Well my friends, the race is complete! Shelley and I won first place in the woman’s division – again!! It was a much harder race this year. This year the race was at Milford State Lake near Junction City. The last few years the race organizer was Bonkhard Racing but this year they sold to a family based in Missouri. People in Missouri can’t be the commissioners of Sunflower State Games! So….with the change in the Race Commissioner, the style of the race changed a bit. Charmion is the owner/operator of Lake Adventures and organizes a wide variety of races and outdoor adventures. She is tough!! Her organizing of race materials is a bit challenging but doable. I am so glad we did the Thumper with her in March so we were familiar with her style! It was once again over 100* and allegedly a 3-5 hour race. Charmion added at least 8 check points and some serious distance to last year’s race. Last year the distance was about 14 miles, this year the distance was 20 ish miles. Obviously, each team’s distance is different dependent on their route. She also gave us 5.5 hours to finish due to the extreme heat. Thank goodness! She included 24 check points in this race as well as three surprises – two un-mapped geocaches and a truck pull. Yep, a truck pull. We got our map at about 6:40am and worked out a plan.
THEN she dropped the two unmapped spots on us. We failed at this point and did not rework our plan or use the UTM points to plot the two points. We were actually pretty short on time because we had to pee and get on the road! Ack!
We chose to canoe first since she didn’t have enough boats for everyone to canoe at the same time it would be a random risk to see if there was a boat when we were ready. Sooo, we canoed first! It was easy to do first since we were close to the boat ramp. Off we went to collect two points by paddle. We did pretty good and used some new tips on paddling to be more efficient.
Second phase for us was trekking for two points plus two unmapped geocaches. We did reasonably well getting the two mapped points but realized belatedly that the only directions we had for the geocaches were from the start OR we could map the UTM points. Too bad we didn’t review how to do that! We tried but just weren’t confident so back to start and randomly searching. Gah! That sucked up some time. I was entertained by two guys we met who had never done an adventure race and who were horribly lost and had done nothing but wander. (Saw them again at the end and although they hadn’t found all the points, they had a blast and will return to race again!) We finished the trekking and headed off on our bikes. Below is an easily spotted flag on the trail. The little red thing you can see is the punch that we use to punch our passports. Each punch must be punched into the correct number box on the passport.
We decided to do a portion of the biking then trek then finish the biking. I think we did pretty good, however, I think we have a tendency to get only a general direction instead of staying focused on the direction and degree that we should be heading. We also struggle with some type of crazy short term memory flaws. We can’t really hold the info we need in our heads for long, we are spastic! We will navigate even better next time! I felt pretty good on the bike. One of the coolest things about adventure racing is that people help each other out. I think that the people who are competing against each other in various divisions may not be as helpful to their direct competitors but there are rarely teams of two women so everyone helps us! We are also pretty good at helping others as well.
After biking for a few points we ended up at the bike drop and manned check point number 2. It was at this point that we learned of the second surprise – a truck pull! Yes, each team was required to pull a Nissan truck! Your total time was three minutes to pull and whoever pulled the farthest would win a prize. Shelley hated it! I thought it was kinda cool except we had already been racing for almost three hours when we got there and had more points to collect. Also, there was a line for the truck so we set off on the trekking part of this leg. It was pretty far and I learned that all of the land below the damn at Milford is a sandy dessert with cacti! At one point, as we were trekking through the land I thought I felt a grasshopper latch onto the back of my calf. It didn’t jump off so I looked back to knock it off and found chunk of cacti stuck in my leg! This trek was LONG and HOT but we did it then we pulled the truck for about thirty seconds in order to conserve our energy. Then we carried/pushed our bikes up the damn – it was the shortest distance to where we needed to be – but the hardest thing we did! We polished off the biking and made it back to the finish line just in time!
It turns out we finished number 30 out of 46 and number 1 in the Women’s division! Whoop! It’s not as fast as we were hoping yet much better than sitting on the couch or giving up during the race!!
Woo Hoo!! It was pretty awesome, really. We covered about 21 miles in 5.5 hours which is actually an average of a little over 15 minutes per mile. Weird, thought it would come out to be slower than that! It was fun and we identified some things that we need to do to improve. We are thinking of doing a navigation/orienteering event later this year.
Meanwhile, it was awesome and I felt great!
I am blessed to have the opportunity to participate in this event and to have such an awesome friend! Thankful!!
I'm hoping that all of you have something amazing and awesome to do sometime soon. Whether or not it is an Adventure Race or a special moment with a friend, enjoy it to the max! Find something to do that will make your day or week excellent and DO IT!! I’m sure you can!
~ Denise
PS For those of you from my long ago past…. on a weird aside, an old friend from high school was in the race as well. Kris Kobach, an old debate friend and currently the Kansas Secretary of State. Weird and random small world!
PPS These pictures are all compliments of Lake Adventures from their website http://www.adventureracekansas.com/
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