2015 MISSION AR
The MISSION had the makings of a great race. This was the home race of Brian Holzhausen, who was RD at the last two national championships, and he was lauded for his course design, always offering fun surprises and lots of course choice and decision-making. The race was attracting lots of top teams and we were excited to head to Indiana for the race on Friday morning, despite it being a 6-7 hour drive from Madison.
We stopped in Rockford at 10 a.m., picked up Starker and jumped in Sketchy, and drove south, then east. Cliff slept in the back for the first two hours, but woke up in Normal, IL for lunch at a vegetarian deli, where we had delicious - but small - tofu banh mi sandwiches. Starker was not a fan of their size and went to the counter to complain. He was told he had just received “the small end of the baguette.” He used that quote frequently during the race to describe our experiences.
We got into Whitewater State Park in Liberty, IN by 7 pm, just in time for dinner. We headed to the group shelter and found people lounging around, eating lasagna and waiting for the race briefing. The food was good, but it stuck in our throats as Brian took the mic and started his briefing. The MISSION’s name derives from the format of the race, where teams have to complete one stage at a time, not knowing what’s next until they arrive in the TA, where they then plot their next series of points. Brian said there would be six stages in this year’s race and that only the top teams had a chance to clear the course. He hinted that we wouldn’t be back to race HQ until late in the day, so that we couldn’t self-TA. And other than that, he offered almost no details on what lay in store for us on Saturday, only saying that he loved the course and that we probably shouldn’t consider skipping any points until stage 3. We headed to our cabin, which was actually really nice, and got our stuff ready for the race. Because we didn’t have any maps, we didn’t have much to obsess over, so we got to bed relatively early.
We were up by 5 a.m. the next morning for our 6 a.m. race start. Just before daybreak, we left the cabin and headed up the hill in Sketchy to the start, but Starker yelled that he forgot the race passport and we pulled an early-morning U-turn to go back to retrieve it. We still had enough time to compose ourselves at the race start, where we were told that the first section would entail memorizing the location of two points on a master map before heading out and finding them based only on what we could recollect. We headed out at a jog with about 50 other teams and found CP pretty easily. CP2 was more difficult, as it was a good 10 minutes run down a trail. Cliff was pretty sure that we were headed the wrong direction, but Kate stayed confident and guided us past one bridge, where many teams were looking for the CP in vain, to a second bridge, which had no one around it. "Trust your navigator!" Kate yelled joyously as Starker spotted the strange lobster-buoy-like CP marker and we started our run back to the TA.
We arrived in the middle of the pack, but plotting did not go well, as we had a mix-up with the longitude numbers that made it look like everything was on the same parallel. Thankfully, Brian came over to help us, and we eventually got it right. The first stage, at first glance, looked huge. We had no time to run the wheel over it but we later measured it at about 40 miles, plus an additional 2-3 miles of hiking into points. All for a total of 6 CPs. The first point was about 8 miles away by bike. We turned off a main road onto an access road, then looking for a trail, a woman came out of her double-wide to yell at another team on her property and going the wrong way, and we headed down the trail she pointed out was behind her trailer. That went down to a river, which we crossed, but there was no trail on the other side. It took us a long time to hike through the underbrush while pushing our bikes, and we started looking for CP3 too early, getting confused when we found a small trail that had obviously seen a lot of traffic recently from people pushing bikes. The clue for the CP was spur/minor trail, and we dropped our bikes and followed it the wrong way for 5 minutes, then spent 10 minutes looking in the wrong place before realizing where we were by looking downstream and seeing where the lake was, and working our way up to the correct spur and the CP. There was a lot more messy hiking out to a dirt road, which we followed for another 10 miles to CP 4. While changing maps at an intersection, we saw Alpine Shop cruise by and we exchanged cheers, and then 10 minutes after that we saw Bushwhacker fly by. As we arrived at the trailhead, which was at the bottom of a huge hill, we saw Michigan Racing Addicts, who advised us to drop our bikes and hike the two-mile singletrack dirt trail into the CP. We picked that up with only minimal problem, as we were still around a ton of other teams who guided us in. Still, the process took us about 45 minutes.
We headed back out to the road, having ascertained a pretty good feel for where we were compared to the other teams in the race, and biked another 15 miles on a busy highway to the town of Brookville, where we found CP 5 at the base of a zipline park. The ropes course had gotten cancelled at the last minute due to insurance reasons, and we saw here what we were missing out on. Looked like a lot of fun. We grabbed some water from the nice folks running the zipline, then continued around the lake, up a brutal, windless and sunny uphill to ridgeline, where we ducked onto a paved road and then onto a singletrack trail that led downhill along a spur, where we saw a bunch of other teams. As we dropped our bikes, the two guys from Dandies Vegan Marshmallows told us CP 6 was slightly misplotted on the map. Thus began our 20-minute search for the CP, as we walked up and down the spur using the singletrack trail for our stopping points. The four-woman team of Boom Boom Pow arrived on the scene, and Cliff and one of their teammates found the CP not long after they started looking.
We skeddaddled out of there and headed on to the TA/CP7, which was located on a boat ramp in Mounds State Recreation Area, which reminded our hungry minds of the eponymous candy bar. We arrived at 1 p.m., in the heat of the day, nearly out of water and ready to hit the canoes and cool off. Also, after a pretty brutal first section, we were looking forward to getting off our feet for a bit. But it was not to be. On the way in, we had seen teams on foot walking back up the hill towards us. Our worst fears were confirmed when we arrived at the lakefront TA to see no canoes in sight. They were then made even worse after we started plotting our next points. At first we thought we were messing up our plotting again. What we were looking at didn’t make sense. Three points, laid out give miles apart, leading up to the boat launch in Whitewater State Park, for a total of at least 15 miles. Starting at the map, we tried to make sense of it in vain. We sat for a while, eating and cooling off, and thinking about if it was worth it. None of us could believe that this was going to be our future for the next 5-7 hours. Because of Brian’s scoring system, we were pretty much required to get both the nav points before the next TA, or else risk losing significant placing. Reluctantly, we accepted our fate and plotted our course.
There was a lot of road walking involved regardless of our route choice (perhaps 7-10 miles worth), but we tried to minimize that misery by choosing to do a shortcut using a powerline cut that led directly from CP 9 to CP 10. We also decided to treat ourselves to a splurge at the camp mini-market, where we picked up a can of Pringles, two sodas and three waters (the TA didn’t have any water). As we walked down the camp road to the first trail, we downed the Barqs root beer and munched on the chips, talking about how ridiculous this experience was going to be. We made our way down a couple of miles of trail, and to kill time, Cliff invented a game to decide when to drink the next soda, the grape Fanta. The game required the person who wanted to drink it to sing the Fanta song while dancing. That would trigger a vote, and the soda would only be drunk if a majority decided it was time. Unfortunately, the game didn’t last long as Starker immediately sang the song and Kate immediately voted to drink based on the valid logic that the soda was going to get warm. A mile on, we found CP 8 with little difficulty in a reentrant while also helping a team doing its first real adventure race to figure out what a reentrant was (sidenote: how can you sign up for an 18-hour adventure race without knowing what a reentrant is?).
A little bit after CP 8, we hit the power lines and were excited to see that our gamble had paid off and that there was an easy trail to follow in the direction we wanted to travel. We went up and down a couple of hills, across a road, then ran into a tributary of the lake, which we circumvented by taking a conveniently placed golf course bridge. We made our way through the golf course, stopping briefly at the pro shop to buy two bags of Fritos and another root beer (a Mug, even better than the Barq’s), and continued along the power lines until we had to cut in to avoid another tributary. This entire time, we were following an old guy in torn-up clothes and an old backpack (it gave him the look of a man who has done A LOT of racing) who turned out to be a guy named Dave. Starker got fairly obsessed with Dave, as he was older-looking but still moving pretty fast. We finally caught up to him at CP 9, which was placed 15 feet off the ground in a power line tower. As Cliff climbed up, Starker and Kate chatted with Dave, who turned out to be a nice guy. We only got to hike with him for a short time after we got onto Curry Road and started the three-mile hike out to Route 101, where we would spent our next two hours. While on Curry Road, we saw a trail of tears as a dozen or more teams made their way down to CP 9. We judged ourselves to have gained between 10-40 minutes on the rest of the teams due to our power lines shortcut, even with some of them running and us just maintaining a comfortable walking pace. One perk of Curry Road was a nice man offering all the racers water out of his front-yard tap. That saved us from running out of water and we thanked him profusely.
The shoulderless Route 101 was just simply miserable. Heavy traffic, most of it trucks towing boats, zoomed past us. The combination of asphalt and our wet feet started creating blisters and chafing. And the knowledge that our lives would not improve in the foreseeable future was the icing on the cake. Eventually, we called a break, and Kate and Cliff changed their socks, which were soaking wet from trudging through the woods looking for previous CPs. We all got something to eat, and we watched complacently as Dave and then Lupine Racing passed us. More composed, we continued down the road, complaining loudly and incessantly about the stupidity of this section. Kate especially suffered during these hours. At one point, a chocolate lab named Sugar ran out of a house and started barking at us. We had to stop to make sure the dog didn’t go onto the road, but thankfully its owner came out and took it by the collar while we hightailed it down the road so the dog wouldn’t follow us.
After a long, long walk, we finally turned off Route 101 (with a laugh as Starker made an exaggerated turn signal with his arm), and onto smaller local roads, where we soon found a vampire romance novel on the side of the road that we picked up and read out loud for a mile or so. Another mile and we made the turnoff to CP 11, which we found with no difficulties. We then hiked the last mile or so into the TA just as the sun set. Lupine was there, as was Brian the RD. He looked pretty bummed that his course was not working out the way he had planned.
Brian told us he was changing the race layout as it was now clear that the majority of teams in the race would only get through 2-3 sections of the race. Most of the teams in front of us were headed back to their bikes and TA 2, but Brian told us to get between 1-3 CPs and come back to TA3. Even though there were four canoe CPs, the last one was actually further than the next TA and so it wasn’t an option. So with about five hours left until our cutoff, we now had a maximum of three CPs to get in about 5 miles of paddling, which seemed eminently manageable.
We hustled to get on the water with some daylight left and headed across the lake for our first CP, with the aim of getting three out of four on the water. Lupine put in about 10 minutes after us, and the race was on! As the sun set, we started really enjoying being out on the water. We got to the CP 12 and found it easily. Then headed south down the lake and found Dave and a two-person male team searching for CP 13 up a reentrant. We walked up about 400 vertical feet to the top of the reentrant but no CP, so Cliff tried a smaller tributary reentrant to the south and found it. As we paddled off, we realized that Lupine had gone to the southernmost point first, most likely to get as many miles completed while their arms were fresh. We looked back at the take-out point for the reentrant and thought that Lupine might have a very difficult time finding it in the dark. As we headed south to CP 14, we saw Lupine’s boat pulled up at a marina landing about .5 miles away from the CP. Kate thought that was a mistake, and it turned out she was right, as we were able to hit CP 14 by paddling up to just underneath it just as darkness was falling. Lupine’s boat was gone by the time we returned on our way back to the TA, but they still had to get the other two CPs and we knew, barring a disaster, we had them beat.
We arrived back in the TA in darkness, pulled our boat out, checked in and prepared to walk the three miles into the finish. Eventually, we met up with the same team from Cincinnati we had introduced the reentrant to. They were jubilant as they had just found CP 11 with the clue “reentrant junction.” Starker chatted with them about how terrible this race was for all racers, not just beginners, and recommended they try some others. At 11 p.m. we made it to the finish and crossed to the sound of our own happy yelling. Only 5-10 other racers were in the pavilion at the time and they were pretty quiet. We hung around for a bit but we weren’t very winded, having had a very relaxing last few hours, and there wasn’t any beer or vegetarian food. We Cliff hatched the plan to go into town. Kate and Starker were skeptical but we found a pizza place open and ordered a large veggie and six beers to go. When we got back, the last few teams were just coming in and the pavilion was filling up. We ate and drank while the other teams sat and debriefed, and we were happy to hear a lot of chatter about just how awful the course was, especially the road walk. In fact, every team we spoke to complained about that section. The main gist of the conversation was, what’s the point of driving six hours to a race if all were going to be doing is walking on a busy road? Still, a spent adventure racing is better than any day spent doing something else, and we quickly got over our frustration and enjoyed some great post-race conversation with all our adventure racing friends.
We stopped in Rockford at 10 a.m., picked up Starker and jumped in Sketchy, and drove south, then east. Cliff slept in the back for the first two hours, but woke up in Normal, IL for lunch at a vegetarian deli, where we had delicious - but small - tofu banh mi sandwiches. Starker was not a fan of their size and went to the counter to complain. He was told he had just received “the small end of the baguette.” He used that quote frequently during the race to describe our experiences.
We got into Whitewater State Park in Liberty, IN by 7 pm, just in time for dinner. We headed to the group shelter and found people lounging around, eating lasagna and waiting for the race briefing. The food was good, but it stuck in our throats as Brian took the mic and started his briefing. The MISSION’s name derives from the format of the race, where teams have to complete one stage at a time, not knowing what’s next until they arrive in the TA, where they then plot their next series of points. Brian said there would be six stages in this year’s race and that only the top teams had a chance to clear the course. He hinted that we wouldn’t be back to race HQ until late in the day, so that we couldn’t self-TA. And other than that, he offered almost no details on what lay in store for us on Saturday, only saying that he loved the course and that we probably shouldn’t consider skipping any points until stage 3. We headed to our cabin, which was actually really nice, and got our stuff ready for the race. Because we didn’t have any maps, we didn’t have much to obsess over, so we got to bed relatively early.
We were up by 5 a.m. the next morning for our 6 a.m. race start. Just before daybreak, we left the cabin and headed up the hill in Sketchy to the start, but Starker yelled that he forgot the race passport and we pulled an early-morning U-turn to go back to retrieve it. We still had enough time to compose ourselves at the race start, where we were told that the first section would entail memorizing the location of two points on a master map before heading out and finding them based only on what we could recollect. We headed out at a jog with about 50 other teams and found CP pretty easily. CP2 was more difficult, as it was a good 10 minutes run down a trail. Cliff was pretty sure that we were headed the wrong direction, but Kate stayed confident and guided us past one bridge, where many teams were looking for the CP in vain, to a second bridge, which had no one around it. "Trust your navigator!" Kate yelled joyously as Starker spotted the strange lobster-buoy-like CP marker and we started our run back to the TA.
We arrived in the middle of the pack, but plotting did not go well, as we had a mix-up with the longitude numbers that made it look like everything was on the same parallel. Thankfully, Brian came over to help us, and we eventually got it right. The first stage, at first glance, looked huge. We had no time to run the wheel over it but we later measured it at about 40 miles, plus an additional 2-3 miles of hiking into points. All for a total of 6 CPs. The first point was about 8 miles away by bike. We turned off a main road onto an access road, then looking for a trail, a woman came out of her double-wide to yell at another team on her property and going the wrong way, and we headed down the trail she pointed out was behind her trailer. That went down to a river, which we crossed, but there was no trail on the other side. It took us a long time to hike through the underbrush while pushing our bikes, and we started looking for CP3 too early, getting confused when we found a small trail that had obviously seen a lot of traffic recently from people pushing bikes. The clue for the CP was spur/minor trail, and we dropped our bikes and followed it the wrong way for 5 minutes, then spent 10 minutes looking in the wrong place before realizing where we were by looking downstream and seeing where the lake was, and working our way up to the correct spur and the CP. There was a lot more messy hiking out to a dirt road, which we followed for another 10 miles to CP 4. While changing maps at an intersection, we saw Alpine Shop cruise by and we exchanged cheers, and then 10 minutes after that we saw Bushwhacker fly by. As we arrived at the trailhead, which was at the bottom of a huge hill, we saw Michigan Racing Addicts, who advised us to drop our bikes and hike the two-mile singletrack dirt trail into the CP. We picked that up with only minimal problem, as we were still around a ton of other teams who guided us in. Still, the process took us about 45 minutes.
We headed back out to the road, having ascertained a pretty good feel for where we were compared to the other teams in the race, and biked another 15 miles on a busy highway to the town of Brookville, where we found CP 5 at the base of a zipline park. The ropes course had gotten cancelled at the last minute due to insurance reasons, and we saw here what we were missing out on. Looked like a lot of fun. We grabbed some water from the nice folks running the zipline, then continued around the lake, up a brutal, windless and sunny uphill to ridgeline, where we ducked onto a paved road and then onto a singletrack trail that led downhill along a spur, where we saw a bunch of other teams. As we dropped our bikes, the two guys from Dandies Vegan Marshmallows told us CP 6 was slightly misplotted on the map. Thus began our 20-minute search for the CP, as we walked up and down the spur using the singletrack trail for our stopping points. The four-woman team of Boom Boom Pow arrived on the scene, and Cliff and one of their teammates found the CP not long after they started looking.
We skeddaddled out of there and headed on to the TA/CP7, which was located on a boat ramp in Mounds State Recreation Area, which reminded our hungry minds of the eponymous candy bar. We arrived at 1 p.m., in the heat of the day, nearly out of water and ready to hit the canoes and cool off. Also, after a pretty brutal first section, we were looking forward to getting off our feet for a bit. But it was not to be. On the way in, we had seen teams on foot walking back up the hill towards us. Our worst fears were confirmed when we arrived at the lakefront TA to see no canoes in sight. They were then made even worse after we started plotting our next points. At first we thought we were messing up our plotting again. What we were looking at didn’t make sense. Three points, laid out give miles apart, leading up to the boat launch in Whitewater State Park, for a total of at least 15 miles. Starting at the map, we tried to make sense of it in vain. We sat for a while, eating and cooling off, and thinking about if it was worth it. None of us could believe that this was going to be our future for the next 5-7 hours. Because of Brian’s scoring system, we were pretty much required to get both the nav points before the next TA, or else risk losing significant placing. Reluctantly, we accepted our fate and plotted our course.
There was a lot of road walking involved regardless of our route choice (perhaps 7-10 miles worth), but we tried to minimize that misery by choosing to do a shortcut using a powerline cut that led directly from CP 9 to CP 10. We also decided to treat ourselves to a splurge at the camp mini-market, where we picked up a can of Pringles, two sodas and three waters (the TA didn’t have any water). As we walked down the camp road to the first trail, we downed the Barqs root beer and munched on the chips, talking about how ridiculous this experience was going to be. We made our way down a couple of miles of trail, and to kill time, Cliff invented a game to decide when to drink the next soda, the grape Fanta. The game required the person who wanted to drink it to sing the Fanta song while dancing. That would trigger a vote, and the soda would only be drunk if a majority decided it was time. Unfortunately, the game didn’t last long as Starker immediately sang the song and Kate immediately voted to drink based on the valid logic that the soda was going to get warm. A mile on, we found CP 8 with little difficulty in a reentrant while also helping a team doing its first real adventure race to figure out what a reentrant was (sidenote: how can you sign up for an 18-hour adventure race without knowing what a reentrant is?).
A little bit after CP 8, we hit the power lines and were excited to see that our gamble had paid off and that there was an easy trail to follow in the direction we wanted to travel. We went up and down a couple of hills, across a road, then ran into a tributary of the lake, which we circumvented by taking a conveniently placed golf course bridge. We made our way through the golf course, stopping briefly at the pro shop to buy two bags of Fritos and another root beer (a Mug, even better than the Barq’s), and continued along the power lines until we had to cut in to avoid another tributary. This entire time, we were following an old guy in torn-up clothes and an old backpack (it gave him the look of a man who has done A LOT of racing) who turned out to be a guy named Dave. Starker got fairly obsessed with Dave, as he was older-looking but still moving pretty fast. We finally caught up to him at CP 9, which was placed 15 feet off the ground in a power line tower. As Cliff climbed up, Starker and Kate chatted with Dave, who turned out to be a nice guy. We only got to hike with him for a short time after we got onto Curry Road and started the three-mile hike out to Route 101, where we would spent our next two hours. While on Curry Road, we saw a trail of tears as a dozen or more teams made their way down to CP 9. We judged ourselves to have gained between 10-40 minutes on the rest of the teams due to our power lines shortcut, even with some of them running and us just maintaining a comfortable walking pace. One perk of Curry Road was a nice man offering all the racers water out of his front-yard tap. That saved us from running out of water and we thanked him profusely.
The shoulderless Route 101 was just simply miserable. Heavy traffic, most of it trucks towing boats, zoomed past us. The combination of asphalt and our wet feet started creating blisters and chafing. And the knowledge that our lives would not improve in the foreseeable future was the icing on the cake. Eventually, we called a break, and Kate and Cliff changed their socks, which were soaking wet from trudging through the woods looking for previous CPs. We all got something to eat, and we watched complacently as Dave and then Lupine Racing passed us. More composed, we continued down the road, complaining loudly and incessantly about the stupidity of this section. Kate especially suffered during these hours. At one point, a chocolate lab named Sugar ran out of a house and started barking at us. We had to stop to make sure the dog didn’t go onto the road, but thankfully its owner came out and took it by the collar while we hightailed it down the road so the dog wouldn’t follow us.
After a long, long walk, we finally turned off Route 101 (with a laugh as Starker made an exaggerated turn signal with his arm), and onto smaller local roads, where we soon found a vampire romance novel on the side of the road that we picked up and read out loud for a mile or so. Another mile and we made the turnoff to CP 11, which we found with no difficulties. We then hiked the last mile or so into the TA just as the sun set. Lupine was there, as was Brian the RD. He looked pretty bummed that his course was not working out the way he had planned.
Brian told us he was changing the race layout as it was now clear that the majority of teams in the race would only get through 2-3 sections of the race. Most of the teams in front of us were headed back to their bikes and TA 2, but Brian told us to get between 1-3 CPs and come back to TA3. Even though there were four canoe CPs, the last one was actually further than the next TA and so it wasn’t an option. So with about five hours left until our cutoff, we now had a maximum of three CPs to get in about 5 miles of paddling, which seemed eminently manageable.
We hustled to get on the water with some daylight left and headed across the lake for our first CP, with the aim of getting three out of four on the water. Lupine put in about 10 minutes after us, and the race was on! As the sun set, we started really enjoying being out on the water. We got to the CP 12 and found it easily. Then headed south down the lake and found Dave and a two-person male team searching for CP 13 up a reentrant. We walked up about 400 vertical feet to the top of the reentrant but no CP, so Cliff tried a smaller tributary reentrant to the south and found it. As we paddled off, we realized that Lupine had gone to the southernmost point first, most likely to get as many miles completed while their arms were fresh. We looked back at the take-out point for the reentrant and thought that Lupine might have a very difficult time finding it in the dark. As we headed south to CP 14, we saw Lupine’s boat pulled up at a marina landing about .5 miles away from the CP. Kate thought that was a mistake, and it turned out she was right, as we were able to hit CP 14 by paddling up to just underneath it just as darkness was falling. Lupine’s boat was gone by the time we returned on our way back to the TA, but they still had to get the other two CPs and we knew, barring a disaster, we had them beat.
We arrived back in the TA in darkness, pulled our boat out, checked in and prepared to walk the three miles into the finish. Eventually, we met up with the same team from Cincinnati we had introduced the reentrant to. They were jubilant as they had just found CP 11 with the clue “reentrant junction.” Starker chatted with them about how terrible this race was for all racers, not just beginners, and recommended they try some others. At 11 p.m. we made it to the finish and crossed to the sound of our own happy yelling. Only 5-10 other racers were in the pavilion at the time and they were pretty quiet. We hung around for a bit but we weren’t very winded, having had a very relaxing last few hours, and there wasn’t any beer or vegetarian food. We Cliff hatched the plan to go into town. Kate and Starker were skeptical but we found a pizza place open and ordered a large veggie and six beers to go. When we got back, the last few teams were just coming in and the pavilion was filling up. We ate and drank while the other teams sat and debriefed, and we were happy to hear a lot of chatter about just how awful the course was, especially the road walk. In fact, every team we spoke to complained about that section. The main gist of the conversation was, what’s the point of driving six hours to a race if all were going to be doing is walking on a busy road? Still, a spent adventure racing is better than any day spent doing something else, and we quickly got over our frustration and enjoyed some great post-race conversation with all our adventure racing friends.
