Turkey Burn Rogaine Adventure Race

Turkey Burn Rogaine Adventure Race
Race Director: Dave Brault/ Team Sun-tek Skylights.

BB = Bonus Bike, MB = Mandatory Bike
BP = Bonus Paddle, MP = Mandatory Paddle
BT = Bonus Trek, MT = Mandatory Trek

To understand what it is like to race in a Rogaine adventure race, you must understand Rogaine. Unlike most races where you complete a course and the fastest time wins – in a Rogaine, you already know your time, the objective is to complete as much of the course as possible. In the TB Rogaine control points are a mixture of mandatory and bonus. All teams must complete the mandatory CP’s, and as many of the bonus CP’s as possible. The Turkey Burn is a Rogaine style race of this type, which is a great format as all teams can compete at their levels and they all finish at roughly the same time. This was also the inaugural race for Pangea Adventure Racing (www.pangeaadventureracing.com) which was the company formed by Greg Owens to handle the challenge of setting adventure races in Central Florida.

Team TCO (Travel Country Outdoors, www.travelcountry.com) was made up of Jamie Sheriff, Ken Kandefar, and Greg Corbitt and we were ready to race, kind of. Greg was coming off a stomach virus that had kept him down all week so he was not starting at 100%. I was feeling pretty good, but had raced literally the last 2 months on races ranging from 4 hour to 30 hours, though I was looking forward to a break after this race for at least a few weeks. Adventure racers are tough stuff so it was that we got about 4 hours of sleep and headed out to set up at the race TA at 2 AM. We were given maps at 3 AM and for me the race was on. Planning and plotting of the course took us the full hour (and about 3 extra minutes) as we missed the start gun and spent the first little run section catching up with the pack.

The race started at 4 AM with a wonderful moonlight paddle on the Wekiva River. There was no navigation on this paddle, we simply paddled to Katie’s landing and back. We arrived back and immediate headed off on bikes for the real racing. It was about 5:30 AM when we headed out, and our plan was to collect BB5 first. A route choice of taking the northern jeep trail was bad as the trail turned sandy quite early, though the southern road might have been just as bad (though I suspect it was better). We slogged about 2 km through the sand and punched BB5. From here it was pretty easy riding East Northeast to Sandy Road and then north to MB1. This was good road and after the bridge the ride up Pine Rd. was fun. BB4 was next and it was pretty easy (though it was off the road a ways). We headed south to BB1 which was pretty easy. We headed back north and picked up MB3 on the way to BB2, which was pretty easy. The trail north from BB2 to the intersection at the end of the railroad grade was packed with head high dog fennel (a tall grass). At this point I reset my odometer, of course I should have paid attention to it as we missed the turn for MB2 and had to double back about 200 meters to it, and then it was to TA1.

The transition to trek here was slower than I would have liked, but we were heading out on foot and it was a beautiful day. BT3 and BT4 were our first two control and were found pretty easy (though the clue to BT4 was in pretty bad shape). From there it was south on the old forest road – now completely overgrown – to MT1. From there it was West Southwest to the southern trail to BT2. We walked right past the flag twice before finally nailing it and heading to BT1. With the clue of a vegetation boundary east of the trail we also found BT1 pretty fast. Since the woods were pretty open we decided to bushwhack back over to the N-S trail. This ended us up near the creek intersection on the N-S trail. A left turn and a little more bushwhack and we were heading north where we had biked earlier that morning. We had kept a pretty good pace throughout the trek, but now we were wearing down and ended up walking the last bit into the TA. So far we had collected 50 points and hit all the mandatory CP’s for that section of the race.

At this point I knew that time would be critical. We still wanted to get BB3 on the way back to the Main TA and that looked to be quite a bit of extra biking and we had been warned that the last half mile of the trial to BB3 was very sandy. After getting back to Pine Rd. we took the right onto the railroad grade (Grade Rd). At this point I switched the Seminole State Forest map. We took a convoluted route towards BB3 staying on the best of the rideable roads (see course map with overlay). We reached the sand road, dropped our bikes and headed down the sand road on foot (from the earlier bike tracks we knew that others had made this choice). Hoof-hearted and SWIM where the other 2 teams to go after this 15 point control, though I was beginning to suspect this was a bad choice. We wasted about 10-15 minutes with some extra looking here – but found the control and headed back to the TA at the fastest clip we could carry.

At arriving at the Main TA we had to scale the wall, paddle 8 miles, bike to the horse barn, do an orienteering course, and get back – all in 3 hours. We scaled the wall quickly and headed out on the paddle. We hammered the paddle as fast as our arms could take us. Greg was in the boat with me, and I could tell he was having some serious back spasms. We saw other teams heading back as we approached the mandatory paddle CP, found it and headed back which was much easier (downstream). I knew I needed an hour to complete the orienteering course under ideal condition (fresh) – and we were not fresh and we only had 40 minutes to bike, run, and then bike back.

Still we had a job to do, we skipped the transition and simply hopped on our bikes – BUT Greg’s front bike tire was flat. The bike was only 1 ½ miles so we pumped it up, prayed it would hold and took the big bike pump with us. The tire held to the barn and we were off and running. We only had time to hit the 2 mandatory and there was no time to have trouble finding them. We nailed both of them – but we were not running well. I was hurting so Ken and then Jamie took my pack so I could concentrate on the navigation. Greg was hurting from simple lack of fuel (remember he had not eaten much of anything since Wednesday and being sick). The 4 PM deadline passed as we were limping back to the bikes about halfway between MT12 and the bikes. We were now losing points, one for every minute. We had been going at 100% for the last 6 hours. We hit the bikes and re-pumped Greg’s bike tire and took the last 1 ½ miles at what could only be called a reckless all-out pace.

In the end we finished at 4:20 (losing 20 points of our 65 we had painstakingly gathered) – and in second place. We had pushed as hard as we possibly could – how we wished we could have gotten back some of those easy minutes from the first half of the course. Congratulations to Manny and Jason of Hoof-hearted, who had done a wonderful job of pushing hard and making all the right choices, even picking up an extra 5 points on the orienteering section. They took the overall win – and I think we were in second behind them.

Of all the races in the past few months – this was the one that hurt the most, we pushed with everything we had for a solid 6 hours and that was following 6 hours of pretty hard pushing. Everyone on the team came through when they had to and once gain we raced wonderfully.