Getting Back to Nature with Adventure Racing

I did an adventure race this past weekend. For anyone not familiar with adventure racing, it is typically an event over the course of a few or many hours, usually with a team, that combines the skill of navigation with other disciplines. In my case, it was an 8-hour event that included navigation, road and off-road bicycling, and canoeing. Throughout the course there were a series of control points (CP) at which you needed to check in, either in person, or by punch card, or by answering a location specific question, completion and scoring of the race is based upon the number of CP acquired during the day.

Honestly, this was something that I had wanted to try for over ten years, and after my year of self-reflection (culminating with this blog, among other changes), I’ve tried to stop making excuses for myself, so when I came across the website for this event about seven weeks ago, I decided right then that I would make this happen.

This also explains a little of why I read The Wilderness Route Finder which I wrote about last week.

As I’ve gotten older, like all who have come before me, I’ve noticed that it requires more effort in watching what I eat and working out more. Over the summer, I had joined an informal group of guys who worked out in the mornings before work. During the school year, I’m on kid duty in the mornings, getting my boys ready and off to school, but in the summer, my mornings are more flexible and I found that this was a great way to start the day off with exercise. I posted the event to the group and had a taker to form a team.

So last Saturday morning, it was 40 and drizzling and I was standing in the middle of a state park with my partner and about 100 other people, probably ranging in age from 20-60. All in all, there were four navigation stages (one actually was cancelled mid-race to shorten the route) each separated by a biking stage where we biked to a different location in the area. For the navigation stages, we were given some type of a map, this could be a topographical map, an aerial photograph, or a plan map with the general locations of the CP’s indicated and we navigated using our compasses to the CP’s. There was also a mountain biking stage and a paddling stage with a similar format.

For a first time ever trying something like this, I think that it went reasonably well. I mean we completed the whole race, we were really tired at the end and stiff the next morning, but no injuries so it was successful from that standpoint.

In the CP system, there were minimum numbers of CP’s at each stage that you had to acquire to “complete” the race, otherwise your race was designated as having “short coursed” the race. Their recommendation for first timers was to focus on hitting the minimums for each stage to make sure that you completed the course in time. Some of the stages had control times where you had to complete the stage by a certain time in order to keep racing. However, the competitive teams tried to accumulate as many CP’s as possible in order to win.

We started out the race playing it conservatively, only clearing the minimum number of CP’s in order to pass the first navigation stage and the mountain biking stage. At the paddling stage, we scored one CP above the minimum. After that, we decided that we were comfortably in the middle of the pack time-wise (some teams surely had acquired more CP’s than us) and cleared all of the CP’s in the next two navigation stages. I liked that our confidence built as we went along and were able to push ourselves to go further in the navigation sections. All in all I estimated that we did 8.5 miles on foot, 3.2 miles on a canoe, and 25 miles biking.

First and foremost, I appreciated the chance to really push myself physically, and by the end, mentally, too. As part of being a desk jockey my body isn’t challenged enough anymore. This is the type of challenge that I need to do more. It was particularly striking to me at the end of the race when my partner and I were mentally making what would be otherwise obvious navigational mistakes. It was a great reminder of the dangers of exhaustion when in the outdoors. I enjoyed that I was able to spend a whole day out of the house and literally walking through parts of state forest that I would never have gone to otherwise, even if I had visited the park under other circumstances. How often does one go off of the trails when you go to a park? While the chance is literally always there, it takes a reason to go off of the trail and explore. This gave me that reason. The race introduced me to multiple new parks that I had never been to before, there are some places that I’d like to return to with the family because I though that they were neat landscape and enviornments including wooded hills, boardwalks over marshes, and praries. During the biking portion we saw sandhill cranes and turkeys and a large 10-point buck. That was a neat sight, it must be rut for a large buck like that to be wandering around near a road in the middle of the afternoon.

Going into this race, a big part of it for me was learning. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into and figured the only way to know if this was something that I would want to do more of would be to try it out and go from there. I learned that I liked it a lot. If only I had tried it out twelve years ago when I first looked at adventure racing, I might be a lot better at it now. But I think that I will do it again in the future and now know much more about how to better prepare myself.

The biggest thing that I learned is that 8 hours is a long time. Rarely do I ever work out more than an hour (lunch hour at the gym next to my office building), I’ve only done 5k runs before this. My preparation needs to include some longer distances and times simply to build up my abilites to keep going for this type of duration. Six hours in I was doing ok. The last two were plagued with leg cramps and general misery. That may also be related to the fact that I did not bring enough water. Again, never having done a race longer than a 5k, I hadn’t really thought about it. The race materials said that you had to bring at least 50 oz of water. I brough 64 and figured that I was being safe by going 25% over the minimum. Come to find out, I read the day after the race that you should plan a minimum of 5oz per 15 minutes of activity. So for an eight hour race I should have had 160 oz of water! That definitely could have contributed to my cramping at the end. As far as training, I need to improve my biking training as that was the most difficult portions of the race for me, an also contributed to the cramping.

All in all, I’m glad that my moment of spontenaeity committed me to trying this out. It was a challenging day that pushed me mentally and physically, while getting outdoors from sun-up to sun-down. I can’t ask for more than that.