I woke up this morning and couldn’t figure out where I was or what I had done to myself: What the hell happened to me? Was I hit by a truck? Beat up by a grizzly bear? Made to play piggy by some backwoods mutant? All I knew was that I must’ve been beaten by someone with an ugly stick cause I hurt everywhere!!!!
Welcome to 24 Hour Adventure racing, Durango style! I’m writing this after spending all day (the day after) in a Lazy Boy chair – not because I wanted to but because I could not move! It was like I was drugged on some of my wife’s pain medication (she is recovering from ACL replacement surgery), while at the same time not having control of my legs. Weird, man!
Our team was led by veteran adventure racer and mythical ultra runner Emily Baer, turns out she’s pretty damn savvy with the maps too. Tom Ober did the actual mapping and set a new record for the number of bathroom stops in the woods, and Brett Sublett was the strongest man in the race, often I’d look up at an unrideable section of the trail and Brett would be riding it!!!!! (I say man because Emily was equally strong all day). Me? I was just hanging on, being drug all over the course by my team – sometimes literally! My prevailing thought all race long was: I’m too old for this shit!
The race started at midnight from Durango Mountain resort – Purg to those of us that have lived here awhile – with a nine checkpoint trek/orienteering section. We were racing without Kiviok, our navigator, so we knew this first section would decide the race – either we would nail it and win or get lost and end up in Telluride. Our history suggested we would get lost…
We didn’t though, and maybe it was home court advantage but we actually were the first team to get all the checkpoints and return to the transition to the mountain biking section.
We were slow mapping our coordinates at first, but we made it all up by making the decision to get our checkpoints out of order but in kinda a figure eight. As a result we caught back up to the leaders at about 2:30 in the morning at Hermosa – suddenly there was Bagel Works, AR Coach and us all at the checkpoint – that was, surreal. Actually AR Coach had led us to a checkpoint that we had mapped wrong, we would have lost a lot of time had we not just followed them to that one – thanks AR! We returned the favor by leading them down an unmarked trail that they may not have found – adventure racing is sometimes a little “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. After Hermosa we took off running faster than we should have, especially since I had rolled my ankle on the last downhill and was now sporting an ankle the size of a grapefruit, but we wanted to get out of sight of the other two teams. It worked too as that was the last we ever saw of them (where did they go was a question we kept asking ourselves). We nailed the next two checkpoints and headed for checkpoint number 5, down a trail we hadn’t been down before. That one ended up being our hardest one to get as the trail was totally horse beaten – nothing like running on a trail that had been post-holed by a horse and then dried hard, on a wasted ankle no less – and the checkpoint was cleverly (we didn’t use that
word at the time, Will!) hidden in the canyon that was from every angle unapproachable without sliding down some rock on your ass. After wondering around for awhile – and wandering where the other teams where –we finally found a way into the canyon, nailed the checkpoint and headed for home. Eight hours after we started we rolled – well, I gimped – into the transition, thinking we had lost the race on that last leg, thinking all the other teams must’ve found a better way and gotten ahead of us. Shocked were we to find out we were the first ones in! Alright then, now we were in the race, and the mountain bike was our strong point, or so we thought…
The mountain bike section was long and hard, but we all felt great and were stoked to be in the lead! So we took off, in the immortal words of Meatloaf, “Like a Bat Out of Hell”. We were flying too – until we got our first flat. No problem, we have a lead, a quick fix and we were on our way. We still had three spare tubes, no problem. 200 yards later – BOOM! - Emily flatted and by the sound of it I knew we had a big problem. A sound you never want to hear on a bike is: BOOM! Sure enough her sidewall was not only ripped open but it was a jagged triangle – Ah #@%&, race over! But like all good adventure racers we had a few McGyver tricks up our sleeves, and we booted her tire with a patch, some duct tape (I always carry duct tape wrapped around my seatpost) and a Cliffshot wrapper. It worked! We were back in the race! Off we raced, more cautious this time as now we were down to 2 tubes and we weren’t even close to half way done. About 5 minutes later – you guessed it – Tom had another flat! @$^*%(^# - that’s code for my burst of Tourette’s! Another quick fix, another tube gone, and we were off, but down to our last tube! Our race rested on not having another flat – what were the odds? We couldn’t figure out where all the other teams were – why weren’t they passing us? We had no idea how much lead we had, but we knew it was getting smaller…We made it almost to the Dutch Creek turn and you guessed it – Tom had another flat! @$^* ! You have got to be kidding me – 4 flats! @$^*% -I was overcome with Tourette’s at this point. We still had half the bike section left, we had lost over 30 minutes of our lead, and now we were about to use up our last tube – the Adventure Racing gods were not being very nice to us! (Turned out it was more our lack of attention then the gods – Tom’s flats were caused by a little thorn that we kept missing, finally on the fourth try we found and removed it – close call).
To make a long story shorter, we pushed our bikes all the way up Dutch Creek, suffered no more flats, and held onto our lead into the ropes section. But by how much did we lead?
We did a fast transition into our climbing gear, blazed across the traverse – thankful that it wasn’t as hard as the one at Buena Vista – and just as I was finishing my last and slowest leg on the traverse, in came Bagel Works!!!!! @$^*%! They had finally caught us after chasing for 8 hours on the bikes. The race was on!
Well, I was dead, had been mostly dead all day, but I was damned if they were going to beat us now! So we jumped on our bikes, hammered the final downhill and short road section to the boat transition, and jumped into the boats without stopping to eat. Yes we still had 3 hours of kayaking to go, and we were hungry and tired – but now it was a race! We paddled hard thru the faster whitewater section, took some shortcuts, nearly flipped twice, and finally settled down as we hit the calmer water near the end. The truth is that we knew they were at least an hour behind us as they had missed a checkpoint, but we wanted to cross the line in first, not win because of the time penalty.
And we did just that crossing the line some 19 hours after we started. Our first win!
Wish I could say I was happy (I am now), but at the time all I could think was: I’m too old for this shit!