USARA Nationals Pre-recap

USARA Nationals Draft Recap - 3rd place

The starting beach run, coasteering was fast and furious, and the bathtub paddle lived up to expectations. I heard that there were a few isolated encounters with the surf, but for the most part it was very tame. Unbeknowst to Lisa and I, the floor of our boat managed to deflate itself mid-paddle, so we slowly plodded through the leg, emerging at our first bike leg in approx 10th place. We managed to pick up a few spots on the way up our first big bike climb up Romero Canyon Rd/trail, from sea level to the mtn range approx 3000 feet above. The first half of the ride was nice FS road, the upper half turned into semi techical singletrack. Beatiful views of the Ocean and Santa Barbara below. We slogged up the trail and finally emerged at the bike drop TA about 10-15 behind the lead pack of Revo 1&2, EMS 1&2 and Silly Rabbits/Ultimate Direction. The following section was a 3 point circuitous rogaine foot section in & around Blue Canyon, which again was beautiful. We chose a CP 4, 5, 6 order-route which followed our same strategy we used in Overmountain Extreme; long fast FS downhill run out & a short but steep uphill return. EMS 1&2 chose to do the opposite and attack CP 6, 4, 5, I believe. Anyhoo, we caught Revo's and Silly Rabbits by the time we reached 5 and we crossed paths with EMS as they were heading from CP 6 to CP 4&5.

Unfortunately, CP 6 had been misplaced 225 meters from where it was supposed to be, and that kind of skewed the playing field a bit, which is always disappointing in our sport. We invested 2 hrs searching for it before making an extremely difficult risky and difficult decision to cut bait and continuing on. Many teams stumbled upon it by wandering around while others, like us, gave up on it.

The plotted location of the point 6

Someone else will have to post the actual location.

In most grass roots racing, if I think I'm in the right place, I usually stick to a policy of hunting for a CP for 15-20 minutes before bailing on a point, but in the pre-race meeting we were assured that the course had been set by Dan Barger, vetted with the help of Jason Middleton (former team Earthlink member with Robyn Benincasa) and that most CP's would be manned by volunteers, but those volunteers would be escorted to the appropriate location by race management. Further, Dan even emphasized using the same plotters that he used to extract the UTM's for the course, and they provided every team copies of the same plotter used. It was clear to me that Dan knows first hand the intricacies around nav, but something got screwed up in the execution of the placement.

The situation was almost exactly the same as what had happened at the ARWC New Zealand last year and from USARA Nationals a few years back... but at least this year there was a pre-published rule that stated:

Teams that miss a CP will be ranked after teams that obtain all CPs provided that all CPs are in the correct spot. Teams will not be penalized for missing a CP if the missed CP is over 100 meters from the correct location of the CP.

So after pleading our case to Dan Barger, explaining our search efforts, he went out and verified that the CP was in fact misplaced. They made the decision to enact the rule. We would not be DQ'd, but it did nothing to recoup the 2hrs we had spent looking for it. I don't know how long other teams spent looking for it or stumbling upon it before moving on, but it definitely impacted everyone in one way or another, some positively, some negatively. But I'm confident that no other team was impacted more negatively than us.

By the time we emerged from the trek, we were fairly demoralized, it was cold, dark, we had plummeted in the rankings from 1st-3rd-ish to 15-20th and we still had the toughest terrain to come. But we bundled up, rallied the troops and pressed on, quickly reeling in team after team on more techincal singletrack descents on the Cold springs trail, withstanding a painful endo for me. Despite my best intentions to stop and cramp up every mile of climb, with James pushing me up every climb, we mounted a huge campaign up the rankings and managed to climb back into fourth place.

MORE TO COME... but a quick summary:
Last trek leg was cancelled, which was a bummer for us as we had caught everyone on the first trek.
Silly Rabbit/Ultimate Direction crossed the line 1st, but had inadvertently taken a forbidden route and were assessed a 4hr penalty dropping them to 9th. This could have been avoided with an additional CP placed somewhere along the mandatory route... a bummer for UD.
EMS 1&2 came across together and were awarded 1st and 2nd
We came across next, but not sure how far back we were (but interested to see the gap and know how much time EMS spent looking for CP6.
Dogs in Space were fourth
Bagelworks/Loki fifth?
It's a blur from there and a lot of what if's

If you're interested in seeing some pics of the singletrack we rode, which was both adventurous and intimidating to say the least, check out:
http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~djhintz/images/2005%20Jul%20Little%20Pine%20climbing%20Santa%20Cruz%20trail/index.html
They're not from nationals, but they'll show you what we rode... only we did it at night.