Dennis picked me up on Friday and we headed up to Ohiopyle, a very cool little town that I had never been to before. The trip took about 4 hours, and when we arrived we hooked up with Cassie at Falls City Pub for some food and to chat about the race. I had never raced with either Dennis or Cassie before but had trained with them both, saw how they raced with others, and was excited to be part of such a great team. Dennis is multi-talented: a great climber, kayaker, mountain biker, and adventure racer. Cassie, ranked the number one mountain biking female in West Virginia, is just an outstanding rider and over the next 36 hours humbled both Dennis and I with her fitness and mountain biking skills.At 7pm we headed down to the Wilderness Outfitters HQ for packet pickup. We received our map and then transposed the checkpoints and out-of-bounds areas from a communal map. I don’t really like this method of plotting points because it can lead to transposition errors. It also makes for a crowded and crazy 30 minutes as everyone tries to copy down the information. We were also given the UTMs to check our work.
We headed back to the Humming Bird Nest to pack after reviewing the course and making sure we had everything copied correctly. The race was going to have us coming back through the main transition area a few times, so that helped with packing somewhat light. Cassie made a great list of points to remember and CP summary items to ensure we didn’t forget anything on the way, and we kept it with the passport. We managed to hit the hay before 10pm, ready for a 6:30am start.
We set up in the transition area at 7:45am, headed over to the pre-race brief by Doug at 8:30am, and then lined up on the bridge ready for the start at 9am. There were 7 teams in our division, and we knew we had good competition from all of them.
The race started promptly at 9am and we headed out along the flat for the first 3.2 miles to CP1. We stayed in the lead pack and managed to bag CP1 first. Dennis did an amazing job almost falling/flying down a 50′ ravine to get the CP in record time. We headed back to the transition and were the first team to head out on bikes to CP2. We took the Bagman trail, a steep technical climb. I think many of the other teams opted for the Sugarloaf trail, which was probably a better route choice.Halfway up the trail my calf muscles began to cramp. I had never had this problem so early in a race and I thought I was in big trouble. But the cramp worries were soon vanquished as soon as my rear derailleur snapped. I couldn’t believe it. We were about 2 miles into the first biking leg and I just lost my bike. We quickly set up the bike as single speed. Dennis and Cassie were great. We knew this was a huge blow so early in the race and I know I had doubts about continuing. My bike worked incredibly well in single-speed mode, and with some help from Cassie pulling on the downhills and flats we, amazingly, were the first team in to CP2 closely followed by a duo male team. This is where our lucked changed. One of the guys from the male team, who I owe our race to, had a Specialized derailleur that fit my bike. Gratitude cannot be expressed enough to this team. As we remounted the derailleur (in about 7 minutes flat) team iMonpoint and the two SOG teams blasted through the CP.
Back in action we rode out to CP3, where all the other lead teams were either still in transition to the trek or just about to head out. We quickly transitioned and checked our Cassie list and made sure we had our bike helmets with us for the river section. Onto CP4, which was about a 7-mile down hill trek to the river. We put on a fast pace to catch a few teams and prevent the lead expanding of others.
We arrived at the boat put in with three teams ahead of us and another close on our heels. We filled our water up from a hose and then were told that is wasn’t potable. We dumped the water and I grabbed mine and Dennis’s water bottles and headed over to the bathrooms to find a different spigot. Dennis and Cassie selected some boats and got them to the water. By the time I got back we were ready to launch. We had a two-person ducky and a single ducky. I started out in the single. No matter how hard I worked I could not keep up with Dennis and Cassie, and the other teams were slowly disappearing out of sight down the river. After about an hour I swapped out with Dennis and he also had trouble powering the single ducky. It felt like trying to paddle a dead whale. Later we found out that the other lead teams managed to get single duckies that were the same style at the two-person duckies and were a lot easier to paddle. The paddle took around two and a half hours, which was actually shorter than we had estimated.
Next we moved onto the rappel. We charged into the transition, threw on our harnesses, and headed over to the rappel station off a bridge neck and neck with a 4-person team. I jumped on the line first and dropped the 60 or so feet. When I got to the bottom one of the race crews asked if we had a left a map at the boat put in. My mind raced and then my stomach plummeted. I couldn’t remember having the map with me on the boat. We had dropped all our mandatory gear at the transition so I would not be sure we had it or not until we got back to the rest of our gear back at the top of the rappel area. Cassie and then Dennis came off the bridge with ease and shot down the rope. As they arrived from above I told them about the possible map situation. They were visibly gutted. After running back up to the transition area, my worst fears were confirmed. No map. How could I have been so careless? In the last race I lost the passport and this one the map. Unbelievable.
I checked with the support crew and to my frustration found our map was no longer at the put-in but was now back at the race start. We knew we needed the map or to hook up with another team to go on. IMONPoint was just about to head out on the time trial and I asked if we could follow them. They graciously said we could, but, as I am sure they did too, we wanted to go it alone. We found out that our map was being transported to our current location, but we would have to take a 1 hour 45-minute time penalty for having “outside assistance.” That was better than nothing, so we waited for our map, which got there in about 15 minutes, and told iMonpoint to go ahead without us. Still down from the map mishap, we gathered ourselves and took off on the time trail being as positive as possible.The gamble we had taken for the route we took was that we would have to bushwhack for about 1k to get from CP8 back to the road and it paid off. At the exact point where we were going head into the undergrowth there was a trail that was unmarked on the map. Joy. Bush whacking with a bike is no fun and the trail we found was clear and headed in the right direction. As we exited from the trail and back to a known path we spotted a CP that we did not have on our map. This could only mean that we were going to be given that point later in the race and would be back to get it during another stage. After a quick ride back on pavement, our time trial was over. I still have no idea what our time was or how we ranked.
Suspicions confirmed, at the CP we were given three additional checkpoints to get on foot. To be able to continue any further in the race and be able to get the final three optional checkpoints it was a requirement to find all three O points. After a quick transition, we were off again. We had no problem finding the O points and were back to the transition within about 3 hours.
Because of the map time penalty we were going to have to be at the finish line an hour and forty five minutes before the real race cut off to prevent losing any points, so we planned to be finished by 8am. From the transition at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain we looked at our options to collect the final three checkpoints, which had weighted values. Although CP13 and 14 were close together, we knew terrain was steep and nasty. CP 15 was a long ride out on the flat with a short, very steep hill at the end and probably an easy find. It was 4:30 am and we decided we didn’t want to lose any points because of cut-off time (you lose 10 points for every minute you are late back) and decided to get CP15 because we thought it would be a sure thing. From CP11 we swung back down the trail I mashed my derailleur on, which was a lot more fun going down than up. Dennis and Cassie set a blistering pace in the dark on the technical downhill. We made a quick stop at CP12 to get some supplies. At this point we had been away from the main transition for about 8 hours. The ride out to CP 15 was nice–totally flat on crushed gravel. The final climb had Dennis and me walking while Cassie rode the whole thing. At the top we ran into both the SOG teams and IMONPoint, who we assumed had collected CP13, 14, and 15 and were in a race back to the finish.
We lost some time trying to find CP15. All the other CPs had been out in the open and relatively easy to find. CP15 was well hidden in the bed of a stream. When I had transposed the points from the source map I was off by about 1mm for CP15, which made all the difference.
The ride back was good–a steep descent back to the flat trail and then an 11-mile ride back to the finish. We rolled in at around 6:45am. We would not have had enough time to go and get CP13 and 14 and were happy to be back, clean up, and grab some breakfast.Two lessons learned from this:
• Always clip the map to your bag. I have always done this in previous races. In this race I was using a new map case that hangs around your neck.
• Always carry a spare derailleur hanger.
When the results were released we ended up coming in fourth in our division. Competition was strong and with the map mistake and the mechanical issue, this is not too bad.
It was a good race format and great location. I went back to Ohiopyle last weekend with the family and rafted on the river as a more leisurely pace. It’s a great little town.
I hope to race with Dennis and Cassie again. Those guys are strong and experienced and we really gelled as a team throughout the race. The more races I do I realize it’s the people who you do it with that make the whole experience worthwhile.
