Cyclocrossin'

What better way to get ready for Nationals than with 45 minutes of suffering above your lactate threshold, otherwise known as Cyclocross. Being off my cross bike for two years, I spent the first lap getting used to the bike, figuring out the lines through the corners and basically sitting in and gauging everyone else. Once we reached the sand pit and some barriers I was able to run around about 4 people which moved me up to third place. As I got more comfortable on the bike, I was able to close the gap on second place and pass her the next time through the sand pit. Her chain went in the spokes right as I passed her but I swear I had nothing to do with it. Not looking back I took off and held onto second place, though I did have some serious chasers.

I was pretty pleased with the result considering my racing these days is geared towards endurance events and it was a good way to open up the legs for Nationals which are 3 days away!

Lazy Weekend

Rather than squeeze in one more monster training, we all decided to scale things back and take advantage of the taper theory. That didn't keep us from doing a little somethin somethin though.

For Lisa & I, Saturday night was spent running around in the woods with our spouses at the Georgia Orienteering Club's annual night-O even at Cochran Mill. It was chilly and dark at the start, but our Niterider Moabs always do a ridiculously good job of turning night into day, so spotting the controls wasn't so bad. It was a mass-start, score-O format with a 90 minute time limit, which essentially means you can go in any order and the winner is whoever gets the most number of punches in the least amount of time. Not wanting to get wet in the cold, my wife Eva instituted a "no river crossing" restriction so our route choice was largely governed by that, but after hearing a few horror stories it probably was a good thing we stayed on the south side. We still managed to bag 16 controls and came in with 30 seconds to spare. Chris and Lisa bagged 16 as well, but they crossed the river which I heard by a few people was a tougher section to locate points.

It was the first time I'd attended a meet since GAOC purchased their E-punch system and it was pretty darn cool not having to fumble for my punchcard at each control. Even better, it's the same system that will be used at the USARA Nationals this Friday. They even printed out our results & split times within a minute of finishing. The coolest part about the system is that a day later, once the data was all loaded, you can view everybody's order/route choice via the internet and watch an animated version of everyone. It doesn't track people by GPS, so you have to manually draw in your specific route, but since the system keeps track of the split times, it generally is fairly accurate with your route:
http://www.forreststokes.com/gadget/cgi-bin/reitti.pl
This is a great analysis tool for anyone wanting to learn more about the techniques that orienteerers use. Months ago, I guess there was a debate on whether GAOC should procure the E-punch system, but I'm so glad they did. It really does enrich the whole experience.

Yesterday, Eva and I visited Kennesaw Mountain for a little tourist hiking at sunset. Not quite epic, but I was a great evening to be out instead of sitting at home watching foosball on TV.

Not sure what James was up to, but knowing him, he probably bagged a triple century with his roadie crew.

Last night was spent packing food and gear for the big trip. T-minus 3 days.

Randalls DQ'ed in Controversial Night-O Decision

Ok, so it wasn't controversial, but I had to get your interest somehow. Last Saturday marked the 2006 Night-O put on by the Georgia Orienteering Club. Proving that two heads are NOT necessarily better than one, the Randalls displayed poor judgement and a case of "I thought YOU were looking at the map" and ended up getting themselves DQ'ed for running overtime on the course.

Starting with a fairly clean run of the points on the west side of the creek, they opted to cross the creek to attempt the points on the east side, unaware that they had a scant 30 minutes to make it back to the finish. After considerable delay in finding a reasonable place to cross they realized they had missed one easy point and continued on the trail up a monster climb to obtain another point. After finding this point it was a mad dash back to the finish. Not carefully looking at the trails and terrain on the map, they were lulled into complacency as they ran along the wrong trail for a good distance before heading into the woods to whack down to the creek. When they did not immediately hit the creek, it then became apparent that things had gone very wrong. Convinced now that they would not make the cutoff, they carefully figured out where they were and headed back to the creek crossing and main trail system, and ultimately the finish. It was a devastating loss as the Randalls were upset by the Gobles, whose "No crossing the creek" handicap actually played out in their favor.

Going up!

We had our last big training before Nationals on Saturday. It started of cold (36 degrees) but it turned out to be a beautiful day of climbing in the N. Georgia mountains. The autumn leaves and colors were peaking and it feels like we are as well. Lisa says we logged ~83 miles, 16,500 feet of elevation (11,300 on bike, 5,200 on foot) in a shade around 10 hours. I was feeling good about it until she pointed out that means that after you consider any paddling/coasteering/navigation, the nationals race course will still have to be twice as steep over the same distance as what we did. Great.

Tonight, we pack up our bikes and bid them adieu for their cross country trip to Santa Barbara. Hopefully, we'll see them on the other side.

Checkpoint Zero 30 Hour

Yak of Checkpoint Zero was kind enough to offer Team Enduraventure a comped entry to the Checkpoint Zero 30 hour race in Helen in March of 2007. Were excited to defend our victory from NGAR last year, but I'm starting to feel a little like this...

The team is off to Dahlonega this weekend for one more big training event before packing up for Nationals.

En Fuego. Winning, Training all over the place.

Well this weekend wasn't spent racing, but that didn't stop our winning streak. Like every other conscious adventure racer, I spent the week watching TV coverage of Primal Quest. Anyway, Golite held a contest in conjunction with the broadcast and each day they had a little quiz to enter drawing for a bunch of gear. I usually don't bother with such things, but Golite gear is pretty good, so I entered each day. I just got an email saying that I'd won the grand prize package, which is about $600 worth of gear. Not two days earlier, I'd been shopping for their Xirtam and Wisp jackets, both part of my winning package. Hallelujah! Thanks to Yak at CheckpointZero for publicizing the contest.

As far as this past weekend, we were all out meeting our training quota. Lisa, her husband and oft support crew member Chris, and I kicked off the weekend with both foot and bike orienteering meet on Saturday. The area is one of the better locations in which to orienteer. With lots of rolling terrain and a vast network of trails that switchback all over the place, it's easy to get turned around if you're not paying attention to every little detail. We all managed to fall victim to these pitfalls at some point, but it was a good outing nonetheless. After the meet was over, we stuck around to help with the bag pickup, which I did on bike.

Sunday was team training day and we spent it gaining elevation on our bikes on some of the most difficult, freshly graded gravel roads in Georgia. Great views and got to see some great areas we'd never ridden before and several tucked away waterfalls. It would be a great area to hold an adventure race. MUHAHAHAHA!

Wha-what?!?! A paradigm shift.

110 miles. 31,320 feet of elevation gain. 30 hours.

That's the course description we received today from the organizers of the USARA National Championship race. While we're gung ho about being ready for this race, this will be a significant challenge. Above all else I'm a realist. The elevation doesn't intimidate me. The distance doesn't intimidate me. The time doesn't intimidate me. Put them together and call me intimidated. Let's not even mention the fact that we'll be paddling the slowest watercraft known to man, the Sevylor inflatable K-79. Consider the following:

A month ago, I got on my MTB and did a 9-Gap, 200-mile Brevet (that's french for way too long organized road ride) in North Georgia that included a climb to the top of Brasstown Bald, the highest point in the state. That took me 11 hours to complete and that was only 26,000+ feet of climbing. Granted I was out of shape and I kept a pretty easy pace, but it was all on paved road and all on a bike. There was no nav, singletrack riding, running or paddling, all of which traditionally have a slower pace than road riding.

A few weeks ago, we competed and won the Overmountain Extreme adventure race. It featured 13,000 feet of elevation gain over 95 miles. We won by a significant margin over our competition, which included the 2002 USARA National Champions, and it took us nearly 19 hours. We've been faster in past races, but we nav'ed clean and were efficient throughout.

So what's that tell me? Either we're ALL really slow here in the SE and need to examine our egos, the RD got his math wrong, he doesn't want anyone to finish (first place gets to race free in '07... sorta, not really), or this race course is going to be utterly relentless. But we have no plans to relent. Prior to receiving this email, we'd been more focussed on how we'd stack up against the teams in attendance. Now, the only thing I'm focused on is how we'll stack up against the course.

As the RD told me:

"It's the Championships, its supposed to be a challenge... :)"

Good point, I guess.

Win in Augusta. Sights set on national championship

It wasn't clean or pretty, but Lisa, Allen and Bryan added a final overall win of their 2006 regular season at the Savannah River/Augusta Canal Adventure Race. Put on by Kando Adventures, the 8 hr. race featured a rappel and traverse along with approximately 25 miles of terrain along the canal and greenway. Despite breaking away during the initial 2-mile run, it was a tight victory as the team see-sawed back and forth with a handful of teams that benefitted from local knowledge and shortcuts aplenty. Enduraventure trailed two 2-person teams until the last 3 miles of the race, but buckled down, nailed the final orienteering point and arrived to the canal zip-line in first place by 5 minutes. The second place elite team, Fukarwi finished approx 1 hour later.

Now we head into overtime, where the only official business left on the 2006 schedule is the 30-hr USARA National Championship Race in Santa Barbara, Nov 3 & 4. The race will serve as the culmination of our racing season and they seem to be peaking at just the right time. We'll be competing against the world's most dominant adventure racing team, Nike Powerblast and are looking forward to the chance to see how we stack up. These guys have won pretty much EVERYTHING they've ever done, whether adventure racing, MTB, kayaking, etc, so we know that a lot of things will have to go our way in order to be competitive with them. Top amatuer teams Silly Rabbit's, EMS, MOAT, and several more regionally dominating teams will be there with the same thoughts. But it is adventure racing, so anyone can win given the right set of circumstances. Between now and then, we're going to be training our absolute asses off to give ourselves the best possible shot at racing to our potential.

Masters Swim

Last March I nearly caused my teammates to freeze to death on our gloriously stupid swim across Lake Allatoona in the Goldrush AR. Since then (well, once it warmed up) I decided that I needed to work on my swimming technique so I started going to our neighborhood pool over the summer, got some pointers from swimmer friends, and evenutally worked up the endurance to swim a half mile (in the pool). The problem is I'm still not really fast, and I still have plenty of technique issues that need to be tweaked. I went to my first Masters Swim session at the crack of dawn this morning, which focuses on speed, endurance, and stroke technique. I found it to be quite beneficial but my upper body is completely worked. I hope the paddle isn't too long in this weekend's upcoming SRACAR, or I'll be hurtin'. Goble, can you paddle for me?

Aaahhh..rejuvenation!

So I rearranged my work schedule this week so that I could get some much needed therapy. My version of therapy is rocks, roots, breathtaking vistas, and cool lakes so I spent the day riding up at Pine Log. My technical riding has suffered since my switch to AR and I definitely got my techy fix today. Kim and I rode a bunch of trails and checked out the awesome overlook at the top of Pine Log Mtn. It was a clear day and we could see for miles. After that, we rode along the rocky ridge until the trail ended about a mile later. Still having nightmares of my last bikewhack at Pine Log, I thought it smarter to just backtrack so we went down the usual ridiculously steep downhill and hooked back up with the main trail. I had the pleasure of an ill-fated yellow jacket stinging me in the inner thigh, but I'm pretty sure he's good and dead now. After about 3 hours in Pine Log we decided to ride down to Lake Allatoona. We rode out on one of the peninsulas near Macedonia Cemetery where I then proceeded to take a refreshing swim in the lake. Its pretty tough to swim in bike shoes, so hopefully we won't ever have to do that in a race. It was truly a perfect way to spend the day, and just what I needed to lift my spirits and get me through the next two days at the office.