| Writer Stacey Dean, left, with OUTEK teammates Brian Pfister and "Shep" Szczepkowski at the REI Mad Dash 12-Hour Adventure Race held in Madison, Wisconsin, last May. |
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On and off course for 24 hours
A Northern Route Adventure team lives to tell about it
By Stacey Dean
The Northern Route Adventure Race this past June 25-26 took my team and 10 others through the most inspiring and spectacular wilderness in the Chequamegon National Forest starting in the Cable
area. The event also took some of us beyond the limits of our endurance.
With 24 hours to play with, we made our way through each leg trekking, paddling and off-road biking using several 1/24,000 topographical maps. Strong navigational skills and teamwork really were key to surviving, let along finishing, this gem of an adventure race.
Team OUTEK, a.k.a. LooseGravel (hailing from the backwoods of Tomahawk, Wisconsin), consisted of myself and "Shep" Szczepkowski,
the original members, and the equally unique duo Juli Lynch and Chris Ransom. Shep and I hadn't fathomed we could possibly find two people on the same adventure racing "plane" as us. But somehow, we were all on it.
Juli "The Doc" Lynch, with an extensive psychiatric background (as a doctor, not a patient), previously had done some adventure races, like the Eco Challenge. Her husband, Chris Ransom, was a skier.
The night before the race we received our maps along with a page of coordinates to plot on four separate maps. It was like cramming for a final exam. Highlighters, pens, food and pop were scattered around the hotel room as Juli read off coordinates and I plotted routes with my grid tool. We were fried by 2:30 a.m. but prepared.
As for sleep what's that before a race? You might as well keep your finger in a light socket all night. Needless to say, Keith Boever, our
teammate turned support crew, woke everyone up after two hours of manic tossing and turning telling us we needed to get our butts in gear and head out. With maps in hand and backpacks stuffed with our gear, we arrived at the start with our bikes.
The long way
We were feeling pretty good until Keith ran back over to us suddenly to say, "The route you plotted to TA1 is the long way."
Hmmm. Should this have come as a surprise?
Pointing at the map, Keith continued: "See these roads here, that wind and twist? They're actually shorter by five miles."
Winding and twisting? Gulp. That sounded like it would require a lot of "reading" of road signs, something none of us could do well. But what's five miles out of the way? If we didn't have to read any road signs, we figured we might be better off in the long run (literally).
When the starting gun sounded, we took off on our bikes out of
Telemark Lodge onto County Trunk M. We drafted behind another team (evil, aren't we?) before splitting off to take the long way.
After this short 20-mile sprint, we rolled into the first transition area where Keith helped us off our bikes and informed us, "One team came in 10 minutes ago but they only left here two minutes ago!" So our reading disorder didn't slow us down much after all.
With our maps in hand, we took off running down a gravel road until we
spotted an overgrown trail. Cutting into the woods, the real navigation began.
We needed to find 10 out of 12 control points (CPs) in any order. After reaching two, we came upon a lady walking. She looked real pretty with her flowered shorts on until we got closer and noticed the pistol. Yes, she was wearing Daisy Dukes and packing real heat.
We managed not to spook her. But as soon as she was out of sight, we
freaked. "What or who was she hunting?" "Is there anyone missing?" "Did you see how big that thing was?" we asked each other.
But three hours into the navigation portion of the race, I was wishing the woman would reappear and shoot my sore leg off. By then my ITB band was screaming, "Hello!"
We found most of the CPs within 30 minutes. Then we hit the dreaded hill in the swamp. You gotta have at least one control located on a hill in
a swamp, you see. And one that's hard to find despite the fact that it appears to be on top of a mountain. We spent two hours looking for it and never found it.
We came out of the navigation section 6.5 hours later. We were now in fourth place with Team Maverick, TKR and another four-person team (all exclusively male) ahead of us.
(Because the North Adventure Race is a new event and still in its infancy, it had one open division. A more standard AR format pits
four-person, co-ed teams against one another. At this event, however, more competition may have been purposely generated by allowing all male teams to challenge other two- and four-member teams of mixed gender.)
Keith crammed us full of food, packed us up like the cool guy he is, and we headed out for a simple bike ride in search of a lake, a trail and the boat landing. But here's a fact: Navigating while riding a bike is a little
difficult when you hold the map upside down. We missed a left turn and passed the lake. But we recovered from that disaster, too, and vowed to be more vigilant.
Grabbing the next CP without a problem, we then hit the pavement with Chris shouting, "A quarter mile is all we need to go!" Twelve miles later, I was wondering what happened. Maybe the hum of our tires on the pavement turned us into zombies. Well, we woke up at a stop sign
forcing us to put the brakes on. We looked at the map again and back we went, another 12 miles.
By the time we reached the Owen Lake boat landing, we had biked about 50 miles and it was 8:45 p.m. Rolling into the transition area Keith greeted us with an odd smile.
"How are we doing?" we asked him.
He really didn't answer the question. Apparently avoidance was his defense of choice at this point.
At the landing were several teams, including Team Enviromark, who had
just dropped out because of the long navigation on foot. Gerry, the captain, came over to us and wished us luck. "Hang in there guys. You can do it," he said.
I wasn't really sure if we were doing well or not. No one wanted to say anything. I started thinking about that lady's pistol again. Another bad sign.
With all four of us in the canoe, we pushed off with the lake map to find several more CPs. Much to our delight, the lake was like glass and the
sun was warm. We cruised along passing teams with ease. Juli was right on with her directions to the CPs on small islands and inlets. And between her eating salami and cheese sandwiches and me sneaking a Hostess banana treat, we were fully fed and feeling good again.
With one more CP left on Lake Owen before the portage to the next lake, we paddled along the shoreline as darkness fell. That's when we ended up in Stump Bay. With our paddles, we pushed one stump after
another out of the way while scanning the shoreline. Little did we know one of those hunks of rotted wood was an actual CP.
Across a strip of land, we ran with our canoe in hand and jumped back into the lake on the other side. We hit the next lake and immediately spotted the glow stick we sought. "There it is! Paddle hard! Paddle harder!" we yelled at ourselves.
We approached the inflatable CP like a war tank. In our zeal, we
inadvertently smashed into the small floating raft and violently knocked loose the glow stick. In seeming slow motion, the beacon intended to guide other racers sank to the bottom of the lake
"It's gone! It's gone!" Chris moaned. "We destroyed the CP."
Then there was silence. We were now in our own twilight zone. Hopefully the others had headlamps like we did to show the way.
When we emerged from the paddle Keith had our bikes, food and
clothing ready. We now all braced ourselves for the "night bike O" An off-road section with six CPs located in the Drummond/Diamond Lake area.
It was midnight. The witching hour.
We rode for a while before we found the offroad trail which was to lead us to the railroad grade. Upon climbing a couple miles worth of steep hills in the still of the night, we suddenly heard an unusual sound. It was the most agonizing and tormenting wail I have ever heard.
And it was Juli.
There she lay on her side like a small rabbit that had been stepped on. I quickly dropped my bike and ran back to her. Shep thought she was dead. I didn't know what to think, when suddenly she popped up
"I'm OK. Let's go," Juli said. "I was just moaning like that because I really hate these offroad sections."
At this point, I gave Shep a pain pill to help relieve his discomfort from the ride. Within minutes I noticed him turning white and his eyes glazing
over. (After the race he told me he was so tired and delusional from the pill, he seriously contemplated running his bike into the ditch so he could finally close his eyes. He was heading into the trees when he asked himself, "Hey, what if I really hurt myself?")
We were all getting weird.
Amazingly, we stuck it out until 5:30 a.m. when we stopped in search of our last CP. With the finish line time counting down, Juli and I began to ponder our team's finishing position.
"Wouldn't it be funny if everyone dropped out and we won the race?" she said.
This seemed like an off-the-wall comment at the time. But when we all converged back on the lakeshore path, we were greeted by only three people: Keith and the race directors.
We knew something was wrong. "Where is everyone? We lost, didn't we?" we asked.
"Did you get all the CPs?" one of the race directors asked. "We need to
see your passport and all your mandatory gear, now space blankets, glow sticks and headlamps."
They carefully looked through everything, especially our passport a laminated card we were able to punch each time we located a CP. Then it was announced: "You just got second place overall. Good job!"
Then we heard those words the same words Juli had uttered in the wee hours of the morning: "Almost everyone dropped out." Out of the 11
teams that started the race, all but ours and two others fell short of finishing.
Apparently we benefited from our insane persistence and unstable psychiatric disorders as individuals. We had completed the course in 23 hours and 59 minutes exactly.
For coming in 40 minutes earlier than us, the all-male Team Maverick took home the top honors. The third-place team actually finished ahead of us, too, but was penalized for missing several CPs.
In adventure racing, anything can happen. The key is to never give up. In this sport, there are no truer words than "It ain't over 'til it's over!"
Stacey Dean started her racing career in the early '90s with WORS mountain bike racing, off-road triathlons and 5K and 10K races. In 2002 she leaped into adventure racing by competing in everything from sprint style to a two-and-a-half-day events, even qualifying for nationals.
Undefeated with her husband as a teammate, the couple formed a four-person AR team, Team Outek/Loose Gravel. So far this year the team has placed first overall in the Planet Adventure 24-Hour National Qualifier in Indiana and second overall in four other adventure races. The team's race reports can be found at www.loosegravel.org. [View our 2004 Adventure Races Calendar] | |
