Wild Wonderful 2012

The team

I had missed last years Wild Wonderful by Odyssey Adventures and was psyched to be heading back to West Virginia to take on the 2012 race.  A favorite of mine because the water section is Class 5 rapids.  Extremely exciting and also means no water section that requires hours of paddling in a canoe, which I hate.

 I arrived at ACE Resort, the host location and met up with Greg, Dave and Sandra.  I had not met Sandra before and her bubbly and fun attitude was gonna help her get through her first 24 hour race.  Dave and Greg are old hands to the 24 hour scene I was glad to be racing with such strong and experience guys.

 After check-in we headed back to our hotel to plot and dissect the course.  I had done the WW twice, Greg once and Dave was on his 4^th or 5^th go around so between us we knew the terrain and proposed course fairly well.  There were some new areas to be explored and the focus was heavily on Kaymore Top, an area we had only passed though on previous races.  Ronnie, the Race Director had set up a challenge trek section following the White Water with a 20-25 mile hike up and down the gorge, followed by a mountain bike course, then a foot O, then a long bike with optional points to the finish.  Mandatory points were required to remain official and we knew that it would be almost impossible to clear the course. With everything plotted, checked and double check, we packed gear for the day ahead, attended the pre-race brief and then managed to a get a descent night sleep.

Pre-race nerves

With a 6am start and we back at ACE with bikes,  staged our gear and loaded onto the buses for a short ride to the put-in.  It was great to see so many familiar faces that would be racing along side us.

With a three wave start we were drawn to be in the first wave.  We loaded into the 8 person rafts and paddled out into the very high and raging New River. Ronnie gave the signal and we were off.  We were in the boat with a 4-man team and tried to preserve energy as we headed down through the rapids.  Its tempting to go balls to the walls to get down the river first but no matter what the separation between boats, it is only a few minutes and over 24 hours that ain’t nothin.

Warming up for the rapids

 At take out we transitioned quickly and headed out onto the trek. After CP3 we know that we would be behind the lead teams as Sandra’s trekking was not as strong as her biking.  Sandra is a world class endurance mountain biker and is a lot more confortable in the saddle than in a running shoes.  We knew this going into the race and planned accordingly although the long initial trek was defiantly not in our favor.

 Dave’s navigation was spot on and we worked our way around the trekking points.  Ronny and somehow managed to find a flight of 800+ stairs for us to go down and backup living up to his motto “Our pleasure is your pain”. Thanks Ronny. We did see the lead teams on some out and back sections.  They were going hard and were probably a good 30-40 minutes a head of us by the time we go to the bike transition.

 The first trekking leg took around 4 hours and it was early afternoon. We made a quick transition to bikes.  We guessed at that point we were in the middle of the pack.  Sandra’s biking skills started to pay off as we took on the most excellent single track that had been recently cut. Biking is always my favorite part of the race and I fully enjoyed the trails.

By the time we finished with the single track and arrived at the O-Course transition we still had daylight, which is a huge advantage.  We had also made up a massive amount of time and were the third team into transition. Sweet.

We decided to take on the hardest points first.  These were the ones that were a long way off the trail and would require good compass work and pace counts to nail. We had no plans to clear the O-Course but had a strategy to work the course leaving the easiest points, but some of the furthest away for the end.  We knew we had to make a 6am cut off point that required a long bike to get to and wanted to make sure we had time to do this.  We set a goal to be off the O-Course by midnight.  Dave once again did a great job navigating (once we had the correct declination set) and we spent some time working through 3-4 of the points with Mark Lattanzi for Odyssey who was crushing the course as a soloist.

As the night drew in and the day’s heat subsided we managed to pick up our pace and realized we would be able to complete the O-Course if we didn’t head out on the last bike section until 1am.  We took the gamble that we would make the cut off, pressed on and cleared the O-Course. With a two points back toward the bottom of the gorge and another requiring a 4-mile out and back, we struggled on, kept fueled and hydrated and kept the pace steady.

Stairs of death

Back at the transition after about 12 miles of trekking we geared up and moved back to bikes.  We moved the transition quickly spending less than 10 minutes getting ready. We made once last water stop at a stream that we had been using for water supply and headed out.

The ride back along Kaymore Top was refreshing.  Mostly down hill or flat we worked our way around the gorge and back towards ACE adventure resort. We didn’t see any other teams until we came off the trail and we started the hike a bike up to CP 21 with a few other teams.

The trails through ACE can only be described as a spaghetti mess of mud and puddles.  We took a wrong turn but managed to do some heavy bush whacking down an over grown trail to get back on course and get to the cut 6am cutoff with 40 minutes to spare.  Unfortunately Sandra’s bike sustained a broken chain on the way slowing progress.  Note to self, quick links don’t work on XTR chains and XTR chains are a pain in the ass to repair.

We ran into the Odyssey team at the cut off and headed out before them but got waylaid with some lights dying.  After distributing some lights between the team we were off again and heading out for CP29, a long haul with some serious hill climbs. We were neck a neck with Odyssey who we assumed had also cleared the O-Course and probably picked a couple of optional points on the mountain bike section. With only two optional points to get we know we would have to get at least one, if not two too be able to take the lead. We traded placed with Odyssey down the trail and eventually arrived at CP29 slightly ahead.  With time running out they opted to not get the final optional points.  We decided to go for it and headed out along a very overgrown trail to get the optional points. Disaster struck once again with the XTR chain breaking in the same spot.  With time against us at this point we got the chain repaired and decided that we were not going to get the optional points we needed and started heading back to be able to finish before the cut off of 9am. With a weakened chain that we ere concerned would continue to blow out, Greg did some impressive towing to get Sandra back up in the ACE resort and to the final check point.  With a final down hill to the finish we completed the 2012 Wild Wonderful with about 30 minutes to spare.

Odyssey managed to get an extra optional checkpoint and took first place the Coed division and we took second.

It was a challenging course.  No one cleared every checkpoint and out of 40 teams who started only 14 officially finished.  For this race, Odyssey Adventures truly lived up to their motto “Our pleasure is your pain”.

Finish line