Training Log Archive: Bash

Event: Untamed New England 3-Day Adventure Race
 

Untamed New England Day 1

Note: Because my camera was stolen, all of these photos were taken from albums that have been posted online. Credit goes to Luis Moreira, Leanimal and a number of other photographers I don't know.

One of the many challenges of Untamed NE is the limited amount of time racers get with the maps before the race. The maps aren't pre-marked - you get a booklet with instructions and UTMs, then you plot the checkpoints. In some cases, information is held back until you reach the relevant part of the race course, then you receive a list of UTMs that you need to mark carefully on your map at a time when your brain is pretty much fried. Several supplementary maps are provided and you need to figure out where they fit with your main maps.

For that reason, we got up early to line up for race check-in at the Balsams Wilderness Ski Lodge. It was great to see so many Canadian friends at this event including:
- Team GUATS with Getawaystix, Ursula, Benoit L. and Benoit T.
- Team Spirit Canada with Urthbuoy, FB, T. Rex and Bender
- Milton Basement Racers with Tiny, Nosnhoj, M&M and Tom
- ATP/Salomon with Phatty, PhattyJR, LaFemme and Scott (token American)

Harps and Relentless have an established system for working together on maps, so they took the info for the early race legs and passed the other maps and instructions to Kirikou and me at the next table. We worked out our own system and prepared maps for several legs of the race. We only had 2 hours to work until it was time to turn in our gear bins and get on the school buses.







The bus ride to the paddle start on Second Connecticut Lake took about an hour. Harps and I sat together and planned our routes for the monster trek. There was significant overlap between two of the maps so we could both carry a map and share the navigation for a good chunk of that section.







One of my less-favourite features of Untamed NE is their unusual choice of boats. Each team was given an 85-lb Old Town Discovery canoe and a plastic recreational kayak. We're a strong paddling team but that advantage was neutralized somewhat by having more than two people in a canoe and having a kayak with low hull speed, i.e. a pig. Teams had different strategies for dealing with the kayak. I think all the top teams put it on tow behind the canoe. Some teams put their strongest paddler in the kayak but our strategy was to put our lightest paddler in the kayak for easier towing. Lucky me! Actually, it was pretty sweet getting my own boat - until we hit whitewater at night, anyway. Team GUATS got a laugh when they unveiled their clever strategy - 4 paddlers in the canoe with the empty kayak towed behind them.





When the start gun went off, we had four orienteering checkpoints to visit around the shoreline of the lake, then it was time for the first portage.









In Canada, a portage is usually a trail where you lift the canoe onto your shoulders and head for the next body of water. In the U.S., adventure racers often portage along paved roads, making portage wheels very useful. The first portage started with a couple of kilometers on pavement and a lot of teams - including us - used this time to work out the bugs in our portage wheel system. We ended up putting the kayak upside down on top of the canoe. If the placement of the canoe on the wheels and the kayak on the canoe wasn't right, it required a lot of strength to hold everything in place as we went down the road. We got our system working reasonably well and were able to run most of the portages on roads. There was about 10 km of portaging in the paddle leg.





We'd been close to the lead but fell back a few places when we adjusted our portage wheels. Bad timing! When we turned onto the "Moose Alley" trail, we got stuck in a conga line behind other teams for about 90 minutes. It was a new, rough, rooty, muddy trail that wasn't always quite wide enough to let a canoe between the trees. Portage wheels were useless. Even the few people who attempted to carry the canoe on their shoulders were stymied eventually. Most of the boats were carried by their ends or hauled up hills on the soft trail. This was tough, high intensity physical effort - not the kind of thing you want to do to your body on the first day of a multi-day adventure race. I managed to get hit on the head pretty hard by a kayak being carried in front of me - totally my fault but painful and disorienting nonetheless. We were all hot and sweating and running out of water. I wanted to kiss the road when we finally emerged from the woods!









We were instructed to run down a rough trail to an area where we would work on our first conservation project. We had to carry a log, a board, a hammer and spikes to build a piece of a boardwalk. Once we got there, it was pretty quick. The run was longer than we'd expected - over a kilometer each way - but at least it felt good to be moving again!









Back in our boats at last - yahoo! Our boys were a paddling powerhouse in the canoe. As long as I kept the kayak moving in a straight line at a decent pace so it didn't drag on the canoe too much, we kept moving up steadily and passing other teams. Other than Getawaystix, I don't remember anyone passing us on the water. Luckily, there were some long stretches of beautiful paddling because the more time the race course spent on the water, the better it was for us! We portaged through a town near dusk, then got onto a shallow river with a decent current and some exposed rocks that were really hard to see in the failing light.







I'm not sure if it was better or worse to be the lone kayaker in this section. On one hand, my boat was pretty bombproof and hard to tip. On the other hand, I was paddling whitewater by myself at night - eek! We had to find one CP on the way to the main hub where we were going to do our conservation project and orienteering relay. By the time we arrived, it was about 9 p.m. and dark. We were in about 5th or 6th place. The conservation project was easy. We had to run a loop and nail plastic trail markings on both sides of a flagged tree. Then it was the orienteering relay. This turned out to be a very fun, relaxed part of the race. There was only so much we could do with our food, water, clothing and gear, and we all got that done pretty quickly. Most people had to wait at least an hour for their teammates, so there was plenty of time to hang around the campfires and chat with other racers. Most of us weren't tired yet so there weren't a lot of people sleeping. I think we eventually saw all our Ontario friends here. We could read our trail mail and it was so nice to know that our friends and family back home were thinking of us.

We sent Harps out first on the "long hard" leg so he would have plenty of time to review maps for the next section of the race. I went second on the "short hard" leg (where Phatty and I spent some quality time together in the woods), then Kirikou blasted through the "short easy" leg, followed by Relentless on the "long easy" leg. It looks like the O relay helped to gain us some time, which we'd been hoping for, since we had 4 navigators on our team. Racers could review the maps with their teammates and point out any tricky parts. We didn't do that but it didn't turn out to be an issue.









We'd talked about changing into our bike shorts here because there was only about 6 km of paddling left and it seemed like it would be efficient. I'd been getting wet in the kayak so I decided to keep my dry clothes in the dry bag. Harps did a full change, so it was definitely sad when the canoe suddenly rammed a rock in the darkness and turned sideways. I had to veer around the boys to avoid hitting them and it wasn't looking good as water flooded into their boat. I eddied out 20 meters downstream and grabbed a branch to stay in place as I watched them struggle to overcome the weight of the water pinning the canoe to the rock.

Suddenly, there were yells and headlamp beams aimed down the river where a couple of big pieces of gear were floating away. I headed back into the current, trying to avoid rocks at the same time as I tried to keep my headlamp focused on the gear that was moving downstream. I was able to pick it up but the rest of the paddle was a little slow since my legs were tangled in the portage wheels instead of pressing on the foot pegs! The boys extracted the canoe and we headed downstream to the first transition area (TA1) at the Beecher Falls Fire Hall where the firefighters had prepared an incredibly yummy dinner of spaghetti, brownies and coffee. That meal was perfect!

We transitioned to our bikes here at around 1 a.m. so I'll save that for the Day 2 report.