Training Log Archive: Bash

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Equinox Traverse 46-hour adventure race
Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania

Mountain biking - 236 km
Trekking - 64 km
Paddling - 17 km
Total elevation gain: 6700 meters (22,000')!

JayXC's report with detailed breakdown by discipline

Sony's report with elevation gain for each section

This event attracted a good field of racers including 3 of the top 4 teams in the Checkpoint Tracker Series. I was racing with Team Checkpoint Zero/Tech4o, the team currently leading the series (gulp!). JayXC (Jason Urckfitz) and Sony (Jeff Woods) are very experienced competitors (formerly Team Eastern Mountain Sports) who are accustomed to racing with speedier women like Jen Shultis and Jenny Johnson. But they knew they were racing with a non-Jennifer this time, and they'd cheerfully agreed to dust off their tow ropes. The three of us had spent time together at the APEX Race in Switzerland in May where each of our teams failed to complete the course after a team member had trouble keeping food down. For all of us, the main goal of Equinox Traverse was to get to the finish line with a decent result, something that eluded us in Switzerland.

JayXC lives in Rochester and we needed a place to leave one of our cars in Buffalo. Attackpoint to the rescue! Dave Cady (Dcady) generously offered us a secure parking place in his fenced yard in Buffalo. How do you recognize an orienteer's house? It's pretty easy, actually.



It took 9 hours to get to Ohiopyle State Park from home. Maps were distributed at check-in and we had to transpose the points and forbidden routes from master maps onto our own. The course was bike-heavy with 20 mandatory checkpoints and four optional trek or bike rogaine sections set up at CPs along the way. We would get each rogaine map when we arrived at that section. This type of course design is a good way to minimize the spread between teams but I would prefer to get all maps up front. Otherwise, there is a major element of luck since you can't plan strategy properly when you don't know what is coming up. Should we skip optional checkpoint 12 because it may be easier to get optional checkpoint 19 on a map we haven't seen yet? Who knows?!

We were only going to see our gear bins once about 5 hours into a 46 hour race. That is a lot of stuff to carry! Food, clothing, batteries for two nights, trekking shoes (to carry during bike sections), etc. Our packs each weighed in at 23-25 lb with no room to spare. JayXC carried the team gear and had to leave out things like his trekking poles and the "recommended but not mandatory" snakebite kit, lovingly known as The Extractor.



Since we didn't have the kit, we kept our eyes open for rattlesnakes and copperheads. Apparently you are supposed to put your foot onto a log and step away from it rather than stepping over a log and possibly annoying a snake huddled against it on the other side.

The boys did the lion's share of the map work. Outside maps were permitted and pretty much required for a good result. The map prep included a lot of conversations like, "OK, which trail did we take here last time?" We consulted Google maps on my netbook now and then. Because I'd just received the news about Tobler, I could barely think clearly enough to pack my gear so I wasn't much help.



It was a nice surprise to learn that I wasn't the only Canadian in the crowd. Hammer and Laura raced together.



And Owen and Barb Steele were part of a team of four. Barb distinguished herself later in the race by launching like a rocket off her bike, landing hard on her chin on the handlebar end. Ouch. She kept going, of course.



We had a quick race briefing just before the 10 a.m. start.



Here are JayXC, me and Sony, ready to rock 'n' roll.



We lined up on the rail trail where teams went out at 15-second intervals.



We soon turned onto a technical mountain bike trail that climbed up toward CP1. It was rocky and rooty with some logs to hop - a very fun trail in a non-race situation. We were doing OK and passed a couple of teams in rough sections, but something was wrong with my legs. My brain issued the standard command to generate power from my quads/hammies but they responded like jello. I knew I'd let my heart rate get too high on a hot, humid day but this was still weird. My legs seemed completely fatigued before they'd even done anything. I'm still not sure what the problem was but I'll have to see if I can recreate it so I can understand how to prevent it. Perhaps it was caused by going anaerobic uphill off the start without a warm-up or maybe it was the initial shock of pushing hard in heat and humidity. It also might have been the 3-hour sleep I had the night before. Because it was so unusual, I wonder if my body was mirroring some of my emotional shock. My head felt fuzzy from crying the night before; for hours I wondered if I had nutrition/hydration/electrolyte issues but that's not what it was, and it cleared up by sunset.

One of the reasons for how awful I felt became clear on the descent from the high point above CP1 to the bike/paddle TA. We rode a rough gravel road that went down, down, down followed by down, down, down, down. Our destination was an upstream put-in on the same river where we'd started, i.e. this crazy-long descent was actually less vertical drop than our climb up had been. Maybe it wasn't so weird to feel pooched.

The paddle took us down the Youghiogheny River (yeah, I had to google the spelling) back to our starting point. It was several hours of shallow, rocky current through fabulous highland scenery. Earlier in the year, this section would have lots of class 1 and probably some class 2 rapids. We hit some fun wave trains and JayXC ensured that I got nicely splashed and cooled down. It was a fantastic break on a hot day.



Our boats were self-bailing duckies so we sat in water all the time, which felt good even though the boats were annoying and slow. We had to use rental kayak paddles which felt sooooo heavy compared to my lightweight carbon paddles. This was the first of two occasions in the race when I noted that more upper body strength training would have come in handy.

Sony was in a one-man ducky, paddling strongly.



JayXC and I shared a less-inflated boat that seemed to suffer from extra drag. We christened it the Lame Ducky. The main challenge of this section was avoiding boulders since the rubber ducky stuck tenaciously to rock. Even when we paddled hard, it felt like we were crawling through flatter water, but whenever we went through rapids, we gained time on other boats. JayXC read the river very well and chose great lines, which is difficult in low water. I was in the bow on watch for hidden rocks. Alas, several of them were really good at hiding!





We came off the river in Ohiopyle and ran to our vehicles to grab our rappelling gear. It was just a short jog up the rail trail to a high bridge over the river. We rappelled about 100' off the bridge then ran back up to the van.





This was our only gear bin visit so we'd planned a major stop even though it was early. Eat, drink, put on sunscreen, change into dry clothing and load a whole pile o' crap into our packs for the remaining 40 hours of the race! Then we set off on a 4-hour trek where we were required to stay on the Laurel Highlands trail for the first section. Beautiful, scenic rocky trail, lots of climb and descent. I was glad to have my trekking poles.





We did the AR shuffle on the downhills and some flats and a lot of speed hiking too. There was lots of racing left and our packs were ridiculously heavy. Mine added almost 20% on top of my body weight - much more than I usually train with.





At a certain point, we were no longer required to stay on the Laurel Highlands trail and that's when we should have forded the river and used the rail trail. Instead we followed an ATV track on our side of the river which looked flatter on the map than it turned out to be in real life. We lost time to a few teams here and, with 20/20 hindsight, we should have bitten the bullet and soaked the dry shoes and socks we'd just put on.

Shortly before the TA in the town of Confluence, we stopped at a gas station for the luxury of ice cold water to refill our bladders. Coke too - yum. (In real life, I can't drink the stuff.)



Then we picked up our bikes at the TA where friendly volunteers gave us a good send-off.







JayXC offered his tow rope as we started the climb out of Confluence. Yessss! He's a road bike racer with huge calf muscles and legs shaved more nicely than mine so I ended up getting bike-towed more in this race than in any other event. We towed on some rugged terrain and luckily I only tried to knock him down a couple of times. As darkness fell, my legs started to feel great and I began climbing well on my own - a huge relief after the weakness this morning. An orange-red moon rose on the horizon and fireflies were everywhere. It was magical.



The next few hours were spent climbing, climbing, climbing, descending, climbing, etc. on a mix of road types. At one point, I started seeing a lot of squished rattlesnakes on the road but Sony, with the benefit of his superior state of wakefulness, assured me they were mere hallucinations. I'm not sure which was worse.





Then we got to the first trek rogaine. We were told we had a deadline of 8 a.m. and they didn't expect any teams to have time for the bike rogaine at the same location. Fine. Great! It took a little time to get maps ready and each of us carried a different map of the area, all of which were useful at different times. It was cool to be on a team with three engineers who all navigate, and JayXC did a great job of leading the charge.





For the most part, things went smoothly and we picked up 5 of the 9 optional points. It turned out to be farther to the finish than one of the trail maps indicated at a glance, so we ended up doing a sprint with me on tow, arriving 4 minutes before the deadline. Oops. Then we learned that the deadline for the bike rogaine had been moved later so we'd be heading back into the same area right away. To be honest, we'd been OK with the idea of missing the bike rogaine since various body parts were telling us that we'd already done a *lot* of biking!





Early in the bike rogaine (about 9 a.m. on Day 2), I started weaving and realized that caffeine was no longer working for me, so we lay down and set the alarm for 10 minutes. As always happens with catnaps, I couldn't fall asleep right away but even a few minutes were enough to get me back in the game. We started out planning to clean the bike rogaine course but after 4 of the 5 optional points, the guys suggested that we move on. For some reason, I'd got it into my sleep-deprived head that we only had one more trek rogaine with 5 OPs, so I convinced them to stick with the original plan. Bad idea. Very, *very* bad idea. We invested about 90 extra minutes on some extremely unpleasant trails to pick up the final point. We whined a bit; I invited well-deserved abuse to be heaped upon my head. We'd been picking up OPs at a rate of about 1 per hour so this was almost certainly not worth it - although one can never be sure without seeing the maps for the upcoming rogaines. As Sony pointed out, we used a lot of energy in the heat of the day in those trail conditions, and that was probably more significant than the time we spent.

On our way to Hidden Valley Ski Resort, we stopped at another gas station for an early afternoon refuelling stop. I had a sandwich and pasta salad, Coke and two bottles of Starbucks iced mocha Frappucino, one of which I used to fill my bike water bottle. Yum, why have I never tried *that* before? We refilled our bladders with cold water too.

We picked up the next trek rogaine map at the ski resort and counted a *lot* of contour lines on it. Man, do I look tired in this photo!



Things went well here. We picked up another 5 OPs by doing a good job of route planning, speed hiking and navigating. We were working toward a 10 p.m. deadline and, just for a change, we thought we'd try to finish early enough that we didn't have to sprint back! We had to skip the final OP we were aiming for but we got back to the resort with time to spare.







Back on our bikes and up, up, up through the ski resort after a break to get water from the main lodge. Then some fun downhill as a reward followed by a couple of hours where the climbs just kept on coming, usually on rough gravel road or ATV trails, with a couple of inadvertent detours.

It's always a bonus when you stumble upon a map on a sign in a remote area. Unfortunately, in some parts of the country, it is apparently traditional to blast out the "You are here" section with a shotgun.



We followed some technical single track next to a steep drop, then crossed a creek several meters wide on slick, mossy rocks while attempting to keep our slippery-soled bike shoes dry, using our bikes for balance. It felt like we were in Cirque du Soleil!

After picking up a few CPs, we returned to Confluence where we took another 10-minute catnap because both Sony and I were starting to fall asleep, which is never good on a bike. Another quick nap did the trick (along with copious quantities of caffeine) and we were both fine until the end of the race.

We had to ride up Sugarloaf on Fire Tower Road - about 1500' (?) of steady climb on a rough road with some loose rocky sections that took a lot of power to ascend. Unfortunately, we had a deadline to get to TA6 on the other side of the mountain, and it was going to be tight. We'd already done 20,000 feet of climbing in the race so far, and in trying to follow JayXC's line up one of many rocky sections, my legs ran out of steam, and I hit a small rock and tipped over. Argghh. After that, I realized that I'd have to walk some of the nastier sections to keep my heart rate down and save power for the more easily rideable parts of the climb. It didn't make a huge difference to my speed anyway but it would have been nice if my legs had cooperated, given the approaching deadline. When we got to the mountain ridge, it was great to go fast again but it still seemed to take forever to make it to Hopi Camp where TA6 was located. Once there, the map was relatively useless in finding the TA staff in the network of roads and trails, and we cut it very close to the wire. Luckily, we were given the green light to continue to the finish.

We had to climb again (of course!!) before descending to the finish. Much of our return route followed the same mountain bike trail we'd taken at the race start. It was a continuous rocky, rooty downhill - challenging riding - and I could see why my legs had protested on the way up. This long, bumpy descent also showed me another good reason to beef up my upper body strength training. Boy, did I have to hang on hard to my bike!

We crossed the finish line at 7:24 a.m. with over half an hour to spare. Phew, I'd been so afraid we would DNF because I couldn't ride fast enough in the final two hours. I could start breathing again!



After an amazing breakfast buffet in the sunshine at the Firefly Grill, we snuck off for showers and returned for the awards ceremony where we took 3rd in the Coed Elite category, 4th overall of 23 teams/solos. It was encouraging to note that 2nd overall would have been very possible without being physically stronger - just a few different strategy choices. Team SOG Knives won the event by a landslide on their home turf and I don't think anyone could have touched them. My prize is a SOG knife, coincidentally!



It was great fun to do this event with strong, experienced, skilled racers who know how to work well as a team and never lose their sense of humour. It was a tough weekend for me and I really appreciated their support and understanding.

On the drive home, I explained the post-race Dairy Queen tradition to JayXC and he graciously put up with me searching on the GPS and leading us into Deepest Darkest Shopping Mall Land until my quest for hot fudge had succeeded. Harps would have been proud. Thanks, Jay.

Equinox Traverse

Equinox Traverse

Before writing about the race, a few words about a very difficult weekend... Tobler was in great form when I left for Pennsylvania on Thursday morning but she faded quickly in the afternoon and died at dinnertime. When the situation became clear and Richard contacted me, there was no time to get home. I will always regret that I wasn't with her. Richard, Mocha and his vet sister Mimi were with Tobler so I know she was surrounded by love, but I feel like I let her down even though that isn't rational. Tobler was very secure; she knew I loved her. She didn't need a final hug to tell her that. But still...

Down in Pennsylvania, I got the news shortly after maps had been distributed and instantly became useless in spite of my best efforts to stay focused. I felt sorry for JayXC and Sony, who had only met me a couple of times before and were now stuck with the awkward situation of an intermittently weepy woman. I would have liked to make it easier for them but it wasn't like I was upset about something minor like our house burning down or getting fired from a job.

The guys were awesome, taking care of all the map and strategy details so that I only had to pack my gear - which was still difficult with my mind all over the place. I slept about 3 hours the night before a 46-hour race with my brain racing and tears flowing. During the event, I tried to "change the subject" whenever my mind wandered in that direction but I still ended up crying quietly behind my sunglasses once in awhile. Much gratitude to my teammates for their understanding and support. Not an ideal situation, to be sure.

August 6, 1996 - July 14, 2011
Rest in peace, Tobler.



Tobler (aka ThunderDog on AP) was born shortly before Richard and I were married in 1996. We met some chocolate Lab puppies on Richard's birthday and one of them bounded happily around the yard at his side. We had been chosen.





We were a newlywed couple but Tobler taught us how to be a family. We shared the silly fun of her puppy years and the joy of her maturity, followed by the bittersweet privilege of caring for her in old age and saying a tearful goodbye.



Tobler knew she was loved and always carried herself with dignity; she brimmed with confidence, independence and strong opinions. She was remarkably adaptable and resourceful in new situations - riding in a canoe, sleeping in a tent, walking across a teeter totter, chasing mountain bikes, meeting new dogs, working in a dental office, and sharing her home when Mocha joined our family. She took life in stride.





She was skilled at comforting sick people and crying children. She showed incredible creativity and perseverance in obtaining food - off the counter, from the garbage pail, out of people's backpacks and in the woods.



She loved the outdoors; she joined and inspired us on canoe trips, bike rides, hikes, swims, skis, snowshoe treks and runs. Winter was her favourite season. She loved to chase us on the trails and make dog angels in the snow before curling up by the fireplace. She took our fitness up a notch since she was never content to sit around indoors.









Tobler stayed with us until just before her 15th birthday, a ripe old age for a Lab. She loved life till the end. She played with toys, explored our yard and gobbled down food even as her breathing became more difficult and her joints got sore. From the way her legs churned sometimes while she slept, we knew that in her dreams, she was still a puppy running in the forest. In our dreams, she is the same way.









She was frisky on Thursday when I left for Pennsylvania. She accompanied me to the front hall, stared at the dog treats until I got the hint, then sat at the door and tilted her head as she watched me drive away from her forever. Her breathing became laboured a few hours later, and Richard called his sister, a vet, to come over to help. There was no decision to be made; after a long life, it was her time to go in peace in Richard's arms.



Richard and I are heartbroken and miss her terribly but are thankful for the time and love we shared. If you have a pet, please hug him or her today in Tobler's memory. She would have liked that.

Almost finished packing for Equinox Traverse, a 48-hr adventure race (Friday a.m. to Sunday a.m.) in Ohiopyle State Park, Pennsylvania. I'm racing with Team Checkpoint Zero/Tech 4o with JayXC and Sony. The website still has some of last year's info on it so I don't expect they're high tech enough to provide live coverage. I'll fill you in when I get home.
<http://americanadventuresports.com/traverse.htm>

Wildermess Traverse is sold out at 40 teams! :) Getawaystix will maintain a waiting list for teams and is also happy to hear from individuals who are available to race if teams need replacement members as the event approaches.

Thanks for all the support!

Packing, tapering, packing, tapering.

U2 Concert with 56,000+ in the audience. Dome was open. Coloured lights on the CN Tower became part of the show.



Saw Bono in person!! ;)