"Instant Classic" - Cal Eco, Auburn 2006

This race was Cool. Really Cool. No really, Cool.

No seriously, Team Silly Rabbits, America's Adventure Racing Team, had our first race of 2006 in Cool. Google it. Mapquest it. Whatever. There's a tiny, itty bitty town outside of Auburn, CA called Cool.

Okay, I just googled it for you and from the "Things to Do" section of the 'Welcome to Cool, California' site, it says: "Many historical sights and tours, scheduled historic events, whitewater rafting, gold panning, camping, hiking, kayaking, and swimming." Hmm... well, I'd say we did just about everything but break out the tin pans.

It struck me after my Mexican tale of December 2005 that I've gotten away from titling my reports. That one was ripe for a title like: "My Impression of Jim Morrison" for my wandering hallucinations in the high Mexican desert.

A title for this race popped into my head right in the middle of the actual race.... not that I was trying to think of such things at that particular time. Thus with a nod to ESPN, I call it an "Instant Classic". Many of you (guys) immediately know what that means. The rest probably don't need a huge amount of explanation to figure through it.

Well, as they say, it's off to the adventure races. We, the Silly Rabbits, decided upon this race -- the first Cal Eco of the year -- as a 'warm up' and kick-off to our season. Now, if you refer to your Adventure Race Update archives from about two years ago, you'll probably find a lot of cuss words about the Cal Eco series followed by a "I'll never do another Cal Eco race as long as the earth continues to circle the sun!!"

Well, short term adventure racing memory won out again as I found myself toe-ing the start line along with about 150 other short-term memory loss athletes making up a big field of racers that consisted of 24 4-person teams plus a number of three and two person teams, and a few hearty solo racers. The race would start at the incredibly mellow and wholesome hour of 2:00 pm. Yes, that's as in two o'clock in the afternoon! We actually had the luxury of sleeping at home and driving the two hours (from San Francisco) to the race site in the morning! And a pleasant morning it was -- quite an unusual and welcome change from the overabundance of rainy days over the last month and a half.

The Rabbits -- myself, Jason, John, and Jen (remember my middle name begins with J, so I am allowed to race with the Rabbit "A" team by virtue of statute 104.7c in the Rabbit handbook) -- found our way to the shore of Folsom Lake outside of Sacramento, Auburn, and COOL with 2 rented kayaks, 4 mountain bikes, a wealth of warm clothing, food, shoes, helmets, paddles, and adventure detritus. This would be a BYOB (bring your own boat) race, as many races are becoming these days.

We wouldn't receive the actual course or instructions until 1/2 hour before the starting gun, making it a bit more of a scramble than usual to get organized fully and plan our race. We would have a crew for this race, which would help considerably in organization -- meaning we could just dump stuff on them, head off into the woods, and reappear hours later with our stuff in some semblance of order.

With the maps and rules handed out, we found out that the course would consist of a short 4-mile navigation scramble, followed by a 6-8 mile kayak with a short hill run in the middle of it, followed by an 8-10 mile trail run, a bike/hike orienteering section of somewhere between 16-23 miles, a 16 mile run/trek, a 10-mile bike, and a final 4 mile uphill trek/run. Short and sweet.... or so we, and the race directors, thought.

When the gun went off, our shoes were dry, our mouths were wet, and our bellies full. Within minutes, that was all reversed and the trend would continue for the next 17 hours! At least we looked cool (not Cool, cool) in our new Zeal Optics sunglasses.

The first navigation scramble gave each team the choice of finding any two checkpoints out of the four that were pre-marked on maps that were handed out mere minutes before the start. When the gun went off, teams went basically in two opposite directions. We ran across a road and into the first of many confrontations with every adventure racer's favorite nemesis -- poison oak. With the abundance of rain lately, the oak has sprung in massive quantities this year. I've been practically unaffected before this year, but now with a few run-ins, I find myself utilizing a good quantity of Technu, an anti-poison oak wash, and just plain having breakouts in various and sundry places.

Somehow, someway, with a little body english and some power moves through bushels of poison oak, the Rabbits came out of the nav scramble in first place, checked in, and rushed to our awaiting kayaks. We were able to get a hold of two kayaks from one of our great sponsors, California Canoe and Kayak, but they were two unevenly matched boats and we fought to stay together as we crossed Folsom Lake en route to a checkpoint at the top of a hill on the far side. Beaching quickly, we scrambled uphill for a mile (climbing roughly 500 vertical feet) to acquire a lone checkpoint before barreling downhill, jumping in the boats and then paddling upstream towards the mouth of the American River.

We were able to maintain some semblance of a lead, despite John and Jason squabbling like newlyweds in the "bad" boat. They couldn't agree on the proper cadence to keep up with me and Jen. After a few verses of Huey Lewis and the News' "The Power of Love" that we heard on the radio as we drove up, all was set right again and the team settled into paddling and navigating up river.

Now, this brings me to a point about adventure racing that I might have touched on before, but which is certainly just another thing in the long list for the psychologist to figure out. I almost always get some song stuck in my head during each race, and it's usually not anything from any of my top 1000 favorite albums. Artists have included: Terrence Trent D'Arby, Warren Zevon, Queen, The Scorpions, and many more. I will say that we forced Huey Lewis into the mix in this race because John and I were enjoying it so much as we drove up... however I don't know if The Power of Love has any type of motivating factor while riding through mud at night.... not that Terence Trent D'Arby does either.

Miraculously, we got to the end of the paddle without getting caught by the teams that had much faster boats. We had to carry our heavy plastic boats a few hundred yards to the transition area where we met our crew, grabbed our pre-loaded backpacks and hit the trail. I do have to give some credit to an amazing 46-year old athlete and his wife who we see at many local races. This man, a doctor by trade and a former world-class cross-country skier, and his wife, a former cross country runner, more than handily kept up with us, as they often do. And this race was no different.

Anyway, we huffed along a beautiful singletrack trail that wound along the banks of the American River upstream towards the town of Auburn. For several miles it was more or less flat running and then we made a huge burst uphill, climbing nearly 1000 vertical feet straight up into town.

We got to the transition in first place with local sons, Team Subaru, hot on our heels. Now these guys literally live and train on this exact turf. We knew it would be tough if not impossible to beat them here. That's like going into someone's house you've never been in and racing the owner to the upstairs bathroom. You ain't gonna win. We enjoyed our time at the front of the pack and at least got to hop on our mountain bikes and leave the transition in first place before Subaru caught up to us as we navigated through the back streets of Auburn en route to some trails that would take us back down into the American River valley and nearly straight up the other side.

For this section, we had a choice of propulsion. We could either use our bikes or we could go on foot. We had to assess the merits of both and weigh the options which included NOT being able to bike on some roads and many of the trails that would take us on the most direct route through this section. We also had to assess the ultimate length of this section and try to figure if it would still be faster to have our bikes for the parts where we could ride. And we had to do this section all around Cool!

We had a small "trick" up our sleeve that we employed. Thanks to Jason, we had four sets of bike pedals that we could use with typical running shoes, rather than the fancier stiff soled bike shoes that attach onto the pedals and which can be uncomfortable to walk in over long distances. We thought that if we had to "run" much of this section that this would be the way to go if we took our bikes. And it worked for us.

Now, back to the race. About a mile out of the transition, as we looked over the map, Team Subaru rode by us like they knew where they were going. They did! We tried to follow them. They pulled the famous adventure racing "stall tactic" whereby they stop and pretend to look at the map to get us to go ahead in the wrong direction. And then when we didn't fall for it, they took off at full speed, made some turns, and lost us. We were reduced to some blind navigation and some blind luck to get to a trail that we could ride. Down, down, down into the valley. And then it was up, up, up some of the steepest terrain you can walk on, let alone push a bike up like we did.

From the top of the canyon, we had to find nine checkpoints scattered across several square miles of rolling, hilly terrain. And it was getting dark. Ace navigator Jason kept us on track through most of the section, though there were a handful of difficult points to find and not the best map from which to find them. Because you could acquire the checkpoints on this section in any order, teams were spread out over the whole course, leaving us with next to no idea what position we were in. We ran across friends and foes over the next several hours as we rode our bikes to a spot on a trail, dropped them on the ground, ran off into the bushes and hills to find the checkpoints, then had to find our way back to our bikes and do it all over again a mile or two later.

The highlights of this section were 27 encounters with poison oak, 16 flesh ripping run-ins with fields of barbed vines, thousands of pounds of mud lifted off the ground per shoe, three face planting "endo's" by three separate teammates -- in which your front bicycle wheel gets buried in a foot of loose mud causing you to go EN DOver your handlebars, and one gnarly nearly ripped off ear by the flying Jennifer Ratay as she nearly impaled herself on a sharp stick while "endo"-ing through some slick mud. She required six stitches the next morning, but loved every minute of it! Can you say 'trooper'?

Needless to say, this section ended up taking a lot longer than the race directors anticipated. Still we hung onto second place. But now Subaru had nearly an hour lead on us. At around 10:00 pm, we got in and out of the next transition with a little extra effort and some hot pizza. We faced a 16-mile run/trek into the darkness along the American River valley. And now, only two minutes behind us was Team DART, our friendly rivals from the Pacific northwest. Made up of a bunch of really good endurance runners, we had our work cut out on this section.

Okay, so they caught us in about four minutes. Together, we barreled downhill hundreds and hundreds of vertical feet over loose rocks, mud, and rivulets of water. We crossed a road and then navigated a few trails that traversed along the side of the river valley. And then at one point, we went down and DART went up... and the foot race was on. We descended down to a gentle and rather straight fire road while DART started along a windier narrower trail above us. At some point, they decided to change their decision, for just as we got the next checkpoint and turned around, they were coming up behind us!

Back along the river we plodded. It was now well after midnight and ten hours into the race as we fought to stay together and move forward. We passed some other teams headed in the opposite direction and estimated a decent lead on most of them... though nothing's over until the finish line, as we all know. We had DART on our heels, Subaru an hour ahead, and several more hours of racing also ahead.

We managed to cling to a few minutes lead on DART as we hobbled into the next transition area nearly 13 hours after the start. The next section was set to be a long bike section, but with teams taking longer than expected to this point, the race director mercifully shortened this section by taking out one very, very remote checkpoint. We still had well over a thousand feet of climbing over the shortened 8-10 miles of biking. Add some difficult to find checkpoints and an overabundance of transition pizza, and we're talking one tough section!

We cranked uphill for about 30-40 minutes to the spot where the next checkpoint was supposed to be. With another 30 minutes of crawling, crashing, stomping, and circling through the thick brush, John somehow found the checkpoint flag tucked into some tree branches. Team DART was in the same area scrambling around and it was our turn to pull yet another famous adventure racing maneuver -- the "Gosh, we can't find the checkpoint, so let's go back over here and regroup" maneuver. They somehow fell for. Must have been our innocent faces or John's Oscar winning performance. We "regrouped" back by our bikes, and hit the afterburners like Evil Knievel jumping the Grand Canyon, leaving DART to find the checkpoint on their own.

We bombed downhill probably a thousand feet and onto a trail to find one last checkpoint on this section. As we neared the checkpoint... wouldn't ya know it, Team Subaru was coming in the other direction. They were only minutes ahead! They looked dejected. We got a shot in the arm. However the shot quickly wore off as we gave a lot of time right back while we searched the wrong creek.

As we raced back out of the trail, DART passed us heading towards the checkpoint. Calculating the distance to the checkpoint and the difficulty in finding it, we appeared to have built up a little lead again. Upon regaining the main road two miles and several hundred feet above us, we were met by the race director, Dan, who stopped us from his truck to ask a few questions about the difficult-to-find checkpoints on this section. In the passenger seat was a member of Team Subaru! We didn't have to ask, but it very well appeared that Subaru had dropped out of the race because they weren't able to find one or both of the last two checkpoints.

After telling Dan that 'yes, they were hard to find, but no, they weren't misplaced', we screamed down the main road back to the transition, pulled on our wet running shoes and got out of there as fast as possible for the final uphill trek. As we left, we got word that Subaru had indeed pulled out because they couldn't find either of the last two checkpoints! They couldn't find the bathroom in their own house!

This shot in the arm propelled us into the daylight and towards the finish. Yes, the sun was rising again at 6:30 a.m. as we left the final transition on foot for a 1000 vertical foot climb to the finish line. Thoughts of DART and their running team motivated us not to dilly dally. As we climbed, we marveled at the trail we were on -- the Western States trail which is famous for hosting an annual 100-mile foot race called the Western States 100. We were now on the last four miles of the trail and it was a technical, rocky uphill that seemed to laugh even harder at the brave souls who undertook the task of already running the previous 96.

We finally reached the last twist and scrambled out into the parking lot that served as an earlier transition and now the Finish Line. And, bloody ears, poison oak, ticks (I had three of them clinging to me), mud, and 17 hours later -- the Silly Rabbits crossed the finish line in first place at 7:30 a.m.!

Whew! An instant classic in every sense. Stay tuned for more tales!

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

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