2024 USARA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP
Race report by Glen Lewis
The 2024 race season had been incredibly successful for us. Our results had been consistent (the season of 2nd places!), but even more so we had finally accomplished the goal of racing our own race which for years had been so much easier said than done for us. We just focused on ourselves and committed to be happy with our races as long as we were successful in executing our plan; we didn't tie our happiness to our placement. Before the race season really got underway we had finalized our team for this race. It would be a great chance to redeem ourselves from our pitiful performances at Nationals in Wisconsin and California (and Vermont for 2/3 of us).
My family joined me again for this race, and we left on Wednesday after school for the first half of our journey. We stayed in Cumberland, MD, which was just halfway through our 6 hour drive. The second half of the trip on Thursday morning gave us some views in West Virginia, but also a bit of weather as we prepped for the remnants of Hurricance Helene to roll through during the race on Friday. We checked into our rooms at Snowshoe and got some gear sorted. The resort sits at the top of the mountain in a lovely little village with it's own bike shop. I stopped by for a tiny tune-up and we later visited for some gloves and sealant - it was a luxury to have this shop so far from civilization. After we had our gear sorted, bikes ready to be dropped off, and paddle bag packed (we were prepping for the paddle but fully aware that it may be cancelled due to low water) it was time for the pre-race meeting, which took place in a conference center under one of the hotels. The nerves are always high, and there is a lot of superfluous information and questioning. This meeting, however, was useful on a few fronts. First, we were introduced to the huge media team, both from USARA and independently involved. Second, we learned about the "windows", which were pockets of points that Michelle and Liz from Adventure Addicts had designated as bonuses. If a team got those three CPs they would receive a bonus; from 1 to 3 points depending on the window. Finally, we were treated to a flyover of the course, which really highlighted the massive scope of the race. It was a loop, starting and ending at Snowshow but was still very linear, with each leg moving racers along the course. Of special note was the leg 2 MTB, The Queen Stage, with 41 miles projected to be completed in a fastest time of 7 hours. We knew just from that data that this course was going to be very physical and extremely long.
We finished the meeting and hustled to drop off our bikes and paddle bags down the road before getting a delicious dinner at a restaurant right in the village (turkey melt, salad, and a wonderful baked potato). We finalized our plans over dinner - continue to race our own race and trust each other. We made note of the fact that in most years the Nationals course is cleared by ~3 teams. With the hurricane bearing on us and knowing that we weren't one of the fastest 3 teams we had already decided that dropping points would be in our best interest. We headed back to the hotel to get some sleep with plans for an early morning. I got to see Evan and read to Noah before setting a relatively late alarm - 5:15. After dealing with an inconvenient spell of insomnia for most of the month, I was relieved to be able to go back to sleep after I woke up a few times. I was even more relieved to get out of bed at 5:15 and start the process of getting ready for the race. Kate and Cliff met me in the room to drop off their bags before we headed down to the conference center to get our maps at 6.
The walk downstairs revealed the weather that we would become familiar with - windy and very foggy. Some light rain, but it really wasn't that bad. The temps weren't terrible either - it was a bit chilly but we knew that we would warm up as the day progressed and we got moving.
We got our maps and grabbed a table next to WEDALI and got down to mapping. We went through the course one time and then worked through it again plotting an optimal route while keeping an eye on the fast estimates. We added them up to 28.5 hours, and quickly realized that we needed to drop points; there was no way that we would make it under 30 hours in a hurricane. We tossed around a lot of ideas for drops, but only ever focused on getting all of the windows and dropping single CPs to allow us to make that happen. We confident about our plan and were buoyed in that when we overheard WEDALI talking about dropping points(!). Our plan was thrown for a complete loop when Michelle announced abruptly (sometime after 7) that the paddle was being cancelled due to a lack of water. The alternate route was outlined in our route book and, essentially, changed the paddle to a bike. This made the course much shorter, but as we redid our estimates we realized that it was still going to be too big for us. We worked backwards from the final stage with cutoff times and knew that we weren't going to be able to make them all, so we planned on certain drops. This included the final 2 bike points (34 and 35), a 3 point drop on the big trek (21-23), potentially some bike points from 8-10 and CP 4 on the opening trek. We knew that time wouldn't be kind to us and getting ahead of the dropping game was the best choice. In retrospect we were shocked that so many teams planned to clear and also that the USARA media team was so focused on the teams who were full course despite the obvious need to drop.
Prologue - Village-O
We headed out to the village to start just before 9 and enjoyed a nice chat with Rib Mountain. We saw Rebekah, Noah and Evan just as we got the prologue maps, which showed a 9 point o course around the village. Thankfully we heard the reminder that we only had to get 5, or we would have been in a world of trouble. After a few final reminders the race started in a flurry. We started with P5, running with a few other teams including both Rootstock teams, significant only because we never saw either of them again! I got caught in some brambles on the way and had to ditch my gloves; never bothered putting them back on again. I noticed teams going in strange orders and checked the map - we had missed the part about finishing the prologue back at the start - oops! We pivoted to then get P4, P3, P2 and P1 before heading back to the start. Our order hadn't been ideal but we made the most of our stupid oversights. Our attention immediately turned towards the opening trek and we set off at a gentle run, passing a number of teams along the road.
Leg 1 - Trek
I was being really careful as we approached the maze of trails near CP1 but we found a chaotic bunch of teams and got pulled off, so it took us an extra minute or two to locate it. From there things got a touch quieter as we traveled to 2 and then 3, where we found teams converging at each point. We happened to see WEDALI and Bend early on, which was a fun wrinkle as we expected them to be the fastest teams out there. After 3 we made our first bold move to skip 4. It saved a bit of distance and got us out by ourselves for close to an hour as we traveled towards 5, which took a slight relocation, and then 6, where we were met by Bend and then another swarm of teams swarming the CP. There were more than I can remember, but I have a fond memory of Jesse Spangler slide tackling down a hill to get the flag and then seeing Amanda Bohley throw herself on the ground repeatedly as we excited - those guys weren't messing around. We knew that we wanted to get the first window (A,B,C) despite it being big and really tough navigationally, and we ended up following this hoard of teams in that direction. (Thinking back, our skipping of CP4 might have been too conservative. All of these teams near us had gotten it and then caught us. I wonder if getting that point with those teams would have pulled our speed up and gotten us back to where we eventually were).
There was a long line of racers heading towards A, and it was really tough to miss. From there we spread out quite a bit on the way to B, which looked to be the toughest point on the entire course with subtle terrain features and a useless clue (north end of old road bed). We planned on hitting a small terrain feature about 500m away but found ourselves in a wild bit of terrain, with rhododendron, pine, moss, and huge boulders. We were reduced to a crawl at times. I heard a teammate say that "the pines are the smoothest travel" which I don't think has ever been said before - it was that bad. After what felt like hours we found our terrain feature (a small reentrant) and turned west to find the terrain and vegetation easing up. We had a good handle on our location and our bearing but were shocked to see and here TanZ sneak up behind us. Seems they had found a balloon dragon in the woods and Mark was extremely excited. He assured us that he knew where he was (he made the map after all) which threw us off. When we corrected we found ourselves in a maze of road beds with no CPs. We eventually knew that we were north of the flag so we tried to refind ourselves by locating a high point, but the woods were too thick there. We ran into No Complaints who were equally as stumped, and we refocused ourselves on a ridge to the north of the flag. From there we began canvassing south and found FLX and TanZ again and slowly worked together to get back towards the flag area. Cliff pointed out a very minor turn in the topography which I was able to find on the map, and we soon located the CP! It had taken us an extra chunk of time, up to 45 minutes, but it was worth it to get the window. We called to the other teams, holding up to our end of the bargain to let them know when we got it, and a swarm of racers appeared from the woods. There must have been 5 teams, including Rev3, who were overjoyed to have found the flag. From there we traveled down to C, but mostly by ourselves. C itself took a little reorientation before hitting it, as the building on the map didn't seem to line up with what we saw in reality. From there it was a simple road run to a ski hill where we grabbed 7 en route to TA1. We passed Full Speed, No Mistakes on the climb. They were slightly ahead of us in the point series going into the race and we were happy to have eyes on them as we ended this stage.
The TA here was quick - we filled up water and put on jackets, expecting the rain to be pretty chilling. We set off after only a few minutes, planning to execute a modified version of our dropping plan.
Leg 2 - Bike (The Queen Stage)
We had decided that we should aim for one of CPs 8-10, and number 9 was the obvious choice as it was nearly all downhill from us. As we approached the trail to 9 though we saw TanZ coming down from 8, and I got a strong urge to hike up the hill to get it. It felt like a poor choice to leave a point only 400m away this early in the race. I was able to convince the team to trek up to get it. The trail was sloppy and we took a few minutes to locate the point when we got up. By the time we got back down I knew that it had taken much longer than I wanted (30min vs 10min). It would have been much faster just to ride there from the TA. We headed down to 9 from there. In all it was 2+km of riding a steady downhill on wet and muddy singletrack. I enjoyed it but knew that it would have been even better in dry conditions. My bike also began it's slow descent into crap here. I was having some major chainsuck and couldn't ride in my small ring. I ended up doing nearly all of this leg with some major cross-chaining.
Horrible for the drivetrain and efficiency, but otherwise we would have been immobile. My teammates did a good job riding through it all, and Cliff spotted a small bikewhack that got us out on gravel roads a bit faster. We descended all of the way out of Snowshoe before following a railroad grade to the abandoned town of Spruce. I'm sure it would have been pretty cool to explore, but it was just a bunch of empty fields to us. Right around here we entered into a pile of other teams with whom we leapfrogged for the next hour. We rode faster than all of them expect for TanZ, with whom we were well matched, but the trail wasn't conducive to much passing. It was sloppy singletrack (following an abandoned railroad) that was 95% rideable, it just took a lot of effort to keep going. As an example, we passed about 6 teams and finally were free to ride a bit faster until we stopped to take off our raincoats and grab a quick bite (eating while riding wasn't really possible for us) and were immediately passed by 7 teams again. Working our way back through this pack of racers took a toll on us timewise, as some would let us pass and some made us wait a good bit. We eventually popped down to 12 with TanZ, on a neat little pond on an island in a creek that we had to wade through, before getting away ahead of them on the way to 13. It took us quite a while to have gotten to that point, fighting through all of those teams on the singletrack to finally make it out to a gravel road where we would move much quicker.
The next pocket of points was in Mower Basin, a section of singletrack that the RDs were excited to send us to. We had a bit of a road climb to get up into this area, and we were excited to have a concentration of points and a bit of tighter nav to focus on. I made a stupid mistake early on, having missed a turn and inadvertently taking the points in a non-ideal order. It might have worked out in our favor, but we ended up doing 16, 15, 14 instead of the reverse order. Along the way here we had to get Cliff climatized and get some food in him, as he wasn't feeling well. We ended up doing 17 as an out and back before looping around to 18 and then 19. We had passed all of the teams near us despite our non-ideal order (TanZ and Adventure Source had been near us from the start of the leg), even catching Misguided whom we hadn't seen for some time. From 19 we had a descent down an exposed hill, and it was a pretty surreal experience. Very open (used to be a strip mine), whipping winds and rain, but also a glimpse of the just-setting sun to the west. I found this to be a very positive moment, as I was reminded that the periodic rain and steady winds were going to abate overnight. Ironic, as it began pouring again shortly thereafter. I found myself wanting to refill water but I elected to just keep moving towards the next window, which we arrived at just after dark. There was a mob of bikes and racers, and even a volunteer van as we set off for these 3 points. We chatted with Kara, Kate, and Derek for a minute, but it was clear that they were in a bad place. We got the first point on a rootstock after a slight recorrection before nailing the second. I told my teammates that I was feeling pretty low in here and needed to drink more water, but I was rather afraid of finishing my bladder. I had only consumed 2 liters of water from my bladder and less than 2 bike bottles since the leg began more than 6 hours prior, which is about half of what my body needs. They gave me the assurance that could finish what I had left because they had extra, but when I did I realized that I wouldn't want to refill in this nasty, strip mined region. While eating and drinking heavily we eventually found the final point of this window on a small pond. It had seemed easy on the map but was very technical on the ground. I finally finished my water on the approach back to our bikes. We had finished another window and were ready for what lie ahead, which seemed like a simple bike ride.
It was actually rather simple, but just took a little longer than expected to arrive at the TA. I was looking everywhere for filterable water but we found none for the first hour. We had very little left as a group and I was resorting to spraying the drops of my bottles into my mouth. We eventually arrived at a creek where we could finally fill up our BeFrees, only to realize that we had missed our turn by a short bit...we'll call that an intentional water stop! There had been some bike tracks that led us astray through a sketchy campsite, but we eventually got ourselves onto the correct-but-nasty trail that led us in the right direction. This was easy navigationally but just so much slower than I wanted. When we finally left the trail we had a short ride to a bridge which led us uphill into the TA. The Queen Stage was checked off (with all windows still intact) and we were happy to get off of the bikes for a while. We arrived in this TA around 11:30, which meant that we had to execute our plan on dropping the first 3 points. We filled up water and got some cookies, which were a bit much for my unsettled and dehydrated stomach despite my best efforts. The volunteers tried to convince us to not use too much water, which we politely ignored as we had been promised water refills at every TA and had planned our last 4 hours around these water jugs. Confident in our plan and ready for some technical foot navigation we set off into the night, unbeknownst to us making our race-changing move.
Why was it the race changing move? We had planned on getting CPs 21-23 if we got to TA by 10, but in reality that section took teams much longer. When we began this leg the TA list was rather full of teams, and although we didn't know it we actually passed nearly every one of those teams by the time we emerged from the woods after CPs 24-26.
We knew that we were skipping 21-23, so we set off towards 24 on a road, planning on following roads and trails to the CP. We turned onto a trail and then expected to see a doubletrack, but realized soon that it was missing. We hunted for a few minutes before deciding to bushwhack up to the saddle where the CP was. We passed the doubletrack once or twice on the way up but it was useless and overgrown, so we just kept heading up. As we approached we found a number of teams in the area, and my teammates did a good job of keeping us on the correct bearing to find the CP. From there we had to descend the better part of a km to a road. It took a little while but it felt productive the whole time. When we reached a creek I realized that the road I was looking for was actually marked the same way as the doubletrack to 24 that didn't exist. We crossed that creek to find a road that I knew would exist (it lead to the TA that we had just left) and from there found a good attackpoint for 25. We had to carefully work our way through the bog to the correct stream to find the CP, but we did it very smoothly. 26 was only 500m away, and we initially tried to follow the stream and cross the bog but stopped after only a few minutes, realizing that this might take an hour. We decided to go back to the wesst side of the bog and travel south until the bog popped out in front of us. The travel there was a touch thick at times but the navigation was simple, with a road to our right as a handrail. When the bog met us we could see the treeline that the point was on and traveled along it for what seemed like a while. I knew that we had to travel a bit further due to our speed, but I eventually felt like we should have seen it and wondered aloud if we were on the wrong treeline. We headed north for a moment before Cliff pointed out that we were clearly at the only actually treeline in the area. We turned around to go back to it and ran right into the flag! It was tucked into the trees and was not at all reflective. I felt bad for any team who tried to find this one.
We made a plan from here to contour around a hill towards 27. This plan was shot quickly as we got pushed out to the road again - we decided to just take it as far as we could. I was studying the map looking for a good attackpoint (there were none) when I noticed roadside that there was a trail that I was positive wouldn't have been present in real life based on how it was mapped. We delightedly followed it as weaved directly towards 27 where we sent Cliff the final way through the bog to punch. We followed that same trail out towards the Allegheny Trail - marked yellow on our maps and on blazes. We stumbled upon it and began following it, a bit slower than we had before but with some delight knowing that we had knocked off 4 very difficult points in only 2.5 hours. We methodically hunted down 28, which we found tucked away nicely in a small reentrant. It was amusing how accurate our navigation was - I had just said that it should be around this little corner when it popped out up ahead. We headed out from 28 towards a road where we took a minute for some self care before heading to 29, which was the easiest point to navigate to in this race- it was on a mandatory out and back road. We found it and immediately turned back. I was amused to read about others experiences with the wonderful views there - I was so focused that I thought I was in the middle of some dense forest...
We had to take a few more minutes here for some GI and foot issues, but eventually turned ourselves trailward towards 30. This time of the race (around 3AM) is always our most unproductive time. We struggle with efficiency, making slow stops and moving with a general malaise. We chatted with other teams but were still moving rather slowly. When we began to attack 30 by dropping down a hillside we made our most-preventable error of the race. We missed the huge reentrant (or just grazed the top of it) and had to reattack from the trail well beneath the CP. We might have wasted up to 30 minutes in this area by not being precise. Despite that we were actually a bit buoyed by our location, as all we had left was the river ford right before the TA. That came quickly enough, and it was chilly but refreshing, and a great way to rinse off all of the mud on our legs. We had been rained on occasionally for the first half of our trek but it was clear that the skies were done dumping. Our trek to TA was actually a bit circuitous, as we missed the trail and had to backtrack (don't know if I've missed a TA like that before), running into Rib Mountain here. We chatted for a minute as we found the trail, hearing about their struggles overnight. This was the first sign that we were doing well, because we had pegged them as one of the teams who would be well ahead of us. Our second sign was the TA sign in sheet that we saw a few moments later. We were the ~10th(ish) team into TA, meaning that we passed 20-30 teams on the trek. We also saw Kara and Kate here, and they shared with us about Derek's injury and how they had become unofficial. They offered us Derek's bike to replace my rusty pile of trash, but it was too small for me. I spent a few minutes cleaning my chain well and lubing it extensively, and thankfully that worked for quite some time. We again filled up with water and got out of this TA quickly, knowing that the sun would soon be rising on us and that we had a decent chunk of course still ahead. We had finally gotten back on pace with our time estimates but had to keep moving steadily to make our goals happen.
Leg 4 - Bike
We were feeling fantastic as we set off here, with a short leg ahead of us. The road was flat and we were able to cruise a handful of km before hitting some undulating roads into the next window. The route book described this as another abandoned town, but we saw no signs of it anywhere. We passed WEDALI leaving this window, which made us wonder if it was longer than advertised, as we had seen their times on the TA sheet. We resolved to be a bit careful to make sure that we didn't mess ourselves up here. My plan was to get H first, but I didn't see the road that led to it so we moved on to G, but I couldn't find a good attackpoint, so we moved on to I instead! This was easy to find, which we did after taking a bathroom break and seeing Rev3 and Ozark. We wouldn't realize until after the race that Ozark was doing so well. I asked Spangler how his Rev3 team was doing, and he responded that they were still full course but "...tired...". I didn't have any reflectors but it wasn't a problem. We returned to our bikes and found a good attackpoint for G, based on a bend that we had spotted when we passed the first time. We must have passed Ozark as we dropped down, because their bikes were there the entire time. When we came back up they had been joined by 3-4 other teams. The sun was rising and we were bordering on not needing lights. We moved quickly down to H where I found the road bed that I wanted, but after lugging our bikes up to it realized that it was a mistake as it was out of the way. We saw Rib's bikes with ours here, but watched them walking out on the road instead, which should have been our first clue that we had a slow attack. The point was slow to find even without any errors, as it was on a subtle reentrant that we had to be careful to spot. We did just as we had full daylight, and hustled back to our bikes with a bunch of teams in view, including Women of AR. We biked out of the window, passing ThisAbility on the way, before nabbing one more CP on a railtrail and then heading into the town of Durbin to the next TA. My brain was getting tired because I was insistent that we had missed the TA before Cliff calmed me down and pointed out the dozens of racers flowing out of it...
This was supposed to be the paddle put in and was left as a TA even though we wouldn't be switching disciplines. We signed in and out quickly while I grabbed a walking taco - delicious!!! Our original plan had us just sprinting out, but we decided to unload extra weight here into our paddle bags. Getting rid of the saddle bag and the wet junk in my pack was wonderful - I probably dropped 2-3 pounds here.
Leg 5 - Bike (+ Trek)
The bike down to the next TA (and final trekking window) was simple and on roads. I was so happy to still have a functioning bike as we flew past team after team here, moving really well on the ups and downs. The sun had come up and the weather was perfect. We all felt great in our shorts and t-shirts. Kate and I got into the fun habit of noticing all of the suffering racers that we passed wearing full rain kit - one even had a bavaclava! I wished for all of them that they would just take of the layers - they would move so much faster!! The final gravel stretch into the TA was a fast downhill where we saw a load of racers walking up - we knew that we would have to account for that in our final leg. I was shocked how many teams we had passed on this stretch. Between the two TAs we might have seen 20 teams.
This final TA gave us access to points J, K, and L. The terrain looked big on the map but we knew that we could do it if we pushed. We still had time before our self-imposed cutoff of 11AM. We pushed hard uphill to a ridge towards J, where we saw WEDALI emerge from the mist. It was really cool to see them on the race course a few times here. Once we got up towards J the woods opened up and made the section really easy to navigate. We had a blast moving quickly and making choices based on terrain features that we could see 500+ meters away. We moved from J to K and then over towards L, where we overshot and had to reattack. The pressure of the timing and tiredness from the race seemed to be getting to me; my teammates let me know that I was being short with them, even though I wasn't trying. It was helpful to hear that so we could be more intentional about helping and supporting over the final 4 hours. We had saved 33 and 32 for the end in case there wasn't time, but we moved so we that we gave them a shot on the way back in to TA. 33 was really easy to find, although the epunch didn't work. 32 looked easy on the map but there were a lot of features not shown in the mapped contours and we took way too long moving in that direction. We resolved to not hunt for 32 but just get out to the trail, which we ended up doing. Once we got to the trail I could tell where 32 would be, but time was bleeding and we didn't go back to get it. We ran back into TA, making a plan to get moving as quickly out of there as we could, which we did after grabbing some water.
The gravel road that teams had been walking up was our first challenge, and we pushed hard to ride up, with Cliff doing some towing and me carrying an extra pack. The team was digging deep and still passing others, which felt great. We saw No Complaints riding down into the TA here, so we knew that we were ahead of them. No sooner after we had gotten up that gravel road and traveled a few minutes on pavement did we have to turn and begin our largest climb, 1400' in 3-4km. We kept it steady, moving as efficiently as we could. We chatted with Odyssey for a bit and then Rib as we went back and forth. With a functioning bike I was able to happy to help the team and tow for a bit. There were some sections of the road that looked like a wall, but we kept our heads down and pedaled the entire thing, albeit much slower than we wanted. We had pulled ahead of Odyssey and Rib and were feeling fast and ready to make a run at the final window despite the dwindling time. It took the better part of an hour, and we had just over 2 left when we made it to the top. We began pushing harder and harder, although it was tough on the road surface here. What I had hoped would be gravel was muddy, rocky, and wet doubletrack. Fortunately the navigation was simple, and we grabbed M before riding up to the observation platform at Bald Knob to get N. The view was wonderful but we didn't take the time to look; we had less than 90 minutes left. We returned back along the railroad tracks, just missing the Cass Scenic Railroad (we had heard it coming up the mountain). The final point to get was N. I assured my teammates at least 5 times that we needed to get it and that we had time to do so. I took the lead and was ecstatic when I spotted it in the distance, knowing that we had cleared all of the windows and were now heading back to the finish line. Our plan had been executed really well, and all we had left to do was to Snowshoe Village on time. We had been chatting about what we assumed other teams performances' were like and knew that we had a shot at 3rd overall if we hurried home.
The ride into snowshoe was down for a bit, but still on the rocky, muddy, wet trail. I heard afterwards that Kate had fallen and injured her eye, but she was so tough that I never even noticed. With the time ticking so quickly I was again relieved to be flipping my map back over to map 1 when we reentered Snowshoe where we had left almost 24 hours prior. The final push back was mostly uphill; I tried to offer a tow but my chainsuck came back at the worst time. I threw the tow back on Cliff's bike and was left to verbally motivate the rest of way home. We saw No Complaints again right after we pushed up a muddy hill and passed TA 1, where I knew that we could make it. The time kept adding up in my head but it was still incredibly stressful because the road never pitched downhill - it felt 100% up!! We dodged traffic and kept our legs moving, finally getting sight of the village with less than 10 minutes left. We navigated through the roads, buildings and sidewalks at a wild speed, coming into the village center and finishing with less than 5 minutes left! We were overcome with some many emotions. For me it was pure joy, having pushed so hard at the end to make it on time. I had set my sights on this race as a goal for the season, hoping that with a renewed racing mindset I could shake whatever demons kept haunting me in the biggest race of the year. In those joyous moments I was so happy to see Rebekah, Noah and Evan - they had been waiting out for a while for us because our tracker had been so intermittent and they didn't want to miss us finish.
Post Race
We chatted with others for quite a while. We heard about Roostocks races and also got some intel that ThisAbility had raced out of their minds. Rev3 told us that they had dropped the last trekking window, which brought our scores much closer than we had expected. It was neat to hear that teams outside of the typical ones that had such strong races. Garrison was giving us some insight into which teams were successful and let on that we were the only team besides WEDALI to have cleared each window. He also told us that no one had any clue what we had be doing, so our finish and score was surprising to everyone. I got some delicious pizza before heading to the bike wash station with Noah. After getting that cleaned up we headed back to the room to get showered. This shower seemed to hurt more than most, with some chaffing and cuts that I had ignored for hours coming back to (literally) burn me. Cliff, Kate and I sat around and looked at the scores and slowly came to the realization that we had done really well. We kept laughing at us being on a list with only WEDALI as teams to have gotten the windows. The strategy had seemed so obvious to us at the start, but clearly wasn't to everyone. I joked with Cliff that we should get the Peter Jolles award for it.
We headed back out for awards and met my family there, directly from the pool. The awards were an excellent culmination of our season and our weekend. We received the Points Trophy, having comfortably beaten Full Speed, No Mistakes in order to pass them for 1st place. We also received the Peter Jolles Award for our use of the windows, which was a really fun recognition of the strategy that was at play during the race. To be honest, I think part of that award was that our score snuck up on everyone at the end of the race and there was so much surprise surrounding our performance. Finally, we were announced as 3rd place premier (and overall) which is a truly wild result that I still haven't wrapped my mind around. In 2017 I had set a goal of one day getting a plaque at Nationals, so getting two in one year was not expected.
This race will end up staying with me for a long time. Outside of the result, we stuck to our strategy so firmly in a way that made me really proud. We weren't perfect (and aren't ever), we made errors (lots of mini-inefficiencies), and we bickered (especially at the end), but we had so, so much fun and blew ourselves away with what we were able to accomplish. In January I set my A goal for the season as top-5 at Nationals. Being able to achieve that with Cliff and Kate was more than I could have ever hoped for.
The 2024 race season had been incredibly successful for us. Our results had been consistent (the season of 2nd places!), but even more so we had finally accomplished the goal of racing our own race which for years had been so much easier said than done for us. We just focused on ourselves and committed to be happy with our races as long as we were successful in executing our plan; we didn't tie our happiness to our placement. Before the race season really got underway we had finalized our team for this race. It would be a great chance to redeem ourselves from our pitiful performances at Nationals in Wisconsin and California (and Vermont for 2/3 of us).
My family joined me again for this race, and we left on Wednesday after school for the first half of our journey. We stayed in Cumberland, MD, which was just halfway through our 6 hour drive. The second half of the trip on Thursday morning gave us some views in West Virginia, but also a bit of weather as we prepped for the remnants of Hurricance Helene to roll through during the race on Friday. We checked into our rooms at Snowshoe and got some gear sorted. The resort sits at the top of the mountain in a lovely little village with it's own bike shop. I stopped by for a tiny tune-up and we later visited for some gloves and sealant - it was a luxury to have this shop so far from civilization. After we had our gear sorted, bikes ready to be dropped off, and paddle bag packed (we were prepping for the paddle but fully aware that it may be cancelled due to low water) it was time for the pre-race meeting, which took place in a conference center under one of the hotels. The nerves are always high, and there is a lot of superfluous information and questioning. This meeting, however, was useful on a few fronts. First, we were introduced to the huge media team, both from USARA and independently involved. Second, we learned about the "windows", which were pockets of points that Michelle and Liz from Adventure Addicts had designated as bonuses. If a team got those three CPs they would receive a bonus; from 1 to 3 points depending on the window. Finally, we were treated to a flyover of the course, which really highlighted the massive scope of the race. It was a loop, starting and ending at Snowshow but was still very linear, with each leg moving racers along the course. Of special note was the leg 2 MTB, The Queen Stage, with 41 miles projected to be completed in a fastest time of 7 hours. We knew just from that data that this course was going to be very physical and extremely long.
We finished the meeting and hustled to drop off our bikes and paddle bags down the road before getting a delicious dinner at a restaurant right in the village (turkey melt, salad, and a wonderful baked potato). We finalized our plans over dinner - continue to race our own race and trust each other. We made note of the fact that in most years the Nationals course is cleared by ~3 teams. With the hurricane bearing on us and knowing that we weren't one of the fastest 3 teams we had already decided that dropping points would be in our best interest. We headed back to the hotel to get some sleep with plans for an early morning. I got to see Evan and read to Noah before setting a relatively late alarm - 5:15. After dealing with an inconvenient spell of insomnia for most of the month, I was relieved to be able to go back to sleep after I woke up a few times. I was even more relieved to get out of bed at 5:15 and start the process of getting ready for the race. Kate and Cliff met me in the room to drop off their bags before we headed down to the conference center to get our maps at 6.
The walk downstairs revealed the weather that we would become familiar with - windy and very foggy. Some light rain, but it really wasn't that bad. The temps weren't terrible either - it was a bit chilly but we knew that we would warm up as the day progressed and we got moving.
We got our maps and grabbed a table next to WEDALI and got down to mapping. We went through the course one time and then worked through it again plotting an optimal route while keeping an eye on the fast estimates. We added them up to 28.5 hours, and quickly realized that we needed to drop points; there was no way that we would make it under 30 hours in a hurricane. We tossed around a lot of ideas for drops, but only ever focused on getting all of the windows and dropping single CPs to allow us to make that happen. We confident about our plan and were buoyed in that when we overheard WEDALI talking about dropping points(!). Our plan was thrown for a complete loop when Michelle announced abruptly (sometime after 7) that the paddle was being cancelled due to a lack of water. The alternate route was outlined in our route book and, essentially, changed the paddle to a bike. This made the course much shorter, but as we redid our estimates we realized that it was still going to be too big for us. We worked backwards from the final stage with cutoff times and knew that we weren't going to be able to make them all, so we planned on certain drops. This included the final 2 bike points (34 and 35), a 3 point drop on the big trek (21-23), potentially some bike points from 8-10 and CP 4 on the opening trek. We knew that time wouldn't be kind to us and getting ahead of the dropping game was the best choice. In retrospect we were shocked that so many teams planned to clear and also that the USARA media team was so focused on the teams who were full course despite the obvious need to drop.
Prologue - Village-O
We headed out to the village to start just before 9 and enjoyed a nice chat with Rib Mountain. We saw Rebekah, Noah and Evan just as we got the prologue maps, which showed a 9 point o course around the village. Thankfully we heard the reminder that we only had to get 5, or we would have been in a world of trouble. After a few final reminders the race started in a flurry. We started with P5, running with a few other teams including both Rootstock teams, significant only because we never saw either of them again! I got caught in some brambles on the way and had to ditch my gloves; never bothered putting them back on again. I noticed teams going in strange orders and checked the map - we had missed the part about finishing the prologue back at the start - oops! We pivoted to then get P4, P3, P2 and P1 before heading back to the start. Our order hadn't been ideal but we made the most of our stupid oversights. Our attention immediately turned towards the opening trek and we set off at a gentle run, passing a number of teams along the road.
Leg 1 - Trek
I was being really careful as we approached the maze of trails near CP1 but we found a chaotic bunch of teams and got pulled off, so it took us an extra minute or two to locate it. From there things got a touch quieter as we traveled to 2 and then 3, where we found teams converging at each point. We happened to see WEDALI and Bend early on, which was a fun wrinkle as we expected them to be the fastest teams out there. After 3 we made our first bold move to skip 4. It saved a bit of distance and got us out by ourselves for close to an hour as we traveled towards 5, which took a slight relocation, and then 6, where we were met by Bend and then another swarm of teams swarming the CP. There were more than I can remember, but I have a fond memory of Jesse Spangler slide tackling down a hill to get the flag and then seeing Amanda Bohley throw herself on the ground repeatedly as we excited - those guys weren't messing around. We knew that we wanted to get the first window (A,B,C) despite it being big and really tough navigationally, and we ended up following this hoard of teams in that direction. (Thinking back, our skipping of CP4 might have been too conservative. All of these teams near us had gotten it and then caught us. I wonder if getting that point with those teams would have pulled our speed up and gotten us back to where we eventually were).
There was a long line of racers heading towards A, and it was really tough to miss. From there we spread out quite a bit on the way to B, which looked to be the toughest point on the entire course with subtle terrain features and a useless clue (north end of old road bed). We planned on hitting a small terrain feature about 500m away but found ourselves in a wild bit of terrain, with rhododendron, pine, moss, and huge boulders. We were reduced to a crawl at times. I heard a teammate say that "the pines are the smoothest travel" which I don't think has ever been said before - it was that bad. After what felt like hours we found our terrain feature (a small reentrant) and turned west to find the terrain and vegetation easing up. We had a good handle on our location and our bearing but were shocked to see and here TanZ sneak up behind us. Seems they had found a balloon dragon in the woods and Mark was extremely excited. He assured us that he knew where he was (he made the map after all) which threw us off. When we corrected we found ourselves in a maze of road beds with no CPs. We eventually knew that we were north of the flag so we tried to refind ourselves by locating a high point, but the woods were too thick there. We ran into No Complaints who were equally as stumped, and we refocused ourselves on a ridge to the north of the flag. From there we began canvassing south and found FLX and TanZ again and slowly worked together to get back towards the flag area. Cliff pointed out a very minor turn in the topography which I was able to find on the map, and we soon located the CP! It had taken us an extra chunk of time, up to 45 minutes, but it was worth it to get the window. We called to the other teams, holding up to our end of the bargain to let them know when we got it, and a swarm of racers appeared from the woods. There must have been 5 teams, including Rev3, who were overjoyed to have found the flag. From there we traveled down to C, but mostly by ourselves. C itself took a little reorientation before hitting it, as the building on the map didn't seem to line up with what we saw in reality. From there it was a simple road run to a ski hill where we grabbed 7 en route to TA1. We passed Full Speed, No Mistakes on the climb. They were slightly ahead of us in the point series going into the race and we were happy to have eyes on them as we ended this stage.
The TA here was quick - we filled up water and put on jackets, expecting the rain to be pretty chilling. We set off after only a few minutes, planning to execute a modified version of our dropping plan.
Leg 2 - Bike (The Queen Stage)
We had decided that we should aim for one of CPs 8-10, and number 9 was the obvious choice as it was nearly all downhill from us. As we approached the trail to 9 though we saw TanZ coming down from 8, and I got a strong urge to hike up the hill to get it. It felt like a poor choice to leave a point only 400m away this early in the race. I was able to convince the team to trek up to get it. The trail was sloppy and we took a few minutes to locate the point when we got up. By the time we got back down I knew that it had taken much longer than I wanted (30min vs 10min). It would have been much faster just to ride there from the TA. We headed down to 9 from there. In all it was 2+km of riding a steady downhill on wet and muddy singletrack. I enjoyed it but knew that it would have been even better in dry conditions. My bike also began it's slow descent into crap here. I was having some major chainsuck and couldn't ride in my small ring. I ended up doing nearly all of this leg with some major cross-chaining.
Horrible for the drivetrain and efficiency, but otherwise we would have been immobile. My teammates did a good job riding through it all, and Cliff spotted a small bikewhack that got us out on gravel roads a bit faster. We descended all of the way out of Snowshoe before following a railroad grade to the abandoned town of Spruce. I'm sure it would have been pretty cool to explore, but it was just a bunch of empty fields to us. Right around here we entered into a pile of other teams with whom we leapfrogged for the next hour. We rode faster than all of them expect for TanZ, with whom we were well matched, but the trail wasn't conducive to much passing. It was sloppy singletrack (following an abandoned railroad) that was 95% rideable, it just took a lot of effort to keep going. As an example, we passed about 6 teams and finally were free to ride a bit faster until we stopped to take off our raincoats and grab a quick bite (eating while riding wasn't really possible for us) and were immediately passed by 7 teams again. Working our way back through this pack of racers took a toll on us timewise, as some would let us pass and some made us wait a good bit. We eventually popped down to 12 with TanZ, on a neat little pond on an island in a creek that we had to wade through, before getting away ahead of them on the way to 13. It took us quite a while to have gotten to that point, fighting through all of those teams on the singletrack to finally make it out to a gravel road where we would move much quicker.
The next pocket of points was in Mower Basin, a section of singletrack that the RDs were excited to send us to. We had a bit of a road climb to get up into this area, and we were excited to have a concentration of points and a bit of tighter nav to focus on. I made a stupid mistake early on, having missed a turn and inadvertently taking the points in a non-ideal order. It might have worked out in our favor, but we ended up doing 16, 15, 14 instead of the reverse order. Along the way here we had to get Cliff climatized and get some food in him, as he wasn't feeling well. We ended up doing 17 as an out and back before looping around to 18 and then 19. We had passed all of the teams near us despite our non-ideal order (TanZ and Adventure Source had been near us from the start of the leg), even catching Misguided whom we hadn't seen for some time. From 19 we had a descent down an exposed hill, and it was a pretty surreal experience. Very open (used to be a strip mine), whipping winds and rain, but also a glimpse of the just-setting sun to the west. I found this to be a very positive moment, as I was reminded that the periodic rain and steady winds were going to abate overnight. Ironic, as it began pouring again shortly thereafter. I found myself wanting to refill water but I elected to just keep moving towards the next window, which we arrived at just after dark. There was a mob of bikes and racers, and even a volunteer van as we set off for these 3 points. We chatted with Kara, Kate, and Derek for a minute, but it was clear that they were in a bad place. We got the first point on a rootstock after a slight recorrection before nailing the second. I told my teammates that I was feeling pretty low in here and needed to drink more water, but I was rather afraid of finishing my bladder. I had only consumed 2 liters of water from my bladder and less than 2 bike bottles since the leg began more than 6 hours prior, which is about half of what my body needs. They gave me the assurance that could finish what I had left because they had extra, but when I did I realized that I wouldn't want to refill in this nasty, strip mined region. While eating and drinking heavily we eventually found the final point of this window on a small pond. It had seemed easy on the map but was very technical on the ground. I finally finished my water on the approach back to our bikes. We had finished another window and were ready for what lie ahead, which seemed like a simple bike ride.
It was actually rather simple, but just took a little longer than expected to arrive at the TA. I was looking everywhere for filterable water but we found none for the first hour. We had very little left as a group and I was resorting to spraying the drops of my bottles into my mouth. We eventually arrived at a creek where we could finally fill up our BeFrees, only to realize that we had missed our turn by a short bit...we'll call that an intentional water stop! There had been some bike tracks that led us astray through a sketchy campsite, but we eventually got ourselves onto the correct-but-nasty trail that led us in the right direction. This was easy navigationally but just so much slower than I wanted. When we finally left the trail we had a short ride to a bridge which led us uphill into the TA. The Queen Stage was checked off (with all windows still intact) and we were happy to get off of the bikes for a while. We arrived in this TA around 11:30, which meant that we had to execute our plan on dropping the first 3 points. We filled up water and got some cookies, which were a bit much for my unsettled and dehydrated stomach despite my best efforts. The volunteers tried to convince us to not use too much water, which we politely ignored as we had been promised water refills at every TA and had planned our last 4 hours around these water jugs. Confident in our plan and ready for some technical foot navigation we set off into the night, unbeknownst to us making our race-changing move.
Why was it the race changing move? We had planned on getting CPs 21-23 if we got to TA by 10, but in reality that section took teams much longer. When we began this leg the TA list was rather full of teams, and although we didn't know it we actually passed nearly every one of those teams by the time we emerged from the woods after CPs 24-26.
We knew that we were skipping 21-23, so we set off towards 24 on a road, planning on following roads and trails to the CP. We turned onto a trail and then expected to see a doubletrack, but realized soon that it was missing. We hunted for a few minutes before deciding to bushwhack up to the saddle where the CP was. We passed the doubletrack once or twice on the way up but it was useless and overgrown, so we just kept heading up. As we approached we found a number of teams in the area, and my teammates did a good job of keeping us on the correct bearing to find the CP. From there we had to descend the better part of a km to a road. It took a little while but it felt productive the whole time. When we reached a creek I realized that the road I was looking for was actually marked the same way as the doubletrack to 24 that didn't exist. We crossed that creek to find a road that I knew would exist (it lead to the TA that we had just left) and from there found a good attackpoint for 25. We had to carefully work our way through the bog to the correct stream to find the CP, but we did it very smoothly. 26 was only 500m away, and we initially tried to follow the stream and cross the bog but stopped after only a few minutes, realizing that this might take an hour. We decided to go back to the wesst side of the bog and travel south until the bog popped out in front of us. The travel there was a touch thick at times but the navigation was simple, with a road to our right as a handrail. When the bog met us we could see the treeline that the point was on and traveled along it for what seemed like a while. I knew that we had to travel a bit further due to our speed, but I eventually felt like we should have seen it and wondered aloud if we were on the wrong treeline. We headed north for a moment before Cliff pointed out that we were clearly at the only actually treeline in the area. We turned around to go back to it and ran right into the flag! It was tucked into the trees and was not at all reflective. I felt bad for any team who tried to find this one.
We made a plan from here to contour around a hill towards 27. This plan was shot quickly as we got pushed out to the road again - we decided to just take it as far as we could. I was studying the map looking for a good attackpoint (there were none) when I noticed roadside that there was a trail that I was positive wouldn't have been present in real life based on how it was mapped. We delightedly followed it as weaved directly towards 27 where we sent Cliff the final way through the bog to punch. We followed that same trail out towards the Allegheny Trail - marked yellow on our maps and on blazes. We stumbled upon it and began following it, a bit slower than we had before but with some delight knowing that we had knocked off 4 very difficult points in only 2.5 hours. We methodically hunted down 28, which we found tucked away nicely in a small reentrant. It was amusing how accurate our navigation was - I had just said that it should be around this little corner when it popped out up ahead. We headed out from 28 towards a road where we took a minute for some self care before heading to 29, which was the easiest point to navigate to in this race- it was on a mandatory out and back road. We found it and immediately turned back. I was amused to read about others experiences with the wonderful views there - I was so focused that I thought I was in the middle of some dense forest...
We had to take a few more minutes here for some GI and foot issues, but eventually turned ourselves trailward towards 30. This time of the race (around 3AM) is always our most unproductive time. We struggle with efficiency, making slow stops and moving with a general malaise. We chatted with other teams but were still moving rather slowly. When we began to attack 30 by dropping down a hillside we made our most-preventable error of the race. We missed the huge reentrant (or just grazed the top of it) and had to reattack from the trail well beneath the CP. We might have wasted up to 30 minutes in this area by not being precise. Despite that we were actually a bit buoyed by our location, as all we had left was the river ford right before the TA. That came quickly enough, and it was chilly but refreshing, and a great way to rinse off all of the mud on our legs. We had been rained on occasionally for the first half of our trek but it was clear that the skies were done dumping. Our trek to TA was actually a bit circuitous, as we missed the trail and had to backtrack (don't know if I've missed a TA like that before), running into Rib Mountain here. We chatted for a minute as we found the trail, hearing about their struggles overnight. This was the first sign that we were doing well, because we had pegged them as one of the teams who would be well ahead of us. Our second sign was the TA sign in sheet that we saw a few moments later. We were the ~10th(ish) team into TA, meaning that we passed 20-30 teams on the trek. We also saw Kara and Kate here, and they shared with us about Derek's injury and how they had become unofficial. They offered us Derek's bike to replace my rusty pile of trash, but it was too small for me. I spent a few minutes cleaning my chain well and lubing it extensively, and thankfully that worked for quite some time. We again filled up with water and got out of this TA quickly, knowing that the sun would soon be rising on us and that we had a decent chunk of course still ahead. We had finally gotten back on pace with our time estimates but had to keep moving steadily to make our goals happen.
Leg 4 - Bike
We were feeling fantastic as we set off here, with a short leg ahead of us. The road was flat and we were able to cruise a handful of km before hitting some undulating roads into the next window. The route book described this as another abandoned town, but we saw no signs of it anywhere. We passed WEDALI leaving this window, which made us wonder if it was longer than advertised, as we had seen their times on the TA sheet. We resolved to be a bit careful to make sure that we didn't mess ourselves up here. My plan was to get H first, but I didn't see the road that led to it so we moved on to G, but I couldn't find a good attackpoint, so we moved on to I instead! This was easy to find, which we did after taking a bathroom break and seeing Rev3 and Ozark. We wouldn't realize until after the race that Ozark was doing so well. I asked Spangler how his Rev3 team was doing, and he responded that they were still full course but "...tired...". I didn't have any reflectors but it wasn't a problem. We returned to our bikes and found a good attackpoint for G, based on a bend that we had spotted when we passed the first time. We must have passed Ozark as we dropped down, because their bikes were there the entire time. When we came back up they had been joined by 3-4 other teams. The sun was rising and we were bordering on not needing lights. We moved quickly down to H where I found the road bed that I wanted, but after lugging our bikes up to it realized that it was a mistake as it was out of the way. We saw Rib's bikes with ours here, but watched them walking out on the road instead, which should have been our first clue that we had a slow attack. The point was slow to find even without any errors, as it was on a subtle reentrant that we had to be careful to spot. We did just as we had full daylight, and hustled back to our bikes with a bunch of teams in view, including Women of AR. We biked out of the window, passing ThisAbility on the way, before nabbing one more CP on a railtrail and then heading into the town of Durbin to the next TA. My brain was getting tired because I was insistent that we had missed the TA before Cliff calmed me down and pointed out the dozens of racers flowing out of it...
This was supposed to be the paddle put in and was left as a TA even though we wouldn't be switching disciplines. We signed in and out quickly while I grabbed a walking taco - delicious!!! Our original plan had us just sprinting out, but we decided to unload extra weight here into our paddle bags. Getting rid of the saddle bag and the wet junk in my pack was wonderful - I probably dropped 2-3 pounds here.
Leg 5 - Bike (+ Trek)
The bike down to the next TA (and final trekking window) was simple and on roads. I was so happy to still have a functioning bike as we flew past team after team here, moving really well on the ups and downs. The sun had come up and the weather was perfect. We all felt great in our shorts and t-shirts. Kate and I got into the fun habit of noticing all of the suffering racers that we passed wearing full rain kit - one even had a bavaclava! I wished for all of them that they would just take of the layers - they would move so much faster!! The final gravel stretch into the TA was a fast downhill where we saw a load of racers walking up - we knew that we would have to account for that in our final leg. I was shocked how many teams we had passed on this stretch. Between the two TAs we might have seen 20 teams.
This final TA gave us access to points J, K, and L. The terrain looked big on the map but we knew that we could do it if we pushed. We still had time before our self-imposed cutoff of 11AM. We pushed hard uphill to a ridge towards J, where we saw WEDALI emerge from the mist. It was really cool to see them on the race course a few times here. Once we got up towards J the woods opened up and made the section really easy to navigate. We had a blast moving quickly and making choices based on terrain features that we could see 500+ meters away. We moved from J to K and then over towards L, where we overshot and had to reattack. The pressure of the timing and tiredness from the race seemed to be getting to me; my teammates let me know that I was being short with them, even though I wasn't trying. It was helpful to hear that so we could be more intentional about helping and supporting over the final 4 hours. We had saved 33 and 32 for the end in case there wasn't time, but we moved so we that we gave them a shot on the way back in to TA. 33 was really easy to find, although the epunch didn't work. 32 looked easy on the map but there were a lot of features not shown in the mapped contours and we took way too long moving in that direction. We resolved to not hunt for 32 but just get out to the trail, which we ended up doing. Once we got to the trail I could tell where 32 would be, but time was bleeding and we didn't go back to get it. We ran back into TA, making a plan to get moving as quickly out of there as we could, which we did after grabbing some water.
The gravel road that teams had been walking up was our first challenge, and we pushed hard to ride up, with Cliff doing some towing and me carrying an extra pack. The team was digging deep and still passing others, which felt great. We saw No Complaints riding down into the TA here, so we knew that we were ahead of them. No sooner after we had gotten up that gravel road and traveled a few minutes on pavement did we have to turn and begin our largest climb, 1400' in 3-4km. We kept it steady, moving as efficiently as we could. We chatted with Odyssey for a bit and then Rib as we went back and forth. With a functioning bike I was able to happy to help the team and tow for a bit. There were some sections of the road that looked like a wall, but we kept our heads down and pedaled the entire thing, albeit much slower than we wanted. We had pulled ahead of Odyssey and Rib and were feeling fast and ready to make a run at the final window despite the dwindling time. It took the better part of an hour, and we had just over 2 left when we made it to the top. We began pushing harder and harder, although it was tough on the road surface here. What I had hoped would be gravel was muddy, rocky, and wet doubletrack. Fortunately the navigation was simple, and we grabbed M before riding up to the observation platform at Bald Knob to get N. The view was wonderful but we didn't take the time to look; we had less than 90 minutes left. We returned back along the railroad tracks, just missing the Cass Scenic Railroad (we had heard it coming up the mountain). The final point to get was N. I assured my teammates at least 5 times that we needed to get it and that we had time to do so. I took the lead and was ecstatic when I spotted it in the distance, knowing that we had cleared all of the windows and were now heading back to the finish line. Our plan had been executed really well, and all we had left to do was to Snowshoe Village on time. We had been chatting about what we assumed other teams performances' were like and knew that we had a shot at 3rd overall if we hurried home.
The ride into snowshoe was down for a bit, but still on the rocky, muddy, wet trail. I heard afterwards that Kate had fallen and injured her eye, but she was so tough that I never even noticed. With the time ticking so quickly I was again relieved to be flipping my map back over to map 1 when we reentered Snowshoe where we had left almost 24 hours prior. The final push back was mostly uphill; I tried to offer a tow but my chainsuck came back at the worst time. I threw the tow back on Cliff's bike and was left to verbally motivate the rest of way home. We saw No Complaints again right after we pushed up a muddy hill and passed TA 1, where I knew that we could make it. The time kept adding up in my head but it was still incredibly stressful because the road never pitched downhill - it felt 100% up!! We dodged traffic and kept our legs moving, finally getting sight of the village with less than 10 minutes left. We navigated through the roads, buildings and sidewalks at a wild speed, coming into the village center and finishing with less than 5 minutes left! We were overcome with some many emotions. For me it was pure joy, having pushed so hard at the end to make it on time. I had set my sights on this race as a goal for the season, hoping that with a renewed racing mindset I could shake whatever demons kept haunting me in the biggest race of the year. In those joyous moments I was so happy to see Rebekah, Noah and Evan - they had been waiting out for a while for us because our tracker had been so intermittent and they didn't want to miss us finish.
Post Race
We chatted with others for quite a while. We heard about Roostocks races and also got some intel that ThisAbility had raced out of their minds. Rev3 told us that they had dropped the last trekking window, which brought our scores much closer than we had expected. It was neat to hear that teams outside of the typical ones that had such strong races. Garrison was giving us some insight into which teams were successful and let on that we were the only team besides WEDALI to have cleared each window. He also told us that no one had any clue what we had be doing, so our finish and score was surprising to everyone. I got some delicious pizza before heading to the bike wash station with Noah. After getting that cleaned up we headed back to the room to get showered. This shower seemed to hurt more than most, with some chaffing and cuts that I had ignored for hours coming back to (literally) burn me. Cliff, Kate and I sat around and looked at the scores and slowly came to the realization that we had done really well. We kept laughing at us being on a list with only WEDALI as teams to have gotten the windows. The strategy had seemed so obvious to us at the start, but clearly wasn't to everyone. I joked with Cliff that we should get the Peter Jolles award for it.
We headed back out for awards and met my family there, directly from the pool. The awards were an excellent culmination of our season and our weekend. We received the Points Trophy, having comfortably beaten Full Speed, No Mistakes in order to pass them for 1st place. We also received the Peter Jolles Award for our use of the windows, which was a really fun recognition of the strategy that was at play during the race. To be honest, I think part of that award was that our score snuck up on everyone at the end of the race and there was so much surprise surrounding our performance. Finally, we were announced as 3rd place premier (and overall) which is a truly wild result that I still haven't wrapped my mind around. In 2017 I had set a goal of one day getting a plaque at Nationals, so getting two in one year was not expected.
This race will end up staying with me for a long time. Outside of the result, we stuck to our strategy so firmly in a way that made me really proud. We weren't perfect (and aren't ever), we made errors (lots of mini-inefficiencies), and we bickered (especially at the end), but we had so, so much fun and blew ourselves away with what we were able to accomplish. In January I set my A goal for the season as top-5 at Nationals. Being able to achieve that with Cliff and Kate was more than I could have ever hoped for.
