Rick Baraff's Tales of Adventure

"Eating Tuna Fish on the Moon" - Desert Winds AR 2008

2008-06-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

* Paddling on Lake Mead *

Okay, by a show of emails, who's eaten tuna fish out of a metallic pouch at 5:30 in the morning while running across what looks like a moonscape after staying up all night trekking and paddling?

What? No one else?

Fine. I'll save the "live a little" speech and get to the juicy bits of the Desert Winds 24-Hour adventure race at Lake Mead, NV. Yeah, yeah, we'll get to the part about eating tuna fish on the run... that comes at Hour 20 of the race... but it was just one of those moments regarding the absurdity and uniqueness of adventure racing that struck me as I licked the last bits of poor old Charlie from the foil package.

Alright, let's rewind. We'll start with the all too true fact: There's no (direct) way to get to Vegas from here.

"Here" is still San Francisco, CA where I reside. You figure if Vegas is the new "Rome" with all roads leading there (heck, they only have about five life-size replicas of Rome out there), they still haven't built one from the bay area. You have to go pretty far south then make a sharp turn east on some big boring highways... or you go the "scenic" way over hill and dale along a number of lesser roads that wind through California and Nevada's high country. We took the scenic way to the tune of 10+ hours from Tahoe! There was an unfortunate accident that we had to go around, but it woulda been long either way. Add 4 hours for my trip to Tahoe and that's a lotta travelin'.

So, I've been racing with some different folks of late ever since most of my Silly Rabbit teammates have had Real Life take over their adventure racing (pregnancies - congrats Jen! Baby boy a mere 2 weeks ago!, marriages and moving, businesses, etc). For this race, I teamed up with some Californians (by way of Sweden and one of the Dakota states): Mats and Jackie from Team Aquan/Racing With Giants. Aquan is an all-things-paddling-related store in the bay area and Racing With Giants is an adventure racing conglomerate of bay area folks.

Luckily enough, Mats and Jackie both live "on the way" to Vegas from SF, so I found myself driving towards Lake Tahoe to stay overnight at Mats' and then hop in Mats' SUV to pick up Jackie -- and her 23-foot long 3-person kayak! -- in Tahoe the next a.m. for what would be that loooong and winding road trip to Vegas. I mention Vegas because it's basically catch point for Lake Mead from out here in the West. You go through there to catch the (tourist-filled) road over the famous Hoover Dam and then along the massive (and drying up, due to environmental factors) Lake Mead to a place called Temple Bar -- a high-desert mobile home and house boat community along the shore.

We arrived at Temple Bar just before sunset and set up camp in some sandy gravel in one of the campsites just on the outskirts of the community. I reacquainted myself with a number of fellow friends and racers that I hadn't seen in anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. After getting our tents and gear situated, I cooked a little pasta and tuna (no, not that tuna! wait for it) for dinner, we drank lots of water, and went off to bed after eight beers and three tequila shots at a house boat party we were invited to... okay, so we just went off to bed.

The race would start at the posh hour of 9:30 a.m., just as the sun was switching from "fry" to "boil" mode. We had all woken up several hours earlier, milled around, looked at our watches 100 times, ate some breakfast, broke down camp, got our gear ready, and finally moseyed on down to the covered area that would serve as the start, finish, and transition area for the race.

Now to truly get a feel for this race, you have to know Robert Finlay. Robert Finlay is a weathered, leathered 50-something year old high desert dude who looks 40, runs like he's 30, and drinks like he's 20. He's the owner/operator of Kayak Lake Mead, an adventure racer in his own right, and one of the most genuine and cool guys you'll ever meet. He also owns and operates the mind that put together this race. It's a piece of heavy machinery, that brain of his.

He calculated that we'd be racing for AT LEAST 24 hours, but there would be NO mountain biking... only running and kayaking. This is because the terrain around Lake Mead is an absolute moonscape of rocks and cactus with nary a trail or road. If you like fixing flat tires, you'll like biking around the area. Robert enlightened us on his 'mathematical' formula for calculating the time it would take for people to complete his races, something that sounded strange and wonderful, yet which was uncannily accurate.

Finally, at 9:30, quicker than you can say "Peter Cottontail" or "Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers", Robert started the race. There was no pre-handing out of the maps to plot, no instructions on where or where not to go, no big speeches about the rules... just some vague notes for how to prepare our gear for the first leg (food and water for 4+ hours including stuff to swim in/with... if you wanted). All he had to say to us was: "Welcome to the race. This is the start. At Checkpoint One, you'll get the maps and instructions for the rest of the first section of the race. To get to Checkpoint One, head 300 degrees magnetic north from here. The maps are on an island in the lake 2.4 kilometers away."

And with that, we were off.

Sure enough, 2.4 kilometers, one barbed wire fence, and one cold, refreshing swim away, there was a small island with a pile of maps and instructions. Oh, barbed wire fence, you ask... well, the darn thing was hidden in some tall swamp grass in a gully that we were plowing through and it nearly sliced me in half. One wire bit into my shins, another into my waist and the top of my head quickly met with the top of my feet as I I went head over, stretching in half before being pulled back up by my teammates. A quick check revealed a big crisis! A barb had ripped a big gash in the Hawaiian surf shorts that I was wearing for the race! Beyond that, I was lucky to come away with a little scratch on my thigh and a few on my shins. Hardly anything to slow us down. We hopped over and kept going.

* Plotting the race on a map... on an island. *

So, I mentioned 'stuff for swimming'. Well, a good portion of the first section encompassed racers having the option of taking to the water. Already we found one checkpoint surrounded by the stuff and we plotted a few more that were in or across several hundred yards of the stuff. We were allowed to have any device short of an outboard motor to help them get across the H2O. After rigorous testing by gear-guy Mats, he figured the fastest way was to have inflatable pool rafts and hand paddles to propel us along. He also figured that lying on your back on the inflatable raft while paddling backwards with a lazy backstroke motion was the most comfortable AND fastest way. Hmm... I think Mats had one too many Corona beers during testing, but we went with the plan.

Upon picking up the maps and instructions, we plotted coordinates for the first 4-5 hours of the 24 hour race. After nearly drying out in the hot wind, we found our bearings, and then hopped right back into the water to get to the next checkpoint. Well, after all we were on a tiny island!

The first section found numerous teams -- including our arch rivals Team DART who were fielding TWO teams instead of one -- criss-crossing the landscape capturing checkpoints and "swimming" across the many inlets around the lake because it was faster than running around them. We could get the checkpoints in any order, and at one point, we deviated from the 'norm' and swam away from the field to try to get a checkpoint that we thought would entail a shorter swim and would offer us a faster way back to the transition.

Mats is an excellent navigator if I didn't mention before (I didn't). He's a dead shot with the maps and we never questioned his map and compass work for a second. As mentioned, he hails from Sweden where orienteering is a royal sport and weekend 'fun' races see thousands of participants -- from age 8 to 80 -- vying for blood.

Our 'plan' for the first section worked out well enough. We're not sure how fast other teams were at the swimming, pool floating, hand paddling, or whatever else they came up with, but we got back to the first transition in decent shape -- maybe 4th or 5th place. We probably spent too much time in the transition -- repacking gear, getting our kayak ready, plotting the next set of instructions for Section 2 -- but we didn't panic quite yet. It would be a long race.

For Section 2, we estimated 8-12 hours. We would have a combination of checkpoints that we needed to get on the kayak and more checkpoints to get on foot. We had to acquire two mandatory checkpoints first, and then we had an array of optional checkpoints that we could get in any order. One interesting thing about this race was the optional checkpoints. A number of other races offer them, either as a way to allow teams to still compete without feeling like they're disqualified for not acquiring them all, and/or because there's a "time limit" on the race and strategy comes into play. In this case, we had to be finished with the race by 12:30 p.m. the next day -- 27 hours after the start -- though Robert would eventually be a little lenient for the slower teams. Without the full extent of the maps and course, we couldn't estimate anything and just had to race as fast as possible until we got to the last section.

So, at about 2 p.m., maybe 40 minutes behind the leaders, we headed out in our 3-person kayak to acquire our two mandatory points and get ALL of the optional ones. Yes, our plan was to complete the entire course, optional checkpoints and all. Each checkpoint (optional and otherwise) was worth a point, so if you got more than the next team, you could win that way, too. Basically you were NOT going to win if you only acquired the mandatory checkpoints because a) there was plenty of time to get at least some of the optional ones, and b) it was a forgone conclusion that most teams would be going for most if not all of the optional ones since there was ample time.

Okay, looong story somewhat short here (well, probably not, but it hopefully re-ignites the reading muscles)... Mats got us to the first checkpoint, then navigated near perfectly to the second much trickier checkpoint (which many teams paddled past). Our team's plan (with a little help from a race staffer's suggestion -- not cheating, just a suggestion!) was to then paddle back to one spot about halfway between the "array" of trekking checkpoints and acquire ALL of them at once. The other option was to grab a few checkpoints, hop back in the boat, paddle to another spot, grab a few more points, hop back in the boat, grab a few more, then paddle back.

The second way sounds like it might take more time, but the checkpoints were arranged in such a way (Robert's brain!), that it looked like an M.C. Escher picture, with no clear or "best" path.

Our plan did succeed however! Well, until about midnight, when a few of the 'wheels' on our 'wagon' began to fall off, and we came to a decision point. We were low on light (the batteries in my main headlamp were out), lower on energy (15 hours of racing!), and even lower on water (Mats and Jackie had about 10 ounces between them!). We were about 2/3 of the way through the trek on this section and we were about an hour and half from our boat... if we walked straight back to it. But we were out in the wild moonscape, at night, searching for checkpoints.

With the checkpoints being optional, we all came to the decision that we'd forgo the furthest one (sorry little wooden marker!) and get the remaining points on the way back to our boat since we were completing something of an adventure racing "circle" (something that looks like a 2-year old drawing a cloud). It was a calculated gamble. We still had an entire unknown section of the race to get instructions for, plot, and complete... and at this late hour, one thought that we shared was that no team would be able to acquire all the checkpoints in the alloted time and that if we only skipped one, we'd still be in good shape.

So, we got the rest of the checkpoints along the way back to our kayak and refueled there: we had left food and water in the boat. Paddling at night can be very zen, very frustrating, very cool, very tricky, or a combo of any of the above. Yes, it was dark out, but we had a nice sliver of moon, our headlamps, and most importantly a boat compass -- a compass gizmo that attaches to your boat and allows you to paddle without taking your hands off the wheel. We made decent time on the way back to the transition, arrived at around 1:30 or 2 a.m.... and promptly found out that we were in the tentative lead! Our main rivals -- TweedleDee and TweedleDum, excuse me, Dart 1 and Dart 2 -- had NOT checked in yet. (I jumped the gun above when I said that our plan worked the best on this section, but it fit at the time). And in fact, Dart 1 had some serious boat problems. How serious? They ran one of their two boats onto a rock and nearly sunk it! So they were on foot for the whole section.

Being two in the morning it took us a bit to plot the next (and last) section of the race and get going again. But amazingly, neither Dart team arrived before we left. One thought about the Dart team that broke their boat was that they really might not make the rest of the race because they had to run across a long expanse of tricky terrain instead of having something of a respite in their kayaks where the going was certainly easier. With this kind of news, we thought that maybe our gamble on skipping a checkpoint could pay off...

With several more hours of racing ahead, we paddled back out into the night, following the bearings we set by looking at the map on shore. About 45 minutes later, we pulled up in the mud several miles away to begin yet another long trek that would have us looping back to the boat. But, upon finding the first checkpoint, we decided to turn around, get in our kayaks and head for another spot that we thought would be more advantageous to complete the section. So, we paddled for another 20 minutes, pulled up at a dark point on the shore, lifted our boat up to safety, got ready to trek... and then started trekking.

We headed up, up, and up a thin ridge with big drops on both sides and then out into more of the trail-less moonscape. We were feeling better about the race and our position in the race than we had a few hours earlier on the previous trek. It was somewhat cool out (at least compared to the day time temps), we had ace navigator Mats pointing us in the right direction, and we were virtually in first place!

The sun came up pretty early. Around 4:30 or 5 a.m. the first bits of ambient light crept over the horizon. It's a very beautiful time of day -- no matter where you are or what you're doing. We were heading up and over one of the countless hills on the course and were able to appreciate it at least a little bit. Topping out on a big plateau, we shut off our headlamps and made our way towards yet another checkpoint. We came across another 3-person team -- the first team we'd seen in hours -- shared a few words and thoughts on the race, got the checkpoint and headed off for the next.

And here, good fans, was were -- after a big ready-made Chef Boyardee mac and cheese, a ready made beef stew, another Power Bar, some energy gels, and a beef jerky all in the last two hours -- I was still hungry enough to pull out that pack of tuna! Yes, I was at the point in the race where my stomach had totally given up on trying to feel pain and suffering, and I get, well, ravenous. As usual, I asked my teammates if they happened to have a hamburger on them. As usual, they all said 'no'. So, it was out with the foil pack of tuna. After so many hours, I find my body really craving the protein.

Though the sun was not over the horizon, it was pretty light out. So light that you could run, jump, crawl or whatever without extra lights. We could see for miles and miles... and we could eat tuna! On the run! At 5:30 a.m.! And our mom's wouldn't tell us to finish our milk!

Yes, we were once again trying to put a little hee-yah in our get-a-long and picked up a light jog across the flat plateau. And as we jogged, and as I ate the tuna, and as we witnessed the beautiful morning light, I had one of those giddy self-conscious moments where you say... "What the Hell am I doing?!" And then you just laugh a little and go on.

After the tuna, and after racing down another loose hill and across a scrub filled meadow, I was feeling pretty good. So I slashed ahead, and up to the next checkpoint which was tucked under the overhang of a big sandstone mesa that jutted a few hundred feet up from the ground.

We then trekked for another hour and a half, acquired the rest of the checkpoints on this section and made our way back to our kayak at about 8:30 a.m. We had not seen Dart since around noon the day before. We believed we were still in virtual first place. All we had to do was capture one more checkpoint and then the finish line.

To get the last checkpoint, we paddled out to a small "island" (a piece of land that was unfortunately jutting out of the water due to the aforementioned low water level). I jumped out, scrambled up some sun bleached rocks about 75 feet above the water to read the writing on the checkpoint marker, and then leapt back down to the boat so we could head for home. Another 30 minutes later, we pulled up at the landing and at around 9:30 a.m. -- almost exactly 24 hours after starting -- we made our way to the shaded benches to check in at the finish line.

We had arrived in virtual First Place! A few other teams had "finished" but had acquired many less checkpoints, so we were ahead on points. All we had to do was watch the clock and wait to see if DART or anyone else could get all the checkpoints and make it back in time. We actually decided to watch the clock from the restaurant at the landing because we were naturally still ravenous after racing for so long. The restaurant had a view of the landing and the shaded benches....

And... about 40 minutes after we finished, as we dug into our omelettes and milk, BOTH Dart teams arrived, together. The Dart team that had been on foot after breaking their boat had caught up to the other Dart team and they traveled together the rest of the way. They strutted up the small hill to the benches and promptly checked in to the finish line. They were well within the race time limit. And... BOTH teams had acquired ALL the checkpoints thereby "beating" us through sheer points.

We kicked ourselves for a short time for not sucking it up and going for that last checkpoint, but that's why hindsight is 20/20. For being the first time the three of us raced together, we had a pretty good race and enjoyed the madness that Robert the race director threw at us.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: coming soon

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Rick's Big Muscle Pic! :)

2007-02-01T15:03:00.000-08:00

Wow, boy howdy! It's been a little time between posts here, but it's time to get excited for another year of racing. This is me in the January 2007 issue of Max Muscle magazine! Look at those guns!! :) They did a feature on a few top racers and what makes us tick, and I can thank uber-A.R. P.R. man Gordon Wright for help with the placement.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Fear the Rabbits!!

2007-01-01T15:29:00.000-08:00

This is the 2006 Silly Rabbits looking spiffy in the pages of OAKLAND MAGAZINE, a cool rag in our 'hometown' bay area. Are you scared to race against us or what?!

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Hammer Time

2006-12-01T15:39:00.000-08:00

This is little 'ol me in the 2006 Hammer Nutrition catalogue! I'm a big fan of their amazing line of endurance products and use them often -- and NO, I'm not a paid endorser!

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

The Big Bloody Nose Pic!

2006-09-20T18:54:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is me in the October issue of MEN'S FITNESS magazine... looking rather fit, eh? There's an accompanying story about the Primal Quest race which the Silly Rabbits tackled in late June.

The Primal Quest will air on TV (yes, on national TV!) on ESPN 2, October 9-12, 7:30 pm EST and on ABC, October 14, 2:00 pm EST/4:00 pm PST.

Pick up the October Men's Fitness (silver cover with blonde gal in red bikini top on cover) to see it live!

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Primal Quest 2006

2006-07-25T08:58:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you for your reading pleasure… the tale of the 2006 Primal Quest expedition adventure race. A tale like no other about a race like no other from a place like no other.

Hailed as a nearly 500-mile juggernaut of an expedition in one of the harshest terrains in the world -- let alone the United States -- the 2006 Primal Quest evoked gasps of amazement when it was announced that the race would be held in the high desert of Utah in the middle of the summer.

“You’re going to die,” was the general sentiment from anyone half familiar with the conditions we racers would be exposed to. “Can I have your CDs?” was my brother’s comment (okay, I made this last one up for effect).

The Utah desert around the tiny mountain biking town of Moab is a panorama of unique and beautiful sandstone and rock mesas combined with a maze of narrow slot canyons, dry washes, and bleak, sandy, sun-scorched plains. Terrain fit (barely) for lizards and… lizards. Anything else – like humans – surely would not survive long without assistance.

And thus, despite all of this, 90 teams from across the globe descended on this spot on the map nearly three weeks ago to test their physical and mental limits in ‘earth’s richest adventure’. Overhauled in the nearly two-year hiatus from the last race in the fall of 2004, the Primal Quest took on a new shape and scope with a change in management – a change that would take adventure racing back towards its more adventurous and ‘wild’ roots, at least partially.

Team Silly Rabbits, America’s Adventure Racing Team ™, coming off a few solid warm-up races in early 2006 as well as a great 8th place finish in the 2004 Primal Quest, showed up in Moab with large targets on our backs and fronts. Yes, the media darlings and everyone’s favorite team to talk about were no longer the underdogs with the goofy name and bunny ears. We would be wearing jerseys with a single digit on them (8) and we would come in with the expectations of finishing once again in the Top 10 – something we held up as motivation in training and preparation.

With membership comes privileges…. And with our low bib number, The Rabbits got an early check-in slot three days before the starting gun. Check-in is a huge process that requires all of your equipment and gear to be checked by race officials as well as final checks (tests) of skill and knowledge. It’s an all-day process that involved proving our horse sense (literally) as well as taking a swim in the pool. Sounds like fun? Well, as part of our water tests, we had to tread water for 10 minutes while answering questions about water safety and then we had to prove our mettle with the double kayaks we’d be paddling by performing safety maneuvers in the pool at the base resort where the race was held.

We also had to saddle, tack, and ride a horse… something we’d do in the race. There were also checks of every piece of equipment we’d use in the race, a rock climbing test with all our gear, bike inspections, Leave No Trace talks, medical questionnaires, and Media interviews.

Yes, the Silly Rabbits would be one of the focus team’s for the upcoming world television broadcast of the Primal Quest (stay tuned in the fall of ’06). A production company was hired to film the race for its ABC/ESPN debut and the Silly Rabbits would be featured.

For this race, each team would be completely self-supported – a feature that added yet another high-stakes element to the adventure. This meant that each team would bring exactly what they needed (or thought they needed) for the entirety of the race, and nothing more could be acquired during the race, nor would outside assistance be available. Teams would pack containers with food, supplies, and gear before the race and hand them off to the race management who would transport these containers to the appropriate re-supply locations on the course. In between… it was only what you could carry that would get you through.

Upon inspection of the course maps the night before the race, we estimated that we would have to be self-sufficient for over 24 hours at a time and often up to 48 hours at a time. That’s a lot of food and water to carry when you’re constantly moving and burning calories.

This adventure was meant to harken back to the mean, ‘ol, ornery adventures of the hearty folks who undertook expeditions or excursions to conquer or settle these type of environs. We’d have the “luxury” of state-of-the-art clothing, nutrition, and equipment on our journey, plus an emergency satellite phone in case the “Indians” really started circling, but otherwise, the terrain was virtually unchanged and the conditions were not much different.

With less than 24 hours before the starting gun went off, the race management informed us that we would have a remote start that would require a four-hour bus ride from the base resort – the beautiful and picturesque Red Cliffs Lodge. The bus would be leaving at midnight. Repeat, the bus would be leaving at midnight.

Unless you’re proficient at sleeping in a ball on a crowded school bus bumping through the night, with a four hour bus ride starting at midnight and a sunrise start, that’s a lost night of sleep BEFORE an expedition that was estimated to take six days for the WINNERS to complete. All part of the fun.

And so, with a high-tech shoe to the face here and a dropped water bottle on the head there, I managed a few minutes of sleep on the floor of the bus and was just starting to get comfortable (read: numb) when we ground to a halt on a dusty road somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Utah.

With the sun still an hour or so from making an appearance, each team of four persons groggily de-bussed and split into two: one pair to acquire the race-provided GPS and emergency satellite phone, the other to acquire one deluxe horse. Yes, the start of the race would find each team carrying enough provisions for roughly 36 hours, a six pound GPS/phone unit, and in the company of one massive 800 pound horse -- personality and disposition unknown.

The Silly Rabbits ended up with a fine looking steed named Chub. Large, imposing, ready to run like the wind, Chub had no idea what the heck he was in for. So, basically, that made five of us. And with all FIVE members of the Rabbits on even ground, we led Chub out into the middle of a large flat high desert mesa to line up with the other 90 teams and horses for what would probably have been one of the dumbest, most chaotic starts to an adventure race if it hadn’t been tried a number of times already to no avail.

Now, I’m all in favor of the IDEA behind having horses in a race, however the execution is another thing altogether. Horses are certainly ‘wild’, ‘exotic’, and evoke words like ‘adventure’ and ‘frontier’, however if it’s not your horse and you gotta race with it, it’s kinda like borrowing your neighbor’s teenage son and telling him he’ll have to do whatever you say for that day.

A note to all aspiring adventure race directors: Things that don’t go together well – huge thoroughbred horses, strangers, helicopters, and guns. This is the recipe that Primal Quest decided to start our adventure with, and after witnessing a few other adventure races that started with this recipe, I can tell you what you get: something that looks and tastes like matzoh. Not good.

Case in point: As if 90 horses that have no idea who is riding them isn’t bad enough, add a few low flying helicopters with video cameras, random media personnel, and a starting gun. And, for our big, grand, made-for-TV start, the race directors wanted one member of each team to be mounted atop their horse.

As we stood watching Jason rein in Chub on the starting line in anticipation of the gun, our amigos on Team Nike yelled over to us. “Hey, uh, maybe you guys want to step over here…” John, Jen, and I turned to see them standing off to the side of the starting line tucked somewhat safely out of the chaos of 300 horse hooves. Thanks for the head’s up, guys! Much appreciated.

Bang! 90 horses and over 300 competitors took off across the valley. And in 90 directions did said horses go. We kept a watchful eye on Jason and Chub for about 10 seconds until Chub thought he was auditioning for “The Lone Ranger” and decided to rear up, tossing Jason like a rag doll into nine feet of dead air….

Gulp. As I watched Jason audition for Superman (yeah, the whole flying through the air thing), I actually thought our race was over ten seconds and 50 yards after it began. Thankfully, Jason (who was wearing a required helmet) came to earth somewhat on his side and backpack and appeared okay. John and I chased Chub for another mile before a cowboy/wrangler on horseback (who was standing by for such occasions) roped in Chub, belted him in the head, and handed him off to us. Thanks, pardner?

We noticed other rider-less horses and knew that other teams were having similar luck. Many teams managed to head in the right direction and several others got through the start unscathed. And with that, the Primal Quest began.

Two mere miles later, the horses and teams had to bottleneck for a steep, precarious trip down a narrow, rocky canyon trail. As we waited our turn in line (while wranglers helped teams line up the horses and get them moving down the single-horse-wide trail), a member of team East Wind got kicked in the thigh by a horse and crumpled to the ground. East Wind had traveled all the way from Japan – could this be the end of their race? Thankfully, he was able to continue, however it would be additional pain to the adventure.

The first leg of the race would have each team accompanied by horse for a 22-mile jaunt through the hot, exposed desert. Though deceptively cool when the race started at sun-up, the temperate quickly shot into the 90s during the early morning hours. After the initial TV-friendly start, teams had the option of placing one team member on the horse OR attaching all team gear (backpacks) to the horse. Most teams opted to take the weight off all four teammates and have them run/walk while the horse carried all packs instead of having one person ride while others bore the burden of heavy packs. We opted to saddle up Chub with our heavy packs and run/walk/gallop beside the beast.

Our strategy was to go out at our own pace and take it easy through the first day or two of the race. We knew it would be a long, hard war of attrition, and we knew that going out at a fast pace early wouldn’t suit our team’s chances. Throughout the next several hours we walked and jogged through the exposed sandy desert chatting with a few teams around us and trying to get Chub to cooperate the best we could. Like any good teenager, he was wanting to break out on his own and we had to tell him a thousand times to “Whoa!” It took a lot of energy to say the least.

After 22 miles and about seven hours of sand walking with a horse, we thankfully said good-bye to Chub at the first transition – a dusty crossroads in the middle of yet another hot, dry, exposed area. The temperature was probably in the triple digits and we checked in somewhere around 42nd place. Not to worry! There were several more days and several HUNDRED more miles of racing…

I believe it was here, unfortunately, that our intended strategy began to fall apart from one end of things. We had decided before the race that we would try to take our rests in the middle of the day when it was almost too hot to move. We would use the cooler nights to travel. This is different than in most races where it’s advantageous to travel in the light of day, however the conditions of this race almost favored the opposite.

We laid down under one of the only gnarled desert trees in the area for a rest and decided we’d take about 90 minutes. So, I went to sleep, hoping that my other three teammates would do the same. Jason got a few winks, however John and Jen were too wired and caught up in the action as we were near to a lot of race staff and other teams coming off the first leg. As a veteran, you can quickly learn to block out these distractions and get all the sleep you can whenever and wherever you can.

After what amounted to 90 minutes of torture for John and Jen, we headed out into the afternoon sun for another foot section. We’d have to go another 20-odd miles, but without a horse to contend with. We immediately picked up the pace and quickly caught up to other teams who had tried to push it too early. This section was completely uneventful otherwise as we continued to walk through dry, hot, exposed sand in the high desert.

One thing that did not play into our team’s hands was the lack of navigation in the race. Due to the environmentally sensitive areas we were traveling through, nearly the entire course was flagged with red tape and reflective markings tied around branches and bushes that we would have to follow in order to avoid these sensitive areas. One of our team’s fortes is navigation and it’s where we make up a lot of time over other teams…. However this would not be the case in this race.

We hiked and hiked for the rest of the afternoon and into the first night of the race before eventually coming to the end of leg 2. About 45 miles down, and nearly 400 to go!

Section 3 would be the first bike leg of the race. Before we could ride, we’d have to put our own bikes together. This is one function of racing in a self-supported race. You pack up your bike in a big box before the race, hand it off to the staff, and then you get to put it back together from whatever shape you packed it in. At the bike transition, we would only see our bikes, not our food. So, from the start we had to estimate our needs for this section as well. One thing in every team’s favor was that at nearly every checkpoint and transition throughout the race, Gatorade (a race sponsor) provided welcome products for all racers. One product that became an instant favorite was a new endurance shake -- a thick, calorie-laden canned beverage that ended up tasting great warm or cold.

We were still sticking with our pre-race plan of resting early, and with most of the teammates already tired from not sleeping for well over 24 hours (though the race began only 15 hours ago, we had the lost night on the bus and had therefore not had effective sleep in close to 30 hours), we decided to try for an hour or so of sleep. Laying down on the soft ground, huddled beneath our space blankets, we got a fitful little nap and then arose to put our bikes together and ride off into the hot, dusty night.

The rest of the night was relatively uneventful. We rode through the desert with a half-dozen or so teams along sandy, dusty (hey, are you getting the theme here? It was all sand out there!) fire roads across some large plains and valleys. We made too many stops on the ride and were still stuck with a pack of teams as dawn broke.

As the sun rose, we found ourselves climbing out of a canyon onto some fast dirt roads before ending up on a paved road for a 15-mile jaunt into our first encounter with civilization – the town of Green River. Again, we were in no real rush to push ourselves knowing what still lay ahead over the next several days, and so… we decided to have a spot of breakfast along the way.

Now I don’t mean we stopped for a meal of Clif Bars and energy gel packs. I’m talking nothing less than a Ben’s Diner type of meal. (Ben’s Diner?!...) I’m talking about taking advantage of what the race course provides which in this case was the little town of Green River – and Ben’s Diner, a welcome little greasy spoon oasis that was open as we rode into town. Riding now alongside Team Dynamic Earth, our newest race friends from the Mighty Mo expedition race (see last Report), we were dreaming about eating a solid meal at any place that might be open in Green River. Thankfully it was not the middle of the night.

Okay, so how do we justify sitting down for a waitress-served meal at a real table on real chairs inside an air-conditioned restaurant in the middle of a race?? Well, it so happens that there was a ‘dark zone’ instituted early in the race. After this bike leg would be a riverboarding section that would find us essentially swimming downriver through some whitewater for about 6-7 miles. This was deemed too dangerous to do at night, so if teams got to the head of the section after a certain time in the late afternoon or before sunrise, then they would have to stop and wait for sunrise or take a penalty and move on. So, with many teams in front of us essentially stopped, we were still moving to catch up… and therefore didn’t lose too much time stopping to eat. Capiche?

As we peered in the windows of Ben’s Diner, we noticed another team already happily eating pancakes and omelettes! So the Rabbits and Dynamic Earth sat down for some tasty grub and enjoyed every last bite. Who knew when we’d get our next solid meal?

Stuffed, we climbed back on our bikes and proceeded out of town towards the actual Green River. Attacked by swarms of mosquito-like flies as we approached the river, we found ourselves only a few hours out of the lead due to the dark zone. We’d finally see our food box here and our transition was again much too long for any racing good, but we got our whitewater swimming gear together and got to the swim put in. For the riverboarding section, were required to bring some sort of swim board (i.e. a boogie board), snorkel fins, a wetsuit, lifejacket, helmet, and shin/knee/thigh padding in order to proceed downriver through rock strewn rapids and fast moving water.

The water turned out to be much lazier than we anticipated and the section turned out to be amazingly welcome and enjoyable as we cooled our overheated bodies in the river and took our time getting downstream. I believe we were somewhere in the high 30s in the overall standing by this point, but again, miles to go!

It was a water-filled day as the next section would find us in the first of two kayak sections for the race. We swapped riverboarding gear for paddling gear and hopped aboard two double kayaks for a 30-odd mile downriver paddle.

Now, in the midst of our big adventure, we were also playing human guinea pigs for some doctors doing a study on the physiological effects of adventure racing. As part of the study, we would be wearing watches and heart rate monitors made by Swedish watch manufacturer Suunto, one of the top brands of adventure wrist top computers. At almost every transition, doctors would download the stored information from our heart rate monitors, take our pulse and temperature, and ask us a series of questions designed to check our mental aptitude and the effects of sleep deprivation. You can see some video at the www.ecoprimalquest.com website where you can navigate to the Silly Rabbits team page.

Kayaking downriver into the afternoon, we were trying to make the next transition by dark, however after our lazy swim earlier, we got a little behind and made it to the end of the paddle just after sundown. From here, we would have to wade/swim from one shore to the other to start another long trek. Getting across was yet another small adventure within the larger one as we would have to get across in the pitch black of night at a point where there was a very strong downriver current to land at a certain spot on the other side.

Safely across, we tried to bushwhack through some dense underbrush and after several attempts to break through, we decided to skirt along the river and cross a small channel to climb into the barren slickrock that Utah’s famous for. As we headed for checkpoint 13 or 14, we came across Team GoLite who, due to a bum horse, had been with us all the way through the first section and had finished the leg with us around 40th place. Incredibly, in only a few hours of race time, they had raced their way all the way up to third place! Yes, they were going in the opposite direction after completing most of the section we were barely starting.

Looking for a trail that would lead us to the next checkpoint, we began crossing paths with more of the lead teams who were returning from this out-and-back section. After some detours through the undulating slickrock, we found the checkpoint and then had to hike straight up and over an amazing rock mesa that would have been really cool to see in the daylight. Following reflective tape, we kept climbing up a ridge of smooth, tacky rock and eventually started down to the first ropes section of the race – a long rappel straight down a rock face that led right into the Green River. Thankfully, we rappelled down to a ledge above the river and then as light broke on the second day of racing, we traversed around the cliff face into a beautiful high-walled canyon.

We decided to take another short nap here because we still didn’t have any quality sleep since the race start. We picked a nice sandy spot and caught about 45 minutes of cool rest… however, it wasn’t until hours later that we unfortunately realized that we had been practically eaten alive by mosquitos. Hiking up the dramatic high-walled canyon, we made our way to another ropes section that required us to ascend up and out of the narrow canyon using devices that allowed us to go up a rope (like magic!).

We were greeted by the intense heat of the sun as we topped out on the ropes. From here, we had another 4-5 miles of walking across open, exposed desert before we’d drop into another canyon. Needless to say, it was hot. And it would only get hotter because we were about to descend into…

Hellroarer Canyon. I don’t think I need to say much else. It was straight out of a bad horror movie. We were able to load up with some water and Gatorade at a checkpoint before trekking into the depths of this dry wash surrounded by walls that rose a few hundred feet above us. The high rock walls and intense sun combined to create a virtual inferno through the canyon. And it was about six miles to the end of it…

We swept into the mouth of Hellroarer at about 11:00. It would be several hours before we saw the other side and despite it being a straightforward trek that offered no chance of getting lost, we would go a lot of ‘twists and turns’ to get through. The sand was starting to take its toll as we stopped every 15-20 minutes to empty several ounces of it from each of our shoes. It was creating blisters on John and Jen’s feet which would ultimately hinder their progress greatly. There was no escape from the heat and we took breaks often, however Jen really started overheating a little more than halfway through. Seeking shade every place we could, we tried to bring our core temperatures down in order to move on. We passed a few other teams who appeared to be in similar situations. Pouring sand from their shoes, sitting in the shade at every opportunity, going slowly to conserve energy and water.

In the midst of this, we came to one amazing section where it was nearly too narrow to get through. We found ourselves scrambling over boulders and climbing down short sections while sometimes having to remove our backpacks to get through. Squirting out the other side, we mercifully left the canyon in the mid-afternoon for the trek back to the river.

Recrossing the river, this time in the light (which made it much less daunting), we re-supplied ourselves for several more hours (possibly up to 24) and got back into our kayaks for another 30-plus mile paddle. This section was both challenging and surreal.

We were roughly 48 hours into the race, several more hours than that without proper sleep, and we were now sitting down in a kayak heading into the heart of the silent night. Can you say ‘sleepy’?

For an hour or so, we kept ourselves going by joining up with another team to chat and pass the time. As mentioned in previous reports, in the middle of such a huge race we are not concerned with getting ahead of other teams so much and therefore it’s fun, helpful, and very unique to pass the time by hooking up with others on the journey. In this case, we were able to initiate some fresh conversations that kept us going for a short time.

We decided not to bring major lights for this section and second-guessed ourselves slightly as a curtain of blackness descended upon us. The river curved back and forth in giant snaking bends as it cut through the desert. Though there were no rapids the current was moving us along and we could easily beach ourselves or run into a 300-foot high rock wall if we weren’t too careful. We did have our small headlamps, but imagine trying to light up a football stadium with a match.

Our paddling partners decided to pull over for a rest and we decided to carry on to try to stay ahead of some weather that was starting to kick up. In the distance, lightning bolts were starting to flash across the sky. The wind was starting to pick up. And our eyelids were starting to close…

Despite our attempts to nap, Jen was exceptionally tired because she had barely slept a wink since the race began. I figured that she could catch some sleep in the front cockpit of our boat while we still maintained some forward progress along the course. With the current moving us along, we could have essentially not expended any energy and still been “racing” ahead while doubly getting some much needed rest. I was fairly awake in the cool night air and paddled us along while Jason and John alternated dozing off and paddling in the other boat.

It was a strain to peer through the darkness with only the light of our tiny headlamps, trying to gauge where the river turned next. A few hours into our paddle, we decided it would be more advantageous to stop and rest even though our plan was to try to continue moving with the help of the current. Coming around another bend, the river canyon opened up and we saw some lights up ahead. As we approached, we noticed it was a bunch of people camping out on a beautiful, white sandy beach. The scene, the weather, and our physical state combined to create quite a surreal moment. As the cool breeze of the impending storm blew over us, we beached our kayaks on the soft sand and asked the campers if it was okay to take a small spot for some rest. John, Jason and I laid down in some of the softest, most welcoming sand in the world (or so we imagined) and using our life jackets as pillows we fell into a short, deep sleep. Jen stayed tucked in the boat to conserve heat.

After 90 minutes in this beautiful oasis, we climbed back into our boats and continued downriver. Thankfully, only a bit of rain washed over us on this section. A few hours later, we tried to find another spot to rest, but there was no place to land our kayaks that wasn’t inundated with mosquitos or too steep to land on.

As dawn broke, three of our four teammates were sleeping, yet we were still progressing down the river! After hitting a sand bar, everyone awoke to paddle the last two miles to the next transition. From here, we’d be back on foot for another hot, sandy canyon trek.

Before heading out, John and Jen stopped into the medical tent to get their feet taken care of, something that would become a theme for the rest of our race. This was by no means unique to our team as many others succumbed to the perfectly blisterful conditions. Some teams had their races ended because of blisters.

Humping well over 100 ounces of water each, our climbing/ropes gear which probably weighed over ten pounds, food, and other mandatory gear, we headed out into another blazing hot day to trek into a dry, dusty canyon towards two rope sections. The first was an ascent up an overhanging cliff face that would lead us into an area of smooth slickrock and steep rock chutes. We had to scramble up and through one of these chutes to get out onto the top of a huge, flat mesa. Handing our backpacks up to one another, we had to perform some very yoga-like moves to tunnel between large boulders. From the top, we were to follow more footsteps and red flagging tape for several miles to the lip of another canyon for a long rappel. In the middle, we incredulously came upon a sparse campground in the middle of this harsh, exposed area. The only souls there were the campground hosts who kindly offered us ice-cold sodas and water… for $1 each! Thankfully, we were carrying money with us throughout the race for occasions such as Ben’s Diner or wherever we might find some outside sustenance. It was highly recommended, if not required, for each racer to carry some money.

I wasn’t no dummy and had stashed two twenty dollar bills in my backpack. John had tossed about 35 bucks into his bag and Jen brought along a twenty dollar bill. We were extremely happy as Ben’s Diner cost us about $45. Jason… brought a quarter. Twenty-five cents. This wasn’t a problem at the campground host’s trailer as we bought twelve cold sodas and bottles of water. But we still had a few days of racing to go, and potentially more encounters with civilization (hint: this is foreshadowing).

Like ants under a cruel child’s magnifying glass, we trudged the open desert to the rappel section. We rappelled. And we came out into another canyon where we’d have to trek several miles to get back to where we dropped off our kayaks. As night fell, we decided to lay down for our first “big sleep” of the race. We decided on a three-hour sleep and we found a relatively decent spot to do so. We came upon a soft sandy spot among some big boulders, ate a “meal”, slapped on some bug repellent and our space blankets, and set our watches for midnight, three hours hence. We had used the daylight to as much advantage as possible to move down the canyon and now it was recharge time.

At midnight, we packed up our little camp and trekked back to the kayak transition. From here, we’d have to carry all of our kayaking gear, along with everything else we had, up a steep road to the next transition where we would again see our bikes.

As dawn broke on the fourth day of the race, we found ourselves reunited with our food container and our bikes. Packing up all of our paddling gear, getting our feet taken care of, slapping on copious amounts of sunscreen, and putting our bikes together again, we mounted up for an extremely long bike section (I can’t quite recall, maybe 60-70 miles – not so long distance-wise for us, but with the terrain and circumstances, it took a long time).

We made decent time across the top of an open, flat mesa to a spot called Gemini Bridges. Gemini Bridges is a spectacular spot among spectacular spots in this area. Along a high mesa wall, there’s a spot where a bridge of rock has been carved across a chasm. From this “bridge” we would rappel down several hundred feet as our bikes were sent down via rope beside us. Landing at the head of a sandy canyon, we slowly pedaled out onto the crux of the biking section – a gnarly bit of riding across barren rock following some four-wheel drive markings.

It was some small consolation that we had pedaled this exact section last year in the Adventure Xstream race and knew what we were in for. However, it would be about 40 degrees warmer this time and we would be working on a lot less sleep while carrying a lot more gear. If I told you it was blazing hot, I would be making a grave understatement. Deep fried fish doesn’t feel this kind of heat. We rode to the next checkpoint… or more accurately we rode to where the next checkpoint was supposed to be. Riding and pushing our bikes up the rock, we searched an area for where we were pretty sure the checkpoint should have been. For well over an hour, we expended precious energy, used up precious water, and exposed ourselves to not only the fury of the sun, but the frustration of not knowing how to deal with a missing checkpoint. There were no other teams near us to check with as we sat down under the thin branches of a scrub tree to talk about our options.

Pull out the satellite phone and risk disqualification? Go back to the last checkpoint? Wait for another team to come by? Move on? We decided to continue moving forward to the next checkpoint and seeing what the deal may be. We were in 26th place and figured that there might be some news from the previous 25 teams if something was amiss.

About a mile further along, we came around a bend in the trail… and there was the checkpoint! We told the checkpoint volunteer that we were nearly certain he was in the wrong spot. He told us that every one of the teams that came before us said the exact same thing. Whew! We weren’t crazy and victims of heat-stroke! However, he said that one of the race officials flew out in a helicopter to check the position of the checkpoint and deemed it to be in the correct spot. There was nothing the checkpoint person could do about it, and very little we could do by protesting to him. We were forced to continue on, though our condition was starting to get critical. We had used up a lot of our fluids in our hunt, and without being able to refuel at this checkpoint, we had to get several miles further to the next checkpoint in the middle of the day on the most exposed part of the entire course.

Onward we pressed. The “trail” that we followed was no more than a series of painted symbols on what is literally a mountain of slick rock. The trail meandered up and down the side of this mountain, often going up sections that were too steep to ride or over rock steps that were too tall to ride up or down. Riding only a few hundred yards at a time, we rested under a few barren trees and eventually wound our way to the next checkpoint just as a few of us ran out of fluids. The race management had deemed this checkpoint a water resupply just before we arrived and therefore the checkpoint volunteer was able to give us water without penalty. Though the water he had was practically boiling. The volunteer had a few large jugs of water standing by, however without any place to hide them from the heat and sun, the water inside was as hot as tea. It didn’t matter to us! We gulped it down, refilled our bottles and headed out for a few more miles of sandy bicycling.

The final “trail” on this slick rock mountain is called the Poison Spider and on days like this you can see why. Alternating some more hike-a-bike with a little riding, we mercifully got to a dirt fire road that led off the mountain and onto a paved road outside of Moab. We stopped briefly at another checkpoint to refill water and then rode about 10 miles into Moab as the sun sank slowly in the sky. And here’s where Jason’s quarter reared up to bite us in the butt.

A town! Civilization! Food! Drink! Yes, we were traveling through Moab in the early evening and the town was open to us. If you do ride into civilization or come across outsiders willing to give you food or water, this is not a penalty. You’re essentially only taking time out of your own race if you decide to stop, but in a case like this, I think that every team in the race stopped somewhere in Moab. As we rode into town, I believe we had the first ‘fight’ of the race. We were having trouble decided where and what we should eat! ☺ The problem came down to money. Basically, we didn’t have much left. A quarter?! Okay, we had more than this, but not an overwhelming amount to feed four hungry adventure racers after 96 hours in the bush.

I carefully pointed out to Jason – who thought he was being crafty by interpreting the mandatory “bring money” rule by taking a small piece of change – that a TWENTY DOLLAR BILL probably weighs LESS than a QUARTER!!! Anyway, we counted out about 26 dollars (and 25 cents) left and we had to decide the best way to maximize this amount. I suggested a grocery store where we could buy in bulk. Others wanted burgers and fries. I said how ‘bout both? So, we pulled over at McDonald’s (I know, don’t hate me, it was a special circumstance, I swear!) and after tabulating the prices found that we could each get a value meal of a quarter pounder and fries. And, we’d have a few bucks left over. We sat in the air-conditioned McDonalds and wolfed down our meals as we spoke to some race journalists who found us. After McD’s, we headed for the supermarket to buy some stuff for the rest of the ride, which would take us several more hours.

After yet another long stop to readjust and re-tape feet, we headed into the night for the dastardly Pritchett Canyon, evil cousin to Hellroarer Canyon. Mercifully, we hit Pritchett at night when it was cool, however it was a long, grinding hike-a-bike up the sandy wash and then up more un-bikeable four-wheel drive “trails”. Everyone was hurting physically, mentally or emotionally at this point and we had to stop to rest several times before reaching the top of the canyon and gliding down into an adjacent one. With nearly everyone at wit’s end, we leaned our bikes against a tree and laid down about two hours before sunrise for another short sleep. We figured it would be better to ride when we could see the terrain around us and it turned out for the better as we made halfway decent time getting out of this section. We were headed for the mountains and into Day Six.

But before the mountains were – you guessed it – more miles of open desert riding. We came upon some friendly faces out in the middle of the scrubby desert and rode to another transition with a team that was also from the SF bay area. At least we were on top of our bikes instead of beside them for the rest of this section, but it still took us two more hours to get close enough to the next transition that we felt we would make it without any mishaps or breaks.

The next transition was at the base of the La Sal Mountain range, a relatively small (at least in terms of area compared with its neighbor the Colorado Rockies) range that has a number of peaks reaching over 12,000 feet. Don’t misunderstand, there’s still plenty of terrain to cover for hikers, bikers, and adventure racers. The transition was in a campground by a very inviting mountain creek.

We were steadily climbing up the leader board though we hadn’t passed many teams. A few teams ahead of us had dropped out for various reasons and we caught up to some others in transitions. I believe we had cracked the top 20!

I stripped off my backpack and biking gear, grabbed some food and headed for the creek. After six days of heat, dirt, sand, and rather unmentionable things, a certain heat rash can start to build up – an itchy rash that can be temporarily soothed with something like a dip in a freezing cold mountain creek. I immersed myself in a tiny pool of ice-cold water and Jason and Jen followed. A real adventure racer shower.

After cooling off, re-packing our bikes, getting feet taken care of, re-supplying ourselves and re-grouping we were off for a 40-mile trek through the relatively cool, rugged mountains. Up we climbed, this time joined by our buddies the Mighty Dogs from Georgia who we also squared off against in the Mighty Mo expedition. We chatted about ways to take revenge on the race course director for putting us through such sand-filled horrors and then switched subjects to more pleasant things.

Several miles into the mountains and we were trekking at some considerable altitude. At the next checkpoint, teams were somewhat surprised to find that they would have to complete an orienteering section in the middle of this long trek. We were given a map and told to copy ten checkpoints off a master map. Out of these ten we would have to find only five before reporting back and continuing on. The checkpoints were spread across several square miles of sharply rolling mountainous terrain and once again night was falling. We read the rules and saw that for each missed checkpoint on the orienteering section a penalty of two hours would be assessed. This meant that, in case we felt it was too difficult and/or too time-consuming to find a checkpoint on the orienteering, we would not be disqualified for not finding one of the points (as it would be with regular checkpoints). Taking this into consideration along with our physical and mental state, we got an idea.

Okay, we had a plan in place long before we got to this ‘surprise’ because word gets around, even in the wilderness. We had heard that a few teams were just taking the maximum penalty of ten hours (2 hours per point times five points) and were electing to sleep away the penalty instead of beating themselves up further on a course that would take several hours at the very least. Upon arriving at the starting point, we heard that it had taken the fastest team nearly five hours to complete the orienteering. Okay, so they would have a five hour advantage over any team that wanted to take the full penalty… but they would be spending five more hours expending energy and getting beat up AND they would probably have to sleep again sometime before the finish line as well.

We were planning on taking another nap at this point anyway, so calculating that if we did the orienteering as fast as humanly possible under the conditions it would take at least five hours. Add a few hours of sleep that we wanted to take and you can see it’s not far from a total of ten hours. Now… in our current state, we estimated that the orienteering would have taken us at least 8 hours if not more. We were not in the same shape as the fastest team at this point. Add a few hours of sleep, and you’ve got at least another ten hours or racing. So… we opted to take the full penalty and rest for a whole ten hours – enough to hopefully recharge us for a big push towards the finish line!

Ahhhh… relaxation. Food. Sleep! When we arrived, a Scandinavian team who was near the top 10 in the rankings was fast asleep, serving their ten-hour penalty. We were able to see a sheet with the leader board and the times it took teams ahead of us to complete the orienteering. Some had taken up to 17 hours! Many others were still out on the course and time was ticking away. We were happy with our decision and kicked off our shoes to eat a bunch of the food we had on us.

Quite aside: Food. Yes, while we had a regular assortment of energy bars, candy and the like, we aimed to take more hearty food with us in this race and so I found some MRE’s – Meals Ready to Eat – the type of stuff the military uses. We also had some self-heating camping meals, cans of chicken, cans of soup, muscle builder shakes, some bagel sandwiches, and a few dry salamis among things like fruit cups, Clif Bar products (one of our sponsors!), sleeves of Pringles potato chips, trail mix, peanut butter in handy packets, and dozens of other sweet and savory treats.

Back to racin’: We pulled out the mandatory tent and sleeping bag that we had to carry on this section (in case of inclement, and/ or cold mountain weather) and unfurled them for our long sleep. A few teams that were several hours ahead of us were still out on the orienteering section getting dangerously close to taking ten hours to complete. Somehow, somewhere, we had crept up the rankings to around 16th or 19th place at this spot. There were only two or three teams ahead of us who had elected to take the full ten-hour penalty – and we heard that they had benefited greatly because of it. One of these teams, Crested Butte, jumped into the top 5 after hovering somewhere between 9th and 12th before this section.

About 90 minutes after beginning our penalty, as we lay down to sleep, the checkpoint volunteer approached us with some awful and painful news. He had received an email on his Blackberry from the race course director which said that teams could no longer serve their penalty at the checkpoint. Instead, the time would be tacked on to your overall time after you crossed the finish line. We cried foul and claimed that we should be allowed to stay since we had already started serving our penalty there. However, we could not contact the race course director and in the end, we decided that we could not risk staying there for much longer as we felt they would still tack ten hours onto our overall time. We desperately needed sleep and decided that we still had to get some now. We decided on about 90 minutes of sleep and with that done, we groggily packed up and moved on into the night – upset that our big push to catapult ourselves towards or into the top ten with a long rejuvenating sleep was probably thwarted.

We trekked like zombies into the pitch black mountains and came across another checkpoint before walking out onto a long finger-like ridge as the sun rose yet again. As mentioned, for nearly the entire race we had been following flagging tape and subsequently footsteps of the teams ahead of us. We were walking along someone’s footprints, but coming to the end of this finger ridge, Jason recognized that we should have crossed over onto the next ridge sometime earlier. So, we had to backtrack about one and a half miles to get over to the next ridge.

As we traversed the next ridge – just one in a line of about four ridges that we had to go up and over to get to the next checkpoint – Jen became somewhat delirious in her overtired state and began laughing hysterically. We told her to lie down for a short nap and she literally turned a 180 and fell over backwards like a tin toy soldier into a bush. She was most likely asleep before she hit the ground. Jason, John and I sat down and nodded off for a few minutes. Jen awoke a few minutes later claiming to be good to go on. She did perk up considerably and we decided to try to move on.

From the next checkpoint it was now time to really climb high into the La Sal range. The next several miles would find us ascending to two peaks that stood over 12,000 feet above sea level and in between having to traverse up and down several thousand feet of elevation. It was a frustrating exercise in torture I thought, and though I was fine physically, in my mentally tired state I was not doing a good job of containing my displeasure. On the flip side, there was still a bit of snow high in the mountains and we actually used it to have a little bit of fun on the way down some of the slopes. Taking a few giant strides, or in some cases a flying belly-flopping leap, we careened down some snowfields into a huge bowl of loose rock created by the mountains and elements.

Needless to say, after trekking up and down thousands of feet of mountains over nearly 40 miles, we were pretty tired. With one last push up and over a ridge, we were descending to the penultimate transition area at around 9000 feet above sea level. As we all auditioned for Night of the Living Dead on the way down, the sun kept on its never-ending course towards the horizon. Just as it became totally dark again – the seventh night of the race – we stumbled into the next transition where we would once again put together our bikes for a final bike leg.

It was critical decision time as we stood in roughly 16th place. We were practically too tired to go on, however we could smell the finish line and wanted to make a final push to get there and see if we could improve our standing at such a late point in the race. We heard that the winning team – Team Nike – was crossing, or had just crossed, the finish line in about six and a half days. In adventure racing, like any other race, your position is not secure until you cross the finish line – so in theory we were still in the hunt for a position anywhere from second to 90th. In reality, we saw our top 10 chances slipping away.

We decided to get a few hours of sleep and start the bike section just before the sun would rise in order to get to a potentially tricky section in the daylight. As with the last bike leg, we were familiar with most of this leg from participating in the Adventure Xstream expedition nine months earlier. The tricky part would be riding onto the Kokopeli Trail, the same trail where we got bogged down to a near standstill in a tremendous thunderstorm that turned the dirt into something akin to fresh cement. We worried we might have this same fate again.

After a few last checks with the medical team monitoring our progress, we laid down in the parking lot of the campground site among dozens of bike boxes, gear containers, race staff and other sleeping racers for a few hours of sleep. We awoke at 4 a.m. to get a jump on the daylight, however we didn’t end up leaving until nearly two hours later – well after the sun was up.

The easiest part of this bike leg came first as we had several miles of country road to travel on before a long climb to the head of the Kokopeli Trail. We held our breath as we rode onto the trail and we thanked each one of our lucky stars that the trail was relatively dry and easy to ride. We were finally making good time in the race! At yet another checkpoint (somewhere around #31, I think), we were told by the volunteers that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 hours to the finish line – at least that’s what the lead teams had taken to get there. The rest of the bike section was mostly downhill and flat and we enjoyed riding through an amazing red-walled canyon while crossing and re-crossing a stream that meandered down the middle of it.

The last transition! At about 10 a.m. on the seventh day of racing, we found ourselves dismantling our bikes for the last time and looking at a few more miles of open desert trekking to reach the spectacular final ropes section. Packing a wealth of fluids and enough food for what we thought would be an eight hour trip to the finish line, we headed out once again into the heat of the day. Like a mirage, we could see the tall majestic spire of rock that we would be ascending and rappelling off of. And for the next three hours we kept walking towards it and towards it yet it rarely seemed to get any closer.

Finally, we arrived at a checkpoint at the base of the spire known as Castleton Rock. Like the trunk of a giant rock redwood tree, Castleton is a long thin spire that reaches about 400 feet into the air and is probably only 300 feet in circumference. Castleton stands about 200 feet from a longer but just as narrow rock formation called The Rectory that we would also ascend and rappel from.

Before trekking up to Castleton, we were greeted by a few surprise guests – Jen’s husband Scott and Jason’s girlfriend Karen had found their way out to the checkpoint to wish us well on our final leg. We knew they would be coming out to meet us after we finished, but it was great to see them on the course for some final inspiration.

One last push! We trekked several hundred feet up a mesa to the actual base of the Castleton spire where we were met by a slew of professional climbing experts who would help us get attached to the ropes and provide some measure of safety. What they also did was watch the weather as it was extremely dangerous to be caught on such incredibly high and exposed rocks in a lightning storm.

Not long before we reached the base the sky had been clear for miles around, but as Jason and I ascended towards the top of the spire, the wind started to kick up and clouds were rolling in fast. Not taking chances, the head rope guide decided to postpone any further activity on the rocks which meant that Jason and I would have to quickly get to the top and then get back down with the rest of the ropes team that was stationed high above. We were devastated.

We had heard reports of other teams having to spend several hours waiting for the weather to clear, and now, with the finish line at the Red Cliffs Lodge practically in sight it was hard to also be one of those teams and have to stand down for some unknown period of time. Yes, the Red Cliffs Lodge was only a few miles away as the crow flies and if not for a beautiful mesa between us and the resort, we could literally have seen it from atop the Castleton outcropping. A few other teams had caught up to us at this point and we all commiserated under some scant shelter of rocks as a brisk rain shower washed over us. It was late afternoon and we hoped, prayed, begged for the clouds to leave as quickly as they came, however they did not fully move on. The rain only lasted a short time yet we all were forced to sit and wait for quite a long time to see if the sky would truly clear of any potential threat.

As darkness approached, the lead ropes guide made the decision to keep the section closed until first light in the morning. It was a cruel thing to hear, however we respected and fully understood and agreed with their safety concerns. So, we would spend yet another night on the race course, sleeping on any stretch of ground that proved comfortable.

And so the night passed. In the middle of it, a number of teams who were “short-coursed” – meaning that they failed to make an earlier time cut-off at some point – traipsed past us in a long 15-team train. They weren’t technically going ahead of us in the race since they would not get the chance to do the final ropes section and since they had not obviously completed the entire course. As a gesture to allow slower teams to reach the finish line, the race directors re-routed a number of teams around certain sections – hence a shortened course – and now they had caught up and were just passing along the trail that led to the finish line without being counted in the final standings

Under newly cleared skies, we awoke early to take our place in line to get through the re-opened ropes section. Jason and I did not have to re-do the part we had done, but we had to wait as Jen and John ascended and rappelled off the first spire before moving on to the second. It was now a bit of a race as about five teams were now hanging around each other and vying for the remaining spots in the top 15-20 places.

Two by two, we ascended the last 400-foot section of rope and then we all trekked across the top of a narrow mesa towards a high-wire zip line that traversed a gap of nearly 1000 feet of air between us and the desert floor. The zip would take us out to an even skinnier rock spire than Castleton! From here, it was one last rappel to earth and then a mad scramble along the mesa’s ridge towards the bottom of the canyon and out to the river that the Red Cliffs Lodge sat next to.

Frustrated and anxious to get to the finish, we literally ran the last two miles to the river, distancing ourselves from any teams that might usurp our position. We didn’t actually trek straight to the lodge. What we had to do first was get to a spot about two miles upstream and hop into inflatable kayaks to paddle down to the finish line. Performing our fastest transition of the race, we dove into the rubber ducky boats and manhandled them down to the bank next to the resort where scores of people were out to greet finishers in the middle of the day. We clamored out of the boats and walked the last 100 yards into the finish chute and across the finish line where we were met by a champagne shower and applause from friends, race fans, and race personnel. And then, I sat down on the cool soft grass…

And so, after a total of nearly 425 miles and 200 straight hours -- just over eight days -- of racing, Team Silly Rabbits crossed the finish line of the 2006 Primal Quest in 16th place.

We were happy to finish the grueling adventure but would have liked to do a number of things differently to have reached our pre-race goals. Hats off to John and Jen for fighting through blisters, sleep deprivation, and for taking on the mother of adventure races as rookies in expedition-length racing. Hats off to all of the teams that completed the entire course for it took its toll on everyone no matter what position they finished in. Personally, I’m still recovering despite, yes, riding and running again in anticipation of the next adventure! I don’t know where and when that will be… but it could very well be a “short” 6-hour race this upcoming weekend in Half Moon Bay, just down the coast from SF.

Check out www.ecoprimalquest.com for pictures, videos, and more.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Links to My Writing

2006-07-17T22:53:00.000-07:00

A Razor Close Finish in the 2006 Race Across America

News from the 2006 Race Across America

Press Release: Team Type 1 -- All-diabetic Cycling Team Tackles the Race Across America to Raise Awareness

Press Release: National Mountain Bike Series "Urban Assault" Rides Into Fontana, CA

Some conceptual work for Aerodrome Pictures, an Emmy Award winning branding/design firm in Los Angeles - Click on 'Universal Channel'

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Adventure Primer

2006-07-16T21:16:00.000-07:00

This is me. This is me carrying my bike across a river. This is me carrying my bike across a river on the island of Viti Levu in Fiji during the 2002 Eco-Challenge adventure race! Yes, I am proud to be one of the few people on earth to have competed in the Eco-Challenge -- the adventure race that made adventure racing something of a household name.

The race was somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 miles and it took my team and I nearly 9 days to finish. They were some of the most incredible days I have had in nearly 35 years of days. We traveled through dozens of remote villages set deep in some of the most beautiful, lush, and breathtaking spots you can imagine. In each village the Fijians greeted us with incredible warmth and hospitality. Sometimes they even waded out into the warm waters of rivers such as the one in the above picture to greet us with plates of fresh fruit and garlands of flowers that they placed around our necks.

We didn't know it at the time, but The Eco-Challenge Fiji was the last Eco-Challenge... possibly ever. This monumental race has since been replaced by many others including the Primal Quest , however it will always be remembered as the race that started the craze -- at least that's the way it happened for me...

Two years before this picture, I boarded a jumbo jet for Borneo -- the true heart of darkness. Some of the oldest rainforest in the world covers this Malaysian island set between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. I was heading there as a volunteer on the Eco-Challenge Borneo, or Eco-Challenge Sabah, Malaysia as it was also referred to. A friend, and fellow adventure junkie, had found out via the internet that the Eco-Challenge was looking for volunteers to help with the various behind-the-scenes production jobs and I put in my application immediately.

I ended up as part of the camera crew and got helicoptered, motor-boated, and 4-wheeled into some incredible places.

That was my first experience with adventure racing... and what an experience it was. Dense jungles, bloodsucking leeches, extreme heat, crystal clear water, incredible scenery, and deathly viral conditions were a few of the things I encountered. You can read more in a post on the Eco-Challenge Borneo...

Onward to adventure!
~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

Welcome To My World

2006-07-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

Ever since I can remember (or at least since college) I've had the desire to seek adventure and the fortune (figuratively, not literally) to make many of those desires happen. Doors open and close in our lives and I had an amazingly colorful door open to Adventure Racing in the year 2000.

Before that, I had always (or at least since college) wanted to be a screenwriter and make films. I've written a number of screenplays and have helped others with their projects. And I've made some short films and hope to make documetaries and feature films soon enough.

My world is filled with some pretty cool tales of adventure and I present this blog as a mere beginning to many things to come.

I try to take it in stride when my friends and family say that I'm an inspiration. I just like to think that I'm living the way I want to live and doing my own 'normal' things. If anything here can spur just one person to take some positive action, get outside of normal 'boundaries', think about our world differently, or just smile... then it's all worth it.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"Into the Heartland" - The Mighty Mo Expedition, May 2006

2006-05-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

This week’s mighty expedition race – the Mighty Mo -- in the great state of Missouri actually started about two weeks earlier and nearly 2000 miles away on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais in the San Francisco bay area. Three of the four Silly Rabbits teammates – Jason, Jen, and Rick, with prompting by the fourth, John, who ultimately ducked out (most likely due to conflicts with his international dealings as part of a top secret CIA team), took on the Envirosports 25km trail race as a “training” exercise.

The 25km race (about 15.5 miles) would start and finish on the beach in the quaint seaside town of Stinson Beach. In between, racers would barrel up and down and up and down Mt. Tamalpais reaching heights of just over 1800 feet above the beach. There would be no navigation and no bushwhacking, just simple running on trails… a novel concept for us. Unfortunately, what transpired was not so novel.

I ended up beating out 92 other competitors to win the race in 2 hours, 1 minute flat. Okay, so that was novel. Jen was the second woman across the line, and a great 9th overall. Still cool. But, the Rabbits didn’t get to go 3 for 3 at the finish line as Jason ended up spraining his ankle, forcing him to drop out.

With less than two weeks to go before a 250-mile race, we would have to play the waiting game to see how quickly Jason could get better.

With this as a backdrop, and with the requisite strains of dueling banjos wafting through our collective conscience, the Silly Rabbits boarded a big old jet airliner last week for the heartland of America – St. Louis, Missouri. Unlike the many folks who travel around this region for game hunting and other vacation-like activities (it’s the canoe capitol of the country), the Rabbits were on a business trip. Our business: adventure racing. And we had a meeting with one Mighty Mo Expedition Race, a 250-mile adventure through the Ozark Mountains.

We would be facing some big challenges to successfully complete our business, namely one Team Nike, the vaunted powerhouse adventure racing team that’s won every major competition there is to win. There were a few other adventure companies in the form of Team Dart, the Mighty Dogs, Gerber Blades, and Dynamic Earth, vying to win the favor of Mighty Mo.

But the Silly Rabbits, America’s Adventure Racing Team ™, are now in upper management positions in our field, so when it came right down to it, the Rabbits got right down to business... Despite going into our “meeting” completely blind because we had scant information about this first time race.

We went into our crew situation blind as well, and lucked out like Powerball lottery winners with two jovial Missouri natives who we had found through the race’s website. They turned out to be so valuable to our efforts that they quickly became our “fifth” teammate.

We drove 2 hours from St. Louis and settled into a nice cabin at the Bass Lake resort, nestled squarely in the absolute heart of this American heartland, a few miles outside of Steelville. And, yes, we ate our first meal at the greasiest spoon perhaps in all of creation. We had a brief gear check the day before the race and were only given instructions on where to show up to start the race the next day. Nothing was said about how we’d be starting or where we’d be going from there. This would be a totally on-the-fly adventure.

On Thursday morning, we packed up everything into our two crew vehicles and made our way 15 minutes from the resort to the starting area. When the gun went off at 8am, all we knew is that we’d have to run nearly a mile to pick up the first set of maps and clues for the race. After acquiring our maps literally on the run, we saw that the first event would be paddling. So, The Rabbits raced back to our crew vehicles, gathered up a few belongings and headed for the nearby river. The race was on.

The Rabbits hopped into a four-person whitewater raft with race-provided rafting paddles for a 15-mile down river paddle. We got into the water in about 3rd and got out in about 4th, and in between there was lots of jockeying for position among Nike, the Mighty Dogs, DART, and Dynamic Earth – teams that would vie for the lead much of the race.

We hopped around inside the raft, trying to find the best paddling combination, and then we proceeded to switch sides every 15-20 minutes to keep ourselves fresh. Oh, yes, we also sang rap songs as we went.

From the rafts, we scrambled into a transition where we plotted some more checkpoints before heading onto an 85-mile mountain bike section. Aaron, one of our stellar crewmen, is an accomplished orienteering athlete and was able to plot nearly all of our maps before we hit the transition. Because of this kind of help, The Rabbits got onto this bike section in first place. We blazed the first 30 miles in about 2 hours along rolling fire roads en route to the Ozarks YMCA where we would engage in a high ropes course. However, we were caught just before the YMCA ropes course by the Team Nike freight train that includes three world-class bikers and the man touted as the World’s Greatest Adventure Racer.

The high ropes caused some problems for Rick who drew the short straw and was charged with the most difficult task – climbing a series of vertical, free swinging logs. Five minutes after scrambling breathlessly to the top platform and rappelling back down to earth, Rick was flopping on the ground like a fish out of water with severe hamstring cramps due to the odd muscle usage from the climbing. Thankfully, Rick recovered in a few minutes, and the Rabbits were off to chase Nike over the next several hours and into the first night of the race.

The cramps were just the beginning of Rick’s wild ride. A few hours later in the darkness, he would break his bike chain and then less than an hour after that, he would rip off his rear derailleur after getting a branch stuck in his wheel.

At this point, you either throw in the towel or you become MacGuyver of the Wilderness. We didn’t have any chewing gum or paper clips, but Captain Jason and Rick mish-mashed Rick’s bike into a makeshift single speed (taking off the broken derailleur and connecting the chain loosely over one particular gear) and the team proceeded out of the forests and onto a road for the final miles to the transition… somehow still clinging to 2nd place even after an additional 20-minute slowdown to find a checkpoint.

From the bikes, it was onto our feet for an 18 to 20-some odd mile trek through the woods that included a wealth of bush-and-stream-whacking to find checkpoints 15-20.

The lead teams started accordion-ing together and apart on this section: the Mighty Dogs (a tough bunch of ruffians from Georgia) and our friendly rivals Team Dart (from the Northwest), the Silly Rabbits, and Nike. At one point, Nike passed us no less than four times in the space of 2 hours.

Daylight broke as we made our way through the underbrush and across a few more hillsides before finding a dirt road that would lead us to the next transition. We found ourselves in third place as we straggled in to meet our crew. Jason’s ankle was holding up, however we were traveling slower than we would have liked on foot. At this point, all teams were informed that the next section – a 40-mile mountain bike leg – was being excised from the course to keep the lead teams on a projected Saturday morning finish.

So, in a brief respite from racing, all teams would hop into their crew vehicles to be transported several miles up the road to the next river section. We scarfed down some food and looked over our maps as Aaron and Craig drove us to the next transition (and yes, we even nodded off…). This next section would find us in some horribly slow inflatable kayaks for another downriver paddle.

This time, the four teammates would split up to paddle in 2 separate boats. This 30-ish mile paddle would be interrupted by a roughly 8-10 mile trek/run which would include another ropes section. Burdened with our climbing gear, a wealth of mandatory gear, food for several hours, and Jason’s sprained ankle, we hobbled out of the kayaks at the trek/run/ropes take out. We were in 2nd place. Not behind Nike, but behind DART who had jumped in front.

Team Nike had forgotten some gear when they drove off and took a little nap as their crew went back to retrieve it. Team Dart was looking and feeling strong. We out-paddled the Mighty Dogs to the take out, but were quickly overtaken while trekking down a few miles of road.

The ropes would include a river traverse via pulleys and harness (hand over hand pulling) and another river crossing via cable. The real cream of the ropes course – a rappel -- was unfortunately sabotaged by some locals and had to be bypassed.

Team Nike caught us on this trekking section, and we found ourselves a bit unhappy to be in fourth place as we got back to the river for the second part of the paddle. We tried to rally as we got back into our kayaks. Prior to this run/ropes section, we had been giddily dropping into big class III rapids and spinning out of control as we got doused with water in the hot afternoon sun. The second paddle would eventually find us slightly terrified as the sun sank, leaving us negotiating some rapids in the darkness. With trees and branches stuck into the river at odd angles (called “strainers” in river speak), and only our tiny headlamps to guide us, we honestly thought about pulling off the river for the night… but, we’re crazy so we didn’t!!

The next transition found most teams taking their time to warm back up and refuel before heading out onto the final 40-mile bike leg. The top four teams were within an hour of each other and it was the dead of night. A kind crew man from Team Nike had helped jerry rig Rick’s bike back together to allow Rick to ride the rest of the course with most of his gears.

The Rabbits headed off into the night in fourth place. If there was anything left in our tanks, now would be the time to find it. We busted a move through a few sleepy towns en route to yet another trailhead for the Ozark Trail, which we had already spent the better part of the last 150 miles on. At the trailhead, we were pleasantly surprised as we came upon the ghostly visages of Team Dart. Looking haggard and spent, they had taken a circuitous route after mis-reading their maps slightly.

With a little burst of motivation, we sped away from Dart onto the trail. And for the next 6 hours, we wouldn’t see a soul. Jason kept us on the straight and narrow and made up for his running with some absolutely ace navigation and renewed energy on the bike.

The ride took us through and along wet, slippery trails strewn with logs and branches. The ride also took Jen into what we like to call “the pain cave”. Jen was able to finally experience all the deep, dark secrets that adventure racing has to offer as she fell ill for a short time after racing to exhaustion on this section. Being the rock star that she is, she recovered soon enough, and the experience will hopefully end up being a positive one in the end (as zany as that sounds…).

We squirted out the far end of this section of forest as light dawned on the third full day of racing. As we scrambled to find a final checkpoint before racing down a country road to the end of the leg, Rick saw a man standing in the road waving at the passing traffic. He was warning folks of a car accident up the road. As Jason and John biked from the checkpoint to catch back up, Rick made a major decision to stop Jason – an E.R. doctor outside of adventure racing – and inform him of the accident. Jason quickly decided to go check it out to see if his services were needed.

Even in the heat of competition, with the finish line almost in sight, we were all comfortable with the decision because there are so many bigger things in life. Thankfully, the man who had flipped his car going around a sharp bend was okay, but we waited nearly an hour for an ambulance to show up.

Somehow, as we rode into the last transition, we were in 2nd place! Team Nike had barreled through the bike leg in relative short order, and somewhere along the way we had passed the Mighty Dogs while Dart never seemed to recover! Bolstered by one last shot of adrenalin, we changed into our running gear for a final 15-mile run to the finish line. Yes, this one we actually ran. It was a rather straightforward run down some country dirt roads and onto a highway (yes, an actual highway) and then into the town of Poplar Bluff, Missouri. In the middle of the run, we stopped for a ‘special test’ which found Jason and Rick doing their best Robin Hood imitations as they shot arrows at a target. As we left the special test area, we caught wind that the Mighty Dogs were not far behind…

With the Mighty Dogs smelling blood because they knew about Jason’s bad ankle, it was literally going to be a foot race to the finish. We got word that Team Nike had crossed the finish line a few hours earlier. Now, The Mighty Dogs were coming hard for second place. And all that stood in their way was a bunch of silly rabbits, I mean, Silly Rabbits!

From the archery range, it was still 7 miles to the finish. John kept calculating that the Mighty Dogs would have to run some wickedly fast times (that would be nearly impossible under such conditions), and he kept trying to convince us that they couldn’t possibly catch us…

This didn’t prevent us from looking over our shoulders for the next hour and half. It also didn’t help that the Mighty Dogs crew kept driving by us and turning around, in a sort of distance gauging.

We jogged off the highway (yes, as mentioned, we ran on the side of the highway and then onto the exit ramp!), and into the town limits. We had to navigate the streets of this small town to a park on the banks of a river where the finish line awaited.

And finally, 54 hours after beginning, we eeked across the finish line about 20 minutes ahead of the Mighty Dogs and collapsed, $2500 richer, in 2nd place!

The Silly Rabbits would like to thank all of our great sponsors: Salomon Sports, Ellsworth bikes, Clif Bar, Epic paddles, Zeal Optics, California Canoe and Kayak.

Stay tuned as we train for the granddaddy of them all – the Primal Quest – coming up at the end of June. It’s gonna be 500 miles of intense heat in and around the Moab, Utah area. Can The Rabbits – or anyone – survive?

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"Instant Classic" - Cal Eco, Auburn 2006

2006-04-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

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

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"My Impersonation of Jim Morrison" - Baja Travesia, Baja, Mexico

2005-12-15T14:55:00.000-08:00

Boy race fans are you in for a holiday treat! First,
happy holidays to all and to all a healthy New Year.
Yes, I'm finally sitting down for a winter break. I
actually owe you a few other reports, but I think this
special holiday edition of adventure race reports will
keep you cozy until I scribble down the earlier ones.

And so, thinking I'd call it quits for 2005 after a
poor showing from the Silly Rabbits at the World
Championships in New Zealand in mid-November, I was
happy to lick my wounds, let my body rest and get on
with the other aspect of my life -- namely my film and
video writing and production. Or so I thought...

Yes, yes. I know, I know... How could I not
immediately report on the World Championships!? Trust
me, it was a decidedly poor showing, though a fair
tale to be told.

By the way, in a shameless bit of self promotion check
out www.waterbuffalofilms.com. This is my new
production company! We've got a lot of exciting
projects in the works and people have been contacting
us from around the world. Back to the story...

There was a race that had been tickling the back of
our team's race throats for a number of months.
Called the Baja Travesia, it was slated as the
unofficially official "Finals" of the Explore
California race series of which there were 4 races
throughout the earlier part of the year. We, the
Silly Rabbits, America's Adventure Racing Team,
participated in two of the four races, and won them
both. With only these two races, we had gained enough
points to stand in second place in the overall series,
going into the Baja race. This Baja race would be
quite a bit longer and more difficult than the other
races and would also act as a stand-alone race which
any team could enter whether they'd participated in
the rest of the series or not.

As mentioned, I was content to take my race vacation
starting two weeks before the Baja Travesia with an
overabundance of Thanksgiving food and drink -- call
it refueling and, um, re-hydration. But then... some
prompting from my former teammates who are the current
race directors of the Baja Travesia broke me from my
food coma and reached that enlarged part of my
cerebelum that must need adrenalin to fuel it.

However, with my dearest "Silly" race companions
already committed to other end-of-the-year activities
and vacations, I was faced with the task of drumming
up a few other racing souls... if, in fact, I were to
give in to the prompting and decide to undertake the
trip to Mexico's incredible untapped wilds. Perhaps
with the sending of this report I have already given
away the fact that I decidedly did attend said race,
so I will again not undermine the intelligence of my
readers. I did attempt to stick to one principle upon
deciding that I would race. I wanted to have as
teammates a few others who would hopefully be
enjoyable to race with and whom I could potentially
race with in the future if circumstances so arose.

With this as background, I leap head first into the
tale of the inaugural Baja Travesia adventure race
(www.bajatravesia.com). Along with the Silly Rabbit's
second place standing in the series came a free entry
into the Baja Travesia. An interesting factor in the
equation I undertook to solve with regards to
participating in the race. The other factors would be
finding two new teammates to join me on this latest
adventure....

At this point, dear readers, I intended -- and
actually executed -- a massive dissertation with
regards to this race... however, in hindsight of
writing and in foresight of sending said dissertation,
I feel that I should be much briefer with my details
and thus, I give you -- a hopefully shorter, certainly
witty, and as always engaging tale of adventure. (I'm
not sure I achieved the "shorter" aspect, but do read
on!)

It was a tight turnaround, but I managed to find two
other persons with equal tastes for high adventure and
spontaneous international travel, and thus, the --
somewhat different, one time only, end of 2005-- Silly
Rabbits once again were slated to begin an adventure
race somewhere on a spinning piece of rock circling a
fiery star at the far edge of a massive galaxy.

I would be joined by Emily, a veteran of many
adventure races including a handful of long expedition
races and Harald, also a longtime veteran of many
international races and a good friend and rival during
the course of the last several years. Emily is a
former US National rowing champion who would have been
in the Olympics if not for an injury and Harald,
a.k.a. "The German", was a Navy SEAL commando. Me?
I'm just a nice Jewish kid from Pittsburgh... :)

And so, we all made it to the white-washed Century
Hotel nestled on a huge piece of property with a swim
up bar and a hot tub on a long stretch of beach
outside of Rosarito, a small town on the Pacific coast
of Baja, Mexico. We went through gear check and a
surf entry and exit exercise to prove our boat
handling abilities on the 3rd of December. We also
attended an intimate Tecate beer sponsored party at
the all-but-deserted-for-the-winter hotel that
evening. The next day, Sunday, Dec 4, we attended the
pre-race meeting in which the course was revealed and
maps with instructions handed out. While we received
all the maps we would need for the race, we only
received the instructions (and checkpoints) for the
first 1/3 of the race. We then had until 3 p.m. to
pack the items and supplies we would need for the race
into two gear containers and three bike boxes.

We also received instruction sheets detailing how to
arrange our gear which would be transported by the
race staff to the various Transition areas along the
course. The instruction sheet that details how to
pack your gear in these races where teams are not
aided by a crew always turn out to be a jigsaw puzzle
wrapped in a brain teaser topped with a Word Jumble.
Figuring out how to properly dole out your resources
into the correct places for the correct transitions is
a Mensa-worthy event. The gear containers would
leapfrog around the course, so it would take
understanding which container would be at which
location at which point in the race to make our
adventure run smoothly and to ensure we had the proper
gear at the proper time. Along with disassembling our
bikes to pack them for transport by the race staff,
this ended up taking nearly the whole of the allotted
time, for at 2:45 pm, only 15 minutes before the
deadline to have our containers and bikes packed, did
we find ourselves breathing normally again. We then
had until 4 a.m. the next day to rest and prepare
mentally for the challenges that lay ahead.

The race did not actually begin at 4 a.m. the next
morning. That was just when our alarms went off in
order to give us enough time to eat and prepare to
board a shuttle bus at 5 a.m. for the 2 hour drive to
the actual start location of the race. At just after
7 a.m. the small but deep field of 15 teams arrived at
a picturesque fishing cove outside of the city of
Ensenada to meet up with our kayaks and take a last
few deep breaths before launching out on what was
measured to be a 300 km course.

At just after 8 a.m., a bright signal flare pronounced
the start of the race. The parts of the race for which
we had instructions would include this first leg of
kayaking nearly 50 km down the picturesque and
stunning coast of Baja, a 40 km mountain bike leg, and
a roughly 25 km trekking section. Upon completion of
these three legs, we would be given instructions and
map coordinates for the remainder of the race.

While our three-person kayak was only one of four
similar vessels in the field, we quickly and decidedly
jumped out to an early lead. Harald and I fancy
ourselves to be above average paddlers and with Emily
digging in the middle seat, we put our muscle into
gaining every time advantage we could. I must digress
here for a moment. Aside from the elation of jumping
to a quick lead, my emotions were further stirred by
the beautiful, majestic company of numerous dolphins
which swam and played alongside us. Magnificent. We
were also greeted by seals, sea birds, and a rugged,
unspoiled and spectacular coastline with the jagged
Sierra mountains as backdrop.

We assessed the breaking waves leading into Checkpoint
One and decided to paddle to shore. We had roughly
ten minutes on the next team. We executed a fine
landing and hit the sand in straight order... however,
we did not get out of the boat quickly enough and a
following wave crashed into us, sending us sideways
into the beach at an odd angle. When we assessed our
boat, we found that this had broken off our rudder!
And we had nothing in our small array of gear that
would come anywhere close to fixing it. Thankfully,
being rudderless does not render your boat un-paddle
worthy, it just means that there is more involved with
steering it from a bio-mechanical (people strength)
rather than purely mechanical (metal rudder) state.

We re-launced from the beach, taking a few waves in
the chest (me especially since I was in the front
seat) and got out beyond the surf as the next teams
arrived. Performing the task of the steersman in the
aft seat, Harald did an excellent job of keeping us as
straight as possible on the rest of our journey down
the coast. He was certainly aided by the nearly
perfect paddling conditions -- almost no wind and
little swells.

Several hours, two more checkpoints, many energy bars,
and no more boat incidents later, we were greeted by
cheering volunteers, race staff, friends, family, and
a few locals, as we pulled our boat out of the water
and rushed to our boxes. We now had to put our bikes
back together for this next leg. The whole transition
with costume changes, food, and bike assembly took
about a half hour, and it was only as we rode out that
the next team was closing in on the beach. We had put
quite some time on the field in the kayaks!

So, about 7 hours after beginning, we were now on our
bikes for a magnificent ride down the coast before
turning inland just after dark. As we rode south
across an open, flat plateau along the ocean, the sun
was setting to our right -- a beautiful sight to
behold.

At just after full darkness, we came to the first
checkpoint on this leg. As we rode away, we thought
we saw some lights behind us in the distance...
perhaps another team. We made haste across some more
open territory and then towards a fair sized town
along Baja's main artery, Route 1. We rode into town
and ticked off another checkpoint. And here, for a
brief couple of miles, we... well, let me say that
driving along Mexico's highways is ample adventure for
most, however if it is true adventure you seek, you
can always try riding your bicycle along them -- at
night.

Incident free, we turned off the two lane highway onto
a series of dirt roads and into the cool night.
Several miles later, we navigated to another
checkpoint and then turned into a canyon that would
lead us towards the next transition area. We felt
like we were going at a pretty decent clip, but now
there was certainly a team behind us. As the evening
grew cooler, Emily started to feel the effects of our
brisk early pace. Her stomach became upset and she
began a deep cough that would only get worse as the
race progressed. And we were only 12 hours into the
race...

We made haste towards a road that would lead us, after
14 km, to the transition area. The team behind us
didn't seem to want to overtake us, though we felt
that they could have. In the darkness, thinking we
would certainly see lights from cars, fires, and
headlamps, we missed the unmarked turn off to the
transition area. When we turned around a few minutes
later, we found ourselves pulling into the transition
in second place behind an interesting, and fast, team
sponsored by Nike which consisted of a one Polish guy,
one French guy, and a British gal.

At the transition, we were greeted by a few locals
offering of freshly cooked tortillas and quesadillas
which we hungrily scarfed down and paid for. We had
to disassemble our bikes here and repack them in the
boxes so that they could be transported to a location
further in the race. Though we were a bit taken back
by this Nike team's speed on bikes, we tried not to
get discouraged because most of the race still lie
ahead... and anything can happen out there (as if you
didn't know already).

At roughly 9 p.m., partially sated with local fare
mixed with our own gastronomical offerings (dried
salami!, energy bars!, more energy bars!), we embarked
on foot from the transition area and began a trek
across a wide, flat expanse of open desert in search
of a particular canyon which would lead us into the
foothills of the Sierra mountain range. Like surf
entries, night navigation is tricky under the best
circumstances, and faced with total darkness and flat
terrain without any distinguishing features, we came
upon perhaps the most difficult of circumstances. At
this point, I was in charge of the team's navigation
and thus, fortunes. My confidence with the map and
compass was bolstered as we caught up to the Nike
team! However, I perhaps placed too much emphasis on
their current course selection and was unable to
pinpoint a distinct peak that we could have used to
key our own course across the open expanse.
Basically, I couldn't find s$%* out there.

Long (part of this story) short, we eventually
meandered to the right canyon and started our uphill
trek towards the ridge tops over a thousand vertical
feet above. Due to our meandering state, a pair of
teams working in unison and racing under the same
moniker, caught up to us. Hailing from the Seattle
area and racing as two teams because they had enough
people in their pool who wanted to tackle this race,
Dart 1 and Dart 2, were aiding and abetting each other
in an attempt to utilize the strength-in-numbers
principle. This is a totally legal and quite
advantageous maneuver in adventure racing.... that is
if everyone can move at the same speed.

My teammate Emily had raced with the members of Dart
before, so she was very friendly with them. We threw
our lot in with theirs -- for the time being -- and
chummily scrambled together through the dense brush of
the ever-narrowing canyon. In a lengthy endurance
race, it is really of no use to sprint ahead of
another team. It is certainly unique to adventure
racing that two competing teams could actually work
together to help each other out, but this is an
amazing sport. Sprinting ahead at this point would be
like trying to win a marathon by sprinting at
100-meter world record pace right from the start --
you'd never make it.

Perhaps it was the fun banter as a few member of the
Dart team were hams like myself, and perhaps it was
the darkness and the fact that we had now been racing
for 15 hours, but we ended up in an off-shoot of the
main canyon that we really needed to be ascending. At
a particularly precarious and near vertical section,
we decided to reassess our position and figured this
out. The options were to continue to climb up this
difficult side canyon and come out near where we would
in the main canyon, turn around and retreat to the
main canyon, or... as I scrutinized the map, I had an
A-ha! moment. I saw that if we scrambled a little bit
higher in our current direction and then traversed to
our left, we could make it to a ridge line that would
offer easy travel to the higher points we needed to
attain. The other navigators agreed and we climbed
the steep loose canyon walls towards the ridge.

Turned out not to be such a bad move. We ended up in
front of the Nike team... at least temporarily. The
next feat of stupidi... I mean racing, had us eyeing a
short cut to the next checkpoint through some off-road
terrain. Now, we COULD have stayed on the nice easy
dirt road and followed it around to another road. It
would have been nice and easy. It also would have
been about 7 km and we would just be doing a big loop
to come back in the opposite direction we were in now.
Or we could scramble over a hill and through a dale
and past grandma's house and shorten our trip by about
4 km. Next time, stay on the road.

We ouch-ed and ow-ed through some scratchy brush, got
turned around a few times due to some poor compass
following (not our navigator, but we were in with the
other two teams for the time being), and then had to
bushwhack (more ouch and ow) in an arc to finally make
it out to the road again. By this time, I looked like
a branch of catnip that had been stuck into the middle
of a room full of rabid cats.

Light was finally dawning again as we checked into
checkpoint 9. Team Nike had gone around the cat trap
and were slightly ahead of us now. We tried to double
time it -- this time staying on the easy, straight
road -- to the next transition. I was carrying
Emily's backpack now and her hacking cough was getting
worse. She is an incredible trooper and never
complained once, though her condition continued to
worsen....

The transition was at a quaint hacienda situated in
the middle of a beautiful ranch complete with horses,
cows, and various barn animals. We warmed ourselves
by a fire and were again offered tasty local fare by
the owners of the property. This was where we
received the instructions for the rest of the race and
the coordinates for the remaining checkpoints. It was
now nearly 24 hours after starting the race and we
hadn't slept a wink.

In a cheeky and calculated maneuver, I suggested to my
teammates that we only plot the next couple of
checkpoints and try to hurry out of the transition
before the other teams. We could plot the rest later
and try to gain a leg up on the other tired teams in
the meantime. We could also kill ourselves. Again,
Emily was a trooper and agreed to our plan. We put
our bikes together, told the other teams we were just
gonna... go over here... for a second. And then we
snuck out of the transition as they ate tortillas and
beans inside the hacienda. Well, Team Nike had
already left, but we jumped back into 2nd place with
our cheekiness.

The temperature swings in the desert can be dramatic
and we encountered this firsthand throughout the race.
Mere hours before, we were cold and covered up with
clothing, and now in only the early morning with the
sun out, we couldn't get naked enough.

The next checkpoint was situated at another ranch at
the bottom of a wide long valley. From here, we had
planned to take a trail across a desert cow pasture
and up through a pass to cut off some miles of riding
on a road. Well, after pushing our bikes through some
sand, sporadic brush, and cow patties, we deemed that
the trail that was so nicely announced on our maps
probably didn't exist in reality, at least any longer.
So, we turned back across the pasture, upset at not
just taking the road around in the first place. Now
see, I mentioned some number of updates ago that we
adventure racers tend to have distinct problems with
our short term memory since we beat ourselves up in a
race, swear we'll never do such a thing again, and end
up doing it a mere week later all over again. Just
see the note a few paragraphs above about taking the
road....

Anyhow, at least we didn't have to do any bushwhacking
and somehow we still clung onto second place... though
it was only the beginning of a long, hot day...

The theme of the day was "Up". And up we went for the
next several hours. 6000 vertical feet of up. One
false rise after the next of up. Extremely slow
riding up. And on top of this, the temperature
continued to go... up. A long day told in a short
manner: we were climbing up towards the tops of the
Sierras, into a beautiful national forest and into the
defining leg of the race. I towed Emily for much of
the day. We tried to find shade at every possible
turn. We often got off our bikes and pushed them to
save from the strain of riding so slowly for so long.
And we got passed by the Kings. It was a wonder that
it didn't happen earlier because their team was made
up of two serious triathletes and a pro female
mountain biker.

Sometime in the late afternoon, one of the two Dart
teams caught up to us. They said that the other team
chose to get some rest, so they had separated. At
around 4 p.m., we arrived at the next checkpoint which
had been changed into a pseudo transition area. Due
to the park gates and closing times, the race staff
had brought our gear boxes to a ranger hut near the
entrance. Despite the fact that this should have been
the warmest part of the day (in summer, that is), we
were now in a shaded forest, at 8000 feet, in
December. Brrrr. It had nothing to do with the fact
that we were nutritionally and sleep deprived for
nearly 32 hours or anything... okay, well, it was also
truly chilly out.

In our waning physical state, we now had to plot the
rest of the checkpoints and noodle out our plan of
attack for the rest of the race. Harald and I found a
nice table inside the ranger hut and slowly plotted
our course. Meanwhile, the other teams were getting
away...

We ate as much food as possible, picked up our
climbing harnesses, lots of warm clothes, a mandatory
rope for the next section, and repacked our packs with
lots of food and water. We were now burdened down
completely, had clothing from head to toe again, and
had to ride another 5 miles to drop off our bikes.
Meaning, we would have to disassemble and repack them
again. And now, the sun was rapidly setting, the cold
mountain air was rapidly creeping in, and we were
still going up (!).

Night fell quickly as we finished repacking our bikes.
The cool air quickly turned cold and we stomped
around to keep warm while preparing to tackle the crux
of the entire race -- a mad, Heart of Darkness style
canyon section that would take us to nearly 10,000
feet into the shadow of Devil's Peak, one of the
highest points in Baja, before plummeting us over 4000
vertical feet into the aptly named Devil's Canyon.
From the canyon floor we would only have to trek
several more miles down stream and into the vast, open
desert on the east side of the peninsula. At the
pre-race meeting and at numerous other times we were
given strong suggestions to follow a certain route
down into Devil's canyon. We were tired, we were
cold, we were now in 4th place,... and we were racing!
This meant that... we were racing! And that meant
that we were here to beat all the other teams to the
finish line (pretty straightforward, eh?)

And though it was a very strong recommendation to go a
certain way, I ran by my teammates an alternate idea.
By taking the very same path that others take, we
would just fall into the same rhythm and fall victim
to the fact that surely the other teams would see us
coming -- if indeed we caught up -- and thus they
would speed up themselves. The strong recommendation
to descend the canyon through a certain gulley came
with numerous announcements that this was exactly why
we were to bring our climbing gear, helmets and rope.
It was heavily suggested that this would be the best
-- i.e. "fastest" -- route down. This route would
require employing our harnesses on a series ropes that
had been fixed by the race staff before the race down
through a treacherous, steep, and precarious gulley.
And we would do this at night.

With all this in mind, we had been given a
supplemental map which detailed another route down
into the canyon. Projecting myself into the minds of
the other team's navigators, I was fairly certain that
they would heed the advice of the race directors and
take the prescribed route. I have never been a very
good follower and because I felt it would be a
potentially advantageous and bold move to take the
alternate route, we did just so! We also could have
killed ourselves. It was longer in terms of distance,
but we heard from some folks that it could potentially
be quite a bit easier. And thus, the race was on!

We followed a series of rock cairns, or markers, set
by previous hikers along this route. It wasn't easy
as it was pitch black out, and our going was slow as
we scrambled over hill, dale, and boulder up to the
highest point in the race. With nothing to gauge our
progress, we finally began our steep descent into
Devil's Canyon. There were a few spots on our descent
that required some nifty down climbing maneuvers as
well as some precarious hand holds. After a few hours
of this, we reached the flatter bottom of the canyon.
From here, we scrambled through brush and over river
rocks to Camp Noche, a tiny flat spot in the middle of
nowhere that served as a jumping off point for many
intrepid hikers and climbers who braved this tough
region. And, lo and behold, dear readers, the
volunteers who were manning the checkpoint proceeded
to inform us that we were now in second place!! Our
gamble this time had paid off.

We found that things had shaken up considerably with
the other teams as well. Team Dart, who had been in
3rd place before heading into the canyon, had decided
that they would sleep at Camp Noche when they arrived.
However, upon finding out that they had arrived in
first place, they sped out of the checkpoint with
enough energy to propel them... further into the race
(I cannot divulge anything further at this point!).
We were proud that our gamble paid off... though it
was kept in check because there were still many miles
and many hours to go.

We left Camp Noche at around 3 a.m. Still we had not
slept. Emily had dozed at one or two points as we
transitioned, but we were now pushing the limits of
endurance. Though we were informed that it was nearly
impossible to "get lost" as we made our way down the
rest of the canyon and out to the desert, I
nevertheless paid careful attention to my compass as
we trekked and scrambled through the mostly dry canyon
bed. Emily's cough continued to worsen, but she was a
complete trooper and never complained about her state.

Dawn. Almost 48 hours since the start of the race.
Over 48 hours since we awoke to board the bus. Light
illuminated quite a scene... and we were smack in the
middle of it. The walls of the canyon we now trekked
through rose hundreds, if not a thousand feet up, on
both sides of us. We were able to rest easier that it
was, as mentioned, nearly impossible to get lost as
there was no other way out except forward down the
canyon. We had several hundred feet of elevation to
lose, yet the canyon appeared nearly flat. It would
turn out to be a very long day...

Nearly five hours after leaving Camp Noche, we caught
sight of a team in front of us. From our distance, I
thought this was Dart! Who else could it be? They
were now the only team in front of us? Could we have
caught up?! I will say that my brain was starting to
play tricks on me at this point. Slight instant
lapses slowly crept into my thinking and movements. I
waved at the team. They yelled something about
getting down from a spot we were in. And then they
disappeared further down the canyon. We were
incredibly excited to think that we had made up the
nearly two hours that Dart had on us at Camp Noche.
About an hour after spotting them, we came around a
bend to encounter something quite different. It was
not Team Dart that I had an exchange with earlier. It
was Team Nike! We found them sitting on some rocks,
looking a bit put out. It was only as we came upon
them that they asked if we had found Camp Noche. My
goodness! They had overshot the checkpoint on their
descent down from the top and wandered several hours
down the canyon! I informed them that Camp Noche was
several hours behind us. Without batting an eyelash,
Team Nike bravely turned around and headed back up the
canyon. Kudos to their spirit.

Much of the rest of the day was spent walking,
scrambling, and down climbing through the canyon. The
Kings once again whipped by us. We chatted and tried
to walk together for a few minutes, however they were
much stronger through here. They informed us that
like Team Nike, they had started to descend the wrong
gulley, but they had turned around and found the
correct one. It had obviously taken them a long time.

At 3:30 p.m., after literally taking a flying leap to
get out of the canyon (we launched ourselves into a
freezing pool of water when we ran out of options at
one point), we came upon two race photographers who
were hiking up from the desert to see if they could
encounter any teams. It's a good thing we ran into
them because they were able to inform us that the next
transition area had been moved! If we hadn't run into
them, we surely would have done what a few other teams
did -- wander to the spot of the old transition in a
state of confusion.

The next leg would represent one of the funkier things
I've done in an adventure race. It was also one of
the main advertising points of the race. A desert car
rally. Before getting to Baja, all of us racers had
visions of donning aviator goggles and leather helmets
and crashing over sand dunes as we drove modified
rally cars through the open desert! Upon getting to
the race, we found it would be a much more sedated
undertaking. Each team would get a local driver and a
vehicle. We would then have to direct them to a
number of checkpoints in the flat, desert valley
floor. We would have two hours to complete this
section whether we raced through it or not. Meaning,
that we would get a flat time of two hours no matter
how fast we went, so there was no bonus for speeding
through it. A safety issue.

We got an amiable American fellow who now resided in a
nearby town with his wife. A former motorcycle and
rally car racer, he was the ideal "partner" for this
section. However, he had a pick-up truck and only one
of us could sit inside the cab. The other two would
have to ride in the back. Since I was navigating, I
got to ride shotgun. Harald and Emily got to know
what it's like to... well there's nothing to compare
it to, so I'll just say it. They attempted to sit in
two plastic deck chairs which were tied into the bed
of the truck as we bounced over sandy roads and
scraped by desert shrubbery for over an hour. Let's
say it wasn't as relaxing as it could have been to be
off our feet.

We found all the checkpoints and made it to the end of
the car rally in just under an hour and a half. It
was now dark again. The third night of the race. 57
hours since the race began. 61 hours since we woke
up. And still, no sleep. Though now we had about 30
minutes to sit and wait before our alloted two hours
were up. The checkpoint volunteer had a nice fire
going, and we huddled next to it. At this point, I
finally managed to nap for about 10 minutes. Emily
got a few minutes in, too, while Harald would take
over the navigation duties on the next leg -- another
huge trek. This time, all the way to the Sea of
Cortez! It was only 20 miles as the crow flies...

Ding! Our two hours were up. Team Dart was somewhere
ahead of us. The Kings had taken longer than us in
transition, but had left on the car rally a few
minutes ahead. They had some difficulty in finding
the checkpoints and came to the end of the rally in
about two hours. We decided to start out together on
this next trek. It was an incredibly welcome venture.
Not that your own teammates are not engaging people,
it's often just nice to get some fresh conversations
in. Again, there's no sprinting ahead in adventure
racing.

So, for the next 3 hours, we stomped through more open
desert and up into another canyon that cut through to
the final section of open desert which finally sloped
ever so gently back down to sea level on the east side
of the Baja peninsula. And here, dear readers, is
where the proverbial wheels started to fall off...

At this point in the race, we were off to see the
Wizard. The wonderful Wizard of Oz. And all his
merry subjects. And a horse of a different color.
And, yes, even a few flying monkeys. For now, dear
readers, were we beyond the point of no mental return.
Upon entering this last high canyon, our two intrepid
teams walked together for several minutes, staring at
little besides the desert and scrub that our headlamps
illuminated. Perhaps staring isn't the right word
since I don't know what it's called when you're
focused on one thing and walking towards it, yet your
eyes are sometimes closed, as if sleeping.

Our two teams quite suddenly turned down the
proverbial rabbit hole (no, nothing to do with our
venerable team or name) and entered a land of Mad
Hatters and talking hares (again, no reference to our
team or team name). The Kings and the Silly Rabbits.
Trudging across a cold, sandy, dark expanse of Mexico
on no sleep. Boy, if only I had a video camera.

We all were starting to nod off while walking (!) and
map and compasses started making less and less sense
-- not that the darkness was helping any. After 60
hours without sleep, our body's were starting to turn
off the lights in a few of the upstairs rooms to
conserve a little power, so to speak. Emily was
practically a zombie. She walked right into my back a
few times. I believe Harald was shaking off some
cobwebs, though he was trying to converse with the
Kings. I, on the other hand, was stuck. I was
leading our teams (or so I thought) and I had come to
the end of the trail (or so I thought). I was now
facing a large bush-tree of some sort and I could not
see a way around it. I thus announced our predicament
to the others. Stopping to assess my pronouncement,
the others quickly came up with a solution. If I were
to just take two steps to my left, I could join them
out in the great expanse of canyon that we still had
to walk through. Basically, I had sleepwalked nearly
into a bush-tree and thought we had been bamboozled on
our journey... yet, I was delirious enough not to
notice that I could have just walked around it.

This was only one minor incident over the next several
hours... The Kings thought better of thte situation
and decided that they needed to finally lie down and
get some sleep. Harald felt as if he could continue
to lead us onward. And so we continued on. Emily
quite literally asleep on her feet. And me... just
resting a bit. Harald said he felt good (or so he
thought). For the next half hour or so, we kept to
our course. Then Harald's wheels fell off, too. He
suddenly exclaimed that his compass wasn't working
properly. It was being magnetized by some supposedly
magnetic rocks in the area! He asked to see my
compass. Oh no! My compass was pointing in the same
direction as his! And clearly (to Harald), we were to
be going in another direction because surely we hadn't
turned anywhere and now our compasses were telling us
we were going in the wrong direction.

Basically, Harald had a few lights off upstairs but
thought all the power was still on. After a few deep
breaths, we shook ourselves to full waking mode and
got our bearings back. A few minutes later, however,
we decided it was officially, as they say in
kindergarten, nappy time. I can't say exactly what
time it was, but Harald's wheels had rolled somewhere
off towards the Sea of Cortez without him, Emily was
rolling along on her rims, and I fortunately had my
wheels still on.... however I was cruising along at
six inches off the ground. :)

Harald laid down and shivered and shut his eyes. I
rummaged through my backpack for our mandatory gear
kit which included 10 waterproof matches. Emily
somehow helped me collect some dry sticks and then she
passed out while I used all my boy scout skills to
build a nice cozy fire. Yes, in the middle of this
"race", I built a fire and we huddled next to it.
Harald and Emily slept while I tended the fire. After
about 25 minutes, we decided that we should continue
on. We were not doing ourselves any favors, but we
were spurred on by the fact that there were other
teams behind us... somewhere.

For our next act, Harald and I consulted the map
several times, attempted to make it correspond to our
surroundings and deemed that we had finally reached
the end of the canyon and were now at the edge of the
next vast, open desert area. Fine by me, but what did
our other three teammates think? Yes, dear reader,
for the next two hours, I was joined by three other
teammates who I would engage in conversation every
time we stopped to consult the map. Harald didn't
know what to think of my mumblings. He was trying to
get my opinion of his choice of direction, and I was
talking with some other people. Emily then walked
into my back again.

On a good note, Harald spotted what appeared to be a
red light in the vicinity of the next checkpoint off
in the distance. We had to basically just find a set
of power lines that ran right across our path, and
then walk along the power lines to the next
checkpoint. In between conversations with my other
three teammates, I was able to corroborate Harald's
conclusion that a set of white-ish lights in the
distance were lights atop the power lines. Coupled
with Harald's spotting of the small red light that
appeared to be a light of a vehicle or campsite
underneath the white-ish lights, we pressed on into
the vast, open, dark desert.

I believe I mentioned that the desert here was vast,
open, and dark. And so, for the next hour or so,
Emily and I stumbled along behind Harald as he set his
sights on the red light underneath the nice straight
line of white-ish lights. Every once in a while I
would wake up. And I would find myself several yards
behind Harald and Emily. And I would shuffle to catch
up. And every once in a while, I would find the time
to stop talking with my other teammates and ask Harald
about the little red light in the distance. Why
wasn't it getting any closer? I didn't ask this aloud
because things always take forever to get to at night
in an adventure race.

But finally, nearly two hours later, this question
turned a small turbine in my upstairs warehouse and a
dim bulb flickered back on in one of the windows, so
to speak. I came back to full consciousness and
called to Harald. I asked him what the elevation of
the checkpoint was supposed to be. He consulted the
map and answered. I consulted my altimeter. He
consulted his. We were hundreds of feet below that
elevation. Harald came back to nearly full
consciousness. We squinted at the white-ish
lights.... Stars. They were stars! They were
admittedly lined up nicely, however we could have
walked for quite a while and really never reached
them. And the little red light Harald was chasing
after? Well, it was earth-based, but it was so far
off as to be on some distant star.

Harald nearly broke down. We had wandered several
miles past the power lines and were now standing
somewhere in the middle of the vast, open, dark
desert. He handed me the map and humbly asked if I
could get us back to the checkpoint. A few more
lights turned on upstairs. I said I could.

We turned our tired ship around and marched back up
the slight grade of the desert towards the power lines
that we had so obviously now walked right underneath.
After an hour and a half (!) we hit the power lines.
Another 15 minutes and we were at the checkpoint. It
was 3 a.m. We were exhausted. We woke the checkpoint
personnel who proceeded to rebuild their burnt out
fire. Emily hacked herself into a fitful nap. Harald
and I warmed ourselves by the fire and ate. We were
actually terrified now.

We calculated that Dart 1 was several hours ahead and
that the Kings, by now, were well ahead also. What
terrified us was the whereabouts of the second Dart
team. With a huge amount of foot travel over fairly
open terrain, we were mortified at the prospect of
getting into a foot race with the second Dart team
which was made up of three ultra-runners. Oy vey! We
needed for Emily to get a little rest and we needed to
regroup mentally for the remaining 20+ km of trekking
to the Sea of Cortez. But we also needed to get up
and go. And painfully, we did so.

The navigation from here was fairly easy. All we had
to do was follow a single bearing towards the ocean.
We left the checkpoint under cover of night and
thankfully an hour later, the sun was again up. The
dawn of the 4th day. The dawn of the dead...

If you've ever seen those horror movies where it's now
late in the last reel and the hero or heroine has
escaped from the villain temporarily, but is now beat
up and bloody after tangling with the villain and he
or she limps and huffs and puffs towards safety all
while constantly looking over his or her shoulder...
then you know what the next five hours were like for
the Silly Rabbits. We were the "heroes" and Dart 2
represented the "villains". Not that they are not
nice people, it's just a metaphor. For after all,
this is reality, not some movie... or was it?

Despite the fact that the sun was out again to warm
things up, we were still a band of walking zombies who
didn't get the memo that you're supposed to go back to
your graves and sleep when it gets light out.
Accompanied by Emily's hacking cough and my distinct
limp we made our way ever so slightly downhill and
towards the water which we deemed our "safe haven".
Like those horror movies, we could see exactly where
we had to go and it seemed a million miles away. And
actually that estimation wasn't too far off. Okay,
so, we tried to move as quickly as possible, but
finally after a few hours, my body had had enough. I
was still clothed in full evening wear which consisted
of ankle length windproof, water-resistant pants, a
few layers of warm undergarments, my waterproof jacket
with the hood up over my head and my heavy gloves.
Harald and Emily had already stripped down. Harald
asked me if I wasn't hot. I said I was just fine.
The lights were shutting off again...

And so I said I needed to sleep. Just for five
minutes. I was trying to hold off until we got to a
big rock outcropping, but I couldn't make it. We lay
down under the shade of a scrub tree. I was wracked
by violent dreams. Harald woke me up a few minutes
later and we continued on. I felt a little better.
We were still looking over our shoulders.

We had an interminable march all the way to the beach,
but finally, we felt safe! We knew that we could
out-paddle any team in the field, and now we had come
to the final leg of the race -- a kayak section
several miles down the coast of the Sea of Cortez.
Like a wanderer in the desert finding an oasis, our
strength -- if not our mental condition -- went up.
At this final transition, we ate the rest of the food
we had left with our equipment, gingerly changed into
our paddling gear, and grabbed two race-provided
kayaks. On this section, the race provided the same
kayaks for all teams. We would receive one single and
one double boat. The trick was getting them into the
water. Being a narrow body of ocean water, the Sea of
Cortez is prone to extreme changes in tide. We
reached the Sea at nearly low tide and therefore had
to walk our boats several hundred yards through knee
deep tidal mud to get them into the water. But we
were safe!

Falling asleep literally in our boats, we paddled to
one last checkpoint and then headed for a steep,
jagged point around which lay the finish line in the
town of San Felipe. Harald paddled the single boat
while Emily and I were in the double. For much of the
paddle, I wondered why Emily was talking to a mermaid
who was clinging to the front of our boat. Can't you
see we're trying to race?! We weren't out of the
woods yet.

And so, we consulted our maps and landed on the beach
in San Felipe, the finish line! Or so we thought.
Met by nothing except the sound of crashing waves, we
pulled our boats ashore and checked the maps again.
We were in the right spot. We quadruple checked. So,
we started walking towards the beach side buildings
and then onto a street. It was eerily silent and
devoid of people. We thought at any moment, the race
staff and volunteers would jump out and surprise us.
At any moment... any moment now... hello?

We finally encountered a few locals and in my broken
Spanish I asked them about the race and if they knew
if we were in the right spot. One kind fellow said
that he was pretty sure the finish line was still a
mile or two down the coast...

We hobbled back to our boats and relaunched into the
water. What a way to finish. It was dusk when we
arrived at this point, and now as full darkness fell
for the 4th time on the race, we paddled slowly down
the coast of San Felipe in search of the "alternate"
finish line. After another 15 minutes, a few whistles
and cheers along a stretch of beach side bars and
restaurants told us to head to shore. The Finish
line? Well, it was not really marked and we certainly
had it plotted at a different spot, but we were
finally there! And in third place!

I will spare the gory details of the post race. All
you wished to know was the horrors and highs of the
race itself and where we finished and how. We were
proud of sticking it out and amazed at how hard and
far we had pushed. After a shower that got about 18%
of the grime off of my body, I fell into a deep, rock
solid sleep in a large bed inside a hotel room in San
Felipe. Another adventure complete. Dreams of our
$8000 payday dancing in my head! Yes, for 3rd place,
we would collect this amount.

And that, dear readers, is my holiday tale. Merry
Christma-Hannu-Kwaanzika to all! I'm going back to
sleep now....

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"To the Xstream" - Adventure Xstream Expedition, Moab, UT

2005-10-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

Boy, just when that last toenail grows back...

Yep, you head off to Moab, Utah and engage yourself in a 225 mile overland (and over-water) extravaganza called the Adventure Xstream Expedition Race. Yeah, notice the X in Xstream. There should probably be a few more lined up next to it. These things can get pretty "adult" rated.

Flashback to three days before the race: Dr. Jason and I somehow drew the short straws for this trip as we got the X-citement of shoe horning five bikes and enough gear and supplies to invade a medium sized country into a station wagon and driving the 15 hours from San Francisco to Moab. Our contemporaries and teammates for this race -- John and Jen -- would get the luxury of flying to Salt Lake City and renting a soccer mom van due to work schedules. They still had a four hour drive to Moab, but they had XM Radio, fresh butts, and a total of a half-day of travel. Jason and I had... 400 miles of Nevada high desert which included a fuel up at what the Washington Post has called the "armpit of America", Battle Mountain, NV. Yes, they actually have a billboard along the highway that touts this claim.

Jason and I were thankfully still talking to each other after arriving in Moab, though he wasn't a fan of the great music I had loaded on my iPod (his loss), and I wasn't a fan of his -- breath (kidding). Thus, on Thursday (Oct 5), we, Team Silly Rabbits, America's Adventure Racing Team (TM), found ourselves pulling into the beautiful Red Bluff Inn nestled in the heart of Utah's breathtaking canyon country. This would be the site of race HQ was and the site where the race would start the next morning.

We pulled everything out of the car in order to get it all ready for the race and for our poor, unsuspecting (and fantastic) crew guy, Dave. Dave came to us via teammate Jen. He's a hard core outdoorsy guy, perfect for this line of work... however we didn't exactly tell him that it would take about 3-4 of his twin brothers to make it all silky smooth.

We consolidated and consolidated and stood staring sideways at the car for long periods of time in order to figure the best and easiest way to get the stuff back inside so that Dave could get it back outside (and then back inside again) in some semblance of order and without too much trouble whenever he would meet us at a designated transition area throughout the course. We then headed off for a pasta dinner and the pre-race meeting where we would receive instructions and maps for a little over half the race. We'd have to make it about 175 miles to receive the instructions for the last few sections.

And so, we hunkered down for the night in the well-appointed rooms of the Inn in order to awaken at 5:30 a.m. to drag our bodies a few hundred cold yards to the banks of the Colorado River in order to start at 7:30 a.m. We got news that the official start would entail one member of your team having to run about 3-4 miles to a checkpoint before returning to the starting area to meet up with your team for a 22-mile river paddle.

Now, John is 'technically' the fastest person on our team. Technically if you put him on a track and we lined up next to him, he'd run a whole lot faster. Well, there ended up being two 'technical' reasons why he didn't do the first run of the race -- and why I did. First, we found out literally 20 seconds before they said "Go!" that the run would require picking a up a small map in order to find the checkpoint -- something that John handles about as well as W handles the presidency. Second, he was in the bathroom when the gun went off...

And thus, I made a mad dash for the map table and then scrambled up some stairs, over a concrete wall, through some boulders, over 2 wooden fences, across the road, and up into a canyon -- at about the pace most people would run the 100 yard dash. That's just the way ALL these races start, no matter how long they are. Us runners didn't really have time to study the map and it's difficult at best to decipher while running up a trail (imagine Carl Lewis reading "War and Peace" as he sprints down the track), so the pack of us cruised hellbent up the canyon until we got to an area that kinda matched what we could decipher. A few deep breaths, some basic map reading, and the pack eventually zeroed in on the right spot... and then it was a mad dash back to the boats.

And thus, after hauling ass for 3+ miles, expending some good energy... I then met up with the gang to tackle... the final 222 miles. We were forced to paddle race-provided boats -- these slow moving, inflatable two-person kayaks that thankfully had drain holes. The down river paddle went through a few minor rapids which added a little fun and adventure. At the first rapid a team that had gotten in right ahead of us flipped. That was only 200 yards into the paddle. 99% of the paddle ended up being relatively harmless and if not for the beautiful scenery on both sides, it could have turned out to be a lot more painful due to our slow speed.

Well, the Rabbits have been paddling a lot lately and we quickly got out to a small lead. In these boats, however, the miniscule difference in speed that a good paddling team and a bad paddling team can achieve doesn't lend well to amassing huge leads. We were shadowed the whole way by our good friends and usual rivals from Team Balance Bar (sometimes players from Wellsport). A French two person duo paddled near us for most of this section as well. A few other teams started slipping back hour by hour.

Four hours and roughly 22 miles later, we came out of a huge bend (it seemed like the river wound up on itself a few times as we kept paddling around this bend for nearly an hour) and raced for the Transition Area with a 3-4 minute lead on our rivals. The next short section would be one of the coolest sections not only of this race, but of most I can remember right now. We grabbed our climbing harnesses and helmets and headed off on a short 4-mile round-trip foot section up into some amazing slick rock. As we rounded a last corner to where we were to perform our rappel, we came upon an amazing site. We were rappeling off of an incredible 200-foot high rock arch! Teams had to scramble up the side of the canyon (attaching ourselves to safety ropes) and then walk out onto the top of the arch where the ropes crew had set up shop.

We zipped out into thin air and spiraled down to the canyon floor. I actually snapped a picture or two as I was rappeling. With teams on our butts, we raced back out of the canyon and back to the Transition Area where we hopped aboard our mountain bikes for a wild 35-mile section on some of Moab's most famous trails (including one call the "Poison Spider"). If you're really into mountain biking, you've heard the lore of Moab's incredible riding. Well, after many, many hours riding some of these "famous" digs, I came away scratching my head at all the fuss. There's lots of very technical stuff and some beautiful scenery and a few nice spots to ride, but there's also a lot of sand and plenty of spots with huge steps in the rock that you can't ride.

This all plays into the fact that it took us until nearly nightfall -- about 7 hours -- to complete this section. It felt like we kept going up and up along the moonscape of slickrock. We were constantly passing 4-Wheel drive vehicles doing things that I don't think Physics professors would approve of. Moab is also a mecca of 4-wheeling, and we saw some insane stuff from numerous Frankenstein-like trucks. The sun was out and we were starting to feel like lizards on the baked rocks. For much of the afternoon we had to follow the painted markers on the rock that we rode over. We pushed our bikes up and over 3-foot high rock "steps", through some sand, and put a few checkpoints under our belt before topping out at a highway for our descent back to the Transition.

We crossed the highway and then after 6 1/2 hours of uphill grinding, we had an awful, teeth-rattling downhill which didn't nearly make up for our riding all day. In less than 15 minutes we had lost all the elevation we gained all day. But, hey, we were in the lead!!

We took a little extra time in the Transition because the next section would be a doozy. We were faced with a 30-plus mile trek, and nearly all of it would be at night. We powered down some food, changed out of biking gear, grabbed our headlamps, and headed out for the evening in only our finest Salomon race formal wear. We started by running (yes, after 12 hours of exercise, we start running up a road) a few miles along the river. We passed Balance Bar who were riding in the opposite direction, having just come off the big downhill. We figured to have about 45 minutes on them at this point. As darkness descended upon us, we found ourselves at an adventurous little river crossing. We would paddle two kayaks a few hundred yards across the river and then we'd have to bushwhack through some very thick vegetation for about 500 yards. The race management was responsible for getting the boats back to the other side while we were responsible for hacking through jungle-like undergrowth in an attempt to maintain a certain compass bearing through the bramble.

Eventually, we squirted out the other side onto some trails that would lead us into the meat of the trek. I had gotten a little behind nutritionally between my early run and the fact that some nutrition I had on the paddle spilled overboard. So, it was my turn to take it a little slow as we trudged up "Jacob's Ladder", another famous Moab trail. We were onto headlamp power by now and there was a slight moon to see by.

After an hour or so, I was able to eat and recover and we trekked on through the canyonlands. We came upon one checkpoint and then headed straight up some switchbacks into more 4-wheel drive terrain. After 40 minutes of trail finding, we looked back down to see that we were practically right above the checkpoint we had just acquired. Cool. And then, the midnight hour struck...

It's now around Halloween and you've all heard tales of ghouls and goblins and ghosts and such. Well, in adventure racing, out there in the wilderness, we get attacked by the Sleepmonsters! Yes, they creep up into your eyeballs and start pulling your eyelids together. I personally don't have many problems with them (must be all those garlic-flavored Powerbars), but we've got a few sleepyheads on the squad. And when you're out all night trekking through darkness, staring at the trail in front of you for hours on end... you become pretty vulnerable to attack.

This was only the first night of the race (only the first?!), and thus our immunity was still high, so we were able to fend them off with only one or two "Hey, now how did we get way over here... and where'd the trail go??" moments. At about 4 a.m. we found ourselves heading out of the "woods" and along a really long sandy road towards the next transition. Did I mention it was really long? We eventually came out to a highway, jogged two miles along it, and then crossed over towards a campgrounds where our soft, warm transition awaited us.

And so, the sun arose... and we checked into the transition and sat down to refuel. And so, you ask "What do adventure racers REALLY eat out there?" Well, I'd have to say that there's absolutely nothing like cold pizza and fried chicken for breakfast! We had asked Dave (nearly 12 hours ago at this point) to see if he could pick up some tasty morsels for us. As we had calculated that this trek would take several hours less than it did (hence the "cold") it made the food taste that much better when we sat down.

Twenty-four hours. People can get a lot done in that amount of time. For example, we'd just run, biked, hiked, and paddled nearly 100 miles! And so, you ask "Gee, weren't you guys beat?" And I'd have to say "Not even close!" (okay, this answer's been edited by our censors). Though, we still had lots of racing to do. So, after about 55 minutes of refueling and gearing back up -- c'mon, there's no sleeping in adventure racing! -- we headed out into the morning sunshine on our bikes... for a 20-mile, 5000 foot climb. Good morning!

I'll say this one was a grind. It happened to be mostly on a paved road, but 5000 vertical feet is still 5000 vertical feet. It didn't help that we happened to be sharing this road with a charity road ride to benefit Lance Armstrong's foundation. As we towed each other uphill at three miles per hour we were constantly being passed by spandex-clad, shaved-leg road bikers hauling ass at four times our speed. Long story, short, we topped out at the next transition about 3 1/2 hours later, and you guessed it, we only had uphill from here!

We were to drop our mountain bikes and complete a 10-mile trekking section that would take us up another 3000+ vertical feet to over 12,400 feet above sea level. We had all heard reports of rain storms moving into the area in the late afternoon on Saturday (exactly the date and a few hours before the time we started this section), and so with this in mind, we tromped off into the La Sal mountain range.

"The weather started getting rough, our tiny ship was tossed..." to quote Gilligan. As we scrambled and scratched our way straight up the last 1000 vertical feet of the exposed peak that held our next checkpoint, the winds started a-comin'. We literally couldn't hear each other talk. Thankfully, we were beating the storm at this point, though we could see it heading towards us. And thankfully, we had a big descent to the next checkpoint. And so, we lost a few thousand feet of elevation and arrived at a small lake to acquire the next checkpoint.

Jason was feeling pretty low at this point -- usually a product of expending thousands and thousands and thousands of calories and only putting in a few hundred at a time. We towed him back up another 900 vertical feet over one last ridge on our way to get back to our mountain bikes. As we climbed this last bit, the sky started talkin' to us. Boom! Shazam! Lightning and thunder began to shake the area. We were under tree cover, but it was exciting anyway (as you might imagine standing outside in such conditions would be). And to add to our racing pleasure, it started to hail as we reached the top of the last hill. Wasting little time, we ran downhill to the transition, passing a few teams heading out onto this section (several hours behind us now).

The weather eased temporarily -- it was only a preview of what was coming. We changed back into our biking shoes and gear, grabbed some food at the race-provided tent, and turned back down the mountain. And we were still in the lead!

We raced back down the dirt to the main paved road, which we would then ride for about 15 miles to get to our next trail. And so, as we rode, the storm that everyone knew was coming thus arrived...

Zap! Bam! Pow! Lightning and thunder shot off in pockets all around us. We caught a little rain and seemed to be dodging pools of electricity. It was about 6 p.m. and we had another hour or so of daylight with us. The road led through more beautiful country side. And inevitably, it led to another big climb. As darkness descended, we granny-geared up another hill towards the Kokopeli Trail (another famous one).

I can say that we thankfully had dodged a lot of the lightning and rain up to this point. We knew that the teams that were behind us heading up into the La Sal range on foot would be having a rough time way up in the exposed hills. But we kept right on going. We weren't out of the path of the weather, but we were at much lower elevation and surrounded by higher ground.

Now, the Kokopeli Trail is actually a 146-mile trail that snakes from Colorado into Utah. We would only be riding a 30-mile section of it ("only", he says). With nightfall aided by thick cloud cover, we dove off the main road and zipped onto the Kokopeli Trail. And we zipped right along... for about a quarter mile.

The rain had turned the dirt trail into what can only be described as wonderfully organic and natural wet cement! We felt like we'd ridden right into a trap set by a nefarious villain in a James Bond movie. Our bikes plowed into the cement-mud and stopped. Well, okay, I had actually been riding la-de-da right along until I noticed that my teammates weren't behind me anymore. Think "Scooby-Doo" where Fred, Shaggy and the gang are walking through a castle and then suddenly Fred is all alone because a ghostly suit of armor has grabbed the others from behind.

"Shaggy?... Scooby?... Velma?" All I could hear were cries from behind me. I turned to see my three headlamps - uh, teammates - at a dead standstill. I guess the tires I was using were a lot more immune to the mud (at this point) than the ones they were riding with. As I turned back, I was greeted with an amazing image. A crackle of lightning shot down behind them and backlit them in a beautiful tableau.

I couldn't waste any real time contemplating the beauty of nature's fury as I quickly backtracked to help unstick my companions. Their bikes were now cement statues. I had to trade bikes with Jen in order to carry her bike which now weighed about 60 pounds. We scraped and yanked mud clumps from every nook and cranny of our bikes, but somehow it still weighed them down. And then it really started to rain!

It was deep into the second act, and it looked like Dr. No's plans to take over the world were coming through. We looked at each other and gulped. Would we have to carry our mud-encrusted bikes for the next 30 miles?? We calculated that would take about 15 hours, maybe more. No way. We scraped off mud, put our bikes down, and pushed them. For five yards. They became statues again. We carried them. The cold rain beat down upon us.

Okay, we weren't freaking out yet... but we were close. This kinda sucked. In a strange reversal, the rain actually started to help our cause. Puddles and rivulets started forming along the trail and we could set our bikes down and "wash" them off. We also started pushing them through the long puddles which enabled us to keep them going. And eventually we got to some rocky spots where we could ride. Whew!

We were by no means "flying" along. A few times we were able to ride for a half-mile or so. The trail was becoming more rocky and less muddy, though we still had to push through some muddy spots. On top of this, we had some short little uphills which were too difficult to ride, and which forced us to hike-our-bikes. At our slow pace, we expected Team Balance Bar to come upon us at any second. We nearly got to the frustrating point where we expected every team to come upon us. And then we started getting hypothermic...

John and I only had wind-breakers on us, while Jason and Jen had waterproof jackets. John started shaking like a leaf in a hurricane, and while I've been in situations like this before, I wasn't far behind. We were soaked. And here's where and why we hump along a wealth of mandatory safety gear. I can say that we often question many of the items that race directors require us to carry, however one which I've never questioned -- and one which I've employed several times -- is the amazing space blanket. A paper-thin blanket of what is essentially a cross between tin foil and Saran Wrap, the space blanket does an incredible job of helping you retain body heat while being virtually waterproof.

John and I stripped off our clothes from the waist up. Yes, you read that right. At 10 p.m. in the middle of a lightning storm, we got half-naked. It was the only way. With a little help from our friends (thanks, Ringo, Jason and Jen), we unfurled our blankets and wrapped them around our skin. We then put back on our wet shirts and jacket. Ahhhh. It allowed us to continue.

Funny I should mention Ringo? Well, to us it was more creepy than funny. At the end of the trekking leg after the previous night, all four of us had the same experience. We all had the sensation that there was someone else trekking with us. Sleepmonsters? You decide...

Back to the Kokopeli Trail and our intrepid racers. Round about midnight, we came to a major junction. A few hours earlier, Jason, the man with the maps, had informed us that we had about 21 miles to go. That was hours ago. After being able to ride some of the trail and figuring that we'd gone at least 15+ miles, John and I guessed that we were near the end. So when Jason looks up from the map and says "We've got about 19 miles left", John and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. We thought he was crazy. We knew where we were. We knew how far we had to go... even if we didn't have the map (or any idea of where we were).

He was serious. We had gone about 12 miles. He had said the wrong thing earlier and had recalculated. John and I weren't laughing anymore. Nineteen more miles? The first twelve had taken us about 4 hours.

And so, we rode on. Things were pretty silent for awhile. You can get into a zone out there. At one point, somewhere around 40 hours into the race, without a wink of sleep, Jen turned to Dr. Jason and told him she was feeling a little weird. She was having some odd sensations in her body and she wasn't sure if she was feeling "right". Welcome to expedition-style adventure racing, Jen! If you're NOT feeling "weird", then something's wrong for sure. It's like the whole "going into the light" experience -- something's wrong if you feel totally at peace out there.

By now, we were so incredibly sure that Balance Bar, at least, would be screaming around a corner any minute and go zooming by us. We were literally moving at about 2-3 miles per hour. And then John broke his derailleur...

Yes, once again, that's the thing that allows your bike to shift gears. No derailleur, no gears. And we couldn't make his bike into a single speed at this point either. So he was forced to walk his bike the rest of the way. And we had ten more miles to go...

The rain was intermittent at this point. The rivulets were running. The rocky trail felt like it kept going up instead of down. And it seemed like we kept coming back to the same spot over and over and over again. When you're on a twisty trail at night, you get this sensation.

Pre-dawn. We figured to finally have one last big downhill to the next transition. Though if you take one thing away from all these reports over the past three years, you know that there is NO downhill in adventure racing! The last "downhill" to the transition somehow entailed riding up a zillion tiny, maddening hills. Or for John, pushing up. I was able to relieve him of his bike a few times while the Sleepmonsters attacked him from all sides. John and Jen are our resident coffee drinkers, so 45 hours without sleeping and no coffee kinda get them tweaking out a bit.

By now, our bikes were almost toast. We had nearly worn out our brake pads due to all the grit, dirt, and mud rubbing on them. Our gears were hardly working, even on the bikes with derailleurs. The one bright headlamp that we had had run out of batteries several hours ago. Yes, in our haste to race fast and light, we had calculated that we might be finished with this section around zero-dark-hundred hours the night before. So, we didn't take our big, giant, bright night biking lights. And so, we were out there navigating by little headlamps while trying to ride. It resulted in a few face plants. I'll leave it at that...

The dawn hour. We dragged ourselves to the end of this section of the Kokopeli Trail. The storm had passed. All was quiet. We towed John into the transition area. All was still quiet. Our crew guy Dave sauntered up to us. He was quiet. We found a member of the race staff who was being exceedingly quiet as he addressed us. And after biking, slogging, pushing, shivering, and stumbling literally all night through lightning, thunder, rain, mud and rocks, here's what he told us: "Uh, guys, we stopped the race 11 hours ago."

Excuse me, I know I've been riding my bike all night and I haven't slept for 48 hours now, but could you repeat that?

With the gnarly storm that passed over the race leaving two feet of snow on top of the exposed mountain where the high checkpoint on the previous trekking section was, the race director had decided to pull the racers off the course. He told them that there may be a restart in the morning and that there would be a meeting at the Red Cliff Lodge to discuss this with the teams. They just hadn't gotten ALL the teams to inform them of this. By this, I mean that we were the only team they hadn't been able to tell.

So, we put in an extra 11 hours of racing while everyone else was tucked up tidily in their beds. Balance Bar had been about to pull out of the race several hours before. They had used their mandatory cell phone to call the race director to tell him that they were at a bed and breakfast while the storm raged. The race director said "stay there, we're calling the race." They stayed. We didn't get the memo.

The member of the race staff that was manning this transition specifically to await our arrival further informed us that we were thus the winners of the race. Excuse me, I know I've been riding my bike all night and....

Yes, the race director crowned us the winners because we were not only so far ahead of any other team when they called the race but because we happened to be leading when they called the race. We accepted it.

In hindsight, I believe the race should not have been stopped. Usually, in a case like this, it wouldn't have been. What normally happens is that teams that are caught in or before a section that is deemed too dangerous (etc) are shuttled forward to the next passable section of the course. They are unfortunately disqualified from being in contention to "win" the race since they haven't done the whole course, however the race continues on. If no team gets to the unsafe section, the whole section can be bypassed without problem and all teams are still on equal terms. If, as in our case, one or two teams get through, then they are the only teams in official contention.

Anyway, we accepted the decision and were happy on one hand that we didn't have to torture ourselves with the final 50 or so miles of the race. But on the other hand, it just wasn't a fulfilling end to the race story. It still officially feels like we won because we sure as heck put in the effort. But you never know how things turn out until the very end, now do you?

It'll go down in the history books and it adds another notch to our belt. And so, we won the 2005 Adventure Xstream expedition race!!

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"It Ain't Over Til It's Over (Whew!)" - Explore CA, Kirkwood Resort

2005-07-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

Well, the following race report might pale in comparison to my latest upcoming adventure... I'm heading off to the Himalayas in northern India in a few hours! Yes, you read that right, sports fans. I'm off to film part of a documentary high in some remote areas. It's not an extreme, cliff-hanging, peak-bagging, snow-filled trip, but more of a story about an amazing woman and her quest to do some incredible good in the world. Updates will come for sure. As for racing:

It was another weekend in another part of the country... just like many other weekends in many other parts of the country. Except we were there to race. And I do so enjoy a good weekend in the country. It's never boring and NEVER the same thing twice, that's for sure. So, with another full work week's worth of time spent dealing with the logistics of getting five people (four racers plus one crew), four mountain bikes, three automobiles, two tons of gear, and a partridge in a pear tree -- make that a 22 foot long, three-person kayak -- all the way to the mountains outside of Lake Tahoe, sometimes the racing is the easy part!

And so, this week's tale of Team Silly Rabbits begins with the unenviable task of drawing straws to see who gets to drive Jason's car. As mentioned previously, it's seen better days (and decades). John and I drew the short straws and had to go pick up the monstrous kayak, strap it precariously on the roof, and drive into the blazing heat of middle California without air conditioning on a Friday afternoon to get to the Kirkwood Ski resort for the first 24-hour race in the brand new Explore CA race series.

The Explore CA series is a conglomerate of a number of previously individual races around California. In a United Nations-style move, five race directors of five separate races came together to pool their resources to create what looks to become one of the premiere race series in the U.S. They've been able to attract a number of top sponsors and have put together close to $100,000 in prize money and prizes.

Formerly known as the Sierra Extreme, this race would be directed by Rich Brazeau, the newly hired CEO of Primal Quest, the world's premiere expedition race. With that in mind, everyone had high hopes of spectacular racing and a challenging course... a peek into the mind of the man who will be in charge of "earth's richest adventure" starting in the late Spring of '06.

John and I braved the Friday traffic and some back roads to climb to the breathtaking (literally) Kirkwood resort which sits at 7800 feet above sea level (at the base! You know what that means). Friday would be a relatively mellow day as the instructions for the race would not be given out until a mere three hours before the gun went off on Saturday morning. Jason would arrive later that evening and Jen, our fourth teammate would arrive after a full day of work with her husband Scott, our newly minted Crew Guy Extraordinaire.

In a nice coincidence for us, the format for this race would be exactly the same as the race we completed less than a month earlier in Bend, OR. It would be a stage race with only three of your four teammates racing in each stage. Your "race time" would not include your time spent in transition (getting ready for the upcoming stage). So, in a perfect race, your team would have time to rest and prepare before jetting out on the next stage without it counting against you.

Nonetheless, we were warned that this would be a difficult race and that even the fastest teams may have trouble making all the sections in the alloted times. Ha, we cried (at least on the outside). Saturday morning, the racers gathered in the wee hours to pick up instructions for the race. There would be eight sections: trek/run, paddle, bike, paddle, bike, paddle, bike, trek/run. In that order. Dizzying? What's it like to go from the boat to the bike and back again and then run up a mountain and rappel off it? Fun, of course!

9:00 a.m. Teams would go off in waves on the first leg-burning, lung-busting trek straight up the slopes of the ski resort to the first checkpoint. When in doubt in an adventure race, look around for the highest point you can see. That's probably where the checkpoint is. Going off in waves didn't really matter because we were really racing the clock in this race. A team might pass you in a later section, however they could technically be two hours behind you in 'race time'. So sticking to your team's game plan is crucial. John, Jason, and I would tackle the first trek while Jen and Scott drove ahead with our boat, bikes, and gear to a lake several miles away.

With Jason's navigation, we caught up to a bunch of teams that had left in earlier waves and then we put a big whuppin' on the field from checkpoint 1 to checkpoint 2. There were two route choices. Run along the semi-circular ridge high above the resort or descend all the way back down to the elevation at the base and run back up the other side of the mountainous "bowl". Hm, choice two doesn't seem like a winner, huh? Well, if you were just drawing straight lines, you'd see that running around the ridge would take you quite a way further. And if you were looking at how much climbing and descending you'd have to do, well going down and back up is never fun. (One rule of thumb: always stay high. But hey, you know what they say about rules.)

We planned on going down and then back up before the race. And that's what we did in the race. And it was the better call. We screamed back down the loose slopes, over hill and dale, and then put our pistons to work grinding back up several hundred feet of elevation to checkpoint two. And we arrived ahead of everyone! In the clear, sunny morning, we could see over a mile up the ridge which constituted Choice 1. And we didn't see a single team coming at us. From here, we caught a nice singletrack trail that skirted along a shady hillside and then we had to run on the road for about two miles to get around a lake to the kayak transition.

Arriving at the transition, we could see back along the road on the far side of the lake -- where we had run from over a mile earlier. Still there was no one behind us. We were amazed. Later, we talked with a few other teams that went back down the slopes and up the other side, but the majority of teams stayed up on the ridge and had a long, tricky run to checkpoint 2.

We decided to have a relatively quick transition for a few reasons. First, we wanted to have ample time for the section after the paddle -- a huge mountain bike leg into the heat of the day. Second, we didn't want to have to paddle with any other teams, especially two other teams that had brought three-person boats. This is just a psychological ploy. We didn't want other teams saying "hey, we can paddle with them... why can't we beat them in everything else?", or something like that.

John, Jen, and I would handle the paddle. A 4.5 mile circumnavigation of a deep blue alpine lake. Very pretty. We checked out before any other teams came in (!), jumped quickly into the boats (time's runnin' now!) and got about two strokes into it when something went horribly wrong with the boat. The person in the back steers the boat using foot pedals which control the rudder. The foot pedals are attached to wires that simply pull the rudder left or right. Well, if one of the foot pedals breaks you could have a tough time steering. And that's what happened. My left foot pedal came off its track and we started to fish tail. I thought it might be broken and it's tough to fix a boat while in the middle of the water, so I pulled up the rudder and we fish tailed to the first checkpoint on the far side of the lake. Upon hitting land where the checkpoint was, I looked at the pedal to see if it was fixable. Thankfully, it had only come off of its holder, it didn't break. We put it back on and started for the next checkpoint.

Unfortunately, the pedal came off a few more times during the rest of this leg, causing us to stop and put it back on -- and costing us some time. When we got back, we found out that we had over 20 minutes on the next closest team. Jason, John, and Jen would ride off into the hot, hot hills on the next section. I can't say I was disappointed to sit out this section. None of us thought it would take nearly as long as it did, but...

Scott and I strapped the boat back onto the car, gathered our team gear, and drove off for the next transition. The rumor was that it would take 3-3.5 hours for the fast teams on this section. Scott and I would have time to pick up some water and food and set up 'camp' on the shores of another lake in the area. We got a nice shady spot, laid out our gear, and waited. And waited. And waited. Three hours went by. We got the blood pumping again thinking they'd be here soon. Three and a half hours went by and we were staring up the road to where they'd be coming from. Four hours came and went. Hm. Well, folks get to talkin' sometimes. And sometimes them rumors just fly around without much foundation, ya know.

By now, most other teams had pulled in and were waiting for their teammates. That's when things really get going. Someone says "Well, I heard it's gonna take 6 hours." And someone else says "Seven." And you can get into a downright bidding war. The friendly and dedicated personnel who were manning the checkpoint didn't know anything about the race times, so we were all in the dark. And waiting.

Obviously, it was taking longer than originally anticipated. At the five hour mark, we started to worry. We were pretty sure they'd be out of water by now and possibly food, too. I was getting pretty stiff just sitting around, and napping, and eating... come to think of it, getting stiff wasn't too bad. But my thoughts were with my teammates out there.

Sometime a little after the five hour mark, they arrived! Tired and dirty, but with slight smiles pushed through chapped and sunburnt lips. Epic. The leg was only 22 miles. The average person can walk about 3 miles per hour. On a bike, you figure you can go a lot faster than that. We sometimes average about 5 miles per hour on steep uphills. So, we calculated that even at an average of the terribly slow 7 miles per hour, the leg would take 3-3.5 hours at the worst.... How wrong we were. They ended up hiking with their bikes a good way.

A long rest was in order. Thankfully our nice shady spot was the perfect spot. BUT! We couldn't rest too long because there were other legs to complete! Once again, we somehow started mounting more and more time on the teams behind us. No one was arriving behind us as we refueled and rested. The next closest team had left about 6 minutes behind us on the bike leg, and now as we prepared to launch onto the next kayak leg 48 minutes after arriving, our lead was growing.

And then you go and do stupid things. Ace navigator Jason is one of the best in the business. BUT! His memorization skills were a bit lacking on this day. Playing hot shot, he decided that we didn't need the maps to find the two checkpoints on this lake. To be fair, water navigation in many races is pretty easy. You either paddle down the ocean shore to a recognizable spot, or you paddle down a river to recognizable spot, or you paddle across a lake to a recognizable feature. You can't really hide anything on open water. (Different story in bigger races where you can't see the other side of said 'open water')

The first checkpoint was on a small island. No problem. The second checkpoint was at the far end of the lake, however there were no recognizable features along the shore. Just a bunch of rocks to the right, an open field in the middle, and a bunch of dense bushes on the left. I had looked at the map a few times, and like Jason figured we'd just paddle down to the end and see something. I wasn't worried.

Well, ten minutes after slowly paddling along the shore going "well, I think they'd put it over here", and "Can you remember anything about the map?" we were sorry to be such show-offs. At least it wasn't dark out! By process of elimination, we found the checkpoint flag tucked into some bushes in a rather nondescript spot. Whew. We turned around and paddled like heck back to the take out.

For the next section, we'd be racing daylight as well as the clock. It was billed as only a 19 mile mountain bike leg and it appeared to have more downhill than up, but after sizing up this race with the first bike leg, we were more prepared this time. We knew we'd be tackling much of the leg in the dark, so we tried to get out as early as possible with a few rays of light left to bike by. Jason, John, and I saddled up at the head of a fire road and began the rocky ascent. Sure enough, it was slow going and wouldn't let up for awhile.

Just before 0-dark hundred, we passed a team that had skipped the earlier bike leg in order to stay "on schedule" for the race. This was a legal and calculated maneuver by a few teams. If you don't think you have time to complete a section and be able to start the next one, then you can skip that section and take a time penalty. Fittingly, the team's name is Epic Sufferin'. A bunch of nice guys that just like getting out there no matter what. That's what this sport is also about.

An hour after leaving, John announced that according to his bike computer we'd gone a little over 4 miles. God bless Epic Sufferin' if we were going twice as fast as them....

In the dark, we found ourselves in a position that we hadn't been in in a while. Racing in the dark! We'd done a number of races this year which all seemed to start and end in the daylight hours. Racing at night is when the real fun begins (now you really think I'm mad, huh?) Just you, the moon, the silence, and the bears and wolves. We don't really worry about those things. And, yes, it is often fun racing at night. You're a bit loopy after racing all day, you're finally cool, you're really traveling into the unknown, and you're almost assured of having the trails to yourself.

We found ourselves dismounting and pushing our bikes over a number of piles of snow, through mud, and across small streams. We hopped through boulder fields and rode in granny gear up some short steep bits. And then we finally had a long downhill to the next transition.

3.25 hours and 19 miles later, we found ourselves at a campsite on the edge of a steep ravine. Here, we would actually get a few hours of sleep since teams could not start the next section until 6 a.m. This is more or less a built-in sleeping period, at least for some teams. We arrived at 10:30-ish, ate some food, sang some camp songs, and curled up in our tents.

Dawn broke early as usual. We unfurled ourselves, powered down some breakfast, and yep, suited up for more adventure. We wanted to jump out as early as possible on the kayak, both to maintain a psychological edge and in order to get to the next bike section as early as possible before it got too hot out.

We had to carry our kayak about 1/3 of a mile to the lake and then it was an out-and-back paddle of about 6 miles. We finally had the boat dialed in and the maps on board. And we ended up with the fastest time on this leg.

Speaking of fastest times on a leg, this race featured stage prizes for exactly this. In five of the eight stages, the team with the fastest time would win prizes from the race's sponsors. I can't honestly remember which stages held which prizes, but I know that we walked away with all three Tivo units that were up for grabs! Yes, Tivo, the fabulous TV recording device is a sponsor. We lost out on the first paddle due to described difficulties and I think we missed another opportunity in the final bike leg. Anyway...

From the boat, Jason, Jen, and I would bike the last bike leg of the race. It would be a long, long climb up over a range and then through an alternating rocky/muddy section to, of all places Mud Lake, and then an all-too-short downhill to the transition. At this point we were racing with well over an hour's lead on the next team. A few teams made up some time on us on this leg, but we were feeling comfortable enough with only one 6 mile trekking section left in the race.

And now, for the dramatic finish. Six miles, one hour and fifteen minute lead. John, Jen, and I would head out on the final up-and-over trek that would take us through some more great Sierra scenery and up to a short rappel off of a large tower of rock before descending down the slopes of the ski resort and back to where we started the previous morning.

I was the lead navigator on this section which only required us to find a trail in the woods, take it to a certain spot and then head up an open slope to the rappel. From here, it would be easy to basically retrace our route down the ski slopes from the day before.

Well, if you don't find your trail, sometimes it can get a little hairy out there. Taking cues from John's wrist top altimeter and following the map, I thought we had crossed the trail at some point and needed to turn back down to get to it. I was trying to avoid heading into a steep cliff face that we had to go around, and in the forest, I think I took that avoidance to the extreme. We were going at a good clip over the exposed granite slabs and through the cool woods. And then we came out of the trees into a rather disorienting spot surrounded by nothing but rocky terrain in all directions.

In my desire to avoid heading into too steep of territory, I had overcompensated and gone a little far in the other direction. Getting my bearings back, and not trusting our altimeter readings anymore, I saw that we had to go straight uphill to regain our course. We got on the right track, but had lost about 40 minutes to our romp through the woods.

When we got to the rappel, we got the news that the two teams that were behind us in the standings had been through a while before. We got through the rappel without incident, and then without taking off my harness or helmet, I led our charge back down the front side of the ski resort to the finish. Scott was pacing the bottom of the slopes like a panther, waiting for our arrival. He screamed for us to step on it because it was gonna be close...

So we crossed the line.

And then we had to wait. For the final time tabulations. They couldn't tell us right there whether we'd had enough to maintain our lead. They also had to get word from the rappel on how much time teams had to wait before rappeling. They would then try to reasonably credit teams for their wait time if they were behind another team.

And then we had to leave. Jason and John had to be back in the bay area. I was with John so I had to go, too. Jen and Scott were able to stay and it wasn't until nearly three hours later that we found out the results.

We won! With the lead we had before the last section, a 15 minute margin of victory was a little close for comfort, but we'd still done it. Team effort all around. With the win (and the Tivos) came a check for $2500. Minus all our expenses and we each ate a victory burrito to celebrate.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking

"Parlay vous Adventure Racing?" - Raid Series, Bend, OR

2005-06-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

Because you demanded it (didn't you?) Because you can't get enough of it (right?). Because you're on the list... You're now practically up to date on the 2005 adventure racing season (okay, I snuck a little race in yesterday. Only 7 1/2 hours, hardly worth the electrons...) Without further ado:

This brings us to The Raid Series. A four-part international series of incredibly fast, technical, and competitive races. Currently, it's the only way to qualify for the race that started it all -- the Raid Gauloises.

Adventure Racing History 101:

1989 -- French journalist Gerard Fusil gets the idea to combine the expedition style of exploring new, uncharted places with the grandiose spectacle of overland racing such as the multi-day Paris to Dakar motor rally. The combination results in the very first "adventure race" in New Zealand - a multi-day, 400-mile plus TEAM race in which all members must complete the course together using only human-powered means of travel while respecting and cherishing the environment. These teams would have to navigate to various points along the "journey" (a.k.a. race) and the first to cross the finish line with all members would be crowned the winner. Simple, eh?

These days, you can find many permutations of this original idea in nearly all 50 states and scores of countries around the world. Thousands upon thousands of athletes and millions of fans participate and witness the most unique sporting event on earth. That's right, I said it here -- the greatest (and most insane) sport on earth.

For the 2005 edition of the Raid Series, the first three races have now taken place in Western Australia, Sweden, and Bend, Oregon with the final stop to take place in the small country of Andorra nestled between Spain and France. The Raid series recognizes teams by their country of origin. The culmination of the series -- the Raid Gauloises -- strives for parity among participants by accepting specific numbers of teams based on geographic regions. For this year's race, they will take up to 6 teams from North America (US, Canada), 10 teams from Western Europe, 4 teams from the Pacific Rim region (Australia, NZ), and so on around the world until the 50+ spots are filled.

At the outset of the year, we, Team Silly Rabbits, set our sites on qualifying for one of the 6 North American spots. Since the races are so spread out across the globe, many teams do not participate in every race, leaving more room to participate in fewer qualifying races in order to collect the necessary points to be invited to the Raid Gauloises. We figured we'd have to compete in at least 2 of the 4 Raid Series races to assure ourselves of one of the North American spots. Without spoiling anything, we're changed our plans a bit and will not be attending the race in Andorra as previously planned, leaving our fate to this one race. Though slim our chance may be, we decided to skip the main Raid Gauloises for 2005 due to the cost and time.

Off to Bend we go. But first, a stop in Portland, Oregon to visit our amazing sponsor SALOMON SPORTS. We've been blessed to hook up with a true champion of adventure racing and outdoor sports and a great company overall. Salomon's generous sponsorship includes an incredible array of footwear, technical race clothes, outerwear, packs, and casual wear PLUS some monetary sponsorship, which actually makes us true "professional" adventure racers now (imagine that... doing it for 'fun' all this time). The folks at Salomon Sports could not be a nicer bunch of people, so if you see the Salomon van driving around your city, give our man Dave Munk a big honk and a wave and tell him you know the Silly Rabbits!

Salomon treated us to lunch at their headquarters where they take up a small slice of the multi-building Adidas campus. They got us hooked up with some more fantastic gear while we met the top dogs and enjoyed a little fun time on the soccer field during Bring Your Kids to Work Day (no not us! the real employees' kids had their day, too). To prove how nice he truly is, Dave invited us to crash at his house Wednesday night after our 10 hour driving trip. Hi, Boone! (that's his doggy).

Okay, enough sucking up... time to suck some wind in the beautiful high desert around the volcanic peaks in and around Bend. We arrived in Bend on Thursday and got situated in the Mt. Bachelor Village along with dozens of other teams from 12 countries including: Australia, Denmark, Switzerland, France, Canada, Spain, the UK, and New Zealand. For this race we were joined by part of the Rabbit's racing familia... literally. Jason's little brother, Corey, would crew for us over the two day race. He watched in amazement as we poured out nearly two tons of gear onto the floor of the room. Salomon hosted a party for the racers at a local outdoor shop that evening complete with local beer and food. It was a nice relaxing prelude to a long weekend of extremes.

Friday was check-in day, where the Rabbits -- myself, Jason, John (back from his ankle injury), and Lisa (fresh off a Rabbit victory in LA -- didn't you read the last report?) -- went through some paperwork, a thorough gear check, and picked out a boat from the race staff which we would have to transport with us throughout the race. Friday night was the usual scramble to get gear organized, eat a carbohydrate filled meal, and the not-so-usual ordeal of determining which teammates would compete in which stages of the race.

Yes, for this race, each team would only field three of its four teammates in each section. The only rule stated that the female on your team could only sit out up to 3 stages. This race would have 9 stages, so teams had the difficult decisions of trying to field their best three racers in each section with this stipulation. NOT that the females are the weakest racers, trust me! It's just a tough strategy game. Never having done a race like this and not wanting to step on each other's toes, we had a difficult time of assigning sections.

The race would begin at 6am on Saturday morning at the foot of Mt. Bachelor, rising over 2000 feet from base to summit. And wouldn't ya know it, we'd have to climb up every single inch of it. For Section 1, it would be me, John, and our only teammate with any real snowshoe experience Lisa (hailing from Colorado versus the beach, ya dig?). The section would be 25km (about 15 miles) of overland foot travel beginning with a lung-busting trek straight up the Mt. Bachelor ski resort. Snow was still prevalent in the area, so crampons were required for the up-and-over-Mt. Bachelor part of this first section. Most teams chose to put them on before the start in order to save a bit of time from having to put them on at the mandatory point higher up on the mountain.

This race had quite an assortment of mandatory gear that we'd have to lug in EVERY section (emphasis for frustration and incredulity, see later sections). The gear included a plethora of warm/weather-proof clothing, a candle (?), folding knife, headlamps, glowsticks, and a tent! Plus the usual medical and emergency stuff. Add in the crampons, trekking poles, water and food, and we were loaded for bear on this first section.

Bang. The gun went off at 6am sharp and over 150 competitors (53 teams x 3 persons each) trounced, plodded, high-stepped, shuffled, tripped, scrambled, and ran up the slopes. Another unique component of this race would be that electronic GPS units would be completely legal (and mandatory to carry) on all sections. We purchased a bottom of the line model knowing that it would be the only race for the forseeable future in which we'd use it, however it came in handy, especially on this first section. A GPS unit takes information from satellites and gives you your exact location. It also tells you how far you are from your desired point and which direction to travel in order to get there. Yes, a big fat cheat device in an adventure race where 90% of the idea behind the race is that you're going into the unknown. But since everyone was on an even field, and it was mandatory, we'd have to grin and bear it. One of our forte's is navigation, so it wouldn't favor us.

Up, up, up, crunch, crunch, crunch through the packed snow we tramped. We arrived in the top third of teams at the summit of Mt. Bachelor, and without nary a glance around at the incredible vistas, sure enough, we bombed down the backside, slipping, sliding, shuffling, skating, and scrunching down the steep, snowy, volcanic rock strewn slopes. We eventually leveled out into a beautiful forest wilderness area. Teams were lock step behind each other going uphill, but not so on the downhill. It was essentially a free for all once the mandatory flagging ended on the way down. Teams disappeared at different angles into the trees and into an eerie silence. Amazing how fast 150 people all heading for the same spot can disperse so quickly.

The forest floor proved easy enough travel, though seeing more than a few hundred feet ahead proved difficult through all the trees. So, I pulled out our GPS unit (not that a good old fashioned compass wouldn't have sufficed) and switched on the arrow device which would keep us constantly updated on the direction to the next checkpoint which we had pre-programmed in. We came across some friends from Canadian team Supplier Pipeline for a few minutes until they jetted off and then hooked up with our old dear friends from Team Wellsport deep in the forest about halfway to the next checkpoint which sat high up another hill behind Mt. Bachelor. Most of the Western teams aren't familiar or comfortable with the GPS, and Wellsport wasn't employing theirs. We trekked out to a main trail that we had hoped to catch a little earlier and found ourselves with a clear path to the base of the next hill. From here, we joined up with another American team and started up a fire road that thankfully was heading in the right direction, yet wasn't on our maps.

At a point, we decided to turn off the fire road because it was starting to veer in the wrong direction. Wellsport continued on it. We made the right call and found some easy off-trail travel to the next checkpoint. From high in a saddle (a geographic spot between two peaks), we got a quick bearing on our next target 5+ miles away and then raced back down into the flats of the forest. We angled for a fire road that would take us towards the transition area, and while many teams got lost in a maze of snowmobile and bike trails, I employed my third grade reading skills to match up the trail signs nailed to the trees with the trails indicated on my map. Not to poke fun at the many teams who got lost, I just found it pretty straightforward getting through. We checked in at one last point before the transition and were informed that we were running in the top 20 teams... not bad, not great.

Four hours after the start, we reconnected with Jason, our all-star crew guy Corey, and our gear and food. Yet another unique feature of this race (and series) is that your racing time stops when you are in transition. The only time that gets counted is the actual time that you spend racing. Once you check in at the end of a section, you can rest and relax in transition... to a degree. Each section had a window in which you can begin. So, we could begin Section 2 anywhere between 10am and noon. Coming in at around 10am, in theory we could take 2 hours before we had to leave to start section 2 without it counting to our overall race time. However, we'd have to be careful to check the start window for the next section in order to have enough time to make that.

This style makes for a very fast race as the top teams do get good recovery time between stages. On the flipside, if you were racing towards the other end of the spectrum and were having a hard time making the start windows, you either didn't rest much or you had the option of skipping a section and taking a time penalty. Thankfully we made all the cut-offs with plenty of room, though we would ultimately be no match for the powerhouses that made up the top of the field.

Section 2 -- A 64km (roughly 40 miles) mountain bike leg. This section and the section we just completed would be the few sections with any type of navigation requirements. And on this section, we proved why Jason is one of the top navigators out there. Fresh and raring to go, Jason led John and I out into a technical, rocky, rolling mass of bike trails. Panting like dogs, John and I hung on and were determined to try to stay within reach of Jason and his top bike skills. I don't think we touched the brakes more than a half dozen times as Jason navigated perfectly from checkpoint to checkpoint. About 8 of the top 10 teams incurred a time penalty for going the wrong way at one point. We eventually came out of the technical sections onto a long stretch of fast, loose fire roads. We caught up to and rode with a nice Danish team who we'd end up racing alongside in many other sections. We rode and rode on what seemed like endless fire roads, eventually came to a reservoir... and then had to ride all the way around it. In the end, we had one of the fastest times in the entire field for this section. A small thing to be proud of.

Next up: a 30km (18 miles) paddle section. The boats for this race, provided by the race management and transported by each team, were these large, super tough, inflatable three-seat canoe-style rigs -- slow and sometimes unwieldy in high winds. We were extremely unfamiliar with these boats and it cost us considerable time figuring out the best way to steer and paddle them. All in the name of experience. Before launching, we got some decent rest -- to the tune of nearly 40 minutes -- on the shores of a beautiful reservoir. In this race, you're usually not racing the teams around you because they could either be way ahead or way behind you (in terms of overall time), so we had to keep in mind that we were only racing ourselves (the clock) as we paddled alongside a few other teams. The wind kicked up in the mid-afternoon as we paddled across the reservoir and into a narrow channel the would lead to another lake. In this channel, we found ourselves suddenly paddling upstream! Yes, this channel was flowing in the opposition direction. Adventure... We were only allowed to portage (carry) our boats in one pre-designated place along this section, however it was nearly impossible to fight the current in spots, so we had to get out and drag out boats upstream as we waded torso deep in the water.

We finally got to the mandatory 1 mile portage, heaved the boat up onto our shoulders, slowly walked down a dirt road, and relaunched into the next white-capped reservoir. Getting a bit loopy being cooped up in such close quarters, Jason, John, and I made the best of our time together by laughing and joking as we pulled for the far shore. We were maintaining a steady position in the top 15-20 teams, and got out of the water in good spirits, though frustrated at our lack of paddling prowess.

The next section would be a fast 18 km (11 mile) in-line skating section on a nice smooth, slightly uphill road through the forest. Lisa, Jason, and I laced up the skates and rolled off a pretty fast time of 45 minutes for this section. My job was to be the mule and pull the others as I would sit out the next section. Apolo Ohno...look out.

Taking the last rest of the first day of the Raid race, we wanted to get out onto this 21km trek with as much daylight as possible. It was about 7pm and we figured to have roughly 1.5 hours of good light. As mentioned, I was finally taking a breather so John, Jason, and Lisa tackled this section -- a relatively flat foot section that would take teams back to the base of Mt. Bachelor where we had begun over 13 hours before. My job was by no means done as Corey and I packed up the gear, headed to town to get some food for everyone, and made camp in the Mt. Bachelor parking lot for the night.

The way the sections were spread out, the window to start Section 6 of the race wouldn't open until 6am the next morning. The team that was leading the race finished Section 5 at roughly 7:45pm, so they'd have nearly 10 hours to rest, recover, sleep if desired (!) and prepare for the start of the next stage. We took about 3 hours to complete the section, finishing it at around 10pm, in the dark. I didn't get much down time as I also cleaned our bikes for the remaining two bike sections and tried to make the best of our sleeping arrangements after our 1 hour round trip to town. We would utilize the back of Corey's truck, John's car, and a borrowed tent from a friend. We ate, refueled, and crashed out....

Daylight came too early. It was probably hovering around 35-40 degrees at 5:30am when we shook off the frost and prepared for "Day 2". They would stagger the start since about 30 teams were lined up to begin at 6am. The top ten teams in terms of overall time would start in intervals and then the other teams would check in and begin in a closer pack. This section was essentially a 27km (16 mile) "downhill" mountain bike ride. It was indeed about 95% downhill with a few minor ups tossed in for good measure. Jason, Lisa, and I tackled this section. There were a few decisions to make at some trail junctions, and once again, Jason got an A+ for making all the right calls. A few top teams came screaming by us towards the end, frustrated after having made the wrong turns up above.

We peeled off our layers and inflated our canoe-boat for a 19km (11 mile) down river paddling section. Most teams had a considerable time to wait until the window opened for this section. The start would once again be staggered based on the top 10 teams and then the rest of the pack. I sat out this leg and had to race with Corey to the next transition because it would likewise be a relatively fast section. Our lack of paddling prowess didn't hurt as badly in this section since we were going with the current and teams didn't gain or lose too much time. We were hanging on somewhere around 15-16th place, within a few minutes of our pals on Wellsport. Not bad company.

As the day warmed up, competitors and crew found the small parking lot on the banks of the river a bit cramped. But there's nothing like adventure racing comraderie anywhere in the sports world. Everyone was having a good time, swapping race stories, and glancing at the light at the end of the tunnel (one section left after this...). Again, we had ample time to rest and prepare for the next section -- a blazing fast 11km (7mile) run down a trail that wound along the Deschutes River towards Bend. John, Lisa, and I would make up the "track" team for this section. The top teams once again went off at regular intervals and then it was every few seconds as the rest of the pack checked in before stepping on the accelerator. Oh, remember my little frustration at having to carry ALL that mandatory gear for the ENTIRE race? Well, imagine having to tackle a fairly innocuous, one-hour run at high noon in 70 degree weather with a tent in your backpack?! And waterproof clothing. And fleece tops. And a candle. And a knife.

Outside of the gear, this section seemed pretty straightforward. There were only two paths along the river and the rules stated that we had to follow the one marked with the brown bicycle path signs. A number of teams thought they had to stick to the narrow and winding footpath that went right along the water, while the majority of the pack rumbled down a straight wide path. In the end, the race director pointed out to a few frustrated teams that it was okay to take either path, which annoyed many teams who lost several minutes to unclear instructions and a little bit of bushwhacking that was required to catch two checkpoints along the way. We went on the straight and easy path and clocked in with a final 200 yard sprint neck-and-neck with a team we hadn't seen much of before. Whew...

John and I took our final rest break of the race. Lisa was officially finished as Jason would be the third teammate for this final leg. The day was truly heating up. Thankfully we had a cool place under some trees. A handful of top teams stomped by us on the way to their crew vehicles, upset at taking the wrong paths and losing time.

The final 35km (20 mile) bike leg would take us back to Bend and reality, but not before some magical riding. We fueled up for the homestretch, gathered our last reserves of energy and joined the line of teams to check in. We sat somewhere around 15/16th place. We were a few minutes in front of Wellsport and about 20 minutes behind the team in front of us. Unfortunately, this whole section would be marked with ribbon, so our navigation would be negated. It would be a flat-out pedal fest to the finish line. If a team ran into mechanical trouble, they could lose considerable time. Or just being a few minutes slower could change a team's position drastically. Going into this section the top 5 teams were less than 15 minutes apart. (we had no worry about catching them...).

A few last deep breaths, a punch of the time clock, and away we went. I'll tell you that this was probably the most incredible single track ride I've ever ridden. We climbed a bit through some loose dirt tracks, wound our way through trees and shallow, dry streams. We carved into berms and cranked up tiny, steep inclines. And then the fun began. We screamed through tight, banked serpentine turns, in and out of trees. For miles. It was exhilarating. Swooshing and swaying, leaning heavily into the turns -- it was a human powered roller coaster ride. We stopped for a few checkpoints along the way, passed two teams very early on, and got passed by our newest friends and rivals from Crested Butte, Colorado. For about the fifth time in nine sections, we raced alongside our Danish friends.

Unfortunately, this good thing came to an end as we spilled out of the forest and onto a road for the last three miles through the town of Bend and to the finish line. We hammered downhill alongside the Danes at about 30 miles per hour, rounded a corner, and nearly met an untimely end as we all skidded to a halt to avoid running over a nice middle-aged woman who was standing in the middle of the road frantically waving her arms for us to make a sharp right hand turn onto a trail. After a few seconds, we recognized that she was a race volunteer pointing us towards the finish. With hearts pounding even harder now, we cruised the last half-mile along the river and zipped under the inflatable Raid Series banner one last time, punched in, and were cheered on by a number of friends, teams, and fans.

16th place overall. Not bad for our first time in this race, though we had hopes of finishing much higher. The lightning pace and lack of navigation didn't favor our strengths, but we chalk it up to a great learning experience, and of course, another amazing adventure.

Race summary: 237 km. 32 hours of overall time. Something like 20 hours of total race time for the Rabbits. A ton of fun. More great memories and a few more friends.

~Rick Baraff
Web Site: Rick Tales of Adventure

Technorati Tags: Adventure Racing, Primal Quest, Screenwriting, Travel Writing, Extreme Racing, Running, Hiking, Mountain Biking