ECARS championship race 18 hrs – 7 springs PA
Photo Credit: Extreme Prestige Worldwide
This weekend Rev3 Mountain Khakis raced in the championship race for the East Coast Adventure Racing Series. The team roster for this race was myself, John Courain, Britt Mason, and Greg Voelkel. This would be the first time that John and I raced with Britt and Greg, who are two of the fastest people on our team. I have to say I was a bit anxious leading up to the race, hoping that I wouldn’t be the one to slow anyone down. I really didn’t want to disappoint my teammates. We all met up at the resort where the race was to start at 12 Midnight, Friday night. Together we went through our mandatory gear checklist, started organizing food for the race, getting our bikes and lights setup, and organizing our transition area. The maps weren’t being given out until 8, and then the race instructions until even later. So we had a bit of downtime Friday evening to try and rest up for what would be a tough race course.
Prologue:
The race started with a short running prologue circumventing the pond on top of 7 springs. All the teams had to do one lap and then jump onto their bikes for the first leg. We were all ready to go and psyched so we took off around the pond at a pace that would hopefully give us a little space when getting into the T/A to pick up our bikes.
Mountain Biking
Once around the short lake loop, we all hopped onto our bikes, turned on our lights and started the long descent down the mountain, and towards the first CP. The Temperatures were in the 50s and the combination of not being warmed up, with the high downhill speeds on the bike made for a chilly start. This whole leg was about 35 miles in total distance. So one by one we picked off our CPs in order, Greg navigating smoothly, and the rest of us trying to keep our eyes alert to spot the CPs as quickly as possible.
The first couple hours of fast moving gravel roads changed into neglected trails as we tried to link between checkpoints 5 and 6. This section I think was the low point of morale for the team. The trails we were on were not what was marked on the map, and soon we found ourselves hike-a-biking in the wrong directions through lots of thorns. We tried 2 to 3 different trails, and John got a flat on his bike, before we decided to take the road back out and go around the long way to CP 6. The lead that we had made on many of the other teams we found was gone, but it also seemed like other teams were having trouble navigating that same area, so we just had to regroup and push on and try to not think of the 40 or so minutes we lost. Our team got back into a groove, formed a paceline, and were moving along swiftly. We passed another few teams on the way to CP7, and continued to put distance on the rest of the pack.
After getting all of the biking CPs it was about 5:30 am and time to head back to the T/A to start the trekking leg. This involved a nice long climb back up to the top of the mountain. We were climbing a trail that contoured the mountain, when we decided it would just be better to push the bikes straight up the ski slopes. It was definitely faster, but not any easier. Either way, we got to the T/A at around 6:30 am and proceeded to refuel, strip off some layers and change shoes.
Trekking
Our transition was fairly quick and smooth, maybe ten mins. But while changing shoes I heard a hissing noise coming from Greg’s tire and knew that we would have another flat to deal with. When we were about to start changing the tube, we saw GOALS show up on their bikes to the T/A, and instead decided to leave the tire for later, and get a head start on the trek. We ran every bit that we could, walking most uphills, but keeping our speed on the flats and downhills. Greg did a great job navigating us through some shortcut bushwhacks to get us to the CPs that we needed to get to.
After about 12 miles of trails, roads, thorns and hills, we made it to the first of two orienteering legs of the race. We were arriving as Team SOG was just leaving, having cleared the course, so we estimated ourselves to be about 1.5 hrs behind them.
Orienteering
The orienteering leg was fairly straight forward. 5 points in a park that surrounded a lake. We attacked the course counter clockwise and got the large thorny bushwhack out of the way early on. Things went smoothly here and we worked well as a team. Keeping the pace as high as we could and only having trouble with one point because we misread the clue. We were able to clear the course, a bit slower than we had hoped but at least we had 5 optional points on our passport.
Trekking
At this point it was getting into the afternoon, and we still had a 6 mile run back up to the T/A to get back onto a bike leg. Again, with a lot of encouragement from eachother we pushed ourselves to run as much as we could uphill and get to the T/A as fast as we could. The last climb back up the ski slopes was a leg burner, but we at least had some more food to refuel us. We also had 2 flat tires waiting for us on Greg’s bike. The first flat we changed ended up blowing out on us, so we had to change a total of 3 tires during this transition. That messed up the flow of things for us and got us out of the nice rhythm that we had going as a team, so the transition took longer than we were hoping for.
Mountain Biking
During transition we were informed by the race director that the rest of the course from here on out had been changed to 100% optional checkpoints. We knew there was an orienteering leg, and we doubted we had time to do it, but we still packed our shoes just in case there was a close by point. We hopped on our bikes after getting everything in order, and screamed back down the roads leaving the mountain. All of us were feeling the constant effort that we had been putting out for the last 15 hours straight, and every hill hurt more than the last. We were able to get one bike point on the way to the orienteering section. We checked in and out there, getting us 2 more CPs at the orienteering T/A, but decided not to go out on foot for any points, because they were all a bit too far. Instead we had about an hour and a half left, so we decided to go for another bike point on the way back to the finish line.
A fun, long downhill on some doubletrack, led us to the spot where we found one more CP, then it was time to grind through the climb back up the trail. When we got to the top of the trail, we watched GOALS ride past us towards the finish. There was about 2 miles left in the course, with a good amount of climbing…we all grouped up and decided to attack. Greg had Britt on tow up every hill as john and I drained the last bit of energy in our legs. We were able to pass GOALS and put some distance on them, all the way to the last brutal climb back up to the finish line.
We finished the race in 17:22, completing roughly 80 miles. Leaving just about everything we had out on the course.
It was good enough to finish second place for the race, which secured Rev3/Mountain Khakis a 3rd place finish in the East Coast Adventure Racing Series.
