Photos by Howell, Howell, & Hart.
(Our qualifying team at the Natchez Trace Adventure Race)
Since the qualification notification came, we'd been in a state of anticipation, preparation, and dread for what promised to be a tough 24-hour race. In fact, it is only intended to be a 24-hour race for the winners. We mortals were most likely to endure a 30-hr death march of a race intended for far superior and more experienced scavenger hunters. To make things more daunting, Joy has this alter ego as one of the top Ironman athletes in the region and had some piddly race to do in Kona, HI three weeks before 24-hr Nationals. Sadly, she was out of the running and we spent the rest of the year looking for a perfect fit.
I guess we were the two bears because we hadn't selected our Goldilocks yet with three weeks to go. Or maybe we were Goldilocks' and we needed a bear or we were after porridge or…whatever. You get the point. After 5 or so candidates didn't work out, were injured, or had other teams and we begged Joy to skip Kona, we reinvited Wendy to fill in since she'd raced at nationals once before with Olaf several years ago in his formative years. Wendy doesn't own a mountain bike but is a really fast competitive road runner in Dallas. I was skeptical that someone focusing on 5 and 10 K results would be happy in a long race. Olaf assured me that she would be great and in retrospect that was understatement. I'm continually awed to be on teams with people like these two over and over.
Anyway, last week we took off to the Dallas area with 3 bikes, a Subaru full of junk food, gatorade, bananas, helmets, paddles, piles of warm clothes, packs, space blankets, signal mirrors, and trail shoes. I had meal bags with food designated to supply 250 kcal/hr for 8 hours each. They came out to around 4 lbs each, being progressively heavier as the later bags were comprised of higher proportions of real food instead of simple sugars. There were four of them. And then there was transition area food and recovery food. I like to think I'm fairly educated in race nutrition needs. The amount of food I set aside after planning was the first sign that this was going to be hard. Really, really difficult. It was about 15 pounds of food for just the on-the-go race stuff, which were the densest, lightest calorie sources I could find. Yikes.
We lined up with the best of the nation Friday morning at 5 AM when they gave out the maps. We used up all of the 2 hours before the 7 AM race start to plot, plan routes, reorganize food, and get under the arches to hear the startling cannon go off. In all, 225 people ran through the arch and down the Lantana Lodge driveway to get on bikes in the dark. The irony of running to get to bikes in the first 5 minutes of a 21-30 hr slog wasn't lost on me.
Sadly, in the rush of the first 50 meters, there was a crash and we later found out that a woman had separated her shoulder and was out less than 2 min into the race. Her team would go on without her after she was cared for, but was ineligible for ranking.
The following 75 min was spent riding hard into the wind on mountain bikes down highways to the boats. It was a surprisingly difficult ride with heavy packs and the group we were in seemed to move a little faster than was realistic for such a long race. Regardless, we got there, hopped into boats, and headed off, again into a headwind. This headwind theme would be continued on the boat for the next 6.5 hours.
In reality, this wasn’t a headwind; we actually had a crossing tailwind that we didn’t think much of at first. I noticed at some point that we were pulling to the left as the wind came across from the back left. Soon, from the back of the boat, I was doing nothing but steering and this would essentially be my only duty for the rest of the paddle. It was frustrating to want to move forward and only be able to pull water from one side over and over. I felt like I wasn’t really helping our progress, but that’s what the conditions mandated. The first few checks were a bit of a blur since we were jockeying for position and had no clue how long the paddle was going to take. At CP2, we saw the team ahead of us drop their passport and carabiner into the lake and go diving after it. I heard later that they never found it and that their race was over. To boot, I can't imagine how cold they got. What a cautionary tale!
By the approach to CP3, we were paddling right along with some people we knew to be fast & capable paddlers including Lab Rats and, not far off, Bikes Plus Little Rock. This is either a good indication of our paddling abilities or a warning sign that we’d overexerted in the first three hours of our day. It’s always hard to tell until you either finish well or bonk. When we arrived at the CP3 area, there were a lot of boats listing about looking confused including Renn Multisport. It’s still not clear what the deal was, because our trusty navigator took us right to the check back in a swampy nook (the water was several feet higher than when the CPs had been put out). Have I mentioned that Olaf is getting really good?
After a little while in the single-boat wide queue to get to the CP, we noticed that no boats were coming back out. That was when Olaf, who had been studying his map said one of the most dreaded words a paddler hears. “Portage.” We hauled the boat up a hill with Olaf and Wendy pushing and me pulling. When we got to the top, there was a guard rail and accompanying road with no other than adventure race legend Robyn Benincasa standing there. She was blogging on a blackberry and encouraging teams as they came through. She asked our names & race number before grabbing the bow of our boat and singlehandedly pulling the boat full of packs & paddles over the rail onto the road. I mean literally singlehandedly, because she was typing on the blackberry with the other.
Within a minute or two, Wendy was wearing three loaded packs and carrying three paddles. Olaf and I were jogging under the canoe with no view of where we were headed. We must've been quite a sight for the race photographer we didn't see from under the boat. From the little bit of the world I could see from my fiberglass turtle shell, I can only assume we went down a beautiful road, through a nice field, over a big hill, down a pasture full of cattle, over a barbed-wire fence, and to the other side of the peninsula to relaunch with 5k to go to CP4, the farthest point on the paddle. We got to CP4 with 2 hours left to the paddle section cutoff and made comments about heading home with a tailwind and how easy that would be.
The following hours were a blur of cramping shoulders, frustrated maneuvering, crashing into dead trees that pepper the shallow lake, and nearly giving up. This paddling leg was the single most challenging boating experience I’ve had. At one point we pulled up to a tree to rest and no one spoke for fear of agreement. We were so sick of paddling, in fact, that we pulled to the far side of the boat launch and portaged to the transition area rather than paddling the equivalent distance. Olaf laughed and cried. While in transition, we saw several teams come in after the cutoff, which must've been devastating. We felt fortunate, if cold and exhausted, and we were a good ¼ done with the race! We would later find out that very few teams went for CP4 and many of those that did regretted it.
***Stay tuned for part 2 of this race report including transitions, cold weather, 2” thorns, falling asleep on bikes, and napping in transition. ***
If you are one of my Memphis friends, you've probably not known a Charlie that's not a 
graduate student. I started my MS in Chemistry after 3 short months of work in the real world, a stint at Woodsen-Tennet Laboratories in the Drugs department. A fresh recipient of a B.S.Ch., I was not impressed with grinding up small furry things (homogenizing was the euphemism), weighing cattle feed and feces, and assaying 60-180 samples daily in an under-air-conditioned metal building in a bad part of downtown Memphis on the 1:30-10 pm shift. When the opportunity presented itself to work with one of my climbing buddies, a good friend and professor, as a research assistant, I jumped on it. A couple of years later when I got my M.S., it was time to move on for the last step. Though I got into my dream school, life didn't lend itself to moving to Colorado just then, so I stayed to finish up 'real quick'.
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