Team Santa Fe at the Races

Salomon X-Adventure
August 18-19, 2001
Salt Lake City, Utah
By Cindy Gagnon

The Salomon X-Adventure is an international adventure race series, with Utah being the only race in the US. Forty nine teams, representing 9 nations all around the world (Costa Rica, Japan, France, Spain, USA) participated in the race. The race is an unusually staged race, with each leg of the race having a start time and a finish time. The race consisted of multiple stages of Orienteering, Mountain Biking, Canoeing, In Line Skating, and Abseiling. The race distance totaled 229 KM with a total elevation gain of 4486 meters. As teams progress along the course, you are required to skip a leg if you miss the designated start time. A team may also opt to skip any number of legs of the race. In addition, each team ! consists of 3 members, plus one alternate. The alternate can swap in and out with any of the teammates, as long as a female is in all but 3 stages of the race. Logistically, this race is not just about speed but includes a lot of strategy.

I participated on team ARGear.Com/Santa Fe. We finished 28th overall, after having one of my teammates airlifted off the course early on the first day due to altitude sickness. We completed only 2 legs on Saturday before the 4AM start time on Sunday, but managed to come back on Sunday and only miss one leg of the race. Only six teams finished the entire course, due to the unusually hot temperatures (100+ degrees) which slowed all teams down and resulted in many teams missing many of the cutoffs early in the race.

I used my Lightspeed mountain bike during the grueling mountain bike sections, and although I am not an very good technical downhiller, I found myself able to ride a lot of the technical sections, due to the great handling of the bike. I could not have lived without my Platypus hydration systems. We carried as much as 4 liters of water per person on the first 33km orienteering section. I also consumed a number of Gatorade bars and Gu. The Gatorade bars are now my first choice in energy bars. I not only love the taste, but they also survive well in hot temperatures and are easy to consume. 

Michigan Bush Bash
July 6-8
By Eric Jacobson

I am very excited to be writing my first race report for Team Santa Fe for several reasons. Now that I have finally raced under the TSF name, I finally feel like an official member of the group! And my first race under the TSF name was extremely successful. Now I look forward to many more TSF races, but let's address this one first.

Long before I became a TSF member, I fell in love with adventure racing and it all started with Ries Robinson.

Several years ago, my wife and I drove from Park City, UT where we live to Albuquerque to a friend's wedding. We had our bikes on the roofs and we stopped to mountain bike in Moab, Valley of the Gods, and Santa Fe on the way to Albuquerque and then in Santa Fe, Durango and Grand Junction on the way back. At the wedding, I was talking to Ries about the trip and about my new love at the time which was kayaking. Ries talked about rock climbing, biking and all kinds of events he was doing and after a few (maybe several) beers, he asked if I would be interested in doing an adventure race. Feeling no pain, I said sure! Next thing I knew, he had signed us up for a race and I was committed. Now, several races later, I am incredibly appreciative. From that first race on, I have been a huge advocate of the sport and I am constantly trying to convince people to try it. Well, last winter I found three novice takers; all good friends of mine from Park City. We searched the web and found a race in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan called the Michigan Bush Bash which we all thought would be fun and we set out to train.

On July 6-8 we competed in the Michigan Bush Bash with 19 other teams from the US and Canada. While none of the other members of my team had ever done an adventure race before, they are all great athletes and I felt pretty good about our chances. All of us are very good bikers, all of us are better than average runners, there was minimal ropes work, and I knew we would struggle in the paddling because two of the three rookies had never been in a kayak or canoe until a few weeks before the race! But my biggest fear was navigation. While I had some navigation experience, I had never been the primary navigator, and none of these people could even read a map or knew what a compass was. OK, maybe that's a bit stron! g, but you get the idea. With all of this in mind, we started the race at 2:00am in the rain in the middle of the swamps of the UP. The beginning of the race was a two hour run down a dirt road to the first check point. While I didn‚t think the navigation on this was that hard, I later learned that 6 of 19 teams got lost on this leg! But the real navigation started from CP1 to CP4. At CP1, we headed directly into the bush on a bearing line for a CP that was located on the other side of a river on a hill. The hill was no more than 50 feet high (in Utah that wouldn't even make the map!), and the hill was only about 1/8 mile wide and 1/4 mile long. It was about 1.5 mil! es away through the bush, so if you missed the hill, you were in trouble. The bush was incredibly thick and the bugs were viscous. We had bug nets over our face, we covered our clothing with tons of deet , and covered as much skin as possible, but the mosquitos still found a way to bite all of us plenty of times. To give you an idea of how thick the bush really was, it took us almost two hours to cover the 1.5 miles. We were sweating from climbing over fallen trees, ducking through brush, scrambling through swamp, etc., but we didn't get lost! While we were in 3rd at CP1, we found CP2 with several other teams and left CP2 in about 6th. From CP2! , we then headed on another bearing line to a small lake (pond) where we found CP3. Again, we plotted correctly and held our line. We found the little lake in the middle of nowhere and headed to CP4, an easier mark to find, but the bushwhacking was just as intense. CP4 was at a junction in the road and boy were we glad to get out of the bush. It was about 8:00am, our feet were shriveled from the rain and swamp water, we had a zillion bug bites, and we had had enough. We entered the canoes and paddled down a river that barely moved and wasn‚t much wider than the canoe. The first two hours of the paddle, we spent more time portaging than paddling. After about 5 hours,! we got to the end of the canoe and to TA1. Between the end of the bushwhacking, the canoe and a slow transition, we entered the bike section in 11th place, quite slow, but feeling pretty good.

The bike section was amazing. It was 55 miles in mostly sand so it was very, very slow and strenuous riding, but it followed along the shoreline of Lake Superior for about 20 of 50 miles and had exquisite views. The two race directors had told us at the pre-race meeting that it took them 6 Þ hours to ride the bike section when they were completely fresh and they said they went very fast, so we settled in for a nice, long ride. But this is where our team really excelled as we were all pretty good bikers. Also, we never made a wrong turn when there were multiple places we could have done so. In fact, we finished this section in just under 7 hours and had passed everyone in front of us except one team. We entered the next TA in second place and 5 minutes off the lead! But this is where the torture started.

The next section appeared to be about a 7-9 mile trek and we thought it would take about 5-6 hours. The trail was not marked on the map so all you could see was the starting point and ending point on the map. Once in the trees, the course followed a series of blue paint spots on trees that were easy to spot in the daylight, but very difficult to see at night. We would find a blue mark on a tree, go to it, and then look for the next one. We started fast because it was still light, but nightfall set in pretty quickly. We entered the trek at about 8:30pm and about midnight, we stopped to rest. I knew we were going slower than anticipated, but I had no idea how slow. The course kept looping around, back and forth, and around again. One of our team members knee was really hurting. This, combined with the difficulty of finding the blue marks, made our pace very slow, but we continued on. Before sunrise, we had run out of food and water and we started to really hurt. We started calling this section the death march. Just before the sun came up, we had been on the trek for almost 9 hours, much longer than any of us anticipated. And as the sun rose, I saw a body of water just ahead of us. Bad news. Looking at the maps, we had either over shot our m! ark, a distinct possibility; we were lost ˆ another distinct possibility; or we had not traveled anywhere close to the distance we needed to travel. It turned out to be the latter. The 7-9 mile trek turned out to be well over 25 miles and we were only 2/3 of the way through it with no food, no water, and an injured teammate. I almost dropped right there in the middle of the trail when I realized our situation. I was completely demoralized. Two teammates started to panic, and the third took the maps from me and said, "Hey, it's OK, I'll find a short cut". Since I knew she had no idea how to read a map, I realized she was just trying to keep the team from quitting. As! the captain, and with 3 complete novice racers, I knew I had to rally. I took the map back, picked myself up (mentally), took all the stuff out of the two slower racer‚s packs and split them between myself and another strong racer, and off we went. About 9:30am we finally finished the death march and got to the final TA.

We couldn‚t believe it, but we were still in second and only 15 minutes off the lead! The final section was a 3 hour kayak on Lake Superior so we were off our feet. Thank goodness. But two of the four racers had never been in a kayak. I found myself teaching the person in my boat how to hold the paddle! It was an interesting paddle, but we did cross the finish line in second. Only 4 teams finished in the allotted time and only 5 teams made it out of the "death march" section. Several teams quit on the bike section because riding in the sand was brutal. So overall, it was a very! successful race. I learned a lot about navigation, I gained confidence in my ability to navigate, and I converted three people into adventure racers. All in all, a good weekend.

 

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