Team Adventure Cats capped off the 2018 adventure racing season with the Milwaukee Area Fall Frenzy. Last year, the MAFF was our first ever adventure race. We had learned a lot from the competition last year, as well as from competing in the Chasin’ The Bone and Half Ocho Adventure races earlier in the year. In preparation, I even started to develop my own course locally.
I have to admit that the thought of adventure races really provided me with motivation this past year when it came to workouts. The thought of competing got me out for more and longer workouts than I would have otherwise. It led me to find some new workout routes and combine biking and trail running in workouts too.
All in all, we ran a pretty good race. While we made a few mistakes in retrospect, no race is going to be run perfectly, and further improvement will mostly require getting faster and more confident in our decisions.
The race started out this year at Ottawa Lake Recreation Area. The first navigation section was across a large area with the option of biking between areas of checkpoints. The course started out well enough, however after a bushwack, I didn’t take a bearing and instead trudged off in the direction of the next checkpoint. While only off by a little ways, this path not only took us through a marsh and missed the mark, taking us a long time to get back on track. With our course corrected, we biked to the last area of this navigation, but only found two of five checkpoints as a strategic decision.
Next was the first of two long bike portions, each about 18 miles. A mystery challenge broke up the first bike portion. The mystery challenge consisted of a series of obstacles – make five baskets, team ski walking, bucket stilts, can jam, and a sack hop. We also opted for the longer “bonus checkpoint” bike route to pick up an extra point. The biking was long for me and is still an area where I can stand to improve.
The next navigation was trekking and paddling in and around Rome pond. We opted to do the trekking first. Upon finding a checkpoint in a clearing at the top of a hill, we took an appropriate bearing heading down the other side of the hill. However we had a little difficulty finding the next checkpoint as we found ourselves in a depression prior to the depression that had the checkpoint. Once we convinced ourselves to push on, we quickly found the checkpoint and were on our way.
The paddle section was difficult, the water was calm, but there was not very much of it. We spent much of our paddling time pushing the canoe through the mud. At least all of the other teams were struggling too. There was supposed to be a checkpoint close to the landing, but we just were not able to find it. In part because of the time that we took looking for it, we skipped two checkpoints, but in retrospect, I wonder if there was more water in that part of the lake and it would have been faster paddling. Either way, the two bladed paddles sure seem to be more efficient both in terms of the time that you have a blade in the water and the expenditure of energy. That is maybe something to invest in for next year.
Next we had the second long bike ride. Much of it was along the Glacial Drumlin State Trail, a gravel rails-to-trails bike path that nearly extends from Milwaukee to Madison. Part way through we had a second mystery challenge where we had to carve a pumpkin. After that we were back on the trail.
This was when we made our most costly mistake of the day. We were actually in a very strong position, until this point. We were looking for Cushing Park Road, but didn’t realize that County Hwy C in that section is both one road to the east and one road to the west of Cushing Park Road. When we saw County C (only slightly further and we would have been at Cushing Park Road), we thought that we had gone past our turn and somehow had missed it. Rather than pausing checking and rechecking the map, and attempting to get our bearings, we simply turned around and backtracked over a mile and a half until the previous road crossing. It was then that we got our bearings and realized our mistake.
The entire sideshow took over 30 minutes. We had been about 6 hours into the race at the time we made this mistake and that cost us about a quarter of our remaining time. This was where we let our one mistake keep compounding. The mistake really put me in a foul mood and I had to bike a pout for a little while. a couple of miles later, I was done feeling sorry for myself. However, I’m sure that I would have been faster with a positive attitude.
This led us to the mountain bike navigation. Because we felt we had to make up for the biking mistake, we thought that we would cut this section short, so we initially chose our path with that intention. However, this ended up being a fun section and we chose to keep going on this section, ultimately getting all but one of the checkpoints, but while biking further than had we just started out to clear the section.
I still struggled more than I would have liked on the hill up to Homestead Hollow in Lapham Peak State Park, but I made it back in to complete the bike, leaving us with a final bonus navigation until the end of the eight hours. Given the remaining time, we chose a pretty efficient path, although with more time, the section could have been cleared of all sixteen checkpoints. However, we only managed to get five. We had trouble finding the correct sign on the Lapham Peak tower, and spent a long time searching for a checkpoint that was apparently a little deviated from the location marked on the map.
We made it back with a few minutes to spare and ended up with a reasonable finish. We finished back of the very top teams, but finished in the next pack of teams that were competing.
This year we went into the adventure race with a better idea of what we were doing and with a lot more preparation. But adventure racing is equal parts mental and physical. The lesson from MAFF 2018 is to keep your cool when things go sideways. This race was a fun way to enjoy a fall day and left us with plenty to think about over the Winter for next year.