already running west, and I swung us SE. We ended up right back at the trail we had left to get A, and headed for M3.
We found D along with Strong Machine, and when they took the bushwhack to E, we decided to loop around on the trail. That is, until we saw the old forest road running north, and foolishly followed this "shortcut", which quickly turned into a slow bushwhack. I knew we were behind schedule, since we had a 1hr paddle to get to N, but by this point the fastest way out was to keep pushing north. Our GPS track shows us crossing the lower Old Mill Trail to E, but I don't ever remember seeing this. We looped north, crossed the creek, and eventually came into E from the east side of the mill pond.
We needed to be paddling at this point, so we had to skip F and run 3.5K back to the boat, and then slog for an hour up to N. Jason had made fast work of his points on the south side of the lake, and had skipped P to make it back to our meeting spot, arriving 1 minute ahead of time. He got a nice rest until we pulled up 30 minutes late. From there it was another 30 minutes of paddling to bring us to the bike T/A.
The MTB trails at Nockamixon were a blast! My only issue on this section was that I started feeling really nausous about halfway through the singletrack. I think I may need to stop indulging in Rootstock's mid-race coffee shots. Trying to unscramble the twisty dashed lines on the map while riding twisty trails eventually proved too much, and Jason stepped up to confirm our nav while I tried to get my head and body back to normal.
Once that passed, the rest of the biking went smoothly, and we breezed past several teams on the dirt roads, trusting our odometers and counting reentrants to confirm that they were searching under the wrong bridges.
We rolled into the final T/A, having decided we wouldn't bother with any of the optional bike-O points in the dark and in the rain. But a quick glance at the map showed two "gimme" points, so back out we went. Kudos to teams that rode those rocky trails in the wet!
We picked up a final 5 points on foot, with Jason blasting off up reentrants to punch while Kate and I prepared for the next location. With 15 minutes to spare but nothing else within striking range, we celebrated our first race together and headed back to the finish.
I don't think any of us knew exactly what to expect heading into our first race as The Adventure Dogs!, but we all came out of it smiling, healthy, and confident in our team.
Thanks to Brian, Abby, and Brent and the rest of the Rootstock family and volunteers for an outstanding course and a great race experience!