Finished: 2nd place for the race, 2nd overall point series
2005 Desert Rage # 3
Saguaro Lake, AZ
Adventure racing is a funny sport. In the beginning you’re clueless as to how everything works and the objective is simply to finish and have a good time. Stage 2 is to do better and iron in specific sport disciplines in which you are weak, and to become better at navigation. Stage 3 is placing top 5 or top 10 and feeling solid about the result. I should note that for me I thought we would get to top 10 and just be complacent, but I was wrong. Next thing you know we were getting pretty decent and even won a few races last year. The races we didn’t win we still placed very well in no matter who the competition was and what state the race was held. Now this leads to stage 4, the “we’ve done this a while now, are confident in our skills, we’ll just do fine” stage. This one is funny in the not so funny way. Basically this is the stage when you expect to place well, but weird things start to happen like marking coordinates wrong, making dumb navigational errors, sink a canoe, struggle on mystery events and so on. 2005 sums up stage 4 pretty well, but as we have neared the end of the year I think we have reawaken and are now back in the groove for a solid race season next year.
The DR3 this past weekend was the series closer for the Desert Rage race series. I heard that 150 people made it out to race between the short and long course options. Temperatures were perfect and with a dark 5am race start it started off with a nice change in scenery.
The race started with an orienteering section that was roughly a mile or so long and left just about every single team running in the wrong direction at the north checkpoint. If it was light this checkpoint would have been a piece of cake, but in darkness the people and the checkpoint were not obvious and I’m sure we all looked a little goofy as a row of headlamps blasted by the cp person. I don’t know if we all made a mistake or if it was a little to low down the hill, but regardless it made for a fun time at 5 in the morning.
The bike section was comprised of a 27ish mile bike and a 1 mile hike midway. The dark start again complicated the navigation in the beginning with many teams veering off in the wrong direction before going up the big hill. There is a strange feeling of camaraderie amongst your teammates and other teams while in the dark. I can’t explain exactly why, perhaps because you notice their light is looking directly at your hind quarters or maybe it’s simply because we don’t have our peripheral vision constantly focusing on anything past our immediate surroundings. Whatever it is, I dig it. Darkness somehow translates into an enlightened view of the world and a drive to explore the people around you more. Ok, enough of the crap. I get it…
Anyways, the bike section was super fly cool and rewarded us with some amazing views of 4 peaks and the surrounding canyons at sunrise. Shortly after the sun began peeking over the horizon many of the teams were off the hike a bike section and on the hammer to cp 5 and 6. It turned out that there were a couple of different options to 5, one good the rest bad, and there were about 3 options to 6, one of them being great, the other 2 being not so good. This seemed to really spread many teams apart and allowed some to catch up. Fortunately we were in the catch up category and were able to close in on those speed demons from Monster. We knocked down what started as a 19 minute time gap to just a couple by the end of the bike section and then only to be rewarded with our weakest sport…..the freaking kayak.
I wish that I could say kayaking was our strongest sport, but unfortunately this is a sport that we all have a hard time finding the time needed to practice. On top of that we don’t have very fast boats so we new that we had to go like a hillbilly after a mudpie to hold our number two spot from the pursuers and to keep as close as we could to Monster in the number 1 spot. The 3.5 mile kayak leg was pretty uneventful, but the scenery was quite nice as always at Saguaro. We came off this section with a time deficit of around 15 minutes or so if I remember right. Now to the trek.
The trek was a pretty simple course in regards to navigation, but provided a fair amount of hills to work our quads. Going into it we nailed 13 quickly and then buzzed over the hill in route to 14 only to discover that we caught back up to Monster and were in 1st place for a brief while. It was a nice feeling while we had the chance to savor it, but as I heard the clan coming down the trail towards us to 14 I couldn’t but help look at Wendi and Dave’s legs and wonder when their alien abduction must have taken place and when the next one might be. If anyone knows, please let me know because I want legs that can run as hard as theirs can too. Cp14 to the finish was merely a race of stamina since the navigational aspect of the race basically ended at 14. This was the hardest point of the race since we all were pretty wiped. Karen and I were silent, Dennis was cramping up, and Jack was pulling Dennis at a pace that was just about as fast as Karen and I probably could have gone anyway. At this point, it appeared that the race was going to be lost.
As we cleared the last hill we saw the finish line with two route options. The first option was to keep running behind Monster and watch them beat us to the finish with no chance of catching them. The other was to skip the run around the cove and instead swim directly across the lake water filled cove and see if by some chance that we could get ahead of them and sprint/hobble to the finish. Well the plan appeared to be working as we dove into the cold green water, but the swim was colder than a well diggers you know what and the climb up the other side of the lake was just as slippery as a well diggers you know what. I was the first to have the pleasure of looking at Monster and to hear them say, “good try guys,” as they ran past our frozen bodies. Well, I guess we gave it all we had and at least we were close, but in this case we were only close, but no cigar today. 2nd place is still better than a swift kick in the arse I guess!
Difficulty rating: Well aged, Spring Chicken
Weather variant: Start = 40F-ish / Finish 65F of nice and purty Arizona sun.
Critter count: 1 tarantula
Thanks for putting on a great race Rick!
Train hard,
AR Josh
www.teamascent-ar.com / www.adventureracingconcepts.com
