Last weekend I did my second adventure race. After the first one last fall, I spent the winter thinking about the fun that I had and how I could do better next time. While Spring came slowly to Wisconsin this year, we had a beautiful first weekend of May and a perfect chance to try out the Chasin’ the Bone Adventure Race from Elkbones Adventure Racing.
While there were some ups and downs to the day, quite literally as it was located in the Kettle Moraine State Park Northern Unit. The Kettle Moraine being named for the geologic features of kettles (depressions) and moraines (hills) left behind by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. I really enjoyed the chance to physically push myself outdoors in some great natural scenery. The race had paddling, biking, and navigation elements. While I’ve camped and hiked a lot in Kettle Moraine North, the race specifically took place in the Greenbush area, which I hadn’t ever been to. Greenbush is known for its trails for mountain biking and horseback riding. It tends to get a little less traffic though since it doesn’t have any lakes, like other more popular areas of Kettle Moraine North like Mauthe Lake or Long Lake.
I did this race with my cousin, Emily. I’m eleven years older than she is, so we didn’t spend much time together growing up. However, after she graduated college and moved to Milwaukee, we’ve spent more time together, which is fun. I was really happy when she decided that she would take a chance and try this out with me. Since the highest division of adventure race teams are co-ed, it is an added bonus to have a co-ed partner for future races.
The paddling was in the mill pond in Plymouth, WI and pretty much served to separate the groups a little bit before the first biking leg from Plymouth to Greenbush. A quick loop through the pond and we were on to the biking.
Since my weakest leg last year had been the biking, I had kept that in mind all winter and therefore was apprehensive when the race details announced twenty miles of biking. I still need to get a bike better suited for this racing but my efforts did seem to pay off as the biking went pretty well. The entirety of the biking leg was on pavement and most of it was on a biking trail that parallels Hwy 23. While there seemed to be a lot of elevation gain, mostly in the form of three big climbs, two of which were right at the end. However, we had previously scouted the general Greenbush area and therefore when we saw the biking route, knew of these climbs so at least we were mentally prepared for them. We managed to complete the first bike in the middle of the pack.
Next was the navigation. it was a Rogaine style navigation with 26 check points distributed around a topographical map. In a rogaine there is no set route between checkpoints so your navigation route selection is important to chart an efficient path between the checkpoints as possible. The catch with this navigation leg was that all of the points that would determine the finishing place for the teams were in this navigation leg, but you had to finish the navigation with enough time to bike the ten miles back home in order to make the hard cutoff time for the race. We made a number of mistakes on the navigation, but now that it is over, it was a good learning experience for next time.
We didn’t get the navigation map, until we checked in from the bike. Taking a quick glance at the map, we picked a general direction and headed off to find checkpoints. In retrospect, we should have taken a little bit more time to plot out our strategy and route because having thought out the route more could have helped us later on. However, the navigation started out great, in the first 20 minutes we knocked out three checkpoints and were feeling good.
However, this is where things went seriously off track. We had to cover some distance to get to the next checkpoint, and successfully got to that area, however, when we went off of the nearest trail into the woods to find the checkpoint, we couldn’t find it. We circled around the area, and kept heading further into the woods, but could not find the checkpoint. Finally, we decided to give up and head back to the trail, hoping to find the checkpoint on the way back. No luck. Bummer, lots of time wasted and nothing to show for it. We continued down the trail to the area of the next checkpoint, headed into the woods and again found nothing! We searched high and low but couldn’t find that checkpoint either. Feeling down and frustrated, we headed back out of the woods and continued down the trail. However, as we went along the trail I noticed that it unexpectedly curved westward, we were on the wrong trail! Now I had a general idea of where we were, but we were pretty lost and in a timed race.
After a significant backtrack we got back on the correct trail. We had to make a decision, there were closer checkpoints, but those would require some more detailed navigation to get the the proper area, our confidence shaken, we decided to forgo those checkpoints and instead head back to the start of the navigation check in, regroup, and try to knock out some of the checkpoints closest to there. By the time that we finally found another checkpoint and got back on track, we had gone nearly an hour with nothing to show for it.
We left ourselves a little bit of extra time to complete the biking, not knowing how we would feel for the ride home. However, we ended up finishing with about fifteen minutes extra, so maybe we could have pushed the navigation a little bit further.
So what did I learn? Almost the entire navigation portion, I was having a hard time with the distances. The scale of our topo map was 1:10,000, but I was constantly overshooting or undershooting on my estimates of distances. Maybe for the future, I should do some practice getting a better sense of distances on this and other scales. Related to that, I think that we should have taken a little more time before plunging in off of the trail. By taking better note of our specific location, a topographical feature, and getting an estimate of the distance, we could have more quickly identified that we had gotten off track when we didn’t find the checkpoint. Similarly, I learned that it can be just as important to get a bearing when heading back to the trail as it is when heading off of the trail.
Personally, it was good to have experienced that feeling of shock and worry, realizing that I didn’t know where we were. Having experienced that this race, hopefully I can handle it better the next time that I am faced with this situation. Having had this experience under my belt, maybe next time I can keep going to get those closer checkpoints rather than bypassing them to do a complete reset. Come to think of it, that seems like a pretty good life lesson too.
It was really great to start off the arrival of nice weather to Wisconsin with an adventure race that challenged me mentally and physically, while filling my spirit with a trek through some of the nicest landscape around me locally. Also, I’m really proud and thankful for my cousin Emily. I know that she didn’t know what she had gotten herself into, but she did the whole thing with a smile on her face and I think she had a fun time too. Having enjoyed adventure racing so much this far, I hope help other people to find this great mix of activity, problem solving, and outdoor skills.
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