2024 HARD FALL AR
Race report by Glen Lewis
We had planned a family vacation around this race - we spent most of the week at my sister-in-law's in upstate New York (including a one day trip in Canada) before heading towards Dover, VT on Friday afternoon. We had to drop off our paddle bags, gear bins, and bikes in the evening in order to get our maps at 5:30 the next morning. It took us a bit of time to get it all sorted out, but we made it before the 8pm cutoff and headed out for a late dinner before heading to bed for an early rise. I finished my book and then got some rather high quality sleep before waking up a bit early. I used that time to get myself situated before heading down to check-in and meeting the team. Staying at the race hotel was very convenient and is a nice trade off considering the expense.
We had about 2 hours with the maps, and we really needed most of that time. The course had 11 legs, all short-ish and accessible by themselves, but when combined together made for a massive race. We began by planning routes for all of the points but also kept in mind that the fast estimates added up to 28 hours, so we began to decide where we would be best served to strategically drop specific points. We were confident that the best strategy was not to skip entire legs but rather the points that would take the longest to get in specific legs. I was planning on navigating with Jason backing up with our 2nd set of maps and Kate assisting as needed. We had a 45 minute bus ride down into Massachusetts (amusingly, I never realized I was in MA until long after I had gotten home from the race) where we were dropped off on the side of a road and given a few minutes to putz about and ask questions before starting at 9:20.
The opening leg was a trek with 15 points. Despite needing to cut points in the race, this leg needed to take us long enough so that we would get to the next paddle leg after the dam release. We decided pre-race to clear this section. We moved quickly to the first point on trail with the rest of the teams before cutting off trail and quickly getting sidetracked by other teams going in other directions. We probably lost 3-4 minutes here because of all of the hectic chaos. The next two points were on trail but we still got a little sidetracked by looking in the wrong spot where other teams had been. It was only on our way to the 5th point where we had spread out enough to allow me to calmly and precisely navigate. We did a really good job from there and nailed the rest of the leg despite the presence of other teams at times. The beginning of races can be very nervy but this felt magnified. Jason and I gelled really quickly, making quick and smart decisions that always felt like the most efficient. We knew that Enabled Tracking was a little ahead of us, but we didn't know where. The other teams that were competitive in the race (Rivals, Women of AR) were back and forth with us but we seemed to be a touch ahead. Our timing was working out perfectly and we descended steeply to CP12 right around 12:30. This was pretty sketchy for me, as I knocked a few boulders loose and felt lucky to make it down with all of my bones intact. At the bottom we had a short swim (we had been carrying PFDs) that was "refreshing". In truth I found the water way too cold and struggled to get full breaths until I got across. Cliff seemed to really enjoy it the whole time, but I was freezing during and only finally enjoyed it during our short jog into TA.
There were a few other teams there but we seemed to be the first full course team. We inflated packrafts really effectively, including the whitewater skirts, and put on the water as quickly as could be expected. This paddle leg may have been my most fun, ever. There was low consequence whitewater throughout and we flew down the river. We passed a number of guided trips and towards the end found hundreds of tube-ists enjoying beers on the water. Paddling with Jason was really enjoyable; he had run the river in the past and was an expert, picking the best lines and keeping us in the best water throughout. We had 2 points and a short portage to keep us on our toes. Still, the end of the leg arrived quickly, after just 2 hours.
We had traded places with The Rivals throughout the paddle (we paddled quicker but they seemed to TA/get in/out faster) and they arrived just after us at the TA, followed only a few minutes later by Enabled Tracking. Our TA took a touch longer than expected, but we had to put two packrafts away so it was understandable. The Rivals left about 3 minutes before us and we set off chasing them. We also followed Vertical Bay AR, who was the only short course team up the road from us. We passed them both at the out and back near CP18, but never saw Enabled Tracking, so we knew that we were doing well and maintaining our position. This section was entirely uphill, but I don't really have a memory of it being that bad. We moved well and were really efficient. At the end there was a section of trail to ride into the next TA. The map was accurate but the distances seemed off from our measurements. Still, we made it neatly and without issue.
The next leg had a short SUP section and then a o-relay where we could split. We planned to do the SUP first to avoid a potential pileup, and hopped to it right away after we got in. We were just in time to watch one of The Rivals flip his SUP just off the beach. Cliff was so impressed that he did the same in the same spot. That made the rest of us decide to kneel. Cliff led the way and we tried to keep up. It was amusing to finally find something that Jason was not an expert in. The nav was incredibly easy (we could see the points all from the start) so I spent the whole paddle staring at the map to determine the best route for the relay. After consulting with Kate we decided to stick with my original plan: Kate and Jason took the eastern 4 points while Cliff and I took the western 4 points. Cliff and I moved well but we had an error where we missed a turn and had to come back to a known junction. It was frustrating to have missed a large signed and mapped turn, but we only took ~5 minutes to fix ourselves. Our side was more physical (the other was more technical to nav) but I thought that we kept a good pace. As we neared the last point I fortunately noticed that the leg had 9 points, not 8! We hadn't seen 23 in our original plan. Cliff and I tossed around ideas, but it made the most sense to have me run out to it while he went back to fill up my bladder and get ready for the next bike ride. We saw Clay from Electric Mayhem just before we split up, and he told us that our teammates were back in TA. It sounds like they beat us by 5-10 minutes. I took at least 10 on the last point, struggling to find it after my attack on multiple tries. I reconfirmed my attack for a third time to eventually find it, buried low in high grass and touching the creek. I hustled back in to TA to my awaiting teammates, who helped get me out of TA quickly. Kate had even filled up my bike bottles...or not. I didn't have bike bottles, she was just topping off the other teams hydration systems. As we left I realized that I didn't get the right maps out for the bike, but thankfully Jason was ready and took the lead for this next leg.
The leg was a straightforward bike ride without much remarkable. There was just one CP, which was interestingly in the center of a traffic "triangle". Outside of that my highlight was using my mapboard as a kitchen counter to make a nice bag of ramen. Unfortunately the bag had picked up a few small holes and I had to hold it upside down in my hand to keep it from leaking. Our pace was reasonable so this wasn't a problem, and the ramen was a fantastic treat when I finally got to it. With the sunlight waning we slowly worked our way around the leg, finally on some old doubletrack that Jason nailed expertly (it looked to have given some other teams a bit of trouble). We moved efficiently but it seemed to take longer than anticipated. Still, we arrived in the TA just as the light was fading and began to TA to the packraft leg. The Rivals were in TA and we worked as quickly as we could to get out ahead of them, but of course took time to indulge in the complementary grilled cheeses from GMARA. Our plan involved keeping the rafts inflated for the entire leg, so we kept our packs in our laps (no T-zips) and left behind the spray skirts.
We had no sooner set off from shore when Cliff realized that he had forgotten the clue sheet. Up to this point it had been very useful, so we debated the ~5 min backtrack to get it, but we all agreed to roll the dice and push onward. We had been very clean thus far and knew that we didn't have any spare minutes to be wasting. We got to our first point very quickly; I was super happy to be paired with Jason again. After the first point though I realized that some of the attackpoints were very subtle, so I (literally) threw the map at Kate and had her nav the paddling portions. I really enjoyed the challenge and strategy of this leg. We made slightly different choices than all of the other teams and were going back and forth with The Rivals, WoAR, and ET for much of the section. We chose to dock south of 36 and get 38 and 39 from there. 36 was subtle but I thought I hit it well, 38 was super tough but we nailed it, and 39 was pretty tough but again we hit it dead on. We backtracked right past the points on the return trip. In retrospect, it would have been faster to get 39 from the other side via paddling, but we liked the plan and stuck with it. With how slow the bushwacking was to 39 (it took about an hour to get out and back) we decided to paddle from 34 to 33, which was a great change of plan and saved us a lot time. After 37 we chose to carry our inflated boats into the woods and do an out and back on foot to 40 and 41. 41 was very tricky (did I mention that we didn't have a clue sheet...?) but we eventually got to it. We saw ET on the way back, and shuffled our boats across the peninsula there to the water. We had always planned to drop 45, and it seemed obvious now to stick with that. We had been considering dropping 47, but we were paddling really quickly in that direction so we chose to get it. Kate and Jason were navving so I was stuck punching the passport, which I was fine with but I think I found myself getting a bit depleted in here. Thankfully some more Ramen seemed to get me moving again. After 47 we got 44, 43, and 42 (a really touchy one) before heading back into TA, right around 1AM. It had taken about 30 minutes longer than we had planned but we felt really good about the stage, even moreso when we saw none of our competition there. The TA was a bit slow but it got us moving in the correct direction again, and we set off full of energy with dry clothes just before 1:30, ready to bike up, up, up to the next trekking leg.
The ride up to the next TA took us right around 2 hours, with stops for 2 CPs - the first of which was in the town of Wilmington and the second which I have no memory of. The ride was nearly all uphill, with only the occasional break for flat or down. This was the only time during the race that I felt the struggles of borrowing a bike (my bike is still damaged from the Longest Day, and I was borrowing a bike from my friend Jake. It worked great, but it was too much bike for a typical AR). As we slowly motored towards the top I was feeling exhausted, and vowed to stop and walk for a moment at the next mailbox. Fortunately that mailbox was where the road flattened out towards the TA, and I was able to save my dignity as we rode in. We were the first team in (we hadn't seen anyone on the ride) and were greeted by a solemn-looking Kit - running remote TAs alone in the middle of the night must not be fun. We hopped off of our bikes and made our way into the woods for this trekking section, feeling great about our progress thus far. We had a plan to skip 2 CPs depending on the terrain but were also considering the amount of time needed for this next bike ride back to Mt. Snow, where we wanted a few hours to finish another trek.
Our plans slowly began unraveling as soon as we dove off trail. The combination of incredibly steep descending and unbelievably thick woods was nearly impassable at times. The only "flatter" sections were blanketed in Stinging Nettle. It took us 45 minutes to travel 750 meters here, and then we still had to follow a creek to get CP 56. Despite that only being 200 meters, it took way too long. We had to stop and fill water when we got there, and immediately began the brutal climbing again to CP 57. This was nearly as steep as the way down, and our pace was a crawl at best. This 400m journey took us more than 30 minutes, where we finally found the CP hiding in some cliffs. Heading to 58 was short and sweet, and from there we decided that we were out of time to venture further afield. We had less than an hour left to get back to the TA by 6, which we had decided was a good cutoff for clearing the rest of the course. The next CP was 55, at an overhanging rock. We had to descend again to get there, and we filled some water right below it, spotting with our headlamps. It was actually a really cool CP, at a massive rock with a bunch of tables and chair beneath it. These (and the beer cans) marked the first signs of life since we left TA. We had to hike up a trail to grab 53 on the way back into TA, and there was saw the first team since we left the packraft leg, almost 5 hours prior. There was a large pile of teams there, and we took a few minutes too long getting out. We had to brush off our tires before heading to the next bike section, and there seemed to be a lot of chaos as teams were all about. We finally left in the glowing morning sunlight, heading back to Mt. Snow. We were a little bummed to have dropped so many points on this leg, but the terrain was so tough (and in retrospect, our route choice was poor, although it felt great before the race). Still, we nail the nav on every point and were feeling awesome as we rolled downhill, with the promise of more downhill to come on this section.
This bike ride was another well designed leg (but they all were, really) where there were lots of places to drop points, or even drop whole chunks of them. CP 60 was not simple but our track looks like we nailed it. We ended up on a parallel trail and oriented ourselves with a junction and another team. CP 61 was our first bad choice. We really should have dropped it, but it seemed so straightforward on the map. It ended up being a soul-sucking 45 minute out and back after we found the right trail; there was only one marked on the map but there were confusing, signed junctions that had us going very slowly. This left us scrambling for time the rest of the race. I can see why no other team chose to get it. CP 62 was an easy one that I punched - I had just started to feel the end of race adrenaline and was itching to moving quickly now after struggling with some GI problems for the past hour. We grabbed 63 (where Jason realized that he had lost his glasses :() before screaming downhill into civilization. We hit 64 right with Vertical Bay (whom we saw repeatedly whenever there were other teams around) before getting the news from Shari that the rain had cancelled CPs 65 and 66 - a shame because they we reportedly a ton of fun to ride. We instead got 67, very carefully as it was on a one-way trail and tucked deep into the woods at a nebulous feature before riding toward 68, 69, and 70 on the side of Mt. Snow in a series of old mines. I used my favorite trick to nail these, asking friends of mine if they had any advice for them, but made Cliff punch the two that were nearly underwater. On the way back down we ran into The Rivals, whom we hadn't seen since 10PM on the packraft, almost 12 hours prior. We rode quickly into the final TA (at the finish line) and got quickly ready to trek alongside them, assuming that we had a few points on them but not being sure.
For the final trek we had been given a topo map with the points plotted but also a supplemental of a satellite view which showed the vegetation. On a ski mountain this was critical. Before the race Cliff had spent time transposing the points onto the supplemental an also choosing the optimum route. For those new to racing, it's hard to stress how critical having teammates this good is for success. Neither Jason or I had to think about this section before we arrived, and I knew that it would be 100% complete for me.
As a team we figured that we needed 7 points to guarantee the overall win (we had done some guessing on how many points The Rivals could have had). We got 71, and I believe that it was on the way to 72 that the rain really began. There were loads of teams around for the first parts of this leg as we got 72, 74, 78 and then hiked all the way up to 81, which seemed much higher than it was. At that point it was an absolute monsoon and brought back memories of the Longest Day. We had a very conservative mindset for this race, and after 81 the team voted to head back down the hill to finish the race, grabbing 4 more points on the way. We ran into Kara, Kate, and Derek from the Dev Squad and got the last 3 points right near them before running into the finish, thankfully in a break in the rain, with under 40 minutes left. We could have gotten at least 1, maybe 2 more points, but we didn't mind because we were sure that we had won... I was really excited to see Rebekah and the boys there, and we hung out for a few minutes before getting ourselves cleaned up and inside for a nice meal and the awards.
...Where we learned that we didn't actually win. We had been way too conservative at the end and lost the overall by 1 point to the Rivals. Turns out that we had come in tied to the final section, and they got one more point and finished just under the time limit. We had assumed that they missed a ton more points on the previous trek, but in fact they had gotten one more than us, and were remarkably close to us overnight despite never seeing or hearing each other. Still, it was a super fun race and we were happy to have gone back and forth with Joseph again after MSAR. I had a really good time at this race and would love to come back again. Kate and Cliff have become even better teammates over the years and I feel like we really fill in each others' gaps well - I'm super excited for racing with them at Nationals this year. And Jason was a wonderful teammate whom I felt very fortunate to finally have the chance to race with. He was always helping and was a great navigational partner. I hope to get the chance to race with him again next year!
We had planned a family vacation around this race - we spent most of the week at my sister-in-law's in upstate New York (including a one day trip in Canada) before heading towards Dover, VT on Friday afternoon. We had to drop off our paddle bags, gear bins, and bikes in the evening in order to get our maps at 5:30 the next morning. It took us a bit of time to get it all sorted out, but we made it before the 8pm cutoff and headed out for a late dinner before heading to bed for an early rise. I finished my book and then got some rather high quality sleep before waking up a bit early. I used that time to get myself situated before heading down to check-in and meeting the team. Staying at the race hotel was very convenient and is a nice trade off considering the expense.
We had about 2 hours with the maps, and we really needed most of that time. The course had 11 legs, all short-ish and accessible by themselves, but when combined together made for a massive race. We began by planning routes for all of the points but also kept in mind that the fast estimates added up to 28 hours, so we began to decide where we would be best served to strategically drop specific points. We were confident that the best strategy was not to skip entire legs but rather the points that would take the longest to get in specific legs. I was planning on navigating with Jason backing up with our 2nd set of maps and Kate assisting as needed. We had a 45 minute bus ride down into Massachusetts (amusingly, I never realized I was in MA until long after I had gotten home from the race) where we were dropped off on the side of a road and given a few minutes to putz about and ask questions before starting at 9:20.
The opening leg was a trek with 15 points. Despite needing to cut points in the race, this leg needed to take us long enough so that we would get to the next paddle leg after the dam release. We decided pre-race to clear this section. We moved quickly to the first point on trail with the rest of the teams before cutting off trail and quickly getting sidetracked by other teams going in other directions. We probably lost 3-4 minutes here because of all of the hectic chaos. The next two points were on trail but we still got a little sidetracked by looking in the wrong spot where other teams had been. It was only on our way to the 5th point where we had spread out enough to allow me to calmly and precisely navigate. We did a really good job from there and nailed the rest of the leg despite the presence of other teams at times. The beginning of races can be very nervy but this felt magnified. Jason and I gelled really quickly, making quick and smart decisions that always felt like the most efficient. We knew that Enabled Tracking was a little ahead of us, but we didn't know where. The other teams that were competitive in the race (Rivals, Women of AR) were back and forth with us but we seemed to be a touch ahead. Our timing was working out perfectly and we descended steeply to CP12 right around 12:30. This was pretty sketchy for me, as I knocked a few boulders loose and felt lucky to make it down with all of my bones intact. At the bottom we had a short swim (we had been carrying PFDs) that was "refreshing". In truth I found the water way too cold and struggled to get full breaths until I got across. Cliff seemed to really enjoy it the whole time, but I was freezing during and only finally enjoyed it during our short jog into TA.
There were a few other teams there but we seemed to be the first full course team. We inflated packrafts really effectively, including the whitewater skirts, and put on the water as quickly as could be expected. This paddle leg may have been my most fun, ever. There was low consequence whitewater throughout and we flew down the river. We passed a number of guided trips and towards the end found hundreds of tube-ists enjoying beers on the water. Paddling with Jason was really enjoyable; he had run the river in the past and was an expert, picking the best lines and keeping us in the best water throughout. We had 2 points and a short portage to keep us on our toes. Still, the end of the leg arrived quickly, after just 2 hours.
We had traded places with The Rivals throughout the paddle (we paddled quicker but they seemed to TA/get in/out faster) and they arrived just after us at the TA, followed only a few minutes later by Enabled Tracking. Our TA took a touch longer than expected, but we had to put two packrafts away so it was understandable. The Rivals left about 3 minutes before us and we set off chasing them. We also followed Vertical Bay AR, who was the only short course team up the road from us. We passed them both at the out and back near CP18, but never saw Enabled Tracking, so we knew that we were doing well and maintaining our position. This section was entirely uphill, but I don't really have a memory of it being that bad. We moved well and were really efficient. At the end there was a section of trail to ride into the next TA. The map was accurate but the distances seemed off from our measurements. Still, we made it neatly and without issue.
The next leg had a short SUP section and then a o-relay where we could split. We planned to do the SUP first to avoid a potential pileup, and hopped to it right away after we got in. We were just in time to watch one of The Rivals flip his SUP just off the beach. Cliff was so impressed that he did the same in the same spot. That made the rest of us decide to kneel. Cliff led the way and we tried to keep up. It was amusing to finally find something that Jason was not an expert in. The nav was incredibly easy (we could see the points all from the start) so I spent the whole paddle staring at the map to determine the best route for the relay. After consulting with Kate we decided to stick with my original plan: Kate and Jason took the eastern 4 points while Cliff and I took the western 4 points. Cliff and I moved well but we had an error where we missed a turn and had to come back to a known junction. It was frustrating to have missed a large signed and mapped turn, but we only took ~5 minutes to fix ourselves. Our side was more physical (the other was more technical to nav) but I thought that we kept a good pace. As we neared the last point I fortunately noticed that the leg had 9 points, not 8! We hadn't seen 23 in our original plan. Cliff and I tossed around ideas, but it made the most sense to have me run out to it while he went back to fill up my bladder and get ready for the next bike ride. We saw Clay from Electric Mayhem just before we split up, and he told us that our teammates were back in TA. It sounds like they beat us by 5-10 minutes. I took at least 10 on the last point, struggling to find it after my attack on multiple tries. I reconfirmed my attack for a third time to eventually find it, buried low in high grass and touching the creek. I hustled back in to TA to my awaiting teammates, who helped get me out of TA quickly. Kate had even filled up my bike bottles...or not. I didn't have bike bottles, she was just topping off the other teams hydration systems. As we left I realized that I didn't get the right maps out for the bike, but thankfully Jason was ready and took the lead for this next leg.
The leg was a straightforward bike ride without much remarkable. There was just one CP, which was interestingly in the center of a traffic "triangle". Outside of that my highlight was using my mapboard as a kitchen counter to make a nice bag of ramen. Unfortunately the bag had picked up a few small holes and I had to hold it upside down in my hand to keep it from leaking. Our pace was reasonable so this wasn't a problem, and the ramen was a fantastic treat when I finally got to it. With the sunlight waning we slowly worked our way around the leg, finally on some old doubletrack that Jason nailed expertly (it looked to have given some other teams a bit of trouble). We moved efficiently but it seemed to take longer than anticipated. Still, we arrived in the TA just as the light was fading and began to TA to the packraft leg. The Rivals were in TA and we worked as quickly as we could to get out ahead of them, but of course took time to indulge in the complementary grilled cheeses from GMARA. Our plan involved keeping the rafts inflated for the entire leg, so we kept our packs in our laps (no T-zips) and left behind the spray skirts.
We had no sooner set off from shore when Cliff realized that he had forgotten the clue sheet. Up to this point it had been very useful, so we debated the ~5 min backtrack to get it, but we all agreed to roll the dice and push onward. We had been very clean thus far and knew that we didn't have any spare minutes to be wasting. We got to our first point very quickly; I was super happy to be paired with Jason again. After the first point though I realized that some of the attackpoints were very subtle, so I (literally) threw the map at Kate and had her nav the paddling portions. I really enjoyed the challenge and strategy of this leg. We made slightly different choices than all of the other teams and were going back and forth with The Rivals, WoAR, and ET for much of the section. We chose to dock south of 36 and get 38 and 39 from there. 36 was subtle but I thought I hit it well, 38 was super tough but we nailed it, and 39 was pretty tough but again we hit it dead on. We backtracked right past the points on the return trip. In retrospect, it would have been faster to get 39 from the other side via paddling, but we liked the plan and stuck with it. With how slow the bushwacking was to 39 (it took about an hour to get out and back) we decided to paddle from 34 to 33, which was a great change of plan and saved us a lot time. After 37 we chose to carry our inflated boats into the woods and do an out and back on foot to 40 and 41. 41 was very tricky (did I mention that we didn't have a clue sheet...?) but we eventually got to it. We saw ET on the way back, and shuffled our boats across the peninsula there to the water. We had always planned to drop 45, and it seemed obvious now to stick with that. We had been considering dropping 47, but we were paddling really quickly in that direction so we chose to get it. Kate and Jason were navving so I was stuck punching the passport, which I was fine with but I think I found myself getting a bit depleted in here. Thankfully some more Ramen seemed to get me moving again. After 47 we got 44, 43, and 42 (a really touchy one) before heading back into TA, right around 1AM. It had taken about 30 minutes longer than we had planned but we felt really good about the stage, even moreso when we saw none of our competition there. The TA was a bit slow but it got us moving in the correct direction again, and we set off full of energy with dry clothes just before 1:30, ready to bike up, up, up to the next trekking leg.
The ride up to the next TA took us right around 2 hours, with stops for 2 CPs - the first of which was in the town of Wilmington and the second which I have no memory of. The ride was nearly all uphill, with only the occasional break for flat or down. This was the only time during the race that I felt the struggles of borrowing a bike (my bike is still damaged from the Longest Day, and I was borrowing a bike from my friend Jake. It worked great, but it was too much bike for a typical AR). As we slowly motored towards the top I was feeling exhausted, and vowed to stop and walk for a moment at the next mailbox. Fortunately that mailbox was where the road flattened out towards the TA, and I was able to save my dignity as we rode in. We were the first team in (we hadn't seen anyone on the ride) and were greeted by a solemn-looking Kit - running remote TAs alone in the middle of the night must not be fun. We hopped off of our bikes and made our way into the woods for this trekking section, feeling great about our progress thus far. We had a plan to skip 2 CPs depending on the terrain but were also considering the amount of time needed for this next bike ride back to Mt. Snow, where we wanted a few hours to finish another trek.
Our plans slowly began unraveling as soon as we dove off trail. The combination of incredibly steep descending and unbelievably thick woods was nearly impassable at times. The only "flatter" sections were blanketed in Stinging Nettle. It took us 45 minutes to travel 750 meters here, and then we still had to follow a creek to get CP 56. Despite that only being 200 meters, it took way too long. We had to stop and fill water when we got there, and immediately began the brutal climbing again to CP 57. This was nearly as steep as the way down, and our pace was a crawl at best. This 400m journey took us more than 30 minutes, where we finally found the CP hiding in some cliffs. Heading to 58 was short and sweet, and from there we decided that we were out of time to venture further afield. We had less than an hour left to get back to the TA by 6, which we had decided was a good cutoff for clearing the rest of the course. The next CP was 55, at an overhanging rock. We had to descend again to get there, and we filled some water right below it, spotting with our headlamps. It was actually a really cool CP, at a massive rock with a bunch of tables and chair beneath it. These (and the beer cans) marked the first signs of life since we left TA. We had to hike up a trail to grab 53 on the way back into TA, and there was saw the first team since we left the packraft leg, almost 5 hours prior. There was a large pile of teams there, and we took a few minutes too long getting out. We had to brush off our tires before heading to the next bike section, and there seemed to be a lot of chaos as teams were all about. We finally left in the glowing morning sunlight, heading back to Mt. Snow. We were a little bummed to have dropped so many points on this leg, but the terrain was so tough (and in retrospect, our route choice was poor, although it felt great before the race). Still, we nail the nav on every point and were feeling awesome as we rolled downhill, with the promise of more downhill to come on this section.
This bike ride was another well designed leg (but they all were, really) where there were lots of places to drop points, or even drop whole chunks of them. CP 60 was not simple but our track looks like we nailed it. We ended up on a parallel trail and oriented ourselves with a junction and another team. CP 61 was our first bad choice. We really should have dropped it, but it seemed so straightforward on the map. It ended up being a soul-sucking 45 minute out and back after we found the right trail; there was only one marked on the map but there were confusing, signed junctions that had us going very slowly. This left us scrambling for time the rest of the race. I can see why no other team chose to get it. CP 62 was an easy one that I punched - I had just started to feel the end of race adrenaline and was itching to moving quickly now after struggling with some GI problems for the past hour. We grabbed 63 (where Jason realized that he had lost his glasses :() before screaming downhill into civilization. We hit 64 right with Vertical Bay (whom we saw repeatedly whenever there were other teams around) before getting the news from Shari that the rain had cancelled CPs 65 and 66 - a shame because they we reportedly a ton of fun to ride. We instead got 67, very carefully as it was on a one-way trail and tucked deep into the woods at a nebulous feature before riding toward 68, 69, and 70 on the side of Mt. Snow in a series of old mines. I used my favorite trick to nail these, asking friends of mine if they had any advice for them, but made Cliff punch the two that were nearly underwater. On the way back down we ran into The Rivals, whom we hadn't seen since 10PM on the packraft, almost 12 hours prior. We rode quickly into the final TA (at the finish line) and got quickly ready to trek alongside them, assuming that we had a few points on them but not being sure.
For the final trek we had been given a topo map with the points plotted but also a supplemental of a satellite view which showed the vegetation. On a ski mountain this was critical. Before the race Cliff had spent time transposing the points onto the supplemental an also choosing the optimum route. For those new to racing, it's hard to stress how critical having teammates this good is for success. Neither Jason or I had to think about this section before we arrived, and I knew that it would be 100% complete for me.
As a team we figured that we needed 7 points to guarantee the overall win (we had done some guessing on how many points The Rivals could have had). We got 71, and I believe that it was on the way to 72 that the rain really began. There were loads of teams around for the first parts of this leg as we got 72, 74, 78 and then hiked all the way up to 81, which seemed much higher than it was. At that point it was an absolute monsoon and brought back memories of the Longest Day. We had a very conservative mindset for this race, and after 81 the team voted to head back down the hill to finish the race, grabbing 4 more points on the way. We ran into Kara, Kate, and Derek from the Dev Squad and got the last 3 points right near them before running into the finish, thankfully in a break in the rain, with under 40 minutes left. We could have gotten at least 1, maybe 2 more points, but we didn't mind because we were sure that we had won... I was really excited to see Rebekah and the boys there, and we hung out for a few minutes before getting ourselves cleaned up and inside for a nice meal and the awards.
...Where we learned that we didn't actually win. We had been way too conservative at the end and lost the overall by 1 point to the Rivals. Turns out that we had come in tied to the final section, and they got one more point and finished just under the time limit. We had assumed that they missed a ton more points on the previous trek, but in fact they had gotten one more than us, and were remarkably close to us overnight despite never seeing or hearing each other. Still, it was a super fun race and we were happy to have gone back and forth with Joseph again after MSAR. I had a really good time at this race and would love to come back again. Kate and Cliff have become even better teammates over the years and I feel like we really fill in each others' gaps well - I'm super excited for racing with them at Nationals this year. And Jason was a wonderful teammate whom I felt very fortunate to finally have the chance to race with. He was always helping and was a great navigational partner. I hope to get the chance to race with him again next year!
