2019 NIAR, PART TWO
The climb up from our camping spot was steep and wet, and soon the dirt trail, which was marked by red blazes or dots, turned into an entirely unmaintained route through a peat bog. The going was slow, and there were a couple of intense river crossings. I started to really lose it during this section as we made extremely slow progress, slipping back down the hill with every step we took. At one point, a hunk of peat detached under my feet and both my knees slammed into the bedrock below, causing excruciating pain that incapacitated me for 10 minutes and that stayed with me the entire race in the form of a dull burning sensation. But we struggled along and at long last reached the CP, up in the swirling, Shakespearean early-morning fog. On the far side of the lake, we saw a figure get out of a tent and start waving at us. It turned out to be the women of Holiday Club, who had made it up to the summit in the night but had lost the trail markings in the thick mist. They asked if we minded if they joined up with us, and after we agreed, they packed up and joined us in a conga line over a long, rocky ridge that reminded us of New England’s high country.
Joining forces with the Swedish women turned into fantastic good luck, as they lifted our spirits with their contagiously fun, upbeat attitude. They are all incredibly accomplished athletes, but were having struggles in just their second-ever adventure race. We all fell into happy conversations and made steady progress, rotating talking partners as individuals stopped for bathroom breaks or quick snacks. I was particularly wowed by the stories of Maria Pietilä Holmner, a three-time Olympian slalom skier who had just retired at 31 and was trying to figure out what she wanted to do next with her life. She had been involved in Are’s losing campaign to host the Olympics and I got a lot of insight into how the selection process works (or, more accurately, doesn’t). Kit rightfully took pride in leading this impressive group of women down the mountain until we broke the back of the hike-a-bike with the appearance of Hans, Marie’s boyfriend and an Olympic skier himself, who showed up in bike shorts and a camera to document the ladies’ progress. We stayed together all the way down to the bottom of the mountain, which arrived in the form of a dirt road after what must have been at least eight hours of heinous bike-hiking.
Another 5k of riding took us into a small Norwegian town beside a river, and Hans directed us to a Coop store, where the Swedish women soon joined us. Just as we arrived, the skies opened up and it started pelting down rain – good timing for a break! The food selection was solid and the store manager offered us the use of his microwave, as well as offering us freshly-brewed coffee. We probably took too long at this stop but we couldn’t help ourselves; we had suffered too much to be eager to go back out into the cold and wet.
After what must have been two hours, the rain subsided and we emerged from the Coop, only to find Kit’s tires were really low. I had forgotten to screw the valves shut after filling them earlier and so we needed to burn another CO2 cartridge to get them back up to pressure. We had bought 10 cartridges in Are before the race and we ended up using eight of them during the race, mostly on Kit’s tires. Not sure why they kept deflating, other than the one time I didn’t close the valves properly. (Kit notes: “I definitely did not have enough Stans in them, and due to that silly immortal sense that nothing would go wrong, I failed to check prior to the race.”) Anyway, it was $70 put to good use.
We got underway and made good progress along a dirt forest road that meandered by a stream for 20 or so kilometers. We struggled to find a special section identified on our maps with an inset but eventually rode into it after acknowledging we had committed the cardinal sin of AR – not realizing we hadn’t gone far enough. Then we turned south and directly uphill, a long, steady climb on a nice asphalt road that brought us up over a grueling 1,000 meters of climbing. Eventually, the road dead-ended at a cluster of houses, and someone came out of one of the houses to waive us through her property to a trailhead we would have had trouble finding. Thus began our second nasty hike-a-bike of the day, just as the rain began to pick up again. We moved purposefully and near-silently through this section, as I think all of us wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. We hit the bald-faced summit and a beautiful mountaintop lake, and considered staying at the summit hut but decided to push on, fearing we would become like the buffalo of Yellowstone, who famously get stuck every year in the deadly conundrum of staying warm in the sulfurous geysers or roaming out into the freezing cold to forage for food.
We immediately lost the trail on the far side of the summit and struggled forward slowly, spreading out to search for the trail in what we thought was the right direction. After 20-30 minutes, Evan spotted a red-blazed cairn in the distance and we hauled our bikes through the low brush toward the trail, which promptly disappeared again as it crossed a freezing stream. We worked our way down alongside the far bank of the stream, as the map indicated we should do, repeatedly finding and losing the trail, which by this point in the race had become a common-enough occurrence for it not to bother us too much. We were still moving quickly, but by this point we were soaked and when we reached the junction of the trail with the dirt road marking the end of the hike-a-bike section, Kit especially was in a bad way. We threw on a space blanket poncho and did a five-minute group hug to warm up, and then sped down the screaming descent into town, which pulled every remaining bit of heat out of us.
As we hit a flatter section of road that we thought would bring us into a few towns where we might be able to find a hotel or at the very least a public building where we could take shelter and regain a little warmth, by chance we passed two race photographers, who especially seemed to enjoy snapping photos of Kit, who was wrapped in tin-foil like a big oven mitt was about to reach out of the sky and throw her in some giant oven. We asked them if we might find any kind of shelter ahead, and they replied in the negative, that there was nothing for at least 30 kilometers. So we proceeded down hesitantly, having a group talk as we pedaled. We were in a more densely populated area for it being so rural, meaning there were houses regularly appearing on both sides of the street, and occasionally, we would see a house with smoke coming out of the chimney or people visible through window. After passing a few of these temptations, we saw through the window of a nice-looking house three figures sitting around the kitchen table. We decided to see if they lend us a roof for 30 minutes to let us dry off. A woman answered the door and after hearing our story and seeing our pathetic state, she agreed to let us in. We tried to take off all our wet layers, but given we were soaked to the bone, we still left little dribbles of water as we walked into the kitchen, happily supplied with comfy and warm wool slippers. The woman, Margunn, her daughter and her niece were welcoming and generous, offering us bread, cheese and hot tea. We chatted for around 45 minutes, telling them our story and trying not to show too much desperation as we wolfed down the food they provided. Seeing we were exhausted, Margunn offered us the use of an outroom on their farmhouse which contained their wood-pellet furnace. The room snugly fit the four of us, and was as warm and dry as a sauna inside. We couldn’t believe our luck.
After we had hung up all our wet clothes and settled in for a planned nap of three hours, a video crew from the NIAR organization found us in the room. Wearing just a fleece as a loincloth (Kate gave a verbal warning to the videographer about choosing an appropriate angle), I did a quick video, where I appear very emotional. While I was indeed wrecked physically from the nearly three straight days of racing, my apparently fragile state in the clip is more a result of just having been asleep inside a very hot room. Inside my head during the filming, I was only thinking about how Brent and Abby of Rootstock would be laughing their heads off at our finding a way into a sauna in Norway, as they always make fun of us for finding a hot tub to ride out a hurricane in during ITERA-Ireland.
Unfortunately, after about an hour in the furnace room, it got way too hot and dry for me to sleep. Additionally, the furnace made a jarring racket every five minutes or so as it self-loaded more pellets into its kiln. I tried to just lie there but it all became unbearable, so I went outside to cool off for a bit. But it was still wet and cold out, so I retreated back into the sauna. But I just couldn’t get comfortable. At around 3 a.m., Margunn and her husband came to check on us, and I realized we probably had ruined their entire night’s sleep. I assured them we were OK, but soon after, I roused the team and told them we had to get going.
It took us around 45 minutes to get everything put away and to get dressed and ready for the road. But we were all out of water, so we just biked down the road about 100 meters and then used our Katahdyn B-Free filters (these things were amazing – highly recommended!) to filter a couple of liters the barnyard-smelling water from the Gaula River into each of our reservoirs.
Once again, it had never really gotten dark, but it was getting lighter again as we hit the road, determined to finish the 150+ kilometers of riding we had remaining in the stage. We attempted a paceline but the constant ups and downs we encountered made it a bit difficult to stay aligned. One highlight in the early-morning hours of the ride was seeing a family of three moose, including a very young calf, running alongside us for two or three minutes.
After several hours of steady biking, we reached the town of Soknedal, Norway, where we stopped at a gas station for a quick breakfast of hot dogs and burgers, along with some machine-brewed espresso. I got to witness Kate eat the first hot dog I have ever seen her eat. We all really enjoyed the food. It was around 6:30 a.m. and we thought we had broken the back of the stage. But when we got back on the road again, and climbed the 300 meters of elevation to what we thought would be a smooth road that would take us at least 30 kilometers in the right direction, we found it was actually a railroad. Like a champ, Kit quickly rerouted us and led us up another 100 meters of climbing, then around a twisty series of dirt and gravel roads that eventually brought us to the town of Birkak, where we stopped for another round of gas station food, a bathroom and water refill break, and a 20-minute snooze for Kit and Kate. Kit seemed especially sluggish as we got going again, so I took over the nav, leading us down a screaming, hairpin-lined descent into Stamnan.
Now thoroughly bottomed out, it was of course time to climb again. I tried to break the news of the upcoming 1,000-meter ascent gently by telling the team it was just an easy 400-meter climb, but the news broke Kit. She climbed hard up for a bit, then had a good cry and did some conscious breathing exercises, and by the time we caught up to her, she was good to go. Before we knew it, she took off, and Evan and Kate followed, leaving me scrambling to keep up with the fierce uphill pace. We continued climbing up past a nice lake to the village of Nerskogen.
It was finally getting nice out and we stripped down to just t-shirts and our race pinneys as we headed off the paved road and onto a dirt path that led to the final checkpoint of the stage. At one point, we had to bushwhack for a kilometer or so, but after we popped back out on the road, it was a smooth, straight shot to the CP, which was hanging on a small bridge over a picturesque waterfall. Now it was time for Kit to break me. Taking over on the next map, she let the team know that it was at least another 30 kilometers to the end of the stage. We rode out to a main road, then got into the saddest pace-line ever, moving about as slow as any of us have ever gone on bicycles. With about 20K to go, we hit a hill and that was it. We all dismounted as started walking. We cursed the race directors. We cursed the stage. We cursed Sweden and Norway. We cursed ourselves for being so stupid to sign up for this damned race. And then we were at the top of the hill. We re-mounted, found our final turnoff, and followed it on an increasingly pretty dirt road into the TA, adjacent to the gorgeous Gjevellvatnet Lake.
We tried not to be a mess. Honestly, I think we pulled it off. But after 41 hours of biking and almost 6,000 meters of elevation gain in the longest stage any of us had ever done, we were not fit to continue. Fortunately, there was an ideal spot to pitch the tent in the shade behind the TA, and after we had all changed, eaten, broken down our bikes and gotten our hiking stuff ready, we passed out for 3 hours. It was in this TA that we got to know Calle, our friendly, bearded host who would become our dedicated race volunteer, manning almost every TA for us for the rest of the race, as we dropped further and further the main pack of teams. Calle is the nicest human being in the world. We found out later that if we hadn’t convinced Kit to join us, it probably would have been Calle who Staffan would have recruited to join us. And if teams of five had been an option, we would have loved to have added him to the squad. While we slept in TA3, Calle actively shooed hordes of inquisitive, bell-wearing, free-ranging sheep away from our gear and our tent. As I said, Calle was the best.
Joining forces with the Swedish women turned into fantastic good luck, as they lifted our spirits with their contagiously fun, upbeat attitude. They are all incredibly accomplished athletes, but were having struggles in just their second-ever adventure race. We all fell into happy conversations and made steady progress, rotating talking partners as individuals stopped for bathroom breaks or quick snacks. I was particularly wowed by the stories of Maria Pietilä Holmner, a three-time Olympian slalom skier who had just retired at 31 and was trying to figure out what she wanted to do next with her life. She had been involved in Are’s losing campaign to host the Olympics and I got a lot of insight into how the selection process works (or, more accurately, doesn’t). Kit rightfully took pride in leading this impressive group of women down the mountain until we broke the back of the hike-a-bike with the appearance of Hans, Marie’s boyfriend and an Olympic skier himself, who showed up in bike shorts and a camera to document the ladies’ progress. We stayed together all the way down to the bottom of the mountain, which arrived in the form of a dirt road after what must have been at least eight hours of heinous bike-hiking.
Another 5k of riding took us into a small Norwegian town beside a river, and Hans directed us to a Coop store, where the Swedish women soon joined us. Just as we arrived, the skies opened up and it started pelting down rain – good timing for a break! The food selection was solid and the store manager offered us the use of his microwave, as well as offering us freshly-brewed coffee. We probably took too long at this stop but we couldn’t help ourselves; we had suffered too much to be eager to go back out into the cold and wet.
After what must have been two hours, the rain subsided and we emerged from the Coop, only to find Kit’s tires were really low. I had forgotten to screw the valves shut after filling them earlier and so we needed to burn another CO2 cartridge to get them back up to pressure. We had bought 10 cartridges in Are before the race and we ended up using eight of them during the race, mostly on Kit’s tires. Not sure why they kept deflating, other than the one time I didn’t close the valves properly. (Kit notes: “I definitely did not have enough Stans in them, and due to that silly immortal sense that nothing would go wrong, I failed to check prior to the race.”) Anyway, it was $70 put to good use.
We got underway and made good progress along a dirt forest road that meandered by a stream for 20 or so kilometers. We struggled to find a special section identified on our maps with an inset but eventually rode into it after acknowledging we had committed the cardinal sin of AR – not realizing we hadn’t gone far enough. Then we turned south and directly uphill, a long, steady climb on a nice asphalt road that brought us up over a grueling 1,000 meters of climbing. Eventually, the road dead-ended at a cluster of houses, and someone came out of one of the houses to waive us through her property to a trailhead we would have had trouble finding. Thus began our second nasty hike-a-bike of the day, just as the rain began to pick up again. We moved purposefully and near-silently through this section, as I think all of us wanted to get it done as quickly as possible. We hit the bald-faced summit and a beautiful mountaintop lake, and considered staying at the summit hut but decided to push on, fearing we would become like the buffalo of Yellowstone, who famously get stuck every year in the deadly conundrum of staying warm in the sulfurous geysers or roaming out into the freezing cold to forage for food.
We immediately lost the trail on the far side of the summit and struggled forward slowly, spreading out to search for the trail in what we thought was the right direction. After 20-30 minutes, Evan spotted a red-blazed cairn in the distance and we hauled our bikes through the low brush toward the trail, which promptly disappeared again as it crossed a freezing stream. We worked our way down alongside the far bank of the stream, as the map indicated we should do, repeatedly finding and losing the trail, which by this point in the race had become a common-enough occurrence for it not to bother us too much. We were still moving quickly, but by this point we were soaked and when we reached the junction of the trail with the dirt road marking the end of the hike-a-bike section, Kit especially was in a bad way. We threw on a space blanket poncho and did a five-minute group hug to warm up, and then sped down the screaming descent into town, which pulled every remaining bit of heat out of us.
As we hit a flatter section of road that we thought would bring us into a few towns where we might be able to find a hotel or at the very least a public building where we could take shelter and regain a little warmth, by chance we passed two race photographers, who especially seemed to enjoy snapping photos of Kit, who was wrapped in tin-foil like a big oven mitt was about to reach out of the sky and throw her in some giant oven. We asked them if we might find any kind of shelter ahead, and they replied in the negative, that there was nothing for at least 30 kilometers. So we proceeded down hesitantly, having a group talk as we pedaled. We were in a more densely populated area for it being so rural, meaning there were houses regularly appearing on both sides of the street, and occasionally, we would see a house with smoke coming out of the chimney or people visible through window. After passing a few of these temptations, we saw through the window of a nice-looking house three figures sitting around the kitchen table. We decided to see if they lend us a roof for 30 minutes to let us dry off. A woman answered the door and after hearing our story and seeing our pathetic state, she agreed to let us in. We tried to take off all our wet layers, but given we were soaked to the bone, we still left little dribbles of water as we walked into the kitchen, happily supplied with comfy and warm wool slippers. The woman, Margunn, her daughter and her niece were welcoming and generous, offering us bread, cheese and hot tea. We chatted for around 45 minutes, telling them our story and trying not to show too much desperation as we wolfed down the food they provided. Seeing we were exhausted, Margunn offered us the use of an outroom on their farmhouse which contained their wood-pellet furnace. The room snugly fit the four of us, and was as warm and dry as a sauna inside. We couldn’t believe our luck.
After we had hung up all our wet clothes and settled in for a planned nap of three hours, a video crew from the NIAR organization found us in the room. Wearing just a fleece as a loincloth (Kate gave a verbal warning to the videographer about choosing an appropriate angle), I did a quick video, where I appear very emotional. While I was indeed wrecked physically from the nearly three straight days of racing, my apparently fragile state in the clip is more a result of just having been asleep inside a very hot room. Inside my head during the filming, I was only thinking about how Brent and Abby of Rootstock would be laughing their heads off at our finding a way into a sauna in Norway, as they always make fun of us for finding a hot tub to ride out a hurricane in during ITERA-Ireland.
Unfortunately, after about an hour in the furnace room, it got way too hot and dry for me to sleep. Additionally, the furnace made a jarring racket every five minutes or so as it self-loaded more pellets into its kiln. I tried to just lie there but it all became unbearable, so I went outside to cool off for a bit. But it was still wet and cold out, so I retreated back into the sauna. But I just couldn’t get comfortable. At around 3 a.m., Margunn and her husband came to check on us, and I realized we probably had ruined their entire night’s sleep. I assured them we were OK, but soon after, I roused the team and told them we had to get going.
It took us around 45 minutes to get everything put away and to get dressed and ready for the road. But we were all out of water, so we just biked down the road about 100 meters and then used our Katahdyn B-Free filters (these things were amazing – highly recommended!) to filter a couple of liters the barnyard-smelling water from the Gaula River into each of our reservoirs.
Once again, it had never really gotten dark, but it was getting lighter again as we hit the road, determined to finish the 150+ kilometers of riding we had remaining in the stage. We attempted a paceline but the constant ups and downs we encountered made it a bit difficult to stay aligned. One highlight in the early-morning hours of the ride was seeing a family of three moose, including a very young calf, running alongside us for two or three minutes.
After several hours of steady biking, we reached the town of Soknedal, Norway, where we stopped at a gas station for a quick breakfast of hot dogs and burgers, along with some machine-brewed espresso. I got to witness Kate eat the first hot dog I have ever seen her eat. We all really enjoyed the food. It was around 6:30 a.m. and we thought we had broken the back of the stage. But when we got back on the road again, and climbed the 300 meters of elevation to what we thought would be a smooth road that would take us at least 30 kilometers in the right direction, we found it was actually a railroad. Like a champ, Kit quickly rerouted us and led us up another 100 meters of climbing, then around a twisty series of dirt and gravel roads that eventually brought us to the town of Birkak, where we stopped for another round of gas station food, a bathroom and water refill break, and a 20-minute snooze for Kit and Kate. Kit seemed especially sluggish as we got going again, so I took over the nav, leading us down a screaming, hairpin-lined descent into Stamnan.
Now thoroughly bottomed out, it was of course time to climb again. I tried to break the news of the upcoming 1,000-meter ascent gently by telling the team it was just an easy 400-meter climb, but the news broke Kit. She climbed hard up for a bit, then had a good cry and did some conscious breathing exercises, and by the time we caught up to her, she was good to go. Before we knew it, she took off, and Evan and Kate followed, leaving me scrambling to keep up with the fierce uphill pace. We continued climbing up past a nice lake to the village of Nerskogen.
It was finally getting nice out and we stripped down to just t-shirts and our race pinneys as we headed off the paved road and onto a dirt path that led to the final checkpoint of the stage. At one point, we had to bushwhack for a kilometer or so, but after we popped back out on the road, it was a smooth, straight shot to the CP, which was hanging on a small bridge over a picturesque waterfall. Now it was time for Kit to break me. Taking over on the next map, she let the team know that it was at least another 30 kilometers to the end of the stage. We rode out to a main road, then got into the saddest pace-line ever, moving about as slow as any of us have ever gone on bicycles. With about 20K to go, we hit a hill and that was it. We all dismounted as started walking. We cursed the race directors. We cursed the stage. We cursed Sweden and Norway. We cursed ourselves for being so stupid to sign up for this damned race. And then we were at the top of the hill. We re-mounted, found our final turnoff, and followed it on an increasingly pretty dirt road into the TA, adjacent to the gorgeous Gjevellvatnet Lake.
We tried not to be a mess. Honestly, I think we pulled it off. But after 41 hours of biking and almost 6,000 meters of elevation gain in the longest stage any of us had ever done, we were not fit to continue. Fortunately, there was an ideal spot to pitch the tent in the shade behind the TA, and after we had all changed, eaten, broken down our bikes and gotten our hiking stuff ready, we passed out for 3 hours. It was in this TA that we got to know Calle, our friendly, bearded host who would become our dedicated race volunteer, manning almost every TA for us for the rest of the race, as we dropped further and further the main pack of teams. Calle is the nicest human being in the world. We found out later that if we hadn’t convinced Kit to join us, it probably would have been Calle who Staffan would have recruited to join us. And if teams of five had been an option, we would have loved to have added him to the squad. While we slept in TA3, Calle actively shooed hordes of inquisitive, bell-wearing, free-ranging sheep away from our gear and our tent. As I said, Calle was the best.
CONTINUED...
