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Kelly, Dave and Micah after a Down, Up, Down, Up, Day
Friday night began with an informative race meeting where racers from Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin converged to get ready for the next day. Once checked in we headed back to our room to plot points and check our gear for the next day. With plots pointed and routes chosen we took the gear list and made sure we had all required gear with us. With all individual gear checked, it was time for the TEAM required gear list for our first race of the year.-1 cell phone fully charged
-Map Case
-UTM tool
-Compass
-Waterproof matches
-Bike and Chain Tool
-Air Pump or CO2 shooter
-First aid kit
Good, Good, Check, Check, and two of most things on the list.
Then, like always we end up tweeking things a little here and there. Light fleece or heavy fleece(went with light fleece). How many tubes total do we have? Six. We don't need that extra weight. Lets just take 3 spare tubes. Two of us are running tubeless. Ya, sounds good. How about nutrition? 8 to 10 hours? 5 powerbars a piece (4 stacked in bento box one in pack) Gels? Finally we decided to call it a night.
Before we knew it we were pushing accross the front of the scenic Milford lake dam to the town of Wakefield where our bikes had been dropped earlier in the AM.
3 teams had seperated and pushed out of transition on to the bikes heading to a series of about 7 cp on bikes. I chose to laminate my map rather than using my map case in this portion and soon found it to be too slick to stay in place well. If possible I try to avoid losing track of my exact spot on the map to avoid diving into an area in the wrong place. We hopped on to the wrong set of single track and worked it up and down for about 20 minutes with another top team. Usually not a good sign when no one else is aroung this early in the race. Lightbulb went on and both teams were back on
on track. We were starting from the back of the pack, but were optomistic as a lot of race was left. Kelly is a strong biker and helped pull us back into the race.
Next section was a choice of Canoe, Orienteering Course, or a single track bike loop with CPs to be picked up in all sections. We choose to Canoe first as the wind was harsh and most likely going to get worse. Teams struggled in this section. With Micah in the back of our vessell I usually like our chances of at least holding our own.
Many teams portaged but Micah choose to remain in the water about 40 meters out from shore. But,,, the person in the middle of the canoe with but down, getting constanstly splattered from that dag gum front paddler was getting cold, fingers turning white, cold.
Kelly was ready to get the blood flowing with a trek on the land navigation portion. We found our checkpoints with few issues and with a some new scratches we were on our way back to the bikes.
punched we were back to transition area to check out.
We were excited to hear we had worked our way up to 2nd place overall. That gave us a little motivation for a fast transition as we were not far behind.
The team in front of us was soon behind as they had the miss fortune of a flat tire.
We felt bad for them as it has been a while since we have flatted in a race. We breezed through the first 6 miles of a bike leg with little problems UNTILL. Flat #1
Flat #1-pop into action tube out, co2 and shooter out,...., come on lets get the bad tube out, where is the... stinking, ... anybody have have tire levers...whoops.... After fumbling around a while we did realize we had two bike tools and were able to use the alan wrenches to get the tire off. After a few co2 cartridge errors we had thing figured out for another mile until we had flat #2.
Flat #2 Micah pulled out of his bag, his spare tube for his 29 inch bike. It did not take long to realize it was a 26" tube and that of the 3 spare tubes we had taken- two of them were 26" tubes and we needed 29" tubes.
It was now time for the pump and ride as fast as you can until you flat tour. Our distance became shorter with each pump as more thorns were gathered on flats 3, 4 and 5. We were searching out how many cartidges we had until our hand pump would be left and found a patch kit with 6 slime patches.
Micah sat down and methodically began locating holes, until there was one patch remaining. We had watched two teams pass us and began to wonder if we would finish. Kelly and I wanted to throw on the tire and save the last patch. Micah said, Lets find one more hole while and patch while its out. With the last patch on we were off and retaining air!
We went by short course teams who were having their own struggles.
Thank you to Char race director for Lake Adventures Racing, to her willing volunteers and to the Manhattan Running Company for the many prizes they provided. Char puts on a quality race for athletes of all abilities and ages. She has results, splits , photos and video of the events to share with your family and friends. All photos were graciously provided by Char and her volunteers.
Fire, food and fun were provided prior to awards.
Looking forward to next year!
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