Mountain Adventure Race Recap Part 4

Part 4: The Calm Before the Storm Before the Calm. Sorry, this is taking longer than the Harry Potter series to finish up.

Evening 3: The weather is perfect, it helps calm the nerves about the next trekking section, 45 miles with at least 30 miles of it at some of the race’s highest elevations of 9-10k feet. The last hour of the previous biking leg the team talked almost exclusively about pizza. We had all hoped that when we went through the outskirts of Big Sky that we would hit a fast food joint, but we only encountered farm land and were disappointed for it. When we arrived at the TA we immediately placed a pizza order with Andie, two large pizzas, ham with pineapple and chicken with mushrooms and basil. We confirmed our pizza order and headed out on the next leg.

We check out with the race directors and we see that another 4-person team is sleeping at the transition, it’s confirmed, we are in second place. Thankfully, we were allowed to ride our bikes the first 5 miles to the trailhead where we would start our trek at, but eggbeater pedals with trail running shoes on tore up feet isn’t exactly pleasurable. I pedaled along with my heaviest pack yet; awkwardly trying to pedal with the arches of my feet to save the balls of my feet for the trek. I thought I would’ve been able to streamline my gear and my pack would get lighter throughout the race, but it’s getting heavier with each new leg, I’m up to around 30 lbs. We get to the trailhead and see that the CP is not manned. We were under the impression that it would be and we could leave our bikes for our support crew to pick up later, wrong. We leave our bikes leaning up against the TH sign and say a little prayer that our bikes won’t be stolen and then head out.

Once again the mood is light. We know that we’ve got a long way to go so we ease into things, not pushing the pace. 2 miles in we make a stop to adjust some footwear and a two person team flies by us, we talk briefly, they are moving like their feet don’t hurt at all, I’m jealous. The trail is absolutely gorgeous, the most beautiful scenery yet. In the five mile approach to Hyalite lake we pass by seven waterfalls, not your typical “Colorado” waterfalls, these were at least 30 ft tall, some were triple falls, one was a thirty foot falls followed by a 200 foot natural water slide that went right under the bridge. When we reach the lake our pace has reached full speed, we’re really cruising; we filter water and eat food. Sundown is about 10 minutes away and we decide to take a 2-hour sleep prior to getting onto the ridge, we’d rather sleep in the trees. We bed down on some grass, the most comfortable grass I’ve ever laid on by the way, in a small group of trees just off the trail. I put on every piece of clothing I am carrying, I then remember the race directors advising us not to sleep in this section of the course because of the bear danger, I move my bear spray to by my head and then quickly fall asleep. An hour in I wake up to a light rain, it’s dark and we watch a 4 person team pass us before forming ourselves into a puppy pile and going to sleep for another hour; we will chase when we’re more rested.

We wake up from our slumber, in which I apparently snored, and start our chase. We knew one team had passed us, did both nearby teams pass us? We were unsure. We climb to the top of Hyalite Peak, the rain is now a drizzle and I wish I had my gloves, we can see at least three other teams scattered across the ridge. With no moon visible because of the clouds it is hard to tell who is closest. We continue on and soon I have an idea of which headlamps are in front of us. Every once in a while I would see a headlamp look back at us, I’d glance at my watch and then time how long it took to get to that point. We were 45 minutes behind the team in front of us at the first time check, within 30 minutes we’re only thirty minutes behind. We’re catching them fast, but I’m not realizing how fast we’re catching them in my condition. Finally, around 1:40 I see a headlamp looking our way, it’s not a short glance this time though, they’re staring. At 1:46 the headlamp disappears and I figure they turned around and continued on, 7 minutes later we come across the team in front of us sleeping on the ridge. They were snoring and sleeping out in the drizzle on the ridge, totally exposed. I give a fist pump and short celebratory dance as we go by, now we’re in 2^nd or 3^rd, not completely sure. We’re making good time, we talk about how stupid that team will feel when they walk 10 minutes down the trail and see a nice area to sleep protected from the wind and rain. Everything is going great and we’re moving fast, after racing for three days at least. Then we reach Crater Lake.

We come down to a saddle and the trail disappears. We look around and see one trail, going the wrong way. We follow the trail anyways and it descends, and descends, and follows the wrong ridge. It’s 2 in the morning and we are not liking this trail, which is not on the map, so we turn around and go back up to the saddle. We search more, and search some more. Finally, we agree to bushwhack back up to the ridge and follow the ridge until the trail regained the ridge 1.5 kilometers later. There’s a reason that the trail doesn’t follow the ridge at this point. Progress is slow, and for the first time I start to get short with one of my teammates. Jim, who obviously is convinced that we don’t know where we are, keeps asking where the lake is for a reference; during one of his episodes in which he left us standing on the ridge in the middle of a storm of wind and rain/ice and walked back a ¼ mile to see the lake I lose patience and Angrily yell “Jim!”. Obviously sensing my patience is thin, he replies with a courteous “Yeah?”. I give another slightly irritated “Let’s get going!”, he quickly agrees and we continue. Soon we’re cliffed out on the ridge, we have to down climb and go around and then get back to the ridge. At sunrise we finally meet up with the trail again and we see that the trail had been re-routed and if we had stayed on the first trail we would’ve been fine, frustrating, 3.5 hours to go 1.5 kilometers.

As we continue over progressively higher peaks I am feeling stronger and stronger, the cooler weather and my ability to eat large quantities of food have given me strength, but my teammates are deteriorating around me. We reached the billionth summit of this trek and Rod and Jim need a sleep. They sleep, face down in the dirt, for thirty minutes while Sara and I tend to our feet; the sun is up and my solar power is working. The pass for the next CP is near and we’re excited. We get to the pass and decide to take our chance on a trail not on the map. It goes to an old cabin, and a stream. We soak our feet in the stream for 10 minutes while we filter more water. It is here I have my first encounter with a leech, the tiny little blood sucker latched onto my foot when I wasn’t looking, great now I’ll probably get some weird leech disease. I’m leading us along now and Sara is navigating. I don’t realize how out of it Sara is, after a while I stop and she just hands me the map and says, “Here, I can’t do this anymore.” I look it over and immediately conclude we are near the CP and send us off in the wrong direction. We quickly end up 2.5 miles past the CP, my bad. We turn around and march back. Now Rod and I are feeling stronger and Sara and Jim decide to stay at the trail while we look for the CP. We didn’t know this and soon we were separated. Great, now we’re in middle of bear country looking for two teammates that don’t have a map and are extremely sleep deprived. After an hour of yelling “Marco” and finally get a “Polo!” response we get back together and find the CP.

The CP is deserted, we see clothes and chairs, but no people, hmmmm, this is bear country. A cry comes from our left, we look, two girls are running towards us with bear spray and satellite phone in hand. They run up and ask us if we are ok, of course we were. They were worried about us as we were expected to be in 6 hours earlier (we spent about 6 hours being lost, coincidence). We looked at the check-in list and realized that we were indeed in 2^nd place, yippee, we had been convinced that our lost wanderings had cost us placement. Our wanderings had not cost us a ranking, but it did cost us money. While we were on this leg the race directors started instituting previously unknown time cutoffs throughout the course and we had missed the cutoff to continue on the full course here and ended our run at being in the money at the end of the race. We were to be shuttled to the next transition area and finish on a short course. We were pretty happy that we had second place pretty well locked up and we didn’t have to do the 9 mile downhill trod to the TA. We chatted a little with the CP girls as they asked us questions like “What do you guys talk about out there?” and told us “The last guys were eating a lot of Pringles, weird” to which I eagerly replied “What? You have Pringles! Where?” Before we left, they gave us one of the biggest compliments that we had received because apparently we were much more jovial than any other team so far “If I ever do one of these races, I want to race with you guys!” We then slowly and painfully hiked 45 minutes down to a parking lot to await the arrival of our shuttle.

We get to the parking lot and nobody is there yet, just two cars, the CP girls’ truck and a white Subaru. We lay down and eat a lot of the remaining food we were carrying. Then hallucinations round 2 began, my first moving one too. I looked at a pine tree and in the branches I could see an ogre playing a flute, not moving, I had a staring contest off and on with him for 15 minutes, he was good, better than me. Then out of the corner of my eye I see a guy about a hundred yards away walk a Weimaraner to a spot in the forest. The Weimaraner sat down and eagerly looked up at his master, and they stayed frozen like that for 20 minutes. I would’ve investigated the Weimaraner and man if my feet didn’t hurt so much, instead I fell asleep in middle of the dirt parking lot, the most comfortable dirt parking lot I’ve ever encountered by the way, and so did the rest of the team. When we woke up the Subaru was gone, we wondered what the person thought when they returned and saw us passed out in the dirt, it made us chuckle. It had now been 2 hours since our ride left the TA, which is 20-30 minutes away. The rain starts to come down and we are cursing things and we decide if it opens up any more we will get our stuff and crawl under the Toyota truck for shelter. Before the rain could get worse our ride shows up, he had been lost for the last 90 minutes or so. When he opened up his car doors he presented us with gifts, 2 pizzas and Gatorade for everyone, courtesy of Andie. I hadn’t been that excited about cold pizza since, well ever.

Jim, thinking he was giving some sort of a compliment said “Wow, your car really smells like a bowling alley!” Whether the car smelled like a bowling alley or not is irrelevant, we all stunk and a confined space made it obvious. We rode with the windows down and cranked up the radio when Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” came on as it tied into our earlier reciting of the More Cowbell skit from SNL. Somewhere along the way back to the TA we passed one of the race directors going the other way and stopped to ask him what our course was going to be. He informed us we were done, but gave us the option of doing the final biking leg. I sarcastically said that I would actually prefer another trek and he replied, oh well there’s plenty of that on the biking leg. That’s what sealed the deal for us, we weren’t doing the biking leg! It was a good decision because the other teams said it was about 50/50 hike/bike and there were countless trees fallen across the trail.

We finally met up with Andie and Barb shortly thereafter and we all returned to the finish line. We enjoyed a nice cold shower and some food and then went to sleep. Surprisingly we only slept about 9 hours before we woke up and started packing everything away. In the afternoon we went to the post-race bbq and talked to the rest of the teams, it was nice to hear that a lot of other people ran into problems at Crater Lake. I found out how small a world it was when I talked to two other people from the CU aerospace program, on two other teams, and one of which I had already worked with on the MaCH-SR1 project (my senior project). Stupid rocket scientists, what do they think they are doing entering races like this.

Some stats:

Mileage: 200-225 miles

Elevation gain: ~37,000’

Jelly Belly Sport Beans Consumed: ~720 (about 4800 calories in Jelly Bellies alone)

Time racing: ~80 hours

Time sleeping: 4 hours 20 min

Time spent lost: ~12 hours (ouch! wish that was sleeping)

Caffeine pills consumed: 3 (all in the 2^nd night)

Dangerous wildlife seen: Leech (Timberland saw a mt. lion and 3 bears though)

Weight purposefully gained prior to the race: 5 lbs (ate like I was at peak training all through my taper)

Weight lost during the race: 4 lbs

Water consumed: ~3000 oz (21 gallons in 3.5 days!)

Thanks for following me on Checkpoint Tracker everyone and for reading my report, I had fun racing it, telling people about it and writing it out for everyone as well.

-Nick

p.s. I would like to thank my sponsors: Andie, she did the best support crew job ever and all for a free pedicure.

p.p.s. I should seriously try to get some sponsorship from Jelly Belly, I eat enough of their stuff.