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Saturday Oct 2, 2010 #
Note
Bash knows how to embed photos into these. I don't, although I think I need to have an online photo album like picassa to do it. Too much trouble at this point. If you want the full Word document in all its glory, I'll be happy to email it to you. Oh yeah: this is long.
Comic book guy says: “Worst nav ever.” Or “didn’t you pass us an hour ago?”
In the immortal words of the late and lamented Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic”. I had my trusty Suunto trekking compass in my pack, but I was with a strong team here and didn’t want to stop to fish it out. Being a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is, I stayed cool and during the next 5 minutes rode with the team trying to ascertain the exact compass issue I was dealing with. It became clear that it was consistently and exactly reversed, so as long as I remembered that North was South and East was West I should be able to make a go of it.
Sadly I had lost touch a bit with the map whilst doing this little experiment, and when Mr. Forcier – uber mountain biker and navigator for the Quebec team – made a small mistake, I didn’t catch it. As I hammered up a steep gravel road I heard the girl yell up “Hey Steve!” to her team-mate who was following me. Funny story here: it turns out his name wasn’t Steve. She though my name was Steve and she was trying to get my attention to tell me that this was the wrong turn-off. Not being Steve, I pressed onwards.
Ha-ha. Hilarious, eh?
Almost immediately after I crested the top of the climb the roads began to differ wildly from what was shown on the map (even correcting for my compass). Also, there was no sign of the team I had been happily riding with until now. I did an about-face and screamed back down the hill, hoping they would still be at the intersection, but they were gone and I never saw them again until the finish.
Looking at the map I realized we had turned in too soon: the road we wanted was another 400-500 metres further down the road. Merde. Sacre Bleu! I had lost some really good “team-mates”. I set off down the road on my own. At least I was now competent to navigate with my bizarro compass. Or so I thought…
During the ensuing 2+ hours of muddy, wet, and treacherous riding I managed to make every single possible wrong turn. I may even have come up with a few that weren’t there. During my map preparation I had meticulously broken the leg down into segments with distance measurements so I could use my odometer to help navigate. Because I was a complete idiot I then decided not to bother using my odometer initially. I don’t know why.
Every wrong turn followed the same pattern: bike for about 10 minutes with slowly growing doubts about my route choice, go down a really long and steep hill, and then hit an impassable dead-end. It became rather embarrassing as I repeatedly passed the same teams 3 or 4 times during the course of this fiasco. After a while I gave up on navigating and mostly tried to follow tire tracks. Worst nav ever.
Brakes-Schmrakes: A video clip is worth 1000 words
To add to my misery, I started having brake problems distressingly early on. I had lost both brakes during the Logs Rocks and Steel race 2 weeks earlier, so I was riding with virtually brand new brake pads. Maybe I got a defective set, maybe there’s something wrong with my disks, maybe it all had to do with my bib being #13 – I don’t know. The point is that about ½-way through the ride I was back down to Fred Flintstone brakes.
Here they are in theory:
…and in practice:
This was also the second mountain bike leg during an adventure race where I had a near-drowning incident. The trails in the Muskoka area are infamous for their many, many “puddles”. These are murky pools of water that invariably cover the trail from side to side and extend sometimes for over 50 metres. Deciding whether to ride through or dismount and walk around these is like playing Russian roulette. Furthermore, as a solo racer I didn’t have the benefit of watching our designated team Guinea Pig ride though them first. The pattern was predictable: every one I bailed on and walked around turned out to be 3 inches deep and paved, whereas the ones I decided to brave turned out to be rutted and rocky and deep enough to swallow a bus.
The worst incident was when I was balancing along the berm beside a very deep body of trail water. My handlebar clipped a tree and I toppled sideways off the berm and headfirst in the puddle. I had enough time to think “oh sh%t, this is gonna suck”, but not enough time to unclip. When everything settled out I was completely underwater except for my left foot, which was clipped into the pedal. That and the wheels which were still leaning against the berm were the only things not submerged. My right foot was clipped in and also pinned under the bike. I don’t remember how I managed to detach myself from the bike and surface, but it probably looked a bit like this loser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEULHN3R5xQ&feature...
Needless to say I was greatly relieved when the ride was done with. Despite my laughable navigation I made the cut-off and completed the advanced section. Pulling into the transition area for the second trek I was greet with “Hey dude: didn’t you pass us like three times already?”
It couldn’t get worse, right?
Revenge of the Tibia
Since time was clearly no longer of the essence I took my sweet time transitioning. I had mud and sand and grit and twigs in every possible fold and crack and…you get the idea. Getting butt-nekkid again was a no-brainer. I had plenty of clean dry clothes to change into in my gear bag. My sincere apologies to the TA staff.
As soon as I set off running down the road my left shin made itself known. It had been merely a nagging annoyance during the bike ride, but now it was letting me know in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t going to put up with any abuse. Unfortunately by now “abuse” included any kind of weight-bearing whatsoever. Being a trained biomechanist and pedorthist I quickly adopted an antalgic gait to cope with this new challenge. That’s just fancy-speak for limping, which is a great way to get other parts of your body to start hurting as well. Luckily I only had about a 20 minute run before heading into the woods again.
Bushwhacking was easier on my leg in one respect – I wasn’t running – but much, much worse in other respects – every log, branch, root, twig, and blade of grass smacked me in precisely the same injured spot every single m$therf&cking time. I built a lot of character during this trek. Technically it was a simple enough bushwhack: go east until you hit highway 400. This was a handrail that not even I could mess up, and I rose to the occasion magnificently and missed spiking the CP by a mere 50 metres. Now that I was completely and utterly out of it, I was actually starting to race reasonably well. The funny thing was that highway 400 – a 4-lane divided highway - wasn’t shown on our maps. Maybe it’s time to update some of our topos, eh.
Red Wine and Chocolate
Jogging into the paddling transition I met up with (hyper) Active Steve and his beau Deanna – uber-volunteer turned racer. I shared some of my litany of woes with them and they laughed at me, but then almost immediately made up for it by offering me some red wine. Really. Deanna had a box of some pretty good red wine in her transition bag, along with some wikkid chocolate. This woman knows how to pack.
The final leg of this race was a pretty straight-forward paddle to the finish. I figured it would take me about 1.5 hours on my surfski, and the only challenge was going to be finding the entrance to the correct channel about midway through. The water looked calm so what the heck, I had myself a second swig of wine before setting off.
Surfskiing: in Theory and in Practice
My solo boat is a sweet Think Fit, which is a surfski as opposed to a kayak. What’s the difference, you may ask? A quick scan through Wikkipedia shows that “A surf ski is a long, narrow, lightweight kayak with an open (sit-on-top) cockpit, usually with a foot pedal controlled rudder.” It goes on to note that “Despite its typical instability, a surf ski (with an experienced paddler) is a very effective craft for paddling in big surf.” Once I got out of the shelter of some long islands and into open water, I realised that the swell was actually quite nasty.
Being at the end of a long lake, the swells had a nice long reach in which to build up. They were probably about 2 feet + from crest to trough and quartering into my port stern on the heading that I wanted to follow. Not a problem for this guy;
but for me it was hard work trying to keep upright. I basically had to run straight downwind with the swells until I hit shore and then traverse over to get into the channel I wanted. I managed to get about 200 metres from shore when a wave caught me a bit off-centre and turned and flipped the boat faster than you could say “hey look, Dobos can’t surfski worth crap!”
The water was cold. Not gasping cold, which was a good thing, but bloody chilly nevertheless. It was around 2cm Dobos, which I later correlated with some Hydro One workers to be about 59 F. My map went floating merrily off into the distance as I tried to hang on to my paddle and flip the boat over to wait for the safety boat. We had been assured that there would be a safety on this section of open water. I have some choice words to say to the crew of said safety boat. If they ever show up.
After about 5 minutes of trying to board my boat unsuccessfully – the heaving seas made it all but impossible – I decided that there was nothing for it but to push my boat to shore. Progress was very slow. I wasn’t feeling cold yet, but I knew I had to get out of the water and then into some dry clothes asap. The safety boat was nowhere to be seen, but there was a team in a canoe approaching. I waved to them and kept swimming, figuring they’d pull up alongside when they caught up.
Ten minutes later I saw them out of the corner of my eye, paddling serenely by about 50 metres to my left. WTF?!? I waved and hollered at them. They seemed to have a bit of a team meeting and then thankfully turned towards me. After steadying my boat and allowing me to get back in, they explained that they had seen me waving and figured I was just “playing around”. What can you say to that? Clearly I had decided that I was making too much progress in the boat and decided to hop into the icy waters to try to push it the remaining 8 kilometres to the finish.
Thank you very much for helping me back into my boat, but….really?!?!?!???? Playing around?
Mandatory Gear finally pays off….sort of
About 28 seconds after getting back onboard I was wishing I was back in the water. No matter how hard I worked, being up in the wind with wet clothes was rapidly turning me into a corpsicle. I was only about 100 metres from the shore of a small island with a $20-million cottage property on it, so I made a bee-line for that. I nearly got dumped again as I tried to make my way to shore, but eventually managed to pull my boat out onto one of the docks.
By this time I was shaking uncontrollably. I staggered into the lee of the cottage (good thing it was a 3-storey 12000 square foot monstrosity) and pulled out my dry bag and mandatory gear. In the first good break of the day I discovered that I had not 1 but 2 dry long-sleeve tops in there. I took off my wet top and pfd, put on the dry shirts and started doing frantic jumping-jacks. I was hoping to generate enough heat to stop my insane shivering.
After a few minutes I was, if anything, colder than before. It seems that spending 20 minutes immersed in the lake had dropped my core temperature significantly and this wasn’t gonna be a quick warm up and get back on the boat type of incident. And so, finally, after lugging it around with me to races for the past ten years, I finally cracked open my emergency blanket. Actually, it was an emergency bivvy sack, so I burrowed into it headfirst and was soon completely covered. I carefully tore small holes for my face and arms and continued hopping around, trying to generate some heat.
I had been in a similar situation once before at the infamous Parry Sound Raid the North. Those of you who were there know what I mean. That time we had actually broken into a small cottage to get out of the brutal winds. No such luck this time, as these guys had everything locked up tight. One of the more frustrating aspects of my tour of this facility was the covered and locked hot-tub on the deck.
I munched some soggy left-over bar-type “food” as I wandered around the island, still unable to get warm enough to contemplate getting back on the boat. Trying another piece of mandatory gear – the infallible FRS radio – proved to be predictably useless. These things are on the gear list solely to keep the insurance vultures happy and nothing else. If you can reach someone on an FRS then you could just as easily yell at them. So that’s what I started doing: yelling and waving at the passing flotilla of racers paddling down the channel.
Finally one team turned and headed towards me. This was team #81, a bunch of first-timers who were short on race savvy but long on being my favourite people in the whole wide world at this point. One guy gave me his fleece, and then I put a dry pfd on top of that to replace my emergency blanket. These things work ok, but will tear like tissue paper if you sneeze on them. They also found a small laundry room that was unlocked and stuffed me in there to help warm up.
For the next 15-20 minutes I slowly got the shivers under control whilst my rescuers tried calling race staff or fellow racers on their FRS. After a while they gave up on that and two of them hopped into their canoe to go across the channel to where a Hydro One crew was working on a neighbouring cottage. Soon thereafter the Hydro One boat came powering over to our island and began saving our asses.
Hydro One Rules!
If any Hydro One people are reading this, please give massive raises to the crew that was working near Christmas Island on Saturday September 25th. These guys came over, bundled us into the heated cab of their powerboat, loaded both the rental canoe and my surfski onboard, and proceeded to take us all the way to the finish at the Wallace Marina. On the way they commiserated with my dumping, saying that the water temperature was only 59 F – this is where I got my calibration for the newly introduced Dobos centimetre scale. They plied us with chips and pop and water and nuts while the guy at the helm opened her up. They had a 4-stroke 300 horsepower engine on this thing, so we had quite the ride. If it hadn’t meant a DNF it would’ve been the best part of the day.
The Forensics Report
This was not the way this race was supposed to have gone. (well, DUH!) I had spent the past 5 months getting myself into the best shape of the past 15 years. I’d dropped close to 20 pounds and was back to my high school weight of 150-155. Earlier races had been very promising and encouraging, winning the solo masters at Storm the Trent, and then winning the solo class outright and finishing 2nd overall at the RaidPulse 8-hour sprint. Most recently I had managed a 5th overall at Logs Rocks and Steel, so I was actually coming into this race with real and legitimate hopes of winning or at least getting on the podium. However, beaucoup sh*t can happen during an adventure race, and I got my full year’s allowance dumped on me in this one.
On upside, I did not bail out. I really wanted to when it became clear that I was waaaaaaaaay out of the running, racing poorly, and with a bum leg to boot. Incidentally, that leg swelled up grotesquely post-race and is still puffy and colourful and tender 1 week later. Also incidentally, I have since figured out the deal with my compass. It was a key-chain version of a marine (globe) compass which, unbeknownst to me is designed to be read from the side, not from above. Y’all watch out for that, and you’re welcome.
At least I’m still learning.
Los Dobos
Comic book guy says: “Worst nav ever.” Or “didn’t you pass us an hour ago?”
In the immortal words of the late and lamented Douglas Adams, “Don’t Panic”. I had my trusty Suunto trekking compass in my pack, but I was with a strong team here and didn’t want to stop to fish it out. Being a hoopy frood who really knows where his towel is, I stayed cool and during the next 5 minutes rode with the team trying to ascertain the exact compass issue I was dealing with. It became clear that it was consistently and exactly reversed, so as long as I remembered that North was South and East was West I should be able to make a go of it.
Sadly I had lost touch a bit with the map whilst doing this little experiment, and when Mr. Forcier – uber mountain biker and navigator for the Quebec team – made a small mistake, I didn’t catch it. As I hammered up a steep gravel road I heard the girl yell up “Hey Steve!” to her team-mate who was following me. Funny story here: it turns out his name wasn’t Steve. She though my name was Steve and she was trying to get my attention to tell me that this was the wrong turn-off. Not being Steve, I pressed onwards.
Ha-ha. Hilarious, eh?
Almost immediately after I crested the top of the climb the roads began to differ wildly from what was shown on the map (even correcting for my compass). Also, there was no sign of the team I had been happily riding with until now. I did an about-face and screamed back down the hill, hoping they would still be at the intersection, but they were gone and I never saw them again until the finish.
Looking at the map I realized we had turned in too soon: the road we wanted was another 400-500 metres further down the road. Merde. Sacre Bleu! I had lost some really good “team-mates”. I set off down the road on my own. At least I was now competent to navigate with my bizarro compass. Or so I thought…
During the ensuing 2+ hours of muddy, wet, and treacherous riding I managed to make every single possible wrong turn. I may even have come up with a few that weren’t there. During my map preparation I had meticulously broken the leg down into segments with distance measurements so I could use my odometer to help navigate. Because I was a complete idiot I then decided not to bother using my odometer initially. I don’t know why.
Every wrong turn followed the same pattern: bike for about 10 minutes with slowly growing doubts about my route choice, go down a really long and steep hill, and then hit an impassable dead-end. It became rather embarrassing as I repeatedly passed the same teams 3 or 4 times during the course of this fiasco. After a while I gave up on navigating and mostly tried to follow tire tracks. Worst nav ever.
Brakes-Schmrakes: A video clip is worth 1000 words
To add to my misery, I started having brake problems distressingly early on. I had lost both brakes during the Logs Rocks and Steel race 2 weeks earlier, so I was riding with virtually brand new brake pads. Maybe I got a defective set, maybe there’s something wrong with my disks, maybe it all had to do with my bib being #13 – I don’t know. The point is that about ½-way through the ride I was back down to Fred Flintstone brakes.
Here they are in theory:
…and in practice:
This was also the second mountain bike leg during an adventure race where I had a near-drowning incident. The trails in the Muskoka area are infamous for their many, many “puddles”. These are murky pools of water that invariably cover the trail from side to side and extend sometimes for over 50 metres. Deciding whether to ride through or dismount and walk around these is like playing Russian roulette. Furthermore, as a solo racer I didn’t have the benefit of watching our designated team Guinea Pig ride though them first. The pattern was predictable: every one I bailed on and walked around turned out to be 3 inches deep and paved, whereas the ones I decided to brave turned out to be rutted and rocky and deep enough to swallow a bus.
The worst incident was when I was balancing along the berm beside a very deep body of trail water. My handlebar clipped a tree and I toppled sideways off the berm and headfirst in the puddle. I had enough time to think “oh sh%t, this is gonna suck”, but not enough time to unclip. When everything settled out I was completely underwater except for my left foot, which was clipped into the pedal. That and the wheels which were still leaning against the berm were the only things not submerged. My right foot was clipped in and also pinned under the bike. I don’t remember how I managed to detach myself from the bike and surface, but it probably looked a bit like this loser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEULHN3R5xQ&feature...
Needless to say I was greatly relieved when the ride was done with. Despite my laughable navigation I made the cut-off and completed the advanced section. Pulling into the transition area for the second trek I was greet with “Hey dude: didn’t you pass us like three times already?”
It couldn’t get worse, right?
Revenge of the Tibia
Since time was clearly no longer of the essence I took my sweet time transitioning. I had mud and sand and grit and twigs in every possible fold and crack and…you get the idea. Getting butt-nekkid again was a no-brainer. I had plenty of clean dry clothes to change into in my gear bag. My sincere apologies to the TA staff.
As soon as I set off running down the road my left shin made itself known. It had been merely a nagging annoyance during the bike ride, but now it was letting me know in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t going to put up with any abuse. Unfortunately by now “abuse” included any kind of weight-bearing whatsoever. Being a trained biomechanist and pedorthist I quickly adopted an antalgic gait to cope with this new challenge. That’s just fancy-speak for limping, which is a great way to get other parts of your body to start hurting as well. Luckily I only had about a 20 minute run before heading into the woods again.
Bushwhacking was easier on my leg in one respect – I wasn’t running – but much, much worse in other respects – every log, branch, root, twig, and blade of grass smacked me in precisely the same injured spot every single m$therf&cking time. I built a lot of character during this trek. Technically it was a simple enough bushwhack: go east until you hit highway 400. This was a handrail that not even I could mess up, and I rose to the occasion magnificently and missed spiking the CP by a mere 50 metres. Now that I was completely and utterly out of it, I was actually starting to race reasonably well. The funny thing was that highway 400 – a 4-lane divided highway - wasn’t shown on our maps. Maybe it’s time to update some of our topos, eh.
Red Wine and Chocolate
Jogging into the paddling transition I met up with (hyper) Active Steve and his beau Deanna – uber-volunteer turned racer. I shared some of my litany of woes with them and they laughed at me, but then almost immediately made up for it by offering me some red wine. Really. Deanna had a box of some pretty good red wine in her transition bag, along with some wikkid chocolate. This woman knows how to pack.
The final leg of this race was a pretty straight-forward paddle to the finish. I figured it would take me about 1.5 hours on my surfski, and the only challenge was going to be finding the entrance to the correct channel about midway through. The water looked calm so what the heck, I had myself a second swig of wine before setting off.
Surfskiing: in Theory and in Practice
My solo boat is a sweet Think Fit, which is a surfski as opposed to a kayak. What’s the difference, you may ask? A quick scan through Wikkipedia shows that “A surf ski is a long, narrow, lightweight kayak with an open (sit-on-top) cockpit, usually with a foot pedal controlled rudder.” It goes on to note that “Despite its typical instability, a surf ski (with an experienced paddler) is a very effective craft for paddling in big surf.” Once I got out of the shelter of some long islands and into open water, I realised that the swell was actually quite nasty.
Being at the end of a long lake, the swells had a nice long reach in which to build up. They were probably about 2 feet + from crest to trough and quartering into my port stern on the heading that I wanted to follow. Not a problem for this guy;
but for me it was hard work trying to keep upright. I basically had to run straight downwind with the swells until I hit shore and then traverse over to get into the channel I wanted. I managed to get about 200 metres from shore when a wave caught me a bit off-centre and turned and flipped the boat faster than you could say “hey look, Dobos can’t surfski worth crap!”
The water was cold. Not gasping cold, which was a good thing, but bloody chilly nevertheless. It was around 2cm Dobos, which I later correlated with some Hydro One workers to be about 59 F. My map went floating merrily off into the distance as I tried to hang on to my paddle and flip the boat over to wait for the safety boat. We had been assured that there would be a safety on this section of open water. I have some choice words to say to the crew of said safety boat. If they ever show up.
After about 5 minutes of trying to board my boat unsuccessfully – the heaving seas made it all but impossible – I decided that there was nothing for it but to push my boat to shore. Progress was very slow. I wasn’t feeling cold yet, but I knew I had to get out of the water and then into some dry clothes asap. The safety boat was nowhere to be seen, but there was a team in a canoe approaching. I waved to them and kept swimming, figuring they’d pull up alongside when they caught up.
Ten minutes later I saw them out of the corner of my eye, paddling serenely by about 50 metres to my left. WTF?!? I waved and hollered at them. They seemed to have a bit of a team meeting and then thankfully turned towards me. After steadying my boat and allowing me to get back in, they explained that they had seen me waving and figured I was just “playing around”. What can you say to that? Clearly I had decided that I was making too much progress in the boat and decided to hop into the icy waters to try to push it the remaining 8 kilometres to the finish.
Thank you very much for helping me back into my boat, but….really?!?!?!???? Playing around?
Mandatory Gear finally pays off….sort of
About 28 seconds after getting back onboard I was wishing I was back in the water. No matter how hard I worked, being up in the wind with wet clothes was rapidly turning me into a corpsicle. I was only about 100 metres from the shore of a small island with a $20-million cottage property on it, so I made a bee-line for that. I nearly got dumped again as I tried to make my way to shore, but eventually managed to pull my boat out onto one of the docks.
By this time I was shaking uncontrollably. I staggered into the lee of the cottage (good thing it was a 3-storey 12000 square foot monstrosity) and pulled out my dry bag and mandatory gear. In the first good break of the day I discovered that I had not 1 but 2 dry long-sleeve tops in there. I took off my wet top and pfd, put on the dry shirts and started doing frantic jumping-jacks. I was hoping to generate enough heat to stop my insane shivering.
After a few minutes I was, if anything, colder than before. It seems that spending 20 minutes immersed in the lake had dropped my core temperature significantly and this wasn’t gonna be a quick warm up and get back on the boat type of incident. And so, finally, after lugging it around with me to races for the past ten years, I finally cracked open my emergency blanket. Actually, it was an emergency bivvy sack, so I burrowed into it headfirst and was soon completely covered. I carefully tore small holes for my face and arms and continued hopping around, trying to generate some heat.
I had been in a similar situation once before at the infamous Parry Sound Raid the North. Those of you who were there know what I mean. That time we had actually broken into a small cottage to get out of the brutal winds. No such luck this time, as these guys had everything locked up tight. One of the more frustrating aspects of my tour of this facility was the covered and locked hot-tub on the deck.
I munched some soggy left-over bar-type “food” as I wandered around the island, still unable to get warm enough to contemplate getting back on the boat. Trying another piece of mandatory gear – the infallible FRS radio – proved to be predictably useless. These things are on the gear list solely to keep the insurance vultures happy and nothing else. If you can reach someone on an FRS then you could just as easily yell at them. So that’s what I started doing: yelling and waving at the passing flotilla of racers paddling down the channel.
Finally one team turned and headed towards me. This was team #81, a bunch of first-timers who were short on race savvy but long on being my favourite people in the whole wide world at this point. One guy gave me his fleece, and then I put a dry pfd on top of that to replace my emergency blanket. These things work ok, but will tear like tissue paper if you sneeze on them. They also found a small laundry room that was unlocked and stuffed me in there to help warm up.
For the next 15-20 minutes I slowly got the shivers under control whilst my rescuers tried calling race staff or fellow racers on their FRS. After a while they gave up on that and two of them hopped into their canoe to go across the channel to where a Hydro One crew was working on a neighbouring cottage. Soon thereafter the Hydro One boat came powering over to our island and began saving our asses.
Hydro One Rules!
If any Hydro One people are reading this, please give massive raises to the crew that was working near Christmas Island on Saturday September 25th. These guys came over, bundled us into the heated cab of their powerboat, loaded both the rental canoe and my surfski onboard, and proceeded to take us all the way to the finish at the Wallace Marina. On the way they commiserated with my dumping, saying that the water temperature was only 59 F – this is where I got my calibration for the newly introduced Dobos centimetre scale. They plied us with chips and pop and water and nuts while the guy at the helm opened her up. They had a 4-stroke 300 horsepower engine on this thing, so we had quite the ride. If it hadn’t meant a DNF it would’ve been the best part of the day.
The Forensics Report
This was not the way this race was supposed to have gone. (well, DUH!) I had spent the past 5 months getting myself into the best shape of the past 15 years. I’d dropped close to 20 pounds and was back to my high school weight of 150-155. Earlier races had been very promising and encouraging, winning the solo masters at Storm the Trent, and then winning the solo class outright and finishing 2nd overall at the RaidPulse 8-hour sprint. Most recently I had managed a 5th overall at Logs Rocks and Steel, so I was actually coming into this race with real and legitimate hopes of winning or at least getting on the podium. However, beaucoup sh*t can happen during an adventure race, and I got my full year’s allowance dumped on me in this one.
On upside, I did not bail out. I really wanted to when it became clear that I was waaaaaaaaay out of the running, racing poorly, and with a bum leg to boot. Incidentally, that leg swelled up grotesquely post-race and is still puffy and colourful and tender 1 week later. Also incidentally, I have since figured out the deal with my compass. It was a key-chain version of a marine (globe) compass which, unbeknownst to me is designed to be read from the side, not from above. Y’all watch out for that, and you’re welcome.
At least I’m still learning.
Los Dobos
Tuesday Sep 28, 2010 #
Note
THE TAPER
Pete’s 12-hr AR taper:
2 weeks before - reduce training 0%
1 week before - reduce training 0%
Race week - reduce training 100%
If you know anything at all about the concept of tapering for a competition then you’ll now be thinking something along the lines of: LOL, WTF, or ROTFLMFAO. Believe it or not, I do actually know some of the rudiments of exercise physiology and training theory: the above taper was all Benoit Letourneau’s fault. He invited me to go riding in the park with him at night, in the rain, after I had already done a run and a bike earlier that day. Yeah, yeah, I could’ve said “no” but I prefer to offload responsibility and blame onto others whenever possible. Needless to say I came down with a nasty head cold the next day which took me hors-de-combat until the race.
RACE WEEK DIARY
Sunday: likely the last sunny and warm day before spring 2011. too sick to go outside.
Monday: too sick to go to work. slept poorly.
Tuesday: too sick to go to work. slept even worse.
Wednesday: got up at 0700 and biked to work. too sick to stay. biked back home right after it started raining again. first decent night’s sleep since Friday.
Thursday: felt okay enough to go to work. might be able to breathe in time for the race.
Friday: felt human again.
Saturday: got up too early. dark. cold. rainy. it’s go time.
BREAK A LEG
This year’s race was starting at 0600 instead of 0400 like last year, which meant less than 1 hour in the dark. This was a mixed blessing. I never say “no” when asked if I’d prefer to sleep in, but navigating in the dark is challenging and it’s one of my strengths…in theory. At 0605 G-man yelled “GO!” and off we went.
The first leg would involve trekking and looked to be mostly bushwhack. I tucked in behind the usual suspects – Running Free, Milton Basement Racers, Fat Bastard – and was pleased that I was running easily at their pace. Once into the woods, of course, everyone scattered to the 4 winds and I was soon all alone. I was shooting a bearing, aiming off to hit a sizable lake when my left leg slipped between two logs to just below my knee. Falling forward I remembered thinking “the tibia is the strongest bone in the body…the tibia is the strongest bone in the body”. And then there was much pain.
The result: Pete’s tibia 1, deadfall lumber 0.
~%@^%^!$# BEAVERS!
Shortly thereafter I hit the lake and coasteered about 75m to CP1. There were a depressing number of teams running along a trail that meandered past it. Oh well, no biggie, on to CP2. This was going to be a similar scenario to getting to CP1: aim off to hit the western part of a lake, coasteer until you hit the stream, follow said stream toward the swamp until you find the CP. Easy, even in the dark with a bum left leg.
When I hit the lake I was a bit dismayed to have come out at the eastern tip. Or maybe I was at the eastern tip of the swamp? How to tell? It looked way more lake-ish than swamp-ish, but I won’t trust a water feature unless it’s an ocean or equivalent. I decided to continue north along the eastern end of whatever-the-hell it was. The reasoning was that if I found the stream then I’d follow it east to the CP. If I didn’t find the stream then I’d continue west around the shore of the lake, find the stream at the other end, and find the CP. Genius. Sometimes I impress even myself.
There being no stream in sight, I concluded that I had drifted way right and was at the eastern end of the lake. A quick 15-minute coasteer brought me to the western end where I was greeted by a sight that haunts the nightmares of AR navigators. There was the Hoover Dam of beaverdom blocking off the end of the swamp and, of course, no CP2 anywhere. At any other time I would have marvelled at the sheer size of the dam: it was a good 50 meters long and as tall as a house. New Orleans should have had this crew build their dikes for them. Now, however, I wished slow and painful deaths upon all beavers. Clearly I had drifted left and hit the eastern end of the “swamp”, possibly due to my throbbing left leg which was gimpifying my gait, making me slowly circle to my left.
I don’t care how upbeat and positive you are, a ½ hour mistake at CP2 is pretty demoralising when you’re chasing really fast teams. Despite my demoralisedness I hustled back along the swamp, shot a bearing to the lake, turned left and soon found CP2. From there it was a short trek north to the bike TA. There was still a long bike section with many opportunities for wrong turns where I could potentially recoup lost time.
Potentially.
MAGNETIC SOUTH
As usual I got completely nekkid at the TA – sorry for the mental image. I knew from experience that a long and muddy bike leg would result in heinous ass-crack sand-papering unless I had on a beefy pair of bike shorts. As I checked out I confirmed with TA staff that I was about ½ hour off the lead, which was about what I figured it would be.
The bike leg started with a road section – head out of the TA, turn right at the “T”, then right at the “T” again and off we go. Orienting my map to the new compass I’d mounted on my bike, I realized that it wasn’t right, but rather left. Almost immediately another racer passed by going the other way. That’s ok, I knew I was going in the right direction. The compass said so. Always trust your compass. After 100m or so the road started a gradual bend instead of T-ing into another road. This was rather less ok, as it didn’t match the map at all.
I quickly turned around and went back to the TA to reboot. Orient the map to magnetic north: check. Why does the map show the TA exit going south instead of north? How could I be messing this up? I don’t remember any significant blows to the head during the trek…
Screw it. I decided to just read the features on the map. Leave the TA. “T” into a road and turn right. Go a couple hundred metres and “T” into another road. Turn right. Drop the hammer. Check the compass. It says I’m heading due south. Look at the map. There is no place anywhere along this road where I should be going even remotely south. WTF?!? I stop and tap the compass a few times. The needle settles and still shows that I’m going south. I knew that I had meticulously checked the bike for any magnetized parts before choosing a spot to mount the compass. Never has a navigator been so confused by so simple a route as I was at that moment. I was ready to cry. In a manly way.
Fortunately one of the Quebec teams went screaming down the road past me. I yelled at them that they were going south, and they looked at me like I was nuts. Fine: if I was going to get lost at least I’d be lost with some other racers. I managed to catch up to them and asked them what our bearing was. “Nord” (that’s “North” for you Anglophones out there). I asked if they were sure about that. “Oui” (“yes”).
For some reason the words “Sherlock Holmes” wandered across my mind at this time. I was unimpressed with this bit of subconscious flotsam and dearly wished that my brain would come up with something, if not useful, then at least remotely relevant. The words “Sherlock Holmes” then connected with another bit of trivia lodged in my brain. It was the famous quotation: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
What I had here was a compass that pointed south.
Once I realized that, according to this piece of sh#t compass, north was south and east was west, everything suddenly made sense. This thing would make a great April fool’s prank on some fellow racer, but right now it was about as funny as the proverbial rubber crutch.*
* I never understood this saying; I think a rubber crutch can be hilarious.
…to be continued…
Pete’s 12-hr AR taper:
2 weeks before - reduce training 0%
1 week before - reduce training 0%
Race week - reduce training 100%
If you know anything at all about the concept of tapering for a competition then you’ll now be thinking something along the lines of: LOL, WTF, or ROTFLMFAO. Believe it or not, I do actually know some of the rudiments of exercise physiology and training theory: the above taper was all Benoit Letourneau’s fault. He invited me to go riding in the park with him at night, in the rain, after I had already done a run and a bike earlier that day. Yeah, yeah, I could’ve said “no” but I prefer to offload responsibility and blame onto others whenever possible. Needless to say I came down with a nasty head cold the next day which took me hors-de-combat until the race.
RACE WEEK DIARY
Sunday: likely the last sunny and warm day before spring 2011. too sick to go outside.
Monday: too sick to go to work. slept poorly.
Tuesday: too sick to go to work. slept even worse.
Wednesday: got up at 0700 and biked to work. too sick to stay. biked back home right after it started raining again. first decent night’s sleep since Friday.
Thursday: felt okay enough to go to work. might be able to breathe in time for the race.
Friday: felt human again.
Saturday: got up too early. dark. cold. rainy. it’s go time.
BREAK A LEG
This year’s race was starting at 0600 instead of 0400 like last year, which meant less than 1 hour in the dark. This was a mixed blessing. I never say “no” when asked if I’d prefer to sleep in, but navigating in the dark is challenging and it’s one of my strengths…in theory. At 0605 G-man yelled “GO!” and off we went.
The first leg would involve trekking and looked to be mostly bushwhack. I tucked in behind the usual suspects – Running Free, Milton Basement Racers, Fat Bastard – and was pleased that I was running easily at their pace. Once into the woods, of course, everyone scattered to the 4 winds and I was soon all alone. I was shooting a bearing, aiming off to hit a sizable lake when my left leg slipped between two logs to just below my knee. Falling forward I remembered thinking “the tibia is the strongest bone in the body…the tibia is the strongest bone in the body”. And then there was much pain.
The result: Pete’s tibia 1, deadfall lumber 0.
~%@^%^!$# BEAVERS!
Shortly thereafter I hit the lake and coasteered about 75m to CP1. There were a depressing number of teams running along a trail that meandered past it. Oh well, no biggie, on to CP2. This was going to be a similar scenario to getting to CP1: aim off to hit the western part of a lake, coasteer until you hit the stream, follow said stream toward the swamp until you find the CP. Easy, even in the dark with a bum left leg.
When I hit the lake I was a bit dismayed to have come out at the eastern tip. Or maybe I was at the eastern tip of the swamp? How to tell? It looked way more lake-ish than swamp-ish, but I won’t trust a water feature unless it’s an ocean or equivalent. I decided to continue north along the eastern end of whatever-the-hell it was. The reasoning was that if I found the stream then I’d follow it east to the CP. If I didn’t find the stream then I’d continue west around the shore of the lake, find the stream at the other end, and find the CP. Genius. Sometimes I impress even myself.
There being no stream in sight, I concluded that I had drifted way right and was at the eastern end of the lake. A quick 15-minute coasteer brought me to the western end where I was greeted by a sight that haunts the nightmares of AR navigators. There was the Hoover Dam of beaverdom blocking off the end of the swamp and, of course, no CP2 anywhere. At any other time I would have marvelled at the sheer size of the dam: it was a good 50 meters long and as tall as a house. New Orleans should have had this crew build their dikes for them. Now, however, I wished slow and painful deaths upon all beavers. Clearly I had drifted left and hit the eastern end of the “swamp”, possibly due to my throbbing left leg which was gimpifying my gait, making me slowly circle to my left.
I don’t care how upbeat and positive you are, a ½ hour mistake at CP2 is pretty demoralising when you’re chasing really fast teams. Despite my demoralisedness I hustled back along the swamp, shot a bearing to the lake, turned left and soon found CP2. From there it was a short trek north to the bike TA. There was still a long bike section with many opportunities for wrong turns where I could potentially recoup lost time.
Potentially.
MAGNETIC SOUTH
As usual I got completely nekkid at the TA – sorry for the mental image. I knew from experience that a long and muddy bike leg would result in heinous ass-crack sand-papering unless I had on a beefy pair of bike shorts. As I checked out I confirmed with TA staff that I was about ½ hour off the lead, which was about what I figured it would be.
The bike leg started with a road section – head out of the TA, turn right at the “T”, then right at the “T” again and off we go. Orienting my map to the new compass I’d mounted on my bike, I realized that it wasn’t right, but rather left. Almost immediately another racer passed by going the other way. That’s ok, I knew I was going in the right direction. The compass said so. Always trust your compass. After 100m or so the road started a gradual bend instead of T-ing into another road. This was rather less ok, as it didn’t match the map at all.
I quickly turned around and went back to the TA to reboot. Orient the map to magnetic north: check. Why does the map show the TA exit going south instead of north? How could I be messing this up? I don’t remember any significant blows to the head during the trek…
Screw it. I decided to just read the features on the map. Leave the TA. “T” into a road and turn right. Go a couple hundred metres and “T” into another road. Turn right. Drop the hammer. Check the compass. It says I’m heading due south. Look at the map. There is no place anywhere along this road where I should be going even remotely south. WTF?!? I stop and tap the compass a few times. The needle settles and still shows that I’m going south. I knew that I had meticulously checked the bike for any magnetized parts before choosing a spot to mount the compass. Never has a navigator been so confused by so simple a route as I was at that moment. I was ready to cry. In a manly way.
Fortunately one of the Quebec teams went screaming down the road past me. I yelled at them that they were going south, and they looked at me like I was nuts. Fine: if I was going to get lost at least I’d be lost with some other racers. I managed to catch up to them and asked them what our bearing was. “Nord” (that’s “North” for you Anglophones out there). I asked if they were sure about that. “Oui” (“yes”).
For some reason the words “Sherlock Holmes” wandered across my mind at this time. I was unimpressed with this bit of subconscious flotsam and dearly wished that my brain would come up with something, if not useful, then at least remotely relevant. The words “Sherlock Holmes” then connected with another bit of trivia lodged in my brain. It was the famous quotation: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”
What I had here was a compass that pointed south.
Once I realized that, according to this piece of sh#t compass, north was south and east was west, everything suddenly made sense. This thing would make a great April fool’s prank on some fellow racer, but right now it was about as funny as the proverbial rubber crutch.*
* I never understood this saying; I think a rubber crutch can be hilarious.
…to be continued…