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October 2010 Team Santa Fe Activities
RACES:
Road Apple Rally Mountain Bike Race
Farmington, NM
October 2, 2010
http://www.nmcycling.org
Kim Bear 1st Expert age
group 50+ 2:30:12
Jan Bear 6th Expert age
group 50+ 2:15:12
By Jan Bear
The Road Apple Rally Mountain Bike Race would be the 30th anniversary
of what is billed as the longest on-going mountain bike race in the
world. It was a group start for Expert and Sport categories; both
groups did long course which was a 29 mile long course. It is a mixture
of dirt roads, paved roads, ridge backs, trails and the "whoops". It
was a fast course with lots of single track. The weather was sunny but
since we started early it wasn’t too hot until after the event ended.
The mass start is always a little nerve racking as you move thru the
winding gravel road for the first half mile or so, very easy to go
down! Then it’s on to a short paved section and then the dirt road for
the next 3-4 miles. Now the field is spread out and it’s into the
single track, lots of woops and ups and downs. This year the course
marking was better so no watching one group go one direction and
another group another way. Then at the midway point you hit the
pavement again for a short couple mikes before you are back to the
single track. The single track is again up and down with lots of rock
and sand. Finally another short section of pavement then a sprint to
the finish. Done, the NMORS series is done as well for 2010. Kim
finished 1st in the 50+ Women’s Expert/Cat 1 group and I finished 2nd
in the 50+ Men’s Expert/Cat 1 group.
Zuni
Mountain 50/100 Endurance Mountain Bike Race
Gallup, NM
October 16th, 2010
http://nmes.wordpress.com
Jan Bear, 4:45, 9th
Kim Bear 5:45, 27th
Carl Gable 5:30, 21st
Ries Robinson 4:52, 15th
By Jan Bear
Kim, Ries Robinson and I headed to Gallup early Saturday morning for
this fun event. What a great venue it is. Fifty miles of single track,
you just can’t beat that. We were glad the weather was good as it can
get very cold in this part of NM in October but it was a beautiful day
with temperatures in the 50's and 60's with mostly sunny skies. The
course was well marked, my GPS worked really well. The course was lots
of fun and generally fast but there were short technical sections that
made the event really fun. I rode with a couple different people and it
was nice to chat with them over the miles. I've really enjoyed the NM
Endurance Series Events and hope to do a couple more next year. Results
are to be posted soon, just check the New Mexico Endurance Series
Website, www.nmes.wordpress.com.
Checkpoint
Tracker National Championships, Produced by
AdventureXstream
Moab, UT
October 29-30, 2010
http://www.checkpointtracker.com/nationals
http://www.gravityplay.com
Team Santa Fe, Bear Pair,
Kim and Jan Bear, 1st place Co-ed Pair, 26:32:00
Team Santa Fe, Joel Krypel
and Carl Gable, 4th place Open Pair, 33:14:00
by Jan Bear
We qualified for this race by winning the AdventureXstream series for
2010 in the coed pair’s category. There were to be 8 co-ed pairs to
compete against in this 36 hour approximately 110 mile adventure race
which had orienteering, trekking, rappelling, a Tyrolean traverse,
river boarding and mountain biking.
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Kim Bear, Jan Bear,
TeamSantaFe.org Bear Pair
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Carl Gable, Joel
Krypel, TeamSantaFe.org
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The adventure race began at Red Cliffs Lodge at 8 am on Friday, October 29. We
had been given one of 3 maps and knew that river boarding would be
first followed by a 25 mile paddle down the Colorado River. The rest of
the maps and checkpoints would be given out on the race course. There
were 190 racers at the start which really made it fun. The sun was up,
but the canyon blocked the sun from reaching us for several hours. We
began with river boarding down the Colorado River about 2.5 miles. The
water was not that cold and our wetsuits helped make it more
comfortable. There were two rapids to swim through, otherwise you could
lie up on top of the boards and use your arms to paddle. We reached the
beach where we had dropped our paddles the night before and switched to
the rubber duckie kayaks. Since we were wet from the swimming, it was
hard to get warm. The paddle was about 25 miles and we really didn't
get much sun until about 12 miles into the paddle. Finally my teeth
stopped chattering. In other races we have been able to hold our place
in paddle, but in this one I felt like there were more experienced
paddlers from other states and we got passed by 6 or so boats. We got
off the water around 1 PM.
At Gold Bar campground, another map was given to us with checkpoints
which had to be plotted. Our next venue was trekking, rappelling and a
Tyrolean traverse. We hooked up with our solo racer friend, Sean who is
a nurse from Wyoming. (Solo racers often work with other teams and we
were lucky to have Sean be part of ours.) He came off the water just as
we were getting ready to take off on the trek. The three of us headed
out into the canyon lands by Corona Arch and did a mini-via ferrata.
From there we went after the checkpoints. After finding 3 checkpoints,
we did the Tyrolean traverse which was delightfully on a downward
slope. From there we headed down a slot canyon to do the rappel and
went through what looked like a puddle; much to our surprise we went
down to our necks in the water. We were one of the first teams to the
rappel so weren’t warned about getting wet. By then it was around 4:30
in the afternoon. I was a little worried about getting all my warm
clothing wet, but the sun was still out so I was hopeful I would dry
out. I was trekking in my biking shorts and didn’t have a spare pair
back in the transition area. We headed out to catch one more CP and ran
into the race director who told us we wouldn’t be able to get back to
the CP we had in mind, so we decided to take the time penalties
(missing 2 CPs which would add 4 hours to our finish time).
Our next instructions were to bike to Slickrock from the Gold Bar
Campground. We were the 3rd team out of transition. Upon arriving at
Slickrock we were given another map with 8 checkpoints to plot and find
on the Slickrock route. We end up riding about 17 miles on and off
Slickrock. The hard thing was that it was night and the punches were
not directly on the route, but placed off the marked route and then
hidden in trees, depressions, and canyons. Since we are not used to
being one of the first teams to arrive and we were not very successful
until other teams began showing up. This made it better as you could
work with other groups to find these elusive punches. Finally we
completed the task and left Slickrock around 1:30 AM. Did I say how
much I loved riding Slickrock at night? It was so much fun. The only
thing that would have made it more fun was to not have to find
checkpoints! We had to keep leaving the trail and take other routes to
find the punches.
Our last section to complete was to bike about 36 more miles to get
back to the finish at Red Cliffs Lodge. We had to ride Sand Flats road
which is about15 miles on dirt road with 3,000 feet elevation gain. As
much as I loved Slickrock, I disliked Sand Flats road. It was windy,
the middle of night and I was going 2-3 miles an hour. Finally we
reached the paved road; La Sal Mountain Loop road. There was a bit more
climbing and our last checkpoint at the intersection of the Kokopelli
trail and La Sal Mountain Loop road. There we were warned that the road
could be a bit icy and the aspen leaves could be treacherous. This kind
of ruined what could have been a super fast descent into a tentative
descent. Truth be known, it was miserable anyway because it was
freezing cold for the next 15 miles. We shivered across the finish line
at about 6:30 am and went to the lodge for an all you could eat
breakfast. Everything tasted amazingly wonderful. We then went to bed
setting the alarm to get up for lunch.
We had no idea how we did until that night at the awards ceremony. We
had won our division beating the pair who had put us in second in the
last race we did with them. Our finish time was 22:32:00 with 4 hour
penalty making our time 26:32:00. The next pair's time was 28:04:00
with their penalty. It was close! Lucky for us, we had the same penalty
hours as they had missed 2 checkpoints on the trek as well. It was a
successful finish to our adventure racing season of 2010.
Checkpoint
Tracker National Championships, Produced by
AdventureXstream
by Joel Krypel
For the final race of the series we were racing as a 2 person open
team. It was going to be an interesting day because neither one of us
had ever river boarded before and that was going to be the first event.
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Carl Gable,
Riverboard take-out
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Carl Gable, Joel
Krypel, Trek/Orienteering
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We woke to a clear and chilly morning with the temps hovering somewhere
around 40 degrees but luckily no wind. The starting gun went off at 8
am and we were off with our river boards. We ran down onto the icy dock
and jumped into the Colorado River. We expected it to be colder but the
water temp wasn`t too bad and with all the kicking and the frenzy of
all the other boarders we never got cold in the water. Once we got out
of the water that would all change.
After an hour plus of river boarding we transitioned to paddling 20
miles in a 2 person inflatable. This turned out to be a long cold event
because we were soaking wet and wrapped in neoprene with the air temp
just starting to rise and very little sunshine in the canyon. After 2
hours and loosing all feeling in our fingers we jumped on shore and
threw some warm clothes on for the last half of the paddle.
When we got to the next transition area things had warmed up and we got
some dry clothes on for the next section of orientiering and ropes. The
first checkpoint was at a fixed ropes section that got you up on top of
the canyon rim. We ended up spending an hour waiting to get on the rope
here which was costly in this portion of the race because we had to
make it to the next ropes event by 6pm so we would not have enough time
to find all the points on the orientiering section and have to take the
2 hour penalty for everyone we didn`t find. We got our first points
easily and decided to try for more before we went to the ropes event.
Unfortunately this didn`t work out and we ended up wandering all around
the point without finding it.
After we gave up on that we raced down to the tyrolean traverse with
half a dozen other teams all trying to get there before the cut off
time. We got lucky right at the last minute and Carl got us in line in
front of everybody so we didn`t have to wait in another big line. It
was a fun event that turned out to be almost effortless with only a
small amount of pulling yourself along the rope for the last 100 feet
of the 350 foot line over the 200 foot ravine.
We were excited to have passed so many teams at that point and started
our way down to the rappel, the next ropes event. After looking at the
map we couldn`t decide which rim to be on and made the mistake of
climbing up and heading down canyon only to find we were too high when
we got to the rappel and had to back track to climb back down to the
right elevation, and during that time half the teams we passed got by
us again. When we got to the rappel we were right on the cut off time
and almost got sent away with the one hour penalty for not making the
cutoff, but they decided to let us through and we were the last team to
get through without a penalty. It was an easy 75 foot rappel except for
the fact that you had to walk through waist deep water to get to it.
Next it was back to the transition area to get ready for the biking and
night orientiering section. It got dark just as we checked in so it
took a little extra time to refuel and pack all our gear up because
this was the last place we would see our gear before the end of the
race so we wanted to be sure to have everything. It was going to be a
20 mile bike section up to the slickrock trailhead where we were going
to start orientiering. After an uneventful ride we got to the next
checkpoint at about 10pm. You could do this section either on your bike
or on foot, we decided to hiking this section made more sense for us so
we headed off into the dark. We had to be done with this section by the
7am cut off but we figured that was no problem. During this stretch you
had to follow the white dotted line that marked the slickrock trail and
then know where you were so you could go off trail to find the points.
It was actually much trickier than we thought but we did end up finding
all the points and making it back to the checkpoint at 5am.
By now we were starting to feel the exhaustion of a long day and night
and the temp had really dropped again so we took a little extra time to
get ready for the final bike to the finish. We started riding at 5:30.
It was a long grinding uphill and Carl was struggling to stay awake so
we ended up taking 2 little cat naps just to be safe and ensure the
fact that we would finish. After about 4 hours of grinding uphill we
finally made it to the pavement which we thought would be the start of
the long downhill to the finish, but it turned out we had another 30
minutes of climbing to the final checkpoint which was not any fun.
After we got the final checkpoint it was a long screaming downhill to
the finish which turned out to be yet one more opportunity to freeze
before the race would end. We finally rolled across the finish line in
27 hours and 15 minutes in a race with a 28 hour cutoff. So we were
pleased to have made it in with some time to spare. We ended up in
fourth place in our division after being assessed our penalty time so
it was a nice finish to the season.
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