Snowshoeing (with poles) 3:00:00 [4] *** 16.7 km (10:47 / km)
Today was my very first Salomon Dontgetlost.ca Snowshoe Raid - what a blast! Bob Miller had designed an interesting course with 45 controls. When I saw that it stayed north of Horseshoe Valley Rd, I was convinced that some team would get them all, but I was wrong. In fact, the winning team (Sudden & Turbo) didn't even enter the Matrix, earning just 1220 of 1450 pts. Kudos to Bob for pulling this off - that's the way a rogaine-style race should be designed. It's one of the few events I've done where you would run into people, then head off in different directions, then run into each other again later on, having done completely different things. There were that many ways to approach this course.
A wild card was the "walk the line" section that wasn't marked on the map - just an "X" at the start and an instruction to head north and follow a marked trail for 1.3 km. There were 100 pts available, so it was worth doing, but it meant that we didn't know where it would take us, so some of our route planning had to remain a little fuzzy.
Hammer is one of my longtime navigation heroes, so I was looking forward to this race - but with some trepidation. (Backwoods is another one of my heroes that I've raced with, and she shares her brother's calm confidence with a map.) Hammer and I had divided up the roles so that I was in charge of planning, and he was in charge of execution. It worked well, since I love planning a rogaine map; we did the fine-tuning of control sequence together. On the course, I monitored distance (until my Forerunner stopped) and time while running on a tow line for most of the race, trying not to lose my balance as we skidded more or less in synch down some very steep, sapling-covered hills. Hammer found efficient routes for us and kept a nice pace at the front of the tow rope. I'd wondered if it might drive him crazy to not be able to run his natural pace, but if it did, he was very polite and patient about it.
Toward the end, we were running short of time, and we had to decide how to approach the finish. Hammer convinced me to do one more control than I would have done on my own. We finished with a mad dash to the finish line, crossing it exactly at the 3-hr mark. Woo hoo!
Comparing notes with 'Bent, we realized that we'd scored the exact same number of points!! But he and Eugenius arrived a few minutes before we did, so they won the Masters division (not entirely unexpected), and Hammer and I were proud to take a close 2nd place - and 7th overall out of about 85 teams.
Big congrats to Sudden & Turbo on the win, Tiny & Hotshot Lawyer for an awesome 2nd place, Nick & XCDan for 3rd, Tarno & Riddler for 4th and Dee & Harper for 5th (and 1st Coed). Congrats also to Slice & Leanimal for taking their usual win in the Female category and to Rocky & Crash for roaring into 2nd place in their adventure run team debut! AdventureGirl! & Etoile also took 2nd in the Family category, and Mr. & Mrs. Gally took 2nd in the Coed category, so it was a great day for our friends all round.
It was great fun to hang out afterward at Coach Trayling's beautiful home and get some extra time to catch up with Slice, Leanimal, Phatty, PhattyJR, Kari and Kona.