So! I know you have been waiting to hear the story. We did it! We finally raced another adventure race! It was a beautiful day in Kansas and we travelled to Milford Reservoir past Junction City to participate in the Lake Adventure Thumper Race. It was the short, 3-5 hour race. Simultaneously, the Break up 8 hour race was occurring. The Break up started at 8:15am and our race, the Thumper, started at 1:30pm. Both had an ending cut off time of 6:30pm. It sounds kind of crazy when you read the times. Trekking, biking and canoeing for that length of time certainly takes dedication and pacing. In case I failed to clarify, the purpose of all this running around is to locate in order specific compass points along the way. This race required us to obtain the points on the mode of travel specified however, we could collect those points in any order. There are many divisions within the race, we were in the two or three person women’s division. Winning is determined both by speed of finish and by points collected. Conceptually, you could be the slower team but collect all the points thus beating a team that “finished” before you. The Thumper was an average of 16 miles. The distance you travel and the length of time it takes you is dependent on the route you choose as well as your speed of travel. It is interesting that skill at navigation can keep a slow team in the top finishers. The race director chose to eliminate the canoeing leg from the Thumper race. It was simply too windy. The length of time that it was taking the Break up racers to complete the canoeing indicated that it would add so much time to the Thumper that some teams might not finish by the cut off time. Several of the long racers dumped their canoes so we were not upset by her decision! It was also probably a good choice as the race without the canoeing was tough and long!
The scene is set in a very wilderness section of Milford Reservoir in the Flint Hills. There was a grass fire the weekend prior to the race which technically probably made it easier… or at least minimized the brush whacking for certain sections! The second half of the race was through the burned area. It was probably better with less brush but we were pretty dirty by the end. I took Marek’s little camera with me and snapped a few pics while on the run! The lake is in front of us and we are trekking towards three points.
But I’m getting ahead of myself! We were allowed to pick up our race packets at 11am. We spent some time plotting our course and considering the map. Since we were the short race, our coordinates were already plotted. YAY! Although we learned how to plot them, it takes some pressure off to have it done in advance. It turned out that a little more attention to detail on the map would have helped us out! We learned a lot about navigation with this race!
The instructions for the race were somewhat complicated so the guys needed some help figuring them out! Actually, these two ended up taking second place over all. They were great and it was their first adventure race. John works with Shelley so we carpooled to the UTM class with them last week. They were funny and good sports… and really fast! They had 4 flat tires before the race even started! Actually, many people had many flats, happily, we didn’t. Guess my good old tires from 1987 were made from sterner stuff!
We had a good time trekking through the wilderness. There was a sticker on everything we passed. We struggled to find a couple of the points but we didn’t give up. The race director chose to put the short race on a portion of the long course so the route was tough. Her flags were often hidden off the beaten track and sometimes there was just a chain with the punch so those were even harder to find. At one point, about three hours into our race we were cooperating with a couple of guys who were eight hours into their race to find a point. We would still be out there if it weren’t for cooperation from competitors! It is a great feeling of cooperation to compete yet still support others. Sometimes the only non-helping teams are those that you are directly competing with in a race. In this instance, we helped and received help from our division competitors.
We really had a good time but many other adjectives could also apply! Here are a few: frustrating, tiring, challenging, exhausting, scratchy, awesome, amazing, empowering… well, you get the idea! We both had some breathing challenges during this race. I swear I must have shot a hundred gallons of snot out of my nose yet more just kept coming. UGH! Shelley ended up using her inhaler. I guess the mild winter and the ash and soot couldn’t have helped. I think we both would have felt stronger without the congestion issues. We also made at least two significant navigation errors. One was fatal for our finish time. We could see a trail that should have been a short cut. We were on our bikes and we took it… then it dead ended in a rough field. We chose to keep going. Holy Cow! Tough times! We ended up carrying our bikes through shoulder high grass, brush and a stand of locust trees and a ravine! We were feeling dejected but we pushed on and came out where we needed to be. Sadly, we lost a lot of time! Strangely, we didn’t get any flat tires! Lesson learned: Sometimes going backwards is the best choice!
This is Shelley in the middle of the soot field. She is pretty great and I am SOOO glad that we have become friends through this unusual sport. We ended up finishing the race at exactly 6:30 – just making the cut off time. We had to have added at least a couple of miles to our alleged 16 with our “short cut”. However, although we were the last Thumper team to finish, we took 13th out of 23 teams because we found all of the points! Yay for not giving up!! (We were pretty close at one point!) We beat some pretty tough teams just by sticking to it. We got third in our division. We were beaten by a team called The Golden Girls – needless to say they are older and apparently wiser than us! Overall, it was awesome. Our dejection turned to pride when we realized that others hadn’t found the points that we struggled to find. Even though we made some mistakes we not only finished (both of us have had some knee issues) and we found all the points. Plus, we had fun and learned more so that we can be even better at our next Adventure Race!!
See you on the trails!
~ Denise
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