2015 PHYSICALLY STRONG ADVENTURE RACE
The 2015 Physically Strong AR took place in Quincy, IL, a five-hour drive from Madison via Rockford. There wasn’t a lot of info available about what the race would be like, other than it was run by the local Boy Scout organization in Quincy...In fact, even getting enough info to register was a challenge, requiring several personal emails to the race director before we received confirmation we were signed up.
For some reason, this particular race required teams of four, even though many races, including the USARA National Championship, require teams of three. Needing a fourth teammate posed a problem for Strong Machine for obvious reasons. We tried to recruit Malcolm to join us, but he didn’t want to do the drive. After emailing the RD, we found out we could, in fact, race as a team of three, as long as we didn’t mind being ranked behind every team of four. It wasn’t ideal but we thought we did have a good chance of getting the regional qualifier slot from the race, so we made the decision to go.
A long drive ended at the lodge of the Saukenauk Boy Scout Camp, way out in the middle of nowhere in western Illinois. When we arrived, at about 8 p.m. on Friday, only one team remained in the lodge. It turned out to be Off The Front Racing from Missouri, who had beaten us at the previous year’s Lightning Strikes AR, but hadn’t gone to Nationals, thereby giving us their spot and $400 regional qualifier sponsorship. We thanked them profusely for that when we saw them, then got our map (there was just one map for the whole race) and went to start plotting, but quickly realized we didn’t have the UTM we needed, which was 1:15,000. OTF graciously offered us theirs, and we got down to plotting.
After we had got through the map work, we talked for a bit with one of the RDs, a really nice guy but clearly more of a Scout than an adventure racer. With the seeming amateurism of the director, we wondered how the race would go the next day. We headed to the campground, Kate and Cliff set up a tent and Starker got his bed together in his Sketchy, then we headed off to the bike drop. On the way back, we spied a map of the camp. This was clutch as we discovered a key shortcut - a swinging bridge that ran across the lake. We found out the next day that not knowing about this bridge would have cost us at least an hour of extra time spent plodding around the lake. We planned to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning to get ready for a 6 a.m. race start. We weren’t exactly sure why they had planned the race to start so early, since we would be racing in the dark for at least the first hour. We chalked it up to the overzealousness of the Scouts.
The morning of the race, we gathered in front of a fire in the lodge for a little bit, eating complimentary chocolate muffins, then were asked to go outside to a fire ring, where we were given a few instructions, then asked if we had any questions. After a pause that wasn’t long enough, the RD then just shouted “Go!” Startled, we took off into the night, aiming for the suspension bridge. Clearly, a number of teams didn’t know about this shortcut, as they headed off the long way around the lake. We were one of the first teams to the bikes, about a 1.5-mile run away from camp, and we hopped on and cruised out to the first CP. Nearing it, day started breaking, and we were able to find CP 1 in a thicket off the road thanks to Kate’s keen eyes. We had no problem steering up to CP2, but arriving in the area, we couldn’t find the CP. The clue was “bridge” but there was no bridge in sight. We search all around a culvert, then biked further down the road, couldn’t find anything, and Starker kept going, getting almost to the top of a hill before Kate and Cliff yelled at him to come back. We then went back to the culvert, searched there with a couple of other teams until we ran out of ideas. In the meantime, another two-person team had biked past us to where Starker had gone. On its way back, the man on the team signaled to Cliff that it was the way they had come from. We biked over and found the bridge and the point, about a kilometer away from where it should have been. That turned out to be the RDs first mistake of what would be several during the course of the race.
It's difficult to get back positive vibes after losing so much time, but we made a conscious effort to try as headed off to CP3, which was a hatchet throw, the first of four special Scout challenges we would face in the race. The RD had said in his race briefing that teams would get a bonus point for having just one teammate complete each task, so Cliff stepped up and started the hatchet throw. He got it pretty quickly, then we dropped our bikes and raced out to get another CP that was in the woods beyond the house where the hatchet throw had taken place. Returning to the bikes, we scooted back to the far side of the lake. Making a tactical mistake, we left the trail to try to bikewhack to CP4. This took a long time as the thick brush and steep terrain slowed us down. Finally arriving at CP4, the team found a fire-building challenge waiting for us. Starker got to it, and quickly built a fire that burned through a string suspended above the firepit while Cliff and Kate refueled and cheered him on.
Leaving our bikes, we then headed off on foot to CP5, crossing some extremely nasty terrain - thick with briars and sometimes swampy - as we worked our way north and uphill. Arriving, we found another Scout challenge, a slingshot shooting competition. We had to hit five coke cans standing on a 2x4 about 20 feet away. It sounds easier than it was, as the ammo provided was cat food and the slingshots were not of the highest quality. Also, we found that being that accurate with a slingshot is extremely difficult. We heard from the volunteer there that it had taken most teams 20-30 minutes, so we decided to bail on the solo/extra point and make it a group effort. Thirty minutes later, Starker hit his fourth and the final can (proving he's not to be trifled with when armed with a slingshot), and we moved on to the orienteering section. After our previous tribulations in the thick underbrush, we decided to approach all the orienteering points from the road. This worked remarkably well, even though it doubled or even tripled our total distance covered. Kate later found out the RDs had placed the orienteering points based off their drive around the area, so our road approach was the right one to take, even though it violated the spirit of what orienteering should be.
One point also seemed misplaced, as we went all the way down a frozen creek until we got to the point where the CP couldn’t be, then went all the way back up it. At this point, a two-person male team joined us and we went all the way back down the creek, finding it just a few steps short of where we had stopped before. Another 20 minutes lost.
Given the wonky plotting and thick underbrush, the o-course took a lot longer than we thought. Towards the end, we ran out of water as Starker forgot his bottles back at his bike. Just as things were getting dire, Starker pulled out a canned espresso and an apple from his pack, and we feasted joyously. Not long after, we had to cross the property of two guys dressed in hunting gear. Tempted to run past them, we instead decided to approach them. They were nice enough and Kate was smart enough to ask if we could have some water, which they gave us out of a spigot. As we headed out, we turned into the woods behind their house and they yelled to us that we didn't want to go that way, and we tried to play dumb by waving at them and then ducked into the woods when we were out of their sight, finding the final orienteering CP down a reentrant not long afterwards.
We arrived back at camp by climbing over a chain-link fence into the back of the archery range. That turned out to be our fourth and final Scout challenge. Kate notched up her bow, took a couple of practice shots that were a foot wide to the right, then Starker leaned in and said, “Why don’t you aim a foot to the left?” One bulls-eye later, we were on our way. We headed down to the canoe put-in, did the-1.5 mile canoe to both ends of the lake (with really crappy small and wooden paddles, since they wouldn’t let us use our own), jumped out and were heading to the climbing wall when we ran into the race director. He suggested we may want to go get our bikes. Looking closer at the race rules, we realized we had indeed forgotten they were required at the next CP. With it already being nearly 2 p.m., we asked him what the race cutoff might be. He told us 4:40 p.m., which would make it nearly a 10 hour race, rather than an eight-hour. We got our bikes, sloshing through deepening mud along the lake trail, and struggling over the narrow suspension bridge, which swayed dangerously with every step. Kate was a vocal critic of the bridge, which was narrow and tippy.
Arriving at the climbing wall, Starker realized he had forgotten his helmet at the bike transition and we tried a stealthy approach so we wouldn’t get caught. Luckily, the volunteers at the wall seemed more intent on joking around than enforcing any rules. When we arrived, a two-person male team was on the wall, and they took a long, long time to get up and then rappel down. Fortunately, the down time allowed Starker to make off with a climbing helmet to replace his missing bike helmet. We waited for about 30 minutes, then finally were able to start our ascent. The climb and rappel was easy but the safety procedures took awhile. Overall, we spent more than an hour going up and down a 30-foot climbing wall.
By about 3 p.m., we headed out on our bikes to do one last loop around the lake. This section was treacherous. The mud was thick and deep, and the path was essentially unrideable. At one point, Cliff tried to ride but his front tire got stuck and he ended up going crotch first into his bike stem. Ouch. Walking around the lake, we arrived back at the bike drop, where Starker retrieved his helmet. On our way to the third and last bike CP, we saw the two-person team we had seen off-and-on all day, and they were heading back the way we had come in. They advised us to do the same after getting the CP, rather than continuing around the lake. Near the 3rd CP, we saw Off The Front come charging back along a wrong trail. Judging from the looks on their faces, they had clearly had a rough race. We found the CP together, then they kept going to circumnavigate the lake, while we turned back around per the suggestions we had received, which to Kate's chagrin, took us back over the suspension bridge again. It was slow going, but we finally arrived at the lodge/finishing point, slightly disappointed to learn that OTF had beaten us by three minutes. One of their team members told us we had made the right decision. I don’t know if there was one, given how muddy and disgusting the trails were. After checking in and getting a little to eat (unfortunately, the spread was not overly vegetarian friendly), we engaged in a long bear hug to celebrate our finish.
After packing up and showering, we hit the road and we were amazed to see teams still out on the orienteering course, more than 12 hours into the race. We felt really bad for them and wished them luck. In the end, we finished fourth overall, behind two two-person teams and OTF, and fourth in our division (behind two teams that finished hours after we did and with fewer points). We thought the scoring was very weird (the team that won had just one of their teammates do the slingshot, thereby earning them the extra point) but since the RD was going to place us last among USARA-eligible teams anyway, our standing didn’t really matter. Still, the race and its lack of organization left a bad taste in our mouths.
A few months later, we were informed by USARA that OTF had once again dropped out of Nationals, handing us their regional sponsorship. That made the bad taste disappear pretty quickly!
For some reason, this particular race required teams of four, even though many races, including the USARA National Championship, require teams of three. Needing a fourth teammate posed a problem for Strong Machine for obvious reasons. We tried to recruit Malcolm to join us, but he didn’t want to do the drive. After emailing the RD, we found out we could, in fact, race as a team of three, as long as we didn’t mind being ranked behind every team of four. It wasn’t ideal but we thought we did have a good chance of getting the regional qualifier slot from the race, so we made the decision to go.
A long drive ended at the lodge of the Saukenauk Boy Scout Camp, way out in the middle of nowhere in western Illinois. When we arrived, at about 8 p.m. on Friday, only one team remained in the lodge. It turned out to be Off The Front Racing from Missouri, who had beaten us at the previous year’s Lightning Strikes AR, but hadn’t gone to Nationals, thereby giving us their spot and $400 regional qualifier sponsorship. We thanked them profusely for that when we saw them, then got our map (there was just one map for the whole race) and went to start plotting, but quickly realized we didn’t have the UTM we needed, which was 1:15,000. OTF graciously offered us theirs, and we got down to plotting.
After we had got through the map work, we talked for a bit with one of the RDs, a really nice guy but clearly more of a Scout than an adventure racer. With the seeming amateurism of the director, we wondered how the race would go the next day. We headed to the campground, Kate and Cliff set up a tent and Starker got his bed together in his Sketchy, then we headed off to the bike drop. On the way back, we spied a map of the camp. This was clutch as we discovered a key shortcut - a swinging bridge that ran across the lake. We found out the next day that not knowing about this bridge would have cost us at least an hour of extra time spent plodding around the lake. We planned to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning to get ready for a 6 a.m. race start. We weren’t exactly sure why they had planned the race to start so early, since we would be racing in the dark for at least the first hour. We chalked it up to the overzealousness of the Scouts.
The morning of the race, we gathered in front of a fire in the lodge for a little bit, eating complimentary chocolate muffins, then were asked to go outside to a fire ring, where we were given a few instructions, then asked if we had any questions. After a pause that wasn’t long enough, the RD then just shouted “Go!” Startled, we took off into the night, aiming for the suspension bridge. Clearly, a number of teams didn’t know about this shortcut, as they headed off the long way around the lake. We were one of the first teams to the bikes, about a 1.5-mile run away from camp, and we hopped on and cruised out to the first CP. Nearing it, day started breaking, and we were able to find CP 1 in a thicket off the road thanks to Kate’s keen eyes. We had no problem steering up to CP2, but arriving in the area, we couldn’t find the CP. The clue was “bridge” but there was no bridge in sight. We search all around a culvert, then biked further down the road, couldn’t find anything, and Starker kept going, getting almost to the top of a hill before Kate and Cliff yelled at him to come back. We then went back to the culvert, searched there with a couple of other teams until we ran out of ideas. In the meantime, another two-person team had biked past us to where Starker had gone. On its way back, the man on the team signaled to Cliff that it was the way they had come from. We biked over and found the bridge and the point, about a kilometer away from where it should have been. That turned out to be the RDs first mistake of what would be several during the course of the race.
It's difficult to get back positive vibes after losing so much time, but we made a conscious effort to try as headed off to CP3, which was a hatchet throw, the first of four special Scout challenges we would face in the race. The RD had said in his race briefing that teams would get a bonus point for having just one teammate complete each task, so Cliff stepped up and started the hatchet throw. He got it pretty quickly, then we dropped our bikes and raced out to get another CP that was in the woods beyond the house where the hatchet throw had taken place. Returning to the bikes, we scooted back to the far side of the lake. Making a tactical mistake, we left the trail to try to bikewhack to CP4. This took a long time as the thick brush and steep terrain slowed us down. Finally arriving at CP4, the team found a fire-building challenge waiting for us. Starker got to it, and quickly built a fire that burned through a string suspended above the firepit while Cliff and Kate refueled and cheered him on.
Leaving our bikes, we then headed off on foot to CP5, crossing some extremely nasty terrain - thick with briars and sometimes swampy - as we worked our way north and uphill. Arriving, we found another Scout challenge, a slingshot shooting competition. We had to hit five coke cans standing on a 2x4 about 20 feet away. It sounds easier than it was, as the ammo provided was cat food and the slingshots were not of the highest quality. Also, we found that being that accurate with a slingshot is extremely difficult. We heard from the volunteer there that it had taken most teams 20-30 minutes, so we decided to bail on the solo/extra point and make it a group effort. Thirty minutes later, Starker hit his fourth and the final can (proving he's not to be trifled with when armed with a slingshot), and we moved on to the orienteering section. After our previous tribulations in the thick underbrush, we decided to approach all the orienteering points from the road. This worked remarkably well, even though it doubled or even tripled our total distance covered. Kate later found out the RDs had placed the orienteering points based off their drive around the area, so our road approach was the right one to take, even though it violated the spirit of what orienteering should be.
One point also seemed misplaced, as we went all the way down a frozen creek until we got to the point where the CP couldn’t be, then went all the way back up it. At this point, a two-person male team joined us and we went all the way back down the creek, finding it just a few steps short of where we had stopped before. Another 20 minutes lost.
Given the wonky plotting and thick underbrush, the o-course took a lot longer than we thought. Towards the end, we ran out of water as Starker forgot his bottles back at his bike. Just as things were getting dire, Starker pulled out a canned espresso and an apple from his pack, and we feasted joyously. Not long after, we had to cross the property of two guys dressed in hunting gear. Tempted to run past them, we instead decided to approach them. They were nice enough and Kate was smart enough to ask if we could have some water, which they gave us out of a spigot. As we headed out, we turned into the woods behind their house and they yelled to us that we didn't want to go that way, and we tried to play dumb by waving at them and then ducked into the woods when we were out of their sight, finding the final orienteering CP down a reentrant not long afterwards.
We arrived back at camp by climbing over a chain-link fence into the back of the archery range. That turned out to be our fourth and final Scout challenge. Kate notched up her bow, took a couple of practice shots that were a foot wide to the right, then Starker leaned in and said, “Why don’t you aim a foot to the left?” One bulls-eye later, we were on our way. We headed down to the canoe put-in, did the-1.5 mile canoe to both ends of the lake (with really crappy small and wooden paddles, since they wouldn’t let us use our own), jumped out and were heading to the climbing wall when we ran into the race director. He suggested we may want to go get our bikes. Looking closer at the race rules, we realized we had indeed forgotten they were required at the next CP. With it already being nearly 2 p.m., we asked him what the race cutoff might be. He told us 4:40 p.m., which would make it nearly a 10 hour race, rather than an eight-hour. We got our bikes, sloshing through deepening mud along the lake trail, and struggling over the narrow suspension bridge, which swayed dangerously with every step. Kate was a vocal critic of the bridge, which was narrow and tippy.
Arriving at the climbing wall, Starker realized he had forgotten his helmet at the bike transition and we tried a stealthy approach so we wouldn’t get caught. Luckily, the volunteers at the wall seemed more intent on joking around than enforcing any rules. When we arrived, a two-person male team was on the wall, and they took a long, long time to get up and then rappel down. Fortunately, the down time allowed Starker to make off with a climbing helmet to replace his missing bike helmet. We waited for about 30 minutes, then finally were able to start our ascent. The climb and rappel was easy but the safety procedures took awhile. Overall, we spent more than an hour going up and down a 30-foot climbing wall.
By about 3 p.m., we headed out on our bikes to do one last loop around the lake. This section was treacherous. The mud was thick and deep, and the path was essentially unrideable. At one point, Cliff tried to ride but his front tire got stuck and he ended up going crotch first into his bike stem. Ouch. Walking around the lake, we arrived back at the bike drop, where Starker retrieved his helmet. On our way to the third and last bike CP, we saw the two-person team we had seen off-and-on all day, and they were heading back the way we had come in. They advised us to do the same after getting the CP, rather than continuing around the lake. Near the 3rd CP, we saw Off The Front come charging back along a wrong trail. Judging from the looks on their faces, they had clearly had a rough race. We found the CP together, then they kept going to circumnavigate the lake, while we turned back around per the suggestions we had received, which to Kate's chagrin, took us back over the suspension bridge again. It was slow going, but we finally arrived at the lodge/finishing point, slightly disappointed to learn that OTF had beaten us by three minutes. One of their team members told us we had made the right decision. I don’t know if there was one, given how muddy and disgusting the trails were. After checking in and getting a little to eat (unfortunately, the spread was not overly vegetarian friendly), we engaged in a long bear hug to celebrate our finish.
After packing up and showering, we hit the road and we were amazed to see teams still out on the orienteering course, more than 12 hours into the race. We felt really bad for them and wished them luck. In the end, we finished fourth overall, behind two two-person teams and OTF, and fourth in our division (behind two teams that finished hours after we did and with fewer points). We thought the scoring was very weird (the team that won had just one of their teammates do the slingshot, thereby earning them the extra point) but since the RD was going to place us last among USARA-eligible teams anyway, our standing didn’t really matter. Still, the race and its lack of organization left a bad taste in our mouths.
A few months later, we were informed by USARA that OTF had once again dropped out of Nationals, handing us their regional sponsorship. That made the bad taste disappear pretty quickly!
