Adventure Xstream Durango 24-hour Adventure Race

Andie and I left Morrison at noon on Friday and drove down to Durango, we got to racer check-in at the Durango Mountain resort at 6:30 or so. Shortly afterwards the rest of the team showed up, it was my first time racing with them, I was excited but nervous too. I was the young gun of the group as everyone else was in their early to mid-30’s, the pressure was on.

At midnight the race began with one team member needing to sprint off into the dark and pick up our first 9 checkpoint (CP) coordinates. We quickly plotted the coordinates and determined a rough route and headed out. Straight up was the only way to go from the base of the resort so that’s what we did, teams were scattered all over the mountain. We were having difficulty locating CP1 so once we were sure of where we were on the map and saw that we over-shot it we moved on to CP2. CP2 was easy, just 200 meters off the main road up a drainage, we then moved on to CP4. CP4 was a little more difiicult having to go about .5 kilometer off the road to find it. I was one of two people doing some pace counting for us, but I wasn’t feeling so hot and was quickly getting irritated with the task of counting, so I stopped that business. I was surprised how easy it is to lose track of counting when it’s late at night, I had to force myself to try and not count more than 20 paces at a time and use my fingers to keep track of the higher numbers. Difficulty counting over 20 and having 20 fingers and toes, coincidence? We returned to the road for a little longer and then reached our attack point and went into the woods; it was about 2:30 a.m. and the pesto chicken I had for dinner had finally settled in my stomach enough that I could eat more than a few nibbles, jelly bellies can really perk you up!

The bushwhacking wasn’t so bad, except that we were side-hilling the entire time and had to lose about 3000’ in elevation in about 4 km; this is where I learned that I want a brighter light for these overnight races, especially when there is no moon out, if I didn’t keep up with my teammates and their lights I was screwed; my little Petzl Zipka with old batteries wasn’t cutting it. The side-hilling was wearing on me and I developed a blister on the inside of my heel on my left foot, though it wasn’t crippling. We got to the bottom of the bush whack to the road that we were headed towards, except where we popped out the creek had crossed over to our side of the road. There was no hesitation, one-by-one we went across Hermosa Creek the water came up to just below the knee. There’s nothing like really cold water at 4:45 in the morning to get you going. The water actually felt pretty good on my blister.

We then ran down the road for about a kilometer before we had to cross the creek again, a sign of things to come. This crossing was shallower, but about 3 times as long, at the end of it our feet were almost cramping because they were so cold. We made our way to the first manned CP of the race after crossing the creek yet again. This CP had the first ever gear-check I’ve encountered in this race series, we had to show that each of us had a space blanket and an emergency strobe. We hadn’t seen any other teams for about 3 hours until this CP. As we were leaving, Team Crested Butte (read: super-strong team, they beat Nike (the world champs) at Moab) were just getting there and only had 3 CPs so far; we had 3 as well, but should’ve had 4 if we hadn’t overshot CP1.

We left CP8 and had a very steep 1400’ off-trail climb to CP9; very steep, we had to use your hands at times. CP7 was down a gully from CP9, it seemed straight forward, but it was 1200’ of elevation loss and more side-hilling, man I was starting to really hate that! We made our way back to the last creek crossing of the trekking leg and refilled our water bladders. We had three CP’s left and 2 hours to get back to the transition area (TA) before we received time penalties. One of the CPs was way out there, we decided we would just take the 1 hour penalty in missing it, the other two were on the way back.

We cranked up the pace and then the 4^th on our team (though not our 4^th for the Montana race) cracked and we slowed a bit. We hooked up a bungee line and towed him, Sara and I did most of the towing as we were feeling the strongest. The race against cutoffs then began for us. Towing Mark slowed us enough that we had to forget the dream of getting CP3 even though we could see it attached to a ski lift 500 meters from the road we were on. We came back over the top of the mountain, located CP1 (much easier in the daylight) and then began flying down the mountain. We had 12 minutes to make it all the way down the mountain without any time penalties. As we descended more and more teams were popping out of the woods and running downhill with us. We all converged on the alpine slide and the next thing you know there are about 30 adventure racers running down the alpine slide tracks. About halfway down Sara twisted her ankle and we had to slow down a lot. We got to the TA at 9:05, 50 minutes of penalties for the 5 minutes over, ouch.

Andie was waiting for us at the TA and had everything laid out nicely. We didn’t have the quickest transition as I used the restroom, Sara took some pain meds, Mark tried to recover some sort of energy and Rod wolfed down some food. At 9:40 we finally left the TA, the bike was pretty good at the beginning, we towed Mark up the climb and then began the fun Hermosa Creek trail, Mark was eating and starting to come back to life, thank goodness. We were doing pretty well here as we were catching and passing teams again. After some initial chain skipping I got my bike dialed in and it hasn’t felt this smooth since I bought it. The trail crossed/went into the creek about 8 or 9 times, the smooth/quiet drive train was quickly replaced with a moaning and groaning chain covered in mud and dust. The trail had some good exposure with a steep drop off to the right, twice, Sara fell off her bike and into the ravine; it was a bad day for her. After the Hermosa Creek funness (if that’s a word) we began an impressive hike-a-bike, about 5 miles and 2-2.5k of elevation gain. I think on fresh legs it’s 85% rideable, maybe 95%, it was more like 50/50 on Saturday though. The last mile of the hike-a-bike we ran into a plague of caterpillars; they were everywhere, trail, bushes, rocks, my shoes, stuck dead on my tires. As we swept through the last bike checkpoints we were now racing to beat the 6 p.m. ropes cutoff, Rod and I were feeling pretty strong, Sara was starting to fade a little and Mark was hurting pretty bad again.

We beat the ropes cut-off by 14 minutes, my first ever tyrolean traverse, pretty fun. A quick ride down to the river and a long transition just to make sure we were ready for a long paddle. We had until 8 to get on the water and we were in no hurry. We all were running short on food at the end of the bike so we pigged out a bit in the TA, I guess 2700 calories for the bike leg wasn’t enough for me.

We finally got on the water at 7:40 and enjoyed the first rapids, though the water was cold. Shortly after getting to the flat water section, darkness set in; paddling in the dark is interesting. We paddled forever, taking our time and even stopping on the shore twice to go to the bathroom; it was obvious we weren’t racing anymore, just finishing the course. We had some big fish jump out of the water near us a couple of times and one of the trees on the shore dropped a huge branch into the river as we went by, interesting stuff. We were under the impression that there was just flat water after the beginning of the course, so the last .5 mile scared the crap out of us. The river was dark, the rapids sounded huge! We made our way through 3 rapids (class II/II- stuff) before we were pretty convinced something was wrong and we had overshot the pull-out. We had just pulled over to the shore, the sounds of the upcoming rapid was even bigger than the three we just went through and it was pitch black ahead, then we heard some cheering from the next bridge and saw the take-out just down river. I’ve never been so glad for the end of a paddle section.

11 p.m. we finally finish and proceed to strip off the wet clothes, shiver uncontrollably and try to put down some food and warm drinks. We packed up the car, with a lot of help from Andie here, and hopped in for the 20-30 minute ride back to the hotel, we were all zonked out within 5 minutes of getting in the car, I almost fell asleep while holding some Doritos in my hand, it was amazing that I finished that bag without falling asleep. It was really hard trying to stay awake for my turn in the shower, thank goodness Andie handed me my toothbrush so that I didn’t fall asleep at the table. Woowee, I was tuckered out, after 43 hours of awake-time and 23 hours of racing, I finally got to go to sleep.

It was a good race and definitely a challenging course. It was a little frustrating that most of the teams that we passed on the Hermosa Creek section bailed out to the short-course option so we felt like we were always racing near the bottom of the pack after the trekking section. We had 2 hours 50 minutes of time penalties (2 missed CPs’ and 5 minutes late after the trekking section). I just hope we get ranked above all of the short-course teams, that long course was way harder! I felt pretty strong throughout, except 1-2 a.m when the pesto chicken dinner just wouldn’t allow my stomach to feel right. More lessons learned and now I am going to get some ultra-light trekking poles and a brighter headlamp for the Montana race. This was also the first AR I’ve been in that I had to treat water between transitions, a 9 hour trek and 9.5 hour bike will do that I guess.

Somewhere along the way I totally screwed up my rear derailleur, making it difficult to shift properly, it might be a bent hanger or even more seriously a bent derailleur. I don’t know how, but I only damage my bike when I am doing ARs, I can ride for hundreds of hours in training and as soon as I race an AR that 5-9 hours of biking is almost guaranteed to break something on my bike.

-Nick

Andie,

Thanks again for running support crew for us and not getting mad at the cranky/whiney racers after we finished, I owe you a nice dinner.